“Biological Information: New Perspectives”

That’s the title of an academic science book. It sure sounds sciencey, doesn’t it? It got accepted by Springer-Verlag for publication. And then inside it claims that one of their conclusions is that “conventional chemical and evolutionary mechanisms seem insufficient to fully explain the labyrinth of information that is life”. Oooh, more of that fancy science talk. It must be taken seriously!

Only, it turns out that this book was being peddled as a contribution to the category of “Engineering and Applied Science” rather than biology, because if it were proposed to Springer-Verlag as a biology text, it would have gotten reviewers who knew something about biology. And it was the product of a creationist conference held in a School of Hotel Administration at Cornell. And the editors are Marks, Behe, Dembski, Gordon, and Sanford, names well known for their affiliation with the Discovery Institute.

Once again, the ID crowd engages in some stealth creationism in order to get a line on their CV. Only this time, Springer-Verlag noticed, and the book has been quietly removed from their listings, pending further review.

Man, those guys at the DI are pathetic.

(Also on Sb)

The Discovery Institute is winding up their persecution complex again

It has the potential to be fun or a fizzle. The Discovery Institute is leaping to the defense of David Coppedge, a computer technician (don’t be fooled, the DI is desperately straining to enhance his credentials) who was demoted and then fired at the JPL. Coppedge claims to be the victim of discrimination against his views on Intelligent Design creationism; the JPL has argued that he was out of line to be harassing scientists with nonsense, passing out DVDs of ID BS, pushing his silly creationist website, and basically wasting his time and not doing his job. They warned him, he persisted. They demoted him, he persisted. Finally they fired him.

So now Coppedge, with the assistance of a fine team of creationist lawyers, is suing the JPL. There’s lots of information at The Sensuous Curmudgeon, which is shaping up to be the go-to place to follow the trial, which started today.

This is a big case for the neo-theocrats at the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture (a/k/a the Discoveroids). They’re trying to establish some new kind constitutional right — an employee’s freedom to promote creationism in the workplace. One of their top legal talents, Discoveroid Casey Luskin, is advising the lawyer for Coppedge — that’s William J. Becker, Jr., who (until he picked up a few creationist clients) appears to be mostly a personal injury and workers’ comp lawyer.

To promote the issue, the Discoveroids initially waged a public relations campaign which we described here: The Coppedge Case: A Study in Tactics and Strategy. They’ve set up a page devoted to this case, which is here, but which seems to have languished for months.

The official information source for the Coppedge case requires payment of fees to obtain copies of pleadings from the court clerks here: Superior Court of California, Los Angeles. At the box for “Case Number” you need to enter BC435600. Some minimal information is available for free — the names of the parties and their lawyers, a list of what documents have been filed, what proceedings have been held, and what future hearings have been scheduled.

It’s going to be a weird trial. It sounds like the JPL was reasonable and put up with Coppedge for quite some time, clearly telling him to desist in his problematic behavior at work; The Discovery Institute has nothing to lose — Coppedge is a nobody — and their enthusiasm for the case has waxed and waned. We’ll see if they put up a fight or not.

(Also on Sb)

Rush Limbaugh isn’t the only moron out there, unfortunately

I’ll say one thing for Rush Limbaugh: he just cracked the sewer valve wide open, but he’s not the only one contributing to the gusher of sewage. Take Bryan Fischer: he’s even worse than that slick pig Limbaugh. He thinks there’s nothing wrong with what Limbaugh said, and acknowledges, like Limbaugh, that the only thing he did wrong was use the “slut” word, which is naughty…but that his sentiment was entirely correct.

Here’s his interpretation of Sandra Fluke’s testimony. He is shocked that:

…this woman could, without any trace of shame, any trace of embarrassment, give open testimony before the entire United States of America, about how much promiscuous sex she and her classmates are having.

Of course, that’s not what she testified. She testified that women’s reproductive health could be expensive, citing the use of contraceptives for prevention of ovarian cysts. But she could have talked about the importance of contraception for a healthy, happy sex life even within a monogamous relationship: it does not make a woman a slut for enjoying sex with her partner. But even if she did have multiple partners, so what? There’s no shame in enjoying sex: every human does, unless they’re wracked with religious guilt.

It really exposes these people for what they are: anti-sex, anti-human prudes. Fuck the Puritans. Please.

And here’s another idiotic perspective on Fluke from Scott Adams, Dilbonian dimbulb. He sees two possible interpretations.

Which of these two events do you find more distasteful?

1. Rush Limbaugh called Sandra Fluke a slut for her position on contraceptives.

Or

2. Activists are treating Fluke as a helpless victim who needs society’s protection against the harsh words of an entertainer.

My interpretation of events is that Limbaugh saw Fluke as a capable adult, and a public figure, tough enough to handle some harsh language. The boycotters apparently see Fluke as more of an endangered child, or a helpless damsel in distress, threatened by a monster. Light the torches and launch the boycott!

Adams has always been this clueless. I don’t know of a single person who has responded to this by thinking that Fluke needs our protective embrace: she seems confident and mature. The reaction has been anti-Limbaugh. He has been exposed as a blue-nosed asshole who despises women in general — not specifically Sandra Fluke — who have a healthy attitude towards sex, who treat it as a reasonable and expected and even joyful aspect of normal behavior, rather than something to hide in shame.

That’s the battle. Not some peculiar chauvinistic idea that one poor woman needs our chivalrous shelter. I suspect Adams is just projecting.

Another person who is projecting is Bill Maher.

Hate to defend #RushLimbaugh but he apologized, liberals looking bad not accepting. Also hate intimidation by sponsor pullout

He did not apologize for despising women who enjoy sex or need medical assistance in maintaining their reproductive health; clearly, he still feels that’s a valid stance. He only apologized for using words like “slut” instead of being more formal and calling her a harlot or something similarly antiquated. Jon Stewart got this right: what’s wrong with Maher that he can’t see this?

As someone who also says things on behalf of a minority that a majority finds offensive, I sympathize with the detestation of “intimidation by sponsor pullout” — but the problem lies in the reliance on money to fund free speech, and coupling that to selling soap. What Limbaugh said is still wrong and stupid.

I get email

Those Australians…they recently ran a segment on their Dateline program featuring their fellow Australian Ken Ham and the Creation “Museum”, which includes portions of an interview with me. Actually, I seem to be the only critic to get any airtime in the show, which is flattering, but I could have used a little more support!

Anyway, the show was recently aired, my name is played up as an atheist opponent of creationist nonsense, and now I’m suddenly receiving lots of email from Australian creationists because they want to persuade me to their foolish cause. And some of them are just weird. I’m including one of the weirder ones below the fold — warning, it’s very long — in which the author uses a novel argument: the zodiac, therefore God.

This ain’t astrology: it’s that arbitrary, human-assigned labels attached to groupings of stars can be rationalized into Christian symbology, therefore, the stars are evidence of the truth of the Bible. It’s one of the sillier arguments I’ve seen. Would you believe that the Sphinx is a Christian testimony, since it binds together a virgin woman (Mary) and a lion (Jesus)? Centaurs represent “Christ’s dual nature”. You can just imagine what he does with Virgo and the Southern Cross.

And then he does the usual thing of claiming that the Bible foretold legitimate scientific conclusions: Somehow, “He [God] set a compass [circle] upon the face of the deep” becomes a biblical explanation that the Earth is spherical. How do you draw a sphere with a compass?

It is grammatically well written, he spells my name correctly, and he uses paragraph breaks, so it’s a step above what I usually get. But behind the superficial courtesies, there lies a brain that has totally stripped its gears and lost most of its connections to reality.

(Also on Sb)

[Read more…]

Veeery interestink

A reader sent along an interesting quote from Heinrich Himmler, taken from Heinrich Himmler: A Life by Peter Longerich. Since we’ve got another religious idiot claiming the Nazis were atheists, it seemed appropriate to include it here…and since I’m lazy, I’m just going to include everything my correspondent wrote to me.

I am a WWII history buff and I was reading the English translation of Peter Longerich’s biography of Heinrich Himmler. Longerich made the point that Himmler did not like Christianity or the Christian churches even forbidding SS men from having any leadership role in the church. He further made the point that Himmler described himself as a believer in God.

He then noted something that I had not heard before: Longerich quoted a letter that Himmler wrote a pastor in 1937 to the effect that what denomination an SS man chose was his own person business. However, apparently this deference did not extend to non-belief. Atheism, Himmler wrote, “is the only world- or religious view that is not tolerated within the SS.” He further wrote, “I have not tolerated an atheist in the ranks of the SS. Every member has a deep faith in God, in what my ancestors called in their language Waralda, the ancient one, the one who is mightier than we are.” (Longerich, Heinrich Himmler, Oxford University Press, 2012, p. 220)

I found that passage interesting in light of the claim that the Nazis were an atheistic system. It clearly rebuts that claim. (As if it needed further rebuttal.) But further, if the Nazi were supposedly atheistic, how is it that the SS — the group that was supposed the vanguard of the Nazi system, the epitome of the Nazi ideal — did not admit atheists in its ranks? One had to be at least a theist. So how, again was the Nazi system atheist??

And of course, for those of you who want to argue that this is merely Heinrich Himmler, we can always turn to good ol’ Adolf Hitler, who was quite clear on the subject of atheism.

We were convinced that the people needs and requires this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out.

You want to call the Nazi leadership unorthodox, marginally Christian, or representative of a pathological religious extreme, I’ll agree with you; but you don’t get to call them atheist.

Anti-creationism legislation—imagine that!

I’ve got to pay attention to the good news more often. My in-box is full of comments about anti-evolution, creationist legislation, but I missed this one: Louisiana SB70 is an anti-creationist bill that “Repeals the Louisiana Science Education Act.” Zack Kopplin has a website combating creationism that focuses on the rational Louisianians and what they’re doing to bring reason to the state.

I’ll call your attention to one notable fact: they’ve got 75 Nobel laureate scientists to endorse this law. If you know a science laureate who hasn’t signed the petition — I noticed a few names missing myself — you might mention it to them.

Why I am an atheist – Phil Hoenig

This essay was originally going to be just the one sentence: “I am an atheist because I am educated.” It’s laconic and full of all sorts of wonderful implications: theists are ignorant, the truth is that there are no gods, if only people could be shown that truth they would all realise it and the abuses of religion would disappear forever. There’s probably a touch of smugness in there too.

As well as being an atheist, I’m a huge procrastinator and between thinking up that as an answer and actually submitting it, I thought about this further and realised that there’s far more to it than the fact that I have been lucky enough to receive an education. To see why education was not a sufficient requirement for atheism I had to look no further than my own family.

I was raised as a Catholic. The church had its clutches on me until seven (although luckily only in a metaphorical sense) and for many years afterwards. Although some members of the extended family back in the old country didn’t appear particularly church-going, I had always assumed that the family had been Catholic for generations, for all I knew going back for two thousand years. It was only a few years ago, decades after the pantomime when I first explicitly told my parents I was an atheist – “I’m not a Catholic.”, “Yes you are.”, “No, I’m not.”, “Yes you are. That’s what it says on your birth certificate.”, “My birth certificate also says I’m not even a foot tall and only weigh a few pounds. I’ve grown up since then.” – they reconciled themselves to my lack of faith and the whole matter was regarded as academic, I had a chat with my grandmother and found out that it’s really only my mother who is religious and the reason why she was such a devoted Catholic daughter to not particularly religious parents.

My mother was an intelligent girl. Even if her parents weren’t religious themselves, they recognised that she had a lot of potential and wanted the best education they could get for her. Unfortunately the best education available was at the local Catholic school. From what I gather the stereotypes of Catholic schools of the era held true there; the teachers were all nuns in habits with a deep devotion to the teachings of Rome, a strong ruler in their hand and a knowledge of how to use it to instill the fear of God into their pupils. What would otherwise have been the best education my mother could have had at the time was poisoned by these black-clad sadistic authoritarians and to this day her mind remains stunted by it.

Compared to the educational opportunities I had as a boy in the seventies in eighties, the opportunities my mother had as a girl in the fifties and sixties would have been limited. The pursuit of maths and science would not have been encouraged anywhere near as much for her as it was for me. Nevertheless, I can’t help but feel a huge sense of sadness at the potential wasted when an intelligent woman tells me with all sincerity that praying to Saint Anthony will help me find lost objects, and an even larger sense of rage when she tells me that she believes in a literal eternity of hellfire, and that fear of such makes it very hard if not impossible for her to question what she was taught as a young girl.

Why am I an atheist? The reason why I believe there are no gods – at least the proximate cause – does have to do with the fact that I did receive an education. Without it I wouldn’t have all the little jigsaw pieces I’ve used to make my model of the world, and it’s this model that’s given me an abiding love of the scientific process. It is most emphatically not a religion. It recognises the fact that its description of the universe is sometimes inaccurate or just plain wrong and endeavours to incrementally correct it. It acknowledges that the human brain likes to make patterns even when patterns aren’t really there and tries to circumvent this tendency when it can. It does not say that the Universe is thus because I or a voice inside my head say so and nay-saying will bring forth retribution, but because I did these experiments and made these observations and that you can do them yourself to verify it or come up with your own experiments and observations if you think they’ll do a better job explaining it. It’s because of this that I accept what science says as a fairly good approximation of what the Universe really is like. Despite the charlatans or the misinformed, science has not found any evidence for the existence of gods and until it does I am not going to believe that there are any.

The reason why I find the above reasoning valid – the ultimate cause of my atheism – is harder to pin down. Could I just have easily followed the same path as my mother? Creating a model of the world where Catholicism – or any other theistic religion – had the answer to everything and any inconsistencies could be explained away by evil forces or just ignored for fear of divine punishment? I’d like to think that it’s because I am more independently minded than her, but is that a fair assessment? Maybe it’s because my education had more science lessons and fewer cruel nuns.

The seeds of cognitive dissonance would have been planted when I was about ten or so, before I had any issues with authoritarianism. Religious teaching was no more complicated then “Jesus died for your sins, God loves you, but you need to follow his rules.” Science was a lot of cool facts but little explanation about how we knew these facts. I wanted to know how, if there were these monkeys that slowly turned into men, where did Adam and Eve come into the story. I did not get a satisfying answer. I did not abandon Catholicism then and there – like many I could make an accommodation between religion and science – but it was the first time I could not blindly follow religious and scientific teachings simultaneously and have to choose one over the other.

I was a fan of Jesus, but found his weekly fan club meetings were boring and pointless. Science I mostly got from books telling me – mirabile dictu – that there were beautiful spiral galaxies out there, and planets with spots on them bigger than the entire Earth or that had rings! There’s stuff that blows up if you get it wet, and a gas that will poison you with one breath, but if you mix the two together you get salt! The stuff in my pencil was made of the same stuff as a diamond, just arranged in a different way! We used to be little monkeys before we changed into people! Me and my dog had the same great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather! One hundred million years ago there were these big lizards walking, swimming and flying around the place!

When I look deeply into the question, perhaps the real reason I am an atheist is because to a ten – or almost forty, for that matter – year-old boy, dinosaurs are cool. Perhaps it’s not too late to tell my mother that.

Phil Hoenig
Australia

A poll on AA’s new billboards

The world is changing. For one thing, American Atheists are doing a better and better job of making billboards — less cluttered, cleaner, with a simpler message appropriate to a billboard, yet still wonderfully provocative (This is also, by the way, a great example of how pointed internal criticism can lead to improvements). These are also good examples of targeting the message, to the Jewish and Islamic communities.

Another way the world is changing is that more and more people are pointing these silly online polls out to me, and they’re already skewed in a favorable direction by the time I arrive. Really, it’s weird: 5 years ago, we’d find some mainstream poll and it would initially be insanely anti-atheist, and nowadays they’re usually more closely split. Like this one:

Do you think these billboards are appropriate?

Yes. American Atheists have every right to express their views and do outreach. 55%

No. It’s unnecessary provocation to put the billboards up in religious communities. 43%
Not sure. 2%

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t make it more insanely biased in favor of the reasonable answer, of course.