Hooray for Catholics!

Don’t be too shocked at the title; my arguments are with Catholicism, not the poor unfortunate victims of that dogma, the Catholics. In this case, one Catholic organization, Catholics for Choice (uh-oh—already, I can tell that one argument against them will be that they aren’t True Catholics™) has published a scathing criticism of Bill Donohue and the Catholic League. Here’s their summary:

  • From the beginning, the Catholic League was marked by a schizophrenic attitude that
    would become its hallmark: It simultaneously argued for the right of conservative
    Catholics to impose their values in the public sphere, while arguing against the right
    of others in the public sphere to offer legitimate criticism of Catholics or Catholicism.

  • The Catholic League tactics are i) manufacture controversy; ii) try to intimidate the
    “enemy”; iii) bully the opposition; iv) complain early and often; v) attack popular
    culture; and vi) silence the loyal opposition.

  • In utilizing these tactics it actively embarrasses, intimidates, bullies and distorts
    reality to suppress critics of the Catholic church, the Vatican, and the church’s many
    controversial policies.

  • Catholic League president Bill Donohue is in a constant quest for the next
    “controversy” to keep his particular brand of reactionary Catholicism in the media
    spotlight.

  • Once Donohue has found a “controversy” he uses wildly inflated rhetoric that is sure
    to inflame–either in print or in one of his infamous cable TV news appearances–and
    then stages a protest or takes out an ad in the New York Timesto attract attention.
    Then he waits for the seemingly ever-receptive press to show up.

  • When it comes to peddling its special brand of inflammatory rhetoric, the media and
    arts have been a special target of the Catholic League since the mid-1990s.

  • The number of examples of anti-Catholicism claimed by the Catholic League grew
    from 140 in 1995 to 320 in 2006, yet the only thing that seems to have actually
    increased is the League’s definition of anti-Catholic activity.

  • As thin-skinned as Donohue appears to be when it comes to any one else referring to
    Catholicism, Jesus or the Virgin Mary, apparently his rules don’t apply to himself and
    his friends.

  • Unable to explain away the Catholic church’s embarrassing pedophilia scandal,
    Donohue tried to turn it back on progressive Catholic activists, claiming that they
    were exaggerating the scandal to try and bring down the church.

  • When the media cover the tempests he manages to whip up from time to time, few
    ever stop to examine the basis for his objections–they just cover the dog fight.

  • Donohue claims that the Catholic League has some 350,000 members and that
    number is often used by the media when referencing the organization’s supposed
    clout. These numbers, however, appear to be a highly inflated picture of the Catholic
    League’s actual membership.

Right on!

Read the whole thing, all 25 pages of it. It’s a very useful takedown.

It’s feeling good — it must be Philly

Fellow travelers, we all know this feeling of stepping off a plane into a strange city and following the signs to baggage/transportation, trying to get our bearings and find our way through these sometimes labyrinthine airports to just get out of these unattractive hubs — the whole thing with air travel nowadays is that you have to do it, and while you’re doing it, all you want to do is escape from it. I know that feeling well lately.

Well, I have arrived in Philadelphia, and it was different. I lived here from 1993-2000, and I stepped off the plane and knew exactly where I was and what I had to do: I strolled unerringly to the train terminal, got on board and paid my fare (which had gone up $2 since I was last here), and rolled off to my destination. It was great. I’ve missed the familiar litany of stations called out by the porter as you travel through the city, and the ease of just taking one of those big bench seats and relaxing while traveling.

I got off at the 30th Street Station, had to go say hello to the big guy with the wings (Old train stations are built like temples, have you ever noticed? Vast spaces with ceilings lofted far above you, and with fabulous winged art deco icons to get you in the right mood), and then knew exactly what I had to do to get to my hotel — take the Market-Frankford line to University City. It was so liberating to stand in that cathedral of transport and realize that I could easily go anywhere. I could have gone down those stairs and taken a train to Trenton and New York, no sweat, and it would have been a pleasant, stress-free rockin’ ride. Anywhere. I was tempted.

Compare the great Eastern urban transit options to our train station in Morris, Minnesota—a sad and shabby relic, abandoned. We’ve got the wide horizons, but there’s a pinched feeling as well, that there is no way out. Cars have closed us off more than they’ve opened us up, I think. Those horizons become a void rather than a destination. They turn us inward rather than making us cosmopolitan.

Small town America is a fine place to live, but man, I want to see more connectedness than the isolation we’ve got now. Places like Europe and the East coast always seem to have more openness — and in large part it’s due to the fact that you can go anywhere.

Old friends, new tools

Once upon a time, way back when I entered graduate school, the first big project I was involved in was essentially a morphological mapping of the circuitry of the larval zebrafish. We did lots of backfills of neurons with horseradish peroxidase, and later the fluorescent dye DiI, and then with injected lineage tracers like rhodamine dextran. I guess technology has greatly advanced, because we never got anything as pretty as this set of fluorescently labeled neurons in the brain and spinal cord of a larval zebrafish.

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(click for larger image)

This image was made using brainbow fluorescent microscopy. Transgenic fish carry an assortment of fluorescent protein genes that are randomly flipped on in the cells to produce these multicolored views of a subset of the neurons. It’s like the good old Golgi silver stain, only in technicolor.

Spinelessness, as usual

The Democrats are giving Joe Lieberman everything he wants, and this is symptomatic of the party: they stand for nothing but the status quo and internal accommodation. “Bipartisanship” is a dirty word when one of the two sides is a discredited, corrupt mob of wannabe theocrats and greedy thugs, but the Democratic leadership simply rolls over and acts as if they are doing a great thing by flushing progressive principles down the toilet.

Glenn Greenwald lambastes the illusion of partisan bickering. We’ve been ruled by one party of idiots and another of fawning puppy dogs, and I’m getting a little tired of it.

Watch TV tonight

NOVA is showing a new episode tonight, The Bible’s Buried Secrets. It doesn’t sound like the usual laudatory tripe we get on the cable documentary shows — in fact, it sounds downright skeptical:

A visually stunning two-hour special edition of “Nova” examines decades of archaeological studies that contradict much of what is in the Bible. The entire Exodus story is debunked, as is the idea that the Israelites were monotheistic following the contract made between God and Abraham. It turns out idol worship was common through the reign of King David and right up to the Babylonian exile.

I have to miss it, I’m afraid, since it’s another travel night and day and day and day for me. Let me know how it turns out, ‘k?

As long as we’re playing games…

How about Playing Gods: The Board Game of Divine Domination? It’s called a “satirical board game of religious warfare”, and sounds like good silly fun. Some people, though, don’t like to see their dogma mocked.

[The game] has no basis in historical reality and doesn’t actually represent any religion. It just appeals to people who hate religion to begin with — the hip subculture of militant popular atheists. These people are fanatics, for the most part, themselves. Their thinking is rigid and hostile and not much different from jihadists who don’t use their minds or study what they are dealing with. They start from their own dogmatic perspective.

Oh. So if you simply think the idea that there is a Great Cosmic Voyeur who wants to control your genitals is absurd, that makes you a fanatic? I can’t be too concerned about the opinions of a deluded true believer who can’t tell a fierce bearded guy with an AK-47 from a tweedy academic with a word processor.

Collect them all!

Getting in on the collectable card game fad, the New Humanist has published a set of religion cards. Here’s a familiar one:

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Here we are:

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Unfortunately, while they have all those stats on the cards, they haven’t given us any rules! I don’t know how to play the game, other than to mix all the cards together in a bag, and set fire to them. At least that has some real-world verisimilitude to it.

Bad arguments, useless poll

There is this strange site that has collected testimonials for the existence of god. If I were a believer, I’d be embarrassed at the painful lack of logic in these rationalizations. To the question “I believe in god because…”, answers are non sequiturs like “because he is the creator” or “because god is real” or “because I don’t do bad things”.

There is also, of course, a poll, because nothing says shallow like adding a pointless poll to a web page. The question is “ Does God exist?. The answers so far suggest that some doubters have already started pharyngulating it.

No! 51.6%

Yes 47.5%
Not Sure 0.9%

Another possibility is that random readers who stumble across the site read a few of the testimonials and are so appalled at their inanity that they immediately lose their faith in a sudden fit of enlightenment. Go ahead and read a few. They will simultaneously confirm your disbelief and disappoint you with the inadequacy of the average human mind.

98%

A survey of scientists in Texas reveals that the vast majority reject all versions of creationism — only 2% give it any respect at all. This is in Texas, the state with Don McLeroy, creationist dentist, running the educational show. There is some dissonance there.

What about that 2%? The survey explains those:

What can we say about the small minority of Texas science faculty (2%) who evidence some measure of support for intelligent design/creationism? (For purposes of this analysis, intelligent design/creationist supporters are all respondents who indicated either “Modern evolutionary biology is right about the common ancestry of all extant organisms, but it is necessary to supplement it by invoking periodic intervention by an intelligent designer” or “Modern evolutionary biology is mostly wrong. Life arose through multiple creation events by an intelligent designer, although evolution by natural selection played a limited role.”)

The educational profile of this group is revealing. Ten supporters of intelligent design/creationism responded to the question, “Have you taught a course that included a substantial block of material on human evolution?”. Of the ten, seven persons replied “no,” as compared to three who replied “yes.” So we readily see that most intelligent design supporters identified in this survey do not teach courses that address evolution. Even more strikingly, no person in the subsample of those supporting intelligent design reported teaching graduate students about human evolution within the past five years. (Another way of phrasing this last point is to say that there was no person out of the total sample of 464 respondents who said they both supported intelligent design and had taught graduate students within the past five years.) We are therefore safe in concluding that the already thin support for teaching intelligent design vanishes to essentially zero when looking at established Texas biology and biological anthropology faculty who teach at the graduate level.

Heh. Bill Dembski = “essentially zero”.