Right here: Skepticast #168.
Right here: Skepticast #168.
I’m here in Springfield, Missouri as a guest of the local Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and now I’ve suddenly found Tarvu.
What is the etiquette in such a situation? Do I have to damn my hosts, and do they have to burn me at the stake in reply?
Oh, come now. Are they just taunting me, waving a bit of succulent red meat before and begging me to bite? Should topics such as creationism or intelligent design be taught in public schools alongside the theory of evolution? 85% say yes. I cannot believe that 85% of the population are that stupid, although it is being hosted on the American Patriarchy News Network, which would tend to bias the sample downward.
Gah. This came out garbled before, and you would not believe how long it took to get in and fix it. The scienceblogs server is rapidly becoming intolerable…which, of course, is exactly what the DOS bastards want.
I get tons of news tips all the time, and I can’t use them all — so here’s a quick dump of a few items from the let’s-laugh-at-religion file.
Yom Kippur is supposed to be such a solemn holiday in Israel that no one drives, no one works, no one eats, but apparently, there is no proscription against rioting. A non-Jewish man started his car (blasphemy!), which drove his Jewish neighbors insane with pious rage to the point that they ended up rampaging through the streets, requiring police force to end the violence. (via Obsessed with Reality)
A doll that babbles baby talk has Christians upset — it seems that they when they listen closely, they think it’s praising Islam. That’s funny — that’s what I hear when I hear Pentecostals speaking in tongues.
“The opposite of homosexuality is not heterosexuality, it’s holiness.” Wait — I thought I was the opposite of holy. My wife is going to be so disappointed.
Peter Watts has an interesting analysis of how dumb-as-rocks fundie goons can thrive in modern society. The pared down explanation: holding ridiculous religious beliefs is costly, and therefore represents an expensive investment that testifies to the depth of commitment, and thereby promotes greater group cohesion.
Tim Tingelstad is running for the Minnesota Supreme court. Please don’t vote for him. He’s a far-right religious kook who wants to ‘return’ the country to godly rule.
Another day, another preacher caught collecting kiddie porn. At least he’s honest—he says he viewed it for the purpose of sexual arousal, but at the same time he’s all tangled up in guilt because he thinks Jesus is unhappy with him.
Richard Carrier and I will be speaking in Springfield on Saturday afternoon, in an event that has been blessed by the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. If you’re in the neighborhood, you won’t want to miss it!
And now I get to spend my afternoon sitting in an airplane. Ho hum.
It sounds like Michael Shermer’s Origins conference was a great event in the morning, an amusing event in the evening, and an absurd sellout to theological thinking in the middle. What Templeton money touches is tainted, I’m afraid.
Today’s must-read article is by Dan Savage, whose mother recently died of pulmonary fibrosis. It’s personal and painful, and it also touches on the political. Washington state has a ballot measure coming up that would make it legal for doctors to prescribe lethal doses of medication for the terminally ill, and Savage’s mother, when her disease reached a crisis stage, had to choose what kind of painful death she wanted to face.
People must accept death at “the hour chosen by God,” according to Pope Benedict XVI, leader of the Catholic Church, which is pouring money into the campaign against I-1000.
The hour chosen by God? What does that even mean? Without the intervention of man–and medical science–my mother would have died years earlier. And at the end, even without assisted suicide as an option, my mother had to make her choices. Two hours with the mask off? Six with the mask on? Another two days hooked up to machines? Once things were hopeless, she chose the quickest, if not the easiest, exit. Mask off, two hours. That was my mother’s choice, not God’s.
Did my mother commit suicide? I wonder what the pope might say.
I know what my mother would say: The same church leaders who can’t manage to keep priests from raping children aren’t entitled to micromanage the final moments of our lives.
If religious people believe assisted suicide is wrong, they have a right to say so. Same for gay marriage and abortion. They oppose them for religious reasons, but it’s somehow not enough for them to deny those things to themselves. They have to rush into your intimate life and deny them to you, too–deny you control over your own reproductive organs, deny you the spouse of your choosing, condemn you to pain (or the terror of it) at the end of your life.
The proper response to religious opposition to choice or love or death can be reduced to a series of bumper stickers: Don’t approve of abortion? Don’t have one. Don’t approve of gay marriage? Don’t have one. Don’t approve of physician-assisted suicide? For Christ’s sake, don’t have one. But don’t tell me I can’t have one–each one–because it offends your God.
Somehow, putting on a silly clerical collar gives people the feeling that they can dictate how others will be allowed to live and die. They want to meddle, and worse, they want to make decisions based on the worst kind of reasoning — that the voices in their heads told them how it was so, that it was written down so in ancient books, that their myths tell them of codes of conduct necessary for an imaginary reward after death. That is no way to live a life, or end one.
This is too much verisimilitude. The movie below is of the mating behavior of the jellyfish Carybdea sivickisi, and the first thing you’ll notice is that the scientists have set it to good old classic porn music.
The second thing you’ll notice, that I found annoying, is that they used too high a power objective to film it, so everything is jerking everywhere and none of the participants stay in the field of view for any length of time. Why is it that porn is afflicted with so many gynecological close-ups? Come on, set the mood, show us whole individuals instead of fragmented zooms of body parts.
Oh, come on. A poll at a forum for the Minerals, Metals and Materials society that asks, “Which U.S. Presidential Candidate Would Better Advance Science and Engineering if Elected?”, and John McCain is winning 59% to 39%? That poll needs some adjusting.