The folks at the NSCE and Expelled Exposed have done it again: made a great instructional video about evolution. This one is how an eye can evolve, and is so easy to understand that it should be shown to every single school student in the country, and indeed the world.

Regular readers of this blog know that I turn a jaundiced eye to claims of sightings of supernatural beings in mundane objects. Mary in an oil stain, Jesus in the wood grain, angels in a window pane. I am of the strong feeling that these are random or semi-random patterns that our brains are desperately trying to make sense of.

Certainly there is no lack of examples. Just check out this very blog’s pareidolia category.

Still, that’s a jumble. Wouldn’t you rather have your Messiahtings (say it out loud) all arranged in a nice, neat ordered list?

Sure you do! So head over to The Shark Book blog, where they list the Top 11 Jesus Sightings. Now, I don’t necessarily agree with their choices on the list or the order (a shower sighting with no mention of Lenin?) but it’s still a good one and shows, all in one place, how some people really really want evidence of their faith, a process I have always found a little bit like cheating. If it’s faith, it doesn’t need proof. And if it’s real, then wouldn’t the evidence be a little bit better than a smudge in a pancake?^*

P.S. Yeah, I’ve seen the Jesus on the Ultrasound, too, and it cracks me up. It looks more like Nosferatu leaning over a victim. And there’s more than one ultrasound sighting, too.

From PZ comes word that the creationists in the Louisiana state legislature are still trying to ram teh stoopid through the system to become state educational law.

Barbara Forrest, one of the Heroes of Dover, is fighting this garbage with everything she’s got, and one thing she’s got is us. If you live in Louisiana, please please please contact your representatives and talk to them about this. Barbara has all the information you need; she’s written a summary of the bill as well as a series of talking points for you.

Mind you, this is for Louisiana residents only for now. She may need all our help eventually, but for now this is a state issue.

Man. Whack-a-creationist is a game that never ends. As Barbara herself says:

The children and teachers of Louisiana are being used as pawns by the Louisiana Family Forum and, most likely, the Discovery Institute, about which I have written so extensively. These people will assuredly not be around to clean up the wreckage they will leave in their wake if we don’t stop them. We have to stop them.

Otherwise:

While I was in England, the good folks at nature.com let me glom on to their pub party, which turned into a Nature/Randi/BA/Brian Cox fan/meetup thingy. It was quite the good time.

In return, all I had to do was write up a soapbox speech and record it for their podcast! What a scam. Suckers.

As it is, they interviewed Randi on it, as well as Alan Marscher, another astronomer who talks about active galaxies! So it’s a skeptical and astronomical smorgasbord.

You can download the podcast directly, read the transcript, or check out their archives for tons more cool podcasts.

If you’re curious, the woman who does the voiceover ad at the very beginning is none other than Gia.

BABloggee Patrick Pricken alerted me to a new movie coming out soon… where pareidolia is real.

It’s called "Henry Poole is Here", and it stars Luke Wilson as a sad sap whose life turns around when the face of Jesus appears on the side of his house. It looks like another in a long line of don’t-trust-reality-instead-put-your-faith-in-something kind of movies. I can already predict with some certainty that in the end there will be an ambiguous scene where you don’t really know if it’s Jesus, or if people use the stain as a catalyst to open up their own inner power.

Either way, feh.

I’d rather see a movie where some kid isn’t doing well in science class because his parents think the Universe is 6000 years old. Then he sees an online interview with Brian Cox about the Large Hadron Collider and is inspired to make it his life’s work to understand why gravity works. In the end, he does, and finds out that the Universe is filled to overflowing with the wonder and beauty of nature.

I’ll be waiting a long time for that movie.

… Hemant has this:

Stein: When we just saw that man, I think it was Mr. [PZ] Myers, talking about how great scientists were, I was thinking to myself the last time any of my relatives saw scientists telling them what to do they were telling them to go to the showers to get gassed.

Yes, Ben Stein went there. He equates PZ with Nazis who gassed Jews by the hundreds of thousands.

Great guy, huh?

There is nothing too onerous for that foul little man to say. Nothing. And then he turns around and talks about "God’s love". What an evil hypocrite.

But of course, we know that. That puts the lie to everything Ben Stein says in his craptacular movie Expelled, too, since it’s illegal to teach religion in schools. And why doesn’t Ben ever mention Chris Comer in the movie? She really was expelled due to creationism… but maybe Stein would rather you didn’t know about her. Hmmmm.

The heroes at NCSE put out this video, which drives home the point about just how deceptive creationist promulgators can be, showing yet again that they are hypocrites, ignoring the Ninth Commandment.