The Catholic League needs your help springing a pedophile from prison

The Catholic League, which is a publicity organization for the Republican Party operated by an obese anti-Semite named Bill Donohue, needs your help. A pedophile is in prison, and they want to get him out.

The defense that Donohue offers for MacRae is simple: the three brothers who say they were abused by MacRae are lying. It's that simple.

I'll let MacRae's own diocese speak for itself on just how wrong Donohue is:

"The Church has been a victim of the actions of Gordon MacRae just as these individuals have been. We mourn with those who were victimized before the discovery of these crimes."

Keep trying, Bill. Not even the pedophile penthouse your organization claims to defend will back you up on this one.

This is insanity

This is not insanity:

An 11-year-old girl died from diabetes after her parents prayed for her recovery rather than calling for medical assistance.

This is not insanity:

Madeline Neumann died on Sunday in Wisconsin, from an undiagnosed but treatable ailment. [The parents,] Dale and Leilani Neumann say they are not 'crazy religious people'. But after Madeline died, they prayed that she might be resurrected.

This is not insanity:

[Local police authority] Mr. Vergin said the couple, who run a coffee shop in Wausau, had blamed her death on their lack of faith. "They have a little Bible study of a few people," said Mr Vergin. "These are not bizarre people."

This is not insanity:

She said her family believed in the Bible and that healing came from God. But she insisted that they were not "crazy religious people" and had nothing against doctors. She said their daughter had been tired over the past two weeks but the day before she died, her bad health "went into a more serious situation". She explained: "We stayed fast in prayer. We believed that she would recover. We saw signs that - to us - it looked like she was recovering."

Mr Neumann said he started trying artificial resuscitation "as soon as the breath of life left" his daughter's body.

This is not insanity:

However, Madeline's aunt said she pleaded with the dead girl's parents to take her to a doctor in the last few days of her life. As Madeline went into a coma, Ariel Gomez telephoned the emergency services from her home in California. But they were too late to save her. She told the ambulance control room that Mrs Neumann had "explained to us that she believes her daughter's in a coma now and she's relying on faith". The parents, who have three older children, told police that Madeline last saw a doctor when she was three to get some injections.

This is insanity:

Police are now preparing a report for prosecutors. However, legal action against the parents may be prevented by a Wisconsin state statute against failing to act to protect children from bodily harm. The statute contains an exemption for what it refers to as "treatment through prayer".

Help science happen

Do it.

Also, Albert J. Mohler is a hypocrite. He has a cute little editorial up on the Christian Post attacking Richard Dawkins for his support of what looks like the British version of the secularism-themed Camp Quest. Here's how he puts it:

At a deeper level, the existence of this camp in Great Britain and its sister camps in the United States indicates something of the intellectual insecurity of contemporary atheism and agnosticism. The effort to create a religion-free zone for summer camp makes for an interesting news story in the media, but it is not likely to draw the masses.

Meanwhile, there are thousands of Christianity-themed summer camps in America.

And the winner is...

According to the latest, highly-scientific Teapot Atheist poll, people widely (69%) prefer "The Bible is not the word of God (1 Cortinthians 7:12, 7:25)" as the answer to state rep Sally Kern's proclamation that the Bible is an indelible fount of moral wisdom for the poor, abortioneering people of Oklahoma.

Thanks for voting! And now we have a new poll up on the right.

TIME Magazine's Bryan Walsh: he knows nothing about evolution

TIME magazine has a fluffy and fairly irrelevant story about "The Incredible Shrinking Sheep of Scotland." What's incredible about them is hard to say- apparently, over time, some sheep on a Scottish island are getting smaller, apparently as a reaction to global warming (as winters get milder, smaller and smaller sheep are able to survive the cold, goes the reasoning).

So this is perfectly in line with evolution. This is exactly what evolution says should happen- as selection pressures change, life adapts. In this case, the selection pressure towards size is waning so sheep of more variable height can survive. I assume that this story is meant to be 'incredible' only to those tens of millions of Americans who don't understand evolution, who doubtless are befuddled.

So puzzle with me if you will over how TIME author Bryan Walsh chose to frame this article:

News alert: the sheep of Scotland are shrinking! On Soay Island, off the western coast of Scotland, wild sheep are apparently defying the theory of evolution and progressively getting smaller.

I'm sorry, what? These are the first two sentences of the article. When I first read them, I thought that Walsh would go on to talk about some genuine scientific mystery- that is, I thought he was going to say that life is adapting in the opposite current as a selection pressure or something like that.

Nope, he goes right on to explain exactly why it's happening:

Why? In short, because of climate change. Generally, the sheep's life cycle goes like this: they fatten up on grass during the fertile, sunny summer; then the harsh winter comes, the grass disappears and the smallest, scrawniest sheep die off, while their bigger cousins survive. That's how you end up with big sheep, which — according to Darwin's laws of natural selection — will pass on their big genes to the next generation.

But over the past 25 years, the average Soay Island wild sheep has decreased in size, according to a report in the July 2 issue of Science by a team of researchers led by Tim Coulson of Imperial College London. Thanks largely to global warming, the winters on Soay Island are becoming shorter and milder. That makes food more abundant and allows some of the smaller, more vulnerable and younger sheep to survive. Then they go on to have offspring that tend to be small themselves — and have a better chance of survival because of the increasingly mild winters.

So this doesn't actually 'defy' evolution... it's more like a... textbook example of it.

The confusion continues because he actually has a quote by the lead researcher explaining:

"The environmental and evolutionary processes are intertwined," says Coulson "There's still natural selection, but it's not leaving as big a signature as it used to. There's still a disadvantage to being small, but not as much."

So somebody actually sat Mr. Walsh down and explained to him the evolutionary explanation for what is happening to these sheep, and Mr. Walsh still wrote his article under the impression that a basic principle of selection 'defies evolution.'

I really can't figure this one out. He doesn't seem to be maliciously against evolution. Is he just an idiot? Does he think that evolution means that, over time, stuff gets bigger? He provided an excellent example of evolution, had the evolutionary principles at work here explained to him, and he starts off his article like a creationist carnival barker.

I do not understand it. Perhaps you should let TIME know about it (link at the top of the article) and explain to Mr. Walsh why he seems so confused.

Christians are PROUD of this guy??

Famous professional Christian propagandist ("missiologist) Ralph D. Winter kicked the bucket a little while ago. At first, I didn't care much, because he was basically just a glorified pamphleteer with a lot of money, and I figured that there are enough of those kicking around for me to get my dander up about it.

But as it turns out, he wasn't just an expert door-knocker: he was also a crummy philosopher! Thanks to a recent Christian Post series on Winter, I've learned a whole lot about how little it takes to become one of the most celebrated intellectuals in Christian history (though Luther, Lewis, and Plantinga have already made this demonstration quite forcefully).

To wit, here is what could be either an example accompanying a textbook's definition of the logical fallacy of special pleading, or a philosophical argument that is considered among Winter's finest:

Those Christians who support Intelligent Design, not surprisingly, identify that “intelligent cause” to be God.

But some would argue that such an association would then suggest that God designed viruses, bacteria, parasites and other harmful and destructive organisms that do nothing but bring disease and suffering to God’s creation.

Either that or they were simply errors in creation or creations with harmful flaws.

It’s an age-old question on a microscopic level – did God create the “tiny evils” that spread disease and death throughout the world? If so, then isn’t He to blame for mankind’s suffering?

One of the most influential missiologists of the 20th Century didn’t think so.

Dr. Ralph D. Winter, who recently died at the age of 84, had argue that all violent forms of life – including all disease pathogens – are the works of an “intelligent evil power” that seeks to destroy God’s creation.

So this is what it's come to with the Christian intellectual tradition. It's come to

1. Stuff is complicated, so God did it.
2. Some complicated stuff hurts.
3. God didn't do the stuff covered by (2).

So first of all, apparently Winter was a creationist (I falter at admiring its cheap suit "Intelligent Design" enough to use its name), which puts him at the back of the intellectual barrel along with almost every other post-Darwin Christian philosopher. But more than that, he was smart enough to realize that some of the critters running around this planet will eat you alive, so he was stuck. His biases kicked in, overpowered his better reason telling him that maybe all this creationism stuff is junk, and then crapped out a childish counterargument to the Problem of Evil.

And boy, is it ever childish. It isn't even Biblical. The Bible says: God made everything. God made cancer. God made AIDS. God made the lymphoma that killed Winter. God made the Holocaust. It says it right there: through him all things were made. God made this Satan character, to whom Ralph mis-ascribed the origin of evil. God made a universe knowing it would have a Fall in it. God made a universe knowing it would have a Satan in it.

Winter was a propagandist. Winter had little understanding of the Bible (apparently). And, thanks to his argument about Satan being co-equal with God as creator, we now know that he was also a heretic.

And the children shall inherit brains of their own

A new study commissioned by world-renowned doofus Ken Ham and performed by America's Research Group confirms what anecdotal accounts have been saying for quite some time: people are literally outgrowing religion at a faster rate than ever before.

Previous old Christians' tales held that it was those evil colleges with their Marxist professors and their mari-huana that gets kids to abandon Christian superstition. But the new study finds that only 10% of Christians say they first started questioning Biblical fables in college; most say that they were already too smart for such garbage by high school.

The Christian Post's take on the whole thing is truly hysterical, though. Firstly and fascinatingly, the survey found that people who were put into Sunday School as children were more likely to gain reason as adults than those who didn't. But look at how the Christian Post frames this:

Sixty-one percent of the surveyed young adults said they attended Sunday school
while 39 percent said they didn't. When comparing the two groups, the survey revealed that those who attended Sunday school are actually more likely: not to believe that all the accounts and stories in the Bible are true, to doubt the Bible because it was written by men, to defend keeping abortion legal, to accept the legalization of gay marriage, to believe in evolution, and to believe that good people don't need to go to church.

So are they bad Christians, or just bad Republicans? (Is there a difference?) I mean it's interesting that indoctrinated children were more likely to realize that the Bible was written by humans, but it is truly hysterical that they think that "believing" in evolution and believing that "good people don't need to go to church" are the marks of bad Christians. It's like they're trying to make themselves look like they never outgrew the late Middle Ages.

Ken Ham's ("whose Creation Museum in Petersburg, Ky., displays dinosaurs next to humans," as the Post disclaims) suggestion for Sunday Schools?

Part of the problem, Ham pointed out, is the curriculum. While Sunday school
teachers teach "Bible stories," children are left to learn biology, anthropology, geology, astronomy and other science courses at public schools.

Ah, yes. Well we already have millions of undereducated, unaccredited parents feeding this garbage to children under the misnomer of "home schooling" (I take issue with the phrase "schooling" being used as a euphemism for "protecting my baby from truths that make mommy's beliefs look stupid"), so why not let undereducated, unaccredited Sunday School teachers try to mislead Christian children out of a good education, too? Good idea, Ken.

I think that what Ken Ham fails to understand is that the stupider Christianity makes itself look, the stupider people will think it is.

Christianity is hemhorraging believers, and the next generation of Christians in this country is going to be its smallest yet. This is nothing but good news. The fewer people being taught that morality is irrelevant and that all that matters is ancient doctrine, the better. Keep up the good work, secularists.