Age of Endarkenment

David Colquhoun addresses the problem of intellectual dishonesty and fuzzy illogic in a Guardian Unlimited article entitled the age of endarkenment.

The past 30 years or so have been an age of endarkenment. It has been a period in which truth ceased to matter very much, and dogma and irrationality became once more respectable.

Colquhoun is author of the Improbable Science blog in which he expands upon his exposition of the reasons that we should be concerned about the "New Credulity.":

This matters when people delude themselves into believing that we could be endangered at 45 minutes' notice by non-existent weapons of mass destruction. . .
It matters when people are deluded into thinking that they will be rewarded in paradise for killing themselves and others. It matters when bishops attribute floods to a deity whose evident vengefulness and malevolence leave one reeling. And it matters when science teachers start to believe that the Earth was created 6,000 years ago.

In nations that value education and intellectuals, politicians who live down to the "average guy" image are not elected to the most powerful executive positions. As the world has recognized with disdain, Giorgio, purchased Ivy League degree or not, would not have appealed to voters in nations that respect merit. More particularly, Giorgio would not have appealed a second time to voters who were able to detect executive deceptions.

Misleading Pseudoscience for Dummies

Pseudoscience masquerades as science, usually to promote some commercial scam or to promote religious beliefs for which there is not, nor ever will be, supportive evidence.

The subject matter of pseudoscientific claims ranges from astrology and the occult to anti-science, religiously motivated falsehoods.

Talking or writing about science is not science. Criticizing or critiquing science is not science. Elaborating mumbo-jumbo about supposed medical treatments without clinical testing is not science. Concocting falsehoods designed to protect unjustified belief in disproved Special Creation is definitely not science.

In order to ignorantly support illogical, indoctrinated religious mythology, creationists deny scientific knowledge, attack a straw man version of science, and falsify science as lie-oramas in the Fiction Lie-See-Um, or spout Misleading Pseudoscience for Dummies on junk tanks. " Creationism has been discredited, however, by indisputable physical evidence – carbon dating, for example."[SW]

External : Science Week editorials : Creationism vs. Sanity : SCIENCE POLICY: ON THE TEACHING OF PSEUDOSCIENCE :

Quotidiem

ƣ Anti-Anti-Medical-Progress .
ƣ Blaming Falsely .
ƣ Chopping down the Tree of Knowledge .
ƣ Definitions of God .
ƣ Definition of Religion .
ƣ Inverse Relations .
ƣ Git of the Gaps .
ƣ Menace of Religion .
ƣ Myth Mania .
ƣ No President Left Behind .
ƣ Not-so intelligent design .
ƣ Political Atheism .
ƣ Televangelical Inanities .
ƣ Vocal Atheism .
ƣ YEC yuck .

ƣ Woody Allen
ƣ Epicurus
ƣ Bertrand Russell

YEC yuck

"There is no polite way to say this: people who resist scientific explanations
for natural phenomena such as the age of the earth and the fact of evolution are
guilty of childish thinking."

~ Sharon Begley in So That's Why Evolution is in Trouble!