Kooks
pharyngula | November 29, 2008When you first read this, you'll think the author has to be pulling our legs — it's got to be a satire site like Landover Baptist or something. But the woman sure does a fine job of maintaining a consistent tone, and I know people who think exactly like she does. Her latest entry is an attempt to justify slavery, and keep in mind that she is a black woman.
Here's the distilled essence of her argument.
Just as wives are to be submissive to their husbands, likewise slaves are to be submissive to their masters.
It's an interesting sentence that can be interpreted in two ways, isn't it? I prefer…
pharyngula | November 28, 2008Well? Can you name a single terrorist attack on Kentucky soil? Hmm? (Aside, maybe, from the occasional abortion clinic bombing or KKK fear campaign, but since those are by home-grown white boys, they don't count). You can credit a law that has been on the books since 2006.
Under state law, God is Kentucky's first line of defense against terrorism.
The 2006 law organizing the state Office of Homeland Security lists its initial duty as "stressing the dependence on Almighty God as being vital to the security of the Commonwealth."
Specifically, Homeland Security is ordered to publicize God's…
pharyngula | November 28, 2008When you need to address Jenny McCarthy's ideas, you really need to consult one of her equals: a puppet with rags and styrofoam for a brain.
pharyngula | November 24, 2008Quiz time! What's wrong with this paragraph?
Sometimes life takes a creative leap that's almost miraculous. Nobody knows how this happens, and it can never be predicted. You'd never know, looking at a reptile's round, hard, shiny scales, that they could genetically morph into feathers. Paleontologists know that they did, however, and finding the very first dinosaur that sprouted feathers is one of the great discoveries waiting to happen.
I think we all know what's a bit off here: whoever wrote this seems to have completely missed out on what has become almost a commonplace observation: lots…
pharyngula | November 24, 2008Uh-oh. I'm in big trouble now — I've been ratted out to the governor. My nefarious schemes will certainly be foiled now! Here is the revealing letter; I've added a few comments in red to it.
Dear Governor Pawlenty
I am an alumnus of the University of Minnesota, having received my Ph.D. in Zoology in 1954 [We've gotten better since then].
I have for some time been concerned about the behavior of Paul Zachary Myers, Associate Professor of Biology at the Morris campus of the University. His rabid attacks on our most treasured institutions [What? The Discovery Institute?] give me great…
pharyngula | November 24, 2008Creationists must live on a different planet. I just summarized this symposium I attended; I posted the schedule last week. In between, Michael Egnor takes this scrap of information and spins out a weird tale. He actually put up a post titled, "Is P.Z. Myers Attending a Conference on Eugenics?". To which one can only mutter, "WTF?"
Here's his "reasoning":
I'm having trouble finding the program Myers is referring to (why wasn't I invited!?), but Claudia Cohen Hall is on the medical campus at Penn, so I surmise that the presentations will be on eugenics (apologies for it, I hope), which is…
pharyngula | November 22, 2008That's all I can imagine: this imaginary conflict has gotten so stupid that it must be mindless undead droning out their need for brains who are still fighting it (oh, hi, Bill O'Reilly!). The latest instance is one of these always-affronted religion organizations that has made a Naughty and Nice List, to "make sure that Christmas does not get secularized or censored from its essence, namely the birth of Jesus Christ". On the naughty list: Disney, because their online store is called the "holiday shop". On the nice list: Best Buy, because Jesus wants a new digital camera they use the word "…
pharyngula | November 22, 2008A while back, two ladies visited the Discovery Institute, and wrote about their experiences afterwards. They admittedly did so under false pretenses, acting as if they were fellow travelers in creationism, but they did get interesting and amusing responses from the inhabitants.
They tried to do it again. They wrote a letter and were entirely upfront about their motives this time, and asked to have a real conversation about Intelligent Design creationism.
Casey Luskin wrote back. It would have been entirely understandable if he'd simply turned them down, but no … instead, he writes a long…
pharyngula | November 21, 2008The United States has some serious problems: an ugly war, a shaky economy, a bad government (on the way out, at last). It's been a rough eight years. So of course it must be someone's fault, and Daniel Henninger has a simple explanation: blame the atheists. Especially blame the atheist's successful war on Christmas. He says, "A nation whose people can't say 'Merry Christmas' is a nation capable of ruining its own economy." You see, we've all lost the important values of "responsibility, restraint, and remorse" that Christianity inculcates.
It has been my view that the steady secularizing and…
pharyngula | November 20, 2008Remember the Rev. Evan Cockshaw? He put a silly poll on the web, and then was quite miffed when we answered it. It turns out that he has lately been dunning Seed, demanding that my post and your comments be taken down! He has also added a redirect to his site so that links from here won't work.
Isn't that sooooo cute?
P.S. Seed has said "no", quite plainly. They do not meddle in blog content at all.
pharyngula | November 20, 2008At first, I was a bit put off by the awesome hubris of someone filing an amicus brief on behalf of god, especially since it was a brief in favor of California's proposition 8. Who would have the gall to declare that they speak for a deity, and use that false authority to promote intolerance and hatred? Oh, wait … that's rather common, actually.
But then I read further, and discovered that this was something special. The author isn't just speaking for god, she is god!
I solemnly declare that I am both fully God and fully human in nature, and currently I am on earth dwelling among the human…
pharyngula | November 19, 2008Don't be too shocked at the title; my arguments are with Catholicism, not the poor unfortunate victims of that dogma, the Catholics. In this case, one Catholic organization, Catholics for Choice (uh-oh—already, I can tell that one argument against them will be that they aren't True Catholics™) has published a scathing criticism of Bill Donohue and the Catholic League. Here's their summary:
From the beginning, the Catholic League was marked by a schizophrenic attitude that
would become its hallmark: It simultaneously argued for the right of conservative
Catholics to impose their values in…
pharyngula | November 13, 2008Watch Bill Donohue explode! I know, it's so easy to set him off, so it's not much of a present…maybe we should think of it as a reassuringly repetitive holiday tradition. This time he's outraged because humanists bought ad space on city buses. It prompts him to a tirade about atheists, Hitler, and even fatwah envy — they're always picking on Christmas, and don't have the guts to abuse Ramadan, don't you know.
pharyngula | November 12, 2008That would be one simple suggestion I'd make in a letter to Obama. When did a god-walloping meathead get the idea he can make informed contributions to government?
pharyngula | November 10, 2008It's another example of weird fundie obsessions. In this case, it's all about an angry god who sends hurricanes and is appeased by prayer, and just what do you think he's angry about? We haven't been hardline enough about Israel.
pharyngula | November 5, 2008We didn't have to wait long for right wing brains to explode into loopy, tangled strands of conspiracy theory nonsense. Creationist brains, already in a state of disarray, are already predisposed to this kind of inanity, so don't be too shocked at what Cynthia Dunbar, creationist, Christian, and member of the Texas State Board of Education has to say:
So we can imagine the blatant disregard for our Constitution, but what other threats does an Obama administration pose? We have been clearly warned by his running mate, Joe Biden, that America will suffer some form of attack within the first 6…
pharyngula | October 30, 2008I'm still experiencing fallout from the cracker incident, like the slow drift of dandruff from the flaking scalp of a gyrating televangelist. The latest is a letter from Mr. E.P. Bruk, who I suspect believes he is making a sarcastic point, but is actually making my point for me…that it is absurd to equate the value of a silly little cracker to a human life, or in this case, an entire ethnic group.
To double the irony, he also included a cover letter he sent to the chancellor and president of the university, decrying my loose use of the "F" word and toilet humor.
pharyngula | October 29, 2008Do I detect a note of anxiety in my Minnesota readers? Lately I've been getting lots of email from concerned locals who are worried about Tim Tingelstad, a candidate for the Minnesota Supreme Court, who is a religious wackaloon.
"Everyone has an opinion or belief as to where absolute truth is and where it comes from, and that's what I'm telling people where I believe my rock solid foundation is," Tingelstad says. "I believe that absolute truth exists and that it comes from God."
And that's one of his milder statements. I've mentioned this guy before, but you all know how it is — judicial…
pharyngula | October 20, 2008Reader wombat found a fascinating site in response to the creationist debate in Kentucky, led by Dr. Ben Scripture. It's an utterly bizarre page about a petrified human brain, and it is typical creationist tripe. They have gathered a collection of "authorities", where they make much of their pedigrees (don't blame me, the "Dr. X, Ph.D." is the redundant formula they use on the site.)
Dr. Suzanne Vincent, Ph.D., a neuroanatomist(!) at Oral Roberts University
Dr. Ross Anderson, Ph.D. of The Masters College
Dr. Bedros Daghlian, M.D., a retired doctor
Dr. Ben Scripture, Ph.D. in biology
Dr.…
pharyngula | October 17, 2008And your fault, too. The conservative columnist Melanie Phillips has an explanation for our current economic problems, for drunkenness and drug abuse, for rudeness, for psychopathic killers, and for the wholesale collapse of Western culture. What could possibly be the single root cause of so many catastrophic consequences? Why, atheism, of course.
I see this financial breakdown, moreover, as being not merely a moral crisis but the monetary expression of the broader degradation of our values - the erosion of duty and responsibility to others in favour of instant gratification, unlimited…