Via Pendagon.net..

Regarding the placing of the menorah, star of david (I assume) and islamic crescent next to an xmas tree

Bill Donahue, president of the Catholic League for Civil and Religious Rights, disagrees, saying the town has chosen to display Jewish and Islamic religious symbols while leaving out the Christian religious symbol of the season, a Nativity scene. He does not believe the Christmas tree is a religious symbol.

Further, he says, the inclusive display “shows tremendous sympathy for Jews and Muslims at the expense of the majority Christians.”

Alas, Donahue is right.  The Xmas tree is roughly as religious as matzo.  Now, it is still distinctly Christian, if that makes sense, but not that religious.

If they are going to make monuments to irrationality, they should include as many flavors of crazy as they can.

FSM, anyone?

Media Matters – Most Outrageous Comments of 2008
I got too fucking mad.

Good.
California city sued for removing billboard about atheism | ScrippsNews

A Wisconsin group recently sued the city of Rancho Cucamonga, Calif. for its alleged role in the removal of a billboard promoting atheism.

Apparently, the city government got many complaints and passed them on to
If so many people were so upset about the billboard company.
It seems to me that, if so many people were so upset, wouldn’t it make more sense to suggest that they do something like
start a counter-campaign?

A stay-at-home mother of four is poised to start a Metrobus ad campaign to counter ads from the American Humanist Association that question a belief in God.
JoEllen Murphy, a 39-year-old Catholic who lives in McLean, started a grassroots Internet campaign after hearing about the humanist ads that started appearing last month on Metrobuses.

I’m, say, 95% certain that this is how its supposed to work.

(FWIW, complaining is also how it is supposed to work…but the government and billboard company aren’t supposed to toss aside free speech due to public opinion.)

’nuff said!

Recently, the antenna to my satellite radio and I’ve been stuck listening to ‘terrestrial’ stations.

Mostly, I listen to NPR on the way to-and-from the metro, but today I was driving around listening to some music channels, and I think something has to be said to the people who run our radio stations.

Every time one of your DJs goes on and on about some crap unrelated to music but is supposedly ‘edgy’, every time you play a song with a radio edit because ‘goddamn’ and ‘fuck’ are too offensive to be heard by anyone, even though most of us here those words almost every day, every time you decide that its better to just not fight the FCC and the paranoid, puritanical, think-of-the-children throwbacks that have managed to sink their claws into the organization that, in many ways, controls our ‘Freedom Of Speech’, you lose another person to satellite radio.

And you deserve no better.  You are cowards, you have sold your souls to the dark ages, and you have decided that ultimate conformity is OK if it looks like rebellion, no matter how many rules you actually follow.

So Florida is considering a vanity plate with a christian message (’I believe’ and a cross).

Of course, many might not see this as crossing the church/state divide.  But those arguments collapse thanks to this telling line:

[Rep. Edward] Bullard, the plate’s sponsor, isn’t sure all groups should be able to express their preference. If atheists came up with an “I Don’t Believe” plate, for example, he would probably oppose it

Time’s Top 25 blogs

Now, I actually like a number of the blogs on this list.  But I’m not sure there’s any online publication less relevant to the world of blogging (or the web in general) than Time (even though an old friend of mine writes for them).  There are many who are equally irrelevant, but I doubt any surpass it.  And none of them had the complete…I don’t even know what the word should be…but whatever it is, no one else made ‘You’ man of the year last year. 

At what point do you simply stop and put a bullet into something?

CNN decides that, by asking the questions CNN should be asking, a high school girl is heckling McCain

This is simply sad.  The question (basically, ‘why are you here if not for political reasons’) is exactly the kind of question the MSM and professional reporters should be asking.

But, apparently, only THEY can ask the questions.  Anyone else is a heckler.

Wow, I didn’t realize how horribly dangerous we were.

Now, while I think that Rob Sherman (if he’s who I think he is) is using his child, I agree with his cause.

I also think that anyone who finds their faith threatened by someone believing something else, or by someone rejecting that faith, then they really don’t have a very strong faith at all.

Interesting…Islam likes to say pretty much the same thing about people who don’t believe in Allah, or worse, those who leave Islam.  Leaving Islam, apparently, damages all muslims.

What is it about ‘people of faith’ that scares them so about people who don’t buy what they bought?

Oh, right…fantasies are pretty damn hard to maintain when someone keeps saying that its all make-believe.

So, as you’ve probably heard, at some courthouse in Crossville, Tennasee, there’s now a statue of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (along with Jesus, etc.).

Someone, apparently, is quite upset by the whole thing.  Its not completely clear what he is upset about, but at the very least he is poorly informed about almost everything he discusses.  As a disclaimer, I have to admit (if you don’t already know it) that I don’t see any significant difference between FSM and Jesus, or, at least, I don’t see one of them as more or less bizarre or likely than the other.  Interestingly, I don’t see this as an insult to Christianity.  I think that, once you have an omnipotent, supernatural being, and his son being sent to Earth, and all these miracles, you just gone into the realm of the strange so far that it becomes difficult to see anything as being impossible.

That said, the Josh appears to be suffering from some sort of persecution syndrome which is common amoung those who have a massive majority (whites, men, christians) or disproportionate amounts of power in society.  They become very agitated when their views are not taken as law, or they have to share their space with others, etc.  One has to wonder, would Mr. Hayes be so quick to jump to the defense of Scientology?  Buddhism?  Taoism?  Probably not. 

Here’s my initial breakdown.

1. He’s complaining that people who vote based on their religions are being kept out of public debate.

“In our present context, those advocating for a completely secular state
discriminate against those who appeal to Christianity or the Bible for
guidance in public policy by merely labeling their agenda as religious”

But it seems to me that if you are guided by your religion, and your religious text, then by definition you have a religions agenda.  Call me nuts.
Further, once you have a religious agenda, there’s no point to debating.
Let’s see an example using abortion.
Person 1: Abortion should be illegal because the child within that womb has a soul and is therefor alive.
Person 2: Abortion should be illegal because the foetus is sufficiently developed to be considered alive and human.  Further, the foetus feels pain when the abortion is done.
Person 1 is stating a dogmatic belief which can’t possibly be argued against.  It may, in fact, be true, but there’s no point in debating it.
Person 2, however, is offering up evidence and making an argument.  His first statement may be a little hazy, but his second statement is clear as day.  Either one of these could be discussed and new information could be introduced to support or undermine his claims.

If Person 1 is prevented from taking part in a debate (and I’ve yet to see any evidence of this sort of thing happening…just look at the Republican Presidential debates), its only because they aren’t bringing anything to the table that can be debated (I suppose you could have a theological debate about whether or not the ‘child’ has a soul). 

2. Secular people are not neutral.

 ”In spite of their best efforts to appear as the objective, rational party, those opposed to Intelligent Design and the influence of religion upon the state have shown themselves to not be so “neutral” after all.”

I’m not at all certain what he’s talking about here.  In what way does any of this show a lack of neutrality? Further, where does rationality imply neutrality? 
A rational person approaches a situation or issue with an open mind, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have a priori knowledge.  If you tell me a rock is made of gold, I can approach it rationally, and, knowing what I
know, test to see if it is really gold.  That test does not mean I am biased towards or against it being gold.
I have acquired knowledge and applied it.  Further, more than just factual knowledge can be applied to situations a rational person finds themselves in.  If we decide that logic is a useful tool, then in every situation, I can then apply logic to help me judge truth from fiction.  I do not have to recompile all the rules of logic in every situation.
In the case of I.D., the same thing applies.  Arguments might be made for Intelligent Design against evolution, but that doesn’t mean that both theories must wiegh equally (which is what proponants of I.D. want you to see as ‘fairness’).  Were one to apply this rule to all things, then we’d have to include, say, ‘time cube’ in out classrooms and all conspiracy theories about the moon landing, JFK’s assasination, and the Masons.  That isn’t neutrality.  Neutrality would be looking at the arguments for and against each side and determining which makes the stronger case, without presupposing the outcome (assuming you have no knowledge of the topic).
Again, neutrality doesn’t mean not having an informed opinion, nor does it mean going into every situation tabula rasa.  A rational person need not claim neutrality as a characteristic.  A rational person claims adherance to facts in evidence and logic.

3. He appears to be angry at Darwin

” While the idea of creation via the Flying Spaghetti Monster may seem ridiculous, modern Darwinist dogma is even more ridiculous in saying the universe came into existence out of nothing. To put it in mathematical terms, nobody multiplied by nothing equals everything”

Of course,   Darwin, and evolutionary biologists don’t make that claim at all.  In fact, that claim falls well outside the boundaries of biology.  So this may be the result of anger based on a misunderstanding, I suppose. 
Mr. Hayes, I do suggest that perhaps your energy spent writing this ‘editorial’ would have been better spent reading about rational thought and evolutionary theory (Darwinism, Neo-darwinism) so that you at least know what your opponant is actually saying.