DI: consult a lawyer

I am amused that now the Disco Institute is reduced to complaining that Judge Jones adopted the ACLU’s findings of fact in the Dover trial. It’s true that Jones didn’t write a big chunk of his decision, because he literally accepted the opinion of the DI’s opponents.

Apparently, this is a common judicial practice. I didn’t know that, but shouldn’t the DI know about it? Don’t they have a lawyer or lawyers working for them (they sure have a scientist deficiency)? Couldn’t they have asked someone on their staff whether this was ordinary procedure before they started complaining?

Oh, wait.

Casey Luskin. No wonder they screwed up. That boy has a reputation for rank incompetence and getting the facts wrong.

AiG poisons a few more minds

A while back, I mentioned this essay contest by Answers in Genesis in which the prize was a $50,000 scholarship to Liberty University. If you’re curious about the winner and one of the runners-up, Zeno has the story: the winner’s essay is all about how anti-matter supports the Bible, and the third place winner has become the official advisor on ID to a presidential candidate (in the sense that my crazy second cousin was a presidential candidate, once upon a time). It’s all rather creepy and sad—poor kids. So young and already sucked into the lunatic fringe.

It’s all OK if you are a Christian

Our country, with the approval and encouragement of George W. Bush, has been carrying out a program of religious indoctrination and the unconstitutional endorsement of evangelical Christianity. Federal money has been funneled into “faith-based” programs that make religious dogmatists prosper, and have no other actual, real-world value. The clearest examples are the prisons, where con artists like Chuck Colson have been engaged in a kind of ministry that is actually religious extortion and bribery.

The cells in Unit E had real wooden doors and doorknobs, with locks. More books and computers were available, and inmates were kept busy with classes, chores, music practice and discussions. There were occasional movies and events with live bands and real-world food, like pizza or sandwiches from Subway. Best of all, there were opportunities to see loved ones in an environment quieter and more intimate than the typical visiting rooms.

But the only way an inmate could qualify for this kinder mutation of prison life was to enter an intensely religious rehabilitation program and satisfy the evangelical Christians running it that he was making acceptable spiritual progress.

The article documents many instance of this kind of behavior line up at the trough and get cash—large amounts of cash—to proselytize to captive audiences. It’s genuinely despicable. This is exactly why the government should not be involved in favoring one religion over another—these gasbags cannot be trusted to put the interests of their target audience above their need to preach dogma.

For another example of the sleazy behavior of evangelicals, I give to you Kent Hovind. Hovind is a dishonest creationist who was caught committing tax evasion. Not only was he skimming to enrich himself, but by playing games with their salaries and paying them under the table, he was screwing over his employees, which seems to be a most Christian thing to do. He’s been convicted and thrown in jail, and he has been sporadically posting blog entries from prison. These are appalling stories of a con man who can’t stop bilking his fellow inmates.

have also been teaching math and science to some of the others. It is great to see convicted drug dealers get excited when they learn fourth grade level math for the first time. I have spent quite a bit of time with one 29-year-old man who cannot read at all. I have been teaching him phonics and we are reading Genesis 1, 2, 3 and John 1, 2, and 3. His face lights up when he sees that he can do it. I offer commissary items like soup or coffee to men who memorize Bible verses. There is no way to describe the joy that they show when they get it right. Many have never memorized scriptures in their life, and maybe that is why they are in jail. Scripture helps us to “cleanse our ways” Psalm 119:9-11.

Hovind is not a good teacher. I’ve heard his lectures; he’s a fraud and a liar who babbles at a frantic pace, who has been peddling anti-scientific crap for decades, and now he claims to be teaching science to his fellow inmates. This is an injustice. We’re locking up these poor fellows as punishment, isn’t it a bit much to also allow a bunco artist like Hovind to fill their heads with lies and actively contribute to their ignorance?

Also note the outright bribery I highlighted in the quote—the man has no shame at all.

In fact, he is so shameless I expect that he’ll soon be applying for federal aid in his propaganda efforts…and given the record of this Republican administration, he’ll probably get it. After all, a belief in Jesus seems to be sufficient qualification for any clown to be a teacher (or a president!), overcoming any amount of stupidity.

(crossposted to The American Street)

The new creationist tactic?

They never rest, and you know the creationists are constantly probing, trying to find the next likely inroad into the schools. Sahotra Sarkar offers some concerns about what’s coming next in creationism—these seem like quite probable strategies to me.

As the physicist and astronomer Victor Stenger noted in the Skeptical Briefs newsletter last September, The Privileged Planet represents a new wedge in the creationists’ arsenal. Equally importantly, the Smithsonian episode shows how this new physics-based version of creationism is being propagated with unusual stealth. Biologists may now feel safe that the problem of combating creationism has moved out of their backyards to infest the haunts of the physicists. Some religious biologists have even endorsed the idea of a conscious creator of the universe, so long as it does not affect biological theory. For instance, the biochemist Ken Miller, who ably defends evolution against creationist charges in Finding Darwin’s God, goes on to claim that God created the universe with its laws and evolution is simply a result of these laws.

These moves are dangerous: once the creator enters the science classroom, even through the physicists’ backdoor, the room for mischief is enormous. Biologists would do well to remember that, ultimately, what has motivated creationists to action throughout history is the natural origin of the human species. Sooner or later creationists will return to the theory they fear and detest most: evolution by natural selection. Moreover, if religious dogma manages to breach the defenses of science, there is every reason to believe that it will proactively encroach on every other secular institution of society. The new stealth creationism is, in short, as dangerous as its older cousins, Intelligent Design and Young Earth creationism. It can and should be defeated in the same way they were.

We’ve seen this coming for a long time: the Discovery Institute has been pushing that fine-tuning argument for a while, and that line of argument makes an end run around one of our most successful debaters, Ken Miller, and also puts Francis Collins and many other theistic evolutionists on their side. We prickly, cranky, vociferous biologists, who’ve been fighting this nonsense for years and are ready to start roaring at the first attempt to smuggle a creationist onto a school board, are also going to be less effective—for instance, I don’t pay that much attention to the physics standards, and wouldn’t have any influence at all on physics teaching. We’d need more effort at the public school level in this discipline.

And, honestly, physics teachers are smart people, but they get even less training in coping with creationist arguments than biology teachers, and unfortunately, a lot of physics instructors and engineers and chemists have more sympathy for ID than do the biologists. Add to that problem the fact that a few notable evolutionists are perfectly willing to pass the headaches on to the physicists, conceding the Big Bang to a vague version of a god, and this could be a major worry.

The full-throated howl of the uncompromising advocate

I’m going to rudely hijack one political issue to make a point about another. I think you’ll quickly figure out what it is.

NARAL has been undermining their own relevance by failing to support pro-choice positions in a misguided attempt to court moderates—basically, as Ezra Klein points out, they’re failing to recognize their role in the political ecosphere. They’re an advocacy group for a specific range of policies, not a politician who has to balance constituencies—they are supposed to be spokespeople for one particular constituency.

…one thing groups like NARAL have a tendency to do is accept vaguely acceptable-sounding or politically popular bills in an effort to remain in the center, believing their group’s moderate credentials — see also their early endorsement of Lincoln Chafee — somehow important. The alternative strategy — practiced by the NRA, among others — would be to wage all-out war on even these minor encroachments, thus fighting to shift the center left.

This strategy of trying to join the center rather than move it is a damaging one. If NARAL were totally dogmatic and absolutist, that would make life much easier on Democrats who could occasionally show their “centrism” by voting against NARAL-opposed legislation that actually doesn’t much matter. Instead, however, to demonstrate independence on choice, Democrats end up supporting much more onerous and repulsive legislation, because just aping NARAL’s priorities line doesn’t win them any points in the media. Elected politicians, after all, often have to remain “in the center.” Independent interest groups, on the other hand, can spend their time trying to redefine what “the center” is. NARAL — and others on the left — should do more to exploit that freedom.

Digby also reiterates this very important point.

I do not think NARAL understands its function anymore. It is not a politician from a conservative district who won with only a few percentage points and needs to pander. It is not a political party that needs to gloss over differences to come to consensus. It is an advocacy organization. Its job is to hold the line and then move the debate their way.

If this is true for NARAL, how much more appropriate is it for the independent voices we look for on blogs? The job of the blogger is not to triangulate and strain to express some hypothetical view of some nebulous ‘moderate’—it’s to state his or her opinion, unmellowed by that fawning desire to appeal to a majority. Our readers are presumably sampling multiple online sources, and what we have to expect is that they will make up their own minds on the basis of those many inputs, and the real arrogance is to pretend that we can read those minds and aspire to represent a majority. We can’t and we don’t. We are nothing but the enabled and accessible voices for nations of one.

I am strongly pro-choice, so much so that my views probably make many other pro-choice people uncomfortable…and that should be OK. I am not trying to stand for a consensus, I am staking out my position.

This is also true for my views on other aspects of the political argument, on science and evolution, and on religion vs. atheism. I simply do not understand why apologists for religion, for instance, think they need to carp at me and tell me to be less radical, to moderate my stance and to quit alienating those hypothetical fence-sitters that they are trying to woo. That’s not my job. My goal is to shift the debate towards my position (without expecting that everyone will adopt my specific views), and I can’t accomplish that by letting the rope go slack and drifting towards someone else’s position.

So, loud and proud, baby. Fight for your ideas, not those that someone else tells you are examples of what the majority wants to hear. Majorities are made of individuals, and the only way we’ll ever get an honest consensus is if everyone is singing out frankly for their own beliefs.

For everyone other than Sean Henry, this one is for you

Gaaa…stop chattering on the Sean Henry thread! I set that up as a finely focused exercise in politely discussing his criticism of evolution, not for all that ongoing discussion about whether this is good or bad or complaining at each other about whether your answer is appropriate or chatting about how old he is. About 50% of the replies in that thread have been tossed out because you aren’t paying attention.

So talk about all that meta stuff here, not there, and stop cluttering up the thread, OK?

Except for you, Charlie Wagner. You’ve finally worn out your welcome. Goodbye, and good riddance—for spamming over 20 times, for whining that you have some sort of right to post here, for being an obnoxious, obtuse jerk, you’re finally banned from this site for good.

How to handle creationism (British style)

The UK Education Minister has the right idea. After the pseudoscientific group “‘Truth’ in Science” mailed out teaching plans for creationism to schools in England, it took them a while, but the government has now spoken out loudly and clearly against their nonsense.

The government has already stated that the Truth in Science materials should not be used in science lessons. On November 1, the education minister, Jim Knight, wrote: “Neither intelligent design nor creationism are recognised scientific theories and they are not included in the science curriculum. The Truth in Science information pack is therefore not an appropriate resource to support the science curriculum.” The Department for Education said it was working with the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, the public body that oversees the national curriculum, to communicate this message directly to schools.

It really is that simple.

Sean Henry, this one is for you

The angry young anti-evolutionist who made that ill-informed video has been complaining in the comments about how rude we all are, and saying that he’s got other, more substantive gripes about evolution that he hasn’t told us about yet.

Well, here’s his chance. Mr Henry can instruct us in what he considers the most damning evidence against evolution, and you all can correct him in an informative, constructive fashion.

I will be enforcing very strict commenting rules here. Be polite or your comments will be axed on sight. No complaining, either; give the young gentleman a chance to state his position. We’ll see if he can put together a coherent argument.

(I am serious, people. Shut your gobs unless you’ve got something instructive to say.)