Marv Albert did something like that 20 years ago, except when he did it, it was just satire: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amused_to_Death

Apparently, like with with Orwell's work, some people seem to be confusing a warning with an instruction manual.

Less interesting when you factor in the truthfulness of that baseball bat statistic: http://www.snopes.com/politics/guns/baseballbats.asp

like, literally, man.

Hmm, the thing on the upper left looks a bit like a camera... I think they've buried the lede: Curiosity has clearly found a big mirror on Mars!

I wonder if there are more of these sorts of papers out there than people realize. Maybe a lot of them just don't get much attention outside the field of the writer. On that note, here's a meteorology one: Case Analysis Of A Historic Killer Tornado Event In Kansas On 10 June 1938

Good point. Seems to me the biggest issue with the whole idea of cell phones causing brain tumors is simply the fact that while cell phone use has increased dramatically in the last 20 years, there hasn't been any corresponding increase in brain tumor occurrence. If those two things aren't even correlated, how can anyone conclude that cell phones actually cause brain tumors?

Someone could claim there is a time lag for tumor development, but these sporadic cases of supposedly cell-phone-linked tumors have been popping up for years and years now, while the overall tumor rate has stayed mysteriously constant.

Funny you should mention the possibility of a right brain / left brain influence on religious belief. My cognitive abilities are tilted heavily enough towards what are considered left-brain abilities that I've been diagnosed with a (non-verbal) learning disorder. Does that play a role in my inability to believe? Hard to say. I spent years trying to make myself regain the faith of my childhood, though, so I think it is indeed an inability. However, I look at it like this -- if I can't believe simply because of the way my brain is wired, that by itself contradicts Christianity enough that I would seriously doubt it's truth. I suppose it may not contradict a strict Calvinist interpretation of Christianity, but I find Calvinism disturbing enough that I wouldn't be interested in worshiping its God even if he existed. Any other religion that requires belief for a positive afterlife would fall into the same boat as Christianity.

All very true. I've had numerous conversations where I ended up wishing I could go back to the beginning and say "okay, before we go any further, we need to precisely define a few words". Personally, I think the proper understanding of 'atheist' and 'agnostic' are as orthogonal descriptors. Atheism/Theism is and ontological question, while agnosticism/gnosticism is and epistemological question. In the end, I consider myself both agnostic and atheist. Unfortunately, it seems few people I have met categorize the terms in the same way. Although Russell doesn't explicitly define things in such terms in the essay I referred to, he describes what is ultimately my viewpoint: There are some things where it is impossible for us to know if they exist for sure, but we can consider their existence to have greater or lesser probability. Furthermore, although actually quantifying the probabilities can be quite difficult or even impossible, such an approach is definitely not limited to considering uncertain things to have a 50/50 chance of being true as some people seem to see agnostics as believing.

A few years back I saw on C-Span a talk that you gave at (IIRC) Liberty University. Afterwards, an audience member asked you a question along the lines of "Could you imagine any event that you would construe as evidence of God's existence?" Unfortunately, I remember feeling that your answer at the time didn't really address the substance of the question, and I'd be interested to hear your answer to the same question without the pressure of having to come up with something immediately. I'm already an agnostic/atheist myself, but I'm curious as to how you deal with the fact that supernatural causes are ruled out axiomatically in a naturalistic philosophy -- any unexplained event is assumed to be due to an as of yet undiscovered natural cause. If a supernatural cause existed, could we ever know, even in principle?

You've been described as a 'militant atheist', but do you consider yourself to be certainly atheist or rather technically agnostic, in the same sense that Bertrand Russell described himself as in his essay "Am I Atheist or Agnostic?"

A small addendum: There is actually one logical way that an all-knowing, all-good God could be influenced by prayer: If what is prayed for is strictly neutral morally. I don't know if many prayers asking for things fit that criteria, though.

Umm, no, he didn't. He simply said if God is unaware of something until someone prays, he is not all knowing. If God is ever unaware of anything, he is not omniscient. That seems pretty basic. To say otherwise is to render the words all-knowing and omniscient meaningless.

Where did he imply any such thing? If God is all-good, he must only do good, whether or not anyone asks him to. How such actions relate to people isn't necessarily relevant to whether or not they are good.

No, he just used basic logic. If God is not bound by that, he is incomprehensible in a way that would leave us unable to know anything at all about him, so any argument about God would be as silly as an argument about whether or not 1 is the same as 2. Also, if God is not bound by logic, I'm curious how you resolve the question of whether or not God can create a mountain so heavy that he cannot move it. The traditional resolution of that paradox is to say that such a thing is logically impossible, and while omnipotence would allow God to do anything that is possible, it would not allow him to do the impossible. Do you have a resolution every other philosopher and theologian has missed?

Once again, he neither said nor implied any such thing.

The GP poster never claimed his argument disproved the existence of God in general, just a God with very specific characteristics. He didn't even imply that prayer was useless -- he explicitly allowed for the possibility of it having psychological effects on the person praying, a la meditation.

His argument showed one thing, and one thing only: That if God is all-knowing and all-good then his will and his actions cannot be influenced by prayer. That doesn't mean God is nonexistent, and it doesn't mean prayer can't have effects on the person praying, it just means that if someone can influence God's actions via prayer, either God is not all-knowing, or he is not all-good. His point was this: Since religions such as Christianity teach that God is, in fact, both all-knowing and all-good, people who believe that such a God both has those characteristics and can be influenced by prayer are misunderstanding their own religion.

Actually, I've found that many atheists and agnostics credit the Bible for being the main reason for their (lack of) belief.

Considering the drugs typically used to treat ADHD, and in light the sort of horrors the same drugs are described as being by the likes of DARE and the DEA, it seems our society is adopting a Trix-inspired motto: Silly adults, speed is for kids!

Of course, there is a difference between using drugs and abusing drugs, but good luck getting drug warriors to admit that. As unhelpful as DARE has been since it's start, it reaches a new level of absurd when police officers come to schools to teach classrooms full of children on amphetamines that even the lightest use of the very same drugs as teens or adults will ruin there lives.

Heh, no, I didn't personally -- when Doom came out I was in middle school and there were only Macs there. However, when I installed Quake on a couple of the PCs on the network at my high school, I had used the box copy since I lacked a CD writer at the time. Playing that on a network instead of the slow dialup I had at home was a lot of fun for a little while, until I got detention for my efforts.

It's been a long, long time since I've touched a floppy disk, but I'm pretty sure the 3.5" disks like Doom came on could be set to be read only, and that was typically the case for commercial software. Now, if the disks were blanks onto which the game had been copied, that's another story. In that case chaos may have reigned.