A mind blowing example of Poe's Law: It's like Brass Eye....ON ACID!

The Rational Wiki defines Poe's Law as follows:

Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of Fundamentalism that SOMEONE won't mistake for the real thing.

Of course it works both ways, often I stumble over religious material so insane that I believe it to be parody, but which is, in fact, genuine. For example here are some church websites. I should warn you that they are both visual and noisy. But it still won't prepare you for what you are about to see. They are amazingly awesome.

• International Congress of Church and Ministers — A site for ensuring the tax free status of churches with the IRS.
  
• Evangel Cathedral — An evangelical Cathedral.
  
• KK Mime — Evangelical Ministers who minister via the medium of yes, you guessed it, mime.
  
• Truth Transformation Ministries.
  
• The 7th District AME Church in South Carolina
  
• St. John Missionary Baptist Church

After watching all these I'm so stoked I could fight a bear. I genuinely think they are amazing. They all seem to have been produced by SharperFX who specialise in making websites. Websites for insane churches.

If Chris Morris was to create a Brass Eye Episode about these churches, his parody would be interchangeable with the real thing and no one, on either side, could tell.

And that kinda makes me happy.

(via reddit)

Dutch news piece on Biblicaly Correct (B.C.) Tours

So a German Dutch speaking film crew went to film a B.C. Tour. The very first part is in German Dutch (or at least I think it is germa it is if you are ignorant) but afterwards we are good to go.

I last talked about this lot here. It's depressing to be reminded they still exist. I think it is significant to note that an organisation that promotes complex 'science' like this and gets worldwide attention has a web site that looks like this:

'Win every argument' indeed.

(This post was also a sneaky test of the site - hopefully, the images, embeds and text are now all hunky dory - please let me know if you are still having problems)

Skeptobot is being a bit funny when it comes to pictures

The site's imagehosting has gone a bit screwy. So I'll be using this update to fix it.

As way of apology here should be an image that I made using this billboard generator - which is a staggeringly great tool to satirise this farcical bit of propaganda.

I'm using some new blogging software which up till now has been great. If it is working you should be able to click through the thumbnail above to see the full sized image.

Update: A google around seems to suggest that this is a problem that has been causing trouble for a number of picasa users. Hopefully it will correct itself in due course.

Open-mindedness

This was sent to me by the wonderful Dr A & it is ace.

Of course you might say that he's arguing against a straw man, but I don't really think that is the point. A wonderful primer on how skeptical thinking doesn't mean close-mindedness.

But actually means you are 50s intellectual man hunk. Or something.