It’s almost time for another episode of Atheists Talk on Air America! Tune in at 9am Central to hear the notorious Greg Laden; he’s going to be talking about academic freedom bills…ferociously and profusely. Lois Schadewald will also be on to talk about studies of pseudoscience. Mike Haubrich has more details.
You can listen to AM 950 KTNF; it will ask for a Minnesota zip code to listen direct. If you can’t catch it then, subscribe via iTunes or RSS.
Sometimes, I am extremely annoyed with the principle of separation of church and state — it leads to absurdities, like this recent court decision that a gay student support group was was using unconstitutional tactics — it was using materials that mentioned that some religions are more tolerant of homosexuality than others. This is, apparently, an endorsement of particular religions and therefore violates church-state separation.
Well, yeah, it is — for specific subjects, like gay rights, science education, and pacifism, some religions clearly are better than others — yet because we have to mindlessly avoid any perception of preference for one over another at any official level, the more enlightened faiths must be lumped with the dumbest, vilest, crudest kinds of religions, and you are not allowed to distinguish between them. I’ve said it before: church-state separation is a principle that protects and privileges religious belief in the United States, and furthermore as we can see here, it isolates pathological, dangerous beliefs from valid criticism.
This decision could be of some concern for future court battles over creationism, too, because science support organizations clearly do have a preference for some kinds of religions over others, and actually do promote certain doctrines over others. This is a fight driven by religious ignorance by the creationists, so of course we’ve got to engage them on the wrongness of their stupid claims about science … but if they wrap those up in the protective mantle of their holy and sacred religious beliefs, this decision says criticism is violating their religious protection. Will we have to worry that someone in the court system will take seriously the claim that teaching that the evidence says the earth is 4½ billion years old amounts to belittling religions that preach that the earth is 6000 years old, and favoring those that are agnostic on the age of the earth?
At least I can take comfort in the fact that the Pharyngula strategy is still safely on the side of the constitution: I don’t favor any religion at all, I despise ’em all equally.
Did you all catch Keith Olbermann’s Worst Person in the World segment? Ben Stein almost made the top of the list — he was beaten by Ann Coulter, though, so the competition was fierce.
The other “almost”…what prompted the nomination was Stein’s claim that listening to me reminded him that science is all about killing people. Alas, Olbermann only mentioned me as a generic scientist, not by name. Oh, well.
Fast political action is needed to stop another anti-science bill in Louisiana. Below is a message from Barbara Forrest, who says it all better than I can.
Friends, fellow educators, and concerned citizens,
First, please accept my thanks to those of you who helped in the effort to stop SB 561, especially those who went to the Capitol to testify. Second, action is needed IMMEDIATELY to ask members of the House Education Committee to kill HB 1168, which is the House twin of SB 561. As far as I know, no newspapers have carried the story of its being filed on Monday, April 21. The bill could be heard in the House Education Committee as early as this week of April 28, so immediate action is crucial.
As you may know, SB 561 was amended to SB 733, the “Louisiana Science Education Act,” in which form it is less pernicious but still bad because it contains code language that creationists can exploit. However, the creationists were unhappy with the amendments, so Rep. Frank Hoffman of West Monroe has introduced HB 1168 in the House of Representatives. HB 1168 is identical to the original SB 561. (Mr. Hoffman was the Asst. Supt. of the Ouachita Parish school system in 2006. He helped persuade the the Ouachita Parish School Board to pass its creationist “science curriculum policy” that is the basis for both SB 561 and HB 1168.)
SB 733 will probably pass the Senate and be sent to the House, where it could be merged with HB 1168, which means that we are back where we started with SB 561. So HB 1168 must be killed in the House Education Committee, which means that we must generate as much opposition to the House Education Committee **NOW.** The bill could come up in the House Education Committee this week, but we are not sure. We need to act immediately to request that House Education Committee members kill HB 1168. And please also contact everyone else you know INSIDE LOUISIANA to do the same. We want opposition from inside the state, not outside. We want the House Education Committee members to hear from people who live here and vote here. We may need to generate outside opposition later, but not at this time.
I have written a revised backgrounder for HB 1168 based on the one I wrote for SB 561. You may download it here:
http://www.creationismstrojanhorse.com/Backgrounder_HB_1168_4.27.08.pdf
There are talking points, contact information, and some instructions for you at the end of this document.
A shorter set of talking points, also with contact information, is here:
http://www.creationismstrojanhorse.com/HB_1168_Talking_Points.pdf
The contact information in these is for ten members of the House Education Committee who may be receptive to our contact based on what we have been able to learn. If you personally know another member who is approachable, please also contact that person.
I have talked personally to three committee members and found those three very nice and very interested. Some of the committee members have been teachers and served on their parish school boards. Some are attorneys. The three to whom I talked were aware of the Dover trial, Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School District (2005), in which I served as an expert witness for the plaintiffs, a case that cost the Dover school board one million dollars. This seemed to resonate with them. You may wish to keep that in mind as you contact them. If I may make a suggestion: remember that this is a political problem, not a scientific one. Please try to avoid “science talk.” As Eugenie Scott, our executive director at the National Center for Science Education says, we will not solve this problem by throwing science at it. We must appeal to the legislators as fellow citizens, parents, and educators. No academic-speak! :)
The children and teachers of Louisiana are being used as pawns by the Louisiana Family Forum and, most likely, the Discovery Institute, about which I have written so extensively. These people will assuredly not be around to clean up the wreckage they will leave in their wake if we don’t stop them. We have to stop them.
Florida delivers some good news: their nasty little academic “freedom” bill is dead. Now we just have to worry about similar bills in Michigan, Missouri, Alabama, and Louisiana.
What a bizarrely random incident: a fur seal tried to have sex with a penguin.
The 100kg seal first subdued the 15kg penguin by lying on it.
The penguin flapped its flippers and attempted to stand and escape – but to no avail.The seal may have been frustrated in its attempts to find a partner
The seal then alternated between resting on the penguin, and thrusting its pelvis, trying to insert itself, unsuccessfully.After 45 minutes the seal gave up, swam into the water and then completely ignored the bird it had just assaulted, the scientists report.
There are pictures. The seal was no doubt ignoring the penguin afterwards out of shame.
And it’s a classic!
It starts off with a little boy getting a lesson in “evolution” from his mother. This version of evolution has nothing to do with what biologists teach, of course — it’s bizarrely teleological, with everything striving towards becoming human.
After having evolution explained to him, the little boy turns into an “atheist” (one who’s planning to become a god — Chick isn’t quite clear on what the whole atheism thing means), and it all means you get to be as evil as you want.
There’s the usual stereotypical Chick interlude where a cute little girl tells the little boy all about Jesus. These stories go one of two ways: the boy can find Jesus and go to heaven, or he can reject the message and be horribly punished. Guess which way this tract ends?
This is so awfully, horribly bad that I must get my hands on a print copy.
I see you’ve all met our little troll, David Mabus. “Mabus” (his real name is Dennis Markuze, and he used to sell used computers in Montreal, Canada) has been flooding my mailbox for about the last month — he has a list of about 70 skeptics and atheists, and just about every day he fires off his little angry rant about how James Randi owes him a million dollars right now, based on prophecies from Nostradamus or some such nonsense. You can get a feel for his insanity from this series of posts he made to the Center for Inquiry forum. It’s hard to avoid coming to the conclusion that he really is mentally ill; if any of you know this fellow personally, you might want to get him some help, fast.
I do have his phone number and address. He has been escalating his attacks lately, and if they get any worse, I’ll be contacting the authorities myself. This is one of those cases where I’ve been targeted by someone with a severe mental disorder, and I think he can be a real risk — but of course I’m only one among many targets, and I think the person who ought to be most concerned is James Randi.
Mabus is still dumping lots of spam in my mailbox—and one claims, ” I will send the CFI link with this video to every faculty member at your university….”.
Great. My colleagues, I hope, are getting used to all the kooks who think they can get at me by proxy by sending crap to them.
Since I saw Iron Man last night (short review: AWESOME!!!), I thought I’d try to find a cephalopod with a similar red and gold color scheme…and didn’t get very close. But this one does have the sleek look of a rocket-propelled machine, so it will have to do.
Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.
