In which I reflect upon my current environment

Chuck Colson has a list of the three greatest enemies of Christianity right now. They are:

  • Islam. It’s “evil incarnate.”

  • Atheism. It’s “virulent.”

  • Christian coffee shops??!?

OK, that last one is a little strange, but I had an epiphany. I’m sitting in a Christian-run coffee shop right now. It’s great for fairly good inexpensive coffee, it’s got an open wireless net, and some of the conversations around me are inspiring—I write some of my anti-religion screeds while the Bible Study Group meets at a table in front of me.

Gosh. Chuck Colson is right.

Shame on UCL UCL makes good!

An important change: UCL is reinstating Colquhoun’s blog on its servers and has announced that it “continues strongly to support and uphold Professor Colquhoun’s expression of uncompromising opinions as to the claims made for the effectiveness of treatments by the health supplements industry or other similar bodies”.

University College London caved in to complaints from alternative medicine quacks and asked Professor David Colquhoun to remove his skeptical blog from their university servers. Ben Goldacre summarizes the complaints:

They objected, for example, to his use of the word “gobbledygook” to describe Red Clover as a “blood cleanser” or a “cleanser of the lymphatic system”. Somebody from the “European Herbal and Traditional Medicine Practitioners Association” complained that he’d slightly misrepresented one aspect of herbalists’ practice. One even complained about Colquhoun infringing copyright, simply for quoting the part of their website that he was examining. They felt, above all, that this was an inappropriate use of UCL facilities.

It’s chilling: a couple of anti-science kooks send in some email to the provost, and the provost goes running to one of his professors and tells him to take it all down. Rather than booting Colquhoun’s pages from their server, perhaps the timid provost ought to have been fired; the job of a provost is to lead, not to scuttle.

But then again…

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Minnesota sex ed bill betrayed

Why is the reality-based community ignored? Because the other side, the Jesus-loving wingnut loons, is committed to defending idiocy, while the Democrats have a complete lack of any guiding principle, other than to get elected. Nick Coleman has another perfect example, not that there’s any shortage of them, in the defeat of a sensible bill here in Minnesota.

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Don Herbert has died

We all knew him as Mr Wizard, of course. He was a great no-nonsense science teacher who influenced a whole generation of kids — he taught us that science was a very down-to-earth process that worked. He didn’t have a lot of flash and pizazz, and the production values on his show were downright cheap, and he never seemed to get carried away; he was the exact opposite of the televangelists, who were all gaudy extravagance and no results.

True nerds loved Mr Wizard. Being undemonstrative nerds meant we never said it. We’ll miss you, Mr Wizard.

That’s gonna leave a mark: Jerry Coyne batters Behe

Coyne not only dismantles Behe’s argument, he gives a nice primer in the basics of evolutionary biology. He also points out that Behe, one of the few biologists in the Intelligent Design camp, has conceded virtually everything to science, and is left clinging to one forlorn hope, that mutations are inadequate to produce the variation that is the fuel of natural selection.

I think he should have titled his book The Edge of Intelligent Design: Behe is hanging from the precipice by one trembling hand, and Coyne and nearly every other biologist in the world is stomping on his fingers.

Whoops, if you can’t read that link, try this one. Hmmm. I don’t subscribe to the New Republic…does my university? I got it with no registration required.

Sorry about that

I haven’t been monitoring the comments too closely lately, so I hadn’t taken a closer look at this latest trollin’ fool, “Peanut Gallery”. When I saw that his latest comment seemed awfully familiar, though, I did a quick search and … whoops, what do you know. It was our old pal, the Kansas troll. Oh, and “Critical Thinker”? Same guy. The same person was also posting as Sophie, Your Dad, Yoshi, Piece of Advice, and many others. Those comments have all been obliterated now, so my apologies if the various comment threads that moron derailed now have lots of dangling references. See, this is what happens when you respond to trolls!

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More science-by-press-release from the Discovery Institute

Wise up, newspapers. You shouldn’t publish the drivel the Discovery Institute sends out — it’s not news, we’ve heard the opinion a thousand times before and it’s just as hokey, and they’re making you look silly. Do you also print without question the latest missives from the Raelians or Gene Ray?

The latest from the failed freakshow in Seattle is an extended whine by David K. DeWolf that touches on their usual themes: “it’s not faaaaaaaaaair that you won’t let us teach ID in the schoooooools.” “It’s not faaaaaaaair that Republicans were asked whether they believe in evolution.” Yeah, I agree — it’s not fair that you have to present evidence in a scientific argument. This isn’t about being fair.

It’s the same old tired drone that they’ve been making for years. The only part that caught my eye was the conclusion.

At the next presidential debate, I’d like to hear the following question: “Do you think public school students should be permitted to hear both sides of the debate about Darwinian evolution?” American voters want to know their answers.

Ummm, both? Both sides? DeWolf has just finished complaining that it was unfair to ask that question of Republicans because ‘”evolution” was never defined,’ yet here he’s left these strange “sides” undefined. He seems to be assuming that everything should be presented as the idea and its negation; like math class should teach “2 + 2 = 4” and “2 + 2 ≠ 4”. There aren’t two sides in this debate, unless you count presenting the facts as one side, and presenting a batshit insane lie as the other.

Besides, when I hear the words “teach the controversy,” I have this nightmare of me and Larry Moran getting dragged around to every high school in the country to argue about the importance of evo-devo. There are many controversies that scientists argue about, but this ginned-up bogus argument about whether evolution occurred or didn’t ain’t one of them.

We stand awed at the heights our people have achieved

i-40619c18cd0722ed1e920522e1fee0ce-bamyan.jpg

When the Buddhas of Bamyan were dynamited, it wasn’t an atheist who lit the fuse. These modern atheists that have stirred up so much resentment among the apologists for religion are not destroyers who seek to demolish the past or who want to advance a destructive ideology — they aren’t philistines who reject literature and art and music, and they aren’t monsters who will exterminate people to achieve their ends. We aren’t out to eradicate the world of ideas or obliterate the vestiges of our religious history in art and architecture, although we have been accused of such nefarious plans; such claims are easy to dismiss as the ravings of the delusional.

Stanley Fish doesn’t go quite so far in damning these “new atheists,” perhaps to avoid the easily ridiculed paranoid martyr-complex of the mob. Instead of being the ‘new communists’ who are planning to march the orthodox to Siberia, we’re merely unlettered, unschooled near-illiterates with no appreciation of the depths of religious thought. We don’t understand the nuances, he cries; we dismiss all of the texts and traditions as “naive, simpleminded and ignorant.” We just don’t understand, period.

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