This is day four of my back being out. It's slowly getting better, but it still hurts to stand up. This is ridiculous.

On an amusing note, have you seen Science Against Evolution? It's a hilarious Web site. It's not just the "my nephew made this" look and feel; it's how the people who created this have managed to put together a laughable set of "theses" to support their idiocy. Of the two officers of this non-profitr organization with a listed background, their science background consists of electrical and civil engineering. There's no anthropology, astronomy, genetics or anything else which might actually relate to the subject matter at hand (astronomy counts, but it would be a long digression).

Here are the "theses" numbered 15 through 17:

15. "Abiogenesis" is the belief that life can originate from non-living substances through purely natural processes.
16. The theory of evolution depends upon abiogenesis as the starting point.
17. If the theory of abiogenesis is false, then the theory of evolution is false.

Number 15 is almost correct. Strike the work "belief" and replace it with "hypothesis". When they have such a subtle twist on a straightforward definition, you know something's amiss. I wonder if this was deliberate? Their general lack of sophistication suggests to me that it's not.

Number 16 is also subtly twisted. The theory of evolution depends on life being created as a starting point. Many religious people believe a supernatural entity created life and let evolution take over (just as the Catholic church). Catholics don't require abiogenesis as a starting point for evolution. I wonder why these people aren't telling you this?

Of course, their subtle psychological attack in number 15, combined with their distortion of point 16 leads to the outright lie in point number 17. Are they cognizant of this lie? I doubt it, so maybe it's not a lie per se, but this inability to reason about something is the sad state our education system has left so many people in.

Of course, many who support the theory evolution are often no better.

I will, however, give the people behind the "Science Against Evolution" Web site credit for at least understanding that there's a difference between the origin of life and the evolution of life. Most creationists I've talked to don't even understand that.

Aries Mar 21 - Apr 19

Stop using your perceived extroversion as an excuse for being an asshole.

Taurus Apr 20 - May 20

Explaining at length to the street preacher with the odd stain on his pants why his being a Taurus is the reason for his being a proseletyzing asshole will make you a bit of a hypocrite.

Gemini May 21 - June 20

As always, you are incredibly sexy, intelligent and a tad arrogant. You are also prone to a bit of a tipple while writing astrology sendups[1].

Cancer June 21 - July 22

Inability to distinguish between anecdotes and data could lead to your downfall.

Leo July 23 - Aug 22

Discovering that your creative, generous and passionate nature is, surprisingly, a self-belief held by most people could lead to a loss of self-esteem. Do not question things too deeply.

Virgo Aug 23 - Sept 22

Due to the precession of the equinoxes, Virgo is no longer aligned with the constellation. Everything you believed about yourself is a lie.

Libra Sept 23 - Oct 22

Your manipulative nature as determined by the gravitational pull of the moon when you were born is fortunately offset by the gravitional attraction of the stainless steel operating table you were born on, as determined by

Scorpio Oct 23 - Nov 21

You are ruled over by Mars, and are thus heavily influenced by the god Nergal. Do not allow yourself to be troubled by the differences between Western and Babylonian astrology as this is merely a sinister plot to confuse you.

Sagittarius Nov 22 - Dec 21

Jupiter rocks your world. Today is a good day to ponder why astrologers didn't discover the outer planets.

Capricorn Dec 22 - Jan 19

Troubled times are ahead. Use confirmation bias to bolster your usual shrewd and authoritative tendencies.

Aquarius Jan 20 - Feb 18

As the 5th Dimension overwhelms your senses, contemplate that you only have six centuries to go before the Age of Aquarius begins. Unless you follow astrologer Dane Rudhyar, who believes it will start about five decades from now. Whether this means spiritual enlightment or better Hair will be for you to decide.

Pisces Feb 19 - March 20

Many people born under the sign of Pisces appear gullible. There is a reason for this.

1. By merest coincidence, your author is also Gemini.

Everything you ever needed to know about astrology.



For extra credit, read up about confirmation bias.

In the spirit of the pagan festival Samhain, which the Catholic church co-opted by moving All Saint's Day to November 1st and eventually became the secular Halloween festival, I present yet another celebration of evolution: how to evolve a watch (via: reddit).

ID proponents routinely use the "watch implies a designer" argument as a rebuttal against evolution. What they forget is that there's a crucial difference between watches and living things: watches aren't alive. They don't breed. They don't mutate. They don't compete for limited resources. Those are three key things for living organisms. So the author of the "How to evolve a watch" decided to write software to find out what would happen if watches could do those things (competing for natural resources is referred to "natural selection", but it's the same thing). The results are fascinating. Complicated yet accurate watches, some with four hands, evolve.

But some people will say that since the author wrote the software, that implies that he's a designer. This is false. It's the abiogenesis/evolution confusion. The two should not be conflated. Abiogenesis is complicated and science cannot explain it. Perhaps science never will. Who knows? The author merely provided the initial conditions necessary for "life" (abiogenesis). He did not design the watches (evolution).

For those desiring a more (recently) traditional topic, here are my pumpkins from a couple of years ago.

You know, I honestly don't go looking for this stuff, but when I came up on Digg, I couldn't help but click. The behavior of these scientologists is absolutely repugnant. How can anyone think that this insulting behavior, physical intimidation and general verbal abuse is appropriate behavior?

So I had to go looking and it seems this isn't that unusual. It's apparently something called "bullbaiting", a term Hubbard co-opted. One or more scientologists get very abusive and offensive to make others lose their temper. If it's something that they practiced in house, that would be their business, but to subject others to it? Disgusting.

The film maker Brett Hanover is no fan of Scientology. Working in close consultation with many ex-Scientologists and the folks over at Operation Clambake, he managed to put together an hour long film covering a young lady who had just achieved "Clear" status in Scientology. The movie is very slow and the story is dull, but according to this review and others like it I've read, the story does a good job of portraying what life is actually like for many Scientologists.

The author wanted people to watch this movie, so he released it free to the Web. So why didn't I link to it? Well, it's not on Google Video any more. Brett Hanover has apparently changed his mind. He's asking blog authors to remove entries about the movie (google cache is here). I hear he's also tried to get the movie pulled from Bit Torrent (I don't use BT, so I don't know if that's possible). If you go to his Web site, his "Films" link is also broken now. Seems that once the movie was released, the Scientologists weren't too happy about it. You can put two and two together on this one and I'm sure you'll reach the right answer. In the meantime, seems that archive.org still hosts the movie. Of course, you'll find the film deathly dull, but I think that was part of the point.

A recent study has found strong correlations between how strong a country's belief in Christianity is and how high their levels of violence and teen pregnancy are. (The survey wasn't about Christianity, per se, but it focused on mostly Christian and formerly Christian nations, with the exception of Japan). One result from the study:

A few hundred years ago rates of homicide were astronomical in Christian Europe and the American colonies (Beeghley; R. Lane). In all secular developed democracies a centuries long-term trend has seen homicide rates drop to historical lows (Figure 2). The especially low rates in the more Catholic European states are statistical noise due to yearly fluctuations incidental to this sample, and are not consistently present in other similar tabulations (Barcley and Tavares). Despite a significant decline from a recent peak in the 1980s (Rosenfeld), the U.S. is the only prosperous democracy that retains high homicide rates, making it a strong outlier in this regard (Beeghley; Doyle, 2000). Similarly, theistic Portugal also has rates of homicides well above the secular developed democracy norm.

And for those who find reading studies boring, you can read this somewhat opinionated summary.

It is possible that part of the problem here is that those who "believe" often look down on those who don't. I and many of my friends back in the US can readily testify to this. It should go without saying that when you have a self-righteous group looking down on those who don't share their views, societal tension is a natural result. But if you're tempted to respond to this, read the study first, regardless of whether or not you agree with me.

Update: if this stuff intrigues you, you have to read the reply by chromatic. chromatic and I have differing viewpoints on this topic and makes a brilliant response to this. He and I disagree a lot about these issues, but I can't help but respect his point of view.

Before we start today's class, boys and girls, let's watch a short video¹. Timmy, you're the class nerd, you get to set up the projector.

Good. Now that we've done that, children, turn to the person next to you and observe them. Did they laugh? Did the chuckle? Did they roll their eyes in disgust? If so, they're mocking God. Kill them.

Only kidding! Whoops. Little Timmy didn't get the joke. We'll all miss Sally.

Class, class, pay attention! We'll just tell Sally's parents that she fell down the stairs or something.

Now, if the child next to you watched the video with rapt attention and was nodding along in agreement, now you should kill them. It would be doing a them kindness. These children are gullible and will grow up to lead pathetic lives, agreeing to any stupid thing they hear, so long as it reinforces their beliefs. (Wow. Little Timmy sure can run, can't he?)

For tomorrow's class, children, we're going to take a field trip. We're going to find the guy holding the banana and explain that God wants him to die. I'm sure he'll enjoy our little joke. Before we kill, though, we need to give him a bit of history lesson. You see, the banana the bad man was gripping so lovingly is not a "wild banana". It's a "Cavendish" banana, a banana which has been carefully bred for centuries to have the characteristics the bad man attributed to God.

In fact, the original banana was a small, finger-sized fruit with large seeds. Humans made what that guy was holding.

1. Once you see this video, you might assume that it's satire mocking typical creationist idiocy with a splash of homoerotic humor tossed in for fun. It's not. Instead, it's part of a program of half-truths and distortions cooked up to push the Christian faith.

I'm not going to talk about intelligent design proponents. I'm going to call a spade a spade and refer to them as creationists. Let's just get this straight: there is no "intelligent design". There are creationists who explicitly embrace God and ID proponents who lie and pretend that religious zealotry is not what's behind their campaign of deceit. Of course, I'm sure that God doesn't mind a little intellectual dishonesty to prop him up, right? Clearly the ID folks have realized that faith ain't enough, praise the Lord!

This is not to say that all who believe in Creation are liars. There are many well-meaning people out there who sincerely and devoutly believe in the story of creation and there are more folks who are swayed by the creationists arguments because the creationist campaign of lying and their very selective use of information has created a propaganda machine that politicians can only envy. However, when you look closely at the creationist claims, most of it boils down to one thing: evolution supporters don't know everything, therefore they're wrong, praise the Lord!¹

It's tough to find a better example of how far we are willing to go to lie to ourselves. It's tough to find a better example of the self-deceit we are willing to engage in when we can accept such a specious argument. And it's tough to keep a straight face while listening to it. So I won't. Praise the Lord!

( Creationists want to eat your babies )

Important: Note that I did not delete any of the "deleted" posts. The author of the posts chose to do that. So long as the commentary is honest and deliberate, I will not delete posts. Only when the commentary is abusive or clearly "trollish" will I do so.

(Note that I've sourced a bunch of the stuff here, but it's getting late and trying to source all of it is becoming too tedious. If you don't believe what I'm writing, look it up for yourself. Also, though I take some digs at Christians, those are primarily aimed at Christians who are using lies to spread their beliefs.)

First, some people tried forcing our children to learn creationism in lieu of evolution. Because that's clearly a religious belief, our courts threw that out.

Then, some people tried forcing our children to learn "creation science" alongside evolution. Because that's clearly a religious belief, our courts threw that out. (Hint: if it has the word "science" in the name, it probably isn't).

Now these people are trying to force our children to learn "intelligent design". They keep trying to force their religious beliefs on others. The courts keep shutting them down, but since they have no respect for the First Amendment of the US Constitution, they don't care. They're sitting in court lying their asses off as if somehow God won't mind deceipt in his name.

Their first assault on science lies in claiming that evolution is "just a theory". There are plenty of flaws with ID, but let's start with the "just a theory" part. What the Christians pushing "intelligent design" (ID) want us to think is that "theory" more or less means "guess". It doesn't.
( More Christian Hypocricy )

There are plenty of ways to take advantage of gullible people. Unfortunately, it appears that our society doesn't do much to give people the tools they need to filter information appropriately. If the information is worded poorly, it's tough to evaluate. For example, consider the bit of tripe about walking on water from the awful movie/documentary "What the Bleep Do We Know".

In one section, the speaker claims that any of us can walk on water. It's merely our doubt which makes us fail. Well, that's a pretty useless statement. If someone fails to walk on water, it's because they doubted. If they don't doubt and still fail to walk on water, we can still argue that they have hidden doubts. There is no way to disprove this claim because the person making the claim can smugly cross his arms and say "sorry, little Jimmy doubted. That's why he drowned."

If we accept this line of argument, I can now go on to say "anyone can make monkeys fly out of their ass if they simply don't doubt their ability to do so." I won't bother to elaborate. The logic is the same. You can follow it.

Another way to make people fall for something stupid is to appeal to their vanity, but give them any means of accepting it as the truth. For example, there was an interesting study published in the Journal of Clinical Psychology in 1977, entitled "Acceptance of general personality interpretations prior to and after receiving diagnostic feedback supposedly based on psychological, graphological, and astrological assessment procedures." (That's only a link to the citation. I can't find the paper on line.)

Whew! That's a long title and it's certainly not something I would have chosen. On the other hand, a catchier title such as "Getting people to swallow bullshit by covering it with astrology" would probably not have been accepted.

In this study, psychologists created a bogus psychological profile of traits that most people believe they possessed. People were asked to rate how accurate it was for themselves on a scale of 1 to 5 (with five being most accurate.) The first group of people were told it was a universal psychological profile. The average score was 3.2 -- definitely suggesting that people tended to agree with the traits. The second group of people were asked for their birthday and then told the the profile was based upon their sun sign. They were a bit more receptive and their average score was 3.76.

The last group of people was told that the profile was their personal horoscope. They scored the profile 4.38.

There was nothing different about the profiles and if people were using objective criteria then we should not have seen these results (to be fair, I confess to not knowing how the people were chosen, groups assigned, etc., since I have only read a summary.)

Where are people's filters? Why can't they seem to properly evaluate things? I hear homeopathists talk about "water memory", even though such a thing has never been demonstrated. I hear astrology buffs talk about gravitational influences, but the gravitation pull of the chair you're sitting on has a much greater affect on you then the gravitational pull of the moon (the math is pretty simple if you want to work it out.) This, unfortunately, reduces down to what I call the "leprechaun sex" problem. I don't want to hear your theories about how leprechauns fuck until you can prove to me that leprechauns exist.