I’d really like to win an iPod Touch

This is terribly crass of me, I know, but I’d love to win a free iPod Touch or iPod Shuffle. All I have to do is get the most people to click through the link posted below, and if I’m one of the top 3 promoters, I win! I get all these readers here, so I figure I might as well use you for personal gain.

Here’s the link. Come back and click on it every day!

Creation Minute is an exciting series hosted by Eric Hovind that explores the creation worldview using cutting-edge visual effects and digital technology. Each episode challenges the evolution theory and gives evidence of the Bible’s historical and scientific accuracy.

Well, as you can guess, I’m not really after the gadget itself…I’m more interested in seeing Eric Hovind compelled to send it to me. Heh heh heh.

(Of course, given his family’s criminal tendencies, and their adherence to Christian immorality, there is a good chance that even if I get the most click-throughs, I won’t win.)

Please, Texas, make Don McLeroy unemployed

There is hope in Texas. Deranged creationist dentist Don McLeroy is getting grilled in confirmation hearings.

State Board of Education Chairman Don McLeroy, R-Bryan, faced searing questioning during his uncommonly long confirmation hearing Wednesday at the Senate Nominations Committee.

And Chairman Mike Jackson, R-La Porte, said McLeroy’s nomination is on shaky ground because he might not be able to get the required two-thirds vote from the Senate.

Texans, call your congresscritters and urge them to purge this embarrassment from the board of education. If you can shed McLeroy, I will celebrate and write a post fulsome in its praise of the beauty and wisdom of Texans, I promise.

Scientifical journalism done good

Over on an MSN site, there is an image of Ötzi the iceman with a very strange caption.

The iceman is believed to be the ‘missing link’ between apes and humans that roamed the mountains, encased in ice.

How many ways is that wrong? The “missing link” remark, applied to a human being let alone anything else, is bad enough…but I’m having a hard time picturing the ecology of beings encased in ice and roaming mountains.

Attempts to get MSN to correct the ignorance are going unheeded, apparently.

It’s a good thing Orac is surrounded by medical professionals

I know how much Orac dislikes the Huffington Post — I despise it myself as the doman of airheaded woo of the type represented by Deepak Chopra, and the only time I glance at it is to remind myself that the left can also sink into sloppy stupidity as deeply as the right. But poor Orac — his head might just explode into flames when he reads this simperingly stupid piece on vaccines from Jim Carrey.

The Huffpo is a little island of pampered fluff, where celebrities are asked to ‘blog’ (it really isn’t, though—they tend to drop these little turds of pseudo-wisdom, and then never hang around to interact with their readers) simply because they are celebrities, and we are expected to pay attention despite their lack of substantive authority. It’s the People magazine of the lefty blogosphere, and I’m really ashamed to see that as one of the showpieces of my political affiliation.

Partway there!

Oy, this has been a long day of travel, and it’s not over yet. I’m at the Salt Lake City airport right now, with a long 5 hour layover. At least I have wireless and my kindle.

It’s a bit of a shock being here, though. I’d forgotten how much those big lumpy whatchamacallums, you know, those giant piles of rocks and dirt — oh, yeah, mountains — add to the scenery. Also, 80°. The world is not supposed to be that hot right now.

Jerry Coyne lobs another bomb at the accommodationists…to the barricades!

It’s another one of those long traveling days for me today. I’m on my way to Oregon (I’m at the airport already, so don’t worry about any more accidents!), so I may be a bit quiet for a while. Which means I should put something here to keep everyone in a busy uproar for a while.

My job is done, and Jerry Coyne has done the dirty work for me. He has put up a long post criticizing the accommodationist stance of several pro-evolution organizations, particularly the NCSE.

Among professional organizations that defend the teaching of evolution, perhaps the biggest offender in endorsing the harmony of science and faith is The National Center for Science Education.  Although one of their officers told me that their official position on faith was only that “we will not criticize religions,” a perusal of their website shows that this is untrue.  Not only does the NCSE not criticize religion, but it cuddles up to it, kisses it, and tells it that everything will be all right.

In the rest of this post I’d like to explore the ways that, I think, the NCSE has made accommodationism not only its philosophy, but its official philosophy. This, along with their endorsement and affiliation with supernaturalist scientists, philosophers, and theologians, inevitably corrupts their mission.

Let me first affirm that I enormously admire the work of the NCSE and of its director, Eugenie Scott and its president, Kevin Padian.  They have worked tirelessly to keep evolution in the schools and creationism out, most visibly in the Dover trial.  But they’re also active at school-board hearings and other venues throughout the country, as well as providing extensive resources for the rest of us in the battle for Darwin.   They are the good guys.

I give it ten enthusiastic thumbs up, not just for the deserved criticism but also for the praise given to the NCSE’s efforts. As Coyne explains, they are trying to have it both ways, arguing that science is a secular enterprise, but at the same time leaning over backwards to incorporate theological arguments, an act of political pragmatism that compromises their mission. It’s a failed strategy that is leading us down a dangerous path — I already feel that there is an unfortunate atmosphere that favors scientists with religious leanings over the more sensible majority.

He also includes a marvelous quote from Charles Darwin. As I’ve said many times, Darwin was not an atheist, but an agnostic, and that he refused to engage in conflict with religion…a sentiment that I think is fair and a personal choice, and one that I think the NCSE wants to follow as well (which I would think is also a reasonable strategy). However, by favoring theism as much as they have, they have broken away from the spirit of that plan.

I entirely reject, as in my judgment quite unnecessary, any subsequent addition ‘of new powers and attributes and forces,’ or of any ‘principle of improvement, except in so far as every character which is naturally selected or preserved is in some way an advantage or improvement, otherwise it would not have been selected. If I were convinced that I required such additions to the theory of natural selection, I would reject it as rubbish. . . I would give absolutely nothing for the theory of Natural Selection, if it requires miraculous additions at any one stage of descent.

Note that what Darwin is rejecting in that statement is what we now call theistic evolution.

I freely admit to being anti-religious myself, and I would agree that an organization trying to represent all of science and promoting science education does not have to be on the same page with me (and maybe even ought not to be), but the NCSE, NAS, and AAAS have all been erring in the opposite direction, jumping merrily into bed with every evangelical god-botherer who blows them a kiss. If they are going to snub the raging new atheists in the name of religious neutrality, they should be similarly divorcing themselves from Christian apologetics.

Richard Dawkins has weighed in…and asks whether we should take the gloves off in dealing with the accommodationist position. Too late! They’re off!

Larry Moran shares a similar view.

Many people seem to be misinterpreting Coyne’s article — it actually makes much the same point I have in talks over the last year. The science classroom must remain secular — that is, it is not a place to endorse atheism or theism, or for those conflicts to take place. We should be teaching about science and science only, and let the implications of that science on culture be discussed freely outside. Organizations like the NCSE and the NAS and AAAS are supposed to be defenders of that secularism. Nobody is asking them to promote atheism. What we’re objecting to is that they have gone too far in mollycoddling theistic views, and have falsely represented science as being congenial to religious interpretations, to the point where godless explanations are being actively excluded.

I know they have a very narrow path they have to walk to be diplomatic and try to gather popular support for science education. The point is that they are wobbling off the tightrope to court the faithful — and the science they are trying to encourage is looking less and less secular.

Bad joke, bad poll

This is an old, tired joke that has just been posted on the site of a right-wing moron’s radio show. I have heard it quite a few times before, usually by smug nitwits who think they’ve delivered a knock-out themselves.

A United States Marine was attending some college courses between assignments. He had completed missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. One of the courses had a professor who was an avowed atheist and a member of the ACLU.

One day the professor shocked the class when he came in, looked to the ceiling, and flatly stated, “God, if you are real, then I want you to knock me off this platform. I’ll give you exactly 15 minutes.”

The lecture room fell silent. You could hear a pin drop.

Ten minutes went by and the professor proclaimed, ‘”Here I am God. I’m still waiting.” It got down to the last couple of minutes when the Marine got out of his chair, went up to the professor, and cold-cocked him, knocking him off the platform. The professor was out cold.

The Marine went back to his seat and sat there, silently. The other students were shocked, stunned, and sat there looking on in silence.

The professor eventually came to, noticeably shaken, looked at the Marine and asked, “What the heck is the matter with you? Why did you do that?”

The Marine calmly replied, “God was too busy today protecting American soldiers who are protecting your right to say stupid stuff and act like an idiot. So, He sent me.”

I love this joke. It’s a perfect illustration of the problem of religion. Set aside the inane caricature of a college professor made by someone who has apparently never met one, and look at the ‘hero’, the Marine. There is no reason to believe he is actually on a mission from a god, other than that he claims it. And he has used this claim to justify violence. Isn’t this the way it always is?

Let’s revise the joke. Substitute “radio show host” for “college professor”, and in the opening paragraphs, describe him as reactionary patriot waving the flag for god and country and demanding that his god strike him down if sending men to war wasn’t a righteous cause. Then have the Marine’s actions play out in exactly the same way.

Still funny? Maybe funnier? Or do you still think the Marine should still be arrested for assault?

That’s why I like the joke. It reveals the ignorance of the people who tell it, and it says much about how much of religion is an exercise in rationalizing criminal behavior.

That site also has a poll attached to it. You can tell the man is an amoral jerk by the way it’s worded, too.

One of the terrorists who planned the 9/11 hijackings is Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. While in CIA custody, newly released documents reflect that the Ron Jeremy-lookalike was waterboarded 183 times, far more than previously admitted to by government officials under the Bush Administration.

You Hear This Information and Think What?

Who freakin’ cares? He’s lucky we didn’t attach jumper cables to his nads.
84.62 %
It’s horrible, but we needed to do it to prevent further American deaths.
5.98 %
Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and others should be going to jail over this.
9.40 %

That our country has engaged in torture is one of the great shames of our generation; that we still have these thugs bragging about it is a continuing disgrace. Show them what you think—the people who find this behavior vile must speak up and act.

Annals of the Texas Board of Education

The NCSE has been posting videos of events at the Texas Board of Education — they are very informative and well worth spending some time watching.

Here’s an example of the bad guys: Don Patton preening smarmily and accusing Darwinism of failing because a ‘prediction’ had failed. The ‘prediction’, as he presents it, is that the fossil record would disgorge a complete accounting of all of evolution…and he can quote biologists from Darwin to Eldredge saying that such a complete series has not been found. He ignores the fact that the actual scientific prediction that the fossil record would always be spotty and incomplete, and most importantly, that there are multiple lines of evidence supporting the idea.

To counter that, here’s historian Abigail Lustig. Notice that right off the bat what she does is point out the distinction between common descent and the mechanism of natural selection, and that more than fossils were involved: biogeography, sysematics, comparative anatomy, etc.

This is also something to emphasize: she’s a historian. The creationist assault on education is not confined to just biology—they have targeted every discipline that challenges their claim of Christian superiority and the infallibility of religious belief.