Sam Harris on Collins’ appointment

Sam Harris has published a piece in the New York Times decrying the appointment of Francis Collins to head the NIH. It’s strong stuff; he points out that Collins isn’t just a Christian, he’s an active science-denier who has set aside whole blocks of scientific inquiry as inaccessible to study because they are a product of a divine being. As he asks at the end, “Must we really entrust the future of biomedical research in the United States to a man who sincerely believes that a scientific understanding of human nature is impossible?”

The strongest part of the essay, in my opinion, was that Harris directly quotes Collins’ own words, and they are not encouraging. Most specifically, he includes the text of slides from a talk Collins gave at UC Berkeley in 2008:

Slide 1: “Almighty God, who is not limited in space or time, created a universe 13.7 billion years ago with its parameters precisely tuned to allow the development of complexity over long periods of time.”

Slide 2: “God’s plan included the mechanism of evolution to create the marvelous diversity of living things on our planet. Most especially, that creative plan included human beings.”

Slide 3: “After evolution had prepared a sufficiently advanced ‘house’ (the human brain), God gifted humanity with the knowledge of good and evil (the moral law), with free will, and with an immortal soul.”

Slide 4: “We humans used our free will to break the moral law, leading to our estrangement from God. For Christians, Jesus is the solution to that estrangement.”

Slide 5: “If the moral law is just a side effect of evolution, then there is no such thing as good or evil. It’s all an illusion. We’ve been hoodwinked. Are any of us, especially the strong atheists, really prepared to live our lives within that worldview?”

My jaw just dropped when I read that. It is breathtakingly vacuous. How does Francis Collins know any of that? Those conclusions are not anything we could draw from any scientific evidence, and there’s the head of the human genome project throwing around quaint Christian dogma as if it were reasonable and valid.

That last one really irritates, too — it’s the familiar anti-atheist canard that atheists cannot know any truly moral behavior, that the only genuine sense of morality arises out of obedience to an authority, especially an invisible but omnipotent authority. Collins is a man who does not trust the godless people in his communities because, to his mind, they are blind to good and evil.

I know evil when I see it. A priest taking advantage of his presumed moral authority to take young boys into the dark and private rooms of his church to rape them is evil, I think. Not because a god has whispered a rule into my head, but because I know that the successful relationships that build a cooperative network within the framework of my society are all formed on mutual trust, and that is a violation. We test these bonds of mutual support all the time, we rely on them, and we know from history that their loss contributes to social decay.

We also contain biological imperatives that strengthen those bonds. We know good when we see it, too: kindness, self-sacrifice, and charity move us, not because we are ordered to do so by an imaginary god, but because we can feel empathy for others, and yes, evolution has shaped individuals to respond with affirmation to actions that reinforce the community. That’s how we survive and succeed.

I have to turn Collins’ statement around against him. If god does not exist, if religion is a byproduct of the evolution of the mind, then there is no reason to obey him. It’s all an illusion. You’ve been hoodwinked. Are you devout Christians really prepared to live your lives in reality? And if you aren’t, why should we trust you in positions of power?

Scientology values

Some leaked documents from the Church of Scientology reveal their priorities — these are papers they require new staffers to sign, and there is no way anyone in their right mind would sign them. The gist is that they want your promise that you are financially solvent, so that nothing can cause you to pull back from your “commitment to the church”, and then there are a whole lot of threatening agreements: you’ll have to pay a ‘penance’ to the church if you leave, you can never, ever sue or hold the church liable for anything, and the church is not under any circumstances obligated to fulfill anything they ever promise.

It’s amazing stuff, but I have to give the scientologists credit for at least being honest with their acolytes.

My kind of art gallery

A gallery in Glasgow has put out a Bible and suggested people write in it.

The Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow has invited art lovers to write their thoughts down in an open Bible on display as part of its Made in God’s Image exhibition.

Next to the Bible lie several pens with a note saying: “If you feel you have been excluded from the Bible, please write your way back into it”.

It’s an interesting idea. I’ve signed a few bibles at people’s request myself — I usually mark up the first page with the question, “Where are the squid?” — so I like the sentiment that people ought to be free to comment on it. Some people, of course, are having the vapors over the fact that some scribblers say very rude things. It comes with the territory, though.

It’s unsurprising stuff, really, but the last line of the article made me laugh.

A Catholic Church spokesman said: “One wonders whether the organisers would have been quite as willing to have the Koran defaced”.

They are so predictable!

Billboard wars!

The atheists put up billboards, the Christians put up billboards. What’s the difference? One small difference can be found in this story about new pro-theocracy ads going up in Florida.

The billboards showcase quotes from early American leaders like John Adams, James Madison and Benjamin Franklin. Most of the quotes portray a national need for Christian governance.

I don’t believe the founding fathers were infallible, so just digging up quotes from old dead white guys who liked Jesus doesn’t impress me much. But wait! That’s not the difference yet. This is the difference:

Others carry the same message but with fictional attribution, as with one billboard citing George Washington for the quote, “It is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and the Bible.”

“I don’t believe there’s a document in Washington’s handwriting that has those words in that specific form,” Kemple said. “However, if you look at Washington’s quotes, including his farewell address, about the place of religion in the political sphere, there’s no question he could have said those exact words.”

This opens up whole new realms of Biblical scholarship, you know. Maybe their god didn’t say in these particular words in this specific form, “The fool says, ‘There is a God'”, but there’s no question that those words could have been there, and it’s certainly in line with the biblical gestalt.

Or, just maybe, atheists shouldn’t make stuff up.

That inhuman monolith

Several months ago, we witnessed a tragic spectacle in the news: a nine-year old Brazilian girl was raped, became pregnant, and got an abortion…and the Brazilian Catholic church responded by excommunicating all the participants. One cleric in Rome, Monsignor Rino Fisichella, said the church had been insensitive, but no one in the hierarchy stepped forward to outright condemn the heartlessness of the church’s stance and the unfairness of the policy.

We now have an official document from the Catholic church clearly stating their position. Anyone involved in an abortion for any reason is to be automatically excommunicated, no exceptions. They’ve actually hardened their position.

That includes nine-year old children raped by their stepfather. It includes any doctors who act on sympathy for a maltreated child. Of course, all the rapist has to do is demand that his victim bear his child, and he will be welcomed in the bosom of the holy church. The church is standing firm on principle.

…there is a more important principle at stake. “We have laws, we have a discipline, we have a doctrine of the faith,” the official says. “This is not just theory. And you can’t start backpedaling just because the real-life situation carries a certain human weight.” Benedict makes it ever more clear that his strict approach to doctrine will remain a central pillar to his papacy, bad publicity be damned.

I see. Dogma is more important than reality, and most surprisingly for representatives of a religion that claims the moral high ground, it is more important than human needs.

Everyone should simply leave that evil institution — tell them they can keep their bricks and their real estate, their gold chalices and their gilt robes, their layered assemblage of celibate perverts, meddling old men, and fearful brides of Christ, and let that human element walk away, free of their superstitions. The church doesn’t want that human weight, anyway.

Cheerful news from the UK

I’m feeling a bit uplifted at the word from the other side of the Atlantic: some doom and gloom from the Anglican church.

A long-serving Church of England bishop has predicted that the Church of England will cease to exist within a generation. In an article in the Sunday Telegraph, the Right Reverend Paul Richardson said declining church attendance and the rise in multiculturalism meant that “Christian Britain is dead”.

The Church is rapidly declining, with attendances at its services in freefall, a proposal on the table at the next General Synod meeting to cut the number of bishops, and huge holes in its finances due to the economic downturn and a lack of congregants to donate to the collection plate.

Richardson said that the Church had lost more than one in ten of its regular worshippers between 1996 and 2006, with a fall from more than one million to 880,000.

The only concern would be that some other, more malevolent church could rise to take its place. Maybe the next step would be for the state to declare that the official state religion was atheism, just to preclude any nastier replacement.

What not to do in the neighborhood of Temple Square

How often have you seen this? An affectionate couple are walking along holding hands, and one gives the other a kiss on the cheek.

The only way you might have missed seeing that fairly often is if you are legally blind. It’s common, it’s harmless, and it’s rather sweet — and we normally approve of such mild public expressions of affection.

Unless, of course, the couple consists of two young men, and especially if it is in Utah.

A gay couple says they were detained by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints security guards after one man kissed another on the cheek Thursday on Main Street Plaza.

“They targeted us,” said Matt Aune, 28. “We weren’t doing anything inappropriate or illegal, or anything most people would consider inappropriate for any other couple.”
Aune and his partner, Derek Jones, 25, were cited by Salt Lake City police for trespassing on the plaza, located at 50 East North Temple, according to Sgt. Robin Snyder.

I know exactly where that is — it’s near the huge office building that is headquarters for the Mormon Empire. Good work, Matt and Derek! If there is any place on the planet that most needs some demonstration of gay endearment, that’s one of the best (oddly enough, all the others that I can think of are also centers of established religion…). Maybe a few hundred loving couples of all sexes ought to descend on the place and show the Mormon security guards that they can’t quell people’s feelings for one another.

Mr Aune did show a little naivete, though.

The kiss happened on a former public easement given up by city in 2003 in a controversial land-swap deal. The easement became private property, allowing the church to ban protesting, smoking, sunbathing and other “offensive, indecent, obscene, lewd or disorderly speech, dress or conduct,” church officials said at the time. In exchange, the city got church property for a west-side community center.

Aune said he was one of those who protested the transfer at the time.

“They claimed in 2003 this would never happen, they were never going to arrest anyone,” he said. “It’s clear now they do have an agenda.”

It’s clear now? Trust me, when a church lobbies for the right to police offensive behavior in any place, they’ve got some very specific stuff in mind, and the people who don’t fit into their narrow fundamentalist pigeonhole should know it doesn’t matter what you do — they’re going to get you. You probably don’t even want to bend over to tie your shoelaces when some straitlaced repressed Mormon authority figure with a nightstick is standing somewhere behind you.

This is not a dilemma for the church

William Saletan highlights an interesting study in reproductive biology.

In a paper presented to the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology, Dr. David Greening, an Australian infertility expert, reports that 81 percent of the men in his study significantly improved their sperm quality, as measured by DNA fragmentation, through a simple one-week program.

The program was so easy that even the average guy could follow it. According to a summary of the study, “The men were instructed to ejaculate daily.”

He presents it as a conflict for religious organizations like the Catholic church, which frown on masturbation. Unfortunately, Saletan gets it wrong. The Catholic Church can still condemn masturbation as sinful and urge their followers to procreate madly because there’s nothing in their doctrine to favor quality reproduction. To the simple-minded, human beings are all r-selected. Pop ’em out and let God sort ’em out should be their motto.