At least these people make freshman biology majors look like philosopher-kings

My readers are a cruel people. They send me links to the strangest things, including this wacky fundagelical rant, exposing me to the bubbling looniness simmering beneath the thin shell of rationality in this country, and making my brain hurt.

So much for the logic of religious atheism. Their problem is really that they don’t accept the doctrine of original sin or free will; they want to blame God for our sorrows. It really comes down to that. If there is a God, they think God should force us all to behave correctly, and if God won’t, then God must be evil, therefore they won’t believe in God under the rubric of plausible deniability.

Religious atheism? What’s that? This person seems to be incapable of understanding that atheists simply don’t believe in any gods, so it’s awfully silly to then claim that they’re upset because they want to place blame on a god. It isn’t just one infelicitous phrasing in a single paragraph, either—she goes on and on about how atheists are “denying human responsibility” and want to “blame God”.

Worse still, that’s the least crazy point in the article. It starts off with a tirade against the “morally insane” Jimmy Carter, that he’s not a good Christian and would fit in well with the Islamic extremists…and the Third Reich. I’m thinking the Zombie Hitler needs to join forces with some Zombie A-rab terrorists and a phantasmal “religious atheist” to cope with this level of lunacy.

Now, please, I’ve got grading to do…so much grading. So many papers. You people deal with the crazy talk, I shouldn’t be distracted.

Reason #10 to vote for Pharyngula

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The bad news: the shameless astronomer is gaining on us, and has closed within a hundred votes.

The good news: Deep Sea News has joined the scienceblogs stable! This is either a portent of the squid-fans victory, or a consolation prize that will make up for any loss.

Vote for Pharyngula (and remember, you can vote every day!). Unless you are incapable of being dazzled by carnivorous sponges.

Volaticotherium antiquus

This sad jumble of bones is all that remains of Volaticotherium antiquus, a small rat-sized mammal that was recently dug up in China. There are two particularly outstanding things about this creature.

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One is that browner layer in the rock: that isn’t an artifact, it’s a bit of soft tissue that was preserved, called a patagium. A patagium is a thin membrane stretched between the limbs, and is used for…flying! This animal probably lived much like a modern flying squirrel (although it is definitely not a squirrel), gliding from tree to tree.

The second surprise is the age. This is a Mesozoic mammal, from Chinese beds that are roughly dated to somewhere around the mid Jurassic to early Cretaceous—it was a contemporary of the dinosaurs. I’m tickled to imagine a diplodocid stretching up its long neck to strip the foliage from a tree branch, and this little guy squeaking angrily and leaping off to fly to the next tree.

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Now one more thing we need, but are extremely unlikely to find, is a Mesozoic moose.

Mang J, Hu Y, Wang Y, Wang X, Li C (2006) A Mesozoic gliding mammal from northeastern China. Nature 444:889-893.

Oh, well, that’s all right then

Here’s another article on that freaky Left Behind video game. The rationalizations for the ability to kill people violently in the game are fascinating.

Left Behind Games’ president, Jeffrey Frichner, says the game actually is
pacifist because players lose “spirit points” every time they gun down
nonbelievers rather than convert them. They can earn spirit points again by
having their character pray.

Isn’t the most wonderful version of pacifism ever? Go out, butcher a few people, engage in a warlike campaign…and as long as you beg an invisible man’s forgiveness afterwards, you can still call yourself a pacifist. With that kind of reasoning, Ted Haggard is a heterosexual, Bill Bennett is a cautious investor, and Ted Nugent is an environmentalist. No wonder Christianity is popular among hypocrites.

So the media aren’t all bad…

Since I was just mean to the British press, here’s a compensatory accolade: here’s a nice, sharp editorial from James Randerson.

ID was itself designed as a Trojan horse for creationism, with its origins in the Discovery Institute, a thinktank in Seattle whose stated aim is “to replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God”.

Even a conservative judge in Dover, Pennsylvania, saw through the sham last year when he heard a case brought by parents who objected to ID being taught in their school. “Intelligent design is a religious view, a mere re-labelling of creationism, and not a scientific theory,” he wrote in his judgment.

Let’s be honest: despite its scientific-sounding frills and baubles, ID is pure religion. It is a reincarnation of an old idea that Darwin dispensed with and it has no place in a science class.

Reason #9 to vote for Pharyngula

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O how desperate he has become. Phil is stripping to get votes now. I’m not going to go down that road (I’d be doomed for sure if I did), so here’s the deal. Vote for me and I’m going to expose my brain rather than my bod: I’ve got this great post on evolution of the vascular system I’ll put up later today if you good, smart people can keep the drooling libidinous minions of the Bad One at bay a little longer, and keep me in the lead. Otherwise, it’s internet memes/quizzes and photos of my cat’s litter box.

Vote for Pharyngula (and remember, you can vote every day!). Unless you hate science.

P.S. Comrade Bérubé insists that my re-education will take great strides forward if I encourage all to vote for him as the Best Educational Blog.

If they can’t get the details right, why trust them at all?

Is anyone else getting a “look how stupid Americans are” vibe from all the British coverage of Ken Ham’s creation ‘science’ museum? It’s another story from the European press that politely echoes Ham’s overblown claims for his grandiose edifice to ignorance, and mostly recycles the same old stuff we’ve heard over and over again. It really does seem to simply parrot whatever the Answers in Genesis con men say with complete credulity…for instance, I’ve seen this strange comment repeated multiple times in these kinds of stories.

Two-thirds of the US population lives within six hours’ drive of Cincinnati, but Mr Ham has bigger ambitions for tackling agnostics further afield.

Hold it. Think. Check your facts. Look at a map, and you’ll see that that domain outside of a circle with a radius of 300 miles includes everything west of Chicago, the entire urban Northeast, and most of the major cities of the South, such as Atlanta. It includes Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, etc., a populous region to be sure, but how can one argue that a small area that excludes California, Texas, New York, and Florida contains the bulk of the nation’s people? That’s an area of about 280,000 square miles in a country of 3,700,000 square miles—shouldn’t that make a reporter stop and think, especially when it is an area that does not include our regions of highest population density?

I’m beginning to feel a “look how stupid the BBC can be” vibe right now, myself. Does anyone know where this mysterious number comes from? Is it Ken Ham lying, or is it the Cincinnati Chamber of Commerce lying?