A well informed citizenry is the only true repository of the public will

Both Andrew Sullivan and Kevin Drum are wrong, but I think Drum is infuriatingly wrong.

They’re arguing over a statistic, the observation that about 46% of Americans believe the earth is 6000 years old and that a god created human beings complete and perfect as they are ex nihilo. Andrew Sullivan sees this as a consequence of the divisiveness of American politics, that they’re using it as a signifier for red vs. blue.

I’m not sure how many of the 46 percent actually believe the story of 10,000 years ago. Surely some of them know it’s less empirically supported than Bigfoot. My fear is that some of that 46 percent are giving that answer not as an empirical response, but as a cultural signifier. That means that some are more prepared to cling to untruth than concede a thing to libruls or atheists or blue America, or whatever the “other” is at any given point in time. I simply do not know how you construct a civil discourse indispensable to a functioning democracy with this vast a gulf between citizens in their basic understanding of the world.

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Why I am an atheist – Mauricio-José Schwarz

I was born an atheist, just like every other child.

My very large and very Catholic family took it upon itself to change this situation, providing my life with priests, religious references and visits to churches aplenty. But apparently my case was particularly virulent, and the whole concept of the supernatural remained incredible in my eyes.

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I’ve finally figured out how to get more diverse participation in the atheist movement!

It would be good to have more people of color in the movement, so I’m going to put on blackface and write about the woes facing my dark-skinned brothers and sisters.

I shall put on a dress and makeup so I can tell everyone that I understand exactly how women feel.

And for my gay brethren, I’m going to come out to my wife and let her know that I’ve been faking my lust for 30 years.

Oh, wait, that last one is already covered, by a Christian who has written a book about pretending to be gay.

It’s nice that he means well, but it’s a rather tasteless approach. In his promotional video to raise money for the book, he tells us that the motivation for doing this was a friend, a young woman, who came out as gay and was disowned by her family…and that he treated with contempt for her preferences as well. I’d rather hear her story than about the self-afflicted martyrdom of a Christian who put on the label “gay” and then set it aside when it came time to profit. And who also uses the treatment of the gay community to promote Christianity.

No, I’m not going to do any of those things. They don’t promote diversity at all, but caricature it.

Another fundraiser!

So @rhysmorgan and @whatkatie_did are also having a fundraiser (it seems like everyone is!), this time to benefit a rape crisis organization for England and Wales. It’s called the Fuck the Patriarchy Readathon, and they’re promising to read 20 books and blog about them this month. The books are all over the place, from Twilight to Catch-22, so the reviews should be entertaining.

For his participation in this cause, the usual suspects are raging that Rhys Morgan is a “little skeptic twat” and “mangina”, so you should support him just for that. Don’t you love how these guys go out of their way to confirm our perception of them?

Science: it’s also a liberal code word

The other day, I wrote in some bafflement about the North Carolina legislature trying to write sea-level rises out of existence — it was like trying to legislate the value of pi, and I had a hard time believing anyone would be so stupid.

But I should have known. There are no lower bounds to stupid. This plan to bury real-world problems in redefinitions and disguising the language? It’s a thing. Now Virginia is doing it, too.

Virginia’s legislature commissioned a $50,000 study to determine the impacts of climate change on the state’s shores. To greenlight the project, they omitted words like “climate change” and “sea level rise” from the study’s description itself. According to the House of Delegates sponsor of the study, these are “liberal code words,” even though they are noncontroversial in the climate science community.

Instead of using climate change, sea level rise, and global warming, the study uses terms like “coastal resiliency” and “recurrent flooding.” Republican State Delegate Chris Stolle, who steered the legislation, cut “sea level rise” from the draft. Stolle has also said the “jury’s still out” on humans’ impact on global warming.

The sea level is rising. But you can’t say that in a Republican universe.

An interesting educational dilemma

The Hamilton Elementary School has an interesting poster hanging in the halls. It’s a kid’s drawing of Jesus asking people to kill unbelievers:

It’s horrible. My first thought was that it was irresponsible of the school to allow that to be displayed — it’s a terrible message to send to the non-Christian kids in school. But then I read their explanation and my views flipped 180°.

A spokesperson with the Fresno Unified District released a statement, which said: “Students at Hamilton were assigned to create a help wanted poster for soldiers needed to fight in the crusades and write a poem about Joan of arc, the Black Death, or the Magna Carta and create a visual background for it. This was one of several posters displayed.”

Oh. It’s a historical poster intended to illustrate people’s actual attitudes…and yes, that’s a reasonable picture of what the Crusades were all about: killing people who didn’t think as you do, in the name of a deity. It’s good for people to know about reality. It’s also good for people to learn the difference between proscriptivist and descriptivist lessons. The poster is describing a reality, but isn’t (I hope!) endorsing it. If kids were to learn that in history class, it might also help us in biology, where so many people have this bizarre idea that because biologists explain what natural selection has done to every species on the planet, that means we all want to kill and sterilize those that don’t fit some imaginary standard.