#2221: Gerald Schroeder

Gerald Lawrence Schroeder is an Israeli-American physicist, author, lecturer and teacher at the College of Jewish Studies Aish HaTorah’s Discovery Seminar. Schroeder does indeed have a genuine science background and may have been a real scientist at some point, but he is also a creationist, and seems to have spent most of the last 40 years doing apologetics, such as investigating “the confluence of science and Torah” and constructing elaborate, tortured ad hoc explanations to get the apparent age of the universe to fit with the literal Biblical six-day account of creation; in particular Schroeder draws on relativity to reconcile a six-day creation as described in Genesis with the scientific evidence that the world is billions of years old using the idea that the perceived flow of time for a given event in an expanding universe varies with the observer’s perspective of that event. As such, it isn’t really young-earth creationism in the traditional sense, but it is still serious nonsense (there is a comprehensive explanation of his silliness here; Schroeder’s non-response to being refuted is discussed here), and still creationism. Although he attempts to reconcile Genesis and science when it comes to the age of the universe, he simply rejects science in favor of the Bible – including the Bible Code – when it comes to all other matters (these areas are, after all, beyond his area of competence anyways, and you can always reject the science of things you don’t understand). Schroeder is a signatory to the Discovery Institute’s silly petition A Scientific Dissent From Darwinism (Schroeder has no expertise on anything related to evolution), and currently seems to be considered something of an authority in the Intelligent Design movement, being invited to give seemingly scientifically informed talks by various denialist groups across the US.

His books include titles like The Science of God: The Convergence of Scientific and Biblical Wisdom (reviewed e.g. here) a book that has generated research such as Andrew Mark Sibley “A Photon Reference Frame and Distant Starlight: Analyzing Ideas from Gerald L. Schroeder’s The Science of God” published in the venerable Answers Research Journal, Answers in Genesis's house journal. Schroeder’s most famous book is presumably The Hidden Face of God, however, since it apparently impressed ex-atheist Antony Flew during his conversion process; it is reviewed here (“[n]o one should read this tiresome book for any serious purpose other than to find examples of popular science-abuse”). Given Schroeder’s background, the most striking characteristic, apart from its New Age-style handwavings, is perhaps the many misinterpretations of and obvious errors in the physics he describes.

Diagnosis: At least he is pretty clear that what he is doing is fundie dogmatism: start with the conclusion you like, try to make the data fit and just reject whatever doesn’t. But Schroeder is also something of a star in the creationist movement, and seems to spend quite a bit of effort promoting denialism. He must accordingly be considered a moderate threat to civilization and human flourishing.

#2220: Jeffrey Schone

Martin Luther College (MLC) is a religious institution (the college of ministry for the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod) in New Ulm, Minnesota, that pretends to offer something resembling “education”. It does not, of course – not even remotely. Instead, they profess creationism, teaches the Genesis story as a factual, historical account, and do their best to prevent their students from being exposed to pollution from reality, truth, science, evidence or similar tricks of Satan. In 2013, for instance, when a local group planned to put on the play “Inherit the Wind” MLC refused to allow them to use any of their facilities for practice, and also pressured the actors to drop out, because evolution is contrary to their teachings. Jeff Schone, vice president of student life at the MLC, made it absolutely clear to its students, WELS members and the public that creationism is the only option. He did admit that he recognized the subtext of the play (or something), but nevertheless said it was unfairly critical of creationism and that most people would only see the criticism. “We felt it was not compatible with what [the school] teaches the Bible says about the universe and the world,” said Schone. “People employing our students need confidence about their views.” In other words, that they prevent their students from being exposed to science, truth and accountability in research, is a selling point for the MLC.

Diagnosis: Deranged Taliban fundie. It may, however, scare us even more that there is a market for the people “educated” at this camp.

#2219: Jeff Schoep

The National Socialist Movement (NSM) is a Detroit-based neo-Nazi organization, and a part of the Nationalist Front. NSM refers to itself as a “white civil rights organization” but objects to being referred to as “racist” and “Neo-Nazi” in part because such descriptions of their goals are unflattering. The descriptionsare not what is wrong here – the group did for instance use the swastika as logo until 2016, and has stated that “When you put on your NSM uniform, you are not just representing the NSM but all National Socialists that fought and died for our Race and our Cause! You are showing the Jews and the rest of the world that our Führer is not forgotten and that his life's struggle was not in vain!”. The aforementioned goals include a US inhabited only by those of “pure White blood” (Jewish people and homosexuals need not apply), and they demand that “all non-Whites currently residing in America be required to leave the nation forthwith and return to their land of origin: peacefully or by force” – according to their website “The Constitution was written by white men alone. Therefore, it was intended for whites alone.” Supporters include Randy Gray and Christian Identity pastor James Wickstrom.

Jeff Schoep was chairman of the group from 1994 to 2019. It was hence under Schoep’s tenure that the NSM for instance led the demonstration that sparked the 2005 Toledo riot and the rally that turned into the 2016 Sacramento riot – ostensibly “non-violent” NSM has a history of seeking out violence that distinguishes them from other expressedly non-violent groups. In November 2016, following the election of Donald Trump, the organization changed its logo from the swastika to an Odal rune, apparently eyeing an opportunity to enter mainstream politics. Apparently Schoep worked hard to unite “pro-white organizations”, though he also sought to distance his group from the KKK: “We’re both pro-white, but our politics are very different,” said Schoep, apparently because whereas the NSM is political, the Klan promotes religion. Anti-semitism is of course at the core of NSM’s conspiracy theories, and according to Schoep “illegal immigration from Latin America is driven by an international Jewish conspiracy whose leaders are plotting "the destruction of all races through the evils of race mixing.” 

In 2019, Schoep was replaced as director and president of the NSM by James Hart Stern, a black activist vowing to eradicate the group. Apparently Schoep was responsible for the takeover because he wanted to leave the group due to the legal issues he was embroiled in (nothing suggests that Schoep has become noticeably less lunatic about the issues that constitute the core of NSM’s mission). Matthew Heimbach used to be the group’s community outreach director.

There is a good portrait of Schoep here, and of the NSM here.

Diagnosis: Yeah, well … 

#2218: Rob Schneider

Celebrity loonis a pretty common breed; after all, celebrity status is only rarely the result of cognitive skills and qualities. We cannot cover them all, but some celebrity loons are particularly vocal and may actually wield enough influence to have a negative influence on civilization. Actor, comedian, screenwriter and director Rob Schneider is one such. Schneider is an anti-vaccine activist (and far from the only antivaxx celebrity loon). And as you expect, Schneider has no idea what vaccines actually are, how they function or how and what the science behind vaccines actually work and says. 

Schneider promotes the thoroughly refuted claim that vaccines are dangerous and cause autism. In Schneider’s opinion “the efficacy of these shots have not been proven ... And the toxicity of these things – we’re having more and more side effects. We’re having more and more autism.” All of those claims are false, of course, but Schneider seems to have a rather foggy idea of how to determine whether claims are true or not. But then, Schneider has claimed that California lawmakers are Nazis for passing a law that requires parents to get educated before getting a vaccine exemption, so there is perhaps a certain bizarre consistency in his position (education, knowledge, research, facts are to be viewed with extreme suspicion), just not of the kind most people should be looking for. Of course, even that sense of consistency is undermined when Schneider claims to be all about advocating “informed consent”; he explicitly doesn’t care about the “informed” part.

Schneider is in particular a vocal opponent of the state of California’s restrictions on non-medical exemptions to school vaccines, mostly invoking the “health freedom” gambit, and views any actions from the state he perceives as attempts to mandate vaccinations “government overreach”. As Schneider sees it, “it’s illegal [it is not].You can’t make people do procedures that they don’t want [which the laws don’t, which is (in part) why it isn’t illegal]. The parents have to be the ones who make the decisions for what’s best for our kids. It can’t be the government saying that [Parent intuitions and conspiracy theories trump facts every time]. It’s against the Nuremberg Laws [and down the rabbit hole we go, as antivaxxers are wont to do].” Some would see it as a shortcoming of Schneider’s statements that they lack any basis in facts or reality; Schneider’s fans don’t seem to care. It is worth mentioning that the Nuremberg Laws were actually the Nazi laws that stripped Jewish people of their citizenship; Schneider might have meant the Nuremberg Code, but who knows – besides: details – details are related to facts and accuracy; good antivaxx conspiracy theorists hate details. Schneider has also railed against Big Pharma, claimed that kids get 70 vaccinations (apparently a number selected at random), claimed that there are no safety or efficacy studies of vaccines (presumably because he hasn’t seen them because he cannot be bothered to check because that would only be relevant if we cared about truthand this has nothing to do with truth), complained that doctors won’t tell you “both sides”, called for a randomized, blinded vaccinated vs. unvaccinated study (which would, ironically, straightforwardly violate the Nuremberg Code; hint: why don’t we have a randomized, double-blinded study of the efficacy of car seatbelts?), and finally claimed that vaccines contain mercury, which is idiotic for a number of reasons. And he wasn’t done: more stupid here; Schneider’s rant is actually kind of remarkable for being wrong about absolutely every single detail.

His main schtick is to claim that “there’s no medical science behind vaccines” or “don’t vaccinate. Vaccines don’t work. There’s no science behind them” or “they don’t research this stuff” (apparently betting on the idea that if he repeats a claim three times, it transforms into an argument). The claim is remarkably easy to refute, of course, but we suspect that Schneider doesn’t even have the faintest clue what he would be looking for. Nor do vaccines work, according to Schneider; “vaccines had nothing to do with the eradication of smallpox from the world.” Instead, according to Schneider, “diseases run cycles.” It is, of course, just a remarkable coincidence that the cycles abruptly end when vaccines are introduced and never return (at least until unvaccinated people bring them back).

Hat-tip RtAVM

Despite being wrong about everything, Schneider has, as mentioned, passionately fought the passage of California Assembly Bill 2109 and California Senate Bill 277, which both intended to make childhood vaccination exemptions harder to obtain. In 2012, Schneider joined California State Assemblyman Tim Donnelly at a “Medical Freedom Rally”, urging governor Brown to veto 2109. In 2015, after Schneider had talked to California state Assemblywoman and Bill 277 co-author Lorena Gonzalez, Gonzalez aptly illustrated the ridiculousness of having that conversation: “he was actually much nicer to me, but let’s be honest … that is 20 mins of my life I’ll never get back arguing that vaccines don't cause autism with Deuce Bigalow, male gigolo.”

His own people in the antivaccine movement don’t really see or care about the difference between Deuce Bigalow and scientists, however. Schneider was for instance invited as panelist, along with e.g. Wendy Fournier, president of the National Autism Association (an antivaccine group sponsored by Boiron), and disgraced fraud Andy Wakefield, at the Give Autism a Chance Summit in 2014. He has also given numerous radio show appearances and narrated deranged videos for the Canary Party published by NaturalNews and apparently shown at a Congressional briefing explaining how antivaxxers completely and fundamentally fail to comprehend how the Vaccine Court works – Schneider really, really doesn’t get it – and venturing deep into Alex Jones-style conspiracy territory, e.g. with the familiar “CDC whistleblower” manufactroversy (decent summary of that one here and here); Schneider is of course himself a champion of the side of wrong regarding that particular conspiracy theory.

Also predictably, Schneider claims to have had his free speech rights violated since his vocal, stupid and dangerous claims about vaccines have generated a backlash and a certain amount of criticism.

He has also claimed that he can’t be bothered to work because California Democrats tax so much and put bureaucratic obstacles in the way of his vitamin company (Schneider is a Republican). 

Diagnosis: The immediate reaction among minimally reasonable people is of course that the feeble idiocy of dense celebrities like Rob Schneider hardly matters; the thing is, of course: antivaxxers have never been able to distinguish the authority of fact, evidence and science from the authority of glitter and nonsense. Unfortunately, the efforts of blathering fools like Schneider actually do make a difference.

#2217: Cindy Schneider

Cindy Schneider is – apparently –medical advisor for the antivaccine group SafeMinds. Schneider is very much concerned with mercury in flu vaccines (that would be thimerosal and ehtylmercury, but SafeMinds has never been particularly concerned with details of chemistry), and was for instance the zombie-like narrator of a 2011 propaganda video targeting ob-gyns about the dangers of vaccines. The video is discussed here. Among the false and misleading claims in the video were the assertion that some vaccines contain up to 250x the levels of mercury identified by the EPA as HAZARDOUS WASTE. The EPA, of course, does not classify hazardous waste by levels at all, but consistency in its details has, of course, never mattered to groups like SafeMinds. Elsewhere, the video mostly lies and misrepresents the science (e.g. this one), for instance concerning the safety levels for, well, methylmercury, in fact – which is chemically very different from ethylmercury, but again: those would be details and facts, not anything SafeMinds’s target audience would or should be concerned with. They also provide a fine example of selection bias when they list a number of famously bad and discredited “studies” on the dangers of vaccines – these studies, on the other hand, would obviously not interest the target audience. Schneider is, of course, by her own assertion not antivaccine but pro-safe-vaccine.

 

Hat-tip: Destroyedbyscience

Otherwise, Schneider is Medical Director of CARE, the Center for Autism Research and Education, and runs an integrative medical practice (forget the contradiction) offering treatments for “the immune, gastrointestinal, and metabolic aspects of autism and the identification of environmental toxins contributing to the autism epidemic”. Needless to say, no one with autism should be subjected to quackery based on such myths – including the myth of the “autism epidemic”. And apparently Schneider “takes a functional medical approach” to illness and conditions like autism; her center also offers e.g. hyperbaric oxygen therapy, and she claims that “any genetic weaknesses can be overcome with lifestyle changes and high quality nutritional supplements.” This is false, and as an MD, it is hard to believe that Schneider doesn’t know better. And yes, her website does indeed feature a prominent link to a store (Aperture International, a company that sells supplements, founded and run by … Schneider, of course).

Diagnosis: There is no way around it: Cindy Schneider is corrupt to the core. A ghastly excuse for a human. And for those in doubt, here is a decent piece of advice: Never ever take medical advice from a website with a store tab.

Hat-tip: Unsure of the source

Hat-tip: Respectful Insolence

#2216: Gary Schneeberger

Gary Schneeberger is president of communication at Focus on the Family and editor of their publication Family News in Focus. According to Schneeberger, the biblical view of marriage and sexuality is badly needed for balance in mainstream media, and “what Focus on the Family’s analysts and experts bring to the national discussion in their media appearances are reasoned, passionate and compassionate insights that help families make sense of, and make their mark in, the world around them.” Of course, “experts” here means “people who agree with us”, not expertson anything remotely relevant to determining the truth of the claims the group is pushing; “passionate”, “compassionate”, “reasoned” and “insights” are similarly understood in non-standard ways. Meanwhile, critics of the group are of course opposed to free speech and trying to silence them by criticism and confronting bigots with stuff they actually say (very fine example here of Schneeberger trying to argue that Keith Olbermann is misrepresenting James Dobson by showing viewers Dobson saying what he actually did say, in context). Exactly as you’d expect, in other words.

According to Schneeberger, the views of the group are shared by a majority of Christians, but he helpfully explains that “we use that word ‘Christian’ to refer to people who are evangelical Christians.” The rest are presumably infidels.

Diagnosis: Schneeberger is not the most flamboyantly crazy spokesperson for the organization, and mostly seems to publicly address organizational or fiscal matters. He is, however, something of a mover and shaker, and his influence, and the harm he is causally responsible for, should not be underestimated.

#2215. Bert Schlossberg

Bert Schlossberg is an internet crank and conspiracy theorist, primarily (well, exclusively) associated with conspiracies surrounding the 1983 Korean Air Lines Flight 007 incident. Schlossberg describes himself as “[t]he son-in-law of one of the passengers of the ill-fated Korean Air Lines Flight 007, shot down by a Russian air-to-air missile in 1983” and director of The International Committee for the Rescue of KAL 007 Survivors, Inc. He has even written a self-published book detailing his views on the matter and is principal author of Conservapedia’s rather substantial article – including 16 supplemental articles – on the issue (he is also a Wikipedia editor, but appears to have received less acceptance for his views there – a separate article on “Wikipedia prejudice on KAL 007” has more recently popped up on Conservapedia). Wingnut conspiracy outlets, such as Accuracy in Media and the magazine of the John Birch Society, have covered Schlossberg’s views.

According to Schlossberg KAL 007, having been missed by one of the missiles, managed to land with the passengers and crew surviving; these were then abducted and put into prison camps by the Soviet authorities; this, of course, is why his organization works to free them. Supplementally, he suggests that KAL 007 might have been used as “bait” by the US to test Soviet response to a flight intrusion into their borders, or that it was a targeted assassination of John Birch Society president Larry McDonald, who was a passenger on the flight (why anyone would bother with that is an open question). University of Georgia Law Professor Donald Wilkes considers Schlossberg’s theory to be “even more preposterous” than Michel Brun's theory of a Japanese locale for the shootdown and an air battle having taken place between Soviet and American aircrafts.

Diagnosis: Ok, so in themselves Schlossberg's conspiracy theories are presumably innocuous, but he also makes his own small contributions to polluting the internet with conspiracy nonsense, and deserves a brief mention.

Hat-tip: Rationalwiki

#2214: Joe Schimmel

Joe Schimmel, of something called Good Fight Ministries, is a delusional fundie of the kind that gets invited on Rick Wiles’s radio show. He is also pastor of Blessed Hope Chapel in Simi Valley, California, Vice President of Blessed Hope Records, host of the documentary “Hollywood’s War on God” and director of (e.g.) the genre-bending “Left Behind or Led Astray?: Examining the Origins of the Secret Pre-Tribulation Rapture”.

As suggested by his documentary (or whatever you call it), Schimmel tends to be concerned with what he perceives as degenerate or unfortunate elements in popular culture. So according to Schimmel, Miley Cyrus’s fame and fortune is for instance to blame on having (non-metaphorically) made a “deal with Lucifer.” Apparently she has also been “baptized into the Illuminati” and is currently teaching people how to have sex with Satan. She is not the only one. Schimmel tastefully weighed in on Robin Williams’s suicide, too, saying that Williams killed himself because he was possessed by demons, just like lots of other “famous celebrities.” Indeed, the whole reason they got famous in the first place was because Satan has possessed them and given them talent to glorify himself and “promote evil and darkness and increase mankind’s rebellion against God.” As evidence, Schimmel draws on his own complete failure to understand how metaphors work – indeed, ascribing to Schimmel a complete lack of ability to understand non-literal speech is actually remarkably explanatory with regard to many of his views and claims (also beyond this example).

Now, Schimmel has written extensively on such issues, and many of writings fit nicely into the tradition of the anti-rock preachers of the eighties. And based mostly on rumors and his own imagination (and interpreting any metaphor or simile ever used by his targets literally), Schimmel finds demonic connections more or less everywhere, from Kurt Cobain (“one does not have to look very deeply into the life of Kurt Cobain to see that the spirit that inspired him was not the Sprit of God”) to Kesha, the “Satanic cult leader”. 

Much of his work is explained in the potential cult classic “Rock-N-Roll Sorcerers of the New Age Revolution”, available on VHS, where he shows how all rock music, broadly construed, from Elvis and the Beatles to Michael Jackson and onward, is rooted in the New Age movement and the occult. According to one Amazon reviewer “[t]his is not just some crazy pastor ranting about sex, drugs, and rock’n roll.” At least the reviewer sensed that someone might potentially raise precisely that concern. The work is, of course, exactly some crazy pastor ranting about sex, drugs and rock’n roll. There is also the 10-hour series They Sold Their Souls for Rock N Roll (“Rock’n roll sorcerers” might be part of that) in which Schimmel “reveals just how Satan has been effectively using popular music to undermine Gods plan for family and ultimately heralding the coming of the Antichrist and his kingdom on earth,” which shows “hundreds of artists” being “used by Satan to destroy many lives” such as “Elvis, The Doors, Led Zeppelin, U2, Creed, Madonna, Britney Spears, DMX, Tupac, Tori Amos and many more.” 

Schimmel was also mildly freaked out about the movie The Shack (based on the novel), in which God is portrayed as an overweight black woman: “Young’s pretentious caricature of God as a heavy set, cushy, non-judgmental, African American woman called ‘Papa’ (who resembles the New Agey Oprah Winfrey far more than the one true God revealed through the Lord Jesus Christ – Hebrews 1:1-3), and his depiction of the Holy Spirit as a frail Asian woman with the Hindu name, Sarayu, lends itself to a dangerous and false image of God and idolatry.” God is a fit, white man, and much more like Joe Schimmel, of course. 

Diagnosis: A throwback to the Satanic panic of the eighties, really. Schimmel is mind-bendingly insane, yet still has plenty of fans out there.

#2213: Richard Schiffman

The evidence is pretty clear that popular alternative treatments are, at best, no more effective than placebo, which means for instance that they have no detectable effect on the actual pathophysiology of disease, are (as placebos) variable, unreliable and weak, and that recommending them to patients requires deception. One common conclusion altmed defenders draw from the evidence (if they bother with evidence at all) is therefore that their favored treatments “show promise”, a phrase that to some extent has come to be equivalent to “show no promise”. Another common strategy, however, is to rebrand CAM as “harnessing the power of placebo”, e.g. to produce “powerful mind-body healing”, which sounds utterly silly to anyone with minimal understanding of placebo, but does indeed, well, show promise as a marketing technique.

Richard Schiffman is not, as far as we can tell, an altmed practitioner, but he is a journalist for the hive of quackery that is The Huffington Post and the author e.g. of the article “How the Placebo Effect Proves That God Exists”. Now, Schiffman has already decided that prayer and spirituality is correlated with better health, and that the “jury is out” regarding whether intercessory prayer works (it isn’t), but even if the healing powers of prayer don’t on its own establish the existence of God, surely the placebo effect does: “To my way of thinking, the very existence of this mysterious effect proves that God exists. That’s right, you can find evidence for the foundational truths taught by religion in virtually every double blind medical research study!” You really cannot, and Schiffman doesn’t consider the possibility that “my way of thinking” might be a weak link in the argument. Of course, Schiffman hastens to add that he isn’t making specific claims about specific gods: “But I am not saying that you and I in our egocentric and separate selves are God. It is rather the other way around – when we drop the elaborate pretense and disguise of being these limited and conditioned entities, we discover that we are not separate or apart from anything. We are part and parcel of all that exists.” I.e., by “God” he means the contents of a word salad tossed by a Deepak Chopra generator. How the placebo effect is supposed to support the existence of thisis not entirely clear but has something to do with (this and) mystics who proclaim themselves to be “one with God”. Well, ultimately the argument is that because Schiffman really doesn’t understand the placebo effect, science cannot explain it (they can), and there placebo effects are “miracles” leaving holes in any scientific explanations that Schiffman is free to fill with whatever he wants, and he predictably chooses something resembling the Secret.

And he really doesn’t get it; Schiffman for instance explicitly characterizes placebo responses as a sugar pill making a sick person healthy again (which then is “miraculous” and resists explanation). It would, of course, be good if it worked that way, but it really doesn’t. The placebo effect really is just a name for a rather complex set of phenomena, including experimental bias, observer effects, expectancy effects, and certain well-known artifacts of the clinical trial process. And most importantly, perhaps: placebo effects are commonly observed only for subjectiveoutcomes, and will not detectably affect the pathophysiology of any disease or condition. Life is hard, and invoking The Secretis really not going to make it any easier.

Diagnosis: Chopra-style word salad processor, quack apologist and amateur pseudoscientist. That Huffpo gives this kind of nonsense a platform is really a disgrace.

Hat-tip: Respectful Insolence

#2212: Michael Scheifler

Liam Scheff, famous HIV denialist, woo promoter, antivaccine and anti-GMO activist, and wholesale conspiracy theorist, seems to have passed away (at 46, from a “mystery illness” for which he apparently consulted every naturopathic trick and vitamin supplement in the book). 

Michael Scheifler isn’t quite as high profile as Scheff, but we have no reason to think he’s not alive – though his webpage (here, if anyone is interested) admittedly bears all the hallmarks of 2003-style, allcaps paranoia. The website concerns “Antichrist, 666, and the Harlot Church Dressed in Purple and Scarlet”, and appears to try to establish – through fascinatingly wild and speculative connections between random observations and Bible passages – that the Catholic church is an institution of the Beast, and important in bringing about the ever-imminent End Times (“The Vatican (STATO DELLA CITTÁ DEL VATICANO), which means City-State of prophecy, is the woman of Revelation 17, Jezebel, the apostate harlot, the mother universal church, the persecutor of the saints that sits on seven hills in Rome and claims authority over the kings of the earth”). There is plenty of numerology, too, used to try to associate various aspects of the Catholic church with the number “666”. It relies on some serious research into obscure sources, and is utterly, derangedly crazy. Do check it out.

Scheifler himself is an Adventist. He is, of course, also a young-earth creationist. Indeed, the fact that the Catholic church officially recognizes evolution – a “modern scientific dogma” [INSERT SCIENCE V. RELIGION MEME], as Scheifler sees it in light of a particularly Orwellian understanding of “dogma” from someone who takes the Bible as the only source of authority – is apparently further evidence that Catholicism is of the Beast. Then he links to Kent Hovind.

For some reason Scheifler also links to some scare articles about artificial sweeteners from Joe Mercola’s website.

Diagnosis: Apparently he has been bantering with several Catholic “scholars”, too. Well, if Scheifler’s deranged rants count as scholarship in certain circles, it doesn’t reflect too well on those circles.