Who won?

St. Xavier’s is an all-boys Catholic high school, and apparently they’re proud of it. In a game with a rival school, Colerain, the team started chanting about how their invisible man gave them an edge: “We’ve got Jesus!”. Ah, the arrogance of Christians…isn’t it nice that they think they get to deploy the Lord and Master of the Universe to assist them in football games?

The Colerain team responded effectively, I think. They chanted back, “We’ve got girls!”

I don’t care what the score was. Colerain wins.

Wait, what? Atheists don’t understand stories?

I get so tired of Christians sanctimoniously declaring what atheists really believe, and going on to tell us how we get it all wrong. They always seem to hector us over stuff we don’t believe and tell us that if we only stopped doing things we don’t do we’d see the value of Jeeesus. And we roll our eyes, and tally up another data point that says that religion turns you into a moron.

The latest exercise in firing 180° away from the target comes from Paul Wallace, who sends an open letter to atheists about believing in Johnny Cash. He really, really likes Johnny Cash, as he explains to us at length; I like Cash too, and I’ve got a few of his songs coming up frequently on my iPod list. His point is that Cash’s songs tell stories, and those stories shed light on the human condition, and that somehow this is something only a Christian can understand while atheists are blind to it.

[Read more…]

Must-see TV!

Wow. Bangladesh has imposed new restrictions on what can be shown on television. These rules will certainly make for compelling viewing.

[1] Private television channels cannot run direct publicity in favor of any political party [publicity in favor of ruling party is allowed],

[2] Misleading information cannot be incorporated in any talk shows [it stops the participants of the talk shows from delivering any comment criticizing the ruling party or its activities],

[3] National ideology or characters cannot be criticized,

[4] The father of the nation [Sheikh Mujibur Rahman] cannot be criticized in any of the programs [any of his mistakes during his governance cannot be anymore mentioned in any of the programs],

[5] No individual can be criticized in the programs [this has been initiated as a number of ministers in the ruling government became subject of harsh criticism following their severe failures],

[6] No criticism will be allowed on national ideologies and goals [this law will stop the television channels from scrutinizing and criticizing any of the decisions or policies adopted by the ruling party],

[7] No defense and government information can be leaked in any of the programs on television channels [this was initiated because a number of private television channels are exposing many of the hidden actions as well as corruptions inside ministries],

[8] No program can be aired which would provoke deterioration of law and order situation [this law will stop broadcasting news and contents related to general strikes and demonstration programs of the political opponents of the ruling party. This law has been incorporated to stop the television channels from exposing corruption as well as brutality of the law enforcing agencies in the country. Especially the ruling party turned uncomfortable when the private television channels exposed the physical assault of an opposition member of the Parliament, who was mercilessly beaten by some police officers. It was disclosed by the private television channels that, those police officers were leaders of the student front of the ruling Bangladesh Awami League, during their student life. Television programs containing investigative reports on murder in custody of opposition leader and lawyer Moinuddin Ahmed [M U Ahmed] also caused anger in the minds of the ruling party leaders],

[9] No program can be broadcast against any friendly nation [this will stop Bangladeshi channels to broadcast programs criticizing Palestine, Iran and many other nations, with which Bangladesh maintains ‘friendly’ relations,

[10] Programs related to trafficking in women, forced prostitution, rape etc will be barred from broadcast under the new law. This law will also stop broadcasting investigative reports on such issues.

[11] Broadcasting ‘kiss scene’ shall be banned under the new law [this will stop all foreign television channels, especially the movie channels from being connected to Bangladeshi cable television network],

[12] No program or content on mutiny or demonstration can be broadcast on television channels [this will stop the private television channels from showing any of the contents related to massacre inside the Bangladesh Riffles Headquarters],

[13] Programs exposing the activities of criminals as well as their modus-operandi cannot be shown on any television channel,

[14] The private television channels shall be ‘bound’ to broadcast speeches of the Head of the State, Head of the government [Prime Minister], public announcements, press notes as well as any ‘program of national interest’. This law will compel the television channels in continuing to broadcast programs containing political agendas of the ruling party.

I could make a much shorter set of laws that would be much simpler.

  • Only say nice things about the ruling party.

  • No criticism of anything!

  • NO KISSING!

It’s the opposite of what I imagine PharyngulaTV would be like — that would consist of many hours of people blowing raspberries at the Chief Poopyhead, nonstop, vicious criticism of everything (even the stuff we like!), and explicit sex 24 hours a day. I’d watch it. It would be much more interesting than the snoozefest on Bangladeshi TV.

(via Butterflies and Wheels.)

If there is no transcendant moral law, asking us to submit to it is a bad idea

My opinion of the rabbinical mind is plummeting downwards, thanks to the determined efforts of one man, Moshe Averick. We’ve encountered him before, and he was most unimpressive. Now he’s got a new line of criticism of atheists: we’re on a slippery slope. You know what comes next? What horrible abominable practice we’ll be endorsing?

Pedophilia!

Yeah, because without god’s laws to guide us, we will start running around raping little children willy-nilly. Never mind that atheists haven’t shown, as a whole, any such pattern or predilection, it’s just inevitable that we’ll want to abuse children. I think it’s a bizarre case of projection, again: really, I have no desire to have sex with small children, to rob banks, to rape dogs, or even to set churches on fire. You might as well suggest that without god I’ll become a NASCAR fan, start chewing tobacco, or vote Republican, all things I have no desire to do and which are not a product of theism or atheism.

I’m always baffled by this argument. What, there’s something about church or synagogue that suppresses your natural urge to rape, murder, and rob? But I feel no such urge without church!

And then, of course, he’s picked the very worst example. Nowadays, mention the word “pedophilia”, and nobody thinks of atheists — you know, even though pedophiles are a minority in their ranks, everyone considers “Catholic priest” virtually synonymous with “child-raper”. So much for religion suppressing those urges — it’s more like it attracts and enables monsters.

And then, having gnawed on one foot, Averick sticks the other one in.

A wise man once observed that while belief in God after the Holocaust may be difficult, belief in man after the Holocaust is impossible. The choices before us are clear: we will either seek a transcendent moral law to which we will all submit, or we will seek our own personal and societal indulgence. If we turn to God in our quest to create a moral and just world, we have a fighting chance; if not, we are doomed to spiral into the man-made hell of the human jungle.

Germany at the time of the Holocaust was a predominantly Catholic and Lutheran country. Hitler claimed to have a transcendant moral law, as well — that his people were the Chosen People, the best and greatest Volk, who by their intrinsic physical and moral and intellectual superiority were compelled to maintain their purity and exterminate the lesser races. That’s where you end up when you decree a source of absolute morality, a morality that isn’t based on equality and empathy and fairness, but on authority, especially the intangible untestable authority of an invisible magic ghost.

All moral laws are manmade. Do we recognize that reality and struggle to make them better as a community of reasonable human beings, or do we pretend that a few of us have special privileges and insight into the desires of a cosmic tyrant, and let them tell us how to live? Given that anyone claiming such authority is mad and delusional, I say no.

Our disgrace

I just saw @ThatKevinSmith’s Red State. It was the perfect movie to watch on 9/11: full of violence, sanctimonious religion, and terror in the name of anti-terrorism. It’s such an American movie. If you really want to feel the grim despair of living in God’s own America, this is the movie to see — a painful vision of our nightmare.

That’s really how I feel: we have been marching backwards since 9/11, throwing away our civil liberties, lashing out at the world with violence, as if that will solve anything. For contrast, read this description of what Martin Luther King did for the country. He inspired people to stand up for their rights, and got African Americans to unite and demand respect.

At this point, I would like to remind everyone exactly what Martin Luther King did, and it wasn’t that he “marched” or gave a great speech.

My father told me with a sort of cold fury, “Dr. King ended the terror of living in the south.”

Please let this sink in and and take my word and the word of my late father on this. If you are a white person who has always lived in the U.S. and never under a brutal dictatorship, you probably don’t know what my father was talking about.

But this is what the great Dr. Martin Luther King accomplished. Not that he marched, nor that he gave speeches.

He ended the terror of living as a black person, especially in the south.

It was a great stride forward for black people. Yet when you look at the last ten years, what do we see? The opposite. The country rushing to embrace fear. There’s nothing to honor today. Americans should see this as a day of shame, not because we were attacked, but for how we responded afterwards — we left courage behind and became a nation of bullies and cowards.

And that’s all I have to say about 9/11.

Oh, man, Orson Scott Card is such a warped little man

In his benighted quest to make everyone on the planet incapable of reading anything he’s ever written without muttering “what an asshole…” under their breath, Orson Scott Card has taken a great leap upward in arrogance and obsession. He is rewriting Shakespeare. Not only that, he’s rewriting him into a cranky Mormon bigot who hates the gays. This is from a review of Hamlet’s Father; I warn you, it completely gives away the conclusion of Card’s retelling, but that doesn’t matter, because it’s frikkin’ Shakespeare and you ought to just read the original, and it’s frakkin’ Card, who has become such a parody of himself that you shouldn’t waste your time reading him anyway.

Here’s the punch line: Old King Hamlet was an inadequate king because he was gay, an evil person because he was gay, and, ultimately, a demonic and ghostly father of lies who convinces young Hamlet to exact imaginary revenge on innocent people. The old king was actually murdered by Horatio, in revenge for molesting him as a young boy—along with Laertes, and Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern, thereby turning all of them gay. We learn that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are now “as fusty and peculiar as an old married couple. I pity the woman who tries to wed her way into that house.”

He really needs to get himself a rent-boy and get these obsessions out of his head.

Prayer is only part of Rick Perry’s strategy

He’s not just a do-nothing governor who sits around with his hands in his lap begging an invisible man to save Texas. He does stuff, too. Like cut fire department funding by 75 percent. You know, reducing funding to the volunteer fire departments that have to battle the catastrophic wildfires breaking out in the state.

But then, how could he possibly know that if God didn’t bring rain, the plains might dry out and become more flammable? That’s like science, or cause-and-effect, or somethin’.

Not like a worm?

Ann Coulter is back to whining about evolution again, and this week she focuses on fossils. It’s boring predictable stuff: there are no transitional fossils, she says.

We also ought to find a colossal number of transitional organisms in the fossil record – for example, a squirrel on its way to becoming a bat, or a bear becoming a whale. (Those are actual Darwinian claims.)

Darwin postulated that whales could have evolved from bears, but he was wrong…as we now know because we found a lot of transitional fossils in whale evolution. Carl Zimmer has a summary of recent discoveries, and I wrote up a bit about the molecular genetics of whale evolution. Whales have become one of the best examples of macroevolutionary transitions in the fossil record, all in roughly the last 30 years — which gives us a minimal estimate of how out of date Ann Coulter’s sources are.

But then she writes this, which is not only wrong, but self-refuting.

To explain away the explosion of plants and animals during the Cambrian Period more than 500 million years ago, Darwiniacs asserted – without evidence – that there must have been soft-bodied creatures evolving like mad before then, but left no fossil record because of their squishy little microscopic bodies.

Then in 1984, “the dog ate our fossils” excuse collapsed, too. In a discovery the New York Times called “among the most spectacular in this century,” Chinese paleontologists discovered fossils just preceding the Cambrian era.

Despite being soft-bodied microscopic creatures – precisely the sort of animal the evolution cult claimed wouldn’t fossilize and therefore deprived them of crucial evidence – it turned out fossilization was not merely possible in the pre-Cambrian era, but positively ideal.

And yet the only thing paleontologists found there were a few worms. For 3 billion years, nothing but bacteria and worms, and then suddenly nearly all the phyla of animal life appeared within a narrow band of 5 million to 10 million years.

It’s so weird to read that: yes, people have been predicting that the precursors to the Cambrian fauna would have been small and soft-bodied (what else would you expect), and that they would be difficult to fossilize…but not impossible, and further, scientists have been out finding these fossils. Somehow this is a refutation of evolution? What we’re seeing is exactly what evolution predicted!

What we have is a good record of small shelly fossils and trace fossils from the pre-Cambrian — before there were fully armored trilobites, there were arthropod-like creatures with partial armor that decayed into scattered small fragments of shell after death, and before that there were entirely soft-bodied, unarmored creatures that left only trackways and burrows. Even in this period Coulter wants to call abrupt, we find evidence of gradual transitions in animal forms.

And then to claim that there is an absence of transitional forms because all that was found were worms! Um, if you take an animal with an armored exoskeleton or bones, and you catch it before the hard skeleton had evolved, exactly what do you think it would look like? Like a worm.

As evolution predicted. As the evidence shows.

I can’t even guess what Ann Coulter was expecting a pre-Cambrian animal to look like. Not like a worm, apparently…but like what?

(Also on Sb)

Where not to find a date

Would you believe there is an online dating site, run by Randroids? It’s called the Atlasphere, and it’s the most ghastly horrible collection of self-centered narcissists all trying to make themselves attractive by fluffing up their egos even more. Take a look at the excerpts, and cringe. Here’s one example:

I love intelligent, sassy girls, particularly those working in consulting or investment banking (but other fields are great too). Really, nothing is hotter than an accomplished girl in a suit, as long as she is willing to settle down and have my children. I want a girl who will support my ambitions against the naysayers in society.

And that’s not the worst!

Michele Bachmann, professional ghoul

There she goes, claiming God sent Hurricane Irene.

I don’t know how much God has to do to get the attention of the politicians. We’ve had an earthquake; we’ve had a hurricane. He said, ‘Are you going to start listening to me here?’ Listen to the American people because the American people are roaring right now. They know government is on a morbid obesity diet and we’ve got to rein in the spending.

Hey, maybe God’s secret message is that he’s really pissed that Americans are stupid enough to promote Bachmann and Perry as candidates. How would you know?

She’s already straining to do damage control, and her campaign is claiming that it was “just a joke”, that old excuse. Was it funny? Are we to believe that Michele Bachmann now openly mocks the Power of the Lord?

After the event, a reporter asked Bachmann about the comments. She said: “Our hearts and prayers go out to the families of the victims. This isn’t something that we take lightly. My comments were not meant to be ones that were taken lightly. What I was saying in a humorous vein is there are things happening that politicians need to pay attention to. It isn’t everyday we have an earthquake in the United States.”

Well, make up your mind, Michele. Was it not meant to be taken lightly, or was it said in a humorous vein?

And actually, we do have earthquakes every day. There have been 2901 earthquakes in the US so far this year; there were 8493 total in 2010. It looks like, on average, there’s an earthquake above magnitude 4 every day, somewhere in the US.