A vaccination survey

The survey on vaccination that’s being held up by DJ Grothe is not out yet, but there’s a preliminary summary that was made available. I learned something from even that one page summary: most anti-vaxxers actually do recognize that vaccination is protective, and their opposition is based on widespread misconceptions about side-effects and the evilness of pharmaceutical corporations. There is even a hint about effective strategies to convince reluctant people to vaccinate.

The full results were supposed to be released a year ago. I wonder when we’ll finally get to see them?

You can study the past scientifically

One of the most common rhetorical games creationists play, especially those influenced by those frauds at Answers in Genesis, is to erect a phony distinction between historical science, which they claim is not a science, and observational science, which they claim is the one true kind of science. It’s a way for them to deny claims of events in the past having any credibility unless there is a direct, eye-witness, personal, written account (a restriction they blithely ignore when it comes to things like the first five days of the creation week, or the life of Jesus, which is all by second-hand accounts).

So it’s always useful to collect good summaries of how you certainly can evaluate claims about the past, and how science can legitimately study historical processes. John Wilkins adds some more arguments.

To deny that we can know the past in any sense is not science. It is in effect an admission of failure, but we need not be so pessimistic. For example, we know Caesar crossed the Rubicon with his legions. We might not know how they were dressed or if it was raining that day, but we do know it happened. Likewise, we know the earth is 3.85 billion years old since the surface hardened. The evidence is there, supported by experimental observations.

Oh, those secular ethics

In case you’re interested, DJ Grothe will be speaking at the Midwest Philosophy Colloquium on the University of Minnesota Morris campus next week. I can’t attend; it’s scheduled at the same time as one of our HHMI student research events.

He’s speaking on secular ethics.

By the way, of no possible relevance at all, I’m sure, Grothe is threatening legal action against Women Thinking, Inc., and is holding up publication of a survey on vaccination outreach, because he doesn’t like that someone reported a bad joke that he made. Which he denies.

Secular ethics in action!

Man, am I glad I have a good excuse to not attend that talk. I’m going to enjoy celebrating students’ summer research instead.

Oh, yay! More examples of secular ethics!

Give Kentucky a hand

They need all the help they can get — having a festering boil like the Creation “Museum” in their midst is not conducive to a healthy educational system. They’re trying, though, and the Kentucky Senate education committee is poised to approve some Next Generation Science Standards.

But of course, some nitwit has to raise absurd objections to the fact that the standards include material on evolution and climate change, the two big hot button issues for ignorant conservatives. The nitwit also happens to be the chair of the Senate education committee, Mike Wilson.

Yeah, there’s a fundamental problem right there, that the Kentucky senate puts an idiot climate change and evolution denier in charge of education.

How about if you all flood this petition and get the message across that science must be supported in education…in Kentucky and in every state.

I beseech you in the bowels of Christ, please stop

I’ve strained to pardon Richard Dawkins’ many insensitivities — ‘dear muslima’, the missteps on twitter, the petty snits against other people — but his latest is just a disaster.

In an interview in The Times magazine on Saturday (Sept. 7), Dawkins, 72, he said he was unable to condemn what he called “the mild pedophilia” he experienced at an English school when he was a child in the 1950s.

Referring to his early days at a boarding school in Salisbury, he recalled how one of the (unnamed) masters “pulled me on his knee and put his hand inside my shorts.”

He said other children in his school peer group had been molested by the same teacher but concluded: “I don’t think he did any of us lasting harm.”

“I am very conscious that you can’t condemn people of an earlier era by the standards of ours. Just as we don’t look back at the 18th and 19th centuries and condemn people for racism in the same way as we would condemn a modern person for racism, I look back a few decades to my childhood and see things like caning, like mild pedophilia, and can’t find it in me to condemn it by the same standards as I or anyone would today,” he said.

He said the most notorious cases of pedophilia involve rape and even murder and should not be bracketed with what he called “just mild touching up.”

I can think of some lasting harm: he seems to have developed a callous indifference to the sexual abuse of children. He was a victim of an inexcusable violation; that he can shrug it off does not mean it was OK, or ‘zero bad’, or something trivial.

Should I have raised my children with such a lack of self-respect that they should have allowed dirty old men to play with their genitals? I would have wanted them to inform me, so that such behavior could be stopped.

Just when did it stop being OK for acquaintances to put their hands inside Richard Dawkins shorts? I presume it would be an utterly intolerable act now, of course — at what age do the contents of childrens’ pants stop being public property?

Should we be giving pedophiles the idea that a “mild touching up” is reasonable behavior? It’s just a little diddling…it does no “lasting harm”. Christ, that sounds like something out of NAMBLA.

And that all Richard Dawkins experienced was a brief groping does not mean that greater harm was not being done. That man was a serial child molester; do we know that he didn’t abuse other children to a greater degree? That there aren’t former pupils living now who bear greater emotional scars?

As for that excuse about not judging behavior of an earlier era by our modern standards…I’ve heard that before. From William Lane Craig, to justify biblical murders. Richard Dawkins had this to say about it then.

But Craig is not just a figure of fun. He has a dark side, and that is putting it kindly. Most churchmen these days wisely disown the horrific genocides ordered by the God of the Old Testament. Anyone who criticises the divine bloodlust is loudly accused of unfairly ignoring the historical context, and of naive literalism towards what was never more than metaphor or myth. You would search far to find a modern preacher willing to defend God’s commandment, in Deuteronomy 20: 13-15, to kill all the men in a conquered city and to seize the women, children and livestock as plunder.

We do not excuse harm to others because some prior barbaric age was indifferent to that harm. Furthermore, the excuse doesn’t even work: are we supposed to believe that a child-fondling teacher would have been permissible in the 1950s? Seriously? Was that ever socially acceptable? And even if it was, in some weird version of British history, it does not excuse it. It means British schools were vile nests of child abuse, just like Catholic churches.

Thanks for swapping the moral high ground for a swampy mire of ambiguity, Richard. I’m not going to argue that compelling kids to memorize Bible verses and fear hell, as stupid an excuse for education as that is, was child abuse, while getting manhandled by lascivious priests was a trivial offense, to be waved away as harmless. I’m sure many Catholics are quite gleeful that Richard Dawkins has now embraced the same moral relativism that they use to rationalize crimes against children.

It’s going to be very popular, I fear

I was stunned by Rebecca Watson’s account of the promotion efforts of a new show that looks like a drunk version of Mythbusters. Then I watched a couple of their videos, which were garbage, and I heard this tag line:

You’ll know stuff your friends don’t, which will give you a temporary feeling of superiority, and might just get you laid.

And I thought, that’s brilliant. They’ve identified exactly what the modern skeptical market wants. And it’s all schlubby guys with women in bikinis as props.

The creator, Jon Hotchkiss, has a horrible blog post bragging about his show on HuffPo, and he also reveals his intellectual lineage: he’s worked on a number of shows I’ve never heard of, but also with Bill Maher, Penn & Teller, and Playboy TV. It shows.

I’ll skip it. It’ll probably thrive anyway.

Dangerous nerds

Behold four scary criminals:

Asif Mohiuddin, Subrata Adhikari Shuvo, Moshiur Rahman Biplob and Rasel Parvez

Asif Mohiuddin, Subrata Adhikari Shuvo, Moshiur Rahman Biplob and Rasel Parvez

Their crime:

Yesterday, four Bangladeshi atheist bloggers were indicted for posting derogatory material about Islam and the Prophet Muhammad online. The bloggers, who were first arrested in April, will now face up to 14 years imprisonment and hefty fines. They are the first people to be tried under the country’s new Information Technology Act, which bans the publication of online material that “causes hurt to religious beliefs.”

Wait until they get a load of me. Don’t they realize there is a whole wide world out here that says mean things about Mo?

I’m tired of Fox News Christians

What awful, horrible people. And they’ve got a whole network full of them! Here, they’re commenting on the Massachusetts case to have “under God” removed from the pledge of allegiance.

All the news is about the first woman speaking, but really what astounded me was that they took turns going around the panel, and every single one of them said something incredibly stupid. They’re 0 for 5.

Dana Perino: I’m tired of them…they don’t have to live here.

Neither do you, lady.

Eric Bolling: It was added, but it doesn’t matter. It’s on our currency…they can choose not to take it.

It was also added to our currency in the 1950s, guy, at the height of Cold War fervor that couple religiosity to patriotism. It’s a relic of the same phenomenon that fostered McCarthyism and the Hollywood blacklist. It’s not a history to be proud of.

Greg Gutfeld: they can…give thanks for giving us the freedom to be an atheist.

Oh, yeah, I should also get down on my knees and praise Jesus for allowing me to be an atheist now.

Kimberly Guilfoyle: Why should they be catered to? It is offensive that a few people…inflict their belief system. It is incredibly selfish, small-minded…

Guilfoyle was furiously indignant. She seems to think it is OK if a majority of small-minded people use their kids as pawns to force their Christian belief system on others, but if the minority resist, they must be ignored.

And finally, Bob Beckel. I despise Bob Beckel. When conservatives go looking for a nominally liberal person they can prop up as a figurehead who will reliably agree with them, they search for the dumbest person around, and there’s good ol’ Bob.

Bob Beckel: interesting that it’s in Massachusetts, where the Salem witch trials, remember that’s when there was an intolerance about not being religious.

I don’t think the women were hanged for being atheists, Bob. Retire, Bob. You’re too stupid to be humiliating yourself this way on TV.

No gods, no masters…and no heroes, either

I was reading Greta Christina’s piece about being disillusioned with heroes…and I was wondering why we keep propping up this hero thing.

We don’t need them. Ever.

I don’t need “heroes” to get my work done. I need colleagues and friends and peers and collaborators and partners. I need people to lead on some projects, and I need to lead on others. I need specialists and I need workers and I need assistants. I mostly need teamwork and a community of equals.

Think about every last job you’ve accomplished. The last damn thing you needed was a shiny nickel-plated figurehead striking a noble pose and freakin’ inspiring you. And I can’t think of anything more useless than getting placed up on a pedestal.

How about if we form a movement and shoo away all the goddamned heroes?

Dragons aren’t real

The concepts of “fiction” and “pretend” and “imagination” seem to be very difficult to get across to some people, especially the ones who keep muddling fiction with reality. The Creation “Museum” has a big exhibit on dragons that illustrates this confusion well, with a telling beginning.

The Creation Museum in Northern Kentucky shares a fascination with dragons with the creators of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus’ new show.

Yep, there’s a sucker born every minute.

Ken Ham is promoting them because he wants to tie folk beliefs, like those about dragons or Jesus or angels, to reality. Hey, if we’re basing our beliefs in the reality of Jesus on myths and fairytales, then fairytales had better be a credible source of evidence.

He said there are carvings and other kinds of primitive artwork all over the world that look like dragons and there are some fossil records to indicate dragon-like dinosaurs. The Welsh flag still features a picture of a dragon, he said.

“They are so prevalent,” he said, “they may have a basis in reality.”

In homes all around the country, you will find copies of Harry Potter stories and comic books about giant green hulks. They are prevalent too. That does not imply in any way that magic wands actually work, or that you should expose yourself to an atom bomb blast to acquire superpowers.

They’re fiction. Fiction does not have to be based on reality. Sometimes it’s only based on what we want to be true.

Silly ol’ Ken Ham. Isn’t it about time you grew up?