Apologetic and arbitrary

I have sinned. While I was in Philadelphia, I was supposed to attend the Drinking Skeptically event on Thursday evening, and I was honestly looking forward to it…but I went to dinner with Michael Weisberg, Janet Browne, Rasmus Winther, John Beatty, Jane Maienschein, and a few others, and when I finally looked up from the conversation, it was 10:30. Too late. I offer abject apologies to Salvatore Patrone and everyone who showed up.

To get even, the Science Pundit has tagged me with a meme. I am, of course, obligated now to actually address it, as long as I’m groveling. Here are the rules:

  1. Link to the person who tagged you.
  2. Post the rules on your blog.
  3. Write six random things about yourself.
  4. Tag six people at the end of your post and link to them.
  5. Let each person know they’ve been tagged and leave a comment on their blog.
  6. Let the tagger know when your entry is up.

Hang on, my entire life is random, a chaotic maelstrom with a thin thread of intent tangled in it. How am I supposed to pluck out just six fragments from it? Oh, well, here’s something:

  1. The oldest object on my person is my social security card. I still have the very same rectangle of paper I was issued when I was 14 and got my first job. It must be made of gopherwood pulp to have held up so long.

  2. I used to be wickedly accurate with a slingshot in my misspent youth. I haven’t used one since I was a teenager, though, so don’t send me out to slay any giants.

  3. I have never smoked a cigarette or any other combustible tube, nor have I ever been tempted to do so in the slightest. My parents were smokers, so I was never curious, I didn’t see anything faddishly rebellious about it, either, and the habit always simply seemed revolting.

  4. I have three small scars on my head and forehead, because when I was a toddler I had multiple independent falls and bloody collisions with coffeetables. My parents and grandparents apparently purged their houses of all such furniture until I reached an age where I was reliably able to stand up without falling down — when I was about 20, I think.

  5. The biggest fish I ever caught was a 29 pound Coho Salmon. This was on the same trip where my father caught a 45 pound King. Oh, but we are fallen from the Ancient Days.

  6. The quietest place I have ever been was an old growth forest in the North Cascades, when the wind was completely calm and the cedars went still and nothing anywhere was moving — it was eerie. Visit that same forest when there’s even a hint of wind, of course, and the trees are all moaning and whispering to you without cease.

Now I have to tag 6? I took a semi-rational approach, and plucked out the names of the six most recent commenters to leave a url here: Scrambled Stoic,
Big Dumb Chimp,
Susannah,
Mike Haubrich,
Matt Heath, and
Tim Fuller, you’re it.

SIWOTI Syndrome Open Thread

At Owlmirror’s suggestion, this is a new thread to cope with the flaming wrongness of this recent creationist pimple, Teno Groppi, on the Entropy and evolution thread (which is now closed, by the way). This happens, now and then: some obtuse and confident creationist, made even more stubborn by an abysmal ignorance, shows up and starts babbling. So of course people rebut him, but he completely ignores everything that he’s told, which means more people jump in to hammer on him, and because he’s too stupid to recognize what’s going on, he babbles more. And then the thread expands in an endless game of whack-a-mole.

You can keep playing right here. The old thread was just getting too long.

I wish this were a Poe

But it seems to be serious. You have to read Christians AGAINST Cartoons — it claims that most cartoons are part of an anti-Christian campaign, and that they promote unwholesome values (like, say, a sense of humor). You will learn that Dora the Explorer promotes SATANISM and COMMUNISM, and that she has a TALKING GOAT (nudge, nudge). Hello Kitty leads children into Egyptian paganism. Adult Swim Sin is nothing but pornography and perversion. As for Spongebob Squarepants…Heads of the BEAST Ridden by the Mother of HARLOTS!!! Abomination of the Earth!!!

Man, now I have a real itch to turn on Nickelodeon and the Cartoon Network.

Zombies defend Christmas!

That’s all I can imagine: this imaginary conflict has gotten so stupid that it must be mindless undead droning out their need for brains who are still fighting it (oh, hi, Bill O’Reilly!). The latest instance is one of these always-affronted religion organizations that has made a Naughty and Nice List, to “make sure that Christmas does not get secularized or censored from its essence, namely the birth of Jesus Christ”. On the naughty list: Disney, because their online store is called the “holiday shop”. On the nice list: Best Buy, because Jesus wants a new digital camera they use the word “Christmas” in their commercials. These are all, of course, stores selling stuff. I had no idea that the swiping of the credit card had become a sacred rite, holy to Jesus Christ.

I’m rather fed up with the pointless inanity, especially since most of the godless I know will be celebrating this Christmas. Here’s a suggestion. Maybe all of us atheists need to point out that “holiday” is derived from “holy day”, and retire aghast to our fainting couches at this religious taint to the season, moaning, “Oh, Br’er Jebusite, please don’t use that word holiday on me”. Then they’ll get all smug and satisfied when some store acknowledges that it is a generic holiday, and they’ll all shut up.

Faith hurts

Since a Wall Street Journal editorialist has denounced secularism as the source of all of society’s ills, it’s only fair to get another opinion. Like, say, of a social scientist who has actually done a comparative study of different nations, looking for correlations between religiosity and superior moral values or stability or whatever. Surely, faith-based societies will have some virtues, won’t they?

Uh-oh. The results don’t look good for believers.

In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion in the prosperous democracies.

The United States is almost always the most dysfunctional of the developing democracies, sometimes spectacularly so.

Some of the problems that the religious most strenuously deplore are ones that are exacerbated by the beliefs they advocate.

The study concluded that the US was the world’s only prosperous democracy where murder rates were still high, and that the least devout nations were the least dysfunctional. Mr Paul said that rates of gonorrhoea in adolescents in the US were up to 300 times higher than in less devout democratic countries. The US also suffered from “uniquely high” adolescent and adult syphilis infection rates, and adolescent abortion rates, the study suggested.

Mr Paul said: “The study shows that England, despite the social ills it has, is actually performing a good deal better than the USA in most indicators, even though it is now a much less religious nation than America.”

He said that the disparity was even greater when the US was compared with other countries, including France, Japan and the Scandinavian countries. These nations had been the most successful in reducing murder rates, early mortality, sexually transmitted diseases and abortion, he added.

Now to be fair, these aren’t causal relationships, and this is only a study of correlations, so religion might not be directly responsible — you aren’t likely to catch gonorrhea by going to church. But with the state of American religion, you are very likely to catch a kind of pernicious ignorance by going to church, and that disability might make it more likely that you will make bad decisions with unfortunate consequences that will add to the roster of dismaying statistics.

There probably isn’t

Recently, we’ve been mocking the sad little website of the Rev. Cockshaw, which had the title “There probably is!” (referring, of course, to a deity). Now someone has done the obvious and grabbed the url for There Probably Isn’t!. So go ahead, post your stories of deconversion there.

I’m feeling a bit sorry for Cockshaw. His efforts got steamrollered rather easily, and now they’re being reversed. Good work!

Enduring damage

The Bush administration will leave us with another legacy: unqualified Republican ideologues receiving appointments in various institutions, including scientific organizations, as their ship of state sinks. The rats are scuttling overboard, and are being rewarded with captaincies on any available vessel. An article in the Washington post discusses the trend. I thought these were striking examples.

In one recent example, Todd Harding — a 30-year-old political appointee at the Energy Department — applied for and won a post this month at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. There, he told colleagues in a Nov. 12 e-mail, he will work on “space-based science using satellites for geostationary and meteorological data.” Harding earned a bachelor’s degree in government from Kentucky’s Centre College, where he also chaired the Kentucky Federation of College Republicans.

And in mid-July, Jeffrey T. Salmon, who has a doctorate in world politics and was a speechwriter for Vice President Cheney when he served as defense secretary, had been selected as deputy director for resource management in the Energy Department’s Office of Science. In that position, he oversees decisions on its grants and budget.

One of the best changes Obama could make in our government is to inspire a culture of competence. It looks like his ability to do that has just gotten much harder.