Friday February 04, 2011

IN WHICH GALILEO PERSECUTES THE POPE. Long piece at National Review today by Discovery Institute-Intelligent Design-woo woo crackers guy David Klinghoffer about how science is persecuting Christians. Some of Klinghoffer's renderings of the Jesus people's ordeals at the hands of scientist-inquisitors are in conflict with those of other sources -- for example, he says Guillermo Gonzalez "was refused tenure, despite a spectacular research publication record, because of a book he co-authored arguing that life is no cosmic accident," but Wikipedia indicates that a.) no, he wasn't, b.) some critics found Gonzalez's pub record less than spectacular, and c.) the Discovery Institute has been working long and hard at a self-publicity campaign based on Gonzalez's case, in the course of which they have not been entirely scrupulous with the facts.

I feel about this the way I usually do when the sons and daughters of the Inquisition weep that they have been denied their First Amendment rights by schoolteachers. I also see that one of Klinghoffer's implied remedies is to defund the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health so that they can no longer feed a "universal compulsion to conform" with their corrupting research grants. Then, presumably, churches and corporations will take up the slack, and force those atheistic scientists to get working on better boner pills and the greater glory of God, as they should be.

The punchline comes from one of the many crybabies in the comments section:

Looks it's all a matter of who has political power, nothing else. Islam has it in droves and Christianity does not.

There actually are people in America who think Islam runs the country while Christianity cowers in alleys, yet have not been committed to asylums -- which is a good thing, as the Discovery Institute would make a persecution protest out of that, too.

UPDATE. Thanks, Tom M, for spelling help.