Here’s another gagworthy media experience for you all: an interview on Skeptiko with Denyse O’Leary, author of one of the worst books I’ve ever read, The Spiritual Brain. O’Leary is awful, as usual, but the interviewer is horribly credulous as well — I had to turn it off when he started nattering on about the wonderful evidence of near-death experiences.
I’m feeling terribly cruel this morning. It must be the fact that on Thursdays I have to teach an 8am class.
This is a promo for a wingnut movie that portrays the autonomy of women as a great evil … with an all-female cast. Even this short clip is nauseating.
The lies fly thick and fast. I’m particularly disgusted with the one interviewee who claims that, as a former representative of family planning education, she would go into schools and increase the teen pregnancy rate so that the girls would have 3-5 abortions between the ages of 13 and 18, and that this was the goal of her agency. Right. It is, of course, the antithesis of what family planning organizations actually do.
The rest is also vile, starting with the odious Phyllis Schlafly. And the foundation of their outrageous claims? The rantings of the 16th century proto-Puritan preacher, John Knox. Hasn’t the passage of 500 years been enough to expose him as ridiculous?
Ray Comfort has a new site, Pull the plug on atheism. It’s a series of short pages which consist mainly of plugs for some bad books he is peddling, with a few paragraphs in which he announces a few of his misconceptions about atheism, with the air of one who has trounced every objection. It really is as bad as his pathetic blog.
For instance, the first thing he does is define what he means by atheist.
An atheist is someone who believes that nothing made everything.
Then he goes on and on with fallacious analogies: “Imagine if I said my latest book came from nothing.” Imagine if I say that I don’t believe a builder build my house.” It’s quite sad.
His analogies are foolish. We know how houses and books are made, so he’s peddling a counterfactual claim. We don’t know all the processes that went into the appearance of the universe — and that “we” includes Ray Comfort — so it is an open question. I’m quite sure it wasn’t his imaginary Christian god, since there is no reason to consider the accounts of his faith to be accurate.
He’s also relying on trickery with the language. When we say “made”, it implies an active event by an agent, so what he is doing is setting up a linguistic conflict between a word that implies agency and an event that scientists are saying was not necessarily caused. The conflict isn’t real, but is only a consequence of a limitation of language and the way our brains work.
And of course, he doesn’t bother with this problem: who made god? I can guess how he’d respond: there was no “who”, and god wasn’t “made”. At which time we do a little judo move and point out that the universe wasn’t “made” by a “who”, either.
He also continues to harp on a very silly argument, the claim that evolution is impossible because both sexes need to evolve simultaneously.
If any species came into existence without a mature female present (with complimentary female components), that one male would have remained alone and in time died. The species could not have survived without a female. Why did hundreds of thousands of animals, fish, reptiles and birds (over millions of years) evolve a female partner (that coincidentally matured at just the right time) with each species?
Curiously, he seems to think that a species is defined by the first male of the kind that appears, and females have to follow along. Weird. Sexist much?
Of course, it’s no problem at all. Species do not poof into existence as individuals without parents, siblings, cousins, or other distant relatives. Populations evolve — populations consisting of both sexes. If the population of the state of Minnesota got on board their rocketships and migrated en masse to underground colonies on the moon, and then had no further contact with the rest of humanity for a hundred thousand years, the two populations would diverge by drift and selection into different species. The population in each location would be continually interbreeding; at no point (except in the isolation mechanism) would there be a sudden transition where one group found itself consisting solely of one reproductively isolated male or female, waiting for a member of the other sex to pop into existence and give them something fun to do. Nor would anyone be able to look back and say precisely when their biology became incompatible — it would be fuzzy shifts among large numbers of people at all times.
But that’s Ray: deluded and confused and ignorant, but still plugging away obstinately with the certainty of tightly closed eyes.
Many of you were anxious to find out more about my trip to Columbus, Ohio in a few weeks, and here’s the information you need. This is to be a Darwin Day banquet, open to the public, but there is a charge. It’s on 14 February, so you could always bring a date and say it’s their Valentine’s Day gift, too.
Wow. This is a painful video. The camera man visits a group of abortion protesters, and asks a simple question: should abortion be legal or illegal? They are all very quick to answer “illegal!” But then he asks an obvious consequent: If abortion was illegal, what should be done with the women who have illegal abortions?.
Watch. Every one is stumped. They even say they’ve never thought about it before.
I wrote about the Kara Neumann case last year — it was the tragic story of an 11 year old girl in Wisconsin who died of treatable juvenile diabetes because her parents were faith-healing morons. Morons who still claim they did no wrong by neglecting their daughter when she lapsed into unconsciousness, choosing to call on the congregation of their wackaloon church to pray harder, instead of calling a doctor.
The parents are finally going to trial this spring, and it could be an interesting case. They are clearly and self-admittedly guilty of lethal negligence, but Wisconsin law actually has an exemption for people who choose to treat their children with prayer. It’s an evil law, but it is on the books, and that makes this a case where justice and reason are on one side, and narrow legalism and superstition are on the other. I’m not betting on which side will win out, not in America.
First, a warning: this is a link to a good science article, but it’s hosted on the Suicide Girls site, which contains many pictures of young ladies with attitude and tattoos in a state of deshabille. You may discover you are blocked at work. But do persevere! It will be worth it even if you have no interest in naked women!
Anyway, one of the broad points of dissension in the discussion of the evolution of religion can be split along one general question: was religion directly adaptive in the evolution of humans, or was it more of a side-effect of other useful cognitive and social properties? I’m on the side of the side-effect gang, and so this article on the evolution of religion jibes nicely with my position. And I really like this simple analogy:
The reason religion is so successful is that it taps into our primal-brains in much the same way that a Big Mac does — only more so. Religion gained its foothold by hijacking the need to give purpose at a time when humans had only their imagination — as opposed to the evidence and reason that we have today — to fathom their world. Spirits and demons were the explanation for illnesses that we now know are caused by bacterial diseases and genetic disorders. The whims of the gods were why earthquakes, volcanos, floods and droughts occurred. Our ancestors were driven to sacrifice everything from goats to one another to satisfy those gods.
Greasy, fatty, substanceless, and not at all good for you…but it tastes so good, and it’s cheap and readily available everywhere. That’s religion and fast food.
So read the whole thing, even if you do have to wait until you get home tonight.
I skipped over Warren’s ghastly babbling until now, when I was sent this recording of the spectacle. It’s pretty much exactly how I imagined it.
The Obama inauguration brought out a number of protesters, seemingly all of the Christian variety. I don’t see what they’re complaining about, though: Obama is a professing Christian who will not do a thing to diminish their privileges. We atheists have more excuses to picket his god-soaked ceremony than they do … but then, we’re also not as stupid as this kind of person.
Nice. Tell me why I deserve Hell someday, and I’ll tell you why you’re in it right now, O Benighted Fool.
I’m not wildly enthusiastic about our new president, but he is so much better than the amoral sleazebuckets he is replacing in office that I have to see it all as a largely positive change. I also just read the speech … not bad. I’ll give him a few years to prove himself.
I also caught the brief acknowledgment of the existence of non-believers. It’s a small thing, but appreciated. Everyone seems to be a bit unsatisfied with his specific choice of word, and I agree a bit. The better choice, the word that would have been more inclusive and positive, is “freethinkers”. Someone let his speechwriters know.
It’s very short. It only has to cover 6000 years to describe all of creation.
