All posts by Andrew Arensburger

US No Longer a Christian Nation?

James Dobson says presidential candidate Fred Thompson isn’t a Christian:

“Everyone knows he’s conservative and has come out strongly for the things that the pro-family movement stands for,” Dobson said of Thompson. “[But] I don’t think he’s a Christian; at least that’s my impression,” Dobson added
…

In a follow-up phone conversation, Focus on the Family spokesman Gary Schneeberger stood by Dobson’s claim. He said that, while Dobson didn’t believe Thompson to be a member of a non-Christian faith, Dobson nevertheless “has never known Thompson to be a committed Christian—someone who talks openly about his faith.”

“We use that word—Christian—to refer to people who are evangelical Christians,” Schneeberger added.

(emphasis added)

I note that according to the American Religious Identification Survey, in 2001 about 1 million people identified themselves as “Evangelical” — they were outnumbered by Muslims. That’s less than 0.5% of the US population.

So can we expect Dobson et al. to drop the “America is a Christian nation” argument?

(HT PZ.)

LJ Plugin for WordPress

I’ve made enough references to LiveJournal users like and enough that I got tired of copying and pasting the standard LJ HTML to link to them.

So I did what any good hacker would do, and wrote a WordPress plugin to expand <lj username> tags.

You can download it .

Morality for Morons

[info]curvemudgeon points me to an article by Steve Alderman in the apparently badly misnamed American Thinker. This is a response to an op-ed in the LA Times by Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation and one of the more outspoken critics of faith.

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Discovery Institute Doesn’t Think God Loves Them Enough

The Mar. 16 episode of Intelligent Design the Future has this blurb:

On this episode of ID The Future CSC Fellow, Dr. Richard Weikart, author of From Darwin to Hitler asks, “does Darwinism devalues human life?” Some Darwinists deny that Darwinism has any ethical implications at all. In this short clip, Dr. Weikart looks at comments from Darwinists about the animal ancestry of humans and shows how that blurred the distinction between the animal kingdom and humanity, and negates the idea of human exceptionalism.

(Transcribed from the MP3 file, in case you notice differences between this and what’s on the episode web page.)

Read that last sentence, and then look at the title of the episode:

Does Darwinism Devalue Human Life?

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Conservapedia Now Slightly Less Fun

Readers of talk.origins may remember Ray Martinez, a particularly dense and combative young-earth creationist. I’d been having fun this past week or so reading his antics at Conservapedia.

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Highest-Ranking Elected Atheist Announced

You may recall that a while back, the Secular Coalition for America ran a contest to find the highest-ranking elected
atheist
[1]
in the U.S. Government. Now the contest has ended and
the results have been announced.

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Freedom Of Religion and Freedom From Religion

This particularly hateful letter,
published in the Kenai, AK Peninsula Clarion (registration required; see also here), promulgates a popular misconception:

The United States is based on having freedom of religion, speech, etc., which means you can believe in God any way you want (Baptist, Catholic, Methodist, etc.), but you must believe.

Let’s consider a scenario: the government in your state allocates X million dollars to buy rosaries to be handed out in public schools, to hire priests to lead the school in reciting “Hail Mary, full of grace” over the PA system each morning, to bus students to mass on Sunday mornings, and so forth.

Most Americans, I suspect, will think, “Wait a sec! How come the school is pushing Catholicism on my kids? That can’t be right!” Then they’ll look up the bit in the first amendment that says, “Congress shall make no law regarding an establishment of religion” and see that no indeed, that can’t be right.

So what the first amendment says is that the government can’t push Catholicism on you. You have freedom from Catholicism.

Except that the constitution doesn’t explicitly mention Catholicism. It covers all religions. So the first amendment says that the government can’t push any religion. You have freedom from religion.

Yeah, it really is that simple. Why don’t people get it?

(HT My Confined Space, via Pharyngula.)

Hovind Figures Out the Whole “Defense” Thing

Kent and Jo Hovind were back in the news last week:

Kent and Jo Hovind were back in federal court this week seeking acquittal on charges of bank structuring.

The couple’s attorneys argued there was no intent to defraud the government by making large deposits just under the $10,000 threshold that triggers bank-reporting requirements.

I can’t help wondering why they didn’t make these arguments the last time they were in court. It could have saved everyone a world of bother.

Frankly, Hovind comes across as a child who’s finally learned out that mommy really means it this time.

The article also notes:

He remains in the Escambia County Jail awaiting transfer.

Hurm. I’d’ve thought the state of Florida would’ve managed to transfer him by now.

A date for Jo Hovind’s sentencing has been delayed pending a ruling by U.S. District Judge Casey Rodgers on the request for acquittal on the bank structuring conviction.

No date has been set for her ruling.

This was originally set for this coming Thursday, but I guess it’s been postponed.

Switzerland Invades Neighbor


The Associated Press reports:

What began as a routine training exercise almost ended in an embarrassing diplomatic incident after a company of Swiss soldiers got lost at night and marched into neighboring Liechtenstein.

According to Swiss daily Blick, the 170 infantry soldiers wandered just over a mile across an unmarked border into the tiny principality early Thursday before realizing their mistake and turning back.

A spokesman for the Swiss army confirmed the story but said that there were unlikely to be any serious repercussions for the mistaken invasion.

“We’ve spoken to the authorities in Liechtenstein and it’s not a problem,” Daniel Reist told The Associated Press.

TSR confirms.

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Software Enzymes for Musical Composition

When
I last wrote about using evo-devo to compose music,
I had gotten stuck on the problem of implementation. In particular, I couldn’t figure out how to write a seed organism that would develop into a simple composition that I could then use to evolve other tunes. I also wasn’t sure how to get the various genes to actually work together, not at a level at which I could start coding.

After some thought, it occurred to me that enzymes and proteins act sort of like functions in software: they bind to molecules (take arguments), which they can then modify, and sometimes release another molecule into the surrounding medium (return a value). So I just needed to come up with the software equivalent of an enzyme.

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