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I have formed a theory about anti-gay activists. Some of them, anyway.

My theory is a refinement of Haggard’s Law, which states that the more you complain about homosexuality, the more likely you are to be secretly homosexual. That not-entirely-serious observation has some basis in fact beyond the numerous examples of preachers and politicians that’ve led us to anticipate the ending of every news story that starts with a listing of some right-wing fellow’s anti-gay credentials.

I’ve always found it implausible, though, that secretly-gay people make up any very large percentage of the anti-gay population.

If you’re a member of a stridently anti-gay fundamentalist religion, then you’re likely to regard gays and atheists and members of other fundamentalist religions that outside observers insultingly claim are really very similar to your own as all being part of the vast Satanic sea upon which your brave little ark of true believers must voyage. Maybe a member of such a religion will get a bee in his or her bonnet about evolution, or Jews, or homosexuals. Not many people would claim that a noisy anti-evolutionist might secretly be reading Richard Dawkins books, or that an anti-Semite secretly celebrates Rosh Hashanah, and I think it’s just as possible to be a really obnoxious gay-hater without, yourself, being gay.

You could, for instance, be very genuinely heterosexual, and therefore find gay sex a fairly repellent idea. Now, if you’re unable to comprehend that anybody else in the world could not find it as repellent as you do, you’ll regard homosexuals as filthy deviants who’ve managed to make a lifestyle out of a ghastly activity. Raping small children is also a ghastly activity, if you’re one kind of horrible sexual deviant then you might very well be ready to give another deviation a go, and bingo, there’s a freshly-minted all-homos-are-child-molesters argument all neatly gift-wrapped and ready to be sermonised about.

The particular thing that led me to a new piece of this puzzle (well, it’s new to me; I’m sure many other people have figured this out) is that weird characteristic of so much anti-gay rhetoric - the insistence that homosexuality is not just a choice, but an easy choice. Gayness is, essentially, just laziness. Instead of having a proper, adult relationship with a woman, the homosexual chooses to have meaningless physical dalliances with other men.

Those of us who reside somewhere near the left side of the Kinsey Scale find this argument preposterous. Most heterosexual men were desperately dateless in their teenage years, when the hormonal urge to have sex is at its strongest, but not very many of us went gay as a result. (Well, not as a lifetime choice, anyway. What happens in the Navy, stays in the Navy.)

There’s a strong societal component here; in the Western world it’s much more socially acceptable for women to experiment with homosexuality than for men to do it, and some other societies, past and present, either accept homosexuality as being entirely unremarkable, or consider it weird if a person hasn’t had some sort of gay relationship.

But if we restrict the scope of inquiry to male homosexuality in the Western world, as anti-gay demagogues usually do to make sure nobody starts asking awkward questions about the Spartans, straight men seldom consider this “choice” to be a real option at all.

So why, I wondered, do so many anti-gay people keep saying it’s easy to just sort of carelessly fall into the “gay lifestyle”?

And then I realised. It’s because those anti-gay people are, yes, gay - but they don’t know it.

They’re good, Bible-believing Christians. They had girlfriends. Now they have a wife, and children. They’re pillars of the community, and may never have had any homosexual encounters at all.

But boy oh boy, do they ever want to have homosexual encounters. The cock, it calls them. It’s been calling them as long as they can remember. But like a border collie that’s never seen a sheep, they don’t know what this urge within them actually is. For them, gayness is like the Dark Side of the Force, or the One Ring.

Now, it all makes sense. These poor men think it’s like this for every man. They think that secret schoolboy assignations and sordid encounters in public bathrooms are as appealing a prospect for the rest of us as they are for them.

You’re gay because you’re weak, or perhaps, especially bizarrely, because you’re greedy. You just have to fight it!

But straight guys don’t have to “fight” an urge to have sex with men. Stereotypically, they’ll fight to avoid it!

Being gay, but unaware of it, can fit quite neatly into other religious beliefs. God requires you to not be envious, to not be lazy, to not lie or cheat or steal; the Lord wouldn’t have needed to tell you not to do those things if they weren’t rather appealing. So gay sex must be the same. It’s a sin into which one can, in weakness, fall.

If this is the way you think, then it becomes perfectly sensible to say that gay people, as a category like “Irish people” or “tall people”, don’t really exist at all. Saying you’re born gay is like saying you’re born a burglar.

I’ve no idea what’s actually going on in the head of Ted Haggard…

…or Larry Craig…

…or Mark Foley or George Alan Rekers:

Who knows how many of these guys were, and are, well aware of their true sexuality, and just lie about it, in the same way that they’ve lied about many other things for personal gain.

But I think the poor people who’re gay but don’t know it really do help to better explain exactly how this situation’s gotten so dramatically messed up.

Now we just need a catchy name for this sexual permutation of the Dunning-Kruger effect. I invite your suggestions in the comments!

Yeah, that figures. I wouldn’t trust ‘em either.

I’m not sure exactly how I got to this oddly apposite error, though I do know why it happened, and will bore those of you intrepid enough to make it all the way through this latest Wall-O-Words™ post with an explanation.

It all started when I read An Evolutionary Biologist Visits the “Creationism Museum”, which is by PZ Myers, the Pharyngula guy and well-known desecrator of all that is holy.

The Creation Museum is a product of Answers in Genesis, or AiG, not affiliated with the other AIG, but similarly untaxable. AiG was founded by Ken Ham, an Australian-born evangelist whom we exported to the USA in 1987.

You’re welcome.

(In case you were wondering, there also exists a Web site called “Answers in Revelation“. It’s pretty much what you’d expect - a little like “The Lord’s Witnesses“, but less apologetic.)

AiG’s Creation Museum is a place which surely ranks among the Seven Wonders of the Whacko American Christian World (there obviously isn’t really a Christian world outside the USA; it’s like the World Series). The Museum is up there with the Crystal Cathedral, the even-more-gigantic Lakewood Church, the sadly-diminished Precious Moments Chapel, Touchdown Jesus and… actually, that’s all I’ve got, off the top of my head. I’m sure commenters will help me out, here, with some more examples of the various US Jay-sus-uh enterprises’ attempts to top each other in visible-from-geostationary-orbit violations of Matthew 6.

PZ Myers’ article linked to the Christian page of this Cracked piece about baffling Web comics. One of the less peculiar comics told its readers to visit Answers in Genesis for the answer to one of the real posers of the Book of Genesis.

I speak, of course, of the bit where the recently-Marked Cain suddenly acquires an (un-named) wife. This is a bit surprising, seeing as the Bible has to this point mentioned a world population of exactly four people, the only female among them being Cain’s mother, Eve.

Christians who bother to address a silly creation-myth plot-hole like this fall into two camps.

The first camp asserts that there were other, pre-Adamic humans, and Cain married one of them. Many white-supremacists hold that these pre-Adamic “mud people” are the ancestors of modern-day black people, who are therefore subhuman pre-Genesis prototypes on their ancient mother’s side, and on their ancient father’s side cursed by God. So, uh, you needn’t feel bad about lynching, raping and/or enslaving ‘em, ‘cos they’re not really people at all.

Answers In Genesis rightly deny this outrageous calumny.

They, instead, belong to the camp which reckons that Cain’s wife “was either his sister or a close relative”.

Because, for reasons having to do with Original Sin, AiG are certain, to the point of putting up a display on the subject in the Creation Museum, that it is impossible for any humans alive today to not be descended from Adam and Eve, and Adam and Eve alone.

Well, unless AiG’s whole huge edifice of biblical literalism is to collapse.

(Given the extreme ages people allegedly lived to back in Genesis, and the parallel and unconnected Sethite and Cainite lineages, it’s conceivable that Cain’s wife was not actually his sister, but could have been his great-great-great-grandniece. Which is much less disturbing, I’m sure you’ll all agree. Note that the completely unconnected Sethite and Cainite lineages each contain a dude called Enoch and another dude called Lamech, not to mention about four other pairs of guys with very similar names; there are actually only four people out of 16 who don’t seem to have been struck by this extraordinary nominative correspondence. AiG assure us all that there’s no way this could just be two differently-Chinese-Whispered versions of the same list of names. Obviously, the real question is if, when and how angels cross-bred with humans!)

Reading on through An Evolutionary Biologist Et Cetera, I had to admit that the Creation Museum has got some pretty cool displays. I mean, check out this awesome Noah’s Ark diorama! And it’s not nearly their whole Ark exhibit; they’ve got plenty more, including a recreated chunk of the Noah’s Ark Construction Site! Don’t miss the dinosaurs!

People like AiG, who believe the Noah story is literally true, have had to enlarge their Ark size estimates. The Bible clearly says that the Ark was 300 cubits long, but it doesn’t say how long a cubit was. The road is therefore open for people like AiG to discover ever-larger sizes of “cubit”, and thereby make their Ark bigger and bigger as those troublesome scientists keep discovering more and more species.

I’m not sure why AiG feel this is necessary, since it’s also normal for people presenting the literal-Flood argument to say that God preserved the Ark from harm, helped to steer it to Mount Ararat, after the Flood helped the koalas make it to Australia and the polar bears make it to the Arctic, and possibly also helped Noah with the gigantic engineering task of building the Ark in the first place.

(Check out how long it takes for the average backyard boat-builder to make a small vessel; adding more family members and making it a full-time job helps, but making the project about a thousand times the size would still leave Noah and family felling trees, dressing wood, hammering, sawing, carrying and caulking for decades, at the very least.)

So I don’t see what the big deal is about God making the Ark into a TARDIS as well, so it could hold as many animals as necessary without having to be as long as HMS Dreadnought, and much wider. This whole subject is a bit like discovering that there are people developing serious theories about how it was that Little Red Riding Hood failed to recognise a wolf dressed as her grandma, or calculating exactly how large a cottage could be built out of gingerbread.

But AiG reckon the Ark had to be big enough for all of the animals (and yes, they’ve got a Genesis Answer for the freshwater fish question). So the Ark had to be really, really, really big.

Different pages on the AiG site appear to disagree about how big the Ark was. I think the minimum is 450 feet - 137 metres. This measurement agrees with the New International Version’s, uh, version.

But then, there’s AiG’s printable “Kids Answers Noah’s Ark Bookmark” (PDF), which I consider as authoritative as anything else on the AiG site. The bookmark puts the Ark’s length at a magnificent 510 feet, 155 metres. They also have a page for adults which concurs, and they proudly present an analysis from the Korea Association of Creation Research (by an extraordinary coincidence, the biggest megachurch in the whole world is in Korea…). The analysis concludes that a 135-metre Ark would have been seaworthy. With a bit of encouragement, I bet it’d stretch another 20 metres.

In the boring old secular world, the SS Great Western was, as I’ve mentioned before, the biggest properly seaworthy ocean-going wooden ship ever built, and its hull was about 65 metres in length (including the bowsprit, it was more than 70 metres). Even this size was too much for wood alone; Brunel used iron bands to hold the ship together.

Wooden ships bigger than the Great Western have been built on several occasions, but none dealt well with waves, and they often disappeared on their maiden voyages. No wooden ship even close to the size of even a mere 450-foot Ark has ever ventured to sea. Nobody can prove that the Ark wouldn’t have worked just fine, of course, because nobody knows how it was built; there may be some amazing construction method lost to the ages, and proving there isn’t is impossible.

Ark-believers like to bring up the subject of other ultra-gigantic wooden ships from the pages of history. Or, at least, from the pages of books that say they’re history.

See, for instance, AiG’s buddies at worldwideflood.com, who’ve got this awesome Flash size-comparer, which assigns the “most likely size” for Noah’s Ark as a displacement of a mere “17000-28000 tonnes”.

So, from the Graf Spee to the 1915 Revenge. I can totally see a family building something that big out of wood. How hard could it be?

The most impressive wooden vessels, besides the Ark itself, in the WorldwideFlood comparer are the two greatest hits in the world of mythical giant ships. First, there’s Ptolemy IV’s “Tessarakonteres”, a mega-trireme alleged to have been rowed by four thousand oarsmen. And then, there’s the Chinese eunuch admiral Zheng He’s treasure ships, which were presented as vast beyond the imaginings of the Western world in that bestselling book by Gavin Menzies.

(Menzies’ claims received a less than entirely friendly response from those tiresome empirical-evidence fetishists.)

The Tessarakonteres and another outrageously large wooden ship also allegedly owned by Ptolemy IV, the 115-metres-if-it’s-an-inch “Thalamegos”, have a peculiar tendency to only be taken seriously on Web pages that also argue for the existence of Noah’s Ark. I’m sure the total absence of any substantive evidence that either of the Ptolemaic ships was ever paid for, built, crewed, sailed, sunk or salvaged has nothing whatsoever to do with the sad lack of orthodox academic interest in these extremely plausible ships about which it would be a terrible slander to say they’re as physically practicable as building an Empire State Building out of pine.

(Or larch.)

For comparison, consider historically-supported large wooden vessels like the Syracusia, which ended up in the possession of Ptolemy III, or Caligula’s giant round barge and “Nemi ships“. The Syracusia probably existed, but is only said to be a - possibly exaggerated - 55 metres in length. And Caligula’s ships pretty definitely existed, but were really just huge lake pontoons, that would have broken up at sea.

I can, at this juncture - quite a bit before this juncture, actually - hear readers begging me to stop poking at this nonsense and finish the review of that new computer you all bought me. But I think there’s something more to engaging with preposterous speculations, like AiG’s mania for persuading us all that the world began in the late Neolithic, than the mere sideshow-freak quality of the exercise. I think there’s a significant educational value to chasing these silly rabbits. It leads you directly to basic philosophy-of-science questions like, “how do we know something is true?”, and “what is truth, anyway?”, and “what is sufficient evidence for a given claim to be treated as true?”

These questions are absolutely fundamental to critical thinking for everybody, not just professional scientists. But I don’t think they’re on a lot of school curricula.

(Did any of you readers receive lessons in critical thinking before tertiary education, or even then? You’d think that there’d at least be room, somewhere in the school year, for a half-hour on the different levels of evidence needed to make plausible the claims “I own a cat”, “I own a horse”, “I own an elephant” and “I own a dragon”…)

Everybody, young and old, needs to know this stuff, and one of the most entertaining ways of learning critical thinking is by examining the writings of people who don’t quite get this whole “science” thing. (I think a kid could pretty much copy and paste this post into a history and/or science assignment and get a decent mark, as long as their teacher wasn’t a Young-Earther.)

The Creation Museum really does seem to be, as Myers says, the very opposite of an actual museum. If you want to read about what real science museums do, I suggest Richard Fortey’s excellent Dry Storeroom No. 1, (out in paperback soon!). As Fortey explains in his idiosyncratic wander through just a few of the numerous paths that exist in just his one museum, and as the Wikipedia article on museums also currently says, a museum acquires, conserves and researches the heritage of humanity and its environment. People who work in the parts of proper museums that visitors never visit devote their entire lives to collecting, collating, categorising and analysing stuff from the real world. Fortey writes of several museum employees who, after their retirement, keep coming in and working for free, so dedicated are they to the pursuit of knowledge.

I presume the Creation Museum has some actual fossils and such, and every now and then there’s another News of the Weird story about hopeful fundamentalists heading off on yet another doomed trip to find the big floating Ark or the little magic one. But such efforts have all the actual substance of a dolls’ tea party. The Creation Museum is, like AiG, nothing more than a great steaming heap of ad-hoc hypotheses, built on faith and making no predictions (if you don’t count failed prophecies about the end of the world). The Creation Museum performs no real research, has nothing to conserve but what their exhibit-builders constructed, and is uninterested in the acquisition of new evidence, because they’ve already got the primary source to end all primary sources.

The Creation Museum even manages to, as Myers also notes, get the layout of a real museum wrong. Instead of letting visitors pick their own path, it funnels them through its didactic exhibits in sequence, like a haunted house or Ikea shop. (Or like a Hell House, for that matter.)

Once again, the Bible-thumpers have approximated the form, but failed to deliver the content, of the scientific endeavour. This is pretty much the definition of “pseudoscience“; pseudoscience is to real science as patent medicines were to real medicines.

Actually, that’s a little unfair to patent medicines, which often contained desirable substances like alcohol, opium or cocaine. But I suppose people in hopeless situations could gain just as much comfort from religious hoo-hah as they could from opium.

Oh yes. The funny error. Remember the funny error that kicked off this bulging tumour of a post?

The error happened because I followed a link, from some damn place, to https://www.answersingenesis.com/something_or_other, which attempts to use the SSL encryption certificate for https://www.answersingenesis.org/, whose suffix doesn’t match the one in the certificate - and hey presto, there’s the snigger-inducing error.

The main Answers in Genesis site is answersingenesis.org, but they also own answersingenesis.com, thus protecting that domain from being hijacked by the vile Satanists who dare to question AiG’s Answers. AiG do actually have their act together as regards this stuff; if you go to answersingenesis.com it redirects you to the .org site, and neither of them try to use SSL so no certificate error appears. http://www.answersingenesis.com/anything redirects, not entirely elegantly, to the home page of answersingenesis.org, but that and the .com/.org SSL certificate thing is the only other bug I’ve found.

And now a reminder for any intrepid readers who’ve made it this far: Please nominate further Wonders of the American Religious World, and/or tell us all who, if anyone, taught you critical thinking!

There was me thinking that vanity-published books-by-loonies didn’t come any better than the inimitable Latawnya, the Naughty Horse, Learns to Say “No” to Drugs. (The same author, with her husband, has also written Spicy True Stories, Investigators Lies, Slanders And Stocks. This latter volume is a chronicle of paranoid-delusion which I contend is indeed made more “spicy” by the author’s decision to spell the word “stalk” as “stock”, throughout the work.)

All that is in the past, though, for I have just this moment - which is to say, a couple of months after a million other people - discovered the landmark work Birth Control Is- I’m sorry, BIRTH CONTROL IS SINFUL IN THE CHRISTIAN MARRIAGES and also ROBBING GOD OF PRIESTHOOD CHILDREN!!, by Ms Eliyza- oh, darn it, I made that same mistake again, I meant to say by MS ELIYZABETH YANNE STRONG-ANDERSON.

MS ELIYZABETH would just be another unhinged religious ranter were it not for two decisions on her part.

The first is that she appears to have decided upon a list price for her book of one hundred and fifty US dollars. (Currently on special for only $135!)

The other, a true stroke of genius, is that BIRTH CONTROL IS SINFUL ET CETERA appears to be ENTIRELY IN UPPER CASE. Amazon have a “Look Inside” for the work, which only gives you the usual few pages, but reveals a distinct lack of lower-case anywhere other than the “and also” on the cover, and the text of the copyright page.

Amazon reviewers have rewarded MS ELIYZABETH with the adulation she deserves.

No sooner have I finished my second reply to that power-saver guy who took an entertaining religious tack in his dispute with me, than this shows up:

Hey Dan. I enjoyed reading some of the material on your website. You’ve definitely got some serious knowledge and understanding (not that you needed me to tell you that). But the reason I’m writing you is that it became clear to me that you reject the concept that God created the universe and yourself. As much as you know and can effectively explain to others who are wondering, you can not logically explain away the fact that you know deep down that you were created by God. And I am prepared for you to write me off as a religious psycho (though I myself hate religion) but I wanted to let you know that I prayed for you tonight that you would come to know your Creator who loves you and sent His Son, Jesus, to give you life. This email did not just happen by chance, just like you did not happen by chance. God is drawing you to Himself and I pray that you would accept His invitation.

“That if you confess with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you confess and are saved” Romans 10:9, 10

Stewart

You know, I actually do kind of wish that I did “know deep down that I was created by God”. It’d make me quite a lot happier, I think. It’d certainly beat the hell out of the terrifying contemplation of the unimportance of all human endeavours when compared with the overall scale of the universe, and the glum certainty that no matter what any human does, and no matter what brilliant tricks any human may manage to pull, in the blink of a geological eye we will all be cold and forgotten dust.

(I think this sort of thing is at the core of your classic Lovecraftian cosmic horror stories. A story that’s just about one guy sitting in a chair contemplating his mortality and unimportance probably wouldn’t be serialised in sci-fi magazines, though, so you have to add tentacles, asymmetric brain-swapping elder races, all-powerful entities with no mind at all, people who aren’t people, and a whole lot of hilarious adjectives.)

The philosophical argument has been advanced that if a God-as-described-in-the-Abrahamic-Scriptures did exist, everybody even slightly sane would believe in him. The fact that there are many apparently reasonable people who do not believe in God may, therefore, be a valid argument for God’s nonexistence - it’s called the “argument from nonbelief“.

(There’s probably a nice tidy philosophical name for the argument Stewart presents, that there actually aren’t any real unbelievers, atheists don’t actually exist, and everybody’s secretly religious even if they deny it. Does anybody know what that’s called?)

But in any case, even if some mysterious suppressed kernel of religious belief survives in my black atheistic heart, why on earth would you assume that the God-of-the-Christians is the only entity that could have inspired it?

(This is the flipside of the there-are-no-real-atheists argument. It can be argued that in fact everybody is an atheist, because everybody disbelieves countless gods, most of whom they’ve never even heard of. By this measure, the only difference between “real” atheists and religious people is that atheists disbelieve slightly more gods.)

I don’t think there’s actually much point to asking somebody presenting Stewart’s argument why they assume that my alleged tiny ember of religious belief is in the Abrahamic god. I already know what the answer’s likely to be. Faith, right? You just know, and you don’t need a reason.

If you ask me, just knowing without a reason is defective thinking, which can severely weaken any attempt to think critically about any subject at all. Most religious people seem to be able to compartmentalise their faith away from their everyday life, so if they’re crossing the road or buying a house or choosing a movie to see, they don’t just kneel down and close their eyes until the Lord tells them what to do. But critical thinking is something you have to learn to do, and learning to be unthinkingly faithful pulls your mind in exactly the opposite direction. It can get to the point where you actually seriously argue that you can arrive at faith via the scientific method, because Jesus said that if you do God’s will you will be convinced that it, um, is God’s will, which sure sounds like solid scientific proof to me!

(The minor problem that the world is full of people all doing contradictory things while convinced that they have the full support of one or more gods does not appear to injure this argument.)

Many religions say faith is laudable in and of itself, and actively encourage adherents to believe all sorts of weird things. Thinking critically is hard enough as it is; thinking critically about religious topics is almost impossible, unless you’re willing to devote years to your education and then, quite possibly, end up sounding not unlike an atheist anyway.

So I can’t really blame people for taking the blind-faith route. It combines simplicity with laudability! How often in life does one get the chance to be commended for being lazy?

Around this point, the religious person often says that everybody has faith, it’s a perfectly good reason to believe things, don’t you have faith that the sun will come up tomorrow and that all of the intersection traffic lights won’t turn green at once. And yes, of course you do, but that faith is based on long experience; religious faith, in contrast, is defined by its lack of evidentiary support. You just have to believe that you’ll get that million dollars when you leave town.

Clearly, Stewart believes I should embrace some sort of Christianity - while, um, hating religion, by which I presume he means organised religion - but what if the one I choose isn’t the right religion? Christianity isn’t even the world’s majority religion; in total, Christianity is more popular than any other religion, but it’s still only got 33% of the religious market (rather less than 33% of the world’s population, since many people have no religion). And of course Christianity, like Islam, is itself broken down into various sects which usually insist that members of the People’s Front of Judea are all going to Hell, and you’d better join the Judean People’s Front if you know what’s good for you. It’s all very well to reject organised religion and come to your own understanding of the scriptures, but there will still be many other incompatible interpretations, all with believers every bit as sincere as you.

Perhaps I should go with the oldest religion that’s still at all popular. That might be Judaism, though of course the Judaism of 1000 BC probably didn’t bear much resemblance to any Jewish sect today.

Or perhaps I should tour countries where everybody’s very religious, take notes, and see who’s got the best argument. Algeria’s 99% Muslim, Armenia’s 99% Christian, Bhutan’s 97% Buddhist, half of Madagascar’s population retain their slightly peculiar traditional ancestor-worshipping beliefs, and about 70% of Albanians profess no religion at all!

In all of those places, I can tell you now that the strongest determinant of anybody’s faith will be the faith, or lack thereof, of their parents. Adolescent rebellion doesn’t actually usually make a lot of difference to that. Which, again, is a bit of a funny thing to see; if there’s one faith that you can just start believing and then, hey presto, its truth becomes apparent, you’d think the global religion market would have settled more solidly on that faith by now.

At this stage in the discussion, the theist will usually sally forth with the warm-and-friendly big-house everyone’s-welcome ecumenical argument, saying “there are many religions, but I suppose they all worship the same God“. I really cannot accept that, though, since the statements and requirements of many of the world’s religions are very clearly incompatible with each other, and people seem to get quite upset about it.

Saying that all, or even many, religions are philosophically compatible is like saying that all codes of football are compatible. OK, sure, a soccer player can pick up the ball, run like hell while dodging the bemused opposition and then dive over the goal-line for a righteous touchdown, but I think you’ll find that his team’s score will not then rise by six points.

So here I am, back in the quandary of which religion to settle upon, with my immortal soul - if I have one - hanging in the balance.

Should I eat bits of my god, start a Crusade, shoot abortionists, or die heroically in battle? Should I pray five times a day, three times a day, or on Sundays, or on Saturdays?

I think the best course of action is to continue to eschew all religious observance, because I think that’ll give me - in a sort of permutation of Pascal’s Wager - the best chance of getting into heaven or a better spot on the reincarnation wheel or whatever. Because if there’s a god up there, and it’s fair, it ought not to cast me into a lake of fire unless I directly choose the wrong religion. If I’m just completely confused by all of the options, each and every one encrusted with bizarre counterfactual and/or solipsistic dogma, and so avoid them all and just try to live a good life, then a fair god should let me into paradise.

And if God isn’t fair - as, objectively speaking, unfortunately seems to be the case - then we’re all screwed anyway. In that case, I might as well not waste any time praying.

Every now and then I check back in with “The Lord’s Witnesses” at TrueBibleCode.com. (The Lord’s Witnesses may be an actual group of people, or maybe just one guy called Gordon.)

Since 2006, the Lord’s Witnesses have been confidently predicting the start of Armageddon, usually to be heralded by nuclear explosion in Manhattan, in the very near future. Which is to say, weeks, or a few months at most, from the date on which the prediction is made. It’s all based on careful analysis of encoded data in the Bible. It’s really very simple.

Over and over and over, the Witneses have been wrong. But there’s seldom even breathing space of a few days between the expiration of the last nuked-New-York deadline and the arrival of another, equally confident prediction that it’s now very likely to happen by a new deadline. They always apologise for their previous error.

The Lord’s Witnesses (who aren’t connected with the Jehovah’s Witnesses, except that Gordon used to be a JW) are so darn snappy about producing the new predictions that I suspect they may work on the new predictions before the old ones have expired, possibly just so as to have something to do while waiting for the Whateverocalypse.

The Witnesses have now reached the entertaining conclusion that the large number of times they’ve been wrong to date (155 times, according to them; a few more if you take every line of the frank list of mistakes on the front page as one error) may, itself, have numerological significance!

This stands to reason, of course. Why would God tease them like this, if not to enlighten them to another aspect of His ineffable plan?

(A plan which seems to have been in progress for rather a while. According to the Bible, Jesus Himself clearly predicted His own second coming before everybody then alive had died. Perhaps there’s some troublesome immortal out there extending the deadline.)

It’s refreshing to see an apocalypto-church, however small, whose org-chart doesn’t taper to a point composed of people who are making out like bandits, and socking away the believers’ cash in investments that’re obviously incompatible with an actual belief in the imminent end of the world.

But at least sometimes those guys get caught. In the early 1990s, there was a Korean church called “Mission for the Coming Days” whose Australian branch was headquartered in a block of flats just up the road from my house. (Apparently there was a Korean “Hyoo-go”, meaning “Rapture”, movement at the time, and the Mission for the Coming Days was the biggest single church in the movement.)

The MftCD predicted the end of the world on October the 28th, 1992; that date stuck in my mind, since it was printed in big letters on the side of their van, which I passed every time I went to buy groceries.

As you may have heard, it didn’t happen.

Some Korean followers of the Mission for the Coming Days committed suicide, I would imagine at least partly because they’d given everything they owned, including their homes, to one Lee Jang Rim, the guy in charge of the church. Some other Hyoo-go enthusiasts tried to kill their preachers.

I think that Lee Jang Rim himself, though, moulders in a Korean jail to this day. The giveaway was his substantial investments, some of which matured after the predicted end of the world.

I just put out some more bird seed, because I noticed that this morning’s supply had been depleted by the usual mob of colourful creatures, but also because one of the birds still picking at the few seeds left clearly needs all the help it can get.

It’s a cockatoo with a fairly advanced case of “psittacine beak and feather disease“. I could have taken a picture of it, but it always makes me so sad to even look at a cockatoo with this disease that I just couldn’t stand it.

It also makes me sort of aimlessly angry, wishing God existed so I could ask Him what the bloody hell He thought He was playing at.

Psittacine beak and feather disease is, in brief, a virus which takes one of the most beautiful creatures in the world, and makes it uglier and uglier until it is so ugly that it can no longer eat, whereupon it dies. If opportunistic infections of the bird’s devastated feathers and tumorous, necrotic beak and claws haven’t killed it already, that is.

There is no cure, or even specific treatment, for psittacine beak and feather disease.

There are hundreds of diseases of humans and animals that’re just as horrible. But few are as purely and plainly awful as this one. It’s like a metaphor for the unfairness of life.

Right - I’m off to Cute Overload for a while.

When I read The Barna Group’s “Most Americans Take Well-Known Bible Stories at Face Value” (which, yes, was a year ago, but it’s not as if there’ve been a lot of great breakthroughs in the field since then), I was not entirely surprised to read that “Americans … remain confident that some of the most amazing stories in the Bible can be taken at face value.”

Given that, as I’ve previously mentioned, the USA appears to be a country in which 21% of the atheists believe in God, it’s not surprising that - to pick one example from the Barna survey - 64% of Americans (or at least of the Americans that the rather preachy Barna Group surveyed…) believe that Moses literally parted the Red Sea.

This, however, is definitely one of those situations where it would have paid for both the people doing the survey and those writing stories about it - presuming they didn’t all just have an axe to grind - to sit down for a probably-unavailable minute and have a little think about exactly what their findings meant.

Since it would appear that they didn’t, let’s do it ourselves, shall we?

Look at that 21%-of-atheists-say-they’re-theists thing, for example. This turns out to be, so far as I can see, an actual, fair, genuine result. 21% of people who clearly said they were atheists also clearly said they believed in a “God or universal spirit”.

That finding is from a Penthouse Pew Forum survey, which I consider rather more reliable than a Barna one.

Pew, you see, make their methodology and detailed results freely available. There’s a PDF, here, that shows you the actual survey questions, next to the results.

On page 27 of that document, there’s what looks to me like a very fair way to quickly find someone’s religious affiliation or lack thereof, which includes a re-questioning for people who’ve been given the final options “atheist, agnostic, something else, or nothing in particular” and chosen the last option, to make sure they actually want to be “nothing in particular”, and not atheist or agnostic.

You can never make a survey question perfect; in this case there’s the problem of people who, like me, hold the considered opinion that gods do not exist (atheism), but accept our own fallibility and thus admit that we might be wrong (agnosticism), however improbable that may be. We therefore tick the “atheist” box, but if later on we’re asked whether we think there’s the slightest possibility that gods may exist, we’ll say yes, like an agnostic.

But the Pew survey is about as good as a quick multiple-choice test is ever going to be.

In the rest of the main “topline” document they roll all of the Unaffiliateds together into one line, which presumably explains why seventy per cent of that category actually report belief in a God or universal spirit (page 44), and 36% of them (page 45) say they’re absolutely certain that said entity exists, neither of which beliefs are at all compatible with atheism or agnosticism.

You can get a nice detailed separate table that breaks down all of the religions (PDF), though. That table shows you that 515 people, 10.2 per cent of the 5048 “Unaffiliated” respondents, said they were atheists.

Taken all together, this indicates that the Pew Forum aren’t getting their “21% of atheists believe in god” result by subterfuge.

Pew’s main “topline” document doesn’t break Unaffiliated out into Atheist, Agnostic, Secular Unaffiliated and Religious Unaffiliated in its tables, presumably to make them clearer. But it does not appear that they’re pulling a statistical fast one by, for instance, rolling all of the responses from Unaffiliateds together and then just declaring 10.2% of those responses to have been from atheists, even if none of the atheists actually reported belief in a deity.

No, it really does seem that about 108 people that Pew surveyed clearly declared themselves to be atheists, and then clearly professed belief in a god of some sort.

That doesn’t, of course, make a blind bit of sense. Atheism is not a religion, just as baldness is not a hairstyle and no car in the driveway is not a kind of car in the driveway. But it’s not the survey-givers’ job to educate people about terminology. If you want to say you’re an atheist who believes in a god, they’ll write your answer down like everyone else’s, even if that answer indicates that you’re ignorant, nuts or a prankster. Fair enough.

Now, let’s look at the Barna Group’s survey.

Oh, wait a minute, we can’t. They’ll be happy to sell us umpteen books about being a better Christian or their copyrighted Christian Leader Profile test, but I can find no trace on their site of even the opportunity to buy a copy of any of their actual survey questions and results.

So now we’re in the woods. Who knows what questions Barna actually asked, and what answers people actually gave?

With the right survey, you can get people to say pretty much anything you want. You can even influence their beliefs. (”What effect would it have on your vote if you were to discover that Candidate Smith is a child molester?”)

Like Sir Humphrey persuading Bernard that he both supports and opposes reintroducing conscription, the framing of the questions makes all the difference. Especially when you’re asking people about things that they don’t actually think about much, or even care about much, like whether David actually killed Goliath.

As anyone working in this field knows, you have to take considerable care, even if you’re scrupulously honest, to make sure that the meaning of your questions, and the meaning of the respondents’ answers, is clear.

Stop people coming out of a church, for instance, and ask them if they believe in the Immaculate Conception. Most of them - Catholic or Protestant - will probably say that they do. So you can tick down ninety-whatever-percent on your survey and then issue a press release saying that belief in that doctrine is very strong, hurrah.

What most of the people will have thought you were asking, though, is whether Jesus was born of a virgin. The Catholic Doctrine of the Immaculate Conception actually states that Mary was born free of original sin, on account of how Jesus could not be incubated in the wicked womb of a normal woman, and if she weighs more than a duck she’s a witch.

Your average rank-and-file dozes-through-the-sermon churchgoer is somewhat unlikely to know this. Your non-churchgoing ticks-the-box-marked-Christian person on the street is very unlikely to know.

So if I were running a survey like the Barna one, then apart from making sure I released the questions and not just digests of the alleged answers, I’d also make very clear exactly what stories I was asking about, without just using common names that people often misinterpret.

(To be fair, the Barna survey probably generally did that; there’s not a lot of room for error when you’re asking about stories like Jonah and the whale or Daniel and the lions’ den.)

But I’d also scatter in a few Bible-ish stories that were actually made up just for the survey. Jesus… blessing the fields… of the Moabites, say.

If respondents say they believe stories that not even Dan Brown ever mentioned - as, I bet, many of them would - then clearly people’s statements of belief in the other stories should be taken with a large grain of salt.

The Barna survey press releases do, however, tell you something about George Barna, who is I think representative of a peculiar movement in American Christianity. This press release about the Bible-story survey manages to restrict its preachiness to a “Reflections on the Data” section, but the one I mentioned earlier contains a number of places where George expresses the strangely popular, and reliable-like-clockwork, belief that Christianity in the USA (and elsewhere!) is “under siege”.

“…While the level of literal acceptance of these Bible stories is nothing short of astonishing given our cultural context…”, for instance, and earlier on “Surprisingly, the most significant Bible story of all - ‘the story of Jesus Christ rising from the dead, after being crucified and buried’ - was also the most widely embraced.”

Outside observers may find this slightly bizarre, since Christianity in the USA is obviously massively dominant…

…and Christians who don’t believe (or at least say they believe) that Jesus was resurrected are pretty hard to find.

But there’s also no shortage of talking heads eager to opine that the evil forces of secularism are constantly gaining ground in their unholy mission to re-name trees with lights on them, and so on.

To be fair, Barna goes on to say (in the third person…) that the real problem is that all of the nominal Bible-believing which his who-knew-what-it-asked survey discovered doesn’t translate to much in the way of actual “Christian” acts. So I suppose that’s the grain of rationality within the “Christianity under siege” belief; that lots of people say they’re Christians, but you can’t find a lot of true Christians among them.

But, again, this doesn’t seem very surprising to anybody who accepts the not-too-hard-to-support point of view that Christianity is just another major religion, which the overwhelming majority of adherents use not to lead them into the light, but to justify whatever they wanted to do anyway. Yes, believing the Bible ought to lead to defined-by-Barna-as-”Christian” behaviour. But no remotely sensible reader of the New Testament could possibly conclude that Jesus would find it acceptable for you to drive a Lexus to church - and yet “prosperity theology” has sprung up to bridge the gap.

Similarly, the idea of karma ought, you would think, to lead people to good behaviour. But instead, your average Hindu-in-the-street is quite likely to believe that karma means that miserable beggars, children raped by their parents, or any other unfortunates you care to name, are suffering righteous punishment for bad deeds in a past life. And, again, that the prosperous deserve their prosperity, for surely god(s) would not have given the rich so much money if it were not their just reward.

All of this makes sense, if you don’t think there’s One True Religion that should guide its followers to be obviously better people than those who’ve foolishly been raised in some other, fictional faith. But to people like Barna, who believe that their particular religious variant is that one special phone-line to God, the entirely ordinary behaviour of their fellow believers can only be explained by the evil actions of external forces, besieging the chosen of God and leading - nay, forcing - them away from the righteous path they’d otherwise obviously choose to follow.

Adding fake-Bible-story questions to the survey could have helped Barna out, because it would have given him a chance to claim that people of disappointing morality who believe that David fought Goliath, but also believe that Josiah, um, washed the Pharaoh’s feet, clearly do not in fact know much about Christianity and could therefore not be expected to be particularly righteous.

Adding fake stories, though, could also have measured the credophilia - indiscriminate collection of beliefs - that lies at the core of a lot of religions.

If your religion says that faith by itself is a virtue, you shouldn’t be surprised if you end up with a bunch of people who’ll believe almost anything. And who’ll think that holding those beliefs, without doing anything else in particular, is enough to get you into heaven.

In the comments for this old Respectful Insolence piece, one less-than-deep-thinker made the mistake of announcing that he sometimes actually told patients “This stroke is God trying to speak to you…”

This attracted a certain amount of snark. If a god can’t think of a better way to communicate with you than by bursting a blood vessel in your brain, I’m not sure I want to visit an afterlife run by him.

I hope, if I ever find myself in a similar situation, to have the presence of mind (somewhat dependent upon the presence of functional brain cells…) to say “Yes, you’re right. There’s clearly not much time left for me to die heroically in battle.”

(If I just nodded and then yelled “BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD!” while lunging at the doctor with a letter-opener, he probably wouldn’t get the joke. Besides, I’m definitely more of a Nurgle kind of guy.)

Vendors of “haunted” objects have apparently diversified from merely selling spooky dolls. Now there are about a billion other “haunted” things for sale on eBay.

(Actually, as I write this, there are only about ten thousand hits for non-Halloween “haunted” things in ebay.com’s ever-entertaining “Everything Else” category. There’s similar nonsense scattered around various other categories, but Everything Else, especially the wall-to-wall-BS “Metaphysical” subcategory, is where the real winners are to be found.)

You name it, someone’s selling it. Ordinary glass marbles that’ve allegedly “captured the energy at the moment of all sunspot explosions that have ever happened on the surface of the sun”. Dime-store rings that allegedly come with an “astral plane incubus”, guaranteed to “bring you pleasure during dreams”. A “Powerful Amulet” enchanted by a “psychic witch” to bring in “MASSIVE AMOUNTS OF MONEY & CASH FAST”.

Some of this stuff costs less than ten dollars all told - the money-amulet is fifteen bucks delivered, but just think how fast you’ll make it back. And the “HAUNTED MOST POWERFUL ASTRAL TRAVEL ORB IN THE WORLD!” costs thirty bucks delivered. But c’mon, it’s “SUPERCHARGED WITH ASTRAL TRAVEL ENERGY!”

It’s possible to spend a fair bit more, though.

“HAUNTED 7 DEVATA PENDANT MOST AMAZING ITEM ON EBAY”? Yours for $149.99.

“Haunted Demon Ring and much more! Money, Power, Love”? $160 delivered.

“HAUNTED WICCAN MARID GENIE DJINN MASSIVE BINDING RITUAL”? $369.99.

“DJINN SON OF OSIRIS HAUNTED RING MARID/EFRIT JINN GENIE”? Fifteen hundred bucks.

“Haunted Ghostly Hand Asylum Window Black & White Photo” or “HAUNTED- THE RING OF UMBRA - THE SEAL OF THE SUMMONER”? Each $2500.

(But the photo doesn’t apparently do anything, while the Ring of Umbra is just dripping with “ISHAB MalFatah & Muhamad-Dal-Jafi Magic”. This will apparently pretty much turn you into Mister Mxyzptlk.)

“FORTUNATE MISS CLEMENTINE HAUNTED AND LUCKY JEWELRY”? Seventeen thousand dollars.

“AUSTRALIAN BLACK OPAL GEMSTONE 14K GOLD PENDANT HAUNTED”?

Twenty-seven thousand, nine hundred and ninety nine dollars. And thirty cents.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you:

The voting public.

I’m a bit late on this one, but it’s so hilarious that I simply must tell you about it, just in case you haven’t seen it yourself.

This is, if you ask me, even funnier than the well-documented evolution of that Intelligent Design textbook.

I hadn’t actually read Richard Dawkins’ blog post about the hilarious stupidity of Turkish creationist Harun Yahya’s glossy but rather poorly fact-checked book “Atlas of Creation“.

(If Harun hasn’t gotten around to sending you one for free yet you may be able to find a seller on Amazon!)

“Harun Yahya” is the pen name of one Adnan Oktar, a leading light in the burgeoning field of Islamic creationism, in which Muslims strive to demonstrate that their newer and more vibrant religion can outdo Christianity in every field, the stupider the better. Islamic creationism has found a de facto home in Turkey, and a de facto leader in Harun/Adnan. He has a Web site.

The problem Dawkins found with Atlas of Creation (instantly, upon opening the book at random) is not the usual distortions, misquotes and plain old lies that are the stock in trade of the jobbing creationist. The problem, rather, comes from the fact that the book contains many comparisons between fossil organisms and modern ones that’re supposed to demonstrate that those organisms have not changed at all over millions of years. That is the entire thesis of the book.

That, in itself, would only actually be an argument against evolution if it were hard to find organisms which have changed over the years, which is of course not at all the case. Environments and ecological niches tend to change, applying selective pressure to the species that live there, which then change, or become extinct. Most organisms are not ferns or crocodiles, pretty much as adequate to their task today as they were before the first mammal had drawn breath.

The standard creationist tactic to deal with this awkward situation is to declare anything that looks as if it’s changed to actually be two, or three, or as many as are necessary, entirely different species with no relationship at all. Any time you find a “missing link”, they can therefore just say that now there are two more gaps that remain tellingly unfilled.

(In related news, it is physically impossible to close a door.)

But never mind that, because Dawkins found that the Atlas of Creation frequently fails to actually compare a fossil creature with a modern version of the same thing at all.

The first such mistake he found, where he first opened the book, was the claim that a fossil eel hadn’t changed at all when compared with… a modern sea snake, which is actually a very different species.

There were many more. Sometimes the book fails to even compare a fossil with a living creature in the same subkingdom.

But the very finest comparisons were discovered by entomologist Steve Lew.

The makers of the Atlas of Creation, you see, apparently kept production costs down by just lifting pictures from all over the Internet. The problem with doing this - besides the tedious copyright-infringement stuff - is that you can’t reliably tell what organism a picture is of just by looking at it. (Especially if you’ve got the level of knowledge about biology that’s typical among famous creationists.) Go to a proper stock-photo outfit (or, in this case, some biology-photos resource, I suppose) and you’re likely to find that when you ask for a picture of a caddis fly, you get a picture of a caddis fly.

If, on the other hand, your image requests are made in a more informal, Google-Imagey sort of way, you may give yourself away just a teeny bit.

As I write this, the third Google Images hit for “caddis fly” is from grahamowengallery.com - specifically, this page. If you go to that page, you shouldn’t need even a rudimentary command of the English language to see that Graham Owen makes wonderfully realistic fake insects, using fly-tying techniques. A lot of his work is actually, in theory at least, usable for actual fishing, because it’s tied around a hook like any other fly.

This detail escaped the worthies putting together the Atlas of Creation.

So there it is, bold as brass in the middle of their glossy book: A fly in amber in the background, and a fishing fly with a bloody great hook sticking out of its arse in the foreground. They just Photoshopped out the background of Graham Owen’s picture.

They also knocked off Mr Owen’s “Red Hardy Spider” image from the same page. The hook’s much harder to see there, but the nature of the page the image came from is just as bloody obvious.

(UPDATE: I e-mailed Graham Owen about this, and he told me that he’s made a Web page about the image thievery! it turns out that they also knocked off his picture of a mayfly. And Graham confirmed for me that the makers of Atlas of Creation didn’t even ask permission to use the pictures, much less pay to license them. Graham’s now asked them about it, but they apparently can’t take any time off from their busy job of being very pious and respectable followers of God to send him an answer about why they copied his photos without paying.)

Mr Oktar spoiled all the fun by writing a reply to Richard Dawkins, a Turkish newspaper that picked up the story, all the cool kids at school who won’t play with him, et cetera, complaining about Dawkins’ “terrible ignorance”. He argues that “whether or not it is a model makes no difference”, since the picture represents something that does actually exist, and then goes on to say “The fact that demolishes evolution is that the creature has remained unchanged for millions of years and that it completely refutes evolution.”

Well, if it completely refutes evolution then I suppose it must demolish it as well, not to mention contradict it, destroy it, pulverise it and give it a very stern talking to. But I think I must have missed the part where evolution says that the phenotype of an organism must change over time.

The only reason to think this is the case is if you believe in the frequently-espoused but completely stupid “ladder” kind of evolution, where everything’s striving to get “higher” all the time, and will surely achieve this goal. This is preposterous on its face - all these billions of years, and we’ve still got bacteria - but it’s ubiquitous in lousy sci-fi. There, “evolutionary level” is a property that can be freely pushed one way or the other, so a ray gun or a defective time machine or whatever can “de-evolve” people into apes, or “evolve” them into huge-brained psychic ectomorphs or similarly super-intelligent “beings of pure energy”.

If you don’t get all of your knowledge of evolution from that one God-awful episode of Voyager, though, the fact that Richard Dawkins “never goes into the question of whether or not the caddis fly is still alive today” is not, as Yahya says, a dead giveaway that evolution is completely bogus.

Dawkins is, I think, reasonably sure that people already know that caddis flies still exist, and that ancient ones looked much like modern ones. If there’s no great selective pressure on an organism, you shouldn’t expect it to change much. If a particular organism was already very well adapted to its environment, and its environment has not greatly changed, then neither does the organism. Stop me if I’m going too fast for you here, creationists.

I think it still matters that they made such lousy image choices, though, because it’s an entertaining case in point of the sloppiness of most, if not all, creationist arguments. Comparing fossils with unrelated animals, or fishing flies, is like your candidate making a speech in front of a picture of a military hospital… that turns out to actually be a picture of a similarly-named middle school. It shows that you’re just not paying attention, even when you’ll look like idiots if you get it wrong.

This doesn’t, of course, matter to the creationist target market, who can’t be expected to make it through any book that doesn’t have pretty pictures (frequently including whatever holy book they claim to so fervently believe).

Adnan Oktar actually does, of course, believe that no species has ever significantly changed over time. (He’s also pleased to point out that all terrorists are atheist “Darwinists”! I suppose that’d explain why they hate American soldiers so much.)

It’s a little difficult to defend these beliefs logically, so he’s taken the popular option in this situation and defended them legally instead. Richard Dawkins’ site is, therefore, now unavailable in Turkey (or supposed to be, anyway), along with a variety of other sites that’ve irritated someone there. (Oktar’s lawsuits are currently protecting Turkish Internet users from the whole of Wordpress.com and Google Groups; the Turkish government blocks several other sites. At one point, the Turkish block list apparently included, on account of a typographical error, the unused imbd.com domain instead of the Internet Movie Database.)

Oktar’s probably a bit too busy to start shooting off more lawsuits at the moment, since he’s appealing his recent conviction for “creating an illegal organization for personal gain”; this is the latest instalment of a particularly distasteful story.

(When looking for more info about that, I found this thread on James Randi’s forum, where one commenter points out that one of the numerous defective comparisons in the Atlas of Creation is between a fossilised spider crab and a contemporary crab spider. Next stop: A horseshoe crab, and a horseshoe!)

Once Oktar’s dealt with his little legal problem, though, I presume he’ll issue a flurry of lawsuits demanding that every site that’s discussed this tragically hilarious story also be blocked in Turkey.

Sooner or later, Turkish Web browsers will only let you see harunyahya.com and discovery.org.