Petty crimes

It looks like one of the staff at Liberty University has been caught.

A Liberty University chaplain is facing drug and burglary charges. Last week, a homeowner caught Scott Ray on surveillance video breaking into a home to steal painkillers. Ray, who is the chaplain for the men’s basketball team and the Director of Convocation, is also suspected in other Campbell County break-ins. In 2005 he was arrested and charged with the same thing. Ray has been suspended by the school and it’s believed he’s checked into a rehab program. Investigators also say Ray has not yet been arrested but additional indictments are pending.

Now if only the rest of the staff could be charged with the greater crime of sowing ignorance…

Roger Ebert doesn’t review Creation

There’s a new movie coming out about Darwin that does something different: instead of talking about the science of evolution, it’s about Darwin’s personal life. Roger Ebert has seen it and offers a few thoughts on the subject matter (it isn’t a review, though!), and it sounds interesting — I’ll be seeing it if it appears in Morris, which isn’t likely, or when it’s available on DVD, which is much more likely. I’m not worried that it will provide comfort to creationists, but I am a little concerned that it may Hollywoodize history a little bit.

Ebert points out that it focuses on the difficulties he had with religion, and how it colored his marriage and work. I don’t know how well it represents reality, though. It’s a lens we use to look back on the 19th century, but it may not be entirely fair to Darwin’s views.

Fearing to offend his wife, he was shy about extending his belief to the evolution of mankind itself, but it is certainly what he privately thought. He denied being a atheist, but said agnosticism came close to reflecting his views. Apart from his research and ideas about science, that conflict in this marriage and with the conventional religious of his times was the most significant thing about him.

I have my doubts that the conflict with religion was a major issue with Darwin. He avoided it very effectively, and did not make public pronouncements on religious belief. He differed from his wife’s opinion, but here’s the thing: there isn’t the slightest hint in any of his writings that he was even tempted to disagree with Emma, and the impression I get is that at every step his priority was to accommodate his ideas with his wife’s beliefs.

Yes, I said it: Charles Darwin was an accommodationist.

I don’t think the most significant thing in his life was the conflict with religion at all — his family and his happy relationship with his wife and children was #1, and I don’t think ‘conflict’ was a word that applied (although, of course, it would have to be emphasized in a movie).

It also leaves something out: Darwin himself said that his greatest talent was as a businessman. Over his lifetime, he invested carefully and wisely and grew a small seed of money given at his marriage into a huge fortune. If anyone wants to sort out what contributed most to his scientific work, I think that fact should loom much larger than a slight tension on matters of religion in which he always deferred to his wife.

Protect the sanctity of heterosexual marriage!

California took such a brave leap last year to protect the purity of marriage by denying it to all of those with matching, instead of complementary, genitali; now John Marcotte wants to take the next logical step, and get an initiative on the California ballot to outlaw divorce. That’s an excellent idea; most marriages aren’t threatened by homosexuality at all (strangely, though, it’s the must fervent fundamentalists who are most tempted by the love that dare not speak its name), but they are at risk from divorce. Nothing would strengthen the institution of marriage more than making a wedding equivalent to a shackling.

I also like this idea because my marriage isn’t at risk for divorce anyway, so it doesn’t affect me at all, but the prospect of being able to meddle in other people’s lives and tell them exactly how they must act gives me a kind of head rush of power. All those women trapped in loveless marriages, or dominated by abusive husbands…nuh-uh, no way out for you, you get to suffer until you are dead! All those philandering men who can’t seem to find satisfaction with one woman, your days are done — we have to crack down on the wretched slugs who cheat on vows mandated by a loving God.

Next year, someone needs to get an anti-masturbation law on the slate. Then we need to outlaw birth control. If we meddle enough, I’m sure we can get to the point where every marriage is a perfect and happy one.

Alan Turing gets an apology

The government of the UK has officially apologized for its past abuse of Alan Turing. Here is the full statement.

2009 has been a year of deep reflection – a chance for Britain, as a nation, to commemorate the profound debts we owe to those who came before. A unique combination of anniversaries and events have stirred in us that sense of pride and gratitude which characterise the British experience. Earlier this year I stood with Presidents Sarkozy and Obama to honour the service and the sacrifice of the heroes who stormed the beaches of Normandy 65 years ago. And just last week, we marked the 70 years which have passed since the British government declared its willingness to take up arms against Fascism and declared the outbreak of World War Two. So I am both pleased and proud that, thanks to a coalition of computer scientists, historians and LGBT activists, we have this year a chance to mark and celebrate another contribution to Britain’s fight against the darkness of dictatorship; that of code-breaker Alan Turing.

Turing was a quite brilliant mathematician, most famous for his work on breaking the German Enigma codes. It is no exaggeration to say that, without his outstanding contribution, the history of World War Two could well have been very different. He truly was one of those individuals we can point to whose unique contribution helped to turn the tide of war. The debt of gratitude he is owed makes it all the more horrifying, therefore, that he was treated so inhumanely. In 1952, he was convicted of ‘gross indecency’ – in effect, tried for being gay. His sentence – and he was faced with the miserable choice of this or prison – was chemical castration by a series of injections of female hormones. He took his own life just two years later.

Thousands of people have come together to demand justice for Alan Turing and recognition of the appalling way he was treated. While Turing was dealt with under the law of the time and we can’t put the clock back, his treatment was of course utterly unfair and I am pleased to have the chance to say how deeply sorry I and we all are for what happened to him. Alan and the many thousands of other gay men who were convicted as he was convicted under homophobic laws were treated terribly. Over the years millions more lived in fear of conviction.

I am proud that those days are gone and that in the last 12 years this government has done so much to make life fairer and more equal for our LGBT community. This recognition of Alan’s status as one of Britain’s most famous victims of homophobia is another step towards equality and long overdue.

But even more than that, Alan deserves recognition for his contribution to humankind. For those of us born after 1945, into a Europe which is united, democratic and at peace, it is hard to imagine that our continent was once the theatre of mankind’s darkest hour. It is difficult to believe that in living memory, people could become so consumed by hate – by anti-Semitism, by homophobia, by xenophobia and other murderous prejudices – that the gas chambers and crematoria became a piece of the European landscape as surely as the galleries and universities and concert halls which had marked out the European civilisation for hundreds of years. It is thanks to men and women who were totally committed to fighting fascism, people like Alan Turing, that the horrors of the Holocaust and of total war are part of Europe’s history and not Europe’s present.

So on behalf of the British government, and all those who live freely thanks to Alan’s work I am very proud to say: we’re sorry, you deserved so much better.

Happy Birthday to Yoouuuuuuu!

Today is 10 September, which happens to be the birthday of the Trophy Wife (I won’t tell you the birth year because she will give me the evil eye, but I will say that she is much, much younger than I am, as a Trophy Wife must be). It would be very nice if she got home from work tonight and, as she usually does, sits down and checks out the blog to see what horrors and outrages I have perpetrated today, and discovers that a few of you had written her birthday best wishes, instead.

Inspiration for student groups

Someone needs to start an organization with this name just so they can use this logo that I got from Glynn Lane:

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Students could join, and then they could all run out and get these t-shirts:

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Unfortunately, there’s pretty much nothing we could do to be even creepier than that other, better known Campus Crusade for some guy.

God works in mysterious ways

A very devout Catholic was trapped on an elevator for a while, and after it was working again, rushed to church to thank God. Then, something unfortunate happened:

He seems to have embraced a stone pillar on which the stone altar was perched and it fell on him, killing him instantly. We have found his fingerprints on the pillar. We are now investigating the case further.

Now, you see, if he’d rushed off to thank the elevator repairman, that wouldn’t have happened. Given his bad luck, the repairman might have been a demented homicidal maniac who would have clubbed him to death with a spanner, but no altar would have fallen on him. Therefore, religion is bad for your health.

Fairies and Bigfoot

Speaking of being underwhelmed by the arguments, we’ve actually got people arguing for the existence of fairies and bigfoot. They even say they’ve got evidence: here’s the Croydon photo:

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Looks like an ugly flash artifact of an insect caught in flight.

Some guy in Kentucky had a video camera set up to monitor his backyard, and it caught this frame of a purported Bigfoot:

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I have no idea what that blurry blob is…somehow, whenever one of these mysterious creatures is seen, the lucky witness is always either a really awful photographer or is using garbage equipment.

There are some real mysteries here, though. Why was that woman going out to take pictures of her ugly lawn furniture at night, and why does that guy need constant video surveillance of his weedy back yard?

The five best arguments for creationism ever!

Don’t you just love a challenge? I’m always looking for some splendid argument from a creationist that would make me think, but they always give me such silliness, instead. And then, I saw this: a mainstream newspaper (well, the Telegraph…but at least it’s not the Daily Mail) offers us an article with a tantalizing promise: they’re going to give us the the five very best arguments to support creationism. Whoa. Cool. I’m sure they also put their very best science reporter on the job to get some real stumpers for scientists.

Here goes. Brace yourselves. Prepare to be provoked and excited!

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