Kooks
pharyngula | June 16, 2011The things that go on during Christian revivals…here's a crazy preacher claiming that conversion changes your DNA. Right.
How does this even work?
(via Joe. My. God.)
Could this be some kind of strange poe? If you look for "onkneesforjesus", there is a blog that features this video, and the tagline for the blog is…
My life is all about getting on my knees and faithfully serving Jesus until He comes.
I find it very hard to believe that was written by someone oblivious to the meaning.
pharyngula | June 16, 2011Don't be surprised, though. It's only natural.
Now consider human males. No doubt you have noticed an alarming trend in the news. Powerful men have been behaving badly, e.g. tweeting, raping, cheating, and being offensive to just about everyone in the entire world. The current view of such things is that the men are to blame for their own bad behavior. That seems right. Obviously we shouldn't blame the victims. I think we all agree on that point. Blame and shame are society's tools for keeping things under control.
The part that interests me is that society is organized in such a way that…
pharyngula | June 8, 2011Let's see…Darwin revealed the theory of evolution in 1859, and the United States declared their independence from Britain in 1776 — but our founding fathers were such magical geniuses that they foresaw the whole thing and debated the subject there in Philadelphia and resolved that evolution was a bunch of hooey. Right.
the founding fathers…already had the entire debate on creation/evolution…and you've got Thomas Paine, the least religious of the founding fathers, saying you got to teach creation science in the public school classroom, the scientific method demands it!
Hey, David Barton,…
pharyngula | June 1, 2011Man, what is it with Christians? Another one goes after me in an article titled Why P.Z. Meyer is Afraid, and a fellow just has to wonder how deeply they are capable of reading when they so grossly misspell my name all the time. "Myers": it's only five letters long, and it's the most common spelling variant of that name in the US.
Anyway, it's the usual litany: I'm uncivil and rude, I'm popular, I have a brute squad, I'm nasty, and I "attack the person rather than the argument". That last one is particularly ironic because the entire post is nothing but an attack on me, and doesn't even…
pharyngula | May 30, 2011Johan Huibers, the owner of a construction company in the Netherlands, is way ahead of Ken Ham. He has actually begun construction of a replica of Noah's Ark, and his even floats—although he accomplishes that by cheating, building his ark as a wooden superstructure on top of an array of bolted-together steel barges.
The revealing factoid about this crank, though, is this:
Actually, this ark is not the first that Mr. Huibers has built. He first began dreaming of an ark in 1992, shortly after a heavy storm lashed the coastal region north of Amsterdam where he lives. His wife, Bianca, a police…
pharyngula | May 28, 2011The scientific animation company, XVIVO, has had their work 'appropriated' by creationists before, and I hate to say it, but there is a reason for it. Although their animations of cellular and molecular processes are spectacular and beautiful, they are also annoyingly purposeful: they show tubulin making a beeline across microns of distance to assemble a microtubule, for instance, while kinesins stride determinedly down the cytoskeleton. There isn't the slightest hint of the stochastic nature of the biochemistry, and they are seriously misleading in that sense — which, no doubt, is why…
pharyngula | May 24, 2011The world didn't end last Saturday (obviously), but Harold Camping and his predictions are just a smokescreen, and everyone is missing the heart of the problem.
Camping has now spoken. He now claims that Jesus did arrive 'spiritually' on the 21st, and that in his generous mercy, God has decided to spare us the 153 days of the tribulation, but that the world will still be ending on 21 October. This is no surprise. This is exactly what these crackpot prophets do: they're never right, but they are great at rationalizing.
His followers are busy readjusting. Here's a radio interview with one bible…
pharyngula | May 20, 2011Oh, wait, no — I meant Stephen Hawking. I understand that physics is actually a fairly rigorous discipline, almost as daunting as molecular biology, so I suspect that a childhood spent on a hackneyed sitcom and an adulthood spent peddling dumb-ass theology is probably not adequate preparation for grasping it. But at least Kirk Cameron tries.
Professor Hawking is heralded as 'the genius of Britain,' yet he believes in the scientific impossibility that nothing created everything and that life sprang from non-life.
Why should anyone believe Mr. Hawking's writings if he cannot provide evidence…
pharyngula | May 19, 2011The Buffalo Beast has an interview with sadly delusional Harold Camping, the senile old man who is predicting the end of the world on the 21st. I say "Pshht!" and "Humbug!" — it's no big deal to get an interview with that loony attention hog on the 19th; I will be impressed with the fellow who gets the first interview on the 22nd.
I bet Camping's phone will be ringing like mad on Sunday.
pharyngula | May 16, 2011Among the many reasons that I detest evolutionary psychology, one has a name: Satoshi Kanazawa. He has a blog on Psychology Today called The Scientific Fundamentalist, and earlier he published this charming article: Why Are Black Women Rated Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women?. Don't bother trying to follow the link, the article has mysteriously disappeared from the site…although you can still find a copy here, if you really must.
I'm a little surprised that it's gone. After all, Psychology Today had no problem with his loving look at American politics in which he wanted Ann Coulter…
pharyngula | May 11, 2011Mike Adams, the cranky quack naturopath, has been exploring "the field of quantum physics" and "consciousness". He says this in his silly pseudo-documentary, "The God Within", after praising physicists and their selfless search for the truth, all while ghostly equations float by in the video. He does this a lot, panning over equations or showing stock photos of people standing in front of transparent sheets of glass with illegible scribbles all over them; but it's obvious that he doesn't actually understand math, knows nothing about physics, and is just holding this stuff up in front of his…
pharyngula | May 10, 2011Salon has a tidy summary of the end-of-the-world claims of Harold Camping.
On May 21, "starting in the Pacific Rim at around the 6 p.m. local time hour, in each time zone, there will be a great earthquake, such as has never been in the history of the Earth," he says. The true Christian believers -- he hopes he's one of them -- will be "raptured": They'll fly upward to heaven. And for the rest?
"It's just the horror of horror stories," he says, "and on top of all that, there's no more salvation at that point. And then the Bible says it will be 153 days later that the entire universe and…
pharyngula | May 7, 2011I almost thought this note was from George W. Bush, and had to double check to see that the author was actually some random guy named Richard Williamson.
Didn't your mommy love you when you were younger... Did she tell you be careful what you say to strangers !!!!!
Remember, those you can DO, those you can't TEACH !!
Semper Fi
I'm trying to puzzle that phrase out. So if I can't teach you, I get to do you? This is a novel disincentive that will immediately set my students to improving their grades.
What must it be like to go through life with such incoherent thoughts? I don't know, and I'…
pharyngula | April 21, 2011The New York Times has a long profile of Andrew Wakefield. It's not at all laudatory (read the last paragraph in particular), but it does include quotes from people who regard Wakefield as a hero…and even something more.
"To our community, Andrew Wakefield is Nelson Mandela and Jesus Christ rolled up into one," says J. B. Handley, co-founder of Generation Rescue, a group that disputes vaccine safety. "He's a symbol of how all of us feel."
Handley, of course, is a certifiable kook and an awful excuse for a human being. I am amused that he sees Wakefield as a Jesus, though; there doesn't seem…
pharyngula | April 20, 2011I'm really interested in DNA and genes and genetics, so I was of course attracted to this website that explains a lot of secret information about DNA. Did you know that all the problems in your life are caused by a misaligned DNA code? The author of this site, Tom OM, is a German chiropractor, and I guess it's a short jump from cracking spines to aligning DNA, because he promises to fix everything in your life just by activating your DNA, whatever that means.
That site is just a teaser, though. You have to give them your name and email address, and then you get to read his seven part…
pharyngula | April 19, 2011Scott Adams once again demonstrates his pointy-headed stupidity with an appallingly irrational rationalization of his sock puppetry. He's got some new excuses, I will give him that.
Guess what, he may have been naughty, but at least he's not a mass murderer.
On the scale of immoral behavior, where genocide is at the top, and wearing Spanx is near the bottom, posting comments under an alias to clear up harmful misconceptions is about one level worse than Spanx.
Great. So if ever I'm caught kicking a puppy or lying on the internet, all I need to do is explain that I didn't kill six million…
pharyngula | April 17, 2011The American Journal of Surgery has published a transcript of a presidential address titled, "Can prayer help surgery?", and my first thought was that that was absolutely brilliant — some guy was roped into giving a big speech at a convention, and he picked a topic where he could stand up, say "NO," and sit back down again. If he wanted to wax eloquent, maybe he could add a "Don't be silly" to his one word address.
But a reader sent me a copy of this paper, and I was wrong. The author spent four pages saying "Yes". It flies off to cloud cuckoo land in the very first sentence, which compares…
pharyngula | April 12, 2011This one is from Bad Pitt. Read it while keeping in mind that we atheists are the ones called militant extremists…while good Judeo-Christian lunatics have these sick, psychopathic, violent fantasies of murder and execution.
GLORIOUS BASTERDS
Inglorious Basterds is a Jewish psycho-fantasy based on the delusional notion of retroactive vengeance against Nazi forces in France at the end of World War II. It is an artful, but ultimately pointless, exercise in orgiastic gratuitous violence. The only redeeming value of this film is:
(1) The not so subtle encouragement of the viewing audience not…
pharyngula | April 12, 2011Perhaps you have no idea who Jack Cashill is — he's not a person of great consequence, but he is representative of the deranged right. I first ran across him as a creationist activist, which tells you right there that he's a few bushels short of a hogshead. He was featured on A Flock of Dodos as the fervent but somehow, supposedly, reasonable political voice of creationism. He didn't have two heads, he didn't tie anyone to a stake and set them on fire, so by golly, he must not be that bad a fellow…which is an interesting phenomenon, that we so readily set aside significant intellectual…
pharyngula | April 10, 2011This afternoon, a couple of smiling, glassy-eyed young ladies stopped by my house to talk about Jesus. I was delighted, but I made the mistake of telling them up front that I was an atheist, and didn't believe in their religion…and they backed away slowly, said "goodbye!", and scurried away. It's so hard to bait the trap when you insist on using honesty.
Anyway, I did get a little online satisfaction reading this great ferocious rant about Seventh Day Adventists.
The Seventh-day Adventist cult's "prophet" and founder, the alcoholic, masturbation-obsessed habitual plagiarist Ellen G. White,…