Another theocrat for Kansas

Maybe somebody from Kansas can say whether this crazy woman has a chance. Joan Farr Heffington is running for governor, and she has a few priorities.

  • Require that a Biblical and Constitutional reason exist for the passage of any new laws

  • Allow teaching of Christianity vs. evolution in schools

I guess there won’t be any laws regulating GMO crops in Kansas, or prohibiting stem cell research, or funding the creation of any wind farms. Anything more recent than the 18th century is going to have to be neglected, along with anything not mentioned in the Constitution.

At least she’s upfront about the conflict between Christianity and evolution.

Quick, somebody reassure me that she’s a fringe candidate without a prayer of getting into office. Please. It’s Monday, the day is painful enough.

What is Richard Mabey smoking?

I really don’t know who this Mabey fellow is — apparently, he’s a well-regarded nature writer in the UK — but he’s recently enthusiastically mentioned his summer reading plans, and they’re freaky.

I’ll need a long summer break just to finish Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini’s dense but explosively exciting What Darwin Got Wrong (Profile). The celebration of the great scientist’s bicentenary last year courteously sidestepped the fact that most cutting-edge biologists now regard natural selection as little more than cosmetic tweaking in the process of evolution. What’s happening is far more philosophically thrilling: creatures are doing it for themselves. The authors show how ancient “managerial” genes, self-organising systems in cells and the inherent tendency towards symmetry in living structures all help to generate new organisms fully pre-adapted to their environments. Wings already pre-balanced for flight!

Say what? Who are these mysterious “cutting-edge biologists” who have these bizarre misunderstandings of biology?

I think Mabey has been overdoing the herbs.

It’s the Happy Hunting Grounds!

Feeling bored? Not enough creationists turning up on Pharyngula? Do you need some fresh meat? There’s a whole field of sheep on the Natural Therapy Pages on Facebook who are unaccustomed to skeptical wolves! A few sample messages there:

Tony Gyenis Susanne and I are bringing tuning forks and channeling to a whole new level. I am presently the only Tuning Fork practitioner in Canada that I know of working in the 6th dimension. We love the fact that we are working with group healing to empower large numbers of people. We will start in Ottawa, Canada and move this across the country and then internationally. We love the interaction with the Elders and the higher realms.

Olya Szewczuk
Some people seem to “sense” the energy of different foods, medicines, supplements, and even technology and other things that surround us in our daily lives.
These frequencies can affect our bodies, our minds, and our state of well-being by bringing our own body frequency up or down, in tandem with their energy.
When we ingest a food or supplement, its frequency, as well as its chemistry, affects us.
These are the principles upon which homeopathy is based.

Romp through the place while you can — I predict it will become an invitation-only group in a few days. Bring back souvenirs! I’d really like to have a 6-dimensional tuning fork, myself.

Madness. Paranoia. Ken Ham.

At the AAI meeting in Copenhagen, the group formulated a Declaration on Religion in Public Life. It was a nice statement, a bit vague, the product of too little time and preparation, but still a useful expression of godless sentiment. To my amusement, Ken Ham read it and his head exploded. It’s the Atheist Agenda for World Conquest! If ever you want to see the Christian persecution complex on full boil, just poke Ken Ham.

For example, here’s the first statement in the Copenhagen declaration.

We recognize the unlimited right to freedom of conscience, religion and belief, and that freedom to practice one’s religion should be limited only by the need to respect the rights of others.

That’s a statement of tolerance. There will be no persecution of believers — everyone has the right to their own thoughts. You can criticize it for being too generous, perhaps, and failing to define limits on the practice of religion in anything but the most general terms, but it reflects the temperament of the group: the atheist police are not going to come pounding on the doors of the synagogue, church, or mosque and tell them to stop that; there will be no godless inquisition.

Not in the mind of Ken Ham, though. He takes that paragraph and rewrites it to say what he thinks it means. It says much more about the mind of Ham than anything at all about atheism.

We recognize the unlimited right (even though we have no objective basis for “rights” in our system) to freedom of conscience, religion, and belief—except for Christians—and that freedom to practice one’s religion should be limited only by the need to respect the rights of others (this is the golden rule: “do unto others . . . ” for which we have no logical basis in our way of thinking)—except for Christians, as we reject Christianity totally and must try to eliminate it.

Wow. That’s some paranoia at work. Atheist support freedom of religion, and poor Ham’s rebuttal is to magically insert “except for Christians!” everywhere. That, and he constantly harps on this strange claim that we have no objective reason to be good to our fellow human beings, since we don’t have Jesus telling us to do it with his prod of damnation.

The whole article is like that! He just takes each paragraph of the declaration, sticks in a couple of “except for Christians”, and pretends it is a plan to oppress everyone who believes in Jesus. Here’s another example:

We assert that private conduct, which respects the rights of others should not be the subject of legal sanction or government concern.

It’s another reassuring generality: the government shouldn’t try to regulate beliefs. I can assure you that what the writers were mainly concerned about is attempts by governments to require adherence to a particular faith to be considered a good citizen, as well as patterns of persecution of minority religious groups. Look what Ken Ham does to it, though:

We assert that private conduct—except for Christians—which respects the rights of others—even though we have no basis for determining what “respect” means, nor any logical basis for why people (who are chance conglomerations of chemicals) ought to have “rights”—should not be the subject of legal sanction or government concern—unless it involves Christians, as we have determined they should not be allowed freedom for their religion because they believe in absolutes and have a system of absolute morality.

The man is simply insane. He’s seeing godless boogeymen where there aren’t any, and inventing complete lies to justify paranoia about atheists coming to take their bibles away.

He misses the facts of the declaration. It’s saying that people like Ham will be allowed freedom of religion despite their odious absolutism. Ham wants to impose his tyranny of absolute morality on others; he’s apparently unable to comprehend that others are more tolerant than he is.

Mike S. Adams, bad professor

The Supreme Court recently decided that campus student groups do not have to be subsidized by the university if they discriminate — so, for instance, the campus Christian club can’t refuse to admit gays and also collect university money. Perfectly reasonable, to my mind.

It’s driving flitterbrained conservatives mad, though. They can’t discriminate? Injustice! Perhaps one of the craziest is Mike Adams, who has announced his intention to abuse the ruling at UNC Wilmington.

…when I get back to the secular university in August, I plan to round up the students I know who are most hostile to atheism. Then I’m going to get them to help me find atheist-haters willing to join atheist student groups across the South. I plan to use my young fundamentalist Christian warriors to undermine the mission of every group that disagrees with me on the existence of God.

What a coincidence — I’m hoping to restart the UMM Freethinkers group this August, too. I can’t quite imagine bringing together students interested in atheism/agnosticism/secularism and telling them our plan is for them to join Christian groups instead, and become pests and troublemakers. That plan is just bizarre, and a disservice to the honest discussion of the issues…and a disservice to the students. Mike Adams doesn’t care!

That means an invading group can turn a smaller, weaker group into second class citizens on campus. That’s what I intend to do to those groups who do not believe in God.

This could get really interesting. It’s not just the students who’ll be annoyed; there’s this little thing called ‘collegiality’, where we have to work together with our fellow faculty. And those faculty may be advising some of those other groups. I can just imagine what would happen if I tried to turn freethinkers on campus into militant disruptors of other organizations: their faculty advisors would descend on me in fury. I might even suddenly find myself nominated and elected to serve on some of the more tedious committees on campus.

And here’s the kicker:

I do not seek robust debate. I seek power over the godless heathen dissident.

This guy actually works at a university? Madness.

By the way, if any Christians or Muslims want to join the UMM Freethinkers, they’d be welcome. We like debate. It would make the meetings lively.

What’s next after Expelled?

I’ve got a little inside information on Premise Media, makers of Expelled — despite all the bragging about what a successful movie they had, they still haven’t fully paid contractors they’d hired, and the company appears to be dead. It was a kind of zombie company anyway, with a fake website filled with fake projects to trick people into taking it seriously, and now it’s simply decaying. All that’s left is a collection of clips.

However, the writer, Kevin Miller, has found employment working on something even schlockier — the poor guy’s career is sinking so fast, he’s going to end up writing for Veggie Tales at some point. He’s working on a new movie with…Kirk Cameron!

The movie is called Monumental, and I dare you to puzzle out what it’s about from the description at that link. It seems to be best described as Kirk Cameron’s Vanity Show, in which a film crew follows him around as he gushes out a right-wing simplistic version of American history that emphasizes how God was on our side every step of the way. It sounds like the sort of thing they’d want to bring in the Texas board of education to consult on.

I remember the classic BBC television series, America, and it has echoes of that…except instead of a guy with class and gravitas like Alistair Cooke, their narrator is going to be a pious pipsqueak creationist with a reputation for inanity and ignorance, and it’s being written by a fellow whose last big screen effort was notorious for its dishonesty and incompetence. The Dunning-Kruger effect strikes again!

How to fish for atheists

It’s easy. Bait your hook with stupid.

It’s true, we’re a sucker for that stuff, although it does have a downside. We’ll come up, swallow the bait, follow the line to its source, devour the poor fool holding the pole, and then waddle off, all fat and smug. It’s our nature, we can’t help it.

So, for instance, an Indiana politician who is considered a potential presidential candidate, Mitch Daniels, talks about atheism.

People who reject the idea of a God — who think that we’re just accidental protoplasm — have always been with us. What bothers me is the implications — which not all such folks have thought through — because really, if we are just accidental, if this life is all there is, if there is no eternal standard of right and wrong, then all that matters is power.

And atheism leads to brutality. All the horrific crimes of the last century were committed by atheists — Stalin and Hitler and Mao and so forth — because it flows very naturally from an idea that there is no judgment and there is nothing other than the brief time we spend on this Earth.

You should read the rest of that interview, especially the part where he talks about not being ostentatious with his faith. It’s so precious.

The projection is strong in this one. I don’t know if I’d want a president who thought the world was divided into people who thought the only two possible purposes in life were to glorify God or a brutal drive to power.

Daniels is an example of a Christian considered smart enough to be president. You should see what the brain-damaged masses believe. It’s always fun to be lectured about what I believe by a marginally literate kook. Did you know that atheists believe in these six things?

  1. Satan.
  2. Ghosts.
  3. Tarot cards.
  4. Astrology.
  5. Veganism.
  6. Saying OMG.

She even made a video about it!

But wait! You haven’t seen the scariest part! Who is this person?

Jellooo I’m Bev, I’m a health care provider, I work in a hospital and nursing home. I also earn my degree in Bachelor of Science major in Management, I teach academic program to toddlers, children and young adults, I also teach speech to foreign student.

If only she’d move to Indiana, she could run for president someday.

Salon v. Huffington Post

Alex Pareene jumps on the anti-HuffPo bandwagon:

Giving a space to quacks to sell vitamin supplements to morons is insulting enough, but actually allowing a shameless asshole like Klinghoffer to use the Holocaust to promote his right-wing crusade to teach children lies is beyond the pale. Platform or no, there’s no reason for anyone rational or even anyone with a sense of shame to continue giving Huffington free content.

Orac is going to be peeved that his jeremiads against quackery at the HuffPo didn’t prompt this response, but what can I say? Jenny McCarthy killing kids with bad advice is small potatoes against stupidity, Nazism, and the Discovery Institute.

Well, not really. The anti-science is just the last straw that broke the back of a camel groaning under a load of Newage garbage.

Holy crap, we were all played!

There once was a gigantic blow-up of accusations that fed into Chris Mooney’s self-righteous crusade against atheists as harming the cause of science education. Remember “Tom Johnson”, the mysterious scientist who told stories of outrageous bias against Christians in academia, driven by people like me and Richard Dawkins? Mooney was very grateful for his brave willingness to speak up.

Well, the fallout from the collapse of the ‘You’re Not Helping’ blog continues. “Tom Johnson” was the same sockpuppeteering undergraduate, “William”. The entire episode was a contrivance built up into a mountain of false accusations fed by one little liar making stuff up that Mooney wanted to hear.

Mooney’s frequent claim of a “New Atheist hate machine” suddenly sounds extraordinarily ironic. The fact that he claimed to have checked on the identity of his source is either an instance of incompetence or dishonesty.

I do believe that Mr Mooney owes us all an apology. I’d also suggest that he needs to do something about his site management; he’s been quick to whine at me that New Atheists need to clean up our act because we use rude words, but I find his tolerance and even encouragement of raging dishonesty to be far more offensive. He doesn’t need to patch up his credibility for me, though, because I’d long ago dismissed him as useless, and these recent revelations have just put him deeper in the toilet.

We proud tyrants of the real

The last time I got a glimpse of the wretched new book from Marilynne Robinson, the review was sufficient to dissuade me from bothering to ever read it. Now we have a positive review from Karen Armstrong, and I am now convinced that if ever I am confronted with this work, the only appropriate response would be to unzip my fly and piss on it, on the spot. Only my deeply ingrained social conditioning would hinder me. Dammit, why can’t I live freely and express my primal impulses without these nagging voices in my head?

Once again, her thesis is that her own twisted version of science, which is always reductionist and ignores the forest for the hadrons, baryons, and mesons that make it up, is a curse upon civilization that destroys all beauty and aspirations. How dare we turn a critical eye upon good ol’ subjective superstition? And besides, science completely ignores the mind and art and strangeness and doesn’t encourage people to ever think long, long thoughts.

How’s your bladder holding up?

This, of course, is entirely copacetic with Karen Armstrong’s views. It isn’t civilized if it isn’t wallowing in the subjective and whining piteously about all those investigators of the real with their bright lights and poking fingers harshing her mellow and demanding that she say something sensible, clear, and objectively verifiable. In order to make her complaints justifiable, though, she has to lie about science. Oh, wait — perhaps I should be more charitable. She is obstinately ignorant of science, so she isn’t exactly lying…she just makes fantastic nonsense up about it.

In the past, the voices that say “there is something more” have always been right. The positivist approach would not only marginalise religion, but also the arts, culture, history, and the classical and humanist traditions. Most prescient of all is Robinson’s contention that “it is only prudent to make a very high estimate of human nature, first of all in order to contain the worst impulses of human nature, and then to liberate its best impulses.”

I wish she had developed this crucial insight, because it is urgently needed at this moment of crisis in human history. If we are indeed completely in thrall to the selfish gene, why not throw all constraint to the winds and just be selfish — individually and collectively, in our politics, social arrangements, financial and economic dealings?

There’s always something more? What? It seems to me that this belief in something beyond the natural and material world has always been wrong — at least, it’s been in constant retreat for the last half dozen centuries, fading into worship of ever more petty and intangible deities. It takes a truly deluded mind to translate a perennial collapse of a world view into a pattern of unending victory.

I should think she should also realize that we happy ‘positivists’ are also trying to contain the worst impulses of human nature, but those sorry worst include the fuzzy tendency to reify wishful thinking into a collection of demanding gods and indignant priests. They don’t include art and culture and history. We aren’t the philistines. We aren’t the ones mangling a deep-rooted historical endeavor with an enviable record of alleviating human suffering and liberating the human mind, science, in order to justify lotus-eating ignorance.

As for that inane argument that the path to progress is by closing our eyes to an ugly reality and focusing on the best and most beautiful, I offer one counter-example: public health. You can appreciate that cholera, for instance, is an ugly, cruel disease that has destroyed millions in unpleasant ways, ripping through whole families, killing children in their mothers’ arms by making them shit themselves to death. It’s doctors and public health scientists that stared that ugly death in the face and fought it who made progress and reduced its ravages. There is no illusion that because it is natural, because it has plagued us for ages, because we were in thrall to merciless epidemics, that we must therefore surrender to it. We would not have gotten the answers we do have if we’d turned a blind eye to the suffering because it would demean our view of the world, and if we’d chosen instead to simply celebrate the bright, healthy, happy people who had escaped the disease (so far…oh, but please, do not disturb our opium dreams with possible unpleasant futures!)

Those selfish genes are real, but they aren’t quite what Armstrong imagines they are — when her understanding is a millimeter deep, perhaps it’s understandable that she would leap to the silly midgleyesque conclusion that it means that we are ruled by genes for nastiness and spite and evil, when it only refers to a pattern of inheritance and selection for genes that promote their own perpetuation…which can include genes that enhance cooperation and altruism, as well. But even if it were such a grim story of bad genes thriving, it does not imply in any way that scientists are cheering on selfishness, or that they advocate giving up and becoming short-sighted brutes.

On the contrary, only by understanding reality can we deal with it and apply our minds to aspire to that ambitious human world filled with art and culture and science and reason and ethical behavior that Armstrong and Robinson probably want, too. The only way to accomplish that, though, is by working harder at mastering reality, a key part of the formula that they seem to miss as they so busily languish in their dreams.

I’m still not buying their books, not even for pissing upon.

Ophelia Benson has already taken aim at Robinson/Armstrong. I’m gettin’ slow in my old age.