The Orca’s Thumb

A prayer group in Washington DC is claiming the credit for the recent sharp drop in the US price of petrol.

“We don’t have anybody else to turn to but God,” Mr Twyman told the BBC. “We have to turn these problems over to God and not to man.”

I guess they’ve selectively forgotten about all the other times they prayed for something and nothing happened… but that’s probably just God’s way of testing us, isn’t it?

Problem is — the prices didn’t go down.

But think about it for a second — if prices had come down and if these people had been the cause, then they just royally wasted their supernatural praying god-powers on lowering the prices of gas/petrol. Wouldn’t it have been better for them to use that divine power to cure cancer or something?

I thought the idea was to pray to ease all the world’s suffering. Not just your own…

A toddler whose remains were found inside a suitcase in Philadelphia this spring was starved to death by members of a religious cult, including his mother, in part because he refused to say “amen” after meals, police said.

Ria Ramkissoon, the mother of Javon Thompson, was charged Sunday with first-degree murder in the boy’s death, and Baltimore police said Monday that three other members of a group called 1 Mind Ministries have also been charged with first-degree murder. Police and Ramkissoon’s family say the group is a cult.

WTF?

When stealing Apple gear, one can’t simply throw just any old cinder block through the Apple Store’s plate glass window. That type of plebeian criminal activity just simply isn’t done when pilfering such high-end gear. These days, if you don’t want to be laughed out of the criminal underworld, you need to make sure you use a $60,000 automobile (or better) as the method of breaking and entering.
[Read more →]

Have you ever wanted to saunter into mass inconspicuously one Sunday morning to grab one of those delicious crackers — without starting a riot?

Well, if this sounds like you, then your lucky day is (almost) here.

Dr. Xiang Zhang and his group from the University of California are announcing this week, in a pair of articles to be published in Nature and Science, that they have created a material that can render a three dimensional object invisible.

Really?
What most people cannot comprehend is that there is no one absolute make-or-break piece of evidence for evolution.

Shocker.

No, not so. Evolution is a conclusion from the totality of the evidence.
There are thousands of cases that demonstrate that the principles of evolution work and are useful for understanding the natural world; and there are no cases whatsoever where creationism has improved our understanding.

Eight iPhone owners have joined an elite clan: Their Apple gadget is running a program that cost nearly $1,000.

When the iPhone first hit the market in June 2007, those who paid the $499 entry price — and signed the two-year AT&T contract — owned a status symbol. A year later, we have the iPhone 3G, Apple’s speedier, sleeker and, most important, less expensive smart phone, which introduced a section for downloading third-party applications. Now that the phone is affordable enough for a wider audience, a new status symbol has emerged: a seemingly useless application called I Am Rich. [Read more →]

Fellow skeptic, Jeff Medkeff, aka Blue Collar Scientist, succumbed to cancer on Sunday.

Damn.

Birmingham City Council has blocked its staff from looking at websites about atheism. That’s their prerogative, of course. The following, however

The authority’s Bluecoat Software computer system allows staff to look at websites relating to Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and other religions but blocks sites to do with “witchcraft or Satanism” and “occult practices, atheistic views, voodoo rituals or any other form of mysticism”.

… doesn’t make any sense at all.

Atheism does not belong under the heading of form of mysticism – Christianity and Islam, on the other hand, do – right along with witchcraft, the occult, voodoo, and New Age nonsense.