It’s Zack Kopplin! Getting interviewed by Bill Moyers!
Let’s hope even more teenagers rise up to express themselves.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
It’s Zack Kopplin! Getting interviewed by Bill Moyers!
Let’s hope even more teenagers rise up to express themselves.
An organization called the Susan B. Anthony List — it’s an adamantly anti-choice group that has neatly named itself after an icon of women’s liberation — has a wonderful president, Marjorie Dannenfelser, who not only opposes abortion, but is dead set against contraception. She argues here that increasing availability of contraception leads to increasing rates of abortion (what?), apparently because all those frisky couples losing their fear of pregnancy will fornicate more, leading to more unwanted pregnancies.
But…but…abortion rates have been going down as pregnancy rates decline. We can’t therefore account for reduced pregnancy rates by claiming they’ve been terminated by abortion, and it seems kind of unlikely that people are having sex less often, so isn’t the correlation the reverse of what Dannenfelser claims?
Also, I am greatly concerned by the implications of the statement that “to lose the connection between sex and having children leads to problems”. There were precisely 3 periods in my life in which I intentionally had procreative sex, and they were both relatively brief because I married a fertile minx who got knocked up as soon as we both put our minds to it. So, maybe three months where I’ve had sex with reproductive intent, while the other 393 months of my married life I was entirely in frivolous sex-for-fun mode. Furthermore, we have not been the slightest bit interested in having more children for 23 years. Is Dannenfelser trying to suggest that having a monogamous and healthy sex life during those decades should be causing problems because we’ve lost the connection between sex and having children?
Back in the dim dark distant days of yore, Matt Groening actually did some promotional artwork for Apple — all at about the same time he started up with some little show called the Simpsons, and when he’d apparently doodle up a poster for them for the price of a Laserwriter.
Speaking of Groening and the Simpsons, Richard Dawkins will be making a cameo voice appearance this Sunday. Tune in!
I thought they were going to clean up their act and stop highlighting crackpots and kooks. But oh look: there’s Rupert Sheldrake, listing all the things he finds wrong about science. How could we possibly accept the dogma that matter is unconscious? Or that genetics is measurable and material?
What I found particularly galling in the video besides the smug arrogance of Sheldrake postulating idiocy is that the audience joins in and laughs smugly at his smug assertions.
“Genes are grossly overrated.” “Species have a collective memory, even crystals do.” “Everything depends on evolving habits, not fixed laws.” Gaaah.
Oh my god: his evidence that the constants of the universe are not constant is that the reported speed of light in 1920 was 20 meters/sec greater than it is now.
I very much enjoyed this TED talk by Amanda Palmer — she puts into practice a spirit of community that we would do well to foster, and which is actually at odds with many people’s attitudes. She’s talking about the music industry specifically but a way of life in general. Rather than trying to think of ways to make people pay for music, putting them in the cattle chute and compelling them to cough up the cash for the industry, she recommends asking and letting them pay, if they can and if they want.
I thought of Greta Christina when I saw that. Recall that when she went in for surgery, she asked for donations to help out…and people who valued her work and appreciated what she brought to the atheist community chipped in and freely gave. That was the work of community. That’s how it ought to work.
Palmer talks about the resentful people who would shout at her “get a job”…and they’re out there. Those are the people who didn’t give, who would bitterly denounce Greta for using money freely given as she saw fit. It’s a peculiar situation where true community is always going to be prone to parasites, but some people get so wrapped up in policing freeloaders that they end up destroying the community they intend to protect.
I think one of the hardest habits for people brought up in a society that dogmatically worships capitalism is to surrender a little bit and just give without expectation of compensation, and without demanding the right to retain control. They’ve rather lost sight of the meaning of the word “give”.
Quick! Let me correct one potential misapprehension in advance! I am not asking you to give to me, I’m not doing an Amanda Palmer move and offering you a flower and a moment of connection for a gift of compensation. I’m one of the lucky ones: I’ve got a secure job, live in an area with a low cost of living, have very good health insurance. I can do this blogging stuff, my own form of giving, without asking you to contribute directly to me. Some of you occasionally give me a small gift when we meet — a bit of squid art, a cupcake, a glass of beer — and that token is more than enough.
If you do feel a compulsion to give, I recommend you pass it on to one of the other bloggers here on FtB who do not have my good fortune of financial security, or alternatively, visit the Foundation Beyond Belief, where you can find plenty of outlets for your compassion.
This year, UMM will have Al Franken as our commencement speaker. Guess who Harvard gets?
A comment on the Crimson story got me poking around (I am not a big Oprah watcher) and now I wonder: Did anyone on the Harvard honorary degrees committee consider the fact that Oprah is a major purveyor of pseudoscience? Four years ago Newsweek did an extensive debunking of pseudo-medicine pandered on her show. She was #1 on Brian Dunning’s list of the top 10 purveyors of pseudoscience, citing her as follows: “she promotes the paranormal, psychic powers, new age spiritualism, conspiracy theories, quack celebrity diets, past life regression, angels, ghosts, alternative therapies like acupuncture and homeopathy, anti-vaccination, detoxification, vitamin megadosing, and virtually everything that will distract a human being from making useful progress and informed decisions in life.” Or read Martin Gardner’s take on Oprah — and her frequent guest, Harvard’s own Dr. Oz.
Score: UMM 1, Harvard -1,000,000.
American Atheists have put up a new set of billboards, with a “go godless” campaign theme.
What’s interesting, though, is the media response:
Atheists ratchet up rhetoric, use billboards to attack Republican politicians
Hang on there…”Go godless instead” is ratcheting up the rhetoric? It seems like a rather mild suggestion to me — presenting an extremist religious position and then offering an alternative is an entirely reasonable approach.
As for attacking Republican politicians…has CNN noticed that the religious right has staked itself out in the Republican party? If Democrats were saying things as stupid as the Republicans, I’m sure Dave Silverman would be ripping on them just as aggressively. And if the Republicans were not basing bad policy on religious dogma, there wouldn’t be much concern about them and they wouldn’t be appearing on those billboards.
I really don’t get it. You’d think they’d learn after getting burned on the facts, but no, Republicans seem to have a need to engage their mouths to say something stupid about human biology all the time. The latest example: California Republican Celeste Greig declares that rape pregnancies are rare.
Granted, the percentage of pregnancies due to rape is small because it’s an act of violence, because the body is traumatized. I don’t know what percentage of pregnancies are due to the violence of rape. Because of the trauma the body goes through, I don’t know what percentage of pregnancy results from the act.
The weirdest thing about that comment is the context. She was talking about Todd Akin’s idiotic remarks about ‘legitimate rape’, and saying that he ought to have backed down and apologized. So she’s really saying, “He shouldn’t have said that, but hey, he was right anyway”?
The article goes on to explain what Greig didn’t know: that it’s biology, sperm meets egg, and that most studies show the frequency of pregnancy from sex acts consensual or non-consensual is roughly equal (with one outlier study showing the frequency of pregnancy after rape is greater than after consensual sex…probably because of reduced opportunities for contraception).
Oh, how I hate this stupid question:
Many popular scientists are atheist, so why are they so happy to use the misty-eyed language of religion?
Check your assumptions, journalist. Why do you associate feelings of wonder and awe with fucking religion? Look at the stuff she quotes from prominent scientists: it has nothing to do with religion, except that religion has spent millennia appropriating these ideas.
It’s ironic that the public engagement with the science crowd is so pro-wonder, because they’re so anti-religion. "All the great religions have a place for awe, for ecstatic transport at the wonder and beauty of creation," writes Richard Dawkins. "And it’s exactly this feeling of spine-shivering, breath-catching awe – almost worship – this flooding of the chest with ecstatic wonder, that modern science can provide."
"I’m an atheist," said maths professor Marcus du Sautoy when he took up the Charles Simonyi chair in the public understanding of science at Oxford. "But for me the important thing is the wonder of science." Advocates for science can’t seem to give up on religion’s selling points: the awe, transcendence, and worship.
Notice what the godbots have managed to do: they have taken a child’s delight in the natural world, stolen it, and said, “Awe belongs to god; you aren’t thrilled with dandelion fluff, stars in the sky, or the leap of an antelope, you’re really feeling ecstasy at gods and the supernatural.”
That’s a lie. The scientists are taking back a stolen joy and placing it where it belongs: in our universe, in our natural world, in us. The journalists should be asking instead how we got so duped that we take it for granted that we’re worshipping an invisible man when we find happiness in a clear warm sky and the scent of grass on the wind and a calm sense of our place on Earth.
That isn’t the language of religion. The language of religion is dominion, tribalism, ignorance, and fear.
