I’m not. Yet.
It’s actually a little bit disturbing: you can do free criminal searches on anyone. Check up on your friends! Your spouse! Neighbors! Turn them in for big cash rewards!
When animal rights activists petition and complain and wave signs around, that’s fine, they are within their rights. When they start firebombing researchers cars and homes, putting children at risk and damaging property, they have become nothing but terrorists and criminals.
Tony Sidaway informs me that a lot of people have been clicking for Jesus — this new documentary that is being aired in England very shortly has roused the creationist hordes (OK, creationist dozens) to click furiously on its TV Guide entry to downrate it. It’s pointless and trivial — they haven’t even seen it! This is the perfect occasion to marshal our godless thousands to stampede the site and teach them how to properly trivialize web polls. Go ahead, go to the UK TV Guide site, scroll down to Channel 4, and click on the 8pm showing of “The Genius of Darwin”. Vote however you want — giving it a ten is a good score, a one means you think it is very bad.
By the way, what are all those awful American comedies doing on British television? Have they no taste over there?
I regret to report that Blue Collar Scientist has lost his struggle with cancer and that he died last night.
It has been announced that Phil Plait is to be the new president of the James Randi Educational Foundation. This can’t be. I’ve never been entertained by Phil doing a card trick. Besides, James Randi is supposed to go on forever.
One consolation is that everyone is going to have to escalate the obligatory Plait bashing at the next Amazing Meeting.
It actually feels kind of good, considering that my job is secure, and that these critics are looking increasingly rabidly insane. I just sit back and watch their hysteria grow. Case in point: Rod Dreher, who seems to be crawling the walls and screaming right now. In his ‘review’ of the desecration issue, nowhere does he mention the cause: the violent over-reaction of Catholics to a student in Florida walking away from Mass with a communion wafer, and the subsequent uproar calling for expulsion and punishment from Bill Donohue.
It’s a small thing, only doing $10,000 worth of damage, but the location is newsworthy.
A fence and garage at Fred Phelps’ Westboro Baptist Church became engulfed in flames early Saturday, according to the Topeka Capitol-Journal Web site. The fire did not spread to the church building.
The cause of the fire is unknown, and I sincerely hope it wasn’t arson — setting homes on fire is not the way to settle grievances, even against people as despicable as the Phelps clan.
I know. It’s WorldNutDaily, so it’s guaranteed to be abysmally ignorant, but I had to comment on the opening bits of this dreadfully bad review of Wiker’s book that blames Darwin for the Nazis.
As a prologue to this book review, I propose the question: Can an idea, a theory, even a delusion kill? A cursory review just of 20th century dictators who overtly or covertly embraced and applied Darwin’s ideas about evolution, survival of the fittest and natural selection to humanity, resulting in tens of millions of corpses they left in their wake, lamentably beckons a resounding, Yes!
I agree that ideas can be powerful things that can lead to lamentable outcomes. That’s why I insist that all ideas must be regarded with skepticism, tested thoroughly, and only those that meet some standards for rigor be accepted…and even that, only provisionally. Evolution has met those standards to a degree that you have to be a fool to reject it, especially when your alternative is the empty promises of Intelligent Design, and the bogus dogmatism of creationism.
Those millions of deaths are a consequence of fanatical adherence to poorly supported ideas: the ideologies of communism and fascism. Evolution is not at fault, and can’t be legitimately blamed, especially if your reasoning is as bad as Wiker’s.
In the opening chapter on Darwin, Wiker wrote: “Reading Charles Darwin’s ‘The Descent of Man’ forces one to face an unpleasant truth: that if everything he said in his more famous ‘Origin of Species’ is true, then it quite logically follows that human beings ought to ensure that the fit breed with abandon and that the unfit are weeded out.”
Wiker actually said that? He’s a bigger idiot than I thought. Does he also read books about epidemiology and assume that the science is all about killing the most people possible with microorganisms? Is oncology all about inflicting slow painful deaths on people? Are the police out to foment crime, and firemen have the job of starting fires?
What logically follows from Darwin’s theory is that fit individuals are those that survive and have offspring. There is no presumption that there is only one possible strategy to accomplish that survival: if we maintain a state that helps the weak and sick live and have children, then we have increased their fitness.
Maybe it’s just me, but I read the truth of evolution as saying that we can work to oppose brute nature and make life better for our fellow human beings, or we can surrender and refuse to resist nature’s course. We have a choice. You can be an enabler of greater rates of selection (using arbitrary criteria that may not generate enhanced survival for anything but the select occupants of a totalitarian state!) or you can work for a better life for more.
It’s somehow predictable that right-wing hacks always project their hateful vision of increasing mortality on a theory that allows for the possibility of change by reducing it.
You can now listen to today’s Atheists Talk, or you can download the mp3. This was the session with Jeff and Lee of KKMS Christian talk radio, and I found it infuriating — they never answered any questions with a straight answer. Out of exasperation, I sent in this question, which was read on the air:
Jeff and Lee were asked a straightforward question: what is their best evidence for a god? Their reply was a shameless exercise in longwinded vacuity. Could they possibly simply ANSWER THE QUESTION, without babbling about the trinity and other such nonsense that even they admit they don’t understand?
That finally got them to try and answer…they claim to believe in a god because the world looks created to them. That’s awfully shallow and silly — they understand even less biology than they do theology, and that answer doesn’t explain at all why they believe in Jesus rather than Thor — but it’s something I’ve encountered often. It reinforces the importance of evolution, and explains why the religious are often so adamant in opposing science: it undercuts their rationale for believing in such goofball ideas.
