All posts by Andrew Arensburger

War on Christmas

Carnival of the Godless
Dear Fox News pundits and assorted wingnuts,

I assume that this year, as has become tradition, you will once again be talking up the War On Christmas™. Since I am a liberal godless atheist who supports both separation of church and state and the ACLU, presumably this makes us enemies in this war.

So I thought I’d let you know how I plan to wage war on Christmas.

Oh, I know, giving information to the enemy is usually treasonous, but Christmas is the season for giving, so what the hey. Pull up a yule log and I’ll tell you all my plans. I won’t even make you eggnog-board me.

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The Kids Are All Right

While walking back from lunch today, I saw a group of preachers in the
semicircular plaza in front of the student union. One had a big banner
telling people to repent their sins and come to Jesus Christ, and the
main ranter was wearing a sandwich board that said pretty much the
same thing in front. On the back, it had a list of people who should
beware the wrath of God, the merciful, the most compassionate. I’m
going to trust
Amanda Gibbs’s
transcript, because it sounds about right:

WARNING

Fornicators, drunkards, sodomists, pot smokers, gangster rappers, immodest women, darwinists, gamblers, feminists, socialists, abortionists, pornographers, homosexuals, jihadists, dirty dancers, hypocrites

JUDGMENT IS COMING!!!!!

I walked around the back to read the whole thing. Broke out laughing.
Saw a bunch of smiles appear among the people in the front row.

It took me back to my own student days, when
Tom Short
would stand in front of the library and rant fundamentalist Christian
inanity for hours.

It gladdened this shriveled old cynical heart to see the reaction of
the students watching today’s spectacle. It ranged from outrage to
mild amusement to wild amusement. One woman ran out to get a piece of
chalk and draw pagan signs on the ground around Ranty Sandwich Board
Guy.

So it looks to me as if the young’uns are being pushed away from
right-wing crazy religion, and toward either moderate religion or no
religion.

I struck up a brief conversation with one of the students in
attendance, in which he told me that he too had been raised Russian
Orthodox, and had been pressed into service as an altar boy a few
times. So we laughed, shook hands, and swapped stories of abusing the
communion wine.

Yeah, I think they’ll be fine.

Who Wants to Live Forever?

A while back, I was visited by a pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses. At one
point, they resorted to argumentum ad wishful thinking: “Well,
don’t you want to live forever?”

They were very surprised when I said no.

Back in 2006, at the Montreal Comedy Festival, John Cleese
expressed
some of the thoughts that went into my answer (starts about 15:52 in):

I’ll tell you something sad, and it is this: as you get
older, I don’t think you laugh quite so much. The trouble is, there’s
only eight million jokes in the world. And when you’ve been doing it,
as I have, for forty-three years — I now know 7,980,000 of those
jokes. And even the ones I don’t know, I can kind of guess. I can
guess what the shape is.

I don’t laugh as much. Occasionally, when you’re young, at twenty,
you discover Buster Keaton, or in my case Peter Cook, or Woody Allen
and Steve Martin. These are great moments. But as you get older, it’s
not so frequent to be really excited by a new
discovery.

(Note: this is heavily edited for flow.)

And this is a problem with immortality: as you learn more and more,
especially in a given field, there’s less and less that’s really new,
and even that falls falls into known patterns..

I’m far from jaded, and I certainly don’t want to die just yet. But I
can see how, after two hundred years, or a thousand, or a million,
life would become dull. I don’t want to sound gloomy and pessimistic,
because there’s no cause to be. I’m sure that I’ll die regretting that
I lacked time to sample anything but the tiniest fraction of what life
has to offer. But at the same time, I can see where thing are going.

(Of course, since we’re talking about either magic or highly-advanced
technology, we can consider things like selective memory editing,
e.g., deliberately forgetting everything about Woody Allen so you can
discover him anew again. But I won’t go into that here.)

So if I were offered a shot at immortality, I’d demand an escape
clause. Better oblivion than eternal boredom.

Am I A Humanist? Definition vs. Allegiance

I don’t know whether I’m a Humanist.

I haven’t read any of the
Humanist manifestos,
but a while back, a podcast that I listen to had a show about
humanism, and discussed the main points of Humanist Manifesto III, the
most recent one. I agreed with points that were discussed, such as
that knowledge of the world comes from observing the world, and that
moral values are something that we humans have to work out for
ourselves.

But I don’t know whether I’m a humanist because I don’t know whether
it’s a matter of definition or of allegiance.

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What? Protests Change Minds?

When I
wrote
earlier about participating in the “No on Prop 8” demonstration at the
National Mall, I was rather dismissive of the notion that it might
affect anyone’s opinion.

However, SurveyUSA published a
poll
about Prop 8 with an interesting result. People who voted for Prop 8
were asked “Have the protesters changed your opinion on Prop 8?”. 8%
of them said yes.

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Props to Moderate Catholics

I give moderate theists
grief
when they fail to stand up and tell the Pat Robertsons and Jerry
Falwells of the world that they’re full of crap, so it’s only fair to
give credit where it’s due:
Catholics for Choice
has issued a
report
about Bill Donohue and the
Catholic League.

It provides a good overview of how BillDo operates, including
manufacturing controversy and bullying. The most interesting part (to
me) was the section about inflated membership numbers (p. 17).

(HT PZ.)

(Update: Fixed link to the report. Thanks to alert reader Fez.)

Minimal Electoral Map

During a discussion on whether the electoral college is still a good idea, someone brought up the point that it’s possible to win the electoral vote but lose the popular vote, and pretty badly at that.

So I wrote a Perl script that used evolutionary computation to try to produce the most skewed electoral map possible. Here’s what it came up with:

Electoral Vote

(click to embiggen)

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A Gay Outing

It’s funny how you never see the sights and do the “local” stuff in your own town. I went to Paris once, and stayed with a friend who had lived there for sixteen years, and had never gone up the Eiffel Tower until I dragged him.

Me, I’ve lived in the Washington DC area for years and years and had never gone to a protest. Which seems a shame: people come from all over the country to march and protest here. For me, it’s just a Metro ride downtown.


So when I found out that there was going to be a
series of coordinated protests
against California’s Proposition 8 across the country, I figured I
should go. I’m neither gay nor Californian, but I figured I could
raise the body count. Especially since the “coordinated” part meant
that the ones in Maryland and DC were going to start at 1:30. I pity
the poor Hawaiians, who had to be out on the streets by 8:30.

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MD to Abolish the Death Penalty?

The Post
reports
that

A high-profile panel appointed by Gov. Martin O’Malley recommended last night abolishing Maryland’s death penalty, concluding that the state’s system of capital punishment is too costly and vulnerable to wrongful convictions and fails as a deterrent to crime to be sustainable.

From here, the report goes to the governor, and then to the legislature — which is a whole separate quicksand pit of committees and deliberation — before a bill abolishing the death penalty lands on the governor’s desk.

But it’s a step in the right direction. W00t!

Godless Buses

Local CBS affiliate WUSA 9
reports

The American Humanist Association, located in Washington, will announce its “Godless Holiday Campaign” on Tuesday with ads on Metro buses and in newspapers. The slogan for the campaign is “Why Believe In a God? Just Be Good for Goodness Sakes”.

The campaign coincides with bus ads by the British Humanist Association. The British ad reads, “There’s Probably No God. Now Stop Worrying and Enjoy Your Life.
…

Speckhardt says there will be full page ads in The Washington Post and The New York Times helping to launch the campaign.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find anything about this at the AHA’s
site. (Update, Nov. 11: Pictures of the ads here.)
But it’s still cool. The consensus among the crowd that attended
PZ’s talk
(and subsequent
hepatic ethanol solubility experiments)
was that the way for us godless heathens to get a voice in society is
to stand up and make ourselves known.

Of course, the other bit of consensus was that with a segment of the
population as argumentative and independent-minded as ours, it’s
nearly impossible to get organized enough to speak with a single
voice, especially since “there are no gods” is no more a rallying
point than “I don’t like sports”.

But still, it’s a step in the right direction.

(HT Shelley.)

(Update 2, Nov. 12: The Post had a story about this as well.)