Kooks
pharyngula | June 2, 2010A curious phenomenon has struck me a few times: in response to my criticisms of religion, someone will bring up the Jains. It's a peaceful religion, they'll say, that promotes kindness to all living beings, therefore my arguments are all invalid. Even more strangely, every time this happens, my interlocutor is not a Jain, which always leaves me wondering why, if this faith is so wonderful, they haven't converted. Besides, my main gripe with religion isn't that it makes people evil (the overwhelming majority of believers, whether Christian, Muslim, or whatever, are peaceable, cooperative,…
pharyngula | June 2, 2010What did America do to deserve this? Nancy Pelosi exposed her vacuous brain at a conference.
At a May 6 Catholic Community Conference in Washington DC, Speaker Pelosi openly touted Jesus Christ, "The Word Made Flesh", as the inspiration for her public policies. CNS News reports a couple of her more powerful statements:
"And that Word," Pelosi said, "is, we have to give voice to what that means in terms of public policy that would be in keeping with the values of the Word. The Word. Isn't it a beautiful word when you think of it? It just covers everything. The Word."
"Fill it in…
pharyngula | May 29, 2010He called himself Dr Woo. He was a practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine, and even those quacks couldn't stand him, and disbarred him. He was bringing in female patients, asking them to get naked, and then poking and prodding in places totally unrelated to their complaints. Here's one remarkably resonant sentence from the article:
Expert witnesses told the hearing there were no acupuncture points in the vagina.
Well, yeah, we can get a flavor of what Woo was doing from that, but I'm left marveling: there are no acupuncture points anywhere, it's all a load of hokum, so where do they…
pharyngula | May 28, 2010It's been a great week for vapid defenses of religion…at least for atheists, that is. It's been a sad week for the godly, given that their paladins are all such flabby purveyors of tepid tea.
First up, let us consider the Dalai Lama, revered all around the world because he's such a nice guy and is always smiling — and I agree that he is an awfully nice fellow, considering that he's the representative of a medieval theocracy. He has an op-ed in the NY Times, sadly, which reveals that behind his happy face is a bubble of confused cortex. Anthony Grayling has already dealt with the core of his…
pharyngula | May 28, 2010The American Humanist Association is making a push to repeal the "don't ask, don't tell" policy of the American military. They want you to write a letter to your representatives supporting the repeal.
Here's another reason besides simple common decency to end a discriminatory practice: It will drive Bryan Fischer insane(r). Fischer is the unpleasant Idaho bigot who thinks homosexuals should be imprisoned, and he's got his own peculiar take on gays in the military.
Homosexuality gave us Adolph Hitler, and homosexuals in the military gave us the Brown Shirts, the Nazi war machine and six…
pharyngula | May 25, 2010Jeffrey Jena, one of those right-wing kooks, is upset about something terribly traumatic that happened to him. Someone unfriended him on Facebook for being a wingnut! Don't you know that lefty liberals are supposed to always pretend to be friends with the goons and thugs of the right?
Have any of you been dumped on Facebook for being racist, homophobic gun toting morons lately? Have some of your tolerant, diversity seeking "Progressive"friends tossed you under the bus for having the temerity to express a conservative opinion based on facts?
He's so upset about the fact that people judge him…
pharyngula | May 25, 2010Some men have a particularly oblivious sense of privilege — these are the kinds of evil freaks who murder their children at the prospect that their ex-wife might get custody. The fact that they are men is used to blind them to the fact that there are these other human beings called women out there who have just as much right to their lives as they do.
Here's the opening paragraph of a blog post by a self-proclaimed anti-feminist.
When men have something women have less of, such as money or power, women simply take it by force. It's called affirmative action and feminists believe it's right. I…
pharyngula | May 23, 2010Angela Wright had a serious heart attack two months ago; she seems to have had a history of cardiovascular problems, because she'd also had a series of blood clots in her leg that required a partial amputation about 20 years ago.
Her very supportive family seems to be the pious sort. They dropped to their knees and started praying fiercely for her. Then she had another heart attack, but she didn't die, and the family prayed harder and also said 'hallelujah, the prayers are keeping her alive!"
Then there was another heart attack. More prayers, more certainty that the prayers were all that was…
pharyngula | May 13, 2010Look who's coming to the Royal Ontario Museum: Deepak Chopra. What were they thinking when they invited that pompous fraud to speak?
World renowned teacher, author and philosopher Deepak Chopra presents his latest concepts in the field of mind-body medicine bridging the technological miracles of the West with the wisdom of the East. He will show you how your highest vision of yourself can be turned into physical reality and discuss how you can become a living cell within the body of a living universe. You don't join the cosmic dance - you become the dance. Deepak will address the deeper…
pharyngula | May 5, 2010This is utterly incomprehensible.
YOGI
YOU SEEM TO LIVE EXCLUSIVELY IN THE
"AFTERMATH" DIMENSION.
SAD REALLY... AND PATHETICALLY
UNORIGINAL AND UNCREATIVE.
USE YOUR "BIG BRAIN" TO EXPLAIN
911... YOU AMERICAN IMBECILE.
ALAN
One noteworthy thing about it: I haven't modified the formatting at all. It actually was sent to me in giant blue all-caps Comic Sans.
pharyngula | May 4, 2010He's still complaining. Maloney is the naturopath in Maine who makes inflated claims about the efficacy of his magic drugs, and who still pops by here and now then to protest feebly, and he's still making stuff up elsewhere. It also turns out that he has a page warning the world about me and you readers.
The infamous PZ Myers asked those who visit his blog to repeat this message all over the internet. He chose me because of false accusations from a local freshman, who blamed me for getting his insipid little clone blog kicked off the internet. Since Myers runs a thing called the endless…
pharyngula | May 4, 2010Everyone knows by now that there has been a catastrophic oil platform disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, the biggest oil spill in American history…and it is still spewing and people are still talking about expanding offshore drilling. The actual causes of this accident stem from deregulation and exceeding legal restrictions, but you know, that assumes that no one wanted this environmental disaster to occur; we are presuming that it actually is a horrible accident.
It takes a mind unfettered by the constraints of reason and evidence to assume otherwise. It requires the brain of Rush Limbaugh.
The…
pharyngula | May 4, 2010It's hard to find something dumber than Kent Hovind, but here you go: the website of Herb Grossman, trashevolution. It's what Hovind could have produced if he'd been an alcoholic gay man in denial. He has a rambling, mostly incoherent set of pages that he claims disprove evolution, but if you read just one, it should be his page on homosexuality. It doesn't really exist, you know, although he has been feeling supernatural homosexual urges for years.
No one has to be a homosexual, because—
—Homosexuality is a Cruel Deception,
and you should not worry about possibly being a homosexual,…
pharyngula | May 2, 2010I was cleaning out my filtered junk mail folder, and what do I discover? Mail after mail after mail from a long-banned kook, the infamously idiotic John A. Davison. Davison's is notoriously incompetent: this is the fellow who has created multiple blogs, each with one entry, which he closes when it gathers enough comments…most of which are from Davison himself. He also tends to get in long running battles in blog comments, all over his dismissal of evolution, which he regards as the most important battle in the history of mankind!!!. He has also reported me to my university provost.
He has…
pharyngula | April 28, 2010Jen has put up the numbers — this was clearly an effective PR move, doing a good job of bringing an absurdity to the public's attention. I think it's important that we use more humor and make more noise to wake people up, because this problem of religious 'prophets' using natural events to bolster their superstition has been around for a long time. I was sent this little essay which seems appropriate. Note the date: it's 9 years old.
NATURAL DISASTERS - UNNATURAL ACTS
Are Natural Disasters Caused by Unnatural Acts?
June 27, 2001
Janis Walworth
Pat Robertson, founder of the Christian Coalition…
pharyngula | April 26, 2010Arch-creationist dentist Don McLeroy is limping and quacking his way off the Texas Board of Education, but there's still plenty of crazy left behind. Cynthia Dunbar recently appeared on a far right-wing radio show to preach her revisionist history, her dislike of atheists and Christians who aren't part of her sect, and plead for more god in the schools. Texas Freedom Network provides a synopsis; listen to the actual show at the peril of your sanity.
Speaking last week on a far-right talk show, The American View, (read more about the show here) Dunbar — a Richmond Republican representing a…
pharyngula | April 25, 2010My readers hate me, and like to make me suffer. That's the only way to explain why they would send me links to the ghastly Huffington Post. I swear, it's becoming as insane as World Net Daily.
The latest screed is from some bozo named Dr Larry Dossey. The awfulness begins right away, as he quotes Jeremy Rifkin, the professional Luddite, on the scientific method.
[T]he scientific method [is] an approach to learning that has been nearly deified in the centuries following the European Enlightenment. Children are introduced to the scientific method in middle school and informed that it is the…
pharyngula | April 23, 2010Last year, Liberty University picked an appropriate commencement speaker: Ben Stein. And the laughter did peal across the nation.
What could they do to top that this year? Who could they possibly get as a commencement speaker for the class of 2010 to signify exactly how deeply into Wingnuttia they are? Who could possibly stand up and show them their future?
It's Glenn Beck. Perfection!
They may have peaked. I don't know who they could possibly get to be as representative in 2011.
pharyngula | April 22, 2010It's a trivial little contest from JetBlue — it does require that you give them your contact information, which may be more than you want to surrender…but you can win fabulous prizes! Look at what you can get:
A vacation in the Dominican Republic!
A vacation in Costa Rica!
A vacation in the Sonoran Desert!
A Vespa scooter (they're giving away 10 each week)!
The Grand Prize: A complete kitchen makeover with a set of appliances from Amana, and a $5000 gift card!
And that's not all! There's an ULTIMATE PRIZE. Looking at that list of pricey luxury items, you know this has got to be…
pharyngula | April 22, 2010I like this. Larry Moran has the summary of a talk by Francis Collins, who asserts that science and religion are entirely compatible. Here are Collins' last few slides:
[First Slide] Almighty God, who is not limited in space and time, created a universe 13.7 billion years ago with its parameters precisely tuned to allow the development of complexity over long periods of time.
[Second Slide] God's plan included the mechanism of evolution to create the marvelous diversity of living things on our planet. Most especially, that plan included human beings.
[Third Slide] After evolution, in the…