The War on New Year

Last updated on: December 30, 2011 at 11:30 am By James F. McGrath

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

X-Men First Class: Never Again, Ever Again

Last updated on: December 30, 2011 at 6:31 am By James F. McGrath

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

A Nice Argument for the Age of the Earth

Last updated on: December 29, 2011 at 10:22 pm By James F. McGrath

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

Pat Robertson vs. Doctor Who

Last updated on: December 29, 2011 at 2:12 pm By James F. McGrath

The key difference is that what the Doctor says is supposed to be funny. HT PZ Myers Read more

Neil Godfrey on Paul-Louis Couchoud

Last updated on: December 29, 2011 at 12:11 pm By James F. McGrath

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

More Evidence that Creationists are Charlatans

Last updated on: September 14, 2016 at 7:55 pm By James F. McGrath

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

Secret Agents Calvin and Hobbes

Last updated on: December 28, 2011 at 1:01 pm By James F. McGrath

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

Thor: A World Where Magic and Science are the Same

Last updated on: December 28, 2011 at 7:01 am By James F. McGrath

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

Doctor Who: The Rescue

Last updated on: December 27, 2011 at 11:01 am By James F. McGrath

The Doctor Who story “The Rescue” is a relatively short (two-part) but nevertheless powerful episode. With “The Dalek Invasion of Earth” having seen the departure of Susan, “The Rescue” introduces a new young girl to fill the function she did, namely providing a relatively young person’s perspective and involvement in the action. In fact, it was precisely because Susan was growing up and had matured into a woman that she was left behind. The question of whether Doctor Who is... Read more

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