The Daily Bluster

Below is the text of Dr. Richard Dawkins' speech at the Reason Rally held last March 24 in Washington D.C.   What a magnificent, inspiring sight! I was expecting great things even in fine weather. In the rain -- look at this: This is the most incredible sight I can remember ever seeing. The sharper, critical thinkers among you may have discerned that I don't come from these parts. I see myself as an emissary from a benighted country that does not have a constitutional separation between church and state. Indeed it doesn't have a written constitution at all. We have a head of state who's also the head of the Church of England. The church is deeply entwined in British public life. The American Constitution is a precious treasure, the envy of the world. The First Amendment of the Constitution, which enshrines the separation between church and state, is the model for secular constitutions the world over and deserves to be imitated the world over. How sad it wo...

Probably one of the most pointless and depressing activities one could do in this day and age is read the comments section on Yahoo. Or participate in an Internet forum debate about politics and religion. Which, to my eternal regret, I did, these past few months. So what did I learn from reading all those caps-locked posts, ad hominems, straw man arguments, and other fallacies that I didn’t even know existed? Absolutely nothing, except that I realized that there is something fundamentally wrong with this country’s educational system. Yes, random strangers hiding behind stupid user names, your posts are a scathing indictment of how rotten our state of education is.  Either that, or majority of humans are just naturally idiot scumbags. Easier to blame education (or the lack of it), I think. I wish I could take back all those hours reading those posts, and trying to explain to faceless strangers that no, evolution does not say that we evolve from monkeys, and that the exi...