P.S. All you happy Minnesotans should be pleased to hear that Roy will be in Minneapolis on 1-4 September. I’ll be sure to put up details as they become available.
On his last visit to the US, Richard Dawkins was having little conversations with various people — people like Steven Weinberg, Lawrence Krauss, and David Buss — and recording them. Now you can get them on DVD. It’s a clever and understated idea; instead of having these guys lecture at a crowd, capture them in some quiet one-on-one conversation.
Yeah, I’m in there, too. Unfortunately, I just can’t watch myself. The others are very good, though!
This is just to handle the overflow from this closed thread.
You crackerbaters are insane.
You know nothing is sacred around here. Well, I saw The Dark Knight last night and … didn’t care for it. It was OK as an action movie, but the story was a mess. The plot wandered all over, and the movie seemed less interested in telling a story well than in throwing up moral ambiguity and ethical dilemmas which, instead of actually pursuing with any depth, it would resolve with a punch from Batman’s fist or an explosion. As a plot mover, the Joker was less an agent of chaos and more like the TA for a freshman philosophy course, leading everyone through twisty little exercises in artificial circumstances that present the poor student with difficult choices. The answers in the movie were about the level of superficiality I’d expect from naive freshmen: he’s not a hero, he’s more than a hero, he’s a guardian, or something. Unbelievably, the dialog actually spelled out such empty nonsense.
Although, it might make such courses much more interesting if, instead of writing papers, the students had to make their arguments in fistfights and pyrotechnics.
On the good side, though, the portrayal of the Joker by Heath Ledger has to be one of the best movie villains ever. That guy was scary — you wouldn’t want to meet him in a dark alley, and Ledger made you believe that you just might find someone like him in a dark alley somewhere. He set the screen on fire, and made the guy in the batman suit recede into irrelevance. If only he’d been given a screenplay that was less stagey pinball machine, and more focused.
Yes, the sad little cracker has met its undignified end, so stop pestering me. The cracker, the koran, and another surprise entry have been violated and are gone. You’ll have to wait until tomorrow for the details, what little of them there are. I must quickly apologize to all you good Catholics who were hoping to attend Mass, since you can’t anymore — I have been told many hundreds of times now that cracker abuse violates your right to practice your religion. I guess you’ll have to adapt. Secular humanism is a good alternative, if you aren’t already flocking to join the Mormons.
Anyway, I’ve got important things to do today. It’s my oldest son’s birthday, and I told him that as a gift to me him, I’d take myself him to see The Dark Knight. I sure hope the world doesn’t end before the movie does.
Olivia Judson has a lovely article about ongoing examples of evolution.
Before the creationists start whining, I know — they’re still birds and lizards and flies. Get over it. They’ve changed, as evolution predicts.
Life has two contradictory properties that any theory explaining its origin must encompass: similarities everywhere, and differences separating species. So far, the only theory that covers both beautifully and explains how one is the consequence of the other is evolution. Common descent unites all life on earth, while evolution itself is about constant change; similarities are rooted in our shared ancestry, while differences arise as lineages diverge.
Now here’s a new example of both phenomena: the development of segmentation in snakes. We humans have 33 vertebrae, zebrafish have 30-33, chickens have 55, mice have 65, and snakes have up to 300 — there’s about a ten-fold range right there. There are big obvious morphological and functional differences, too: snakes are sinuous slitherers notable for their flexibility, fish use their spines as springs for side-to-side motion, chickens fuse the skeleton into a bony box, and humans are upright bipeds with backaches. Yet underlying all that diversity is a common thread, that segmented vertebral column.
The similarities are a result of common descent. The differences, it turns out, arise from subtle changes in developmental timing.
Nick Spencer of the Telegraph says Americans don’t do atheism. It’s a weird piece that frets over the religiosity of American politicians, but somehow seems to find it reassuring that there are different ways to be religious, and that maybe the US is moving away from dominionist wackaloonery towards religously-motivated social activism — doing the right thing for the wrong reasons, in other words. There’s a germ of hope there, that the country might get somewhat less insane — but at the same time it represents an opportunity to entrench superstition deeper into the republic. I really don’t consider a liberal theocracy any better than a conservative theocracy: both are built on ignorance and dogma.
Worse, Spencer thinks Rick Warren, glib cult-leader and bubble-gum philosopher, is a good thing for the country. Blah. He seems to be a nice fellow on some subjects, but ultimately he’s a patriarchal loon who thinks gays and atheists will burn in hell. Maybe he is representative of the country, though…superficially earnest and well meaning, with a seething core of stupid that means we’ll do horrible things in spite of good intentions.
That isn’t anything to inspire optimism.
This is a nicely done essay prompted by the papal poltroonery that has been going on in Sydney recently. Here are a few bits:
I don’t give a stuff what people believe in, but it won’t stop me poking at it or prodding it. Why should religion be any exemption? Telling me I’m going to hell won’t bother me because I have the Flying Spaghetti Monster, the Invisible Pink Unicorn and Bertrand Russell’s Teapot in my heart. Google them if you are in the market for some red hot enlightenment.
And this is really true — throwing off the foolishness is liberating.
It’s been a revelation to me a year since my “epiphany”. I feel as if I’m walking through life with the blinkers off. Suddenly all the religious mumbo-jumbo jumps out as so bonkers. Wearing certain things, eating certain things, mumbling certain things at certain times so some imaginary friend will let you into a club in the sky when you die. I want to do my living now, thanks. I’m not afraid of dying. I’m afraid of never having lived.
I don’t care what people believe in, but I do care that religion impacts on political discourse, public policy and that it stunts the ability of people to think for themselves and question. And that it kills people and causes suffering. But most of all I care that the invisible electric fences that are wired in the minds of children brainwashed by religion are difficult to remove. And impossible if you don’t even know they’re there.
