Take It Away, PZ!

It's late and there's nothing in particular gnawing at my raging spleen so I thought I'd leave you with the words of a much wiser man than I.

The following is the first 50% of an article by PZ Myers, a man of rigorous science and of Pharyngula fame. As, as of September 17, he's been honored as one of the nation's most influential college professors by Playboy Magazine. Congrats, PZ!

The balance of the story can be found at the link following this excerpt.

=Lefty=


Sunday Sacrilege: A funeral for folly

I will not respect a book of lies. I will not tolerate intolerance.

Lately, there has been considerable angst and fury over a bad book, the Koran. Terry Jones, a fundamentalist lackwit, gets called out by the American president, not for being a professional fool taking advantage of our lax laws that encourage the promulgation of religious inanity, but for being insufficiently sensitive and deferential to another gang of fools promoting a different brand of religious idiocy. Then six British racists got arrested, not for real crimes against their neighbors of a different ethnicity, but, again, for the sin of disrespect for a holy book. In both of these acts, the culprits are people for whom I have no respect, who I would not normally support, but they are guilty of 'crimes' that are not crimes. What we are witnessing are efforts by authorities to confer special secular and legal privilege on the intangible aura of sacredness — a figment of the imagination of deluded believers, which they insist all we non-believers must honor.
I refuse.

The insistence by the faithful that we all must treat their precioussses as magical and inviolable has convinced me to re-evaluate the books on my shelves, and I've decided that no, they aren't worth keeping. These holy books have been influential, that's for sure, but it's been a pernicious kind of importance — that we hold these awful, terrible, ridiculous books aloft as the guiding ancient wisdom of our civilization doesn't so much exalt the books as it demeans our culture. It is an unfortunate fact of human nature that if our forefathers had used a badly written fantasy novel like The Eye of Argon or The Book of Mormon to justify the existence of our tribe, people would be battling to silence the obvious and deserved criticisms of the sacred writ, instead of looking at them objectively and noticing that they are inexcusable bunkum. And then, of course, we secular, rational people would defend keeping them on our shelves because they were precious to others, because they shaped our history, because they are part of our culture.

(Story continues here.)