What’s the matter with the United States?

This just isn’t right. The United Kingdom is this small little country way off in Europe, and the United States is this giant powerful country, and they managed to put creationists in their place while we debate about electing them to the presidency. It makes no sense.

Leading scientists and naturalists, including Professor Richard Dawkins and Sir David Attenborough, are claiming a victory over the creationist movement after the government ratified measures that will bar anti-evolution groups from teaching creationism in science classes.

The Department for Education has revised its model funding agreement, allowing the education secretary to withdraw cash from schools that fail to meet strict criteria relating to what they teach. Under the new agreement, funding will be withdrawn for any free school that teaches what it claims are "evidence-based views or theories" that run "contrary to established scientific and/or historical evidence and explanations".

Which reminds me…where are the American Richard Dawkins and David Attenborough, huh? The world just isn’t fair. On the basis of the population difference alone, we ought to have 10 Dawkins/Attenborough equivalents here.

You don’t think…could there be a relationship between a compromised educational system and the shortage of outspoken advocates for science?

(Also on Sb)

And now for something completely different

Here is a page of WWII propaganda, from all sides. It’s weird to see it now with the distance of history making it more remote — it’s easy to judge it now fairly impartially. I have to say, from this sample, that Americans were rather crude and blunt; the Europeans in general had better design sense. And the Italians…whoa, fabulous! On the artistic merits of their propaganda posters, the Italians should definitely have won the war.

Here, for instance, is how the Italian fascists viewed American soldiers:

I’ve seen how US cartoonists caricatured the Germans and Japanese (short answer: full-on racist slander), but it’s eye-opening to see how the same was done to us.

(via Ptak Science Books)

Why I am an atheist – Ellen Rees

Unlike most atheists I have come across, I am an atheist because I am a profoundly irrational person; my life is dominated by narrative, by fictions and lies, performance and artifice. In other words, I am a literary scholar. Two factors shaped my early life: I was raised without early first hand exposure to religion by an artist and a psychology professor who self-identified as atheists, and my extended family concealed a dark secret about my grandmother. Because I was not exposed to religion until the fourth grade, when little friends started trying to “save” me, the Bible stories I encountered struck me as no more believable than any of the many, many other narratives I had been reading. Middle Earth, Wonderland, Oz, Avonlea, Villa Villekulla, the court of King Arthur, and even Narnia had primed me to look upon the Biblical Judea as just another historical fiction.

The fact that no one in my family would tell me why my grandmother had only one leg sparked any number of possible explanations in my overactive imagination, each one embellished until it became a pathos-filled romance of suffering and redemption. This early lesson in my own brain’s ability to speculate wildly illustrates perfectly the psychology of religion and the drive to find unambiguous answers to things that, for various reasons, are beyond our ken. And even when, as a young adult, I was given the “real” answer in the form of newspaper articles describing the incident, it quickly became clear that this “answer” contained yet more unanswerable questions (no one will ever know why my grandmother’s step-father attempted to murder her in a drunken rage, or why he missed and ended up shooting her in the knee). I am a relativist through and through, largely at ease with ambiguity. Science per se has almost nothing to do with my atheism.

Ellen Rees
Norway

A fabulous strategy for annoying fundagelicals and conservatives

I remember discovering Laci Green on YouTube several years ago — she was a great advocate for unabashed atheism. She still is, but she’s discovered a very effective way to piss off the Christians: by speaking frankly and truthfully about sex. Here’s her latest example, which just cheerfully explains the clitoris…and managed to throw a few prudes into censorious hysterics.

(via Camels With Hammers.)

Unleash the Kraken on Peter G. Palumbo!

Palumbo is a Rhode Island representative; he just called one of his constituents, Jessica Ahlquist, an “evil little thing” who was “being coerced by evil people”. I think he needs to apologize. No, scratch that; he needs to lose his next election. Contact him! Palumbo’s email address is rep-palumbo@rilin.state.ri.us. His office phone number is (401) 785-2882.

Char Margolis and amazing powers

Char Margolis is one of those ditzy book-peddling Newagers who claims to have psychic powers and can see spirits and auras and crap like that. She appeared on WGN, and tried to “read” one of the news hosts. Watch as she pulls the boring John Edward bullshit (“I see an ‘M’ or a ‘J'”…jeebus, do ghosts all wander around in the afterlife wearing monogrammed smoking jackets or something?) and belly-flops ignominiously.

But the title of this post promised amazing powers, you say. I didn’t say whose, and they sure aren’t Char’s. I was really impressed with the news host Larry, though, who demonstrated the amazing powers of skepticism, coming right out and telling Char, “you failed!” I was less impressed with the woman who tried to make excuses for her.

That’s what I’d like to see more of, though: interviewers who can come right out and do a Johnny Carson and call the fakes fakes.

Well, aren’t we an optimistic bunch?

First we had Steven Pinker writing about The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, with the thesis that we’re getting more peaceful over time.

Now John Horgan has declared the potential for The End of War — that we have the ability to stop fighting and cooperate.

Horgan makes the point that human nature requires us to fight, and that many people make this fatalistic assumption that it cannot end. It’s a reflection of the usual argument for futility that claims the status quo is thus because it must be so.

It’s also the argument that is made to defend the inevitability of religious belief.

(Also on FtB)

Why I am an atheist – James Willamor

I grew up very active in a conservative Southern Baptist church. I
served in music ministry, set up Vacation Bible School, went on
domestic and international mission trips, took Bible courses at a
Baptist college, and chaperoned youth trips. I truly believed in God
with all my heart, with all my mind, and with all my soul.

I always thought that Christians became atheists because they were mad
a God; that it is an act of rebellion against giving God total control
of their life. The complete opposite happened to me.

I drifted away from the faith for several years because I became
disillusioned with the mingling of right wing politics with the
pulpit, but then I discovered several progressive Christian writers
such as Shane Claiborne and Donald Miller, and I felt a renewed zeal
to study the Bible and pursue my personal relationship with God. It’s
funny that this pursuit of God led to my atheism.

Several years ago I traveled to Japan and China and visited Shinto
shrines and Buddhist temples and it occurred to me that these people
that I was meeting and getting to know have morals and ethics often as
great as or greater than most Christians I know. I read Confucius
Lives Next Door by T.R. Reid and pondered how can so many Asians have
such high moral standards, lower crime rates, strong communities and
families, all without Jesus?

Around this same time, over the span of several years, I began to
learn more about the world around me. When I was little, God was
bigger than I could imagine and there was no truth, no morality
outside God. One day I came across this thought exercise: “If God told
you to kill someone, would you do it?” Of course the answer would be
that God would never ask me to do that. “But if he did tell you, that
it was for the greater good, part of his plan?” I would have to answer
no. My morals would never allow me to take another life. I’m a firm
believer in non-violence and pacifism. At this moment I was almost
shocked to realize what this means: my values go beyond God – go
deeper than God. It is as if God got a little smaller, or the universe
as I know it got a little bigger.

As I studied the Bible more in my quest to grow closer to God, the
more issues with theology I discovered. Perhaps the greatest issue I
had was with salvation, or put simply, “who goes to heaven and who
goes to hell.” If salvation is though faith in Jesus alone, then it is
unjust to condemn those who have never heard the Gospel, and equally
unfair if these people get a “free pass” to heaven while those who, to
varying degrees, have heard the Gospel are judged.

The more and more I learned about the world, the more I disagreed with
the exclusivity of faith in Christ. Somebody who earnestly says a
prayer accepting Jesus, then goes about life as usual, is more
deserving of heaven than a Buddhist monk who dedicates his entire life
to feeding the poor and clothing the needy, and caring for the sick?
After all, Matthew 25 pretty plainly states that those who do “unto
the least of these” are rewarded with heaven and those who selfishly
do not are condemned. How do you reconcile “faith alone” with this
teaching? How does simply saying a prayer supersede this? Maybe just
praying the “Sinner’s prayer” and repenting of sins is not enough.

I thought that perhaps I am a Universalist – that there are many paths
in life and all people will eventually be reconciled to God. But if
this is true, then why is there a need to believe in God anyway?
What’s the difference, as long as I seek to live out the message of
Matthew 25 and seek to “love my neighbor as myself?”

Still, I tried fervently to seek God in spite of growing doubts. I
wanted to believe that he existed. I prayed that he would show me the
way. Lying in bed at night I prayed until I cried, begging that he
would restore my faith. I read more Christian books and studied the
Bible more fervently.

Eventually I accepted what my heart and mind was telling me – there is
not God. It’s not that I didn’t believe in Jesus’ teaching, but that
his divinity and the existence of a God seemed increasingly unlikely
in light of what I was learning about the world around me. I never
stopped believing in the Bible in the sense that it is the greatest
source of moral truth in my life. Jesus’ teachings such as the Sermon
on the Mount and Matthew 25 form the basis of my ethics. I will always
follow my conscience and seek peace, justice, equality for all people
through love.

I guess some Christians will say it is okay – people take many paths
and all people will be reconciled to God eventually. Some will say
that I’ll eventually “come back around.” Some will say that I was
never a Christian to begin with, or that I was not predestined, or
elected, by God. My faith was completely real to me for the better
part of two decades. I was certain that God heard and answered my
prayers. I felt his supernatural presence in still quiet moments of
worship.

But now I realize that it was just a creation of my own mind. I want
to be honest with myself and use reason and logic, not blind faith, to
explore the world. Life as a human being is very precious, and it is
something to be cherished. I want to spend my life creating “heaven”
on earth for the “least of these.”

James Willamor
United States

There is no god

A mighty battle to settle the question once and for all was fought on the playing fields of America today, and a mere mortal, Tom Brady, kicked Jesus’ champion’s ass all over the field 45-10. I think the matter is finally over.

This is what happens when you vaingloriously give your deity responsibility for carrying a stupid little football game: his impotence might be exposed.

Think this is silly? 54% of Republicans believe god is helping Tebow on the field. Jamie Kilstein sets ’em straight.