They really are that crazy

Answers in Genesis, that site that tries to promote an alternative view to natural origins, has put up an article to answer that question that I’m sure is pressing on everyone’s mind as we get close to Halloween: Are demons real?. You won’t be surprised to learn that AiG’s answer is that yes, they are.

According to the Bible, demons are real spiritual and personal beings, not just forces or phenomena in the physical and psychological realm. Various Bible passages reveal that they have intellect, emotions, and will. They think, hate, and choose plans of action against God, Christ, and mankind. They especially hate believers in Christ because believers belong to Christ and are foes of Satan.

The Scriptures provide many details about demons. They are spirit beings created by God and responsible to God (Colossians 1:16). They are creatures limited in space, time, and powers. They have become morally perverted and are called “unclean spirits” (Matthew 10:1) or “evil spirits” (Luke 7:21). They promote immoral and sensuous lifestyles (2 Peter 2:1-18). They cause false teachers of depraved minds to oppose the truth and appeal to carnal and selfish impulses (2 Timothy 3:6). They sow false followers of Christ in the world (Matthew 13:37-42). They blind the minds of unbelievers to keep them from seeing God’s salvation through faith in His Son (2 Corinthians 4:3-4).

Wow, they’re everywhere. The best part, though, is the next paragraph.

Demons promote primitive religions, magic, superstition, and worship of evil spirits. They are the dynamic behind idolatry and their devotees, whether worshipers of the gods Marduk, Asher, Zeus, Jupiter, Apollo, Ra, Diana, Aphrodite, or a host of lesser manmade deities.

“Like Jesus,” I ask, innocently?

I will agree that belief in demons is a sign that you’re dealing with a primitive religion and superstition.

Is Damian Thompson the British Bill Donohue?

Someone tell him that that is no status to which one should aspire. He’s just written a brief, cranky complaint about Dawkins’ righteous smackdown of the Catholic church. Here’s the totality of it.

Richard Dawkins’s latest attack on the Catholic Church is worthy of a dribbling loony on the top of a bus. He calls the Church “the greatest force for evil in the world”, “an institution where buggering altar boys pervades the culture” and describes it “dragging its skirts in the dirt and touting for business like a common pimp”. (Pimps in skirts – that’s a new one.) And all in The Washington Post.

The peg for this piece? The Pope’s offer to make special arrangements for Anglicans converting to Rome, a matter I would have thought was none of Prof Dawkins’s business. But I’m not going to bother to argue with any of his points, because these are the ravings of a man who appears to have lost all sense of proportion. Seriously: is there something wrong with him?

Why, no, Damian! What’s wrong with you?

Let’s start with the quote-mining. He did not call the church “the greatest force for evil in the world”. He asked a question, “What major institution most deserves the title of greatest force for evil in the world?”, and gave a general answer, “In a field of stiff competition, the Roman Catholic Church is surely up there among the leaders.” I would have thought that the English could comprehend their own language, but apparently that isn’t necessarily true of religion columnists. Quelle surprise!

Second, Dawkins’ characterization of the Catholic church was spot on, and justified by a recital of its flaws: that bizarre belief in transubstantiation, its misogyny, its deadly opposition to contraception in Africa, its homophobia, its history of pederasty. It’s not simply a matter of administrative reshuffling of priests between the Church of England and the Vatican, as Thompson seems to imply, but an attempted merger brought about by enticing the most reactionary of the Anglican priesthood, something that will not correct the sins of the church, but worsen them.

By the way, Dawkins wasn’t the only person to notice the nasty implications of this merger. So did I. It’s even the subject of some humor.

i-a512526a23db6879d3b914fb675af427-vatican_merger.jpeg

So what’s wrong with you, Damian? Are you blind to the obvious?

A fair and balanced poll?

A story on NPR reports that there’s a bit of a tiff between the White House and Fox News: spokespersons for the administration and media have basically stated that Fox is a conservative propaganda outlet, deeply hurting Fox’s dewicate widdle feewings. And they have a poll! It looks like the right-wingers have already poisoned it for us, because no one in their right mind would actually deny that Fox is unfair and unbalanced in its reporting.

I’m supporting:

The White House on this one; Fox News isn’t “fair and balanced.” 14% (3,973 votes)
Fox News on this one; it asks questions others don’t and the White House should be able to handle them. 83% (23,544 votes)
Neither side. They’re both trying to play this “feud” to their advantage. 3% (850 votes)

Those are big numbers, so it’ll be a tough haul to compete…have fun trying, anyway!

I ♥ sabbaticals

Why? Because Jerry Coyne can mention this amazing conference, I can take a look at the luminaries speaking at it, and decide at the drop of a hat that I’m going. So this weekend, I’ll be spending my Halloween at a major conference on evolution. Yay!

Look forward to lots of liveblogging (I hope…if they have wi-fi in the conference halls. If not, there will be some massive data dumps in the evenings.)

Whee! More jousting!

Peter Irons sent this little comment to Stuart Pivar on receiving the news about his failed lawsuit.

Hi Stu,

Good news! The story is already up on Pharyngula (PZ didn’t waste a
minute) and the mocking has begun. Enjoy!

By the way, what pissed me off the most about you was not the PZ suit, but
your lie about giving the eulogy at Steve Gould’s memorial service. Don’t
ever repeat that lie again.

Here’s Pivar’s rejoinder.

I never said I gave a eulogy at Steve Gould’s memorial.

The day after Steve died I read the Kaddish service at the funeral obsequies in his small library, the minion including the Rabbi, the preparators, artist Steven Assails who made a drawing, and anatomist Eliot Goldfinger who took a death mask. Rhonda Schearer Gould, Helen Matsos and I then accompanied the body to New Jersey for cremation.

Your information re the case is also incorrect. You are seeing the first step in an agreed change in venue.

I’m making popcorn.

More reasons not to debate creationists

I’m going to be in this silly debate on “Should Intelligent Design Be Taught In The Schools?” with creationist kook Jerry Bergman on 16 November, sponsored by CASH and the local Kook Central. The latest hangup, though, is that the creationists want to have a pre- and post-debate survey, and they plan to give the audience these questions:

I think intelligent design should be taught alongside evolution in all schools, public and private.
Strongly Disagree Disagree Undecided Agree Strongly Agree

I think intelligent design should be taught alongside evolution by teachers who support it, without punishment.
Strongly Disagree Disagree Undecided Agree Strongly Agree

I think that as a minimum, the evidence against evolution should be taught alongside evidence for evolution.
Strongly Disagree Disagree Undecided Agree Strongly Agree

I’ve told them that that last question is simply unacceptable: it’s misleading, prejudicial, and begs the question. There is no evidence against evolution. If there were, I’d agree — teach it. However, until they can say something specific, I’m not going to let them get away with sneaking in a stupid loaded question to their audience ahead of time.

I explained that as is, I’d answer that question with “strongly agree”, because I think that evidence should be taught…but that I know they want to use it to pretend that there is some substantial support for teaching creationism, which is not the case.

Much waffling is going on on their part. I’ve put my foot down: cut the question out. They’re trying to weasel in some fuzzy alternative that will have the same effect. The first two questions are fine, they directly address the subject of the debate more specifically (that is, “Intelligent design”), but the last is just an open-ended bit of noise that they want to use to justify their anti-science agenda.

Dealing with these charlatans is aggravating on so many levels.

Pivar gives up on another suit

In August, Stuart Pivar once again threatened to resolve a scientific dispute by waving a team of lawyers at it, when he tried to sue a scientist, Robert Hazen, for daring to insist that Pivar stop using his name to promote Pivar’s pseudo-science of balloon animals. I just heard from Peter Irons that he had received notification from some of the lawyers involved in that case.

Good morning Peter,

We are pleased to report that Pivar’s counsel called and offered to
dismiss the action with prejudice. We recently filed the executed
Stipulation of Voluntary Discontinuance. The action is officially
dismissed with prejudice (though it may be a few days before the Clerk
changes the case status to inactive). Thank you,

Monique E. Liburd
Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP

This is becoming a tradition.

Scientology = Fraud

At least, that’s the outcome of a court decision in France, where Scientology was guilty of fraud and got slapped with a few fines, which they’ll scrape out of the pockets of their gullible followers.

It’s nice, I’m not going to complain, but I’ll be more impressed when they apply the same reasoning to the Catholic Church. Why do French authorities still allow that con-game called Lourdes, for instance, to continue?

That’s not an unfair question!

This story strikes a little close to home, because I’ve faced exactly the same kinds of complaints from some of my students — except that these are Religious Studies students. They are very upset because they consider one of the questions on a standard exam to be “unfair”. Here’s the question:

Question four on Islam, worth 20 marks, gave candidates a quotation referring to the Qur’an and the prophet Muhammad. Then it asked candidates: “With reference to the quotation, analyse the role played by the revelation through the Prophet in the life of Muslims.”

It sounds reasonable to me. They’re students of religion — I’m sure they’ve discussed the idea of revelation often enough, they’re supposed to be able to interpret texts, they’ve been given a quote, now all they have to do is spin out a nice line of blather, which again, is almost certainly a skill students of religion are expected to know.

But no. These students make some familiar complaints.

One student identified only as Clare said: “When we reached section three I think most students in the state had a communal heart attack as we discovered obscure and obtuse questions which were from absolutely no part of the otherwise very straightforward syllabus.

“I just lost 20 marks from a paper I studied very hard for.”

As a number of schools called for an explanation, Newington College student Nick Grogin said he was stunned by one question.

“I had never seen anything like that in the syllabus,” he said. “Nothing about it related to what I had studied and been taught.”

There was nothing about Islam in their studies? That would be deplorable. Or there was nothing about revelation, or about interpretation in their studies? That would be even more shocking.

These are students who don’t get it. I’ve had a few of them in biology classes, too. Some students think that if the answer to a question wasn’t plainly spelled out in lecture or in their texts so that they can just “study” (a verb that in some vocabularies means “memorize”) and spit back that very same answer, the question is unfair. Wrong.

Clare and Nick, you fail. And you deserve to fail. And not just because you’re wasting your time in Religion Studies.

A good test also examines a student’s ability to think, to come up with good answers to brand new problems. When a student is so limited in their intellectual ability that they are incapable of generalizing from principles they learned in the context of Christianity to Islam (or, as I’ve sometimes discovered, when they are flummoxed by a problem in Mendelian genetics in zebrafish rather than flies), they’ve flunked the thinking part of the exam.