Forms Most Beautiful

Rational Atheist article!

2007-08-18T14:39:00.000-07:00

So in the coming week or so, I will be putting the final brush-ups on my post, "Theistic Stalins," putting in the citations, and sending it over to Rational Atheist where it has been accepted and will be posted. Hoorah! I'll let you know when the posting goes through so that you ,and all of your friends interested in the ID movement and the absolute vacuity of "theistic realism," can take a look and pass it around.

As always, the lovely Christopher Hitchens

2007-08-17T14:34:00.000-07:00

I've been reading a fair amount of atheist thinking from the last couple of centuries and it seems to me that Hitchens really has taken the mantle, sans the anti-semitism, of H.L. Mencken. He pulls no punches, insults equally in kind, asks for no quarter, and shreds his opponents for their wish-thinking and the pathetic frailty of their logic. Should you like to see one of his late book tour appearances for God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, give a watch.

Gay marriage...a problem that religion gets wrong

2007-08-15T13:45:00.000-07:00

I have avoided this issue for quite a while...too long. The whole reason that gay marriage receives the invective crap it does from Republicans and Democrats and who the F*** knows who else is...

DING! DING! DING! American conservative Christianity.

And guess what? It all comes down to an argument of definition. What is marriage but a union between a man and a woman? What is a marriage but the union of two consenting adults? So on and on and on and on and on and on.

But what gets me...is two things: the first is based on general legal principle a la the constitution and the second is a bit personal.

1. The government has no place defining what a church can and can't define as a marriage. "Whoa!" you might think. PDB has lost it. He supports religion.

No. I support a disentanglement of government with religion. If you look at the Lemon Test, I think you could make an inferential argument that allowing churches to dominate a civil institution like marriage entangles the government with the church. That's unacceptable.

The government should respect church marriages and allow consenting adults to marry one another no matter if they are male-male, female-female, male-female, male-hermaphrodite, female-hermaphrodite, or hermaphrodite-hermaphrodite. The government should allow adults to make up their own minds and it baffles me that the any branch of government invades upon this area.

2. My sisters are gay. Well...one of them is biological and the other is illegally married into my family. They are beautiful. Devoted. Patient. Loving. But for f***'s sake, they pay taxes and are limited in their freedoms because religious wingnuts want them to be stoned to death under Levitical law. Madness.

At some point, I'll elaborate further. I wish that the Dems would pony up.

The "Smart Set" visits the Creation "Museum" (a.k.a. The Museum of Wish Thinking)

2007-08-14T15:46:00.000-07:00

Check this out. A group called the "Smart Set" from Drexel visited the Answers in Genesis Creation Museum and filed this report.

It's a really interesting tour, taking us through the perplexing bizarro world Answers in Genesis has created. Consider the following:

It’s hard to say whether the Biblical exhibits are actually “first rate” and “world class,” since there isn’t a whole lot to compare them to. But they don’t look cheap. The wax figures are as professional as those in Madame Tussaud’s. Adam and Eve are the most represented. The real Adam, ashamed as he’s said to have been, would probably be mortified by the muscled yet strangely round belly designers gave him. Eve, however, is spared: Though Genesis says they were created nude, no delicate areas are visible. Still, there’s something strangely erotic in the two canoodling under the trees as a dinosaur watches with what looks like a knowing half-smile. When they’re bathing together in a pool, the sound of a waterfall strong in the background, lily pads cover their lower halves. The water level is as low as it can be, though. Suggestion makes the scene more titillating than if AiG had gone ahead and shown everything. After all, traditional museums show penises and breasts, and nobody walks away from Neanderthal exhibits hot under the collar.

The titillation doesn't surprise me at all. Whereas a science museum like the Museum of Natural History in D.C. strives to get the facts up front without the overt emotional appeals, the AiG museum, must make an emotional appeal because it derives itself from a revelatory religious experience. Titillation, however taboo and because it is taboo, demands its centrality. Think about it. The Christian must be confronted with the sins of their flesh while also denying those same sins. By evoking voyeuristic sentiment, they elicit their particular Christian audience's guilt - a central tenet of their doctrine of humanity's fall from grace. Everyone (at least of the targeted audience) looking at the exhibit feels their sin. Isn't that what so much of this museum is about, with its bonus material about pornography, abortion, teen pregnancy, and fornication?

The museum’s gift shop is the Dragon Hall Bookstore. The name might surprise anyone who’s heard Christian protests of Harry Potter and Dungeons & Dragons. But it makes sense if you see the film Dinosaurs and Dragons in the museum’s basement. Ancient dragon myths, it claims, are proof that dinosaurs walked the Earth with humans. They only died out after Noah’s flood, when the limited number of plants diminished their numbers to the point at which humans could finish them off. Further creationism education is available in Dragon Hall. Its book titles include Grand Canyon: Monument to Catastrophe, One Small Speck to Man: The Evolution Myth, and Darwin's Demise: Why Evolution Can't Take the Heat. DVDs include Inherently Wind: A Hollywood History of the Scopes Trial, It Doesn't Take a Ph.D. and Lucy: She's no Lady.

I love this paragraph because it just shows us that the AiG folks will use the most baseless evidence - dragon myths - as evidence for their claims - dinosaurs' coexistence with humans. Hearsay and conjecture are preferred to independently verifiable and repeatable observation or experimentation. They ignore thousands and millions of scientific data, wave their hands and make some incantations to the lord, then use some shoddy myths from cultures they say are hellbound (Chinese, Greeks, Aztecs), and make an inference to the "best" explanation. When I say, "best," I mean the most vacuous, unrealistic, insane, pseudoscientific hodgepodge we see in an allegedly rational species.

Anyway, read on and learn more about the madness.

A nice evening at Kate and Tony's House

2007-08-14T15:43:00.000-07:00

I haven't been to a Tony party in a long time and what a treat it was. From 1997 to 2000 I worked at Svoboda's Bookstore in State College, PA with a great group of people: Tony (our pony-tailed Adonis-legged manager), Brian (the chisel-faced philosopher), Sharon (blonde pre-hipster bespectacled lover of poetry), Amy (the soft-faced artist), Michael (the stern-faced Darwin-bearded owner), and others to boot. It was a great independent bookstore with a solid following in the Penn State community.

It's where I helped my father-in-law before he was my In-dad as I call him now.

...where we danced until 4 am drinking wine and beer and eating sushi while discussing operations in the eleventh dimension with a Field's medal finalist.

...where I bought books at cost...

...that brought me to a new appreciation of the depth and breadth of learning...

...that gave me some good friends that I am so happy to be near again, now that J, Sacha, and I live in State College.

We had a great time and are eager to see Kate, Tony, and their girls again and the rest. Scott. Maybe Adam and Lorelle (though they live in California now). Amy. Brian.

Na-na! Na Na! Hey! Hey! Hey! Goodbye!

2007-08-13T13:00:00.000-07:00

See ya' turdblossom! Ding! Dong! The architect is gone! At least he's not in the White House any more.

Read it here in The New York Times:

But from the time he leaves office, Mr. Rove will no longer have the protection of White House lawyers and will be more on his own when it comes to dealing with Congressional subpoenas.

The White House has provided cover for some former aides by issuing letters directing them not to testify about their privileged conversations with the president or to answer only a limited set of potential questions.

...or at The Wall Street Journal.

Good riddance.

Guerilla librarianship

2007-08-13T12:59:00.000-07:00

My friend Kim tipped me to the blog postat The Guardian which links us to this blog on Biologists Helping Bookstores. He thinks that Michael Behe's new book, The Edge of Evolution should be placed in a new area:

I flip a copy and read the back. Here's the beginning of the first quote from the back cover: "Until the past decade and the genomics revolution, Darwin's theory rested on indirect evidence and reasonable speculation..." (Dr. Philip Skell, Evan Pugh Professor of Chemistry, Emeritus, at Pennsylvania State University, and member of the National Academy of Sciences). That's not true! I am emboldened by this bare-faced lie from this well-respected elderly chemist, pick up all four copies, and stroll upstairs.
Now, I aim for accuracy in my recategorization, and I was still slightly mad at the lies on the back cover (read the "Editorial Reviews" at Amazon for a sampling), so I sought out the most appropriate section of the store:
Behe's lie-covered volume now rightly resides in the Religious Fiction section. A job well done.

I think this is probably a good idea. Given the reviews of The Edge of Evolution by Ken Miller (from Nature which requires a subscription: "Yet, at the heart of his antidarwinian calculus are numbers not merely incorrect, but so spectacularly wrong that this badly designed argument collapses under its own weight."), Richard Dawkins ("I had expected to be as irritated by Michael Behe’s second book as by his first. I had not expected to feel sorry for him."), and Jerry Coyne:

What has Behe now found to resurrect his campaign for ID? It's rather pathetic, really. Basically, he now admits that almost the entire edifice of evolutionary theory is true: evolution, natural selection, common ancestry. His one novel claim is that the genetic variation that fuels natural selection--mutation--is produced not by random changes in DNA, as evolutionists maintain, but by an Intelligent Designer. That is, he sees God as the Great Mutator.

...each of which drag Behe's assertions through the sieve of current scientific thinking. We can see that Behe is once again making arguments from ignorance in order to set up a false inference to the best explanation that ends up being a god of the gaps. It's a big non sequitur once again; a concatenation of logical fallacies.

I've used this blogger's tactic twice now with the textbook from that was front and center in the Dover Trial, Of Pandas and People, another notable anti-science book by moving Pandas to religious fiction. I also wrote to Barnes and Noble about it.

Mitt Romney is a hypocrite

2007-08-13T12:57:00.000-07:00

Big surprise that an opportunistic schmuck would have this exchange:

Voter: "You, sir, are a pretender. You don't know the Lord. You are a Mormon."

(BOOS)

Romney: (Chuckling) "Let me, uh, let me offer just a thought. And that is, uh, one of the great things about this great land, is we have people of different faiths and different persuasions. And uh, I'm convinced that the nation, that the nation does need, the nation does need to have people of different faiths but we need to have a person of faith lead the country."

I like the open religious intolerance here. It just provides one more little piece of evidence that these sectarian debates are really debates about so much fantasy. Imagine a Muslim in America saying, "You, sir, are a pretender. You don't know Allah. You are a Mormon." That would show the patent intolerance and incompatibility of religion in good government. Instead we have Romney trying to create a feeling of inter-faith dialog and ecumenicism. Good luck on that.

But it's also nice to see that when confronted with intolerance, he just tries to slide the intolerance onto another group - atheists - by saying that "we need to have a person of faith lead the country." I suppose that if the majority of believers "need to have" a believer lead the country then they can vote that way. But I see no reason that a candidate is more qualified because he believes in some sky god and his son acting on Earth, much less visiting North America. Why should we nominate someone who thinks - no matter the evidence - that a lost tribe of Israel traveled across the Atlantic Ocean (before open-ocean-going vessels were invented by the Vikings) and populated the continent? He apparently believes this because his faith demands it but there isn't a shred of evidence for it and all of the evidence of America's indigenous population says that it came from its west via East Asia. So we're supposed to believe that a wish-thinker and evidence-ignorer is more suitable as a president? Me thinks not.

The point, though, is that Romney is intolerant of non-belief. As part of the majority of believers, it's convenient for him to disparage non-belief. That's not surprising though, because it calls into question some foundational stuff for him and so he can ally with other believers. Hey. At least they all believe in nonsense right?

But of course, when the table is turned on him and mainline Protestant, Catholic, or fundies ask, "Would Jesus vote for Mitt Romney?" he is going to get very upset and cry intolerance and bigotry. It's inconvenient for him to be criticized for the content of his belief when he is in a minority within the majority - a majority built on senseless tribal divisions about the outmoded beliefs of bronze age shepherds and their iron age descendants.

I am intolerant, but I'm no bigot. I don't accept any of this claptrap but your actions define the quality of your character. Romney is not consistent and neither are the rest of these theists trying to be twenty angels dancing on the head of a pin. Romney, like Giuliani and Clinton (Hillary that is), are opportunistic swindlers out to line their own pockets and that's what keeps them off my voting card. Their theism is just so much baggage I'd prefer to eliminate with Occam's Razor. I wish they would too.

Review of "The Enemies of Reason"

2007-08-13T09:46:00.000-07:00

This review by Charlie Brooker in The Guardian contains some real zingers, many of which I agree with whole-heartedly. His notion of "spirituality" seems a bit narrow, but then again the common usage of so-called "spirituality" is so thin as to be little more than linguistically cheap gossamer used to sound deep when it's often a diversion to escape probing conversation about belief.

Welcome to a dangerous new era - the Unlightenment - in which centuries of rational thought are overturned by idiots. Superstitious idiots. They're everywhere - reading horoscopes, buying homeopathic remedies, consulting psychics, babbling about "chakras" and "healing energies", praying to imaginary gods, and rejecting science in favour of soft-headed bunkum. But instead of slapping these people round the face till they behave like adults, we encourage them. We've got to respect their beliefs, apparently.

Well I don't. "Spirituality" is what cretins have in place of imagination. If you've ever described yourself as "quite spiritual", do civilisation a favour and punch yourself in the throat until you're incapable of speaking aloud ever again. Why should your outmoded codswallop be treated with anything other than the contemptuous mockery it deserves?

Maybe you've put your faith in spiritual claptrap because our random, narrative-free universe terrifies you. But that's no solution. If you want comforting, suck your thumb. Buy a pillow. Don't make up a load of floaty blah about energy or destiny. This is the real world, stupid. We should be solving problems, not sticking our fingers in our ears and singing about fairies. Everywhere you look, screaming gittery is taking root, with serious consequences. The NHS recently spent £10m refurbishing the London Homeopathic Hospital. The equivalent of 500 nurses' wages, blown on a handful of magic beans. That was your tax money. It was meant for saving lives.

How about it? Codswallop indeed! I am rather tired of having to "respect" bullshit notions about reality. Why don't the theists and supernaturalists and assorted other anti-realists respect evidence? When I teach rhetoric and composition classes I tell students at every turn: "Show. Don't tell." You want me to believe you? You want a court to accept what you think is real or likely? Pony up with the evidence kids and don't drivel on about what you would like to be true. Wish-thinking does not reality make.

That is one of the great things about the Enlightenment. It banished (I wish forever) the seriousness with which we take wish-thinking, magical thinking, irrationality, and just-so stories. Hume, Locke, Bacon, Newton, Leibniz, Kant, Descartes, d'Holbach, Paine, Jefferson, Franklin, and many others brought us to a world where rationalism could reign and the weight of evidence, deduction, induction, and inferences to the best explanation could guide us into the future and even lead us to more moral lives The reasoned moral life may not be easy for the brain to take at all times, but it is a consistent life imbued with beauty, truth, purpose, passion, and discovery because it eschews that which we think we want to be true and real.

"The Enemies of Reason" to air on BBC.

2007-08-13T09:44:00.000-07:00

Richard Dawkins has a new series coming out that takes aim at so-called new age practices and paranormal quackery. The Enemies of Reason will air on BBC Channel 4 tonight at 4 pm in Britain.

It seems as though Dawkins is taking the well-paved path that Carl Sagan took with The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark and Broca's Brain. Sagan was very open about his skepticism to religious claims and...how to say this...gently hostile to new age beliefs. "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence," he said.

Dawkins, having spent the last year or so grinding theism into millet, has decided to take on the more innocuous and less overtly threatening paranormal flim-flam to task. I appreciate that Dawkins and Sagan consistently state that just because people use things like:

belief in the five elements - earth, air, fire, water, and spirit- instead of the periodic table; the virgin birth; transubstantiation; 72 virgins awaiting you in heaven; etc.

doesn't make them true or real. People, like Chris Hedges might argue that they aren't real but that they are true nonetheless because they are subjectively true and therefore worth our time and belief as investments in the ineffable nature of spirit joined and never joined with the breath of the universe. I may have just unfairly caricatured Hedges except that he has said some spectacular nonsense here so I feel somewhat justified:

God is better understood as verb rather than a noun. God is not an asserted existence but a process accomplishing itself. And God is inescapable. It is the life force that sustains, transforms and defines all existence.

Anyway, we must align truth - perhaps our subjective ascertainment of the world - with that which is real or run the risk of maladaptive belief, maladaptive action, and conflict with logic and reason. Reality, natural reality, that wonderful testable thing that it is, should guide us. The pied piper cabals of the supernaturalists - the theists and the paranormalists - lead us astray. I'll have my reality and eat it too even if it doesn't always taste good.

Three cheers for skeptics and Dawkins's new series.

Head of Church of Satan on Point of Inquiry!!!

2007-08-12T16:06:00.000-07:00

This is terribly interesting! Peter Gilmore, the head of the Church of Satan has been interviewed on Point of Inquiry. The metal-loving oppositionalist within me loves this. Interestingly, he explains that Satanism is an atheistic leader of "an unreligion," "show business," and a celebration of "individualism, liberty, and pride" derived from Milton. He discusses something that Qira talks about a lot: self-transformational psychodrama by using ritual in communities. He talks a lot of science, atheism, and freedom of belief.

Check it out!

Teaching Evolution in Massacheussets

2007-08-12T16:03:00.000-07:00

An article in Thursday's Boston Globe tells us about hoped-for improvements in evolution education.

The author, Sally Lehrman, recognizes that the evolution unit in high schools is often sped through or put at the end of the year and then dropped because there is no time and other units must be covered. This easily leads to student misunderstanding, bad teaching, and an open door to ID critiques:

As one of their complaints, intelligent design proponents claim that schools should do a better job of explaining evolution. They may very well be right. While people who believe in the scientific method do not accept the antievolution lobby's claim of "irreducible complexity," are they prepared with a coherent response? They might say "survival of the fittest" with conviction but only have a hazy recollection of terms like "descent with modification," "natural selection," and even "mutation."

Biology teachers should have to take at least one unit/course in evolution during college. Additionally, we might want to emphasize the history of science in the high school curriculum instead of the simple wars of nations and lives of great men models that exist now. If students had a better context for the workings of science as an active part of culture, what they learn in science class would, or at least could, be integrated into a better understanding of the forces around them. Additionally, the arguments put forth by the armies of the night would lose some potency because the scientific method's power would be demonstrated both as part of science and as something to be scientifically assessed in history. And let's face it, confronting natural reality can only help.

[Note: I am thinking of doing a thesis on the teaching of the history of science in the U.S. for an M.S. in Education. I'll keep you up on that too.]

Lion Photograph Essay: Africa's Magnificent Predators

2007-08-12T11:40:00.000-07:00

Over at Edge, they have posted a marvelous photo essay on lions by Nathan Myhrvold, titled, Lions: Africa's Magnificent Predators.

Here is a small sample:

Females, on the other hand are sleek efficient hunters. They must kill most of the prey, which is very dangerous work. I saw three lionesses that had each lost an eye. One, which the guides call Silver Eye is the most aggressive hunter in her pride. In another area we saw a lioness dubbed "Evil Eye" who had a similar but much more recent eye problem. The eye was still swollen, giving her a demonic look, a bit like villains in Japanese Anime. I also saw a lioness which had lost her eye in the last couple days—the socket was still oozing blood. Each of the lionesses had lost their right eye, which suggests to me that lions might be right handed—technically this is called laterality. Presumably right favoring lions would approach prey preferentially from the right, leading to more right side injuries. Of course, a sample size of three is too small to make a firm conclusion.

Often the buffalo just shrugs the lions off, and that is that. However if the buffalo falls down, things get much more serious. Some cats kill instantly with a bite that dislocates cervical vertebrae, severing the spinal cord—for example, cougars in the US. This is not the case for lions, they are stranglers or suffocators. They either bite the underside of the neck to collapse the trachea. Or they put their entire mouth over the prey animal's nose. Either way it is a relatively slow suffocation that kills the animal. This can take 30 minutes, or even an hour for a buffalo because they can't get enough pressure on the huge buffalo neck to close it all the way, or can't get a good seal on the nose. This is not the quick merciful picture that one sees in nature documentaries. If the buffalo gets up during that period he or she may get away with only some minor mauling.

What a human being must wonder is about theodicy - the problem of evil in the world. If God is alleged to be good, then why waste so much and allow so much pain? An hour of suffocation with teeth in one's throat? This sounds much like Dawkins' (albeit not joyful) proclamation that:

We cannot admit that things might be neither cruel nor kind but simply callous - indifferent to all suffering, lacking all purpose.

I don't think that "lacking all purpose" sums up the lion's point of view very well for, as Dawkins knows, the lion pursues its prey to increase its fitness as the amoeba consumes the galena to improve its fitness. But the suffering entailed in either is neither here not there. It is part and parcel of the movement of life on our small planet. Our subjective sense of cruelty (useful as it is) will be constantly affronted by the death and suffering of Cape Buffalo, baby Gray Whales, and Harp Seals.

---

All in all, this is an amazing piece. The pictures capture that which we inherently despise and admire about "nature": its red tooth and claw...its indifference (to paraphrase some). But it also captures the evolved beauty with which lions move and also their profligate nastiness. Strangely, when I look at my cat Floyd...

...though far-removed from lions, I see his feline predatory instinct and wonder, even hope, that he still wishes to kill as a lion would. His eyes, though small and domesticated, watch the squirrels and chipmunks outside of our backdoor and wish that they could follow the tether of his eyesight to play and natter with the rodents. He wishes that his mouth could be coated in the blood of some furry scrap that had all of the ability to hide while he sought and yet could never escape his grasp. How my cat wishes he were a lion. Or perhaps, I wish that he wishes he were a lion.

Morality can't be religion's guide / Serving God < Corporate Welfare

2007-08-12T11:38:00.000-07:00

This morning, my son Sacha and I went for our standard morning walk. I adorned myself in Baby Bjorn, baby, and book - Atheism: A Reader. Off we went.

"David Hume. Oh, David Hume. Such rapturous paeans I have for thee," I think as I read an excerpt from his The History of Natural Religion, a book I own but is buried in the unpacked boxes of our still incomplete move.

Hume enumerates the ways in which humanity creates double standards for its deities and inevitably demanding much less of the deities' moral character than they do of their own, taking this so far, we might infer, that we praise them for their genocides. Hume writes,

But as men farther exalt their idea of their divinity; it is their notion of his power and knowledge only, not of his goodness, which is improved. On the contrary, in proportion to the supposed extent of his science and authority, their terrors naturally augment; while they believe, that no secrecy can conceal them from his scrutiny, and that even the inmost recesses of their breast lie open before him. They must then be careful not to form expressly any sentiment of blame and disapprobation. All must be applause, ravishment, extasy (sic). And while their gloomy apprehensions make them ascribe to him measures of conduct, which, in human creatures, would be highly blamed, they must still affect to praise and admire that conduct in the object of their devotional addresses. Thus it may safely be affirmed, that popular religions are really, in the conception of their more vulgar votaries, a species of daemonism; and the higher the deity is exalted in power and knowledge, the lower of course is he depressed goodness and benevolence; whatever epithets of praise may be bestowed on him by his amazed adorers.

This brought to mind two things:

1. Morality cannot be the system by which a religion judges us.

2. Serving God, at least an allegedly omnipotent and omniscient God, is worse than giving welfare to Rupert Murdoch or the Saudi royal family.

Morality cannot be religion's judgment tool because morality exists independently of religion. One need only ask the simple question, "Can God do anything immoral and properly declare that it is moral?" Can God murder an innocent baby or rape a child and declare it moral simply because he did it? Of course not. The standard by which we judge his actions are independent of whether or not God says the action is good or not. Religion's judgments as they relate to what occurs in the afterlife, then, cannot be based on a system of morality that human beings can derive independently of God's guidance or interference (depending on how you look at it). Religion must instead base its judgments on something else: adherence to its extra-moral tenets.

If morality were the guide, then any human being could obtain the benefits of paradise no matter the face of God they claimed to view. The Zen Buddhist would have just as much right to enter the gates of heaven as the Christian. The devotees of Thor and Poseidon might both walk onto the fields of Asgard or attain the summit of Olympus. The Hindu and the Muslim would both receive the bountiful service and succulent thighs and nipples of 72 virgins in the afterlife.

[Question: Do they remain virgins even after you enter into coitus with them? And as unwed women are they then burned alive in heaven in an honor killing by their celestial male relatives? Just a thought.]

But that can't be the way of religion for its claims must be super-moral. They must transcend moral notions and add onto them particular tenets of devotion to the group. Then, having usurped the minds of their adherents, they convince the believers that their beliefs in the tenets - 72 virgins in heaven, transubstantiation, cyclical birth and death, and so on - are in fact the reason that they are moral. The believers mind has been shown some bait and then had it switched and they become a vehicle for a virus that supersedes actual ethical behavior. So the service to God becomes the most important thing and that service is the determining factor in one's entrance into the afterlife.

Secondly, if God is omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent, then what need does it have for anything? If it is able to do anything, then it is able to satisfy its needs at any time. Indeed, it would seem to follow that it is constantly satisfied. What need of fellowship with human beings? What need of servitude from human beings? Why must we serve a being so perfect that it can serve itself. Why not focus on those less fortunate like us? Indeed, isn't it the height of selfishness, and then by extension the height of gullibility for its followers, for a perfectly powerful being to demand service from those so much less able than itself? Shouldn't it help us in some clear way without outrageous demands of idiotic servitude?

It's worse than welfare for Rupert Murdoch.

Lucretius on why we shouldn't fear death

2007-08-12T11:36:00.000-07:00

It's been such a long time since I read anything after Book I of Lucretius's De Rarum Natura (trans. On the Nature of Things), that I had forgotten this poignant and beautiful moment from Book 3:

Thus one thing will never cease to rise out of another, and life is granted to none in fee-simple, to all in usufruct. Think too how the bygone antiquity of everlasting time before our birth was nothing to us. Nature therefore holds this up to us as a mirror of the time yet to come after our death. Is there anything in this that looks appalling, anything that wears an aspect of gloom? Is it not more untroubled than any sleep?...

How beautiful. It is a much more elegant way of saying what Ecclesiastes says, "From dust we have come, to dust we shall go." What has been before us was of no consequence to us insofar as we were unconscious of it as that which we call us - our conscious humanity - did not exist. When we, with our sense of self that comes about through the phenomena-generating machine of our bodies, die, we will simply cease and sleep forever, unconcerned about "our" fates because "we" won't exist.

Hindu Prayers in Congress

2007-08-12T11:10:00.000-07:00

A good friend of mine told me that there had been a Hindu prayer in Congress a couple of weeks ago, but in the hullabaloo of life, I had dropped the ball on checking it out. Today, Ed Brayton reminded me to check it out.

This event has happened 7 years after the first congressional Hindu prayer, led by Venkatachalapathi Samuldrala, which was attacked by the Family Research Council (FRC).

In response to the prayer, the Family Research Council, the most prominent Religious Right lobbying group in Washington, D.C., disparaged religious pluralism and said only Christianity deserves government support in this week's edition of the group's CultureFacts newsletter.

"(W)hile it is true that the United States of America was founded on the sacred principle of religious freedom for all," the FRC wrote, "that liberty was never intended to exalt other religions to the level that Christianity holds in our country's heritage."

The group added, "Our Founders expected that Christianity -- and no other religion -- would receive support from the government as long as that support did not violate peoples' consciences and their right to worship. They would have found utterly incredible the idea that all religions, including paganism, be treated with equal deference."

First, don't you love how Hinduism is paganism? Just because some forms of paganism are polytheistic doesn't mean they are the same. Does that mean that Judaism and Islam are the same?

Second, what is this nonsense about the "Christianity...receiv[ing] support from the government?" The Christian Dominionists and Dispensationalists just can't keep their mits out of the government. Barry Lynn called this "damnable religion" in a recent Intelligence Squared U.S. debate; religion that is so weak-willed and lacking in content that it seeks government endorsement to see its ends met. It can't rise to the challenge of other faiths head on because it has nothing to stand on. The fundies live in a house of cards.

The most recent nonsense has been just as good. The Associate Press reported the following:

A Hindu clergyman made history by offering the Senate's morning prayer, but only after police officers removed three shouting protesters from the visitors' gallery. The clergyman, Rajan Zed, director of interfaith relations at a Hindu temple in Reno, Nev., gave the brief prayer that opens each day's Senate session. As he stood at the lectern, two women and a man began shouting ''this is an abomination'' from the gallery. They were arrested and were charged with disrupting Congress. The man told a reporter, ''We are Christians and patriots.''

According the Times of India, the protesters are members of a "Christian Right anti-abortion group Operation Save America [also Operation Rescue]."

Surely they think they are patriots. Sure, when it means that their nation is united under their sectarian version of God they are proud to be Americans. But these people are the Christo-fascists who, given the opportunity would return us to medieval morality and education. Religious freedom is great when it's their religion.

Brayton's post (see previous link) lets us know about a ridiculous House member, Rep. Bill Sali (R - Idaho) who wants us to understand that the Lord can hold back his hand on the U.S. for invoking other Gods in our chambers of government. To Sali, it doesn't matter that founders like Jefferson, Madison, Washington, Franklin, and Paine were Deists who were:

1. varyingly skeptical of Christianity's claims,

2. set up Jefferson's "wall of separation" with the Establishment Clause, and

3. ensured that there was no sectarian litmus test for public office.

Given that we have so much freedom for belief in this country - religious, non-religious, and even anti-religious - it should follow that if we permit prayer in the House and Senate, that perhaps we ought to invite all faiths to come and speak. Perhaps my sister would like to come and give a Wiccan ceremony on Beltane or her friend Patty might give a Santarian invocation at some point? That sounds fun.

But this issue itself shouts why we shouldn't entangle government and religion. When we make religion a part of the political machine it automatically sets up arguments about salvation and devotion among different religions and sects of said religions and makes people look like morons shouting at one another that their religion has the key to understanding the meaning of the universe simply because they feel it so fervently. Congress...no! All of the government mustn't be ruled by emotionalism and magical thinking. It must be lucid in its judgments and religion (in most instances in our pluralistic heterogenous culture) gets in the way.

Some pleasant words from James Madison

2007-08-12T11:00:00.000-07:00

I will let him do the writing. And let us thank him for his sane and lucid defense of religious liberty:

Ye States of America, which retain in your Constitutions or Codes, any aberration from the sacred principle of religious liberty, by giving to Caesar what belongs to God, or joining together what God has put asunder, hasten to revise & purify your systems, and make the example of your Country as pure & compleat, in what relates to the freedom of the mind and its allegiance to its maker, as in what belongs to the legitimate objects of political & civil institutions.

Strongly guarded as is the separation between Religion & Govt in the Constitution of the United States the danger of encroachment by Ecclesiastical Bodies, may be illustrated by precedents already furnished in their short history.

H. erectus and H. habilis were neighbors?

2007-08-12T10:51:00.000-07:00

A new report in Nature shows us why the scientific study of evolution is so fascinating. The New York Times today has an article highlighting some recent findings from Kenya. Apparently, Homo habilis and Homo erectus coexisted in east Africa about 1.5 million years ago:

Scientists who dated and analyzed the specimens — a 1.44-million-year-old Homo habilis and a 1.55-million-year-old Homo erectus found in 2000 — said their findings challenged the conventional view that these species evolved one after the other. Instead, they apparently lived side by side in eastern Africa for almost half a million years.

If this interpretation is correct, the early evolution of the genus Homo is left even more shrouded in mystery than before. It means that both habilis and erectus must have originated from a common ancestor between two million and three million years ago, a time when fossil hunters had drawn a virtual blank.

Although the findings do not change the relationship of Homo erectus as a direct ancestor of Homo sapiens, scientists said, the surprisingly diminutive erectus skull implies that this species was not as humanlike as once thought.

All the time we get to put in new pieces of the puzzle, only to learn that the puzzle gets even bigger.

Texas: The No-Brain State?

2007-08-12T09:15:00.000-07:00

Ah yes. The specter of creationism and ID pops up again. In Texas, Don McElroy, the chair of the State Board of Education, has decided that his state is already too friendly to teaching evolution. He is "[o]ne of four board members who voted against current high school biology books because of their failure to list weaknesses in the theory of evolution." As someone in charge of setting standards and policies, he might well be able to move things around to make things a little more friendly to creationists and IDers and with eight religious conservatives trained in Discovery Institute newspeak, we might see Kansas all over again.

According to the Texas Freedom Network, McElroy wants to undermine science education and its naturalistic roots by using Phillip Johnson's and ID's "big tent":

“Why is ‘intelligent design’ the big tent? Because we’re all lined up against the fact that naturalism, that nature is all there is. Whether you’re a progressive creationist, recent creationist, young earth, old earth, it’s all in the tent of ‘intelligent design.’” (6:10 mark on recording)

So McElroy isn't hiding his objection's basis. It's religious and philosophical. It has nothing to do with data.

He's upset because naturalistic explanations have described natural phenomena which have caused God's explanatory power, in its "pitiful level of detail," to retreat farther and farther back on the plank of meaningful description.

For example, in a 2005 statement, McElroy said:

Actually, in intelligent design we are focused on a on a bigger target, and in the words of Phillip Johnson “the target is metaphysical naturalism, materialism or just plain old naturalism. The idea that nature is all there is.” Modern science today is totally based on naturalism, and all of intelligent design’s arguments against evolution and chemical origin of life it is the naturalistic base that is the target. And this is a quote from Phillip Johnson: “The important aspect of Darwinian evolution is it’s naturalistic claim that life is the result of purposeless, unintelligent material causes. When Darwinian evolution and intelligent design stand in a complete antithesis. Intelligent design requires the designing influence to account for the complexity of life where Darwinian theory of common descent claims that life spontaneously arose.”

He has tried to place himself next to Johnson at the front of the Wedge. But he isn't as slick as the Discovery folks who have carefully crafted a chameleon's strategy.

McElroy, like Bill Buckingham and Alan Bonsell in Dover can't keep his creationist fundamentalist protestantism to himself and run with the data. He talks the data up, but he shows that he starts with a non-scientific assumption (the triune Christian God made everything) and then looks for data to back it up. Consider this:

But I want to tell you all the arguments made by all the intelligent design group, all the creationist intelligent design people, I can guarantee the other side heard exactly nothing. They did not hear one single fact, they were not swayed by one argument.

Thanks for linking the creationists and IDers for us. The DI folks and the defendants in Kitzmiller v. Dover tried to cover those tracks. Unsuccessfully I might add. Should this land in court because of a "teach the controversy" challenge to evolution, we have our Lemon Test ready and it will find that there is not a secular purpose or effect here and that an official has attempted to entangle the government with a sectarian agenda.

The Pope has some wits

2007-08-12T09:14:00.000-07:00

The Pope formerly known as Cardinal Ratzinger has a decent statement on evolution that the debate between evolution and creationism is "an absurdity."

“They are presented as alternatives that exclude each other,” the pope said. “This clash is an absurdity because on one hand there is much scientific proof in favor of evolution, which appears as a reality that we must see and which enriches our understanding of life and being as such.”

I'd like to thank the Pope for spending some time on something based in reality and not whether unbaptized children go to Limbo or not.

Using the "n-word"...or "nigger" in class.

2007-08-12T09:00:00.000-07:00

I would like to take a few minutes to address my use of a racial epithet in yesterday’s class. It would seem on the face of it that my endorsement of the proposition “Freedom of speech must include the right to offend” seems to violate at least two principles that I have explicitly or tacitly endorsed: First, do no harm; second, and dependent on the first, use language that recognizes that might offend others’ sensibilities. However, my belief that offensive speech should be protected does not mean that I personally choose to offend others or believe that we should offend others. It means I think we should be allowed and must not have anyone that can regulate that speech.

The n-word – I needn’t repeat it – appalls us because reminds us of oppression, bigotry, hatred, murder and distrust. It would seem that in today’s world that it is out of bounds for a white, middle-class, once-Catholic male to use it. In almost all contexts, that is probably true as it relates to decency. In few cases could I claim that any racial, gendered, sexual, or religiously sectarian epithet – towel head, slut, fag, or kike – is appropriate.

But in a class about the use of words we must be free to explore words and their implications and that means reading and hearing them. Remember, “Sunlight is the best disinfectant.” Thomas Jefferson wrote, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men (and I might add women) are created equal.” I believe the same is true of words. As human beings should all be provided with equal access to life, liberty, and property, I believe that so are words. We should be able to access them in our own minds and from one another’s mouths, no matter how offensive they might be.

I cannot agree more with Mari Matsuda: in public life, where group decorum and individual respect trumps almost all, we should not use these words for they compromise our own reputations as well as those at whom we might aim them. However, I differ greatly with Matsuda on what offensive speech is. She seems to believe that threats, libel, financial subterfuge, and harassment somehow fall under the rubric of offensive speech. I do not. We should engage the golden rule: “Do unto others as you would have done unto you.” We should have a categorical imperative that demands that we speak with dignity and respect. We should behave ethically and treat one another as sovereign subjects and not as objects, what Martin Buber called the “I-thou” relationship.

You might ask then, “But you have said do no harm. What about clownfish? You dropped the n-bomb?” Note, first, that the person’s credibility and reputation most likely to be harmed by my use of the n-word yesterday was not any or yours. It was my own. I ran the risk of appearing as a bigot in front of two African-American students and a class of educated and culturally sensitive young adults. In this way, I believe the greatest harm done was potentially done to me. All of our ears rang to some degree because of the n-word. Second, and maybe more importantly, clownfish is my own euphemism. You may adopt it if you’d like too, but I do not make it a policy in my classroom nor would I have it become a form of politically correct newspeak. No, I am not interested in controlling others’ speech. People must volunteer or we compromise the sovereignty of their selves, something worthy of Stalin’s Soviet Union, Mao’s China, and contemporary Iran and North Korea where the individual is turned into an implement of the state and cannot even believe that they are autonomous. In the United States and much of the “western” world we can at least carry on the illusion, if not the total reality, that we are free to think and speak as we like so long as we do not threaten or harass.

I believe that all words are created equal. They are not the same. They should not be locked into prisons and shut away. That is the way to foster quiet bigotry and make sure that taboos fester. Napoleon and Snowball, the two pigs in George Orwell’s Animal Farm set up a utopia over which Napoleon ends up ruling tyrannically. The utopia begins as a place where all animals are created equal. But as he gains more power, some animals become more equal than others. I, for one, will not go down that line.

God-fearing populations correlate with ignorant populations

2007-08-12T08:29:00.000-07:00

This is pretty interesting and has managed to generate a bit of controversy in the blogosphere over at Science Blogs. I'm a big fan of PZ Myers because he confronts the ignorance inherent in much religious belief. One of his recent posts has really got some people in a tiff.

He wrote:

Isn't this a lovely map? It shows the concentration of ignorant, deluded, wicked, foolish, or oppressed victims of obsolete mythologies in the United States, with the lighter colors being the most enlightened and the dark reds being the most repressed and misinformed. Oh, it's labeled as the frequency of religious adherents, but it's the same thing.

I have to say that I am with him almost full tilt (wicked might be overly harsh) and point you to his responses.

But someone gave an even more interesting map showing Baptists as percentage of total population. Scary.

Look. It correlates so nicely with the great bastion of Southern ignorance in the United States. If we could do Pentecostals and Lutheran Synods, I bet we'd get more of the Midwest in there while most of the West, Northwest, and Northeast would remain more or less the same as Kevin Phillips's American Theocracy showed.

Is anyone really surprised that a frequency of belief is correlated to the least enlightened parts of the nation? I'm not. This map makes it even clearer.

Isn't it great to know that the allegedly most morally grounded (Read: religiously fervent) parts of the nation are those that foster the most misinformation, have some of the highest levels of poverty, the most hate crimes, highest levels of teen pregnancy and STD infection, sectarian bigotry, and scientific ignorance? Great!

"...your pathetic level of detail..."

2007-08-12T08:23:00.000-07:00

A while back, William Dembski, the inaptly-called "Isaac Newton of information theory", father of specified complexity (here are some critiques by Elsberry), the explanatory filter (and some critiques) and a bunch of other Intelligent Design (ID) nonsense, wrote:

As for your example, I’m not going to take the bait. You’re asking me to play a game: “Provide as much detail in terms of possible causal mechanisms for your ID position as I do for my Darwinian position.” ID is not a mechanistic theory, and it’s not ID’s task to match your pathetic level of detail in telling mechanistic stories. If ID is correct and an intelligence is responsible and indispensable for certain structures, then it makes no sense to try to ape your method of connecting the dots. True, there may be dots to be connected. But there may also be fundamental discontinuities, and with IC systems that is what ID is discovering.

The quotation comes from a blog debate on the evolution or irreducibly complex nature of the immune system. How did it come about? Did it evolve via mutation and natural selection or was it intelligently designed? You can read through it here.

Dembski's post was a reply to a poster named Rafe who provided a massively (for a blog thread) detailed account with multiple citations and quotations of research that explained how the immune system could have evolved bit by bit. Rafe's comment that preceded Dembski's nasty remark was:

admittedly, i left out a lot of details, but if you want more, you'll first have to propose a model for the origin of an IC system through intelligent design in at least as much detail as i presented. that shouldn't be too hard, it's only 8 sentences.

Just 8 sentences (after considerably more). But what amazes me, as today's title makes clear, is Dembski's objection to "[Rafe's] pathetic level of detail." If ID wants to be included in the scientific game, then it needs to engage the details in such a way that explains the observable phenomena and subsequently generates predictions that we can test. In order for it to become a scientific theory, it must, in some way, be mechanistic.

Why? Nature behaves according to laws that are uniform in all of the observed universe. Inductively, we ascertain that material phenomena have material explanations which means that science is methodologically natural. The natural explanations that we ascertain through hypothesis testing are all gleaned from the interaction of matter and energy occurring in space and time. Those phenomenal interactions operate according to mechanistic laws that we glean through observation and inference. So what's this have to do with Dembski's invocation of the boogey man of the "mechanistic theory" and its "pathetic level of detail"?

An accurate response to the questions, "How did the immune system come to be?" must be both mechanistic and detailed...even pathetically so.

The word "how" in the previous question asks for the cause of the effect. It can also fairly be asked as "What process formed the immune system?" What a staggeringly cool question that has an answer worth knowing. There are also lots of answers that are not worth knowing because they are factually errant or irrelevant. An answer worth knowing or least considering would be that proposed by Rafe in the previous link. An explanation of "How did the bacterial flagellum come to be?" has been proposed by the likes of Ken Miller and Nick Matzke who are looking at the Type III Secretory System (TTSS) as a possible root. Note, we can't prove (that word makes me nuts now) that it is the TTSS, but it appears as a good candidate for the predecessors and by examining the protein differences (see previous link) between the TTSS and the flagellum, we can glean some of how the flagellum arose and, seemingly, evolved.

An irrelevant answer to the question would be "An intelligent agent designed it." The question was not "Who made the immune system/flagellum come to be?" No. "How..." We could say Merlin, Voldemort, Saruman, or the midgets from Time Bandits (they did make the giant bungaroo afterall) made the immune system. But that doesn't answer the adverb "how" at all. Even if we know "who" did it, we didn't ask that question which makes it irrelevant, that doesn't explain to us at all what the process was that Merlin or whoever used. It's an inquiry stopper and a huge embrace of ignorance.

A question to ask Dembski. "How did the designer make the flagellum?" But he has no answer. Essentially, "God did it." Thanks for that pathetic level of piffle. I'll go with the details thank you.

Hitchens interview.

2007-08-12T08:22:00.000-07:00

Check out this Hitchens interview in Atlantic:

It’s an image that could make the most hardened cynic smile: a miniature Christopher Hitchens, fair-haired and apple-cheeked, trotting across a meadow in ankle-strap sandals. It’s a gentle season in a gentle era. Britain has won the war, the ruins have been repaired—the Dartmoor ponies are grazing, the grass is lush and verdant. Nine-year-old Christopher is excelling at school and has a special fondness for Bible studies. By all appearances, God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world.

On this particular outing, Christopher’s religion instructor, a kindly old widow, is using the natural surroundings to demonstrate God’s love for humankind. In His infinite kindness, she explains, He made the grass green, a color that would please and soothe the human eye. “I simply knew,” Hitchens would later write, “almost as if I had privileged access to a higher authority, that my teacher had managed to get everything wrong in just two sentences.” In the green fields of England, an atheist is born.

2007-08-12T08:18:00.000-07:00

On Friday I woke up with a very mild hangover; just some mild dehydration really. But I had told myself that I was going to do a race-paced ride on the Single Speed World Championship 2005 course which I hadn't ridden since mid-April when I weighed 20 pounds more than I do now and didn't have the couple thousand miles in my legs I now have.

Map:

The ride was great. I rolled out from the parking lot at the Tussey Mountain Ski area and took a good clip up the trail that parallels Bear Meadows Rd. and then got onto Laurel Run Road and worked toward finding a cadence. This was all cold...no warm-up...and I remembered starting races cold. It makes finding rhythm a bit harder than when you get 15 minutes in of moderately highly intense work. But I digress.

Following the sharpest corner in Centre County I started thinking about the coming rock garden on Three Bridges Trail: