Simmer on low heat, stir occasionally

That’s my recipe for dealing with crackpots; feel free to use it, it’s easy.

You all may remember Vincent Fleury, the French fellow who ascribes developmental processes to swirls of cellular movement in development, who wrote a peculiar paper in a European journal of applied physics (which I mocked mercilessly), and who then went crying to fringe journalist Suzan Mazur, and then demanded withdrawal of my review and an apology. He’s done it again. I just received a copy of a letter from France, which was also sent to the vice chancellor of academic affairs of my university, demanding that I be gently chastised. He claims he is the “victim of a fierce attack”. If you really must know all the details, here are some scans of the letter.

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Just a gentle hint for future complaints: the vice chancellor’s name is Cheryl Contant, not “Content”, and she should be addressed as Dr Contant, not Mrs Content. You’re welcome.

Otherwise, there’s nothing in his letters that I think needs to be answered.

Death state update

The sentencing of a convicted murder, Khristian Oliver, should be an embarrassment to the state of Texas; the jurors consulted the Old Testament to see what should be done with him, found a bible verse they liked — “And if he smite him with an instrument of iron, so that he die, he is a murderer: the murderer shall surely be put to death” — and sentenced him to be executed.

Well, that was just fine with Governor Rick Perry. Oliver has been killed. Isn’t it nice to have the importance of biblical morality affirmed for us once again?

My insane weekend

The mild nausea I mentioned earlier? Gone now, it seems to have vanished as soon as I disposed of the wretched rag Answers in Genesis sent me. It’s a good thing, too, because I have a frantic weekend ahead of me.

Today and tomorrow, I’m pounding the keyboard to prepare a couple of talks. At least one I can borrow liberally from the book-in-progress (yeah, I’m still working on that, too).

On Thursday, I’ll be giving a public lecture at Purdue University. I’m cutting it close on this one; my plane gets into Indianapolis a mere 2 hours before the talk, so if I’m late, feel free to leave scurrilous slanders on the blackboard for me. The talk is at 6:00 in the Class of 1950 Lecture Hall Room 224. It should be fun. My trip in is tricky in timing, but afterwards, my time is unrestrained, and I think we’re getting together to shoot the breeze that evening. If you’re somewhere near West Lafayette, Indiana, stop on by.

On Friday, I’ll be at this evo-devo meeting:

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This is not a public event, but a serious science conference with registration fees and all that. It should be fabulous, even if it does have some nattering nobody for a keynote speaker. Expect heavy real-time science blogging all day Saturday and Sunday morning. I might get out for a wild night in Bloomington on Saturday, though, we’ll see.

Finally, on Monday, I’m lowering myself from the glories of real science to a debate with a flaming creationist on the St Paul campus at 7:30pm. Show up! I’m sure the creationists will be trundling in their bible-clutching faithful to boo, even though the subject is nothing about god or religion — it’s simply “Should intelligent design creationism be taught in the schools?” The answer is “no,” if you’re at all confused.

Tuesday I’m sleeping in late. Don’t bother me.

Another of those polls that should be 100%:0%

Atheists are putting up a billboard in Lakeland, Florida that says, “Don’t believe in god? You aren’t alone.” This is, apparently, controversial, and the newspaper article has an accompanying poll.

Does an atheist group have a right to display their own billboard?

Yes  77.7%
No  22.3%

I’d say that’s a really stupid poll question, except that it reveals that 22% of the respondents don’t think a number of their fellow citizens don’t have the same privileges they do.

Apostasy is a crime punishable by death in Islamic countries

Wake up, everyone: Iran is about to execute three men for the crime of atheism…well, specifically, apostasy, rejecting the Islamic faith. The news is not good.

Habibollah Latifi, Ehsan (Esma’il) Fattahian and Sherko Moarefi have all been sentenced to death for “enmity against God” in unconnected cases over the last two years. They are believed to be on death row in a prison in Sanandaj, the provincial capital of Kordestan.

They are also Kurds, so this is also all tangled up in regional politics. One thing you can do right now is fill in a petition to the Iranian government.

Mr Deity brings me solace and hope

To get this, you may want to look at the last episode of Mr Deity, in which Jesse and the Deity struggled with the implications of the trinity — it was hopelessly confusing. This is the blooper reel from the making of that episode.

That was hard. It makes me feel good, though, because these guys are pros…and my little incursion into their world left me impressed with how difficult it is to put together even these shorts.

If they ever put out the bloopers from my episode, though, I’m going to have to cry.

The Deep Rifts simply call us unto the breach once more

I hereby declare this the official theme of the whimpering, pathetic, anti-atheist backlash of 2009: there are Deep Rifts in atheism. It’s all over the place, and it’s a little weird.

YOU would think, wouldn’t you, that one of the principal attractions of atheism would be the complete absence of schisms. Where the devout always seem to be working themselves up into a frenzy over some obscure theological point, non-believers can glide through life, absolved, as they are, of the need to negotiate the terms of their disbelief. If there’s no God, there is no message. And if there’s no message, then there’s nothing much to argue about.

Well, we do have a complete absence of schisms, because we don’t any central dogma or doctrine. I wish this weren’t so difficult for the believers to understand. Each of us has our own, individual goals and follows their unique paths to understanding. Nobody is looking at Paul Kurtz and Christopher Hitchens and saying that they’re so different that they can’t both be atheists. There is no atheist pope, no atheist catechism, no atheist holy book.

And nothing to argue about? Oh, we have and always will have a million things to argue over — it’s just that they tend not to be whether Jesus was of the similar or same substance as God, but instead about real world politics and about ideas that matter. As anybody who has attended a meeting of atheists knows, we love to argue. We’re ordinary human beings in that regard, despite repeated claims by apologists for religion that godless and faithful are different species. Really, when I’m on my deathbed, if my wife wants to keep me going for a little longer, all she has to do is bring in editorials like that by Dani Garavelli, and I’ll cling to life as long as my middle finger and my snarling muscles are still functional.

This Garavelli person is so oblivious to reality, though, it’s the kind of thing to keep me jazzed up for whole minutes.

Despite this, atheism was last week rent by disagreement, proving that the need for petty, internecine squabbling runs deeper in the psyche than the need to find meaning in existence. The question that is dividing its leading proponents is how much they should be evangelising about their lack of faith. Should they adopt a live-and-let-live approach to the religious? Or should they be shouting their atheism from the rooftops in an attempt to get all the blinkered throwbacks to see the light?

Oh, just last week. We’ve been unified, until just then, huh? So Madalyn Murray O’Hair, to name one example, united all atheists under one banner, and no one ever criticized her approach? We’ve been bickering over strategy as long as atheists have been a visible part of the culture; Garavelli is remarkably uninformed if he thinks dissent just popped up last week. One of the things that has provided fuel for discussion on this blog has been constant disagreement with other godless partisans who want the mob to go one way (usually to a more complacent silence) than I want them to go — so we engage in healthy, sometimes ferocious, open argument. So what? This is our strength. We offer competing solutions, and we’ll see in the end which one is most successful.

Go read Ophelia Benson’s discussion of this issue. It ain’t a schism. It’s not something that should provide apologists any solace at all; they should regard us atheists as diverse barbarians who gird themselves for war at birth, and train themselves with a lifetime of fierce strife among themselves and against our weak, whiny foes. It’s our nature to wield a wicked pen and rouse ourselves to rhetorical battle at the flimsiest slight; it should be no comfort to the frightened faitheists and followers of cultie fallacies. They should fear us, instead.

Correcting Ken Ham’s standard omission

I’m feeling a bit nauseous right now. I’m not sure whether I’m coming down with the flu, or whether it was merely the monthly arrival of answers update, the newsletter from Answers in Genesis, which is mainly a catalog selling garish lies.

Anyway, the reason I’m writing this instead of either puking into the ceramic shrine or tossing the rag into the trash is that Ken Ham has pulled his usual stunt of pulling a quote from some godless critic of his “museum” and wrapping a pious sermon around it, without attribution or linkage. In this case, the quote is from someone Ham refers to only as “a secular humanist” or “this secularist”, and here it is:

For me, the most frightening part was the children’s section. It was at this moment that I learned the deepest lesson of my visit to the Museum: It is in the minds and hearts of our children that the battle will be fought; and it is they who will suffer the most because of this.

Helpful fellow that I am, I will give the citation the neglectful fraud ‘forgot’ to make. The quote comes from Patrick of Ann Arbor, Michigan. Congratulations, Patrick! You know you’re doing good when the creationists start using your words in their fundraising!

Everyone should read the rest of his article on the Creation “Museum”, too — it’s the criticism Ken Ham doesn’t want anyone to see, after all.

Now I have to go throw this ugly mag away, and hope my symptoms disappear.