The most disturbing 8 year old in the world

This cute kid makes a nice rant that I completely agree with, but yeesh—those aren’t her words. She’s playing dress-up and prancing in front of a camera, and reciting with child-like enthusiasm words someone else wrote for her. That bugs me.

My kids were brought up without religion, and I know what a genuinely godless kid is like. They’re interested in Where’s Waldo and Dr Seuss, not Richard Carrier and Robert Ingersoll and Richard Dawkins. They play video games and like the swings at the local park. They run into religious practices when they visit their friends, and they’re curious, but it’s not a big deal…it’s exactly like discovering the different foods their friends’ families eat. They don’t care about religion.

So sure, this kid is cute, but she rings false. Please, atheists, don’t use your children as props in this kind of anti-religious tirade—speak for yourself.

(via Echidne)

The Chopra Delusion

Can I possibly bear another bucket of gobbledygook from Deepak Chopra? One must soldier on, I suppose, even as Chopra becomes even more vague. I’m going to keep it short, though.

Dawkins, along with other arch materialists, dismiss such a search [for “god”]. Are information fields real, as some theorists believe? Such a field might preserve information the way energy fields preserve energy; in fact, the entire universe may be based upon the evolution of information. (there’s not the slightest doubt that the universe has an invisible source outside space and time.) A field that can create something new and then remember it would explain the persistence of incredibly fragile molecules like DNA, which by any odds should have disintegrated long ago under the pressure of entropy, not to mention the vicissitudes of heat, wind, sunlight, radiation, and random mistakes through mutation.

Well, no. We can see the chemical processes involved, we can measure rates of degradation, we can calculate how selection would maintain a viable DNA sequence. This is all very silly; we don’t need his “invisible information field” to account for the characteristics of DNA. He’s fond of conjuring up these magic sources for phenomena we do understand, so maybe we should all be a little skeptical when he invents them for phenomena we don’t.

As for his lack of doubt about an “invisible source outside space and time” for the whole universe—I have my doubts, but I’ll defer to the physicists on this one. I don’t see why a source for something before which there was no space or time is at all necessary.

The man gets grandiose:

The entire universe is experienced only through consciousness, and even though consciousness is invisible and non-material, it’s the elephant in the room so far as evolutionary theory is concerned. This is a huge topic, of course, and I’ve offered earlier posts on the many flaws in current evolutionary theory. under the topic of Intelligent Design. It’s difficult threading one’s way through the battlefield, with fundamentalists firing smoke on one side and skeptics arrogantly defending the scientific status quo on the other, but earth-shaking issues are at stake. When we understand both intelligence and design, a quantum leap in evolutionary theory will be possible.

Actually, since most organisms lack any kind of consciousness yet evolve just the same, consciousness has almost no applicability to evolution at all. It’s a very narrow topic limited to a relatively tiny lineage, and the question isn’t how consciousness contributed to evolution, but how evolution produced consciousness. I don’t quite understand why he’s got that dangling sentence fragment splat in the middle of the paragraph, but his message is clear anyway: he’s just another Intelligent Design creationist, asserting that his god must have played a role in our origins, but he has no evidence, no real theory, and his ignorance of biology is pathetic.

Maybe he should ask the Discovery Institute for a membership application. He’d fit right in.

What’s wrong with this statement?

Something is odd about this comment:

…to help make his point that the bible was the word of god, he introduced the Dead Sea scrolls. He said that they were 3,000 years old and that scholars had found that they were identical to the modern day bible. In fact, he said, “Every dot over every ‘i’, every cross of the ‘t’, every comma, and every period is in the exact same place as in the bible in your hand” (quote paraphrased).

And to this day in Hebrew school, the children receive careful instruction in dotting i’s and crossing t’s.

Demon squid?

This is just not right. Orac finds some wacky spiritualist ‘healer’ who claims to have the cause for diabetes: a demon, the great spirit squid of doom. What? A squid demon? How kooky. Everyone knows no self-respecting squid demon would confined itself to screwing up one subset of cells in your pancreas.

You’ll have to read the original page to find a list of other demons. There is, apparently, also a Demon of Excessive Foot Odor which you can cast out, and you can also have Demons in your Blood Sugar.

It’s “Sod off, God!” week

My favorite ferocious feminist has declared this to be “Sod off, God! Week” at I Blame The Patriarchy. There’s no respite from the patriarchy blaming, but she is taking a sledge to a few sacred cows as a sideline. Like this:

Take ritual, for instance. My suspicion is that ritual is no deep human need. As a concept it gives off quite the lip-wrinkling whiff of eau du primitif. And what about that trio of stinky undertones — conformity, obeisance, and orthodoxy — that comes with it? Add the collateral conditions of exclusivity and tradition, and you got yourself all the field marks of one of those bogus assumptions that status-quoticians are always trumpeting as “natural” or “instinctive” but which are really just tools of the patriarchy or opiates of the people or what have you. You know. “Big tits are sexy.” “Women’s minds are naturally less inclined toward mathematics.” “Van Morrison is a genius.” Etc.

I’ve heard that so often: that people need ritual, that there’s something beautiful and comforting about the predictable and stately. Why? I get along fine without it, and find it a nuisance when I’m subjected to it, so it’s clearly not a universal human need, like food or love. If you’re brought up with it, if it’s dunned into your head that you must attend Sunday services or you will go to hell, I can understand how the relief from an artificial anxiety might feel good…but why not cut the problem off at the roots and raise kids who aren’t instilled with those foolish fears?

Ritual is a head game. It’s the droning repetition of nonsense that the church has used for millennia to kill the muses of creativity and individuality—and once they’ve punched that god-shaped hole in your head, they’ve got you hooked on the weekly or daily pap sessions needed to fill the gap with the sacred version of gelfoam.*

*That reference may be a little obscure. In my neurosurgical days, we used to chop bits of brains out of experimental animals, and you don’t just leave a hole—you pack it with light space-filling foam. They only need it because we’ve cut out something more essential.

Our judiciary at work

Justice Scalia: “I told you I’m not a scientist. That’s why I don’t want to deal with global warming.”

He’s quite right, actually: he’s not a scientist, nor should we expect him to be. That’s why our government ought to be served by competent scientific advisors…and why it’s a shame that Scalia will probably think he’s doing his job if he listens to people from hack tanks like CEI and the Heritage Foundation.