Am I to be the next enemy of the NCSE?

I’m a little worried. Jason Rosenhouse wrote about this new paper by Peter Hess, the Faith Project Director (I’m already rolling my eyes) of the NCSE, and I learn that the first failing of Intelligent Design creationism is that it is blasphemous.

Uh-oh.

I am proudly and unapologetically blasphemous, and I encourage other people to join my heretical ranks all the time. If ID is blasphemous, it’s the first element of their program that I can approve of — anything that weakens the grip of faith has got something good going for it. It’s simply not a problem. It can’t even be a problem for a religious program in America — we’re a pluralist society, and everything is blasphemous to someone. The mild-mannered theistic evolutionists think ID is blasphemy, but so does Ken Ham…and Ham also thinks the theistic evolutionists are heretics, apostates, and blaspheming bastards who defile the Holy Word of God. Lutherans are blaspheming Catholics. Baptists blaspheme against the sacred doctrines of Calvin. Every time you pull out a cell phone, you’re insulting the Amish way of life, and Ron Jeremy is glad the Shakers died out. So? We can’t use and absence of blasphemy as a criterion for truth and accuracy. It’s silly to bring it up. And, as Jason points out, the same religious arguments applied against ID are equally valid when aimed at theistic evolutionists.

I’m also troubled by this whole position of Faith Project Director. Peter Hess is almost certainly a nice guy, and he’s on the side of evolution, or he wouldn’t be working at NCSE…but why is the NCSE now actively engaged in the business of promoting Faith Projects, and why do they have a professional Bible thumper to pontificate on hair-splitting matters of dogma? They’re all wrong. Having a theologian on staff to tell us that some of them are more wrong than others on matters sacerdotal, from his position which is just as shaky as everyone else’s, seems to me to be so bad that it falls into the category of not even wrong.

And then there’s the matter of this paper. It is titled, “CREATION, DESIGN AND EVOLUTION: CAN SCIENCE DISCOVER OR ELIMINATE GOD?”, and the answer Hess gives is no: “The scientific quest for the designer behind the veil of nature ultimately fails—science can neither discover nor eliminate God.”

That’s easy, then. God is irrelevant. These guys always seem to use “science” as a word demarcating a very narrow field of endeavor involving white lab coats, test tubes, and strangely colored solutions, but it isn’t. Science is simply a process for examining the world, and anyone can do it, even if you do’t have a lab coat. If something has an effect or influence, you can try to examine it using the tools of science — so when someone announces that gods cannot be detected by observation or experiment, they are saying they don’t matter and don’t do anything, which is exactly what this atheist has been saying all along.

This is the strange thing about the whole argument. When I was on my daily walk today, I was surrounded by a million mysteries: what’s in that house? How was this sidewalk made? What signaling molecules are moving through that tree to trigger new bud formation? What insect was making that odd sound? Why was my left ankle sore this morning? Were there any neutrinos whizzing through me right now? How did that boulder get on that lot? You get the idea. We’re immersed in a piece of the universe and we don’t know a lot about it, but we’re seeing these curious eruptions of natural phenomena all around us, and we can pursue them if we want.

That’s the obnoxious part of religion, and why it’s in conflict with science. Science is the world of Let’s-Find-Out, while religion is always the land of You-Can’t-Know-That. One tries to build fences around sacred domains, the other has great fun knocking them down. Go ahead, pretend that your god is safe and hidden away where scientists can’t poke at him with needles or measure his emanations with widgets that go beep or photograph his spoor and stick it in a chromatograph — we don’t care. The only way he can escape our probes is if he doesn’t exist…so the more you protest that he is absolutely indetectible, the more we nod and say, “Then you’re admitting that he isn’t even vapor.”

Denying god is yet more blasphemy, isn’t it? That’s why I’m in trouble. Of course, claiming that god has no measurable influence in the world is probably also blasphemy, which puts Peter Hess in the theological clink, too.

Mike Huckabee endorses my candidacy for the presidency

I’m a shoo-in now. Although my mind may have just blown up.

In what may come as a surprise for some, Huckabee agreed that an atheist could be fit to serve as president. “I’d rather have an honest atheist than a dishonest religious person,” he said.

Don’t worry. He didn’t mean it. He’s actually just doing some sneaky sniping at Mitt Romney. He continues with a clarification of what he really meant.

It’s better to have a person who says, ‘Look, I just don’t believe, and that’s where my honest position happens to be. I’m frankly more OK with that than a person who says, ‘Oh, I am very much a Christian. I very much love God.’ And then they live as if they are atheists, as if they have no moral groundings at all. That’s more troubling.”

I think it’s nice if a person believes in God. I’d hate to think somebody was making decisions who thought that he couldn’t be higher than himself.

See? He still equates atheism with a complete lack of moral grounding. He’s still a slimebag.

Evangelical scholar expelled!

Michael Behe is a professor at Lehigh University. He’s also a crank, marginalized and mocked and belittled in academia, and regarded as an ignorant ideologue. But he’s still holding his position and he’s still allowed to express himself. That’s the principled position we hold in academia — he’s allowed to speak even stupidly, and we’re allowed to fire back.

That’s not the way creationists work, though. Bruce Waltke is apparently a respected Old Testament scholar who used to work at the Reformed Theological Seminary. Not any more, though. He made the mistake of speaking in a BioLogos-sponsored seminar, saying that you could be a Christian, you could even believe the Bible was inerrant, and you could also believe in evolution. He was promptly shown the door, but not because what he said was irrational and incoherent, but because evolution is a proscribed subject.

But while Milton insisted that this provides for “a diversity” of views, he acknowledged that others are not permitted. Darwinian views, and any suggestion that humans didn’t arrive on earth directly from being created by God (as opposed to having evolved from other forms of life) are not allowed, he said, and faculty members know this.

This is a tough one for me. The article is full of opinion from loons affiliated with BioLogos and the Templeton Foundation, organizations that I think are dangerous because they willfully poison science with superstition, so it hurts to agree with them at all, especially since they only endorse the compatibility of religion and science as a tool to smuggle lies into the search for truth…but they are right to condemn the closed-mindedness of these theologians.

Of course, I also have a tiny amount of sympathy for the theologians. Their beliefs are so ridiculous (and I include the beliefs of Waltke and the followers of BioLogos and Templeton) that any introduction of reason and evidence-based thinking risks inducing the meltdown of the elaborately rickety structure of their belief. The RTS should be reassured, though: BioLogos and Templeton both show that at least some people’s stupidity can perennially persist even in the face of facts that show they are wrong.

Sex with children AND getting rich? They’re brilliant!

Father Maciel was one of the most notorious influential pedophiles in the Catholic hierarchy — he led an order, the Legion of Christ, which seems to have consisted of likely catamites for his pleasures. Predatory sexual habits don’t seem to be his only legacy, though: follow the money.

Maciel left a trail of wreckage among his followers. Moreover, in a gilded irony for Benedict — who prosecuted him despite pressure from Maciel’s chief supporter, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, Vatican secretary of state from 1990 to 2006 — Maciel left an ecclesiastical empire with which the church must now contend. The Italian newsweekly L’espresso estimates the Legion’s assets at 25 billion euros, with a $650 million annual budget, according to The Wall Street Journal .The order numbered 700 priests and 1,300 seminarians in 2008. On March 15 of this year, five bishops, called visitators, from as many countries, delivered their reports to the pope after a seven-month investigation. A final report is expected by the end of April.

Read the whole article. The twisted sexual politics of Catholicism are just a small part of the corrupt whole: the accounts of the kickbacks and bribes — $5000 here, $10000 there, all adding up to a giant pot of cash — make the organization sound like just a gilded Mafia.

For some reason, this video came to mind after reading it.

An interesting admission

The Connecticut legislature is considering a bill that would remove teh statute of limitations on child sex abuse cases. Guess who is opposing the bill. No, it’s not NAMBLA. No, it’s not a mob of sexually precocious toddlers. It’s…the Catholic Church! You probably didn’t see that one coming.

The reason they oppose it isn’t some conservative legal principle. They spilled the beans already — it’s the cost to the church.

The proposed change to the law would put “all Church institutions, including your parish, at risk,” says the letter, which was signed by Connecticut’s three Roman Catholic bishops.

Oh? Why are they worried? Do they have a gang of septuagenarian child molesters tucked away somewhere in the bosom of the Connecticut church?

Let’s hide that embarrassing conflict in American culture

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For many years, the NSF has been producing a biennial report on American attitudes (and many other statistics) about science called Science and Engineering Indicators. This year, as they have every year, they got the uncomfortable news that a majority of our compatriots reject human evolution and the Big Bang (that last one might have been partly because of the dumb way the question is phrased). What’s different, though, is that for the first time the NSF has decided to omit the fact.

This is very strange. It is a serious problem in our educational system that so much of the public is vocal in their opposition to a well-established set of ideas — these ought to be relevant data in a survey of national attitudes towards science. Why were they dropped? It isn’t because of an overt whitewash to hide our shame away, it seems — instead, it sounds like it’s an accommodationist’s discomfort with highlighting a conflict between religion and science. At least, that’s how I read the excuses given. John Bruer, a philosopher who led the review team on this section of the report, is open about his reasoning.

Bruer proposed the changes last summer, shortly after NSF sent a draft version of Indicators containing this text to OSTP and other government agencies. In addition to removing a section titled “Evolution and the Big Bang,” Bruer recommended that the board drop a sentence noting that “the only circumstance in which the U.S. scores below other countries on science knowledge comparisons is when many Americans experience a conflict between accepted scientific knowledge and their religious beliefs (e.g., beliefs about evolution).” At a May 2009 meeting of the board’s Indicators committee, Bruer said that he “hoped indicators could be developed that were not as value-charged as evolution.”

Bruer, who was appointed to the 24-member NSB in 2006 and chairs the board’s Education and Human Resources Committee, says he first became concerned about the two survey questions as the lead reviewer for the same chapter in the 2008 Indicators. At the time, the board settled for what Bruer calls “a halfway solution”: adding a disclaimer that many Americans didn’t do well on those questions because the underlying issues brought their value systems in conflict with knowledge. As evidence of that conflict, Bruer notes a 2004 study described in the 2008 Indicators that found 72% of Americans answered correctly when the statement about humans evolving from earlier species was prefaced with the phrase “according to the theory of evolution.” The 2008 volume explains that the different percentages of correct answers “reflect factors beyond unfamiliarity with basic elements of science.”

George Bishop, a political scientist at the University of Cincinnati in Ohio who has studied attitudes toward evolution, believes the board’s argument is defensible. “Because of biblical traditions in American culture, that question is really a measure of belief, not knowledge,” he says. In European and other societies, he adds, “it may be more of a measure of knowledge.”

I’ve emphasized the key phrases in that summary, and actually, I rather agree with them. These are issues in which ignorance isn’t the fundamental problem (although, of course, ignorance contributes), but in which American culture has a serious and active obstacle to advancing scientific awareness, the evangelical stupidity of religion. That is something different from what we find in Europe, and it’s also something more malevolent and pernicious than an inadequate educational system.

It seems to me, though, that that isn’t a reason to drop it from the survey and pretend it doesn’t exist and isn’t a problem. Instead, maybe they should promote it to a whole new section of the summary and emphasize it even more, since they admit that it is an unusual feature of our culture, and one that compels people to give wrong answers on a science survey.

Maybe they could title the section, “The Malign Influence of Religion on American Science Education”.

I also rather like the answer given by Jon Miller, the fellow who has actually conducted the work of doing the survey in the past.

Miller believes that removing the entire section was a clumsy attempt to hide a national embarrassment. “Nobody likes our infant death rate,” he says by way of comparison, “but it doesn’t go away if you quit talking about it.”

Exactly right. But if we do talk about it, we end up asking why it’s so bad, and then we make rich people squirm as we point fingers at our deplorable health care system. And in the case of the question about evolution, we make religious people, and especially the apologists for religion, extremely uncomfortable, because they have been defending this institution of nonsense that has direct effects on measurable aspects of science literacy.

Unfortunately, Bruer has also been caught saying something very stupid.

When Science asked Bruer if individuals who did not accept evolution or the big bang to be true could be described as scientifically literate, he said: “There are many biologists and philosophers of science who are highly scientifically literate who question certain aspects of the theory of evolution,” adding that such questioning has led to improved understanding of evolutionary theory. When asked if he expected those academics to answer “false” to the statement about humans having evolved from earlier species, Bruer said: “On that particular point, no.”

What was he thinking? The question on the NSF survey is not asking about details of the mechanisms of evolution, so his objection is weirdly irrelevant. I don’t know if he’s hiding away any creationist sympathies (that phrasing is exactly what I’ve heard from many creationists, after all), but it does reveal that he’s not thinking at all deeply about the issue. And for a philosopher, shouldn’t that be a high crime?

Bhattacharjee Y (2010) NSF Board Draws Flak for Dropping Evolution From Indicators. Science 328(5975):150-151.

Pope…BUSTED!

We now have a smoking gun implicating Pope Ratzi in the cover-up of child abuse by priests.

Pope Benedict XVI has become embroiled in new revelations over child sexual abuse, over a letter he is said to have signed in 1985 before becoming pontiff.

Associated Press said it had obtained the letter, signed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, resisting the defrocking of offending US priest Stephen Kiesle.

Cardinal Ratzinger said the “good of the universal Church” needed to be considered in defrocking, AP reported.

The good of the innocent seems to be much, much lower in the church’s priorities.

Now what will happen, though?

I predict…absolutely nothing. The church will hunker down and change nothing, the flock will make excuses for the abuses as they’ve always done, and the story will repeat year after year. We just have to hope that the scandals will erode church membership further, and that secular authorities will be quicker to protect the kids.

But I’ll just keep on dreaming of the Pope making a visit to some secular country, getting arrested, and being forced to do a perp walk in front of broadcast cameras. It’s not going to happen, but it would be so sweet.

It’s all their fault!

The Bishop of Tenerife has voiced the latest excuse in the Catholic pedophilia scandals, and it is a predictable one. Women have heard this claim about rape over and over again: the victim was asking for it.

His comments were that there are youngsters who want to be abused, and he compared that abuse to homosexuality, describing them both as prejudicial to society. He said that on occasions the abuse happened because the there are children who consent to it.

“There are 13 year old adolescents who are under age and who are perfectly in agreement with, and what’s more wanting it, and if you are careless they will even provoke you”, he said.

Oh, it is so hard to be a noble heterosexual man in this society, with every woman, every gay man, every child, every moist orifice, every knothole, every small animal burrow on the ground, every lemon meringue pie, every velvety wrinkle in the Pope’s cassock, all just taunting and teasing and tantalizing you, begging you to stick your penis in them. And then when you finally give in and let them have what they want, despite all your insistence that you’re doing it for their benefit, not yours, what do they do? They cry rape, or lock you up for child abuse, or the Vatican dry cleaning service sends you an extravagant bill.

It’s just so unfair!

How bad can a Catholic priest get?

Sorry, I’m going to have to ruin your breakfast again. The Stranger has a revealing article on pedophile priests — in particular, it focuses on the native populations of Alaska and Canada, which were used as a nice, obscure dumping ground for the very worst sexual predators the Catholic Church could provide. Small children were raped, entire villages are decimated by mental health trauma and suicides brought on by these monsters, and in one particularly appalling instance, a priest was caught raping a dying woman he was supposed to give the last rites. There’s also an interview with a former priest who was a “cleaner” (yes, he actually calls himself that), brought in to tidy up the messes these evil men brought into a community…before they got shipped off to another community.

The sheer concentration of known sex offenders in these isolated communities begins to look less like an accident than a plan. Their institutional protection looks less like an embarrassed cover-up than aiding and abetting. And the way the church has settled case after case across the country, refusing to let most of them go to trial for a public airing, is starting to look like an admission of guilt.

Here’s the reason why the church covers up for rapist priests.

Why does the church keep sending these priests, who have come to be such a major liability, back into ministry? “It’s all about keeping the stores open, keeping the revenue rolling,” Wall says. The Alaskan provinces in particular, Wall says, were a source of revenue–not from the Native population living there, but from parishioners in the lower 48 who were encouraged to donate for the Native ministry up north. “You could raise thousands to fund a mission that cost very little to run,” Wall says. “The profit margin is huge.”

The story makes 1950s Ireland look like a paradise of blissful religious sanctity. It is not for the squeamish.

If you’d rather read something a little more encouraging, read Katha Politt on priestly pedophilia. She nails the priesthood on their sanctimony and hypocrisy, and their pretense to a moral superiority that is so patently betrayed. She also mentions this surprising story:

In February, Bishop Margot Kaessmann, the first woman to head the German Protestant Church and a much-admired public figure, was caught running a red light while intoxicated. There was a lot of sympathy for her, even in the conservative media, which disagreed with her liberal and anti-war views, and she received the support of the church’s governing body. Nonetheless, within four days Kaessmann resigned, saying her moral authority had been so compromised she could no longer do right by her high office. Maybe Pope Benedict and his bishops could learn something from her example.

What? A Protestant bishop resigns for the crime of running a red light under the influence? She got a traffic ticket and felt her moral authority was compromised? I mean, that’s a bit excessive, but OK, at least she’s taking religion’s claims of morality extremely seriously.

Meanwhile, the Pope heads a Catholic office that was sheltering child-rapers, and the entire Catholic hierarchy is busily claiming the martyrdom of Christ for itself because people have started to complain about their intrusive little penises. They aren’t even trying for the moral flood plain, let alone the moral high ground. It’s more like they’re taking a dive in the Marianas Trench of turpitude while pretending to climb the Everest of propriety.

While we can’t expect the church to expire in shame, at least we should start regarding Catholicism as a Mafia-like criminal organization…and maybe our governments should stop treating with them.

Ladies, you have a mysterious and special garden

People send me stuff via email, and I browse through it all in the early morning, before I go offline and get to work, and that means I often wake up to some of the most disgusting, revolting, horrible messages: death threats, angry letters, and all kinds of interesting insults. But sometimes the worst comes from people who are on my side, like this message that really ruined my breakfast. It’s from a Catholic anti-choice site, full of prim certainties about gods and babies and your reproductive organs, and it has this…this…letter to a young girl, written by Alice von Hildebrand.

Be prepared to hurtle back and forth from hilarity to revulsion.

Let us take off our “secular” eyeglasses, and then we shall be able to see that women, far from being “discriminated” against, are in many ways privileged. And this is the “secret” I wish to share with you. The body of every little girl born into this world is mysteriously sealed by what is properly called the “veil of virginity”. That is to say, a “secret” is entrusted to her body, and a secret is always “veiled”. According to Christian teaching, this veil closes the entrance to a mysterious garden which belongs to God in a special way, and for this reason cannot be entered into except with His express permission, the permission that God grants spouses in the Sacrament of Matrimony. Any little girl aware of this “mystery” will feel that her body is to be modestly clothed, so that its secret will be hidden from lewd looks.

Little girls, of course, grow up. How beautiful when a bride can say to her husband on their wedding night, “I have kept this garden virginal for you, and now, with God’s permission I am giving you its key, knowing that you will enter into it with reverence”.

Moreover, when a wife conceives a few hours after her husband has embraced her, God creates the child’s soul in her body, (as you certainly know, neither husband nor wife can produce the human soul; God alone can create it.) In other words, there is a personal “contact” between God and the woman which, once again, gives to the female body a note of sacredness. Don’t forget that He whom the whole universe cannot contain, was “hidden” in the womb of the Holy Virgin for nine months. Once you realize this, you will be awe-filled for the double mystery that God has confided to you: to conceive a human being made to God’s image and likeness, and to give birth to it in pain and anguish. Do not forget that it was also in pain and anguish that Christ re-opened for us the gates of paradise – which had been shut by sin. To women has been granted the awesome privilege of nobly suffering so that a new human being, made to God’s image and likeness, might come into the world. Meditate upon this for a moment, and you will feel a deep reverence for your body. It belongs to God, and is not a “play thing” that you can dispose of as you please.

Wow. In a few short paragraphs, she’s managed to promote the cult of virginity, insist on magical ensoulment at the instant of conception, belittle the struggle for equality of women, glorify pain, and imply that anyone who doesn’t follow Catholic dogma is throwing away their body…and she does it with a kind of Victorian smugness that alone is rather off-putting.

I think I’ll go take a shower now.