Just one more…

I’m not sure what it is about religious belief that robs you of any sense of irony, but that phenomenon is fairly well-documented. Religious people seem to lack the God-given ability to self-examine and see yourself as others see you, which is problematic because most of the rest of us see you as sanctimonious jerks (which is, I suppose, a charge commonly leveled at atheists, so maybe that’s not fair of me to say. SEE HOW IT’S DONE, RELIGIOUS PEOPLE?)

What really doesn’t make sense, however, is the complete loss of a sense of historical perspective that seems to be associated with fervent religious belief. For some reason, they keep falling in the same hole over and over again:

Christian groups have condemned a provocative Spanish play about Jesus called Golgota Picnic (Golgotha Picnic), due to premiere in France. Street protests are planned when the play is performed in the southern city of Toulouse, before moving on to the capital Paris. While urging restraint, Toulouse’s Catholic archbishop said the play “fouled the faith of many believers”.

I mean, haven’t we already done this? Didn’t we do this like… 3 months ago? And wait… didn’t we do the exact same story only 4 months before that? I mean, I could keep writing this stuff again and again, but after a while it kind of gets boring making the same points. Censorship of blasphemy doesn’t create less blasphemy. If anything it makes it more attractive and popular. There are things that are actually worth getting upset about in your own organization. Log in your own eye, speck in others’. Art is supposed to be subversive. Blah blah blah. C’mon guys, get hip to it! [Read more…]

The weirdness runneth over

More censorship weirdness. This time it’s all funny, I promise:

It is not good to accept the person of the wicked, to overthrow the righteous in judgment. A fool’s lips enter into contention, and his mouth calleth for strokes. Sam’s Wholesale Club, a division of Wal-Mart, is doing the Lord’s work by removing a blasphemous book from its shelves, and sadly many reactionary Christians are responding with foolish lips calling for a boycott, not of the book, but of Sam’s Club!

The atheist at the center of the controversy, Brendan Smith, must be laughing all the way to the bank for duping conservatives into opposing a decision by Sam’s to stop selling his book. Why did they fall for the trap? Because Smith called his book “The Brick Bible”. It is a collection of distorted “stories” illustrated with LEGO bricks and characters. Though the book itself openly mocks God and the Bible over and over again, many naïve Christians are so ignorant of the Bible they don’t even see it and are buying the book for their children.

It’s generally poor form to write a blog post about someone else’s blog post about a news item, so I’ll just encourage you to trip on over to Caffeinated Thoughts and read the rest. I wish I could make this shit up, but once again the truth is stranger (and hilarious-er) than fiction.

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When censorship goes weird

Long-time Cromrades will know, given my unabashed free speech stance, that I am decidedly not a fan of censorship. While I recognize that individuals have a right to privacy, I also know that large institutions (be they private or, especially, public) must be held accountable. This means that more transparency is good, and that censorship is bad.

Censorship is especially bad when it is done by large institutions against individual people. Provided that communication does not immediate place lives in danger, or that the speech in question is not slanderous or fraudulent, there is no justifiable reason to censor unpopular speech. In fact, if recent events have shown us anything, it’s that the more attention you draw to something you do not wish seen, the more people look at it out of sheer morbid curiosity.

Often, censorship is disturbing. Occasionally, it is overblown and counterproductive. But sometimes… well sometimes it’s just weird:

[Read more…]

…and sometimes it’s not

Well THAT didn’t last long. My good mood from this morning has officially worn off. How could this have happened so quickly, you ask? Easy: because the people in charge are still unethical, scheming morons who legislate like cavemen and behave like schoolyard bullies.

Lethbridge MP makes shootout gesture during vote

A Conservative MP who made gunshot gestures as he voted to kill the long-gun registry last month says he meant no offence. A clip of Jim Hillyer miming a two-gun shoot-out as he voted was posted on YouTube on Tuesday, which was the anniversary of the Montreal massacre. Hillyer says if people were offended they should blame whoever posted the six-week-old video on the anniversary.

(snip)

“No offence was intended. No one who sincerely looks at the video and the timing of the video would think for a second that I intended offence towards victims of violence. “The people who caused the association, the offence, are the people who connected the video at the wrong day. That is terrible.” [Read more…]

Health care by the numbers

Once again I feel the need to reiterate that my comments about health care are personal opinions only, and do not reflect anyone’s positions but my own.

Part of the reason I am so opposed to the private delivery of health care is that the market tends to work on a principle of caveat emptor – let the buyer beware. The problem with this generally-sound skeptical principle when it is applied to health care is that people are not “buyers” of health care, nor can they said to be “consumers” in the same way as someone walking into a hardware store or restaurant. A hefty proportion of our interactions with the health care system are in times of crisis, meaning that it is unreasonable to expect us to do the kind of cold, rational calculus that one might expect of someone choosing a realtor or a bottle of fine scotch.

Congruent with this issue of need-based service consumption is the incredibly high bar of education required to understand how the health care system works. Most people are capable of understanding a basic supply chain, and can usually navigate the hoops needed to ensure they don’t get screwed on a car loan or a warranty on their stereo (although not always, which is why we have consumer advocacy and protection groups). The kind of education needed to understand health care is, to put it mildly, extensive. Regardless of which country you live in, health care systems are often fragmented and convoluted. Even those who work within the system have difficulties navigating it – how could a lay person possibly expect to do better? This question becomes more acutely important when you consider the fact that those laypeople are in crisis while trying to do it.

It is for this reason that we are best served when treatment decisions are made based on the evidence, as interpreted by people who are educated enough to understand it. While it seems unfair that your medical care might be guided by someone you’ve never met, it is far preferable than being pressured into decisions you don’t understand – particularly at a time when you are particularly vulnerable to either manipulation by outside agendas that may not have your best interest in mind, or when you are psychologically less able to make rational, informed choices. While patients must have the right to make the ultimate choice about their care, we are best served as individuals and as a system when the choices available to us are based on the best evidence rather than our own ‘best guesses’.

Well, maybe not if you ask this guy: [Read more…]

Nation will rise against Nations

It is difficult to be Canadian sometimes. We pride ourselves (well, most of us at least) on being tolerant, forward-thinking people. Part of our national neurotic need to be seen as distinct from our American cousins pushes us to be more collective, more restrained, more self-effacing; a contrast to the stereotype of our indvidualistic, brash and assertive southern neighbours.

The reason this stance is difficult is because of the cognitive dissonance present in seeing ourselves as progressive and inclusive, and yet becoming increasingly aware of the abhorrent way we have treated our most-maligned minority group: First Nations and other aboriginal people. Whereas slavery is America’s admitted national shame, Canada has not yet donned the sackcloth and ash required to atone for our past (and current) sins. We saw a dramatic manifestation of those sins this morning.

It is not enough to simply allocate increased funding to First Nations communities, or to issue public apologies for past mistakes (although both of those are helpful in their own way). We need to instead change the narrative we have about the relationship between the nation of Canada and its First Nations across the country. High-profile discussions like this may yield some hope: [Read more…]

Counting down from infinity

I had an… interesting visit from what I assume was a creationist about a week ago. I like it when theists show up here. It gives me a chance to practice diplomacy as opposed to my usual unrestrained polemic, which I like to alternate with dismissive mockery when the occasion requires. At first he showed up in the comments of a post that had absolutely nothing to do with anything, so I redirected him to a more appropriate post.

When I was offered the chance to “go first” (a really really bad idea) as to why I thought there were no gods, I expressed my conclusion that, given the available evidence, I could not see anything in the universe that looked like design only explainable through an intelligent agent. Since any theistic belief is predicated on supernatural intervention, I can’t accept any of the downstream conclusions of theism.

I also asked him to agree to abide by some simple rules: don’t skip off when your arguments are refuted, don’t expect me to accept scripture as a reliable source of information, and finally don’t use articles of faith in place of reasoned argument. He agreed to abide by those rules (and I have the folks at The Atheist Experience to thank for that list), which was probably another tactical mistake for him, but he does get kudos from me for being plucky. [Read more…]

The inherent racism of “Tough on Crime”

I’ve talked about the need for diversity before, as a way of making policy more effective. When you have a plurality of voices articulating their position, you stand a better chance of hearing new ideas. Diverse groups may be more unwieldy, but they are far less limited in scope than homogenous groups because a variety of perspectives are providing input. There is another reason why diversity is important though: it makes us less stupid. Because any in-group is going to subject to its own biases and privilege, the inclusion of diverse voices helps safeguard a movement from being self-serving, or worse, inadvertently harming another group.

It is fairly clear, based on this response, that the Prime Minister’s Office did not have a particularly diverse group building their absolutely moronic crime bill:

A University of Toronto law professor says a new federal crime bill chips away at sentencing provisions that require judges to consider all reasonable alternatives to jail. This, said Kent Roach, will only increase the over-representation of Aboriginal people in the criminal justice system.

“We’re going to have a future where one in every four people in prison are aboriginal,” he said. “And we’re going to have a future where perhaps more aboriginal people are going to go to jail than to university.”

Nearly half of the inmates in some Canadian prisons are Aboriginal people. That’s despite the fact they make up less than three per cent of the general population.

So, funny story. It turns out that when you take away the ability of judges to… well… judge, they also lose the ability to factor in the causes of crime and the best interest of not only the criminal defendant, but society at large. Poverty and crime are inherently linked. Not all crimes, to be sure, are caused by poverty. One would have to stretch the definition of ‘poverty’ pretty thin to claim that Bernie Madoff was impoverished, but the types of violent and property crime that the omnibus crime bill are supposedly targeting is linked to poverty. [Read more…]

I don’t believe in ‘agnostics’

As someone who believes strongly in his opinions, and who doesn’t shy away from debate, I often find myself having heated discussions with friends. They’re not always about atheism (in fact they rarely are), but they often end up back at the same point: “look, you believe that, but other people disagree – I think there’s truth on both sides.” They seem to think this is some kind of profoundly meaningful truth that I, in my zeal, couldn’t possibly comprehend. “Here I am,” they say “happily ensconced in my island of neutrality, not dirtying myself by having an opinion on something.”

I’m not a big fan of theists as a group, but I have a great deal of respect for honest ones who are at least willing to expose their beliefs to scrutiny and will drop a bad argument once it’s been exposed as fallacious. There’s precious few of those around, but when I find them I go out of my way to express my appreciation. I hold those kinds of people in much higher esteem than I do self-proclaimed “agnostics” who are just soooo over the whole religion question. Indeed, there are few people I have more contempt for than someone who archly sits on the sidelines, piping up only long enough to shit on people on both sides for being so crass as to believe in something being true or not.

First, I would be remiss if I didn’t clear up an important issue of semantics. Atheism is a response to a claim: that there is a god. If you are going to classify yourself with respect to the god question, simply ask yourself “do I believe in a supernatural entity responsible for the creation of the universe that involves itself in human affairs?” If the answer is anything besides “yes”, then you are an atheist. If your answer is “I believe that there is some kind of superior intelligence out there responsible for the universe, but not one as defined in any religious tradition” then you might describe yourself as a deist, provided you also believe that this ‘intelligence’ doesn’t interact with humans in a meaningful way. Deism is incredibly lazy, but whatever I don’t care. [Read more…]

How do you know when you’re wrong?

Well there’s no definitive answer to this, but it’s a pretty safe bet you are if you’re considered too conservative for Texas:

Conservatives in the United States’ toughest crime-fighting jurisdiction — Texas — say the Harper government’s crime strategy won’t work. “You will spend billions and billions and billions on locking people up,” says Judge John Creuzot of the Dallas County Court. “And there will come a point in time where the public says, ‘Enough!’ And you’ll wind up letting them out.” Adds Representative Jerry Madden, a conservative Republican who heads the Texas House Committee on Corrections, “It’s a very expensive thing to build new prisons and, if you build ’em, I guarantee you they will come. They’ll be filled, OK? Because people will send them there. “But, if you don’t build ’em, they will come up with very creative things to do that keep the community safe and yet still do the incarceration necessary.”

I’ve spoken before about the terrible clusterfuck of ideas that is the incoming omnibus crime bill. It’s a mishmash of ideas, some of which are good, most of which are bad. Legal authorities, criminal law enforcement, opposition MPs, pretty much everyone who knows what they’re talking about when it comes to crime, they’ve all said that it’s a bad idea. Then again, our mighty ruling party has demonstrated repeatedly that it is relatively indifferent to outside criticism.

Until, apparently, they went to Texas. It’s not a trivial issue – arguments that work in Texas work for the Republican North party’s base. If there was anywhere that this type of bill should receive a warm welcome, it’s in “common sense” Texas. The only criticism one would be likely to expect is that Canada’s crime bill, coming from the great socialist north, would be seen as a bit “soft on crime”.

The problem is that Texas has about a 10-year crystal ball look into the future to know that this kind of approach just doesn’t work: [Read more…]