pharyngula

Which is satire? Which is sincere?

That ID blog, Uncommon Descent, had a slight shakeup in their management recently. If you had the faint idealistic hope that their comment policy might have become a bit less intolerant, forget it: they're still deleting dissent.

I have sinned. While I was in Philadelphia, I was supposed to attend the Drinking Skeptically event on Thursday evening, and I was honestly looking forward to it…but I went to dinner with Michael Weisberg, Janet Browne, Rasmus Winther, John Beatty, Jane Maienschein, and a few others, and when I…

At Owlmirror's suggestion, this is a new thread to cope with the flaming wrongness of this recent creationist pimple, Teno Groppi, on the Entropy and evolution thread (which is now closed, by the way). This happens, now and then: some obtuse and confident creationist, made even more stubborn by an…

But it seems to be serious. You have to read Christians AGAINST Cartoons — it claims that most cartoons are part of an anti-Christian campaign, and that they promote unwholesome values (like, say, a sense of humor). You will learn that Dora the Explorer promotes SATANISM and COMMUNISM, and that she…

Whoa, I was worn out from traveling, and just got up. It's almost time for Atheists Talk radio! This week, it's time for some science: we're going to hear from Matt Kaplan, head of a DNA testing lab, and he's going to discuss the Genographic Project and procedures for tracing human ancestry.

Everybody is sending me links to this game, Night of the Cephalopods. Nice title, but I'm sorry, it's Windows only, so no way will I ever sully my gaming muscles to play it.

That's all I can imagine: this imaginary conflict has gotten so stupid that it must be mindless undead droning out their need for brains who are still fighting it (oh, hi, Bill O'Reilly!). The latest instance is one of these always-affronted religion organizations that has made a Naughty and Nice…

You really have to look at this shirt from the right perspective. On a superficial level, you might think it portrays a pirate octopus battling a team of ninja pandas, but you would be wrong. What looks like chaos is actually coordinated teamwork by both pirates and ninjas together. Fear them.

Since a Wall Street Journal editorialist has denounced secularism as the source of all of society's ills, it's only fair to get another opinion. Like, say, of a social scientist who has actually done a comparative study of different nations, looking for correlations between religiosity and superior…

Recently, we've been mocking the sad little website of the Rev. Cockshaw, which had the title "There probably is!" (referring, of course, to a deity). Now someone has done the obvious and grabbed the url for There Probably Isn't!. So go ahead, post your stories of deconversion there. I'm feeling a…

The Bush administration will leave us with another legacy: unqualified Republican ideologues receiving appointments in various institutions, including scientific organizations, as their ship of state sinks. The rats are scuttling overboard, and are being rewarded with captaincies on any available…

A while back, two ladies visited the Discovery Institute, and wrote about their experiences afterwards. They admittedly did so under false pretenses, acting as if they were fellow travelers in creationism, but they did get interesting and amusing responses from the inhabitants. They tried to do it…

I'll be spending my day at this symposium, "Understanding evolution: the legacy of Darwin", most of today. It's about to start, so I'm not going to say much before I focus on the lectures, but it is open to the public, so if you're in the Penn neighborhood, come on down to Claudia Cohen hall, room…

The United States has some serious problems: an ugly war, a shaky economy, a bad government (on the way out, at last). It's been a rough eight years. So of course it must be someone's fault, and Daniel Henninger has a simple explanation: blame the atheists. Especially blame the atheist's successful…

(Today's entry is reader-submitted, from Scott Milton)

The Mormons have this arrogant practice of posthumous baptism — one of the motivations for their huge genealogical libraries is to help them go through the old records, find the names of dead people, and 'convert' them to Mormonism. It's silly and pointless, but it can also be insensitive and…

I'm attending a lecture by Janet Browne at the University of Pennsylvania, and the organizers asked me if I'd be willing to do something a little bit unusual — if I'd be willing to blog the talk. Obliging as always, I said yes, so here I am in the front row with a borrowed laptop typing away. I'm…

I've got a rather laid-back schedule here in Philadelphia, and I took advantage of it this morning — I took a little walkabout around the neighborhood. Unless you're from Los Angeles, cities are great places for walking, and it was very pleasant to idle along. Then, of course, I was required to get…

I am a very bad person. I laughed at this.

Remember the Rev. Evan Cockshaw? He put a silly poll on the web, and then was quite miffed when we answered it. It turns out that he has lately been dunning Seed, demanding that my post and your comments be taken down! He has also added a redirect to his site so that links from here won't work. Isn…

At first, I was a bit put off by the awesome hubris of someone filing an amicus brief on behalf of god, especially since it was a brief in favor of California's proposition 8. Who would have the gall to declare that they speak for a deity, and use that false authority to promote intolerance and…

While I'm basking in the balmy warmth of Philadelphia, I get word from one of my homies that Morris temperatures dropped below 0°F for the first time this year. I'm sorry I'm not there to keep the Trophy Wife warm.

The Texas State Board of Education is holding hearings right now on their science standards, and by all reports it is an embarrassment to the state: on the one side, we have the educated teachers and scientists, and on the other, a coterie of ignorant ideologues. Martin has been attending the…

Don't be too shocked at the title; my arguments are with Catholicism, not the poor unfortunate victims of that dogma, the Catholics. In this case, one Catholic organization, Catholics for Choice (uh-oh—already, I can tell that one argument against them will be that they aren't True Catholics™) has…

Fellow travelers, we all know this feeling of stepping off a plane into a strange city and following the signs to baggage/transportation, trying to get our bearings and find our way through these sometimes labyrinthine airports to just get out of these unattractive hubs — the whole thing with air…

Once upon a time, way back when I entered graduate school, the first big project I was involved in was essentially a morphological mapping of the circuitry of the larval zebrafish. We did lots of backfills of neurons with horseradish peroxidase, and later the fluorescent dye DiI, and then with…

The Democrats are giving Joe Lieberman everything he wants, and this is symptomatic of the party: they stand for nothing but the status quo and internal accommodation. "Bipartisanship" is a dirty word when one of the two sides is a discredited, corrupt mob of wannabe theocrats and greedy thugs, but…

NOVA is showing a new episode tonight, The Bible's Buried Secrets. It doesn't sound like the usual laudatory tripe we get on the cable documentary shows — in fact, it sounds downright skeptical: A visually stunning two-hour special edition of "Nova" examines decades of archaeological studies that…

How about Playing Gods: The Board Game of Divine Domination? It's called a "satirical board game of religious warfare", and sounds like good silly fun. Some people, though, don't like to see their dogma mocked. [The game] has no basis in historical reality and doesn't actually represent any…