It happens every year. People start playing football and soon the temperature drops. Before you know it, the ground is covered in snow. (Well, we rarely get the snow down here in Florida, but the temperature frequently drops to 50F or lower in January and February… Brrrr!) Within a few weeks of the end of football season, the temperatures rise once again. All is sunny and warm until the fall when kids start tossing around the pigskin again and the cycle repeats.

That is an example of The Logical Fallacy of Correlation Implying Causation that I learned many years ago. It’s just absurd enough (and familiar enough in the U.S.A.) that I usually get the point across. I was reminded of that in two articles that I ran across recently. And, of course, now that school has started back up, the kids are playing football again….

Anyway, in Comic Relief written by the legendary comic creator Stan Lee (the Fantastic Four, the Amazing Spider-Man, the Incredible Hulk, and many more) he tells us:

In one of my public debates with comic-industry foe Dr. Frederic Wertham, one of the funny things that he used to say was that he had done a very scientific study revealing that 90 percent or more of all the kids in reform school had read comics. So I said to him that 100 percent of kids in reform school drank milk. It went over really big with the audience.

He had another great quote on different topic that I’ll post some other time, but it’s a very short piece and I encourage you to read it on your own.

And then just today, I saw a link on AlterNet:Blogs:Peek to a post on Boing Boing and to a Wikipedia entry on a parody religion called Flying Spaghetti Monsterism.

Among the beliefs proposed in FSM:

  • The Universe was created by an invisible and undetectable Flying Spaghetti Monster. All evidence pointing towards evolution was intentionally planted by this being.
  • Global warming, earthquakes, hurricanes, and other natural disasters are a direct consequence of the decline in numbers of pirates since the 1800s. (The logical fallacy tie-in)

The prophet of this religion, Bobby Henderson, sent a letter to the Kansas Board of Education after they decided that Intelligent Design deserves equal time with Evolution by Natural Selection in biology classes. In the letter he formally requested that FSM be given equal time as well. It is, after all, another of the many theories of Intelligent Design. He even has received responses from some of the board members which actually demonstrate that there may be far more intelligence (and humor) in that group than I have seen in anything else reported recently.

Technorati tags: ~~

del.icio.us Tags:
Posted by Tim