The petites sauvages of Pharyngula: old Mollies, new Mollies, and open enrollment

The always perspicacious Chris Clarke is talking about us, in a post where he talks about the pleasures and perils of managing comments on a blog.

I’d be lying if I said I never appreciated a good bar brawl of a comment thread. And some blogs make the free-for-alls work: Pharyngula comes to mind as an example of a wonderful, worthwhile blog with a laissez-faire comment policy. But few blogs have that winning Pharyngular combination of high traffic, sharp focus, distinct blogger personality, and devoted constructive regulars. The chance of a typical low-to-mid-traffic blog ripening into another Pharyngula is, as the blog world matures, decreasing.

He’s got it right — managing comments is tricky stuff, and there are the issues of setting the tone, of culling the more egregious violators, of keeping the place from descending into random madness. Probably the best example of a blog pulling off the delicate balancing act of of getting a convivial and smart continuing conversation going is Making Light; I think Pharyngula has a fine comments section that at least aspires to that level, less the “convivial” part. Chris accurately describes the situation here as a laissez-faire free-for-all.

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Megachurches make millions

You really should read this Senator Charles Grassley’s investigation into megachurches. It’s about time someone pulled down these big-time scams.

Nearly 2,000 years later, some who claim to speak in Jesus’ name are taking a different view. Consider Bishop Eddie Long, who pastors a megachurch in Lithonia, Ga. With a salary approaching $1 million a year and a nine-bathroom mansion situated on 20 acres, Long’s choice of vehicles reflects his opulent lifestyle: He drives a $350,000 Bentley.

Far from casting out money changers, Long is likely to join them. In a 2005 profile in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, he defended his high-flying ways, insisting, “I pastor a multimillion dollar congregation. You’ve got to put me on a different scale than the little black preacher sitting over there that’s supposed to be just getting by because the people are suffering.”

These charlatans tend to hide behind the first amendment and claim that their congregations have a right to worship as they please (which generally seems to mean throwing money to the pastor at his bidding). As the article makes clear, Grassley isn’t interested in challenging them on constitutional issues: he’s investigation financial fraud, not doctrine.

That sounds fair to me. Churches ought to repay their tax exemption by being required to provide full, open, public disclosure of all of their finances.

A few follow-ups

  • Remember the creationist trying to raise money by selling off his mastodon skull? Now we know why he is trying to get money fast. He got into a nasty, mud-slinging lawsuit with a fellow Christian creationist over ownership of another fossil. The wonderful news: if he doesn’t get enough cash from the sale of the skull, he may have to close his museum.

  • Man, you people sure jumped hard on that poor Canadian who thought the title of Darwin’s book was sufficient to damn it. Now he has replied with another post in which he demonstrates his stupidity. He really should stop. He has put up a long list of “ironic” claims that show he also doesn’t know what irony is — here’s part.

    3)Irony is being accused of not reading the atheist bible (and even being told I have “no excuse”) when I’m actually a couple of days into this.

    4)Even greater irony is that I can probably guess on one hand, probably even less, how many of these accusers have read my Bible — and mine’s been completed for almost 2000 years!

    5)Even greater irony is that I might or might not need my other hand to count how many of the above-mentioned have read their own bible…

    How clueless can you get? There is no atheist bible, and the Origin certainly wouldn’t be it if there were; his bogus criticism was specifically of the title of the book, and reading the NAS booklet on evolution is irrelevant to that point. He’s got a lot to learn, too, if he thinks atheists haven’t read “his” Bible, since many of us came to atheism precisely because we were unimpressed with the content of that book. Somebody else will have to break the sad news to the poor fellow that the Bible wasn’t completed at the time of Jesus, but is a pastiche put together many centuries later…and that there were multiple versions of the Bible before they settled on the particular chapters now in the canonical version.

    I’m sure a fair number of us here have read the Origin, and it is a darned good book, but it is not required reading anymore, and it is greatly out of date.

  • Answers in Genesis is starting a fake science journal. Now you can actually read the first issue, which contains a grand total of two articles. One claims that granite can form very, very quickly, therefore the earth could be young (as if that is the only reason we can see that the earth is far older than 6000 years old). The second tries to puzzle out where the bacteria fit into the six-day creation account — it’s quite an exercise in absurdist reasoning, since bacteria weren’t even imagined in biblical times.

    Not recommended, unless you’re a masochist.

Success!

The new Minnesota Atheists radio show was very good — they’re going to have a hard time topping getting a heavy-hitter like Richard Dawkins next week (well, maybe not: next week they’re talking about sex), but they’ve clearly got no shortage of material to talk about. My segment was cut a bit short, but it was my own fault — my usual wordy exposition needs refinement.

Dawkins was great, and give a clearer explanation of Sam Harris’s point about not calling ourselves atheists than Harris has; he also talked about his experience with the movie, Expelled.

If you missed it, it will be available as a podcast on the Minnesota Atheists site. I noticed a lot of foreigners, people from California, of all places, calling in — so presumably many of you can catch the program regularly.

There’s more to a book than a title

Talk about clueless gomers—here’s a Canadian blog praising the Expelled movie, and bringing up a very tired argument against evolution.

For the trolls (and you know who you are!), I simply offer the original title Darwin gave to his book,

On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life

,and ask you to explain how such a social (and Holocaust-endorsing) statement can be classified as the title of a purely scientific work — until I get a direct answer to that, I will not respond to any of your inquiries as I haven’t seemed to get much of a response on mine and think I’m overdue!

First of all, the logic is deeply flawed: if evolutionary theory did have undesirable social consequences, that wouldn’t be a valid argument against the truth of evolution.

Secondly, and more conclusively, the question reveals quite a bit about the questioner. He hasn’t read the book he’s criticizing, beyond copying down the title! The Origin is using “race” in an antiquated way that refers to what we’d now call varieties — he doesn’t discuss human races at all, but does talk a great deal about domesticated breeds of pigeons and horses and vegetables. It certainly doesn’t endorse any kind of holocaust. Darwin doesn’t advocate any action, but is offering a descriptive explanation for what is.

The Origin is a purely scientific work, rich in detail and experiment and offering a useful framework for subsequent research. A man who can barely read past the title is in no position to make demands for explanations or deplore the unread contents of the book.

(via Canadian Cynic)

Sunday is a big day for Minnesota Atheists

Minnesota Atheists will be having the first of many weekly radio programs on Air America, starting on Sunday, 13 January, at 9 AM. They’re getting off to a very strong start with an interview with Richard Dawkins, among many other features.

Minnesota Atheists will launch a weekly, one-hour program on Air America Minnesota (AM 950) beginning Sunday, January 13, 2008 from 9:00 to 10:00 a.m. It will be broadcast live, streamed live on the internet, and made available later as a free podcast. The name of the program is Atheists Talk (the same as our cable television show). The show will feature news, interviews, live call-ins, and more. We are proud to announce that our special guest on the inaugural program will be Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, The Selfish Gene, and many other important and influential books.

If you are out of the listening area and want to hear the program live, go to www.airamericaminnesota.com/listen and enter a Minnesota zip code. If you would like to become involved with the program by volunteering your services, making a donation, or purchasing advertising, please call August Berkshire at (612) 338-4548 or e-mail him at augustberkshire@gmail.com.

Tune in! Call in!

Hey, St Petersburg, Florida!

You’ve got a real winner running for mayor down there. Bill Foster is another ignorant creationist running for political office.

“Evolution gives our kids an excuse to believe in natural selection and survival of the fittest, which leads to a belief that they are superior over the weak,” Bill Foster wrote board members in a letter received this week. “This is a slippery slope.”

He continued: “One of the Columbine shooters wrote on his Web site, ‘You know what I love? Natural selection! It’s the best thing that ever happened to the Earth. Getting rid of all the stupid and weak organisms.'”

Rather than reducing our kids’ exposure to evolution, let’s increase it. The problem with what Bill Foster believes, a belief he shares with the Columbine punks, is that it has nothing to do with evolutionary biology — in their ignorance, they’ve swallowed a whole pop-culture, religious line of bullshit about the theory. Biology does not advocate killing the stupid and weak; it does not preach some kind of objective superiority of one class of people over another; it merely describes what happens in the natural world.

Maybe if the Columbine killers had gotten a more accurate version of evolution from a science teacher rather than the idiot’s version they got from people like their conservative preachers and the Bill Foster’s of the world, they wouldn’t have held those ridiculous distortions of the idea.

I hope all you St Petersburg residents are planning to vote for some other person. You don’t really want an ignoramus in charge of your city government, do you?

Goodbye, Vampira

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Sad news…Vampira has died. She was very young for a vampire, only 86, and there’s no word on whether it was a stake or sunlight that ended her long career as one of the rare Finnish vampires (real name: Maila Syrjäniemi). You may recall her from her important role in Plan 9 from Outer Space.

It’s the last sad whimper to the lingering death of an old tradition. When I was a young’un, there were horror hosts everywhere—you knew that if you turned on the TV anywhere at about 11 on a Friday or Saturday night, there’d be somebody in a Halloween costume introducing some old black-and-white horror movie. It was campy, it was predictable, the movies tended to be awful (although when one of the old Universal classics with Karloff or Chaney, or anything with Vincent Price, was scheduled, I made a special effort to watch it), and it was always fun. Rmember those cheap Japanese monster movies? Roger Corman’s low-budget rip-offs of Edgar Allen Poe titles, with content completely divorced from anything Poe ever wrote? That phenomenal wave of British horror coming out of Hammer Studios? Them, The Incredible Shrinking Man, The Amazing Colossal Man, The Blob—all that 50s paranoia about nuclear bombs?

Many of us godless people still identify as cultural Christians because that was the background of our upbringing, but I think my late night inoculations with classic horror and sci-fi movies had a deeper, more long-lasting influence on my life than those boring, unentertaining, unengaging Sunday mornings spent in church pews. I am a cultural Frankenstein, Jekyll, Moreau, Morbius, Pretorius, Phibes, and even Vampira — and they were all the more important as shapers of my perspective because there was no pretense that they were real, and because their portrayals were open to criticism and mockery.