Chariots of Iron

Over on Panda’s Thumb they’ve got a great little write up on a Triassic fossil found in china. It is that of  Odontochelys, a clear mid-point between turtles and reptiles. The thing has reptile-like teeth and broad flat ribs as well as belly armor, but no shell on it’s back. Not quite a crocoduck, but a “lizurtle” (turtizard?, oh I like that, sounds like a pokemon… tutrizard! I choose you!) to be sure. I’ll be having Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron eating their hats now please.

Oh, this one’s originally posed by PZ Myers, so I’m sure you’ll find they information on pharyngula as well.

There is a nother nice write-up on Not Exactly Rocket Science.

Bill Donohue is at is again, over on the Catholic legue website is this little gem. It’s Donohue railing against the appointment of Melody Barnes as the Director of the Domestic Policy Council.  My favorite quote from the blurb is the following:

“A few years ago, when pro-life Catholic and evangelical judges were being summarily denied the right to serve on the federal bench, Barnes denied that bigotry was at play. To top it off, when asked to name people who are both pro-abortion and religious, she offered as proof the notoriously anti-Catholic group, Catholics for a Free Choice. Looks like Obama has chosen a ringer.”

Co the CFFC is now “anti-catholic”, sorry folks, Jews for Jesus is anti-jew, but the CFFC is definitley not “anti-catholic” in any way, the differ from the papal dictates on abortion and birth control. Appaerntly when a Catholic organaization admits that the reality of our modern world makes certain dogmatic declarations to be the inverse of just plain common sense then they’re stuffed into the same category as the KKK (now there’s an orgnization that can truly be called “anti-catholic”!) or the Penecostal “the catholic church is an apostate church” Faith. Sorry Billy-boy I just ain’t buying it. As a matter of fact I don’t buy any Abrahamic religious argments against abortion or birth-control. I am aghast that religious fundamentalists refer to a book that has been used to both support and condemn racism, slavery and the abuse of both women and children for any setting of public policy.

One of Kent Hovind’s more ridiculous claims in his creationist videos is that Earth is the sole repository of water in the universe. Aside from just being patently false (water is the second most common molecule in the universe right after H-H), scientists now have compelling evidence that aside form Earth and Jupiter’s Moon Europa that one of Saturn’s Moons, Enceladus, may have liquid water near it’s surface (let’s not forget all the ice that’s floating around the solar system as well).

I personally cannot wait until we have the technonlogy to get an unmanned space vehicle that can not only go and look, but either grab-and-analyze or bring the samples back to earth for further study. If you keep up with science news at all, and realize that this is just a hint of the full wonder of the universe I don’t see how you can be satisfied with a few hundred pages of “scripture” to provide you with an explanation.

A very depressing story form South Africa came to my attention this morning. Apprently former South African president Thabo Mbeki and his administration had adopted a fringe belief that AIDS is not caused by a virus. South Africa’s AIDs epidemic is one of the largest in the globe, but to deny that this disease not caused by an infection of some sort (and thus denying it’s communicability) is literally a death sentence for those under his administration.

The stance by Mbeki’s administration caused them to turn down free drugs and grants to help deal with the problem. Ignorance of science is by no means isolated to those with strong religious convictions, but such beliefs as held by the Mbeki administration do require similar leaps of logic.

You will hear me say this a lot in the blog, but religious belief is just another species of a much bigger problem and that is one of ideology over reality.

Apparently Ann Coulter’s Jaw has been wired shut.

Anyway to make this a permanent condition?

Another week, another stack of madness to sort through. We discuss United Nations folly, the atheist army that we have all been waiting for, billboard censorship, Christian Christmas trees and THE AWESOMEST SUNDAYSCHOOL TEACHER EVER. But wait, there’s more: “I was tricked into a church abortion freak show!” sometimes, the title is just better than anything that I can come up with. Tired of Mormon bigotry? Convert them to homosexuality!

Smack them Christians down! Damn, when did we become The Man?

Ever wonder if certain parts of the bible were just blatantly plagerized from somewhere else? Well, in short: probably! We chat about flood mythology, and no conversation about it is complete without a discussion of everyone’s favorite “buddy action flick,” Gilgamesh. Seriously, if anyone could kick Chuck Norris’s ass, it’s Gilgamesh. But I digress. Lamar and Eli smoothly pick apart abrahamic flood mythology. Joe asks stupid questions. Hilarity ensues.

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I found this interesting link over on Intelligent Design The Future, it’s a further link to an Amazon page for the book “Billions of Missing Links”. It is billed as a rational look at the mysteries science cannot explain, however I would never use the word “cannot” how about “has yet to explain”, this would be an accurate, however less sensationalist description.

It’s true science has yet to explain everything, and each discovery in turn raises more questions, this is how knowledge advances. The book essentially complains that each fossil we find creates more “missing links” it is apparent that the Intelligent Design crowd will never be satisfied unless every living thing on this earth has fossilized and we’ve uncovered all these non-existent fossils. They’ve completely bypassed any version of “reasonable” evidence and will use even the tiniest gap to shoehorn their views in. This is the “god of the gaps” argument taken to an irrational extreme.

The fact is that every fossil is transitional, evolution doesn’t stop (although evidence does show that it may slow down for periods of time), and every species is on it’s way to becoming an entirely new species guided by the forces of natural selection.

To take a quote from the post,  “Every “link” discovered brings many more questions (missing links) than answers”. Of course it does! This is how science works, each discovery leads to more questions which leads to more discoveries. This isn’t lik escripture where you write it down, close the book and it’s done. Knowledge is continously being uncovered, questions being answered which lead to new and better questions. If a discovery ended all questions than science would grind to a halt. We’d know all we could ever possibly want to know about the universe. Of course this is what the ID movement and it’s theist backers want. They want science to come to a halt, as we’ve entered a dawn of discovery that has already squeezed thier bronze-age myths into irrelevance.

Due to a recent decision by the UN, the atheist bloggers are in a bit of a stir. Pharyngula, of course, raised my attention to this article over on Ottawa Citizen. We covered this in the upcoming episode when the UN resolution was only being proposed… but now the damned thing has passed. Fortunately the resolution is non binding, but as the Canadian says it does provide international validity for governments imprisoning people for that heinous crime of blasphemy. I wonder if the American religious right will grab onto this?

This resoultion, even in its non-binding form is a major blow to freedom of speech and religion everywhere.

Blogging like a madman today, I wanted to point our readers to the latest On Faith column in The Washington Post. This one by CFI Chairman and Founder Paul Kurtz. He nicely summarizes just precisely how one can be moral without a religious foundation. As we plan out our future shows it’s a topic we intend to visit and revisit (hey, there’s a lot to it!).

Stealing a link from Panda’s Thumb, that no doubt any astute surfer of atheist blogs is bound to have already come across, I just feel I’ve got to comment on this one. Renowned mathematician Peter Olofsson has a great refutation of IDiot William Dembski’s mathematical arguments against evolution and points out the flaws in the thinking behind Dembski’s procesees.

It’s an excellent read, although I still think the most common sense refutation of such ramblings are that probabilities say nothing about how things are. When you think of all the genetic information that makes up a single human being and all the possible combinations just between thier two parents, the odds are just stangering that “you” came out like “you” at all, but you did, you beat all the odds… as worthless as those odds may be.