pharyngula

How dare radicals insert their civil rights provisions into the sacred Constitution — a federal judge has just declared that California's Proposition 8 is in violation of the 14th Amendment. Now it's probably going to the Supreme Court, and who knows what will happen in wacky Roberts-Scalia land,…

Uh-oh. Seed Media has received some demands from Robert Lanza, MD, Scientist, Theoretician, Genius, Renegade Thinker. He wants us to take down a few posts by Orac and myself. I guess he doesn't like being compared to Grandpa Simpson, or seeing disagreement with his ideas about the afterlife, or…

I blame Barbara Bradley Hagerty — or at least, she is the face of religious inanity at NPR. She has a new piece up titled Christian Academics Cite Hostility On Campus, and does she have any evidence for this claim? None at all. Actually, she has evidence contradicting the claim. There are two parts…

Am I the only one who sees "theidiocy" whenever I read or hear the term "theodicy"? Just curious. Anyway, take a look at this lovely example of rationalizing the death of children. The most merciful thing an omnicient God might do is end the life of a child whom he knows will never seek Him. -…

I have no idea how this stuff gets published. I've been sent a new paper that tests the effect of prayer, and I was appalled: it's got such deep methodological problems that nothing can be concluded from it, but that doesn't stop the authors, who argue that they're seeing that Proximal…

Not that he's ever been soft on religion, but this recent column in SciAm makes him sound like one of those shrill, militant, rabid, dangerous Gnu Atheists. I don't know which is more dangerous, that religious beliefs force some people to choose between knowledge and myth or that pointing out how…

You know, every morning I get up and try to plow through the flood of email I get overnight, and it's always full of these dire stories and horrible events. So here I will share with you a little sense of how I feel when I open my mailbox. It's amazing that I'm still such a happy fellow. I think…

Gullibility really does destroy lives. A Vietnamese couple in Australia, the Trans, were missing a purse, so they made mistake #1: they went to a fortune teller to find out where it was. Really, magic doesn't work. Mistake #2: the fortune teller told them that a young woman, Leilani dos Santos,…

I am cruel. I am heartless. I am evil. For this instance of the damned thread, I give you…"music". You knew I wasn't a nice guy when you came here. (Current totals: 10,755 entries with 1,077,020 comments.)

I am not a fan of homeschooling; in fact, if I had my way, I'd make it illegal. Too often it's an excuse to isolate kids and hammer them full of ideological nonsense, and in a troubled public school system, it doesn't help to strip students and money from a struggling district — it should be part…

Writing about the role of the NAACP in swatting down the endemic racism in the Republican party, Ta-Nehisi Coates writes something beautiful. I have, in my writing, a tendency to become theoretically cute, and overly enamored with my own fair-mindedness. Such vanity has lately been manifested in…

All the dudes griping in the feminist threads have finally convinced me that I should bring out my inner horndog. So here we go: I'm converting Pharyngula to an all porn format. I expect my page views to go through the roof. As my first entry, here is the infamous Eva Mendes sex tape. Enjoy. Eva…

This past weekend, I attended my 35th high school reunion. It's a strange phenomenon to be meeting people you haven't seen since you were 18, and further weirdness ensues when we discover that most of them are already grandparents. There have been a lot of life changes in 35 years. Saddest of all…

It's an illustrated guide to facial hair, and it contains many important True Facts. It also has a survey of different beard styles, with a discussion of what they mean. Obviously, I have to agree with this one. Don't even try to argue with me. I've got honor, virility, and wisdom on my side.

Man, that Heffernan article is turning out to be such an excellent marker for stupid. Now some Catholic wanker is citing it as supporting his claim that scientists are all nasty people, claiming that the problem with science is scientists. Being Catholic, you know exactly who he is going to…

I have often been told that 1) very few people believe the weird faith I mock, and 2) I should be more respectful of religion. So I guess the stands at this Benny Hinn spectacle were mostly empty, and this coat-waving miracle cure stuff is something I ought to consider serious theology. Huh. It's…

I've always wanted a squidmobile. Someone is living the dream.

I'm trembling in fear. I should probably pay homage.

That implicit consent thread has just broken a thousand comments, so I'm closing it and inviting everyone to move here. Just to keep it interesting, I found (via Jen) a couple of lists. The one on the left is from one of those liberal progressive sites, and clarifies the whole issue of male…

In addition to summarizing my talk in Vancouver, the Crommunist also reports on godless CFI skeptics participating in the Vancouver gay pride weekend. I don't understand…how is it we amoral fiends lacking an objective source of cosmic ethics always seem to come down on the right side of the civil…

Virginia Heffernan did us all a favor: it's easy now to tell who the ignoramuses are by looking for favorable reactions to her ill-informed screed. And of course, if you want to find a real ignoramus, we wouldn't even need that much: we could just look to Rod Dreher, apologist and apparatchik of…

Many of the Scienceblog expatriates plus a few others have formed a new collective, Scientopia. It looks like a good bunch of people and a new and maybe better bottom-up approach to organizing a blog network — I'll be reading them and looking forward to their growth. Adventures in Ethics and…

What is it with Georgia? First Neal Horsley, now this.

Yeah, those annoyingly shrill fundamentalist militant agnostics annoy me too.

After listening to Ken Ham set to music, I never want to hear another complaint about auto-tuning Carl Sagan.

The cover of the latest issue of Time is going to shake a few people up. Aisha is a woman who fled the tyranny and abuse of her in-laws, and as a punishment, the Taliban had her husband cut off her ears and nose. Here's where pro-war propaganda steps in: the cover is titled, "What happens if we…

I'm still trying to recover. I gave two talks on Friday, one in Abbotsford and the other at Vancouver CFI, which wasn't hard — it was just fun. And then they took us out for a night on the town, and we shut down two bars, and we only got back to our hotel at almost 4am. This was some kind of…

Queensland is allowing fundamentalist Christians to teach religious instruction classes in the public schools — and, as we might have predicted, they are teaching nonsense. Students have been told Noah collected dinosaur eggs to bring on the Ark, and Adam and Eve were not eaten by dinosaurs because…

Jen McCreight is participating in that masochistic exercise in prolonged blogging called Blogathon, all to raise money for charity. Take a look, donate if you can, at least give her a little sympathy.

This is an appalling story. Those "Girls Gone Wild" videos are already about the sleaziest things you'll find advertised on mainstream TV: they are basically made by getting young women drunk to reduce their inhibitions and than urging them to expose themselves for 'fame' and titillation, and…