And it’s a strange thing. It’s a law that slaps anyone who offends “a substantial number of the adherents of a religion” with a €25,000 fine — which is equal to most of my yearly salary, and also means I’m one of the few people that one could make a good case for having committed blasphemy. I guess I won’t be vacationing in Ireland any time soon.
Fortunately, some people are speaking out against the law, especially Atheist Ireland. Join in if you can, work to repeal this medieval nonsense.
I’ve been wrestling with how to respond to the imminent appointment of Francis Collins to the NIH, and it’s tough. The problem is that he has excellent qualifications for the position of chief paper-pusher and technician-wrangler, but that his position on religion is just plain weird. He’s a lovable dufus with great organizational skills whose grasp of the principles of science is superficial. But you can’t just reject the guy because he’s religious — we’re in big trouble when we start using a religious litmus test for high political positions.
Oh, wait…we already do that. You know if someone with equivalent prestige and administrative credentials was even half as vocal about atheism as Collins is about Christianity, there’s no way she would even be considered for this appointment.
Anyway, I was on The World Tonight Redux with Rob Breakenridge, a radio program out of Canada to talk about these issues the other night, and I listed a few reasons why Collins was a poor choice.
He’s a big-science guy, who headed the National Human Genome Research Institute. I have some concern that he has a mindset that may not promote the diversity of scientific research — he represents a very narrow, gene-jockey style of research, which is valuable and does churn out lots of data, but I’ve often found exhibits a worrisome lack of understanding of the big picture of biology. I’d have liked to have seen a leader with more breadth: someone with an appreciation of systems biology, or environmental biology, and a little less shackled to the purely biomedical side.
He doesn’t understand evolution. He has said that he thinks humans are no longer evolving, that junk DNA is functional, and he can’t understand how altruism could have evolved. RPM summarized these deficiencies well. I know he argues well against the specifics of intelligent design, but ultimately, he’s following the same gods-of-the-gaps formula that the Discovery Institute does, as this article on Slate explains:
This formula offers a convenient litmus test for where Collins falls on a variety of questions: If a given problem appears to be merely unsolved, then he’ll leave it to the realm of science; if, on the other hand, Collins deems a question to be unsolvable, it’s fair game for inclusion in a spiritual interpretation of the universe.
That’s not what I want to hear from someone with such a visible position in science.
His website, Biologos, is an embarrassment of poor reasoning and silly christian apologetics. It’s awful. His logic is a joke, and all it really shows is that Collins is a man blinded by faith to the absurdities of his convictions. That he even asks “At what point in the evolutionary process did humans attain the ‘Image of God’?”, or “Was there death before the Fall?”, among many other similar absurdities, is a revelation. These are questions that don’t even have any meaning outside the scope of a specific, very narrow religious view.
It’s also another difficult issue for me. I’m the last guy who’s going to say someone should be denied a position because he maintains a controversial website. However, it’s not the controversy that annoys me (it’s also not particularly controversial among the American mainstream — it’s more like a site that panders to a religious bias), it’s the stupidity.
This is a big one for me: he will use his position to act as a propagandist for Christianity, entirely inappropriately. We already saw this in the announcement of the completion of the draft of the human genome project, where he actually brags about getting Clinton to include religious language in his speech, and where he himself made claims about the DNA sequence being “the language of god”. The head of the NIH isn’t just an administrative position; it’s a political position, and the appointment of a loudly evangelical Christian to that spot is sending a political message. There are enough of us even louder atheists out here who will make a stink over any attempt on his part to use the accomplishments of science under the NIH to proselytize, that he’s going to have to be very cautious in his statements from now on.
Finally, my objections rest on an important word: integrity. Collins hasn’t got it.
I don’t mean integrity in the sense of being honest and having strong moral principles; I think Collins is entirely sincere, and he doesn’t seem to be the type to have ever crossed any lines of ethical behavior, except perhaps in his taste in music.
I mean integrity as in the condition of being unified, unimpaired, or sound in construction. He’s a jumble of intellectual contradictions, and when you read any of his interviews, he comes off as an amiable lightweight. I’d rather have someone who can think like a scientist in charge than yet another Jebusite with an evangelical agenda.
Steve Pinker, and
Eric Michael Johnson all have interesting things to say on this subject. I have no hope that any of this will make a difference, however; Collins will obligingly appeal to the superstitions of congress and sail through any confirmation. I had higher hopes for Obama, but at this point, I can only despair of the kind of president who would consult the Pope on bioethics. I’m beginning to feel he will not hesitate to sacrifice reason on the altar of religious conformity.
Oh, great. He’s been appointed by Obama.
He’ll do a fine job…he’s a competent administrator. I think we can trust him to manage the institution smoothly.
We can also trust him to drape Jesus over every major announcement, use the office as a platform for promoting religiosity, and otherwise taint the whole business with embarrassingly inane nonsense…just as he did with the human genome press conference. Isn’t it about time our government promoted secular values that work over these antique and ineffective superstitions that just make their proponents look goofy?
Remember the Viet Nam war? I know, we’ve been suffering with the most recent military cock-up, but it’s still worth looking back at what evil old Tricky Dick was up to. A new batch of tape transcripts from White House discussions about the war have been released, and wouldn’t you know it — Nixon was engineering the defeat, putting pressure on the South Vietnamese government to accept a settlement that would lead to failure, but would at least postpone defeat until after the American elections.
Did I really need to be reminded that practically my entire lifelong exposure to American politics has been a history of contemptible screw-ups?
There is a strange correlation: most of the atheists I know are straight, yet when I post a pointless poll like this one, I know with near certainty which way the godless hordes of Pharyngula will try to skew it.
51.38% Yes
48.62% No
It goes further, too. We atheists tend to strongly favor women’s rights and equality in the marketplace, yet only about half of us are female. I could bring up an article like this one, in which conservative democrats demand that abortion services not be provided under universal healthcare, and I know how most of the progressive godless readers here will respond: with anger. You won’t be voting for Reps. Dan Boren (D-OK); Bart Stupak (D-MI); Colin Peterson (D-MN); Tim Holden (D-PA); Travis Childers (D-MS); Lincoln Davis (D-TN); Heath Shuler (D-NC) Solomon Ortiz (D-TX); Mike McIntyre (D-NC); Jerry Costello (D-IL); Gene Taylor (D-MS); James Oberstar (D-MN); Bobby Bright (D-AL); Steve Driehaus (D-OH); Marcy Kaptur (D-OH); Charlie Melancon (D-LA); John Murtha (D-PA); Paul Kanjorski (D-PA); and Kathleen Dahlkemper (D-PA) in the next election. Hey, Colin Peterson is my state representative; I’ll be writing him a pissed-off letter when I get home, and he has lost my vote.
It’s not just a selective reading on my part. Other sources, like Lavender Magazine, have noticed that the atheists in their communities have a rather reliable political and social position. Here’s a review of Atheists Talk radio (which is no more, I’m sorry to say).
Many radio programs broadcast locally are queer-inclusive. But aside from KFAI’s Fresh Fruit, which is total queer content, no program is as fully queer-supportive as Atheists Talk. Large time chunks have been devoted to Wayne Besen, the Fagbug, and Project 515. Plus, an organic queer sensitivity weaves throughout other segments, because of the atheist and democratic value that separates religion and state.
Host Mike Haubrich thinks “religious institutions that suppress the rights of GLBT folks are using their beliefs as justification for an underlying homophobia. By using the Bible as an absolute moral guide in legislating issues related to marriage and other societal benefits that should be recognized as being granted by such a basic document as the Declaration of Independence, they are demonstrating precisely the effects of church-state entanglement that James Madison was warning against. The state should not be used as a sledgehammer to enforce a particular religious code, and an individual’s sexuality should not be subject to the whims of religious interpretation.”
Contributor August Berkshire observes, “Americans are proud of our ideals of liberty and equality. Why then are some people shocked when these ideals are applied to people of color, women, and sexual minorities? Are some citizens ‘more equal’ than others?”
People dependent on religion like to claim that atheism is just another religion, and they argue that we can’t know that we’d have a better society if we got rid of god (and usually go the other way and claim we’d be immoral without our imaginary cosmic policeman in the sky), but you know, I look around at all the atheist communities springing up around the country, and I see the people who are most committed to tolerance and equality joining them, and I am convinced. A godless America would be a better America, one more committed to the Enlightenment ideals that accompanied its founding, one that would actually have some ideals and principles that would make it a better place to live for everyone.
That wacky know-nothing up north, Sarah Palin, has quit her job as governor. She doesn’t give a good reason why; in an annoyingly chipper speech, she whines about the way she was being scrutinized for ethics violations, and the fact that she was currently an ineffective lame duck governor, and then announces that she’s stepping down from office. It makes no sense at all, and it does say something about the weakness of her character.
Brave Dame Sarah ran away.
(“No!”)
Bravely ran away away.
(“I didn’t!”)
When danger reared it’s ugly shead,
She bravely turned her tail and fled.
(“no!”)
Yes, brave Dame Sarah turned about
(“I didn’t!”)
And gallantly she chickened out.
Bravely taking (“I never did!”) to her feet,
She beat a very brave retreat.
(“all lies!”)
Bravest of the braaaave, Dame Sarah!
(“I never!”)
Remember this if (when) she runs for president in 2012. Who wants a president who at the first minor crisis turns her office over to the vice president and runs away?
The Minnesota Supreme Court has ruled against him, and finally Norm Coleman has conceded the Minnesota state senate race to Al Franken. Hooray for Al, we have a new senator!
Some people have asked for a thread to laugh over the latest Republican hypocrite: Governor Mark Sanford of South Carolina, chairman of the Republican Governors Association, often considered a likely Republican candidate for president, has been caught with his pants down. He had an affair with an Argentinian mistress, and lied to his staff and public about his prolonged absence, saying he was hiking the Appalachian trail.
I hope it was an awesome six days in Argentina. It’s cost him his political career, his marriage, and his credibility. Maybe he and John Edwards should get together and form a club.
The simple summary:
As the video says, the country is shutting down the flow of information, clamping down on the internet — that alone would tell me that something nasty has been going down in the government there. Information should flow freely, and I’ve run across one set of instructions for setting up a proxy server under Windows, and one for Linux. I run neither…does anyone have similar instructions for BSD or Mac OS X Unix?
Otherwise, feel free to talk about the new source of chaos in the Middle East.
Netroots Nation, the big lefty political/blogging meeting, is organizing sessions for their conference in August. Unfortunately, they seem have given up on the idea of a secular nation, because this one session on A New Progressive Vision for Church and State has a bizarre description.
The old liberal vision of a total separation of religion from politics has been discredited. Despite growing secularization, a secular progressive majority is still impossible, and a new two-part approach is needed–one that first admits that there is no political wall of separation. Voters must be allowed, without criticism, to propose policies based on religious belief. But, when government speaks and acts, messages must be universal. The burden is on religious believers, therefore, to explain public references like “under God” in universal terms. For example, the word “God” can refer to the ceaseless creativity of the universe and the objective validity of human rights. Promoting and accepting religious images as universal will help heal culture-war divisions and promote the formation of a broad-based progressive coalition.
That makes no sense at all. Separation of church and state certainly isn’t discredited — if anything, the experience of the last few years makes it more important than ever. Voters can already propose policies based on religion, and they do, unfortunately…but whoever wrote this thinks there should be no criticism? That’s insane. This is a progressive organization that is proposing that we shouldn’t even criticize religious intrusion into government.
And then look what they do: they redefine “god” into a waffling, meaningless placeholder for anything anyone wants!
I’d like to know who came up with this garbage — it reeks of the Jim Wallis/Amy Sullivan camp of liberal theocrats, although neither is actually on the panel.
