Rapture day needs a theme song.
(Episode CCLXIII: Magical floatie science!)
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Ken Ham claims to have turned 60 years old yesterday. I don’t believe him. For one thing, I wasn’t there, and for another, if we apply the same magnitude of error to his age that he does to the age of the universe, he’s actually less then 15 minutes old. And I’m sorry, Kenny, you don’t get presents for being 15 minutes old. You get a spank, a couple of shots, and an Apgar score, nothing more.
Nah, not really. This is supposed to be the last day of our existence, according to Harold Camping, but not even the Christians believe him, and they’re pretty kooky.
Rocky Mountain, N.C.’s Glenn Lee Hill, a retired pastor of Meadowbrook Christian Church, has told The Christian Post, “The late night comics tend to make fun of Christians anyway and when this happens it gives them an opportunity to mock us.”
Hill fervently refutes Camping’s latest rapture claim that “the end is going to come very, very quietly, probably within the next month. It will happen by October 21.”
According to the retired minister, “That is an erroneous prophecy, I don’t believe the world is about to end. Jesus has provided the choice for people to live forever.”
That’s from a Christian news site which then concludes on this note.
Fifty-eight percent of white evangelical Christians say Christ will return to earth by the year 2050, by far the highest percentage in any religious group, according to the survey.
By the year 2050, 23 percent of Americans believe that Christ will definitely return, and 18 percent more believe he will probably have returned to earth by that date.
It seems to me that if you’re one of those evangelical Christians, you’re just as insane as Harold Camping. The only difference is that you believe the Bible verse that says no one can prophesy the date, and Camping is skeptical.
Remember this poster?
Now it’s for sale! It’s not cheap — 200 NOK, or about $35 — but worth it.
I grew up in a town in southeastern Idaho. Where Mormons outnumber the “real Christians”. I was raised a Methodist, and we always made fun of the Mormons but I never looked at my own beliefs to think that maybe they are as unwarranted as the Mormons. At the age of 19 my father died of esophageal cancer and I still believed. I believed that God was real and Jesus was real but he didn’t do anything to help. His days of miracles were over.
I went away to a community college in Kansas and friends there were believers. I wanted to know what they knew so I tried to wash away my beliefs and start fresh. I started listening to other people’s beliefs and enrolled in a class titled “Biblical Archeology”. Hoping that it would help solidify my beliefs in the historical accuracy of the bible and then I could start to accept the words of the bible.
I am not the outspoken person I am today, another benefit of my atheism. So I sat in class and listened. I tried to take it all in even though 99% of everything the instructor said made no sense. I wanted the class to show me what was found in the archeological records and then show how that is related to the bible. Instead the class showed what the bible said and then desperately searched for something that could possibly be related to it. The final straw was a piece of wood found in China that was said to be part of the Ark. A quick internet search showed it to be a forgery.
Out went the bible and in came a flood of authors. Hitchens, Dawkins, Krauss, Coyne, and soon to be P. Zed. I am going back to school and majoring in Ecology. Thanks to just a little bit of critical thinking and a nudge from the god believers themselves. And I thank every atheist author and blogger that always had things for me read or listen to so that I didn’t have to use more than reason to figure out what was going on in the world.
Cody Feldman
Idaho, United States
Tomorrow, I’ll be on radio station KPFK in Los Angeles around 10am, on The Michael Slate Show. We’re going to be talking about various things, but one thing in particular: we’ll be plugging The Magic of Reality. Slate had a very good one-on-one interview with Dawkins earlier this week, and I think we all agree — getting more copies of that book into people’s heads would be an excellent idea.
While I’m recommending books, I also just finished Sean Faircloth’s Attack of the Theocrats! How the Religious Right Harms Us All-—and What We Can Do About It. It’s about how the religious right is corrupting the United States, with a nice collection of concrete examples of the idiocy these bozos — who keep getting elected! — represent. If you’re reading this blog, you know what I’m talking about, and it’s a safe bet you’d appreciate this book.
So get readin’. You can listen to the radio while you’re working your way through the books.
I’ve been buried in classes and meetings today, and I look up and discover Ghadafi has been killed, and people here are already talking about it. I guess I should put up a thread so you can stuff all the words into one common place.
(Also on Sb)
In my previous post, I described the misguided approach Gauger and Axe have taken to criticizing evolution, and one of the peculiarities of their criticism is that they cited another paper by a paper by Carroll, Ortlund, and Thornton which traced (successfully) the evolutionary history of a class of proteins. Big mistake. As I pointed out, one of the failings of the Gauger/Axe approach is that they’re asking how one protein evolved into a cousin protein, without considering the ancestral history …they make the error of trying to argue that an extant protein couldn’t have directly evolved into another extant protein, when no one argues that they did.
The tactical error is that right there in the very first paragraph of their paper, Carroll, Ortlund, and Thornton point out the fallacy of what the creationists were doing.
Direct comparisons among present-day proteins can sometime yield insights into the sequence and structural mechanisms that underlie functional differences. Such “horizontal” comparisons, however, cannot determine which protein features are ancestral and which are derived, so they are not suited to reconstructing the events that produced functional diversity.
They don’t mention Gauger and Axe, of course — this paper was written before the creationists wrote theirs — but a methodological flaw is still spelled out plainly, the creationists reference it so I presume they read it, and they still charged ahead and did their flawed study, and then had the gall to claim their work was superior.
The Discovery Institute has me on a mailing list for their newsletter, Nota Bene. That’s probably unwise: usually I just glance at it, see another ignorant bit of fluff from Luskin or Nelson or one of the other usual suspects, and I snigger and hit ‘delete’, but sometimes they brag about how they’re really doing science, and I look a little closer. And then I might feel motivated to take a slap at them.
The latest issue contains an article by Ann Gauger, babbling about her recent publication disproving Darwinism, written with her colleague Douglas Axe, published in their tame ‘science’ journal, Bio-complexity, and edited by Michael Behe. It’s not work that could survive in a real journal, I’m afraid.
I’ve been buried in classes and meetings today, and I look up and discover Ghadafi has been killed, and people here are already talking about it. I guess I should put up a thread so you can stuff all the words into one common place.
(Also on FtB)
