Kooks
pharyngula | August 7, 2008I'm afraid the odious Oklahoma legislator, Sally Kern, has opened her mouth again. She has declared herself a "cultural warrior for Judeo-Christian values. I despise the term "Judeo-Christian" — it's so fake, and such a transparent attempt to tie morality to religion. So what are these "Judeo-Christian" values?
"I am not saying everyone has to be Christian; this is not a homogenous nation," Kern said. "What you have to be is someone who believes in a Judeo-Christian ethic, in other words, in knowing there's a right and wrong.
That's it? Knowing that some things are bad to do and others are…
pharyngula | August 7, 2008Barack Obama will be giving his acceptance speech at the DNC outside, so what do the geniuses at Focus on the Patriarchy propose to do? They urge their followers to pray for rain.
Pathetic. Why not suggest instead that they pray for thunderbolts of doom, and that the earth split open beneath Obama's feet and swallow him up with a chthonic belch of sulfur and magma? It would be just as effective.
I swear, god-botherers nowadays have lost all sense of style.
pharyngula | August 4, 2008When animal rights activists petition and complain and wave signs around, that's fine, they are within their rights. When they start firebombing researchers cars and homes, putting children at risk and damaging property, they have become nothing but terrorists and criminals.
pharyngula | August 4, 2008It actually feels kind of good, considering that my job is secure, and that these critics are looking increasingly rabidly insane. I just sit back and watch their hysteria grow. Case in point: Rod Dreher, who seems to be crawling the walls and screaming right now. In his 'review' of the desecration issue, nowhere does he mention the cause: the violent over-reaction of Catholics to a student in Florida walking away from Mass with a communion wafer, and the subsequent uproar calling for expulsion and punishment from Bill Donohue.
His parting shot to believers: "Nothing must be held sacred."
He…
pharyngula | July 30, 2008Perhaps you remember Karl — I ripped into an interview he did a while back. Well, "ripped into" is probably the wrong phrase — I pointed out several things I thought were quite good, and then tore up his sectarian defense of Christianity, his blind obeisance before the Christian bible, and his mangling of what other scientists have said about religion. It must have rankled — he now gripes that "Myers doesn't seem to like me" and has slapped together a nice bit of hackwork that is the lead story on Salon. And clumsy hatchet job it is.
Here's his opening:
PZ Myers is a true believer, a science…
pharyngula | July 28, 2008It is another mark of the incompetence of the ID movement that they actually hand out an award named after Casey Luskin. Pick the most ineffectual, uninformed, pathetic loser on the creationist side, and use his name to inspire the next generation of IDiots. It's actually amusingly appropriate.
I note that the latest awardee is keeping his name anonymous. That's hopeful — at least some of them can still retain a sense of shame and embarrassment.
pharyngula | July 26, 2008Good news! While I still get flooded with email every time Bill Donohue puts my address in a press release, I'm getting 90% fewer death threats! I think that maybe the example of Ms Kroll and her trollish husband has made people thinking twice before explicitly spelling out their gruesome plans, so that's an improvement.
I'm still getting way too much repetitive crap, though. Yes, people, I know you're offended. You don't all need to tell me. If I had time to reply to each one of you individually, I'd simply tell you to tough it out — I'm offended by you, but none of us have a right to not be…
pharyngula | July 24, 2008This is just to handle the overflow from this closed thread.
You crackerbaters are insane.
pharyngula | July 22, 2008Here's another one for the files. This guy has sent me several menacing messages — nothing new there — but now he has announced that he's coming to visit me. I've put the header for one of Mr Moore's creepy threats below the fold, for the record. His specific email address is not included, so we don't have a repeat of the last episode.
Nice people, these Catholics. If Mr Moore shows up at my door, the only people who will be meeting him are the local police.
From: *******@gmail.com
Subject: The Visit
Date: July 22, 2008 1:21:00 PM CDT
To: myersp@morris.umn.edu
Delivered-To: pzmyers@gmail.com…
pharyngula | July 22, 2008Bill Donohue has once again issued a press release, urging all of his followers to harass my in-box. Once again, my email is rendered useless by a flood of idiots sending me bizarre tirades and links to Catholic fables and threats. There is a new change in tone: now lots of them are gloating that they've written to CAIR, and the Muslims are now going to come and blow up my house, ha ha! Thanks, Donohue, for reinforcing prejudice about Muslims.
I may have to simply dump all email sent to my more public addresses and create new accounts that I'll only make known to a sensible few. It's that bad.
pharyngula | July 21, 2008How about a little extreme right wing paranoia to start your morning?
Global warming is the perfect excuse to do what the Left always wanted to do - to destroy faith (Christianity), the family and freedom. There is no area of our lives that will not be invaded through taxation, control, regulation or obliteration to save the earth.
Read the whole thing — global warming is the conspiracy that ties together abortion, taxes, communism, and our hatred of little children. If only it had mentioned evolution, it would have been perfect.
Also, it's from a Canadian. It's reassuring to see that the US…
pharyngula | July 20, 2008Good grief, but this is tedious. I'm still getting piles of email every day from people 1) begging me not to abuse a cracker because it is so sacred to them, piles of email telling me to 2) abuse a book because it is so sacred to Muslims (I've even been sent two copies of the Koran!), and of course, the 3) bizarre complaint that I'm a coward, afraid to commit sacrilege. You can all stop now. 1) Your personal sense of the sacred in a piece of bread dough is absurd to me and imposes on me no sense of obligation. 2) Since I now own one entirely superfluous copy of the Koran, it will meet the…
pharyngula | July 16, 2008Thomas Foley of Virginia is nuts. This is the delegate to the Republican National Convention who has called for increased security. Why? Because he has an irrational fear of us.
On Friday the Catholic League reported that Thomas E. Foley, a Virginia delegate to the Republican National Convention (RNC) in Minneapolis has asked that increased security be considered for the event in light of Myers' threat to acquire and desecrate the Eucharist.
"I just felt security at the Republican National Convention ought to look at him and his followers," Foley told CNA in a phone interview on Wednesday…
pharyngula | July 16, 2008I regret to inform you all that Melanie Kroll has been fired for using her work account to sound death threats. In a further and not-unexpected twist, it wasn't Melanie who composed and wrote the message — the husband, Chuck Kroll, did it. We even have a confession. Good work, Chuck! You cost your wife her job!
pharyngula | July 11, 2008You asked for it, I deliver. Here's a good chunk of the opposition email that I've received in the last two days; not quite all of it, though, since I got bored and a lot of it has just been going straight into the trash. I've tried to cut out most of the identifying names and so forth, but if I missed a few…tough.
Trust me, it's very tiresome to read.
I know you are smarter than most people and probably even God himself, if you even believe in God. But you could learn something in humility. And there is nothing wrong with a Catholic standing up for his faith. In fact, a Catholic who…
pharyngula | July 11, 2008The Catholic League has issued another press release. In addition to disparaging the theory of evolution as the "King Kong Theory of Creation" (which is a bit peculiar, since Catholicism does not take a stand against evolution), he accuses me and my ilk (that's you, fair readers) of hysteria while making this hysterical declaration:
As a result of the hysteria that Myers' ilk have promoted, at least one public official is taking it seriously. Thomas E. Foley is chairman of Virginia's First Congressional District Republican Committee, a delegate to the Republican National Convention and one of…
pharyngula | July 10, 2008So far today, I have received 39 pieces of personal hate mail of varying degrees of literacy, all because I was rude to a cracker. Four of them have included death threats, a personal one day record. Thirty-four of them have demanded that I be fired. Twenty-five of them have told me to desecrate a copy of the Koran, instead, or in some similar way offend Muslims, because — in a multiplicity of ironic cluelessness — apparently only some religious icons must be protected, and I would only offend Catholics because they are all so nice that none of them would wish me harm. I even have one email…
pharyngula | July 4, 2008Andy Schlafly is one persistent fool. After harrassing Richard Lenski not once, but twice, prompting one of the best smackdowns on the intertubes, Schlafly now wants to take some vague sort of legal action against Lenski to get his own copy of every bit of data Lenski has generated in 20 years … data that he wouldn't understand, and which would include bacterial samples that he couldn't maintain, and requiring so much effort to collect (can you imagine having to go through 20 years worth of stored bacterial samples to create a copy?) that it would disrupt research in the lab to an…
pharyngula | June 28, 2008Admit it: you've been wondering what Fred Phelps thinks of George Carlin. If you'd rather not click, rest assured: it's exactly what you might expect.
pharyngula | June 25, 2008Wacky Michael Egnor is complaining that the data showing progress in treatment of some cancers should be credited to the culture of Christianity instead of science, and further claims that "The remarkable progress in the treatment of cancer in the past several decades had a lot to do with faith and prayer."
Hmmm. Given that the data shows a change, a rise in cancer survival within the past few decades, was there some breakthrough in prayer efficacy 20 years ago? Thumbs in vs. thumbs out in the folded hands thing? Accent on the "A-" or on the "men!"? Sudden change from the old useless lazy god…