Canada is sharing in Christian shame

The Canadian government is planning to help a fundamentalist Christian group, Youth for Christ, to proselytize. They’ve offered to contribute several million dollars to the construction of a youth center in downtown Winnipeg, which sounds like a wonderful, useful idea…except for the fact that the group building it has this as their mission:

To impact every young person in Canada with the person, work and teachings of Jesus Christ and discipling them into the Church.

They also openly admit to their plans:

Sharing the person of Christ with every young person within our target group in Canada (5.4 million youth). This will require the development of new strategies, as well as strengthening existing efforts.

So, sure, anyone can come on down and freely use their skate park, their gym, their various services, and they don’t need to be Christian. It would be especially great if they aren’t Christian, because they will be met by a team of cheerful youth pastors who will tell them all about the glory of Jesus while they work out or play. That’s the whole purpose of the facility — not to provide a healthy recreational outlet for kids, but to corral the unconverted in one place for easy predation by a coven of kooks out to win over their minds.

Here’s another nice twist to the story, too.

Roughly one in 100 youths contacted by the organization — 17,010 out of 154,192 — “responded to the opportunity to become a Christian,” said the report, which identified “the aboriginal youth community” as a “prime area for development.”

It’s not just those cranky atheists who are outraged at the funneling of money into Christian evangelism — it’s an ethnic issue, and Youth for Christ knows it.

The Christian youth centre in a primarily aboriginal neighbourhood stirs up thoughts of historical assimilation, some First Nations leaders told councillors.

Nahanni Fontaine, director of justice for the Southern Chiefs Organization, an advocacy group for First Nations people in southern Manitoba, said giving public money to the project would be like contributing to the contemporary version of residential schools under the guise of helping youth.

“[We] saw religion used as an abusive and violating mechanism in which to assimilate aboriginal children into Euro-Canadian mainstream,” she said.

“Aboriginal people were assured that these sort of infringing practices and strategic policies would never occur again.”

Approving this proposal would just be sanctifying a “more contemporary form of the residential school experience,” Fontaine said.

That is serious stuff. People seem to have forgotten what we, Canada and the US, were doing a bit over a century ago: we were actively ripping children away from their native parents and boarding them up in schools where they were taught the White Man’s Ways, which usually involved religion in some way or another. My own university (which is celebrating its history this year) had its beginnings as a native American boarding school, run by an order of Catholic nuns. That’s not something to be proud of, but a stigma to be overcome. Why would Winnipeg want to be afflicted with a new racist black mark on their history?

Atheism book found in home linked to fire suspect!

Two suspects in a Texas church arson have been arrested. Unfortunately, guess what the most important fact in the presentation of the story is?

Investigators have seized books on demons and atheism as well as rifles and knives from in a home linked to one of the men charged with setting an east Texas church on fire and suspected in a string of similar blazes.

Jason Robert Bourque, 19, and Daniel George McAllister, 21, were arrested Sunday and charged with a single count of felony arson in the torching of the Dover Baptist Church near Tyler about 90 miles east of Dallas.

Right. Because atheists don’t believe in gods, but they do believe in demons. All this tells me is that these are a couple of confused young men…but if they’re setting fires, we already knew that.

Oh, wait…that report left something out. Here’s another one. I’ll just quote the paragraph that was buried near the end.

Jason Bourque’s family home in Lindale was also searched, yielding a small plastic bag of “suspected” marijuana seeds, more Skechers shoes, and three Bibles.

Ooops. One atheist book, one book about demonic possession, and three Bibles. Surely, that must be the most relevant datum, don’t you think?

The Duggars visit the Creation “Museum”

The Duggars are that creepy family paraded about on The Learning Channel — the ones with the swarm of kids. It’s a horrifying show, but in this episode, the nightmare is compounded by the fact that they visit the Creation “Museum” and even get a personal guided tour from freakishly dead-eyed Ken Ham. Only watch it if you like to torment yourself.

One other reason to watch it: they show enough of the “Museum” that you really don’t need to go there.

Do pity these poor kids, too.

More faith-based evil

Cults are all about control, and small children must be very hard to control.

The leader of a religious cult was “outraged” when a 1-year-old boy did not say “Amen” before a meal and ordered her followers to deprive him of food and water until he died, a Baltimore prosecutor told jurors Monday.

Another horrifying detail: the mother of the boy went along with the punishment and watched him waste away…all because she wanted to be accepted as a member of the cult.

Francis Collins is up to the same old tricks

Collins has a new book coming out, titled Belief: Readings on the Reason for Faith. It’s the same old drivel: CS Lewis, old chestnuts re-roasted on a dying fire, nature and science somehow testifying to the truth of faith, moral law, fine-tuning, the Big Bang, etc. Jerry Coyne says it just right:

Enough is enough.  Collins is director of the NIH, and is using his office to argue publicly that scientific evidence—the Big Bang, the “Moral Law” and so forth—points to the existence of a God.  That is blurring the lines between faith and science: exactly what I hoped he would not do when he took his new job.

And to those who say that he has the right to publish this sort of stuff, well, yes he does.  He has the legal right.  But it’s not judicious to argue publicly, as the most important scientist in the US, that there is scientific evidence for God.  Imagine, for example, the outcry that would ensue if Collins were an atheist and, as NIH director, published a collection of atheistic essays along the lines of Christopher Hitchens’s The Portable Atheist, but also arguing that scientific evidence proved that there was no God.  He would, of course, promptly be canned as NIH director.

Or imagine if Collins were a Scientologist, arguing that the evidence pointed to the existence of Xenu and ancient “body-thetans” that still plague humans today. Or a Muslim, arguing that evidence pointed to the existence of Allah, and of Mohamed as his divine prophet.  Or if he published a book showing how scientific evidence pointed to the efficacy of astrology, or witchcraft.  People would think he was nuts.

Collins gets away with this kind of stuff only because, in America, Christianity is a socially sanctioned superstition.  He’s the chief government scientist, but he won’t stop conflating science and faith.  He had his chance, and he blew it.  He should step down.

I note that one of the ways the book is being promoted is by touting the credentials of its editor as “the Director of the National Institutes of Health.” Atheists are often told that they are “harming the cause” by being outspoken with their ideas, that it is impolitic for science educators to be forthright about their godlessness, that we should emphasize the compatibility of science and religion (even when we think it is false) — and we’re also told that this is part of the virtue of scientific objectivity, since we can’t possibly disprove the existence of a god. I should like to see some of those same people and organizations (like, say, the Colgate Twins or the NCSE) to come out and similarly deplore this promotion of medieval nonsense by a supposed scholar of good science.

They won’t. It’s never been about fairness or diplomacy or objectivity. It’s always been about pandering to a delusion held by a majority.

I so do not want to get sucked into the drama

I run a blog, not an open forum, and I’m reminded once again why I prefer the former.

The Richard Dawkins site is revising their forum. This substantial change is causing a great deal of unwarranted anxiety — people are unhappy (which is fair enough) and complaining, and many are flocking to a new open forum, which is also just fine. They’re also complaining to me, which is odd. So I’ll say a few words.

  • First and foremost, it is not my site, and it is not your site. It is Richard Dawkins’ site. People have lost sight of the fact that Dawkins has his own views on how the site should function, and he has the right and even the obligation to try and shape it to his goals. If you don’t like it, fine, go somewhere else. I know, that sounds so cavalier, but that’s the reality of it all. Richard spends the money to keep it going. He’s the boss.

  • There has been a lot of vilification of Josh Timonen going on, which does not win my sympathy. Josh is a good guy, and he’s neck-deep in work for the RDF — not just the richarddawkins.net site, and not just the forum, which only represents about a quarter of the daily visits to the site overall. Yet the forum represents most of the drama and trouble in maintaining the whole business. If it’s not reflecting Dawkins’ vision, and if it’s a headache to maintain, you have to appreciate why they would think revising it would be a smart idea.

  • I’ve been active in forums on the web in the past, and I’ve also played a role as a moderator. It takes a lot of work to keep a forum afloat. Every one I know of follows one of two paths: a slow decline into quiet apathy, or a rapid growth in membership and activity which leads to an eventual implosion into chaos, acrimony, and drama as disparate interests try to tug the forum in different directions. The forums at richarddawkins.net should not have competing interests, but only one: that of the Richard Dawkins Foundation. I think the recent changes are intended, in part, to remind participants of that.

  • The forums are not going away, but they are going to change in character. That hurts if you have an attachment to the old forums, but this is reality, and reality is dynamic and change happens all the time. Adapt or die. Who knows, the new format may be even better than the old — try it!

  • You can always just come to Pharyngula and chat here. Or any of the other atheist sites on the net. The community is not going away and is not harmed by a change in one outlet for its expression, and if it is, then it’s not much of a community, now is it?

So, move on. Adapt. Express yourselves wherever. Check out the new RDF discussions when they emerge later. This is not a crisis, it’s a change.

Richard Dawkins expresses his opinion.

One very weird thing about this whole contretemps is how people are treating Josh like some evil Rasputin. Josh and Richard are on very good terms, and Richard has clear opinions on how the site should be run — and there is no doubt about who is in charge.

Terrorists of the animal rights movement

Janet Stemwedel was a participant in a panel discussion on the ethics of animal research. She got her reward: she is now featured on the web page of a deranged terrorist for animal rights, complete with her home address and phone number. These thugs are people who threaten children and carry out violence against researchers, and deserve to be treated as terrorists, fitting the definition perfectly: they use fear and intimidation and violence to compel people to meet their irrational demands.

They are also ignorant, and don’t even want to understand the purpose of basic research. This particular ranting loon made a revealing admission in the complaints about the researchers:

On the left below, are the three individuals [Stemwedel, Blakemore, Ringach] who will be speaking in favor of imprisoning, mutilating and then killing animals under the “guise” of science. NONE OF THEM ARE MEDICAL DOCTORS; repeat, NONE of the three vivisectionists have EVER treated a single patient in their lives and their torture of animals has NEVER helped a human patient.

(Punctuating with frequent use of ALL CAPS is one of the characteristics of this person’s mode of communication, I’m afraid.)

There is so much wrong with that comment. There is a false equation of scientific and medical research; the only kind of research regarded as ‘scientific’ is therapeutic, clinical research that directly makes a human being healthier. It’s fallacious and short-sighted thinking. We need to understand how cells and tissues function in normal, healthy organisms, and for that we need to work on animal models — there are obvious ethical problems with proposing to tinker with the nervous systems of healthy human babies, for instance. The scientists who do fundamental work on how nervous systems work tend not to be M.D.s because they are not trying to do clinical work; the scientists who directly study human disease tend to be M.D.s because they must be to be qualified to work on people. They are both necessary, the first to puzzle out basic mechanisms of biology, the second to apply that knowledge to human beings. Excluding the first from the domain of science because they don’t have the specialized, narrow training needed to work on one species is nonsensical.

One of the panelists, Colin Blakemore, is a perfect example of the importance of basic research.

Colin Blakmore’s claim to fame is experimenting on kittens for YEARS in England. Blakemore is outspoken in his support of the use of animal testing in medical research. He came to the attention of the animal rights movement while at Oxford University in the 1980s, when he carried out research into amblyopia and strabismus, conducting experiments that involved sewing kittens’ eyelids shut from birth in order to study the development of their visual cortex.

Oooh, sewing kittens’ eyes shut sounds so evil, doesn’t it? How could that possibly help people?

Well, it doesn’t if you’re an idiot who begins with the premise that the only true science in this field would require that Blakemore be an M.D. who sews babies‘ eyes shut. But let’s assume you are a rational human being.

My daughter was born with mild strabismus. Our doctor was rightly concerned, and took us aside to explain what happens to the brain in these case, citing the research done on cats (which I was already familiar with, since I was trained as a developmental neurobiologist). The brain is a plastic organ, and even for several years after birth, it is being wired and remodeled — the optic nerves are making connections with specialized targets in the brain. The young brain actually tests for disparities in the signals from the two eyes and makes adjustments to minimize noise in the signal — too much variance, and it automatically starts shutting down confusing inputs. We knew from the work on cats that, while my daughter had two perfectly functional eyes, her brain was going to respond by rewiring to ignore one of them.

She spent her first several years with therapy designed from the perspective of our understanding of how the plastic brain works — understanding directly derived from the work of people like Blakemore. She also had a series of surgeries to adjust and strengthen the muscles of her eyes.

Think about this: you have a baby daughter who needs precise surgeries done on the tiny, delicate muscles of her eyes. Do you want her to be the very first practice surgery the doctor has ever done, or would you rather, perhaps, that the doctor had done his practice surgeries on animals first? Early in my career, I worked as an animal care assistant in a department of surgery, and that’s what most of the animals were used for: teaching medical students the basics of their craft, running students through simple procedures that made them learn how to handle tissues, how to cope with bleeding, how to repair damage, all stuff that you cannot do except on living organisms.

The real monsters are the terrorists at the “Negotiation is over!” website. Even from the title you can tell that they are not open to reason.