Uninvention

Our Seed Overlords have asked a question (our answering is entirely voluntary, if you were wondering, and we’re only answering because it is an interesting question): “if you could cause one invention from the last hundred years never to have been made at all, which would it be, and why?“

Several of my colleagues here have coughed up answers—Adventures in Ethics and Science (with a particularly appropriate entry),

Afarensis,

Evolgen,

Living the Scientific Life, and

Stranger Fruit—but I’m going to be a little bit contrary and question the question.

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Julia Sweeney

Julia Sweeney has a new play, “Letting Go of God”, and describes her path to atheism. It’s different than mine—she was drawn to religion by mystical feelings, and rejected it on intellectual grounds after inspecting it up close, while I’ve never found any appeal in the mystical or supernatural—so she’s much more sympathetic than I am.

“The world is modernizing so quickly, people want to latch on to things that seem familiar,” she mused. “Religion identifies people, roots them in a tradition bigger than themselves, reminds them to be compassionate. I get that.”

I don’t see the reminder to be compassionate in religion at all.

Empower the meatless!

Watch this short film of Terry Bisson’s well-known short story, They are made out of meat. I like the idea, but it was a little off-putting that they used actors made out of meat to play the main characters.

There is no shortage of non-meat actors, you know, and there are some CGI functions that might want to protest the usurpation of roles that really ought to go to minorities. Here some excellent, juicy non-meat roles come up, and they hand them over to the meaty majority.

(via The Valve)

Death to the tornado

Yarrgh, but I hate that thing—that animated collection of whirling poop-flecks that the History Channel has inflicted on us with that ad on the right. It’s supposed to only show up every 12 hours, and it’s supposed to be disabled on browsers where it causes conflicts (like Safari, where it disables every link it spins over and also shuts down my key commands), but it just keeps coming.

We’re stuck with it for a while—commitments were made—but they’re not supposed to ever put up anything that intrusive again.

Creationists, you’re going to hell—you’re pagan!

Uh-oh. Those Catholic creationists had better watch out: the Vatican thinks they’re pagans.

Believing that God created the universe in six days is a form of superstitious paganism, the Vatican astronomer Guy Consolmagno claimed yesterday.

Brother Consolmagno, who works in a Vatican observatory in Arizona and as curator of the Vatican meteorite collection in Italy, said a “destructive myth” had developed in modern society that religion and science were competing ideologies.

He described creationism, whose supporters want it taught in schools alongside evolution, as a “kind of paganism” because it harked back to the days of “nature gods” who were responsible for natural events.

Yes, I can see how the major monotheistic religions might take offense at the “God of the Gaps” and Designer gods—they are attempts to shift the deity from the cosmic and the abstract to the mundane and the petty, and also to put those gods in the realm of the testable.

I can’t say that I agree entirely with Consolmagno, though.

“Religion needs science to keep it away from superstition and keep it close to reality, to protect it from creationism, which at the end of the day is a kind of paganism—it’s turning God into a nature god. And science needs religion in order to have a conscience, to know that, just because something is possible, it may not be a good thing to do.”

No, we don’t need religion for that. Atheists can have a conscience, too, and we are aware that there are human limits to what we should do. Too often, religion is used as a justification for doing the inhuman to heretics and unbelievers…and to pagans. It’s a piss-poor substitute for morality, unless you think propping up the obscenely rich or damning people for what they do with their genitals is “morality” (and isn’t that also an awfully petty concern for their majestic deity?).