Chuck Norris Facts

Remember those silly Chuck Norris Facts? Ever wonder what Chuck Norris thinks of them (well, actually, I didn’t…so don’t feel bad if you didn’t care)? It’s sad to see that we had to find out, since all we learn is that Norris is as dumb as a brick.

Chuck Norris actually responds to the jokes—in an article on World Nut Daily, of all places. Here’s one example.

Alleged Chuck Norris Fact: “There is no theory of evolution. Just a list of creatures Chuck Norris has allowed to live.”
It’s funny. It’s cute. But here’s what I really think about the theory of evolution: It’s not real. It is not the way we got here. In fact, the life you see on this planet is really just a list of creatures God has allowed to live.
We are not creations of random chance. We are not accidents. There is a God, a Creator, who made you and me. We were made in His image, which separates us from all other creatures.

By the way, without him, I don’t have any power. But with Him, the Bible tells me, I really can do all things – and so can you.

Well. I guess that’ll teach me…I learned otherwise by reading the work of scholars and scientists, when I should have been paying more attention to men whose reputation is built on their ability to kick people in the face. Since Chuck Norris disagrees with all those “facts” that consist of hyperbolic exaggerations of his machismo, I think we need to start accumulating a new list of more accurate Chuck Norris Facts. Here, I’ll start.

  • Chuck Norris’s skull is so dense, the tidal effects from his cranium kill you before his head-butt hits you.

  • Chuck Norris sneers at neurologists—it takes a team of geologists to appreciate the pace of his thoughts.

  • When Chuck Norris furrows his brow, he’s not thinking—he’s knuckling his third fist.

Does anyone else find it ironic that a spokesman for a religion of love is a muscleman who beats people up in movies? What next…will Rambo speak out for Jesus?

A little pessimism about Extraterrestrial Intelligence

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Warren sent me link from The Indigestible, wondering if I was interested in these kinds of speculative questions about the existence of alien life. Why, yes I am…and even wrote something along the same lines a few years ago, coming to the same conclusions: I think intelligent extraterrestrials are unlikely.

My reasons are below the fold. Of course, I will retract my opinion immediately when Klaatu lands.

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Action! Cue the cartoon squid!

Here’s an interesting collection of scans from a defunct comic book called Action. It’s rather grisly—most of the action seems to involve people being bloodily devoured by marine organisms—so don’t look if you’d rather not see people getting pulped in a shark’s jaws. This comic book was apparently shut down because of the outcry over the violence, but I see another reason:

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Badly drawn squid, completely false information about their eating habits, and poor grammar (“liquidises”? Don’t they know that the plural of squid is squid?)—clearly, the book’s audience turned away from it in contempt for their lack of accuracy.

(In case you’re wondering, and don’t want to look…I’m sorry to say that yes, it pecks a hole in poor Pat’s stomach and dissolves away his internal organs. And then it gets in a fight with a Great White Shark!)

(And before anyone sends me more links to that video of an octopus vs. a shark, I’ve seen it, and I know the octopus wins. In this comic, though, the shark is the title character, so I think he wins.)

Extreme Evangelism?

Did anyone else get this spam from “Extreme Evangelism”, or am I just special?

What if I told you that you could hold an event for your community and that 90% of the people who attended would be unsaved. What if I then told you that in most communities at least 1000 people would show up. And what if during that event on average 100 people would give their heart to Jesus??? How long does it take your church to get 100 people saved? Think of the church growth possibilities! Its an outdoor event so even churches without large facilities can participate! Now what if I were to tell you that our ministry will come in and partner with you, bringing in the stage, the rides, all the equipment, and the presentation that will bring all those souls into the kingdom! Just this summer we did an outreach where over 6000 people attended and over 600 gave their heart to Jesus! There were so many salvations that the hosting church had to scramble to find ways to counsel all those who made a decisions for Christ!! What a problem to have! If you want to host this event and see more salvations than you can handle please join our group to find out more.

Now I’m really curious. What kind of lies do they tell to get all those “unsaved” to show up? Should I really believe that they could come into my town, that most of the people who would come to see them would be us heathens, and they’d get a 10% conversion rate?

It does seem a little fishy that they’d say 90% of the attendees are unsaved, and then proudly announce that 10% of the attendees “give their heart to Jesus”…maybe their conversion rate is actually 0%.

A little more on Eagleton

I’ve seen an email that cites that crappy Eagleton review of The God Delusion that seems to think this quote is somehow a significant rebuttal of the book, rather than an indictment of the reviewer’s ability to comprehend the book without inserting his own biases against atheism into it.

Such is Dawkins’s unruffled scientific impartiality that in a book of almost four hundred pages, he can scarcely bring himself to concede that a single human benefit has flowed from religious faith, a view which is as a priori improbable as it is empirically false. The countless millions who have devoted their lives selflessly to the service of others in the name of Christ or Buddha or Allah are wiped from human history—and this by a self-appointed crusader against bigotry.

If you actually open The God Delusion to pages 340-345 and read, you will find a substantial section in which Dawkins defends the Bible as a literary and historical source, deplores the lack of knowledge of the book by its most ardent defenders, and even argues that religious rituals like those for marriages and funerals are a good thing. It begins this way:

I must admit that even I am a little taken aback at the biblical ignorance commonly displayed by people educated in more recent decades than I was. Or maybe it isn’t a decade thing. As long ago as 1954, according to Robert Hinde in his thoughtful book Why Gods Persist, a Gallup poll in the United States of America found the following. Three-quarters of Catholics and Protestants could not name a single Old Testament prophet. More than two-thirds didn’t know who preached the Sermon on the Mount. A substantial number thought that Moses was one of Jesus’s twelve apostles. That, to repeat, was in the United States, which is dramatically more religious than other parts of the developed world.

The King James Bible of 1611 — the Authorized Version — in English includes passages of outstanding literary merit in its own right, for example the Song of Songs, and the sublime Ecclesiastes (which I am told is pretty good in the Hebrew too). But the main reason the Bible needs to be part of our education is that it is a major source book for literary culture.

I will speak for Dawkins when I say that the the real bigotry and the crime against history is when the religious take acts of human selflessness and credit them to a nonexistent phantasm rather than their true source…people. I think it’s particularly galling when those paragons of virtue, the Christians who claim their goodness devolves from their religion, in general have such a deficient knowledge of their purported source of morality. Perhaps the reason Christians are such bad examples is that they don’t know their religion as well as we atheists do?

Dissecting embryos from half a billion years ago

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There is a treasure trove in China: the well-preserved phosphatized embryos of the Doushantuo formation, a sampling of the developmental events in ancient metazoans between 551 and 635 million years ago. These are splendid specimens that give us a peek at some awesomely fragile organisms, and modern technology helps by giving us new tools, like x-ray computed tomography (CT), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), thin-section petrography, synchrotron X-ray tomographic microscopy (SRXTM), and computer-aided visualization, that allow us to dig into the fine detail inside these delicate specimens and display and manipulate the data. A new paper in Science describes a survey of a large collection of these embryos, probed with these new techniques, and rendered for our viewing pleasure…that is, we’ve got pretty pictures!

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