Michele Bachmann writes a letter

Minnesota’s own pious Republican idiot (uh-oh, I repeated myself three times) has chastised Obama for his wickedness in a recent letter. His crimes are many. In a recent speech in Indonesia, he 1) referred to our national motto as E pluribus unum, not “In god we trust”, 2) quoted a small part of the Declaration of Independence that did not include the word “Creator”, and 3) mentioned that the US is unified under one flag without saying the magic phrase, “under god”. Now I know that Bachmann is an amazing expert in American history, so I think Obama should give this letter all the attention it deserves. The historicity of her complaints in this letter are thoroughly documented.

However, I’m afraid I must bring something even more significant to everyone’s attention. Recently, Ms Bachmann had a national platform in which to discuss important issues: she gave the Teabagger response to the President’s State of the Union address, and I notice something terrifying in the text of that speech.

She fails to acknowledge any gods anywhere in the speech, except as an afterthought in the very last sentence. Never mind that the speech was total BS, by her own standards, she must demand a retraction and apology from herself for its appalling absence of public piety.

I must also note something else. She is a woman. She is also working outside the home. And she has displaced a man, who could be holding down the position she is occupying. Under normal conditions, this would not be a problem, except that Ms Bachmann would like to return our country to the high moral state that it held in the 17th century, before the Enlightenment and secularism tainted our government with its ungodly latin motto of E pluribus unum, and impious independent women who deprived men of their exalted status really are guilty of a great crime.

Therefore, Michele Bachmann is a witch. I demand that we put her to the test.

Richard Dawkins in the lion’s den

Whoa — Richard Dawkins will be on Revelation TV — it looks the the British version of the Trinity Broadcast Network or similar jebus-walloping station — shortly, at 3:30 GMT. It will be streamed live on the net. I’m listening to a bit of their programming now, and it’s ghastly, nauseating stuff.

I’m going to have to miss the interview, since I’ll be teaching at that time. Maybe someone will tell us about it here.

Philadelphia’s shame

I lived in Philadelphia for seven years — it’s a great city, and it’s also an amazing ethnic patchwork. The residents are proud of the fact that the city’s neighborhoods have so much character, although it also means that there is a bit more racial tension lurking in the city, and there are also extremes of poverty and wealth. One other thing you notice living there is that some neighborhoods are extraordinarily Catholic, and that Catholicism just soaks into the area.

I imagine that there’s some deep anxiety in those neighborhoods right now: the Catholic church has just announced the suspension of 21 priests in Philly on suspicion of child sex abuse. And this is after several had been indicted on charges of rape and assault on minors.

A list has been released. I didn’t know any of the priests, of course — I recognize some of the churches, but I’d never have so much as stepped inside one. The Glenside church was right near where I lived while I was there.

Unfortunately, I’ve also heard from a few correspondents in Philadelphia who report that there’s a kind of studied blindness going on.

I don’t know why I am surprised but all the presiding priest said was
that they diocese would have a steady rotation of priests to fill in
untill a replacement is named. NOT ONE MINUTE was spent addressing the
issue. He only asked to pray for everyone involved… I was offended
for anyone hurt by what these guys did. He didn’t even take the time
to denounce the alleged actions… He didn’t mention how future kids
would be safe guarded, he did mention that the church has come a long
way in the process of their investigations.

Apparently, the church is treating this as a minor problem in staffing church functions instead of a sign of corruption and failure. I guess that’s typical.

It’s good that the church is actually doing something to remove child-rapists, but shouldn’t it be regarded as more profoundly systematic problem when you find scores of abusers working in your organization? This isn’t just one aberrant perv, it’s endemic!

Respect the tradition

Today, you may notice people wandering about with strange smudgy marks on their foreheads. You may also know that today is my birthday. And you might be wondering if those two observations are related.

Yes, they are. I traditionally celebrate my birthday by punching god-botherers in the forehead. Some of those people may have been victims of my fists, and are badly bruised. Others, more cunning, put the marks on their heads so that when they see me coming, they can say, “Hey, you already got me!” Either way, the appropriate remark to individuals you see with these smudges is, “I’m sorry, I hope you get better soon.”

There are alternative explanations. You can also say “Praise Odin” to them, and point them at the nearest monastery to sack and burn. Another possibility is that they’re credulous, brain-damaged nitwits, but I think it’s kinder to pretend they’ve been punched in the head by PZ Myers. It’s a gentler, more accommodating belief, and as we all know, tone and sucking up is so important.

How do we know when the world will end?

Harold Camping has been predicting the end of the world for quite some time. He’s always been wrong, but now he is insisting absotively posilutely that the earth really will end on 21 May of this year, and he’s got teams of brainwashed, deluded followers roaming the country claiming the end is nigh.

I’ve always wondered how he comes up with his specific dates, and now here’s a short article that lays the math out for us.

According to them, Noah’s great flood occurred in the year 4990 B.C., ‘exactly’ 7000 years ago. Taking a passage from 2 Peter 3:8, in which it is said a day for God is like a thousand human years, the church reasoned that seven ‘days’ equals 7000 human years from the time of the flood, making 2011 the year of the apocalypse.

In its second ‘proof’ the exact date is revealed by working forward from the exact date of the crucifixion – April 1, 33 AD. According to their reasoning, there are exactly 722,500 days from April 1, 33 A.D. until May 21, 2011 – the alleged day of judgement. This number can be represented as follows: 5 x 10 x 17 x 5 x 10 x 17 = 722,500.

The church then argues that numbers in the bible have special meanings, with the number 5 signifying atonement or redemption, the number 10 signifying ‘completeness’ and the number 17 equalling heaven.

That is quite possibly the dumbest reason I have ever heard to throw away all of your belongings and go on the road screaming about the end of the world. I think humanity is in on some great conspiracy to forever disappoint my opinion of it.

Ignorant rabbi demands evidence he won’t provide for himself

Why do you torture me so? For the past week, the number one request in my mailbox hasn’t been this nonsense about bacteria in meteorites, it’s been people asking me to address Rabbi Adam Jacobs’ stupid article on the Huffington Post.

I have a problem with that. I despise the Huffington Post and the fact that some liberals who ought to know better take it seriously as a leftist voice, instead of the lowbrow, pandering, honking noise of stupidity that it is. And in particular, I cannot support Arianna Huffington’s contempt for labor and her privileged pretentiousness. So I cannot link to her site any more at all.

Fortunately, I can link to Jerry Coyne instead, who takes the silly rabbi apart. I’ll only mention one item that jumped out at me.

His whole piece is a complaint that science has failed to explain the origin of life, and that we don’t have a complete step-by-step description of every process that generated the first replicator over four billion years ago.

One might suppose that in the six or so decades since the discovery of the DNA molecule by Watson and Crick during which researchers have been investigating the origin of life they might have come up with some pretty solid leads to explain it.

We’ve only had a few decades of steady progress, and already he’s demanding the moon? I notice that the rabbi has had a few millennia during which his ancestors have claimed an intimate and special relationship with an omniscient super-being, and all they have to show for it is “god did it.” You would think that with all that privileged access, there would have been some tiny fragment of scientific utility somewhere in their holy book, but no, nothing.

If we’re going to start comparing lacunae, let’s start with thermodynamics. We’ve got detailed, complete mathematical descriptions of a fundamental mechanism that drives all of biology; the Torah’s got nothin’. The believers have got a dissipated invisible vapor with not reasonable support; we’ve got Ludwig Boltzmann.

We win. Argument over.

Fuck off, rabbi.

Why is it your favorite mosque, Dr Hasan?

Religion is toxic. Here’s a case in London in which both the acute and the chronic poison are in clear view: a Moslem scientist has been threatened with murder over his views on evolution. He tried to explain how Islam and evolution are compatible.

Masjid Tawhid is a prominent mosque which also runs one of the country’s largest sharia courts, the Islamic Sharia Council. In January, Dr Hasan delivered a lecture there detailing why he felt the theory of evolution and Islam were compatible — a position that is not unusual among many Islamic scholars with scientific backgrounds. But the lecture was interrupted by men he described as “fanatics” who distributed leaflets claiming that “Darwin is blasphemy”.

“One man came up to me during the lecture and said ‘You are an apostate and should be killed’,” Dr Hasan told The Independent. “I want to go back — I’ve been going to the mosque for 25 years. It is my favourite mosque in London, and I have been active in the community for a long time. I hope my positive contribution will outweigh their feelings towards me.”

There’s one evil: zealots who think their superstitions justify threatening death to anyone who disagrees with them. That’s the obvious one.

But there’s another, subtler poison at work here. Hasan has apologized for speaking the truth about the science; he canceled a lecture out of fear for his life (quite reasonable), but then goes on to beg for readmission to a mosque filled with blind, hateful fanatics who want to murder scientists like him.

Why?

Hasan is also deeply deluded, in a nicer way, but it doesn’t change the fact that he’s blind to the conflicts between his science and his religion, and to the even more immediate conflicts between himself and his local culture. That ignorance is likely to get him killed, or perhaps more probably as his behavior is currently demonstrating, likely to get him to abandon reason and science altogether.

Htargcm Retsila

I am astounded. Alister McGrath wrote something that was correct!

Reason needs to be calibrated by something external. That’s one of the reasons why science is so important in the critique of pure reason — a point that we shall return to in the next article.

Of course, it’s only two sentences embedded in a great gross tangle of wrong, and he does accompany it with a threat to screw it all up in his next essay, but let’s give him credit for finally, after years of pretentious mumbling, managing to say one thing I can agree with.

It is exactly right. I’ve had the experience of putting together beautiful theories to explain phenomena I’ve seen in the microscope, simple, clean, elegant explanations that would be efficient and sufficient…if only the biology actually worked as I deduced. And then I’ve done an experiment or made an observation or read a paper with new data, and immediately had to discard my lovely logical construct. This is routine and expected. Science is built on a foundation of empiricism.

And it’s not just science. I remember looking for a used car in my teenaged years, and finding a sweet-looking used machine in my price range, and I could imagine cruising the town and picking up chicks with it…and then my father the auto mechanic had me turn the engine over and explained to me what all those strange grindy sputtery noises meant, and I looked in the rear view mirror and noticed that James Dean wasn’t sitting in the driver’s seat, and a lot of lovely fantasies came crashing down under the oppressive weight of reality. Dammit.

A much smarter man than I also had something to say about it.

Science is organized common sense where many a beautiful theory was killed by an ugly fact.

TH Huxley

It’s what most mundane science is about. It’s not the sudden eurekas that drive the process, but the regular, repeated check and recheck and double-check and triple-check, plodding forward by constantly comparing our logic and expectations against the actual terrain.

I’m glad McGrath noticed. So why does he get everything else exactly backward?

McGrath asserts that the Gnu Atheists are prisoners of “mere rationality”, that we’re trapped in the “dogma of the finality of reason”, and even claims that we’re just rehashing discredited 18th century philosophy that claims a sufficiency of logic and reason to discern the nature of the universe. It’s utterly bizarre that at one point he can notice that foundation of science in reliance on empirical evidence, and then go on to complain that these Gnu Atheists, who he generally likes to accuse of scientism and overly demanding of mere evidence, are now a gang of armchair pontificators who insist on the primacy of reason alone!

It’s simply not true. Gather a mob of unruly atheists to confront theologians like McGrath, and we are not chanting demands for them to expand on their logical ‘proofs’ for the existence of gods (those freakin’ bore us), we’re more likely to be chanting “evidence, evidence, evidence” and pointing out that their fantasies are built on weak to nonexistent foundations.

And then there’s this:

The New Atheism seems to think Christianity refuses to have anything to do with reason — a delusion that can only be sustained by refusing to read the many Christian writers who take it seriously, such as Thomas Aquinas and C.S. Lewis.

That’s wrong. I’ve mentioned this a few times: I’m very impressed with the logical abilities of theologians, who construct the most intricate, elaborate, methodical apologetics imaginable (I don’t include C.S. Lewis among them, though — that man conjured up flimsy, weak appeals to mindless sentiment and inanity). The gripe isn’t that they’re stupid or incapable of rationality, it’s that they build fantastical castles in the clouds and expect you to ignore the absence of testable, observable support.

Although, come to think of it, I do agree that dedicating your life to constructing elaborate rationalizations while never questioning or testing the premise of the divine origin of a badly written book is rather stupid.

McGrath reverses everything, though, and tries to argue that the scientists who constantly question their hypotheses and measure them against empirical reality are the prisoners of mere rationality, while the dogmatists who build a cage of improbable extrapolations from flawed and limited ancient texts are wandering about free. He’s literally engaging in double-speak and reversal of meaning.

For Christian writers, religious faith is not a rebellion against reason, but a legitimate and necessary revolt against the imprisonment of humanity within the cold walls of a rationalist dogmatism. The Christian faith declares that there is more to reality than reason discloses – not contradicting reason, but simply transcending it, and escaping from its limitations.

As I have said several times now, science and the Gnu Atheism are not about using reason to discern reality, but using observations of reality itself as the yardstick for determining the validity of our modeling of the universe. Reason is important, but not sufficient.

It is revealing that McGrath is willing to argue that abandoning reason is a virtue, while still failing to bring up any empirical evidence that his imaginary magical explanations actually reflect anything particularly relevant about the universe.

Some things never change

You can’t possibly be surprised at this turn of events anymore.

The Reverend Grant Storms, a Christian fundamentalist pastor known for his campaigns against New Orleans’ gay Southern Decadence festival, has been arrested for masturbating in a public park in front of children.

But wait! Let’s let Pastor Storms tell his side of the story.

Storms told deputies that he was merely having lunch at Lafreniere Park, 3000 Downs Blvd., in his van when he decided to relieve himself using a bottle instead of using the restroom, an incident report said.

Stay classy, Grant, stay classy.

What exactly are we allowed to do in the bedroom?

As we’ve learned watching the Rethuglicans lately, the assault on abortion rights is only the first step — they also want to shut down the wickedness that is contraception. But they’re not going to stop there, oh no! If you want a peek at our theocratic future, read this incredibly long-winded disquisition on exactly what you are allowed to do even in the marriage bed. Everything is forbidden, except vaginal penetration and the ol’ in-out. You aren’t allowed to even do these things as foreplay, culminating in procreative intercourse.

The expression ‘that use which is against nature’ refers to unnatural sexual acts, such as oral sex, anal sex, or manual sex. Saint Augustine condemns such acts unequivocally. He even states that such unnatural sexual acts are even more damnable (i.e. even more serious mortal sins) when these take place within marriage. For God is even more offended by a sexual mortal sin that takes place within the Sacrament of Marriage, since this offense is not only against nature, but also against a Holy Sacrament.

Dang. Well, at least Augustine didn’t explicitly forbid rubber wetsuits, fuzzy handcuffs, vibrating crucifixes, octopus, ceiling-mounted swings, clamps, chocolate pudding, flavored lubricants, Wonder Woman costumes, rubber chickens, exotic headware, whipped cream, video cameras, Silly String, roller skates, trampolines, nitrous oxide, balloon animals, feather boas, ball gags, or bungee cords, or I might be going to hell.

It’s amazing how much detail Catholics will go into documenting why people shouldn’t do the things that they all do anyway. You might even call it loving detail.