I bet you guys thought I forgot about this! Way back in August, I posted this genuine bona-fide Astroboy comic book scene and asked if anybody could come up with some good captions. I was expecting to get back to it a couple of weeks later. What I didn’t count on was having to live in a hotel for nine weeks, and then getting hammered by other priorities.

But Astroboy has returned, and he has the best of your proposed captions to show for it!

If you think of any additional captions, go ahead and leave them in the comments. If I get any especially funny ones, I’ll make some more cartoons.

One of Northern California’s more prominent peaks is Mount Diablo. The mountain has been called that since the early 1800s. “Diablo” is the Spanish word for “devil”. You can probably anticipate where this story is going.

Yup! That’s right! A fundie wants to rename it! According to the Contra Costa Times, a God-botherer who is scared of his own shadow has been trying to rename the mountain since 2005. He has just recently filed another request:

[Arthur] Mijares, a devout Christian, says he believes the word “Diablo” — Spanish for “devil” — is “derogatory and profane”

But wait! There’s more! Not only is he offended, but he claims that the current name violates government policy on naming geological features:

Mijares argued that the devil, or “diablo,” was a “living person” so that name should also be prohibited.

So what name does this über-conservative want applied to the peak?

Mount Reagan.

The latest Carnival of the Godless is godlessly carnivaling at Right to Think. There’s a bunch of stuff over there. I really liked “Against the Gods: Arguments Against God’s Existence” by Ken at Arizona Atheist. It’s a long, thoughtful argument that refutes many of the arguments for God’s existence. Check it out.

I also have to put in a strong recommendation for “The Republican Master Plan” at Polymath From Portsmouth. You’ll want to read it.

I haven’t been trying to neglect the blog lately. I was hoping to cut back to two or three articles per week, not two or three weeks per article. It’s amazing how merely re-prioritizing the blog from #1 hobby to #2 hobby has robbed it of so much attention. The photography class I’m taking ends in March, so this isn’t permanent.

The latest edition of the Skeptics’ Circle has just arrived at The SkeptVet Blog. It’s definitely a good one. It’s jammed full of great articles. You need to go check it out.

The best article of the bunch is “Discovery Channel: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly” by Akusai at Action Skeptics. I gave up my cable TV almost two years ago, so I still have favorable memories of the Discovery Channel. This was the home of Mythbusters, after all. Sure, many of the Discovery Channel’s shows had succumbed to the Least Common Denominator, but at least they didn’t have any of those horrible ghost-hunting shows. Then lately I started hearing about some horrid dreck called Ghost Lab. And it’s on the Discovery Channel! How depressing.

Anyway, Akusai fills us in on what little is still good on the Discovery Channel. He lists Mythbusters first, but even that is apparently sliding. Say it isn’t so!

He also mentions a show I’ve never heard of: Time Warp. Apparently the program is full of all sorts of amazing footage of ordinary things photographed in high-speed video. That sounds like a great show. In fact, I was experimenting with high-speed photography myself last Sunday (See result above. That was shot at 1/2000th of a second.).

Akusai then goes on to tell us about the Bad and the Ugly on the Discovery Channel. Some of it sounds very ugly. If you’re as disgusted as I am with the dumbing-down of science television, you should go read “Discovery Channel: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly”. After that, check out the remainder of the Skeptics’ Circle.

[Here is the next installment of my experience at the Darwin Was Wrong lie-fest put on by Logos Research Associates. You can start from the beginning of this story in Part 1, or you can jump to the first speaker in Part 4. You can also watch the videos of this conference at the Logos website (not recommended for the sane).]

The first talk of the morning was given by Marcus Ross, and it was titled “Darwin Was Wrong about the Fossil Record”. Here is how Logos describes this talk:

In Origin, Darwin admitted that the fossil evidence contradicted his theory, but he hoped future discoveries would come to his rescue. Now, 150 years later, the problem of missing intermediates is even more glaring.

Who is this guy? It turns out we’ve met him before. This is the guy who made headlines in 2007 for lying in order to get a PhD (See brief BoF article here. See longer, better Larry Moran article here.).

Ross is a young-Earth creationist. He believes the Earth is 6000 to 10,000 years old, yet he wrote his PhD thesis as if he actually understood the true age of the Earth (4.5 billion years).

He does not understand geology at all. If he did, he would know the true age of the Earth. Therefore, he has failed geology and did not deserve the degree. University of Rhode Island was too cowardly to stand up for academic integrity and gave him the degree so he’d go away quietly and not make trouble. They have devalued their graduate program, and they have disrespected everybody who has ever earned a degree there.

University of Rhode Island is an academic whore.

Marcus Ross is an academic fraud. And a john. He paid URI money for the empty pleasure of a cheap degree, and he infected URI with the venereal disease of creationism.

Now that we know who we’re dealing with, let’s look at what he had to say.

He told us that he would cover three main topics:

1. The use of fossils in geology
2. Looking back: Darwin’s views on the fossil record
3. Our present understanding

The Use Of Fossils In Geology

He said fossils are used for four purposes:

• Organismal reconstruction
• Environmental reconstruction
• Correlation/Biostratigraphy
• Reconstruction of evolutionary lineages

Prior to Origin of Species, fossils had only been used for the first three functions. Once Origin appeared, all the God-hating atheists out there realized they could put together a fake natural history based on the fossils, thereby “proving” that God doesn’t exist.

He didn’t phrase it the way I’ve described it, but it’s clear that this is what he means. He told us how all of the strata containing all of these fossils were laid down during Noah’s Flood. All these freakish-looking prehistoric critters were just wandering around the world minding their own business, and the next thing you know — FLUSH! — a giant flood wipes them all out. Apparently velociraptors, triceratops, and tyrannosaurs were not on Noah’s list of “clean animals” or on his list of “everything else”.

According to Ross and some of the other speakers at this event, atheistic evilutionists just draw lines connecting similar-looking fossils and claim that X must have evolved into Y, because they look similar, and X was in a lower strata than Y. Yet according to Ross and friends, all of these critters existed in that brief 2000-year pre-flood period.

Maybe he explained it and I missed it, but I don’t understand how Ross rationalizes these two issues:

1. Why are certain critters only associated with certain strata? This is true no matter where in the world they are found. Ross freely admitted these associations.
2. Why are the simpler critters (what we would call less evolved or an earlier species in a given evolutionary line) always in strata below the more complex critters (what we would call a later species in the same evolutionary line)?

Steve Austin presented diagrams purporting to show how dozens of layers (totaling hundreds of feet) of the Grand Canyon were deposited in a few hours. If everybody is intermingling and walking around at the same time, how do they sort out so nicely when the Flood comes?

He did show a diagram showing some of the geological eras:

• Cenozoic
• Mesozoic
• Paleozoic
• Proterozoic

He claims those middle two (Mesozoic and Paleozoic) happened during the Flood. My questions above would apply to those eras. There aren’t many fossils from the Proterozoic, but what about the gobs of fossils from the Cenozoic? If all of that is post-Flood, where did they come from? According to Ross’ timeline, all of those fossils would have to be from the last 4000 years. So nobody noticed the giraffe camels or bone-crushing dogs or elephant-sized ground sloths wandering around? Nobody thought they were the slightest bit strange and bothered to write about them?

Looking Back: Darwin’s Views On The Fossil Record

The next main point of his talk was what Darwin said about fossils. Darwin was concerned about the fossil record, so he devoted two chapters in Origin to it.

Ross then did some Darwin quote-mining.

We need a Godwin’s Law for Darwin quote-mining. Godwin’s Law itself is:

As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.

However, the corollary is more appropriate here. Wikipedia describes it:

[T]here is a tradition in many newsgroups and other Internet discussion forums that once such a comparison is made, the thread is finished and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically “lost” whatever debate was in progress.

Our new Creatard’s Law could be:

Any creationist quote-mining Darwin has automatically lost the argument.

Our Present Understanding

This was Ross’ final topic of his presentation. He gloated about gaps in the fossil record. Then he started talking about “baramins” and all of the different horse “kinds”. He said that all of the modern horse variants (zebra, donkey, quagga, zedonk, zorse, etc.) descended from that first created “kind” that Noah had on the Ark.

Here’s a question for all of the creationists out there. You people claim there are no transitional fossils. You people claim that any fossil that looks transitional is actually just a diseased specimen of a known species.

So how do you know that all of these different horse kinds descended from Noah’s horse? By your own definition, you have no transitional fossils to support your claim.

The only “horse kind” creationists can produce is the ass.

[And now, exactly one month since the last episode, here is the next installment of my experience at the Darwin Was Wrong lie-fest put on by Logos Research Associates. I’m writing this at 1:30 AM, so I’ll only cover the praying and singing that preceded the first talk of the day. Tonight, I hope to write up a description of the talk itself.

If you’ve come in late, you can start from the beginning of this story in Part 1, or you can jump to the first speaker in Part 4. You can also watch the videos of this conference at the Logos website (not recommended for the sane).]

I arrived at the church just five minutes late, but they’ve already started the program! Some guy was on stage saying something. Wait! Don’t start praying without me! I hurried to my seat. Made it! You can start praying now.

And they did.

After the prayer, the guy talked about how this was an historic event. Really? That you’ve got a church full of people praying and singing about Jesus and denying evolution?

Pathetic? Yes. Historic? No.

I looked around the church. It was sparsely attended this morning. Only about 25% of the seats were filled. Even the faithful don’t want to be at church at 8:30 on a Saturday morning.

The preacher guy left the stage. Hallelujah! The Jesus singers came out. Oh, crap! They started by singing “I’ll Fly Away”. That’s actually a good song, when it’s done right. They didn’t do it right.

Next, they asked everybody to stand for the performance of “Amazing Grace”. What is it with religious people and that song? I took this opportunity to run to the restroom. I got inside, and…

Oh, lord! They pipe the audio from the stage into the restroom! I can’t even get away from it in here! I discovered, however, that it acts as an excellent stimulant. Who needs Ex Lax?

By the time I got back to my seat, they were on to the next song. I scanned the auditorium and noticed some small kids sitting a few rows away. They were maybe 5 or 6 years old. Most of the lies that would be said that day would go over their heads. The lifetime of indoctrination won’t.

I looked at the video screens and noticed that they put the words to the song up there, so the congregation can sing along. Who needs hymn books? This is the 21st Century. We’ve got Jesus karaoke! The only thing missing is a bunch of drunk Japanese businessmen. Our congregation has them beat. We’re drunk on the Lord! (And not in a Catholic booze-and-crackers way.)

Did I just say “our congregation”? Oh no! The assimilation has begun! By the end of the day, I’ll be completely absorbed!

As I said above, “I’ll Fly Away” is a good song when it is done right. Behold the right doing:

The latest Carnival of the Godless has arrived. You can find it over at Null Session. There are several good articles. I recommend starting with “The Intelligent Design Falsifiability Myth?” by Naon Tiotami at Homologous Legs.

Creationists. I hate those guys.

I found the above image on Miss Retro Modern’s Flickr stream. The ad above comes from Canada, which just proves that the U.S. doesn’t have a monopoly on Christian fear-mongering. The ad was published in 1955, the glory days of anti-communism, anti-atheism, and the Cold War.

This ad is so scary. The church is almost empty! The commies will win for sure! We’re endangering our Way Of Life by cheating God out of his weekly fix.

I bet you materialistic atheists out there didn’t know you were enslaving six out of every twenty people living!

(Why didn’t they just say three out of ten? Can’t they find the least common denominator? Maybe they should spend less time in church and more time in school.)

A couple of weeks ago, Jeff Eyges alerted me to the website Pray 4 Trig, and it’s a fundie winner! Its subtitle tells us that its purpose is to organize a “Worldwide Day of Prayer to Heal Trig Palin”.

The home page is set up as a FAQ.

Q: So what makes this particular prayer so special? Why should congregations gather in support of it?

A: Atheists and others who hate God…

Umm… Actually, if you would bother to look up the definition of an atheist… oh, never mind. Why do I bother?

…like to claim that He only “answers prayers” where divine intervention can’t be proven. They make websites about it, like Why Won’t God Heal Amputees? They say that God won’t answer the prayers of amputees because He isn’t real!

Mommy!! Suzy said that Santa isn’t real! Tell her she’s wrong!

Q: Well, why doesn’t He answer their prayers?

A: Honestly, when’s the last time you heard of a congregation praying, with faith, that a member’s lost limb would be restored to him? Never in my lifetime. Too many people lack faith.

Seriously? That’s their answer? That most Christians are too disinterested in helping out others in their congregation? That’s a seriously damning condemnation. And they claim atheists don’t have morals!

Apparently God is sitting up there on his cloud just waiting to heal amputees, but nobody bothers to ask him! If all they’d do was ask, there would be a worldwide epidemic of new arms and legs sprouting up everywhere!

With enough congregations joining up, I have no doubt there will be sufficient people with genuine faith in God (instead of lip service) to ensure that Trig Palin is healed of Down Syndrome.

They’re also saying that most Christians aren’t True Christians™. God ignores non-True Christians™, so all of the praying that they do goes straight into God’s commode. He likes to stand in front of the toilet and watch the non-True Christians’™ prayers swirl around in the bowl and then disappear as he flushes their prayers away.

God is a dick.

Q: Why Trig Palin?

A: Trig Palin is well known in the media; people all over the world know just who he is, and they already care about him. It will be much easier for them to sincerely pray for someone they care for, instead of what to them is a random name.

Apparently True Christians™ save all their brotherly love for the children of True Republicans™.

Also, it is known publicly that Trig Palin indeed has Down Syndrome. Science has no way to undo this condition, which is the result of an extra chromosome; but God can. When Trig Palin is found to be miraculously healed, everyone but the most hardened atheist will have to acknowledge God’s Majesty!

Hey, that’s all we ever asked for. A little freakin’ evidence for once!

So what happens when Trig isn’t healed? Does that mean God doesn’t exist?

The rest of that page is filled with mundane stuff, such as telling us that this global event of True Christians™ will happen on April 18, 2010.

Presumably, that means that on April 19, Trig will be “Down-free” (No, you don’t get down off a Trig. You get down off a duck.) and there will be a mass conversion of atheists to Christianity.

Or, more likely, Trig will still have Down Syndrome, and there will be a mass conversion of Christians to atheism. (Who am I kidding? Only the first part of that sentence will be true.)

Secondly, I just fished a funny comment out of the spam filter. It’s from somebody calling him/herself atheismisdead. He/she/it links to a YouTube video about PZ Myers. Apparently I’m responsible for his blasphemy.

Then there is a link to a forum where atheismisdead spits and fizzles and foams at the mouth.

This comment is attached to my recent article “Attention Creationists”. Apparently he didn’t absorb its message. Anyway, the comment is amusing. It missed being profiled in the Recent Comments sidebar, because it was no longer “recent” when I fished it out of the filter.

I don’t know if this person calling himself “atheismisdead” is the same person who runs the blog of the same name. I took a fast look at that blog and found this funny graphic:

Sorry. It is abuse. You are an abuser. It often (but not always) leads to a lifetime of warped thinking and repressed emotions.

Finally, you might be anxiously awaiting the next installment of Darwin Was Wrong. I’ll see if I can get that written tonight. You’ll notice the frequency of articles will slow down for the foreseeable future, to maybe one every few days. I’m spending too much time on the computer and need to get away from the soul-stealing internet. I’m taking a photography class now, in the hopes that I might actually become competent at something other than offending Christians.

I know this comes as a shock to you. It doesn’t surprise the rest of us, but we had to check your X-rays to make sure.

You’re probably wondering when this happened.

Frankly, I’m surprised that you’re surprised. Didn’t this tip you off every time you said it?

I hate to break this to you.

In fact, you have more information than I do. I can only surmise.

Your condition may have started even before conception.

Ordinarily I’d live and let live. But you keep trying to get your religion taught as “science” in the public schools. That makes you…

I know you’ve been complaining about my language on this blog. Well you shouldn’t be reading it anyway. There are better things for you to be doing.

And finally…

A note to my regular readers: As you may have guessed, there will be no changes in this blog’s content or style in the foreseeable future.

However, the last two comments made me decide to run this as is. The article only addresses those comments peripherally, but it contemplates the broader issue arising from them.]

The 127th Skeptics’ Circle has arrived at Unibrow One Brow. Go check it out.

One of the articles there has dredged up one of the ongoing dilemmas of this blog. The article is “The Trouble With Skeptics” by James Cole over at Stuff and Nonsense. The article consists of his comments on the 10 “skeptic fails” twittered by Daniel Loxton of Junior Skeptic magazine.

I especially liked fails 8 and 9:

Skeptic Fail 8: Thinking your skepticism makes you immune to error; it should make you more aware of your own fallibility.

Skeptic Fail 9: Assuming that your fellow skeptic is (or ought to be) an atheist.

The one that bothers me the most is #5:

Skeptic Fail 5: Using ad hominems. Ad hominems are as ugly and offputting coming from us as from anyone else.

First of all, a lot of people don’t really know what an ad hominem is. Here’s the Wikipedia definition:

An ad hominem argument… is an argument which links the validity of a premise to an irrelevant characteristic or belief of the person advocating the premise.

It takes the following form:

Person 1 makes claim X
There is something objectionable about Person 1
Therefore claim X is false

As you can see, that is a fallacious argument. It is also something I have never done.

However, I have been accused of making them. Just look at that last article, where I call Ray Comfort retarded. Wikipedia tells us about common misconceptions:

Gratuitous verbal abuse or “name-calling” itself is not an argumentum ad hominem or a logical fallacy. The fallacy only occurs if personal attacks are employed instead of an argument to devalue an argument by attacking the speaker….

I called Ray Comfort retarded, because he thinks that evolutionists contend that a male animal evolves into a new species and then has to sit around and wait for a female animal to evolve into this same new species. No scientists contend this. It has been explained to him numerous times, yet his tiny brain is unable to comprehend it. Ergo, he is retarded.

OK. That leads to fail #10:

Skeptic Fail 10: Thinking that disrespect and mockery are ever effective outreach. At best, superiority entertains the base.

I know I’m not convincing anybody out there. I gave up on that belief long ago. Really, the only thing this blog does is “entertain the base”, if it even does that.

I wonder if I’m doing more harm than good.

I do this blog, because I would have stepped in front of a speeding train long ago if I had to keep all this frustration bottled up.

Look at “Climategate”. The fact of global warming hasn’t changed, but now we have a bunch of retards who have discovered that they were actually called “retards” by some scientists.

Somehow, in their retarded brains, they think this is proof that global warming isn’t real. I know, they’re “really” claiming it’s because they see words like “trick” in the emails. Actually, though, they’re just pissed off about the venomous rhetoric. It must be very painful to go through life not knowing that you’re the village idiot and that everybody is laughing at you, and then to one day gain that realization all at once. They’re reacting the only way they know how: By retreating into the comfortable beliefs that they know so well.

Likewise with the creationists who come across this site. I’m just making them stronger. OK, well those people were unreachable anyway. But what about the fence-sitters? I’m sure I’m turning 100% of them to the other side. Who wants to be on the team with the smug elitists who think they know everything?

We don’t know everything, of course. In fact, we know very little. But we do know a few things with virtual certainty: The age of the Earth, that life evolved and approximately how it did so, etc.

So should I cut the justified insults? Do they really accomplish anything?