Are you wiki’d out yet?

Here’s another special interest wiki: Athpedia, die säkulare Enzyklopädie. It’s a wikipedia for secularists, and as you might guess from the description, it’s so far all in German. There isn’t a lot there right now, so make it grow; a moment’s browse with my slow and clumsy recollections of German suggests that it isn’t a bad site—at least the articles don’t read like they were scribbled by third-graders and cribbed from some bottom-tier homeschool rag—but it clearly needs more contributors. More English would be helpful, too, but I mustn’t be a language imperialist, I know.

Shame on Oprah

“The Secret” is the latest New Agey scam; there’s an excellent article on this con on Salon:

Worse than “The Secret’s” blame-the-victim idiocy is its baldfaced bullshitting. The titular “secret” of the book is something the authors call the Law of Attraction. They maintain that the universe is governed by the principle that “like attracts like” and that our thoughts are like magnets: Positive thoughts attract positive events and negative thoughts attract negative events. Of course, magnets do exactly the opposite — positively charged magnets attract negatively charged particles — and the rest of “The Secret” has a similar relationship to the truth. Here it is on biblical history: “Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, and Jesus were not only prosperity teachers, but also millionaires themselves, with more affluent lifestyles than many present-day millionaires could conceive of.” And worse than the idiocy and the bullshitting is its anti-intellectualism, because that’s at the root of the other two. Here’s “The Secret” on reading and, um, electricity: “When I discovered ‘The Secret’ I made a decision that I would not watch the news or read newspapers anymore, because it did not make me feel good,” and, “How does it work? Nobody knows. Just like nobody knows how electricity works. I don’t, do you?” And worst of all is the craven consumerist worldview at the heart of “The Secret,” because it’s why the book exists: “[The Secret] is like having the Universe as your catalogue. You flip through it and say, ‘I’d like to have this experience and I’d like to have that product and I’d like to have a person like that.’ It is you placing your order with the Universe. It’s really that easy.” That’s from Dr. Joe Vitale, former Amway executive and contributor to “The Secret,” on Oprah.com.

The main focus of the article, though is on how Oprah Winfrey is destroying her own credibility with the promotion of this nonsense; I never felt she had any credibility before (and heck, she had a negative account with me for advancing the career of that annoying fraud, Dr Phil), so that really doesn’t resonate with me…but the uncompromising dismissal of “The Secret” is worth reading.

Aww, it’s so sweet

A reader sent me a link to this myspace page (don’t quail in horror just yet!) called Bark, Hide and Horn—it’s by some folkies, and includes some songs. Love songs about mating molluscs and ants and various invertebrates! It’s very romantic. Listen if you’ve long had a lingering suspicion that you were born into the wrong phylum, or if just appreciate love no matter what the species involved are.

Consider it some theme music for the Circus of the Spineless, which will be appearing right here later today.

Lost Tomb of Jesus

Last week, I promised I’d watch this documentary about the “lost tomb of Jesus” because it was being advertised here on Pharyngula. Promise fulfilled, but the ghastly program was two hours long—two hours of nothing but fluff. I’ve put a bit of a summary of the whole show below the fold, but I’m afraid there’s nothing very persuasive about any of it, and it was stretched out to a hopelessly tedious length.

[Read more…]

GodTube

Youtube has spawned a few copycats, and now there’s one called GodTube.com—I think you can figure out what it’s about. I’d be willing to let it be, just as I don’t bother much with XTube (yes, there’s one just for porn!)—if they want to masturbate quietly in private, I’m not going to bother the little wankers. Unfortunately, as you ought to expect, it’s also a haven for creationists, right now largely consisting of some of the dumbest videos ever in a series called “Chatting with Charlie”. Charlie is very confused and not very bright; he’s a kind of Kent Hovind on quaaludes. For example, take a look at his Four Problems with Evolution, which consists of:

  • Second Law of Thermodynamics. That tired old fiction—c’mon, Charlie, if the SLoT prohibited evolution, your refrigerator wouldn’t work, and you wouldn’t have progressed beyond a little slime in your mom’s fallopian tubes.

  • Fossil Gaps. Ho hum, you should be falling asleep by this point—but of course there are transitional fossils. Charlie is just ignorant.

  • No Known Mechanism. At this point, Charlie’s gears are slipping. Sure, there’s a mechanism—that’s what Darwin came up with, but apparently and unsurprisingly, Charlie hasn’t read any of that. Instead, he babbles about how if you puree a frog he won’t come back, and dogs don’t change into cats.

  • Finally, he leaves us hanging with the claim that “The World is not 4½ billion years old,” and he claims there is growing evidence that the world is young (not). He said he’ll get to that in another video, but sorry, Charlie, you bored me so much I couldn’t bother looking for it.

GodTube’s slogan is “Broadcast Him.” I think it should be “Reinforcing the stereotype that Christians are morons since 2007.”

A godless parent’s request

I got a request for a children’s book on atheism—something to counter the usual sunday school tripe kids are fed, a version of The God Delusion for the younger set. Offhand, I couldn’t think of a thing. So, I thought, I’d turn to the collective wisdom and see if anyone out there knows of one or two.

You know, there is a niche here—all of us who have raised kids have wished that somewhere there was a primer on skeptical thinking, the scientific method, and religious criticism that was appropriate for early readers or junior high school kids. If you can’t think of one that’s already been done, who’s willing to volunteer to write one?