God doesn’t get a Nobel because he didn’t do the work and doesn’t exist

By now, you probably already know that Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Thomas A. Steitz and Ada E. Yonath won the Nobel in chemistry for their work on the structure of the ribosome, and a well-deserved award it is. They (and many others) put a lot of work into puzzling out how this central feature of the cell works.

However, wouldn’t you know it, there are always religious parasites around who want to coopt a scientific discovery.

What strikes me today, however is that scientists who receive these honors win such praise for what they discover, not what they create. Through their cleverness, hard work, and remarkable brilliance, they have asked new questions and devised creative methods to unwrap hidden mysteries in the universe. But their success is detective work, not invention. This year’s award for the explanation of how ribosomes work is notable and certainly deserved. But these scientists discovered wonder that was already there – put there by the Creator!

Our deeper delight today is the surprising and vivid new window this work has created for those of us who want to give honor and glory to God, our Maker. The work of these Nobel laureates is a profound act of worship to the One who thought up the very possibility of “LIFE” and is slowly but eagerly giving us the right and capacity to uncover His secrets. As we honor those who discovered and explained ribosomes, we also pause to praise and honor God the Creator of ribosomes!

No, we don’t. Your god did not create ribosomes — they evolved. Not only did your god not have anything to do with it, his priests and unthinking followers, like the wanking cheerleader at beliefnet who wrote that piece, made no contribution to our understanding of how life works, and in some cases either discouraged knowledge-seeking or drew away resources for their pan-handling churches that could have been used, for instance, to educate the poor and bring up a generation of smarter, more productive citizenry who might have helped broaden and deepen our understanding.

Notice, too, how the fraud who wrote the piece also gives credit for the work of discovery to his god — as if he were giving us the ability to figure it out.

That freeloading moocher, that imaginary phantasm, deserves and gets no credit for anything. The bottom feeders of faith just want people to bestow their gratitude on the coffers of their churches, nothing more, and they will lie and steal credit for their personal benefit.

Shroud of Turin is not a miracle

I get thrown the miracle of the shroud of Turin on a regular basis — just last week someone confronted me with it, basically saying “A-ha! Jesus existed because there’s an old scrap of cloth with a face on it!” It doesn’t matter that I point out that it’s been dated to the 13th century, and was nothing more than a profit-making ‘relic’ for churches that would also hawk Jesus’s foreskin and John the Baptist’s pinky bone. They’d usually retort that it was not humanly possible to make the shroud, so it had to be a religious miracle.

Now I’ve got more ammo. The Shroud of Turin has been recreated, using simple medieval technologies. No magic, just acidic pigments.

I know, it won’t stop the kooks, but it’s still useful to know. Next up, we need more evidence against the patently goofy Miracle of Luciano, which is the other ‘proof’ of god that gets flung around a lot.

Some polls aren’t meant to be answered, apparently

There is an utterly ludicrous evangelical ‘course’ which has been advertising in England by slapping big ol’ polls on the wall. Like this one:

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As is, those boxes are blank…but man, they’re just begging to be filled in, and a lot of people can’t resist walking up to them and marking the right answer. Unfortunately, the transit police are then arresting them.

There’s a metaphor there. Looking at this Alpha Course, what I see is a narrow evangelical game that pretends to be an open arena for skeptical inquiry, but is actually nothing of the kind. Their ads are full of questions that by their very nature reveal that they expect certain kinds of answers, answers that only verify the dogma of Christianity. Look what they go on about:

Who is Jesus?
Why did Jesus die?
How can we have faith?
Why and how do I pray?
Why and how should I read the Bible?
How does God guide us?
How can I resist evil?
Why & how should we tell others?
Does God heal today?
What about the Church?
Who is the Holy Spirit?
What does the Holy Spirit do?
How can I be filled with the Holy Spirit?
How can I make the most of the rest of my life?

But it seems to me that if your answer to the basic question of whether there is a god is “no”, it’s silly to go on to make assumptions about the divinity of Jesus, or babble about prayer, or talk about mysterious magical entities like the Holy Spirit.

You know what they’re doing. Answer any question with reason, or an expectation of evidence, anything but blind affirmation, and they will lock you up. It’s how religion works.

I do love to see the trembling of the faithful

The number of godless Americans rises a few percentage points, and O Woe Is Us among the apologists. They are so weak and easily discomfited that it makes me chortle.

This one is pretty funny, too — he urges all the religious people to drop their differences (hah!), “Or risk becoming Europe, where religion is fast becoming an afterthought.” What is it with these guys? Europe is a fine, successful place, the thriving heartland of Western thought, and they do very well with a diminished religious influence. I think we’d do well to steal the best parts of European culture, and use them to replace the creaky embarrassing bits of ours…and that means religion should go.

I didn’t even know there was a reporter there!

My appearance at Bates made it to the Lewiston Sun Journal.

They did get a little piece of one point I tried to make. I don’t think religion makes people do wicked things, and that’s not my gripe with it. What it does is cut an intellectual brake line, making them incapable of dealing with certain situations rationally — they may do what is right, or they may do something that’s just nuts, but you just can’t rely on them doing what is reasonable.

Bill Donohue is getting anticipatory apoplexy

30 September is going to be International Blasphemy Day, and I suspect Donohue will be turning purple while his head twirls around on his neck. It should be entertaining: he’s already sending out press releases to complain.

BLASPHEMY DAY TARGETS CHRISTIANITY

The Center for Inquiry will launch the first International Blasphemy Day on September 30, the anniversary of the 2005 publication of the Danish cartoons that so inflamed Muslims worldwide. Billed as a free speech event designed to oppose such things as a Muslim-sponsored U.N. resolution banning criticism of religion, the day has drawn the support of people like PZ Myers. Myers, a professor at the University of Minnesota known for intentionally desecrating a consecrated Host, says the day was established to “mock and insult religion without fear of murder, violence, and reprisal”; he wants every day to be Blasphemy Day.

Catholic League president Bill Donohue spoke to this event today:

The Center for Inquiry is factually incorrect to say that “Free speech is the foundation on which other liberties rest.” Freedom of conscience is the first liberty, and it is inextricably linked to freedom of religion. Moreover, the whole concept of inalienable rights presupposes a belief in the Creator. In other words, atheists have the right to mock religion because our Christian Founding Fathers afforded them human rights.

They are all such phonies. The stated purpose of Blasphemy Day has nothing to do with any religion but Islam, yet there is not one scheduled event insulting Muslims. We can only guess why. So who have they chosen to mock? You guessed it–Christians.

Artist Dana Ellyn will wander to Washington, D.C. to show her masterpiece, “Jesus Does His Nails,” a portrait of Jesus polishing a nail jammed into his hand. In Los Angeles, there will be a film about a gay molesting priest and another about a boy who is so angry about being sent to bed that he asks God to kill his parents. Oh, yes, American Atheists will conduct “De-Baptisms” in New Jersey.

Nice to know that even the atheists know that Christians can be counted on to react to their antics like good Christians. Which is why there will be no violence.

Ol’ Bill really doesn’t get it. The purpose of the day is to jeer at religion, not to do his dirty work of attacking just one sectarian slice of the whole pie of absurdity. In the US, we’ll tend to poke fun at Christianity more than Islam because it’s Christianity that’s in our faces every day of the year. Islam also lacks a histrionic spokesman like Donohue to make entertaining facial spasms for us.

I’m hoping there will be no violence, but I can’t say the same for those “good Christians.” I get a lot of threats from those people, inflamed by affronted polemicists like Donohue, and I can also count on the Catholic League to pine for opportunities to turn Muslims loose on atheists.

My Fargo visit makes the local news!

It’s a fine story, taken from the press conference I gave on Thursday, except for two things.

The comments are a mix of the sane and the deranged. Fargo has some interesting people living up there—a lot of smart, sensible, rational people, and some some very noisy lunatics. It’s strange how the lunatics rarely show up for any of my talks, however, but they always have the most vivid opinions of them.

The other problem is the end. The writer just had to do the usual thing of looking for a dissenting voice and giving them the unquestioned last word.

The Rev. Jeff Sandgren, pastor at Olivet Lutheran Church in Fargo, said Thursday that he doesn’t think science and religion need to be at odds.

He tells the story of an astronomy course he took in college and his introduction to the professor who taught it.

“Here comes this well-known physics professor and the guy is carrying two books, one was this great big astronomy book and the next one was the Bible,” Sandgren recalled.

“Mind you,” Sandgren added, “this is a guy who has been working for NASA, he’s a brilliant physicist and he says: ‘I have two books in my hand, this one tells us how – and he holds up the astronomy book – and this book tells us who.’

“For me,” Sandgren said, “that’s always been the dialectic I’ve lived with.”

OK, fine. He’s always lived with insipid opinions. He’s a pastor, I’m unsurprised.

But tell me…what, exactly, does that Bible contribute to students’ understanding of astronomy, huh? It may say “who”, but so does the Bhagavad Gita, so do the Eddas, so do the local Anishinabe myths, so does Dr Seuss (it’s Cindy Lou Who, in case you forgot). Being a ‘guy who worked for NASA’ does not confer infallibility or even a smidgen of authority in a discussion of the identity of invisible intelligent vapor wafting about outside the universe. Let’s hear some of the arguments, rather than waving about holy books and second-hand physics degrees, please.

I’m also feeling a bit cranky about the asymmetry of the situation. You won’t catch me striding boldly into my classes with a biology textbook in one hand and The God Delusion in the other, triumphantly announcing to the students that one book explains biology, and the other is the philosophy of atheism they should follow — that would be inappropriate, a distraction from the subject students were there to learn, and an unprofessional violation of my responsibilities as an instructor.

Yet here’s this guy proudly recounting tales from his college days when a bible-thumping bozo would come into a science class and preach Christian superstition. No wonder he’s a benighted peddler of hoary dogmas now, instead of an astronomer — he got screwed over in his education, and he’s not even aware of it.

My new, revised retirement plan

My former plan for a prosperous retirement plan involved suddenly finding Jesus and winning a Templeton Prize, but it always left an unpleasant taste in mouth. Sure, I’d be rich, but to do it I’d have to stand up in front of the whole world and pretend to be an addled moron. It was going to take a lot of drinks-in-coconuts-with-umbrellas to wash that indignity into unawareness, you know.

But now I have a new plan that leaves my dignity mostly uncompromised! Well, somewhat compromised. Here’s the idea:

  1. Go to England.

  2. Chat up a few vicars.

  3. Become horribly offended that they are not atheists.

  4. Sue the whole delusional lot of them for rejecting my unbelief.

I’ll be following the case of the Muslim woman who had a conversation about religion with her Christian hotel hosts with some anticipation — it could set a very useful precedent for me. Oh, and if that isn’t enough, Melanie Phillips and Andrew Brown have already said some horribly unkind things about us atheists. Perhaps I can hang the whole British journalistic establishment upside down and shake them for the pennies in their pockets.

Other strategies involve hunting down Simon Cowell and singing in front of him. I’m positive that whatever he says will be actionable. People can’t go around having different opinions and even expressing them, you know!