Owens and Scozzafava are both center-left candidates. Both are pro-choice, and Republican Scozzafava is in fact pro-gay marriage while Owens is merely pro-civil union. During her campaign, Scozzafava announced her opposition to the initial Senate health bill because it failed to “reduce costs by expanding competition across state lines,” though her main complaint was its failure to include tort reform. Effectively, Scozzafava is in line with Midwestern Democrats.

Though party affiliation is typically a better indication of voting preference than ranking of political liberalism or conservatism like the classic ADA scores, consider the differences between Scozzafava and the Conservative Party candidate, Doug Hoffman. He is anti-gay marriage, anti-abortion, admits that the economy is recovering but is doing so “in spite of the stimulus, not because of it;” opposed to healthcare reform, and has a section of his campaign site dedicated to ragging on ACORN.

As such, I think the problem can be mapped as follows:

Scozzafava’s loss x < Scozzafava’s loss y.

Tom Coburn proposed an amendment a few days ago to prevent any NSF funding from going to political science. His reasoning – in full here – is a study in silly. He believes correctly that medical science resulting in advanced medicine will “help save lives” – but not so for studies that have had a real impact on preventing genocide globally. Other recent political science studies relying on NSF funding include one on fostering democracy in China (a topic about which Coburn once pretended to care seriously – even going so far as to flip-flop on his pro-trade stance with China because of human rights issues); protecting civilians during civil wars, and countless others. A casual perusal of recent NSF poli sci grants show that the proposal to defund poli sci on utilitarian grounds is ridiculous.

In his proposal, Coburn creates a very telling list of studies singled out for abuse. He doesn’t like ones about “Why do political candidates make vague statements?” (No real shocker there for the guy who prides himself on opposing pork-barrel politics, while strong-arming other legislators to support every single Bush budget), and opposes funding for the Human Rights Data Project, because it “concluded that the United States has been “increasingly willing to torture “enemy combatants‟ and “imprison suspected terrorists… leading to a worldwide increase in human rights violations as others followed-suit.” Shocking.

And, of course, his report included a factually incorrect attack on Paul Krugman, who is not a political scientist – but is, in Coburn’s opinion, “a liberal.” Doctor Coburn, I assure you, the number of professional scientists who you would consider “liberal” is staggering. (And do yourself a favor – don’t even ask about their religious beliefs)

Tom Coburn bought the “death panel” conspiracy theory hook, line and sinker and even the birther bill. He features prominently in The Republican War on Science for his magical thinking on condoms.

Tom Coburn generally has good ideas about trimming government fat. Further endangering American academia’s prestigious place in the world is not among them, and ending the source of a third of all political science funding isn’t, either. If you would like to inform Coburn of this fact, you can contact him here.

As a reader over at monkeycage pointed out, similar attempts to drastically scale back NSF funding have been launched in the past – secular favorite Kay Bailey Hutchison proposed something similar in 2006 – and it looks like enough people have spoken up to kill the amendment, which currently sits dead in the water in unproposed status for a bill that has already been voted on – but Coburn still has time to bring it up, technically. Considering his current rapport with the scientific world, no amount of dissent will go unneeded.

Children and fools are suffered to speak truth; priests and ministers, as men engaged in politics and advertising, are suffered to speak untruth. Like parents who deceive their children about Santa Clause, the men of God enjoy a dispensation to deceive their folds for their own good. Publicly, the shepherds give every appearance of believing what in conversations with philosophers they claim, of course, not to believe at all.

-Walter Kaufmann, from his introduction to Europe and the Jews

That the so-called ‘New Atheists’ do not waste their time engaging with sophisticated theologians is one of the most common, most pointless objections raised against Dawkins and his fellow nonbelievers. This objection, most often raised by sophisticated theologians, is based on the crucial assumption that there is something to be gained by such engagement. That this assumption is false is so evident that hearing it raised is frankly disenheartening: one imagines an unpopular schoolboy picking fights with bullies just to get a little attention. Or, more fairly, one imagines “West Side Story’s” scrawny Anybodys: all bluster, no muster, but hungry nevertheless for an attentive ear.

PZ Myers reminds us that the Emperor may be the subject of an in-depth biopic from an esteemed and respected fashion publication, but he is still naked. This “Courtier’s Reply” is the heart of any sustained attack on the flagging cult of theology. Theology is done in academic journals that nobody reads, in encyclicals that do nothing but support beliefs and practices that are already in place, and in quiet conversations between theologians outside of churches. No religious people listen unless the theologian errs in his exposition of doctrine, at which point the theologian is useful only as an example of the dangers of reason. In either end, the purposes and doctrines of the churches remain intact. The theologian makes no difference to the church, yet the theologian considers himself the apex of and spokesman for that church.

Superfluous for the believer and irrelevant to the non-believer, certainly, but is theology truly without redeeming content? Yes. The embarrassing role of the theologian is this: defend doctrine at all costs. The theologian can claim to be in the business of truth, and sometimes they even deign to conflate themselves with philosophers since their role is both academic and argument-based. This dishonest equivocation is betrayed by three simple facts. First, theologians rarely (if ever) come to conclusions that genuinely dispute the dogmas laid down by their employers. Second, on the rare occasions when they do end up disputing dogma, churches are not changed, they are simply one theologian less shortly thereafter. And third, the methods of argumentation employed in theological circles are so poor that to call them real philosophy is a slander against the rest of us.

Where there is a mystery to be resolved, such as why God permits so much evil in our universe, their defenses are either deliberately obtuse (Plantinga) or insultingly dissatisfying (Swinburne, et al). Where there is a mystery that cannot be defended even poorly, theologians do not give up doctrine, they simply state it as fact (watch Aquinas and Augustine wrestle with the contradiction of the Trinity and you’ll see what I mean).

For the theologian, it is often enough to simply drop a verse of Scripture and call the matter settled. Most of the rest of the time, theologians retreat to ancient and fallacious proofs, subtly re-brand them, and think themselves victorious when the theistically-biased journals in which they publish refuse to publish skeptical ripostes. To be called a ‘Great Light of the Church,’ Aquinas needed little more than arguments cribbed from Plato, the Bible, and decades of free time. This proud tradition continues to this day, and theologians claim their own value on these grounds.

Theology is irrelevant

We are quiet here without strife and disputes since above all else we honour the privilege of silence which is without peril.

-St.. Gregory

This brings us to one good reason that atheists needn’t bother with theology, which is that theology has no meaningful impact on the beliefs or practices of any religious people. Atheists need not engage theologians any more than they need resolve disputes with Raelians, because like Raelians, theologians worship a god or other highly impersonal abstraction that is completely unfamiliar to any religious person. Jews do not say that they worship “knowledge knowing itself,” they worship a real person with moods and emotions named YHVH. Yet Maimonides earned his stars as the greatest Jewish theologian in history worshiping just such a god. Catholics do not recite the lengthy expositions of Aquinas or Augustine, they say the Apostle’s Creed and they are content with it. Theologians make themselves into heretics in their attempts to make ancient superstitions palatable to modern audiences, and in this sense theologians are nothing more than evangelists of a new religion to undergraduate college students.

Churches trust these evangelists-to-the-educated precisely as far as they can throw them. Church authorities can out of one side of their mouth proclaim the proud intellectual lineage of their church while using the other side to condemn the same intellectuals for “erring” on crucial dogmas. Hans Kung might be of extreme use to the Catholic Church as a prop, a smug demonstration that wise men can fill a pew as well as anyone else, but this doesn’t stop the Church from calling Kung a heretic for his views on condom use and female ordination.

Conversely, a loyal theologian can work his way through an elegant proof for each step of such a Creed, but this is nothing but a dusty curio in the Church’s attic: no one reads the proof, or if someone does, he has gained nothing but the satisfaction that a man with a PhD is as comfortable parroting the Creed back at the priest as he is. No one recites creeds because their truth is demonstrated; people recite creeds because the priests says they should and everyone else in the congregation is doing it. Where religious practice is concerned, the most a theologian can do is give you a very complicated reason for doing what you are doing already.

In this sense religious beliefs are immunized against the influence of theology because such beliefs have had centuries to dispense with heretics. If someone disagrees with a core doctrine, they are not welcome in the church, and it is that simple. Given that this is the case, how could we expect a theologian in the employ of, say, a Catholic college to give us an unbiased argument against Catholic doctrine? We could not expect it, and they do not provide it, because their paychecks depend on their faculties being deployed exclusively in defense of what the believer has already been told for his entire life. If a Catholic theologian did come up with a good objection to the Catholic position on female ordination, we can expect that such a theologian would not get to call himself Catholic for much longer. It is noteworthy that the current Pope’s previous job with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (a modern pseudonym for the Office of the Inquisitions) was to deliver threats of excommunication to such theologians. An exhaustive list of those thusly threatened can be found in the brilliant, anonymous Against Ratzinger.

The Catholic Church serves as an excellent example of the fact that modern religions are institutionally immunized against philosophical discourse. When asked to justify, say, a fundamentalist anti-homosexual dogma, or a dogma against condom use, or female ordination, or that the Eucharist host is literally and substantially the body of Jesus, no Catholic authority gives you an argument. They just tell you the page and paragrap where you can find the dogma spelled out in the Cathechism. The same is true of the vast mythology of any Christian sect: they will either tell you that a belief is good because it is the belief of the elders, or if they are in a sporting mood, they will give you a verse from the Bible. Argument and discussion is not the point, the point is the propagation of tradition. When the tradition itself is called into question, the heretic is appropriately dealt with and the conversation ceases.

Not only are religions thus immune to the kind of discourse that the whiny critics of ‘New Atheism’ demand we have, many strands of religion are explicitly anti-theological. One need only spend a moment in works like Peter Ruckman’s Anti-Intellectual Manifesto or such tracts as “The Chaplain” and “Who Is He?” to realize that good credentials and academic prestige are anathema to these believers. (While Jack Chick is on the board, it would do us well to ask if there are any theologians more widely-read than he is.) The theologian can arrogantly assume a position as a spokesman for his denomination, but the atheist knows as well as the religionist does that the theologian is just blowing smoke.

It is just as evident that theology is irrelevant because nobody reads it. If you took together every book and commentary written in defense of Biblically-adduced doctrines, would they equal even a minute fraction of the sales of the Bible itself? Of course not. People who believe in the Bible do not do so as a point of reason; reasons fall into place to support a pre-existing belief.

But why stop with the Bible? Take every book ever written by Aquinas, Augustine, Luther, Calvin, Kierkegaard and any other great lights of Christendom you please. Will their readership ever equal the readership of insultingly simplistic tracts printed by the millions and scattered at random? No. Religions do not spread with elaborate arguments, they spread with simple messages, and in fact an overly complex, overly theological religion is doomed to fail (this is why early Christians had so little difficulty out-competing Gnostics and mystery cults). The theology is an interesting accessory to be taught to an esteemed few after the religious belief is deeply entrenched in a society. It does not cause religious belief, it sustains it virtually no believers, and it never furthers belief.

This is an admission accepted as readily by the theologian. In his God, Freedom, and Evil, Alvin Plantinga makes a furiously rigorous case for the existence of God adduced from an ancient proof, but prefaces this proof with the disheartening maxim that “few who accept theistic belief do so because they find such an argument compelling.” Self-deprecating confessions of this sort abound in theology.

Churches ignore theologians just as plainly as believers do. How many theologians have, with their philosophy hats on, attacked the superstitious worship of relics, or fables about miraculous healings and dancing suns and demonic possessions? Many have, but who listens? Protestant churches will take your tithes at the revival meeting just the same.

Theology is about dishonesty

Although it is quite true that the existence of God is to be believed since it is taught in the sacred Scriptures, and that… the sacred Scriptures are to be believed because they come from God… nevertheless this cannot be submitted to infidels, who would consider that the reasoning proceeded in a circle.

-Rene Descartes

Like all great religious liars, theologians try to claim God for themselves, dismissing critics as targeting not “their” Christianity or “the real” Jesus. The god written about in the works of theology is an alien, an idol, a demiurge meant to satisfy the superstitions of their elders with the fashionable rationalism of their contemporaries. Theologians can toss around Biblical metaphors and tell us about the “Ground-of-all-Being” (Tillich) or the “Being-Itself” (Heidegger) or the “knowledge knowing itself” (Maimonedes) that they worship alone. They can whittle away the God of folk religion to a metaphysical abstraction so slender that it is unrecognizable. In fact, these are the skills at which they excel. Few are better at discrediting organized religion than those who claim to be using rational methods to defend it. This is how the great Protestant theologian Paul Tillich, a giant of our century second in his academic prestige perhaps only to Niebuhr, can deny the truth of the Bible but still count himself a Christian, or how Rudolf Bultmann called himself the same while denying the very thing that makes Christianity more than a Sparknotes version of Judaism, that is, the eternal damnation of those who fail to accept Jesus.

Theologians like to call themselves members of religions because they are dishonest. For six days a week, they write essays for poorly-circulated academic journals expounding elaborate and nuanced positions on matters of faith, but on Sundays they switch their Philosopher hat for their Religionist hat and say the same creeds everyone else does. Paul Tillich excelled at this: he advocated lying as an esteemed theological enterprise. If the simple folk religionist could be easily assuaged in his doubts, than a dutiful literalism should be encouraged. But if the questioner showed the least intellectual stamina, only then would Tillich share what he really believed and thereby keep the doubting Thomas in the faith by appealing to his intellect. Walter Kaufmann summarizes:

Tillich, however, does not favor the crude method of confronting men with arguments that he himself consdiers bad. Instead he redefines the crucial terms and cultivates a kind of double-speak. Literalists thus feel reconfirmed in their beleifs and are pleased that so erudite a man should share their faith, while the initiated realize that Tillich finds the beliefs shared by most of the famous Christians of the past and by millions of Christians in the present utterly untenable. [Kaufmann, Walter. The Faith of a Heretic,]

Tillich believed that religious belief ought to be dumbed down, if the “questioning power” in a particular believer “is very weak and can be easily answered.” (See Tillich, Paul. Dynamics of Faith. Harper, NY, 1957, Torchbooks. (c)1958. p.32-34) In his academic writing he excoriated simple-minded literalism, but thought it better that the flock be simple-minded literalists than have them exposed to the dangerous complexities of the cult of the theologian. Dishonesty this profound does not merit conversation, and how could atheists engage with such a person if their claims fluctuated with schizophrenic alacrity depending on what kind of believers were eavesdropping?

But don’t think that Tillich is the only one so guilty. This is the way of all theologians; Tillich is worthy only of such attention because his theological co-cultists hold him up so highly. Most theologians are not clergymen, and those that are do not refine their practice based on their philosophical speculations. They toe the party line in public, and in their private speculations they either do away with God entirely (as the atheist does) but use such convoluted language that nobody notices, or else they do all in their power to defend the dogma just in case an authority happens upon their writings. These cases are opposites, but they both support the conclusion: theology is a dishonest practice.

The Protestant theologian William Lane Craig is as good an example. Recognizing the poverty of his arguments, he has set himself to refining the rhetorical style with which he presents the same tired red herrings year after year rather than find new arguments. He is often described as one of the most talented theistic debaters of our time, but this is precisely the point. He can be refuted as often as he likes, as he has been in person and in writing. John Loftus, Richard Carrier, and Bart Ehrman have all refuted the dramatic misrepresentations of Biblical scholarship of which Craig is so fond (such misrepresentations include the howler that most Biblical scholars agree that the post-resurrection appearances of Jesus were historical events); this has not changed his arguments. Nor does it change the arguments of any preacher or evangelist who has met a stumbling-block, and this proud tradition of feeding the same malarkey to different audiences goes all the way back to the Book of Acts, in which Paul is said to have been confounded by Greek sophisticates and then just continued on his merry way with the same message.

Churches are as dishonest as the theologians are; this is why Anselm was touted as a genius for his ontological ‘proof’ of the existence of God, but the first contemporary to refute his argument (a fellow Catholic named Gaunilo) was utterly dismissed and only rediscovered in modern times through the work of skeptics. In this case, the Church was not interested in the truth of the matter about the ontological argument, they were interested in the propagation of doctrine. How can a conversation be had with such a mindset? Atheists cannot engage meaningfully with such institutions because these institutions have spent centuries signalling their dishonesty and their insincerity. The case of Gaunilo is one of thousands; why should we hail John Calvin as an intellectual great while ignoring his cooperation with the Inquisition in disposing of heretics who disagreed with him? Why should we take seriously a Church that coyly dangles the Shroud of Turin in front of us without taking a stance on its authenticity, saying only ‘believers can have their faith strengthened by it whether it is real or not?’

Catholicism is not alone in this regard. The Buddha himself simply dismissed all questions of theology and metaphysics as “questions that tend not toward edification.” The inventor of Protestantism, Martin Luther, went a step further, calling the use of reason to question religious dogma “the Devil’s bride” and “God’s worst enemy.” Luther’s arguments came from scripture alone, and the dogma of Sola Scriptura is one of which his intellectual descendants are the most proud. The circle is thusly established: Scripture provides the answers, and where Scripture is questioned, the faculty being employed is just a tool of Satan so do not even worry about what good sense tells you.

Even Tolstoy, thought to be one of the greatest assets of his type to Christendom until CS Lewis, shrugged off his doubts, coyly remarking that “[w]hat is comprehensible to one may seem obscure to another. But all will certainly agree in what is most important….” And like that, all mystery is gone. As long as the core of the religion is accepted, peripheral anomalies in dogma are inconsequential. This is a common technique of modern apologetics: get people to swallow the message, and doubts about the message will simply solve themselves.

Another common technique is obscurantism. William Lane Craig prides himself on the simplistic, easy-to-understand character of his arguments, yet when asked to solve the ancient Euthyphro Dilemma, he simply bellows in response “God IS goodness!” As if that solved the matter. But oscillating from simplicity into obscure language is helpful because it gives the believer a catchphrase on which to hang his own doubts, and against which to smash the doubts of the skeptics around him. The catchphrase need not make sense. It need not really answer the question. But it is helpful because one can make a creed out of it.

Theology is without substance

In my speeches and sermons that I gave, there were none of the arguments that belong to philosophy; only a demonstration of the power of the Spirit. And I did this so that your faith should not depend on human philosophy but on the power of God.

-Paul, I Corinthians 2:4-5

Whether or not all of the above is enough to dismiss the cult of theology, there is still the crucial assumption that theology has some ultimate substance with which to engage. Even if this substance is presented dishonestly, is without practical impact, and is presented from the obvious bias of “faith seeking understanding” (Aquinas’s motto), we are often told that these intellectual greats have something to contribute that atheists should take seriously.

Paul, father of Christianity, disagrees. He told generations of early Christians that genuine inquiry was insubstantial, and that is how the Patristics and the other early leaders of the Christian religion closed the ears of their congregations to Greek philosophy and other troublingly intelligent doubters. This gave rise to a whole new method of engaging with arguments: ignore them at best, and at worst treat them as dangerous. The Christian crowd that butchered skeptical philosopher Hypatia of Alexandria alive was just following orders from above.

It took until the Middle Ages, when most of the heretics had already disappeared, for Christians to think it okay to engage with the arguments of their enemies. This engagement took a hollow form: parrot a crusty proof from the Greeks or perhaps the Arabs and call it a day. It does not matter how often the traditional ‘proofs’ for the existence of God (ontological, cosmological, teleological, experiential; the proofs are presented so repetitively that they are easily cubbyholed into these simple categories) are refuted by skeptics. The elegant responses by men as diverse as Guanilo, Walter Kaufmann, and John Mackie have never stopped the religious demagogue from thundering about creationism because truthful engagement with arguments is not their business.

Even when great religious men trash the arguments of their co-believers, nobody takes notice. The greatest philosopher in continental history, Immanuel Kant, spends a good deal of his epochal Critique of Pure Reason simply feasting on the traditional proofs for God in ways that have not been satisfactorily refuted since. Yet to this day theologians build careers defending these proofs. The popular Protestant theologian Alvin Plantinga has reformulated the ontological version of these arguments ad nauseum, always in ways that traditional rebuttals are just as successful, and William Lane Craig isn’t going to let go of the cosmological argument no matter what he is told from the religious or the skeptics about its futility. They do not care to make novel or solid arguments, nor can they.

So when the religious critic of atheism demands that we atheists engage with all levels of sophisticated theology, what are they really saying? They are saying that we should copy and paste established refutations in our books and essays to their satisfaction. They are saying that we should waste as much time cribbing from the dead as they do. When one attempts to prove God’s existence from their personal experiences, how many times do we have to point out the inherent unreliability of such experiences? Until the religious person is able to read them? Until the religious person is able to understand them? Until the religious person accepts them? The first step is rarely reached, the second even more rarely, and the third step often makes the headlines (see Charles Templeton) on the rare occasion when it does happen. It is fruitless.

It is fruitless not only because religious believers usually either don’t read or don’t accept the counterarguments, but also because religious believers seem particularly adept at forgetting them. Kai Nielsen explained to William Lane Craig what is wrong with the moral argument for God decades ago, yet Craig continues to use it in his lectures and debates around the world. And why shouldn’t he? He isn’t about honesty, he’s about conversion. And so with his colleagues.

Where theologians attempt to wrestle with evil, things get even uglier. Dawkins famously points out that Richard Swinburne, a celebrated theologian, is fine with the Holocaust because of how bravely it permitted the Jews to act in the face of persecution (which doesn’t matter, because in the theology of Swinburne’s religion they’re all going to hell anyways). JP Moreland’s epic Scaling the Secular City aims to defend God’s existence from skeptical inquiry while dealing with the problem of evil in a single paragraph that concludes unsatisfactorily with “Evil is traceable to the free will of God’s creatures.” The immediate question of why God would value Hitler’s free will over the lives (and, by extension, the free will) of millions of other creatures of God is obvious, and completely unanswered in the whole literature of theology.

When the religious believer cries out for God in times of distress, they do not want Plantinga’s empty assertion that God and evil are merely possibly logically compatible, they want a real answer. And the British bishops who blamed flooding and hurricanes on the sinfulness of the English people or the American televangelists who blamed the attacks of September 11^th on feminists and homosexuals do not provide this answer. When a quarter million innocents are washed away by a tsunami in the southwestern Pacific, the survivors rightfully demand an explanation. They do not get one, they get platitudes. Why should atheists waste time and pages dealing with them when their inadequacy is so painfully obvious?

Theology, like all religious institutions, demands respect where none is earned. Historically they serve only the functions of defending dogma to no one in particular, providing cover for the rare believer who comes to doubt the various absurdities of his faith, and of optimistically regurgitating the failed arguments of previous theologians. There is nothing here with which to engage. There is no novelty among them to treat with new counterarguments.

Show me a proof for the existence of God whose origins are less than five hundred years in the past and perhaps we can talk. Show me where a theologian has genuinely comforted the mother of the massacred or otherwise disposed-of child and I will reconsider. Until then, do not waste my time of the time of others claiming that theology is an accomplishment to be regarded with straight-faced serious argumentation. Quit whining about your obscurity, theologians: it is your own fault. Stop complaining about how you are treated unfairly and start earning the privilege of serious treatment. Until you redeem yourselves from a long, boring, obscure, dirty history of defending dogma, you are not worth the effort. Until you get your churches to stop appealing to magical talismans, supernatural relics, and other folk superstitions, the futility of your writings is apparent. Until you get the religious con-men who refer to you only in the improbable circumstance of the one intelligent doubting believer to stop shouting “but where’d all this stuff come from?” or “but why’s this stuff look so pretty?” or, as Job’s friends were so fond of saying, “your suffering is your fault,” you have not made enough of an impact to warrant our attention. The God you worship is either unfamiliar to religious believers, in which case you are a heretic, or he is completely congruent with established creeds and dogmas, in which case you are irrelevant.

Now that that’s settled, I say we atheists get on with our lives and resume chuckling at the poor schoolboy who smacks us in the shoulder just to get our attention. He is a petty, lonely boy who craves a moment in the sun, nothing more.

There are a few problems that I face with teaching science. First of all the only reason given for teaching anything in science is the state mandated standardized test in science. This is only half the problem. 

The other half is that most science teachers don’t know science themselves. 

These problems compound to getting a batch of students who are basically good kids, whose parents have no idea who Carl Sagan was. Their number one extracurricular activity is usually based in Church (probably because its free). Their only exposure to science is fed to them by the ignorant who don’t give too much of a shit about science themselves and they only do it to appease a test which seeks primarily its own market share. 

My states test is definitely made by a private company, and that private company holds a strict monopoly of the whole educational system. 

What do you do?

Most of the stuff I can think off would border on being either unethical or depressing. 

In spite of writing this highly cathartic anonymous blog I do try to maintain a relatively mainstream professional ethic about teaching. 

I wear my goddamn tie, something which I don’t even have to do. 

I mostly get my paperwork in on time. 

I give my principal the benefit of the doubt. 

But I really feel like my legs are broken on getting these kids to love science. 

And let me be clear, my incentive as a science teacher is to cultivate a lifelong love for science. 

People who love science take good care of the world.

Secular people strike me as a charmingly overcaffeinated bunch. What’s your daily intake?

I became a teacher because unscientific, mooshy, subjective thinking dominates the world. I want to teach kids to be driven by reason and critical thinking. 

I became a teacher to give youngsters, especially those who are less likely to succeed academically, an edge in life. 

I have a science degree with a great deal of primary scientific research experience. 

I became a teacher to save the world. 

But so far my first three weeks of being a teacher have consisted of being given too much secretarial work to properly prepare my classes or even grade work. I have to have 12 grades by Monday. Actually, technically they are 3 days late on Monday, but thats when the administration starts paying attention. 

I would love to have my grades. I have been gauging what my kids know from class work and discussions that I can watch, but their independent work is what will really show me what they are getting or not.

I need to spend my time assessing student mastery of what is being taught. 

I need to spend my time designing creative lessons and classroom activities that will maximize my student’s  interest and mastery. 

I really want my kids to succeed. I want them to be smarter than anyone ever expected them to be, I want them to be life long learners and leaders. 

My students are 100% latino, they are what is referred to as a “bilingual” class which means (where I live) that Spanish is the language spoken at home. 

On CNN Lou Dobb’s talks about my kids like them and their parents are pests who should be dragged off into camps for stealing jobs, healthcare, and the education that I am trying to provide. 

My kids are seen as “beaners, greasers, wetbacks,” and “spics.”

I became a teacher to save the world. 

By school district mandates, passed on to me by my state legislation I am required to track, process, maintain and write so much paperwork that I have been working 12 hour days to maintain a mountain of this inane secretarial work. 

I need to figure out how to make sure my kids see the links between critical thinking and science. Logic and math, and math and science. 

I get to go through four years of records and make sure that papers that their parents fill out (or often don’t fill out) are turned in and organized. 

I need to figure out how much math my kids missed as it was not properly emphasized since it was not a required state standardized test in 3rd or 4th grade. 

I get to go to dozens of hours of “development” meetings in which former kindergarden teachers treat me and a room full of adults like kindergardeners and call it “modeling.” In these meetings I am taught to use software so basic, as an experienced behaviorist, I am confident I could teach rats to use it.

I need to have individual time with each of my students so that I can help them iron out their academic weaknesses and come up with engaging strategies that I design with them to maximize their potential. 

Instead I have individual time with ” new teacher liaisons” who eat up time and space so that I can meet some criteria decided in a boardroom somewhere by people who haven’t been in a classroom for a decade. 

I became a teacher to save the world.

Rep. Jean Schmidt (R-OH) whispers to a birther: "I agree with you."

Lest we dare believe that a position of authority grants a position of reasonableness. Birtherism, it seems, is the new trutherism.

Note, however, that there doesn’t appear to be a fair balance of conspiracy theorists on the right and left. Who is set to deliver the Republican retort to Obama’s speech tonight? Charles Boustany (R-LA), himself a birther. From Bill Posey (R-PA) to Lou Dobbs (R-CNN), Liz Cheney to Sean Hannity, the right is apparently much more eager to embrace the notion that a half-century of recorded history and the words and memories of thousands of people simply never happened.

To put it in as neutral a light as possible, this is a scandal and an embarrassment of massive proportions in the making for American conservatives. Will public pressure from the vast majority of people who understand that Barack Obama’s life is not one long, drawn-out conspiracy theory force the resignation of our government’s next crop of Van Joneses?

Mr. Fish fully agrees that kids t’dee aren’t good writers. Seconded. But a basic premise of ACTA’s paper is that schools should teach more reading, ‘riting, and ‘rithmetic with the explicit undertone that such should be used to instill right-wing values in the young. Readers may recognize some cribbing from the Allan Bloom school of curmudgeonly oafism. Evidently, even though the current young generation is better than its predecessors in almost every measurable way, the fact that its teachers are doing things unlike how previous teachers did them is cause for immediate uproar.

On the other hand, postmodernism is silly and shame on Mr. Fish himself for trying to ward off ACTA by saying that ACTA’s trying to “politicize” the process of building a humanities curriculum. They are, but so are postmodernists. In fact, most postmodernist scholars make the explicitly political argument that all factions in the battle of ideas must be given an equal playing field; to paint with a brush the size of the past fifty years, the literary legacy of postmodernism forms a Bill of Rights for lousy ideas. As tremendously wrong as conservatives usually are in criticizing Freud’s pretty good work and their bizarre obstinance to admitting that sexual liberation was an admirable inevitability, postmodern thinkers are often guilty of failing to form a critique of much of anything except for picking a particular ethnicity around which said things can be accused of “centering.”

How much you care about Allan Bloom’s failure to read the literary and rhetorical works of his and the following generation is an open question, as is the extent of your emotional investment in the effete chin-rubbing of UoI-Chicago’s English department. But here’s a proposal I think secularists should be pushing in their own universities and in the schools of their children:

1. Kids should be taught more math and science than they currently are. That includes a greater emphasis on the actual act of doing science beyond the mere philosophy of science.
2. This will help everyone figure out that by anything even approaching a useful, reusable standard, some ideas are better than others, and certainly more right than others.
3. As such, it may be an apolitical statement that institutions advancing this wholly secular, wholly non-implicative way of thinking are of intrinsic value and worth defending.

That’s as close to a secular defense of the notion of an academic duty to the West’s historical legacy as I can get in a page, and it is a defense to which I will stick.

There were well over 200 skeptics, and we caused a back-up at the “museum”. Despite the lines, the crowds, and the outright misleading information, people seemed to be having a good time. We were surrounded by people who were of similar ideas and thoughts on science and religion. Ironically, it was here in a place of religion over science that many of us felt as if we belonged. It is no secret that skeptics are a marked minority, for now. Many student and community groups have trouble breaking 50 members, many of whom are never really active. To be immersed in such a large crowd was a shock. Everywhere I looked, I saw the black and white SSA sticker. We didn’t have to make noise or rattle the cage or cause a stink; our mere presence was enough to get the message across loud and clear.

I would like to state that I’m not knocking the work that many like PZ do. Until skeptics are acknowledged as part of society, attention is necessary, even if it’s bad attention. We can’t let people pretend that we aren’t here. This wasn’t the case August 7th. The need to get attention was no longer needed, which left more room to be respectful and polite. I saw many skeptics quiet their snickers and move aside to let the families on vacation look at the exhibits. I know many would say they shouldn’t have to do that. Those people are right. They don’t. But they did. And although that might have meant they missed the chance to try to convert someone, they did something that is by far more important. The skeptics showed respect to the believers. They proved that we aren’t evil, rude, immoral hooligans; they proved that even when we hold the majority we still respect the minority.

PZ Myers is amazing at what he does. He can bring a small news story to the front of the internet is less than a day. Anything posted to his blog is circulated within minutes. His controversies bring attention to the skeptical movement. He even admits he loves causing so much outrage. There is no question that his tactics are needed at this point in time and, unfortunately, for some time to come.

I find it mildly amusing that the “bad cop” of the movement made so many “good cops” simply by visiting some obscure place in Petersburg, Kentucky. Bad attention is better than no attention, and can obviously have positive effects. Just remember that you also need enough good attention to balance it all out.