It’s been quiet here today for a good reason: I’m facing a bunch of deadlines, and I told myself I’d stay offline until I’d met them. I haven’t met them quite yet, but I hate leaving the blog dead for a day…so I’m just offering this note of explanation, and setting this up as an open thread.
Now I’m gone again, back to my labors.
9am Central. Sunday morning. The evil atheists of the upper midwest will continue their nefarious plan to disseminate propaganda internationally by means of the radio waves, which will vibrate even within the walls of Minneapolis’s churches, synagogues, and temples, and also via the godless intertubes. This week, they will once again spread the infidel lie that atheists can “lead rich, ethical and fulfilling lives without appealing to gods or religious authority”, when every Christian knows deep in their heart that they want to murder, maim, rape, and steal, and only God’s holy extortion can keep them in line.
Go ahead, tune in if you want to lead hedonistic lives of ungodly self-indulgence. Click on that link if you want to make Jesus cry. Destroy all of Western civilization by letting the heathen weaken the shackles of your sacred servitude.
(Just don’t tune in before 9 or after 10, because Air America runs some awesomely stupid informercials before and after the hour of reason.)
They’re finally getting organized. Minnesota has had our citizens for science group together for years now, and only now is Wisconsin catching up. Better go sign up now, Wisconsinites, lest your membership look pathetic next to ours.
I’m looking at you, UW Madison. Get in there and participate and keep your state off the creationist roster!
Just go and gape in awe at the obliviousness of our national media. This is a poll on US News & World Report, and it asks, “If you had a choice of four daycare centers run separately by Michelle Obama, Sarah Palin, Hillary Clinton, and Nancy Pelosi, which would you choose for your kids?” Incredible.
I believe that next week they’ll have a question about Barack Obama’s, Colin Powell’s, Al Sharpton’s, and Jesse Jackson’s hypothetical fried chicken stands.
We’ll have to see how long this video remains available. Thunderf00t, the well-known godless anti-creationist creator of fine youtube videos, is routinely targeted by Christian/creationist scriptbots to downgrade his videos and even get them banned, and he’s had enough — this clip takes the youtube management to task for kowtowing to the ignorant god-crowd. It was, of course, deleted by the youtube management, but not before it got copied to many other places.
It’s actually rather sad to see. There have been a lot of shenanigans like this recently, and I’ve gone from regarding youtube as merely poorly managed to suspecting that they are actively evil.
It’s an interesting edition of Bloggingheads: the always pleasant Carl Zimmer in a dialog with hyper-enthusiastic Phil Plait. If I ever do one of these things with Phil, I’m going to have to send him a horse tranquilizer to swallow first, just so I can keep up.
Have you ever gotten sucked into one of those endless “Teach the controversy!” or “You’re afraid to look at both sides” kinds of arguments? You know, the ones people backing the most ridiculous positions always make? I need to make a copy of this cartoon to carry with me. It’s a point I’ve often tried to make.
Unfortunately, the kinds of people who advance those arguments are exactly the kinds of people who won’t be able to get it.
I’m never going to get to go to parties anymore, am I?
It’s been a while since we had a pointless poll…so here’s a light snack to nibble on. We are asked, “The best evidence for an afterlife is from…“, and the answer so far is:
Mediums
3% (20 votes)
Near-death experiences
26% (147 votes)
Reincarnation memories
15% (86 votes)
Ghosts
5% (29 votes)
EVP and similar
3% (19 votes)
Crisis apparitions
2% (14 votes)
All equal
11% (64 votes)
Other
7% (41 votes)
There is no evidence
27% (156 votes)
I don’t get the popularity of the NDE “evidence”. I had a friend once who told me that he had the most awesome experience on ‘shrooms — he’d melted into a purple puddle that soaked into the earth, and he had spiritual sex with tree roots. I’m pretty sure that didn’t actually happen, and I wouldn’t use it to argue that human beings were capable of phase changes into a fluid state or that intimate congress with plants was fun and rewarding, but people use the same logic all the time in arguing that while they were in a brain-damaged state, befuddled by anoxia, their perception of the hallucinatory state afterwards is evidence that there is a heaven.
I have no idea what “crisis apparitions” are. I don’t care to know either.
I have heard of EVPs — they’re all the rage right now thanks to all those horrible ‘ghosthunter’ shows on TV. Leave a tape recorder running in an empty room, then play it back with lots of amplification of the background hiss and crackle of noise. If you are gullible and really want to believe, you will hear random splutters that you can imagine are sort of voices. And the really cool thing is that if you tell someone that this scrap of noise says something like, “Paul is dead”, then their pattern-forming circuits in their brain will impose your interpretation on the noise for you, and they’ll hear the same thing! Very convincing, I’m sure.
I voted for no evidence. If you vote otherwise, maybe you can come back here and explain your evidence to us. We need a good laugh on a Saturday morning.
I had no idea they were so progressive! If my local churches had religious services like this I’d be going three times a week. Scandinavian languages are all so pretty to listen to, anyway (don’t worry, the link has English subtitles).
The Texas legislature is generally the butt of jokes, and it’s not hard to see why: it’s an awesome body of distilled stupidity. However, that doesn’t mean there aren’t some good ones among the chaff, and State Senator Rodney Ellis and State Representative Patrick Rose should be counted among them. They’ve written an excellent op-ed for the Houston Chronicle in which they point out the contradiction of a state that wants to build a leading-edge set of scientific research institutions with a State Board of Education led by a mob of incompetent creationist cretins. They’ve put together some legislation to hold the SBOE accountable for their performance — a marvelous turnabout of the No Child Left Behind philosophy of policing schools on their performance. Let’s see the rascals who want to put together bogus curricula scrutinized on the basis of long-term performance in science by the kids!
Here’s something you can do right now. Thank these two smart politicians by signing a letter. It’s the least you can do. And if you’re a Texan in their districts, vote for them!
