True, the charlatans have not gone away

William Brinkman received a fund-raising letter from an unusual source: some people have access to the James Randi Educational Foundation mailing list, and they’re using it to beg for money. This is already a dodgy thing to do — the people who willingly joined that list weren’t signing up for spam from anyone who found the mailing list, they were supporting the JREF. The list should have been erased when the JREF dissolved, but mailing lists are valuable things, so someone is taking advantage of it.

The fundraising pitch aims at an appropriate target for James Randi supporters, but it’s pretty damned ironic. We’re supposed to oppose charlatans, you know.

Meanwhile, the charlatans of the world have not gone away. Indeed, we see more pseudo-psychic nonsense than ever, with alleged psychics being only a phone call away, ready and eager to take money from grieving or worried people.

Unfortunately, the fund-raising is to benefit a convicted charlatan, Brian Dunning. Dunning ran a cookie stuffing scheme that pocketed millions of dollars from users of eBay, and was sentenced to 15 months in prison, back in 2014. Dunning is a smart guy who saw the money-making potential of the internet in the early 2000s, and jumped into the ‘scientific skepticism’ niche despite having no credentials in science or philosophy or anything at all relevant–he’s a salesman. I guess he’s continuing in that vein now that he’s out.

I would trust him to pick my pocket, but not anything else.

Isn’t it odd how the people who should have imposter syndrome don’t?

The rising of the full loon

If you’re really curious, my recent debate with Hendricks is now online as a video, with the full Q&A. It’s a cell phone video, so not great quality, but the whole thing is there.

But I want to talk about another problem with doing debates: it stirs up the crazies. I’ll give you some examples. This is an email I got the other day.

For what science and religion, not to mention the rest of us, thought impossible has now happened. History has its first literal, testable and fully demonstrable proof for faith and it’s on the web.

The first wholly new interpretation for two thousand years of the Gospel
and moral teaching of Christ is published and on the web. Radically
different from anything else we known from history or tradition.
Redefining all primary elements including the very nature of Faith, the
Word, Law, Baptism, the Trinity, the Holy Spirit and especially the
Resurrection, this new moral teaching is predicated upon the ‘promise’ of
a precise, predefined, predictable and repeatable experience of
transcendent omnipotence and called ‘the first Resurrection’ in the sense
that the Resurrection of Jesus was intended to demonstrate Gods’
willingness to reveal Himself and intervene directly into the natural
world for those obedient to His Command, paving the way to confirm and
justify, by faith, to the power of divine Will, Purpose, Law, covenant,
and the absolute certainty of ultimate proof!

Thus ‘faith’ becomes an act of trust in action, the search along a defined
path of strict self discipline, [a test of the human heart] to discover
His ‘Word’ of a direct individual intervention into the natural world by
omnipotent power that confirms divine will, law, command and covenant,
which at the same time, realigns our flawed mortal moral compass with the
Divine, “correcting human nature by a change in natural law, altering
biology, consciousness and human ethical perception beyond all natural
evolutionary boundaries.” This is the discovery of the ‘true self’ and
thus is a man ‘created’ in the image and likeness of his Creator.

So like it or no, and most won’t, a new spiritual teaching offering a
testable, predictable, moral wisdom not of human intellectual origin,
transcending subjectivity, wholly testable by faith, meeting all
Enlightenment criteria of direct, evidence based causation and definitive
proof now exists, and carries all the implications that suggests. Nothing
short of an intellectual, moral and spiritual revolution is getting
underway.

Links on request.

I did not request a link.

I think this is a guy trying to stir up interest in his peculiar Christian cult. I made the point before that these debates are often a conflict between certainty and doubt, and here comes someone offering the absolute certainty of ultimate proof! No thanks.

Here’s a fun YouTube comment. Try and figure this one out:

Unfortunately its 2 archytypical minds at work in believers & non believers. In both camps this gets in the way often.

And you must understand current concesus science was authorativly imposed through actvist judges and politics it did not win over the arena of thoughtful science. It violated America’s main rule that we would never impose physical prescriptions upon each other because they was a aware of newtons infinite sums of approximating probability and was very aware of how hard it is to tell where physicalism begins and ends. Interpretations are not hurtful but physical prescriptions are damaging to society and nations.

Its the wrong question, this is typically only formulated by a chaldean mind or thought.
What isn’t God ,is the correct formulated question to ask.

This is hard for a Babylonian deterministic quantitative evolutionary mythological Euclidean mind to think of because its dictated by a radicalized environment governed by these extreme physical lawism structuralisms.
It rather stay in platos cave granting unification & simplicity in the top of the higher archy even if its made up , it needs to connect dots and force the evidence to fit the grand theory of everything to fill in missing links.
It rather live in complexity of many different disciplines cults within cults. Its unaware of its triality navagating this dualistic system.

War time powers of Ww2 & the modernization act traps America back under this chaldean mind model because the classical American mind triality recognized such necessary evil structuralism must give the unity & simplicity to the top so that 18 year old troops deal with Entropic turn over of infinite sums of approximating probability & complexity .

This type of believer says God is universe big bang with math & time is his actual fingertips and through mult verses he chose this one here etc etc etc.

The classical American mind is the only one to ever escape the chaldean mind or platos cave.

It state man made language, time & maths are inspired by god, only by his grace do we have a mind that can read his left over fingerPRINTS that’s legable.
This mind follows the evidence where it leads it knows the human dashboard can never removed from the system thus this system is the proper place to unify individual systems .
God is not in a rock or under a rock he was separated from his creation at different points but through us thy will be done. Through Jesus salvation the unification of tripartite nature of man past present and future. It is the grand unification of objects physica cause l,subjective secondary effect & idealogical minds. Mind body and soul. You know whole deal ,father ,son holy spirit represents the 3 natures of our reality .

What kind of archytypical mind do you have, a chaldean mind, a Babylonian deterministic quantitative evolutionary mythological Euclidean mind, or a classical American mind triality?

Does God exist? Perry Hendricks & I argue about it

I was drafted to participate in a debate on my campus last night, and first I have to admit that yes, I have been quite vocal in my opposition to the utility of debates. As an excuse, I was asked by our students to do this, and I’m a sucker for student requests.

Secondly, the topic was, “does god exist?” That’s a real groaner of a subject, and normally I’d demand something more specific and manageable, but again…students. Also, my opponent, Perry Hendricks, seems to be a nice guy, so I went with it. It’s not as if we’re going to actually answer the question, or that the answer would matter.

We had an audience of about 100 people, mainly students taking a break before finals week hits them next week. I’d asked that it be recorded, but unfortunately it was not. But fortunately, I’d brought a pair of clip-on mikes, so I was able to capture Perry’s and my remarks in audio. Unfortunately, those mikes did not capture the audience’s questions, which is too bad since there were a lot of questions (mostly for Perry) and they were good sharp questions, too. I end this recording at the start of the Q&A, I’m sorry to say.

The format was straightforward. Perry got 20 minutes for an opening statement, then I got 20 minutes, then we go 10 minutes each for responses, and then we descended into a flurry of back-and-forth that again, my rudimentary recording set up could not cope with.

Partial transcript/commentary below the fold.

[Read more…]

Pray for me

In about an hour I’m strolling over to be sacrificed in this godawful debate.

It will be recorded, apparently. I’ll see what I can do to get a copy.

I dream of the day when these kinds of debates are banished to the domain of public arguments about whether Santa Claus is real.

Science contest at the Ark Park!

It sounds contradictory to combine science and their fake, unscientific ark, but that’s what Answers in Genesis plans to do. They are hosting something called the Answers STEM Challenge, a contest where people stand a chance to make some big money. Here are the prizes:

First place prize—$5,000
Second place prize—$2,000
Third place prize—$1,000

That’s pretty good money for what is basically a sort of science fair. I say “sort of” because unlike most science fairs, the students are told exactly what they have to do, so it’s fairly strongly constrained. Participants must build a wind turbine, which must have:

• Generator (provided)
• Housing (Nacelle)
• Blades
• Tower
• Base

It also must fit on a 1.2m x 1.2m base, so it’s basically a small model that will be propped up in front of fans and the power output measured.

OK, so it’s more of an engineering challenge. It’s also somehow tangled up in their version of Biblical literalism. So far, it sounds like something even I could do: assemble some basic stuff with cardboard and duct tape — or if I wanted to be fancy, build it with acrylic or 3D printing, buy some large propellor blades on Amazon, and show up. The only difficult part would be the electronics…but they provide that for everyone? There doesn’t seem to be a lot of scientific/engineering work involved. There is one obstacle for me, though.

This event will equip and encourage participants to hold to the authority of God’s Word while learning about STEM from a biblical worldview! Form your team, register, and get designing today!

One of the requirements in the official rulebook is : Application of biblical worldview to the design task. Participants are required to explain how their design is Biblical.

Team showed the importance of standing on the authority of God’s Word when faced with complex environmental issues.

Uh, where in the Bible does it talk about wind turbines and electricity and wind power? Or about “complex environmental issues”? The Biblical perspective on environmentalism is that humans must subdue and rule the natural world, and AiG has some rather regressive views on that.

While some, like Dr. Michael Nortcott, think — as he expresses it repeatedly in his recent book A Moral Climate: The Ethics of Global Warming — that we must choose between people’s rising out of poverty and protecting the environment, as if either prevented the other (a bifurcation fallacy), we believe the two are not exclusive alternatives but mutually interdependent. A clean, healthful, beautiful environment being a costly good, and wealthier people being able to afford more of a costly good than poor people, it follows that growing wealth — accompanied by ethics and values informed by Scripture, and in the context of a just civil social order — can protect and improve our surroundings (the real meaning, by the way, of the word environment) rather than degrade them.

I don’t know whether that’s derived from the prosperity gospel or effective altruism, they can be hard to tell apart. I do know that they’re reading an awful lot into the Bible, and I wouldn’t want to contribute to that.

I will be interested to see what ludicrous lump of propaganda wins the contest — it’ll be held in November 2024.

Oh god no

I forgot all about this debate.

These signs will be going up around campus, so I guess I’m committed. Or should be committed.

At least I insisted that “god” needed to be defined, so I’m going to be debating the nonexistence of “an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent being.” The other side has to defend the absurdly difficult proposition that such a being exists in the absence of any evidence for it, so at least I’ve got that going for me.

I am going up against a philosopher, though, so I dread the haymaker deepities he’ll throw at me.

We won’t have Michael Voris to kick around anymore

I’ve featured Michael Voris several times here — he was the front man for an organization called the Church Militant, a small mob of disgruntled TradCaths, and Voris does a YouTube show called The Vortex which is usually him complaining about the gays, the liberals, the Pope, that sort of thing.

Michael Voris has resigned. Can you guess why?

I still don’t know. He rambles on about “demons” and “moral failings” and “horrible stuff” without dishing out any details.

Here’s another Church Militant weirdo who makes an empty statement on his resignation. Near as I can tell from this evasive complaint, Voris stopped praying with the staff a few years ago. Prayer is so important! No wonder he lapsed in some mysterious way.

We do know that he was “asked to resign for breaching the Church Militant morality clause,” so there was probably something sordid going on, like that he kissed a boy or donated to a social justice organization or, you know, didn’t pray enough. As much as I would be entertained by a tale of decadence and degeneracy, I suspect that his downfall was brought about by some simple thing that the rest of the world would find quaint, but that his insane community would have been horrified by.

Local pseudo-archaeology

Here’s a fascinating old photo.

Farmer Olof Öhman (center), who reported the artifact’s discovery in 1898, at a carnival held to raise funds to buy a park for the Kensington Runestone, 1927.

I’ve seen the Kensington Runestone, it’s in a local museum just north of here. I’ve been to that park several times — it’s nicely maintained, it has a large, mostly empty building used for presentations (it’s always been locked when I visited), and it’s a bit out of the way, several miles away from a town of any size. It’s notable only because a fair amount of money and time has been invested to enshrine this fraud in local culture. It was probably an even bigger deal in 1927, when that photo was taken, and when the old farmer who ‘found’ it was the center of attention.

What I just learned is that there were other runestones all over the country. There’s the Yarmouth Stone and the Narragansett Runestone in Nova Scotia and Rhode Island. The Heavener Runestone in Oklahoma. The Poteau stone, and Shawnee stone, also in Oklahoma. The Braxton Runestone and Grave Creek Stone, in West Virginia. They even found a second runestone in 2001 near Öhmon’s original ‘discovery’ to ‘corroborate’ it. You’d think there were armies of Vikings tromping all over the eastern half of the US in the 14th century, all busily chiseling rocks and scattering them about to entertain tourists in the 20th and 21st.

The article gives a couple of explanations for this curious phenomenon. One is that the Viking sagas were popular at the time. I don’t find that convincing — you’d expect every literary fad to generate a pile of phony artifacts if that were the case. The second is that the wave of Scandinavian immigrants were trying to build validation. I can sympathize with that a little more. If Italian immigrants could take pride in Christopher Columbus, well, Swedes and Norwegians would hold up Leif Ericson as their hero.

I’m inclined to favor their third explanation.

The third factor was the urge to assert European prior claim to land, which predated the Columbus expedition of 1492, and furthermore, gave it a northern European character. At times, this involved the expropriation of Native American monuments as part of a process which sought to belittle Native American cultural and monumental achievements by claiming Viking ancestry for them—and at times, claimed that those responsible were just about anybody, so long as they were not Native Americans.

The Mormons did it. The Mississippi valley settlers who denied that indigenous peoples could have been the Mound Builders did it. All those batty von Dänikenites who claim aliens built every bit of non-European architecture do it. Why couldn’t my Scandinavian ancestors have done it?

The Runestone park is a pleasant little spot, but fundamentally it’s an embarrassment.

I guess you could argue that corporate capitalism is a kind of religion

Ken Ham is pissed off at this song from an upcoming Disney movie.

I know nothing about the movie, nor am I interested in seeing it (maybe my grandkids will enjoy it, I don’t know). I don’t think it will turn anyone into worshippers of Sol Invictus. All it is saying is that the world around us is pretty nifty.

Not in Ken Ham’s feeble mind, though.

Imagine if public school students in their science classes were encouraged to worship the sun. And yet this is happening! But how do they get away with it? Well, they just call worshipping the sun “science,” and then claim they can teach this “science” in the public schools! Really the Disney song mentioned above is all about worshipping the sun and stars.

That’s quite a leap, from a cheerful bit of fluff to a sinister plot to inculcate sun worship in public school classrooms. No one is teaching kids to pray to and worship natural objects in the universe.

By the way, he also doesn’t like Neil deGrasse Tyson.

“Our ancestors worshipped the sun. They were far from foolish. It makes good sense to revere the sun and stars because we are their children. The silicon in the rocks, the oxygen in the air, the carbon in our DNA, the iron in our skyscrapers, the silver in our jewelry—were all made in stars, billions of years ago. Our planet, our society, and we ourselves are stardust.”

That statement was made by Neil deGrasse Tyson in the Cosmos series he narrated. Evolutionists encouraged teachers to use this series in public school classrooms.

Oh, how awful: he was suggesting that pre-Christian people were not stupid, and were trying to understand the world as best as they could. Tyson is not an animist. He’s not saying it would be a good idea to worship rocks, but that we should try to understand why some people might have. Damn those public schools! They’re teaching tolerance and empathy! You won’t get any of that in a Ken Ham-approved homeschool.

He really is a fully coked-up conspiracy theorist.

I think it’s about time Christians woke up and understood that even though there are Christian missionaries in the public (Government) school system (and they need our prayers), by and large these schools are actually churches of atheism. Millions of students are being taught that all life and the universe arose by natural processes—by naturalism. But we need to call naturalism what it is—atheism.

Well, so, True Christians™ reject understanding of the natural world? There’s no difference between studying physics, chemistry, and biology and worshipping pagan gods and being an atheist? Good to know.

Please to stay out of education and politics, Ken.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a Christian now

In a totally unsurprising announcement, Ayaan Hirsi Ali renounces atheism and declares herself a Christian. I half-expected this to happen — she’s been working at the Hoover Institute with a lot of wealthy conservative Republicans, it was just going to take time to realize who was buttering her bread. I’ve read her autobiography, and it was clear that what drove her was in large part a resentment of the terrible Islamic authoritarians who controlled her life for so long. Well, now she’s come full circle and is identifying with a different set of terrible authoritarians.

As an atheist, I thought I would lose that fear. I also found an entirely new circle of friends, as different from the preachers of the Muslim Brotherhood as one could imagine. The more time I spent with them — people such as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins — the more confident I felt that I had made the right choice. For the atheists were clever. They were also a great deal of fun.

So, what changed? Why do I call myself a Christian now?

Part of the answer is global. Western civilisation is under threat from three different but related forces: the resurgence of great-power authoritarianism and expansionism in the forms of the Chinese Communist Party and Vladimir Putin’s Russia; the rise of global Islamism, which threatens to mobilise a vast population against the West; and the viral spread of woke ideology, which is eating into the moral fibre of the next generation.

Oh. So she has bought into the conspiratorial anti-woke nonsense, and the usual fear-based bullshit that is the foundation of most conservative thought. The communists are coming to get us! Our only hope is to follow a different authoritarian ideology!

But we can’t fight off these formidable forces unless we can answer the question: what is it that unites us? The response that “God is dead!” seems insufficient. So, too, does the attempt to find solace in “the rules-based liberal international order”. The only credible answer, I believe, lies in our desire to uphold the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

That phrase judeo-christian always sets off alarm bells in my head. Misrepresenting what atheism is about also doesn’t help.

That is why I no longer consider myself a Muslim apostate, but a lapsed atheist. Of course, I still have a great deal to learn about Christianity. I discover a little more at church each Sunday. But I have recognised, in my own long journey through a wilderness of fear and self-doubt, that there is a better way to manage the challenges of existence than either Islam or unbelief had to offer.

It’s Jeeeesus. Good luck with that, Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

By the way, nowhere in her long essay does she say a word about why Christianity is a good philosophy, other than that it’s a platform for fighting against Muslims and woke atheists.