LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

This article from the NYT talks about how science museums are standing up to the creationist onslaught:

Challenged by Creationists, Museums Answer Back
By CORNELIA DEAN

ITHACA, N.Y. - Lenore Durkee, a retired biology professor, was volunteering as a docent at the Museum of the Earth here when she was confronted by a group of seven or eight people, creationists eager to challenge the museum exhibitions on evolution.

They peppered Dr. Durkee with questions about everything from techniques for dating fossils to the second law of thermodynamics, their queries coming so thick and fast that she found it hard to reply.

After about 45 minutes, "I told them I needed to take a break," she recalled. "My mouth was dry."

That encounter and others like it provided the impetus for a training session here in August. Dr. Durkee and scores of other volunteers and staff members from the museum and elsewhere crowded into a meeting room to hear advice from the museum director, Warren D. Allmon, on ways to deal with visitors who reject settled precepts of science on religious grounds.( Read more... )

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

This editorial article from the Arizone Republic makes some interesting points:

Religion, holy ones strangling U.S. rights

By Linda Valdez
The Arizona Republic
Sept. 18, 2005 12:00 AM

An extraterrestrial sent to study the United States would look at the headlines about John Roberts' confirmation hearings and think the biggest issue facing the nation is abortion.

E.T. would be wrong.

The issue is religion, not abortion.

Questions from Democrats about Roberts' views about the right to privacy were code for: Hey, America! Religion has a stranglehold on your government.( Read more... )

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

This Tom Paine article is interesting:

With God On Our Side?
Paul Waldman
September 19, 2005

Paul Waldman is a senior fellow with Media Matters for America and a senior contributor to The Gadflyer.

The anti-Americans in our midst are out in force again, saying everything that goes wrong is America’s fault. They just won’t stop running down this country, their hatred never far from the surface.

I’m speaking, of course, about conservatives.

A certain brand of conservative, anyway. Seeing the misery caused by Hurricane Katrina, some on the right knew what was going on: God hates America. Or at the very least, he’s really, really angry with us. And you don’t have to go to the maniacal Rev. Fred Phelps of “God Hates Fags” fame, whose latest project is www.godhatesamerica.com, to find this kind of rhetoric. It comes from people with strong ties to the Republican party.( Read more... )

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

The latter part of this Petty-Larseny [sic] blog goes into some interesting observations of Bush's faith-based behavior:

All of this, though, leaves us with the question of why does Bush now, after Sept. 11, after Katrina, after Michael Brown, still feel comfortable relying on trickle-down cronyism to fill spots of vital national security?

Oddly, John Kerry unknowingly provided the key to understanding this pivotal part of Bush's personality. In a debate discussion utterly unrelated to this one, he said: "The president and I have a difference of opinion about how we live out our sense of our faith. I talked about it earlier when I talked about the works and faith without works being dead."

Pres. Bush is a faith-based president. More importantly, he's a faith-based person. He's a new breed of Christian; seeing the world and everyone in it solely through the lens of personal salvation. I don't mean he literally has a religious litmus test. I mean that he's embraced a viral, mutant strain of Christianity that pays no heed to the teachings or works of Jesus, but focuses exclusively on a new, ephemeral, poorly defined notion of faith: Personal acceptance of (something you call) Christ as (something you perceive as) your savior. That's it. That's how you get to heaven. You don't even have to accept the biblically defined Jesus, you just have to think you do.( Read more... )

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

Cartoonist Mark Fiore does wonderful Flash cartoons on various political and social subjects. This is his take on Intelligent Design.