Archive for the 'Liars for Jesus'

A ‘professor’ at the far-right wing diploma mill, Judith Reisman, has come out with a bizarre explanation for homosexuality. On Sept. 21, 2012, Texas neurosurgeon Donald L. Hilton Jr., M.D., spoke on pornography addiction and sexual orientation, saying: “Pornography is a visual pheromone, a powerful 100-billion-dollar per year brain drug that is changing sexuality even more rapidly through the cyber-acceleration of the Internet. It is ‘inhibiting orientation’ and ‘disrupting pre-mating communication between the sexes by permeating the atmosphere’ and Internet.” This complements my theory perfectly. My theory is that while watching televangelists on TV, every once in a while a cartoon rabbit with a mallet jumps out and bonks the viewers on the head, causing transient memory loss that eliminates knowledge of the bunny, and also causes the viewer to become more stupid. I am calling these brain-damaging rabbits ‘leporobashins’, because as we all know, giving things a Latin name makes them real. (Edited to remove link to source that mangled the story, and replace it with a direct quote from the original source at WND.)

He was asked about education. He replied with a tired creationist excuse. Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy Bottom line, at the end of the day, we want our kids to be exposed to the best facts. Let’s teach them about the big bang theory, let’s teach them about evolution, let’s teach them — I’ve got no problem if a school board, a local school board, says we want to teach our kids about creationism, that people, some people, have these beliefs as well, let’s teach them about ‘intelligent design.’ The first sentence is sort of OK — yes, let’s teach the best ideas, the best evidence, the best science, the facts as we know them, and that includes good science like evolution and the big bang. But what Jindal then throws up as examples are bad science, claims without evidence, bad ideas that are contradicted by the evidence. Creationism and Intelligent Design Creationism are not the “best facts”, they don’t even cut it as “adequate facts” — they are bad and they are non-facts. Can Jindal not tell the difference? And since when is good education about teaching kids what their less-well-educated parents want them to know? How about if we teach them the truth, instead?

Every time I despair at the dreadful nonsense from the Discovery Institute, I can reliably turn to Answers in Genesis and despair harder. They’ve just announced that “after two centuries of research”, they’ve finally determined the dates of the Ice Age. They’ve even announced that they’re going to have a chat on their facebook page at 2pm ET today if you really want to learn more. They have figured out the dates of the Ice Age (singular) from reading their Bibles closely. You might quibble and say that the Bible doesn’t say anything about glaciers or ice sheets or changes in climate, so how could they possibly determine anything about Ice Age(s) from that book? Easy. They make shit up. First step: build everything around a chronology derived from the catalog of patriarchs in Genesis. The Bible gives us an inerrant chronology for marking historical events. It tells exactly how many human generations passed from the Flood to Abraham’s birth: eight.1 God’s judgment occurred at Babel sometime during the days of Peleg, who was the fourth generation after the Flood. Second: reject all of the science that says the Ice Ages occurred between roughly 3 million and 10 thousand years ago. Though this range is clearly not accurate because it lies outside the Bible’s total timeline of 6,000 years, several lines of evidence support the choice of the Pleistocene layers for the Ice Age. Pay attention to that last line. They’re accepting that the Ice Ages and the Pleistocene occurred concurrently. But the third step is a devious one: reject the dates set by the radiometric and other data, and simply compress and shift the entirety of the Pleistocene into a Biblical window: it started in 2250BCE, and instead of lasting 2½ million years, it was only 250 years long. They’re only off by four orders of magnitude. Wait. That puts the Pleistocene smack in the middle of the Bronze Age. How can they do that?...
Read more

This is truly getting ridiculous. The Independent has published a story claiming that atheists face an Islamophobia backlash, and the first thing I have to do is take exception to the premise. A “backlash”? Seriously? Dawkins has been hit with this “backlash” nonsense from the day The God Delusion hit the stands in 2006; he has had a colony of fleas (like this one, for example) leaping on his coattails and announcing that the great backlash has begun from the very beginning. I daresay there was a “backlash” on the day the first hominin looked at the rock his tribe was worshipping and grunted, “it’s just a rock” — of course, the backlash then was more like a backswing with a handaxe, but it was the same sentiment. When the popular culture has been howling for centuries in protest at any expression of the idea that there is no god, you don’t get to use the word “backlash” any more, OK? You don’t get to pretend that this nonsense is something new. It’s just a “lash”, yet another in the commonplace droning torrent of complaint. And they don’t have a single original idea in that complaint, either. This is the crux of their disagreement. The opening broadside began earlier this month with a polemic from Nathan Lean on the Salon.com website. Lean, a Washington DC native and Middle East specialist who has recently written a book about the Islamophobia industry, was prompted to pen his attack following a series of tweets last month by Professor Dawkins attacking Islam in snappy 140 character sound bites. “Haven’t read Koran so couldn’t quote chapter & verse like I can for Bible. But often say Islam Read more
Read more

Another item for your personal Ray Comfort trophy collection via the Global Secular Humanist Movement Religion Is A Joke Facebook page. Read more