There was exactly one time I went to a “serious” church. My parents took the family to the local Unitarian church every once in a while, but only because taught more lessons about tolerance than it did about Jesus. But my parents are also classical musicians. They have a hectic work schedule, and when I was five, they left us with the nanny on a Sunday morning.
Oh, boy — Bobby Jindal’s new program to open up state funds to support all kinds of random nonsense in schools is going to have some interesting (that is, horrifying) effects. They are going to be throwing money at A Beka Books and Bob Jones University texts, and Accelerated Christian Education. What kinds of things will Louisiana kids be learning?
Science Proves Homosexuality is a Learned Behavior
The Second Law of Thermodynamics Disproves Evolution
No Transitional Fossils Exist
Humans and Dinosaurs Co
Existed
Evolution Has Been Disproved
A Japanese Whaling Boat Found a Dinosaur
Solar Fusion is a Myth
It’s not just science! Look what else they’ll learn:
Only ten percent of Africans can read or write, because Christian mission schools have been shut down by communists.
“the [Ku Klux] Klan in some areas of the country tried to be a means of reform, fighting the decline in morality and using the symbol of the cross… In some communities it achieved a certain respectability as it worked with politicians.”
“God used the ‘Trail of Tears’ to bring many Indians to Christ.”
It “cannot be shown scientifically that that man
made pollutants will one day drastically reduce the depth of the atmosphere’s ozone layer.”
“God has provided certain ‘checks and balances’ in creation to prevent many of the global upsets that have been predicted by environmentalists.”
the Great Depression was exaggerated by propagandists, including John Steinbeck, to advance a socialist agenda.
“Unions have always been plagued by socialists and anarchists who use laborers to destroy the free
enterprise system that hardworking Americans have created.”
Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential win was due to an imaginary economic crisis created by the media.
“The greatest struggle of all time, the Battle of Armageddon, will occur in the Middle East when Christ returns to set up his kingdom on earth.”
Watch the video. It’ll show you that I’m not just making this all up.
Fortunately, the student body at my university is largely from the upper Midwest, so I don’t think we’ll have to worry too much about an influx of miseducated kids here — but other universities may have to look at Louisiana enrollments. How much remedial teaching do you want to do?
I’ve noticed this before, and I’m sure many of you have, too: you can often take creationist comments, especially when they’re lengthy, run them through a google search, and discover that the were lifted wholly from some other source. If you read the creationist literature for any length of time, it really begins to sound all alike, because what they’ll often do is cobble together their treatises by lifting whole paragraphs and pages from previous creationist tracts. It’s the kind of thing where, if they did it as a student in my class, they’d get an automatic fail, especially since they rarely bother to include attributions.
Here’s another similar case: Hamza Tzortzis, the Muslim creationist, wrote a critique of Dawkins’ The God Delusion. Guess what? It’s a copy-pasted pastiche of an article by William Lane Craig. The original Craig review was pretty bad, but running it through a copier a few times just makes it worse.
I was born in Brussels (Belgium) in 1976. My family was catholic (but not overzealous) and I attended catholic primary and secondary schools where prayer was obligatory and religion omnipresent. I recall having been very religious until the age of about 13. I still remember bowing each time I was passing by the huge statue of Jesus that was present in the park surrounding the playground of my middle school. I was however also very interested in sciences but I did not see any conflict between science and religion at that time. Also, since Catholicism represented for me the ultimate truth, I did not understand why people were not more engaged in their religion.
Everything changed within a couple of hours at the age of 13.
Danny Vendramini is a man with a vision…but absolutely no knowledge or competence. He has invented out of whole cloth a bizarre hypothesis that Neandertals were super-predators who hunted modern humans for food and sex. To support this weird contention, he builds up a tissue thin set of speculations, all biased towards this idea that Neandertals were giant, hairy brutes who looked like bipedal chimpanzees, and that were intent on raping and eating people.
If it sounds like the plot for a cheesy SyFy channel horror movie, you shouldn’t be surprised: Vendramini is not a scientist, but he is a “theatre director, TV producer and award-winning film director and scriptwriter“. He has no training in comparative anatomy, ecology, or evolutionary biology, and it shows.
He has written a book titled Them+Us. Here’s the promotional video. Prepare to simultaneously laugh and stand aghast at the abuse of science.
I’m just going to take apart one claim out of this mass of nonsense. He commissioned “one of the world’s foremost digital sculptors”, Arturo Balseiro, to reconstruct a Neandertal skull to meet his requirements. Poor Balseiro! He’s not going to be well regarded in scientific circles after selling out this badly.
One of his hilarious claims is that all other reconstructions have been biased because they’ve been done to make Neandertals look human — but, don’t you know, Neandertals are primates, so they should be made to look like other primates.
Contemplate that last sentence. Humans are apparently not primates, and the analog for reconstruction should not be modern humans, their closest relative, separated by a mere 100,000 years, but a random gemisch of miscellaneous apes and monkeys, separated from Neandertal for over 6 million years.
To support this unlikely comparison, he superimposes a Neandertal skull on the profile of a chimpanzee, and declares that they fit perfectly.
There are a few problems with this reconstruction. To get the slope of the skull’s face to align with that of the chimpanzee, he has completely ignored the position of the foramen magnum, at the base of the skull. In the image to the right, the Neandertal’s spine would be erupting out the front of his trachea. Note also the little details, like this orientation requiring that the chimp’s ears be yanked down to be coming out of his neck, and how the chimp’s neck has to be mostly filled with the bowl of the occiput. It doesn’t fit. It doesn’t fit at all.
You can also look at a chimpanzee skull and compare it to that of a Neandertal (strangely, an obvious comparison that he doesn’t bother to make on his web page). They don’t look anything alike, except in the general sense that they’re both apes.
But ignore all that! TV producer knows better.
The Neandertal skull above is actually the La Ferrassie specimen, the very same individual Vendramini uses to reconstruct his version of a Neandertal. And here it is, in all its ridiculous creature-feature glory.
After all that complaining about how those scientists impose their human biases on all the other Neandertal reconstructions, Vendramini just decides on the basis of no evidence at all that they had to have been as hairy as a gorilla, with cat’s eyes because they hunted at night.
It’s all ludicrous, pseudo-scientific bullshit.
The other day, I wrote about this unfortunate case of a cancer researcher at UC Davis who was abused by his university for criticizing another department’s poor health advice. I said that that’s one of the things you have to protect with academic freedom: the right of scientists to make informed criticisms of others’ work.
Now I’m getting squeaked at by Casey Luskin of the Discovery Institute, who protests that I don’t give that same freedom to creationists.
So Myers doesn’t really believe in academic freedom — he only defends the freedom of scholars to agree with him. But without the liberty to dissent, the whole idea of “academic freedom” is pretty meaningless.
Scientists are supposed to use their intelligence, expertise, and knowledge to make evidence-based criticisms of claims. Since creationists lack all three characters, as well as having a dearth of evidence, it doesn’t apply. Academic freedom does not mean you are given carte blanche to make wild claims without an expectation that you’ll provide scientific reasoning behind them, and the thing is, in the UC Davis case, the cancer researcher was knowledgeable and discussed the best evidence.
There’s more to being an academic than having unfettered freedom, you know.
Growing up I had a vague notion that we were created by a supreme being. I never really probed the existence question, so the “creator” answer suited my brian just fine then. However, the idea of God was something that wasn’t reinforced in my house. We never went to church, prayed or kept any religious symbols. What I did have reinforced, on the other hand, was the wonderful altruistic care of my parents. My upbringing was enough to let me know how rational, humane beings ought to treat one another.
Ladies, aren’t you used to this yet? Marty Klein is a sex therapist who writes for Psychology Today; he’s also a dishonest hack who will distort the facts to make his case.
You may remember that strange incident in which Elyse of Skepchick was working at a conference, and out of the blue, was handed a card offering group sex by a pair of strangers. Klein has taken that story and turned it into a tale of a prude squawking hysterically at a kindly offer by a pair of friends. It’s one of the more egregious manglings of a story I’ve seen in a long time.
What I find particularly outrageous, though, is that Klein is exactly like Ken Ham: nowhere in his fractured fairy tale does he include a single link to the actual participant and witness to the story, where readers might have discovered how he lied, and of course his article doesn’t include comments, where readers might correct him.
Gregory Paul has been looking at trends in the International Social Survey Program (ISSP) and other polling data. We’re behind in some countries (I’m looking at you, USA), ahead in others, but the overall trend is good: atheism is winning out around the world.
We’re growing!
It appears that Ameroatheists have expanded by 10 million since the turn of the century—representing about a million a year, and about a third of overall population growth, to a total of 60 million out of more than 300 million. Atheism has made large gains among the young, while congregation size has dropped by as much as a fifth. Even so, the ISSP results confirm that the United States is still the most theistic prosperous democracy—yet not nearly as theistic as some Second and Third World countries.
A multinational waxing of atheism and waning of theism seems to be occurring, and may well be universal in Western countries. The increase in Western atheism appears to be continuing a long-term trend that probably started in the 1800s, if not earlier, and has accelerated since World War II with no signs of slowing down, if the ISSP results are correct. Losses in theism have occurred in both Protestant and Catholic nations, albeit with the latter somewhat more resistant to losses. In most Western nations, the religious right is already weak, and in the few where it is a strong minority, it is losing ground. Demographically driven by a growing loss of piety among youth, the rise of secularism in the advanced democracies is in accord with the socioeconomic dysfunctionality hypothesis that predicts and observes that improving levels of financial and economic security in middle class majorities strongly suppresses interest in supernatural deities.
That last bit is what worries me. Atheism thrives on economic stability; religion prospers when people are desperate and ignorant. Here in the US, the theocratic party, the Republicans, have no interest in keeping the majority in good economic shape — they’d like to destroy the social safety net and increase economic inequity. I see an awfully strong correlation there between religiosity and economy-wrecking.
The thesis that popular secularism is dead, or at least dying, is clearly false. In the most advanced and successful nations, it is religion that is in the demographic ICU. Also entirely discredited is the premise that religion is universal to the human condition, like language—while theists vary from constituting nearly entire populations to less than a third, verbal skills are nearly uniform across the board. Demographic extrapolations that suggest fast-reproducing fundamentalists are on a statistical course to outgrow low-fertility secularists are proving flawed because they fail to account for mass nonchalant conversion due to modernity.
Yes! I have never been concerned about all the people moaning about how the fundies and Muslims are outbreeding us — I see them as busily making minds that will be ripe for reason and knowledge.
I am an atheist primarily because I know of no evidence for any gods. I think that gods were invented by the human mind at some point in our evolutionary development. It was probably at the time when human intellect began to develop concepts arising from the elementary awareness of cause and effect, which I think behaviorists call conditioning. Some things happened seemingly randomly or without explanation or cause. When humans came up with the idea that events in nature could bring good or bad fortune to them, they probably attributed them to some unseen forces or power. Memory played a role as well. One thing that certainly helped develop the idea of spirits is the power of memory of persons close to us who died but whose presence lingers. In times when it was hard to distinguish what was going on in our heads from the events of the external world, memories and ghosts and spirits must have seemed quite real. Although we have evolved culturally since our first appearance as a species, our brains seem to be built pretty much the same was as our earliest H. sapiens ancestors. The reasoning function of the prefrontal cortex is a Johnny-come-lately. It seems to have progressed in fits and starts, but over centuries it has given us science, the best tool we have for understanding ourselves and the universe in which we live. Science has not as yet found any evidence for the existence of gods. Today’s struggle between faith and reason is really a battle between the more modern part of our brains and the more archaic areas that evolved to help us survive in a vastly different and more hostile environment.
