I especially like her lesbian robot video.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
I especially like her lesbian robot video.
Word.
The media are lashing back. The post-convention media (with the exception of one article in the Australian) has been abysmally bad, relying on tried-and-true excuse-making from religious apologists. It would be nice if they actually had conversations with atheists rather than immediately running to the nearest cathedral for consolation, but I guess that’s what they have to do now. After all, the convention was an unqualified success, a real triumph for the atheist movement, and they just can’t have that.
Barney Zwartz is a concern troll. He’s a believer; he presumably thinks religion and god and all that crap have some value; so why is he trying to give us advice on how to make atheism more effective?
Here’s my advice. If atheists can reduce their contempt for believers and work harder for their positive goal — reducing the footprint of religion in society — they may begin to exert more of the influence they feel they deserve.
OK, Barney. Here’s my advice for you: put away the writing career, join a monastery, and pray, pray, pray. It will advance your cause!
Of course, why should a believer trust my advice on this issue? I want you to go away. It’s the same with Zwartz. Complain away, at least that’s being honest about your own opinions; but playing the game of offering grandfatherly advice to a movement you detest is insincere and obnoxious.
Oh, and what you consider unworthy doesn’t interest me much. Explain why.
Also unworthy were ABC science presenter Robyn Williams offering “a devastating argument against religion in two words: Senator Fielding”; former Hillsong member Tanya Levin: “I’m finally getting to hang out with the adults”; and Rationalist Society president Ian Robinson, asking whether there were any believers in the audience. “OK, I’ll speak really slowly.” (Wild applause after each.)
What was missing was any sign of self-deprecation. Atheism will be a mature movement in Australia when atheists can laugh not just at the religious, but at themselves.
For instance, you could try to defend Fielding — that would be interesting. Fielding is the fellow who believes the earth is 6000 years old, after all, because his religion tells him so. The religious should be embarrassed by him.
As for laughing at ourselves…we did. There was quite a bit of humor aimed at our own little group. It’s just that the wacky, goofy religious nuts are so much funnier. Religion will be a mature movement when it can stop providing so much juicy material for comedians, although, given that you’ve been struggling with that problem for a few millennia, I don’t offer much hope.
Speaking of jokes, here’s a punchline for you: Melanie Phillips. She’s the deranged religious nut who rants and raves about atheists being totalitarian fundamentalists, and who is now making a career out of her hatred of Richard Dawkins.
Just why is he so angry and why does he hate religion so much? After all, as many religious scientists can attest, science and religion are — contrary to his claim — not incompatible at all.
A clue lies in his insistence that a principal reason for believing that there could be no intelligence behind the origin of life is that the alternative — God — is unthinkable.
Melanie Phillips was not actually at the Global Atheist Convention. I specifically addressed her argument about compatibility from propinquity — it just doesn’t work, because it means that everything must be compatible with everything else in the most trivial way. I also have not heard Dawkins ever claim that God is unthinkable, or that there is no possibility of intelligence responsible for the origin of life — quite the contrary, these are possible alternatives which we simply reject because there is no evidence for them.
It’s always a bad sign when the only way you can make a point is by lying about what the other person said.
Phillips is always a source of amusement, though.
Through such hubristic overreach, Dawkins has opened himself up to attack from quarters that, unlike the theologians he routinely knocks around the park, he cannot so easily disdain.
Books taking his arguments apart on his own purported ground of scientific reason have been published by a growing number of eminent scientists and philosophers, including mathematicians David Berlinski and John Lennox, biochemist Alister McGrath, geneticist Francis Collins, and philosopher and recanting atheist Anthony Flew.
Uh, yes. We can easily disdain them. Berlinski, Lennox, and McGrath are not serious contributors to the debate; Berlinski is a popinjay and Lennox and McGrath are wacky theologians. Collins’ arguments for religion are fallacious and trivial, and Flew is in a sad state of senility.
Here’s the worst. ABC news spent half their brief coverage with shots of a communion ritual at a church, and got some smug idiot in a dog collar named Philip Freier to give his opinion of atheism, and got it all wrong.
Here’s the priest’s brainfart:
It will be interesting to me to see how something that is framed around a largely negative concept, atheism <self-satisfied smile>, is capable of developing a coherent position.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. The central concept of modern atheism is the importance of evidence. We have seen the remarkable success of evidence-based reasoning, and have noticed that religion doesn’t seem to use it…that the only negative concept here is the fundamental premise of religion, faith. Evidence and reason are not negative concepts, except perhaps in the minds of faith-heads who have replaced them with a vacuum and gullibility.
We’ve also been waiting a long, long time for religion to develop a coherent position. Their failure so far suggests that they are incapable of doing so.
…is that too often newspapers think you don’t need a science journalist to write it. Any ol’ hack will do. Take this article on evolution in the Vancouver Sun, which distills modern evolutionary biology into 12 theories, which happens to include Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophy as well as Intelligent Design creationism — which, at least, is pairing intellectual equals. The author, Douglas Todd, is speaking High Crackbrain and making stuff up. It’s all garbage from a buffoon who knows nothing about the field. What, you have to wonder, qualifies him to be writing on science?
He has twice taken first place in the Templeton Religion Reporter of the Year Award, which goes to the top religion reporter in the secular media in North America. Todd is the only Canadian to have received the Templeton.
Hey, the Templeton Foundation puts it right at the top of their web page: they are SUPPORTING SCIENCE. They are all about sponsoring the reconciliation of science and religion (although, perhaps, that should be written as “science and RELIGION“, since we all know where the emphasis lies). It’s just too bad that the results so often belie their claims.
I haven’t had a chance yet to listen to the whole of Kim Stanley Robinson’s talk at Duke, but what I’ve seen so far is very good. I’m more posting this here so I have a reminder to watch the rest once I get home, but nothing is stopping you all from enjoying it now.
science is a Utopian project; it began as a Utopian project and it has remained so ever since, an attempt to make a better world. And this is not always the view taken of science because its origins and its life have been so completely wrapped up with capitalism itself. They began together. You could consider them to be some kind of conjoined twins, Siamese twins that hate each other, Hindu gods that are permanently at odds, or even just a DNA strand wrapped around each other forever: some kind of completely imbricated and implicated co-leadership of the world, cultural dominance–so that science is not capitalism’s research and development division, or enabler, but a counterforce within it. And so despite the fact that as Galileo says that science was born with a gun to its head, and has always been under orders to facilitate the rise and expansion of capital, the two of them in their increasing power together are what you might call semi-autonomous, and science has been the Utopian thrust to alleviate suffering and make a better world.
There is a bit farther in where I have to disagree — he equates science with a new kind of religion. I understand why he’s making that argument, but I consider it lazy thinking; it’s like saying a car is a horse, because they share some basic function, but at some point in the transformation of a concept, you have to stop and say, “Wait a minute…this is something new.” Both a car and a horse may be useful for transportation, but a car is not a horse: we have a very different relationship to the two, their prevalence bends culture in very different way, their differences are far, far greater than their similarities. In the same way, Robinson can say “It’s a religion in the sense of religio, it’s what binds us together. It’s a form of devotion: the scientific study of the world is simply a kind of worship of it, a very detailed, painstaking, and often tedious daily worship, like Zen,” but that glosses over the fundamental differences. Science changes the world and our understanding of it in ways that religion cannot.
I saw the most awesome tech demo reel tonight — a little show called Avatar. It was well worth the admission cost, but you should be prepared with reasonable expectations.
There isn’t a plot. Well, actually, there is…but it’s so predictable that they might as well have left it out. It’s a wish-fulfillment fantasy on rails. Don’t worry about it, as long as you don’t expect to be challenged or surprised, it’s fine.
There are good guys and bad guys, and the good guys are really, really good, and the bad guys are really, really bad. Like straight from the associate of arts degree program at the local Cartoon Villain College. When there’s nothing else to do, they blow things up that gain them nothing but universal loathing. They also have standard cartoon villain military tactics, which usually involves sending in swarms of moronic foot soldiers to accompany their high-tech airborne missile platforms and act as targets for the defenders.
There is a climactic battle scene that puts the Ewok’s Battle for Endor to shame.
You get the idea. Don’t go in to the theater looking for cleverness or wit or even, dare I suggest it, intelligence in the story. But it’s OK, I heard several ten year olds behind me cheering at key points.
The planet Pandora is the real star, anyway, and it’s inhabited by strange alien creatures that exhibit some real creativity in their design. Except, unfortunately, for the protagonist aliens, who are basically human beings stretched out to be 8 feet tall and with lovely golden Keane eyes plastered on, but otherwise follow our body plan pretty much exactly, right down to the toenails. If I saw that situation for real, I’d be an intelligent design creationist, because it’s obvious that the intelligent aliens did not evolve from the animal stock on that world.
I kept wishing that the makers had shown a little bravery and made the aliens alien. Some of the animals had this creepy slick black epidermis, for instance, that looked like a mucous-covered wetsuit; why not drape that over the aliens instead of the pretty blue skins they had? Most of the alien animals also had an interesting complex dentition with a lipless covering — again, be daring and make the aliens look like something that you wouldn’t ever want to kiss. District 9 did it, and got away with it — the aliens in that movie were definitely different.
But then, this was a demo reel. They were showing that they can get awfully close to realistic human performances with computer graphics, and this was a story about native Americans anyway, not really about aliens on a different planet. And it actually pulled it off: the characters were impressive and expressive.
Speaking of which, one thing I was wondering about was that the aliens, and in particular the lead female character, were hot: lithely sexy, and barely clothed. It had me wondering what kind of rights the lead actress, Zoë Saldaña, has retained to the image. After all, it’s clearly her, despite the distortions of the alien form, and that image is now in a great big digital bucket on some computers somewhere, and could be trundled out and reused in other films. I imagine it would be valuable information to the porn industry, which you just know is itching to get its hands on that technology. There must be some kind of legal protections for digital likenesses being hammered out somewhere, because one thing this movie is going to do is start making that potential problem acute.
I’ve been belittling the movie, but it really wasn’t that awful. It’s a phenomenal demonstration of a technology that will let movie-makers create anything on the screen, where all the stories are told by geeks and nerds with very sophisticated machines. In a lot of ways, it reminded me of Star Wars: an absolutely enthralling experience on its opening day which completely changed the look of all science fiction films to come, which changed the way the movie industry worked (for good and bad), and which used visual spectacle to help us overlook the silly story and the embarrassingly bad dialog.
Now we can look back at Star Wars, especially with the aid of the hideous prequels, and see that a lot of it was pure crap movie-making. Avatar is in the same situation (although I hope it isn’t mined out making a series of increasingly terrible sequels) — but it’s also got the shine of some magic in it.
Tonight, on NOVA, it’s The Last Great Ape, promising to have lots of sex and violence (violence provided by the genus Homo, I’m afraid). These are very cool apes, well worth watching.
Richard Dawkins will be interviewed on Australian TV tonight, at 8pm. Since the news down under is full of this nonsense about the canonization of Mary McKillop, I hope they’ll talk about that madness, and that Dawkins will introduce a little reason into the media.
Although, when the temperatures are down around -25°C, we people in the Northern hemisphere don’t associate Christmas with drinking white wine in the sun. The sentiment is great, though, so I’ll do my part and overlook the interesting seasonal reversal there.
Richard Cohen is one of those profit-making advocates of gay deconversion, whose work has been used in Uganda to justify laws that promote killing gay people; Rachel Maddow, of course, is the fabulous, intelligent interviewer who ought to be the model for responsible television journalism.
She politely rips him to pieces and most decorously picks her teeth with his splintered bones. I like it.
