Jesus

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See that guy over on the right? The well-fed fellow doing the salute?

That’s Jesus.

Not just a guy named Jesus, but the Son of God. The Messiah. The literal second coming of the Savior. King of kings, Lord of lords, yadda yadda yadda, and he swears he isn’t a False Christ.

That’s what he says, anyway. And apparently he’s got a substantial number of followers who believe him.

Thanks, Liberal Debutante, for disillusioning me further. Jebus, but people can be awfully stupid, especially when religion is involved..

Drinking Liberally tonight

We faculty at UMM are about to go off to a Campus Assembly meeting, which is always good for making one thirsty. Fortunately, there’s a Drinking Liberally scheduled for tonight, at 6:00, at Old #1—it would be a great idea if we all stopped in for a little refreshment and conversation afterwards.

This is, of course, wide open to everyone of the liberal persuasion, so townies, out-of-townies, and students are also welcome to stop by.

Tomorrow’s the day

John McCain is going to be addressing the Discovery Institute in a panderiffic event tomorrow. DefCon Blog has a petition urging him to cancel his appearance, on the perfectly reasonable grounds that no candidate should be giving moral support to such a contemptible organization.

I have mixed feelings about it. I’m no fan of McCain, and I like watching the far Right embed themselves ever deeper into Christian lunacy—I have this hope that someday everyone will wake up and see the whole Christian/Republican edifice as purest poison. So I can’t quite bring myself to sign the petition, not that McCain would care about my opinion anyway, but you others can make your own decision.

Phillip Johnson labors to issue a mighty squeak

I guess Phillip Johnson stepped down from on high to deliver a thunderbolt of a defense of Intelligent Design creationism. At least that’s the impression you get from the IDists.

Ho hum. To me, it sounds more like an old man farted.

You can get an assessment from the rational people on the side of evolution, like Shalini, John Pieret, and Joe Meert. I think Larry Moran summarized it most succinctly.

Like most IDiot arguments, this one relies on two main points: (1) evolution is wrong, (2) the bad guys are picking on us. There isn’t one single scientific argument in favor of intelligent design.

Johnson whines and whines and whines, and is disappointed that “influential scientific organizations formed a solid bloc of opposition to the consideration of whether evidence points to the possible involvement of intelligent causes in the history of life.” There’s a reason they’ve opposed ID; the proponents never get around to offering any of that evidence we’re supposed to consider, and Johnson’s latest emission is no exception. Instead, we get a lot of nonsense about how Anthony Flew converted, sorta, and how we shouldn’t be afraid to let God into our science.

The gasbag of ID is slowly deflating, and the intellectual flabbiness is becoming apparent. Rather than rejoicing, the IDists ought to be dismayed that this is the best they can do, after years of phony triumphalism.

The unspeakable vileness of religious law

Am I supposed to believe religion is a force for morality, when I see so many examples of it more being a force for mindless obedience to arbitrary rules? This story out of Pakistan is disturbing in many ways.

Zilla Huma Usman, the minister for social welfare in Punjab province and an ally of President Pervez Musharraf, was killed as she was about to deliver a speech to dozens of party activists, by a “fanatic”, who believed that she was dressed inappropriately and that women should not be involved in politics, officials said today.

Ms Usman, 35, was wearing the shalwar kameez worn by many professional women in Pakistan, but did not cover her head.

Executed for not having a piece of cloth on top of her head; what god looks down on our world from his cosmic perspective and thinks that is an important concern for humanity? Allah, apparently; I can find commandments in the Bible that make similar demands.

Mr Sarwar appeared relaxed and calm when he told a television channel that he had carried out God’s order to kill women who sinned. “I have no regrets. I just obeyed Allah’s commandment,” he said, adding that Islam did not allow women to hold positions of leadership. “I will kill all those women who do not follow the right path, if I am freed again,” he said.

I’m sure religion’s defenders will shout long and loud that this guy Sarwar is simply an isolated lunatic, and that if he’d been an atheist he would still have been a monster. True enough; one asshole might be an exception, and godlessness is no guarantee of goodness, but a series of incidents is a pattern, and we have to look at who is inciting it.

General Musharraf, whose support for the US-led war on terror has caused consternation among Pakistan’s hardline elements, has promised to address women’s rights as part of his more moderate agenda.

But analysts said that the murder of the female minister highlighted the failure of his government in curbing Islamic extremism. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan in a recent report said that violence against women had increased alarmingly, with some of the incidents incited by Mullahs opposed to women’s emancipation.

Face it, everyone. Religion is not a source of moral behavior. It’s a source of tribalism and obedience to authority, which sometimes coincides with respectable morality, but isn’t necessarily associated with it. We have to find our virtue in one true thing, our common humanity, and these ancient superstitions actually interfere with instruction in how to be good by encrusting it with nonsense.

(via Pro-Science)

Too damn religious

This letter to the New Zealand Herald was written to protest a claim that NZ was a “Christian nation”. It’s got a nice twist to it.

If my resistance to deem New Zealand to be a Christian nation makes me a traitor, as Brian Tamaki suggests, take me to the Tower, or the New Zealand equivalent, for it would be greatly preferable to living in such a country.

You might think, then, that I am one of the 48.8 per cent of non-Christian New Zealanders.

I am not. I am an Anglican priest serving an Auckland church. And no, I’m not Bishop Richard Randerson under a nom de plume.

As an immigrant from America I know what it means to live in a Christian nation. That’s why I left. New Zealand’s respect for human rights is why I chose to live here as a permanent resident.

Read the rest. You can tell he was more than a little disgusted with America’s Christian hypocrisy. As a confirmation, you can also listen to this NPR panel debate

that concluded that the US was “too damn religious”.

What’s the matter with M.D.s?

Take a look at this interesting discussion of a recent PLoS article in which publications in medical journals are reluctant to use the word “evolution”:

According to a report released last week in PLoS Biology, when medical journals publish studies about things like antibiotic resistance, they avoid using the “E-word.” Instead, antimicrobial resistance is (euphemistically, I suppose) said to “emerge,” “arise,” or “spread” rather than “evolve.”

This decision has consequences, too—popular press descriptions of the work then tend to avoid using the word “evolution”, too. This is exactly the kind of run-around that allows kooks like Phil Skell to claim that modern biology doesn’t actually need evolution (although, truth be told, Skell is so looney that he claims papers on evolutionary biology that use observations of fossils or gene frequencies don’t really need evolutionary theory).

Of course, what this is all about is really just to have an opportunity to tweak the noses of the good doctors here at Scienceblogs, like Orac and Revere and Charles and Craig—what’s wrong with these M.D.s? Are they poorly educated, cowardly, or do the granting agencies or journal publishers actually pressure them to avoid ‘controversial’ words?

There is some degree of seriousness to the question. This habit has effects; what can we do to correct it?

Hey, this Joachim Bublath guy is good!

A reader pointed me to this German documentary (with English subtitles) on evolution and creationism—it has a nice 10 minute primer on mechanisms and evidence for evolution (with evo-devo, especially of fruit flies and zebrafish, prominently mentioned, appropriately enough for the country of Christiane Nusslein-Volhard).

There’s also a segment on creationism that is a bit lacking in nuance—they are all lumped together as young earth creationists—which is the kind of opening creationists use to disavow association with those other kooks, while glossing over the foolishness they do believe. Never mind the theological hairsplitting, though, YECs and IDist are fundamentally identical in their rejection of science for dogma.

Aside from that, it’s a simple introduction to evolution that emphasizes the molecular evidence (yay!), has eye-catching graphics and animations, and scathingly dismisses creationism and the general descent into mystical thinking. Do any of my German readers know of this fellow? Was this broadcast on German television?