Muslim creationists, same as the old creationists

There were Muslims lurking about here at the Dublin conference, and I spent a few minutes talking to them and grabbing some of their literature. I can tell you this: don’t bother. They were boring and utterly unoriginal — everything they said was the same old crap, patently cribbed from the Christian creationists, with the new stuff (what little there was) being incoherent and inane.

Here’s an example. I picked up a pamphlet titled “The Man in the Red Underpants”, and the only novelty in it was the title annd the weird metaphor that was briefly mentioned and then dropped. The titular man is part of a story: you are awakened at 2am by a knock at the door, and when you get there, it’s a man wearing nothing but red underpants who says he’s there to read your gas meter. You’d send him away, right, because “you’d use reason, logic, and common sense to make sense of the man in the re underpants, just as we do for most things that happen in our lives.”

Now that the booklet has convinced you that you are obviously a reasonable human being who values evidence and reason, it asks you to use those virtues to determine that Islam is the one true religion and that God, not evolution, created life on earth.

Wait, you might have been thinking, the man in the red underpants isn’t a metaphor for crazy religious people with ridiculous claims? Nope. It’s apparently a metaphor for science. And the rest of the book is a chattily-written, sloppy rehash of tired old arguments for creationism.

Tell me if you’ve heard this one before. “What if I told you that I was walking along in the desert of Arabia (where there is lots of oil and sand) and picked up a mobile phone which I found just lying there…” yeah, seriously: watches and heaths are so 19th century, let’s update it to cell phones and deserts.

There’s more. They trot out fine-tuning, the Big Bang, the first cause argument, la de da, the same old stuff we’ve heard a thousand times from Christian ignoramuses. It’s nice to know we don’t face any real challenge here, but dismaying that we’re going to be stuck hammering away at the same stupid arguments for the next 20 years. These people are impenetrably dense.

Then there is a longish section that “proves” Islam is the one true religion, because by defining god as the being with the properties asserted by the Quran, they can show that the Quran precisely predicts and describes God. They also explain that — again, stop me if you’ve heard this before — we have a choice whether Mohammed was a liar, deluded, or the one true prophet of Allah, and since the first two are obviously false, you must agree that he really was the Messenger of God.

One mildly interesting bit: it freely admits that the Quran says men can beat their wives, that women’s testimony is worth half of men’s, that men can marry multiple wives, and that there are apparently barbaric laws with “hand chopping for thieves, and death for apostates and adulterers…and homosexuals”, but that you can’t use that to argue against its divine origin. “Does the fact that the Quran teaches certain things the customs and norms that we are used to, mean that it is not from the Creator?”

That’s quite right, it doesn’t. The author suggests that “perhaps the Creator doesn’t like modernity or any other man-made ideology.” That’s also quite true.

So what they’re arguing is that their One True Faith involves worshipping a medieval tyrant who doesn’t like women and does love mutilation and murder. At this point, I don’t even care whether their god is true or not; I’m not going to worship their barbarian despot.

I’m impressed, though, that Islam seems to be yet another religion where the more I learn about it, the more I despise it.

First evening in Dublin

The first panel (DPR Jones, Lone Frank, Richard Dawkins) at the Wotld Atheist Convention has got us off to a roaring good start. Lots of interesting discussion and disagreement within the panel and the audience, good questions, not too many audience manifestos.

There is a delegation of Muslims here, one of whom stood up to ask a question that instantly marked him as a moron: he asserted the common inanity that Dawkins believes in a universe of nothing but chance. There were boos, Dawkins ripped him a new one, but of course he was undeterred. Now the Muslims are hitting the twitter hashtag #wac11 hard.

The basic conflict raised was by DPR Jones, who expressed a rather pessimistic view that religiosity was an inevitable consequence of human psychology, and we’re not going to escape it. I disagree. I didn’t raise my hand and comment, though, because the Q&A should be for Qs — those things that end in question marks — and I have my own soapbox. 

Psychology is not an issue of inevitability. We grow and change all the time, and to suggest that one state is determined because we can developmental evidence for it is misleading. An example: there is a game that children play that palls for us adults. It’s called peek-a-boo. That one year olds can be naturally thrilled by hiding and reappearing  says nothing about adult behavior. Unfortunately, we live in cultures that have enshrined peek-a-boo as an act of reverence, that couples weekly peek-a-boo sessions with sociability, and tells everyone they’ll be horribly punished if they aren’t good at peek-a-boo. Don’t tell me it’s an inevitable aspect of human nature, because my response will be to tell you to just grow the fuck up. Some of us already have.

What Rethuglicans think of the environment

They have an official wish list. it’s mostly “drill, baby, drill” and other heedless, short-term indulgences and catastrophes, but it also openly advocates ignoring science.

In California’s dry central valley, ensure that no federal scientific report … requiring water for endangered fish be allowed to interfere with farmers’ rights to their historical maximum allocations.

That bodes well. Bugger evidence, let’s do whatever maximizes profit now!

Fishkiller

I write in my sleep. You see, the way it works is that if I have something on my mind when I go to bed, my brain will churn over it all night long, and because of the way my head works, it will spontaneously generate a narrative. I do that in all of my dreams — I float aloof from the events, mentally transcribing what’s going on. My consciousness is a kind of disembodied reporter, I guess.

This quirk can work out well. Lots of my longer posts are composed while I’m sleeping — I wake up in the morning and the structure of the story is all laid out in my head, with a jumble of words stacked up waiting to be written down. It’s not a complete word-by-word write up, but major themes and key chunks of text are all done, and writing is more like splicing in a few transitions and tidying up some rough edges than actually, you know, writing, whatever that is.

 Sometimes this has weird results. Like last night. I had finished organizing my talks for this trip I’m on, I’d packed up my gear and had my suitcase by the door, and I went to bed with nothing in particular on my mind, relaxed and unconcerned about the coming week. This is a dangerous condition for me. It means strange, random stuff will waft unbidden through my dreams, and when I wake up I’ll have something really freaky queued up in my consciousness, and my brain will be all “dude, time to get those fingers wiggling and frog vent the blast core to clear this crazy stuff out of the cortex,” and the sober, responsible part of my awareness will be all “no way, meat lump, they’ll lock me up if any of that escapes my cranium,” and then I’m cranky and blocked up all morning.

So, anyway, this peculiar dream/memory/vignette swam into the purview of my floating narrator last night, got annotated and slotted into the blogging module of my brain, and was sitting there waiting for digital instantiation this morning, so I typed it anyway while I was sitting on my boring shuttle ride, just to clear it. It’s not as bizarre as some of my undirected dreams (no way are my sex dreams ever being manifested; they’re choreographed by some twisted Rabelaisian alien), and travel is disrupting my usual schedule, so I’m dumping it online as filler anyway. Don’t judge me! Just think, it could be so much worse.

This one is nothing but an old recollection of cleaning fish. Fair warning, though: it’s channeled straight from my id, and what is an evocative memory for me might be a shrieking nightmare for you. And don’t expect much — it’s just a dream.

[Read more…]

Episode CCX: Rested and recovered!

I’ve heard the “waily waily o waily” cries from the mob after the Endless Thread took a brief vacation. Well, too bad, TET had a wonderful time napping on the barren coral sands of Pukasavilivili, but now it’s back and is slogging in to work.

Don’t listen carefully to the lyrics, or you may learn that TET has not completely shed its cynicism. It would need to spend much more time in the islands to do that, and would also need to meet a lovely Polynesian girl and find redemption for humanity in love and kindness and hope. But no, you had to drag it back.

(Current totals: 12,473 entries with 1,389,844 comments.)