Arrgh, I can’t believe I sat through the whole thing

I just suffered through a few hours of Terry Mortenson, Answers in Genesis stooge, babbling and lying on stage here in Morris. I’m going to recuperate for a while with a nice cup of tea and a little light reading, so don’t expect me to post on it now. You can browse my twitter feed for the short choppy reactions I put up during that horror, and I’ll try to summarize it tomorrow.

Although…he’s also speaking tomorrow night. I suppose I’ll have to suffer again, Christlike, for you.

Oh, by the way: the most annoying part of the event is that they announced at the beginning that there would be no Q&A, because Mortenson’s voice was giving out. Then cancel the crappy lecture part, and turn it over to questions! The guy is giving 7 lectures in two days — I think we’ve have our fill of this loon just standing up there and lying at us.

An evening of old fashioned rural American entertainment

Oh, dear…today is the day the clown from Answers in Genesis is speaking at the elementary school in Morris. I guess I’ll be going, even though Terry Mortenson is a goats-on-fire flaming moron. Here he is in all of his pursed-lipped pretentious glory.

Anyway, I’ll be attending his 6:00 lecture — “Dinosaurs: Have You Been Brainwashed?” — and the 7:30 exercise in idiocy — “Noah`s Flood: Washing Away Millions of Years”. The schedule is online; I may get more than my fill today, so I don’t know that I’ll go to any of the Monday events. It’s a disgrace that such a fool was invited here.

I will have my iPad with me and will be live-twittering the event (look for the hashtag #creoass). I’ll also post a summary here. Don’t expect much — this guy is classic old-school dead-brainless creationism: 6000 year old earth, Flintstones was a documentary, all of geology is explained by the flood, unbelievable stupidity.

One possible saving grace is that the Morris Freethinkers will be meeting next Saturday at the Morris Public Library from 3-5pm to have a panel discussion about the event. Everyone is welcome. We’ll be tearing his inanity apart.

What exactly are we allowed to do in the bedroom?

As we’ve learned watching the Rethuglicans lately, the assault on abortion rights is only the first step — they also want to shut down the wickedness that is contraception. But they’re not going to stop there, oh no! If you want a peek at our theocratic future, read this incredibly long-winded disquisition on exactly what you are allowed to do even in the marriage bed. Everything is forbidden, except vaginal penetration and the ol’ in-out. You aren’t allowed to even do these things as foreplay, culminating in procreative intercourse.

The expression ‘that use which is against nature’ refers to unnatural sexual acts, such as oral sex, anal sex, or manual sex. Saint Augustine condemns such acts unequivocally. He even states that such unnatural sexual acts are even more damnable (i.e. even more serious mortal sins) when these take place within marriage. For God is even more offended by a sexual mortal sin that takes place within the Sacrament of Marriage, since this offense is not only against nature, but also against a Holy Sacrament.

Dang. Well, at least Augustine didn’t explicitly forbid rubber wetsuits, fuzzy handcuffs, vibrating crucifixes, octopus, ceiling-mounted swings, clamps, chocolate pudding, flavored lubricants, Wonder Woman costumes, rubber chickens, exotic headware, whipped cream, video cameras, Silly String, roller skates, trampolines, nitrous oxide, balloon animals, feather boas, ball gags, or bungee cords, or I might be going to hell.

It’s amazing how much detail Catholics will go into documenting why people shouldn’t do the things that they all do anyway. You might even call it loving detail.

Can you OD on woo?

This is an experiment. Take care, readers, you might experience symptoms of distress and nausea if you actually watch this video.

Wow. “Quantum”. “Vibrational frequencies”. “Higher planes”. “Vibratory medicine”. Attractive young lady waving her hands over people. Did you know Melissa Hocking has a double degree in…Science? Really, it’s true — check out the Quantum BioEnergetics website if you don’t believe me. It’s got testimonials.

Many clients, adolescent, adult and child, have reported healings from Cancers, Mental illnesses, Depression, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Physical injuries, a variety of Disabilities including Cerebral Palsy, ASD (Autism), and many other Serious Afflictions.

Notice that she doesn’t just cure serious afflictions — she cures Serious Afflictions, which are far more serious than the lower case kind.

Unfortunately, my audience tends to be a little bit skeptical of this sort of thing, so you may be feeling a little dissonance and dismay, and you may be disturbed about this kind of outrageous bunkum and the way it’s taking advantage of gullible, sick people. If you’re upset, here’s what I want you to do. Rest your hands lightly on your computer keyboard, and lean forward until your forehead just touches the screen. Wait there for a few minutes. I have waggled my fingers over my laptop while composing this blog entry, and the beneficent vibrations will be radiating out over the internet in the form of quantum soothing bubbles.

Do you feel a little better now?

Then send me money.

Reproduction in Ireland

It’s all very confusing, and I’m not quite sure how they managed all these years…all those Irish children must have been the product of some amusing and peculiar accidents. At least the quacks are profiting from the confusion — here, for instance, is a mysterious bottle of an over-the-counter “organic” menopause relief remedy.

i-d70fa497b2b7dd5d5dd2ef7c12e4d82e-menorelief.jpeg

It’s the limitation that is the stumper: “Do not use if pregnant.” Are there many women bumbling about in the pharmacy thinking that they need to be relieved of this problem of menopause?

And then there’s this headline, “I’d lost my baby then somehow fell pregnant thanks to acupuncture“. There are clear and unambiguous causes of pregnancy — “somehow” isn’t usually a word associated with the process — and, well, acupuncture isn’t any of them. Although I suppose it could be an insulting reference to her partner’s penis size.

Why did our government give special preference to Christian pseudo-insurance companies?

This country recently managed to pass a rather lame compromise on health care: there is now a mandate that requires everyone to have health insurance, even if it is from a hodge-podge of insurance companies, with the intent of fairly distributing the expense. Unfortunately, one group got singled out with an exception from this requirement. Can you guess who?

Yep, Christians.

Did you know that if you are a Christian you are exempt from the taxes, penalties and regulations imposed by the recently enacted health insurance law?

All you have to do is to affirm a statement of Christian beliefs and pledge to follow a code that includes no tobacco or illegal drugs, no sex outside of marriage, and no abuse of alcohol or legal medications and pay a monthly fee to join a religious health care sharing ministry plan, a plan that specifically does not guarantee the payment of your medical bills in any fashion and holds members solely responsible for payment of said bills.

And the reason for this exemption? According to the spokeswoman for the Senate committee responsible for writing much of the legislation, lawmakers granted the exemption out of respect for religious freedom.

That’s a rather large loophole, and it’s also preferentially sectarian. It’s also non-surprising. What it means is that a few Christian scam-artists get to get richer, while lots of gullible Christians get screwed. The con is to set up a Christian “bill-sharing” cooperative in place of a real insurance plan; members send in monthly premiums, which can be quite substantial, but do not have to buy in to any other insurance plan, and then the bill-sharing program offers to help cover medical expenses, but “The payment of your medical bills…is not guaranteed in any fashion.” It’s a great deal for the Christian bill-sharing plan; if your medical expenses get so high that they cut into their profits, they can just elect not to pay, and then you have to go begging to join some other insurance pool.

Absolutely brilliant. Send me money now, and maybe, if I feel like it, I’ll help you out with some bills later. But I am not obligated.

And this is such a profitable plan that they managed to lobby congress to support it, all under the cloak of Christianity.

How to tell you’re arguing with an idiot

There are some useful tells. My favorite has the been the classic quotemine, where creationists quote one sentence of Darwin’s — “To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree” — to claim that Darwin was stumped by the evolution of the eye. As everyone who has read the Origin knows, what he was doing there was setting up a rhetorical question, which he then followed by three pages of detailed description of exactly how such an eye could have evolved. When you hear some creationist say “absurd in the highest possible degree,” you know right away that they haven’t read the book.

There’s another great example, though, that’s an even better demonstration of your opponent’s illiteracy. That is when someone cites The Selfish Gene and then goes on to rail against the horrors of evilution and the way it encourages people to be righteous bastards who kill and steal and rape their way to dominance. They haven’t read the book! All they’ve done is scanned a three word title and leapt to a series of absurd conclusions! (Yeah, Mary Midgley, I’m givin’ you the squinky eye.)

Ken MacLeod exposes the inanity of this claim in some detail. It really is astoundingly common for people to expound on how Richard Dawkins was arguing for the rightness of Thatcherism or whatever reactionary conservative policy they think he was endorsing, and get the whole story completely wrong — it really is a great tell. Unfortunately, it seems to expose left wing idiocy more than that of the right, but only because I think the righties make the same invalid assumptions, but since they like that error, they tend not to criticize.

Frenetically catching up with Molly

I told you I was bad and neglectful, but we’re getting there. The Molly award for December 2010 goes to a long-dead Seleucid monarch, Antiochus Epiphanes…on the condition that he promises to leave Egypt alone, and occupy himself with conquering trolls on Pharyngula instead.

Now you get to leave nominations for a Molly winner for January 2011 right here in the comments.

Yeah, January. I’m behind. I’m going to do an abbreviated round of voting, so I’ll announce the January winner next week, and put up a post for nominations for February then. It’ll work, I think.

Post on Pharyngula, win big prizes!

This happens every year about this time: that first month of the new semester is such total chaos that I let stuff on the blog slide…like failing to take care of the Molly stuff. Now I’m going to catch up quickly.

The first order of business: I proposed a Molly of the Year award, and you people nominated a fair number of well-appreciated people for it. Unfortunately, you couldn’t just pick one, and the results congealed around a trinity…so I’m giving it to three people. I also can’t just call it a mega-Molly or something, so let’s give this a completely different title: Champions of Reason, to be awarded just once a year.

And our three champions are: Sastra, Cuttlefish, and David Marjanović. Congratulations all around!

And of course there are prizes. I ought to be giving out cars and vacations in Cabo San Lucas, but instead you’ll have to settle for your very own limited edition Spaceship of the Imagination and a free imaginary trip to anywhere in the galaxy. That’ll do, right?

If not, I’ll also be sending you a copy of Hank Fox’s Red Neck, Blue Collar, Atheist — just send me a shipping address and they’ll be on the way. And all you worthy contributors who did not get an acknowledgment this year can simply order the book for yourself.