Apparently I need to go back to bed and shut down all social media, because this is the dreck I’m getting now on Bluesky.

Created by @darwintojesus, posted by @markwillworship

I can’t resist, let’s look a little more closely at the supposed contrasts in this illustration.

The average atheist pretends to understand science, while the average Christian understands science. I’m an atheist who has an advanced degree in biology and teaches evolution, and I guarantee you that the average Christian apologist does not know the first thing about science — I’ve been debating them for a few decades. All I have to do is point out that this illustration was created by a fanatical Christian who thinks Darwin is to science as Jesus is to Christianity.

The atheist doesn’t believe in right and wrong while the Christian believes in right and wrong. Atheists do believe in right and wrong, they just reject the unthinking authoritarian right and wrong, the rule-following idea that Christians have that they already possess absolute inviolable Truth in their mish-mash of a Bible.

The atheist secretly hates god while the Christian loves god. Nope. God doesn’t exist. We don’t feel much of anything about the invisible man. Now Christians, on the other hand…

The atheist doesn’t care about evidence while the Christian cares about evidence. The one thing about most debates between Christians and atheists is that the atheist will spend most of his time asking for evidence to back up the Christian’s assertions, while the Christian will gish-gallop all over the place, making a whole series of baseless claims. These debates get boring and predictable.

See also the atheist refuses to defend his atheist worldview while the Christian defends his worldview. This is not true, the two approach this concern from two different angles. The Christian thinks a recitation of dogma is a defense, while the atheist expects to give and take evidence.

The atheist has no purpose while the Christian has a real purpose. All purposes are constructed frameworks we use to explain why we do what we do. Atheists have them, they just don’t accept that they are fixed and absolutely assigned by a deity who communicates them to us through an old book. Christians real purpose is an arbitrary bit of nonsense, to serve God, which is dangerous and destructive since that God is observed by following a lot of out-of-date rules that don’t apply to the society we live in.

Then the whole image collapses into scattershot nonsense because the artist couldn’t think of comparable contrasts.

I’m not particularly terrified of dying, I’m sort of resigned to the reality — but I will resist it even as I know it’s inevitable. I don’t believe that Christians are unafraid of death or ready to die and go home, they will fight it as hard as I will.

I don’t think I’m just an evolved fish. Fish are pretty amazing organisms. I respect my lineage, I don’t deny it like the average Christian does.

I do understand the moral argument. That’s just the idea that a moral norm is an objective truth that is only explainable as a command from a God, or a kind of created instinct. I understand it, I just reject it.

I don’t want to be god. Can Christians ever get it through their thick skulls that we don’t believe in gods?

I’ll add another label. The average Christian believes in pious bullshit and readily lies about others.

Would you buy a cancer cure from this man?

It’s been a while since I mentioned Joseph Mercola, the alternative medicine cancer quack with a vast empire of snake oil supplements.

If anti-vaccine influencers had a king, it would be Dr. Joseph Mercola, the osteopathic physician whose supplement empire has netted him a tidy fortune of $100 million. Mercola has been a power broker in alternative medicine circles for years—as my colleague David Corn has reported, he received a publicity boost more than a decade ago from celebrity doctor and erstwhile US Senate candidate Dr. Mehmet Oz, who called him a “pioneer in holistic treatments.”

You’d think he’d be riding high right now, given that the quacks have been been put in charge health, science, and medicine in this country. But it seems his fake drug companies are getting a bit of a shakeup.

This week, the supplement industry trade publication Natural Products Insider reported that last week, Mercola suddenly fired four members of his executive team. He also announced that his company would be going in a new direction, reportedly informing his staff in a video that “my new goal is to reach billions, literally billions, around the world with a new paradigm of how to increase joy in their life.”

He doesn’t have a grand plan. What he’s got are delusions of grandeur, fueled by a psychic. The con man has been thoroughly conned!

The details of Mercola’s “new goal” and “new paradigm” are scant, but according to the article, he made the changes in management after extensive consultations with a psychic named Kai Clay, who sometimes goes by the name of Bahlon.

Janet Selvig, Mercola’s sister, was one of the executives who was fired. In an interview with Natural Products Insider, she expressed concern about Bahlon’s influence on her brother:

Selvig said she confronted her brother about the odd behavior on Jan. 31 after seeing hours of videos of his trance channeling sessions with Bahlon. “I just felt immediately that he was being taken advantage of,” Selvig said.

The confrontation did not go well. Selvig said her brother was very dismissive of her concerns and defended his work with Clay. “He thinks the book is going to save the world,” Selvig said. “He believes that he’s [Mercola] a god and he’s been reincarnated. And he even referred to himself as the new Jesus.”

On Feb. 2, Selvig was shown an email sent to a coworker from Mercola’s address announcing the doctor’s intention to fire Selvig, Rye, Boland and a fourth executive. The email offered the CEO spot to a different Mercola team member who later turned down the position. The email went on to explain “reasons for the mutiny,” describing the Catholic church as a “global cabal” that controls “50% of the world’s worth” and “created all the pain that most people experience.”

Who is Kai Clay? Who is Bahlon? Just ask him.

Ever hear of channeling? Or Light Language?

Meet BAHLON an ancient and wise high-vibration entity from the Causal Plane channeled by Master Trance Channel Kai Clay.

The messages and healing energy shared during their packed group events are always uplifting, are often staggeringly predictive—filled with the Divine healing energy of Universal love, hope and healing.

And now sometimes when available, his 10 year-old daughter Sera joins with Bahlon to share full conversations in Light Language (and interpret these in English for all) followed by Light Language meditations so powerful many say they can “feel it in the bones of every past life, present and future life.”

It’s nice that Mercola has been taken in by a New Age crackpot, but…Bahlon has also roped in his 10 year old daughter Sera. A ten year old! That is child abuse. I found a video of Bahlon and his daughter babbling (and that’s all it is, babble) at each other, if you’re curious about what “light language” is. It’s horrible and gross, and I only listened to a few minutes of it before I had to close it. Maybe you’re made of sterner stuff? I hope not, because no one should want to listen to this creep lying to a child.

Bryan Johnson — you know, the Bryan Johnson who wants to achieve eternal youth by turning himself into a plasticine android — has taken the next inevitable step. It’s not a bold new medical innovation. It’s turning his lifestyle and his weird recipes and behavior into commodities that he can sell to gullible people, especially now that RFK jr has conveniently tagged all the dupes with the MAHA label. Johnson set up a conference that you can attend for the low, low price of $249 ($1799 for the premium package), and he and his associates will lecture you on how to don’t die by buying a subscription to his $15-$20 per plate food delivery service. You could live forever on this kind of meal:

I knew this was going to happen. Bizarre schemes by Trump-lovin’ rich people are a natural consequence of the world we live in now. Maya Vinokour attended the first event in New York, and blesses us with a lengthy breakdown of all the nonsense and banality that went down. Really, it’s long — but all you need is the conclusion.

I overhear a young woman telling her friends, her voice hesitant: “I guess this was ever so slightly overpriced?”—laughable from my perspective, as a severe understatement. Even at the Premium tier, the summit’s health “insights” were either overly familiar or extravagant and outlandish. The most daring proposal I heard all day was that we can save our messy human selves from technological obsolescence by capitulating to algorithms in advance. Is that a good idea? In keeping with this authoritarian moment in American history, what Johnson’s Blueprint and its commercial ecosystem does, ultimately, is invite us to understand our own dehumanization as a form of empowerment.

If that has whet your appetite, Bryan Johnson is taking his medicine show on the road, and is going to be bringing it to Los Angeles, New York, and Miami. Get your tickets now.

I’ve done multi-city traveling lecture tours on the past, and they’re grueling, even when all I did was talk for an hour and then go to a restaurant and spend a night in another hotel room. They’re bad for your health. Somebody should tell Johnson that he’s going to reduce his lifespan by doing this.

You don’t need a medical degree if you can do this

The latest “health” craze is all about condemning “seed oils”. I’m a guy with a family history of heart disease, so I pay attention to doctors’ dietary recommendations, and I never heard anything about “seed oils” until recently, and the complaints were always coming out of the mouths of fools.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the new health secretary, has said Americans are being “unknowingly poisoned” by seed oils and has called for fast-food restaurants to return to using beef tallow, or rendered animal fat, in their fryers instead.

Recommendations from RFK jr tend to make me run in the opposite direction, but apparently there are a lot of gullible Americans who readily adopt any claim made by an anti-scientist. And then every corporation stampedes to follow the money.

In response to consumer concerns, some food-makers have stripped seed oils from their products. Restaurants like the salad chain Sweetgreen have removed them from their menus. Many Americans say they now avoid seed oils, according to a recent survey from the International Food Information Council, an industry trade group.

The seed oil discussion has exasperated nutrition scientists, who say decades of research confirms the health benefits of consuming such oils, especially in place of alternatives such as butter or lard.

“I don’t know where it came from that seed oils are bad,” said Martha Belury, an Ohio State University food science professor.

I know! I know! It comes from wellness influencers. All you need is a tiktok channel and a lot of unfounded confidence, and you too can promote weird random ideas under the guise of making people “well”. You don’t need a medical degree! You don’t even need to be a college graduate! Wellness isn’t a real scientific/medical discipline — it’s just a buzzword that has no regulatory oversight or any basis in empirical data. We all want to be well, but to have any authority in medicine requires years of training and constant updating from real sources.

I found something called Your Ultimate Guide to Becoming a Successful Health and Wellness Influencer. It’s revealing. The way to become a wellness influencer is a) find something you’re passionate about, b) connect with a community of wellness influencers, and c) land a brand deal. That last one is obviously the most important. Nowhere does it say you should study medicine or nutrition, or read scientific studies, or even be capable of understanding scientific studies. Just promote whatever random bias is floating around in your head!

It also helps to be young and slender and capable of doing yoga poses. Here’s a whole page of wellness photos you can use to build a page promoting your brand. Take a look and let me know if there’s anything illustrating knowledge or expertise; there is a common theme, and that’s not it.

In that article dismissing the seed oil obsession, you instead find studies and numbers.

Belury, who has studied fatty acids for three decades, says that claim is based on an oversimplification and misunderstanding of the science. Studies have shown that increased intake of linoleic acid, the most common omega-6, does not significantly affect concentrations of inflammatory markers in the blood, she said.

“Scientists who study omega-6 and omega-3 think we need both,” Belury said. “Seed oils do not increase acute or chronic inflammation markers.”

In addition, research from the American Heart Association and others has consistently shown that plant-based oils reduce so-called bad cholesterol, lowering the risk of heart disease and stroke, especially compared with sources high in saturated fat.

That’s found in new research from Brigham and Women’s Hospital scientists as well. A study of more than 200,000 adults over more than 30 years released Thursday found that people who ate the highest amounts of butter had a 15% higher risk of dying than those who ate the least. People who ate the most plant-based oils — including seed oils — had a 16% lower risk than those who ate the least.

Dr. Daniel Wang, who led the research, said new modeling data suggests that swapping less than a tablespoon a day of butter for equal calories of plant-based oils could lower premature deaths from cancer and overall mortality by 17%. Such a small daily change could result in “a substantial benefit,” Wang said.

Gosh. Belury and Wang are never going to be rich, famous, and popular at that rate. Americans don’t want to be told about data, they want to see a glossy image of sexy people sipping a drink with an umbrella in it while sitting on a beach in Costa Rica. That’s wellness, not a bunch of studies showing what’s actually effective in reducing mortality.

I think I’ll just listen to boring doctors in Minnesota who tell me to eat less red meat and consume more olive oil and salmon. It seems to be working; most of my ancestors seem to have died in their 50s, and I’ve made it to almost 70, and I haven’t made any major sacrifices in my lifestyle. A Mediterranean diet is delicious and good for you.

Unfortunately, I don’t look like a 20-something model and I don’t have a wellness supplement to sell.

Sometimes, I’ll tune in to these atheist phone line shows on YouTube. It’s unfair, but it’s always the worst, dumbest, most ignorant Christians who call in to air their idiotic views publicly — maybe there are intelligent Christians out there, but they don’t call in to get skewered by atheists who know the Bible better than they do. Also, I enjoy hearing Matt shout, “SHUT THE FUCK UP” to some babbling ninny who can’t answer a simple question and chooses to instead try and overwhelm everyone with frenzied bullshit.

For example, this video titled “From Biblical Slavery to Alien DNA – Nebraska Steve Takes Us on Another Trip” is a good example of the genre. First the guy tries to say the Bible doesn’t endorse slavery, only to be trounced by the hosts reciting Bible verses at him. Then he segues to claiming there is evidence for God, although he can’t say what it was, in spite of repeated requests from the hosts to explain what that evidence was.

He did finally gasp out that “the WOW signal” is evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence. In case you don’t know, here’s is the WOW signal.

In 1977, an astronomer named Jerry Ehrman was recording radio transmissions from space, and got a brief, strong signal that he didn’t understand, so he scribbled “Wow!” on the printout. I’ve seen this cited so often by so many people as a sign that aliens are out there.

It’s not. The observation has been repeated. It’s noise from a passing comet.

The explanation started to come into focus last year when a team at the CPS suggested that the signal might have come from a hydrogen cloud accompanying a comet—additionally, the movement of the comet would explain why the signal was not seen again. The team noted that two comets had been in the same part of the sky that the Big Ear was monitoring on the fateful day. Those comets, P/2008 Y2(Gibbs) and 266/P Christensen had not yet been discovered. The team then got a chance to test their idea as the two comets appeared once again in the night sky from November 2016 through February of 2017.

The team reports that radio signals from 266/P Christensen matched those from the Wow! signal 40 years ago. To verify their results, they tested readings from three other comets, as well, and found similar results. The researchers acknowledge that they cannot say with certainty that the Wow! signal was generated by 266/P Christensen, but they can say with relative assurance that it was generated by a comet.

Somehow, I don’t think Nebraska Steve would care.

I have no idea what he’s trying to say with this illustration on the column. God has a whip? He’s a bastard to make you behave?

But I could try, if the New York Times would give me a sinecure as their atheist columnist, and if I were willing to discard any self-respect I might have. After all, they do employ the most insipid theist they could find, Ross Douthat. He tried something slightly creative this week, trying to steel-man an atheist argument, badly. He presents his idea of The Best Argument Against Having Faith in God. It’s the problem of evil.

One interesting point about this argument is that while it’s often folded into the briefs for atheism that claim to rely primarily on hard evidence and science, it isn’t properly speaking an argument that some creating power does not exist. Rather it’s an argument about the nature of that power, a claim that the particular kind of God envisioned by many believers and philosophers — all powerful and all good — would not have made the world in which we find ourselves, and therefore that this kind of God does not exist.

That is correct. No one uses the problem of evil to disprove a god, but only the idea of a benevolent god, or more specifically, the perfectly good being most Christians promote. When I see it deployed in an argument, it’s usually to make the narrower point that I don’t believe in your god.

Douthat follows the usual out — refusing to deal with a direct criticism of his version of god to ask, “what about this other god?”, a weaker god than his magical being. And then falls back on general apologetics.

You can’t fully counter the argument from evil with evidence of God’s existence because the argument doesn’t fully try to establish God’s nonexistence. And you can’t fully counter it with an argument for why God might allow suffering — as a necessary corollary of free will, for instance — because the claim isn’t about the existence of suffering but its scale and scope and excess.

What you can offer, instead, is a set of challenges rather than straightforward rebuttals. The first challenge emphasizes the limits of what the argument from evil establishes even if you fully accept it: not that God doesn’t exist, not that the universe lacks a supernatural order, but just that the traditional Christian or classical-theist conception of God’s perfect goodness is somehow erroneous or overdrawn. This still leaves you with the converging lines of evidence for some kind of cosmic order, some kind of crucial human role within that drama. And it still leaves you with various theological alternatives to make sense of that evidence: You could be a pantheist or a polytheist, a gnostic or a dualist, a deist or a process theologian, and more. The argument from evil might be a reason to choose one of those schools over traditional Christianity, without being a good reason to choose atheism.

He really just doesn’t like atheism. Anything else but atheism. He doesn’t bother to say what those the converging lines of evidence for some kind of cosmic order are, though. But OK, sure, the problem of evil says you should be anything but a traditional Christian, I’ll take it.

Douthat is a traditional Catholic.

Does he even read what he writes?

The straw he grasps at is that any good exists, and you can’t explain that, therefore God.

But it makes the problem of good — real good, deep good, the Good, not just fleeting spasms and sensations — at least as notable a difficulty for the believer in a totally indifferent universe as the problem of evil is supposed to be for the religious believer.

Which suggests that even if that evil makes it hard for you to believe in a God of perfect power, you still shouldn’t give up hope that something very good indeed has a role in the order of the world.

Except that we don’t need an all-powerful supernatural being to explain how the world works.

The ball is in your court, New York Times: I’m available. I don’t know if I could write anything as stupid as Douthat’s scribblings, though. If I read enough Douthat will that make me ignorant enough to take his place?

A horse living as God intended it to

I suspect most of you don’t read the Answers Research Journal, the hack pseudoscientific journal published by Answers in Genesis to create the illusion that they do actual research. They don’t. And I don’t normally read it myself, but Daniel Phelps sent me a link to a recent article there titled Were Horses Designed to Be Ridden? If you know Betteridge’s law of headlines, then you know the answer is supposed to be “NO!”, but AiG can’t even get that right.

Horses have served as one of man’s closest companions for thousands of years. Humans have ridden them into battles, attached them to the plow, galloped them across great plains, and shown them in countless competitions. Found anywhere from ranches, to back yards, to racing tracks, to beaches, these magnificent animals have been used as instruments which brought great change into the world. One might even wonder how easily man would have managed to advance without them. With such close ties to man’s history, it seems natural that one should ask if horses were designed for riding. Such is the topic of this article and the research thereof. In considering different subjects such as History, Anatomy, and Scripture, it is this author’s belief that horses were designed to be ridden.

A bold claim. Does Caleb Harrier back it up? I shall follow Betteridge’s law, and the answer is…NO!

He’s supposed to provide evidence that horses were designed to be ridden, so he looks up the answer in a few sources, which is good. The sources are all consistent in their answer, which is also good.

Unfortunately, authors who have spoken to the topic of whether horses were designed to be ridden are usually dismissive to the idea. For example, the authors of Equine Science, simply state: “The horse is not designed to carry a rider’s weight on top of its back” (Pilliner and Davies 2004, 23). However, no explanation is provided in the text as to why the authors dismiss the idea.

Another example can be found in the popular book, How to Think Like a Horse by equine author Cherry Hill. In this work, she states that “A horse’s body isn’t really designed to carry extra weight, but it can by virtue of its suspension-bridge features” (Hill 2006, 50). Soon after, she adds: “Even though a horse is not designed to carry weight, because of the cooperative interaction between major topline ligaments and the circle of muscles, with careful consideration, we can ride” (Hill 2006, 52). The implication, then, from the author is that horses were not designed to be ridden. According to the text, horses at least have the capacity to be ridden but were not designed for such a role.

Numerous blog articles have been written on this topic of discussion as well. Sadly, these authors’ views also tend to be quite dismissive. In her article, “The Horse’s Body is not Designed to Carry a Person,” Didier (2019) states: “when we objectively assess what really holds a riding horse back we have to admit something quite awkward, and that is—from a design, strength, and balance point of view—the horse’s body is simply not designed to carry a person.” In this article, she at least provides reasoning for why she believes horses were not designed to be ridden, and it is due to their back structure in relation to where a rider sits.

In the article, “Were Horses Meant to be Ridden by Humans?”, Stone (2022) flatly opens with “Horses were never meant to be human slaves and carry them on their backs.” His explanation is the recurring theme about a horse’s anatomy, in addition to back pain caused by riding.

So all his sources say no, horses were not designed to be ridden, but he’s going to ignore that and decide that yes, they were designed to be ridden. So much for scholarship! His argument is that well, horses are ridden, and have been ridden throughout history, therefore they must be designed to be ridden. He also points out that they have strong back muscles, so therefore the only reason they don’t suffer catastrophic back failure is because they were designed to carry a human.

Then he unlimbers the big gun. The reason that we know horses were designed to be ridden is because the Bible, specifically the book of Revelation, says so.

It is this author’s position that, because Christ and His heavenly armies will one day be riding horses— as part of biblical prophecy—then horses were indeed designed to be ridden. It is not a horse’s historical record nor its anatomy that ultimately decides what it was designed for. As always, Scripture is our final authority. The King and His armies will return to the earth, riding on white horses. The horse kind—like other kinds—has always been a part of God’s plan. Horses have made a historical impact in our past; they will certainly have an impact in our future.

If that’s not enough evidence for you, there’s also the argument that Jesus would not use a horse for a purpose for which it was not designed.

Revelation 19 demonstrates that horses were designed by God to be ridden just as powerfully within a symbolic or metaphorical interpretation. For example, if horses were not designed to be ridden, then the Holy Spirit would not inspire John to write a passage that shows the Creator Jesus misusing His own creation. Also, if it were animal abuse to ride horses, Scripture—even metaphorically!—would not depict Jesus abusing His own creation.

I don’t know why he bothered to research horses, since he already knew his conclusion, and since the only source he needed was the Bible.