Uh-oh. This morning, Sydney may have gotten a sign of the Apocalypse: the skies turned red as blood. I don’t know what else it could be, other than the wrath of heaven.
Well, and airborne dust particles.
Which is the more likely, rational, reasonable explanation is left as an exercise for the reader.
It’s hardly news, though: people have been using pages for this purpose since I was a young’un, at least.
CNN is cutting to the chase:
Yes 69%
No 31%
This poll will rack up big numbers, I suspect, so don’t expect a big turn-around…but do get in there and make a tiny little popping noise as you click and drop in your contribution!
The latest online edition of Seed Magazine (you all know it’s gone to an all-digital format, right? You should be reading it regularly) has an interview with Richard Dawkins on his new book — it focuses on the potential for the new book to persuade people to accept the idea of evolution.
I think it does a good job of that, too. They asked me to write a little commentary on the book, and I think it has even wider possibilities. It’s so readable and clear, I want some of those die-hard creationist fanatics to read it. Really read it, and understand it. I don’t expect them to be converted at all — they’ve drunk too much kool-aid to be cured — but jebus, I’d like to see some challenging arguments from the creationist camp, rather than these rehashed exercises in idiocy they always drag out. If they want to argue against evolution, that’s fine…but please, argue against evolution, not these freakish fever dreams of crocoducks and linearity and Hitler in a lab coat.
Also…they’ve made me an icon! I wish I were that good looking.
The results of yet another poll are out, showing that the godless are rising and promise to rise for years to come. In 1990, we made up 8% of the population; now in 2009, we’re 15%. They’re extrapolating forward and estimating that we will make up 25% of the country in 20 years.
It’s not enough, is all I can say. I suppose it’s good news, but I am disappointed in my fellow Americans. I will not be content until the number is 100%. (OK, 95%. It’s not fair to demand rationality from people who are brain damaged or locked up in asylums.)
The really bizarre news here is the way people are squirming to put a twist to the data to reassure the believers. They’ve got a label for that 15% that isn’t “godless atheist unbelievers”: they are “Nones”. Don’t panic, they say, only 10% of them call themselves “atheists”! They’re mostly agnostics and skeptics of organized religion! You don’t have to stockpile food and ammo, bar the doors and windows, and prepare for the anarchy and evil that would follow if all those people were atheists.
It’s rather annoying. Every article I see on this subject makes this desperate rush to reassure their readers that this growing cohort of Americans aren’t really those goddamned atheists — they’re nice people, unlike those cold-hearted, soulless beasts called atheists, and they aren’t planning to storm your churches and rape the choir boys and boil babies in the baptismal fonts, unlike the scary atheistic monsters. They’re special. And most of all, they aren’t French.
“American nones are kind of agnostic and deistic, so it’s a very American kind of skepticism,” says Barry Kosmin, director of Trinity’s Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture. “It’s a kind of religious indifference that’s not hostile to religion the way they are in France. Franklin and Jefferson would have recognized these people.”
Oh, please. All the low frequency of self-reported atheists in the survey tells you is that the long-running campaign in American culture to stigmatize atheism has been highly successful — and it’s an attitude that we still see expressed in reports like this. The most important news they try to transmit is not the increase in unbelievers, it’s “Thank God they aren’t atheists! They’re just rational skeptics, instead!”
Atheism is not a state to be avoided. It does not distort your features so that the founding fathers would throw you out of the country as an undesirable alien. It does not give you a French accent. It doesn’t even make you want to bomb churches. We are “rational skeptics,” too, we’re just the ones who aren’t afraid to confront the social conventions that insist that you must be churched or in some way pious in order to be a good person — we are just the ones who will get in beatifically complacent faces and tell them they’re wallowing in bullshit.
So don’t be reassured. Those “Nones” don’t believe in a Bearded Ape of Cosmic Proportions, they aren’t propping up the local priestly den of ignorance with donations, and Pat Robertson is still confident that every one of them will burn in hell. Most are not as vocal or as confident as the spokespeople for atheism are, but then, most of the people who have been filling church pews for centuries haven’t been as noisy or assertive about their faith as have the priests and bishops and deacons, but no demographers have therefore felt compelled to split definitions and point out the weakness of Christianity by declaring only some tiny percentage to be church leaders.
Don’t fall for their subtle attempts to divide the unbelievers. Religious institutions would love to see atheists continually demonized, even by, especially by, agnostics. It furthers their ends, not ours. There is no meaningful division — we are all abandoning the old superstitions together.
And if you are a believer, and are consoled by the fact that this growing demographic is called “Nones”, don’t be. They all reject your most cherished dogmas, your belief in Jesus and the Trinity and Mohammed and Transubstantiation and the Sacredness of the Holy Spirit or freaking whatever, and they all think your goofy myths are completely looney-tunes. More and more of us are rejecting your nonsense and moving away from your peculiar superstitions. That only 10% of us call ourselves atheists should not salve your fears. It’s not that only 10% of the Nones call themselves atheists…it’s that a whole 10% of the fastest growing beliefs in our our society are enthusiastic about openly tearing down and expressing contempt for those quaint religious institutions that have been shackling human minds in ignorance for so long.
This is hardly a fair fight. Cristina has about ten times the brains of Kirk.
In further news, Ray Comfort has announced that his give-away of the edited Origin of Species has changed: he’s going to give away 100,000 books at 100 universities, Darwin’s text will be left intact (although his page counts don’t add up), and he’ll be revising his 50 page foreword to be more fair to atheists and evolution. I’m beginning to suspect he’s lying to us.
Uh, gang? It’s the wee hours of the morning of 22 September in Jerusalem. That means, if you are reading this, you are not one of the elect who was raptured. Oops.
I checked the site that predicted the rapture to see if it had been updated with excuses…and it hadn’t. Obviously, this means the author was raptured! Well, cool!
This does have a down side. We’re about to enter seven years of tribulation. Stock up on firearms, cocaine, and explosives while you can, you’ll be needing them.
There is an up side, though. Have any Christian friends or neighbors? Go knock on their door. If no one answers, they’re in paradise — help yourself to their house, their car, their jewelry, that nice TV in their living room. Traffic on your commute should be a little lighter in the morning. The Republican party has evaporated, and the entire staff of Fox News are gone, and the network will have to shut down.
If you were partying yesterday, keep going!
I’m traveling to Fargo on Wednesday for a series of events. I think I know what I’m doing, so let me spell out as much as I know.
On Wednesday at 6:00, I’ll be speaking at Minnesota State University Moorhead, in room 118 in the Science Lab building, on the subject of “Darwin and Design”.
Wednesday evening afterwards? I don’t know. Somebody will probably take me by the elbow and lead me to beer.
Thursday morning I’m doing a press conference with the Red River Freethinkers, and then at 11ish, I’m going to be on WDAY radio for a short while. Tune in!
Thursday afternoon at 2:15 2:00, I’ll be engaging in an informal panel discussion at NDSU (location to be announced). I’m planning to talk about godless activism, but I’ll also address questions, so who knows, we could find ourselves walking down some strange paths.
I just heard from the organizers: here’s update information on the Thursday panel.
Jason did all the advertising and scheduled it for 2:00pm 9-24-09 at the Century Theater at NDSU. The century Theater is located upstairs in the Memorial Union on campus. 12th ave is torn apart. I would advise anyone to take I29 North to 12th ave North and go right. On 18th Street go left and then go right on Centennial BLVD. If they have to come from downtown, AVOID Main ave bridge connecting Moorhead to Fargo!
Thursday evening at 6, we’ll be watching Julia Sweeney’s movie, Letting Go of God, at the Fargo Theatre. After the movie, I’ll be making some remarks — I’m going to talk about narrative and story-telling, and its value to atheists.
Sometime after 9, elbow, beer, somewhere, again.
It should be fun! I shall be talked out, all of North Dakota will be tired of me, and I’ll go home the next day to shackle myself to the book again!
The state of Texas is considering striking the name of Neil Armstrong from the social studies standard. I hate to be the voice of restraint here, but I don’t think it’s as bad as it sounds. The reasoning given is completely bogus (because Armstrong wasn’t a scientist? Give me a break), but the action is not unreasonable. The state should not be in the position of dictating the niggling details of instruction — they should be laying down the law on the broad picture of what is taught, but not how it was taught.
So what the curriculum should do is say that the social studies classes for that grade level should do is discuss the space program, its goals and its effects on American society. It shouldn’t be saying that the teacher has to do this by asking students to memorize the names of famous astronauts — that’s a pedagogical decision that should be made by the teacher. I would hope that most teachers would see that talking about the people in the space program is a great way to humanize the topic, but I wouldn’t want the BOE to be meddling to that degree in the classroom.
Similarly, I think it is fair for a state curriculum to insist that biology classes cover the principles of evolution…but it would be inappropriate to demand that it be done by teaching about Darwin. You can do a fine job of discussing evolution without mentioning ol’ Charles even once.
