Taslima has the news: experts in Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, and Iceland are proposing a complete ban on circumcisions of all types. Unfortunately, it’s a little premature to say it will happen: what we have right now is a group of ombudsmen for children, paediatricians, and paediatric surgeons passing a resolution at a meeting. There is no law yet.
But it certainly makes sense. Hacking up babies’ crotches is perverse and bizarre and unnecessary.
Ken Ham is promoting this goofy exercise in special effects by Eric Hovind, a movie that claims to portray the 6 creation days of Genesis by throwing money at the CGI folks. Now Ham is quite irate that Silverman is intolerant of the movie. Just look at the wickedness Silverman spouts:
“I’m not at all surprised at this kind of support,” said David Silverman, president of American Atheists. “As we have seen in nearly every religion in world history, indoctrinated victims of religion will do anything, including pay large sums of money, to have their antiquated beliefs of immortality validated. Flashy movies may make Christians feel like there is validity to the myth that they are immortal, covering up the known and proven truth with special effects.”
Waaaait. Intolerance would be if Silverman were to use all the funds at American Atheists’ disposal to crush Eric Hovind, or was calling for a world-wide boycott of all of Hovindiana. But opining that the movie is ridiculous and self-serving, and that Christians will dump buckets of money on it? That isn’t intolerant at all. That’s just expressing an opinion (and an accurate opinion at that.)
That’s what scares me about the Christian right. They have a definition of intolerance that repudiates any disagreement with Christianity at all — when they can see a comment that simply says there is soon to exist a silly movie that uses special effects to patch over Christian insecurities, and then regard it as an intolerant act, you can imagine the depths of persecution they would execute if they had any more power.
How does a science teacher handle a kid with the “were you there?” argument? Like a champ.
Ray Comfort, king of non sequiturs and nonsensical arguments, is at it again. Apparently our menus are dictated by God.
Ray Comfort: There was a big fuss recently in Sweden about lasagna and burgers containing horse meat. Sweden is atheist heaven, and so there shouldn’t be any hard and fast table manners—other than “if it tastes good, eat it.” So why aren’t cats and horses on restaurant menus in most countries? It’s because Judeo/Christian nations base what is right and wrong to eat on the rules God gave to the Jews. But if atheism has its way, we can expect restaurants to expand their menus to include eagle-wings, double-double whale burgers, fresh cat casseroles, and tasty little kitten fingers. When any nation forsakes God, it defaults to mob rule (what society dictates) and that can go anywhere it wants.
If America bases what is right and wrong to eat on God’s rules, what are we to say about bacon, mussels, crab, pork chops, catfish, calamari, baby back ribs, steamed butter clams, ham, lobster, pork loin, and oysters? And you know that the avoidance of eating horse meats is primarily a habit in English speaking countries, and that many other European countries have no problem with it (although it may be regarded as a low quality meat, since horses aren’t typically raised for slaughter — they have too many other uses)?
Rabbits and squirrels are also not kosher, but we don’t have any other proscriptions against eating them.
We don’t eat cats and dogs, not because the Bible says we can’t, but because we’re uncomfortable with eating pets. I mean, come on, unless you’re orthodox Jewish or a member of a few other sects that takes Old Testament dietary laws very seriously, food preferences are determined by a broader cultural tradition and we simply ignore antique religious demands entirely. When you get rid of phony god rules, you get to make eating decisions based on flavor, availability, and ethics, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
Besides, everyone knows that when we fully forsake the gods, we default to veganism.
New Ulm is a town in Minnesota. It hosts Martin Luther College (MLC), which, as you might guess from the name, is a religious school. An acting group in New Ulm planned to put on the play “Inherit the Wind”, but now they won’t be — MLC refused to allow them to use any of their facilities for practice, and also pressured the actors to drop out because evolution is contrary to their teachings.
MLC is the college of ministry for the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod (WELS), which believes in creationism that teaches the Genesis story as a factual, historical account. Schone said MLC was concerned about making it absolutely clear to its students, WELS members and the public about its beliefs and teachings on creationism. He said he recognizes the subtext of the play, but feels it is unfairly critical of creationism and that most people would only see the criticism.
"We felt it was not compatible with what [the school] teaches the Bible says about the universe and the world,"? said Schone. "This is a ministerial school. People employing our students need confidence about their views."
It is not unfairly critical to the bankrupt fairy tale of creationism, it is unfairly generous. I really like that last line, though. Apparently, one of MLC’s selling points is that they work hard to keep their students safely and confidently ignorant of any perspective outside the Wisconsin synod’s accepted interpretations.
That’s not an education. That’s carefully nurtured stupidity.
We all know that the creationists have been busily trying to redefine science so that they can call Bible-based faith that the earth is 6000 years old “science”, while empirical research and validated theories are relabeled “dogma”. But now they’re going to reach deeper into the educational process and redefine “knowledge”.
While most of us think that it is ignorance that needs to be stamped out, advocates of Kentucky’s new unapproved and forcibly implemented science standards are targeting … knowledge.
Just take a gander at the responses to my opinion piece in the Louisville Courier-Journal which were published on Monday. According to Brad Matthews, former director of curriculum and assessment for the Jefferson County Public Schools, one reason we need these unapproved and forcibly implement standards is to extirpate that bane of all modern permissivist educators: memorization.
"Science education has moved away from the memorization of many facts," says Matthews, "and toward understanding how the laws and principles of science are applied."
That’s right: students have memorized too many facts. Their heads are bursting with scientific facts. There is not enough room in their tiny little brains for an understanding of how these facts should be applied because all the room us currently taken up by scientific facts which these students have memorized. There is simply no space in those fact-crowded little heads for scientific concepts.
The solution is obvious to people like Matthews: clear all that knowledge out of there so they will be able to apply the knowledge they will no longer have under these standards.
Knowledge is now the rote memorization of “facts”, and educators who try to get students to understand concepts are now enemies of knowledge. I’m sure the taskmasters who run madrassas are now nodding their heads in complete agreement.
Brad Matthews’ statement is entirely reasonable, and does not warrant one iota of the hyperbole Cothran applies to it. The worst classes in the world are the ones where we sit students down and force them to memorize strings of data and then regurgitate them onto an exam. That does not imply that kids shouldn’t have to master some basic rote skills; sorry, gang, knowing your times tables is still important as a basic life skill.
But you still have to understand how to apply that knowledge. For instance, in cell biology, I expect my students to memorize the structure of a peptide bond (that’s not hard) and the basic properties of the classes of amino acids (only slightly harder), and we talk about some basic chemical reactions, like hydrolysis. They should be able to figure out how you break a peptide bond, without memorizing all the pairwise combinations of amino acids and how they’re split chemically. Once you know the general principle you can apply it everywhere!
Also, if you’re learning science, you have to learn how to fit new facts into an existing body of knowledge, and memorization won’t cut it.
What these guys are really afraid of is that deep ideas like evolution are natural inferences from all the data and facts floating around in science — if you learn how to think, you’ll inevitably figure out that creationism is bullshit, evolution actually works and makes sense, and that all those religious cranks have been lying to us. So in defense they want to truncate education: memorize what we already know (and even that they will tightly circumscribe), but don’t you dare teach kids how to think.
So I got this email. I think it’s sincere. Can you answer it?
Dear PZ,
I’ve lurked since forever at Pharyngula, and wanted to ask so many questions, but feared ridicule and contempt. I wish there were room for folks like me at FTB.
I’m what you could call an extreme agnostic, and to the bone, a secular humanist. To keep peace in the family, I do not advertise. But here it is…I still find myself, in moments of extreme stress, essentially falling back on the “prayer” release.
As in, “Dear God, if you do actually exist, and you are not actually an irrational, misogynist, kill-happy sociopath, could you please do something about X?”
How does a non-believer get past this NEED to do something, anything…when there really is nothing that can be done at all?
Thank You for your time.
She also sent a picture.
There should be room for people in transition to full-blown raging atheism, especially for people with an appreciation of the tentacle esthetic, so let’s try to do better, ‘k?
But my answer to the question would be…don’t worry about it. I’m not going to judge someone’s atheistical purity when they’re lost in despair or fear, and I can sympathize with someone who wants to reach out to someone, anyone for help, and is so desperate that they’re even calling on imaginary help. It’s a reflection of how we are brought up, not our intellectual capacity, and of our current straits, not our rationality.
Speaking for myself, I was cured by cynicism. That imaginary help never answers, and it always seems to be real world people who do right by me (which also says that maybe one way people could be cured of this belief is if other people did a better job of helping). I don’t call on a god for the same reason I don’t call on the Blue Fairy or Optimus Prime — I’m pretty dang sure they’re not going to show up. They’re fictional characters.
But if you’re in trouble, and you whisper a little prayer, and some atheist overhears…they should be more focused on helping you out of your trouble than chastising you for a common cultural tic. If they aren’t, they’re a bad human being and you should just ignore them.
This is an interesting clip of Tzortzis first rebuking Lawrence Krauss for his lack of an objective morality in admitting that there are certain conditions under which he could not condemn incest, and then, in a different debate, Tzortzis defending sex with children and rationalizing the lack of a taboo in the Qu’ran against it.
It’s so hypocritical, and so lacking in a rational morality. Krauss’s argument has a clear foundation in mutual consent and a lack of harm; we should not prohibit private actions of consenting adults that do not cause harm to others.
Tzortzis tries to claim that the Qu’ran uses similar principles in accommodating sex with children, by claiming that it should only be done when the child is physically and emotionally ready. But he ignores the concept of consent, and in fact flouts it when one of his points in favor of some cases of child marriage is that the father was willing to give away the child. And of course he doesn’t bother to mention the disturbing fact that he’s not discussing cases of kids exploring their sexuality together (I suspect he’d be dead set against that), but of grasping old men taking ownership of little girls and using them as sex toys.
I know I’m notorious for complaining about those goofy definitions of atheism (“it just means “not believing in god”, nothing more!”, the superficial mob will say) because the word has acquired much deeper resonances that we ignore at our peril, and has implications far greater than simple rejection of one assertion. But the other word that people love to abuse is “freethought”. The same superficial twits all think it means simply that you’re allowed to think whatever you want (which, it turns out, you can do even in a theocracy) and that it’s a kind of hedonism of the mind in which all things are permissible.
It’s not. It’s a word with a long history, a real meaning, and a greater substance than the poseurs know of. Alex Gabriel does a marvelous job scouring the ignoramuses on the meaning of freethought.
Objections to Freethought‘s place in our masthead are among the laziest, glibbest soundbites our critics have, but more than that display a failure to grasp even the term’s most basic history. Freethought is not ‘free thought’ or uninhibited inquiry – to think so boasts the same green literalism as thinking a Friends’ Meeting House is a shared beach hut or that Scotch pancakes contain Scotch – though even if it were, it’s silly and inane to assume one’s critics are automatons or say loose collective viewpoints mean dictatorship. Freethought is a specified tradition, European in the main, whose constituents have by and large been countercultural, radical and leftist, everything Condell and cohorts viscerally despise.
I am so fed up with people who say that they understand the meaning of the word “free” and the meaning of the word “thought”, and therefore they understand everything they need to know about “freethought”. And these are often the same people who claim that their tradition is one of knowledge and learning and skepticism, yet they want to replace the complex world of knowledge with a kind of naive literalism.
I got a strange email the other day.
Dear Troller
Dear Dr Myers, I note that you are trolling our work Please find attached a copy of our SPIE paper which we gave in San Diego. I would welcome the opportunity to give a talk at you Institution so that you, with all your infinite wisdom, could shoot me down in flames and make a fool of me. However, I doubt that you have the balls ! Professor Milton Wainwright
“Trolling” their work? And who the heck is Milton Wainwright? And then I looked at the paper and realized…
Earlier this week, someone had told me that there was another loony “organisms from space” paper touted as proof that British scientists had discovered alien life published in that joke journal, the Journal of Cosmology by this guy Wainwright, and I admit it, I took a quick look at his goofy blog. But that’s it! All I did was read it! I didn’t comment or write about it here!
For a moment I had this terrible thought that maybe the crackpots have finally figured out how to read our minds.
But then I realized that these guys get so little attention paid to them that they probably carefully scrutinize their tiny little referer logs, and they noticed that someone from Morris, Minnesota stopped by, and obviously, since I’m the sole inhabitant of this eerily empty ghost town on the prairie, it must have been me.
So now merely reading their work is trolling.
Well, now I guess I’m obligated to follow through. I had read their paper and decided it was more of the same ol’, same ol’ and hadn’t said anything then, but I’m willing to summarize it.
It’s crap.
The data collection is fine. They’re lofting balloons into the stratosphere, and at a designated altitude, are opening a trap that allows dust, debris, small organisms, and so forth to settle and adhere to EM stubs. Then the trap is closed, the balloon descends, and they put the stubs on the electron microscope and see what is floating around in the atmosphere.
So far, so good. The problem lies in the interpretation. They’re then sorting the material observed into known vs. unknown, where “known” is clearly material from earth, and “unknown” is immediately categorized as Possible Signs of Extraterrestrial Life. The logic doesn’t work. It makes no sense. You’re looking at low density airborne particles in the atmosphere of a planet; it’s not as if we’ve come even close to categorizing all the particles of terrestrial origin, so you can’t play this game of assigning subsets to some other source outside our world.
The authors also have a bad case of apophenia. Almost every bit of unrecognizable garbage they spot is called “life”. Here is one of their examples.
A, Sheet-like inorganic material recovered from the stratosphere which is clearly not biological; and B, a clump of stratospheric cosmic dust which includes coccoid and rod shaped particles which may, or may not, be bacteria.
So the sheet-like stuff to the left is not biological (how they know that, I don’t know and they don’t tell us — I think it’s “it doesn’t look like it to my untrained eye”), while the amorphous blob to the right may or may not be biological. In other words, the information content in this image is precisely zero. (By the way, that mess on the right doesn’t look at all bacterial to me.)
In other cases they flat out claim that the blob they see is biological.
An unknown biological entity isolated from the stratosphere
Unequivocally biological, no less. How they know, I again don’t know. It seems to be that when they stare at it and do a little subjective pattern matching, they call something a “neck” and something else a “body” — that is, they slap labels on things that conform to their beliefs about the morphology of organisms.
The structure shown in Fig.3 however is unequivocally biological. Here we see a complex organism which has a segmented neck attached to a flask-shaped body which is ridged and has collapsed under the vacuum of the stratosphere or produced during E/M analysis. The top of the neck is fringed with what could be cilia or a fringe which formed the point of attachment of the neck to another biological entity. The complexity of this particle excludes the possibility that is of non-biological in origin.
Complexity does not exclude a non-biological source. Also, just saying that things have names similar to the names we’d give a life form does not support the claim that it is anything other than a subjective interpretation of some debris.
They have another example that demonstrates my point.
A collapsed balloon-like biological entity sampled from the stratosphere. Note the “proboscis” to the left, with nose-like openings and the “sphincter” present at the top of the organism
The structure shown in Fig.4 is also clearly biological in nature; here we see a somewhat phallic balloon-like structure which has presumably collapsed under low pressure. A “proboscis” is seen emerging from the left of the main cell which has two, nostril-like openings. At the top of the collapsed “balloon” is a sphincter-like opening. Again, this entity is clearly biological in nature, and is not an inorganic artefact. Although it is clearly not a bacterium it could well be an alga or a protozoan of some kind. The organisms shown in Figs. 3 and 4 are presumably clear enough for experts in the relevant branches of taxonomy to provide some kind of identification.
Why would an alga or a protist have a proboscis with nostrils? Do they have multiple samples that exhibit a similar shape? Isn’t it more likely to be a random scrap of material, rather than the patterned shape of an organism?
Oh, wait. They missed something: look at that wrinkle at the bottom right of the object. It looks like…a pointy ear. And then there’s the nose, alright, and a robust jaw beneath it. By golly, it’s the tiny decapitated head of a gnome that was less than a tenth of a millimeter tall in life! And its forehead has been bashed in, no doubt in a great battle between microcosmic fairy tribes waged by thrip-mounted cavalry in the skies!
I think that’s a more plausible explanation than the authors’ similarly evidence-free guess that unidentified particles are signs of extraplanetary life.
Also, I thought Journal of Cosmology was defunct — it was up for sale, complete with crude slymepit-style parting shots at me. I guess it’s still dribbling on, providing a forum for the worst and dumbest kinds of pseudoscience.
By the way, Rawn Joseph, former(?) owner of the JoC, appears to have had a rather nasty falling out with Chandra Wickramasinghe, who he accuses of theft and plagiarism.
