“Will Obama greet Muslims on Capitol Hill?”

So asks OneNewsNow.com in its usual breathless, mindless way.

Those, poor, spurned Christians. When was the National Day of Prayer, anyway? And why the fuck do we have such a thing? Why not have a “watch out for black cats” day, and a “be especially careful not to walk under any ladders” day as well?

A political activist and former GOP presidential candidate says he wonders whether President Barack Obama — who essentially spurned Christians on the National Day of Prayer — will give a special greeting to a Muslim gathering scheduled later this month on Capitol Hill.

Bauer says unlike coverage of most Christian venues, the mainstream media coverage of the upcoming Muslim gathering has been very positive and supportive.

If you don’t know who Gary Bauer is, by the way, this tells you about all you need to know.

As if resorting to touting Bauer as an authority were not sufficient to reaffirm the worthlessness of OneNewsNow.com, enter Ray Comfort. Anyone familiar with Comfort is aware that he is a livid joke. This is a man who uses the banana as an example of “evidence” for intelligent design because it fits neatly into a human hand, kind of like an erect penis or the entirety of Comfort’s cerebrum.

Best-selling author and evangelist Ray Comfort hopes to give away tens of thousands of copies of a special edition of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species at colleges nationwide.

The book giveaway is set to coincide with the 150th anniversary of the book’s publication.

Note that Charles Darwin never published a book titled The Origin of Species (Christopaths routinely fuck this up) and that “an introduction which poke holes” is a construct most sixth-graders would immediately identify as wrong.

Finally, less than an hour ago, a blithering bitch named Maggie Gallagher, the president of the National Organization for Marriage, told attendees of a “values voters” summit hosted by the Family Research Council and broadcast by C-SPAN that defenders of “traditional marriage” had weathered storms of “hate” from Proposition 8 proponents after the measure was shot down. She said this with a straight face. This woman (and it would be gratuitous to point out that she is as physically repulsive as she is disgusting in general) is genuinely unaware of the amazing hypocrisy inherent in fighting against the right of same-sex couples to marry (something that cannot possibly affect anyone outside such an arrangement) and labeling others “hateful.”

That was only a warm-up, because afterward, Carrie Prejean, the hyperbimbotic twuntlike hominid who held the title of Miss America runner-up until she was relieved of this status owing to a failure to stop talking out of her stinkhole, assumed the dais and for the next ten minutes talked solely about herself and God’s plan for her, which apparently consists exclusively of beauty pageants and agitating against the freedoms of others. Naturally, she complained of being “attacked” for her views a sine qua non of Godheads and dirtbags in general. A more vapid individual you will never see.

The shit keeps flowing. Time for a run.

New Jersey is not exactly a “deep red” state, right? So I was a little surprised by the results of this poll. Among conservatives, 18 percent think that President Obama is the Anti-Christ and another 17 percent are just “not sure”. Thus, over one-third of New Jersey conservatives believe that Obama either is or could be the Anti-Christ.

I am appalled by this on a number of levels.

On the Rachel Maddow show last night, Frank Schaeffer, author of Crazy for God, had a spot-on comment, liking this group to “the village idiot” and stating that we cannot necessarily convince them of their error, but need to move past them:  “A village cannot reorganize village life in order to suit the village idiot”.

on this blog. Usually one or two of us retreats into a cocoon for a spell for various benign reasons, but the last month has seen a combined, unplanned hiatus. For my part I had a laptop stolen and have been scrambling to keep the orts of my life in order ever since (replacing it has been a fiasco, but that’s a long, boring, and profanity-laced story). SO I’ve been neglecting this place, but at least I weaned myself off Facebook and the Concord Monitor site in the process of losing much of my online access.

Anyway, recent days have seen American stupidity move from its terminally gibbous phase into the full–I daresay full-frontal–version. Two stories in particular have tweaked my balls: the teabagger nonsense in D.C. yesterday and the failure of the film Creation to find a U.S. distributor. More to get some content up here for a change than anything else, I’ll paste some scattershot thoughts I’ve expressed on message boards relating to these calamitous phenomena. Read the rest of this entry »

For me, Creation, a much anticipated movie about Charles and Emma Darwin (based on Annie’s Box: Charles Darwin, his Daughter, and Human Evolution by Randal Keynes, Darwin’s great-great grandson) is — or rather was — a must-see flick. It premiered this weekend at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Paul Bettany is cast as Darwin. Bettany is a versatile actor whose performances have always impressed me, e.g., his roles as Dr. Stephen Maturin in Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World and John Nash’s imaginary friend in A Beautiful Mind (John Nash cinematic fan fiction at its most “interpretative”) among many. Jennifer Connelly (Bettany’s wife) — a lovely actress (Pollock, House of Sand and Fog, and A Beautiful Mind) is cast as Emma.

Darwin the man (as well as Darwin the naturalist) has long intrigued me. A few years ago, the American Museum of Natural History in NYC (where my great-great uncle[1] — a paleontologist — had been a curator for a time) had a special exhibit of Darwin’s collections and notes, including a replica of his study. I took my kids to see it on February 12 — Darwin’s birthday a.k.a. “Darwin Day.” To see the notes that he had written with his own hand was marvelous and truly sent shivers down my spine.

And my favorite passage from The Origin of Species:

Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely. the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

That is poetry.

Olivia Judson wrote a wonderful essay on Creation in her blogThe Wild Side, hosted by the New York Times. Judson’s eloquent essay further reinforced my desire to see the flick.

So yesterday afternoon, when my spawn and I were on our way to see Ponyo (a feast for the eyes: gorgeous color and images, all dream-like with those delightful characters and weird touches I have come to expect from Hiyao Miyazaki), we talked about the upcoming Creation film with no little excitement. However, my 18 year old daughter wondered aloud if the film would be released in all markets in the United States.

Prophetic pondering that. Today, Co-Chimp Kevin sent the link to this article from the Daily Telegraph:

Charles Darwin film ‘too controversial’ for religious America.

Excerpts from the article by Anita Singh:

However, US distributors have resolutely passed on a film which will prove hugely divisive in a country where, according to a Gallup poll conducted in February, only 39 per cent of Americans believe in the theory of evolution.

And…

Jeremy Thomas, the Oscar-winning producer of Creation, said he was astonished that such attitudes exist 150 years after On The Origin of Species was published.

“That’s what we’re up against. In 2009. It’s amazing,” he said.

“The film has no distributor in America. It has got a deal everywhere else in the world but in the US, and it’s because of what the film is about. People have been saying this is the best film they’ve seen all year, yet nobody in the US has picked it up.

“It is unbelievable to us that this is still a really hot potato in America. There’s still a great belief that He made the world in six days. It’s quite difficult for we in the UK to imagine religion in America. We live in a country which is no longer so religious. But in the US, outside of New York and LA, religion rules.

“Charles Darwin is, I suppose, the hero of the film. But we tried to make the film in a very even-handed way. Darwin wasn’t saying ‘kill all religion’, he never said such a thing, but he is a totem for people.”

Unbelievable indeed.

When I was growing up, I was a member of the United Methodist Church. My favorite minister was “Reverend Mac,” a gifted speaker and a scholarly man (almost rabbinical!) who was also the substitute science teacher at my public high school. He embraced the theory of evolution and the entire concept of a universe that is billions of years old. As one of the Faithful, he did not see such concepts as incompatible with an Abrahamic God. In his mind, these added to the mystery and glory of God rather than negating the idea. He even brought beautiful scientific imagery into his sermons — for example that laws of physics that govern an atom’s motion and that of a galaxy.

So that is what I grew up with as well as a household where evolution was considered fact. That is what I thought was theologically “normal.” Many of my Roman Catholic pals were taught much the same way. In essence, we (as kids) were already experiencing what the late Stephen Jay Gould called “separate magisteria,” that is Faith and Science in parallel — not overlapping but co-existing.

Now, as an atheist, I respect the beliefs of the Rational Faithful — like Rev. Mac and many others I know for whom science poses no difficulty in their faith in God and who honor the concept of non-overlapping magisteria — even if I have no need for belief in the supernatural. Again, I (naively) tend to think that is what most believers are like.

Apparently that is not the case in the United States.

The lack of balls on the part of US distributors is appalling. I had anticipated the possibility of limited distribution, that is, the film would not make it to markets in certain areas of the country, but I fully expected it would show in venues like the Angelika in NYC or the Garden Theater here in Princeton or the Kendall in Cambridge among many of the independent US theaters in the Northeast, the West Coast and certain areas of the Midwest. Maybe in Houston, too. But not distributed AT ALL!? Does the Christian Right have that much power in this country such that US film distributors cave into their lunacy? That smacks of an especially horrific censorship.

Yet Mel Gibson’s bloody Passion of the Christ was A-OK.

Here’s a trailer for Creation. Enjoy it. It may be the only bits we idiot Americans will get to see.

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[1] My great-great uncle was told to resign from the faculty of Butler University because he embraced Darwin’s theory. He went on to work at the AMNH in NYC and the Carnegie Institute in Washington DC. He published a number of monographs on the vertebrate paleofaunas of North America, and a big tome (800+ pages) on fossil vertebrates of North America and the Pleistocene of North America.