We can learn things from the 17th century

I was amused overall by this timeline of hysteria and sex toys, but I have to say that the 17th century entries were my favorite. So informative!

Nathaniel Highmore, an English surgeon who was one of the few doctors to publicly acknowledge that the end result of pelvic massage—the “hysterical paroxysm”—could also be described as an “orgasm,” noted that it was no easy task. He likened it to “that game of boys in which they try to rub their stomachs with one hand and pat their heads with the other.”

I’m going to have to play that game more. For practice. I’m confused though — I’m supposed to give her an orgasm by rubbing my stomach and patting my head, or hers? Or some other combination of the two motions? I suppose that trying all the permutations could be fun.

English physician Thomas Sydenham estimated that hysteria was the most common disease after fever, accounting for a sixth of all human maladies. Among women, he wrote, “there is rarely one who is wholly free from them.”

Oh, my. The poor dears. We must do whatever we can to save them!

A well informed citizenry is the only true repository of the public will

Both Andrew Sullivan and Kevin Drum are wrong, but I think Drum is infuriatingly wrong.

They’re arguing over a statistic, the observation that about 46% of Americans believe the earth is 6000 years old and that a god created human beings complete and perfect as they are ex nihilo. Andrew Sullivan sees this as a consequence of the divisiveness of American politics, that they’re using it as a signifier for red vs. blue.

I’m not sure how many of the 46 percent actually believe the story of 10,000 years ago. Surely some of them know it’s less empirically supported than Bigfoot. My fear is that some of that 46 percent are giving that answer not as an empirical response, but as a cultural signifier. That means that some are more prepared to cling to untruth than concede a thing to libruls or atheists or blue America, or whatever the “other” is at any given point in time. I simply do not know how you construct a civil discourse indispensable to a functioning democracy with this vast a gulf between citizens in their basic understanding of the world.

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Why I am an atheist – Mauricio-José Schwarz

I was born an atheist, just like every other child.

My very large and very Catholic family took it upon itself to change this situation, providing my life with priests, religious references and visits to churches aplenty. But apparently my case was particularly virulent, and the whole concept of the supernatural remained incredible in my eyes.

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The wages of pseudoscience

I completely missed the disgraceful hokum the Animal Planet channel aired last week, Mermaids: The Body Found, a completely fictional pseudodocumentary dressed up as reality that claims mermaids exist. You can watch it now, though, until Animal Planet takes it down.

It’s genuinely awful. Total nonsense, gussied up with more nonsense: would you believe it justifies the story with the Aquatic Ape gobbledygook? Brian Switek has torn into it, and of course Deep Sea News is disgusted. How could the channel have so disgraced themselves with such cheap fiction?

Here’s the answer:

ANIMAL PLANET SLAYS WITH BEST-EVER MAY IN NETWORK HISTORY

— Monster Week’s MERMAIDS: THE BODY FOUND Made Mighty Splash with More Than 3.4 Million Viewers —

(May 30, 2012, Silver Spring, Md.) – Animal Planet devoured the month with its best May ever, earning its strongest performances in both prime and total delivery among all key demos, including prime deliveries of 681K P2+ (+7%), 508K HH (+7%), 330K P25-54 (+21%), 301K P18-49 (+12%) and 193K M25-54 (+30%), and total day deliveries of 456K P2+ (+13%), 355K HH (+10%), 215K P25-54 (+26%), 203K P18-49 (+13%) and 120K M25-54 (+32%).

Animal Planet’s May victory was propelled its first-ever Monster Week (the week of May 21), featuring MERMAIDS: THE BODY FOUND, which made a huge splash at the “tail” end of the week. MERMAIDS: THE BODY FOUND delivered nearly 2 million viewers (1.96M P2+) for its premiere, making it the most-watched telecast since the Steve Irwin memorial special in September 2006. The two-hour premiere scored a 1.3 HH rating and helped rank Animal Planet #2 in the timeslot, including 960K P25-54 (0.9), 482K M25-54 (1.0) and 477K W25-54 (0.9). The subsequent late-night airing of MERMAIDS: THE BODY FOUND earned the title of Animal Planet’s most-watched late-night telecast ever, delivering nearly 1.5M viewers (1.46M P2+), bringing the combined viewership to more than 3.4 million viewers. MERMAIDS: THE BODY FOUND encores Thursday, May 31, from 8-10 PM ET/PT.

Brace yourselves. More of this will be coming…unless more of us protest by turning off the Animal Planet channel altogether. They’ve just been rewarded for epic dishonesty with peak traffic; what lesson do you think they’ll learn from this?

Why I am an atheist – Lawnboy

Growing up, I was really involved in my church, a charismatic Lutheran megachurch in the suburbs of the Twin Cities. I attended Sunday church service nearly every week, but I also was in youth vocal choir, bell choir, Sunday School, and youth group. And if the Passion Play was going on, I might be at the church six days out of the week for two months!

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The HuffPo has a weddings section?

How much mindless fluff infests the HuffPo? I don’t know and don’t want to find out. But I was provoked when someone sent me a link to the article on “Why you aren’t married” — it doesn’t apply to me at all, but I was aghast at what awful advice was being dispensed. It consists of 9 insults: this is an agony aunt who looks at miserable lonely people and tells them how wretched they are. I presume that happy unmarried people don’t exist in her universe.

But it’s the capper, reason #10, that annoyed me most.

10. You’re Godless. Remember how I said that marriage is a spiritual path? Well, we’re there. The point where I suggest something totally radical and punk-rock as a way of transforming whatever it is you have going on (or don’t have going on) in the area of relationships. And here it is: I want you to get a god. Wait, come back! It’s not necessarily what you think. What do I mean by god? Well, I don’t mean a bearded dude in the sky who is going to give you a Mercedes and a husband if you’re good and punish you if you’re bad. That would be Santa Claus. I mean I want you to cultivate a sense of SPIRIT in your life, a relationship with the intangible, the unseen — the power behind the oceans, gravity, chocolate and the Beatles. You know, the thing you experience in life where the hair stands up on your arms? The Big Something. You could just call it Love. Whatever you name it — it’s the game changer. Because when you mix the idea of spirit into your relationships, it no longer matters how many men are, techincally, out there. No more demographics, no more short guys and tall guys or chicks with cankles or ten extra pounds. There are no more lists of things you think you have to have in a mate. There are only two people on a spiritual assignment: TO LOVE EACH OTHER.

Given the other 9, I suppose that was intended to be an insult, too, but it’s just so stupid it bounced off me and stuck to her instead. Love isn’t spiritual. It’s something real. If you start loading up your relationships with entirely imaginary delusions, you’re either going to blind yourself to real problems, or you’re going to be living in a fantasy relationship.

And you know what we call love with a fantasy: masturbation. There’s nothing wrong with that, but you really don’t need to find a partner for it.

Of course, what you then learn is that this person sneering at everyone for not being married is…not married. But she’s been divorced three times!

Why I am an atheist – Nikolaos Mavrantzas

I do not remember all the steps I took on my way to becoming an atheist, but I am an atheist right now because I accepted, at some point, the fact that the universe does not care. I also liked the freedom from all the madness that was imposed on me, having spent two decades of my life trying to fit the loving god / uncaring universe paradox in my head. And then, I noticed that apart from within the edifice of lies erected by the church, there was no indication that a god existed at all.

Nikolaos Mavrantzas
Greece

Absolute certainty, absolute ignorance

Jerry Coyne seems to have just discovered World Net Daily — at least, he’s surprised that a conservative publication would go after evolution. Think again; WND is notoriously demented. It’s full of birthers and other crazies, and they insist that the earth is only 6,000 years old, and fully accept the argument from Ussher’s chronology.

So he finds an article by a creationist apologist, Carl Gallups, and now I’m surprised: he discovers an original argument for creationism. In addition to insisting that no transitional fossils have other been found, he has a “creative” explanation for molecular similarities between species: it’s so they can eat each other.

When we ingest other living things, the DNA of those living things (fruits, vegetables, nuts, meats, etc.) just happens to be compatible with our DNA so that cellular respiration can take place. If it were not for the fact that our DNA is so akin to all other living things, we could not eat. If we could not eat, we would die.

Is the process of eating and cellular respiration the result of a mere fluke of evolution? Alternatively, could it be that a common Designer made certain that the process of eating and cellular respiration would function in such a precise and perfect manner? Which answer appears to be the most probable to you?

If the supposed cosmic and random happenstance of evolution was the real reason that all living things exist, why, when, and how did this happenstance mechanism decide that living things needed to eat anything in the first place? Would it not be odd that evolution should come up with the idea of food and energy creation through cellular respiration?

Cellular respiration is an astoundingly complex, energy-expending system. Yet in order for life to be sustained, living things must have other living things to ingest. What an odd thing for a mere cosmic coincidence to develop, by random generation. Is it not a strange convenience for evolution that all living things have such unimaginable DNA similarity that cellular respiration is possible?

It’s an impressive example of the difference between certainty and knowledge. Gallups is absolutely certain that he’s correct, but what he reveals in his writings is an absolute absence of knowledge about the subject he’s talking about.

Digestion does not require DNA template matching. DNA is a tiny fraction of the content of our food; we’re mostly after proteins, fats, and carbohydrates. When I eat a banana, I don’t rely on sequence matching at all: the masticated banana gets dumped into an acid bath with enzymes (my stomach) that breaks it down chemically, and then moves on to my small intestine where further enzymes demolish the structure of the polymers in the banana. For instance, nucleases dismantle the DNA strands, breaking them down into individual nucleotides, and those are then absorbed into my intestinal walls and used as an energy source and recycled into building my DNA and RNA.

I’m always dismayed at the way these bozos can rant on about metabolism and use fancy words like “cellular respiration”, declaring that they disprove evolution, yet they don’t understand one single thing, not even the most basic concepts, about the process. It’s rather dishonest.