Leprechauns always looked suspiciously fey to me

How do these bigots get into high office so frequently? An Irish official in charge of the country’s health care cheerfully made some outrageous accusations on the air.

Homosexuality is a mental illness, at least according to the head of Northern Ireland’s health committee. Iris Robinson MP, who, with impeccable timing, put forth her views on a radio show while responding to the news that a local man had been badly beaten in a homophobic attack.

After apparently branding homosexuality as “disgusting, loathsome, nauseating, wicked and vile” she went on to recommend that “I have a very lovely psychiatrist who works with me in my offices and his Christian background is that he tries to help homosexuals – trying to turn away from what they are engaged in”.

Weird. It’s a common attitude among clueless twits, but how can anyone acquire even a modicum of education and still cling to such hateful ideas?

Bobby Jindal, another clown in the body politic

Oh, my. Bobby Jindal was on TV, and he got asked about evolution. Here’s his answer to a question about whether he had doubts about evolution.

One, I don’t think this is something the federal or state government should be imposing its views on local school districts. You know, as a conservative I think government that’s closest to the people governs best. I think local school boards should be in a position of deciding the curricula and also deciding what students should be learning. Secondly, I don’t think students learn by us withholding information from them. Some want only to teach intelligent design, some only want to teach evolution. I think both views are wrong, as a parent.

One, that is an incredibly dumb answer. Devolving the responsibility for deciding science content onto a local school board is a horrible idea; has he never attended school board meetings? They are run by, at best, well-meaning people who care about local schools, but unless it’s a school district in a district with a university, you’re not likely to find any scientists on them. More typically, they’re going to contain a mix of very bad people: ideologues who want to shut down public schools, or push their unsupported nonsensical agenda, or the local cranks who’ve upgraded from writing letters to the editor of the town paper.

If he wanted to let the school board manage budgets, that’s one thing; unfortunately, thinking that a hodge-podge of random community members with few scientific qualifications are adequate to evaluate the science content is a classic instance of conservative idiocy. Standards must be determined at a higher level by a carefully chosen pool of competent, qualified experts.

Second, nobody is withholding information from students. Here, this is the complete curriculum for the intelligent design part of the syllabus:

A magic man done it.

There, finished! There are no experiments that need to be summarized, no details that need to be explored, no complicated mechanisms that need to be explicated. Parents can exhaustively cover the subject in a moment or two some evening, or perhaps Mom could could scribble it down on a note in her child’s lunch. If they’re ambitious, they could send them off to a Sunday School, which might be taxed by the sudden increase in difficulty over the usual pap they dispense, but they’ll cope, perhaps by dumbing it down a little more.

One thing is for sure, we shouldn’t marshal the resources of our public school to teach such trivia, nor should we dignify the vacuity of ID with a place in the curriculum when there is nothing to teach.

Jindal’s “ideas” are utterly ludicrous, nothing but the warmed over inanity of the Discovery Institute’s usual “teach the controversy” foolishness. This is a “Republican superstar”? Man, but that party has become a bucket of rejects and peckerwoods, hasn’t it?

A Father’s Day thought…

My father is gone. He died in 1993; I vividly remember how I felt when I got that phone call, the desperate search through my memory of every last moment I’d spent with him, the anguish over the missing details and lost days and years, the despair that there would be no more memories, ever. It’s gotten worse over the years, too — it becomes harder and harder to recall the faces and voices of the dead as they recede into the past, no matter how important they were to us once, and while we might regularly resurrect fond remembrances, they aren’t so pressing anymore, nor are they as vital as they once were, and the pain of loss slowly fades. I loved that man very much and respected him as a guide, a father in the best sense of the word, yet there he goes, all his personality and works and words and concerns, dissipating into the background hiss of the universe, someday to be lost to all.

His grandchildren scarcely knew him, if they met him at all. To his great-grandchildren he’ll only be a name, at best, and to his subsequent descendants, even less, perhaps a scrap of a tattered record in some archive, or a tombstone, or a few bits in an online database. There is no immortality for us, not even in the history books or in some great saga … which only serve to promote a myth or echo of the man, anyway.

And so it will be for us, too. You and I will be gone some day, and be realistic — a few generations beyond that, and we will be unknown, forgotten, unimportant to anyone.

Perhaps you think this is too bleak a view, and that this is a vision of the future that we have to turn away from or lose all hope. It’s truth, though. Think back through your past: most but not all will remember their fathers well. Many will have known their grandfathers, but only in their aging years. Some will have met their great-grandfathers, but remember only an old, old man. Beyond that, you might have a few stories, a sepia-colored photo, an entry in a genealogy record, and the otherwise relatively recent will be nothing but a name and a few dates, while go back a few centuries and not even that will be there anymore. Each of those men were for a time among the most important people in their children’s lives, and now, nothing but dust. Do you think you will be any different?

But wait. I am not some glum nihilist who counsels everyone on the futility of their existence. There is more to this story than generations of wasted effort — to think that misses the whole point.

Look at the biology. Parenthood has a personal cost — we know this objectively. Both males and females are sinking a great deal of effort into reproduction, and we know experimentally that parental investment in breeding and care for offspring reduces longevity — and it’s true for fathers as well as mothers. Those of us with caring fathers know well the time and work involved, and the heartache we caused, and the hopes and worries that afflicted our parents.

Richard Dawkins famously said we come from a long line of survivors, that we are all descended from historical champions. This is true, but it leaves off another important factor: they were all survivors who made a sacrifice in order to leave progeny. Almost all of this chain of fathers are nameless and faceless, but all have in common the fact that at some time in their life they spent health and time to create new life (and before you belittle paternal investment as often little more than a spasm and spurt, think about the genuine cost of sexual reproduction; it’s such a silly activity, with only a small and transient reward, and yet it’s so ingrained in our being that we take for granted that males will sink much of their life into the business of courtship. Among humans, of course, responsible parenting is also a huge, prolonged expense.) Our parents were people who held our hand through childhood, who gave us the car keys when we were adolescents, who got us through high school and college, who paid for our weddings and gave us assistance through the rough spots, and all of that was to send us off into the world on our own, and they took pride in our independence. What a strange idea, that a life could find meaning in selflessly helping a generation that will leave one behind.

That is what fatherhood is really about: not immortality, not long-term reward, but self-sacrifice to launch a new generation into the world with a little momentum and a little potential … potential to stand autonomously and be something new; not to serve the past but to become the future. We regretfully watch our fathers fall away behind us, knowing that we will be next, and at the same time we prepare our own children to carry on and be themselves, just as we were given this chance at life.

I miss my dad, but I also know how to honor him. By being myself, as he brought me up to be, and by raising my children to be themselves, as he did for me.

Radio reminder

Don’t forget to tune in to Atheists Talk radio at 9am Central! Today Mark Borrello will be talking about the grand Evolution 2008 conference that will be taking place this coming week in Minneapolis (I’ll be there — I’m even giving a talk in the education session on Sunday). You may recall Mark as the historian and philosopher of science who ably ripped apart John West’s claims that ‘darwinism’ leads to fascism.

Also on the bill: George Erickson, an author. I don’t know much about him; let’s find out!

Not even tempted

I can’t believe people are actually going to see Shyamalamadingdong’s new movie, The Happening. Just as George Lucas ought to be hogtied and gagged anytime he tries to write a single line of dialog, Shyamalan needs to be slapped silly next time he tries to invent a plot. The man has some artistic talent, but unfortunately, it’s imbedded in a brain that is simply not very bright, and sees Portents and Significance in inanity, which really gets in the way of composing a good story. What makes it even worse is when he starts pontificating on his version of Science — it was disastrous stupidity in Signs, and his new movie seems to be in the same vein.

Now I’ve read a review (warning: spoilers therein), and my worst suspicions are confirmed. The review claims the movie is about intelligent design, but I have my doubts about that: I think it is just vacuous and muddle-headed, which gives it a strong family resemblance to ID. But yes, they are at least in the same phylum, in which ignorance is promoted and vaguely wishful thoughts pining for a heavenly sky daddy are treated as evidence.

Oh, and Shyamalan and Wahlberg are jesus kooks? That’s disappointing, but I suppose it isn’t surprising. ERV seems to be unhappy with the prospects, too.

Ladies?

Would you like to host a TV series?

Leading cable television network is casting for female scientists (professionals or grad students) to host a reality/documentary series. Smart, energetic, charismatic candidates wanted. No previous media experience required.

“Reality series” always means “mindless” to me, but hey, maybe you can inject some intelligence into it.

These shows always want someone who is not me, though, which is always a bit depressing, even if I’m personally not at all interested in doing anything like this.

You want crazy? We got crazy all over the place!

Somebody must have mistaken us for the local insane asylum, because my mailbox this afternoon is full of weird stuff. Could it be…could it be…Friday the 13th?

  • A suggestion for Vox Day: he should debate Jesus’ General!

  • This one is kind of sad. A loon who thinks 9/11 was an American conspiracy has gone on a hunger strike, for the nebulous goal of getting a meeting with John McCain (The fool! McCain was in on it!) His wife and friends are rather distressed. Kooks aren’t just for laughs; there are people behind them who are hurt by their behavior.

    Note also: he’s a professor of religious studies. There’s a sign of lunacy right there — professors are nuts.

  • Ben Stein.

    I know. Nowadays you can just say the name and you know it’s something stupid. This it’s misrepresenting Obama’s taxation plans, and there it gets a little unreal. Both Stein and Obama are chattering away as if an income of $250,000/year is just barely getting out of the middle class. What does that make me? I’m earning nowhere near that amount!

  • Here’s another funny name for you: Yomin Postelnik. This fellow has a long-winded proof of the existence of God that is little more than concatenated baloney. Be careful: if you criticize him, he’ll start sneaking around, editing your wikipedia page and threatening to sue you.

  • Europe isn’t free of superstition yet, that’s for sure. German Catholics have been carrying out exorcisms, with the blessing of the church.

    Engel told DPA that church officials commisioned exorcisms – a ritual to drive out evil spirits – only after examination by pastoral counselors and psychiatrists had found the affected people to be free of mental illness. Paderborn officials received 18 serious requests since 1999 for exorcism from people who believed themselves to be possessed by the devil, he said.

    So, what, exactly, are these mentally healthy people doing to warrant calling in the local witch doctor to cast a magic spell on them?