From a lovely article in the New York Review of Books about octopods:
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Freethoughtblogs has a brand new addition, YEMMYnisting, who is “Proudly Feminist, Proudly Bisexual and Proudly Atheist.” I think she might just fit in.
Read this article on fracking and you’ll agree with me. The oil companies have reached new despicable lows in their efforts to poison the air and water.
Like any good little privileged American, my first thought was…is this going on in my back yard? And the answer is no, it’s not, there is no fracking going on in Minnesota. However, we are one of the prime suppliers of industrial silica sand used in fracking, and we’ve got lots of mining going on in the southeastern part of the state. So we’re just enablers of fracking.
All that sand is going next door to allow lots of fracking in North Dakota, though. Sorry, neighbor. I do find it ironic that a state known for its regressive/conservative social policies is happily making a big chunk of its territory uninhabitable, though.
Sad, isn’t it, that even when we get rid of religion, we still have to ask this question.
I suppose we also need to change “sacrifices” to “sex toys”.
We live in an unreasonable country, so I don’t expect that the National Day of Reason will get as much attention as the idiocy of the National Day of Prayer. But apparently we’re not supposed to pray today. Big change for all of you, I know.
But here’s a suggestion: usually we just sit quietly and let the faith-heads get on with their ritual nonsense. Today, though, take another step: if you find yourself in a situation where people are wasting your time babbling at an imaginary man in the sky, don’t hold your tongue. Stand up, say “NO”, and turn your back or leave the room. Let them play their game, but don’t let them continue without knowing that you reject superstition.
Unfortunately, that’s easy for me to say — I’ll be at a university, where I’ve never seen a prayer invocation. I think I’ll keep the television news off, too, or I might be waving my middle finger at the screen a lot.
If you don’t have an opportunity to openly express your contempt for prayer, you can at least sign the petition being sent to Obama.
The state religion of Morocco is Islam, so it took real guts to establish a Council of Ex-Muslims in that country Imad Iddine Habib was awesomely courageous to do so.
What followed next was predictable. Under the yoke of Islam, shaking yourself free of superstition is a crime punishable by death. So Morocco’s High Council of Ulemas has issued a fatwa decreeing the death penalty for Moroccans who leave Islam. I wonder who might be subject to that? Imad Iddine Habib, of course.
The state police have come looking for him, but Imad Iddine Habib has gone into hiding. There will be more news to come on this subject, I’m sure…although you know that people will be trying to shush the media on religion-sponsored terrorism, silencing the revelation of the evil committed because it’s all about religion.
How dare you condemn the attempted murder of a man because he does not share your faith? That’s Islamophobia!
This well-written article in The Atlantic remarks on a familiar tactic. It’s about the Femen, the topless jihad, and Amina, and the complaints an annoying number of stodgy critics have made. You know the ones: the people who demand that all arguments be respectful, and insist that there are proper channels for debate, and protests that actually rile the establishment are inappropriate.
With its topless jihad and Femen leader Inna Shevchenko’s subsequent incendiary blog post on the event, Femen was both defending one of its own and upholding a right to freedom of expression (to say nothing of life and liberty) flagrantly violated by Amina’s own family and by an angry, largely Muslim, community from which threats against Amina and Shevchenko continue to emanate. It’s worth pointing out that Femen’s critics, several of whom professed concern for Amina’s well-being, did not speak out in Amina’s defense before the jihad, but only post-factum and in passing, all the while pummeling the group standing up for her with stale, politically correct shibboleths and demands to stay out of what they perceived to be their own business.
We saw this in all the battles over accommodationism: there’s always someone on your side who offended that you have chosen to battle antagonistically or unconventionally against oppression and foolishness. I think their favorite word must be “hush” — don’t upset the status quo, even if it’s the status quo you’re trying to upset. And most importantly, they insist that you have to follow their tactics, and they get to tell everyone how to engage, even if their history is one of largely sitting on their thumbs and getting chummy with the enemy.
Guess what is often at the root of that reluctance to actually confront? Yeah, it’s the same old boogeyman everytime, conservative traditionalism in the guise of religion.
There is a problem, however. The media has long fostered the view that religion should be de facto exempt from the logical scrutiny applied to other subjects. I am not disputing the right to practice the religion of one’s choice, but rather the prevailing cultural rectitude that puts faith beyond the pale of commonsense review, and (in Amina’s case), characterizes as “Islamophobic” criticism of the criminal mistreatment of a young woman for daring to buck her society’s norms, or of Femen for attacking the forced wearing of the hijab.
We’re seeing a lot of that lately, but it’s been going on for a long, long time. Point out that transubstantiation is ridiculous, and that Catholics don’t get to tell you to honor a cracker, and Bill Donohue raves that you’re an anti-Catholic bigot; stand aghast at ultra-orthodox Jews spitting on little girls for “immodesty” and you’re an anti-semite; critize the deeply rooted misogyny in Islam, a misogyny that harms men and women in the faith, and you’re declared an Islamophobe.
Just because it’s cloaked in the self-declared mystery of religion doesn’t mean it’s exampt from scrutiny and rejection.
Literally. A number of intelligent people have been trying to get the Louisiana Science Education Act repealed, a law that opens the door to teaching creationism in the public schools. The efforts have been stymied, though, and the Louisiana Creation Science Miseducation Act is still in effect.
One of the people who acted to kill the efforts offered an, ahem, interesting rationale.
Sen. Elbert Guillory, D-Opelousas, said he had reservations with repealing the act after a spiritual healer correctly diagnosed a specific medical ailment he had. He said he thought repealing the act could "lock the door on being able to view ideas from many places, concepts from many cultures."
"Yet if I closed my mind when I saw this man — in the dust, throwing some bones on the ground, semi-clothed — if I had closed him off and just said, ‘That’s not science. I’m not going to see this doctor,’ I would have shut off a very good experience for myself," Guillory said.
“in the dust, throwing some bones on the ground, semi-clothed”…that’s how I’m going to picture Louisiana legislators from now on.
I do wonder about one thing in Mr Guillory’s story, though. How does he know his witch doctor “correctly diagnosed” his ailment? Did he, perhaps, see a real doctor?
I hate the way chemistry has been infantilized to the point where you can’t even buy a decent home chemistry kit for kids anymore, but this story takes it a step further. A teenager in Florida did a simple experiment that made a small plastic bottle go boom and spew out some smoke (and no one was hurt, although apparently the student was surprised), and the school over-reacted: they expelled her.
It was a simple reaction: aluminum + sodium hydroxide releases hydrogen gas and the pressure ruptures the bottle. It was also a poor decision to do it unsupervised in a school yard, but good grief…kicking her out of school means that interest is now quelled. Channel that perfectly reasonable curiosity into constructive academic pursuits! This school seems to be more concerned with shutting down exploration and keeping everyone unchallenged and safe than in engaging in that dangerous business of education.
People are always sending me links — sometimes it’s to a cogent rebuttal of lunacy, sometimes it’s something advocating lunacy, and sometimes…it takes me a while to tell. For instance, here’s this site called “The Truth of Genesis”. I read this and thought for a moment that it was a site debunking creationism.
The biggest laugh comes from the “young Earth” teachers, who try to convince others that the Earth is only 6 000 to 10,000 years old. This is in direct conflict with scientific reality, and the true reading of Genesis. It’s embarrassing to see them try to add up the years from Adam (who they think only lived 930 years), on down to Jesus, who was born in 7 BC. They deny the existence of humanity before Adam and Eve, which were formed from the dust of the Earth. So where do they put Cro-Magnon and the Neanderthals? They claim that there was “no death before Adam”, but that is not found in scripture.
Those fools at Answers in Genesis who think the earth is only 6,000 years old! How ridicuolus! All those inconsistencies and their absurd methodology of toting up the ages of the patriarchs…but then I read on.
Adam was formed in about 7200 BC. The modern animals, along with the birds, were made in about 7100 BC, and Eve came along in about 7000 BC. I’m guessing that the animals lived in and out of the Garden, and Adam probably took Eve out on sight-seeing trips to lands surrounding the Garden. They did this for 2,733 years., until Eve ate of the evil tree in 4267 BC. It is then that the years of Adam’s age begins to be counted, because that is when he “began to die”. So from 7200 BC, till 3337 BC, when Adam died, Adam had lived for 3,863 years.
The reason the sequence of events in Genesis chapter one, do not agree with those in Genesis chapter two, is because Moses was writing about two different time periods. So actually, Genesis is declaring the existence of pre-historic man, which lived more than 60 million years before God made Adam and Eve. The world of science won’t admit to mankind being on Earth any earlier than 10 million years ago., which shows how misinformed they are. Or is it that they are in denial?
I don’t know about you, but I’m always impressed with the specificity of their dates, all derived from the land of making-crap-up.
It’s good to know we’ve now found the one correct creationist, rather than all those other wrong creationists. Also a brave creationist, because he’s going to reveal the truth to us at last.
Now, let us talk about the world of science. They are insane, because they would rather lie to the public, than to admit that there is a Creator. Yes, they lie, and they know it, because they have been withholding evidence from the public in order to not have to explain certain ‘phenomena”.
What is this evidence? You will be dazzled by it, but I’m afraid that as a mere biologist I am not qualified to even contemplate the author’s vision. This one is for the physicists out there. Have at it:
Science refuses to come clean about comets, especially Shoemaker-Levy 9. They know good and well that comet was never “captured” by Jupiter. Captures of comets and satellites never occur, because their paths (orbits) obey the command of God. That is why the moon Metis, of Jupiter, does not crash into the planet, even though it is only 79,800 miles from Jupiter. Science calls it a “gravitational lock”. There is no such thing.
Also, science tells the public that the nine planets of our solar system revolve around our Sun, because of the Sun’s “gravitational pull” and centrifugal force on the planets (the same excuse for why our Moon doesn’t “fall”). But that too is not the truth. If they came clean, their theory of stellar evolution, namely the origin of our solar system, would become suspect. Our planets are not really just orbiting the Sun. The Sun is actually following the planets, as they spiral around the Sun, as they all orbit the center point of our galaxy, the Milky Way, as the galaxy spirals around the center point of our “local group” of about ten galaxies. All of the stars (suns) that you see in our galaxy are moving with the rotation of our galaxy.
So when Halley’s Comet orbits around the Sun, how does the comet know where our Sun will be 75 years later, since the comet leaves the solar system in the opposite direction of the Sun’s orbital path (around the galaxy)? Where does it go? What causes it to come back? Certainly not gravity. How did comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 know where Jupiter would be two years later, when Jupiter had moved over 500 million miles since the comet’s previous orbit of the planet? Its apojove was 32,313,600 miles, so again, gravity was not a factor. For more than 4 billion years, it obeyed the command of God, until its (Divinely) staged crash into Jupiter.
Well all righty then, I guess that’s all settled now.
