Exciting news if it pans out: there are some hints of possible life on Mars, in the form of sporadic plumes of methane gas, similar to instances on earth of outgassing from deep pockets of bacteria.
This would suddenly make a mission to Mars interesting. Extraterrestrial biology? Sign me up for that one!
Details of some high-level Catholic tribunal and how it handles the most grievous sins have been revealed. In a very strange overview, we learn that murder and genocide, while truly horrible crimes, can be handled by lower members of the hierarchy. There are a few that only this tribunal and the Pope are qualified to cope with. They are briefly listed: trying to assassinate the Pope, a priest spilling the beans about what is said in the confessional, priests having sex, and abortionists becoming priest. But there is one other crime, which the article dwells on:
Defiling the Eucharist, which Catholics believe is the body and blood of Christ, is also considered a sin of extreme gravity and one which is on the increase, the high-ranking members of the tribunal said.
Cardinal Stafford said there had been a rise in incidents in which people would receive Communion and then spit it out or otherwise desecrate it, sometimes in Satanic rituals.
In July last year an American academic, to make a point about freedom of thought and religion, drove a nail through a Communion wafer and then threw it in a rubbish bin.
Paul Myers, from the University of Minnesota, said later: “I pierced it with a rusty nail. Then I simply threw it in the trash. Question everything. God is not great, Jesus is not your Lord.”
Such sins, which can only be dealt with by the Pope, acting through the tribunal, bring automatic excommunication from the Church. If the Pope decides to grant absolution, the excommunication is lifted.
But how can I be excommunicated from a church to which I’ve never belonged?
And aren’t their priorities a little screwed up that they consider genocide a lesser offense?
Pough sent along an illustration that I must use.
South Carolina has made it illegal to transmit “material containing words, language, or actions of a profane, vulgar, lewd, lascivious, or indecent nature”.
Well, darn. Dang it all to heck.
Actually, it looks like it doesn’t take effect until approved by the governor, so we have a little grace period. After that, though…they’re going to have to sweep up everyone on the internet and imprison us for 5 years.
Here’s a phenomenal suggestion you can promote to the Obama administration: shut down the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. It’s a huge boondoggle, a fat earmark for low-quality pseudoscience, and it’s money that would be better spent on real science and medicine. Sign up at change.gov and vote it up!
I just don’t get it.
I just got a long, whiny, self-serving email from a Mr John Buford, in which he claims that I was in error for banning him, because he once took a 4-credit course in anthropology, and his comments about race are therefore credible.
You may recall Mr Buford by his pseudonym, “hahajohnnyb”. He’s a racist moron.
I won’t bother with posting the whole of his letter, which is mostly a lot of chest-thumping about how smart he is, but I will share with you his closing threat.
It is your blog, and you certainly have the right to ban whomever you choose, and I shall respect your ban, but I intend to post a link to your site on Stormfront, which gets 10s of thousands of hits a day and has 100s of thousands of members, so you will get to hear from an ever increasing number of racial realists. I shall not stop only at your site, but will also have my people inflitrate the entire Dawkins Network with realism about race. Maybe, we will be able to open the minds of a few of your co-religionists or maybe we will make the Dawkins movement look like a bunch of Nazis, either way. You lose.
Woo-hoo! More traffic! Maybe I’ll be able to cover my daughter’s tuition payments this term, after all!
More likely, a few thugs and rednecks will straggle over and leave a few illiterate comments, but be prepared. I’ll also be ready. One of the nice things about our recent software update is one-click comment deletion.
The other day, I pointed out that tasteless web design is a hallmark of crazy web sites, and used this Overcompensating comic to illustrate it…and you all scurried over to Timecube to see one of the best examples on the web.
I got this email today.
Dear Mr. Meyers,
Putting aside any offensive criticism of our website on your web page at http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/contact.php, we found many of the comments extremely humorous, even though at our expense.
We comment on your page at http://lfnexus.com/scumbagwebsites.htm.
Thank you for the good laugh!
Oh, yes, you can share this email with anyone you wish!
PS: There is method in our madness.
Cordially,
Dr. Michael Bisconti
President
The L. F. Nexus
They got the url of my “offensive criticism” wrong: it’s at an article called “How can you tell when you’re a kook?” I think he shows all the signs.
Here’s what’s really funny. I originally laughed at a whole series of insane arguments he made against evolution, homosexuality, and women, and look at what he considers the most offensive thing I said, that warrants rating me as a “medium scumbag”:
This website incorrectly reported that we believe that Gay “activity” can be sinless. However, this was due to an editorial problem on one of our web pages, which has since been corrected.
I guess my sin was that I accurately reported on a comment that was less than damning of homosexuality.
But now, you must see this: their updated website. Behold, and tremble in fear. This is getting up there pretty darned near Time Cube territory. It may get even better, since up near the top they prominently mention that they have a new site under construction by WebPsyops, Inc.. Yeah, that’s who we all ought to turn to for our professional web design.
Fans of classic SF will be grieved to learn that both Patrick McGoohan, AKA The Prisoner, and Ricardo Montalban, AKA Khan Noonien Singh, will now only be accessible on DVD in the movie room of your local SF convention and on late night television.
We want information. Did Montalban quote Moby Dick on his deathbed?
People are telling me that my blog entries are getting sprinkled with creationist ads in the RSS feeds, like this:
Heh. I think it’s great. This is an old and familiar game that has been played for years, where creationists buy up lots and lots of ad placement on searches for topics in evolutionary biology, and I think they should continue to throw their money down that sinkhole. It seems like an entirely ineffective tactic, to try and dun people who are already willing to look at the evidence with appeals to their dogma.
Shall I start taking out ads in the local church bulletins, perhaps?
The intelligent design creationists are jubilant — a paper has been published that shows that organisms were front-loaded with genes for future function! It describes “‘latent’ or ‘preexistent’ evolutionary potential” in our history, they say.
One small problem. The paper says nothing of the kind. It does mention latent potential, but it means something entirely different from something that is ‘front-loaded’, which is a sneaky little elision on the part of the creationists. There isn’t even the faintest whiff of a teleological proposal in the paper at all, which makes me wonder if they even read it, or if, as seems more likely, they’re simply incapable of comprehending the scientific literature.
So let’s take a look at what the paper is actually about, and you’ll see that it in no way supports the self-serving cheering of the creationists.
