For greater moral rectitude!

Penn State’s reputation will be saved now! They’ve got an ally willing to work with them to get over the stigma of pedophilia: the Catholic church. Whaaa…?

The Roman Catholic Church is willing to partner with American educational institutions to educate the public about child sex abuse after the Penn State scandal, according to the head of the U.S. church.

Well, sure, that makes sense. It’s like if you’re caught stealing cars, you do restitution by volunteering to work in the biggest chop shop in the state. You bring together two groups renowned for a crime, and they magically cancel each other out and return to a state of probity, right?

Using my gift of prophecy, I see other brilliant tactical moves from PSU soon to appear. The fired coaches will be replaced with recruits from the sex offenders wing of Graterford, and they’ll soon have a new mascot:

That won’t be as big a change as you might think. Here’s the current mascot:

He just wants to give the boys and girls a big hug!

Too much internet drama

Oh, man, Abbie Smith just melted down over Jen McCreight, sniping at her fellow grad student in a public display of petty, malicious, and false accusations, among them the ironic claim that Jen was unprofessional, wasting her time in internet drama, and of being immature. Self-awareness is not her strong suit, I guess.

Jen has responded with a calm and thorough takedown.

It’s a shame and it’s all so unnecessary. I don’t even know what triggered the outburst from Abbie — near as I can tell, a recent post about misogynistic messages (which didn’t mention Abbie!) just put her on Abbie’s ever-expanding hate list.

Brace yourself for another exploding comment thread…I’m just hoping it’s on Jen’s blog, not mine.

Oh, agony

We had a debate on the subject “Is Atheism or Islam More Rational?”, between Hamza Tzortzis and Dan Barker, at UMTC last week. It’s now on youtube. It’s agonizing. Tzortzis is a kind of cut-rate Islamic William Lane Craig, and again he repeated his lies about the Quran containing inexplicably accurate embryology. It does not, and I’m tired of telling him so.

Why not?

We’ve encountered Michael Voris before: the painfully dogmatic and fervent Catholic Dominionist kook. He has a ridiculous video in which he asserts that theology is the queen of all the sciences because everything reduces to god, ultimately — which does leave one wondering why theology never produces any ideas that are actually useful to all of those scientific disciplines. I mean, take math for example: mathematicians are constantly coming up with tools and ideas that chemists and physicists and biologists and geologists all find awesomely useful. But what has theology given us? Nothing.

Michael drones on, going through the motions — he really seems dead-eyed and robotic in this video, doesn’t he? — and you probably got bored 30 seconds into the 5 minute clip. So I want to focus on just one point that Voris made, and mentioned in the caption, and which actually isn’t unique to Catholic nutjobs at all.

The fields of science can offer all kinds of information in answer to the question how… through the observance of the human intellect. But when asking the question why, man MUST turn to the divinity of the Creator.

How many times have you heard that claim: science can answer “how” questions, but it can never answer “why” questions, therefore we have to leave those kinds of questions to a non-scientific domain, which must be religion, therefore god. And that’s wrong at every step!

There’s no reason the interpreter of “why” questions has to be religion…why not philosophy? That seems a more sensible objective source than a religion burdened with a dogma and a holy book and wedded to revelation rather than reason. Voris assumes there has to be a divine creator, but that’s one of the questions, and you don’t get to just let it go begging like that.

The more fundamental question, though, is this oft-repeated distinction that science can’t answer “why” questions. Of course it can, if there’s a “why” in the first place! We are perfectly capable of asking whether there is agency behind a phenomenon, and if there is, of exploring further and identifying purpose. Why should we think otherwise?

Imagine you came home, as I did the other day, and saw this on the edge of your yard.

You’d immediately assume it was artificial, as I did — the perfectly circular outline suggests that a machine came by, and someone lowered some auger-like device and drilled a large hole in the yard. You could also look up and down the street and see that the hole-driller had struck several other places, all in a line parallel to the road and exactly the same distance from the curb. They are almost certainly the product of intent.

Does that in any way imply that I’m now done, that asking why these holes were dug is beyond the scope of all rational inquiry? That I ought to drop to my knees and praise ineffable Jesus, who caused holes to manifest in the ground for reasons that I, as a mere mortal man, cannot possibly question? Oh, Lord, mine is not to question why, I must accept what is!

Of course not. I can speculate reasonably; it looks like a hole for planting something in. I can check into the city offices, and learn that there’s concern about emerald ash borers killing trees in our community. I can see the next day that a city crew came by and put new saplings in place all up and down the street. Even without actually talking to anyone directly, I can figure out from the evidence why there is a hole in my yard.

Similarly, if there was a god busily poofing the entirety of the cosmos into existence, that’s an awful lot of evidence that can be examined for motive…are we to instead believe it is so incoherent that we can discern no possible purpose behind all this data?

And what if instead, I’d come home and found one hole in the neighborhood, it was a rough-edged and asymmetrical crater, and in the center of it was a small rocky meteorite? Then I could ask how it came to be there (it fell out of the sky and smacked into my yard), and I could try to ask why, but the answer would be that there was no agency behind it, there was no purpose, and it was simply a chance event of a kind that happens all the time.

When people try to argue that science can’t answer “why” questions, what they’re actually saying is that they don’t like the answer they get — there is no why! There is no purpose or intent! — and are actually trying to say that the only valid answer they’ll accept is one that names an intelligence and gives it a motive. That is, they want an answer that names a god as an ultimate cause, and a description that doesn’t include agency doesn’t meet their presuppositions.

OCCUPY SPARTA!

We all know that comic book artist Frank Miller is an arrogant macho jerkwad, but I didn’t know the magnitude of his jerkwadiness. He’s written an angry diatribe against the Occupy Wall Street movement.

The “Occupy” movement, whether displaying itself on Wall Street or in the streets of Oakland (which has, with unspeakable cowardice, embraced it) is anything but an exercise of our blessed First Amendment. “Occupy” is nothing but a pack of louts, thieves, and rapists, an unruly mob, fed by Woodstock-era nostalgia and putrid false righteousness. These clowns can do nothing but harm America.

And then he gets really cranky.

Apparently, us liberals are hurting America, because we’ve got a war to fight against al-Quaeda and Islamicism, and we need to get out of the way so the investment bankers can fight it for us. I guess wrecking the economy was all part of a secret plan to defeat terrorism.

Anyway, ol’ Frank lives in a cartoon fantasy world where violence solves everything, and all it takes to solve a problem is a bigger gun and the will to use it indiscriminately, which I think we all could have learned from his graphic novels and movies without reading his blog. And now that we’ve read his blog, we don’t need to pay for his commercial products anymore! Miller’s simple-mindedness stands exposed even further.

Which is funny if you think about it. Could anyone take 300 seriously? I giggled through it all — it was hysterically campy, all macho homoeroticism energetically portrayed with a complete lack of awareness of how over-the-top it all was. It fervently espoused an elitist right-wing view of the world, where only kings ruled divinely and the peons were all slaughtered off-stage.

David Brin has sallied forth to smite the lunacy. He takes an interesting approach: he discredits Miller’s authority on history by utterly demolishing the pseudo-history of 300. It seems hardly worth doing — didn’t we already know that 300 was a great goofy ahistorical joke? — but there’s a nice analogy to be drawn. The contempt Miller shows for the 99% protesting American economic inequality is paralleled in the contempt he shows for everyone other than royalty and professional killers in his work.

Frank Miller rails against effete, pansy-boy militias of amateur, citizen soldiers. But funny thing, none of his Spartan characters ever mentions those events, just a decade earlier! How bakers, potters and poets from Athens – after vanquishing one giant invading army, then ran 26 miles in full armor to face down a second Persian horde and sent it packing, a feat of endurance that gave its name to the modern marathon race. A feat that goes unmatched today. Especially by Spartans.

That Athenian triumph deserves a movie! And believe me, it weighed heavily on the real life Leonidas, ten years later. “300″ author Frank Miller portrays the Spartans’ preening arrogance in the best possible light, as a kind of endearing tribal machismo. Miller never hints at the underlying reason for Leonidas’s rant, a deep current of smoldering shame over how Sparta sat out Marathon, leaving it to Athenian amateurs, like the playwright Aeschelus, to save all of Greece. The “shopkeepers” whom Leonidas outrageously and ungratefully despises in the film.

It just goes to show you can’t trust a fascist thug to recognize reality.

By the way, is it required for comic book artists to be crazy, or does it just help? (Uh-oh, I know Melissa Kaercher…what dark secrets lurk beneath her superficially normal (OK, mostly normal) personality?)

Minnesota Republicans have very low standards

Mitch Berg is a fairly prominent Republican blogger here in Minnesota — he’s generally thought of as a more or less mainstream Limbaugh-style, pro-Tea Party Republican, which tells you right there that he’s a few meters shy of sane.

He’s also rude. That in itself is not a mark against him, obviously; I’m rude myself. But there are some limits, you know. Berg has endorsed a guy named TJ Swift, who goes by the pseudonym Swiftee, and is one of the earliest denizens of the Pharyngula dungeon. Berg doesn’t just endorse the guy, he gives him high praise:

TJSwift remains the single finest editorial cartoonist in the Twin Cities blogosphere.

@mitchpberg

Like I say, I have a reputation for sharp invective; but I don’t think I can match Swift’s peerless artistic talents and cogent pithiness. If you’d like to see what is regarded as the high water mark of the Minnesota GOP’s wit, talent, and insight…all you have to do is look at the latest work of the single finest Republican editorial cartoonist in Minneapolis/St Paul.

Perhaps we’ll someday see his work in the Minneapolis Star Tribune…or dare I suggest it, the New Yorker or New York Times.

Let’s just please not see any Minnesota Republicans anywhere near an elected office.

JoePa has an answer

Joe Paterno has finally, after ten years of denial and sheltering a child rapist, taken a moment to do something. He has spoken out for a change and for action to be taken, and it’s amazing…I thought my respect for the guy had hit bottom, but no, he had miles to dig further.

I shall pass this one on to a fine angry rant at the Atheist Camel:

His termination by Penn State was right and proper, and that would have been the end of it save any legal actions that might befall him as a result of his inaction. I’d have had nothing to comment upon, no further ax to grind with him. But then he said this:

“As you know, the kids that were the victims, I think we ought to say a prayer for them,”

And there, in that one sentence is the very heart of the grotesqueness of religion, the very core of what I have raged about, fought against, and endeavored to put a face on for these many years all summed up nice and tidy by a disgraced coach.

PRAYER?? Say a PRAYER for the child victims? You self righteous sanctimonious jerk… some of those kids are victims partially because you failed as a man. You relinquished your responsibility as a human being. Your hubris and self interest over shadowed those victims interest. But, now, NOW you’ll implore us to mumble words to a nonexistent thing in the sky as though that will fix things? As though those kids’ lives will be repaired by words to a deity when your own misbehavior, self-serving actions, or apathy was a causal factor for their pain?

When you’re at the very bottom of a pit, when you’ve failed egregiously at basic human decency, there’s always that one last recourse for the scoundrel and coward: turn to Jesus and hope that piety will buoy your reputation up a little bit. It’s sad, too, that it often seems to work with that credulous majority.

It’s interesting how much loathing Paterno’s remarks have inspired here. Let us make public piety a repulsive act!

If you really need to puke, look at this video, where students have a sign that says “Two of my favorite J’s in life: Jesus and JoePaterno”. It also says he plans to coach this weekend. Is it too much to hope he’s met by the police and turned away?

Oh, man, it just gets worse and worse. There was a press conference at PSU, and the media and students embarrassed themselves. They were questioning the firing of Joe Paterno by raising the spectre of what is good for the university and the football program. Allen Barra has the best and strongest answer…what the PR flacks should have said.

Angry student: Was any consideration given as to how his would affect the football program?

Me: The football program? The football program?? Are you serious? A former assistant coach was just indicted for over 40 counts related to sexual assault on a child, your football coach was fired in disgrace, your athletic director has been indicted for perjury, and a current assistant coach will, I’m sure, soon be fired. And the crimes against humanity — against children — took place in the university’s athletic facilities. Do you think you will even have a football program when the full extent of this becomes known?

Do you even think you’re going to have a university?

I made the point the other day that sports programs can develop an undue and even pathological effect on academic programs, but that a winning season does have a surprisingly powerful effect on enrollments. This is quite possibly the most catastrophic disaster I’ve ever heard of hitting an athletic program, and it’s at a university that has always made a huge deal of their football team. Barra’s article emphasizes the financial hit the university is about to take — a whole department sheltering a pedophile for more than a decade? They are about to cough up more in legal fees than my university spends on operating costs — but it will be interesting to see what happens to enrollments next year. It’s going to hurt. I hope it hurts a lot…not because I have any animus against PSU, but because I hope the students who planned to go there will discover a shred of conscience.

He and Bachmann could be BFFs!

The crazy Minnesotans keep crawling out of the woodwork and onto the political stage — it’s a little embarrassing. We’ve had a professional wrestler, a vampire, a crazy Jebus lady, and now…Gary Boisclair, an anti-abortion fanatic who’s running against Keith Ellison, our Muslim representative in the Fifth Congressional District. Here’s his ad (which he has no money to air, so only put it on youtube, where it got pulled for violating their terms of service), which makes a big deal of the fact that Ellison swore his oath of office on a copy of the Quran, which is full of bombastic Islamic tribalism and sectarian exclusivity, and threatens unbelievers with violence and horrible fates.

It’s a “book that undermines our Constitution,” says Boisclair. So what book would he take his oath of office on? The Bible, which is just as bad?

Why I will not debate William Lane Craig

Several people have written in response to my previous post suggesting that I debate William Lane Craig. It’s not going to happen. Here’s why.

  1. He hasn’t asked me. I’m a small fish, not even on his radar, so the whole question is pointless.

  2. I may be a small fish, but still, a debate with a professional prevaricator and con artist doesn’t look great on my CV — the same point Dawkins has made.

  3. Let’s be honest, debating is a skill, Craig is well-practiced in it, and I’m not. Craig would probably ‘win’, and that’s the great lie right there: debate is a terrible way to resolve a truth claim, and a great way to flaunt some rarefied rhetorical talent. He could clobber me six ways from Sunday, and what it would show is that I’m a lousy debater, and he’s good at it; but his fans would all say it’s evidence that he’s right.

  4. I much prefer the written argument, because he can’t run away from his own words. One of his skills in the oral debate is the slippery elide; if someone is hammering him on one point, he’ll just skip over it to a new point. I’d rather get his words down in writing, where I can pin him down, stick a knife in the bastard, and twist it for a good long while. Longer and with more detail and rigor than is possible in a verbal tussle.

So sorry, no debate in the offing (and #1 is really the most relevant issue, anyway).

William Lane Craig and the problem of pain

Kitties experience pain and suffering, which turns out to be a theological problem. If a god introduced pain and death into the world because wicked ol’ Eve was disobedient, why is god punishing innocent animals? It seems like a bit of a rotten move to afflict the obedient along with the disobedient — shouldn’t god have just stricken humanity with the wages of sin (or better yet, just womankind)?

William Lane Craig has an answer. His answer involves simply waving the problem away — animals don’t really feel pain — and he drags in science to prop up his claim. Basically, Craig is playing the creationist gambit of abusing the authority of science falsely to support his peculiar theology.

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