Charming theodicy

Am I the only one who sees “theidiocy” whenever I read or hear the term “theodicy”? Just curious.

Anyway, take a look at this lovely example of rationalizing the death of children.

The most merciful thing an omnicient God might do is end the life of a child whom he knows will never seek Him.

-Pastor Doug Humphrey

I’m going to have to remember that one. Since the death of seeming innocents is all for a cause visible to an omniscient deity, abortion must be God’s way of purging the population of little potential Hitlers, then. Makes a fellow wonder how he missed the original Hitler, though.

Belief can be dangerous

Gullibility really does destroy lives. A Vietnamese couple in Australia, the Trans, were missing a purse, so they made mistake #1: they went to a fortune teller to find out where it was. Really, magic doesn’t work.

Mistake #2: the fortune teller told them that a young woman, Leilani dos Santos, who was living with them had stolen it. The fortune teller had no way of knowing, but made this potentially destructive accusation anyway.

Mistake #3: The Trans believed the fortune teller.

Mistake #4, and this is the really big one: The Trans believed that torture was an appropriate method of getting the purse back.

Ms Tran also allegedly told Ms dos Santos they would cut off her fingers, but they loved her and would inject her with heroin, so she would not feel it.

Ms dos Santos said Mr Tran beat her in the back with a meat cleaver, threatened her with a samurai sword and burnt her arm with a cigarette.

Ms dos Santos said the couple had a Lady Gaga CD playing loudly. “I was screaming,” she said. “I was hoping maybe somebody would break down the door and help me.”

Ms dos Santos eventually escaped, and the Trans are currently on trial. Let’s hope the court doesn’t make mistake #5 and let those insane people go — the Trans are clearly infected with a delusional belief system that they use to justify horrific acts against others.

I mean, really…Lady Gaga?

The Problem With Science Is Dumb Non-Scientists

Man, that Heffernan article is turning out to be such an excellent marker for stupid. Now some Catholic wanker is citing it as supporting his claim that scientists are all nasty people, claiming that the problem with science is scientists. Being Catholic, you know exactly who he is going to complain about.

Heffernan writes about the meltdown over at Science Blogs. “Science Blogs”, as you may well remember is the home of blogger PZ Myers who is famous for advancing science by desecrating the Eucharist. While Myers is the most read of the misogamists at Science Blogs, his penchant for the unpleasant is rather standard fare.

“Science Blogs” has recently seen many of its bloggers leave in protest over the addition of a new nutrition blog called Food Frontiers. Science Blogs’ sin that PepsiCo sponsors the site. It is indubitable that nobody does righteous indignation quite like the ungodly.

Wow. Every sentence is wrong.

  1. There is no meltdown. There was risk of one, but Seed got their act together, and we’re all working away productively now.

  2. Cracker abuse is so 2008. Get over it. And no, that wasn’t science, nor did I claim it was: it was a protest against the inanity of reactionary Catholics.

  3. Misogamist? Moi? I’ve been happily married for over 30 years!

  4. Nobody quit over the addition of Food Frontiers.

  5. It was not a sin that Pepsi sponsored the site. The problem was that it was not labeled as an advertisement, and blurred a boundary between advertisement and content. That’s what got people upset, as well as a pattern of infrastructure neglect.

  6. Funny about that ungodly business. I’m definitely ungodly; I’m still here. So is Greg Laden. ERV thought it was all a tempest in a teacup. Jason Rosenhouse didn’t even seem to notice. The biggest ungodliest bloggers here seem to have had a range of reactions; and several of the people who decamped were theists.

Like I said, everyone who cites the Heffernan noise positively seems to be factually incompetent, including Heffernan herself.

The rest of that wanker’s article is just as bad. To defend his claim that scientists are all rotten people, he cites two examples. Galileo: not as nice as you’d think! After all, the Catholic church didn’t behead him, but only sentenced him to a life of confinement, and he had been very rude in mocking the Pope by putting his words into the mouth of a character called Simplicio in his dialogue.

His second case is Alfred Wegener, who he claims was persecuted by a scientific inquisition (every bit as bad as the Catholic inquisition, apparently — despite the fact that we don’t use thumbscrews). Here’s what scientists did to the discoverer of continental drift:

For his insight, Wegener was mocked and criticized and ultimately ostracized by the mainstream scientific establishment. Ultimately he died virtually unknown on an expedition trying to prove his theory.

Well, no. He was a well-respected meteorologist who died on an expedition to Greenland to study Arctic weather. He wasn’t ostracized at all, but was a working scientist right up until his death. His theory of continental drift was criticized and rejected in his lifetime, because he had no mechanism and because his evidence was all circumstantial. That’s what scientists are supposed to do — demand solid evidence. And when that evidence came in after Wegener’s death, the theory was accepted.

I’m kind of impressed. That Heffernan article is smoking out a lot of nobodies who are proudly standing up to demonstrate how stupid they are.

More savage than natural men!

One of the more contemptible anti-gay activists is Reverend Scott Lively, a true liar for Jesus who considers it his sacred mission to rid the world of homosexuals. He was proud to have inspired the Ugandan death penalty for homosexuality law (although in the face of the outrage that generated, he backed off, claiming they should give them the choice of prison or gay conversion “therapy”).

His other claim to fame is that he is a holocaust revisionist. He has written a book, The Pink Swastika, in which he claims that Hitler and his entire inner circle was gay, that the atrocities the Nazis committed were driven by the immoral impulses of the gay Nazi elite, and that the well-known anti-gay laws and mass murders of homosexuals in the Third Reich were just a cover, a distraction to conceal the fact that Nazis were all gay. Oh, and also that the reason they were murdered is that gays are intrinsically violent, anyway.

Lively is an evil little liar, so it was delightful to see him exposed on the Daily Show. This is one of the clearest illuminations of the insanity of these gay-hating evangelicals I’ve seen.

The best moment was after Lively expounded on his ferocious gay Nazi theory and how the Nazi’s public denunciation of gays was evidence that they were all secretly gay, the interviewer asks him, “That which you hate the most you secretly are?” Reverend Scott Lively sits there stunned for a moment before he can say, “I’m not gay.”

I don’t see how we can conclude that he’s not, though, given the Christian logic he has so impeccably applied to the problem.

I shall be looking forward to my massive pay raise

Zeno catches something amusing: a right-wing radio host ranting about professors.

Sussman:I get a kick out of— You go to UC Berkeley, you go to Stanford, you go to these various campuses and these students are out there protesting, “We need more money for our schools!” And standing next to them are the professors. “We need more money for our schools!” Hey, have you ever asked that professor how much money they’re making every year? These professors are all millionaires. They’re millionaires with big, big salaries and big, big retirement packages. And yet they dress like little schmoes, you know, with their crummy jackets [Officer Vic: Patches on the elbow.] that are twenty years old, yeah, and patches on the elbow. And their ties are askew and their hair’s kinda crappy and they drive crummy little cars and they’re millionaires. They’re all millionaires! And they actually have the gall to stand next to the kids who are protesting because their fees are too high. “We need more money for our schools!” So you can pay these millionaires!

Reality doesn’t matter to these guys, does it? We wear the crummy jackets and drive the crummy little cars because that’s what we can afford: professors are proud members of the middle class, not even the upper middle class. It isn’t pretense.

I’m also not really getting a pay raise. In Minnesota, we’re getting a pay cut this year.

Shakin’ the nuts

Stay tuned for frolicsome hijinks and high hilarity. We have stirred up some kooks. Here are 3 in ascending order of lunacy.

That climate fraud, Anthony Watts, has noticed Pepsigate. He’s got a unique spin on it: the reason some Sciencebloggers were very upset at the inclusion of an unlabeled infomercial as a blog had nothing to do with the ethics of keeping advertising separate from content — it’s because we don’t like Pepsi. Then he goes off on a riff about how we’re hypocrites because we probably eat Doritos and drink Mountain Dew.

Wait. That’s not funny. That’s just stupid.

This one is a little better. Crackpot right-wing physics goon Lubos Motl has also noticed Pepsigate, and of course he has his own distinct explanation. It’s because we’re all left wing socialist pinko commie stooges producing “stinky communist garbage”.

These “thinkers” make Leonid Brezhnev look like Milton Friedman in comparison. The list includes the self-described “Godless ejaculating liberal” Paul Z. Myers, the top climatic Wikipedia censor and U.K. Green Party apparatchik William M. Connolley whose Stoat is “taking science by the throat” (his words!), Tim Lambert with his Deltoid, and many others whose names remain actively unknown to us – thank God. (I follow dozens of blogs but none of the SB blogs is anywhere in my bookmarks.)

Got that? Stoat and Deltoid are my comrades. Don’t ever visit them. I repeat: Stoat and Deltoid. Together, we are the troika of evil.

One last tidbit, and this is really funny.

Your humble correspondent was offered to join the scienceblogs.com platform in 2006 and I had nothing substantial against it. The purely technical considerations such as the stability of the URLs and traffic and the control over the design – and independence in general – decided I would say no.

I remember that! Motl was considered, and his name was floated to the blogger community here, and after we all got done laughing, the consensus was that no, we’d rather not have Crazy Lubos in our company. And the fact that he wanted full control over his design…Lubos Motl is infamous for his tasteless and eyeball-busting scrambled layouts.

Last example of conservative conniptions, and this one is my favorite. I have been targeted by Conservapædia for their Article of the Week. Yay me!

My crimes are numerous and severe: cracker abuse, gate-crashing movie premieres, mocking creationists, riding a triceratops, and being “intellectually slothful”. The most grievous crime, though, the one that deserved to be pulled out and highlighted with a figure, was this one.

i-fc3aa64822b290c7f523be1f13a10b5c-pzs_sin.jpeg

I’ve been very naughty.

By the way, years ago there were several Conservapædia fanatics who did spam the site rather fiercely, trying to jam up conversations and presumably direct more traffic to their silly site. I had to add “conservapedia” to the list of filtered words here. If you want to comment on this, you can’t link to Conservapædia, and you can’t mention them by their preferred spelling either. You can use that effete European ligature, though: just write it out Conservapædia. Drives ’em nuts.

All of this is very annoying. I’m an atheist; how can Voltaire’s prayer be working out so well for me? (“I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: ‘O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.’ And God granted it.”)

Ben Stein does his best Ben Stein impersonation

Ben Stein has opened his mouth again, this time on the economy. He thinks the 15 million Americans who are unemployed deserve it.

The people who have been laid off and cannot find work are generally people with poor work habits and poor personalities. I say “generally” because there are exceptions. But in general, as I survey the ranks of those who are unemployed, I see people who have overbearing and unpleasant personalities and/or who do not know how to do a day’s work. They are people who create either little utility or negative utility on the job.

Wait…Ben Stein is complaining about other people’s overbearing and unpleasant personalities and bad work habits? The man who built his reputation on a voice like a strangled frog and the dullest personality imaginable thinks those are firing offenses? Very good, then, let him be unemployed.

I’ve known a few people who have been laid off — I grew up near Seattle, where every other year, Boeing would hiccup and mobs of people, including my own father, would find themselves fired and looking desperately to make ends meet. I had no idea that Boeing managed their personnel by firing only nasty unpleasant people.

Scientology’s new enemy: Twitter

John Dixon is a councillor in Wales who, a year ago, and one day he wrote this on twitter:

I didn’t know the Scientologists had a church on Tottenham Court Road. Just hurried past in case the stupid rubs off.

Oh, deary me. What a blistering attack, what an in-your-face, vicious, horrible, bloody, nasty bit of savagery that was. Surely it fully warrants the Church of Scientology making an official complaint and trying to get him fired? The church claims that being called “stupid” “impinges on the right to religious freedom”.

No, it doesn’t. Everyone has a right to believe in stupid things, and everyone has a right to call them stupid.

If you’re on Twitter, practice your right to free speech and join in the fun: use the tag “#stupidscientology”. It’s Streisand effect time!

(Uh-oh. I’m being a dick again, aren’t I?)

(via Jack of Kent)

You might go blind if you watch this

You might want to skip this video. It’s Glenn Beck performing in Salt Lake City, when he claims to have macular dystrophy and might go blind — and it’s revoltingly mawkish, maudlin, and self-pitying. People are actually swayed by this bathetic BS? Amazing.

Next time I give a talk, I’ll have to try rubbing vaseline in my eyes before I get up on the podium.

(via Joe My God)