1. I'm gonna be a MOVIE STAR

Comment #65767 by iota on August 26, 2007 at 11:48 am

This movie will play the mega-church screening room circuit and then go straight to DVD.

Here's an idea for the ID movement, though:

Instead of filling your ranks with lawyers, trying to get ID taught in the classroom, and producing movies and slick marketing campaigns, how about proposing an actual scientific experiment?

2. The problem with secularism

Comment #14566 by iota on December 23, 2006 at 9:02 am

"Sam Harris's diatribe "The End of Faith" has to falsify history by claiming that Hitler and Stalin were religious in order to make its case for the malign influence of faith."


Whether Hitler and Stalin were atheists or not is incidental to the fact that their fatal flaw was their dogma: blind faith in a set of proposed "truths" regardless of the evidence.

With Hitler and Stalin, this blind faith was in their political ideologies. As Sam Harris points out, their problem was not that their evidence standards were too high, but that their evidence standards were just as low as those of religious fundamentalists, only with respect to a non-religious ideology.

In contrast, the kind of atheism being proposed by Harris and Richard Dawkins is not dogmatic at all. Rather, it is the absence of a belief in any God or gods as the result of insufficient evidence. So one could change the mind of such an atheist by simply providing enough evidence. As such, atheism is a branch of reason, which puts it well apart from any dogma, religious or otherwise.

3. Christmas Present to Defenders of Darwinism

Comment #13432 by iota on December 17, 2006 at 4:51 pm

So, for those not keeping score within the ID movement, that would be...

Peer-reviewed articles in legitimate scientific journals: 0

Cheesy, low-brow Flash animations: 1

4. How Predictable: Richard Dawkins Supports Eugenics

Comment #11594 by iota on December 5, 2006 at 8:00 pm

Wesley Smith apparently has a strong tendency to read what he wants the writer to have written, as opposed to what actually was written. This is certainly the case with this latest "Dawkins supports eugenics" nonsense, in which Smith makes all sorts of assumptions and misinterpretations just so he can feel like he is justified in his bogus claim.

Smith's ability to misinterpret text to his own advantage seems to be a skill that he can summon at will. I recently had a private email exchange with Wesley Smith about the eugenics post above (this whole exchange has been posted in the comments section of Smith's post). In it, I pointed out the contradiction between Smith's claim that Dawkins supports eugenics, and Smith's own quote of Dawkins saying he can think of good ideas why eugenics might be bad.

Smith misinterpreted this email, which was very brief, as an accusation that he was ignorant of the Dawkins quote. Any reasonable reading of my two-or-so line email would not have given him this impression, since I clearly acknowledge Smith's quoting of Dawkins.

I suspect that this kind of sloppy reading is a habit of Smith's.

5. Our Teapot, which art in heaven

Comment #10309 by iota on November 27, 2006 at 8:29 pm

Couldn't find O'Brien's email, so I threw this up instead:

http://upperlip.blogspot.com/2006/11/delusions-of-grandeur.html