Well, I was going to do something with that awful, horrible, ignorant Klinghoffer piece that the Discovery Institute was pushing, but my distracting weekend kept me occupied, and
Pro-Science,
Thoughts in a Haystack, and
Salt on Everything
all demolished it for me. Anything I could say at this point would just be bouncing gibs around.
I have been remiss in my duties—there is a Tangled Bank this week, at the amazing and awesome Aetiology. Send those links in to me or host@tangledbank.net by Tuesday!
My uncle Ed, my fun uncle who took a long, long time to grow up, had two favorite comics on the funny pages: The Wizard of Id and B.C. I liked them, too, and we followed them regularly. Of course, that was in the 1960s and early 70s, and I’m afraid they were afflicted with that syndrome common to long running strips: fading relevancy, recycled humor, the growing impression that the caroonist was phoning it in and didn’t really care anymore, as long as he got his syndication check. Johnny Hart, the creator of those strips, was a particularly sad case, because compounding the problem of staleness was an especially annoying and intrusive simple-minded religious stupidity. And now he’s gone. It’s unfortunate, in part because I regret any death, but also because he wasted so many of his last years cranking out crap and soiling his reputation.
I’ll forget about his religion, and remember instead my uncle chuckling over the Sunday funny pages.
We have a new scienceblog here, Shifting Baselines, authored by Jennifer Jaquet and associated with Randy Olson’s Shifting Baselines Ocean Media Project. She has already opened up shop with an absolutely horrible, conflicting argument:
Should We Continue to Eat Seafood?
“But it tastes so good,” I whimper.
Al Gore slaps me to the floor and kicks me in the ribs a few times. “But it’s bad for overfished oceans!”
I don’t know what to do. I’d have fish or some nice marine invertebrate every night for dinner, but I have a different constraint: my wife and daughter are not fans. About the only time I have seafood is on those rare occasions I go out for dinner without the family, and since I’m not giving them up, I guess I’m effectively adopting Jennifer’s position and, if not giving it up absolutely, at least cutting back consumption greatly.
To my dismay, even after a good night’s sleep and a fresh perusal of the paper, after reading both of Greg Laden’s thorough articles, Mooney’s latest summary, Orac’s claim that it’s nothing but tailoring your message to your audience, and Nisbet’s roundup of responses, I’m still hopelessly confused. What the heck is this paper telling me to do?
Wilkins is not happy that I jumped down Pagels’ throat for a stupid comment in an interview. He thinks I ought to take Pagels more seriously (as did some of the commenters here), and, unfortunately, also goes on to mischaracterize the uppity atheist arguments, like so:
This is what I reject about the Dawkins/Moran/PZ aggressive atheism – it takes the most stupid version of religion, argues against it, and then claims to have given reasons for not being religious. At best (and here I concur) they have given reasons not to be stupid theists. But a good argument takes on the best of the opposing view, not the worst.
Alas, as is common for criticisms of this kind, the “best” of the religious views are mentioned as a mythic monolith on a far-off mountaintop, rather than actually stated, making them rather difficult to take on. I think it’s because whenever anyone tries to state them, there’s usually a lot of hemming and hawing and admissions that they don’t actually believe in these arguments, they’re just trying to be fair and state that there are good arguments out there. It’s basically a bait-and-switch: They say, “I may believe X, but here’s Y; you can’t refute Y!” Then we pound on Y for a while, and they say, “Why are you wasting my time with arguments against Y? I believe in X!” So you pummel X for a bit, and they announce, “I may believe X, but here’s Z; you can’t refute Z!” And so it goes, endlessly. This is the theme I argued in an essay on Edge.
Hrrm … I seem to have stretched myself a little too thin this weekend. Early this morning I drove off to Minneapolis and Minicon to pick up Skatje and catch a few panels at the con, and then I drove back — I just got back a half hour ago — and despite the fact that there are a great many interesting things to talk about, this day has been a bit too much. Minneapolis really must pick itself up and move about 150 miles further west — I’ll appreciate it, and St Paul will be eternally grateful.
I will address Wilkins/Rosenhouse, Grayling, Klinghoffer (grrr), Mooney, Laden, etc., but right now my brain demands a total shutdown for a little bit.
If you really need a good Easter anti-religion rant to tide you over, read Skatje’s. She got to sleep in the car while I was dodging semis on I94 for most of the day.
The movie 300 has finally arrived in Morris, and I saw it last evening. I’d heard a lot about this film, in particular that it was loaded with relationships to current events—the war in Iraq, in particular, with arguments for it being pro-war, anti-war, a jingoistic propaganda film, etc. The arguments are all wrong. I could tell exactly what this movie’s hidden meaning was: it’s a retelling of the creation-evolution struggle! “But of course!” you’re all saying to yourselves, “It’s so obvious, now that you mention it!”
Abbie makes an excellent point on it the ongoing discussion of the Nisbet/Mooney paper: just how often do scientists get an opportunity to discuss their work to the public, anyway?
I have a few simple points to make.
From Geoff Arnold, it seems there is a cult of Schneier. Since I said hello to Bruce Schneier in my brief visit to Minicon yesterday, I feel that I am obligated to set the facts straight. It’s all true. He is a god among men, and the earth would tremble at his footsteps if he wasn’t so beneficent that he insisted on levitating himself everywhere.
Speaking of deities on earth, I also got to briefly meet Teresa Nielsen Hayden at her panel on conversations on the net. Yes, in person, she is exactly like she is on the web, only more so. Somebody interrupted her, she raised a finger, and with a glance disemvowelled him on the spot, something you really do not want to see occurring in the real world. Alien geometries were involved; people reduced to consonants are angular, dysphonic, disturbing, and very hard on the eyes.
Fortunately, I only waved to Patrick Nielsen Hayden from a distance, otherwise an evening in the presence of a Trinity might have perturbed even my absolutely inflexible dogmatic atheism.
I am a little jealous of Skatje, who is spending all day and all night today and most of tomorrow at the con.
Skatje’s keeping us up to date on the con at her weblog. I’ll have you know I introduced her to de Lint’s books, and now she’s going to be bringing home a bunch more for me to read. Bwahahahaha! My clever scheme bears fruit at last — there’s the true reason I had kids, merely so they would one day bring me books.
