Creationist alleges “religious discrimination” at JPL

An Intelligent Design creationist is suing Caltech for allegedly firing him for espousing his beliefs at the workplace.

David Coppedge has sued Caltech, which operates Jet Propulsion Laboratory for NASA, claiming religious discrimination and retaliation, harassment and wrongful demotion. Officials removed Coppedge from a lead system administrator position on the Cassini mission to Saturn in 2010, and was let go in 2011. Some 200 workers were laid off that same year due to budgetary constraints.

Denying the allegations, in documents filed with the Los Angeles Superior Court, JPL officials allege that Coppedge received a written warning because Coppedge allegedly harassed co-workers about his beliefs.

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At last the GOP makes sense

The democratic process relies on the assumption that citizens (the majority of them, at least) can recognize the best political candidate, or best policy idea, when they see it. But a growing body of research has revealed an unfortunate aspect of the human psyche that would seem to disprove this notion, and imply instead that democratic elections produce mediocre leadership and policies.

The research, led by David Dunning, a psychologist at Cornell University, shows that incompetent people are inherently unable to judge the competence of other people, or the quality of those people’s ideas. For example, if people lack expertise on tax reform, it is very difficult for them to identify the candidates who are actual experts. They simply lack the mental tools needed to make meaningful judgments.

As a result, no amount of information or facts about political candidates can override the inherent inability of many voters to accurately evaluate them.

via People Aren’t Smart Enough for Democracy to Flourish, Scientists Say – Yahoo! News.

Don’t laugh, this explains a lot about the Democrats, Libertarians, and Tea Party too.

Who said it?

Here’s a bit of a riddle for some of you. Who said the following?

I don’t want to go to a trade war, I want to beat China. I want to go to war with China and make America the most attractive place in the world to do business.

Need a hint? He also said this:

I do not want to make black people’s lives better by giving them someone else’s money, I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money.

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A simple cold

Last Sunday morning, I woke up with a sharp pain in the back of my nasal passages, as though I’d somehow gotten a grain of sand or something stuck there. I thought it would pass, and it sort of did—by becoming a full-blown sore throat and swollen glands and let’s-just-make-life-a-bit-more-miserable-overall. No biggie, I’ve had head colds before. But this one is slightly different. I just changed jobs, and that means I have no health insurance for the next 3 months. My old company was too small to qualify me for COBRA benefits and my new company has a 3-month break-in period or whatever they call it.

And that’s it. I’m a professional, I make a good salary, I work hard. And I’ve got no health insurance, for myself or my family.

Like I said, it’s just a head cold. I’ve had them before and they never bothered me. But I had insurance then. If they got worse, I went to the doctor. Last time my wife had a bad cough, she went to the doctor and found out she had pneumonia. Me, I’m trying to eat healthy, drink fluids, and get lots of rest, because I don’t have anything else right now. And some people raise kids under these conditions? Something is seriously wrong when a first-world country like the USA can’t even provide decent health care coverage to its citizens.

How the Bible drives technology

There’s a fascinating story over at the Atlantic about the impact of the Bible on science and technology. And it’s not what you’d think.

Over the past several decades missionary groups like the Wycliffe Bible Translators have sometimes been among the first visitors to remote cultures to learn those cultures’ languages — and to do some pretty thorough (though often amateurish) ethnographic study: after all, you can’t translate the Bible into a language until you understand not just the linguistic vocabulary of a people but their cultural vocabulary too. (The whole discipline of anthropology has deep roots in Christian missions.) That this study is done for explicitly conversionist purposes makes the Wycliffe translators, and other Christians who do similar work, immensely controversial; but the bodies of ethnographic and linguistic knowledge they have amassed are remarkable.

The main focus of the article is about the latest development in this trend: Christian missionaries working to create Bible translations in people’s native languages, that are accessible via cell phone. In the process, they’re solving unique technical problems that mainstream cell phone apps never bother to tackle, due to the lack of a profitable market.

It’s quite a paradox. On the one hand, it shows that believers can do legitimate scientific and technological work when they put their mind to it. And yet, ironically, their success in such fields only highlights their failures when it comes to the message they’re working so hard to share. If they only thought more clearly about their own faith, they could save themselves a lot of work. And yet, if they failed to do this work, how much would we lose?

Protecting religions

Ed Brayton writes:

But there is an inherent danger in having the government decide which religions deserve protection and which do not, which are “legitimate” and which are not, especially since all religions are ultimately illegitimate. On the other hand, it seems absolutely clear to me that Scientology was created for the sole purpose of being a swindle, a con, a way to make money. I don’t think that’s true of other religions, even if they all do have adherents who find a way to get rich from it. It’s a very tough issue for me.

He’s right, it’s a tough issue. I suggest making a distinction: a free society should protect religious belief and religious speech, but religious institutions should not receive any more protection than any other organization. In other words, it should not be legal to discriminate against individuals for having or promoting religious beliefs, but religious institutions should not receive any additional benefits not available to other institutions or organizations.

In particular, religious institutions should not be exempt from accountability with respect to their constituents. If they make promises to their adherents that involve being paid or otherwise compensated for things, then they should be just as accountable as any other institution for delivering what they promised. And in cases where it’s disputable whether or not they kept their end of the bargain, the consumer should have the benefit of the doubt. The religious institution received tangible benefit from the consumer, and should therefore be obligated to prove that it provided tangible benefit to the consumer, or face appropriate breach-of-contract penalties.

Yeah, I know, I should also wish for a pony while I’m at it. But the first step in fixing a broken system is determining what a working system would look like.

 

The year of …?

Via Ed Brayton comes this report that the Pennsylvania House has declared 2012 to be “The Year of the Bible,” on the spurious grounds that “Biblical teachings inspired concepts of civil government that are contained in our Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States” etc, etc. Which of course is why the three branches of American government are the king, the priesthood, and the prophets, just like the governments ordained in the Bible.

Anyway, I was just thinking: what year should 2013 be? The Year of the Koran? The Year of the Book of Mormon? The Year of Dianetics?

Or perhaps we should go with The Year of On Origin of Species? Or perhaps Demon-Haunted World? (One of my favorites.) Or how about Letter to a Christian Nation?

What’s your nomination?

 

Gospel Disproof #34: Progressive sanctification

Today’s Gospel Disproof comes (again) from our friend Eric, who writes:

Salvation is ALL of grace and none of human merit so there is no grounds for boasting and certainly one is given no reason to think that the unsaved are “ even worse than you”.

Eric is partly correct. No matter what you may hear people say when giving their testimony, no matter what the Bible says about how the blood of Jesus “cleanses us from all sin,” and no matter how earnestly the Apostle Paul argues that believers have been freed from sin, “sinners” without God are no worse than believers with God. Or to phrase it in less negative terms, accepting Jesus doesn’t really make you a better person.

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Baptist seminary student recalls history

Zachary Bailes, a seminary student at Wake Forest, has this interesting perspective on the public outcry against Jessica Ahlquist in Cranston, RI.

An irony not lost on students of history is that Roger Williams, the prodigious 17th century rabble-rouser, founded America’s First Baptist Church in nearby Providence in the name of “soul freedom” after banishment from the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Now the eventual state founded by the man who championed religious liberty long before it was popular (and some might contend that it still isn’t) appears antagonistic toward the idea.

Published by the Associated Baptist Press web site (of all places!), Bailes reminds Cranston’s largely Roman Catholic population that it wasn’t all that long ago they themselves were on Jessica’s side of the line.

Not too long ago it wasn’t a good idea to announce in public that you were Catholic. John F. Kennedy had to make a case to Southern Baptist ministers in 1960 that if he were elected president papal rule would not seep into the Oval Office. http://usinfo.org/docs/democracy/66.htm

Where I grew up Protestants did not date or associate with Catholics. Catholics were seen as the “other” and for some the sentiment still exists. If anything, the Catholic community in Cranston should protect Ahlquist and others because they share a similar story.

You tell ’em, Zachary!