Don’t panic if I’m not posting tomorrow

It won’t be because Charlie Kirk zealots showed up at my door and wreaked their misplaced vengeance on me — it’s much more likely that I will have been raptured.

On June 17, 2025, a South African pastor shared his vision of the Rapture on the “I’ve Been Through The Most” Podcast. In the viral YouTube video of the podcast, Pastor Joshua Mhlakela made claims that he saw Jesus returning to Earth on the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah, which begins at sundown on Monday, Sept 22 this year.

“The rapture is upon us, whether you are ready or not,” Mhlakela said. “I saw Jesus sitting on his throne, and I could hear him very loud and clear saying, ‘I am coming soon.’”

“He said to me on the 23rd and 24th of September 2025, ‘I will come back to the Earth.’”

As we all know, the random rantings of an obscure pastor who claims to have witnessed Jesus always come true. I’m not sure what timezone he’s talking about, so I’m just going to take off all my clothes and hang out on the deck until I soar up into the heavens, leaving all the bad people behind.

I’m sorry if you don’t get selected and I’m abandoning you all to the ravening mobs of angry, deluded Christians (who will not be raptured, obviously.)

Avi Loeb loses a soccer match

Tragic. Avi Loeb lost the annual soccer match at his institution!

Last night, we held the annual soccer cup match between the faculty and the students at Harvard’s Institute for Theory & Computation, for which I serve as director. Although I scored 2 goals for the faculty team, the students won 3 to 2. Disappointed by the outcome, I focused on 3I/ATLAS as soon as I woke up the following morning.

On the bright side, it gave him an excuse to remind everyone that he was the director, and to mention that he scored the only two goals on his side. Apparently, no one has told him that these kinds of games are just for fun, that it’s bad taste to focus on the score, and that no one else was trying to “win”. He was disconsolate at “losing,” though, and when he woke up the next morning he decided to cheer himself up by contorting some data to make it fit his idea that 3I/ATLAS was a nuclear-powered starship.

He does a lot of math, and determines that

IF 3I/ATLAS is much smaller than the estimates
THEN it must have an internal light source to get the brightness we observe

Rather than considering that his initial premise could be wrong, he invents some other hypothetical mechanisms.

I first calculated that a primordial black hole with a Hawking temperature of 1,000 degrees Kelvin would produce only 20 nanowatts of power, clearly insufficient to power 3I/ATLAS. A natural nuclear source could be a rare fragment from the core of a nearby supernova that is rich in radioactive material. This possibility is highly unlikely, given the scarce reservoir of radioactive elements in interstellar space.

Wait…why assume an interstellar rock needs a certain amount of power? Never mind, those were explanations he threw out and discarded so we would favor his preferred hypothesis.

Alternatively, 3I/ATLAS could be a spacecraft powered by nuclear energy, and the dust emitted from its frontal surface might be from dirt that accumulated on its surface during its interstellar travel. This cannot be ruled out, but requires better evidence to be viable.

Then he nicely asked NASA to redirect their instruments near Mars and Jupiter to focus on his hypothetical nuclear powered spacecraft. And also contacted the NY Post to write about his sensational discovery.

The man is such a ridiculous glory-hog.

It’s the confidence, stupid

I ran across this ridiculous comment, and it struck me that the interesting thing isn’t that Joseph Martin is outright wrong, but that he presents his stupid ideas with such absolute confidence.

Men, even today, would rather marry a virgin than not, but a virgin woman today is like trying to find a needle in a hay stack. The reason why men would indeed prefer to marry a virgin woman is because when a virgin bride marries a man, a woman’s vagina is molded to the man to whom she married, and that is a virgin brides vagina is becomes a mold to her man’s penis, and if a woman then cheats on her husband, the husband of a virgin bride then knows her wife has cheated on him because that mold has been broken, lol. Although this is true, women can also do vagina exercises that strengthen their vagina muscles, and allow a women to then control her vagina in pleasing any man she may lay with, and if a woman trains and maintains the muscles in her vagina, she can then even pick up a pencil with her vagina from just having control of the muscles in her vagina, lol, and when a woman has such control of her vagina muscles, can fool any man with regards to her faithfulness to him.

Vaginas don’t “mold” themselves to a penis. They’re flexible and muscular, and they don’t conform permanently to the first object that enters them; they also don’t evert themselves to grasp things. This series of assertions is written by a man who has never been intimate with a woman.

The weird thing is the certainty. He has to know that he has no direct personal information about the subject, yet he goes ahead and says it in public. There’s a psychopathy here that I think is incredibly common — we live in a country tainted by the collective sin of certainty that people use to make decisions about everything, politics, religion, relationships, whatever. Have you noticed that this is Donald Trump strategy? Just state half-assed nonsense with blithe confidence, and then he finds willing believers who will follow him without question, simply because he said something they want to hear.

Abby Hafer has died

Sad news: we’ve lost an important scientist and atheist, Abby Hafer, professor and American Humanist board member. Also, the Discovery Institute hated her, which is a tremendous accolade.

The enmity arose when she published an article titled No Data Required: Why Intelligent Design Is Not Science, in which she pointed out that the ID movement was barren of data and hypothesis testing, and was essentially a club for debate-bros who would masticate observations until they were a gooey pulp that they could sculpt to fit their conclusion.

Intelligent Design (ID) proposes that biological species were created by an intelligent Designer, and not by evolution. ID’s proponents insist that it is as valid a theory of how biological organisms and species came into existence as evolution by natural selection. They insist, therefore, that ID be taught as science in public schools. These claims were defeated in the Kitzmiller case. However, ID’s proponents are still influential and cannot be considered a spent force. The question addressed here is whether ID’s claim of scientific legitimacy is reinforced by quantified results. That is, do they have any data, or do they just argue? The ID articles that I analyzed claimed to present real science, but they rarely referred to data and never tested a hypothesis. Argumentation, however, was frequent. By contrast, peer-reviewed articles by evolutionary biologists rarely argued but referred frequently to data. The results were statistically significant. These findings negate claims by ID proponents that their articles report rigorous scientific research. Teachers will find this article helpful in defending evolution, distinguishing science from non-science, and discussing the weaknesses of ID.

She was sharp. She will be missed.

I can do arachnomancy, too

Everybody and their mother has been sending me links to this story, Spider divination. In Cameroon, they have a practice of cluttering up a spider’s burrow with leaves and sticks and stones, and then interpreting the future from how it tidies up the garbage.

Questioning a spider involves first clearing the area around its burrow. Then a large, open pot that has had its base removed is placed over the hole, with a piece of tin used as a lid. The pot and tin keep the spider in a contained space. A stick and stone are left inside, with special marked leaves (which I think of as ‘cards’) placed over the hole. The diviner then asks a question in a yes/no (or either/or) format – with each response corresponding to either the stick or stone – while tapping the enclosure to encourage the spider to emerge from their hole. The stick and stone represent possible answers, while the leaf cards offer the possibility of further clarification.

My tarantula, Blue, likes to hide in a silk covered tent she has constructed — when I look in, all I usually see is a dark hole with maybe a couple of legs visible in the shadows. I leave her meals in a space in front of the opening, and she will dart out and the prey disappears. She is very tidy, keeping her silk-lined floor clean, so could see using standard spider behavior as an indicator of the state of the universe.

Blue is back in the lab, but I have an oracle right here in my home. She lives in the corner by our internet router, and has strung silk around all the various cables. I trust that she has far more access to information than a spider in a hole in a remote Cameroon village. Here she is:

She is very pretty, so you know you can trust her. I asked her whether these spiders are a good source of information.

“Of course,” she told me, “this is a historic, traditional mode for getting input from spiders, a variation of the technique you are using to communicate with me — I’m just a bit more articulate. However, you have to read deeper into the article to see the truth. Read this paragraph.”

In many forms of divination, randomness is important. Examples include bibliomancy (opening a holy text and picking a verse at random), tarot and other sorts of cartomancy (shuffling the cards and picking some at random), Yijing and Ifá (throwing coins or chains; picking up odd or even numbers of sticks or nuts), or African basket divination in which objects placed in a basket are repeatedly tossed in the air (those that settle on top are then interpreted to answer a question). The point of this randomness is that the diviner cannot influence the result, so the message from beyond can be heard without the risk of human manipulation and interference.

She continued, “They are using the spider as a random pattern generator. The author fails to understand the key to the author’s misunderstanding, though, is that final sentence, ‘The point of this randomness is that the diviner cannot influence the result,’ which is false, and gives the game away. The diviner has all the power here as the interpreter of the pattern. The spider can be howling that the answer is X, but the interpreter can then declare that the answer is Y. The author is an unreliable source if they are able to ignore the power of the human manipulator of information.”

“By the way, PZ, I expect you to report my explanation accurately and completely, or my children will build nests in all of your orifices while you sleep.”

She really didn’t have to threaten me — of course I would avoid manipulating or interfering with her truth — but I could tell that she was annoyed by this story about humans stealing the authority of spider-kind for their own selfish ends.

I’m off the leash!

Good news for us atheists — we can now deny god publicly in the classroom!

Civil servants can seek to “persuade others of the correctness of their own religious views,” the Office of Personnel Management said in the memorandum to federal agencies, adding employees must ensure their efforts are “not harassing in nature.” OPM issued the guidance to restore constitutional freedoms and enable feds to practice their religious practices without fear of retaliation, the agency said.

“Federal employees should never have to choose between their faith and their career,” OPM Director Scott Kupor said. “This guidance ensures the federal workplace is not just compliant with the law but welcoming to Americans of all faiths.”

I know, if you’re a “glass half-empty” kind of person, you might think this is another step in the erosion of secularism and the separation of church and state, but I’m an optimistic “glass half-full” kind of guy. I’ve always been careful to not introduce my anti-religious sentiments in the classroom, or to make dismissive comments about gods to my colleagues, and when students tell me about their religious holidays, I make accommodations for them. But no more! I don’t have to conceal my fervent secular beliefs any more!

I get to be the kind of stereotypical atheist asshole portrayed in the God’s Not Dead movies. First day of class, the lecture is on why Jesus is stupid. First exam will have a question, “50 points: God exists, true or false” and the only answer I’ll accept is “false!” Religious students will be told they fail the class unless they can prove the existence of their god in a public debate in the classroom. Creationists in my evolution class? Not on my watch, they aren’t.

It’ll be such a relief to not have to throttle myself anymore.

I wonder if it will be a distraction from the scientific subject matter of my courses to bring up contentious issues like that? Nah. If probing the private, personal beliefs of their coworkers is considered a protected behavior in the federal government, why shouldn’t I poke deeply into these wacky ideas that some people at the university hold? It’s only fair.

Anyone want to take bets on whether the author(s) of that memorandum were atheists, or even considered the existence of atheist employees?

Stephen Meyer is the guy in the red sweater

I’m sure we’ve all felt this way before — some smug know-nothing confronts you with a dilemma out of his own imagining, and then expects you to applaud and recognize the brilliance of his insight.

That guy in the red sweater is every creationist on the planet.

It’s amusing to imagine playing along, but even better is when a scientist replies with dumbfounded incredulity. I found an example of that, but I’m not going to address it myself, because it’s on the topic of physics and cosmology, and I have only a superficial knowledge of the subject, so I’d only be able to say “I don’t know” if queried on the details. This video, Roger Penrose confronts creationist critic Stephen Meyer, is wonderfully satisfying.

Stephen Meyer is fond of pontificating on the origins of the universe, and he often claims that physicists like Hawking and Penrose are supporting his ideas about the Big Bang, and singularities, and fine tuning — it’s annoying because he doesn’t actually understand what he’s saying, but loves to quote sciencey-sounding fragments that make you think physics is pro-intelligent design. In that 20 minute video, they show clips of Meyer chattering about physics with Christian apologists like Sean McDowell, intercut with Roger Penrose replying.

He’s usually saying “that makes no sense” or “that’s wrong” before explaining what he actually wrote or discussing the details of his theory. I’m not going to discuss any of the details of Penrose’s CCC theory, because I’m afraid he’ll then turn around and make a video titled “Roger Penrose debunks biologist critic PZ Myers”. It could happen. Watch the whole video and see what you think.

Best outcome: Stephen Meyer shuts the fuck up and stops distorting Penrose’s physics.

P.S. Angela Collier rips into billionaires who think they can use AI to solve deep problems using “vibe physics”. It’s the same problem: poseurs who think they can skip all the hard work and math and go straight to their Nobel prize.

I’m hoping for the death of the debate bro

I’ve long despised debate — if you’ve been here long you know how opposed I am to debate — and the recent debacles with the Jubilee channel, which invites one person to engage 20 people with an opposing ideology, has demonstrated how terrible this format is. It’s simply an opportunity to give idiots a platform and to promote bad ideas unfettered by constraints. I’m a broken record on this topic, but fortunately, Rebecca Watson can articulate why these people, and this concept, are awful.

One thing that annoyed me is that Rebecca got a copyright strike and had to edit out a segment showing the one apparently honest attempt at communication within the debate. So much for Jubilee just encouraging the free expression of ideas! They’re a machine using controversy to generate clicks.

Atheists aren’t bubble-headed apologists for disasters

Gregory Paul makes an interesting point — atheist perspectives are underrepresented in the media. If there’s a disaster, they immediately go to someone who will babble some reassuring pablum about God.

What we do hear about without end is the theists’ view on the dreadful deaths of children. As per Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin who said, “By the grace of God, my family was safe,” after they by pluck and luck survived the Guadalupe River catastrophe. This detached view, in which the creator — who has the power to prevent dreadful random deaths — is ardently thanked for being selective about it rather than preventing it all in the first place, is the theme repeated as a matter of course. Typically by Christians after the latest natural disaster in the form of storms, the tornadoes that afflict the Bible Belt especially, wildfires, quakes, tsunamis, volcanoes, avalanches and the like. As per the flood survivor who said, “God, I know you brought me out, he marked me” (WashPost 7/11). But not dozens of girls. To that add the professional clergy and theologians who — despite their deep bias — the media persistently turn to to opine on why the latest killer event may appear hard to explain, but insist all must understand is truly in accord with the existence of a loving and wise creator.

Have you ever heard an open and assertive atheist be asked in a mainstream venue what those who do not believe in the supernatural think about natural tragedies and that is just so left field that let’s have a good chuckle at the notion. Do you ever see us atheos have a place on a panel of pundits to provide the nontheist perspective on anything on CNN or MSNBC? Of course not. Never happens. (You can check out secularfrontier.infidels.org/2022/06/theocancel-culture-discrimination-by-neglect-the-chronic-news-and-opinion-media-bigotry-against-atheists.)

Except…I have a counter-example! About eleven years ago, a tornado struck Moore, Oklahoma, destroying homes and businesses, and Wolf Blitzer was on the scene, interviewing survivors. At the end of this excerpt, Wolf tells Rebecca Vitsmun, You gotta thank the lord. Do you thank the lord? She replies, “I’m actually an atheist.”

So it happens sometimes, by accident, and the media personalities try to wedge the atheist into a god-shaped perspective. It doesn’t work. How can you talk to a person standing in front of the wreckage of their home after a natural disaster and ask them to be thankful? If it’s worse than a demolished house — it’s dead children — how dare you draft some pious airhead to tell you on television that it was part of a divine plan?

Paul explains what we atheists think about piles of suffering and dead children.

Until humans busted their scientific butts to produce modern medicine, half the children died. To the tune of 50 billion children tortured to early deaths. Largely by a too long host of cruel diseases that squeezed the life out of them. Smallpox and malaria alone have snuffed out tens of billions of little ones. The situation could not be worse because higher youth mortality would crash the human population. Even this very day, many thousands will succumb to microbes without the intervention of the divine.

Where, we atheists must ask you theists, is the grace in this? Where was the wise creator when the little girls at the Christian summer camp – yes, we note the irony – were living out the last moments of their short lives in lethal agonizing terror? Where was the grace of God when, as Jesus who Christians claim was God, was curing a few children via miracle spectacles while half the rest of kids around the world died as per the historical norm? These are entirely legitimate questions that believers must provide solid answers to. But they cannot. There is far too much in the way of premature death to do that. Instead, we hear platitudes and clichés that come across as a knee jerk cover up. As per the little flood victims are now in the arms of the same homicidally negligent Jesus who did not see fit to keep them safe in the first place.

Christians love to talk about the angels that protect the little ones. Where were those angels on July 4th in the flood zone? Why did the good with God Christians running the Mystic camp not ensure that none of their cabins were subject to flooding? But those are human beings and we big brained apes mess up all the time, atheists included. Why did the all-capable God not inspire them to properly protect their charges? Why did the immaculate creator of the entire universe put anyone in danger in the first place? Why did it not with a lift of its little finger ensure that massive rains not drench the Texas hill country and prevent the mess from the get-go? What have required mere, caring thought on its part. Having not done that, how could it stand by and watch the children praying for help as they experienced the tormenting drowning process which often involves vomiting (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8928428) while He in his perfect wisdom prepared to welcome them to paradise without their first making a mature choice on the matter?

That is what we — appalled at the Christian wave away — atheists think. As well we should. The problem is not with us. It is with you. Do you not get why so many reject the arrogant God that would be so indifferent about the endless suffering and early death of so many? It is you who need to do a big moral rethink – as increasing numbers are.

No wonder we don’t get much airtime. We tend to place the blame on human actions or inactions, rather than putting the guilt on a ghost in the sky.

An Aurelian wager

I was just served Pascal’s Wager in my email. Anyone who deploys that ill-formed nonsense is a fool in my book — including Pascal himself, who invented it after a weird Jansenist epiphany. My reply is always the same, after Marcus Aurelius, who seems to have avoided the “revelation” of religion:

Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones.

That’s good enough for me.

What happened to Pascal’s brain? He must have read some deeper philosophy than the tripe he wrote.