Carnivalia and an open thread

Carnivals for this week:

A call has been put out for Darwin Day posts. Get it together and put up something celebrating Darwin Day. I’ll try, but my schedule is once again bubbling over chaotically — I’m giving a short talk to an education conference on Monday, and I volunteered to do a talk here at UMM on Darwin Day — I’ll have to see if I can maybe wring something out of that.

My Darwin Day talk isn’t so much about Darwin, though, as it is about the contemporary fruits of his theory, and an attempt to explain evo-devo to a diverse audience.

The Obama failing

Apparently, Barack Obama did well in the recent primaries, increasing the chances that he’ll be the Democratic candidate for president. Right away, we’re seeing an old video of an Obama speech (transcript here) being refloated. This is the same speech that prompted me to say I would never vote for Obama. It really is a ghastly exercise in self-delusion and post hoc justification of religious bigotry; I’d say he was pandering to his audience, except that I think he really believes the nonsense he was spouting.

Just reading it again pisses me off, it’s so full of stupidity. Look at this:

And by the way, we need Christians on Capitol Hill, Jews on Capitol Hill and Muslims on Capitol Hill talking about the estate tax. When you’ve got an estate tax debate that proposes a trillion dollars being taken out of social programs to go to a handful of folks who don’t need and weren’t even asking for it, you know that we need an injection of morality in our political debate.

Good grief. We need Christians, Jews, and Muslims to “inject morality” into Capitol Hill? Capitol Hill is full of nothing but believers, and it’s the loudest and most fervent of those believers who passed the regressive taxes we have now. To make it even worse, he turns around a few sentences later and says this:

So the question is, how do we build on these still-tentative partnerships between religious and secular people of good will? It’s going to take more work, a lot more work than we’ve done so far. The tensions and the suspicions on each side of the religious divide will have to be squarely addressed. And each side will need to accept some ground rules for collaboration.

You want to build bridges to the secular part of the nation? Then don’t assume the godless are the amoral, unethical, venal part of society that you need to discipline with a ruling majority of religious saints in government.

There’s much more in that speech that grates. For instance, he praises Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech for it’s religious content, which he claims was necessary. NO. Read it again. King was a minister, and of course his religious tradition informed his speech, and the cadence of the speech is straight from good ol’ sermonizing, but the religious references are nothing but little fillips on a call for social justice, for equality and freedom. If you read that speech and come away thinking it’s a paean to religiosity, you’re missing the point. Atheists and other secularists are moved and inspired by that speech; the religious content is background, not purpose.

So let’s be clear here: I despise Obama’s faith. I think it has the potential to be a major hindrance to any accomplishments of an Obama administration, and I worry that it would further promote the desecularization of our government. If Obama is elected, I will not be a cheerleader, but a constant critic.

That said, though, in the recent caucus, I made myself a liar and voted for Obama. If he’s the Democratic candidate, I’ll vote for him in November. (I hope I don’t regret it.) I would remind him, though, that the last liberal Christian candidate who made his faith a matter of public discussion was Jimmy Carter, a wonderful human being who was also a one-term president. Piety is no substitute for accomplishment.

I do not aspire to the complete disenfranchisement of all religious people, and I always have to hold my nose and press that lever for some Christian — as an atheist in America, I have never had the opportunity to vote for any candidate in any election who was willing to admit to disbelief. (Think about that—as a group, we lack representation in our government, but it’s the other side that is always claiming discrimination.) So there’s nothing new in having to swallow my pride and vote for a compromise candidate who represents my views so poorly.

In this election, I’m confronted with a moderate Republican in Democratic clothing (Clinton) who I don’t see advancing secular government in a progressive direction; a weak progressive (Obama) who is tainted with religious delusions, but I’m hoping will focus on more practical issues, and the religiosity will not be prominent in his administration; and a mob of flaming lunatics on the Republican side who promise nothing but catastrophe.

I’m reluctantly voting for Obama, but as I said last time, someday I want to vote for a freethought president. I have a dream! Of course, I seem to still be waiting for a chance to vote for a freethought city councilman, so it may be a while.

So…what’s the latest buzz about Expelled?

The culture wars are proceeding as expected, and Ben Stein’s reputation is following a predictable trajectory.

Popular character actor and mendacious old fool Ben Stein has a little movie coming out about how “BIG SCIENCE” doesn’t want you to know the truth about evolution. Stein salutes the scientists who are bad enough to question Darwinism in his upcoming documentary Expelled, about an unscrupulous Nixonite hack who parlays his unlikely pop cultural fame into an inexplicable career as an entertainer/propaganist. Rex Sorgatz asks, “do you remember when Ben Stein wasn’t bat shit crazy?” Actually, uh, not really.

Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.

Institutionalized misogyny

Saudi police arrested and strip-searched an American businesswoman for the crime of visiting a Starbucks with a male colleague.

“Some men came up to us with very long beards and white dresses. They asked ‘Why are you here together?’ I explained about the power being out in our office. They got very angry and told me what I was doing was a great sin,” she told the Times.

It could be worse. In Iraq, women who violate “Islamic teachings” are tortured and murdered. The “Islamic teachings” that are so important that violators must be tortured and beheaded involve wearing a headscarf.

You can imagine the reaction, then, when the Archbishop of Canterbury suggests that England ought to legally recognize Sharia law. It’s foolishness with well-meaning intent — let’s help the waves of Islamic immigrants acclimate — but it’s also a perfect example of why even moderate religions are dangerous. What he proposes is outrageous appeasement, an accommodation to a primitive religious tradition, when what ought to be said is that the uniform application of secular law is what a civilized society demands, not a patchwork of piecemeal laws which apply differently to different people, and especially not the corrupting insanity of irrational, hateful, vile nonsense like Islam.

Perhaps the Archbishop was concerned that if he didn’t support the Islamic version of irrational insanity, people might notice that the Anglican church is also a bastion of irrational insanity. Let’s hope that instead this will help open people’s eyes and get them to wonder, “why the hell do we even pay attention to old fools whose only claim to authority is their position in an antiquated ecclesiastical hierarchy?” Go away, archbishops and imams — you harm our culture.

Loyal Rue vs. (?) PZ Myers

At some time, a recording of our ‘debate’ will be available online, so I won’t try to do a play by play now. I will say that I found this one pretty much impossible to prepare for — there was no way this debate could be shoe-horned into a good vs. evil or smartness vs. ignorance conflict, making it a much more complicated discussion, rather than a television wrestling storyline. We’d had a few conversations in email and there were several points of disagreement, and in fact Dr Rue showed those points in a slide, but you know, he had good reasons for all the stuff he got wrong. I read his book, Everybody’s Story: Wising Up to the Epic of Evolution(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), which is actually very good: he doesn’t advocate the abandonment of religion, but rather the evolution and transformation of religion to incorporate the best of modern science in its cosmology, rather than the best of Babylonian science from the first millennium B.C. We have our differences, but I couldn’t help but feel that I’d be quite content if all the reactionary religious nuts would convert to Rue’s religion, even if they did fall shy of the perfect ideal of atheism.

So we had a discussion rather than a debate, a discussion that revolved around some of our differences, but our intent was more mutual enlightenment than mutual evisceration. We got good probing questions from the audience, too, so I think a lot of us had our thinking caps on. I had a good time. I had two dark ales afterwards to celebrate a pleasant evening.

Some of you loyal readers were there, feel free to chime in with your impressions in the comments. Maybe it looked completely different from the bleacher seats…?

P.S. Greg Laden was there, and he made some really good points about how morality isn’t a product of religion at all in most cultures. We should have dragged him up on the stage to give his perspective, but maybe he’ll expand on that on his blog.