“IT BELONGS IN A MUSEUM!”

There isn’t that much difference between a trained archaeologist and a professional wrestler, is there? Look at the new depradations encouraged by reality TV:

There’s nothing more exciting than digging for treasure, and that’s just what SPIKE TV’s new unscripted original series, American Digger is going to do when it premiers on March 20 at 10/9c. Former professional wrestler Ric Savage and the American Savage team have the tools, knowhow, and instincts, and are ready to show everyone what could just be hidden beneath your backyard if you give them the chance.

American Digger will showcase Ric Savage and his crew trekking across the country each week, from Chicago, IL to Jamestown, VA and everywhere in between. Once the team identifies an area they think is ripe with high-value artifacts and relics, they’ll have to convince the current homeowner to give them permission to dig up their backyard. If American Savage is persuasive enough, they’ll get a chance to dig up the tenant’s backyard using their state-of-the-art equipment, and divide the cash they get from selling the artifacts they find there with the tenant.

Savage and his crew definitely have an eye for artifact-rich areas, and will seek out historic sites as a result. These areas are home to great finds, as the team uncovers old relics in the show such as a 5 million year old Megalodon shark’s tooth. American Savage is the top artifact recovery company in the United States and is made up of Ric Savage’s wife Rita, who manages the business, battlefield historian Bob Buttafuso, recovery expert Rue Shumate, and Giuseppe, his 25-year old son.

Shark’s teeth aren’t a big deal, but having a team of hacks charge into a historical site to dig up and sell everything they find sounds like a horror story.

Nasty little man snipes at the brave

I am the father of a non-religious soldier. I take it personally when a cretinous wackjob priest declares that my son is a coward lacking in commitment, damned, evil, and weak. Fuck you, Bryan Griem.

There’s an adage I expect will be repeated by other ministers responding to this question. It goes, “there are no atheists in foxholes.” Meaning, when bombs burst, everyone hedges their bets and prays, “God, save me!” There’s a joke about one combat vet who prayed “Lord, if you’re there, I’ll serve you and attend church every Sunday; just get me through.” The Air Force immediately comes and blasts everything, answering the man’s prayer. He then looks up to heaven and says “never mind….”

I know that religious people have security that atheists don’t. If you believe in life after life, you fight harder, risk more, and serve better than a guy who thinks, “this is it!” If you believe you’re nothing but worm-food at death, you aren’t going to jump on a grenade to save the platoon, or charge a machine-gun nest expecting to meet Jesus. You’re going to be reserved, second-guessing, and probably be a big fat chicken.

Look, you just read the stats: “Researchers have found that spiritual people have decreased odds of attempting suicide, and that spiritual fitness has a positive impact on quality of life, on coping and on mental health.” Atheists be damned. They will be. So I really don’t care what they think regarding these tests. I’m tired of having their constant nagging, their constant opposition against God — their evil. They contribute nothing positive in the long run. Their very name, “a” theist, means they are “against,” with a big “no” regarding America’s “creator” and “Nature’s God” (the one mentioned in our Declaration of Independence). I’m frankly sick of them. Why they are here on the In Theory cast is beyond me. It’s like saying, “I have no spiritual input because I don’t believe in the spirit. So here’s my ignorance….”

I wonder what the military puts on gravestones of atheists, a thumbs-down? Listen, all religions are protected by our laws, but atheists don’t countenance America’s documents that mention God. They don’t actually deserve rights that even bizarre religionists have. If it could be shown that people who deny God create military weakness, however small, what should commanders do when choosing a winning military? I agree with you.

This is what we get when the Army decides to evaluate soldiers’ “spiritual fitness”: scumbags like Griem judging our troops by how superstitious and gullible they are.

You can let Griem know what you think of his attack on our troops. Be civil, but don’t pussyfoot around his douchebaggery.

Keep that Santorum out of our science

Jeez…Rick Santorum, young earth creationist, climate change denialist, anti-stem cell research crusader, fundamentalist/evangelical Christian, has just accused liberals of being anti-science. He might have been right if he’d been talking about the liberals who are mushy-headed over alternative medicine, but in this case, he’s pinning his accusation on the fact that we don’t want to burn more coal.

Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum charged on Monday that President Barack Obama and Democrats were “anti-science” because they refused to exploit the Earth’s natural resources to the limits of technology.

Over the weekend the candidate had been criticized for saying that President Barack Obama followed a theology that was not “based on the Bible.” He later insisted that he was talking about the president siding with “radical environmentalists.”

“I accept the fact that the president’s a Christian,” Santorum told CBS host Bob Schieffer on Sunday. “I just said when you have world view that elevates the Earth above man and says that we can’t take those resources because we’re going to harm the Earth — like things that are not scientifically proven like the politicization of the whole global warming debate.”

The scientific view is that global warming is occurring, and that it’s driven by anthropogenic production of greenhouse gases; the politicized, ideologically demented view is a denial of the evidence. Like Santorum’s nonsense.

This is a speech he gave to the crowds in Ohio:

But if we don’t provide those opportunities for those jobs that can sustain a family, for power in this country that is affordable, not just coal but all energy. It drove the economy of Southwestern Pennsylvania, Eastern Ohio for a long time. And through a variety of things — yes, problems with management, problems with negotiations — but actually there were bigger problems. The bigger problems of environmental regulation. In many cases environmental regulation that has gone extreme, particularly in this administration.

What they have done? And I referred to it the other day and I got criticized by some of our, well, less-than-erudite members of the national press corps who have a difficulty understanding when you refer to someone’s ideology to the point where they elevate Earth, and they say that, well, men and humanity is just of a variety of different species on the Earth and should be treated no differently.

Whereas, we all know that man has a responsibility of stewards of the Earth, that we are good stewards and we have a responsibility to be good stewards. Why? Because unlike the Earth, we’re intelligent and we can actually manage things.

Did Santorum just call the press “less-than-erudite” while arguing against the idea that humans are one of a variety of different species on the planet? What a maroon.

And yes, we’re intelligent, and we should try to manage things. So what does that make a head-in-the-sand denialist like Santorum who wants to allow unrestricted, unmanaged exploitation of natural resources? Not a good steward, I would say.

Family matters and cheesy insinuations

What do you know? Richard Dawkins and I have something in common.

In a particularly slimy move, the Telegraph has posted an article that tries to tar Dawkins with the sin of slavery. Not that Richard Dawkins himself has slaves or endorses slavery, but that he had an 18th century ancestor who had a Jamaican estate with over a thousand slaves. The reporter also made the ludicrous suggestion that slave-holding was genetic.

I’d scarcely had time to re-open my lecture notes when he rang back: “Darwinian natural selection has a lot to do with genes, do you agree?” Of course I agreed. “Well, some people might suggest that you could have inherited a gene for supporting slavery from Henry Dawkins.”

So now there’s a slavery gene? That is quite possibly the dumbest assertion I’ve heard in a whole week…and I read creationist websites. As Dawkins points out, he had 512 direct ancestors in that same generation, and that he has a number of ministers in his lineage. Not only is it ridiculous to invent a slavery gene, but it’s a selective absurdity to cherry-pick members of a large population of remote relatives and claim that an individual is responsible for everything every ancestor did. That’s a rather biblical position to take, I think.

So what do we have in common? I poked around a bit in the genealogical records and found this: a piece of the 1820 US census.

It’s not easy to read, but that’s a bit of the records for St Stevens Parish, King William, Virginia. I’ve mentioned before that I’m Scandinavian on my mother’s side, but on my father’s side, I’m English/Irish/Scots and an undefined mingling of who-knows-what, including a bit of Dutch, and they’ve been skulking around North America since somewhere in the 17th or 18th century, and some of them were even Southerners. My great-great-great-great-grandfather, Garland Hurt (1764-1839) was a Virginian married to Martisha Thurston (1768-1818), who had 3 sons and 3 daughters…and also 1 female slave under 14, and 1 female slave between 14 and 25.

Oh no! Do I carry the slave-master gene?

I suppose if I were interested and extremely ambitious (sorry, I’m not), I could trace all of Garland Hurt’s descendants forward, and then we’d find not only that some of you readers might be related to me. I suspect that some of the people who utterly despise me (if they even know of me) are distant cousins. We’re different from each other and from our ancestors.

My family is a bit down-class compared to those fancy-pants Dawkinses, but as you can see, it’s easy to find slave-owners for any of us among the swarms of ancestors we all have, just by going back far enough. I also have at least one ancestor who fought on the Union side (an Iowan who fought with Grant in the Mississippi campaign) in the Civil War. I deplore the slave-owner, but I don’t own his guilt, nor do I get to take credit for the great-great-grandfather who was mustered out in New Orleans. We’re all a great gemisch of subsets of genes from a bounded population. It’s simply silly to start parsing out characteristics from individuals in a complex cloud from the ancestral gene pool and arbitrarily assigning them to single contemporaries. The writer of that article, Adam Lusher, is an idiot…and the Telegraph ought to be embarrassed at publishing such tripe.

Interesting associations

So we’re going to have this event called the Reason Rally next month.

The opposition is beginning to stir, weakly and ineffectually, with a contribution from a creationist fool.

I have already commented on it here, but I will also note that they are calling this rally of people who profess to support "reason," "science," and "secularism" the "largest gathering of its kind in history." I guess they forgot about the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror. Maybe they should add "history" to their list of emphases.

No word yet on whether national park officials will allow them to operate a guillotine on the Mall.

There will, of course, be no Bastille to storm, but will we be doing this the same way we’ve done large-scale atheist projects before? Will we consider women "passive citizens" who were denied the vote because they didn’t have "the moral and physical qual­ities" to exercise political rights? Will we deny the égalité in "Liberté, égalité, fraternité" to non-whites?

No wonder we can’t get any decent intellectual progress in this country: we contain idiots who hear the words “reason”, “science”, and “secularism” and leap to the conclusion that we’re talking about guillotines. I guess that’s why they’re so anti-science and anti-reason — they’ve made some maddeningly stupid associations with the words.

And why should Martin Cothran leap to this bizarre scenario of atheists going all 18th century and discriminating against women and minorities? That’s more of a 21st century obsession of religious fundamentalists.

But then, he’s not even being creative. This is Rick Santorum’s line that equates science, social justice, and secularism with chopping people’s heads off. No one is advocating tyranny or revolution here, and decapitation is a signature move of terrorist extremists nowadays…so how can anyone take seriously a trembling nitwit who screams bloody murder because Richard Dawkins or Taslima Nasrin or Lawrence Krauss or Hemant Mehta or Jamila Bey or Greta Christina talk about liberty and equality without gods or priests?

There will be no guillotines on the mall unless the religious right brings them. We cannot be responsible for the imaginary terrors the stupid and ignorant conjure up when confronted with knowledge and good sense and a dismissal of superstition.

Next, throw a bag over the Washington Monument

Wasilla High School has a piece of art called “The Warrior Within” on display. The artists describe it this way:

Emerging from the powerful stone form are two warrior shields encircled by glowing feathers,” the description says, adding the art is a monument to the warrior spirit. “The bronze shield has a hand impression showing ‘good deeds.’ The aluminum shield has a flame symbol representing the ‘spark of inspiration.’ The stone form represents the strong material from which a warrior is made.

And here’s what it looks like:

I suppose one might think it looks very vaguely like a vulva, if you squint and don’t know much about anatomy and kinda ignore all the details to the point where any oval is going to be interpreted as a vagina. Or if you just have a dirty mind.

So of course the high school has now covered it with a sheet. The sniggering philistines of Wasilla lose again; if they think they will silence criticism of their town because they have a vulva sculpture, they instead get to have us laughing at them for being close-minded prudes and censorious prigs.

Relax, people. Go with it. It’s a shield, but if you think it looks like a vulva, even better — that’s a lovely symbol, too. Just think…it could have been a sheela-na-gig, instead.

That’s from a Christian church, by the way. Just in case someone there thinks it’s godless and profane.

Because Denyse O’Leary is so much nicer than Jerry Coyne

I could have warned him. Jerry Coyne had an interview on Skeptiko, that nest of feeble-minded credulity, that was a hilarious collision of reason with idiocy. The last time I looked at Skeptiko was when he interviewed Denyse O’Leary, on her ghastly book, The Spiritual Brain.

Strangely, that interview went smoothly and without any argument. Clearly the problem must lie with Jerry Coyne’s temperament.

Quantum Christianity?

Hallelujah! At long last, we can reconcile Jesus and science — all we need is to know a little quantum physics. Very little quantum physics. So little that we can get it all wrong, and it really doesn’t matter. Heed this call to improve the world by having Christians embrace physics!

It is time for the spiritually faithful to openly support the acceptance of this new science, which is called quantum physics theory. It replaces Newtonian physics theory, which is based on concepts developed in the 17th century when scientists separated themselves from the Church of Rome to avoid being burned at the stake when their discoveries were at variance with the teachings of the church.

Uh, hey, what? I had no idea that Newtonian physics was a cop-out to avoid conflict with Catholicism. The things you learn on the interwebs…

The Newtonian physics the-ory describes most day-to-day physical phenomena well, but does not support concepts of intuitive, spiritual or other "nonphysical" phenomena, such as electricity and field theories.

This is getting weirder and weirder: electricity is non-physical? It’s an intuitive, spiritual phenomenon? I know James Clerk Maxwell was a devout evangelical Christian, but he managed to keep all of that out of his work.

I think you can see where this is going: wicked Catholic-appeasing Newton doesn’t support spirituality (which is already ridiculous and ahistorical), but quantum physics does.

Quantum physics theory sees the universe as an infinite, interactive field of energy patterns (quantum holograms) in which the true intentions of humankind influence the application of infinite sources of energy in our physical world.

See?

I don’t think quantum physics includes human intention as a factor at all. This sounds more like Deepak Chopra’s version of physics, i.e., total bugwackin’ nonsense.

So how does this guy justify this idiosyncratic version of physics? By personal experience, of course.

I have personally experienced and observed the moving of physical objects, the changing of chemical compositions and the healing of sickness by means of true intentions, alone. I foresee a near future in which each of us "who does not doubt in his heart" quietly and without ostentation, helps to keep turning the wheels of industry, transportation and electric generation, as required. How many Christians truly believe in the teachings of Jesus?

I look forward to our bright future in which the prayers of devout Christians cause the turbines of dynamos to whirl about telekinetically, generating free godly energy for us all.

If you doubt this, you do not truly believe in the teachings of Jesus, who was all about magic-powered industrial machinery.

A wild jewelry idea

Did you know that Rick Santorum thinks atheism leads to beheading people?

“They are taking faith and crushing it. Why? Why? When you marginalize faith in America, when you remove the pillar of God-given rights, then what’s left is the French Revolution. What’s left is a government that gives you rights. What’s left are no unalienable rights. What’s left is a government that will tell you who you are, what you’ll do, and when you’ll do it. What’s left, in France, became the guillotine. Ladies and gentlemen, we’re a long way from that. But if we do, and follow the path of President Obama and his overt hostility to faith in America, then we are headed down that road.”

Which led me to a crazy thought…maybe the atheist symbol should be a little guillotine. I understand there’s a peculiar trend in religions to use an execution device as a fashion statement, so it would fit right in.

It would also be of some practical utility to cigar smokers.

And what overt hostility to faith does Obama have? Did you see his prayer breakfast remarks? He’s so fucking pious I don’t want to vote for him.

How a Christian brain works

Pat Robertson and his cohost are trying very hard to understand us evil atheists, so they do a little projection and a little Christian logic. They deduce that we…well, you’ll have to watch it to believe it.

Here’s how it goes:

  1. Atheists hate all gods. Actually, they hate everything.

  2. Wiccans worship trees as gods.

  3. Therefore, atheists should all want to cut down trees.

Yes, it’s 8am here. I waited a few hours to drop that on you. A headache is as good as a cup of coffee for waking you up, isn’t it?