I often try to do what I can to help support those in other states who try to defend science education against those who seek to undermine it, even though state legislators are largely deaf to anyone but their own constituents. Today, news about legislation being proposed here in Indiana came to my attention, via the NCSE. First, here’s the news item: CREATIONIST LEGISLATION IN INDIANA Senate Bill 89, prefiled in the Indiana Senate and referred to the Committee on... Read more
Apparently the forces of darkness are mounting an attack, this time on the Christian holiday of New Year’s Day, which commemorates and worshipfully celebrates the anniversary of the day on which a Romanian monk miscalculated the year in which our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ was born. In addition to the anticalendricals, it seems that the Chinese, Jews, and Muslims are all opting out and deciding to celebrate other days as their new year. More recently the ranks of these heathen... Read more
I finally got around to watching X-Men First Class, and found it not only an enjoyable superhero action movie and a satisfying prequel exploring the earlier lives of the X-Men, but also a challenging parable about the danger of history repeating itself when we most want to avoid it doing so In the first X-Men movie, we briefly got to see Magneto’s power manifesting itself for the first time as he desperately tried to stop the Nazis separating him from... Read more
This comes from Geoffrey Pearce by way of PZ Myers: I am regularly approached by young Earth creationists… If I have the time I try to engage them on the age of Earth, since Earth is something whose existence them and I agree upon. They will tell me that Earth is somewhere between 6,000 – 10,000 years old, and, when prompted, that the rest of the universe is the same age as well. I have taken the approach of responding... Read more
The key difference is that what the Doctor says is supposed to be funny. HT PZ Myers Read more
Paul-Louis Couchoud has something in common with other mythicists: he was not a historian. But Couchoud also has something in common with the kinds of mythicists that could, at one point, be taken seriously: he died more than half a century ago. He thus formulated his ideas and wrote about them before the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi codices transformed our understanding of phenomena such as early Judaism and ancient Gnosticism forever. So it is not surprising that... Read more
2011 saw the move of this blog to Patheos and the transfer of the archives of older posts from the blog’s old home on Blogger. A retrospective seems to be in order, as the end of my first (partial) year at Patheos draws near. I won’t list top 10s, but will instead mention a few highlights. The post with the most visits was by far the one that went viral recently, in which I shared a picture someone made of... Read more
IO9 shared depictions (created by Coran Stone, also known as Kizer180) of a grown-up Calvin and Hobbes having become action heroes, fighting against a Winnie the Pooh and Christopher Robin who have turned to evil. Why am I sharing this? Not because it has anything to do with this blog, but just because it is awesome. Read more
I finally got around to watching the movie Thor last night and early this morning, and I’m glad I did. Thor has always been an interesting character in the realm of comic book superheroes. Others were godlike or messianic in character, and the lines between sci-fi and the supernatural, always blurry even at the best of times, are regularly transgressed in comic books and graphic novels. But Thor, as an actual classic deity from a human culture, still stood out... Read more
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More Evidence that Creationists are Charlatans
Cdbren has been a persistent commenter on some threads about creationism here, insisting that creationists are not liars and denying his ignorance about science even when it has been blatant. While the ability to edit comments after the fact is useful both for correcting inadvertent mistakes and for covering up evidence of one’s major blunders, one should not be misled to think that evidence will not persist of one’s having edited a post or comment after the fact. A case... Read more