I’d better go home and put on my “Welcome Squid Overlords” t-shirt—someone has caught an octopus…in the Ohio River.
Unfortunately, this is almost certainly a case of some bastard bringing a cephalopod home, allowing it to die, and throwing it out like a piece of garbage. When the cephalopod overlords do show up, I hope they take care of him/her first.
Since there was a comment asking about that strange “PYGMIES + DWARFS” exclamation we sometimes get in these parts, I thought I’d bring over all the articles from the old site, just to have them here and explain some of the inside baseball lingo. So here’s the collection:
“PYGMIES + DWARFS” is simple—it’s a wonderfully illogical non sequitur. How do we know that there were biblical giants? Because there are very short people nowadays. It’s a representative example of a whole mindset, where any random observation is marshaled by an unconscious chain of absurdist logic to prop up an unlikely claim. It’s not just Pinkoski that does this, there’s also a reek of the same silliness to Francis Collins, for instance: seeing a three-part waterfall and leaping to the conclusion that the Christian trinity is a universal truth is a perfect example of “PYGMIES + DWARFS” logic.
One other thing. I think I’ve been rather mean to poor Pinkoski, publicly and repeatedly exposing his foolishness like this. I suspect from my few interactions with him that he is a decent human being, lives a normal life, and has a bit of talent. Don’t forget that, inane as his ideas are, he’s still a person who has every right to enjoy the privileges of his life and that he has done nothing criminal.
What we have to do, though, is criticize these idiotic ideas as harshly as possible. They’re wrong, they’re insane, and Pinkoski is part of a whole network of people whose goal is to disseminate ideologically-driven lies as far as possible, and Pinkoski’s role in this is to write comic books that appeal to kids to corrupt them as early as possible. Pinkoski might be a nice guy on a personal level, but we can’t afford to pull punches when such flaming gobshite is presented to the public.
It’s been a little while since I last brought up Pinkoski, so maybe you can handle another dollop. When I got his creationism comic book, I also picked up another, titled “Christian SF”, which promised to be the first in a series of comics containing science fiction stories with Christian themes.
Oh, it is bad.
Ignoring the Christian content completely, it is a major rip-off. It contains all of two stories, each given only 3 or four pages, which barely set up the premise and then stop cold, telling you to buy Christian SF #2 to find out what happens.
The first is titled “Who is the model citizen”, and consists of a few pages of exposition about terrorist attacks on the US requiring new weapons, and then the unveiling of a humanoid robot. That’s it.
The second, “The aliens”, sets the stage with some alien worlds where everyone is perfect and happy and worships God, when another alien shows up and announces that there has been a “great non-friendliness among the beings that serve the great I AM”, and that part of the Milky Way has been declared off-limits. Again, it just ends there.
As science fiction and as story telling, this thing just plain sucks. It’s got a few pages of the beginnings of some very lame stories, and everything in between is evangelical Christian babbling…and that’s where you’ll find the real science fiction. I haven’t seen such bizarre theology since I caught a glimpse of premillennial dispensationalism—what is it about the crazed Christian extremists that they can simultaneously declare their belief in literal biblical fundamentalism while indulging in the most fantastic distortions of the book itself?
For instance, here’s how Pinkoski explains the Christian Trinity.
John Price sent me some scans from another Pinkoski masterpiece, titled Discovered: The True! Genesis Story of Creation. A Presentation of Ron Wyatt’s Material. It’s clear that Pinkoski has completely swallowed all of Ron Wyatt’s pseudo-archaeological hokum—Wyatt was an outrageous fraud, and even devout Christians and creationists back away from him.
Can you stomach a little more Jim Pinkoski? He’s ranting in the comments most amusingly.
You guys LIE about Java man, you LIE about Lucy, you LIE about the horse ancestary chart, you LIE about fetuses mimicking evolution stages, you LIE about upright trees sticking through different geology layers, you LIE when you ignore the arguments about the earth’s magnetic field, you LIE when you respond to the rotation of the moon orbiting the earth — SO WHY SHOULD I EVER CONCLUDE THAT ANY OF YOU ARE ACTUALLY “RIGHT” ABOUT ANYTHING? All I see is repeated pathological LYING done by evolutionists in the evolution vs. poor old Kent Hovind’s Creationism!
I’ve been having some fun with a bizarrely didactic creationist comic book by one Jim Pinkoski that purports to explain all the flaws in evolutionary biology. What it really is is the most astounding collection of bad creationist arguments I’ve ever seen gathered in one place. I’ve been trying to slog through rebuttals, but unfortunately, it’s like every word and phrase is so far off kilter that it’s going to take me forever to get through it. One putative “problem” that I’ve already dealt with is that we only use 10% of our brains, and so scientists are stupid and untrustworthy, but here’s another one: evolution requires that everything be extraordinarily brilliant. Or in comic book speak,
Evolutionists are saying that “teeny-tiny” life forms somehow willed themselves to “evolve,” which means that we must credit
MICROBES
with being smarter than Albert Einstein!!!
I promised to show you some more of Pinkoski’s A Creationist’s View of Dinosaurs and the Theory of Evolution, so here we go.
Pinkoski’s book is actually reasonably representative of the majority opinion held by creationists; the arguments in this book aren’t what you see openly presented by most of the Intelligent Design creationists, but do reflect what you’ll see in most of your small town church meetings and your big city mega-church revivals. Informed Christians are, of course, a bit embarrassed by the foolishness and don’t endorse this stuff, but unfortunately the kind of nonsense peddled by Gish and Hovind and Ham and Pinkoski is exactly what drives the creationist activists to get out and poison our public schools.
Which brings up a problem…if these are the people we want to persuade, we face a near-impossible task. Pinkoski’s book is 56 pages long, and every page contains a shocking array of falsehoods and outright stupid crap. There’s no point in pussy-footing around it; creationism in all of its forms is nothing but ignorance, misconceptions, dishonesty, credulity, and sloppy logic. I don’t think it helps the cause of reason to be gentle with fools, nor should we be trying to persuade creationist activists—all we can do is dissuade, by showing others the bankruptcy of their position.
And wow, but is A Creationist’s View of Dinosaurs and the Theory of Evolution an example of a foolish position.
How nice—having an open thread overnight provided me with some entertaining reading this morning!
Henrik Aasted Sørensen mentioned this fascinating description of a creationist comic book—it has an account of evil angels leading the dinosaurs on a last-minute assault on Noah’s Ark, and announces that ‘THIS EVENT IS NOT A FABLE AND IS NOT A “MYTH”…IT IS VERIFIABLE SCIENTIFIC FACT!‘ It looks like a fun story, but what might the evidence for this be?
Penguins on the freeway—that must have been an interesting sight. A truck overturned in Texas, releasing the animals, and several were taken out by passing cars.
The good news is that there was also an octopus in the truck, and it came through the accident unharmed. I’d kind of like to know the details of that one.
CNN is also reporting some roadkill in Connecticut. I never cared for the sanctimonious git so I’m less concerned about that one.
Here’s an idea: a young woman takes a picture of herself every day, and assembles it into a movie. It’s off to an interesting start, but she’s at a developmental stage where the changes aren’t happening very rapidly, so she pretty much looks the same at the beginning as at the end.
