Blame the pope…for everything!

A reader sent me a link to this very strange site, and I’ve been trying to determine whether it’s a satire or not. It seems the answer is…not. There’s a huge amount of kook screed here.

We get to learn that we Americans are actually living in Cabotia, named after the one true discoverer of North America, John Cabot (oh, and since North and South America are all one connected land mass, he gets to claim both continents.) Pope Pius IX had something to do with Lincoln’s assassination, and Kennedy’s assassination was the work of a conspiracy by Nelson Rockefeller.

The author is not a fan of Catholicism: the pope is the anti-christ.

His science is also wacky. He’s an anti-vaccination nut. Albert Einstein was a “lazy dog” whose wife actually wrote his books, and he was a creature cobbled up to hide the most important discovery of all time: the earth doesn’t move. The sun orbits the earth once every 24 hours, while the moon orbits us once every 24 hours and 50 minutes. Geosynchronous satellites are truly stationary, because “at exactly 22.300 miles above the equator, the force of gravity is cancelled by the centrifugal force of the rotating universe.” Please don’t ask me to explain that.

As you might expect, he doesn’t care much for Darwin, either, but there’s a twist: he dislikes three Darwins. Erasmus Darwin, well, he was just crazy. Charles, he stole his theory from the Egyptians, and lied about the Patagonian giants (What? Get used to it; this is a mind unhinged at work). But perhaps the really wicked Darwin was George.

You don’t usually hear much about George Darwin. He was Charles’ son, and he grew up to be an astronomer and mathematician. And, it seems, he published a book about the tides—which is entirely cockamamie if you know the earth doesn’t rotate. I guess astronomers would tend to be anathematics as far as geocentrists are concerned, and an astronomer named Darwin…? In the mind of a conspiracy theorist? Heady stuff.

Before you decide the author of these web pages is totally nuts, though, he’s quick to reassure us that he doesn’t believe the earth is flat. Flat-earthers are insane, unlike geocentrists who know the pope is out to rule the world.

If there were a god, he’d make Deepak Chopra shut up

This has been really tiresome. Deepak Chopra’s endless string of ignorance is simply wearing me down, but he has declared that he has made his last post on The God Delusion. I’m sure, though, that he’ll find other things to babble about.

In this one, he claims he’s going to deal with objections that people have brought up to his previous inanity; he doesn’t, really, and the few things he does choose to highlight expose the fact that he hasn’t been listening to the criticisms. He only makes four rather incoherent points.

  1. Chopra has claimed that Dawkins believes in a purely random universe, which is complete nonsense, of course, and certainly Dawkins claims nothing of the kind. Chopra’s response is to say that “Dawkins stoutly maintains that genetic mutations are random”, which is a true, but incomplete statement, and further, Chopra seem to think that suggesting that “atoms and molecules know what they are doing” is a rebuttal, rather than evidence that he is koo-koo for cocoa puffs.

  2. Chopra thinks that when someone says God is an unnecessary hypothesis, that means they are condemning “art, music, truth, beauty, etc.” This is just stupid stereotyping on his part, in which he wrongly assumes that godlessness entails a denial of human values.

  3. His third point will leave you gawping in astonishment. He’s trying to argue that the brain is not the source of the mind, and he makes a banana argument. “I want to eat a banana, and once I do, my brain carries out the necessary action”…he’s simply asserting that the “I” precedes the biological process of the brain that generates an action, rather than considering the possibility that the “I” is also a consequence of the activity of the brain. He’s surprised at this idea: “How in the world do our thoughts manage to move the molecules in our brain?” It’s a classic example of being stumped entirely because you’ve phrased the question in an invalid way.

  4. His final point is the same old excuse of theistic apologists everywhere: that Dawkins is dealing with a crude and stupid version of religion, not the sophisticated, clever, wonderfully enlightened kind of religion he practices. Someday, someone is going to have to tell me about this brilliant version of religion, because I’ve never found it (I’ve looked), and if Chopra’s is the kind of mind that emerges from his faith, I don’t think I want any part of it.

He also asserts that materialistic science is “a model that is quickly crumbling”. He might be right in that, but only because his kind are fostering stupidity and ignorance, two properties that are antithetical to science. He seems to be proud of that, though.

Grounded in unreality

Oh, man: this is classic crank pseudoscience:

The heretofore unknown science of “earthing”, patented by Clint Ober, is that your body needs to be earthed so that you can have the earth’s antioxidizing flow of free electrons to go through your body and extinguish free radicals.

Earthing Axiom:

The earth’s infinite supply of free electrons will neutralize free radicals in your body and will thus help to stave off disease and aging. YOUR BODY WAS DESIGNED TO BE IN CONTACT WITH THE EARTH FOR MANY HOURS PER DAY.

Being connected via our barefeet to the earth appears destined to provide us with many far-reaching health benefits, which when coupled with modern medical prowess and optimum nutrition will offer mankind the best opportunity for health and longevity possible.

It’s an impressive web page. There’s just about everything you might want to see to persuade you that you’ve entered kookdom.

  • Sweeping claims of incredible health benefits from one simple mechanism.
  • All you need to “earth” yourself is a grounded pad—which they’ll sell you for the low, low price of $349.95.
  • Grain-of-truth biology (free radicals can cause cellular damage) coupled to extravagant and silly claims (the infinite flow of electrons from the earth will stop free radicals from hurting you).
  • Lots of repetitive, long-winded gobbledygook to justify freaky ideas.
  • Fond reminiscences of the good ol’ days, when people were always grounded and never, ever got sick…you know, like in the 19th century.
  • Random font size changes, and ALL CAPS SENTENCES.
  • Bizarre color schemes—brown and orange text, and dark purple text on a light purple background, all in the same paragraph.

It’s insane. It’s unbelievable. I sure couldn’t believe it. But then I saw the one thing that absolutely convince me that there had to be something to it. The one piece of awesomely professional evidence…

[Read more…]

Chopra rambles on some more

Shorter Deepak Chopra: “I don’t know how DNA works, so there must be an omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient God-field who does.”

Wow, but that guy is one long-winded, boring gomer. It sounds like he might be planning to fart out just one more of these stinkers, but I’d thought he’d run out of gas somewhere around part 0.

Am I supposed to take this seriously?

Some real estate agent, Bill Wiese, had a bad dream: he thought he was in hell, and that Jesus had put him there so he could see what it was really like, and testify to the people. Alas, some people think this guy’s fantasies are reality. That link is to a painful half-hour interview with Sid Roth, a crazy Jew-for-Jesus kind of guy, and they go on and on together, plugging a video you can buy, all about this guy’s pathetic dream. I skipped most of it, I’m afraid, and got just enough of a taste to feel nausea.

So this is what happens when you mix up stupid people and religion. It’s hell on earth.

The Chinese Ed Conrad

Sometimes, I get something other than hate mail from creationists—I get crank mail, too. I got a letter recently from Lin Liangtai, asking me to help disseminate information about his amazing paleontological discoveries. He has photos of what he calls a 300 million year old penis, along with other organs.

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There are also close-ups of sectioned material: it quickly becomes obvious that anything that has a vaguely circular profile is called a cell, and anything with a reddish tint is called blood, and anything with that elongate anteater look is a penis (they apparently did not practice circumcision in the Carboniferous). It’s all crude and wrong and very, very silly.

I’ve seen it all before, too: Lin Liangtai is a Chinese Ed Conrad! Conrad (whose site seems to have vanished, unfortunately) also spent his time puttering around among old mine tailings in coal country, collecting Carboniferous rocks that resembled, to his untutored eye, fragments of body parts, and then spammed various internet sites with claims that he had evidence of “man as old as coal”, and that his “fossil” organs clearly reflected fragments of a catastrophic disaster that splattered people everywhere, and somehow preserved their bones and kidneys and penises and lungs for later discovery.

I think those two ought to get together and share their findings. They are clearly kindred spirits.

The Chopra Delusion

Can I possibly bear another bucket of gobbledygook from Deepak Chopra? One must soldier on, I suppose, even as Chopra becomes even more vague. I’m going to keep it short, though.

Dawkins, along with other arch materialists, dismiss such a search [for “god”]. Are information fields real, as some theorists believe? Such a field might preserve information the way energy fields preserve energy; in fact, the entire universe may be based upon the evolution of information. (there’s not the slightest doubt that the universe has an invisible source outside space and time.) A field that can create something new and then remember it would explain the persistence of incredibly fragile molecules like DNA, which by any odds should have disintegrated long ago under the pressure of entropy, not to mention the vicissitudes of heat, wind, sunlight, radiation, and random mistakes through mutation.

Well, no. We can see the chemical processes involved, we can measure rates of degradation, we can calculate how selection would maintain a viable DNA sequence. This is all very silly; we don’t need his “invisible information field” to account for the characteristics of DNA. He’s fond of conjuring up these magic sources for phenomena we do understand, so maybe we should all be a little skeptical when he invents them for phenomena we don’t.

As for his lack of doubt about an “invisible source outside space and time” for the whole universe—I have my doubts, but I’ll defer to the physicists on this one. I don’t see why a source for something before which there was no space or time is at all necessary.

The man gets grandiose:

The entire universe is experienced only through consciousness, and even though consciousness is invisible and non-material, it’s the elephant in the room so far as evolutionary theory is concerned. This is a huge topic, of course, and I’ve offered earlier posts on the many flaws in current evolutionary theory. under the topic of Intelligent Design. It’s difficult threading one’s way through the battlefield, with fundamentalists firing smoke on one side and skeptics arrogantly defending the scientific status quo on the other, but earth-shaking issues are at stake. When we understand both intelligence and design, a quantum leap in evolutionary theory will be possible.

Actually, since most organisms lack any kind of consciousness yet evolve just the same, consciousness has almost no applicability to evolution at all. It’s a very narrow topic limited to a relatively tiny lineage, and the question isn’t how consciousness contributed to evolution, but how evolution produced consciousness. I don’t quite understand why he’s got that dangling sentence fragment splat in the middle of the paragraph, but his message is clear anyway: he’s just another Intelligent Design creationist, asserting that his god must have played a role in our origins, but he has no evidence, no real theory, and his ignorance of biology is pathetic.

Maybe he should ask the Discovery Institute for a membership application. He’d fit right in.

Demon squid?

This is just not right. Orac finds some wacky spiritualist ‘healer’ who claims to have the cause for diabetes: a demon, the great spirit squid of doom. What? A squid demon? How kooky. Everyone knows no self-respecting squid demon would confined itself to screwing up one subset of cells in your pancreas.

You’ll have to read the original page to find a list of other demons. There is, apparently, also a Demon of Excessive Foot Odor which you can cast out, and you can also have Demons in your Blood Sugar.

Maybe it would be more miraculous if a huge stone Buddha appeared there

A miracle has occurred in Florida!

The Ten Commandments have appeared at the Dixie County Courthouse.

A six-ton block of granite bearing the Ten Commandments had been installed atop the courthouse steps. Inscribed at the base was the admonition to “Love God and keep his commandments.”

The concept of a Ten Commandments monument was endorsed by county commissioners.

A six-ton block of stone just “appeared”? As in “poof”? Were there angelic trumpets, perhaps, or an astonishing bolt of lightning, or an eclipse? I mean, if a miraculous manifestation of the will of the Old Testament god actually shimmered into existence magically, with a command to “OBEY” inscribed upon it, well, I’d just have to reconsider this atheism gig.

Of course, if it were actually just another gaggle of pea-brained Republican godidiots who commissioned the carving of a big rock and smuggled it into a government establishment, eh, not so much reconsideration necessary. I’m sure the newspaper would have said something if it were a mere exercise in all-too-human pigheadedness, right?