A chat about drops of blood and chewed flesh

Just in case you haven’t heard enough about bogus Islamic embryology yet, I’ve been invited to call in to the TheJinnAndTonicShow on Saturday at 21:00GMT (which is sometime mid-afternoon my time…I’d better look it up). Tzortzis has also been invited to call in, but even if he doesn’t, we’ll have a grand time ripping up Muslim pseudoscience.

Oh, look…a promo!

The Quran is bunk, too

I know you kids like the youtube and hate that tl;dr text stuff, so if you couldn’t find the patience to read my post on Islamic embryology, you can now watch the screen instead. The Rationalizer goes through the ‘science’ in the Quran and shows that it’s largely plagiarized from Galen, and that it also steals Galen’s mistakes, so it’s a beautiful example of a plagiarized error of the type biologists use to demonstrate a lineage.

All the straining Muslim apologists use to fit the science to the few lines of poetry in the Quran (I’m looking at you, Hamzas Tzortzis) are futile and really only demonstrate that the founders of Islam borrowed their message, not from a divine source, but from Greco-Roman medicine.

But perhaps Allah is just another name for Galen.

(Also on FtB)

The Quran is bunk, too

I know you kids like the youtube and hate that tl;dr text stuff, so if you couldn’t find the patience to read my post on Islamic embryology, you can now watch the screen instead. The Rationalizer goes through the ‘science’ in the Quran and shows that it’s largely plagiarized from Galen, and that it also steals Galen’s mistakes, so it’s a beautiful example of a plagiarized error of the type biologists use to demonstrate a lineage.

All the straining Muslim apologists use to fit the science to the few lines of poetry in the Quran (I’m looking at you, Hamzas Tzortzis) are futile and really only demonstrate that the founders of Islam borrowed their message, not from a divine source, but from Greco-Roman medicine.

But perhaps Allah is just another name for Galen.

(Also on Sb)

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.