We made them cry!

We had a pointless poll post a while back where I pointed you at a silly site that asked what was the best evidence for the afterlife — and you people triumphantly emphasized that there was no evidence.

Amusingly, the guy who runs the site is now whining about the attention we gave him.

While I appreciate the attention from this Big Fish of the Intarwebs (and I thought Randi and the Bad Astronomer were big), I did find a bit of perverse irony in the situation. The biggest science blog on the planet, home site of one of the foremost ‘defenders of reason’, telling readers to go and vote on a topic which most of them have not read on at all?

Well, he might be right that Phil Plait is small potatoes, but really…does he really believe that no one who reads this site has seriously considered the possibility of the afterlife?

Oh, and of course he has deleted all of your votes from the old poll. We are victorious!

Rename Christi Himmelfahrt!

Those wacky, madcap Germans are promoting a little change in their set of national holidays: some people want to change the Feast of the Ascension, celebrating the day Jesus supposedly floated up into heaven, to…Evolution Day! As you might guess, I think this is an excellent idea. There is a petition you can sign, and less usefully, an online poll:

Soll “Christi Himmelfahrt” in “Evolutionstag” umbenannt werden?

Ich bin dafür (for it) 3061
66.30%
Ich bin dagegen (against it) 1312
28.42%
Ist mir egal (don’t care) 244
5.28%

They even have a charming video to go with their proposal.

Don’t vote on this poll

Just go and gape in awe at the obliviousness of our national media. This is a poll on US News & World Report, and it asks, “If you had a choice of four daycare centers run separately by Michelle Obama, Sarah Palin, Hillary Clinton, and Nancy Pelosi, which would you choose for your kids?” Incredible.

I believe that next week they’ll have a question about Barack Obama’s, Colin Powell’s, Al Sharpton’s, and Jesse Jackson’s hypothetical fried chicken stands.

Maybe we’d get better answers if we polled ghosts

It’s been a while since we had a pointless poll…so here’s a light snack to nibble on. We are asked, “The best evidence for an afterlife is from…“, and the answer so far is:

Mediums
3% (20 votes)
Near-death experiences
26% (147 votes)
Reincarnation memories
15% (86 votes)
Ghosts
5% (29 votes)
EVP and similar
3% (19 votes)
Crisis apparitions
2% (14 votes)
All equal
11% (64 votes)
Other
7% (41 votes)
There is no evidence
27% (156 votes)

I don’t get the popularity of the NDE “evidence”. I had a friend once who told me that he had the most awesome experience on ‘shrooms — he’d melted into a purple puddle that soaked into the earth, and he had spiritual sex with tree roots. I’m pretty sure that didn’t actually happen, and I wouldn’t use it to argue that human beings were capable of phase changes into a fluid state or that intimate congress with plants was fun and rewarding, but people use the same logic all the time in arguing that while they were in a brain-damaged state, befuddled by anoxia, their perception of the hallucinatory state afterwards is evidence that there is a heaven.

I have no idea what “crisis apparitions” are. I don’t care to know either.

I have heard of EVPs — they’re all the rage right now thanks to all those horrible ‘ghosthunter’ shows on TV. Leave a tape recorder running in an empty room, then play it back with lots of amplification of the background hiss and crackle of noise. If you are gullible and really want to believe, you will hear random splutters that you can imagine are sort of voices. And the really cool thing is that if you tell someone that this scrap of noise says something like, “Paul is dead”, then their pattern-forming circuits in their brain will impose your interpretation on the noise for you, and they’ll hear the same thing! Very convincing, I’m sure.

I voted for no evidence. If you vote otherwise, maybe you can come back here and explain your evidence to us. We need a good laugh on a Saturday morning.

Keep your god out of my kids’ schools!

I confess to some mixed feelings about this one. Several schools in Wisconsin hold their graduation ceremonies in local churches, and Americans United is threatening litigation to block them. One the one hand, I am all for secularizing ‘sacred’ spaces — let’s take them all over and do something useful with them for a change. On the other, I don’t think that’s what this particular situation is all about, since it looks like the schools are using the churches to pollute what should be a secular ceremony with religious smog.

There is a poll, so you can weigh in on the topic…and like all online polls, I’m sure this one will be incredibly influential.

Should public schools be allowed to hold graduation in a church building?

Yes (79%)

No (21%)

A truly pointless poll

I don’t even see how one could vote on this incredibly biased and stupid poll. It’s another of these homophobic fundamentalist christianist sites trying to argue that homosexuality is evil, and is a conspiracy to promote an anti-Christian agenda. It contains a collection of questions that are a beautiful example of how not to design a poll. One example:

Should homosexuals be given the same special rights extended to African-Americans and other minorities?

Your choices are “yes”, “no”, and “undecided”. They leave out the reasonable options, “Minorities aren’t given special rights”, “We want all people given equal rights”, or “This site is racist as well as homophobic”. Whatever. All I know is that I have a strong opinion on this matter, and none of the possibilities represent my position.

There’s also a video. Don’t waste your time, unless you’re suffering from low blood pressure or have a too optimistic view of American intelligence.

This poll is dead. Please let it rot in peace.

I’m getting a big surge in requests to pharyngulate this poll, Should the motto “In God We Trust” be removed from U.S. currency?. Stop, please. That poll is already blown to smithereens; just look at the numbers. Almost 11 million votes. The results are hacked, oversubscribed, and the product of massive flooding. When you see something like that, there’s no point in asking me to swamp the poll, because it’s done gone and sunk already, and is plummeting to depths that will make the Marianas Trench sigh with envy.

I like my polls fresh and tangy, ripe with stupidity. This one ain’t, although the stupidity is reekingly high, I will admit.

It’s yet another atheist bus poll

I just don’t get it. Put a few signs with the atheist point of view on a bus, and people everywhere just freak out. Anyway, Toronto secularists are planning to slap some signs on some busses now, so this poll asks the strange question, “Should atheist groups be allowed to buy advertising space on the TTC?”. I should think that the answer to this one ought to be 100% yes — after all, what grounds do they have to discriminate against atheists? — but here’s the current results.

Yes – if religious groups can do it, why not let atheists as well? 57%
Maybe, but it depends on the wording of the advertisement. 15%
No, is it offensive to many people to see such ads in public places. 28%

What does Spain think of the atheist bus campaign?

Well, if you believe in online polls, they don’t like it very much. But hey, you know what we think of online polls! I suspect that we’ll be able to win over all of the beautiful country of Spain with a few clicks on all of our computers. Here’s the question, and the current state of affairs:

Que opinas sobre esta campaña ateista? (What do you think of the atheist bus campaign?)
Pésima (very bad): 83%
Mala (bad): 4%
Antiliberal: 8%
No se (don’t know): 0%
Buena (good): 5%

Will it become buena in the next few hours?

By the way, the slogan sounds much prettier in Spanish: Probablemente Dios no existe. Deja depreocuparte y disfruta la vida.