I get email

Just wanted to send you a note to say that if someone publicized that they were going to kidnap your wife, Mary, and your kids Alaric, Connlann, and Skatje, rape them brutally, kill them, throw them in a trashcan, and then laugh and brag about it, then you just might have just a hint of the outrage that you have caused many good people.

A grad student writes something like this, but it's Webster Cook and the guy who did nothing but warm the pew beside him who deserve to be expelled?
http://video.google.com/videosearch?hl=en&q=hitchens%20hate%20speech&um…

hmm a telephon number. i wonder what you could do with that...

hmm a telephon number. i wonder what you could do with that...

Leave the phone number alone. I thought you guys learned your lesson in the Krollateral damage episode.

As someone who was raised Catholic I have to say I am really surprised at how crazy these people are. I always thought when we were told the host "really is" Jesus it was just Clintonian word play. Even as a child I remember teachers fumbling through explanations, and I just accepted it "really is" even though it obviously isn't. Sigh, I suppose we aren't as removed from the dark ages as we thought.

I also find it weird that the religious automatically think about rape and murder when they think of a world without god. I have to think most of these people are decent human beings, but do they really want to rape and murder people? Are they constantly thinking "Oh boy, I'd love to rape and kill so-and-so. Too bad god would be pissed"? Is there really no other reason not to rape and kill people?

Such unabated ignorance!
The only thing I can do to attempt to maintain some sanity is laugh. And boy is this making me laugh.

How long before you close that email account and start another?

Dustin, I couldn't agree more. Can Bryan Stikeleather really not differentiate between a communion wafer and four very real people!? Besides, do these people not realize you fucking chew, swallow, digest, and eliminate the host? This is not a very dignified fate is it? Let it decompose in a landfill. Hopefully they have methane capture and utilization at the Morris landfill. The wafer could create renewable energy.

Congrats PZ. I am glad that the nutties have been "turned off" by your unwillingness to back down. I suppose we should not be surprised at the absolute breathtaking stupidity shown by the fundagelicals. Thanks, above all, for being a voice of reason in a sea of stupidity.

I just glanced at the latest press release on the Catholic Leagues website, and in it they seem to be comparing PZ's cracker desecration with a professor who was fired for having child porn on his computer.

"In 2001, this part of the Tenure Code was invoked against a professor at UMN because he had images of child porn on his computer. It should now be invoked against Myers, and that is why we will appeal to UMN's Board of Regents to do just that. It strains credulity to maintain that Christian students can expect fair treatment by a faculty member who has publicly shown nothing but contempt for their religion."

That says something about Catholic mentality that the consider wasting food (if it can be called that, I'd never eat one) to be as severe as a crime as child porn.

That guy didn't even spell Minnesota right...nor did he even mention your University right!!! He referred to it as "Minisota University"...

Honey, it's the University of Minnesota!!!

Ha, these people are HILARIOUS

Jason Larrimore's missive is cracking me up so much I am now purblind.

Seriously, if this pathetic show of confused thinking and warped emotional reaction occurs while these people are supposedly under the positive influence of religion, what would they be like without such a benign influence? Would they be the same, better, or worse?

I have always kept a personal distance from Catholics, even the moderates, because they are just so boring and droningly trite, but now I am entertaining the notion that maybe I should run in the opposite direction as fast as my little atheist legs can carry me the next time I encounter one.

For you Catholics reading this thread, have no fear from me, as I will avoid you folks like the plague.

What is Bryan Stikeleather's email address? I have to ask him something.

Fire this grotesque blasphemer Myers NOW.

"All I said to my wife was, that piece of halibut is good enough for Jehovah!"

they are the same words used by Jesus

Leaving aside the issue of Jesus being a fictional character, claiming Jesus muttered magic spells in Roman Catholic Latin rather than some local language of his era is still very much along the lines of those crackers people who declaim about the Bible having to be in the original English (eg KJV).

There is something seriously deranged about a belief that puts maltreatment of a WAFER on a par with doing the same to someone's family. Not that there aren't sickos in every sector of society but the Catholic church actually encourages this insanity.

I can't figure out what these people want when they complain you don't respect their beliefs. I saw people on the other threads condemning the great desecration on the grounds that it was like taking a security blanket from a little kid. Is that the sort of repect they want? Because to me that is more insulting to them as individuals than any trashing of a piece of bread, or even speaking up and saying that how STUPID that part of Catholic doctrine is. At least you give them credit for potentially being able to see the stupidity; I know I do. It rubs me the wrong way when people in these discussions talk about devout Catholics like they were five years old. I'd rather be insulted than patronized. But maybe that's just me.

These emails remind me of a chapter in the Marylin Manson auto-bio where he published all the false affidavits filed against him for all these horrible things he was supposedly doing on stage.

And who filed all these bogus affidavits? Decent, young christians, and the unbelievably sick and disgusting things they claimed that happened on stage (none of which actually did) truly shows who the sick minded people really are.

They claimed he mutilated live animals on stage, then had sex with them, etc etc etc. Really depraved acts, but then again, these little liars are the ones who wrote this stuff so that really says it all about who is the greater evil.

I've been watching from afar the whole cracker-gate thing, and I just can't stop laughing at the emails. In one breath, they pray for your soul, and in the next they want to kick your ass.

Good upstanding christians. Full of love and compassion.

"Just to be fair, let me mention the current tally: somewhere well above 12,000 hate mail messages from religious people, mostly Catholic; two reasonable messages from Catholics who said that while they are unshaken in their faith, they approve of my opposition to cracker idolatry; and zero comments of any kind from admitted Muslims."

I just wondered, do you have a total for supportive messages?

Do you have any idea how many emails President Bruininks received, either in total or in support?

I'm still trying to wrap my mind around the fact that this people really believe that the cracker is their god, just because they were told so. And not just believe it, but assume it's an obvious and unmissable fact, to the point of thinking that only a murderous person could abuse that particular piece of confectionery. It boggles the mind.

Is that a legitimate telephone number? Does it really belong to who it claims it belongs too. Perhaps not wise to post it after the MKroll incidents.
Z

Poor wittle babies got their feewings hurt.

Good thing they have sky daddy to comfort them.

Doesn't seem to be helping much...

Absolutely terrible! Is nothing sacred?

Christians continue to amuse me to no end. How a vast population of people who claim to live by the teachings of Jesus in a brotherhood of love and tolerance can become so enraged by something so meaningless that they threaten violence is just hilarious. Yet us godless heathens are able to have tolerance and compassion in our hearts for all people, without the vital guidance of God and his bible.

I'm not giving out their email addresses, sorry.

As for Larrimore's phone number, please don't call it unless you really, seriously definitely desire him to desecrate your ass. And if you are MAN ENOUGH.

Wow. What scares me is these types of wackos are all around us. We were sold the "war on terror" line a few years ago. But the biggest dangers lurk among us in the the form of unfathomable stupidity.

Unfortunately, these idiots will never change. Ever. As a whole, they are too ignorant and fearful to consider rational thinking (unless it serves their own greed or need for self-preservation).

I have zero respect or tolerance for people who refuse to rise above their stupidity. I no longer associate with anyone who openly pushes their beliefs on me. There's no point in debating them. It leads nowhere. Calling them on it feels more gratifying.

Thus, I have no trouble calling religious wackos or conspiracy theorists "morons", "cretins","wackjobs", or worse. It's like squeezing a painful zit :-)

Yet us godless heathens are able to have tolerance and compassion in our hearts for all people, without the vital guidance of God and his bible.

Thank God for that!! Amen.

"All I said to my wife was, that piece of halibut is good enough for Jehovah!"

"He said it again!!"

But professor, you gotta realize these Catholics have got big money tied up in their Fracken-crackers! They cost $8.99 for a box of 1000. A major part of the gadzillion megabuck church budget, you know!

...don't think a desecration of the Eucharist by you will go unabated...

Do you mean PZ is still "desecrating" frackers? Damn, I thought we were in the denouement.

Baba @ # 21:

Absolutely terrible! Is nothing sacred?

Nope.

You know, really, though, I'm amazed they keep sending you emails.

Makes me sleepy.

Counting sheep tends to do that.

"...your kids Alaric, Connlann, and Skatje..."

Yeah they make threats at your kids, but can any of these loons pronunciate your kids' names?

"In 2001, this part of the Tenure Code was invoked against a professor at UMN because he had images of child porn on his computer. It should now be invoked against Myers, and that is why we will appeal to UMN's Board of Regents to do just that. It strains credulity to maintain that Christian students can expect fair treatment by a faculty member who has publicly shown nothing but contempt for their religion."

Myers hasn't been fired for showing contempt for creationism (which is the same as showing contempt for certain versions of Christianity), so one wonders what makes Donohue think Myers is going to be fired for this.

Unfortunately, these idiots will never change. Ever.

That's why re-education camps are so handy. Bring back the Gulag.

don't think a desecration of the Eucharist by you will go unabated.

"Unabated"? Now for some reason, that made me laugh.

The inestimable Rick DeLano is kind enough to warn, "Please be advised that there is a limit beyond which gratuitous, evil and demonic hatred expressed toward Catholics will either be dealt with by the appropriate authorities, as it should have been long ago in this instant case . . ."

I'm just guessing here, but wouldn't the "appropriate authorities" be the being he calls by a name that is forbidden to be spoken as well as this being's minions, who seem to be legion? And are not these agents the very ones that Rick and his congregation not only pray to faithfully and earnestly, but in whom the average Catholic will claim complete trust? So why invoke something as lame as vague threats issued at long distance by mere humans?

Just thinking out loud here . . .

At my small liberal arts alma mater, a tenured prof was recently fired for having a consenual affair with someone he met over the internet...

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20080721.LPERSONAL21/T…

I get the impression tenure isn't as tenured as I thought?

"how much do you love your son. myers? or are you looking at him just as a big blob - a collection of amoeba-like entities"

But surely Catholics are meant to love all gods creatures? It saddens me to think there is a group of people who have it in for single cell organisms.

Jebus, there used to be a time when Catholic schools actually taught people how to write. I see that time is long gone.

Larrimore's 334-410-0611 phone number needs to be dispersed across the net.

Myers: You shouldn't complain about proofreading when you have such a poor command of the English language yourself. To wit: "I'm offended by you, but none of us have a right to not be offended." None of us implies "not one of us." Hence, you should say, "None of us has..." (Incidentally, you also have a split infinitive.) You see, its only a smart idea to pontificate when you know what the hell you're talking about.

You see, its only a smart idea to pontificate when you know what the hell you're talking about.

If you're the same Sandi who posted reams of demented gibberish in the recent 2000-plus comments thread, how on earth are you in any position to judge?

Hey, Sandi shouldn't that be "...it's only a smart idea...".
You see, "its" is the possessive form of "it", and you wish to use the contraction of "it is". Well done.

Personally, I think it's going to get worse, not better.
As society advances technologically, I think we're going to end up with more, crazier fundamentalists rather that fewer... because only a small percentage of the populace actually understand technology. To the rest it's essentially "magic." Ad the magic gets more and more confusing, a large segment of the population will become more and more estranged from the technologically literate ones. Tension, anxiety, misunderstanding and a general feeling of lack of control is going to manifest itself in crazier and crazier cultish behavior.

Just think of the distrust and ignorance behind the "moon landings were faked," the "government hiding aliens" and other nutty concepts, and magnify that by a thousand as people are less and less able to understand and deal with the technology around them.

I swear, 100 years from now there will be churches worshiping nanotech.

I hope you didn't strain yourself actually trying to make sense of that.

Too late.

PZ,
You must be a demon of the time warping type. To handle all of what is on your plate MUST require Supernatural effort. This is TRUE PROOF that you are only a faux atheist.
OUT with you demon! OUT with you demon! Oh, the exorcism didn't work. WTF? I paid 666.00 dollars for the internet exorcism kit and you are still on my darned bookmarks.
I want my money back.

Ken

If I was you, I'd reply to all the hate-mail with just three words:

"I forgive you"

#'s 39 and 41

Come on you guys, don't be such grammar nazis.

Myers: As for your rant the other day against Catholics ("The Great Desecration"), let me make the following observation: you're like Rip Van Winkle. Most of your rant involved the year 1310 and the Middle Ages. We are now in the year 2008--perhaps you didn't get the memo? Talk about holding a long grudge! Maybe you're compensating for your, ahem, shortcomings in other areas.

"You can't even stop again. Look at your tummy!!!"

haha, this was my favourite. OK, I really don't get the tummy part, but it's hilarious. I love how idiots seem to think that as biologists we should be basically superhuman and know how to cure JUST OURSELVES from all diseases. Priceless.

I'm kinda sad that you're trashing your messages now, because these are so entertaining. But I'm glad for you that things seem to be lightening up a bit.

"We are now in the year 2008--perhaps you didn't get the memo?"

And yet here you still are worshiping a cracker and treating a book of fairy tales as a history textbook.

Jim RL at #41 is quite right. I really should have proofread before posting. Oh, well, at least I had fewer errors than Myers.

Oooops,
Sorry about the exorcism. It turns out that someone is actually selling a book about internet exorcism. Who knew?

Ken

You shouldn't complain about proofreading when you have such a poor command of the English language yourself.

Because using a split infinitive is just as bad as not being able to spell one of the fifty US states.

Come on you guys, don't be such grammar nazis.

I was thinking to myself the last time any of my relatives saw grammarians telling them what to do they were telling them to go to the showers to get gassed.

I'm generally not a grammar nazi because I tend to make numerous errors when posting comments. My point was that repeatedly misspelling the name of a US state is not the same as using the wrong verb tense in a convoluted sentence. PZ wasn't being a grammar nazi. He was just pointing out blatant and repeated spelling and grammar mistakes. Such systemic abuse of the English language does reflect poorly on the writer. Sandi's missing character and PZ's verb tenses are not systemic errors.

That split infinitive thing is a pet peeve of mine. The rule comes from Victorian-era grammarians who thought that Latin was a "perfect language" or whatever. Just like modern descendants of Latin like Spanish, the infinitive tense of a verb is a single word and cannot be split. They decided that that also made sense for Germanic languages. Splitting infinitives in English is not "bad grammar", and doing it can often make a sentence more clear.

just a blob of amoeba - a blob that is hell-bound until your 9th generation.

HOLY CRAP!!!! It's the BLOB !!!!!

Hurry, somebody call Steve McQueen

#53

Language leads to killing.

Myers: As for your rant the other day against Catholics ("The Great Desecration"), let me make the following observation: you're like Rip Van Winkle. Most of your rant involved the year 1310 and the Middle Ages. We are now in the year 2008--perhaps you didn't get the memo? Talk about holding a long grudge! Maybe you're compensating for your, ahem, shortcomings in other areas.

Sandi, I only wish you could appreciate how monumentally stupid that sounds coming from someone who practices a religion based on a 2000 year old book.

I wonder how many of these whack-jobs will now turn around and join in the "Official Pray for PZ Myers Month.

And if they do, will they be praying that he converts, or will they be praying that he will finally see the beauty of ass desecration and give them a call?

Sandi@#39,

That's the best you have? An attack on grammar? Wow, what an impressive intellect. I quiver.

@ Sandi...

Get over it. Seriously.

That is all.

Poor Minnisota, I'm sure their tourism is going to suffer from all the boycotting.

Hang in there PZ, maybe the kook mails will begin to decrease after a few months. :)

Sandi, the whole point is that it is 2008. In the 21st century people shouldn't make death threats over the well-being of a small piece of unleavened bread. It is absolutely ridiculous. In a rational society, PZ's actions would be eccentric, but not offensive. Putting a nail through some bread should not be a big deal.

What a bunch of mooks!

But to anyone who reads history, particularly that of religions in general and the Catholic Church in particular, it should come as small suprise. Vicious attacks on anyone who who disagrees and is less than silent about it was SOP. It was only a very few centuries ago that this idiotic cracker business would have resulted in heresy charges for everyone concerned including thee & me. Someone else's heresy was taken very seriously and, evidently, it still is with some of the more loosely-wrapped faithful. They grieve that they don't live in a place where Church law is THE law. I suggest that they immigrate to Saudi Arabia or Iran. They'd have to change their faith, but what the hell; it's all the same thing.

I think it's about over, although I'm sure that these maroons will find some new quasi-outrage to knot up their delicate knickers and provide me, at least, with more amusement. Thanks, Catholic blatherers! I enjoyed the ride!

doov

English isn't my native language, and if someone told me my English sucked badly, I'd be the last one to contradict - but hey, some of the folks emailing PZ are even worse than me, and they are f'ing native speakers! That kind of restores my trust in my English teachers.

Sandi,
Catholic apologists are forever boasting about the long and glorious history of the Church. you don't get to do that, then trurn round and say "but that was a long time ago" when it comes to the nastier parts of that history - which are very, very nasty indeed.

"I wonder how many of these whack-jobs will now turn around and join in the "Official Pray for PZ Myers Month."

I like the comments where they can't figure out PZ motives, assume it's unknowable, and decide that he's just full of hate and only wanted to do it to offend and hurt Christians.

Things are so much easier when you don't have to think.

I'm sure if they bothered getting the facts or looking at the context, they'd just be disappointed that things aren't as black and white as in their version. Who wants to find that out? Better not to even find out at all!

Geru (#62), I'm sure their tourism is suffering already from the fact that no one seems to be able to find Minnisota on a map!

Dr. Myers,
You should not filter off of the e-mails. Instead you should gather the worst and most inane into a compendium and dedicate it the hate-monger Donahue. Call it "The Whackaloon Tales or Adventures of a Cracker Fracker" or something like that. In this country these missives plus some of your adroit commentary should contribute to a blockbuster best seller. You know how the American public eats up tales of mystery, persecution, violence, etc. Just look at the sales from the "Da Vinci Code". I would suggest the profits be used to create a scholarship for the two CFU students being viciously persecuted by the catholics and to fund research into religious whackaloonery. Perhaps as a #1 on the NY Times Book List, there may be enough money generated to establish several foundations and support several research projects.
Now THAT would really frost their fracken crackers, eh?

That kind of restores my trust in my English teachers.

Grammar, as taught by English teachers, has nothing - nothing - to say about how life originated. Has nothing to say about how the governing principles in the universe - gravity, thermodynamics, motion, fluid motion - how any of those originated. It's...it's got some gigantic missing pieces.

Mr. Meyers, have you read the criticism posted on Alonzo Fyfe's Atheist Ethicist blog?

He's sent you several emails, but they might have gotten lost in with the spam and the death threats.

Craig #42,

"I swear, 100 years from now there will be churches worshiping nanotech."

no there won't its immoral.

It strains credulity...

*blink*

When did Catholics become concerned about that?

None of us implies "not one of us." Hence, you should say, "None of us has..."

Nope. If pluralizing "none" is good enough for the King James, it's good enough for PZ. He's respectful like that.

(Incidentally, you also have a split infinitive.)

Jeez, now you're disagreeing with Star Trek. Is nothing sacred?

The SAT writers do not define the English language. Read more books!

"People have been splitting infinitives since the 14th century, and some of the most noteworthy splitters include John Donne, Samuel Pepys, Daniel Defoe, Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Johnson, William Wordsworth, Abraham Lincoln, George Eliot, Henry James, and Willa Cather."

Catholic apologists are forever boasting about the long and glorious history of the Church. you don't get to do that, then trurn round and say "but that was a long time ago" when it comes to the nastier parts of that history - which are very, very nasty indeed.

Kind of like atheists denying the atheist atrocities of the 20th century as "not true atheism". Admit it - Stalin was just as capable rational thought as you.

Ah, Catholic love. Can you feel the love? Brought to you by the ministry of peace.

They keep using that word. I do not think it means what they think it means.

Hmm something's wrong here.
Google says this:

Jason Larrimore (334)636-1328 1097 W 3rd St S, Thomasville, AL 36784

And he says his phone number is (334)410-0611, which is actually located in Selma, AL. 55 miles away.

I'm willing to bet giving mr. Larrimore a call at the first, not mentioned, number is a lot more effective. He might have been dumb enough to post his information only, but whatever you do, don't supply him with a few free korans and shipping boxes.

nudge nudge, wink wink.

As for Larrimore's phone number, please don't call it unless you really, seriously definitely desire him to desecrate your ass.

It's handy to have around for those special moments around three AM, when I'm too drunk to type, but I still feel like having a dialog.

Most of your rant involved the year 1310 and the Middle Ages. We are now in the year 2008

As it is readily apparent in the outfit and general demeanor of this people. It's a remarkable thing how things have changed, right?

I bet nice little old ladies who are Catholics, who wouldn't dream of saying an unkind word to anyone, believe atheists go to hell and deserve to go there.

My roommates and I prank called poor Jason. He's a dumb instinctive dude, but one of us did a chat with him and he's a bit remorseful and feels kinda stupid for what he did.

I'm pissed at my roommate for letting him know his phone number had been posted - I was gonna call as a collections agent.

Jim RL #4

Wow, that's one of the most rational responses from a Catholic that I've heard since this ordeal started.

Cn smn pls pnch Snd n th cnt?

[misogyny makes me angry. No more, please.]

I have found all this very amusing. Back in my religious days, I worked from 8am-4pm every Saturday and Sunday. This meant that I could not attend my Lutheran church with my family. In a discussion, we decided I would attend the local Catholic church with my Catholic aunt for Saturday night mass. I was not Catholic; I was never baptized into the Catholic church, but for well over a year I attended mass and took communion, without EVER going to confession or anything. The priest, who knew my aunt well, also knew I was not Catholic. Never stopped him from giving me communion. He never said anything about it.

In fact, at the wedding of my aunt and uncle, held in the local Catholic church, the mass/service was co-performed by the priest and a Lutheran minister; both gave communion to whomever came up to the alter rail, Catholic, Lutheran, Baptist, whomever. No one asked what religion you were (if ANY...)

To me, that was TRUE Christianity. All were welcome to the alter, and all were treated the same. As an atheist now, I wouldn't go up for communion. But then, I recognized true love for all people (and no one got into trouble for taking a host back to their seat and eating it there, either...)

Wonder what these rampant writers would have done at the wedding?

would like to desacrate your fat ass.

You desecrated the eucharist by putting a nail through it. So does that mean that he wants to... Oh my.

From what I could find out (for free), that is an unpublished phone number in the Montgomery, AL area. Thomasville is 85 miles SW of Montgomery. The phone number probably belongs to an innocent party.

"Oh my."

I can't help but imagine George Takei saying that.

Absolutely terrible! Is nothing sacred?

"The individual human mind. In a child's power to master the multiplication table, there is more sanctity than in all your shouted 'amens' and 'holy holies' and 'hosannas.' An idea is a greater monument than a cathedral. And the advance of man's knowledge is a greater miracle than all the sticks turned to snakes or the parting of the waters."

PZ wrote: "As for Larrimore's phone number, please don't call it unless you really, seriously definitely desire him to desecrate your ass. "

Oh yeah, that'll work, PZ.

You don't learn very quickly, do you?

Can someone please punch Sandi in the cunt?

Take it somewhere else.

Thanks for posting some of the Catholic hate mail. They
illustrate beautifully how religion kills the brain and strips away morality in order to replace it with blind obedience to utter bullshit.

There can be no doubt of the strong correlation between rabid religiosity and the inability to form a rational sentence with properly spelled words.

"Take it somewhere else."

Like the balls?

Hi Ben!
Nice to have you here so that we may share your unsurpassed wisdom. I heard an English teacher was fired for teaching early modern English in a modern literature course. I hope on behalf of all of us that you'll look into that. I look forward to your next project.

Hey! Rick DeLano sent you a missive? He is a well known defender of geocentrism even on the Catholic blogs; thinks Galileo still should be on the Pope's shit list because there's no scientific evidence for heliocentrism - even today. Surprise, surprise...

"Kind of like atheists denying the atheist atrocities of the 20th century as "not true atheism". Admit it - Stalin was just as capable rational thought as you."

uh, no. Stalin was quite possibly, actually probably truly an atheist. The point is, he didn't use atheism as a REASON for killing people.
Many people have been killed FOR god or Allah. The people Staling had killed he had killed simply to stay in power. If he could have had a better hold on power by proclaiming himself Pope, that;s what he would have done.

Splitting infinitives in English is not "bad grammar", and doing it can often make a sentence more clear.

To boldly split infinitives which no man has split before - or even if someone has, I'm still very much in favour of it myself. It's one of the things which makes English better than those other languages - along with the bolt-together-a-tense kit which makes convoluted Doctor Who scenarios possible to describe.

Neural T, I said I was raised Catholic. I've since become an atheist. I really started supporting PZ in this when I saw it as standing in solidarity with Cook. The whole Cook ordeal could fly under the radar with little media attention. He could get expelled or suspended and no one would remember next week. I see what PZ is doing as using his soap box to shed some light on this lunacy. Reading the responses in this post, it is easy to see which side I'd rather be on.

Can someone please punch Sandi in the cunt?

How super-intellectually rational!!

Jim RL #4
Wow, that's one of the most rational responses from a Catholic that I've heard since this ordeal started.
Posted by: Neural T

Jim RL said "As someone who was raised Catholic". He didn't say whether or not he's still a Catholic. I'm betting he's no longer a Catholic, but perhaps he will let me know I'm wrong.

You should exercise some discretion in calling Jason Larrimore. For all we know, he could have just given the information of an atheist in his neighborhood to try to get us to spam them. Don't do spamming unless you actually have confirmation that Jason Larrimore is the one who sent the email.

Oh, well, at least I had fewer errors than Myers.

Sandi, grammatical errors are one thing, logical errors are another. In that regard you win.

Hey Baba - "atheist atrocities"? Really? I don't recall Stalin doing anything in the name of atheism. Let's not forget that Stalin was educated in a monestery. Hmm, I wonder where he got all his good atrocity ideas from.

"Please be advised that there is a limit beyond which gratuitous, evil and demonic hatred expressed toward Catholics will either be dealt with by the appropriate authorities, as it should have been long ago in this instant case . . ."

Long ago in this instant case?!?

I... umm... They... How... err...

I can't even try to make sense of this nozzle's gibberish. Really, man. With writing such as that, they should ALL be called "Hoss."

It's a bloody miracle these knuckle-draggers don't step on their own tongues when they try to negotiate a flight of stairs.

#86

Google shouldn't be relied on too heavily.

The cell phone number of a person who lives in Thomasville can be a Selma number (or possibly vice versa). My son who lives down the street has a cell phone number from a small town in Texas. We are living about 1,200 miles away from that town. When that Texas town comes up on the caller ID, I know it is him though.

It's a miracle!

Can someone please punch Sandi in the cunt?

How super-intellectually rational!!

I've now got a bunch of filters in place that trash mail that mentions certain common keywords

You might want to send a friendly note to the Gmail admins warning them that there's an arkful of toxic waste going into the bit bucket and to exercise proper precautions when emptying it.

They sure do have a fascination with sex. I guess that's what happens when you turn it into something evil. I find so strange that they accuse someone else of being a child molester. You'd think they might want to avoid the subject. Maybe they secretly like the subject. Vicarious enjoyment?

This is what I find hilarious. In regard to the woman, (I think it was a woman, I'm not going to bother reading that shite again), who claims PZ's descendants down to the ninth generation will suffer for his evil.

Here's a bite off my Bit-o-Logic bar you moron, if you believe that PZ's descendants are doomed, you have to believe that it is highly likely; no, it is absolutely certain, that one of your ancestors has done something naughty enough that it damned you to hell. If there's a loophole, (there's always a loophole with these Catholics), that gets you out of eternal damnation, then that same loophole is there for PZ's poor descendants. The Catholics writing you and posting here seem to have no ability to think rationally. Whatever bullshit fits their rage at the moment will do for them, no matter how stupid it is.

#52, Tulse, I'm glad you had a chance to watch that Randy Pausch video before they apparently took it down. References to Captain Kirk and all... It was one of the most inspiring messages I've ever heard.

There have been a number of interesting posts by Alonzo Fyle on his blog Atheist Ethicist (atheistethicist.blogspot.com)concerning Dr. Myers and Mr. Donohue and the "cracker". I think it would be appropriate for Dr. Myers to post his thoughts about what Alonzo has written (Mr. Donohue certainly won't). Let us know if you will be saying anything about these posts Dr. Myers.

unclejeffie

Good call BobC. I did accurately describe my feeling on the Eucharist, though. I was quite devout, but I never thought the host really was Jesus. I knew as a Catholic I believed it "really was", but like I said, I thought it was all word play.

The Catholic Church could stop this if they wanted to, but they obviously do not...
They are quite happy to let the barking classes fight the good fight and the clergy do not even get their hands dirty being the consummate cowards that they are...they know the point is untenable...evil cretinous clowns that they are.

But they are aware that to pontificate on this nonsense will either injure the catholic supremacy of dogma or leave themselves wide open to the charge of ....

'What kind of sicko religion covers up child abuse but gets all spluttering and waffling about a cracker...?'

So they leave that to 'donkeyhue' to rile up the clones.
Handy having a ignorant delusional like him to do their dirty work...nothing can be traced back to them...cos apparently the CL and 'donkeyhue' in particular does not represent the RC's in the states...very convenient though.

As for trying to get the kid and his mate expelled that is just the ancient catholic hatred of education in the masses as classically practised by the sexually inadequate...they would be far happier if only their own anointed acolytes could be educated...

They are frightened simple like so, the overreaction has met the meltdown criteria because these idiots are aware that their religion is failing, they are more irrelevant now then they have ever been, they see people laughing at them, and they want to strike out and hurt, and regain past glories of being an RC clone...so now they are acting like homicidal village idiots in their panic.

Their dogma is falling apart in front of their eyes, there was no lightning strike on the kid for taking their invisible fairy hostage, there has been no natural disaster to cull the Atheist's that are mocking their stupidity, and the four riders of the apocalypse are keeping their gee gee's at home and kicking back with a six-pack.

They fear the anti-christ because they will be the first to the wall come the revolution, and jebus is nowhere to be found except in some dodgy cracker.

The prob being that even the delusional secretly know it is just a cracker. and that is the problem, nobody believes them now when they say otherwise, they have lost the element of fear that they love to wield so much.

Maybe it is dawning slowly on them that they are really a laughing stock, even calls and appeals to other religions are falling on deaf ears, the Catholics are shaken and very frightened...it was not supposed to be like this...being in a religion and get laughed at...and not taken seriously...except by their own infected.

oh dear!...how sad!...never mind!...

we were told the host "really is" Jesus

Let's think this through. If the host really is Jesus then shouldn't it really be pretty tough? Tough enough to deal with PZ Myers without resorting to deranged followers to get revenge? So either the cracker isn't really Jesus or Jesus approves of Myers' actions (or at least doesn't mind them or thinks that the issue should be dealt with in the afterlife...at any rate, doesn't plan to smite him any time soon.) Alternately, if the cracker is Jesus but isn't able to deal with Myers, why should he/it be worshipped?

You should exercise some discretion in calling Jason Larrimore. For all we know, he could have just given the information of an atheist in his neighborhood to try to get us to spam them. Don't do spamming unless you actually have confirmation that Jason Larrimore is the one who sent the email.

Also, as an example, my full name is not particularly common, but there are four people in this state who share it nonetheless.

Hey Baba - "atheist atrocities"? Really? I don't recall Stalin doing anything in the name of atheism. Let's not forget that Stalin was educated in a monestery. Hmm, I wonder where he got all his good atrocity ideas from.

You should do more reading then.

Also,that should be m-o-n-a-s-t-e-r-y.

I thought the Old Testament god only punished to the 4th generation, which was merciful at the time. I also thought Jesus did away with the whole punished for your ancestors' sins thing.

Kind of like atheists denying the atheist atrocities of the 20th century as "not true atheism". Admit it - Stalin was just as capable rational thought as you.

As I have stated about 5 billion times already, Atheism has no church, no creed, no bylaws, no philosophy. No Atheist has anything to do with any other Atheist. I have no more to do with Stalin than I have to do with some random green eyed lady from days gone by. It is so utterly bizarre that you people cannot escape the concept of group thinking.

Whether or not Stalin was an Atheist is irrelevant. He was an evil human. By your logic we are all responsible for him because we are all humans, or perhaps only men who shared his physical traits are responsible, or people who were of a certain height he was, or weighed exactly the same amount he did, or, or, or.....

Why is that so frikkin' hard for you to grasp?

Like the balls?

Like an ultra-Catholic blog, maybe - fantasies of sexually-charged violence really seem to be their cup of blood.

WA #59

I wonder how many of these whack-jobs will now turn around and join in the "Official Pray for PZ Myers Month."

The more the better, as it will mount the falsifying evidence for prayer.

The individual human mind. In a child's power to master the multiplication table, there is more sanctity than in all your shouted 'amens' and 'holy holies' and 'hosannas.' An idea is a greater monument than a cathedral. And the advance of man's knowledge is a greater miracle than all the sticks turned to snakes or the parting of the waters.

If I became an atheist can I become as pretentious as you? Please?

Hyperdeath #45:

Kudos for the Doctor Who quote (Even if it was unintentional).

Also, Meyers, this is my first time commenting during this entire thing, but I just want to say that it's truly inspiring that you didn't give in to the threats of the insane loons. Well, that said, why would you, their just idiots with no brain-mouth filter.

Right now www.catholic.org is giving out FREE e-mail accounts/addresses with fairly complete e-mail services. Be the first one on your block! Just think of impressing your friends and neighbors by using n@cathoic.org, one of the most violent and hateful organizations known to man. Only those coveted e-mail addresses from the KKK or Stormfront impress people more.

I wouldn't send any e-mail to PZ from here though....

You should do more reading then.

So should you.

Also,that should be m-o-n-a-s-t-e-r-y.

Yes it should. Thanks for the red herring.

#120
Oops, I guess it should be n@catholic.org....
Oh Well.

#69
Good idea. The perfect book to show someone who claims that no Catholics believe in Hellish torture anymore, that their faith removes all hate, that Jesus inspires to love and all that.
I know that it's not a representative elicitation, but it definitely disproves the first claim, and will give pause to all those who have a naively benign view of their peers in faith. It is very dangerous having a huge, global organization concerned primarily with morality, highly respected for their traditional role in history and scholarship, subsidized by many governments - and extremely overrating the education level and more importantly the ethical standard of behavior and manners of expression of its average members.
On one hand, it may be that the 12,000 hate mails you received were from the dregs of Catholicism. But on the other, as people familiar with the use of the internet and email procedures still tend to be more than averagely educated, I think it probable that a large portion were from people regarded as normal, friendly and moral members of their church, in unawareness of how they change character when in private.
It wouldn't surprise me if you found that whole congregations had written hate mail en bloc, given how effectively Donohue directed their herd mentality.
Speaking of whom, has Donohue challenged PZ to a written, personal or public discussion of the cracker incident? Or is he merely exhibiting the typical passive-aggressive mode of behavior by letting his minions do the outraging and complaining?
PZ, would you let Donohue punch you in public for the cause? ;)

Kind of like atheists denying the atheist atrocities of the 20th century as "not true atheism". - Baba

How many times does it need to be pointed out that there is no atheist organisation to which you must belong to be an atheist, no authority to which all atheists defer? There is no church of atheism or atheist party.
The opposite is true of Catholics: no-one is a Catholic unless the Church accepts them as such, and they proudly proclaim the historical continuity, unified authority structure and achievements of the Church, using them as justification for their claims for respect. The Catholic Church, like all organisations, must take responsibility for everything in its own history; the corresponding body in Stalin's case is presumably the Communist Party of Russia, the main heir to the Soviet Communist Party. Take your justified horror of Stalin out on them.

Admit it - Stalin was just as capable rational thought as you.

On the contrary, I admit no such thing. Stalin was severely damaged psychologically by a dreadful childhood, part of which was "education" in a brutal and obscurantist Orthodox seminary. He emerged from this as intensely ambitious, apparently conscienceless, and particularly liable to paranoia. He was thus drawn to the most ruthless of the Russian opposition factions, the Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks were atheists, but so were most of the rest of the opposition, who were persecuted under Stalin - as indeed were almost all the original Bolsheviks. Once in power, Stalin was surrounded by yes-men, and like all long-term political leaders, especially dictators, became detached from reality because no-one dared tell him uncomfortable truths. Although Stalin was clever and cunning, that he was frequently far from capable of rational thought is shown by the immense damage he did to Soviet agriculture and society by forced collectivisation, to the Red Army by his purges of senior offices in the 1930s, and to Soviet science by his support of Lysenko's nonsense; by his failure to heed the abundant warnings that Hitler was about to attack the USSR in 1941; and by the manufactured "doctors' plot" of his last year.

There can be no doubt of the strong correlation between rabid religiosity and the inability to form a rational sentence with properly spelled words.

Then guys like this must belong to the 21% of dis-believers who believe in a higher power.

#92 Like the balls?

#83 Can someone please punch Sandi in the cunt?

Neural T, #117 - that's pretty much what I wrote in my own blog response to it. :) I completely agree.

The individual human mind. In a child's power to master the multiplication table, there is more sanctity than in all your shouted 'amens' and 'holy holies' and 'hosannas.' An idea is a greater monument than a cathedral. And the advance of man's knowledge is a greater miracle than all the sticks turned to snakes or the parting of the waters.

If I became an atheist can I become as pretentious as you? Please?

Quoting Inherit the Wind is pretentious? Damn, you guys set the "high culture" bar low these days, don't you?

Oh, I forgot to add...

PZ, I think they keep calling you a Jew because they can't imagine any under six foot 3 inch tall white man with a beard as anything other than a Jew.

But they aren't a bunch of frikkin' racists or nothin'

*rolls eyes*

@ 103

True, but his home phonenumber is bound to have more effect then a cellphone.

For those with slightly more malicious intent, mr. Larrimore has left quite a trail online.

uh, no. Stalin was quite possibly, actually probably truly an atheist. The point is, he didn't use atheism as a REASON for killing people.
Many people have been killed FOR god or Allah. The people Staling had killed he had killed simply to stay in power. If he could have had a better hold on power by proclaiming himself Pope, that;s what he would have done.

Why do you believe in fantasies?

She can't stop, can she?

Oh, well, at least I had fewer errors than Myers.

Not if we're talking on a cumulative basis. That sentence had an extraneous comma. Unless you were caught by surprise, and were desperately trying to come up with a distraction, I think you really wanted to say:

"Oh well, at least I had fewer errors than Myers."

See? Remove the comma, the meaning changes. I'm also unsure about your claim to "fewer errors" than P.Z.

Myers: As for your rant the other day against Catholics ("The Great Desecration"),

Parentheses are unnecessary here. Simply enclose the quotation in commas. In addition, on the internet, when referencing another posting, it is considered correct to properly link to the referenced posting. So the first part should be:

Myers: As for your rant the other day against Catholics, "The Great Desecration",

See? It's more clean, and properly references the named post.

let me make the following observation: you're like Rip Van Winkle. Most of your rant involved the year 1310 and the Middle Ages.

You're now up to two colons in the same sentence. Sentences, like people, should have no more than one colon. I realize that due to your life's calling two colons, one each for web and toilet, seem like a godsend, but really, do try to only use one. In fact, you could have rewritten that initial sentence as:

"Myers: As for your rant the other day against Catholics, "The Great Desecration", you come off sounding like Rip Van Winkle."

See? Same meaning, but only one colon, no extraneous parentheses, shorter, and more to the point. However, I'm unsure as to the validity of Rip Van Winkle. PZ is not unaware of the passage of time since the Middle Ages, and the attendent changes in human behavior. You would perhaps be better off to use a simile that compares him to someone who instead, insists on living in the past, never able to come to terms with things as they are now. I know! The Pope! Perfect example of someone unable to deal with modern reality!

Of course, the irony in a Catholic, whose religion has created a booming tourist industry off of living in the past, castigating someone else for supposedly doing so is rich. But then, hypocrisy and Catholicism are old friends.

We are now in the year 2008--perhaps you didn't get the memo?

Double dashes? Really? Allow me to borrow from your overfull cup of wit: We are well out of the typewriter era. There is this lurvely concept known as the em dash. Do try to keep up with things, or you look as hopelessly stuck in the past as you accuse PZ of being. In addition, I question the use of even an em dash here. I realize you wanted to accentuate 2008, but there are better ways to do that, perhaps with the use of our good friend, the bold tag:

"We are now in the year 2008, perhaps you didn't get the memo?"

You drive home the point of the sentence, and it now flows better. No overlong pauses to stumble over.

Talk about holding a long grudge! Maybe you're compensating for your, ahem, shortcomings in other areas.

A Catholic bitching about holding a long grudge? Wow...that's amazing. I know you're afraid of hell, so your boldness in openly courting it here is astounding.

However, penis insults? That's so inane, I feel forced to ask: What are you, 12?

I think it's clear though, that if you're trying to claim some high moral ground vs. P.Z., perhaps spelling and grammar are not the best tactics for you. I recommend something better suited to your background. Maybe sitting in a closet, with your eyes closed, index fingers firmly in ears, shouting "LALALALALALAICAN'THEARYOU".

Jim RL (#109),

I think we share a similar history. I was Catholic, and I mostly believed all the myths, but I don't think I took it as seriously as some other Catholics. For example in Catholic grammar school, after a nun spent one hour telling us we're all going to hell, I thought the nun was nuts, and I had to reassure a friend of mine he wasn't going to hell, even though he was the sort of person the nun was talking about.

I used to think it was bizarre that Catholics oppose abortion because they can't tell the difference between a baby and an embryo. But now that I discover they can't tell the difference between a person and a piece of bread, I guess it's not quite as bizarre.

STOP IT, PEOPLE!

I TOLD YOU BEFORE, WAIT TILL THE THREE DAYS RUNS TO SEE IF IT COMES BACK TO LIFE. NEVER ASSUME ANYTHING! YOU'RE PLAYING WITH FIRE!

Kind of like atheists denying the atheist atrocities of the 20th century as "not true atheism". - Baba

Atheists generally hold critical thought, open inquiry, and skepticism as ideals. The secular dictatorships and totalitarian regimes of the 20th Century, so often cited as examples of "atheist atrocity," share the following features: dogmatism, uncritical allegiance to a leader or group, lack of inquiry, a controlled press, strict laws, strong punishment against transgressors, and so on. In other words, the same features that extreme forms of religion have in common. Those despotic regimes had a lot more in common with religion, from Muslim Sharia law to Middle Age Catholicism, than the democratic humanist philosophy espoused by most atheists.

As I have stated about 5 billion times already, Atheism has no church, no creed, no bylaws, no philosophy. No Atheist has anything to do with any other Atheist. I have no more to do with Stalin than I have to do with some random green eyed lady from days gone by. It is so utterly bizarre that you people cannot escape the concept of group thinking.

And anyone who disagrees with your historically inaccurate assertions will not be tolerated.

Whether or not Stalin was an Atheist is irrelevant. He was an evil human. By your logic we are all responsible for him because we are all humans, or perhaps only men who shared his physical traits are responsible, or people who were of a certain height he was, or weighed exactly the same amount he did, or, or, or.....

Actually, it's your logic.

"I wonder how many of these whack-jobs will now turn around and join in the "Official Pray for PZ Myers Month."

If I were PZ, I'd be worried about the upcoming month. I mean, we all know how those intercessionary prayer studies turned out.

Baba@130,

How much have you read about Stalin? You're clearly an expert, where do you derive your expertise from?

"If I became an atheist can I become as pretentious as you? Please? "

What's more pretentious than thinking the universe was created for you? And that the magical guy who created it created you in his image? And that unlike all other life forms, when YOU die, you won't actually die - because you're just too special to be like the other life forms?

Man created religion so that they could pretend to have godlike powers themselves.

In other words, in the despotic secular regimes of the 20th Century, there were sacred things. We open, democratic, humanistic atheists rail against sacred things.

James@55, I agree, the split infinitive nonsense is one of the alleged english "mistakes" which not only isn't one, its origin is, as you say, a language that has, at best, a very indirect relationship to english. There's a number of other "rules" with the same bullshite origin (as I recall, the double negative is another?), but for some reason, it's the claim that split infinitives are bad that really gets my goat.

(Apologies for any spelling errors. For some reason the spellchecker thinks all words are mispelt ( ;-) ) ... sighs--ah, wait a moment, I see why, for some reason my default dictionary is Deutsch! Hum... debugging time!

A favorite logical fallacy of mine is when someone appeals to authority, and decides to make that authority themselves. Saves you from citing evidence, and makes you forever and automatically right.

I have yet to see any evidence that Stalin did anything out of the principles of Atheism. Mainly, because there are none. It is a negation. Atheism is not prescriptive. I get so tired of educating the religious on the simplest of ideas.

I thought you guys learned your lesson in the Krollateral damage episode.

The lesson, as it turned out, is that a hateful liar got fired from her job for letting her equally hateful husband send death threats through her work email account.

That said, there is no way I'd call that number. Using a false phone number/website/email address if the oldest griefing trick in the book.

From Carl Sagan's 1994 keynote address to CSICOP:

What I'm trying to say is that the one deficiency which I see in the skeptical movement is an "us" verses "them." A sense that we have a monopoly on the truth, those other people who believe in all these stupid doctrines are morons...or worse, and that...if you're sensible you'll listen to us, if not, to hell with you.

That is non-constructive. That does not get our message across. That condemns us to permanent minority status. Whereas, an approach which from the beginning acknowledges the human roots of these problems understands that the society has arranged things...for very good reasons that skepticism is not well taught.

By very good reasons I mean very good reasons for the protection of those in power. If skepticism is well understood, then who's the skepticism going to be applied to except those in power. Those in power do not have a vested interest in everybody being able to ask searching questions.

If we understand that then we have compassion to the abductees [persons who claim to have been abducted by aliens] and those who, startled, come upon crop circles and believe that they are supernatural, and then we have a much better chance of succeeding.

I think it is key for us to make science and the scientific method more attractive, especially to the young. Because that's a battle for the future.

This is taken from around the 1:36 mark in the recording found here: http://www.pointofinquiry.org/ann_druyan_science_wonder_and_spiritualit…

I recommend listening to the whole speech before disagreeing with Sagan.

thickslab #83

Can someone please punch Sandi in the cunt?

Like this?

None of us implies "not one of us." Hence, you should say, "None of us has..."

Haha. So apparently it's also correct to say "None of the strawberries is ripe"? I mean seriously, it takes about three seconds of thought to realize that this "none of us"=singular rule makes no sense.

I am a Catholic Christian, I would like to desacrate your fat ass. I know that I shouldn't feel that way,

No homoerotica there. Could he be repressing something?

A challenge to the religious:

Just try this. Take a sabbatical for a decent period of time (maybe 6 months to a year) and truly try to open you mind to rational thought. You're not going to the dark side. You're just being a rational human being willing to look at facts. And hold yourself to that. Really examine evidence as if your life depended on it.

When faced with something you'd ordinarily say "goddunit" to, dig a bit deeper. Ask yourself if there could possibly be other expalantions. Keep Occam's razor in mind throughout.

Read a physics book. A book on chemistry. A book on cosmology. And certainly, a really good book on evolutionary biology (such as The Ancestors Tale). Just do it as an earnest experiment.

Then, wite down questions about things you don't understand. And rather than drawing conclusions, talk about it with folks who understand the area.

Just try it. How could t possibly hurt?

BTW, I tried the religious route early in life, all the way through a Catholic University. I found no answers there, only ancient dogma and mindless gibberish. But I tried. I really, really tried.

"Why do you believe in fantasies?"

I believe in the existence of fantasies because I see plenty of evidence that other people have them, and I have them myself. My fantasies are pretty mundane though, just your run of the mill sexual fantasies, and daydreams of writing better music than I'm currently capable of writing.
I certainly don't have "I'm important to the whole universe and I will never die" fantasies.

Most importantly, I know that my fantasies are fantasies. Having fantasies is healthy and sane.

Having fantasies and thinking they're real, making religions out of them and demanding that nobody nurst your bubble - that's insane.

I know I am inviting some flame but seriously, I find this rather touching. Pray for PZ Myers Month

Yeah I know it's goofy and superstitious, but it is nevertheless a positive sentiment, and more in line with the Catholics I have worked with, who are certainly a small minority.

I have worked with Catholics and Mary Knolls, and Catholic Workers Party people doing war resistance work, and they are very, very impressive people, and really work their asses off, and get arrested a lot, too.

There are Catholics and Christians out there who actually walk the walk.

When I interviewed PZ he pointed out that it was important for all progressives and liberals of all faiths or not to unite behind humanistic ideals.

Just my two cents of the moment
----------
PZ Interview

Quoting Inherit the Wind is pretentious? Damn, you guys set the "high culture" bar low these days, don't you?

More like a low pretentious tolerance. Plus I haven't seen much evidence that men's (or women's) minds are being advanced much around here.

Hey #121 Wikipedia is the Truth, the Light and the Way. We should all bow to the authority of the Great Wiki.

This has been a heck of an education in hate. PZ, you are such the mensch to deal with this and to post. I am a sephard jew, and I recognize the rape, fires, burning in hell threats with which I grew up in SW OH--for having a family history & artifact. Not good press for catholic pr considering their priest problem of recent years. For the thoughtful, we learn, don't we?

I do so very much love the embarrassment Christianity has suffered as a result of all this cracker nonsense. It's astounding that they can sit there demanding we respect them in one breath while barking out such vile, bat-shit insanity in another.

Seriously, religious addiction is clearly a very destructive thing. These people actually think those emails are perfectly fine and dandy. They kiss their kids in the morning, and sit down to spew such vicious, hate-filled, intolerant nonsense in defense of a fucking cracker.

I love how you hit a nerve with this all, PZ. You showed them that, in the minds of rational human beings, their beliefs are to be held no higher or lower than any others. And, as a result, they are terrified and struggling to make sense of it all.

#129 Alcari

For those with slightly more malicious intent, mr. Larrimore has left quite a trail online.

Just like the Krolls. A family that preys together stays together, right?

**See MKroll's post in support of her looney tunes spouse. Although just to be fair many observers just saw the symptoms of the battered spouse syndrome.

(+)

I haven't read the whole thread, so I'm sure someone else already said this, but what is with all these Catholics accusing PZ of pedophilia? Is fear of Hell the only reason they're not molesting children?

How much have you read about Stalin? You're clearly an expert, where do you derive your expertise from?

Wikipedia.

Written by Rayven: As I have stated about 5 billion times already, Atheism has no church, no creed, no bylaws, no philosophy. No Atheist has anything to do with any other Atheist. I have no more to do with Stalin than I have to do with some random green eyed lady from days gone by. It is so utterly bizarre that you people cannot escape the concept of group thinking.
________________________________

And anyone who disagrees with your historically inaccurate assertions will not be tolerated.
__________________________________

Written by Rayven: Whether or not Stalin was an Atheist is irrelevant. He was an evil human. By your logic we are all responsible for him because we are all humans, or perhaps only men who shared his physical traits are responsible, or people who were of a certain height he was, or weighed exactly the same amount he did, or, or, or.....

___________________

Actually, it's your logic.
________________________

Posted by: Baba

Then prove it. Prove we Atheists have a creed or philosophy. Prove to me what all Atheist believe beyond the obvious (there is no god). Other than that tell me what all Atheist believe, and prove it. Prove to me I am responsible for Stalin.

I'm waiting.

I'd love to see a study showing a correlation between one's religiosity and one's ability to spell correctly.

If I may toot my own horn, a friend of mine points out that if you google "Rick Delano troll", my site comes up as the #2 hit. (It's the #1 hit if you google "Rick Delano twatwaffle".)

I believe in the existence of fantasies because I see plenty of evidence that other people have them, and I have them myself. My fantasies are pretty mundane though, just your run of the mill sexual fantasies, and daydreams of writing better music than I'm currently capable of writing.
I certainly don't have "I'm important to the whole universe and I will never die" fantasies.

Most importantly, I know that my fantasies are fantasies. Having fantasies is healthy and sane.

You sound boring.

Hey, my quote tags messed up again. I know I put them in the right spots. Odd.

Maybe I'd better slow down and stop listening to a radio talk show while typing.

Atheists generally hold critical thought, open inquiry, and skepticism as ideals.

I'm skeptical.

So, PZ, you have a Jewish ascendency you've never heard of? OK, so maybe you'll be interested in the story I've managed to gather. It goes like this:

Back in the end of the 13th century, there was a Jew called Jonathas who lived rue des Billettes, in Paris, where he worked as a moneylender (not a lot of other activities were allowed to Jews). One day, a woman came to him: she wished to recover a gown she had left with him, but had no money to get it back. So in exchange, he asked her to bring him a consecrated communion wafer. She accepted ("like Judas", the old text says). She put the wafer under her tongue, came back to his house and gave it to him.

Jonathas took the wafer and started to stab it with his knife, and blood began to flow. His wife and children came and begged him to stop, but he carried on. He tried to break the wafer in pieces, but he could not; it only bled some more. Seeing he could not destroy it, he threw it in a cauldron full of boiling water, but the wafer rose above the water, and Jesus appeared.

Meanwhile, Jonathas' son was in the street, and he saw groups of people passing by. He asked them where they were going, and they said they were going to church to adore God. The child replied that it wasn't worth it, because he must surely be dead by now, seeing how his father was stabbing him hard. A woman heard the conversation and went to the house carrying a wooden platter, so she could pretend she came to ask for something for her cooking. When she entered the kitchen, she saw the flying wafer; she made the sign of the cross, and the wafer came to rest in her platter. She took it with her and brought it to a church.

Jonathas was denounced and sentenced to death. Before his execution, he asked for a book that was supposed to help him escape death. But he and his book burned very quickly. After that, his house was destroyed, a church was built at its place, and years later, the knife and the wooden platter were still shown as relics. People familiarly called nicknamed the street "the one where God was boiled". A passion play called "The mystery of the holy host" was written and often represented; the text still exists.

Now, the story was undoubtably told and repeated around these basic events. But it is very difficult to know what really happened. A Jew stealing a host and trying to destroy it is a ridiculous tale with zero credibility, but at the time, people believed it happened regularly.

The good thing is that, while the church exists, and while it it said that it was built on the site of a house belonging to a Jew, it doesn't seem that such a man was actually put to death. My personal opinion, as a non-historian and non-specialist, is that the details of the story were cooked up by the Church in order to impress the faithful.

Like I said Baba, prove it. Prove we Atheists have a creed or philosophy. Prove to me what all Atheist believe beyond the obvious (there is no god). Other than that tell me what all Atheist believe, and prove it. Prove to me I am responsible for Stalin.

We are still waiting for the evidence. If you have none, then perhaps the conversation is over.

Perhaps batch forward the 12000 emails(and what the subsequent filters capture) to the vatican website, a local bishop or one of those red cardinal guys? Perhaps somebody there might notice the state of catholicism that Bill Donahue and his minions practice? Will the papal bull slap Donahue upside the head, condemn the posters who's actions run contrary to teachings or will they say nothing, and in doing so, reveal the hypocrisy of their ineffective authority.

Doov, #64, Ah, yes, the delectably descriptive mook. Oh my, how I missed using that one! Thanks for jogging my memory and here's that hysterically funny mook scene from Mean Streets: http://youtube.com/watch?v=JmrQ70gJUJI

Sandi, It seems that it is you who have not received the memo that we are at present in 2008. Try reading books that at least have been written last century.

@144

So, I like Sagan. How can you not like Sagan? The quote you've put up also reflects a fine sentiment: let's not blame the victims.

However, I keep laughing to myself because it strikes me as a kind of reverse concern-trolling. Sagan was always ahead of his time.

So, who wants to go frequent some religious sites with me and let them know how very sorry we are that they aren't capable of thinking rationally, through no fault of their own, but because they've been indoctrinated into ancient mystical cults. *sighs beautifically*

I just posted the following over at the "month of prayer" blog (mentioned in WA's post, #59):

Hi all....

Just for the record, the stated reason Professor Myers went through the trouble was in protest of certain aspects of the Catholic reaction to the Webster Cook incident at UCF. Cook has received death threats for taking a consecrated host from a service (which he later returned), and there's an ongoing attempts to have him expelled from the school.

Peace to you,

- Pheathers

Let's see how long it lasts.

Oh man, I actually feel sort of bad for the guy who gave out his phone number. The Internet is a merciless place, afterall.

So, should I plan my wardrobe for the brunch tomorrow around body armor? :)

My aunt yelled about me about all this. She is a very staunch Sunday Catholic mother. She gets even angrier when she decides to "discuss" her beliefs with my and I disagree. My stepfather (great guy) told her that she should get the scientist guy (PZ) and Bishop Humpachild (member of Catholic clergy) together to discuss this issue on TV. You think PZ has had some hateful things sent his way? Wow. She is certain that everyone, except her, will rot in hell. Funny how that seems to work.

I love coming here and reading stuff about science & kooks. Especially when I'm having a slow ass day at work. I almost sh*t myself laughing at my desk! Keep it up PZ. They keep showing their true colors.

@170 Oh man, I actually feel sort of bad for the guy who gave out his phone number. The Internet is a merciless place, afterall.

Should anyone be interested in some information on Mr Larrimore, send a mail to:
DoxOnLarrimore@mailinator.com

Or do your own digging, it's not that hard.

"You sound boring."

Better boring than delusional.

I'm skeptical.

Vapid.

Scooter, #150:

I know I am inviting some flame but seriously, I find this rather touching. Pray for PZ Myers Month

This is not meant as flame, because you're entitled to your opinion, and I can understand why it would appear touching, kind and generous.

I would agree, except for the fact that these Christians who are walking the walk are not taking the time to understand the message PZ was trying to get out. Instead of trying to have a discussion with the other side, they chalk "The Great Desecration" and its supporters up to hate, Satan, whatever. Then they turn to the man in the sky to make it all go away. They may do it out of a perceived love for fellow man, but a true love would be to understand opposing viewpoints instead of wishing for some miraculous turn of everyone's thought to match their own.

For those of you who want to argue this, I'll just say now: no, I don't think PZ's actions are analogous to what I'm saying about Christians. He used reason and logic to make a point, and engage their minds, so they might consider something from a new perspective and decide for themselves. Obviously, many have made the decision to continue believing what they choose. The Christians who will devote their prayer time to PZ would rather have a supernatural being just change his mind, just flip it right over to their side. Whether or not it can actually be done is irrelevant. They believe it can, and they're employing a dirty technique.

That's just how I see it...

It's looking like the Baba troll is running out of steam.

Well, think of it this way, PZ - all of this will make for an interesting chapter in a book - if you ever decide to write one.

Myers: You shouldn't complain about proofreading when you have such a poor command of the English language yourself. To wit: "I'm offended by you, but none of us have a right to not be offended." None of us implies "not one of us." Hence, you should say, "None of us has..." (Incidentally, you also have a split infinitive.) You see, its only a smart idea to pontificate when you know what the hell you're talking about.

You are the one you doesn't know what they're talking about.*

"None" is both singular and plural. It can be used as the literal translation of both aucun/aucune (sg.) and aucuns/aucunes (French), keiner/keine/kein and keine (German), and so on.

The ability, not to mention the occasional necessity, to "split infinitives" is what sets English apart from, say, German. ("To boldly go" translates into German as kühn dorthinzugehen, literally "boldly there-to-go".) Be sure to follow the link in comment 52.

Where did you little know-it-all learn linguistics? Did you ever learn linguistics? (Is that a rhetorical question?)

* And, yes, singular they is another English peculiarity that appears in Shakespeare, Chaucer, and the King James Bible. Well, it's less peculiar than split infinitives, because it also occurs in Biblical Greek and Biblical Hebrew, but you get the idea.

Hey, Sandi shouldn't that be "...it's only a smart idea...".

You see, "its" is the possessive form of "it", and you wish to use the contraction of "it is". Well done.

No, this is not Sandi's own fault. As I'm sure you know, the Bierce-Hartman-McKean-Skitt Law of Prescriptivist Retaliation states that any article or statement about correct grammar, punctuation, or spelling is bound to contain at least one eror. :-)

It's one of the things which makes English better than those other languages - along with the bolt-together-a-tense kit which makes convoluted Doctor Who scenarios possible to describe.

The first half of this sentence is sort of like Homer Simpson's famous saying "To alcohol -- the origin and the solution of all of life's problems" (warning: I'm retranslating from German here, I don't know the original). Sure, there are situations where (see above) splitting infinitives is necessary in English, but that doesn't mean that other languages can't deal with that in other ways, just that English can't.

The second half also applies (at the very least) to German, which (see above) doesn't split infinitives, and by "doesn't" I mean that no native speaker would ever get the idea of trying it, no matter how uneducated.

Incidentally, Jim RL (comment 54), the infinitive is not a tense. (I don't know where the word tense comes from; other languages just use "time", and while that's an oversimplification, it does make people get the fact that present, past, future and the like are tenses, while infinitive, passive and so on are not.)

-----------------------------------

Kind of like atheists denying the atheist atrocities of the 20th century as "not true atheism". Admit it - Stalin was just as capable rational thought as you.

Capable? He was clinically paranoid... his atrocities were motivated by that paranoia combined with communism. Communism behaved like a religion: holy infallible scriptures, infallible prophets, belief in supernatural forces (inevitable march of progress and the like)... and we know what religions do to each other when they are allowed to.

#108 In reference to the call for Donahue's resignation.

Putting together last week program with an extended Hit peice on BillyBoy I ran across some hysterically funny material from Kathy Griffin, another recent victim of Donahue.

Quote: 'Then I discovered that the CATHOLIC LEAGUE is one guy and a computer'

It's probably Bill Donahue, a webmaster and maybe an intern.

Knowing this, reading Catholic League press releases are particularly hysterical. But also calling for Donahue's resignation is equally humorous.
---------------------------

Bill Donahue pwn3d

Personally I think it's pretty dumb to call the number, etc.
Just because one person's an asshole harasser doesn't mean we have to do it back... and also, it's entirely possible for someone to pull a prank by sending nasty emails to people using their enemies' names and/or phone numbers.

I sure wouldn't like to start getting bunches of upset phone calls and emails and reports to police or whatever because my neighbor decided to get back at me for complaining that he was burning leaves or something.

Maybe he (Baba) is kissing Sandi when the other guy wanted to punch her.

These folks give a whole new meaning to the phrase "crackerhead".

That should read "...where the other guy..."

You sound boring.

Nice to see that the Alex McRae tactic is really starting to pick up steam. It's really oh-so-effective in proving any point.

Leave poor Larrimore alone. The guy has enough problems dealing with homoerotic impulses that his church tells him are sinful.

Baba is a troll. Enough posts have been made to make this clear. His opinions may be relegated to the rubbish bin. Maybe if Baba really wished to challenge us he'd be kind enough to send us someone who actually engaged in conversation. Much less someone who kept from stating outdated and tired arguments like they were some coup de grace.

BobC, that sounds pretty similiar. As I got older I really tried to get skeptical side and my faith side to co-exist. I would seriously ponder questions like "when did the soul evolve?" I wanted to live in a rational universe that also supported the myths I was taught.

I may not have been as rational as you because our 6th grade teacher scared the hell out of me. She told us that people could seriously sell their souls to the devil and go to hell for it. My parents were going through a rough patch, and there was talk of divorce. They worked things out, and I remember laying in bed scared that I had sold my soul to get them to stay together. I didn't remember selling my soul, but the devil could make me forget. I would have probably requested it. What would he care?

I guess it's a small blessing that Kerry didn't reach the Whitehouse. Otherwise the poor fellow'd likely be asked to comment on this tempest in a teapot (scirocco in a chalice?).

By attacking Atheism with what they regard as wit and sarcasm they are attempting to distract and gloss over the point that has so well been illustrated recently...that Roman Catholicism is the most blood thirstiest and evil of all Magisteriums.

A quick glance at the messages these little heroes leave behind like dog shit just stinks of fear and basic ignorance.

It is more then enough to classify them as hate lovers, they just love to hate and threaten, bullies and sycophantic sexually inadequate cowards always like to pretend moral superiority, and when that fails they try to blame and accuse their protagonists of exhibiting precisely the same traits as they have.

But it is the way that they have been taught and grilled in the cult...lie, distort and lie again, if that fails claim religious intolerance, and pretend hurt innocence.

Ahaha. I laughed myself silly at the amoeba guy, but PZ's reply at #23 really sent me over the edge.

Like I said Baba, prove it. Prove we Atheists have a creed or philosophy. Prove to me what all Atheist believe beyond the obvious (there is no god). Other than that tell me what all Atheist believe, and prove it. Prove to me I am responsible for Stalin.

We are still waiting for the evidence. If you have none, then perhaps the conversation is over.

Take note minions, the next time a troll starts the Stalin/Hitler.etc...shit, just ask them to do this. *points up*
They cannot comply. They will ignore our demand, but if we keep posting it over and over and refuse further dialog, they will go away.

.....or mention tacos. They seem to calm down and start being peaceful if you mention tacos. It must be their favorite food. (and they like to trade recipes, that's kind of cool, so they aren't all bad)

Odd. I typed in "Jason Larrimore Thomasville, AL" into Google and got an entirely different phone number.

** Not that I would ever harass poor dim Jason, or his family **

Instead, a less direct approach:

St. Joseph Parish
West Front Street
Thomasville, AL 36784

Mailing Address: PO Box 70 Grove Hill, AL 36451

Phone: 251-275-3665

Might want to know if a parishoner is threatening other human beings.

Nothing like the wrath/guilt of their own "god" and all that. Jason is a recent convert (apparently wife-driven) -- and we all know about recent converts and their fanaticism

It strains credulity...

And this coming from people with some of the biggest, densest, most thoroughly reinforced credulity on the planet!

The email tally given by Prof. Myers seems a bit crudely categorized, in that the Christian section includes only "hate mail" and "reasonable". Surely there were abundant messages speaking only of pity and prayer: those clearly don't belong in the "reason" box, but while condescending to the point of insult, don't quite qualify as "hate mail" either.

However, I'm not volunteering to conduct the recount, and am a bit skeptical that our esteemed (ahem) host will do so either. The question of proper classification will have to wait until some aspiring scholar chronicles the christ-cracker crusade crisis for a thesis or dissertation.

Rayven, #191 -- I don't have time to get into an actual conversation about it, but being in the Christian worldview, you might be more inclined to expect people who reject it to have some sort of unified creed. To them the world is populated entirely by two groups: the saved and the unsaved. If you have somehow come to be a non-Christian then they have to expect there's some reason for it, and furthermore that that reason is your fault, or the whole free-will-salvation-theodicy falls apart. Atheists are people who have rejected God and furthermore don't even accept any other Christianity-esque creed like most other groups, so they must have some kind of big problem with him.

Ok, it still doesn't really make perfect sense to view atheists as a unified group from that angle, but you can at least see how they don't grok atheism as a sort of neutral epistemic starting position in the way we'd be inclined to.

Like I said Baba, prove it. Prove we Atheists have a creed or philosophy. Prove to me what all Atheist believe beyond the obvious (there is no god). Other than that tell me what all Atheist believe, and prove it. Prove to me I am responsible for Stalin.

I'll do no such thing! Don't let others do your thinking for you, you must have a questioning mind.

They will ignore our demand, but if we keep posting it over and over and refuse further dialog, they will go away.

Apologies. I wasn't ignoring you, I had to pray over supper.

"Ok, it still doesn't really make perfect sense to view atheists as a unified group from that angle, but you can at least see how they don't grok atheism as a sort of neutral epistemic starting position in the way we'd be inclined to."

Well I learned from fstdt.com that the latest research indicates that atheists are actually a different sect of Muslims.

Maybe he (Baba) is kissing Sandi when the other guy wanted to punch her.

An example of the sophisticated advancing of the "the minds of men".

Vapid.

Glad to see that we can agree on some things.

Don't feed the troll.

Rayven, #191 -- I don't have time to get into an actual conversation about it, but being in the Christian worldview, you might be more inclined to expect people who reject it to have some sort of unified creed. To them the world is populated entirely by two groups: the saved and the unsaved.

Don't forget the fouls and offsides.

Yep. Game over. 100% Troll.

Glad to see that we can agree on some things.

Look. Almost a sentence.

(Yet still not a thought.)

#131 reminds me of http://xkcd.com/406/

Better boring than delusional.

Prove it!

Awwwww...Isn't it cute how they try to excuse why they don't answer direct questions? The troll claims he doesn't have time? LOL, too funny. He has time to post message after message of the same tired nonsense but he doesn't have time for an original thought.

How many times has Wowbanger asked the trolls to answer the direct question he keeps asking them about the policy of the church in regards to sex crimes? They refuse to answer.

Perhaps we should ask them direct questions which they refuse to answer and refuse further discussion.

What, then, am I to do with this bag of Bits 'n' Bytes Troll Food ?

It keeps their coats shiny and fights troublesome Troll Breath.

I paid alot of Pay Pals for this stuff, and it tastes terrible so I can't eat it.

"Prove it!"

You already did.

Look. Almost a sentence.

(Yet still not a thought.)

Where?! Where?!

You already did

Yawwwwn!!!!

Our current troll has, despite himself, led me to a recurring thought. It is one that has shown itself quite commonly among those who repudiate PZ. Why when someone thinks "I hate 'X' type of behavior" do they then go on to react to it by behaving like 'X'?

I hate smarmy know-it-alls for example. How is it best to deal with them? Most of the people in opposition to PZ would apparently choose to act like a smarmy know-it-all.
It really blows my mind. I know this is a blog heavy on biology, but I bet MAJeff (or any other qualified person) could take a crack at explaining the psychosis that underlies such contradictory, and morally stunted behavior. I really do wonder about it.

#179: scooter, the Catholic League is not just one guy and a computer, I'm afraid:

http://www.catholicleague.org/about.php

It has a board of directors, a chairman, and a vice president, and probably some additional staffers. There's also a (probably powerless) board of advisors that includes some other well-known nutters like Brent Bozell III, Dinesh D'Souza, Alan Keyes, Thomas Monaghan, and Paul Vitz.

I'm a bit late to this thread but craig #42 has it exactly right, in my opinion. Look at the big picture - the loftier and more complex the science, the less the general public will understand it. The divide between science and pseudo-science (and by extension, woo) is only going to get wider and wider as I see it. We have an ever harder task ahead of us to keep the depressing effects of this widening chasm to a minimum. PZ, Dawkins, Dennett and their ilk are doing an absolutely essential job, and deserve all the backing we can give them.

And I'm not even a scientist. I'm a composer.

Bits 'n' Bytes Troll Food?!?! Ok, you can feed the troll. But only one tiny bit at a time. it doesn't seem to do well with more than that.

David Marjanović, OM @#178

Thank you, David. None of us would have been able to explain it as well as you did. (Was that right?)

Awwwww...Isn't it cute how they try to excuse why they don't answer direct questions? The troll claims he doesn't have time? LOL, too funny. He has time to post message after message of the same tired nonsense but he doesn't have time for an original thought.

How many times has Wowbanger asked the trolls to answer the direct question he keeps asking them about the policy of the church in regards to sex crimes? They refuse to answer.

I hate that. I refuse to answer, you can torture me, pierce me with a nail and throw me in the Gulag, I will not talk.

Perhaps we should ask them direct questions which they refuse to answer and refuse further discussion.

Dastardly!! Yet characteristically uncreative of the atheists on this site.

If somebody starts up an "Atheist League" headed by someone who foams at the mouth in "defense" of atheism as much as Bill Donohue does in "defense" of Catholicism, will they get as much press coverage?

If anyone still hasn't listened to the Webster Cook radio interview, you can find it at the Freedom From Religion Foundation's, 'Freethought Radio & Podcast' - July 19, 2008
here;
http://ffrf.org/radio/podcast/
The Webster Cook interview starts at about 18:30 minutes into the show.

For those of you who either can't, or don't wish to listen to the interview, then here is a brief summary of Webster Cook's version of events.

But first, a little background information.
As a condition for receiving funding from the student union, any religious organisations receiving such funding must allow any student to attend any of their events free of charge.
Another condition for receiving funding is that any students attending any such events are in no way obliged to participate in the event, but may attend purely as observers.
Students must also permitted to leave the event any time they wish.

It appears that the person who really started this whole kerfuffle is a girl named Michelle Ducker (not sure about the spelling). During the mass she was bickering with, and chastising Webster Cook and his friend Bernie Collar for not standing and kneeling at the appropriate times during the service, and was annoyed and hostile about the questions which Bernie was asking Webster, and Webster's answers to him. She insisted that if Cook and his friend did not participate in all the standing and kneeling rituals, then they would need to leave the service (in clear violation of one of the conditions for receiving funding from the student union).
She also whispered something to the cracker dispenser just prior to Webster receiving his cracker.

After receiving his cracker, Webster was accosted by Michelle Ducker, both in front of the congregation, and again after he had returned to his seat.
After Webster had returned to his seat, Michelle Ducker ran around behind Webster, then proceeded to reach over and attempt to manhandle the cracker from Webster's grasp, while yelling at Webster to give her the cracker and "screaming" for his friend Bernie to help her.
After all this self-created mayhem she then proceeded to summon the help of a large usher named Joshua Swallows ( an appropriate name considering the circumstances : D ), who asked Webster and Bernie to accompany him outside into the hallway, where he proceeded to explain to them that the reason why he and Michelle were concerned about Cook not eating his cracker, was that he might attempt to practice witchcraft or black magic with it. After this, Webster Cook and his friend left the building.

That in a nutshell, is how this whole debacle got started. It all came about because of a stupid, superstitious, intolerant religious fanatic called Michell Ducker, and her deluded superstitious mate.

How paranoid are these people, to suspect that a university student would be purloining a communion cracker in order to perform witchcraft or black magic with it?
But I guess anyone who can convince themselves that a priest mumbling an incantation over a cracker can somehow mysteriously change it into some kind of demi-god, can convince themselves of just about anything. These people really are deluded nutters, who's minds appear to be stuck somewhere back in the dark ages.

Does anyone have any other information about this Michelle Ducker loon?

I'm not telling anyone what to think, so to make up your own minds, look up delusion (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delusion) and delusional disorder (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delusional_disorder) to see what fits whom.

So...have I mentioned lately that Myers is a bigot? Imagine a professor bashing Jews on his blog. Imagine a professor bashing Blacks on his website. Everyone would be shocked. Oh, but that's different, you cry. Those people aren't Catholics, so of course we shouldn't bash them. We're not being bigots if we trash Catholics, though. It's only bigotry if Jews, Blacks, or homosexuals are involved. You folks couldn't analogize if your lives depended on it; absolutely no logic at all. Myers thinks it's perfectly fine to intentionally insult and bait Catholics and bend over backwards to publicly desecrate whatever they hold to be sacred. The "intention" to insult is the main point. Not only does it demonstrate intolerance and bigotry, but it also shows great immaturity and incivility as well. Sort of like a teenager who hates his father, the government, and all authority figures. Yeah, sort of like a hippie. You know, Bishop Sheen was acquainted with a man who used to bash Catholics whenever possible. Sheen met the man and said, "What is your sin?" After talking and listening quite a bit, he learned that the man had stolen a great deal of money in the past. The man had turned his guilt into anger at the Church for its position that stealing was a sin. Obviously, Myers is hate-filled and angry at the Church. My question to Myers is: what is your sin? Marital infidelity? Anger at God for the death of a loved one? Plagiarism? I don't know, but he's obviously feeling very guilty about some sin and has inverted his guilt into anger. Enough psychoanalyzing the psycho. Hey, how many atheists does it take to change a lightbulb? It doesn't matter; they never see the light anyway! P.S. Don't bother replying; I've got a Red Sox game to watch. GO SOX!!

What is Bryan Stikeleather's email address? I have to ask him something.

I have a question for Bryan, too. When did his family lose the "r" in its last name? I'll bet it used to be "Strikeleather" and no one noticed when they started to misspell it.

This is freaking me out. I wonder what the people writing in with threats are like in real life. They could be your neighbour.

Has the pope said anything about the cracker incident or PZ Myers yet? I bet he'll promise it will never happen again like he usually does.

If somebody starts up an "Atheist League" headed by someone who foams at the mouth in "defense" of atheism as much as Bill Donohue does in "defense" of Catholicism, will they get as much press coverage?

I nominate Rayven!! Rayven! Rayven! Rayven! He sounds intolerant!

I'm not telling anyone what to think, so to make up your own minds, look up delusion (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delusion) and delusional disorder (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delusional_disorder) to see what fits whom.

Don't tell us what to look up - we can think for ourselves, we're Bright!!!

I was wondering if Sandi = Baba, but it seems Baba takes lots of little craps on the thread while Sandi takes the occasional large crap on the thread.

Baba Yaga, is catholic church innocent of wrong doings?

Sandi: My question to Myers is: what is your sin? Marital infidelity? Anger at God for the death of a loved one? ... P.S. Don't bother replying; I've got a Red Sox game to watch. GO SOX!!

So now it's a sin to be angry at God over the death of a loved one? I think Sandi thinks the Vatican is too easygoing and decided to make up some new sins on her own. That might be considered heresy. Is Sandi going to stone herself?

By the way, the Red Sox lost. Why is God so cruel to you? (Careful! Don't get angry with him!)

Has the pope said anything about the cracker incident or PZ Myers yet? I bet he'll promise it will never happen again like he usually does.

That Pope - what a character!!

According to The Blue Banner, Mr. Stikeleather (with a name like that, I assume it's the same person) hasn't been a Catholic for long:

Some Christian students admit they do not practice Lent because they simply do not have the time, yet Bryan Stikeleather, a Western Carolina graduate who converted to Catholicism in 2005, said it is a very important holiday and should be taken into consideration not just by Catholics but by all.

"In America's go-go consumer society, it would benefit everyone to take the time to step back and ask ourselves if we're living the way we ought to be living," Stikeleather said. "It doesn't matter whether you're religious or not. Everyone could benefit from practicing Lent. It's also a good chance to renew your New Year's Resolutions. It's hard to flake with 40 days."

Well, Mr. Stikeleather, color me confused. You don't care for "America's go-go consumer society," and yet you don't mind fantasizing about America's kidnapping, raping, murdering, and illegal dumping society or studying for a degree that's driven by consumption.

You became a Catholic in freaking 2005, yet you're "outraged" now that the precious religion that you've been practicing for no more than 3 years has been questioned. Why don't you share your outrage with the children, and their families, who've been porked by the Catholic clergy over the last 50 years?

Here's a tip on something to sacrifice for 40 days for the next Lent: freebasing crack.

"Lenting season is a time of penance. In order to properly celebrate Lent, we need to recall our sins and reflect on them," Stikeleather said. "It's a chance to check in with God daily and make sure my heart is in the right place."

Well, sir, you apparently haven't been checking in often enough.

Dastardly!! Yet characteristically uncreative of the atheists on this site.

Ooh. An insinuation. Not especially specific. Will not be defended.

Who are you, and what have you done with the real Baba?

I was wondering if Sandi = Baba, but it seems Baba takes lots of little craps on the thread while Sandi takes the occasional large crap on the thread.

What amazing critical thinking skills!! But I'm still skeptical.

Sandi, you really need to learn the difference between hating people and criticising a belief. For example, many Catholic beliefs are silly and deserve to be ridiculed. However, the vast majority of Catholics are just decent people getting on with their lives like everyone else.

Do you see now why it's inappropriate to compare this to racism?

"Has the pope said anything about the cracker incident or PZ Myers yet? I bet he'll promise it will never happen again like he usually does (Tor A #220)."

Believe me Tor A, the Pope doesn't even knows Myers exists. Myers is like an insignificant speck of dust on the carpet of life. (Hey, that's pretty good!). I think of myself as the carpet-cleaner.

As for your not-so-subtle dig at "The Scandal," I can only say that a few handfuls of homosexual priests broke their vows and an even smaller handful of bishops covered for them. The VAST majority of priests and bishops in the world have remained faithful to their vows of celibacy and have sacrificed their lives to help people. By the way, did you know the Catholic Church was the single largest charitable provider in the WORLD? For "bad guys" they sure do a lot of good for people. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, you bigots.

One thought I find a bit interesting is the idea that all the trolls may be the same person. I would love to track the IP's. Wouldn't it be absolutely hilarious if they all turned out to be Donahooey?

That would be something almost worthy of making a youtube video about.

Trolls have always fascinated me, but only from a clinical point of view. It takes a very strange person to do what they do. Now, in truth, there are some people who are branded trolls, but they aren't really trolls, just annoying.

Then there are those kinds of trolls who are messed up but do actually believe what they are spouting. Maybe I will call them almost-trolls, mini-trolls, trollimps, or troll-ets from now on.

Then there are the fully evolved (de-evolved?)trolls, the ones who behave the way they do for no reason except attention. The views they express are meaningless, even to themselves. They say different things in different company. Those are the really strange ones. They post huge text walls, "you must have small penis" lines, and stupid crap like that. They are actually easier to ignore than the trollimps.

We need cyber tacos with some kind of secret sauce to feed to them so they will retreat off the web and go back to poking gerbils or whatever it is they do in real life. Yeah, secret sauce. Kind of like the secret sauce we sprinkle on ant mounds.

MMMMM....tacos. Here you go little trollimp, here's a taco for you.

Yummy it is.

@196:

That reminds me, we should probably think about introducing them to baba's particular brand of stupidity.

Ooh. An insinuation. Not especially specific. Will not be defended.

Who are you, and what have you done with the real Baba?

I refuse to answer direct questions! What are you insinuating anyway?

I was wondering if Sandi = Baba, but it seems Baba takes lots of little craps on the thread while Sandi takes the occasional large crap on the thread.

...as the second troll in question has demonstrated in it's last few posts. Just a heads up there is not discussing things with this troll it just feebly tries to come up with something glib to say to keep the trolling going.

Jim Lippard @#210

If I recall correctly, someone posted some info on the Catholic League in a recent thread and it indicated that they have 8 employees, according to recent disclosures.

The fact that they have the likes of Keyes and Bozell on their board of advisors, is more an indication that it is really just a front for a conservative political organization, rather than a religious organization dedicated to preserving civil rights.

When I was looking at the list of their board of advisors the other day and saw Keyes on it, the thought occurred to me that there does'nt seem to be a large African American component of Catholicism.

Anybody have any thoughts on why that is?

For all of these whackos, I wish they would run through a little thought exercise: their spouses and children on one side of a line, a consecrated cracker on the other. Depending on which side of the line they stand on, whatever is on the other will be destroyed. Wonder how many of them would stand with the cracker?

Thank you Sandi, your opinion has been noted.

Prof. Myers, like I said before, instead of trashing the emails, you should also forward them all to Bill Donahues inbox. Let him have a taste of his Catholic folk.

One thought I find a bit interesting is the idea that all the trolls may be the same person. I would love to track the IP's. Wouldn't it be absolutely hilarious if they all turned out to be Donahooey?

That would be something almost worthy of making a youtube video about.

Trolls have always fascinated me, but only from a clinical point of view. It takes a very strange person to do what they do. Now, in truth, there are some people who are branded trolls, but they aren't really trolls, just annoying.

Then there are those kinds of trolls who are messed up but do actually believe what they are spouting. Maybe I will call them almost-trolls, mini-trolls, trollimps, or troll-ets from now on.

Then there are the fully evolved (de-evolved?)trolls, the ones who behave the way they do for no reason except attention. The views they express are meaningless, even to themselves. They say different things in different company. Those are the really strange ones. They post huge text walls, "you must have small penis" lines, and stupid crap like that. They are actually easier to ignore than the trollimps.

We need cyber tacos with some kind of secret sauce to feed to them so they will retreat off the web and go back to poking gerbils or whatever it is they do in real life. Yeah, secret sauce. Kind of like the secret sauce we sprinkle on ant mounds.

MMMMM....tacos. Here you go little trollimp, here's a taco for you.

Yummy it is.

I un-nominate you. You sound too irational.

For all of these whackos, I wish they would run through a little thought exercise: their spouses and children on one side of a line, a consecrated cracker on the other. Depending on which side of the line they stand on, whatever is on the other will be destroyed. Wonder how many of them would stand with the cracker?

Sieg Heil!!! Let's set up gas chambers too! What fun!

Catholic priest to his altar boy:

"It is a sacrilege to spit, my son, just swallow."

"If I became an atheist can I become as pretentious as you? Please?"

No.

You still wouldn't even be nearly as intelligent as us.

Sandi,
I'm sure that this has explained to you before. Catholicism or any other eligious belief, any belief at all, is not an innate trait. It's nobody else's fault that a person chooses something ridiculous to believe (except the people who smothered his critical thinking ability), and believing in it or having faith in it doesn't make it one iota less ridiculous. It is a disturbance to mock someone's faith inside a building or room dedicated to that faith, and there are laws to protect that place and the people practicing their faith therein. It is not a disturbance outside of a place of worship, no matter how many people feel offended by it. For one simple reason: if anything offending anyone who claims to be offended was persecutable, nothing would be allowed. You'd be surprised how many things offend other people.
Cook did not disturb the service. He didn't attack anyone, he merely didn't fully participate, which was and still is anyone's right. The wafer was a gift freely given and accepted, and nobody but the recipient has any property rights to it. Only future gifts may be revoked by the donor.
Your anecdote is pointless and irrelevant. All of your claims and accusations are false, fallacious and/or hyperbolic.
Emigrate to a country where theocratic law overrules secular law if you love oppression so much.

...as the second troll in question has demonstrated in it's last few posts. Just a heads up there is not discussing things with this troll it just feebly tries to come up with something glib to say to keep the trolling going.

Cock-blocker!

wookerist (comment 155) for Molly.

-------------------------

Thank you, David. None of us would have been able to explain it as well as you did. (Was that right?)

I doubt it. There are other Language Log readers here, too...

-------------------------

I hate that. I refuse to answer, you can torture me, pierce me with a nail and throw me in the Gulag, I will not talk.

Ladies and gentlemen, a self-confessed troll.

My question to Myers is: what is your sin? Marital infidelity? Anger at God for the death of a loved one? Plagiarism? I don't know, but he's obviously feeling very guilty about some sin and has inverted his guilt into anger. Enough psychoanalyzing the psycho. Hey, how many atheists does it take to change a lightbulb? It doesn't matter; they never see the light anyway! P.S. Don't bother replying; I've got a Red Sox game to watch. GO SOX!!

Another self-confessed troll -- makes a big logical mistake* so people will be outraged and will be motivated to reply, and then tells them she won't read any of the frenzy she hopes to generate.

* People who don't believe God exists are by definition incapable of being angry at him. Are you angry at Zeus because he kidnapped Europa and chained Prometheus to the Caucasus? Are you angry at Zeus because he sends all those hurricanes? Are you angry at Poseidon because he made the earthquake in Sichuan? Eat that, troll.

What are you insinuating anyway?

That's a direct question. Your foul. My serve.

Benjamin Franklin: When I was looking at the list of their board of advisors the other day and saw Keyes on it, the thought occurred to me that there does'nt seem to be a large African American component of Catholicism.

This is not a very tricky question, Ben. Consider where most of the black people lived in the U.S. With the exception of Louisiana, southern states do not have a lot of Roman Catholics (and had even fewer in the past). Thus the Christianity which was drilled into the slaves was of the Protestant variety. Their descendants may be scattered more widely through the nation today, but the number of Catholics in their ranks is still small.

I bet Joe Cracker (#242) knows all about that kind of thing. I guess he can't come up with any rationale arguments in this debate so he has to share his lifestyle with us.

I am having a hard time understanding the difference between the hatred expressed by the atheists here and the hate mail you say you have been getting from Catholics. There are 63 million Catholics in the US alone. Even allowing for those who are nominal or no longer Catholic or those who are children so young, they cannot yet read, how large a percentage of all Catholics do your death-threatening correspondents comprise? Mathematically, is it even measurable? Are they really more than an angry and, perhaps, lunatic fringe?

On the other side, we have you and your atheist followers spewing hatred and contempt for most of humankind, all served up with a heaping helping of self-righteous fatuity and self-congratulation. But are you representative of all non-believers? Are all non-believers bad neighbors and bad citizens? Do all of them wish to live at odds with the rest of the community? Or are you some fringe, sociopathic minority spewing impotently on the Internet?

Quite frankly, I don't see any significant differences here. A pox on both your houses.

Sandi, have I mentioned lately that you're an idiot?

ALL IDEAS ARE FAIR GAME FOR CRITICISM.

Claiming that criticism of your ideas is bigotry exposes you as a craven coward who can't defend her ideas and demands that her ideas be given a pass as being "special."

It also exposes you as a disgusting pig of a person, appropriating the suffering of true victims of bigotry, people with innate characteristics that others mistreat them for, and using it as a shield for your ideas.

And we KNOW that you know you're misusing the term bigotry.
It's a pattern, straight from Donahue on down - a deliberate and calculated design to use a concept you know liberals ahbor, bigotry, to get liberals to shield you from due criticism.

Craven and disgusting because you know its a lie.
Craven and disgusting because you appropriate the suffering of others.
Craven and disgusting because you attempt to curry liberal favor when in fact you despise liberals - its an attempt merely to use them.
Craven and disgusting because the true victims of bigotry whose suffering you are appropriating have often been and STILL often are experiencing that bigotry at the hands of Catholics.

You must be a fool.

Every time you post here you expose yourself as a delusional person.
Every time you intentionally misappropriate the word bigotry you expose yourself as at the best a very stupid person, and at the worst, vile immoral scum using the suffering of others to shield your fantasies from the scrutiny they deserve.

Yet you continue to post here. Please, keep it up.
Every post is proof of the fact that religion short-ciruits rational thinking, and every post is proof of religious penchant... no, make that lust - for the exploitation and oppression of others.

Religious ideas make you delusional.
Claiming that criticism of religious ideas is bigotry make you immoral and disgusting.

That's a really good question Ben. Why arn't their more African Americans in the Catholic church? I suppose they may have lost a great deal of recruiting time with their staunch defense and practice of slavery. But protestants are guilty of the same thing and they haven't had as much of a problem comparatively. Is it the simplicity of modern charismatic beliefs that make it easier to follow as opposed to the centuries of dogma and obscure rituals that the Catholic proclaim? I think that may have something to do with it. Possibly once African Americans were acceptable enough to be preached to, they went with the religion that sounded more natural. This is all speculation of course.

Sandi, I was talking about the Eucharist. Do you spit, or swallow - it ?

What were u talking about?

By the way, the Red Sox lost.

Verily, I say unto you, there is a Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Apropos of nothing, I note baba is Spanish for drool (slobber, drivel).

BRB, scribbling "for a sexy time, call 334-410-0611" on all of the public bathrooms I can find.

Holy shit those are some fucked up emails.

Craig wrote @ #139:
"Man created religion so that they could pretend to have godlike powers themselves."

Touche'!

"Alacazam, Alacazoo,
I'll change this cracker in front of you,
Hubble, Bubble, and boil in a pot,
I'll convince you this cracker is something it's not."

It appears that things haven't changed much during the last several thousand years.

No.

You still wouldn't even be nearly as intelligent as us.

Scathing!! An impressive display of rapier wit!!!

There is an organization called American Atheists. Their founder Madelyn Murray O'Hair was the one who got prayer out of public schools. She is a great hero to atheists. She also was a thief. Once she tried to defect to the Soviet Union and even they wouldn't take her. Her son, a Christian convert said:

"My mother was an evil person... Not for removing prayer from America's schools... No, she was just evil. She stole huge amounts of money. She misused the trust of people. She cheated children out of their parents' inheritance. She cheated on her taxes and even stole from her own organizations. She once printed up phony stock certificates on her own printing press to try to take over another atheist publishing company."

She was murdered by a fellow atheist. "Police concluded that Waters and his accomplices had kidnapped all three O'Hairs, forced them to withdraw the missing funds, went on several huge shopping sprees with the O'Hairs' money and credit cards, and then murdered all three people. Danny Fry, an accomplice, was murdered a few days after the O'Hairs; his body was found with its head and hands severed on a riverbed, but his remains were unidentified for three and a half years. Waters eventually pled guilty to reduced charges."

So you atheists have a fine organization to belong too with a wonderful history. It has everything: theft, deception, fraud, and murder. Atheism at its best.

Trolls have always fascinated me, but only from a clinical point of view. It takes a very strange person to do what they do. Now, in truth, there are some people who are branded trolls, but they aren't really trolls, just annoying.

Then there are those kinds of trolls who are messed up but do actually believe what they are spouting. Maybe I will call them almost-trolls, mini-trolls, trollimps, or troll-ets from now on.

I usually think of trolling as more how they post and what they hope to accomplish than whether they believe it. Trolling is usually an attempt to control the conversation, regardless of whether it makes them look good or bad they just want to be the focus. Sometimes just for personal reasons and some just to try to disrupt the discussions.

Michael, ever hear of the Abolitionists?

And I see Zeno actually knows what he's talking about. See, that? That's why I read this blog.

That's a direct question. Your foul. My serve.

Theist!

Fr. J, ever hear of a minority nor representative of the church?

Black Wolf (#245). You're absolutely right, so let's start attacking Jewish beliefs. Have somebody steal a Jewish Torah and hand it to Myers. Myers can then rip the Torah and place it in a trash bin with a side of ham. Of course, he should also wear an insulting tee shirt at the time, such as one emblazoned with the logo "Jews Suck!" or "The Holocaust Never Happened!" Then, post the photo on the website. No bigotry there, right pal? Let's go for it! I can hardly await your response. Let me guess...Catholics aren't the same as Jews. It's not bigotry to bash Catholics, but it is to bash Jews. No logic.

"I am having a hard time understanding the difference between the hatred expressed by the atheists here and the hate mail you say you have been getting from Catholics."

Let me spell it out for you then.

Atheists are NOT attempting to get anyone fired. Atheists are NOT sending people threats and death threats. Atheists are NOT trying to get people expelled from school.
Atheists are NOT attacking anyone physically.

Atheists are NOT attempt to silence criticism of atheism in any way, nor are they making the claim that criticism of atheism is bigotry, nor making the claim that criticism of atheism on a personal forum such as a blog is grounds for for being fired.

Catholics are doing ALL of those things against atheists.

All atheists are doing is using their freedom of speech to express their disagreement with what the Catholics are doing - often vociferously, even rudely and profanely, but just speech.

No threats, no attempts to ruin others' lives, no attempts to get others to stop saying what they want or believing what they want.

THAT'S the difference.

So you atheists have a fine organization to belong too with a wonderful history. It has everything: theft, deception, fraud, and murder. Atheism at its best.

I disagree. I still say Stalin offered the best of atheism followed by Mao. Just an opinion.

Sandi, this whole episode was a reaction to Catholic insanity. Did a jewish woman assault a young man holding a cracker? Wouldn't it then be non-sequitur to react by criticizing the Jewish religion? But, don't worry. They'll commit some oppressive act soon enough and we'll be there to criticize it. Then your bloodlust will be satisfied (well probably not).

Lily:

Compare the Catholic sentiments expressed in the emails Prof. Myers has posted above and elsewhere -- emails that express hatred for Prof. Myers, atheists in general, Muslims, Jews, and gays -- with the following, resposted from Prof. Myers' response to BobC in the "Write to UCF" thread (post #84):

"We don't have to condemn a whole diverse collection of people, we need to focus on the absurdity of certain beliefs, and protest the execution of specific actions.

Catholics aren't the problem. Some individual Catholics are, and they are enabled by the foolishness of Catholicism."

Prof. Myers -- along with most of the atheists posting here -- is not spewing hatred for any, let alone most, of humankind. The problem is not Catholics (or Jews, or Muslims, or Hindus, etc.) in general but religious belief. I repeat: it's not a question of believers (except for the very few particularly vile ones), but of belief.

Lily, the difference is obvious, but you won't admit it. The atheist side is not threatening to do bodily harm to anyone. We also are not spewing hate at anyone. We are are expressing our disdain for certain ideas. Destroying communion wafers and criticizing ideas is completely different than threatening people's lives and trying to get them fired from their jobs. If you can't see the difference you are blind.

Theist!

Don't hate the player. Hate the game.

"When I was looking at the list of their board of advisors the other day and saw Keyes on it, the thought occurred to me that there does'nt seem to be a large African American component of Catholicism.

Anybody have any thoughts on why that is?

Well, I worked for a Catholic organization. My sister worked for it, and my father is on the board of directors. Odd, since we're all atheists.

And I never once heard any one of the Catholics use the words "African-American."

No, every single time any words were used it was "the coloreds." And the words were not used in very flattering terms.

The organization moved from the city and it's historic building, it's home for over 100 years, in part to escape "the coloreds."

...as the second troll in question has demonstrated in it's last few posts. Just a heads up there is not discussing things with this troll it just feebly tries to come up with something glib to say to keep the trolling going.

Not necessarily. Some trolls use one persona to convince themselves they are rational and the other one to have the juvenile freak-outs through. They could be the same person, just as many of our recent trolls could be the same person, or a collection of just a few people.

At one Atheist board we once had a troll who actually started a war with her other persona, it was a huge flame war with so much drama I could not begin to explain it ....and in the end we found out they were both her. This strange troll episode went on for many months. There was more than one invented persona, a poor,(fake), dead child, and all kinds of crazy shit. She cozied up to many people and invented all kinds of drama. Her *nice* persona was a regular poster. (I think her main persona's name was Adrianne if I remember correctly.) I and another person got suspicious when she slipped and said something that directly conflicted with something she had said months prior to that, and we began questioning her. Slowly the charade unraveled. It was one of the most bizarre things I have ever witnessed online. We tracked IP's and nailed her. She logged in the different persona's from the same place. When first confronted she claimed her evil cousin did it to make her look bad and to frame her, that is was not her. We finally got her to admit the truth, but it took s while.
After we found out the truth about her, she begged us to forgive her and stay friends with her.

She turned out to be a high school aged fundy girl who began the fiasco by coming there to troll because she thought she could make Atheists look like scum. When it didn't work, she created a fake Atheist persona and stuck around milking everyone with fake sob-stories. The troll persona still came by to cause trouble and her *nice* persona fought with it regularly.

I'm telling you, some of these religious people are so whacked it's unbelievable. If you saw the character in a movie you'd be thinking that no one could possibly be THAT strange. Sadly, you'd be mistaken.

And, PS, Lily:

What craig said.

(Well said, craig!)

Fr. J, I belong to NO organization.

Not the same can be said about Catholics, who belong and support an organization that has recently protected pedophile priests, and has a history of centuries of murder all in the NAME of CATHOLICISM.

If they really believe that the host is the "real" body of Jesus, does this make it a cannibalistic ritual?

So you atheists have a fine organization to belong too

There is no organization.

Your ignorance is the most embarrassing I've seen in months, and on the Internet that means something!

There is no Atheist Un-Church. There is no organization. Atheists have nothing in common except that they agree that "there almost certainly is no deity" -- what could they build a church around?!?

Let me guess...Catholics aren't the same as Jews. It's not bigotry to bash Catholics, but it is to bash Jews. No logic.

1) When you say "Jews", nobody knows if you mean the religion or the people. You choose if you belong to the former, but not if you belong to the latter.

2) The Holocaust really happened. Just like the Crusades happened, and just like Diocletian persecuted Christians. You are entitled to your own opinions, but not to your own facts.

Sandi@266
Yeuch, holocaust envy. I preferred fatwa envy.

Sandi,
thanks for proving your memory span is less than half an hour. Remember me mentioning innate traits? Words too big for you?
You know what? We can talk about desecrating a Torah when Jews harass and threaten a student with physical harm and expulsion from university who didn't wear a yarmulke in a synagogue.
And don't project your blood-libel-driven desires onto people who had nothing to do with inventing, perpetrating or denying the Holocaust. A Jew posted in this thread supporting PZ's action. If you can't deal with your cognitive dissonance, that's nobody else's problem. Except when you try to deal with it by harassing other people. And that's exactly why all this started.

I concur with Nick Gotts @ #124.

Lysenkoism, and the Soviet collective agricultural policies, probably contributed more than anything else towards the total suffering experienced by the Russian people under Stalin and his regime.

Baba, FrJ, Sandi

Is catholic church innocent of wrong doings?

gsj:

No. The doctrine of transubstantiation allows for Catholics to move the goal-posts around as much as they want. It's not cannibalism if you eat it, but it is kidnapping or hostage-taking (as opposed to theft) if you receive but don't eat it. See a multitude of posts on this topic in the other cracker threads for further explanation.

I think the only respectable thing to do now is to get a web site up with user-submitted host desecrations.

Sort of like ratemypoo.com, but with eucharist desecrations instead of shit. Oh...wait...

I'm willing to help out if anyone has the know-how!

What amazes me about these nutjobs is their belief in an all-powerful cracker god who is apparently totally incapable of taking care of itself. A truly omnipotent ritz cracker should be able to take down PZ without lifting a finger, a mere thought being all that is required. And yet, he continues to live. This fact alone keeps these saltine-freaks absolutely vibrating with rage. Their meek little animal cracker is refusing to get involved so they must take action upon themselves.

What a pathetic group of losers.

As for your not-so-subtle dig at "The Scandal," I can only say that a few handfuls of homosexual priests broke their vows and an even smaller handful of bishops covered for them. The VAST majority of priests and bishops in the world have remained faithful to their vows of celibacy and have sacrificed their lives to help people.

Sandi

The actual sexual attacks are the smaller of the two issues. The greater issue is the fact that your Pope ordered every member of the clergy to help cover up these attacks. The whole of the church, as policyu, tried to hide evidence and prevent reports of these attacks, and as a normal part of the process, moved the attackers to areas where their past actions were unknown.

Any body can have a few bad apples, but when that body help hide these apples and even help them continue their sexual assualts and help them to evade the law, then that body, and everyone who continues to claim membership in or support of that group must also carry responsability for the rapes.

Sandi, it is just a cracker, your church is rotten to it's core, and while it dose massive ammounts in the way of assistance, it does this for itself it is simply an effort to convert members.

"Minnisota"? Is that like "Mini-me", only for a state?

Sorry, I'm still laughing from that post way back there (#157) in which Baba proudly claims to have gotten this all-sweeping knowledge of ol' Uncle Joe from wikipedia. (Just one calorie--not skeptical enough.)

Sorry, amigo, you might as well claim that Communism is a Jewish conspiracy because of all the Jewish Russians who joined the various groups responsible for the February (March) Revolution. But something tells me that you wouldn't know the Leftist SRs from the Mensheviki from the Bolsheviki from the Nihilists...

(shakes head sadly)

It would probably be too much to ask for you to actually research the sad state of China between the Boxer Rebellion and the Great Leap Forward to add a little perspective to your understanding.

Or are you only interested in tarring atheists with the broadest brush possible?

You, Sandi, and the Good Friar are still only worth 845 XP apiece, divided by the size of the attacking party.

The MadPanda, FCD

gsj:

Just keep in mind that the explanations you'll find will not be consistent or, by even the lowest of standards, even close to rational. But, hey, we probably shouldn't expect too much by way of consistency or rationality in religious delusion.

when you know what the hell you're talking about.

To pile on just a bit, Sandi, "about" is a preposition. Ending sentences with prepositions is the sort of grammatical abuse up with which a proper grammar nazi knows better than to put.

Lily meet Sandi, Sandi meet Lily. I think you two will like each other. Sandi has a crush on PZ, but has turned bitter because he ignores her emails. I hope you two do not get into a fight over this. Have fun.

Ciao

Cute little smear of gays there, Sandi.

Pedophilia is NOT the same as homosexuality, even when the victim is of the same sex.
Sexual abusers don't always target victims of the gender that they personally feel sexually oriented towards. "Straight" abusers might target little boys, etc.

There can, of course, be gay pedophiles, but to generalize as you did was obviously a deliberate attempt to smear homosexuality as being immoral, to smear all homosexuals are being innately likely to be sexual predators.

Slimy fucking sleazy tactic - and YOU'RE calling OTHER people bigots?

David Marjanović, OM @#246

wookerist (comment 155) for Molly.

Thanks for your response & thanks for the Molly nomination.
I am wookerist.

If you would be so kind as to refresh the nomination when they are called for, hopefully within the next few days, I would be honored, and highly appreciative.

(+) = :)

Benjamin Franklin/wookerist

And of course I left out... your smear was a way of trying to pin the church's problems on "homosexuals."

As if the whole thing wouldn't have happened if it weren't for those horrible homosexuals.

Fr J,

There was this bunch of folks who believed in god. They made a compound and everything, so that they could all be together. Then one day the leader and his enforcers made everyone drink poisoned kool-aid, and they all DIED.

Ergo, all god believers are megalomaniacal killers.

No complaints from you, it's the same logic you used to implicate all atheists as evil.

How can you stand to look at yourself in the mirror, knowing how you lie?

Lysenkoism, and the Soviet collective agricultural policies, probably contributed more than anything else towards the total suffering experienced by the Russian people under Stalin and his regime.

And why did Stalin adopt Lysenkoism as dogma?

Because it was deemed more compatible with Scripture Marxism-Leninism than the science of genetics ("Mendelism-Morganism-Weissmanism" as Lysenko called it).

Sorry, amigo, you might as well claim that Communism is a Jewish conspiracy

Unsurprisingly, the Nazis did exactly that.

You, Sandi, and the Good Friar are still only worth 845 XP apiece, divided by the size of the attacking party.

I notice, though, that you don't let perfectly good XP go to waste... :-)

My husband just asked if am STiiiiiiLL reading that cracker-stuff. I have been reading this all day. I have got to make myself step away from the CRACKer.

It's just so fascinating to watch the crazy catholics in action.

I'm going to go watch a movie. Carry on good people (and crazy catholics).

It sure would be nice if a few of the non-crazy catholics would show up and dialog. I keep telling myself that they exist, but I know that's just me having faith in something I can't prove. I hope someone gives me some proof soon or I will have to become a non-believer.

If you would be so kind as to refresh the nomination when they are called for, hopefully within the next few days

Almost certainly impossible. I'll be digging for Triassic fossils for the next two weeks. In fact, I'll leave tomorrow morning, so I should have gone to bed long ago instead of staying up till half past 2 at night. Just nominate yourself, or should I say "each other"... :o)

Fr. J. has declared his final post here.

I wonder if he'll stick to his promise.

@ 288

To be fair Baba the troll was referencing a prior post.

Sieg Heil!!! Let's set up gas chambers too! What fun!

Way to totally miss the point, moron. The point was that if something important was really on the line, as all of those Catholic fucknecks sending threatening emails like to make analogies about, they would suddenly realize the cracker was, indeed, only a cracker.

So you atheists have a fine organization to belong too with a wonderful history.

So? I'm not a member.

The MadPanda, you sure those level 1 monsters are worth that much? I concede the Fr may be a level 2 monster.

Fuck the Catholic God.
Fuck Jesus.
Fuck the Eucharist.
Fuck the Holy Ghost.
Fuck it all.
Sorry, just had to get that off my chest.

Fr. J. has declared his final post here.

I wonder if he'll stick to his promise.

The Fr. is a compulsive liar, which should be clear to everyone by now.

I love the people who claim to be persecuted and in the next breath call for the same treatment of some other group. Like Jesus said, if someone strikes you on the cheek, offer your neighbor's cheek as well. ::rolleyes::

PZ, I would be especially interested in what you have to say about the Carl Sagan quote in #144 http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/07/i_get_email_20.php#comment-1…

I am a Catholic. I think that to be an Atheist requires the same degree of faith as to be religious.

If there is no scientific evidence for God, as you say, then you are quite correct that He cannot be proven. However, the theory that there is no God is equally without merit. Just because you cannot now observe or quantify Him does not mean that you might not one day. In the middle ages, early scientists could never conceive of Atoms. They were as sure that the world was composed of four elements as you are that there is no God.

Therefore, by your criteria, the only intellectually honest position would be Agnosticism.

Earlier in these posts someone challenged Christians to read a biology book, an astomnomy book, one on Evolution, and to take "6-months out" from religion to look at the world rationally. I ask the same favor of Atheists- only read "Mere Christianity" by C.S. Lewis. This is no right-wing ignorant rant, but a classic piece of literature that backs up its claims with good thought and good science.

Fuck the Catholic God.

Bad plan. Look what happened to Mary when she tried it.

I could not stop laughing! Those people are so stupid it's hysterical.

Thanks for the laugh PZ.

I am, unfortunately, not surprised that you don't see your own hatred and its implications. All this impotent fist-waving and fiery rhetoric has led PZ to do something incredibly childish that, after the initial reaction of disbelief and shock, has actually started to provoke derisive laugher among the people who aren't likely to write any sort of threats. I think that you will come to see that this stunt has been a public relations disaster.

I told my own priest what was going on -- he has never heard of Webster Cook or Myers. His reaction? He burst out laughing and then shook his head in disbelief-- disbelief that an adult could suppose that there was some value in such a meaningless, stupid gesture. As predicted, you got an emotional response-- and what else? God is still in his heaven and all is right with the world.

Our world in any case. Yours seems to be hopelessly lacking in love, good manners, compassion, humor and plain, old-fashioned, neighborliness.

Rick B. (#300) Yes, I know. He was asked for the basis of his wide-ranging expertise on ol' Joe and responded thusly. That's a bit like me claiming to be an expert on cephalopods because I read Phyrangula. :)

John Morales (#303) and David Marjanovic, OM (#296)
Gentles, at our collective level, even the 6d+6 HD Troll is as the lowly Kobald and humble Goblin...barely worth the time to slay even for a generous bounty. And at our betentacled host's level, nothing short of a Class VI is worth so much as a sneer.

The MadPanda, FCD

Wishing you all a very good day, nice times with your family, and no ass-desecrating moments (unless you like it).
Thanks for the blog and the lively comments !
Keep it going !

Still looking for crackers to surface on Ebay.

Lily wrote:

"[Your world] seems to be hopelessly lacking in love, good manners, compassion, humor and plain, old-fashioned, neighborliness."

You did read the emails PZ received, right? This is called projection.

PS: Way to ignore the many substantive respnses you received to your previous post! Your intellectual honesty knows no bounds.

If there is no scientific evidence for God, as you say, then you are quite correct that He cannot be proven. However, the theory that there is no God is equally without merit.

...

I ask the same favor of Atheists- only read "Mere Christianity" by C.S. Lewis.

But why should they study your god and not the god of Islam or the Norse? While we are at it don't forget the gods of Rome and Greece in addition to those of Mesopotamia and Mesoamerica as other viable options. A person could spend years their life devoting 6 months at a time in the effort of accepting one type of a god and once through the list on what basis is a decision made.

It is a fool's errand

Lily, meet Anne. Anne, meet Lily. Anne, Lily appears to have a crush on PZ, but is apparently pissed at him so has been spreading her bile. Probably best if you do not try to move in on Lily, Sandi has already set her cap for PZ and three of you at once is probably a bad idea.

Wow, this making stuff up is fun. Hmmm, how about this, it is a well known fact that 79.25689% of Catholic priests have to kill a Jewish baby when they are promoted to Bishop. I read that on Conservapedia. Now, if I can just come up with one more big lie I might be able to be a Cardinal - can't say I care for red, though.

Ciao

What substantive responses? I saw none.

Frankly, what is left to say that hasn't been said by now? I have nothing more to add. So, unless one of you can come up with something new, I won't repeat myself.

Anne wrote:

"I think that to be an Atheist requires the same degree of faith as to be religious."

That you think it doesn't make it so.

Instead of advising the atheists here to familiarize themselves with Christianity -- something many, if not most, of us have already done -- do a little research on atheism, something of which you've kindly demonstrated that you have very little understanding. The little pearl of wisdom you've offered here today has been proposed and debunked ad nauseum. Go. Read. Once you know what you're talking about, come back and try again.

Best of luck with your research,
KM.

Anne #308: Thank you for a rational and well-reasoned post. Personally, I have to say that I have not read the C.S. Lewis book you mention (although I have read several of his others), but when I can get hold of a copy, I will.

As for the difference between the terms "agnostic" and "atheist", it all comes down to semantics in the end. Richard Dawkins has covered this argument already in some detail in "The God Delusion" I believe. Even he will not commit to calling himself a "strong atheist", and neither will I. It all comes down to evidence, and the evidence for a divine all-powerful being is simply not there - at least there is no more evidence for the Christian god than there is for any other proposed deity, or for fairies, the Flying Spaghett Monster, etc.

And that, as I see it, is the defining factor. Even if there IS some sort of god, who is to say that it is the god you want him/her/it to be? Where is the evidence?

And (anticipating any complaints from any side), please don't castigate me for not capitalising the word "god" - for me the word denotes a job description, not a name. And as far as I can determine, that position is currently vacant.

And to all other trolls (who I refuse to name or converse with), please note: Anne was polite, so I was too. See - it can be done.

I'm curious: Has there ever been a government friendly toward the Catholic Church but at the same time heinous enough to be denounced by it? The Vatican climbed into bed with the most bloodthirsty regimes of the 20th century, turning away from them only when they began to lose their grip on power.

http://www.concordatwatch.org/showtopic.php?org_id=871&kb_header_id=318…

The primary, possibly the sole, criterion for the Vatican's support of a regime appears to be its non-hostility to the Church's power or ambitions. Are there any examples of regimes that have been accommodating to Catholicism and yet despicable enough that the Vatican has refused to support them? Of course, a few exceptions would do nothing to erase the long and sordid history of collaboration with dictatorships, but I'm wondering if there are any at all.

PZ: If you just add a filter "I deny God" You might get rid of 99% of the emails you don't want to read.

Evening SC. Interesting question at #320. Heading out for dinner soon, but that is worth a little research tomorrow. A dim memory wants me to say yes, there has been a regime accommodating to Catholicism and yet despicable enough that the Vatican has refused to support them, but I cannot dredge it up right now. Maybe it is just wishful thinking on my part.

Ciao, Bella (I have such a crush on your mind)(smile)

Lily:

Posts 270 and 271, for starters.

(I'm not sure why we have to come up with something "new" in order to respond to you. Your problem seems to be an inability to understand the things that have already been said -- and they've been said quite plainly. The onus isn't on us, it's on you.)

@ Mad Panda

Although I think Baba is an insipid troll, in this instance he was referring to the link in post 121. I believe he was being facetious.

Professor Myers--Just out of curiosity, have you heard anything about this from Catholics you actually know? Or is this crapola all coming from whackjobs from afar?

You know, after this whole episode, I think I have finally reached some sort of conclusion about how I should conduct myself in one miniature part of my life when it comes to religious and non-religious issues. Up until now, I have said nothing when the girl behind the counter at my local coffee shop tells me to "have a very blessed day" with a special wink, a dangling silver dead Jesus cross and a smile, as if I should accept her supernatural premise no matter what my personal beliefs are on the subject. From now on, I'm going to tell her that I don't believe in her blessings, but that I appreciate her sentiment nonetheless! Har har!

KM and John- If you had read "Mere Christianity" you would know that C.S Lewis first establishes the existence of a God before expouding on the reasons why He believes the Christian God is the most true to reality.

El, It is good to see reasonable people on the other side of the fence. This blog has been for the most part, a treatise of mud-slinging by both sides.

I think it is right to point out that if there is a God, there are many people vying for the right to call their God the real God. This is where C.S. Lewis could defend Christianity better than I.

In the end, it comes down to evidence of faith, an altogether differnt thing that cannot be proven. I reasonable, rational and a responsible member of society. I am also a "Troll" because I really do believe that what you slam as a "cracker" is the true and living presence of Christ.

And since I asked the Atheist to read "mere Christianity", I will read "The God Delusion". :)

Rick B. (#324)

Well, gawrsh, I been near-Poe'd?

(laugh)

My answer must stand potentially adjusted for sarcasm in the event that Baba was being funny, because my facetiousness meter completely failed to register any such readings. Alas, my inner historian can be cranky when grave and complex matters are reduced to simplistic binary soundbites (which is why I avoid certain news programs like the plague).

The MadPanda, FCD

KM and John- If you had read "Mere Christianity" you would know that C.S Lewis first establishes the existence of a God before expouding on the reasons why He believes the Christian God is the most true to reality.

You can believe in God or Thor or Zeus or Unicorns or 100,000 Angels dancing on the head of a pin. Aside from cultural molding there is no reason to accept one over the other, they all demand acceptance with zero evidence.

So when you say you ' C.S Lewis first establishes the existence of a God' you mean he first convinces himself to accept a fantasy as reality. That is the step that most of the regulars here quite reasonably refuse to take, for it is at its base a silly base for a person of evidenc and reason to build a world view on.

"I think that to be an Atheist requires the same degree of faith as to be religious."

"I think that to be a Gentile requires the same degree of faith as to be a Jew"

Sounds pretty absurd, doesn't it? And yet, it's the same logic. Atheist is a term like Gentile - one defined not by what you ARE, but by what you are NOT.

Anne:

I don't really care that CS Lewis "established the existence of God" to your satisfaction at the beginning of his book. That you and CS Lewis both believe that his version of reality is the best is in no way a compelling reason for me to believe that it is so. I will, however, pick up a copy of the book at my uni library when I get a chance. Thank you for the recommendation.

I wasn't trying to sling mud when I suggested you research atheism -- just as I'm sure your invitation to research Christianity was not mud-slinging. If you think that atheism is a matter of faith, you simply do not understand what atheism is all about. The book El mentioned -- Dawkins' God Delusion -- is by no means the best book on atheism, but it's a good place to start.

If PZ nailed an actual priest-blessed Eucharist cracker, how come it didn't spurt AB blood all over him? Did the Koran pages nullify its powers? Or was it St Dawkins?
That was facetious, but since that bleeding-on-PZ scenario hasn't been part of actual postings (that I've read), maybe it shows most Catholics don't really believe their own mythology.

Lewis is no more convincing than Augustine or Aquinas, I'm afraid. Unlike those two, however, he did also give us some fun kids' novels with swashbuckling mice.

Oh, and the Screwtape Letters, which were a fun read.

The MadPanda, FCD

Anne: you say "evidence of faith" which to me doesn't make sense. You have evidence, or you have faith. If you have evidence there is no need for faith. Faith only thrives where there is no evidence. And for people who consider themselves atheist or agnostic (note I use the terms as adjectives, NOT nouns. I am NOT "an atheist". I am "atheist" or "atheistic". Small point, but it matters to me), faith is simply not an option.

And there is always that niggling problem of which god. Are you aware of the now quite famous remark made by Stephen Roberts? I contend we are both atheists, I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.

Before I head out, did a little research. Nothing yet on SC's question but found a new, to me, site. Much enjoyed

http://www.godlessgeeks.com/LINKS/GodProof.htm

I literally laughed out loud at several of them.

Nite all

This is not for Fr. J, or Baba, or anyone else who claims that there is an atheist organization or orthodoxy that has any authority over any or all atheists. They are lost to us. This is for someone who is still does not understand what an atheist believes...

First, don't believe any atheist who says, "this is what all atheists believe." Our beliefs and opinions are as diverse as any other random sample of humans. Some of us are liberal, some of us are conservative: there are libertarian atheists, republican atheists, democratic atheists, marxist atheists. Some of us are straight, some of us are gay. Some of us are polyamorous, some of us are fiercely monogamous.

The only unifying opinion is that there are no gods. Theists in our society seem unperturbed by our lack of devotion to Amun, or Ahura Mazda, or Thor, or Quetzalcoatl, or Amaterasu. We believe in none of them. And we don't believe in Elohim (adba YHWH or Yahweh, adba Jehovah, adba Allah) or his alter ego, the Christ. There are diverse opinions as to the historical evidence for the rabbi Yeshua -- or whatever his name really was -- aka "Jesus."

That is it. There are self-styled groups that use "atheist" in their names, but they have no authority over anyone who does not belong to their organization, nor do most claim it (and, given my experience with other freethinkers, they probably have very little authority over their members, either).

Anyone who says otherwise is either mistaken (we can be charitable) or they are actively lying.

It seems that many fundamentalists or literalists have a profound difficulty believing that the world is not composed of polar opposites. They seem to think that if you don't belong to a religious organization, you must belong to an anti-religious organization. But our lack of belief in any gods does not unite us any more than most adults' lack of belief in the Tooth Fairy. Beyond that, you may as well be herding cats.

By the way, very few of us were raised atheist, and many of us used to be theists of one brand or another. Many, if not most, of us have read the Bible or C.S. Lewis. Thanks, but we remain unconvinced. (A lot of us have also read the Qur'an, the Diamond Sutra, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Same result...)

I do not know that there are no gods. Athena may, at this moment, be wondering why there are so few sacrifices anymore. But I do know that there is no more evidence that Yahweh Elohim is real than there is that she is real. The fact that there really was a city called "Jericho" does not mean that the entire Old Testament is accurate or true any more that the fact that there was a city called "Troy" is proof that the rest of the Iliad is accurate or true.

To this atheist, there is as much evidence that Yahweh Elohim knocked down Jericho's walls as there is that Poseidon knocked down Troy's. And that is the Alpha and the Omega of what I "believe."

Ciao, Bella (I have such a crush on your mind)(smile)

Evening, JeffreyD.

That's actually a super nice thing for a woman to hear (this one, at least - and not just because I've grown tired of all the real-world crushes ;)). It's mutual, but to be honest you're not alone - this blog is a cornucopia of intellectual-crush possibilities for those prone to them.

the united states would do well to remove the tax exempt status of institutions that practice delusion.

John- It is ignorant to comment on something you have not read. You don't know what C.S. Lewis writes. If you are sure of your position then exposure to another should not be threatening.

Paper Hand- It is not the same. Atheism is a belief system, the belief that there is nothing worthy of belief. Notice I say "belief" since I have already said that it is Atheism is as unsubstantiated as religion.

KM- I did not have you in mind when I wrote "mud-slinging". I had just read the previous 200 posts. Thank you for accepting my recommendation. Knowing the opposing side makes for better discussion.

I have to log off now too; it's 2:30 AM here in the UK. All the best posters seem to come online way after my bedtime!

And just for the record, I've been posting here for some time now, except that my username was Elwood Herring. I decided to de-woo my name a couple of weeks ago for obvious reasons. "El" suits me fine. Call me either.

bgbaysjr:

Yes! What you've just said cannot be said enough, especially since our critics seem not to be able to grasp it.

There are various nuanced forumlations of it, but they all come down to this: atheism means lack of belief in god(s). Nothing more. Attempts to load atheism with all kinds of political (and other) baggage with the aim of criticizing it on those counts are, quite simply, exercises in intellectual dishonesty.

El- Good to talk with you.

KM:

Thanks! And El Herring said it so much more succinctly -- bravo, El, and pleasant dreams...

Thank you all for hearing my point of view. I hope that everyone on this blog can be civil as I, John, El and KM (with others) have managed. I have to tuck my kids in bed. Good night to all. I wish you the best.

I love that site, JeffreyD! I can't wait to read them all. Seems to have the makings of a drinking game...

Sorry, you're wrong. I don't "believe" that there is no God. What I believe in is what I see evidence of. I see no evidence of Yahweh, Zeus, Thor, Odin, Amaterasu, Buddha, Brahmin, Allah, etc.

Why should I believe in something with no evidence?

I have read various theologians. I haven't read Mere Christianity, admittedly. I've also read the entire Bible. I grew up Christian, but I came to realize that Christianity conflicted with the evidence available (as well as being based on belief in a being who, if he existed and was as the Bible describes him, would be horrifically evil, and a being who no moral person should praise). As a result, I rejected it.

Pleasant dreams to you too, Anne, and yours...

lol, rotffl. atheism is not a belief system. we know that there is no god. just like we know that a prehensile, opposable thumb and a bad back that is verticle is advantageous as opposed to not have them. monotheism is a joke but then again what can one expect from peeps who accept messages whispered in the ears of the chosen few.

PS: Sweet dreams!

I left the Church for good when the College of Cardinals elected Razti pope instead of this guy:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=BRpzkpyr6RM&feature=related

David, be sure to keep us informed of all the Triassic goodness you unearth!

Er, #347 was directed to Anne. Sorry, forgot to specify

Zomg I am so sorry... as a Pitt student myself, I'd like to let you know that we're not all murderous rapists.

Ack to the extreme. =(

Ben Stein @ 70

That for sure was a molly!

Paper Hand @ 347:

Yes! Everyone remembers to not believe in Thor, but hardly anyone remembers to not believe in poor Amaterasu...

John- It is ignorant to comment on something you have not read.

I honestly do not know if I have or have not read it. Much earlier in my life I read a more than a little of CS Lewis (religious Mother) and none of it has stuck with me. Of the dozen or so of his books I have read I can remember the name of only one, and not much of the content of that one. I cannot say if the argument in you recommended CS Lewis book would have any profound effect. For all I know have already read it and dismissed it. At this point all I can say is all the Lewis works I have read were not compelling in any way.

What you will find if you stay here and continue you discussions is that almost everyone here knows far more about Christianity, Islam and other faiths that most people of faith know about atheism. Most of the posters I have seen have moved to atheism only after careful study of their and other faith systems. It is not a lack of understanding but a well reasoned reaction to careful study that has led them to accept that there is no god.

I am a Catholic. I think that to be an Atheist requires the same degree of faith as to be religious.

Nonsense. It takes zero faith to reject a proposition. Faith is belief without evidence. Rejecting a belief is not the same as a believing the negative. Simply:

believe ~A != ~believe A

The weak atheist takes the latter position. So without a positive belief (without evidence), that position can't be based on faith.

Wow, as sick of this whole crackergate thing that I am, it still amazes me how much fear there is on the Catholic side of the fence. Seriously, if they don't feel threatened by the postings of P.Z. and the others who support him, why is there such a defensive attitude about them. They "know" that they're right and that God will do Goddy things to their enemies. If they were truly secure in their beliefs, and honestly angry at Prof. Myers, they would simply wait for their god to do what it is best at: Punishing people.

"All I said to my wife was, that piece of halibut is good enough for Jehovah!"

"He said it again!!"

"Let's be completely clear about this. No one is to throw any stones until I blow this whistle, even if they do say Jehovah."

KM said I'm not sure why we have to come up with something "new" in order to respond to you. Your problem seems to be an inability to understand the things that have already been said... Hmm. You seem to share it. I said quite plainly that I had nothing to add (to what I have already said) and would not write any further unless you had something new to say (that I might wish to respond to). This doesn't seem like an exceptionally demanding bit of prose but, clearly, you had trouble with it. I am so sorry. I will try to write more slowly, if there is a next time.

Craig wrote: All atheists are doing is using their freedom of speech to express their disagreement with what the Catholics are doing - often vociferously, even rudely and profanely, but just speech.

Uh, no. Myers crossed the line when he asked his readers to steal consecrated wafers for him. At a minimum, it is disorderly conduct to come into a Mass with the intention of profaning the Eurcharist, which the Eucharistic ministers are obligated to try and stop; in states with strong hate crime laws (which I disapprove of, by the way), he has incited his readers to commit crimes. Still, since it is safe to bash Catholics, they aren't likely to be applied in this sort of case, even if a given parish decides to press charges which is unlikely.

No threats, no attempts to ruin others' lives, no attempts to get others to stop saying what they want or believing what they want.

Of course it is an attempt to get others to stop believing! Myers' belief that he has somehow shown that nothing is sacred is preposterous on its face but it was an attempt to do just that. While I am disgusted with threats of violence and death, what did you all think you were playig at? When you deliberately arouse strong emotions, why are you surprised by the reaction? Do you understand that little about human nature?

As far as trying to ruin his life? Frankly, he is ruining his own life. Even if UMM resists the pressure to fire him, they will have to watch him like a hawk. Every class he teaches from now on will be, potentially, a hostile environment for believers. How many Christian and Muslim students are going to avoid his classes, if they can, because they don't feel safe? How many will refuse to have him as an advisor, if they can?

If a complaint about harrassment is lodged in the future, the university is going to have a heck of a time mounting a defense, since they know he is toxic but have allowed him to continue teaching. Really, there is no good way out of this mess for either Myers or the UMM.

sure wish god would get a PR guy so that his press releases would follow the same story line. you'd think a bloke so powerful and almighty could at least get his story straight.

Lily @ #360: How is accepting a mass-produced piece of cheap bread given away for free "theft"?

I will pray for you, even though I would really enjoy kicking your ass.

Okay, that made me laugh uncontrollably. Too funny.

Anne:

Thanks for posting.

I do not believe that it is possible to be an atheist without also being an agnostic, and vice-versa. It is entirely dependent on the particular god that is posited. So for instance, a god that has made sure that you never have any reason to believe that it exists would necessitate agnosticism [since a-gnostikos means "without knowledge"]. On the other hand, a god that made sure that there is tons of clear and undeniable evidence would necessitate atheism [a-theismos, without theism, i.e. without a belief in god], and that would hopefully be the case for theists, as well! Indeed, the absence of evidence in this case is not only highly predictive of its non-existence, it virtually entails its non-existence. It would therefore be patently irrational not to actively disbelieve in this god, given that no such evidence exists.

All other gods should fall on a continuum between these two, and we are left to argue about which gods we deny and which ones we merely disbelieve.

In my opinion, it is important we live, insofar as is possible, according to the very best evidence that is available. When you say that I cannot prove that god doesn't exist, you are of course correct, but you need to be aware of the dismaying trapdoor that is about to open up right in front of you. That excuse can be used to justify literally anything! And there is also the fact that even believers do not accept this line of reasoning in almost any other aspect of their lives. It is essentially a case of special pleading.

That is why I do not accept that any belief in god is justifiable. Once you allow one group of people to not only believe things for which there is little or no evidence, but to celebrate and venerate that mode of thought, how do you then argue against others who wish to do the same?

lilly wrote:

I told my own priest what was going on -- he has never heard of Webster Cook or Myers. His reaction? He burst out laughing and then shook his head in disbelief-- disbelief that an adult could suppose that there was some value in such a meaningless, stupid gesture.

Yes, that is exactly the response PZ hoped to get. That you (all Catholics) would be rational enough to realize that yes it is a stupid and pointless exercise to "desecrate" a wafer. Instead he gets thousands of e-hate-mail, hundreds of death threats, calls for his expulsion etc. Did you by any chance also tell your priest about this? Did you tell him of all the Catholics damning PZ to hell and threatening him with bodily harm? What was his reaction to members of his flock dispensing such un-Christian "charity"?

lily, when you the email from jesus, pass it on to us. until you have, you have nothing but delusion to suck on.

Lily, you did read where he said that some of the wafers were really old. Many good Catholics have left mass with consecrated wafers. Children have also been known to do it. Also, is it really disorderly conduct to take something that is being given away freely? It's like stopping by a giant luncheon for a group you don't belong to and walking out with a cookie. How is that disorderly conduct? How is that a hate crime?

Why do you flip out at the notion that he is trying to get people to stop believing? If that is a hate crime then I've had tons of people commit hate crimes against me on campus and even at my own home.

Lily @#311 wrote,

I told my own priest what was going on -- he has never heard of Webster Cook or Myers. His reaction? He burst out laughing and then shook his head in disbelief-- disbelief that an adult could suppose that there was some value in such a meaningless, stupid gesture.

This is exact what PZ wants! He wants the entire Catholic community to see the act a Eucharist desacration as "a meaningless, stupid gesture." That so many Catholics get their knickers in a knot over it is exactly what Mehers wanst to call attention too. Too bad not all follow your priest's example.

"Paper Hand- It is not the same. Atheism is a belief system, the belief that there is nothing worthy of belief."

/facepalm

Let the religious ignorance come to light.

Protip: Not believing in something is not the same as denying its existence.

I have no evidence aliens have ever visited Earth. This means it would be foolish to believe they have; however, it does not mean I am affirming they have never done so.

Significant difference.

C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity is the tome that originally concocted that god-awful "lunatic, liar or Lord" argument, for those who want a preview.

Holy shit! I'm from Eau Claire!

To help balance things out: there are at least two people here who think you're right on. (One of them is me.)

PZ, if you ever come to give a talk at the university, I'll be first in line.

Baba @#138:

If I became an atheist can I become as pretentious as you? Please?

I don't know if it's possible for anyone to lose that amount of pretentiousness. You can but try...go for it!!

Martin

i can think, i think!!! i believe in space aliens!!! i know that they exist. i also believe they have never visited earth. hey, ya know what??? i'm probably right.

Lly:

One of the major aspects of this whole situation that you just can't seem to grasp -- see, e.g., your own comments on PZ's supposed hatred of Catholics and his classroom becoming an unsafe place for believers -- is precisely what I explained at 270. It's not about believers, it's about beliefs. That's all I'm interested in having you (and the other Catholic fundamentalists and apologists that have been lurking arond Pharyngula lately) understand. Alas, none of you seem capable of differentiating between the beliefs and the believers.

Until you can understand the issues at stake in this discussion, please don't bother to add anything new.

We should contact the Pope and ask him whether death threats and threats to lose jobs, over the Eucharist is Catholic policy, or whether these Middle Age practices are really history.

I suspect that this could be a replay of South Park with Bill Donahue ...

Sandi, Lily, FrJ, Baba

Is catholic church innocent of wrong doings?

The Gumby background is showing up nicely without damaging the readability of the Comic Sans. This is a definite improvement over the old look.

Hx: Baba sounds like "Fr." J, with similar tactics, except less loquacious.

How many Christian and Muslim students are going to avoid his classes, if they can, because they don't feel safe? How many will refuse to have him as an advisor, if they can?

Lily, how many 18 year olds even know of Bill Donohue's existence? Do you really think the incoming freshmen would even be aware of this kerfuffle?

christianity you got to love it. the manifest destiny folks, you know, the same guys that gave us ethnic slavery, child labor, genocide, wife beatings and on and on and on.

My god.

What a collection of stupid, stupid people, with such a tiny, helpless god that needs such feeble and weak thoughts to protect him.

they're not stupid Talen Lee, they are just brainwashed. and guess who doesn't know it???

I'm still waiting for the Lily's, Father J etc to announce that it wrong for churches to be bigoted in their hiring practices by eliminating gays and atheists from employment.

Why do they forget this? Surprised that Dobson hasn't jumped on the bandwagon - he of the "Christian affirmation required" for employment.

And WHEN are they going to start paying taxes.

Chris P

I told my own priest what was going on -- he has never heard of Webster Cook or Myers. His reaction? He burst out laughing and then shook his head in disbelief-- disbelief that an adult could suppose that there was some value in such a meaningless, stupid gesture.

And you're absolutely sure that he wasn't laughing at the realisation that you really do believe in transubstantiation? That would've been my first guess...

Anne I'm sorry but lewis' proof has been totally discredited by most readers, it has so many logical falws that it would take me too long to record you may want to look at http://www.daylightatheism.org/ for greater detail.

anyway bigbagsjr has said it better than me, thnks. At least anne you tried to avoid lying unlike the other apologists who do troll here.

Paper Hand: I don't believe that I used the word theft. However, there is an explicit, printed instruction in every missalette in every Catholic Church, multiple copies of which are available in every pew. It states in plain English that only faithful Catholics may participate in the Eucharist and there are strict protocols in place as to how it is to be consumed.

Therefore, Eucharistic ministers are obligated to try and stop someone from profaning the Host which, necessarily, disrupts the service. Hence, the disorderly conduct charge that would be appropriate, if the person does not immediately cease his misconduct.

Jim RL Lily, you did read where he said that some of the wafers were really old. (No) Many good Catholics have left mass with consecrated wafers. Children have also been known to do it. So what? If it was done with no intention of profaning the Host, there is no problem.

Also, is it really disorderly conduct to take something that is being given away freely? It is not being given away freely. There are conditions that must be met. However, the disorderly conduct comes into the equation at the point the Eucharistic ministers have to stop what they are doing to try to prevent the clown from profaning the Host. Disrupting a service is disorderly conduct.

Why do you flip out at the notion that he is trying to get people to stop believing? I wasn't aware that I had flipped out. Since I think the whole thing is silly and unworthy of a thinking adult, I am not likely to get particularly upset. I am also not a cradle Catholic, so I don't have the deep, reverence that is almost part of the blood and bones of many faithful.

Moreover, I have no problem with anyone using reason and logic to talk civilly with people and try to persuade them to a different point of view. But that didn't happen here. This was not reasonable or charitable and there was neither civility nor logic employed. Myers knew how deeply upsetting an act it was and he did it deliberately to hurt as many people as possible. It was unworthy of an adult and a deeply antisocial, spiteful thing to do.

Someone wrote: This is exact what PZ wants! He wants the entire Catholic community to see the act a Eucharist desacration as "a meaningless, stupid gesture." ... Too bad not all follow your priest's example. You have badly misconstrued the point of what I wrote. Desecration is not a "meaningless, stupid gesture" it is deeply antisocial and antagonistic. My priest laughed at Myers' folly. The idea that Myers thought he could accomplish something with such a gesture boggles my mind, as it did my priest's. It was the sheer lunacy that had us in stitches. Did Myers really suppose that he could hurt God? Did he really suppose that the Church would stop believing and give it all up? The more I think about this, the funnier it all strikes me.

I only hope that the Muslims who come to hear of his little stunt feel the same way. Unlike the pope, bishops and priests of the Catholic Church, Muslim clerics do have a policy of ordering up the smiting heathens and blasphemers.

-"So...have I mentioned lately that Myers is a bigot? Imagine a professor bashing Jews on his blog. Imagine a professor bashing Blacks on his website."

Imagine Catholics bashing atheists on this blog. Now fancy that? Who would have thought?

Lily wrote:

"How many Christian and Muslim students are going to avoid his classes, if they can, because they don't feel safe? How many will refuse to have him as an advisor, if they can?"

Aside from your misunderstanding of the actual target of Prof. Myers' "desecration" (see posts 270 and 374), you're purposefully omitting something that will defuse the point you're obviously trying to make here. Among the desecrated items were the cracker, the Qu'ran, and the title page of Dawkins' God Delusion. By your logic, atheists should also avoid Prof. Myers classes. He did, afterall, destroy part of a symbol of their beliefs (or lack thereof), too.

Also, jsut a tip: avoid making points with rhetorical questions. Your reader's response may not be the same as yours, and your point will not be made as you want it to be. My guess is that only a very few Christian, Muslim, or atheist would-have-been students of Prof. Myers will avoid his biology classes because, in his private time, he trashed a cracker and a few pages from a couple of books.

"Did Myers really suppose that he could hurt God?"

Seeing as though he doesn't believe god(s) exist(s), I would find that particular scenario highly unlikely. PZ has, rather, been rather explicit in his motivation to show that nothing bad happens when you fuck up a stupid cracker, no matter what supernatural properties you delude yourself into thinking it has.

You see, its only a smart idea to pontificate when you know what the hell you're talking about.

Posted by: Sandi | July 26, 2008 4:09 PM

Grammar Nazi - UR DOIN WRONG!!! U can knot hav cheezeburger!!11!

The idea that Myers thought he could accomplish something with such a gesture boggles my mind, as it did my priest's. It was the sheer lunacy that had us in stitches.

Lunacy? You are here are you not? The fact that members of you church have resorted to the physical assualt of someone to defend a lump of dough has been made public. Both of these events indicate he has done quite a lot.

I only hope that the Muslims who come to hear of his little stunt feel the same way.

So far the only threats he has gotten have come from self professed christians.

That alone says a lot and validates PZ Myers efforts.

KM: It's not about believers, it's about beliefs. That's all I'm interested in having you (and the other Catholic fundamentalists and apologists that have been lurking arond Pharyngula lately) understand. Alas, none of you seem capable of differentiating between the beliefs and the believers.

Who cares what you are interested in? You are making a distinction that is meaningless to most of us. You can explain it til you are blue in the face. You are wrong. We are the ones who will decide how we feel about this childish, spiteful act. You don't get to tell us how we should feel. Sorry. That is the nature of reality.

Why are you so ignorant of human nature? Did you grow up in a stall like poor Kasper Hauser?

how high is hosanna anyways???

how high is hosanna anyways???

We are the ones who will decide how we feel about this childish, spiteful act. You don't get to tell us how we should feel. Sorry. That is the nature of reality.

This has never been about feelings, it is about facts. You can feel that a cracker is god or you father or a bright green friendly flying hippogriff. It doesn't change that fact that it is just a cracker. If you are unable to make that distinction that your problem. No one made you come over here.

Lily's panties are in a twist over a cracker? really?

* Sorry. That should read "... very few, if any, ...".

Based on the reactions to the Great Desecration so far (from the three groups in question), I'd say that we could expect that no atheists and no Muslims will avoid the professor's classes. We may expect a very small number of fundamentalist Catholics to avoid his classes. However, if they hold their religious beliefs sacred, valuing them more than things like their education, it's not really Prof. Myers' fault at all, now, is it, that they should miss out on his classes and expertise? Especially given the point of this whole exercise...

"You don't get to tell us how we should feel. Sorry. That is the nature of reality."

Actually, we are perfectly within our rights to tell you that you should stop being a lot of lunatics over a cracker. We can't force you too, though, so you are also free to go about your merry way clinging to your delusions.

Death threats and harassment over a perceived insult to said delusions are another story altogether.

Lily:

That distinction is at the very centre of your inability to understand what's going on here.

My, but you are willfully ignorant and agressively stupid.

Sandi, Lily, FrJ, Baba or some other catholic apologist as the main players seem to avoid the issue

Is catholic church innocent of wrong doings?

Here is Bryan's info.

Name:Stikeleather, Bryan R
University relationship:Registered Student
Campus:Pittsburgh
Career:Graduate
Program:Joseph M. Katz Grad Sch Bus
Plans:Business Administration
Email:brs83@pitt.edu

Larry at 285 said: "What a pathetic group of losers."

Speaking as a loser myself, I've really got to wonder just who are the losers here. Yes, Sandi, Lily, et al. do not display a great deal of intelligence, let alone logic. However, being the cynic that I am I would just like to remind you that by definition (Stanford Binet IQ) half of the people are below 100 (average to stupid in varying degrees) and half are average to highly intelligent. Even in the latter half there is a lot of stupidity. Such as, for example, your choice in deciding to argue with these people. Most of the regulars here seem to be educated and intelligent. By arguing with them you just perpetuate your agony in having to deal with these "losers." Grow up.

I have long maintained that truth is stranger than fiction only because fiction knows when to stop... I am thankful to these theistic zealots, because I am finally understanding why they panic about heterodoxy and blasphemy, and are constantly relying on arguments from authority.

It is all they have.

Coming from a scientific background, I was trained to question all authority and to only trust what someone says when they have evidence that supports their assertions. If we say "I believe X" it is only as a shorthand for "the preponderance of evidence currently supports the hypothesis X, subject to change with more evidence..." Some people earn authority only as they forge a history of verifiable results, but they can lose it even more quickly.

So, to us, heterodoxy supported by evidence is -- or should be -- welcome. Any hypothesis or theory can be overturned, but Sagan reminds us that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Although we stand on the shoulders of giants, we recognize that they are (or were) human with all the strengths and weaknesses that implies.

I am finally getting that they must know, deep inside, that when someone draws a picture of Muhammed or drives a nail through a wafer and God does nothing that the only logical explanation takes them somewhere they are afraid to go: not only are there no clothes, there is no Emperor.

So, blasphemy, of all things, becomes the only Unforgivable Curse, er, sin. Worse than murder. Not worse because it causes real harm to real people, but because it proves that there are no real gods active in this, the real world.

May West reminds us that people who are easily shocked should be shocked more often. Perhaps people whose world is shaken by a "childish action" should examine whether the foundations of their world are built on sand.

PS, Lily:

I'm not trying to tell you how to feel. Don't lie about what I've said to you.

Likewise, you should not attribute vicious intentions to Prof. Myers -- e.g., hatred of or violence against Catholics -- that are not there. It is not the case that he was attacking Catholics -- no matter how put upon you, as a Catholic, may feel. If he was attacking anything, he was attacking the notion of sacred belief.

(And we're back at that pesky distinction between belief and believer again... Funny that.)

Now you are going to start getting piles of emails from people (such as myself) who want to see what it takes to get blocked by your filter....

Great. You've got a group of semi-literate psychotic wafer-worshippers infatuated with you and your posterior. This Hoss guy works with high-school students? Perhaps he meant they tutor him.

I've read Lewis' Mere Christianity. Unfortunately, the pure apologetic section of the work falls far short of its target of providing a rational justification for faith. He attempts to structure deductive and inductive logical arguments to support his conclusion that there is a single God and that Jesus was his only Son. Surprisingly, considering Lewis' obvious intellect, his logic if rife with serious flaws. Three quick examples are symptomatic:

Lewis states that "Reality is something you could not have guessed. This is one of the reasons I believe in Christianity. It is a religion you could not have guessed." What he means is that the world is complex and therefore a religion that accurately explains the world must be complex. Thus, because Christianity is complex, it accurately explains the world. This logic leaves seekers of religion free to accept any "complicated" belief system, the more complicated the better.

Lewis argues that Jesus must be the Son of God because the Bible makes it clear that he was "neither a lunatic nor a fiend" and that he must be either a lunatic/fiend or the Son of God. In addition to several deductive logic holes, the argument faces an obvious circularity problem. One believes what the Bible says because Jesus is the Son of God and one believes he is the Son of God because of the Bible's description of his life.

In arguing for basic theism, Lewis does a little linguistic switch and then makes something out of it. He begins by using the word "law" descriptively (i.e., gravity) and the switches to a prescriptive use of "law" (i.e., morality). He then makes much of this without acknowledging that that in fact is all he's done. It's a language trick, not in any way a proof of god.

For all the issues with Lewis' apologetic efforts, his attempt to provide an easily understandable, concise summary of the major cross-denominational Christian beliefs is outstanding. One can take issue with the lack of depth and breadth of coverage, but only if one does not clearly understand Lewis' objectives. His discussions of the cardinal virtues, the sin of pride and the trinity are clearly articulated.

Is that all you can be, a stupid biologist?

Isn't that what everybody wants to be when they grow up (growing up being a requirement for the job)?

Who are these people who use 'huh' in correspondence? Hey, eh, LMAO, ROTFLMAO are all venerable insertables. But 'huh' just tells me that you an inbred wanker who doesn't get out much. It further tells me that that is a good thing.

I'm wondering if there should be an IQ/MMPI test before internet connections are provided.

I would like to add that your comment numbers are astounding. I'm sure some sort of record was set with the 2,200+ post. If I get 6 - 9 comments, I figure I've really made a point. Any more and I start to get paranoid about all the attention.

How do you handle it, Chief?

Oh honestly, these comments have degenerated into parody. You think the wafer is a cracker. Big yawn. Who cares what you think?

Seeing as though he doesn't believe god(s) exist(s), I would find that particular scenario highly unlikely. PZ has, rather, been rather explicit in his motivation to show that nothing bad happens when you fuck up a stupid cracker, no matter what supernatural properties you delude yourself into thinking it has.

Quelle surprise! We could have told him, and many of us did tell him, just exactly that before he performed his childish rite.

And this comment will go down as the most fatuous comment of all in a flaming sea of fatuity:

Aside from your misunderstanding of the actual target of Prof. Myers' "desecration" (see posts 270 and 374), you're purposefully omitting something that will defuse the point you're obviously trying to make here. Among the desecrated items were the cracker, the Qu'ran, and the title page of Dawkins' God Delusion. By your logic, atheists should also avoid Prof. Myers classes. He did, afterall, destroy part of a symbol of their beliefs (or lack thereof), too.

I'm sorry be blunt but how else can I make you understand? For sheer stupidity, this can't be beat. Is there a single atheist on the planet who thinks that Dawkins is God? Is there a single atheist on the planet who thinks his book is sacred? Only Myers could have thought that tearing pages from it somehow proved something other than his disconnect from reality.

BTW, is it just me, or does the email from Jason Larrimore look like a Craigslist ad offering BDSM?

Wow, another 400 post thread in about 8 hours. When will the fun ever end?
I see Lilly and Sandi are still having trouble comprehending that they are asking us to give special privileges to the Catholic church. No one, or no church, should be expecting special privileges from the public without getting called on it. We will never give special privileges to any body or any church. Ladies, you need to understand that a cracker is just a cracker, and will remain so until you can show the physical evidence otherwise. If you don't have the physical evidence (and we know you don't), and then you expect us to buy your hocus-pocus (as good as spell as found in any fantasy novel) that the cracker is now not a cracker, but something more. We just see you as delusional as our first question is usually "what is the facts?". And the facts are, your cracker is just a cracker.
I'm not sure this is the best analogy, but I feel like every time you try for us giving the cracker "special respect", that you are being like a nice couple from down the street who, because they keep a kosher kitchen, is trying to require us to keep a kosher kitchen to show proper respects for their beliefs. Personally, it is going too far.

Anne:

If there is no scientific evidence for God, as you say, then you are quite correct that He cannot be proven. However, the theory that there is no God is equally without merit. Just because you cannot now observe or quantify Him does not mean that you might not one day.

Wake me up when you find Bertrand Russell's celestial teapot, 'kay?

#210 scooter, the Catholic League is not just one guy and a computer, I'm afraid:

http://www.catholicleague.org/about.php

It has a board of directors, a chairman, and a vice president, and probably some additional staffers. There's also a (probably powerless) board of advisors that includes some other well-known nutters like Brent Bozell III, Dinesh D'Souza, Alan Keyes, Thomas Monaghan, and Paul Vitz.

Posted by: Jim Lippard | July 26, 2008 7:16 PM

I'm compiling the financials for the local garden club. Their Board of Directors is as impressive as the Catholic League's.

So don't let the list of names fool you through its "gravitas." You'll see charities with $40K, or less, in annual revenue with boards like that.

They're just hollow organizations with one or two employees, not always even one full-timers. It's the nature of the beast.

There's got to be a board. No matter how much it's just paper. As a matter of fact, I have served on a couple of boards in the past. Currently my wife is the Secretary of the Rose Society. I'm also the Secretary of two of my client's corporations (our State requires a President & Secretary).

These titles and positions are all as empty as the Catholic League. Though, frankly, I suspect the Rose Society and the Garden Club are larger...

Anyway, the people on these boards serve so they can put that crap on their resume to impress people who don't know the game. Or because there are other reasons, kind of like when I was in college and some friends of mine started doing some computer consulting during the DOS ages... They were in their early 20's and calling themselves "Senior Partners."

I guess because "College Engineering Geeks" seemed so harsh... I saved their cards. I show them to younger clients as WHAT NOT TO DO.

"Who cares what you think?"

Erm, you're the one on the atheist's blog yammering about the topic on and on. This question shouldn't be too hard to answer.

"Quelle surprise! We could have told him, and many of us did tell him, just exactly that before he performed his childish rite."

Well then, to quote the great Eric Cartman, "What's the big fuckin' deal, bitch???"

JoJo:

Thanks for the info. As one of the people who promised to read this tome, a heads up is nice.

I recently read Lewis' "A Grief Observed". If nothing else, it's an interesting account of his move away from faith after his wife's death and his reasons for returning to faith after a brief stint as a skeptic. He made similar sorts of errors in his arguments in this book that he seems to have made in "Mere Christianty". Now I know to expect more of the same.

....So you atheists have a fine organization to belong too with a wonderful history. It has everything: theft, deception, fraud, and murder. Atheism at its best.

Posted by: Fr. J | July 26, 2008 7:48 PM

I see the asshole is back. Still doesn't compare to one day of the Inquisition or the Crusades or the Holocaust or the Taiping Rebellion or any of the other In the Name of Christ atrocities we've gotten through history. SO fuck off.

Lily, #311, wrote:

I think that you will come to see that this stunt has been a public relations disaster.

Atheists can't have PR disasters, Lily. We're not a country club that's worried about its membership, or a listed company concerned about its share price.

People don't become atheists because they think atheism is a nice idea; they do it because they don't feel there's a good reason to believe in god/s. Popularity and public opinion don't come into it.

At worst, someone might not admit to being an atheist for fear of retribution from the theistic community - as we've seen here, the hostility has manifested itself into threats of physical violence (funny, I've heard no reports of atheists threatening christians on their blogs; have you?) and I can't say I blame them for keeping it to themselves.

You say that this is a meaningless gesture - yet you're here writing to criticise it. Surely if it were truly meaningless you'd just ignore it and deny him the oxygen of recognition.

PZ achieved exactly what he set out to do - highlight the existence of a catholic lunatic fringe who value a cracker above the well-being of an actual human being.

Craig, #267, wrote:

no attempts to get others to stop saying what they want or believing what they want.

Just a point on this one - I, for one, want christians to know that not believing is an option, that believing is irrational, and that there are many reasons to do without belief. Exposing the lies and hypocrisy of the theists is also high on the ToDo list - since that does a lot of the work for us.

If, by doing what he's done, PZ has encouraged even one fence-sitter to free themselves from religion (and, since many deconverts admit that the undermining of their beliefs in just this way has sometimes been helpful in the process, it's fair to assume that it will) then it's been worthwhile.

PZ loves to hear his own voice, like most of the arrogant professors I've forced to listen to so that I could one day put food on the table.

You overpaid professors are not nearly as important and influential as you think you are.

PZ is just a pudgy, middle-aged has-been who thinks that the sun shines out of his anus because he read a few biology textbooks once.

What amuses me is all the sycophants on these blogs.

What the hell is the attraction? His stellar posts?

C'mon, guys - get a life! Get off the frigging computer and pay attention to your spouse and children.

Quit giving this guy airtime.

Wow Lily. You don't seem stupid at first glance. But then you go and say stupid shit.

NOTHING IS SACRED. No matter how hard you want it to be. Yes obviously atheists wouldn't care if someone destroyed a book by Dawkins. The point is that there's no difference between any of the objects in terms of sacredness... including the banana peel.

I think this edge.org response is relevant since in more than half of the rants there are associations with the less than human: nazis, molesters, amoebas. Just because we can say Godwin's Law predicts the bogus associations with the inhuman Nazis, doesn't mean there isn't something neurological at the base of this flamewar behavior. Something that can be analyzed scientifically. (The irony of course is that Nazis are hated since they were bigots but bigots always invoke Nazis.)

from http://edge.org/q2007/q07_1.html MARC D. HAUSER
Psychologist and Biologist, Harvard University: Author, Moral Minds

3. Be vigilant of disgust!

The most virulent of human emotions is disgust. Although disgust was born out of an adaptive response to potential disease vectors starkly, things that are normally inside but are now outside such as vomit, blood, and feces it is a mischievous emotion, sneaking into other problems, alighting, wreaking havoc on group structure, and then spreading. Throughout the history of warfare, every warring group has tagged their enemy with qualities that are reminiscent of disease, filth, and parasites. The imagery is overwhelming, beautifully designed to trigger the rallying cry. Though the destruction of 6 million Jews by the Nazis was made possible by an extraordinary advertising campaign, it was made all the more possible by the carefully crafted manipulation of disgust: in the Nazis' hands, the Jews were vermin, dirty, diseased, and thus, disgusting. Wouldn't we all be better off without disgust? What if we could remove this emotional card?

Would we knock the sails out of our efforts to denigrate the other? Intriguingly, there are some people who never experience disgust and don't recognize it in others, even though they experience and recognize all of the other familiar emotions sadness, happiness, fear, surprise, anger. These people are carriers of the genetic disorder Huntington's Chorea. Though they suffer from significant deterioration of the motor systems, they are disgust-free. So too are carriers that are pre symptomatic. Although we don't know whether patients with Huntington's are immune to the nefarious propaganda that might come their way should someone wish to foist their prejudices upon them, my hunch is that science will confirm this relationship. And if that is the case, perhaps modern molecular techniques will one day find a way to cure Huntington's, but along the way, work out a method to crank down or turn off our disgust response, while preserving our motor systems.

Especially you Scrotum.

I just wanna express my dismay over the way this other "Anne" and her Mere Christianity nonsense are profaning my beloved first name, and also, y'know, totally dissociate myself from all that.

However, if anybody feels a burning need to read the thing, the full text seems to be available here. No idea about the copyright status of it though.

For myself, every time I try to read more than about a sentence of Christian apologetics these days my eyes instantly glaze over in boredom and I find myself incapable of continuing. I gave the damn things a good fifteen years to win me back into the fold after I realized (at the age of fourteen) that there was just no good reason to believe the things I'd been taught to believe, and I think they've had their chance. I'm not wasting any more of my time on it when I could be reading about cool science shit.

And on that note, I'm outta here.

Scrote@418:

"What the hell is the attraction?"

You tell me, you're here too.

And the fat jokes are just beyond the pale. Is that all you have? Way to argue like a five year old.

Cripes!

I just noticed that, while catching up on this thread, my automatic filters were making my finger page down as soon as "Lily" showed up.

Thank you, oh adaptive para-autonomic reflexes!

Jeremy,

I came to see what all the desecration fuss is about. I don't plan to stay, which I know will be heartbreaking for you to hear.

The aptly named Nerd (of Redhead) said the following: see Lilly and Sandi are still having trouble comprehending that they are asking us to give special privileges to the Catholic church. No one, or no church, should be expecting special privileges from the public without getting called on it.

Uh, what special privilesge would that be? I didn't ask for any privilege. Did Sandi? I *can* tell you that you will afford me my constitutional right to worship as I please without disruption from boorish louts. But there is no special privilege in that. It is a matter of law and enshrined in the Bill of Rights.

Have you any other foolish remarks you would like to make before I head off to bed?

Lily:

You believe in the literal truth of fairy tales, and Prof. Myers is disconnected from reality?

For the point that was being made -- in the original Great Desecration post, it's in bold-faced type for easy reference -- it DOES NOT MATTER that some people think two of the three items are sacred, that some people think one of the three items is God, or that no one thinks one of the three items is not sacred.

(Note that the part of my post that you found -- as you should have done -- fatuous began with "By your logic...". This takes into account your -- not my -- inability to understand the point of the Great Desecration.)

The aptly named Nerd (of Redhead) said the following: see Lilly and Sandi are still having trouble comprehending that they are asking us to give special privileges to the Catholic church. No one, or no church, should be expecting special privileges from the public without getting called on it.

Uh, what special privileges would those be? I didn't ask for any privileges. Did Sandi? I *can* tell you that you will afford me my constitutional right to worship as I please without disruption from boorish louts. But there is no special privilege in that. It is a matter of law and enshrined in the Bill of Rights.

Have you any other foolish remarks you would like to make before I head off to bed?

Ballsack is new here, and may be forgiven for not knowing that PZ Myers really does shoot sunbeams out of his ass. In fact, I'm going to force him to drink some colon lavage solution and harness his ass-radiation to solve the world's energy problems.

Anne @#327:

If you had read "Mere Christianity" you would know that C.S Lewis first establishes the existence of a God before expouding on the reasons why He believes the Christian God is the most true to reality.

Um, no he doesn't. Dredging up my memories of reading that book 40 yrs ago, it seems to me that he asserts the existence of a universal "moral law" (an assertion easily refuted). He then uses that to assert the creator of the moral law and finally to assert the identity of that creator to the Christian god, hence universal creator. He lost me as he tried to incorporate Satan, Jesus and the Trinity with some especially awful arguments. Anyway, as his base thesis fails (Universal Moral Law), so do all of his "logical" conclusions.

Sorry. His "Screwtape Letters" were a lot more entertaining (except he gets a little heavy handed trying to make his points). I did read it after "Mere Christianity, so it was for fun rather than illumination.

In the end, it comes down to evidence of faith, an altogether differnt thing that cannot be proven.

That's rather the point...faith is evidence-less and its very existence is NOT evidence for the target of that faith.

I have a pet peeve about the words "proof" and its cognates. Proofs belong to axiomatic systems and liquor. NOT to statements of fact about the world which are:
1. Supported by evidence (evolution, anthropic global climate change),
2. Lacking any supporting evidence (deity claims, Marxism)
3. Contradicted by the evidence (Noah's flood, thimerosal/autism linkage)

...I really do believe that what you slam as a "cracker" is the true and living presence of Christ.

That's nice, but that is a truth claim belonging to the third category above.

Here's the point: you can believe what you like about a wafer that's had some words mumbled over it. *BUT* when your coreligionists bodily assault and threaten the life, family & livelihood of any who mess with said wafers (even those innocently associated with one of the "perps"), then your belief has been brought into the spotlight of the public square. And once there it will be subject to scrutiny, criticism, demands for evidence and, when no evidence is forthcoming, derision. Because, after all, it is still only a cracker.

Thought experiment: Imagine 1000 tabernacles each containing a wafer. One of those wafers is consecrated. What would be the odds of the selection of the tabernacle containing the consecrated wafer, if the selector is:
1) An atheist
2) A devout Hindu
3) A devout Jew
4) A devout Lutheran
5) A devout Anglican
6) A devout Eastern Orthodox Catholic
7) A devout Roman Catholic
8) A Roman Catholic Nun
9) A Roman Catholic Priest
10) A Roman Catholic Bishop
11) A Roman Catholic Cardinal
12) The Pope.

My bet is none could better 1 in 1000.

Martin

we're all crushed...

that your still here.

Cool, It's Stalin Time instead of Nazi Time ITT.

As for Stalin, the Teaching Company's lectures on Russia say that the Russian church prepared the way for dictatorship. In fact, the same "thou" word was used both for God and for the political leader. Neat, huh?

Uh, what special privilesge would that be? I didn't ask for any privilege. Did Sandi? I *can* tell you that you will afford me my constitutional right to worship as I please without disruption from boorish louts.

So, when exactly has your right to worship as you please been disrupted?

Did not think so.

Good night, Lily.

Lily@426:

How is laughing about your blind devotion to fairy tales on a website interfering with your ability to worship your sky fairy? We're not violating the Constitution, it says nothing about *offending* people's delicate superstitions.

Scrote@425:

I'd actually prefer you left. Sorry to burst your bubble.

We don't know what the desecration "fuss" is all about either. That's the point.

Oh you who hopes to invoke a pair by your eponym:

I came to see what all the desecration fuss is about. I don't plan to stay, which I know will be heartbreaking for you to hear.

You've found the wrong destination; back up to this before you go.

Oh wow, all this over a cracker. I'm never going to be able to look a catholic with a straight face again because of this. Cracker worship is hilariously sad.

Why would you like me to leave? Did I say something offensive?

KM and John- If you had read "Mere Christianity" you would know that C.S Lewis first establishes the existence of a God before expouding on the reasons why He believes the Christian God is the most true to reality.

No he doesn't. And that's the problem with it. He establishes nothing in his circular logic. He just fools people by preaching to the choir who can't see through his crap.

El, It is good to see reasonable people on the other side of the fence. This blog has been for the most part, a treatise of mud-slinging by both sides.

We're not the ones making death threats because you don't believe in atheism. We don't believe that you're subhuman and inherently worthless and evil. If, at any time, we treat you like you're asshole, it's because you've acted like an asshole. Even if you don't think you have.

When the religious come in here, dumping their fervent, but ignorant, beliefs on us, it doesn't win points or make friends. And since we've heard all the lies and idiotic arguments, when you make them (for the 50,000th time) we're not going act like you're a great thinker or you deserve respect. Get your shit together and know what the hell you're talking about before you argue. It works MUCH better.

I think it is right to point out that if there is a God, there are many people vying for the right to call their God the real God. This is where C.S. Lewis could defend Christianity better than I.

Maybe. But he still sucked. He ran from everything of controversy and swaddled it all in feel-good cotton. And this kind of representative thinking is anything but logical:

"Either this man (Jesus) was, and is, the son of God, or else a madman or something worse."

Seriously, that's fucked-up thinking. There are MANY MORE OPTIONS for the Jesus Story than just these two points. Yet it's these kinds of false dilemmas, plus Christian Homilies, on which he makes his case.

In the end, it comes down to evidence of faith, an altogether differnt thing that cannot be proven. I reasonable, rational and a responsible member of society. I am also a "Troll" because I really do believe that what you slam as a "cracker" is the true and living presence of Christ.

Posted by: Anne | July 26, 2008 9:18 PM

I have evidence. I have evidence that your faith is nothing like the original polytheistic, child=sacrificing Judaism practiced by the early Jews. That your religion has gone through multiple changes and has evolved from the polytheistic, child-sacrificing religion that first became culturally distinct during 1600BCE (when the Israelites went Kosher).

Seriously. God had a wife. You can, if you know your bible, actually find some references to her. And you'll here her voice in first Genesis, though it's mistranslated to the masculine in Western Bibles, it's still in the feminine in ancient Hebrew texts. There is a REASON "God" made them MAN AND WOMAN in OUR IMAGE.

That's what that strange passage meant. Man and WOMAN, EQUAL (but different) created by EL and Asheroth in their image. Before Asheroth was written out of Judaism in 700BCE by the Judean Monotheists under King Josiah.

So, knowing all this. And knowing you're completely ignorant of this. I know your cracker is a cracker, because I know the proper way to worship El is with HUMAN SACRFICE. Something your religion, in its various sects, hasn't done for 2300 years.

God doesn't want a cracker. He wants your first born son. Though you are allowed to buy him off, there's even a payment scale in the bible. If you're rich, it's a pretty large fee. If you're poor, much less.

Kind of like progressive taxation.

Anyway, off to bed for me. This cracker thing causes problems around the house.

@Martin, #430

I agree with you that a creator doesn't follow from moral law. However, doesn't moral law follow from logic not being off in some distant Platonic plane, but here present between us individual speakers?

I'm not saying moral rights are always singularities, but they are partly singularities in that you can't deprive individuals of certain rights, no matter what the masses want. That's why you can't turn on the tv and instead of seeing NFL see the nightly torture broadcasts, no matter how entertaining that would be. There are moral rights. I don't know about "moral law" whatever that is, since I didn't study philosophy but that sounds like moral calculus which is kind of against the point of moral right singularities. Moral calculus being where you can add 5 minus 3 multiply by 12 and crank out morality instead of looking at the right and wrong, in singular.

I am not a philosopher but I find the concept of moral rights worthwhile.

Lily:

What special privileges?

At the very least, one of the privileges you are demanding is the right not to be offended. By the posts from you and your ilk, the emails Prof. Myers has so far received from "concerned" Catholics, and the Catholic League's current witchhunt, it seems that that right is not to be afforded equally to Catholics and to atheists (or, for that matter, those belonging to any religion other than the Catholic branch of Christianity).

#438

Why would you like me to leave? Did I say something offensive?

vs
#425

I don't plan to stay, which I know will be heartbreaking for you to hear.

Sigh. Another would-be troll.

Moses: Holy crap!

Concise expression is an asset, you know.

Learn to summarize, you twit.

LOL!

I don't understand. I'm off to mutilate my scrotum with sharp instruments anyway. It makes me feel closer to God. Jesus would be proud of my ability to inflict pain. I AM a demented fuckwit, aren't I? Goodnight!

"Why would you like me to leave? Did I say something offensive?"

Well, no. We just think you should lead by example if you want people to ignore PZ.

Ignoring the Brassierescrotum, may I say I for one don't find Anne a troll.

Anne, I encourage you to engage with Pharyngula.

You guys have are all trying to figure out life by playing guessing games, hosted by the master of delusion himself: PZ Myers.

None of you have an effing clue what life is all about. You just think you know, and make yourselves convincing by interspersing your arguments with psycho-babble in order to impress.

You are a sad lot of wandering, lost souls who possess intelligence but no wisdom.

Jeremy: How is laughing about your blind devotion to fairy tales on a website interfering with your ability to worship your sky fairy? We're not violating the Constitution, it says nothing about *offending* people's delicate superstitions.

This is off-topic and has nothing to do with anything I have written. More sign, if any were needed, that few of you are capable of real thought about this matter. You, for instance, are just spewing the party line, like some wind-up doll. But really, you need to wait for the right cue. Otherwise, it sounds kinda stupid.

Never mind, of course, that I hold fairy tales in the highest esteem, above all logic and reason. Magic is awesome. It esplains everyting to clearly!

Back to the gentital mutilation...

As KM said, no-one has the right not to be offended.

For example: the music of Celine Dion offends me, on several levels. What can I do? Simple. I just choose not to listen to her music and do my best to avoid situations where I would hear her music - or, if for some reason I'm somewhere where i do hear her music, I grit my teeth and put up with it.

But what I cannot do is demand she stops making music or that people should stop listening to her music.

Simple as that.

Uh, what special privilesge would that be? I didn't ask for any privilege.

Except that you did. You want the special privilege of people respecting your beliefs and not questioning or insulting them. Sorry, you're not going to get it.

Go ahead and pray, we don't have a problem with that. What we do have a problem with, is the underhanded techniques and threatening and oppressive behaviour by religious nutjobs to try to prevent any criticism against their beliefs. Sorry, not going to happen. Offended? Too fucking bad. As PZ said, no idea or belief is sacred, and we need to question everything.

PS Nonymous, I feel your pain.

Wow that's some broad generalizations. You couldn't possibly know much about any of us. But you're an ass. So, no worries.

Lily@448:

Didn't you go to bed?

There's nothing off-topic about what I wrote. The bottom line is that you believe in ridiculous things with no evidence, and are apparently willing to fight to the death to defend the irrationality of your beliefs.

"Real thought"? Damn that's ironic.

I actually find it kind of affirming that one of you has hijacked my name. It means I am hitting some nerves here. This means you might reflect on my words of wisdom later, when you're feeling introspective and lonely.

RIGHT ON!!

Lily doesn't want to talk about the issues. She wants to ignore them. She's offended, that's all that matters.

Lilly, the special privileges you are asking for is that we must take your cracker as seriously as you do, and give it exactly the same respect you do. This goes waaaayyyy beyond normal social decency, where I listen politely to you and then I can ignore what you say. You keep saying I must believe you and do as you say. You need to back off a bit on the attitude. Go to my couple with the kosher household analog. Where is the line drawn that I must keep a kosher household because they believe so sincerely, and actually have Deuteronomy and Leviticus to back them up. Personally, it stops at the door to my house, or more specifically half way to my house. They can talk all they want, but I don't have to agree with them. This applies to your cracker. I, and most of the thread, have listened to your concern. We believe you are sincere. But we don't have to believe the same as you or act on your concern. Not doing so does not make us bigots. Time for you to go to bed, an not come back until you run yourself through the proper exercise to determine where you would put yourself in this analogy. Time for my bed too.

Hey, Scrotum . . .go eat a cracker. You'll feel better.

Then, get back on your meds. There's a nice fellow.

I love how the trolls so effortlessly move from defending one set of meaningless, airy beliefs to another. Apparently, in addition to lacking knowledge of the supernatural significance of crackers, we now lack knowledge of some vague details about "how life works."

Waldteufel:

"Fellow"?!?

The closest I come to being a fellow is that I possess ovaries, which are actually a primitive form of undescended testes.

No scrotum here, people!

LOL!

Fr, J,

I just gotta say this. i've tried to engage you in civil discourse. I've seen others do as well. I've tried to give you the benefit of the doubt, others here have, as well. But as soon as a point is made other than your own, you kinda fade away and start a new tact. Then you repeat this behavior over and over.

You owe it to yourself to actually try to answer the questions being asked of yourself. If you can't, it's time to go away. Really. There is nothing more affirming to me, as an atheist, than to listen to your drivel. Honest! You are nothing but a clear indicator to me that there is no god. You are a living, breathing example of what is wrong with religion. Repeating dogma, hyper-sensitive, ignorant, and fearful.

You really should try to keep quiet, if you want to do any good. You do your silly mythology no help with your ranting. You are pathetic. I wish you had not been brain washed, because it seems you might have been someone who could add to humanity instead of repressing it given another reality. As it is...

FUCK OFF!!!

PS Nonymous, I feel your pain.

Posted by: John Morales | July 27, 2008 12:22 AM

Yeah, I can only imagine. Hey, at least neither of us has the same first name as a bologna. That's something to be happy about, right?

Dahan,

Can't you control your anger, even in writing?

Tyler, it just wouldn't be Pharyngula without the trolls.
Adds ambience.

Anne, yeah, let's be grateful for small mercies.

I actually find it kind of affirming that one of you has hijacked my name. It means I am hitting some nerves here. This means you might reflect on my words of wisdom later, when you're feeling introspective and lonely.

Alert! Masochistic persecution complex detected!
Warning! Remote contact has diverted main cognitive functions to its posterior!
Expect extreme stupidity, ignorance, and brain-dead fuckwittery.

John,

Trolls like me provide comic relief. I don't take life too seriously, and it amuses me when uptight intelligentsia, like some of the folks here, do.

I'm actually having quite the chortling sesh tonight. This is a hoot!

Just a freakin' shot in the dark, here, but...

Scrote:

What are your thoughts on ghost-sighting and prescience?

Ghosts? What utter drivel!

Somebody remind me tomorrow to install greasemonkey for firefox. I miss the killfile.

Scrote @ 468:
Ghosts are "utter drivel", and yet you believe in an invisible man in the sky, hunh?

In solidarity, I'm publishing the stuff. The added bonus, of course, is that it raises a lot of awareness about how much bigotry is out there.

I guess Monique Davis isn't the only idiot ready to pop off at any minute.

I'm outta here, you loonies.

Enjoy what's left of your lives, which will be difficult since so many of you lack inner peace.

Oh, I've got plenty of inner peace. It's outer peace that's sorely lacking

Scrote...now that you've admitted you're a troll and are arbitrarily making combative taunts, all of your statements have been rendered meaningless. You are a disgrace among trolls.

Reading this makes me so relieved that I was not raised by Catholics! I'm happy to keep my distance from such astonishing hatred.

Is Scrote some sort of twisted Zen Yogi?

Get your finger out of my 3rd eye asshole.

Community Service Announcement

Bashing trolls ≠ feeding trolls.

Scrote at 463,

Um, yeah. I used a swear word in reference to someone who is a supporter of a religion that has inflicted terrible harm upon others in the name of a made up entity.

Can I control my anger? Sure! I haven't made a death threat in my life. Even though I'm a former Marine with a fair amount of ability to carry out such a threat, should I wish. I don't think that's right. I don't feel one should kill someone just because they don't believe the same as you. That's different than you and your friend Fr. J, I guess.

I'm not the one who's being "in your face". I, like most here, aren't trying to "convert" you. We just wish you'd leave us the fuck alone (damn, another swear word). Don't try to pass laws according to your "sacred texts". Don't try to make us follow your "sacred beliefs". Make your decisions on what is affirmable and real, and you'd be surprised how little resistance you'd see from is.

Try to shove your own personal belief in a fairy tale down our throats and ask us to thank you for it, and you better believe I'm gonna add you to my list of "FUCK YOU!" candidates.

Not complicated is it?

You really are sadly ignorant, that you don't understand this.

I am a Catholic. Now that is out of the way, I am sure some of you may have some hatred prepared to type back to me based on that statement alone.

Just some quick one liner thoughts/comments:

1) If you want true separation of church and state, then tear up the US Constitution - the rights guaranteed in it are based solely on Judeao-Christian philosophy

2) How do you expect any human to understand the fullness of God's creation? What fuels PZ and his ilk, is the fact that they have a scientific answer and understanding for all that is explainable; but, when the topic of God arises, they have no ability to fully explain It. Since they cannot explain It, they mock It and choose to accept their inability to understand.

3) Catholics believe in evolution - God created the process.

4) I wish PZ well...may his hatred and disrespect subside.

Lily @ 409:
Oh honestly, these comments have degenerated into parody. You think the wafer is a cracker. Big yawn. Who cares what you think?

Exactly. And why should PZ care that you think a cracker is anything but a cracker. That is the whole point of this exercise, which seems to have gone whizzing straight past your head. PZ thinks it is just a cracker and that threatening life and livelihood over a cracker is demented and delusional.

How many times do you need to have this explained to you?

Dahan, good to see you're passionate, but you just fed a troll.

Trolls don't actually care what you actually say, what they hunger for is attention.

This is for Anne via damian:

I'd have to agree that atheism entails agnosticism. To claim that there are NO 'gods' means arguing the negative in a question (Does god or gods exist?); that is, asserting that there aren't ANY conceivable supernatural doohickeys past, present, or yet to be invented or discovered.

Atheists argue the negative; agnostics say that the question isn't even worth considering without further justification of goddism or religiosity or whatever you want to call the impulse to manufacture (and worship and convert people to) the aforementioned supernatural doohickeys.

Think of it as a conservation of energy: Why waste energy inventing and propitiating fantasies? Yes, yes, we know-- there's Pascal's wager. But with an infinite number of targets (all of which are the ONE, TRUE god) you never know, if you're honest, if you've got the right one.

Of course, like C.S. Lewis, it's possible to settle on and defend a comfortable choice for yourself. But then you're not being honest: not only may the buddhists or the H54t8ians from Eroticon 6 be correct about god or gods, but you're actively perverting other impressionable beings from the Correct Path.

The 'actively perverting' part really pisses off agnostics (and atheists, who aren't going to linger over the question). If you entertain one religion, you've got to entertain them all (and by all, I mean every imaginable one). Then, you haven't got Christianity, you've got Goddism, with lethal and imaginative retribution for all the competing factions.

WHAT IF YOU'RE WRONG? This question haunts science and scientists-- most of whom have an explanation, correction, and apology prepared. Agnostics keep seeking, if they think it's necessary. Goddists charge down any number of embarrassing dead ends, provided they don't resurrect themselves into proper agnostics.

The flow of squalid apologies for godly perpetrations encourages agnostics to assert agnostic principles: "Just can the fairy tales and tell us the details of the morality. We already know most of it, probably. And try abiding by it yourselves."

So, if you don't like being talked back to, it's because there's a universe of thought you need to explore.

#479:

#1: Really? Can you tell me which Biblical verse was the inspiration for the House of Representatives, say? Or the first amendment?

#2: No, what "fuels" us in regards to religion is the lack of evidence for Yahweh, or any other deity.

#3: Some Catholics do, some don't. Who cares? We're not talking about evolution in this thread, but about the laughable claim that a piece of bread is somehow human flesh

#4: What hatred? I see no evidence that he hates Catholics, except for the particular Catholics who have threatened his life. No, he was simply pointing out the absurdity of transsubstatiation.

Catholic@479:

1) Since there's no mention of "God" or "Jesus" or any other supernatural hogwash in the US Constitution, how can you claim it's based solely on Judeo-Christian philosophy? Many of the founding fathers were pseudo-atheists or Deists (common during the enlightenment), and wary of any kind of state endorsement of religion. Read a history book.

2) In the last several hundred years, science has provided answers and solutions to many questions about the nature of the world. It's testable, demonstrable, and repeatable. Religion would have us just close our eyes and chant "God did it!". What is more productive?

3) If Catholics accept evolution as the fact that it is, congratulations! Now if only you could stop attributing natural processes to an imaginary sky-fairy, we'd be all set!

4) I'd hardly characterize it as "hatred". "Mocking" is more appropriate. The only hate in this whole debacle is coming from Catholics.

*yawn* Try harder!

Were any framers of the Constitution even Catholic???

How do you expect any human to understand the fullness of God's creation? What fuels PZ and his ilk, is the fact that they have a scientific answer and understanding for all that is explainable; but, when the topic of God arises, they have no ability to fully explain It.

Excuse me, but first of all, let me point out that when you mean God, you obviously mean the christian god. You automatically exclude every other god.

when the topic of God arises, they have no ability to fully explain It

Actually we do. Here's a short explanation. There's not a shred of scientific evidence for the existence of a supernatural deity which is remotely interested in Human affairs. Is that a clear enough explanation?

Since they cannot explain It, they mock It and choose to accept their inability to understand.

How dare Catholics offend the beliefs of millions of Hindus by eating beef? Isn't it incredible hypocrisy to so openly deny the existence of gods of other religions and not respect their beliefs, but come here so openly to complain that *your* beliefs are not being respected?

Catholics believe in evolution - God created the process.

Obviously not all catholics belive in evolution. Only a subset of catholics believe in evolution

I wish PZ well...may his hatred and disrespect subside.

I wish you well too. May the wisdom of Richard Dawkins shine upon ye. Have a nice day.

From the other thread... in case CATHAHOLIC missed it.

The framers of the constitution were meticulous in keeping god and religion out of the constitution. They expressly wanted the government to have nothing to do with religion whatsoever, including endorsing it. Almost all were christians of various flavors and commitment, so it speaks volumes, that they with deliberate care chose not to involve religion in our federal government.

Dahan:

Scrote, like her alter-ego, Shas, has a strange idea that swearing is immature and a crutch for the inarticulate (see various comments in the Michael Edmondson thread).

I was one of the dupes that played her game last night. Don't bother. She's little more than an annoying, disingenuous twat.

I think "Scrote" just changed his name to "Catholic". I don't find it coincidental that "Catholic" started posting as soon as "Scrote" stopped. He's a good little troll, learning from his past mistakes.

Perhaps would should all do something more productive, like have a Jack n' Coke in PZ's honor for exposing the lunacy of Catholicism, and let the trolls go back to mutilating their own genitalia, or whatever it is that floats their boats...

Catholic #479

If you want true separation of church and state, then tear up the US Constitution - the rights guaranteed in it are based solely on Judeao-Christian philosophy

It's amazing that you could make a statement like that given the reams of scholarship and the amount of disagreement between people who spend their lives studying the texts of the Founding Fathers. It can only be because you are completely ignorant of it.

What Jeremy said is highly plausible; I concur.

Dahan,

Simmer down, little fella.

Okay - I won't shove my beliefs down your throat!

I don't actually remember doing this, though. You're talking as though I did.

Catholic making stuff up:

If you want true separation of church and state, then tear up the US Constitution - the rights guaranteed in it are based solely on Judeao-Christian philosophy

That isn't even remotely true. It was written by smart people who saw the horrors of religion run amock for 1600 years.

In your case, the Catholic church claims to be the One True church and all the other xian sects are fake. They fought a bloody war with the Protestants over this opinion that ended a few years ago in N. Ireland after 400 years. Long time to hold a grudge really. 400 years.

The Catholic church never gave up power. They simply lost numerous power struggles with secular power groups. Henry VIII didn't give a rat's ass about Anglicans, he wanted to get out from under the church.

They also invented antisemitism and moslem bashing. At various times in the history of the church Jews were massacred for made up reasons and they tried to drive the moslems out of the middle east during the crusades.

We don't have to know what a Catholic world would look like. We've already seen it. Witches were hunted down by the 10,000's and burned at the stake. Heretics were burned and massacred in huge numbers. Schizmatic sects and other religions were targets for attempted genocide.

These days it is different. We no longer allow Catholics or other religions access to heavy weapons and let them have the ability to hunt down and kill whoever they want. It was a matter of self preservation and morality.

KM,

Quit talking in riddles. You're starting to sound like PZ.

Oooohhh...now he's back to using "Scrote". What a sly little troll!

John Immorales,

You're right. I don't care what Dahan and anyone else of his ilk has to say. I know that my views are right.

I say this with confidence, because I've been on both sides of the fence. You're all still on one side.

How do you expect any human to understand the fullness of God's creation?

You have yet to establish that there is a God, and that it is able to create stuff, and that it did create stuff. Carts <- horses.

Jeremy,

I'm not "Catholic", whoever that is. I simply took 30 minutes out of my evening to exercise on my Gazelle.

Carts

Carts before horses. Thanks sorry.

Heh, Jeremy. This is a fine specimen.