The loons, cranks, and haters were a bit thin on the ground this week, although there were quite a few wonky comments not amusing enough to reproduce here.
Here are four readers whose comments we won’t be seeing again. As always, the poor grammar and misspelling are from the originals and are not mistakes in transcription.
Reader SDs tried to comment on “NPR says science has a faith problem“:
Science doesn’t have a faith problem but you atheists certainly do. You atheists place faith in Richard Carrier’s book about Jesus, thinking that his conspiracy about Jesus not existing is somehow is true and overrides the fact that 8 contemporary historians of Jesus mentioned him as a real person.
The worst part is when atheists in the comment section of this very site start saying Jesus is inspired by Pagan myths (that they didn’t bother to research) and that his name comes from Zeus (even though his Hebrew name translates to Jesus from Greek in English spelling and means “God is salvation” really).
Perhaps worst of all, you atheists think evolution refutes God when it doesn’t and you have blind faith that everything a few scientists say (specifically the atheist scientists, you probably reject any research from scientists like Francis Collins or Freeman Dyson because they’re Christians) is somehow true even if what they’re saying is founded upon their own evidenceless speculations.
This site is a joke, your atheism is a joke and you should feel bad.
Well, I have my doubts about those “8 contemporary historians,” but never mind. He/she clearly has a Jones for Jesus, and is deeply misguided about science. Really, we reject research from Francis Collins and Freeman Dyson? The last time I looked, the data from the Human Genome Project was universally accepted by geneticists. Oh, and there’s that little misunderstanding about the vernacular versus the religious uses of the word “faith”. . .
*******
Two readers commented on “More creationist shenanigans at Georgia Southern University,” about history professor Emerson McMullen’s pathetic attempts to inculcate his students with creationism and religion. The first comes from reader Joe Heinz
I have Dr. McMullen right now and I have not had any issues with him doing any of this. If he was teaching his Buddhist or Muslim faith nobody would give a shit. But since he is teaching something related to the christain bible everyone losses their minds. Find something better to do peoe.
Heinz is kidding: if McMullen were teaching Buddhism and Islam in the guise of science, he and the religious people at Georgia Southern would be the first to scream about it. And I would have just as much a problem with that as with Christianity. After all, one of the “textbooks” used by Eric Hedin at Ball State was by a Jew, and pushed Jewish dogma as “science.”
*******
And another from reader “Jim”:
Another example of all you scared cat evolutionists afraid of one dude.
But when pz Meyer doesn’t take vacation and takes his students to the ken ham world that’s an ok use of taxpayer dollars.
I have no idea where the money came from for Meyer’s Creation Museum trip, but it would be justifiable as an expense merely to show students what “the other side” has to say, which would provide fodder for post-visit discusion. After all, the students weren’t allowed to criticize the exhibits during their visit to “ken ham world.” And Meyer wasn’t pushing atheism on that trip, so far as I know: he was trying to expose students to bad science.
*******
Reader “MetaBullshit” commented on “Read the rules”
Why are you so mad about people who are just trolling? Don’t you realize you will just cause more trolling if you complain about it? Also, why does a professor in his 60’s have a childish Reddit-tier sense of humor (as evidenced by calling his blog’s rules “Da Roolz”) and spend so much time posting cat pictures and anti-religious rants that sound like they were written by a child who just found out about atheism?
I’m sure this post won’t be visible to anyone besides you Jerry but I think it should give you food for thought and help you re-evaluate your life.
Oh noes! I have to re-evaluate my life! Naaah, I’ll just post more cats and eat some pie. I love it when trolls like this try to tell me how to run my site, but, sadly, it never works. And MetaBullshit is wrong: this post is now visible to everyone.
There are people with issues and they need help. Since when was it wrong for old professors to have cats or post them?
“I have no idea where the money came from for Meyer’s Creation Museum trip . . .” The trip was organized by a secular student organization that was having a get-together in Cincinnati, and Myers was a speaker. It was a for them to go there as it was so close. Others, even old farts like me, also joined in. I did so only because of the group rate. I had a hard time deciding if to go or not because I didn’t want to give them money.
I find it faintly amusing that creationists have decided to (near enough) _always_ misspell PZ’s name.
Is it supposed to make the reader more profoundly certain in his/her assumption that creationists have studied their sources, whether religious baloney or scientific critics?
But why would Coyne repeat the misspelling, twice? I don’t get it, if it’s a joke.
You should of spelled it “Coin” . . .
This is absolutely hilarious, both the bollocks in those hate comments and your replies to them, especially the last one. Is that loony seriously expecting you to re-evaluate your life just because you don’t agree with his particular brand of hateful nonsense? Flabbergasting. Thanks for sharing this, it has made my day.
You should feature another dedicated post called Da Foolz.
Or, keeping with biology: “Christaceans”
That term would do in a pinch. An impervious defense, often found crawling backwards, spoiling for a grub … well, easily spoiling and spoiled (special privilege of religious offense) in general.
… and they’d still not be able to spell it properly. (Since it’s a neologism to you, your spelling above is definitive. Unless you can cite a previous use.)
Would an old “Christacean” become a C-hrist-rustacean?
If you took a lot of “Christaceans,” put them into a Noachian ark, which inevitably sank, would any of them be able to evolve into “C-hrist-etaceans”?
These are all drop outs from some society, I’m sure but the one that really gets me is “Jim” with his cat evolutionists comment. Does that mean he does not like cats as well? Maybe a dog will bite him in the appropriate place.
“… drop outs from some society… ”
Yes, rational society.
But they have a value giving me a laugh as I lie in bed late on a Sunday morning (in NZ).
I noticed an interesting symmetry (must be god) in that the first note’s ending is remarkable while the last note’s beginning is the interesting part.
In the first note, I love how it ends with the final assertion: “This site is a joke, your atheism is a joke and you should feel bad.” I can’t feel bad because my jokes are making me laugh so hard, but I think “you should feel bad” is at the heart of what a lot of believers want for atheists. That last sentence is the most true part of all the assertions made in the whole piece.
The last note’s starting is interesting: “Why are you so mad about people who are just trolling?” What is so benign about trolling that it deserves a qualifier, “just”? Trolling, in its most benign form, pushes away people with intelligent things to say, thereby stifling good conversation while in its most deadly form, exposes others to harm through doxing, threats, and defamation. It’s a shame people don’t seem to recognize how pernicious trolling is – no one would accept that behaviour in meat world.
Except that many of those same people insist that you accept their behavior in the real world: “Why are you so upset, we were just teasing you? We tease you because we like you!”
When people “punch down” it is never made better by claiming that they are doing it because “they like you”….but too many people seem to think that it does (or should in your particular case: “you should be a better sport, then people will like you more”).
Not that I have issues or anything.
When I was in 6th grade (American, 11 years old) another student punched me in the stomach, and when he saw that I was trying to get a teacher’s attention, said “just kidding around”. Oh, ok. Well in that case…
Exactly what I thought. These kind of people think it’s not bullies who are the problem, but their victims for being the target.
In many ways that’s what religion is about – making you feel guilty for some natural thing they decide is a sin, then controlling you via their warped judgment.
They might but when you know who they are, they tend to behave a bit better since others will criticize them. They couldn’t, for example, threaten to rape you and announce they were going to do so to a large crowd without ramifications (like being reported to the police and potentially being charged). They, hiding behind aliases, seem to think that this is okay in the cyber realm however. Which of course, makes one wonder if there is a large part of society that would cause a lot of harm if they were not carefully watched. Having worked in public service jobs when I was younger, I tend to think, cynically, this is the case.
“Scared cat evolutionist” 🐱. I think we need T-shirts!!
MetaBullshit? MegaBullshit, I say. I think the sweetness of this site, and the congeniality of the commenters, an island of cheer in an Internet full of bad political news, pissy trolling and disappointing clickbait.
True. And, for MegaBullshit’s information (as I am sure he is reading this, trolls always want to see the reaction their snit-fits have had), Jerry’s readers find his so-called “childish Reddit-tier sense of humor” to be his charming individuality. As Dawkins said, his “idiosyncratic charm”.
This week I had a non-beef beef, I agree on Nye’s populism (but he is effective in scifi roles and as head of Planetary Society).
HTML fail, but at least obvious enough.
I’m sure it also includes Lucien, whose entire contribution was to say that those christians are such gullible fools that they will believe anything and lose their money to every conman who comes among them.
Isn’t it something how the fundamentals never change.
Lucian was born about 125 CE, so I don’t think even a Christian would call him, “contemporary”…though SDs could certainly be confused enough to include him in that list.
But he definitely describes Peregrinus as a Joe Smith character. We don’t have anything solid on what name Christians knew Peregrinus by, but we do know that such figures were the norm in early Christianity. Even Paul himself fits the mold, for we know that he’s the one who stole the Mithraic Eucharist of his hometown religion and turned it into the Last Supper. He showed not the slightest hesitation of making up stuff on the spot and attributing it to revelation from the Holy Spirit — doing away with circumcision and dietary laws would be another great example.
b&
Josephus was born 37 AD, so not contemporary. I suspect the “8 contemporary historians” were Mathew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul and the other authors of the NT. I won’t bother with the debunking which most all of us have seen numerous times.
“Naaah, I’ll just post more cats and eat some pie.”
Wisest words ever, including any supposedly uttered by Jesus.
Regarding SD: Freeman Dyson once did some great physics – you know, the kind supported by evidence. When he started producing absurd stuff (his take on climate change is pathetic – “polar bears like it warm!”) then scientists no longer took him seriously. It has nothing to do with being a Christian, as much as Christians love to nurse their persecution complexes.
Brian Josephson did some brilliant work on superconductors and won the Nobel prize for his efforts. Later he moved to crazy town. As his Wikipedia page puts it, he
…demonstrating that you don’t have to a Christian to be a loony tune. If your ideas are crazy (unsupported by evidence) you get laughed at, no matter how good your science was (or is), whether you’re a Christian or not.
It’s my understanding that Josephson is Jewish.
Brian… wasn’t he played by Graham Chapman in a movie?
SDs is technically right about one thing, evolution does not disprove God.
Theologians tell us lots of stories about lots of different gods. They tell us stories about how those gods supposedly created the universe, the Earth, and us humans. Evolution doesn’t touch on Inflation or planetary formation, but it disproves most of those God-did-it stories about how humans were created. The only stories that aren’t disproven are the stories that claim God invisibly and undetectably guided evolution to bring us… us. In other words, the stories that claim no discernible difference between purely natural methods and God-involved methods are not technically “disproven” by the evidence. (Occam’s Razor should be enough disproof at that point though.)
What really disproves God is all the contradictions in the stories about God.
I think you have managed to miss Jerry’s posts on how theistic evolution is still rejected creationism. They do insert magical mechanisms in a completely natural process. And so, yes, it means they are technically rejected.
What worked for Newton in the early days of science doesn’t work today when theories are complete descriptions of natural processes. I wonder when religious and accommodationist theologians will be wise to the problem?
It didn’t work very well for Newton when he was unable to come up with a scientific explanation for the stability of the Solar System and invoked god’s occasional intervention. Some 100 years later, Laplace showed using perturbation theory that there was no need of that hypothesis.
What really disproves God is the fact that there are so many of them. The ancient Egyptians alone had 2000 of them, I have heard.
Which proves that humans are predisposed to invent gods and other supernatural beings.
If you want to understand Religion, look at it from a psychological perspective.
I read that there are 36 000 variants of christianism, meaning they have as many magical agents where at least someone have a _hope_ to be factual or else that _all_ of them do not know what they talk about.
In either case, it spells doom for the idea that anyone can remain rationally skeptic and at the same time take religion and its, stated or unstated, claim to be anywhere close to fact seriously.
To be clear, with “complete” I don’t mean “completed”. Just that they preclude old style “gap” insertions.
Hmm, I missed all of the ‘food’ for thought in Metabullshit’s post. It must have been too meta for me to pick up.
I wonder why he/she/it wants Jerry to be 100% serious? And why would he/she/it want this site to be overrun with trolls? There is nothing more depressing that reading sub-literate diatribes. The daily news is already reminder enough of the stupidity of too many in the human race.
The reason that you missed the “food for thought” was not too much meta – quite the opposite.
I would appreciate if SDs (or anybody else) could identify a single contemporary account of Jesus, historian or otherwise.
The closest we have is Paul, who explicitly never met Jesus in the flesh (and who made explicit that his own visionary experiences of Jesus were just like all of everybody else’s experiences of him), and Paul wrote nary a jot nor tittle until long after the reign of Pilate — making his account explicitly not contemporary.
Everybody else wrote after Paul…and, indeed, it might even be the case that everybody else wrote after the Roman conquest of Jerusalem in 70 CE. Certainly everything else in the New Testament was written after that.
Regardless, I’ll bet a suitable beverage that SDs hasn’t actually read Richard’s book, and has only read the usual sorry apologetics attempting to excuse its conclusions. It’s basically not possible to read his book and still cling to the notion of the historicity of Jesus — at least, not if you’ve got any sort of intellectual integrity.
Cheers,
b&
We don’t even really know who Paul was either. Most of the letters supposedly written by him are forgeries, (pseudepigrapha to be more polite) and there is no extra-biblical evidence for his existence. To cite a possibly non-existent Paul as evidence for a probably non-existent Jesus is not very convincing unless you’re already convinced.
All true…but somebody wrote those letters, and it’s all but certain that person did so before anybody else wrote of Christianity and Jesus, and it’s basically guaranteed this person did before the Roman conquest of Judea in 70 CE. And, whatever his (almost certainly not her) parents named him, “Paul” is as good a name to use to refer to the author as any.
That it was a popular pen name is confusing. As you note, not all of the letters attributed to “Paul” in the New Testament were written by the same person.
And we can also be reasonably confident that the biography of “Paul” presented in Acts bears little or no semblance to the author of the letters. There might be a kernel of truth here and there, but at least most if not the overwhelming majority is unquestionably bullshit, and separating the two is basically impossible.
Also, unfortunately for Christians and Christianity, Paul’s Jesus was the same archangel Jesus / Joshua of Zechariah 6 who had subsequently been identified (explicitly by Philo and presumably by others) with the Pagan Logos. Not once is he identified as anything other than a divine theological entity.
b&
Reevaluate your life?
Wow, that is…well, I’m not even sure where that comes from, really. Probably some ego-driven arrogance in there.
But, hey! Look at it this way: you’ve achieved that level of publicity (celebrity?) at which perfect strangers have this totally confected conception of what you should be like.
Look, I “reevaluate my life” every day. I get up and the first thing is coffee or back to bed.
I consider the consumption of caffeine part of my daily hygiene/grooming routine. It would not be polite at all for me to subject my un-caffeinated self to, well, anybody.
That, Sir, is why my other option is to go back to bed.
I prefer a nice buttery croissant with a smear of apricot preserves and Devonshire clotted cream with strong hot tea.
Mmmm, buttery croissants and apricot jam;-)
Years ago I stayed alone at a cheap hotel in Paris, having left my travelling companion a few days before. They only had double rooms, which were comprised of a barely wider than twin bed in a tiny room (and bathroom down the hall) I had to pay the price for two, and the only silver lining was that I got two helpings of croissant and jam in the mornings, as well as two cups of really rich hot chocolate. (also got bitten by bed bugs;-( The concierge saying, No, Madame, nous n’avons pas de punaises (same word as thumb tack, fyi)…I survived, and they did not travel on with me.
I attended (along with several hundred other atheists) the SSA-organized trip with PZ Myers to the AiG Creation “Museum” on August 7, 2009, and I paid my own admission fee as did all the other people whom I know that attended, and as far as I know nobody else’s admission in our large group (participants from multiple states and Canada) to the “museum” was paid for by Tax-collected money.
Thanks! I love your site!
🐾
I would really like to see the names of those supposed contemporaneous historians who testified to Jesus activities. I have never heard of them regardless of having read widely on the subject. I suspect the writer pulled them straight out of his nether regions.
//
Sorry that you get posts from people like MetaBullshit. My, ll this talk about how you run *your* life. Wonder what he’s done with his? I suspect not much…
More CATS! More PIE!
get your spelling right: moar cats, moar pie – lol