They can’t shut me up!

Tomorrow, Sunday, at 1:00 in the Roseville Library, I’ll be giving a talk on “There Are No Ghosts in Your Brain: Materialist Explanations for the Mind and Religious Belief”. Come on down and argue with me!

Now I have to get back to polishing this talk up. I suppose no more than ten powerpoint slides of equations is the limit? (Nah, not really—there’s no math in this talk at all. A few pretty pictures, though…).

By the way, if you listened to the Horgan/Myers Show, there was an unfortunate characterization of atheist organizations as groups of people congratulating one another on how much smarter they are than those crazy theists. As you can see, we actually do have issues of substance to discuss, and it actually helps to talk about them in an explicitly non-supernatural way.

And as everyone knows, the backslapping chatter about our plans for world domination are confined to the business meeting.

Ever upwards

Of course it would be Phil who would remind me: today is the 38th anniversary of the first manned landing on the moon. I remember lying on my stomach on the floor with my chin in my hands, watching TV in the way only 12 year olds can and which would nowadays leave me wondering if I’ll be able to get up again, the front door open, a summer breeze blowing through the screen, the sound of someone down the street mowing their lawns, and right there in front of me, in this ordinary day in a boring little small town, I saw these grainy echos of a human being stepping onto the moon. We can do that. It was hard, and only a tiny few of us have ever accomplished it, but here in our hands and in our minds we have this amazing power to accomplish astonishing things.

How are we going to accomplish our next miracle, do you think?

Egnor mangles the history of eugenics

John Scopes was prosecuted for teaching the theory of evolution. He used a textbook called A Civic Biology, by GW Hunter, which, if you ever seen it, is a rather awful book, and is certainly something we wouldn’t want poisoining our classrooms today. Michael Egnor, as behind the times and obtuse as ever, uses the ugly racism of A Civic Biology to falsely damn evolution. He quotes some nasty bits of the book, such as suggestions to prevent breeding with the feeble-minded and its equation of civilization with white skins, and then concludes with a foolish switcheroo.

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A reluctant plug

The Evolution Sunday project, which tries to recruit clergy to advocate good science at least once a year, has sent out a request for scientific expertise to help them. They’re well-meaning, but they need it. Try reading some of their collection of Evolution Sunday sermons, and what you’ll find is usually attempts to piggyback the validity of truth by religious revelation on the credibility of evidence-based reasoning.

I personally do not support the Evolution Sunday project — I think it benefits religion far more than it does science in that it lends support to superstition and taints evolution with nonsense — but in a truly ecumenical and catholic spirit, I’ll at least mention it for those of you who think otherwise.

Besides, imagine giving me a red pen and a sermon to edit. My eyes would start to glow, I’d channel the damned soul of Abdul Alhazred, and the end result would drive whole congregations mad.