I’m doing a little under-the surface changing, so you may get an odd response in the next day or two — especially from the gods4suckers.net URL (the god.ozrock.net one should be fine). But otherwise, the site should stay completely operational through the change. Sunday Morning Update: Site’s been moved. Everything’s working fine, although the new pointing of the gods4suckers.net URL will take another 48 hours or so to percolate through the net. The new alternative URL is god.zm3.net; that works fine now, and should continue to work in the future as well.

Richard Dawkins, the “Devil’s Chaplain” and friend to atheists everywhere, has been voted “Britain’s top intellectual” by the reader’s of Britain’s Prospect Magazine, “Europe’s outstanding political and cultural monthly”.

Never in Amerikkka. Dawkins voted “Britain’s top intellectual”

I know; picking on Pat Robertson is like shooting fish in a barrel. But I couldn’t resist this one; I was archiving some old stuff, and I stumbled on this piece from Pat’s little version of Bizarro World:

Just like what Nazi Germany did to the Jews, so liberal America is now doing to the evangelical Christians. It’s no different. It is the same thing. It is happening all over again. It is the Democratic Congress, the liberal-based media and the homosexuals who want to destroy the Christians. Wholesale abuse and discrimination and the worst bigotry directed toward any group in America today. More terrible than anything suffered by any minority in history. [From a 1993 interview with Molly Ivins]

Damn, he’s on to us! How will we get them to wear the armbands now?

“More terrible than anything suffered by any minority in history.” Yeah, I can see how being snickered at by 10% of Americans (while holding essentially every position of political power), and not being allowed to turn the public schools into churches is way worse than, you know, gas chambers, work-till-death camps, and horrible medical experimentation.

So nice to see how beautifully designed we humans are — and how much God likes to do nothing while kids suffer and die in cars: Dad Charged in Death of Tot

Andres Sierra, who would have turned 4 next week, was to spend Thursday at his father’s office near Boca Raton. But Sierra forgot the child and only realized the deadly mistake about three hours later, when the boy’s grandfather called to see how Andres was doing, deputies said.

Family members who worked in the office said they hadn’t seen the child.

Sierra, who was with a patient, yelled, “Oh my God, he’s in the car!'’

Andres died of hyperthermia, deputies said. His temperature was 108 degrees and he had swelling and bleeding from the lungs.

I guess giving a tiny memory-tink in this guy’s brain would have been too much. But, in the end, that should show him. I mean, how else is the guy gonna learn, except through the death of his 3-year old son? Yeah, that’ll show him.

Daniel Wirth, co-author of one of the most commonly displayed “successful” studies of the medical effects of prayer, “pled guilty in May to taking part in a conspiracy in which his friend Josepf Steven Horvath — under the false identity of John Wayne Truelove, which Wirth created — paid Wirth and others millions of dollars for alleged computer consulting for the former cable company Adelphia.” (Designer defends controversial prayer study)

Of course, the study is bullshit. And more recent, legitimate studies have shown no effect. But you all probably knew that. Anyway, here’s my favorite part of the article:

The question taps into one of the most basic tenets of scientific research: reproducibility. If other scientists can’t replicate results, a study is generally considered suspect. But Wirth rejects that idea. “I don’t think the standard of reproducibility should be the gold standard,” he said, and “intangibles” make prayer study “a tough field. Due to the nature of the phenomenon, we’re going to get varying effects… I’ve come to the realization that we’re not going to be able to show these effects all the time, and that’s okay. That still can’t negate the profound effect that love and compassion have in people’s lives.”

Who needs reproducibility when you have a researcher with such high standards of integrity?

You know, if more Xians were more like Bill Moyers, I’d have to lighten up on them a little. He has a talk that’s become the cover piece for the remarkably sensible Sojourners Magazine reminding me that even people with wacky metaphysical views can get some of the moral and poltical issues at least partly right. Some tidbits:

I trace my spiritual lineage back to a radical Baptist in England named Thomas Helwys…. In no small part because of Baptists like Thomas Helwys and other “freethinkers,” the men who framed our Constitution believed in religious tolerance in a secular republic. The state was not to choose sides among competing claims of faith. So they embodied freedom of religion in the First Amendment. Another person’s belief, said Thomas Jefferson, “neither picks my pocket not breaks my bones.” It was a noble sentiment often breached in practice. The Indians who lived here first had more than their pockets picked; the Africans brought here forcibly against their will had more than their bones broken. Even when most Americans claimed a Protestant heritage and practically everyone looked alike, we often failed the tolerance test; Catholics, Jews, and Mormons had to struggle to resist being absorbed without distinction into the giant mix-master of American assimilation…. My friend Elaine Pagels, the noted scholar of religion, says “There’s practically no religion I know of that sees other people in a way that affirms the other’s choice.” You only have to glance at the daily news to see how passions are stirred by claims of exclusive loyalty to one’s own kin, one’s own clan, one’s own country, and one’s own church…. Religion has a healing side, but it also has a killing side…. In our time alone the litany is horrendous. I keep a file marked “Holy War.” It bulges with stories of Shias and Sunnis in fratricidal conflict. Of teenage girls in Algeria shot in the face for not wearing a veil. Of professors whose throats are cut for teaching male and female students in the same classroom. Of the fanatical Jewish doctor with a machine gun mowing down 30 praying Muslims in a mosque. Of Muslim suicide bombers bent on the obliteration of Jews. Of the young Orthodox Jew who assassinated Yitzhak Rabin and then announced to the world that “Everything I did, I did for the glory of God.” Of Hindus and Muslims slaughtering each other in India, of Christians and Muslims perpetuating gruesome vengeance on each another in Nigeria.

Bill Moyers: Almost smart enough to be an atheist. Give it a read: Democracy in the Balance

Ah, summer vacation!…

Anyway, just found something that cracked me up, from a place called Dkew’s Quotes

A Christian who does not try to push their views on me or on public policy is, to me, sort of like a person who is wearing a funny hat. You know the hat is stupid, and it sort of bugs you, but you try to ignore it even though it is huge and floppy and bright pink with big metallic-green feathers. If you can deal with the funny hat, many Christians are pretty OK; but sooner or later, they always have to say, “So Scott, how come YOU aren’t wearing a funny hat?” and I have to say, “Please fuck off.” from Why Christians Suck

Nice. Very nice.

Nice op-ed in Newsday (Where politics shouldn�t go) by Susan Jacoby, author of the newish book “Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism”. Her nice concluding line:

The framers knew what they were doing when they declined to write, “We the People under God.” It is simply disgraceful that modern politicians run away from the noble secular heritage that they should embrace.

Not that I’m big on the intent of the framers, y’know.