Did you smell the brimstone in Toronto on Friday night? Probably not, over the ineptitude of Toronto City Hall in dealing with the garbage strike. The city reeks, so you’d never notice the stench of hate and misogyny that swept through on Friday.

Everyone’s favorite “progressive” blogger, Canadian Cynic - AKA Robert PJ Day - came to town to talk intelligent design, creationism and evolution at the Centre for Inquiry on Beverly Street.

Someone taped the show last night - not sure who - but Robert didn’t much care for the free publicity. Whatever his reasons for wanting to suddenly stay private, he wound up chasing a guy with a camera halfway down the street back from O’Grady’s pub to tell the guy not to post the footage. Maybe he’s Amish at heart, and doesn’t want his image captured. Whatever his reasons, he muttered something about “not what I signed up for, no videos…”

Robert Day spent much of his two hour speaking engagement reliving past glories, in a debate he had with a creationist back in 1990 - almost 20 years ago.

He was astonishingly polite with the crowd, but then again, it was his turf. He had no reason to feel uncomfortable or intimidated in a roomful of his friends and fellow travelers. In fact, the extent of his profanity was far less than you’ll find here at Girl on the Right - “douchebag”. Of course, he has been much toned down the past couple of weeks.

At one point he did get a little testy, when an audience member came right out and called him a liar regarding the case of Abousfian Abdelrazik (though what the subject has to do with evolution, I do not know, unless it was the Evolution of Robert Day).  Day was talking about how the Harper government didn’t want the Sudanese-Canadian back in the country. The audience member reminded him that Paul Martin’s government had also refused Abdelrazik’s return. Day snapped back that he wasn’t “talking about the Martin government, I’m talking about the current government!”

He spent a good deal of time recounting a debate he had with a former VP of the Christian Science Association of Canada, Ian Taylor. In his talk last night he mocked Taylor a fair bit, and talked about how “scientists” rarely won against “creationists”, because the “scientists” tried to be fair and polite. Ahem. While not a scientist himself, Robert Day has clearly made a name for himself by being neither. No one could ever, ever accuse Robert Day of being too nice. Is he fighting the creationists with their own rules of warfare? Perhaps, but I can promise you I’ve never been called a cunt or a douchebag by a creationist.

Amusingly, and on the same point, he says he can’t understand why people get so upset at him for being rude. He said it would be worse to be called a liar than to be called rude. Hmmm… no wonder he got to touchy about the Martin/Harper double standard!

Amusingly, mere hours before his rock star appearance here in the sleazy city, I had read this article by Jason Calacanis for the first time, about a new phenomenon he dubs Internet Asperger’s Syndrome (IAS). About how people in online communications can’t see or read facial expressions or physical cues of discomfort, much like the sufferers of Asperger’s, and how it makes them numb to empathy and other human emotions. Read the article - it’s long but very interesting. Anyway, again, Day doesn’t understand why people are offended by his rudeness. Yeah.

He also called Richard Evans’ decision to post his - Robert Day’s - personal information online “uncool”. He wasn’t asked if it was “cool” or “uncool” to google-bomb someone’s name and link them to NAMBLA.

One amusing tidbit about the outing, though, that leads me to wonder about the veracity of his or of his former employer’s claims. He said that he had “stopped working for” Christie Digital by the time we outed him. Hmmm… yet Christie insisted they had never had anything to do with such a person at all.

On one point we certainly agree. Day wants the religion books in schools to be kept in the religion section, and the science books in the science section. Science can be taught in science class, and religion can be taught in religion class. I know some of my readers disagree, but too bad. He pointed out that if you want to start teaching religion in science class, or one religion over another, you’d soon have everyone demanding equal time for their theories and religions. The old quote about history being written by the winners came to mind. It’s true - there’s only so much you can teach in a 6.5 hour school day. Why not just give students a passion and a thirst to learn more on their own time?

Anyway, he was not harassed or heckled as I’m sure he hoped to be, because we don’t roll that way. And besides, it was a Friday night. Most of us had better things to do.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 4th, 2009 at 9:17 pm and is filed under Religion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.