I don’t know how to tell you guys this, but I’m abandoning my blogging duties today to hit up museums. I’m off to the TELUS Spark this morning, and then to the Royal Tyrrell Museum. You’ll all have to entertain yourselves for a bit.
Oh, yeah, then I have to give a lecture tonight. Busy busy.
I am an atheist because I no longer blindly accept what people tell me. I used to be a conservative, practically fundamentalist, Christian. I was raised that way and never thought to question it. Then I started blogging. I made a Christian blog and arrogantly thought that I could convert the world. I ended up meeting a whole host of people who believed differently than I did, but the really crazy thing was that they weren’t demonic or evil the way my pastor always depicted them! Once I realized that they really were just people like me, I began to question everything I’d ever been taught. It took me two long and painful years to finally accept what I’d come to know – there is no God.
Mandi Ottaway
United States
Nothing. Nothing at all.
The ICR is a young earth creationist organization; we know they’re a bunch of anti-scientific loons. The Discovery Institute claims to be pursuing an “evidence-based scientific theory about life’s origins”. So why is the DI echoing the ICR’s totally bogus claim that 30% of the Gorilla Genome Contradicts the Supposed Evolutionary Phylogeny of Humans and Apes?
The bottom line is that the gorilla genome has confirmed that there is not a consistent story of common ancestry coming from the genomes of the great apes and humans. Hundreds of millions of base pairs in the gorilla genome conflict with the supposed phylogeny of great apes and humans. They might think their explanation salvages common ancestry, but clearly the gorilla genome data badly messes up the supposedly nice, neat, tidy arguments which they use to claim humans are related to the great-apes.
That’s breathtakingly wrong. I’ve already explained that incomplete lineage sorting is an expected outcome of evolutionary theory (see also Joe Felsenstein’s complementary explanation of the same phenomenon). There is a consistent explanation; coalescence does not represent a conflict with the phylogeny; the gorilla genome data does not mess up any arguments of common descent. That the Discovery Institute will so baldly mangle the evidence and distort its conclusions shows how dishonest or incompetent the organization is.
The article is by Casey Luskin, which does tilt the interpretation in the direction of incompetence. What a clown.
I’m about to board a plane to Calgary, but I want to leave you something positive and uplifting to discuss for the next few hours. So here you go, excerpts from conversations on twitter.
I’m gonna be incommunicado for some time to come. I do so love dropping that kind of bomb on you all.
You’re all invited. You’re not going to break my heart by not showing up, are you?
I hear you can get good beer there.
This is a letter I wrote my aunt in 2007 after she asked why I wanted to take her faith away from her.
Why I am godless.
I don’t understand how perfectly rational, intelligent, kind, and responsible people can believe in a God. It baffles me totally. And I think about it a lot, not like I feel like I am missing anything myself but in wonder at how this belief can be corrected. You know, I wouldn’t trade our family for any other family, I enjoy and love them all and the fact that most have faith saddens me somewhat.
I do not see any god anywhere I look. From the maelstrom of quantum mechanics in particle physics, to the busy chemistry of each living cell, to the beautiful physics of aerodynamics, to the majestic geology of our earth, to the titanic forces in our solar system, to the stupendous forces driving our galaxy and universe… it is all so awesome and beautiful that to attribute any of it to God’s creation is, to me, insufficient. That there are questions and problems with what we understand only makes discovery all that more meaningful. It is all so hugely complex in total, but it all builds upon many simpler things. Evolution is perfect simplicity which builds very slowly into the complex beauty of life we have today. I feel that beauty in my heart much better than I can express in words. Even without the controversies of life and evolution, the complexities of the universe are so much beyond a god, needs no explanation with a god. God is so unnecessary.
I have a saying that has gelled in my mind over the last year or so… Atheism: Natural Morals, Real Meaning, Credible Truth.
Our morals come naturally, someone writing them down and calling them the word of God seems like plagiarism to me. And I think they added in the rules to help control the masses better, or at least to control the women better. It looks to me that our natural morals come from our need to survive, we can’t survive if we are killing each other, we are wired for survival and propagation of the population. Stoning women for adultery seems wrong and it is, it isn’t a natural moral, but the writers of the “messiah’s” words seem to have another motive, valid at the time maybe, probably to help control the population to their benefit. The need to survive and procreate is very simple but a lot of things derive naturally from it. Helping others, kindness to your children, education, it just builds and builds on it. To me it boils down to “relieve and prevent suffering, give pleasure.” If I am doing that in any way, I am being true to my morals.
Real meaning in life also comes from the need to survive and procreate, to do so means we must discover how our world works, adapt, learn, overcome problems, coexist with the individuals of our species, coexist with our world. This is real meaning to me. To worship a deity hoping for a good result when I die doesn’t provide any meaning. The discovery of our world may be the most important and leads us into our future. If we stop, we will stagnate and suffer. I think our species made a mistake creating religions, it is a dead end that we have to back out of to progress on, but maybe it was a lesson we had to learn.
Credible truth, the biggest being that this is it. This is heaven, hell, whatever you make of it. This is your one life. You are only borrowing the atoms you consist of for your sort life time and then they are recycled into the universe to be used again. I am ok with that. It doesn’t scare me. I wish it weren’t so but that is the way of the universe. We are such a small mote in just our galaxy which is a small object in an immense universe. But the meaning of life is to be all that you can be to your family and friends, community, and world. That is a real truth that I can believe in.
Why is this important to me? I see thousands dying monthly, sometimes daily in fighting to the death over what are to me fairy tales. Fighting over essentially worthless land, fighting for what boils down to power. Much of it in the name of their religion. It makes me angry. The war in Iraq has many religious overtones that disturb me. The trillions of dollars this is going to cost us is going to hurt.
I didn’t mean to write this on a Sunday, it just turned out that way, I’ve been busy and I had to compose it some in my mind first. I had a great day yesterday with flying passengers for the 99’s scholarship fundraiser. Allena came over and helped out the ladies. It was one of those things I do that gives real meaning to my life, showing 10 people their world from above.
Tom Hail
United States
State Representative Terry England of Georgia was defending a bill that would completely outlaw all abortions after 20 weeks — even those in which the fetus was already dead, or was so congenitally deformed that it had no hope of living after birth. I can’t quite imagine the logic behind forcing someone you love to go through labor to deliver a corpse, but England tries — and mainly convinces me that dumbass uneducated farmers ought to be barred from positions of responsibility in government.
His argument is this: he’s worked on a farm, and cows and pigs don’t get the benefit of a medical procedure to remove dead calves and piglets — the mares and sows just have to buck up and deliver it. It’s a life experience, don’t you know. And what is a human woman but a breeder sow, hey?
To top it off, he tells a charming little story about a man who indulges in cock-fighting — “salt of the earth”, he says — who offers to give up his flock of fighting birds if only those women could be compelled to have babies.
Think of the sacrifice that man is making, ladies! Think of the chickens! Surely you’ll let such a noble gentleman fill up your bellies with babies, living and dead, and you’ll gladly bear them for him, won’t you?
What is going on here? I provide an open thread for everyone all the time, and that isn’t good enough for some of you…noooooo, you have to go and commandeer another thread altogether and turn it into The Zombie Thread. And then fill it up with…stuff. Unsanctioned, unauthorized, unmonitored stuff.
Well, I know what to do with zombie threads: shoot it in the head. So I did. It’s dead. Now don’t you go resurrecting it, neither.
