“Iles” is an anagram for “lies”

Martyn Iles, the heir to the pile of dishonest shit that is Answers in Genesis, has posted a tirade about the sin of lying.

One of the biggest changes | have seen over the course of my not-that- long life is the normalisation of lying.
Yes, at the level of worldview and culture . .. “woke” is effectively an “objective truth is evil” belief system. Politics is a festival of lies to the point of being a depressing joke. The media lied so much they’re dying. But also at the level of relationships. People actively deceive each other, deny their behaviour, say whatever is expedient to the moment, or hide their true agenda, simply as a way of life.
And when you catch them out, they kick you out of their life.
It’s become shockingly normal.
Effortless, brazen, easy liars, and deceivers are multiplying. People who have become so calloused in their own self-interest and self-serving that they say whatever it takes.
I have sat in rooms where apparently reputable people tell outright lies to get what they want or avoid scrutiny. It’s so shocking that your first assumption is to imagine that you must be mistaken.
Are you a Christian? Then you tell the truth. Ruthlessly. Consistently. Without fail. Without fear. Every time. Because truth is good, no matter what. .. even when we feel like it will cost us. The cost will ultimately be for good.
The closest you will ever come to a lie is remaining silent in those exceptional situations where wisdom demands it.
And if your goals cannot be achieved with honesty, then your goals are simply wrong, and you are on a wrong path, no matter how self- righteous you may feel about it.
Remember, the Holy Spirit is called “the Spirit of truth™—and Satan is called “the father of lies.” Your denials, misrepresentations, masked agendas, and self-serving deceptions only serve one of those two. Really, this issue is a barometer for measuring how active Satanism is in a given place or situation. If there is a pattern or system of deception, you know what’s up.
Stay true.

The most brazen, easy liars I’ve ever met have all been creationists. I am reeling at the level of projection and the lack of self-awareness in his post.

If this is an admission that Satanism is active at Answers in Genesis, I might agree with some of it.

Finally, a cause to unite the Right and Left

Who knew we could find unity in the cause of killing children? Right-wing loonies and left-wing moonbats have been working together to erode food safety and loosening milk pasteurization laws and allowing ideological weirdness to be poured down the throats of innocent children. But at least it’s bipartisan!

The contentious belief that raw milk may be healthier than pasteurized is a bipartisan one, however, it has captured the imagination of, as the Atlantic put it in a 2014 story, “urbanite foodies (read: progressives).” That same year, Joel Salatin, which the publication referred to as a “food and farm freedom celebrity,” told Politico that it was nice to have some liberals join the fight for the mainstreaming of raw milk.

“When I give speeches now,” he said. “The room is half full of libertarians and half full of very liberal Democrats. The bridge is food.”

You know, we actually have data. We know that childhood mortality was greatly reduced when we required that milk be pasteurized. It’s a simple and relatively easy parameter to measure: when you require pasteurization vs. allow raw milk to be sold, how many dead kids do you stack up in each category? We know the numbers.

The CDC would want us to remind you here that, yes, you are allowed to take risks in private, but raw milk is 150 times more dangerous than pasteurized milk.

When we were raising kids, we made the decision to exclude Salmonella, E. coli, and Listeria from their diet as much as possible. It wasn’t just the cost and trouble of paying for funerals, but the nuisance of infants with diarrhea. Trust me, it’s no fun for anyone.

If you’d like to see an entertaining discussion of the thrills of raw milk, Talia Lavin has you covered.

Pasteurization changed the dairy game. By 1911, Chicago and New York had mandated milk pasteurization in commercial operations, with other major cities quickly following suit; by 1936, 98% of milk in the United States was pasteurized. This coincided with lots of other medical discoveries and improvements in public hygiene, but the milk-pasteurization push had particularly drastic effects: between 1890 and 1915, infant mortality dropped by more than half. By midcentury, babies drinking swill milk and dying of diarrhea was largely a thing of the past. Most people would agree that this is, generally, a good thing. I personally drink milk daily with my coffee; I am glad it doesn’t come with a side of typhoid.

I said that this movement was bipartisan, but now it’s fueled by a lot of right-wing “own the libs” influencers and nutcases.

It’s just that the contemporary opponents of pasteurization—the “raw milk” movement, as they call themselves—are so fucking dumb, and so knee-jerk about it. The movement is endorsed by such disparate grifters as Gwyneth Paltrow; RFK Jr.’s erstwhile running mate, Nicole Shanahan; Christian TikTokers; the existentially stifled Mormon tradwife that is the wanly smiling face of Ballerina Farm. The overwhelming number of recent raw-milk converts—and its loudest current evangelists—are on the far right: over in the raw milk aisle you’ll find an assortment of right-wing Fitness Guys with steroidal vasculation filming themselves chugging raw milk, alongside Alex Jones, QAnon influencers, the CEO of racist Twitter clone Gab, and a motley assortment of also-ran far-right Congressional candidates, plus organizations like the Farm to Consumer Legal Defense Fund and the Farm and Ranch Freedom Alliance.

Now normally I might be willing to shrug off this suicidal insanity — let the kooks voluntarily weed themselves out of the population by swilling contaminated food — except that the primary victims of this lunatic movement are kids who have no idea of the risks, and who are simply expressing a natural trust in what Mommy and Daddy tell them. The problems arise when Mommy and Daddy are named Gwyneth Paltrow and Alex Jones. That’s who the food safety laws are aimed at.

I’m getting flashbacks to the internet atheism of yore

Russian deep state operatives

In the aftermath of the disclosure of Russian disinformation agents sponsoring right-wing YouTube, I kept seeing this name, Lauren Chen, that sounded vaguely familiar. She’s the person behind Tenet Media, and was also attached to Blaze TV, and then I remembered…oh yeah, she was also a player behind the right-wing takeover of a big chunk of internet atheism. Yuck. I detested her before it was popular to dislike her!

She was associated with MythCon and that horrible collection of regressive assholes, and spoke at various right-wing atheist conventions, despite the fact that she is openly a Christian nationalist. She was sorta big on YouTube, although now her channel has been taken down. She spoke at a MythCon adjacent event in 2019. Look at this lineup of dreadful people:

The Great Migration: A discussion on digital and physical immigration
Moderated by: Stephen Knight

Panelists include:
Lauren Chen, aka Roaming Millennial
Claire Lehmann
Daisy Cousens
Tara Devlin

12:25 PM – 1:25 PM
NSFW: How Prohibition Amplifies Problems
Moderated by: Melissa Chen

Panelists include:
Aydin Paladin
Karen Straughan
Brittany Simon
Meghan Murphy

1:30 PM – 2:30 PM
Demonetized: What Role Should Corporate America Play in Activism?
Moderated by: Bill Ottman

Panelists include:
Rucka Rucka Ali
Josephine Mathias
Jeff Waldorf
Graham Elwood

3:20 PM – 4:20 PM
Nuance, Context and the Future of Comedy Online
Moderated by: Stephen Knight

Panelists include:
Gregory Fluhrer, aka Armoured Skeptic
Mark Meechan, aka Count Dankula
Blaire White
Hunter Avallone

4:25 PM – 5:25 PM
Changing Minds: How to Admit When You’re Wrong
Moderated by: Lauren Chen, aka Roaming Millennial

Panelists include:
Tim Pool
Melissa Chen
Carl Benjamin, aka Sargon of Akkad
June aka Shoe0nHead

5:30 PM – 6:00 PM
Ending Racism, Violence and Authoritarianism
Moderated by: Bill Ottman

Panelists include:
David Pakman (via Minds Gatherings)
Tim Pool

Stephen Knight, aka Godless Spellchecker; Claire Lehmann, chief Nazi at Quillette; Karen Straughan, denizen of the Manosphere; Armoured Skeptic, major asshole; Count Dankula, training dogs to give Nazi salutes; Blaire White, evidence that being trans does not make one smart and pleasant; Carl Benjamin, dear-god-who-gave-that-jerk-a-platform; and of course Tim Pool. There also all those other lesser jerks and bigots I struggle to remember, and don’t want to remember. Internet atheism was (and still is) infested with these nasties back in 2019.

Since the Justice Department has started striking down a few of the big grifters, may I suggest that that list is a pretty good hint at who else needs to be investigated? So many useless, horrible people with surprising popularity and an overblown income stream…

“Being a pedophile, a molester, that’s not OK.”

Remember Robert Morris? Pastor at one of the largest megachurches in the country, Gateway Church, that draws in a 100,000 suckers every week? Or did you manage to erase him from your memory after learning that he was guilty of molesting a 12 year old girl? If so, good for you, and stop reading because I’m going to remind you of the man.

There have been developments.

Last week, a pastor who oversaw all of Gateway’s campuses departed amid an undisclosed “moral issue,” becoming the latest in a series of changes for the church: The cancellation of its annual conference. The departure of Morris’ successor. The renaming of its Houston campus and an exodus of worshippers.

An “exodus of worshippers” sounds great, and is what I’d expect: empty megachurches as parishioners wake up and realize that it’s all a sham run by con artists and that they can do better with their life than getting their morality from a pedophile. I’m relieved to see that some people did exactly that.

For Emily High, the 17 years she spent as a church member came to a halt because she felt betrayed, she said.

“It’s anger, it’s all the range of emotions,” High told WFAA. “Being a pedophile, a molester, that’s not OK.”

Yes! Except…Ms High represents a minority.

The church has seen a decrease of 17% to 19% in weekend services attendance, a church spokesperson told CNN.

I can do math. That means there are still 80,000 fools and tools shuffling into those churches every weekend. The Christian grift continues!

It’s always a good time to be an atheist

The Intelligent Design creationists had a discombobulating conversation that they thought was brilliant, but just left me wondering what planet they live on. They were discussing when it was a better time to be an atheist, and apparently it was in 1890, when being an atheist would prohibit you from entering a major university.

Jay Richards: The fact that we now talk about the universe as having an age is a significant update from a century and a half ago. It leads to new questions. Is it unique? Was there one beginning? Can we talk about the beginning? But that’s a different sort of situation. And so, I think if you’re thinking in terms of worldviews, I would much rather be a materialist where everyone assumed the universe was eternal than be at a moment in which virtually everyone, whether skeptic or believer, says, “Well, the universe has an age, so it’s got a finite past.”

Peter Robinson: You’d rather be a materialist in the 1890s…

Jay Richards: Exactly.

Peter Robinson: Than today?

Jay Richards: Yes, and I think it’s much easier to be a theist when standard cosmology says “Well, the universe hasn’t always been here.” It’s no longer a good candidate for an ultimate explanation if it had a beginning.

Jay Richards is not an atheist, of course, which makes one wonder about his ability to see the world from the perspective of an atheist. But OK, he considers himself an authority on the godless. That does not surprise me at all.

As an atheist and a materialist, though, I can say pretty definitely that the better time to be a materialist is when we have more information about the material world, which ought to be obvious. The big difference between scientists and the clowns at the Discovery Institute is that we welcome new information and aren’t trying to force-fit the universe into a mold decided upon by ancient civilizations.

So our universe had a beginning? We happily filed that data away with all the other facts about the material nature of the world. There’s nothing in that observation that implies a supernatural or magical origin — in fact, to the contrary, what led to that conclusion is physical observation and measurement, and physicists, not theologians, are exploring the 13.8 billion years of its existence.

News for Jay Richards: the Big Bang is not evidence for Jesus. It’s a bad time to be a theist when your god is getting squeezed into smaller and smaller gaps, and godless science is doing a better job of explaining how the world works than your holy book.

I coulda told you so

Destin Sandlin is an enthusiastic and cheerful engineering YouTuber, who spoke at Skepticon seven years ago. I was there. And I remember it, because I really disliked his talk. He’s got this “Aw shucks, I’m just a redneck engineer from Alabama” style that started to grate minutes into his presentation, and also he’s a Christian. That wouldn’t have been bad, except that that was his whole schtick — he’s a Christian speaking at an atheist conference! He must spend much of his time defending his faith and telling the audience to be tolerant of different perspectives, because obviously the Skepticon organizers must be intolerant despite the fact that they invited him to speak. It’s not as if they were unaware of his religious views, after all he mentions it and includes a Bible verse in every video.

I was really annoyed with the last 20 minutes, in which he showed off a bicycle that he’d modified to reverse the steering — it goes right when you turn left, etc. — and spent a year practicing riding it. His point was that different people have different backgrounds and expectations, so yeah, once again, you atheists who invited me here need to learn to respect other points of view.

Hated it.

Anyway, my response was to simply ignore him ever after, and had no interest in seeing any of his videos, until now. He has been written up by the Discovery Institute! He recently put up a video that was “golly gee, the flagellum sure is complex and awe-inspiring.”

A popular YouTube science channel called SmarterEveryDay has 11.5 million subscribers. The channel recently posted a fantastic video about the bacterial flagellum titled, “Nature’s Incredible ROTATING MOTOR (It’s Electric!).” It has been up for less than a week and already has over 1.9 million views. In the video, engineer Destin Sandlin explains how he became captivated after watching an online animation of the bacterial flagellum. He notes that the flagellum “is a really big topic, not only in biomechanics” but also in “philosophy.” That’s because “the complexity of the flagellum implies many things about the origin of life” and “raises questions that people are debating and they’re talking about how can this be?” Sandlin says that he’s “not going to answer” those deeper questions in this video and he doesn’t explicitly endorse intelligent design — but he clearly appreciates the importance of this tiny molecular machine.

Sandlin is very careful about walking a thin line. He clearly believes that complex molecular machines were designed, but he doesn’t have even basic knowledge about protein chemistry or how organisms work (at one point, he says that sperm flagella have rotary machinery like the bacterial flagellum — they don’t), so he’s conscious that he’s not at all qualified to discuss this stuff and that all he brings to the table on this topic is his religious bias, so he doesn’t come right out and say it. He’ll let the viewer fill in the blanks for him.

In the end, Sandlin expounds upon his emotional reaction to seeing the complexity of the flagellum. He says its complexity gives him “joy” and makes him feel “awe and reverence,” and even brings him to give thanks to God. What a beautiful reaction to such a little thing!

Gee whillikers, he’s just a good ol’ country boy letting you know how he feels…and providing fodder for creationists.

I’ll continue to ignore him, but now with additional vehemence.

Road trip!

I have learned that the most haunted road in Minnesota is located about an hour away from me, near Sibley State Park. It’s called Timber Lake Road.

The street is called Timber Lake Road, which is located in central Minnesota near New London. The area is far from any major cities – about an hour west of St. Cloud – so you’re in for a bit of a drive. In the daylight, that might not seem like such a big deal. It looks like any other country road in Minnesota.

But at night, things can get a little scary. The road is located near the thick forests and wetlands of Sibley State Park. The landscape certainly looks like it would set the scene for a horror movie. As the story goes, a woman who lived in a house near the road one day came home to find her children murdered. Devastated, she hung herself, and her ghost has wandered the road searching for the murderer ever since.

Locals have reported strange sightings on the road for years. Shadows in the woods along Timber Lake Road may point to a supernatural force at work. There have also been reports of red eyes blinking at travelers from the darkness.

A gated cemetery stands along Timber Lake Road. This is where the woman and her children are said to be buried. Here, visitors have sighted ghostly children wandering the graves. You may also hear strange sounds. Dogs howling, a woman wailing, and otherworldly screaming have all been reported.

Never mind the imaginary ghosts — I’m looking at the photos and thinking, “Spider country!” The wailing and screaming are just the sounds the locals make when they stumble into cobwebs. I should check it out. Maybe we could spend a night at the Palmer House Hotel while we were out there.

Man, the ghost-hunting business must be tremendously profitable — you can just milk the absence of the subject of inquiry for money.

Random godless thought

After seeing a few recent atheist videos and reading a few godless articles, I had a question: where are my natural-born, god-free from birth atheists at?

It’s just strange that all the popular atheists nowadays are people who deconverted — you know, like Matt Dillahunty and Paulogia — which is fine, they are good representatives, but I can’t relate. Other ex-Christians and ex-Muslims probably find them relevant and interesting, but they aren’t me. I never believed; I got shuffled through Sunday school more because it was free daycare for my parents, who had six kids wearing them out, and I would memorize Bible verses for the teachers, but that was just an exercise that would get me praise on Sunday. I never prayed, not even as a very young child, because it seemed stupid to me. Who’s listening? I didn’t expect a response from someone else inside my head.

My parents were not religious either, and neither did they ever pray or even go to church. My grandparents made me read from the Bible every Christmas, but do you think they ever went to church? Heck no. I didn’t know anyone, except the Sunday school teacher, who was particularly devout, and even the pastor, when I asked him about why I was going to church at all, just shrugged and said it was fine if I didn’t. (I wonder if he was deconverting himself — he later left that church).

This is not a complaint — atheists who deconverted are great, and an important part of the face of atheism. I am just feeling unrepresented. For instance, I don’t give a flying fuck about interpreting Bible verses or finding contradictions, but there’s a lot of atheist content on that sort of thing, which I find largely irrelevant. I enjoy stuff about humanism and science, which matters far more to me.

What about you? Are there more people here who never ever believed in Jesus or prophets or whatever, or more people who fought the good fight to escape from youthful misconceptions?