Hey, I’m late to the party, but not too late. There are going to be a series of grassroots concerts all across the country to benefit Americans United for Separation of Church and State. This weekend! Look at the map and find the one nearest to you and go!
If you can’t make it, here’s Roy Zimmerman with a song he composed for the event.
It’s probably a sign that you’re doomed to be a heathen when your initial conception of God was not the Gandalf-looking dude from the “Creation of Adam”, but the Fairy Godmother from “Cinderella.” It was easy for me as a child to buy into fictional characters being real. The brief time that I did go to church, and claim to feel something there like angels in the rafters or whatever, was also at about the same time that I was looking for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in sewer grates. Yep, The Almighty, and four mutated terrapins named after renaissance artists were equally plausible to me.
A blogger recently posed this question.
If I had to vote for one of two hypothetical candidates, would I be more likely to vote for a liberal Christian or a conservative atheist?
My first, immediate response was to just answer the question: yes, of course I’d vote for the liberal Christian. All you have to do is realize that Karl Rove is an atheist to know that the label “atheist” is not an automatic marker for a good person (just as we know “Christian” isn’t either, with more examples than I can count.)
But then I thought about it a moment more, and realized it is a goddamned stupid question.
I have never, in my entire life, been given an opportunity to vote for an openly atheist candidate for any office. Not once. This is a radically hypothetical question postulating an unthinkable world (to an American, at least) in which atheists can run for office without the bigoted Christian majority making it an exercise in futility, where we actually get a choice. In that reality, I think actually I might seriously consider voting for a non-odious conservative atheist (not Karl Rove, not a Randian asshole) just for the novelty of it all and to see someone, anyone representing my irreligious views in office.
Because isn’t that really the issue, that atheists are virtually locked out of most offices?
Then there are some weird assumptions in the question itself. What if a conservative atheist were answering it? There’d be no conflict of values at all. Notice how it simply assumes that nearly all atheist readers would be politically liberal — which I think is mostly true, despite the strong strain of Libertarianism within atheism.
But doesn’t that imply that if we had an atheist candidate representative of most atheists’ political leanings, the question ought to be:
If I had to vote for one of two hypothetical candidates, would I be more likely to vote for a liberal Christian or a liberal atheist?
O Glorious Imaginary Universe of Delightful Choices! Can you imagine going into the voting booth and finding yourself confronted with a decision between two reasonable, intelligent, thoughtful candidates, rather than Dumb Thug vs. the person the other party decided to run against it? Or, as I often find when voting for local offices, Dumb Thug vs. Dumb Thug.
But of course what reality tells us is that the candidate who clothes himself in religious garb and makes their faith an issue in a political campaign is almost always conservative — religion tends to side with stupid, archaic, and authoritarian on social issues. What that means is that if we ever did get an opportunity to make that choice at the ballot box, it would look like this:
If I had to vote for one of two hypothetical candidates, would I be more likely to vote for a conservative Christian or a liberal atheist?
And now it’s no question at all.
Ben Goldacre has a new book coming out, Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients
In any sensible world, when researchers are conducting trials on a new tablet for a drug company, for example, we’d expect universal contracts, making it clear that all researchers are obliged to publish their results, and that industry sponsors – which have a huge interest in positive results – must have no control over the data. But, despite everything we know about industry-funded research being systematically biased, this does not happen. In fact, the opposite is true: it is entirely normal for researchers and academics conducting industry-funded trials to sign contracts subjecting them to gagging clauses that forbid them to publish, discuss or analyse data from their trials without the permission of the funder.
This is such a secretive and shameful situation that even trying to document it in public can be a fraught business. In 2006, a paper was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (Jama), one of the biggest medical journals in the world, describing how common it was for researchers doing industry-funded trials to have these kinds of constraints placed on their right to publish the results. The study was conducted by the Nordic Cochrane Centre and it looked at all the trials given approval to go ahead in Copenhagen and Frederiksberg. (If you’re wondering why these two cities were chosen, it was simply a matter of practicality: the researchers applied elsewhere without success, and were specifically refused access to data in the UK.) These trials were overwhelmingly sponsored by the pharmaceutical industry (98%) and the rules governing the management of the results tell a story that walks the now familiar line between frightening and absurd.
Drugs that don’t work, dangerous side-effects concealed by legalistic loopholes, blatant biases in drug testing…and the data are hidden away from the conscientious doctors who try to give informed recommendations. It’s all scary stuff.
She’s going to be live-tweeting the Creation Evidence Expo in Indianapolis this weekend. It looks awful and hilarious; Carl Baugh will be there with his hair, and John Whitcomb, the guy who poisoned a generation’s minds, and and a host of lesser intellectual vacuums who will do their best to reduce the knowledge in the lecture rooms over the next few days.
Also, if you don’t do Twitter, she’ll be posting a post-catastrophe brain dump on Biodork. I can kind of guess what ‘evidence’ for creationism they’ll be dragging out, but it’ll be good to be updated on what the loons are thinking is important nowadays.
This is a submission for the Why I am an atheist series. however it is not about me. I really don’t have a fancy story, I just read a lot of science books and got serious doubts and later read the work of Dawkins, your blog etc.
Let me digress just a little right up front……I do not like the word “Atheist” as it sounds so negative. I have considered words like “Naturalist”, “Naturist”, Universalist” but these have all been appropriated by other groups for other reasons. I certainly do not like the word “Bright”, advocated by some atheists, as I really don’t think I am that bright most of the time. A more positive sounding epithet is still looked for and I would welcome suggestions.
Sometimes they are polite requests, but they smell fishy.
My dad is a christian who says he would be willing to read a book on evolution that includes a comprehensive list of dig sites and photos of transitional forms. Can you recommend something?
I replied. I was not kind.
…just examine the logic and evidence behind this judge’s decision to deny a transgender woman to have a name change.
“A so-called sex-change surgery can make one appear to be the opposite sex, but in fact they are nothing more than an imitation of the opposite sex,” the judge wrote in a seven-page order last year.
“Here, petitioner has not even had the surgery by which his sex purports to be changed. Thus, based on the foregoing and the DNA evidence, a sex change cannot make a man a woman or a woman a man all of which, the Court finds is sufficient in and of itself to deny petitioner’s request for a name change,” Graves wrote.
“To grant a name change in this case would be to assist that which is fraudulent,” Graves wrote. “It is notable that Genesis 1:27-28 states: ‘So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth …’ The DNA code shows God meant for them to stay male and female.”
That is a scientifically and ethically bankrupt position, driven entirely by a fundamentalist interpretation of Biblical dogma. We do not determine gender by chromosome counts; what is this judge going to do to determine the Official Sex of individuals with androgen insensitivity syndrome (XY chromosomes, but physically female)? And how can he make the leap from the book of Genesis to the “DNA code”? The Bible verse he cites says absolutely nothing about the genetic basis of sex, or whether it is fixed and inflexible in any individual.
The Bible is silent on this subject. The science tells us that gender is far more fluid than Judge Black&White thinks it is. Yet that ignoramus is trying to use both to justify a cruel and stupid decision.
Maybe the problem isn’t so much religious people as it is idiots in our judiciary, who think the nonsense their preacher thunders at them from the pulpit is actually information of worth in making a reasonable decision.
