Some people find it easy to lie

People like Hamza Tzortzis, for instance. Here he is confronted with a statement he made claiming that Muslims reject the whole idea of freedom, and he promptly denies that he ever said it. Unfortunately for him, his statement was recorded on video, and here that earlier video is spliced in right after his lie.

The other weird thing here: note how the audience cheers and claps at his denial. Like the creationists, Islamic fundamentalists also make the effort to pack the venue’s seats with their mindless followers. I’ve been in similar situations; it’s like trying to talk to an auditorium full of zombies.

“You people”

You can hardly blame Hobby Lobby for refusing to serve Christ-killers on Christmas, now can you?

Beginning your shopping list for Hanukkah gifts and decorations? If so, make sure to avoid Hobby Lobby, a swiftly growing U.S. crafts store with 561 stores, which sells zero Hanukkah merchandise, and hires Jewish intolerant employees.

On September 27th, Ken Berwitz took to his blog to explain what happened when a friend of his entered Hobby Lobby seeking Hanukkah goods. To the customer’s surprise, a sales associate callously replied, “We don’t cater to you people.”

Understandably, Mr. Berwitz had to hear this supposed truth for himself, and quickly made a call to Corporate to ask why Hobby Lobby didn’t put Hanukkah goods on their item list this year.

The response: ”Because Mr. Green is the owner of the company, he’s a Christian, and those are his values.”

My values involve never setting foot inside a Hobby Lobby store.

Martin Luther College looks like a total waste of time and money

New Ulm is a town in Minnesota. It hosts Martin Luther College (MLC), which, as you might guess from the name, is a religious school. An acting group in New Ulm planned to put on the play “Inherit the Wind”, but now they won’t be — MLC refused to allow them to use any of their facilities for practice, and also pressured the actors to drop out because evolution is contrary to their teachings.

MLC is the college of ministry for the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod (WELS), which believes in creationism that teaches the Genesis story as a factual, historical account. Schone said MLC was concerned about making it absolutely clear to its students, WELS members and the public about its beliefs and teachings on creationism. He said he recognizes the subtext of the play, but feels it is unfairly critical of creationism and that most people would only see the criticism.

"We felt it was not compatible with what [the school] teaches the Bible says about the universe and the world,"? said Schone. "This is a ministerial school. People employing our students need confidence about their views."

It is not unfairly critical to the bankrupt fairy tale of creationism, it is unfairly generous. I really like that last line, though. Apparently, one of MLC’s selling points is that they work hard to keep their students safely and confidently ignorant of any perspective outside the Wisconsin synod’s accepted interpretations.

That’s not an education. That’s carefully nurtured stupidity.

Now they want to poison knowledge

We all know that the creationists have been busily trying to redefine science so that they can call Bible-based faith that the earth is 6000 years old “science”, while empirical research and validated theories are relabeled “dogma”. But now they’re going to reach deeper into the educational process and redefine “knowledge”.

While most of us think that it is ignorance that needs to be stamped out, advocates of Kentucky’s new unapproved and forcibly implemented science standards are targeting … knowledge.

Just take a gander at the responses to my opinion piece in the Louisville Courier-Journal which were published on Monday. According to Brad Matthews, former director of curriculum and assessment for the Jefferson County Public Schools, one reason we need these unapproved and forcibly implement standards is to extirpate that bane of all modern permissivist educators: memorization.

"Science education has moved away from the memorization of many facts," says Matthews, "and toward understanding how the laws and principles of science are applied."

That’s right: students have memorized too many facts. Their heads are bursting with scientific facts. There is not enough room in their tiny little brains for an understanding of how these facts should be applied because all the room us currently taken up by scientific facts which these students have memorized. There is simply no space in those fact-crowded little heads for scientific concepts.

The solution is obvious to people like Matthews: clear all that knowledge out of there so they will be able to apply the knowledge they will no longer have under these standards.

Knowledge is now the rote memorization of “facts”, and educators who try to get students to understand concepts are now enemies of knowledge. I’m sure the taskmasters who run madrassas are now nodding their heads in complete agreement.

Brad Matthews’ statement is entirely reasonable, and does not warrant one iota of the hyperbole Cothran applies to it. The worst classes in the world are the ones where we sit students down and force them to memorize strings of data and then regurgitate them onto an exam. That does not imply that kids shouldn’t have to master some basic rote skills; sorry, gang, knowing your times tables is still important as a basic life skill.

But you still have to understand how to apply that knowledge. For instance, in cell biology, I expect my students to memorize the structure of a peptide bond (that’s not hard) and the basic properties of the classes of amino acids (only slightly harder), and we talk about some basic chemical reactions, like hydrolysis. They should be able to figure out how you break a peptide bond, without memorizing all the pairwise combinations of amino acids and how they’re split chemically. Once you know the general principle you can apply it everywhere!

Also, if you’re learning science, you have to learn how to fit new facts into an existing body of knowledge, and memorization won’t cut it.

What these guys are really afraid of is that deep ideas like evolution are natural inferences from all the data and facts floating around in science — if you learn how to think, you’ll inevitably figure out that creationism is bullshit, evolution actually works and makes sense, and that all those religious cranks have been lying to us. So in defense they want to truncate education: memorize what we already know (and even that they will tightly circumscribe), but don’t you dare teach kids how to think.

Please, please people: stop using the naive dictionary meaning of words in place of context

I know I’m notorious for complaining about those goofy definitions of atheism (“it just means “not believing in god”, nothing more!”, the superficial mob will say) because the word has acquired much deeper resonances that we ignore at our peril, and has implications far greater than simple rejection of one assertion. But the other word that people love to abuse is “freethought”. The same superficial twits all think it means simply that you’re allowed to think whatever you want (which, it turns out, you can do even in a theocracy) and that it’s a kind of hedonism of the mind in which all things are permissible.

It’s not. It’s a word with a long history, a real meaning, and a greater substance than the poseurs know of. Alex Gabriel does a marvelous job scouring the ignoramuses on the meaning of freethought.

Objections to Freethought‘s place in our masthead are among the laziest, glibbest soundbites our critics have, but more than that display a failure to grasp even the term’s most basic history. Freethought is not ‘free thought’ or uninhibited inquiry – to think so boasts the same green literalism as thinking a Friends’ Meeting House is a shared beach hut or that Scotch pancakes contain Scotch  – though even if it were, it’s silly and inane to assume one’s critics are automatons or say loose collective viewpoints mean dictatorship. Freethought is a specified tradition, European in the main, whose constituents have by and large been countercultural, radical and leftist, everything Condell and cohorts viscerally despise.

I am so fed up with people who say that they understand the meaning of the word “free” and the meaning of the word “thought”, and therefore they understand everything they need to know about “freethought”. And these are often the same people who claim that their tradition is one of knowledge and learning and skepticism, yet they want to replace the complex world of knowledge with a kind of naive literalism.

A philosopher agrees with me

I don’t know whether this is a good thing, or a bad thing, but at least he’s agreeing for a different reason. On the question of whether we’ll someday be able to download brains into a computer, I’ve said no for largely procedural reasons: there is no way to capture the state of all the complex molecules (and the simple ions, either) of the brain in any kind of snapshot, and the excuses of the download proponents are ludicrously ignorant of even the current state of biology. John Wilkins says no for a different and interesting reasons: a simulation (and that’s all a computer version of a person could be) is not the thing itself. The map is not the territory. So even surrendering the idea of a high-fidelity transfer and saying that you’ll just develop a model of a brain doesn’t get you anywhere close to solving the problem of immortalizing “me” in a machine.

Sorry, trans-humanists. I can believe that there can be a post-humanity, but it won’t include us, so I don’t know why you aspire to it. I can sort of imagine an earth transformed by human activities into a warmer, wetter, even more oceanic place that allows more squid to flourish, and it’s even a somewhat attractive future, but it’s not a human transformation.

Some academics in literature apparently have a lady problem

So, so familiar, and so, so tiresome. Professor of literature at the University of Toronto David Gilmour:

I’m not interested in teaching books by women. Virginia Woolf is the only writer that interests me as a woman writer, so I do teach one of her short stories. But once again, when I was given this job I said I would only teach the people that I truly, truly love. Unfortunately, none of those happen to be Chinese, or women. Except for Virginia Woolf. And when I tried to teach Virginia Woolf, she’s too sophisticated, even for a third-year class. Usually at the beginning of the semester a hand shoots up and someone asks why there aren’t any women writers in the course. I say I don’t love women writers enough to teach them, if you want women writers go down the hall. What I teach is guys. Serious heterosexual guys. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Chekhov, Tolstoy. Real guy-guys. Henry Miller. Philip Roth.

Let me guess. He thinks his opinion of woman writers is an objective fact, and not at all colored by his own personal sexism.

Also, what kind of teacher only teaches the work he personally adores? Shouldn’t the point of a literature course be to broaden students’ minds, rather than imprisoning them in the limited scope of the instructor’s prejudices?