Lawyers: here’s a profitable target

What organization rakes in the cash by exploiting the poor and making extravagant claims that never come true? What business is built entirely on mass marketing and dishonest advertising, and yet is never called into account for its failure? It isn’t the tobacco companies or the makers of penis enlargement drugs — it’s religion.

I have no idea whether this is a brilliant idea or just the daydream of an ambulance-chasing shyster, but someone is pursuing Earths Greatest Lawsuit — an effort to gather a swarm of plaintiffs to slam various religious organizations with numerous lawsuits.

It’s an interesting idea. I’m not a fan of the sue-them-into-compliance strategy for social issues myself (I want people to change their ideas, not bankrupt them and make them powerless), but I do like the idea of making religious organizations accountable for their real-world claims.

Besides, God is a ripe fruit ready for plucking — everyone knows the Devil has all the lawyers.

How Ricky Gervais lost his faith

Ricky Gervais has published his deconversion story — I feel a little inferior because he made up his mind about it very quickly, while it took me years to ease my way out of the nonsense.

I like his answer, though, especially the last paragraph below.

…within an hour, I was an atheist.

Wow. No God. If Mum had lied to me about God, had she also lied to me about Santa? yes, but who cares? The gifts kep coming. And so did the gifts of my newfound atheism. The gifts of truth, science, nature. The real beauty of this world. Not a world by design, but one by chance. I learned of evolution—a theory so simple and obvious that only England’s greatest genius could have come up with it. Evolution of plants, animals, and us—with imagination, free will, love and humor. I no longer needed a reason for my existence, just a reason to live. And imagination, free will, love, humor, fun, music, sports, beer, and pizza are all good enough reasons for living.

But living an honest life—for that you need the truth. That’s the other thing I learned that day, that the truth, however shocking or uncomfortable, in the end leads to liberation and dignity.

Cline at UMTC

Hey, Minneapolitans — Campus Atheists, Skeptics, and Humanists have two big events coming up soon. This week, it’s pizza and bowling on the UMTC campus. I’m probably not going to be able to make that one, but the week after, on 6 March, Austin Cline will be speaking on critical thinking and skepticism, and I may be able to get into town for that one. Let’s all go say hello to another godless blogger!

The genome is not a computer program

The author of All-Too-Common Dissent has found a bizarre creationist on the web; this fellow, Randy Stimpson, isn’t at all unusual, but he does represent well some common characteristics of creationists in general: arrogance, ignorance, and projection. He writes software, so he thinks we have to interpret the genome as a big program; he knows nothing about biology; and he thinks his expertise in an unrelated field means he knows better than biologists. And he freely admits it!

I am not a geneticist or a molecular biologist. In fact, I only know slightly more about DNA than the average college educated person. However, as a software developer I have a vague idea of how many bytes of code is needed to make complex software programs. And to think that something as complicated as a human being is encoded in only 3 billion base pairs of DNA is astounding.

Wow. I know nothing about engine repair, but if I strolled down to the local garage and tried to tell the mechanics that a car was just like a zebrafish, and you need to throw a few brine shrimp in the gas tank now and then, I don’t think I would be well-received. Creationists, however, feel no compunction about expressing comparable inanities.

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What a strange phenomenon…

MAJeff started it all. Here I go and set up this blog just so I can lord it over a readership, and the readers starthaving a good time talking to each other, and they seem to have noticed that they are of like minds and find each other to be interesting — perhaps more interesting than the blog owner — and there is a growing awareness that they don’t need me. So MAJeff is organizing a Boston Pharyngulite get-together, a group with no masters, not even me, but of similar free-thinking, scientifically-inclined minds.

Now I’m getting more requests in email to help people gather local pharyngulites for social meetings. This is rather cool, even if it means I’m going to have to kiss my cunning plans to become the Atheist Pope-Tyrant goodbye in the face of this rising democratization of freethought. Oh, well.

I can still be a central clearinghouse for information about these events (from overlord to bookkeeper…oh, I have fallen). Use this open thread to talk about organizing your own meetup, or joining someone else’s. I suppose once you’ve got something arranged, if you send me the city, date, time, and location, with a link to an article on one of your blogs that is taking RSVPs or discussing plans, I can put it up on the sidebar somewhere.

And I insist that you at least send me a link to your after-event photos and discussion.

Oh, and one little suggestion…I’ve been at these kinds of events before, and one problem is that you are all internet nerds who have never met each other before, so people show up at the restaurant or bar and wander about, not knowing who among the milling horde are the actual fellow weirdos they’re supposed to meet. I suggest that you have a recognizable symbol somewhere on the table or on the attendees — as early Christians used the fish, I recommend that you have something with a cephalopod on it.

By the way, I set up this Frappr Map several years ago, and have neglected it ever since. Would this be a useful tool for finding locals?

Radio reminder

Remember — Sunday morning at 9am, you can tune in to the Minnesota Atheists’ very own Atheist Talk radio program. This week, we’re planning to have a bigger slice of time for the Moment of Science, and Kristine Harley and I will be talking about the idea of bad “design” — the observation that many features of evolved organism don’t look at all like they are the product of intent.

(Oops, no — not this week. That’ll be next week. This week, you’ll get to hear from Lori Lipman Brown, and you’ll hear a discussion of secular ethics. Tune in!)

Feel free to call in, but please do try to be crisp and cogent…we do have more time, but even the extended segment will fly by quickly.

By the way, there have been some problems with the audio stream in the past, with the program getting cut off at the commercial breaks; the station says that it was a technical glitch, and that it has been fixed.

Florida: Land of the Delusional

Donna Callaway, a member of the Florida Board of Education, has an editorial that has to be read to be believed. This is a woman who has drunk deep of the Kool-Aid.

First, she’s babbles about how surprised she was that the revision of the science standards included major elements, such as evolution, of which she disapproved. This seems to be hard for many people to grasp, especially some of those who are appointed to education boards, but the board members are administrators, not scientists. To write the science standards, they actually recruit knowledgeable, qualified people to put together a document that reflects the current state of science: it doesn’t matter if the bureaucrat in charge of implementing the standards doesn’t know the science. Problems arise when one of these paper pushers decides to impose her brand of ignorance and attempt to override the efforts of the standards writing team (a situation that arose right here in Minnesota several years ago, with Cheri Yecke’s efforts to sabotage our state science standards.)

Callaway is alarmed at one of the Florida standards: “Diversity and Evolution of Living Organisms. A. Evolution is the fundamental concept underlying all of biology.” Your alarm is irrelevant, Donna. You aren’t a biologist. That standard is accurate and properly represents the opinion of the scientific community. If instruction in the state of Florida is to prepare students for understanding the reality of biology rather than the errors of your ideology, then that is what should be taught.

Not only does she not have a clue about what her job entails, but she’s swaddled in meters-thick layers of delusion.

If there is a victory for those who oppose the evolution standard as written or amended, it is that they stood shoulder to shoulder, not in a fanatical, demanding way as many may have expected. Rather, they stood kindly with a sense of calm assurance, with open and transparent reasoning that confused their opponents who expected a religious battle. This was never that battle; it was a battle over student rights. Those rights were not recognized.

Well, they might have confused their opponents, but it wasn’t because they were open and transparent and reasonable — it was because they were batshit insane. Have they already forgotten the orange man?

As for whether there was no religious battle, note that this editorial was published in the Florida Baptist Witness and, well, read on.

I left the SBOE meeting emotionally drained but reaffirmed by the love for children and the respect for others that I saw in those who hold beliefs with which I can identify. And, speaking of identity, I began my comments to the SBOE with an acknowledgement that I have a religious identity. That identity urges me to use the Master Teacher as my example.

(Trust me, I don’t think she’s talking about Richard Feynman here.)

The model He set for us 2,000 years ago is so appropriate for today. He allowed Himself to be questioned. He never thrust his belief on anyone. He allowed both Nicodemus and the Samaritan Woman to question Him, each from an opposite end of the human spectrum. It was as if He said, “Ask me questions. I will answer. It may not be what you want to hear, but there is more. I invite you to come and see. Decide for yourself.” Learning took place under those circumstances.

We very much want that kind of learning experience to occur for our children. When they are not just allowed, but encouraged to debate issues, they explore them, search for evidence, think critically, and then have an ownership of the knowledge they gain. Adults have a right to do this. How can we deny that to our children?

In the immortal words of that masterful tactician, Bill Buckingham, “Two thousand years ago someone died on a cross. Can’t someone take a stand for him?” Oh, right, we’re supposed to believe these bozos are promoting Intelligent Design with purely secular intent. If there is a god, why does he keep promoting his most stupid followers to school boards?

Is this going to be the major creationist strategy?

It seems to be all over the place, with both the Discovery Institute and the various overtly (as opposed to the DI’s stealthy) religious creationists. It’s the one message they are all pounding out consistently.

It, of course, is the argumentum ad consequentiam, the Great Godwinization of the debate, the constant claim that Charles Darwin was the evil monster responsible for the Holocaust, all modern racism and oppression, anti-semitism, whites-only seating on buses, slavery, eugenics, abortion, man-on-pig sex, gun control, job discrimination, illegal aliens, feminism, the birth control pill, hedonism, Mexicans, atheism, hippies, and anything other than the average social mores of 1950s America, and therefore evolution is false.

Anyone with half a brain can see right through this argument: Darwin could have been a baby-raping cannibal and it wouldn’t have affected the validity of his arguments one whit. That Darwin was actually a fairly conservative British gentleman who was also an abolitionist and advocate for fair treatment of all races (although, admittedly, not equality of all races) similarly doesn’t affect the status of his theory, but does allow us to comfortably celebrate the man, and not just the work.

Furthermore, it is ahistorical nonsense. Darwin’s ideas were a relatively late addition to Western culture, arising in the last half of the 19th century. Many of the evils Darwin is blamed for, like slavery and anti-semitism, preceded his birth, and many are even literally endorsed by by a book the liars for Jesus revere, the Bible.

This is an argument that relies entirely on a deep and all encompassing ignorance on the part of the listener to be accepted — they have to be oblivious to the rules of basic logic, they have to be complete blanks on even the roughest outline of history, and they have to be willing to allow visceral reactions to the key words the creationists are spitting out to be tied to unrelated concepts. They have to be stupid and uneducated. This is the state the creationists must perpetuate if their argument is to succeed.

Who is making these transparently idiotic claims? John West, Ken Ham, Geoffrey Simmons, D. James Kennedy, and Tom DeRosa to name just a few. These are people leading a campaign to keep your children stupid.

The latest to jump on the Darwin-caused-Hitler bandwagon is — and I dislike linking to her bad prose and pathetically transparent inbred link-farm — is Denyse O’Leary. Watch how quickly she spirals into lunacy in a single paragraph.

Darwin was instrumental in discrediting the traditional way of looking at human beings. This is a fact that everyone admits and many celebrate. How often have you heard that Darwin’s great achievement was to knock humanity off its pedestal and show that we are merely evolved animals, accidentally evolved at that? And that had everything to do with the Holocaust.

It is true that one thing Darwin accomplished was to challenge the traditional exceptionalist view of human beings as somehow privileged — a hierarchical view that was also used to rank races within the human species — and this was a good thing. While he didn’t always meet his own standard to “never speak of higher and lower,” it was a commendable goal.

But notice how O’Leary twists it: we are merely evolved animals, as if our status as animals somehow excuses our abuses of our fellows. I always wonder if people who make this argument also pull the wings off flies. Darwin did not demote humanity, he elevated it and all life on earth to the exalted position of equal products of long eras of evolutionary history.

This had nothing to do with the Holocaust.

The idea of making Jews extinct in the sense that the dinosaurs are extinct – as the Nazis tried to do – was derived culturally from Darwin, not from the Church. Also derived from Darwin and his supporters – rather than the Church – was the view of Jews as simply a gene pool rather than a race/religion/culture/Jesus’s family/God’s chosen people/essential part of history/essential part of our neighbourhood/people we know. The stew of traditional issues sometimes overflows into violence, but not into a eugenics program.

Look right there, in O’Leary’s preferred view: Jews are “God’s chosen people.” Some people, apparently, are better than other people; we are therefore justified in exterminating those other people if they get in the way of the chosen ones. And who gets to say who are the chosen ones? Why, the chosen ones themselves.

The biological view that arose from Darwinian thought is that there are no specially preferred groups. Jews are as unique and valuable as Palestinians, Chinese, Basque, Germans, Italians, Swedes, New Guineans, Inuit, or Canadians. “Simply a gene pool”? What nonsense. If the other is “simply a gene pool,” then so are we, and none of us have grounds for demanding privileged status.

As for the claim that the Nazi efforts to exterminate the Jews was derived from Darwin, all we have to do is look at Luther’s On the Jews and Their Lies to see how false that claim is. Luther published in 1543, 316 years before Darwin, and in that little pamphlet lays down an 8-point plan for destroying the Jews.

  1. “First to set fire to their synagogues or schools and to bury and cover with dirt whatever will not burn, so that no man will ever again see a stone or cinder of them. …”
  2. “Second, I advise that their houses also be razed and destroyed. …”
  3. “Third, I advise that all their prayer books and Talmudic writings, in which such idolatry, lies, cursing and blasphemy are taught, be taken from them. …”
  4. “Fourth, I advise that their rabbis be forbidden to teach henceforth on pain of loss of life and limb. …”
  5. “Fifth, I advise that safe-conduct on the highways be abolished completely for the Jews. …”
  6. “Sixth, I advise that usury be prohibited to them, and that all cash and treasure of silver and gold be taken from them. … Such money should now be used in … the following [way]… Whenever a Jew is sincerely converted, he should be handed [a certain amount]…”
  7. “Seventh, I commend putting a flail, an ax, a hoe, a spade, a distaff, or a spindle into the hands of young, strong Jews and Jewesses and letting them earn their bread in the sweat of their brow… For it is not fitting that they should let us accursed Goyim toil in the sweat of our faces while they, the holy people, idle away their time behind the stove, feasting and farting, and on top of all, boasting blasphemously of their lordship over the Christians by means of our sweat. No, one should toss out these lazy rogues by the seat of their pants.”
  8. “If we wish to wash our hands of the Jews’ blasphemy and not share in their guilt, we have to part company with them. They must be driven from our country” and “we must drive them out like mad dogs.”

In the blinkered, shuttered, moldy attic of O’Leary’s mind, the fact that Darwin used the word “race” in the title of his book is far more evil than the fact that an influential leader of the church ranted openly about hating the Jews and published specific plans for their destruction.

Here’s what’s really appalling. This whole argument on their part is so blatantly stupid and false, yet somehow the diverse group of leaders of creationism in this country have all informally reached a consensus that their followers are ignorant enough that they will actually accept it. Sense, reason, history, logic, the plain and documented facts can all be ignored — they can delude themselves and lie, lie, lie, and the state of the creationist mind is so abysmally benighted that they can reliably expect a large following to believe them.

Talking animals with more sense

The German Family Ministry (does anyone know if inclusion of the word “family” in an organization title is as ominous auf Deutsch as it is in English?) wants to ban a children’s book. The book is about two little animals on a pilgrimage to find god, and in the end they don’t find him anywhere, and conclude that they haven’t been missing anything. There’s a good reason to ban it, I’m sure…

“The three large religions of the world, Christianity, Islam and Judaism, are slurred in the book,” the ministry wrote in a December memo. “The distinctive characteristics of each religion are made ridiculous.”

You’ve got to be kidding me. If that were grounds for banning, the Bible has to be the next book on their hit list.

A little further on, they do hit on a more legitimate reason, if it were true: the argument that the illustrations of the book are hateful stereotypes, of the sort that Germany has good reason to be sensitive about: you know, the old anti-semitic caricatures of Jews as hook-nosed and greedy. If they’d taken that ugly shortcut, yeah, I’d agree — it would be just more hate literature. However, they include several images from the book, and they don’t look like that: the rabbi looks like any of the ordinary orthodox Jews you’d see walking around New York, so it’s a bit of a stretch.

Maybe it’s badly written. Maybe other illustrations are more overtly hateful. Just don’t try to tell me it’s a bad book because it makes ridiculous religions look ridiculous.

I have my suspicions about the source of the problem, though. The book is titled “How Do I Get to God, Asked the Small Piglet” — Ken Ham must be trying to suppress it.