Skepticism

Comment o’ the Week: Creationist Smackdown Edition

Well, I promised to award Comment o’ the Week to anyone making a “Leave the Pope alone!” YouTube video in the style of Chris Crocker, but not one of you took me up on it. SO FINE, you bastards. I’ll pick another.

I nearly gave it to the comment that got the most nominations, which came from No Astronomer in a thread chock-full of hilarious comments: “Why wait until conception? I’ve been teaching my sperm to read for years now. They love the articles.”

That is in fact hilarious, but I have to award the prize to another oft-nominated comment for being both hilarious and educational and buried in a long fight with a seemingly unsinkable creationist. Congratulations to Blake Stacey for the following gem:

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Blake StaceyNo Gravatar // Mar 25, 2009 at 12:50 pm

@mynym:

Wow, one bit of wrongness jams up against another until the individual pieces of wrong are almost indistinguishable, leaving only an impressionistic orgy of fail.

History shows that nature based paganism generally leads to a lack of concern with the “least of these” and a survival of the fittest mentality.

1. Your conflation of all non-Christian beliefs into “nature based paganism” betrays a stupefying ignorance of history.

2. Hippocrates was not a Christian.

In fact, some here have been wallowing around in it and seem to think that they’ve explained co-operation while others seem to think that they’ve explained war on evolutionary terms. That’s because despite Darwin’s best efforts at reforming hypothetical goo “evolution” is generally still not a scientific theory which is testable. Instead, it is a meaningless word that can comport with all change and all observations.

Wrong on all counts. You’re attributing to evolutionary biology the sins of “evolutionary psychology“, which is a nascent field still under development and beset by too many ideologues for its own good.

It “predicts” the existence of hospitals as well as their destruction.

If you stopped trying to use cultural phenomena to attach biology, you might look less like a benighted idiot.

Instead, during the so-called Dark Ages, European technology and science overtook and surpassed the rest of the world!

If by “the rest of the world” you exclude Arab Spain, T’ang China and Mesoamerica, then yes, you might have a point. (If you try to claim Andalusia as part of “Christian Europe”, then you’re an even more blithering moron than I had imagined.)

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Blake went on to deliver several more hilarious bitch-slaps, and therefore he is our winner. Additional kudos go to everyone else in that thread who was valiantly representing reality. Blake, please let me know what you’d like to ask for your special prize: Wednesday’s Afternoon Inquisition.

Remember folks, nominate your favorite comment by quoting it (using the little arrow next to it) and writing “COTW!” in your response.

Happy Friday!

Rebecca Watson

Rebecca is a writer, speaker, YouTube personality, and unrepentant science nerd. In addition to founding and continuing to run Skepchick, she hosts Quiz-o-Tron, a monthly science-themed quiz show and podcast that pits comedians against nerds. There is an asteroid named in her honor. Twitter @rebeccawatson Mastodon mstdn.social/@rebeccawatson Instagram @actuallyrebeccawatson TikTok @actuallyrebeccawatson YouTube @rebeccawatson BlueSky @rebeccawatson.bsky.social

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11 Comments

  1. Well Done Blake! When I read that comment originally I couldn’t stop chuckling about it for the rest of the day. The astounding factuality of it certainly helped too. :)

  2. So Moorish Spain doesn’t count as European…why, exactly?

    Incidentally, the Reconquista started in 718. I don’t know when Blake Stacey’s claiming the ‘Dark Ages’ were…

    The mosque at Cordoba suggests things were a bit more complicated. The pillars making up the avenues were from an original Vizigothic Christian cathedral; and when Cordoba was retaken, the Spaniards plonked a great big church slap bang in the middle of the Mezquita.

    IMO Spain went down the pan after they kicked out all the Muslims and all the Jews.

  3. Phew! Thank the teapot for that! I was worried I might have to come up with an afternoon inquisition question. Grats to Blake!

    Mike.

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