“Hello, My name is Herb Grossman”

It’s hard to find something dumber than Kent Hovind, but here you go: the website of Herb Grossman, trashevolution. It’s what Hovind could have produced if he’d been an alcoholic gay man in denial. He has a rambling, mostly incoherent set of pages that he claims disprove evolution, but if you read just one, it should be his page on homosexuality. It doesn’t really exist, you know, although he has been feeling supernatural homosexual urges for years.

No one has to be a homosexual, because—

—Homosexuality is a Cruel Deception,

and you should not worry about possibly being a homosexual, because there is no such thing–homosexuality is an evil supernatural trick! The key is to fight it, and the sooner the better. I still sometimes get supernatural “urges” towards perversions or homosexuality, but by immediately rejecting “it” (both physically and mentally), “it” goes away.

What I write or say concerning belief in evolution being a major encouragement towards homosexuality is not meant to win some popularity contest. Some of you will laugh and think I am stupid for writing this, but the shoes I have walked in–the years of aggravation while fighting off the cause of homosexuality–have given me a certain amount of sympathy for the homosexual and a hatred for the way evolution is such a big factor in keeping many of them trapped in their unfortunate perversion. It would be a crime for me to know what I know and not do something, because I thoroughly believe that many people will benefit from knowing of the troubles I’ve been through and will be inspired to avoid or get out of the homosexual trap

He never does get around to explaining how evolutionary biology contributes to homosexuality, and after reading about his miserable life with two angry divorces, 35 years of alcoholism and gambling addiction, I’m thinking he’s about the last person I’d want advising me on how to live a good life. Instead of actually addressing anything about evolution or homosexuality, though, what Mr Grossman does next is recite a litany of “supernatural” events that occurred to him and which prove there is a god. Here’s my favorite of his examples:

I had several situations where I would be sitting and think of something good I could do, and a big foam-rubber-like hand would then pat me on a shoulder as if approving of my thoughts. Was an invisible person standing beside me? Some supernatural person was–and I was inclined to think “God,” but I now suspect it was really someone conditioning me towards accepting supernatural deceptions.

Did I mention that he was a long-term alcoholic? Yes, I did. This is what most of his supernatural events are: imaginary incidents, bleary fantasies of seeing things that weren’t there. And then, finally, he ties this all back to his ideas about homosexuality (but not evolution):

It wasn’t long before I fell into about three months of doing perverse, homosexual acts with invisible, supernatural people/beings* Strong thoughts and sensations would get things started, but I was not the cause–no pornography used. Somebody had control of me! (I did meet up with some visible demonic types, but those encounters, although weird, were not of a homosexual nature).

*I have never acted in any perverted/homosexual manner with any man or boy, nor felt any attraction/sensation towards the same. However, I am not claiming total innocence on my part, as I must admit to some perverse actions (sometimes with use of pornography) in my past that I am ashamed of (I wish I knew then what I know now). Looking back, I suspect those past actions likely made me an attractive target to the supernatural “persons’ that drive the homosexual deception system. To be fair, though, I realize there are many social forces and situations that might condition a person to accept the homosexual deception. and I do not doubt that some people have fallen into the homosexuality trap without having prior perverse activities:

What a sad, repressed, confused little man. He never felt any attraction towards other men…he just fantasized about homosexual acts with invisible people. And has so little ability to distinguish the imaginary from the actual that he thinks those dreaming encounters were real, but at the same time not real enough to count as gay impulses.

The other sad thing about his series of articles is that he’s addressing them to “Mr. or Miss Teenager of America.” He’s trying to reach out to youth and convince them that he has all the answers, but I can guess what young people will think: “Ewww. Creepy old loser.”

A pipe dream of proper priorities

This is an education plan I could get behind.

One additional requirement, besides diverting reasonable amounts of money into education: demand improvements in quality. Not this misbegotten accountability of No Child Left Behind, but shakeups in how school boards manage budgets; remove the elected officials from the business of dictating pedagogy and content, and let the qualified professionals design curricula that actually works. I listened to the video and just felt a sense of dread at the thought of the Texas Board of Education suddenly flush with new money and deciding to buy Bibles for every child, or something similarly absurd.

The Shroud of Turin is clearly fake…so why is the Pope worshipping it?

When an old thread is suddenly resurrected, it’s interesting to try to guess why. Every time Kent Hovind gets a little bit of press, his weird fans start googling his name, and presto, they stumble onto one of my old threads and start waxing indignant. The latest zombie thread is about the Shroud of Turin, and I can guess what has prompted people to start digging on the web for info: that goofy ol’ Pope Ratzi is genuflecting before the Shroud.

He said that keeping up that hope is the message of the Shroud of Turin, in which disciples see their sufferings “mirrored” in the suffering of Christ, CNA reported.

No, no, no. That’s not the message of the Shroud. It’s a much more reassuring one for the papacy: the moral is that even the cheesiest, most absurd con game can be kept going for centuries if it involves religion. That’s the message of hope the Catholic hierarchy can take from a fake relic.

Speaking of hope…look at this other entrepreneurial opportunity: for a mere 57€, there is an organization that will light a candle for you at Lourdes, that other long-running, lucrative fraud.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it…

…is to work on uprating this video:

You may recall that today the Mormons are trying to push up the rankings of a truly stupid video which argues that the fact that someone believes in something fervently means it must be true. Don’t bother watching the Mormon video — in fact, avoid giving it any more traffic — and instead follow this link to the Thunderf00t video and click on the “Like” button to vote it up, and also leave a comment. The more input, the better. We don’t quite have the numbers of the Mormon church, so spread the word and get more people to join in.

Massimo Pigliucci is so very rude

Massimo Pigliucci has written a book, Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science From Bunk(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), that actually sounds very interesting — it takes a strong skeptic’s approach to truth claims. What really makes it sound worth reading, though, is a review by Carlin Romano that pans it, Pigliucci, and a whole great legion of scientists irritated with the public endorsement of nonsense: Romano complains that we’re on “ego trips.” Why? Because Pigliucci expresses such strong certainty about the conclusions of science.

Here’s the heart of the review. It’s a lot of aggravating piss-pottery about tone.

Pigliucci offers more hero sandwiches spiced with derision and certainty. Media coverage of science is “characterized by allegedly serious journalists who behave like comedians.” Commenting on the highly publicized Dover, Pa., court case in which U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III ruled that intelligent-design theory is not science, Pigliucci labels the need for that judgment a “bizarre” consequence of the local school board’s “inane” resolution. Noting the complaint of intelligent-design advocate William Buckingham that an approved science textbook didn’t give creationism a fair shake, Pigliucci writes, “This is like complaining that a textbook in astronomy is too focused on the Copernican theory of the structure of the solar system and unfairly neglects the possibility that the Flying Spaghetti Monster is really pulling each planet’s strings, unseen by the deluded scientists.”

Is it really? Or is it possible that the alternate view unfairly neglected could be more like that of Harvard scientist Owen Gingerich, who contends in God’s Universe (Harvard University Press, 2006) that it is partly statistical arguments–the extraordinary unlikelihood eons ago of the physical conditions necessary for self-conscious life–that support his belief in a universe “congenially designed for the existence of intelligent, self-reflective life”? Even if we agree that capital “I” and “D” intelligent-design of the scriptural sort–what Gingerich himself calls “primitive scriptural literalism”–is not scientifically credible, does that make Gingerich’s assertion, “I believe in intelligent design, lowercase i and lowercase d,” equivalent to Flying-Spaghetti-Monsterism?

Tone matters. And sarcasm is not science.

Romano is oblivious to the actual facts of the Dover case. William Buckingham was not some thoughtful theist who wanted a philosophical discussion in the science classroom; he wasn’t even an ID proponent. He was a born-again jesus freak befuddled on hillbilly heroin who was more of a young earth creationist. He wanted to get the Christian Bible into the public school classrooms, was willing to lie on the witness stand to do it, and saw intelligent design only as a tool to smuggle Jesus into the science classes.

Yes, really.

“Inane” is also how Judge Jones described the school board’s actions: to be precise, he called it “breathtaking inanity”. The view they were trying to push on children, that the there is a magic man in the sky who poofed us all into existence, is actually entirely as silly as the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Pigliucci was right. Romano is wrong.

But what if Buckingham had been a genteel, considerate, ruminative Owen-Gingerich-style Pennsylvania populist? Would that make any difference? No. Gingerich is a religious cosmologist who believes that “a common-sense and satisfying interpretation of our world suggests the designing hand of a superintelligence.” There is absolutely no evidence for this, despite his claims that that bogus ‘fine-tuning’ argument supports the notion. It’s a fabulous fantasy of a grand cosmic super-brain hovering about at the beginning of the Big Bang that is just as ludicrously unfounded as the claim that Jesus did it, or that the Flying Spaghetti Monster flapped a few noodly appendages to conjure a home for pirates into existence. Leaving the word “Jesus” out of your explanation does not turn it into science.

The only thing I agreed with in Romano’s cranky review was the second to the last sentence above: “Tone matters.” It certainly does, but not in the way he imagines. Romano has written a kvetching review in which he reserves all of his bile for the fellow promoting an evidence-based view of reality, and provides nothing but gentle strokes for people who favor fantasies over hard truths…and his complaint is that scientists are insufficiently conciliatory to those deceitful purveyors of faith and fables. Tone does matter when you use that brand of argument to beg special treatment for liars, and to justify chastising those who deliver a blunt truth — it means one is pandering to faith-based folly.

Tone matters, because too many have been insufficiently fierce in their criticism of pious excuses for sloppy thinking. Tone matters because we haven’t been rude enough in the face of special claims of privilege for religious inanity. We need to flip that tone argument around 180°—the problem isn’t that our tone is so harsh, it’s that yours is so inappropriately soft towards people who lie to children, who want to gut our educational system, and who want to taint science with a bias for magic.