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.

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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.

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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.

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Isn’t it nice of a Southern Baptist minister to expose his ignorance with a question?

via Twitter:

For instance, why would there need to be a God if we just evolved, are really just animals, and that everything happens purely by chance? If the entire universe is just a random set of events and a collection of beings with no purpose, then having a Creator is unnecessary.

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Otto West: Apes don’t read philosophy.
Wanda: Yes they do, Otto. They just don’t understand it.

Michael Egnor read my post on how medical publications avoid using the word “evolution”. He just didn’t understand it.

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Vantrú, the Icelandic atheist organization, has unilaterally decided co-opt all the children born in that country and automatically enroll all Icelanders as atheists. I guess that means the percentage of atheists in Iceland will leap from roughly 10% to nearly 100%.

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Last year, Creation Ministries International announced a new documentary called “Evolution’s Achilles’ Heels” which was supposed to be revolutionary and like no other creationist movie. Did anyone see it? Anyone? I didn’t, but I just ran across some notes on it, so I rummaged around the web to find out what happened.

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And it’s about time. Soon is a dishonest hack, one of the climate change deniers who exploited his prestigiously titled position as a researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics (Oooh! Sciencey!) to claim authority in attacks on more credible climate scientists, and he’s been very popular on the denialist side of things.

Now his own boss is admitting that he violated disclosure principles by failing to reveal his industry connections. You might be wondering what connections, and how much did he get?

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