A reminder: the Darwin Fish Contest closes early next week, and there are lots of good entries right now, so competition will be fierce. Send your entries in soon!
Don’t let these excellent carnivals distract you too much from expressing yourself artistically…or maybe something here will inspire you.
Of course this is also an open thread—talk about anything.
Now I’m just going to have to give up — I can’t top Ophelia, who just got a Jesus and Mo comic that references her. Maybe if I talked about epistemology more…
This simpering sycophant to John A. Davison has been spamming the site recently, yammering away to get everyone’s attention despite the fact that he has been banned. Please do not reply to V.Martin, or anyone who is babbling about Davison — their posts will be deleted as soon as I notice them. This particular irritating fool has not only been morphing his username to get past my filters, but has at least once imitated a regular here, a particularly obnoxious and contemptible strategem that guarantees that I won’t ever be lifting the ban.
When you see a car labeled with creationist slogans parked, don’t you expect to see a dozen guys with floppy shoes and big red rubber noses pop out of it?
(I think the fellow in this picture is mocking the car, so don’t laugh at him if you see him in public.)
Remember “The Lost Tomb of Jesus“?
You can forget it now. Even some of the pro-Jesus documentarians featured in the show are backpedalling away from it.
People who have seen your photo and know your name might notice you when you pick up two-dollar hookers in the seedy part of town.
Another useful hint: when said observers later mention this fact, it is not a convincing disavowal to state that you do not hang out in the red-light district “on a regular basis.”
(Hat tip to Zeno for providing this fabulous PSA. I note that Zeno is pseudonymous and does not have his picture on his blog.)
First the ideologues came for evolution, making it uncomfortable for teachers to teach it, even when it is not only legal, but mandated by state education standards. What will they suppress with indirect social pressure next?
How about those bits of history the fascists and the religious find objectionable?
Schools are dropping the Holocaust from history lessons to avoid offending Muslim pupils, a Government-backed study has revealed.
It found some teachers are reluctant to cover the atrocity for fear of upsetting students whose beliefs include Holocaust denial.
As I said in the previous post, this struggle in which we’re engaged is more than a fight against a few specific clowns — it’s for a broader ideal of striving towards a truth, against those who want to twist perception of reality to support short-sighted, selfish, and silly beliefs. It’s not just science, it’s history, politics, culture. If you side with the primacy of faith over reason in science, there is a long list of other virtues you will also be sacrificing on your altar.
Mike’s Weekly Skeptic Rant has a good rant on the subject.
Here is a criticism of evolutionary biology:
…it is also true that the theory of evolution is not a complete, scientifically proven theory … We cannot haul 10,000 generations into the laboratory.
If a Bill Dembski or a Michael Egnor or a Ken Ham had said this — and it is exactly the kind of thing they would say — we’d be throwing rotten fruit at them and mocking their ignorance of how science works. Nothing is proven, it’s all provisional, but we do have an incredible amount of evidence in support of biology. This fellow is also deeply wrong about what we can do in the lab, and is overlooking the fact that not all science is something you do on a bench. Those statements are the kind of destructive nonsense the Discovery Institute uses, propaganda sown explicitly to spread excessive doubt where we should have very little, so that their vapid and useless ‘alternative’ theory looks a little more attractive. That quote is a stupid statement that ought to be ripped apart on the evolution blogs.
We all have a request from Kurt Vonnegut.
I am, incidentally, Honorary President of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the late, great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in that totally functionless capacity. We had a memorial service for Isaac a few years back, and I spoke and said at one point, “Isaac is up in heaven now.” It was the funniest thing I could have said to an audience of humanists. I rolled them in the aisles. It was several minutes before order could be restored. And if I should ever die, God forbid, I hope you will say, “Kurt is up in heaven now.” That’s my favorite joke.
I think it is also only fair to give him Kilgore Trout’s epitaph: “We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane.”
Skatje beat me to it. Vonnegut is one of her favorite authors, after all.
