This Frightening World
Category: Humor • Politics
Posted on: July 30, 2007 8:13 AM, by PZ Myers
Tom Tomorrow has a list of things he's been wondering about, but it's actually a list of things I suspect but would rather not have confirmed.
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PZ Myers is a biologist and associate professor at the University of Minnesota, Morris.
…and this is a pharyngula stage embryo.
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(Complete listing)Man, as a curious accident in a backwater, is intelligible: his mixture of virtues and vices is such as might be expected to result from a fortuitous origin. But only abysmal self-complacency can see in Man a reason which Omniscience could consider adequate as a motive for the Creator. The Copernican revolution will not have done its work until it has taught men more modesty than is to be found among those who think Man sufficient evidence of Cosmic Purpose.
Bertrand Russell, Religion and Science (New York: Oxford University Press), p. 222.
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Comments
Yeah, there are a few things I'm starting to wonder about myself... like, when is it OK to squeeze the demons out of your toddler?
Yay for ignorance and superstition!
Posted by: Mike O'Risal | July 30, 2007 8:19 AM
Yeah, as soon as I saw this story, I thought "I bet this will be a topic at Pharyngula today!" Dog help us, but I'm afraid those poor cops will get jacked up for violating the dead would-be exorcist's "religious freedom." [sigh]
Posted by: Bill Dauphin | July 30, 2007 8:45 AM
Posted by: Mike O'Risal | July 30, 2007 8:49 AM
According to the story I read, there's an ongoing investigation into criminal charges for her. In the meantime, I suspect she wasn't arrested because she was hospitalized, along with her unfortunate daughter. I'm guessing it's still something of a coin-flip whether the investigation will show her to be a perp or a victim in this tawdry affair: The fact that she was only 19 and the grandfather/exorcist only 42 leaves wide open the question of who was in charge of the situation.
Posted by: Bill Dauphin | July 30, 2007 9:02 AM
Unfullfilled atheists keep confusing evolutionary superstition with true science (aerodynamics).
Posted by: Mats | July 30, 2007 9:42 AM
Mats, I know I am going to regret this but I have to ask. What about evolution is superstitious?
Posted by: Janine | July 30, 2007 9:46 AM
I wonder: Who, and where, is the father of the little girl?
Posted by: Kseniya | July 30, 2007 9:58 AM
I have wondered why so many religious nuts who deny the theory of evolution are prepared to board an aeroplane and fly where ever, given that what allows such travel is the theory of flight. After all, if it's just a theory...
Posted by: Stephen D. Moore | July 30, 2007 10:34 AM
Aerodynamics doesn't rob us of our special place in the cosmos. You don't want to be un-special, do you?
Posted by: Rey Fox | July 30, 2007 10:41 AM
Rey Fox, aerodynamics show yet again how the filthy humans goes against Big Sky Daddy's plans. Big Sky Daddy gave the sky to flying beasts. He did not give humans wings in order to fly. Humans were not meant to be there. By using aerodynamics, lowly humans are trying to climb up from their given place in the cosmos.
Posted by: Janine | July 30, 2007 10:53 AM
Janine, you are SO right. The Wright brothers were agents of Satan. It gets worse: Subsequent removal of prayer from schools led us directly to other mortally sinful activites such as landing on the moon.
Posted by: Kseniya | July 30, 2007 10:59 AM
(Suddenly I find myself wondering why, if the Tower of Babel was such an affront to God, all space projects from Sputnik to Apollo and beyond did not precipitate equally dire consequences and were not similarly struck down.)
Posted by: Kseniya | July 30, 2007 11:07 AM
(Suddenly I find myself wondering why, if the Tower of Babel was such an affront to God, all space projects from Sputnik to Apollo and beyond did not precipitate equally dire consequences and were not similarly struck down.)
Perhaps humanity is not yet sufficiently united for God to feel threatened. Apparently, he hates world peace more than temporary human presence in celestial spheres.
Another option is that God is resorting to subtle sabotage like he did the first time. The tower was not actually struck down, was it? The project was abandoned after the Lord & co. "confounded the language of all the earth". That pound vs metric confusion that crashed the Mars Climate Orbiter, for example - was it God's work?
Posted by: windy | July 30, 2007 11:30 AM
"By their fruits, ye shall know them": Mars orbiter, Columbia, Challenger, Apollo 1- Looks like gods' work to me
Posted by: mothra | July 30, 2007 11:38 AM
Windy:
I believe it was, yes. For corroboration, I offer this passage from the Wiki page on the Tower of Babel:
(Tangentially: Tower of Babel: The Evidence Against the New Creationism)
Posted by: Kseniya | July 30, 2007 11:48 AM
Actually, one of the "fathers" of the US space program had this to say:
"I find it difficult to understand a scientist who does not acknowledge the presence of a superior rationality behind the existence of the universe."
Posted by: Mats | July 30, 2007 1:17 PM
Now he's gunning for Non Sequitur of the Year.
Posted by: Rey Fox | July 30, 2007 1:30 PM
Kseniya, I've encountered milder, but equivalent, sentiments about landing on other planets. There was a Catholic lady who ran a store... I got along with her just fine, but I remember how affronted she got with the idea of sending men to Mars, because it was greed and a violation of God having given us the Earth for our own.
Mats: Werner von Braun was confirmed into the Lutheran church and his mother gave him a telescope to commemorate the experience. His religious thought didn't start creeping in until the 60s, but he certainly didn't force it on people, and was by all accounts a pleasure to work with. When he started to take ill was when he 'descended' full-bore into religious thought in a manner unrecognizable to many of his cohorts.
Over his life, he also made quotes like this:
He was a man against the evils of the atomic bomb and the like. I think he would have been sad at how much we have reneged on the sort of dreams for humans in space he had.
He was a smart man, but IMO mistaken about the existence of a Creator. I find physics and mathematics leave people more open to that particular illusion because the nature of the fields leaves one with a sense of the "definite". (Engineers and doctors seemingly even more so) There are no equivalent surprises to those in biology like the discovery of equivalent neural proteins in sea sponges.
windy:
I laughed :)
I never did understand why the confounding followed rules of linguistic change and migration. Why doesn't Dutch sound like audio feedback instead of a relative of English, and why doesn't Egyptian, say, sound like hooting owls?
Posted by: Ritchie Annand | July 30, 2007 2:21 PM
Who let the Sphinx out? Who? Who, who who - WHO?
Posted by: Kseniya | July 30, 2007 11:34 PM