Hey everybody, it's been months since I've been over to the RRS forums! I just got through arguing with my mother about a number of things, and felt like venting a little here. It seems like lately my contact with reasonable human beings has been pretty limited, and I need a break from that.

Anywho, I don't know how many of you have heard of this guy named Immanuel Velikovsky, but chances are he's been discussed sometime, somewhere on the forums here. My grandfather, who is of course a very conservative christian, has been recently trying to persuade me of this guy's ideas. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Velikovsky, as I was, here's a quick overview:

Velikovsky took little bits here and there from myths all over the world, trying to find commonalities between them, and used those commonalities as "evidence" that global catastrophes or incredible celestial events occurred in recent history, including, among others, the idea that Venus was formed a mere 3500 years ago when it was shot out of Jupiter, leaving a scar on Jupiter now known as the Great Red Spot (I'm trying so hard not to add an "lol" after some of this). Venus supposedly then flew by Earth as a giant comet, causing unimaginable catastrophe on earth, which caused some of the magical events with Moses and the Hebrews, for example. Oh, and he also had to rearrange the historical record to make some of this stuff fit together. All in all, Velikovsky was a pseudoscientist, and nothing more.

Now I have the unwanted burden of dealing not only with my normally creationist family and their friends, but with pseudoscience bs of another, less familiar sort. Arrg.