What Orac said

Scienceblogs are being reviewed by Some Guy, and Orac criticizes the critic. My disagreement with the clueless critic comes from a fundamental flaw in his approach: he’s basically coming along and announcing that Blog X should be about Y, and if it isn’t Y-ish enough for his taste, he pans it. He, apparently, is the Content Dictator of the Blogosphere.

One thing everybody needs to understand about blogs is that they aren’t about what you think they’re about. Good blogs are about the author, not your perception of what the subject should be.

ConFusion 2007

Yes! We made it home! The plane was a few hours late, the weather was awful, and we didn’t pull into our driveway until 3AM (my brain is not exactly humming along right now, I tell you what…), but it was a great weekend at ConFusion.

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Skatje, me, John Scalzi, and Matt Arnold

I have to thank a few of the people who made this a most excellent event.

  • The con organizers, who made the whole experience completely painless for me. I’m very impressed with the amazing art of con organization.

  • Matt Arnold, who was my GoH Liaison, and was most pleasingly obsequious and servile. I scarcely had to lift a finger all weekend, and I ate very well. Skatje wasn’t too keen on the sushi cafe we’re at in the picture above, but but I think even she enjoyed herself.

  • The smart people with whom I shared some panels: Eric S. Raymond, Bruce Schneier, and Karl Schroeder. We argued…intelligently! It’s great fun to sit down with people who have thought through opinions on science and aren’t afraid to wield them.

  • The attendees who showed up at all those panels. They argued, too—it was like leading the best kind of discussion sections at the university, where the students have all done their homework and don’t need to be coaxed to contribute.

  • The younger set at KidFusion, who also were pretty darn vocal. Who knew that the best way to hunt giant squid was with a fighter jet?

By the way, John Scalzi also has a ConFusion wrap-up, and it’s mostly true. Mostly.

Everyone should go next year. Go ahead, surprise the organizers, and let’s have 2,000 people register. It’ll freak them out.

Atheism is a source of greater optimism than dour old Abraham

John Horgan criticizes Francis Collins for his defeatism in thinking that human beings will always be evil to one another:

Christians castigate atheists such as Richard Dawkins for propagating a dark, nihilistic view of human existence. But Dawkins is Pollyanna compared to Christians like Collins, who has so little faith in human reason and decency that he thinks we’ll kill each other until the end of time.

I’m not quite as optimistic as Dawkins—I don’t think that the disappearance of religion would necessarily or rapidly lead to an improvement in the human condition. I do think it is an essential start to the process, however; reason is the tool by which we will build a better future, and we must clear the interfering clutter of superstition to make a beginning of it.

To the losers go the spoils

Karen Klinzing, a creationist-friendly Republican who lost her run for the Minnesota legislature, has been rewarded by our Republican governor, Tim Pawlenty, with a nice cushy job…as Assistant Commissioner of Education.

There’s nothing quite so charming as the sight of a conservative hack getting handed a sinecure, and one from which she can work mischief.

(via Lloyletta)

Carnivalia, and an open thread

I’m taking a little downtime from the busy con fun-and-games, and catching up with the various carnival announcements.

I’m here in Michigan for several more hours, then I’m off to the airport for the late flight home. Talk among yourselves.

Obama’s Religion is the problem

Man, it’s so annoying when the little sites take a poke at me, hoping to trigger a strong reaction so that I’ll send lots of traffic their way. It’s pathetic, and you know I can’t resist. This particular site is trying to yank my chain by complaining about my lack of support for Barack Obama, and along the way they confirm my point.

What’s interesting to me about all this is that when you get down to it, Obama presents conservatives with a category error. Democrats are liberal, and therefore cannot be religious, q.e.d. It simply fries their circuits that Obama won’t stick in the pigeonhole they’ve constructed for him. It’s going to be a hard election season for them: As Grillmaster pointed out to me the other day, Edwards, Gore, Clinton, and Obama are all comfortable with the language of religion.  The Republican front-runners – McCain, Guilliani and Newt – not so much.

And just for fun, allow me to point out that many folks on the left share the same perspective, albeit from a different angle. A real Democrat can’t be religious!

To be fair to Prof. Myers and those who agree with him, what they’re saying is more properly, “a real Democrat shouldn’t be religious.” They’re entitled to their opinion, whether or not we agree with them.

I’m glad he tried to be fair, although he completely blew it on both attempts. What I said was that I will not support Obama because he is too pious for me, and Pastor Dan is rather freely admitting that the Democratic front-runners are all a squad of name-droppers for God. This is a disaster. When will people learn that the demagoguery of appealing to non-existent super-beings will not do a single thing to correct any of our problems?

While he’s chuckling over how Obama fries Republican circuits, he’s also reinforcing the view that one of the major reasons he is getting a lot of play is precisely because he is a happy god-bot. He’s also glossing over my other complaint about Obama: he hasn’t accomplished much of anything. If he had a commendable congressional record, I’d be willing to overlook his reliance on phantasms and spirits, but he doesn’t have one, and he doesn’t seem willing to work for one, preferring to jump on the shortcut to the presidency that a felicitous charisma and the appeal to superstitious ignorance gives him.

It amuses me that an article called Obama’s Religion Problem proposes to deal with the issue by admitting that he does represent Religion with a capital “R”, but that it isn’t a problem. Wrong. Foolishness is always a problem.

The foundation of religion: despair

There’s a whiff of armchair psychoanalysis to this article on why religiosity has become such an epidemic in this country, but I think there’s a strong strain of truth running through it.

The engine that drives the radical Christian Right in the United States, the most dangerous mass movement in American history, is not religiosity, but despair. It is a movement built on the growing personal and economic despair of tens of millions of Americans, who watched helplessly as their communities were plunged into poverty by the flight of manufacturing jobs, their families and neighborhoods torn apart by neglect and indifference, and who eventually lost hope that America was a place where they had a future.

This despair crosses economic boundaries, of course, enveloping many in the middle class who live trapped in huge, soulless exurbs where, lacking any form of community rituals or centers, they also feel deeply isolated, vulnerable and lonely. Those in despair are the most easily manipulated by demagogues, who promise a fantastic utopia, whether it is a worker’s paradise, fraternite-egalite-liberte, or the second coming of Jesus Christ. Those in despair search desperately for a solution, the warm embrace of a community to replace the one they lost, a sense of purpose and meaning in life, the assurance they are protected, loved and worthwhile.

Promises of glory and paradise are always cheaper than actually doing anything about worldly problems.