Stiefel has been doing a series of interview with the Glenn Beck’s Blaze, and the latest is slammin’ Jesus. It’s vastly entertaining: Stiefel is a fierce and uncompromising atheist, and the commenters…hoo boy. Pascal’s Wager in the second comment, if that tells you anything.
It’s true. A bunch of people in kilts who wash down their sheep’s stomachs with Irn-Bru while listening to caterwauling bagpipes are giggling at those stupid Americans. It’s embarrassing. The Scotland edition of the Herald is mocking the American educational system.
The textbooks in the series are alleged to teach young earth creationism; are hostile towards other religions and other sectors of Christianity, including Roman Catholicism; and present a biased version of history that is often factually incorrect.
One ACE textbook – Biology 1099, Accelerated Christian Education Inc – reads: "Are dinosaurs alive today? Scientists are becoming more convinced of their existence. Have you heard of the ‘Loch Ness Monster’ in Scotland? ‘Nessie’ for short has been recorded on sonar from a small submarine, described by eyewitnesses, and photographed by others. Nessie appears to be a plesiosaur."
Another claim taught is that a Japanese whaling boat once caught a dinosaur. It’s unclear if the movie Godzilla was the inspiration for this lesson.
The situation is pretty bad when the Scots are looking at you like you’re mad and saying, “You don’t really believe in the Loch Ness monster, do you?”
(At least I can explain that no, it wasn’t Godzilla — it was a rotting basking shark with the gill region torn away that was called a plesiosaur.)
Don’t read the comments there and at The Scotsman! They really are laughing at us — they can’t believe that Americans believe in Nessie, let alone that creationism bullshit.
OK, now I want to move to Scotland. Seems like a sensible place.
Ironically, my other’s staunch Catholicism sowed the seeds for my rejection of god. Not in the way one might expect, through so perfectly illustrating the hypocrisy and contradictions between her speech and actions (although there was that, too). Instead, her choice to bear 11 children in 18 years (I know – crazy! I’m number 9 – everyone always wants to know.) meant that my eldest siblings were effectively a different generation, and they held far more sway with us younger kids than our parents ever did. Fortunately for me, those siblings had come of age in the early seventies, and were heavily influenced by the counterculture. My eldest brother, an aspiring musician who was an early follower of punk and new wave, was like the Pied Piper to the rest of us – and he was an atheist.
As Bob Dylan sings,
“The country I come from is called the Mid-west,
I was taught and brought up there the laws to abide,
and that the land that I live in has God on it’s side.”
Among the habits of our recently enrolled group of youtubers is participation in the MagicSandwich show on blogTV, which this time is firing up in about a half hour (at 7pm central time). Listen in if you’re interested.
Also, tomorrow at 9am Central, Stephanie and Brianne will be interviewing Katherine Stewart, author of The Good News Club: The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children
They should all be good conversations!
They’re having their 5th anniversary event today. Actually, I think they had it earlier — darn spherical planet and it’s different time zones! But it’s never too late to let them know you appreciate their work.
That creationist rascal Kenwal Hamza is up to his tricks again: he’s convinced the state of Kentucky to invest millions of dollars in his planned theme park, Koran Kountry.
The controversial park is the creation of Answers in Koran, LLC, who seek to bring visitors to the “family-friendly attraction that celebrates the truth of the Koran, and the power of the global jihadist movement to liberate Muslims from the oppression of the infidels and Jews. We also have roller coasters.”
The $300 million park, built on top of a reclaimed surface mining site in Muhlenberg County, was constructed with the help of unnamed international investors from Pakistan and Iran. Their feasibility study projects millions of tourists from the Middle East and South Asia will come to the park in its first three years of operation.
“This day would not be possible without the great help we received from the Beshear administration,” said Kenwal Hamza, CEO of Answers in Koran. “Muhlenberg County is now truly the closest thing to Paradise on Earth.”
They’re going to have rides and celebrate the true history of Islam…no, stop.
This doesn’t work.
Sorry, total fail. It’s bad satire.
No one is ever going to believe that an American state would fund something as stupid as “Koran Country”, or that they’d actually smile and approve tens of millions of dollars to a non-Christian theme park. There’s a plausibility gap a few zillion miles wide.
Although it does go a good job of highlighting the smug sense of Christian privilege that allowed the colossal inanity of Ken Ham’s Creation “Museum” to get built in the first place.
Sometimes I feel like I’m not a “true atheist” because I never drank the cool aide to begin with, and I did not have to go through the conversion process that most atheists identify with.
Growing up in the Bible belt you were always surrounded by Christian dogma.
Benjamin Radford, a regular at The Amazing Meeting, has decided he doesn’t like blogs, and never has, no sir. This is a fact which he has chosen to announce in a blog by citing his first blog entry.
As I write my first entry for the sparkly new “Free Thinking” blog, I’m skeptical of its utility. While I have spent much of my career promoting critical thinking and skepticism, I’m concerned about joining the noise, the glut of words inundating the Web and indeed the world.
By most estimates there are over 120 million blogs out there on the World Wide Intertubes. It seems everyone has a blog; teens are blogging, grandmothers are blogging, almost anyone with access to a computer, an opinion, and some spare time has a blog. The Web has democratized the dissemination of information, but not necessarily improved the content quality. There’s incredibly good, useful info on the Web, but the signal to noise ratio is higher than ever.
Of course, some blogs are better than others, but according to a statistic I just made up (so you can’t check), 98.3 percent of blogs are irrelevant, self-indulgent musings and journaling, read by the blogger and one or two friends.
Blogs are inherently personal; they rarely include references; they are short, thus allowing for little or no detailed, critical analysis. In this age of blogging and Twitter, communication comes in smaller and smaller bites, conveying less and less information. For people to accurately understand the world around them, they need more information and context, not less.
So he makes up a statistic and doesn’t bother to cite anything, so blogging is all noise and doesn’t include references (hint, Mr Radford: it’s called a “link”, some of us use them heavily.) And nobody reads them, except a few of the bloggers’ friends. He could make a case for that, I suppose; I sure don’t read Radford’s attempts at blogging, and only ran across this one because DJ Grothe praised it on twitter. (Oh, I so want to see Radford’s critique of twitter — I’m sure it will be as perspicacious as his complaints about blogs.)
Then he concludes by announcing that blogs still suck.
The same problems and issues I identified are still around, if anything magnified by the exponentially growing World Wide Web. Since that first blog I have been witness to (and occasional victim of) flame wars, troll attacks, misrepresentation of others’ positions (both obvious and subtle), and so on. We’ve all seen bloggers resort to feigned outrage, insults, and invective in their efforts to stir up controversy and increase page hits. This sensational, shock-jock sleaze is nothing new, and has been immensely successful for Jerry Springer, Rush Limbaugh, Howard Stern, and their countless blogging ilk. It’s not helpful or productive, but it gets attention.
Still, media has always had the inherent problem of separating out the wheat from the chaff, the insightful from the banal, the incisive from the divisive. Such is the price for the democratization of speech that the Internet brings: anyone with a computer has equal access. It’s probably true that most of everything is crap-but it’s a shame that we must work so hard to find the non-crap.
There’s a grain of truth to what he says, and I’m trying to think of some productive suggestion that would help improve the web, and I’ve come up with one: Ben Radford could stop blogging, and stop adding to the noise.
But he’s also deeply wrong. You could make the same arguments about books, or magazines, or newspapers: they’re mostly junk. The only solution, obviously, is for everyone to stop writing. Everyone, but especially Mr Radford, who can then go back to talking about chupacabras. And then he can ignore every criticism made of his work by telling himself they’re just trying to stir up controversy and increase page hits.
This claim that blogging is all about stirring up controversy to get page hits is also nonsense, but nonsense that gets regurgitated regularly by every old school pundit who objects to getting criticized. It’s wrong. I can tell you what gets you traffic: reliable, sustained writing on subjects of interest to an audience. Just controversy is never enough; it’s the people who can write well about controversy who win the audience. If you can’t do that — and Radford certainly can’t — you lose, and you have to resort to whining that all your competitors for eyeballs are all hacks and cheaters who don’t have the skill at communicating that you do.
But actually, his second to the last paragraph does get to the source of his unhappiness: he has been the victim of blogging. The poor man last got on our radar when he wrote a most ludicrous and appalling piece of pseudo-skeptical, evo-psych bullshit to justify sexism. It was piece that ignored reason and evidence, what few scientific articles he used to support his claims he understood poorly and mangled misleadingly. Rebecca Watson spanked him hard; I took him to school on his abuse of the science; Stephanie Zvan showed that his rationale made no sense; the blogosphere, that wretched hive of irrelevant, self-indulgent musings, lit up with pointed criticisms of Radford’s ghastly abuse of skeptical thinking. His response? Throw up more banal, divisive crap. And get slammed again.
This was a case where blogs were actually extremely good at separating the wheat from the chaff. It’s just that we’ve determined that Ben Radford is the chaff.
And now the chaff is complaining, on a blog.
(Also, I have to add: DJ, your proxies aren’t helping.)
As a Mexican, I was raised following most of Catholic traditions. Even when my parents aren’t that devout themselves (I suspect they are closet atheists), they go with the flow and as a family we participate of important celebrations. I always was critical about beliefs and irrational thinking and that got me a few discussions at school, but nothing too prominent or problematic.
