Bay of Fundie

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.)

First of all, here’s a funny comic that I found over at God Lizard. I had to shrink it slightly to fit my margins. You can visit the original if you need it bigger.

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 need to say something to the creationists in the audience.

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.

[I wrote this article last night, then decided not to run it. I was going to rewrite it this morning with just a mention of the carnival and a recommendation for another article.

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?

I took a break from recounting the horrors of the Darwin Was Wrong conference, so I could fit in the Christmas-related posts. As soon as I get a reasonable amount of time (in a day or two), I will resume the tale.

It was worth the diversion. The Atomic Toy article got Stumbled-Upon, and I received my second-highest one-day traffic of all time! (About 8000 hits. The highest was about 14,000 hits way back in 2007 for the AIG Research Paper Winner.)

I know you’re going through creationism-conference withdrawal, so head on over to Robert Madewell’s blog. He also went to a creationism conference and lived to tell about it.

In his first article, he gives a brief recap. His second article is an open letter to the pastor of the sponsoring church. That goes into the most detail of what he heard there. Robert’s experience is fundamentally (ha!) different from mine.

I throw around the term “liar” and “lying” rather loosely in my descriptions of the conference I visited. Many of the statements that all of the speakers made were falsehoods. In most cases, the speakers were lying to themselves as much as they were lying to the audience.

The speakers at Darwin Was Wrong largely misunderstood the science they were presenting to the audience. They were mostly saying things such as:

Atheist scientists say that the Earth is billions of years old, but it isn’t, because their radiometric dating is incorrect.

Or:

Darwinists claim that humans evolved from apes, but there are no transitional fossils. Every fossil that they claim is transitional is just a diseased ape.

They are giving a quasi-accurate description of current scientific consensus, and then explaining why they disagree with it.

In Robert’s case, the speaker was (apparently) intentionally misrepresenting the current scientific consensus. He was building straw-man arguments, because they were so much easier to refute than the actual scientific beliefs.

Robert is a little more charitable than I am in this assessment. Robert says:

I am horrified that Dr. Harrub could so blatantly misrepresent science. I can’t say whether it was out of dishonesty or negligence. Doesn’t matter. A man with his credentials should research his claims about his opposition’s claims, before writing a presentation based on them. I think anyone is obligated to do that.

Here is just one example that Robert mentions:

In the lecture The Dinosaur Dilemma, Dr. Harrub claims that a fossil skeleton of a mammal was found that has parts of a dinosaur in its stomach. He then claims that this fossil contradicts the theory of evolution, because science claims that dinosaurs preceded mammals and that these two classes of animals did not co-exist.

Scientists do not claim that dinosaurs and mammals did not coexist. This is something that Dr. Harrub should have known if he had done the barest research beforehand.

Robert says he counted at least ten incidents like this. I say that a pattern of recklessly-false statements about the opponent’s position indicates intentional deception by the speaker.

In my encounters with creationists, I find that most of the ones who try a scholarly approach to refuting evolution use the approach of the speakers at Darwin Was Wrong. They present the scientific side as best they understand it, and then wave their arms around and pretend all of those facts don’t matter.

Only a minority take the approach of Dr. Harrub at the event Robert went to, whereby they make false statements about the scientific side, in order to more easily shoot it down.

Of this latter group, I think very few of them are actually like Dr. Harrub, who is educated enough to know better. This is the true liar of the anti-evolutionists.

The bulk of the people who mis-state the scientific side are simpletons like Ray Comfort. He is an uneducated rube with no intellectual capacity. He can be forgiven for being retarded.

In our efforts to make the world safe for retards, we have removed all of the fun from life. That includes the most awesome toy of all time: The Atom!

This bad boy comes to us from 1959. It comes with a spinthariscope and a cloud chamber for two different ways of viewing radioactive decay; it comes with an electroscope for doing electroscopy things; and it also comes with two radiation sources: radium and uranium ore!

Drooling idiots who injure themselves with Nerf dart guns need not apply.

This was back in the day when men were men, and boys were men, and girls were men, too! This toy had balls! It was nuclear!

It was also very educational. Of course, these days you wouldn’t be able to sell something like this. “Oh, help! It’s nook-yoo-lur! Get it away from me! It’s almost as dangerous as the swine flu vaccine!”

I’ll have you know that most of the radiation this thing gave off was alpha, and that’s relatively harmless. As Wikipedia says:

In general, external alpha radiation is not harmful since alpha particles are effectively shielded by a few centimeters of air, a piece of paper, or the thin layer of dead skin cells.… If substances emitting alpha particles are ingested, inhaled, injected or introduced through the skin, then it could result in a measurable dose.

So as long as you keep this thing away from your baby sister who sticks everything in her mouth, you should be fine.

My only concern is that the source of that radiation was tiny amounts of radium and uranium ore, and I don’t know if there are any additional concerns around those materials (besides obvious careful handling).

But if you think that toy is frakkin’ stupendous, check out this puppy:

This mother-of-all-awesome-toys dates back to 1951.

If, back in those days, the U.S. government could have its soldiers stand above ground to witness a nuclear blast, and then march through fallout across the drop zone, it sure as hell could give its kids radioactive materials for Christmas.

To quote ORAU:

The set came with four types of uranium ore, a beta-alpha source (Pb-210), a pure beta source (Ru-106), a gamma source (Zn-65?), a spinthariscope, a cloud chamber with its own short-lived alpha source (Po-210), an electroscope, a geiger counter, a manual, a comic book… and a government manual “Prospecting for Uranium.”

You wouldn’t even be able to mail this toy today! Imagine trying to bring this to market in 2009.

This toy isn’t all roses, though. It’s a little backward. What do you notice here (aside from the fact that he seems to be enjoying being radiated a little too much)?

Based on the illustrations on the packaging, this toy is only for boys. I guess girls aren’t smart enough for this thing. Marie Curie will have to go back to doing the laundry.

The toy also comes with this order form for buying more fissionable material:

I was disappointed to read that the toy is useless today, because all of its radiation has decayed away. It would be really funny to send in this order form today, but the A.C. Gilbert Company went out of business more than 40 years ago. I guess there is no such thing as long-term support any more. Where is a guy supposed to buy radioactive materials these days? (Maybe I should mail this form to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and see what happens.)

They mentioned above that the kit also came with a comic book:

That’s right. Dagwood Bumstead splits the atom. Is that what Dithers & Co. has been doing all these years? They’re a defense contractor? And Dagwood is one of our top scientists? And we won the Cold War?

I noticed one last thing about this toy. As you’ll recall, Marie Curie died from exposure to radiation. That makes me wonder what happened to all the boys who had this kit. The illustration that comes with the kit makes it obvious. It made them gay:

Here’s an excerpt from The Onion:

Fun Toy Banned Because Of Three Stupid Dead Kids

WASHINGTON, DC—In cooperation with the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, Wizco Toys of Montclair, NJ, recalled 245,000 Aqua Assault RoboFighters Monday after three dumb kids managed to kill themselves playing with the popular toy, ruining the fun for everybody else.

“The tragedy is inconceivable,” Wizco president Alvin Cassidy said. “For years, countless children played with the Aqua Assault RoboFighter without incident. But then these three retards come along and somehow find a way to get themselves killed. So now we have to do a full recall and halt production on what was a really awesome toy. What a waste.”
…
“I know the overwhelming majority of American kids who owned an Aqua Assault RoboFighter derived many hours of safe, responsible fun from it,” CPSC commissioner Mary Sheila Gall said. “But, statistically speaking, three deaths stemming from contact with a particular toy constitutes an ‘unreasonable risk.’ Look, I’m really sorry about this. Honestly. But our agency’s job is to protect the public from hazardous products, even if those who die are morons who deserved what they got.”

The problem with toys today is they’re too safe. All the fun has been CPSCed away.

I’m not advocating dangerous toys. Toys that can pierce your skull should be banned. The problem is, we go too far. So if one idiot somewhere manages to hurt himself, everybody flies into a tizzy and the toy comes off the shelves.

Here’s a great toy that I had when I was 9 or 10:

It was part of Mattel’s Thingmaker line of toys that can burn your house down. It consisted of an open hot plate (Yes! Is that freakin’ sweet or what?), several metal molds, and a few bottles of colored “Goop”. The Goop was some sort of liquid plastic (toxic, of course, but you shouldn’t be drinking the stuff!) that solidified when heated.

All you had to do was decide which critters you wanted to make, by looking through your set of molds (I think I had about 8). Here is a typical mold plate:

Then you decide which colors to make each of the crawlies. Just squirt the appropriately-colored Goop into the mold. You could even mix the colors to make psychedelic bugs, if you wanted. You could fill the scorpion’s legs with red and fill the body with purple, or whatever. Then (and here is the fun part) you put the mold plate onto the hot plate and turn it on.

The hot plate lived up to its name and got very hot, and you could watch the plastic solidify. When it was completely solid, then you took a little metal tool and hooked it into a slot on the plate, lifted the plate out, and set it in a little trough of water.

Then WHOOSH!! A cloud of steam rose up around the hot mold as you put it into the water. That was the best part of all. Shortly thereafter, the mold was cool enough, and you could pry your bugs out using tweezers. Then, of course, you didn’t actually play with the bugs. Making them was a lot more fun!

The plastic fly in this ointment was the bottles of Goop seemed awfully expensive to a 10-year-old. That’s the only reason I didn’t use this toy more than I did.

I Have a Burning Desire to Make Some More Bugs

I remember very distinctly that day I had the accident. (You could say it was burned into my memory.)

I was merrily making some centipedes or spiders or some other gloriously-creepy critters. I watched the Goop hardening in the mold. It is done! Praise the miracle of modern plastics! Now all I had to do was remove the mold from the hot plate. So I absent-mindedly grabbed the mold. With my hand.

Ouch.

That’s an understatement.

Thank evolution for reflexes. I pulled back immediately, so only my thumb had made contact. Over the next couple of weeks, I learned first-hand the lifecycle of a second-degree burn. It was a pretty big one, too. I had a nasty welt that turned white and filled with fluid and—nevermind. It still creeps me out.

But did we sue? No! Did we make a stink in the media? No! Did we report the toy to the government and demand they pull it off the shelves? NO!!

Why? Because the accident had been my fault! I’d just have to be more careful next time.

The icing on the cake is that my parents didn’t even take the toy away from me. They let me go on making bugs and risking bodily injury.

Were those great days to be a kid, or what?

Fun and Government: Incompatible

Eventually that toy did get yanked off the market, for precisely the reasons illustrated above. Kids were getting burned! That thing was dangerous! It eventually reappeared on the market in a boring wimped-out version that was impossible to abuse. I’m sure it sucked.

So go ahead. Give your kids some crappy toy today that has no obvious hazards. And if it somehow manages to hurt them anyway, sue the manufacturer and file a complaint with the CPSC. Take away everyone else’s fun. Then your kids will learn that the world owes them a completely risk-free existence. They’ll demand that the government make everything super-safe and super-regulated. Life will be grand under the nanny-state.

This is what toys used to be like, before they got all wimped out due to “safety issues”. I’ll have more to say about that in my next two posts. In the meantime, here are some great and not-so-great presents (both real and imaginary) that you can get your kids for Christmas.

For kids who like Sesame Street:

This next one was a real product, and it looks like a real ad. I just can’t figure out what publication would run it:

This next one is a little too real:

The copyright on that ad says 1967. That’s right! You can buy Johnny a toy version of the very same gun that his older brother is using right now to kill Viet Cong! Then when Johnny gets drafted in a few years, he’ll sail through boot camp, because he can already field-strip an M16 blindfolded.

Note to modern kids: If you manage to score one of these at a flea market or antique shop, don’t take it to school for show and tell. Somehow I don’t think they will be as enthusiastic about your treasured find as you are.

Finally, some kids will be disappointed that they didn’t receive what they really wanted this Christmas: