Marching on Europe

During the week of 17 September, the National Secular Society is organizing a series of events (in collaboration with other European secular societies) in a Secular Europe Campaign. They will be protesting the privileged status of churches, the political meddling of the Vatican, and faith schools, in support of secularism and state neutrality on religion, along with equal rights for everyone, regardless of their faith. It’s a good cause, I hope many of you take the time to participate.

They’ve made some promotional videos. I’m in one.

But I’m the weird American. Listen to Andrew Copson, head of the British Humanist Association.

Or the guy you’ll really pay attention to, Richard Dawkins.

We Americans will be following along. Remember also that we have the Reason Rally on 24 March in Washington DC!

I get email

So I hear you East-coasters had a little earthquake. I grew up near volcanoes, so I’m not too impressed, but OK, a little shakeup is interesting, and fortunately it sounds like no one was hurt.

But wouldn’t you know it, the crack team of cranks who have my email address reacted promptly with an explanation.

these earthquakes are a result of us sucking the oil from the earth, oil is supposed to be used as a lubricant for the earth not to fill our cars, I imagine these things will get worse and more common

There you go. It’s all everyone’s fault for driving around in cars and flying in airplanes.

I’m not impartial

Since I just made a defense of humanism, I should be upfront about my stake, since I did get recognized a few weeks ago by the International Humanist and Ethical Union. And as long as I’m mentioning my own award, I should also name all the other people who were also commended by the IHEU.

The Nordic Rainbow Humanists award was given to George Thindwa, who has been fighting for LGBT rights in Malawi against unbelievable bigotry and hatred.

There were several 2011 IHEU awards.

The Distinguished Service award was given to:

  • VB Rawat, who has been a leader in India fighting for social justice, working to bring aid to the poor and those afflicted by catastrophe, and who has been opposing the caste system.

  • Narendra Nayak, a tireless promoter of skepticism and science in India, who has worked to expose psychics and magic workers.

  • David Pollock has been an active secularist and editor of the New Humanist magazine, and has been a leader in the British Humanist Association in working for humanist social policies.

The International Humanist award was given to:

  • Sophie in’t Veld is the vice-chair of the European Parliament Committee on Civil Liberties, who has been a great supporter of women’s and LGBT rights.

  • PZ Myers, some guy with a blog.

One of these things is not like the others…

Humanism, or corporatism?

I am completely baffled by Michael Lind. He’s some think-tank scholar who regularly publishes in Salon, and somehow in all of his writings he’s managed to avoid clearly stating any principle he stands for. I understand he’s some kind of center leftist, he’s no fan of right-wing demagoguery, but then he publishes strange articles arguing that we shouldn’t mock Glenn Beck, or now, an article pissing on secular humanism. Why, I don’t know, and what he’d offer as an alternative is missing from his diatribe.

He has a peculiar view of the American condition, too. Apparently, the liberal/progressive element in the US is suffering from a “religious vacuum”, which he claims is being filled by three “new creeds”.

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A very sad story

What does this religious puritanism do to people? It screws up their lives with needless guilt. This is a kind of oppression of the mind, where women are inculcated with unrealistic and shameful views of their own bodies.

Mental purity is a state of mind Renaud came to after years of struggle. When she was 10, she discovered a dirty magazine in her older brother’s bathroom. She had never seen male genitalia before; she became increasingly curious and began to search for pornography. When she hit puberty, she says, her curiosity turned into compulsion, and she added masturbation to her porn-seeking behavior. At 15, she attended a Christian summer camp and heard the pastor talking about “a Father in heaven who loves you unconditionally regardless of what you do.” From then on, she became active in the church and vowed to end her masturbation and porn habits.

“I’ve been sober for seven years now,” she says of her masturbation-free life.

Although some married women participate in Dirty Girls Ministries, Renaud’s crusade is largely for single women like herself. The majority of Dirty Girls’ members are in their 20s and 30s, but many teenagers and preteen girls, some as young as 11, have also joined. Technically speaking, most are virgins, but because of their below-the-belt explorations, they report feeling tainted, undesirable, and perverted.

Being orgasm-free is not the same as being sober, and masturbation does not make someone tainted or undesirable. There are, of course, extreme cases of sexual obsession where the behavior can interfere with day-to-day, productive living, but that isn’t the case in this story: this “Dirty Girls Ministries” regards masturbating or even reading a romance novel twice a week as a dangerous case of excessive addiction. Given that attitude, I suspect they’d regard the Pharyngula readership as a nest of decadent, pervy wastrels obsessed with sex. You should be proud.

But the reverse is true: having a fairly casual attitude towards sex — it doesn’t define you, and your worth is not a function of abstinence — is healthy, and this weirdly repressed perspective inflicts unforgivable pain on ordinary human beings.

Indeed, guilt and shame are emotions commonly expressed by the women involved in Dirty Girls Ministries. “Once I’ve actually committed the sin (of porn and masturbation), I find myself feeling such sadness, frustration, disappointment, anger, shame,” writes one anonymous commenter on the Ministries’ forum. “It makes me feel sick and unworthy,” writes another. One girl even reported feeling guilty after simply dreaming about masturbating.

Isn’t that just the most wonderful thing about religion? Once you’ve infected someone with it, it’s incredibly easy to put them to work punishing themselves for you.

You’ve got a choice. Either you accept the artificial guilt of an ancient dogma and stop doing a perfectly normal, harmless, and universal behavior, or you stop accepting the guilt and find human happiness in being who you are. Rational people choose the latter. Deluded people follow the former, and suffer lifelong for it.

(via Skepchick)

Faith no more

Speaking from the radical flaming atheist end of the spectrum, I have to oppose certain labels that are flying around. Greg Epstein likes the idea of “interfaith”, this movement where atheists join hands with religious groups to carry out good works. The good works part, fine; the bit where we do it under the umbrella of “interfaith”, not so good. Atheism is not a faith position, so it’s false advertising and promotes “faith” as the unifying principle. Ick.

Now Ed Clint responds with a new label, “transfaith”. He changed the prefix, which is a step forward, but kept the suffix! He changed the wrong part of the word! His idea is generally good, and I think it’s fine to engage and cooperate with the opposition, but “faith” is the problem.

Faith is the enemy, and I think we have to be clear about that. Belief without evidence, uncritical acceptance of authority, giving even a shred of credibility to dogma is simply not something I can do, ever, and it distresses me to see people blithely accepting “faith” as a common denominator. Work with people of faith, but not for faith — we can cooperate for real-world effectiveness, but not to whitewash superstitious bullshit.

I will not work with anyone under the banner of “xxxxFaith”, no matter what the prefix.

Except, maybe, “anti”.

A victory for reason and good education

A California school teacher, James Corbett, called creationism “superstitious nonsense”, and was dragged into court by a student claiming that was a violation of the separation of church and state. The verdict from an appeals court has come down and they disagree — they sidestepped the whole constitutionality question, and instead made the reasonable decision that it is the teacher’s job to question dogma.

“In broaching controversial issues like religion, teachers must be sensitive to students’ personal beliefs and take care not to abuse their positions of authority,” Judge Fisher wrote.

“But teachers must also be given leeway to challenge students to foster critical thinking skills and develop their analytical abilities,” he said. “This balance is hard to achieve, and we must be careful not to curb intellectual freedom by imposing dogmatic restrictions.”

Here are the kinds of things Corbett was saying in class:

“Aristotle … argued, you know, there sort of has to be a God. Of course that’s nonsense,” Corbett said according to a transcript of his lecture. “I mean, that’s what you call deductive reasoning, you know. And you hear it all the time with people who say, ‘Well, if all this stuff that makes up the universe is here, something must have created it.’ Faulty logic. Very faulty logic.”

He continued: “The other possibility is, it’s always been there.… Your call as to which one of those notions is scientific and which one is magic.”

“All I’m saying is that, you know, the people who want to make the argument that God did it, there is as much evidence that God did it as there is that there is a giant spaghetti monster living behind the moon who did it,” the transcript says.

Corbett told his students that “real” scientists try to disprove the theory of evolution. “Contrast that with creationists,” he told his students. “They never try to disprove creationism. They’re all running around trying to prove it. That’s deduction. It’s not science. Scientifically, it’s nonsense.”

I’m on record saying that teachers should not use the public school classroom to proselytize for atheism, any more than they should be proselytizing for Christianity. But that’s not what Corbett was doing: he was doing something that a science teacher must do, assessing hypotheses against the observable facts and in the context of reason. When people use their religious ideology to make counterfactual claims, a teacher should be able to point out that those claims are wrong.

I am very glad that the court came down on the side of allowing science teachers to teach science, even when it exposes the fallacies of religious claims.

Rhett S. Daniels, litigious bully

Several people have proposed going after Najera’s spineless employers by dunning them with email. Please do not. He has requested that people not jeopardize his job further, so further action is discouraged, OK?

Via Orac comes this amazing story of a thug intimidating a public health employee: it seems Mr Daniels was very upset with René Najera, an epidemiologist, who has been blogging and tweeting about medicine and quackery, and when the two of them got into an argument on the internet, Daniels took the low road. He contacted Najera’s employers, waved lawyers around, and compelled the department he worked for to demand that he stop all these extracurricular internet activities, or be fired.

Mr Daniels has the appearance of a coward and somebody who can’t hold his own in an argument. And because his feelings were hurt by his own inadequacy, he took steps to silence an informed voice on the internet.

And it gets worse. Liz Ditz has a detailed summary of the affair, and Daniels appears in the comments, frantically throwing out more threats, and bragging about his giant penis financial worth.

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Quacks everywhere

David Colquhoun has posted an excellent series of posts on the Steiner Waldorf schools, 19th century crackpottery that persists even now, by hiding their fundamentally pseudoscientific basis under a fog of fancy invented terms. He discusses their goofy philosophy of anthroposophistry, their devious efforts to get state funding, and their unfortunate but unsurprising history of racism. It’s wild and crazy stuff, and it’s been sidling under the radar for a while.

What initially drew me to DC’s site was his article on quackery in retreat: the University of Westminster has discarded some of their previous offerings in naturopathy. There is still a fair amount of junk in their curriculum, but there’s hope that those are waning too.

I needed that bit of solace, because my university’s official listserve sent me a wonderful offer earlier this week.

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The world is upside down in Kentucky

In a weird reversal of the normal state of affairs, the Democratic governor of Kentucky has long been pushing support for Ken Ham’s ridiculous Ark Park…and now his Republican challenger, David Williams, has come out opposing it. Even more interestingly, he argues that the feasibility study was bogus, and that it simply won’t get built. Of course, Ken Ham isn’t happy with that.

Unfortunately, Williams is far behind in the polls, and isn’t expected to succeed in his bid.

Or rather, fortunately. My brain would melt into a puddle that flowed out my ears if I lived in a country where the crazy social conservatives were the pro-science party, while the social progressives were all NewAgey dingleberries who promoted bad science. It sort of saves my sanity that the Republicans tend to be so unremittingly evil on all fronts that the sickly performance of the Democrats doesn’t cause me any major dilemmas. Just constant despair.

(Also on Sb)