This is what we should be fighting for in the next election.
I’m going to be staffing the DFL booth at the Stevens County Fair tonight. I think one of our problems as a country is that I fear even our more liberal political party would be uncomfortable with spreading that particular message…but hey, maybe they’ll surprise me, someday.
It’s not exactly a Mecca for atheists, but the American Atheists have announced their speakers for the 2014 National Convention in Salt Lake City. It looks good!
American Atheists revealed details on Wednesday about its 2014 national convention in Salt Lake City, announcing that speakers will include NFL Raiders punter Chris Kluwe, Survivor®: Philippines winner and sex therapist Denise Stapley, and Grammy®-nominated Spin Doctors bass player Mark White. The convention will also feature an art show, workshops, childcare, and a comedy show the weekend of April 17-20.
“We’re thrilled to bring so many great nontheists to our convention—some of whom have never addressed our movement before,” said American Atheists President David Silverman. “This is our 40th annual convention and it’s going to be stellar.”
Early bird tickets will go on sale Wednesday, August 7 on the American Atheists website at www.atheists.org. The convention will take place at the Hilton Salt Lake Center hotel & convention center in downtown Salt Lake City, Utah.
Salt Lake City is famous for being the seat of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, also known as the Mormon church. American Atheists chose Salt Lake City in order to better reach out to the sizable ex-Mormon population there.
“We want ex-Mormons to know that there is this entire community of people here for them,” said Public Relations Director Dave Muscato. “Often when people leave the Mormon church, they continue to base their identity in it because they don’t know any other community they can identify with. The 2014 American Atheists National Convention will be the place where ex-Mormons know that it’s okay to take that step and start saying, ‘I am an atheist.’”
Other speakers include the Reverend Barry Lynn of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, Maryam Namazie, Matt Dillahunty, Greta Christina, PZ Myers, Marsha Botzer of the Ingersoll Gender Center, Faisal Saeed al Mutar, Sikivu Hutchinson, Brian Keith Dalton also known as Mr. Deity, and Vickie Garrison.
Chris Kluwe, whom the New York Times called “The Most Interesting Man in the NFL,” is also a gaming enthusiast, author, LGBTQ equality activist, and musician. His book, Beautiful Unique Sparkleponies: On Myths, Morons, Free Speech, Football, and Assorted Absurdities, features personal essays about religion and the Pope, his family, guns, and many other topics.
Denise Stapley is the $1,000,000 grand prize winner of the 2012 CBS show Survivor®: Philippines. She is also a sex therapist and lives with her husband and 9-year-old daughter in Iowa.
Mark White is the bassist of the Grammy®-nominated alternative rock band Spin Doctors, known for their hits “Two Princes” and “Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong.” He lives in Houston, Texas where he also teaches music privately.
I’m especially happy that they’re reaching out for speakers who aren’t on the usual roster of known atheists (although the ones they’ve got are good, no complaints there!). This is how we grow. I’ll be especially interested to hear Chris Kluwe talk.
You know I was really pissed off at the crap ENCODE was promoting, that the genome was at least 80% functional and that there was no such thing as junk DNA. And there have been a number of better qualified scientists (like W. Ford Doolittle and Dan Graur and many others) who have stood up and registered their vehement disagreement with that nonsense. But there are some who agree that the genome must be largely functional, like John Mattick. Larry Moran reminds me that Mattick is the author of this infamous chart, however, which is best known as the original Dog’s Ass Plot.
That is so misleadingly dishonest it takes my breath away — Mattick cherry-picked genome sizes to fit his curve. One of my cell biology labs involves teaching students how to properly construct a simple graph, and I think I’m going to include this figure as a bad example.
Well, Mattick has done it again. He has published a paper (how do these things get through peer review?) disputing the existence of large quantities of non-functional DNA, which is largely an attempted rebuttal of Graur’s paper. It’s a short paper, but painful in its contortions and extraordinarily poor arguments. Larry Moran has done an excellent job of tearing it apart — I think he needs to polish it up and get that published.
The worst part of the paper, though, is the concluding paragraph — you know, where most of us try to put the most important message of the work.
There may also be another factor motivating the Graur et al. and related articles (van Bakel et al. 2010; Scanlan 2012), which is suggested by the sources and selection of quotations used at the beginning of the article, as well as in the use of the phrase “evolution-free gospel” in its title (Graur et al. 2013): the argument of a largely non-functional genome is invoked by some evolutionary theorists in the debate against the proposition of intelligent design of life on earth, particularly with respect to the origin of humanity. In essence, the argument posits that the presence of non-protein-coding or so-called ‘junk DNA’ that comprises >90% of the human genome is evidence for the accumulation of evolutionary debris by blind Darwinian evolution, and argues against intelligent design, as an intelligent designer would presumably not fill the human genetic instruction set with meaningless information (Dawkins 1986; Collins 2006). This argument is threatened in the face of growing functional indices of noncoding regions of the genome, with the latter reciprocally used in support of the notion of intelligent design and to challenge the conception that natural selection accounts for the existence of complex organisms (Behe 2003; Wells 2011).
I’m sure the Discovery Institute staff are dancing in pirouettes of joy at getting a neutral or possibly favorable mention in a legitimate journal. It’s not clear exactly what Mattick is trying to do here (lack of clarity is also a sin in science writing, let me remind you): either he’s trying to pre-emptively slander his critics by impugning them with an ideological motive, or he’s granting credence to Intelligent Design creationism. I’m inclined to think it’s both; he’s clearly trying to argue with the motives of Graur and others, but also, he’s claiming, as the creationists do, that evidence of function for the highly variable component of our genome is a de facto argument for a purpose for that variation, and that evolutionary theory does not support the idea of a functional purpose for variation in the sequence of most satellite DNA, for instance.
But I would not argue that ubiquitious functionality is unlikely because it has consequences for our theories; it’s wrong because of all the evidence that has been marshaled that most DNA is not there to serve a specific, selectable purpose for us humans.
I just watched our very own Sikivu Hutchinson and Ophelia Benson, along with Rebecca Watson, brilliantly discuss this silly question, “Are women afraid of atheism?” I think this embed code below will work, but who knows…it was through the Huffington Post, and they have to make everything weird and difficult.
There was also a concurrent text stream, and wouldn’t you know it, all the usual dudebros were there to complain that there is no problem, women are all equally represented, atheism has no cultural relevance anyway so why are these women talking?
It’s shark week. I’m not going to watch a bit of it; I’m actually boycotting the Discovery Channel for the indefinite future. The reason: An appalling violation of media ethics and outright scientific dishonesty. They opened the week with a special “documentary” on Megalodon, the awesome 60 foot long shark that went extinct a few million years ago…or at least, that’s what the science says. The show outright lied to suggest that Megalodon might still exist somewhere in the ocean.
None of the institutions or agencies that appear in the film are affiliated with it in any way, nor have approved its contents.
Though certain events and characters in this film have been dramatized, sightings of “Submarine” continue to this day.
Megalodon was a real shark. Legends of giant sharks persist all over the world. There is still a debate about what they may be.
There is no evidence of this species’ persistence, nor did they present any. They just made it all up; reality isn’t awesome enough, so they had to gild the giant shark story. They’ve gone the way of our other so-called “documentary” channels dedicated to fact-based education — the History channel, Animal Planet, TLC. Garbage rules.
This also makes me sad because I already have to deal with irrational loons telling me that since coelacanths exist, scientists are wrong and humans walked with dinosaurs. I await with gritted teeth the first creationist who tries to argue that the survival of the Megalodon to modern times means it’s perfectly plausible that medieval knights hunted dragons/dinosaurs.
Thanks, Discovery Channel. And screw you.
Posting will be light today — this morning, I’m at the Houston Oasis, and then this afternoon I’ll be at Answers in Science. We’re hoping to snack on creationists all day long.
Nahla Mahmoud is the spokesperson for the Council of Ex-Muslims in the UK. Salah Al Bandar is a director of the Sudan Civic Foundation in the UK. Al Bandar has chosen a dangerous method to politically suppress his opponent: Al Bandar has incited Muslims to threaten Mahmoud and her family.
Following an interview on Channel 4 on Sharia law, Islamists have threatened Sudanese secular campaigner and Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain Spokesperson Nahla Mahmoud with death, calling her a ‘Kafira’ and ‘Murtada’ who has offended Islam and brought “fitnah”. The threats have been reported to the police who have closed the case and advised that nothing could be done.
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Nahla writes: “I am most concerned with the harassment by Mr. Salah Al Bandar. Not only is he endangering my health and sense of safety and security in the UK, but he is also organising against me back in Sudan in ways that are potentially very dangerous for both myself and my family. As a consequence, my younger brother has been physically attacked in Sudan, my mother has been seriously threatened and I continue to get threats and have had to endure a number of cyber stalking episodes by Mr Al Bandar or his associates.”
I don’t just support Nahla Mahmoud, I oppose the kind of vicious demagoguery perpetrated by Al Bandar, which has no place in any civilized nation.
The New Humanist has announced and posted the cover story for their next issue of the magazine: a celebration of Iain M. Banks. What does a science fiction writer have to do with humanism? All is explained:
…Banks also engaged, with the creation of the Culture, in a piece of sly, prolonged and magnificent anti-theism. I don’t so much mean because, here and there, he used his wide screen for explicit attack on elements of religion, as in Surface Detail’s Hieronymus Bosch-worthy demonstration of the repulsiveness of the idea of hell. I mean that the Culture itself represents an elegant absorption of, and therefore displacement of, one whole department of religious yearning. It offers, in effect, a completely secular version of heaven. With its sentient ships as omniscient as any pantheon of gods, and a lot more obliging and benign, and its vision of human nature uncramped from disease and hunger and oppression, and its rationalised equivalent to transcendence, it gives its inhabitants (and you as you read the books) all the pie in the sky they could possibly want; but transformed by being made wholly material, by being brought within the reach of human aspiration. Where religion, on the Marxist reading of it, is a kind of comprehensible counsel of despair, the heart of the heartless world, Banks supplies a counsel of optimism.
I probably shouldn’t read the Texas Freedom Network the day before I go to Texas. They do good work, but whoa, they need to — Texas is one thoroughly screwed up state.
The creationists are upset that we’re going to be talk about science at the Houston Museum of Natural Science. They’re demanding that we be banned from the museum, because evolution ain’t a science, don’t you know, and we’re just planning to spread anti-Christian propaganda.
When people bind Christianity to anti-science lies, then yes, we’re going to criticize the lies, and yes, the Christians are going to cry that we’re attacking their religion. Christianity is not a get-out-of-jail-free card; it should not give you immunity to criticism.
The saddest part of this effort to mind is that the museum is defending our participation by claiming neutrality — they say “we do not have a position on any religion, politics or other topics of that nature”. That’s tragic. When religion or politics contradicts science, a science museum should take a stand. One of the reasons this country is in such a sad state is that most of our pro-science organizations have been effectively pithed by the first amendment, which has been a great tool to shelter religious idiocy from any opprobrium.
For example, the State Board of Education is going to be reviewing high school biology textbooks this year, and they’re already packing the committee with creationists. These are people whose credentials rest largely on their association with creationist ministries, their recognition by creationist organizations, and their employment in Christian private schools. These are anti-science zealots, and Texas blithely hands over control of science textbooks to these kooks.
So that’s what I’m flying into tomorrow: conservative America on meth and steroids. At least I get to hang out with the rational subset of the state.
Also, I love this song by Wimme Saari.
In the NY Times Opinionator, Gary Gutting indulges in a little public philosophical masturbation: did Zeus exist? And he concludes that we can’t decide that he didn’t.
On reflection, then, I’m inclined to say that an atheistic denial of Zeus is ungrounded. There is no current evidence of his present existence, but to deny that he existed in his Grecian heyday we need to assume that there was no good evidence for his existence available to the ancient Greeks. We have no reason to make this assumption. Further, supposing that Zeus did exist in ancient times, do we really have evidence that he has ceased to exist? He may, for all we know, just be in hiding (as Heine’s delightful “Gods in Exile” suggests), now that other gods have won humankind’s allegiance. Or it may be that we have lost the ability to perceive the divine. In any case, to the question, “May we properly remain agnostic about whether Zeus ever existed?” the answer is “Yes, we may.”
I’d tear that up, except I don’t have to: The Digital Cuttlefish beat me to it, and includes a poem, too.
Two things, then. One, I’m surprised that a philosophy prof is conflating ideas of belief with ideas of knowledge. Disbelief in Zeus is absolutely grounded. Without convincing evidence (this is where “knowledge” comes in, and where his objections actually matter), Zeus has not passed the threshold for my belief. I have no obligation to believe in something that has no positive evidence for it, just because there is no evidence against it.
Which leads to my second thing. Presuppositional arguments may be logically airtight, but this example shows why good logic can lead to bad conclusions. It is absolutely true that science has to presuppose that there are no supernatural entities intervening, in order to examine the natural world. And we, therefore, cannot conclude there is no supernatural, since that would simply be circular logic, assuming our conclusions. And since our conclusions about the supernatural depend on our assumptions, the logic is no help at all.
I have two things, too, though. One is that DC is using philosophy to argue against Gutting, so let’s not make this a blanket condemnation of all philosophy.
The other is a point of disagreement: “It is absolutely true that science has to presuppose that there are no supernatural entities intervening”. I disagree strongly with that. If they are intervening, they are having an effect on the natural world that can be examined with the tools of science, even if the supernatural entities themselves are completely invisible to us. If every time I mumbled a magic word before throwing a die, it would come up six, and this effect was statistically robust and worked with such reliability that I could clean up at the craps table in Vegas, I’d have to postulate a force outside of our understanding to explain it. I’d still be able to investigate the effect scientifically, however, and clearly it would demand extensive replication…say, a grand tour of every casino in the country.
I agree that we cannot conclude that there is no supernatural that is operating outside of our universe. We can conclude that there has been no consistent detectable supernatural phenomenon meddling within our universe.
