God causes a Sumerian recession 17 Dec 2009 The Onion, as always, nails it… Members of the earth’s earliest known civilization, the Sumerians, looked on in shock and confusion some 6,000 years ago as God, the Lord Almighty, created Heaven and Earth. According to recently excavated clay tablets inscribed with cuneiform script, thousands of Sumerians—the first humans to establish systems of writing, agriculture, and government—were working on their sophisticated irrigation systems when the Father of All Creation reached down from the ether and blew the divine spirit of life into their thriving civilization. “I do not understand,” reads an ancient line of pictographs depicting the sun, the moon, water, and a Sumerian who appears to be scratching his head. “A booming voice is saying, ‘Let there be light,’ but there is already light. It is saying, ‘Let the earth bring forth grass,’ but I am already standing on grass.” “Everything is here already,” the pictograph continues. “We do not need more stars.” I bet this caused a major error in the local economy. Humor Religion
Accommodationism How to argue with silly thing believers 30 Jan 201420 Feb 2014 [Apologies this took a while; I’ve been rather sick] So, given all this [Why believers believe silly things, why they believe the particular silly things they do, and the developmental hypothesis of belief acquisition], how can you change a believer’s mind? It is tempting to say that you cannot, or… Read More
Humor Danger! Snark ascending! 30 May 200922 Jun 2018 Nicola McEldowney, who may or may not be related to a certain cartoonist, functions in a dialectic. Into the RSS reader she goes… Read More
Creationism and Intelligent Design Dembski can’t weasel out of this one 19 Mar 2009 Ian Musgrave has a brilliant post showing that Dembski’s revisiting of the old creationist canard that Dawkins’ 1984 Weasel program, designed to show that random variation and selective retention can “evolve” a target phrase, in this case Shakespeare’s “Methinks it is a weasel” (oops; I nearly had my own mutation… Read More
“And people over there fell for it completely!” The tablet went on to say. “What a bunch of tools.” “We had a bloke here who had a neat trick of appearing to turn water into wine. He couldn’t get there fast enough.” “I hear he did very well for a while . . .”