Throw the teachers in jail…a poll

Greg Laden is entirely correct the case in question reference by this poll is about some teachers who are being tried for contempt of court, and this particular court case is not about separation of church and state. However, the poll is asking a more general question:

Should educators be fined or jailed for offering prayer in public schools?

Yes (12.6%)
No (87.4%)

I say yes: teachers who organize sectarian prayer in their classroom are betraying their trust and are in violation of the principle of separation of church and state. Imagine the outcry if a teacher were a Satanist and tried to lead the class in a demonic invocation — as stupid and ineffective as such a ritual would be, parents would be rightly irate that their kids were being indoctrinated into a religion, and compelled by pressure from an authority figure to participate in a rite they find odious. The classroom must remain secular, and although I might quibble with the details of the punishment (they ought to be fired for violations, not necessarily jailed or fined), there has to be a way to sanction such actions.

That also goes for teachers who push atheism in the public schools.

Foil the depraved designs of a dastardly duo!

Back in June, I reported on this new sleazy tactic by Ray Comfort: he produced an abridged edition of Darwin’s Origin of Species, and then had the gall to tag on a preface that he had written himself, full of the standard creationist misconceptions. Comfort is astoundingly ignorant of basic biology; the best analogy to what he’s doing here would be if I were to give a chimpanzee a few blank sheets of paper and a convenient pile of his own feces and ask him to write a theological exegesis of the book of Genesis.

Oh, wait. On second thought, the chimpanzee would probably do a smarter job of his task than Comfort did of his.

Anyway, Ray and his polyp, Kirk Cameron, have a grand plan. They are going to give away their mangled edition of the Origin on 50 college campuses on 19 November, with the intent of allowing students to see the ‘alternative’ view. As if no one has heard of creationism, or as if it was a valid alternative to science.

There is a strategy to address this obscenity. They’re giving the books away for free: just get one or a few. Take them away and put them on a bookshelf, or rip out the introduction and donate the rest of the book to charity (which is a little impractical, I fear: these books will be very cheaply bound, and will not survive the mutilation). But anyway, let the intelligent, rational community sop up these sad mutilations of a great book and tuck them away from the gullible.

Alternatively, send copies to your favorite opponent of creationism on your campus. I know I keep a bookshelf full of creationist literature, and a Cameron/Comfort-edited version of the Origin would be a hilarious joke to have on hand. I doubt that the University of Minnesota Morris will be ‘lucky’ enough to get a team of these evangelical idjits on campus, though…so maybe one of you readers can get a copy for me? Get two, I’ll sign one and send it back to you so that you have an extra special version. Be sure to tell the people handing it out that you want an extra copy for an evil atheist!

Beware, America! Your streets are not safe!

I give you all fair warning: my daughter Skatje has passed her driver’s test, and has a license to drive. Alone. Without her father sitting by her side, hands clenched tightly to the armrest, feet pounding the floorboards to hit imaginary brakes, and using the force of his indomitable will to prevent collisions, explosions, squirrel-squishings, etc.

You might just want to stay home for the rest of your life.

Stanley the barnacle

I used to love to watch barnacles. Well, I still do, but there’s a distinct shortage of tidepools here in Minnesota, which makes it a very difficult hobby. Barnacles are arthropods hunkered down in stony shells attached to a substrate, and what they do is unfurl feathery legs like ostrich plumes (called cirri) and wave them about in the water to catch small particles of food. They’re very pretty, but also very skittish: a shadow passing over, a splash, the klunk of a rock sending vibrations through the substrate, and they instantly withdraw their limbs and slam the plate-like doors to their home shut. There isn’t much variation in their response; they can’t get up and run away, they can’t leap out use kung-fu on an interloper, all they can do is hide behind their armored shells, and that’s what they do as a reaction to any stimulus.

Barnacles are completely lacking in curiosity. It makes sense; they have very tiny brains, and all they want is to be left alone to strain the water for nutrients. For a barnacle, curiosity would be a dangerous vice. Any intrusion on their routine is a risk, and they don’t need to analyze…just slam the doors shut.

While there may be few tidepools in Minnesota, I can find some in the pages of the NY Times. Stanley Fish is apparently some species of barnacle. James Leach of the National Endowment for the Humanities gave a lecture titled “Is There an Inalienable Right to Curiosity?”, which has stirred Fish to protest. I think. In a wonderfully consistent pattern that I’m sure would meet the approval of barnacles everywhere, he doesn’t actually express an opinion directly himself. Instead, he merely reports what others have said. We must deduce his opinion from the fact that he only quotes critics of curiosity. Curiosity is the original sin, you know: we can blame all of our suffering on a god who righteously slapped down a couple of people for daring to be curious.

When God told Adam he could eat of all the fruits of the Garden of Eden, but not of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, he placed what has been called a “provoking object” in Adam’s eyes. The provocation was to go beyond the boundaries God had established and thereby set himself up a rival deity, a being with no limits on what he can conceive, a being whose intellect could, in time, comprehend anything and everything. Such a being would imagine himself, God-like, standing to the side of the universe and, armed only with the power of his mind, mastering its intricacies. Those who engage in this fantasy, says Thomas Aquinas, think “they are doing something great, if with surpassing curiosity and keenness they explore the whole mass of this body which we call the world; so great a pride is thus begotten, that one would think they dwelt in the very heavens about which they argue.”

Another churchman, Lorenzo Scupoli, put it this way in 1589: “They make an idol of their own understanding” (“Knowledge puffeth up,” I Corinthians 8:1). Pascal said it succinctly: “Curiosity is only vanity.” Jonathan Robinson, writing in this century, makes the same point: “What we are talking about is the desire to satisfy our curiosity on any and every conceivable subject that takes our fancy” (“Spiritual Combat Revisited”).

Isn’t that fascinating? If barnacles could imagine and could write, that’s precisely what they’d say, too. There is a hallowed tradition in certain scholarly circles of simply quoting famous dead white guys who agree with you in order to lend your words some authority that reason cannot bestow on them, and Stanley Barnacle has this same attitude. When someone quotes stodgy old promoters of the status quo who insist that human knowledge must have limits, we must go no further than we have up to this century, though, I have to note that they’ve all been irrefutably proven wrong by the time the next century rolls around. I am unpersuaded. Actually, I’m anti-persuaded. There’s something about citing a 5th century bishop telling everyone to stop exploring the world that has the effect of convincing this 21st century secularist to go turn over a few more rocks.

Give this indictment of men in love with their own capacities a positive twist and it becomes a description of the scientific project, which includes among its many achievements space travel, a split atom, cloning and the information revolution. It is a project that celebrates the expansion of knowledge’s boundaries as an undoubted good, and it is a project that Chairman Leach salutes when he proudly lists the joint efforts by the University of Virginia and the N.E.H. to digitalize just about everything. “The computer revolution,” he announces, “holds out the prospect that the digital library could be become an international citadel for the pursuit of curiosity.”

That’s exactly what Paul Griffiths, professor of divinity at Duke University, is afraid of. Where Leach welcomes the enlargement of curiosity’s empire, Griffiths, who is writing a book on the vice of curiosity, sees it as a sign of moral and spiritual danger: “Late modern societies that are fundamentally shaped by the overwhelming presence of electronic media and the obscene inundation of every aspect of human life by pictures and sounds have turned the vice of curiosity into a prescribed way of life” (“Reason and the Reasons of Faith”). The prescriptions come in the form of familiar injunctions: follow the inquiry as far as it goes, leave no stone unturned, there is always more to know, the more information the better. “In a world where curiosity rules,” Griffiths declares, “unmasking curiosity as a destructive and offensive device . . . amounts to nothing less than a . . . radical critique of superficiality and constant distraction.”

Oh, no! Digitizing books? Heresy! We should be reading marks chiseled in stone or clay, as the gods intended!

I would have been shocked that an academic would condemn curiosity as a “vice”, as “destructive and offensive”, as “superficiality and constant distraction”, since exercising our curiosity, and fostering curiosity in our students, is supposed to be one of our jobs. However, the barnacle gave us advance warning: it’s not just an academic, it’s a professor of divinity. Oh, well then, point taken. I can understand why a professor of nothing would resent the possibility of other human beings poking into his little niche and discovering what a hollow lie it all is.

I, with my omnipresent laptop and smartphone, my kindle and my flash drives full of pdfs, my blog and my facebook and my twitter accounts, am a walking, talking, info-flooding obscenity to these guys. I like it. Now why, though, should they find the data-driven life so disgusting? You can guess why.

Griffiths builds on the religious tradition in which curiosity is condemned because it distracts men from the study and worship of God, shackling them, says Augustine, “to an inferior love.” But curiosity can also distract men from secular obligations by so occupying their minds that there is no room left for other considerations. These men (and women) fail to register the pain of animals subjected to experiments in the name of knowledge, pay no heed to the social consequences of their investigations, and take no heed of the warnings issued in Marlowe’s “Dr. Faustus,” Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein,” H.G. Wells’ “The Island of Dr. Moreau” and Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” (not to mention the myth of Pandora and the Incredible Hulk).

God likes his people uninformed, ignorant, and close-minded. With good reason: if his followers aren’t that way, they might discover what a sham the priests have erected. I reject such self-serving excuses.

The social consciousness argument has a little more weight, but is still unconvincing. Scientists have changed the world, and that always causes stresses on society, the kinds of stresses that writers like the ones he cites have explored. That does not imply that scientists are somehow outside of the culture they are changing; we do pay attention, we have to. The point is, though, that we change social realities because we are bringing about greater understanding of material realities, and if our beliefs about how the universe works are confronted with the reality of how the universe works, we think it is the beliefs that ought to change, because the universe is not going to bend to our convenience. We are responsive to nature, not the contrived dogma of theologians.

As for his dig against animal experimentation…he’s clueless and has never been in a research lab. We care very much about the comfort of our animals.

They are obsessive and obsessed and exhibit, says John Henry Newman, something akin to a mental disorder. “In such persons reason acts almost as feebly and as impotently as in the madman: once fairly started on a subject, they have no power of self-control” (“The Idea of a University”). They have no power of self-control because they have no allegiance — to a deity, to human flourishing, to community — that might serve as a check on their insatiable curiosity. (Curiosity is inherently insatiable; its satisfactions are only momentary; there is always another horizon.)

In short, curiosity — sometimes called research, sometimes called unfettered inquiry, sometimes called progress, sometimes called academic freedom — is their God. The question, posed by thinkers from Aquinas to Augustine to Newman to Griffiths, is whether this is the God — the God, ultimately, of self — we want to worship. Given the evidence, including Chairman Leach’s address, the answer would seem to be yes.

Wow. Curiosity as a mental disorder: are these people not primates? It’s a behavior that practically defines us naked monkeys! There is no greater joy and no more satisfying experience than exploring new avenues and discovering new ideas. It’s what makes us civilized humans and not cows or jellyfish or barnacles. It’s how Stanley Fish ends up clucking over our insatiable desire to learn more and do more…on the internet, with his computer, from his position as an academic at a university. It’s a bit hypocritical, don’t you think? He should at least be living in a cave, draped in animal skins, and scrawling his treatises in charcoal on flat pieces of rock.

Or better yet, his ideal life of the mind would be better spent sessile, locked in a limestone shell, with his only interaction with the world being the gentle scraping of his environment for little slimy gleanings of food. He could worship god as he did so, as well.

The rest of us…well, we’ll try to reach a little higher and a little deeper, and enjoy our curiosity.

An evangelical subculture has rotted the mind of America

Frank Schaeffer was on fire in this interview with Rachel Maddow, prompted by a bizarre NJ poll that showed 35% of the conservatives in that state believe Obama is the anti-christ. Heh, “We have a village idiot in this country, it’s called fundamentalist Christianity”. Gold star for Schaeffer!

He’s right. Those are minds that are lost, and we have to move past them.

A completely unsurprising result

A recent survey that correlated the degree of fundamentalism, as measured by positive responses to questions about the absolute, literal truth of the Bible, and teenage birth rates, has discovered something we all suspected all along: fundie kids are getting pregnant despite their stern, restrictive upbringing. There are caveats, of course, and some implied messages here.

However, the results don’t say anything about cause and effect, though study researcher Joseph Strayhorn of Drexel University College of Medicine and University of Pittsburgh offers a speculation of the most probable explanation: “We conjecture that religious communities in the U.S. are more successful in discouraging the use of contraception among their teenagers than they are in discouraging sexual intercourse itself.”

Fancy that. The adolescent sex drive is a power greater than Jesus.

Time to activate Team Canada!

Uh, there is a Team Canada, isn’t there? Many of you may have noticed that Dennis Markuze has been going on a commenting spree lately. He’s leaving a few hundred threatening messages a day, which I clean up as I find them, and has also said he is emailing these threats to every individual member of my university (I haven’t verified that he has yet, but he has done so in the past). I’d say he is just another deranged spammer, except that he’s been escalating lately — the messages have become more personal and much more violent. Here’s a small sample of the terroristic threats he’s sending out:

i will execute you. the police wont save you

God told me to MURDER you…

pz and his entire family will burn in HELL…
police won’t save that fucker from me…

you will be executed without mercy…

you have forfeit your lives…
and the police wont save you…

see, the entire university is going to be destroyed because of
blaspheming PZ…
this will be sent to every member of the University…

police won’t save that fucker from me…

did you know that blasphemy is punishable by DEATH and I am here
to execute all of you?

He is quite simply insane, and unfortunately, he’s got violent delusions and is becoming increasingly frenetic in his outbursts. It’s time to call in the police. Unfortunately, he’s Canadian, so I need to contact them…and the Mounties don’t have a station down here in Minnesota. Here are some of his recent IP addresses.

whois 72.12.103.179
B2B2C Inc B2B2C-CABLE (NET-72-12-96-0-1)
72.12.96.0 – 72.12.111.255
CIDC Internal use B2B2C-CABLE1 (NET-72-12-96-0-2)
72.12.96.0 – 72.12.111.255

whois 69.70.187.234
Le Groupe Videotron Ltee VL-13BL (NET-69-70-0-0-1)
69.70.0.0 – 69.70.255.255
Videotron Ltee VL-D-QN-4546BB00 (NET-69-70-187-0-1)
69.70.187.0 – 69.70.187.255

whois 69.28.232.153
Peer 1 Network Inc. PEER1-BLK-07 (NET-69-28-192-0-1)
69.28.192.0 – 69.28.255.255
3482286 Canada Inc PEER1-3482286CANADA-02 (NET-69-28-232-0-1)
69.28.232.0 – 69.28.233.255

I suspect that he spends his insomniac nights wandering from internet cafe to internet cafe, sitting down for a while in each to tap in his rants and screeds and post them repeatedly to various blogs and forums. It makes it difficult to get his ISP to put a block on him, because he doesn’t seem to have one and is probably using public terminals. He also varies his login name and fake email address, which makes it difficult to block him on my end.

Markuze has been doing this for years and years…I remember him popping up on usenet with this nonsense. We’ve all become somewhat inured to the crazy ranting Canadian with the Nostradamus obsession, and it’s not good — at some point he’s going to snap and cause harm to himself or others, and investigators will look with considerable alarm at the rising tide of hysterical threats he has been posting and wonder why no one did anything.

So let’s do something now. I just need somebody with some knowledge of Canadian legalities to explain how. Suggestions about how to get the RCMP to take this nut seriously would be appreciated.

If nothing else, when my body is found beaten to death with a hockey stick, surrounded by scrawled quatrains from Nostradamus, you’ll all know who was responsible and will be able to point a finger. Seriously. I don’t think I’m his only declared target, and I think he’s too scrambled up in the head to make the concerted effort necessary to get all the way to Morris, Minnesota (and I have mentioned him to the local police), so I’m not barricading my doors — but he has loudly announced his desire to commit mass murder. I think the innocent residents of Ottawa or Montreal (it’s not clear where he lives) are in some danger.