“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

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

From the candidate:

“I think it’s just and I think it’s proper to have Pro-Life on the ballot,” he told the Idaho Press-Tribune of Nampa. “If I save one baby’s life, it’s worth it.”

Yes, putting the slogan “pro-life” on the ballot box is going to make young potential mothers between the ages of 18-29, who as a voting bloc are notorious for their 100% attendance at the polls, think twice before they decide to hobble themselves with a pregnancy that they don’t want or can’t handle because a strawberry farmer from Backwater Idaho’s all-loving invisible friend in the sky will send you to hell for destroying a fertilized egg.

Pro-Life doesn’t stop the crazy there, however:

He says he will run for the highest state office on the ballot every two years for the rest of his life, advocating murder charges for doctors who perform abortions and for women who obtain the procedure.

Why stop there?  If we’re going to go down the road of religiously mandated murder charges then we might as well round up every guy who has ever masturbated.  That’s billions of potential humans who are being killed according to the narrow religious definition of life.  We should probably also grab any woman who uses birth control or anyone who purchases a condom, because it’s a well known fact that Trojan brand and Ortho Tri-cyclen are long-running government-sanctioned mass murderers that would make Hitler and Stalin look like kittens in comparison.  And it goes without saying that anyone who uses the morning after pill should probably just be sentenced to death on the spot so we can stop the moral threat that birth control poses to society as a whole.

Technorati Tags: pro-life, Idaho senate, abortion debate, Idaho politics, Idaho, religion

These Christian groups are trying to turn this into a complicated morality debate, but the entire situation can be boiled down to two conflicting views about when life starts: Science tells us that a high dosage of chemicals from the morning after pill prevents a fertilized egg from implanting itself on the wall of the uterus therefore preventing a pregnancy from ever happening. Religious leaders believe that a fertilized egg, a single cell that hasn’t even begun dividing and doesn’t have anything approaching consciousness, should be afforded the full rights that living humans who have had their cells divide a few billion times enjoy.

The usual histrionics are put into the article to try and make the plight of this single-celled potential human seem more endearing:

It is a medical fact that the morning-after pill (a high dosage of the birth control pill) and most, if not all, birth control drugs and devices including the intrauterine device (IUD), Depo Provera, Norplant, the Patch, and the Pill can act to terminate a pregnancy by chemically altering the lining of the uterus (endometrium) so that a newly conceived child is unable to implant in the womb, thus starving and dying.

It is a medical fact that a cell doesn’t implant in the uterus. That cell probably wasn’t going to implant anyways. Cells are regularly fertilized and then fail to implant all on their own without any help from pills, but you don’t see any crazy fundamentalist Christians shooting up the local church because of those millions of natural abortions God performs every day. The thing making its way through the woman’s body is not a child. It cannot feel pain. It can’t starve because it doesn’t even require nutrition unless it implants, which it won’t because of the contraceptive. It will just disappear into the body along with thousands of its fertilized brethren who are similarly fated to never enjoy the thrills of cellular mitosis.

So my question is simple, where is the definition of human life going to stop? Abortion rights activists were once happy to reserve their ire for abortionists who were going after fetuses that were well along in their development in the womb. There is even a certain point in fetal development when I’m willing to concede that abortion leans more towards killing a potential human, but that point definitely isn’t when a fertilized egg is floating around a woman’s body possibly getting ready to implant itself. The egg can’t feel anything. The egg is probably going to fall victim to God, nature’s most prolific abortionist, and fail to implant all on its own without the morning after pill stepping in and upping the odds.

The religious groups have come up with several other arguments that no doubt sounded compelling in their own minds when they were thinking them up. Pharmacists object because of health concerns, pharmacists object because of conscience, pharmacists have a free speech right to prevent people from using contraceptives. Here’s a hint for these groups since they haven’t caught on quite yet: if you have to rephrase your ludicrous religious belief system into equally ludicrous rational-sounding arguments then it’s probably time for you to realize that you’re siding with a lost cause and it’s time to give up. The bait-and-switch tactic of trying to preach religion in secular terms might work for your congregations that are well practiced in doublethink, but it isn’t fooling anyone else.

I think this quote from Wisconsin pro-life activist Peggy Hamill sums up the religious position quite nicely, though not in the way she likely intended:

Simply wishing something to be true does not make it so.

You might want to sit and think long and hard about your advice, Peggy. The morning after pill and birth control don’t cause abortions. You can’t abort something that was never there to begin with. Even if it was an abortion (which it isn’t, legally or biologically, I can’t emphasize this enough), abortions are perfectly legal in the United States and the argument could be made that the law is broken if someone is prevented access to perfectly legal medications.

Pharmacists aren’t exercising any sort of freedom of speech when they refuse to prescribe said pill. What they are doing is violating their professional obligation and imposing their irrational religious beliefs about life and sexuality on other people. Leave it to the church to oppose a bill that clarifies and forces them to obey the law of the land and claim that their freedom of speech and freedom of choice is being infringed when they’re the ones actively trying to do it to everyone else around them.

Technorati Tags: morning after pill, pharmacists, birth control, abortion, religion, christian groups, pro-life, pro-choice