Over the weekend if have been getting a
lot of hits from P.Z. Myers’
blog since someone linked to my desecration post in the comment
section.  The replies I have found to b rather funny in their
missing the point.  The commenter said to check out this guy
who wanted to get even by desecrating a microscope.  I guess
he and others totally missed that this is a parody site and that I
don’t think that P.Z. Myers hold’s microscopes sacred and of course it
was only a photoshop thing anyway.  Many seemed to have
totally missed this and the point I was actually making is that science
can only go so far.

It kind of reminds me  of the Richard
Dawkin’s rap video where later Dawkins’ didn’t get the video
and asked his readers whose side the video was on.

A commenter at Vox Popoli blog had a
great bit of satire on this.

1. Video posted around 11:00
 
2. 1 hour and 44 minutes later, Dawkins implores his more intelligent
readers to help inform him as to whose side the video is on (his side,
or not his side). He then pokes fun at people that think things are
funny that he doesn’t understand just in case it turns out to be ‘not
on his side.’ Comment #151544
 
3. Dawkins now presumably goes to sleep.

4. Nearly nine hours later, he wakes up and checks the post again. He
sees that his fellow scientific elites like the video, but also don’t
understand it. Dawkins tries to get in a little dig on postmodernism,
but just ends up making fun of his posters. Comment #151685
 
5. Nine and a half hours after posting, Dawkins wonders how his fellow
comrades could laugh at something they don’t understand. He then lauds
The Life of Brian as the pinnacle of comedic evolution. Comment #151704

6. A couple minutes after the last post, he gets in another jab at
Postmodernism. Comment #151713

7. Under chastisement for his humbuggery, Dawkins admits that Daniel
Dennett popping his head up from out of nowhere is, in fact, funny.
Comment #151715

8. Nearly ten hours after posting the video, someone postulates that
the humor is derived from the silly dancing bodies (not the satire).
Dawkins seems to accept this theory and thanks the poster for his
intellect. Comment #151723

9. Sixteen hours after first watching the video, Dawkins finally
realizes that it is, in fact, making fun of ‘his side.’ Dawkins defends
himself again by saying that he didn’t understand it. Comment #151849.

10. Seventeen hours after posting, Dawkins attempts to comprehend the
humor by equating similar scenes of incongruousness that Monty Python
has also done. Dawkins has apparently not yet pondered why, if this
were the only thing funny about the video, he did not catch on before
this. Dawkins chalks this up to the video not being funny, and
dismisses the obvious conclusion that his head is too big to see the
satire behind it. Comment #151889
 
11. The next day, Dawkins chimes in again to defend his Ph.D. status to
a poster who dared question it. Comment #152142
 
12. Nearly 36 hours after posting, Dawkins discovers what a ‘grill’ is
and waxes philosophic as to why Sam Harris would have one in the video.
The conclusion he comes up with is that it adds no humor to the video
and should not have been put in. Comment #152168
 
13. After a full three and a half days after first watching the video,
Dawkins (obviously perturbed at the fact he didn’t get that he was the
butt of the joke, when every other non-elite who saw it could tell in
an instant) attempts to equate the video with ‘The worst poem ever
written.’ He then satisfies himself by settling on the conclusion that
this is the only reason why people might like it. The final analysis is
that it’s not only ‘not good,’ and not even ‘pretty bad,’ but so
incredibly bad, that it is in fact, good. He gets in a snobbish comment
about the Bible for good measure. Comment #153061

This is not to say that atheist don’t
get parody since a lot of religious people also can be rather dense
when it comes to parody and totally missing the point.  Though
it is
rather ironic for people who describe themselves as brights somehow can
totally miss the point and take something much to seriously.

What I do really appreciate after looking
at some of the comments made over at P.Z. Myers blog is that I am
really happy that blogging didn’t exist when I was still an atheist.
 The advent of blogging developed during the time that I was
not yet in the Church, though moving towards it.  I am quite
glad that all the dumb things I likely would have said and my zero
understanding of philosophy is not recorded on a hard drive somewhere for
all eternity. I would no doubt have been a troll on religious blogs
mocking them for following their hunter-gatherer base religion and
flouting my own superiority.  As someone who is a hard SF geek
and who has followed science from a young age and has always been
fascinated by the sciences I can quite understand the attitude of the new
atheists and their followers.  “There but by the grace of God
go I” – yes I am pulling the grace card.  I still love the
sciences, the only difference is that I have gotten to know their
author.

MANASSAS, VA, July 31, 2008 (CNSweb) –
Articles about end-of-life ethics by two college professors, including
a bioethics professor at Loyola University of Chicago, have prompted a
rare public correction by the leading American bishops responsible for
pro-life activities and Catholic doctrine.

Cardinal Justin Rigali, Archbishop of Philadelphia and chairman of the
Committee on Pro-Life Activities of the U.S. Conference of Catholic
Bishops (USCCB), and Bishop William E. Lori of Bridgeport, Conn.,
chairman of the USCCB Committee on Doctrine, raise their concerns in
the August 4 issue of the Jesuits’ America magazine.

The bishops write that two previous America articles by John Hardt,
assistant professor of bioethics at Loyola University of Chicago’s
Stritch School of Medicine, and Thomas Shannon, emeritus professor of
religion and social ethics at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, “appear
to misunderstand and subsequently misrepresent the substance of Church
teaching on these difficult but important ethical questions” about “our
moral obligations to patients who exist in what has come to be called a
‘persistent vegetative state.'”

Both professors argue for exceptions to Church teaching, thereby
allowing the removal of a feeding tube and hydration from such patients.

In his January article, Hardt cites a 2007 statement by the Vatican
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), which teaches that
artificial nutrition and hydration may be withheld from a patient when
“in some rare cases” the treatment “may become excessively
burdensome.”  Using the example of his father, who has asked
not to receive artificial hydration and nutrition should he enter a
vegetative state, Hardt writes, “[M]y father has judged that the burden
of persisting in a vegetative state far outweighs the benefit of being
sustained that way.  This, in my view, is a very Catholic way
of thinking….”

Cardinal Rigali and Bishop Lori respond that Hardt wrongly defines
excessive burden as “a simple dislike for survival in a helpless
state.”  In fact, the bishops write, “that claim has no
foundation in the text [and] is actually contradicted” by the CDF.
…

Glad they reacted to this since these
type of article certainly must be addressed especially in a magazine
put out by a religious order whose founder’s Feast Day is today.