Kooks
pharyngula | March 1, 2011But it's not enough on its own. Case in point: the Raelians have put up a sign in Las Vegas.
It does have a helpful statement from a Raelian spokesman to help you sort the rationalists from clowns, if the flying saucer in the billboard isn't enough for you.
If you drive the freeway between Vegas and Los Angeles, you'll see several signs warning drivers to follow the Bible or else face eternal hell," he said. "Those signs are designed to make viewers feel fear and guilt. We want to counterbalance that fear by letting them know there is no God or Devil. There's no need to live in fear. We…
pharyngula | February 23, 2011Here is the last of Anthony Horvath's ghastly morality tales. This one is the easiest to summarize, because there isn't much to say about it: Richard Dawkins dies, goes to heaven, is judged, and sent to hell. It's short, only seven pages long, and five of them are spent in loving description of the disintegration of Dawkins. It's nothing but a horror story for Christians in which the bad guy meets a grisly end.
The blurb for the book declares that "these stories draw from what is known publicly to imagine what would happen in this most private of moments." Yet there is essentially nothing…
pharyngula | February 23, 2011
Anthony Horvath is responding to my reviews with some flustery bluster. He's insisting that you must buy his stories in order to have any credibility in questioning them, which is nonsense: I'm giving the gist of his fairy tales, and he could, for instance, clarify and expand on the themes of his story, explain what I've got wrong and where I'm actually seeing the True Christian™ message, but instead he chooses to run away and hide while flogging people to buy his stories.
He does throw out a hilarious complaint cloaked in his refusal to address anything I've written, like this:
As before, I…
pharyngula | February 22, 2011I saw the open letter from Anonymous threatening to shut down the Phelps gang and the Westboro Baptist Church. It didn't sound right. WBC is not at all reliant on the web, but they are always on the lookout for more opportunities at promoting themselves through the media…so it seemed to me like a futile exercise, with any damage Anonymous might do being entirely tangential to the operation of the GodHatesFags gang, and actually gaining them more notoriety and news.
Cory Doctorow has a more plausible angle. This is WBC itself playing games to draw more attention. He also suggests that the WBC…
pharyngula | February 16, 2011It's a triumph of hope over reason, and that means the residents of the Kiribati Islands, an archipelago of tiny islands with an average altitude of 6.5 feet, are doomed. They've got faith, you know, but one thing they haven't got is any reason. NPR reports on their dire situation as the waters slowly rise and the climate changes:
"I'm not easily taken by global scientists prophesizing the future," says Teburoro Tito, the country's former president and now a member of Parliament.
Tito says he believes in the Biblical account of Noah's ark. In that story, after God devastates the world with…
pharyngula | February 14, 2011Would you believe I still get email about cracker abuse? At least this one is novel in its tone.
LESSON NUMBER ONE: IMPORTANCE OF CHRISTIANITY STRAIN
So-Called Atheists a.k.a RUBES a.k.a. LAMESTREAM ACADEMIA PABLUM asks: "Why is so-called defunct ''Christianity Strain'' the prime target of Satan lead OPERATION LAST DREAM/PAGAN-ATHEIST OPERATION PROJECT?''.
LESSON NUMBER ONE: IMPORTANCE OF CHRISTIANITY STRAIN
THE GREAT ANTI-SPIRITUAL INSURGENCY (a.k.a 'atheism' a.k.a 'secular humanism' a.k.a 'paganism' amongst so-called atheists/RUBES) is only the BEGINNING of the FINAL PHASE of SATAN's…
pharyngula | February 13, 2011Ray Kurzweil is a genius. One of the greatest hucksters of the age. That's the only way I can explain how his nonsense gets so much press and has such a following. Now he has the cover of Time magazine, and an article called 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal. It certainly couldn't be taken seriously anywhere else; once again, Kurzweil wiggles his fingers and mumbles a few catchphrases and upchucks a remarkable prediction, that in 35 years (a number dredged out of his compendium of biased estimates), Man (one, a few, many? How? He doesn't know) will finally achieve immortality (seems to me…
pharyngula | February 13, 2011Hi, Ben!
Ben is my neighbor, and I think he's on his way to being a good skeptic. He found this book at the library book sale and had to share it with me — although he had a hard time holding back the laughter as he tried to describe it, and now that I've read it, he's right…it's hilarious.
We are doomed, according to V.M. Rabolú. There is a giant planet called Hercolubus, or the Red Planet, which is going to collide with Earth and destroy the human race entirely. Rabolú is warning us, not that there's much we can do about it.
How does he know this? He's an astral traveler. You can trust him…
pharyngula | February 13, 2011I don't know what it is, but the kooks who write to me either don't know what paragraphs are, so that I get a dense knot of disconnected sentences, or they use a peculiar pattern of quirky line breaks that makes sense to them, I suppose, but not to anyone else. Arvin is one of the latter. He likes his white space.
Hello Dr. PZ Myers my name is Arvin Sookiassian
I had two questions for you Dr. PZ Myers.
1. How do you justify objective morals without a moral source (GOD)?
2. Why are short human beings deserving of life?
• Taller human beings are smarter then shorter human beings…
pharyngula | February 8, 2011Albert Mohler, that deluded Baptist zealot, has written an analysis of the New Atheism that puts evolution front and center. I actually sort of agree with him — these New/Gnu Atheists are predominantly scientific atheists who consider scientific explanations to be far better and more satisfying and most importantly, more true than religious explanations. Mohler lards his summary with gloppy accusations of "worldview" and "dogma" and other such buzzwords that religious apologists use as insults when applied to atheists but virtues when applied to theologians, but otherwise, it's a fair cop.…
pharyngula | February 1, 2011Queensland, Australia is currently threatened by a major cyclone, and everyone is bracing for the impact. There isn't much we can do right now but watch and wait, and be prepared to help however we can. But there are things that are pointless to do.
I thought this was the silliest, most useless web source I'd find for this problem: it's a set of specific instructions on how to pray during a natural disaster. Yeah, everybody in Cairns right now — all you need to do is get on the internet, read a few hundred words telling you what to pray for, and then get on your knees and start begging God…
pharyngula | January 31, 2011I must be a magnet for madness. The latest treasure to manifest itself in my mail is a book by Stefano Polidori called The Chaos Riders. It may be a rare artifact; it's not listed on Amazon, but it's expensively bound with an inset photograph of Da Vinci's The Last Supper on the cover, with thick glossy pages and profuse color illustrations throughout, but no publisher is listed anywhere. It's hot off the vanity press.
I have tried to read bits and pieces of it. I was a bit put off by the translator's remarks that claim the author is a scientist, but the first words in the preface are…
pharyngula | January 30, 2011After a brief career as one of Richard Dawkins' fleas, author of some book or another complaining about atheism, Alister McGrath faded away into irrelevance again. Not that he was missed; he always reminded me of the Impressive Clergyman played by Peter Cook in The Princess Bride, that affected pontificator with nothing really to say. I guess he's trying for a comeback now, but his only tactic is to try and ride the coattails of the New Atheists again, this time by triumphantly pointing out that there is dissent in the ranks, that the New Atheists are all loud and enthusiastic while other…
pharyngula | January 30, 2011There's another reason not to go to prison: they'll confiscate your Dungeons & Dragons rulebooks! The courts have ruled that fantasy role playing games are a threat to security because…
Well, in a 2009 case, a prison gang leader "established and enforced rules." You know, just like in D&D. And hell, there's even a risk of "D&D players looking to Dungeon Masters, rather than to the prison's own carefully constructed hierarchy of authority, for guidance and dispute resolution."
Man, this is too easy. I can think of another fantasy game that is encouraged and rewarded in prisons,…
pharyngula | January 27, 2011What a stupid, ignorant woman. She's baffled by the phrase "Sputnik moment"; she reads it over and over; it makes her vaguely uncomfortable, with that Russian sound to it; and rather than asking someone or looking it up, she decides to invent her own totally wrong definition built on false premises (the Soviet Union was bankrupted by a satellite launch in 1957? Ha ha, screw you, Ronald Reagan!), and declare it on national television? It must be bad, that commie Obama said it.
Man, if I thought the American electorate cared at all about intelligence in its presidential candidates, I'd…
pharyngula | January 23, 2011A few Christians are indignant over this video mocking Pollyannaish theology.
Unfortunately for them, and to our increased mirth, their excuses are just as ridiculous as Suzie.
Dr. Normal L. Geisler, author of If God, Why Evil?, said the video contains a lot of misconceptions.
"You look at all of that [and] you sympathize with Susie because you think they (disasters, illnesses, etc.) are evil," he said. "But if it's evil, then there must be a standard for good. If there is a crooked line in this world then there must be a straight line. If there is a straight line then there must be God…
pharyngula | January 19, 2011I don't really need to comment on this story, do I?
A vial containing blood drawn from Pope John Paul II shortly before he died will be installed as a relic in a Polish church soon after his beatification this year.
It's as if they aren't even trying to avoid the connection to voodoo, vampirism, and blood magic.
pharyngula | January 14, 2011Jacqulyn Levin, a high school health education teacher, had a simple lesson plan to help students understand the anatomy of the female reproductive tract.
"She stood in front of the students," district spokesman Jeff Puma said. "If you can picture a body builder flexing his arms and having his hands [above head level] out to the side, my hands would be the ovaries, my arms would be the fallopian tubes, and so on."
That sounds perfectly reasonable to me — it's a way to get the layout of the structures clear in students' heads. I'll be teaching human physiology this term, and I'll just…
pharyngula | January 12, 2011Sarah Palin has put her foot in her mouth again. In a statement about the shooting of a Jewish politician, she accuses the media of victimizing her with "blood libel".
Does this stupid woman even think about what she's saying?
Just to add to the charm, she goes on and on insisting that the crazy shooter was entirely on his own, uninfluenced by anything in the culture, and that nothing else did or could have affected him. Apparently, he's been living in a bubble floating in the vacuum of space and has only recently landed here on this planet.
pharyngula | January 11, 2011He certainly has the most awful aim ever. Here's Pr Daniel Nalliah (I think the "Pr" is short for "Prat") finding a reason for the current terrible floods in Queensland, Australia: Kevin Rudd has been insufficiently zealous in his support for Israel, and Rudd is originally from Queensland, so God is making it rain great buckets in Queensland to send him a message.
It's a rather opaque message, O Lord, and it seems to be causing far more suffering to other people, rather than Rudd. Wouldn't it have been far more effective and efficient if, say, the Lord God Almighty made the plumbing in Rudd's…