The joke’s on them

I hesitate to mention this, but I seem to be the target of creationist humor. It’s not being targeted that I mind, but that the ‘humor’ is so lame and the photoshopping is so bad. I would have thought that I’d be an excellent subject for lampooning, being easily caricatured and having views outside the mainstream, so why are they so pathetic at it?

Never mind, I looked around the site a little more — it’s all that bad, a kind of ham-fisted exaggeration of creationist misconceptions that really only makes the creationists look foolish, on a par with Dembski’s clumsy attempts at a joke. Don’t they know that good satire has to build on some grain of truth about the subject?

Jesus won’t bring you any presents!

I don’t know whether this is staged or not, but it’s bizarrely amusing: someone video taped his mother’s reaction to learning he is an atheist. Mom throws a hissy fit. After a bit of denial, she brings the big guns to bear on the poor guy: if he’s an atheist, he’s not going to get any presents for Christmas, because it’s all about Jesus.

After crushing him with that overwhelming threat, what’s she going to do to punish him when she finds out he posted her tirade on Youtube? It’s good parenting skills to know you don’t launch the thermonuclear missiles with the first offense, because you won’t have any credible escalation options left when you discover the really awful thing the kid has done.


The video has been pulled from youtube, but you can still find it here.

We should have known better—Egnor fooled us all

A world-class neurosurgeon couldn’t possibly have been as stupid as Michael Egnor — the denial of even the most basic and medically relevant evidence of evolution in bacteria, the outright denial of the importance of the scientific literature, dismissing it as “chaff”, the obtuse insistence on self-contradictory definitions of information — it should have told us long ago that our leg was being pulled. We put a lot of effort into debunking arguments that only a purblind ignorant creationist could have fallen for, and we should have noticed that Egnor was just a little too far over the top.

As the Panda’s Thumb reveals, those wacky fellows at the DI have carefully set us up with a well-built-up foundation for an April Fools prank, establishing Egnor as a believer in ideas so outrageously inane that not even Casey Luskin could possibly have fallen for it. I blush to admit that I did think it was possible a well-trained surgeon might hold notions as foolish as those expressed by the clownish Egnor persona. It just goes to show that the line between creationist parody and creationist reality is drawn awfully fine.

Now that the trick has been played, though, I do hope the Discovery Institute goes back through Egnor’s postings that were put up to establish his fake creationist bona fides, and edits them or adds disclaimers. There’s a lot of material he’s put up in the last month that’s going to have to be labeled with big bold THIS IS A JOKE! stickers, lest others also be fooled into thinking the DI supports that kind of blatantly backwards old-school creationism.