Background Probability

The Agnostic Popular Front has moved to its new home at Skeptic Ink, and will henceforth be known as Background Probability. Despite the relocation and rebranding, we will continue to spew the same low-fidelity high-quality bullshit that you've come to expect.

Monday, July 20, 2009

The BM grunts out steaming pile of journalism

Sally Kern drafts a proclamation which looks official, uses the tone and style of official legislative resolutions, and then hostesses a massive public ceremony in the heart of the legislative building, at which she invited fellow lawmakers to sign on to her theocratic agenda. Sally did everything possible to create the impression of official imprimatur, without actually going through the process to sponsor an official resolution, as she very well could have done.

Leave it to the Baptist Messenger to top Kern's (relatively subtle) attempts at melding church and state via public relations sleight-of-hand, by photoshopping official state seals and signatures onto the bottom of the document. One wonders whether the phrase "bearing false witness" ought to have any bearing on the journalistic ethics of a denominational organ.

Ah, well. I ought to have known not to expect better from the theocratic camp which inspired such efforts as Liars for Jesus, a book which I heartily recommend.

2 comments:

Rhology said...

1) Yes, and atheists have never done anything foolish or stupid that has embarrassed other atheists. Sam Harris never wrote "Letter to a Christian Nation", for example.

2) And all sarcasm aside, what the Messenger did is unbelievably ridiculously stupidly counterproductively dumb. I am dumbfounded at them.

Damion said...

Two things:

1) I don't think Sam Harris officially represents the views of an entire denomination, or whatever the atheist equivalent might be.

2) He never fabricated evidence so as to create a false impression in the minds of his readers.