God bless Roger Ebert (that’s a metaphor), one of Chicago’s greatest assets.  And although he can no longer speak, his voice is getting ever louder on his website.  In his December 2 entry he takes on the supernaturalists:

If you were attending a dinner party of community leaders in Dallas, Atlanta, Omaha or Colorado Springs and the conversation turned to religion, a chill might fall on the room if you confessed yourself an atheist. Yet at a dinner party of the nicest and brightest in New York, Chicago, San Francisco and (especially) Los Angeles, if the hostess began to confide about past lives, her Sign and yours, and her healing crystals, it might not go over so well if you confessed you thought she was full of it. . .

I adamantly support the right of any candidate to profess any faith, or none. And in the separate case of their New Age or Creationism beliefs, I emphasize my words “should not” rather than “can not” be President. If a candidate professes the story of Creation as an ancient legend or symbol, as so many do of Adam and Eve, that is quite understandable and has long precedent.

It is in the specific cases of those with literal belief in the scientific truth and application of such beliefs that I raise a red flag. We live in the harrowing early years of a century when the nation must compete in a new way, and this battle will be fought on the grounds of science defined by the traditional Scientific Method. We can have no patience with a chief executive who professes the value of ancient superstitions in the forming of policy.

My only purpose today is to state early and often that if a Presidential candidate believes early humans used saddles to ride on the backs of dinosaurs, as they are depicted at the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, that candidate should not be elected President.

h/t: RichardDawkins.net

Today’s turning out to be Video Saturday.

Most academic rap videos are pretty geeky and dire, but this one is really good: “3.5 ’til infinity”, by Bill Durham and his Galápagos gangstas.

Think about it. If there were hella elephants

Growing exponentially with none remaining celibate,

We’d all be swimming in elephantal juices;

So who decides who survives and reproduces? . . .

Speciation’s got me feeling psychotic

They got 20 finch RIMs–and they’re all prezygotic!

h/t: Bill Etges via Mohamed Noor

o.k., this is really scary.  Here are the reliably insane congresswoman Michele Bachmann and conservative activist Lou Engle, accompanied by a zany cast of chanting Republicans, praying at a Family Research Council “prayercast” aimed at stopping Obama’s healthcare bill.  And if, God help you, you want to watch a whole hour of people importuning God to stay Obama’s hand,  go here.

The Reason Project has announced its annual video contest: make a video.  Your video that promotes rationality and/or scientific thinking could win up to ten thousand dollars. (There are three prizes.)  Make big bucks and save the world at the same time — how do you beat that?

Never before has one man done so much to help so few (himself).

My whole life I watched the old sinner bilk his sheep for millions to finance his own deification and the construction of his empire.   Roberts once saw a 900-foot-tall Jesus who assured him that his City of Faith hospital would be built, if only Roberts would squeeze his acolytes for more bucks.  The hospital was built, and went bankrupt. It’s now an office complex.

In 1987 he raised the stakes of his importuning, saying that unless his viewers donated eight million dollars, God would “call him home”.  Last night I watched a clip of him begging those viewers, ” Please extend my life!”  The clip also showed him claiming that God, through Roberts’s ministry,  had brought several dead people back to life.

He was a man of Mammon, not of God.

Here he is “curing” polio. I couldn’t find any record of him curing amputees.

Paperback due out in about a month.