VERSION|0.5.1|NAME|Tesh|DATE|1378929478|CONTENT|Off topic. Want to start with a huge thank you to all who sent so many references to great but ‘unknown’ scientific an d mathematical women.  I couldn’t get back to this yesterday.  Sorry.  I will track them down.  I’ve encountered many scientists, male and female of whom I previously knew nothing,   just by listening to “The Life Scientific” which I love.  Every programme in the series smashes the lunatic picture of scientific ‘value-absent’  ‘hubris’ which so many of the ‘religious’  hold.   These kind of people never get on TftD do they unless they hold an explicit religious flag as well like the Templeton lot? 
I think someone of the presumed academic status of Banner should have been able to point out that the same words are used  to convey totally different meanings to different groups of people – telling girl babies to follow the Lord and not the Devil -  or whatever the baptismal service says-  for centuries meant little more than,  “Be  a virgin, preferably all your life like all those ghastly female saints,  but if you can’t then at least until you get married,  and then be meek mild and obedient and produce lots of babies for us.  Don’t bother with education, it’s a waste of time for little fluffy-heads like you” .  It has never meant that for boy babies. I’ve had quite a soft spot for Mary Kingsley –who took herself off to Africa  and wrote about  it – turns out she had nursed both her parents while  brothers of course went to university but which she of course wouldn’t need.  She was thirty when the parents died, had had no kind of life outside the  stifling role of home,  no formal education but had taught herself a great deal -   So off she went in her crinoline skirts to Africa.  Good for her. 
REV Peter -  I miss you desperately: I can do the serious and the angry and sometimes the reflective and sometimes the tolerant  - but I can’t do the wonderfully funny and the parody. I felt quite a sharp pain for you and me and us when you said the site had become ‘more popular’.   Not so. You never told me whether you tracked down  and acquired– The Portable Atheist, [ed: Christopher Hitchens].  That’s  the kind of stuff I was never introduced to when younger either.  I had no idea that Mark Twain wrote essays like that.  Knew about John Stuart Mill – but not that chapter [2] on his father.  Still  love the image that no naturalist would dare begin to describe a black beetle with the confidence that theologians at that time talked of God – and the whole way that Leslie Stephen unpacks who really is  arrogant!  this book should be put in every hotel along with the Gideon Bible! [Do they still do that?]
Thanks to a discussion on this site long ago I bought Alan Sokal’s “Beyond the Hoax”.   [That hoax!] So thank you all those  who inadvertently led me to that!  Part 1 deals with the hoax [of all time?!] but I really enjoyed his later essays of Part 3 as well. 
sorry, I&#039;m too tired to make this shorter! 
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