Wednesday, September 05, 2007

Unbelievable!

Go read this column from an editor of the Galesville Republican, a small paper in Wisconsin. The writer, a certain Rose Eddy, compares the Freedom from Religion Foundation (an excellent organization devoted to the separation of church and state - I'm a member) to the Ku Klux Klan, the Nazis, and Al Qaeda.

There's been a lot of whining in my local paper about how "people of faith" are misrepresented in the mainstream media. The funny thing is, the kind of misrepresentation Christians get in the media is nothing compared to the abuse regularly heaped on atheists.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Not to worry, Theo Hobson is calling for a more intelligent religion debate. Although, having read a few pieces by Hobson, I have to say that if I wanted to up the IQ of a discussion, he's not the one I'd be calling.

M@ said...

If you haven't already read this, your day is about to get a whole lot worse...

Forthekids said...

I picked this up at the ffrf website:

"The history of Western civilization shows us that most social and moral progress has been brought about by persons free from religion."

That's quite a stretch, don't ya think?

I ran across several other items on that site that I believe are inaccurate. It's unfortunate that they don't provide sources to back up their assertions.

Jeffrey Shallit said...

Oh, how nice, my own creationist troll!

Forthekids:

I don't speak for the FFRF, and I don't agree with every statement they make. If you have a bone to pick with their website, why not contact them directly?

If you want to learn about the contributions of freethinkers, agnostics, and atheists, I'd suggest picking up a copy of Susan Jacoby's Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism.

Do the names Thomas Paine, Robert Ingersoll, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton mean anything to you?

Anonymous said...

What's the matter, Jeffrey? Didn't you like my literal definition of the words "random" and "complex."

Quoting Shallit: "complexity is the same as randomness. It's easy to get complexity; all you need is a source of random events."

Dragon replied - "Random” (chaos) = “complexity” (order)."

I think I'll leave this blog to all the birds who flock here. It seems that Jeffrey prefers it that way.

Dragon

Jeffrey Shallit said...

Dragon:

You must be extremely confused.

First, there was no discussion of complexity in this post, which was about the Galesville Republican.

Second, complexity does not equate with order in the theory of Kolmogorov complexity. Time for you to brush up on your mathematics!