Tag Archives: Mr Gumby

An unusual anti-global warming advertisement

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From here:

“Charles Manson Still Believes in Global Warming. Do You?”
That’s the essence of a thoughtful and nuanced new billboard campaign put together by the Heartland Institute, the nation’s top climate change-doubting think tank. The billboards feature portraits of figures like Ted Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber, Charles Manson, and Fidel Castro, alongside giant lettering that reads “I Still Believe in Global Warming. Do You?”

If I had designed the ad, it would have been much more subtle. Something like this:

The Templeton Prize

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The Templeton prize is supposed to honour someone who:

has made an exceptional contribution to affirming life’s spiritual dimension, whether through insight, discovery, or practical works.

This year, the winner was Martin Rees, an astrophysicist at Cambridge University who “has no religious beliefs”, but occasionally attends Church of England Sunday worship – where he fits right in.

It might be possible for this to be more mixed up, but so far we have Rees who doesn’t believe in God, but attends an Anglican Church sporadically, winning a prize for making an “exceptional contribution to affirming life’s spiritual dimension”.

But wait, there’s more: real atheists like Richard Dawkins reckon he’s let the side down by “blur[ring] the boundary between science and religion, making a virtue of belief without evidence”. Meanwhile, Dawkins continues to believe, without evidence*, that the excogitations of the grey soup beneath his thinning curly locks are of a weightier substance than Mr Gumby’s flower arranging instructions.

* J. B. S. Haldane: “If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true…. and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms”