Columbus Day is a terrible holiday

So this guy sails over to the New World, kills and enslaves some local populations, brings human beings back to Europe as curiosities, and also unleashes a whole series of nasty plagues that devastate the people of the American continents over the next several centuries…and we celebrate this event?

How about if we don’t?

Here’s a great suggestion: rededicate the day to exploration, and do it in the name of Neil Armstrong, someone who didn’t initiate a wave of genocide and was by all accounts a decent human being. It serves two purposes: it stops enshrining a rather nasty event, and starts celebrating a noble purpose. Easy. It’s such an obvious idea, I don’t know why we haven’t done it already.

Sign the petition.

Oh. It’s got 90 signatures so far. It needs 25,000. That’s why it hasn’t happened yet.

Good news from South Korea

South Korea is strongly infected with the Evangelical Christian plague, and for a while there, there was real concern that the creationist lobby in that country was gaining some clout, and like Texas, was going to censor evolution from their biology textbooks by removing mention of fossil evidence. Good news, everybody! The scientists and educators got their act together and fought back.

On 5 September, the panel concluded that Archaeopteryx must be included in Korean science textbooks, and it reaffirmed that the theory of evolution is an essential part of modern science that all students must learn in school.

The battle is not over, of course. The polls aren’t promising.

Duckhwan Lee, president of the Basic Science Council and the panel leader, says he hopes that the panel’s guidance will eventually improve the public’s understanding of evolution. In July, a survey by Gallup Korea, a research firm based in Seoul, found that of 613 respondents, 45% believed in evolution and 32% believed in creationism.

32% creationist? That’s bad news.

Perspective: the US is 40-50% creationist.

Why I am an atheist – Paul Williams

I attended that most English of institutions, a Church of England Boarding School. My mother was a lapsed Catholic and my father was inscrutable on such issues but he did pick the school.

The school advertised its “pastoral” approach to the care of the young men who attended. Girls were only admitted in the 6th Form (for any US readers – that is the last 2 years of study before a pupil leaves at 18 years old). Chapel attendance was compulsory. There was a school service every week on a Sunday, a week day service for your class and a weekly event called a House Meeting that was for members of your house (think fraternity without the beer, or porn, or TV other than the news or sport) that was partly a meeting about upcoming events and partly an excuse to get a pupil to write a short morality based story that always ended with the “Christian Family Prayer” (The Lords Prayer). There was also Religious Education classes that never mentioned any other faith at all, despite the demands of the National Curriculum.

[Read more…]

A little bit about the new guy

It’s an honor and a treat to have had PZ ask me to join him here at Pharyngula. Though there have been months lately where I haven’t been a particularly exuberant participant in the lively and collegial discussions here, my relationship with Pharyngula goes back a ways — back to ought-four, in fact, back when the blog was hosted on the Cray 2 in PZ’s undersea lair, and commenters underwent a series of strong electric shocks in an early form of CAPTCHA technology. It was just me and Hank Fox commenting back then, I think, and Old Man Buell the painter, and a giant ground sloth name of Shep. Good times.

Despite that long tenure, though, I haven’t been really active here all that much. I read regularly, but aside from that lurking, and the requisite supporting you all in email, I’m really kind of a newbie here. So a few things about me to get out of the way so you know who you’re talking to: [Read more…]

Text of Obama’s DNC speech

It was a real stem-winder. Finally, a liberal democrat uncloaked himself and spoke the truth.

Slamming his fists on the lectern until his hands began to bleed, Obama proceeded to lay out a “three-point plan of sin and lechery” for his second term. If reelected, the president said, he would begin by banning organized religion entirely—starting with Christianity—and burning all churches to the ground, preferably “with their wretched, Jesus-loving congregants still huddled inside like rats.”

As members of the audience violently tugged at their genitals and howled like sex-starved, atheist wolves, Obama stated that his administration would then seek to make free, taxpayer-funded abortions legal at any stage of pregnancy, even up to one full year after birth, in order to supply his newly created “federal stem-cell harvesting plants” with raw materials.

Oh. Wait. Sorry. Wrong text. That was the secret speech he gave at the Godless Cabal. Here’s the one he gave at the DNC. It was a bit more conciliatory, but it wasn’t bad.

Pharyngula is about to add a co-blogger

Are you ready for this? Chris Clarke now has authorship privileges on Pharyngula.

Those of you who know his work will be awestruck. Chris is a phenomenal writer, a true progressive, and a committed environmentalist. I’d been thinking about bringing in an additional contributor, because let me tell you, this semester is going to kick my butt and I am already stressing out, and when I thought about who I would just dream of partnering with, Chris was right at the top of the list…so it was a tremendous honor when he accepted.

This is going to be awesome.

I’m ready to be divisive

I can understand how the strain gets to people. I’m a white guy; I’ve got it easy. I do get a steady stream of hate-mail and vituperative noise in my in-box, but I’ve been getting that for 20 years (usenet gave me a leg up on most of you) and my skin is pretty damned thick by now. But what gets me most right now is shame. Embarrassment at being associated with some of these ‘skeptics’ and atheists — a painful shame at being male. Even the polite ones who think they’re making a rational point make me cringe. Look at this little note from JoeNietzsche:

PZ, you’ve clearly misrepresented the function of his “forms in triplicate” argument. What he is doing there is called exaggeration for effect. No one, not him, his readers or anyone else actually believes this is what anyone at FTB would demand of him. He is simply making the point that obtaining consent would ruin the moment. Social interaction is messy, even the deeply conscientious sort. Now, I had no dog in this fight but this, along with your stream of ad homs, have made up my mind. :(

My nonexistent freakin’ deity. “Obtaining consent would ruin the moment.” For whom? How oblivious can you get?

I can understand why Jen is taking a break. These assholes are exhausting. It’s not just the vileness, it’s the godawful stupidity of people who otherwise claim to be on my side. They aren’t. I’m on the side of humanism, of men and women, for science and the environment, for equality and justice, and I’m against the troglodytes who make excuses for treating women as ambulatory receptacles for their “moment”. Screw ’em.

So one thing we can do is let people cycle back away from the front and take a little R&R, and then those of us still on the line can follow Rebecca Watson’s suggestion: double-down, everyone.

I suspect that if everyone steps up and speaks just as loudly as Jen did, there’s no way the assholes would have enough time in their day to bully all of us. But I get that not everyone can do that. I can do it, though, so until everybody steps up, I’ll just try to be twice as loud in the hopes of acting as some kind of asshole lightning rod.

Battle on, horde!

Holy crap. Via Ophelia, Marty Robbins brings up an interesting point: some of these assholes show a greater level of obsession than Dennis Markuze. Look at the pile of stuff one jerk, “Elevatorgate”, compiled in one day. Get help, Chris. You’re sick.