Kooks
pharyngula | October 22, 2010Sometimes they sucker me. I thought James was writing a nice letter, at first.
I found your site to be entertaining. I must say after reading the comments from your site I can see where the problem really is in this country. The fools follow the leaders of silly nonsense.
See? It sort of sounds like he's agreeing with me. Little did I know how he was using the word "entertaining", which isn't always complimentary. James is probably more familiar with the word in its less than flattering sense. Like when he turns to his date after sex to murmur, "Was it good for you, baby?" and she replies…
pharyngula | October 21, 2010Mike Adams must really hate the "It gets better" campaign, which is trying to give gay kids some hope, rather than letting them die of despair. Being Mike Adams, though, the only way he can deal with it is by lying. So he writes an essay in which he describes eight heterosexual kids who were hounded into suicide by homosexuals, just for parities sake, I guess.
Only he didn't. All eight cases are based on true events of young Republican nitwits getting slapped down for anti-homosexual bigotry…but the part where Adams says "and then they killed themselves"? Total fabrication. In every case,…
pharyngula | October 20, 2010I know. You're still trying to get over the shock of learning that little Billy Dembski admits to being a biblical literalist. Brace yourself for this one, then: Glenn Beck is also a creationist, and his reasons are really, really stupid.
You know, if you know so little about evolution that you think the fact that monkeys aren't turning into humans is a credible argument, maybe you should have "MORON" tattooed across your forehead.
Evolution is an engine of diversity. It produces "endless forms most beautiful", to quote the guy who thought it up. Asking why different species don't all…
pharyngula | October 20, 2010Video is not Christine O'Donnell's friend — every time she opens her mouth she exposes her ugly, ignorant side. The latest faux pas comes from here performance in a debate with her opponent in which she reveals she hasn't read the first amendment, and is surprised by what's in it.
Here's the relevant part:
"Let me just clarify," O'Donnell pressed. "You're telling me that the separation of church and state is found in the First Amendment?"
"The government shall make no establishment of religion," Coons said, summarizing the gist of the specific words in the First Amendment's establishment…
pharyngula | October 12, 2010Hmmm. I just chewed out one repulsive little Spratlin named Daniel, when I get this email from a Spratlin named Ric. It's a vaguely threatening email, too.
From: Ric Spratlin
Subject: There's never a shortage of smarm among evangelicals
Date: October 12, 2010 3:44:20 PM CDT
To: PZ Myers
Reply-To: ric.spratlin@att.net
Delivered-To: pzmyers@gmail.com
Received: by 10.216.183.144 with SMTP id q16cs155211wem; Tue, 12 Oct 2010 13:44:09 -0700 (PDT)
Received: by 10.224.174.147 with SMTP id t19mr6103964qaz.262.1286916248284;Tue, 12 Oct…
pharyngula | October 10, 2010Nathan Moran wrote to chastise me. I feel bad for him…I get these things all the time and the stream-of-consciousness reaction I have to them is never flattering to my correspondents. Maybe they should stop.
Kent Hovind & Your Point of View/Opinion
I would extremely promote you to debate Dr. Kent Hovind, when he is accessible [When he gets out of prison?]. I guarantee you, afterwards you won't look very smart [Yeah, what would I be thinking, debating a lunatic ex-con with a mail-order degree?] PROFESSOR [Is there a salary raise with my promotion to ALL-CAPS PROFESSOR?] PZ Myers [He…
pharyngula | October 5, 2010Some people are in the news that I've covered before. Let's do a quick update.
We've encountered that very silly man, Barney Zwartz, a few times before. He's an Australian columnist who whined incompetently about the Global Atheist Convention in Melbourne, and thinks "militant atheist" literally means they are coming in jackboots to crush believers (he also comments in that thread). He's kind of a clueless dingleberry.
He's also getting dumber. He's now credulously reporting that a fundagelical kook is going about raising the dead. It's not just any kook, either, it's Danny Nalliah, an…
pharyngula | October 4, 2010Dixon, you may recall, was the fellow who mention on twitter that he was hurrying past the Church of Scientology "in case the stupid rubs off", and for his casual contempt was rewarded with a lawsuit from the ever-sensitive Scientologists. It didn't work. Dixon has been cleared.
I think that in his honor everyone should get on Twitter today and write something dismissive and rude about Scientology.
pharyngula | October 3, 2010Many people in the godless community know and detest Dennis Markuze AKA David Mabus, the crazy spammer who repetitively and obsessively sends email and posts on forums and comments on blogs, with lunatic accusations, deranged claims of prophecy, threats, and random Depeche Mode videos. Others know him too; this is the guy who CC's his rants against me to every member of the faculty at my university. He's definitely mentally ill.
He also lives in Montreal, where I was this weekend for the AAI convention, and would you believe that he actually showed up! A while after someone pulled a fire…
pharyngula | September 30, 2010The Pew Forum surveyed Americans on their knowledge of religion, and discovered that the group most generally knowledgeable about world religions was…those unshriven hellbound godless folk. This does not sit well with many believers, who have long preferred to relegate atheists to a hell of total unawareness of the gods, smugly assuming that if only we knew what they knew, we'd be True Believers in god in general and their specific, narrow sect in particular. That we might actually know what they believe and not only choose to not believe, but also to regard their superstitions as ridiculous…
pharyngula | September 28, 2010Stuart Pivar has replied to my criticisms. He's very quick. It's too bad he isn't rational.
Dear Dr. Myers,
My paper, "The Origin of the Vertebrate Skeleton," published in the International Journal of Astrobiology, does not describe what is observed in embryology. I never made this claim. The references in the paper illustrate and support the historical context. Namely, attempts to represent in drawings the missing historical stages lost by the phenomenon called condensation (the attrition of initial stages by the addition of terminal stages over eons, see Ontogeny and Phylogeny, Stephen…
pharyngula | September 27, 2010I lied. Lied, lied, lied. You knew I was being sarcastic — there's no way I'm going to give Stuart Pivar a pass.
Pivar has published in a rather obscure journal, The International Journal of Astrobiology, which is obviously going to contain a fair amount of speculation…but his article doesn't fit the subject matter of the journal in the slightest, and I suspect he relied on an unqualified pool of reviewers who knew nothing about developmental biology to get it published. It's the same old crap Pivar has always peddled.
The title of the article is "The origin of the vertebrate skeleton".…
pharyngula | September 27, 2010I have been chastised by William Connolley; he thinks I was too "strident" in condemning that lousy paper about Moses parting the sea with a fortuitous wind. I disagree, obviously. It was a bad paper, and I gave the reasons why it was so awful: it was poorly justified, it was not addressing an even remotely significant question, and the logic of the work and the conclusions was lacking. Connolley also doesn't seem to understand why it is objectionable and serves an ideological purpose for the creationists. Yes, as I pointed out, finding natural causes makes miracles irrelevant, but that logic…
pharyngula | September 25, 2010They are as bad as creationists. They often are creationists. Their anti-abortion ideology is so overwhelming that they will make up 'facts' and call them science. Here's a recent example:
"I think it's important to note with the term fertilized egg, that's the same thing as using the N word for an African American," said Mason. "Because it's a dehumanizing term and it's not based in science. The term would be a zygote, or an embryo, speaking of a unique individual." Mason is hoping the passage of the amendment will lead to the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
"It's a bad law," said Mason,…
pharyngula | September 24, 2010I don't know how they do it. The Texas BOE has a new 'controversy' to fret over:
At a three-day meeting that started Wednesday, the board is scheduled to consider a resolution that would require it to reject textbooks that it determines are tainted with teaching "pro-Islamic, anti-Christian half-truths and selective disinformation," a bias that it argues is reflected in current schoolbooks.
I really missed the public school education in Islam — we never learned much of anything about anything outside the borders of the US, I'm afraid. And I rather doubt that in the current political climate…
pharyngula | September 14, 2010Please, fellow godless folk, stop trying to claim Obama as one of us. He isn't. He goes to church sometimes, he has a religious history, he's happy to use Christian metaphors, he hasn't claimed to be so much as an agnostic. He's a liberal Christian who is not obsessed with religion. Take his words at face value; I find it annoying when people look for signs that he's a hidden member of our little clan. It is so conspiracy-theory.
Maybe it's a science thing: use Occam's Razor and make minimal assumptions, and use the simplest explanation to see if it is sufficient to explain a phenomenon. And…
pharyngula | September 12, 2010The University of Minnesota Twin Cities is to be blessed with a visit from Brother Jed on 16 September…and the Campus Atheists, Skeptics, and Humanists plan to be waiting for him with a special event:
As a counter protest to the preacher Brother Jed, we want to get as many people as we can to share a kiss with their significant other. Our goal is to get many same-sex couples, but all couples are encouraged to partake in the event. We want to show Brother Jed and the rest of the campus that we don't support the hatred we portrays and that all people deserve to be with the ones they love.…
pharyngula | September 12, 2010
Teach the controversy! Who would have thought geocentrists would still be around? They're having a conference even: Galileo Was Wrong: The Church Was Right, the first annual Catholic conference on geocentrism. They're also arguing that the Earth is less than 10,000 years old. No word yet if any flat-earthers will be in attendance.
I think it's cute that they call it a "Catholic conference" and make a point of it being held near Notre Dame, even if it is extraordinarily unlikely that they have any official Catholic status.
(via Unreasonable Faith)
pharyngula | September 8, 2010It has become quite amusing to watch the Defenders of the Faith reach for increasingly more hysterical phrasing to describe what the Gnu Atheists are doing. I thought we were writing and talking, but according to William Oddie, we're carrying out a distressing onslaught.
The atheists' utter loathing, all the same, is at times a little frightening in its sheer vicious irrationality. These people are in the grip of a barely restrained hysteria. Take the current issue of the New Humanist, subtitle: "Ideas for godless people"; this issue gives a good idea of what it must be like being godless,…
pharyngula | September 5, 2010It's an unfortunate fact of google life that links to my criticisms of Kent Hovind pop up quite high in google listings, so I'm always getting these letters from pissed-off creationists who are shocked, shocked, shocked that there they are, innocently searching for information on their hero, when Pharyngula rises up and dares to criticize the great bible-thumping convicted tax cheat.
In addition to the usual incoherence and refusal to offer any scientific support for their position, these letters are usually marked by a rather sniffy attitude of offended sensibilities and surprise that web…