Sunday activities for the godless

There is a Sunday School for Atheists? I think it’s an interesting idea to have a special school on Sundays for people to teach their kids about ethics and family, but it shouldn’t be for atheists — Christians need it more. I know they already have something called Sunday School, but I went through it, and it wasn’t about values: it was about memorizing bible verses, mindless arts and crafts, and antique and false stories illustrated on a felt board.

Besides, we already have a Carnival of the Godless and a Sunday Sermonette. If we just had a felt board and some colored cloth, maybe we could re-enact science stories for the kiddies.

Faith is not a prerequisite for science

Paul Davies has written a curious op-ed that has been blithely published by the New York Times. I’m not sure why the NYT saw fit to publish it, except that Davies does have a reputation as a popularizer of physics, and as something of an apologist for deism; they certainly couldn’t have chosen to print it on its merits. His argument is the tired and familiar claim that science has to be taken on faith, so it’s just like religion. I recall hearing variants on this back in the schoolyard, usually punctuated with “nyaa nyaas” and assertions about each others’ mothers, and while we may not have said much about science, the principle was the same. Citing a false equivalency is a cheap argument, but not very credible.

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Human beings can be hateful to one another

This is quite possibly the most depressing story of the year, because it says so much about the amoral nature of some people: A 48 year old woman named Lori Drew poses as a cute 16 year old boy on myspace, leads Megan Meier, a 13 year old neighbor, on, then turns on her and drives her to suicide. Then afterwards she pretends to be a good friend to the family for several weeks, until the charade is exposed. The LA Times has an editorial, and The Smoking Gun has the police documents.

What kind of psychopath would elect to hound children into suicide? And show no remorse at all afterwards?

I’m not cynical enough to be able to cope with this kind of evil.

So what’s Marcus Ross up to nowadays?

The NY Times sent a reporter to the First Conference on Creation Geology, and came back with a discouraging tale of creationist blindness. The two stars are Kurt Wise, old school, and Marcus Ross, new school. Ross recently recieved a Ph.D. for his paleontological work on mosasaurs — marine reptiles from 65 million years ago — yet he also goes to creationist conferences and touts his belief that the earth is less than ten thousand years old. The dissonance does not disturb him at all.

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Cooties, girls’ germs, and your precious bodily fluids

Michael Hanscom gets a very amusing advertisement:

THE PROBLEM IS NOT TESTOSTERONE – The Problem Is That You Are Being Deluged with Female Hormones. You Are Being Feminized and You Don’t Even Know It.

It’s for one of those fake ‘natural male enhancement’ products, but it has an interesting premise: that your impotency problems are not your fault, but a consequence of the flood of estrogen entering our drinking water. You need Estro-Blaster to blast the estrogen out of your system. This product looks like total bunkum, but I had to admire the ad copy — if I were a completely unethical, greedy slime-weasel, I’d want to invest in this company. It does a beautiful job of tapping right into certain male fears.

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Congratulations, Australia!

You’ve managed to remove your li’l Bush clone.

Conservative Prime Minister John Howard suffered a humiliating defeat Saturday at the hands of the left-leaning opposition, whose leader has promised to immediately sign the Kyoto Protocol on global warming and withdraw Australia’s combat troops from Iraq.

Labor Party head Kevin Rudd’s pledges on global warming and Iraq move Australia sharply away from policies that had made Howard one of President Bush’s staunchest allies.

All the articles I read on the Australian elections used the lovely phrase “humiliating defeat.” I like it. Now we just need to humiliate our wanking Republican politicians here at home.