It’s time to recognize gun worship as a cult which has the second amendment as its holy text

Tony Perkins says that teaching kids about evolution leads to mass shootings.

Perkins said that teaching children about evolution is one cause of mass shootings.

“We’ve taught our kids they come about through chance through primordial slime and then we’re surprised they treat their fellow Americans like dirt!” he exclaimed. “It’s time we talk about the result of the left’s systematic march through our institutions, driving religious expression from the public square.”

Perkins complained that children are not being taught that they are “created in the image of God.”

“We’ve driving religion from our public life and we’re shocked that we no longer have morality and we no longer value human life,” he remarked.

As a totally godless human being who has been teaching about evolution for a few decades, I’ve noticed that I and my fellow biologists and atheists are less casual about taking life than our gun-totin’ Christian brethren in general. Evolution teaches that we’re kin to everything; it doesn’t bring us down, it elevates every living thing on the planet in our eyes. To claim that we have no morality is a lie. We have many of the same values that our fellow citizens do, we live quiet lives finding happiness in our families, our children, in service to others, in simple pleasures. Most Christians are the same way, except when their priorities have been distorted by misplaced fanaticism, which, unfortunately, the kinds of Christians who listen to Tony Perkins are fed constantly.

Take Representative Matt Schaefer of Texas, who has a similarly perverse and horrid idea of the “root of the problem”.

Godless, depraved hearts. That IS the root of the problem. Every person needs a heart transformed by faith in God through Jesus. May God be near to those suffering in Odessa and Midland, and everywhere that evil has struck a blow.

He is quite confident that the solution to everything is conversion to Christianity. Everyone must believe in Jesus to stop the mass shootings! As if no Christian had ever killed anyone senselessly.

The real root of the problem is this: that a fervently Christian legislator has decided that he must oppose all actions to restrict the “god-given” ownership of AR-15s. Apparently, the Christianity he wants us to convert to is the version that has all the followers of Jesus armed to the teeth. He’s going to do nothing but pray, and hand out more guns.

“Do something!” is the statement we keep hearing. As an elected official with a vote in Austin, let me tell you what I am NOT going to do. I am NOT going to use the evil acts of a handful of people to diminish the God-given rights of my fellow Texans. Period. None of these so-called gun-control solutions will work to stop a person with evil intent. I say NO to “red flag” pre-crime laws. NO to universal background checks. NO to bans on AR-15s, or high capacity magazines. NO to mandatory gun buybacks. What can we do? YES to praying for victims. YES to praying for protection. YES to praying that God would transform the hearts of people with evil intent. YES to fathers not leaving their wives and children. YES to discipline in the homes. YES to supporting our public schools. YES to giving every law-abiding single mom the right to carry a handgun to protect her and her kids without permission from the state, and the same for all other law-abiding Texans of age. YES to your God-given, constitutionally protected rights. YES to God, and NO to more government intrusions.

You know, the guy who went on a murder spree in Odessa and Midland doesn’t seem to have been either a vocal Christian or a vocal atheist — just another angry white man who loves guns. Maybe instead of trying to answer everything with stories about which religion they did or did not follow, we should be addressing the gun-worshipping cult that crosses boundaries between believer and non-believer.

One thing for sure, Matt Schaefer won’t be doing anything about that, because he’s a card-carrying member of that cult.

I get email

I often get requests from students to answer questions about biology — typically, they’ve been told to write to a scientist and get a response, and somehow they’ve picked me. I try to answer them, but due to the number of requests, I usually only give brief answers. Here’s an example:

Dear PZ Meyers,

Yeah, I know. Somehow my name is impossible to spell correctly. I’m resigned to it and just let it slide nowadays.

My name is XXXX and I’m a 19-year-old junior in college.

Now this part was a little weird. They’re a college junior…but the questions are more like what I’d expect from a grade school kid. But OK, I’ll go with it.

I know you might be quite busy, but I wanted to ask if you could assist me with a simple assignment for one of my college courses dealing with the origins of life on earth. I am required to ask anyone (preferably someone who is science-minded such as yourself) the following four questions:

Here are their four questions, and my short answers.

1. How long are the days in Genesis 1? Why?

The bible is not a science textbook, and trying to pin a specific length to a vague metaphor is a category error. All that matters is that the events described in Genesis 1 cover a period of billions of years, and are presented in an incorrect order.

2. How old is the earth and life? Why?

The Earth is approximately 4 1/2 billion years old. Life arose approximately 4 billion years ago. We have multiple corroborating lines of evidence from physics and astronomy that confirm the first date, and genetic and trace fossil evidence confirms the second.

3. Did man and apes share a common ancestor? Why or why not?

Humans ARE apes. Yes, all modern primates share a common ancestor. The last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees lived roughly 6 million years ago. Again, this is confirmed by molecular and genetic evidence.

4. Were Adam and Eve real people? Why or why not?

No. Humans have more genetic diversity than could possibly arise by divergence from only two ancestors; also, a population of 2 lacks the genetic diversity that would allow the population to survive. Population genetics tells us that the greatest population bottleneck in our history occurred about 80,000 years ago, when the human population was reduced to 15,000-20,000 breeding pairs. Not two.

I fired those off, and thought I was done. I just got a thank you from the student, though, which was nice.

Dear PZ Meyers,

I hope you’ve been doing well.

First, I’d like to thank you again for helping me with this assignment because I got all the points on my grade for it! As promised, my professor sent some comments (quite a bit in fact) for me to read over and share with you. I don’t know how much you’ve heard already, but if you have the time, you can read them over and give a reply. I’m not as knowledgeable in this scientific area but I do believe in God and that his Word is true.

Uh-oh. Their professor did send a reply.

Jebus, did they. 11,000 words of pure, ripe, grade-A creationist bullshit. I’m exhausted just looking at it.

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It’s truth and justice

Jonny Scaramanga wrote a good post explaining why creationism matters.

We should be worrying about creationism. But everyone is worried about it for the wrong reasons. Yes, creationism is false, and young-Earth creationism is particularly ridiculous. But with thousands of false beliefs in circulation, why should we particularly care about creationism? It doesn’t make much difference to my daily life whether or not I accept that all life on Earth shares a single common ancestor, or that the planet is 4.54 billion years old. Even in science, there are limited areas where the fact of common descent is immediately relevant.

The trouble is that the areas of fundamentalism which are truly oppressive— the denial of women’s rights and bigotry against LGBTQ people, for example—are intimately bound up with creationism. You’ll notice that, amid its busy schedule of producing pseudoscience, Answers in Genesis has found time to oppose gay marriage. There aren’t a lot of copies of The Selfish Gene in Quiverfull homes, either. These facts are not coincidences.

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Incidentally, racist

I don’t approve of homeschooling. I understand how sometimes, the local school is in a state of intellectual collapse and it becomes necessary (although I’d rather the state realized it has an obligation to maintain school quality in all districts), but too often it’s because parents demand a bizarre ideological purity — in particular, because they don’t want their kids exposed to liberal ideas like diversity and tolerance.

Which leads to…

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Don’t forget the other coping strategies

In a rather cheerful article about the increasing numbers of Americans who insist on secularism, especially among the youth, we get a number of explanations for why young people are leaving religion.

A third explanation [the others being demographic shifts and increasing levels of education –pzm] for the rise of Americans claiming no religion is the increasing politicization of religion. Michael Hout and Claude Fischer argue that the political right has become so identified with a conservative religious agenda that it has alienated moderates who consider organized “religion” a synonym for an antigay, antiabortion, procivic religion agenda. At the same time, while they may feel disenfranchised from organized religion, many of them remain privately religious or “spiritual.” This reaction against the politicization of religion is seen particularly among young adults.

I agree with this. I see it as a psychological coping strategy: as it becomes increasingly obvious that religious explanations fit real world situations poorly, as there is increasing dissonance between faith and reality, people deal with it in rational ways. One way is to distance oneself from specific claims, to generalize, and adopt an increasingly vague term to describe oneself. “Spiritual” is popular. It’s so open and meaningless that conflicts are minimized…and that’s what all of this is about, is reducing disparities between your mental model of how the universe works and your functional behavior.

The article is all about how people and families have adjusted to the declining importance of religion, but I have to say that they left out a few strategies that worry me.

One important long term strategy: we have to recognize that religions are flexible and plastic — even, or especially, the oldest ones are capable of remarkable shifts over time. As dissonance between science and faith increases, don’t expect religions to break. Expect them to adapt and coopt instead (how do you think they managed to last so long, anyway?) We’re already seeing remarkable plasticity in Christianity. Megachurches are crucibles of religious evolution, where the selective pressures are high and the pastors are sensitive to losses in membership and income. Atheists should worry: one beneficial mutation and a new religion could erupt (or possibly worse, atheism becomes that religion).

But the other coping mechanism that we see in play right now is self-reinforcing tribalism. It would be less deleterious to our society for a popular new religion to emerge that accommodates itself to reality better, than for what we see right now: a society fracturing itself as groups wall themselves off into little hothouses of sanctimonious delusion.

The history of creationism is instructive. As we came out of the 19th century, religious people were sincerely trying to reconcile the Bible with science. There were many models proposed for how the book of Genesis, for instance, could accommodate the new geology: there was the gap theory and the day-age theory, and lots of less well integrated attempts to solder faith and rocks together with revelation. But the model that won out, that is now the dominant (but not sole!) form of creationism, is rigid denial. They simply reject the testimony of the rocks, because there is no way their stories can be reconciled.

And how can they do that? Just by forming tight little groups where they repeat their messages to each other incessantly — they are self-affirming enclaves that find vindication by finding other people who want to believe the same things they do. Apes are good social animals who are quite adept at doing that: what rocks and trees and stars are saying is far less significant to an ape-mind than what that other ape who grooms your hair is saying. How do you think Answers in Genesis and the Tea Party can persist, when the real world is shrieking at them at full volume that their myths are false? They simply don’t care.

So I’m a bit more pessimistic than that article. The secular nones are rising, and we could get lucky and just see religious movements slowly fade away and become little more than traditional social groups. But don’t ever lose sight of the fact that, like any group of pathogenic parasites, religions are trying adapt and exploit us, and also that human beings have an amazing capacity for forming weird little subgroups that can have a deadly effect on the body politic.

I’m always getting asked if I think religion will go away and secularism will become dominant. I think the trends are going that way, fortunately, but there’s always this nagging thought in my head that innovation and changing circumstances can bring about novelties that completely upset any trends.

A related story about a religious innovation: That’s what objectivism is, and it certainly does appeal to a subset of the population.

You know it’s agony for me to listen to Christian talk radio, right?

You are a cruel readership. One of you — I won’t name names to protect the guilty — told me to go listen to this radio program out of Colorado Springs called “Generations With Vision”, by some guy named Kevin Swanson, and in particular to an episode called The Secular Hold is Slipping. He’s a very cheerful, confident fellow, and I listened to several minutes of him lying blithely and loudly. It was…painful. It was a happy idiot gloatingly making stuff up to make himself feel good.

Here’s their summary of the episode.

It’s getting harder and harder to “shut up” the little boy in the Emperor’s New Clothes proceedings. And evolutionists and the secularists aren’t happy about it. Ray Comfort’s Evolution vs. God video is going viral. Kevin Swanson also questions the McMillan new dictionary definition for marriage on this episode of Generations.

It starts off with this assertion that the holy trinity of the humanists consists of evolution, feminism, and homosexuality, and that we’re on the run in all three areas. To claim that, though, they have to mangle all three ideas. Here’s their short summary of feminist social theory, for instance: get rid of all men, get rid of marriage, kill all the kids, and have lots of sex. Abortion is the sacred sacrament of the feminists.

I wish I were joking. That’s literally what they said, in a tone of absolute certainty. How can you even begin to argue with people who are that wrong?

But then they spent most of their time laughing at evolution from a position of unassailable ignorance. They are inspired by Ray Comfort (you know their credibility is shot right there), who is making everyone so mad. They claim he’s interviewed “the big shots”: Richard Dawkins [no, he hasn’t] and PG Myers [who?]. They actually believe he has exposed an absence of evidence for evolution, when all Comfort has shown is his zeal in chopping out evidence that contradicts him.

And then comes the babble of creationist buzzwords and assertions. There is no evidence or data for evolution; there is no evidence for how a non-heart non-lung animal turned into a heart-lung animal. That, at least, is a novel constructed claim, but…have they looked? If anyone mentioned Tinman/Nkx-2.5/csx to them, would they have the slightest clue what we’re talking about? There’s been a lot of work on the molecular evolution of heart-related genes, for instance. That they are ignorant of it all is not evidence that the data is not there.

Their biggest lie: they claim “We would love to know how it happened.” No, they wouldn’t. They believe they already know, that an invisible superbeing simply zapped hearts and lungs into existence, and they deny the truly wonderful explanation backed by the evidence and aren’t even interested enough to try and learn. They are smug little jerks sitting in a puddle of their own urine, unwilling to wash themselves of foolishness.

They make a host of weird claims. “Punctuated equilibrium is where a prince kisses a frog.” What? “Richard Dawkins isn’t a scientist.” They keep talking about all the “honest scientists” who are leaving evolution, but they don’t bother to name them.

Then they try to dazzle their audience with the intimidating authority of math. They trot out Fred Hoyle’s example of 20 amino acids assembling into a protein having impossible odds — wrong. It’s actually quite trivial, and they’re making an error of invalid assumptions. By their reasoning, every bridge hand is a triumph of the impossible coming into existence.

Yeah, they actually say it’s impossible. They trot out the familiar creationist claim that odds of one chance in 1050 can never happen, this magic number of 10 to the 50th power representing an absolute boundary. It’s wrong, and it’s ridiculously wrong.

To crown their demonstration of the power of lying about mathematics, they then announce that “People are not very good at math”. They did manage to prove that claim by example.

And of course they’re making claims that “Honest scientists are abandoning the theory left and right, because there is no evidence. They have no data.” and that “Evolutionists are going away — they’re very desperate.”

I would ask how they know that. They certainly don’t have any evidence for it. The subject of evolution is placed solidly in the core of every competent college biology curriculum; every week new papers come out testing and demonstrating the power of the theory; all of the biologists I know — and I think I’ve got more inside knowledge than a couple of obscure evangelical radio guys in the heart of fundie-land — are advocates for evolution who use it routinely in their work. They might try looking at the Society for the Study of Evolution (SSE), the Society of Systematic Biologists (SSB), the American Society of Naturalists (ASN), the European Society for Evolutionary Biology (ESEB), the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution (SMBE), or the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB), just for a start. Ask them about the people abandoning evolution: they’ll give you an odd look, wonder what the hell is wrong with you, and walk away.

But then, that requires actually peeping out of their little bunker of isolated, ignorant Christianity and actually talking to a real biologist, rather than listening to a lying fraud like Ray Comfort. That’ll never happen.

Newsweek panders to the deluded again

I’ve got to wonder who is responsible for this nonsense, and how it gets past the staff at Newsweek. Every once in a while, they’ve just got to put up a garish cover story touting the reality of Christian doctrine, and invariably, the whole story is garbage. This time around, the claim is proof of life after death, in Heaven Is Real: A Doctor’s Experience With the Afterlife. This time, we have a real-live doctor who has worked at many prestigious institutions, as we are reminded several times in the story, whose brain was shut down and who then recites an elaborate fantasy of visiting heaven.

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Why I am an atheist – Mitchell Hayden

I consider myself lucky that I never really had a faith to lose. I was raised in a Christian family, but I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t questioning the things I heard in church. I made the firm decision to reject any organized religion in third grade when the leaders at my first and only Awana meeting told me (and most of the other children) that we would burn in hell for eternity if we continued to read Harry Potter. Luckily my family is not so ridiculous that they’d keep me in such an environment, and I was free to never have to go back. From that point until late into my high school career I considered myself a Deist. Just because organized religion was awful didn’t mean there wasn’t a kind loving god right? I was happy to think this until I began identifying as a skeptic. Even after my mother also rejected organized Christianity there were still a multitude of woo filled beliefs to contend with. The more educated I became the more I began to doubt all the things I had grown up with. “The Secret,” “Angel Therapy,” tarot cards. It didn’t take long for the idea of a god to follow the other foolishness down the drain. I’m now a proud and active atheist. There was a time when I thought leaving all the comforting ideas behind would be hard, that their absence would bother me. The exact opposite is true. The more I see how harmful those ideas are, the more sure I am I’m right. I could never go back to supporting beliefs that would keep people miserable because they think that their actions will lead them to a salvation that doesn’t exist.

Mitchell Hayden

O brave new world that has such penises in’t

I am getting quite impressed with the progress being made in organ reconstruction. New techniques have allowed amazing improvements in bioengineering that allow whole complex organs to be grown in a dish and then surgically reimplanted — and much of this research is being driven by our military ventures, which provide a steady supply of scarred, damaged, and mutilated veterans who need new body parts. There I read that scientists are developing procedures to regrow penises…how could I not look up that paper? So I did, and now I have the current recipe for building new penises — or at least, corpora cavernosa — in a lab.

It’s got limitations. First, you have to start with an intact penis, preferably from a dead body. Then it has to be delicately decellularized, leaving behind a fragile, ghostly collagen matrix, the connective tissue ‘skeleton’ of the organ. This framework is completely acellular, with no remnants of the donor’s cells, and consisting of just the collagen matrix, so that it will not provoke an immune response.

Then smooth muscle and endothelial cells are harvested by biopsies from the prospective host. This is to be an autologous transplant, a regrown organ built from the host’s own cells, again so immune system rejection will not be an issue. These cells are seeded in multiple steps onto the collagen scaffold, where they proliferate and infiltrate the matrix and reassemble (you hope!) the fully functional organ.

Note the limitations, though: you have to start with a penis. There are relatively few of those to spare, although since histocompatibility matching isn’t an issue, it ought to be doable as part of an organ donor program — we’ll just grab the penis as well as the corneas and kidneys. This procedure does not regrow the entire penis, but just the spongy erectile tissue in the core; this is implanted into the sheath of skin of the normal penis. I know all you body modification fans are dreaming of the day you can have multiple penises, but this isn’t quite there yet, and sorry, I should hope injured people who need the procedure get priority over cosmetic uses.

But here’s the astonishing thing: it works. The procedure has only been tested in rabbits so far, but with amazing success. I know what you are saying. You are saying, “Really? Then show me the bunny penises, with erections.” And I will.

At the top left is an unaltered, unoperated rabbit penis; top right is the case we’re interested in, a rabbit with an implanted, bioengineered penis (say, isn’t it a little larger than the unaltered penis?). At the bottom are negative controls, penises with just the unseeded collagen matrix implanted and with nothing at all to replace the surgical deletion.


Cavernosometry and cavernosography. (A) Cavernosometry shows that all rabbits implanted with the bioengineered corpora after complete pendular penile corporal excision had sufficient intracorporal pressure (ICP) to attain erection (n = 12). The levels of ICP were comparable to native corpora (n = 12). (B) Cavernosography shows a homogenous appearance of corpora in the bioengineered group (n = 12), similar to the native corpora (n = 16), numerous filling defects in the unseeded control group (n = 12), and major filling gaps in the negative control group (n = 3).

The researchers have done experiments in rabbits in which they compare a positive control group (no removal of the corpora) to a negative control group (rabbits with their penises hollowed out and the corpora removed — sad bunnies) to an experimental group (rabbits with their penises surgically cored out, and then replaced with bioengineered neocorpora), and look what happened.

The experimental and control animals were each placed with a female rabbit and mating activities were assessed at 1, 3, and 6 months after implantation. All rabbits with bioengineered neocorpora attempted copulation within 1 min of introduction to their female partners, and this occurred as early as 1 month after implantation. Most control rabbits did not attempt copulation after introduction to their female partners.

The rabbits were ready and eager to try out their new penises! Yay science!

The intravaginal ejaculation rate was determined using vaginal swabs to detect the presence of sperm after copulation and/or impregnation. In the experimental group, vaginal swabs contained sperm in eight of 12 instances, and four of the 12 females were impregnated, resulting in an intravaginal ejaculation rate of 83% (10/12). In the control group without cell seeding, all 12 vaginal swabs were negative.

And it wasn’t all just for fun, those penises worked, they successfully inseminated the females, and, typical bunnies, a third of the females were impregnated! Yay science again!

A difference between experimental and control group without cells in the intravaginal ejaculation rates of 75% was noted, with a 95% confidence interval of 36% to 89%. For the negative control group (excision only), all vaginal swabs were negative, and none of the females were impregnated (0%).

I feel sad for those bunnies with their flaccid, hollowed out penises, but I guess that is the expected result — it would have been far more surprising if the negative controls had inseminated their partners.

The bottom line is that we need more stem cell research and more bioengineering. There are wonders to be accomplished! And don’t let religious nonsense interfere with this kind of work.

Although, to be fair, both Islam and Christianity would be perfectly fine with reconstruction of the holy penis — it’s only when it steps into the task of reconstructing scarred and damaged vulvas that it treads over the line into abomination.

Chen KL, Eberli D, Yoo JJ, Atala A (2010) Bioengineered corporal tissue for structural and functional restoration of the penis. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 107(8):3346-50.