Earth Day: Atheism+Environmentalism

We’ve started the hangout on Google+. Stop by if you’re interested.

And…here’s the result.

This is the brief introduction I gave, to try and focus the discussion:

For a long time, I’ve been saying that atheism is a heck of a lot more than just disbelieving in gods: we arrive at that conclusion by various means, so the history matters, and recognition of the consequent reality matters — it has implications. I am an advocate for increasing the depth and meaning of atheism, for broadening it and increasing its relevance to more people. In that sense, I’m kind of an ur-atheism-plusser.

But actually, I think we all are. Atheism has always meant more than just disbelief. Probably the narrowest interpreter of atheism on freethoughtblogs is Edwin Kagin, who has openly said that he thinks the only issue that ought to matter to atheists is separation of church and state. But even that is adding extra meaning to the word, and it’s also a terribly narrow meaning, that really only applies to constitutional issues in the United States. The New Atheists (and Old Atheists, too), blithely fold Science into atheism, with scarcely any complaint from other atheists. There seem to be some affiliated issues that atheists, even atheists who still dumbly assert that atheism just means an absence of god-belief, are happy to unthinkingly accept as natural parts of atheism.

And then there are others. All you have to do is look at the angry loons who have freaked out over Atheism Plus. You want atheists to care about equality, and ethics, and social justice? NNNNOOOOOO! How dare you add stuff that isn’t in my minimalist understanding of atheism to my obligations as a human being? I want to be selfish and self-centered and Darwinian!

Now I’m curious to see what would happen if we say that environmentalism is a natural part of atheism, too. Will there be a freak out again? Will the Libertarians finally go away? Or will a majority happily recognize it as a necessary component of an ethic that tries to build a sustainable society on a world that is not propped up by magic?

So you’re all here to agree or argue with me, to consider the ramifications, to suggest where we’re going to hit a brick wall. And maybe we can also talk about why religion is a poor foundation for a responsible stewardship of the planet.

Happy Eliminating All References To Him Day!

earthday

It’s Earth Day today, and I had no idea this was an atheist holiday. Ken Ham sets me straight, though, explaining that Earth Day is actually an anti-christian plot.

You see, God made humans stewards of the earth, which basically means that we’re supposed to turn it into farms and gardens. There are also bad things that were brought about by the Curse of the Fall, and icky things that don’t help people be fruitful and multiply are supposed to be removed.

Meanwhile, Earth Day is just a bunch of pagans elevating the universe over the imaginary being he claims created the universe, so it’s bad. Furthermore, it’s…evolutionary.

But we must be cautious of putting the creation over the Creator. Romans 1 warns against worshiping the creation rather than the Creator—and many Earth Day celebrations are founded on evolutionary ideas, where man’s opinions are lifted above God’s Word. And we must remember that “nature” is not perfect. In fact, we read that God cursed the ground in Genesis 3:17. That will dramatically affect how we understand farming and gardening. Also, in Genesis 3:18, thorns and thistles came into existence as part of the Curse. Thus, man can help improve things by working against the Curse.

So, see, the tallgrass prairie that once dominated where I live, and was home to bison and prairie dogs and prairie chickens and passenger pigeons and numerous small lizards etc. etc. etc. better serves God’s purpose when we plow it down and replace all that diversity with endless fields of corn and soybeans. That’s Earth Day to an evangelical Christian: chop down that copse of trees, rip out that inhuman habitat, replace it all with a fecal lake for the nearby pig farm. That lake glorifies God!

There’s also the inevitable denial of scientific facts. Global warming is a myth, his “Christian perspective” says so.

As a biblical creationist, let me illustrate how I would deal with a specific issue like climate change, which can serve as a useful example of how we should use biblical principles when we approach any issues associated with Earth Day.

I argue that the earth’s climate has gone through a few major periods of change, but in every case, humans did not produce the change. Ever since the Flood of Noah’s time, about 4,400 years ago, people have seen an unsettled earth in its sin-cursed state. Many smaller climate changes have occurred and continue to occur (perhaps in cycles). Whether humans have contributed significantly in a detrimental way is just not suggested by the evidence we have at hand.

What a nice, succinct explanation for why we shouldn’t want Christian dogmatists in charge of anything to do with maintaining the planet’s life support system. They’re all just slacking, simultaneously declaring that nothing can go wrong because of God’s will and everything is screwed up anyway because God cursed it. Christians and Libertarians: a hellish combination of oblivious destructiveness.

By the way, I promised yesterday that I’d try another Google+ Hangout tonight, at 9pm Central time. I’m hoping I’ve got the bugs worked out this time, so we’ll give it another shot. This time around, though, in keeping with the day, let’s focus on a theme — “Earth Day: Atheism+Environmentalism”. Be prepared to explain why you think the environment is an appropriate topic to have on atheism’s agenda, and why you think the godless (or at least, the non-libertarian atheists) ought to be better than anyone else at being stewards of the planet. Keep in mind, though, that not all religious people are as batty as Ken Ham and his ilk. Maybe it would work if all the bureacrats in the US Department of the Interior were required to be druids? Let’s discuss the intersection of religion and the environment!

The Discovery Institute’s mask just slipped a bit more

That ghastly collection of homophobes and right-wing zombies, Focus on the Patriarchy, is starting a new initiative to take on the happily growing army of student atheists. They’re launching a series of ‘edgy’ videos called True U which feature grim Christians staring glumly at the camera while statistics scroll by (“Increasing numbers of college students are losing their faith!” “60% of all biology & psychology professors are atheist or agnostic!” Cheer up kids, it’s good news all the way!). Then to inspire them, they cut to a Christian fake college professor ranting away.

The ‘professor’ is…Stephen Meyer of the Discovery Institute! And the great thing is that he’s openly using the arguements of Intelligent Design creationism to counter atheism with assertions that science supports the existence of a god.

“The new atheism is the old atheism repackaged to make best sellers,” says Dr. Stephen Meyer, a presenter in the video, “but is completely out of touch with the most current developments in science.” Meyer, who holds a Ph.D. from Cambridge University in the History and Philosophy of Science, is a Senior Fellow at the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, an organization that promotes intelligent design. The Discovery Institute is behind the “Teach the Controversy campaign” that aims to teach creationist anti-evolution beliefs in United States public high school science courses alongside accepted scientific theories, claiming that a scientific controversy exists over these subjects.

It’s been settled for a long time, but this is one more nail in the coffin: Intelligent Design is simply a front for religious pitchmen. And not just any religion, but far right Christianity.

Also, his arguments are awful.

“When we find information in DNA molecules encoded in digital form, the best explanation is that that information also had an intelligent source.”

That’s what he babbled about endlessly in his dreary text, Signature in the Cell: nothing but rank assertions that genetic information is digital (really, it’s not), that it’s just like computer programs (nope), that computer programmers write computer code (OK, I’ll accept that), and therefore, there had to have been a Great Intelligent Space Programmer at the beginning of everything (can you say logic error, boys and girls? I knew you could). So now you know the next step, the part he wasn’t brave enough to say in his book…and that Super Programmer is Jesus.

At least I suspect that classroom is as fake as the one Ben Stein was yelling at in Expelled, since Meyer is no longer affiliated with any real university and spends all of his time flogging lies to his creakily fanatical colleagues and church audiences any more.

So, so touchy

Richard Wiseman, Jon Ronson, and Rebecca Watson went on a road trip a while back, checking out American weirdness. One thing they did not check out, though, was the Creation “Museum”, because as Rebecca explains, they were sensitive about being mocked.

Now Ken Ham verifies that by indignantly posting that they are not sensitive to criticism. Yeah, they are. It’s their entire raison d’etre: they’ve built up this flimsy façade, a museum of cards, that will all come tumbling down if you have any knowledge of how museums actually work — so questioning them openly, especially in a place where paying suckers customers might hear it, is forbidden.

When a group of us went to their “museum”, you could just see their paranoia twitch. They were very concerned that we amoral atheists might have gay sex on their exhibits, for instance, and told us not to.* We had to sign contracts promising good behavior. When we got there, there were guards with police dogs and tasers on patrol (from others, I heard that at least one of the guards was very friendly, but still…). Mark Looy was inspecting people’s t-shirts, and if they were bearing atheist slogans, they were asked to turn them inside out. We had one student threatened with eviction because he remarked on the cheesiness of the gift shop.

You get the idea. They don’t tell you you can’t come (they want your money!). But they will make you feel like an interloper if you exhibit your heathenish, scientific ways. They call it an insistence on “conducting yourselves in a professional manner”, but what they really mean is “don’t question anything while you are here.”

Especially, we learned, don’t question the gift shop!

*Not even if we brought condoms and promised it would be safe sex!

Do you want to be like El Salvador?

El Salvador has an absolute prohibition on all abortions — they can’t even be done to save the life of the mother (it’s a very Catholic country, are you surprised?) Now a situation has made the news that exposes the villainy of that policy.

A young woman named Beatriz is petitioning El Salvador’s supreme court to be allowed to get an abortion. Why? There’s a couple of really good reasons.

The four-month fetus is acephalic — no brain has formed. It’s doomed. It will never be viable. At best, it will be born, live a few days as a vegetable on life support, and die.

The mother is suffering from complications from lupus and kidney disease. The fetus won’t even get to the point of being born — the mother will be killed by this pregnancy first.

The heartless, amoral, religiously-based rules of that society are condemning this woman to death. In addition, if any doctor honors their Hippocratic oath and helps her live, they can be prosecuted and sentenced to long terms in prison for it.

Beatriz has been refused a necessary and simple medical procedure because the demented fuckwits of the Catholic Church have prioritized dogma over human life. She has to beg authorities, right up to the highest levels of government, for the right to live.

All because some old assholes believe god has told them that the dying lump of meat in her belly is more precious than a woman’s life.

Ars Technica on Dunning

It’s just looking worse and worse. Ars Technica discusses the Dunning widget to stuff cookies, and reveals something damning. It was coded to avoid planting cookies in computers in San Jose or Santa Barbara, where the eBay headquarters are located. If he considered this perfectly acceptable behavior in eBay’s eyes, why did he need to conceal his activity?

Bottom line is that he stole $5.2 million dollars over two years. I did my taxes last week, and realize that at my current salary I’ll have to work for the University of Minnesota for a century to earn that much money — that’s a colossal sum, wealth beyond my imagining, and I’m a fairly prosperous fellow. This was not a minor crime. There are kids robbing corner grocery stores for a handful of dollars who face greater penalties than this white collar criminal who slithered away with a small fortune at little risk.

What I also find dismaying is those members of the skeptical community who are closing their eyes and trying to pretend that their friend was a good guy. He was a thief. It’s that simple.

Graaarh, physicists BIOLOGISTS

I thought physics was the most hubristic scientific discipline of them all, but I may have to revise that assessment. Last week I was sent another of those papers published in archiv, the physics repository, making grand pronouncements about evolution, and I made the mistake of simply dismissing it on twitter — it was simply too ridiculous to post about. But now io9 has picked it up, and more people are clamoring at me to explain it.

Jebus, it’s terrible.

Here’s what Sharov and Gordon claim:

An extrapolation of the genetic complexity of organisms to earlier times suggests that life began before the Earth was formed. Life may have started from systems with single heritable elements that are functionally equivalent to a nucleotide. The genetic complexity, roughly measured by the number of non-redundant functional nucleotides, is expected to have grown exponentially due to several positive feedback factors: gene cooperation, duplication of genes with their subsequent specialization, and emergence of novel functional niches associated with existing genes. Linear regression of genetic complexity on a log scale extrapolated back to just one base pair suggests the time of the origin of life 9.7 billion years ago. This cosmic time scale for the evolution of life has important consequences: life took ca. 5 billion years to reach the complexity of bacteria; the environments in which life originated and evolved to the prokaryote stage may have been quite different from those envisaged on Earth; there was no intelligent life in our universe prior to the origin of Earth, thus Earth could not have been deliberately seeded with life by intelligent aliens; Earth was seeded by panspermia; experimental replication of the origin of life from scratch may have to emulate many cumulative rare events; and the Drake equation for guesstimating the number of civilizations in the universe is likely wrong, as intelligent life has just begun appearing in our universe. Evolution of advanced organisms has accelerated via development of additional information-processing systems: epigenetic memory, primitive mind, multicellular brain, language, books, computers, and Internet. As a result the doubling time of complexity has reached ca. 20 years. Finally, we discuss the issue of the predicted technological singularity and give a biosemiotics perspective on the increase of complexity.

Life originated 9.7 billion years ago, huh? Maybe 13 billion plus years ago? I didn’t even have to read the paper: I predicted that there would be a certain graph in it, opened it up, scanned to Figure 1, and there it was.

dumbassgraph

We’re done. Anyone else see the problem?

They cherrypicked their data points. They didn’t include lungfish, ferns, onions, or some protists because that would totally undermine their premise; those are contemporary organisms with much larger genomes than mammals’, and their shallow, stupid exercise in curve-fitting would have flopped miserably. It’s a great example of garbage in, garbage out.

There’s another figure, in which they slap their ‘origin of life’ numbers on a diagram of the history of the universe. Very convincing. I could also stick a label on such an image and show the ‘origin of clowns’ at the time of the Big Bang. It wouldn’t make it scientific, though.

sillyorg

Do they have any other evidence to support their claim? No, not one bit. Most of the paper is a handwavey summary of various models of abiogenesis, with no effort to be quantitative…except for their quantitative claim on the basis of one fudged graph that life originated over 9 billion years ago. There’s also some weird stuff about biosemiotics, which they use to argue for goals and meaning in evolution. It seems to be a popular term among creationists, and what little I’ve read on it from marginally more credible sources makes it look like nonsense.

That graph, though, just kills it. At least try to respect the larger data set, will ya, guys?

This was published in archiv, probably to escape the restrictions of peer review (i.e., slip some bullshit under the door), and really, I read that and thought, “physicists, again?” But then I looked closer at the authors. I am so ashamed.

Alexei A. Sharov, Ph.D.
Staff Scientist, Laboratory of Genetics
National Institute on Aging (NIA/NIH)

Richard Gordon, Ph.D.
Theoretical Biologist, Embryogenesis Center
Gulf Specimen Marine Laboratory

They’re biologists of some sort. Now I have to crawl off in embarrassment for my discipline.

In case you still held the illusion that Liberty University was a real institute of higher learning…

A ‘professor’ at the far-right wing diploma mill, Judith Reisman, has come out with a bizarre explanation for homosexuality.

On Sept. 21, 2012, Texas neurosurgeon Donald L. Hilton Jr., M.D., spoke on pornography addiction and sexual orientation, saying:

“Pornography is a visual pheromone, a powerful 100-billion-dollar per year brain drug that is changing sexuality even more rapidly through the cyber-acceleration of the Internet. It is ‘inhibiting orientation’ and ‘disrupting pre-mating communication between the sexes by permeating the atmosphere’ and Internet.”

This complements my theory perfectly. My theory is that while watching televangelists on TV, every once in a while a cartoon rabbit with a mallet jumps out and bonks the viewers on the head, causing transient memory loss that eliminates knowledge of the bunny, and also causes the viewer to become more stupid.

I am calling these brain-damaging rabbits ‘leporobashins’, because as we all know, giving things a Latin name makes them real.

(Edited to remove link to source that mangled the story, and replace it with a direct quote from the original source at WND.)