Austria gives us yet another tolerance problem

By Dan Brooks in Christianism 4 Comments

Niko Alm's weirdo European driver's license

Fun fact: in Austria, you are prohibited from wearing a hat or other headgear in your driver’s license photo unless you are doing so for religious purposes. This policy holds to Austria’s motto, We Promise Never To Be Dicks About Yarmulkes Again, but it also creates an interesting dynamic. We can all agree that a decent society does not prohibit individual religious expression. In the case of the Austrian driver’s license hat, though, all forms of individual expression are prohibited except the religious. It seems we are headed toward that donnybrook of liberal democracies, the scenario in which everyone is treated equally but some people get treated especially equally. Enter Niko Alm: Austrian, atheist, insists on wearing a pasta strainer on his head.

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Meanwhile, inside Michele Bachmann’s head

By Dan Brooks in inside Michele Bachmann's head 5 Comments

"The pancake is neither a pan nor a cake. Ergo..."

 

Part of the problem inherent in measuring an extradimensional space from which neither light nor reason can escape is how to determine scale. Obviously, the inside of Michele Bachmann’s head is larger than some gravitational manifolds and smaller than others. Is it smaller than the Horsehead Nebula? Probably, because I can’t see it right now. Is it bigger than a singularity? Yes, because her eye makeup isn’t getting sucked in through her pupils. Between these poles, though, little was known until last week, when Michael Zimmerman PhD informed us via the Huffington Post that a high school student is successfully refuting one of Mmm-Bach’s most infuriating claims. From October, 2006:

There is a controversy among scientists about whether evolution is a fact … hundreds and hundreds of scientists, many of them holding Nobel prizes, believe in intelligent design.

Shocking, right? If hundreds of Nobel laureates believe in intelligent design, maybe it’s not the church-organized attack on the knowledge of schoolchildren I thought it was. Of course, Bachmann will just say shit. Whereas Zack Kopplin is a high school senior and therefore has to back his claims with evidence. In gathering support from scientists, he has provided science with some valuable information of its own. It turns out that the inside of Michele Bachmann’s head accommodates less information than that of a 17 year-old in Louisiana.

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Dept. of Inevitability: Critics of evolution take on global warming

By Dan Brooks in Christianism 2 Comments

Personally, I think it's a sin to draw the flying spaghetti monster, but I already took high school biology so I'm damned anyway.

Remember in junior high, when the kid who was getting into shoplifting and the kid who broke windows on cars inexorably drifted toward each other? Well, they’re both born-again Christians now, and despite their apparent differences they’ve still got something in common: their complete rejection of modern science. Oh yeah—they’re also united by their complete ignorance of modern science, but ignorance never stopped a concerned American from influencing his local school board. The Times reports that opponents of teaching evolution in schools have expanded their opposition to include global warming, in part because courts have found that to attack only the science of evolution violates the separation of church and state. See? God never closes a door without opening a window, which had previously protected us from the 140-degree supersaturated vaporsphere.

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