Kooks
pharyngula | October 5, 2009The far right wing has long rested their authority on Biblical truth — how can you possibly question them if they speak for God, after all? There is one little problem, however.
The Bible is suffused with liberal bias. A lot of the Old Testament isn't bad, but the New Testament, when Jesus makes the scene, suddenly takes a turn into commie-land, with it's talk of helping the poor and camels and needles and so forth. Jesus was obviously misquoted all over the place.
So what to do? When your claim of godly authority rests on your interpretation of God's holy word, but God's holy words…
pharyngula | September 30, 2009Do I really need to add anything to this buffoon's own words? Get the rubber room ready.
(via Below the Beltway)
pharyngula | September 28, 200930 September is going to be International Blasphemy Day, and I suspect Donohue will be turning purple while his head twirls around on his neck. It should be entertaining: he's already sending out press releases to complain.
BLASPHEMY DAY TARGETS CHRISTIANITY
The Center for Inquiry will launch the first International Blasphemy Day on September 30, the anniversary of the 2005 publication of the Danish cartoons that so inflamed Muslims worldwide. Billed as a free speech event designed to oppose such things as a Muslim-sponsored U.N. resolution banning criticism of religion, the day has drawn…
pharyngula | September 22, 2009Yesterday, I disagreed with Phil Plait — I didn't think the suggestion by Texas educators to remove a requirement to mention Neil Armstrong was that bad. However, that was because I presumed that they were making a reasonable pedagogical argument, that the state board shouldn't micromanage how the details of social studies were taught.
I was wrong. I was very wrong. They're suggesting this change and others because they're batshagging mad.
On day one of hearings in Austin, disagreements flare over the importance that should be given to civil rights leaders including Cesar Chavez and Thurgood…
pharyngula | September 18, 2009Remember Glenn Moon, the strange candidate for city council of Livonia, MI? The primary election is over, and he finished dead last. He did get 301 votes out of 6,432, though, which is a little accomplishment, and we now that 4½% of the population of the town is stark raving bonkers, which isn't too bad.
pharyngula | September 17, 2009I used to love to watch barnacles. Well, I still do, but there's a distinct shortage of tidepools here in Minnesota, which makes it a very difficult hobby. Barnacles are arthropods hunkered down in stony shells attached to a substrate, and what they do is unfurl feathery legs like ostrich plumes (called cirri) and wave them about in the water to catch small particles of food. They're very pretty, but also very skittish: a shadow passing over, a splash, the klunk of a rock sending vibrations through the substrate, and they instantly withdraw their limbs and slam the plate-like doors to their…
pharyngula | September 17, 2009Uh, there is a Team Canada, isn't there? Many of you may have noticed that Dennis Markuze has been going on a commenting spree lately. He's leaving a few hundred threatening messages a day, which I clean up as I find them, and has also said he is emailing these threats to every individual member of my university (I haven't verified that he has yet, but he has done so in the past). I'd say he is just another deranged spammer, except that he's been escalating lately — the messages have become more personal and much more violent. Here's a small sample of the terroristic threats he's sending out…
pharyngula | September 9, 2009I've been promoted. I'm now a member of a ruling cabal that forms a world dictatorship. BWAHAHAHAHAAHAAHAHAAHAHAAAA!
At least, that is, according to this email I just got.
Darwinism is under official protection in 95% of the countries of the world. People are forced to believe this false theory imposed on them as an official ideology.
THE GLOBAL DARWINIST DICTATORSHIP MUST APOLOGIZE TO THE ENTIRE WORLD,
for presenting innumerable frauds to the scientific world for 150 years,
for imposing Darwinism as the official ideology,
for trying to keep Darwinism alive by means of official protection…
pharyngula | September 3, 2009Now that he's been drummed off the NY Times editorial pages, I guess Ben Stein can throw restraint to the winds.
We have … an entire party, the Democrats, whose primary constituency, besides the teachers' unions, is homosexual men and lesbian women. I hope it won't come as a surprise to anyone that a big part of male homosexual behavior is interest in young boys.
Why, yes, it will come as a big surprise. There is a range of homosexual behavior (just as there is a range of heterosexual behavior), and among both homo- and heterosexual men, there is a significant minority that are focused on…
pharyngula | August 29, 2009Denyse O'Leary has a contest: provide a copy of the source code to Dawkins' Weasel demo. The prizes are your choice of a copy of Dawkins' new book, The Greatest Show on Earth, or Meyer's creationist apologetic, Signature in the Cell. It must be like that television game show where you get to choose door #1 or door #2, and one door hides a free vacation in the Bahamas while the other hides a goat.
It's a very silly contest because a) only Dawkins could win it, and he conjures up Bahamas-quality books all the time, and probably doesn't want a copy of Stephen Meyer's rank little goat, and b) the…
pharyngula | August 23, 2009Brace yourselves: Glenn Moon is plainly mentally ill, but what are we to make of Pastor Steve Anderson? He has a job, he has a congregation, people actually respect him…but if you go to that link, you will hear the most astonishingly deranged, hateful, creepy nonsense in his sermons.
It's all bible-based, too. You can use that vile old book to support any evil you can imagine, I think.
pharyngula | August 23, 2009Livonia, Michigan (Orac's home town!) is having an election for city council. This is not newsworthy. What is amusing, however, is the candidacy of Glenn Moon, who is running on the issues of abortion, littering, and paying city employees a salary of $1 per year plus the love of Jesus Christ. He is remarkably passionate about killing babies, litter, and firing heathens.
I'll be really curious to see how he does in the election. He'll get some votes, guaranteed, but probably won't get elected. Probably. Don't rule him out, though. Who knows, he may be running for vice president of the US on…
pharyngula | August 19, 2009You know the bus signs in Iowas that read, "Don't believe in God? You are not alone"? One bus driver refused to do her job because "the message is against her Christian faith," and was then suspended.
Somebody tell me what precisely in that message is against anyone's faith? It simply asks whether one believes in a god (I know that is not forbidden, because Christians have asked me that), and then says that there are others with the same beliefs, which is simply a description of reality. Oh, I get it — reality is in conflict with Christianity. I can believe that.
Anyway, I think the…
pharyngula | August 18, 2009Bill Donohue has a new target: he has taken out an ad in Variety, demanding that Penn and Teller be fired, because they've been irreverent and sacrilegious towards the holy Catholic church.
On August 27, Showtime, owned by CBS, will feature a vicious assault on Catholics. In the season
finale of Penn & Teller's show, they "take on the secretive inner world of The Vatican, the holy city of
Catholicism and home of the Pope." How do we know it will defame Catholics? Because on the
show's website, it says so: There is a Showtime Advisory for "Graphic Language, Adult Content."
If Showtime…
pharyngula | August 15, 2009Peter Irons wrote a letter to Murray Gell-Mann.
Dear Dr. Gell-Mann,
You may (or may not) know that Stuart Pivar has included on the jacket and promotional materials for his new book, On the Origin of Form, a purported endorsement by you of the book, which reads: "This is the discovery of the connection between the laws of physics and the complexity of life."
Mr. Pivar used the same quote, attributed to you, in promoting his previous book, Life Code.
I have learned that this quote is drawn from promotional material written by the publicist for your book, The Quark and the Jaguar, which reads…
pharyngula | August 14, 2009We have made Michael Ruse very sad and very angry. He has an essay up called Why I Think the New Atheists are a [Bloody] Disaster, in which he bemoans the way he has been abused by these brutal atheists, and explains how he thinks these godless scientists are damaging the cause of science and science education. Here's the heart of his pitiful complaint.
Richard Dawkins, in his best selling The God Delusion, likens me to Neville Chamberlain, the pusillanimous appeaser of Hitler at Munich. Jerry Coyne reviewed one of my books (Can a Darwinian be a Christian?) using the Orwellian quote that only…
pharyngula | August 13, 2009Stuart Pivar is on a rampage again — he has rallied his lawyers and is on the attack. Not against me, fortunately, but against Robert Hazen, biochemist and author of the excellent book on abiogenesis, Genesis. His crime is that Hazen said a few generous things about Pivar's work once upon a time, Pivar inflated the remarks into a wholesale endorsement of his cockamamie theories, and when Hazen saw he was being touted as a True Believer™ in the evolution of balloon animals, he demanded that Pivar cease and desist.
Now Pivar claims this is a cruel attempt to silence the promulgation of his…
pharyngula | August 12, 2009Watch this video: 50 rabbis are circling Israel, chanting and singing and blowing horns to ward off the swine flu. The scene is one of pure madness.
pharyngula | August 11, 2009Uh-oh, get the muzzle: Ken Ham is practically foaming at the mouth. He's upset that I pointed out that one of his displays is a relic of a racist theory of human origins. And it is! He does a bit of yelling about credentials, too.
And this professor seems to have a fixation on me--yet, our own full-time PhD scientists and many other scientists who work in the secular world provided the research for the museum scripts. But, then again, he wouldn't want to acknowledge that people with better qualifications than he holds (qualifications obtained from secular universities, including PhDs from Ivy…