Our first blizzard of the season is hitting us right now: snow is pouring down, the wind is howling, temperatures are in the single digits °F and dropping, and we’re nearing white-out conditions. We’re staying indoors.
I don’t think our snowflakes look anything like the picture above (from this gallery of snowflake photomicrographs). They’re tiny and powdery, and flying by horizontally at 30 or 40 mph.
All the smart people in the 56267 zip code will be tuned in to Atheists Talk radio this morning at 9am, to hear about the winter solstice and godless bus signage. You can too!
Oh, and at noon we’re all going to tune in to Nic McPhee’s and Susan Gilbert’s radio show on KUMM for an eclectic mix of interesting music. We’re all planning on bunkering down today, since we’re supposed to get slammed with a major blizzard…which I can see is gearing up outside my window right now.
Cruel, cruel readers. Everyone is sending me links to this recent episode of The View, in which four women babble inanely about something or other. In this case, it’s evolution. Do you people like to see me suffer? This was horrible.
OK, Whoopi Goldberg is wishy-washy, rather than stupid: she argues for some vague kind of deistic intervention at the big bang, then evolution is the mechanism for creating life. Elisabeth Hasselbeck, though…allow me to paraphrase. ‘Really cool handbags and shoes have, like, designers, so really cool people must have a designer, too, even greater than Gucci and Prada.’
Oh, wait…that’s not new. That’s the same old argument the ID creationists have made all along.
Here. The rest of you can suffer and despair of humanity now, too.
Australia has taken an interesting step forward: they’re going to allow instruction in humanism in their schools, apparently in place of traditional religion classes.
Victorian state primary school students will soon have an alternative — religious education lessons taught by people who do not believe in God and say there is “no evidence of any supernatural power”.
The Humanist Society of Victoria has developed a curriculum, which the State Government accreditation body says it intends to approve, to deliver 30-minute lessons each week of “humanist applied ethics” to primary pupils.
Accredited volunteers will be able to teach their philosophy in the class time designated for religious instruction. As with lessons delivered by faith groups, parents will be able to request that their children do not participate.
Now the fun part. The religious are complaining, of course. The fundies are saying this opens the door to all kinds of wacko religions to get equal time in the schools.
Fundamentalist Christian group the Salt Shakers panned the idea of humanists being given religious education class time.
Research director Jenny Stokes said: “If you go there, where do you stop? What about witchcraft or Satanism?
“If you accredit humanism, then those things would have an equal claim to be taught in schools.”
To me, witchcraft and satanism are no crazier than Christianity, so I don’t see the point of the argument. What’s even funnier, though, is that the groups with a vested interest in supporting the mainstream religions have a completely different argument.
But the body that accredits Victoria’s 3500 Christian religious instruction volunteers, Access Ministries, says humanism is not a religion and so should not be taught in religious education time.
Access Ministries now teaches in about two-thirds of state primary schools. Other accredited instructors teach Judaism, Buddhism and Baha’i.The Humanist Society does not consider itself to be a religious organisation and believes ethics have “no necessary connection with religion”. Humanists believe people are responsible for their own destiny and reject the notion of a supernatural force or God.
So they can’t let a secular ethics taught because it’s a religion, and we can’t let it be taught because it is not a religion. I say let those two groups fight it out while the secular humanists just do their good ol’ rational thing.
Yeah, and next we’ll have a really important poll on what color socks I should wear. Right now, you’ll have to settle for answering this question: What do you think of the decision to block the “I Believe” license plate? The results so far:
Good. The plates are a violation of church and state 18.16 % (69)
I disagree with the ruling. I have a right to show my faith 63.95 % (243)
They should get rid of all vanity plates and have one standard design for the state 17.89 % (68)
The second, and so far winning (but you’ll turn that around fast), choice is palpably stupid. Of course you have a right to display your faith! Slap a Jesus fish and a bunch of bumper stickers on your car. Go out and get a vanity license plate frame that is dripping with crosses. Buy some trucknutz. You can flaunt your faiths all you want, you just don’t get to demand that the state endorse them and promote them.
That’s a good question. After all, how can someone get seriously upset when they’re wished “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas”? It’s been ridiculous from the get-go. Well, Max Blumenthal has traced the meme back in an article on who started the War on Christmas, and you probably won’t be too surprised: it originated in racist kooks who blamed foreigners and Jews for all of the nation’s ills. Notice that when people talk about the War on Christmas, they rarely mention who’s waging it. It’s unspoken but understood on the far right that this is a war with Jews and immigrants.
This is clearly Orcinus territory. Dave Neiwert has often made the argument that right-wing radio and TV exists to mainstream the worst ideas of racist extremists, and that the war on Christmas can migrate from the racist founder of the odious VDare website to a daily rant on Bill O’Reilly’s cable show is a perfect example of the phenomenon.
I thought Expelled was an awful concept, but now there’s another movie that’s come out that is even worse: The Day the Earth Stood Still. I haven’t seen it, and I don’t plan to, since I was horrified by the trailers … and now Gary Farber has collected the key points of many reviews. There ought to be a law that no remakes can be released that are worse than the originals, just to discourage this kind of abomination.
The original movie was a wonderful SF classic. I’ve got it on DVD here, and I think just to spite the hacks who ripped it off, I’m going to watch Michael Rennie and Patricia Neal sometime this weekend. It has some great lines in it: “It isn’t faith that makes good science, Mr. Klaatu, it’s curiosity” and “I am fearful when I see people substituting fear for reason”, and of course, “klaatu barada nikto”. And the theremin! I’d watch it right now if I didn’t have a lot of work to do tomorrow…
We’ve got a few new trolls/poes babbling in some of the threads, and it’s getting out of a hand. I think it’s time to remind you that the list of bannable offenses does include godbotting — and it doesn’t matter if you are sincere or if you’re clowning around, once I get tired of the games I will start adding your user info to the blacklist. It would be a shame to get your IP address locked out of commenting because you thought it would be funny to run a fake creationist under an alias.
We do have word that there will be a major update to the scienceblogs software in the next month. You shouldn’t see any difference (except, I hope, better performance), but there is the possibility of implementing changes to the commenting system after that, and I may have to go to some kind of registration system to limit some of the insincere distractions that have been going on.
