It’s easy. Look at all the students who think the cure for social problems is praying for 40 days.
Ah, maybe we shouldn’t pick on ’em too much. It’s cruel to taunt the handicapped.
(UM students and alumni should feel free to defend the honor of their school in this thread.)
Hey, you all must know Possummomma (aka, Atheist in a mini van) — she’s got a great blog, she’s an outspoken, positive atheist, and she’s one of those excellent representatives of atheist family values. She’s not doing well right now, and is struggling with lupus. Berlzebub is organizing donations to help her out, so if you’ve got a little bit to spare, please do contribute to a member of our godless community.
I’d be surprised if any of you knew who Louis Savain is — he’s a weird little crackpot that I stomped on hard all of 3½ years ago. He claims that the Bible is actually a complete and accurate technical description of the neurological workings of the human brain. It was one of the more memorably loony ideas I’ve seen come out of religious derangement.
Well, Louis is back. Not here, definitely — a comment from him here would probably fuel one of those thousand-comment atrocities where everyone took turns going stabbity-stab-stab with the crazy newbie — but he is plaguing Stranger Fruit with extravagant claims and crackpot denouncements of the Scientific Establishment. He also doesn’t like peer review and haunts Uncommon Descent. And look! He plans to build a Christian AI using the Book of Revelation as a blueprint!
I’m at a loss for words. I’m trying to imagine what a Christian AI would be like, and all I get are images of diadems and whirling spheres and seven-headed whores or something.
A lab at the University of Minnesota has done something cool: they’ve grown a functioning heart from stem cells. The problem with building complex organs in a lab is that their normal construction required an elaborate context in the developing embryo, something that is impossible to replicate, short of just growing the whole embryo. The Doris Taylor lab did something very clever: they took an adult rat or rabbit heart and stripped it of its cells, leaving behind a scaffold of nonliving connective tissue. Then they recellularized it with stem cells, and they differentiated appropriately to make a new, beating heart.
They’ve got a long way to go yet — the resynthesized hearts only beat with 2% of the strength of the normal adult heart — but it’s a good start.
You can watch a video describing the work. Warning: it does show one dead rat and a guy with a knife, and there are pulsing pink blobs of hearts in glass chambers, so it may not be for everyone.
The always perspicacious Chris Clarke is talking about us, in a post where he talks about the pleasures and perils of managing comments on a blog.
I’d be lying if I said I never appreciated a good bar brawl of a comment thread. And some blogs make the free-for-alls work: Pharyngula comes to mind as an example of a wonderful, worthwhile blog with a laissez-faire comment policy. But few blogs have that winning Pharyngular combination of high traffic, sharp focus, distinct blogger personality, and devoted constructive regulars. The chance of a typical low-to-mid-traffic blog ripening into another Pharyngula is, as the blog world matures, decreasing.
He’s got it right — managing comments is tricky stuff, and there are the issues of setting the tone, of culling the more egregious violators, of keeping the place from descending into random madness. Probably the best example of a blog pulling off the delicate balancing act of of getting a convivial and smart continuing conversation going is Making Light; I think Pharyngula has a fine comments section that at least aspires to that level, less the “convivial” part. Chris accurately describes the situation here as a laissez-faire free-for-all.
You really should read this Senator Charles Grassley’s investigation into megachurches. It’s about time someone pulled down these big-time scams.
Nearly 2,000 years later, some who claim to speak in Jesus’ name are taking a different view. Consider Bishop Eddie Long, who pastors a megachurch in Lithonia, Ga. With a salary approaching $1 million a year and a nine-bathroom mansion situated on 20 acres, Long’s choice of vehicles reflects his opulent lifestyle: He drives a $350,000 Bentley.
Far from casting out money changers, Long is likely to join them. In a 2005 profile in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, he defended his high-flying ways, insisting, “I pastor a multimillion dollar congregation. You’ve got to put me on a different scale than the little black preacher sitting over there that’s supposed to be just getting by because the people are suffering.”
These charlatans tend to hide behind the first amendment and claim that their congregations have a right to worship as they please (which generally seems to mean throwing money to the pastor at his bidding). As the article makes clear, Grassley isn’t interested in challenging them on constitutional issues: he’s investigation financial fraud, not doctrine.
That sounds fair to me. Churches ought to repay their tax exemption by being required to provide full, open, public disclosure of all of their finances.
Remember the creationist trying to raise money by selling off his mastodon skull? Now we know why he is trying to get money fast. He got into a nasty, mud-slinging lawsuit with a fellow Christian creationist over ownership of another fossil. The wonderful news: if he doesn’t get enough cash from the sale of the skull, he may have to close his museum.
Man, you people sure jumped hard on that poor Canadian who thought the title of Darwin’s book was sufficient to damn it. Now he has replied with another post in which he demonstrates his stupidity. He really should stop. He has put up a long list of “ironic” claims that show he also doesn’t know what irony is — here’s part.
3)Irony is being accused of not reading the atheist bible (and even being told I have “no excuse”) when I’m actually a couple of days into this.
4)Even greater irony is that I can probably guess on one hand, probably even less, how many of these accusers have read my Bible — and mine’s been completed for almost 2000 years!
5)Even greater irony is that I might or might not need my other hand to count how many of the above-mentioned have read their own bible…
How clueless can you get? There is no atheist bible, and the Origin certainly wouldn’t be it if there were; his bogus criticism was specifically of the title of the book, and reading the NAS booklet on evolution is irrelevant to that point. He’s got a lot to learn, too, if he thinks atheists haven’t read “his” Bible, since many of us came to atheism precisely because we were unimpressed with the content of that book. Somebody else will have to break the sad news to the poor fellow that the Bible wasn’t completed at the time of Jesus, but is a pastiche put together many centuries later…and that there were multiple versions of the Bible before they settled on the particular chapters now in the canonical version.
I’m sure a fair number of us here have read the Origin, and it is a darned good book, but it is not required reading anymore, and it is greatly out of date.
Answers in Genesis is starting a fake science journal. Now you can actually read the first issue, which contains a grand total of two articles. One claims that granite can form very, very quickly, therefore the earth could be young (as if that is the only reason we can see that the earth is far older than 6000 years old). The second tries to puzzle out where the bacteria fit into the six-day creation account — it’s quite an exercise in absurdist reasoning, since bacteria weren’t even imagined in biblical times.
Not recommended, unless you’re a masochist.
The new Minnesota Atheists radio show was very good — they’re going to have a hard time topping getting a heavy-hitter like Richard Dawkins next week (well, maybe not: next week they’re talking about sex), but they’ve clearly got no shortage of material to talk about. My segment was cut a bit short, but it was my own fault — my usual wordy exposition needs refinement.
Dawkins was great, and give a clearer explanation of Sam Harris’s point about not calling ourselves atheists than Harris has; he also talked about his experience with the movie, Expelled.
If you missed it, it will be available as a podcast on the Minnesota Atheists site. I noticed a lot of foreigners, people from California, of all places, calling in — so presumably many of you can catch the program regularly.
