Give Bill O’Reilly apoplexy

I have a suspicion that that photo of squid guts in the last post is going to make a few people feel squeamish, and now I’m going to show something even worse: Bill O’Reilly. <cue frantic screams from everyone…”More squid guts! Please! Anything but Billo!”>

Of course Billo is outraged at the news from Washington state. How dare they allow atheists to express themselves? This is a Judeo-Christian nation, and only Christians are allowed to have a voice in the public square (Jews, too, as long as they’re quiet and willing to pretend that they’re pre-Christians).

He urges his listeners to howl dementedly at Governor Gregoire. I may not have quite the reach of Mr Falafel, but I’ll suggest that you write polite, supportive letters to Gregoire as an antidote. If you want a little instant gratification, there’s also a poll to crash: Under freedom of expression do you approve of the atheist representation at the State Capitol?. It’s split 51:49 right now.

Egnor loses it, again

Creationists must live on a different planet. I just summarized this symposium I attended; I posted the schedule last week. In between, Michael Egnor takes this scrap of information and spins out a weird tale. He actually put up a post titled, “Is P.Z. Myers Attending a Conference on Eugenics?”. To which one can only mutter, “WTF?”

Here’s his “reasoning”:

I’m having trouble finding the program Myers is referring to (why wasn’t I invited!?), but Claudia Cohen Hall is on the medical campus at Penn, so I surmise that the presentations will be on eugenics (apologies for it, I hope), which is Darwin’s only legacy to medicine.

But of course eugenics won’t be mentioned, except perhaps brief exculpations (“Eugenics was the misuse of Darwin’s theory by a few rogue geneticists…”). No doubt the talks will be ‘Children Hate Vegetables Because of Ancestral Reproductive Advantage of Avoiding Toxins’ or ‘We Will Evolve Oiler Skin Because of Frequent Bathing’ or ‘X-Linked Color Blindness Evolved to Help Paleolithic Male Hunters See Camouflage.’ Believe it or not, these are actual cutting-edge evolutionary “theories.”

Do we need any further demonstration that creationists are divorced from reality, have no interest in pursuing the truth, and will make stuff up on the airiest of whims? No, it wasn’t a conference about eugenics, pro or con. No, it wasn’t about medicine. No, none of those very silly talks were given. No, since evolution contributes substantially to basic biology, all that stuff about how cells work and interact and change, evolution has contributed significantly to modern medicine — Egnor’s ignorance of the mechanistic underpinnings of what medicine does is no excuse.

Oh, and Dr Egnor, I can guess why you weren’t invited. It’s because you’re a babbling chowderhead.

It’s not even Halloween yet!

And already the War on Christmas nonsense is starting up. Why, I remember they used to wait until after Thanksgiving before they’d put up the Christmas lights and install Santa in the shopping malls and start complaining about how the atheists were out to destroy Christmas, and every year it came earlier and earlier.

I’m a traditionalist. I’m going to wait until mid-December to put up my Christmas tree and subvert the holiday.

OH NOES! SPIRCHUL WARFARE!

Great. It just gets more and more insane. It seems that while McCain’s side knows how to do ‘spiritual warfare’, Obama has all the witches on his side.

Minutes ago I spoke with friend Dr. Norman G. Marvin, M.D. and he is so concerned at what he has learned about Barack Obama’s family in Kenya that he is calling a special prayer meeting in his home to pray against the witchcraft curses attempted by them against John McCain and Sarah Palin.

Dr. Marvin sent me the below e-mail from Flo Ellers. Flo is credentialed with the International Fellowship of Ministries which is based in Washington State. She is also a member of EndTime Handmaidens and Servants of Jasper, Arkansas.

IF YOU KNOW HOW TO DO SPIRITUAL WARFARE, PLEASE PRAY TODAY AND CONTINUALLY THAT ALL SUCH CURSES BE BROKEN AND SATAN’S PLAN FOR AMERICA BE DEFEATED, IN JESUS’ NAME. PRAY AND COVER MCCAIN AND PALIN WITH THE BLOOD OF CHRIST. IF YOU DO NOT KNOW HOW TO DO SPIRITUAL WARFARE, IT IS TIME YOU LEARN!!!

Two days ago, I listened to a 9-6-08 message by Bree Keyton, a young woman evangelist who had just traveled to Kenya and visited Obama’s home village and what she found out about his relations with his tribal people was chilling. And his “cousin” Odinga was dreadful. She said the witches, warlocks and those involved in satanism and the occult get up daily at 3 a.m. to release curses against McCain and Palin so B. Hussein Obama is elected.

<Pssst. McCain supporters. Here’s the secret to winning the election: stay home for the next few weeks praying nonstop. Especially when the polls open up in November, you must stay on your knees calling on your god the entire day. Otherwise, the witches will get us.>

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.