Only the religious could turn a disaster into a mark in the plus column for God. Jim Downey has found an amazing series of books with some impressive titles, all with the point of giving credit to God for personal catastrophe:
Chuck Norris convinced me before that the bruised and jellied blob bobbing about in his cranium isn’t working so well anymore, but this video of Norris advocating a bible-based public school curriculum is the final kicker.
He’s fronting for an organization that’s trying to smuggle bogus history and religious propaganda into our schools. It’s a shame—after playing a hero for so many years on TV, he’s fading away in the real world as one of the bad guys.
That Allen MacNeill fella is crazy brave — after trying to approach Intelligent Design seriously as a course subject, now he’s going to teach another controversial summer seminar on whether religion is adaptive. I think where the previous course ran off the rails was in the too-respectful attempt to encourage the participation of the Cornell IDEA club — he basically ended up aiding and abetting a gang of ignorant ideologues, and that’s also the way it got spun in the media, to the creationists’ advantage. I agree that it’s a good idea to engage the counter-culture warriors who are pushing the unscientific glop on the public, but we can’t begin with the premise that ID creationism has some validity; that’s doing the work of the Discovery Institute. Discussion of evolution has to begin with the scientific foundation of modern evolutionary biology, and if anyone wants to wiggle in with their alternatives, they need to do the hard work of providing evidence, first.
I also have to disagree with one of the premises of his course description. After explaining the ubiquity of religious belief, it’s variation, and the existence of people who have no use for religion, he says:
To an evolutionary biologist, such pan-specificity combined with continuous variation strongly suggests that one is dealing with an evolutionary adaptation.
No, it most definitely does not.
I have noticed a lot of students wandering around with these white rectangular objects with cables hooked up to their ears. I’ve also discovered by personal experience with a teenager that these objects are quite precious to their owners, and are practically revered. Yet there are also some students who don’t care at all for them. Do evolutionary biologists look at the iPod and say “A-ha! There is an evolutionary adaptation”? Probably not. Evolutionary psychologists might, but we already know they’re nuts.
I think instead that we ought to determine if there is a hereditary component before talking about its likelihood of having an evolutionary function. Since we see that whole cultures can rapidly, within a few generations, shed much of their religious baggage; since religion seems to be largely a product of indoctrination rather than a built-in product of the brain; and since individuals can exhibit reversals from religiosity to atheism and vice versa within their lifetime, I remain unconvinced that there exists any kind of direct biological predilection for religion. The frequency of a phenomenon is not an indicator of its adaptive value, nor do variations reinforce that notion.
For another example, people in the US largely speak English, with a subset that speak Spanish, and a few other languages represented in scattered groups. That does not mean we should talk about English as an adaptive product of evolution. Language, definitely—there’s clearly a heritable biological element to that ability. Similarly, religion may easily be a consequence of a universal trait like curiosity (we want answers to questions, religion provides them, so it spreads—even if the answers are all wrong) or empathy (we are social animals, we like community activities, religion hijacks that communal urge), but religion itself is but one replaceable instance, an epiphenomenon that too many people mistake for the actual substrate of the behavior.
The pop culture hysteria is getting ridiculous. The movie 300, based on a graphic novel treatment of the sacrifice of the Spartans in the battle of Thermopylae, has become a political palimpsest with everyone trying to find support for their agenda in it—but get serious, it’s a comic book on the big screen. Similarly, a few have tried to see omens in the death of comic book hero Captain America recently. Again, it’s a comic book — superheroes die all the time, and they bounce back like Jesus or get replaced by someone else willing to look ridiculous in public wearing garish Spandex. For the most obvious example of a hyperbolic search for Meaning and Significance in the death of fictitious characters, though, we have to turn to the religious — they’ve got so much practice at it, after all. Ladies and gentlemen, behold Rabbi Marc Gellman, whose thesis is that the Spartans and Captain America died for God.
What a shock—that awesome “Left Behind” video game in which you get to convert the infidel and slaughter the heathen has tanked, big time. They sunk $27 million into it, the stock had a peak of $18.70 $7.44, and now it’s worth 18 cents.
I guess they didn’t pray hard enough.
Neural Gourmet has put out a call for everyone to blog against theocracy:
I’d like invite you all to Blog Against Theocracy. This is a little blog swarm being put together by everybody’s favorite panties blogger Blue Gal for Easter weekend, April 6th through the 8th. The idea is simple. Just post something related to, and in support of, the separation of church and state each of those three days. Something big, something small, artistic, musical, textual or otherwise. The topic is your choosing. Whether your thing is stem cell research, intelligent design/Creationism, abortion rights, etc., it’s all good. Separation of church and state impacts so many issues and is essential.
This is hardly a challenge for me—I have to consciously restrain myself from turning this blog into one long sustained growl against religion anyway, so all I have to do is take the muzzle off for three days. And as it is, you people will probably tell me that you don’t notice that the 6th is any different than the 5th of April.
Every once in a while, a reader sends me a link to something I’ve already dealt with (and that’s OK, I don’t expect everyone to have committed the entirety of the Pharyngula database to memory), but it’s a link to something so dang weird it’s worth reposting. In this case, I was sent a link to a page that purports to describe the beliefs of some Jehovah’s Witnesses about cats, where among many other jaw-dropping arguments, it gives us this jewel:
Indeed, modern studies of classification of cats, while not necessarily being reliable as they may be based on the discredited ‘theory’ of evolution, strongly associate felines with serpents (despite some external differences in physiology and morphology, which confuse those who do not study these matters deeply).
The consensus of the previous discussion was that the site is probably a satire, although it hews so close to the insanity of the actual religion that it’s hard to tell. It’s still funny either way, though. It’s also a good excuse to quote one of my favorite fantasy authors, Tanith Lee.
Since I previously mentioned GodTube, which is all Jesus all the time and has lots of creationism videos, it’s only fair that I reveal that there is also an IslamTube, where you can listen to speeches about the religion of peace or watch humvees get blown up.
Somebody introduce these two to each other.
(hat tip to Peter McGrath)
Garrison Keillor has done it again: he’s written another insipid article loaded with casual bigotry, this time against gays. I’m pleased to see that Dan Savage has savaged him, so I don’t need to go on at length.
However, this really isn’t the first time Keillor has done this—he has a history of unthinking stereotyping and rejection of gays and atheists. He’s an excellent example of why, when I see the Religious Right and the Religious Left, I don’t think the problem is the Right or Left…it’s the Religious.
My criticism of Keillor from 2005 is below the fold. Not only does he reject atheism and homosexuality, but he does so on the most trivial grounds—gay people want to get married to economize on their wardrobe? It’s nuts.
If you go to the main ScienceBlogs page, you’ll discover that the Buzz for the day is this little gem, triggered by one of our newbie bloggers:
Spirituality and Science
Over the last few hundred years, science has provided a mind-boggling richness of answers about the workings of the universe. For many people the importance of religion, at least as an explainer of the natural world, has shifted. Is it possible to believe what science teaches us about nature, and also be a person of faith? A Galactic Interactions post about being a Christian and a scientist has ignited an explosive debate.
Appropriately enough, the latest Templeton Prize has just been awarded. $1.5 million for this rubbish:
Professor Taylor has written extensively on the sense of self and how it is defined by morals and what one considers good. People operate in the register of spiritual issues, he said, and to separate those from the humanities and social sciences leads to flawed conclusions.
“The deafness of many philosophers, social scientists and historians to the spiritual dimension can be remarkable,” Professor Taylor said in remarks prepared for delivery at the announcement of the prize at the Church Center for the United Nations in New York this morning. This is damaging because it “affects the culture of the media and educated public opinion in general.”
There’s also much more at the Templeton Prize site. He blathers on and on about “spiritual thinking” and a “spiritual domain” without ever telling us what the heck it is, although it does seem to be all tied up in believing in a religion, any religion. So, someone tell me, how am I supposed to hear this “spiritual dimension”? What is it supposed to mean?
Near as I can tell, it means making up vague nonsense about special values only religious people can have, and getting a cool million five for insisting on it. What a sweet scam, and what a useless lot of hot air.
(via Butterflies and Wheels)
