What’s your school board like?

The Center for Inquiry in Austin hosted a meeting that asked the question, Will Texas Support 21st Century Science Education? The good news is that the place was packed, and there are a lot of rational, intelligent people in Texas who are fed up with the lunatics running the show and are motivated to do something about it. That’s kind of the theme here; we’re having a rising grassroots revolution here that’s going to throw these rascals out.

But here’s the bad news: we’ve been slacking off, and the raving fundie nitwits have taken a lot of political power.

Here’s why the situation for science is so dire right now. Science standards are coming up for review later this year, and right now, the State Board of Education is not only run by a YEC, but out of the SBOE’s fifteen members, seven of them are YEC’s.

And it gets worse…there’s a chance that the Texas board will gain a creationist majority, and the Democratic party is absolutely spineless and worthless.

Now this part is important: Right now the fundies are running some fundie wingnut against Patricia Hardy, a non-fundamentalist, non-creationist Republican. If Hardy loses to this person, then the YEC’s will flip to a majority on the SBOE and every schoolchild in Texas will be assured of a 19th century education. In other words, they’ll be fuct, and Texas will become as bad a laughingstock as Kansas was a few years back.

What about the Democrats, you ask? Who are they running? Well, no one. Apparently the Democratic party in Texas doesn’t care about the SBOE, preferring to devote its efforts toward the legislature. So that means there’s no outright progressive, solidly pro-science candidate to vote for. The best we have is a moderate Republican. But that’s better than nothing, I imagine.

Now if you think Texas is bad, take a look at Florida. The school boards there are an amazing collection of the most ignorant and obtuse members of society — in Clay County, the board members went on and on, openly discussing the fact that they didn’t know the meaning of “theory” or “concept”, and then went ahead and voted to reject the theory of evolution. They had an overwhelming majority of the community members in attendance argue against their resolution and favoring teaching evolution (again, demonstrating that community members are not as stupid as their school boards), and the board ignored them to vote for the resolution (demonstrating that they are not representative, as well as ignorant.)

I can imagine how the residents of Texas and Florida feel. They’re trusting that their schools are well run, that smart, educated people are in charge of making curriculum decisions, and then one day they wake up and notice that a gang of dumb-as-rocks yahoos with a bizarre religious agenda are calling the shots … and just maybe, after Dover, they’re realizing that these gomers are going to cost the school district a million dollars, as well as crippling the science education of a whole cohort of students.

Wake up NOW. Look at your local school board, and realize that those races are important. Run for office yourself. Start a local group to promote better science education, and recruit candidates from your ranks. Get out and vote. Those counties where the fools have taken hold are facing a few years where the curriculum is going to be wrecked for the students — and those are years that are going to be simply lost to those students. Don’t let it happen to your schools.

Ask Mitt what he thinks

Alright, Mormonism is weird…but did you know there are some church ‘scholars’ who think Bigfoot is actually Cain?

Here’s a Bigfoot theory I haven’t heard before. Apparently there are some in the Mormon church who hypothesize that Bigfoot may actually be Cain, condemned to walk the earth forever. Matt Bowman provides some scholarly elaboration on this theory on the Mormon Mentality blog.

This is all spun out from an early church leader’s tall tale of encountering a hairy giant.

Tune in Sunday morning

Remember—every Sunday at 9am, you Minnesotans (and clever others) can listen to the Minnesota Atheists radio program on Air America. Tune in tomorrow — it’s especially important since I’ve heard that Air America has actually already lost one advertiser because they had the gall to actually allow atheists to broadcast on their show. We’ll have to demonstrate that the program can get a strong audience, so listen in, call in, and if you have a business that you advertise on the radio, think about buying some time on the show. And if you’re in the area, patronize the businesses that are open-minded enough to advertise there (I noticed that the Q. Cumbers restaurant was one such advertiser — try it sometime).

By the way, we’re revamping the format a little. My “Moment of Science” got cut short last week, so the new idea is to give it a whole 10 minutes every two weeks, instead of 2-4 minutes every week. So I won’t be on tomorrow — listen anyway — but August Berkshire and I will have a more substantial conversation next week, on resources for people interested in learning about evolution.

Also, Minnesota Atheists will be meeting tomorrow afternoon at the Roseville Public Library, to hear Jen Tudor discuss Sex Across the Curriculum, where you’ll get to hear about “politics, pleasure, queer identity, lubrication, masturbation, and religion.” I wish I could go, but it’s -10°F right now and expected to drop down to -25°F tonight, so traveling is to be avoided…and there’s also this nagging nuisance of a new semester starting on Tuesday.

His Dark Materials will be incomplete

While it had its moments, and was based on a provocative and interesting series, I wasn’t that impressed with The Golden Compass movie adaptation. Still, I’m disappointed that the decision has been made that the subsequent books will not be filmed. It apparently did very poor box office in the US, so it isn’t a surprise, I suppose.

I have to compare it to the Narnia movie, though. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was a great gilded turd, an awful piece of poor storytelling and suspension-of-disbelief shattering illogic, with nice cgi. The Golden Compass had a story that was given short shrift in the movie, was kind of a mangled mess, but was better than C.S. Lewis’s fairy tale for the inane; it also had better and more imaginative graphics. Which one of those series is going to be inflicted on us many times over, though? The one with the comfortable Christian themes, of course. It had a guaranteed undiscerning and credulous audience.

So you thought I wasn’t going?

Today is the day of the North Carolina Science Blogging Conference, and I was pretty sure I wasn’t going. This is also the weekend before the start of spring semester classes, and I’m going to be going mildly insane for a while.

But then, someone has photographic evidence that I am there. This is truly weird; maybe the insanity is kicking in a little harder than I expected.

If you’re at the conference, don’t expect to see much of me at the sessions. Looking at that picture, I realize I’m going to have to spend the whole meeting alone, in my hotel room, with my shirt off, marveling.

Faith based solutions

I understand that we’re currently running some ads on scienceblogs for an organization that promises to harness the power of religious institutions to solve environmental problems (I use an adblocker, so I’m afraid I haven’t seen it). It’s a nice sentiment, but you can imagine what I think of the utility of religion, and of people of faith imagining that their delusions have something to contribute to finding real solutions. If you can’t imagine that, here…a comic to help you out.

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O Canada! O Women!

The North looks ever more attractive — read this excellent article on the collapse of organized religion in Canada. The numbers of church members is simply plummeting up there, a state we can only dream of bringing to pass here in the US (numbers are declining here, too, but we can hope that this is an inevitable descent and that Canada is only leading us by a few years.)

One interesting hypothesis for why it’s happening is that we can thank, in part, feminism.

Women — the traditional mainstays of institutional religion — in huge numbers abruptly rejected the church’s patriarchal exemplar of them as chaste, submissive “angels in the house” with all of the social and moral responsibility for community and family but none of the authority.

Unable to find acceptable religious role models or religious ideals that were not painful or oppressive, they reconstructed their identities as secular and sexual beings.

As they progressed into university graduate and professional schools and entered the work force, their horizons broadened and they discovered ways of serving that were more valuable than doing dishes and running church picnics.

I don’t know how solid the data is on that claim, but it’s at least intuitively attractive. Mothers are typically far more influential on their children’s religious belief than fathers, at least in my experience, so anything that draws women away from the church is going to have strong effects.

Maybe if we want atheism to succeed, we need to promote women more. Everyone thinks of Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens when we discuss the godless movement — but perhaps we should be giving more props to Susan Jacoby, Julia Sweeney, Ellen Johnson, Natalie Angier, Margaret Downey, even Madelyn Murray O’Hair … hey, have you noticed? There are lots of actively atheist women!

Happy Birthday, Jacob Bronowski

I just learned that Jacob Bronowski would be a century old today. I wonder how many readers here know anything about the man? Many people will praise the impact Carl Sagan had on people with his program, Cosmos, way back in the 1980s, but I have to say that Bronowski’s Ascent of Man was much, much better, and far more influential on me, at least. It’s a program that PBS ought to bring back — thoughtful, deep, and intellectually enriching.

The testimonial above opens with a great quote from the man:

The great poem and the deep theorem are new to every reader and yet are his own experience because he recreates them. They are the marks of unity in variety; and in the instant when the mind seizes this for itself in art or in science, the heart misses a beat.

And really, that’s what it was all about: there aren’t non-overlapping domains, there aren’t two cultures, there’s only the breadth and depth of the human mind.