Yes, I occasionally listen to the Intelligent Design the Future podcast. But I had trouble today downloading the latest episode:
For those who can’t or won’t read the image:
There was a problem downloading “Predictions from an Intelligent Design Perspective”
A while back, some people were getting bent out of shape because Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials had sex in a children’s book.
(Spoilers after the jump.) Read More
The LA Times reports
Friday’s violence occurred as hundreds of thousands of worshipers across Iraq took part in Ashura rites commemorating the death of Imam Hussein, a grandson of Muhammad who was killed by the army of the Caliph Yazid on the plains of Karbala. Hussein’s death in 680 made permanent the schism between Shiites and Sunnis over the succession after Muhammad.
[…]During a reenactment of Hussein’s slaying in Basra, the crowd turned on the actor who was performing the part of his killer and beat the man so badly that he returned with an assault rifle to exact revenge. At least one onlooker was killed in the crossfire when soldiers tried to subdue the man and his relatives, security officials said.
Why am I not surprised that religious nuts can’t tell the difference between fact and fiction? This would be Pythonesque if it weren’t tragic.
(Via FSTDT)
The Mt. Blanco Fossil Museum, a young-earth creationist outfit, is a mastodon skull to raise money.
As mentioned above, Mt. Blanco is a young-earth creationist organization:
We believe that evolution is an old-fashioned theory not substantiated by facts, and that what the Bible says is more scientifically accurate. Our museum shows that there was a worldwide flood only a few thousand years ago.
They also talk about work they’ve done in collaboration with Don Patton and Carl Baugh.
Oddly enough, Mt. Blanco’s about the auction has nothing to say about the age of the skull. The auction gallery
Distinct also from its European cousin, the Mammut borsoni, the American mastodon lived throughout North America, from Alaska to Central Mexico, in the Pleistocene epoch, and is generally believed to have become extinct about 10,000 years ago.
and CNN writes
Heritage Auction Galleries says the skull is estimated to be 40,000 years old, and projects it will fetch upward of $160,000.
You’d think that a skull three or four times older than the universe would sell for a lot more than $160,000.
Unless, of course, they know that their Biblical dating is horseshit, and were deliberately downplaying the fact that they’re YECs to avoid driving away serious buyers. Does money trump dogma?
Courtesy of FSTDT and the Internet Archive Wayback Machine comes 2007rapture.com, by Shelby Corbitt.
Back on Aug. 29, 2004, his site said:
The rapture of the church (God’s children) willl happen JULY 2007.
By Nov. 30, 2004, he had added the only copyright notice he’d need:
©
2004-2007 2007Rapture.com. All Rights Reserved.
By Dec. 6, 2005, however, the Word of God™ had become fuzzier:
The rapture of the church (God’s children) will happen during the SUMMER OF 2007. This could be anytime from June 21-September 21.
(emphasis in the original)
As of Jun. 29, 2007, he had a huge header reading:
THE RAPTURE OF THE CHURCH IS GOING TO HAPPEN DURING THE SUMMER, THIS YEAR
(JUNE 21-SEPTEMBER 21) 2007!!
To his credit, the site now says:
I SAID :
THE RAPTURE OF THE CHURCH IS GOING TO HAPPEN, THIS YEAR
2007!!
I WAS WRONG!!!
I THOUGHT THIS WAS A WARNING FROM GOD TO THE WORLD
Meanwhile, Yisrayl Hawkins (formerly Buffalo Bill Hawkins) doesn’t seem to have noticed that the world didn’t end on or about Oct. 13, 2007. Oh, well.
I thought I was being satirical when I wrote this post, justifying belief in Santa Claus in the same way that, as I see it, sophisticated believers justify belief in God. But then I realized that my post was already written 110 years ago, in the famous “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus” editorial.
Here are the first two paragraphs of the editorial’s reply to Virginia. Try substituting “God” for “Santa Claus”, and count how many arguments still make sense, and how many are routinely used
Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s, are little. In this great universe of ours, man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.
Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus! It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The external light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.
I admit that I’ve been Poed. I don’t see any significant difference between my parody and this apparently sincere bit of Santapologetics.
In Pinker’s How the Mind Works, there’s a brief passage on artifacts (pp. 327-329 in my copy) that caught my eye because of its connection with creationism.
Artifacts come with being human. We make tools, and as we evolved our tools made us. One-year-old babies are fascinated by what objects can do for them. They tinker obsessively with sticks for pushing, cloth and strings for pulling, and supports for holding things up. As soon as they can be tested on tool use, around eighteen months, children show an understanding that tools have to contact their material and that a tool’s rigidity and shape are more important than its color or ornamentation. Some patients with brain damage cannot name natural objects but can name artifacts, or vice versa, suggesting that artifacts and natural kinds might even be stored in different ways in the brain.
References:
- Brown, A.L. 1990. Domain-specific-principles affect learning and transfer in children. Cognitive Science, 14, 107-133.
- Hillis, A.E., & Caramazza, A. 1991. Category-specific naming and comprehension impairment: A double dissociation. Brain, 114, 2081-2094.
- Farah, M.J., 1990. Visual agnosia. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
(Emphasis added, and list of references expanded from endnotes and
bibliography.)
This seems to me to have a direct bearing on creationist arguments like William Dembski’s Mount Rushmore example:
Designed objects like Mount Rushmore exhibit characteristic features or patterns that point to an intelligence. Such features or patterns constitute signs of intelligence. Proponents of intelligent design, known as design theorists, purport to study such signs formally, rigorously, and scientifically. Intelligent design may therefore be defined as the science that studies signs of intelligence.
It’s December, which means it’s time for the annual War on Christmas™, in which the latest volley was fired by Albert Mohler in a column about a comment of Richard Dawkins’s in which he said that he intends to celebrate Christmas like any normal Englishman who happens to like decorated trees and getting together with friends and family.
We can only wonder which Christmas carols are Richard Dawkins’ favorites. The sight of an avowed atheist joining in the Christmas chorus is a bit hard to imagine. At the same time, there is something comforting about the idea that even the world’s most famous atheist will move his lips to the songs that celebrate Christ’s birth.
Mohler’s obviously limited imagination must be challenged all the time by people mouthing words that they know to be untrue or impossible, like carolers singing Frosty the Snowman, performers in Wagnerian operas full of Germanic gods, or Dana Perino defending Dubya’s latest blunder.
But let’s take a look at what Christmas is today, and how it got to be that way.
Evangelicals like to tell us that sex should take place within the confines of marriage, and only for purposes of procreation. But in fact, the situation is much more complex. In his book Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (1987), James A. Brundage compiled a list of various restrictions on sex from religious sources, and put them together in this handy flowchart (click to embiggen):
(Thanks to for the pointer.)
Well, it finally happened: the diocese of San Joaqin has split off from the Episcopal church, over a question of whether women and gays are human enough to hold high rank in the church.
It does raise the question, though, of why they didn’t just ask God what he thinks.