School Boots Boy Over Jesus Costume



( Principal says costume was offensive and disrupted education process )

( Mum thinks her son's freedom of expression was violated )

( And now the commenters have a wing at it! Osama bin laden, Mohammed, murderers, ghosts, and prostitutes included! )

Needless to say Jesus was resurrected later on Halloween night to go trick or treating. Whoot!

Who's in the mood for a good ol' academic tussle?

1. Professor Steve Fuller writes a book called Dissent over Descent: Intelligent Design's Challenge to Darwinism.

2. Professor AC Grayling reviews the book for New Humanist magazine.

It is sometimes hard to know whether books that strike one as silly and irresponsible...are the product of a desire to strike a pose and appear outrageous (the John Gray syndrome), or really do represent that cancer of the contemporary intellect, post-modernism.

3. Fuller responds to the review.

I wish I could repay AC Grayling’s compliment by naming an exotic mental pathology after him, but regrettably his review of Dissent over Descent displays disorders of a much more mundane kind: he has merely failed to read the book properly and does not know what he is talking about.

4. Grayling responds to the response.

Steve Fuller complains, as do all authors whose books are panned, that I did not read his book properly (or at all). Alas, I did.

5. Forum fight!

Okay, so someone links to a relatively cute article about the Top Ten Myths About Dinos on a science forum. (Myth 1, Dinosaurs coexisted with humans, Myth 7, Dinosaurs were slow and sluggish animals, etc.) Right off the bat, someone starts in on 'evangelicals' probably not accepting #1, thus sending out some sort of subsonic signal across the internet for everyone with a bible and black helicopter fetish to show up and proclaim they are really the sane ones, really truly.

jteamjohn kicks off the WTFery with, Why don't you try to understand if what "evangelicals" believe may be true since almost anything we know about what happen to the dinosuars is myth or unexplainabe. I believe in my heart that dinos and man where here together. It is because of evidence that I have studied leads me to this belief. I believe man saw dinos becasue one of them wrote about them, Job.

Aaand they're off.

Is the Bible a peer-reviewed document?
Didn't I see cave drawings of 'dinasaurs' and man together?
Um, carbon dating is like guessing and therefore science is faith-based so haha, suck it, scientists*!
Did you know hippos don't have tails that look like trees? That means the Bible mentioned dinosaurs!
Dinosaurs and people lived together in a vegetarian utopia but I await your ignorant responses**!
You know, if I put what you "believe" in "quotes," it makes me look more "right."
Well, I was taught about Pluto, but now there's no planet Pluto, so science must have erased it!

And that's just page one and two. It goes on to name-calling, off-kilter assumptions about people of faith, a random quote by Pliny about Vesuvius from out of nowhere, and...

*screeches to a halt*

Dinosaurs could breathe... flame? Really? On page 3:

The fermenting plants in the stomach of the Parasaurolophus produced a combustible gas that ignited when the dinosaur channeled it through it's headcrest and out it's nostrils, as a defensive weapon. The Parasaurolophus was a "fire breathing dragon."

....Yes. Dinosaurs? Totes breathed flame. Don't believe him? Just look at the dinosaur's head and diet! It's obvious.

It goes on for quite a bit longer, but once I got to fire-breathing parasaurs, I knew I had to share.

*Some statements may be wildly paraphrased to make them funnier.
**That one was, um, not.