But I don’t think I want to be this bigot’s brother

The Republican governor of Alabama, Robert Bentley, has moved on a little bit from the 1950s — he made a speech on Martin Luther King Day in which he declared himself colorblind and the governor of all the people of Alabama. How nice! But then, unfortunately, he had to ruin it by making a few exceptions.

But if you have been adopted in God’s family like I have, and like you have if you’re a Christian and if you’re saved, and the Holy Spirit lives within you just like the Holy Spirit lives within me, then you know what that makes? It makes you and me brothers. And it makes you and me brother and sister.

Now I will have to say that, if we don’t have the same daddy, we’re not brothers and sisters. So anybody here today who has not accepted Jesus Christ as their savior, I’m telling you, you’re not my brother and you’re not my sister, and I want to be your brother.

Gosh. I guess Christians in Alabama are just extra-special people. The rest of us — Muslims, Buddhists, atheists, agnostics, Hindus, animists, whatever — not so much.

Isn’t it just amazing that the governor of a secular state would stand up and unabashedly make a speech declaring a specific religious group as having a privileged status with him?

Ken Ham still doesn’t get it

Ken Ham is complaining bitterly about the newspaper article that showed his attendance estimates for the Ark Park are unlikely. He’s reduced to nonsensical whines about persecution, and acts as if he’s baffled about the criticisms.

The article raises a question: why is the Courier-Journal even concerned with possible attendance at the Ark? If the attraction does not meet its projected figures, the state government and its citizens are not impacted—except positively, in that the attraction will still produce state sales tax to benefit Kentucky and its citizens regardless of the attendance. So why the paper’s concern? Where is the story? Ultimately, what is the article’s author, an “investigative” reporter, supposedly investigating here? If backers of a tourist attraction like an amusement park with thrill rides would also want to locate in Kentucky and its feasibility study showed 1.6 million guests the first year, would the paper also “investigate”?

Poor dumb Ken. I’ll try to explain.

Even without considering the finances, people are right to be concerned about the construction of another exhibit dedicated to ignorance in the state. It harms their reputation, it is bad for education, and it can have long-term consequences for the economy that are not good. Do you really want to be known as the state with the really stupid workforce?

This is not an automatic win situation for the state, no matter how Ham tries to spin it. The state will be investing resources in this project, and while Ken Ham seems unconcerned if the actual attendance is much less than the estimate, the state should be: that affects the economic viability of the project. Granting millions of dollars in incentives to a big theme park that flops is not good for the state.

If Answers in Genesis were not looking for state money and expecting the state to expand the highways and other infrastructure projects, and was the sole contributor to the expenses, there wouldn’t be as much concern about the funny numbers in their feasibility study…but they aren’t alone. They’re looking to drag down other investors with a scheme built on unreliable numbers.

And yes, if a non-religious group showed up in the state and asked for a $50 million handout to build their theme park, I’m sure the paper would investigate. Dodgy schemes with a poor record of success are always ripe for investigative reporting.

Ham ought to read this opinion piece. It lays out the facts very clearly.

In the latest shoe to drop, Courier-Journal reporter Andrew Wolfson wrote in Sunday’s editions that a half-dozen theme-park experts find that the developers’ estimates of 1.6 million annual visitors to the Ark park are wildly optimistic.

They note that Kentucky Kingdom, which is now closed but hopes to reopen in 2012, and Holiday World in Southern Indiana have never attracted that many people, despite being long-standing institutions and offering a broader appeal. Ark Encounter would actually be less of an amusement park than an outdoor museum to a literal interpretation of the Bible, including the belief that the world was created in six days as recently as 6,000 years ago and that humans co-existed with dinosaurs.

To attract 1.6 million visitors, the park — again, absent significant tourist facilities — would have to attract four times as many visitors as the nearby Creation Museum.

The record elsewhere is not encouraging. Bible Park USA, whose two proposals to build biblical-story parks in Tennessee were rejected, is exploring Southern Kentucky sites, also with state tax incentives. Holy Land USA, which opened in Virginia in 1972, closed in 2009. Holy Land Experience in Orlando, Fla., struggled with declining attendance and rising costs and debt until it was sold to the nation’s largest religious broadcaster. It gets a little over 200,000 visitors a year.

Indeed, the saturated theme-park market and the depressed economy make times tough for any new park. The most recent large amusement park, the Hard Rock Park in Myrtle Beach, S.C., closed five months after opening in 2008 and failed again the following year under new management, leaving investors, contractors and vendors in the lurch.

That’s reality. It says that the extravagant expectations of the feasibility study Ken Ham’s pal scribbled up (and which they are still keeping secret) are unlikely to be met, and yet another theme park with a very narrow focus is a poor investment. I know he’s not used to dealing with facts, but other people are.

Of course, I don’t care much about the economics. I’m more concerned that this is yet another effort to put together a giant exercise in miseducation for the state, where a small group of ignorant people are the recipients of large amounts of money that they use to lie to the public. The Ark story is nonsense, it never happened and couldn’t happened, and building expensive monuments to fairy tales sends a cracked and damaging message to the citizenry.

The Australian census

The next Australian census is coming up in August, and the Atheist Foundation of Australia has begun an awareness campaign to clarify one issue. When you’re asked about your religion, don’t simply answer by default with what faith you were brought up in; answer accurately about your current views. There are a lot of people who just blandly answer with whatever church they attended as a child, which tends to inflate the perception of the importance of religion.

For instance, I was brought up as a Lutheran of Scandinavian descent, and of course that has affected my cultural attitudes, but it would be as silly for me to say I’m a Lutheran as it would be to say I’m a Swede. I’m an American atheist. Similarly, Australians, if you were brought up in the Anglican church and still feel a nominal attachment to that faith, don’t answer by where you park your car when you go to family weddings and funerals, but by your actual philosophical leanings, whatever they are.

That’s not so hard, now is it?

“the outworking of the corrosive nihilistic amorality that is inherent to evolutionary materialism”

The IDiots at Uncommon Descent are horrified and appalled by my ideas about the status of fetuses and babies … so horrified, in fact, that some of them want to make me the poster child for the fall of Western Civilization into a godless, nihilistic chaos in which babies are casually destroyed, and there are of course, a few comparisons to Hitler. But then, they are IDiots, after all.

I was amused by this remark from one of the deathcultists:

Sad to say, what we just saw from PZM, is the outworking of the corrosive nihilistic amorality that is inherent to evolutionary materialism. Hopefully, sufficient of us still have enough moral sensitivity to see the absurdity and the danger if this agenda is allowed to triumph in our civilisation.

Anyway, they found this list of the 25 most influential atheists, and fired off a questionnaire to all of them, looking to see if all atheists are as evil as I am, or whether I’m just the most evil of them all.

(a) Do you believe that a newborn baby is fully human? Yes/No

(b) Do you believe that a newborn baby is a person? Yes/No

(c) Do you believe that a newborn baby has a right to life? Yes/No

(d) Do you believe that every human person has a duty towards newborn babies, to refrain from killing them? Yes/No

(e) Do you believe that killing a newborn baby is just as wrong as killing an adult? Yes/No

As you can see, they’re blinded by an assumption that you can reduce a continuum of potential and actuality to black & white answers, which is the whole problem I’ve complained about before, and what they’ve written is actually a confirmation of my complaint about pro-lifers: they don’t think, and they don’t comprehend. They’ve gotten a few replies from those influential atheists, and most have fallen into the trap. I have to give James Randi credit for making the best answer:

I will not respond to such a heavily biased set of questions, and I could not do so without providing extensive explanations for my answers. The “quiz” is short, but the answers would be far too involved and lengthy.

I will simply repeat what I’ve said before, and not bother with their stupid poll. We all understand “being human” to mean something more than being a eukaryote with a certain assortment of genes: there are “fully human” cells that I will unconcernedly dump into the toilet and flush away every morning, and there are fully developed individuals in my life who I will revere and honor, and everything in between. The dehumanizing aspect of the so-called pro-life position is the flattening of the complexity of humanity and personhood, and its reduction to nothing more than possession of a specific set of chromosomes. To regard a freshly fertilized zygote as the full legal, ethical, and social equivalent of a young woman diminishes the woman; it does not elevate the zygote, which is still just a single cell. It is that fundamentalist Christian view, shallow and ignorant as it is, that is ultimately the corrosive agent in our culture, since it demands unthinking obedience to a rigid dogma rather than an honest evaluation of reality, and it harms the conscious agents who actually create and maintain our culture.

My position is one that demands we respect an organism for what it is, not what it isn’t. It recognizes that an epithelial cell shed from the lining of my colon is less valuable than a gamete is less valuable than a zygote is less valuable than a fetus is less valuable than a newborn. It does not imply that one must still adhere to the black & and white thinking of the IDiots and draw a line, and say that on one side of the line, everything is garbage that can be destroyed without concern, and on the other side, everything is sacred and must be preserved at all costs.

A seed is not a tree. That doesn’t imply that I’m on a crusade to destroy seeds.

Warmup for the first day of classes

The spring semester starts tomorrow, and this term I’m teaching three classes: one I’m familiar with, one I haven’t taught in four years, and another one I’ve never taught. It’s going to be a busy busy busy term.

But then I had an idea. If I could just lecture like this…

…then I could probably finish off the whole semester’s teaching load this week. The students won’t mind, will they?

An unfortunate choice of subject

In my previous post about an absurd NIMBY protest in Canada, I suggested that it would be far worse to live next to a pig farm than a hospice. I was not aware of the sordid story of Canadian serial killer and hog farmer Robert Pickton and the rather traumatic associations people in that region have between death and pig farms. No such connection was intended, and my apologies to anyone who thought I was making any implications between dying in a hospice and being murdered by a vile criminal.

NIMBY

Not in my backyard! I wouldn’t want a hog farm to be built upwind of me, because of the stench. I wouldn’t want an airport built next door, because of the noise. I don’t want a church in my neighborhood, because of the traffic in stupidity (but too bad, I’m stuck with several of them). There are lots of reasons some kinds of properties are incompatible with residential living, but here’s a new one. Tenants in a pricey Vancouver highrise are protesting the construction of a hospice nearby. I’d love to have a hospice go up next door; they tend to be quiet, tasteful, well-maintained, and good contributors to the community. But these residents are objecting because of the unpleasant effluvia the hospice would produce.

Wait, what? What could a hospice produce to poison a neighborhood?

“‘Death is the Yin and ‘Live’ is the Yang,” it [a letter to the hospital] read. “If the Yin and Yang are near to each other, ‘Death’ will bring bad luck, meaning sickness and even death . . . The ghosts of the dead will invade and harass the living.”

That’s right. Upscale residents of a condominium complex with units worth about a million dollars are afraid of ghosts. Dying people must be tucked away somewhere remote where they can haunt the place of their death without their restless spirits stinkin’ up the good neighborhoods.

I’m hoping that these complaining, over-privileged superstitious nitwits remember this when they are old and dying — as they most likely will be someday — and courteously excuse themselves to go gasp out their last breaths in some place where civilized people won’t be troubled.

I recommend the hog farm. It might expedite their departure from this planet if those final breaths are taken somewhere where the soft breezes waft over a fecal lake before arriving at the rickety bed in the drafty shack in which they lay dying. Their ghosts probably won’t want to hang around long afterwards, either.

What tool would you put in your cognitive toolkit?

The Edge annual question and its answers are out. This year, John Brockman asked, “What scientific concept would improve everybody’s cognitive toolkit?” He got 158 people to send in answers.

I was one of them. If you like my answer, you might also like Sean Carroll’s and Carl Zimmer’s — we seem to have made similar points. Carl has a thread on the topic, and so does Sean: I think I like his original title of dysteleological physicalism better, never mind Carl’s post deploring jargon.