It ought to be up to Americans to decide what is true!

You must watch this episode of the Daily Show — it’s all about science. Lisa Randall is on it plugging her new book, Knocking on Heaven’s Door (she actually doesn’t get to say much about it, but I’ve ordered it for my iPad anyway — I know what I’ll be reading on the plane to New Orleans tomorrow), a good section on the recent confirmation of global warming, and my favorite bit of all, Aasif Mandvi blithely leading a chipper Republican operative to agree with the most egregiously ignorant, anti-science claims.

Mandvi: Why are surgeons the only ones allowed to perform surgeries?
Blithering Republican: Absolutely.
Mandvi: Doesn’t make any sense.
BR: It never makes any sense!
Mandvi: and the only other people who can check whether they’re manipulating…
BR: are other scientists!

It also features Marty Chalfie defending himself against accusations of rape.

(Also on FtB)

Mississippi’s shame

The state of Mississippi will be considering Initiative 26 in less than two weeks. This ballot initiative is radical and dangerous; it intends to elevate a single cell to the full status of an adult human being, with all the rights and privileges of such status. It has an effect that ripples through every law on the books, because it changes who they apply to…and you know that no matter how charitably you might try to interpret the law, some fanatic somewhere is going to use it punish women for getting pregnant. It puts a little time bomb in the uterus of every expecting mother.

BALLOT TITLE: Should the term “person” be defined to include every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning, or the equivalent thereof?

BALLOT SUMMARY: Initiative #26 would amend the Mississippi Constitution to define the word “person” or “persons”, as those terms are used in Article III of the state constitution, to include every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning, or the functional equivalent thereof.

This is Dr Freda Bush, who seems to be the spokesperson for this abomination of a law. Notice how nice and positive she is, and how warm and sincere her voice is. Notice also that she lies through her smiling mouth.

Here’s what she says that fills me with fury. It’s a lie.

Science confirms that a person is a human being at the moment of fertilization. At that moment we are fully human and fully alive.

No, “science” does not say that. She is playing word games. It’s only true if all a person is to you is a cell or tissue with the right ancestry and the right collection of genes; she relies on our colloquial understanding of “human” to imply our better qualities, the gifts that make us different from animals, the elements our our nature that freight the word “humane”. Science does not judge that. Science can look at the derivation of a cell, and we could sequence genes from it and assess its relationship to human genes, and we could apply tests and tissue-type its proteins and tell you what species it belongs to, but there are no unambiguous markers for the broader meaning of humanity.

What she says is nominally, superficially true, but only in the sense that it also applies to an excised anal polyp…which is also “fully human” and “fully alive”, as the cells have the right number of chromosomes, are derived from a human parent, and have metabolisms whirring away just as industriously as any other cell in the body. We tend, however, to confine the meaning of “human” in the moral, social, aesthetic, and freakin’ meaningful sense of the word to something more substantial than the flavor of the meat. These mindless godbots want to throw that meaning away.

We can say that the cell at fertilization has no capacity for love, no sense of humor, no joy in its existence, no thoughts or plans — it lacks the neural substrates to do any of that. At some point, the developing fetus will acquire those abilities, but science can’t say precisely when, so it’s a lie to claim that you have a definitive, absolute, positive answer.

The real ambiguity of science and the imaginary certainty of these dogmatists has real consequences, though. If passed, it means women who are raped do not have recourse to abortion or even the morning after pill. It means fetuses with crippling, devastating abnormalities will be forced to be carried to term. Worse still, it means that common forms of contraceptive could be determined to be criminal: IUDs that prevent implantation and birth control pills that may prevent implantation (that’s not their primary mode of action) could be declared illegal. Proponents of the initiative claim that it will not, but they are being disingenuous and denying the known behaviors of the fanatical ‘pro-life’ crowd. You know some raving Catholic or devout Baptist will use this law as a lever to ban every potential instrument of family planning that hinders the hegemony of the patriarchy.

It also denies the reality of Mississippi.

It’s the most conservative state in the nation. Planned Parenthood (which doesn’t even provide abortions in its one clinic here) and the ACLU are dirty words. Where there were once seven abortion clinics in the state, the one remaining flies in a doctor from out of state. As for supporting life, Mississippi’s infant mortality rate is the worst of any state in the nation. The number of babies who die as infants in Mississippi is double the number of abortions annually. It also has one of the highest rates of teen pregnancy nationwide, alongside a child welfare system that remains dangerously broken.)

If they really cared about babies, all their energy would be spent correcting that abysmal infant mortality rate. But they don’t. They care about god and public piety, nothing more.

This law is not about bringing public policy in line with the scientific evidence — the people behind it do not have a record of ever caring about that. This is pure religious illogic.

Imbuing fertilized eggs with rights isn’t a serious philosophical position, it’s a convenient rhetorical tactic to justify subjugating women.

It’s madness.

Brace yourselves, world ending today

Nah, not really. This is supposed to be the last day of our existence, according to Harold Camping, but not even the Christians believe him, and they’re pretty kooky.

Rocky Mountain, N.C.’s Glenn Lee Hill, a retired pastor of Meadowbrook Christian Church, has told The Christian Post, “The late night comics tend to make fun of Christians anyway and when this happens it gives them an opportunity to mock us.”

Hill fervently refutes Camping’s latest rapture claim that “the end is going to come very, very quietly, probably within the next month. It will happen by October 21.”

According to the retired minister, “That is an erroneous prophecy, I don’t believe the world is about to end. Jesus has provided the choice for people to live forever.”

That’s from a Christian news site which then concludes on this note.

Fifty-eight percent of white evangelical Christians say Christ will return to earth by the year 2050, by far the highest percentage in any religious group, according to the survey.

By the year 2050, 23 percent of Americans believe that Christ will definitely return, and 18 percent more believe he will probably have returned to earth by that date.

It seems to me that if you’re one of those evangelical Christians, you’re just as insane as Harold Camping. The only difference is that you believe the Bible verse that says no one can prophesy the date, and Camping is skeptical.

Ritualized child abuse: circumcision

Want to spend an hour cringing and twitching? This is the abridged version of “Cut: Slicing Through the Myths of Circumcision“, and you will suffer if you watch it. It is a wasteful, terrible thing to do to a child.

One rabbi interviewed is at least honest about circumcision: “It’s painful, it’s abusive, it’s traumatic, and if anybody does it who isn’t in a covenant ought to be put in prison…I do abusive things because I’m in covenant with god.” What nonsense. What a wretched excuse for abusing children.

(Warning: lots of shots of babies getting chopped, as well as closeups of adult penises.)

The arguments for circumcision are pathetic and awful.

  • “You either believe [in the covenant of circumcision] or else nothing is true”. I’ve heard that before: it’s the argument creationists use to defend the absolute literal truth of the book of Genesis, because if that’s not true, the story of Jesus falls apart, and therefore the whole of Christianity is false. Yeah, so? Then it’s false.

  • “The mystery of circumcision is profound”. Ignorance should not inspire the kind of awe that motivates one to mutilate another person’s body.

  • The health benefits. Total bullshit. As one of the speakers in the movie explains, there have been progressive excuses: from it prevents masturbation to it prevents cancer to it prevents AIDS. The benefits all vanish with further studies and are all promoted by pro-circumcision organizations. It doesn’t even make sense: let’s not pretend people have been hacking at penises for millennia because there was a clinical study. Hey, let’s chop off our pinkie toes and then go looking for medical correlations!

  • It’s tradition. Grandpa and great-grandpa and great-great-grandpa did it, so I’ll perpetuate the cycle of abuse to my children. I have to reject that: it reduces a decision to do irreparable damage to a child to repetitive, superstitious, mindless behavior.

There is no reason, other than certain rare and specific medical conditions, for maiming anyone’s genitalia. Don’t do it to your children.

(Also on Sb)

Ritualized child abuse: circumcision

Want to spend an hour cringing and twitching? This is the abridged version of “Cut: Slicing Through the Myths of Circumcision“, and you will suffer if you watch it. It is a wasteful, terrible thing to do to a child.

One rabbi interviewed is at least honest about circumcision: “It’s painful, it’s abusive, it’s traumatic, and if anybody does it who isn’t in a covenant ought to be put in prison…I do abusive things because I’m in covenant with god.” What nonsense. What a wretched excuse for abusing children.

(Warning: lots of shots of babies getting chopped, as well as closeups of adult penises.)

The arguments for circumcision are pathetic and awful.

  • “You either believe [in the covenant of circumcision] or else nothing is true”. I’ve heard that before: it’s the argument creationists use to defend the absolute literal truth of the book of Genesis, because if that’s not true, the story of Jesus falls apart, and therefore the whole of Christianity is false. Yeah, so? Then it’s false.

  • “The mystery of circumcision is profound”. Ignorance should not inspire the kind of awe that motivates one to mutilate another person’s body.

  • The health benefits. Total bullshit. As one of the speakers in the movie explains, there have been progressive excuses: from it prevents masturbation to it prevents cancer to it prevents AIDS. The benefits all vanish with further studies and are all promoted by pro-circumcision organizations. It doesn’t even make sense: let’s not pretend people have been hacking at penises for millennia because there was a clinical study. Hey, let’s chop off our pinkie toes and then go looking for medical correlations!

  • It’s tradition. Grandpa and great-grandpa and great-great-grandpa did it, so I’ll perpetuate the cycle of abuse to my children. I have to reject that: it reduces a decision to do irreparable damage to a child to repetitive, superstitious, mindless behavior.

There is no reason, other than certain rare and specific medical conditions, for maiming anyone’s genitalia. Don’t do it to your children.

(Also on FtB)

Just call me a Quaker, I guess

My post yesterday declining to support churchiness for atheists seems to have irritated a few people, including Greg Epstein himself, and there was a bit of to-and-fro on twitter trying to convince me of the folly of my rejection. It didn’t take.

(There is apparently going to be more twitter chatter about it today, at 5pm (time zone unspecified), under the tag #humanistcommunity. I can’t join in — I’m doing an interview with Michael Slate around that time. I think.)

Now Hemant has joined in with a deeply flawed argument. He criticizes my complaint with a little sarcasm:

Right… who wants to bond with other people, perform community service, have fruitful discussions, find a secular way to celebrate rites of passage, and have someone they can talk to when they’re going through rough times who isn’t going to spit religion in their face?

Who’s disagreeing with any of that? Regular meetings, bonding, service, etc., all sans religion is great! Nowhere in any of my criticisms have I objected to any of those goals.

I also had people claiming my objection was to having weekly meetings. Again, I have no idea where that came from. Minnesota Atheists has weekly meetings, too, and I’d be going to them regularly if I didn’t live a three hour drive away.

Secular parenting, service, discussion, etc fine but if done weekly they’re a cheat & a waste?

So that’s just bizarre. I don’t have a clue what’s running through Epstein’s head. Have weekly meetings; have bi-weekly meetings. Have ’em every day. Organize for community service, have discussions about science and religion, socialize, all that good stuff. Have secular celebrants come in to celebrate milestones in people’s lives. That’s all good.

Just don’t turn it into church. Don’t develop a structure. Don’t have it led by chaplains. I’ve heard Epstein speak; a lot of what he talks about seems to be fond recollections of the way familiar old churches and synagogues were run, and I’m seeing that echoing in the way he’s setting up this “chaplain” nonsense. It’s un-egalitarian, it’s non-secular, it implies a special knowledge possessed by a Head Bozo. Epstein is a product of a theology program and a divinity school, and he’s still trapped in archaic patterns of thought, just trying to stuff atheism into a familiar model. We have lots of atheist groups out there that function perfectly well with things like elections and committees without granting special privilege to people who go through Epstein’s Magic Course. I stated my opinion of chaplains:

And chaplains? I suppose their entrails are just as good for strangling kings as a priest’s, but that’s their only use.

I also asked why the heck we needed them, what they were good for, etc. This is Epstein’s reply.

Humanist chaplains are trained in freethought history & philosophy, ceremony & meeting facilitation, counseling, etc.

People who do counseling and get specific training in it are called “counselors” or “psychiatrists” or “therapists”. They have specific and valuable roles in any community, and it’s not as a generic leader of a group. I’m suspicious of any organization that churns out “chaplains” and calls them “counselors”. The other examples of knowledge…why do I need to be a chaplain to practice them? How do all those other atheist groups out there survive without chaplains?

My objection is simple. No priests. I don’t care what label you call them, creating a hierarchy of privilege is not acceptable to me. As I’ve also said, though, the Epstein approach will definitely appeal to people who are looking for a church substitute — you just won’t find me among them. I don’t want another church, I want them all gone.

I’m living in a small town with 15 petty little sects, each with their building, from humble to historically impressive, and I can encourage nothing that might add yet another sinkhole to the mess we’ve already got. In my perfect atheist future, each of them would shut down, one after the other, and be replaced by secular institutions that actually contributed to the community economically and socially. Replacing them with little Epsteins leading their flock through ceremonies and doing such productive work as lighting candles and playing group therapist and singing godless hymns…<shudder>…no, I wouldn’t be going. I’d be saying nothing has changed but the names.

I will be disappointed that humanity just can’t seem to break free of bad ideas.

If only he’d been a good Christian, he might have gotten away with murder

This is a dismal story of a wretched man who murdered a young woman. No sympathy for the murderer is at all implied; he’s rotten and stupid, let the legal system handle him.

No, this is about the strange ethics of prison chaplain Peter Brotherton. Part of the evidence against the killer was a confession the chaplain received from the accused, a confession he felt no need to keep confidential and instead scurried off to prison authorities. The problem is why he felt no confidentiality was required.

Mr Brotherton said he decided he could not keep the information secret because Tabak was not religious. The prison’s senior chaplain then took the report to the security office.

So Brotherton is saying that if the accused, Vincent Tabak, had gone to church often enough, he would have kept mum about his admission? So that’s what religion is all about: sheltering the guilty.

Catholicism steals a generation of Spanish children

Another Catholic scandal? Yeah, it’s another one, this time in Spain. Mother Church knew best who should raise children.

Several mothers say they were told their first-born children had died during or soon after they gave birth.

But the women, often young and unmarried, were told they could not see the body of the infant or attend their burial.

In reality, the babies were sold to childless couples whose devout beliefs and financial security meant that they were seen as more appropriate parents.

Official documents were forged so the adoptive parents’ names were on the infants’ birth certificates.

300,000 children. 300,000 heartbroken mothers. 300,000 lies.

Many mothers who gave birth there claim that when they asked to see their child after being told it had died, they were shown a baby’s corpse that appeared to be freezing cold.

The BBC programme shows photographs taken in the Eighties of a dead baby kept in a freezer, allegedly to show grieving mothers.

Who needs ethics and morality when you’ve got god?

The destruction of ignorance is goal enough

I am so tired of the fatalist atheists. Julian Baggini is a perfect example: on the one hand he is incapable of seeing the progress atheism has made in the last decade, declaring us at an “impasse”, and on the other, he announces that he, as a philosopher, is going to come up with the productive, powerful Answer. I’m not interested. We’re long past the point where long-winded rationalizations by gooey apologists are at all useful. We must be aggressive and loud and keep the momentum going.

Ophelia takes him on in detail, I just have to mention a few things.

I do not blame the quagmire on the intransigence of any of the three sides in the debate – believers, atheists and agnostics – but on all of them. Broadly speaking, the problem is that the religious mainstream establishment maintains a Janus-faced commitment to both medieval doctrines and public pronouncements about inclusivity and moderation; agnostics and more liberal believers promote an intellectualised version of religion, which both reduces faith to a thin gruel and fails to reflect the reality of faith on the ground; while the new atheists are spiritually tone-deaf, fixated on the superstitious side of religion to the exclusion of its more interesting and valuable aspects.

LIKE WHAT? I guarantee you that every single “valuable aspect” he could mention (which he doesn’t) don’t need religion and are fully achievable by secular institutions…except the lies and promises of magic afterlives. Just for once I’d like these guys to lay it on the line and tell me what, exactly, humanity can’t accomplish without religion.

And then there’s this:

As a querulous member of the atheist camp, one of my aims is to end up with a richer, more constructive vision for what should follow the “new atheism”, which may well have been needed, but does not appear capable of taking us much further. To use another military analogy, the new atheism seems designed for effective invasion, but not long-term occupation.

I’ve often heard this assertion that we have to come up with something positive to replace the religion we eradicate. That would be nice, but it’s not essential: when a doctor purges a person of parasites, they’re not going to moan and fret about what they’re going to replace the worms with — getting rid of them is sufficient benefit.

Even that analogy is flawed, however. We’re getting rid of ignorance. We don’t need to replace it with a different kind of ignorance. It’s enough to learn the truth about reality.

I just got back from Cincinnati, right next door to Answers in Genesis and the Creation “Museum”. I do not feel at all charitable to religion, and my mood was not lifted by the latest insanity from Ken Ham. This is not the Omphalos argument — it’s worse.

As I have spoken at conferences over the years, people have often come up to me and said:

“When I am talking to someone who believes in an old earth, one of the things I say to them, as a young-earth creationist, is that God didn’t make Adam a baby—He made him an adult. And when He created the universe, He created it fully functional, with the appearance of age—even though it wasn’t old.”

My response often shocks these speakers: “By saying the universe looks old, you are trusting that dating methods can give us an apparent old age for the universe—but they can’t.”

Let me explain. When people say the universe has “apparent age,” usually they are assuming, for whatever reason, that the universe “looks old.” I have often found that, unconsciously, such people have already accepted that the fallible dating methods of scientists can give great ages for the earth. So if they believe what the Scripture says about a young universe, they have to explain away this apparent great age.

Ham is denying all of science and all of the evidence. The science does say the universe is very, very old, there’s no getting around it. Ham’s argument is a simple claim that all of science is completely wrong.

Why does he do this? Religion. I have no reason to believe it provides a positive benefit, nor do I need to replace it with some pretentious philosophy. These clowns are wrong.

I’m also not at an impasse. We’re going to crush them.

Seems like a good goal to me.