Another mobile element has been slotted into the SciBorg matrix: everyone say hello to The Thoughtful Animal, a blog on animal cognition. So far, Needs More Squid, but it could be interesting.
It’s been a long term issue: a lot of vocal skeptics want nothing to do with atheism. They see it as a difficult issue that could sidetrack campaigns to encourage critical thinking, even though a lot of prominent skeptics are also atheists. I’ve never quite seen the logic: they’re going to oppose the use of magic crystals to enhance your aura, but praying to a magical sky-primate to bring you a new bicycle…eh, it doesn’t hurt. It seems a little inconsistent.
Anyway, Rebecca Watson, a godless skeptic if ever there was one, wrote a bit in support of the Hitchens/Dawkins proposal to bring legal action against the perfidious pope, and she caught some flak for it — people claimed that opposing religion, even if it is a baby-raping religion, could ‘harm the cause’ (Oh, those three words…I have heard them so often). Watson has a good reply.
So is this effort going to somehow hurt the “skeptical movement?” You may notice that I use the quotation marks here, because I can’t bring myself to seriously consider a movement supposedly based on the defense of rationality that would turn its back on children who are raped by men they trust because those men claim a supernatural being gives them power, wisdom, and the keys to eternal life with a direct line to God’s ear. If we discovered that a world-famous psychic was leading a secretive cabal that protected child rapists, would we be silent? If a world-famous faith healer was using his heavenly persona to molest kids, would we say that it’s not our fight? You might. I couldn’t.
I would hope, though, that it wouldn’t take molestation of children to stir up a skeptic (although, apparently, even that won’t rouse some of them, if the culprit is a priest). Shouldn’t an organization that claims you’ll go to hell after you’re dead if you don’t give them money while you’re alive also be on every skeptic’s hit list?
The horrible evidence of a Catholic cover-up keeps piling up in these various sex abuse cases…what’s going on? Certain minds are certainly drifting towards conspiracy theories, evil attempts to bring down the church with a web of deception. And if that’s the case, who is behind it all? Isn’t it obvious? It must be…The Jews!!!
A website quoted Giacomo Babini, the emeritus bishop of Grosseto, as saying he believed a “Zionist attack” was behind the criticism, considering how “powerful and refined” the criticism is.
Unfortunately, the article is accompanied by a photo of the Pope…and this doesn’t necessarily reflect his views. It is the position of one rather cranky, old, and possibly senile priest.
Allegedly speaking to the Catholic website Pontifex, Babini, 81, was quoted as saying: “They do not want the church, they are its natural enemies. Deep down, historically speaking, the Jews are God killers.”
It’s probably also the view of Mel Gibson and a terrifying number of conservative Catholics. It’s also a position advanced by that important event in Catholic history, the Fourth Lateran Council, which also, curiously enough, established that whole celibate priests nonsense. You can trace a lot of the most horrible Catholic ideas right back to 1215, and we’re still suffering for their foolishness.
I’m a little worried. Jason Rosenhouse wrote about this new paper by Peter Hess, the Faith Project Director (I’m already rolling my eyes) of the NCSE, and I learn that the first failing of Intelligent Design creationism is that it is blasphemous.
Uh-oh.
I am proudly and unapologetically blasphemous, and I encourage other people to join my heretical ranks all the time. If ID is blasphemous, it’s the first element of their program that I can approve of — anything that weakens the grip of faith has got something good going for it. It’s simply not a problem. It can’t even be a problem for a religious program in America — we’re a pluralist society, and everything is blasphemous to someone. The mild-mannered theistic evolutionists think ID is blasphemy, but so does Ken Ham…and Ham also thinks the theistic evolutionists are heretics, apostates, and blaspheming bastards who defile the Holy Word of God. Lutherans are blaspheming Catholics. Baptists blaspheme against the sacred doctrines of Calvin. Every time you pull out a cell phone, you’re insulting the Amish way of life, and Ron Jeremy is glad the Shakers died out. So? We can’t use and absence of blasphemy as a criterion for truth and accuracy. It’s silly to bring it up. And, as Jason points out, the same religious arguments applied against ID are equally valid when aimed at theistic evolutionists.
I’m also troubled by this whole position of Faith Project Director. Peter Hess is almost certainly a nice guy, and he’s on the side of evolution, or he wouldn’t be working at NCSE…but why is the NCSE now actively engaged in the business of promoting Faith Projects, and why do they have a professional Bible thumper to pontificate on hair-splitting matters of dogma? They’re all wrong. Having a theologian on staff to tell us that some of them are more wrong than others on matters sacerdotal, from his position which is just as shaky as everyone else’s, seems to me to be so bad that it falls into the category of not even wrong.
And then there’s the matter of this paper. It is titled, “CREATION, DESIGN AND EVOLUTION: CAN SCIENCE DISCOVER OR ELIMINATE GOD?”, and the answer Hess gives is no: “The scientific quest for the designer behind the veil of nature ultimately fails—science can neither discover nor eliminate God.”
That’s easy, then. God is irrelevant. These guys always seem to use “science” as a word demarcating a very narrow field of endeavor involving white lab coats, test tubes, and strangely colored solutions, but it isn’t. Science is simply a process for examining the world, and anyone can do it, even if you do’t have a lab coat. If something has an effect or influence, you can try to examine it using the tools of science — so when someone announces that gods cannot be detected by observation or experiment, they are saying they don’t matter and don’t do anything, which is exactly what this atheist has been saying all along.
This is the strange thing about the whole argument. When I was on my daily walk today, I was surrounded by a million mysteries: what’s in that house? How was this sidewalk made? What signaling molecules are moving through that tree to trigger new bud formation? What insect was making that odd sound? Why was my left ankle sore this morning? Were there any neutrinos whizzing through me right now? How did that boulder get on that lot? You get the idea. We’re immersed in a piece of the universe and we don’t know a lot about it, but we’re seeing these curious eruptions of natural phenomena all around us, and we can pursue them if we want.
That’s the obnoxious part of religion, and why it’s in conflict with science. Science is the world of Let’s-Find-Out, while religion is always the land of You-Can’t-Know-That. One tries to build fences around sacred domains, the other has great fun knocking them down. Go ahead, pretend that your god is safe and hidden away where scientists can’t poke at him with needles or measure his emanations with widgets that go beep or photograph his spoor and stick it in a chromatograph — we don’t care. The only way he can escape our probes is if he doesn’t exist…so the more you protest that he is absolutely indetectible, the more we nod and say, “Then you’re admitting that he isn’t even vapor.”
Denying god is yet more blasphemy, isn’t it? That’s why I’m in trouble. Of course, claiming that god has no measurable influence in the world is probably also blasphemy, which puts Peter Hess in the theological clink, too.
I’m a shoo-in now. Although my mind may have just blown up.
In what may come as a surprise for some, Huckabee agreed that an atheist could be fit to serve as president. “I’d rather have an honest atheist than a dishonest religious person,” he said.
Don’t worry. He didn’t mean it. He’s actually just doing some sneaky sniping at Mitt Romney. He continues with a clarification of what he really meant.
It’s better to have a person who says, ‘Look, I just don’t believe, and that’s where my honest position happens to be. I’m frankly more OK with that than a person who says, ‘Oh, I am very much a Christian. I very much love God.’ And then they live as if they are atheists, as if they have no moral groundings at all. That’s more troubling.”
I think it’s nice if a person believes in God. I’d hate to think somebody was making decisions who thought that he couldn’t be higher than himself.
See? He still equates atheism with a complete lack of moral grounding. He’s still a slimebag.
Michael Behe is a professor at Lehigh University. He’s also a crank, marginalized and mocked and belittled in academia, and regarded as an ignorant ideologue. But he’s still holding his position and he’s still allowed to express himself. That’s the principled position we hold in academia — he’s allowed to speak even stupidly, and we’re allowed to fire back.
That’s not the way creationists work, though. Bruce Waltke is apparently a respected Old Testament scholar who used to work at the Reformed Theological Seminary. Not any more, though. He made the mistake of speaking in a BioLogos-sponsored seminar, saying that you could be a Christian, you could even believe the Bible was inerrant, and you could also believe in evolution. He was promptly shown the door, but not because what he said was irrational and incoherent, but because evolution is a proscribed subject.
But while Milton insisted that this provides for “a diversity” of views, he acknowledged that others are not permitted. Darwinian views, and any suggestion that humans didn’t arrive on earth directly from being created by God (as opposed to having evolved from other forms of life) are not allowed, he said, and faculty members know this.
This is a tough one for me. The article is full of opinion from loons affiliated with BioLogos and the Templeton Foundation, organizations that I think are dangerous because they willfully poison science with superstition, so it hurts to agree with them at all, especially since they only endorse the compatibility of religion and science as a tool to smuggle lies into the search for truth…but they are right to condemn the closed-mindedness of these theologians.
Of course, I also have a tiny amount of sympathy for the theologians. Their beliefs are so ridiculous (and I include the beliefs of Waltke and the followers of BioLogos and Templeton) that any introduction of reason and evidence-based thinking risks inducing the meltdown of the elaborately rickety structure of their belief. The RTS should be reassured, though: BioLogos and Templeton both show that at least some people’s stupidity can perennially persist even in the face of facts that show they are wrong.
Father Maciel was one of the most notorious influential pedophiles in the Catholic hierarchy — he led an order, the Legion of Christ, which seems to have consisted of likely catamites for his pleasures. Predatory sexual habits don’t seem to be his only legacy, though: follow the money.
Maciel left a trail of wreckage among his followers. Moreover, in a gilded irony for Benedict — who prosecuted him despite pressure from Maciel’s chief supporter, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, Vatican secretary of state from 1990 to 2006 — Maciel left an ecclesiastical empire with which the church must now contend. The Italian newsweekly L’espresso estimates the Legion’s assets at 25 billion euros, with a $650 million annual budget, according to The Wall Street Journal .The order numbered 700 priests and 1,300 seminarians in 2008. On March 15 of this year, five bishops, called visitators, from as many countries, delivered their reports to the pope after a seven-month investigation. A final report is expected by the end of April.
Read the whole article. The twisted sexual politics of Catholicism are just a small part of the corrupt whole: the accounts of the kickbacks and bribes — $5000 here, $10000 there, all adding up to a giant pot of cash — make the organization sound like just a gilded Mafia.
For some reason, this video came to mind after reading it.
Klotho (KL) is an interesting gene. It produces an enzyme which seems to be involved in repressing cellular senescence by regulating the p53 pathway, mouse mutations in these genes produce the symptoms of accelerated aging, and there are even a couple of known human alleles correlated with changes in longevity and coronary artery disease. The current research is at the level of basic science, though, asking how this gene product fits into the regulatory web that maintains cell states; it is not ready for any kind of medical work, I don’t even know how we would take advantage of the information to tinker with aging processes, and as far as I know, there are no clinical trials of any kind in the works. So it’s promising and is useful information, but it’s not at all ready or even approachable for medical use, yet.
That doesn’t stop the quacks, though!
A commercial quack operation called Homeovitality is taking advantage of a tiny bit of research (to create pseudo-scientific buzzwords) and people’s ignorance to market fake therapies. One among several is based on a smidgen of truth about the Klotho gene and a lot of fakery.
Homeovitality® is an entirely new concept in health promotion. It is designed to help people achieve and maintain different forms of nature’s “super-health” and stay healthy. For the first time ever, Homeovitality® helps everyone to benefit from new “cutting-edge” genetic and other scientific discoveries right now using a safe, natural non-pharmacological delivery system.
You may be wondering how they are taking advantage of “cutting-edge” research. Here’s how.
Because of Dr. Matsumara’s work and completion of the Human Genome Project, the complete DNA sequence of the KL gene has been worked out. Therefore, to target your KL gene, a DNA molecule was prepared that was identical in sequence to 273 base pairs of an active part of everyone’s KL gene. The sequence of the KL targeting molecule is as follows;
5′- ACTACCGCTT CTCCATCTCG TGGGCGCGAG TGCTCCCCAA TGGCAGCGCG GGCGTCCCCA ACCGCGAGGG GCTGCGCTAC TACCGGCGCC TGCTGGAGCG GCTGCGGGAG CTGGGCGTGC AGCCCGTGGT CACCCTGTAC CACTGGGACC TGCCCCAGCG CCTGCAGGAC GCCTACGGCG GCTGGGCCAA CCGCGCCCTG GCCGACCACT TCAGGGATTA CGCGGAGCTC TGCTTCCGCC ACTTCGGCGG TCAGGTCAAG TACTGGATCA CCA -3′.
The KL targeting molecule, as well as the others was prepared, purified and sequenced by one of Australia’s leading genetics laboratories.
So they get onto the easily accessed NIH site and get the gene sequence, and then they order a vial of the purified DNA from a commercial outfit (this is trivial: the NIH even includes a link to suppliers of cDNA clones).
Now what?
I mean, really, just having a strand of DNA with the sequence of Klotho does nothing — it’s the action of the gene product in the cell that plays a subtle role in aging. What we need for a therapeutic use of this information is a way to regulate the activity of the protein in cells in a predictable way. So what does Homeovitality® have people do?
Drink a DNA solution? Are they insane? That’s just going to get broken down and do nothing, and besides, it’s not as if your body contains some shortage of Klotho genes — every cell in your body has a copy. Of course, even that objection is pointless, because you aren’t actually drinking any DNA. This is a homeopathic solution.
Homeovitality® products have also been succussed at each dilution stage so they will also help to promote desirable forms of hybrid vigour in a “like promotes like” mode of action involving some of the mechanisms (4) described by Dr. Kratz, (http://kulisz.com/how_does_homeopathy_work.htm).
Homeovitality® products are safe because firstly, they are used at similar dilutions to classical homeopathic disease remedies and secondly, hybrid vigour is a completely natural biological process that has been developed by nature over millions of years to enable all creatures to enjoy “super health” and disease resistance.
They’re selling bottles of water and pretending it’s medicine, with a cloud of pseudo-scientific hokum to justify it.
And here’s another sad fact: the creator of this snake-oil, Peter Kay, has a legitimate degree and a good collection of scientific publications to his name, some of them in topics with which I am familiar. None of them justify this homeopathic DNA nonsense. It looks like someone has realized that science doesn’t pay as well as grifting.
Kurt Zimmerman is pissed off. He’s not a very bright guy, and he doesn’t know much about biology or history, and he’s extremely annoyed that not only is the local school teaching his kids stuff he didn’t know, but they’re actually telling them that his sources of information are wrong. You see, the only level of education we’re allowed to raise children to is the Kurt Zimmerman level…which is a little scary. I was kind of hoping that sending my kids off to school would produce progeny who are smarter than me, and now I learn that they’re only supposed to produce kids who are dumber than Kurt Zimmerman? How dismaying.
Anyway, Zimmerman is upset because he found a biology textbook that defines creationism as “the biblical myth that the universe was created by the Judeo-Christian god in 7 days”. This is mostly factually correct (one might quibble that the bible actually says their god created the earth in six days, and doesn’t really say much about the universe as a whole…but really, when you’re dealing with that degree of lunacy, 7 is the same as 6 is the same as canned beans), but seeing “myth” in the same sentence as “bible” has made Mr Zimmerman quite unhinged.
Zimmerman asked in December that the school immediately quit using the book “Asking About Life” in his son’s class and all classes.
He said it could “mislead, belittle and discourage students in believing in creationism and pointedly calls the Bible a myth.”
It’s not misleading at all, it doesn’t belittle students except in the sense that students who believe something that is wrong will be faced with a direct statement that they are wrong, and I should hope schools would discourage people from believing in stupid and fallacious mush! It also doesn’t go as far as I’d like or that Zimmerman thinks it does: it does not call the bible a myth. It says that it contains a myth, which it does. It would be nice if we did have a high school biology book that called all of Christianity and Judaism a collection of myths, but we don’t. Yet.
But Zimmerman has accomplished one triumph: he has won himself a brief spot on Fox News. The really astonishing thing about this clip is that the two Fox interviewers, Barbie and Dullard, actually come off as dumber than he is.
The good news, though, is that the local school board has decided not to decide anything about the book for 30 days. That’s committee-speak for “let’s wait for the noise and notoriety of Mr Zipperhead to die down a bit, so we can ignore the whole stupid proposal”.
Oh, this is interesting: a commenter looked up the book on Google Books and got the actual, full quote from the book.
In the 1970s and 1980s, antievolutionists in Arkansas, Tennessee and
Louisiana passed identical bills calling for “equal time” for teaching
evolution and creationism, the biblical myth that the universe was
created by the Judeo-Christian god in six days. But a court ruled that
the “equal-time” bill was unconstitutional on the grounds that it
violated the separation of church and state.
That’s even biblically accurate. And it’s a very reasonable context in which to mention the topic of creationism.
The Connecticut legislature is considering a bill that would remove teh statute of limitations on child sex abuse cases. Guess who is opposing the bill. No, it’s not NAMBLA. No, it’s not a mob of sexually precocious toddlers. It’s…the Catholic Church! You probably didn’t see that one coming.
The reason they oppose it isn’t some conservative legal principle. They spilled the beans already — it’s the cost to the church.
The proposed change to the law would put “all Church institutions, including your parish, at risk,” says the letter, which was signed by Connecticut’s three Roman Catholic bishops.
Oh? Why are they worried? Do they have a gang of septuagenarian child molesters tucked away somewhere in the bosom of the Connecticut church?
