Kristol? You’ve got to be kidding

I gripe about the NY Times now and then — the newspaper is an infuriating mix of the best and the worst of print journalism. I’ve had a couple of the people who work there stop by in the comments now and then, and I’d love to see one of them show up now and explain something to us all.

William Kristol??!? Jebus. The man has spent years demonstrating that he’s a clueless ideologue who always gets it wrong.

So wy, NY Times, why?

And if you don’t know Kristol’s litany of failure, Tom Tomorrow reminds us.

Yeah, that’ll work

So the Catholic church has a problem with pedophilia. In a rational world, there’s a range of options available: stop protecting priests who abuse their position, threaten convicted child-abusing priests with expulsion and excommunication, even revisit this peculiar custom of demanding celibacy for the priesthood. Alas, the Pope has his own very special solution.

Pope Benedict XVI has instructed Roman Catholics to pray “in perpetuity” to cleanse the Church of paedophile clergy. All dioceses, parishes, monasteries, convents and seminaries will be expected to organise continuous daily prayers to express penitence and to purify the clergy.

Pray harder! Exercise a completely ineffective technique more strenuously!

I do wonder how the Pope imagines god will “cleanse” the church. Just tweaking the brains of priests so they don’t feel lust anymore would be a violation of free will and make a mess of centuries of theology, while having god get all Old Testament on the church and smite priests all around the world with lightning bolts would be spectacular and effective, but probably very bad PR.

Paulos summarizes Beyond Belief

Cool — John Allen Paulos has a roundup of the events at the Beyond Belief conference this year. It really was a stellar meeting, in part because there was such a variety of talks (almost all in attendance were atheists, but there were some deep disagreements). Paulos had one of the talks I found copacetic rather than irritating…and, by the way, he has a new book out: Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don’t Add Up(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). It’s a slim little thing that comes right to the point—and this is a reminder that I ought to pull it down off the stack and get it read.

How depressing

Creationist can actively impede science. One of the largest mastodon fossils ever found was discovered on a ranch in Texas owned by a fellow named Joe Taylor — an infamous creationist who runs the Mt. Blanco Fossil “Museum”, a wacky little place that peddles fossils while claiming they support a 6,000 year old earth. Now he’s putting it up for auction, and you can buy the skull for something north of $60,000.

We can’t win this one. Even if it’s bought by a reputable museum and studied scientifically, it still means that this creationist is going to get a huge chunk of change to use in promoting more lies.

The limited representation of movie atheists

I saw the new Will Smith movie, I Am Legend, last night. In short, it was far worse than I expected, with a drawn out and rather boring beginning (Smith is lonely, everyone is dead except for his dog. Got it), and the ending felt like a stapled-on feel-good absurdity that didn’t follow from the premise—and is only a happy ending if your dream of paradise is an armed camp of Christians. The only virtue I’d heard about the story is that the hero is openly atheist … but that was a disappointment, too, because I discovered he was the wrong kind of atheist.

Atheists in the movies aren’t that common. Most seem to be cast as amoral opportunists — the villains. They are rarely cast as the hero, and when they are there is only one atheist stereotype allowed in that role, and Will Smith filled it perfectly.

The acceptable atheist is the one who has faced so much tragedy, whose life has been damaged by cruel fate to such a degree that his declaration that there is no god is understandable. He is a failed Job; he’s portrayed not as an actual contented atheist, but as someone who has broken under the burden a god has placed on him, and is therefore a sympathetic figure, and also is implicitly endorsing the audience’s beliefs about god. Job without god, after all, is just a deluded loser.

That’s the standard trope: the atheist is a broken man, a nihilist, a cynic, someone who has come to his disbelief as a consequence of a devastating emotional experience. This is the kind of atheist theists are comfortable with — but it’s not the kind of atheists the New Atheistswann are, and especially not the scientific branch. We don’t fit into their unthinking convention, which is probably why they stuck us with the label “new”.

There are atheists who look on a tragedy and cry, “There is no god,” in despair. But we are atheists who look on beauty and complexity and awesome immensity and shout out, “There is no god!” and we are glad.

That’s the distinction we’ve got to get across. We are fulfilled, happy atheists who rejoice in the superfluity of the old myths. We generally don’t have a tragic backstory — quite the contrary, we’ve come to our conclusions because we have found natural explanations satisfying and promising.

wann: who are not “new”.

Mixed messages from the NAS

The NAS has a new edition of their Science, Evolution, and Creationism publication, which is a genuinely excellent piece of work. We’ve used the previous editions in our introductory biology course here at UMM, and if you want a short, plainly written introduction to the evidence for and importance of evolution to modern biology, I recommend it highly. It fills a niche well — it explains the science and gives a general overview for the layman without getting distracted by the details. And if $12 strains your wallet and 70 pages exceeds your attention span, you can download an 8 page summary for free. If you teach high school biology or have kids in high school, grab that: it’s an outline of what every educated adult ought to understand about evolution.

However, it does play the bland game of religious appeasement to a small degree, and although it is only a short part of the book, it’s a blemish that would have been better left out. The NY Times review plays up the religion-and-science-are compatible angle, unfortunately; as you might expect, Greg Laden doesn’t sound impressed and Larry Moran doesn’t fall for it. I don’t either. It’s not enough to dissuade me from urging more people to read the book, since it really is an inconsequential dollop of pablum tossed on top of some good science, but I have to say that it really looks stupid in there.

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Uh-oh — I can think of a few people who will argue with this

Although this article does make a very good case that you can’t be a feminist and religious at the same time. Even the most peaceful religions, like Jainism and Buddhism, treat women as inferiors.

The article doesn’t mention any female-centered religions, though, like Wicca…I suppose you could be a Wiccan feminist, but you’re still stuck trying to believe in crazy stuff.