Dis-appointment

In all the news about Obama’s choice of an appointment to the Supreme Court, there’s another possibility looming:

Francis Collins, the geneticist who led the Human Genome Project, is close to taking over the top spot at the National Institutes of Health, according to areport by Bloomberg News.
Collins, who was the director of the NIH’s National Human Genome Research Institute from 1993 to 2008, is in the final stages of being screened by the administration of US President Barack Obama, an unnamed source told Bloomberg.

Elias Zerhouni, Collins’ would-be predecessor, voiced his approval for the pick, telling Bloomberg that Collins has “done things many scientists wish they could do once in their lifetime, and he’s done it repeatedly.”

Collins recently unveiled a new foundation, BioLogos, that promotes “the search for truth in both the natural and spiritual realms, and seeks to harmonize these different perspectives,” according to the organization’s Web site. Collins, who is an evangelical Christian, has said that his new foundation is an attempt to resolve Christian faith with scientific evidence, especially with regard to evolution. In 2006 he published a bestselling book, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, that stirred some controversy in the scientific community.

I didn’t see much “controversy in the scientific community” over that book; I think everyone agreed that he had a perfect right to express his religious views, and there was near-unanimity that they were the views of a gullible fruitbat…an opinion confirmed by his wacky Biologos website. I know he had a good reputation as an administrator of the human genome project, but do we really need to go back to the Bush years of god-walloping goofballs at the head of every major government agency?


There are some objections being raised in the comments that have made me feel like I have to expand on this.

Collins is extremely well qualified for this job. If all we did was look at his CV to see if he’s competent to administer the NIH, I’d say they’d be hard pressed to find a better guy.

I don’t care if the director goes to church. If that’s what he wants to do as a hobby on sunday mornings, no problem.

However, and I think this is a great big HOWEVER, Collins also has a tremendous amount of religious baggage. This is also a political position, and it is fair to look at all the other stuff he brings into the job, and I’m afraid Collins is more than just a guy who goes to church…he’s a religious freak. I’ve read his book, and I’ve browsed his website, and he’s waving a great big hairy ideological flag in addition to his perfectly commendable credentials.

Look at it this way. If we had someone who had an administrative record as good as Collins’, but who was as overtly and proudly atheist as Richard Dawkins, everyone would be doubtful about Obama’s judgment as I am right now — they’d be rightly wondering if this hypothetical candidate would be a diplomatic dead duck…not to mention the right-wingers would be out for his head. Somehow, because Collins happens to be weirdly Christian, we’re supposed to simply overlook the fact that he struts about with his underpants on his head?

Well, Collins is not going to have my confidence, that’s for sure. His writings reveal a man with an extraordinarily poor grasp of scientific reasoning and a surprising lack of understanding of evolutionary biology (his argument that morals could not evolve, for instance, is stunning in its ignorance). I also suspect that he’s going to use this position as a laurel to peddle religious nonsense. I’m assuming he’d have the decency not to do it while he’s in office, but afterwards, it’ll be a stock part of the credentials he will trot out to validate his bogus beliefs, never mind that a large number of the scientists he will be working for think his apologetics are utterly loony.

Do You Believe In Angels?

The gullibility of the religious is amazing…but they always seem to be rewarded with the fawning affirmations of other believers, and more publishing opportunities. Yet again, the Huffington Post flaunts its absurdl woo side with a piece of tripe from Therese Borchard claiming that angels exist.

As you sit there reading this–whether you believe it or not–there is an angel by your side: it is your guardian angel, and it never leaves you. Each one of us have been given a gift, a shield made from the energy of light. It is a part of the guardian angel’s task to put this shield around us.

To God and the angels we are all equal; we all deserve to be protected, to be cared for, and to be loved, regardless of what others might think of us–good or bad. When I look at someone I can physically see this shield around them; it’s as if it’s alive.

Your guardian angel is the gatekeeper of your body and your soul. He was assigned to you before you were even conceived; as you grew in your mother’s womb he was there with you at every moment, protecting you. Once you were born and as you grow up your guardian angel never leaves your side for an instant; he is with you when you sleep, when you are in the bathroom, all the time–you are never alone. Then, when you die, your guardian angel is there beside you, helping you to pass over.

No, there is no angel next to me. There is no tangible, visible, magical agent here in the same room; I can’t smell it, hear it, feel it, see it, and if I stub my toe there will be no winged seraph to kiss it and make it all better. We could scan this room with all kinds of scientific instruments that can look at wavelengths well outside the limitations of our eyes, and there would be nothing there — I’d be surrounded by a corona of infrared radiation, but in the rest of the room, nothing but a layer of bacteria and nematodes, a cloud of dust mites, and perhaps the occasional housefly.

Yes, I know, if I confronted a fan of belief in angels, they’d tell me my material scientific tools can’t see something spiritual, but then I’d have to point out that their eyes are also merely material tools, and she has claimed to be able to see the ‘shield’ of angels. Is she lying? If we had two angelists viewing this room at the same time, but unable to communicate with each other, they’d give two different accounts of what is going on. They are making it all up.

This whole elaborate mythology of guardian spirits floating about in your vicinity is a lie, and these frauds who claim knowledge of their existence are faking it every step of the way.

But all they have to do is say it confidently, and make sure it’s a pleasing myth, and fools will eat it up.

The forgettable Mr Birdnow

Timothy Birdnow is one of those common wingnuts: he worships GW Bush, thinks global warming is a hoax, homosexuality is evil, evolution is a lie, and history is all about the triumphant ascent of Judeo-Christian America. I’ve laughed at him a few times before; now he’s venting his diseased, shriveled spleen at atheism. It’s funny stuff.

A lot of it is the usual ahistorical tripe which can be summed up in this cliche:

This prohibition was clearly intended to restrain governmental interference with the right of the individual to believe and worship as he sees fit. The “Wall of Separation” was put in place to secure freedom of religion, not freedom FROM religion.

So, apparently, Americans do not have a right to be godless, and we can be compelled to join some church, any church, just to keep us from marching around free FROM religion. It’s the weirdest argument, though, because at the same time he’s damning us for being free of religion and insisting that we have no right to be god-free, he’s insisting that atheism is a religion. The inconsistency doesn’t matter when your brain is as scrambled as Birdnow’s; but I am amused by his most extreme efforts to shoehorn atheism into his narrow vision of what a religion is. Behold: we are trinitarians now!

Radical Atheists hate it when their belief system is categorized as religious, but it is. What is religion after all? It is a system of beliefs about the nature of the Universe, of Man, and of the Hereafter. It generally has a moral code. It has a creation story, and often a prophecy of the end of the world. Atheism has all of these things.

Atheism is triune in nature in many ways; we have Universe the Father (Let there be light, and there was the Big Bang), Earth the Son (all life evolved from the mechanistic determinism of the Blind Watchmaker), and the Holy Spirit of Human intellect. As a result, atheism incorporates several beliefs into one system.

Atheism worships (they hate that word) the Cosmos, Evolution, and Reason. The Big Bang and Darwinian Evolution are the creation myths, and the Big Crunch the prophecied cataclysm. Oh, I know; these are scientific concepts and not simply faith-based stories. Still, the atheist has decided that he will not believe in anything that cannot be given in evidence by the senses. Of course, this means that the ultimate questions of where this random, mechanistic universe came from cannot be answered. God is as good of an answer as any, but most atheists simply insist there can be none and believe in a mechanical universe that generated spontaneously with physical laws balanced just right for the evolution of life and human consciousness.

Oh, yes. And bdelloid rotifers are our Madonna, and ichneumonid wasps our Satan. Could he possibly stretch the comparison a little further?

Why is he concerned about this? We’re destroying Western Civilization!

That is why our society is sliding down the long, greasy pole; too many believe in nothing. This is evident in every facet of our lives. All of society`s problems can ultimately be traced back to the severing of human reason from human passion, and that is the fruit of Western Civilization`s arrogant belief in himself, the material world, and his disbelief in the Divine. The looming triumph of Atheism is bringing forth the demons of the human abyss, as surely as did Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, or the other Atheists who ruled over their kingdoms for one hour. The bell is now tolling for we.

As we all know, sliding down a long, greasy pole is the homophobe’s worst nightmare, which is why they dwell on it so much. The poor man is deranged, so I’ll just have to forgive him for his very typical, hateful attitude. Unfortunately, I have to despise him forever for “The bell is now tolling for we.”

Ray Kurzweil Wants to Be a Robot

I was pleasantly surprised by this Newsweek article on Ray Kurzweil: it’s critical of him! Usually, and especially from the technopress magazines, there’s this kind of fawning attitude towards him, because he really is a smart guy — they overlook the fact that he is also a bit of a kook. You know what I think of him, and the reporter interviewed me for a short comment, too.

Still, a lot of people think Kurzweil is completely bonkers and/or full of a certain messy byproduct of ordinary biological functions. They include P. Z. Myers, a biologist at the University of Minnesota, Morris, who has used his blog to poke fun at Kurzweil and other armchair futurists who, according to Myers, rely on junk science and don’t understand basic biology. “I am completely baffled by Kurzweil’s popularity, and in particular the respect he gets in some circles, since his claims simply do not hold up to even casually critical examination,” writes Myers. He says Kurzweil’s Singularity theories are closer to a deluded religious movement than they are to science. “It’s a New Age spiritualism—that’s all it is,” Myers says. “Even geeks want to find God somewhere, and Kurzweil provides it for them.”

There’s another point of similarity to New Age religious figures, too. Every time I criticize these guys, I have to brace myself for another flood of hate mail. The Kurzweil Kult members are going to read this Newsweek article, see my name on the first page, and send me little disquisitions on how I’ll be sorry when the nanobots dismantle me and upload my brain into the cosmic computer. I should have warned the writer, Daniel Lyons, that he can expect some earnest dissenting technobabble to be coming his way.

The things you learn from Whirled Nut Daily

I never sign up for these things, but apparently many people think it’s hilarious to give crazy right wing sites my email address, so part of my daily flood of email is crap from places like WorldNetDaily. Most of it just gets a filter entry and I never see it again, but I have a soft spot for WND — it’s barking mad, full of the craziest deluded wackos with this strange sense that, since the Bush years, they represent the mainstream. I learn the wildest stuff from their mail.

Did you know that the Girl Scouts are out to turn your daughters into lesbians? It must be true, since WND says it is.

But here’s a perfect example of the strangely twisted minds behind WND. In one section, the author is complaining about one of the books the Girl Scouts use, called Girltopia.

In the next age group, for teens in the ninth and tenth grades, girls are taught about wage disparities between the sexes, and a lack of assets and senior management positions held by women.

“Girltopia” poses the questions, “When women don’t earn enough, what happens to their children?” and “How could everyone help create a Girltopia?”

Asked what the purpose of including a message of inequality served in the Girl Scout curriculum, Tompkins explained:

It’s to show girls what’s going on in the country and have them be part of the dialogue. A lot of girls just aren’t aware of what’s going on. I think that specific topic might be new this year, but in the broader scheme of things, it’s not that new. I’m sure it’s something that came up in the 1920s as well. Girls Scouting has been around since before women had the right to vote, so I’m sure these discussions were always part of this.

The text praises Renaissance author Sir Thomas More for his book “Utopia,” Mary Cavendish for her book “A New World: The Blazing World” about a utopian kingdom and 24-year Executive Director of Rocky Mountain Planned Parenthood and feminist author Sheri S. Tepper for her novel, “The Gate to Women’s Country.”

“Girltopia” encourages girls to “let songs inspire you,” and as some examples, it provides lyrics to songs such as “Independent Women, part 1” by Destiny’s Child; “Hammer and a Nail” by the Indigo Girls – an “out” lesbian rock band; and “Imagine” by John Lennon. The curriculum also asks girls to create an avatar “to represent the ideal you in Girltopia” and features “Wild Geese,” a short poem by lesbian poet Mary Oliver.

I read that and was thinking that, hey, I’d like to read that — and those sound like strong, positive messages to send out to girls. Be aware of the real problems you face, but stand up for what is right. Good stuff.

 

And then I read WND’s assessment of the book…and it’s exactly what makes these rascals such a bizarro mirror of the real world.

“This book was so depressing that I don’t know what I would have done as a teen reading it,” Garibay said. “The sense of hopelessness abounds in ‘Girltopia.’ The positivity, the enthusiasm and the vigor of youth is completely destroyed by data found to further the Girl Scout USA’s feminist agenda. It plants seeds of despair and hopelessness in today’s girls.”

I don’t quite see it. All I learn from WND is that conservatives are obsessed with lesbians, and somehow equate them with despair.

Charlotte Allen really is angry at us

Oh, no. I spent a long day traveling, getting my daughter to the airport in Minneapolis so she could fly off to Phoenix for 10 weeks of research (she has arrived, and seems a bit shocked to be in a desert), and then I drove all the way back. I sit down to see what has happened in the world, and discover that Charlotte Allen hates me. She doesn’t like you much, either. And she got her little tirade published in the LA Times. Let’s take a look and see what she doesn’t like about us.

Her opening is clear. She thinks we’re “crashing bores”. A hint for Ms. Allen: never start an essay by declaring your subject to be boring. Either your readers will stop at that point, or they’ll read on and discover that despite your claim, you seem to be concerned enough to write on at excessive length about something that is supposedly boring.

Second paragraph: she says something about Eagleton. I read Eagleton’s book, and didn’t recognize her summation (Dawkins and Hitchens indulged in “a philosophically primitive opposition of faith and reason that assumes that if science can’t prove something, it doesn’t exist”), either from the Eagleton book or from the statements of either Hitchens or Dawkins. This line of argument doesn’t last beyond one paragraph, however — perhaps because there is no way she can defend it — and she quickly drops any pretense of wanting to engage a substantive argument. Instead, she tells us more specifically why we’re boring.

My problem with atheists is their tiresome — and way old — insistence that they are being oppressed and their fixation with the fine points of Christianity. What — did their Sunday school teachers flog their behinds with a Bible when they were kids?

Well, personally, I don’t feel that I’m opressed. I’ve pointed out before that it’s awfully easy for an atheist to just keep his or her mouth shut and pass for a believer. My usual theme instead is to show what a botch theists have made of the country, and how hypocritical they are, and how absurd their beliefs are. But otherwise, yes, we do have de facto discrimination against the godless in America; we have some blatant examples, and of course there is the obvious fact that one must be a professing believer to get elected to office in most places in this country. All Allen musters against this evidence is the claim that atheists are a tiny minority (which makes it all right to discriminate, I guess?), and there are only six states with anti-atheist clauses in their constitutions. Logic…not her strong suit.

As for the claim that we’re fixated on the “fine points of Christianity”, I don’t think so. Atheists are more concerned with the basics: where is the evidence for a god, any god? Some of us are a bit fascinated with the Christian obsession with the details of ritual and dogma in the absence of any reason to accept their core beliefs, but that’s not our weird fixation, Ms. Allen — it’s yours.

Then there is an incoherent middle where she just flames on about how mean atheists are (I call them all horrible names, you see), never seeming to notice that all she is doing is spouting angry vitriol about atheists. Gripe, gripe, gripe. The only time she even tries to state what the position of theists might be is in her closing paragraph, and again, she’s oblivious to the problem with her position.

What atheists don’t seem to realize is that even for believers, faith is never easy in this world of injustice, pain and delusion. Even for believers, God exists just beyond the scrim of the senses. So, atheists, how about losing the tired sarcasm and boring self-pity and engaging believers seriously?

Yes? We know you work hard to maintain a belief in a loving, personal god in the absence of evidence and the existence of facts that contradict you. We agree with you that it is remarkably unlikely and difficult to understand. We also agree that the existence of god is something you can’t sense — we can’t sense it either. Whenever we engage you seriously this is the same stuff we get, over and over again: we’re just supposed to believe in the absence of your ability to explain why we should.

There simply isn’t anything to engage in Allen’s howl of outrage. I’m a little surprised that something so shallow and empty could get published in the LA Times at all, especially with Charlotte Allen’s track record. My only previous encounter with her was an astonishing rant in the Washington Post, in which she flatly claimed that women were dumber than men. Seriously. While claiming there was no difference in average intelligence.

It should be impossible to take this raving crazy loon seriously, but somehow she’s getting published in major newspapers. That’s the real mystery.

These are “evolutionary leaders”?

I was sent a petition to call for conscious evolution. I have no idea what this means. I don’t think the creators of this petition have the slightest idea, either. I don’t even understand the point of pledging to “elevate consciousness”. I do know that these loons seem to like the word “evolution” an awful lot, abusing the term to the point where I want to just slap it out of their hands and tell them “NO! Not until you learn what it actually means.”

And, of course, it is somehow being appropriated by these kooks to imply something about spirituality. Here’s the fluff they write.

We now realize that we are affecting our own evolution by everything we do. This knowledge awakens in us the aspiration to become more conscious through subjective practices including meditation, reflection, prayer, intuition, creativity, and conscious choice making that accelerate our evolution in the direction of unity consciousness and inspire us to deeply align our collective vision.

Gaah! What vacuous nonsense! This is written by a group of people who call themselves “the evolutionary leaders” — what they actually are is an assortment of pop New Age con artists who primarily make a living peddling books that sell ridiculous woo to a mass market.

I signed the pledge, mainly because they ask for your recommendations for what they can do to promote ‘consciousness evolution’. Here’s what I told them.

Teach critical thinking. Laugh at woo-meisters who push vapid idiocy like meditation and prayer and spirituality. Turn away from the lies of religion. Point out the bullshit in the empty noises of people like Deepak Chopra. Learn something about evolution, which has nothing to do with the fuzzy, sloppy, lazy goo these so-called “evolutionary leaders” are babbling about.

I’m #39,109 — I won’t be surprised if my signature is expunged.

You can’t win

I have a…errm…reputation for offending Catholics. It’s undeserved, since I try so hard to offend everyone, but also because some Catholics are too easily offended. Can you spot the unforgivable offense the writer is complaining about in this story?

Your April 27 front page had an article, “World government race to contain swine flu outbreak.” The article was from the Associated Press.

A picture of a priest distributing the Eucharist had a caption, “Catholics who entered a closed door Mass line up for a communion wafer Sunday at the Metropolitan Cathedral in Mexico City.”

That one line drove Helen Licon to write a letter to the editor.

[Read more…]

Matters of vast importance

The Republicans, apparently feeling that there are no other pressing matters of concern in the governance of our country, are pushing to designate 2010 as the Year of the Bible.

I may surprise you a little bit. I endorse this resolution…with a few caveats. I say the Democrats should vote this bill up as long as there is a little quid pro quo: the Republicans reciprocate by going along with the next couple of Supreme Court nominations Obama makes. Fair enough, I think.

Then, since 2010 is the Year of the Bible, we get to say that all subsequent years are Not the Year of the Bible, and be done with it.

(via Kos)