Scienceblogs was down for the count most of the morning — we had some annoying technical glitch on the server, nothing malicious. Now you can read this. Right? If you can’t, let me know by leaving a comment describing exactly how the site is no longer visible, why you can’t comment, and any other strange circumstances that impair your ability to read or write the page you are viewing or commenting on.
A woman wrote an article on LiveJournal, freely available to readers and for her own interests, and then the managing editor of a small magazine picked it up and published it, without notification and without, of course, payment. When the author contacted the editor and pointedly brought up the matter of the ethical lapse, suggesting that compensation could be in the form of a donation to the Columbia School of Journalism, the editor, Judith Griggs, condescendingly wrote back with this load of tripe:
Yes Monica, I have been doing this for 3 decades, having been an editor at The Voice, Housitonic Home and Connecticut Woman Magazine. I do know about copyright laws. It was “my bad” indeed, and, as the magazine is put together in long sessions, tired eyes and minds somethings forget to do these things.
But honestly Monica, the web is considered “public domain” and you should be happy we just didn’t “lift” your whole article and put someone else’s name on it! It happens a lot, clearly more than you are aware of, especially on college campuses, and the workplace. If you took offence and are unhappy, I am sorry, but you as a professional should know that the article we used written by you was in very bad need of editing, and is much better now than was originally. Now it will work well for your portfolio. For that reason, I have a bit of a difficult time with your requests for monetary gain, albeit for such a fine (and very wealthy!) institution. We put some time into rewrites, you should compensate me! I never charge young writers for advice or rewriting poorly written pieces, and have many who write for me… ALWAYS for free!
Whoa. Patronizing, critical snark from the wicked witch who plainly stole somebody else’s work for her personal gain. By the way, apparently the bits that needed editing were literal transcriptions of 16th century spellings from an old cookbook which the editor updated, not flaws in the author’s writing.
Just to add a little extra irony to the whole affair, Judith Griggs’ email had this signature:
This electronic message may contain information privileged for the addressee only.
Please be advised that the Cooks Source email addressee is not intended to be transferred to any other addressor, and any copying, distribution or use of the contents of this message is prohibited.
I think Ms Griggs is about to discover that her snootiness is going to be transferred, copied, and distributed to a greater extant than she imagined.
Ever since I ferociously asserted that god was not only dead, but never existed and never will exist, and that no amount of hand-waving speculation will convince me otherwise, those thuggish provisionalists have been gunning for me. Jerry Coyne tried, and now Greta Christina pounds on me, trying to convince me I’m wrong. They’re not succeeding.
I’m merely being honest here. I read Greta Christina’s list of events that would convince her, and I have to say that none of them would sway me. They’d convince me that there are unexplainable phenomena and beings greater than myself, but I already believe that with no problem and without budging from atheism. I’ve already dealt with the 900 foot tall Jesus fallacy (it’s not a prior conclusion of religious thought), and while finding amazingly detailed scientific information in a holy book would be impressive, evidence of beings in the past who were smarter than me isn’t evidence of a god. Also, they haven’t because they didn’t, so postulating circumstances that have been shown not to have occurred is only persuasive in the most abstract and imaginary way possible. I suppose you could postulate that I would be rich if my fabulously wealthy great-aunt had left me her billions in her will, except of course that I didn’t have a fabulously wealthy great-aunt.
Sorry, guys, you’ve failed. Your arguments haven’t even touched my premises.
But wait! There’s another challenger, that sneaky, devious, underhanded, philosophizing gadfly, John Wilkins. I don’t think he’s even trying to address what I was arguing, and he’s snuck in an interesting possibility. He calls it the Greek Panthon test, and he’s basically defining “god” as something with the possibility of existence, unlike the usual ethereal all-pervasive omniscient omnipotent eternal entity that we’ve been indoctrinated to accept as the only true kind of god in our culture. His definition is simple: If it would be a god in the Greek Pantheon, then it’s a god. So capricious, cranky beings with human-like qualities but just a little more oomph and privilege than your average vanilla human, creatures with something that would look to us like super-powers, are all gods.
So angels and saints are all gods, and Christianity becomes a polytheistic religion. Batman is a god. The Easter Bunny is a god. Babe Ruth is probably a god now. Tiger Woods might be a god, but I think the convention is that deifications tend to happen after some isolation from mundane testability, i.e. death.
So I think I’d concede that if you provide a sufficiently trivial definition of a god (but only trivial in the sense that it is probably the most common and most universal understanding of what a god is, anyway!), then you would be able to come up with evidence that would convince me of the existence of that specific being. The requirements for this being, though, would have to be sufficiently loose and achievable that you’d also end up redefining most atheists as polytheists, and you’d probably also piss off all the believers who would be even more peeved at the lumpers who diminish the exclusivity of their pantheon than they are with the atheists who simply say their pantheon is false.
I have reviewed the audition tapes you all sent in for Survivor Pharyngula, averaged together the scores given to people who had multiple recommendations, and sorted them into a ranked list, and then arbitrarily threw out everyone who got below a score of 40. Here’s the list of Enemies of the Threads.
Rascals and troublemakers, every one. But the list is too long! I have to whittle it down a bit before we move on to the next stage, so in my role as capricious autocrat, I’m going to give them all a chance to ask to be excused. Beg for mercy, entertain me, show cause to keep you around, and perhaps I shall decide on a whim to remove you from the list. It doesn’t matter if I agree with your views or not, demonstrating a sense of humor would be a plus, as would being able to make a rational argument.
I want this list cut in half, at least — if every one of these people shows that their presence is worth something to the site, maybe I’ll just call the whole show off.
So, before I throw you to the mercies of the Pharyngula commentariat, you irksome infernal rabble-rousers can show me why I should keep you around. Unless you want to be thrown to the mob, of course…
Of course they do, and lots of them — it’s a nation with a proud secular tradition.
http://suphecimelek.wordpress.com/
http://materyalistceseyler.wordpress.com/
http://nodrylight.wordpress.com/
http://garajimdakiejder.blogspot.com/
http://pozitifateizm.wordpress.com/
http://brightsturkiye.blogspot.com/
Really. You need more thread because you filled up the old one?
Oh, well, it’s an excuse to exhibit the latest Mr Deity.
(Current totals: 11,308 entries with 1,175,434 comments.)
This is the worst case of atheist buttery I’ve ever seen. I’m left with this terribly greasy, bloated feeling after going through it, and I think my arteries were clogging up just reading it. This fellow Malcolm Knox is an atheist who happily sends his kids off to the Catholic church, which is just fine (his wife is Catholic)…but he’s got to rattle off ten terrible, awful, stupid excuses for why he has to do it. It’s embarrassing how pathetic his reasoning is. And my SIWOTI syndrome compels me to take each one apart.
In his 1995 open letter to his 10-year-old daughter Juliet, Dawkins counselled her against belief based on “tradition, authority or revelation”. Because children, he writes, are “suckers for traditional information, they are likely to believe anything the grown-ups tell them”. If this is true, surely it applies to atheism as much as to belief. To keep my children out of church would be to impose my unbelief upon them by the exact mechanism that Dawkins warns against.
False dichotomy. Not sending kids off to be indoctrinated in church does not imply that you are instead sitting them down and preaching atheism at them. If they want to go, let them; if they don’t, let ’em stay home. That is not imposing beliefs on them, quite the opposite, it is giving them the freedom to choose.
Imagine growing up in a world where the most imposing monuments of architecture are unknown places. Do atheists really want their children to think of churches as fearsome compounds of weirdness?
Yes.
And seriously, you can explain to them what a building is for without sending them to sit in it for a few hours every week. With that attitude, he’s going to have to troop the kids off to every little architectural oddity for instruction.
I don’t believe Jesus raised Lazarus, or walked on water, or fed the masses with those loaves and fishes. I don’t believe in the seven-day Creation, the Flood, the burning bush or the parting of the Red Sea. Yet I cannot imagine feeling at home in Australia without knowing those stories.
So buy a book of Bible stories. They’re cheap and common. Really, it doesn’t take tedious weekly instruction to get the gist of the major stories in the Bible.
Unless your kids are really stupid. I’m beginning to think Mr Knox has little respect for his children, since they apparently have to be repetitively hammered with Genesis before they’ll recognize Noah’s Ark.
When (not if) my children rebel, it would have more meaning if they knew what they were rebelling against. I mean rebellion in the broadest sense: artistic creativity, inventing secret languages, striking out for independence. I mean rebellion in the sense that I rebel against Hitchens’s 300-page anti-religion harangue, God Is Not Great, even though I agree with every word. There’s something particularly bullying about singing in the choir being preached to.
So you send your kids off to literally sing in the choir being preached to? This makes no sense. Maybe it would be of benefit to the children to rebel against something rational and interesting; is he really pretending that he’s sending them to church so they’ll someday have an easy mark to flail against?
So they may come home with unanswerable questions. Who made God? Why can St Mary save some sick people and not others? I send my children to church not to find the answers – they won’t – but to come home with more questions. With unanswerable questions, they can puncture the infantile myth of their father’s omniscience.
Hey, how about having them come home with difficult, interesting questions? Like what are neutrinos, how are traits stored on chromosomes, and daddy, can we dissect the roadkill in front of the house? I think it’s great to encourage kids to ask questions, but why settle for stupid questions?
There is one basic distinction for which I admire the Catholic Church. As the coverage of Mary MacKillop’s canonisation showed, even if you reject the mumbo-jumbo of miracles, there is much to be gained from the example of selflessness.
I grew up going to church. There were nice people there. But they did not have a monopoly on selflessness, and it is offensive for Mr Knox to be perpetuationg the myth that they do.
Without it, they can never be tolerant, only indifferent. As Hitchens reminds us, churches have been bastions of religious exclusivity and intolerance. But the great crimes of the 20th century were alliances of the fundamentalist few and the indifferent many.
Wait, what? I thought you just said they were bastions of selflessness.
And once again, Knox plays the false dichotomy card. Not going to church every week is not synonymous with complete ignorance of and indifference to religion.
Religion is not synonymous with ethics. The content of NSW’s proposed schools ethics classes has been robustly debated. But to substitute ethics for scripture is akin to replacing food with vitamin pills. Biblical parables, or teachings from Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism or any other religion, may contain ethical lessons. They may not. But they do much else besides.
What? Mr Knox does not say. There’s just something in those old superstitions he wants taught, which is not an argument.
Kids don’t get indoctrinated that easily. If children’s minds were putty, they would emerge into adulthood caring for the underdog, distrusting materialism, cherishing the environment and standing up against the corrupt. These (Judeo-Christian) precepts are embedded in pretty much all of the children’s film, television and literature I’ve ever seen. Do children grow up to embrace those beliefs? The evidence suggests otherwise.
See #4. When it’s convenient, Mr Knox argues that kids will rebel against what they’re taught; when it suits him, he claims that they ignore what they’re taught. Which is it?
Also, he has a pollyannaish view of film, tv, and literature. Maybe he should take the kids to see the latest Saw film instead of Veggie Tales.
Because I had to. When my son finished his first Communion classes after two months of Sundays, he was in a celebratory mood. “Yay, now I don’t have to go to church any more!” “Not so fast,” I said. “There’s still confirmation.” He wasn’t too pleased. “But you don’t have to go to church every Sunday.” I replied: “I did when I was your age.” Did it do me any good? Possibly. It didn’t make me a believer, but it left me with some knowledge of what I was unbelieving in.
“I had to suffer when I was your age, so you get to be miserable, too”. Wow. Give that man a parenting award!
None of these were reasonable arguments for sending your kids to church every week. Not one. These are feeble exercises in rationalizing an irrational decision.
And his conclusion is even worse.
At worst, Sundays in church give hours of boredom in which the young mind can roam. Kids don’t get much of a chance to get bored. As the filmmaker Peter Weir once said, the creative mind should actively seek boredom. My children’s schooling is more engaging than mine and their leisure hours are filled with more varied activity. A little boredom now and then, sitting in church while they’re thinking about something else, can send them off to new places inside the lozenges of those stained-glass windows. The boredom of that Sunday hour, if boredom is the worst of it, might be more precious than it seems.
So lock your kids in a closet for a few hours every week.
No, boredom is not a virtue. There’s a difference between boredom and having leisure time…and an even greater difference between leisure and compulsory silence and immobility.
How about this: instead of church, give the poor kids two hours of free time on Sunday morning — no chores, no forced activity — and turn them loose in a room full of books and toys. And don’t sermonize at them, but tell them that they can talk to mommy and daddy all they want, and you’ll listen.
Jeez, but this Knox fellow seems like a sucky father.
This is billed as a special news report: do angels exist?. I remember using “special” in exactly that way in grade school, too. Do Fox News reporters also ride the short bus to work?
I suppose I should be grateful that they brought in one skeptic to moderate it a bit, but otherwise…it’s an excuse to quote the Bible a bunch of times and drag in some truly stupid people to testify. Joey Hipp ought to be in jail: after being told, he says, that his wife’s spine was so mangled she might not be able to walk, he strolls up to her hospital bed, takes her hand, and makes her stand up…what kind of dangerous moron would do that? That she isn’t crippled now is due to luck and medicine, not her husband’s demented faith.
I’m also left feeling a bit peeved at angels. That tall, handsome angel in the silver corvette who helped some lady not be late for Bible study should have been off warning Joey Hipp to slow down on his motorcycle before he killed his wife.
But yes, O you fortunate people in distant lands, this is the American news media. I bet you also didn’t realize that Mike Judge’s movie, Idiocracy, was a documentary.
