Pope Francis Just Can't Hide His Misogyny

Lost in translation? 7 reasons some women wince when Pope Francis starts talking - Religion News Service

Poor old Pope Francis just can't hide his misogyny no matter how hard he tries to look like a modern liberal reformer. These seven examples of where his prejudices are showing comes from religionnews.com a site not normally associated with religious criticism.

The former Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina, the son of Italian immigrants, comes from a background and a clerical tradition not normally associated with its liberal progressiveness and

Ken's Ham-Fisted Plan Scuppered

The Lost Ark: Kentucky will not grant tax incentives to Ark Encounter - Insider Louisville

Thanks to their own arrogant stupidity, the plan by the money-making loons at Answers in Genesis to subvert the US Constitution and con the State of Kentucky into using taxpayers money to help them promote their fundamentalist Christian bigotry and Bronze Age superstition, despite the 'Establishment Clause', has failed.

AiG had been planning to create an 'Ark Encounter' theme park to promote its infantile belief that the story of Noah's Ark in the Bible is a literal account of an

How Creationists Lie To Us - Michael J. Behe

Kenneth R. Miller

Edging towards Irrelevance - part 1

Professor Kenneth R Miller is an evolutionary biologist and expert in molecular biology and cell membranes. He is also a Roman Catholic who has written books such as Finding Darwin's God trying to show that evolution is compatible with belief in the Christian god. He also profoundly disagrees with the notion of 'Intelligent Design' as promulgated by fellow Roman Catholic, Michael J. Behe and the Discovery Institute.

The Discovery Institute was set up with the aim of using the Theory of Evolution, which many Americans find distasteful because it doesn't make them feel important enough, to undermine science as a prelude to subverting the secular US Constitution and installing a fundamentalist Christian, Taliban-style Levitican theocracy in America and elsewhere. Behe is a leading light in this disinformation campaign and concentrates particularly on misrepresenting evolutionary biology.

Miller's opposition to Behe and the Discovery Institute has made him a particular target of the antisciencers who are continually demanding he apologise for disagreeing with Behe and pointing out the misrepresentations of science, glaringly bad mathematics and false conclusions in his 2007 book, The Edge of Evolution, in which Behe tries to bamboozle his readers into thinking Darwinian evolution is mathematically impossible.

A Message From Homo Erectus

Homo erectus made world's oldest doodle 500,000 years ago : Nature News & Comment

A fossilised etched river mussel shell, dated to between 430,000 and 540,000 years old, from Java in Indonesia is being attributed to one of our immediate ancestors, Homo erectus and so becomes the oldest known engraving, beating the previous earliest by some 300,000 years and the first to be unequivocably pre-modern. This early artist from our remote ancestry unwittingly left an important message for those with the scientific literacy to read it.

This find is highly significant, if it turns out to be what it's claimed to be, because it's the first real evidence

Catholic Deception - Pope To Venerate The Fake of Turin

A typical ‘souvenir’ of an exposition with presiding clergy (1608), one of several made between 1578 and 1750.

The Trustees of the British Museum.

A typical ‘souvenir’ of an exposition with presiding clergy (1608), one of several made between 1578 and 1750.

The Trustees of the British Museum.

The Origins of the Shroud of Turin | History Today

News that Pope Francis is to make a pilgrimage to Turin Cathedral to venerate the Shroud of Turin, despite it now being regarded only by the most die-hard supporters as anything other than a fairly crude 14^th Century painting on linen made from flax which grew in the 14^th Century, shows that the 'reforming' Pope, whom many people thought was going to modernise the Catholic Church and introduce a modicum of honesty into its teachings and dealings with people, is still happy to follow his predecessors and mislead the credulous and gullible with forgeries and deliberate deceptions.

The Pope's announcement came only a few days after the publication in History Today of a slamming refutation of the Shroud's authenticity by a British historian. I've written before about this forgery here and here so it's pleasing to read this exposé by historian and writer, Charles Freeman, who, in this article destroys any remaining vestige of arguments for the shroud's authenticity and offers a possible explanation for its existence. An intent to deceive may well not have been the motive of the 'artist' who created it. That came later probably from the Savoy family who bought it and, of course, was adopted later by the Catholic Church in its constant search for the means to fool gullible people and keep them giving the clergy power, money and privileges.

Look Where Manny Is Accessing The Internet From!

Manuel de Dios Agosto, the Bronx expelled seminarian, Internet stalker and habitual liar has boobed again and revealed something interesting about himself. He has shown us exactly where his emails are coming from and it's all available online from public sources so you don't even have to take my word for it; you can check for yourselves.

Twitter users will have watched in stunned amusement as Manny, with his usual Dunning-Kruger cock-sure self-confidence, via his sock puppet account @CatholicGadfly, challenged Twitter user Ellif D'Wulf to post evidence that he knew his IP address. Ellif had been pointing out that at least two of Manny's sock puppet accounts have the same IP address. Didn't he realise that Ellif doesn't make evidence-free claims? Not everyone does, Manuel! It's not normal!

Victims of Religion in Poland

30–39 year old female with a sickle placed across her neck.

PLOS ONE: Apotropaic Practices and the Undead: A Biogeochemical Assessment of Deviant Burials in Post-Medieval Poland

Ignorant superstitions are often a cause as well as an effect of religious bigotry. These can and often do provide an excuse for human rights abuses and victimisation of people who are a little bit different to the cultural norm, whether in personality, physical or mental disability or even race, skin colour or ethnic origin.

Eastern Europe, and Poland in particular, has a long history of superstitious belief in 'unclean' spirits re-entering a dead body and reanimating it. This superstition, underpinned by the religious idea of a soul or some form of magical other being who lives in our bodies and gives it 'life' is not, as some might think, a biblical or Quranic idea but one which was known to the ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans.

Environment, Evolution and Polar Bear Extinction

PLOS ONE: Projected Polar Bear Sea Ice Habitat in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago.

The prospect of polar bears becoming extinct by 2075 because of the loss of the North Polar icecap is a stark warning of what we are doing to the life-support system we call Earth as we pump out more and more of our toxic waste, like bacteria polluting our culture medium. It also serves to illustrate a couple of things about how life evolves and changes over time, pushed as often as not by environmental change, not genetic change.

Chamber of Secrets Has Creationists in Denial Again

Phote credit: John Hawks

Bone bonanza: Chamber of secrets yields human remains - life - 28 November 2014 - New Scientist

One of the things which illustrates the difference between religion and science is how science continually looks for new information and adjusts its thinking accordingly, whereas religion constantly looks for excuses not to change in any way, and this includes actively ignoring, or finding ways to dismiss, new information.

Take for example the buzz of excitement in the field of palaeoanthropology at the moment at news that a team of archaeologists working in a cave system in South Africa have discovered and excavated the

Christian Fundamentalist - No Cake for Gays!

© UTV

Equality law 'conscience clause' bid - UTV Live News

You have to hand it to Christians, they are relentless in their determination to get their special privileges back and to be permitted to carry on victimising and bullying minorities. Even though they've been knocked down and defeated in every court in the UK and Europe, still they whinge and grizzle and demand changes to the law when they are found yet again to have been bullying gays and denying them the same basic human rights that they enjoy.

Rapid Darwinian Evolution In Agricultural Weeds

Wheat field

Vincent van Gogh, 1888

Wheat Field, Vincent van Gogh, 1888. Weeds and all.

Dawn of farming sparked speed-evolution in weeds - life - 19 November 2014 - New Scientist

One of my recurrent themes in my blogs about evolution is the difference between information held in the DNA and the meaning of that information as interpreted by the environment. This is something that creationist frauds traditionally ignore of course, especially when they try to fool their credulous victims with the claim that no new information can arise because of the Second Law of Thermodynamics (sic), so evolution is impossible.

Not only is that nonsensical claim refuted by simple observation but evolution often doesn't need new information anyway; evolution often comes about because a change in the environment give new meaning to existing information.

Evolving Cooperation - But For Who Or What?

Bacteroides fragilis

Look after your gut bacteria; it might be your allotted purpose in life - if you subscribe to the evidence-free religious notion that you must be here for a purpose.

A couple of scientific papers in the last couple weeks have caught my attention because they demonstrate how Richard Dawkins' 'Selfish Gene' metaphor for how Darwinian evolution actually works gives, contrary to what a superficial reading of the term might suggest to those who don't understand evolution, cooperation rather than conflict.

We humans, as with all other multicellular species, are not just cooperative alliances of 'human' genes; not just cooperative alliances of prokaryotic cells and not even just cooperative alliances of eukaryotic cells

Another Mad Day In A Bronx Cuckoo Land

I really must resist the temptation to write blogposts exposing Manuel de Dios Agosto, known to Twitter and G+ users as 'Manny' or 'Sac', or other less printable terms, and get back to writing about science and exposing religion's fallacies and human rights abuses, but his latest pratfall is just too hilarious to pass over. Besides, as Oscar Wilde said, the only sensible response to temptation is to yield to it.

His latest piece of hilarity is yet another attempt to convince people he knows who I am and yet another 'exposé' on me straight from Manny's fevered imagination.

So far over the last couple of years, he has told his few readers of his various blogs that:

Gay Gene Poser For Homophobic Creationists

Cambridge Journals Online - Psychological Medicine - Genome-wide scan demonstrates significant linkage for male sexual orientation.

Strangely, a paper based on a large study of brothers and twins which supports the idea that male sexuality, including homesexuality, has a strong genetic basis, has been completely ignored by homophobic religious fundamentalist. I say strangely because these same religious extremists are almost invariably creationists of one sort or another, either Young Earth Creationist loons and frauds like Ken Ham, Ray Comfort and Michael Behe, who ignore almost all science, or Old Earth Creationists like Francis Collins and Alvin Plantinga who only ignore the inconvenient bits and bits they can't pretend aren't true.

Abstract
Background: Findings from family and twin studies

Is Manny Plagiarising Your Work?

What's the real reason or Manny's insistence on apparently absurd conditions for debating him? It may not just be cowardice.

Those few people who have logged onto one of Manuel de Dios Agosto's blog sites to discover his terms and conditions for 'debating' him when he issues one of his many challenges to do the impossible and prove the Christian god doesn't exist, will have been astonished to find some apparently idiotic conditions being imposed, failure to comply with which will result in Manny claiming victory by default.

Incidentally, thanks to Wulfwitch for that link to a cached copy of one of Manny's blogs. Manny's blogs tend to be quickly edited when he's embarrassed by them, just prior to calling people liars for quoting them verbatim. Thanks too to Wulfwitch for drawing my attention through his blog to these conditions that Manny tries to impose on people who may be tempted to try to have a grown-up debate with him.

Church of England 'Has Six Years Left'

The Right Reverend Tim Thornton, Bishop of Truro. Looking for a miracle.

BBC News - Bishop of Truro says Church of England has 'six years'

No. This is not an over-optimistic secularist or a cleric from a rival Christian sect spreading disinformation about Anglicanism but an Anglican bishop telling the Church of England that, basically, unless a miracle intervenes, and there have been precious few of them since we introduced universal education, the Anglican Church is about to expire.

No less an authority than the Bishop of Truro estimates that the Church has about six years left, such is the decline in attendance and income. His diocese alone

Religion's Flexible 'Moral Absolutes'

One of the smug claims made by theists is that their religion gives them a set of moral absolutes, thus whatever they do in the name of their religion can't be immoral - and anyone who questions it is, by implication, immoral. It's fundamental to the way abusive clerics gain the confidence of their victims, for example. Who could doubt the moral fibre of someone who is working for God or Allah? Obviously, we should consult them on all matters of morality and ethics and allow them to dictate to us on such matters.

So where exactly are these moral absolutes in the holy books, and more importantly where is the evidence that these are er... moral absolutes? Shouldn't we expect a moral absolute, especially as practiced and promoted by religious clerics to be unchanging and eternal? If not, in what way is it an absolute?

How Selfish Genes Can Make Large Testes

Infanticide drives female promiscuity and big balls - life - 13 November 2014 - New Scientist

Infanticide by a dominant male is frequent in many species, having been observed in some 200 species of mammal alone. It is, of course, easily explained by gene theory of Darwinian evolution by natural selection; it is, like so much else in biology, completely nonsensical in terms of intelligent design by a benevolent designer.

It is especially common in species where a single dominant male has a harem of females but can be displaced by a new, younger male, and especially

Comets, Science And Religion

BBC News - Probe makes historic comet landing.

In an astonishing feat of precision engineering and applied science, scientists today landed a probe on the surface of a comet 316 million miles away travelling at 40,000 mph, after a ten year journey of 4 billion miles.

There is a slight concern that the probe might not be anchored firmly to the comet as the harpoons which should have fired into the surface may not have fired. but they are now set to perform scientific experiments

Oxfam Confirms It - Manny Lied Again

Let's see Mad Manuel try to lie his way out of this one.

In a spectacular intervention, Oxfam, through their verified Twitter account, @Oxfamgb, have confirmed that all the donations I have said I made to them from the proceeds of advertising through this blog have been received. Twitter account @CatholicGadfly is, as most people will be aware, just another fake disinformation account owned by Manuel de Dios Agosto, the expelled Bronx Catholic seminarian, hobby troll, Internet stalker, pathological liar and serial abuser who can be read about here.

My thanks to Twitter user @Ellif_DWulfe for taking this up with Oxfam with my full cooperation and at my invitation. I gather they confirmed everything I said by email, which of course, Manuel was disputing on Twitter. Oxfam's intervention was unsolicited and must have come as a bombshell for poor little Manny.