Unsought Input

I’m sure you’ve seen the trailer and ads for the new movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed! with Ben Stein on TV or the internet. The premise of the movie is that Big Science the elitist scientific establishment is keeping Intelligent Design out of the classrooms and ruining the careers of any scientist who speaks in favor of it.

Stein says on the topic, “Big Science in this area of biology has lost its way,” says Stein. “Scientists are supposed to be allowed to follow the evidence wherever it may lead, no matter what the implications are. Freedom of inquiry has been greatly compromised, and this is not only anti-American, it’s anti-science. It’s anti-the whole concept of learning.”

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I thought this video was pretty funny. Look at the guys website for more stuff.

www.fortaxreasons.com 

Recently Yahoo featured Preacher Dan Smith as its person of the week. Dan Smith is most famously known for his internet video parody of Baby Got back, Baby got Book.

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In honor of the passing of Jerry Falwell, who made a mockery of Christ’s teachings, we present the best mockeries of Jesus himself. Actually, that’s a bit harsh - these aren’t really mockeries, more like satire.

1. First off, in Passion of the Christ 2, Judgment Day, we see Hollywood logic extended to Mel Gibson’s blockbuster. A box-office hit deserves a sequel, and any self-respecting sequel needs twice as many explosions.

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This video is blowing up in the interweb, but if you haven’t seen it, take a look. Mike Daisey, probably best known for his descriptions of working for Amazon.com during the dot-com bubble, is performing a pretty funny monologue. Unfortunately, a Christian group is there to protest, and there ain’t nothing Jesus hates more than the F-bomb.

I ran across a great post at Technocrat titled If We Taught English the Way We Teach Mathematics.

“Suppose that those classes, from elementary school right through to high school, amounted to nothing more than reading dictionaries, getting drilled in spelling and formal grammatical construction, and memorizing vast vocabulary lists — you never read a novel, nor a poem; never had contact with anything beyond the pedantic complexity of English spelling and formal grammar, and precise definitions for an endless array of words. You would probably hate the subject.”

This is a great point, and the post goes on to talk about why it’s not just a lack of “real world” examples that makes math and science such boring, intimidating subjects.  Here’s the perfect example of how a real world example definitely did not help one student with physics:

So if memorizing facts and formulas is no use, and contrived, often bizarre examples are no help, how should we teach math and science?

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Here is a nice little summary from Matt and Trey. I mean, they sum it up so nicely.

Finally the question, “Have you found Jesus?”, can now be answered yes. The tomb of Jesus as apparently been discovered in Israel of all places, well duh why didn’t they look there in the first place. I don’t know why he was in this crappy box either, I mean he’s supposed to be the messiah for christ sakes, get him a nice coffin. Also it was found by Terminator 2 and Titanic director James Cameron. Apparently he has so much money now they only thing left for him to do was find Jesus, literally.

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I saw this mentioned in ScienceBlogs and had to share. We’ve talked about the War on Christmas before, but really that war is part of a larger issue: how do you cope when you are part of an over-represented majority? When the majority of Americans share your faith, and your religion dominates the culture and all three branches of government, it’s doesn’t leave you much to complain about.

Now, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t complain. Instead, the few things left should be complained about ad nauseum. So when the Faith & Values section of the Columbus Dispatch wrote a few stories about Islam and Buddhism, they got letters from unhappy readers:

A couple of critics wanted to know why we were wasting ink on these “false” beliefs when Christ is the only path to salvation. Another caller said he was tired of having “that Islam religion … shoved in my face.”

Mark Fisher, editor of that section, decided to take a look at their coverage. He tallied up the subjects of all the front page articles and compared it to the demographics of their readership. It turns out that one group was being left out, but it wasn’t the Christians:

Although Faith & Values isn’t ignoring Christians, my tally does suggest that we are giving nonreligious people less attention than they deserve. We’re already taking steps to correct that.

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