Well, maybe it is exactly like their brains

Reader wombat found a fascinating site in response to the creationist debate in Kentucky, led by Dr. Ben Scripture. It’s an utterly bizarre page about a petrified human brain, and it is typical creationist tripe. They have gathered a collection of “authorities”, where they make much of their pedigrees (don’t blame me, the “Dr. X, Ph.D.” is the redundant formula they use on the site.)

  • Dr. Suzanne Vincent, Ph.D., a neuroanatomist(!) at Oral Roberts University
  • Dr. Ross Anderson, Ph.D. of The Masters College
  • Dr. Bedros Daghlian, M.D., a retired doctor
  • Dr. Ben Scripture, Ph.D. in biology
  • Dr. Travis Shipley, Ph.D. in theology (snort!)
  • Dr. Frederick Trexler, Ph.D. in geology and Physics

The photos show these people and others gushing over this lump of rock, with testimonials like:

  • “It is scientifically impossible for this to not be a brain”
  • “Clearly, this is the brain stem and spinal cord, see it wrapped around there? Everything right where it is supposed to be.”
  • “Dr. Daghlian checked microscopically, and confirmed residue to appear cellular.”
  • “…I spent several years in medicine before obtaining my Doctorate in Theology. When I reviewed the x-rays of the rock and different brains, I chose incorrectly which was which!”

After all that, you’d expect to find some remarkable degree of similarity, wouldn’t you? It convinced a neuroanatomist, after all, and surely all those people with their fancy degrees couldn’t be fooled. But then they show us a close-up photo of this “brain”.

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They’ve got to be kidding. That’s a lumpy rock. It’s no brain; I’ve seen a lot of brains in my time, from fish to frogs to lizards to birds to all kinds of mammals, and that looks nothing like any of them. Here, in case you haven’t seen one, is a photo of a human brain:

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This is the Ed Conrad effect. Hand some ignorant people a random lump of rock, tell them it’s a fossil, and their imaginations will do the rest. There is no excuse for these “experts”, though — the author of the page claims that “It has been examined and determined to be a petrified human brain by many people with high degrees in several different fields of study and occupation.” That just goes to show that even the most qualified people in creation ‘science’ have to be flaming idiots.

Bill O’Reilly is a big fat idiot

Forgive me if this amazing tale of ego and inanity makes you recoil in disgust.

And O’Reilly cites himself as proof there is a God:

“Next time you meet an atheist, tell him or her that you know a bold, fresh guy, a barbarian who was raised in a working-class home and retains the lessons he learned there.

“Then mention to that atheist that this guy is now watched and listened to, on a daily basis, by millions of people all over the world and, to boot, sells millions of books.

“Then, while the non-believer is digesting all that, ask him or her if they still don’t believe there’s a God!”

Mmm-kay. Let’s see…do I still believe there is no god? Let me ponder on it.

I think…no. Definitely not.

Was that exercise in pomposity supposed to persuade me?

YouTube chickens out

It’s happened: craven YouTube has pulled all of the eucharist desecration videos. Click on one and you’ll just get the message, “This video has been removed due to terms of use violation.” FSMdude’s account has also been suspended. There is no description of what rule was violated; I guess we must presume that YouTube is now in the business of defending religious dogma.

Catholicism seems to breed natural censors and cowards, doesn’t it?

Do Republicans think at all?

The mayor of Fort Mill, South Carolina forwarded one of those stupid chain emails that throws around absurd accusations — in this case, the Bible predicted that the anti-christ would be a Muslim in his 40s, and that Barack Obama was therefore the anti-christ. There is so much wrong there; Obama is not a Muslim, the Bible doesn’t say such a thing (especially since it was written before Islam), and you would expect such a devout Christian to know this. But he sent it on anyway.

Now if he were somebody of normal intelligence, at this point he’d be saying, “oops, hit the wrong button, I meant to hit delete…”. But no. He’s making excuses.

Fort Mill Mayor Danny Funderburk says he was “just curious” when he forwarded a chain e-mail suggesting Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama is the biblical antichrist. “I was just curious if there was any validity to it,” Funderburk said in a telephone interview. “I was trying to get documentation if there was any scripture to back it up.”

Well. Think that one through. So Funderburk’s way to get to the truth of a scurrilous claim is to simply repeat it to a bunch of other people? And the kind of evidence he’d accept to debunk it is scriptural?

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Now I’ve got Bill Donohue’s attention

The Catholic League is preparing a stake for me. They’re going to go straight for the jugular and threaten my job — notice how they repeat that you can access my post from my faculty page, nicely avoiding the fact that the post they find so offensive is not hosted on any university server, and that they are urging everyone to harass the president of my university and the regents and the Minnesota legislature. Extortionists and witch hunters, that’s all these scumbags are.

Paul Zachary Myers, a professor at the University of Minnesota Morris, has pledged to desecrate the Eucharist. He is responding to what happened recently at the University of Central Florida when a student walked out of Mass with the Host, holding it hostage for several days. Myers was angry at the Catholic League for criticizing the student. His post can be accessed from his faculty page on the university’s website.

Here is an excerpt of his July 8 post, “It’s a Frackin’ Cracker!”:

“Can anyone out there score me some consecrated communion wafers?” Myers continued by saying, “if any of you would be willing to do what it takes to get me some, or even one, and mail it to me, I’ll show you sacrilege, gladly, and with much fanfare. I won’t be tempted to hold it hostage (no, not even if I have a choice between returning the Eucharist and watching Bill Donohue kick the pope in the balls, which would apparently be a more humane act than desecrating a goddamned cracker), but will instead treat it with profound disrespect and heinous cracker abuse, all photographed and presented here on the web.”

Catholic League president Bill Donohue responded as follows:

“The Myers blog can be accessed from the university’s website. The university has a policy statement on this issue which says that the ‘Contents of all electronic pages must be consistent with University of Minnesota policies, local, state and federal laws.’ One of the school’s policies, ‘Code of Conduct,’ says that ‘When dealing with others,’ faculty et al. must be ‘respectful, fair and civil.’ Accordingly, we are contacting the President and the Board of Regents to see what they are going to do about this matter. Because the university is a state institution, we are also contacting the Minnesota legislature.

“It is hard to think of anything more vile than to intentionally desecrate the Body of Christ. We look to those who have oversight responsibility to act quickly and decisively.”

When dealing with others, I must be respectful, fair and civil. Hmmm. Doesn’t seem to say anything about when dealing with crackers.

That last paragraph is marvelously blind. Hey, Bill! I can think of something more vile! How about intentionally desecrating the bodies of young altar boys who respect the position of trust held by Catholic priests? I think that is a lot more vile than mistreating a cracker. In fact, I can think of innumerable vile acts going on all around the world right now, and not all of them even involve Catholicism. It takes the moral vacuum of a purblind ideological bigot like Bill Donohue to think that goring his sacred cow is the worst thing in the world.

Nobody gets to call me arrogant ever again

I’ve been outclassed. Every scientist in the world is a modest little mouse in comparison. All of you readers: humble, demure, and retiring. Ray Comfort has just compared himself favorably to Einstein, saying that he has made a discovery more important than E=mc2. He even has a painfully vainglorious animated image on the page showing his face morphing into Einstein’s.

I think Ray Comfort tried to look up “humility” in a dictionary once, but after slowly sounding out as far as “h – u -“, he got stuck and settled for “hubris” instead. Close enough for a brain-dead Christian, after all!

The Darwin Conspiracy

Sometimes you just have to sit and stare dumbfounded at the appalling stupidity creationists will state with absolute conviction. Here’s an example that will leave you awestruck, too: a site that declares there is a Darwin conspiracy, and cites three fatal flaws that they claim conclusively prove that evolution is wrong. You might expect that such a grand claim would be accompanied by arguments that are at least impressively sophisticated … but no, we get two claims that kids should learn the answers to in high school, and a third that is just flaky and weird.

Wow, but these are amazingly stupid claims.

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I get email

I just got an email listing 50 “proofs” for the existence of a god. It was also sent to a large number of skeptics, and included a plug for the dumb-as-bricks author’s book — she’s a flea who writes an imaginary scenario in which Richard Dawkins gets psychiatric counseling…from Jesus! If Debra Rufini’s imaginary dialog is as bad as this list of “proofs” — more like a collection of cliches, bad quotes, and lies — I can’t imagine wanting to slog through it.

Any one of these I’d happily rip to shreds, but 50 at once? The distilled dementia herein is overwhelming, and I’m sure she counts on that.

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The stupid, it burns

Oh, no … I mentioned the existence of godtube the other day, and now people are farming it for incredibly stupid videos that they send to me. It’s rich soil for stupid over there, and they’ve got a bumper crop — you would not believe how awful some of their arguments are.

I hesitate to mention this one because I know it’s going to trigger yet more bad videos in my in-box, but it is so bad, so crazy, that I have to share it. This one claims that Food Patterns of our Body Proof for Intelligent Design, and, well, you have to see it. It starts with the claim that a sliced carrot looks like a human eye, and carrots are good for your eyes, and just goes downhill from there — tomatoes are red and have chambers, just like the heart, walnuts look like brains, kidney beans look like kidneys, etc.

I think the creator must be a virgin. He also claims that citrus fruits look just like human mammary glands.