pharyngula

Them folk are not like us folk. I really had to twist my brain to read this article from Touchstone on "contradeception", because I'm finding it hard to imagine how screwed up in the head you have to be to think that way. It's an article against contraception. When these quiverful zealots argue…

Are the fundies imploding? Look at this summary of their own assessment of the status of the evangelical priesthood: Another article reveals even more telling statistics based on a survey of 1,050 evangelical Pastors (note these are evangelical pastors not liberal pastors): 89% considered leaving…

Their project in bacterial evolution in the lab has reached the milestone of 50,000 generations. Andy Schlafly has still got nothin'.

The ENCODE project made a big splash a couple of years ago — it is a huge project to not only ask what the sequence of a strand of human DNA was, but to analyzed and annotate and try to figure out what it was doing. One of the very surprising results was that in the sections of DNA analyzed,…

Karl Giberson, who I've bashed once or twice, has a fresh new pile of nonsense on the Huffington Post. Jerry Coyne has already tackled it, but it pushes a few of my buttons, so I've got to say my piece, too. To summarize the Giberson nonsense briefly, he claims that Intelligent Design creationism…

Today is the day for the big protest rally in Austin against the follies of the board of education. Meet at the Texas Education Agency, 1701 Congress Ave., at 1pm. They're also asking that you register your attendance, although I'm sure no one will be turned away if they don't.

Poor Ken. He so wants to be respectable. He's complaining now that the Creation "Museum" tried to get in on some marketing deal with an outfit called Groupon, that advertises discount coupons or something, and he got turned down. They thought his "museum" was too controversial. So Ken Ham must…

Argonauts are odd animals. They rather resemble a nautilus, but they aren't particularly closely related to them; their closest cephalopod relatives are the octopuses. Females have a thin shell and scoot about in the water column, but the poor males are all dwarfs, rarely seen, with no shell.…

I am reminded that today is also the 30th anniversary of Ian Curtis's death…so I think we need a little Joy Division.

I don't know what to say. This is a Christian's idea of an argument against abortion — not just exaggerating abortion into murder, but also by trivializing rape. Atheists always use rape as an argument for justifying killing because they want to justify abortion. But is rape really that bad? It's a…

May 18, 1980 is when Mount St Helens blew its top. I was newly married, in my first year in graduate school in Eugene, Oregon — far enough south that we saw little of the ash, typically only seeing cars filmed with gray every day. My in-laws, though, all lived right in the shadow of the mountain,…

I am really surprised at all the people who are saying the original letter had to have been an intentional joke. Haven't you looked at Ray Comfort/Kirk Cameron/Kent Hovind on YouTube? They say essentially the same things! For another example, I was sent this link (scroll down to where it says "…

It's hard to believe, but Mother Teresa is getting her own US postage stamp. She was a horrible woman who practiced the Christian ideal of poverty as a virtue by doing her very best to keep as many people poor and miserable as possible — and I hate to see the post office promoting her delusional…

I want to hear the rest of this talk, because I'm wondering about that "building a relationship with your readers". I think "relationship" might be too sensitive a word for "throw out lots of bloody gobbets of freshly hacked up meat so the readers will tear them apart instead of you". Ride the…

A Republican congressman from Indiana, Mark Souder, is resigning. He's one of those conservative, abstinence-only sorts of politicians who uses family, family, family to flog his politics for him, so it's no surprise that the reason he's quitting is that he got caught with his pants down in an…

Texas has been using their excessive and unwarranted influence on textbook content to insert right-wing propaganda and lies into the entire nation's school books. I am pleased to see that California has taken the first steps to reduce Texas wingnuts' influence. A California lawmaker has introduced…

I encourage young people to organize and promote freethought — it's the way we'll grow and become more influential. But there's no denying that sometimes it is hard, with even friendly, innocuous groups receiving public opposition. People resent the fact that other people don't need their god. Here…

It's not all good news: Jonathan Katz may have lost a position, but someone who had much more power to do good keeps his. Our Minnesota governor, Tim Pawlenty, is also a homophobic jerk—he just vetoed a bill that promoted some common decency, giving gay partners a few end-of-life rights and…

I remember Joycelyn Elders. The woman was appointed to the position of surgeon general, and when asked about masturbation at a conference on AIDS, she replied, "I think that it is part of human sexuality, and perhaps it should be taught." It was a perfectly ordinary comment about something nearly…

The unending thread drifted onto the topic of cooking…but as usual, all the threads here always revolve around arguments. Then I realized that every thread is just another Abbott and Costello routine. (Current totals: 10,234 entries with 996,226 comments)

I'm glad someone occasionally looks into the other side of the net to see what they're talking about — I can't bear to read religious forums, myself. Here's why: take a look at what they're saying on BaptistBoard. I believe women in politics have done a great disservice to the sovereignty and…

In 2002, 15 young girls burned to death in a school fire because firemen were not allowed by their religion to enter and rescue females who might not be covered head-to-toe in concealing clothing. In fact, religious police had actively hindered the escape of the girls, with reports that they were…

This is terrible news: one of the very best blogs on Scienceblogs, or anywhere, Effect Measure, is shutting down. It's a sad day; it was one of the blogs I turned to every day, and especially on Sundays for the Freethinker Sermonette. Revere has made a personal decision to move on to other ventures…

A pregnant woman in a Phoenix hospital was in a dire state: she was suffering from severe pulmonary hypertension, a condition made much worse by the pregnancy, and was at risk of heart failure. The hospital did what had to be done, with the approval of the family: the 11-week-old fetus was aborted…

Macroglossum stellatarum

Just in case you're nearby, I'll be speaking at the Southdale Public Library in Edina at 2:00 on how religion is always wrong. Come on by! If you can't make that, we'll also be going to Q Cumber's restaurant at 4 for dinner. Everyone is welcome to join in.

A very nice statement by Dawkins: the virtue of the New Atheist is clarity, not shrillness, not certainty, not militancy, and the problem is our opponents all have to be obscurantists to make excuses for folly.

Half the people in the world commit this sin against god: they are born women. It's an astounding thing that any women at all accept Christianity, Judaism, or Islam; these are profoundly misogynistic faiths. Throughout the Christian Bible, women are treated as chattel to be abused and misused, and…

Have you heard about the Enemy Belligerent Interrogation, Detention and Prosecution Act? Meanwhile, the bill recently introduced by Joe Lieberman and John McCain -- the so-called "Enemy Belligerent Interrogation, Detention and Prosecution Act" -- now has 9 co-sponsors, including the newly elected…