Jon Stewart, you let me down

Last night, Stewart interviewed Marilynne Robinson. I do not expect attack dog tactics from Stewart, ever, but I also didn’t expect him to so totally buy into her premises. It was very disappointing.

The low point came as Stewart tried to justify Robinson’s nebulous argument that science and religion need each other, and he offered stock apologetics.

The more you delve into science, the more it relies on faith.

No, it doesn’t. The less you delve into science, and the more superficial your understanding of the evidence, the more likely you are to ascribe its more difficult concepts to faith. Faith is the product of ignorance.

When Stewart strained to give an example of faith-based conclusions in science, he came up with one: anti-matter. He’s never seen it, so obviously it must not be real, but only the imagined fancy of some egghead physicist somewhere.

Unfortunately for Stewart, anti-matter exists. It’s been observed, measured, analyzed. Its existence is not a matter of faith, but of knowledge and experiment.

Marilynne Robinson was no better, of course, just mumbling the usually feeble platitudes and complaining that the atheists represent science poorly, as if she’d know. And at the end, she offered up this little jewel, unchallenged by Stewart.

We need insights from religion.

Name one. Name one insight religion has ever given us that could not have been made by secular philosophers, that was also useful and true.

HuffPo adds cowardice to their résumé

We’ve known for a long time that the Huffington Post is a stronghold of anti-scientific, anti-medicine woo. They’ve also recently added Discovery Institute propagandists to their roster. I’ve given up on them as a lost cause, but Eric Michael Johnson of the Primate Diaries has been trying to swim up the sewer, posting articles on HuffPo that are pro-science and reason. It’s been a noble but futile effort.

The latest revelation is that being a columnist on HuffPo does not mean you have any independence to write as you please: they have editors who censor content. Write something critical of HuffPo’s lunatic woo side, and swish, that gets conveniently sliced out of your article.

Write ’em off. HuffPo is not on our side.

Henry Gee is probably chortling happily right now

He’s tweaked the noses of those ‘New Atheists’, for sure! One of Gee’s roles is as the editor of the Futures science fiction section in Nature, and he’s proud to have published a story by Shelly Li, which actually is a well-written short dystopian fantasy, titled The End of God. Gee really detests those obnoxious atheists, though, so I think one of the reasons he picked it was that it so perfectly conformed to his idea of militant atheists as fascists.

The story is about a future in which satellites can somehow pick up on activity in the parietal lobe of the brain in individuals — amazing resolution and sensitivity, that — and detect when people are praying. And when they do, naturally, the godless thought police whoosh into action, take the faithhead into the hospital, and zap that lobe of their brain so god won’t talk to them anymore. And then they’re so lonely. Aww.

Taking away faith is a bad thing, don’t you know.

“Faith means believing in something when common sense tells you not to,” I reply, looking around. No one is moved. “And faith gives me a warmth that no amount of common sense ever will. Don’t take this away from —”

Of course, it’s science fiction in multiple ways, not just in the unlikely technology, but in the weird idea of a godless world state enforcing anti-religious mind control with surgery. It’d be a bit more potent if it was something we could do, or if anyone had ever endorsed such a hypothetical procedure as desirable.

I don’t think Henry Gee would have accepted this story if the plot had been inverted, so that it was a member of an atheist minority that was zapped to induce warm, happy feelings of the godhead — so just a hint to SF writers hoping to get published in Nature: Gee wouldn’t compromise on writing quality, so it had better be good stuff, but your odds of acceptance will probably be improved if your Bad Guys are cartoonish Dawkinsites with a penchant for doing evil things to the religious.

Just so I’m not being too vicious, although I would argue that it’s very hard to be too vicious, I’ll mention that I did rather like Gee’s review of the iPad, and he has my sympathies for his back pains, which I’m currently sharing with him to a lesser degree. But please, less unbelievability in Futures in the future, OK?

“Climategate” slowly deflates

After the computer break-in that revealed so-called ‘damaging’ emails in the East Anglia Climate Research Group, after all the media hysterics and errors and misrepresentations, now at last some newspapers are coming out and admitting that they screwed up. Any idiot could just look at the released emails and see that they didn’t call the substance of the data into question, but the media took the profitable way out and fanned the flames of denialism.

It’s rather like the Andrew Wakefield story. Take a very weak story, puff it up a bit to appeal to fringe kooks, and before you know it, you may be selling newspapers, but you’re actually hurting people.

Kilstein will kill

Jamie Kilstein is putting on a comedy show in New York on 2 July, titled No War, No God, No Nickelback. You should go if you can. He’s recommended by that polite, soft-spoken gentleman AC Grayling, so you know exactly what to expect: calm, cerebral, gentle humor, quietly skewering social mores.

Yeah, right. Watch out for a GOATS ON FIRE level of outrageousness. Everyone should go and make him rich and famous, because he’s the one comedian I trust will aspire to someday having a comedy tour featuring a giant inflatable vulva*. He does need to get really rich and famous first, though.

If I were in NY on that day, I’d go.

*He doesn’t actually have such a thing, and hasn’t even mentioned wanting one, but as a fan I think it will eventually be a necessary appliance for his stadium tour.

Bill Donohue goes gaga

Bill Donohue was looking awfully silly demanding that the Empire State Building celebrate Mother Teresa’s birthday, so I guess he needed a new cause. He found one. The Catholic League is outraged by Lady Gaga’s new video.

Lady Gaga is playing Madonna copy cat, squirming around half-naked with half-naked guys, abusing Catholic symbols–they’re always Catholic symbols–while bleating out “Alejandro” enough times to induce vomit. Dressed occasionally as a nun in a glossy-red habit, the Madonna wannabe flashes the cross, swallows a rosary and manages to get raped by her S&M boyfriends. Hence, she has now become the new poster girl for American decadence and Catholic bashing, sans the looks and talent of her role model.

Like Madonna, Lady Gaga was raised Catholic and then morphed into something unrecognizable. “So I suppose you could say I’m a quite religious woman that is very confused about religion,” she told Larry King last week.

That she is confused is an understatement. In any event, we hope she finds her way back home. In the meantime, Catholics will settle for her treating us like Muslims.

I’m actually a fan of Lady Gaga (Bill will not be surprised), so I had to zip over to youtube to see this. Here it is. It’s got something for everybody. Just imagine poor Bill Donohue watching it over and over, compelled to document this atrocity, a little bit of saliva drooling from his slack lips, while with one hand he clicks “replay” repeatedly.

Donohue does have a point, I hate to say. I watched the whole thing, with its muscular young men gyrating in jackboots and tight shorts and nothing else, the weird headgear, the sadomasochistic imagery, the black leather uniforms, the flaming homoeroticism, and I was thinking, yeah, all that does remind me of Catholicism. I didn’t think it was Catholic bashing, though. I thought it was a recruiting video.

I want to see this movie

It’s called Agora, and it’s about Hypatia, who was a kind of non-Christian martyr, murdered by a religious mob. Here’s one account of her death:

And in those days there appeared in Alexandria a female philosopher, a pagan named Hypatia, and she was devoted at all times to magic, astrolabes and instruments of music, and she beguiled many people through Satanic wiles…A multitude of believers in God arose under the guidance of Peter the magistrate…and they proceeded to seek for the pagan woman who had beguiled the people of the city and the prefect through her enchantments. And when they learnt the place where she was, they proceeded to her and found her…they dragged her along till they brought her to the great church, named Caesareum. Now this was in the days of the fast. And they tore off her clothing and dragged her…through the streets of the city till she died. And they carried her to a place named Cinaron, and they burned her body with fire.

She’s definitely a wonderful subject for a movie, they’ve got a big name, Rachel Weisz, playing the leading role, and the film is done and looking for a distributor. No one wants to give it wide release. I wonder why? It could be that it’s badly made (not likely, since it was the highest grossing film in Spain for 2009), or it could be that a movie about an intelligent godless woman who is persecuted and slaughtered by a mob of mindless fanatical Christians with the approval of the church is a poor fit to the American political climate.