Comic: Evolution Debate

This comic encapsulates the dishonesty of creationists so well.

From UC Berkeley

Dissecting Some JW Literature

Some Jehovah's Witnesses stopped by my house a few days ago, and gave me a little pamphlet that says "All Suffering SOON TO END".

Here's a quote.

"At some time in your life, you have likely asked, 'Why all the suffering?'...Will all of this ever end? ... The comforting answer is yes"

The correct answer is no. At least not until either our sun explodes or the universe suffers heat-death.

I'm taking them out of context, but I really don't care. This piece of literature is just one giant faulty premise. Lets start from the beginning - the claim that suffering (and death) began when Adam and Eve sinned. This is slightly problematic, considering that A) Adam and Eve never existed in the first place, and B) 99% of all animals that lived before humans are extinct. This means that there was a whole lot of suffering and death. Every time they make a claim, they just quote something from the Bible, which is probably out of context (they're really good at that). There isn't a single claim on this paper that is grounded in anything that could be considered rational, sane or factual. It's all based on faith and misunderstandings of their own holy book.


TheGoodAtheist wrote in a recent post (talking about religious people) “They have it easy: they can make an infinite amount of baseless claims, and we’re seen as the bad guys for calling them on their bullshit.”

Exactly.

Funniest Video Ever

The Origin of Life Made Easy

I just watched this video and had to post it here, it's an excellent, concise explanation of current scientific theory regarding the origin of life.

Religious Privilege

Am I missing something? Some religious people seem to think that their belief systems should have a privileged status in society and I can't think of a single reason why. In light of the recent fiasco with the Florida preacher wanting to burn Qurans on September 11th, many Muslims were outraged that this might happen, and are now pressing the UN to make "all forms of offense against religions" illegal.  Others are calling for the preacher to be arrested and his church permanently shut down. Now I don't agree with his reasons for burning the Quran, but do I care that he's doing it? No, and why should I? The Quran is absolutely meaningless to me. It's a piece of literature from another culture that I haven't read and don't really ever plan on reading it. I can understand why Muslims would be upset by this, but to have the man arrested, and make free speech a crime? Grow some balls.
On a similar note, an Australian University lawyer's job is in danger, as some people took offense to his smoking of the bible and Quran. He didn't hurt anyone or damage anyone else's property so what's the fuss about? Religions have been shitting on everyone else's front doorsteps for millennia, and now that some individuals are deciding that enough is enough, the religious are screaming bloody murder. I challenge every single person out there reading this, to try and think of one single reason why religious belief deserves to be exempt from criticism. On top of that, I cannot think of any reason why anyone should have the right to not be offended, and why should causing offense be illegal?

I would never demand that people respect my individual values and beliefs, only that people respect my right to hold them. I would never demand that someone be jailed for desecrating something of great importance to me (like reason itself). In fact, every day I am encountered by desecrations of reason, they're called creationists. I find their sheer stupidity quite offensive, as they reflect badly on the competence of the human race. However, I am all for their right to believe whatever anti-intellectual vomit they want to believe in, as long as I have the right to be able to criticize them for believing it.

Parasites and Creationism

I signed up for the Creation Ministries International email newsletter the other day, so I'll be checking out their latest and greatest arguments for a young earth all the time.
In the first email I received from them, the main article they linked to was about parasites and how they fit into creationism. I'll just go through this article and see what I can find.

Firstly they talk about how the flatworms of the genus Schistosoma have "a bizarre and complex life-cycle which defies an evolutionary explanation." So straight away we have an argument from incredulity.. Uhh I meant to say argument from complexity. They are basically saying "Look how complicated it all is! GOD DID IT!" which is quite frankly an awful argument. They can't conceive of an evolutionary mechanism, therefore in their mind, creationism automatically wins. Sorry, that isn't the way science works.

Their next play was predictable, they assert that "The straightforward, biblical answer is that these evils did not exist in the original creation." Parasites (and all other bad creatures) apparently didn't exist until after Adam and Steve sinned. With this argument they take aim at other Christians and theistic evolutionists who "accept the secular belief in millions of years", saying that since death and disease and parasites exist before sin in this view of the world, that Young Earth Creationism must be right! Oh boy, I've really picked a great article to pee on haven't I?

Next is the explanation for the origin of parasites, and it is comedic gold. I'm just going to quote them. My comments are in red, bold and underlined square brackets.

"Parasites must have been benign and beneficial in their original form. ... But when Adam and Eve sinned [HAH!], things began to go wrong. These once-harmless creatures degenerated [evolved?], and became parasitic and harmful ...

Perhaps some became parasitic as a result of mutations [evolved?]...

Other kinds of genetic change may have been involved too [evolution?]. For example, microbes can swap genes  [and evolve?]...

In many cases, however, the life-cycle of the parasite is so complex that new genetic information may have been needed [evolved?]. Mutations do not provide new genetic information [WRONG]; so the information may have been there from the beginning. However, it was in a ‘switched off’ mode before the Fall [HAH!], and was not ‘switched on’ until after the Fall. God could have included this genetic information because of his foreknowledge that Adam and Eve would disobey him. "

They're so clever that they're committing post hoc fallacies with events that never happened.

Finally, they mention Noah's Ark, and try to explain the existence of parasites in the context of it. They propose the typical creationist hyper-evolution post-flood. All parasites in their mind have evolved from a few different parasites into the millions of species of parasitic organisms we have today, in just 4000 years. It blows my mind how much cognitive dissonance there is in the mind of a Young Earth Creationist.

Gotta Give AiG Some Credit For This

I just logged into the Answers in Genesis website to see what nonsense they were peddling today and I came across this article about the creationist argument 'If humans evolved from apes, why are there still apes today'. To my surprise, AiG actually did a good job of explaining why this is a retarded argument, and why creationists should not use it.

Then I went back to their homepage and saw something about their creation 'museum' and I was suddenly brought back to reality. I can't really give them much credit for debunking something a child can understand (and probably debunk just as well).

Why Biblical Literalism is Wrong Part 5: New Testament

The Old Testament isn't alone with its errors, the New Testament has a fair share too. Though most of them are related to illnesses being caused by sin or by demons. Here is a short list of some of them.

Herod killed all young boys under 2, yet it is not mentioned by any historians, Josephus who wrote in great detail about Herod doesn't even mention it. Mat. 2:16
The devil shows Jesus the whole world from a mountaintop.. Flat earth? Mat. 4:8
If you have enough faith you never get sick. Mat. 9:22
The inability to speak is caused by demon-possession Mat. 9:32-33
Illness is caused by unclean spirits Mat. 10:1
Mustard seeds are not the smallest, and they do not grow into the greatest of all trees. Mat. 13:31-32
Jesus thought Noah's flood was an actual event Mat. 24:37
Jesus taught that Adam and Eve were there at the beginning of creation, though this is emphatically untrue. Mark 10:6
Epilepsy is caused by demon possession Luk 9:39
Angels cure disease John 5:4
Being crippled is a punishment for sin John 5:14
A blind man is cured by washing in a pool. John 9:7
Paul is bitten by a poisonous snake in Malta, yet there are no snakes on Malta or any evidence that there ever were. Acts 28:3-8
God is self-evident. Sorry, I don't see him. Rom 1:20
Only dead seeds germinate? Sorry Paul you're wrong. 1 Cor 15:36
Paul believed the creation myth 2 Cor 11:3, 1 Tim 2:13
Storms and droughts are caused by Satan Eph 2:2
The earth doesn't move, because it is set on a foundation. Heb 1:10 (geocentricism fail)
All beasts, birds serpents and sea creatures have been tamed by humans. James 3:7
All illness is curable by prayer. James 5:14-15
Author of 2 Peter believed the flood story 2 Pet. 2:4-5

There's a whole lot more in revelation, but anyone with 1/2 a brain knows that it is apocalyptic literature, and none of it is meant to be taken literally.

This series has the potential to carry on for a long time, but I've run out of categories to post about. I think I have made a fairly strong case for why the bible is not literally true, regardless of whether it is intended to be interpreted as such or not. In retrospect, I think I haven't really made a case for why Biblical Literalism is wrong as a theological approach, but rather argued for why I think that it is not correct. In summary, as a collection of texts, the Bible can not be taken as literal truth so long as it contains: Creation myths, contradictions, scientific errors, historical errors and anachronisms.

The Bible is not literally true, if anyone thinks they can give a reason why they think it is I would love to hear it.

Part 4: Errors
Part 3: Genesis
Part 2: Contradictions
Part 1: Creation Myths

Running With The Devil

The other day I was driving home from University, and when I pulled onto the motorway, I saw some enormous words on the back window of the vehicle in front of me in the other lane. The words were "JESUS LOVES YOU", I chuckled to myself at how silly I find that sentence and then stopped thinking about it. No more than 10 seconds later, a new song started playing on the radio, lo and behold it was Van Halen's 'Running With The Devil'. Now as you can imagine, I was quite pleased at the situation I found myself in. Driving alongside a vehicle with "JESUS LOVES YOU" on the back while I'm listening to 'Running With The Devil'. I couldn't resist head-banging, pulling the metal (devil) horns and poking my tongue out à la Gene Simmons at the people in the Jesus car.

Best coincidence ever.

Why Biblical Literalism is Wrong Part 4: Errors

The Old Testament contains a lot of extremely un-scientific and un-true statements, which is odd for a book that is supposed to be literally true and infallible. As I said in the previous instalment the bible was written by uneducated (by today's standards) men, so we really get what we should expect. I would not expect to see anything that is scientifically sound in 2000-3000 year old writings. Here is a short list of some errors to demonstrate my point.

-The Israelites took 40 years to make a journey that would have taken less than two weeks to walk. Exo 16:35
-Disabled people are made that way by god. Exo 4:11
-There are four-legged fowls Lev 11:20
-Bats are birds Lev 11:13
-The Israelites went from a total population of 70 to a few million in only a few generations. Num 1:45-46
-Leprosy is caused by the wrath of god or the malice of Satan Num 12:10
-There were giants that were 14 feet tall Deut 3:11 (Yet somehow not a single skeleton has ever been found)
-Joshua destroyed Jericho before it even existed, and said that whoever rebuilt it would be cursed. Too bad that it still exists today. Josh 6:26
-Joshua destroys the city of Ai, but it was already an abandoned city centuries before this supposedly happened. Josh 8
-The stars helped people in battle. Judg 5:20
-The sun goes around the earth Judg 5:31
-The earth rests upon pillars 1 Sam 2:8
-God is the cause of thunder and rain 1 Sam 12:18
-God is the cause of earthquakes 1 Sam 14:15
-Earthquakes can be caused by people singing and shouting loudly 1 Kings 1:39-40
-Pi =3 1 Kings 7:23
-Droughts are a punishment for sin. 1 Kings 8:35

I think that's plenty. There are hundreds more, I didn't even go through comprehensively, and didn't even get through half the Old Testament. It goes without saying that a book that is 'literally true' and infallible would not contain egregious errors of this kind. Some are no doubt metaphorical (or are they?) like the verses mentioning that the earth rests upon pillars, or that there are four corners to the earth. It seems like the others actually mean what they say they do, that Joshua destroyed cities that didn't exist and that bats are birds.

Part 5: New Testament
Part 3: Genesis
Part 2: Contradictions
Part 1: Creation Myths

Friday Fundies

Today's Friday Fundies quote will be from the Channel description from the youtube page of user 'SAUNDERSacts2618'. I came across this user because he went street-preaching with another user called TheWoodsofJordan. Jordan used to be an extreme fundamentalist Christian, who used to make videos about hellfire and so on. Anyway, a while back, Jordan left the church and became an agnostic-atheist. About a week ago, Jordan decided to get baptised into the Mormon Church, and he sold all his Metal CD's to buy church clothes. He's already left the Mormon church and is hanging out with this extremist fundie SAUNDERSacts2618.

Jordan, if you read this, which I don't think you will. I'm trying my best not to put you in the same box that you started out in, but hanging out with this guy really doesn't look good. I wish you all the best.

Here's the quote.. It speaks for itself, and all the spelling mistakes and all-caps are from the original formatting.

Jesus is God! Every knee will bow and confess Jesus is Lord!!!!
If you become a friend i will pray for you daily!also i ask that you would pray for me!Also lets keep winning souls to The True God Our Lord and Saviour Jesus.All Glory to our Father!! Praise the Lord!! Please subscribe!

EVIL RELIGIONS TO STAY AWAY FROM
ISLAM
WICCA,WICCAN,WITCHCRAFT
MORMONS
JEHOVAH WITTNESSES
SCIENTOLOGY
ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH
EVOLUTION
SATANISM
ATHEIST'S
BUDDHISM
SEVENTH DAY ADVENTISTS
DEISTS
PAGANS
ONENESS PENTACOSTALS
HINDUISM
CHRISTIAN SCIENCE
EASTERN ORTHODOX CHURCHES
ORIENTAL ORTHODOX CHURCHES
ZOROASTRIANISM
GNOSTICISM
MASONS




" Jesus said,I AM the WAY,the TRUTH,the LIFE,no man comes to the FATHER but through Me.

I'm a five point calvinist.
I'm pretib rapture.
I believe all the Gifts of the Holy Spirit


Atheism:
In the beginning there was nothing, and nothing happened to nothing, until nothing exploded, and created everything. Then, the nothing that became everything magically rearranged itself for no reason into self-replicating complex life forms, that became intelligent beings that believed in God. Makes perfect sense. LOL.

Why Biblical Literalism is Wrong Part 3: Genesis

Now this is quite possibly the easiest way to show that the Bible is not literally true and thus not infallible, since it was written in the pre-scientific era by humans who had no knowledge about biology, astronomy, advanced mathematics and whose method of recording historical events was extremely poor. Statements of 'facts' whether historical or scientific are one of the many problems with biblical literalism.

I already addressed the fact that the Genesis creation accounts are part of the genre of Creation Myth's, and by definition should not be taken literally, but let's take a second look at them from a scientific standpoint.

-The earth is created before the stars?
-Light is separated from darkness, but we still have no stars?
-There is a solid object called a firmament between 'heaven' and earth that separates the higher waters from lower waters?
-Plants are made before the sun? photosynthesis fail.
-God places the sun and stars in the previously mentioned solid object called the firmament?
-The moon is a light source?
-All animals were herbivores?
-The entire creation takes six days? The universe is 13.7 billion years passed the big bang, new stars and planets are constantly coming in and out of existence.
-Humans weren't created from the dust, but evolved over a long period of time.
-Adam went and named all the animals? That must have taken a while since there are hundreds of millions of species currently alive, not to mention all the ones that have gone extinct since the origin of life(which Adam was supposed to have been very close to) .
-Woman was created from the rib of man? Actually, men and women evolved together over millions of years..

I'll stop there, because there are about 40 more factual errors in the rest of genesis following the creation myth, including Noah's Flood, 970 year old humans, and historical errors, such as the assertion that the Philistines were in the land of Canaan around 800 years earlier than they actually were. It seems quite obvious that there is no way that Genesis is literally true at all, and it most certainly is not infallible, unless you define infallible as 'rife with errors'.

Part 5: New Testament
Part 4: Errors
Part 2: Contradictions
Part 1: Creation Myths

God is Superfluous Pierre-Simon Laplace quote

When doing my post a while back called 'God is Superfluous' I was searching around for this quote, and google wasn't helping me much because I had the wording wrong. Alas, I have found the quote that I was searching for. The quote comes from French Mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749-1827). Laplace was giving a copy of his work Mécanique Céleste (Celestial Mechanics) to Napoleon, who had been informed that it made no mention of god, and Napoleon asked Laplace "they tell me you have written this large book on the system of the universe, and have never even mentioned its Creator." and Laplace responded "I had no need of that hypothesis."

So it is with all of our natural models, they do not contain god in them, because they work perfectly well without the assumption of god.

Why Biblical Literalism is Wrong Part 2: Contradictions

I've done some posts on contradictions before, but there's no harm in covering the same ground more than once.

It doesn't take a genius to notice that the bible is full of internal discrepancies, differences in name, number, order etc. and some apologists have become moderately adept at trying to explain these away. For example when a passage in Numbers mentions that 24,000 died from a plague(in Moses' time), and the apostle Paul writes that 23,000 fell in a day from the plague, an apologist will say something flaky like "It is not contradictory that 23,000 should die in a day, and another 1000 die before or after" . While what they say is true, it isn't very convincing. The account in Numbers was not written by Moses, but rather much later, and then Paul is writing over a millennium later again. A better explanation of this contradiction would be that Paul was referring to the same passage from numbers, but his copy of the text had a different number written down than the text we have today.

In fact some contradictions addressed by the same apologist were ascribed simply to copyist error. For example 2 Sam 8:4 says that David took 700 horsemen, and 1 Chron 18:4 says that David took 7000 horsemen. If this apologist is able to realise that there are errors within the bible, even if they are potentially attributable to copyist error, then what on earth are the literalists thinking? The origin of the contradictions is not important because the fact that they exist is enough to demonstrate that the bible is not literally true, and is most certainly not infallible or inerrant. Are you really willing to believe that Joseph's father was Jacob, and Joseph's father was also Heli? Is it possible that the accounts mentioning how many men the chief captain of David's army killed are both literally true considering one account says it was 300 and the other account says 800? Certainly not.

In order for anything to be inerrant, infallible or literally true, these kinds of contradictions would have to be completely absent. Far from being free of contradictions, the Bible (both new and old testaments) is filled with them. Apologists have conceived of ways to explain many of them away, but most are utterly unconvincing, and others require some amazing feats of mental gymnastics to avoid some serious cases of cognitive dissonance. 
"Genesis 1 says that God created them both, and that He did it on the sixth day. It does not say that He created them at the exact same moment. He created Adam first, then created Eve from his rib later the same day. Not a contradiction."
Not only did this aspiring apologist take the verses out of context when he quoted them and misunderstands the creation myth (because he's an ignorant biblical literalist), he also doesn't appear to be familiar with the plot of Genesis 2. God created Adam, then realises that Adam is lonely and has no companions, so he creates all the animals, which Adam then proceeds to name. God then created Eve out of Adams rib to be his companion because he apparently didn't have the foresight to realise that he'd created a sexual being, who required another member of the same species (and opposite sex) to reproduce. Unless Adam was Superman, The Flash and a hyper-genius all rolled into one, I highly doubt that all of those events could have happened in the same day. There are literally billions of species if you count all of the ones that went extinct hundreds of millions of years before homo sapiens existed. Oh wait, I just remembered something, Genesis is a creation myth from a culture that knew nothing about science, no wonder it doesn't make any sense as a literal story.....

By now it should be quite glaringly obvious that being a biblical literalist requires some very serious mental deficiencies.

A list of 1512 contradictions by book.


Part 5: New Testament
Part 4: Errors
Part 3: Genesis
Part 1: Creation Myths

Ken Ham has a Vacuum for a Brain

What really angers me about Ken Ham and his ilk is that very frequently they target their misinformation at children, for example on the AiG website they have an entire section called kids answers. In this section of their website they take questions from children, (though I'm not even sure about that because Ken Ham has the integrity of a rat), and give them extremely fallacious creationist responses. This particular example is a child asking the question "Why are Stars Millions of Light Years Away?"

Ken Ham responds with an extremely childish answer,  something that I would expect to see in a parody like Monty Python. Anyway, in short his answer is that god created the light already reaching Earth. It is so moronic that I have difficulty finding words that describe precisely how stupid I think Ken Ham is. You know that when they're giving answers like this that they really have nothing intelligible to offer. It's about as viable of an answer as saying "God put the fossils there to test our faith" or "Junk DNA and vestigial organs were created to give the appearance of an evolutionary history" or "The sedimentary layers on earth just give an appearance of age, god created them 6,000 years ago" or "The igneous intrusions into sedimentary rocks that are used to radiometrically date many layers were created with partially decayed radioactive materials to give the illusion that they were laid down sequentially over billions of years". The only reason you don't see creationists spouting lines identical to these ones, is because they have other explanations for these phenomena, the problem is that their explanations are about as coherent as a 2 year old child's first attempt at artwork.

Why Biblical Literalism is Wrong Part 1: Creation Myths

Something that seems to plague conservative Christianity is the idea that the Bible is literally true, literally the word of god and that it is infallible. This becomes problematic from the very start of the bible with the Genesis creation myth. Besides the extremely basic distinctions between the "historical" texts, law texts, prophetic texts, gospels and epistles, biblical literalists don't seem to be able to grasp the more specific genres contained within certain books.
First off, with Genesis, the first few chapters belong to the genre of Creation myth. The Genesis story is not unique, original, or true in any sense and to interpret it as such shows an enormous misunderstanding of the genre. It isn't meant to be interpreted literally because creation myths were symbolic narratives that described how the known world came to be, not scientifically accurate accounts of actual events. They developed in the same way most folklore does, by being passed down orally through many generations. Genesis was written down to preserve the cultural tradition of the Israelite creation myth. This is most likely the reason why there are two different accounts of the same basic story contained in Genesis. Chapter one and two give two divergent accounts of the same basic story, the events are in different orders, one contains details that the other doesn't and vice versa. The biblical creation story is a myth, nothing more, and we find parallels to it all throughout early human history, many of which predate the Israelites. If you want to understand the Genesis creation narrative, you interpret it within its cultural context, not take it as infallible, literal truth.

Anyway, here is a List of 46 Creation Myths if you're interested.

Part 5: New Testament
Part 4: Errors
Part 3: Genesis
Part 2: Contradictions

Apparently I Write Like a Happy Old Man

Hat tip to Blag Hag for the idea.

This nifty little website takes the text of a blog, and determines the approximate age, gender and demeanour of the writer by the style of writing.
So what does it say about me?

undeniably-atheist.blogspot.com is probably written by a male somewhere between 66-100 years old. The writing style is personal and happy most of the time.

Close but no cigar. Everything but the age is spot on, and I imagine that it picked me as an old man because of the words I use, sentence structure and so on. I'm pleased that it didn't pick me as a geriatric old woman.

Politicians Staging an Assault on Atheism

Well not quite.....

I just noticed two things in the blogs today.

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair spoke at a university to a conference of Christians and Muslims and said that they need to unite to fight a war against the "secularist agenda". Just what the hell is a secularist agenda? The only thing that comes to my mind is justice and freedom for all, regardless of race, religion, gender, preference or anything else. A war against secularism is a war against freedom. Tony Blair is an imbecile, and is morally vacuous.
Source

PZ Myers over at Pharyngula has a post about a recent speech of Obama's where he said "We are one nation under God. We may call that God different names, but we are one nation." Which is a shame, considering that in his inauguration speech he made a minor mention that non-believers were Americans too. It seems the U.S.A. will have to wait a while longer before they have a President that isn't simply a puppet to the faithful and decides to represent ALL of his citizens.
Source

I can't wait till the day when Politicians get their snouts out of religious excrement and when religions stop eating from the gargantuan trough that is tax-payers money.

Atheist Intelligence

I was linked this rather humorous article on the OkCupid blog. It was titled "The REAL 'Stuff White People Like'" and the majority of the article was concerned with taking the most common phrases on 500,000 profiles on their site and dividing up the people into their self-professed racial groups, and then seeing which phrases came up the most for each race/gender group. I found it funny because a lot of stereotypes were confirmed, and it was based simply on what people said about themselves.
But anyway, that's not what I wanted to talk about. At the very bottom of the article they had a section on literacy vs. religious belief. They used a program to analyse the reading/writing level of the text contained on each profile, and sorted the profiles by religious belief. You probably won't be surprised by the results.

Then they made another graph sorting each religious group (and non-religious) into 3 categories, 'not serious', 'somewhat serious' and 'very serious'. You probably won't be surprised by the results in that graph either.

As you can see, for all the religious groups but two, the 'somewhat serious' group were the dumbest, followed by the 'very serious'. In all the religious groups, the people who were least serious about their belief were the most intelligent in their group. That brings us to the agnostic and atheist groups. The results were flipped for atheists and agnostics, the more serious they were about their non-belief, the higher their literacy was.

Another VERY interesting result from these graphs was how the religions compared. No surprises that protestants were at the bottom of the heap, it's almost impossible to drag that number up no matter how many intelligent protestants there are. Protestants are more likely to be creationists and biblical literalists than Catholics, who didn't fare much better.

Please note: I'm not taking this as conclusive proof that Christianity rots your brain, I just find it incredibly interesting. The results speak for themselves, and most other major studies done in this area have found similar results.

Source

Debating a True-Believer™

Recently I was having a discussion on a Facebook group forum. It was an anti-vaccination group and I'd only gone there to look at some of the things they were saying, and what I saw amazed me. I had never seen such convoluted reasoning before in my life. People were giving anecdotes for why their particular belief was true, while simultaneously saying that they weren't basing their views off anecdotes. When pressed to give data supporting their position, they would go on a rant about how scientists are being paid off by big-pharmaceutical companies. When I would mention the fact that most medical scientists could earn a lot more money if they converted to alt-medicine, because people like them would buy any books they would write, they would have another anecdote about a scientist they know. When the nature of their argument was shown quite clearly to be circular, they would continue repeating the same things ad nauseum. Perhaps attempting to engage 'True Believers' is pointless......
What motivates me is that some of them are out there doing real harm to people, and perhaps if one person turns their back on medical quackery, then there might be one child who doesn't have to die in the hands of an incompetent homeopath

Apology for lack of posts

I'm sorry I haven't posted anything really in the last 2 weeks, but I promise I have a semi-decent excuse.

I was in a car accident, got busy looking for a new car.
My internet usage exceeded my data-cap and I've been slowed down to dialup speed and it depresses me to try and do the simplest of tasks. I'll be back up on full-speed shortly though and I'll try put out some thought provoking content.