My kitchen sink has a problem. Something has broken inside the Moen faucet, so that the handle is loose and only marginally effective. I’m thinking I should run down to the hardware store and get a new faucet assembly, and get under the sink with a pipe wrench. It shouldn’t be too difficult.

Right away, I run into an obstacle. I get down to the basement to fetch my wrench, and there’s one of the local ministers sitting on the toolbox. “Have you tried the incredible power of prayer yet, son?” he asked. I said no, of course not. I’m trying to fix a broken faucet. And then he gave me one of those pitying looks and tried to convince me that not only could Jesus fix my faucet, he would give me wine on tap. So I told him to get his fat ass off my toolbox and out of my house, and he stomped off.

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Nah, I haven’t bothered to listen to the Luskin/Egnor podcast from the Discovery Institute—I trust Orac’s summary enough that I know it’s a load of the same arrogant, clueless BS he was spinning here a while back.

There’s not a lot of substance to this short video, but it is a last chance to see shots of Kent Hovind’s Dinosaur Adventure Land in Pensacola, Florida. It was shut down at the time it was photographed — the poor man refused to get building permits, so county authorities closed his little ‘theme park’ — and now that he’s in jail, I imagine it will all wither away into shabby, weathered plywood and cockroach-infested abandoned shacks. At least, we hope so.

Youtube has spawned a few copycats, and now there’s one called GodTube.com—I think you can figure out what it’s about. I’d be willing to let it be, just as I don’t bother much with XTube (yes, there’s one just for porn!)—if they want to masturbate quietly in private, I’m not going to bother the little wankers. Unfortunately, as you ought to expect, it’s also a haven for creationists, right now largely consisting of some of the dumbest videos ever in a series called “Chatting with Charlie”. Charlie is very confused and not very bright; he’s a kind of Kent Hovind on quaaludes. For example, take a look at his Four Problems with Evolution, which consists of:

• Second Law of Thermodynamics. That tired old fiction—c’mon, Charlie, if the SLoT prohibited evolution, your refrigerator wouldn’t work, and you wouldn’t have progressed beyond a little slime in your mom’s fallopian tubes.

• Fossil Gaps. Ho hum, you should be falling asleep by this point—but of course there are transitional fossils. Charlie is just ignorant.

• No Known Mechanism. At this point, Charlie’s gears are slipping. Sure, there’s a mechanism—that’s what Darwin came up with, but apparently and unsurprisingly, Charlie hasn’t read any of that. Instead, he babbles about how if you puree a frog he won’t come back, and dogs don’t change into cats.

• Finally, he leaves us hanging with the claim that “The World is not 4½ billion years old,” and he claims there is growing evidence that the world is young (not). He said he’ll get to that in another video, but sorry, Charlie, you bored me so much I couldn’t bother looking for it.

GodTube’s slogan is “Broadcast Him.” I think it should be “Reinforcing the stereotype that Christians are morons since 2007.”

Mike Dunford takes my side in the War of Angry Words.

A while back, I wrote a response to Coulter’s piss-poor excuse for a book, Godless. It’s actually fairly long and substantial; since there was absolutely no accurate statement of either fact or theory on the subject of evolution in the entire book, and since there was nothing specific to address, I took the time to make a link-rich collection of sources where anyone could look up the evidence for evolution, with suggestions of places where one could look up the basics of the theory. Writing a line-by-line rebuttal would have been a massive task, and one that Coulter fans would have ignored anyway.

At the end of that post, I made a challenge. I said that I would make a comprehensive, detailed reply to any one paragraph in the chapters on evolution if anyone who’d read the book would come right out and state that it was an accurate and honest and supportable claim about the subject. I’m still waiting for anyone to stand up for Ann’s words. No one has, and it’s been about 9 months now.

I guess even her fans can’t defend anything in that book. Either that, or they just got it for the pictures.

The IDists love to quote me, because I am rather militant in my opposition to their lies. They are particularly fond of one particular quote^* that they’ve even used in their fund-raising literature. They think it’s damning; some of my fellow anti-creationists swoon and protest when they hear the words, but they tend to be faint-hearted anyway. But here’s what’s really amusing.

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This one has been around for almost a year now, but if you’re getting tired of Conservapedia, take a stroll through the CreationWiki. It doesn’t generally have that tone of having been written by a gang of third-graders, but there’s plenty of stupid on display.

(via Unscrewing The Inscrutable)