Dr Oz crosses the line

Usually, Oz just dispenses pointless pap and feel-good noise, but now he’s antagonized the agriculture lobby. On a recent show, he claimed that apple juice was loaded with deadly arsenic — a claim he supported by running quick&dirty chemical tests on fruit juices, getting crude estimates of total arsenic, and then going on the air to horrify parents with the thought that they were poisoning their children.

One problem: his tests weren’t measuring what he claimed. The FDA got word of the fear-mongering he was doing, and sent him a warning letter.

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How stupid is your worldview?

Gah, I hate flowcharts. And I hate pathetic attempts to explain philosophy with a flowchart.

Most people, I’ll wager, have a pretty hazy relationship to spiritual beliefs. For example, there are Christians who don’t go to church, Jews who don’t believe in God, and agnostics who don’t really believe in God but also say they’re spiritual. If you know exactly what you believe in, then consider yourself lucky. For the rest of us, this handy infographic, created by Cameron Blair of The Fellowship for Evangelism in the Arts, lays out an astonishingly wide array of religious thought into one deceptively simple flowchart.

Ugh. That thing is hideous — it’s another example of how religion makes ugly everything it touches.

It forces everything into simple binary choices: “deceptively simple” is right.

The entire right two-thirds of the graphic is dedicated entirely to Christian suppositions, asking questions that only matter to an evangelical Christian. The worldview of the ‘artist’ is all that’s explored here.

The left side does nothing but fuss over where the godless find meaning, as if that’s the most important thing we ever worry about. And then all it does is split everyone into categories…categories that are not mutually exclusive.

As long as we’re making flowcharts that are ugly, pointless, and simplistic, I thought I’d make my own, which is mine, which is far better than the one above.

Does god exist? → NO → Correct. Have a cookie.

↓
YES
↓
You’re a deluded moron.
Goodbye.

There. Done. Easy.

I can take a suggestion. Here’s a prettier version of my flowchart.

Believe in mad rubbish because it’s good for you

Scott Stephens is the Religion and Ethics editor for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation online, and he’s a bit of a whacker — he’s one of those cranky apologists for religion, and he really, really despises those awful New Atheists, as you’ll see. He was recently in an intelligence2 debate, on the proposition that “Atheists are wrong” — his side, the affirmative, lost. He has just posted his position on the debate, titled The Unbearable Lightness of Atheism, and it’s easy to see why he didn’t fare so well. It’s a bitter diatribe informed only by his own ignorance and his deeply held conceit that god is real and religion is good, and therefore atheists must be wrong.

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Lists

As I’ve mentioned before, one annoying property of Christians is that they keep lecturing us on what atheists believe…and they’re always wrong. Here’s a suggestion next time they do this to you: tell them to go look at these two lists written by atheists and get their stories straight.

My favorite creationist web page of all time

I just had to share. Look at this sample: at least 5 different fonts, 6 different colors, shadowed text, and all superimposed on an irrelevant and elaborate background.

And then there’s the content: It’s a creation museum! It’s a taxidermy collection! And it’s run by some antique tools!

Savor the Creation Museum and Taxidermy Hall of Fame of North Carolina; I don’t think it will change any time in the near future, so there’s no hurry. It’s so nice of creationists to erect these monuments to stupidity and tastelessness on the web.

(Also on Sb)

I think his money is safe

A professor at the University of Minnesota, Steven Miles, is offering a $1000 reward for the name and release of the medical records of the person Michele Bachmann says became mentally retarded after getting the HPV vaccine. I’d like to see that, too.

One unexpected consequence of Bachmann’s accusation: Rick Perry is now defending science.

Perry himself has weighed in. “You heard the same arguments about giving our children protections from some of the childhood diseases, and they were, autism was part of that,” he told NBC News. “Now we’ve subsequently found out that was generated and not true.”

I guess Rick Perry just lost Jenny McCarthy’s vote.

Next debate, I’d like to see Bachmann promote creationism and pooh-pooh global climate change, just for the unusual spectacle of seeing Republicans rushing to puncture her claims by citing real science.

Michele Bachmann: pseudo-scientist and anti-vaxxer

There was another Republican debate (I skipped it; there are limits to the horrors I can endure), and apparently, many people think Michele Bachmann trumped Rick Perry by jumping on his ‘liberal’ endorsement of using the HPV vaccine to prevent cancers in women. Bachmann ranted about the federal government forcing innocent little girls to get mental retardation injections, and the teabaggers loved it. They loved it almost as much as they loved Rick Perry’s record of executions.

Orac rips her apart. It’s great fun, and informative, too.

As I’ve pointed out time and time again, Gardasil is incredibly safe by any measure. Also by any measure, it’s been very heavily tested and monitored. Of course, there is no evidence at all that the HPV vaccine can cause mental retardation. I’ve also pointed out how the vast majority of the reports of adverse reactions after the HPV vaccine made to the VAERS database were almost certainly not due to Gardasil and have castigated Medscape, of all publications, for buying into anti-vaccine myths about Gardasil. Meanwhile the American Academy of Pediatrics immediately issued a press release to correct Michelle Bachmann’s false statements about Gardasil. What Bachmann is peddling is pure pseudoscience. I suppose I shouldn’t be in the least bit surprised, given how gullible she is when it comes to science in general and how much she allows ideology to trump science.

Once again, the Republicans step forward as the anti-human, anti-science, anti-health party.

(Also on Sb)