I’m speaking at Murray State University in Kentucky on Nov. 21 and 22 (stay tuned for BBQ reports) under the aegis of the Murray State University Student Organization for Reason and Science. The head of that group just told me that the posters for one of my talks are being removed and defaced. This is exactly what happened when I spoke—about evolution—at the University of Kentucky at Lexington several years ago. The students sent me a photo of a defaced poster in which somebody—I’m betting a believer—ripped the “is true” part off of my book cover:
This doesn’t really anger me, but I’m sorry that the students have to replace the ones that were taken down. And I’m always aware that this kind of acadmic vandalism, at least against evolution, is based on fear: fear that people might hear the anti-Biblical truth about science. And that’s exactly why I prefer to speak in places like Murray, Kentucky. I am talking about evolution, but the talk touted above is on accommodatinism—a far more incendiary topic. You never feel the oppressive pervasiveness of religion in America more strongly than in the South.
The students, bless their hearts, have asked me if I’d like some campus security there in case there’s trouble. I don’t really need that (though when I spoke in Augusta Georgia they provided a guard packing heat), but I told them I’d let the campus cops figure out if it was really necessary.
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p.s. “Freed Curd” Auditorium sounds like it was named after a compatibilist yogurt.
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…did someone eat it???
Freed Curd sounds like fries with gravy or cheeseless poutine.
Is it possible that it was torn off to write a quick grocery list?
Yes, it’s a logical possibility but not a reasonable one (like God’s existence!). I suppose all the posters that were removed were used to make LARGE grocery lists!
Laughing with tears in my eyes. I am just trying to hope that people are better than they act. Maybe it is like what they tell us at work: walk around the block before sending that emotional email to people…maybe these people need to walk around the campus before ripping posters off the wall. Maybe they will forget or run out of time to be spiteful.
In Southernese, “Bless their heart(s)” is generally translated as “they are morons”. Obviously not the case in context, but you have to be careful with the idioms of a foreign language. 😛
Curiously, when speaking directly to the person in question,”Bless your heart” is better translated as a very sincere “Eff you”. A native speaker can convey worlds of contempt and dismissiveness with those three words while seeming to be the epitome of politeness and charm.
Signed,
One of the Natives
Thanks for that explanation. In fact, I’ve never heard it used as an insult, and of course I didn’t mean it that way.
I’ve never heard it meant that way, and I’m from Virginia. My grandmother used it to mean “I may not understand you, but I sympathize with you anyway” or something like that.
I spent nine years in KY and never heard it there, but many people in the southern states consider KY only marginally southern anyway.
Good point! I’m sure the usage becomes more common and pronounced as one moves farther south. Regions within a state matter also; I *think* the phrase is less negative near the mountains and coast of North Carolina than it is in the Piedmont area between them, for example.
Consider the sentence, “He means well, bless his heart.” In your grandmother’s time, it’s easy to see how that might have meant, “He’s a good person, he just made a mistake.” But the way language slips, it often now reads as “He’s a good person, but he’s a moron.” Tone and accent matter, of course; listen to a Georgia Belle deliver the line with a smile full of venom; it’s AMAZING.
Ive been transplanted Yankee for 5 years now in Murray KY (Im the faculty advisor to the two secular groups hosting Jerry in two weeks) and I hear “bless her heart” all the time, often in sympathy but regularly to nicely convey the person is a couple bricks short of a load. It’s quite expressive
The vandalism of the poster advertising JAC’s talk is an example of a fundie whose “faith” is so weak they can’t tolerate even a hint of a whisper that their belief system is wrong.
Or to put this another way, that poster-vandal knows in his(her) heart that all that b.s. s/he claims to “believe in” is just that, b.s., but can’t bring her(him)self to admit it. Sort of like a seven year old still nursing: can’t give up the comfort of sucking on that titty and face the cold cruel world of truth.
Next, I suppose you’ll be denying the existence of the tooth fairy, too…
Blasphemy!
Agreed; we’d better keep a close eye on this RFW fella…
The Tooth Fairy is a myth.
So is Santa Claus.
And the Great Pumpkin.
And the Easter Bunny.
[Does this consign me to a new circle of hell a la Dante?]
That’s like a blasphemy quadruple. Oh, you gone dun’it now!
Mum with a seven-year old on the tit would have words for the tooth fairy too!
I had a friend who taught English at Lansing Community College many years ago. He was an atheist and used to post cartoons on his door making light of religion – pretty mild stuff. He would routinely – I mean on a weekly basis – have not just the cartoons, but class announcements, etc., ripped off his door, defaced, threats written on them, etc. And, none too surprisingly, just a few doors down was a physiologist, advisor to the campus (LCC is a huge community college) anti-abortion group (he was also known for spewing anti-evolution in garbage in his classes) , whose door was festooned with large pictures of crucifixes and fetuses. These were never (to my knowledge) defaced. Funny how that seems to work.
There used to be a good catfish restaurant in Murray, but I can’t remember its name.
The best fish restaurant was ‘Sue and Charlie’s’ in Aurora on Ky Lake, which is now ‘Willow Pond.’ Also good fish is served at ‘Country Crossroads’ in Hardin.
In the early ’70’s my occupation at that time obliged me to reside briefly in communities in Arkansas and Tennessee, and travel on occasion to several Deep South states. Restaurants recommended as great fish joints invariably served (salty) breaded, deep fried catfish, with the exception of coastal cities where there is more variety. (It pays to be wary of salty additives in some southern sea food restaurants, too, more so in my experience than the rest of the US or Europe.) In pretty short order I found reasons to be too busy to join diners at the inland fried catch places. Is breaded/fried at these restaurants still the norm? With hush puppies?
I’m afraid so, Foggybottom. Seems us Southerners enjoy our deep fried ‘fats’. However, these places do offer ‘ocean boneless’; ocean cod instead of slimy, bottom-sucking catfish! Very few places offer baked fish in these parts. Guess that’s why we all die young!
My comment comes off as very judgemental, but I don’t mean anything personal against the hundreds of millions of those who enjoy deep fried food. I consider myself fortunate in never particularly appealed to me. Well, except for breaded shrimp and french fries.
Blood pressure/weight control issues that set in decades ago required me to wean myself from food prepared this way, and in time satisfaction derived from its flavor departed. I have no doubt that if I eat this stuff daily it, like sweets, will swiftly trip a craving switch in my brain, though, so I refuse to entertain kind memories of fried anything.
So, this opinion about southern fish cuisine is about me, not about other diners. If y’all want to ruin a perfectly good piece of fish this way, and double down on cooking health risks adding oil saturated clumps of processed flour, salt, and sugar rolled into a ball on the same plate, you’ll roll on regardless of any unsolicited yankee opinion anyhow. These two items combined do enhance the flavor of tangy coleslaw (a dish suthrens get right), I’ll give ’em that.
Wear your W&M sweatshirt. It’ll disorient them.
Talk the talk & walk the walk. I admire that.
The people who defaced your flier are likely the same that think Islam is a violent religion, yet they don’t seem to realize how they are just a step or two away from physical violence in the name of their god as well.
I actually heard of Xian physical violence at the KY Freethought Convention. A mother and hi school age daughter told of the daughter and younger son, not only getting teased and threatened but shoved and punched over being outed non-believers in rural KY around Louisville.
Jerry,
You must try Bad Bob’s Bar-B-Que on Chestnut Street, great food and atmosphere
This is indeed a place we plan on taking him! 🙂
I’d take their actions as a complement and and a reasonable indication that the perpetrators know that they don’t have a rational argument to counter yours. Censorship is the first refuge of those who fear for their own cosy existence.
+1; getting to the heart of the matter with no waste of words.
If this is how the “good Christians” behave I shudder to think what the bad ones are up to.
For that, see Dr. Coyne’s immediately preceding post, on religion as child abuse.
No, no, no ; the preceding post is about REALLY good Christians.
Same difference?
Still burning books after nearly 2 millenniums…
The reaction of choice by totalitarians everywhere!
The moment they defaced your poster you won.
Statistically it’s highly likely that the poster was defaced by a Christian, but there’s some small chance it was another religious belief system…
MSU has a Muslim Students Organisation & href=”http://campus.murraystate.edu/org/mso/Islam.html”>HERE [scroll down to the “What is the Qur’an” section] you’ll find this as the 5th bullet point:-
ALSO…
There are some interesting uses of language throughout the whole page I linked to above. Written [I believe] by an Islamic scholar apologist constructing a worldview for consumption by the Kufr [in this waiting time prior to Islam finally owning the world & minds of everyone]
Examples:-
This sounds very fair until one considers the implications:-
…this makes more sense given that the MSO believes that Islam trumps the U.N. [note the veiled threat at the end ~ given that “disbelievers” are not treated equally under Islam]:-
Freedom of expression is your right, but…
And finally ~ a curiously appropriate LOLZ misspelling of “revealed” [what was in the mind of the author of this webpage?]:-
The link I screwed up IS HERE
Apparently, some folks never progress much beyond the clot stage…
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I always admired Hitch for wading into the Bible Belt. Of course he was combative by nature.
And strident! 😉
So, he waded stridently into the Bible Belt, or strided wadently … no, that’s enough already.
Is this talk open to the public? It’s only a 40 min drive, I’d like to make the trip if I thought I could get in when I got there.
I looked at Murray State’s web page for info, I did not see this event listed.
It’s a student society, so it’d be unlikely to be on the university’s website itself. (Plausible deniability!)
The link on the poster isn’t working for me here … though I am getting the organisation’s name, so the header has come back. (D)DOS’d? Or do they just have some (a lot) of their media hosted out to another site, which itself appears to be down.
It looks like the MSU Secular student’s site is down at the moment, but it looks like normal web failure rather than a directed attack (wix.com, the hosting provider is up, but parastorage.com – presumably a media host – is borked).
Try .. oh, it’s back up. 09:23 CET.
Try this page, and see if they’ll answer your question through the “contact us” link at the top of the page. (Prof.CC’s presentations are at the bottom of the page.)
It is open to the public, we are just a student group so its not university sponsored.
Here a link to the info: http://wearedone.org/?p=204
Our bio dept is sponsoring him to speak on Evo the nite before also at 7, in Mason Hall.
We’d love to have anyone come up and hear Jerry.
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As you note, it appears that the vandal has a problem with the proposition that Evolution is valid. But at least it seems you’re both on the same page with the incompatibility of Science with Religion.
Yes, the talk is free and open to the public! Please come and join us! 🙂
Thanks Ben, will do my level best to get there. It is a pretty short trip, so it will take an extraordinary act of Murphy’s Law for me and the wife to not make it.
I look forward to the experience.
If anyone wants more information on both of the talks, you can visit our website at secularmsu.org and view the schedule. We hope many of you that are close by will be able to make it! 🙂
Thanks for the Link. Wish more people were aware of it.
Having grown up not far from there in West Nutsack, Tennessee, I am not at all surprised. However, I am thrilled to see that there is a Murray State University Student Organization for Reason and Science!
West _Nutsack_ ?
Is that a real name (like Fucking, Germany or Hell, Norway) or is it a mythical one like Hicksville or Sleepy Hollow? Please excuse my geographical ignorance…
Oh, are those towns twinned? Even better than the Dull-Boring alliance.
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Sent from my iPhone. Please excuse all creative spellings.
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There are real places called Sleepy Hollow!
Google tells me there is a real Hicksville, too. AND a Foggy Bottom.
It gets really difficult to think up an imaginary backwoods name, doesn’t it? 🙁
Entirely mythical. Names have been changed to keep the backwater pristine.
Well, congratulations. My attempt at dreaming up mythical names was a miserable failure.
Please Jerry, tell the organizers to give you the defaced poster(s), sign them and give them to us! Defacement by christians make these potentially collectible 🙂 .
You may wish to broach with your Murray State point(s)-of-contact (and they with campus security) the possibility of student (and non-student) opponents dirupting your presentation.
One occasionally hears of university student groups across the fruited plain, of various ideological mindsets and refulgent in their solipsism and sense of entitlement, presuming to interrupt and shut down speakers.
Lamination.