Skulls in the Stars

Via yet another tangled web of links (via Crooks&Liars, via BradBlog, via RatTube), we find this rather remarkable Fox “News” video. In late March 2008, the Reverend Michael Pfleger invited Jeremiah Wright, conservative demon of the month, to deliver a blessing at Saint Sabina in Chicago. Bill O’Reilly sent one of his ill-informed conservative waifs to ambush, harass and interrogate the Reverend, but the Reverend wasn’t going to be readily pushed around. Video link after the fold:

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Blake over at Science After Sunclipse has written an excellent essay about the real threats and intimidation that people have experienced when speaking out in favor of evolution.  The makers of the idiocy that is the film Expelled would like the public to believe that good scientists are being persecuted unfairly for speaking out against evolution.  Remember, though, that a vast majority of people, both in and out of academia, are Christian, and many of the cases Blake highlights are of people who are Christian being punished and threatened apparently for being insufficiently dogmatic.  Blake’s essay is well-worth a read.

A few weeks back, I made a comment on Pharyngula about the reasons that I finally lost complete respect for organized religion. The reasons seemed odd enough and entertaining enough to merit a post on their own: Legos and Peanuts. This isn’t quite as crazy as it sounds, as I’ll hopefully explain after the fold…

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Sorry, sweetie: a concerned viewer asked Pat Robertson whether yoga has its origins in evil.  Well, bad news: by repeating yoga mantras you’re praying to pantheistic gods and are apparently engaging in ’spooky’ activities, though Robertson doesn’t go so far as to admit that it’s evil.

I guess we can file this one amongst all the other, um, ‘interesting’ things that Robertson has said.

After you’ve read some of the science blogs for long enough, you start to think that there isn’t any amount of crackpottery that can surprise you. For instance, reading Good Math, Bad Math will expose you to an endless amount of mathematics abuse, from bible code crazies to horrible mathematical ‘proofs’ of God. If you read Pharyngula, you will encounter so many creationists and Biblical literalists to make you want to become a Pharisee.

But I was really stunned when I discovered (h/t Pharyngula) another science blog where trolls are actually arguing in favor of geocentrism, the long-debunked view that the Earth is the fixed center of the universe and everything else revolves around it.

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Most people are hopefully aware of the very strong religious right movement to incorporate creationism (the belief that God created the world and everything in it in its present form) in science classes as valid topic of study alongside evolution (the reality that all living species evolved from ‘lower’ forms of life, and continue to evolve over timescales almost incomprehensible). This dishonest movement, now referred to as ‘intelligent design’ or ID to get past the religion ban in classrooms, has no evidence in its favor and consists almost entirely of negative arguments (”You can’t explain that? Then God did it!”). The biology website Pharyngula, written by PZ Myers, is a good place to get the latest scoop on creationist nonsense. And these things have potentially catastrophic consequences: a Presidential candidate, for instance, is on the record as saying he doesn’t believe in evolution, and has other ideas that are far out of the mainstream of reality.

Leafing through the collected science essays of H.P. Lovecraft (hey, that’s what I do for kicks), one finds that similar problems have been around before.

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