Archives February 2010

Shooting the Message, Not the Messenger

Today, White House staff met with a group from the Secular Coalition for America, an association of disparate atheist and secular groups, to discuss policy (USA Today, by way of RichardDawkins.net. McClatchy article).

Apparently the meeting went pretty much as I expected: brief meeting with White House staff (but not the president), polite airing of views, no immediate effect on anything.

Of course, not everyone was happy with that. Christian NewsWire reports:

“It is one thing for Administration to meet with groups of varying viewpoints, but it is quite another for a senior official to sit down with activists representing some of the most hate-filled, anti-religious groups in the nation,” says In God We Trust’s Chairman Bishop Council Nedd.

“President Obama seems to believe that it is a good idea to have a key senior aide plan political strategy with people who believe faith in God is a disease,” Nedd says. “Some of the people in this coalition believe the world would be better off with no Christians and no Jews and they aren’t shy about it. The fact that this meeting is happening at all is an affront to the vast majority of people of all faiths who believe in God.”

According to the Freedom from Religion Foundation’s President Dan Barker, “Christianity is an enemy to humanity, and the antithesis of freedom.” (Dan Barker, Freedom from Religion Foundation Co-President in Losing Faith in Faith Page 255) and “Religion also poses a danger to mental health, damaging self-respect, personal responsibility, and clarity of thought.” (Losing Faith in Faith Page 217.)

“The President should tell the American people whether he believes these groups’ hate-filled views to be ‘mainstream’ and worthy of his supposedly inclusive administration,” Nedd says.

BillDo cranked up the Persecut-O-Tron and pounded out a predictable spittle-flecked screed:

[I]t is the business of the American people, most all of whom are believers, to know where the president and his administration stand with regards to their concerns. It is not likely that this outreach to anti-religious activists—many of whom would crush Christianity if they could—will do anything to calm the fears of people of faith.

Ooh, scary! Atheists are “hate-filled” and want to “crush Christianity”. They think “the world would be better off with no Christians”. The meeting is “an affront”. Kinda makes you want to lock up your daughters and barricade the windows, doesn’t it?

BillDo, in particular, doesn’t actually come out and say that the ravenous atheist hordes want to burn down your church and rape your pets. He’s just saying people have a right to know if that’s the case.

But look at what the atheists’ quoted or paraphrased words are: that “faith in God is a disease”; that “the world would be better off with no Christians and no Jews”.

What if I said that heroin addiction is a disease, and that the world would be better off if there were no heroin addicts. Who in their right mind would think that I want to go off on a junkie-killng spree?

A more apt comparison would be to homophobes who claim that homosexuality is a disease. I’d bet money that if you surveyed the people who believe that, that the vast majority of them would rather use some therapy to turn gays straight, than to execute them.

Dan Barker is quoted as saying that “Christianity is an enemy to humanity”. Christianity, not Christians. And that “Religion also poses a danger to mental health”. Again, religion, not religious people (except, obviously, insofar as religious people act on their beliefs). If religion is a disease, the obvious course of action is to cure it, not to kill the patient.

In An Anthropologist on Mars, Oliver Sacks writes of a patient with Tourette’s Syndrome:

[The patient says:] “Funny disease—I don’t think of it as a disease but as just me. I say the word `disease,’ but it doesn’t seem to be the appropriate word.”

It is difficult for Bennett, and is often difficult for Touretters, to see their Tourette’s as something external to themselves, because many of its tics and urges may be felt as intentional, as an integral part of the self, the personality, the will.

(An Anthropologist on Mars, ISBN 0-679-43785-1, LCC 94-26733, p. 102.)

It looks as though people like Nedd and BillDo have the same relationship with their religion: they can’t distinguish between killing the disease and killing the self. Either that, or they’re fear-mongers trying to stir up anti-atheist feeling.

How about a reality check? Atheism has been on the rise in the US for at least a decade. Millions of Americans don’t believe in any gods, and millions have read (or at least bought) the “new atheists”‘ bestsellers. How much anti-religious crime has there been? I’ll even tentatively spot you Jason Bourque and Daniel McAllister, at least until the facts of the matter, and whether they’re atheists and whether that played any role in their alleged crimes, come to light.

Equally importantly, try to find an atheist who defends them. Or those perennial favorites, Stalin and Pol Pot. In contrast, it’s much easier to find someone who defends or supports Scott Roeder’s murder of Dr. George Tiller. To say nothing of mass murderers like Moses and Joshua in the Bible.

The Dawkinses, the Dennetts, the Barkers and Gaylors, the Hitchenses, Harrises, and PZs just aren’t into bloodshed, rape, and arson, and neither are the people who listen to them. They pose no threat to religious people’s health, safety, or property. The worst they’re likely to do is to pen sharply-worded books and blog articles. Perhaps get legislation passed to curb the most egregious excesses of religious organizations. Very few of them have horns or eat babies.

If you’re so worried about these people that they shouldn’t even be allowed to meet with a White House staffer to try to have a say in how their country is run, you’re a loon. Get over it.

(Thanks to Attempts at Rational Behavior for pointers.)

We’ll Have Ample Warning of the Apocalypse

People have been arguing for ages now that the end of the world, as foretold in John’s shroom trip the book of Revelation, will be upon us any minute now.

But I think the Bible makes it clear that we’ll have ample warning — thousands if not millions of years — before that happens.

Revelation 6:12-13 says:

12I watched as he opened the sixth seal. There was a great earthquake. The sun turned black like sackcloth made of goat hair, the whole moon turned blood red, 13and the stars in the sky fell to earth, as late figs drop from a fig tree when shaken by a strong wind.

As I understand it, all seven seals have to be opened before Armageddon, and the seventh seal can’t be opened until the stars fall to earth.

The thing is, we know where the closest stars are. The nearest one is four and some change light years away. Even Kent Hovind concedes that stars up to 100 ly away can be located via parallax.

We can also directly measure the velocity with which stars are moving toward or away from us by looking at their spectrum shift.

What this adds up to is that we’ll be able to tell when neighboring stars start moving toward us. Since stars are such massive objects, they have a lot of inertia. They can’t just turn on a dime. We’ll see them slowing down and shifting direction. And even when they’re on a collision course with the solar system it’ll take centuries before they get here.

Of course, there’s the whole business of the size of stars compared to the Earth. When the events of Rev. 6:13 occur, I doubt anyone will describe it as “stars falling to earth”. When those stars collide, they’ll destroy all of the inner solar system planets. Which raises the question of where, exactly, the seventh seal will be opened.

But I’ll let the theologians worry about that. And Michael Bay, because that seems like the kind of movie he’d make.

A Step Forward for Marriage Equality in Maryland

According to the Baltimore Sun, the Maryland Attorney General has released a paper saying that “same-sex marriages performed in other states could be recognized by Maryland’s legal system.”

Now, there are some big caveats: the AG isn’t a judge, so this paper doesn’t have the force of law, the way a legal decision would. Rather, as I understand it, the AG is giving his opinion that if it were ever to come to trial, a Maryland court would find that the state should recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states. No court has ruled on this yet.

So so it’s premature for gay couples to break out the bubbly and file their taxes jointly. There’s still a ways to go, but it’s a step.

Update: The Post has this update:

UPDATE 2:50 P.M.: Maryland Attorney General Douglas F. Gansler (D) says effective immediately the state recognizes same-sex marriages performed elsewhere and state agencies should begin giving gay couples the rights they were awarded elsewhere.

Hey Lookee! We Have Wingnuts Here, Too!

From Think Progress, here’s a video interview taken at CPAC of Eric Wargotz, who’s running for Senator of Murland. In the video, he reveals himself to be a birther:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jz8wn8_8-w&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

Actually, the interviewer asks the questions from the recent Daily Kos poll of Republicans. For the benefit of those who don’t want to watch the entire video, I’ve summarized Wargotz’s answers. I’ve tried to be fair to him, god knows why:

  1. Should Barack Obama be impeached?
    If there’s sufficient cause.
  2. Has he been accused of anything that would warrant impeachment?
    No.
  3. Do you think Barack Obama is a socialist?
    Due to his foreign upbringing, he has more socialist tendencies than most Americans. People in other countries have different perspectives on social issues.
  4. Do you believe Barack Obama was born in the United States?
    No.
  5. Do you believe Barack Obama wants the terrorists to win?
    No.
  6. Do you believe ACORN stole the 2008 election?
    There were irregularities. Don’t know to what extent.
  7. Do you think Sarah Palin is more qualified to be president than Barack Obama?
    I don’t think she’s less qualified.
  8. Do you believe Barack Obama is a racist who hates white people?
    No.
  9. Do you believe your state should secede from the United States?
    No.
  10. Should Congress make it easier for workers to form and join labor unions?
    It’s already pretty easy.
  11. Would you favor or oppose giving illegal immigrants now living in the United States the right to live here legally if they paid a fine and learned English?
    No.
  12. Do you support the death penalty?
    Yes.
  13. Should openly-gay men and women be allowed to serve in the military?
    No.
  14. Should same-sex couples be allowed to marry?
    No. Civil unions, yes.
  15. Should gay couples receive any state or federal benefits?
    Depends on how the civil unions are worked out.
  16. Should openly-gay men and women be allowed to teach in public schools?
    What do you mean by “openly”?
  17. Should sex education be taught in public schools?
    Yes. But it should emphasize abstinence.
  18. In public schools, should it be taught that the book of Genesis in the Bible explains how God created the world?
    Evolution should (also) be taught.
  19. Are marriages equal partnerships, or are men the leaders of their households?
    In many cases, women are the leaders of the household.
  20. Should women work outside the home?
    It’s up to them.
  21. Should contraceptive use be outlawed?
    No.
  22. Do you believe the birth control pill is abortion?
    No.
  23. Do you consider abortion to be murder?
    In some cases, yes.
  24. Do you believe the only way for an individual to go to heaven is through Jesus Christ, or can one make it to heaven through another faith?
    I respect all faiths.

It’s tempting to give him credit for getting a number of answers right, but frankly, this is such an easy test that no one should get any answers wrong. Yes, I’ll spot him the questions on whether abortion is murder and whether illegal immigrants should have a path to legality. I’ll concede that there’s room for informed honest disagreement on those. But if he thinks Sarah Palin is as qualified to be president as Barack Obama, he’s wrong. If he thinks there’s any doubt as to whether gays should be allowed to teach, he’s wrong. Sorry if my bluntness offends, but there it is.

Science, Theology, and Information

Creationists like to ask where the information for evolution comes from. I thought I’d turn that question around a bit.

Back when I studied information science in college, the instructor said that the information content of a message is a measure of surprise. That is, if you’re trying to communicate as tersely as possible (because you’re trying to minimize your bandwidth usage, or because you’re being charged by the word, or whatever) you shouldn’t waste precious bits describing high-probability events. If you’re playing hangman or Wheel of Fortune, it’s less surprising to learn that the word contains an E or a T, than to learn that it contains a Y or a Z. And if someone told you that the (English) word is composed of Latin letters, you’d wonder why they were wasting your time.

So if information is a measure of surprise, then being surprised means that you’re learning something. And in this respect, science certainly delivers. A quick search yielded examples like:

“The universe keeps making strange things stranger than we can think of in our imagination,” said Jon Morse, head of astrophysics for NASA.

“We were surprised to find that subtle modification of only two amino acids in this very large protein can prevent the onset of disease.

The investigators were however surprised to find that the the degree of modifications on the histones continued to be about the same.

Speaking by phone from Japan, Kawaoka said he was surprised how effective T-705 was against avian influenza and how superior it proved to Tamiflu.

So the $64,000 question is, are creationists, Intelligent Design researchers, or theologians ever surprised by their work? How often do they say things like “A year ago, I would have bet you $100 that the answer was X, but after checking, it turns out that the answer is Y. Who knew?”

I can’t think of any such instances. Nor have I been able to find any. And if they aren’t surprised, are they really learning anything?

Now, one could argue that theologians have been at it for so long that all the big discoveries have been made, all the important conclusions arrived at, and new discoveries are so minor or so few and far between that they don’t make the news anymore.

But the cumulative sum of all these discoveries should be considerable. And someone who got them all in quick succession should certainly be surprised. That is to say, theology students and seminarians. What are they surprised to learn?

If Bart Ehrman and Daniel Dennett are to be trusted, by and large seminary students are surprised to learn just how little evidence there is to support the notion that the Bible was inspired by God; that many of the epistles are likely forgeries; that politics played a huge role in how the Bible was put together. That is, information from history, archeology, literary analysis, and the like.

Surprising things that they don’t learn, on the other hand (as far as I know) are things like “Well, that one-god-in-three-persons thing you learned is fine for Sunday school, but it turns out that there are 4.129486… persons. We’re still working on figuring out whether that number is rational or irrational.” Or experiments showing how brain damage affects the soul. Or sonograms and MRIs showing how and when the soul enters and leaves the body, and how that affects debates about abortion and euthanasia. Or “if we compare religions from around the world, we see this pattern that shows that Jesus also appeared in Australia and South America.”

Again, maybe they do learn these things. But if so, I’ve never heard of them, even they’re the sort of thing you’d think would crop up when theists accuse people like Dawkins of ignoring sophisticated theology.

So again, I have to ask: if theologians aren’t surprised, how can they be said to learn anything?

Ken Ham Is Not Ashamed, for Some Reason

Not too long ago, in a post entitled
I Am Not Ashamed,
Ken Ham, director of that epicenter of idiocy, Answers in Genesis,
criticizes Christians too wimpy to admit that they still believe in
fairy tales. He urges all True Christians™ to embrace their
inner crazy and proudly proclaim their gullibility to the world.

AIG will lead this charge by erecting billboards with the theme of
I Am Not Ashamed
Some examples include



If I might suggest a few others:

The Bible speaks for itself on pr0n:
There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses.
Ezekiel 23:20

The Bible speaks for itself on revenge:
Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.
Psalm 137:9

The Bible speaks for itself on whether the Earth is round:
an exceeding high mountain, and sheweth him all the kingdoms of the world
Matthew 4:8

The Bible speaks for itself on 401(k)s:
Take therefore no thought for the morrow
Matthew 6:34

You get the idea. I’m sure you can come up with your own suggestions.

There is one bright spot for Mr. Ham, though:

The Bible speaks for itself on intelligence:
 
 

Preserving the Sanctity of Marriage

See, this is what we can’t allow teh gays to get their hands on, lest they ruin it for everyone:

LEWISTON, Idaho (AP) — A marriage got off to a rocky start after the 21-year-old groom from northern Idaho was arrested twice on his wedding night and charged with assaulting his new wife in nearby eastern Washington. Court records show Nathan Lewis of Lewiston, Idaho, was charged Tuesday in Asotin County Superior Court with second-degree assault and interfering with a report of domestic violence.

The Nez Perce County Sheriff’s Office in Idaho says Lewis was married Sunday and later arrested for drunken and disorderly conduct in Lewiston.

Police say that after Lewis was released on bail, he assaulted his new wife at a home in nearby Clarkston, Wash. The bride told authorities she was slapped and choked during the altercation, the Lewiston Tribune reports.

The fact that these two were allowed to get married should also serve to silence anyone who mounts any kind of “but think of the children!” argument.

Ego Likeness: Save Your Serpent

Just heard this on the Metropolis Records podcast, and thought I’d pass it on: Ego Likeness’s song Save Your Serpent (direct MP3 download).

The lyrics, in particular, jumped out at me:

We are of reptiles
We are of stardust
We are of mercury
and these things are our kin
We are of dignity
We are of mercy
We are of cruelty
and this is not our sin

Build no temple
Just remember
what you came from, who you are
And you’re owed nothing
Just feel lucky
to leave a trace of who you are

Basics: I Didn’t Decide to Be an Atheist

I occasionally hear people say things like “If you choose to be an atheist, that’s fine. It’s your decision and I respect that” (or, from less-tolerant people, “if you choose to be an atheist, don’t be surprised when you suffer the consequences”).

This bugs me because, in fact, I did not choose to be an atheist. This is a basic point, and will come as no surprise to many atheists, but I feel it needs to be underscored. This was not a choice I made.

I was born into a Russian Orthodox family, and grew up believing in God and Jesus. I learned all the usual (bowdlerized) Bible stories, went to mass, occasionally went to Sunday school when our schedule permitted. I had religious instruction class in Swiss public school. I spent my summer vacations at Russian scout camp, an explicitly religious organization.

What’s more, as the son of people who had fled the Soviet Union, I heard all sorts of horror stories about razed churches, enforced atheism, and so on. When I read the Communist Manifesto in High School, I went in with the express intention of finding the flaws in Marx’s and Engels’s reasoning and tearing it apart.

But I also grew up reading Heinlein and Clarke and Asimov (both fiction and nonfiction) and Martin Gardner’s mathematical games, and watching Carl Sagan’s Cosmos on PBS. I learned that the world was full of magnificent things, and all you needed to do was look for them. Heck, you did’t even need to get up from your chair, not with mathematical wonders like Pascal’s Triangle and fifteen-dimensional spaces. Notably, somewhere between High School and college, I read Richard Feynman’s You Must Be Joking, Mr. Feynman and learned the difference between understanding a thing, and merely knowing its name; and that a teacher who can’t explain a concept in such a way that you can understand is not a good teacher.

And through it all, I kept trying to figure out this whole God thing. Evolution didn’t pose any problem, because obviously the god of the entire immensity of space and time would work on a grand and epic scale, and would think nothing of letting things run for millions or billions of years. I worked out for myself that prayer was pointless, because God already knew what I wanted, and had a much better idea than I did of what was best. He also didn’t mind me thinking for myself. Or if he did, he never said anything.

Hell obviously couldn’t be forever: I had a pretty good idea of the difference between mind-bogglingly huge numbers and infinity, and there was no way that even someone like Stalin deserved an infinite amount of punishment (though I did play around with convergent sequences and the idea of an eternity of ever-diminishing torment, so that total suffering converged on a finite amount). Famous Bible stories like Adam and Eve, Noah’s ark, the parting of the Red Sea, and so forth had to be instructional myths or allegories, since they resembled Greek myths far more than scientific or historic accounts. I’d read Jesus’ instruction not to engage in vain repetition in the book of Matthew in some hotel Gideon Bible; this immediately brought to mind a way that Orthodox priests chant “Lord have mercy” over and over during mass (and forty times at Easter mass), and undermined my faith in that institution.

I did this not because I wanted to disbelieve the Bible, but because I wanted to get at the truth. But little by little, I had to discard bits and pieces of the religion I’d grown up with. At the time I would have said I was moving from a child’s understanding of God to a more mature, adult theology.

I went through what I now think of as a deist phase, partly because there was no good evidence of divine intervention, and partly because from a divine perspective, setting up the initial conditions of the universe and then standing back and letting it unfold seemed most elegant.

I went through a Taoist phase, which (I thought at the time) was even more elegant because the Tao wasn’t even a being, a mind bolted onto the universe, but was more like an emergent property of, well, not just the universe, not just a multitude of possible universes popping in and out of existence, but of The Way Things Must Be.

And eventually I stumbled on alt.atheism on Usenet, and read its FAQ, which defined atheism simply as the absence of belief in God.

It would take a while longer, but eventually I realized that that definition applied to me. That in trying to figure out who and what God was, what he wanted, and his relationship with the universe, I’d stopped believing in him without even noticing. And that all that faffing about with Taoism was a delaying tactic, an attempt to have some sort of religion because it never occurred to me that I didn’t have to have one.

I wasn’t happy about this. After all, the word “atheist” conjured images of Stalinist purges and priests sent to work themselves to death in Siberia. But at the same time I couldn’t lie to myself and tell myself I didn’t fit the definition, when I clearly did.

The point is that I didn’t decide to be an atheist. If I had, I would have stepped back as soon as I realized what I’d done. Rather, after spending years thinking about the problem and examining it from all sides, I’d come to the only conclusion I could. And so, I had to expand my definition of “atheist”, to cover not only communist priest-murderers, but also myself. It didn’t take too long to come to terms with the word.

If you’re still reading this, then the main point that I’d like you to take away from this is that you don’t have to have a religion. If you’re looking around, trying to figure out which religion is right for you, you do have the option of saying “none of the above” or “none”, and of staying there for as long as you like, either until you find one that fits you, or forever.

The second point is that if God is indeed good and wise and loving, then how can he punish you for honestly examining your beliefs and how they mesh with the world?

And finally: you can lie to other people. You can even lie to your parents if you have to. But don’t lie to yourself.

(Update, Feb. 18: Is this autobiography week or something? Roger Ebert has a new post similar to this one.)

Journalistic Balance in a Biased World

CNN has a piece up called Is the lunatic fringe hijacking America?, about how extremists have a disproportionate effect on politics. Okay, fair enough.

But in an effort to be fair and balanced (if not Fair and Balanced™), CNN’s guest gave four examples of extremists, two from the left and two from the right; two from politics, and two from media.

On the right: Michele Bachmann and Glenn Beck. Two well-known unhinged nutjobs, but I’m sure we can all think of others: Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Sarah Palin, Pat Robertson, etc.

And to balance them out on the left, Alan Grayson and Keith Olbermann.

When I heard that, my first thought was “Alan who?”. I mean, he could at least have gone with someone people have heard of, like Dennis Kucinich or Wonkette.

Now, as it turns out, Alan Grayson is an actual, honest-to-Cthulhu freshman representative from Florida’s 8th. According to Daily Kos, his long and sordid history of espousing far-left causes includes

  1. Oct. 2, 2009: Characterized the GOP’s health care plan as “Don’t get sick. If you do get sick, die quickly.”
  2. Feb. 3, 2010: Several Republican candidates for Grayson’s seat drop out of the race.

It might also be instructive to see what PolitiFact has to say about their record of truthfulness:

  Michele Bachmann Alan Grayson Glenn Beck Keith Olbermann
True 0 0 0 0
Mostly True 0 0 0 2
Half True 0 0 2 2
Barely True 0 1 4 0
False 3 0 5 1
Pants on Fire 4 0 2 0

Which, I think, confirms Stephen Colbert’s observation that “reality has a well-known liberal bias.”

I’m all for journalistic balance, and not favoring one ideology over another, but this is ridiculous. The purpose of news outlets is to tell the public what’s going on. Their commitment should be to the truth, not to any party. But what’s going on here is an abdication of that commitment. The truth does not always lie at the midway point between opposite sides. It’s entirely possible for one side to be full of shit, and in that case, it’s a journalist’s job to say so. It’s sad that Jon Stewart could teach these people a few lessons

As for which extremists have the most sway, where’s the army of marching leftist morons to balance out the Teabaggers? Which networks and politicians have promoted their meetings? Where are the calls from the left to dismantle the constitution?

In fact, the most common accusation I hear leveled against Democrats, aside from the background noise that they’re baby-killing communo-fascist terrorist sympathizers, is that they’re wimps who can’t get anything done; that they need to grow a spine and a pair of cojones and start acting like they have a majority.

So CNN can suck my balls. One on the left, and one on the right. For balance.