World Humanist Day is tomorrow

You’d think that after yesterday’s travails, I might finally be home. But no; I’m still in Minneapolis, and am about to spend a day at the Science Museum of Minnesota with a group of students. And then afterwards I’ll go home and sink into blissful unconsciousness.

It’s a good way to prepare for World Humanist Day, don’t you think? There are a lot of other suggestions at that link, but contributing to a museum and talking science with young people is just my thing.

You’ve got until tomorrow to come up with something human to do for yourself. What will it be?

There’s a simple solution to every problem

And it’s usually wrong and makes everything worse. I see that the Baltimore police have a response to a panicky pet. No excuses for the dog; it was lost and apparently a bit frantic, and tried to bite someone.

Nala’s owner, Sarah Gossard, said that her dog “had a collar around its neck with tags, with my phone number. She was just the sweetest dog and would never hurt anyone. She was just scared that day, and through all of those events — being scared and lost, thirsty, hungry — yes I’m very sure that she bit someone, but the actions after that were not OK.”

So what should the police have done? Caught the dog to prevent further harm, sure; maybe even fine the owner for negligence. I can imagine lots of ways to appropriately deal with this real problem. Officer Jeffrey Bolger came up with an innovative solution.

After the dog, named “Nala,” was secured with a dog pole, Officer Jeffrey Bolger approached the dog and slit its throat. According to the charging documents, before cutting Nala’s throat, Bolger yelled, “I am going to fucking gut this thing!”

Oh. So we’re out of the realm of ‘appropriate’, and into the realm of ‘extreme lashing out’. In that case, the proper Bolger response to Bolger ought to be simply putting Officer Jeffrey Bolger down…quickly and humanely, of course, because we aren’t barbarians.

But I guess if we’re going to abide by the law, maybe instead Bolger should be arrested (he was) and fired (not clear if he will be).

I’m just curious why a policer officer was out serving and protecting while carrying a knife suitable for throat-slitting. Is that standard issue in Baltimore?

Why don’t we do this?

The UK has officially prohibited teaching creationism in all government funded schools.

The government released a new set of funding agreements last week including clauses which specifically prohibit pseudoscience.

"The parties acknowledge that clauses 2.43 and 2.44 of the Funding Agreement [which preclude the teaching of pseudoscience and require the teaching of evolution] apply to all academies. They explicitly require that pupils are taught about the theory of evolution, and prevent academy trusts from teaching ‘creationism’ as scientific fact," one clause reads.

The funding agreement defines creationism as "any doctrine or theory which holds that natural biological processes cannot account for the history, diversity, and complexity of life on earth and therefore rejects the scientific theory of evolution," and goes on to note that this idea is rejected not only by the scientific community but most mainstream churches as well.

"It does not accord with the scientific consensus or the very large body of established scientific evidence; nor does it accurately and consistently employ the scientific method, and as such it should not be presented to pupils at the Academy as a scientific theory," the agreement states.

That got me thinking. Here in the US, legislatures are constantly debating creationist bills, all usually the same old ‘strengths and weaknesses’ boilerplate, and the good guys are reduced to playing defense (often successfully, fortunately). Conservatives and creationists are really good at being aggressive in pushing stupid ideas forward.

So where’s our offense?

Why doesn’t someone (hey, NCSE, what you doin’ today?) take the language of the UK resolution, adapt it to have a more American flavor, and get friendly state politicians to propose it? Many politicians, proposing it many times, just like the game the creationists play. It may not get passed the first time through, but persistence works, and having a clear statement of principle can be a great rallying cry.

And don’t tell me you don’t want to antagonize the electorate. That’s timidity that gets us nowhere. Have you ever noticed that the idiots on the right say incredibly stupid stuff all the time, and they still manage to advance their agenda? So why be shy about saying something intelligent?

Yet another reason to refuse to debate William Lane Craig

Because, in addition to being an amoral pseudoscientific dumbass, he doesn’t even believe in the validity of debate himself.

Should a conflict arise between the witness of the Holy Spirit to the fundamental truth of the Christian faith and beliefs based on argument and evidence, then it is the former which must take precedence over the latter. (Reasonable Faith, Third Edition, 48)

There are a whole bunch more quotes there at the link where Craig basically endorses faith as a last-ditch bolthole to dodge any argument based on evidence and reason. So why waste any time on him?

Greg Laden must be another of those creationists

By the criteria of those HBD kooks, anyway. He’s published a take-down of Nicholas Wade’s book in American Scientist, pointing out the familiar scientific consensus that inflames them so.

As soon as it appeared, Wade’s book touched off a firestorm of controversy—as he surely knew it would. It’s the latest in a series of dispatches concerning human variation, whose authors in recent decades have starkly divided into two camps, one centered in anthropology and the other in psychology, political science, and economics. Wade is in the latter camp. The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, a widely read text by psychologist Richard Herrnstein and political scientist Charles Murray in 1994, proclaimed intractable human differences in ability between races; the authors based their views on disputed work published by Canadian psychologist J. Philippe Rushton in the 1980s and early 1990s. Meanwhile, anthropologists had developed a divergent concept of human variation, reaching the collective conclusion that the human species is not compartmentalized in races or subspecies (interchangeable terms in zoology). In 1998 the American Anthropological Association adopted its Statement on Race asserting that the best available research shows race to be a social construct that is biologically invalid.

The HBDists were threatening to vote for me as creationist of the year — I thought I’d be a shoo-in, especially if I recognized it as a pointless poll and asked all of you to vote for me. But maybe now there’ll be enough competition that I shouldn’t get cocky. I think the HBD poll would have to include most of the anthropologists on the planet.

Talk to us about what you would like to talk about

FtBCon is coming on 22-24 August, and this is your chance: we are taking proposals for talks and panels.

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Anything goes. You’ve got some subject you’d like to get in front of a camera and tell the world? You’ve got a group of people with a shared message you’d like to promote? You’ve got an idea that must be discussed, and you’d like to suggest a few experts who’d be recruited to explain it all? Go for it. There are only a few catches. You have to write a good proposal; you have to get it to us by 22 July; and it has to pass muster with our crack team of inspectors.

Do it nooooow!