Professor Paul Mirecki’s outrageous statements about evolution, intelligent design and religion shine a light on why he wants to teach this class right now. It isn’t just his comments on intelligent design that have got him in hot water, but his calous and nasty comments over the years about religon in general, such as referring to the Pope as “a corpse in a funny hat wearing a dress.” Read more at Evolution News & Views, www.evolutionnews.org.

My old college town paper, the Lawrence Journal-World, reports that two new classes at the University of Kansas will work to discredit the theory of intelligent design. One class, taught by religion professor Paul Mirecki, chairman of KU’s religious studies department, was initially titled Special Topics in Religion: Intelligent Design, Creationism and Other Religious Mythologies. In an e-mail to an atheist listserv, Mirecki wrote: “The fundies [fundamentalists] want it all taught in a science class, but this will be a nice slap in their big fat face by teaching it as a religious studies class under the category mythology.” Mirecki later apologized for the e-mail, noting that he didn’t intend for the e-mail to end up in the public square.Meanwhile,

CNN strikes again, delivering a completely biased story about the debate over intelligent desgin. In their treatment of Dr. Behe, CNN’s editors used short quotes from Dr. Behe interspersed with factually inaccurate voiceovers to mislead viewers about Dr. Behe’s views on intelligent design. Rather than let Dr. Behe in his own words define intelligent design, and his work related to it, CNN correspondent Delia Gallegher puts words in his mouth wrongly stating: “Michael Behe is a major player behind intelligent design, the movement that’s trying to bring the supernatural into science.”