The jobs don't pay a lot, and you take most of your pay in self-esteem, but somebody is always trying out for village idiot or village atheist. Often they're one and the same...

-- Wesley Pruden, Revival time with the village atheist, (Washington Times)

In a classic pot-and-kettle scenario, Wesley Pruden has done disservice to the readers of the Washington Times with an irrational screed mocking atheists for writing "irrational screeds mocking those who have the faith the authors clearly envy."  The saving grace for these unfortunate atheists is that the average Times reader is probably too smart to be taken in by such drivel.

Pruden has nothing constructive to offer in his screed.  He merely calls atheists names and cites examples of atheists saying bad things about people who deserve to have bad things said about them.  This is what his article boils down to:

• Did you know that there are atheists living among you?
• Atheists are idiots.
• Atheists hate people of faith because they don't have faith but desperately want it.
• Atheists say the darndest things.
• Atheists are getting more attention than I am and it pisses me off.

Mr. Pruden apparently doesn't concern himself with the facts regarding persons atheists have spoken ill of, or even facts about the atheists themselves.  I mean really, who among us who has actually read The God Delusion would use the word "irrational" to describe it?  I've been struggling with the book myself and have found it incredibly dense, repetitive, and belaboring of points, but irrational?  Rationality is the coin of the atheist realm.  The author has got it backwards... it is faith that is irrational.

The article is clearly calculated to incense the readership, as opposed to communicate any meaningful argument as to why atheists are idiots, or naughty, or whatever else he's trying to say.  He notes Christopher Hitchens' reference to Mother Theresa as "the ghoul of Calcutta", without bothering to say why.  He notes Pulitzer prize winner Paul Greenberg's mention of Reverend Falwell's one "decent" moment on record, without bothering to say why.  Apparently the "why" doesn't concern the unencumbered-by-a-Pulitzer-Prize-Pruden.

A rational person will find little of interest in this yawn-inspiring rant against atheism, except perhaps an appreciation of the irony by which the author reveals himself to be the shrill irrational caricature that he tries to paint atheists as.  Beyond that, there's nothing to see here.

Okay, here's a bunch of little things I want to talk about.  None of them really deserves its own article but I want to share it anyway.  I suppose I should caution you that I am on percoset right now, so I am a little loopy... I apologize if this is a scatterbrained.

Eating

I still can't chew, and won't be able to for another week at least.  So I am exploring different things that I can eat without chewing.  Stuff that has worked out well has been jello, applesauce, soup broth, rice in thick gravy, spagettios, small bits of bread soaked in broth, yogurt, pureed fruit mixed with yogurt and juice, and so forth.  Pureed baked beans is really grainy, and I don't like it.  Gonna try baked beans again sometime soon where I just try to swallow the beans whole, unchewed.  I've found I can eat Italian Ices, but all the acid in fruit juice is making this bothersome.

All this nigh-liquid food combined with drugs that mess up my sleep schedule, and amoxicillin (to avoid infection) is making my stomach pretty upset.  But I'll get through.  (It's not like I have a choice!)

NPR Podcasts

When I go to bed I like to listen to music or speech on my MP3 player.  I find that listening to the same stuff every night helps me sleep.  But eventually I get tired of the same stuff.  The NPR website has always been a great place to go to stream shows you've missed, but at some point they began offering these shows as podcasts.  (The difference, from my perspective, is that you can download old shows as MP3 files, drop them on your MP3 player or your computer, and listen to them anytime.)  You guys were probably aware of that, but to me it's big news... streaming is great, but it is much nicer to grab the last few episodes of my favorite NPR program and listen to it whenever (in my case, when I go to bed.)  NPR has a huge podcast directory with shows from all their member stations.  Here's a link to the directory... you can subscribe to these shows as feeds in Google Reader or just hit the URL directly and save the MP3 files.

The podcasts (shows) that I am most interested in are:

• NPR Science Friday with Ira Flatow
• On Point with Tom Ashbrook
• Car Talk
• Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, The NPR News Quiz

Stem Cells

So I was listening to one of those podcasts of NPR Science Friday where the topic matter was stem cell research. A guy called in who equated a 14-day-old blastocyst with a person. He was in the crowd that considers a fertilized human egg to be a human being, what he framed as "life begins at conception".  Obviously holding that view, there was no way he could get behind stem cell research since it involved killing embryos.

Then one of the guest experts offered the caller a challenge which I committed to memory because I never wanted to forget it:

Imagine you are a fireman dealing fighting a fire in a fertility clinic.  You enter a room and find in it a six year old girl, and a tray with 20 frozen embryos.  You can either save the girl or the tray of embryos.  Which one do you choose?

In my opinion, the caller chickened out.  He said something like "that would be a call I would have to make as a fireman... it would depend on who was closest to the door and who was most likely to survive."  I felt his answer betrayed that he couldn't really equate 20 embryos with 20 people... if  he could, the decision should have been both straightforward, and patently ridiculous... as if anyone could ignore a 6 year old girl screaming for rescue from a fire and instead choose a rack of test tubes.

Although it isn't clear exactly when an embryo becomes a person, it seems downright obvious that a 14-day-old blastocyst is far less a person than a six year old girl.  I'm going to remember this challenge.  It really made me think.

Birdies

I've been feeding the birds in my yard again lately.  I stopped many years ago, but started up again after my Dad passed away.  It's funny, I sort of got him interested in birds and birdfeeding years ago, and now he has sort of gotten me back into it.  Things haven't changed much.  Regular wild bird food doesn't have enough millet in it, and has some other seeds that most of the birds don't eat.  So I went back to one of my old recipes and it worked like a charm, but it involves buying parakeet food and mixing that into the seed, which is expensive.  I have to find a place where I can get millet cheap.  Anybody know a place?

Dawkins Discussions... on Amazon?

I've been following some discussions on Dawkins which are popping up on Amazon.  Apparently any product for sale on Amazon gets its own discussion forum.  So at the bottom of the amazon page for The God Delusion are the hot forum topics related to that book.  It's amazing what lengths some people will go to in order to discredit Dawkins.  Check it out, if you dare.  This is where I found out about the "Dawkins Pause" video... this particular discussion links to the video (it's something of a relief to see that the theists seem to be in the minority on this forum.)

If you need more Dawkins, here's a feed for RichardDawkins.net which you can drop in your news aggregator.

I'm about halfway through The God Delusion myself.  Having trouble reading it right now... mostly because of the percosets.

Topix.Net

Don't know if I've recommended this before, but topix.net is a nice source for regional newsfeeds for small towns.  They incorporate feeds for local newspapers and blogs, and all you do is enter the zip code of the town you are interested in, and topix.net will generate a feed for that town that you can plonk into a feed reader like bloglines, Google reader, and so forth.  (It's my understanding that IE7 has a feed aggregator built right in.)

My Shared Shite

I've been regularly flagging articles in the feeds I read as shared so that other people can enjoy them.  You can access the GoogleReader page devoted to my shared articles here.

3Hive Decency

Some fairly decent stuff has cropped up on 3Hive since my last article about indie music.  I recommend The Autumn Defense and Lymbyc Systym.

From University panel says student parody "harassed" blacks (AP via Boston.com):
...The parody of "O Come All Ye Faithful" calls black people "boisterous" and proclaims, "Born into the ghetto. O Jesus! We need you now to fill our racial quotas."

The lyrics also say, "No matter what your grades are, F's, D's or G's, give them all privileged status."...

I can understand that someone who is a conservative might have issues with affirmative action, a system that attempts to correct for the effects of years of injustice and discrimination.  But when you write "funny" songs called "Oh Come All Ye Black Folk" that indicate that black people come from the ghetto and have bad grades, you probably aren't doing your cause any favors.

But that's exactly what a Tufts University conservative campus newspaper "The Primary Source" did.  You can imagine how well the idea was received, especially since it was only last month that the same paper garnered the ire of Muslim students by posting parodies of Islamic Awareness Week advertisements in which they discussed brutality in Muslim countries.

There is a value sometimes in being shocking.  Sometimes it is necessary to shock someone into realizing that they are behaving in a manner they wouldn't tolerate from others.  Maybe that's what this paper was doing.  In order to be certain though, I'd need to see some shocking articles directed at white Christians, or something like that.  Barring that, it sounds like the students who imagine themselves to be Tuft's University's "one lone conservative voice" are abusing that voice by saying things that no decent conservative I know would say.

What do you think?