Let’s go to church!

One of the most common arguments against the New Atheists is to claim that they’re railing against a straw man — that religion is benign and thoughful and rational. I’ll agree that some individuals within religion are like that, but religion itself is a poisonous nest that encourages lunacy. Here’s one example: take a look at Steve Foss Ministries. In particular, watch the video titled “I-55 Revival explostion of POWER “, which has it all. Babbling idiots talking in tongues, people spazzing out in a frenzy, and worst of all, the minister and parents urging children to join in the insanity.

This crap is going on everywhere in this country. Maybe most moderate Christians aren’t joining in directly, but they sure are good about closing their eyes to it.

I-55 Revival explostion of POWER

The Natural History of Nonsense

I received a fascinating pdf of a book from the author of the Cape Cod History page — it’s by Bergen Evans, was published in 1946, and is titled The Natural History of Nonsense. As far as I’ve read yet, it’s a wonderful example of rational thinking, and makes one wonder why this kind of writing isn’t more representative of American popular literature.

Here’s a short sample from the chapter titled “Adam’s Navel,” which is about the curious history of the omphalos theory, and it also gets into some of the mixed signals our country was sending about race and intelligence.

This ingenious theory, that the real “use or office” of
Adam’s navel was to tempt men into the sin of being sensible, was
revived in 1857 by Philip Henry Gosse, the naturalist, as an
analogy to prove that while the fossils which the paleontologists
had discovered seemed to imply organic evolution, God might
have so arranged them at the Creation in older to damn nineteenth-century skeptics. Gosse had a few followers among the Plymouth
Brethren, but most men greeted his suggestion with shouts of
derision. It was inconceivable that God would have baited a trap
for anything so respectable as the Royal Society. And anyway,
they said, Adam’s navel was as dead as a doornail.

But they were wrong. Although it was no longer a fashionable topic among the learned, it must have continued as a
subject for speculation among millions. For in 1944 it suddenly
raised its head in no less august surroundings than the Congress of
the United States, when a subcommittee of the House Military
Affairs Committee, under the chairmanship of Representative
Durham of North Carolina, opposed the distribution of The Races of Mankind to our soldiers on the ground
(among other reasons) that in one of its illustrations “Adam and
Eve are depicted with navels.”

The Honorable Gentlemen’s motives for raising this particular objection can only be surmised. Perhaps they were
uncertain of orthography and of the scope of their duties and in
consequence assumed that Navel Affairs came under their
jurisdiction; but the chances are that they were just laying down a
smoke screen, for the pamphlet in question, a thirty-page booklet
prepared by two Columbia professors, contained information that
almost any politician would feel it his duty to conceal. It stated that
the concept of race is based largely on prejudice, that most of us
are of mixed blood, and that nonphysical racial characteristics are
probably the product of environment. And, most horrible of all, it
chose to illustrate this last assertion from tests given by the United
States Army in World War I which indicated that the average
intelligence of Negroes from some Northern states was higher than
the average intelligence of whites from some Southern states.

The OCR on this scan is very well done, and it’s only a 1.2M download despite being the whole book — let’s try not to bring the guy’s server to its knees, though.

Plant and animal development compared

Blogging on Peer-Reviewed Research

Since I wrote about the wacky creationist who couldn’t wrap his mind around the idea that plants and animals are related, and since I generally do a poor job of discussing that important kingdom of the plants (I admit it, I’m a metazoan bigot…but I do try to overcome my biases), I thought I’d briefly mention an older review by Elliot Meyerowitz that compares developmental processes in plants and animals. The main message is that developmental processes, the mechanisms that assemble the multicellular whole, are very different in the two groups and are non-homologous, but don’t get confused: the basic cellular processes are homologous, and there’s no doubt that we are related. The emphasis in this paper, though, is the evidence that plants and animals independently evolved multicellular developmental strategies. There is some convergence, but the tools in the toolbox are different.

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Carnivalia and an open thread

Carnivals!

A Tangled Bank announcement!

The Tangled Bank

The next Tangled Bank will be at Greg Laden’s place, so send those links in to me or host@tangledbank.net before Wednesday!

A reminder!

Don’t forget to tune in to Atheist Talk at 9am tomorrow morning. The topic of the day: Lori Lipman Brown, lobbyist for the Secular Coalition of America, will be interviewed.

An open thread!

Hypocrisy? From the Expelled guys? Say it ain’t so!

Ben Stein, Walt Ruloff, and Mark Mathis have been rattily scurrying about the country, doing press conferences and radio interviews in an attempt to boost attendance at their upcoming schlockfest, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. Their schtick is to claim that academia prohibits free speech, and doesn’t allow people to pursue the truth and ask questions.

There’s a problem, though. In order to have a media interview, they have to let media representatives into the room. They try to deal with this problem by making them sign a non-disclosure agreement (wait…they’re holding a press conference, but they don’t want the press to write it up afterwards?) I’m glad to see, though, that some journalists are still willing to report on the sleazy behavior of the Expelled crew.

Freedom of expression is unseemly at an Expelled press conference. There was no give-and-take, no open marketplace of ideas, in fact, scarcely any questions at all. Ruloff and Stein batted one softball after another out of the park from those posed by Paul Lauer, a representative of the film’s public relations firm. Questions from non-employees had to be submitted by email. Lauer (or somebody at his firm) screened them.

I’m not sure whether Thomas Aquinas handled media inquiries this way. I’ll have my people get back to your people on that.

The questions that made it through the screening were from: Listen Up TV, a Christian program; the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, the policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention; Focus on the Family; and the Colorado Catholic Herald. Four outside questions in 50 minutes of press conference, only two of which can be described as “press.”

I’ve participated in a lot of press conferences in my thirty years as a journalist. I once bumped into President Gerald Ford on the front lawn of the White House. I had a question for him, which he politely answered. I went to a press conference by John Lennon and Yoko Ono, who took all of our questions and hung around afterward to talk with me. I’ve had press conference questions answered by physicists Hans Behe and Edward Teller, “father of the hydrogen bomb”; by Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson; by John Wayne; by U.S, Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney; by U.S. Sens. Alan Simpson, Craig Thomas, John Kerry, Malcolm Wallop and Gary Hart, and by lots and lots of other public figures whose time I’ve wasted. Some of my questions were argumentative, but all were thoroughly – if sometimes equally argumentatively —  answered.

Until I got to Ben Stein. Though calling for the rough-and-tumble of openness and debate, Stein didn’t have time for questions.

In my earlier review, I dealt with Expelled as a failed and dull attack on evolution. But this “press conference” convinced me that not only is Expelled and the intellectual movement behind it hypocritical in its supposed defense of “freedom of expression,” it’s an attack on the entire superstructure of science and technology that has created the modern world. Expelled is anti-rational.

I have a suggestion for the Expelled PR team. Stop inviting legitimate journalists altogether — they’re going to see right through your pretenses. Just invite the liars for Jesus of creationist apologetics: they don’t have any objections to dishonesty and ignorance, and will write much more sympathetic reviews.

The argument from oranges

What is it with creationists and fruit? I hope you’ve had your coffee already, because this is an unpleasant way to wake up. The clip below is from a public hearing in Orlando, Florida, in which citizens had a chance to stand up and state their opinions of evolution. Are you braced to handle a little smug and stupid this morning?

I’m sure this guy thought he was rhetorically brilliant, with a knock-’em dead argument against evolution. Why, nobody with any common sense could possibly believe that people (or their pets) could be related to an orange! Just pointing out the obvious to everyone, that round orange fruits don’t look anything like furry mobile animals, will reveal the absurdity of evolution.

Unfortunately for Mr Dallas Ellis, we really don’t have any problem seeing the similarities between oranges and kitty cats — scientists look a little deeper than he does. Slice an orange and put it under a microscope, and what do you see? Cells. Slice a cat and look at it under a microscope, and what do you see? Cells. We find similar organelles: cytoplasm, nuclei, mitochondria, etc. The contents use similar metabolic processes, and we find the same chemicals. The nuclei contain DNA, and we can compare the sequences — and we find similarities there (they are related) but many differences as well (they are distantly related — one estimate for the last common ancestor of plants and animals says they diverged roughly 1.6 billion years ago). Mr Ellis is relying on his profound ignorance of the basic building blocks of biology to make a superficial case.

Let’s not even get into his closing remarks, trying to compare evolution to trucks full of poultry and garbage colliding, and spontaneously fusing maggots and turkeys to produce the school board. It’s simply more evidence that he’s a clueless old git.

I’m perfectly comfortable with the idea that I’m a distant relative of every creeping, crawling, blooming, squirming organism on the planet, but I do have to admit to some discomfort at being related to Mr Ellis. An orange has evolved no neurons and at least has an excuse for being unthinking, and hasn’t evolved speech and so spares us its mindless gibbering.

Don’t get cocky

Hemant thinks he has a shot of winning an online poll to determine the sexiest atheist blogger. No way! I’m going to send you, my minions, over there to … uh … wait. You people are probably still in shock from that time I exposed my chest, aren’t you? Dang. I need to wait at least 20 or 30 years before those memories fade if I’m to stand a chance.

I voted for Greta Christina, anyway, and my second choice was C.L. Hanson.

People, what are you doing voting for me? That’s insane. Unless, of course, you’re one of those people who likes a bad boy with a hint of danger, even if he does look like Meatloaf or Jack Black … but as everyone who meets me says, I defuse even that with a mild and professorial air. Pick someone else!

Compound irony

Would you believe there is actually an award called the Award for Liberty and Truth? You just know in this Orwellian country of ours that it couldn’t possibly be given in recognition of actual liberty or truth … but it’s even worse than that. It is the Phillip E. Johnson Award for Liberty and Truth, and it’s handed out by the Bible University of Los Angeles, better known as Biola; named after a prissy old fraud, given out by a bible college with delusions of grandeur, and guess who the winner is this year?

Ben Stein.

I like it.

It’s a fake award by a fake college named after an infamous creationist and now given to a second-rate character actor. It’s the creationist version of the Nobel Prize!

February needs a Molly

It’s that time again: nominate your favorite commenter(s) in the thread for this post, and we’ll see who gets to be honored with a Molly this month. You can check the last Molly thread if you want to see what worthies lost out last time.

Also, you may recall that story of a large snake that tried to swallow a large alligator … this is how I feel right now.

i-2f43d203958512fbf5f6270405906d98-snake_meal.jpg

I have updated my blogroll with as many of the new submissions in the last Open Enrollment day as I could. It’s getting a bit bloated, I’m afraid. I do have to explain a few things, though.

If you aren’t on the current list even though you submitted your blogroll, there are a few possibilities. Some of you were already on it, so look harder. Some of the blogs failed to load — it’s nothing personal, but if there were technical difficulties at the time I tried to add you, I didn’t try too hard to overcome them. Some of the submissions did not have a syndication feed, and I’m afraid that I can only follow blogs with some kind of feed.

Everything in the blogroll comes straight out of the feed, including the title. If the title doesn’t look right, don’t blame me: check the settings on the RSS/Atom feed on your site. Also, some blogs have a little descriptive tag line after the title; again, that just comes out of your feed.

I’ve put the list of new blogs below the fold. Remember to nominate a new deserving commenter for a Molly!

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