full of the joys of schadenfreude

it's funny what can cheer you up isn't it? i mean, there are so many wonderful, heartening, warm-glow inducing things in the world: the news that your friend's long awaited baby has arrived, being given an extra couple of slices of chorizo by the cheery lady who made your lunchtime sandwich, an amusing anecdote in David Niven's autobiography. any of these things could be enough to stop you feeling sorry for yourself and remind you of the quixotic joy of life here on earth.

so, it is a sad reflection of the depths my black, heathen, smug-bastard soul has sunk to, that it was none of these things that made stop my self-absorbed strop.

it was Richard Dawkins being rude to creationists.

70 life-enhancing minutes of it. priceless. via the Guardian



as bill hicks would say, sit down and strap in.

you can see talk he actually gave here but that's just a boring mix of rational philosophy and science. nowhere near as fun as watching as his responses become terser and terser till he can eventually stand it no more and transmogrifies into a giant, raging, axe-wielding yeti and slaughters half of lynchburg in a bewildering orgy of atheistic destruction.

fantastic.

i was further gladdened by the cursory research i did into Liberty University, the source of all these imaginary-friend sharing lunatics. check out their statement of purpose. aside from some jolly reasonable stuff about contributing to a knowledge and understanding of other cultures, it contains this gem:

2. Promote an understanding of the Western tradition and the diverse elements of American cultural history, especially the importance of the individual in maintaining democratic and free market processes.

yeah, i remember Jesus being really hot on the free-market.

Matthew 12 vs 34: "Jesus sat down with the temple money changers and discussed the possibility of increasing their margin by introducing a traded exchange for sacrificial currency and perhaps diversifying their portfolio to include sacrificial property."

this venerable institution was setup by none other than Jerry Falwell, baptist bible-thumper extraordinaire. after the September 11 attacks he came out with the now classic, "I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say 'you helped this happen."

thanks jerry. we are feeling the love.

one of the other purposes of this bastion of educational rigour has been to provide academic justification for intelligent design. and they even have some "3000 year old" dinosaur (or as they call them: dragon) fossils dug up by this joker to help prove their point. to give you an idea of the strength of his argument, here's a sample quote:

"There is just no way that the theory of evolution can be reconciled with the truth of creation as recorded in the Bible."

well that's that dealt with then.

so yes, i'm a lot happier now. there's nothing like a load of intelligent, educated people spending millions of pounds, willfully disregarding logic and the accumulated knowledge of the panoply of human scientific endeavour in order to create a scientific basis for a bronze age creation myth they had the dumb luck to be brought up believing, having the piss ripped out of them to put a smile on my face.

hurrah!

now coffee...