Paul Z. Meyers
pharyngula
Posts by this author
January 25, 2011
Boo hoo, Fox News is reporting a new wave of disastrous economic news: the churches are going bankrupt and closing up shop. Future headlines I'm also looking forward to: "Meth lab economy collapses!" "Pedophile rings go out of business!" "Homeopathy peddlers file chapter 11, citing high cost of raw…
January 25, 2011
What a strange world we live in that I could make an offhand quote on my blog and someone turns around and makes it into a demotivational poster.
Now, though, instead of emailing it to me, people ought to toss that kind of thing into a new community construction project, the Pharynguwiki. It has…
January 25, 2011
An old-as-stupid benighted leader of a medieval institution that thinks the last word in social engineering is the mistranslated words of ancient goatherders scrawled on vellum has come out and said that using your computer for social networking is OK, as long as you don't do it too much and adopt…
January 25, 2011
Richard Dawkins takes a slightly harder line than I do on the case of Gaskell, the astronomer who didn't get a job because his potential employers objected to his faith-based mangling of evolutionary biology. Dawkins regards that as entirely justifiable, and makes a good case.
A commentator on a…
January 24, 2011
Drymonema larsoni
(via National Geographic)
January 24, 2011
It's shocking. How dare they. The Australian writes about our puritanical television viewers and how British television has to be stripped of religious criticism before it's aired here, or our citizens get all Muslim-cartoon-rioter over it.
It's not as if those real Americans are pretending to be…
January 24, 2011
Nah, not really — that work has been independently confirmed many times over. Recently, though, Deepak Chopra has been praising Luc Montagnier, the Nobel prize winning co-discoverer of the human immunodeficiency virus, for tumbling down the walls of science — which ought to be enough to condemn the…
January 24, 2011
Eventually, anyway. Jack LaLanne has died after a lifetime as a paragon of fitness and exercise.
OK, so he was healthy and vigorous and active right up until the end. OK, so he was 96. I tell you, eventually all that exertion will catch up with you!
January 24, 2011
All you godless folk: some busybody wants to know about your sex life. Go ahead and tell them in this survey:
This is a short survey about how your sexuality has developed over time and how it has changed in relation to your lack of belief in a god. The research is being conducted by Dr. Darrel Ray…
January 24, 2011
Cothran, an analyst for one of those right-wing religious think tanks, the Family Patriarchy Foundation, has written an op-ed rebuking the University of Kentucky for discrimination against Christians. It is breathtakingly ridiculous. He claims that the reason Gaskell was not hired was religious…
January 24, 2011
Don't send the kiddies to Sunday School, just have them watch this video and they'll master the whole of the Bible (Old and New Testaments!) in 2½ minutes.
(via SMBC, of course)
January 24, 2011
Google Scholar is a really useful tool — it's like vanilla Google in that it returns links to resources on the web, but it has additional filters to return genuine scholarly articles, enriched for the kind of stuff that gets peer-reviewed and formally published. Unfortunately, somebody or some…
January 23, 2011
A few Christians are indignant over this video mocking Pollyannaish theology.
Unfortunately for them, and to our increased mirth, their excuses are just as ridiculous as Suzie.
Dr. Normal L. Geisler, author of If God, Why Evil?, said the video contains a lot of misconceptions.
"You look at all…
January 22, 2011
You'll want to watch this a few times, denizens of the thread infinitely prolonged — it's subtle and potent.
(Current totals: 11,739 entries with 1,253,343 comments.)
January 22, 2011
Do you remember those ridiculous childhood arguments, "My big brother can beat up your big brother"? They were pathetic then, and no grown-up with any self-respect would think that that kind of fantasy boxing by proxy is any kind of way to settle a disagreement…but we atheists have to remember that…
January 22, 2011
Last night before bed, I downloaded and started to read a light piece of fluffy fiction, one of these urban fantasy novels that are so popular right now. I won't name it because I really just want to complain about a phenomenon I'm seeing a lot of in this whole genre, as much as I've read, anyway.…
January 22, 2011
Martin Gaskell, the astronomer who wasn't hired at the University of Kentucky (my words were chosen carefully; that really is the only 'crime' against him), has won an out-of-court settlement in his discrimination suit, and has gone on to give an interview which confirms my opinion of him: Kentucky…
January 21, 2011
That's what I do, after all. I strongly criticized his uncritical analysis of a set of rape-related evolutionary psychology studies, and now he responds with a rebuttal. It's not a very good rebuttal, but I highly recommend his second paragraph in which he lists a good collection of links to…
January 21, 2011
I just know participants in the indeterminately long conversation would never stoop to the kind of conversation common among people like Rush Limbaugh.
Oh, no, the far right isn't a collection of racist, bigoted pigs. No sir!
(Current totals: 11,733 entries with 1,251,659 comments.)
January 21, 2011
An indie film project is looking for help funding their movie, Standing up to the Experts, which tells the story of the Texas board of education, its excessive power in defining what science is taught, and featuring that blithely incompetent buffoon, Don McLeroy. Here's a taste.
I'd like to see…
January 21, 2011
The webcomic Jesus and Mo has won the Riffy Award. Maybe now it will get the hatred, rioting, and violence it so deserves.
January 21, 2011
Some gomer has set up a website about prayer with a subsection dedicated to an experiment: they're going to pray for PZ Myers. They're rather vague about what they're praying for, which I guess is tactically useful, since if I stay healthy or drop dead they can then claim success either way. I'm…
January 20, 2011
Lately I've been receiving a flood of messages from the anti-choice zealots. They've got one thing in common: they all contain lots of images of aborted fetuses, a common tactic used by these creatures to intimidate with horrible images. I'm not impressed. Here's a representative example, with the…
January 20, 2011
So it's almost Valentine's Day, that schmaltzy holiday dedicated to commercializing love. I was sent a list of science-themed Valentine's Day cards, and I was shocked and disappointed. They're all freakin' physicists! Physicists know nothing of love; they're like atheists that way. Come on,…
January 20, 2011
Dan Savage has called on his readers to respond to a poll. Here's the description:
"A religious right-wing conservative State Senator is trying to make [death-with-dignity] illegal," writes a reader. "A state senator, along with a couple of anti-choice religious-based organizations, are freeping (…
January 20, 2011
Gosh. I hope no one looking for Ken Ham's Ark Encounter accidentally types arkencounters.com.
(Warning! Obnoxious autoplay video! Warning! Dinosaur porn! Warning!)
January 20, 2011
Stand in awe of the loving grace and harmony that church brings to the community! Here's a letter one evangelical church sent to a congregant because she'd committed a sin.
They are handing her over to Satan! Worst collection agency ever.
Oh, and her sin was…getting divorced. How dare she break…
January 20, 2011
That loon Terry Hurlbut is irate that I mocked his "Creationist Hall of Fame" in a post the other day, so he rails against me today. It's a typical collection of squirrely non-sequiturs, but I'll address the funniest of them.
But what PZ Myers of the Pharyngula blog fails to understand is that the…