Pat and Peter Shaw were in their 80s, and experiencing physical and cognitive decline, so they decided to die. And they did. Quietly, at home, after talking it over with their grown-up children. It was all very dignified and sensible.
I’d like to fade out that way, except for one difficulty: my wife is going to still be kicking when I’m a doddering wreck, so the joint suicide pact is not going to happen.
There is a group of Christians (maybe — could be a stupid Poe) who disagree with Ken Ham. Ham argues that dinosaurs were real, that they were created 6000 years ago, and the they were on Noah’s Ark, but were killed by dragon-slaying knights in the Middle Ages. Stop laughing. It’s what he actually believes.
This other group, Christians Against Dinosaurs, argues instead that dinosaurs never existed, they’re totally fake, and that paleontologists just assembled random rock fragments into phony assemblages, inventing dinosaurs.
So here’s one of their people trying to make the case that you can smash up anything and assemble it into a dinosaur skeleton, if you use enough spackle.
When I first saw this, I thought it had to be a hoax. Nobody could be that idiotic, could they?
But then I thought…if somebody suddenly sprang Ken Ham and his wacky ideas on me, I’d be thinking exactly the same thing. This guy is just a bad actor, right, trying to make religious people look like nitwits? Nobody’s going to fall for that goofy routine. You’re pulling my leg.
If you think it’s satire, tell me how you’d know…and sorry, but the argument that it’s too ridiculous to be credible is not valid in a world of Hams and Hovinds and Trumps and Bergmans.
The university has accepted the Ph.D. dissertation of Judy Wilyman, which is plum full of rancid bollocks. She’s an anti-vaxxer, and apparently her advisor had no problems with a thesis that basically lied about the science and promoted bizarre conspiracy theories.
Look at that first line. There is no stringent monitoring of adverse events or evaluation of the effectiveness of vaccines in the population that would provide meaningful data on their effects in the population.
Has she never heard of this science called epidemiology? Does she know what a Phase IV clinical trial is? This stuff is assessed out the wazoo. It’s the analysis of effectiveness and side effects that allows doctors to recommend dosages and schedules.
But it seems the social sciences department at UOW doesn’t believe in statistics or science at all. And most appallingly, the university is supporting this crap.
UOW ensures research is undertaken according to strict ethical and quality standards and supports researchers’ academic freedom of thought and expression,he said.
UOW does not restrict the subjects into which research may be undertaken just because they involve public controversy or because individuals or groups oppose the topic or the findings.
I can believe they have quality standards
, but this is an admission that those standards are disgracefully low.
I would agree that research shouldn’t be restricted because it’s controversial. That’s not the case here. The problem with Wilyman’s research is that it is wrong, and that it violates the apparently non-existent standards at UOW for truth and accuracy.
Bill Donohue doesn’t think so.
Parents in Maine’s Scarborough School District say that efforts to ban Christmas have become so extreme that they now refer to Christmas as the new ‘C-word.’ In nearby New Hampshire, things aren’t any better. For example, the principal of Epping Elementary School boasts that his school raises money for the needy, ‘but we don’t call it a Christmas gift drive,’ and that’s because ‘it’s a time for giving and that’s pretty much universal.’ But if that’s the case, why choose December as the gift-giving month? Similarly, why is December ‘a time for giving’? His counterpart at Newfields Elementary is so wound up about Christmas that he actually said, ‘we’ve tried to distance ourselves from religion and world events.’ No doubt he’s been a smashing success.
Yadda yadda yadda. Who cares anymore? We’ve got a mid-winter break in schools around the country — it’s a good time to do something for others, whether you call it Christmas or Kwanzaa or Boodlyboop. Doesn’t matter. We’ll do stuff that we enjoy with friends and family, and we’ll do it without bowing down to your silly Jesus character, which is what really rankles right-wing Catholics.
But really, ol’ Bill tends to get upset about the most ludicrous things. The Scarborough school district calendar for December 2015 has the forbidden “C-Word” on it three times; but it looks like they showed an evil anti-Christian movie to the kids on the 15th.
The Student Advocacy office is sponsoring an ELF movie event on Tuesday, December 15th 2:30-4:30 in the SMS cafeteria. We are asking that students donate either a new, unwrapped toy or $5 for Toys for Tots. We will also have a bake sale with home baked goods provided by students and staff. All proceeds from this sale will go directly to Toys for Tots.
The movie was Elf. Not only was Jesus not in it, but it was all about an illegal alien trying to make Christmas all about having fun, rather than going to Mass.
Oops, I said the C-Word. Sorry, everyone.
Hey, doesn’t Elf use the C-Word a whole bunch of times? Those poor kids must have walked out of that cafeteria with blistered ears and a soul packed with damnation.
In his little weekly radio homily, Ken Ham makes an amazing claim about the Bible. After pointing out that scientists have had different interpretations of Neandertal’s relationship to modern humans, he claims that the Bible has all the answers.
They wouldn’t be surprised if they started with God’s word. You see, when we start with the Bible and not Man’s ideas about the past, we get a very different view of Neandertals. They were human. And we know that Neandertals were intelligent descendants of Adam and Eve, just like us.
He has a Bible that contains a phylogeny of Neandertals? Remarkable.
Actually, the basis of his claim is that Neandertals are the remains of people who died in the flood; that they were not on Noah’s ark, but all “kinds” were on the big boat; therefore they had to belong to a “kind” already represented on the Ark, which means they had to be human. So he really doesn’t have any information from the Bible that supports his claim that they’re humans, but only a flawed chain of inference. We’d have to argue that Australopithecines were also fully human, because they also all died in the Flood, according to Ham’s own claim of perfect representation of all “kinds” on the boat, and therefore Adam and Eve were the ancestors of Lucy, as well.
It’s rather illogical, too. The reason he says the Bible explains Neandertals is that the Bible says absolutely nothing about Neandertals, so he has complete freedom to claim that whatever parts of science he likes are already inferrable from the tea leaves. The Bible also says nothing about other hominins; about tomatoes; about genes; about the circulation of blood in the human body; about the planet Neptune; about signal transduction in cells. The absence of an explanation is being treated as an explanation-shaped hole he can fill with whatever he wants.
Meanwhile, biblical cosmology treats the Earth as a disc of terra firma floating in a vast universe filled with water.
That off-his-rocker conspiracy theorist at Florida Atlantic University has been fired, despite being tenured. I would defend the right of a professor to argue for whatever wacky idea he wanted — that’s the whole point of tenure — except that he crossed a line, and there really are lines that even tenure won’t protect you from.
A major factor in Tracy’s firing was an op-ed in the Sun Sentinel by Lenny and Veronique Pozner, whose 6-year-old son, Noah, was shot and killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School on December 14, 2012. The couple wrote that Tracy sent them a certified letter demanding proof that Noah had lived, and that when they refused to respond, he blasted them on his blog and accused them of accepting government payoffs to feign grief. In an angry Facebook post, Tracy wrote that the Pozners’ op-ed was an attempt to
intimidate his employer into firing himbecause of theextensive researchhe’d done on the Sandy Hook shooting.The Pozners, alas, are as phony as the drill itself, and profiting handsomely from the fake death of their son,he wrote.>
Believing that the slaughter of innocents at Sandy Hook was staged is totally nuts — it belongs up there with believing the moon is made of cheese, the earth is flat, and that there is a god that loves you. But you don’t get to fire professors for that; you also shouldn’t use their weird little hobbies as grounds for not hiring them, if they’re competent at doing the job they’re supposed to do.
But when your obsession turns into harassment, when you start hounding people who, with good reason, disagree with you, then it’s time to stop allowing you to use your position to launch these ill-founded crusades.
Secondarily, that he calls making up bizarre conspiracy theories extensive research
also calls into question his competence.
Some of us have been saying this for a long time: Michael Shermer is a poor excuse for a skeptic. Now John Hawks takes him out to the woodshed over a recent SciAm column, in which he spins out a violent fairy tale about the Homo naledi fossils.
But Shermer is wrong to ignore the evidence that already exists. The editor of Skeptic magazine failed to do the one thing that any journalist should do: simply ask someone whether he was missing some important evidence that might make him look like a fool. I’m very sorry that he has misled so many Scientific American readers about the nature of evidence about Homo naledi and how we approach the science of human origins.
Hawks, of course, is one of the primary investigators of the H. naledi work, and knows what he’s talking about. I have to wonder again why SciAm continues to keep Shermer on as a columnist.
They’re liars. Kent Hovind attempts to explain the contradictions in the Bible, and it’s easy. The Bible is a trap. God intentionally put in errors so he can catch the people smart enough to notice them, and drive them away from the faith. Because, apparently, he only wants irrational people to believe in him.
If I was god…I would write the book in such way that those who don’t want to believe in me any way would think they found something — “a-ha, here’s why I don’t believe” — and then they could go on with their own life, because they don’t want to believe in god any way.
…
I would put things in there that appear, without digging, to be contradictions. I don’t think that’s deceptive, that’s really wise for our heavenly father to weed out those who are really serious.
I know this is difficult for an ethically-challenged person like Hovind, but that actually is deceptive.
See, this is useful. We need to know what makes this god business work, and apparently, you need to be up high in the sky, and you need to be undistracted by those demons in a long metal tube
, that is, plebeian airline passengers, so definitely no flying in coach, and even first class isn’t good enough — you want to talk with god, you need to have your own private jet.
Well now I know why I’m an atheist — I’ve had a lack of opportunity for conversations with gods. All you Christians out there need to click on that donate button in the left sidebar a lot. I’m sure I could be brought to Jesus if only I had my very own Gulfstream and a pilot on retainer.
It would be nice if the IRS could hear that rationalization from the prosperity gospel practitioners, but I rather suspect that the IRS also only listens to you if you’re calling on a satellite phone from your private jet.
By the way, the video cuts out just before we get the Biblical revelation of Amos 6:1, so here it is:
Woe to them that are at ease in Zion, and trust in the mountain of Samaria, which are named chief of the nations, to whom the house of Israel came!
What it means, I don’t know, and I wasn’t interested in tracking down their interpretation. It probably means something about how they need to upgrade to a bigger, more luxurious jet.
There’s this insanely popular mullah, Zakir Naik, with lots of videos flooding youtube. He reminds me a lot of Kent Hovind and Ken Ham: the same ignorance, and the same absolute confidence that they’re always right, but with no evidence to support their conclusions other than their own belief. But then I ran across this video, and I actually agreed with Naik in the first part.
He argues that if a school is hiring a teacher, it ought to matter whether they believe 2+2=4 or 2+2=3, and they ought to employ only the one who’d teach the correct answer. I was floored! I’d argue exactly the same thing. Of course, he doesn’t carry through on that ideal: he’s also a creationist, of exactly the same primitive ilk as Hovind and Ham.
Where it all gets familiar and stupid is in his answer to the original question, which is why Islamic countries don’t allow places of worship for other religions, while Western nations allow a diversity of faiths to flourish. His answer is that that’s because Muslims know absolutely that Islam is true, so why should they allow false religions to proselytize? And how does he know that Islam is true? Because the Koran says so. When pressed on the fact that many Christians are as adamant about the truth of their beliefs, he simply asserts that the reason other countries allow mosques to be built is that they are less confident that their native religions are true.
It was a mistake to have Bill Nye debate Ken Ham. The debate I really want to see is Ham vs. Naik. They’re indistinguishable from each other, but both are totally convinced that the other is completely wrong. Please make it happen!
