Your comparisons make me cry

When we’ve got bad news, we get comparisons that show how deluded people are on other subjects. The NRA has been doing a great job promoting less gun control, and one of their tactics has been the myth of woman empowerment by gun…when on average, women are far more anti-gun than men. But do I really need to be reminded that 29% of Americans believe in little green men?

The data on guns isn’t so good for the ladies. A 2003 study by The American Journal of Public Health found there was “no clear evidence” that owning a gun reduced women’s chances of being killed. An analysis this year by Mayors Against Illegal Guns found that “in states that require a background check for every handgun sale, 38 percent fewer women are shot to death by intimate partners.” Six times more women were murdered by intimate partners than by strangers in 2010. A study published in the Journal of Urban Health in 2002 found that women were 4.9 times more likely to be murdered by a gun in states with high gun ownership than in states with low gun ownership. Of the 10 states with the highest rates of female homicide, five are in the South. Southern white men are the most likely to own guns, at 61 percent. Southern white women are the women most likely to own guns, at 25 percent. That’s 5 percent more than the percent of American women who believe aliens exist. 

Aliens: More real than the myth that more guns means women are safer.

Or how about this: we get the good news that public support for gay marriage is rising, but get reminded that belief in creationism has been steady, and right now, only 44% disapprove of gay marriage, while 46% think the earth is 6000 years old.

What is going on? The Supreme Court hearings on the challenges to the Defense of Marriage Act and California’s ban on same-sex marriage suggest barriers to legalisation will fall eventually. Growing public support for same-sex marriage is another factor: the latest poll by the Pew Research Center shows 49 per cent of Americans approve of same-sex marriage, with 44 per cent disapproving.

This number is significant, not just because it shows that the swing in support for same-sex marriage has been swift, but because – as Jon Stewart pointed out on The Daily Show this week – more Americans have an “evolved” view on same-sex marriage than actually believe in evolution. Forty-six per cent of them think the human race was created in a single day within the past 10,000 years, according to a 2012 Gallup poll. It is unclear how many of them will eventually evolve this view.

I get the message. People aren’t rational.

But I also get the promising message from the fact that we see a rise in support for gay marriage that there are tactics that work, and they involve actually touching personal and emotional and human values. The gay marriage campaign has been working because they’ve combined sound, logical arguments — how can you deny rights to one couple and give them to another? — with personal stories of people in love, and people excluded by cold regulations and bigotry.

We ought to try that more.

Can we at least fire this one media lackey?

When the revolution comes, media lackeys will not be lined up against the wall. I have a better idea, inspired by Robert Johnson of Business Insider, who actually wrote an article titled THE OTHER SIDE OF THE GITMO STRIKE: Detainees Are Treated Absurdly Well. He had the gall to write this:

While indefinite detainment without trial may be morally offensive…

Whoa, whoa, WHOA. Robert, I’m going to have to stop you right there. Indefinite detainment without trial IS morally offensive, so why are you writing a defense of it? Don’t you think that clause just brings your whole argument to a screeching halt? The “While…” tells me already that you are about to completely ignore the morality of the issue.

But go ahead, continue.

…the overriding philosophy on base these days is to treat the detainees really well. Compliant detainees enjoy a selection of six balanced meals, 25 cable TV channels, classes, and an array of electronic gadgetry and entertainment. I’m talking about a Nintendo DS for every compliant detainee, plus Playstation 3 access with a library full of video games.

OK, you seem to think that is sufficient to offset the immorality of indefinite detainment. Which is where my idea comes from: after the revolution, you, Robert, will be confined in a small room with a television, some holy books, a healthy but bland diet, and some video games. You’ll be happy, I presume? It’ll be just like a long, very long, vacation at a secluded island resort!

Except, you know, you actually wrote that the detainees are treated absurdly well, and also wrote this about the guards’ custom of taking apart copies of the Koran.

Zak demonstrated why Koran inspections are important, taking a hardcover Koran, flipping it upside down, and showing the wide opening under the spine.

Last time they stopped Koran searches, he explains, several detainees stashed medication in these tunnels of paper and then took the medication all at once in an unsuccessful suicide attempt. Suicide is another effective way of getting media attention, and there remains a rumor among detainees that three simultaneous suicides would force the Pentagon to close Guantanamo — despite three suicides already happening in 2006.

It’s a bit odd, don’t you think, that while on this long vacation with good food and lots of video games, the residents are in such despair that they’re trying to kill themselves.

I’ll warn my wife. Next time I get a few days off and am lounging about eating and playing video games, it’s really a sign that I’m miserable and should be on suicide watch.

The Christian Theocracy isn’t planning to murder me after all!

I am so relieved, and a bit ashamed that I thought so poorly of my Christian brethren. They aren’t going to kill me, they have other plans. They’ll make me a slave instead!

In a recently posted You Tube [which has now been set to private –pzm] sermon, the pastor of Chalcedon Presbyterian Church, Dr. Joe Morecraft says in a Biblical society, the godly must own “the fool who despises God’s wisdom” because it’s the only way to keep those with a “slave mentality” from ruining other people’s families.

Based on Proverbs 11:29, Morecraft makes a case for Biblically justified enslavement of a man who does not “trust in Christ” since slavery is the only way to “keep a fool under wraps.”

The dominionist pastor interprets the Proverb to predict that in a Christian theocracy, an unbeliever will “lose his family, his property, and his freedom,” and “his energies, talents and life will not be used as he himself pleases, but in the service of wise people who work hard to benefit the community.”

“Put him in somebody’s service where they can watch over him and make him do right even though he doesn’t want to do it.”

According to Pastor Morecraft, the consequences of being a “foolish person who is unwilling to live by the Word of God” is to “become a slave of somebody who is godly and who is wise.”

Well, now I can relax. What a load off my shoulders.

And it’s only fair. After all, once I’m appointed Tyrant-President of the United States of America (there’s no way I could even be elected to the lowliest office), I have my own horribly sinister plans for the religious people of this country. First thing, I’d remove the special tax privileges their churches and religious charities have, and then…and then…uh, I guess that’s about it. But that’s pretty damned terrible!

More lies from the Discovery Institute

Oh, christ. Another book is coming from those frauds at the DI, Darwin’s Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design. It’s Stephen Meyer’s unqualified, incompetent take on the Cambrian explosion.

Casey Luskin has already given us three reasons we’re supposed to buy it. 1) It’s going to contain the best arguments for intelligent design creationism EVAR; 2) it’s going to be packed full of reviews of the work of the “ID research community”; and 3) we’re living in a “post-Darwinian world”, where all the evolutionary biologists are already deserting the sinking ship of neo-Darwinism. Those aren’t reasons to buy the book; those are reasons the book is going to be total crap.

And why should you read it anyway? You want to know about the Cambrian, read books by real scientists. They’re out there already. One excellent resource is James Valentine’s On the Origin of Phyla; it is not light reading, but if you want to know about the paleontology and systematics of the invertebrate phyla of the Ediacaran and Cambrian, it really is the book to read.

And then to my surprise, while I was digging up the link to that book, I discovered that Douglas Erwin and James Valentine have a new book out as of January: The Cambrian Explosion: The Construction of Animal Biodiversity, which the reviews say is less technical than the Phyla text, but highly rated as an excellent overview. I can’t say I’ve read it yet, but I instantly ordered it.

I think it might be an interesting summer project to compare Erwin & Valentine side-by-side with Meyer. Well, “interesting” in a Bambi Meets Godzilla sort of amusing sense.

But if you want to know what caused the Cambrian explosion, I can give you the short answer. Not intelligent design; that doesn’t even make sense. What it was was environmental changes, in particular the bioturbation revolution caused by the evolution of worms that released buried nutrients, and the steadily increasing oxygen content of the atmosphere that allowed those nutrients to fuel growth; ecological competition, or a kind of arms race, that gave a distinct selective advantage to novelties that allowed species to occupy new niches; and the evolution of developmental mechanisms that enabled multicellular organisms to generate new morphotypes readily. Read the real books if you want to know more, and ignore the uninformed babble the charlatans of the DI will try to sell you.

By the way, Joe Felsenstein is asking for help: he’d like suggestions for what Stephen Meyer ought to have in his book.

This is a real thing?

I have no idea where this is. I especially have no idea what the people who wasted money on it were thinking. It’s a prayer booth.

prayerbooth

I am speechless at the absurdity of it all. This isn’t about ‘communing with god’ or any such nonsense: it’s about having a prominent public prop with a big sign so that everyone around you knows that you are praying — it’s public piety.

It also has instructions. Apparently the people who might use this are so stupid that they wouldn’t be able to figure out the appropriate posture to take while babbling to Jesus.

prayerboothinstructions

Those instructions are a bit Orwellian.

This device exists to facilitate and control prayer in public space. Improper use may result in a penalty or fine.

It’s there to control prayer? What? How? And they’re going to impose some kind of legal penalty if you don’t use it exactly as they want? How do you improperly use prayer? I’m picturing the prayer police thumping you with a nightstick if you prayed to the Episcopalian god rather than the Catholic god, or possibly battering you into unconsciousness if you dared to use the prayer booth to talk to Allah.

And then there’s the preemptive assumption that they’re going to get criticized for this silliness:

Please avoid the booth if you are sensitive to or feel threatened by actions that are religious in nature.

Nobody is going to feel “threatened” by this ditzy exhibition, guy. A better warning would be to the users: “Please avoid the booth if you are sensitive to passers-by pointing and laughing at you.”

The perils of anthropology…and other scientific disciplines

I’m beginning to get geared up for the summer research season, and I have to count myself as fortunate. I’m one of those bench guys; I’ll be fussing over embryos and computers in an air-conditioned lab, and mostly sitting in front of a microscope. The field researchers will be out hiking, and facing other privations: heat, humidity, man-eating mosquitos, ticks, summer rainstorms, sexual harassment, assault, and rape.

Oh, wait, those last three…not a problem here at UMM, we’ve got a good group of faculty we can trust to respect the students. But elsewhere, in fields like anthropology where groups of men and women might be out in remote areas for long periods of time, Kate Clancy reports that they are big problems.

We heard many reports of women not being allowed to do certain kinds of field work, being driven or warned away from particular field sites, and being denied access to research materials that were freely given to men (and men who were given access were the ones telling us these things). Ultimately, not being able to go to certain field sites, having to change field sites, or not being able to access research materials means women are denied the opportunity to ask certain research questions in our field. This has the potential to limit the CVs of women and given them permanently lesser research trajectories. This can lead to not getting jobs, or getting lower-tier jobs. It also means certain research questions may get primarily asked by one gender, and reducing the diversity of people doing research has been shown to reduce the diversity and quality of the work.

Don’t be discouraged from going into anthropology if that’s the field you love, but just be prepared: women have an extra duty piled on top of all the research work, to slap down privileged offenders…who may be their superiors.

Hey, wait a minute: Clancy is focused on the field work situation, but even in my cozy climate-controlled environment, there is the possibility of harassment — I’ve even heard tales of faculty (at other universities, of course) who were dirty old men who made life hell for their women students. Is anyone doing work similar to Clancy’s in places like medical schools? Maybe we should be sending teams of anthropologists in to study the indigenous cultures of the biomedical establishment. I fear it would be scary stuff, but at least you wouldn’t have to deal with mosquitos.

Thank you, crowepps

Bad news: I’m informed offline by Mattir that fellow hordeling crowepps has passed away, not particularly expectedly.

She wasn’t the most loquacious commenter here, and I didn’t know her at all aside from reading what she wrote here. But I always liked what she had to say.

She was funny:

I am boggled by the lack of logic behind “Make me a sammich.” Seriously, so you don’t want to listen to someone’s opinion, you want to treat them as having no more value than a household appliance, so you send them into the kitchen, where all the *poisons* are, to prepare food? Want a side of Valium overdose with that, or just a garnish of the traditional rat poison?

I didn’t know her well enough to say with certainty that she made the world a better place — those who knew her can weigh in on that — but she definitely made Pharyngula a smarter place. Thanks for that, crowepps.

 

Greta Christina has a new book

It’s called Bending: Dirty Kinky Stories About Pain, Power, Religion, Unicorns, & More. I bought it. I read the first page of the introduction, my gnarled and liver-spotted hands trembling, and saw words that were threatening to my comfortable cis male heterosexual conventionality, and then started getting palpitations. I set it aside. Maybe when I’ve recovered and my heart gets a little stronger, I’ll try the second page.

Unless…maybe one of you can read it and tell me if it’s got stuff suitable for a geezer. Or, you know, I’m not really into unicorns, so maybe you can tell me which page has the hot cephalopod action.

Another possibility is that I could give it to my wife to read. I’m just afraid that if she really likes it, I might not survive the experience.

Or maybe I could ask her to read it aloud to me. That ought to be safe. Like a children’s book, right? Bedtime stories?

Why should anyone have to read your goofy holy book?

This is truly getting ridiculous. The Independent has published a story claiming that atheists face an Islamophobia backlash, and the first thing I have to do is take exception to the premise. A “backlash”? Seriously? Dawkins has been hit with this “backlash” nonsense from the day The God Delusion hit the stands in 2006; he has had a colony of fleas (like this one, for example) leaping on his coattails and announcing that the great backlash has begun from the very beginning. I daresay there was a “backlash” on the day the first hominin looked at the rock his tribe was worshipping and grunted, “it’s just a rock” — of course, the backlash then was more like a backswing with a handaxe, but it was the same sentiment.

When the popular culture has been howling for centuries in protest at any expression of the idea that there is no god, you don’t get to use the word “backlash” any more, OK? You don’t get to pretend that this nonsense is something new. It’s just a “lash”, yet another in the commonplace droning torrent of complaint. And they don’t have a single original idea in that complaint, either.

This is the crux of their disagreement.

The opening broadside began earlier this month with a polemic from Nathan Lean on the Salon.com website. Lean, a Washington DC native and Middle East specialist who has recently written a book about the Islamophobia industry, was prompted to pen his attack following a series of tweets last month by Professor Dawkins attacking Islam in snappy 140 character sound bites.

“Haven’t read Koran so couldn’t quote chapter & verse like I can for Bible. But often say Islam [is the] greatest force for evil today,” the Cambridge evolutionary biologist wrote on 1 March.

For a man who has made a career out of academic rigour the admission that the author of the God Delusion hadn’t studied Islam’s holy book surprised many and led to a flurry of responses from both fans and critics alike. Three weeks later – in an apt illustration of Godwins’ Law (the idea that as an online discussion grows longer the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one) – Dawkins added: “Of course you can have an opinion about Islam without having read Qur’an. You don’t have to read Mein Kampf to have an opinion about Nazism.”

Richard Dawkins hasn’t read the fucking Koran. He hasn’t read every word of every hadith, either, neither Shia nor Sunni. He isn’t an Islamic scholar. He doesn’t know Arabic, so he hasn’t read the text in the original language, either, which purists will insist is the only way to study it…and if you study it, the purists will also insist that you are not allowed to criticize it. Once again, atheists are getting hit with the Courtier’s Reply, and it is rank bullshit.

The holy books of any religion are just collections of rationalizations, inconsistent and incoherent, with only the weakest relationship to the religion as it is practiced. Most of the practitioners of a religion have not dedicated their life to studying the texts, either; they have lives to live. You can get a better idea what a religion is about by studying what the believers actually say and do, and what practices are current in their culture: Christians, Jews, and Muslims all claim to be built on the Abrahamic foundation of the Old Testament, but studying that text isn’t going to allow you to predict what each of those religions are doing. Sunni and Shia both claim to be following the Koran; Quakers and Catholics claim to follow the Bible. Somehow they’ve built completely different faiths from the same starting point. If I am concerned about priestly pedophilia in the Catholic church or female genital mutiliation by some followers of the Koran, it is simply a distraction to tell me to go read their holy books — they won’t have anything to say about the subjects.

I can condemn pedophilia and FGM without knowing a word of Arabic or Aramaic, without spending a few years in a seminary, without receiving detailed interpretations from a sanctified religious authority. To imply that not reading those worthless books is a failure of academic rigor is sleazy and dishonest, because the atheists in question are not making a critique of the text, but of the politics and behavior of individuals and culture.

Even if I hadn’t read any of the Bible, I could still castigate the violence and oppression carried out by so many good Christians, in the name of their lord, against gays or women or Muslims or anyone different or foreign. Similarly, without reading word one of the Koran, I can categorically reject honor killings and terrorism and misogyny.

In addition, if I’m confronted with a strong claim made from a holy book, I can compare the specific argument with reality; I can have the believer explain to me what it means to him or her, and then address that interpretation directly. For example, without reading the whole of the Koran, I could discuss a 58 page exegesis of Muslim embryology by a true believer, and critique what he said, what his translation of the text said, and what he claimed were direct predictions of his interpretations. Are you going to tell me that I really needed to learn Arabic and read the whole of the Koran to do that?

Because that’s exactly what the gullible faith-heads want to tell me to do, too. When I criticized the two sentence summary of all of embryology from the Koran (shouldn’t it be enough to point out the necessary poverty of such a brief explanation?), one blithering believer told me my problem was that I couldn’t read the rich and very expressive language of the Koran…so rich and expressive, apparently, that an entire modern biology text fits into a few lines of poetry.

Knowing both languages; Arabic and English, I clearly understand why Hamza Tzortis needed to use many dictionaries to explain the meaning of this verse in such a script. The Arabic language is rich and very expressive. The translation can never give you a clear picture. From having a first language education in Arabic, I can tell you that the words in the Quran are not as simple as a “drop of fluid” but do need this much explanation that he provided to make the words’ meaning be shown. Having an advanced study in Biology, I can directly relate and fully agree that the words of the Quran are an exact match to embryonic development stages in humans. Furthermore, I can assert that the knowledge from the Quran extends beyond this to all stages of human life and after death and describes in great detail the stages of the first creation of man which was different from the usual process of reproduction, thereby superseding the current level of scientific knowledge.

That’s simply goal-post shifting and dishonesty: I don’t believe for one minute that the author of that excuse had any advanced knowledge of biology.

As for the Mein Kampf argument, I consider it totally appropriate and a perfect example of what I’m talking about. Does anyone really need to read Hitler’s manifesto before they can honestly decide whether the Holocaust was a good thing, or a bad thing? Is it OK if I think right now that starting a global war that led to 60 million casualties is an unforgiveable evil, or are you going to tell me that somewhere in Mein Kampf there might just be a cunning justification that will cause me to change my opinion? Only if I read it in the original German, of course.

Spare me. Yet another unoriginal whine from the tens of thousands we’ve gotten from the faithful in the last decade, not one word of which addresses the source of the conflict between atheist and theist, leaves me cold and unimpressed.

But I’ll tell you what. Show me one scrap of reasonable scientific evidence that this Allah character actually exists, and I promise I’ll read the whole of the Koran. If it’s really convincing I’ll go off and study Arabic. But until then…telling me to waste a big chunk of my life reading another collection of pretentious babbling mythology is not going to be a good enough excuse to stop me from rejecting the stuff you actually say and do and believe in the name of an imaginary ghostly ape in the sky.