Texans can do things right, I tell you: they just booted Don McLeroy off the state board of education in the primary election. Yay!
It’s a step forward, although the rest of the board is still a muddled mix of creationist loons and cautious conservatives.
Or you will be exterminated! You know, Texas has a reputation of being a nasty place full of particularly ignorant rednecks, which I don’t blindly agree with — I know too many smart Texans, and it does have many good organizations, like the Texas Freedom Network — but this is a blight that smirches even that already sooty name. I am speaking of a vicious vigilante organization called Repent Amarillo. Look upon that link and quiver with disgust.
It’s saturated with military imagery: men in uniform, humvees, helicopters, helmets; they compare themselves to special forces; they call themselves the Army of God, and sport Bible quotes glorifying warfare. They aren’t military, but they pretend they are, and bring shame to both our soldiers and their faith. They’re actually just cowardly busybodies who snoop and whine at their neighbors, and harass their employers until they get fired. They are not nice people. They’re actually some of the worst kind of people.
They are a “rabid group of religious nuts” who object to the usual targets of fundie hatred — gays — but also harrass people who visit sex shops, engage in consensual heterosexual activity outside the bounds of traditional marriage, and…well, here’s a list of their targets.
1. Gay pride events.
2. Earth worship events such as “Earth Day”
3. Pro-abortion events or places such as Planned Parenthood
4. Breast cancer events such as “Race for the Cure” to illuminate the link between abortion and breast cancer.
5. Opening day of public schools to reach out to students.
6. Spring break events.
7. Demonically based concerts.
8. Halloween events.
9. Other events that may arise that the ministry feels called to confront.
They also plan to hit:
1. Sexually oriented businesses such as pornography shops, strip joints, and XXX-rated theaters.
2. Idolatry locations such as palm readers, false religions, and witchcraft. Many of the smaller missions listed above may be just prayer oriented missions for tearing down demonic strongholds or they may involve more aggressive use of soldiers and prayer warriors. Some other missions occasionally employed may be “undercover operations” where the groups show up together but are not publicly visible together to effect the outcome of a public meeting such as city commissioners meetings, etc.
Check out their Warfare Map. It includes local Buddhist churches (“False god”), the Islamic center (“Allah is a false god and Muhammad is a false prophet”), the Masonic Lodge (“Masonic rituals and teachings in the upper ranks is based on Egyptian paganism. Full of secrecy. Only evil hides in the dark”), the Universalist Church (“Teaches that everyone is going to heaven. This calls Christ a liar. You cannot be a Christian if you call Christ a liar”), the Unitarian Universalist Church (“Pagan and witchcraft headquarters for Amarillo. Pagan and witchcraft celebrations and rites are performed here”), St Andrew’s Episcopal Church (“Referred to an OUTstanding Amarillo’s (Homosexual activists) website as a ‘gay friendly’ church. In other words, they do not tell homosexuals who attend this church that they must repent of the sin of homosexuality. This is a serious violation of scripture”), and Beavers Gentleman Club (“Total nude strip club”), among many others.
“Repent or perish” is their message. They show up dressed in army fatigues, carrying bullhorns, with ghetto blasters blaring Christian music, and they write down license plate numbers and photograph people doing anything they disapprove of. They are our American Mutawwa’in, petty tyrants of propriety with a bloated sense of their own importance. They are our self-righteous wanna-be oppressors.
Keep this in mind. This is the future the Pat Robertsons, the James Dobsons, the Sarah Palins want for us — a kind of Saudi Arabia that differs only in the name we give our prophet.
…is that too often newspapers think you don’t need a science journalist to write it. Any ol’ hack will do. Take this article on evolution in the Vancouver Sun, which distills modern evolutionary biology into 12 theories, which happens to include Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophy as well as Intelligent Design creationism — which, at least, is pairing intellectual equals. The author, Douglas Todd, is speaking High Crackbrain and making stuff up. It’s all garbage from a buffoon who knows nothing about the field. What, you have to wonder, qualifies him to be writing on science?
He has twice taken first place in the Templeton Religion Reporter of the Year Award, which goes to the top religion reporter in the secular media in North America. Todd is the only Canadian to have received the Templeton.
Hey, the Templeton Foundation puts it right at the top of their web page: they are SUPPORTING SCIENCE. They are all about sponsoring the reconciliation of science and religion (although, perhaps, that should be written as “science and RELIGION“, since we all know where the emphasis lies). It’s just too bad that the results so often belie their claims.
Chopra has another mindless post on the HuffPo, titled Only Spirituality Can Solve The Problems Of The World. I read the whole thing. He’s got some fuzzy definitions, praises god-consciousness, gushes about love, joy, kindness, peace, etc., but overall, it’s the usual vacuous fluff. I am left with one question in reference to the bold assertion in his title.
How?
Just to name a few problems of the world: overpopulation, famine, resource depletion, water scarcity, war, and disease. Deepak Chopra, quick, 30 seconds: how will you solve any one of those problems with spirituality?
Bzzzt, time’s up. OK, clearly you can’t answer questions with that kind of scope. Let’s narrow it down a bit: the aftermath of the Chilean earthquake. How will you fix infrastructure problems with spirituality? 30 seconds.
Oh, man, you suck at this game. We’ll simplify some more. A woman comes into your office looking for medical help. She has breast cancer. In 30 seconds, tell us what spiritual advice you would give her that would actually help her with this disease?
Bzzzt. Oh, so sorry, you’ve been skunked. Better luck next … wait. The judges have made a decision. Really? You’re going to give it to him?
The judges have decided that the correct answer for each of those questions was “No, spirituality can’t fix any of those problems” and that your stupefied silence counts as a legitimate response. You lucky dog, you win the grand prize! We’re going to give you a shovel, a hammer, a bag of antibiotics and vaccines, and airdrop you into a remote African village where you can use your “spirituality” to solve a few problems. Congratulations!
I’ve long held a gripe about science-fiction aliens: they’re always far too unimaginative. I know it’s because SF is rarely about real aliens but is always about ourselves (and is also usually but keeping the budget manageable, in the case of SF movies), but still…the model is always our species, and they can’t even broaden their horizons enough to look at the diversity within the phylum Chordata, let alone examine some of the weirdness in other phyla. And, of course, any alien life form isn’t even going to be at all related to us, so it should be even stranger. Avatar was just the worst example of this trend — and Cameron did not have the budget excuse — but Star Trek and Star Wars were also pretty feeble in biological creativity department.
Examples that buck the trend are rare. District 9 at least modeled their aliens after cockroaches. Babylon 5 had most of their primary interacting alien races boringly humanoid, but had a few oddballs lurking mostly offscreen.
At least here’s one artist who does biologically informed aliens. Here’s one example, check out his gallery.
Have you heard about this strange new web service, Chatroulette? It makes webcam connections between random pairs of people with the idea that it’ll spark interesting conversations. I like the idea, but I haven’t tried it yet myself because a) I’ve heard that mainly what you get is pathetic exhibitionist men who aim the camera at their crotch, or b) people who want to chat about sex and flick past anyone who isn’t pretty enough (I think I’d be subject to rather rapid dismissals), and c) I DON’T HAVE TIME TO CHAT RIGHT NOW. MUST WRITE.
However, here’s an interesting use of the service: this fellow would flash the video, The Symphony of Science at people with a request to give a thumbs up for science. Look, it worked! This video is totally safe for work.
Earlier reports about ChatRoulette had given me some misgivings about humanity, or at least the male half of it. This video makes me feel a little better about it.
I thought she’d just want to know, since she talks about it as one of her hideous personal deformities without knowing what it is called.
Nice video. It takes quite a bit of confidence to be able to do that. I’d make a similar one recounting my flaws, but youtube has a 10 minute limit on their videos.
You know, Rebecca will be one of the speakers at Skepticon III…
Springfield, that is. And you’ll have to wait until November, but it will be worth it. It’s Skepticon 3! Read about the meeting. Peruse the list of speakers. Register now. If you’re rich, help by sponsoring.
I hear there will be a drinking contest between Richard Carrier and Rebecca Watson, which will be an event for the ages. I’m excused because of my advanced age and unfairly fine-honed metabolism.
It’s a fabulously fun meeting. You want to go.
This is reassuring: I’m not the only ‘militant’ atheist who is softspoken in person. Welcome AC Grayling to the club!
(via Atheist Media)
Stanley Fish is at it again. He’s found an author, Steven D. Smith, who has written a book that appeals to his inner cenobite and has written another dismissal of secular reason. And once again, his problem is that his view of the universe is a millimeter deep and most marked by dumb incomprehension.
I’m not going to mess around with his lengthy apologetics, because where Fish flops is in his premises. Apparently, Smith is arguing that there are no legitimate secular arguments for anything of significance; they all work by smuggling in non-secular presuppositions, without admitting it. It’s not that secular reason doesn’t work, it’s that it fails to provide a framework for making decisions, which rely on a moral or religious disposition.
The game fails at the onset.
Once the world is no longer assumed to be informed by some presiding meaning or spirit (associated either with a theology or an undoubted philosophical first principle) and is instead thought of as being “composed of atomic particles randomly colliding and . . . sometimes evolving into more and more complicated systems and entities including ourselves” there is no way, says Smith, to look at it and answer normative questions, questions like “what are we supposed to do?” and “at the behest of who or what are we to do it?”
Exactly right!
There is nothing we are supposed to do, and there’s no one we have to obey. We’re free!
What Smith and Fish are doing is asking a stupid question — where are the Orders of the Cosmic Dictator? — and failing to note that there seems to be no evidence of a cosmic dictator, and his orders are merely pretenses put up by institutionalized frauds. And then they run about in circles, flailing their arms and screaming at the people who point out that there are no orders. The problem, they think, is secularists who explain the nonexistence of supernatural agents, not the multitude of religionists who all tell us different things we’re supposed to do and name different entities behind our instructions.
There’s a very Darwinian view of the universe that these two have failed to recognize. There is no destination. There are only local, short-term responses to the environment, and the idea of a direction is an illusion that can only be seen retroactively. There is no “ought”. There is no “should”. There is no overmind with a plan for you. Trying to ask where the rules are just tells everyone that you don’t understand the game, and worse, deciding that there must be rules and inventing them and demanding that we all follow them or we betray our cosmic purpose means that you’ve completely lost it.
No rules. No purpose. Got it?
However, that doesn’t mean that patterns won’t emerge. A Darwinian world “rewards” stable replicators with greater representation in future generations. It’s still not a purpose, it’s a consequence of a lack of overarching purpose. Procreators find their genes propagated into the next generation; it’s not because God wants it so, or because Nature says you’re supposed to do it, it’s because the process itself happens to yield more possessors of the property than individuals who lack the property.
Likewise for other complicated or abstract institutions. The cultures that will exist a century from now will be the cultures that avoid melting down or blowing up. That’s not destiny or the product of divine guidance, it’s simply a self-evident truism. There is no “should” that even says you should be a member of a culture that will persist into the next century: you are free to run off to a California commune, grow sinsemilla, and have gay or prophylactically controlled orgies until your tribe grays and dies out. Or you can join the Shakers and excel in craftsmanship and celibacy and quiet worship of a deity until your tribe grays and dies out. The universe does not freaking care.
I’ve chosen my particular lifestyle, not because I’m supposed to do what I do or because I’m obeying orders from on high, but because it makes me feel good now. My biological needs are met, I’m entertained and stimulated, and I see the people I care about being likewise fulfilled. I want to see my views propagated into the next generation because they work well for me, and I have an emotional attachment to my children and other human beings, and want to see them given the same (and better!) opportunities that I’ve had. And of course, the reason I have those feelings for other people is that I’m the product of many generations of successful procreators who have also been well-integrated into their culture. I do what I do not because I should or because I’m told to, but because it works, in the sense of producing a stable and productive line of human beings.
That’s godless thinking. It’s too bad Fish and Smith are completely incapable of grasping it.
