But now all the Pharynguloids will be beaming hostile thought waves at them!

Oh, sure, this strategem may have given the LA Dodgers an edge for a few seasons:

Frank and Jamie McCourt, the multi-millionaire owners of the LA Dodgers, have been revealed to have employed a Russian scientist to beam thought waves to boost the team’s chances.

That’s over now, though. I urge all loyal readers to close your eyes, face LA, and beam baseball hatred at them. To really potentiate the effect, you can also wiggle your fingers and go “Nnnn-nna-nna-naaaaa” or speak in tongues while doing it. We’re also going to pray for the New York Yankees*. Dodgers are dooooomed!

Although…

According to Bill Shaikin of the LA Times, the McCourts paid Vladimir Shpunt several hundred thousand dollars over five years to apply his “V energy” and help the Dodgers to victory. Between 2004, the first season under the McCourts’ ownership, and 2009, Shpunt was retained for Dodgers matches, despite the fact that he knew little about baseball.

…you know, “Vladimir Shpunt” is an awesome name for a Russian woo artist.

I might also be persuaded to end my campaign of psychic oppression for a few hundred thousand dollars, myself.

*Don’t worry about it, we’re atheists and already going to hell, so rooting for Satan’s favorite team won’t do you any more harm.

The schmuck who would be king

So, England, how does it feel to have a hereditary moron like Prince Charles fluttering about the country?

The Prince of Wales has blamed a lack of belief in the soul for the world’s environmental problems, and said that the planet cannot sustain a population expected to reach 9 billion in 40 years.

He said he found it “baffling” that so many scientists professed a faith in God yet this had little bearing on the “damaging” way science was used to exploit the natural world.

The Prince pinned part of the blame on Galileo. Criticising the profit imperative behind much scientific research, he said: “This imbalance, where mechanistic thinking is so predominant, goes back at least to Galileo’s assertion that there is nothing in nature but quantity and motion.

“This is the view that continues to frame the general perception of the way the world works, and how we fit within the scheme of things.

“As a result, Nature has been completely objectified — ‘She’ has become an ‘it’ — and we are persuaded to concentrate on the material aspect of reality that fits within Galileo’s scheme.” The Prince said that he believed “green technology” alone could not resolve the world’s environmental problems. Instead, the West must do something about its “deep, inner crisis of the soul”.

Oh, yes — if only we’d return to regarding Nature as feminine, whatever that means, and start believing in souls, we could fix all environmental problems. He’s not very specific, though — could he make some clear suggestions about how pretending the planet is a lady will solve, say, global warming or the oil spill in the Gulf?

Don’t be too embarrassed, UK readers. It could be worse. If Charles were an American, he’d be getting elected to his position as ceremonial woo-meister. At least you can blame it all on the vagaries of the genetic lottery and a royally pampered upbringing.

The wisdom of crowds is sometimes the prejudice of the majority

The folks over at the Urban Dictionary have battened upon the word “atheist”, and much hilarity follows. There is one reasonable definition in the bunch, and the rest are mostly indignant complaints by theists.

A worshipper of the self or the god of science, often unknowingly religious.

An atheist can speak of moral relativism, but not live it.

A person who denies the reality of God (particularly Jesus Christ, despite historical proof of His otherworldly being), and lives life ‘free’ trusting in science and ‘logic’. This despite the fact that may be able to point out when and how the universe was created, but are unable to state WHY. Stephen Hawking himself made this point. Despite so much being unknown about what reality actually is, how it came into being, how colours, morality, love, the fabric of space and time ‘happened’, they consider themselves smarter than any faith bearing person, and pretty much anyone else they happen across. God loves atheists. Despite what they make think. Ironically, they are usually more militant about their lack of belief than faith bearing people are about their faith.

Stevie the atheist: "There is no God"

John the Faith-nut: "How did the universe happen?"

Stevie- "The big bang you idiot!"

John- "What caused that to happen?"

Stevie- "Pressure…eh…gasses…eh…"

John- "What caused the ‘pressure’ and ‘gasses’ to exist?

Stevie- "Eh…eh…"

John- "In fact, what caused existence to exist?"

Stevie-"Eh…eh…Darwin said that…"

John- "Who designed the tongue, instrument of Darwin’s speech?"

This goes on for awhile. Atheists have nothing and no faith.

Until they’re on their death bed.

The Urban Dictionary might be a useful site for looking up current slang, but established terms with clear meanings…not so much.

I get email

I mentioned earlier this week that sometimes I get positive email, and that it actually outnumbers the outright hostile hate mail. But both classes are greatly outnumbered by the most common kind of email I get, the cranks and crazies. Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce Woolsey, Stephen D Mr CIV USA — a perfectly representative exemplar of the crap clogging my in-box.

Yes, he’s posting from an army.mil email address, which may account for some of the strange stuff inserted in the text, but not all of it.

[Read more…]

Local loon

We’ve got ’em. A St Cloud minister took out an ad:

i-30e068be42f50e2ad7f766cac0f8963f-islamic_threat.jpeg

Oooh, it’s the usual fear-mongering. I had to do a double-take when I saw Dennis Campbell’s summary of the Islamic Strategy, though…

Moslems seek to influence a nation by immigration, reproduction, education, the government, illegal drugs, and by supporting the gay agenda.

…because when I think “gay friendly”, I picture the Taliban.

I’m also wondering if Pastor Campbell thinks that a good way to oppose the influence of immigrating Muslims would be to counterbalance it with more immigration from those Catholics south of the border.

No, not the Jains!

A curious phenomenon has struck me a few times: in response to my criticisms of religion, someone will bring up the Jains. It’s a peaceful religion, they’ll say, that promotes kindness to all living beings, therefore my arguments are all invalid. Even more strangely, every time this happens, my interlocutor is not a Jain, which always leaves me wondering why, if this faith is so wonderful, they haven’t converted. Besides, my main gripe with religion isn’t that it makes people evil (the overwhelming majority of believers, whether Christian, Muslim, or whatever, are peaceable, cooperative, normal human beings), but that it’s a petrified clown turd of foolishness that convinces people that it’s OK to be a credulous git.

And Jainism is no exception.

Prahlad Jani, the Indian fakir who claims to live on nothing but air and sunshine, is a transparent fraud with gullible friends in a high places. Indian skeptics have found obvious flaws in the ‘testing’ that has been going on.

While the test was running, I exposed some of those loopholes in a live programme on India TV: an official video clip revealed that Jani would sometimes move out of the CCTV camera’s field of view; he was allowed to receive devotees and could even leave the sealed test room for a sun bath; his regular gargling and bathing activities were not sufficiently monitored and so on. I demanded an opportunity to check the test set-up with an independent team of rationalist experts. There was no immediate reaction from Ahmadabad. But a sudden call from Sterling hospital invited me – live on TV – to join the test the next day itself.

Early morning, ready to fly to Gujarat, we were informed that we had to wait for the permission of the “top boss” of the project. Needless to say: this permission never came.

Similarly, we were unable to attend Shah’s first Jani test in November 2003 (that was financed by Dipas too). Shah has a long record of conducting these studies, which up till now have never been discussed in any scientific journal. They merely try to prove his strange sunshine theory: that humans can stop eating and drinking and switch to “other energy sources, sunlight being one”. Prahlad Jani is not Shah’s first poster child. In 2000/2001, he tested one Hira Manek for more than a year and confirmed his claim that he was feeding on sunshine only (and sometimes a little water). The idea that Shah’s research was investigated by Nasa and the University of Pennsylvania was officially denied by both the misrepresented parties.

So…he’s a complete phony, and the fellow running the tests, Dr Sudhir Shah is either incompetent or a conspirator. Guess what Shah’s religion is?

Shah is a deeply religious Jain. As the president of the Indian Jain Doctors’ Federation (JDF), he proposes that via research, the still imperfect science of medicine is to be brought in line with the Jainist ‘”super-science” as revealed by the omniscient Lord Mahavir. We can only wonder whether his researcher eyes are sometimes clouded by religious zeal. Interestingly, many members of his team are Jains and his partner in the Manek test was a former president of JDF too.

I’m sure they’re very nice people who wouldn’t harm a mouse, but they’re kooks, plain and simple.

But…but…everyone knows The Bird is The Word!

What did America do to deserve this? Nancy Pelosi exposed her vacuous brain at a conference.

At a May 6 Catholic Community Conference in Washington DC, Speaker Pelosi openly touted Jesus Christ, “The Word Made Flesh”, as the inspiration for her public policies. CNS News reports a couple of her more powerful statements:

“And that Word,” Pelosi said, “is, we have to give voice to what that means in terms of public policy that would be in keeping with the values of the Word. The Word. Isn’t it a beautiful word when you think of it? It just covers everything. The Word.”

“Fill it in with anything you want. But, of course, we know it means: ‘The Word was made flesh and dwelt amongst us.’ And that’s the great mystery of our faith. He will come again. He will come again.”

I swear, there has got to be some kind of natural law that makes sure airheads float to the top, because I don’t understand how leaders on both sides of the aisle in congress can end up being such dimbulbs.

Yeesh. It was captured on video. It’s so sad to see the consequences of lobotomies.

Most appropriately named quack ever

He called himself Dr Woo. He was a practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine, and even those quacks couldn’t stand him, and disbarred him. He was bringing in female patients, asking them to get naked, and then poking and prodding in places totally unrelated to their complaints. Here’s one remarkably resonant sentence from the article:

Expert witnesses told the hearing there were no acupuncture points in the vagina.

Well, yeah, we can get a flavor of what Woo was doing from that, but I’m left marveling: there are no acupuncture points anywhere, it’s all a load of hokum, so where do they get off rejecting so unambiguously an assertion from another quack? I see claims that sticking a needle in an ankle will fix a problem in an elbow, for instance, so using their own unsubstantiated illogic, maybe dithering about in the vagina is just the thing to fix a case of dandruff.

How about if crazy Dr Woo is followed into disrepute by the whole shady gang of alt-med practitioners?

Oh, the inanity! The Dalai Lama and Francisco Ayala vie to be most vacuous

It’s been a great week for vapid defenses of religion…at least for atheists, that is. It’s been a sad week for the godly, given that their paladins are all such flabby purveyors of tepid tea.

First up, let us consider the Dalai Lama, revered all around the world because he’s such a nice guy and is always smiling — and I agree that he is an awfully nice fellow, considering that he’s the representative of a medieval theocracy. He has an op-ed in the NY Times, sadly, which reveals that behind his happy face is a bubble of confused cortex. Anthony Grayling has already dealt with the core of his argument, that the many faiths are all facets of one truth, which is ragingly dishonest. The only equality between them is their entirely comparable falsehood — while there are relatively few ways to answer a question correctly, there is endless diversity in error, and that’s all we’re seeing…swarms of priests vigorously asserting that their weird and substanceless take on the universe is the one truth. And no, you aren’t going to arrive at the truth by splitting the difference between the inmates of an asylum.

I want to focus on one other assertion the Dalai Lama made. What is the central core of all religions? Compassion. I disagree, of course, since the religions I get hammered with day after day here in the US are all militant, evangelical, aggressively hegemonical faiths, and compassion isn’t what you see if you are confronted by them. Even their putative compassionate outreach in such things as missionary work are often attempts at cultural conquest. That compassion business is just a tool to win over minds for the Lord/Prophet/Messiah/Cult.

But also…what is uniquely religious about compassion? I don’t have to be a Muslim to give to the poor, I don’t have to be a Christian to abstain from excess. You don’t have to believe in ghosts to be kind, and what Tenzin Gyatso is doing is more of that hegemonical impulse — he’s seen something he likes, so he rushes to land on it and plant the sacred flag of religion on it, declaring this the property of all the holy people of the world…without noticing all us pagans and infidels already occupying it. Lama go home! We don’t need you, or your pious ilk!

Then there’s that fellow Francisco Ayala, who apparently has been emboldened by that generous Templeton Prize to babble vacuously and frequently. He has two pieces out. The first is in Standpoint, some rag affiliated with the ghastly Social Affairs Unit. Does Ayala know this is the kind of magazine that will blithely claim that “Evolution describes a linear progression from the amino acid to man of inevitable increasing complexity”, and publishes apologists for Intelligent Design creationism like Steve Fuller? At least his drivel is in good company. I was primed with contempt by the first two lines of the article.

Can one believe in evolution and God? Some people of faith and some scientists agree: “No.” They are wrong.

Strawmanning already? That’s what someone like Ken Ham says, all right, but that’s not what the pesky New Atheists have been saying at all. Of course you can believe in evolution and gods. People are not either 100% right or 100% wrong, but can actually be right about one thing and wrong about another. Shocking, I know. It seems to be news to Francisco Ayala, though!

The rest is pure noise in which he mentions internal contradictions within the Bible, but excuses them as irrelevant, and mentions other erroneous factual statements about the world, but says it is OK because the Bible is not a science textbook, and the authors did not intend to accurately describe the natural world. He recites the usual cliches about how it’s a book that is supposed to teach us how to live, how to get to heaven, and the purpose of your life. Which, of course, makes it worse. Has Ayala read that book? It’s a cacophony of vileness, with god’s chosen people raping and murdering for their land, god going off into peevish snits in which he tortures and massacres people, and your purpose is to win a place as god’s eternal slave in a ‘paradise’ where you will spend all your time praising the supreme tyrant. It’s a horror.

And Ayala wants to draft science to prop up god’s evil regime. The problem of evil is no problem for god, because it’s all evolution’s fault!

Evolution is not the enemy of religion but, rather, it can be its friend, because it accounts for disease, death, and the dysfunctions and cruelties of living organisms as the result of natural processes, not as the specific design of God. The God of revelation and of faith is a God of love and mercy, and of wisdom.

So if I choose to force you to slave for me and follow my orders with a whip and a gun, I still get to be the good guy, because it isn’t me doing all the harm — it’s my weapons. I love my weapons, they are my great good friend, taking all the blame and still allowing me to reap the fruits of my methods.

So is Ayala claiming that evolution is not a product of god’s actions? Or is he just a goddamned dimwitted airhead?

Ayala’s second article is just as bad. What he claims is that religion has nothing to do with science — and vice versa. It’s that tired old NOMA garbage, with none of the graceful language of SJ Gould to soften me up. It’s simply a series of repeated assertions that science is excluded from decisions about values or meaning, while religion is excluded from saying anything about the natural world, and he allows absolutely no overlap between the two. Ayala’s Venn diagram of the universe is rectangle labeled “everything” with a square labeled “science” filling up the left half and another labeled “religion” occupying the right.

It’s absurd and dishonest because we know that religion makes claims about the natural world — it’s right there in the fabric of the institution of religion, which tells us how we material beings are supposed to act, where we came from, and where we’re going to go when we die. Ayala has to rewrite history to say that “Religion has nothing definitive to say about these natural processes” when the religious themselves babble constantly about how every event from the trivial score fo a football game to the cosmic supernovae are evidence of the hand of their god. Somehow, religion is allowed to claim that we have a purpose in our life (life: it’s a natural process, you know, something supposedly in the domain of science), but science may not, despite the fact that we’ve got a good look at our history and the mechanisms and the drives of life, and can say fairly strongly that there is no evidence of an external driver pushing us along.

Now let us admit that in one respect, he’s right. Science isn’t everything. We don’t use science to appreciate a piece of art (although, fundamentally, it is a material object and our brains are similarly natural); we don’t break out beakers and bunsen burners to determine if we’ve fallen in love; calculators have limited utility in writing poetry. That’s fine, but it doesn’t mean that religion fills in all the spaces! I don’t consult a priest to find out what I think of a painting, prayer has bugger-all to do with love, and there is better poetry in the world than what we find in holy books. You don’t get to simply assume that if science does something poorly, religion must do it well, and that the universe has to be neatly divvied up into these two mutually exclusive domains.

We already know that science does its job well, and even Airhead Ayala would agree with that. We can talk about and measure expertise in manipulating and examining the natural world.

What about religion’s “domain”, values and purpose and its insight into a supernatural world?

It’s all bullshit. There is no evidence, no reason to believe in a supernatural world at all; priests are no better than John Edward or James van Praagh at letting us see this hypothetical after-life, and are just as patently ridiculous. There is no agreement among all the religions, each claiming greater authority than all the others, on what our purpose is, other than the self-serving one of keeping the clergy prosperous. As for values: are homosexuals to be stoned, or treated as equals? Which is more important, the woman or her fetus? What foods are unclean and an abomination unto god? When the foreskin is lopped off, is that mandatory or a defilement of the temple of the human body? Are you allowed to mow your lawn on Sunday? Or on Saturday?

Ayala assumes and asserts and demands that we privilege religion as the final arbiter of those kinds of decisions. As far as I can see, though, there are no good reasons why believing in reincarnation or witches or angels or omnipotent phantasmal overlords makes one better qualified to decide what is right or good for people…to the contrary, it seems to me that such lunacy proudly declared shows that the believers are the wrong people to make real decisions.

I’m embarrassed for Ayala, and my opinion of the guy is spiralling down fast. His entire essay is an exercise in making a false dichotomy and proposing a supernatural, superstitious authority that he doesn’t even try to defend rationally. I guess this is what happens when the Templeton Foundation buys off your integrity.

Beware the gay stormtroopers!

The American Humanist Association is making a push to repeal the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy of the American military. They want you to write a letter to your representatives supporting the repeal.

Here’s another reason besides simple common decency to end a discriminatory practice: It will drive Bryan Fischer insane(r). Fischer is the unpleasant Idaho bigot who thinks homosexuals should be imprisoned, and he’s got his own peculiar take on gays in the military.

Homosexuality gave us Adolph Hitler, and homosexuals in the military gave us the Brown Shirts, the Nazi war machine and six million dead Jews. Gays in the military is an experiment that has been tried and found disastrously and tragically wanting. Maybe it’s time for Congress to learn a lesson from history.

To Bryan Fischer, it’s a simple and direct causal relationship: gay people want to join the military so they can reinstate Adolf Hitler’s policies and exterminate the Jews and Christians, and the Nazis were all gay all the time. But wait, you say, didn’t the Nazis round up homosexuals and put them in death camps? Your paltry imagination cannot grasp the subtle twists that the minds of frantic homophobes can invent.

Scott Lively’s well-documented book, “The Pink Swastika,” exposes a secret homosexual activists don’t want you to know about Nazi Germany: that although the Nazis did persecute homosexuals, the homosexuals the Nazis persecuted were almost exclusively the effeminate members of the gay community in Germany, and that much of the mistreatment was administered by masculine homosexuals who despised effeminacy in all its forms.

See? They only killed all the swishy ones, but the butch ones all joined the SS. The logic is irrefutable. Extravagantly masculine macho men who want to beat up and imprison and subjugate other men must be gay themselves…oh. Hey. Isn’t Fischer promoting… nah, that couldn’t be.

His source, Scott Lively, isn’t exactly reputable, either. Watch Missionaries of Hate (sorry, non-Americans, that’s on Hulu). Lively is the American missionary who inspired the Ugandan hate laws; you’ll also learn about the odious liar, Ssempa, who is using Christianity to foment an insane level of prejudice in Africa.

I’m not at all worried about a diverse community of gays suddenly charging off into flaming fascism. I’m more concerned about existing fascists in the evangelical community acquiring more influence. They are far more predisposed to encourage oppression.