African Americans for Humanism

I usually gripe about the esthetics of atheist billboards here, but I have to come right out and say it: African Americans for Humanism did good. Their whole campaign is attractive, positive, and tasteful. Heck, I’m Minnesota Pallid*, and I want to join them.

They have a speakers bureau. If you’re building an atheist/humanist/secular conference, look. I’ve heard less than half of them speak, and next time I’m at a conference I’d like to hear more.

*True fact. I had a routine checkup today, and the first thing the doctor said to me was “Boy, you’re pale”…which is a major accomplishment in Minnesota in February, to have a complexion so white that it elicits comment. I’d go outside and see the sun, but I’m also teaching a cancer course which makes me fearful of everything.

Home School Science Fair this NEXT weekend

Aaargh, I think I’m going to have to miss it again. Our local creationist organization is having its yearly creationist science fair at the Har-Mar Mall near Minneapolis on 18-19 February. You can check out photos from a few years back and see that it is typical grade school science stuff, mostly not very interesting with a few that look like the kids are actually thinking. That’s not to knock this fair; you could say the same of most of the secular science fairs.

The difference is 1) this fair requires you to have a Bible verse on your project, and 2) the purpose of the fair isn’t to promote science, it’s to evangelize Christianity.

1) To promote home schools,

2) To show that Homeschool students can do good science.

3) To present our science fair project to non-Christian people. This should be a great Gospel outreach.

We heard about one lady who saw the Science Fair displays at the Mall. She began to read some of the verses on the displays and was convicted to start attending church and get right with God. There are probably other stories like this we have not heard but it shows the power of God’s Word through our program.

Seriously? Look over their examples and their fair ideas. Do any of them look at all like they might convince you to follow Jesus?

Well, if they answered the question “What is God made of?” or better yet, “Why do we have pimples? Did God goof?”, maybe.

Why I am an atheist – Jonathan Judd

I would credit my atheism to an excellent education. I have had the opportunity to have been taught by many excellent teachers and professors who passed down to me the ability to think critically, ask questions, and to complete wide research to find answers. While I am not a scientist, my education provided me with a background in the scientific method, and a basic understanding about how the sciences can explain our natural world, and sometimes what others may call the “unexplainable.”

Because I was not as gifted in the sciences / mathematics areas, I chose study literature and writing. I found that through literature, there is a great deal of information and as that contributed to my atheism. I believe my first foray in to questioning the existence of god came about after reading Greek mythology in the 6th grade. After learning about all the myriad gods, goddesses, titans, nymphs, monsters, and super-powered heroes the Greeks once believed in, that they used to explain their world, I thought it might not be a stretch that in modern times, “god” was used by humans to explain our modern world. The Greeks once believed the titan Helios pulled the sun around the earth on the back of his flying chariot, when we now know that the Earth actually revolves around the sun.

My English teacher introduced our class to “Elmer Gantry” and “Inherit the Wind” in our freshman year of high school. I learned about the hypocrisy of believers, and how people can twist the Bible to fit their own needs and agendas. I found this was not only the case in modern times, and in reading Voltaire, I discovered that hypocrisy and religion have been travelling hand in hand for centuries. I discovered that promoting belief in a god or gods was also a route to power of those that promote dogma.

In college, I was introduced to Freud, and psychology. By reading further into the subject matter, I became aware of why people have a need or desire to believe in god, an afterlife, angels, or a higher power, why they have a need to feel some connection to the world around them. It can be difficult for the human brain to accept “not knowing,” and god and religion try to comfort those “discomforting” thoughts and feelings. I found that religion was there to soothe and coddle those who feel uncomfortable with life’s most difficult questions.

I am truly grateful for having been exposed to great teachers, who in turn exposed me to new ideas. Not telling me which may to go, but arming me with a variety of viewpoints to help me choose my own direction. I continue to use my educational experience to find new questions, and new answers, some that confirm thoughts, and others that help me to answers questions that others have.

Jonathan Judd

WTF?

Do you see anything wrong with this table?

It’s bizarre, and it’s posted on the BBC site. There have never been only two human beings on the planet. The “births since previous date” column is absurdly precise — I could see estimating the total at 100 billion, but 107,602,707,791? Jeez, was that 6:21pm tonight, or 6:25?

I hope the problem isn’t that the data comes from an American source.

(via Further Thoughts for the Day)

Zooming in on the Origin of Life Science Foundation

I’d been wondering about the credibility of David L. Abel, an Intelligent Design creationist who claims to work in the Department of ProtoBioCybernetics and ProtoBioSemiotics, Origin of Life Science Foundation, Inc. I tried to track down this foundation with the lofty title, the million dollar prize, and the elaborately specific departments, but the best I’d been able to do was find a google satellite image.

Huh. That looks suspiciously like a suburban house.

So then someone from the Evil Atheist Conspiracy’s vast network of spies and agents decided to drive by and get a picture.

Why, it is someone’s house at that address! It’s a nice but unpretentious little place in a residential suburb. There must be some mistake. This doesn’t look like a fantastic institute of advanced science — it’s got shady trees and a lawn and a basket of flowers by the garage and it looks like a typical two bedroom house.

But wait…what’s that by the hanging basket? It’s a sign of some sort. Look closer…

Yep, that’s the place.

That’s every intelligent design creationism institute of scientific thinking: a cheap sign tacked up on a garage, with some guy with delusions of competence twiddling his thumbs inside.

(Also on Sb)

Why I am an atheist – Beanpuff

I am an atheist, mainly because of the overwhelming evidence, but everybody says that so here’s the other reason: I’m happier without God. I hate the idea of my only purpose being to serve an all powerful being who I can’t communicate with. If it weren’t for that fact, I might not be writing this. In fact, I might be writing hate mail instead. But after a while I gradually realized that I don’t have to get my morality or purpose from god. I had always believed being fully aware that there was no supporting evidence, so I decided to stop believing altogether.

Also, Westboro Baptist was a pretty good deterrent.

Beanpuff

Anoka, our little blight on the prairie

Rolling Stone has an excellent article on One Town’s War on Gay Teens, featuring Minnesota’s own Anoka school district, where Michele Bachmann and the Minnesota Patriarchy Council hold sway. I recommend it highly, but I also warn you: it’s a hard read, since it personalizes the kids who killed themselves after incessant taunting and bullying. I choked up a few times myself.

I’m going to leave out any discussion of the kids, because I hate crying on my keyboard — go read it yourself, if you think you can take it — and want to focus on one issue. The Anoka school district claims that it has no responsibility at all in these deaths, and instead blames gay activists for driving these kids to suicide; how, I don’t know. It’s probably a variant of the same accusation atheists face, that it’s their own fault for being themselves and provoking critics by openly existing. They also occasionally mention that right-wingers are responsible, but that rings hollow, since at every step the district has been dancing to the fundamentalist Christians’ tune.

The Southern Poverty Law Center and the National Center for Lesbian Rights have filed a lawsuit on behalf of five students, alleging the school district’s policies on gays are not only discriminatory, but also foster an environment of unchecked anti-gay bullying. The Department of Justice has begun a civil rights investigation as well. The Anoka-Hennepin school district declined to comment on any specific incidences but denies any discrimination, maintaining that its broad anti-bullying policy is meant to protect all students. “We are not a homophobic district, and to be vilified for this is very frustrating,” says superintendent Dennis Carlson, who blames right-wingers and gay activists for choosing the area as a battleground, describing the district as the victim in this fracas. “People are using kids as pawns in this political debate,” he says. “I find that abhorrent.”

Read further into the article, and there are all these little revelations that show that the district has been pandering thoughtlessly to the Religious Right all along; they are so thoroughly steeped in the cult of Christian conservatism that they are unconscious of the problem.

It had been a hard day: the annual “Day of Truth” had been held at school, an evangelical event then-sponsored by the anti-gay ministry Exodus International, whose mission is to usher gays back to wholeness and “victory in Christ” by converting them to heterosexuality. Day of Truth has been a font of controversy that has bounced in and out of the courts; its legality was affirmed last March, when a federal appeals court ruled that two Naperville, Illinois, high school students’ Day of Truth T-shirts reading BE HAPPY, NOT GAY were protected by their First Amendment rights. (However, the event, now sponsored by Focus on the Family, has been renamed “Day of Dialogue.”) Local churches had been touting the program, and students had obediently shown up at Anoka High School wearing day of truth T-shirts, preaching in the halls about the sin of homosexuality.

Every goddamn school district in this state gets these lying whores for Jesus showing up to do “assemblies”. Here in Morris we’ve had the “You can run, but you can’t hide” ministries show up, or other variants. They’ve usually got some ridiculous “cool teen” schtick — they’re body-builders or wrestlers or rappers — and they bill themselves as presenting a positive, anti-drug message, something that they can superficially pretend is secular, and then they turn on the prayer and Jesus babble, and it’s transparent as hell — these are simply evangelical Christians in crappy camouflage, and the schools just let them sail on in and preach to the students.

It seems to happen at some school around here every year. It’s repulsive. I often don’t hear about it until after the fact, because here’s another giveaway: they don’t advertise publicly, they advertise in the churches.

So the Anoka school district wants to claim that the anti-gay bullying is not their fault, but they annually have a “Day of Truth” led by Exodus International or now, Focus on the Family (as if that’s an improvement)? The district turns the hyenas loose in the hallways, but denies responsibility if someone gets chewed up.

It’s not just the students. The schools have gay teachers and staff, who are silenced, and the straight teachers lead the way in gagging any protest.

“There has been widespread confusion,” says Anoka-Hennepin teachers’ union president Julie Blaha. “You ask five people how to interpret the policy and you get five different answers.” Silenced by fear, gay teachers became more vigilant than ever to avoid mention of their personal lives, and in closeting themselves, they inadvertently ensured that many students had no real-life gay role models. “I was told by teachers, ‘You have to be careful, it’s really not safe for you to come out,'” says the psychologist Cashen, who is a lesbian. “I felt like I couldn’t have a picture of my family on my desk.” When teacher Jefferson Fietek was outed in the community paper, which referred to him as an “open homosexual,” he didn’t feel he could address the situation with his students even as they passed the newspaper around, tittering. When one finally asked, “Are you gay?” he panicked. “I was terrified to answer that question,” Fietek says. “I thought, ‘If I violate the policy, what’s going to happen to me?'”

The silence of adults was deafening. At Blaine High School, says alum Justin Anderson, “I would hear people calling people ‘fags’ all the time without it being addressed. Teachers just didn’t respond.” In Andover High School, when 10th-grader Sam Pinilla was pushed to the ground by three kids calling him a “faggot,” he saw a teacher nearby who did nothing to stop the assault. At Anoka High School, a 10th-grade girl became so upset at being mocked as a “lesbo” and a “sinner” – in earshot of teachers – that she complained to an associate principal, who counseled her to “lay low”; the girl would later attempt suicide. At Anoka Middle School for the Arts, after Kyle Rooker was urinated upon from above in a boys’ bathroom stall, an associate principal told him, “It was probably water.” Jackson Middle School seventh-grader Dylon Frei was passed notes saying, “Get out of this town, fag”; when a teacher intercepted one such note, she simply threw it away.

The district is aware that there is a problem — dead kids are very bad PR — and has been waffling ineffectually about doing something or other. Pointless meetings are always the preferred solution for a bureaucracy.

Just to be on the safe side, however, the district held PowerPoint presentations in a handful of schools to train teachers how to defend gay students from harassment while also remaining neutral on homosexuality. One slide instructed teachers that if they hear gay slurs – say, the word “fag” – the best response is a tepid “That language is unacceptable in this school.” (“If a more authoritative response is needed,” the slide added, the teacher could continue with the stilted, almost apologetic explanation, “In this school we are required to welcome all people and to make them feel safe.”) But teachers were, of course, reminded to never show “personal support for GLBT people” in the classroom.

Never show personal support for GLBT kids. That’s the killer right there.

I have some suggestions for the Anoka school district that would be helpful. First, repudiate the Minnesota Family Council and Focus on the Family. These are hate groups that have no business advising the school administration; they should be recognized immediately as symptomatic of the bigotry problem they have. Second, adopt a strictly secular policy on all official school events. No more preachers, no more evangelical assemblies, no more church sponsorship of days or picnics or t-shirts or whatever the hell trick they try to pull. God is the poison here, get it out. That’s not to say that Christians must be oppressed, but that we need to learn that Christianity is a personal, private preference that does not instill a moral message. Third, crack down hard on the students: seeing a few bullying jocks getting kicked off the football team for cracking jokes about faggots would send a strong signal right there.

That’s a school district that definitely needs more atheists. Maybe the SSA needs to seed the place with a little rational thought.

Anything beats church anytime

There’s going to be some kind of football game played this weekend, and American Atheists are sending a message to the pregame parties.

An Atheist civil rights group announced today that it will be flying an airplane banner on Super Bowl Sunday around Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis. The banner will read “Football beats church anytime – atheists.org.” The banner is scheduled to be in the air from 9:30-11:30 AM local time.

That’s nice. I’m going to be working on a lecture on signal transduction in cancer. Cancer beats football beats church!

I just committed an American heresy, didn’t I?

Making excuses

The editor of Life, Shu-Kun Lin, has published a rationalization for his shoddy journal.

Life (ISSN 2075-1729, http://www.mdpi.com/journal/life/) is a new journal that deals with new and sometime difficult interdisciplinary matters. Consequently, the journal will occasionally be presented with submitted articles that are controversial and/or outside conventional scientific views. Some papers recently accepted for publication in Life have attracted significant attention. Moreover, members of the Editorial Board have objected to these papers; some have resigned, and others have questioned the scientific validity of the contributions. In response I want to first state some basic facts regarding all publications in this journal. All papers are peer-reviewed, although it is often difficult to obtain expert reviewers for some of the interdisciplinary topics covered by this journal. I feel obliged to stress that although we will strive to guarantee the scientific standard of the papers published in this journal, all the responsibility for the ideas contained in the published articles rests entirely on their authors. Discussions on previously published articles are welcome and I hope that, by fostering discussion and by keeping an open-minded attitude towards new ideas, the journal will spur progress in this little explored, difficult and very exciting area of knowledge.

In particular, the paper “Andrulis, E.D. Theory of the Origin, Evolution, and Nature of Life. Life 2012, 2, 1-105” was published recently online and is due to appear in Issue 1, Volume 2, 2012 of Life, at the end of March this year [1]. So that our readership has as much information as I can divulge without violating the confidentiality of the review process, what follows is the background of these events. Professor Bassez had previously guest-edited a successful special issue titled “The Origin of Life” in another MDPI journal [2]. Although Professor Bassez [3] had also planned to be the Guest Editor of the special issue “Origin of Life – Feature Papers” for Life [4], she was, for personal reasons, unable to do so. I therefore volunteered to take this responsibility on her behalf and to guest edit this special issue and supervise the editorial procedure for the papers. I made the decision of acceptance based on the peer review reports we received and their recommendation in support of publication.
As stated earlier, finding reviewers able to cross discipline boundaries as is often needed for multidisciplinary “origin of life” topics [5] is particularly difficult. The publishing process that MDPI manuscripts go through by our in-house editorial staff members is that they choose reviewers from sources like Chemical Abstracts, PubMed, Web of Science or more recently, from Google Scholar. Very often we also ask the Editorial Board members to review papers or ask those of them who have relevant knowledge and expertise to supply possible reviewer names. We also use the reviewer names suggested by the authors, but we do this with great care, checking the background of each potential reviewer and their publication record, as well as ensuring they have no collaborations with the authors that may be construed as a conflict of interest. I should stress that although we try to encourage bold, innovative science, we reject many submissions. In the case of the Dr. Andrulis’s long paper, the two reviewers were both faculty members of reputable universities different than the author’s and both went to considerable trouble presenting lengthy review reports. Dr. Andrulis revised his manuscript as requested, and the paper was subsequently published.

Regardless of opinion on specific papers that have been published to date, I sincerely hope that all of our articles, most of which are outstanding, will continue to be read and discussed. Our editorial procedure is under scrutiny by the Editorial Board, who wishes to be more closely involved in the editorial process, and we are striving to further improve our editorial service. We welcome comments on the Dr. Andrulis’s paper or any other papers that have been published in Life.

The “interdisciplinary” excuse is bogus. I am not a specialist in the fields discussed, but I could see immediately that Andrulis’s paper, and Abel’s paper as well, were “off” — to any critical, skeptical thinker their flaws are obvious. Are there any scientists in any field — general physics, biology, chemistry, psychology, for instance — who would read either of those papers and think maybe there’s something to them? You’d have to be a fellow crackpot or somebody completely unqualified to evaluate any science papers to fail to see the problems in them.

Also, you don’t need someone with great interdisciplinary knowledge to be able to screen out this kind of nonsense. I’m reminded of the comment I read on the Velikovsky affair: someone (it might have been Sagan) noted that the astronomers could see that Velikovsky’s cosmic billiard game was bad physics, but gosh, his biblical scholarship sure was impressive; while the Bible scholars were all saying his mythology was all terrible literary scholarship, but golly, he sure seemed to know a lot of physics. Evaluating interdisciplinary work does not mean you cherry pick the most favorable interpretations from those most ignorant of a specific subfield, nor does it mean you split the difference and average the opinions of the subfields together. If one part of the mix is bullshit, you throw out the whole thing.

The fact that they’re having trouble finding qualified reviewers for the work they’re publishing is also ominous. Shouldn’t the editorial board consist of people who are competent in this interdisciplinary field who can screen out the wackier submissions? And shouldn’t it be setting off alarm bells when they accept suggestions of reviewers from authors, and those are the only people they can get reviews from? It’s a situation ripe for selection by crackpots of crackpot reviewers; you just know that the Abel paper was reviewed by fellow travelers in the Intelligent Design creationism movement, and got no critical evaluation at all.

Given the spectacularly poor quality of the Andrulis and Abel papers, though, I am most amused by the claim that the editors and reviewers of Life “reject many submissions”. I would love to see the papers that they judged worse than Andrulis’s and Abel’s.

(Also on Sb)

OwlMirror found the quote in Sagan’s Broca’s Brain.

Velikovsky has called attention to a wide range of stories and legends, held by diverse peoples, separated by great distances, which stories show remarkable similarities and concordances. I am not expert in the cultures or languages of any of these peoples, but I find the concatenation of legends Velikovsky has accumulated stunning. It is true that some experts in these cultures are less impressed. I can remember vividly discussing Worlds in Collision with a distinguished professor of Semitics at a leading university. He said something like “The Assyriology, Egyptology, Biblical scholarship and all of that Talmudic and Midrashic pilpul is, of course, nonsense; but I was impressed by the astronomy.” I had rather the opposite view.