And speaking of horribly unenlightened views, there is also Ashley Miller’s father, who has decided to stop talking to her, to disown her, to cut her off, to make her an undaughter, because her boyfriend is unwhite.

I can’t get my head around it. Imagine caring more about your racism than you care about your daughter! Imagine giving up a daughter for the sake of racism. What an incredibly bad bargain. What a pathetic, wrong-way-around exchange.

I suppose I am thankful that he waited until the day after Thanksgiving to do it.  Not that he told me, he made my stepmother his proxy as he was too angry to speak to me directly.  I have been disowned for loving someone my father does not approve of.

“Too angry” – as if there were an important principle involved.

I don’t know how one goes about coping with these things.  I have a very supportive family, friends, and boyfriend.  And Dad and I were never super close.  And, perhaps there were things I could have done better, but none of them change the fact that my dad is the kind of person who would disown their only child for dating “out of race”.

Just what I’m trying to get my head around. That kind of person. What kind of person would do that?

It’s heartbreaking.

 

I’m back. I didn’t get sucked into the engines even once.

Yesterday morning CFI demonstrated in front of the Ugandan High Commission in Ottawa to protest the Kill the Gays bill. Vyckie and I went too. Kevin Smith, the director of CFI Canada, used Twitter to summon media attention, and took pictures. He gave me permission to post them.

 

That’s Seanna in the purple coat. She’s the Director of CFI Ottawa, which is an unpaid position – a volunteer position, but that word suggests to me a not quite real job, and that certainly doesn’t fit. The guy tweeting on her right is Michael Payton, and I’m hiding behind him.

Kill the bill, kill the bill, kill the bill.

Kevin told me that one of the cops at the demo is on the LGBT panel of the RCMP. Yesss!

Support CFI Canada. They’re doing good work.

Ahh that was fun. Went out for a nice refreshing walk – to Parliament Hill then east on Laurier and along the canal and then back here. Pitch dark but all the nicer for that.

Last night we went to the Museum of Nature for nibbles and PZ’s talk on chance in evolution and then we got to wander around in the bird and dinosaur galleries. After hours! Cool or what?

Eschaton is over. I just had a long conversation with Eric in the doorway of the larger of the two rooms where it was held, until he had to leave for the airport. It’s been wonderful to meet him and talk to him.

Udo Schuklenk gave a great talk on secular ethics this morning. I kept wishing some of the sciencey types who think philosophy is useless could have been present. He based it on three of the myths in his forthcoming book with Russell Blackford on 50 myths about atheism. He used three Jesus and Mo toons to illustrate his analysis of three of the myths – no morality without god; no-god robs life of purpose and meaning; denial of the sanctity of human life.

One of the observations I liked – the validity of laws ultimately depends on their acceptability to a given population. The same applies to god. Goddy types think you have to choose between nihilism or goddy absolutes, but really god too depends on acceptability.

Ian Cromwell also gave a great talk. Zombies. Racism. Then we had a panel discussion on godless ethics. Eric and Udo and I had lunch together last thing before Udo left.

Heina Dadabhoy told me she tweeted the last line of my talk yesterday, that along with separation of church and state we need separation of church and health care, and it got 42 (or was it 46?) RTs. All right! We can do this, people. And we need to.

CFI is protesting at the Ugandan embassy (or consulate?) tomorrow, and I get to go.

So I’ve met Eric MacDonald at last. Also Mark Fournier. Conversation about Job, and Steiner schools and anthroposophy, and people who think they know things, and the quiet revolution in Quebec.

My talk is this afternoon; Vyckie is after me; Eric is after Vyckie.

Note to hotels: don’t have tv on in the breakfast room. Ugh.

 

All riiiiight – I got to see inside the Parliament library. That makes up a little for the crushing fact that I didn’t get to see the second floor of Manchester Town Hall (with the murals by Ford Madox Ford) because it was off-limits that afternoon.

I had to take the tour, because you can’t go as many places if you just wander around on your own, such as the library for one. The tour it is then, I exclaimed, and accepted my orange pass with 2:50 stamped on it. It was 2:30, so I nipped up to the Peace Tower to look at the view. It was very like the time I nipped up to the Old Post Office tower in DC – same line to wait for the small elevator, same easier time getting down, same general kind of architecture – and both in national capitals. How about that.

The library is gorgeous.

I like gorgeous. I don’t like coldly minimal. I know someone who spent two million dollars on a reno – yes really – and it’s coldly minimal, just the same very boring tan wood everywhere. The hell with that. I want gorgeous.

Second trip, to walk by the canal.

First I went around the corner from the hotel to get a look at that park I can see from my window, where I saw dogs being walked in the frozen sunrise. I found that it’s not a park at all, it’s the grounds of the Science Museum (where PZ is doing a talk tomorrow evening) – so now I see that I can see the museum from here! It’s right over my left shoulder as I speak. It’s one of those massive castle type museums – the bit I can see looks like Caernarvon Castle or something. There’s also a new glass part, which I can also see from here.

Also, Ottawa (at least this downtown part of it) is packed with very appealing 19th century brick houses, that are like the brick semis you see all over London and yet also not like them, and not like anything else I know either. They’re familiar yet oddly distinctive.

Hey if you’re a magician, be careful about what tv talk shows you grace with your presence. Go on the wrong one and you might be set on fire.

Wayne Houchin, a Las Vegas-based magician, was.

Shocking footage has emerged on YouTube of a magician being attacked and badly injured by the host of a TV show on which he was a guest.  In an apparently spontaneous gesture, the man (who has been named as Franklin Barazarte) who is both host and producer of a talk-show in the Dominican Republic, doused 29-year old Wayne Houchin with a flammable liquid and set it on fire.

Well at least Bill O’Reilly doesn’t do that.

We shouldn’t jump to any conclusions about this one incident, although it if *was* an attempted exorcism, it would not be unique in involving violent and dangerous practices.  To take two examples from different parts of the world, in 2007 a Romanian priest was jailed for 14 years for conducting an exorcism that led to the death of a nun,  while in Japan last year a 13-year-old girl suffocated after being strapped down and doused with water by her father and a Buddhist monk who were trying to expel an “evil spirit”.

And there are all the children in places like Akwa Ibom state in Nigeria, and London, and all the women in places like India and Kenya, who get tortured to death for being “witches.”

Bullshit is not always harmless.

Yow – it really is cold. I got out there though. Walked around Parliament Hill and admired the stunning views of the river and Gatineau and the Gatineau hills and the distance. Saw three of the Cats of Parliament Hill sunning themselves on their front porches. I also admired the ugly-beautiful crazily grandiose architecture, just as I admired that of Manchester Town Hall. Saw the mouth of the Rideau canal. Also the Women are Persons! monument. Yes, Virginia, it really had to be argued that women are persons, and there really were people (men, that is) who said no they aren’t.