Every time I see someone using the words "believe" and "evolution" (or variants thereof) in the same sentence, I'm filled with the urge to reach for the spiked baseball bat.

Evolution isn't a matter of "belief", it's a matter of observed fact, accompanied by supertanker loads of empirical evidence.. In the folder on my hard drive devoted to scientific papers in the field of evolutionary biology, I now have a grand total of 3,832 scientific papers, all of them containing hard evidence for evolution. That's just a tiny fraction of the available literature, which now runs to somewhere around 1½ MILLION papers published in the field over the past 150 years. So can we, once and for all, drop the "belief" canard and put it in the bin where it belongs? Preferably with the freshly cremated remains of lying douche schooners such as Kent Hovind and Ken Ham?

Ooh, snark. Where have I seen this before?

@Tin Man, thank you! Only signed up here about a hour ago, so I'm still very new. Thank you for the kind welcome!

Or the simple unassailable fact that no claim for a miracle or supernatural event has ever stood up to critical scrutiny by being objectively validated. Coupled of course with organised religions committing known frauds for such miracles throughout their history.

One of the embarrassing (for supernaturalists, if they did but realise it) observations I've made is this.

When the only people around to "witness" such events, were pre-scientific nomads who couldn't count correctly the number of legs that an insect possesses, Magic Man allegedly unleashed all manner of fabulous pyrotechnics for them to watch. Wind forward to the 21st century, and what do we see? The planet is literally bristling with sensors of all sorts, ranging from the several billion smartphone cameras now deployed by humans all over the planet, through to space based telescopes, neutrino and gravitational wave detectors, not to mention particle accelerators the size of a small country, satellites in low Earth orbit surveying the landscape right across the electromagnetic spectrum, and enough civilian and military radars covering the planet to home in on anything unusual. Yet none of those fabulous pyrotechnics have put in an appearance, in a manner detectable by any of this vast array of sensors. Apparently, Magic Man is now reduced to various pathetic acts of food vandalism.

This is even before we factor in to the equation, that the universe itself is constructed on a scale at least nine orders of magnitude greater than the authors of mythology though it was. Planet Earth alone possesses three entire continental land masses that the authors of Abrahamic mythologies knew nothing about, and this should be a serious source of embarrassment to any adherents of those mythologies residing on those land masses. The authors of these mythologies knew nothing about vast swathes of the biosphere - fully forty entire phyla of living organisms were unknown to them. They knew nothing about bacteria, the vast swathes of protists, and as for some of the more exotic astronomical phenomena that have been brought into view via our telescopes, they couldn't even fantasise about these entities, let alone provide us with a scientifically consistent and coherent account thereof.

The same authors of these mythologies, also peddled a frankly ludicrous tale, that the entire planet was purportedly covered in 9,000 metres of water over and above that present today, just because Magic Man had a psychotic hissy fit. Worse still, certain adherents of these mythologies not only treat this nonsensical drivel about a "global flood" as fact, but rejoice in the gigantic act of biocide that it would have constituted, had it been anything other than the product of the rectal passage of one or more superstition-addled specimens immortalising their psychosis on papyrus. The frankly inhuman glee with which creationists masturbate over the sick "global flood" fantasy, would be treated as signs of a clinically significant mental disease, if it were directed toward anything other than the requisite mythology. Yet because this mythology is treated as if it were the product of a fantastic magic entity, instead of a collection of bad fairy tales by people who thought talking snakes were real, and whose approach to disease was pathetically ludicrous even by the standards of the era, let alone in the light of 21st century medicine, this florid psychosis is treated not as a cause for grave concern in some quarters, but as something to be celebrated.

Oh, and as for that ludicrous approach to disease, just head over to Leviticus 13, and see something that looks like an out-take from The Life of Brian taken to Spinal Tap 11. Which would be hilarious in the extreme, were it not for the existence of palsied dickwads who treat this shite as fact, and while doing so, end up killing their own fucking children, because they prefer to masturbate over mediaeval superstition than to call an actual qualified doctor. Worse still, some of these dickwads live in a country that has been thus far, the only country to send human beings to the Moon and bring them back alive. The decline thereof is pitiful to observe in this respect, and not merely because it has temporarily chosen to place a self-propelled Cheeto in the White House.

Meanwhile, with respect to purported "miracles", my favourite piece of apologetic excrement (for comedy purposes only, I hasten to add), is that Fatima nonsense about the Sun purportedly zipping about the sky, for all the world like an astronomical version of a kitten doing a catnip spazzdance. This was supposed to have been observed in Portugal in 1917, when a large crowd of superstition addled people gathered on a hillside in anticipation of a supposed "miracle", and the local refractive conditions in the atmosphere happened coincidentally to produce sundogs. Whereupon the inevitable frenzy was unleashed. Except that, oops, if the Sun had really moved about the sky in this manner, it would have been travelling at speeds massively in excess of the speed of light, and a certain Mr. A. Einstein would have much to say on this if he were alive today. If, on the other hand, the Sun remained in its usual position, and the Earth moved in this manner to produce the same effect, the accelerative forces would have squashed those on the forward side of the planet to pancake shaped mush, and left those on the rearward side of the planet suddenly finding themselves floating in deep space. Then, of course, we can factor in here that none of the world's astronomers noticed anything unusual happening to the Sun that day, or for that matter any of the billion or so other humans in other locations on the planet on the day in question. While we're at it, motions of this sort, if they had actually happened, would have left profound observational consequences for the orbital mechanics of every body in the Solar System, consequences that would remain detectable to the present, yet, lo and behold, no such observational consequences have been found.

On the other hand, anyone familiar with light refraction is well placed to work out what actually happened on the day. Unless of course, a particularly unusual Alcubierre warp bubble was formed on the day in question, though even that scenario is replete with issues, such as the fact that light distortion arising therefrom would be globally visible, and not restricted to one small corner of Portugal filled with Jeebus-heads. Astronomers in particular would sit up and take notice very quickly if such visual phenomena materialised in our neighbourhood, and the discourse on this would not only be filling the academic literature for decades, but be headline news around the world.

Apparently, it's not just iron chariots that Magic Man is scared of, he's also scared of cameras, telescopes and radar.