I wouldn’t normally quote the odious Matt Walsh, but I was amused that he was taking umbrage at a new version of the Bible. Then I read these excerpts, and actually sympathized with Walsh — a truly horrible sensation — because, yes, this was an embarrassing translation, something assembled by one of those old people who think they can be “cool” by naively aping slang they don’t understand.

It’s real. It’s something called The Word According to Gen Z: A 30-Day Devo Challenge, a month-long exercise in introducing young people to the Bible.

Over the next 30 days, the guys at Sunday Cool will guide you through unique daily devos written specifically for Gen Z. You’ll learn about the reverence, ministry, and application of God’s Word. You’ll also see how Scripture isn’t just about reading, but deep study and enjoyment of the very God who created you.

From the creators of the popular YouTube series with Cool Carll—the youth intern who grew up but never left.

If you have to call yourself “cool,” you aren’t.

I dug a bit deeper, and at least this video from Cool Carll suggests that there’s a little tongue-in-cheek action going on here.

They’re trying too hard. Most of my students would qualify as Gen Z, and I’ve never heard this kind of slang…but fine, I can believe some people talk like that, just as some people of my generation could talk like stoned hippies, man. But it’s all about context, we all know how to speak appropriately in different situations, and Gen Z kids don’t talk like that in the classroom, or in Bible study, unless they’re trying to get a laugh.

And then I found this interesting insight from a Christian blog.

Lifeway, the media and publishing arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, has long been known for its proclivity toward placing its bottom line ahead of biblical integrity when it comes to the materials they’re willing to peddle to Evangelicals and Southern Baptists for cash. Headed by Thom Rainer — and formerly, along with Ed Stetzer who now holds the Billy Graham Chair at Wheaton College — Lifeway has been criticized for its continued lack of concern over the heresy they publish and sell.

Lifeway is particularly dangerous because, being a part of a perceived conservative denomination, it is blindly expected that the store only produce, promote, and sell theologically sound materials. In reality, however, LifeWay’s model requires it to promote heretical garbage to maintain a steady income and it is part of the reason so much heresy has influenced the denomination over the years.

From its in-house Cash-Cow of Bashan, Beth Moore, who regularly fancies herself with silly stories of talking to God face to face who tells her to do silly things which sounds more like schizophrenia than anything biblical, to serial plagiarist, Christine Caine, Hillsong Australia’s rebellious version of Beth Moore, and others, such as Priscilla Shirer, Ann Voskamp, and practically any heretical lady-preacher you can think of, along with rank heretic and anti-Trinitarian, T.D. Jakes, Joel Osteen, Steven Furtick, and even at one time, “gay pastor,” Matthew Vines, the list is practicalkly endless — Lifeway has made millions over the years peddling this garbage.

But now, Lifeway is taking it a step further by selling what is being dubbed a translation of the Bible — the Gen Z translation which is part of a new pragmatic approach to millennials called “Sunday Cool” — which practically turns every verse of the Scripture into a mockery of God by downplaying and stripping the majesty and deity of God by using meaningless words and artificial language that even millennials can’t understand.

I don’t follow Christian media at all, but I do know that “Christian culture” doesn’t exist — there’s a wide range of beliefs from innocuous “faith” with little commitment to insane fanaticism, and in between there are a lot of grifters, like the ones listed above, who get wealthy by seizing the power of capitalism and making a buck by telling gullible people what they want to hear.

One thing is for certain: you can always find a Christian who will call some other Christian a “heretic” or “blasphemer,” because it’s all of it, every word of it, made up. There is no foundation to any of it, not even the Bible they hold sacred, because they’re always happy to mangle the words to get any interpretation they want, and will go to war with anyone who mangles it a different way.

This doesn’t sound like my childhood swimmin’ hole.

“Swimming and wading are not allowed due to high bacteria levels,” the National Park Service states on its website. “Stay out of the water to protect streambanks, plants, and animals and keep you and your family (including pets!) safe from illness.”

In addition to the high levels of bacteria, the waterway also has “other infectious pathogens,” making swimming, wading, and any other water contact a “hazard” for humans and pets alike.

I wouldn’t go anywhere near it, and I’m a guy who went swimming in a cow pond when I was 14, wondering what the squishy stuff I was wading through was. I’ve encountered places like that before, I would never do that again! One thing worse would be wading into human waste.

“Getting into Rock Creek anywhere inside the Beltway is sort of weird and kooky, getting into Rock Creek downstream from the National Zoo is bugnuts. Basically begging for a zoonotic parasite. Forget Chinese wet markets, this guy is cooking up COVID-25 inside his grandkids.”

Yeah, don’t bring children into such a place. Who would do such a thing? Would you believe the head of Health and Human Services?

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. went swimming with his grandchildren in Rock Creek in Washington, D.C., even amid warnings that the waterway isn’t safe for swimming because of high bacterial levels.

Kennedy wrote on X that he went on a “Mother’s Day hike in Dumbarton Oaks Park with Amaryllis, Bobby, Kick, and Jackson” and took “a swim with my grandchildren, Bobcat and Cassius in Rock Creek.”

The 71-year-old posted a number of photos, showing him shirtless, jeans on, in the water in the Potomac River tributary.

The man is an absolute legend. He’s bathing in effluent and eating rotting road kill; of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, he’d be Pestilence. And he’s in charge of American health!

A plea for moderation in the face of fanaticism:

Being aware of the consequences is a good perspective to have for any goal.

There are an awful lot of extremists running the game right now who need to be sat down and told to grow up and shut up. They’re making the whole damn world worse for everyone.

It’s some American guy named Robert Prevost who has now accepted the purported mantle of infallibility and divine favor from an imaginary god. Just once I’d like to see one of these clerical nobodies admit that they don’t have any special powers and therefore need to turn down the unjustified honor. But no, this one is calling himself Pope Leo XIV and is already spewing pious declarations.

He does meet one of the necessary prerequisites to be a Catholic authority figure: he does have a distinguished history of concealing child-rape accusations against the priesthood.

OK, everyone, we can go back to ignoring and occasionally sneering at the ridiculous man at the top of the hierarchy.

I had to skip out on all the talks of the last day of the American Atheists convention — we’re entering the last two weeks of the semester, with lots of extra work, and usually I spend my weekends catching up on grading and preparing for the next week of content, so I’m already behind.

It was a good weekend though, although yesterday was all deja vu. So many talks on social justice! It sounded like an atheist conference from 15 years ago, with all the liberal weirdos standing up and talking about feminism and gay rights and how the atheist community needs to fight for equality, except this time around we didn’t have audience members leaving their seats and cornering the speakers later to hiss at them about how “atheism only means disbelief in gods, how dare you taint the meeting with liberalism” and then the speakers get assailed with nothing but hate mail from the unbelievers for a year afterwards. So it’s getting better. I think the religious right is actually helping things, because nowadays everyone is seeing the horrible consequences of raging conservatism on the country. The few times I heard Trump mentioned, the audience was snarling/groaning/booing in response.

One difference: no one was talking about science. Not one talk the entire weekend. I think that might be another unintended consequence of so many of the atheist-scientists of yore having turned out to be such roaring asshats. Thanks so much, Dawkins & Coyne & Harris & Pinker, you’ve made science a toxic pill in everyone’s mouth.

This old atheist found it to be an encouraging day.

• Keith Ellison spoke at an atheist conference despite being a Muslim because he’s committed to religious freedom and plurality. He also never shuts up about rights and freedoms, and Nick Fish, who was interviewing him, had an easy job since you can just wind Ellison up and he keeps going and going and going, saying all the right things.
• I spoke to Debbie Goddard for a bit, and she’s optimistic about the direction American Atheists is taking. They’re listening to the members and volunteers, and those people all want social justice to be a priority, and AA is listening. Hey, I feel less like an isolated weirdo over here.
• Aron Ra’s dog Falcor is a pretty cool dude.
• Do not leave your phone charger in the parking garage across the street. I did, and I was afraid to prowl the building after dark, so I’m going to have to wait for sunrise to get my phone working again.

Shortly, I’m going to retrieve my phone charger, maybe have breakfast, and then go off to a bunch of social justice talks. This should also be a good day.

I’m about to drive to Minneapolis for the American Atheists conference. I’m not as enthused as I ought to be.

Atheism is an important topic, especially given the ascendance of destructive Christianity in this country, but so much of the atheist movement has become orthogonal to everything else I value — somehow people can be libertarian atheists or conservative atheists without feeling any conflict with the movement, and that bugs me.

I’ve paid for it, and there are some good people there I’d like to see, so I guess I’m going to go anyway. Maybe I’ll be revitalized.

A new paper is out: A Critical Reassessment of the Anthropogenic CO₂-Global Warming Hypothesis: Empirical Evidence Contradicts IPCC Models and Solar Forcing Assumptions.

Let us examine the authors.

• Grok 3 beta: the first author is AI software, Elon Musk’s pet AI, to be specific. It is competent at stringing words together, but can you trust it?

• Jonathan Cohler: He’s a professional clarinetist with no scientific training (he has written software), but he’s also a vocal climate change denialist. Ironically, he’s also the author of The Puppeteers of Perception: How AI systems are designed to mislead. I guess now he has changed his mind and decided that AI is a path to the truth.

• David Legates: He actually has climatology credentials! But he’s been using them to deny climate change. He’s a creature of the Heartland Institute, and was recently appointed by Trump to a position at NOAA.

• Franklin Soon: He’s a high school kid. He’ll have to grow up a bit before we can kick him around.

• Willie Soon: A notorious climate crank. He’s an aerospace engineer affiliated with the Heartland Institute and a whole slew of far right think tanks. He has received hundreds of thousands of dollars, possibly many millions, from the fossil fuel industry, but he works damn hard to lie about his ties. He’s generally an awful person, worst of the bunch on that paper. He’s apparently also corrupted a teenaged boy to follow his path in lunacy.

I am unperturbed by the human authors on this atrocity, who have been babbling like this for decades, but am very concerned about the use of AI to churn out garbage. The paper is dense and technical, and mostly impenetrable by me (dammit, Jim, I’m a biologist!), but clearly goes against the climate consensus, denying any role of carbon in global climate change. I’m going to reject its conclusions out of hand because a) it flouts all the information delivered by real, human, scientists who are experts in the field, b) it’s a machine-generated Frankensteinian mishmash cobbled together from cherry-picked sources; c) it was fed by a team of kook climate deniers who fed it garbage in, and got garbage out, designed to mislead. But you know all the climate change deniers are going to be citing this thing without question.

What I dread, though, is when even more denialists pick up on this. You want to argue against vaccines, or a spherical earth, or evolution, or racial equality, it’s easy: crank up Elon’s Lie-Making Machine, feed it trash from any of a number of delusional web sites, and it’ll spit up a technically dense, grammatically competent, flaming heap of bullshit that you can cite in your debates. I imagine the Discovery Institute and AiG and Jay Bhattacharya’s corrupted NIH already have some dumbass intern gearing up to crank out more papers with a shiny pseudoscientific gloss. The Gish Gallop will be mechanized.