Donate to the Secular Student Alliance

While it’s nearly impossible to get a group of atheists to do anything together (the reaction to the Out campaign demonstrates that!), you’ve all got to agree* that at least the Secular Student Alliance is a good idea. Maybe you don’t know what it’s like for new students entering a university, but getting them involved in student organizations is an important step in getting them involved in the university — our administrations know that, and they push and we faculty advisors push, all to get these students who have left home and are facing a new and challenging and sometimes intimidating environment to make these informal connections with their peers. And what student organizations are waiting for them, licking their chops and looking forward to recruiting new bodies for their cause? A huge part of the collection are religious: we have Campus Crusade for Christ, Chi Alpha- FUSION, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, Catholic Campus Ministry, Free Church Campus Ministries, Lutheran Campus Ministry, Lutheran Student Fellowship, Morris Community Church Campus Ministries, the Dungeons and Dragons Club, you get the idea. This is fertile recruiting ground for the cults.

The SSA tries to foster groups to give students a secular alternative. At the University of Minnesota Twin Cities campus, for instance, we have Campus Atheists, Skeptics, and Humanists working to keep a lively freethought community going; we’re starting a chapter here at UMM (web page is under construction, sorry). Universities are one of the best places we’ve got to build secular leadership.

So what we need, though, is support. Maybe you hated the idea of buying a scarlet “A” t-shirt with Richard Dawkins’ name on it — but are you also going to refuse to donate to the Secular Student Alliance? It’s a great cause. Do what you can to help out.

*It’s like throwing a bone to a dog … you people are all going to rush to disagree now, aren’t you?

The apologists will now explain to us that these people don’t actually exist

The wingnuts are still outraged that there is a Muslim in congress and that a Hindu delivered an opening prayer (which was pretty dang lame, anyway). Now look at this silly little man (R-Idaho) ranting about the death of America:

Last month, the U.S. Senate was opened for the first time ever with a Hindu prayer. Although the event generated little outrage on Capitol Hill, Representative Bill Sali (R-Idaho) is one member of Congress who believes the prayer should have never been allowed.

“We have not only a Hindu prayer being offered in the Senate, we have a Muslim member of the House of Representatives now, Keith Ellison from Minnesota. Those are changes — and they are not what was envisioned by the Founding Fathers,” asserts Sali.

Sali says America was built on Christian principles that were derived from scripture. He also says the only way the United States has been allowed to exist in a world that is so hostile to Christian principles is through “the protective hand of God.”

“You know, the Lord can cause the rain to fall on the just and the unjust alike,” says the Idaho Republican.

According to Congressman Sali, the only way the U.S. can continue to survive is under that protective hand of God. He states when a Hindu prayer is offered, “that’s a different god” and that it “creates problems for the longevity of this country.”

We’ve been having a little discussion in the comments here about the insensibility of satire and parody in this age of Christian lunacy. Take a look at the comments on that article — they are almost all effusive in their praise for Sali and are howling about how America must be ruled by the One True God™. These recent parodies of various Republican presidential candidates are amusing, but there’s a reality out there that’s far crazier and far scarier.

But these people don’t exist, I have often been told. The religious are thoughtful, progressive, inoffensive types.

Assaults on creationism scheduled for Sunday and Monday

It’s a busy weekend coming up. On Sunday, 12 August, I’ll be speaking at the St. Paul Critical Thinking Club, at The Kelly Inn (off I-94 at the Marion St exit) from 10:00 AM to noon. Well, it’s scheduled for two hours, but I promise not to babble on for that length of time. There is a $10 fee to cover the buffet breakfast, and you need to rsvp to Lee Salisbury if you want to attend.

Progress and Opportunities in Evolution
Scientists are a pragmatic bunch who typically don’t worry too much about the deeper philosophical meanings of their vocation: the important property of a good theory is that it allows them to formulate experimentally testable hypotheses and leads them on to intellectually fruitful pursuits. I’ll summarize some of the reasons good scientists have found and are still finding evolutionary theory eminently useful, to the point that many of them take evolutionary conclusions for granted. There is almost no argument about the major ideas of evolution within biology because of its utility — the argument is entirely between a few representative members of the scientific community and scientifically ignorant and religiously motivated leaders of backwards ideology.

And then I talk to the Stillwater Critical Thinking Club on Monday, 13 August, from 7:00-9:00 pm at The Family Means Building on 1875 Northwestern Ave.

Complexity and Order in Evolution
One of the most common arguments for Intelligent Design creationism is that organisms are “too complex” to have evolved. This is fallacious: complexity is a natural consequence of evolutionary processes. It reflects a fundamental confusion in creationist thinking — they use complexity where they mean order, and order when they mean intent. I’ll be discussing these three different words, complexity, order, and intent, and their relevance to evolutionary biology.

And then I get to come home for a few days before my next out-of-state trip.

That’s so sweet

I’m being prayed for.

A prayer for the soul of PZ Meyers

Dear God of Enduring Love, The atheist evilutionist and liberal elite college professor PZ Meyers has lost The Way and says some of the MOST hateful things about Your Work on this Earth and Republic that it is easy to understand why good Christians would pray for the Absolute Damnation of his soul to an eternity in the Hellfire of the Beast. The darkness of his Soul must cause you at least as much pain as do the souls of Muslims and Jews. Dear God, please find in Your great Heart warmth to share in the heart of PZ Meyers, or otherwise, he will continue to perform the Demon’s Duty and steal other souls from you. And please make it difficult for the computers of children and teenagers to visit his many websites where he proclaims his Dark Message of despair and secularization so that their impressionable bodies and minds are not brought under his spell.

I am always so pleased to see my opponents appeal to the impotency of a non-existent being through the ineffectual medium of talking to themselves.

Another turkey pops his head up and gobbles

First Luskin, now Vox Day rushes to say something incredibly stupid (so what else is new?) about the new hominin fossils.

It doesn’t matter what the evidence is, evolutionary biologists are happy to change their story to suit.

Errm, what?

There’s a problem in principle with his objection: yes, that’s what scientists are supposed to do. They’re supposed to follow the evidence where it leads, not cling to a story in spite of the evidence. Religious fruitcakes like Day are the ones who think sticking to a falsified story in spite of the evidence is a virtue.

There’s also a problem in detail. He’s buying into one of the many extremely poor media stories about this discovery that claims the difference in ages of the two specimens means Homo habilis could not possibly be a human ancestor. In this case, the media aren’t entirely to blame — some of the authors have been making similar claims — but it’s still bogus and contradicted by the conclusions of the actual paper.

Day also complains that there are different versions of the theory of evolution, and cites this story as an example. He’s screwed up pretty thoroughly: while there are different mechanisms that play a role in evolution, this is an example of a historical detail, not something broadly related to theoretical concerns, and it does not call into question any mechanisms. In particular, scientists arguing about the precise relationships of species within a specific mammalian lineage does not mean there’s room for god-went-poof explanations.

These guys should just read John Hawks, who actually knows something about the subject.

But this idea of contemporaneity of H. habilis and H. erectus is neither interesting nor new. Recall yesterday’s story about the African and Asian clade hypothesis? News stories had the same lede — “hominid family tree more complex than thought.” This is the ultimate paleontological “dog bites man”: “Human Evolution A Bush, Not A Ladder.” It’s just not interesting anymore.

He goes on to say that there are very interesting things about these fossils: they just aren’t the ones that a poorly informed media or the actively delusional creationists are battening on.

That didn’t take long

Amateurs. The Discovery Institute has already weighed in on the recently discovered hominin fossils, and wouldn’t you know it … Casey Luskin squeaks that we must simply disown Homo habilis, and of course he claims that Jonathan Wells has been vindicated in his ‘refutation’ of a straight line of human descent. And of course he quote mines scientists who say the transitions in human evolution are complex and incompletely understood — as if anthropologists have been claiming to have a complete and perfect answer.

The real irony, though, is that little Casey Luskin, pretentious junior lawyer, pompously declaims that he must “favor abandoning theories that aren’t working.” Exactly what theory is he abandoning? The theory that humans descended from an African ancestor with a smaller brain, that they evolved from more primitive apes? Because that theory isn’t refuted at all by the latest evidence, although I’m sure he’d like to pretend it is.

What this evidence reinforces is the observation that humankind was not a specially privileged lineage, that the ape family tree was diverse and complex, and that we had distant cousins who were following several different paths in their history. This is no comfort to creationists of any ideological stripe.