Jon Swift asked for various blogs to submit a “best of” post for his end-of-year list, and it’s a clever way to get an idea of a blog’s content and introduce yourself to some interesting blogs. My entry is a science post, but even that one consigns me to an eternity in hell.
Denyse O’Leary is a very silly person, but you all knew that. One of her latest entries on her silly Design of Life blog, which purports to be promoting Dembski’s silly book of the same name, is treading old ground. She’s claiming that convergence is common, and that marsupial lions and wolves and squirrels are evidence of some kind of natural destiny. She’s getting all of this from Michael Denton, but the similarities are in ecological niches (sometimes, not even that) and in the names, and contrary to Denton, the similarities are only superficial.
Laelaps has the details on those convergent marsupials. The differences are very easy to spot, especially when you’ve got an expert guide with a battery of photos.
When I read this tale of woe, I have to admit I had a hard time feeling much sympathy for the victim.
The message flickered into Cindy Fleenor’s living room each night: Be faithful in how you live and how you give, the television preachers said, and God will shower you with material riches.
And so the 53-year-old accountant from the Tampa, Florida, area pledged $500 a year to Joyce Meyer, the evangelist whose frank talk about recovering from childhood sexual abuse was so inspirational. She wrote checks to flamboyant faith healer Benny Hinn and a local preacher-made-good, Paula White.
Only the blessings didn’t come. Fleenor ended up borrowing money from friends and payday loan companies just to buy groceries. At first she believed the explanation given on television: Her faith wasn’t strong enough.
But then again, she was probably brought up to trust her preacher, and she was promised all sorts of amazing things like immortality and paradise, and no one ever raised a question about those promises — and she was probably also told that to doubt was a sin. Who do you blame for deeply inculcated gullibility?
The story does go on to say that Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa (and a Republican! Hallelujah, it’s a miracle!) is investigating a half dozen of these holy parasites, including the odious Benny Hinn, and there is the threat of removing their tax exempt status. There is also the usual collection of theologians making excuses, claiming that this is not True™ Christianity.
Bunk. This is the heart of all religions: make the priesthood fat and happy by extorting money from the sheep with threats of hellfire and promises of paradise, promises that they never have to fulfill. If you’re going to go after Hinn and Copeland and Roberts, you have to go after every little preacher who passes the collection plate on Sunday — they’re all in the same game. The only difference is that the promoters of the prosperity gospel make promises that can be assessed. They broke the rule that the good stuff always has to be nebulous and untestable.
Scarcely do I mention Ann Coulter and my challenge to her fans, than one such fan shows up in the comments. You will not be surprised that this person didn’t even try to meet the challenge, which is to cite some specific paragraph in Coulter’s drecky book, Godless, that they considered to be making a solid scientific point. Here’s all he could cough up.
For all of you that buy into the evolution answer for where we come from, I have the following question; How is it that science cannot demonstrate or replicate species change yet we have so many species. Please dont mention finches either. Inspite of all the documented changes, every one of them is still a bird. Chromosomes are still the same number. Although a dog could possibly mate with a cat, science knows that it is not possible for conception to occur. So I am at a loss as to how we have so many different species.
So much of the evolution evidence has been proven to be a fraud. Admittedly, some of it is not….but one can hardly adopt evolution as fact on evidence that is merely suggestive.
All documented cases that I am privvy to fail to even demonstrate how an observed change in a species appearance was an improvement on its previous form. Based on that, I feel that mutations are freak events that always produce an inferior model. Mutation don’t ever produce a new species.
I am not ready to embrace evolution as science. If you do accept it as fact, then you do so on faith. Its safe to say that your religeon is evolution.
An unwillingness to even consider intelligent design is not sufficient reason to promote a theory to the level of factual science.
He’s almost as ignorant as Ann Coulter.
Let’s take it apart piece by piece, shall we?
A 2 year old girl picks up a screwdriver, runs around, falls, and…
She’s fine now, fortunately — it somehow missed her brain. The father calls this event a “Christmas miracle.”
That God fella. He’s such a card, poking little girls in the head with screwdrivers.
Well, they’ve got one Republican and one Democratic congressman to agree to co-chair a presidential debate on science, which is good news. The framework for the debate is coming together…now all they need is some debaters.
This is no way to run a country.
Yeah, they’re already pouring in: everyone has a list of the best or worst of 2007. Most I couldn’t care less about, but the Beast’s 50 most loathsome people in America is at least primo grade-A disgust.
The winners in this year’s list weren’t just predictable, they were inevitable.
Peter Irons has again been having way too much fun with creationist shenanigans. Irons, you may recall, is a hot shot west coast lawyer who had a grand time with the Pivar situation, and has lately been nudging Dembski on the case of his misuse of the Harvard/XVIVO animation. Would you believe that Bill Dembski went crying to his lawyer because Irons was making him miserable?
The email exchange is below the fold. John Gilmore is the St Paul lawyer who defended Dembski in the recent Baylor flap, and he does seem to have rather more sense than his client.
And it is so apparent on his new blog. The only reason I’ll link to it is 1) it’s always useful to highlight the awesome inanity of a YEC/ID blog, and 2) to correct a bizarre claim: “Myers is the USA’s leading voice for atheism.” All that follows is equally wrong and foolish.
