Creationists are outliers in another way

Popehat is looking for someone to defend yet another science blogger from a lawsuit.

Pepijn van Erp blogs about science and pseudoscience from the Netherlands. He praises good science and skewers and critiques the bad. Wait a minute. Is that the Jaws theme playing? Yes. Yes it is — because blogging about junk science is a great way to get threatened or sued. In my experience, purveyors of “non-mainstream” science are unusually litigious and sensitive to criticism. You’ve seen it here at Popehat with “atavistic” cancer theorists and vaccine truthers and naturopaths and fans of questionable cancer remedies and AIDS deniers. I blame the crystals.

He’s being sued by Ruggero Santilli, a physics crank. However, I realized something as I was reading about it. I’ve become something of an unwilling expert in this area — I’ve been threatened with lawsuits so many times that I’ve completely lost count. I now regard cease-and-desist letters as ho-hum, and getting told I’m going to be sued for over 2 million dollars just triggers an eye-roll. But you know what’s weird?

I’ve never been threatened with a lawsuit by a creationist.

Notice that they aren’t present in Popehat’s list, either. The people who get most indignant about criticism seem to be people who are trying hardest to gain undeserved credibility from mainstream science, and that includes certain skeptics and atheists. Creationists love to steal scientific cred whenever they can, but it’s for the purpose of suckering Christians and Muslims, not for winning the respect of the scientific community.

I’ve also pissed off Catholics, but even they didn’t threaten to sue me. They threatened to kill me and my family and destroy my life, and repeatedly told me I was going to burn in hell, but not a whisper of dragging me into court over maltreatment of a cracker.

I’m going to have to file this datum away in my head as a reference to use in determining which are the “safe” targets of criticism. Religious nuts may talk a loud game about bashing your skull in, but they don’t hire lawyers to harass you.

Skepticon highlights

#inappropriatefistpose

#inappropriatefistpose

I’m back from Skepticon, and I’m feeling good. This is the most relaxing conference around for me — it’s a gathering of non-believers, but of non-abrasive, open-minded non-believers who also think there’s a heck of a lot more to being an atheist than expunging “god” from our coinage. It was all good, but here are my favorite events:

  • Margee Kerr talked about the physiology and psychology of fear. She’s been checking spooky places, like Eastern State Penitentiary, to try and figure out what it is about these supposedly “haunted” places that triggers fearful reactions in people. It turns out that the fear is real, but ghosts are not.

  • Jennifer Raff analyzed some outlandish claims about genetics: that Peruvians are descended from Nephilim and white Europeans, and genetic astrology. There were some particularly effective bits in their where she contrasted the lengths she goes to to extract and isolate DNA without contamination, with the rather sloppy stuff people like LA Marzulli do.

  • Alix Jules discussed the reality of racism. It’s not just loud people with southern accents, pickup trucks, and confederate flags: casual racism is everywhere, and it just won some big elections.

There was lots of other good stuff: Rebecca Watson made a triumphant return to the stage, there were lots of conversations about the state of secular activism, there was a taco truck parked outside, and of course lots of happy socializing. I also had to miss the entire last day — I had to fly back and get ready to teach this morning — so I didn’t get to see Jerry DeWitt or Debbie Goddard or the other people who finished up the conference with a bang.

Skepticon 10 will be held on 10-12 November 2017, so clear your calendars now.

This is what I call self-care

I’m flying off this afternoon to lovely Springfield, Missouri for Skepticon. I’m taking a break from distressed students to go hang out with distressed atheists and humanists. It’ll be good for me.

I’ll be teaching a workshop on explaining evolution to people who don’t understand it at all tomorrow, which might be fun. I hope. I’ve got a little bit of an outline of major points I’ll be telling attendees, but mainly I’m going to provide some challenging questions and making the participants do all the work. Yeah, that’ll draw them in — come to my workshop, I’ll make you do everything!

I suspect that there might also be spontaneous outbursts of planning and activism, since it’s that kind of crowd.

I also have dinosaur stickers to give away. I might end up giving them all away on the first day, so hit me up early if you want something decorative for your badge.

The power of self-delusion

the-exorcist

William Friedkin, the guy who directed the Exorcist movie, has written a rather unreliable account of the activities of an official Catholic exorcist, Gabriele Amorth. I say unreliable because, I’m afraid, he sounds rather confused.

I am an agnostic. I believe the power of God and the human soul are unknowable. I don’t associate the teachings of Jesus with the politics of the Roman Catholic Church. The authors of the New Testament—none of whom, it is now generally believed by historians, actually knew Jesus—were creating a religion, not writing history.

I had no particular interest in the spiritual or the supernatural when the writer Bill Blatty asked me to direct the film of his novel, The Exorcist.

…

More than any film I’ve directed, The Exorcist inspired me to the point of obsession each day as I made it. I rejected all constraints, creative and financial. The studio, Warner Bros., thought I had taken leave of my senses. I may have. I made the film believing in the reality of exorcism and never, to this day, thought of it as a horror film.

There is a video of a woman undergoing exorcism. She thrashes around violently, she growls and howls, she curses in Italian. There is absolutely nothing supernatural on display, although it is also illustrated with a still from The Exorcist of a possessed girl levitating. This woman does not levitate. Her head doesn’t spin around on her neck. It’s all sadly mundane and shows a person suffering from some kind of mental illness, nothing more.

So Friedkin takes the video to some real doctors. They are non-committal; this is a problem they wouldn’t know how to treat, they come right out and say “this isn’t demon possession”, they suggest that there isn’t necessarily anything they could do, they agree that religion may be a useful palliative, and they explain that they have a patient with similar symptoms, and “we’re treating her with medication, giving her psychotherapy, creating a safe environment. She gets better.” How does Friedkin interpret this? As an affirmation of the supernatural.

I went to these doctors to try to get a rational, scientific explanation for what I had experienced. I thought they’d say, “This is some sort of psychosomatic disorder having nothing to do with possession.” That’s not what I came away with. Forty-five years after I directed The Exorcist, there’s more acceptance of the possibility of possession than there was when I made the film.

No there isn’t. It’s astonishing how he imposes his own beliefs on a natural phenomenon. And then he has the confidence to say of Amorth that He has performed thousands of exorcisms successfully. That makes no sense. Even the specific person he describes in this account he has to admit has been “exorcised” nine times, and at the end of the story is still having these seizure-like episodes. Is he going to call these nine successes?

I don’t believe in demons, but this account sure convinces me of the power of people to lie to themselves. There’s nothing heroic or noble in that, and in particular, there is nothing admirable about a man who uses religion to perpetuate damaging dishonesty about human behavior.

You might want to tune into Atheists Talk radio this morning

It’s at 9am Central time (you remembered to adjust your clocks, right?), and this week Atheists Talk radio features Geeks Without God to mock Ray Comfort and his new ‘movie’, The Atheist Delusion. They’re going to have to work hard to top the hilarity of Matt Barber’s serious review of the movie, though.

I mean it when I say “The Atheist Delusion” is the most persuasive and captivating answer to atheist questions I’ve ever seen on film. Without giving too much away, let me just say that non-believers and believers alike will be moved emotionally, spiritually and intellectually. I have no doubt that many who claim atheism at the beginning of the film, will be left well on their way to admitting His existence and infinite glory toward film’s end.

Geeks Without God can meet that challenge, I’m sure. Unless Minnesota’s atheist comedian/podcasting group was converted to Christianity by the movie.

Trick or treat

I’m completely missing Halloween this year, but if I had gotten back in time, I’d have been tempted to print out copies of this little fake Chick tract to hand out to the Christian kiddies, instead of candy.

Nah, I’m lying. I’d never do that — I always despised those sanctimonious people who handed out tracts instead of candy. But since I can’t pump candy over a satellite link to all of your computers, I’ll have to settle for bits instead.

Jack Chick is dead

deadjack

There will be no rejoicing at his death, because his poison and lies and ignorance live on. I just really can’t care much — it doesn’t help that I just got home after a 13 hour day — and I think he’s just been a malignant goofball with a team of believers doing the work for him, and the absence of one foolish man won’t make a lick of difference.

He has ceased to exist and won’t even know that he’s not going to meet a faceless glowing giant on a throne, or a horned Jewish caricature with a pitchfork. He’s just dead meat.

Further travels, to Cincinnati & beyond!

I’m planning to attend the 2017 Midwest Zebrafish Meeting in mid-June, which is, unfortunately, being held in Cincinnati. It’s only unfortunate because I’ll be tempted to make a side-trip to…Ken Ham’s goddamn Ark Park. There’s an excellent overview by Dan Phelps of what I can expect to see. I’ll also leave $40 poorer.

floodburial

Just looking at that makes my brain poorer.

I am sadly lacking in Atlantean or alien ancestors

Did you know that PEOPLE WITH RH NEGATIVE BLOOD MAY BE DESCENDENTS OF EXTRATERRESTRIALS OR ATLANTEANS? I learned it on a site called Spirit Science, so it must be true. And their logic is impeccable: the Rh- phenotype is rarer than the Rh+ phenotype, therefore it must be specialer, therefore it must have been inserted into the genome by aliens, and implicitly those aliens love sticking things in people, so QED.

There are also some curious assertions.

So, if all mankind evolved from the same ancestor, their blood should be compatible. Do you get what I’m saying? If we had all evolved from the same ancestor, we would all have the same blood.

Continuing with that logic, if we had all evolved from the same ancestor, we would all have the same hair. I have thin, straight, weakly pigmented hair, unlike the majority of humans on this planet, therefore I must be an Atlantean. My beard has been slowly turning grey over the last 20 years, which my wife can use in the divorce proceedings as proof of my ongoing affair with an alien.

Where does this person think all human diversity comes from? Somehow the species has this mad jumble of varying alleles; one hypothesis would be that each difference is the product of a recent coupling between a human and a pure breeding, cross fertile creature from another planet, but it seems to me more likely (and readily demonstrated) that spontaneous mutations within individuals within our species produces variation. Evolution does not predict genetic uniformity.

The author has more “evidence”, though.

We don’t! RH Positive blood can be traced back to the Rhesus monkey and all other primates, but RH negative blood CANNOT. In fact, it cannot be traced anywhere else in nature.

This is simply not true. The author doesn’t understand Rh genetics.

We bear two closely linked, closely related genes, RHD and RHCE. The RHD gene produces the protein antigen D. RHCE has four common alleles that produce the antigens ce, cE, Ce, and CE. Individuals with Rh- blood are lacking the products of the RHD gene.

Get it? Rh- is caused by the absence of a specific antigen on blood cells. It doesn’t even make sense to say that it’s some kind of evidence for your alien hypothesis that Rh factor D isn’t present in some people, and it isn’t present in monkeys. It isn’t present in frogs, either, or in mushrooms or in paramecia. You’d also have to argue that these alien interbreedings weren’t adding a magic Rh factor, they were removing one.

Also, of course the Rh factor can be found elsewhere in nature. It’s present in all primates, as far as I know. Humans carry the results of a gene duplication event — our RHD and RHCE genes are copies of one another, about 92% identical in their coding sequence, and this duplication occurred sometime before the last common ancestor of humans, gorillas, and chimpanzees. I guess the star-man must have showed up about 10 million years ago to screw a monkey, and the shock was so great it duplicated a gene it already had.

It’s just nonsense and errors through and through, but let’s skip even more crap and go straight to the important stuff: the magical properties of being Rh-.

RH Negatives also tend to have strange characteristics about themselves that are uncommon to most other people in society, such as:

  • A feeling of not belonging
  • Truth seekers
  • Sense of a “Mission” in life
  • Empathy & Compassion for Mankind
  • An extra rib or vertebra
  • Higher than average IQ
  • ESP Ability
  • Love of Space & Science
  • More sensitive vision & other senses.
  • Increased of psychic/intuitive abilities
  • Lower body temperature
  • Higher blood pressure (some say lower)
  • Predominantly blue, green, or Hazel eyes
  • Red or reddish tint to hair color
  • Increased sensitivity to heat & sunlight
  • Unexplained Scars
  • Empathetic Illnesses
  • Ability to disrupt electrical devices
  • Experience strange unexplained phenomenon
  • Psychic Dreams
  • Prone to Alien Abductions
  • Cannot be cloned

Well now I’m curious. I have O+ blood, the most common and mundane type, which explains why I’m so easily cloned and why my laptop seems to be working just fine, but it also means I’m missing out on all these supranormal abilities. I’d like to hear from my Rh- readers. So tell me: do you have higher or lower blood pressure? Are your eyes a color other than brown? Are you responsible for the disruptions of world wide web services that occurred yesterday?

I suppose you boring Rh+ positive people could chime in with stories about how you hate the truth and lack ESP and despise science and have a low IQ and have a blood pressure that’s neither higher nor lower (OMG, that’s exactly describing me!), and maybe you’ve had the experience of an alien showing up in your bedroom late at night and saying, “Oooh, ick, not that one.”

Open thread, except every statement must be somehow related to your blood type.