Episode CXCII: The true meaning of Goon

I must be very old. I remember a friend getting recordings of the Goons sent by mail, and we’d sit around listening to an old reel-to-reel tape machine and we’d laugh and laugh. I suspect that Eccles and Bluebottle will not resonate with the whippersnappers here, but I shall inflict them on you anyway.

(Last edition of TET; Current totals: 12,173 entries with 1,334,165 comments.)

It’s the 7th annual Paul Nelson Day!

How could I forget? Easy, actually, it’s a rather forgettable event in which nothing happens. Seven years ago, Paul Nelson invented a creationist metric, ontogenetic depth, which purportedly measures the complexity of developmental processes and somehow implies that evolution is impossible. At that time, he wasn’t able to tell us exactly what it was or how to measure it, but he promised to explain it…tomorrow. A tomorrow which has so far stretched out to seven long years, and we now annually note the anniversary.

I really don’t care anymore if Nelson ever comes up with a nonsensical rationalization. It’s symbolic. It’s representative of all the promised ‘science’ the Intelligent Design creationists have been claiming to be doing, yet never deliver. Last year I predicted that there would be no revelations from Nelson in 2011, and now I predict that in 2012, I’ll be making the same reminder.

Unless I forget. I might. It’s hard to remember a specific day on which creationists fail — that’s like every day, you know.

Tragedy in Brazil

Another madman has run wild, this time in Brazil, killing 11 schoolchildren and wounding another 13 before killing himself (and here’s the story in Portuguese, with many photos, including a few that are grislier than you’ll see in the US media). The killer left a suicide note, and a Brazilian reader sent me his translation:

First of all you should know that the impure can’t touch me without
gloves, only the chaste or the the ones that lost their chastity after their
marriages and haven’t been adulterous may touch me with no gloves,
i.e., no fornicator or adulterer may have direct contact with me, nor anything
impure touch my blood, no impure may have direct contact with a virgin
without permission, those that take care of my burial should take off all
my clothes, bathe me, dry me and wrap me while totally naked in a white cloth
which is in this building, in a bag I left in the first room of the first floor, after
wrapping me in this cloth you may put me in my coffin. If possible, I’d like
to be buried next to the grave where my mother sleeps, my mother is
called Dicéa Menezes de Oliveira and is buried in the Murundu cemetery.
I need the visit of a faithfull follower of God in my tomb at least once,
I need him to pray in front of it asking for God’s forgiveness for
what I did asking that when Jesus comes he will wake me up from the
sleep of death to life.

At least this savagery won’t be pinned on atheists, not this time. I don’t think we can blame religion, either, although his insanity clearly found expression in religious idiom — this guy was just malignantly deranged.

I hope no one is respecting the killer’s final wishes, and that his corpse is treated like dead rotting meat, nothing more, and buried with exactly the same treatment anyone else’s body would receive. And then may his name be forgotten.

Sam Harris and Rebecca Watson!

Not in the same place at the same time, unfortunately — that could be an interesting conversation. But they’re both out and about talking.

Tonight at 7pm Eastern, Sam Harris will be wasting his time debating William Lane Craig. Rumors are that you will be able to watch the debate live at that link; I’m neck-deep in work, so I don’t think I’ll be able to watch, but I’m sure I’ll here about it.

The other fun event is next week: Rebecca Watson will be speaking on “Women’s Intuition and Other Fairytales” at 7 pm Friday, April 15, at CFI-Transnational, 1310 Sweet Home Road, Amherst, NY.

Show up, tell her I sent you, and that she owes me a beer for getting you to go.

The lamest punchline in the world

An unsavory fellow named Tommy Pitts is under arrest for child abuse in Oklahoma.

Police said Pitts was arrested on 15 counts of first-degree rape, 15 counts of rape by instrumentation, 20 counts of lewd or indecent acts with children under 16 and 20 counts of forcible sodomy. He is on suicide watch, police said.

Investigators said the abuse went on for months.

Now the lamest punchline in the world: Tommy Pitts is pastor of the Midway Assembly of God Church.

I know! You saw it coming from a mile away! Nowadays all you have to do is put some theological title in front of someone’s name, and you can’t help but wonder how big his butt plug collection is, how many indecent exposure convictions he has, or how many children he’s molested.

It’s why I haven’t applied for any of those mail-order divinity degrees. Admit it: if I were the Reverend PZ Myers, you know you’d expect me to start posting porn. And then, when the police raided my home and discovered how conventional and vanilla I am, I’d have to suffer the embarrassment of defrocking.

Ho-hum, another claim that there are no atheists in foxholes

Man, this article is bad.

Perhaps atheism is a luxury of the well-to-do. Put differently, everyone–even the most hardcore atheists, I think–will start believing in God if put under a high amount of stress. Think of the last time you prayed to God, and I will bet that, for many of you (whether you generally classify yourself as an atheist or not), it would have been when you were under stress. For most of us so-called atheists, when things go horribly wrong, we think of God.

PZ raises his hand. Hardcore atheist here. Nope. I’ve experienced stress, even thought I was dying once…no gods came to mind. But I bet that if you repeat that silly claim often enough, if you go up to dying people and tell them they’ll probably think of Bugs Bunny before they die, you’ll find that lots of them will have the words “What’s up, doc” pop into their head when the doctors visit their hospital room.

The last time I prayed was when I was a goddamned child.

Since this is published in Psychology Today, the author just hast to dredge up some weirdly distorted pop-psych to justify his claims. Here’s the story he tells.

Don’t believe me? Consider Philip Zimbardo’s “broken window” theory. In one of his studies, Zimbardo left a car on the streets of Palo Alto for two weeks. During the first week, the car looked like any other car parked on the street: nothing in it was broken. After the first week, Zimbardo deliberately broke one of the car’s windows. Zimbardo was interested in assessing whether, by merely breaking the window, he had enhanced the chances that it would be vandalized. That’s indeed what he had found. This experiment shows that, contrary to conventional wisdom, the world is not made up of two sets of people: vandals and non-vandals. Rather, the world is made up of people who all have a propensity to vandalize, and whether one of us vandalizes or not may depend more on something as subtle as whether we see a broken window or not–and not necessarily on our personality.

Wait, what? How do you derive that conclusion from that study, as described? It’s not as if vandals vandalize every car they see; isn’t it more likely that vandalism-prone individuals are more likely to target an already damaged car?

Well, if you’ve leapt to one entirely unjustified conclusion, nothing is stopping you from leaping even further. You’ve already abandoned all respect for the evidence.

Extrapolated to the topic of God: This means that no one is a complete atheist or, for that matter, a complete believer in God. Each of us has a propensity to be somewhere on that continuum. And even a hardcore atheist may exhibit belief in God if he feels his life is sufficiently broken.

While there is definitely a continuum of belief, how can a psychologist (oh, wait…the author is a professor of marketing) so blithely disregard the impact of culture? We hammer people with lifelong messages telling them they must really believe in the god their society favors, and what do you know, they go along with it. Don’t think of an elephant! Have you noticed that no one is telling you that Odin is all-knowing or that Asclepius will heal you, and the likelihood of people under stress invoking either of those gods is really, really low?

Besides, if we’re really going to extrapolated from the Zimbardo study to religion, the story really ought to be like this: God has been like a beautiful, pristine car parked on the street. When someone punches a hole in one of its windows, though, God’s vulnerability is revealed, and pretty soon the humanists come along and steal the tires, the agnostics key the paint job, and the atheists set it on fire, and before you know it, all you’ve got left is scorched rubble and an eyesore that the city needs to tow away and junk.

I like that extrapolation much better.

Gandalf rose from the dead to save you

There is a church in Romsey, Australia which is getting lots of attention because they offer a “Sci-Fi and Fantasy Friendly Church Service,” where people dress up as fantasy characters and wave light-sabers around while quoting Buffy and Bilbo. It’s a weird story, because every church service offered everywhere is fantasy friendly, so what’s the big deal? Obi-Wan and Gandalf are both Jesus-figures, anyway.

Predictably, though, some stuffed shirts are outraged, which just fills me with more appreciation of irony. Says the Baptist minister who hears voices in his head and promises escape to an imaginary paradise after death,

“I don’t have a problem with people enjoying sci-fi, but church isn’t the place to encourage escapism and fancy dress,” Mentone Baptist minister Murray Campbell said.

“It is the time where real people with real lives need to hear the real God speak his word, the Bible.

Another of the men wearing a dress speaks up:

Catholic priest Gerald O’Collins said: “There should be no need to dress it up.

“There is a magical story there already – We just have to start selling ourselves properly.”

At least he’s honest—yes, religion is all about selling magic. The Romsey church is embarrassingly blatant about it, which is nothing new — but their real crime is making the silliness obvious by inviting comparison with openly fictional stories.