Maybe they should poll the dead to get the answer

Last night, Larry King Live (without Larry King, who was off getting his internal organs stuffed into canopic jars or something) was all about life after death, and guess who they brought on? Deepak Chopra, new age nutcase; Dinesh D’Souza, dithering moron; and Sanjay Gupta, their usual token MD, who was completely ineffectual and didn’t say one word to criticize the pair of loons sharing the screen with him. They did bring out Michael Shermer in the middle of the show to say a few words, but again, he was too busy being nice to actually hammer on the Chopra/D’Souza BS.

They have a poll. I’d be curious to know if your answer would change after seeing (or reading the transcript) of that ghastly show. I suspect knowing what Chopra and D’Souza had to say could only increase the frequency of “no” answers.

Do you believe in life after death?

Yes 80%
No 20%

Christian shame

Salon has a peculiarly defensive article by a Christian confessing to being embarrassed about her beliefs, which seems like a good start to me. She should be embarrassed. As a fun exercise, though, try reading her article while categorizing its statements in the Kübler-Ross stages — there’s a bit of denial in there, some bargaining, and a faint hint of depression, but mainly what she’s got is anger. She lashes out at atheists a fair bit, but it’s in a revealing way.

Writers like Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and Victor J. Stenger — and, of course, performers like Bill Maher — get loads of press mocking the dummies gullible enough to believe some guy a couple thousand years ago was God’s son. But come on. It’s like shooting Christian fish car magnets in a barrel.

Well, yes, it is easy to mock people who “believe some guy a couple thousand years ago was God’s son.” But, you know, that’s the central tenet of the Christian faith! Shouldn’t you stop and wonder about the validity of your beliefs when you realize the core idea is ridiculous? She isn’t going to defend that idea at all, though — atheists are just mean for noticing it, I guess.

Oh, and of course she trots out the standard fundamentalist canard.

And yet, atheists are at least as fundamentalist and zealous as any religious people I know, and they have nothing good to show for it: no stained glass, no great literature, no great art, no comfort in the face of death. Just dissipated Christopher Hitchens sounding off on “Larry King Live” and a stack of smug books with childishly provocative titles.

Atheists are not fundamentalists. Saying so just makes you look like a moron.

We have nothing good to show for being atheists? Hey, what about SCIENCE? I had no idea that atheists were unable to create stained glass windows — maybe this is the answer to Hitchens’ challenge, to find something good that a theist can do but an atheist cannot. Unfortunately for our distressed Christian, stained glass is a secular technology that has been used to decorate churches…but we godless people can use it just fine, if we want.

No great literature? One name: Mark Twain.

No great art? Berlioz, Paganini, Schubert, Saint-Saëns. If that’s not enough, browse the list.

No comfort in the face of death? What we lack is a collection of lies about death. I could say the same of Christianity, since I certainly find no comfort in unwarranted authority, wishful thinking, and delusional incentives. And at least atheists do not threaten others with hell.

Her snide comment about Hitchens is accompanied by a link which you should watch. It’s revealing. It’s Hitchens surrounded by a couple of McCain apologists before the last election, ripping into Sarah Palin’s anti-scientific views on genetics and research, and her ridiculous creationism. Does the sad Christian somehow find that antagonistic to her beliefs? I know many members of her own faith who would have expressed the same sentiments…just not as eloquently as Hitchens.

Finally, she wonders if she should speak up.

But also, increasingly, I wonder: When I’m getting a ride from some friends and they start talking about how stupid religious people are and quoting lines from “Religulous,” do I have an obligation to point out how reductive and bigoted they’re being, the way I would if they were talking about a particular race? Increasingly I wonder if I should pipe up from the back seat and say, “Excuse me, but these fools you’re talking about? I’m one of them.”

You certainly are. Please do speak up, we like to know when we’re in the presence of fools.

The equation of race with religion is also standard practice for fools. Sorry, lady, ignorance isn’t the same as being brown, and you can’t excuse yourself by claiming that you were born without knowledge.

Wouldn’t you know a whole bunch of people would write to me with examples of stained glass in scientific institutions? Here’s an example from the Pembroke College library at Cambridge:

i-7691398086beb2975c2eb54ead438ad0-stainedglass.jpeg

I get email

I am often chided by morons.

Consistent

Dear Mr. Myers,

To be wrong is always acceptable, because we are human. But, to be consistently wrong, especially when you call yourself a Professor, is going way beyond the bounds of good sense. Anyone who even gives ear to people such as Dawkins and Kitchens is no less than a fool. There is nothing wrong with being a fool, but teaching others to be one is unacceptable and irresponsible, at the very least. Furthermore, to have a degree or degrees in biology and to still believe in Darwinian theory, shows ignorance in the worst degree. Macro evolution is founded on absolutely nothing but blind faith. No evidence has ever been provided for it. Several hokes and false attempts, but no real evidence. A large group of sciences, including biologists, have concluded that the theory is false. Why, other than you can make a living no way else, that a professional biologist would continue on with such a shenanigan, is beyond comprehension. It is a poison to society and you are one who doses it out. As common as a drug dealer. I hope you will come to your senses, as a thinking rational man, before too long. If it is the result of bitterness about something in your past…get over it.

Sincerely,
Michael Aprile

I’ve split half-billion year old stones to expose the shells of trilobites, I’ve seen the bones of Tiktaalik, I’ve held in my hands the skull of Neanderthal. I’ve compared the genes of mice and flies, I’ve studied the embryos of grasshoppers and fish, I’ve read thousands of papers produced by a scientific community that values curiosity over money. I’ve also read dozens of books by creationists, and I can say with complete confidence that they, and you, Mr Michael Aprile, are full of shit.

You write chastising email built out of condescending ignorance, and can’t even be troubled to check the spelling and grammar. You claim there is no evidence for evolution, when you haven’t even looked. All those people with degrees in biology know genetics, molecular biology, anatomy, physiology, and ecology — what do you know, Mr Aprile? The science points ineluctably to evolution as a fact, as the mechanism for biological change over time. The only people who argue otherwise, and that includes those ‘sciences’ [sic] you claim have concluded that the theory is false, are ideologues who have had their brains addled by non-scientific presuppositions, and who have decided that their fallacious traditional myths must supersede observation and evidence.

The professional biologists whose work you do not comprehend are not spreading poison or drugs: they are sharing knowledge. I know you find that anathema, since it directly displaces the ignorance you and your religion thrive on, but I do not concede an iota of respect to your stupidity, and will be spending the rest of my life opposing it.

Aaaah! Horrible wretched wicked story of faith and foreskins!

I happen to be male. I found myself unable to read the following story without feeling an urge to double over and cup my crotch, which was really awkward when sitting in a public coffee shop. So stop here if you are prone to sympathetic pains.

A man in British Columbia decided that he and his four year old son needed to be circumcised.

Already, half my readership has decided to flee to less cringe-inducing websites. That’s OK, just leave quietly, and close the door behind you.

[Read more…]

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.

Smarm + Creationist Math = Smath

Which makes this video very, very smathy.

That’s Carl Baugh, by the way, who appears regularly on the Trinity Broadcast Network to teach viewers about creationism. It’s a good program to watch (I do, now and then) if you want to see how flinking bugnuts insane young earth creationists can be.

This particular episode has all the standard tropes. They bring on a guest gomer, and they go on and on about his credentials — this one is a ‘prominent mathematician’ who teaches at a high school and part time at a trade school. They puff him up good; creationists really want the Voice of Authority, which is why so many of them chase after bogus degrees…it’s for the window dressing.

Then they do a lot of mutual backslapping, where they tell each other how skeptical and scientific they are, and in this case, bray about how mathematics is the language of science (which is true) and how they are going to look critically at the actual data using objective mathematics.

Then they “crunch the numbers.” I think that’s creation-speak for “diddle the books.”

All the guy does is plug numbers into the standard formula for compound interest to calculate the expected number of people in populations after a certain period of time. Seriously. I tried it, and got pretty much the same numbers he did. You can play the same game with his Biblical scenario in a little more detail and calculate populations at various times in history: the world population was about 150,000 at the time of Alexander the Great, 600,000 when Jesus was born, 5 billion when I was born. As usually happens with these kinds of bogus calculations, our smath professor needs to use an invalid formula and apply it inappropriately to get numbers that only match at the beginning and end of the time period he is examining, but are so low as to be laughable at the earliest times in his history, and that don’t match up at all over periods where we have good census data.

You might also wonder where he got his growth rate of 0.456%. He made it up. It happens to be the number that, assuming a starting population of 8 4500 years ago, you get a final population of 6.5 billion now.

Leaving death out of his calculations is a tiny omission that makes even that fudged number wrong.

I stand corrected — his growth rate, imaginary as it is, consolidates birth rates minus death rates, so it still works with non-immortals.

For dedicated bibliophiles only

What a deal. For only 99¢, you can get an abridged version of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life; you can tell it’s been abridged because the title has been reduced to Origin of Species. It’s also special because it contains a 50 page introduction by Ray Comfort, which tells you everything that the creationists are sure is wrong about the rest of the book. It’s like a book with multiple personality disorder — two parts that absolutely hate each other, an intro that is the inane product of one of the most stupid minds of our century, and a science text that is the product of one of the greatest minds of the author’s century.

But wait! For only $3.99, you can also get a copy of The Charles Darwin Bible, which is the only Bible in existence to mention DNA, the Cambrian, mutations, peppered moths, etc. And it includes “In-text study notes written specifically for atheists”! Unfortunately, Charles Darwin had nothing at all to do with this Bible; it’s actually the product of Answers in Genesis.

I’m tempted to get copies of each. They look like beautiful examples of creationist “thought”.

Another vastly important event

Baseball. Baseball and god. What could be more important? An now a couple of baseball players are in a snit.

The Cliff Notes version: After hitting a homer off Wilson in the 12th inning of the Giants’ 7-5 13-inning victory, Blake was seen on television making the same well known gesture that Wilson makes after every save in tribute to both his Christian faith and his late father. 

By the time Wilson returned to the clubhouse after securing the win in the 13th, some friends had sent images of Blake to his cell phone, sending him into an agitated state that his teammates instantly had to calm him down from.

After all, Wilson must have a patent on the “two forefingers pointing to the sky” gesture, and only he should be using it. Why, if just anyone could do it, god wouldn’t know how special Mr Wilson is.

Wilson explains the importance of the gesture.

“It shows no disrespect toward anybody. It’s all positive praise. It’s not for showboating. It’s not to start an epidemic. It’s just me getting a quick message out to the world and to Christ and that’s it. I just thought, ‘What more perfect time to display my faith than at the end of a game?'”

Indeed. What more perfect time could there be?