Nah, not really worth it

Sorry, Rev. BigDumbChimp: you asked if Faith Converter 1.1 for Mac was any good. It’s a gimmick program that will take a chunk of text or a web page and supposedly convert it to be compatible with a specific religion. It’s a nice use of the Mac Webkit and so forth, but otherwise, it’s just a program to do an automated global search and replace of certain terms. It’s marginally amusing, not something I’ll every use again, and you can get the full joke just from the promotional web page.

Lucky Houston gets Lucy

The state department has approved a visit from an eminent foreigner: a certain 3.2 million year old australopithicene is going to be at the Houston Museum of Natural Science from 31 August 2007 through 20 April 2008…and then she’s going on tour. Future locations haven’t been determined yet, but Minneapolis is nice. Chicago would be OK. I hope I get a chance to pay court on her.

Just a thought, but the creationists have got it all wrong. They think we worship Charles Darwin, but actually, if there are any objects of reverence among evolutionary biologists, it would be the evidence — the bones of Lucy, of Archaeopteryx, of Tiktaalik, the little trilobite in shale that I keep by my hand at my office desk.

First we lost the America’s Cup, and now this…

Australia is trying to show us up again, aren’t they? Their 2006 census shows that religious believers have dropped to 79% of the population, a substantial decline from 83% in the the 2001 census. And from previous data, it looks like an accelerating trend. Come on, America, we have a godlessness gap! We have to catch up!

Of course, I’d be even more impressed with Australia if I didn’t have a sneaking suspicion that it wasn’t caused by a rapid growth of rabid, militant, middle-of-the-road fundamentalist agnostics.

Hooray! We’re getting less money!

Academia is a strange little world—we’re happy about this news!

The biggest winners from the University of Minnesota Board of Regents meeting? The 1,900 students at the Morris campus who saw their tuition go down by almost $1,000.

We’re an even better bargain than before. Now we just need to get more students to take advantage of us…so enroll at the University of Minnesota Morris! Send your kids here!

Heaven, Hell, who cares — I pick Earth

The Washington Post had a ‘conversation’ on a very stupid question:

Do you believe in heaven or hell? If not, why not? If so, who’s going there and how do you know?

It’s a stupid question, because the only sensible answer is “no” and “because there is no evidence for it, nobody has been to either place and come back to tell us about it, and everyone who makes claims about them is using them as a carrot-and-stick to compel you to obey them”. Unfortunately, What the WaPo did was gather a bunch of gullible theobabblers, and it’s a collection of the most absurdly pious garden mulch this side of the Crystal Cathedral. It’s got short essays from the Dogmatic A-hole Brigade (Chuck Colson and Cal Thomas) to a swarm of blithering churchmice who squeak out vacuous promises of eternal love.

It’s uniformly awful, with one exception: the token nonbeliever, Susan Jacoby. She doesn’t believe in either heaven or hell.

But I certainly do believe in purgatory. Purgatory is wondering whether the human race in general, and my fellow Americans in particular, will ever grow up enough to realize that we ought to treat one another decently simply because of our common humanity—not because we are looking forward to being entertained by harpists among the clouds or are terrified of eternal flame.

That’s the only one worth reading in the whole bubble-headed, mindless collection. It’s also the one that gathered the most comments. That should tell everyone something right there—shouldn’t we all be tired of the empty promises and delusional fantasies of the theologically inclined by now?

(via gnosos, who has a shorter summary of many of the articles)

Church and State, hand in hand

What an attractively symmetrical graph:

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People who don’t go to church mostly disagree with GW Bush; people who do go to church regularly mostly agree with GW Bush. Unfortunately, these results are from a poll taken in 2005, so it may have lost some of that symmetry since—I certainly hope it has, and that all of the bars in “agree for the most part” category have since gotten smaller.

A very tentative Seattle itinerary

Lots of people want to say hello on my trip to Seattle next week, so I thought I’d better let you all know the public parts of my itinerary. This is mainly a trip to relax, eat seafood, meet family and old friends, so there’s a problem of priorities. Most of my time will be spent a bit further south than the Big City—my family lives in Auburn, and I grew up in Kent—so these are tentative times and places where I’ll be available in metropolitan Seattle. I might have to revise my schedule if family events come up—if I do, though, I’ll mention it on the blog.

Sunday, 1 July, 3:00-8:00: I’ll be at the Seattle Freethinkers’ Picnic in Woodinville. I don’t know that I’ll stay there the whole time, though, and might head back early. First day back in the Northwest with Mommy and my baby brothers and sisters, don’t you know.

Tuesday, 3 July, 8:00: I’m planning on dropping in on the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally, at the Montlake Ale House, and which is hosted by Nicholas Beaudrot and somebody named TheHim. As usual, I’m driving a ways to attend a Drinking Liberally meeting, so I’ll have to go easy on the Drinking part and get a double-helping of Liberally.

Friday, 6 July, whenever: We’re just going to indulge in downtown Seattle — cruise the bookstores, maybe hit up the aquarium, see the tourist traps (Ye Olde Curiosity Shop still exists, I presume? Maybe we’ll stop by Seattle Center and stare up at the Space Needle), Pike Place Market, the University district, etc. We’ll need to fuel up at lunch, so there’s an opportunity to catch up with us there, and we’ll definitely want a leisurely evening meal where we can rest our tired feet. I’ll try to name some specific places from the previous Seattle thread when the date gets a little closer—but basically we’ll be somewhere in center city Seattle.

I was also hoping to get a picture taken of me peeing on the Discovery Institute’s building downtown, but I hear that’s illegal nowadays (I also hear they have cement sidewalks instead of wooden slats, and the streets are paved; everything has changed since my youth), so I may have to settle for merely shaking my fist at it and scowling ferociously.