Now I am talking ignorant in the sense of "not knowing", not in its pejorative sense or of wilful ignorance.

Who has not had their ego stroked by someone turning to you, asking you a question while staring expectantly into your face?  Who has not felt the compliment of having everyone hanging on your every pronouncement?

Professionals, like doctors , lawyers or teachers fall foul of this, they get asked so many times a day about the area of their expertise that it is hard to shake off this role when it comes to other areas where knowledge might be lacking.

We fear simply saying "I don't know". 

This idea entirely irrational, the more we learn, the more we realise that we know so very little, that it is impossible to be knowledgeable on everything or even on  most things.

But when we admit we don't know, we are stepping down from a pedestal, from a position of power and I don't think we as humans like losing that power.

Another point to consider is, that when we make assertions based upon our own personal feeling or opinion rather than on solid evidence/knowledge we are committing a small injustice, we are preventing ourselves and perhaps others from discovering the facts, from actually investigating for ourselves.

We are encouraging ourselves and others to be lazy thinkers.

When we run blindly from anything we usually end up in trouble.

So we need to get comfortable with stopping, taking a deep breath and saying

"I don't know...yet"

Thanks to PhillyChief for inspiration by way of the Zarathustra Test

Theists may think they’re something special, beyond human. The rest of us see people as people. I’m a humanist atheist. I like my species. I think on average we’re fairly decent mammals. No matter how fancy you dress us up, we’re still all humans. If we could base our social behavior on the fact of our common humanity, there would be fewer things to be intolerant about.

Intolerance arises when one group of humans wants to be accepted as superior and separate from another group of humans. Religion is one of the many human belief systems that try to impose a false hierarchy on society.

Religions seek to artificially classify some people as blessed and the rest as heathens, and expect society to reflect their arbitrary classification system based on nothing more than their insistence that their interpretation of the wants and needs of the invisible and all powerful “Divine Whatever” are the most right.

Intolerance need not be tolerated.  It need not be legislated against or deposed by force.  Intolerance will decrease as humanity increases.  The more of us there are, the greater the need to be tolerant.

Religions stand in our way.  They need to be exposed as ancient, irrelevant attitudes that have outlived their usefulness and certainly don’t contribute anything of value to society that can’t be provided without all the supernatural and superstitious trappings.   Once religion has passed into irrelevance humans will still be capable of acts of extreme compassion as well as acts of extreme cruelty.  The only difference will be that acts of compassion will stem from our realization of our common humanity and acts of cruelty will have fewer reasons to occur.

Pat Condell on "Faith"

These comments were made in response to a posting at Atheist Revolution in which vjack asked if atheists should be involved in picketing churches whose leaders express extreme religious views.

I am not going to write on the specific merits of vjack's proposal. The specific case does not matter. His proposal drew a number of general comments that are brought up any time somebody suggests some form of atheist activism ??? comments that do not depend on the specific type of activism being suggested. Those are the comments that I am interested in.

From CJ:

One thing I have always despised about most religious people is the fact that they feel the need to force their views on me. Why then should I want to be a part of something that is trying to force my non religious views on someone else?

There are two points that can be made against this type of statement.

The first has to do with this claim about 'force'. The forms of atheist activism that I am talking about do not involve 'force' in any meaningful way. It does not involve holding a gun to people's head and saying, "Renounce your God or die." Atheist activism falls perfectly within the realm of free speech. The right to freedom of speech includes the right to respond to the claims of others with words of criticism and condemnation and private (peaceful) actions.

Some atheists are annoyed by theist proselytizing. They don't like it when people come up to them and push belief in God. "My goal is to change your beliefs. Please give me some of your time so that I may do so." The response is, "No, get out of here." Proselytizing falls in the same category as telemarketing. "Leave me alone, I just want to get on with my life."

This is a valid point. However, what happens when the beliefs of others contribute to real-world harms suffered by real-world people? For example, we are all familiar with religious practices that do harm to the interests of those who (1) would potentially benefit from the medical treatments made possible by stem-cell research, (2) effective programs for family planning and against the spread of sexually transmitted disease, (3) the ability to run for office without facing an politically fatal level of religious bigotry because one does not trust in or pledge allegiance to God, (4) seek an early-term abortion, (5) wish to marry somebody of the same gender.

These are just a few examples.

There are certain views that it is perfectly legitimate to 'force' on others. Imagine taking the position, "I dislike it when people force their views on me, so I will not force my views on others," and apply it to issues such as rape, ethnic cleansing, segregation, slavery, and the right to vote. Are we going to morally prohibit the forcing of these views on others?

Refusing to protest religiously based policies that do harm to others is, in effect, permitting the harm done to others. The individual is saying, "It is better that the religious person maintain the freedom to do harm to others, than that his victims obtain freedom from those harms."

That is not a morally defensible position to take.

This does limit the scope of atheist activism to the protest of religiously-based activities that have victims. Yet, as the list I gave above indicates, these are not at all difficult to find. There are a great many things out there that are worthy of protest. Of all of the absurd beliefs that people can hold, there is good reason to concentrate first on those that do the greatest harm, and to work one???s way down the list.

Historically, this is the trend that we have seen. From the dark ages, where the slaughter of people holding different religious views to the norm, to increasing degrees of religious tolerance, to the abolition of slavery, to political equality for women, to the present it has been the worst of religious doctrine that has fallen first.

This is the historic trend, but the conflict is far from over. There are a great many prejudices still to pull down.

None of these historic prejudices have fallen as a result of people cleverly sitting home and doing nothing to protest against it. All of them have fallen because people have had the courage and commitment to stand up and put their foot down. Every time they had their say the defenders of the status quo were there to condemn them for being 'annoying', 'brazen', and even 'militant' (even when the protesters were emphatically non-violent). Yet, they would not have won if they had listened to these objections and decided that, instead of protesting, they should give up their fight and say nothing.

There is a choice to be made between two possible worlds. One world puts the sentiments of those who hold absurd beliefs above the life, health, and well-being of those whose interests are adversely affected by those beliefs. The other world puts the life, health, and well-being of real-world people above the sentiments of those who hold absurd beliefs. To do nothing is to say that the life, health, and well-being of the victims of absurd beliefs are not important ??? that they are not worth protecting or standing up for.

Keeping in mind that the type of 'force' we are talking about here is verbally assaulting absurd beliefs that are the basis of policy decisions harmful to the interests of innocent people, the harm that one seeks to prevent provides the right, and even the duty, to 'force' others to abandon absurdities.

[Note: I will know that I have reached the big time when people start quoting only the last half of the previous paragraph in order to depict me as some type of moral monster ready and willing to start the next Stalin-like purge.]

(Wordpress released
blog app in iTunes store yesterday. Works on amy Wordpress blog. W00T!!!!!!!)

…

[On a date]

Date: I’m psychic.

Me: Umm… CHECK!

[Check doesn’t arrive.]

Date: Give me your hand so I can find out what you are thinking.

[Date closes eyes and puts her hands on top of mine.]

Me (in my mind): You’re crazy. Stop touching my hand. You know, you could just ask me what I’m thinking…

[I scan around for our waiter.]

Date: I’m all done.

Me: And?

Date: You’re having a wonderful time!!!

Me: Wow… your powers are incredible.

…

And one more that has nothing to do with religion/skepticism:

[Phone rings]

Me: Hello?

Dude: Hi, I’m from U.S. Cellular!

Me: Mhmm…

Dude: I see that your cell phone contract with us is about to expire. I wanted to know if you were planning to renew next month!

Me: Nope.

Dude: Oh… and may I ask why?

Me: I want an iPhone.

Dude: Oh…

Me: You guys don’t work with iPhones.

Dude: Right…

Me: Yep.

Dude: You know, we have several products that work just like an iPh—-

Me: No you don’t.

Dude: We do!

Me: No. No, you don’t.

Dude: But our phones have pull-out keyboards.

Me: Right… I’m hanging up now.

Dude: [quietly] Come back to us…?

[*click*]

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For much of my evangelical Christian life, I held a Theistic Evolutionary view of creation. I’ll confess that I didn’t always adhere firmly to this view. Sometimes I wavered and veered into a fairly conservative Creationist point of view. Nevertheless, I could never entirely shake free of the realization that evolution had lots of empirical support. Moreover, I realized this long before I ever read my first book about evolution.

What, you may wonder (or maybe not), does a theistic view of evolution look like? Let me state up front that I can only describe what my view was; I cannot and do not claim to speak in any way for other theistic evolutionists. My view of theistic evolution was pretty simple and consisted of these points:

• The first section of Genesis (say, the first eleven chapters) should not be read as literal accounts; they were literary constructions intended to recognize and respectfully memorialize through poetic imagery God’s activity in the universe. As for the rest of Genesis, I’ll shamefacedly admit that I took much of it literally.

• Evolution was the process that God designed to create and sustain life on earth.

• The Original Sin of Adam and Eve was pride; maybe Eve sinned first, maybe she didn’t - what mattered was that Adam and Eve ruptured, in some indefinite way, their relationship with God. The consequences of that rupture were death, evil, suffering, etc., that catastrophically affected all of creation, as well as humankind. Before their Fall, the universe was perfect.

As you can see, this view was long on Christian theological concepts and extremely short on evolutionary ones. I will not bore you with the details regarding how and why I came to learn more about evolution. Suffice to say that, as I became more familiar with the basic ideas, I realized that evolution and theology did not mesh very well.

The first point above, understanding Genesis as a literary rather than a literal account, was not and is not particularly problematic. It is, in fact, the right position. My difficulty was my inability to reconcile the second and third points with a realistic, albeit fairly basic, view of evolution.

The first problem I had was accepting that a perfect God deliberately established a very imperfect process to sustain life. One of the reasons evolution is imperfect is because, while it is not random, it is inefficient. Species do not travel a straight path of development, nor do they inevitably progress from less perfect ways of being toward better ways of being. Each mutation that takes hold and becomes a regular feature of a species shuts off many possible developmental pathways and slightly narrows the options for future developments. Many of the paths that are taken eventually lead to extinction. Many more species have withered and died than have survived and thrived throughout the earth’s history. That’s a lot of wasted effort. It’s difficult to call such waste “perfect” in any way. How could such a process been the plan of a perfect God?

Another imperfection in the evolutionary process is the fact that species have evolved to devour each other. Predator-prey relationships are violent and they were going on long before human beings entered the stage. Many animals are eaten alive by their predators and their deaths are often slow and agonizing. Why would God establish an inefficient, violent, painful system for sustaining life on earth? Neither of those characteristics is consistent with the activities of a loving, perfect God.

All of this leads to the second problem I had with theistic evolution, namely, blaming humankind for all the woes of the world. If suffering, death and extinction are inevitable components of the evolutionary process, then it follows that the doctrine of Original Sin makes no sense. Firstly, as I’ve already noted, there is no way that humankind can be held responsible for bringing suffering and “evil” into the world. The world is not imperfect because people did something really bad and messed up what had been a perfect place and a perfect way of life. Humans evolved into a world that was already filled with suffering and other forms of imperfection, such as hurricanes, floods and Ice Ages. Secondly, death is not a punishment for sin; death has always been part of the cycle of life and evolution on earth. If humans are not responsible for suffering and evil, and death is simply a natural process rather than a punishment, then what need is there for atonement and redemption? Once I reached the right conclusion to that question, that there is no such need, I only needed a short, quick mental step to advance from discarding theistic evolution to discarding theism in its entirety.

– the chaplain

1. That Was Just Your Life
   
2. The End Of The Line
   
3. Broken, Beat & Scarred
   
4. The Day That Never Comes
   
5. All Nightmare Long
   
6. Cyanide
   
7. The Unforgiven III
   
8. The Judas Kiss
   
9. Suicide & Redemption
   
10. My Apocalypse
    

In the article that provided the main inspiration for this lecture, Peter Singer suggested that this was illustrative of a general quasi-consequentialist moral principle:

???if it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it. By “without sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance” I mean without causing anything else comparably bad to happen, or doing something that is wrong in itself, or failing to promote some moral good, comparable in significance to the bad thing that we can prevent.

I call this a quasi-consequentialist principle, because it’s just a slight variant on the consequentialist doctrine that you should always do whatever will have the best consequences, on balance. Singer words it to appeal to people who don’t agree with his brand of consequentialism, for example, the “something wrong in itself” clause goes against the grain of your standard form of consequentialism. Singer also offers up a weaker principle. He thinks his stronger principle is correct, but thinks the weaker principle is enough for his purposes: “if it is in our power to prevent something very bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything morally significant, we ought, morally, to do it.”

Now the application: there are hundreds of millions of people suffering from malnutrition. According to one estimate, over half the deaths in 2006 were related to malnutrition–36 million people. And in the most desperate cases, it’s likely that you could prevent one of those deaths for rather less than the cost of replacing a $500 suit. Peter Unger, in his book /Living High and Letting Die/, suggested an estimate of $64 for greatly increasing the chance of a two year old in Africa living to six years old, at which point long-term survival prospects increase dramatically. At any rate, if an expensive suit isn’t morally significant compared to the life of a drowning child, then the $64 shouldn’t be significant compared to the life of a starving child in Africa. So, according to even the weaker of Singer’s two proposed principles, you are morally obligated to give that $64 dollars. But then we find something surprising: since there’s a lot more than one starving child in the world, it seems you’d be obligated to give until giving any more would require you to give up something of moral significance. Plausibly, that doesn’t mean giving enough to push you into poverty, but the average middle-class person in the United States and similar rich countries spends a fair bit of money on trivial luxuries that don’t seem to have any moral significance at all.

Before moving on to the important responses to this argument, I want to emphasize how if you accept Singer’s principle, there really isn’t any way to avoid his conclusion. For example, you might think that in the case of famine relief, there are too many people who need saving. This, though, doesn’t change the fact that you’re still in a position to do some good. Nor does the fact that there are other people who might possibly help change the fact that you’re in a position to do some good. You know that most of them won’t help, or at least won’t help enough to make your help superfluous. Distance might have made a practical difference once, but given how easy it is to get money to competent aid workers, it seems not to make much of a practical difference in the modern world. And if you’re worried about overpopulation, Singer would argue, you should support charities that fight overpopulation. This could be directly, as in international organizations for birth control, but from what I understand of the sociological data, it can be done indirectly: better education for women tends to substantially lower the birthrate.

So to reject Singer’s conclusion, you just have to reject his premise. And some philosophers–even philosophers sympathetic to his views like Peter Unger–have suggested that at first glance, that doesn’t look that hard to do. The principle may look like a good explanation for why we have an obligation to help in the drowning child case, but it produces counter-intuitive results in other cases–if you’re feeling bold, you can just say “it produces the wrong results in other cases, i.e. it tells us things that simply aren’t true, and it logically follows from that that the principle can’t be true.” The claim that we don’t have the sort of extraordinary moral obligations that Singer says we do, it can be argued, is as good a starting assumption for moral philosophy as anything???at least as good as the claim about needing to save the drowning child, certainly a better starting point than Singer’s broad principles. And there’s a very natural way of extending this, to turn this into an objection against consequentialism itself. Some people seem to regard the strict moral demands of consequentialism on famine relief as just as bad as what it allows in terms of harming some to benefit many. Consequentialism is both too lax and too strict, at least that’s what anti-consequentialists have said.

When you’re judging whether Singer’s principle has absurd consequences, it’s important to notice how large the difference between the two versions of the principle is. Plausibly, providing for the education of your own children is morally significant, but not as morally significant as the deaths of other children. So, the weak principle, while making a fairly strong demand in requiring you to give up frivolous luxuries to help the very poor, would not require you to give up paying for your children’s education for the same reason. But if we accept the strong principle, and the claim about the relative moral significance of education and starving to death, you would be required to give up paying for your children’s education to help the poor.

Unger, as I’ve said, endorses the criticism that it’s pretty easy, at first, to reject Singer’s premise. But Unger still comes out endorsing Singer’s conclusion. How does he do it? The strategy explicitly adopted by Peter Unger to defend Singer’s conclusion–and which you see hints of in Singer’s own paper–is to systematically examine possible distinctions you might make between the two cases, and show that none of them work.

Consider distance. Singer suggests that taking distance into account violates a general principle of impartiality. You could respond, though, that it does no such thing, as the distance principle would apply to everyone equally–I’ll leave it up to you to think about whether that’s too technical a response. Perhaps a better argument against the difference principle comes from considering cases like the pond and the famine relief cases, but where the distance element is flipped. So maybe you get a distress call from a few miles away on a short wave radio, and you have a vehicle that can get there in time and be used for a rescue. And compare that to a case where you’re vacationing in a foreign country, and pass within a block of some starving children. It seems like the distress call case is morally like the pond case, and the vacation case is morally like the charity case, in spite of the flipped distance relation.

Now you should notice that this sort of strategy can be extended for all kinds of possible distinctions. For any proposed distinction, invent a pair of cases like our initial pond / charity case, but with that one element altered. For example: if you think perhaps it is not physical distance, but some sort of “social distance” that matters, such as being fellow countrymen or some such, then consider a case where you walk by a child drowning in a shallow pond while staying in South America. When you look at it that way, the “social distance” distinction seems implausible. If you think the key thing is that the drowning child case is an emergency, or more urgent, or whatever you want to call it, you can imagine receiving an appeal to give to charity with just that feature. This strategy works for an awful lot of possible replies.

You should be able to see that Unger’s basic strategy here is what we saw him applying in to the trolley problem in the first lecture on ethics, and what was applied to medical ethics in the last lecture. The strategy is taking ethical distinctions that look at first sound, and questioning whether they really make sense, especially by coming up with cases that run counter to the distinctions, and coming up with cases where the apparently clear distinctions turn out not to be so clear.

A problem that arises with this approach is you can start talking about cases very far removed from ordinary experience, F. M. Kamm, in trying to show that distance actually can make a moral difference, in spite of what Unger says, once proposed a case where you become aware of some emergency very far away thanks to super-vision, and are in a position to help somehow. Kamm has also proposed cases where by putting a fair bit of money into a machine, you can cause another machine to scoop some drowning children out of a pond. Kamm claims to have moral intuitions about these cases that back up his larger claims that distance is, in fact, morally significant. And when our intuitions are ambiguous, what are we supposed to do? We get into a debate about who has the burden of proof???does it need to be obvious that the cases support the proposed distinction? Does it need to be obvious that the cases undermine the proposed distinction?

These problems become even worse when you consider what could be called “combination responses”???responses admit that, say, distance alone can’t account for why you must save the drowning child but not give great amounts to charity, and the emergency status of the situation alone can’t account for why you must save the drowning child but not give great amounts to charity, but maybe the two factors combined account for this difference. Maybe it’s some other combination, maybe a more complicated combination. And when we try to come up with complicated hypothetical cases to evaluate the more complicated proposed distinctions, it gets harder to make obvious judgments.

In the last bit of this lecture, I’m going to stray into foreshadowing things that I’ve long been holding off on for future lectures???some of it I’ll launch into in full detail next lecture, but some of it will be saved for even longer than that. The first point is this: one alternative approach to the sort of consequentialism I’ve kept in the background in discussing all these moral problems says that we should focus not so much on action, but rather on rules. We want to formulate a set of moral rules that meet some criterion of goodness, whatever it is. And that suggests a couple of accounts of the problem we’ve been discussing. For example, it seems like there are some definite advantages to a rule requiring us to help others when we happen upon emergencies. Such a rule would give everyone a certain protection against emergencies. Its effects would be very different than the effects of a rule requiring us to help in all cases of significant need whatever. So maybe on that grounds, we can recommend a rule requiring us to help in emergencies, but not in any cases whatever. And if we are concerned with global malnutrition, and think it important to make some account of it in our system of rules, we can try to formulate a rule that, if universally followed would solve the problem, say by requiring everyone to donate $50 to the cause. I’ll have a lot more to say about the merits of this approach next lecture, but keep it in your heads for now.

The second idea is, to some extent, a stronger version of the first, and suggests that morality isn’t a set of absolute demands imposed on us by some extra-human moral reality, but rather that morality is a human invention, a set of rules to help society function. And it seems that a policy of helping members of our own society in emergencies has a value, from a self-interested point of view, that a strong requirement to alleviate ongoing problems wouldn???t have. To some people this approach will make a lot of sense; to some people it may sound like “fake morality,” and we’ll discuss it in depth much later in the course, when we get around to discussing the nature of truth in various subject matters.

What questions would you like her to answer?

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Interestingly enough, Louis Pasteur was claimed to have stated on his death bed that Bechampe was right, the terrain (PH) is everything and the germ is nothing.

A mashup between an Aggregator and a Voting System with a lot of extras.

• Type: News mashup
• Status: Conception
• Completion: 0%

[more]

1. Rules 1 and 2 only apply to raids. Stop spamming my blog, cancer.
2. I neither support nor oppose Project Chanology. I simply don't care enough. If they want to dance and yell on the street with silly masks, more power to them.
   
3. Anonymous is an idea, not a group.
   
4. Where did I ever say that 4chan is my favorite *chan? It isn't.
   
5. Stop making fools out of yourselves.
6. No, I will not link to Enturbulation on my blog.
7. No, I do not have any sympathy for Alex Wuori.
   

What made you become an atheist or agnostic?

His own story is captivating in itself:

I???m Daniel Florien. I was an evangelical Christian for over a decade, completely convinced that God was real and Jesus was alive today. I attended Bible college to train to be a pastor. I worked at a Christian church for many years. I have ???led people to Christ.??? I have left tracts in bathrooms. I have knocked on hundreds of doors asking people to repent and believe in Jesus.

I now know I was wrong…

He’s getting a number of interesting responses. Feel free to share your own at his site.

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That???s a purposely ambiguous title up there. Is this post about deletions of the word ???God???? Or is it about deletions by ???God??? or ??? given the quotation marks ??? people who claim to represent some supernatural character whom they call ???God????

Well, it???s about both.

Deletions OF ???God???

If I had my way, which is not really my way but, rather, the way of the framers of the Constitution, the word ???God??? would be removed from all enterprises sponsored, directly or indirectly, by the American government. Article VI and The First Amendment are quite clear on that point: ???God??? has no official business here. Let???s take that silly, but loaded, word off our money and out of our pledge. Let???s banish it from our courts, from our legislative chambers, and from the mouths of our elected representatives. And, since, according to the third clause of Article VI, religion can???t be used as a test for official office or ???public trust,??? let???s keep those fucking spiritual advisers away from the president. The views of religious leaders who counsel our elected officials are selected, weighed, vetted for conformity to America???s alleged Christianity. That???s a religious test, folks.

There???s nothing more unAmerican, more anti-patriotic, than elected and appointed governmental office-holders intoning the word ???God.??? Why? Because the wise men who drew up our Constitution and its Bill of Rights consciously and purposefully chose to leave that word out of their formula, and to take steps to make sure it would never be included in any future activities done specifically under the auspices of the government they created.

Perhaps the writers of the Constitution didn???t foresee the loopholes. They mistakenly thought that all our laws would be passed by the legislature, instead of many ???laws??? being enacted by the executive branch and by governmental agencies. With that erroneous thought in mind, they voted to include the First Amendment, which specifically banned our legislature from pandering to the superstitious: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion. Notice that they didn???t write ???an establishment of a religion,??? which would argue against elevating a specific belief system over others. No, what they said was ???an establishment of religion,??? with no article, no qualifier. Religion, itself, cannot be established by the legislature. The spirit, if not the letter, of their ideas should be extended to the Oval Office and the Supreme Court, and, therefore, to every executive office and courtroom under the titular jurisdiction of either.

Stop forcing ???God??? on me, you tyrants.

Deletions BY ???God???

OK, let???s start by admitting the obvious: There are many reasons for blogging. Not everyone is interested in sharing ideas, discussing their own and opposing views, or debating with passion and at least some degree of coherence.

In this neck of the Atheosphere, though, we all seem to enjoy doing those things. If you check out my list of frequent commenters, you???ll see the names of lots of people with whom I???ve engaged in intellectual smack-downs, people who have eagerly and effectively jabbed me back. Almost everyone on that list has argued with others in that ???honor??? roll, although many of us consider one another to be friends. We may get nasty, satirical, or just plain silly. Sometimes, we even piss each other off. A lot. Yet, when we cool down, we can acknowledge that the attacks aren???t personal, they???re back-and-forth thrusts about ideas. To me, taking part in a vehement verbal dispute is a way of showing that I respect another person, although not necessarily his or her opinions about a particular subject. You???ll never see me (and most of us, I think) whining ??? as one commenter did here: ???Obviously you don???t like me.??? How stupid and irrelevant is that?

One thing most of us don???t do is delete comments. We may refuse to engage in debate with some people who do write ridiculous remarks, even urge our readers to avoid feeding the ???trolls.??? But we don???t ban anybody???s ideas from our premises. Most faithfreeists champion Freedom of Speech. In our opinion, it may well be the most valuable right we possess.

But go take a look at some religious blogs. I???m not giving you any links; just pick a few sites at random. What you???ll find, for the most part, are ???moderated??? threads. If the blog-owner doesn???t care for what someone says, if it offends ???God,??? then, bam!, it???s gone. Back to the ether. Deleted. The attitude seems to be:

Hey, I have an idea. Let???s have a debate. Only I???ll remove most of the things you say because they???re offensive and they???re aimed at me personally.

I win!!!!!!! YAY!!!!!!

Now that PZ has successfullly desecrated his cracker piece of the body of Christ, I’ve received a message from the “Fire Paul Zachary Myers” Facebook group.

In His own words:

“Yes, the sad little cracker has met its undignified end, so stop pestering me. The cracker, the koran, and another surprise entry have been violated and are gone. You’ll have to wait until tomorrow for the details, what little of them there are. I must quickly apologize to all you good Catholics who were hoping to attend Mass, since you can’t anymore ??? I have been told many hundreds of times now that cracker abuse violates your right to practice your religion. I guess you’ll have to adapt. Secular humanism is a good alternative, if you aren’t already flocking to join the Mormons.”

They missed the best part of PZ’s post!

Anyway, I’ve got important things to do today. It’s my oldest son’s birthday, and I told him that as a gift to me him, I’d take myself him to see The Dark Knight. I sure hope the world doesn’t end before the movie does.

Paul Zachary Myers is a man after my own heart. Batman is completely awesome.

Anyway, the rest of the Facebook message…

Pray for him and please join me in making Friday a day of reparation. I would also encourage you to NOT email myers.

Oh! Oh! Maybe they’re learning their lesson!

Then again, maybe not…

Instaed contact civil authorities in MN.

Contact the civil authorities because PZ desecrated a cracker? What? Are we going to start calling 911 whenever somebody offends a plate of spaghetti? If only the Pastafarians didn’t have a loving religion.

I’m sorry, but this is a secular society. You can’t throw PZ Myers in jail for desecrating a cracker any more than you can stone homosexuals.

Do not rely on the hate speech argument alone, but also point out he is doing this on the taxpayers dime.

Um… Even if PZ had done the desecration of a cracker in his workplace, what if he had done it on a coffee break? His blog isn’t even run on the site of the university he works for. It’s on Science Blogs which as far as I know does not receive federal money.

I love America. People are free to offend whatever type of food they want.

There was a story on the local news the other day about a car show dedicated to Jeeps. We get them (car shows) locally every so often, but the hook to this story was that one of the Jeeps would not be on display. Apparently, it was the pride and joy of one of our servicemen presently doing time in Iraq, and the pictures indicated that it was in good shape, albeit a bit dirty. His family characterized his relationship to the Jeep as “#1″, ahead of even his family. I’m sure that wasn’t true, just mere hyperbole for the story, but it appears it was also part of the setup for the sales pitch. The family had decided that as a surprise for their military man, they would have a compete makeover of the Jeep accomplished: new upholstery, new dash, supercharged accouterments and accessories, etc, all to the tune of about $25,000. And they were asking for donations from people who were attending the Jeep show at the local fairgrounds to help cover the cost to do so. The unstated, underlying theme of the fundraiser was clearly “Support The Troops”.

Now I’m a big fan of the idea of support for our troops, but it irritated me that this family thought that they could cash in on the natural patriotic fervor of all Americans, bolstered recently by the front-and-center debate about the war in Iraq, to get the public to pay for the upgrade of an automobile for one of their family members who just happened to be in Iraq. I certainly agree that for the service he is rendering to his country, and indirectly to us, he is entitled to far more remuneration and benefits than our government is compensating him with, and a nice refurbished Jeep is probably wholly deserved. I wish him well, and hope his family is able to provide it for him. But why should we, the American public, be asked to help pay for it. He’s not down on his luck, he hasn’t been injured, and his family didn’t look like they were without the means to pay for it themselves. Call me cynical, but it seems more like a crass attempt to take advantage of the national guilt we have for sending him to Iraq in the first place, and not adequately supporting him once he got there.

And why do we have a national guilt? The answer is obvious. We are guilty because our leaders have really fucked up, and we, the voters of this country, put them in the position to do so. Think about it. If you were going to take this country to war, would you not 1) make sure that you had a very good, well articulated reason for doing so; 2) makes sure the country and you were on the same page, that is, you had adequately and thoroughly explained to the country?? what your reasons were for taking this monumental and country altering step; 3) insure that the country was in agreement with you; 4) adequately plan and provision the armed forces prior to attacking, and continue to provide more than ample support to the troops as it proceeds, to the point of redundancy; 5) make sure you had the best and the brightest people in place not only to work directly under you, but also on the ground at the war locale, to makes proper policy decisions and to lead the war; 6) make sure that you had a plan for how to secure and maintain control of the war locale, and also, in the event you had to get out quickly, have a plan for that; 7) make sure the country understood the nature and objectives of the war, and was willing to accept the loss of life and health that was bound to occur, not to mention the expense; 8} provide for the continued support and maintenance of the returning veterans from the war, including the families of those who died, the ones who were injured, and the ones who came home healthy.

Now I ask you: Is there any evidence that this country’s current leaders fulfilled any of those requirements? Again, the answer is no. A resounding NO. Not one of them. Our President, the man we elected twice (well, at least once), lied to us about the reasons for going to war, created facts out of whole cloth in an effort to use our natural anger after 9/11 to blindly accept the war, put the war into the hands of incompetents, (people that made us feel just Rummy), did so with an inadequate number of troops to maintain control of the Iraq after it was taken over, and to add insult to injury, failed to ensure that the men and women on the ground, the ones putting their lives on the lines, had adequate armor to protect themselves. Now, this administration is doing everything it can to make sure that the returning veterans have to fight for benefits they should have been guaranteed.

This is why there is a pallor of national guilt hanging over us, and why it’s easy to use that guilt to get some poor slob’s car refurbished. I’m sure he’ll be happy with it.

If he makes it home.

Personally, I am getting sick and tired of hearing “support the troops’. Frankly, I’ve said this before, but that phrase is simply an argument stopper, designed to deflect someone who opposes the war, by implying that opposition to the war equates to a lack of patriotism.?? I doubt you would find a single American who opposes the support of our individual troops (with the arguable exception of the current occupant of the Oval Office). Criticism of the war is not the same as criticism of our troops, as the right wing war mongers would have you believe.

While it’s a nice gesture, supporting the troops doesn’t mean sending a Care package to the front lines, or affixing a magnetic ribbon to the bumper of your car, like the one in the picture above. It means what I said above. It means not going to war unless you have a good reason for doing so. (Why should one good American serviceman die for a lousy, unfathomable reason?). It means once you send people to put their lives on the line for their country, that you spend the money and the brainpower to insure that they are well supplied, armored and capable of defending themselves in a hostile environment, so that they have the best possible chance of returning in one piece, or at all. Finally, once they do come home, often psychologically, if not physically, damaged, they are often left to their own devices, often time finding that the heroics of war don’t equate to a wonderful life at home. Many suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome are not getting adequate treatment. They should be entitled to adequate post war care?? and benefits.

I’m going to climb out on a large, sturdy limb here, and say that this “support the troops” response to criticism of the war is not patriotic. It’s false patriotism. Blind patriotism is worse than no patriotism, because it allows the government to do whatever it wants, without any check or balance from the people presumably being governed. “Your Country, love it or leave it” is counterproductive to good, responsible, accountable government, and government, in order to be good, must be accountable to the governed. That is impossible if we don’t hold our leader’s feet to the fire, if instead we go around spouting “support the?? troops” without actually making sure that our government is doing so.

In short, proper support of our troops should come from the top, from our government, not via some pitiable platitude from individuals in the street, nor via donation to some Jeep refurbishment fund.

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Anyway, I've got important things to do today. It's my oldest son's birthday, and I told him that as a gift to me him, I'd take myself him to see The Dark Knight. I sure hope the world doesn't end before the movie does.

DEAR DR. GRAHAM: Our 17-year-old daughter says she doesn’t believe in God anymore, and now she even refuses to go to church with us. When we try to talk with her about it we just end up in an argument. What can we do? — Mrs. S.McD.

Despite the fact that I agree with the daughter and not her parents, I actually don’t mind Graham’s answer that much, at least when compared to what others in his position may have said.

The most important thing you can do is to pray for her — because only God can overcome her spiritual resistance and draw her back to Himself…

But you also can let her know you that love her, despite your differences — and by doing so, you’ll be showing her that God loves her also. Don’t let your discussions degenerate into arguments; this will only make her more determined to keep her position. In other words, don’t let this become a test of wills between you — your will battling against her will — because almost the last thing she wants to do right now is admit she is wrong…

Of course, she’s not wrong. By going against what she was raised to believe, she’s probably quite intelligent.

But what is Graham saying?

Pray for her — we know that won’t achieve anything tangible, but it won’t hurt the daughter.

Show her you love her — which is exactly what she needs.

It’s much better than a few other alternatives we’ve heard before: Make her talk to a pastor, send her to a “Jesus Camp”-like place, try to argue with her, etc.

Not surprisingly, Graham thinks the daughter is an atheist because she “wants to run her own life — and that’s far easier to do if you push God out of your life” rather than the fact that atheism’s just a more honest depiction of reality. But I doubt anyone would expect him to say otherwise.

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Did I mention that I just got back from New York from the CFI Student Leadership Conference? Well I did! So, just a few highlights…

I spent the weekend hanging out with a bunch of other sexy student freethought campus group leaders and the best part is… I wasn’t the only high school student! There were three of us!

The existence of other splendid high school students was awesome by itself. But! But but but but but… I also got to meet a few of my personal heroes.

And you may be wondering about my quote of the week. We wanted to see The Dark Knight but all show times were sold out until 1am and most of us didn’t have cars. DJ Grothe was kind enough to give me and three other students a ride there and back. That’s when he said the most completely funniest thing of the whole conference…

“Make sure your mother knows that I’m gay. I don’t want her getting the wrong impression about me taking fifteen year-old girls to movie theatres at 1 am.”

DJ Grothe

Anyway, I believe I’ve name dropped enough in this post. I’m going to miss that convocation so terribly.

Sometimes my Google Reader juxtaposes the weirdest articles. Last month I giggled incessantly at the grouping of “Just so you don’t get the wrong impression of Louisiana???” and “Louisiana: Epically Doomed.”

Now I have two back-to-back articles by Wired Science that I find somewhat ironic in their placement next to each other.

Power to the Parasites

The findings, published today in Nature, can’t be directly extrapolated to other ecosystems — but they’re greater by a full order of magnitude than previous parasitic biomass estimates, suggesting that parasites might be widely underappreciated.

Everyone go hug a parasite!  (But not too close now.)

Parasites May Fuel AIDS Epidemic

RUN!  RUN!  Parasites with AIDS!

Before the creationists start whining, I know — they're still birds and lizards and flies. Get over it. They've changed, as evolution predicts.

It holds a number of different training programs, including Basic Combat Training (BCT). BCT is the first training where service members are taken from civilian life and trained in basic army actions. Therefore, during this training (approximately nine weeks), service members have essentially no rights. They are controlled in what they do and where they go. They don???t get the luxuries of everyday life. More to the point, there is no authorization to leave post. You???re stuck at the base for over two months.

With one exception.

It???s called the Free Day Away.

Tabernacle Baptist Church is authorized to pick up several busloads of trainees to be taken 30 miles away to Lebanon, Missouri where the church is located. Outside the church, the trainees are given privileges they can???t get at the base. They get candy, soda, and home cooking. They get to bowl and play sports. They can use a cell phone.

After that, they go inside the church for a ???special ceremony.??? It???s over the top. All fire and brimstone. As stereotypical as it can get. There???s a dunking booth in the front so you can do a walk-in baptismal. During the ceremony, people are invited up to the stage to be saved. In front of the stage are several people, waiting to give one-on-one counseling to the prospective ???savees.???

Americans United for Separation for Church and State is finally investigating this base.

… ???The coercive religious practices at Fort Leonard Wood are an outrage,??? [Rev. Barry W. Lynn, Americans United executive director] continued, ???and the Department of Defense should put a stop to them immediately.???

During the church service, soldiers are told that they are all sinners who must repent and that they ???must be saved now or go to hell.??? Soldiers willing to accept Jesus Christ as their personal savior are instructed to step into the aisles of the church and enroll in a six-lesson correspondence course that will lead to their ???personal salvation.???

…

Americans United, in its letter (PDF), urged Gordon S. Heddell, acting inspector general for the Department of Defense, to conduct a full investigation into the Army???s ???Free Day Away??? practice.

Hopefully, they can find a secular alternative to help troops get a well-deserved break from their duties, if only for a day.

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When I get back to my proper PC, real content will be blogged once more.