Why does Revere torment me so? He’s got a collection of highlights from the current presidential campaign that make me want to secede from the union.
Is Huckabee out of the race yet? I’ve been actively avoiding news from the Huckster lately, to prevent the awful symptoms of head-asplodey.
There are limits to even my capacity to cope with The Stupid, and this video reaches them. It’s interesting in a historical sense, in that it seems to be an old recording — familiar faces look so young, and the whole thing has the clumsy style of a bad 1970s documentary—but it’s a whole half-hour of badly concatenated mish-mashes of creationist arguments. Who knew that Charles Darwin was responsible for the Big Bang theory, or that evolution was the foundation of astronomy? (Don’t tell Phil, his inferiority complex is bad enough.).
It’s rather weird to see old faces that most of you have forgotten or never knew, like Ian Taylor and Luther Sunderland and John Morris, all sitting there mired in the most awful ignorance and propagating lies about Lucy’s knee joint and Neandertal just being an arthritic old man and so forth, and realize that they or their successors are still spouting the same old lies today. Ignorance builds more ignorance, unfortunately.
The incoherence of the whole production is amazing, too. It starts of with this weird set of New Age rationalizations before wallowing in the reactionary pronouncements of fundamentalist kooks like D. James Kennedy … and then at the end it includes a five minute music video with Kurt Cobain of Nirvana.
There’s a brief discussion of the video here, brought up by a guy who thought it made good points and made him question his acceptance of evolution. Among the issues he had was that the movie claims that “cro-magnon and other pre-humans were determined to be transitional species from as little as a tooth or a rib,” which is actually an excellent example of an outright lie from the movie. Nope, not true. Cro-magnon refers to a variety of Homo sapiens, so calling them transitional is stretching the word. Transitional forms are far better established than as extrapolations from a single tooth — but the creationists sure milk their mangled story of Nebraska Man for all it is worth, and use it to falsely cast doubt on other explanations.
I’m not even going to try to address the details of that mess. It’s the Gish Gallop on video; if anyone has any specific questions, OK, but the shorter summary is that all the creationists in it are lying out of ignorance and all the scientists are taken out of context.
By the way, if the stupidity in that video doesn’t make your cortex disintegrate into slime, try this one — it’s the intellectual equivalent of huffing a hydrofluoric acid/osmium tetroxide cocktail.
The premise of evangelical atheism is that you can introduce people to the importance of reason and they will come to a reasonable conclusion on their own. The premise of evangelical faith is that people must accept an arbitrary belief because an arbitrary judge, who the convert may not query, demands it. The former kind of proselytizer ought to be called a teacher, but is more often called an arrogant asshole; the latter ought to be considered a liar, a fraud, and an arrogant asshole in fact, but they actually believe they are humble servants of the lord.
Here’s a beautiful example of oblivious faith in a story of an encounter with a Mormon missionary.
His position was that there are NO righteous people absent baptism into the Mormon faith; that no one enters heaven without it.
Since it had recently come to public attention that Elie Wiesel’s name was on a list for future baptism, I asked him if Wiesel would qualify as a “righteous man”.
No, replied the Mormon, Wiesel would not qualify.
“But you would, being a Mormon?” I asked.
Yes, replied the Mormon.
Well, I told the kid, any belief system that makes you righteous over Elie Wiesel seems pretty obviously fucked.
But it does make the kid feel all noble and important for putting on a white polyester shirt and riding a bicycle, which I think is the point of the appeal of religion: all the righteousness, none of the sacrifice or hard work.
Sunday morning at 9am, on Air America, you’ll want to catch Atheists Talk. This week, half the show will be Hemant Mehta, talking about being a friendly atheist or some such nonsense antithetical to the whole atheist enterprise, which revolves around dour nihilism, of course.
The second half will be Kristine Harley and me talking about bad design. Tune in and call in!
As you all know, the position of President of the World is traditionally determined by a vote on facebook. In the last millennium, the title was awarded to the Papacy, and we are all aware of what an awful cock-up that was — it was also a rigged vote, since the only computer with facebook access was kept in the Vatican. This millennium, it’s a race between Facebook PZ and Facebook Phil, and of course Phil has already mobilized his evil hordes. Being a much nicer guy — the kind of beneficent tyrant you would want to dominate you — I haven’t been pushing for this one, but think that perhaps the decent thing to do is compromise. So I have a few suggestions.
We could simply divide this by the electorate. Everyone who lives on earth should vote for me, while all the space-based citizens can vote for Phil. Or perhaps all sentient biological organisms should vote for me, while any of you inorganic creatures reading this can vote for Phil.
Or we could divvy up the spoils. I get planet Earth and all the residents thereon, while Phil gets outer space, and has dominion over all vacuums. That sounds fair and gracious to me. After all, this is the World presidency, not the Offworld presidency.
Alternatively, if Phil is unwilling to consider my generous offer, we could just crush him and take it all. That might be simplest.
You need stuff to read…
Scientiae — and it’s one year old today!
Berry Go Round #2 (a new carnival for the botanists)
Talk about whatever you want right here.
I feel like I missed so much. MAJeff organized a gathering of Pharyngula readers, and it sounds like it was great fun, as a group of like-minded godless skeptics and rationalists used my web site as a mere pretext to justify meeting to drink bar and talk.
I’m superfluous to the whole affair, which is a little strange, but also reassuring. It’s the opposite of the L. Ron Hubbard effect — what if you started a movement that wasn’t a religion? You wouldn’t get rich, you wouldn’t get worshipped, you wouldn’t even be personally necessary, and what you’d have instead is a whole lot of people thinking for themselves. Helping to catalyze freethought isn’t going to get me a yacht with a flock of slave bimbettes, but at least it also won’t lead to drug addiction, delusions of grandeur, criminal behavior, paranoia, poor hygiene, and dying in a soiled bed doped to the gills on psychiatric drugs and worried that the clams were going to eat me. Cool.
You want pictures? You can have pictures. And more pictures.
Now go organize your own.
