The NCSE has opened a new front in their war on bad science!
Episode CCXCI: Maybe the Puritans weren’t all bad.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
The NCSE has opened a new front in their war on bad science!
Episode CCXCI: Maybe the Puritans weren’t all bad.
A talk on Sharia law and human rights was about to begin at Queen Mary, University London, when someone made an announcement.
Five minutes before the talk was due to start a man burst into the room holding a camera phone and for some seconds stood filming the faces of all those in the room. He shouted ‘listen up all of you, I am recording this, I have your faces on film now, and I know where some of you live’, at that moment he aggressively pushed the phone in someone’s face and then said ‘and if I hear that anything is said against the holy Prophet Muhammad, I will hunt you down.’ He then left the room and two members of the audience applauded.
The same man then began filming the faces of Society members in the foyer and threatening to hunt them down if anything was said about Muhammad, he added that he knew where they lived and would murder them and their families. On leaving the building, he joined a large group of men, seemingly there to support him. We were told by security to stay in the Lecture Theatre for our own safety. On arriving back in the room I became aware that the doors that opened to the outside were still open and that people were still coming in. Several eye witnesses reported that when I was in the foyer a group of men came through the open doors, causing a disruption and making it clear that the room could not be secured. Unfortunately, the lack of security in the lecture theatre meant we and the audience had to leave and a Union representative informed the security that as students’ lives had been threatened there was no way that the talk could go ahead.
This event was supposed to be an opportunity for people of different religions and perspectives to debate, at a university that is supposed to be a beacon of free speech and debate. Only two complaints had been made to the Union prior to the event, and the majority of the Muslim students at the event were incredibly supportive of it going ahead. These threats were an aggressive assault on freedom of speech and the fact that they led to the cancellation of our talk was severely disappointing for all of the religious and non-religious students in the room who wanted to engage in debate.
Guess what? Cowardly extortion works! The talk was cancelled.
I guess we’re not supposed to say anything against holy Prophet Muhammad, but he didn’t say we couldn’t talk about his benighted followers. So…fuck you, rabid Islamicists. I hope people in the audience snapped open their phones and got pictures of angry ranty threatening guy and his followers, and that the police will be giving them a few lessons in the rule of law and how to live in a civil society real soon.
I’d be furious, too, if someone called me a “fundamentalist Christian”. That’s just sinking too low.
A blogger who characterised anti-porn activist Melinda Tankard Reist as a ”fundamentalist Christian” says she has been asked to apologise – or be sued.
Tankard Reist – who briefed lawyers to warn off liberal blogger Jennifer Wilson – says it’s not being called Christian she objects to, but the claim that she is ”deceptive and duplicitous about her religious beliefs”.
Tankard Reist is apparently some fairly big-name anti-abortion, ant-porn activist in Australia, who is driven at least in part by her conservative religious background…a background she’d really rather nobody brought up. She also doesn’t want to discuss anything with her critics, she wants to use the legal system to silence them instead. Right there she loses all my sympathy.
Her rationale doesn’t hang together very well, either.
The two statements I made that offended Tankard Reist, according to her lawyer’s letter, are 1) I stated she is a Baptist, which he claims in the letter she is not, and 2) that I expressed my opinion that MTR is duplicitious and deceptive about her religion.
I would think that the easiest way to refute point 2 is by addressing point 1 thoroughly, explaining what her religious beliefs are. The fact that she can’t, and that her paper trail shows her to be rather evasive about her beliefs tends to confirm point 2. It’s very strange, too: you’d expect most Christians to be proudly Tebowing to get off the hook. At least, that’s what American Christians would do, maybe Australian Christians have a sense of shame.
Apparently Tankard Reist has been consorting with right-wing religious crusaders for some time. The association is suggestive, if nothing else: she’s been waddling and quacking, and now takes offense when someone says “It’s a duck!” by protesting, “No, I’m not, I’m a … how dare you claim I’m evasive about what I am!”
You know that the must-read post for this week (and it’s only Tuesday!) is Crommunist’s Shuffling feet: a black man’s view on Schroedinger’s Rapist. Who would have thought a black person might resent getting used to excuse sexism?
(By the way, I heard a rumor that Ian will be at the Imagine No Religion conference in May — another reason for you to attend. There will be sensible Canadians there!)
If you throw this question out in China, “why are you an atheist?” in most cases it will be taken as a joke. This is also perhaps the only thing that the communist Party has done right to this country, that is, to seed a strong scientific spirit in China’s education system, but which doesn’t by any means excuse its brainwashing of Chinese students with Marxism and Maoism. Sadly rumor has it that Christianity is growing rampantly in China, which I suppose is due in large part to the fact that the majority of Chinese are suffering, a topic that I should spare for the thesis here. Had I grown up in a religious environment, I barely think I could break free from this sort of ideological slavery. For this reason, I always keep an extra piece of respect for the atheists in western countries, now and in history.
I came to the States three years ago as a newly college graduate, with a thirst for higher education from American universities, something I had always been dreaming of attending. My first stop was the University of Minnesota, which really didn’t disappoint me with its strong research background. In retrospective, what was sort of disappointing was that University of Minnesota is in Minnesota, a place filled with “harassing” Christians of assorted denominations.
My first clue was the ceaseless invitations from numerous churches to participate in their friendship meals. Considering that China has gone not too far away from its once massive poverty, enticing Chinese students with food is indeed a good strategy. I myself fell for many times, but every time I had to eat with prayers and preaching, which indeed undermined the flavor of the already-not-as-good-as-Chinese American food. There were some other churches taking a less confrontational way. They formed “volunteer” organizations to help Chinese students in settling down such as airport pickup and provision of free furniture, but none of their activities didn’t wind up with Jesus.
Believe it or not, back then I was not as of new atheism as I am today. For one thing, I had never heard of PZ Myzer. Candidly, I had no inkling what was really going on in Christianity, although I might have been under a vague—but, of course, illusorily mistaken—impression that Christianity leads Americans to behave. As a person (a to-be scientist!) curious about almost everything, I couldn’t help but explore the intriguing question “in such an era in which almost everything can be reasonably explained by science, why people are still believing in nonsense?”
I thereby accepted many of those invitations—again, partly for the meals. I went to church on an almost weekly basis, which perhaps outperformed most Christian peers, and I attended quite a few bible studies. My best friend was an American Lutheran, who doubted evolution because scientists haven’t figured out the origin of life yet, which, translated in our words, means because evolution conflicts with the literal version of Bible. And I even had an American grandpa, who was, to cite his own words, “still open about whether the earth is 6,000 thousand years old or billions,” under which circumstance, I rarely bothered to spell out the number 4.6.
Looking back, along the years of intensive interactions with Christianity, I did grow in my knowledge of what a thing it really is, thanks to both the repulsive content of their holy book and, more importantly, all the speeches, debates, blogs, books by those outspoken, heroic atheists whose names are too familiar to be mentioned here. It may sound a bit implausible that a person from the far East has joined in this New Atheism movement, but I did turned from a mere listener to now a brave—brave in the sense of in a foreign country—refuter whenever I hear nonsensical religious ramblings.
I am an atheist partly because of the environment in which I grew up, but more because of the fact that, even though physicists haven’t figured out how the universe begun, posing creators does not answer any questions whatsoever, let alone a monstrous one as the Judeo-Christian god.
More excitedly, atheism has become such an important part of my life. I will continue combating religious doctrines, as should all atheists, for protecting our lovely and innocent kids. My resolve has been especially reinforced upon seeing Hitchens’s special care for a nice-year-olds in this latest reception of the Richard Dawkins Freethinker of the Year Award. The contrast between the dying hero and his attempt to list suitable reading material for a thriving young mind is exceedingly heartwarming and stimulating.
I could go on and on, but let me stop here. One last point, let us atheists help those personal faiths be kept personal.
Fred Young
China and United States
All you professors out there know the existential dread associated with the start of a new term — you’ve only just now cleared away most of the accumulated drudgery of the last term, and now here comes a new one, with all of the work associated with that. And you’re sitting there now with your sets of syllabi, each with dates locked in that represent fresh inundations of exams to grade and papers to read. You’re standing on the shore looking out at the maelstrom, bracing yourself to swim into the heart of it, where you will be buffeted and swirled about and at the end of it, spat out onto another shore to face another in the next term.
And my special horror is that I’m teaching a brand new course this term: 3 new lectures to develop each week, mad scrambling in between to grasp the new ideas in the scientific literature. It’s madness. What was I thinking when I agreed to this? Was I strung out on reefer? Blasé in decadent insolence, my mind half-lost in absinthe-fueled dreams? Or manic on meth, so confident in my drug-induced megalomania that I casually agreed to conquer everything? I’m going to be a gibbering wreck come May and sweet relief.
Oh, well. I’ve survived 37 semesters like this one so far; I’ll make it through another one.
Probably.
I think. It could be the psychosis talking.
It’s easy. You’re one of us if every time you hear the tune, “It’s a long way to Tipperary”, you hear the lyrics as, “It’s a long way from…”
Now you have to sing the rest of the chorus.
(Also on Sb)
This isn’t the first time I’ve seen a Christian give a series of stupid “proofs” that his religion is the One True Faith, but it never fails to surprise me. They’re always so blindly oblivious, and they always say exactly the same things. So here’s Ken Ham, answering a child’s question, “How Do We Know Other Religions Aren’t True?”, in one crazily breathless paragraph.
No religion other than Christianity has a book like the Bible that tells us about the origin of everything, and who we are, where we came from [The Analects, the Bhagavad Gita, the Koran, the Talmud, the Tao-te-ching, the Upanishads, and the Vedas are all books that lay down a code of ethics, make assumptions or explanations about the nature of the universe, and in many (but not all) cases explain the origins of everything. This is pretty much what holy books do], what our problem is (sin), and what the solution to our sin problem is[Other religions have different systems of ethics; each one is unique. The question isn’t which one is different, because they all are, but which one is true]. No other religion has a Savior who is alive (He rose from the dead)[Dead gods that rise again are dime-a-dozen; it’s a common theme in seasonal/agricultural deities]. All other religions require people to do something to work out their future—only Christianity has the solution that we can’t save ourselves, only God can do it[Again, that some interpretations of Christianity have this weirdly psychopathic and nihilistic delusion does not make them true, only different]. So how can we know if other religions aren’t true? Well, if they don’t agree with the Bible they are not true![Circularity!] There are two main tests I want you to use though. First of all, any religion that claims to be true MUST believe that Jesus is God![More exclamation marks does not make it truer!] Remember, Jesus Himself told us that He and the Father are one. Many religions talk about God a lot . . . but if they don’t believe in Jesus and that He is God, and they don’t believe that Jesus’ death on the cross and His Resurrection results in our sin being forgiven if we will receive it, then it is not the truth![OK, this is just silly. Saying over and over again that your religion is true because your religion says it is true does not make it true. They all say that.] The other test is to find out if they believe that salvation is given to those who trust in Jesus. There is nothing you can do to save yourself. We could never do enough good works to get us to heaven, but Jesus did it when He died for us![This villainous attitude that living life in a virtuous and worthy way is futile is one of the reasons I despise Christianity, but that’s irrelevant, too. Restating the dogma of your faith is not a way to argue for its truth] Jesus Christ is the way, the truth, and the life.[Yeah? Prove it.]
You know, I have this crazy idea that if you’re going to say that something is objectively true, you ought to have some source of evidence external to the something; otherwise it’s just hamster-wheel logic. Internal consistency would also be nice (Christianity doesn’t even have that), and some kind of empirical way of validating truth claims is kind of essential. The wackos at Answers in Genesis even have some vague understanding that those are good ideas, since that’s the whole raison d’etre of creationism, is to contrive the appearance of having evidence for their beliefs. If that weren’t the case, they could just declare Noah’s Flood a miracle, an event and its associated consequences that were conjured together by an omnipotent being, free of our restrictions of cause and effect and evidence and even contrary to reason, and not fuss over their fallacious rationalizations.
But this whole business of responding to evidence for the truth of claim X by simply repeating claim X endlessly…it’s stupid. Maybe it works as a kind of brute-force psychological hammer when abusing the mind of an 8-year-old, but as an example of rational thought, it falls flat.
Along with SOPA and PIPA, our government is contemplating another acronym with deplorable consequences for the free dissemination of information: RWA, the Research Works Act. This is a bill to, it says, “ensure the continued publication and integrity of peer-reviewed research works by the private sector”, where the important phrase is “private sector” — it’s purpose is to guarantee that for-profit corporations retain control over the publication of scientific information. Here are the restrictions it would impose:
No Federal agency may adopt, implement, maintain, continue, or otherwise engage in any policy, program, or other activity that–
(1) causes, permits, or authorizes network dissemination of any private-sector research work without the prior consent of the publisher of such work; or
(2) requires that any actual or prospective author, or the employer of such an actual or prospective author, assent to network dissemination of a private-sector research work.
This is a blatant attempt to invalidate the NIH’s requirement that taxpayer-funded research be made publicly available. The internet was initially developed to allow researchers to easily share information…and that’s precisely the function this bill is intended to cripple.
Who could possibly support such a bill? Not the scientists, that’s for sure; and definitely not the public, unless we keep them as ignorant as possible. The corporations who love this bill are the commercial publishers who profit mightily from scientists’ work. And first among these is Elsevier, the gouging publisher scientists love to hate.
If passed, the Research Works Act (RWA) would prohibit the NIH’s public access policy and anything similar enacted by other federal agencies, locking publicly funded research behind paywalls. The result would be an ethical disaster: preventable deaths in developing countries, and an incalculable loss for science in the USA and worldwide. The only winners would be publishing corporations such as Elsevier (£724m profits on revenues of £2b in 2010 – an astounding 36% of revenue taken as profit).
Since Elsevier’s obscene additional profits would be drained from America to the company’s base in the Netherlands if this bill were enacted, what kind of American politician would support it? The RWA is co-sponsored by Darrell Issa (Republican, California) and Carolyn B. Maloney (Democrat, New York). In the 2012 election cycle, Elsevier and its senior executives made 31 donations to representatives: of these, two went to Issa and 12 to Maloney, including the largest individual contribution.
So Elsevier bought a couple of politicians to get their way. It’s typical unscrupulous behavior from this company; at least they stopped organizing arms trade fairs a few years ago, so we know their evil can be checked by sufficiently loud public opinion.
Tell your representatives to kill RWA. It’s another bill to benefit corporations that will harm science.
(Also on Sb)
The same station that ran the interview with Peter Palumbo calling Jessica Ahlquist an “evil little thing” and has also called her a “trained seal”* is now trying to salvage some vindication from the ugly affair with an internet poll. It isn’t working. JT and Twitter and Reddit have been pounding on it for a while, but I think we can take a moment to splatter it a little more.
Do you support the Judge’s decision to remove the Cranston Prayer Banner?
Yes 91%
No 9%
*The person who made that comment was the author of the prayer…who, ironically, also claimed that at her age Ahlquist could not possibly be mature enough at 15 to have independently opposed the prayer. He wrote it when he was a 7th grader, about 13 years old.
