Kooks
pharyngula | October 9, 2007The latest round of indignant lawsuits by those irked at negative reviews: Left Behind Games isn't too happy with their game's reception in the blogosphere, so they've started sending out threats of lawsuits to silence the critics. One of the letters is online, another target is Daily Kos, and most amusingly of all, the CEO of the company tried to plead for Christian charity from on critic before deciding to wave a lawyer at him.
It's an awfully silly strategy. Bloggers have loud mouths, but don't have deep pockets. These attempts at legal harrassment are only going to win them negative…
pharyngula | October 8, 2007The best response so far (much better than mine) is Possum Momma's. She points out that all the sins Siegel sees expressed in the godless seem to be just as prominent in contemporary Christians.
I really didn't need to know about "Christian Domestic Discipline" or Christian porn.
pharyngula | October 8, 2007You have to read this essay to believe it: Militant atheists are wrong. It's a collection of what I call indignant pieties — "how dare atheists challenge my precious faith!" — and it's also distilled, concentrated, essence of stupid, painful to read and even more agonizing to have to waste time arguing against. But then, it's by Lee Siegel. Lee Siegel. There's a man who has a lot of courage, exposing himself on the internet again. Siegel is the amazing hypocrite who denounced the ethics of the blogosphere, and then cobbled up a sock puppet ( remember "Sprezzatura"?) who went trolling around…
pharyngula | October 4, 2007I recently mentioned the way some serious theologians believe in demons and exorcisms. I can't help it; I find these notions ridiculous to an extreme, and the absurdity of serious scholars blaming diseases on demonic possession in the 21st century is something one has to find laughable. I was being hard on Christianity, though. I left out an important exonerating factor for these people.
Some of them believe in angels, too.
Yes, I'm joking when I say this is an exonerating factor. This merely makes them even more silly. But no, you say, they can't possibly argue for demons and angels being…
pharyngula | October 3, 2007If you've got a high tolerance for nonsense, you might want to check out 50 religious insights from George W. Bush. The man is a regular mullah, full of deep insights. I rather like juxtaposing these two:
I'm also mindful that man should never try to put words in God's mouth. I mean, we should never ascribe natural disasters or anything else to God. We are in no way, shape, or form should a human being, play God. Washington, D.C., Jan. 14, 2005
I am driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, 'George go and fight these terrorists in Afghanistan'. And I did. And then God would tell me…
pharyngula | October 2, 2007That last creationist email I posted was agonizing in its longwindedness…how about something short and illustrated?
(Mild warning: this sketch might be considered obscene if it weren't so crude and talentless that any relationship to real anatomy is a scurrilous rumor.)
i drew a picher of u and ur bf
awww ur so in luv
I don't often get "artwork" in my email. The last one was a few months ago where the sender pasted my head onto the torso of what looked like a gay porn model engaged in an interesting act — that one really was obscene and I wouldn't consider putting it here, even if my…
pharyngula | October 2, 2007I tried. I really, honestly, sincerely tried. I've been struggling with this book, The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist's Case for the Existence of the Soul(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mario Beauregard and Denyse O'Leary, for the past week and a half, and I've finally decided it's not worth the effort. It's just about completely unreadable.
The writing is aggravating. It is constantly broken up with strings of quotes — 3, 4, 5, or 6 at a time — that are just plopped out there to speak for themselves, and often the authors don't even bother to address the points brought up in the quotes. It's…
pharyngula | September 28, 2007Neal gets no respect. He's been trying and trying to comment over at the Panda's Thumb, and his rants keep getting shut down. Well, I'm going to let one of his comments through right here — as far as I'm concerned, they're a kind of twisted, insane poetry. You can almost picture his brain arcing and shorting and fizzing away, and you can virtually see the instant the circuit breaker blows.
It is just very difficult for me to follow the socially "hotpoint"
controversies that tend to "crop up" in this forum in a genuine discussion
of life system "origins" and what some might refer to as "…
pharyngula | September 27, 2007Since Katie is trying to turn this into a football blog (don't mock it! Have you seen the kinds of traffic numbers the big sports blogs bring in?), here's another football story with a neuro link: a player who credits his recovery from a concussion to a "miracle". It sounds like there is a whole epidemic of foolishness in the NFL.
"People get really nervous when they hear someone proclaim their faith boldly," says the Rev. Peter Gallagher, one of the chaplains for the Indianapolis Colts. "So the easy thing to do is make fun of them. That way you won't have to deal with the real questions…
pharyngula | September 23, 2007Scott has discovered an odd little book: The Faith Equation: One Mathematician's Journey in Christianity. Yeah, another guy finds Jesus and uses math and science after the fact to claim Christianity is the one true answer. What, you may ask, is this wonderful faith equation that leads directly to one of the Abrahamic religions?
Faith = (Mind) + (Heart)+ (Will)
Hey, who knew you could make pablum out of crap? At least now nobody needs to buy the damn book.
pharyngula | September 22, 2007Poor William Dembski has many thorns in his side. There's that spunky grad student and that guy who knows more math than he does, and there's also been a certain professor of constitutional law who has been quietly plaguing him behind the scenes. I'm on Peter Irons' cc list for these emails, and there have been quite a few occasions when I've been laughing from my easy chair at the well-aimed slingstones winging their way from California to Texas.
Dembski has had enough, and has posted his own reply. Irons has been chatting with Baylor President John Lilley, urging him in particular to not…
pharyngula | September 19, 2007The Great Wasteland is done. It's hit bottom. I suspect everyone has heard about
Sherri Shepherd, a new co-host on a talk show for stupid women, who doesn't accept the theory of evolution and, by the way, isn't so sure about the shape of the earth, either.
Way to go. Way to reinforce the idea that women are incurious airheads. Way to inform and educate and encourage thinking — hire an idiot to help anchor your program in idiocy.
pharyngula | September 18, 2007Oh, joy. We've got a new crop of persistent Religiots pissing and moaning in the comments. They're whining that I'm mean, that all the regular commenters are mean, that the fact that some good scientists are also Christian somehow validates Christian belief, that I can't criticize scientists who are working at more prestigious universities, and that my tactics are bad. I don't know why they're here; it's not as if we're going to be converted by their inanities, or that they're going to persuade us to accept any of their claims.
Let's break it down into simple sentences and ideas.
Yeah, we're…
pharyngula | September 18, 2007Oh, no! Neal's comments haven't been getting through, so he sent me a friendly email message to let me know.
(By the way, the filters have been acting up in a horrible way lately — about 10% of the comments have been held up for moderation when they shouldn't, and it's irritating the heck out of me. I go in and approve broad swathes of arrested comments whenever I can, but it means sometimes your words get held up unnecessarily long.)
Warning: you might find these comments inoffensive if you are a longshoreman or attended Catholic school. Otherwise, watch out. Some of you know Neal by…
pharyngula | September 15, 2007Take note of that name, just in case. This ambitious young zealot might just be a future president of the Christian States of America (in which case, look for me at my new home in Australia).
More likely, though, he'll be one of those desperate men in shabby suits handing out bizarre political pamphlets at the mall, wondering why his life is such a sad sack of futility. But you never know! Maybe he'll be incredibly successful, and instead end up cowering in a bunker with a pistol, wondering why his life is such a sad sack of futility.
pharyngula | September 13, 2007Sometimes you just have to shake your head at the indignant, smug prudes who want to control what you read. Here's a story of a young lady who wants to dictate what her peers are allowed to see.
Lysa Harding, 15, couldn't believe the sexually charged prose of the novel she checked out from the library at Brookwood High School. Her grandmother was offended, too.
Now they're refusing to return the book, "Sandpiper" by Ellen Wittlinger, saying other teens shouldn't be exposed to it.
She read it, her grandmother read it, but you better not read it … because it's about teenagers having sex (never…
pharyngula | September 11, 2007On eBay, obviously!
The source is the PL Institute of Space Technologies. It's an amazing place that offers undergraduate and graduate degrees in "Creationist in Sciences" (a Cr.S. degree is not equivalent to a bachelor's degree, they say), and also carries out research in these fields:
Creational Healing: We develop a new kind
of healing method.
Electrical Engineering: We develop and use
a new kind of semiconductor technology mainly based on silicon, copper and
oxygen, and we search for new energy systems, etc.
Minor-System-Technology: This
environmentally sustainable technology uses a…
pharyngula | September 10, 2007In case you'd been wondering why Scientology is such a silly crock, you should know — it wasn't. Before it was corrupted by the people running the show, Lafayette Ron Hubbard's technology and philosophy actually worked. We just need to return to the primal purity of the original Scientology vision. And that's why Freezone has split from the Church of Scientology™, and proudly displays a picture of a goofy fathead in a nautical cap on their web page.
It's going to be interesting to see how the fascist goons of
the Church of Scientology™ deal with heresy. If it cuts into their profits,…
pharyngula | September 9, 2007Back when I had an ungodly commute to work and had to get up at 5am to knock back a quart of coffee before staggering out to the bus and train, I'd sometimes flip through the channels on the TV to see what was happening. And at that hour of the morning, what you'd find is quack ads, infomercials, and the televangelists. I confess, some of my favorites were Ken Copeland (an awe-shucks country boy who looked like a few generations of inbreeding and moonshine abuse had shriveled his brain) and Benny Hinn (head-thwacking con man in a shiny white suit) — I'd watch them, awed that anyone was…
pharyngula | September 7, 2007Poor Pastor Ted had been fired from the New Life Church, and was trying to get his life together. He put out a plea claiming poverty and soliciting donations to support his new calling, ministering to the poor at a halfway house. Your humble narrator was righteously suspicious.
In the latest turn of events, his former church tut-tuts reprovingly at his unseemly begging for handouts, and tells everyone about his $138,000 severance pay. The halfway house, aghast, says Mr Haggard sure isn't moving in with them, and there's no way he's going to be counseling the needy. What will happen to the…