An innovative legal strategy

David Coppedge, the creationist who was fired from JPL and is currently trying to sue them, has submitted his legal brief as plaintiff in the case. It is…bizarre. It includes a screenplay in which Coppedge imagines a dialog between a couple of JPL staff — a dialog in which he was not present, which basically makes it a work of fiction.

Are court cases often resolved on the basis of creative writing?

This kind of crankery really seems to be part of a trend: there was Kent Hovind’s “subornation of false muster” defense, Bill Buckingham and Alan Bonsell lying on the witness stand in the Dover trial, the prolonged whining by Freshwater, accused of burning a cross into a student’s arm. Creationism seems to draw in the wackiest court cretins; I guess it’s not surprising, given that you have to be a bit off to fall for creationism in the first place.

Martin Pribble: CRUSHED.

It was all about defeating that Australian upstart, and I have succeeded. Martin Pribble, my “competition” in the Readers' Choice for Favorite Agnostic / Atheist Blog of 2012, has been totally defeated, routed, smashed, squished, annihilated, beaten.

Furthermore, the grudge match continues. He has been challenged to a Hug-Off at the GAC in Melbourne. He shall be pulped in person. I shall emerge as the most cuddly huggable lovable atheist in the world by standing on the bleeding, broken corpses of my opponents.

That’s how a Hug-Off works, right? And this isn’t going to happen?

Why I am an atheist – Rod Chlebek

Religion didn’t seem to be very important in my earliest years. We didn’t pray or go to church except for maybe twice a year and then whenever someone died or got married. Strangely, I ended up in Catechism in preparation for First Communion. Somehow I botched that up and didn’t attend when I was expected but I got another chance at it when I hit 4th grade. That was the year I started to attend Catholic School. It was totally voluntary. I wanted to go because my neighborhood friends went there. I made it through First Communion that year being very skeptical about the whole body and blood thing. We were taught that “amen” means “I believe” and that when you receive Communion you are expected to reply “amen”. What bothered me more would have been being the only student who didn’t go through with this. Everyone else did it and believed. I must have been doing something wrong.

Sixth grade brought my third year of being an alter boy and also a heavy dose of science. This increased the amount of conflict I had in dealing with a resurrection, miracles, and the existence of God. Again, I went along with the duality because there’s no way that a bunch of adults could be wrong about this. For a short while, we had an occasional visit from Father John on Wednesdays. It was our opportunity to talk with him about God. I didn’t say much; I didn’t have to. The class asked every question that I had. It was like we had discussed what to ask him just moments before he walked in. He was calm and pleasant as ever, but I noticed something peculiar about his responses. The answers were a bit to the side. There was little that was a very direct from him.

I left Catholic school for 7th grade and returned back again for 8th because my naivety got me in trouble. I went through with Confirmation with the same result as Communion. I knew things were “all in His timing” so I just waited patiently afterward. I thought this was supposed to be a big deal, big enough that I should notice something happening but I didn’t.

High school came and went without any religious influence and I started getting caught up on all the secular things of which I had been unaware. When I finally left home at 20 I bounced around from church to church, from non-denominational to evangelical. I did some soul searching. I was convinced I was doing it wrong and really wanted to know Him. I asked Jesus into my heart. I cried. Nothing.

My wife and I got married at Silverwood Mennonite Chuch in 2000. We were both believers, and very minimal at that, but certainly not Mennonite. That was from her side of the family. I would probably still be a minimalist believer in the Christian god if it were not for another dose of evangelism. Some members of her family were a bit extreme. Religion wasn’t just a part of them, it was them. This created conflict. I never liked being unsure about things that should be so important, so I was forced to try it again. The exception this time is that I took a different approach. My research started with understanding the meaning of words, ones that i taken for granted such as belief and knowledge. The internet proved to be a wonderful tool for finally getting some objective answers. I was fascinated with the amount of knowledge out there. The more knowledge I gained, the less I believed in God. After a hard year of digging, my conflict was resolved. I came to the realization that I did not believe. I was atheist and I found it to be reasonable.

Rod Chlebek

So nice, and so wrong

What do you do on airplanes? I usually devour a book or two, usually something popcorny and light, sometimes something I need to get read for work. On my trip home from Washington DC, I lucked out: I was handed a book the day I took off, and it turned out to be a damned good read.

Jason Rosenhouse is my co-blogger at Scienceblogs — he’s a mathematician, but he’s also neck-deep in the evolution/creationism wars. He was in town for the Reason Rally (wait: from the description, he left before my talk. Cancel the review, gotta pan him instead…nah, I guess I’ll forgive him this one time), and he gave me his brand new book, Among the Creationists: Dispatches from the Anti-Evolutionist Front Line.

Jason regularly goes to creationist conferences. I often drop in on the small local stuff — creationists ranting in midwestern churches — but Jason goes to the big events, the major conferences with swarms of concentrated inanity babbling at large audiences who have made a special trip just to bathe in theistic lies. It’s a different environment; he just shows up, listens and takes notes, politely asks questions to make them struggle a bit, and then leaves…to write up the full story in his blog and now this book.

This isn’t the book where the scientist dismantles in detail every bogus argument the creationists throw at us. Instead, it’s a personal account of the audiences and speakers at this event, and there’s something that comes through loud and clear, that I’ve also experienced: they’re all so damned nice. They haven’t got a leg to stand on with the nonsense they’re talking about, but they try to make up for it with friendliness and manners and all these other psycho-social arts of persuasion. They don’t compensate for being wrong, but you can see how they manage to win over so many people who don’t know better.

It’s a valuable perspective to have. Know your enemy; don’t underestimate them, and don’t demonize them as evil. But be aware of exactly how they manage their image, how they cajole people into believing in ideas that are horribly wrong, and what they are precisely saying. Jason’s book is an essential personal view of our foes.

Also, we noticed that the cover uses a very similar minimalist design and color scheme to my book that will be coming out in the fall. Buy them both as a matched pair!

(Also on Sb)

Why I am an atheist – Anne Marie

After careful thought and consideration, I decide I would write in as to why I am an atheist. Up until about six years ago, until I was 22, I was a believer in fairy tales. I believed that when you blessed yourself and made the sign of the cross that it would be as though it was a “direct telephone line” to God and that whatever I said would go straight to his ears. During mass I would count the number of times I blessed myself to make sure I “hung up” so that in case I thought of something bad it would not go straight to him.

I used to have a rosary and miraculous medals with me at all times, and even carried a scapular and small figures of Mary and Jesus in my purse. After tenth grade I stopped going to church mainly because I hated the parish I went to and detested the monsignor there, who always seemed to be the one officiating. But I still carried those trinkets with me wherever I went. Even though I no longer believe, I still cannot bring myself to throw them away, for sentimental values (gifts from my parents and grandparents).

As far as science goes, I was taught evolution in school and it was not until high school that I learned that people actually thought the world was six thousand years old. Needless to say, those girls were terribly misinformed then as they are now. I am at least thankful that I never believed in that nonsense. The Big Bang makes more sense than creationist stories about how the earth was formed. I love physics and engineering, and am going back to school to learn more about it and to get my degree in mechanical engineering (I know, big leap from fashion design, but I always want to know how things work and why and now that I am 28, I realized what I wanted to be when I was 18 is not what I want to be now that I am no longer a teenager).

The biggest thing that caused me to question and ultimately read about religion more than anything was the child abuse scandal and when the Catholic Church decided there was going to be no more Limbo, which goes back to my constant need to understand things and why it is done that way. I could not believe that no one would come forward for these kids and how dare the priest cover for themselves. It disgusted me that basically the entire hierarchy of the Catholic Church cared more about the pedophile priests than they did for the children whose lives were ruined because of them. Additionally when the Catholic Church announced a few years ago that despite the fact that they are infallible, they made a mistake for a few millennia and that unbaptized babies no longer go to limbo they are in heaven. My grandmother had a stillborn baby some fifty odd years ago and she spent every day until her death ten years ago thinking that she would never see her baby in heaven because the Catholic Church told her it was in Limbo with no chance to be with her.

It was because of this anger that led me to start reading about Catholicism and its history, which led to reading about Protestants and finally other Abrahamic religions and a little of the other world religions. I read why Jews didn’t accept Christ because he did not fulfill the prophecies of the Old Testament. I read about how there is no evidence for Jesus aside from the Bible. I started to realize that if I grew up in India and raised Hindu, I would believe Hinduism is the only way, or if I grew up in Saudi Arabia I would be Muslim and Islam would be the only way. I started to question why would God only allow his religion to be given to only a few select people. I then started to realize that it was all crap. It was all man made and it all boils down to this one thing: people are afraid to die and are afraid that there is nothing after our time on this earth is over.

Through time and reasoning I came to the conclusion that all religion is false and that I now pity people who believe in it and base their whole lives on pleasing an invisible man in the sky. My family is now what we joke as being on the “Dark Side”, and my mother is pretty much an agnostic now. My siblings are also atheists as well and my dad is a strong agnostic too. I am not going to go back to believing in fairy tales ever again. If only the rest of the world would too.

Anne Marie
United States

How many more conferences can you bear?

This is getting ridiculous. Another collision: on 18-20 May, I’ll be attending Imagine No Religion in Kamloops, BC. At the same time, the Women in Secularism conference is taking place on the other side of the continent, in Washington DC. I can’t be at both!

But I do have a proxy. My daughter Skatje will be traveling to DC, and she will also be posting the occasional summary of the days’ events here on Pharyngula. One blog, two conferences. We shall do everything!

Warning: if you are at the same conference with Skatje, do not attempt to weasel sordid stories of her awful father and his goofy behavior out of her — she is under strict instructions to obey that one commandment about honoring your father and mother. Also, the one about killing.

OK, maybe not the one about killing if you get too pushy.

A third conference this weekend?

Yes, a third one. Northwest Free-thought Alliance Conference is taking place on 30 March-1 April in Renton, Washington, just south of Seattle. Fly into Sea-Tac, it’s not that far. Richard Dawkins is speaking at this one, too — he does get around — as well as Anu Garg, who gave an excellent talk last time I heard him.

All right, divvy it up. Southerners and East Coasters, go to Rock Beyond Belief; Upper Midwest, go to our Midwest Science of Origins Conference; West Coasters, head up to the Northwest Free-thought Alliance.

Man, I remember when godless conferences were scarce, and you’d have a choice of a couple of them every year; now you’ve got a couple of them on the same day.

Why I am an atheist – Neel Ode

When I was four (or thereabouts) I was taken by an elderly “aunt” (I think she was a friend of my maternal grandparents) to a church in Manhattan to “see the animals in the stone”. Now I had previously been taken to the American Museum of Natural History and had seen the mounted dinosaur skeletons, etc., and I was eager to see more – especially those which were not yet extracted for the rock.

So I eagerly accompanied her to a church which was lined with marble. To my dismay there were no animal skeletons embedded in the stone: some vague shapes which, if you stretched your imagination a whole lot, could be interpreted as a rabbit, or a squirrl, or a bird, or something else.

After waxing lyrical about the “animals in the stone” my “aunt” then proceeded to start talking about Jesus and God and Heaven.

The first part of her discourse – about the animals in the stone – was obviously blown out of her ass – although I didn’t think in those terms at that time. So I took the second part, about God and Jesus, etc., as just more of the same.

That experience inoculated me: Sunday school, Bible lessons, etc. etc. etc. – you name it – rang false false false from then on.

As I matured, of course, I became more sophisticated in my reasoning, which is only to be expected. But no matter how bullet-proof an argument for God apparently was, I KNEW, from the start, that it was bogus, and I just had to poke and pry at it some more to find the catch – the unstated and erroneous assumption, the false premise.

It has been more than 6 decades, now, and I grow weary of the lies the proselytizers spew with unfailing energy.

Neel Ode

Battle in Scotland!

One of the few places outside the Discovery Institute that promotes Intelligent Design creationism is the Centre for Intelligent Design, led by Alastair Noble, a Scottish creationist. (Sorry to embarrass you, Scot readers and commenters, but you should be a little bashful about the nest of ninnies in your midst). There’s been some recent wrangling between sensible people and Noble and his oh-so-helpful assistant, Casey Luskin…wrangling that has been made public by the Centre for Unintelligent Design.

It’s good stuff. You know your argument is in trouble, though, when you have to bring in an incompetent dweeb like Casey Luskin to squeak out the usual ID boilerplate.

We detect design by finding features in nature which contain the type of information which in our experience comes from intelligence. This is generally called complex and specified information (CSI). In our experience, CSI only comes from a goal-directed process like intelligent design. Thus, when we detect high levels of complex and specified information in nature, we can infer that intelligent design.

“Generally called”…by whom? Not scientists, that’s for sure. CSI is an invented term with no quantitative definition, no means of measurement (it doesn’t even have units!), and no mechanism of detection, but these bozos trot it out time after time in order to make these sciencey assertions.

It’s like ontogenetic depth. They’re happy to invent the term, they’re happy to claim they’re demonstrating the falsehood of evolution with real science, but when you try to pin them down and get the methods that would allow you to replicate their claims, they squirm and wiggle and declare that it’s “A Biological Distance That’s Currently Impossible to Measure”.

That’s all they’ve got. Stuff backed up by claims of quantitative values that, when pressed, they admit that they can’t measure.