Humanism on Metro
Seen on Metro yesterday (clickify to embiggen):
It’s one of the Consider Humanism ads. Specifically, the one about women.
Morality Debate, Part 1
Matt Dillahunty’s opening statement in the debate on “The Origin of Human Morality” at UMBC on Wednesday:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkMAJai5D3c&fs=1&hl=en_US]
He addresses two common misconceptions about morality: first, that secular morality borrows from religious morality. And second, that secular morality does not include an external authoritative source for morality, and that this is somehow a problem.
He argues that since religions disagree with each other on moral questions, so it is not the case that a deity has shown up and given us a clear set of moral rules. And even if a god did show up and clearly tell us what its values are, how can we tell whether those values are correct? (See the Euthyphro dilemma).
We should, he says, seek correct answers, not necessarily easy ones.
Matt Dillahunty at UMBC videos
The folks at the Atheist Experience blog have posted video of last night’s debate at UMBC, with Matt Dillahunty and Hans Jacobse.
There seem to be only three videos, but the titles say there should be nine. Hopefully the other six will show up in due course.
I hope to have a post up soonish with my comments.
Remaining Relevant FAIL
The AP reports:
NEW YORK (AP) — Citing a shortage of priests who can perform the rite, the nation’s Roman Catholic bishops are holding a conference on how to conduct exorcisms.
[…]Organizers of the [two-day training] are keenly aware of the ridicule that can accompany discussion of the subject. Exorcists in U.S. dioceses keep a very low profile. In 1999, the church updated the Rite of Exorcism, cautioning that “all must be done to avoid the perception that exorcism is magic or superstition.“
Yes, that’s like Coca-Cola spending millions on advertising to avoid the perception that Coke is just fizzy brown sugar water.
Signs of demonic possession accepted by the church include violent reaction to holy water or anything holy, speaking in a language the possessed person doesn’t know and abnormal displays of strength.
Speaking an unknown language? Like speaking in tongues? Of course, that’s mostly a Protestant thing, so no wonder the Catholics think it’s a sign of demonic possession.
As for displays of strength, should I have a priest on hand at my next Festivus party?
I was going to suggest that they could win James Randi’s prize by demonstrating that demonic possession is a real phenomenon, but they’re the Catholic Church. What do they need yet another million bucks for?
The full exorcism is held in private and includes sprinkling holy water, reciting Psalms, reading aloud from the Gospel, laying on of hands and reciting the Lord’s Prayer. Some adaptations are allowed for different circumstances. The exorcist can invoke the Holy Spirit then blow in the face of the possessed person, trace the sign of the cross on the person’s forehead and command the devil to leave.
Yes, I’m so glad this isn’t magic or superstition.
Music Nerd Joke
I’m going to tag all my Cocteau Twins MP3s and, in the TLAN frame, set the language code to zxx.
Bioscience Day
(In which I play at being Ed Yong.)
Today is Bioscience Day at UMD. While I’m not a scientist, I am a science groupie, so on my lunch break I wandered over to the poster session to see what was being presented, and maybe score a pass to go backstage where the brown M&Ms and orgies are, and scientists would snort blow out of the small of my back before using me up and dumping me in some back alley with nothing but a case of antibiotic-resistant herpes and a couple of coauthor credits talk to the researchers.
For the most part, I lacked the vocabulary and the background to understand what was so cool about the research. But occasionally I understood enough to ask what was going on.
The Taboo Wiktionary: One problem with the sciences is that it uses big words, and so students are tempted to just memorize definitions without actually understanding the underlying ideas. So these folks devised a game similar to Taboo, in which students have to define terms without using certain words.
Attack! We’re right behind you! (Biological Nanofactories Target and Activate Epithelial Cell Surfaces for Modulating Bacterial Quorum Sensing and Interspecies Signaling): This was a rather cool notion. The idea is that bacteria like E. coli don’t attack the host organism until there’s a lot of them. The way this is coordinated is through chemical signals: the bacteria emit chemicals that their neighbors sense, so that each bacterium can tell whether it’s alone or part of a crowd. And if it’s part of a crowd, a bacterium will attack, confident that everyone else is, too.
So what these people figured was, what if you try to mimic the “crowd” signal? If there are only a handful of E. coli in your gut, but you fool them into thinking that there’s a bazillion of them, then they’ll attack. Your immune system will make mincemeat of them, and in the process, learn what that strain of E. coli looks like, in case they come back. I guess this is like beating the bushes to force potential enemies to show themselves.
Drug Delivery by Cucurbituril-Type Molecular Containers: The word that caught my eye was “Cucurbituril”. I seemed to remember that “cucurbit” is Latin for “pumpkin” or “gourd”, and that didn’t seem to match with the chemistry-heavy abstract.
I asked the author, figuring that cucurbiturils were originally derived from some gourd protein or something, but she explained that no, it’s because the molecule is sorta-spherical and has a lot of empty space inside, so it looks a little like a pumpkin. Sense of humor FTW!
Ant diversity from space: The way the title read (unfortunately, at that link they’ve replaced the poster’s title with “Assistant Research Scientist”, for some reason), I thought it was about detecting and mapping ants from satellites, which seemed rather hard to believe. It turns out that while there are some ant structures that can be seen from space (giant anthills in the African savannah, for instance), that wasn’t what they were talking about. Rather, they were using satellite imagery to map conditions like humidity, temperature, soil composition, etc., and from that predict the likely characteristics of native ants. In other words, if you’re looking for ants with a certain set of characteristics, this research can help narrow down the best places to look.
All in all, I found that all of the researchers I talked to were friendly, and more than happy to explain their work to a layman like myself.
Conclusions Arrived at After Watching a Bunch of College Students, Both Theist and Atheist, Discussing the Origin and Nature of Morality
We all want simple rules by which to live. But simple rule sets are simplistic. Failing that, we want a simple set of principles by which to make rules by which to live. But those are usually arbitrary, and often fail to take into account that people want different things for many reasons, some good and some bad.
There aren’t any simple answers. There aren’t even any simple ways to get at the answers.
And as I said earlier, morality, like the value of a dollar, is an evolving emergent phenomenon.
Speaker-to-Volcanoes
The AP reports:
For 33 years, Maridjan spoke to Mount Merapi, believing he could appease its unpredictable spirits by throwing offerings of rice, clothes and chickens into the volcano’s gaping crater.
…Maridjan was believed by many to have the ability to speak directly to the mountain and led ceremonies every year to hold back its lava flows by throwing rice, clothes and chickens into its dome.
(emphasis added.)
Well, duh. Of course he could speak to the volcano. Anyone can talk to a mountain, or a river, or dead ancestors. To quote Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I:
Glendower: I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
Hotspur: Why, so can I, or so can any man;
But will they come when you do call for them?
The real question is, does anything happen as a result of talking to a mountain?
Belgian Priest Doesn’t Think Pedophile Priests Should Necessarily Be Punished
André-Joseph Léonard, the head of the Catholic church in Belgium, granted an interview to RTBF, in which he said (French article, English article) that seeking punishment against old child-abusing priests just vindictiveness:
Priests who abused children in their care, he told RTBF television, “must obviously be conscious of what happened in their lives, but if they’re no longer working, if they have no responsibilities, I’m not sure that exercising a sort of vengeance that will have no concrete result is humane.“
Asked whether it was a good thing to punish abusers, he said “If they’re still active, certainly.“
“But do they (the victims) really want an 85-year-old priest, all of a sudden, pilloried in public?“
Yes, pity the poor priest who fucked some kids up forty years ago and is now just a few years from retirement or death. Once his organization stopped being able to cover up for him, he found himself thrust into the spotlight. Isn’t he the real victim here, and not the people he raped all those years ago?
I wonder if M. Léonard is in favor of a statute of limitations for all child-abusers, or just those in his club.
The archbishop caused an uproar earlier this month when he said AIDS was “a sort of intrinsic justice.“
On second thought, I don’t care what this clueless clown has to say on any topic relating to justice.