On being human

Santino is my hero. He was kept imprisoned in a cage, and his response was to throw rocks at his obnoxious captors. He’d scavenge the prison yard at night for whatever loose stones he could find, and he’d cache them for the morning. When there weren’t enough rocks, he’d pound the concrete retaining wall to knock loose chips of stone. Then when the jailers would show up, zip, zip, zip, a rain of stones on them. You have to respect that kind of defiance and planning.

Santino is a tough guy. Santino is also a chimpanzee.

Doesn’t that make you wonder a bit? Chimpanzees fight back at being caged, and they do so with forethought and resourcefulness. I imagine our ancestors felt the same way at every obstacle to their life, from marauding leopards to bad weather, and they stoked a bit of rage to fight back (which was probably ineffective in dealing with a thunderstorm, requiring slightly cleverer strategies). It’s a start; it’s a way of using your brain to resist, and I think it’s a very human approach to a problem.

Unfortunately, the story does not have a happy ending, and this also tells us something about modern humanity. Santino was not a placid clown for the crowds, so his keepers fixed him: Santino has been castrated.

I think they should have taught him how to use an AK-47 and turned him loose in his native habitat to instruct his brothers and sisters in better ways to defend themselves.

We are growing!

There’s a sense of glee in the American atheist community over the results of a recent survey: religion is in decline. As the site summarizes, “Only 1.6 percent of Americans call themselves atheist or agnostic. But based on stated beliefs, 12 percent are atheist (no God) or agnostic (unsure), while 12 percent more are deistic (believe in a higher power but not a personal God). The number of outright atheists has nearly doubled since 2001, from 900 thousand to 1.6 million. Twenty-seven percent of Americans do not expect a religious funeral at their death.” The “New Atheist” approach is working, and more people are coming out of the dark closet of faith and standing in the light.

If you want to play with maps of the data, try
USA Today’s interactive map page or this Google maps page. It’s so nice to see all the growth visually, or the declining numbers of Catholics and Baptists.

Or you can read the take of the Friendly Atheist or Rieux.

Keep it up! There is hope that this world can become a less superstitious place!

A major change in stem cell policy

Today, President Obama signed a bill lifting the Bush restrictions on stem cell research. You really must go listen to his speech on the occasion — he seems to get what scientific research is all about. Man, it’s been a long eight years, and oh is it wonderfully good to hear an eloquent defense of scientific research from our president, for a change.

The ugly little goblins of the Bush years still plague us, though; compare the uplifting message of knowledge from Obama with this fundamentally fallacious opinion piece from the carnie barker of junk science, Steven Milloy. And by “fundamentally fallacious”, I mean that it’s problems are far deeper than his usual slithery tweaking of the facts to misrepresent the evidence and the science — I mean that right at the core of Milloy is an absolute lack of comprehension of the very nature of science, and it’s right there, exposed and naked and hideous.

His problem? He thinks his ignorance of the field is an accurate picture, and he thinks science ought to be more like a vending machine: put in your nickel, and the bubble gum you wanted pops out.

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I get email

I thought Canadians were supposed to be nice. It’s rather strange — I’m used to getting one or two death threats in my mailbox a week, but lately I’ve been getting several a day…and it’s not as if I’ve done anything particularly dramatic lately. Or have I? Are my horns showing?

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Billy Graham answers his email

Billy Graham has a column in which he answers letters — he’s a kind of evangelical agony aunt, I guess. A recent letter will make you laugh.

DEAR BILLY GRAHAM: Why do people get involved in cults? My cousin has gotten involved in one, and no matter what we say to him, he refuses to listen. He says we are the ones who are in the dark, and he alone in our family has found the truth. — S. McM.

That’s a real problem, and I’m sure we all know someone who has gone off the deep end with some weird belief. That’s not the funny part; the good bit is Graham’s oblivious reply.

DEAR S. McM: One characteristic of cults is that they strongly believe they alone are right in their beliefs and everyone else is wrong. Thus they reject the central truths of the Bible that Christians have held in common for almost 2,000 years and substitute their own beliefs for the clear teaching of Scripture.

Shorter Billy Graham: The difference between their cult and mine is that they think they have the absolute truth, when I know that I do.

NO MORE BIRTHDAY!

Waaaaa. First I get a pile of porn in my mailbox (wait, that’s not so bad…except that none of it matched my particular interests), and then I get sent a free DVD: Expelled. This is shaping up to be the suckiest birthday ever.

Alright, I confess, the DVD was a good present, so I could have a copy in my archive of creationist material. And it was obtained by an industry insider who didn’t have to pay for it, so no money passed to the hands of Premise Media, which is even better. It’s actually appreciated, so thanks Stranger Who Asked That His Identity Remain Secret. I don’t know if I’ll be able to bring myself to watch it, though…I haven’t seen it yet.

I am kind of bracing myself right now in case some well-meaning admirer has commissioned a dump truck to drop off a load of squid poop in my yard, or something, though.

You can stop now, Jim

Mr James M. Baker is really lashing out, cluelessly. He has sent me a few other emails (which I just trashed on sight), and now someone at the IP address 67.177.100.132 (which traces back to Shelbyville…Hi, Jim!) has attempted to subscribe me to a large body of gay and fetish porn. Who knew there were sites dedicated to just pictures of young boys’ feet?

Anyway, the people who run these porn sites are not stupid, and they know they’ll be abused by homophobes who think they are a weapon. Before they send me a pile of glossy magazines and DVDs they verify by sending an email, with the IP address of the person who tried to subscribe me. Busted! Tsk, tsk…how petty, Mr Baker.

The only question now is how Mr Baker came to have such a working familiarity with so many diverse sites, with such a focus on gay sex, feet, and watersports?

Besides, someone else has associated me with porn with a bit more humor…and a more appropriate focus.

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Mary’s Monday Metazoan

This may shock you, but the Trophy Wife is not perfect. She doesn’t quite get the cephalopod fetish, and thinks I’m a bit…weird. I know! It’s unbelievable that there’s only one person on the planet who thinks that, and I’m married to her! So, anyway, just to appease the spouse, I’ll try to regularly throw in a non-cephalopodian creature. This week, here’s something from back home in our mutual birth state of Washington, a crab being eaten by a sea anemone. Try not to read anything Freudian into it — although now that I’ve mentioned it, everyone will be looking for a metaphor here.

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