He and Bachmann could be BFFs!

The crazy Minnesotans keep crawling out of the woodwork and onto the political stage — it’s a little embarrassing. We’ve had a professional wrestler, a vampire, a crazy Jebus lady, and now…Gary Boisclair, an anti-abortion fanatic who’s running against Keith Ellison, our Muslim representative in the Fifth Congressional District. Here’s his ad (which he has no money to air, so only put it on youtube, where it got pulled for violating their terms of service), which makes a big deal of the fact that Ellison swore his oath of office on a copy of the Quran, which is full of bombastic Islamic tribalism and sectarian exclusivity, and threatens unbelievers with violence and horrible fates.

It’s a “book that undermines our Constitution,” says Boisclair. So what book would he take his oath of office on? The Bible, which is just as bad?

Why I will not debate William Lane Craig

Several people have written in response to my previous post suggesting that I debate William Lane Craig. It’s not going to happen. Here’s why.

  1. He hasn’t asked me. I’m a small fish, not even on his radar, so the whole question is pointless.

  2. I may be a small fish, but still, a debate with a professional prevaricator and con artist doesn’t look great on my CV — the same point Dawkins has made.

  3. Let’s be honest, debating is a skill, Craig is well-practiced in it, and I’m not. Craig would probably ‘win’, and that’s the great lie right there: debate is a terrible way to resolve a truth claim, and a great way to flaunt some rarefied rhetorical talent. He could clobber me six ways from Sunday, and what it would show is that I’m a lousy debater, and he’s good at it; but his fans would all say it’s evidence that he’s right.

  4. I much prefer the written argument, because he can’t run away from his own words. One of his skills in the oral debate is the slippery elide; if someone is hammering him on one point, he’ll just skip over it to a new point. I’d rather get his words down in writing, where I can pin him down, stick a knife in the bastard, and twist it for a good long while. Longer and with more detail and rigor than is possible in a verbal tussle.

So sorry, no debate in the offing (and #1 is really the most relevant issue, anyway).

William Lane Craig and the problem of pain

Kitties experience pain and suffering, which turns out to be a theological problem. If a god introduced pain and death into the world because wicked ol’ Eve was disobedient, why is god punishing innocent animals? It seems like a bit of a rotten move to afflict the obedient along with the disobedient — shouldn’t god have just stricken humanity with the wages of sin (or better yet, just womankind)?

William Lane Craig has an answer. His answer involves simply waving the problem away — animals don’t really feel pain — and he drags in science to prop up his claim. Basically, Craig is playing the creationist gambit of abusing the authority of science falsely to support his peculiar theology.

[Read more…]

Oh, those wacky Catholics

It’s happening in Minnesota again. The church is peddling nonsense, and people are believing it. Catholic congregants are finding corpses hidden inside the church. Oh, wait…not corpses. Crackers.

In recent weeks, parishioners at St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Church in Hastings have approached their pastor, Rev. Jim Perkl, “heartbroken and with tears in their eyes,” he says.

The cause of such sadness? The discovery of communion hosts found between the pages of about 30 hymnals in the pews. Catholics believe the communion wafer becomes the actual body of Jesus once it’s consecrated during mass.

Thank you, priestly abusers, for once again finding a way to wring pain out of your parishioners lives, all over little pieces of bread. This behavior is childish and ridiculous.

Although it’s unknown whether these wafers were consecrated, the incident has led Perkl and the Twin Cities Archdiocese to wonder: Is the church doing enough to emphasize the sacredness of the host?

The church is doing too much. It’s not sacred, it’s a CRACKER.

Somebody is just a little bit out of touch

The pastor of the Crystal Cathedral, Robert Schuller, has a wife, Arvella. Arvella is sick! She has pneumonia.

I’m so sorry. I wish her well and hope she gets better soon.

The Schullers have done something quite common: since she’s not feeling well, they asked the community to help prepare meals for the family. This is a very traditional thing to do, and one of the nicer parts of religion — it’s quite OK for someone to ask for help, and people are happy to pitch in.

What grates, though, is the email sent to explain how to deliver the meals. Don’t come by the house, oh no.

…they would appreciate meals over the next three to four weeks. They are to be sent to the church in order to be transported to Arvella. The limo drivers could pick up the dinners or meet in the Tower Lobby around 4:30 p.m.

‘Please, we need charity, just hand it to our limo drivers’? America is in deep economic trouble, and we’ve been bled dry by income inequity: the Schullers are perfectly emblematic of the attitudes of the 1%, oblivious, privileged, arrogant, and demanding more. And they do this while their church is failing into bankruptcy.

Lunatics on campus

The UMTC Campus Atheists, Skeptics, and Humanists has been busy. They recently had an event to mock homeopathy, and it has been written up in the campus newspaper. Unfortunately, they’ve smoked out the local kooks: the comments on the article are embarrassing. Look at this:

I am a whole hearted aficionado of homeopathy, discovered in the late 1700s by German physician Samuel Hahnemann. In the 1800s and early 1900s, homeopathy was widely practiced in the United States. There were many practitioners, medical schools, conventions all over the USA. It is such a successful method of treatment, doctors had a hard time making a living, and so eventually the American Medical Association succeeded in quashing it. It took me many years of trying to figure it out on my own before I finally came across a book by Dr. Don Hamilton about using homeopathy to treat illness in cats and dogs which helped me begin to understand how to choose the right homeopathic drugs and cure illnesses. It strikes me as silly that skeptics get so enraged by a medical art that so many doctors have spent their lives working on and that has so many documented successes. Glad to hear the University of Minnesota is helping patients discover true healing.

It doesn’t work. It doesn’t even make sense. I’m just going to let xkcd handle it.

There are also a couple of letters from our wretched Center for Spirituality and Healing in there. Strangely, they disavow any support for homeopathy. I don’t understand how I can then take a quick look at the CSH faculty and find that at least three — Jacob Mirman, Paula Jelinek, and Karen Lawson are homeopaths. Weird. It’s almost like lying is easy for quacks.

Feel free to leave comments on the MN Daily site. Our students, faculty, and staff clearly need some remedial instruction.

One other event is coming up, a debate. Aaargh. Between Dan Barker (Yay!) and …Hamza Andreas Tzortzis, the wacky deluded Muslim fanatic, on “Is Atheism or Islam more rational?” It’s taking place in Smith Hall, room 100, on Thursday, 3 November at 8:00.

I have a feeling it’s going to be ghastly. I may have to go, just to watch the foolishness explode. Also to catch any more silly claims about Islamic embryology.

MRAs are almost as hilarious as creationists

I swear, it’s the same oblivious stupidity, just expressed in a different domain, and I deal with enough inanity trying to cope with creationionism — I should probably avoid this stuff lest I suffer an overdose. But Manboobz hurts me again, and I can’t turn my eyes away. This is a real revelation about how these guys think:

[W]hen most men pass the age of 30-35, they begin to awaken from this biochemical “dream” and what do they awaken beside? What do married men look forward to the next 30-50 years of their lives? Sleeping with a living corpse, which continues to torture and destroy them day by day? Looking forward to the time when the woman undergoes the process of metamorphosis, into a completely insane mummy (menopause and post menopause)?

Pussy is indeed way overrated and if younger men could get a shot of “anti-testosterone” for a few weeks, they could see through the eyes of men who are 40+; without the haze of hormones, you cannot believe how much farther you can see! It’s the difference between seeing the horizon through LA style smog and seeing the horizon from a high mountain in the Rockies.

Guys, you’re doing it wrong. I don’t think your wives are the insane ones, it’s you.

If you’re doing it right, the relationship gets stronger and the sex gets better the older you get; while I might well be willing to trade in my sputtering 50+ year old body for a 20 year old model, I would not ever want to exchange the kind of sex I get at 50+ for the kind I got at 20 (which was great, don’t get me wrong, but experience in these matters really does improve everything). People who look at their spouses as hostile occupiers are just weird, sick, and deprived individuals; I simply don’t get it.

I also like my testosterone, thank you very much. If those wackos were serious, there really is an easy fix: a do-it-yourself orchidectomy. Just think, a little knife work, and his vision will be so clear it’ll be like sitting on board the space telescope.

Ick, Easterbrook.

I should probably rotate the objects of my ire more often. Way back in the days before Scienceblogs, a couple of my common targets were people I rarely talk about anymore, like George Gilder, or Gregg Easterbrook. Easterbrook is a pretentious sports writer and creationist who hates godless books and movies, who somehow managed to land commissions with Slate and Wired as a science writer (this is comparable to me getting hired to be a sports writer — Armageddon is nigh if that ever happens).

I am very pleased to see, though, that someone else shares my contempt for the guy: Tom Levenson can be provoked to peevishness by an Easterbrook column. Easterbrook’s not just bad at science, he sucks at writing. What does this mean?

A Cosmic Thought: Last week researchers announced they had found, in a South African cave, evidence of painting 100,000 years ago. The previous oldest evidence of painting was from 60,000 years in the past; the famous Lascaux cave paintings in France were made about 17,000 years ago. The latest find, in South Africa, shows both that our ancestors were experimenting with iron oxides to make permanent paint 50 millennia in the past: all that time ago, they painted inside caves, seeming to hope their work would last long enough to be seen by distant descendants.

Each time telescopes improve, the universe is revealed to be larger, older and grander. Each time anthropology makes an advance, the human experiment is shown to be older and more complex than thought. Who can say where the cosmic enterprise may be headed?

Hey! I’m talking about that really cool discovery of a 100,000 year old pigment set in New Orleans this coming weekend! It really is a nifty story that shows people have been doing art for about as long as they’ve been Homo sapiens.

But I haven’t a clue what Easterbrook is talking about. I think the cave art was painted for the people of that time, and they don’t seem to have been doing it for posterity, or Gregg Easterbrook; I’m also baffled by the odd implication of a prediction of greater, older complexity of human culture far back in the past. People 100,000 years ago were fully anatomically human; I think everyone expects that their would have been cultures existing coincident with our evolution.

Let’s not even get started on his math confusion that 100,000 years = 50 millennia.

I do wish someone could explain to me how that hack continues to publish.

Give the presents back, Ken

Ken Ham claims to have turned 60 years old yesterday. I don’t believe him. For one thing, I wasn’t there, and for another, if we apply the same magnitude of error to his age that he does to the age of the universe, he’s actually less then 15 minutes old. And I’m sorry, Kenny, you don’t get presents for being 15 minutes old. You get a spank, a couple of shots, and an Apgar score, nothing more.