In case you’re interested in attending a performance by the dance and music troupe Shen Yun, you might want to know one little tidbit: they’re a collection of Chinese Falun Gong expatriates, and the music, while in Chinese, is a little bit religious.
OK, a lot religious. And not the fuzzy well-meaning kind of religious, but the dogmatic anti-science kind.
His trial on charges that he’s been willfully trying to interfere with the forfeiture of his properties (which was part of his sentence) started this week. The Pensacola News Journal has an account. Not much has happened yet, and they’re expecting two weeks of proceedings.
John Gray asks what scares the New Atheists — and I tried to think of what scares me before I read it. And the answer is…
Jimmy Kimmel put together a nicely scathing PSA on those damned stupid anti-vaxxers. Here it is:
Guess who got upset about it?
Mike Adams, the demented Natural Health Ranger. It’s an amazing rant. He announces that he, and all the other people who refuse to prevent terrible diseases in their children, are just like gay and black people, because they’re hated by bigots.
Really. He goes there.
Then he claims that the PSA is making fun of sick children, and shows photos of disfigured and dreadfully ill children, claiming they’re all of kids damaged by vaccines.
I think it’s obvious how fallacious his nonsense is, so I don’t need to say more…especially since you can go read Orac, who definitely says more.
As pointed out in the comments, the RationalWiki has a good summary of Mike Adams’ lunacy.
The Mountain Express, a newspaper in the liberal bastion of North Carolina, Asheville, ran an article on one of those alt-med quackeries, “medical intuitives”. These are people who claim to be able to see inside you and diagnose diseases, and the newspaper article was completely unquestioning. A reader, Robert J. Woolley, wrote in to complain, and listed some of the claims made.
Specifically, Teresa Eidt claims, “I was shown a cancerous ulcer on the internal wall of [a massage client’s] abdomen,” and “I scan the body system by system.” Kimberly Crowe is said to claim “that when she placed her hands on people, she could see things in their bodies.” Rachel Frezza claims that her ability in this regard was objectively tested: “Frezza was given no information about [10 patients] or their conditions. Only by accurately reporting the conditions did she pass the course.” Tammy Coffee is quoted as saying, “I see the physical body like an X-ray machine, like I have a camera and I am going inside the body … I will look through, for example, the entire small and large intestine.”
The editor’s reply reveals the problem.
Jonny Scaramanga wrote a good post explaining why creationism matters.
We should be worrying about creationism. But everyone is worried about it for the wrong reasons. Yes, creationism is false, and young-Earth creationism is particularly ridiculous. But with thousands of false beliefs in circulation, why should we particularly care about creationism? It doesn’t make much difference to my daily life whether or not I accept that all life on Earth shares a single common ancestor, or that the planet is 4.54 billion years old. Even in science, there are limited areas where the fact of common descent is immediately relevant.
The trouble is that the areas of fundamentalism which are truly oppressive— the denial of women’s rights and bigotry against LGBTQ people, for example—are intimately bound up with creationism. You’ll notice that, amid its busy schedule of producing pseudoscience, Answers in Genesis has found time to oppose gay marriage. There aren’t a lot of copies of The Selfish Gene in Quiverfull homes, either. These facts are not coincidences.
I get a lot of crap in my email, especially since trolls love to sign me up for weird mailing lists. This morning I got something from “Christian Reader Alerts”, and this is what it said:
It’s a weird little weapon that could kickstart WWIII.
A weapon so easy to produce…that fifth graders make a small version of it for their science projects.
A weapon so powerful, that it could cause a global economic crash, mass pandemics and vicious food riots…at the same time!
And latest reports from DHS reveal that majority of our enemies are preparing to use THIS against us.
>>Click Here To Find Out More>>
So I clicked There to Find Out More.
An excellent read: The Game That Let Me Mourn My Lost Faith. A former Christian describes his gradual abandonment of faith in the context of a video game about religion that he’s playing, and it’s subtle and complex…both the game and his loss. The games weren’t actively forcing atheism down his throat — they often had fictional religions embedded in them — but they did make him think about alternative explanations, and realize that maybe there were other ways to understand the world outside that bubble of Christianity.
Poor Erskine College. They recently had a successful volleyball season, then two of their players came out as gay — which shouldn’t be a problem, except that Erskine is in South Carolina, right there in the front flap of the Bible Tightie-Whities, and trustees and administrators and community supporters freaked out. What to do? Easy. They turned to the Bible and issued a statement.
American Atheists is doing it again: they’re attending CPAC. I’m at a loss — this is simply incoherent, and sends the message that the atheism movement is so broad it is meaningless, it can encompass any philosophy, including explicitly anti-humanist ones. So why bother?
And weirder still, look who they’re sending.
