John Maddox dead at 84

I’m sad to report that John Maddox, former editor of Nature, has died. He was one of those fellows who shaped the direction of science for quite a long period of time with the power of one of the most influential science journals in the world.

I suspect every scientist of my generation read his editorials in our weekly perusal of the journal. The one I remember most vividly, and probably the one that got the most attention in general, was his ferocious denunciation of Rupert Sheldrake’s work — he went so far as to say that if ever there was a book suitable for burning, it was that one. So of course, I had to read it (that’s one of the pitfalls of calling for the destruction of books). And then, also of course, I discovered that Maddox was right on the money — that book was an astonishing pile of B.S. masquerading as science, and it’s true that Sheldrake is still peddling his nonsense.

We’ve lost a vigorous skeptic and humanist.

Where a troll comes from

As many of you know, Alan Clarke is a fundamentalist/creationist kook who has been babbling in the comments for a while now. A reader alerted me to how Clarke found his way here: he was posting his silliness on a powerbasic support forum, and was warned that we would “kick his butt” if he came here. He’s just as obtuse there as he is here, so nothing has changed…and yes, his butt has been kicked up and down the threads here.

This is no big deal, and completely unsurprising, but Clarke left one comment there that made me think.

I took your advice and have been hanging out on the Pharyngula site:

Thread 1
Thread 2

Bob Zale would have shut these threads down long ago for the abusive language. I appreciate him even more when his civility is contrasted to that of P.Z. Myers’.

That last paragraph is…enlightening. Mr Clarke seems to think that civility is equivalent to silencing argument, and that I would be more civil if I had shut down the discussion. Interesting. It raises a conundrum that my poor brain cannot resolve; I had thought that it was better that I allow Mr Clarke to continue his ignorant ravings without taking a hand, but apparently Mr Clarke himself thinks that was uncivil.

So, I leave it to the readers. Shall I be civil and boot Clarke’s badly bruised butt from the site entirely, or should I be abusive and allow him to continue to comment here?

If you’re having trouble deciding, too, just follow his comments on these pages…I am actually relieved that commenters don’t have the ability to freely insert cartoons and caricatures here, because Mr Clarke can create quite a circus.

Dobson gives us a message of hope and joy on this day

This will put a smile on your face — James Dobson is in despair.

The battles that we fought in the Eighties now, we were victorious in many of those conflicts with the culture, trying to defend righteousness, trying to defend the unborn child, trying to preserve the dignity of the family and the definition of marriage. We fought all those battles and really it was a holding action. […]

[W]e made a lot of progress through the Eighties but then we turned into the Nineties and the internet came along and a new president came along and all of that went away and now we are absolutely awash in evil. And we are right now in the most discouraging period of that long conflict. Humanly speaking, we can say that we have lost all those battles, but God is in control and we are not going to give up now, right?

Knowing Dobson’s definition of what is ‘evil’, I am overjoyed to be awash in it. Keep on discouraging these sour old dogmatists!

Mac Brunson, Baptist tyrant and greedy Pharisee

What can we expect of a theocracy? One thing is for sure: you won’t be able to criticize the church or church leadership. Here’s an example from Florida.

Mac Brunson is the pastor of one of those awful megachurches, an organization that has been growing fast and sucking up lots of money for expansion. A member of his flock who was a bit concerned at the direction the church was taking set up a blog, FBC Jax Watchdog, and anonymously expressed dismay at the way the church was being run.

I saw possible abuses at our church shortly after our new pastor arrived, regarding acceptance of a $307,000 land gift just three weeks after he arrived – even though his own Pastor’s Guidebook cautions pastors against accepting large gifts! I watched as we spent $100,000 to renovate 3600+ square feet of our newly constructed children’s building to provide the pastor and his wife and secretary luxury office suites. I saw the preacher vacate the pulpit unannounced, I heard him say he took several Sunday nights off because he had to finish a book manuscript. I saw us spending money on the A-Group, a church marketing consultant and promotions firms. The head of this firm, Maurilio Amorim, came to be involved in personnel decisions at FBC Jax the first year of Mac’s tenure, at a church and city that he knew nothing about. I saw us develop promotions plans to “raise revenue” at our pastors conference through charging for advertising and selling “promotions packages”.

The pastor also gets a salary of $300,000. The universe is always telling me I went into the wrong line of work.

Simple public criticism — it’s a good thing. As you might guess, though, Pastor Brunson did not appreciate the inquiries into his cash flow (which, as we all know, is the principle purpose of a church), and hired a private investigator to find out who this critic might be. This is where it gets ugly. The blog did not post anything illegal, was not doing anything but documenting problems in the church, but the investigator successfully got a subpoena and compelled Google to release the identity of the blogger. The blogger is now banned from the church (which, to my mind, is a net positive), and his name has been exposed.

What is most troubling is that the investigator was able to get a subpoena and expose the identity of an anonymous blogger on the sole grounds that a disgustingly rich pastor was annoyed by him — not by citing any actionable behavior. You might want to think about this if you’re on google/blogspot and think that your anonymity is safe. It apparently doesn’t take much effort to crack open google and fish your name out of it…perhaps only a local judge with sympathies for some religious goofball who doesn’t like you.

Oh, wait, actually…what’s most troubling is the pastor’s salary. And he claims “he is one of the lowest-paid mega-church pastors in the Southern Baptist Convention”. Gee, so all I have to do is start lying for Jesus and maybe I can make those kinds of wages? I guess a biblical piece of silver has been inflated to be worth about $10,000.

The only good news here is that Pastor Mac Brunson’s high-handed behavior should focus a little more scrutiny on his money-making enterprise. Could we please start taxing the churches?

(via Daily Kos)

How to frustrate an evangelical’s Jesus script

I have encountered this pathetic rhetorical game so often…it’s one of Ray Comfort’s favorite tools. Christian goes up to a stranger, and says he’d like to play a “what if” game with you. What if there was a god, and the ten commandments were his rules? Do you agree that if they’re real, you’d deserve to go to hell? But look, Jesus says you don’t have to, if you believe in him! Isn’t that nice of him? It’s all a stupid con — they ask you to hypothetically accept their premises, then lead you through a script which they demand that you answer in agreement at every step, and then at the end of their absurd, comical series of weird demands, they tell you that you’ve agreed that Jesus is your savior. Every year at our county fair they have their “Are you going to heaven or hell” booth that tries to bamboozle kids with this spiel, and I thoroughly detest and despise them.

Todd Friel, one of those glassy-eyed glad-handing used-car-salesmen of the soul types, tried to pull this same routine on his radio show…on Christopher Hitchens. Listen as Hitchens simply refuses to follow the script, and keeps on bringing up objections to the sloppy logic of the radio show host. Friel can’t cope; he’s like a dumb robot who can’t comprehend anything outside the narrow scope of its programming, and keeps trying to shoo the Hitch back onto his preplanned track. Friel sounds like a fool, which is great, since he is one.

Part 1:

Part 2:

If you run into one of those “Heaven or Hell?” people, you now know what to do.

I give up

I have just spent over an hour of my day cleaning up the spam from the insane asshole, David Markuze/Mabus. I’m still not done; I’ve got various tools cranking away in the background purging his recent eruption of hate-filled, lunatic rants. 160 comments, all saying the same thing.

It’s too much, and it’s eating up way too much of my time. Starting Monday, I’m turning user registration back on. I know, a lot of you find it a real pain, and it will inhibit some people from commenting…I’d rather not do it. But I’m serious: David Markuze is costing me too much time and effort, and I have to take some fairly extreme efforts to cut him off. Blame him, not me.

If any of you know a way to get to his ISP (he’s Canadian, lives in Quebec, and currently uses the IP address 70.48.98.204) and convince them that he is committing egregious abuse of his privileges on the internet, that would be a useful alternative. I doubt that we can shut him down at the source, though, so my only choice is to throttle everyone here.

P.S. All of you who responded to Mabus are not helping. The next time this happens I’m also purging all of your comments, so don’t bother making them.

P.P.S. Fair warning: this kind of thing also frays my tolerance to a frazzle. There are a few other morons who have been commenting here regularly, and it’s not going to take much to make me snap and finally get around to banning your useless, parasitic asses. Silver Fox, Pete Rook, and Facilis…I’m looking at you. You might want to lie low until the “Hulk Smash” mood fades a little bit.

Bad Science: the missing chapter

While Ben Goldacre was writing his book, Bad Science, he was also being sued by the crank, Matthias Rath…which meant he was under a lawyer-mandated gag order and couldn’t include his debunking of Rath in the book. Now that the suit is ended (Goldacre won), he is making the chapter on mega-vitamin charlatan Matthias Rath freely available on the web. It’s a disgusting story of exploitation of the sick: Rath’s main contribution to the world was the undermining of efforts to treat HIV-infected people in Africa.

Don’t threaten the Discovery Institute—they are frail and delicate

Someone at the Discovery Institute received a vaguely threatening email. If the writer is someone who reads this, you’ve done something disgraceful, and you should send an apology immediately; we do not threaten to silence or cause harm to the clowns of creationism. Laugh at them, dissect their arguments, explain that they are damaging education in this country…but you draw the line at intimidation and threats of personal damage. Got it?

That said, I have to also say that the DI’s reaction was amusing. This is the first time they’ve received a death threat? Overall, then, our side (with the obvious exception of this one violator) has been commendably restrained — I’ve been receiving email with that tone or worse for years now, several times a week. I wish the abusive jerk had not done this stupid thing, so that our record would be spotless.