Warren sent me link from The Indigestible, wondering if I was interested in these kinds of speculative questions about the existence of alien life. Why, yes I am…and even wrote something along the same lines a few years ago, coming to the same conclusions: I think intelligent extraterrestrials are unlikely.
My reasons are below the fold. Of course, I will retract my opinion immediately when Klaatu lands.
Perhaps it doesn’t fit your stereotypes of what Minnesotans are like, but there are also freaky wild parties with cocaine and huge…huge…well, you know. Watch the video to find out.
I think it’s shot in Lake Wobegone, actually.
Here’s an interesting collection of scans from a defunct comic book called Action. It’s rather grisly—most of the action seems to involve people being bloodily devoured by marine organisms—so don’t look if you’d rather not see people getting pulped in a shark’s jaws. This comic book was apparently shut down because of the outcry over the violence, but I see another reason:
Badly drawn squid, completely false information about their eating habits, and poor grammar (“liquidises”? Don’t they know that the plural of squid is squid?)—clearly, the book’s audience turned away from it in contempt for their lack of accuracy.
(In case you’re wondering, and don’t want to look…I’m sorry to say that yes, it pecks a hole in poor Pat’s stomach and dissolves away his internal organs. And then it gets in a fight with a Great White Shark!)
(And before anyone sends me more links to that video of an octopus vs. a shark, I’ve seen it, and I know the octopus wins. In this comic, though, the shark is the title character, so I think he wins.)
Did anyone else get this spam from “Extreme Evangelism”, or am I just special?
What if I told you that you could hold an event for your community and that 90% of the people who attended would be unsaved. What if I then told you that in most communities at least 1000 people would show up. And what if during that event on average 100 people would give their heart to Jesus??? How long does it take your church to get 100 people saved? Think of the church growth possibilities! Its an outdoor event so even churches without large facilities can participate! Now what if I were to tell you that our ministry will come in and partner with you, bringing in the stage, the rides, all the equipment, and the presentation that will bring all those souls into the kingdom! Just this summer we did an outreach where over 6000 people attended and over 600 gave their heart to Jesus! There were so many salvations that the hosting church had to scramble to find ways to counsel all those who made a decisions for Christ!! What a problem to have! If you want to host this event and see more salvations than you can handle please join our group to find out more.
Now I’m really curious. What kind of lies do they tell to get all those “unsaved” to show up? Should I really believe that they could come into my town, that most of the people who would come to see them would be us heathens, and they’d get a 10% conversion rate?
It does seem a little fishy that they’d say 90% of the attendees are unsaved, and then proudly announce that 10% of the attendees “give their heart to Jesus”…maybe their conversion rate is actually 0%.
I’ve seen an email that cites that crappy Eagleton review of The God Delusion that seems to think this quote is somehow a significant rebuttal of the book, rather than an indictment of the reviewer’s ability to comprehend the book without inserting his own biases against atheism into it.
Such is Dawkins’s unruffled scientific impartiality that in a book of almost four hundred pages, he can scarcely bring himself to concede that a single human benefit has flowed from religious faith, a view which is as a priori improbable as it is empirically false. The countless millions who have devoted their lives selflessly to the service of others in the name of Christ or Buddha or Allah are wiped from human history—and this by a self-appointed crusader against bigotry.
If you actually open The God Delusion to pages 340-345 and read, you will find a substantial section in which Dawkins defends the Bible as a literary and historical source, deplores the lack of knowledge of the book by its most ardent defenders, and even argues that religious rituals like those for marriages and funerals are a good thing. It begins this way:
I must admit that even I am a little taken aback at the biblical ignorance commonly displayed by people educated in more recent decades than I was. Or maybe it isn’t a decade thing. As long ago as 1954, according to Robert Hinde in his thoughtful book Why Gods Persist, a Gallup poll in the United States of America found the following. Three-quarters of Catholics and Protestants could not name a single Old Testament prophet. More than two-thirds didn’t know who preached the Sermon on the Mount. A substantial number thought that Moses was one of Jesus’s twelve apostles. That, to repeat, was in the United States, which is dramatically more religious than other parts of the developed world.
The King James Bible of 1611 — the Authorized Version — in English includes passages of outstanding literary merit in its own right, for example the Song of Songs, and the sublime Ecclesiastes (which I am told is pretty good in the Hebrew too). But the main reason the Bible needs to be part of our education is that it is a major source book for literary culture.
I will speak for Dawkins when I say that the the real bigotry and the crime against history is when the religious take acts of human selflessness and credit them to a nonexistent phantasm rather than their true source…people. I think it’s particularly galling when those paragons of virtue, the Christians who claim their goodness devolves from their religion, in general have such a deficient knowledge of their purported source of morality. Perhaps the reason Christians are such bad examples is that they don’t know their religion as well as we atheists do?
There is a treasure trove in China: the well-preserved phosphatized embryos of the Doushantuo formation, a sampling of the developmental events in ancient metazoans between 551 and 635 million years ago. These are splendid specimens that give us a peek at some awesomely fragile organisms, and modern technology helps by giving us new tools, like x-ray computed tomography (CT), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), thin-section petrography, synchrotron X-ray tomographic microscopy (SRXTM), and computer-aided visualization, that allow us to dig into the fine detail inside these delicate specimens and display and manipulate the data. A new paper in Science describes a survey of a large collection of these embryos, probed with these new techniques, and rendered for our viewing pleasure…that is, we’ve got pretty pictures!
What kind of lowlife would threaten a dog?
Wired has the perfect article for you: it’s called the Battle of the New Atheism, and it’s message is that the New Atheists (Dawkins, Harris, Dennett) are, well, right, but they’re also obnoxious and unsettling and foolish, and gosh, but youth pastors are cool and nifty and caring.
Where does this leave us, we who have been called upon to join this uncompromising war against faith? What shall we do, we potential enlistees? Myself, I’ve decided to refuse the call. The irony of the New Atheism — this prophetic attack on prophecy, this extremism in opposition to extremism — is too much for me.
The New Atheists have castigated fundamentalism and branded even the mildest religious liberals as enablers of a vengeful mob. Everybody who does not join them is an ally of the Taliban. But, so far, their provocation has failed to take hold. Given all the religious trauma in the world, I take this as good news. Even those of us who sympathize intellectually have good reasons to wish that the New Atheists continue to seem absurd. If we reject their polemics, if we continue to have respectful conversations even about things we find ridiculous, this doesn’t necessarily mean we’ve lost our convictions or our sanity. It simply reflects our deepest, democratic values. Or, you might say, our bedrock faith: the faith that no matter how confident we are in our beliefs, there’s always a chance we could turn out to be wrong.
Ah, yes. The classic response of the comfortable: both sides are bad, both are threatening my cozy life, so I’ll just damn them both and ignore them, hoping they’ll go away…and heck, misrepresenting the upstarts is always good. Actually, what these New Atheists are saying is that sure, we could be wrong, but the other side is almost certainly wrong. What we have to offer is uncertainty and a demand for some degree of rigor; it’s the theists who are arrogant in their certainty, who are willing to believe in the ridiculous, who reject the author’s “bedrock faith” that there’s a chance they could be wrong. The real irony is that he doesn’t recognize that his last sentence is a good summary of the principles of this “New Atheism,” and that it is directly contrary to the philosophy of the New Religion he finds so unthreatening.
The article is a perfect example of the tepid atheism that closes its eyes to the world, that advocates the kind of bland semi-solipsism that reassures itself that everyone else thinks in the same happily reasonable way, so we don’t need to exert ourselves to confront the opposition. It’s an attitude that will be popular, unfortunately.
