I don’t care, just GIVE ME A CHOICE

A blogger recently posed this question.

If I had to vote for one of two hypothetical candidates, would I be more likely to vote for a liberal Christian or a conservative atheist?

My first, immediate response was to just answer the question: yes, of course I’d vote for the liberal Christian. All you have to do is realize that Karl Rove is an atheist to know that the label “atheist” is not an automatic marker for a good person (just as we know “Christian” isn’t either, with more examples than I can count.)

But then I thought about it a moment more, and realized it is a goddamned stupid question.

I have never, in my entire life, been given an opportunity to vote for an openly atheist candidate for any office. Not once. This is a radically hypothetical question postulating an unthinkable world (to an American, at least) in which atheists can run for office without the bigoted Christian majority making it an exercise in futility, where we actually get a choice. In that reality, I think actually I might seriously consider voting for a non-odious conservative atheist (not Karl Rove, not a Randian asshole) just for the novelty of it all and to see someone, anyone representing my irreligious views in office.

Because isn’t that really the issue, that atheists are virtually locked out of most offices?

Then there are some weird assumptions in the question itself. What if a conservative atheist were answering it? There’d be no conflict of values at all. Notice how it simply assumes that nearly all atheist readers would be politically liberal — which I think is mostly true, despite the strong strain of Libertarianism within atheism.

But doesn’t that imply that if we had an atheist candidate representative of most atheists’ political leanings, the question ought to be:

If I had to vote for one of two hypothetical candidates, would I be more likely to vote for a liberal Christian or a liberal atheist?

O Glorious Imaginary Universe of Delightful Choices! Can you imagine going into the voting booth and finding yourself confronted with a decision between two reasonable, intelligent, thoughtful candidates, rather than Dumb Thug vs. the person the other party decided to run against it? Or, as I often find when voting for local offices, Dumb Thug vs. Dumb Thug.

But of course what reality tells us is that the candidate who clothes himself in religious garb and makes their faith an issue in a political campaign is almost always conservative — religion tends to side with stupid, archaic, and authoritarian on social issues. What that means is that if we ever did get an opportunity to make that choice at the ballot box, it would look like this:

If I had to vote for one of two hypothetical candidates, would I be more likely to vote for a conservative Christian or a liberal atheist?

And now it’s no question at all.

The drugs don’t work!

Ben Goldacre has a new book coming out, Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients, which will be available this week in the UK and January in the US. From this excerpt in the Guardian, it’s going to be phenomenal…and phenomenally depressing. Once again, money poisons good science — the pharmaceutical industry is so awash in profits and greedy for more that they skew the results of clinical trials to get favorable statistics.

In any sensible world, when researchers are conducting trials on a new tablet for a drug company, for example, we’d expect universal contracts, making it clear that all researchers are obliged to publish their results, and that industry sponsors – which have a huge interest in positive results – must have no control over the data. But, despite everything we know about industry-funded research being systematically biased, this does not happen. In fact, the opposite is true: it is entirely normal for researchers and academics conducting industry-funded trials to sign contracts subjecting them to gagging clauses that forbid them to publish, discuss or analyse data from their trials without the permission of the funder.

This is such a secretive and shameful situation that even trying to document it in public can be a fraught business. In 2006, a paper was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (Jama), one of the biggest medical journals in the world, describing how common it was for researchers doing industry-funded trials to have these kinds of constraints placed on their right to publish the results. The study was conducted by the Nordic Cochrane Centre and it looked at all the trials given approval to go ahead in Copenhagen and Frederiksberg. (If you’re wondering why these two cities were chosen, it was simply a matter of practicality: the researchers applied elsewhere without success, and were specifically refused access to data in the UK.) These trials were overwhelmingly sponsored by the pharmaceutical industry (98%) and the rules governing the management of the results tell a story that walks the now familiar line between frightening and absurd.

Drugs that don’t work, dangerous side-effects concealed by legalistic loopholes, blatant biases in drug testing…and the data are hidden away from the conscientious doctors who try to give informed recommendations. It’s all scary stuff.

Follow @Spa_YediMonster today!

She’s going to be live-tweeting the Creation Evidence Expo in Indianapolis this weekend. It looks awful and hilarious; Carl Baugh will be there with his hair, and John Whitcomb, the guy who poisoned a generation’s minds, and and a host of lesser intellectual vacuums who will do their best to reduce the knowledge in the lecture rooms over the next few days.

Also, if you don’t do Twitter, she’ll be posting a post-catastrophe brain dump on Biodork. I can kind of guess what ‘evidence’ for creationism they’ll be dragging out, but it’ll be good to be updated on what the loons are thinking is important nowadays.

Why I am an atheist – Garry J. VanGelderen

Let me digress just a little right up front……I do not like the word “Atheist” as it sounds so negative. I have considered words like “Naturalist”, “Naturist”, Universalist”  but these have all been appropriated by other groups for other reasons. I certainly do not like the word “Bright”, advocated by some atheists, as I really don’t think I am that bright most of the time. A more positive sounding epithet is still looked for and I would welcome suggestions.

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If you ever wanted a perfect example of why government should be secular…

…just examine the logic and evidence behind this judge’s decision to deny a transgender woman to have a name change.

“A so-called sex-change surgery can make one appear to be the opposite sex, but in fact they are nothing more than an imitation of the opposite sex,” the judge wrote in a seven-page order last year.

“Here, petitioner has not even had the surgery by which his sex purports to be changed. Thus, based on the foregoing and the DNA evidence, a sex change cannot make a man a woman or a woman a man all of which, the Court finds is sufficient in and of itself to deny petitioner’s request for a name change,” Graves wrote.

“To grant a name change in this case would be to assist that which is fraudulent,” Graves wrote. “It is notable that Genesis 1:27-28 states: ‘So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth …’ The DNA code shows God meant for them to stay male and female.”

That is a scientifically and ethically bankrupt position, driven entirely by a fundamentalist interpretation of Biblical dogma. We do not determine gender by chromosome counts; what is this judge going to do to determine the Official Sex of individuals with androgen insensitivity syndrome (XY chromosomes, but physically female)? And how can he make the leap from the book of Genesis to the “DNA code”? The Bible verse he cites says absolutely nothing about the genetic basis of sex, or whether it is fixed and inflexible in any individual.

The Bible is silent on this subject. The science tells us that gender is far more fluid than Judge Black&White thinks it is. Yet that ignoramus is trying to use both to justify a cruel and stupid decision.

Maybe the problem isn’t so much religious people as it is idiots in our judiciary, who think the nonsense their preacher thunders at them from the pulpit is actually information of worth in making a reasonable decision.

Kent Hovind writes

I staggered out of bed this morning, feeling much better — my guts are making some very peculiar noises and I have no appetite, but otherwise I’m getting by — and what do I find at the top of my inbox but a letter from Kent Hovind via some guy claiming to be his proxy. I’ve been challenged to a debate!

PZ Myers,

Recently, while researching items for Dr. Kent Hovind, I happened to stumble across your many mean-spirited attacks against him. I read on as you and your minions showed yourselves to be as the apes you claim to descend from (probably your best evidence for evolution). Since you, and most of your ape-like readers, have no point of reference for justifying morality within yourselves, you should be notified that your behavior is downright shameful.

Anyway, I have been informed by Kent Hovind personally that he is ready at any time to consider your best evidence for evolution (in writing). Further, since you have zero capacity to understand even the smallest of spiritual concepts, he is ready to also present empirical evidence in rebuttal to support his position.

While you excel at insult and insensitivity, we wonder how much actual empirical evidence feeds this pompous attitude of yours. For years evolutionists have desired to get Kent Hovind into an “email debate” and he always refused, preferring rather to meet face to face.

However, as you so joyously gloat, that is not currently possible, so you are now being given that opportunity. Kent is officially challenging you to an email debate (**white gloves smacking your face**) under the condition that only one topic at a time be discussed and that it begin with your most empirical, straightforward, undeniable evidence for evolution.

I will number the paragraphs for ease of reference and will post the debate online. I will forward said evidence verbatim to him and then I will return his rebuttal verbatim back to you. I will, that is, should you actually accept the challenge.

This challenge is posted online at www.2peter3.com

Jonn Mooney for Kent Hovind

Kent Hovind can’t write to me directly, of course, because he’s in prison and won’t be getting out until August 2015.

And no, I’m not interested in a ‘debate’ with Hovind. I’ve been following his poisonous trail for years, and one thing I’m absolutely certain of is that he knows absolutely nothing about evolution, so there would be nothing to argue about. Ignorance is not a credible side in a debate.

But I have a counteroffer, since I do have some sympathy for a guy who’s probably going stir-crazy right now (and started out in the position of the proverbial shithouse rat). Kent Hovind has lots of time to read right now. He can put down his Bible now and then and instead read some basic evolutionary biology, and then when he gets out in three years I’d be willing to have a conversation about it. Not about the Bible, but about a decent, informative text on evolution.

I recommend Why Evolution is True, by Jerry Coyne. It covers a wide range of the evidence for evolution, and would give us lots to talk about.

If Mr Mooney would send me Hovind’s prison address, I’d even be willing to buy and ship a copy to him. It would give him something useful to do to pass the time, too.

Why I am an atheist – j.

My story begins at a very young age.  In my earliest memories my family, and in particular my father, were very religious.  I was initially raised in the Lutheran church. It seems now that the Lutheran church we attended was really quite vanilla and innocuous. However, when I was 12 the church’s new youth minister had an idea: Christian Youth Camp. Mom and Dad ponied up the nominal fee and I was sent to a christian bible camp for two weeks in the summer. All my friends went. Heck, we jumped at the opportunity. It was a chance to get out of town and be preteens away from our parents and bond as budding adults.. It was something different for kids my age stuck in a small industrial town of northern Iowa in the stagnant early 70’s . Every kid that went to Trinity Lutheran Church looked forward to this excursion. For two weeks we were sent to a rural setting that for the most part, looking back, resembled a military boot camp. Cabins, mess hall, summertime activities, a canteen (yes, they called it that) and “counselors” for each cabin of 6 attendees. Every morning there was a revelry, breakfast, bible study and then you were left to your own devices (supervised of course) until lunch. Then more bible study and then you were again left to entertain yourself with canoeing, swimming, volleyball etc. etc until dinner, followed by another hour of bible study and then were freed to explore the woods, go to the canteen for a snack,  or nap if you cared to. At nightfall , however, the nefariousness began. We would all be called to a large hill next to an A-frame chapel. A massive bonfire would be constructed and the proselytizing would intensify. Now it doesn’t take a genius to figure out what was going on here was a well orchestrated manipulation of young minds. The glowing fire, the singing, mass recital of prayer…… preteen and teen boys and girls, hormones…… very powerful stuff. Not to violate Godwin’s Law, but it was very much a nightly authoritarian rally. Flags flying, drums beating anon anon.  Being a child, it took…….. for about two weeks. Then it was back to being a preteen and summer baseball, eating apples from the neighborhood trees and generally coming home only when I was too tired to do anything else. Very, very bucolic.

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