Now Indiana wants your opinion

Secularists in Indiana wanted to run a simple message on buses in Bloomington: “You can be good without god”. The transit authority refused their money because the message was “too controversial”. Too controversial? Is it their position that it is controversial that atheists can be good? I would love to see a debate on that issue: let’s line up everyone in the transit authority who thinks atheists are always going to be evil, get their names and faces and opinions on record, and see if this really is controversial.

Since it is unlikely that anyone will ‘fess up to that, we’re going to have to settle for asserting ourselves on a poll.

What is your opinion of an advertisement rejected by Bloomington officials because its message of “You Can Be Good Without God” was deemed too controversial?

I agree with the advertisement and I think it should be allowed. 37%
I don’t agree with the advertisement, but I think it should be allowed. 11%
I don’t agree with the advertisement and I don’t think it should be allowed. 48%
I agree with the advertisement, but I don’t think it should be allowed. 3%
I don’t know. 1%

Click click click!

You know, this could also be a factor in the declining appeal of religion

Some of these cults are stocked with puritan prudes. Baptists, in particular, are a bit nuts.

A student at a fundamentalist Baptist school that forbids dancing, rock music, hand-holding and kissing will be suspended if he takes his girlfriend to her public high school prom, his principal said.

The student is named Tyler Frost, not Kevin Bacon, by the way.

You want to dance, dance. You want to sing, sing. The two of you want to kiss, kiss. I think those are all beautiful acts, and as long as no one is harmed, it is ridiculous to forbid them.

I also think the school has stepped way out of bounds when it tries to control activities well outside the domain of the school itself. But sure, go ahead and act like repressive tyrants — Mr Frost may well go looking for a more tolerant religion, or will perhaps leave that body of superstition altogether.

Uh-oh. Spanked.

VenomFangX is one of those semi-legendary creationists, one so inane that it’s hard to believe. He had a website where he kept all of his ridiculous youtube videos, but it’s about to disappear. If you go there now, this is what you’ll see:

i-a6e3de7dd1685032ab1b452cf5289c9e-venomfangxsite.gif

Oh, wow, that’s going to leave a psychological scar.

As long as we’re talking smack about creationists, don’t forget to click on this link and help me win an iPod Touch from Eric Hovind. Click it lots.

Casey Luskin, smirking liar

The smug and rather imbecilic face in this video belongs to Casey Luskin of the Discovery Institute, who was interviewed on a conservative talk show, Fox & Friends. Watch it at your peril. Like the recent Matthews/Tancredo incident, it’s two people who know nothing about science babbling at each other.

At the beginning, the host says,

Your main problem with science books is that they take a one-sided look at evolution.

No one seems to notice that this is a show that claims to be examining a “white-hot controversy” with one guest discussing only the Discovery Institute’s position. Hmmm.

Luskin parrots a couple of Discovery Institute talking points, and he lies, lies, lies. He claims all the biology textbooks are completely wrong, and that all they want is for good science to be taught. His evidence? The first thing he talks about is Haeckel’s embryos, and repeats the oft-told canard that Haeckel’s embryos are presented uncritically — that they are fraudulent, the biologists know it, and they still use them.

Oh, dog. Not again. I have been all over the Haeckel story so many times. It’s not true: relatively few textbooks use the Haeckel/Romanes diagram, and when they do, they present it in a historical context. And the Discovery Institute doesn’t object to the obsolete figure itself, since they also castigate textbooks that use photos of embryos. Vertebrate embryos at the phylotypic or pharyngula stage do show substantial similarities to one another that are evidence of common descent. That’s simply a fact. The creationists are just frantic to suppress that piece of information, I guess.

The second piece of ‘evidence’ Luskin throws out is another one that pisses me off: he cites the New Scientist article that claims Darwin was wrong! I told you all that we were going to be seeing a lot of quote mining of that blatantly misleading cover — as I also told you, they ignore the content that says the opposite, and they ignore the strongly worded rebuttals that scientists have published. New Scientist has a lot to answer for; these creationists are desperately mendacious and will be flaunting that rag at us for years to come, claiming that New Scientist has shown that Darwin’s tree of life is all wrong, yet we still keep teaching it.

Luskin’s new twist is that “when you look at one gene, it gives you one version of the tree of life, and when you look at a different gene, it gives you an entirely different tree of life”. Of course, if you actually read the NS article, it’s about horizontal gene flow in bacteria making the root of the tree of life more syncytial, saying nothing about the variation you get when you look at single genes. Luskin’s argument is completely bogus. It’s like saying that when we look at the history of the English language and pluck out one word, it may have a different etymology and rate of change than another, therefore English could not have evolved.

Luskin has had this stuff explained to him repeatedly, and it never sinks in…or more likely, as a dishonest propagandist, he chooses to disregard all the demonstrations of the problems with his claims. How he can accuse scientists of peddling fraudulent evidence when he sits there and lies nonstop is beyond me.

Poor Stanley and Terry

Terry Eagleton and Stanley Fish get another drubbing, this time at the hands of Matt Taibbi. I’d almost feel sorry for them, except that I’m still feeling the trauma of being trapped on a plane with Eagleton’s book, so I say…sic ’em.

This latest salvo is fired by author/professor Stanley Fish, a prominent religion-peddler of the pointy-headed, turtlenecked genus, who made his case in his blog at the New York Times. Fish was mostly riffing on a recent book written by the windily pompous University of Manchester professor Terry Eagleton, a pudgily superior type, physically resembling a giant runny nose, who seems to have been raised by indulgent aunts who gave him sweets every time he corrected the grammar of other children. The esteemed professor’s new book is called Reason, Faith and Revolution, and it’s sort of an answer to the popular atheist literature of people like Richard Dawkins and Chris Hitchens. If you ever want to give yourself a really good, throbbing headache, go online and check out Eagleton’s lectures at Yale, upon which the book was based, in which one may listen to this soft-soaping old toady do his verbose best to stick his tongue as far as he can up the anus of the next generation of the American upper class.

Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime is death

Really, you can’t make this stuff up. An angry letter writer hates those atheists who are making all that racket, and believes that Vox Day’s awful little anti-atheist book refutes them all perfectly. You’re probably already questioning his sanity and intelligence, but then he takes one more step to impeach his own judgment.

This brilliant critique clearly demonstrates why a mere anti-blasphemy law is not sufficient. In the interests of rationality and common sense, the legislation should go further and label atheism a thought crime.

Wait, what? Has he read 1984? Does he understand what a thought crime is? Does he understand that the book is a critique of totalitarianism? Most of us understand that the concepts of the totalitarian state described in that book were not presented as a recipe for a utopia, but a nightmare.

“Most of us” apparently does not include fans of Vox Day.

The Templeton conundrum

Money is essential to science, and at the same time it can be a dangerous corrupter. There’s a common argument, for instance, that a lot of biomedical research is untrustworthy because it is done at the behest of Big Pharma dollars — it’s more persuasive to people than it should be, because there is a grain of truth to it, and it would be easy to get sucked into the lucrative world of the industry shill. However, we also have a counterbalance: scientists don’t go into research because they want to be rich, and we are also educated with a set of principles that puts the integrity of our observations above all. But we also have to be honest: there is temptation, and there are tradeoffs, and there are scientists who lose sight of their principles when the stakes get higher.

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Priorities

We really do have a screwed up culture. Carrie Prejean, Miss California USA, could publicly argue for continued denial of civil rights to gays on air, in a beauty pageant, and pageant officials were unperturbed. Now that semi-nude modeling photos of Prejean are emerging, they are considering revoking her title. So flaunting her bigotry is no big deal, but posing in lingerie makes them clutch their pearls and squeak in horror? When they themselves ask contestants to show even more skin while wearing a bikini?

I don’t get it.