I finally got around to rebutting Calvin Smith’s lies. But I have to confess that I was flattered by his lengthy description of me.
Unfortunately, now I have to go to the hospital, where a dermatologist is going to slice out a divot of my flesh in the name of cancer prevention. Wheeee. I’ll probably survive this procedure, but I’m going to be dealing with some discomfort and a bloody bandage for a while.
Ooh, I got that done last week. First time in my life I’ve needed stitches for something other than surgery. Biopsy said it turned out to be benign, but given that the only way my skin cancer risk could be higher is if I had albinism, I expect that won’t be the case every time.
Apologists might call a system that relates to human needs “moral relativism,” but if some divine agent imposed moral law without regard to our humanity, that alternative would be “moral irrelevancy.” I find ideas like heaven and hell and “moral laws” that determine who goes where intrinsically twisted because they distort morality: It incentivizes deferred hedonism, where any purpose or meaning in life is replaced with an urgent need to avoid the suffering of hell and seek out the debauchery of heaven. Once you’ve established that system of incentives, there’s no moral reasoning, just appeasing the law maker in the sky out of self-interest. It dehumanizes us, reducing life to a calculation.
What I find twisted in particular is that hell discourages love if it exists (it doesn’t): You don’t want to risk caring about someone who’s at risk of going to hell because then you’re going to mourn their plight and suffer by sympathy or be forced to give up on compassion and love for the hellbound for your own selfish bliss.
If I somehow got promoted to a deity, I’d probably arrange the afterlife simply: I’d not include one. No perverse incentives. I’d want people to make and debate their moral decisions on their own merits, not my personal preferences.
Last time I had this done, they just froze it with a spray of liquid nitrogen.
It didn’t hurt or even leave much of a wound.
The biopsy was a lot more traumatic and that did require stitches.
This is yet again, another proof that Intelligent Design is wrong.
Calvin Smith has one significant advantage in persuading the casual YT viewer or religious fence-sitter (as well as the choir he’s also preaching to): he’s got the voice and delivery of every industrial and instructional video narrator everyone had to sit through at some point in school. It’s the voice we think of as unbiased authority. So people listen to him and assume he’s relaying facts because it’s how they’ve been conditioned to accept that voice.
If he were talking about how to safely change a tire, how a bill becomes law, or the wonders of octopuses, he would sound exactly the same.
And he’d still get it all wrong.
A creationist quoting out of context? I’m shocked, shocked I tell you !
I’ve had several excisions for skin cancer (basal cell carcinoma, the mildest form). It’s no big deal, and even with a two-inch long chunk of flesh gone it heals quickly and in a few months is barely visible. Surviving an insane American president, however, is quite another problem.
@4
He’s got a Canadian accent. e.g. “about” becomes “a boat.”
I think I heard this first at PZ’s …
Canadian: Lets watch a movie.
American: Have you seen Titanic?
Canadian: What’s that about?
American: Yes, it was. A big one that sank.
@Ridana #4:
I wouldn’t say everyone. When I was at school in the 1970s, several of the instructional short films we were shown were presented or narrated by John Cleese. Some ended up as semi-comedies, eg https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0295434/.
Unbiased authority? I was always waiting for the rotating knives.
I had a BCC about 20 years ago; treated with the topical cream and all cleared up. More recently I had a few keratoses frozen, just to be on the safe side. GP checks me over very carefully every year or so. He shares his office with a dermatologist; there is a sign on the counter explaining that there’s only ~30 dermos in this city of a million+, therefore wait times to see one are like a year. So I hope that if anything worse develops, it’s nothing the GP can’t handle.
Me too PZ, me too. And my dermatologist is running out of skin….
Inducted into the Shadow League?!?
What’s your power? Who will play you in the MarvelCU movie?
So when do you meet Raz al’Gul?
Oh, sorry. Shadow League, not the League of Shadows (which is DC, not Marvel, so it’s clearly inapposite as the Amazing Spider-Man is Marvel).
“Which hurts worse: Calvin Smith’s lies, or being flayed alive?”
Well, being flayed alive would hurt very much, the lies do not hurt at all.
So the flaying is better at hurting and the lies are worse at hurting, which means they hurt worse.
@ Jaws : Then theré s the Shadows and their allies from Babylon 5 which I mentioned in the last thred on this
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2026/08/08/ive-been-enrolled-in-the-shadow-league/#comment-2308751
@9. astringer : Groan.
@12. nomdeplume : “And my dermatologist is running out of skin….”
Hence the need to flay people alive to get more? ;-)
@17 Yes, but I probably need an elephant……
Nah. Just adopt tissue culture.
@19 🙂
Thanks John. I got a laugh from that.
“Flayed alive” reminded me of when I turned up at the surgical ward for my colon cancer surgery and said “good morning, I’m here to be partially disemboweled”.