A glimpse into the darkness

I police my social media fairly heavily, since I really don’t want to waste time on major bozos. This one snuck through, though.

Yeah, no. Ozone is a greenhouse gas, although a short-lived one that decays fairly quickly. Putting more ozone into the atmosphere isn’t going to help reduce global warming, although the stratospheric ozone layer is a useful radiation filter.

You don’t want to follow that clown. I looked, and it’s all flag-waving MAGA racist garbage, as you might expect.

Would Chris Coons want me to talk about my faith, if I were running for office?

Coons biases are showing nakedly in this essay in which he says Democrats need to talk about their faith, using the example of Sherrod Brown, who got all this attention from the electorate for openly making a big deal of his Christian beliefs. So, he argues, everyone needs to make it part of their stump speech.

What’s implied is that this is a fine strategy for Christians.

Unfortunately, choosing not to talk much—or even at all—about faith and religion has become common in today’s Democratic Party. That choice, I believe, is the wrong one for two important reasons.

First, it hides away the deep, passionate, and formative faith backgrounds of so many Democrats who are seeking or serving in office. At our weekly Senate prayer breakfasts, for example, I’m consistently inspired and moved by the words of my colleagues whose faith is fundamental to their life and their work, but who rarely talk about it publicly.

Second, choosing not to talk about our faith as Democrats ignores the clear fact that America is still an overwhelmingly religious country, and that the Democratic Party, too, remains a coalition largely made up of people of faith—including tens of millions who identify as deeply religious.

I guarantee you that if I were running for office (fortunately, I’m not) Coons would be telling me to hush about the atheism thing. If I were Muslim and running for the presidency, my religion would be a huge issue; that’s a campaign that wouldn’t even get off the ground, all because people like Coons and Brown are making their Christianity a ploy in their run for office.

Someone like Coons would not be consistently inspired and moved by the words of a godless colleague, or one who worshipped Allah, or a Satanist friend. The implication is that only the dominant beliefs in a culture are worthy, and should be expressed loudly, and anyone else should shut up.

How about if instead we recognized that your goofy, irrelevant, evidence-free beliefs should not be part of our government, directly or indirectly, and that making it a prominent part of a campaign is pandering to a biased segment of the electorate? That goes for atheists who might make it a central feature of their campaign for office. I want to know your position on the issues and your proposed solutions, not what phantasm (or absence thereof) you talk to.

Shermer’s disgrace continues apace

Not that it will cost his reputation in the skeptic community anything — he is the master of falling upwards. But recently he has been saying really stupid things on Twitter to defend the alt-right, including this bizarre declaration:

Yeah, right. As we’re seeing in the American concentration camps today, German Nazis didn’t have a monopoly on evil. Ordinary, not-very-bright American Trumpkins are doing a phenomenal job of imitating them right now. Shermer had even more to say, though, including this astonishing canard: Good to remember that Nazi=National Socialism. Not far right but far left. Do we really need to debunk this exercise in naive etymology anymore?

Also, in case you didn’t get the memo, Nazis were not atheists, but were generally Lutherans and Catholics. They also weren’t demonic satanists incarnate.

Anyway, just enjoy Rebecca Watson’s thorough takedown of this skeptic fraud.

Sunday Sacrilege: Expanding Minds & Inspiring Service

I haven’t done one of these in a while — it’s a dispiriting time to be an atheist — but I was inspired by a sign near my house. This is a truly excellent motto.

Expanding Minds & Inspiring Service

That would be a great theme for an atheist community, but of course, that sign was posted outside the Campus Lutheran Ministry Christus House, which is cause for some reservation. Religion does not expand minds, but instead narrows them. You would not go into the Campus Lutheran Ministry and find the pastor explaining how you should question everything, explore the wide world of ideas, and be reluctant to accept dogma, because their mission is to get you to accept their peculiar, limited, tightly circumscribed interpretation of Jesus Christ. The place where you’ll get your mind expanded is a few blocks north, on the campus of the University of Minnesota Morris, a secular institution.

I’m not going to accept the literal truth of that part of the sign. It’s a nice ideal, though. Too bad they don’t implement it.

The second part of the sign, though, “Inspiring Service”, is more legit. I remember from my church-going days that that was a serious and important message. Some of it was self-serving: service meant volunteering for the church or donating money to the church. Some of it was well-intentioned but horribly harmful: we were regularly exhorted to support missionary efforts in Africa. There was also, however, real good that was done. There were food drives to help the poor, visits to shut-ins, call for donations to help those who had fallen sick, requests to assist the elderly. I mowed the lawn of one little old lady who would invite me in afterwards to say a little prayer and praise the Lord. I went along with it, to be nice, and because she definitely didn’t need an argument.

A while later, she died, and she left me a gift in her will: a giant print of “Christ knocking at the door” in a fancy gilt frame. I was told it was because she’d noticed me looking at it in her house, which was true — I had found it remarkably unattractive. I think I would have preferred a decorative lamp as a Major Award, but OK, I accepted it in the spirit with which it was given. It was a nice thought.

My point, though, is that there is an honest and sincere spirit of service in many church-goers, and I think that is a good thing. An important part of a successful movement has to be an ideal of community, and that requires effort to maintain. It requires service.

That got me thinking about atheism. Unfortunately, I think atheism exhibits the inverse of the traits of religion with respect to that motto.

There are close-minded people within atheism, I can assure you of that, but at its best, atheism practices that ideal of expanding minds. I have been involved in programs specifically geared to discuss science, and there are others who’ve worked hard to communicate principles of philosophy ad logic. We can probably all list a hundred individuals who are more interested in taking advantage of the profit potential of atheism — we have our Joel Osteen types — but there are far more atheists who are honestly interested in learning and teaching. We know their interest is sincere, because the ones who do it for pure motives are also the ones who don’t make bank off lecture tours.

But “inspiring service”? Oh god. Ask that of an atheist group and the vast majority will look elsewhere and wander off. The libertarians will clamor for a hanging. YouTube videos will appear condemning everyone of trying to build a petty empire off the membership, or simply shrieking, “HELL NO” at the very idea, and screaming about SJWs taking over. If we wanted to do “service”, we’d join a church. That’s telling, actually. You can’t build a community out of a mob of arrogant individualists who consider contributing to the greater good to be a crime against their independence.

Imagine, though, what a powerhouse atheism could be if it actually implemented the ideals in that sign. Imagine a movement built on teaching and learning, and also on sharing and working together in a community where every member was respected.

We could also imagine if a church actually worked towards both ideals…they’d stop being part of a religion and turn into a secular community. That wouldn’t be a bad outcome, either.

I’m afraid neither are going to happen, though.

Tired, not wired

Wired, the magazine, has a promotional spot for their Team of Experts. I hate it.

Bill Nye, James Cameron, Ken Jeong, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, former NASA astronaut Scott Kelly and neuroscientist Anil Seth answer the most interesting science questions from Twitter.

Let me count the ways this is bad.

  1. It’s all men. Did you notice? Let’s foster the impression that cool science nerds are only boys.
  2. These are all men who are comfortable with pontificating on science — that seems to be the primary criterion for their selection. James Cameron, for instance, is not good at engaging with an audience of learners. Bill Nye’s answer to a stupid question isn’t at all insightful, and is somewhat wrong, because he’s not an evolutionary biologist.>
  3. The format is stupid: those are not “the most interesting science questions from Twitter”.
    In fact, I’d say that if you’re going to Twitter for science questions, you’re already fucked. If we evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys? Just shoot me now.
  4. What’s with the sciencey toys scattered on the desk? They don’t use them. They’re only there because someone thought a scientist’s desk would be covered with toys. Nope. My desk is covered with books and papers and computer cables. So many cables…
  5. Getting bad questions from Twitter means you’re going to get short, glib answers. It’s blipvert science. They’ve taken a complex process and boiled it down to a game of snappy answers to stupid questions.
  6. The worst thing to me — that women are ignored would be the worst, except that it’s a blessing to women that they aren’t associated with this crap — is that this is exactly the attitude that wrecks TV, YouTube, and other media as tools for education. It encourages the idea that the purpose of learning about science is to enable you to crush fools with your witty erudition. The people who rise to the top are those best able to punch down, which turns the whole thing into an aggressive hierarchy. That’s not science, although it may reflect the ugly side of the social institution of science.

You know what might make for a good science show? Go to scientists, and ask them what difficult questions are bugging them. Then have them explain the background to the question, what’s been done so far, and speculate about what the answer might be, and how they’d know it if they saw it and how it would affect their perspective on the field. Unfortunately, that’s hard and wouldn’t give you snappy blipverts that make people feel smarter than the rubes. It would require a goddamn conversation.

But this Wired thing? It’s a vision of science as an authoritarian cult as imagined by a libertarian who learned his science on Reddit.

Wasn’t Bret Weinstein supposed to be the biologist brother?

I have to ask because he wrote one of the most absurd evolutionary arguments ever.

The hair in your armpits broadcasts adaptive messages we don’t know much about, therefore there is no patriarchy. You wouldn’t be stinky if it weren’t adaptive.

Everything in that is just wrong.

Holy crap, turn off your irony meters before you read this one!

Jesus, no. They can’t do this to me. Can a creationist say something so ironic, so oblivious, so un-selfaware, so stupid that my head might explode? Danny Faulkner comes very close. He’s a young earth creationist associated with Answers in Genesis, he was ponderously featured in Eric Hovind’s creation movie, and he has a Ph.D. in astronomy.

He thinks the Earth is less than ten thousand years old, and that the Big Bang is bunk, but he is also confident that the Earth is a sphere, and he patiently explains how flat-earth dogma is wrong. He is very concerned about the flat-earth movement, and tries to explain why they are wrong.

Flat-earthers raise an excellent epistemological question: how do we know what shape is the earth? For three decades, I asked this very question of students in the first semester of my introductory astronomy class. The context of this question was the early history of astronomy. I would ask my students what shape they thought the earth had. All my students would answer that the earth was a sphere. I retired from the university more than six years ago, just about the time the modern flat-earth movement was starting, so I expect that if I were teaching classes now, I frequently would encounter students who think that the earth is flat. When I asked my students how they knew the earth was a globe, not one student could give me a good reason.

Aww, the ignorance of students concerns him. Me, too. I’m not retired, I still engage with students, and I can say that I’ve never met one who thinks the Earth is flat, but I’ve met more than a few who think the Earth is young. I was not prepared for the degree of irony to come, though.

…few students ever develop proper critical thinking skills. When someone comes along with a few arguments for the earth being flat, most people have absolutely no knowledge or resources to counter them. Flat-earthers, for example, typically testify that when they first heard about the earth being flat, they thought it was the dumbest thing that they ever heard. The soon-to-be converts thought that they easily could disprove that the earth was flat, but they quickly realized that they couldn’t. Perhaps out of frustration, they finally concluded that the earth must be flat. It never occurred to them that perhaps their education had failed them in not better preparing them for refuting the notion that the earth is flat.

Just as an exercise, reread that paragraph, but change the word “flat” to “young”. It stops being a description of students, and instead is an indictment of…Danny Faulkner.

Keep going. Keep changing “flat” to “young”. It’s amazing.

There is an important difference between gossip and flat-earth cosmology. Mere gossip rarely is life-changing (except perhaps for the poor victim of gossip). But if one becomes convinced that the earth is flat rather than being spherical, that is a major change in one’s worldview. If the earth truly is flat, then we have been lied to about the earth’s shape our entire lives. One must ask how and why this lie was created and perpetuated. Ultimately, this line of thinking leads to the conclusion that there must be a vast conspiracy about the earth’s shape that has been going on for a long time (since the time of Columbus in most flat-earthers’ estimation, since they generally subscribe to the Columbus mythology). And coming to believe that a vast conspiracy is responsible is a relatively small step for most flat-earthers, because, by definition, a conspiracy is a secret knowledge, and the allure of secret knowledge generally was a major factor that led them into flat-earth belief in the first place. The thirst for secret knowledge is why so many people find belief in all sorts of conspiracies so appealing.

We’re not done yet. Let us look at the Bible through this lens.

In their new-found fervor, flat-earthers often become very bold. Flat-earth Christians think they have found cosmological truth in the Bible, and they aren’t about to let anyone dissuade them from this belief. It doesn’t matter that until very recently virtually no one within the church saw the Bible as teaching that the earth is flat.

Has Danny Faulkner read Danny Faulkner’s testimony?

I had never given much thought about what I would do with my life, though I had always loved astronomy. Almost immediately after my rededication, I came to realize three things: that one could make a living doing astronomy, that I had the ability to do that, and that I believed God had called me to do this. About this time I read The Bible and Modern Science, by Henry M Morris. This was the first book of his that I read, and I’d eventually read many more. A year or two earlier I had read two books that taught day-age and probably even theistic evolution. I realized that what these books espoused was a bit different from what I had understood the Bible to mean, but I respected these men and thought that they probably were right. But I quickly saw that what Henry Morris wrote made much more sense biblically, so I immediately became a recent creationist.

Four decades ago, I learned a valuable lesson from a Bible professor from whom I took two semesters of Pauline epistles. He said that if you see something in a passage that no one else has seen before, there’s probably a very good reason: it isn’t there.

Until very recently, no one within the church saw the Bible as teaching that the Earth is 6000 years old. The day-age explanation he mentions, as well as the gap theory, were more common among educated theologians a hundred years ago, and in fact protestant churches were interested in reconciling the Bible with the science of geology. The Catholic church even today is just fine with the Earth being ancient. There was a trickle of a strain of belief over the last few hundred years (thanks, Archbishop Ussher), but no one saw the Bible as explicitly setting a date for geological events.

That is, until Whitcomb and Morris stole some prophecy from the Seventh Day Adventists and published The Genesis Flood in 1961, claiming to see something in the Bible that no one else had seen before.

Faulkner just charges on, completely unaware that he’s talking to a mirror.

Some flat-earthers also fashion themselves to be experts on science and the methodology of science. Consequently, they think of themselves as competent to dictate to scientists, both godly and ungodly, on how science ought to be conducted. But their definitions and practice of science appear to be formulated to make science as generally understood impossible.

Where do these flat-earthers get the notion that they are capable of rewriting so many disciplines of study? This is particularly galling when one considers the limited science education that most flat-earthers seem to have achieved.

OMG. I am so done here. I refuse to explode, though, because this is the only fate appropriate to Mr Faulkner.

You aren’t owed admission to Harvard, Kyle

Harvard has rescinded an offer of admission to Kyle Kashuv, Parkland shooting survivor, pro-gun advocate, former member of Turning Point USA, and young rising star of dumbass conservatism, because of stupid things he wrote on a message board. He’s now complaining that he should not be judged on the basis of crap he wrote when he was 16 or 17.

That ridiculous defense has now reached peak absurdity. The whole college admissions process is about evaluating your prospects on the basis of what you did in high school! What’s the acceptable window here? Can I say you can’t criticize me for something I wrote yesterday, because I’m a new me today?

The late teens is a period of rapid changes, and we see lots of increases in maturity in college age students. It’s possible he has acquired wisdom in the last few years, but he has to show it, not just say it, and his affiliation with TPUSA is not a good sign that he has become a better adult. Also, the messages go a long way to reveal the content of his character, and it’s not good.

Wow. There’s some remarkable code-switching going on here, because, setting aside the ugly content, that’s not college-eligible writing. That’s simply vomiting up toxins from the id.

Oh, well. He has defenders. The “Intellectual” Dork Web is out in force, deploring the no-platforming of another asshole. Ben Shapiro is whining something fierce, and this guy is, of course, supporting the racist twink.

Lo, the Skeptical Movement.

You have to decide which part of the club charter matters most

Remember when Francis Collins published a book containing his goofy, ridiculous testimonial about how he became a Christian because he was out hiking and saw a waterfall in three parts, demonstrating the Trinity? Oh man, that was stupid. Then he became director of the NIH.

Remember when Francis Collins announced that equality in science was so important that he was refusing to speak on non-inclusive science panels?

“It is time to end the tradition in science of all-male speaking panels, sometimes wryly referred to as ‘manels,’” Dr. Francis Collins wrote in an online statement this week. “Too often, women and members of other groups underrepresented in science are conspicuously missing in the marquee speaking slots at scientific meetings and other high-level conferences.”

“When I consider speaking invitations, I will expect a level playing field, where scientists of all backgrounds are evaluated fairly for speaking opportunities,” he continued. “If that attention to inclusiveness is not evident in the agenda, I will decline to take part.”

Good for him. That’s the right decision.

Hey. Hey…remember when swarms of popular atheists proudly declared that god is a fiction, and that feminism is a cancer and women can’t be funny and atheism doesn’t have the estrogen vibe that would encourage women to disbelieve in gods? Remember that?

Fucking hell. You get to choose between the club that still does silly prayers and wacky rituals, but thinks women are people, or you can choose the club that supports the obvious conclusion that gods don’t exist and girls and brown people are inferior. I hate choices like that, but I guess they aren’t choices at all — I’m part of the former, at least until atheism wises up.

I think it’ll be a long time before that happens. People are sneering at Collins not for his religious beliefs, but for his ideas about human equality — people like Geoffrey Miller, evolutionary psychologist and atheist.

What an ugly clubhouse…