I am devastated: Mrmojoman0 doesn’t like me!

I have received a dreadful rebuke. A user on reddit has announced that I have driven him to become an MRA.

against atheism+ which is largely a feminist ridden anti-male/mensrights movement, hiding behind the guise of atheism.

like PZ myers, a popular atheist/science blogger who is probably responsible for my becoming an mra. i had been following his blog, because it seemed pretty reasonable. posts like burning a dawkins’ book along with the koran/bible to show that it’s not something to take so seriously.

however, one day i saw him posting about feminism, i thought "women’s rights, nothing wrong with that"

then he said something along the lines of "if you are a man, you aren’t even ALLOWED to talk about sexual equality." and i lost all respect for him. just because i’m male doesn’t mean i can’t understand anything, or that i shouldn’t be allowed to have an opinion.

timewarp to the future, he is a popular voice in the "atheism+" movement, which is as i said, pretty feminist/anti-male.

I said what?

All right, I want you all to bow down in gratitude and thank me profusely because I have single-handedly driven yet another fool away from our brand of atheism. You are welcome. You can send checks directly to me, or you can find my paypal account.

Building! Plumbing! Fishing!

It’s been a busy, productive, tiring day. I’ve been working hard, leading and administering, while my student Josh has been working hard working working. We’re building a benchtop fish system and I seem to have spent a lot of the day in local hardware stores gathering stuff that Josh then assembles and cuts and hauls and scrubs and cleans. It’s a rough life.

Anyway, here’s the work in progress. On the left is the fish system…well, the shelves in place. On the right is the bulk of the fish system, in pieces and boxes and on the floor. We’ll be plumbing things together tomorrow, at least the stuff we’ve got — more bits will be trickling in as the week goes on. By this time next week I expect to see water cascading everywhere and fish frolicking and mating! And mermaids! And sirens! Manatees, even!

lab1lab2

Josh just started work yesterday. I think we’re making wonderful progress already.

Tonight, on the Nones

I’ll be joining Lilandra and Shayrah on The Nones podcast this evening, along with a few others.

PZ Myers of Pharyngula, Vic Wang of Houston Atheists, and Neeley Rebel Fluke of Orange County Freethought Alliance, and the mister Aron Ra will join Shayrah and me on the n0nes today at 8:00 PM CST. We will be discussing just who is scientifically inept Ken Ham or us. (Hint it isn’t us) We’ll also be further discussing what we are planning to do about Ham’s visit to Houston homeschoolers to hawk Young Earth Creationism as science. 

I think we’ll be making mocking chicken noises in the direction of Answers in Genesis.

Dragons!

The Creation “Museum” has a new exhibit: Dragons. Really. You see, according to their rules, which is that every word of the Bible has to be literally interpreted (whatever that means), nothing said in the Bible can be incorrect, metaphorical, erroneous, or even ambiguous — it has to be true. Since God told Noah that at least two of every animal were on the Ark, for example, that “every” means that every single kind of animal must have been on the big boat…which is why they insist that dinosaurs must have been aboard. Well, that and because dinosaurs are good marketing.

Similarly, there must have been dragons, because the Bible uses a word that translates as “dragon”. It’s that simple.

Does the Bible mention dragons? Used multiple times in Scripture, the Hebrew word tannin is defined by The Enhanced Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon as “serpent, dragon, sea-monster.” It likely refers to certain reptiles, including giant marine creatures and serpentine land animals. Though translated several different ways and differing in precise meanings based on context, tannin can denote a dragon and therefore can potentially refer to a dinosaur since all dinosaurs are dragons (though not all dragons are dinosaurs by definition).

If tannin is so vague that it can refer to a serpent as well as a sea-monster, though, and can be conviently post-fit to mean “dinosaur”, it seems to me that there is no necessity to interpret it to mean specifically dragon. But then, my brain doesn’t work like a creationist’s. It says “dragon” in the Enhanced Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon, by God, so there were dragons!

And what’s more, the Bible says they breathed fire, so they were fire-breathing dragons!

The burden against the beasts of the South. Through a land of trouble and anguish, From which came the lioness and lion, The viper and fiery flying serpent, They will carry their riches on the backs of young donkeys, And their treasures on the humps of camels, To a people who shall not profit. (Isaiah 30:6)

Many dragon legends such as what we find outside the Bible could be embellished, but the basic characteristics of dragons can be found in known creatures. Some dragon descriptions fit well with certain dinosaurs. Fossil pterosaurs reveal dragon-like wings. Certain beetles shoot out burning chemicals, so is a fire-breathing dragon really that far-fetched?

Yes. Yes, it really is that far-fetched. The Bible is not a science book.

Bombardier beetles use a small reaction chamber to produce a pressurized blast of peroxides. It’s not “breathing fire”. This is merely the kind of incoherent nonsense you get when you pretend the myths of ancient people are evidence of anything other than that they held certain peculiar beliefs.

Creationist logic now dictates another step: if tannin is a dragon, and dragons breathe fire, and tannin also means “dinosaur”, then dinosaurs breathed fire. Yeah, we’re done here.

Now if the Bible is a mess of incoherence, you should listen to Ken Ham. He was interviewed about his dragon exhibit.

“There are lots of dragon legends because they were real creatures. We believe many of the dinosaurs would fit some of the descriptions of dragons, the land dragons at least. I’ve never seen an exhibit like this anywhere else,” Dr. Ken Ham, president and founder of Answers in Genesis and the Creation Museum told OneNewsNow.

“We have an animatronics scientist there and other high-tech features like a dragon fly fossil. People will be able to download an app and when you put it over it, then the dragon fly comes out of the fossils and you see it three dimensional.”

Does anyone understand what the heck he’s saying? It’s interesting that his scientists are animatronic — that seems reasonable given their level of intelligence — but what do dragonflies have to do with dragons? What’s high tech about a dragonfly fossil? What is this magic app doing?

Every time I try to understand the mind of a creationist, my brain hurts.

Harvard’s shame

It seems Tauriq Moosa and I have a similar opinion of Oprah Winfrey — she’s a successful peddler of pseudoscientific nonsense. It’s too bad that Harvard doesn’t have the same ability to recognize a fraud when they see one, since they had Oprah disgrace their commencement ceremonies, and then gave her an honorary degree. In what, I don’t know; can you get a Ph.D. in dangerous foolishness at Harvard?

Didn’t you people read any of the books?

A host of people taped themselves watching the bloody violent climax of the most recent episode of Game of Thrones. It’s bizarre. First, who tapes themselves watching TV? Second, if they’ve read the first couple of books, they’d know exactly what horrible event is coming up.

Third, if they’d either read any of the books or watched the show to this point, they’d know that George R.R. Martin is a real psychopath to his characters, and just about anyone in the cast is liable to be thrown into a meatgrinder at a whim.

And most importantly, all this vicious chaos will not advance the plot one bloody bit, but will instead stymie all possible resolutions. These are books in which the actions of the characters are totally meaningless — I expect Martin’s plan for wrapping up the series is to have a giant asteroid smash into the planet in the final chapter, turning it into a cinder of ash and magma, spiraling into its sun for a final “pfffft.”

(Oh, sorry…”Spoiler!”)