PZ Didn't Speak Out

via TMR

First they came for the Copts...

A mob of nearly four thousand Muslims has attacked Coptic homes this evening in the village of Soul, Atfif in Helwan Governorate, 30 kilometers from Cairo, and torched the Church of St. Mina and St. George. There are conflicting reports about the whereabouts of the Church pastor Father Yosha and three deacons who were at church; some say they died in the fire and some say they are being held captive by the Muslims inside the church.

Witnesses report the mob prevented the fire brigade from entering the village. The army, which has been stationed for the last two days in the village of Bromil, 7 kilometers from Soul, initially refused to go into Soul, according to the officer in charge. When the army finally sent three tanks to the village, Muslim elders sent them away, saying that everything was "in order now."

A curfew has been imposed on the 12,000 Christians in the village.

...and PZ didn't speak out because he isn't a Copt.

Then they came for the Christians in Ethiopia...

Christian students recently suffered an attack by a Muslim mob in Ethiopia. The students were on a mission trip to a Muslim village when they were attacked. Jonathon Racho of International Christian Concern tells OneNewsNow they were handing out Bibles and witnessing to villagers.

"Then one of the villagers angrily argued with the Christians,” Racho explains, “and then he incited the Muslim mob to attack the Christians. Then the attackers shouted 'Allah Akbar,' which means 'God is great,' as they hurled stones at the Christians and beat them with rods."

Seventeen people were injured. Racho explains that Ethiopia is a predominantly Christian country with about a third of the population Muslim, but with pockets where Muslims are in the majority.

...and PZ didn't speak out because he isn't a Christian.

Then they came for the Islamic Darwinist...

A prominent British imam has been forced to retract his claims that Islam is compatible with Darwin's theory of evolution after receiving death threats from fundamentalists.

Dr Usama Hasan, a physics lecturer at Middlesex University and a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, was intending yesterday to return to Masjid al-Tawhid, a mosque in Leyton, East London, for the first time since he delivered a lecture there entitled "Islam and the theory of evolution".

But according to his sister, police advised him not to attend after becoming concerned for his safety. Instead his father, Suhaib, head of the mosque's committee of trustees, posted a notice on his behalf expressing regret over his comments. "I seek Allah's forgiveness for my mistakes and apologise for any offence caused," the statement read.

...and PZ didn't speak out because he isn't an Darwinist Muslim.

When they come for PZ, who will be left to speak out for him?

Words of wisdom from Mark Steyn:

When the west’s bestselling atheists, stand-up comics, transgressive artists and all the rest belittle Christianity but steer clear of Islam, they’re not just engaging in prudent self-protection. They’re objectively advancing the cause of Islamic imperialism – because their selective mockery acts in support of the bullies’ core belief, that Islam is different and must be accorded a special deference: In practical terms, their selectivity comes to the same conclusion as any bigshot Talib in a hardcore madrassah. I said somewhere in America Alone that we’re operating to the same rules as the old Cold War joke: An American tells a Soviet that in America everyone is free to criticize the president. The Soviet replies, “Same in my country. Everyone is free to criticize your president.”

That’s one reason I found the Corner debate on the Westboro Supreme Court decision these last few days faintly surreal. In the rest of the west, Islam grasped very quickly that in some of the oldest free societies in the world the law bends according to the muscle you apply to it, and the Pansy Left (in Orwell’s phrase) will gladly concoct ever more tortured legalisms to explain why selling out core western values and incentivizing the thugs is the right thing to do.

Selective mockery, selective disdain, selective derision, selective ridicule:

Skepticon is an annual skeptics convention set in Springfield, Missouri. Springfield is home to the Assemblies of God and several religious universities (such as Evangel and Drury). The area is affectionately referred to by many locals as the buckle of the bible belt. This is why in the Fall of 2008, JT Eberhard, Lauren Lane, and the MSU Chapter of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster invited PZ Myers and Richard Carrier to the Missouri State campus to criticize belief in god. The event was well-attended and was retroactively dubbed Skepticon.

Onward Islamic imperialism!

X-posted

Memeorandum thread

Separation of Church and Home

This blog isn't about science or religion, but sometimes science, politics and religion collide; and when all three of these intersect with elementary education, sparks will fly.

An article released by the Associated Press this weekend is a fine example of this explosive combination of issues. Although it probably doesn't qualify as a hit piece, Dylan Lovan does a pretty good job of portraying home-schoolers as anti-science wingnuts:

Two of the best-selling biology textbooks [for home-schoolers] stack the deck against evolution, said some science educators who reviewed sections of the books at the request of The Associated Press. "I feel fairly strongly about this. These books are promulgating lies to kids," said Jerry Coyne, an ecology and evolution professor at the University of Chicago.

Coyne is even more explicit about his antipathy toward home-schoolers in his personal blog:

As Lovan noted in his piece, “83 percent of home-schooling parents want to give their children ‘religious or moral instruction.’”

I weep for those children. For many of them are simply being brainwashed by their parents. Yes, that’s what it is—brainwashing...

How many budding biologists have been stifled by their parents’ willful ignorance of science, and on their insistence that the Bible is the real source of biological information?

Wow...sounds like the state should intervene, doesn't it? These poor kids probably should be taken from their parents. Forcing the kids to go to a government-run school would be a good start, but insufficient. Sure, you can get them on the right track at school, but what's going to happen when they go back home to their parents?

Reaction to Lovan's article on the left-wing spite sites has been even more paranoid. Robert Crook provides his very humble opinion:

Religiously brainwashing children, who are helpless because they depend entirely upon their parents, I asserted, is a form of child abuse.

Home-schooling, too, in most cases is done for the purpose of brainwashing, and therefore in most cases is child abuse.

Children home-schooled by “Christo” fascist parents are put at a huge disadvantage. Even children who are home-schooled for reasons other than religious indoctrination — children whose home-school curricula aren’t religious-based — are put at a disadvantage because they don’t get the same opportunities to socialize with children who come from different backgrounds as do their non-home-schooled peers.

For all the talk about the need for exposure to diverse views, Mr. Crook's ability to digest opposing opinions is surprisingly underdeveloped:

I Googled your e-mail address and found your blog, rightklik.net. On your blog you link to Michelle Malkin, RedState and The Heritage Foundation as “important websites,” for [expletive deleted] sake. You’re a wingnut. So I’ll consider the source. You are, after all, preparing your children for the End Times, which they don’t teach in our public schools.

Unfortunately, this notion that home schooling is some kind insidious abuse is not confined to personal blogs and left-wing hate sites. Serious scholarly publications have entertained the idea as well:

The right to unregulated homeschooling visits quite concrete harms on the homeschooled children themselves, the mothers who are teaching them, and the often rural and isolated communities in which they are raised and taught...

...[T]here are political harms. Fundamentalist Protestant adults who were homeschooled over the last thirty years are not politically disengaged, far from it. They vote in far higher percentages than the rest of the population. They mobilize readily. The “army” in which adult homeschooled citizens are soldiers has enormous clout: homeschoolers were called “Bush’s Army” in 2000 and 2004 for good reason...

They are as effective as they are, and as successful as they are, because they engage in politics in the same way that soldiers participate in combat. They don’t question authority, and they can’t go AWOL. With little education, few if any job skills, and scant resources, their power either to influence the lines of authority within their own sphere, or to leave that sphere, is virtually nil.

An army of stupid, conservative Rove-bots? This must be stopped! Here's the plan:

As the political philosopher and homeschool critic Robert Reich has persuasively argued, curricular review would give the state a way to ensure that the academic content is such as to protect the children’s interest in both acquiring the necessary skills for active, autonomous, and responsible citizenship in adulthood, and in being exposed to diverse and more liberal ways.

And now we see the real concern. The statists aren't losing sleep at night because little Johnny can't read ― if that were the case, they'd allow kids to escape our lousy public schools ― no, the statists are worried that Johnny is sneaking off to Tea Parties with his parents when he should be at a real school singing praises to Barack Hussein Obama! Better keep an eye on Johnny.

Mmm, mmm, mmm!

More

Just for kicks, I recommend a visit to Dylan Lovan's Twitter feed. He links to this surprisingly religulous, unintentionally funny video from Symphony of Science:

...The sky calls to us

If we do not destroy ourselves

We will one day venture to the stars

A still more glorious dawn awaits

Not a sunrise, but a galaxy rise

A morning filled with 400 billion suns

The rising of the milky way...

...as religious as anything I've ever seen or heard.