I attended a funeral today for a great great aunt who was a devoted churchgoer for all of her 96 years.  As a result the ceremony was highly religious with lots of pauses for prayer.

When they asked for people to bow their heads in prayer I simply assumed my non-theist prayer stance: hands clasped and head up with eyes open, no amens or mumbled agreements with the pastor for every Jesus this and Jesus that.  I’ve found it’s a nice non-confrontational way to abstain in social situations where prayer is obviously going to be called for.

The interesting thing  was a great uncle at the funeral.  Everyone else bowed their heads and closed their eyes with hands clasped firmly in front of them, but he stood there with his eyes open looking ahead in much the same stance as me.  We looked at each other, shared a brief nod of understanding, and went back to looking ahead, this time smiling at the irony of ferreting out a fellow non-believer in a moment of prayer.

Technorati Tags: prayer, atheist etiquette, prayer etiquette, atheism

I came across this blog post about a bar in Georgia selling racist pictures that equate Barack Obama with Curious George the monkey.  I was shocked until I scrolled through the post and saw that this was being sold in none other than Cobb county.  That’s Cobb “Our school board is putting stickers on science textbooks claiming evolution is only a theory until the courts make us stop” county.

After that I wasn’t really surprised.  Ignorance is very rarely confined to science alone.

Go read this and laugh your ass off.

Scientists in Britain have started creating genetically modified embryos to use for research purposes. It appears that they’re only using embryos that were discarded from fertility clinics, are destroying the embryos after five days, and won’t be implanting any of these genetically modified embryos into a uterus where it could potentially grow up to become Ricardo Montalban and take over the world in a series of wars between genetically modified humans and the normal variety.

Don’t worry fundies (or trekkies), this isn’t going to happen any time soon thanks to strict regulation!

 I don’t imagine for a moment that the strict regulation surrounding this endeavor will stop religious groups from protesting it long and loud, despite the potential medical advances that could be made by studying these modified embryos. The fundies would rather live in a world where their invisible friend in the sky got to pick who wins and who loses in the genetic lottery rather than having humanity work it out for ourselves so we can fix all of those potentially lethal errors that the great Creator left lurking in our base pairs. At the very least they’re destroying fertilized embryos, and we’ve seen how they all get their panties in a twist every time a blastocyst is blended in the name of science rather than being thrown out and wasted.

There are serious ethical concerns that need to be raised and dealt with when it comes to genetically modifying embryos. If scientists perfect these techniques then it might only be a quick hop, skip, and a jump from curing alzheimers in the womb to a visit from ‘ol Khan up there. But the debate over these legitimate ethical concerns are going to be clouded by masses of religious sheep bleating about the sanctity of a non-sentient clustering of cells that will otherwise never see the light of day.

Technorati Tags: designer babies, genetically modified embryos, embryos, religion, sanctity of life, fundamentalists

Shock!  I almost found myself agreeing with a Christian group today, but then they had to go and take things a little too far.  Pro-Decency and Pro-Family organizations are going to hold a conference at the Press Club in D.C. and then go on a peaceful demonstration for a couple of hours in front of the Justice Department to protest what they perceive to be a lack of funding, staffing, and enforcement of obscenity laws by the FBI.

Their press release even managed to hit all the right notes almost all the way through:

“We want the next President to know that failure to vigorously enforce federal obscenity laws is undermining government efforts to, among other things, strengthen the family, protect children from pornography, curb sexual exploitation of children and curb sexual trafficking.”

So they seem to be protesting child pornography and sexual trafficking.  I think just about everyone can agree that those are admirable goals.  And I’m sure that most people who read through the article will focus on that alone, but in the next paragraph they take a sharp swing into left field:

“We also we want the next President to know that widespread availability of obscene materials is not proof of community acceptance. According to a survey conducted by Harris Interactive in April 2008, 75% of adult Americans said they would support the next President were he or she to ‘do all in his or her constitutional power to ensure that federal obscenity laws are enforced vigorously against commercial distributors of hardcore pornography.”

And now we’re safely into familiar territory for the Christian moralizers.  First off, I have to wonder about that survey where 75% of Americans said they want to get rid of hardcore pornography.  I imagine that a fair number of that 75% has their own private collection that they feel entitled to while they’re publicly denouncing the stuff.  It’s more than 25% of Americans keeping the porn industry chugging along rather nicely through the recession, after all.

The real problem here is that they’ve gone from supporting better enforcement of the law to supporting censorship by lumping hardcore pornography in with child pornography and human trafficking.  I’m sure that there is exploitation going on out there in the mainstream porn industry, but the fact remains that it is completely legal to make, distribute, and sell those materials in most of the country.  Saying that something should be banned just because a large chunk of the population publicly disagrees with it is stepping dangerously close to the tyranny of the masses.  Sure Debbie Does Dallas 42 isn’t on par with great works of literature or film, but censorship tends to be a slippery slope once you start down that path.

Besides, people are going to continue to cry and beg God for forgiveness after they finish using their private collection whether or not it’s illegal to own those materials.  These groups almost had me, but then they had to overstep themselves and try to lump the prosecution of a reprehensible illegal action with the censorship of a legitimate and completely legal business venture.  Sorry guys, but you can’t ban something just because your invisible friend in the sky makes you feel bad about using it.

Technorati Tags: censorship, christians, pro-family

After my post concerning the Alabama legislature the site was visited by C. David Parsons, author of a seven-volume textbook called The Quest for Right that claims to finally provide a synthesis of science and the Bible.  Now that I’ve read through his site I’ll have more to say about Quest for Right in future posts, but for the moment I’ll start with the excerpt from his book that he so helpfully copied and pasted in the comments:

“The National Center for Science Education is antichrist.”

Just about anything that is said afterwards can be discredited by this first sentence alone.  This is a debate about whether or not religion should be taught in public schools under the guise of Intelligent Design.  Intelligent Design has been proven time and again to be a slapdash repackaging of creationism in secular sounding terms in a feeble attempt to get it into science curriculum.  The National Center for Science Education isn’t antichrist, they’re simply asking that science curriculum reflects the separation of church and state that was established with the founding of this country.  To call the NCSE antichrist is to call America and most of the founding fathers antichrist while at the same time revealing your true religious motives right from the get go.

“Text taken from The Quest for Right, a 7-book series on origins based on physical science, the old science of cause and effect:”

As far as I know science is still operating under the same old system of theorize, test, modify, and test again until you get it right or get as close to right as is possible with current technology and methodology.  It’s the same system that has been in use since the beginning of the Enlightenment, and it’s the same system that has consistently validated ideas like evolution that have gotten your panties in such a twist.  Could it be that you’re hearkening back to the pure science of the dark ages that served humanity so well for so long?

“Special note on obstructionism: In 1916, one thousand scientists were polled as to their belief in a deity (i.e., God). Of the ones responding, 60 percent had no religious belief. A follow-up study 80 years later revealed that the percentage of atheists, someone who does not believe in or denies the existence of God, among scientists remains shockingly high: 78 percent of physicists, 58 percent of biologists, and 55 percent of mathematicians are atheists.”

This is one of the biggest gripes that I have with modern religions.  Why is it shocking that scientists don’t believe in God?  Why is this such a scandal?  Why do the religious have this impulse to convert everyone around them to their particular belief system?  In short, who cares if they don’t believe in God?  It doesn’t surprise me that a good deal of scientists don’t hold a religious belief one way or the other.  Their whole life revolves around coming up with a suitable cosmology that is based on observable evidence and rigorous testing, which is something that no religion in the world can stand up to.  There is no case for God other than taking it on faith, and you’ll forgive me if I prefer scientists who question the world around me rather than taking it at face value based on ancient and outdated tribal morality.

 ”Sixty percent of those polled by the University of Georgia historian Edward Larson snubbed Judaism, Islam, and Christianity by equating “belief in a deity and an afterlife with superstition based on fear and wishful thinking.” Nature, 4-09-1997″

At the risk of sounding pedantic, here is the dictionary.com definition of superstition:

1.	a belief or notion, not based on reason or knowledge, in or of the ominous significance of a particular thing, circumstance, occurrence, proceeding, or the like.

2.	a system or collection of such beliefs.

3.	a custom or act based on such a belief.

4.	irrational fear of what is unknown or mysterious, esp. in connection with religion.

5.	any blindly accepted belief or notion.

Sounds like religion fits the definition of superstition perfectly!  Moving on.

“Even more disturbing, only 10 percent of those polled “expressed an intense desire for immortality” (that is, going to heaven), thus, signifying that on the average only 10 percent of physicists, biologists, and mathematicians are under covenant.”

Again you’re showing your ass by revealing your true motives.  Basing an argument against science on the fact that scientists aren’t “under covenent” is ridiculous.  Freedom of religion means they have the freedom to no religion, but that shouldn’t affect how they do their job either way.  Ethical scientists have their own system, the scientific method, that has done pretty well so far.

“The great majority (90 percent) have little or no regard for God but, rather, oppose Him, promoting the error that the earth and all that is in existence happened by chance. The mystical tenet governs every aspect of academic science”

There is a subtle but very distinct difference between actively opposing God and teaching a cosmology that has no room for God, though that’s a distinction lost on the religious.  If an experiment was carried out tomorrow that proved once and for all that God did exist then that would be put into the science textbooks, but so far the almighty creator of the universe has been strangely silent for the past five thousand years.  Science teachers aren’t actively trying to convert their classrooms to radical atheism, they are simply teaching the sum total of centuries of scientific inquiry.  It’s not the scientists’ fault that God hasn’t shown any evidence of his existence once in all that time, and it isn’t the teacher’s job to teach religion to students.  Religion and schools are separate, and that’s how it should be.  If you’re interested in theocracy then you can move to Iran where they’re more welcoming to that brand of close-minded thinking.

“To the point, obstructionists: scientists, biologists, mathematicians, and the NEA, teach the innocents within the classroom that there is no God.”

Again, God and religion shouldn’t be taught in the classroom.  We are a secular society that has the basis for that secularism written into the Constitution.  I for one am glad that I live in a society where freedom of inquiry and freedom of thought is considered a basic human right that is part of the highest law in the land.  Otherwise we might live in a world where creationist theocrats such as C. David Parsons got their way and stifled true understanding of the universe with a tragically limited cosmology written by primitive nomads six-thousand years ago.

Technorati Tags: C. David Parsons, secularism, religion, creationism, intelligent design, The Quest For Right, theocracy

After reading through some of the comments on the most excellent Bad Astronomy blog it appears that the Academic Freedom bill I mentioned in my previous post might have died simply because they’re at the end of their legislative session and all of the leftover junk is just being rushed off the docket.  I’d like to believe that there was an indignant rational response to the idea of stealth religion making its way into the science curriculum, but state senators eager to clear everything so that they can get to their summer vacation sounds like a far more likely explanation.  I’m willing to bet that we haven’t heard the last of the so-called “academic freedom” bill down there.

The National Center for Science Education is reporting that an effort to get Intelligent Design into the state science curriculum under the guise of academic freedom for teachers has failed. This is definitely a good thing. The Intelligent Design crowd had their asses handed to them in the Dover trial back in 2005, establishing a legal precedent that Intelligent Design is nothing more than an underhanded attempt to sneak religion into the schools, and ID proponents have been desperately trying to find a new way to sneak religion into the science classroom ever since.

The “academic freedom” tactic is just another example of Intelligent Designers taking a good idea and perverting it as a means to their own disingenuous ends. I wholly agree that academic freedom is a good thing, but that freedom doesn’t extend to allowing teachers to dress up their religion in vaguely scientific terms and poorly thought-out logical fallacies and teach it as fact in the classroom.

Let’s be clear, what the ID crowd is advocating isn’t academic freedom, it’s institutionalized ignorance. Intelligent Design can’t be proven. Religion is taken on faith, and as such there is no test that man could ever devise to prove or disprove the existence of God. Any student who has taken biology and genetics courses in college can easily poke thousands of holes in the “scientific” rationale for Intelligent Design with evidence to back up their claims while the Intelligent Design groups are forced to rely on facile appeals to the ignorance and incredulity of the masses. As the courts and the overwhelming evidence has proven time and again, Intelligent Design is nothing more than an attempt to sneak religious teaching into the school system, and teaching religion is most definitely verboten.

Of course that didn’t stop the Alabama legislature from trying to use a false appeal to “academic freedom” in the language for the bill:

“[teachers have the right to] present scientific information pertaining to the full range of scientific views in any curricula or course of learning “

The last time I checked, no reputable scientist opened up their copy of the Bible and took every cosmological statement found therein at face value. Even people who study the Bible for a living admit that there’s a lot in there that’s contradictory and just plain wrong when seen through the lens of a modern world view. Intelligent Design and creationism are not part of the scientific debate anywhere but amongst the creationist academic pariahs at the Discover Institute. The ID crowd is attempting to create the illusion of scientific controversy where none exists, because the hard evidence consistently disproves just about every idea they espouse.

“no student in any public school or institution of higher education … shall be penalized in any way because he or she may subscribe to a particular position on any views.”

I don’t know about you, but I certainly hope that the future doctors and scientists of America are flunked if they fail basic 100 level science courses because they insist that religion trumps reason and evidence. The country will be in a sad state in a few decades if the people who wrote this bill eventually have their way. Of course I do have to admit that it would have made the biology and genetics classes I took in college much easier if we were simply allowed to say “God made it happen” on exams instead of drawing detailed cladograms and blending nasty smelling chunks of beef to isolate and analyze the genetic material over the course of several weeks.

On the plus side, the language in that bill would have provided legal protection for the teaching of Pastafarianism in the schools, but it’s probably a better idea to just keep all religion out of the classroom no matter how noodly and delicious it may be.

via Bad Astronomy

Technorati Tags: alabama, creationism, intelligent design, HB923

You can’t make this sort of thing up.  A substitute teacher in Land ‘O Lakes Florida has been sacked for wizardry.  The exact brand of wizardry?  He made a toothpick disappear for about half a minute and then made it magically reappear.  For this he is fired.

Now I’ll be the first to admit that there are circumstances under which it would be acceptable to fire a teacher for wizardry.  Maybe if he was trying to entice one of his students to enlist as a thief with a group of dwarves on a quest to reclaim their lost treasure from an ancient and fearsome dragon.  That’s the sort of dangerous thing that middle school students probably aren’t ready to handle.  Firing would be justified if if he was trying to kill one of the students to create a seventh horcrux that would make him an all-powerful immortal evil overlord.  I’d even say firing was justified if he was using his magical powers to banish students to the magical land of Oz.

But for making a toothpick disappear?  That’s just plain stupid.  I’d be willing to bet that there is a fundamentalist Christian child at the bottom of this who complained about the magic trick in the first place because everyone knows sleight of hand is an abomination before the Lord their God, but for a school system to actually fire someone over a magic trick is just further proof of the downfall of reasonable civilization.