Rebuked by Michael Egnor!

It’s kind of like having my fashion sense chastised by the Insane Clown Posse…I’m not going to lose sleep over it. He’s upset that I don’t think a blastocyst deserves the same consideration we give to a child or an adult human being — that I have baldly stated that I’m pro-abortion. Unfortunately, his argument against my position doesn’t hold up at all well.

Women have a right to control their bodies — the right to self-determination. Yet the right to self-determination is contingent. One does not have a right to kill another person. The right to life supersedes the right to self-determination. When a woman is pregnant, the rights of two human beings must be weighed — that of the woman, and that of the child. While decent people agree on the rights of the woman, what about the rights of the child? What is the moral status of a child (or an embryo or a zygote) before birth? Is the unborn child a person?

My answers:

Biology 101: Human life — the existence of a discreet individual human being — begins at conception and ends at natural death.

Morality 101: All human beings are persons, and all human beings (from conception to natural death) are entitled to the fundamental right of personhood: the right to life.

Denial of personhood to some human beings — to Jews, to blacks, to women, to unborn children — is profound evil, and is the same evil.

So, according to Egnor, this is a “discreet [sic, I presume] individual human being”:

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So is this:

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And they have exactly the same right to live as these:

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Huh. I don’t know about you, but to me, that doesn’t exalt human life at all — it seems to do the opposite, and devalue the life of women.

Maybe when Egnor graduates to something beyond the 101 level, he’ll learn that human cells are not equivalent to a full human life. An “unborn child” (what a silly euphemism!) is not suddenly a person at conception: development is a gradual process of epigenesis, in which information and complexity expand over time, and the person does not form in an instant. There is no black-and-white boundary between non-personhood and personhood — it’s an arbitrary line drawn in a continuum.

The War on Christmas escalates

Now the Catholic League — you know it’s going to get ugly when Bill Donohue joins the fray — has bought a billboard near the American Atheists’ billboard. The pro-superstition sign says, “You Know It’s Real: This Season Celebrate Jesus“. Isn’t that sweet? It’s just like the religious side to proclaim a falsehood. Anyway, they’re welcome to buy the ad space. The real winners here are the commercial enterprises marketing billboards and selling, selling, selling…and when you get right down to it, isn’t that what Christmas is really all about?

Meanwhile, the British have their own weird version of an indignant Christian majority standing up against oppression: a group has launched the Not Ashamed campaign, in which Christians are urged to be shameless, as if they’ve ever had a problem with that.

Paul Sims calls them out on the silliness. They’re seeing the same ridiculous whining over there that we are here, where outraged empurpled Christians claim that “Merry Christmas” is an endangered phrase and somehow they’re being repressed by the fact that sometimes people say “Season’s Greetings!” or “Happy Holidays!”, which I have to say as an atheist are about the two least ferocious battle cries I could imagine. In response to the Christian persecution complex over Christmas, he says:

But it isn’t happening. When are campaigners like Carey – and members of the government like Eric Pickles – going to take a look around them and finally admit that there is no widespread movement to ban Christmas. Lots of non-religious people (I’d wager the majority) even quite like it. I know I do. Some might even (whisper it…) confess that they quite enjoy hearing the odd carol, and find the local nativity scene (yes they still exist) quite endearing. Sure, there are Season’s Greetings cards and the like, but I guarantee that your local card shop will have plenty of religious ones too. It’s called catering to a diverse market – Christmas is a Christian festival, yes, but it’s also a mid-winter celebration (whose history stretches back to pagan times) that means lots of different things to lots of different people. But one thing we can all agree on is that it’s an enjoyable time of year, whether you include the baby Jesus or not. Banning it would be a really bad (and quite frankly bizarre) thing to do.

He also has a poll question. Would you believe that so far, it looks like people will still be able to celebrate Christmas even when the atheist dictators take over the universe?

Would you like to ban the Christian version of Christmas?

Yes 11.39%

No 88.61%

Of course, the evil truth is that I don’t want to ban Christmas either — I plan to coopt it as an atheist holiday. Bwahahahahahaha!

Short notice and bad creationist politics

Answers in Genesis is planning to build an idiotic creationist theme park in Kentucky — we’ve known that for a little while now. The latest news, though, is that they’ve brought Steve Beshears, governor of Kentucky, on board to participate in a press conference announcing the latest accomplishment of creationism. That’s right, the Democratic governor of Kentucky is going to endorse this latest monument to ignorance and miseducation.

Early tomorrow morning. That is, Wednesday. At 9:30. It’s a smart move, giving us little time to respond.

So, belatedly, I’ll ask you all to register your displeasure with the governor’s office. Especially if you are a resident of Kentucky, someone whose vote matters to this clown, let him know that you’re outraged…but outsiders expressing their polite disrespect for a pol pandering to anti-scientific wackaloons is also useful.

You can call him at:

Main Line: (502) 564-2611
Fax: (502) 564-2517
TDD: (502) 564-9551

Or use the contact form.

It’s almost certainly too late to convince him to back out of this deal with the goofball, especially since this notice is going up in the middle of the night and only a few hours before the meeting, but getting public disapproval piling up on his desk even after the fact will help him think twice before doing this kind of thing again.

Kurzweil = Criswell

You all remember Criswell, right, the amazing prognosticator of Plan 9 From Outer Space? Ray Kurzweil fits the mold: vague predictions, slippery, fuzzy statements, backtracking and excuse-making. The only differences are that Kurzweil is cold-reading technology rather than people’s personalities, and like most mediums, he tends to make happy optimistic predictions that sell better than some of the wackier stuff Criswell talked about (there has been no cannibal apocalypse, and Criswell was one of the early kooks to leap on the end-of-the-world in 2012 bandwagon; Kurzweil just prattles about the rapture of the nerds).

Anyway, I’m not the only naysayer. John Rennie assesses Kurzweil’s predictions, which (surprise!) mainly turn out to be overhyped nonsense. I also learned something interesting:

To help spread the gospel of accelerating returns, Kurzweil and entrepreneur Peter Diamandis established the Singularity University, in California, which offers 9-day executive training sessions (for $15 000) and 10-week graduate studies (for $25 000) on how to understand and master exponentially advancing technologies.

Wow. There’s money in woo, isn’t there?

PZ PREDICTS! I see a flood of email in the near future from fervent followers of the Ray; I see Kurzweil looking cross and popping a few dozen more vitamin pills to reduce the aging effects of his irritation. But then, every time I criticize the Master of Technology Woo, that’s what I get, and he drowns himself in pills every day anyway.

Get over yourselves, timid atheists

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That is a billboard that’s appeared in New Jersey, thanks to American Atheists. It is assertive and strong and clearly expresses an idea of atheism, that the tales we are told about religious ideas are superstitious myths, and I approve of that message.

Some atheists don’t.

I was raised pretty devoutly Catholic, attended a Catholic university (Go Irish), and after college realized that I’m an atheist. My family is still Catholic and many of my friends still attend mass, and every day, I struggle with Not Being A Big Fucking Dick About It (and I often fail and end up acting like a jerk, and then I feel horrible). This is an example of a group of atheists losing that struggle.

Chris Hitchens-like atheists and agnostics would disagree with me (and then tell me that it is impossible for me to be funny, as a woman), but, in my experience, I’ve found that confrontational atheism isn’t productive, just as aggressive proselytizing on the part of religious groups isn’t a good way to endear the religion to the populace in the modern era. Many of the holidays that are celebrated around this time of the year are religious in nature, and part of existing as a decent person in this world is letting people go about their daily lives in peace.

She doesn’t want to be a Big Dick to the religious, but oh, yes, sneering at a bunch of loser atheists…that’s safe. No one feels bad about that. As we all know, good atheists bow and scrap and say “Yassuh” to the religious, and never ever disagree with them. It’s so much more productive to reassure believers in dogma and superstition that their myths are reasonable, or at least to sit back and keep our mouths shut.

I agree that letting people go about their lives in peace is the decent thing to do. So, tell me, what about that sign interferes with common decency?

Are people who see that sign subsequently unable to go to church? Does it silence preachers all across the land?

No.

Does that sign incite hatred, does it deprive people of their civil rights, does it oppress a minority?

No.

Does it misrepresent atheism, does it unjustly criticize religious people for ideas they do not hold (which, by the way, would be wrong, but doesn’t interfere with people’s lives)?

No.

Might it stir a little resentment, maybe even sting Christians a little bit because it reminds them that atheists exist and freakin’ disagree with them?

YES! And that is a good thing that does them no harm, and even does them considerable good. We’re here, we’re just as much a part of this society as they are, and we’re not going to sit silently any more.

If Christians resent that, well, they can just read Jezebel or a thousand other sites and discover the self-loathing atheists who consider the forthright expression of their ideas to be dickish and indecent, and restore their sense of smug superiority that way.

Non-breeding behavior must be punished

Prime Minister Raila Odinga of Kenya has called for the arrest of all gay couples in the country. He’s probably been listening to the American Christian evangelicals who’ve been busily poisoning Africa for the last century or so — the West has been such a blight on that continent for so long. Anyway, what’s interesting is his rationale for outlawing gays — anti-gay ideology goes hand-in-hand with a dismissive view of women.

The premier thrilled the crowd in a largely conservative country when he asserted that the country’s recent census showed there were more women than men and there was no need for same sex relationships.

He termed it “madness” for a man to fall in love with another man while there were “plenty of women” and added that there was no need for women to engage in lesbianism “yet they can bear children”.

It’s naked patriarchal thinking all the way down. There are enough women for all the men, therefore the men should have sex with them. That there are more women than men should imply that the excess women (from this point of view, of course, all women beyond what are needed to service the men are “excess”) ought to be free to be lesbians, but no — they all have a job to do. They must be made pregnant.

It’s as if there is only one reason that human beings would associate with one another, and that is procreation, and there is one purpose for women, and that is to bear men’s children, and in this blinkered view of the human species, recreational intercourse of all sorts is alien and non-productive. In that sense, unfortunately, most of the activities of civilization are also alien to these crazy blind people.

Wikileaks poll

Hmmm. We may not be able to really skew this poll, since my sense is that readers here are somewhat divided on the topic — but here goes anyway. Obama wants to crack down on leakers, while Sarah Palin thinks we ought to hunt down Assange and treat him like a terrorist. So what do readers of the NY Daily News (and now, Pharyngula) think?

Is WikiLeaks right in making these ‘secret’ documents public?

Yes, the people have a right to know. 58%
No, they are endangering lives and destroying important alliances. 39%
I don’t know 3%