Bafflingly hyperbolic, PZ Myers, Pharyngula, January 4, 2015
As for the claim that creationists will be terrified by this discovery…excuse me, but I have to go off somewhere and laugh for ten minutes or so.
Creationists don’t understand thermodynamics. Heck, they don’t understand basic logic. You think an obscure bit of theory by some brilliant wonk, written up in journals they’ll never read? My dog, man, I’ve still got creationists asking me, “If man evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?” and you think they’re going to be stunned into silence by a technical paper in a physics journal on entropy, heat dissipation, and molecular self-organization? Look at England’s paper — it’s got math in it. The only thing that’s going to terrify the religious right is the prospect of reading the thing.
I Am Trying Not to Hate and Fear Men, Laura Bogart, AlterNet, January 1, 2015
My father was the flint-fisted epitome of the “alpha male” that the pick-up artists and the frat boy wolf packs aspired to be. My mother and I were images in a photo frame that assured his bosses he was a family man, a man who could be trusted. We were bellies and backs and cheeks, the soft places that bore his anger, or any feeling that found expression in his fists. And he was the axis of the turning world—at least to my mother, who sent my abuser (a choir boy, a Boy Scout) home to his parents with a polite explanation that he was simply “too old” to be babysat. Until his family moved, I’d see him at the bus stop, and that copper-penny taste of fear would flood my mouth.
Before I could ever know anything different, this was maleness: aggression and protection, equally awful. Something cowardly and brute, something that hit you with its belt and pulled you beneath your favorite Lion King blanket and stuck its fingers into your vagina. My mind was still a dark house, waiting for positive moments—happy memories in the making—to light up each room. My father took a hammer to the circuit box, left me to wander the rooms of that dark house; and the neighbor boy who made “a secret game” of putting his hands under my dress while we sat on the couch, watching videos of Disney princesses whose happy endings came in a man’s kiss, pulled me into the basement.
Why Can’t We Admit That Religion Is F***ing Crazy? Chez Pazienza, The Daily Banter, April 12, 2013
With the exception of those who allow their faith to lead them to do despicable things — those whose behavior isn’t simply eccentric but dangerous — I do my best to respect people who claim to be religious. I respect the people themselves. That doesn’t mean I respect their beliefs, because I don’t. I don’t feel the need to show one ounce of deference to the beliefs of someone who thinks that God listens to his entreaties any more than I would feel the need to show deference to the beliefs of a guy talking to a telephone pole on a street corner who thinks the same thing. Neither of the two has evidence to back up his claims and the only difference between them, really, is that one probably has a roof over his head and isn’t considered crazy by most of society.
The fact is that when you peel away the culturally sanctioned rationale for not eating meat on a Friday, or sitting on a box and covering the mirrors after someone dies, or making sure that a woman’s body is clothed almost completely, what you’re left with is just plain old nuts. And what’s worse is that the rules and restrictions adhered to by the faithful all too often negatively affect people who should be well beyond the jurisdiction of any one particular religion. It’s one thing for someone to make a personal decision not to work on Sunday because he believes his god demands it — it’s another thing entirely for a pharmacist not to dispense the morning after pill for the same reason.
