DJ Grothe baffles me

His response to Greta throws out several accusations: there exist something called “controversialist” blogs, and their writers have anonymously informed him they’ve been directed to go on the attack by the founders for an “uptick in hits”.

I don’t know of these blogs. Can anyone point me to some?

I can say that there have been no such directions given at Freethoughtblogs, Scienceblogs, the Panda’s Thumb, or any blog I’m associated with.

There other weird things about that comment, but I trust Greta will handle it well; I’m just surprised by this novel conspiracy theory.

Ajita Kamal has died

I am sad to report that Ajita Kamal has died. He was the founder of Nirmukta, and was a leading promoter of science and freethought in India.

Here’s one of his articles that I liked very much.

There is a very important role that anger, ridicule and passion play in any social movement. While intellectual understanding is key to a movement that is well-grounded, it is the primary emotions that provide the impetus for social organization. Without this, atheism would simply remain an idea to be discussed in academia and in private settings.

Let me give you an example. Secular Humanism has been around for more than a century. Humanists often deride the ‘New Atheists’ for their bitterness. In fact, the argument from many humanists has been that their tactics are more effective! But how many people knew about secular humanism before the ‘New Atheists’? Their whole movement was an academic one, restricted to an elite group of people who had the time and inclination for such intellectualisms. While the humanists were debating about human rights and ethics for over a century, atheists continued to remain in the shadows, in a cultural environment where they were unable to realize many of their fundamental rights. The only community that was available to most atheists was society at large. As you may well know, one of the most important functions of religion is to provide a common cultural ground to enable a common morality and social code to bring together people and form a functioning and content community. We atheists did not have this- not until a few years ago. It is easy to ignore the freedoms (from the point of view of social acceptance) we have gained towards expressing our beliefs in public and for gathering in the name of reason. It is easy to forget that millions of atheists crave the kind of social contact that religions have traditionally provided. It is even more easy to forget the role that anger, ridicule and passion have played in creating this global community of freethinkers. Without the ‘new atheists’, secular humanism would have remained irrelevant in the public sphere. Today we can meaningfully talk about replacing religion with a secular morality derived from humanistic principles only because of the social impetus that the ‘New Atheists’ like Dawkins have provided humanity with.

I also recommend this recent article by a group of the Nirmukta writers. He was one of us. We are now diminished.

They’re eating their own!

Holy crap. Watch this anti-Romney campaign ad.

It’s from Newt Gingrich. We have a Rethuglican paying to push a progressive liberal political message on television.

When Romney wins the Republican nomination, can Obama just borrow these ads and run them for his campaign? Or won’t it work because Obama has benefited so much from Wall Street donations?

(via Salon.)

Calvin could do it so much cheaper, with just a cardboard box

The Templeton Foundation has found another way to throw money at universities: they are supporting a study of spirituality in space, whatever that means. The University of Central Florida is getting $300,000 to build a rocketship simulator, in which subjects will apparently sit and go “Ooooooh, aaaah”.

To perform the experiment, they will build a virtual space lab to simulate a space flight with the help of the Bildakt Research Group in Berlin. The simulation will try to replicate those spiritual experiences among astronauts.

The team will also analyze astronauts’ reports using a software program developed at the University of Memphis.

The team’s hypothesis is that the spiritual experiences described by astronauts are primarily caused by the various views of the earth and the vastness of space.

No duh. What are the alternative hypotheses? What results would support or disprove their hypothesis? How are they going to measure “spirituality”? Their proposal sounds murky from this summary, and it also sounds remarkably like they’re going to be looking at natural processes — so why confuse the issue with ambiguous words like “spirit”?

What they don’t realize is that in this project, UCF is the experimental subject, the Templeton Foundation is the experimenter, the $300,000 is the unconditional stimulus, and they are trying to make “spirituality” the conditional stimulus that causes university administrators to start drooling. The only way to succeed is to wake up and realize how they’re being manipulated.

Oh, well. We already know what result they’ll get.

That student from hell

We’ve all had them, but none quite so annoying as the one that afflicted Dr Caitlin Zaloom of the NYU Department of Social and Cultural Analysis. Dr Zaloom gave a simple enough project to her students, to go down to the Occupy Wall Street protestors in Zucotti Park and write an ethnographic analysis. It seems reasonable, but one student, Sara Ackerman, had a melodramatic breakdown over it. She has been ranting at the administration about it, and the emails have been made public.

Professor Caitlin Zaloom forced myself, and my classmates to do an ethnographic assignment on Occupy Wall Street a few months ago.
*No alternatives were offered, and we were instructed to interview only those people who were participating in the OWS movement– that means anyone, including criminals,drug addicts, mentally ill people, and of course, the few competent, mentally stable people that stationed themselves at Zuccotti Park

(**note: I did not meet any of the supposedly mentally sound, non-delusional people at Zucotti Park. All of the interviews that I conducted are on video, and clearly show that each person I interviewed—and believe me, for my own safety, I tried to interview the most seemingly normal people there—was either mentally disturbed or dangerous, scary or masked, or misogynistic and rude. I was cat- called at, gawked at, ogled, and called derogatory names.)

Way to pre-judge your subjects, Sara! Why are you taking a sociology course, again? I really would love to see her videos of the insane lunatics in Zuccotti Park.

Although it went against my core values, moral beliefs, and also made me feel unsafe, I ultimately did go to Occupy Wall Street with my class group—–two other young girls, who are quite attractive and thin, and don’t look particularly physically fit enough to take on a potential predator, rapist, paranoid schizophrenic, etc.—-just to see if I was being as melodramatic as Professor Zaloom made me feel I was.

***I won’t go into detail here, but let me just tell you that if anything, I had previously underestimated how awful Occupy Wall Street was, and I left the park feeling as though I had escaped an extremely dangerous—and even, life-threatening—situation.***

I’m glad Sara at least had the company of two other thin, attractive girls. What a horror it would have been if her classmates had been fat or homely.

Really, these videos had better document overtly criminal behavior, or yes, Sara is being as melodramatic as Professor Zaloom made her feel.

It turns out that the TA for the class, Jen, was also oppressing Sara.

During Jen’s 2nd and 3rd lectures, she mostly refused to call on me, even when Iwas the only student raising my hand.

Other times, I kept my hand up for about 75 seconds—a long time to keep one’s arm raised, by the way —and Jen still did not call on me, or she dismissed my questions, thoughts, and opinions.

Furthermore, when Jen did call on me, she was incredibly hostile, rude, and condescending—she acted in a completely different manner than she had before,and she seemed to change her behavior only towards me.

How dare an instructor not pay attention to Sara for 75 seconds. It must have been like torture.

My favorite part of Sara’s strangely punctuated and formatted rants, though, is this little bit.

Lastly, I have over 1,000 friends on facebook, and if Professor Zaloom does not resign, or is not fired by 9 am tomorrow morning, I will publish every single email exchange we have had, on my facebook account.

Every single email exchange has now been published. They are being posted far and wide. Professor Zaloom still has her job.

Who looks demented now?

(Also on Sb)

Why I am an atheist – Michael Glenister

It’s been an interesting change in perspective for my mother. She was raised Church of England (Protestant) in High Wycombe, England, and remembers, as a child, the first time she met someone who didn’t believe in god. The initial response was to cry. The secondary response was to think: “Convert!”. My Dad was an altar boy as a kid, but his family were not as devout as my mother’s. Irregardless they met, grew up, got married, and then immigrated to Canada.

I was born a couple of years later. By this time my parents, particularly my mother, were no longer as devout as my grandparents and other relatives, and going to church was not a regular part of our lives. However there was a large brass crucifix on the wall of our bedroom hall, I was sent to Sunday School for a while, and remember doing some praying by myself before I went to bed.

I figured out a quite a young age that Santa Claus didn’t make sense, and applaud my parents for being honest with me when I asked. I was also an early reader, thanks to my mother’s efforts, and not long afterward someone (I don’t remember, probably a relative) gave me a large, thick, illustrated, children’s bible. I read the whole thing, cover to cover. It was certainly an entertaining read, but my mother now proudly relates that after I finished reading it, that I concluded the whole thing was nonsense and told her so.

From then on I was an atheist, and so were my parents and younger siblings. In high school we covered the Greek/Roman gods, and read “Inherit the Wind”, which gave me ample opportunity to express my opinions. A female student made my day when her essay was read in class. It included a discussion on Mary and Joseph: “An angel makes Mary pregnant. What kind of excuse is that!? If I came home and told my mother that an angel made me pregnant…”

While studying at UBC in Vancouver, I attended the annual “Does god exist?” debates sponsored by the Campus Crusade for Christ. Usually I was disappointed in the debating abilities of the Con side, and wished that I was a better debater myself. I even heard about David Suzuki attending one and getting angrier and angrier at how the Pro side was misrepresenting science.

Years later I read about Richard Dawkins in Discover magazine, did some research, and started collecting books. Consequently I’m a much better debater and look forward to JW’s knocking on my door so that I can refine my skills. As I Science/Math teacher in high school, I also encourage my students to think for themselves, and not accept things as true because an authority figure – including myself – tells them that it is true without evidence.

Now my parents, particularly my mother, and I enjoy reading Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris, and discussing the ridiculous and irritating things the religious do around the world.

Michael Glenister
Canada

Also, the sharks are smarter than Eric Hovind

The news a few weeks ago was that hybrid sharks had been found off the coast of Australia. They looked like tropical Australian black-tip sharks, but genetic testing revealed that they’d hybridized with the common black-tip, which has a wider range; these hybrid black-tips were similarly extending their range and living in colder waters.

This is an excellent example of evolution: it’s a population shifting its range, correlated with an observation of novel genetic attributes. This is exactly the kind of gradual transition that we’d expect to be compatible with evolutionary theory.

Unless you’re a creationist, of course. Or an idiot. But I repeat myself.

I wonder if they ever considered that when you stand back and look at them, they are all sharks. That means they are the same kind of animal. That is not evolution taking place; there is no changing from one kind of animal into another kind of animal happening here. We started with a shark and now we have a shark. That is not evolution!

That’s Eric Hovind’s take on the story. First of all, “kind” is not a valid taxonomic unit; it makes no sense at all to demand that a “kind” turn into a different “kind” when “kind” is undefined, undefinable, and unmeasurable. What was seen was a population with a measurable change in their genetic characteristics, and a natural mechanism, hybridization, to explain the shift, and a possible selective force, climate change, to drive the process. That’s the science.

Secondly, what does he expect? That a shark would turn into a mouse?

Thirdly, Eric Hovind does not get to define what evolution means. Biologists get to do that. Eric Hovind does not qualify. Eric Hovind has qualifications equivalent to those of his father: he is a “graduate” of Jackson Hole Bible College, an unaccredited and glorified tourist lodge in the Rocky Mountains which offers a one year course leading to a Diploma of Biblical Foundations, whatever the hell that is. That diploma and an application might qualify him for a job at McDonald’s.

Especially since I looked at their class schedule: not one lick of biology, but lots of evangelism, acts of the apostles, church history, prophecy, mangled geology, apologetics, and most importantly of all, “Intro to Finance”.

(Also on Sb)