Now that I’ve had kids I look forward to that day (hopefully far away) when I can rest and look back on my tiny contribution to this special world. A world that happened to settle into a spot that was conducive to it creating life. How fantastic! And it will be enough just to say I was here. That I got to be born. That I got to live when billions of others didn’t even make it out of the womb. And that my genes (through evolution) will eventually be in every human on earth, just like our genes contain bits of ancient Egyptians and other Africans. No one thinks about heaven, but at the same time it’s all they want. But only if their lives don’t feel like heaven. I have what I need in this life. And it’s enough. And now I get to experience things all over again through my children. What better gift? But I’ll have had enough when I’m old. If I spent my entire life wondering where I was going when I died, I’d forget to live.

Thomas Lawson
Canada

In email, Libby Anne passed along a little jewel from her youth: some radio propaganda against that horrible demonic portal to evil, Dungeons & Dragons. It’s a radio show called Castles and Cauldrons, with a special introduction from James Dobson, warning you kiddies about the dangers of those role-playing games and their non-Christian magic and mysticism, which will lead them into contact with demons and satanism. It’s a two-parter, with summaries of Part 1 and Part 2. Warning: it’s laced with commercials for Focus on the Patriarchy.

They play a version of the games I’ve never encountered. These games give you actual magic powers that allow you to summon demons and control people and eradicate your enemies and read people’s minds. They sure seem a lot more powerful than Christianity.

Secular Coalition to Flood Capitol Hill with Godless Voters to Lobby Representatives

Lobby Day for Reason: March 23, 2012

WASHINGTON, DC— The Secular Coalition for America today announced the Lobby Day for Reason, a free lobbying day for secular Americans to take place on March 23, 2012, on Capitol Hill.

The Lobby Day for Reason will offer secular-minded individuals a morning of free lobbying training followed by the opportunity to meet with congressional staff to discuss issues related to the separation of church and state. Lunch, snacks, and materials are included.

The event will coincide with the Reason Rally, expected to be the largest secular gathering in American history, co-sponsored by the Secular Coalition for America. Lobby Day for Reason is free and will begin at 8:30 am on March 23, 2012, at the Hyatt Regency, located at 400 New Jersey Ave. NW, Washington, DC.

This event will encourage and support secular and nontheistic Americans to speak out to the elected officials who were put in office to serve all of their constituents regardless of religious beliefs. The Secular Coalition will support these taxpaying Americans as they put faces to the nontheist and secular communities and tell their federal representatives that they are voters and are paying attention to issues.

The lobbying training will be led by Amanda Knief, government relations manager for the Secular Coalition.

"We want to have a wave of godless voters flood the halls of every congressional building to show all of America that secular and nontheistic Americans are here, that we expect our elected officials to represent our issues, and that we care about our country just as much as any American," Knief said. Only by participating in the very system that is working against our communities right now can we hope to change things.

While studies show that up to 15 percent of the U.S. population—or roughly 50 million Americans—are secular, the visibility of our community is still low. Secular Americans often hide their nontheistic viewpoints and ideologies because they fear persecution. A 2006 study conducted by the University of Minnesota’s Department of Sociology found that atheists are the least trusted minority group in America–many of the respondents associated atheism with immorality, including criminal behavior, extreme materialism and elitism. A 2011 study by the University of British Columbia found only rapists were distrusted to a comparable degree as atheists. The Secular Coalition is working to change this by making the voices of all secular Americans–atheists, agnostics, humanists and freethinkers–heard by the Administration and Congressional representatives.

2012 will mark the second consecutive year that the Secular Coalition will host a lobby day. The 2011 lobby day included more than 80 people making almost 50 lobbying visits in one afternoon. The Secular Coalition expects the 2012 event to draw even more secular Americans due to its timing the day before the Reason Rally.

To register or for more information, go to http://secular.org/reasonlobby. The Secular Coalition encourages early registration those who register early will more likely be able to have visits with their Senators’ and Representatives’ offices.

But Josh Engen was there. Apparently my name came up a few times while he toured the exhibits.

Finally, we came across a presentation entitled “Dinosaurs And The Ark.” The board had obviously been put together by a very young child, and the matriarch of creationism wanted desperately to protect it. This woman, whose nametag read “Julie Von Vett,” ungracefully positioned herself between the camera and the poster board and began staring at me in a way that reminded me of my grandmother.

“Are you planning to post these pictures on PZ Myers’ website?” she finally blurted out.

Me: “Excuse me?”

Julie: “You know PZ Myers, don’t you?”

I explained that I had no relationship with Mr. Myers and that my being there had nothing to do with him. But, it was obvious that Julie’s mind was made up. By then she was grilling me like a cartoon drill sergeant. Who was I working for? Why was I there? Etc. Etc.

After several passive-aggressive attempts to trick me into admitting that PZ Myers had sent me on a secret mission to disrupt her event, or perhaps that I actually was PZ dressed up in some kind of clever disguise, a small crowd of people slowly formed around us. Within a few minutes, I was surrounded by several aggressive creationists, and each one had a separate theory about my associations and purpose.

The most interesting accusation that was brought against me (and PZ Myers, and all of his readers by association) was that I was specifically there to make fun of children.

I’ve attended many creationist events. I never disrupt them or even recommend to others that they disrupt them: those visits are fact-finding missions. I also don’t encourage making fun of the kids — they are the victims. It’s good that some of them are trying to do basic science, but the fact that the organizers compel everyone to put bible verses on their posters is telling and deplorable.

But by gosh, next year, or perhaps the year after, I’m going to have to go to the Har-Mar Mall in February, just to freak these people out. Or maybe I can actually get by with commissioning a squad of undercover minions to go on a secret mission to infiltrate their science fair. Or perhaps openly — maybe we need a Twin Cities Creozerg?

Except for the sadness of dealing with deluded kids. That makes it so much less fun.

• Unequally Yoked
• Pharyngula
• Atheism: Proving the Negative
• Martin S Pribble
• Greta Christina’s Blog

Wait…Greta Christina, my fierce sister-in-arms at FtB? Those bastards! They have pitted family against each other for their sick entertainment! You know what this means. Vote harder. Vote every day. I must conquer.

Unless I can cunningly maneuver her into some peculiar forfeit if she wins, in which case I’ll cheerfully throw the race. Atheist, you know.

She has a condition called Uterus Didelphys. Variations of this condition aren’t uncommon, occurring once in a few thousand births. The reproductive tract develops from paired tubes that fuse prenatally, and sometimes the fusion is incomplete, producing a range of arrangements illustrated below.

Would you believe a pornographer has asked Ms Jones to star in a movie? (Of course you would — that’s exactly what you’d expect.) In this case, it’s stupid as well as insulting and offensive. Women with these kinds of conditions often don’t even know it until puberty or later — there aren’t any obvious external differences, so when she takes off her pants she looks like any other woman, and no, she can’t have sex with two men at once. In didelphys, the vagina is divided in two by an internal septum, nothing more. Sex with a man just means he can bear a little bit to the left or a little bit to the right and penetrate one side or the other. And even there, it’s possible to get surgery to reduce or remove the septum.

The primary problems for the woman are a little confusion during menstruation, with awkwardness in using tampons; and it does constrain the birth canal somewhat, so caesarian deliveries are recommended.

So…no obvious external differences; no special kinky sex; some reproductive difficulties; if the condition is known, somewhat more likely unpleasant interactions with dumbasses, like the porn producer. That’s about it.

Here’s another video about the condition (contains closeups of female genitalia, in a clinical setting).

(Also on Sb)

I think of myself as primarily a developmental biologist, someone who focuses on processes in embryos and is most interested molecular mechanisms that generate form and physiology. But I’m also into evolution, obviously, and recently have been trying to educate myself on ecology. And this is where the conflicts arise. Historically, there has been a little disaffection between evolution and development, and we can trace it right back to Richard Goldschmidt and the neo-Darwinian synthesis.

There is minimal consideration of development in the synthesis. The big man in the interdisciplinary study of evolution and development at the time of the formulation of the synthesis was Goldschmidt, who actually raised some grand and important issues. He was interested in sex differences; the same genome can give rise to very different forms, male and female. He was interested in metamorphosis; the same genome produces both a caterpillar and an adult moth. And he was interested in phenocopies; the same genome can generate alternative forms under the influence of environmental factors. He had some very speculative ideas about global systemic mutations that haven’t really panned out, and his ideas were tarred with the label “hopeful monsters”, which didn’t help either. It was non-Darwinian! It argued for abrupt transitions! I’ll defer to Gould’s defense of Goldschmidt, though, and would say that those weren’t good reasons to reject some challenging ideas.

The charge that stung, though, was Ernst Mayr’s accusation that Goldschmidt believed that new species could arise by a single fortuitous macromutation in a single individual, that Goldschmidt had abandoned or failed to grasp one of the most essential principles of evolutionary thought: that evolution occurs in populations, not individuals. He did not understand the concept of population thinking. I don’t think he was entirely guilty of that, but I have to concede that there was a disjoint there: as a developmental biologist, Goldschmidt would wonder first and foremost about the kinds of genetic rearrangements that would generate an evolutionary novelty, and just assume that a superior morph would propagate through the population, a process of relatively little interest; while an evolutionary biologist would be less interested in the developmental details of the generation of the phenotype, and much more interested in the mechanics and probabilities of its spread through a population.

Evolutionary biologists and developmental biologists think differently, and that creates a conflict between the evo and the devo. I’m not unique in noting this: Rudy Raff included a table in his book, The Shape of Life, which I’ll reproduce here, with a few modifications of my own.

Those different emphases can lead to biases in where we place the importance of various processes. I’ll focus on just two: causality and variation.

When we’re looking at the process of change within our domains, evolutionary biologists have already mastered the art of population thinking: everything is about propagation of patterns of variation within a population. There aren’t explicit mechanisms that generate subtypes to fit the range of roles available. Instead, a cloud of forms is created by chance variation and the unfit are selected out. Developmental biologists, on the other hand, see an organism with a constellation of necessary and dedicated functions — there must be a nervous system to regulate behavior, there must be a gut to process food — and specific molecular mechanisms to programmatically generate them. Embryos do not proliferate a mass of cells with random variants, and then use the ones that secrete digestive enzymes for the gut and the ones that generate electrical impulses for the brain. A lot of development papers really do talk about nothing but proximate sequences of causal interactions that lead to a specific function or fate.

To an evolutionary biologist, variation is the stuff of interest: populations with no variation are not evolving (it’s a good thing such populations don’t exist, or if they do, chance will swiftly change the situation). To your average developmental biologist, variation is noise. It clutters the interpretation of the data. We want to say, “Here is the mechanism that produces this tissue type,” not “Here is the mechanism that sometimes produces this tissue type, in some organisms, sometimes with other mechanisms X, Y, and Z.” We generally love model systems because they allow us to establish an archetype and see a reliable pattern. In the best case, it gives us a solid foundation to work from; in the worst case, we forget altogether that there is more complexity in the natural world than is found in our labs. I would be the first to admit that laboratory zebrafish, for instance, are tremendously weird, inbred, specialized creatures…but they’re still extraordinarily useful for getting clean results.

I will also be quick to admit that the above is a bit of a caricature. Of course many developmental biologists reach out beyond the simplistic reduction of everything to linear, proximate causes. Raff, in that book, goes on to discuss specifically all of the problems of model systems and how they distort our understanding of biology; I could cite researchers like David Kingsley who specifically study variation in natural populations; Ecological Developmental Biology, which describes the interactions between genes and environment; and of course there are all those scientists at marine stations who aren’t staring at tanks full of inbred specimens, but are going out and collecting diverse forms in the wild. I am admitting a bias, but the best of us work hard to overcome it.

And then…we sometimes slip. I highly recommend Sean B. Carroll’s Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo as an excellent introduction to evo devo, I even use it in my developmental biology course. In reducing the discipline to a popular science book, you can see what had to be jettisoned, though, and unfortunately, it’s that whole business of population thinking and environmental influences (clearly, Carroll knows all that stuff, but in distilling evo devo down to the basics, that developmental bias is what emerges most clearly). Here, for instance, is the admittedly sound-bitey one sentence summary of what evo devo is from the book:

The Evo Devo Revolution

“The comparison of developmental genes between species became a new discipline at the interface of embryology and evolutionary biology—evolutionary developmental biology, or ‘Evo Devo’ for short.”

Sean B. Carroll, 2005

Again, this is not a criticism of the book, which does what it does very well, that is, describe the mechanistic process of development and the regulatory logic behind it, but notice the missing words in that abbreviated description: populations and environments don’t really come into play. All we’ve got there (and this is a bit unfair to Carroll) is comparisons of genes between species, which is enough to show common descent and relationships between the phyla, but it doesn’t say how they got that way — which is an unfortunate deficiency for a discipline that is all about how things get that way!

That’s what I’m concerned about. Right now, evo devo is far more devo than evo; we really need to absorb some more lessons from our colleagues in evolutionary biology. A more balanced evo devo would weight variation far more heavily, would be far more interested in diversity within and between populations, and would prioritize plasticity and environmental influences far more. If we did all that, it wouldn’t be a revolution — because it would embrace everything that is already in evolution — but would be what Pigliucci calls the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis. What we’d have is a better appreciation of this well-known aphorism:

“Evolution is the control of development by ecology…”

Van Valen, 1973

That’s the holy trinity of biology: evolution, ecology, development. Our goal ought to be to bring all three together in one beautiful balance.

(Yeah, I stole the triquetra. We’ll use it far more wisely than the religious.)

(Also on Sb)

My early experience with the church was much like the experience of most of the people I know. Sundays were a day where I was forced to wear uncomfortable clothes and go to a big place that smelled funny. It was full of old people who got very bent out of shape if you did not sit absolutely quietly for a whole hour! Then this other old guy in funny clothes would stand up in the front and drone on and on about whatever was on his mind. It was torture. The big payoff, though, was that if you behaved, you got to go out to eat afterward.

Despite myself, I still managed to pick up the basics. There was this guy who was really really powerful up in the sky somewhere who really really cared what you spent your time doing. There were all these stories about him, or more usually, about people interacting with him, that were just like the fairy tales my dad would tell when I was going to sleep. Stories about animals on a big boat and guys riding around in whale stomachs. For some reason, though, people seemed very concerned that you take these stories seriously and not the fairy stories–even though, I confess, I liked the fairy stories better. I was also aware that there were other kinds of people who believed the exact same stories but were not to be associated with if possible. They were called Baptists. Somehow, they believed the stories TOO much.

The turn didn’t come until one day in about the second or third grade. I was at the library in my school looking for a nice little book to hold me for the weekend. Usually, I would be on the lookout for some nice Garfield comics or perhaps some Clifford the Big Red Dog. That day, however, I found a story of creation that the Indians told. Honestly, I don’t remember the story or from which tribe it originated. It had to do with the Sun and the Moon getting together and making the Earth as their child… or something like that. It was a long time ago. In any case, what I remember most of all was my reaction to it. I thought, “How could anybody possibly believe that?!” That thought made me pause. “Wait a moment,” I pondered, “if that story sounds ridiculous, then what rational can I give to the story in the Bible? Why does everyone take THAT story so seriously?” I should point out that I grew up in the deep south. I had never met anyone who did not take the Bible seriously.

From there, it was a slow spiral into inevitability. From Christians, I got my first taste of what a horrible argument sounded like. I was in high school then. I said to some of the kids in Sunday school, “But you can’t really KNOW that the stories in the Bible are true.” I don’t remember what this was in response to, but they seemed shocked. Their reply was, “Yes, you can. It says so in the Bible. You just have to have faith!” I was shocked that anyone could say something so inane.

I remember sitting in church again, later on. I was bored. So, I decided to actually take a look at what all of the fuss was about. So, I picked up the Bible. They were liberally sprinkled about, after all. I suspected that this was to encourage us to read them. I started at the beginning. Genesis started out okay. I knew this story, after all. Then I came across one I hadn’t heard. It was about these two brothers named Cain and Able. They were the sons of Adam and Eve. Somehow, they had managed to get wives from somewhere. It didn’t really go into where exactly these females came from. I suspected I wasn’t supposed to ask. Anyway, they got together to buy presents for God. Able got something really nice that God liked. Cain gave something kind of mediocre. God was a bad liar and hurt Cain’s feelings, so Cain got all jealous and killed Able! WHOA!!! WHAT THE… Who reacts like THAT?! Talk about Christmas from hell! Anyway, the rest of the people (what other people?) were upset and figured they ought to punish Cain, but God said not to and gave him a NoNo mark instead. I guess that was supposed to have been sufficient, or maybe there weren’t enough people back then to start offing people for transgressions. I had thought this was supposed to be a GOOD book. It’s really not. I guess you could argue that it has really good parts, but then you don’t say it is a good book. You say it is a book that has its moments. Doesn’t really have the same ring to it. “The It-Has-Its-Moments Book.”

My senior year in high school, I decided that the only rational position to take on the whole affair, considering the sheer number of available religious beliefs and the unknowabilities of their various faith claims, was one of “I don’t know what the truth is, so I’ll just have to find out when I get there.” I was prepared to wait for death to take me so that I might find out the truth. The truth, I decided, was more important than wishful thinking. I later found out that this was called agnosticism, so that’s what I called myself.

It wasn’t until graduate school that I discovered the atheist community on YouTube. I read the books. I listened to the arguments. I reasoned that I was being unfair in my beliefs. I wasn’t really agnostic on the issue of whether or not Zeus or Thor were real. I didn’t believe for a minute that the Cargo Cults were a representation of reality. It was just the religion of my childhood that I was holding up a candle for. So, I abandoned it.

I am an atheist, because I recognize the value of the truth over faith. I recognize that the truth is not something that is landed on one day and held to vigorously. There is great value in bringing it slowly into focus as the facts come in. What you BELIEVE is the truth on one day may not in fact BE the truth. Evidence is the key.

I am an atheist, because I can find no reason not to be.

Nathaniel Logee

The only worry is that they might not ever figure it out.

Now the shoe is on the other foot. The Heartland Institute, a right-wing think tank with an agenda of willful dishonesty, leaked, and leaked hard. Someone mailed a collection of internal documents to Peter Gleick, and Gleick responded by sending a request to Heartland under a fake name, and got additional copies that confirmed the accuracy of the documents. Was this wrong? It doesn’t seem to be illegal, and I think it’s an open question whether it was unethical — it would be unethical if Gleick lied and misrepresented the contents of those documents, as the denialists did with the East Anglia emails, as the Heartland Institute did with those emails.

And there’s Peter Gleick beating himself up for exposing the Heartland Institute’s mendacity. I really don’t get that. He’s a scientist. Scientists gather data to make informed decisions. Gleick got the data the Heartland Institute tried to hide. You can’t on one hand condemn Gleick for asking for the information and getting it handed to him, while praising hackers for breaking into a server and illegally taking data.

And then Mann, Trenberth, Bradley, Overpeck, Santer, Schmidt, and Karoly write the most naïve letter ever, pointing out the hypocrisy of the denialists while deploring the acquisition of the documents, and saying this:

We hope the Heartland Institute will heed its own advice to “think about what has happened” and recognize how its attacks on science and scientists have helped poison the debate over climate change policy. The Heartland Institute has chosen to undermine public understanding of basic scientific facts and personally attack climate researchers rather than engage in a civil debate about climate change policy options.

Really, people? Seriously? This is what the Heartland Institute wants, the poisoning of the debate and the undermining of public understanding. They probably read that letter and said, “Yay! It’s working!”

How about if we focus on the content of the leaked documents instead? They do reveal a deep truth: that the Heartland Institute is a propaganda organization with great support from right-wing political organizations and individuals, and that their mission is to parcel out money to disinformation agents like Anthony Watts and Fred Singer, who sow unfounded doubt and confusion about real science. And they plan to poison American education.

Principals and teachers are heavily biased toward the alarmist perspective. To counter this we are considering launching an effort to develop alternative materials for K-12 classrooms. We are pursuing a proposal from Dr. David Wojick to produce a global warming curriculum for K-12 schools. Dr. Wojick is a consultant with the Office of Scientific and Technical Information at the U.S. Department of Energy in the area of information and communication science. His effort will focus on providing curriculum that shows that the topic of climate change is controversial and uncertain- two key points that are effective at dissuading teachers from teaching science. We
tentatively plan to pay Dr. Wojick $100,000 for 20 modules in 2012, with funding pledged by the Anonymous Donor.

No matter how it was obtained, the Heartland Institute has confirmed that it stupidly mailed out internal documents. The denialists are trying desperately to claim that one of the documents is fake, which just affirms that all the others are accurate.

That ought to be the central story here.

(via Greg Laden)

(Also on Sb)

I have no idea what is going on in his head. I don’t think I want to know, but I hope he’s got a few real-life friends to help him out.

I don’t even like Disneyland, why would I want immortality of any kind, let alone one where I’m supposed to be happy for eternity? I think the only afterlife I’d like would be the kind where I get to storm the gates of heaven and end the whole tyrannical empire.

There’s an adage I expect will be repeated by other ministers responding to this question. It goes, “there are no atheists in foxholes.” Meaning, when bombs burst, everyone hedges their bets and prays, “God, save me!” There’s a joke about one combat vet who prayed “Lord, if you’re there, I’ll serve you and attend church every Sunday; just get me through.” The Air Force immediately comes and blasts everything, answering the man’s prayer. He then looks up to heaven and says “never mind….”

I know that religious people have security that atheists don’t. If you believe in life after life, you fight harder, risk more, and serve better than a guy who thinks, “this is it!” If you believe you’re nothing but worm-food at death, you aren’t going to jump on a grenade to save the platoon, or charge a machine-gun nest expecting to meet Jesus. You’re going to be reserved, second-guessing, and probably be a big fat chicken.

Look, you just read the stats: “Researchers have found that spiritual people have decreased odds of attempting suicide, and that spiritual fitness has a positive impact on quality of life, on coping and on mental health.” Atheists be damned. They will be. So I really don’t care what they think regarding these tests. I’m tired of having their constant nagging, their constant opposition against God — their evil. They contribute nothing positive in the long run. Their very name, “a” theist, means they are “against,” with a big “no” regarding America’s “creator” and “Nature’s God” (the one mentioned in our Declaration of Independence). I’m frankly sick of them. Why they are here on the In Theory cast is beyond me. It’s like saying, “I have no spiritual input because I don’t believe in the spirit. So here’s my ignorance….”

I wonder what the military puts on gravestones of atheists, a thumbs-down? Listen, all religions are protected by our laws, but atheists don’t countenance America’s documents that mention God. They don’t actually deserve rights that even bizarre religionists have. If it could be shown that people who deny God create military weakness, however small, what should commanders do when choosing a winning military? I agree with you.

This is what we get when the Army decides to evaluate soldiers’ “spiritual fitness”: scumbags like Griem judging our troops by how superstitious and gullible they are.

You can let Griem know what you think of his attack on our troops. Be civil, but don’t pussyfoot around his douchebaggery.

(via NatGeo)

(Also on Sb)

Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum charged on Monday that President Barack Obama and Democrats were “anti-science” because they refused to exploit the Earth’s natural resources to the limits of technology.

Over the weekend the candidate had been criticized for saying that President Barack Obama followed a theology that was not “based on the Bible.” He later insisted that he was talking about the president siding with “radical environmentalists.”

“I accept the fact that the president’s a Christian,” Santorum told CBS host Bob Schieffer on Sunday. “I just said when you have world view that elevates the Earth above man and says that we can’t take those resources because we’re going to harm the Earth — like things that are not scientifically proven like the politicization of the whole global warming debate.”

The scientific view is that global warming is occurring, and that it’s driven by anthropogenic production of greenhouse gases; the politicized, ideologically demented view is a denial of the evidence. Like Santorum’s nonsense.

This is a speech he gave to the crowds in Ohio:

But if we don’t provide those opportunities for those jobs that can sustain a family, for power in this country that is affordable, not just coal but all energy. It drove the economy of Southwestern Pennsylvania, Eastern Ohio for a long time. And through a variety of things — yes, problems with management, problems with negotiations — but actually there were bigger problems. The bigger problems of environmental regulation. In many cases environmental regulation that has gone extreme, particularly in this administration.

What they have done? And I referred to it the other day and I got criticized by some of our, well, less-than-erudite members of the national press corps who have a difficulty understanding when you refer to someone’s ideology to the point where they elevate Earth, and they say that, well, men and humanity is just of a variety of different species on the Earth and should be treated no differently.

Whereas, we all know that man has a responsibility of stewards of the Earth, that we are good stewards and we have a responsibility to be good stewards. Why? Because unlike the Earth, we’re intelligent and we can actually manage things.

Did Santorum just call the press “less-than-erudite” while arguing against the idea that humans are one of a variety of different species on the planet? What a maroon.

And yes, we’re intelligent, and we should try to manage things. So what does that make a head-in-the-sand denialist like Santorum who wants to allow unrestricted, unmanaged exploitation of natural resources? Not a good steward, I would say.

The correct spelling of PZ Myers’ last name is
A. Meyers
B. Meier
C. Myers
D. Mayr

12% of the class answered “A”.

<sigh> I shall carry on with the rest of the exam. I hope the students don’t mind that I return them spattered with my tears.

The state does not ‘own’ the institution of marriage. Nor does the church.

The honourable estate of matrimony precedes both the state and the church, and neither of these institutions have the right to redefine it in such a fundamental way.

So who got to define it in the first place? What makes an antique definition sacred? Why shouldn’t society adapt to reality?

And at the same time, Lord Carey calls gay marriage “cultural vandalism” and is supporting a group called the Coalition for Marriage, a new UK organization that makes the same tired old arguments.

If marriage is redefined, those who believe in traditional marriage will be sidelined. People’s careers could be harmed, couples seeking to adopt or foster could be excluded, and schools would inevitably have to teach the new definition to children. If marriage is redefined once, what is to stop it being redefined to allow polygamy?

You know, people’s careers are harmed and couples are excluded from adoption right now because of the existing anti-equality policies; the difference such a law would make is that instead of gay people being harmed, it would be bigots who would face the consequences of their beliefs. This isn’t a “save marriage” movement, it’s a “save the bigots” movement.

There’s a poll. Even if it is in that dumb rag, The Telegraph, it’s going the right way. How about pushing it further, and slapping the Telegraph around a little bit?

Should gay marriage by legalised?

Yes, everyone should have the right to get married no matter what their sexuality 81.12%
No, marriage should be between a man and a woman 18.88%

The beginning of this video shows exactly why the book is necessary.

Efilzeo
Italy

In case you were anxiously awaiting a bug fix yourself, I’ll tell you…it didn’t work. I’m watching printtool eat up all my memory right now, and am about to shut it down and go to bed.

(And you know what? If any idiots start pointless, stupid OS flame wars in this thread, I’ll delete you in the morning, and close thread comments.)

Aaaaand…of course I had to delete a half-dozen comments this morning, although it wasn’t as bad as I feared.

I also had some helpful email: at the suggestion of a correspondent, I also killed this stupid little startup item called SPanel that was installed when I got the printer. It’s behaving so far this morning.

Lots of people suggested that I simply drop-kick the printer into the nearest landfill, which may happen. I don’t trust it anymore; I’m reluctant to use the goddamned thing, because I feel like everytime I fire it up I have to monitor CPU activity to see if it is bleeding memory again, and I have to restart my computer afterwards…whereas I typically go months without a shutdown or restart.

Bottom line: treat Samsung devices as equivalent to vectors for viruses that will corrupt your system and degrade performance significantly. I’ll never buy anything from Samsung ever again — they’ve got plenty of competitors so there’s no reason to risk struggling with their incompetence.

In a particularly slimy move, the Telegraph has posted an article that tries to tar Dawkins with the sin of slavery. Not that Richard Dawkins himself has slaves or endorses slavery, but that he had an 18th century ancestor who had a Jamaican estate with over a thousand slaves. The reporter also made the ludicrous suggestion that slave-holding was genetic.

I’d scarcely had time to re-open my lecture notes when he rang back: “Darwinian natural selection has a lot to do with genes, do you agree?” Of course I agreed. “Well, some people might suggest that you could have inherited a gene for supporting slavery from Henry Dawkins.”

So now there’s a slavery gene? That is quite possibly the dumbest assertion I’ve heard in a whole week…and I read creationist websites. As Dawkins points out, he had 512 direct ancestors in that same generation, and that he has a number of ministers in his lineage. Not only is it ridiculous to invent a slavery gene, but it’s a selective absurdity to cherry-pick members of a large population of remote relatives and claim that an individual is responsible for everything every ancestor did. That’s a rather biblical position to take, I think.

So what do we have in common? I poked around a bit in the genealogical records and found this: a piece of the 1820 US census.

It’s not easy to read, but that’s a bit of the records for St Stevens Parish, King William, Virginia. I’ve mentioned before that I’m Scandinavian on my mother’s side, but on my father’s side, I’m English/Irish/Scots and an undefined mingling of who-knows-what, including a bit of Dutch, and they’ve been skulking around North America since somewhere in the 17th or 18th century, and some of them were even Southerners. My great-great-great-great-grandfather, Garland Hurt (1764-1839) was a Virginian married to Martisha Thurston (1768-1818), who had 3 sons and 3 daughters…and also 1 female slave under 14, and 1 female slave between 14 and 25.

Oh no! Do I carry the slave-master gene?

I suppose if I were interested and extremely ambitious (sorry, I’m not), I could trace all of Garland Hurt’s descendants forward, and then we’d find not only that some of you readers might be related to me. I suspect that some of the people who utterly despise me (if they even know of me) are distant cousins. We’re different from each other and from our ancestors.

My family is a bit down-class compared to those fancy-pants Dawkinses, but as you can see, it’s easy to find slave-owners for any of us among the swarms of ancestors we all have, just by going back far enough. I also have at least one ancestor who fought on the Union side (an Iowan who fought with Grant in the Mississippi campaign) in the Civil War. I deplore the slave-owner, but I don’t own his guilt, nor do I get to take credit for the great-great-grandfather who was mustered out in New Orleans. We’re all a great gemisch of subsets of genes from a bounded population. It’s simply silly to start parsing out characteristics from individuals in a complex cloud from the ancestral gene pool and arbitrarily assigning them to single contemporaries. The writer of that article, Adam Lusher, is an idiot…and the Telegraph ought to be embarrassed at publishing such tripe.

Episode CCCIII: Vegas!.

It just depended on who you asked.

I’m the oldest child and was born in a major city on the northeastern coast of the United States. My father was brought up Catholic in Ireland, while my mother was brought up in the southeastern United States in a non-churchgoing family. I think she is a deist or agnostic-it was just never discussed. Both of my siblings are too young to have formulated any opinion on religion yet-they’ve not been brainwashed, so I think they’ll be agnostic at very least, but I’m not entirely certain.

My father was very different. He worked from a young age to make sure I knew that it was wise to stay away from the clergy, particularly Catholics. He instilled from a young age that talking to any priest or parishioner was a bad idea. I’m almost entirely certain that was from his rough upbringing with devout Catholic parents and nuns and priests at the schools.

Because of an unfortunate circumstance, my father lost his job while I was young and was forced to journey away to find work. Since then he’s had to take jobs that left him little time at home and what he had was usually spent sleeping. That meant that he didn’t have any time to discuss his atheistic beliefs with me and my mother has permanently refused to discuss hers with the family.

I eventually became a vague deist after I picked up ideas from my peers. There had to be somebody up there, right? While I was still in elementary school, I had a friend that, trying to be just like her preacher and her parents (who were active in the pursuit of converting people to their particular Lutheran strain of Christianity), converted me to a vague form of Christian-esque deism. I prayed in my bed at night to God (who, I would learn later, was also known as Jehovah), I learned about the Nativity and believed it, and I learned about Heaven and a diluted form of Hell. Bad people would go to timeout, good people would be happy.

I didn’t ever go to any church, I never really read the Bible until I was a lot older, I didn’t realize the exact qualifications to go to Heaven, I didn’t know that the God of the Abrahamic trifecta was a childish tyrant, I had barely any knowledge of the crucifixion and resurrection, I just had no idea. I guess I wasn’t ever really a Christian. I did believe in God in my own childish way, but it was filtered. I proudly told people (outside of my family) that I was a Christian.

It took me a few more years to realize that I didn’t know what I was getting into.

My converting friend had long since vanished into the past. At the time, I was taking piano lessons with a Southern Baptist woman who is (to put it mildly) extremely devout and committed-she had played the organ for her congregation since she was a teenager. She’d gone to a Christian college and converted people for some time. She knew my parents were non-theistic and I was a Christian, though I’d asked her not to say anything to my parents and I’d tell them when I was older and knew how to articulate my beliefs to them.

I had just finished a song and was looking for a new one. As I flipped through a book of pop songs of the last 50 years or so, I chanced upon a simplification of “Imagine” by John Lennon. I knew of the Beatles’ music and enjoyed it, though I hadn’t yet heard that particular song. Recognizing the name, I said, “Ooh, John Lennon.”

She replied, with a sort of satisfaction, “No, we don’t play that here. He wasn’t a Christian, but he learned his lesson in the end.”

At the time, the comment confused me, but I let it go without continuing the conversation. We drifted elsewhere, but I didn’t forget the comment. I thought that maybe he’d eventually converted.

I got home and searched for “Imagine” and for “John Lennon” on Google.

While listening to “Imagine” and reading John Lennon’s Wikipedia biography, I chanced upon the fact that he’d been shot and killed at a fairly young age, but he’d never converted. After I’d listened to “Imagine” twice, I made the connection in a stroke of brilliance.

She thought that John Lennon’s death was a judgment from God for writing that song.

Suddenly, I didn’t want to be a Christian anymore.

Now, she’s generally a nice woman, though obviously she holds no sympathy for atheists (or homosexuals, or Muslims) and she watches Fox News.

But this hate, I found as I finally read the Bible, was supported openly. The Old Testament was just a compilation of the evil of Jehovah-the New just a contradictory set of tales of the purveyor of an immoral doctrine that was supposedly simultaneously the son of Jehovah and Jehovah.

It was terrifying and laughable at the same time. But I also realized that the idea of this God, the idea of Hell, of original sin, of resurrection, of believing an old story book, of trusting the nonsensical and often contradictory doctrines of Christianity was just absurd, ludicrous, preposterous!

But, for some reason, I stopped there. I didn’t renounce deism, though I realized that an interventionist God was also absurd. I became something of a Ben Franklin-like deist; it (whatever it was) existed but it didn’t do anything.

Eventually, through a rather strange route, I started watching Dara O’Briain’s standup comedy. I laughed and laughed until I reached the part where he said he’d take psychics, homeopaths and priests and put them all in a sack and hit them with sticks. The psychics and priests I could emphasize with, but I didn’t know what homeopaths were.

The next stop was to James Randi’s YouTube channel.

I found Thunderf00t on YouTube shortly afterward.

After that, I stumbled across the Atheist Community of Austin and the Atheist Experience, followed shortly thereafter by the Non-Prophets.

And then I found Pharyngula.

From there, the whole world of atheism and anti-theism opened up.

Since then, I’ve been commenting on the intertubes, I’ve been joining chatrooms and I’ve been reading and educating myself about evolution, about religion, about society in general and anything else I can get my hands on. I’ve just gotten into one of my first written debates with a theistic friend of mine (verbal sparring has been going on for a while) and I’m having a blast.

Once I started educating myself and enjoying it…everything fell into place. I finally understood why I found the Bible so absolutely absurd. I finally figured out why my father was so anti-theistic. I finally figured out why people were protesting church-state separation violation. I finally figured out why calling Jesus a madman or something worse was justified. I finally figured out why the line between what is comforting to believe and what is true is so important.

I’m going to end with one of the only quotes in the Bible, otherwise known as the Big Book of Multiple Choice, that has ever held any significance for me. Predictably, it does not come from the Old Testament (though Ecclesiastes is interesting at very least) nor does it come from the supposed sayings of Christ. Instead, it is from Paul. Also predictably, I had to take it (somewhat) out of context.

1 Corinthians, 13:11-When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. (KJV)

Fitting then, now that I am no longer a child, that I put away the childish god of Abraham, the childish reliance on imaginary friends, and the brutal yet still childish threat of pain that are all mainstays of the destructive and infantile organizations we call religions.

Xios the Fifth
United States

The opposition is beginning to stir, weakly and ineffectually, with a contribution from a creationist fool.

I have already commented on it here, but I will also note that they are calling this rally of people who profess to support "reason," "science," and "secularism" the "largest gathering of its kind in history." I guess they forgot about the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror. Maybe they should add "history" to their list of emphases.

No word yet on whether national park officials will allow them to operate a guillotine on the Mall.

There will, of course, be no Bastille to storm, but will we be doing this the same way we’ve done large-scale atheist projects before? Will we consider women "passive citizens" who were denied the vote because they didn’t have "the moral and physical qual­ities" to exercise political rights? Will we deny the égalité in "Liberté, égalité, fraternité" to non-whites?

No wonder we can’t get any decent intellectual progress in this country: we contain idiots who hear the words “reason”, “science”, and “secularism” and leap to the conclusion that we’re talking about guillotines. I guess that’s why they’re so anti-science and anti-reason — they’ve made some maddeningly stupid associations with the words.

And why should Martin Cothran leap to this bizarre scenario of atheists going all 18th century and discriminating against women and minorities? That’s more of a 21st century obsession of religious fundamentalists.

But then, he’s not even being creative. This is Rick Santorum’s line that equates science, social justice, and secularism with chopping people’s heads off. No one is advocating tyranny or revolution here, and decapitation is a signature move of terrorist extremists nowadays…so how can anyone take seriously a trembling nitwit who screams bloody murder because Richard Dawkins or Taslima Nasrin or Lawrence Krauss or Hemant Mehta or Jamila Bey or Greta Christina talk about liberty and equality without gods or priests?

There will be no guillotines on the mall unless the religious right brings them. We cannot be responsible for the imaginary terrors the stupid and ignorant conjure up when confronted with knowledge and good sense and a dismissal of superstition.