Psychic Detectives Allow Murderer to Escape Death Penalty
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Last month I pointed out how a self-proclaimed psychic detective failed to help find a young girl,Jaycee Dugard, who had been abducted and held captive for nearly 20 years. In addition to Dugard, Chandra Levy, Laci Peterson, Elizabeth Smart — and, well, every other missing person — psychic information failed to recover Brooke Wilberger, a university student missing since May 24, 2004. Police said they received more than 500 tips from psychics about Wilberger’s location, though she has only now been found.
According to ABC News, “Five years after Brigham Young University student Brooke Wilberger vanished from an Oregon apartment complex, her remains have been found. Authorities told The Associated Press today that her suspected killer, Joel Courtney, told police where he’d left Wilberger’s body following her 2004 disappearance. His admission was part of a plea deal to avoid the death penalty. It was not immediately clear where the remains were found. The Benton County District Attorney’s office said Monday that Courtney, 42, pleaded guilty to aggravated murder and received a life sentence without the possibility of parole. The deal allowed Wilberger’s family to finally learn what really happened to their daughter after all these years.”
The result of an absurd religious war
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Rome – A Moroccan man allegedly killed his 18-year-old Muslim daughter in northeastern Italy after she moved in with an older Catholic Italian man, press reports said on Wednesday.
Dafani El Ketawi, 45, an assistant cook from the Pordedone region, attacked the couple with a knife after chasing their car on Tuesday, according to La Repubblica newspaper.
The Italian man, identified as Massimo de Biasio, 31, was stabbed several times but escaped with non-life threatening injuries, it said.
Ketawi’s daughter, Sanaa, tried to flee but was caught a few metres (yards) away and was stabbed in the throat, the newspaper said.
Accepting “I Don’t Know” As An Answer
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There is something that all of us do if we aren’t careful, mostly stemming from a deep discomfort of not having an immediate explanation or answer to something we want to know, but don’t–the argument from ignorance–a fallacy of thought by which we draw a conclusion not from data, but from a lack of data, from what we don’t know, a conclusion which more often than not turns out to be false when properly investigated.
One of the first things I had to learn as a skeptic was a tolerance for ambiguity, habits of thought by which I could say to myself “It’s okay to not have an answer for such-and-such a question right now.” It’s perfectly fine to say, “I don’t know…yet.”
There’s a great many people who are just terrified by the thought of not knowing everything with conclusive surety, even when that conclusiveness is wrong. So many people go to great lengths to convince themselves that they do, in fact, know what that strange light in the sky is, or what that creaking noise in the house late at night is, when they really don’t.
This is particularly true of those with a tendency to claim a event as being impossible to explain by natural or normal causes, and thus dismissing such causes prematurely, especially that dual bugaboo of paranormal and fringe-science advocates, coincidence and statistical noise.
A common argument is stated something like “X is so unlikely as to not possibly be due to the laws of chance(or nature)!”(read; the claimant’s understanding of those laws). In fact, it would be even moreimprobable that unusual coincidences don’t occur as often as they do, in accordance with the Law of Truly Large Numbers. For example, in a city of say, ten million people, one should by chance alone expect ten 1-in-1,000,000 coincidences to happen each day.
I wonder what Creationists will make of this?
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Get this: a Chinese woman was recently scared halfway to death upon discovering a strange creature hanging from its talons to the wall of her bedroom, in the middle of the night. What was it; a bat? Some lizard?
Close – a snake. With a leg.
Sure, this is neat in itself – who’s ever heard of a snake growing a leg? The most common mutation observed in snakes is a second head (twice the creepiness for most, I’m sure). But what this is, is also clear evidence for evolution. Snakes evolved from previously legged species; occasionally, random genetic mutations can activate genetic markers (indicators for where to grow legs, teeth, skin or feathers, tails, etc. – just about anything) that had been switched off along the species’s evolutionary course. That is the case with this particular individual.
Stupid quote of the day
‘You have turned to Islam and this promises well for your future, particularly as you are now an adherent of a religion which respects women and self-discipline.’
Answers in Genesis Logical Fallacies 101 Grade: FAIL
It amuses me to no end when those that abuse critical thinking try to present themselves as critical thinkers, as is the case with this article at Answers In Genesis. In this article they try to explain what the Ad Hominem fallacy is, a worthy effort if properly done of course.
They do an overall pretty decent job at explaining what an Ad Hominem is, until of course the commit the big booh-booh by giving this as an example of, what they seem to consider, and Ad Hominem.
“Christianity isn’t true. You just believe in Christianity because you were brought up in a Christian home. If you were brought up in the Islam religion, you would be a Muslim now.”
Ouch! To anyone who knows a thing or two about critical thinking it is obviously clear here that there may be a logical fallacy in this argument, but it is not the Ad Hominem. It is…drum roll…the Non Sequitur, an altogether different sort of logical fallacy, one where the conclusion doesn’t follow from the premises! The premises (you are christian because you were brought up christian) does not lead to the conclusion (christianity is not true). This is not an Ad Hominem, more specifically not the circumstantial Ad Hominem, because the claim is not being rejected because of the kind of people who support it. That would be ridiculous because it would have to read as follows : Christianity is not true because christians believe it. In fact, the two things mentioned here have no bearing upon one another, therefore this is a Non Sequitur. The conclusion does not follow from the premises.
Why do I say “there may be a fallacy here”? Because it is not clear that “christianity is not true” is presented as a conclusion based on the following sentences, or as an unsupported statement. You can read the above sentences as two separate statements, the first stating what the person believes to be true, and the second stating why they think someone else holds a different belief. It does not have to be an argument, in which case there wouldn’t be a fallacy. If it is meant as an argument,then we have the Non Sequitur, but not the Ad Hominem!
The cherry on the cake comes next:
An evolutionist might argue:
“Creation isn’t true. You just believe in creation because you read that stuff on the Answers in Genesis website!”
Ah, that would be the Straw Man because an evolutionist, in general would not say that. There would be no need for it. We’d simply have to point to the fact that the creationist has not put forward any convincing evidence for his argument. That usually is enough to wrap up that conversation. It is also a bit of Poisoning The Well since this attempts to discredit “evolutionists” as people who rely on logical fallacies to win arguments, when in fact that is quite simply not true.
Oh AiG, leave the critical thinking teaching to those qualified to provide it, will ya?
Yemeni girl, 12, dies in painful childbirth
AMMAN, Jordan (CNN) — A 12-year-old Yemeni girl, who was forced into marriage, died during a painful childbirth that also killed her baby, a children’s rights group said Monday.
Fawziya Ammodi struggled for three days in labor, before dying of severe bleeding at a hospital on Friday, said the Seyaj Organization for the Protection of Children.
“Although the cause of her death was lack of medical care, the real case was the lack of education in Yemen and the fact that child marriages keep happening,” said Seyaj President Ahmed al-Qureshi.
Born into an impoverished family in Hodeidah, Fawziya was forced to drop out of school and married off to a 24-year-old man last year, al-Qureshi said.
Child brides are commonplace in Yemen, especially in the Red Sea Coast where tribal customs hold sway. Hodeidah is the fourth largest city in Yemen and an important port.
More than half of all young Yemeni girls are married off before the age of 18 — many times to older men, some with more than one wife, a study by Sanaa University found.
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