Jesus, the biologist

Oh, joy…yet another bible-walloping lackwit claiming that god hates gay marriage…and this time he claims to have a biological justification.

“You only have 15 percent of the middle who are hypocrites, who think, Jesus is cool, but I don’t agree with how he defined marriage,” Klingenschmitt said. “When Jesus talks about one flesh, he’s really being a scientist, he’s being a biologist. Because he realizes and he’s articulating simple biology, that when a sperm and an egg form together, they match in a zygote and a new DNA is formed and it becomes one new human flesh.”

“[W]e’re not reading our biology textbooks,” the former chaplain added.

“Which were written by Jesus, as you say,” Pakman pointed out. “Jesus was a biologist.”

“Well, he defined marriage between one man and one women, becoming one zygote, becoming one flesh,” Klingenschmitt insisted. “And that’s the only way in the next 100 years that humans are going to be able to procreate. If you get two men together and they mate, they’re not going to have a baby. If you get three women and a dog together, and they all mate together, they’re not going to have a baby.”

Wait, wait there. I can read Matthew 19 just as well as Satan can, and that’s where he claims Jesus is discussing biology. Here’s the relevant passage:

And he answered and said unto them, Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female,

And said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh?

Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.

Jesus is talking about the man and woman becoming “one flesh”, not sperm and egg. He also doesn’t mention zygote even once.

He’s not describing fertilization at all. That’s the plot of The Human Centipede!

#HumanistSolidarity with Bangladesh

The International Humanist and Ethical Union has issued a call to action on the Bangladesh situation. It’s gotten worse than I thought.

bangladesh-anti-atheist-protest

Islamist political parties have provided government with a list of 84 "atheist bloggers" and are demanding the death penalty for "insulting religion". Several bloggers have already been arrested and a government official promised to pursue all those listed.

Crowd at Islamist rally against atheist bloggers in Bangladesh

Last week, we said the government would be "walking into a trap set by fundamentalists" if they gave any succour to these demands. But they did. And on Friday a rally on the order of 100,000 Islamists marched in Dhaka (video) calling for a new blasphemy law and for the execution of the atheist bloggers. Earlier this year a prominent atheist blogger was murdered in a machete attack at his home, so we are also concerned about the safety in public of those accused of "blasphemy".

So there’s something else that would disappear in a world without gods.

It’s a call to action; so what are we supposed to do?

They have four simple suggestions: express your dissent online (I know you can do that!), rally and protest, contact your ambassador to Bangladesh and express your concerns, and contact the Bangladeshi embassy. They have suggestions at the link for how to do that.

You know, it’s getting very hard to argue that atheism is not a human rights issue when people are being jailed and murdered for expressing their conscientious beliefs.

I had a vision last night. A vision of a world without gods.

I went on a twitter rampage last night. It was just too much: a day of incessant bland dumb Mormon bleating at me, then the skeptics once again expressed their contempt for atheism (more about that later), followed by a parade of stereotypes about us awful atheists, who are unlike our skeptical brethren in hating our religious family members and coming to our conclusions by irrational means and being just generally dumb and average, they say. It was exceptionally irritating to once again see people who should be allies sweeping atheist concerns aside with an air of smug superiority.

Oh, gosh, so that’s what it feels like for women and minorities…

Anyway, the final straw was DJ Grothe, who, in replying to someone who said they wanted him to pay as much attention to atheist issues as he does gay issues (a point I definitely strongly disagree with: no one gets to dictate what matters to someone else), made the statement that gay concerns are very, very different than atheist concerns, and we shouldn’t conflate the two. Again, a point I agree with 100%.

But then he had to take a step too far and suggest that atheists don’t even have clearly definable goals. He asked, “What would winning look like?”, as if we lacked any kind of vision at all.

You know, all I have to do is look at all the aggravations, great and small, petty and significant, that are caused by the overwhelming privileges given to the religious in this country, and I can see clearly a lot of things that would improve if faith were kicked off its undeserved pedestal.

So I buried poor DJ for about an hour, just riffing on how life would be different if religion weren’t so oppressively dominant. I probably drove off a few twitter followers, but hey, it was so easy…and I could have kept going for a few more hours. You should feel free to add your own to this list.

  • You want a list?

  • Atheists could get elected to high office.

  • Piety wouldn’t be a qualification for high office.

  • Our kids wouldn’t be bullied because they don’t attend church.

  • Idiots wouldn’t be defining public policy by its conformity to the Bible.

  • Our schools wouldn’t be silent on “controversial” topics like evolution.

  • America wouldn’t be launching crusades against the foreign heathen.

  • Women could get abortions when they needed them.

  • There would be rational, evidence-based sex education in the schools, rather than religiously dictated abstinence only.

  • Nor did I say they would be. RT @DJGrothe: Wouldn’t be similar. Atheists not in a struggle for liberation equal to oppressed minorities

  • Huge chunks of every community’s tax base wouldn’t be stolen to support lies.

  • .@DJGrothe You asked what winning would look like for atheists. I’m telling you. I’m not saying it would be the same as gay rights.

  • My car wouldn’t be keyed if I had a darwin fish on the bumper.

  • Environmental policy wouldn’t be shaped by people who believe the world is going to end in their lifetimes.

  • Neither would foreign affairs or military policy.

  • Maybe the arts would be as well funded as religion.

  • I wouldn’t have public chimes installed down the street that blare hymns at me every 15 minutes.

  • And a city council that considers enforcing a noise ordinance sacrilegious.

  • The local high school would stop bringing in anti-gay, anti-drug, up-with-god groups for assemblies.

  • I agree it was false. You’ve said we can have different goals. I’m explaining them. RT @DJGrothe: I just pointed out the false equivalence

  • Women wouldn’t be forced to wear the burqa.

  • Women wouldn’t be executed for “immodesty”. Honor killings would end.

  • Condoms would be distributed in Africa. Everywhere, for that matter.

  • Victims of disease & accident would be seen as victims of chance, not stigmatized as sinners.

  • Churches would close. Not all of them, but enough to be replaced with *real* community services.

  • 46% of the American population wouldn’t believe the earth is less than 6000 years old.

  • No more war on Christmas! Secular holidays that prioritize families and people, not sterile rituals and dogma.

  • Institutions that shelter child rapists would be dismantled.

  • We could have death with dignity.

  • Puritans wouldn’t be dictating our sexual relationships.

  • A Baptist could marry a Lutheran or a Jew a Catholic, and their families wouldn’t freak out.

  • Children wouldn’t be labeled by their parent’s irrational beliefs. They wouldn’t be pigeonholed at birth.

  • The science section in your local bookstore might be as big as the faith and religion section.

  • I would stop getting email that contains litanies of my post-mortem torture.

  • Children wouldn’t die in agony because their parents believe in faith healing.

  • Scoundrels and charlatans would have a harder time fleecing their flocks without god’s imprimatur.

  • We’ll recognize that our fate is in our hands, not some invisible benign being’s.

  • We wouldn’t have to put up with football players claiming the Almighty Lord of the Universe helped them get that goal.

  • The Gideons would be handing out real literature rather than the same dumb book over and over. They’d promote literacy, not faith.

  • No more bible colleges. Liberty University would close. Young people would have to get real educations.

  • We’d see ourselves as one tiny fragile speck in a vast universe, rather than the privileged focus of all creation.

  • Humans would no longer see themselves as the only important organisms on the planet. We’d have to recognize our place in an ecosystem.

  • An end to god-soaked talk radio!

  • Imagine Republicans no longer able to swaddle themselves in God and Country…just Country.

  • We’d expand stem cell research — no more pretense that a blastocyst was a full human being…or had the same rights as a woman bearing it.

  • The God Particle would just be called the Higgs Boson.

  • Priests & other believers wouldn’t be haunting the sick & dying in our hospitals any more.

  • Theology would be as dead as alchemy. It would be replaced with history, anthropology, psychology, sociology…real disciplines.

  • We’d no longer pretend that memorizing the Bible was a fit qualification for counseling unhappy people.

  • Priests would finally be free of the need for pretense. They could be people again, and serve in secular ways.

  • Marriage wouldn’t be a prison, but a partnership that could be dissolved without guilt, or maintained by mutual respect and love.

  • We could question EVERYTHING. End religious shibboleths.

  • Religiosity would no longer be a shortcut to morality. People would actually have to BE good, to be regarded as good.

  • No more consoling the grieving by telling them lies. No more fear-mongering with stories of hell.

  • Donating money to a church would no longer be considered charity. How about donating to a real charity instead?

  • Mormons would have to wake up to the fact that their history is bullshit.

  • Goodbye, missionaries. Hello, secular aid.

  • Televangelists would be scorned as scoundrels.

  • All those poor sad priests would have their vows of celibacy lifted. And there will be rejoicing. By the priests, at least.

  • Pope: fired. Vatican: turned into a really great museum.

  • Islamists would stop killing apostates. Authors and comic artists could live free again.

  • Ultra-orthodox Jews would stop spitting on little girls. Liberal Jews would stop mutilating little boys’ penises (so would everyone else).

  • Religious butchers could stop torturing animals in the name of halal and kosher foods.

  • The ordination of women priests would become a moot point.

  • The ordination of gay priests would become a moot point.

  • The shortage of Catholic priests would no longer be of any concern.

  • We would at last recognize that Timothy Dolan has absolutely no qualifications to be consulted on matters of public policy.

  • Ditto, Rick Warren.

  • We could admire churches for their architecture, rather than deplore them as centers of oppression.

  • No more madrassas. No more replacing knowledge & understanding with rote memorization of dogma.

  • “Tradition” is no longer sufficient reason to keep doing stupid things.

  • No one sensible will try to claim the Ten Commandments are a fit foundation for jurisprudence.

  • Atheist organizations will shut down, their job done.

  • Writing lists of how good life would be without God will be as silly as writing lists of how good life would be without ghosts.

Small things, big things. It’s only when you stop for a moment to think about it that you realize how much faith-based noise we’re drowning in here in the US. I don’t have a god-shaped hole in my heart as much as I do a huge amount of Jesus-shaped deadweight piled on my shoulders.

A vivid demonstration of white privilege

Most racism isn’t represented by a redneck screaming racist slurs from his pickup truck. It’s the casual demeaning of the importance of “other people’s” problems (Heck, even using the word “other” in that context is a problem.) It’s about letting stereotypes dictate your response to a person, not even necessarily negatively.

You really have to watch this video of a rough experiment in human behavior: white kid trying to break a bike lock, passers-by assume he’s got a legitimate reason; black kid doing the same, shouting and cell phones and calls to the police.

It’s fascinating. Although I’ve got to say that one flaw in the experiment is the time it took the kid to fail to get the lock off…with the amazing array of tools he has in his bag, I would have been off with that bike in 10 seconds flat, so I was wondering why their experimental accomplice was so incompetent.

This is just disgusting and wrong

This cocktail, called “The Kraken” by its purveyors at the Whitehouse-Crawford restaurant in Walla Walla, WA, is one of the worst abominations I’ve ever seen.

The Kraken

Here’s the description by the restaurateurs:

spicy, dirty vodka martini with tentacles

In other words, they take an innocent little cephalopod and mercilessly plunk it into a so-called “martini” made with [shudder] vodka, instead of with gin as is right and proper.

Truly these are dark times in which we live. I weep for our species. With dry, delicious, juniper-scented tears.

Sent along by a regular whose name I won’t share because of the whole “outing by locality” issue. (But thanks, and feel free to ‘fess up in comments if you like.)

The dark side of open access journals?

The New York Times has an article on the rise of predatory, fake science journals — these are journals put out by commercial interests with titles that sound vaguely like the real thing, but are not legitimate in any sense of the word. They exist only for the resource that open access publishing also uses, the dreaded page charge. PLoS (a good science journal), for instance, covers their publishing costs by charging authors $1350; these parasitic publishers see that as easy money, and put up cheap web-based “journals”, draw in contributors, and then charge the scientists for publishing, often without announcing the page charges up front, and often charging much, much more than PLoS.

Nature has also weighed in on problematic journals, again emphasizing that it’s a bad side of open access. I think that’s the wrong angle; open access is great, this is a downside of the ease of web-based publishing, and is also a side-effect of the less than stellar transparency of accreditation of journals. There are companies that compile references to legitimate journals, and they are policing the publishing arena by refusing to index fake journals, but that isn’t going to be obvious to the reader.

One really useful resource, though, is this list of potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access journals. I notice that our old friend, The Journal of Cosmology, is listed, deservedly (I wonder if Jeffrey Beall, the author of the list, has had his face photoshopped onto pictures of obese women in bikinis as a reward?) It’s missing De Novo, the fake journal created by Melba Ketchum specifically to publish her Yeti DNA paper — but maybe that one isn’t threatening to sucker in authors, since it’s more of a vanity project.

I also notice that the major creationist journals aren’t on the list: Acts&Facts, the Answers Research Journal, and BIO-Complexity. Maybe it’s because they’re real journals?

Ha ha ha ha. Sorry, couldn’t resist. Scientist humor.

Maybe it’s because they’re so obviously fake and associated with such blatant ideological nonsense that no real scientist would be tempted to publish there.

Yet another case of anti-atheist discrimination in Tacoma

The incredibly talented and pleasant Shelley Segal is going to appear in Tacoma, Washington! You should go, every time I’ve heard her I’ve enjoyed it. Only thing is, the venue that was originally booked suddenly pulled out (at least this one gave advance notice!)

We had originally booked a coffee and ale shop called Anthem in the middle of downtown Tacoma. It was a new venue (for us), the staff was incredibly friendly, and it looked like the perfect all ages venue for a show like this. We discussed doing the event there, and they were on board.

That fell apart this morning, when I received an email from the booking folks. It was a polite, professional email, but the intent was very clear. I’ll quote the relevant part:

This isn’t something that we feel comfortable promoting or hosting because it doesn’t align with what we believe and stand for.

Anthem Beverage & Bistro, Tacoma

Additionally, the CC field included an address at “Eternity Bible College,” something that wasn’t in the original thread. So, we we’ve been booted from the venue, and they wanted us to know why.

Man, Christianity ruins everything, doesn’t it? Strangely the coffeeshop has a statement of vision and values that nowhere mentions obedience to fundagelical bullshit, and instead babbles about “integrity” and “community” and stuff that the atheist community also values…but apparently they’re all talk, no action.

They have a yelp page, but since they did at least give the organizers a little time to find a new venue and didn’t pocket any profits, they aren’t quite as vile as Oklahoma Joe’s. You might drop a note there about their hidden Christian agenda, though.

What you should definitely do, though, is give your custom to Doyle’s Public House, the new venue. You should especially go there this Sunday, 14 April, at 5pm to see Shelley Segal in a free show!