Uh, I don’t think those credits will transfer anywhere

Glenn Beck really is certifiable. He’s now pushing his own “university”, staffed by a trio of right wing incompetents, with a tuition of $9.95 per month.

His introductory curriculum is Faith 101, Hope 101, and Charity 101, titles which don’t seem to have much to do with their contents. I look forward to the first student to show up my university with a transcript and ask for transfer credits — normally, we just give no credit for inappropriate or bad coursework, but this is one case where I think negative credits are warranted.

7 out of 8 isn’t bad

I actually listened to a little bit of that Chopraesque blithering about the Gulf from “Evolutionary Leaders” — I really, really despise them for taking that name — and you can, too, at this link. I don’t recommend it: the incompetent boobs who set it up had created a two-way conference call with swarms of people, and configured it so every time someone dialed in, there was a chime…a horrible, awful piercing chime. So throught the whole thing you get to hear ‘ping – ping – ping – ping’ at about the same volume as the speakers. It will drive you insane, if listening to Chopra doesn’t do that to you first.

I still hate these slimebags, but I do have to admit, Chopra actually gave some practical advice, and it wasn’t quite as awful as I feared. Except for the pinging. And I did give up early, so it could have gone downhill fast. Here’s Chopra’s list of things for people to do, and all except the last one are reasonable.

  1. Give direct financial aid

  2. Learn more about organizations

  3. Volunteer to help organizations

  4. Engage in global conversations with social networks

  5. Make conscious choices that are green

  6. Support investments in sustainable technologies

  7. Educate yourself on successful approaches

  8. Support spiritual education — the cause of the problem is scientific dualism that separates the organism and the environment

I was impressed — he actually didn’t propose thinking happy thoughts to change the universe, so he greatly exceeded my expectations. That last one is standard Chopra ignorant inanity and makes no sense at all, but we can always hope that the listeners are so tired after doing the first seven that they get to #8 and decide it’s a good time to take a nap.

So, not very enlightening, at least some practical if slightly fuzzy suggestions, and one moment of anti-scientific folly from the woo-meister. Not that bad.

Except for the pinging, which will haunt my nightmares.

Jesus Christ, but I hate these slimebags

I got email just now from Evolutionary Leaders. The source sounds promising on the surface, so I opened it. Big mistake. Bad for my blood pressure.

Are you tired of sitting around while our environment is being destroyed?

Yes! Yes, I am!

Do you feel helpless, angry or powerless to make a difference
as you watch millions of gallons of oil pouring into the Gulf every day
with no end in sight and thousands losing their lives and their livelihoods?

Yes!

Join The Gulf Call to Sacred Action!

Yes! Wait…”sacred” action? Huh?

The Evolutionary Leaders: In Service to Conscious Evolution have joined together
to be a loud and important voice for all who feel powerless.

The People Need You ~ The Gulf Needs You

And then there’s some fol-de-rol about working via telephone and internet with tens of thousands taking action and making a “powerful impact for the good of humanity” without any of explanation about what will be done. Until we get to the meat of the story.

We begin by setting our collective intention. Join Deepak Chopra to set our powerful vision and participate in a worldwide Intention Experiment with renowned author and scientist Lynne McTaggart. Explore how our collective intention, our voice and our commitment can impact the cleanup of the oil spill. And then we will be graced by Jean Houston who will share with us why this time matters and why we matter.

Jebus. Deepak Chopra. They’re going to get a bunch of people to sit around and wish the problem away. These people are Newage dead weight.

Our collective prayers and thoughts have the power to cause a profound shift on the planet. Pray with some of the most powerful spiritual thought leaders — Reverend Michael Bernard Beckwith, Joan Borysenko, James O’Dea and more. Together we discover that we have the power to change the world.

Prayer will never, ever change the world. Prayer is an excuse to lie about doing nothing and pretend you are making a difference.

Open up and connect to the deeper heart of our planet where we hear our individual and collective call to action. Together with sacred activists Barbara Marx Hubbard, Gregg Braden, and Andrew Harvey, we will take back our power and move into powerful action that will forever change our lives and the lives of generations to come.

Demented fuckwits, every one. You know, none of these cretins are fundamentalists, they probably smile a lot, and what they all propose is absolutely harmless, in the sense that it doesn’t do anything, anything at all…but they are the killers, the mind-rot, the lazy brained lotus eaters who will watch civilization crumble away while chanting that we’re becoming closer and closer to Mother Nature. I’m less worried about the ranting theocrats and openly anti-science thugs than I am these numbing, mindless, happy-talking liars who lead the gullible down an easy, cheerful path to destruction. At least the fundie kooks do their best to make their way look really hateful and hideous.

Get in the feckin’ sack, Newage know-nothings.

There. Dara O’Briain always makes me feel a little better.

It’s gotta be tough to be a Texan

Ophelia Benson is having a giggle over the Texas Republican Party Platform, which you can download, too. It’s the usual: guns, US out of the UN, immigrants must be controlled, etc. They really don’t like homosexuals.

We believe that the practice of homosexuality tears at the fabric of society, contributes to the breakdown of the family unit, and leads to the spread of dangerous, communicable diseases. Homosexual behavior is contrary to the fundamental, unchanging truths that have been ordained by God, recognized by our country’s founders, and shared by the majority of Texans. Homosexuality must not be presented as an acceptable “alternative” lifestyle in our public education and policy, nor should “family” be redefined to include homosexual “couples.” We are opposed to any granting of special legal entitlements, refuse to recognize, or grant special privileges including, but not limited to: marriage between persons of the same sex (regardless of state of origin), custody of children by homosexuals, homosexual partner insurance or retirement benefits. We oppose any criminal or civil penalties against those who oppose homosexuality out of faith, conviction, or belief in traditional values.

They don’t like heterosexuals, either, since they want to arrest a bunch of them.

We oppose the legalization of sodomy. We demand that Congress exercise its authority granted by the U.S. Constitution to withhold jurisdiction from the federal courts from cases involving sodomy.

I wonder if they’re going to go high tech and install surveillance cameras in everyone’s bedroom, or if they’re satisfied with the old school system of spot checks and bashing in bedroom doors?

Probably low tech, since Texas Republicans don’t care much for that sciencey stuff.

We oppose any legislation that would allow for the creation and/or killing of human embryos for medical research. We encourage stem cell research using cells from umbilical cords, from adults, and from any other means which does not kill human embryos. We oppose any state funding of research that destroys/kills human embryos. We encourage the adoption of existing embryos. We call for legislation to withhold state and/or federal funding from institutions that engage in scientific research involving the killing of human embryos or human cloning.

Evolution gets a mention, too — it’s one of those suspicious theories, along with global warming and “political philosophies”…I guess there are no such things as “political philosophies”, only the one true absolute political reality of Ronald Reagan.

Realizing that conflict and debate is a proven learning tool in classrooms, we support objective teaching and equal treatment of all sides of scientific theories, including evolution, Intelligent Design, global warming, political philosophies, and others. We believe theories of life origins and environmental theories should be taught as challengeable scientific theory subject to change as new data is produced, not scientific law. Teachers and students should be able to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of these theories openly and without fear of retribution or discrimination of any kind.

Hang on, though, let’s not just laugh at Texas: they also did something right recently. A Texas federal court has refused the Institute of Creation Research’s plea to be allowed to hand out science degrees. That’s got to sting, after the ICR left California to settle in Texas, hoping for a more lenient, accommodating atmosphere for lunacy. Even Texas has limits.

Now if only Texas’s limits weren’t so slack as to tolerate the Republicans down there…

Christian nations don’t have no ornery bears

Some fundamentalists have a weird obsession with animals. One in particular is Bryan Fischer, disturbing homophobe, who is outraged at the latest tragedy in which a man was killed by a grizzly bear. It shouldn’t have happened. Why? Because in a god-fearin’ country, animals will be tamed by god.

History reveals that God’s covenant with an ancient nation suggests that one of the consequences for a nation which walks in his statues is that it will have nothing to fear from wild animals. “If you walk in my statutes…I will remove harmful beasts from the land” (Lev. 26:3,6).

…

Earlier this year, I reminded readers that if biblical precedent had been followed, the whale that killed SeaWorld trainer Dawn Brancheau would have been euthanized in 1991 when it killed its first human victim. Ms. Brancheau would be alive today if the principles of the Judeo-Christian tradition had been followed.

God said a curse would fall on a land which turned its back on him, and one consequence would be more tragic deaths at the hands of predatory animals. The truly sad thing here is that we are bringing this curse upon ourselves.

Now I’m really confused. Why is Fischer demanding we kill the bear? Bears are clearly the Lord’s instrument of righteous wrath! Anyone who has read 2 Kings 2 knows that bear maulings are just god’s version of a wrist-slap.

23 Then he went up from there to Bethel; and as he was going up by the way, young lads came out from the city and mocked him and said to him, “Go up, you baldhead; go up, you baldhead!” 24 When he looked behind him and saw them, he cursed them in the name of the LORD. Then two female bears came out of the woods and tore up forty-two lads of their number. 25 And he went from there to Mount Carmel, and from there he returned to Samaria.

Oh, that story always warms my heart and reassures me of the all-encompassing nature of god’s love.

Adam and Eve did not exist. Done.

One of the things I failed to mention when I discussed the Bergman-Enyart dialogue was that the spent some time talking about whether Adam had a navel or not, and the general historicity of Adam and Eve. I did not mention it because it was stupid, and that discussion already had a surfeit of stupid.

But now I discover that BioLogos is also carrying on about the historicity of Adam and Eve, with their usual load of waffle and metaphor and vague ways of trying to say it was really true, and God made us really, really special anyway.

There are such things as stupid questions. Stupid questions are questions that have no reasonable or rational referent, that out of the blue ask us to rationalize and reconcile, on the one hand, a patently silly fable with trivial content, to, on the other hand, the whole of known science. Just by asking, it’s an effort to equate the neglible to the substantial, to the benefit of the fluff and to the detriment of the serious.

There was no Adam. There was no Eve. We are the product of populations and pools of genes that are briefly instantiated in individuals, and it’s a great conceptual error to even fuss over finding “the” many-times-great grandparents of us all. It’s an even greater error to try to use poorly understood genetics to justify believing in a goofy myth created by people who hadn’t even imagined genetics yet.

I am amused to see both a couple of crazy young earth creationists and the pompous apologists at BioLogos have something so clearly in common, though.

Bob Enyart wants me to respect his intelligence

I was cured of any interest in debating creationists by Jerry Bergman, that astonishingly awful whiny young earth creationist I crushed last November. It was embarrassingly bad — Bergman wandered all over the place, made absurd claims (did you know the periodic table of the elements was irreducibly complex — even Behe says it isn’t), and spent more time bragging about his many degrees and his evangelical history than he did on the topic at hand. Everyone I talked to, including the creationists, thought Bergman’s performance was dreadful. And you know that the hosting organization, the Twin Cities Creation Science Association knew it was bad for one obvious reason: they brought in a a lot of video gear, recorded the whole event, and “promised” (we all know how little a promise means to a Christian) to send me a DVD copy, but for some reason, the DVD has never appeared, and the debate also hasn’t appeared on youtube or any other video sites. They are doing a good job of burying it.

But here’s why it’s a waste of time to debate these frauds. The TCCSA immediately sent me a letter trying to spin the outcome in their favor. As is their usual M.O., the local evangelical radio station brought Bergman on afterwards to defend himself — of course I was not invited. The TCCSA also surveyed the audience: there was little change in opinion.

So I come home to several emails from some radio wacko named Bob Enyart challenging me to a debate — and after I briefly and rudely told him to get lost, I get the lame retort that if he’s so stupid, I should be able to demolish him easily, so I must be afraid to debate him. Jebus, talk about not getting it — I’ve come to the decision not to debate after one-sided triumphs with people like Bergman and Simmons — it’s not about winning or losing, it’s about how the creationists will lie and twist and distort no matter how it goes.

For example, they tried to pad Enyart’s résumé to make it sound like he was a worthy opponent. In particular, a previous debate was crowed over, in which Enyart’s opponent praised him for his intelligence.

Richard Dawkins once said that “if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I’d rather not consider that).” It rapidly became clear that Bob was none of these things. For a start, I know a fair bit about evolution and genetics. But when it came to familiarity with the arguments, he was way ahead of me. On epigenetics, RNA/DNA chemistry, and animal physiology, I was hopelessly outclassed. Bob is not ignorant. And it is pretty clear he is neither stupid nor insane. He came across, in fact, as extremely intelligent. So perhaps he is wicked? Well, despite a brush with the law a few years ago, I am sure he is nothing of the sort. Comments such as those made by Dawkins only further undermine the presumption of good faith on the part of creationists and Darwinists.

Wow. This summary was written by James Hannum, a theistic evolutionist who has written a book about medieval history and philosophy. Enyart had to find a medieval historian to find someone who might think he was scientifically competent.

As for “a brush with the law a few years ago”, that’s painting lightly over the facts. Enyart has a history of law-breaking derangement. He was an activist with Operation Rescue and was frequently arrested for his, shall we say, vigorous protesting style. He was divorced, and was later convicted of child abuse for beating a girlfriend’s son — he’s very big on beating up children. He was most recently arrested for trespassing at Focus on the Patriarchy — they weren’t conservative enough for him, having endorsed John McCain for the presidency.

I think it’s safe to say that Enyart is both insane and wicked. Ignorant, too, and maybe even stupid. I tried listening to the Enyart-Hannam discussion for evidence of his knowledgability about biology, but I’m sorry — tl;dl. It’s mostly Hannam and Enyart fawning over each other and not talking about biology, which neither know anything about anyway. I did hear enough to learn that Enyart is a young earth creationist and Biblical literalist, which is enough to indicate that he’s pretty damned ignorant.

So I poked around to see if I could find something shorter and clearer in which Enyart would demonstrate some scrap of sense about science. And what did I find? A mutual backslapping session between Bob Enyart and Jerry Bergman! Listen and be amused — it’s like a two-stooges routine.

Of course they start by being awed by Jerry Bergman’s NINE DEGREES, as if they indicate some great intelligence. Sorry, guys, you’ve got it backwards. A graduate program is a training program that culminates in the award of a degree — it is not an accomplishment to require multiple education attempts. Somehow, I think that if I mentioned that I had a bike with training wheels for a month or so when I was six, Jerry Bergman would try to top me by claiming that he kept his training wheels on his bike for 9 years, and is currently getting it fitted with a new set.

They then spent some time talking about vestigial organs, one of Bergman’s favorite topics, because he thinks if he finds some tiny function for an organ, it’s proven to be non-vestigial. This has never been the criterion for assessing whether an organ is vestigial or not, and Charles Darwin himself was very clear on the topic.

An organ, serving for two purposes, may become rudimentary or utterly aborted for one, even the more important purpose, and remain perfectly efficient for the other.

Bergman tried flailing away on this hobby-horse during our debate, too. All it tells us is that he doesn’t understand evolution.

Another topic discussed was sexual selection, in reference to the peacock’s tail. Bergman doesn’t believe in it! And worse, he lied shamelessly about the science, claiming that peacock tails have no influence on female mate choice, when exactly the opposite is true. Enyart really revealed the depth of his competence in evolution when he claimed that these fancy patterns on tails were evidence against evolution because…well, look at his analogy.

If tattoos become really popular so that women are attracted to men who have tattoos, how long will that be the fad before kids start being born with tattoos? When is that going to happen? How stupid could Darwin be and all the world full of evolutionists?

Oh, gosh, I guess that settles it, then — how dare all those scientists believe so fervently in the inheritance of acquired characteristics?

Sorry, Bob Enyart, I won’t be debating you. I don’t respect you in the slightest, and I’m not going to give you an opportunity to claim parity. You’re a raving loony!

Grandpa Simpson gets a writing gig

Grandpa Simpson is that old character in the animated show who tells odd, rambling stories. “We can’t bust heads like we used to, but we have our ways. One trick is to tell ’em stories that don’t go anywhere – like the time I caught the ferry over to Shelbyville. I needed a new heel for my shoe, so, I decided to go to Morganville, which is what they called Shelbyville in those days. So I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on ’em. ‘Give me five bees for a quarter,’ you’d say.” That sort of thing.

Grandpa has been hired by the Huffington post, and is writing stuff under the pen name of Robert Lanza. For instance, he’s got a fascinatingly weird tale up titled “What Happens When You Die? Evidence Suggests Time Simply Reboots“. Now if you or I were writing something with that title, we’d probably write something about what happens after we die, or about time, or maybe we’d get really ambitious and write about some evidence linking the two. Not Grandpa Lanza! No, we learn that when he was a boy, his hobby was killing small mammals by torture, until one day a blacksmith destroyed his trap and gave him a new mission in life. “I’ll give you 50 cents for every dragonfly you catch,” the old man said, and when the excited Little Lanza had caught one, the blacksmith made a model dragonfly out of iron rods. Oh, and he fixed a squeaky chimney cap by blowing it away with a shotgun. But it’s not dead! He’s sure it’s squeaking somewhere.

Someone needs to explain to Grandpa Lanza that the plural of anecdote is not data. And neither is the plural of senile rambling.

Bumblin’ Midgley babbles again

Is Mary Midgley supposed to be the epitome of philosophical confusion and bungling incomprehension? She’s like the Emily Litella of science criticism, always going off on harebrained tangents of her own invention, but unlike Litella, nothing ever compels her to offer a meek “Never mind”. Midgely has done it again with another tirade against the New Atheists.

Science really isn’t connected to the rest of life half as straightforwardly as one might wish. For instance, Isaac Newton noted gladly that his theory of gravitation gave a scientific proof of God’s existence. Today’s anti-god warriors, by contrast, declare that Darwin’s evolutionary theory gives a scientific disproof of that existence and use this reasoning, quite as confidently as Newton used his, to convert the public.

But…but…none of the New Atheists claim to have a disproof of gods! We’re all rather explicit in saying that we can’t disprove every possible formulation of a deity, and we’re not even going to try.

We could just stop there, since especially for a philosopher, she seems exceedingly confused about just what the argument is about, but let’s push on and see what kind of point she’s trying to make.

In both cases the huge prestige of science is being used not for scientific purposes but to defend an existing general world-view. In both cases that defence is found necessary because this world-view, though prevalent and respected, has been coming under attack. And in both cases the supposedly scientific argument provided is weak. It only convinces people who already share that world-view.

Naturally, Newton’s arguments scarcely need refuting today. Though he was not a Christian, he reasoned that gravity cannot be physically caused because it acts at a distance and material causes were believed always to work by contact, leaving God – a “god of the gaps” – as the only possible cause. Nobody thinks like this now.

Say what? “God of the gaps” is the number one most common defense of theism I encounter — people are always saying that if we don’t know what happened at the Big Bang or at the instant the first cell appeared, that that is an action by their god. It’s the whole foundation of the Intelligent Design creationism movement that poking at inadequacies or incompleteness in evolution’s account of the world is the way to identify where their designer god was at work. I’m hoping she is just saying that no one believes that action at a distance is impossible, but her writing is awfully confusing.

Unfortunately, in order to make her case that the New Atheist argument is just like Newton’s argument for god, she has to mangle the idea dreadfully.

But is today’s evolutionary argument – which is often treated as fatal not just to Christianity but to religion generally – actually any stronger?

I am not questioning that there can be valid objection to theism. (Buddhists, of course, deploy many of them.) The point is simply that this particular argument is irrelevant to it. Appeals to evolution are only damaging to biblical literalism. Certainly the events described in Genesis 1 are not literally compatible with what science (from long before Darwin’s day) tells us about the antiquity of the Earth. But this is not news. The early Christian fathers pointed out that the creation story must be interpreted symbolically, not literally.

No, no, no. It is not an evolutionary argument, it is a science argument — you can be a physicist or a geologist or a chemist or a biologist and have the sense to reject religious belief. It is also not specifically a reaction against young earth creationism, except in a very general sense that creationism is an example of the arbitrary unreliability of religious ideas. That people can continue to believe in ridiculous nonsense that has been disproven, such as the idea that the earth is only 6000 years old, merely because it has the support of some religions, is an instance of the corrupting effect of faith.

It’s also not scientism. There is no expectation that a system for generating knowledge has to follow a narrowly defined scientific method (although no one has yet shown us a functioning alternative.)

Here’s the logic behind the scientific rejection of religion, which is nothing like the weird version Midgley has cobbled up. The success of science has shown us what an effective knowledge generator accomplishes: it produces consensus and an increasing body of support for its conclusions, and it has observable effects, specifically improvements in our understanding and ability to manipulate the world. We can share evidence that other people can evaluate and replicate, and an idea can spread because it works and is independently verifiable.

Look at religion. It is a failure. There is no convergence of ideas, no means to test ideas, and no reliable outcomes from those ideas. It’s noise and chaos and arbitrary eruptions of ridiculous rationalizations. Mormonism, Buddhism, Islam, and Catholicism can’t all be true — and no, please don’t play that game of reducing each religion to a mush that merely recognizes divinity. Religions have very specific dogmas, and practitioners do not blithely shuffle between them. Those differences are indefensible if they actually have a universal source of reliable knowledge about metaphysics.

Again, this is not a demand that religions must conform to science’s methods, only that we should be able to assess whether it works. I can imagine a world where revelation, for instance, actually generates useful knowledge, where people independently acquired specific information piped right into their heads, straight from god. I’d expect, though, that there would be some agreement between all the recipients. It could even be strictly theological information, with no expectation of material support. If a host of people all around the world suddenly heard a gong in their heads, followed by the words (in their own language, of course) “The name of God is Potrzebie”, well, then…there’s something interesting going on. If these kinds of revelations continued and were consistent across cultures and traditions, I’d be willing to consider that there was something outside the human mind that was communicating with us. I’d admittedly be baffled by it all, but the fact that there’d be growing cross-cultural consensus on very specific claims would be hard to ignore.

As for outcomes, it also doesn’t have to be something material — religion wouldn’t have to be a tool for making better microwave ovens before I’d believe it, for instance. It could provide a universal moral code, or be an effective tool for improving mental health. If the enlightened people of Potrzebie were demonstrably calmer, more peaceful, and better at coping with stress because of the intermittent revelations, then I’d also have to admit that something was up. It’s actually too bad that there isn’t any such phenomenon taking place.

Basically, we’ve learned from the example of science that a way of knowing ought to do what it promises to do. They don’t have to promise to do exactly the same thing — architecture and botany, for instance, don’t have the same goals or methods, so we wouldn’t expect physics and theology to echo each other’s answers — but they ought to produce something reliable and true.

The fact that no religion can is damaging to them. Biblical literalism is crazy nonsense, but no more so than transubstantiation or doctrines of salvation or any accounts of what happens in heaven or hell. What drives our rejection of religion isn’t that a few bits and pieces of specific religious beliefs, like the literal interpretation of Genesis, have been falsified, but that no consistent knowledge comes out of religion at all…yet every religion claims to provide knowledge about the nature of the universe.

Midgley just offers us more gooey jello to play with, though.

Like cargo cults, however, this Bible worship [referring to biblical literalism] is also a spiritual phenomenon, a message felt in the heart. Despite its confusions, it involves a genuine response to the real wisdom which can also be found in the Bible. Serious attempts to answer it need, therefore, to acknowledge that wisdom. They must try to show ways of combining it with more modern thinking.

“Spiritual” is a meaningless word, the last feeble gasp of a foolish faith that has nothing to offer except reassuring sussurations. There may well be wisdom in the Bible because it is a literary work created by people trying to understand their world, but it has no special privilege as a source of that kind of wisdom — it’s there in Heller’s Catch-22, or Borges’ The Library of Babel, or Burroughs’ Tarzan of the Apes, or Hitler’s Mein Kampf…and just because someone wrote it down does not obligate us to regard it as true. The New Atheists have no problem with treating the Bible as a book, evaluating it as a human work with flaws and glories…but these apologists always want something more, as if it is a grievous insult to religion if we fail to treat a plodding hodge-podge of fantasy with the proper reverence, that we must pretend that it is a special product infused with something holy. That’s not going to happen.

There have been many millions of books written, and we do not have to respect them all. No one trots out the Harry Potter books and tells us that we must combine those novels “with more modern thinking”. Why does this one holy book get singled out as a source of wisdom? Especially when, if you actually do read it, it’s a horror of vicious tribalism and questionable ethics and enduring ignorance. I have read it, seriously and with an effort to extract these jewels of wisdom it’s supposed to contain. I think modern thinking would be better off trying to untangle itself from this wicked dogma.

Midgley just has to close with more infuriating nonsense.

Belief in God is not an isolated factual opinion, like belief in the Loch Ness monster – not, as Richard Dawkins suggests, just one more “scientific hypothesis like any other”. It is a world-view, an all-enclosing vision of the kind of world that we inhabit. We all have these visions. Though they are always loaded with lumber and often dangerous, we need them. So, when we try to relate and improve them we have to treat each of them as a whole. We would not be right, any more than Newton was, to start by taking our own standpoint as infallible.

Just because the fervency of a belief smothers those who hold it into a vision of the world does not make it true, and definitely does not make it exempt from treating it as a hypothesis, and evaluating whether it is actually true or not. While we all have “world-views”, what Midgley is promoting is perilously close to insisting on privileging her Biblical BS as something we must respect…and her real gripe with the New Atheists is not that we claim infallibility, but that we joyously poke holes in her cherished delusion.

And no, no one needs to believe in a cosmic intelligence, let alone the weird squinty petulant psychotic of the Abrahamic religions. It really is possible to say no to myths.

Bill Donohue goes gaga

Bill Donohue was looking awfully silly demanding that the Empire State Building celebrate Mother Teresa’s birthday, so I guess he needed a new cause. He found one. The Catholic League is outraged by Lady Gaga’s new video.

Lady Gaga is playing Madonna copy cat, squirming around half-naked with half-naked guys, abusing Catholic symbols–they’re always Catholic symbols–while bleating out “Alejandro” enough times to induce vomit. Dressed occasionally as a nun in a glossy-red habit, the Madonna wannabe flashes the cross, swallows a rosary and manages to get raped by her S&M boyfriends. Hence, she has now become the new poster girl for American decadence and Catholic bashing, sans the looks and talent of her role model.

Like Madonna, Lady Gaga was raised Catholic and then morphed into something unrecognizable. “So I suppose you could say I’m a quite religious woman that is very confused about religion,” she told Larry King last week.

That she is confused is an understatement. In any event, we hope she finds her way back home. In the meantime, Catholics will settle for her treating us like Muslims.

I’m actually a fan of Lady Gaga (Bill will not be surprised), so I had to zip over to youtube to see this. Here it is. It’s got something for everybody. Just imagine poor Bill Donohue watching it over and over, compelled to document this atrocity, a little bit of saliva drooling from his slack lips, while with one hand he clicks “replay” repeatedly.

Donohue does have a point, I hate to say. I watched the whole thing, with its muscular young men gyrating in jackboots and tight shorts and nothing else, the weird headgear, the sadomasochistic imagery, the black leather uniforms, the flaming homoeroticism, and I was thinking, yeah, all that does remind me of Catholicism. I didn’t think it was Catholic bashing, though. I thought it was a recruiting video.