They liked the Dawkins/Krauss road trip movie, ‘The Unbelievers’. It’s getting a one week long showing in New York? That’s all? I wonder how long we’ll get it in Morris. (Not really. There’s no way it would play here.)
I suppose I’ve got to wait for it to come out on Netflix.
Bill O’Reilly, as he always does this time of year, was ramping up this War on Christmas nonsense again. He’s peeved at the new billboard display from American Atheists in Times Square.
American Atheists launched a major billboard display on Tuesday that declares Christmas is better without the Christ. The huge 40′x40′ digital billboard is located in Times Square in Midtown Manhattan. Using motion graphics, the billboard proclaims, “Who needs Christ during Christmas?” A hand crosses out the word “Christ” and the word “NOBODY” appears. The display then says “Celebrate the true meaning of Xmas” and offers a series of cheery words: family, friends, charity, food, snow, and more. The commercial ends with a jovial “Happy Holidays!” from American Atheists and displays the organization’s website, atheists.org.“This season is a great time of year for a hundred reasons—none of them having to do with religion,” said American Atheists President David Silverman. “This year, start a new tradition: Don’t go to church. You hate it, it’s boring; you probably only go because you feel guilty or obligated. Instead, spend more time with your family and friends—or volunteer. There are better uses of your time and money.”
Ed Brayton jokes that O’Reilly should have invited him on to talk about it — he would have engaged in some merciless needling that would have annoyed the old windbag. It would have been nice, but no, no way was that going to happen; it would have been even better if David Silverman had been invited on…not only more appropriate, but Silverman is good at standing his ground and punching back. But no. O’Reilly brought on…
Chris Stedman.
He was awful. Well, from my perspective he was awful — O’Reilly seemed to think he was just wonderful, since Stedman was largely agreeing with him. O’Reilly showed part of the billboard, the bit where is it says “Who needs Christ during Christmas? Nobody,” and then cut away to O’Reilly asking Stedman what he thought about it. He replied that they were “not contributing to the destigmatization of atheists,” and later he said that he completely agreed, and he wanted “to see more of yes of atheism than the no of atheism.”
I can guess exactly how Silverman would have responded: by pointing out that the primary message of the billboard was the importance of this season as a family holiday, which certainly is the “yes of atheism”. Stedman either didn’t do his homework or was more interested in ingratiating himself with a far right blustering jerk, and decided instead to see if the snow tires on the bus could bounce over a few atheists.
O’Reilly was pulling his usual schtick, claiming that atheists are bitter, that they sue schools if they have the temerity to let a kid sing a Christmas carol, and whining that Macy’s department store brought in a Santa Claus and didn’t announce that it was Christmas. Why can’t those atheists just leave Christmas alone, he begged.
Most of these claims of atheists hating Christmas are lies, and the criticisms groups like the FFRF levy against schools and other state institutions aren’t that kids shouldn’t be allowed to pray or sing hymns if they want, but that these schools cannot selectively privilege only the Christian religion. Stedman was totally ineffective.
Further, when O’Reilly says “What I’m seeing here is an amazing amount of anger from atheists” and “I don’t really know what they are angry about”, when the angry ranter here is O’Reilly and the atheists aren’t expressing any anger at all, Stedman feebly goes along with it and agrees with the stupid host. I guess he’s hoping for a repeat invitation.
If Stedman and the Harvard Humanists want to put up a friendly, cheerful, unchallenging milquetoast sign, they are welcome to do so, and I won’t have a problem with it. I do have a big problem when a representative of the Harvard Humanists goes on the air to deny the righteous, forthright words of a less weasely organization, and when they are so ineffectual that they can’t even raise a word of rebuttal against the BS Bill O’Reilly lays on so thickly — familiar, tired BS that anyone going on the show ought to be prepared to slap down. It’s not as if he ambushed Stedman with a weird new claim.
Stedman is too feeble, and maybe Ed Brayton would be a touch too acerbic. If they can’t get Silverman to go on, may I recommend Rob Boston, instead? He wouldn’t let the bogosity fly by with a smile and a laugh. Anyone but Stedman.
I think I want these kids to handle O’Reilly.
via MamaAtheist
I think we’re all tired of the War on Christmas. The atheists have won; it’s officially a secular, federal holiday, the capitalists promote it as a consumerist orgy of mass consumption, most people see it as a nice time of year to get together with friends and family, and this Jesus guy, as always, is superfluous. But like the Japanese soldiers occasionally found holed up on remote Pacific islands, there’s Bill O’Reilly, dug in and flailing. Apparently, we have some grand plan to destroy Christmas so we can win entitlements and get gay married and have lots of abortions.
Give it up, O’Reilly. You’re just sounding increasingly deranged. War’s over.
I quite like this sentiment:
But of course, Bill O’Reilly would see that as oppressive and atheistic, because it doesn’t elevate his “Judeo-Christian” values to an exalted position.
Just to spite O’Reilly, this year I’m going to have two Christmases, one with the youngest daughter and middle son in Boulder, and another with the oldest son in St Cloud. Nyah.
Jonny Scaramanga has posted a sampling of quiz questions from Accelerated Christian Education. Take a look, and ask yourself, “Am I smarter than a fundamentalist Christian taught from a home-school curriculum developed by fanatics in Texas?”
You will be reassured by the fact that yes, you are. Much smarter. Although after reading the questions, you might be a little less smart than you were five minutes before.
You’ll need all your smarts when you face the truly terrifying question: who thinks the ACE curriculum is an acceptable educational standard for the 21st century?
In the United Kingdom, UK NARIC has deemed qualifications based on ACE to be comparable to A-level. Ofsted routinely whitewashes ACE schools in reports, and ACE nurseries teaching creationism receive government funding.
In New Zealand, ACE qualifications are accepted for university entrance.
In the USA, ACE’s Lighthouse Christian Academy is accredited by MSA-CESS. The curriculum is used in givernment-funded creationist voucher programs in eleven states.
In South Africa, based on HESA’s recommendation, a number of universities have signed up to accept ACE graduates.
ACE says its curriculum is used in 192 countries and 6000 schools worldwide. This is happening nearer than you think.
They want to dumbify everybody.
Salon has published another of those articles — you know, the ones where some clueless ignoramus presents his biased interpretation of what atheism means and then proceeds to flog the New Atheists for their imagined sins. This time, it’s Sean McElwee bashing away at What Hitchens got wrong: Abolishing religion won’t fix anything. And here’s his premise:
The fundamental error in the “New Atheist” dogma is one of logic. The basic premise is something like this:
1. The cause of all human suffering is irrationality
2. Religion is irrational
3. Religion is the cause of all human suffering
The “New Atheist” argument gives religion far, far too much credit for its ability to mold institutions and shape politics, committing the classic logical error of post hoc ergo propter hoc — mistaking a cause for its effect.
Tellingly, he can’t quote any prominent New Atheist say any such thing — or for that matter, any atheist at all — but he does quote a reporter from the Independent, Bernard Lewis, and Terry Eagleton on the wickedness of Hitchens, and of course Hitchens himself was rather bellicose and I concede that he might have promoted some hyperbole…but I don’t know of any specific quotes, and certainly no one I know follows that illogical chain of reasoning above.
I’d also agree that abolishing religion (wait, does any reasonable atheist propose abolishing religion?) would not fix everything, but educating people away from irrationality would certainly fix some things. We have a more moderate vision of the affliction that is religion than McElwee credits us with, but at least we can still recognize some legitimate distinctions, unlike him.
The impulse to destroy religion will ultimately fail. Religion is little different from Continental philosophy or literature (which may explain the hatred of Lacan and Derrida among Analytic philosophers). It is an attempt to explain the deprivations of being human and what it means to live a good life. Banish Christ and Muhammad and you may end up with religions surrounding the works of Zizek and Sloterdijk (there is already a Journal of Zizek Studies, maybe soon a seminary?). Humans will always try to find meaning and purpose in their lives, and science will never be able to tell them what it is. This, ultimately is the meaning of religion, and “secular religions” like philosophy and literature are little different in this sense than theology. Certainly German philosophy was distorted by madmen just as Christianity has been in the past, but atheists fool themselves if they try to differentiate the two.
So religion is just like philosophy and literature, and philosophy and literature are just instances of this peculiarly vague monstrous amalgam McElwee wants to call “religion”? Do science, philosophy, and literature have at their heart an unevidenced concept that defies everything we know of reality, an elaborate and ultimately nonsensical premise around which theologians build intricate fantasies that contradict one another and all human experience?
The man libels philosophy and literature, and puffs up myths and lies with a credibility they do not deserve. For shame.
Gwen Pearson makes a really good point about the Ark Park: there has been virtually no thought put into animal care, and it’s an abuse scene waiting to happen.
I’ve helped manage and care for a wide assortment of wild and domestic animals, big and small, over the course of my career. There is a HUGE amount of paperwork, documentation, and inspections involved in having captive animals. It is, frankly, a gigantic pain in the ass, and the animals are healthier and receive better care because of all the annoying, complex rules. That’s why the Ark project set off all sorts of alarm bells in my head.
Keeping animals in captivity is really, really difficult. By gathering animals together in an artificial environment you concentrate all the poop and pee, and just make it easier for diseases to rapidly spread. (Got a kid in daycare? You know exactly what I’m talking about.)
As caretakers we have an ethical duty to provide captive animals with the food and environment they need to stay healthy. Doing that takes specialized knowledge. If you have raptors or game birds, they can get bumblefoot just from the wrong kind of perches. Feeding an imbalanced diet, or just not noticing a raptor is off its food, can tip a bird into a metabolic crash. Ducks can get a fatal type of herpes.
And they’re doing everything backwards! They originally planned to stock their fake ark with a menagerie, and are now backing off and plan to use some live animals and a mix of animatronic and stuffed animals now, but this is exactly the reverse of what you do in setting up a facility that will contain live animals:
Those were some early ideas about how we’re going to lay things out, and we are going to fine tune those as we get the final plans back from the architects. The architects are planning the building, lighting, air conditioning, ventilation. Once that is done, then our display design team will take those plans… we have 132 bays that we’ll have available for exhibits.
Wait…they’re planning the ventilation first, and then they’ll think about how to shove animals into their 132 bays? How many ways can that go wrong?
I guess it’s only to be expected from idiots so remote from biology that they’ll design a zoo based on a few paragraphs of mythology in a religious text.
For those of you not imbedded in the academic bureaucracy, “IACUC” is “Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee”, an organization that oversees appropriate and ethical care of laboratory animals.
Read this excellent long form expose of James Arthur Ray, the New Age guru who had been promoted by Oprah and who then ended up scamming swarms of people and killing a few of them in a ridiculous sweat lodge ceremony.
Or watch the video.
Or do both!
Daytime talk shows do a really good job of pandering to gullible people and elevating con artists like Ray as “spiritual leaders”. Oprah has been pushing phonies and frauds for years, poisoning the citizenry with nonsense…and getting obscenely rich in the process.
But I think a movie about it could be interesting. If you’ve never heard of it, Sedona is kind of the epicenter of a whole webwork of New Age nuttiness — it’s what you get when liberals go full-on faith-head.
Carrie Poppy, Brian Thompson, and Adam Isaak are running a kickstarter to make an expose of the whole silly mess. If you’re feeling nice, it’s an opportunity to help them get a nice camera and some travel expenses; if you’re one of those mean skeptics, look at it as donating to send them off to get a colonic irrigation on camera. Win-win!
OK, so that Daily Mail piece that talked about my refutation of the MFAP hypothesis — the idea that humans are ape-pig hybrids — has been getting a fair amount of attention. The article actually did quote me tearing into the idea fairly thoroughly, although it did also give far too much attention to a crackpot, but here’s the thing: the media doesn’t care that much what I said, it’s all the kook nonsense driving the reporting.
For example, Jennifer Raff heard it on Alex Jones’ radio show. Jones is a wacky, hateful, loud-mouthed conspiracy theorist, and what is he talking about? Not that there are good explanations for human evolution, but that a kook with a ridiculous idea has demolished the theory of evolution.
What really drew my interest in the subject was the way Alex Jones discussed the news article. He called Eugene McCarthy a “top geneticist” and an “expert”, and while rightly dismissing the hypothesis as idiotic, he implied that it was in line with the current scientific consensus on human origins: that evidence was increasingly disproving evolution as an explanation. Instead, alternative ideas, such as an Intelligent Designer (Jones kept calling it “aliens” and mentioning the movie “Prometheus”) were becoming mainstream explanations for human origins, and this chimp-pig hybridization idea was yet another example. Framing the story in this way, he went on to say that “They (scientists) have no idea what they’re doing” (quote paraphrased from my memory), and therefore evolution is nonsense. And he’s not alone. The creationist/Intelligent Design site Uncommon Descent also dismisses McCarthy’s hypothesis while simultaneously dismissing “neo-Darwinism”
Raff goes on to list all the red flags thrown on McCarthy’s loony hypothesis, which ought to get any reasonable journalist to immediately question and reject the idea. But the lesson I’m seeing from the differential attention given to my explanation and McCarthy’s is that I clearly did not throw enough red flags.
So I’m pointing out that a Christian, conservative, dominant minority is conspiring to suppress my radical idea that evolution, a natural process, has generated all the diversity of life on earth, and that as a top expert authority I plan to lead a revolution in scientific thinking. I know that’s a wild claim and that I’ll probably be pilloried by the mainstream establishment, but I’ve just got to get past the scientific gatekeepers to bring this secret knowledge to the masses.
Alex Jones, call me. We’ll talk.
So I watched this show with Anderson Cooper’s name on it; he didn’t bother to show up, so maybe he has some sense of shame. It was dreadful. It was three anecdotes about people who had experienced serious trauma, and then invented lovely narratives about a happy afterlife to make themselves feel better, or to justify their prior religious beliefs. There was no fact-checking. It was just these three women getting interviewed and telling unverifiable accounts of events that happened while they were unconscious.
First woman: She claims to have “died” in a kayaking accident in Chile. Her kayak was pinned underwater by a rock; she describes all of her sensations, including her legs breaking when her friends dislodged the boat and she was torn free by the current. Her friends were frantic, yet she’s happy to claim that they accurately described the passage of time, and that she was under water and deprived of oxygen for 30 minutes. She said she “gave herself up to god”, was visiting spirits/angels/whatever while resuscitation was attempted, and that she had a conversation with Jesus who told her she had to go back to take care of her husband. Her husband was later diagnosed with lung cancer. Thanks, Jesus! Also, she’s flogging a book
Verdict: completely unverified account of a “death”. This was a religious woman who experienced a serious trauma, and who had also experienced the death of a child and wanted to believe that there was a purpose to life. It was a wish-fulfillment fantasy.
CNN’s verdict: “Amazing”. Not one word of doubt about anything in the account.
Christian Mingles is advertising on this show, of course.
Second woman: Child growing up in Hong Kong, of Indian descent. A friend dies of cancer, and she becomes paranoid; she later is diagnosed herself with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. She deteriorates under treatment, and later lapses into a coma. Claims to have heard doctors talking while she was in a coma, and that they said she was going to die within 24 hours. She was, she said, “in another world” where she felt peace, and her dead friends were all there. Dead people told her to go back and live, so she did.
She recovered consciousness, cancer goes into remission, she’s still alive. In fact, nothing in her account said she died at all.
Verdict: A lot of story telling and confabulation. Nothing remarkable in the story at all; Hodgkin’s has a roughly 80+% 5 year survival rate, and she was apparently getting good medical care.
CNN’s verdict: Accepted every bit of it without reservation. No attempt to verify any of the claimed facts, not that there was anything particularly unusual about it.
Third woman: Has a son with a serious heart condition. He and his mother engaged in a fair bit of Jesus talk. One day he collapses and is hospitalized, and claims to see a bright light and an angel. Later he collapses at his school again, and claims to have been in a good place and not wanting to come back. But “he came back for a reason”. The family does a lot of praying and bible reading. Then the son dies on Christmas day. He doesn’t come back.
Verdict: Absolutely nothing remarkable or unexplainable. No evidence of much of anything presented.
CNN’s verdict: Ends with a clip of a video of the dead boy holding up a sign saying he believes in god and angels.
Overall assessment: Gullible dreck, lots of fantasizing, no evidence presented of much of anything, and no critical thinking from the reporters at all. A disgrace.
I didn’t believe a word of it. There’s only one comment on the show website, and Randy didn’t believe it, either, but for rather different reasons.
This is all a liar, heaven is a holy place and those that Enter must be born again of the water and of the spirit, those that have excepted Jesus as their personal savior and have been born again of the baptism of the Holy Ghost will make it in.
I despair.
