Christmas shopping?

One of the small disadvantages of academia is that we get hopelessly busy just before Christmas, which makes squeezing in the gift shopping difficult. I’m probably not even going to step into a store until sometime around the end of next week. That’s why you have to appreciate these online gift suggestions. I’m leaning towards the Televangelists’ Rapture Early-Warning System as a universally useful gift for my family members of all faiths. Even the atheists should like the half-hour warning before the Rapture so they can rapidly convert!

Watching the creationist pots coming to a boil

All right, who’s in charge of pool predicting the location of the next big creationist trial? The odds on Florida have just gone up: another Board of Education member has said something stupid.

I would support teaching evolution, but with all its warts. I think that some of the facts have been questioned by evolutionists themselves. I would want them taught as theories. That’s important. They could be challenged by others and the kids could then be taught critical thinking and they can make their own choices.

Thank you, Linda Taylor. Warts: name two. Theory: define the term. Answer the following multiple choice question:

Who is best qualified to make informed choices about complex scientific theories?

  1. Scientists with years of training in the subject, and qualified science teachers who understand the fundamentals of the theory.
  2. Creationists who won’t even commit to an estimate of the age of the earth.
  3. Members of the board of education who have absolutely no training in the sciences.
  4. Children who are just being introduced to the topic for the first time, haven’t read any of the primary literature, and who are entirely dependent on the competence of the instructors who have given them an outline of the general story.

So I’m leaning towards a big blow-up in Florida. Now you might think Texas should be in the lead, what with the obvious clown circus in the Chris Comer story, but I suspect that the Texas creationists have grossly overreached and are going to face a serious backlash — Texas biology professors are pissed off and are mobilizing to fight back. Floridans are going for the slow and steady buildup.

Florida parents are also contributing to the problem. Let’s see more Florida parents rising up to protest so I can dial those odds down a notch.

People behaving badly

We shouldn’t leave the Moslems hanging with all the blame for bad behavior — so here’s some more deplorable activities that have show up in my mailbox in the last few hours.

Aren’t fathers supposed to love their daughters?

Daughters (and sons) have a special property: normal people simply can’t kill them. They drive us crazy, they can break our hearts, but we just can’t do them harm ourselves.

So I really don’t understand how a father can kill his daughter over her clothing choices. I can yell, and I could ground her, and I could deprive her of privileges…but physically hurt her? Impossible.

Oh. It was over religious apparel. That explains everything. Religion is very good at subverting and destroying normal, healthy family values.

What would Admiral Ackbar say?

Steve King (Rotten-Iowa) has our house of representatives pondering a resolution that states that Christmas is peachy-keen…and that also contains implicit assumptions that the US is a Christian nation. It’s very devious: under the cover of empty, feel-good fluff, it advances right-wing religious talking points. It’s sneaky. It’s underhanded. It’s dishonest. It’s so Christian.

Schrödinger abuse

I’m feeling left out. The mathematicians — Mark, Blake, and Tyler — are having so much fun bullseyeing a certain womp rat over there in Creationist Canyon. Yeah, Slimy Sal Cordova has poked his pointy head up and claimed that, somehow, Intelligent Design and Advanced Creation Science (whatever the heck that is) are built on Fourier transforms and Schrödinger’s equation. It’s a pathetic spectacle — Cordova simply throws up a formula with some Greek symbols in it, waves his hand with a flourish, and says, “A-ha!” After a time of his readers staring blankly at him, he says, “A-ha!” again, expecting us to now absorb what he has said spontaneously. And then people who know what they’re doing laugh at his pretense.

I am not a mathematician, but once upon a time I did discuss Fourier transforms in biology, and while I can’t claim to have offered a high-level mathematical discourse on the subject, I did at least try to explain what I was talking about. Cordova’s got nothin’.

(By the way, if you’re interested in playing with Fourier imaging, the wonderful free image processing and analysis program from NIH, ImageJ, lets you do all kinds of fun stuff with images, including an FFT and inverse FFT.)

Aaaaahhh.

Classes aren’t quite over, but I gave my last lecture for the fall 2007 semester today. I still have a discussion session, a lab, and an exam to give, but it’s still something of a landmark in the trajectory of the term. No more lecture prep! No more daily theatrical performances! What’s left is more like friendly conversation and accounting.

I have this six-pack of homebrew from Dave Puskala waiting for me in the refrigerator at home…I’m opening one tonight.

Another holiday effort from a group of atheists

A number of readers were peeved at the Connecticut Valley Atheists’ choice of a holiday display — I was not, and I applauded their assertiveness. So what do you think of the Chester County Atheists’ display?

The group’s display, “The Tree of Knowledge,” will include a 15-foot evergreen with color copies of book covers as decorations. Some of the book covers will include the Holy Bible, the Quran, “Ethics Without God,” “Why I Am Not a Christian,” and “Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism.”

Better? Personally, I would have left off the first two listed since they’re actually more a source of ignorance than knowledge, but you can’t fault the group for trying to be inclusive and conciliatory. These are the “make nice” atheists who are the only ones some readers approve of…but look what it gets them.

Fox News had a program on the display, pitting Margaret Downey against some wanker, Father Jonathan Morris. They called it an “outrage”. Father Jonathan was practically gibbering into his tea at the thought that atheists would have the temerity to speak up, even in such a consciously inoffensive way.

Father Jonathan’s comments were frequently interrupted by Downey, but he appeared to be trying to make the point that he supports free speech but feels that Downey’s group should have had the delicacy to refrain from exercising it.

…

“So many people who I work with on a daily basis, who are really struggling with faith, look and say, ‘You know what? I’m embarrassed,'” said Morris. “Because you’re an atheist, you’re trying to say therefore we’re going to sabotage what is a holiday, a religious holiday.”

I’m afraid that when people whine at me that we need to be more sensitive to those pious beliefs, when I’m told that atheists must be more tasteful, unaggressive, and quiet, I know what an exercise in futility that is — our very existence is offensive to some, and just the fact that we’re living in freedom is an affront to the religious right. You can’t win by accepting their rules and surrendering, so you might as well raise a ruckus and offend, offend, offend. And do it proudly.

I like their “Tree of Knowledge” idea. But now, if I were to do something like that, I definitely wouldn’t include any of their “holy” books. Being positive is good, compromising on principle is not.

The things you learn about us godless evilutionists…

Who knew we were so wicked? Slimy Sal Cordova thinks that being
sodomized by horses is concomitant with “Darwinism”, and Joe Blundo claims The Golden Compass is superfluous as a recruiting tool for atheists because we have the video game Grand Theft Auto, some stupid sitcom called Two and a Half Men, slasher movies, Girls Gone Wild videos.
I had no idea these were the rites of my ideology.

I’ve never played Grand Theft Auto, I might have seen ten minutes of that sitcom once before turning it off, I dislike slasher movies, and not only haven’t I seen Girls Gone Wild, I think the whole concept is contemptible and exploitive. Oh, and I’ve never had sex with any animal unless they’re members of my species.

I guess I’m a very, very bad atheist.