I hope these people aren’t your friends

Japan has a tragic and devastating earthquake. American responses follow a range of attitudes. One that is normal and appropriate is sympathy and outreach by donations to organizations like the Red Cross; if you’re in that group, good for you, congratulations on being a human being.

Another response that is far too typical is for people to drop to their knees and start praying to their fairy-tale magic man in the sky, being about as ineffectual as is possible while still feeling smug about it. That’s human too, it’s just dumb. You don’t get congratulations for being a stupid human being, but at least you don’t make me want to disown the human race.

And then there’s a third reaction. I was sent a collage of messages posted on Facebook in the last day or so, and these make me ashamed to share a culture with these wretched people.

I may be about to ruin your morning. Don’t click on this compilation of facebook entries unless you’re one of those cynical people who already has low expectation of the worst of Americans.

And…the story from Japan has just gotten worse. There was an explosion at a nuclear power plant last night.

How do we know when the world will end?

Harold Camping has been predicting the end of the world for quite some time. He’s always been wrong, but now he is insisting absotively posilutely that the earth really will end on 21 May of this year, and he’s got teams of brainwashed, deluded followers roaming the country claiming the end is nigh.

I’ve always wondered how he comes up with his specific dates, and now here’s a short article that lays the math out for us.

According to them, Noah’s great flood occurred in the year 4990 B.C., ‘exactly’ 7000 years ago. Taking a passage from 2 Peter 3:8, in which it is said a day for God is like a thousand human years, the church reasoned that seven ‘days’ equals 7000 human years from the time of the flood, making 2011 the year of the apocalypse.

In its second ‘proof’ the exact date is revealed by working forward from the exact date of the crucifixion – April 1, 33 AD. According to their reasoning, there are exactly 722,500 days from April 1, 33 A.D. until May 21, 2011 – the alleged day of judgement. This number can be represented as follows: 5 x 10 x 17 x 5 x 10 x 17 = 722,500.

The church then argues that numbers in the bible have special meanings, with the number 5 signifying atonement or redemption, the number 10 signifying ‘completeness’ and the number 17 equalling heaven.

That is quite possibly the dumbest reason I have ever heard to throw away all of your belongings and go on the road screaming about the end of the world. I think humanity is in on some great conspiracy to forever disappoint my opinion of it.

They have funny standards of feminine beauty in Maine

The Rethuglican governor of Maine, Paul LePage, has been dismissing the health risks from Bisphenol A, an additive to plastics which is known to be an estrogen mimic. His remarks take “Not even wrong” to whole new levels of crazy:

The only thing that I’ve heard is if you take a plastic bottle and put it in the microwave and you heat it up, it gives off a chemical similar to estrogen. So the worst case is some women may have little beards.

Hey, I’ve heard that high densities of homeopaths and other quacks in your state gives off fumes that cause severe mental retardation in civil servants. Could it be?

Ladies of Pharyngula, who knew that if only you increased your estrogen levels a bit more, you too could sprout a lovely beard like me? I’m sure there are better ways to maximize your beauty than stuffing milk jugs in your microwave, though. I don’t recommend ever taking health advice from a Republican.

Ludicrous religious behavior compounded by altitude

Here’s some more sophisticated theology for you. “Prayer Warriors” in Colorado Springs are hopping into helicopters to fly over the city and deliver prayers from on high. Why? I don’t know. Maybe it’s the same urge I had when hiking in the mountains in the Rockies and Cascades, and every time I stood at the edge of a high cliff, I felt a temptation to unzip and sprinkle a little shower on the objects below me. I resisted, but gullible Christians apparently lack self control.

Why do physicists think they are masters of all sciences?

If you asked me about cosmology, I’d defer to physicists — I’ve read Stenger & Hawking & Krauss & Carroll, and I might be willing to say a few generalities about what I’ve learned about the process, but I’d always say you should look to the original sources for more information.

There seem to be a lot of physicists, however, who believe they know everything there is to know about biology (it’s a minor subdivision of physics, don’t you know), and will blithely say the most awesomely stupid things about it. Here, for instance, is Michio Kaku simply babbling in reply to a question about evolution, and getting everything wrong. It’s painful to watch. This guy isn’t really an idiot, is he?

Man, he doesn’t have a clue and is just making it up as he goes along.

Fundamental error: he confuses evolution with natural selection, and thinks that if we aren’t being hunted down by sabre-toothed cats, evolution has stopped. This is wrong. We currently have reduced mortality compared to our ancestors, which suggests that we are less strongly selected in specific ways, but we are still experiencing selection — some of us have been selected for lactose tolerance in the last 10-15,000 years, for instance, and sexual selection is ongoing, and in case you hadn’t noticed, there are still diseases around that kill people.

But most importantly, reducing mortality and selection allows variants to survive, increasing the diversity of forms present in the population. You could even argue that reducing selection increases the rate of evolution. Selection is a conservative force that retains only a subset of the population for propagation into the next generation, you know.

And the rest: “gross” evolution? What the hell is that? Creationists already mangle the distinction between micro- and macro-evolution, now all I need is some half-assed third category getting peddled by the ignorant. And where does he get this idea that Australia is the product of accelerated evolution? That makes no sense at all; isolation meant the populations there evolved relatively independently of forms elsewhere, not that something goosed their mutation rates.

Oh, look: somebody in the comments asks Kaku about why we only use 20% of our brains. Let’s hope the next time he answers a reader question, he’ll tell us at length what we can do with the sleeping 80% of our brains. (I use mine for fulminating at morons, how about you?)

Actually, I’d rather he tried to answer the question in the title of this post.

Pray4PZ!

Some gomer has set up a website about prayer with a subsection dedicated to an experiment: they’re going to pray for PZ Myers. They’re rather vague about what they’re praying for, which I guess is tactically useful, since if I stay healthy or drop dead they can then claim success either way. I’m also going to confound their experiment since I’m going to tell everyone to not Pray4PZ, and since their site traffic is so minuscule, I’m going to overwhelm their results.

They also have a post titled “Can PZ Myers be reasoned with?”, which is amusing — I guess the prayer effort wasn’t doing much, so they had to resort to reason, and they even do that ineffectively.

They’ve also got an online poll, and I’m embarrassed to point it out. The subject is me again, it was set up 11 months ago, and it has received ONE vote so far. That’s just sad.

poll: Is PZ Myers the AntiChrist?

No. Obama is. : (0 votes)
No. Pat Robertson is. : (0 votes)
No. Someone else is. : (0 votes)
No. He doesn’t claim to be God. : (1 votes)
100 %
YES! YES! YES! : (0 votes)
I don’t know. : (0 votes)
Other answer: : (0 votes)

There’s a lesson here. I guess I’m not Kim Kardashian, and just dropping my name won’t make you popular and draw in lots of meaningless interest.

Now if one of the Kardashians was on that poll…

I get email

Lately I’ve been receiving a flood of messages from the anti-choice zealots. They’ve got one thing in common: they all contain lots of images of aborted fetuses, a common tactic used by these creatures to intimidate with horrible images. I’m not impressed. Here’s a representative example, with the url to yet another horror show removed.

Please read

Abortion is more than a “procedure” and it is rare that a pregnancy causes harm or death to a woman.

Maybe to better understand the murder that abortion truly is, you should study the photos in the link below. It is easy to desensitize yourself and your readers and say it’s just a procedure, and the fetus is just a “bunch of cells,” but again, I ask that you study the photos in the link below, and I hope you are sickened with the real truth- Abortion IS Murder.

  URL deleted  

Abortion is more about greed and selfishness. There are many many many families that would give anything to do a domestic adoption and offer prenatal care to a woman that did not want to keep/raise her baby.

No one says it better than Mother Teresa.

“It is a poverty to decide that a child must die so that you live as you wish”

I pray that you will take the time to more fully understand what abortion is, and why the option to kill our nation’s babies should not be an option at all.

Sincerely,
Sarah Dillon

Sarah Dillon is an ignorant hysteric, and she’s awesomely stupid. She couldn’t have written a letter better guaranteed to dissuade me from accepting her position.

First, never quote Mother Teresa at me — she was an evil hag who worshipped poverty, who did not help people except to encourage them to suffer more for her faith, while she lived in comfort and traveled far and wide to receive the accolades of the gullible. I would never find the words of that wicked woman persuasive.

Secondly, the standard bullying tactics of waving bloody fetuses might cow the squeamish, but I’m a biologist. I’ve guillotined rats. I’ve held eyeballs in my hand and peeled them apart with a pair of scissors. I’ve used a wet-vac to clean up a lake of half-clotted blood from an exsanguinated dog. I’ve opened bodies and watched the intestines do their slow writhing dance, I’ve been elbow deep in blood, I’ve split open cats and stabbed them in the heart with a perfusion needle. I’ve extracted the brains of mice…with a pair of pliers. I’ve scooped brains out of buckets, I’ve counted dendrites in slices cut from the brains of dead babies.

You want to make me back down by trying to inspire revulsion with dead baby pictures? I look at them unflinchingly and see meat. And meat does not frighten me.

The vilest thing in the picture is the moron waving the sign and thinking they’re making an argument.

“the outworking of the corrosive nihilistic amorality that is inherent to evolutionary materialism”

The IDiots at Uncommon Descent are horrified and appalled by my ideas about the status of fetuses and babies … so horrified, in fact, that some of them want to make me the poster child for the fall of Western Civilization into a godless, nihilistic chaos in which babies are casually destroyed, and there are of course, a few comparisons to Hitler. But then, they are IDiots, after all.

I was amused by this remark from one of the deathcultists:

Sad to say, what we just saw from PZM, is the outworking of the corrosive nihilistic amorality that is inherent to evolutionary materialism. Hopefully, sufficient of us still have enough moral sensitivity to see the absurdity and the danger if this agenda is allowed to triumph in our civilisation.

Anyway, they found this list of the 25 most influential atheists, and fired off a questionnaire to all of them, looking to see if all atheists are as evil as I am, or whether I’m just the most evil of them all.

(a) Do you believe that a newborn baby is fully human? Yes/No

(b) Do you believe that a newborn baby is a person? Yes/No

(c) Do you believe that a newborn baby has a right to life? Yes/No

(d) Do you believe that every human person has a duty towards newborn babies, to refrain from killing them? Yes/No

(e) Do you believe that killing a newborn baby is just as wrong as killing an adult? Yes/No

As you can see, they’re blinded by an assumption that you can reduce a continuum of potential and actuality to black & white answers, which is the whole problem I’ve complained about before, and what they’ve written is actually a confirmation of my complaint about pro-lifers: they don’t think, and they don’t comprehend. They’ve gotten a few replies from those influential atheists, and most have fallen into the trap. I have to give James Randi credit for making the best answer:

I will not respond to such a heavily biased set of questions, and I could not do so without providing extensive explanations for my answers. The “quiz” is short, but the answers would be far too involved and lengthy.

I will simply repeat what I’ve said before, and not bother with their stupid poll. We all understand “being human” to mean something more than being a eukaryote with a certain assortment of genes: there are “fully human” cells that I will unconcernedly dump into the toilet and flush away every morning, and there are fully developed individuals in my life who I will revere and honor, and everything in between. The dehumanizing aspect of the so-called pro-life position is the flattening of the complexity of humanity and personhood, and its reduction to nothing more than possession of a specific set of chromosomes. To regard a freshly fertilized zygote as the full legal, ethical, and social equivalent of a young woman diminishes the woman; it does not elevate the zygote, which is still just a single cell. It is that fundamentalist Christian view, shallow and ignorant as it is, that is ultimately the corrosive agent in our culture, since it demands unthinking obedience to a rigid dogma rather than an honest evaluation of reality, and it harms the conscious agents who actually create and maintain our culture.

My position is one that demands we respect an organism for what it is, not what it isn’t. It recognizes that an epithelial cell shed from the lining of my colon is less valuable than a gamete is less valuable than a zygote is less valuable than a fetus is less valuable than a newborn. It does not imply that one must still adhere to the black & and white thinking of the IDiots and draw a line, and say that on one side of the line, everything is garbage that can be destroyed without concern, and on the other side, everything is sacred and must be preserved at all costs.

A seed is not a tree. That doesn’t imply that I’m on a crusade to destroy seeds.

NIMBY

Not in my backyard! I wouldn’t want a hog farm to be built upwind of me, because of the stench. I wouldn’t want an airport built next door, because of the noise. I don’t want a church in my neighborhood, because of the traffic in stupidity (but too bad, I’m stuck with several of them). There are lots of reasons some kinds of properties are incompatible with residential living, but here’s a new one. Tenants in a pricey Vancouver highrise are protesting the construction of a hospice nearby. I’d love to have a hospice go up next door; they tend to be quiet, tasteful, well-maintained, and good contributors to the community. But these residents are objecting because of the unpleasant effluvia the hospice would produce.

Wait, what? What could a hospice produce to poison a neighborhood?

“‘Death is the Yin and ‘Live’ is the Yang,” it [a letter to the hospital] read. “If the Yin and Yang are near to each other, ‘Death’ will bring bad luck, meaning sickness and even death . . . The ghosts of the dead will invade and harass the living.”

That’s right. Upscale residents of a condominium complex with units worth about a million dollars are afraid of ghosts. Dying people must be tucked away somewhere remote where they can haunt the place of their death without their restless spirits stinkin’ up the good neighborhoods.

I’m hoping that these complaining, over-privileged superstitious nitwits remember this when they are old and dying — as they most likely will be someday — and courteously excuse themselves to go gasp out their last breaths in some place where civilized people won’t be troubled.

I recommend the hog farm. It might expedite their departure from this planet if those final breaths are taken somewhere where the soft breezes waft over a fecal lake before arriving at the rickety bed in the drafty shack in which they lay dying. Their ghosts probably won’t want to hang around long afterwards, either.

That answers nothing

Here’s an interesting exercise for you: summarize the Bible in one sentence. A bunch of theologians and pastors took a stab at it, and failed to escape their preconceptions and say anything that made any sense.

The statements all vary in their length and their floweriness, but I picked this one example because it’s fairly clear and representative. This is a one-sentence summary of the Bible by a Christian pastor:

A holy God sends his righteous Son to die for unrighteous sinners so we can be holy and live happily with God forever.

That is an empty statement, one that explains nothing and simply sits there looking absurd. I don’t understand how anyone can commit themselves to a life spent promoting that kind of nonsense; these people really should try taking their summaries and looking at them carefully to try and see the peculiarity of their claims.

I’m not cherry-picking, either. Here are a couple more examples just so you can see the general thrust of the arguments.

God was so covenantally committed to the world that he gave his one and only Son that whoever believes in him may have eternal life!

God is redeeming his creation by bringing it under the lordship of Jesus Christ.

The message of the Bible is the transforming grace of God displayed preeminently in Jesus Christ.

The good news is that they all mostly agree with one another. The Bible is about a god who is trying to get people into his heaven by asking them to believe a story about his son being killed and rising from the dead.

The bad news is that the story makes no sense. I’ll give them the existence of their god as a premise, just as I’d grant Herman Melville the existence of Ahab as the start of his story. But what follows doesn’t work. This god has a son — there’s a whole story there that is glossed over. It rather anchors the deity into the prosaic, doesn’t it? He’s a discrete being with an anthropomorphic capacity for procreation. OK, let’s just give them that as a premise, too, although my experience with theologians is that they’ll sit there endlessly arguing with you over that detail.

But then it gets sillier. He sends this son to us to die. He dies? So he’s not an immortal god? Oh, wait, he doesn’t really die, he bounces back a day and a half later, and again, Christian theologians will weeble at you incessantly about how Jesus really is their god, their one true god, who is part of a trinity.

And then that bit about his death “redeeming” us? No way. That makes no sense. If I commit a crime, having someone else suffer 2000 years ago for some other crime that is completely unrelated to what I did does not have any logical connection at all to absolving me of guilt. It’s simply crazy talk, theological noise.

I have my own one-sentence summary of the Christian bible. It actually fits well with human behavior, unlike the prattling nonsense of theologians.

Here is a long tome containing fractured history and arbitrary and patently ridiculous rules that, if you say you believe them, will represent a costly signal to indicate that you are a committed member of our tribe.

Or if that’s too long for you, “Be stupid and belong.” Theology then fills the same role as frat-house hazing or blood-brother rituals, and all the contributors to that list of summaries can be proud brothers together in blissful inanity. It’s clubhouse psychology.

I can even sympathize a bit with that purpose. Lots of organizations have similar trials to secure their membership. Even science does this: we’ve all been through that long gauntlet of calculus and chemistry and basic physics. The difference is that scientists are expected to master something difficult and useful, not bullshit.