Damned if you do, damned if you don't

I have mixed feelings about Pharyngula. Lots of nifty science, but Myers' attitude towards religion irritates me more than a little. Sunday, he posted this:

I'm afraid the kooks and RaptureReady folks and Left Behind fans and Christian Reconstructionists and Dispensationalists and Bible Belt prudes are the face of American Christianity. Don't complain to me: it's the Christians who ought to be deeply, shamefully embarrassed about this…but as usual, I expect they'll find it easier to complain about those damned godless people who dare to hold up a mirror.

In comments below, he expanded on that:

As I said, I know all Christians aren't like that...but it is simply the case that your religion has acquired a serious PR problem. And I am going to be mean and tell you that the moderate, sensible, rational Christians who have let this go on should bear a good part of the blame.

And then today, referring to the Archbishop of Canterbury's recent support of evolution, he said:

On the one hand, it's good to have a religious authority figure coming down on the side of sense. I applaud the sentiment of his statements, and hope they have some positive influence. On the other hand, I don't give a flying firkin what the Archbishop of Canterbury thinks, and would question his authority to even make such a pronouncement.

This is exactly what I was talking about a few weeks back. If you don't want people to bring religion into the public discourse on creationism/sexual freedom/whatever, don't complain about the religious moderates just because they're not bringing religion into it. You can argue that religion should keep out of these debates, you can argue that moderates ought to leap into these debates to answer their extremist coreligionists, but arguing both at once is kinda inconsistent.

Kill Without Sense

Every so often, somebody pops up on little_details to ask "how does a hitman work?" And inevitably, somebody else pops up and plugs a book called 'Kill Without Joy', although it hasn't happened so much lately; I like to think that this has something with my efforts to discourage this via severe beatingslucid counterargument.

KWoJ, written by John Minnery, was published by Paladin Press in 1973. (For those who've never heard the name, they're a small press who publish how-tos on a wide range of topics, including some concerned with illegal activities. 'Informational/self-defence purposes only' and all that.) There's a large chunk of it, if not the whole thing, available online here.

The content falls into two parts. The first is concerned with mundane methods of murder - guns, knives, what-have-you. I'm no expert on such topics, but AFAICT, this section is moderately reasonable. Not terribly well written, and somewhat padded with philosophy, but you could certainly kill somebody with this stuff.

The second is concerned with more exotic techniques, and this is where the crack-smoking commences. I'm not sure whether this was the author's fault, or whether the publisher told him to sex it up a bit, but either way it's frickin' hilarious. Excerpts below the cut, spelling as I found it:

( Somewhat gruesome. )