I get email

Well there you have it PZ. I don't understand why you still don't believe. Bwaaaaahaaaaaa! Praise Ceiling Cat!

OK, thanks, I'm stupider now, and I didn't even read the whole thing.

What the shit.

I sifted through the incest babble until I got to the racism and now I'm wondering if this person is trolling, and if not how someone so stupid can survive. How is that possible?

Also, "morfadites". Haha.

You didn't mention the tendency towards repetitiveness (and inability to construct coherent sentences or logical arguments).

I am absolutely baffled. Surely this is a joke? Surely no one can be that stupid?

There is no way I am bothering to read all that. Where do you find the time and energy?

Which recessive allele is it that makes you a murderer? I can't remember.

It stopped rather abruptly; did someone give him a cookie?

Wow. On the bright side, he's against procreation so at least he won't be spreading this stupidity onto his kids.

I could feel my brain trying to commit suicide line by line.

A fascinating glimpse into a mind that has lost touch with reality. A very entertaining story.

... and what's more, the whole thing was typed with one hand; when this guy writes about having sex with himself, he knows what he's talking about.

Diarrhea of the mouth. Acute diagnosis.

Gotta be a Poe. Please, please, please let it be a Poe.

"Now the way it happened was Adam had sex with his own flesh because she was bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh".
Well good sir, I'd say that a man "having sex with his own flesh" would generally not involve another human being. Female or othewise.

Erm, I am flabbergasted.
Professor Myers, please tell me you made it up? Please?

Where do these people come from? Bloody Hell...

Paragraphs are one thing, but I'd expect this guy to at least understand chapter and verse.

Let me get this straight.
Adam had sex with his own flesh and bones, then his daughters.
Eve had sex with her sons.
All christians are descendants of Adam and Eve.
All christians are a product of inbreeding.
Makes sense to me.

"Well there is no devil or satan from hell. That is a fairytale that has been handed down through generations."

If only he'd stopped there...

And cut out everything before it...

You should include the whacked one's email address so everyone can have a little fun.

Well, at least the "non-whites" had the sense to stop having sex with their own flesh...

Wow...

Just, wow...

I never thought someone could end up even more sex crazy than a normal fundy idiot, but I guess I was wrong.

No one can be that stupid. It's a Poe.

I got as far as "No Kissing or Sex" and "Lucifer put evil in the tree". WTF?

How does that square with an all-powerful god? So powerful that one of his perfect creatures (angel Lucifer)

• invented evil all by his lonesome,
• infected one of God's perfect creations with said evil (tree of good - now good & evil),
• tempted and convinced eve to eat from the tree, and
• convinced her to similarly tempt adam THEN
• convinced them to fuck like bunnies.

I guess Lucifer is the all powerful one.

SEF,

Repetition and incoherency are traditions within the belief system, not beliefs themselves.

teel deer

"Then God went away..."

I bet you didn't expect a member of the Texas State Board of Education to be sending you email.

Wonders never cease.

Wait, this must be a joke. It reads like one, since it can hardly be serious. I mean, the story itself was quite funny.

... It's somewhat logical, if you accept the premises.
How else can we explain giants + dwarfs???

Well, that answers the question of how much can an insane man write from the time he takes his meds until they kick in. Can anyone PLEASE find him some faster acting meds?

I can't believe I read the whole thing.

Just . . . Wow.

I'll be the one going through the day with a pronounced twitch.

Since no one has said it yet, I will:

If you doubt this is possible, how is it there are PYGMIES + DWARFS?

Umm, turkey baster of Thorazine, anyone? If people stop procreating how are future generations supposed to adopt?

From about 12 lines in "God did not give them power to have sex and create. Because that would be evil and bad" I'm getting the impression this person doesn't have much of a sex life. Shame.
The funniest bit (didn't read all of it though) was
"tell your children when they grow up not to create. Tell them if they get married they can always adopt. I am 100% sure your future generations will appreciate not being created"
Erm, run that past me again...

Wow, that was amazing. I did kinda like the part about jesus not coming from god. And this bit:

I am 100% sure your future generations will appreciate not being created.

actually made me laugh. But now my brain hurts and I need more coffee.

So this was written by an eleven year-old, right? I loved the part where the "Christians and Jews" crucified Jesus...

A lot of this sounds like a slightly more incoherent version of the usual Christian Identity Movement babble.

POE!

"But the Christians, Jews and the Roman all got upset and rose up in evil and came and got him and brought him in and crucified him."

So it was the Christians who killed Jesus! I guess that's one way to get yourself a martyr...

He's against sex? You know what I call that?

Natural selection

... it just seems to be popping up everywhere this past week... this guy against sex, the other guy not believing in appendicitis... It's like they came out just to honor Darwin.

This is the funniest thing I've read in a long time. I especially love the idea that white, english-speaking people long before Jesus was born, CREATED the africans...

Ooh it's just too much. *wipe tears*

Poe? Or Genesis as explained by Mrs. Garrison?:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1H-eBmbqCeM

Erm... ow!

I mean it. Seriously. I've got a headache now. I think my frontal lobes are throwing themselves at the inside of my skull in protest. Someone pass the ibuprofen.

The other recurring motif is the Pharyngulites that insist rantings by disturbed zealous xians must be a examples of poe. What insulated world do you people live in?

The wooly mammoth was just a group of elephant that happened to wonder into the United States at the top of Africa when they were conected. They grew long hair to protect them against the cold. They adapted to their enviroment and that's all.

"Hey Jumbo, let's take a stroll over to the US. I always wanted to see New Orleans and Mt. Rushmore."

and what's more, the whole thing was typed with one hand; when this guy writes about having sex with himself, he knows what he's talking about.

This was sent by Ted Haggard?

I..... am..... lost..... for..... words

Brilliant parody. The "skunk ape" that's a new one.

I'd like to cut and paste that message into this website

Wow, that was great. I think this was the best line from that whole diatribe (talking about Jesus, with emphasis added): "But the Christians, Jews and the Roman all got upset and rose up in evil and came and got him and brought him in and crucified him."

Good grief what a maroon. I couldn't get through all of that! PZ do you really read these things? It is so stupid it's not even amusing.

A world of quiet, desperate hope that things aren't really as bad as they seem?

I stopeed reading at "Skunk Ape"......just f'ing WOW.

"Enter" key!....it's the big-ass key on the right!

....USE IT!!!

That right there is an F5 woonado.

I only made it about halfway. I will have to go back when I feel up to it. I am wondering if English is not his first language.

"Now everyone believes that Jesus came from God. Well that's not true. Jesus came from Mary having sex with a Roman soldier while Joesph was off fighting in a war. She lied to save her own life. Back then if a woman got pregnant and she wasn't married they would stone her to death. So she lied and said that Jesus came from God."

That part sounds plausible to me.

"They had no knowledge of kissing or sex."

No kissing? What if you don't use any tongue? What about a peck on the cheek? What about holding hands? He seems to be in the know on this stuff, I wish he'd enlighten us.

Perhaps an enema and some sort of oil pack to the forehead would help this guy. I've heard they do wonders.

My English teacher will have a field day with this.

What I want to know is: what is "X is closer than closer than Y" supposed to mean? It appears from context to mean something like "X is like Y, and both are bad" but I have no idea what would lead someone to write it that way.

Alan, why are you sending PZ email now.

Essentially, they are telling PZ that they have greater evolutionary fitness and are going to out reproduce him. Strange argument for a creationist to use. Will PZ take up the challenge and add a second trophy wife to the collection?

I don't have enough coffee in me to read through that mess. Just scanning a few parts was bad enough. Seems to take forever to get to a point, if he has one. Spelling surprisingly good compared to the rest of the rant.

Insanity: A Treatise

tl;dr

After scrolling through a long enough one of these e-mails, it starts to feel like a sick parody of the opening crawl of a Star Wars movie, except that "Funeral March for a Marionette" is playing.

@#9: YES we can at least be thankful for that!

I stopped reading about 1/2 way through thinking this was too crazy to be . I then came back determined to finish it and get the joke at the end, but there was none..

How can that much crazy fit in one head?

Obviously most posters here have little experience with the mentally disturbed. What you are reading is not an example of a poe but more likely an example of dementia.

Well I would have thought that that was just too stupid for words. Unfortunately it appears I was incorrect by a very large margin.

Other than being a side effect of incest, does my gayness make me less or more of a Perv? Or is the 'flesh of Adam' thing kinda the same for everyone?

This is a person who gets to vote and reproduce. Scary.

i tried to read this... i really tried -- but it got more and more bizarre and i just gave up.

what a tormented person this is.

"Then God went away and while he was gone Lucifer tried to get Eve to eat from the evil." Sounds to me like this God fella could be sued for neglect. What's he thinking just wandering away like that?!

@ Skepticat, #67

This is a person who gets to vote and reproduce. Scary.

Just voting. He seems against reproducing.

This makes so much more sense than that "Your Inner Fish" book I once read.

I'm proud to say I read the whole thing. And like another commenter above, my favorite part was the white people cutting the tongues out of black people so they couldn't speak *English* long before Jesus was born. Great stuff.

I call Poe.

"I am 100% sure your future generations will appreciate not being created."

I REALLY want to know how he plans to ask future generations of people that haven't been created if they appreciate not being created.

That's truly TimeCube worthy. Wow. I thought I'd seen just about every fundamentalist worry about sex, but procreation itself being evil? That's a whole new level there.

For someone who thinks all sex is evil, he sure thinks about it a lot.

tl;dr

He believes the scientists about the hole in the ozone layer then!

That was absolutely insane...and hilarious.

I think someone failed Sunday School 101 and totally ditched their science classes. Both Darwin and Jesus would be slapping their foreheads after reading that.

It's all made up to cover up the incest. We are nothing but Adam's flesh having sex with Adam's flesh.

That's not incest. That's masturbation

We need go no further than the first line in any refutation of the creationists claim - 'In the beginning', the heavens AND the Earth were verifiably not created together.

"They are half man and half Gorilla and half man and half Orangutan."

No, no, no...they're half orangutan, half man-gorilla. Or maybe half man, half bear-pig...

Priceless.

"Now we are still the same way because people still create birthdefects and deformaties. Here are just a few examples. The blind, deaf, handicapped, mentally retarded, gays, lesbians, shemales, morfadites, transvestites, midgets, giants, murderers, childmolestors [sic] and many more."

This man has absolutely no idea what the hell he's talking about. It's astounding how ignorant he is of the world surrounding him.

I... I just can bear to read the rest of his letter.

It’s way too long to be a Poe. I wouldn’t waste the time to type up a Poe that long.

I still don't understand why there are monkeys AND humans. Are there yet no world views out there that can answer a simple question? [now to write up my 100,000-word, single paragraph, creation manifesto]

"If all are one," he reminded them, "all violence is masochism."

"If all are one, all sex is masturbation," Werner replied nastily. "Let's have no more mehum metaphysics here."

I see Felicia @40 has beaten me to the point about pre-Roman english-speaking white oppressors.

I was particularly bemused by the author's seeming impression that he was revealing something new and unknown about the mythology of Lucifer.

Sweet electric black gay jesus on a flaming pogo stick how can you even READ that screed? The occasional carraige return appears to be too much for these people. My eyes...

If Adam came from the dust and Eve came from the dust there would be no incest.

This is my favorite quote from the entire screed. Let's have some fun with it!

"If Adam came from the Montagues and Eve came from the Montagues there would be no incest."

Okay. Seems not to generalize very well. Need some Capulets or something in there.

Elena Z.,

"I just can bear to read the rest of his letter."

You read too much. I just skipped to the end for the de nous ma.

Wow.

OH!
MY!
Gawd!

Am I the only one here who immediately had to google "morfadites"? God on a wheel, there are legions of creepy poor spellers out there!

Now long before Jesus was born the white people created what they believed to be birthdefects. They looked different from the whites. Everytime one was born the whites would cut the nerves in the tongue so they couldn't speak. They would grow them up and use them as slaves. The reason they cut their tongues was because the whites were afraid these people might plan some kind of over throw. So as long as they could understand english they didn't have to speak english.

Whites were speaking English before Jesus was born. What do those silly philologists know, thinking that English didn't get invented until after the 11th Century CE?

OMG, THE DUMB, IT BURNS MY MIND!!!!

How the fuck do people believe this ridiculous story?

These people just make me think of Jack Kerouac and "On the Road" - for some reason.... Virtual toilet paper roll of writing.

JC

I think it ended abruptly because he fired off some "knuckle children" (apologies to Seth McFarlane).

How did God go away? I thought he was everywhere, all the time, watching all our sporting events.

And in this case it sounds like he missed a good one...

Oh, come on, it's a troll. I prefer to believe that so I can laugh and not worry, because it's pretty hilarious, actually.

What da heck are morfadites and shemales?

"they may believe in god, but they don't believe in paragraphs "

Troll or not, that is the funniest one liner I have heard in a while. Kudos!

Mr P. @ #54:

I am wondering if English is not his first language.

To quote a recent Chez Watt winner on Usenet's talk.origins:
"Language is not his first language"

--
Martin

That's some imagination! But I did have a nice laugh reading it....

What da heck are morfadites and shemales?

There is still innocence in the world.

Dianne, google can help you. However, you may not wish to be helped.

I'm not reading that. It doesn't have paragraphs.

Shemale - Mexican food item, kind of like a tamale, but made with tofu instead of pork. You form them with a morfadite. It is kind of like a leaf from an ear of corn, only from a cactus instead.

OK - I am just kidding.

And to J. T. Delany @92 - no, you are not.

JC

Sorry, no way I could read all that puke. However, I believe this email contains the best creotard quote ever:
"God did not give them power to have sex and create. Because that would be evil and bad."

Well, explains everything. Now. Doesn't it?

OH.MY.DOG!
PZ, was this emailed or written on paper with wax crayon?

"Now if Adam came from the dust and Eve came from the dust and they had sons and daughters and Adam had sex with his daughters and Eve had sex with her sons to keep the population going that would be worse than incest and they would create closer than closer flesh. Now the way it happened was Adam had sex with his own flesh because she was bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh. Now that would be worse than worse than incest and they would create closer than closer than closer flesh."

I got totally lost after that!

Cretin

Definitely a Poe. There's no way that could have been serious.

I call Poe.

Geez, take a breath...

Please please please PZ, next time warn us about the freaking word count....holy hell that sucked and I gave early.

Good grief, that was written by an adult?! How can people be so gullible?

"...and I vote."

Reading this was like trying to swim out of quicksand - the harder I fought the more it sucked me in.
I wonder what kind of hideous childhood produced this wreck of a human mind.

He sounds like a fan of Ariosophy/Theozoology. This was an occult pseudoscience which may have influenced Hitler. One of the fathers of theozoology, Jörg Lanz Liebenfels, believed that true aryans (the descendants of Adam and Eve) fornicated with cryptic beasts, among them the sodomite apelings. This gave rise to the "non-aryan" races. You can't write comedy like this.

It's unclear what influence Liebenfels' ideas had on Hitler. Following the Anschluss, the Nazis banned Liebenfels' work. However, some very prominent early members of the party were subscribers to his journal, Ostara.

I don't think it's a Poe. Notice the misuse of the words "their" and "they're", etc. That's to subtle a thing for a Poe. They tend to gravitate more toward the "teh" sort of thing.

In the words of Homer Simpson, "I understand completely."

Seriously?

Poe.

If not, this person must be 10. "no knowledge of kissing or sex".

How sweet.

"Here are just a few examples. The blind, deaf, handicapped, mentally retarded, gays, lesbians, shemales, morfadites, transvestites, midgets, giants, murderers, childmolestors and " creationists.

Is morfadite even a real word? I'd google it, but I've already given this wackaloonery way too much of my attention.

"Some of these men went to Borneo and caught female Orangutans and sailed across to South America and had sex with the female Orangutans and created the Indian. And the men who stayed in Africa caught female Gorillas and had sex with them and created the Black man."

My brain hurts!! Owwwwwwww...

"They are half man and half Gorilla and half man and half Orangutan."

Wow! That IS impressive! Not only are they human hybrids, but they are 150% ape!

I'm of the opinion that someone told this guy to "go fuck yourself", and he took it literally, tried it, and now wants to spread his message to the rest of the world.

I have to praise his use of punctuation and capital letters! You don't usually see structure of this magnitude written by creationists :P

If this is a Poe, and I think not, that was a lot of work. If 'tis a troll's handiwork, thanks for the laugh.

I'm with mark @ 91. I'm abso-fuckin-lutely gobsmacked at this virtual mountain of horse shit. What I fear most is that this individual is actually out, walking about, and voting. Ewwww.

I think that is the dumbest thing I have ever read. And considering how much I have read by creotards that is saying something.

"And the men who stayed in Africa caught female Gorillas and had sex with them and created the Black man"

So, SOME humans DID have an ape for ancestor afterall?
(Or is the 'Black man' not considered human?)

But I have to agree: POE all the way...

Considering that this crazed individual said:

Jesus came from Mary having sex with a Roman soldier while Joesph was off fighting in a war. She lied to save her own life. Back then if a woman got pregnant and she wasn't married they would stone her to death. So she lied and said that Jesus came from God.

I doubt he's a creationist, since the above would be considered blasphemy by any Christian. I imagine he's just some fringe lunatic, who probably needs to seek psychiatric help - and we probably shouldn't be sitting here laughing at his unfortunate mental difficulties.

"When Jesus grew up he found out the truth from the Priests and at 33 he came out"

Jesus had teh gay? Wow. I knew those robes meant something.

All joking aside, I agree with EV: this is definitely the outpouring of someone with mental illness, not an attempt at parody.

My primary trouble, here in the states, is that this particular screed it is not very far removed from the demented ramblings espoused by average people of faith.

And most local government activities are controlled by such people - especially here in the south.

I worry. I do.

Hmm... I suspect this was drafted with multi-coloured fridge magnets on the writer's parents' fridge. Or the communal fridge at the mental asylum.

Doubt it's a Poe. You'd actually have to be insane to make this shit up.

Lord Of The Rings is a much better read. Its believers also include a better class of troll.

OMG - I actually agree with walton.

"Some of these men went to Borneo and caught female Orangutans and sailed across to South America and had sex with the female Orangutans and created the Indian."

what? WHAT?!!

words fail me...

R.BDC, #58

Which Alan? We of the Conspiracy want to be sure the right one gets the credit.

Utter insanity. This person must really be inbred.

I loved the bit where he says that: "Well there is no devil or satan from hell. That is a fairytale that has been handed down through generations".

This level of delusion is amazing. Gotta love those emails, right PZ?

You know that painful snapping sensation when you pull a muscle? My brain did that about halfway in. I felt myself thinking "maybe this makes sense."
Then I stopped reading and slapped myself until the feeling passed.

It does sound very timecubish. I wonder if the original is in multiple colors and fonts?

Great cosmos, that's one long email. I managed about 25% before I started to zone out.

It's like a David Lynch movie.

Except Adam and Eve would have to wear bunny costumes, and Jesus be played by Kyle McLachlan.

Pardon my ignorance of internet slang...but what is a POE as used in comments above?

I guess my old church taught me wrong. I was told it was the Tree of Knowledge not the Tree of Evil. Though, for this person, those seem to be the same.

Would somebody...PLEASE...make a YouTube video of him/herself reciting that letter? Preferably in an extremely Southern mildly retarded accent? (I type this from Augusta, GA, I can make cracks at Southerners.)

I would do it but I don't have a camera.

That would be beautiful.

I like how the writer ran up against a major dilemma of the creation myth (how two adults solely created the entire population of humans) but didn't realize it until having sketched out how Adam and Eve are of the same person. For a brief second the writer may have actually questioned the sanity of such a story.

If Adam came from the dust and Eve came from the dust there would be no incest. And what they created would be a true son and a true daughter. Now when the true son and daughter had sex to keep the population going that would be incest and they would create closer flesh. Now if Adam came from the dust and Eve came from the dust and they had sons and daughters and Adam had sex with his daughters and Eve had sex with her sons to keep the population going that would be worse than incest and they would create closer than closer flesh.

"Wait a minute." The writer is baffled. It appears there may be no way out of this logic trap. The thought creeps in that Genesis may actually be impossible, when out of the blue it hits the writer, "This means everyone is committing incest and that explains genetic deformities! Eureka!" LOL

@Robert, #143

Pardon my ignorance of internet slang...but what is a POE as used in comments above?

Poe as in Poe's Law.

Without a blatant display of humor, it is impossible to distinguish religous fundamentalism from a parody thereof

I doubt he's a creationist, since the above would be considered blasphemy by any Christian. I imagine he's just some fringe lunatic, who probably needs to seek psychiatric help - and we probably shouldn't be sitting here laughing at his unfortunate mental difficulties.

He certainly is a creationist because he claims a god made the world. Whether he's a Christian is clearly debatable but we say "Hindu creationist", "Jewish creationist" and "native American traditionalist creationist" so that's an unrelated question.

This is what you get when you allow the inmates of the boobyhatch to have internet access as a form of therapy.

One matter to take note of- the writer may be a creationist racist anti-sex maniac, but he's not a christian creationist racist anti-sex maniac. He doesn't believe jebus was devine. We have a Fundy Deist on our hands.

BWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA that has to be one of the funniest screeds I read. I actually sprayed my drink when I read "morfadites".

Whoever wrote this is either very funny or desperately insane.

I cannot decide which based on such little evidence.

Louis

P.S. I notice that the intellectual genius of "pygmies and dwarves" got in there too.

This post is making my eyes bleed.

Please, please give us his e-mail, PZed, please...

He's not a troll because it's an email not an attempt to derail a thread. If this is a poe, it's the driest example I've seen. My guess is unmedicated Bipolar I manic phase or schizophrenia, although the inbred angle is novel. Art Bell would be proud.

I come from Bigfoot country, and know plenty of folk who quietly believe. The term "skunk ape" kinda stuck in my mind, so I gave in and looked.

Lawd, wouldn't you know, there's a research institute:

http://www.roadsideamerica.com/story/13341

This fella is just motherfucking insane. In a clinical sense. Or, if you believe his rant, in a literal sense.

ermm... is "Morfadite" a word? It seems to bring up about 1000 google hits, mostly porn and I think (I couldn't investigate too much more closely at work) it is being used as a synonym (or eggcorn?) for "hermaphrodite"

PS Thank you for sharing your email, btw. My email is much more boring; ways to grow my 'member,' lost Nigerian fortunes, etc.

... and lucifer was created by... ? So, how can he be a god of goodness and perfection if his own creation rebelled against him? So, lucifer rebelled against god like skynet will rebel against us? ;)

"We have a Fundy Deist on our hands."

He doesn't talk about god being particularly distant; he seems to hold the Jesus was a particularly enlightened man; I think he's a fundie Unitarian.

I would be highly concerned for my own safety after reading that, if I were you, PZ. This person sounds like a serial killer. o_O

tl;dr
But I am noticing a strange absence of caps-lock and italicizing...

"So, lucifer rebelled against god like skynet will rebel against us? ;)" God forgot to put a line in the fitness function of his angel-designing genetic algorithm punishing "This angel becomes Bringer of Light"

Poe. And don't say we weren't warned:

"Posted by: BG | February 5, 2009 9:35 AM

It is now my mission to Poe-up a crank email to see if I can get PZ to post it."

This person is no stupider than any doctor of theology or church father who believes in a sky fairy. It will always require ridiculous ideas and mental gymnastics to make wordly sense of mythology, if you think of it as anything other than mythology.

@ Matt Heath #156

I couldn't find a reference to 'morfadite' on Wikipedia. 'Morphodite' which probably translates to morfadite' in yokel, comes up as a comic mispronunciation of hermaphrodite, as found in To Kill A Mockingbird and the works of Truman Capote.

Posted by: Thoughtful Guy >"I think someone failed Sunday School 101..."

No, I don't think so. It's been many years but if my memory hasn't completely failed me, that sounded quite close to what I was taught in Sunday school. Remember, there is no quality control in Sunday school. The kiddies are trotted off to some side room where some well-meaning but foolish adult tries to teach them something age-appropriate from the bible. That in itself places some limitations... no selling of daughters, no "lying with" (wouldn't want to have to explain that term), no harlots and stoning to death. But even with the usual myths that get taught, Adam&Eve, Johah, Noah, David&Goliath, etc. the kids ask questions. And this adult, who is totally ignorant of theology, untrained in the actual tenents of their own church, has to make up something to answer the kids. So we end up with kids being taught the kind of silly fables written in that letter with the kids adding their own childish interpretation on top of that.
It did sound as if the writer of that missive was in the 12 - 14 year old range. I was still going to Sunday school at that age so maybe there is still hope for this person.

@164: Umm, "worldly", I mean :)

I don't know whether to mock this one or excuse him as a victim of mental illness that's beyond his control. I'm leaning toward the latter.

I'm not buying this. Anyone who thinks this took too much work or was too subtle (!) to be poe doesn't have enough time on their hands.

I think I rented this one the other night. Yeah, that's it.
"Bone of his Bone"--starring--not sure now, just trying to remember--Eve Apple, I think, and Adam "The Snake" Milton. They did it Goddie style, if I recall correctly.

ice

untrained in the actual tenents of their own church

I think you'll find the word is TENETS

Although I guess some of the sunday school teachers might be untrained in the tenants of their church (as the actress said to the bishop?)

Wow. Just fucking wow. And you think your head hurts after reading it? This guy's head hurts all the time.

If this had been written in Aremeic in a cave 2000 years ago in the ME, there's a chance that this would be biblical.....I assume it would be more poetic in the King James translation.

On a competely unrelated note, can someone explain to me what 'tl;dr' means? I'm probably missing something obvious, but I've had a long day at work, my head aches and reading this email that started all this has probably cost me 6-8,000 neurons, so humour me please.

Oh, FSM, it's the Time Cube of creationism.

My only reaction (outside of a few chuckles - I mean, the Christians helped crucify Jesus?!?) is "Holy f***ing s**t" (pun intended).

WTF??? I think some Poe has been sniffing glue before hitting the keyboard.

God only created them with goodness. God did not give them power to have sex and create.

You know, it probably would have saved a lot of trouble later on, then, if God did not give them a penis or a vagina.

All tigers want to get borned!

On a competely unrelated note, can someone explain to me what 'tl;dr' means?

Too long; didn't read

tl;dr: too long, didn't read.

Wall of text crits you for 10274
You die

Dafmeister, tl;dr stands for "too long; didn't read".

What the heck is a "morfadite"? o.O

HOLY SHIT THAT WAS BRILLIANT. That's it. I'm converted. Praise Jebus!

the diagnosis is crystal clear: hypozyprexemia.

A proud example of how home schooling can and does go pear shaped...

There is a kindda lack of the obligatory 'praise be ta jeebus' every second line...methinks he got hypnotized by the sex of his dreams and just had to follow it to the just conclusion...

(male contributors might recognise that syndrome ;-))

If not Poe...and methinks tis a tad to long for a poe to rant...then obviously this bunny is suffering mental meltdown...

It was a stream of consciousness straight from cranium to keyboard...no breaks no breaths no dramatic pauses...almost a symptom of OCD...the fixation on sex...which is a symptom of some schizophrenic types and no logical conclusion or point...divorced from reality and with his own version of Genesis and history in general...

Nah!..de dude is just ill..nothing beyond...!

Ah, yes, I can see how shorthand like that would be useful in a situation like this. I read pretty much the whole thing because I was a) bored and b) masochistic.

And Richard Smith @ #178, if you're planning to sit there pointing out the logical inconsistencies in this assault on the English language... well, I hope you've got a comfy chair, you'll be a while. You might want to send out for pizza.

damn. that's, well, it's.. um. damn.

"The blind, deaf, handicapped, mentally retarded, gays, lesbians, shemales, morfadites, transvestites, midgets, giants, murderers, childmolestors and many more."

Oh, Gawd! I'll be chuckling about this all day... when I'm not looking over my shoulder for a morfadite attack.

I wonder if the guards know that Kent Hovind plays on the computer when they're not looking?

That has to be a poe - he hits too many points about different things and then twists them - Most of the crazy creationists are so locked up in their patterns of thought that they wouldn't think to point out so many different things all at once (unless they spent hours formulating the email, and then it would probably have some paragraphs).
Although this was vastly entertaining (at least the bits I could read before my brain stopped), I wish the poes would knock it off - there is enough entertainment value to be had by the real creationists that we don't need poes causing us headaches...
Now where did I put the Ibuprofin...

We should have some compassion for this person. The email appears to be a word salad typed by an educated person with a brain chemical imbalance (in my lay opinion). I say educated because of the punctuation and ability to stay on topic (albeit nonsense) from start to finish. I know a person that talks and writes likes this due to a mental health problem, but is more disjointed in his communication.

A final comment that expounds on an earlier post. Perhaps Adam's incest originated from a misunderstanding of God's use of English idioms. When he saw Adam and Eve had ate the forbidden fruit God said; "I am displeased, you can go fuck yourselves."

"The blind, deaf, handicapped, mentally retarded, gays, lesbians, shemales, morfadites, transvestites, midgets, giants, murderers, childmolestors and many more."

So the fact that I'm quite a bit taller than average makes me somewhat similar to a murderer or a child molester ? And it would be even worse if I was blind ?

"The giant cave bear is just a bear that was born and it got bigger than the rest. Just like Jumbo the elephant that weighed 12 ton. It was just an elephant that got bigger than the rest. Just like the giant 3 toed sloth. The white tiger is a freak of nature and the white buffalo is a freak of nature."

OK, OK, we get it. So all those weird beasties were also products of incest ? Does it have anything to do with Adam sometimes getting tired of having sex with his own flesh, or something ?

Whaaaaaaat theeeeeeee heeeeeeeeeeeeell?

"The Morfadites" would be a great metal band name.

@Dafmeister, #187: I've got time; I'm a civil servant. Chair's not that comfy, though.

The comments here are sheer entertainment. Keep those snappy one-liners coming!

So, according to this own guy's logic, the races that he doesn't like are actually better than him because there is less inbreeding with them. I wonder which he considers worse - incest or bestiality.

Also, if God went away while Adam and Eve ate the apple, does that mean he's not always watching us now?

Anyway, I'm amazed that he managed to get all this stuff out of the Bible. I never read anything in it about humans breeding with other primates.

For once, this guy's crazy ideas are a good thing because it means he won't be reproducing.

I'm not buying this. Anyone who thinks this took too much work or was too subtle (!) to be poe doesn't have enough time on their hands.

Or perhaps a better explanation is they have dealt with people with a similar mentality, or specifically mental disorder.
It's enlightening to see how naive many of the people here are who cry "poe!"
Again I ask, how insulated or isolated is your paradigm? The "this just can't be for real" and the "this guy is stupid" crowd evidently have been sheltered from a fairly significant swath of humanity who are mentally ill. When you've dealt with those who suffer from true religious mania and paranoid delusions, it rocks your world and not in a good way.

The cognitive dissonance expressed here is much like the creationists' incredulity towards evolution, "I refuse to accept anyone can actually believe this is real because I don't believe it." Take a little walk outside of your ivory tower sometime. Volunteer at a mental health facility and you'll never be so quick to cry "poe."

I call poe^trillion.

It's too internally consistent, too well spelled (even though there's the occasional and deliberate homopohone), and there are some crackers in it that are just designed to push buttons.

Schizoid writing runs off the rails very quickly. This is too coherent. There's not enough "I", "me", there are too many 3rd party references that are specific (like saying "scientists" instead of an inderterminate "them"), and so on.

Poe poe poe!

thank you for posting that "letter" I am sorry I could not read the whole thing though well not really sorry kind of great full I did not have to read the whole thing. It is the most complete description of why the bible is not a factual book as I have ever read. The "logic" is clear and inescapable i.e. it makes no f'n sense!

"Then God went away and while he was gone Lucifer tried to get Eve to eat from the evil."
Where did God go? On holiday?

Schizoid writing runs off the rails very quickly.

Oh yes, because everyone knows all schizophrenia is the same in type and scale.
Thanks Dr., but FAIL

"When you marry someone you are marrying someone who is 3 times closer than a true brother or sister."

That's quite specific: not twice as close and not four times closer, but three time closer than a true sibling.

So I guess this fellow is going to avoid the sin of incest by marrying his sister. From the rest of it, it sounds as if he's following a long and hallowed tradition of his family.

EV - you rock (again)

Quoth Hamlet: There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy

I shudder at the lack of imagination, and lack of 'experience' suggested by some folks commentary. I'm sorry to say this 'extreme insulation from reality' is even more evident among American colleagues than those from Europe. 'Education' doesn't seem to help. To paraphrase 'shallow is as shallow does'.

Poe or not, my favorite part was:

The sabor toothed tiger was just a freak of nature. It was just a few tigers that had extra long teeth because they were borned that way.

That's brilliant.

Somewhere, someone has decided to test wether a million monkeys-with-typewriters can, in fact, write a Shakespeare play. Sadly, this was the actual result.

It's the only explanation!

tl;dr - "Too long; didn't read"

"Morfadite" is derived from "hermaphrodite", but means "homosexual" in middle America. It's verbal slang, so the spelling varies. Lesbians are sometimes called "morfadikes".

The screed was very sad, but at least it kept what I think is the coolest part of the Bible--the serpent tells the truth about what will happen, God gets it wrong. "The Serpent spake sooth."

I just had my teenage son read this - he looked at me and said "I wonder if he knows where his drugs came from".

I'm so proud. :-)

"Now everyone thinks of Lucifer as the devil or satan from hell. Well there is no devil or satan from hell. That is a fairytale that has been handed down through generations."

Spoing goes the irony meter!

Well, it could be a Poe, or it could be schizophrenia, but I was going to bring up the point that Martin brought up in #116: there are vast portions of this "theology" which have been advocated, in all seriousness, by people who had actual followers. My understanding is that many of the Nazi ideologues were, technically, creationists who believed that the Aryan race was descended directly from Adam and Eve, and all the other races were the result of evolutionary descent from apes, and human matings with apes.

Following Paul, celibacy has frequently been advocated as the ideal by a lot of Christian sects, though the ones who made it part of their dogma -- like the Shakers -- eventually died out (for obvious reasons.) There have also been -- and still are -- "Christian" sects that argued that Jesus was just a man, and not a God, and that he never claimed to be God. Jefferson had that view, and still considered himself a Christian. Today, most of those Jesus-as-wholly-man groups are very theologically liberal, and don't take Creationism and the Garden of Eden literally. The interesting thing here is the way the writer's theology picks and chooses from what are considered conservative positions, to what are considered liberal ones.

Someone above suggested this was a shared theology from the Christian Identity Movement. I don't know. It could be -- or from something like it. It also sounds like something a child may have been taught. Which means the writer may not be crazy, just very unfortunate.

This was amazing reading.
Now, if someone wanted to be 'that guy', that mail is a treasure trove for a Freudian psychoanalysis...

Mind-melting stupidity and severe mental illness combined with religion. I hope that this is a Poe, because it's painful to acknowledge that people this fucked up really exist.

@Gustav Nyström, #207: Particularly, a million offspring resulting from when Shakespeare caught female monkeys and had sex with them.

Dafmeister & Menyambal: I can personally attest
that 'morphodite' was in use among adolescents
in Kansas 40 years ago, but we weren't sure what
they were, exactly. I think the word cropped up
in a Fugs lyric also.

tl;dr

Amazed PZ finds the time to read all these

The lack of paragraphs makes some sense, actually. Poke at the GSS web app for variables BIBLE (feelings about the Bible), WORDSUM (words correct in a short vocabulary test), and SCITEST4 (feeling as to whether humans evolved from other animals). Those who take the Bible as the literal Word of God tend to have slightly but significantly below-norm verbal ability overall.

(Perhaps counter-intuitively, though, among those who take the literal interpretation, the smartest are most likely to reject evolution. So, it would be surprising for all of the letters to be this incoherent. I wonder if a statistical analysis on a couple months of PZ's inbox would reveal anything interesting.)

Poe or not, I can readily imagine a wierd looking man shouting this diatribe on the subway. And not looking out of place.

*** Jaw still down.***

This letter is wrong on so many levels I don't even know where to begin.

"mentally retarted" - says it all.

1964 words according to my word count feature, and not a clue among them.

"When scientists find drawings in caves they were put there by Bigfoot and the Orangutan man."

Priceless.

This is the rare person who could be helped by having Alan Clarke teach him science.

But... what if... he's right?

This is just an unintelligent person who ahs received trainign in kook religion; this is real, actual, mental disease. I would not be surprised to find that this guy is a rather serious sex offender, what with all that hatred he feels toward sex. We're looking at something really nasty here, I'm afraid.

I agree that people who think this is a Poe must have lived sheltered lives.

This is the real deal. I'd guess the writer was of above average intelligence, but grew up in a home and community where good reading skills are uncommon. That's how terms like "morphadites" come to be. Terms based on unfamiliar words are clipped and transformed in a community where most information is transmitted orally.

Plus this guy has some serious mental health issues. The incest obsession makes that obvious.

Sadly, if Forbes did publish a point-by-point refutation, most people wouldn't have the stamina or the knowledge to understand it anyway. Which means that the DI bigots win, as they command the attention of Jerry Coyne, and the DI's marks are not given the information to show that the IDiots were just lying through their teeth, as usual.

I don't know. Getting those two forces of stupid together in one place could cause a rip in the idiot-space continuum that could lead to a total collapse of the known universe. At the very least it would suck all the light and sound out of the room. Strangely it would still smell like shit.

Please someone tell me what POE stands for.

Skunk Ape??
Another name for GWB? Surely the name describes him to a 't'!

CUT AND PASTE FAIL

This is the rare person who could be helped by having Alan Clarke teach him science.

I don't know. Getting those two forces of stupid together in one place could cause a rip in the idiot-space continuum that could lead to a total collapse of the known universe. At the very least it would suck all the light and sound out of the room. Strangely it would still smell like shit.

better

Please someone tell me what POE stands for.

poe's law

Without the use of a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to make a parody of Fundamentalism that someone won't mistake for the real thing.

The person doesn't sound mentally ill to me, but they do have some weird ideas. Sounds more like a person of average or higher intelligence with little to no education and very limited exposure. They are making up their own reasons for the problems they see which is actually a little brighter than the average creationist's pre-fab reasions. Most Christians would consider this crazy too.

E.V. #203

Correct, I'm no Dr. But I didn't mention schizophrenia, nor any other mental illness; psychoses aren't the issue. Schizoid personalities are not ill in the sense you describe.

Overt schizoids display "idiosyncratic moral and political beliefs... a tendency towards spiritual, mystical and para-psychological interests... engrossed in fantasy... alternations between eloquence and inarticulateness... vulnerable to esoteric movements owing to a strong need to belong" and so on (descriptions from wikipedia).

The writer could have been trying for the writing style of such a personality. I don't think this writer is schizoid, and so called poe. I thought the term would have been better understood on this blog without detailed explanation (or at least not confused with schizophrenia). As to whether the writer is clinically insane, I leave that to you.

Wow. I'm sorry P.Z.

Ouch! I sprained my brain and I only made it to

Then God went away

And that's when I decided to go away too.

PZ, Can we get that letter on a t-shirt? I'm thinking it'll look great on a busty woman then it would be much more interesting to read.

Hi Patricia! *wink*

Wow. Five Stars for this literary marvel.

Sastra:

Which means the writer may not be crazy, just very unfortunate.
I have to take issue with the imprecise term "crazy", just as a botanist takes issue with the term "weeds". It is dismissive and banishes any sense of pertinence into a form of cognitive limbo. I never meant to imply that schizophrenia was the only possibility, but it is obvious, to me at least, that this person is most likely suffering from some form of mental disorder as well as a lack of higher education and limited cognitive skills - the "unfortunate" part you were referring to.
I'm not focused on diagnosing the writer's DSM IV status.
I'm was bemused but now frustrated by the many people here who don't seem to have a clue about people who generate writing of this type.
Poe by definition is a satirical mimicry of existing ideologies that is not easily differentiated. Some would go further and claim that it is a hyperbolic take on irrational claims, however, if you've actually delved into the insanity of these ideologues, you understand that ultimately anyone trying to "out-poe" some of the worst offenders will fail because the original claims are infinitely irrational and bizarre.
If it's a poe, it failed to be any funnier, more tongue-in-cheek or more bizarre than a rant from a truly disturbed person.

He's a nutter. Many years ago, I started out in the mailroom of a major motion picture studio. Once a week one of us would do the "openers", letters simply addressed to the studio, no name or department indicated. Most were the usual fan mail requests for pictures, but every few weeks we would get something that looked like this. Our nut (it was always the same letter)completely covered the paper from top to bottom, no margins. I wondered how he did it, since it was typed (maybe he trimmed the paper)and he was less coherent that this poor sod, but the overall impression was the same. Not a Poe - he really thinks this way.

This... made me want to get in my car, drive home, crawl back under the covers, and hide until the stupid goes away. But then I think I'd be waiting an awfully long time.

I really agree about the scary sex obsession though. This sounds like the kind of person who may decide to "fix" some people to better serve God.

damn! blockquote fail. (You make me giddy, Sastra)

I call Poe. No one is this stupid.

That was crazier than crazier than crazy...

Vic | February 13, 2009 12:19 PM
I call Poe. No one is this stupid.

I call poe on you Vic, and for the same reason.

Not schizoid; I've seen those and they are far more rambling. Definitely manic, though, with the loosening of associations and tangentiality.

Definitely markedly impaired from mental illness.

"I call Poe. No one is this stupid."

I disagree. Not very long ago I was having lunch with a friend and she invited a guy that she had dated in high school along because she ran into him online and wondered whatever happend. Well whatever happened was that they guy went absolutely mental at some point. His father was a minister at some very creepy church (and very much not a good person), so he was brought up with these extremely freakish ideas, not to mention he was also severely abused. Long story short... for the whole of lunch I listened to this kind of screed, only in person. Well this alternating with laments about how hard it was to get weed that month. Scary. Very very scary. These people are very much real.

I'm speechless. No one could be that stupid, but it's way too stupid to be satire. Possibly the single craziest thing I've ever read.

I call poe on myself.

He started out insane and ended up batshit crazy.

I love the part where he says Mary fucked a Roman soldier and lied about it by claiming she was impregnated by God. If Jebus did exist, that might be the only part of his rant that has any merit of probability.

The whole fucking of the great primates scenario to create "Indians" and "blacks" is racist ignorance beyond belief.

This whole thing could also be "The Poe Man's Bible".

I thought it was worth reading just for the "morfadites" bit.
At first I was thinking 'Are they like the Jesubites?' and then it hit me.

Since I'm not religious and my exposure to the extremely religious has been mercifully and intentionally minimal, perhaps I am not qualified to judge Poe vs nonPoe, but this seemed to have the ring of sincerity to it.

The thing I found most striking was how much thought went into it. Yes, seriously, although I'm not saying it was good thought. The whole Adam and Eve story makes no sense and is full of holes (like much bad fiction), which this person saw and has tried to spackle to make the story make more sense. It reminded me of a horrific version of the re-written fairytale which is popular in young adult fiction, where the author takes the basic story and characters and rewrites them, and along the way adds more internal consistency and character motivation so the story holds together better.

Of course, those retellings are intentional fiction and this screed is its unfortunate cousin, making shit up. The difference being that the latter is seen as (or at least presented as) truth, whether it comes from someone mentally ill or a true believer. Only someone desperate to believe would go to all this trouble to try to make it make sense rather than simply abandoning it (or calling it allegory).

I just want to know why MSU (as an acronym of making shit up) isn't more widely used on the internet. There's so much of it going on, it seems a natural. Is it just because it's too similar to the acronym for various state universities? If so, too bad, because it would have been perfect.

Please PZ, don't post insane creationist rantblocks without interspersing some of your scathing wit into the monotonous mononologues. I'd rather read your comments mocking these utter twits than the industrial strength fuckwittery of creationist mythology, undiluted by rationality.
I'm going to have to read The God Delusion again to calm my injured logic.

The white tiger is a freak of nature and the white buffalo is a freak of nature. The sabor toothed tiger was just a freak of nature. It was just a few tigers that had extra long teeth because they were borned that way. The wooly mammoth was just a group of elephant that happened to wonder into the United States at the top of Africa when they were conected.

I've noticed something in common with creationist wingnuts, too. They're almost universally illiterate. Also, they're lacking in knowledge in pretty much all areas of science.

Do they even realize that if the earth is only 6,000 years old, the "United States" and Africa couldn't have drifted as far apart as they are now?

tl;dr

There is an easy solution
for all of his incest concerns:

anal sex.

Possibly the single craziest thing I've ever read.

Jebus, you people don't get out much. Yooohoooo - Art Bell anyone? PETER ROOKE? Go to any fetish porn site, especially those dealing with incest fantasy. Read the fucking threads on Answers in Genesis, Schlaffly's blog or any Fox News pundits blog... peruse Conservapedia for god's sake. This guy was tame and fairly coherent.

There's a whole underbelly of society you haven't even fathomed. You've either been protected all your life or you've got your head in the sand. Who knew the new intelligentsia were so blinkered?

Creationists; Proving Survival of the Fittest wrong every day!

tl;dr

At least he's concerned about global warming...

"There is an easy solution
for all of his incest concerns:

anal sex."

Hey now... don't leave out oral.

Umm...

Wow.

'Kay. I read really, really fast, but I still gave up somewhere in the garden of Eden... And that bit, for what it's worth, struck me as sorta like a book review by a junior elementary student who hasn't yet worked out that just recounting the events of the story in your own uninspired prose sans commentary or reflection is going to make your piece suitable material for anaesthesizing burn victims. And I decided I didn't want to know how else this guy might try to make my eyes glaze over...

Mebbe I'm just getting jaded. Too many loons in too little time makes Jack an impatient reader. I'll have to trust the rest of you there's some fun weirdness about incest somewhere in the rest of it. Not up to looking for it, myself.

But it did strike me: has no one told these guys how incredibly tedious they can be? Seriously, I was reading--or trying to read--something some loon of presumably related persuasion had left over at Eamon's blog a while ago--and I had the same reaction: heard it, looks like nothing much new or amusing is likely to work its way in, here, eyelids getting droopy, so enough already. And moving on, now...

There's something to think about there, now that I do: zealots of various faiths are so often on about how great their faith makes them feel, but seriously, I tend to find that some mix of (a) creepy, and (b) sad. Because they tend by their very nature to undermine that very claim--with displays like the one above and certain others. It's a bit like watching the guy from Python's Grail: 'I feel happy... I think I'll take a walk...' Yeah, right...

So: wild conjecture: they're so boring because they're dead, more or less. Hollow out the creative intelligence, turn it into a slave machine for spouting dogma, and a side-effect is it also becomes an incredibly effective sleep aid device...

(Or is that the plan: conversion by tedium--some sorta hypnosis thing--you are getting incredibly bored, and sleepy--when you awake, you will feel a profound desire to tithe...)

Anyway. Stopping before this gets as long as his was...

(Looks back in awe at length of post again...)

Okay. Well before.

E.V. #237 wrote:

I have to take issue with the imprecise term "crazy", just as a botanist takes issue with the term "weeds". It is dismissive and banishes any sense of pertinence into a form of cognitive limbo.

Fair enough. By the term "crazy" I meant to include any form of clinical mental illness.

I never meant to imply that schizophrenia was the only possibility, but it is obvious, to me at least, that this person is most likely suffering from some form of mental disorder as well as a lack of higher education and limited cognitive skills - the "unfortunate" part you were referring to.

It's not really 'obvious' to me, partly because I've run into pretty much every one of this guy's claims in some other context, and it's possible that they've all been knit together somewhere and handed down to an entire group. Also, my general impression -- which could be wrong -- was that the writer was pretty young, possibly a teenager. Probably sheltered. Respectably literate, considering.

There are some religions and cults out there that are "crazy" -- or, using the more precise psychological jargon, "fuckin' looney toons." With religion, there are few rules, particularly when they encourage people to get their interpretations from guidings and promptings by the Holy Ghost. A schizophrenic founder can gather followers who aren't schizophrenic themselves.

I'm curious as to whether any of the Christian Identity churches have tracts which advocate all the stuff in the letter. If so, the relatively high likelihood of schizophrenia or something like it, goes down. But I think you're right, this doesn't look like poe (satire) to me.

That was closer than closer to insane. But very entertaining. I read the whole thing, but it took a while, because I kept laughing so hard, I'd lose my place.

Where did god go "away" to? Borneo? Was that when and where he invented the English language?

If this isn't a Poe, I think PZ should invite this person to guest-write, so that we might interact with him/her.

"Hey now... don't leave out oral. "

Never!

But for most people oral sex
never has that sense of ultimate completion
you get with some good old in and out.

Just makes me want to run out and join a church, so I can be around all the nice folks who believe like this.

Wordle was made for this...visualize the mind, Poe or not:

http://www.wordle.net/gallery/wrdl/541798/PZ_Gets_mail

I felt my brain was becoming comatose just at 1/3 of the text, so I stopped reading just to survive. The only reason this kind of text deserves reading is to ridicule it, because sometimes (many times that I would like to see) some well intentioned people, without much scientific background, eat raw the whole text because it sounds religious or scientific. These are the people that need to hear and understand why text like this are crap. How? Bombard well intentioned media people with links to places like pharyngula. Not all radio and TV people are morons. Sometimes they are just misinformed and don't have the time or knowledge to recheck what is going on in Science.

AJ Milne #262 wrote:

And I decided I didn't want to know how else this guy might try to make my eyes glaze over...

Understandable, but I think PZ posted this particular letter because it does start off so bland and standard -- and then slowly veers off into strange and even stranger. Jesus was the bastard child of a Roman soldier, Bigfoot did the cave drawings, black people are ape hybrids who had their tongues cut out to keep them from speaking English, and nobody will survive the hole in the ozone layer.

No, it's not the usual been-there-done-that religious screed -- more like a Creationist bait 'n switch. The big question is whether this is just him, or an actual theology with a church.

I have to wonder....

...did he *have* to rewrite the entire first five books of the Bible as his basic introduction?

What the hell was the point of that?

What on Earth is a "morfadite"?

You really believe this bullshit? Wow, I didn't realize how blind people were. You really, truly believe that everyone is from incest? Do you not see how wrong that is? If everyone was created from incest, wouldn't there be deformities on every single new flesh created. That's when Natural Selection would come in, and humans would not have been able to survive and breed for as long as we have. We would not be as sophisticated as we are today. Read this for me, The Global Conspiracy and How To End It. That might open your mind to a different point of view, rather than the Christian's form of blind faith. You should actually have something substantial to believe, rather than believing that some Christian God came down and created man from dust when dust is not organic matter. Also, after Adam and Eve ate the apple, they "hid" from God. What the fuck? I thought "God" knew where everyone was, all the time, and what they are doing. Then you say he "finds" them. What? Was he looking with his 2 eyes and a hand above the eyebrows to block his eyes from the sun? How can you be so ignorant?!? This is the kind of shit about religion that puts me in utter amazement. It's a form of brainwashing. Research your little Jesus friend, and tell me the similarities of him with other ancient gods. Jesus was a real man, I'll give you that, but the son of God? Give me a fucking break. Jesus was an old school Ghandi, and if you are going to counter me with, "Oh, well Ghandi didn't perform miracles like Jesus!" think about all of the other fucking bullshit that is in the Bible, like Jonah getting eating by a whale. I'm done talking shit. Wake up you ignorant fuck. That story is a lie.

Anyone who read all of that is at least 50% as crazy as the author himself.

It would be funny if it were ALL TRUE. I'd head straight-away to the nearest zoo so that I could make it with a Zebra and get stripey babies. I suppose this explains how Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were created far better than that 'magical ooze' crap.

This worldview is actually pretty neat. I think I'm going to adopt it as my own for a week and see how it turns out.

Brain...melting...losing consciousness...must..fight...must read..Coyne...

So it seems to me like penises are the problem, not Satan. If only god hadn't been so damned fastidious in making Adam in his image, all of this sin stuff could have been avoided.
That does make me wonder though; what does god use his penis for? Maybe that's how Satan got so messed up. Maybe those catholic priests are more godly than we think.

That has to be a spoof. It was so nutty I found myself smiling and laughing through the whole thing.

... and then there are those mentally ill scientists who fake their data thereby gaining fame and later notoriety -- the so-called vaccination/autism link being the most recent case. As a rule empirical sciences are self-correcting and self-enforcing systems. But, ingrained dispositions have a way of taking over even disciplined minds --

** stereotypical images, or why is Darwin shown aged with flowing beard? **

Saints of science; icons of the state.

Old Darwin, like fossil Newton before him, has long since been venerated by the British Establishment and the Scientific Establishment ever since his death in 1882. The remains of both men lie within shouting distance of one another in Westminster Abbey.

Darwin’s bust with its prophet’s beard appears on the back of the ten pound note, a childish image of God in the clouds

Magical thinking and supernaturalism still thrive, hidden away in stereotypically xian ideation taking charge over otherwise religion-free minds.

The de-deification of western culture (including all the sciences) is our task for the next five hundred years.

Anti-supernaturalist ©2009

I've got it figured. Charles Manson has studied theology and this is his thesis.

This may be a Poe, or it might not be. I haver seriously met people who hold such strange and wacked out theories. They are perfectly normal people who function very well in society, just don't get them talking about their pet theories on how the world really works.

Yup, they walk among us people, and they look completely normal.

Still it is hard to believe that someone could be this stupid.

Thanks for the laughs PZ.

If this is not a poe, and the writer is serious, there is an upside to his message. Look at

"There won't be any survivors. So if you don't want that to happen then I suggest that you stop creating and tell your children when they grow up not to create. Tell them if they get married they can always adopt. I am 100% sure your future generations will appreciate not being created. If you don't believe me then just go to any prison and ask them if they appreciate being created. If you do not stop your generations now then your generations will stop themselves the hard way."

If the author believes this I'm guessing he (she?) won't reproduce.

I'd like to think it was a poe, but I'm with E.V, Another Joel and Valhar2000.

Someone needs to check this dude's basement to make sure he's not stacking up dead hookers down there.

I've had some interesting conversations in my time with some people with schizophrenia who had equally deranged, yet internally consistent, theories about the world.

This is a POE peeling an onion.

Somewhere in the wilds of Appalachia someone is sitting on his front porch with a satisfied smile on his face.

Morphadites? OMFG!

The electrons! Won't somebody please think of the poor innocent electrons?

ABC: Paragraphs are your friend. Use them.

"Then God went away and while he was gone ..." lmao. So, what, he went out for a beer and a lap dance cause all that creating really takes it out of you

I just figured it out, the person is the product of Creationist, Home School Educational System.

But what I still want to know is, Did Jesus Ride a Dinosaur? Or did he just f*** a monkey and called it day?

PZ, I laughed so hard it nearly killed me! Please be careful what you write!

Tony C @171>"I think you'll find the word is TENETS"

Yes, damn I hate to make spelling mistakes. In any case, after thinking about this for a while I'm going with hoax. Obviously it's in Poe territory, ie. indistinguishable, but if I had to bet $5 on this particular instance I'd go with "pulling PZ's leg".

Okay. Seems not to generalize very well. Need some Capulets or something in there.

Don't you need Capulets for Capulation?

Sorry.

I kept hearing the author reading this in a hyper-fast mode as if it were one lenghty run-on sentence. He seems obsessed with bestiality also. Or just sex in general? Perhaps the author hasn't been laid in a while.

I need to find out more about this Orangutan man.

"So as long as they could understand english they didn't have to speak english"

Let me guess, here is a person who thinks that Jesus was white and spoke english because he bible he reads is written in english. A certifiable racist nutter.

@292

Or ever.

well, that was a novel kind of weird. though the obsessive disgust with sex and incest doesn't sound like the guy had a pleasant childhood :-/

also, I don't get the impression that he was very young... definitely an adult, but a crazed one.

WTF? Seriously, WTF?

Maybe the author of this... stuff... should go work for Ken @ AIG. They could skillfully confuse the F*** out of everyone better than before.

I feel more stupider for reading da whole ting....

that was hiLARious! reminds me of Henry Darger.

i think that dude's more pschizo than creationist.

Wow...this is a special kind of crazy and I actually feel bad for this person. Crazy person? Please get some help, preferrably from someone who can prescribe you something in heavy doses.

And now this guy can go into a shop and buy an M16...

#238: "Not a Poe - he really thinks this way"

May I assume you used the word 'thinks' metaphorically?

A real six-car-pile-up-on-the-Interstate of a post; I just couldn't help slowing down to rubberneck.

I don't think it's either a Poe or mental illness. I think that what we've got here is someone (possibly a kid) trying to make some sort of synthesis out of whatever unorthodox Christianity they've been raised with, and poorly-understood bits and snippets from TV documentaries, based on the assumption that all of it is true. (Think about some of the crap that gets served up as "documentaries" these days....) In this post we've got revisionist history, a bit of continental drift, an awareness that there is a relationship between humans and other primates, a taking at face value of the existence of Bigfoot, yeti and so forth, odd bits and pieces of paleontology, the ozone hole, and concern about overpopulation; all superimposed on a relgious framework.

Of course, I could be wrong.

Did he say... "mated with a Gorilla"?

Methinks he may know what he's talking about. :)

I checked the timecube guy to compare insanities. Timecube guy still has this loon beat, by a mile.

And, surprisingly, the timecube site is still being added to. Turns out the guy is a racist, too. Not too happy about our president. Heh.

@Nichole, #298: reminds me of Henry Darger

Not sure I'd want to see this illustrated, though, what with all that sex with orangutans and gorillas... Darger's stuff was creepy-cute, this would be pretty much just creepy.

Come on people! This guy is clearly insane and needs help.

Any volunteers?

No way anyone can be that stupid. Also, his life must be miserable, what with "sex is EEEVVIILLL!!!111oneone"?

I,for one, was very interested to learn that prehistoric man spoke english.That should quiet those of you who don't think the Flintstones is history.

12 virgins?

Er. Peter (at least) was married.

Wow. I needed three breaks and a glass of whiskey of get through that whole thing.

Oh, the electrons... won't somebody please think of those poor abused electrons?

Too Stupid; Didn't Read

The stupid....it burns so bad.

And I'm glad the omnipresent god was somehow able to leave the garden so Lucifer could sneak in.

Now everyone believes that Jesus came from God. Well that's not true. Jesus came from Mary having sex with a Roman soldier while Joesph was off fighting in a war. She lied to save her own life. Back then if a woman got pregnant and she wasn't married they would stone her to death. So she lied and said that Jesus came from God.

Other people recognize bits and pieces of other stuff (eg, Ariosophy/Theozoology), but I should note that this part appears to be taken from some combination of Celsus, and/or some fragmentary mentions in the Talmud, and/or Toldot Yeshu.

He said "bone".

HEH HEH HEH HEH!

(C.F. "Beavis and Butthead")

That was a really long letter. Wonder how people find time to write such nonsensical letter?

Thank you Rev.BigDumbChimp. I tried all the acronyms but none of them fit - I didn't realise it was a law! (And a valid one, I have to say.)

I really hate when people write like this:

"Well that's not true."

"Well there is no devil or satan from hell."

First of all, why do people use "Well" like that? Awful. Second of all, if you are going to use "well" like that (like you're having a fucking conversation), at least put a comma after the word.

The same goes with "Now":

"Now all God wanted was Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and the animals on the earth."

DRIVES ME FUCKING BATTY.

Those Liburty U. grads are so smart!

Well he didn't say anything about masturbation, so I'm still safe.
Tough luck on all you others doing the nasty.

Cruithne, I figured this part was a reference to masturbation:

God did not give Adam the power to have sex with his own flesh. God is a God of goodness not evil.

I suppose there could be a paragraph break in between those sentences, but with this writer it's quite hard to tell.

Look. Don't worry. Whether this guy is clinically insane, which political correctness may allow me to say, or just plain daft, which it probably will not allow, it doesn't matter. The woods are and always have been full of his kind, and ultimately most of them have been forgotten, as he will be.

Who now remembers Comyns Beaumont, who wrote a whole series of books dedicated to the proposition that the Roman empire had really done a huge job of disinformation on the genesis of Christianity; it all really happened in Britain, not Palestine, but for some reason, I cannot now remember what, the Romans shifted it all in their history books. So Jerusalem was really Edinburgh and the Temple was where the Edinburgh Castle now is. Jesus was crucified at Gogarburn, on the road to Falkirk. OK, Gogarburn sound like Golgotha, right? If you are drunk enough?

Beaumont followed this up with books which argued that Odysseus sailed around the Scottish islands, visiting Yell in Shetland which was really where the wind god Aeolus came from, and that Moses led the Israelites for 40 years through the deserts in England. Gath of the Philistines is now Bath. Sounds like, right?

Who also now remembers the writers, I think L. Sprague de Camp was one, who reckoned that stone circles such as Stonehenge were built for air traffic control purposes? The way they worked was that the druids got lots of people to dance widdershins around the stone circles, thus setting up a big charge of invisible bio-energy which could be detected by aliens using pendulums in their flying saucers. Primitive VOR and glideslope,which we only caught up with in the 20th century, right?

Come to that, who now remembers Velikovsky of "Worlds in Collsion" fame? To say nothing of von Daeniken and his "Chariots of the Gods" and T. Lobsang Rampa of "The Third Eye".

All these guys had a good story, reasonably consistent and on the surface plausible. It didn't sound too far off the wall. You only had to suspend your disbelief a little bit, and away you went. You too could be a believer. It is awfully easy to believe if you want to. Especially when the story is good fun, as these stories were.

Even better, these guys sold books, lots of them. There is an enormous public demand for fantasy and these guys knew how to satisfy it For a while, in their time, anyway, though I suspect they or their estates are still getting paid for library borrowings. Then the world moved on and the punters wanted a fresh fantasy. And so it goes.

All this can probably be explained by meme theory in action; these memes didn't quite manage to reproduce themselves in enough human minds and so they were not selected and died out. Evolution of ideas works too.

I don't think PZ's correspondent's meme - if that is what it is, for I have not studied meme theory - has much viability. It won't reproduce. Not many people will buy the proposition that sexual reproduction is inherently sinful. There are not too many Shakers or Skoptsi around nowaydays. If it does reproduce it certainly won't reproduce more succesfully than its competitors.

Leave the poor fellow alone. His meme is not infectious. It's just another non-starter.

@ Richard Smith,

Yeah, but dude, did you ever read any of that 15,000 page manuscript that accompanies those creepy cute little naked girls with penises and wings and shit?? They played a reading of it over headphones when I went to that exhibit.. Def. more creepy than cute IMHO.

That must have taken a few days to type with just his two index fingers.

Who also now remembers the writers, I think L. Sprague de Camp was one, who reckoned that stone circles such as Stonehenge were built for air traffic control purposes?

Wait, what? L. Sprague de Camp wrote fiction, and labeled it as such. He did also write about ancient engineers, and the real feats they performed in moving heavy things around, but checking inside finds no mention of ancient astronaut woo.

I think you're thinking of someone else, but I am not well read enough in woo to figure out who.

But it wasn't a natural evolution it was a man made evolution. That' where Bigfoot, Sasquatch, Orangutan man, Yeti and the Skunk Ape comes from. They are half man and half Gorilla and half man and half Orangutan. When scientists find drawings in caves they were put there by Bigfoot and the Orangutan man.

Does this mean that Bigfoot and OrangutanMan speak English? Or only half-English (AKA: "Southern")? And why did Bigfoot draw in caves without putting English captions to his pictures? Since he's only half-man, with half-English, can he speak it, but not write it? So many questions!

I'm confused by the phrase "mentally retarted". Does that mean I can become a born again slut, but only in my own mind?

I stopped reading at about the point where he said that having sex would be "evil and bad."

I also turned off the radio today when I saw Rush Limbaugh was on the only talk radio station I can pick up.

Sometimes it's just not worth subjecting yourself to stupidity and venom.

I kind of doubt either of those mouth-breathers, Mr. I Believe and Mr. Limbaugh, had anything remotely insightful, new, or truthful to say. Sure, sometimes it's fun to listen just so I can go over things that prove them wrong in my head, but I mean.. I can also beat a cat at a game of chess. That doesn't mean it's not a waste of my time and an exercise in pointlessness.

Wow. I can't believe I read that whole thing. This has to be a troll - there's no way anyone actually believes all that.

... Right???

You know.. I have a theory about the whole paragraph thing. See, there is some really horrible post software you find some sites using, and usually ones where the guy writing the blog is a total idiot, which actually "delete" all extraneous white space. Mind, it thinks "paragraphs" are extraneous white spaces. So, here is what I think. Someone convinced these mentally ill people that all the other products where the work of Satan, or something, so they all use the crappy forum post code. And, since every post of ranting insanity lands on the web "before" it ever gets emailed, they do what they always do, which is cut and paste from the last place they posted the screed to, thus resulting in them "losing" all the paragraphs/white space they had in the originals.

Well, its an idea anyway. But seriously, what kind of moron makes a post with X characters allowed, then "deletes" returns, so that you are forced to add [br][br] codes to the post, to get the damn thing to "fix" them? Got to be some sort of brain damage or mental illness involved...

I think L. Sprague de Camp was one, who reckoned that stone circles such as Stonehenge were built for air traffic control purposes

What? De Camp was a fantasy writer. A really good, inventive, funny and original fantasy writer. After reading de Camp (in my pre & early teens, alone and in collaboration with Fletcher Pratt) I found all other fantasy was just so many muscles (until Terry Pratchett, that is!)

You must be thinking of some other brand of woo.

I'm thinking the author did it "For teh LULZ".

De Camp was a fantasy writer. A really good, inventive, funny and original fantasy writer.

Agreeing some more, here.

De Camp had a short-story collection book called The Purple Pterodactyls. The title is weird, but the stories were good.

One of them was about finding a small idol that really did respond to sacrifices. Another was about a cult that apparently did have access to some sort of magic powers, and used them against the protagonist, who was able to fight back.

But de Camp had a very rigorous and rationalistic attitude towards magic in his stories: magic (or even religion) might work, but it worked according to rules that could be discovered, formalized, and used in a quasi-scientific fashion. And magic (and religion) was not given any sort of real respect; it was just the way the universe happened to work.

His fantasy was often a good antidote to woo.

Yeah it is close to physically impossible to reach the end without your brain exploding. I got about 1/2 way through and already had a headache. Anyway, the best bit has to be:-

"Now everyone thinks of Lucifer as the devil or satan from hell. Well there is no devil or satan from hell. That is a fairytale that has been handed down through generations. The real truth is that Lucifer was one of God's angels."

LOL that's a classic!!! So he can spot that part of it is a fairytale, but why not the rest of it? Handed down the generations eh? But isn't that how all religion works and unfortunatley it gets much (ill deserved) prestige as a result.

What is the difference between Lucifer being from hell and, say, some guy magically rising from the dead? The answer is locked away in a Creationist brain somewhere.

Linda @115

Reading this was like trying to swim out of quicksand - the harder I fought the more it sucked me in.

and the many who claimed brain frazzling from this ...

The key is not to fight against the crazy. Just float along with the flow, you'll stay on the surface and revel in the giggleicousness of it all.

What is interesting to me is that it follows Genesis 1-3 fairly accurately, then BOINNNNGG, something short circuits when the writer tries to make sense of "where did all the people come from? WHAT, it must be INCEST!!!" and the fireworks start.

The only response I can make is to quote Mr. Spock while he subtly arches an eyebrow:

Fascinating

L. Sprague de Camp was a founding member of CSICOP, and a respected foe of pseudoarchaeology. He was always careful to distinguish between his fiction and his nonfiction writing. And he was a hoot. Definitely some other brand of woo, as TonyC says.

The kiddies are trotted off to some side room where some well-meaning but foolish adult tries to teach them something age-appropriate from the bible. That in itself places some limitations... [redacted}no harlots and stoning to death

Hmph. What Sunday School did you go to that they didn't talk about stoning harlots to death? That kind of talk started when I was, oh, 7 or 8 in my Sunday school, but the preacher had already been saying stuff about it during the sermons for me to remember it as early as 4.. But then the preacher was a misogynist fucktard. I'm still not sorry I bit him when he tried that patronizing head-patting thing.

And EV, I agree that the chances are high that this letter writer is mentally ill--but it's not necessarily so. I can remember perfectly normal (albeit dumbfuck ignorant) people making these nonsensical leaps of warped data. For instance, the mating with animals making the "races" is one that was really common to hear about in East Texas. That whole Adam Eve Lucifer barrage is very close to some other stuff out there.

In fact, the only place where this guy goes off the hillbilly rails is when he talks about Jesus not being divine. Other than that, I can assure all of you that there are people right here in America who really do think these things. They are out there amongst you and considered maybe a little ignorant, but normal enough as it goes. And they're not all in Texas or the south.

Well, at least we can be glad that this one won't reproduce.

I find it interesting that all the human/ape hybrids had human fathers and ape mothers. Does he expect us to believe that King Kong and Ann Darrow were "just friends?"

Does he expect us to believe that King Kong and Ann Darrow were "just friends?"

Not enough KY to lubricate that partnership!

Finally,peer acceptance of my"Hairy Elephants Running Around When America And Africa Were Joined At The Top Theory"Also,I always knew those early christians spoke English,translated it into Hebrew,then translated it back into English again!

At least he didn't claim that the snake in garden of Eden was really a Negro gardener.

"they saw they were naked so they covered themselves up"

that bit's right. Same thing happened to me just the other day.

Obviously, this is the result of home schooling.

I need to read something smarter to keep my brain from committing suicide, where's "Oh the places you'll go"?

I'm sure if PZ posted a compendium of his nutty emails we would see the common thread he mentioned and the muddled inanity the human mind is capable of spewing toward better educated people.

I'm not concerned with the authors sanity or his sincerity. What concerns me is the people who write:

"This has to be a poe because..."

a) "No one is that stupid"

b)"No one is that crazy"

Um, no it doesn't because:

a)a significant number of people are more stupid than that.
b)a significant number of people are crazier than that.

I just love how he puts the "mentally retarted" on the same level as "childmolestors".

I loved this letter, although the repititious racism in the third act was a bit boring. But I loved the rest. It raises the bar for insanity.

I want to cherish this letter. I want save this, I want to print it out and post it on my wall and read it every now and then. To the extent that insanity is beautiful this is beautiful. I am in awe.

Creationist author:

"If you don't believe me then just go to any prison and ask them if they appreciate being created."

Category 7 Atheist @ 3:

"I sifted through the incest babble until I got to the racism and now I'm wondering if this person is trolling, and if not how someone so stupid can survive. How is that possible?"

If you doubt this is possible, then why are there pygmies + dwarves?

that...broke my brain. where do I send the bill?

Wow, just...I'm flabbergasted. That has got to be a troll, otherwise I'll spend the entire weekend in a fetal position crying for the sake of humanity.

The only good part here is this lunatic has his own head so far up his backside that he's probably chewed his gonads off since they're so unholy, and will never, ever reproduce.

Dear Author,

Your ideas are so intriguing. Please ameliorate my doubts by having sex with a female orangutan and producing an Indian, then having sex with a gorilla and producing an African. If you care about your theory so much then you have an obligation to do it. Take your time and try for as long as it takes.

By the way, saying that Adam and Eve didn't have sex or kiss because that is wrong and evil is the dumbest thing I've ever heard. Evil isn't innate and doesn't presuppose any type of God just because YOU said so.

Also, Adam and Eve covering themselves because they realized they are naked is completely arbitrary and proves the Bible was made up to fit societal norms. There was no reason to feel any shame, because there was so society to need privacy from. What, Adam didn't want his wife, who saw him naked for weeks or whatever, now suddenly not to see him nude? Why would either of them care? Who else would see? The animals? The God who can see you whenever you get naked anyhow? It is no difference than Adam eating the apple and suddenly saying, "Damn, I need to get a job and pay taxes now, because now that I am smart I realize you need to get a job and pay taxes."

Dummy.

I found the last paragraph somewhat incomprehensible...

Except for this bit: "I am 100% sure your future generations will appreciate not being created."

That bit was funny.

Sounds like you got e-mail from a Cathar.

morfadites,...

That made it all worth reading! I hadn't heard or seen that word since the Benton County Fair in about 1962, when the Older Boys said there was one you could look at in that one tent back behind the Knock 'Em Down And Win A Prize!!! tent.

But I thought "morphodite" was the proper spelling.....

Pure, unadulterated gold from begining to end. All of you who say you couldn't read past the first few sentences need to go back and TRY. It's worth it. I thought he was loosing heart near the end when he started babbling on about population control and the ozone layer, but his assurances that my future non-existent offspring would surely thank me for not producing them put the smile back on my face.

Does this mean he's pro-choice?
And did he basically call Jesus' mom a slut? Oh no he di-n't!

Thanks PZ, made my evening.

It hurts! Just a few queries. Is god a person? I mean he went away and didn't notice what was going on with his pets. Then, lucifer puts evil in a tree, and god can't get rid of it? Oh no, he can only warn about it. Pretty pissweak god right there.

Regarding the possibility of crossing orang laut with orang utan, the answer is "no".

It's amazing how this 0.9-Tc person rambles on and on about completely fictitious affairs and still manages to make a mistake of fact!

I don't even know what to do with myself, now. I think I'm going to sit here and cry. No wait... Vomit sounds better!

I think I've become permanently Slack-Jawed by the sheer number of preposterous proclamations made in this most appalling testament, to the one and ONLY FACT found in this infantile drivel... which is that this "Man? - Thing? - Typing Creature?" is, certainly, the descendent of an incestuous history.

I see this more as a Family Tree, carved by a demented individual whose superstitious parents allowed him to develop & believe in, an alternate reality. One... where his fondling of "kid sister Suzie" can find pardon, and also where his love of faux-primatology can find preeminence. By placing English Speaking Orangutans, Gorillas & Chimps, at the top of his lineage, he's succeeded in weaving the books of "The Bible" with that of Pierre Boulle's Sci-fi classic "La Planete Des Singes" - a wonderful feat in it's own right, but not necessarily solid grounds for omitting procreation from our future.

I agree with his last sentiments, that there are far too many humans occupying this earth, and that a drastic solution needs implementation, before amok runs our progeny in scourge, but I propose........... an alternate method!

I say we round up people just like him, AND BEAT THEM SENSELESS WITH THEIR OWN STUPIDITY!!!

Brilliant, absolutely brilliant.

I'm using that letter as the lyrics to my next prog-rock concept album.

BAND NAME? "The Morfadites", OF COURSE.

Wouldn't having sex with your own flesh be more like masturbation than incest?

I have always had problems with that Christian concept that knowledge is somehow evil. What just God would want simple ignorant pets?

In any case, this individual has certainly not "polluted" himself with knowledge. The pathetic thing is, there are so many in America who regard such astounding ignorance as a virtue.

LOL

My eyelids instinctively clamped shut halfway through email. Praise our evolved stupid radar for protecting my brain from any potentially hazardous drivel!

Holy shit that is the looniest thing I've ever tried to read.

I don't get nearly so many completely, fornicatingly stupid, frothing-at-the-mouth-and-nose stupid e-mails as you, P.Z.

I think that they think Christians can see through them. So, in the end, if you'd just confess Christianity, you'd get far fewer of those idiot e-mails.

And so I see more reasons you wouldn't confess the faith -- you'd not get to see the craziest excrement from these guys, and they'd somehow mistake you as one of them. The embarrassment of the mistaken identity is, alone, almost enough to make me forsake the faith.

If there were God, wouldn't God make intelligent life on Earth? If if there were intelligent life on Earth, wouldn't all these flakes disappear?

Christians themselves are some of the best arguments against Christianity.

PZ is obviously a lightening rod for stupidity. Can you imagine Dawkins' and Hitchens' email? *shudder* Although, the crackergate missives would give them a run for their money, I imagine.

A riveting read!

"This may be a Poe, or it might not be."

Just a word on Poe's law, if I may. If you're not sure whether or not it's a parody, then it's definitely a Poe. Remember, Poe's law holds when you can't tell the difference.

Sorry for being a pedant.

I don’t have time to go into all the things wrong with his argument, but one glaring falsehood has to be addressed: Everyone knows a skunk ape comes from a mating of skunk and ape. And frankly I don’t see how we will ever keep those two from breeding.

EV--surely you've seen the video of Richard Dawkins reading his hate mail?

At least we don't have to worry about him grunting out 14 frankenbabies.

I don’t have time to go into all the things wrong with his argument, but one glaring falsehood has to be addressed: Everyone knows a skunk ape comes from a mating of skunk and ape. And frankly I don’t see how we will ever keep those two from breeding.

I was thinking the same thing. Has anyone mentioned the skunk ape to Ray "Where's the crocoduck?" Comfort?

I couldn't sit through an entire re-telling of Genesis, but I did randomly scroll and read this sentence:

"God designed nature so the animals would never destroy the earth."

WRONG! Many species destroy aspects of their habitat utterly, which changes the entire biome. Elephants versus trees, for example.

And depending on how you define "the earth," there are lots of animals that are made extinct thanks to competition and predation by other animals. So that could also be part of "destroying the earth."

Let's not even get into weather or magnetic pole shifts changing the climate. I just sat in on a very fascinating lecture on just this subject yesterday for Darwin Day!

In this guy's defense, some of this has been done by others.

Pantera the Roman soldier Panthera, who the writer Celsus claimed was the true father of Jesus.

I used to see some graffiti in Seattle that said a certain ethnic group was living proof that a certain race had sex with monkeys.

"Orangutan" is Indonesian and Malay for "person of the woods", for what that's worth.

Well, it's a point of view. If we're going to "teach the controversy" it would surely be only fair to include this version along with the more conventional creationist lunacy.

This person is certainly committed.

Nurse Ratched is gonna be pissed when she finds out someone used her computer.

Holy. Word. Salad. Batman!

It's either a Poe or it was written by a child. "They had no knowledge of kissing or sex." That has to be a put-on.

man that was long. I gave up when I reached the part where Adam and Eve choose sex. Thank God they made that decision, otherwise this world would be so damn boring! hooray for them!

"God designed nature so the animals would never destroy the earth."
WRONG! Many species destroy aspects of their habitat utterly, which changes the entire biome. Elephants versus trees, for example.

Yeah, that one jumped out at me, too.

Jared Diamond in Third Chimpanzee listed some examples of animals actively destroying ecosystems. One was a rabbit with no known predators, who overbred and ended up wiping out all but one or two pieces of vegetation on an island (Hawaiian, I think...).

I wonder exactly what he thought he was going to accomplish with that screed?

Also, I doubt it's a Poe...who would spend that much time on a Poe THAT messed up? And I think I met this guy at a truckstop in Texas about 10 years ago. Weird guy.

Hmm. He reminds me of my mother's sister's eldest child, who married my father's brother's youngest; well that was the first marriage for each, being as they were not brought up good Christians following the Bible so's they didn't know about not divorcing their spouses because God commanded they not do that, though of course if they read it through they'd have known that God would rather they didn't marry in the first place. And He'd not have wanted them to have so many children, though in a little town like ours you couldn't swing a cat without hitting a double first cousin anyways. Twice, even.

I completely lost it at "...extra long teeth because they were borned that way."

All you biologist should be ashamed of yourselves for not stealing this obviously scientific word from the 6 year old neighbor kid before this whackjob beat you to it.

Are you sure this wasn't written by a computer program for writing fundie sermons?

Awwww - all that and not even a "Kind Regards" or "Best Wishes" at the end?
How rude.

As of this posting there are over 380 comments here. I think I am a minority but(having studied and done some psychiatry)I think this is a real psychotic person, not someone trying to mock us. And obviously no denomination of Christianity would consider it less than heretic.
Which is not to say, he did not make my day, between the gorillas and the orangutans...

come on guys, this is clearly satire. but nonetheless, absolutely hilarious!

Oh, and of course -

Well, I for one, welcome our new Orangutan-Gorilla-Man overlords!

@ Insightful Ape

Oh, I totally agree that this person appears to have a mental illness. Several others expressed a similar opinion as well. This isn't typical fundie/godbot wackiness or ignorance, this is deranged. I think psychosis is a real possibility.

"I am 100% sure your future generations will appreciate not being created."

Best. Line. Ever.

Surely this is a joke. There's no way this guy can possibly believe what he's saying. I think he was messing with you, PZ.

I hope he was anyway. If not, the guy needs help.

First thing I thought was that this had to be a joke. Surely, none can be so completely incoherent. On the other hand, why would anyone bother to write this unless he actually believed what he wrote?

Scientists are either finding freaks of nature or their making mistakes or their findings things and they just don't know what they are.

Never have I seen the bedrock existential dilemma of the modern scientist expressed so pithily.

Also, can alyone tell me more about this "Skunk Ape"?

Soon, you will all bow before Skunk Ape. And the morfadites. All hail Jebus!

Posted by: Sven DiMilo | February 14, 2009 12:56 AM

Also, can alyone tell me more about this "Skunk Ape"?

A regional name for Bigfoot*, used mostly in the Southeastern U.S. Apparently they smell bad. Occasionally you'll hear Swamp Ape or Swamp Monkey too. Google for supposed pics of one taken (not too far from me actually) in Sarasota, Fl.

*I'm sure many a cryptozoologist would jump all over such a simple description, hollering about subspecies or something, but screw 'em. They want to expound, they can post.

Further to Skunk Apes

The term is a regionalism, used mostly in the Southeast United States. According to the stories a sasquatch gets scared he starts smelling real bad.

I haven't heard of the same phenomenon occurring with four (five, six, seven*) great apes.

*Depends on whether there are three or four species of chimpanzee instead of just two, and one or two species of orangutan.

A veritable buffet of madness. Something for everyone. The whole idea seems to be centered around "sex is evil".
Poe or no? If this dude hsn't been diganosed with some type of mental disorder, he will be in the near future.

I was also picking up Mad magazine flavor there. But just a bit. It is a work of art. But like Hunter S. Thompson's madness. And we know where that ends.

#395

Surely there are at least 5 species of great apes? Had you forgotten us? Or are you assuming that gorillas are now as good as extinct.

all of my applause goes to E.V., for finally saying it.

it steams me when all the brilliant commenters here at Pharyngula are always so quick to cry "Poe". it's like, you guys are clever 99% of the time, why do you always disregard clear insanity as someone faking you out? I get being incredulous, but that's taking it all the way to naivete.

well said, E.V.

I only managed to get about halfway through the big pile of crazy that was that letter.

I do have to hand one thing to the author though. He got one little fact probably correct:

Now everyone believes that Jesus came from God. Well that's not true. Jesus came from Mary having sex with a Roman soldier while Joesph was off fighting in a war.

However, one little factoid does not a genius make.

Its true, some people never grow out of their childish fantasies.

There are some people who very seriously promote the idea of the extinction of humankind. You can agree or disagree with them (it's difficult to deny that the planet would be rather better off without us). But I had never seen such crazy arguments for this idea.

Timecube Law anyone? Only in this case it's a single paragraph

Re EV @43:

The other recurring motif is the Pharyngulites that insist rantings by disturbed zealous xians must be a examples of poe. What insulated world do you people live in?

What bothers me is using "Poe" to declare something is a parody, rather than the proper use of declaring it to be indistinguishable from parody. In that sense, I agree with all those declaring Poe; this is truly indistinguishable from parody.

But back to the original letter. I was baffled by the argument that sex with a complete stranger is 3 times "closer" than incest with your actual sibling. Is this person trying to justify his own actual incest by declaring it to be unavoidable?

Some of you have led very sheltered lives; so have I, but I know it. The writer is mentally disturbed in some way. A person can hold ideas of this kind, even mutually contradictory ideas, with absolute conviction that they are right and even self-evident. That's what makes it sound like religious faith. And there's no irony meter to sound an alarm at Christians killing Jesus, because the story is in a separate compartment from knowledge of history. To me it sounds like fanfic - the invented back-story that interprets the lives of fictional characters. But it's all intertwined with personal obsessions.

I rate this as genuine but imagine this person is barely functional in the sense of making his own living. Living with a parent? In prison and using the library? Or working at a gas station? Can we get this person some help before he decides to start avenging wrongs or "fixing" things? One unfortunate theme in popular stories is the idea that if enough unfair things happen to you, you can start breaking the law and "avenging."

So as long as [the nonwhite slaves] could understand english they didn't have to speak english.

I realize this is probably the least of the problems with the rant, but does he think people spoke English centuries before Jesus? He probably thinks that English is God's language and the language of the only truly human race, the white Christians, who are nonetheless created by inbreeding.

"Then God went away and while he was gone .."

Omnipotent, omnipresent, all powerful, all knowing god went away??????

I laughed so much I may have torn a few intercostal muscles.

This MUST be a precocious delusionist child, surely.

That timecube guy is scary funny. Why stop at four corners for the earth? Why not 6, 24, 360, or 6 billion, once for every point of view? A circle has an infinite number of corners, each very close to the next. It's all proof by assertion, anyway: I am brilliant! This is the most brilliant theory ever! People at different places on the earth experience different sunrise and sunset times! Therefore God does not exist and I am brilliant! Everyone who acknowledges Greenwich time is part of an evil conspiracy!"

I think publishing email from the more disturbed and disgruntled people is insightful, especially to those who don't maintain a blog or those whose blogs tend to stay away from controversial topics. I think it's fair to find the letters tragic and/or funny or even eye opening. (Remember Crackergate&trade and the jaw dropping realization as to how many Catholic adults actually believe in transubstantiation in the 21st century?)

I am not in academia. I work as an artist and a contractor and have to deal with all walks of humanity. There are members of my extended family who suffer from a range of mental disorders, I have dealt with severe clinical depression for many years, but that's a wholly different story for another time.

What is startling to me is the college educated, successful professionals and clients I deal with who espouse truly bizarre beliefs and willful disdain toward any science that pushes their god into ever decreasing crevices. YEC Veterinarians, a beautiful Interior Decorator married to a surgeon who won't let her kids celebrate Halloween or read Harry Potter, Art Directors who refuse to work with non-theists because they bring "negative energy", NeoCon wealthy business man who let it be known in casual conversation that all atheists and scientists who teach evolution should be jailed (or shot) during his just-between-you-n-me back-to-Africa rant, the Psychologist who goes on screaming rampages at his neighbors and opines that the godless can never find true mental health, and on and on.
I've heard it all (many people feel the need to confide in me for some reason). I was targeted early on by those who knew I was shedding my religious beliefs. Few dared to confront me face to face, but the anonymous letters... boy, I got letters, well, threats and direly earnest irrational pleading actually. This is why I never bring up my non-theism to any client -hell, politics are a safer topic.

I've had casual conversations with clients in which I voiced my skepticism over trivial (or so I thought) matters and learned that many people think science is merely a collection of debatable piecemeal facts and figures like history or politics. Most people, even well educated people, are not even aware they practice magical thinking; they feel they are reasonable, logical and have common sense but that the magisterium of religion trumps the physical laws of the universe, i.e., with God, all things are possible even if logic would dictate otherwise and they will become even more irrational if you point out their illogic.
I've been privy to ridiculous, stupid, vitriolic credos from highly functioning people and incoherent bat-shit crazy but sincere ravings from the mentally disturbed. Nothing surprises me anymore except the cluelessness of some otherwise really smart people.

My apologies for beating this thread to death.
FWIW, I would bet the author of the inanity above is older than many have suggested.

He seems like he's on of those Militant Black Ministers. They stand on the street wearing a primary colored uniform with one supporter at his side (usually in a smilar uniform) preaching the evils of the demonic white man. They usually have a video camera set up pointing at them... makes them look like they're preaching to a large crowd. It's usually 3 or 4 very confused looking tourists.

Reading this again(yes, I am a masochist) I realize that it's actually a bit like the beliefs of Christian Identity-- all nonwhite races are actually the descendents of Eve and the Serpent, which was actually a black man(a "beast of the field") and the Jews are an inferior race, the real "chosen people" of course being white. If you ran Christian Identity through a blender, you'd get this rant.

I wonder if skunk apes have anything to do with Stinkor (photo) from the Masters of the Universe storyline.

Wow.
My personal facepalm moment was this delight:

"long before Jesus was born ... they cut their tongues ... because the whites were afraid these people might plan some kind of over throw. So as long as they could understand english they didn't have to speak english."

I know implying modern English took off in excess of 2000 years early (assuming 'long before' is at least the necessary 400-600 years to equal 2000 before Shakespeare) is hardly his most revolting claim, but it's surely got to be in the running for stupidest?

Whoa! I've been cloned...

I personally enjoyed the bit about:
"It was just a few tigers that had extra long teeth because they were borned that way."
All babies want to be borned!!!

Signed,

Bobby Jindal

This guy is brilliant. Not many people can piss off believers and non-believers at the same time.

I didn't read every comment so forgive me if someone already suggested that this screed is a put-on. Either way we may benefit from the unbridled creativity of the artist behind this piece. It is chock full of goodness and you know what that means.

We have here re-inventing the bible, contempt for both spell-check and typo correction, English before Christ, the Morning Star in the time of Genesis, "worse than worse than"
incest and so much more.

Does anyone else feel this is intended as a joke?

The whole, "Was just a freak of nature," series was great. Everything's a freak of nature. That's all. It's a freak of nature.

~ CJ
(the freak of nature)
http://www.helium.com/users/165611/show_articles

oh.my.pasta.

please, please be a Poe or a troll...if not, I'm afraid for the integrity of the human genetic pool.

White people are better than blacks or Indians (orange)...but an orange tiger is real while the white tiger is the freak. He's not even consistent in his stupid insanity.

Geez, PZ, if this is the mail you have to sift through...my sympathies. Of course, this kind of stuff explains why crap like the Louisiana bill get passed all the time...people really are just this stupid. I think we have bigger problems than climate change or WMDs if that's the case.

Help me out here.

WTF is "POE"?

It's very easy to understand; this person's therapist went on vacation, the medication ran out and he/she wandered into an internet cafe, ordered a triple espresso and sat in front of a computer.

A Poe is someone pretending to be a kooky fundie. Almost impossible to tell the difference.

How can you even bother to read this drivel? Isn't that why someone intelligently designed the 'delete' key?

Too long; DID read!

Though his paragraph was long, his "substance" made up for the lack of wackaloon icons. In addition to the option of this being a Poe, it also sounded like it could be either a 2nd grader (with some mad math & typing skillz) or a copy/paste job from said 2nd grader's "Children's Bible" (submitted by his fundy mommy/daddy).

I don't think it's a Poe, but I would guess that the writer is mentally ill. Definitely a member of the Junior Antisex League.

Did anyone read the whole thing? I read quite a bit but gave up when he assumed that before Babel everyone spoke English.

And another option is that this was typed by a breakaway sect from the WBC -- one that is more obsessed with incest than with homosexuality.

And another option is that this was typed by a breakaway sect from the WBC -- one that is more obsessed with incest than with homosexuality.

I'm pretty sure that the Nicene Creed is sufficiently important to Baptists that one would not suggest that Jesus was a bastard and still call himself a Baptist.

I'm just saying, is all.

This guy's got the right idea about "creating": he shouldn't do it.

So ... where did Cain's wife come from?

Dafmeister @165: Thanks

Morons - Chapter One, Verse One.

I like the part where he says: "Now everyone thinks of Lucifer as the devil or satan from hell. Well there is no devil or satan from hell. That is a fairytale that has been handed down through generations."

Yeah, because everything else isn’t, right?

What does "GOD ON A WHEEL" mean?!

Delusion at its finest.

Kind of reminds me of this woman
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STFT0C5Hu8M&NR=1

I started to read thought it but stopped when I got to the part about "sex being bad and god isn't bad". Did a 15 year old send this to you?

"Then God went away and while he was gone ..." lmao. So, what, he went out for a beer and a lap dance cause all that creating really takes it out of you.

No, after all that creating he needed a cigarette.

Best laugh in a long time. thanks!

This is a hoax. I mean, it just has to be.
But, thank you.
Really cute.

I just picture the little guy plucking away by candle light on his commodore 64 with two index fingers, shooting snot rockets, and drinking from some jug with an X on it.

Ah, Lisa is denying it to be real as any religious apologist would.

Cute Lisa, but your site seems almost as goofy as the author above, just not overtly so. Thanks for playing anyway.

WHAT IF PRAYER WASN'T SOMETHING YOU DID BUT WAS SOMETHING YOU COULD BECOME

Yeah Lisa, that's much more coherent than the letter.

The good new is that this person will apparently not be reproducing. Proof that religion can do good for humanity.

I'm sorry, but this annoys me…

To everyone feeling the the need to post "tl;dr" here:

If you did not even read a part of a blog post why comment?

"Hey this post was too long for me to want to read it all. However, I still have the urge to let everyone here know that I did not read it..."

What do you want? A fucking cookie?

You need to send it back to them with the following:

Grade F--

Reasons include flawed arguments, ramblings, and a primary-school theme quality.

also please refer to grade 3 notes regarding basic sentence structure and paragraphs.

Oh, yeah, I remember reading this. And my reaction is the same:
"...huh ... haaha .... ... what?? ... okay ... *what*?? ..."

The thing is though, Adam and Eve were both naked and didn't have boardgames or cable. If they didn't have sex, what did they do?

If you just poofed into existence, I'd imagine that a bit of curiosity and general cluelessness would lead to some interesting things. Especially since (going along with the myth) there wasn't a society to shun freako behavior.

wow...just wow...

Jumpin' Jesus on a Pogo Stick!

An obvious troll. Lighten up, kids.

I'm fairly certain this charming specimen got his Mary-boinked-a-Roman theory from Life of Brian.