Representing for Christ

A lot of people don’t like Lyndon Rush, the Christian zealot who also happens to be a bobsledder in the Olympics. I think he’s wonderful. It’s so helpful to have someone like him openly demonstrating that Christians are morons.*

You know there’s no atheist in a foxhole, right? There’s no atheist at the top of a bobsled run, either.

But there are atheists in the military. I don’t know about any specific godless organizations dedicated to the plight of unbelievers in bobsleds — bobsledding is a rather trivial issue to focus on, anyway — but there probably are some. They’re just smart enough to know it’s pointless to make a sport a place to issue a philosophical manifesto.

Oh, but wait…here’s why I love Rush as a paragon of Christian idiocy. There are no atheists in bobsleds, but there are atheists right there on his team. And Rush doesn’t even notice that he contradicts himself!

I’ve had atheists on my team and they have no problem talking to God before the run. Everybody likes it. Even the atheists, for instance, they like how it sets the tone. We all come together and I pray about things that they want, too. Maybe they’re not in a period of their life where they believe in God, I guess. I don’t know. I don’t really believe in atheists.

I marvel at that. It’s a miracle that the same person who has the awesome intelligence required to plummet down an icy track could babble so…he doesn’t believe in atheists, but atheists are on his team, and there are no atheists at the top of the bobsled run, and the atheists there like to hear him chatter about god. He is so self-unaware, so oblivious, so Gomer Pyle.

Guess what, Lyndon? The atheists don’t like to listen you preach your inanity, except in the mean-spirited sense of watching yet another dumb Christian proudly demonstrate what an ass he can be. They probably get together for beer after a run and tell Lyndon Rush stories, and laugh and laugh.

*I know they aren’t all morons — they just believe in incredibly stupid ideas. But you have to appreciated what great negative PR Lyndon Rush is for Christianity.

Canada is sharing in Christian shame

The Canadian government is planning to help a fundamentalist Christian group, Youth for Christ, to proselytize. They’ve offered to contribute several million dollars to the construction of a youth center in downtown Winnipeg, which sounds like a wonderful, useful idea…except for the fact that the group building it has this as their mission:

To impact every young person in Canada with the person, work and teachings of Jesus Christ and discipling them into the Church.

They also openly admit to their plans:

Sharing the person of Christ with every young person within our target group in Canada (5.4 million youth). This will require the development of new strategies, as well as strengthening existing efforts.

So, sure, anyone can come on down and freely use their skate park, their gym, their various services, and they don’t need to be Christian. It would be especially great if they aren’t Christian, because they will be met by a team of cheerful youth pastors who will tell them all about the glory of Jesus while they work out or play. That’s the whole purpose of the facility — not to provide a healthy recreational outlet for kids, but to corral the unconverted in one place for easy predation by a coven of kooks out to win over their minds.

Here’s another nice twist to the story, too.

Roughly one in 100 youths contacted by the organization — 17,010 out of 154,192 — “responded to the opportunity to become a Christian,” said the report, which identified “the aboriginal youth community” as a “prime area for development.”

It’s not just those cranky atheists who are outraged at the funneling of money into Christian evangelism — it’s an ethnic issue, and Youth for Christ knows it.

The Christian youth centre in a primarily aboriginal neighbourhood stirs up thoughts of historical assimilation, some First Nations leaders told councillors.

Nahanni Fontaine, director of justice for the Southern Chiefs Organization, an advocacy group for First Nations people in southern Manitoba, said giving public money to the project would be like contributing to the contemporary version of residential schools under the guise of helping youth.

“[We] saw religion used as an abusive and violating mechanism in which to assimilate aboriginal children into Euro-Canadian mainstream,” she said.

“Aboriginal people were assured that these sort of infringing practices and strategic policies would never occur again.”

Approving this proposal would just be sanctifying a “more contemporary form of the residential school experience,” Fontaine said.

That is serious stuff. People seem to have forgotten what we, Canada and the US, were doing a bit over a century ago: we were actively ripping children away from their native parents and boarding them up in schools where they were taught the White Man’s Ways, which usually involved religion in some way or another. My own university (which is celebrating its history this year) had its beginnings as a native American boarding school, run by an order of Catholic nuns. That’s not something to be proud of, but a stigma to be overcome. Why would Winnipeg want to be afflicted with a new racist black mark on their history?

Ms Palin, you fail

Sarah Palin gave a $100K speech to a convention of teabagging wankers, she faced a few pre-screened, prepared questions, and what did she need? She had to have the answers written on her hand ahead of time!

Here’s what gets me the most, though. She didn’t have a cheat sheet of wonky little details, stuff that would be hard to keep straight and important to get exactly right. No, she had to write down the three most important goals for a conservative majority. What, she’s shaky on that?

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Energy
Budget cuts
Tax
Lift Americans
Spirits

Man, next time I go off to give a talk, I’m going to get a sharpie and write “Science. Evolution. Anti-creationism.” on my left hand, in case I get asked what I’m going to talk about. ‘Cause I might forget, you know.

And then I’m going to ask for a few thousand dollars. And the presidency. All right, I’m not going to be greedy — the vice-presidency will do.

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:

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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.