One of those other godless, unfeeling scientists dared me to post this cuddly video of frolicking furry animals.
I’m only doing it to lull you all into a false sense of security. One minute you put your guard down in the presence of all the furry warm cuteness, then wham! Out comes the chitin and slime and the tentacles and the cold staring eyes oh god oh god the eyes the implacable glare. Then where will your puppies and kittens be, hey?
This local (he’s in my backyard of St Paul!) rabbi, Manis Friedman, offers an enlightening vision of old testament morality. He was asked, “How should Jews treat their Arab neighbors?” Here’s his answer.
I don’t believe in western morality, i.e. don’t kill civilians or children, don’t destroy holy sites, don’t fight during holiday seasons, don’t bomb cemeteries, don’t shoot until they shoot first because it is immoral.
The only way to fight a moral war is the Jewish way: Destroy their holy sites. Kill men, women and children (and cattle).
Fortunately, other rabbis gave slightly different answers.
The Horizon Church of Towson asks what I’m sure is a very sincere question.
about 6000 years old 28.13 %
about 4.5 billion years old 37.50 %
I am not sure 34.38 %
Gosh. This question has a very simple answer. Maybe you should tell them what it is.
Don’t follow this link if you are at all sensitive. Gingi Edmonds has weighed in on the killing of George Tiller. She compares him to Lee Harvey Oswald, Ted Bundy, and Jeffrey Dahmer, and concludes with some really twisted logic.
Tiller was killed by a pro-choice act. Pro-lifers need make no apologies.Â
I hope the police have an eye on this evil monster…if she doesn’t have a gun in her hand herself, she’s busily inciting others to go kill in the name of her fetal gods.
Texans have been doing a lot of things right lately. The newest happy result: bills in the Texas legislature to prop up the Institute for Creation Research and to add creationist language to their science standards failed.
So there’s a bit more hope for Texas: Don McLeroy is out as Chairman of the State Board of Education, the creationist “strengths and weaknesses” language is not in the standards, and the ICR is still not certified to award phony graduate degrees in science education.
The UK still wins, though. We’ve got school boards that seriously consider including the fantasy that the earth is 6000 years old into the curriculum, but in the UK, you’ve just got clever people with ropes and boards stomping out patterns in the barley fields. The media seems to take the “crop circle experts” a little too seriously, but at least you’ve got pretty exercises in aerial photography to show for it.
Nice jellyfish!
Classy.
The fundies are very concerned, because they have rightly noticed that when their kids go off to college, they come back better educated…which often means they become more liberal and reject traditional religious beliefs. What to do? How about creating desperate online courses with ‘hip, edgy’ music and bad acting to tell teenagers not to do those things? You really have to see that caricature of a movie at that link: a family says goodbye to their sweet little girl going off to college; she comes back 9 months later pregnant, snotty, and ecologically conscious. The classes spout all these statistics about how many college students try drugs and experiment with sex…but somehow never get around to the counterbalancing facts of meth and alcohol abuse and teen pregnancy rates among high school dropouts.
They’re misleading on the statistics about drugs and disease and pregnancy — colleges are actually very healthy places — but they’re dead on with their complaints that college graduates are less enthusiastic, on average, about religion. The video above is wrong, though: it’s not because we actively proselytize for atheism, but because we teach them to think and to question, two activities that are anathema to dogma.
How annoying: the video was in the clear this morning, and shortly after I linked to it, they slapped on all kinds of privacy restrictions. Sorry.
It’s easy to summarize, though. Bad actor pretending to be a college professor lectures about how you need to be a godless humanist atheist to learn anything, then a giant iPod Touch falls out of the sky and crushes him to a bloody splatter. Cut to ad for their religious indoctrination seminars. You didn’t miss much but the egregiously violent elimination of a liberal atheist.
Frank Schaeffer, who with his father was one of the aggressive peddlers of anti-choice ideas, has commendably accepted part of the blame for the Tiller murder, admitting that he and his kind contributed to the atmosphere of hate. Unfortunately, he fails with this bit in the middle.
Contributing to an extreme and sometimes violent climate has not only been the fault of the antiabortion crusaders. The Roe v. Wade decision went to far, too fast and was too sweeping. I believe that abortion should be legal. But I also believe that it should be re-regulated according to fetal development. It’s the late term abortions that horrify most people. And for the sake of keeping abortion legal adjustments need to be made. Roe is far too all or nothing (as I explain in my book Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All — or Almost All — of It Back). As I say in my book today I believe that abortion should be legal but more regulated than Roe allows. I also think that we should do what President Obama calls for: use sex education and contraceptive distribution and programs to help women and children in a way that results in less abortions.
No, not good enough. Abortion must remain a decision between a woman and her doctor…crazy evangelists (or ex-evangelists) and senators have no part in it. And the late term abortions? I am so fed up with the oh-so-concerned “pro-lifers” being “horrified” by them — those abortions are carried out when the pregnancy is threatening the life of the mother. Those are specifically decisions from which some patriarchal relic should be ejected. Does he really hope to place more obstacles and more stress in the way of frightened and often grieving women?
And speaking of not-pologies, look at Randall Terry’s.
“George Tiller was a mass-murderer. We grieve for him that he did not have time to properly prepare his soul to face God. I am more concerned that the Obama Administration will use Tiller’s killing to intimidate pro-lifers into surrendering our most effective rhetoric and actions. Abortion is still murder. And we still must call abortion by its proper name; murder.
Those men and women who slaughter the unborn are murderers according to the Law of God. We must continue to expose them in our communities and peacefully protest them at their offices and homes, and yes, even their churches.”
Randall Terry is available for comment at
FUK-YOU-TERY
He’s more concerned about the government response to a murder by zealots like him? And he’s afraid the government will close down his most effective actions…like what, murder? Or is he afraid his ability to terrify frightened women and harass health care professionals might be limited? Way to place your priorities, man.
As for being available for comment, I hope no one bothers with the grandstanding ghoul.
I admit, I was initially put off by the mere title of Nick Lane’s new book, Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). I’m one of those many biologists who is adamant about the absence of direction in evolutionary history, and ascending just sounds too much like life climbing the rungs of the ladder of life, so I picked it up in a somewhat prejudicial mood.
Have no fear, though, I was won over. Right at the beginning, he admits that it is a subjective list; his criteria for including the ten chosen evolutionary innovations are that it had to revolutionize the living world, that it was important to a significant subset of life today, that it was a product of biological (not cultural) evolution, and that it had to be iconic — it had to symbolic and arrestingly interesting to human beings. That’s fair enough; one could write a book on just the evolved properties of prokaryotes, but yeah, operons and chemical sensing and secretion and motility are of vast importance, but they’re only going to be iconic to a rather restricted set of readers. And since my own personal interests run more to metazoan innovations, I’m not going to complain about a book that gives my hobby horses a more substantial run.
Even better, though, what enlivens the book is the biochemist’s perspective: Lane isn’t so much interested in the superficial matters of morphology, but in the emergence of new properties in the molecular machinery of the cell, and how it affects the world around us. Somehow, it always thrills me when we drill down right to the interactions of molecules to explain how biology works.
So here are the ten evolutionary inventions Lane describes.
Origins of life: Where and how did life arise? A review of some of the models for abiogenesis.
DNA: What conditions would allow for the synthesis of nucleotides? Where did the genetic code come from?
Photosynthesis: The photosynthetic pathway is a combination of two very different functional pathways — what does this tell us about their evolution?
Complex cells: How did cells become more complex? A chapter on horizontal transfer and endosymbiosis — borrowing and stealing and kidnaping by ancient cells.
Sex: Why do we have sexual reproduction? A question that focuses on the cytological and genetic machinery.
Movement: How do organisms get around? Cytoskeletons and motor proteins, and where they came from.
Sight: How did vision evolve? A fairly wide-ranging discussion of opsins and crystallins and Hox genes and the weird glow of black smokers.
Hot blood: Another chapter with a little taste of everything: respiration, metabolism, insulation, and how a key feature of our physiology affects everything.
Consciousness: Where did our awareness come from? You won’t be surprised to learn that Lane is a materialist — the answer lies in the wiring of the brain.
Death: Why do all organisms die, and why do we even have genes that contribute to senescence and death?
So the topics aren’t that biased: only three exclusive to multicellular animals, and six that are about eukaryotes almost exclusively — and even in those our prokaryotic heritage is discussed. And really, when you’re talking about genes and biochemistry, you can’t get away from the fact that you are dealing with genuinely universal processes.
The book is also a fun read, deep enough to give you some substance, yet clearly written with the general public in mind. If you aren’t a biologist or biochemist, don’t shy away — you will be able to read this book, and you will learn a lot from it. When I was reading it, I was thinking this would be a really enjoyable text to build a freshman seminar course around. The chapters are readable and each one addresses an interesting topic in biology, bringing up both current research and pending questions, and it’s meaty enough to spark some good discussions.
I never thought I’d say this, but WND has a reasonable article on Kent Hovind’s legal troubles. It just recites the facts of the case, although I suspect they somehow expect their readership to view it through their Jesus glasses and see it as an indictment of the government. Still, the illogic of the Hovind position shines through.
Hovind’s son, Eric, asserts his parents and the ministry he now heads are not scofflaws.
“My father says very clearly, if you owe a tax, by law, you should pay it,” he told WND. “We are not tax protesters.”
…
In 1996, Kent Hovind tried to file for bankruptcy to avoid paying federal income taxes. He told a judge at a hearing he did not believe the United States, the Internal Revenue Service and the U.S. Attorney’s Office “have jurisdiction in this matter.”
“I sincerely believe that I am not a person required to file a Federal Income Tax Return,” he said. “This belief is a result of extensive research that I have done.”
I see. He thinks people should pay taxes if they owe them. He just thinks he has a special exemption and doesn’t owe them. Right.
Unfortunately, the article doesn’t address the most important question burning in everyone’s minds: will PZ Myers win that iPod Touch?
