If Dr. Phil is a fraudulent hack, is it OK to respect his opinions?

No.

This has been a brief example of easy answers to stupid questions. For the longer version, take a look at Dr. Phil’s recent excursion into JAQing off over rape, where he asked if it’s OK to have sex with a drunk girl.

What’s also awful about that notorious tweet is that his twitter history shows what he’s doing: he’s trolling for story ideas for his ghastly little show. If you think that stupid question was bad, just imagine an hour of folksy Dr Phil trying to sympathize with a rapist who uses drugs to remove women’s ability to deny them.

Remember when TV was called a “vast wasteland”? That was in 1961. They hadn’t seen anything yet. If the FCC had seen Dr Phil coming then, they would have shut down all the networks on the spot.

Hamza Tzortzis can learn

Tzortzis has learned that claiming miraculous knowledge in the Qu’ran has “become an intellectual embarrassment for Muslim apologists”. Progress!

Regrettably, the scientific miracles narrative has become an intellectual embarrassment for Muslim apologists, including myself. A few years ago I took some activists to Ireland to engage with the audience and speakers at the World Atheist Convention. Throughout the convention we had a stall outside the venue and as a result positively engaged with hundreds of atheists, including the popular atheist academics Professor P. Z. Myers and Professor Richard Dawkins.  During our impromptu conversation with Professor Myers we ended up talking about God’s existence and the Divine nature of the Qur’ān. The topic of embryology came up, and Professor Myers being an expert in the field challenged our narrative. He claimed that the Qur’ān did not predate modern scientific conclusions in the field. As a result of posting the video[8] of the engagement on-line we faced a huge intellectual backlash. We received innumerable amounts of emails by Muslims and non-Muslims. The Muslims were confused and had doubts, and the non-Muslims were bemused with the whole approach. Consequently, I decided to compile and write an extensive piece on the Qur’ān and embryology, with the intention to respond to popular and academic contentions.[9] During the process of writing I relied on students and scholars of Islamic thought to verify references and to provide feedback in areas where I had to rely on secondary and tertiary sources. Unfortunately they were not thorough and they seemed to have also relied on trusting other Muslim apologists. When the paper was published it was placed under a microscope by atheist activists.[10] Although they misrepresented some of the points, they raised some significant contentions. I have since removed the paper from my website. In retrospect if this never happened, I probably wouldn’t be writing this essay now. It is all a learning curve and an important part of developing intellectual integrity.

Of course, he now has a new strategy:

  1. The Qur’ān allows multiple and multi-level meanings.

  2. Our understanding of natural phenomena and science changes and improves with time.

  3. The Qur’ān is not inaccurate or wrong.

  4. In the case of any irreconcilable difference between a Qur’ānic assertion and a scientific one, the following must be done:

    • Find meanings within the verse to correlate with the scientific conclusion.

    • If no words can match the scientific conclusion then science is to be improved.

    • Find a non-scientific meaning. The verse itself may be pertaining to non-physical things, such as the unseen, spiritual or existential realities.

#1 and #2 are correct. #3 is assuming what they want to demonstrate. #4 is an exercise in rationalization, and cannot generate new knowledge; it’s an admission that science will drive progress and understanding, while the religious apologists will follow along behind and try to steal the credit.

Don’t you wish you’d chosen UMM?

Now that the academic year is starting, the Star-Tribune puts out a short summary of success at Minnesota colleges. We’ll use it next year to recruit more students.

The University of Minnesota, Morris stands out among the state’s public four-year institutions for generating more grads than expected at a good price. UM-Morris Chancellor Jacquie Johnson attributes that result to a tight-knit, supportive campus culture that allows the nearly 1,800 students to build strong relationships with faculty. One of every three students at Morris is either minority or international in origin. The school’s success with that diverse student population warrants examination and imitation.

Yay, us!

Last refuge of the scoundrel

There is a facebook page called The Patriot Nation, and it’s exactly what you’d expect: people raging against an America that isn’t white. And it is on facebook, so hell no, it’s never going to get taken down, even when it lies.

This is how it lies. The photo on the left, below, is the original, of a woman protesting the Trayvon Martin verdict. It didn’t fit the racist narrative of the goddamn Patriot Nation, though, so they had to do a little blatant photoshop tweaking, and produced the faked photo on the right.

racistphotoshop

These scum are the people who defile the good name of my country, who make me gag and recoil when someone calls anyone a “patriot”. That woman on the left? I’d be proud to call her my fellow American.

I’ve never been to San Diego’s Creationist “Museum”

But at least now I have a photo tour. It’s predictable, and says pretty much the same stuff as the one in Kentucky, or the one in Missouri, or the one in Washington state…they really don’t have any evidence or any story that’s worth sharing in a great big building.

Go read the first page of the Bible. You’ll have the total shebang right there, including the totality of what they’re calling evidence.

Although I do think this one photo is a nice summary of the entirety of bogus creationist logic.

thatsit

Sanal Edamaruku writes about his friend, Narendra Dabholkar

It’s sad reading. Dabholkar was clearly a good man.

Dabholkar was hated by fundamentalists. But, being the peaceful, open-hearted and kind man he was, he was adored and loved by the people. Over the years, his popularity in Maharashtra grew and grew – together with public understanding of the importance of the rationalist fight.

Stories like this make me wonder. We can praise the dead and we can talk about the good he had done, but we don’t hear the conversations of the cowards who shot him in the back, and their defenders. I’d like to see what they have to say, because I’m confident that their words would be even more persuasive of the rightness of Dabholkar’s cause.

Rebecca Watson poisons everything again

That’s the message from this ex-fan of Ender's Game. Her analysis was spot on and wrecked his ability to enjoy Orson Scott Card’s books — which is a good thing. We should learn to read critically.

I can sympathize, though. When I first read Ender’s Game, I’m ashamed to admit that I got sucked in, too — it’s a wonderfully highly polished Mary Sue, which leads a strong character with whom you identify through a series of moral dilemmas in which, in every case, he makes the simplistic, evil choice, with plenty of post hoc rationalizations about why he had to do it. I didn’t realize it until I was half-way through the second book, and it sunk in…”wait a minute…he committed genocide and now I’m reading a long story in which he wallows in self-pity?”

I also learned something new. There are 15 books in the Ender’s Game series. Jeez, the man is milking it.

Manitobans are getting busy

Our neighbors to the North are getting out and doing stuff throughout September. They’re launching the You Are Not Alone! campaign, and doing this fancy outreach stuff.

The Humanists, Atheists & Agnostics of Manitoba (HAAM) are having so many good events coming up that we’ve decided to call it the “You Are Not Alone” campaign. It’s “Super Secular September” in Manitoba.

In brief:

– This weekend our booth will be out at the Morden Corn & Apple festival (very bible-belt area of Manitoba) doing outreach.
– Winnipeg transit will run our external bus ads starting September 2.
– Manyfest, another festival in Winnipeg on September 7/8. Outreach again.
– We’re sponsoring a talk on behalf of “Dying with Dignity Canada” on September 10th
– Fourth annual Skepticamp on September 14
– Our regular September meeting on September 21

I imagine they’ll get a few double-takes at the Morden Corn & Apple Festival, which is exactly why atheists ought to do more of that sort of thing.

Ray Comfort sinks to new depths of pathos

So Ray cobbled together some heavily edited footage of people answering questions he asked, called it a “movie”, and is promoting it on the internet. I’ve seen it; it’s a terrible piece of dreck, and yeah, he lies. I’ve been over this a few times before, but I gave him evidence for evolution, and he just cut it right out of the footage since it didn’t fit his claims.

Now he’s got a new strategy for promoting it: he’s taunting Richard Dawkins to “Come out of Hiding”. It’s bizarre. Dawkins wasn’t in the “movie”, he had nothing to do with the “movie”, and Comfort is just trying desperately to attach a big name to his lazy piece of crap. You know, I have some home movies of my kids; I think I’ll try to peddle them as quality entertainment on the internet by telling Brad Pitt and Angeline Jolie to quit hiding from the superiority of my family and give me a testimonial.

A number of people have demanded that Comfort release the unedited raw footage so we can see how dishonestly he mangled people’s words. He’s refused. Or rather, he’s now attached conditions: he wants people to pay him for the full video recordings.

American Atheists Inc., have demanded that unedited footage be released, which they believe will show a USC professor giving scientific evidence for evolution. Comfort says that the USC professor didn’t give any, but that he is willing to release the interview if Dawkins pays the same amount he required for a debate with Comfort (payable to the Salvation Army). “I offered him $20,000 to debate me, and he said he would, if I gave his foundation $100,000. He knew that I wouldn’t go that high, so we produced the movie instead.”

Greedy lowlife. Recall that Richard Dawkins produced a documentary, The Root of All Evil?, in which he interviewed various religious figures, which of course had to be edited for brevity. Afterwards he released the full footage of the interviews, freely, so that there could be no argument that he’d edited them dishonestly.

Ray Comfort can make no such claim.

By the way, the article about taunting Dawkins is a disgraceful bit of creationist propaganda, but it’s posted on CNN…as something called an “iReport”, which has a disclaimer that it is not vetted by CNN. What does it take to get on there? Given that apparent creationists get a slot, the bar to entry must be really low.