How the West was ‘Won’: with spin and rewriting history

The Discovery Institute is spinning wildly to make excuses for West’s performance on Friday, and to declare him the “winner”.

I got two calls last night about Dr. John West’s presentation at the University of Minnesota on Darwinism’s fathership of eugenics. It appears that the scholarly and well-delivered lecture, derived from the new West book, Darwin Day in America, was successful in influencing the thinking of a largely skeptical audience. (The dyspeptic and ad hominem blogger/biologist Dr. P.Z. Myers was there and brought a Darwinist claque. West generously introduced him and acknowledged him as Minnesota’s Richard Dawkins, which is about right.)

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34 Unconvincing Arguments for God

Here’s a very useful document that I got from August Berkshire (you can also get this in pdf form from Minnesota Atheists): 34 Unconvincing Arguments for God. I guess he forgot to include all the convincing arguments for gods, but I’m sure some wandering delusional troll will try to provide some. That’s OK, I’m sure August would be willing to increase the number in his title.

Anyway, maybe a better title would be “34 arguments for god, and why they are unconvincing”. Go ahead and make suggestions to improve them, I think August will be checking in and following along.

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Snow!

How nice that we should start the first of December with a howling snow storm.

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This is prairie winter: not your big fat flakes falling gently, but hard icy snow slicing horizontally with a stiff wind; no quiet hiss of steady accumulation, but the rushing roar of wind and weather blowing billows of crystals everywhere. We’ll have thick drifts against the house before this is done.

I’m glad to be sitting quietly in a warm house, and I think I’ll put on another pot of hot coffee. Later, when it dies down though…then comes the cold feet and the tired shoulders that go with shoveling snow. At least this stuff tends to be dry and light and fairly easy to heave.

John West at the McLaurin Institute

Yesterday, I hopped into the black evo-mobile and made the long trek to Minneapolis to witness another creationist make a fool of himself. As is my custom when traveling alone, I like to crank up the car stereo until the road noise is beaten back, and the soundtrack for my trip was first, NPR’s Science Friday, and then Richard Einhorn’s Voices of Light, which I’d received in the mail earlier this week (thanks, Richard!). This was a mistake. This would have prepared me for science, complexity, and beauty, but all I was going to get at the end was ideological stupidity, simple-mindedness, and a particularly ugly dishonesty.

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Viewing religion through Panglossian spectacles

Let’s ruin a perfectly pleasant Friday with a poll full of ugly reality.

The poll of 2,455 U.S. adults from Nov 7 to 13 found that 82 percent of those surveyed believed in God, a figure unchanged since the question was asked in 2005.

It further found that 79 percent believed in miracles, 75 percent in heaven, while 72 percent believed that Jesus is God or the Son of God. Belief in hell and the devil was expressed by 62 percent.

Darwin’s theory of evolution met a far more skeptical audience which might surprise some outsiders as the United States is renowned for its excellence in scientific research.

Only 42 percent of those surveyed said they believed in Darwin’s theory which largely informs how biology and related sciences are approached. While often referred to as evolution it is in fact the 19th century British intellectual’s theory of “natural selection.”

I keep hearing from people that criticizing religion is over-generalizing, that we shouldn’t judge it by the minority of fundamentalist loons who get all the attention in the media, or by those few, rare exploiters who represent religious beliefs poorly. I am sick of it. Ask people directly whether they believe literally in a damnable stupid doctrine like hell, and they don’t waffle, they don’t pose like pedants and maunder on about metaphysics and socioeconomic influences and tradition, the majority simply say “yes”. This is the reality. The majority of Americans do not think, they just accept this nonsense at face value, and we have to deal with stupidity on a national scale.

This is what it means:

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Pope Benedict denounces god!

Good news, everyone! In a new encyclical that reveals the papacy is feeling the heat from all those vocal atheists, the pope makes a startling admission:

Reciting arguments made by atheists, he said: “A world marked by so much injustice, innocent suffering and cynicism of power cannot be the work of a good God. A God with responsibility for such a world would not be a just God, much less a good God.“

Exactly. Good on yer, Ratzi. I knew you’d see the light someday.

The rest of it is pious noise, about what you’d expect from the lunatic leader of a globe-spanning cult of ridiculous mythology, and I give bugger all for what a puffed-up theologian in funny robes says. Those two sentences, though, give me some hope that his rational humanity might someday shine through.

Nah. Just kidding. That’ll never happen.