(via Ark in Space.)
(Also on Sb)
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
It’s another day of flying about for me (and tomorrow, there’s even more flying across the Atlantic), so here’s something to chew over: My Telekinesis, a site dedicated to explaining how to do all kinds of magical things with the power of your brain. It even has instructions! I was all keen on trying to levitate while I wait for the next leg of my flight, but the first step I was supposed to take was to “open my third eye”. I’ve only got two. I don’t think it was fair of the author to lead us cripples on like that.
I also noticed that the author had to explain that his technique works best when you’re asleep. Nice — I should contribute an article explaining my amazing mental power, called “dreaming”.
Being the kind of guy I am, I jumped straight to the article about evil powers. It wasn’t very helpful.
Dark Bomb
First take all of your energy and convert it into darkness, if you dont have energy then you should draw mana from the darkness. Then lift your hands over your head and pull all the darkness energy into your hands. You should do this until it is feeling very heavy. Then make it unstable by making it to where it will explode on contact. To do this simply imagine it like a bomb. Then throw it hard against a target or down on the ground. It will hurt you and everything else in its way.
It’s got 350 comments, and they aren’t all “Bwahahahahaha!” There are people enthusing over using this power against bunny rabbits and people — somehow, the idea of some nerd concentrating really hard and waving his hands at me (or a bunny) doesn’t scare me very much.
(via rationalbrain.)
I am an atheist because, as my brother once said, ‘If it don’t gel, it ain’t jello’. Religion and supersition in general just does not gel. I see no reason to believe in gods or the supernatural. It took me some time and and a good deal of exploration to come to that conclusion, but in the end there is simply no evidence.
No correlation with experience. There are far too many holes in the theory, if you will. Its a simple as that.
KillJoy
Hey! It’s Everybody Draw Mohammed Day! I’ve been been engaged in this meeting all day, so I haven’t had time to do anything — although, I think I should get a pass since I spent an hour listening to Maryam Namazie giving a ferociously anti-Islamist talk, which I’m sure was far more offensive to the fanatics than any doodle I could possibly scribble up.
But OK, I’ll just steal something someone else drew: here’s a picture of Mohammed by Rashid al-Din, a 14th century Persian. That should do the job.
Or you could just read Jesus and Mo for a while.
Whew. Good meeting. You should have been here — it ended with a major bang with Seth Andrews blowing us away with some gorgeous video (Sagan!), Maryam Namazie wringing us out with her passionate opposition to the injustice of Islam, and Lawrence Krauss telling us how exciting it was to be insignificant residents of a universe that arose from nothing and is hurtling towards nothing. Now I’m exhausted, but I’m staying here in Kamloops for one more night, with beer to dispose of (I’m like Jesus, only instead of loaves and fishes, beer magically manifests itself in my hands every time I turn around. Which makes me greater than Jesus.)
I think we’ll be having an evening of the remnants of the Imagine No Religion 2 crew and speakers and attendees chattering happily over alcohol. Look me up if you’re still around.
He had to be named Bubba. He just had to fill every possible stereotype of the Southern good ol’ boy, the shallow, narrow-minded redneck who treats his women like he treats his dogs. Only he’s a state representative, elected to serve in the Mississippi congress — and Bubba Carpenter is proud to have stripped medical services from the women of his state.
We have literally stopped abortion in the state of Mississippi. Three blocks from the Capitol sits the only abortion clinic in the state of Mississippi. A bill was drafted. It said, if you would perform an abortion in the state of Mississippi, you must be a certified OB/GYN and you must have admitting privileges to a hospital. Anybody here in the medical field knows how hard it is to get admitting privileges to a hospital…
It’s going to be challenged, of course, in the Supreme Court and all — but literally, we stopped abortion in the state of Mississippi, legally, without having to– Roe vs. Wade. So we’ve done that. I was proud of it. The governor signed it into law. And of course, there you have the other side. They’re like, ‘Well, the poor pitiful women that can’t afford to go out of state are just going to start doing them at home with a coat hanger.’ That’s what we’ve heard over and over and over.
But hey, you have to have moral values. You have to start somewhere, and that’s what we’ve decided to do. This became law and the governor signed it, and I think for one time, we were first in the nation in the state of Mississippi.
“You have to have moral values.” I agree. I truly wish Bubba Carpenter had some.
It’s not just coathangers. Poor women will also use clorox, turpentine, quinine, misoprostol, and back-alley butchers. They’ll bleed out, they’ll have perforated bowels, they’ll suffer unbearable agony, they’ll die. These are “moral values” at work. And note that he even acknowledges the other inequity: if they’re wealthy enough to go out of state (read: Republican), they won’t have to worry about the coathanger. This is open warfare on both women and the poor.
Bubba let slip the naked truth about the Republican agenda. The video of his statement is on youtube, but I suspect it won’t be for long: they’re scrambling to hide it away right now. I suppose it’s good that they exhibit a little shame, but it seems to be embarrassment that they were caught openly expressing what they think, not shame at their callousness.
I was brought up to be a Christian, taken to a protestant church from the time I was born until I went off to college. Everyone in my family is a Christian, indoctrinated into the faith with bible stories every night and prayers at every meal and nearly every public event. Christianity was part of who we were and part of my personal identity. I believed, and I prayed, and when I prayed I knew what God wanted me to do.
David Sloan Wilson does not like the New Atheists. He’s pushing something he labels Evolutionary Religious Studies, which, by his view, attracts all the serious scholars of religion. His definition of “serious”, though, seems to be simply scholars who agree with him, who do not regard religion as harmful as the New Atheists do, and who are willing to plug his group selectionist theory of religion as a prosocial phenomenon.
In a new piece at the HuffPo (I’d rather not link to that place, so read it through Jerry Coyne, who ably deconstructs Wilson), he lays out three points comparing ERS to the New Atheism, and his third point is this: that the New Atheism ignores the scientific evidence.
Whenever New Atheists make claims about religion as a human phenomenon, their claims should respect the authority of empirical evidence. Insofar as the new discipline of ERS has added to empirical knowledge of religion, the New Atheists should be paying close attention to ERS. This is especially true for Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, whose names are so closely associated with evolution. Step 3 should go without saying and I doubt that anyone would disagree with it in principle. Yet, by my assessment, there is a serious disconnect between the New Atheism and ERS at the level of Step 3.
To back this up, he uses an example from Dawkins who clearly explains the byproduct theory of religion, and shorts him because he doesn’t fluff David Sloan Wilson’s pet idea, that “religions are fundamentally about the creation and organization of prosocial communities”. I note that Dawkins also did not seriously discuss the Catholic church’s theory that the one true religion is the product of divine fiat, either.
What if he had said that religions are fundamentally about the creation and organization of prosocial communities? That all people require a cultural meaning system to organize their experience, receiving environmental information as input and resulting in effective action as output? That all cultural meaning systems confront a complex tradeoff between the factual content of a given belief and its effect upon action? That secular meaning systems often depart from factual reality in their own ways? The effect upon the audience would have been very different than when they were told that religion is like a moth immolating itself or like a child mindlessly being fed useless information.
This is why Dawkins has a reputation as an excellent communicator, and David Sloan Wilson does not. That humans process data using a mental model shaped by cultural influences is simply a given, a kind of common property of the substrate that does not say anything about the special status of religion in poisoning (or more charitably, shaping) our cultures. It does not increase understanding. And most importantly, it does not address the problem of religion, or beliefs that lead entire cultures into benighted dead-ends of onanistic inanity.
The feline fanatic has a succinct summary of the New Atheist agenda. I concur with this:
Testing whether the tenets of religion are true. The New Atheist answer is “no.”
Assessing the effects of ungrounded religious belief on the world. The New Atheist conclusion is that, seen as a whole, religions have inflicted far more harm than good on the world.
Getting rid of the unwarranted authority and privilege that religion, established churches, and religious officials have garnered for themselves over the centuries.
Even David Sloan Wilson would agree with the first point: religions teach false dogma about the origin and nature of the world. He is reduced to making pragmatic arguments that false beliefs can have beneficial effects on society.
But I have one word for David Sloan Wilson’s benign view of religion, for his argument that it is a prosocial phenomenon. It represents a huge pile of evidence for our second agenda item that he seems to ignore. That word is…
WOMEN.
Whenever I hear that tripe about the beneficial effects of religion on human cultural evolution, it’s useful to note that the world’s dominant faiths all hardcode directly into their core beliefs the idea that women are unclean, inferior, weak, and responsible for the failings of mankind…that even their omnipotent, all-loving god regards women as lesser creatures not fit to be intermediaries with him, and that their cosmic fate is to be subservient slaves to men, just as men are to be subservient slaves to capital-H Him.
David Sloan Wilson can argue all he wants that religion helped promote group survival in our evolutionary history, or that his group selectionist models somehow explain its origins, but it doesn’t matter. Here and now, everywhere, those with eyes to see can see for themselves that religion has for thousands of years perpetuated the oppression of half our species. Half of the great minds our peoples have produced have lived and died unknown and forgotten, their educations neglected, their lives spent doing laundry and other menial tasks for men — their merits unrecognized and buried under lies promulgated by religion, in cultures soaked in the destructive myths of faith which codify misogyny and give it a godly blessing.
Isn’t that reason enough to tear down the cathedrals — that with this one far-reaching, difficult change to our cultures, we double human potential?
I was raised in the quite conservative Reformed Church of America. I was a very curious child and read the entire bible through a few times starting at a young age, yet I still swallowed every lie they fed me. I never really fit in in high school youth group. We went to a smallish church and my school friends all went to different churches. In addition I wanted to learn things like theology and apologetics; the others wanted to learn about pop culture and dating. We also weren’t much of a priority for the church (we got no funding and the room we used twice a week had to be arranged the way the elders wanted it for their monthly meeting). Because of this I was slightly bitter towards the church I grew up in, although not religion in general yet.
It’s also for the fabulous headgear.
