The Daily Press has a gallery of the top 17 witches from pop culture.
Coming in at #10, alongside the ones you’d expect, like Sabrina and Willow, is Delaware Senate candidate and anti-masturbation activist Christine O’Donnell:
(Thanks to JB for the pointer.)
BillDo, complaining about Catholics for Equality, a group of gay Catholics who support the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell:
Archbishop Broglio’s response pulled no punches. He wondered how Catholics for Equality got the authority to identify itself as a Catholic entity, maintaining “it cannot be legitimately recognized as Catholic.”
He’s right. While any group can slap the label Catholic on itself, bona fide Catholics are under no obligation to acknowledge it. And by bona fide, I simply mean Catholics not in open rebellion against the teachings of the Magisterium.
So a guy who heads a group with “Catholic” in its name but with no official connection to the Catholic church, who spends his time on talk shows speaking on behalf of the Catholic church, is complaining about a group with “Catholic” in its name speaking on behalf of… um, speaking on behalf of its members, as far as I can tell from BillDo’s release.
Is it just me, or are many conservatives so utterly lacking in introspection that they can’t recognize when they’re being hypocrites? Or do these champions of absolute morality hold to the absolute rule that “it’s not wrong when I do it”?
I hereby proclaim today to be Everybody Make Fun of Bill Donohue Day.
The Montana GOP‘s policy platform, adopted on Jun 19 (via AP):
Homosexual Acts
We support the clear will of the people of Montana expressed by legislation to keep homosexual acts illegal.
What’s next? Blasphemy laws? Dynamiting statues of Buddha? Mandatory burqas for women?
If you’re a Montanan and you’re still a Republican… Why?
Update: The AP article argues that Montana Republicans are lazy, not evil:
Montana GOP executive director Bowen Greenwood said that has been the position of the party since the state Supreme Court struck down state laws criminalizing homosexuality in 1997 in the case of Gryczan v. Montana.
Nobody has ever taken the initiative to change it and so it’s remained in the party platform, Greenwood said. The matter has never even come up for discussion, he said.
In other words, “Sorry, 5% of Montana! We couldn’t be arsed to take out the part of our policy that says you’re vile scum. Don’t worry about it.”
I was at a religious event yesterday on campus. Some student organization had invited three people to tell their conversion stories: one lifelong Christian, one former Muslim, and one former atheist.
All three stories followed a familiar pattern: “I used to be unhappy/abused/selfish, until I met some True Christians™ who seemed really happy. They invited me to read the Bible, pray, and live the life Jesus wanted, and I became happier and a much better person.” Nothing new there, but I was struck by the resemblance to an old statistical illusion:
Child psychologists have known for a while that praising children for their achievements works better than punishing them for their misdeeds. And yet, lots of parents think that punishment gets results. To see why, imagine a class of children taking a class with a series of weekly quizzes. In real life, a student’s grade depends both on how much effort he or she has put into studying, but also on random factors, like whether there were distracting noises outside, and things like that. So let’s ignore the effort part and make the grade completely random: the lazy teacher simply rolls percentile dice to determine each student’s score.
Imagine that one student got 90%, and his parents reward him for his this. Another student gets 10% and is punished by her parents for this. What should we expect to see on the next quiz?
The first student has a (roughly) one-in-ten chance of getting 90-100% on the second quiz, but nine times out of ten, his second grade will be 1-89%, lower than the first one. Likewise, nine times out of ten, the second student will get 11-100%, higher than on the first quiz. So what the first child’s parents see is that they rewarded their child, and his grades went down; the second child’s parents see that they punished their child, and her grades went up.
Likewise with conversions: if you’re at a low point in your life, there’s nowhere to go but up. And if you underwent a religious conversion during that period, you may attribute your subsequent improved fortune to the conversion. Post hoc, ergo proper hoc and all that.
Now, obviously conversions often come with changes in behavior and attitude, which are probably more significant. I’m not saying that this statistical illusion is a major factor in conversions, merely perhaps a contributing one.
An interesting thing happened in discussion afterward: the guy I was talking to said he had faith that Jesus existed. I asked him whether he thought faith was a good way of distinguishing what’s true from what isn’t. He asked me how I defined faith. I told him to use his own definition, since he was the one who believed on faith, and asked him again “is faith a reliable way of distinguishing what’s true from what isn’t?” He quoted Hebrews 11:1 and went off on a tangent, so I asked him again. I kept pressing him, and he kept dancing away from having to give a straight yes or no answer. I could practically hear the “clank!” as a shutter closed in his mind. “Don’t go there! There are dangerous thoughts there!”
Other than that, I have to give the organizers and presenters points for not bringing up Pascal’s wager. The general message was “follow Jesus and you’ll be happier”, rather than “repent or burn”.
In his latest eructation, about opposition to the pope’s visit to England, BillDo writes:
The Catholic League does not exist to fend off legitimate criticism of the Catholic Church.
That’s rich, coming from the guy who defended pedophile priests several times, including claiming that since most of their victims had already reached puberty by the time they were abused, those were normal homosexual relationships.
He goes on to complain about the people criticizing the pope:
much of the criticism about the papal trip emanating from the other side of the Atlantic crosses the line.
The most organized attempt to smear the pope comes from the Protest the Pope campaign. Some two dozen organizations, ranging from Atheism UK and the Gay & Lesbian Association to the National Secular Society, have launched an all-out attack on the pope and the Catholic Church. To read a sample of the commentary, click here. Some clergymen have joined the chorus, including long-time anti-Catholic bigot Rev. Ian Paisley.
Wow! The pope’s critics must really be something, frothing at the mouth, shopping around for sniper rifles and building IEDs, right? Let’s see BillDo’s list of the worst of their comments:
Bernard Wynne, a spokesman for Catholic Voices for Reform, Telegraph, 9/8/2010:
“The church, I think, is deeply misogynist and we have to change that.”
“There is a whole series of issues … about the equality of women, but also there is also an issue of sexual orientation and how in fairness to what the church suggests, one could only say that it is intolerant of people of a different sexual orientation.”
Hm. That sounds like forthright criticism, but I don’t see any calls for papal blood.
Well, I’m sure “long-time anti-Catholic bigot” Ian Paisley will have something properly fire-breathing:
Reverend Ian Paisley, Sky News 9/9/2010:
“When the Roman Catholic people are torn asunder because of this matter that the Pope has in many ways closed an eye to, it is time for the Protestant people also to support them.”
Oh, no he di’int! How dare he say that… um… that Protestants should help Catholics. That seems, um, charitable or something. Some might even say Christian.
BillDo goes on to write:
When militant atheists like Richard Dawkins threaten to make a citizen’s arrest of the pope, and when gay activists like Peter Tatchell make a “documentary” about the pope to be shown on TV, then there is cause for concern.
Oh, no! Documentaries on TV! We can’t have that! As for Dawkins’s “citizen’s arrest”, what really happened, according to Dawkins, is that after a suggestion by Christopher Hithchens, he started looking for lawyers to mount a legal case against the pope, within the British legal system.
I think BillDo has had his head up his own ass for so long that he can’t even tell when he’s lying. Either that, or he doesn’t care.
In case you hadn’t heard, the upcoming issue of Awake!, the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ other magazine (the one named after an Assemblage 23 song instead of a Jimi Hendrix song) has a cover story about the “new” atheism, called Atheists on A Crusade. You should turn off your irony-meters before reading the first two sentences:
A new group of atheists has arisen in society. Called the new atheists, they are not content to keep their views to themselves.
Since there’s a JW Kingdom Hall on my way home (right next to the Solid Rock Church, built out of wood), I stopped by to see what their opening hours were. Turns out that there was a service in progress. An usher or someone was helping direct traffic in the parking lot, so I asked him if I could pick up a copy of the November issue. He went to check, then came back and said that it’d be out in a couple of weeks. He took my information and promised that it’d be hand-delivered. I’m guessing they don’t get a lot of people who actually want their literature.
He asked me why I was interested, and I told him I’d seen the cover story on the Net, and wanted to read it. I confess that I didn’t tell him that I’m one of those pesky “new” atheists.
I wonder if they’ll recognize my house when they come to deliver it.
The other day, on the occasion of World Youth Day, pope Benny gave a speech on the general theme of damage control:
Why aren’t kids interested in religion anymore? We used to be such friends, back when we controlled the governments and had thumbscrews, and before all that child-rape coverup stuff came out. Where’s everybody going?
Okay, that wasn’t a direct quote, just my paraphrase. Here’s something he really said:
As today’s “strong current of secularist thought” aims to marginalize God and create a “paradise” without Him, the Pope explained, “experience tells us that a world without God becomes a ‘hell’ filled with selfishness, broken families, hatred between individuals and nations, and a great deficit of love, joy and hope.
“On the other hand, wherever individuals and nations accept God’s presence, worship him in truth and listen to his voice, then the civilization of love is being built, a civilization in which the dignity of all is respected, and communion increases, with all its benefits.”
That may be his experience — in fact, if we define “civilization of love” as “religious”, then he may in fact be right — but it sounded fishy to me, so I thought I’d dig up some numbers.
For starters, I found this table of religiosity, from a Gallup poll on religion and suicide. “Religiosity” here is based on whether people say religion is an important part of their life, whether they’ve been to a service recently, and whether they trust religious organizations.
Next, I found UN data on migration, available both as an attractive poster, and in convenient spreadsheet form. The part that interested me is column (6), which gives the net migration in or out of a country in people per 1000 population (that is, what proportion of the population emigrated or immigrated; I didn’t want to use raw numbers, because that would skew the data toward populous countries).
Anyway, to cut a long post short, the data I wound up with is here. And here’s what it looks like in picture form:
In case it’s not clear, the X axis gives Gallup’s religiosity, and the Y axis is the UN’s net migration. The green “correlation” line is a least-squares fit of the data points (ax+b, where a=-0.00102936 and b=0.433999). The US is in the middle of the pack, at 61,4. For some reason, Kuwait is up in the top right corner, above the “correlation” label, at 83,19.5.
I must confess that I’m surprised at how flat the least-squares line is. Given that religiosity is negatively correlated with societal health, I thought that people would be fleeing more-religious countries and moving to less-religious ones. But that doesn’t seem to be the case.
On the other hand, Joey Ratz’s pronouncement about how more secular societies are miserable hellholes where you can barely hear the constant gunfire over the screams of the rape victims, while more religious societies are paradises where birds sing to skipping passers-by and priests pee root beer, turns out not to be true either.
But I can see why he’d think that: he moved from a fairly secular country (Germany: 37) to a much more religious one, and they gave him a palace and a chauffeured car. So yeah, there’s that.
This month’s Secular Bible Study is about the book of Ruth.
Here are my notes in org mode, and in HTML.
If you’ve passed a TV set in the past few hours, you may have heard that some nutjob walked into the Discovery Channel building in Silver Spring, MD with a gun and possibly a bomb, and took hostages.
Apparently this is his plan to stop human overpopulation, war, pollution, and species extinction. He wants Discovery to air a game show. Oh, and CNN mentioned in passing that he’s an atheist.
So first of all, I hope the hostages are okay, that they get out safely, and that the hostage-taker gets the mental help he so obviously needs.
And secondly, a quick message to the gunman, James Lee:
Get off my team!
Basically, I want to condemn this act in no uncertain terms this. As, I would hope, any reasonable person would do.
I can only assume that the right-wingers and creationists are going to be making hay out of this for years to come, and I’m not looking forward to that.
Fuck.
Update, Wed Sep 1 17:53:44 2010: ABC news is reporting that Lee has been shot and killed by law enforcement, and that the hostages are safe.
This news item caught my eye because it’s a “news of the weird” type of story:
NEW YORK — A New York City man who plunged 40 stories from the rooftop of an apartment building has survived after crashing onto a parked car.
But then there was this bit:
The car’s owner, Guy McCormack, of Old Bridge, N.J., told the Daily News he’s convinced that rosary beads he kept inside the Dodge saved Magill’s life.
Can we please stop lending credibility to such obvious superstitious nonsense by repeating it uncritically?
If the car’s owner had attributed the man’s survival to a statuette of Ganesh on his dash, or a voodoo amulet, or a lucky Mickey Mantle rookie card, would it be taken as seriously? If not, then why are magic beads more plausible?
ObPunchline: You’re a mean drunk, Superman.