Kooks
pharyngula | May 26, 2007A reader sent in a request that I post a reply to an old article. How old? From June 2005. I'd almost forgotten this old quack, but Cindy Lee had to remind me.
Yes, the email she sent was all set in Comic Sans.
It seems most of these posting are rather old so in reading them I am going to comment and post a more up-to-date statement.
It is easy to be critical of something you have not experienced. I have hear stories, been to several healing services at the churches and have had five or six private office visits with Dr. Nemeh.
I have also encouraged many family members and friends to come…
pharyngula | May 26, 2007
Fresh off his earthshaking debunking of the whole of evolutionary biology with his classic "banana" and "coke can" arguments, Ray Comfort has a compelling new argument against atheism: the electricity argument. It's a little story about "three wise fools" who are exposed to electricity for the first time, and who refuse to believe in this amazing invisible force, and refuse even to test it. Obviously, the "wise fools" are supposed to be modern scientists, and the invisible force they refuse to acknowledge is a god. Comfort tells the tale to make the scientists look like obstinate idiots who…
pharyngula | May 24, 2007I completely missed it — Chuck Norris made a couple of roundhouse face kicks at godless evolutionists last week, and I didn't even notice. Apparently, we've been trying to outlaw Christianity, and Norris has scuttled that plan by exposing our devious strategy of being sufficiently literate to write books, and sending our kids to summer camps that lack religious indoctrination.
Zachary Moore has the complete breakdown of the Atheist Conspiracy's 5-year plan. Now's the part where I laugh my movie villain laugh and taunt my feeble, brain-damaged opponent as I launch my nefarious onslaught. "You…
pharyngula | May 24, 2007Guess who's building an Ark on top of Mt Ararat in Turkey now?
Greenpeace.
Normally, I like the goals of Greenpeace, but I have to wonder what blissed-out ditz thought that the appeal to fairy tales from an overrated book was a good tactic.
pharyngula | May 23, 2007Falwell's funeral was yesterday, and apparently there were demonstrations — which seems highly inappropriate to me, now matter which side they were arguing — and a Liberty University student was arrested for bringing homemade bombs to the funeral. Bombs. To a funeral. There's just something insanely religious about that.
Worse still was his excuse: "to stop protesters from disrupting the funeral service." Yeah, people waving signs and chanting slogans at a funeral is tacky and disruptive, but you don't enhance the solemnity of the moment by setting off explosions. Replacing chanting with the…
pharyngula | May 21, 2007I was interviewed on a website over a month ago, and unfortunately John A. Davison and his infected polyp, VMartin, took over the comments there and went on and on in their ridiculous way.
They're still going at it. Even more absurdly, the droning duo are bragging on ISCID, in an awesome example of pretentious self-delusion:
658 comments and going strong again. Are there any brave souls here that are willing to join Martin and myself in this incredible demonstration that there are still those who believe that life in all its manifestations was an accident? Are Martin and myself the only ones…
pharyngula | May 20, 2007I know everyone is talking about this demented blog supporting Brownback's candidacy that, among other things, denounces heliocentrism. I honestly can't decide whether it's satire or genuine—I've met a few people who sincerely believe ideas that stupid. It's just that they usually lack the technical competence to put a website together.
But then, of course, all you have to do is read Brownback's official campaign site, or his official blog colony, which is almost as looney, and you have to wonder how crazy an idea would have to be to be rejected by a Republican presidential candidate. After…
pharyngula | May 11, 2007It's always so exciting to see a new creationist argument…until you actually look at it and see how silly it is. And they've been getting more and more desperately absurd as the years go by and the flaws in the old arguments get harder and harder to support. Once upon a time, they could just say it rained really hard for 40 days to flood the earth. When it was pointed out that you can't wring that much water out of the atmosphere, they had to contrive all kinds of elaborate conditions for earth prior to the flood, with deep reservoirs and a "vapor canopy" of crystalline hydrogen to keep huge…
pharyngula | May 9, 2007At least, that's what he says. He's a good Christian, so he wouldn't lie to us, would he?
You know those parts in the debate where they sat there looking poleaxed, not knowing how to reply? They were praying. That's the ticket; when the Rational Response Squad said something rude about god, they had to stop for a moment to beg god to forgive them. That's how good a Christian Ray Comfort is. It was an unfair edge to the skeptics, because they could blaspheme without having to pause to have a chat with The Lord.
pharyngula | May 5, 2007Frank Tipler claims to have proven the existence of god with phyics. Will this be the sort of answer we'll see in Ray Comfort's promised 13 minute proof?
Notice that we don't actually get to see the infamous equation. We see Tipler scribble a few words like "quantum" (does the word "quantum" actually appear imbedded in the formulas describing quantum mechanics?) and a few bits and pieces of math, and then the camera lingers on him writing "= god exists", but there isn't any substance shown. He says stuff like, "If you are using quantum mechanics and general relativity, you are forced to…
pharyngula | April 25, 2007The most important battle in the history of mankind!
A bit more than a week ago, I mentioned this interview I did for a site called One Blog A Day. The comment thread on the interview has grown in a peculiar way — John A. Davison and his pet sycophantic monkey, VMartin, are babbling away in a most painfully lunatic fashion, cruelly egged on by wÒÓ†. It's hard to beat this comment for delusions of grandeur:
Martin and myself are waging a very effective war against the forces of darkness on both sides of this idiotic debate, sides which are dead wrong and always have been. Our success is…
pharyngula | April 23, 2007George Shollenberger is not happy with scienceblogs. He sent an email to the scienceblogs website (whatever that means) with a complaint:
I started to inform 'the people' on my website that our mathematicians are practicing atheism. Then, after I investigated the website, ScienceBlogs, I concluded that all sciences also practice atheism. So, my website is now informing 'the people' that mathematicians and scientists are practicing atheism.
However, I am dismayed to discover that the overwhelming godless influence on scienceblogs is not me, but Mark Chu-Carroll! I feel so inconsequential now…
pharyngula | April 21, 2007Wow, but this is awful. Don't watch it unless you're feeling masochistic.
It's a snotty, arrogant punk kid filmed in annoying style claiming that he has disproven atheism and that all science is based on theology. I think he might be something like a freshman philosophy major who has just discovered the problem of induction.
The problem of induction is a real one, all right; we can't logically support one of the fundamental tools of science, the idea of making general inferences from specific observations. You might think, well, it's worked so far and we've got all these successful…
pharyngula | April 20, 2007Has anyone heard from Dinesh D'Souza lately? He ought to be offering a humble apology now that the atheists he thought were invisible are turning up on the faculty and in the student body.
Oh, wait … he admits that there were "undoubtedly atheists among the mourners", but considers his point that atheists have nothing to offer "unrefuted". So I guess the unbelievers are there, they're just heartless robots. Thanks, Dinesh! You're a peach!
pharyngula | April 19, 2007I speak of Dinesh D'Souza, who seems to have noticed that his creepy and dishonest tirade against atheists won him some attention, so now he has upped the ante, and gotten even creepier and more dishonest.
Start with the title: "Dawkins' Message to Mourners--Get Over It!". That sounds as if he is reporting that Dawkins has said something horribly callous directly to the grieving families, doesn't it? Well, no … all we actually have in this article from Richard Dawkins is a quote from his book, River Out of Eden(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), published in the mid-90s.
The universe we observe has…
pharyngula | April 18, 2007It's Rush Limbaugh. What took him so long?
It's all secularism's fault, and what he wants is more god, more prayer, and more religion at the university. He doesn't comment on the fact that the killer wanted to "die like Jesus Christ".
(Who knew Jesus murdered 32 innocents on the way to the cross, and nailed himself up there?)
pharyngula | April 18, 2007Could D'Souza be right? Does our lack of religious beliefs really impair our ability to offer help to people?
I suppose that if we actually cared, we could have
sent teams to Virginia to do useful things like
stroke sad people's thetans and
point to chairs and trees for them (a technique that will also sober up drunks in minutes, which sounds very handy). Even if the VT students aren't in shock or drunk, I'm sure they'll appreciate the important study tips. Did you know that the most important thing you can do is look up words in a dictionary — the bigger the dictionary the better — and that…
pharyngula | April 5, 2007If I see Francis Collins' pious, simpering facade one more time, I'm going to get really pissed off. Can someone please give that man a Templeton Prize and let him retire to the Cascades, where he can stare at waterfalls to his heart's content? CNN has an article on "Why this scientist believes in God", and it's just more vapid crap distilled from his vapid book.
But OK, let's take him at his word. He claims to be presenting reasons to believe … what are they? Do they meet any kind of scientific standard?
I've thrown out most of his essay, and pulled out just those parts that actually address…
pharyngula | April 4, 2007On The Infidel Guy, Abby of ERV goes up against a ranting crackpot, Leonard Horowitz, who thinks AIDS is the product of a secret conspiracy. She handles herself very well. It's painful to listen to—Horowitz is a master of the bellowing Gumby style of discourse, and he believes in some very looney things. He's also smart enough, though, that he knows some of his stuff is going to go over as immensely kooky to an informed audience, and he gets evasive at several points.
Some highlights occur when he's called "Mr Horowitz", and he goes on an indignant tirade about his credentials. Another is…
pharyngula | March 30, 2007Bill Donohue is hopping mad again — he's got another wild hare up his butt and is fuming over another insult to his very Catholic sensibilities:
Catholic League head Bill Donohue called it "one of the worst assaults on Christian sensibilities ever".
The latest affront is a life-size sculpture of a naked man on a cross, made out of 200 pounds of chocolate, on display in New York just in time for Easter.
Come on, Bill, get over it. Shouldn't Abu Ghraib have been "one of the worst assaults on Christian sensibilities ever"? How about the injustice of our war in the Iraq? What about the ongoing…