ABC thinks we’re all morons

Who knows? Maybe they’re right. They’re planning a program for “Nightline” (which, I seem to recall, at least used to be a pretty good news program) which will probably get them some decent ratings.

They’re going to have a debate on the existence of Satan.

Yeah, you heard that right…on a so-called news program. But it gets worse! They have 4 people coming on to yell at each other.

On the “Satan exists!” side, they have Pastor Mark Driscoll, head of a megachurch in Seattle, and Annie Lobert, former prostitute and founder of a group called Hookers for Jesus. Sensationalism is already rearing its gaudy head, you can tell.

Even worse, the “Satan does not exist!” side is a joke. It consists of Bishop Carlton Pearson, who doesn’t accept the doctrine of hell but is a Christian, and…unbelievably…Deepak Chopra. Not an atheist or skeptic among them, just hardcore believers in woo vs. fluffy believers in woo.

Don’t tune in. It will be a complete waste of time.

This is not news

The media are all agog at the fact that the Creation “Museum” has an exhibit on natural selection. Whoop-te-doo, I say — anybody who has been following creationism at all knows that they happily trot out this claim all the time. We’ve got all kinds of concrete examples of observed evolutionary change in lizards and insects and birds and fish, so their argument has always been that they accept a small amount of change, but there are magical limits.

A new exhibit at the Answers in Genesis Creation Museum argues that natural selection — Darwin’s explanation for how species develop new traits over time — can coexist with the creationist assertion that all living things were created by God just a few thousand years ago.

“We wanted to show people that creationists believe in natural selection,” said Ken Ham, founder of the Christian ministry Answers in Genesis and frequent Darwin critic.

The exhibit might seem peculiar to many who have watched the decades-long battle between evolution scientists and creationists, who take the Bible’s Genesis account as literal truth.

No, it isn’t. This is old stuff and an elementary distortion of evolutionary theory that the creationists have been using for years. It’s the same as their old distinction between microevolution, which they say they accept while not understanding what it is, and macroevolution, which they say they reject while in a similar state of blind ignorance.

The newspapers are getting played for a chump. They even asked Eugenie Scott’s opinion of this “development”, and she flat out told them it was old news.

But the idea that creationists can accept natural selection “isn’t really new in creationism, though it’s interesting that Answers in Genesis would have an exhibit on it,” said Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education in Oakland, Calif.

It’s interesting that they have an exhibit in that we would like to see how they’ve mangled good science this time.

Gary Goodyear “believes” in “evolution”

The Canadian science minister who first refused to answer a question about his support for religion because it was querying his personal religion has now flip-flopped and said that he does accept evolution. Only it’s a very twisted version of evolution. What does it mean when he says something like this?

We are evolving every year, every decade. That’s a fact, whether it is to the intensity of the sun, whether it is to, as a chiropractor, walking on cement versus anything else, whether it is running shoes or high heels, of course we are evolving to our environment. But that’s not relevant and that is why I refused to answer the question. The interview was about our science and tech strategy, which is strong.

I’ll tell you what it means: it doesn’t matter whether he believes in any kind of evolution (and trust me, that explanation doesn’t touch the subject), because we can tell right away that the man is an incompetent moron who is going to flush Canadian science down the tube.

I’ve got irony poisoning!

The Vatican astronomer made some strong comments against creationism…but I find them bizarre.

Brother Consolmagno, who works in a Vatican observatory in Arizona and as curator of the Vatican meteorite collection in Italy, said a “destructive myth” had developed in modern society that religion and science were competing ideologies.

He described creationism, whose supporters want it taught in schools alongside evolution, as a “kind of paganism” because it harked back to the days of “nature gods” who were responsible for natural events.

Wait…did a priest of one weird cult full of bizarre ideas just claim that another weird cult was full of bizarre ideas? He’s right, of course, but he seems to have a blind spot for his own superstitions.

This, unfortunately, is complete bullshit:

“Religion needs science to keep it away from superstition and keep it close to reality, to protect it from creationism, which at the end of the day is a kind of paganism – it’s turning God into a nature god. And science needs religion in order to have a conscience, to know that, just because something is possible, it may not be a good thing to do.”

His religion is a superstition, and I don’t believe for a moment that he wants science to keep it close to reality — if that were true, he’d be chucking out all those myths about triune gods, ritual cannibalism, magical transformations of crackers into holy meat, virgin births, miracles, yadda yadda yadda.

The tripe that religion provides a conscience is just a cliche…and one that is completely false. We’ve seen just in this past week that the Catholic church would rather that 9 year old girls die in childbirth, and that Africans should eschew protection from sexually transmitted disease in order to better follow the advice of ancient celibates.

If he wants to talk credibly about morality and conscience, first thing he needs to do is dump the evil archaic religion.

A testimonial

Not all of my email consists of metaphorical daggers hurled my way. I actually get a fair amount of praise and comments about how I’ve won people over to the cause of atheism — I just tend not to post those, because of my awesome modesty and because you all know this stuff, anyway. This one is interesting because I didn’t convince the fellow to be an atheist, but instead made him think…which is what we’re all after, anyway.

[Read more…]

Survivor: Pharyngula! Day Three.

Well, gang, the voting is closed on our first Survivor event. I would never have expected such a dramatic turn-around. From out of nowhere, John Kwok surged out of fifth place in the field — I had written him off as a bad bet — to rally astonishingly by doing one simple thing: commenting. He clobbered Pete Rooke and Simon, even, just by writing one threat (to sic his facebook friends on me), and doing his usual irritating name-dropping nonsense. He showed real heart in this race, and I’m sure that if he just continues to babble, he will eventually win his place in the fabulous Pharyngula dungeon.

In the end, though, he could not stop the juggernaut. One person stood out as a universal target for opprobrium by virtue of her homophobia and her cheerfully evil views. She was described as the Dolores Umbridge of Pharyngula. And for that reason, Barb has been found unfit, and is cast into the dungeon for all time.

Now, on Day Three of Survivor: Pharyngula!, you get to vote on who you’d next like to evict. You may notice some changes in the list.

Africangenesis
Barb
Facilis
John Kwok
Piltdown Man
Pete Rooke
Silver Fox
Simon

A few people on the first list who garnered little enthusiasm have been dropped. On the other hand, a few have been added. It’s a remarkable thing: these threads represent an opportunity for readers to vent their spleens over some of the more obnoxious commenters here, and thus represent a dangerous circumstance for the pesky little goblins — you’d think, if they had an sense at all, that they’d realize this is the time they should be lying low, keeping as quiet as possible. But no! I guess if they had any brains in the first place, they wouldn’t be quite as annoying. Maybe if I’d called this Shark Week: Pharyngula!, they’d have realized that jumping into a well-chummed lagoon full of vicious beasts champing their razor-toothed jaws was not a good idea.

Now vote by leaving a comment here. Or, if you’d rather, you can always send the thread off in unusual directions — the last one seemed to be all about oral sex, lesbians, and bacon. I’ll tally the votes on Friday, if I can manage to pick them out of the non sequitur salad.

How about an immunity challenge for our contestants? Since the last runoff was characterized by an astonishing lack of self-awareness on the part of the victims candidates, we should test that. The challenge for the seven surviving candidates is to write a short comment, 200 words or less, that reveals that they actually understand why their attitudes and pattern of expression have so exasperated readers here, and explains what they will do to change their behavior in the future. This will be a tough one for this crowd, I’m sure. Let’s see if they can wake up enough to do some honest self-assessment.

They have until 1pm tomorrow to complete the immunity challenge, and then we’ll open those up to the crowd for honest evaluation.