Comments on: What Would we Do Without PZ Myers?

By: Recent URLs tagged Idle - Urlrecorder

Recent URLs tagged Idle - Urlrecorder — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 10:16:08 +0000

[...] recorded first by 93930 on 2009-01-25→ What Would we Do Without PZ Myers? [...]

By: Lifewish

Lifewish — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 21:47:24 +0000

Ooh, did I just win the wordiness contest?

By: Lifewish

Lifewish — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 21:46:39 +0000

Actually I recall that, for one term, PZ let his students post on his blog. A couple of them “came out” on Pharyngula as being quite strong Christians, which led to a few interesting debates but no downgradings that I’m aware of. So my guess is that, if you knew him in person, you’d probably be a lot less worried.

On the whole “who started it” thing, technically it was the student who refused to swallow the Host he’d just been given, but in terms of escalation I think the medal goes to those who were sending that student death threats. Myers does get angry about religion, but in this case I think he’s just upset about people treating a student that way. That’s why he also “desecrated” a copy of The God Delusion at the same time as the Quran and the Host, to show that his actions here are more-or-less unrelated to his atheism.

I kinda agree with him here. I wouldn’t desecrate a religious symbol just because it was a religious symbol – that would be unnecessarily disrespectful, and I don’t enjoy that sort of thing. But I might desecrate it to make a point to those who think their religious beliefs should trump everyone else’s right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It’s not hard to be angry at someone who apparently believes you don’t deserve basic human rights.

By: RBH

RBH — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 08:35:37 +0000

Henry wrote

Instead, we believe that God is a God of hypersensitive feelings, overreaction, anger, and hate, …

Bingo! The Old Testament a nutshell.

By: Mark

Mark — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 05:31:43 +0000

Are you looking for bloggers who are less concise in general, or looking to compare length on a particular topic? It's on different topics, but the blog Idle Words has quite an ominous tag line: "brevity is for the weak"

By: SoMG

SoMG — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 04:02:30 +0000

Similarly, I would be uncomfortable taking classes required for MY major from a religious fundamentalist. Partly, but not only, because I would fear biased grading. This is not hypothetical: when I was in grad school (physical chemistry), one of the world’s greatest authorities on using computers to predict infra-red spectra of small organic molecules was out of the question as an advisor for me because he used to lead prayer sessions in his lab and hand out born-again Christian literature to grad students.

And there is PLENTY of reason for non-religious Americans, and scientific Americans, to be angry at organized Christianity generally and Catholics in particular. Catholics are not evolution deniers but they are responsible for using egregious abuses of science to promote bad laws and policies which are motivated by their religion (see for instance http://www.abortionbreastcancer.com/
).

By: SoMG

SoMG — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 03:47:17 +0000

The ongoing effort to pollute science classes with a theory of the supernatural is at least as meaningful and infuriating a desecration as anything Professor Myers has done.

Governor Jindal is a disgrace to the Rhodes Scholarship. He should be forced to pay back the money Rhodes Trust spent on his education.

By: Therese

Therese — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 02:32:57 +0000

As a happy and faithful Catholic who holds an undergraduate biology degree (so I remember how many hours you spend hanging around in the prof’s lab and in classes), I sure wouldn’t be comfortable taking any required class from him. I’d be afraid of my faith coming up in conversation (as casual as “what are you doing this weekend? Well, after church, we’re going to the lake….”), attracting his obvious scorn, and affecting my grades. So his actions are not just harmless posturing – he is creating a hostile atmosphere on the campus, indeed, all around him.

His anger is really frightening – why reach out and snatch what is NOT a symbol BTW, but the sacramental presence of Jesus to us. It’s not as though people were throwing consecrated hosts at him, and attracting his retaliation.

He started this, and I can’t see why. In our constitution, my opinion stops at your nose, and his opinion should stop at the door of a church he does not belong to.

I pray that his anger will be overcome by God’s Grace.

By: Peter Kirk

Peter Kirk — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 22:51:16 +0000

Indeed there is a distinction. I have no problem with people disagreeing with Todd Bentley, while letting him decide. But the great majority of the opposition to Todd, with a few honourable exceptions like yours, has been in the rant category – although I haven’t seen anyone dare to send him death threats, as I’m sure they would feel the tip of his biker boots if, like the attacker in Ethiopia I think it was, they tried anything.

By: Henry Neufeld

Henry Neufeld — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 14:52:34 +0000

Oh, I’m fully convinced we can manage to rant about them both at the same time, unfortunately.

I distinguish “disagreement” with “ranting about.” Disagreeing involves saying “I think he should do x instead of y” while recognizing that he’s the one who gets to decide. “Rant about” involves everything that starts with “he’s going to destroy Christianity” and ends with death threats.