The last edition of the Never-Ending Thread has once again grown beyond reason, with no end in sight. At the same time, a thread that began with a sneer at creationists and grew to such proportions that it needed to expand to another thread has also bloated up to the point where it needs trimming.
So there I am, holding two tubes on the internet that are pulsing and spewing, ready to cut both off…and what is any scientist’s natural inclination in such circumstances? Why, to take the severed ends and suture them together and see what happens! That is this new thread, an anastomosis between two, count ’em, two old threads. I wonder…will it explode?
I must also confess to some curiosity about how Sven will cope with the fusion.
*Kaboom*
*walks in holding unlit stick of dynamite*
More like “squish…SPURT…spurt…spurt………spurt………………spurt………….sssssss”
Perhaps the patient will die on the operating table.
I like penguins. Especially the cute, little fairy penguins.
BTW, I finally bought Jerry Coyne’s book… “Why Evolution is True.” Really good, much better that Dawkin’s populist “wow, gosh, golly” approach in “The Greatest Show on Earth” which bored me to tears.
Mummy, hold me. I’m scared.
ha! I managed to get a comment in AFTER PZ closed the TSTKTS thread! Maybe I am divine, after all ;-)
anyway, responding to robocop’s claim that once can prove a negative, he links to an essay about formal logic.
except that this isn’t a question of formal logic, but one of empirical evidence. It is not possible to empirically find evidence for the non-existence of something; there is only lack of evidence, and as we know, “the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” (at least not conclusive evidence of absence, since complete absence of evidence for X in a thoroughly studied are does suggest that X probably doesn’t exist. But it’s indeed not proof that it doesn’t)
so, while it may be wrong to say that it is logically impossible to prove a negative, it is still empirically impossible.
If, as Robocop suggests, babies aren’t born atheist, how come they never seem to start believing in any gods other than those they’re exposed to through their education and culture? Surely if theism is innate, and there’s one true god, all babies would believe only in that one true god.
Of course, the alternative is that theism is innate and the one god who does exist creates the belief in newborn babies that false gods exist – actually, that does sound like par for the course when it comes to the piece-of-shit god of the Christians…
Remember, Robocop, unless you’ve sat down and disproved the existence of every god other than the one you happen to worship then your atheism towards them is identical to our atheism toward your god. However, if you have achieved this feat you may feel free to present your arguments for why the other gods don’t exist.
Let’s pick an easy one to start with – how about Vishnu?
Well, one thread was having a scholarly discussion about how Monty Python named all the animals, and the other thread has all the robots, so I suppose the merged result will be a case of move along, nothing here to see… Or perhaps a lot of slapping with a wet fish.
I think time just flowed backwards and, like, parallel universes merged or something. That, or they’re getting stingy with the comments around here. There used to be a time when people could make a lot of comments without worrying about quantum paradoxes or whatnot.
anyway, here’s the example used to prove that you can prove a negative:
I’m sure I’m not the only one who headdesked after reading that.
It would be a bit weird to argue that babies are born with any beliefs of any kind. That brains are wired in a particular way to make supernatural thinking more prone? Yes. But that’s a different matter.
Oh goody, now these threads will load on my work computer–just in time for the weekend. My home computer handles the old threads with ease.
Let the sophistry continue…
owww, my logic centre of my brain! Quick, call forth the ghost of Carl Sagan.
I don’t understand what that talk was about glory and knockdown arguments in the last thread. Also not sure why Robocop thinks Humpty Dumpty is an insult. Are tone troll Christians so incapable of ‘being mean’ that they can’t call someone a lackwit (Despite the willingness to deprive gay people of rights).
Also, Kel, that bit about uhhhhh
Atheism being just for Rebellion against Culture/Parents. Even CONSERVAPEDIA won’t advance that claim. Well, they will blow the dog whistle, so maybe they are making that claim while simultaneously not doing so… You decide!
“# Rebellion: Atheism stems from a deliberate choice to ignore the reality of God’s existence”
Note: The citation at the end of that sentence is to Romans. For disgracing lawyers everywhere, I want to punch all the blood out of Andy Schlafly.
OUCH! WHat’s the best way of removing keys (the sort you type with) from my forehead?
Seriously, someone advanced this “argument”? I hear clearer reasoning at the local bar at closing.
BS
Same as he did when we brought the panexperientialists to The ThreadTM or when you sent Sean Pitman (MD!) here, I’m sure.
It’s still The ThreadTM.
Boy, every missionary ever must feel like an idiot now.
Comment eaten by thread closure. Grmpf.
Alright, I am the Messiah…
– Brian
No, still not. :-) There’s no apostrophe here, the name is Mohs, not Moh.
While I am at it… that’s not language, that’s spelling :-)
The Mad Women of Pharyngula they call themselves.
Robocop argues for a different definition of atheism. He argues (I bet – have yet to check) that agnosticism, not atheism, is innate, and that most of you here are agnostics, not atheists.
Nah, they’re too busy fleeing from persecution – and probably feeling a bit annoyed that, unlike their predecessors hundreds of years ago, they don’t have the power of the sword and the gun to help educate the ignorant on how much Jesus loves them.
Just wanted to make that point with the Higgs boson clear because I often read people say, I don’t believe in God because there’s no physical evidence.
That’s just not sufficient.
More importantly, because God is void of everything that reason can grasp at. No coherent definition, no theoretical framework, no testable hypotheses, no predictions,… zilch, nothing. It’s af if the word God can be transposed for unknown.
Therefore, in the absence of those, no belief in God should be held unless it is exclusively based on un-reason, or faith.
Urgh. By that logic poison-dart frogs don’t exist.
What the fuckin fuck??! They cut away from that video right at the action I really wanted to see—the suturing! Ran a card of the technique and silk size or somesuch and then sponging and unclamping!
Talk about burying your lede! It’s like an expurgated version of Hamlet for the seriously dainty: all the dying and< .i> the skull in the Yorick soliloquy and the Play’s the Thing play done offstage and reported on placards.
The musical background was cute tho’.
Or you could take it the other way. Fresh from Plato’s dialogues is the paradox of knowledge. How does one recognise knowledge if they have no knowledge of it in the first place? The answer Socrates gave had the problem of a regression to infinity, and thus didn’t really explain. But in pure sophist fashion, we could posit that God gave us all our knowledge and it is merely us recognising what we already knew through familiarity. So missionaries are merely unlocking secrets trapped in the minds of the natives waiting to be unlocked through familiarity… QED
¡Wow! I’m new to Pharyngula, and let me congratulate to Owlmirror for “The Genesis of the thread”.
Heh, Robocop has made exactly the same argument before.
Hey Robocop, you never did respond to my comment #329 in that thread; did you run out of excuses and obfuscation?
I’ve got to say the most persuasive definition for children I’ve heard is Theological noncognitivism.
Ugh. That was me up there failing to close my itals tag and forgetting to cop to my post.
Still, microsurgery dude, where’s the beef?
Ron Sullivan
http://toad.faultline.org
@ Leigh Williams #715 in TSTKTS:
As it happens, I was intending to refer to whatever your local flavour / sub-sect / cult of Christianity was. But the existence of the big tent of pretence (ie that they’re all the same religion whenever they want to be counted as a really big gang) does indeed make the unethicality far worse.
The next stage in this gang bulking-up behaviour is one indulged in by some modern Unitarians (note that UK ones are not the same as US UUs) and many monotheists when trying to put against atheists (and “pagans”) – viz that of claiming that the Judeo-Christian-Islamic god is all the same god (despite the evident untruthfulness of this in its varied descriptions, alleged holy rulings and the rampant splittage of groups of self-proclaimed followers).
You’re giving them a veneer of relative sanity and niceness and providing them with a +1 any time they’re trying to claim support for their own views (including when the only people they’re trying to fool are themselves). At least it seems (#722) that you’re trying not to fund their evil directly yourself (though they’ll still be counting you when collecting grant money).
What we already knew…
http://scienceblogs.com/tfk/2010/01/bill_dembski_creationist.php
“I believe Adam and Eve were literal historical persons specially created by God. I am not, as he claims, a theistic evolutionist.”
“But because many Christians accept some form of evolution, I show in chapter 21 of my book how the theodicy I describe might apply IF one holds to an evolutionary view (which I don’t).”
Or, maybe he’s lying because he thinks his creo-credibility might be at stake…
“Johnny T. Helms’ concerns about my book THE END OF CHRISTIANITY as well as his concerns about my role as a seminary professor in the SBC are unfounded. I subscribe to the Baptist Faith and Message 2000 as well as the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy.”
Who knows…
Do babies even believe as the term would be used by the fundies?
If so, at what stage in development are they talking about? I mean, at one stage Mom is everything, so Mom must be god, right? No Mom, no food/love/comfort. Dad is a poor second at that stage.
Raising Shadow-ling, I never saw an inherent ‘god belief’ stage. I was asked if Randy Johnson was bigger than god after going to a fan appreciation day event and seeing RJ up close. I just asked if Shadow-ling could see god — no? — then RJ was bigger (and also existed). Got into some comparative religions discussions after school mates tried to ‘convert’ the kid.
I was born atheist and remained that way; my mother sent me off to Sunday School to try and instill Christian values in me (this from a woman living ‘in sin’ with the father of her child; that’s right – I’m a bastard in both senses of the word) but none of it ‘took’ in me.
Heck, one of my memories is of being 6 or 7 and asking the minister/priest/padré/witchdoctor person there for the fortnightly Religious Education session questions that reflected just how silly I thought the idea of god was. Mind you, I wouldn’t consider that a sign of my advanced intellect, ’cause I also distinctly remember completely failing to understand how gravity worked at about the same age…
1. If unicorns had existed, then there is evidence in the fossil record. 2. There is no evidence of unicorns in the fossil record. 3. Therefore, unicorns never existed.
I missed the context – I tend to hop in early on these threads then lose it because it moves too much. But whatever is wrong with this, it’s not the logic.
If A then B.
~B
therefore ~A
Perfect modus tollendo tollens.
Sure, the premise “If A then B” is not true in the given case. But the logic is fine.
I thought there was a meme floating around about how Dembski accepts common descent or something.
http://scienceblogs.com/tfk/2010/01/bill_dembski_creationist.php
“Johnny T. Helms’ concerns about my book THE END OF CHRISTIANITY as well as his concerns about my role as a seminary professor in the SBC are unfounded. I subscribe to the Baptist Faith and Message 2000 as well as the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy.”
I guess he was only “hypothetically” accepting common descent. Lol, gotta love them fundie creatinists.
Robosomething (from t’other thread):
We don’t pretend it doesn’t exist. We pretend it doesn’t apply to us. One thing that annoys me, and I’m sure annoys many other atheists, is when non-atheists insist on defining atheism. Muldoon (or whatever his name was) on t’other thread came up with a strawman definition of atheism and, after it was shown to be a strawman, modified his definition into another strawman.
I really object to assholes like roboturd and Muldoon telling me what my beliefs (or lack thereof) are. I know what my beliefs and non-beliefs are and, if you ask nicely, I’ll be happy to explain them to you. I will get rude, crude and socially unacceptable when you come up with your own description of my beliefs and insist that I conform to them. I will get even more upset when you tell me that I cannot hold my beliefs because some fucking dictionary disagrees with me.
I will resent my parents forever for finally getting married. For 17 years, I was very much able to say the same, and now I’m just born out-of-wedlock, which is less catchy :-p
well yeah, that’s the point. we’re talking about empirically not being able to prove a negative, and robocop pulls formal logic on our ass… with an example that just fucking hurts, because the content of it is such an obvious Empirical Evidence Fail.
I guess he was only “hypothetically” accepting common descent. Lol, gotta love them fundie creatinists.
This is the part I meant to quote:
“Johnny Helms suggests that I’ve embraced evolutionary theory because I’ve shown how it can be squared with the theodicy I develop. But his charge here is unfounded. To show how the theodicy I outline can be squared with an evolutionary view is NOT to endorse it. I don’t endorse evolutionary theory, as all my books on intelligent design demonstrate (search my name on the Internet, and you’ll find that I’m often called an “anti-evolutionist”). But because many Christians accept some form of evolution, I show in chapter 21 of my book how the theodicy I describe might apply IF one holds to an evolutionary view (which I don’t).” –Dembski
Yep, gotta love them fundie theocratic creationists. A laugh a minute. Lol.
Yes, I’ve encountered this many times. It also forms the basis of “atheists really believe in God, they just deny him because (pick one: they’re mad at him/they’re mad at their parents/they just want to do drugs and have gay sex).”
Well, I’m convinced, and thus am waiting to be converted by the first missionary who reaches me.
(I should be careful. Back in my service industry/college student days, I was serving coffee at an Amway convention. Just for fun, I walked to the centre of the room, looked at my watch, loudly announced “What’s Amway all about, anyway?” and counted the seconds until I was skeletonised. Teddy Roosevelt wrote all about the encounter.)
erm… hit post to soon. was gonna add that if formal logic was all there is to this, god could be disproven in no time:
1)If there were supernatural powers, then evidence of temporary suspension of the Laws of Physics would exist
2)No evidence of suspension of the Laws of Physics exists
3)Therefore, there are no gods.
See? I just proved once and for all that there are no gods! [/sarcasm]
oops
3)Therefore there are no
godssupernatural powers.It’s time for a break, methinks.
Just wanted to say “Bacon”.
Bacon.
Thanks.
@ Shadow #31:
That sort of thing has been studied. (And once again, re a previous thread comment on this problem, the link I saved has changed and the bulk of the content is locked from view.)
@Dahan #42
Bacon is always welcome/needed. Notwithstanding the following:
http://xkcd.com/418/
… and this is what happens to children (religiosity-wise) when they grow up.
Fortunately, “TSTKTS” is short. “The Monolith Monsters are taking over the world!” can be shortend to “Monolith Monsters”, or even MM.
Leigh Williams @#554 on TSTKTS:
This reminds me that I seem to recall reading somewhere that oxytocin production is/can be associated with temporal lobe seizures, and of course oxytocin is the hormone associated with love/pair-bonding, and also with trustingness. Just as an additional thought.
==
Leigh Williams @#561 on TSTKTS:
I’m glad to hear it (and I’ll support this by noting that for the most part, you are cogent, lucid, and self-aware).
But I will note that neurological effects like temporal lobe seizures can be surprisingly narrow, especially if they are infrequent and/or mild. I actually would not expect any “deterioration”, as such.
However, I repeat that I am not a neurologist. This is not a diagnosis.
I hate that movie. They covered the easy parts and totally skipped the finicky, difficult part. Besides, the background music is entirely inappropriate. They should have backed it with something by Michael Mantler.
To be honest, I dislike the term ‘atheist’, since it suggests theism is the default. I don’t feel the need to identify myself an ‘ahomophobe’ or an ‘arapist’ and yet those are equally accurate terms to use in a description of me.
@MosesZD #4
You must be special guy ‘cos I thought The Greatest Show On Earth was terribly entertaining and read it in one go.
I guess Jerry Coyne’s book may be more entertaining, I haven’t read it yet. To an average bloke like me though, I think Dawkins did just great with his book.
My theory is that by posting ever-more-icky videos at the start of new chapters of the endless thread, and by torturing Sven, PZ is hoping to kill the beast.
Dream on, oh optimistic Overlord.
RE: Proving a negative:
I submit that it is possible to empirically prove, say, the nonexistence of unicorns; all you have to do is empirically observe everything everywhere ever, and then note that there are no unicorns. This never actually happens, though.
No problem. We’ll keep referring to ourselves as ‘atheists’, and those who believe in god(s) as ‘aatheists’.
Neither nor.
The meaning of every word evolves. On the one hand, there’s mutation – metaphorical usages, misunderstandings, extinction of rare usages. On the other, there’s selection – too sudden changes are incomprehensible and therefore won’t spread, while some changes are advantageous because they provide a term for a new concept or whatever (and never mind sociolinguistics).
A lot of drift can happen in just a few hundred years. The English word bead meant “prayer” before a series of misunderstandings about the rosary happened. Gebet is still “prayer” in German, and the word beten means “to pray”. English read and German raten “to guess” share a common ancestor. Sake and German Sache “thing” likewise do. French demander simply means “to ask”… and cool has become an expression of being impressed [sorry for the pun…] which is so successful it has entered German, French, and even Chinese.
All the big dictionaries of all the big Western languages no longer try to be prescriptive. They’re all purely descriptive now, as far as I know. This holds even for those that a large number of people considers prescriptive (like the Duden dictionary in Germany).
But just for the record, I prefer the sense of “atheist” that means “someone who assigns a probability of less than 0.5 to the existence of any deities”. That would mean that I, an apathetic agnostic (“I don’t know, and I don’t care”), am not an atheist, because I don’t bother trying to figure out whether probabilities can be assigned to that kind of concept (especially when ineffability, the great killer argument, enters the picture). If “atheist” means “someone who lacks belief”, then I am one, because I’m not capable of believing without evidence. I’m too anxious and too nosey to trust my wishful thinking. :-)
And greater sensitivity, all the way up to premature ejaculation.
The FSM has a very peculiar sense of humor indeed.
6: ha! I managed to get a comment in AFTER PZ closed the TSTKTS thread! Maybe I am divine, after all ;-)
I was surely impressed.
except that this isn’t a question of formal logic, but one of empirical evidence.
As an empirical matter, one can’t definitively prove a positive either — light may always have been observed travelling 186,000 MPS, but we can’t see every instance or even a small percentage of same. I readily concede that proving a negative to reasonable satisfaction is more difficult than proving a positive.
7: Surely if theism is innate, and there’s one true god, all babies would believe only in that one true god.
Psst. I don’t think theism is innate.
Remember, Robocop, unless you’ve sat down and disproved the existence of every god other than the one you happen to worship then your atheism towards them is identical to our atheism toward your god.
I don’t pretend to have anything like proof.
11: It would be a bit weird to argue that babies are born with any beliefs of any kind.
I agree.
14: I don’t understand what that talk was about glory and knockdown arguments in the last thread. Also not sure why Robocop thinks Humpty Dumpty is an insult.
Hint: Through the Looking Glass.
19: Robocop argues for a different definition of atheism.
No, I argue that another definition of atheism is the standard one.
26: did you run out of excuses and obfuscation?
Yeah, I have a long history of drive-by posting here….
35: One thing that annoys me, and I’m sure annoys many other atheists, is when non-atheists insist on defining atheism.
I said as much already in explaining that I am very sympathetic to the idea that people ought to be able to define themselves and their beliefs in their own terms and their own way.
I really object to assholes like roboturd and Muldoon telling me what my beliefs (or lack thereof) are.
Except that I have been very careful not to.
Anatheists that would be.
Though that could be misunderstood as being about “apart god”… compare anatomy, which is about “cutting apart”… I need to read up on what the Anabaptists believe.
As apposed to the agnostic dyslexic insomniac who stayed up all night wondering if there really was a Dog.
BS
This line of argument really doesn’t hold much water, since someone could use the same argument to say that children are born without the ability to use language. After all, they only learn the language(s) in vogue in their culture, right. And yet, we have identified certain brain structures that are key to language — indicating that they are inherent.
I don’t disagree with the conclusion, just the reasoning you used to get there.
Checked out the new alt-text for the permalink yet?
“Bwahahahaha! Multiple threads fused into one gigantic monstrosity! Chaos reigns!”
I’ve seen it happen before. The ScienceBorg software always behaves strangely when 2 or 3 people post in the same minute.
Better get this in before the thread gets too long and this announcement gets lost in the thread.
Attn: Baltimore area Pharyngula Fans
I’ve set up a google group, Baltimore Pharyngula Fans, primarily for those of us who live in the Baltimore area, but open to other Pharyngulates as well.
Become a member of the group to find out about our first planned get-together, or just to get to know each other better.
Bingo. I just brushed my teeth and shall go to bed without further delay. :-)
Sastra @#676 on TSTKTS:
No, you misunderstood what I wrote. I did not mean that as a rebuttal to Pascal’s Wager; I meant it as a rebuttal to “having Faith in the Sweetness and Light and No-Bad-Consequences” God, and that my rebuttal (in @#540 on TSTKTS) is something like Pascal’s Wager in reverse.
Pascal’s Wager argues that there are potential infinite negative consequences to no faith, and potential infinite positive consequences to having faith — if God exists [and I suspect that Pascal had in mind specifically “exists per Catholic doctrine”]. And if God doesn’t exist at all, then there are no consequences at all to having faith or not.
My rebuttal to “Faith in the S&L&N-B-C” sort of God — call it Owlmirror’s Handwave, maybe — argues that there are No Bad Consequences to not having faith if God exists and is all “Sweetness and Light and No-Bad-Consequences”. And if God doesn’t exist at all, then there is the (potentially slight) negative consequence of having fooled oneself by having faith.
Right, and you can respond by rolling your eyes and/or palming your face, or you can point out that there are “No Bad Consequences” to not believing.
If they actually use that line “make you a better person”, they’re trying to guilt you, I think. You can ask, “So am I a bad person now?”
I see my Handwave as being a way to achieve some rhetorical goals — either emphasize the point that Faith in “Sweetness and Light” God is utterly irrelevant in any putative afterlife, and is at best a nice extra in this life (not an absolute good), and at worst is a self-delusion. Or you get your interlocutor’s façade of “nice” to slip a bit.
It may be that I’m missing some nuance or something. I suspect that the sort of interlocutor you have in mind may not post to the Internet much.
So Dembski has admitted he’s an OEC then? Good, now we can finally drop the pretence that ID isn’t religiously motivated.
Old earth creationism might sidestep the problem of a very old universe and solar system, but it just leads to further questions. I wonder what Dembski’s scientifically accurate history of the world looks like… Special creation events that look slightly different from a special creation event a few hundred thousand years before. Oh shit, I think I get it. God’s an engineer, and all the failed hominan lines are throw-away prototypes in an iterative prototype fashion!
I’ve cracked the secret of the cosmos, can I has book deal now?
Robocop wrote:
Then all children are born atheist?
Then it should be easy enough for you to grasp what atheism is for us – just write down how you feel about the Flying Spaghetti Monster and, once that’s done, go back and cross out the words ‘Flying Spaghetti Monster’ and put in ‘Christian god’.
Here’s an example: ‘The
Flying Spaghetti MonsterChristian god is something invented by people and in which there is no good reason – i.e. evidence or compelling argument – to believe.’redmjoel wrote:
Have we done the same for the structures which are the key to theism?
@ 975Robocop #725 on TSTKTS:
1)
I misunderstood? Really? And yet you utterly fail to deal with any point I made, point out my misunderstanding in any way, deal with the fact the article you quote disapprovingly doesn’t say what you wanted it to, and merely repeat again your original claim as if it still stood. Hmmm clearly the misunderstanding is mine.
Others have pointed out the problems of relying on dictionary definitions as arbiters of some “majority” view. Firstly, you haven’t established that what you claim is the majority/favoured definition of atheism is the majority/favoured one, and secondly even if you had (and you won’t be able to) it would be irrelevant. If you were debating the accuracy/merits of atheism with a specific person then you argue the type of atheism they are arguing for, not the type you wish they were arguing for.
No one, least of all me, is pretending that there are not several definitions of atheism. That is, in fact what I have been arguing FOR from my first comment on this thread. You are desperately trying to appeal to some form of common or personal prejudice in order to avoid the actual specific types of atheism people are advocating here. This is at best misguided and fallacious and at worst intellectually dishonest.
You are making a category error, trying to force atheism to be something it isn’t. Atheism is merely the answer to a specific question. It is a philosophical position regarding one single issue. It is not an ideology that is defined by some core tenet of beliefs. You are projecting your own theist model onto something that is not like theism. This is a common mistake, a common prejudice, of theists in general.
2)
My first reaction is LOL.
My second reaction is thank you for your patronising sanctimony.
Would you like it if I said to you that I find your psychological reliance on a protective imaginary friend a hallmark not of an adult, but of a pathetic and intellectually sub-normal child?
Perhaps you would be edified by a Mencken quote:
“God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent, the helpless, the miserable. They find not only sanctuary in His arms, but also a kind of superiority, soothing to their macerated egos: He will set them above their betters.”
Maybe you’d enjoy me commenting that your terror of your own mortality, obvious by the the fact that you believe in wanton impossibilites that claim to grant you immortality, is the hallmark of a coward?
How about the observation that you clearly lack the intellectual and moral courage and capacity to escape the most simplistic indoctrination of your cultural environment?
Or perhaps you’d be gratfied by my noting that your continual attempts to patronise and cast slurs at atheists bespeak a mind addled by bigotry, the very hallmark of a shallow thinker.
Enough?
I think you better stay away from unsupported and unsupportable character analyses of individuals/groups you are clearly unfamiliar with, 975robocop. You are clearly overmatched and unlikely to come out the happier for it. Take that as friendly advice.
Enough demonstration that we can all be vitriolic if needs be, now to the “point” of this quoted portion of your post:
No atheist defines themselves, in the manner you are insinuating, as an atheist. They may describe themselves as such. Atheism is a position on one question, albeit a culturally common one. Hardly an all encompassing self definition. Your biases regarding atheism and ignorance of atheism are showing.
Take me for example. I am an atheist, but I don’t define myself as such. It is not the be all and end all of who and what I am. It doesn’t define me. It is, in fact, a relatively unimportant fact about me, about as significant as my hair colour. What makes my atheism significant is the environment around me which is saturated with (some) theists professing their faith, attempting to legislate their faith and discriminating against atheists and others because of their faith. Luckily for me, I live in the UK (a far more significant fact about me), so this isn’t as severe as it is for my American colleagues.
You are trying to force atheism and atheists into a straightjacket of an ideology that competes with your own. You clearly do not understand what atheism is and so you try to project your own model for a worldview onto it and atheists. You are doing so erroneously and inappropriately (just like your fictional assertion, unsupported I note, about what the “favoured and majority” definition of atheism is). A person’s atheism is no more significant than whether or not they have a moustache, it signifies nothing more about them than an answer to a specific question. Whether an atheist is ALSO a humanist or ALSO a secularist or ALSO something else is independent of atheism and says nothing regarding it.
You can be a conservative atheist, a liberal atheist, an agnostic atheist, a gnostic atheist, a libertarian atheist, a socialist atheist…etc etc. Just like you can be a conservative moustache wearer…etc. Whilst there may be a greater frequency of certain groups within those people who self describe as atheists, this is irrelevant to atheism as a philosophical position. It is however, more likely to be relevant to how those people arrived at their atheism. For example a large number of scientists are atheists. This doesn’t mean necessarily that science is related to atheism (although in epistemological terms it is, so perhaps this is a bad example), but that perhaps people trained scientifically are more likely to become atheists. Do you see the distinction?
3)
A lot of 2) relates to this so I will make one small addendum. Atheists and atheism need no unifying goal, movement or principle, despite what you might think to the contrary. If certain atheists are tired of being disenfranchised and discriminated against, then yes there are well worn routes they can take to acheive equality. This is, again, independent of atheism as a philosophical position on the existence of deities. It is a position on what strategy it is best to adopt to acheive a specific sociopolitical goal. The tactics of how best to acheive a specific goal are independent of the position one adopts on a question unrelated to those aims. For example I’m a secularist, I work to acheive a more secular society. I work with colleagues who are not atheists to do this. A secular society has benefits for religious people too. My personal atheism is irrelevant to the tactics I use to aim at this particular goal.
4)
And atheism destroys does it? Destroys what precisely? Your prejudices are showing again. Naughty, naughty.
Again this barbed piece of silliness on your part stems from your prejudices about what atheism is and your projection of what you think it should be. Category error, 975robocop, category error.
How about a quote from Stephen Roberts to round up?
“I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.”
You need to improve your understanding, 975robocop, not merely repeat your prejudices, fallacious reasoning, and recieved theist tropes as if they were fact.
Louis
I had to read the last half of the previous thread to catch up. I found this there, from Kel:
Piece of cake. When God first created the Earth, he made it flat. But then he got bored after a few millennia, and decided to re-model it into the Much More Interesting Earth MKII™. That’s why he needed to employ the flood device, so that he could re-fashion it into an oblate spheroid while no one was looking (or else the advanced alien race that was casually observing the Earth from their mothership, but happened to be looking the other way at the time, would realise that there really is a God, which *completely* defeats the purpose of religion).
Q.E.D. See? Anyone can do creationist. You just have to think outside the
straightjacketbox.oh for fucks sake
You’re crossing the streams, fool, and the result can only be chaos! loss! atonal music!
Cath the Canberra Cook #33:
The problem is the premise: “If unicorns had existed, then there is evidence in the fossil record.” Should be: “If unicorns had existed, there may be evidence in the fossil record that we may or may not have discovered at this point.”
Surely you can disprove X, if X is the sort of thing that should leave evidence. (And by prove of course I only mean establish beyond all reasonable doubt, like any empirical claim)
Robocop’s example was invalid but sound.
1. An elephant in my house would leave:
a. noise.
b. eaten houseplants
c. an unmistakable visual impression
d. elephant scat
e. elephant-sized holes in the drywall
2. My house shows none of these.
3. Therefore, there is no elephant in my house.
I could not prove there are no black widows in my house – practical considerations play a role in this sort of quest, which is where robocop’s example fails – but not badly. If Greek-style unicorns existed in historical times, would there not be ample remains? What is our best argument against the existence of sasquatch? We don’t have any sasquatch bones! Large vertebrates require a minimum breeding population to last for hundreds of thousands of years.
An incontrovertible example (among the sane): there was no global flood. How do we know this? There is no evidence for it, and if there *had been a global flood, we would have evidence up the wazoo.
Also therefore, there is no god of the sort that definitely would have whipped up a global flood, because there was no flood.
But maybe there is a Deist god, hiding. Meh.
Kermit
Robocop:
Evasion.
You still haven’t responded.
Here:
Response?
God is Frankie and Benjy mouse?
In empirical matters one can’t have absolute certainty, but there are degrees of certainty. If light in a vacuum has always been observed to travel at ~186,000 MPS (or, using better units, 299,792,458 m/s) and there’s no experimental or theoretical grounds* to doubt it, then it’s much more reasonable to think that it’s a constant than not.
* By this I mean there’s a theory that has proven accurate which implies a changing speed of light.
Hah. That’s what they said to Alastair Reynolds, too.
Whoa, trying to ward off us squeamish ones, eh PZ? (I’m still a little queasy after seeing the still photo on the video stub.)
Maybe one reason this argument doesn’t work for Christians is because they understand atheism to be some kind of denial and they themselves aren’t in denial like those heretics.
John Morales #26, aha! From Robocop:
Hold on now, Robocop. Are you sure you understand the precise meaning of “denial” used in that definition? Perhaps J.J.C. Smart uses “denial” as the strict negation of “acceptance” of the proposition “God exists“. Put in another way, atheism would be not holding that God exists while theism would be holding that God exists. That is not the same as the colloquial meaning of “denial” as in “the act of refusing to accept a fact no matter how much evidence there is for it“.
So that does it. I’m going to call myself a show-me atheist: You be the first to show me evidence* for your god and I’ll decide if it convinces me or not. So far, nobody has provided us with any evidence of a god other than fictional stories. Right now I believe there is no reason for even positing a god other than as a shortcut in storytelling.
* See the thread Dennett, Harris, Hitchens vs. Boteach, D’Souza, Taleb vs. Wright around the 400s and 500s.
Worse!! This thread could be headed for a disaster of biblical proportions!
As this seems to be the sum of 975robocop’s argument I’ll just make clear how spectacularly stupid this is:
Atheism is a diverse set that contains different philosophical positions upon a the question of the existence of a deity/deities. It is not beholden upon an individual who holds one of those diverse definitions to defend (or be held to adhere to) one of the different definitions. That’s like insisting that a monetarist defend all aspects of keynesian economics because they both fall under the borad definition of “economist”.
Robocop is attempting to argue the generality as a means of ignoring the specific. It is, to be blunt, spectacularly dishonest (esp. now that I have gone back to the thread John links and read the previous incarnation of robocop’s drivel*).
It is not more intellectually valid a claim than the creationist who says “evolution is just a theory” equivocating about the definition of the word “theory” and insisting their preferred definition (the colloquial one which roughly means “guess” and fits into some spurious hierarchy) over the one actually in use.
Louis
*Ah well, pearls before swine, pearls before swine.
Jadehawk, thanks for the context catchup.
JasonA, the bit of my post that you snipped contained your point already. I already noted that the premise is false.
googleaccountsmishmashnumberthingyperson: Correct disinction but you got it exactly backwards: the argument is valid (correct logic) but unsound (false premises).
Err, why, yes, I have studied formal logic at a postgraduate level. Not that it makes me pedantic and nitpicky at all. (I was pedantic and nitpicky before.)
With regards to the existence of God, I’ve never been able to take position as I’ve never really understood the question.
I don’t understand how one can answer that question without answering first what is meant by God. And I can’t find a coherent answer to that question either.
There’s this awful word for my kind of inability : I’m an ignostic.
Well, this now seems a little out of place since the Great Merge, but here goes anyway. A few of us on the previous endless thread were discussing the “documentary” “The Lost Civilization of North America.” (Yes, the scare quotes around “documentary” are deserved.)
Seems some sneaky mormons snookered some legit scholars and scientists (and quite a few quacks as well) into being interviewed for a movie whose secret purpose is to provide proof that Joseph Smith was right, and that the Book of Mormon is historically accurate.
I sent one of the scholars, Roger G. Kennedy, an email and he replied that no one had mentioned the Book of Mormon to him, not on camera, and not off camera.
So, that catches us up, and here’s the new part. An ex-mo did a bit of research and said this:
So, I guess that we don’t need to send a heads up to Alice Kehoe, but it sounds like I should definitely alert Kenneth Feder to his having been used and abused by the film makers.
Uhh… What? That’s a logical fallacy, called “Affirming the Consequent”
See: http://www.iep.utm.edu/fallacy/#Affirming%20the%20Consequent
The only way that argument would work if the first premise was phrased:”If and only if X, then Y” would allow you to use Y the proof of the X.
If A then B is not in any way equal to if B then A. The link I posted gives a fine example of the problems you run into.
@ Negentropyeater #78:
Sounds good to me. I can has borrow of the term?
Louis
chrisdamconnor, you are wrong.
“If A then B” is logically identical to “if not-B then not-A”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modus_tollens
You have claimed that I said it was “if B then A”, which is clearly not true. And if you actually read what I wrote, I never said it was.
What annoys me is I stayed up passed my bedtime and made a massive error: wasting my time by bothering with Robocop.
Bugger.
Teach me not to remain in semi-lurkage.
Oh well.
Louis
Owlmirror, re: my hypothetical temporal lobe seizures:
Why, thank you.
Good to hear! You can’t imagine how relieved I am.
You’ll be glad to know I do my best to keep my oxytocin levels up through other means, in case the TLS’s fail me.
Gee Aratina (@74), I had to zoom to 400% to read what was on that footnote of yours.
Louis,
the more ipi the merrier
(international pharyngula ignostics)
–
btw, before I forget :
Please sign this petition to fix the broken comment registration system
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/fix-scienceblogs-registration
Totally OT, if that’s possible –
Ooh, ooh, ooh, look, I got my first David Mabus trollshit! I have been noticed! Yay me!
http://thecanberracook.blogspot.com/2010/01/back-again.html
And you continue to prove yourself awesome.
Yeah, he’s been trolling me as well. I just delete it as soon as he does it, best not to encourage the mentally ill in their delusions.
I just caught up with the other thread, by listening to Phanto 309. Good stuff if that’s your cuppa. Sounds nothing like Drag Racing Underground’s On the Road Again. Which many of you will be mighty relieved about.
Nice. Reminds me of this;
Their guitar said “Agitate! Educate! Organise!”.
Hurin @#527 on TSTKTS:
This is not what I have taken away from my various arguments with religious creationists — usually YECs — here on Pharyngula. Don’t get me started on Alan Clarke and the fucking magical Fountains Of The Deep ™.
If truth has any meaning at all, it should at least avoid blatant contradiction. But when blatant contradictions are pointed out to the YEC apologists, they simply ignore them. If an argument is genuinely refuted with reason or evidence, then YECs should stop using it. But YECs all seem to care far more about ignoring contradictions pointed out in their arguments and repeating their tired and refuted arguments.
No, I see them redefining truth to be only what their dogma says is true, and more specifically, what they say their dogma says is true. It’s rock-hard arrogant certainty that their presupposed interpretation of the Bible cannot possibly be wrong.
Out of all of them, Todd Wood might get a pass — if he’s honest enough to concede that his Omphalos-God is deceptively dishonest. But he’s an extreme rarity in the religious world.
It might be inconsistent, but I’m not sure that it’s actually unprincipled — although I can see it being so, depending on what claims they make and how they make them. They compartmentalize, and are perhaps more aware of their compartments than YECs. If they don’t put their dogma above reason and empirical evidence, I think they can be given a pass on what is, in a sense, devout fandom.
Don’t get me started on presuppositionalist apologetics….
Apropos of nothing, whatever happened to Hollbach?
On the cold versus warm thing; I prefer ‘just right’. But it does emphasise that global climate change is much more than a little local warming. It’s like a basic sine wave, where the peaks are higher and the troughs deeper.
In Britain, a big worry is the gulf stream and, if it stops bringing so much warm water across the atlantic to us…
http://www.bbc.co.uk/climate/impact/gulf_stream.shtml
Was around the other week, not as often as he used to tho…
Rorschach, never mind Holbach.
Where is Smoggy! :(
chrisadamconnor,
for the uninitiated, the ~ sign means the logical opposite of the proposition, or logical “not” (it’s easier than remembering the key-strokes to get the ¬ character as appears on the Wikipedia page for Modus tollens, or De Morgan’s laws)
A implies B
is thus equivalent to
~B implies ~A
Familiar to anyone whose struggled through Boolean logic in a computer science degree.
[The
posterlurker who styles himself as Pope Maledict DCLXVI]Yeah how dare these people not to spend 24/7/365 on an internet blog to entertain us…:-)
I give you Smoggy, and raise you one :
Where is Emmet Caulfield??
Ah, phi1ip, that could well explain the confusion. The things you take for granted, eh?
@ 80,
affirming the consequent goes like this :
If P, then Q.
Q.
Therefore P.
Cath’s example was indeed modus tollens.
phi1ip, how hard is it to remember the HTML entity ¬? (¬)
Thanks. I’ven’t been reading that closely lately. (Still have a Christmas hump to work off).
I just realised I hadn’t seen the usual choleric contributions in a while.
D’oh,
whosewho’s…To touch on another weft in this thread, perhaps rather than asking “Is theism innate?”, wouldn’t the better question be, “Is gullibility innate?”
Despite being raised in an Anglican household, and having been regularly exposed to church services for thirty-seven years, I’ve always more or less been incredulous about the common beliefs I was exposed to, even if there were other reasons to be tempted to believe them – say, for reasons of wishful thinking about the “rewards” of religion, or desire to remove one cause of peer pressure from family to conform to their belief.
Just as P.T.Barnum said “There’s a sucker born every minute” when describing the seemingly endless supply of human gullibility, it would be equally interesting to know if there’s any innate propensity for both gullibility and/or skepticism, hard-wired into our brains.
PMaL
I actually liked boolean algebra, damned if I could remember any of what I did anymore.
I just ran across a lovely circular disposition on atheism. The writer states that he has met many atheists and that he admires them for sticking up for their beliefs, better sometimes than so-called “Christians” he’s met. He says he knows plenty of atheists who are nice people, who love their children, who do charitable acts and who lead “moral” lives. Hence, they are “good”. And since God = Good, they really believe in God, or they wouldn’t act in this manner.
So take that, you “good” atheists! Ha! The only way to prove you’re an atheist is to do evil things! Oh, wait, that would mean you believe in Satan, and if you believe in the Adversary, cast down from Heaven by God, then you must believe in God…
He also has advice on beating your children. After all didn’t someone say “little children must suffer”? Or was that “suffer the little children”? Aargh!
Recently I was trying to read a Victor Stenger physics paper and the first thing he did was put in a Lagrangian equation. I remember that such equations exist, I remember that I had to study them at one stage, but damned if I could remember what they were for or what they signified.
@John Morales,
well yes, but there are a lot of HTML entities to remember, and let’s say ¬ isn’t very high on my list! (On a Mac, it’s just option + L, but I had to look at the keyboard viewer to remember.) Still easier to use ~ which was a commonplace substitution back when I did my degree.
PMaL
A follow up to my post @79: I received an email reply from Ken Feder, the Anthropologist that was interviewed in the faux “documentary” titled “The Lost Civilization of North America.”
Mr. Feder is in wait-and-see mode. If anyone has seen the film, please let me know. I really don’t want to travel to Sandy, Utah (or other likely mormon strongholds) and pay money to see it.
The promotional text that raises red flags is here:
http://www.mormonapologetics.org/topic/47275-rodney-meldrum-the-movie
Excerpt:
DominEditrix quotes silliness:
But… if they really believe in god, and say they don’t, then they’re bearing false witness, hence they’re not being “good”, hence they don’t believe in god!
</casuistry>
Ahhh! They didn’t show what I wanted to see the most. How the HELL did they tie those tiny knots? It’s like someone chopped out the last chapter of a mystery novel!
Brownian, hi,
In the previous incarnation of this thread, you lamented:
Now… I’ve never used SAS before, but I looked up its randomisation functions, and found this:
UNIFORM(SEED) – generates values from a random uniform distribution between 0 and 1
It looks as if SEED is a negative number (like -1), you get a different number each time it is called (which is what you want).
So all you need to do is:
1) Generate a random number
2) Write a function that splits the 0 – 1 number space into percentiles according to the ending digit you wish to randomly change
So, as a simple example, for the digit 2 you said you wanted a 60% chance of it being rounded down to 0, and a 40% chance of it being rounded up to 5. So in the case of a 2, if the randomly generated number is > 0 and < .6 it gets rounded down to 0, otherwise it gets rounded up to 5. You could represent the percentile breakdown for each ending digit as a table, with each row in the table being:
min, max, outcome
That do it for you? You may have to split the range up into more percentiles if you want to allow more than 2 possible results per digit, but I think you can run with it from there :-) Of course, you may have already figured out this sledgehammer approach and are looking for a more elegant solution. I also run the risk of being patronising here for obvious reasons :-(
My question arising from curiosity is… if you go randomly changing digits in numbers, how are you going to recover the original information? But I’m sure you guys have that one already figured out.
Finally, sorry to all for being OT. Brownian, if you wish to take this further off-line, you can find my e-mail on the about page at metzomagic.com.
Nail. Head. Contact.
This is a fairly common debating tactic (from fundamentalists as well as political pundits/operatives) – although I suspect many who employ it don’t realise their error.
(BTW, very nice work on a number of different comments, Louis (and others too – there’s a high quality crowd here), even if it often seems to have no impact on the original commenter(s).)
Robocop @#626 on TSTKTS:
Should all the creeds and prayers used by Christians be modified to reflect this lack of certainty?
John – Ah, but they don’t know they believe in God! Hence, no false witness…
This guy is a very liberal fundy. He even let one of his daughters choose whom to marry. Even tho’ he knows she would have married any guy he picked, because she’s a dutiful daughter. Fortunately, he approved of one of the various suitors for her hand.
I do so love these Dark Ages re-enactors.
Kel,
Was it classical or quantum? Lagrangian mechanics is simply an elegant way to formulate the dynamics of the system. It does so in terms of conjugate variables, such as Energy-time, momentum-position, angular momentum-angle, etc.
The Wikipedia entry isn’t bad. Maybe it will refresh your memory.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_mechanics
negentropyeater #85,
Noted. :( That was the <sub></sub> tag by the way.
Yeah, where is Holbach? Smoggy is probably off giving the word of the lamb to some ewes.
Pretty sure when Stenger was using them, it was in reference to quantum. It was a paper on how a universe could originate from nothing if that helps.
Though when I did the mathematics of lagrangian equations at university, it wasn’t explained in any context other than yet a further way of doing ODEs. Which I don’t like doing maths like that. Like in high school when I started calculus, it was confusing until I had one of those revelations in the physics classroom where all those formulas we had to memorise were able to be linked through calculus. As soon as I had that, the mathematics became interesting.
That’s basically why the term ‘agnostic’ is redundant. No-one ‘knows’ there are or aren’t gods; what’s the point of even bringing it up? Let the discussion be solely about whether or not a person believes or doesn’t believe.
I’m happy to admit that I accept the fact there might be a god – albeit one who has deliberately distanced him or herself from us. But if such a god exists it seems ridiculous to me that it would need to be revered or worshipped – so I don’t care whether or not he/she exists.
Christians who insist that atheism is an arrogant position and that godless people should instead be humble about their knowledge and call themselves agnostic rarely seem to want to apply the same scrutiny to their own beliefs.
Yet they rarely do.
Kel,
Do you mean Euler-Lagrangian equation?
Oops, that should be Euler-Lagrange equation.
That’s why I like “rationalist” or “skeptic.” But those terms don’t go far enough.
Okay, note to self: re-read comment before posting. Duh.
I called myself a “probabilistic atheist” for a while – i.e. “in my estimation it’s rather unlikely that any of the interventionist deities from the major religions exist, but I could be wrong”…but it’s too clumsy for frequent use.
I sometimes use “non-theist” rather than “atheist”, “rationalist” or “skeptic” to try and jog theists out of their preconceptions about what the term “atheist” means…
On Unicorns
The problem with unicorns is that there is no reliable evidence pointing to the existence of unicorns. Not the sort of unicorns found in stories and tales. In this unicorns are much like Nessie, chupacabras, and late surviving pterosurs; and unlike sasquatch, the orang pendak, and honest used car salesmen.
But, the matter comes down to the question of reliable evidence. No matter how much evidence there is for a subject, so long as people refuse to accept the validity of that evidence once it’s been tested and validated, that evidence is effectively useless.
The most recent example of this I found in a recent report at For the Sake of Science on how the refusal of some Texas physicians to accept evidence of an occurrence of Lyme Disease meant unnecessary suffering and damage to a patient. It was only when an official with the NIH in Texas came down with Lyme Disease that the doctors realized the illness could occur where they live.
The existence of evidence means nothing so long as people refuse to accept that the evidence exists, and there are many people who will deny anything that contradicts what they believe and feel comfortable with. This a sort of denial not limited to people you disagree with.
Accepting the world as it is means accepting things that trouble you. If reliable evidence appears that says pixies exist, then the odds are, pixies exists. And all your complaining means nothing.
BTW; no, I do not see a zipper on Patty’s back. Nor does Patty look anything like a certain clown who says he wore an ape suit for Patterson and Gimlin. The size is all wrong, the color is all wrong, the proportions are all wrong. Claims that Patty was a man in a suit are nothing more than special pleading and outright denial. Being upset about evidence is no proof that the evidence is false.
Quite possibly Feynmaniac, but this was over 5 years ago now so I can’t really remember anything I did in that subject beyond names. Mathematics onto itself feels somewhat like sophistry, so when I don’t use any of those equations in my line of applied logic, it’s really not going to resonate with me. Stuffage like Big O theory, however…
http://oursovereignjoy.blogspot.com/2009/12/book-review-william-dembskis-end-of.html
Makes sense to me. Once you have the forwards and backwards in time, then you might as well use it.
Sounds good to me, dude. You have done well. Nice job with the all caps for the book title too. It’s not very annoying at all.
Yawn, Mythusmage accepts evidence that doesn’t meet the standards of us skeptics. So far, all evidence for sasquatch points to it being a deliberate fake, including testimony and props from people who deliberately faked footprints and the like. That makes it hard to accept vague evidence as being conclusive. Even a corpse would go a long way to proving the creature exists.
Atheist is just the lack of belief in gods, so maybe whether you use the term is not as important as would be a term you use to positively identify yourself, such as physicist, american, scot, biologist or saggermakker’s(sp?) bottom knocker.
As for Lagrangians: I didn’t learn about those until I did maths at high undergraduate level. I was shocked. All the high school maths I did was Hamiltonian and this characterises a dynamical system in terms of total energy; in which kinetic + potential (+ others) = total energy. Having this as a starting point made it hard for me to get my head round the idea that the difference between kinetic and potential energy was much more useful. It allows you, as was said earlier, to explore ayatems in terms of conjugate variables, that have special relationships when looked at this way, and also gives the concept of the Action and the Action Principle.
So basically is Dembski saying that God created the tyrannosaurus because some 80 million years down the line some soul-infused golems got conned by a talking snake into eating some magic fruit which made people self-aware? Wow, just wow.
So basically the actions of God in deciding what species He created was determined by an act of human free will hundreds of millions or even billions of years in the future. Is this the appropriate time to mutter about the vacuity of religious explanations for the natural world?
“ayatems”?
systems.
I’m going to bed.
Is this the appropriate time to mutter about the vacuity of religious explanations for the natural world?
Like they say, if it explains everything, then it explains nothing. Theologians can have pretty much whatever they want, since God can do whatever they want God to do.
Theologians can have pretty much whatever they want, since God can do whatever they want God to do.
Errr, I should say they can have pretty much whatever they want except for actual real stuff that does stuff. They can have whatever pretend stuff they want. (And pretend like it does stuff too.)
Arguing semantics isn’t terribly illuminating.
Atheists deny the existence of God for the same reason most people deny the existence of invisible pink unicorns or the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Are we 100% certain that God doesn’t exist? No, but given the evidence there is no good reason to think He/She/It exists.
Now this isn’t the same as the religious believers who have faith in spite of the lack of evidence (or sometimes the evidence against their beliefs). As Dawkins points out, Kurt Wise (who has a Ph.D in geology from Harvard) wrote:
I don’t think this attitude is particularly rare among the religious. By calling atheism a “faith” or “religion” or whatnot I think some people are trying to imply that atheists have this same attitude except with regards to the nonexistence of God. However, if there was some very clear evidence for God I think most atheists here would change their minds.
I think this explains a lot more. Such statements like this try to explain something, but they inadvertently have roll-on consequences to other ideas. Like saying that God is the Intelligent Designer. Given the flaws of design present in biological organisms, it puts the constraint on God being finitely powerful or finitely knowledgeable. It doesn’t explain anything about how life was made, but it does have a hell of a lot of philosophical implications for the very thing it is trying to argue for.
Like in this case of Dembski’s. Given that he’s a creationist, by retrofitting the fall to all of life’s history in some attempt to justify suffering in the animal kingdom, he’s basically gone and stated that God created with the fall as a constraint in design. The potential perfect paradise 4.5 billion years into earth’s history being ruined by a truth-talking snake (lets be honest, in the story of genesis the snake told the truth and God lied) meaning that all history has been shaped by the future knowledge of events that hadn’t happened yet. That hundreds of millions of years of extreme suffering was caused by an event that hadn’t happened yet.
If I were religious I’d be decrying such nonsense. But since I’m not religious, I can just sit and laugh at the complete inanity of trying to get around the problem of evil by making bigger philosophical problems than the one which was trying to be solved! Kind of like explaining that the mind is far too complex to evolve, therefore it is the product of an even bigger mind.
While looking for where I saw that posting I told you about earlier, I found this over at Zornhau’s LiveJournal
No, I haven’t found the posting I thought was at “For the Sake of Science”, but I’m still looking.
Robocop @#626 on TSTKTS:
Mm. Speaking of dictionaries, the OED notes that the term “agnostic” was coined in the late 1800s by Thomas Huxley.
Of course, there are also these additions to the entry:
As the citations show, the word quickly gained additional usages — but the original coinage was indeed about knowledge.
Hm. I was unaware that the original coinage referenced Paul of Tarsus and the Unknown God (Acts 17:23 — “Ἀγνώστῳ θεῷ”). I see that Huxley reversed Paul, in a sense: Paul proclaimed that the “Unknown God” was the creator of all things and had raised Jesus from the dead (Acts 17:24-31); Huxley insisted that any putative creator of all things was unknown and unknowable.
Nerd of Redhead, #126
Wrong!
I accept evidence that has been vetted, tested, proved. I accept evidence that has been assessed regardless of how it make a person feel. I accept reliable evidence even when it contradicts my feelings or beliefs. We do science not to support out beliefs, we do science to learn; and when it includes learning things we happen to heartily hate, well then fuck your feelings and the delusions they rode in on. I see no difference between a creationist and a sasquatch denier, for both lie about the available evidence and refuse to give it an honest consideration.
Your animosity towards the subject means nothing, what matters is the question of the available evidence, and denying any evidence can exist does nothing to show it does not exist.
Let me make this simple, if Patty was a man in a suit, where did they get the material, and why is the costume work better than anything we can do today?
I accept evidence, not baseless assertions.
If we’re still talking the Christian god then I agree that I’d change my mind about his existence; however, I still wouldn’t worship the piece of shit. I don’t respect monsters.
Referring back to #134, I found the post where I read about the denialist doctors. It’s over at Rob Heinsoo’s Live Journal. It’s the last item in the post itself. If you don’t feel like going over there yourself, here’s a quote:
Denial, not just for wackjobs, bigots, and rightwingers.
If you have a citation for sasquatch in the peer reviewed scientific literature, present it. I will read that paper, and probably stop being a “denier”. I don’t accept evidence without the proper rigor expected in science, which excludes most of the stuff like your film. I trust other scientists, since they must be honest in their work, and the double checks that occur during the peer review process strengthen the reliability. A stranger from a random web site, I have no confidence in, and fall back to the concept they are wrong until they prove themselves right. And that requires proper scientific publication. Which is what any skeptic does. And why I remain a skeptic about sasquatch. Those who I find reliable keep finding the fraud in the “evidence”. As I said, one half rotten corpse would do more than a hundred pieces of vagary.
Not this again. Academics and other intelligent people are blind and stupid about some things. They never, ever learn, no matter what happens.
1. The media will faithfully repeat what you said.
2. Your email is private. It won’t end up getting 20 million hits on google.
I really have no explanation for these blind spots other than that intelligent life has yet to evolve on earth.
Wowbagger:
Agnostic is not a statement about whether one knows or doesn’t know god exists. As I understand it, it is about whether or not it is even possible to know whether god exists. “I don’t know whether god exists or not” is a statement of atheism. “It is not possible to know whether god exists or not” is a statement of agnosticism. So it is possible to be an agnostic theist; if you believe god exists but that there is no way to know that god exists. I think this is pretty close to Catholicism, there can be no proof of God, he must be accepted on faith alone.
As for whether it is worth discussing agnosticism, I think it really is what most of the atheism arguments are really about. I mean I think it is more interesting to discuss whether it is really possible to know whether god exists or not rather than whether any individual believes he exists or not. That is, it seems to me creationists are really trying to say that the existence of god can known and is proven by the facts of reality. (That they can’t provide those facts is a separate issue). Whereas we atheists are arguing that reality does not provide any evidence for god and so there is no way to know whether god exists.
I don’t know, I think I’ve had too much wine, never mind.
I’m with NoR on this one. There’s little there which could even give plausibility to the possibility of sasquatch, let alone it being possible at all. Maybe some homo erectus migrated to the north west of America where it survived several ice ages and the two different migrations of homo sapiens in the last 18,000-14,000 years as well as the post-colonial expansion of civilisation. It’s possible though quite an extraordinary claim on its own.
Do we have any sasquatch specimins? Any sasquatch droppings? Any sasquatch skeletons? Anything beyond folk legend at all? They’ve been able to pull Mastodon DNA from soil samples.
To say I’m a denialist goes too far, it implies there’s something to deny and really there isn’t any solid evidence to support the notion in the first place. I don’t think sasquatch exists, I’m pretty confident that sasquatch does not exist. But if one was able to produce a baby sasquatch in captivity for example, I’d change my mind. That’s scepticism, not denialism. Same goes for alien abductions or UFOs. They might be possible, however implausible, but I am still going to think that there’s no reason to believe that aliens are visiting earth until the alien artefacts and / or aliens themselves are presented.
Indeed, a strong agnostic is one who asserts that the question of deities is unknowable. Yet the popular usage of agnostic has turned it into being unsure, just don’t know whether God exists or not. To quote Bertrand Russell: As a philosopher, if I were speaking to a purely philosophic audience I should say that I ought to describe myself as an Agnostic, because I do not think that there is a conclusive argument by which one prove that there is not a God. On the other hand, if I am to convey the right impression to the ordinary man in the street I think that I ought to say that I am an Atheist, because, when I say that I cannot prove that there is not a God, I ought to add equally that I cannot prove that there are not the Homeric gods.
I would love to have a better word then atheist to express my lack of belief in the supernatural and/or gods, ecaxtly because as was pointed out above it makes theist look like the default position and atheism the negation of the default position with all its negative connotations.It should not have to be pointed out that we are arapists and astalkers and abankrobbers, after all !
However “brights” was just an awful suggestion.
I totally agree. And what’s more, I think that despite all the monstrous theology that surrounds this idea of a Christian god, believers often expect the damn thing to be like a simple logic gate. If you “do X”, go to Heaven, else go to Hell where “do X” can be “worshiped it”, “were baptized”, “were saved”, “believed in it”, “burnt a goat to it”, “were selected by it”, and so on. It just doesn’t mesh with the persona of the god presented by Christians which is one of an intervening psychopathic bully/sadomasochist flower child. Then we have our Robocop Christians who don’t believe in Hell, and I wonder why the hell they even bother to talk about their god since it matters not whether one believes in it if we are all going to be whisked away to Heaven.
got someone on myblog trying to claim that the recent Red Queen hypothesis paper in nature is just the kind of thing that “creation scientists” predict. Any biologists in room, please clarify. I heard one of the scientists involved with the paper discussing the findings and the implications on the Nature podcast (which is very good for science news) but beyond that I just don’t know. Can anyone who has access to the paper email me a copy please? My email is kel[underscore]skye[at]yahoo[dot]com
Also, if anyone can translate why he’s trying to play down that young earth creationists exists, it would be appreciated. It’s like he thinks I’m attacking a strawman of creation science by going after a view that no-one really holds anymore – and if that’s the case, it’s quite silly. I’m going after the argument itself, one that comes up from creationists all the time. Debunking the argument isn’t the same as thinking I’ve debunked every possible incarnation of creationism that has ever been or ever will be…
As Kel said, ‘agnostic’ – much like ‘atheist’ – seems to be used by whomever chooses to use it in whichever way best suits the point they’re trying to make.
In most cases when a Christian uses it it’s yet another step in the tapdancing routine they use to try and deflect attention away from the fact they’ve got no more compelling reason to believe that their god exists than the so-called victims of alien abduction do that a team of Greys abducted them from behind their moonshine still in backwoods Mississippi and probed them on three non-consecutive Arbor Days.
If we can’t know something exists, why the hell should we take the word of scientifically illiterate story-telling goat-herders from three or four thousand years ago that it does? How did they know?
I don’t use ¬? (¬) because I assume that no-one who is not trained in logic will know what it means. ? for material implication is right out. Both logicians and computer people usually understand ~ as negation.
the salvation purchased by Christ on the cross, saves not only forwards but backwards in time…
Whatever in the flying fuck are you talking about?
Patricia, perhaps 386sx posted in the wrong thread? Or was Dumbski being ridiculed in the parent threads to this one, the TSTKTS thread or the thread that will not die? (Both threads were way too long, did not read most of em…)
Kel,
left a comment on your blog..:-)
(+1)
And as to joining of threads, I dont know about you PZ, but I don’t like that many strangers in my living room !!
;)
Kel, I sent you a copy of that paper.
These neverending threads really just become an open forum for whatever. Initially they started out with a couple of young earth creationists who were trying to prove a global flood (by pointing at localised structures and from there extrapolating) and then has since become a free-for-all.
So this thread is as appropriate as any to discuss Dembski’s stupidity. If nothing else, it’s a potential new talking point.
Patricia, Queen of Sluts OM | January 9, 2010 12:41 AM:
Patricia, didn’t you know Jesus was a time traveler? He also visited Mars. And I’m sure Lynna and Pixelfish could tell us Jesus visited worlds without number.
Thank you phi1ip – as a former Old Believer I have a problem with the idea that Christ’s salvation (!) SAVES backwards in time. That’s not the biblical truth I was taught.
Excellent, thank you! Reading now
llewelly – See how I am. Us dumbass Old Believers can’t fathom such a thing! :)
lol, agreed.
The idea itself was good, but the name “brights” was lame.
Well, here, dude, slake your curiosity at last. Bit of a kluge but you get what you pay for.
16732
Thanks Patricia. In fact I’m not sure what the story about that was supposed to be – wasn’t it something like that when Jesus died, he descended into hell to redeem the souls of the just? Or they were all waiting around in Limbo waiting for Jesus to draw them all to heaven?
At least one of the gospels (Matthew) not only has zombie Jesus returning to life after this
gruesome torture, apparently foredained“redemption”, but he also brought back a whole lot of his undead friends, who got up from their graves and wandered around Jerusalem for a while.(You would have thought something really bizarre happening, like a zombie invasion of a major Roman colonial city, might have gotten a mention in Tacitus or other historians of his like… but there’s no secondary reports, only the Babble.)
Someone at Fox News is a fan of Pharyngula or atheists.org, but not so much of giving credit:
What’s Islam? Don’t Ask Google
O hey, guys, Brownian & Metzo’Magic – I am just learning SAS now. Any nice tips for the best quick startup lessons would be good.
And I am now, what, 50 posts behind in the thread? I think it may be time to leave until the next incarnation.
Christopher Hitchens answers some questions
Rorschach #141,
does calling myself an aleprechaunist make it look as if the default position is belief in leprechauns ? If the subject matter is the existence or non existence of leprechauns, you’re not going to avoid using the term leprechaun. Same is valid with God. Also, one rarely comes across theists who call themselves that way. They usually prefer to use the brand of their particular religion.
In french, we’ve dropped the “ist” of théiste and use the term athée, which is shorter than the positive. I’ve never considered it as implying that théiste (which is also very rarely used) is the default position.
@ Rorschach #144:
= sane
As in: “I don’t believe in any gods – I’m sane“.
(Though of course that does also include being a-leprechaunist etc.)
Cath @#86:
I just zipped over to your blog for a quick recce – you made me hungry – and noticed your review of Cafe Momo. I’m sitting at my desk just across the road from there, at this moment, and it definitely sounds like the food has improved since I got sick after eating one of their burgers about 18 months ago. Pity it’s always closed when I’m at work since I changed to nightshift.
Wowbagger & Jadehawk:
If you ever want to start a Pharyngula Bastards subgroup, include me in :-)
Homeopathy BSc
You used to be able to take a BSc in Homeopathy at an English University (although not one of the top flight). It is important to say immediately that the course was withdrawn in 2008, along with nearly all the other courses in alternative “medicine”.
Prof David Colquhoun of University College London has used the Freedom of Information Act to get hold of the course material. After much stonewalling the Commissioner (the final appeal – but don’t take that too literally – I do not know the detailed workings: IANAL) ruled that it must be released. The guy has now received 13.7kg (as he says, nearly 30lb in old money) of paper in 7 box files and is starting to assess them on the net:
http://www.dcscience.net/?p=2628
Interesting. Some of the material appears to be in breach of English law, let along in breach of science and common sense:
A reference from this site which talks about how homeopaths use the concept of facts and evidence:
http://apgaylard.wordpress.com/2007/11/08/its-evidence-jim-but-not-as-we-know-it/
Hat tip The Englishman at:
http://www.anenglishmanscastle.com/archives/008179.html
Alan B,
I did some checking and I’m wrong. Diesel fuel and other hydrocarbons are not used for gamma shielding but for neutron shielding. I misremembered a lesson from nuke school.
@Rorschach (#144)
I don’t think there’s a way around this, because the primary issue in a discussion where the term comes up is likely to be “do you believe in god(s)?”
Saying that we’re “rationalists” isn’t good enough, because many people consider belief in God to be the rational position.
Saying that we’re skeptics isn’t good enough, because many of the faithful would tell us that they have their own doubts, which they manage to overcome.
Saying we’re empiricists isn’t good enough, because the fundamentalists will tell us about all the scientific evidence that supports their beliefs.
For the same reason, referring to the religious as “askeptical” (or what have you) isn’t specific enough. They may be too quick to believe late night television ads, used car salesmen, or chiropractors, but the important fact, when discussing religion, is that they believe in god(s).
The lack of belief in god(s) may just be a small part of a much larger picture to us, but when we’re talking about religion, it becomes the most important part. You can’t say “I don’t believe in god(s)” without saying “god(s)”.
And theism really is the default position. Not logically or scientifically (“I don’t know” or “show me the evidence” fits better there), but culturally, because the vast majority of people have some sort of theistic belief. When you meet someone, it’s a pretty safe bet that they have some sort of religious leaning, even if it’s very small. That makes the lack of religious belief the oddity. Not wrong, but unusual.
I think that can be painted as a positive. People love to cheer for the underdog. People live rebelling against the establishment. People love the idea of being “better” than the mindless majority. Theist as the default position doesn’t have to hamper us.
I wasn’t previously aware of the shielding abilities of hydrocarbons at all, so for me it’s still a cool bit of intel.
thomas,
That really depends where you live : believe me, in a big city like Paris in post-religious France, religious folks are the minority. If you’re living in an urban setting and are less than 50 year old, 3 chances out 4 you’re a non believer.
@Cath the Canberra Cook (#148)
You’re right, we do (I’m a CS guy), but now that I think of it, I have no idea why. It’s six in the morning here, and I haven’t been to bed yet, so my brain just might be off, but all of the languages I can think of use ‘!’ as the not-operator.
No, wait, lisp actually uses the word “not”. But that doesn’t count, because I hate lisp.
In popping over to check out Sven’s update, I noticed that we’re approaching the first anniversary of the Time of Threadgenesis. If The ThreadTM lives another two months*, I hereby propose some sort of recognition celebration (marked at the very least by the CavedwellersTM coming up with some stupid name to mark the day**).
____________________
*Yes, I realize that any suggestion that another possibility might exist is heresy.
**Since coming up with names for things that arguably don’t need them is one of the things that we do best.
Speaking of homeopathy*…
Josh, how’s your toe?
*I know. It’s totally unrelated. But boygenius and I were talking about homeopathy when Josh had his accident and somehow the two things got associated in my mind. Knowing how I am, it’s quite possible that from now on I’ll be thinking about Josh’s toenail every time homeopathy is mentioned… And it’s all boygenius fault.
@ thomas.c.galvin #172:
(a) It was used in an early book you studied, even if it doesn’t persist in the languages currently used.
(b) You’re sensitive to picking up new computer languages, so the presence of any symbol in that unitary position would make you suspect it stood for “not”.
@negentropyeater (#171)
Please forgive my amero-centrism. ;-) Around here, it’s a different story. I have only ever knowingly met three atheists, though I don’t exactly interrogate everyone I meet.
America is changing, though. “Non-religous” is the fastest growing demographic, as far as these things are concerned.
@SEF (#175)
I just googled “tilde not etymology”. I’m going to bed.
~ is twos-complement in C, which is bit-by-bit negation. More generally, there aren’t all that many unary logical operators. I’ll recognize ~, ¬, !, not, and neg as logical negation the same as I’ll recognize C(A), AC, ~A, A as set complement. I’m probably forgetting a few that would be clear from context.
Oh for feck’s sake, one of the SciBorg banner ads I just got was for this s(h)ite:
http://2012-comet.com/category/2012/
It’s as stooopid/entertaining as you’d expect:
And:
Geesh! I didn’t spot any Norstradomus, but I rather suspect that old goof is in there somewhere…
(And they seem to accept comments, albeit I’ve no idea if they are “moderated” or not.)
No, it’s the ones-complement, which really is bit-wise inversion (bit-by-bit negation).
Ahh, you’re correct. I muddled the storage of signed ints with the ~ operator.
And to think that there was a time when we were talking about “popping smoke”. Do you remember? I think it was right before AlanC’s Second Coming.
blf,
They do moderate comments at that website. I’ve got one awaiting moderation now. I doubt they’ll print it because I quoted Matthew 24:36* and asked them if they were familiar with the term “false prophets.”
*No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.
Where’re all the Wieland fanbois?
Tartar building up… :{
Hm.
Hey! You! Wieland is a coprolithocephalos!
<waits hopefully>
Yes, yes you were. :)
Still a bit muddled, perhaps: The ISO C standard does not require signed integers to be twos-complement, and in fact the minimum ranges of the various integer types just-so-“happen” to coincide directly with the ones-complement range (which is, of course, for any given number of bits (width), one negative value “shorter” than the twos-complement range). This is obviously a highly pedantic point. And I don’t know of any ones-complement C implementation, nor do I (now) recall the rationale the original ANSI standards committee decided to (try and?) “support” ones-complement. (The most recent ISO C standard, C99, does provide for some optional integer types which, if implemented, must be twos-complement.)
I’m reminded why I quit programming and headed back to school to finish degrees in mathematics. :)
Hee hee. Apropos of nothing much, one of my degrees is in mathematics.
The sorts of programming I do for €’s requires me to be familiar with (among other things) types and storage (including representations), and a few years ago a job meant I had to be familiar with those parts of the C standard. Sorry…
Dania @ 174,
IIRC, we were discussing the concept that like-cures-like when Josh’s toenail reared its ugly head. With that in mind, perhaps this will help you dissociate the two events:
Hope this helps!
It’s much better, thanks. As I kinda figured from the last time it happened (opposite foot and during a hill climb), it really hurt like hell for about two days, and then it had healed to the point where functionality was pretty much restored to normal. The nail itself will take a minute to grow back, but the lack of it really isn’t effecting me too much now (I’ve rucked three times since it happened, with no problems). Yes, the length of this paragraph was for Sven’s benefit.
And while I’m at it, let me just tie up the last loose ends of the toe talk (from the previous Chapter).
Yeah, it’s training right now, but it’s not gonna be training next month. My unit tries to walk a line* between long-term performance strategy and permanent injury** because we take some very serious risks. I don’t think the sports POV applies here. If a football coach sidelines my dumb ass because of an injury and that somehow weakens the team so much that we lose the next game, no one dies. But if I fuck up my ankle bad in the suck, and I’ve never experienced what it’s like to push through a mission with that kind of pain tagging along, then I might be just distracted enough to, I dunno, miss a little movement in my peripheral vision while pulling security. In that case, there is a very real possibility that I’m gonna get someone killed (and no, this isn’t hyperbole–ops get comprised from exactly this kind of shit (lots of moving parts–lots of potential for things to go bad)). Injuries are a fact of life down range, and there is no mechanism to exfil someone who breaks a finger. You bandage it and keep going. So, training is as real-world as we can make it, and there is a brutal selective pressure to remove candidates who can’t force themselves on through the discomfort, pain, and fatigue. It sucks, and it’s a shitty thing to do to people, especially those who’ve had their eyes on this for a long time. But as shitty as it is, it’s nowhere near as bad as having just been infilled 100 miles from the nearest friendly and not having complete confidence in the guy lying beside you in the cold sandy dark.
I know–who would be crazy enough to do that? Those people are just weird.
*shakes head*
Madness :P
I agree. I don’t understand that mentality, either. But that isn’t really the situation. We’re talking about minor stuff here, and there is that line we try to hold to (when I did brake my foot that time, yeah I walked my ass off the fucking mountain, but they didn’t let me train the next day–they sent my ass to the hospital). People with a Rambo attitude get selected out–quick. There is no room for them. We don’t think of ourselves as supermen. We’re just aware that the jobs we’re asked to do are extremely difficult, and that there are going to be people depending on us when the shit goes down. That pretty much trumps everything else. It certainly trumps a toenail. I’d say the mentality is closer to something like:
“Yes, it hurts. Yes, it’s awful. But, regardless of how much it sucks right now, can you find it somewhere inside of yourself to keep going despite the pain? Even if you’re a little fucked up because of a few minor injuries, are you still gonna be focused enough to be watching my six when it counts?”
You may respond with “of course people will pull it out and perform when it’s for real; there’s no reason for them to deal with actual injuries during training.” That’s fine, and you might well be right. I hope so. But the fact is we’re not willing to wager our lives on it–not any more than we have to. Anyone can talk tough when we’re strolling through the woods in North Carolina and the injury is a bad finger cut or a ripped-off toenail. Those kinds of injuries are things you simply have to fight through, while retaining focus (as with hunger; as with fatigue). It’s just how it is–medivac isn’t always a reality… As such, tough talk about “being about to go the distance when it’s real” simply isn’t good enough. We wanna see some actual evidence as to how the folks on our left and right perform when it gets bad (because we’re all on someone’s left or right). So, the training is, well, awful, and we try hard to mimic the real deal. If I rip off a toenail during a drill weekend and we’re gonna ruck the next morning, I can choose to select myself out of the event. Absolutely. It’s on me to choose. But my teammates will notice, and the fact is, their confidence in me will drop a little. People may not see this is a particularly rational environment, but then we’re not practicing to do particularly rational things.
______________________
*And of course everything we’re talking about here is a billion miles away from how regular guard units train. This is not what the vast majority of part-time soldiers sign up for.
**A huge portion of it is learning, for yourself, the difference between being kinda fucked up (I’m okay–I can keep going) and being really fucked up (uh, yeah–you guys need to fix me). That line is blurry and people, including the unit medics, do get it wrong on occasion and people do get permanently injured and removed from candidacy/teams as a result. The training is specifically designed to find your weak spots and POKE at them–because the suck is gonna poke at them worse (and any team is limited by weakest Joe at any given moment). That blows, but this isn’t a goddamn game.
I’m glad no one took my suggestion seriously. The ThreadTM must live.
I do admit that I miss the AlanC/RogerS days some. We just haven’t had anyone show up since from who I derive the same combination of amusement/frustration. Those two were a definite education.
…which seems kind of appropriate, because so many of the fallacies about propagated by believers are rooted at least partly in binary thinking (e.g. the opposite of active “100% certain” belief can only be active “100% certain” denial/disbelief)…
For biblical literalists, this takes on a particular importance. If “whatever is not of faith is sin”, any doubt, no matter how small is punishable. Whether you go to hell for doubt or just have to lie still and think of Jesus depends on the level of vituperation in that particular creed, but doubt is never acceptable.
I read this and thought of the unofficial motto of the Légion Étrangère (French Foreign Legion): “Marche ou crève” (march or die).
That’s much better than the way they put it to us when I was in basic:
Train-As-You-FightTM people! Hooah*!
_______________________
*Running around yelling Hooah! is one of the things that’s probably gonna get your ass selected out of my outfit right quick.
Yeah. My head was still hurting from the night before and you were trying to make it spin with statements such as “Can I cure a hangover by drinking myself to death?” :)
*shudder*
Very helpful, boygenius. Very helpful indeed.
*eyeroll*
@Josh: Glad to hear that your toe is better and isn’t preventing you from rucking
Weebles.(This is just a test. No, Josh, you don’t need to try to read that last word. It really isn’t important. Trust me.)
TC @ 169,
Not at all. Just because something is prevalent doesnt make it the default position.It’s an acquired position, you have to be taught/indoctrinated into it. You don’t have to be indoctrinated into atheism, it’s the factory setting of your brain.
It’s even worse then that, I am quite smitten with this jewish girl atm, but I am not even a candidate, because Im not jewish ! So not only will a lot of people have some sort of religious leaning, it also determines who they meet and mate with !
That’s how it is, Josh. You fuck just one weeble and they never let you forget it.
Dania especially…
That’s okay, though. That’s not a problem :P
Dania,
Always glad to help. ;-) Although, if you have any additional psychosomatic issues, Imma have to charge you next time.
My eyes are pretty good. I got it…
There was supposed to be an exaggerated eye roll and a sticking-tongue out including in 202. I hit send too fast.
I know a few things from weeble re-enactments of Bible scenes as a child:
Weebles may not fall down, but they will stay down if properly balanced.
A Weeble sent to the flames of hell (in the absence of hell, a baseboard heater will work) loses its wobbliness.
Weebles will eventually drown.
Hey, has there ever been any sort of campaign to try to force the Catholic church to strip psycho-killer saints of their sainthoods?
I’d like to start with St Thomas More. I went to a school named after him, and we learned that he was awesome because he got his head chopped off rather than let Henry get a divorce.
Then, 25 years later, I’m watching The Tudors and I’m, like, “Holy shit! Thomas More had people burned alive! Because their religious views were just slightly different to his own!”
Then I find out that the f*cker who had the astronomer Giordano Bruno burned is also a saint.
Outrageous, don’t you think?
#168 ‘Tis Himself, OM
No problem. I guessed you were thinking about neutrons. I tended to remember it because gamma and neutrons required the opposties for shilding:
gamma you need the highest atomic weight and density (think lead)
neutrons you need the lowest atomic weight (and hydrogen has the lowest density).
Also, I used to sit in the same open plan office with members of our Health Physics section on the nuclear power station. With repeated instruction on radiation and repeat contact with health physics it became so in-drilled (is that a word?) that I will probably remember it “forever”.
There’s nothing wrong with, ah, er, pleasuring one’s self with weebles. It’s certainly better than lusting after furries. Not that there’s anything wrong with that either. After all, your kink is fine as long as nobody gets hurt, or if they do get hurt then that’s what they want.
Rorschach,
I feel your pain:
boygenius,
I did Not need that….:-)
Oh, never mind. I don’t think I’ll be needing your “help” in the future, thank you very much. ;)
Hmm…
Alan B,
It’s been so long since I was a nuke that much of what was so repetitiously drilled into me has leaked out. Just about the only thing left is when I have a wrench or screwdriver in my hand I don’t have to say “rightie-tightie leftie-loosie.”
#182 Dania
Do we await his return? Are there any prophesies as to when we might enjoy his company again? Will he be accompanied by RogerS?
It will be like old times (sadly).
There was no need to point it out. It was implied…
This thread needs music !! Frank Zappa
Damn! My MLM homeopathy theory isn’t bearing the fruit I was promised. Back to the drawing board…
Sometimes I wonder if he would still be around if he hadn’t been banned. He was persistent!
Actually, I think I meant “implicit”…
Wait a minute, isn’t “New Atheist” supposed to signify that we aren’t going to take it any more and won’t put up with “atheist” being used as a slur or being misunderstood? I do like the sound and look of athée, though (é is rendered by typing é in HTML), as suggested by negentropyeater.
No no no, “New Athiest” means that we’re going to be cruel and rude to Christians and other goddists. The poor, downtrodden, persecuted Christians will cry in fear and anguish every time they see a “New Atheist” appear.
aratina cage,
This one’s for you!
That’s what aratina said. See, by “not taking it anymore” we’re already being rude and cruel to the poor persecuted Christians. We’re taking away their right to persecute… that’s persecution.
The situation is so bad that soon it will be necessary for them to pass a Defense Of Our Faith United Statute.
Do you know how your congressperson will vote on the upcoming DOOFUS bill?
‘Tis Himself, OM #218, that so made me laugh. I was going to say something similar to but less brilliant than what Dania #220 said in response.
boygenius #219: faved!
Of course, you must not forget that atheism is doooooomed and in decline. Funny how a minority in decline is able to persecute the majority so much.
Must be hard to be a Christian nowadays.
I’m so pleased to see that we’re back to having really long discussions about Josh’s injured toe. (Sven, I feel for you, but I’m entertained.)
I agree with Josh that, to a certain extent, one needs to practice the art of staying focused, or of keepin’ on keepin’ on, in spite of injuries or discomfort. My brother and I don’t take people with us on most of our expeditions because other people focus on discomfort. It’s hard to enjoy the great outdoors if every discomfort becomes the center of your attention.
I don’t really have anything to add to the discussion of rucking with weebles, or whatever it is that people were doing with weebles. But I do have an inexplicable new longing to own a few weebles. I blame Josh a bit, but mostly I blame ‘Tis for posting links to addictive images.
Rorschach@163: Thanks for posting the link to Christopher Hitchens answering questions. I was struck by his comment that he pities people who have to rely on mainstream, published journalism for their information. Another memorable point Hitchens made was that Iran is bankrupting itself in the pursuit of nuclear weapons (and he meant economically, not ethically, though one could make a case for both).
Sven @159: Excellent means of fighting back, Sven. It was almost worth having the Overlord torture you to read this:
However, I do sense that we have somehow lost our purity.
blf@179
Dania @185, many thanks for the trip down memory lane. I don’t know where he/she has gone, but I belatedly thank Møøse for posting the enticing “A creationist once bit my sister.”
Kel, OM @133;
Wasn’t that kinda like the Dr Who xmas special? The source of the master’s madness was put there as a trick by the head time-honcho.
Actually, the more I think about it, that’s the opposite of what happened. It was a kind of paradox where the master’s madness was the cause of the time-lords’ trick that was the cause of the madness.
That’s pretty much what Louis Agassiz believed.
Headdesk, crash, headfloor, the usual story.
Brilliant.
All? Every single trackway?
The film is rather equivocal. Too bad its resolution isn’t higher.
The strongest argument against the existence of the sasquatch is the lack of bones in the Pleistocene fossil record. But then, none of that record comes from forest environments, AFAIK.
Still, the evidence for it isn’t as good as that for the orang pendek, and that one isn’t an open-and-shut case either.
Why not just go back to the roots and translate them?
Look no further than the top of this page.
Also…
As in “we are those that you always warned us about”.
Now that I think about it, I’m surprised that no one has yet asked for a photo of Josh’s toe, injured or otherwise. Is that because Pharyngulette isn’t around?
(Yes, I took the day to link to comments from earlier chapters of The ThreadTM. Sorry.)
Lynna@227 (correcting the quoting),
Well, it/Them are advertising
thingsgarbage for money, and presumably getting somecustomerssuckers, so in one sense, it’s perhaps not a waste of time (for it/Them).What annoyed me about the s(h)ite, besides the deeeep stoopid, is that it was a SciBorg banner ad. I realise the SciBorg contracts out for ads, and ads can be mis-classified for multiple reasons so the filtering of the deeeepy stooopid doens’t always work, but that doesn’t prevent me from being annoyed.
@Miki Z (#178) and blf (#180)
And I am yet again reminded why I jumped on the J2EE train. I just put strings in a database. I didn’t even know C had an operator for bitwise negation.
Also, further evidence against the existence of God: the C++ templating system. No kind, loving god would allow such a beast to live.
My reading of the evidence is from Skeptical Inquirer. They don’t look at every piece of “evidence”, just representative samples. And they have tracked down a couple of people who go out on weekends and leave tracks.
Given the number of hikers, hunters, and lumbermen in the Pacific NW, I would have expected one of them to run across a body or some strange bones.
Dania’s #185 (=#16758) inspired this amusing glimpse of the history of The Thread.
We we wrong; we were so, so wrong.
Cath @162 and others
I do a lot in SAS and I’ve found this is a good introduction (I really need to get the newest edition, though. Mine is the 2nd edition.)
http://www.sas.com/apps/pubscat/bookdetails.jsp?catid=1&pc=61860
I still use it, even after 10+ years.
We shouldn’t give it a 21 gun salute, but rather a 21 beer salute. With bacon sandwiches.
what’s more, we were wrong OTI
We we wrong; we were so, so wrong.
And a good thing too. Long live the thread! By the way, what incarnation # and post # is this?
RAmen. I’ll take double bacon and pass on the beer, though.
What does OTI mean? I don’t think I’ve heard it before.
This is subThread #17 and comment #16813.
OTI refers to SIWOTI syndrome.
Thread history here.
After 21 beers, I rather suspect Teh Thread That Thrives™ wouldn’t—if only because all the participants also aren’t.
Oh, crap, quoting FAIL. Let’s try this again, shall we?
And a good thing too; long live the thread! How many thread incarnations have we gone through now, and how many posts?
RAmen. I’ll take double bacon and pass on the beer, though.
What does OTI mean? I don’t think I’ve heard it before.
I figured it was, but on the off chance that you interpreted the comment incorrectly, I didn’t want there to be any risk of me appearing annoyed.
There has been some critiquing of my communication skills as of late…
Rorschach, @606 on the previous chapter of the endless thread, you provided a link to a lecture by Sean B. Carroll. Just wanted to say thanks as I found it a particularly clear explanation of using DNA, and even remnant decayed bits of DNA, to investigate evolutionary changes, or to document those changes. The lecture was great for we non-biologists.
Weebles…
I’m glad I already have a call sign; I know what you guys would tag me with.
Just now back from communing with some dead stuff over at the Smithsonian.
It’s not warm out there…
Sven @235: Ah yes, the thread cannot even be killed by the posting of poetry. I once mistakenly thought the thread had died of poetry poisoning. But no, it shook off poetry like an Irishman in a light rain and proceeded to the nearest pub.
Riffing off Joseph Smith’s gig as a translator of golden plates and whatnot, other “mormon” sects had their own translators. Some of the descendants still exist, worship together, have websites, and do other important scam-related stuff.
from http://www.strangite.org/Law.htm
Seven witnesses! Ha, I have more witnesses than Joe Smith, nyah, nyah. :-P
From Sven’s blog:
Indeed, it would have been a tragedy. I’m so glad The Thread is still alive and in good health.
BTW, thanks, Sven, for keeping track of The Thread’s history and count. It’s nice to have a page with links to all the subThreads (especially when I want to find an old comment :)).
Really? In writing or in speech? I don’t think I’ve ever had a problem comprehending the meaning of your posts and I usually find your explanations to be very clear*.
*Yes, even you go on at length about such fascinating subjects as… turf. :P
I’m not entirely sure how to vote in this competition, but I imagine that some deviant Pharyngulistas might want to favour this hat with their approval.
In writing.
Damn. Turf is going to become my new Weeble, I can feel it :P
Ah! I see. If we pool our money and get PeeZed a hat, the designer gets one as well.
Any takers? I’m in for $10 (and the $5 to request a quote).
Also: asterisks.
And because today is Link-to-old-comments Day for me:
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/04/i_have_no_idea_what_this_threa.php#comment-1546995
:P
Yes, and asterisks. :P :P :P
You really are doing some digging today, aren’t you?
*reads*
Wow, I’m fucking goofy sometimes.
And following Dania’s link brings up another point. Where the fucking hell is AnthonyK?
I’ve noticed he has been absent for a while. But he was here last month.
wow
I just happened across this cover of a 1978 Dr. John album and found it…disquieting.
http://tosca.homelinux.com/temp/tosca/D/DSC04214.jpg
There’s a reason why I still remember that comment (from 9 months ago!). It has a strong giggle-inducing effect on me, that’s for sure.
The Dr. will see you now.
Re ambulocetacean @205;
I went to a school names after Roberto Bellarmino. How d’you think I feel. He was another of those who tried Bruno, and was the one as threatened galileo with torture for speaking the truth.
I recall there was such a suggestion in the recent past but the paedo cult are unrepentant on the matter.
And speaking of giggle-inducing comments that for some unknown reason my brain has decided to remember today*:
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/05/i_have_no_idea_what_this_threa_1.php#comment-1668908
There are few things I miss more than Owlmirror’s witty translations. Those were good times.
As long as I can keep making you giggle, I’m a pretty happy guy.
There was a synergy among all of us that we have yet to repeat* and it was beautiful.
*It requires the appropriate kind of adversary.
Dania, good links to Owlmirror rants. :-)
Ah, those were good times, when the scienceblogs servers were even more passive/aggressive than they are now.
“Were you trying to submit a comment….”
Fuckin’ goddamn AYE, I was trying to submit a comment. Did you think I just wanted to hold hands?
Yeah… that asterisk. I put it there for a reason, I’m sure. And it must have been good reason. Pity I can’t remember what it was…
Anyway, from now on I shall blame Rev for the typos and Josh for the superfluous asterisks. ;)
And aren’t you sweet…
Sweet? Me? Nahhh…rough and mean.
Okay, my Thread siblings, I’m off to some great steak and (hopefully) good Shiraz. Back in a while.
I don’t believe you. :P
I’m probably off to bed (meaning that I should be going to bed…). See you all tomorrow.
Are we witnessing a burgeoning internet romance?
If so, name a kid after the website! ;-)
Louis
[I need to preface this by saying that Josh knows many of my thoughts on the US military. (So could anyone who’s read some of my comments here, but I’m not arrogant – or paranoid – enough to think anyone’s following them that closely.) My criticism of that culture and policy in this instance is in a small way a part of a larger critique, but here I’m simply disagreeing with the rationale for how things are done. My focusing on this more minor point does not imply an acceptance or endorsement of the military in any general way.]
Yeah, I don’t think you quite caught the argument that I was making, which I’m sure is my fault – even as I was writing, I sensed that it wasn’t entirely clear. First, and most importantly, what I was saying had nothing to do with pain or focus; it was entirely about healing (most significantly, keeping even a minor injury from developing into something more serious/permanent). Second, when I referred to “training,” I meant your physical fitness training.
No, it does. The discussion was about losing some time on speed tests due to taking a couple of days off from running due to an injury. It was the intelligent thing to do, given the possibility of exacerbating it, snd if your times were affected at all that should reasonably be regarded as a temporary effect of a minor injury that you were wise to rest. Hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars have been invested in your training, and it would be irresponsible to risk any sort of complications in that circumstance.
Good grief, this was not about pushing through pain. I assumed from the start that pain could be taken out of the mix. You’re elite soldiers with years of experience and have shown that you can perform under all sorts of adversity in training and real-world action. The idea that you would be sidelined in a combat situation by such an injury should be ridiculous to anyone.
No, that makes perfect sense to me. Not what I was talking about, though.
It’s minor if it’s allowed to heal properly. Since that’s possible in this case, that’s what should happen. What I’m saying is that there is a real possibilty that minor injuries become major if you fuck with them.
That’s intelligent.
Again, my remarks had nothing whatsoever to do with pain or focus or that kind of toughness. There is no toughness that prevents complications from not allowing injuries to heal. Ever see Joe Namath’s legs? Hamstring tears keep tearing. *grumble*
Well, I would in the sense that I assumed that elite soldiers or athletes with years or decades of training would of course be able to perform in any circumstances, which is why I wasn’t thinking about pain at all.
But you’ve gone through the training. Again, I was talking about your fitness training. Honestly, I’m a bit surprised that your faith in one another is this fragile.
That’s a stupidly-designed system. That decision should be made by a medical professional when possible.
That’s very sad. I would expect that at that level people would expect their fellows to be intelligent enough to know what’s best for the team in the long run and not assume some silly motives. Of course, this wouldn’t be an issue if a doctor or nurse were making the decision.
Too…many…comments…
I think the policy should be to err on the side of caution, and that there should be a requirement to inform the medical people (whenever). You’re simply not qualified to make that decision in major cases; in minor cases, they should trust that you’re not a moron.
And what an enormous fucking waste that is, on so many levels, which is why caution – in anything but a battlefield (and, since I think the analogy stands, Superbowl/Olympics/World Series) situation – is reasonable.
OK, so…once again, I wasn’t talking about that kind of training or that kind of toughness.
…It’s interesting to note – leaving aside for the moment the changing relative percentages of civilians/soldiers killed in wars – the various causes of military deaths…
And I’m off to bed too (Please do not assume it will be the same bed as Dania. Just coincidence)
Weather forecast is dire doom and disaster. I suspect it will just be a few snow flurries!
Great Britain isjust about covered with snow and we are running out of grit. Isn’t it good that we are suffering from Global Warming. We’ve had about 2-3 inches of it here.
Let’s be real. I’ve seen the pictures and there was no where He could have kept his wallet, and certainly no way He could have gotten to it to purchase anything…time travel being entirely beside the point.
I realise I may be in the minority here, but think the total thread count is wrong. Yes, SDiM says we have a roolz that only threads that are specifically closed with a message saying ‘continues here’ OWTTE count but the roolz is arbitrary and ought to be fixed.
In particular, I think the original “let’s teach alanC about real geology” started here and that’s another 912 comments to add to the total.
I have no idea what this thread is about any more.
Perhaps a biologist could explain the implications of the Red Queen Hypothesis for me, or at the very least link me to a resource that is not wikipedia.
That said, with regard to the anastomosationitude experiment, it appears that the Wieland threads were abosrbed quickly and choked out by the inexorably stronger conversational currents of the Thread Everlasting.
As one might have predicted, Professor.
This thread is about precisely what topics are under discussion.
Except when it isn’t.
Louis
Alan B. @267, I thought you might like to know where all your warming is going:
http://esrl.noaa.gov/psd/map/images/rnl/sfctmpmer_07b.rnl.html
See the red from Greenland to Eastern Canada–that’s where the Gulf Stream is flowing, rather than to Europe. It’s a pretty odd occurrence.
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/04/i_have_no_idea_what_this_threa.php#comment-1546834
Hey. I’m in damn good company :-)
The problem with the laughably bad Unicorn example is that it merely substitutes proving one negative for another (instead of proving no Unicorns exist, you have to prove no evidence of Unicorns existing exists). It doesn’t demonstrate that you can prove a negative, as bobocups claimed.
What it does demonstrate, though, is the amazing power of the Interwebs to find some other wackadoodle to support your own flawed reasoning abilities.
Hats.
pdferguson,
Of course a negative can be proven (to the degree any non-logical/mathematical proposition can be proven!).
Consider the conjecture: [the planet Earth has two identical Moons].
Disproof: We can observe the Moon, both directly and indirectly (e.g. by its tidal effects, stellar occultation). Were there a second, identical Moon, we would therefore be able to also observe it. Since we cannot, there isn’t.
QED.
Only one? :-)
Strangely*, I have no access to Nature. Write to the authors to beg for the pdf; they’re not affiliated with Macmillan Publishing, so they’ll send it gladly.
* Well, actually… there once was a Nature paper on how the French science budget correlates with whether conservatives or Social Democrats win presidential and parliamentary elections. It’s scary how close the correlation is.
Ooooh. Snap!
Bobocups? *snicker* I wish he would get back on here and better explain his ideas.
Oops, in my haste to provide an example, I got the phrasing wrong.
Make it C=[the planet Earth does not have two identical Moons] to fit the “negative” requirement. :)
Re a_ray_in_dilbert_space’s re to Alan B;
I seen that before and remembered that the fabled NW Passsage was open for the summer. I wonder how badly the british climate will be affected if (more of) the gulfstream were to go between canada and greenland.
I don’t think he knows his ideas. He is just looking for a gap so we don’t think of him and Xians as delusions fools. Which he proves, because the only evidence that will work is physical evidence for his imaginary deity, which he acknowledges he doesn’t have. *snicker*
I have the paper now (Thanks Miki Z), and have read it. Combine that with the interview on the nature podcast and I think I get the gist of it. I’m just wondering the wider implications for the Red Queen Hypothesis is for evolution. Upon reading about the red queen hypothesis, I can’t see any problems between it and my understanding of evolution. So perhaps it’s my understanding of evolution that is lacking, because all I’ve read on it sounds perfectly consistent with the notion of allopatric speciation. Indeed, in Dawkins new book he talks about single events acting as genetic barriers fuelling new species so I’m quite confused that an old earth creationist has sited it.
IANABioloigist but I think what creos see in the red queen hypothesis is that it seems to go against what they imagine is evolutionary doctrine; that there is no teleology, only random variation and natural selection. There’s nothing in that that ays goddidit. They just look for gotchas as Nerd of Redhead just said.
The real situation, which is well understood by biologists, is that coevolution and arms races can give what looks like directionality to evolution. e.g. cheetas have to evolve to run faster because gazelles do also.
On that cheetah/gazelle race; when reading Dawkins’s River Out Of Eden, it occurred to me that the two species are not actually in competition. Although individuals in both species compete, it’s the same genes for running fast that are in both mammals.
Eddie, Oh without the Gulf Stream, Britain and really all of Europe is in deep Stilton. Note that Rome is at the same latitude as Baltimore.
London is at the same latitude as Labrador.
Of course in my last post, that should have said “cited”.
Actually further north than Dah UP. We averaged 200+ inches of snow, most of lake effect. London will have ocean effect.
David M. @53
How does it kill? By underwhelming you to death?
Effin’ right.
Scientist sounding person dising PZ on the trackways thread. Sez PZ misrepresents figures because he doesn’t RTFP. Tsk
BS
Dix2, bottom of page 5
BS
I adore windy.*
*(when I’m not arguing with her. Aw, hell, I adore her even then. :))
My impression is that PZ makes sure he feels that he understands the articles before posting them. And he usually presents the authors ideas, and says if he agrees or not. His interpretation may not agree with some, especially IDiots or creobots. Hard to tell if the complainer is a delusional fool, or just a biologist with a different interpretation.
Profile says DLX2 is a grad student. Used to know grad students like that when I was in grad school. “Where are they now…?”
I just received a package from an organization known as “St. Matthew’s Churches”. The missives contained therein are a bunch of mind-numbing eye-rape, promising wealth and salvation.
Why was I not subsequently surprised to learn of its cynical and highly unscrupulous dealings?
That second link also mentions:
I object to that. I’m not that poor.
He was asked to provide some evidence about 24 hours ago and still hasn’t come up with any.
Hmm…Another one who can’t see the forest for the trees? Funny how when you can see the forest, the trees are also very sharp…
Oh and SC:
BAIL OUT BAIL OUT BAIL OUT BAIL OUT BAIL OUT BAIL OUT BAIL OUT BAIL OUT BAIL OUT BAIL OUT BAIL OUT
– I cannot get it out of my head and you are responsible.
Wow. So Jesus is like an uber-terminator who not only saves you in the past but the future.
“Believe in me if you want to live forever“
The time stamps on the track thread are GMT.
BS
Somebody elsethread just linked this review of Star Wars I.
Luckily for them I can’t now remember who or where.
Damn you! I’m actually starting to respect the original trilogy as decent filmmaking.
Also: hat.
Sili #303
While the review of Star Wars I, II and II were good, the extraneous stuff was over the top. The woman tied up in the basement was way too much.
I must have a pretty basemental form of humour. I was amused by the reviewer – after I finally got used to the Ben Steinian drawl.
Eddie @ 258
It’s incredible that the Catholic church continues to worship these killers.
On the 400th anniversay of Bruno’s burning, the Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Angelo Sodano defended Bruno’s inquisitors, saying they “had the desire to preserve freedom and promote the common good and did everything possible to save his life.”
Yeah, everything up to but not including not burning him…
On a side note, part of the “evidence” for making Australian nun Mary McKillop a saint is that she performed miracles in response to prayers.
WTF is up with praying to people who aren’t even saints yet? Could I pray to Oscar Wilde or, I dunno, Jerry Orbach on the off chance that they get canonised one day?
You rang? Oh, I’m around and still lusting after the well-edumacated minds of the sexy, nerdly stud-males of Pharyngula. I just have a painfully slow (as in slower-than-dialup) connection these days and can’t be arsed to log in, simply to make my presence known. That said, I’ll pass on said photo of Josh’s toe. Thanx anyway.
Suffice it to say, I read the threads and lurk. I absorb. I learn. And I continue to have impure thoughts about extremely smart men.
Nerd of Redhead, #139
How the fuck am I supposed to provide citations from scientific literature if you refuse to take it seriously? If every time any possible evidence is presented it is declared de factor to be a fake, a fraud, or a lie? Where is the literature to be found when the work is automatically assumed to be baseless, without any work being done to prove or disprove it?
And let me add that just saying it’s all fake is not science, it is denial. It is the same depth of reasoning as seen in creationism, Holocaust Denial, and the Book of Mormon. It’s an appeal to authority and I say it stinks. Show me where the evidence as a whole has been studied and found, as a whole, to be wanting.
Or are we assuming that all hominid skull fossils are fakes because the Piltdown Man skull was concocted?
so in other words: on one hand, David M. will get as much snow as he can handle; and on the other hand there might actually finally be wine from Vinland, and Greenland will be actually green (at which point the cult of Eric the Prophet shall arise) :-p
well, seems he has only been noticing that one. Which in turn makes me think I have not been sufficiently expressing my… appreciation… of your intellect, lately ;-)
haven’t gotten anything from them, which either means I’m not poor enough, or I don’t look illiterate enough; or maybe it has to do with not ever having taken part in a census
Sorry, until sasquatch is proven to exist by a body, there cannot be any denial. One cannot deny that which doesn’t exist. That is true science. You are confusing pseudoscience with true science, and I am not. Your previous posts on topics like plate tectonics show your grasp of science to be rudimentary. I will not agree with you until you show the proper evidence. In this case, a body (live or dead), or at least most of a skeleton.
Oscar Wilde-The Selfish Giant
Jerry Orbach-Razzle Dazzle
I can deny the existence of dragons, but I don’t think it makes me a denialist to do so. To be a denialist, I feel it has to fly in the face of evidence as opposed to denying in the fact of lack of evidence.
Show me a sasquatch and I’ll change my mind, until such time the extraordinary nature of the claim (the extreme unlikelihood coupled with the utter lack of evidence despite a huge cryptozoological hard-on for such a creature) means that it’s only appropriate to deny that the claim has any meaningful validity until appropriate evidence is presented. Doesn’t have to be in a peer review paper, a live baby bigfoot in a zoo would suffice…
Sili- “Somebody elsethread just linked this review of Star Wars I.
Luckily for them I can’t now remember who or where.
Damn you! I’m actually starting to respect the original trilogy as decent filmmaking.”
It is! That review is slamming “Phantom Menace”. It is fair, logical, accurate, and snark-licious!
Nerd, the sasquatch may be a fake, but you cannot deny the unsettling evidence presented in this documentary about Stonehenge.
NoR and Kel (and other folks),
I don’t know the full history of the subject of sasquatch, I do know enough to know that frauds and pranksters have played a large role in the controversy. But, whenever I hear somebody asserting, with no evidence to back it up, that everything presented as evidence pointing to the existence of the animal is a fraud I have to ask, “How do you know?”
Has all the evidence been tested, and tested honestly with no a priori reasoning? Has the testing been cross checked and verified. Have the tests been duplicated? I submit no, because too many people have an emotional investment in sasquatch being a lie.
Thanks to a few frauds the whole subject has been poisoned, and the standard of proof has been elevated to levels a physicist would have trouble achieving. You have become afraid to admit to error, you and many more besides.
What do you do? You start with the premise the item or items are false, and you do whatever you can to demonstrate it. It can’t be true, therefor it isn’t true, and here’s why it isn’t true. Insofar as you use the scientific method to confirm your prejudices, much as creationists do, that makes you no better than the creationists.
Why do I accept the existence of sasquatch? From a short piece of 16mm film shot back in 1967. Footage that shows a female saquatch, with an apparent injury on her right thigh. A subject that does not look to me like a human in a costume. Because the proportions are all wrong, the movement overall is all wrong for anyone in a costume — indeed, any clothing of any kind. This little fantasy you adhere to doesn’t gibe with reality in any way shape or form.
I can understand why the sasquatch was rejected when it first came to our attention, but basing a scientific conclusion on disgust with a lying sack of shit is no way to do science at all. So when you ask what I have to offer in the way of evidence, I present to you the Patterson/Gimlin film, and its subject, the sasquatch Patty. Considering the circumstances of how the film got made, where it got made, the appearance and behavior of the subject as the film was being shot, I can find nothing that shows that anybody go together to deliberate defraud the scientific community. No my friends, it is the scientific community that has been defrauding itself.
Kel, #312
Do you mean to tell us you believe komodo dragons don’t exist? After all the specimens found, the films taken, the animals kept in captivity, you think komodo dragons are fake?
Next thing we know you’re going to try and convince us that basilisks (jesus lizards that is) are a figment of our imagination. Is there no limit to your depravity?
It’s more than that though, even if what you’re saying is true about the frauds bringing it into question, the fact is that there still is no evidence presented of any form of sasquatch population. None. We can’t say for sure that sasquatch exists, we have no basis to beyond the urban legend itself. That’s the problem.
Am I rejecting the notion of a sasquatch because it’s been hoaxed before? No. I’m rejecting sasquatch because there’s no good reason to support sasquatch – the entire premise is incredibly unlikely and there’s not been any sufficient evidence to demonstrate it. But like I said, if you show me a sasquatch baby in the zoo, I’ll change my mind then and there. Remember when the platypus was first sent back to London it was thought a fraud, but the point is we can conclusively point to the existence of the species. Why can’t we do that for sasquatch?
Mythusmage, until you show with proper positive evidence that sasquatch exists, he doesn’t. Parsimony. That proper evidence is a body (live or dead), or a fairly complete skeleton. Until then, sasquatch is like deities. Imaginary. You can believe what you want. I don’t have to without the proper evidence, preferably from the peer reviewed scientific literature.
*facepalm* I can’t believe you just said that. The Sasquatch is a long running joke and nothing more than that. Next thing you know, mythusmage will be telling us that Harry and the Hendersons is a documentary.
Nope, I’m a True BelieverTM. Not only do I know they exist from reading about them in science books, seeing them in science documentaries and hearing of them through various lines of research – but I’ve also seen them for myself in captivity in a Sydney zoo.
Again, my criteria is that there must be solid evidence to get the concept of a sasquatch away from the null hypothesis. Where are the sasquatch droppings? Where is its habitat? How many live in the population to sustain it? Where can we see a live one? Where can we see a dead one? Where is the evidence that takes the sasquatch away from myth and into zoology?
NoR, OM (and mythusmage),
Heh. I actually “saw” Bigfoot when I was 13. I was checking my trap-line in the woods of northern Minnesota one late afternoon. Scared the shit out of me. I lost a lot of blood and a fair amount of flesh running full-bore through the woods to get away. In my panic, I left my rifle and trap basket behind.
When I got home, my parents insisted I was crazy and ordered me to go back and collect my gear. So I reluctantly crept back to the scene and observed that “Bigfoot” was actually two old tractor tires stacked against a tree.
Twenty six years later I still vividly recall having seen a large, mobile creature. My mind’s ear can still hear it moving through the brush. All in all, a good life lesson regarding the ability of the mind to fabricate and hallucinate. “Believe none of what you hear and half of what you see”. Indeed.
Damn poe’s law, I fell for it again. Here I was thinking that you’re actually serious about the sasquatch (or at the very least being contrarian) and it was just you pulling our collective legs all along – knowing full well that our SIWOTI syndrome would get the better of us. Good show, but the ruse is over now. Back to serious discussion please?
mythusmage (#308)
Do you really think sasquatches are special in this regard? That it’s unusual or wrong for people to automatically assume a farfetched claim is baseless until someone provides evidence of merit? Please, you’re asking for special consideration because you don’t have the goods.
(#315)
I have a quote from a creationist over on the Casey Luskin embarrasses himself again thread: “With all the time and work that’s been invested in the theory of evolution, do you really think the scientific community would ever acknowledge it was wrong, regardless of the evidence?” Gosh, would you look at that. Who’s no better than a creationist? (Actually, that’s not really fair to the creationist in question; he seems to be genuinely interested in learning about evolution.)
It should be noted that I am not denying that conclusive evidence for sasquatch might not be found in the future. Until that conclusive evidence is found I treat sasquatch like cold fusion. Something that doesn’t quite sound right, and the evidence doesn’t quite add up conclusively.
Rorschach, thanks for the links. That Jerry Orbach clip was priceless :)
Feh, trolled me too, then. My detector is much less sensitive to fakes when it comes to things non-religious, I guess.
Yeah, mythusmage got me too. I didn’t refresh before posting and missed #316.
“This little fantasy you adhere to doesn’t gibe with reality in any way shape or form.”
I don’t suppose you can produce the video. I suspect people might be more willing to say “You may have something” with it.
You can’t say these people aren’t squaring with reality when you have produced, well, nothing. All you’ve done is attack the hoaxers.
Oh, neat. Good to know he wasn’t serious. That’s what I get for doing stuff instead of reading carefully!
Skepdic, much like Snopes, should always be a first point of call for weird claims.
Bigfoot.
He’s a known loon; I’m pretty sure he was and is serious.
it’s just as well Nessie is a myth, or she’d be freezing.
I just heard there was another attempt to find Big N, with hi-res sonar. What they did find was the floor of loch ness littered with lost golf balls.
I don’t either, so we can happily bullshit each other to high heaven here.
In the previous paragraph, you accused people of making accusations with no evidence to back them up. Here you are, making an accusation with no evidence to back it up.
In science, I thought it was a good thing to be especially wary of extraordinary data.
And when you have convincingly demonstrated it, as I understand has been done to
much of the sasquatch evidence, again, why is this a bad thing?
One data point, shaky footage, that has been deemed inconclusive, and for which the original negative no longer survives. No record of the frame speed, which is vital in making conclusions about the creature’s gait.
Why is this good enough for you, and where is all the corroborating evidence?
Could you elaborate on that with a detailed anaysis? Or should I point you to this detailed analysis that suggests otherwise?
But this is irrelevant. Lack of motive doesn’t stop the evidence from being bullshit.
WTF? I don’t think this has any relation to his point. Other than that you’re playing childish word games. He meant dragons, as in the fire-breathing, flying, knight-eating variety. Again, WTF?
Nah, bigfoot!
BS
Relevant bit starts at @ :40.
Well, that was HTML failtastic. This is the link:
I can’t really work up the sarcastic vitriol unless I’m in the right mood. And it takes a really pompous, smug, narcissistic, repeatedly dishonest prat constantly committing fallacies to inspire me.
Hm.
Yanno, AC and RS moved to another blog (“Debunking Christianity”) after AC was kicked off this one (and John Loftus, having less patience than PZ, gave AC the heave-ho from his blog). If AC has moved on again, I wonder if he might be tracked down again?
Hm.
@mythusmage (#308)
Here’s the thing: the scholarly consensus refutes creationism, attests to the holocaust, and laughs at the book of mormon. Why? Because scholars are generally interested in the truth.
But no credible source attests to bigfoot. Why? Because no one wants the fame and money associated with discovering modern-day neanderthals? Because the vast science conspiracy thinks that the existence of bigfoot is a truth too terrible for the people to handle?
Science isn’t always right, but it is generally progressing towards being right. There are just too many people playing the game for it to work otherwise. If bigfoot was real, we’d know about it by now.
@mythusmage (315)
Two points:
One, a priori reasoning doesn’t always stop people from learning the truth, even if its by accident. I came at the evidence of biblical contradictions from an evangelical perspective, but I was still (eventually) convinced.
Two: who exactly has an emotional investment in bigfoot being a lie? I have a hard time believing that there are biologists lying awake at night praying to the god they don’t believe in that no one finds another one of those damn bigfoot tracks.
Bigfoot is staying in my basement, until he finds a job.
That’s what he told me, anyway.
@mythusmage (#315)
You’re projecting. You have an (obvious) emotional investment in bigfoot being real, and assume that the rest of us feel just as passionately about it as you do. We don’t. I think bigfoot is silly, but otherwise, I give nary a fuck. If someone trotted out the entire bigfoot family from Harry and the Hendersons tomorrow, I’d say “well, that’s neat,” and get on with my life.
Next thing we know you’re going to try and convince us that basilisks (jesus lizards that is) are a figment of our imagination.
Oh, don’t be foolish. The Jesus Lizard was and is one again quite real. Don’t get me wrong, he’s a real nice guy. I like him just fine. But he’s a mouth breather.
Some Googling around found this, but it looks like AC wasn’t very active there
(4 posts total)
http://www.evcforum.net/cgi-bin/Profile.cgi?action=profilepresent&mbrid=8436
Also here:
http://debatingchristianity.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=254023&lofi=1
But it’s old….
Oh, wait. Check out this banning post:
http://debatingchristianity.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=11822
Heh. They couldn’t stand him either.
Hm. Not sure where else he might have popped off to.
Local news: Fire services brace for SA scorcher.
(SA = South Australia)
Non-local news: Meet Roxxxy the robotic girlfriend.
(A sign of things to come?)
Disturbing to see that the Roxxxy dolls have internet. As they come more popular, I imagine Pharyngula will get busier. The “creobot” personality can’t be far off, as the AI is already there.
Uhm, or not….
;)
I know. As Josh says, it requires the right kind of adversary. But you have the talent and you do get inspired sometimes, so I’m happy to have you around, AC or no AC.
It looks like no one else can stand him for as much time as we did. Do we get some kind of award for putting up with two of them for so long?
Hm. When he posted here, his name used to link to a thread at a Powerbasic forum… I wonder if he stopped posting there?
@ NoR #318:
Actually some sasquatch/yeti poo (with DNA being able to be extracted from cells shed with it) would go a long way to establishing the species. Even a clump of fur (which, even without root cells attached, could possibly be analysed as not matching other hair types) would go a long way.
Especially given the fact that we have
Neanderthal DNA to compare it to !
Ugh… my head hurts from debating Australian Christians on the Faithworks blog (the religious blog of Rupert Murdoch’s papers in Oz).
At the moment I have someone telling me that pro-gay Christian legislators would have passed gay marriage legislation in New York and other states but that they were outnumbered by anti-gay atheist legislators.
Can anyone point me to a link that refutes this? I can’t be bothered cross-checking voting records for entire legislatures with stated religious alliegances….
If you want to see the stupid thread (I don’t recommend it) it’s under the heading “Christianity is not a religion” at
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/faithworks/
Seems like he did. He hasn’t posted anything since this a year ago.
ambulocetacean, it sounds plausible enough, but I think you should rather be asking whoever the claimant is to sustain their contention (e.g. via citation).
It’s not your onus to refute it, the burden of proof is theirs (since they made the claim) in the face of your skepticism.
SIWOTI only goes so far you know…:-)
Sounds like BS to me, mainly because you pretty much can’t hold public office as an atheist in the US.
Dania, Alan Clarke was plonked.
D’oh, anti-gay atheist legislators.
I misread you… OK, not so plausible! :)
My advice stands, though.
I know (I was there…). We were just trying to track him down to see if he’s still WOTI, but apparently he gets banned everywhere he goes…
Dania, I misread you too by not following your link earlier.
I concur, a quick search doesn’t find any recent posts under that name.
—
ambulocetacean, I just did a quick search.
If you can get your interlocutor to name names, this resource may be of use as a starting point to verify any such claim.
Aside: Windows GodMode. I think my Vista machine had better remain atheistic for now though.
Lol. Thanks Rorsch. Wise words re SIWOTI. Just thought someone might have known the perfect link off the top of their heads.
John Morales, yeah the onus is on him, but that’s not how it works. He’ll just claim victory and keep blaming atheists for killing gay marriage. Thanks for the link, though. :)
ambulocetacean,
On the contrary, that’s exactly how it works.
Call him on it. Tell him to name names, or to point out to the specific bill in question.
Point out he’s made an unsubstantiated claim and cannot support it when challenged.
Point out that anyone can make unsubstantiated claims, but only those with evidence can sustain them when challenged on them.
I agree with John Morales. The guy making the positive statement that anti-gay atheist legislators are actively preventing gay marriage needs to come up with data to support his claim. “You’re the guy making the claim, where’s your evidence.”
SEF, you helped clarify my point, where there needs to be conclusive physical evidence. DNA would be conclusive evidence, and the poo would give information on diet too.
Hey John (and ‘Tis Himself),
Yeah, I know that’s how it works when grown-ups are arguing, but it’s a pretty infantile forum. I regret ever checking it out >.< Anyway, I called him on it but I don't expect much/anything. No more SIWOTI for me! I'm gonna lurk here and at Ed Brayton's blog and at my local (non-Murdoch) broadsheet and that's it. No more posting ... ever!
Re Roxxy
Is this another attempt to cash in on the Twilight-mania?
So Roxxy isn’t Hot! Hot! Hot!
Meat Loaf is starting to show his age:
What’s unsettling was that Stonehenge was in danger of being crushed–by a dwarf!
That’s just stupid. One single piece of physical evidence is the standard of “proof”.
You have just described the scientific method, dumbass.
What? If the argument presented in the “here’s why it isn’t true” part is logical, then your first two straw men there are irrelevant. Nobody thinks it can’t be true. We all just doubt that it is.
Fuck you, Alan. Do you have any idea how wrong, and therefore insulting, this is? You are quickly becoming killfile bait.
*eyes a’rollin’*
The “scientific community” was not the target of the alleged fraud.
The Patterson film has been discussed to DEATH, others have provided links to skeptical analyses above, and I think it’s fair to say that as evidence, the film is inconclusive at best.
*looks around for exit from Bizarroworld*
Where the “little fantasy” that doesn’t “gibe [sic] with reality” is the probable non-existence of BIGFOOT??????
*mouth agape*
SEF is right. A single hair, properly analyzed, would get the attention of most reasonable people. And fuck the complete skeleton, a single bone (if it was the right one)(and there are dozens of possibilities) would be enough for a competent mammalogist to publish in Nature with blanket media coverage.
With all the loggers and pot-growers stumbling around 24/7 in those woods, you’d think someone would have spotted an old jawbone by now.
Even if the latrine is still hidden.
I will click on that link when Hell freezes over and Bigfoot’s secret latrine overflows.
Just ran across good ol’ Pete R**ke stinking up the place over at Ed Brayton’s blog. Some choice tidbits:
Wait…
You’re not seriously equating creationism and Holocaust denial with… skepticism towards the existence of sasquatch. Right?
As usual, he thinks not.
The correct link to Pete’s R**ke’s droppings is http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2010/01/revenge_of_the_open_thread.php albeit ERV’s blog, which Sven linked to, is also a good read.
!!!
His personality?
A c-cup is standard.
WTF?
BS
I do love these entertainingly entitled open threads. Where else could I see someone seriously arguing for the existence of Bigfoot with such absolute gems of reasoning as;
The ‘little fanatsy’ apparently being that place where one requires proof before conferring the status of a fact on something. What is it called again? Oh yes, reality.
Priceless!
oops. Linkin’ fail.
The most thorough review of the Patterson-Gimlin film I know. Read the comments, too.
A peer-reviewed paper on sasquatch footprints has come out recently. Unfortunately I don’t remember the citation… it was cited in a recent paper on sauropod and human feet in the journal Historical Biology, if that helps anyone.
Yes, basically. It can save any logical contradiction by simply declaring it true but beyond the understanding of Puny Humans™. If you can’t trust logic anymore, you can just pack up and go home.
I have the paper now, I’ll check.
Canonization means that someone is recognized as a saint. They’ve been saints ( = in heaven) ever since they died.
Day saved – already! :-)
Great Britain is just about covered with snow and we are running out of grit. – Alan B.
Great Britain, running out of grit? Never, I say, never in a thousand years! When in 1940 we stood alone against the might of…
Oh. That sort of grit. Carry on!
That’s Ok. Here’s a loaded bacon. Go around back and do the decent thing.
Image-stabilized version of the Patterson sasquatch film (linked from DM’s excellent link):
http://www.bigfootencounters.com/files/mk_davis_pgf.gif
looks like a dude in a suit to me, but I don’t claim my opinion as evidence
Running out of grit? Nah, there’s always British, and I use the term loosely, very loosely, “cooking”. You can build reenforced aboveground nuclear bunkers out of the stuff. Well, except maybe mushy peas, albeit that hardens into a tar-like substance which can be cut only by a burning bar.
Sven, thanks, I been looking for that image-stabilised version for some time. I first saw it on JREF some yonks ago, and (as I recall) it was made by a sasquatch believer.
p.s. You can return the loaded bacon. But next time…
Jesus Jorge…step away for a few days and this is what I find? Sasquatch? FFS.
There’s miles of sandy beaches in Britain just ready to be stripped of their sand for laying on roads. Saunton Sands in Devon could easily be de-sanded and relaid with rocks and pebbles. It could become the new Brighton, full of noisy people and overpriced bars selling warm beer in plastic glasses.
blf @ 380;
This is actually the secret weapon of our military. When we perfect sheperd’s pie enhanced, mushy pea reinforced toad in the hole armour for our tanks, not to mention steak and kidney tipped bunker busting bombs, then nothing in the world will be able to stop us! The Empire will be rebuilt lickitty split, and any who are not defeated militarily will be felled by hardened arteries and atrocious indigestion.
Unfortunately, now that you know too much about the Top Secret Plan, something must be done about you…
Here, have some fish and chips. *cue manic, evil laughter*
Hi. I’m new here. Could some one catch me up on what this thread (these threads) is about?
Fortunately, the UK is a bunch of islands, and the slimeys will never be able to get all that heavy kit off the islands without it sinking or falling from the sky. There’s the chunnel, but it can be flooded, which will give the trains even more problems than the snow. And as a precaution, open a few pubs on the continental side. That always stops ’em… for a “few” drinks.
mingfrommongo: No one remembers.
BS
It all started with a big snake…
The Genesis of the Thread
Let’s have a little quiz to determine the subject(s) of these threads:
□ A. All of the above
□ B. None of the above
□ C. Both
Hint: C. is the correct answer.
Oh, and hey, speaking of sasquatch:
http://theoatmeal.com/quiz/bigfoot_love
A Moment of Mormon Madness: Brigham Young’s son, Brigham Morris Young, in drag.
Re: 391,
O Nohz! I only have a 29% chance of surviving. Their advice to me:
It’s probably about the same chance I would have of surviving an intense lovemaking session with teh Easter Bunny (which there is more evidence for than Sasquatch by the way, mythusmage, if you were not joking which I am not sure of anymore).
We have always been at war with The Intersection.
Speaking of sasquatch and Mormons, so I was poking about in the sasquatchosphere and learned of this guy at Idaho State who is the leading academic proponent of Bigfoot’s existence. Here are his last 3 listed pubs:
2006 MacPhee RDE and DJ Meldrum. Postcranial remains of extinct Antillean monkeys (Platyrrhini, Callicebinae, Xenotrichini). American Museum Novitates 3516, 65 pp.
2004 Meldrum, DJ. Midfoot flexibility, fossil footprints, and Sasquatch steps: New perspectives on the evolution of bipedalism. J. Scientific Exploration 18:67-79.
2003 Meldrum, DJ and Stephens, TD. Who are the Children of Lehi? Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 12:38-51.
Re John Morales’s second link @344;
Further down that page was this;
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/01/10/2788955.htm
There ought to be some kinda memorial.
Except I don’t go hiking in America. So there, nyah.
I wonder how they would deal with AlanC if he showed up there…
All of the above can be said not to believe in the existence of alternative universes, at least in some sense. Do you think it’s a mere “quibble” to see the differences in their positions as noteworthy? – robocop@691 in TSTKS
That depends on which particular positions are under consideration, and what the context is. As I said before, what matters is to be ready to specify further to the extent clarity requires. In the case under discussion, it certainly is a quibble, because nothing at all hangs on the distinction. Specifically, the examples you claimed showed the criticisms of the claim that atheism is a faith were dependent on the “positive denial” interpretation, did not in fact do so. Tell me, would you insist on this distinction in the case of my disbelief in leprechauns? Do I simply “not believe in leprechauns”, or do I actively deny that there are leprechauns? I don’t know which more accurately expresses my behavioural dispositions (which is what beliefs are best understood as being), so how could you? I would, of course, say exactly the same about my atheism.
Lynna, OM @392;
Thank goodness that wasn’t in colour ;-) I got only 23% chance of surviving an ‘encounter’ with bigfoot, but then, I’m not a big foot fetishist.
Sven @395, the Meldrums are insane. It is a Meldrum (Rodney) who is currently promoting the “documentary” titled “The Lost Civilization of North America” — a film in which he features interviews with real scientists and scholars whom he duped into participating.
Rod Meldrum is propping up some of the DNA research done by D.J. Meldrum (bio at http://www.isu.edu/bios/Professors_Staff/meldrum_j.shtml) that purports to prove the historicity of the Book of Mormon.
D.J. Meldrum is indeed the “Bigfoot Professor”:
Here are a few excerpts from a knowledgeable ex-mormon about Rodney Meldrum’s documentary:
Here is the other Meldrum’s (Bigfoot dude, and DNA wannabe researcher, D.J. Meldrum) take on DNA. The excerpt below is from a much longer supposedly scholarly paper:
Apparently, you need to be a lumberjack to survive an, uh, “encounter”, with bigfoot.
I will resist… resist… resist urge to… to… break in the lumberjack song.
There’s more than a whiff of bullshit emitting from Meldrum’s apologetics.
Yes, ‘Tis Himself, I agree that there’s more than a whiff of bullshit there. SL Cabbie (ex-mormon) added to his previous comments this note about the representation of DNA evidence in Rodney Meldrum’s documentary:
I sent an inquiry to Deborah Bolnick. Her profile is here: http://www.utexas.edu/opa/experts/profile.php?id=738
Sniff, definitely eau de mercaptan, underlain with eau de diamine. *reaches for respirator*
Remember that absolutely awful painting that PZ featured? It was the rabidly patriotic and rabidly religious kitsch by McNaughton, the one with Jesus holding up the constitution. Well, you will not be surprised to find that painting featured on Rodney Meldrum’s website at http://www.bookofmormonevidence.org/ Scroll down beyond the offers of the new film, and of DVDs, to find the claim that 28,000 people viewed the painting within two weeks:
Time for some remedial math.
Seven and seven is?
If man is five, then the devil is six and god is seven!
Urgh. Unfortunately I know what you’re talking about!!!
…That’s a way to put it, yes…
The Pixies will be here in Adelaide soon, but I stupidly didn’t expect tickets to sell out and they did.
Not happy.
blf @ 386;
Curses! How did you discover our secret Achille’s Heel? Do not be too complacent, however. It is for just this reason that I was genetically engineered. By the use of Frankenstein-esque genetic science (Its Aliiiiveeee!) I was born; the first in an invincible army of teetotal Brits! No longer will we be distracted by anything remotely resembling alcohol! No longer will we drink ourselves into a semi-comotose stupor hours before the battle (or the sex for that matter, but that’s a whole other story) begins!
Tremble, Oh World!
1! 2!
Three! Five! Oh! One! Two! Five! Go!
I love it when Mormon’s try to be artists.
Donny and Marie are the apotheosis of Mormon “artistry”.
It’s as easy to learn as your A-B-C’s.
You know my name, look up the blah, blah, blah…
Four seconds was the longest wait.
No excuses for these things, except I watch too much saturday morning cartoons in the early seventies. And I think a point argument can be made that bubblegum music of that time is superior to what is given to kids now.
123 Careful, it ends with a Laugh In bit.
I really wanted to be with the Sour Grape Bunch.
I’ve always liked the Pixies. Too bad Wowbagger — maybe you can still buy a ticket from someone who bought a block of them.
Alan B is down there somewhere.
I think we all just threw up a little bit in our mouths just now.
I’m having so much fun.
Yes, this is the one. Or maybe not.
That doesn’t happen here in Australia like it does in the US – pretty much all the tickets are bought directly by people from the ticket seller, and they generally have a maximum number they’ll sell to each person; I think four is standard.
I could probably get one on eBay but I haven’t looked – I’m not that big of a fan to want to pay hundreds of dollars for the privilege.
#404 Nerd of Redhead – Interesting choice of perfume!
KemistryKorner
As I am sure Nerd is aware, diamines are some of the foulest-smelling of any chemical. All one needs to know are the names of 2 of them:
Putrescine: from the word “putrid”
Cadaverine: from cadaver because it smells like rotting flesh.
Nice!
Mercaptan is more interesting. Think of alcohol [Ed. He often does …]. The alcohol molecule has an -OH grouping. Mercaptans have -SH in place of the -OH. They are more correctly called “thiols” (or sulphur-alcohols, if you like).
Many thiols have strong odors resembling that of garlic. The odor of thiols is often strong and repulsive, particularly for those of low molecular weight. Ethyl mercaptan (the “brother” of ethyl alchol) is pretty unpleasant.
Mercaptans are used world wide because of their foul smell. The story goes back to 1937. In that year there was a terrible accident at a school in London (now New London), Texas which killed over 295 children and teachers, thus making it the worst-ever school building accident. Natural gas is naturally odourless and leaked into many areas of the school. A small spark produced when an electic grinder was turned on ignited the explsive mixture and a terrible explosion resulted.
The subsequent inquiry proposed adding a stenching agent to the natural gas so that it could be detected easily in the event of a leak. This was so sensible that the use quickly spread world-wide and distributors began adding thiols, originally ethyl mercaptan, to natural gas. Most gas stenching agents contain mixtures of mercaptans and sulfides, with t-butyl mercaptan as the main odor constituent.
Tips for terrorists (applicable only to Salt Lake City Airport):
This incident was posted in April, 2009.
I’ve been working in the Kremlin with a two headed dog.
#418 Lynna OM
Can you see me waving – 3rd snowman from the Left!
It was this picture I had in mind (#267).
When will I see you again?
Alan B @426: I thought that was you!
Anatomically correct snow persons:
http://creepsterinc.files.wordpress.com/2007/10/ch930114.jpg
An anatomically correct snowman of Alan B would be wielding a rock hammer.
#427
About 8 hours time when I get up.
Will you miss me oh MistressOfFoulMouthAbuse,OM?
Good night all.
Who is the master of fox hounds? And who says the hunt has begun?
In keeping with what Janine’s been posting, here’s another song:
I am getting obscure now. He was on the Hi-Five label.
There’s trouble in the monkey house!
#428 Loved that, Lynna
To be accurate, I use a x8 handlens far more often than a rock hammer. The most important field tool for a geologist – hope Josh would agree?
Now I am going to bed!
http://www.shropshire.gov.uk/legacy/llmrc.nsf/open-exhib/Leptaena%20depressa./$file/main_G.09749%20Leptaena%20sp..jpg
http://www.bristol.gov.uk/ccm/cms-service/stream/image/?image_id=522064
(Leptaena depressa (J. de C. Sowerby)
http://www.fossilmuseum.net/Fossil_Galleries/TrilobitesOhio/crassituberculata/PhaC.jpg
(Picture of me nicely enrolled up in bed!)
‘Tis Himself, I have a theme of sorts. Let’s see seven. Yeah, you should see this one coming from seven miles away.
This is simply one of the best fucking covers ever! It is not open to debate, just accept the fact.
You’re a million miles from reality.
It does get cut off early. But, damn!
They don’t care what their moms and dads are doing.
Alan B, along with David Marjanović, got my reference. On the CSI show (pick your city) they simply call it “decomp”. As if a dust mask could remove that smell. You need a cartridge respirator minimum…As the Mythies have proved, any relationship between Hollywood and reality is purely coincidental…
Anatomically correct snowman? How about anatomically correct stick people? Going through life without a time piece did pay off.
@Lynna:
FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF-
I FLIPPING HATE MORMONS! Almost as bad as the Church of Lawology. I don’t suppose that caused any problems for the Mormon Jackass who let the guy through.
Just caught an interesting segment on 60 Minutes about resurrecting extinct species and preserving endangered ones. Sparse on detail, but interesting nonetheless. They interview Sean Carroll about the possibility of cloning mastodons, and Dr. Betsy Dresser, who is already cloning endangered species using non-endangered but closely related species.
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=6078982n
Bah.
…using non-endangered but closely related species as surrogates.
Are you sure that cloning Mastodon would be such a good idea?
Lately the bogosity and malevolence of the anti-gay marriage crowd has just been rankling me.
From The Washington Post: Same-sex marriage set for big day in federal court
Hmm. And this editorial from 1860:
Janine, MOFMA, OM,
Your particular example of Mastodon cannot go extinct soon enough, IMHO. OTOH, I think that real woolly mammoths roaming the plains around Winnipeg would be feckin’ AWESOME.
Janine, does this fit into your motif?
Or is this more what you’re doing?
Stuff. And Things. And bacon.
Hoo, man, that takes me back! Flip side of the Let It Be single…were they kidding?
Where the fuck did they shoot that vid, in some sort of upscale lip-synching nightclub?
Al Green is “obscure”? Seriously??
*shakes head*
(‘course that’s a Curtis Mayfiled tune, though)
Seriously? That noise-flaying of the Byrds classic?
*shakes head some more*
‘Tis Himself, OM,
I believe this more appropriately fits Janine’s motif. Although she did lose her stride with her post at #444.
oh, oh, now I get it…not Rev. Al, but the connection to the numerical theme was obscure. Hokay.
By the way, the Dead tune in #451 is called “The Eleven” because at about 1:35 they start playing in the time signature of 11/8 (12312312312), which is not easy to do.
Doh!,
I missed Janine’s #440. Egad, she’s gone off- script. No telling where she’ll end up now.
Miki Z @445: Yes, Nimocks is a nimrod. Here are some more enlightening comments from this lawyer touting religious retribution and nonsense:
Who is “Al Green”? Another nickname for “Al Gore”?
Sven @ 452:
“not easy to do.” is an understatement, at least for me. I have a hard enough time playing tunes like Estimated with “weird” (7/4) time sigs. Songs where they change up the sig. in mid- stride like Unbroken Chain; forget about it.
Seriously? That noise-flaying of the Byrds classic?
*shakes head some more*
Some of us happen to love noise flaying. And many consider Husker Du to be one of the finest examples of this. As well as being possibly the best band of the eighties. Perhaps I need to pull out some Naked City for musician making complex noise. Well, some of their stuff was not. Gob Of Spit, anyone?
‘snicker’
Please keep this mind the next time you point out my dislike of the Dead
‘Tis, there is too much good music to find to waste time ironically liking those two.
Janine @ 457:
Was there any such thing as a best band of the eighties?
I’m sensing a rift, possibly deep, almost certainly unbridgeable, forming.
I’m sensing a rift, possibly deep, almost certainly unbridgeable, forming.
How can something be forming when it has already formed? Yet we are all still here. Funny how this happens.
And boygenius, the eighties was when I was most in touch with music. Not all of it is too be found in Awesome Eighties compilations. Shit, many of us sought refuge in the underground and college radio. Don’t make me get all generation gap on you or I just might start cracking Big Chill jokes.
‘raspberry’
Dan makes a good point here:
http://pandasthumb.org/archives/2010/01/casey-luskin-em.html#comment-203773
If all the evidence points against evolution all the time, then how come all the scientists don’t expel themselves all the time?
I never liked the Grateful Dead too. Or freakin Frank Zappa either, for that matter.
Gregory Greenwood @ 410,
In the remote and unlikely possibility the pubs don’t work, there’s other defences: No-one speaks Ingerlish. And the money’s all funny. Plus a chap in a smart uniform saying (translated) “All right, what’s this all ’bout then? Come on, come on, time to ‘ome. You’ve had your fun, now go sleep it ‘of.”
I don’t like bacon.
Beer tastes like crap.
Squids are stupid, and they look goofy too.
I see yet more rifts appearing! How will this blog survive?
Why doesn’t atheists ever get a haircut? Because they like big bangs!!
Janine @ 460:
Hey, I came of age in the eighties. This is what I took away from it:
1. Reaganomics (fuck the middle class)
2. Just Say NO (don’t use drugs or you will die)
3. AIDS (don’t have sex or you will die)
4. Cold War (we’re all gonna’ die)
5. Really bad music (Cyndi Lauper, FFS)
Granted, I didn’t have access to underground or college radio in my remote little burg. My recollections are of horrid FM radio. (REO Speedwagon? Really?)
I feel like letting lose my inner pirate.
Why does she has an evil eye?
Yes, this is a really violent song.
386 – I’d change that to – Why do atheists have great sex?
Because they like big bangs!
…she said from the nunnery.
Janine, Big And Pretty Mother, OM. I am truly smitten! All I did was go to work for a shift and I find The Pixies, Husker Du and Sugar Cubes waiting for me to come home. Thank you, goddess!
I gotta go to bed now but have a nice glass of Peroni to help me sleep. Will try to return the favour tomorrow.
Janine,
Ahh.
At least we can agree on Marianne Faithfull:
386sx:
Yo, what’s up with the long hair/hippie jokes?
Wanna’ know the difference between a hippie and a Deadhead? A Deadhead will kick your ass! ;-)
*shrug* The rest of us don’t.
I could have played bass on that tune and nobody could have told the difference. And I am a pretty crappy bassist.
I don’t know that I’ve ever done that. I’m happy to leave it to you to demonstrate your own don’t-get-it-itude.
What makes you think he was being ironic?
(REO Speedwagon? Really?)
Oh shit! It is because of them and bands like Journey that I ended up listening to indie bands.
Sadly, it seemed that just as many students at my college loved Raygun as much as the rest of us detested him. It was a very conservative friend of mine that I first saw Human Events. As naive as I was, I was struck by just how paranoid it was.
I was out of public school just in time to miss this. But most of my younger brothers and sisters went through DARE. Fat lot of good that did.
And I remember when herpes was the scary illness. But I have to say, you are slightly mistaken here; don’t have gay sex or you will die.
Hardly unique to the eighties. That goes back to 1948 when the USSR exploded their first nukes. Try finding a documentary titled The Atomic Cafe.
There is always shit music being made. But there is always great music being made also. Should the fifties be thrown in the scrap pile just because If I Knew You Were Coming, I Would Have Baked You A Cake was recorded during that time. Or should we instead pull out some Fujiyama Mama?
Eddie, because of you, I have to whistle funky tunes in the ears of my neighbors.
I decided not to use the more obvious line. I am sure you can guess what it is.
A Deadhead will kick your ass…. thats a new one on me.
I managed to convince my mother the elementary school teacher to refuse to parrot the Project Charlie propaganda re: “Hey, kids. If you see your mom and dad smoking a joint, you need to tell me so I can send child protective services in to remove you from your home and tear apart your family.”
I had to worry about AIDS heaped atop herpes, clamidia, genital warts, etc. IIRC, by the late 80’s, early 90’s, they were recognizing hetero transmission. (Not that I was getting all that much action at the time. :( )
True. The Cold War lasted half a century, but the military industrial complex really got its teeth sunk into the public teat under Reagan. We were told that if we didn’t spend billions on the Star Wars missile defense system, the ebil Ruskies would take us out. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Defense_Initiative
You’re absolutely right. I stand corrected. The utter vacuousness of modern pop music actually does trump the crap we were fed in the 80’s. I’m just bitter because in the 80’s, I didn’t have the option of an iPod and archive.org.
Janine – I’m listening to Stellamara and Layne Redmond . Good night sweetheart.
We were told that if we didn’t spend billions on the Star Wars missile defense system, the ebil Ruskies would take us out.
Ha! I was part of an anti-Star Wars group in college. I remember meetings where we tossed out ideas on how to get around the ‘defenses’ that were proposed.
Ummmm….I’ll admit straight off that I did not read every comment…beginning at previous thread to here…All I want is to comment on the Monolith Monster video.
It was so damn good, I just had to wonder–who is the narrator? Does anyone know? I’ve heard that voice before & it’s just so perfect for the “totally cheezy mid-late 50’s sci-fi movie” genre.
I’ve never seen that particular flick, but it looks like a goody, so I will seek it out–hey, can you blame me? It has Lola Notsobrite in the cast!
Va-Va-Va-Pfffttttt……
Patricia, My Queen Slut,
There is a subtle yet distinct difference between a Deadhead and a hippie. (oxymoron alert) Not all Deadheads are hippies. Hippies are into crystals, the power of sage smoke to cleanse your spirit, astrology, yoga as more than just stretching exercises, etc. They are also completely harmless. Trust me, the parking lot at a Grateful Dead show was about as woo-filled as it gets.
Deadheads, on the other hand, are there to commune with/through the music. None of the other shit matters. They are also less likely to be completely harmless if provoked.
At work today had a 3yo girl who had fallen from a horse, lost consciousness and needed emergency neurosurgery for bad skull fracture, and the woman holding the reins was dragged 10 meters after the horse bolted and injured her neck.
Therefore :
Wild Horses
And for no particular reason at all :
Memory Motel
Rorschach,
I don’t know how medical personnel manage teh stress! The sight of blood doesn’t bother me in the least, as long as it’s my own blood. Seeing someone else in pain and bleeding makes my knees buckle.
Yeah, but always remember :
There is no body cavity that cannot be reached with a 14# needle and a good strong arm !
;)
Also remember:
#8. They can always hurt you more.
In the context of the book, this is actually referring to the Interns, not the patients…:-)
I hope you did the only responsible thing and instead of treating her with modern medicine, you put a picture of a dead Aussie nun around her neck. Vatican certified!
This was on the news on ABC radio when I drove home.I was like WTF….
Never mind the post hoc fallacy, but what serious journalist would even consider making this news?
Aha!
That explains #9. Sorry, haven’t read the book, just skimmed the Wiki.
Ack, I can’t keep up.
Hi neon-elf – another Canberran – awesome! We should do a pharyngula meetup. Kel is from Canberra, too.
This thread goes to eleven!
SC @294: aw shucks
Snow in Great Britain, grit not shown
blf @ 463;
Hmmm. Perhaps you are right. We must return to our secret base in the bowels of the catacombs beneath The Houses of Parliament (we were going to have a proper, evil genius volcano base but, with the economy being the way it is, the budget just wouldn’t stretch that far) to plot anew. Well, to start plotting anew once the weather improves a bit. It is difficult to be properly evil when the temperatures are so low that Brass Monkeys are at risk of being placed on the endangered species register.
*Grumble* I told them that we should have conquored the Maldives first and built a forward evil lair there, but oh no! That would have taken the project too far overbudget, and Gordon Brown is already having problems with spending cuts. Damned penny-pinchers. *Grumble, mutter*
Many smell like shit instead – literally, because shit contains thiols.
(Garlic contains very complicated sulfoxides, disulfides, sulfones and whatnots.)
And I associate that with good food, because my grandma has a gas stove… :-)
OK, so, next time I want to board a plane with a bottle of nitroglycerine, I need to claim affiliation with a specific ward, and I’ll be waved through?
(…Naaaah. Outside of comics, nobody is so stupid as to carry nitroglycerine around in bottles.
…I hope.)
…ZOMGZ!!!1! It’s a conspiracy!!!1!!!eleventyone!!!!!
In the end-90s I found a Scientific American article on how to deceive, overwhelm, circumvent, and otherwise vanquish Star Wars.
In the early 00s, Scientific American published a very similar article on “Why National Missile Defense WON’T WORK” – all-caps and color in the original.
History repeats itself: first as a farce, then as a farce.
And look at Ireland.
Look at Ireland!
And laugh.
Maldives? What maldives? Before the end of the century, they’ll be sunk if Greenland keeps melting at the predicted rates. And I don’t think the Masters can just wait till the Maldives regrow – corals don’t like acidic oceans all that much.
“stenching agent” is my new favorite term
Rorschach: you must drop everything–everything! now!–and read Beat the Reaper by Josh Bazell. Trust me on this. (I don’t think it gives too much away to mention that it includes the word “autofibulectomy”.)
But one man gathers what another man spills. Opinions about music are like assholes: everybody’s got one, but some stink worse than others.
I don’t know. Commercial fluff Tin Pan Alley pop vs. redneck rockabilly 3-chord pop? That’s a pretty limited purview there.
But you’re right that there was great music made in the 50s.
Love it.
Here’s a Grateful Dead cut chosen especially for Janine (go ahead…click it…)
17066
JNOV, whom we met before (briefly) when I posted the evidence that her blog was being trolled by lds.org, decided to give the lurkers from lds.org something more interesting to read. Here is an example, This post concerns the Lamanites. I think there are seven posts in the suite of in-your-face examples of mormon assholiness. The one to which I linked includes a youtube video from India.Arie, plus multiple links to even more moments of mormon madness.
Yesterday I saw a shrew (Blarina brevicauda). Maybe only the 2nd or 3rd time I’ve seen a live (i.e. not in a trap) shrew in the “wild” (suburbia) in my life, and I’ve turned over a lot of rocks and logs in my life!
So that was cool.
Sven, when I lived in Alaska shrews were so common that you could sometimes kill one by stepping on it. I think the shrews must keep a lot of wolves and birds alive.
Many Moments of Mormon Madness are available here:
http://mormonscholarstestify.org/category/testimonies
An ex-mormon speculated that church leaders had forced scholars and scientists to post their testimonies as a means to combat real knowledge that is causing people to leave the church.
There’s a Biology professor, Larry St. Clair, who says,
Environmentalist Peter Sinclair has produced a new video that reveals the lies and half-truths behind the “Oregon Petition”. The Oregon Petition attempts to show that scientific consensus does not exist on global warming. The Oregon Petition people compiled a list of “skeptical scientists” packed with frauds and hoax names, but very few actual climate scientists.
The Oregon Institute for Science and Medicine, which markets products like homemade radiation detectors, makes the point that crazy scientists are misleading us, and that crazy scientists have instituted socialized education (or some such bugaboo — it’s too whacko to remember exactly without brain damage). These people joined forces with the Oregon Petition people. They put their garbage out in a disguise that led people to believe it was from the National Academy of Sciences. “Borrowing Authority” anyone?
Sign a petition and you too could become a “leading scientist”.
“Fox is the only cable network will put us on the air!”
Durrrr!
The easiest way to build an evil underwater lair is to first build the domes on land and then wait for the ocean to rise. Do you really think this growing temperature is an accident?! It’s simply the economically prudent way to go about world domination.
Up until 1996, mormons had a program that removed Native American Children from the reservation and placed them with white, LDS families. An NPR podcast (January 3, 2005) covers the story.
Shush! This is typical British planning: As a key part of the plot, pick a place which is quite charming but is (a) Going to disappear before the plot completes; and (b) Has been shown to be very vulnerable to counter-attack (in this case, with the secret Tsunami Gun™). Admittedly the Tsunami Gun™ is a bit hard to aim precisely (sorry about that India, Thailand, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, et al.)—it’s mostly a case of point it at the correct ocean and FIRE! (no goats involved).