Creation Museum's foundation disproves its content

The Kentucky Creation Museum is built upon a foundation (literally) that disproves its contents--alternating layers of limestone and shale filled with fossils of ancient marine creatures. This video gives you a tutorial (and is a demonstration of what Ken Ham and Answers in Genesis don't want people to learn).

The economics of pirate practices

Peter Leeson, an economist at West Virginia University, is writing a three-part series on the economics of pirate behavior and institutions. The first two parts are available online.

Part 1, "An-arrgh-chy: The Law and Economics of Pirate Organization," describes how pirates solved the problem of predation by captains that was common among naval and merchant ships by a system of checks and balances involving written constitutions and democratically elected captains and quarter-masters--in the 1670s, before England and a century before the United States introduced similar political developments.

Part 2, "Pirational Choice: The Economics of Infamous Pirate Practices," looks at the reasons for the use of the "Jolly Roger" as a pirate flag and the practices of pirate torture and pirate conscription.

Part 3 has been promised for the fall of 2007...

These papers are an addition to the literature about non-governmental institutions of law and order that arise within criminal organizations, in the fringes between government jurisdictions, and in areas of governmental neglect. Some other works addressing these topics include Diego Gambetta's excellent book The Sicilian Mafia: The Business of Private Protection, Robert Neuwirth's book Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, A New Urban World, Ian Lambot and Greg Girard's City of Darkness: Life in Kowloon Walled City, and the HBO series Deadwood and The Wire.

Crazy things Kent Hovind believes

Nathan Zamprogno has put together a nice list of the craziness that Kent Hovind purports to believe.

(Via Pharyngula.)

Kent Hovind music video

(Via Dispatches from the Culture Wars.)

Fred Thompson: Watergate Weasel

Fred Thompson was minority counsel on the House committee investigating the Watergate break-in. In that role, he regularly leaked information about the investigation to the White House--in effect, he was Nixon's "Deep Throat."

Mike Gravel performance art video #2: Fire

How Jeff Harshbarger convinced himself he was possessed by demons

A piece at the 700 Club describes Jeff Harshbarger's childhood acquisition of a Ouija board, which he convinced himself was being used by demons to communicate with and ultimately possess him:

Jeff: It scared me beyond anything I’d ever experienced but at the same time, it was like a rollercoaster ride. You’re scared to death but you’re thrilled. I began to recognize that there was a presence that began to develop in my house. I would wake up in the middle of the night and literally feel somebody’s watching me. I basically felt like someone was with me. I would wake up and walk through the house in order to experience that because I liked it.

Of course, the movement of a Ouija board planchette is well-known to be caused by subconscious ideomotor movements by the people using it, as are similar phenomena like table-tipping. Table tipping was studied by the 19th century scientist Michael Faraday, who demonstrated that the forces applied to the table were coming from the people with their hands upon it.

But Harshbarger convinced himself that he was accompanied by a presence that was controlling the planchette, and then that he was freed from demons by the intervention of a woman who led him to Jesus (and who he may have then married--the story's not clear on that).

(Via The Agitator.)

Ben takes a picture of himself every day

Similar to the woman who took a picture of herself every day for three years and Noah who took a picture of himself every day for six years, Ben did something similar...

The Trend Continues...

June's Notices of Trustee's Sales for the Phoenix metro area topped out at 2330, continuing the trend line set a year or so ago. At this point I can't help thinking we've got nowhere to go but up. Even the scammers are saying that Phoenix is a bad market.

Olympic gold medalist abandons God, has never been happier

British Olympic gold medalist Jonathan Edwards, whose faith in Christianity led him to excel in sports, has abandoned his Christianity in his retirement. The Times Online has a very interesting interview with him, in which he says that he didn't take time to consider the philosophical foundations or evidence for Christianity when he was so focused on his sports career, but once he retired from athletics, he found the time to question, which led him to nonbelief:

“But when I retired, something happened that took me by complete surprise. I quickly realised that athletics was more important to my identity than I believed possible. I was the best in the world at what I did and suddenly that was not true any more. With one facet of my identity stripped away, I began to question the others and, from there, there was no stopping. The foundations of my world were slowly crumbling.”
...
“Once you start asking yourself questions like, ‘How do I really know there is a God?’ you are already on the path to unbelief,” Edwards says. “During my documentary on St Paul, some experts raised the possibility that his spectacular conversion on the road to Damascus might have been caused by an epileptic fit. It made me realise that I had taken things for granted that were taught to me as a child without subjecting them to any kind of analysis. When you think about it rationally, it does seem incredibly improbable that there is a God.”

Now that he has abandoned his faith, he is not unhappy about it:

The upheaval of recent months has not left Edwards emotionally scarred, at least not visibly. “I am not unhappy about the fact that there might not be a God,” he says. “I don’t feel that my life has a big, gaping hole in it. In some ways I feel more human than I ever have. There is more reality in my existence than when I was full-on as a believer. It is a completely different world to the one I inhabited for 37 years, so there are feelings of unfamiliarity.

I've posted some different quotes from the interview at the Secular Outpost.

It's my impression that Edwards was a typical Christian in that his faith was not a position he held on the basis of evidence, but one he found himself in because of his upbringing, but never challenged. Once in a position where he began to question, he found he didn't have good reasons for what he believed, and had the integrity to stop believing.

(Hat tip to Ed Babinski.)