Some people in Australia are unhappy about the government paying to keep a useless mob of chaplains in the public schools — it’s basically a sinecure to prop up the finances of way too many religious parasites. Anyway, there’s a poll associated with the article.
Is there a place for chaplains in state schools?
Yes
42%No
57%
It’s a confusing question. Don’t Australian schools have rubbish bins and toilets? Those are “places”, after all.
Hey, this is a non-pointless poll — Scienceblogs very own Christie Wilcox is in a contest for a $10,000 scholarship…and she’s falling behind. You can look at all of her competition, and there’s not a single other blog about science in the bunch, and the leader so far is a blog about cosmetics? Woo hoo.
The cunning way to make a poll unpharyngulable is to throw in an irrelevant extra option to draw off our attention, and the NY Daily News has done it well. They’re basically asking the question, “Is evolution true?” and giving us the option of no, yes, and Glenn Beck is a freakin’ moron, and look! Mobs of people rush in to give the irrelevant (but true) answer:
Is evolution a dubious theory being “forced down our throats”?
Yes, I’m sick of scientists telling me what to believe. 29%
No, it is clearly how things came to be. 24%
It’s harder to believe Glenn Beck is so popular. 47%
They should have also included “Ooooh, shiny…” and “Hey! Squirrel!”
The first answer is also misleading. It should have been worded, “Yes, I’m sick of smart, educated people telling me that my brain farts are wrong.”
You’d think this one is a no-brainer; a Chilean newspaper is asking who was responsible for rescuing the trapped miners, miracles (milagro) or science (ciencia).
El rescate de los mineros en Chile fue para usted más:
Milagro 49.5%
Ciencia 50.5%
I didn’t see any miracles on TV. I saw lots of engineering and mining technology, though.
The Berkeley County jail in South Carolina has a terrifying policy:
Our inmates are only allowed to receive soft back bibles in the mail directly from the publisher. They are not allowed to have magazines, newspapers, or any other type of books.
First thought: I’d die if I were arrested in Berkeley County.
Second thought: it says something about the county that they’ve had this policy for years, and are only now moving on one complaint made in 2008. The comments section on the article is enlightening, too — apparently, prisoners ought to be digging ditches, not reading, and if we let them read magazines, next thing you know they’ll be demanding vacations in Vegas.
But here’s a snapshot of the South Carolina citizenry’s views on this issue. The numbers might change soon, though, as a more enlightened world intrudes.
Should prisoners be able to read whatever they want?
Yes 22%
No 66%
It depends on the crime. 11%
By now, everyone knows that the hateful gerontocracy of the Mormon Church was on proud display by Boyd Packer. Besides the message of ignorance he’s passing on, this video also reveals something we became familiar with in our years of living in Utah: the leadership of the church is really a collection of feeble-minded, doddering old fools, who frighteningly have an audience that thinks they’re wonderful, no matter what they say.
A Salt Lake City television station is running a poll on whether the audience agrees with that benighted homophobia. The numbers aren’t as bad as I expected, but then, SLC is full of gentiles.
Do you agree with President Packer’s statement on homosexuality and same-sex marriage?
Yes (59.8%)
No (40.2%)
I thought this had to be a political Poe…but then I find it’s full of Alex Jones crap, and he takes himself seriously, vile and stupid as he is. So take a swipe at this poll, anyway.
Yes 67%
No 29%
Unsure 4%
I hate to break the news to him, but he’s just so Johnny Snow. I’ve grated against ol’ Wayne a few times before to mock his awful polls, and now I think he has finally snapped, babbling out incoherent mush about how atheists are just like believers, only worse…and he really doesn’t like me. I don’t think. Hard to tell with mixed messages like this one.
Just as James Dobson and other evangelists cultivate audiences in order to spread their beliefs, so do atheist evangelizers. The bigs are Britons Christopher Hitchens, who is battling cancer, and Richard Dawkins, who turns 70 in March. Myers, who grabbed attention by vandalizing sacred religious property, is a young and energetic American evangelist on track to become the James Dobson of atheism.
Excellent whiplash there — my eyebrows were pressing up against my hairline with that “young and energetic” remark, but then I had to do a major eyeroll at the comparison to Dobson. He’s giving my face quite a workout.
Anyway, yeah, he’s got another terrible little online poll, and it’s already going the wrong way for him. I think he’s got a reputation as the noisy little freak of Colorado Springs, so people all over already gawk at his train-wreck editorials. Here is this week’s, which really out to be answered with data, not opinion polling:
Per capita, do athiests provide as much charity as members of traditional religions?
Yes, atheists are at least as charitable as members of traditional religions
68%
No, atheists are less charitable than members of traditional religions
16%
I don’t know
5%
I don’t care
10%
According to the statistics, religious people do donate more time and money to charity, but it’s also complicated: atheists aren’t organized and even when they are, typically aren’t associating as community service organizations. It’s like asking who gives more, TV repairmen or members of Habitat for Humanity? It’s biasing the sample of TV repairmen (or atheists) by selecting from a more diverse pool, while Habitat for Humanity (or many religions) are preselected to contain more volunteers. Then of course there’s also the confusion of needing only one godless Bill Gates to skew the data.
I like to skew it another way, and say that giving for religious purposes shouldn’t really count, any more than flushing money down a toilet should count as charitable outreach. Instead, let’s only consider productive charities, like hospitals.
From the Guardian:
Is physicist Stephen Hawking right that physics, not God, created the universe?
81.3% Yes. I believe in gravity, not divinity
18.7% No. God: Hawking ‘not necessary’
Somebody show me the units of divinity, please, as well as a few measurements that show the goodness of fit to theory.
Oh, and show the formula, too.
Here’s a silly poll from Eric Hovind, and we know from experience how it will go: if he doesn’t like the results, he’ll jigger everything around until he gets what he wants. Make him dance anyway.
Without Him we can’t know anything 47%
Um…He doesn’t 35%
Examined evidence 18%
Hovind hasn’t juggled the contents of the poll around (yet), but he has snuck in a redirect to take you away from it. When you follow the link, you’ll end up on a page without the poll; to get to it, either go to the home page for the site, or just paste the address ” drdino.com ” directly into your browser.
