This is what happens when you abandon a consensus

Suddenly, we have “universities” claiming to be the only ones in pursuit of the truth.

Then…THE DEEP RIFTS. Oh, this is delicious. The phrenologists and the anti-vaxxers are battling it out on Twitter.

There’s more.

Screw all those guys, every one of them.

Noooooo! Curse you, algorithm!

I made the mistake of reading this article about some minor celebrity, Demi Lovato, endorsing some weird video channel, Gaia. Look at this: it’s perfect skeptic bait.

On a Lovato-themed Gaia page for their fans, the singer’s supporters can view a free episode of a Gaia show about an “ancient space program” before signing up for a $11.99 monthly Gaia membership.

Lovato’s “handpicked favorite” shows, according to the website, include a series positing that Atlantis was real and that humanity is living in the aftermath of a battle between giants and lizard-like “reptilians.”

A representative for Lovato declined to comment on the record. Gaia didn’t respond to a request for comment.

While the claims made in the videos produced by Gaia can seem laughable, the site, which claims to have more than 750,000 members, has become a clearinghouse pushing conspiracy theories into the New Age movement. Gaia’s videos are slickly produced to look like genuine documentaries, with some featuring prominent figures in the anti-vaccine movement. The site has also been called a “hub for QAnon,” with QAnon promoters flocking to the platform after facing crackdowns from other websites.

Then I doubled my mistake. I had to look up this Gaia thing (warning: you might not want click on the link yourself, it’s cursed). It’s an overpriced subscription service for really bad fake “documentaries”. It left me wondering how these incompetent clowns get so much attention for such wacky beliefs?

I know of some of them. They’re total idiots.

But now the curse of the internet algorithm — Gaia must be pumping lots of money into their ad promotion, because now I get tons of pseudoscience ads. I can’t watch YouTube without getting wall-to-wall ads about Atlantis and the Annanuki and Bigfoot and Q. It’s annoying. In for a penny, in for a pound, so I watched a bit of this one. Don’t do it unless you’re a committed masochist!

This young man calmly asserts that he was born in Atlantis to the descendants of the Annanuki.

Now I am doomed. It’s going to be even more continuous foolishness than usual for me on the interwebs. Heed my warning!

The Freezer of the Damned

Uh-oh. Apparently, I’ve been storing Satan in my freezer.

Conservative cable network Newsmax has sidelined White House correspondent Emerald Robinson after she made the utterly bonkers claim that COVID-19 vaccines contain a “bioluminescent” tracker linked to the Devil.

In a post that has since been taken down by Twitter for peddling COVID-19 misinformation, Robinson warned “Christians” that the vaccines include “a bioluminescent marker called LUCIFERASE so that you can be tracked,” all while suggesting to her followers that the shot was the “Mark of the Beast”—something she’s said before.

What do you know…someone who is just too batty for Newsmax.

A little more information:

  • There is no luciferase in the vaccines. That would be silly and pointless, since no, you can’t use it to track people.

  • Luciferase is an enzyme that reacts with a couple of common substrates to make light. If you want to make cells glow, you inject them with it, or in many cases you insert the luciferase DNA into the genome, and you get a cell that produces light, which is handy…if you are tracking its expression in a microscope.

  • I’ve also got some Lucifer Yellow in my freezer. This is not an enzyme — the compound actually glows bright yellow under fluorescent light. Likewise, I’ve used it for looking at cells, not people.

  • Do you even know how much this stuff costs? Last time I bought it, LY was about $600 for a vial containing 100mg. You’re not going to throw it into a dose of vaccines.

I have several other dyes in my freezer. 1,1′-Dioctadecyl-3,3,3′,3′-Tetramethylindocarbocyanine Perchlorate (DiI, for short) is a favorite, but who knows, it might be the name of some other Lord of Hell.

Wiccan Communists turned my child into a gay transgender revolutionary!

This silly little Halloween commercial for Twix candy has the creationists coughing up all kinds of bizarre ahistorical nonsense. It features a goth nanny with witchy powers who is non-judgementally taking care of a little boy who is wearing a princess dress. The non-judgmental bit is clearly anathema to fundamentalist Christians.

Answers in Genesis discusses it in their weekly “news” show. I learned many things from this segment. You don’t need to watch it, I’ve transcribed the relevant bits, but if you must, the bullshit is flowing at around the 8 minute mark.

Patricia: It’s pretty incredible the messages it is promoting. One of the things I noticed is that actually if you take that narrative that is happening it basically summarizes the key principles behind Marxism. So that whole idea is that you have this minority that is being oppressed so then the solution to that, to make everyone live happily ever after, is to violently overthrow the oppressor, commit some kind of revolution, forcibly remove them, and then everything is good. And that’s actually what you are seeing in this commercial. So that’s an interesting connection to Marxism there.

Tim: And that’s what we see historically with Marxism. Every time there’s a revolution, everything is perfect afterwards and nothing ever goes wrong. It’s utopia.

Patricia: That’s the idea, but it’s not going to work in a sinful world.

Tim: And it never has worked.

It is November, which puts us about four months after the Fourth of July, so I guess we just pinned down a measure of how far back into the past a creationist’s mind can reach. About 4 months. Which explains a lot about the whole young earth notion, I guess.

It’s a bit of a reach to call it Marxism, though. So the key principle of Marxism is for oppressed minorities to have a revolution, period? I’m no expert on Marx or communism, but I’m sure there’s slightly more to it than that. By that definition, the United States is Marxist.

Oh, but she’s not done. It’s also the key principle of Wicca, which is the same as Marxism, a connection I’d never seen made before.

Patricia: She’s teaching him the main principle of Wicca, it’s called the Wiccan rede, it says “an ye harm no one, do what you will”. So throughout this video she’s encouraging him to wear this dress because he wants to. You know, that sounds OK because you’re not harming someone, but actually civilizations have tried that in the past. One civilization that tried it said that “liberty consists of the freedom to do everything that injures no one else.” You might think that sounds pretty good, but what civilization was this? It was revolutionary France, where they tortured and guillotined thousands and thousands of people because, without God, a creator as your source for absolutes in truth and morality, you can define harm however you want, you can define human rights however you want, these were all things that were seen happening in this culture, and the commercial, unfortunately, summarizes that pretty well.

Wait wait wait…the French Revolution was run by Communist witches? I’m a little confused by the contradiction here: the Wiccan rede says “harm no one”, and according to AiG, that was the cause of a bloody revolution with guillotines lopping off heads? It seems to me that if the revolution were actually inspired by Wiccan principles, there would have been no bloodshed.

Remember: the French Revolution was an act by Marxist Wiccans.

The AiG show goes on with more instances of idiocy. They are also upset by another commercial, “Doritos made this ad for the Mexican market where a dead guy’s ghost comes back to tell his family he has a gay lover in heaven”. Yeah, it’s the Gay Agenda again. They’d don’t like it.

Curiously, almost all their sources for these stories is a crappy conservative sort-of-humor site, “Not the Bee”, which is a spinoff of the not-at-all funny Babylon Bee. That tells you something about the depth of their research. One exception is that they comment on an article from Science Daily, “DNA tangles can help predict evolution of mutations”.

In that article, the authors describe how loops or tangles in unfolded bacterial DNA can act as hotspots for mutations. It’s basic research into the mechanisms of evolution and discusses how identifying these hotspots can lead to better predictions about likely new mutations in a line of bacteria.

You can guess how deeply Ken Ham discusses this topic. “They’re still just bacteria.” Done and done.

Damn, those people are stupid. I’m sure they’re sincere in their deeply held beliefs, the problem being that their beliefs are so idiotic and ignorant.

I would never have predicted such a fall

The Church Militant — you know, the fanatical fringe of conservative Catholicism, home to Michael Voris, etc. — has a new product to sell. For a mere $75, you can buy CDs of the Psalms and Proverbs being read aloud by…

Are you sitting down for this?

…Milo Yiannopoulos.

The comments are full of people praising the power of God to rescue such a sinner, but I’m a doubter. I don’t think he’s saved at all. He’s found another grift, is all. I’d be more impressed if he’d found a humble faith to follow, but I’m sorry, the Church Militant is a mob of extremist weirdos.

The Dawkins ennui

Richard Dawkins got a major fluffing from The Times this weekend, and I don’t care enough to try to get around the paywall. Sorry. We all know what kind of conservative BS he’s going to say, and the worst of it (I hope — if there’s worse in the article, I don’t want to know about it) is right there up front in the blurb, and in the title, even.

Richard Dawkins: ‘Race is a spectrum. Sex is pretty damn binary’

This doesn’t even make sense. Pretty damn binary — so he’s adding vague qualifiers to something he wants to assert is only one thing or another. Everything is black and white, as long as those shades of gray get ignored, I guess. Let’s also ignore the fact that there is a wide spectrum within each sex, with femaleness and maleness having huge individual variation, with overlap. These are forced categories. You’ve decided that, by definition, there are only two possibilities allowed, therefore everyone must be wedged into one or the other, and you look with horror on the boundary conditions that show your classification scheme is inadequate.

What does he think should be done with individuals who are in the pretty part of his damn binary? Shall we just ignore them, pretend they don’t exist, maybe torture them into non-existence so they don’t clutter up your boundaries?

Good grief, he’s an evolutionary biologist. Does he also insist that species are pretty damn binary, you’re either a member of one or not, and there are no individuals who fall into any kind of hybrid state? Embrace the blurriness of the boundary conditions. That’s where all the interesting stuff happens.

I am privileged to see the opening paragraphs of the article. I don’t need more.

There’s not much that frightens Richard Dawkins. He shrugs off his regular hate mail from angry evangelicals, occasionally taking to YouTube to read it aloud. He has never backed down from his withering criticisms of Islamic fundamentalism, despite the potential for blowback. He’s happy to pick intellectual fights with eminent fellow scientists and has even been known to find fault (hard to imagine, I realise) with the odd journalist or two.

But Dawkins tells me there are two things he does fear: one is being cancelled by the left. The other is hang-gliding. I think he’s probably in more danger from the former.

There is so much hand-wringing on the right about getting “cancelled”, whatever that means. It seems to be a rather ineffectual state in which some people stop treating you as a demi-god and are more willing to criticize what you say and do, and it’s only a threat to people who consider themselves deserving of uncritical adulation.

By that definition, sorry, Richard. You were cancelled long ago, as were we all. If not by one group, by another (like, say, the American Humanists). Get used to it.

By the way, this photo was embarrassing.

I will charitably assume that it was the newspaper’s idea to put him into a christ-like pose, but really, Richard, you can say no. Tamp down that ego a little bit and just realize that an occasional fit of humility will serve you better nowadays.

Owen Strachan needs to get out more

There are no atheists out there—not even one, he says. He’s pretty insistent about it, too, and seems to think it’s a profound insight.

Guy, the only reason I have clearly perceived the existence of the concept of a god is that you goofballs won’t shut up about it. As a child I went to church and Sunday School every week, and listened as the pastor and my teachers confidently asserted that a god existed, while never offering any good reason I should believe. I never did believe even as I was memorizing Bible verses and singing hymns and learning the catechism, and once I was old enough and confident enough to shed the cant, I did. Never looked back. I’ve had a few close scrapes where I was pretty sure I was going to die, and nope, I didn’t say any prayers, didn’t call out to any god, didn’t imagine the actions of a higher power saving me or damning me. It’s just not in my brain, get used to it.

It’s also the case that, while I find it incredible that anyone is stupid or gullible enough to believe in that cheesy trash called the Christian Bible, I do believe that many people do. If someone says they’re a Bible-believing Christian, well, I accept that they are, and proceed under that assumption. It helps that their claim to sincerity is backed by a statement that is so foolish, since the only way anyone could find that at all credible is if they actually held it as a deeply irrational belief.

So do me a favor, and trust that I also am sincere when I say I’m an atheist. I have no reason to lie about it. It’s not as if it gets me fabulous prizes and admission to a community of people who will fawn over me.

Probably like you, I had never heard of Owen Strachan before, so I had to look him up.

Dr. Owen Strachan is Provost and Research Professor of Theology at Grace Bible Theological Seminary. Before coming to GBTS he served as Associate Professor of Christian Theology and Director of the Residency Ph.D Program at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. He earned his Ph.D from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, his M.Div from The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and his AB from Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. He is married and the father of three children. Strachan has authored numerous books, including Reenchanting Humanity: A Theology of Mankind, The Pastor as Public Theologian: Reclaiming a Lost Vision (with Kevin Vanhoozer) and the forthcoming Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement is Hijacking the Gospel – and the Way to Stop it (Salem Books, July 2021). Strachan is the former president of the Council on Biblical Manhood & Womanhood, the former director of The Center for Public Theology at MBTS and is the President of Reformanda Ministries.

Ouch. That’s one insular little biography. A theologian and seminarian who has spent his life in seminary, talking with theologians, sitting in his office inventing theologies, never even imagining godless nature. OK, you really need to get out more, Owen. For your own good.

Also, whining about social justice and wokeness…when you do go out, stay away from me, you smug little tinpot authoritarian. We won’t get along.