I was unable to fix the other comment because in the fantasy world it was written words mean the opposite of what you expect. (i.e. – free thinker = someone who must abide by a 2000 year old book of mythology and is not free to make up their own mind).

I was an English major… :(

Dru, um, no one is angry. I mean, I’m a bit annoyed because the one day early thing meant I couldn’t have fun getting a copy for myself (since I wasn’t at one of the targeted universities). There is a general anger among many skeptics about the creationist movement. That is because people like Ray lie repeatedly and are impervious to reason. Heck, he couldn’t even tell the truth about when he was going to distribute his modified book.

This is a general pattern. Yes, it gets people upset. It has nothing to do with creationists in particular though. The major proponents of many pseudoscientific belief systems act this way. The anti-vaccination groups and homeopathy proponents both act this way for example. Moreover, it is all the more irritating because the major proponents rake in the cash bilking the innocent who don’t know better.

But there’s really no specific anger. Sure some people might be angry, but you can always find angry people. It seems pretty clear that among the general skeptical community the response to this has been far more amusement than anger.

I’m incidentally amused by someone trying to claim they are a free thinker when your ministry’s blog doesn’t allow comments. Yep, that’s a real dedication to open and honest debate. I thought that maybe you didn’t because you had such a high traffic website that you didn’t want the hassle to deal with spam or inappropriate comments. But then I saw your your stat counter [link] and you seem to get fewer daily hits than my blog. I’m pretty sure I don’t make the D-list of bloggers. So that’s not the reason. If you are going to make a claim about being “free thinking” it might help to minimally pretend to do so.

I mean, really… was MIT the /best/ place to be handing these books out. This is a science school…

But, no, you guys ran from that like the intellectual cowards you are. If you want to call that a victory, go ahead, but it’s still cowardice.

Here’s my question for you — I won’t bother calling your show, because I know that standard procedure for you people is to block critics from being heard, just like every ID and creationist blog on the internet — how many of those 170,000 copies got dumped and abandoned in public spaces rather than actually handed out?