Archives 2009

Indian Stupid Burns Like a Hyderabadi Biryani

First, the Telegraph has a
story
about an Indian nun’s book about sex in the church:

The book by the former nun reveals how as a young novice she was propositioned in the confession box by a priest who cited biblical references to “divine kisses”. Later she was cornered by a lesbian nun at a college where they were teaching. “She would come to my bed in the night and do lewd acts and I could not stop her,” she claims.

When she was sent to Bangalore to stay with a priest known for his piety, he lectured her about the need for “physical love” and later assaulted her.

To steal a line from
Monty Python,
“may I take this opportunity of emphasizing that there is no sex in the Catholic Church. Absolutely none, and when I say none, I mean there is a certain amount, more than we are prepared to admit”.

The article concludes with a spokesman who dismisses the nun’s claims:

“How far what she says is well-founded I
can’t say, but the issues are not very serious. We’re living with
human beings in a community and she should realise this is part of
human life,” he told the Daily Telegraph.

(emphasis added.)

Oh, the irony! If the Catholic church would only realize that yes, sex
is part of human life, and would allow its priests and nuns to get
laid every once in a while, maybe there’d be less of this sort of
thing, to say nothing of child abuse.

(Cue BillDo in 3… 2… 1…)

The second item concerns an
op-ed piece
that appeared in
The Statesman in India.

The piece by Johann Hari argues that while people deserve respect,
ideas don’t. And that a recent UN resolution to avoid criticizing
religion has the effect of shielding human-rights abusers.

He and his editor have since been
arrested
for “hurting the religious feelings” of Muslims. You can’t make this
stuff up.

The Statesman’s
letters page
includes a letter entitled “Denigrating Islam”. Among other things, it
replies to Hari’s original contention that

I don’t respect the idea that we should follow a
“Prophet” who at the age of 53 had sex with a nine-year old girl, and
ordered the murder of whole villages of Jews because they wouldn’t
follow him.

with

Hari has made some vulgar remarks about the marriage of the Prophet with young Aisha, which incensed and hurt many readers of The Statesman. Muslims regard the pious wives of the Prophet as their mothers and hold them in high esteem.

Aisha, was not 9 but 10 years of age when she was married to the
Prophet, but came to live with the Prophet much later. It was after
attaining puberty when she was more than 15 years of age. Following
the Arab custom at that time, her father Abu Bakr, the first caliph of
Islam, proposed this marriage to cement his close relationship with
the Prophet.

Oh, so instead of a 53-year-old man fucking a 9-year-old, it was
actually a 58-year-old fucking a 15-year-old. I guess that’s supposed
to make it all right.

I’ve heard Christian apologists make similar excuses for the Old
Testament atrocities (e.g., by saying that Leviticus sets rules on
what you can and can’t do to a slave; which presumably makes it okay
to own human beings as chattel). I’m sure the fact that their Muslim
counterparts use similar arguments says something profound about the
ecumenical brotherhood of man or something. I can’t help imagining a
crowd of Christian and Muslim fanatics hand in hand with torches and
rakes, singing Kumbaya while marching to punish the heretics who would
disrespect their imaginary BFFs.

Bible Study Notes: Homosexuality in the Bible

I’m leading the discussion at today’s Bible Study session with the
Beltway Atheists.
The topic is Homosexuality in the Bible.

I’m attaching my
notes
(also available in
Org mode for Emacs
here).

Where Can I Buy a Shillelagh?


HB 1009 was recently introduced in the Maryland State House:

SECTION 1. BE IT ENACTED BY THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF MARYLAND, That
the Laws of Maryland read as follows:

Article — State Government

13—322.

THE SHILLELAGH IS THE STATE WALKING STICK OF STATESMEN AND
GENTLEMEN.

SECTION 2. AND BE IT FURTHER ENACTED, That this Act shall take effect
October 1, 2009.

If this passes, I’m afraid that I don’t know where to get a
shillelagh. I bet there are specialized stores, though. Anyone got any
pointers?

On the other hand, maybe I don’t need to worry: I’m definitely not a
statesman, and arguably not a gentleman.

(HT Legum’s New Line.)

Slick’s Transcendental Argument

Last week on
The Atheist Experience,
a guy named Matt Slick from
CARM.org
called in to present the
Transcendental Argument
for the existence of God. His version of the argument is
here.

When I read
Slick’s version of the argument,
my reaction was one that I often have when theists try to construct
purely logical arguments: as I was going through his bullet points, I
wasn’t nodding in agreement, even reluctantly. I kept thinking “well,
this is sorta-kinda-maybe true, given the proper definition and
starting assumptions”. Take, for instance, his point 1. C. ii.:

“I am alive” is either true or false.

This statement is true, but only if you define “alive” very carefully.
This is why courts spend time splitting definitional hairs: to decide
precisely where the line between “alive” and “not alive” runs or ought
to run, and by extension where the line between “legal” and “illegal”
runs. In real life, however, things can get much messier (Terry
Schiavo, anyone?). Now, Slick is free to divide the world up into 100%
true and 100% false statements if he likes, but he must then accept
that some of the 100%-true statements won’t feel 100% true.

This sort of sloppy thinking permeates the argument, which tends to
trigger my BS-o-meter.

Or take 2. C.:

Something cannot bring itself into existence.

I wonder how Slick deals with things like pairs of virtual particles,
which just pop into existence all over the place, and usually
annihilate each other a fraction of a microsecond later.

We can also apply this statement to 7. D.:

We call this transcendent, absolute, perfect, and independent mind, God.

Surely a mind is a “thing” in the sense of 2. C.. This means that God
cannot have created itself, and therefore raises the question of who
or what created God.

Don Baker, who was co-hosting The Atheist Experience on
the day that Slick called in, has a
fine rebuttal
including several points I would have made:

  • There is no universal requirement that a system of logic be complete, elegant, or even consistent. It’s just that we humans value these properties.
  • A lot of Slick’s “universal” laws, like the law of the excluded middle (a statement is either true, or it’s false) are not inherent to logic; they just happen to be true (as far as we can tell) in this universe, and in most of the systems of logic that we humans find useful.
  • Properly applied, logic is universal and absolute, but you have to be very very careful and rigorous.

In short, this version of the Transcendental argument is par for the
course, as far as purely logical arguments for God go: it looks okay
on the surface if you don’t look at it too closely, but the
construction is shoddy. The argument doesn’t tell us which statements
are assumptions for the sake of argument, which ones are assumptions
Slick thinks are obvious enough to be axioms, and which statements
follow from which premises. If this argument were a work of
carpentry, all of its angles would be slightly off from 90°, the
sides wouldn’t line up quite right, and there would be gaps between
the boards.

Color me less than impressed.

QOTD

From Frank Rich by way of dKos:

Bush-era Republicans have no moral authority to lecture about deficits.

The same goes for Reagan-era Republicans, BTW.

Thank You for Telling Me What I Believe

Not too long ago, I got
this reply
from one Ælfheah to a comment of mine:

‘Atheism’, for your information, does not mean a lack of religion, or, for that matter, a lack of religious beliefs. Abram was not an atheist before God revealed Himself to him.

‘Atheism’ means a belief that God does not exist. Merely not believing in God is commonly called ‘agnosticism’. An agnostic is someone who is (theoretically) prepared to believe in God if he is shown some evidence – which is of course a fallacy, given that God is infinite and so would require an infinite amount of evidence for His existence to be “proved”.

And more recently, S. forwarded
this article
by Sam Storms at the ironically-named Banner of Truth:

Do honest atheists exist? By honest, I don’t mean atheists who pay their taxes and keep their promises and choose not to steal or lie. What I mean in asking the question is whether or not there exists an atheist who honestly believes there is no God.
…

I contend they do not. I contend that they are living and speaking in denial of what they know to be true. I contend that they are labouring to persuade themselves of what is indelibly and inescapably inscribed on their hearts: that there is a God and that they are morally accountable to him.

(emphasis added.)

Gosh, isn’t it kind of these people to tell me what I believe? I
wonder whether they’d be happy to turn the tables and allow me to tell
them who is and isn’t a True Christian.

Storms bases his claim partly on
Romans 1:20,
by way of John Calvin, to add a bit of argument-from-authority sauce
to his argument from authority.

The other half of the argument is the venerable argumentum ad
wow:

  1. Look at the universe and the trees and stuff.
  2. Wow.
  3. Therefore, God exists.

The Bible says everyone believes in God. If anyone claims otherwise,
it must be because they’re lying, not because there’s an error in the
Bible.

Ælfheah, on the other hand, seems to want to redefine 95% of
self-described atheists as agnostics. And his definition of an
agnostic, as someone who would believe in a god if there were good
evidence, fits 95% of the self-described atheists I’ve met.

Except that he then commits the all-or-nothing fallacy:

given that God is infinite and so would require an infinite amount of evidence for His existence to be “proved”.

Okay, technically he’s right: if God is infinitely powerful, then a
feat like building pyramids like the ones in Egypt could be
accomplished either by God, or by humans, or by space aliens. Other
feats, like putting Venus in orbit around Saturn, could be done either
by a god or by sufficiently-powerful aliens, and so forth. Any given
feat could be the work of aliens who are advanced and powerful enough
to accomplish that feat, but are not infinitely powerful. So
in that sense, no evidence is sufficient to establish the existence
of an infinitely powerful god.

But at some point, the question becomes moot. If we’re talking about
aliens who can create universes, rearrange time and space like Legos,
and know everyone’s thoughts, then they may as well be gods, for all
practical purposes. If such a being were demonstrated to exist, you
might as well behave as if it’s infinitely powerful.

But of course theists haven’t demonstrated anything like that. The
argument between theists and atheists isn’t over whether the being
that rearranged stars to spell out “I am the LORD thy God” in Aramaic
as seen from Earth was infinitely powerful, or merely extremely
powerful. The argument is whether there’s any good evidence
for any gods at all.

I can see where this all-or-nothing approach can be useful: “I’ll
never get all of the bugs out of this program, so I won’t do any
debugging”; “I’ll never know everything, so there’s no point in
learning anything”.

So anyway, a True Christian™ is someone who covers himself in
strawberry jam on Fridays while singing medleys of show tunes. All the
rest of you who call yourselves Christians are just lying to
yourselves and to me to mask the shame of not liking jam.

Happy Darwin Day! And I Suck

As you doubt already know if you go anywhere near the science end of
the blogosphere, today is not only Darwin Day, but Chuck’s 200th
birthday. Such an occasion must be celebrated!

Unfortunately, what with other stuff going on, and because I suck, I
don’t have any special content prepared. So go over to Pharyngula or
someplace. I’m sure there’s something fun and interesting there.

Another Reason Not to Write csh Scripts

In case you haven’t read Tom Christiansen’s
Csh Programming Considered Harmful,
here’s another reason not to write csh/tcsh scripts
if you can avoid it.

Unlike the Bourne Shell, the C shell exits with “Undefined variable”
if you reference an undefined variable, instead of expanding that
variable to the empty string, the way the Bourne shell and Perl do.

But there’s the $?VAR construct, which allows you to
tell whether a variable is set.

I needed to check this in a script that, for reasons I won’t go into
here, needed to be written in Csh. So I had

if ( !$?FOO ) then
    # Stuff to do if $FOO isn't set

and got an error. It turns out that csh started by evaluating
$?FOO. In this case, $FOO was set, so $?FOO
was set to 0. Csh then tried to evaluate !0 and parsed it as
“event number zero”, which failed. Grrr.

Putting a space between the bang and the dollar sign fixed that.

ID FAQ 2

Barry Arrington’s
ID FAQ question 2
isn’t much better than
question 1.

2] No Real Scientists Take Intelligent Design Seriously

Yes, they do. For simple instance, in telecommunications work, we start by distinguishing the intelligent signal from the naturally occurring noise that tends to garble it.

One obvious problem with this is that in telecommunications, we know
what signal is (whatever the customer wants to send) and what noise is
(anything that changes the signal between the sender and the
recipient).

The existence of a signal is not in doubt: people pay telecoms good
money to send it, and get upset when their signals aren’t sent
reliably. We also know that people exist, and what sorts of signals
they tend to send (speech, email, streaming audio and video, etc.),
when, and why.

“Noise”, in telecommunications and signal processing, is by definition
anything that changes the original signal at the receiver. If I call
my mom on the phone and say “Hello” but she hears static crackling,
that’s noise. If I say “hello” but she hears “oh hell”, that’s noise.
But if I call a friend and send a series of high-pitched shrieks with
my acoustic modem, but he gets a Vivaldi concerto, that’s still noise:
I’m paying the phone company good money to send high-pitched shrieks,
dammit, and that’s what I want to arrive at the other end.

The
cdesign proponentsists
(hey, there’s another good example of information being garbled), on
the other hand, want to use a recieved message (the human genome, or
bacterial flagella, or mousetraps, or whatever) to try to infer the
existence of an original signal, a designer. At the same time, since
they don’t want to admit that the designer is the God of the Bible,
they play coy and refuse to ascribe any properties to the designer.

I’ve seen a variant of the telecommunications analogy, in which IDists
pointed to archeologists trying to figure out whether a given rock was
used as a tool by prehistoric humans, or was broken and scratched by
natural (non-human) processes. But again, this is exactly backward:
archeologists not only can assume that humans existed 10,000 years
ago, but know a lot about their probable motivations (food, sex,
companionship, worship, etc.) and their limitations (any hypothesis
that involves people having three arms, for instance, is going to get
shot down pretty quickly).

IDists have none of that. They’re trying to prove magic, so they have
to use this sort of smoke and mirrors.

Obama’s Faith-Based Initiatives: WTF?

During his electoral campaign, Obama promised to keep and expand Bush’s
Office of Faith-Based Initiatives. This morning, the AP has
this story:

Obama is also telling the gathering that the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships that he is announcing Thursday won’t favor any religious group, or favor religious groups over secular groups.

(More
here.)

I’m all for the separation of church and state, and all the stuff
Obama said in that paragraph, but if the Office of Faith-Based
Initiatives won’t favor religion over irreligion, why put “Faith” in
the organization’s name? Seriously, WTF? Why not call it the Office of
Charity or Office of Public Service or something like that?

I suppose one explanation is that he thinks that federal support of
charitable works is a Good Thing, but that the Bush administration’s
implementation of it was broken, but that religious overtones are
necessary for public support.

Of course, he could just rename it, as when the Department of War
became the Department of Defense, but perhaps he thinks that would
make him unpopular.

A more cynical explanation is that he plans to continue the previous
administration’s policy toward the office: have an Office of
Faith-Based Initiatives in place to suck up to the religious, but not
fund it adequately.

I doubt the latter explanation, because a) if that were the case,
Obama wouldn’t have made his comments about keeping church and state
separate. And besides, sucking up to voters is typically something
presidents do when they’re running for reelection. And as long as the
last election cycle has lasted, I don’t think it’s grown to four years
yet. Please tell me it hasn’t.