Arkansas is promoting sexual ignorance

Arkansas schools are promoting abstinence-only sex education, through a program called “The Real Deal”. Like all abstinence-only programs, it’s foundation is in morality (their byline is “abstinence builds character”, which isn’t true, unless you mistake sanctimonious prudery for character) and lies — they announce statistics on their main page that claim that their abstinence programs reduce sexual activity by 30-40%, although they don’t bother to give us a source for those numbers, and all the other evidence available says that abstinence-only fails in comparison to comprehensive sex education.

On their site, they do cite a general source, WebMD. Let’s see what what WebMD has to say about abstinence-only sex ed, shall we?

Students who took part in sexual abstinence programs were just as likely to have intercourse as those who did not. And, those who attended the classes reported having similar numbers of sexual partners to those who did not attend the classes. Mathematica also found out that the average age of having the first intercourse was the same for both groups – just a little less than 15 years old.

Four different abstinence-only programs were examined from around the USA. Students were about eleven when they participated in these programs in 1999. They were surveyed again in late 2005 and early 2006 when they were about 16.

They found that about half of the abstinence-only students had experienced intercourse and about half of the control group (having no program) had also. The 2,057 students were from Miami, Milwaukee, Powhatan, VA and Clarksdale, MS – with both urban and rural settings represented.

The site also touts True Love Waits, a page created by LifeWay Christian Resources, providing “Biblical solutions for life”, which is owned by the Southern Baptist Convention…which reveals the real motivation behind this organization. Has anyone ever seen a genuinely secular abstinence-only program? They all seem to be driven by a conservative social agenda that wants to police children’s thoughts and behaviors, and force them to conform to a failed and obsolete biblical model of culture. At best, they strain to strip the program of any appearance of faith-based thinking (does that remind anyone else of Intelligent Design creationism?), but they can’t hide the fundamentalist/absolutist foundation of their ideas.

They’re also ludicrously stupid. Look at what some Arkansas parents discovered that “The Real Deal” had their kids signing: a card promising to conform. My favorite part is the expiration date.

My wedding night was 31 years ago. Woo hoo! Alcohol, illegal drugs, pornography, and sex outside of marriage, here I come!

The only real deal for sex ed is comprehensive sex education, which also encourages restraint and good sense, but gives accurate information about how to prevent pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. Anything less is encouraging ignorance, and we’ve got the example of a few thousand years of Christianity to show what a mess that makes of people’s lives.

You, too, can be a good atheist if only you respected God a lot more

I just can’t warp my brain in the way required to be a good atheist, I’m afraid. R. Joseph Hoffman is doing his usual schtick of whining about those philistine New Atheists, and this time his point is that we’ve diminished atheism and turned it into a “little idea” instead of the grand powerful concept it ought to be. And how did we do that? By not giving enough credit to a god.

When did atheism cease to be a big idea? When atheists made God a little idea. When its idea of god shriveled to become a postulate of a new intellectual Darwinism. When they began to identify unbelief with being a woman, a gay, a lesbian, or some other victimized cadre. When they decided that religion is best described as a malicious and retardant cultural force that connives to prevent us being the Alpha Race of super-intelligences and wholly equal beings that nature has in store for us. When they elevated naturalism, already an outmoded view of the universe, to a cause, at the expense of authentic imagination.

Atheism has become a little idea because it is based on the hobgoblin theory of religion: its god is a green elf with a stick, not the master of the universe who controls it with his omniscient will. –Let alone a God so powerful that this will could evolve into Nature’s God–the god of Jefferson and Paine–and then into the laws of nature, as it did before the end of the eighteenth century in learned discussion and debate.

What a load of jaw-droppingly stupid bollocks.

Atheists believe god is non-existent — you can’t make it much smaller than that. If you’re postulating a grand great god while proclaiming your atheism, you’re doing one or the other wrong.

There is no requirement to be a lesbian to be an atheist (there are a lot of us who’d be very surprised to discover that the people he later names as prominent are all gay or lesbian minorities). But there is an appreciation that you don’t have to be an old white heterosexual guy to benefit from reason and science and liberation from old superstitions.

I don’t believe atheists are an “Alpha Race of super-intelligences”, or that they are becoming such. Atheists are just people…people who’ve shed a parasite.

Naturalism is outmoded? Hoffman doesn’t get out much, I guess.

I have an interesting mental picture now of who R. Joseph Hoffman regards as a good atheist: it’s an old white heterosexual guy (so far I qualify!) who thinks god is all-powerful and that religion is a useful way to understand the universe. Poor Hoffman. He’s searching for a paradox, so I think he’s going to be a frustrated crank the rest of his life, as he watches a logically consistent form of atheism overwhelm his impossible ideal.

Larry Moran also finds Hoffman to be a bit dotty.

Subscribe to Free Inquiry

You should! Ophelia Benson is already in it, and I just got the latest issue, which boldly announces in a banner across the top, “NEW COLUMNIST: PZ MYERS”, so I’m entirely self-serving when I say you should send them money.

It really is going to be a regular thing — I just sent off column #2 this past weekend. I think I get to eventually post the columns here, but only after a long lag to avoid undercutting the magazine. Which is silly, though: if you’ve ever seen Free Inquiry, you know it regularly features a large collection of interesting writers — Wendy Kaminer, Susan Jacoby, Christopher Hitchens, a whole bevy of that ilk — and you ought to be getting it to savor the whole magazine.

Why I am an atheist – Breton Vandenberg

My conversion to atheism was less of a de-conversion from religion as it was a personal realisation of what being an atheist represented. In my life I was not surrounded by religion nor was I compelled to find it by family or friends. However, even this is not a guarantee that someone will become an atheist – one only needs look at the numerous conspiracy-theorists in the world today to see how easily irrationality can take root in one’s mind.

So, the beginning of my conversion began with the simple realisation that after reading about the awesome-ness of the T-Rexs, Tricerotops, Great White Sharks and Killer Whales I found the stories of Joshua and Noah to be no more interesting or entertaining than the fairy tales I had been brought up on. Thus at around the age of 8 or 9 I simply decided I had enough with the bible and its silliness and promptly told my mother I wouldn’t be going to Sunday School any more.

But this did not make me an atheist. Rather I began to refer to myself as agnostic (once I learnt what the word meant of course! I was still young) – loudly proclaiming that I believed in a greater power, a personal God, but that this was a God not trapped in any book. A God that existed beyond us – but always there to guide and assist. Indeed, I still prayed every night to this God and I felt he listened. I left school, completed university and entered into work – sinning and fornicating along the way – and still I felt that this personal God was there with me. I could not perceive of a world without a greater power above us nor could I bear to associate myself with the now ingrained view I had of an atheist, that they were arrogant, nihilistic and dismissive by virtue of their disbelief.

And so it was that I found Richard Dawkins The God Delusion one day, in an airport on my way to Johannesburg. And it was within its pages that I started to recognise a deeper appreciation for the world – a world based on rationality and logic. And within its pages I also recognised myself. For here I was clinging to the idea of a personal God despite no evidence to its existence and all the while dismissing the superstition so prevalent in my society – giggling at stories of the ‘tokoloshe’, expressing shared disgust at ‘muti’-killings as well as mocking creationists. I was a hypocrite and it was all there for me to see.

And so it was that one evening, I just refused to pray. I had seen that to be an atheist was not to be closed minded, nor cynical. Rather it was to finally recognise what had begun when I first refused to return to Sunday School – that on looking at the evidence for religion, and finding it to be insufficient, the only honest outcome was atheism.

Breton Vandenberg
South Africa

PS Unless you are South African I doubt you would be familiar with the terms ‘tokoloshe’ and ‘muti’-killings. It is for this reason Google is there for you – I’m sure there are better and clearer definitions out there then I could provide!

Lonely broken-hearted creationists

Aww, poor Intelligent Design creationism is feeling unloved. Or perhaps it’s jealousy. David Klinghoffer, that clueless ideologue at the Discovery Institute, is whimpering that blogging scientists aren’t paying enough attention to his brand of creationism while sniping at Jack Scanlan.

Darwinian scientists who blog — in other words, those whose comments are most readily accessible to us — may indeed not pay attention to ID arguments, but that’s certainly not because of any lack of “rigorous and persuasive ideas” on ID’s part. The proof is that Darwin defenders are typically very busy indeed picking on other arguments that no thoughtful and critical person would remotely regard as “rigorous and persuasive.” What those other arguments have in common is that, unlike ID, they’re too weak to effectively fight back.

As a convenient example, right over at Panda’s Thumb, Scanlan’s colleage PZ Myers contributes a longish post (1500+ words) attacking some guy’s rather… well, strained attempt to discover the details of all of embryology in two vaguely formulated verses from the Koran. Dr. Myers complains:

I have read the entirety of Hamza Andreas Tzortzis’ paper, “Embryology in the Qur’an: A scientific-linguistic analysis of chapter 23: With responses to historical, scientific & popular contentions,” all 58 pages of it (although, admittedly, it does use very large print). It is quite possibly the most overwrought, absurdly contrived, pretentious expansion of feeble post hoc rationalizations I’ve ever read. As an exercise in agonizing data fitting, it’s a masterpiece.

Who is Hamza Andreas Tzortzis? On his Facebook page, he is identified as “a convert to Islam, …an international lecturer, public speaker & author. He is particularly interested in Islam, philosophy and politics.” How Dr. Myers discovered Mr. Tzortzis and what an easy punching bag he makes, I do not know.

Don’t worry, Davy! I think you’re just an easy a punching bag as Tzortzis, and just as obscure and irrelevant! Also, I think Intelligent Design creationism is just as strained, just as ludicrous, just as fallacious as Tzortzis’s Muslim creationism, or Ken Ham’s fundamentalist creationism, or Hugh Ross’s old earth creationism, or Biologos’s theistic evolution. I despise you all equally.

Big hug, OK?

Now I know these guys are used to cherry-picking all of their data and seeing whatever they want to see, but Klinghoffer has made a ridiculously bogus claim, that we don’t pay attention to Intelligent Design creationism’s arguments. Of course we do! It’s just that right now ID is rather spent — they’ve blown it in all of their attempts to legislate creationism into the schools, they’ve got nothing credible published, and their predictions have all fallen flat — in 2004, Dembski predicted the demise of “molecular darwinism” in 5 years, which, you may notice, has passed. Instead, it looks like ID has lapsed into a twitching coma, with nothing new to say…not that they ever did, since all they were was warmed over William Paley in the first place.

Besides, ID creationism was only a puppet for the religious creationists anyway. Almost everyone in the movement is devout in some way or another (cue Berlinski to swirl in superciliously and declare that no, his only god is Berlinski), and their support was entirely derived from a creationist base that saw ID as a convenient secular facade to plaster over the godly superstition of its underpinnings. Sorry to say, that base was only loyal when they thought ID was a useful mask…as it has failed, they’re all flocking to the Hams and Hovinds and local megachurches instead. You know, the religiously-driven fanatics that Klinghoffer so lightly dismisses as our easy targets.

But it’s silly to claim we haven’t addressed their arguments. Personally, I’ve reviewed Meyer’s Signature in the Cell and Jonathan Wells’ Icons of Evolution and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design. I’ve tackled Casey Luskin and Michael Egnor and Paul Nelson and Michael Behe and William Dembski. I’ve written general critiques of ID creationism. I’ve trashed ID creationism repeatedly, and with bemused enthusiasm.

Let’s not forget all those other science bloggers and writers who’ve also stomped on ID repeatedly: Ian Musgrave, Wesley Elsberry, Carl Zimmer, John Wilkins, Larry Moran, Steve Matheson, Jeff Shallit, Allen MacNeill, Jerry Coyne, Ken Miller and many more. Or the whole danged gang at the Panda’s Thumb. We’ll all continue to take swipes at ID creationism occasionally, but the Discovery Institute just has to learn that as far as creationism goes, we’re polyamorously promiscuous, and we’re happy to screw the whole damned bunch of anti-science goombahs.

ID is just one minor and particularly pretentious form of the pathology. We don’t focus on only ID, and it’s not because we’re afraid that they’ll “effectively fight back”. They won’t. What they’ll do instead is pretend our critiques never existed…just as Klinghoffer does here.

(Also on Sb)

Burzynski Clinic: the domain of scoundrels and quacks

Billie Bainbridge is four years old, and she has an inoperable brain tumor, and her prognosis is not good. Her family is desperate, and has been frantically trying to raise money from the community to cover the costs of a treatment they’ve been told might cure her. They need £200,000. They are asking the public to contribute.

Unfortunately, the treatment they want to give her is antineoplaston therapy: it’s pure bunk. The clinic that is trying to suck large sums of money away from the family of a dying child is the Burzynski clinic. So in addition to being a quack, Burzynski is now a vampire, exploiting sick children for profit.

Andy Lewis wrote an article about the false hope of the Burzynski clinic. It’s damning — the Burzynski clinic has been exploiting the sick for years with an exorbitantly priced ‘therapy’ that has never passed Phase III trials.

A scientific organization would respond to such an argument, you would think, with a deluge of data and explanations of the scientific basis of their treatment. Not the Burzynski clinic! Instead, they have some angry hack at their establishment who fired off a whole series of threatening letters to Lewis, claiming legal authority with no evidence that the angry clown, Marc Stephens, has any legal credentials at all. There’s certainly no science behind his rants, and there doesn’t seem to be any legal standing, either.

So Stephens threatens Lewis’s family.

Be smart and considerate for your family and new child, and shut the article down..Immediately.

You can guess how the Internet responds to such thuggish, bullying behavior: by blowing up and pointing out even more loudly the deficiencies of the Burzynski clinic.

So Stephens has started sending these threatening letters to other people, including Rhys Morgan. “GOVERN YOURSELF ACCORDINGLY,” he blusters as he promises libel suits.

I think you all know what to do now. Spread the news of the Burzynski clinic’s quackery far and wide; trumpet it loudly everywhere. The media has been fairly passive about this abuse of children and dying adults for some time now, so let’s make it clear to the world exactly how contemptible these phonies are.

GOVERN YOURSELF ACCORDINGLY.

(Also on Sb)

The Quran is bunk, too

I know you kids like the youtube and hate that tl;dr text stuff, so if you couldn’t find the patience to read my post on Islamic embryology, you can now watch the screen instead. The Rationalizer goes through the ‘science’ in the Quran and shows that it’s largely plagiarized from Galen, and that it also steals Galen’s mistakes, so it’s a beautiful example of a plagiarized error of the type biologists use to demonstrate a lineage.

All the straining Muslim apologists use to fit the science to the few lines of poetry in the Quran (I’m looking at you, Hamzas Tzortzis) are futile and really only demonstrate that the founders of Islam borrowed their message, not from a divine source, but from Greco-Roman medicine.

But perhaps Allah is just another name for Galen.

(Also on Sb)

Acupuncture is bunk

Here’s a terrific webcomic exposing the silliness of acupuncture. People are always citing these awful studies at me that they claim support the efficacy of acupuncture, and like the comic says what I see when I read them is that the advocates have gone “anomaly hunting after any statistically relevant result, usually by cherry-picking data or creative interpretation. You’ll never find a conclusive effect with acupuncture studies”.

I’d really like to hook the traditional Chinese medicine freaks with the cannabinoid bozos who’ve lately been doing the same thing: citing weak results to prop up extravagant claims of near miraculous efficacy. A kookfight to the death!

(Also on Sb).

Why I am an atheist – Gülşah Ökmen

My story dates back to 4 years ago during when I was in 6th grade.

We started having our science course in our newly built lab. Our science teacher, who was in her 30s, was a firm believer. Outside the school she was wearing headscarf1. During a lecture, I realized a framed poster on the floor. I went to the teacher’s desk at the end of the class and said “Something has fallen off here ma’am”. With a sharp voice she replied back “Oh that, they found it among the old lab stuff, I didn’t want to confuse you by hanging stuff like that on the wall.” When I took the poster and started to examine it, she warned me to put it in the trash and walked out of the classroom. As you can guess, there was a detailed description of the tree (evolution) of life on the poster. I didn’t know much about the tree of life or evolution until that day but I pretty much figured that my teacher was irritated of the poster because of her religious beliefs. When I came home I immediately set out to make a research about evolution on the internet and examined the basic written and visual sources on evolution and natural selection for hours. And that day, for the first time in my life, I questioned the all mighty creator on whose existence I didn’t have the tiniest doubt before.

The more I read about evolution, which gives much more humane (and universal) answers to the questions like how we exist than intelligent design does and stands on sound evidence, the more I reasoned, questioned and got curious. All the prevarication of my teacher when I asked her questions about these issues together with the pervasive moralist pressure of the conservationist society all around me, stimulated me to inquire a lot more and drove me to explore further. With time, being skeptical also helped me to get rid of my other stupid supernatural fears and thus made me sleep more peacefully and take more confident steps in life. Besides, as it has always bothered me that the god was holding men dearer and commanding only to women to cover themselves, I questioned more. It was not very difficult for me to come up with the conclusion that this whole religion and belief systems were nothing more than sick dreams of a patriarchal society.

As time went by, with all these thoughts on my mind, I got rid of my ignorant superstitions, and I am finished with feeling guilty about being a woman and with being treated like a second-class person. I am much more aware that I’m holding the rights to speak about my life and my body, and I think I am much more peaceful and confident than if I were a religious person. This is why I’ve been an atheist for three years now.

Gülşah Ökmen
Turkey

1Translator’s note: it is not allowed to teach with headscarfs in public schools in Turkey.

(Gülşah Ökmen was the winner of a coming out essay contest held in Turkey on this Turkish atheist blog.)

There is no one true Skepticon

I missed a whole series of good talks on the final day of Skepticon, all because I have this job and these responsibilities and I had to fly back so I’d be prepared to teach the next day. Fortunately, Hambone Productions did a fine job of recording everything, and edited presentations are gradually appearing on the web. JT Eberhard’s talk on mental illness is highly recommended. I say that even though I have no mental illnesses at all. Well, no diagnosed, treatable mental problems that are recognized by psychiatrists as something different from the normal range of human weirdnesses, anyway.

Hmmm. I wonder if any of the Guardians of Skeptical Conference Purity will show up to denounce that as not part of the accepted traditional purview of skepticism?

I also missed this other deviation from the ethereal perfection of the refined gentleman’s version of skepticism, so if you need a pick-me-up after JT’s troubles, here’s Hula Hoop Chick.

I think they both advanced the cause of atheism.