stcynic

The DI loves to put out lists of scientists who "dissent from Darwinism". Because such lists make no actual arguments, they are pure appeals to authority. That authority is often misplaced, of course, since a large percentage of those on the list have no more training in the relevant fields (fields…

You've gotta love this kind of pointless snarkiness. It comes from David Limbaugh (yes, Rush's brother) and it's the perfect combination of smugness and stupidity: I suppose it's a matter of one's perspective, but it sure seems to me that if there is any special interest group aggressively pushing…

A beautiful quote from John McCain during the 2000 election, when he was trying hard to distinguish himself as the moderate candidate in relation to Bush: "Neither party should be defined by pandering to the outer reaches of American politics and the agents of intolerance, whether they be Louis…

We just posted to the Panda's Thumb a letter written by Kevin Padian responding to Dembski's faux apology for his slanderous and false accusations toward him. I think you'll all agree that Padian is quite a reasonable man who is handling Dembski and DaveScot's attacks with far more grace and…

Rich Hughes sent along a diagram of Dembski's explanatory filter. It won't fit on my screen, but PZ Myers redid it and posted it to his blog as well. It's hysterical. Click here.

Are you confused over all the different types of Christian groups there are out there? It's easy to lose track of them all. Your eyes can glaze over trying to distinguish between fundamentalists and evangelicals, and don't even get me started on the difference between infralapsarian Calvinists and…

When the NSA's program to build a database of every phone call made in America was revealed the other day, I mentioned one obvious way that it could be misused, by providing blackmail material for political enemies. If they have evidence that a candidate or legislator called, for example, a phone…

I'm finding great amusement lately in the fevered and over the top reaction of many conservative Christians to the Da Vinci Code movie coming out. It's like watching the Islamic reaction to The Satanic Verses, only without the death threats (so far). Folks: it's a novel. A book of fiction. It's…

Indian Cowboy left a comment on a thread below and I'm moving it up here so it doesn't get lost. It was in response to some of the conservative catchphrases that I and others came up with for the refrigerator magnet game. In particular, he seems to be responding to two catchphrases I pointed out, "…

Gene Healy, writing at the Cato blog, has an important message for all those alleged conservatives cheering on Bush's vast expansion of Presidential power. Commenting on a new book from John Podhoretz called Can She Be Stopped? Hillary Clinton Will Be the Next President of the United States Unless…

Few have heard of tiny Patrick Henry College, but it has become quite prominent among the religious right. Despite its size, it seems to be a feeder system to a wide range of internships and jobs in DC, at the White House, on Capitol Hill and in thinktanks. Think of it as a politically connected…

I mentioned in a recent post that I thought a writer on an Alan Keyes-related website must be using a refrigerator magnet game with a bunch of conservative catchphrases just jumbled together randomly. A commenter thinks that would make a fun game and I think so too. So all we need is a list of…

This cracks me up. I regularly look at the Agape Press website for ideas on things I might wanna write about involving church and state or ID. But I had to laugh when I read this (scroll to the bottom): One expert says Islam's worldview is making massive inroads in Europe and could do the same in…

ESPN is reporting that New York Knicks owner James Dolan is going to buy out the last 4 years of Larry Brown's contract ($40 million left on it, so you gotta figure it's gonna cost half that to buy it out) and that he is then going to name Isiah Thomas as coach. I'm almost giddy with anticipation…

Some of you who watch Dembski's blog may have read his false accusations aimed at Kevin Padian over the last couple weeks. As it turns out, the whole thing was nonsense. Someone sent him an email about a paleontologist from Berkeley who allegedly singled out a church in the area that is…

One of the things I've noticed over the last couple years is that there is large collection of conservative webpages that tend to print columns by the same mostly unknown writers - Vincent Fiore, Robert Meyer, Jim Kouri, Joseph Grant Swank and many others. You can find them all over the web on…

Remember the case a few weeks ago of a professor at Northern Kentucky University leading a group of students in destroying an anti-abortion display on the campus? There are new developments. The district attorney has given the six students involved in the case a plea bargain and they've apparently…

I had a couple people email me this article from the Sacramento Bee about Phillip Johnson, the founder of the ID movement. One thing that jumped out at me about it was this statement: Johnson said his intent never was to use public school education as the forum for his ideas. In fact, he said he…

Some of you may remember a few months back my post about Larry Darby, former head of the Atheist Law Center who is now running for attorney general in Alabama. Eugene Volokh and I both wrote posts outing Darby as the total nutball that he is after a series of bizarre posts he made to the…

Some of my readers may be aware of the ongoing legal controversy over a 29 foot cross in San Diego that was erected as a memorial to Korean War veterans in 1954. The legal battle has raged for 17 years, when Phillip Paulson first filed an establishment clause suit to have the cross removed. A…

Kevin Shapiro, a neuroscientist from Harvard, has an interesting op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal about ID and the neo-conservatives that is very much worth reading. And by neo-conservative, he doesn't mean the casual, everyday political slur (where "neo-con" has become as much an empty…

Pim Van Meurs has an excellent post at the Panda's Thumb that looks at Dembski's design inference and why it is really nothing more than a "god of the gaps" argument, contrary to the common claims of ID proponents that there is a positive way to detect design: Okay, let's start with how ID tries to…

Rhetorical bombs thrown at courts and judges are a common theme on the right and have been for quite some time. Any judge who rules against them is branded an "activist judge" seeking to impose "judicial tyranny". We hear constant screeds against "unelected judges" who "subvert the will of the…

I know, I know. Saying that Pat Robertson said something stupid is like saying President Bush mangled a word or Paris Hilton is on a magazine cover - you could write that headline pretty much every day. But since it involves a group I support, I thought I'd report it anyway. On the 700 Club,…

Jesse Walker has an essay at Reason that absolutely nails the emergence of political correctness on the right. It's titled Right-Wing P.C.: How conservatives learned to stop worrying and love political correctness. After long denouncing the sort of shallow identity politics so common on the left,…

I've written several times in the past about the homophobe lobby and Ford. They've been urging a boycott of Ford because - gasp! - they advertise and sell cars to gay people. Apparently gays are supposed to walk everywhere, or hitch rides with the Amish in their buggies. But their latest attack on…

USA Today reports on a massive NSA database of every single phone call made in the United States, compiled with the help of the three largest telecom companies. The National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by…

This guy just does not give up. In his latest, he completely ignores the substance of my response, pretending that it didn't exist. But he does throw in this one bit of stupidity: Ed also had this little gem: "I'm not against the government mandating that evolution be taught as a theory in schools…

Tim Sandefur has posted a reply to Francisco's post about Dover and mootness over at the Panda's Thumb. Well worth reading.

When it comes to the relationship of evolution to atheism, there are basically two positions from evolution supporters. There is the Dawkins/Dennett position that evolution provides strong support for atheism, that it renders theism useless, and so forth. And there are people like me, Wesley…