The Jig is UP!!!

Yes, I got this email, too.  It seems that more than a few atheist bloggers and ranters got this email sent to us, and I buried my face in my palms so long, and so hard, it left a mark.  Oh, the stupid hurts so much, that I hope so seriously that it's a Poe.

Read it and weep, my fellow atheist brethren...  I know I wept with unbounded sorrow in the knowledge that there are very well certain to be people who are fully convinced by arguments of this level.  It's clearly VERY scientific given all the numbers and maths and junk.

Seriously, though...
Never mind that this assumes that every person on Earth has access to 2 liters of safe drinking water every day.  Never mind that it doesn't even seem to differentiate between potable water and water which is unsuitable for drinking.  Never mind that it excludes the level to which we can partly hydrate ourselves using other sources that store plenty of moisture...  like fruit.  Never mind that it assumes that when scientists say life has been on Earth for about 3.5 billion years, that meant human beings throughout all that time.  Never mind that those assumed 3 billion years of human existence also assumes a constantly maintained population around 6 billion people.

Did the supposed non-Poe creationist of sub-jellyfish intelligence who did this calculation think that people don't urinate?  That the water we drink is simply wiped out of existence?

If only Ancient China was a Christian Nation

It isn't often that I look through WorldNet Daily, since reading it probably lowers your IQ by a few points each time.  This time, I ran across it for its review of the film, Kung Fu Panda 2.  Being one of the crew members, I can't help but be curious.  Being an atheist, anti-theist, and someone who knows the kinds of immeasurably concentrated stupidity that WND cannot help but spew out, being the fountainhead of creationist crockery that they are...  I really can't help but be curious how they're going to play this one.

For a few sentences, I thought I might be disappointed, as it started to look like a serious movie review.  The reviewer, Drew Zahn, offered a very valid criticism of the film in that the Furious Five's role is still relatively small (at least Jackie Chan got to speak a little this time), with Po and Tigress taking control of the show.  He also offers praise of the visuals, the humor, and the typical feel-good ending that all family-friendly films apparently must have.

Then came this little gem in the segueway of his review (emphasis added) --

The movie's messages likewise offer promise, but stray from the truth down some heavily New Age paths.

Oh, boy...  the truth...  and here we go.

Real Life Covers Real Life

It'd been a long time since I'd read Greg Dean's Real Life -- a webcomic that oddly enough, has very little connection to reality.  For crying out loud, it has a guy who reconfigures space-time within a localized field to make a small room several thousand square feet in altered space and travels light-years in seconds by warping the fabric of reality, and all in all, defying the laws of physics.

It does include a few instances of real life, of course...  The protagonists of Greg and Liz got married in the comic the same day the cartoonist got married in reality, and similarly so with Liz's pregnancy in the comic.  Then again, some of them were just plain off the wall, and then you realized that you knew a person just like that.  One of the oldest comics in the series (and also one of the earliest in color) involved Greg snacking on sticks of butter that had been dipped in melted butter...  I think it was a silly joke to signify his lack of cooking skills, but yet, I knew someone who actually did that.

Anyway, I got around to reading up on several of the comics that I'd missed, and went back through them, and ran across this one that really hit the bullseye.

Grown-ups can't be healed

Just over a week ago, I was sitting down at a cafe noshing on a tabouleh salad and at a table behind me, there was a guy I wanted to murder.  Okay, I'll rephrase that -- there was a guy at a table behind me who was preaching to his compatriots that he'd discovered that The Scripture^TM has healing powers.  Oh, the many mortifyingly moronic manifestations of mindlessness I did hear.  (Why yes, I do have a fondness for alliteration!)

Among the most fun of them was when he draw a parallel between the power of the Holy Spirit and the Marvel Comics character, Wolverine.  I later discovered that this man apparently believed that the Wolverine character was based on a real person who had historically been mistaken to be Bigfoot (but was in fact Hugh Jackman's father?), but more on that later.  The basic thesis this guy was pushing was that there's apparently some mystical energy intrinsic in the Word of God, and that it provides an unexplainable and unknowable power that can physically heal wounds, cure sicknesses, and raise the dead.  I guess he must have been taking lessons from Randy Demain.

Well, at the cafe, I was quiet about it, but a few days ago, I ran into the same fellow again, and this time, he was trying to sell others (myself included) on his claims rather than simply preaching to the choir.  Though I was eating my lunch, I was unable to keep my mouth shut at this point.  I will say, though, that I didn't murder the fellow.  I did better than that -- I ripped him to shreds to the point where he just plain walked away silently realizing he had no hope of getting anywhere.

That was a happy moment.

Feeling Over Fact

Deepak Chopra sickens me almost all the time.  Well, the feeling is mutual, or so I'm told.  When he posts things on his Twitter feed that he somehow caused some disastrous earthquake by way of the power of his meditation, it's easy to laugh it off and presume he's just babbling towards the goal of selling something.  If he was serious, I'd be glad to blame him for that rib I fractured during an earthquake not that long ago.  When he posts things on HuffPo about how skepticism itself is morally evil and bad for your health, I find myself unable to contain my anger.  Chopra values the emotional because he knows it is an easy avenue by which his brand of woo-woo hocus-pocus littered with criminal misuse of "quantum" terminology can be effectively sold to the unwashed masses.  Again, he's relying on the same old misrepresentation that every other anti-science moron spouts, but he goes to the further step that irrational thinking should be considered equally valid.

Even among the responses I got to my previous post on vegetarianism was that the emotional value is something that should not be discounted;  That because it is so fundamental to the nature of being human, we should seriously consider it and not brush it aside.  Now I'd like to know...  among any of the people who read that entry...  where did I actually say that?  I specifically spoke first about the moral arguments being divorced from reason.  I also got into the point about a simple fact that gets overlooked and how there is more than one way to address the issues.  Where the line gets drawn here is the end effect that listening to one's feelings on that matter could not have found you all the ways to skin a cat.

This is why I cannot possibly offer the slightest assent to Chopra's notion that emotional values and experiences should be considered equally valid.

There is a simple reality that I think everybody accepts with regards to emotions -- they are personal.  They are part of the fabric of individual experiences.  How this differs from rationality and reason is that reason does not try to write the description of truth on an individual level.  Because of this simple distinction, the two are not only different, but undeniably unequal.