Pray4PZ!

Some gomer has set up a website about prayer with a subsection dedicated to an experiment: they’re going to pray for PZ Myers. They’re rather vague about what they’re praying for, which I guess is tactically useful, since if I stay healthy or drop dead they can then claim success either way. I’m also going to confound their experiment since I’m going to tell everyone to not Pray4PZ, and since their site traffic is so minuscule, I’m going to overwhelm their results.

They also have a post titled “Can PZ Myers be reasoned with?”, which is amusing — I guess the prayer effort wasn’t doing much, so they had to resort to reason, and they even do that ineffectively.

They’ve also got an online poll, and I’m embarrassed to point it out. The subject is me again, it was set up 11 months ago, and it has received ONE vote so far. That’s just sad.

poll: Is PZ Myers the AntiChrist?

No. Obama is. : (0 votes)
No. Pat Robertson is. : (0 votes)
No. Someone else is. : (0 votes)
No. He doesn’t claim to be God. : (1 votes)
100 %
YES! YES! YES! : (0 votes)
I don’t know. : (0 votes)
Other answer: : (0 votes)

There’s a lesson here. I guess I’m not Kim Kardashian, and just dropping my name won’t make you popular and draw in lots of meaningless interest.

Now if one of the Kardashians was on that poll…

I get email

Lately I’ve been receiving a flood of messages from the anti-choice zealots. They’ve got one thing in common: they all contain lots of images of aborted fetuses, a common tactic used by these creatures to intimidate with horrible images. I’m not impressed. Here’s a representative example, with the url to yet another horror show removed.

Please read

Abortion is more than a “procedure” and it is rare that a pregnancy causes harm or death to a woman.

Maybe to better understand the murder that abortion truly is, you should study the photos in the link below. It is easy to desensitize yourself and your readers and say it’s just a procedure, and the fetus is just a “bunch of cells,” but again, I ask that you study the photos in the link below, and I hope you are sickened with the real truth- Abortion IS Murder.

  URL deleted  

Abortion is more about greed and selfishness. There are many many many families that would give anything to do a domestic adoption and offer prenatal care to a woman that did not want to keep/raise her baby.

No one says it better than Mother Teresa.

“It is a poverty to decide that a child must die so that you live as you wish”

I pray that you will take the time to more fully understand what abortion is, and why the option to kill our nation’s babies should not be an option at all.

Sincerely,
Sarah Dillon

Sarah Dillon is an ignorant hysteric, and she’s awesomely stupid. She couldn’t have written a letter better guaranteed to dissuade me from accepting her position.

First, never quote Mother Teresa at me — she was an evil hag who worshipped poverty, who did not help people except to encourage them to suffer more for her faith, while she lived in comfort and traveled far and wide to receive the accolades of the gullible. I would never find the words of that wicked woman persuasive.

Secondly, the standard bullying tactics of waving bloody fetuses might cow the squeamish, but I’m a biologist. I’ve guillotined rats. I’ve held eyeballs in my hand and peeled them apart with a pair of scissors. I’ve used a wet-vac to clean up a lake of half-clotted blood from an exsanguinated dog. I’ve opened bodies and watched the intestines do their slow writhing dance, I’ve been elbow deep in blood, I’ve split open cats and stabbed them in the heart with a perfusion needle. I’ve extracted the brains of mice…with a pair of pliers. I’ve scooped brains out of buckets, I’ve counted dendrites in slices cut from the brains of dead babies.

You want to make me back down by trying to inspire revulsion with dead baby pictures? I look at them unflinchingly and see meat. And meat does not frighten me.

The vilest thing in the picture is the moron waving the sign and thinking they’re making an argument.

“the outworking of the corrosive nihilistic amorality that is inherent to evolutionary materialism”

The IDiots at Uncommon Descent are horrified and appalled by my ideas about the status of fetuses and babies … so horrified, in fact, that some of them want to make me the poster child for the fall of Western Civilization into a godless, nihilistic chaos in which babies are casually destroyed, and there are of course, a few comparisons to Hitler. But then, they are IDiots, after all.

I was amused by this remark from one of the deathcultists:

Sad to say, what we just saw from PZM, is the outworking of the corrosive nihilistic amorality that is inherent to evolutionary materialism. Hopefully, sufficient of us still have enough moral sensitivity to see the absurdity and the danger if this agenda is allowed to triumph in our civilisation.

Anyway, they found this list of the 25 most influential atheists, and fired off a questionnaire to all of them, looking to see if all atheists are as evil as I am, or whether I’m just the most evil of them all.

(a) Do you believe that a newborn baby is fully human? Yes/No

(b) Do you believe that a newborn baby is a person? Yes/No

(c) Do you believe that a newborn baby has a right to life? Yes/No

(d) Do you believe that every human person has a duty towards newborn babies, to refrain from killing them? Yes/No

(e) Do you believe that killing a newborn baby is just as wrong as killing an adult? Yes/No

As you can see, they’re blinded by an assumption that you can reduce a continuum of potential and actuality to black & white answers, which is the whole problem I’ve complained about before, and what they’ve written is actually a confirmation of my complaint about pro-lifers: they don’t think, and they don’t comprehend. They’ve gotten a few replies from those influential atheists, and most have fallen into the trap. I have to give James Randi credit for making the best answer:

I will not respond to such a heavily biased set of questions, and I could not do so without providing extensive explanations for my answers. The “quiz” is short, but the answers would be far too involved and lengthy.

I will simply repeat what I’ve said before, and not bother with their stupid poll. We all understand “being human” to mean something more than being a eukaryote with a certain assortment of genes: there are “fully human” cells that I will unconcernedly dump into the toilet and flush away every morning, and there are fully developed individuals in my life who I will revere and honor, and everything in between. The dehumanizing aspect of the so-called pro-life position is the flattening of the complexity of humanity and personhood, and its reduction to nothing more than possession of a specific set of chromosomes. To regard a freshly fertilized zygote as the full legal, ethical, and social equivalent of a young woman diminishes the woman; it does not elevate the zygote, which is still just a single cell. It is that fundamentalist Christian view, shallow and ignorant as it is, that is ultimately the corrosive agent in our culture, since it demands unthinking obedience to a rigid dogma rather than an honest evaluation of reality, and it harms the conscious agents who actually create and maintain our culture.

My position is one that demands we respect an organism for what it is, not what it isn’t. It recognizes that an epithelial cell shed from the lining of my colon is less valuable than a gamete is less valuable than a zygote is less valuable than a fetus is less valuable than a newborn. It does not imply that one must still adhere to the black & and white thinking of the IDiots and draw a line, and say that on one side of the line, everything is garbage that can be destroyed without concern, and on the other side, everything is sacred and must be preserved at all costs.

A seed is not a tree. That doesn’t imply that I’m on a crusade to destroy seeds.

NIMBY

Not in my backyard! I wouldn’t want a hog farm to be built upwind of me, because of the stench. I wouldn’t want an airport built next door, because of the noise. I don’t want a church in my neighborhood, because of the traffic in stupidity (but too bad, I’m stuck with several of them). There are lots of reasons some kinds of properties are incompatible with residential living, but here’s a new one. Tenants in a pricey Vancouver highrise are protesting the construction of a hospice nearby. I’d love to have a hospice go up next door; they tend to be quiet, tasteful, well-maintained, and good contributors to the community. But these residents are objecting because of the unpleasant effluvia the hospice would produce.

Wait, what? What could a hospice produce to poison a neighborhood?

“‘Death is the Yin and ‘Live’ is the Yang,” it [a letter to the hospital] read. “If the Yin and Yang are near to each other, ‘Death’ will bring bad luck, meaning sickness and even death . . . The ghosts of the dead will invade and harass the living.”

That’s right. Upscale residents of a condominium complex with units worth about a million dollars are afraid of ghosts. Dying people must be tucked away somewhere remote where they can haunt the place of their death without their restless spirits stinkin’ up the good neighborhoods.

I’m hoping that these complaining, over-privileged superstitious nitwits remember this when they are old and dying — as they most likely will be someday — and courteously excuse themselves to go gasp out their last breaths in some place where civilized people won’t be troubled.

I recommend the hog farm. It might expedite their departure from this planet if those final breaths are taken somewhere where the soft breezes waft over a fecal lake before arriving at the rickety bed in the drafty shack in which they lay dying. Their ghosts probably won’t want to hang around long afterwards, either.

That answers nothing

Here’s an interesting exercise for you: summarize the Bible in one sentence. A bunch of theologians and pastors took a stab at it, and failed to escape their preconceptions and say anything that made any sense.

The statements all vary in their length and their floweriness, but I picked this one example because it’s fairly clear and representative. This is a one-sentence summary of the Bible by a Christian pastor:

A holy God sends his righteous Son to die for unrighteous sinners so we can be holy and live happily with God forever.

That is an empty statement, one that explains nothing and simply sits there looking absurd. I don’t understand how anyone can commit themselves to a life spent promoting that kind of nonsense; these people really should try taking their summaries and looking at them carefully to try and see the peculiarity of their claims.

I’m not cherry-picking, either. Here are a couple more examples just so you can see the general thrust of the arguments.

God was so covenantally committed to the world that he gave his one and only Son that whoever believes in him may have eternal life!

God is redeeming his creation by bringing it under the lordship of Jesus Christ.

The message of the Bible is the transforming grace of God displayed preeminently in Jesus Christ.

The good news is that they all mostly agree with one another. The Bible is about a god who is trying to get people into his heaven by asking them to believe a story about his son being killed and rising from the dead.

The bad news is that the story makes no sense. I’ll give them the existence of their god as a premise, just as I’d grant Herman Melville the existence of Ahab as the start of his story. But what follows doesn’t work. This god has a son — there’s a whole story there that is glossed over. It rather anchors the deity into the prosaic, doesn’t it? He’s a discrete being with an anthropomorphic capacity for procreation. OK, let’s just give them that as a premise, too, although my experience with theologians is that they’ll sit there endlessly arguing with you over that detail.

But then it gets sillier. He sends this son to us to die. He dies? So he’s not an immortal god? Oh, wait, he doesn’t really die, he bounces back a day and a half later, and again, Christian theologians will weeble at you incessantly about how Jesus really is their god, their one true god, who is part of a trinity.

And then that bit about his death “redeeming” us? No way. That makes no sense. If I commit a crime, having someone else suffer 2000 years ago for some other crime that is completely unrelated to what I did does not have any logical connection at all to absolving me of guilt. It’s simply crazy talk, theological noise.

I have my own one-sentence summary of the Christian bible. It actually fits well with human behavior, unlike the prattling nonsense of theologians.

Here is a long tome containing fractured history and arbitrary and patently ridiculous rules that, if you say you believe them, will represent a costly signal to indicate that you are a committed member of our tribe.

Or if that’s too long for you, “Be stupid and belong.” Theology then fills the same role as frat-house hazing or blood-brother rituals, and all the contributors to that list of summaries can be proud brothers together in blissful inanity. It’s clubhouse psychology.

I can even sympathize a bit with that purpose. Lots of organizations have similar trials to secure their membership. Even science does this: we’ve all been through that long gauntlet of calculus and chemistry and basic physics. The difference is that scientists are expected to master something difficult and useful, not bullshit.

The new John Benneth policy

That loopy homeopath, John Benneth, is bragging now that he is the most widely read homeopath in the world, and that his blog has broken all previous viewership records. He’s quite proud of this “accomplishment”.

One of the last John Benneth Journal entries for 2010, IN ONE YEAR, has broken all previous viewership records and sparked more commentary and outrage amongst the pharmaceutical company stooges than any previous Journal entry, enlisting the usual fury and nasty responses.

He seems to be aware of how it happened: I linked to that one article. What he doesn’t seem to appreciate, though, is that what I giveth, I can take away, and that it doesn’t say much for homeopathy that one link from one blog can make such a dramatic difference in his traffic.

So, because he thinks it’s meaningful, I’ve added a little filter to this site: using “johnbenneth.wordpress.com” in a comment will get it held for moderation…and it won’t be approved. Bye bye, Mr Benneth.

You’ll have to look him up indirectly, as in this mention on FSTDT. Otherwise, ignore the loon.

The universe conspires to make me humble

Earlier I had claimed that cable networks had bottomed out by conspiring with the Catholic church to make an exorcism show.

I was wrong.

TLC is making a reality show with Ted Haggard.

I will refrain from saying that now they’ve hit bottom, because if I do, some cable executive somewhere will step forward to plumb depths I can’t even imagine.

I think I understand why religion is so successful

It’s because it is the absolute bottom floor of any descent into crepitude. That’s all I can conclude from looking at the fate of various cable television channels: they all seem to start out well with commendable goals, and pretty soon they’re all selling out to the cheapest, sleaziest advertisers and producing the worst shows they can imagine, all to pander to the lowest common denominator. Look at The Learning Channel (you won’t learn anything watching it anymore), the History Channel (yeah, if your idea of history always has Nazis in it), and the SciFi channel, which now isn’t even trying and has renamed itself the SyFy (what?) channel and hosts what I once thought was the lowest of the low, Ghosthunters.

But the Discovery Channel has out-bottomed even the SyFy channel: they have made a deal with Satan the Catholic Church and will be producing a show on exorcisms.

This is why NetFlix will conquer the home entertainment universe: all the broadcast and cable channels have become the domain of the dumb.

Well, won’t that cheer us all up

The CBC has one of those awful year-end countdown shows, and this one is rather appalling. It’s a countdown of the top 10 miracles of 2010. Hey, there, Canada, I thought we were supposed to be the crazy country, while you were supposed to be the polite, serious brother! What happened?

It gets worse. As Canadian Cynic points out, they’re devaluing the word “miracle”. Among the tripe they’re promoting is a statue of the Madonna that weeps oil (fake!), and the usual business of people going in for treatment of serious medical ailments, and ta-daaaa, the doctors fix them. But the #1 top “miracle” of the year was a plane crash—a plane that carried 104 people, 103 of whom died instantly, bloodily, with shattered bodies and splintered bones. Isn’t it wonderful that one person survived?

I don’t know whether the people who toss around that artless, useless word “miracle” are freakin’ ghouls or simply stupid. It’s Christmas, and I’m feeling charitable, so I guess I’ll go with stupid.

The War on Christmas, xenophobic edition

You know who really hates Christmas?

MUSLIMS!

i-1615de9fc48d9b3921c3edee73f5f64b-muslim_xmas.jpeg

I bet you didn’t know that if you converted to Islam you’d get immunity to STDs, your debt would disappear, rapes, teen pregnancy, and abortions would never occur, the rave would be canceled, you’d stop making that silly claim that god had a son, there’d be no exploitation or promiscuity or crime, the night clubs would shut down, nobody would have sex with 9 year old girls (oh, wait a minute…), you wouldn’t be a pagan anymore (duh), you’d get a house, but you wouldn’t drink alcohol or do drugs in it. Amazing stuff. The Muslim world must be a quiet little paradise, kind of like Wally and Beaver’s neighborhood.

Actually, this seems to be the work of a deranged lunatic, kind of like a browner, Englisher, Islamicer Fred Phelps. That doesn’t stop the Daily Mail from having vapors over the Islamic threat and MPs demanding that the signs all be ripped down. Alas, this is one of the prices we pay for free speech: people get to say stupid things.