An important message from the Atheist Census: El Censo Mundial de Ateos ahora en español! Más de 220.000 personas han sido contadas en todos los países del mundo – asegúrate de serlo tú también!
(For us non-Spanish speakers: “The World Census of Atheists is now in Spanish! More than 220,000 people have been counted in all countries of the world – be sure you do too!” And actually, there are options to translate it into a whole lot of languages there.)
You sure can spot the creationists by their use of slogans — “teach the controversy,” “strengths and weaknesses,” “teach both sides,” “think critically about controversial subjects” — and they’re all on display at an Ohio school board that is currently debating opening up the curriculum to creationism. The parents and students are resisting, at least.
Please. There is no controversy here. Evolution happened, teach it.
The best argument that one student provided is that “I don’t feel like the people here are educated or prepared enough to deal with it.” Yeah, that describes most school boards.
You may think this is good news, but you should be deeply troubled. The Church of England has officially decided that same-sex couples should be allowed to marry.
The Bishop of Leicester, who leads the bishops in the House of Lords, said they would now concentrate their efforts on “improving” rather than halting an historic redefinition of marriage.
It represents a dramatic change of tack in the year since the Church insisted that gay marriage posed one of the biggest threats of disestablishment of the Church of England since the reign of Henry VIII.
“Troubled?” you ask, “This is exactly what Myers has favored for years!” But, you see, I didn’t factor in the theological implications. When the source of all objective morality (as we’ve been told God and his priesthood are, many times) undergoes a major revision, we ought to think about what it means. Let us consider the possibilities.
There is a god who cares very much what you do with your genitals, and sometimes he changes his mind. You should find this terrifying. Here’s this all-powerful deity who can send you to paradise or to hell, and the rules for admission can change at any time. Your absolute objective morality is suddenly in flux! You could be cruising along, living the rules of your religion meticulously, and there could be a revision at any time — what if god, on a whim, decided that all marriage was an abomination, and you were supposed to practice free love? Are you prepared to obey?
Related concern: is this retroactive? So if a pair of randy, lonely medieval goatherds were getting it on in a beautiful French meadow and were condemned to hell for it, do they get released now? What’s the PTSD like after a thousand years writhing in unthinkably intense agony?
I’d assumed getting into heaven is like getting tenure — you’re set for the afterlife. But apparently it’s more like working for a psychopathic boss and the rules can change on the fly. This doesn’t sound like a particularly pleasant, stress-free existence.
There is a god who cares very much what you do with your genitals, but the priesthood has been consistently misinterpreting him. This should shake your trust in organized religion — they can get God’s will totally wrong. What if God gave you your genitals for a reason, and you’re supposed to be using them joyfully in all sorts of ways, and the communication between heaven and earth is just totally garbled? He’s up there raging at the phone line like Bill O’Reilly muffing his lines, while the priests are straining to understand what he’s saying in all the bellowing and crackling static. “What’s that you say? Something about penises? Cut off what?” We could be committing all kinds of crimes of omission and emission without even knowing about it!
What if god said, “I gave you men a prostate for a reason, you should be using it”, and all those straight males in a committed relationship who haven’t been getting pegged regularly by their wife are damned to hell? That would be a shocker at the pearly gates.
We don’t know that the priests are getting it right even now. Maybe god really is a bronze-age patriarchal chieftain with bizarrely restrictive rules about sexual behavior, and those untrustworthy priests are translating those rules with more and more errors. You really can’t believe anything they say, whether you like their conclusions or not.
There is a god who really doesn’t care much about what you do with your genitals — he has greater concerns that matter more. Maybe he only has two commandments, “Be excellent to one another” and “Party on!” and all this fussing over specific sexual practices is a gigantic distraction — you’re not going to get grilled about where your penis has been or what has gone into your vagina when you get to heaven at all. All this angst about sexual behavior is simply a reflection of the psychological hangups in the heads of the kinds of people who appoint themselves morality monitors.
I have a suspicion that chopping off young women’s heads for losing their virginity won’t be compatible with “Be excellent to one another”. Neither is beating up people you meet at a gay bar.
We really don’t know what the rules are any more. Maybe we should stop trying to imagine what a cosmic overlord in the sky wants us to do, and look to our fellow human beings for guidelines, instead.
There is no god, no afterlife, no eternal punishment or reward. The priests have been making it all up, using this invisible boogeyman as a goad to get you to serve their earthly whims. You’ve been had, people, rise up and throw off your chains, cast down the church!
I kinda like #4 best.
I have to admit, though, that the most conservative religious people actually have one thing right: if you go around changing any of the rules, if you exhibit any flexibility in interpreting the faith, it means you have cause to question the whole elaborate edifice of religion — every wobble has the potential to cause the whole structure to come crashing down. The church is extremely rickety, which is why reason is such a threat to them.
But I also think that demolition would be a good thing.
Ken Ham has replied to the conversation we had last night. We talked about the importance of a secular education, deplored creationism, and challenged Ken Ham to a debate in Houston when he’s there to speak at a homeschooling conference.
But what does he respond to? He cries, “Lilandra called me an ape!”
Yes, she did, because humans are apes. It’s not an insult, it’s a statement about what larger group your species is nested within.
Alternatively, maybe Ham objected because he feels a greater kinship to another clade, and would rather be grouped with them: he’s clearly part chicken. He was challenged to a debate; he earlier refused because it was beneath him to debate a non-Ph.D. (his degree is only honorary, but he apparently puts much stock in it), but now that there will be a person with a doctorate on the side of evolution, that excuse has evaporated. And now he’s nattering on about a minor point rather than addressing the bigger issues? For shame.
The big kahuna of Turkish creationism is Adnan Oktar, better known as Harun Yahya…in fact, he seems to be the only major player in Turkish creationism. He’s a known con man, and a bit of a playboy, and his organization is more cult-like than any other creationist group I know of. He also is using an unusual ploy: he uses sex and a group of heavily dolled-up young women to promote Islamic creationism. Only in Turkey!
On one recent day, as he often does, Oktar was talking about one of his many exhibitions of fossils that he says disproves evolution.
Oktar and his cult-like organization have been in the Turkish media space for decades. But only last year did he deploy his new weapon in the battle against Darwinism: A flock of ostensibly attractive, curvy young women.
The “kittens,” as he calls them, call him “master” and generally guffaw at the right moments and nod their heads in agreement with whatever he says.
He’s been up to this for a while. He has a series of youtube videos that feature his Stepford houri droning about the miraculous nature of cell biology. If you have some sick fetish about having Barbie read a biology textbook to you in broken English, here you go.
I’ll be joining Lilandra and Shayrah on The Nones podcast this evening, along with a few others.
PZ Myers of Pharyngula, Vic Wang of Houston Atheists, and Neeley Rebel Fluke of Orange County Freethought Alliance, and the mister Aron Ra will join Shayrah and me on the n0nes today at 8:00 PM CST. We will be discussing just who is scientifically inept Ken Ham or us. (Hint it isn’t us) We’ll also be further discussing what we are planning to do about Ham’s visit to Houston homeschoolers to hawk Young Earth Creationism as science.
I think we’ll be making mocking chicken noises in the direction of Answers in Genesis.
The Creation “Museum” has a new exhibit: Dragons. Really. You see, according to their rules, which is that every word of the Bible has to be literally interpreted (whatever that means), nothing said in the Bible can be incorrect, metaphorical, erroneous, or even ambiguous — it has to be true. Since God told Noah that at least two of every animal were on the Ark, for example, that “every” means that every single kind of animal must have been on the big boat…which is why they insist that dinosaurs must have been aboard. Well, that and because dinosaurs are good marketing.
Similarly, there must have been dragons, because the Bible uses a word that translates as “dragon”. It’s that simple.
Does the Bible mention dragons? Used multiple times in Scripture, the Hebrew word tannin is defined by The Enhanced Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon as “serpent, dragon, sea-monster.” It likely refers to certain reptiles, including giant marine creatures and serpentine land animals. Though translated several different ways and differing in precise meanings based on context, tannin can denote a dragon and therefore can potentially refer to a dinosaur since all dinosaurs are dragons (though not all dragons are dinosaurs by definition).
If tannin is so vague that it can refer to a serpent as well as a sea-monster, though, and can be conviently post-fit to mean “dinosaur”, it seems to me that there is no necessity to interpret it to mean specifically dragon. But then, my brain doesn’t work like a creationist’s. It says “dragon” in the Enhanced Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon, by God, so there were dragons!
And what’s more, the Bible says they breathed fire, so they were fire-breathing dragons!
The burden against the beasts of the South. Through a land of trouble and anguish, From which came the lioness and lion, The viper and fiery flying serpent, They will carry their riches on the backs of young donkeys, And their treasures on the humps of camels, To a people who shall not profit. (Isaiah 30:6)
Many dragon legends such as what we find outside the Bible could be embellished, but the basic characteristics of dragons can be found in known creatures. Some dragon descriptions fit well with certain dinosaurs. Fossil pterosaurs reveal dragon-like wings. Certain beetles shoot out burning chemicals, so is a fire-breathing dragon really that far-fetched?
Yes. Yes, it really is that far-fetched. The Bible is not a science book.
Bombardier beetles use a small reaction chamber to produce a pressurized blast of peroxides. It’s not “breathing fire”. This is merely the kind of incoherent nonsense you get when you pretend the myths of ancient people are evidence of anything other than that they held certain peculiar beliefs.
Creationist logic now dictates another step: if tannin is a dragon, and dragons breathe fire, and tannin also means “dinosaur”, then dinosaurs breathed fire. Yeah, we’re done here.
Now if the Bible is a mess of incoherence, you should listen to Ken Ham. He was interviewed about his dragon exhibit.
“There are lots of dragon legends because they were real creatures. We believe many of the dinosaurs would fit some of the descriptions of dragons, the land dragons at least. I’ve never seen an exhibit like this anywhere else,” Dr. Ken Ham, president and founder of Answers in Genesis and the Creation Museum told OneNewsNow.
“We have an animatronics scientist there and other high-tech features like a dragon fly fossil. People will be able to download an app and when you put it over it, then the dragon fly comes out of the fossils and you see it three dimensional.”
Does anyone understand what the heck he’s saying? It’s interesting that his scientists are animatronic — that seems reasonable given their level of intelligence — but what do dragonflies have to do with dragons? What’s high tech about a dragonfly fossil? What is this magic app doing?
Every time I try to understand the mind of a creationist, my brain hurts.
It seems Tauriq Moosa and I have a similar opinion of Oprah Winfrey — she’s a successful peddler of pseudoscientific nonsense. It’s too bad that Harvard doesn’t have the same ability to recognize a fraud when they see one, since they had Oprah disgrace their commencement ceremonies, and then gave her an honorary degree. In what, I don’t know; can you get a Ph.D. in dangerous foolishness at Harvard?
Here’s a list of 10 execrable versions of evolution from the popular media. I’m not too impressed with the list: it cheats. There are two examples from the Star Trek franchise (if you’re going to open it up to individual episodes rather than the whole schmeer, the whole list would get devoured by ST), two examples from Dr Who (ditto), two very obscure examples from the Disney channel and pulp fiction, one comic book example — and it’s not the X-Men, which is dismissed as being just genetics, not evolution — Planet of the Apes, The Creature from the Black Lagoon (???), and Greg Bear’s Darwin’s Radio. What, that’s it?
Where’s Prometheus? Avatar? All those stories that predict humans evolve into frail little people with bulging domed heads? Any SyFy channel schlock that uses the word?
I’m afraid if we were to trash any genre that abuses the concept of evolution, just about all of them would go.
Ken Ham is putting on a snooty snit. He was challenged to a debate, and then dismissed the highly qualified individuals who would have gone up against his team of frauds. Why, you might ask, did he consider the evolutionist debaters unworthy? Because they didn’t have Ph.D.s. Credentialism at its most blatant!
Now, we’re not saying no to a debate with the Houston Atheists Association. In fact we want one of our PhD scientists on staff to debate a PhD scientist chosen by the Houston Atheists Association. This would encourage a more fruitful exchange on the merits of creation vs. evolution, the age of the universe, etc. Answers in Genesis would seek out an impartial moderator, perhaps a local newsperson, and the debate could even be held in a university setting. Such a debate needs to be set up in a formal and professional way.
We hope that such a scientist with a doctorate would be willing to engage in a debate where both participants have time to present their sides and offer rebuttals in a respectful manner.
This is so outrageous that I’d be willing to set aside my policy of refusing to debate creationists to take these phonies on…as long as I could have as my partner the fellow they rejected. Especially since he’d be a far better debater than I am, even without a Ph.D.
That fellow is Aron Ra.
He actually wants to replace both of us. He wants to pit a professional scientist with respectable accolades against one of his own anti-science apologists wearing similar credentials. Why? To present the illusion that there is a legitimate scientific debate wherein creation is might be a seen as a reasonable option to evolution. It’s not, and there’s no debate in science about that.
Exactly. This is what they always do. It’s not about having a legitimate discussion: it’s about pretending to have parity with real scientists. They don’t deserve it.
Also, I suspect that in this case they looked at Aron’s record and realized that he’d mop the floor with the creationists, and they spurned him out of fear.
