John Wilkins has left Scienceblogs to start anew at Evolving Thoughts Mk. III. I’m pretty sure it’s because of a) pure philosophical bloody-mindedness, b) chronic embarrassment at his inability to spell “Mghrz’z” properly, and c) something to do with being Australian, which is a legitimate excuse for all kinds of contrary behavior.
Unfortunately, he’s still planning to occasionally chew over my heathenish ways, so I guess I’ll have to continue to keep my eyes on him.
Tune in to Atheists Talk radio on Sunday at 9am Central to hear an interview with John Loftus. He’s one of those ex-Christians, a former minister, who has seen the error of his ways and no longer endorses ludicrous tripe. Learn more about deconversion!
Oh, yeah, we did…but now this silly poll has popped up elsewhere, sans previous pharyngulation. I’m sure you can fix that.
Do You Believe You Evolved From An Ape-like Creature?
No (68.0%, 327 Votes)
Yes (32.0%, 153 Votes)
I do not know (1.0%, 3 Votes)
You know, I’d like to know what kind of creature they think they did evolve from. And if there is “nothing”, they ought to re-word their poll to “Do You Believe You Evolved?”
(By the way, dig a little deeper into that site — it looks like christwire.org is a parody site. It says something that the very same poll that onenewsnow.com presented seriously can be a joke to anyone else.)
I have just read the most awesomely insane but calmly stated collection of dangerous medical advice ever. Andreas Moritz claims cancer is not a disease — it’s a healthy response to stress. Guess what causes cancer? Guilt, low self-esteem, and insufficient spirituality.
Cancer has always been an extremely rare illness, except in industrialized nations during the past 40-50 years. Human genes have not significantly changed for thousands of years. Why would they change so drastically now, and suddenly decide to kill scores of people? The answer to this question is amazingly simple: Damaged or faulty genes do not kill anyone. Cancer does not kill a person afflicted with it! What kills a cancer patient is not the tumor, but the numerous reasons behind cell mutation and tumor growth. These root causes should be the focus of every cancer treatment, yet most oncologists typically ignore them. Constant conflicts, guilt and shame, for example, can easily paralyze the body’s most basic functions, and lead to the growth of a cancerous tumor.
After having seen thousands of cancer patients over a period of three decades, I began to recognize a certain pattern of thinking, believing and feeling that was common to most of them. To be more specific, I have yet to meet a cancer patient who does not feel burdened by some poor self-image, unresolved conflict and worries, or past emotional trauma that still lingers in his/her subconscious. Cancer, the physical disease, cannot occur unless there is a strong undercurrent of emotional uneasiness and deep-seated frustration.
It goes on and on like that — it’s a whole chapter of a book that I presume must go on even longer with this quackery. The whole thing is this illogical mish-mash of unsupported claims and ridiculous conclusions. Cancer has been known for ages; it wasn’t that rare. Animals get cancer, and I doubt that it is caused by “emotional uneasiness”. We see more cancers now than we did a thousand years ago because today you are less likely to be slaughtered by the pox, poor sanitation, or a spear in the belly, and are more likely to live a longer life. We know many of the genetic causes of cancer: somatic mutations that knock out portions of the apoptotic pathways (cells are always on the knife edge of spontaneously killing themselves if errors occur in replication, for instance, and removing the hair trigger can allow more errors to accumulate) will increase the cell’s predisposition to become cancerous. Those mutations are not induced by subconscious worries.
The entire premise behind this guy’s schtick is false. Anyone who thinks an essential question to ask yourself if diagnosed is “What is the spiritual growth lesson behind cancer?” is a quack who’s out to take advantage of you and the worries that having cancers will naturally cause.
Another clue is to look at his qualifications.
Andreas Moritz is a medical intuitive; a practitioner of Ayurveda, iridology, shiatsu, and vibrational medicine; a writer; and an artist.
Dear sweet jebus, if that guy asked me to blow my nose I wouldn’t trust his medical advice. What the hell is a “medical intuitive”? Someone who doesn’t have a scrap of knowledge or evidence, but diagnoses and prescribes on the basis of his feelings? That’s the impression I get from the collection of lies he has written.
The woman who prayed instead of getting medical help when her daughter was dying of diabetes, Leilani Neumann, has been found guilty. I found the defense argument ludicrous and revealing.
Linehan countered, saying Neumann didn’t realize her daughter was so ill and did all she could do to help, in line with the family’s belief in faith-healing.
He said Neumann is a devout Christian who prays about everything and took good care of her four children.
“Religious extremism is a Muslim terrorist,” Linehan said. “They are saying these parents were so far off the scale that they murdered their child. The woman did everything she could to help her. That is the injustice in this case.”
Charming redefinition there — so only Muslims can be terrorists? I think everything this crazy woman did fit perfectly into the definition of religious extremism.
Oh, man. I’m willing to keep saying that Darwinius masillae was an important discovery, but the PR machine is making it hard to do so without cringing. Carl Zimmer has the History Channel ad for their program on it.
Oh. My. Dog. “The most important find in 47 million years”? “A global event: this changes everything”? This is not helping. It is inflating a good discovery beyond all reason, and when the public hears the creationists declare that it’s one fossil of a monkey-like creature, and they’re right, it’s going to damage the credibility of science.
Seed Media has a bit of a scoop: they’ve got an interview with a PLoS One editor, a History Channel executive, and Jørn Hurum, the scientist behind all the promotion. It’s appalling. They’re bragging about how a “production company got in on the ground floor”. Shall we anticipate the brave new world when paleontologists have to beg for McDonald’s happy meal tie-ins to get funding?
And I’m sorry, but Hurum comes off as a complete ass.
But in order for the story and the film to pack the most punch–and to reach the public–Hurum and the production company knew they had to keep it secret. Hurum seemed particularly preoccupied with the way the blogosphere is able to dissipate a story, mentioning an Arctic excavation he worked on several years ago that was picked-up by a blog in Japan within three hours of posting his pictures on the internet. “I’ve seen Chinese specimens of dinosaurs and so on destroyed like this with lots of bad early descriptions [from] blogging,” he says. Hurum wanted to subvert the system and take his story straight to the masses in a way that would appeal to the average person, especially kids: “If we really want kids to get involved with exciting scientific findings, no matter what kind of field, we really need to start [thinking] about reaching people other than [our] fellow scientists. This paper could have been drowned in other papers and would have been read by 15 people around the world.”
That’s revealing. The fossils would not be destroyed by someone blogging about it prematurely; what would be destroyed would be Hurum’s chance to play P.T. Barnum and make himself the center of the show. Apparently, those are the same thing to him. And he thinks it a problem that his paper would be “drowned” in a large volume of papers on the fossil? Jebus. This is what we want in science, lots of open discussion.
And if he thinks a few bloggers chatting prematurely about a find would ruin it for him, he should take a look at the damage this commercial hype and bogus hysteria about the specimen is doing. Misperception is rife, and the exaggeration is diminishing the importance of other finds.
It gets worse. Here’s the trailer for the show.
I suppose it’s only a surprise that it took them this long, but Liberty University has shut down the college Democrats. They were able to put up with the existence of a few very conservative Democrats for a whole 6 months before pulling the plug.
Liberty University has revoked its recognition of the campus Democratic Party club, saying “we are unable to lend support to a club whose parent organization stands against the moral principles held by” the university.
“It kind of happened out of nowhere,” said Brian Diaz, president of LU’s student Democratic Party organization, which LU formally recognized in October.
Diaz said he was notified of the school’s decision May 15 in an e-mail from Mark Hine, vice president of student affairs.
According to the e-mail, the club must stop using the university’s name, holding meetings on campus, or advertising events. Violators could incur one or more reprimands under the school’s Liberty Way conduct code, and anyone who accumulates 30 reprimands is subject to expulsion.
Hine said late Thursday that the university could not sanction an official club that supported Democratic candidates.
“We are in no way attempting to stifle free speech.”
Yeah, right.
Well, I’m at a secular university, where our traditional values are built on the Enlightenment, open-mindedness, free inquiry, reason, and secular humanism. I guess I need to go down to the administration building on Tuesday and point out that we have a few organizations — the Young Republicans, Campus Crusade for Christ, etc. — that do not support our mission, and have them shut down.
Oh, dang, I forgot! We’re also committed to free speech (FOR REALZ), so we have to allow our students to express even weird ideas that are the antithesis of rational thought. Rats. I guess I just need to encourage all of our students to speak out on their own personal views in public and private argument.
Apologies, too many Father Ted references lately. Anyway, that’s what popped into my head when I saw that it wasn’t just the Catholics, but the Orthodox church as well, that seems to have a humanity deficiency. A Serbian Orthodox Christian drug rehab center has some rather unorthodox techniques…like beating the crap out of recidivists. Don’t watch the video at that link if violence makes you faint: it shows a thug first smacking a guy hard many times with a shovel, then punching and slapping him until he’s reeling and falls to the floor. It’s a nice touch when he’s bounced off a wall and rattles the Orthodox icons hanging there.
The LA Times offered me a little space to write a reply to Charlotte Allen in their online edition, so I did. You can read it at the LA Times or below the fold.
I’m already getting lots of unhappy email from people, so I must have done it right.
It is truly an amazing hat.
That’s the kind of hat that if anyone other than a priest were seen to be wearing it, small children would point and whoop with laughter, adults would purse their lips in concern and cross the street to avoid it, and concerned policemen would pull over to politely ask, “Do you need some assistance, sir? Are you on any medication?”
Strangely, though, priests must get a special dispensation to be allowed to wear clothing that, if portrayed on the pages of a super-hero comic book, would cause readers accustomed to the garishness of Superman and Wonder Woman to blanch, blink their eyes, and wonder how over-the-top these crazy artists were going to get.
And that’s before we even listen to what they have to say.
That’s the new Archbishop of Westminster, and the Times had the perfect title for the article: Archbishop of Westminster attacks atheism but says nothing on child abuse. Really, nothing more needs to be said.
This is the blinkered cleric who said of the reports of abuses in Irish Catholic workhouses that it took great courage for the clergy to step forward. This is the guy who used the opportunity of his homily to pretend faith was a source of great good in the world.
This archbishop also has a pal, Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor, who against the backdrop of the recent revelations of pedophilia, sadism, and the cover-up of same, could say:
For Jesus, the inability to believe in God and to live by faith is the greatest of evils.
So Richard Dawkins and I are far greater evils than the goatish Christian Brothers who raped young boys in their care? Well, gosh, thanks, I think.
Just to place myself in the Catholic mindset for a moment, though, if leaving the church is a great evil, wouldn’t discrediting the church by evil acts, by the suppression of justice, and by turning a blind eye to the corruption spreading through the body of Christ be even greater sins, since they will cause multitudes to turn away from the Church? Wouldn’t that make Murphy-O’Connor and Nichols perpetrators of even greater crimes against the faith than Richard Dawkins?
