lookatthestateofthat

The UK government is above the law because it says so, allows mandatory prayers in council sessions

2012-02-18T15:21:00.001Z

We thought we’d won. A High Court judge ruled that Bideford Town Council couldn’t insist that (Christian) prayers be part of their regular meetings. And quite right too: what does religion have to do with meetings about….roads…and…allotments….and….whatever else it is that town councils occupy themselves with? What is prayer supposed to achieve?

It’s supposed to intimidate people, that’s what. It’s intended to make it more difficult for people who aren’t Christians to participate in public administration. Do you think it might be more difficult for a councillor to gain support for an initiative judged traditionally non-Christian directly after a Christian prayer? Do you think councils are above including words in their prayers that would bias decisions?

That’s why religion has no business in government, including local government and that’s why Justice Ouseley ruled that the council shouldn’t hold prayers as part of its meetings.

Council members can pray as much as they want, of course. The Christian ones could easily have a pre-meeting to pray if they wanted to. Everyone could pray silently to whatever god they wished before during or after the meeting.. But the ruling said that prayers shouldn’t be part of the meeting.

Our Communities Secretary Eric Pickles has simply cancelled this ruling. He, personally, has decided that it’s perfectly fine for Christians to dominate the agenda at council meetings. He thinks that Christians’ views are more important than anyone else’s and has made sure councils can discriminate against non-Christian views.

"By effectively reversing that illiberal ruling, we are striking a blow for localism over central interference, for freedom to worship over intolerant secularism, for Parliamentary sovereignty over judicial activism, and for long-standing British liberties over modern-day political correctness."

How many times do I have to say this? It is not illiberal to complain about government forcing us to do things we don’t agree with. Its democracy. It is not right for government ministers to to invoke hat they call religious views to trump other people’s viiews. That is simply the ultimate corruption.

My country had the chance to do something amazing and instead it fucked it up so badly that it made things far worse. I am so ashamed.

Religion’s place in government

2012-02-15T07:39:00.001Z

Robert Winnet writes in the Telegraph:

In an historic visit to the Vatican, Baroness Warsi will express her “fear” about the marginalisation of religion throughout Britain and Europe, saying that faith needs “a seat at the table in public life”.

That. Right there.

Bringing religion into public life can only possibly mean trying to impose your beliefs on other people and force them to behave how you want. These beliefs, of course, have nothing to do with what’s actually objectively good for people; it’s all about unsupported nonsensical myth, usually very antagonistic toward large numbers of people. When governments get involved in religion, the result is always the same: conflict, discrimination, suffering, all because of some footling differences between sets of nonsensical rules based on things that aren’t true anyway.

The minister, who is also chairman of the Conservative Party, says: “My fear today is that a militant secularisation is taking hold of our societies. We see it in any number of things: when signs of religion cannot be displayed or worn in government buildings; and where religion is sidelined, marginalised and downgraded in the public sphere.

It is not militant to demand that one’s government treat everyone fairly. All we want is for government to stop taking people’s idiotic beliefs seriously and treat everyone the same. That’s militant?

I hate how apologists always try to turn the argument back on us: every one of the incidents I’ve seen where religious jewellery has supposedly been banned from the workplace has turned out to be….quite the reverse. It hasn’t been about intolerance of religious iconography, but a blanket ban on jewellery which includes crucifixes and Stars of David and so on. It’s the religious who are demanding special treatment, not atheists.

There have also been recent cases of public sector workers being banned from displaying Christian symbols at work.

Oh really? What are those cases? Are there any cases or is this just something that ‘everyone knows’? I suspect very strongly that these ‘cases’ will entirely evaporate under the slightest scrutiny,

“For me, one of the most worrying aspects about this militant secularisation is that at its core and in its instincts it is deeply intolerant. It demonstrates similar traits to totalitarian regimes – denying people the right to a religious identity because they were frightened of the concept of multiple identities.”

Warsi paints a pretty horrible picture of atheists while at the same time preaching tolerance. She doesn’t seem to understand the contradiction. I don’t know a single atheist who’s intolerant of religion. We tolerate it all time time. We don’t care at all if people want to worship imaginary gods. We just don’t want those beliefs to dictate how we live our lives. And we’re the intolerant ones? We’re the ones advocating totalitarian regimes? We’re the ones who are frightened? By “religious identity”, Warsi seems to mean the ability to impose views, not the ability to possess them.

David Cameron welcomed the visit. He said: “Our relationship with the Holy See is an important one.”

Why? What would we lose if the relationship were to suddenly end? I can’t see how even Catholics would be affected in the slightest and the rest of us would probably benefit. We wouldn’t have to pay for any more popes to visit, for one thing.

“You cannot extract Christian foundations from the evolution of our nations any more than you can erase the spires from our landscape,” she will say in her speech.

And nobody wants to. Nobody denies that there’s a tradition of Christianity in the UK. It doesn’t mean we have to take it seriously now.

“Where, in the words of the Archbishop of Canterbury, faith is looked down as the hobby of 'oddities, foreigners and minorities’. Where religion is dismissed as an eccentricity because it’s infused with tradition.”

Not because it is infused with tradition. Because it is stupid.

John’s Cole and Sentamu

2012-02-02T07:31:00.001Z

John Cole writes:

In fact, everywhere you look these days, if Christianity or religion is getting a mention, it means something ugly is happening and someone somewhere is being victimized, marginalized, or otherwise abused.

He’s right. He’s talking about people like the execrable Archbishop of York, John Sentamu, who claims that he and his god (how does he know?) both value homosexuals, but just think they shouldn’t have the same rights as heterosexuals. This is a man who thinks that a government’s attempts to remove restrictions on marriage is a dictatorial act; an absolutely unfathomable position, since dictating what other people are allowed to do with their private lives is exactly what he wants to do.

Sentamu might have argued against gay marriage on the grounds that his bible regards gay sex as an abomination. But he didn’t do that for two reasons:

He’d have to consistent. He’d have to condemn the eating of pork and shellfish. He’d have to campaign against people who trim their beards or wear synthetic fibre. He knows that all this stuff is palpably nonsense and that he’s engaging in special pleading because he just doesn’t like the idea of gay people having sex.
He’s well aware of the shit-storm that would rightly cause. He’d no doubt try to nuance it, but the message to take home would be that homosexuals are abominations. He knows that’s an untenable political position.

So instead he speaks cowardly about ‘history’ and ‘tradition’ in a brazen attempt at justification rather than valid argument. Let’s be clear: John Sentamu wants to deny rights to homosexuals on the grounds that we’ve always done it. There’s a history and tradition of slavery too (which, by the way, his god is totally fine with). But Sentamu does not support slavery, which clearly suggests that history and tradition are not really what Sentamu is concerned with. When an argument from history comes up against an argument from justice, it’s revealed for what it is. It’s not about history and tradition. It’s not about the Bible. It’s about the fact that John Sentamu doesn’t like the thought of gay sex.

His argument that legalising gay marriage is a dictatorial act is just plain confounding. It would be an act of liberation and empowerment. The government would be giving up some its authority to determine who can and can’t get married. By contrast, doesn’t banning a whole section of the country from marrying seem rather more dictatorial? The government is changing laws to reflect majority view, which is what democracies do. Sentamu and his church want to impose their views on everyone, whether they believe in the god that’s supposed to motivate this nonsense or not. Sentamu goes on to justify his statement by apparently claiming that legalising gay marriage is what dictators do, I’d be very interested to see some examples, I can’t think of a single one.

Things that can happen in elevators

2012-01-30T14:59:00.001Z

I admire Richard Dawkins immensely, but like most of us, his privilege shows from time to time. Richard felt that there were bigger fish to fry than elevatorgate, such as the treatment of women in places like Saudi Arabia. He was right that awful things happen and continue to happen to women there and under similar regimes every day. It isn’t just the violence that’s problematic, it’s that women’s rights are virtually non-existent and that attitudes toward women are widely and horrifically contemptuous in principle and harmful in practice. Women are to a greater or lesser extent (often greater) considered the property of men. This is not just a disgrace, it is a moral and intellectual emergency.

I know Richard recognises that this shameful attitude toward women is an important root of this problem so I was disappointed that he apparently doesn’t see that the same kind of disrespect is rife in the West. He later wrote this:

No escape? I am now really puzzled. Here’s how you escape from an elevator. You press any one of the buttons conveniently provided. The elevator will obligingly stop at a floor, the door will open and you will no longer be in a confined space but in a well-lit corridor in a crowded hotel

Well, there’s this as reported by Ophelia Benson. Some of the details of this story as it has been reported in the media seem dubious, but the fact is that a woman was severely beaten in a lift, presumably while trying to calmly press buttons to escape. She was found in a pool of her own blood and her family says every bone in her face was broken. She was in a medically induced coma for a while and now she’s awake, the bits of her face are wired together.

A suspect has been identified by security video footage and he’s confessed, but his story is dubious in places. For example, he says he punched her four or five times. I happen to know that it takes a hell of a punch to break a face bone, let alone all of them. If the family is right, then I’d expect the injuries to be more consistent with beating someone’s head against something like a handrail.

The suspect denies kicking the victim, though the video evidence seems to show him doing that. He says he was just pushing his victim’s hand back inside the lift with his foot so the doors could close. Obviously that’s far better than kicking her.

He says he encountered Nabb, who he said wasn’t wearing any clothes, at the sixth floor. When Quintero tried to prevent her from leaving he said she screamed, and he panicked.
“I didn’t try to abuse her, or I didn’t … I didn’t try to kill her or anything like … or rob her or anything. I was just afraid and I wanted to leave.”
Quintero said he covered Nabb’s mouth and asked her not to yell.
“But she continued yelling,” he said. “She got more afraid when I covered her mouth. And then I hit her … four or five times in the face with my fist. And then I left.”
(from here)

He was afraid? He wanted to leave (why didn’t he follow the Dawkins procedure)?

Preventing her from leaving was obviously abuse. Quintero says it as though it was somehow a reasonable act to restrain someone against her will for reasons he doesn’t explain. When she screamed, he tried to stop her screaming rather than – say – just leaving. And when his attempt to shut her up failed, he beat her half to death, then casually kicked her limp hand back inside the lift so that the doors could close.

Come on, Richard. Your heart was in the right place but you didn’t think this one through. And more importantly, come on numerous elevatorgate-related wankers who are determined that women shouldn’t be frightened when you corner them in secluded places. Yeah, we know you’re going to beat or rape anyone, but some people clearly are.

So let’s go back to Rebecca’s original point: don’t you do that.

The Pope thinks that gay marriage is a threat to the future of humanity

2012-01-10T12:40:00.001Z

“Has anyone noticed that the head of the Catholic Church isn't very bright?”

-- Tim Minchin

Tim has a point, but as he pointed out a few minutes later:

“The pope is an intelligent man. Denying that absolves him from responsibility for his awful words.”

Either way, the Pope said on Monday that gay marriage “undermined the future of humanity itself”. He said it to diplomats from nearly 180 countries. I don’t understand why those diplomats were there to listen to the old horror. Why do we insist on pretending that the Vatican is a proper nation or that it has any significance at all on the world stage? But those diplomats were in for a festival of unsupported bigotry:

"The family unit is fundamental for the educational process and for the development both of individuals and states; hence there is a need for policies which promote the family and aid social cohesion and dialogue,"

Difficult to know where to begin, isn’t it? In what way is ‘the family unit’ ‘fundamental’ to education? And if it’s true, how does that differ if there’s only one parent or two parents of the same sex? Or for that matter, more than two parents? Benny didn’t say and didn’t offer any evidence to support his claims. But we’re not done yet. Apparently the same is true for the development of states. I’m not sure what that’s supposed to mean, but that’s OK because Benny doesn’t either. He hasn’t thought it through, presumably because he doesn’t need to. We get it, you think homosexual acts are wrong, therefore anything that helps it to become more acceptable to society is also wrong.

But the most horrible thing Ratzinger says here is the part about needing policies “which promote the family”. By which – transparently – he means banning gay marriage. He means forcing everyone to do what he, personally, thinks is proper. Based on a couple of sentences in a bronze age book.

"pride of place goes to the family, based on the marriage of a man and a woman."

Or to put it another way, he’s saying gay and unmarried parents – and their families - should be treated as second-class citizens. Charming. He doesn’t say what sanctions he thinks ought to be applied to such parents or how he feels the children of those families should be discriminated against.

One more thing, and this is remarkably common behaviour for religious leaders. He can’t resist a threat: “polices which promote the family and aid social cohesion and dialogue.” Watch out, he’s saying, If you don’t do what we say… there’s going to be ‘trouble’. His friend, New York Bishop Timothy Dolan says – in the same article – that not banning gay marriage could "precipitate a national conflict between church and state of enormous proportions."

What’s that if it isn’t a threat?

Well, we’re not scared.

Christopher Hitchens is dead

2011-12-16T05:37:00.001Z

There was nobody like him.

PZ on free will

2011-12-07T07:34:00.001Z

Like PZ, I can’t get very excited about the question of free will. I agree with him that for free will to be anything other than an illusion, our minds would have to be able to reach into our brains and change it’s behaviour. Minds would have to be intangible things, independent of brains, and this is demonstrably (and trivially so) not the case.

I’ve never been able to understand why people find it so difficult to accept that we could be fooled by a sensation of free will. It certainly feels like we can make choices, but what reason do we have to assume that makes it true?

Scooby-doo is a morality tale for secular humanists. Unfortunately, it is shit.

2011-12-07T07:14:00.001Z

A post here makes some good points. As Tim Minchin points out in the excellent Storm:

That show was so cool

Because every time there’s a church with a ghoul

Or a ghost in a school

They looked beneath the mask and what was inside?

The fucking janitor or the dude who runs the water slide.

Throughout history

Every mystery

Ever solved has turned out to be

Not Magic.

This article goes further:

Because that's the thing about Scooby-Doo: The bad guys in every episode aren't monsters, they're liars.

More than that, they’re liars who prey on superstitious people so they can fleece them. Sound familiar?

The article goes on to point out that the episodes are about children searching for truth in a world where adults are either liars or believe the liars because they’ve been fooled by stories of the supernatural.

Some other good points are made. For example: “curiosity and thinking always triumph over fear” and

To paraphrase G.K. Chesterton, Scooby Doo has value not because it shows us that there are monsters, but because it shows us that those monsters are just the products of evil people who want to make us too afraid to see through their lies, and goes a step further by giving us a blueprint that shows exactly how to defeat them.

The article is a little over-enthusiastic and the show heavily romanticised. I’ve always been dismayed that the main heroes of the show are the two cowardly idiots. No matter how often they pull off the monster's mask and find it was old Mr Johnson all along, Shaggy and Scooby never learn. Well of course, all those other monsters turned out to be not monsters, but let’s automatically assume this one is legit, despite our vast experience. They never acquire any critical faculties and this is not an admirable trait.

Velma should have been the hero, but the show’s makers seemed to do everything they possibly could to make sure she wasn’t. She’s portrayed as a frumpy nerd who can easily be defeated by simply taking her glasses away. In fact, as far as I can tell, the only reason for Daphne existing at all (other than being Fred’s beard) was to demonstrate how frumpy, nerdy and undesirable smart girls are supposed to be. The show didn’t do a thing to make kids want to be more like Velma.

The principle of the show was great and something I’d like to see a lot more of in both children’s and adult TV. Shows like the awful X Files could have been great as an adult Scooby-Doo. It could have explored the nature of evidence. The friction between Mulder and Scully could have been been about what counts as proper evidence rather than ‘spooky shit does/doesn’t exist’. I think it might even work if they never got to the bottom of the mystery in some episodes and had to leave it unexplained. Mulder would take that as proof that the supernatural is real and Scully would roll her eyes at him and try to explain why it’s not. Scully wouldn’t have to be right all the time. She could even be closed-mided rather than appropriately skeptical sometimes. And hopefully she’d learn her lesson, just so long as there’s never any real evidence of the supernatural. That could have been a great show. But it’s easier to pander to superstition, so we got drivel instead.

While I find some of the principles of Scooby-doo laudable, I could never stand the show. Even pre-Scrappy.

Hemant has a good comment about all this here:

There’s a lot of truth to that. After all, what scares you more? Frankenstein or a Christian pastor who thinks the Bible ought to be the playbook for your life? The former might send a temporary chill up your spine, but the latter permanently ruins lives by convincing so many people that he’s right, hurting their ability to think rationally, manipulating them into giving up their money (even when they don’t have any give), convincing them that people who don’t fall in line with the faith are eternally condemned, and persuading them to put their lives in control of an imaginary being instead of taking full control of it themselves.

Yep.

Driving destroys virginity

2011-12-05T13:42:00.001Z

According to the BBC:

A report in Saudi Arabia has warned that if Saudi women were given the right to drive, it would spell the end of virginity in the country.

Assuming that Kamal Subhi – who wrote the report – doesn’t think that women driving will cause babies to be born with sexual experience (not something I’m willing to put past him), the claim dissolves into the usual one. He means that if women are allowed the beginnings of freedoms equal to those of men, then fewer of the women he might personally want to fuck would be virgins, which he seems to think is a national emergency.

The report contains graphic warnings that letting women drive would increase prostitution, pornography, homosexuality and divorce.

These are all extraordinary claims, but the homosexuality one is especially bewildering. I wonder if he means female homosexuality (women will be allowed to visit each other unsupervised so won’t be able to resist jumping on top of each other) or male homosexuality (the women will be off driving around so men will all have to fuck each other until they get home).

Silly as the report apparently is, the problem that women have effectively no rights in Saudi Arabia is highlighted by this sentence in the BBC story:

Though there is no formal ban on women driving in Saudi Arabia, if they get behind the wheel, they can be arrested.

They can be arrested under the blanket acknowledgement that women don’t have the right to do anything at all.

Where to begin? Oh, I see now

2011-12-05T12:43:00.001Z

The Fail reports that – according to the headline – "”Christians [are] a minority at ‘biased’ BBC where staff are more likely to be atheists or non-believers”

Wait a cotton-picking minute, aren’t atheists the same thing as non-believers? I suppose the count might include those damnable fence-sitting agnostics, but either way this seems a clear attempt to dilute the number of atheists. Times are bad, unbelievers are among us, but at least they’re not all atheists. We couldn’t allow atheists to be wandering around in a television company unpersecuted, could we?

Ah, but this is a story about persecution, isn’t it?

The new research has been seized on by critics who accuse the Corporation of bias against Christianity and marginalising the faith in its output.

Because ‘only’ 22.5% of staff said they were Christian.

And there’s the story laid bare. It’s OK to discriminate against atheists, but not against Christians. Christians are automatically preferred staff and something must be done to thin out the atheist ranks.

I mean just look at this:

The survey found that just 22.5 per cent of all staff professed to be Christians.
Yet the combination of those who said they were atheists and those who had no faith came to a total of 23.5 per cent.

What do you mean “yet”? It’s an implied assumption that – at the very least – Christian staff should outnumber atheists. It’s pure bigotry.

Random BBC employee Roger Bolton said:

There is an inbuilt but unconscious bias against religion, fuelled by the fact staff are not representative of the public. It is not a conspiracy but it needs a correction.

What kind of ‘correction’? This can really only mean the sacking of atheists in favour of Christians or the hiring of Christians instead of atheists in new appointments.

Then a random Catholic opined that the BBC is:

…institutionally incapable of reflecting the society it serves since BBC staff are not representative of the audience they broadcast to.

I can’t imagine what this means. Would more catholic canteen staff or technicians quantitatively change the nature of the BBC’s output? It’s a familiar and stupid argument. What they mean, of course, is that they want to have more influence on what’s broadcast. They are quite aware that this has nothing to do with the religious affiliation of random BBC staff, but sense an opportunity for bigotry which they just can’t bring themselves to ignore.

Well, Catholic Church and Independent Christian Broadcasting Council, I accuse you of being institutionally incapable of reflecting the society you serve since we have a lot of atheists and people of non-Christian religions in this country. Surely the composition of staff in your organisations should precisely reflect that mix?

Jesus and Mo do it again

2011-11-22T07:43:00.001Z

An oldie, but Very Nice: http://www.jesusandmo.net/2011/11/16/sssh2/

15 years or so ago, I was what I’d today call an accommodationist. I didn’t believe in any kind of god or any other supernatural fuckwittery, but I felt compelled to respect other people’s beliefs.

‘Compelled’ is the right word. I didn’t really respect those beliefs. But I felt like I was supposed to so I mumbled along with the nonsense on the few occasions I could be dragged into a church and I let people drone on about the quantumness of crystals or the fractalness of spirituality, knowing it was nonsense, letting it slide and hating myself for it.

Presumably there was a single moment when I suddenly realised that I didn’t actually have to respect idiotic beliefs at all, but I don’t remember it. It’s a pity, because it must have been a pretty decent revelation. The only thing I can compare it to is the day I suddenly realised I could say no when my boss asked me to do stupid work. Until then, I didn’t know I could. That was a dramatic shift in the power balance between employer and employee which has never reversed. It was immensely liberating and so was the revelation that I owe nothing to the feelings of people who believe stupid things, so I’m sorry I can’t remember it.

“So what?” is a powerful question. So what if I offend you? You’ve never cared about whether you offend me.

Technorati Tags: jesus and mo,respect

Even stupider comment to a stupid daily mail article about ghosts

2011-11-22T06:58:00.001Z

I'm looking forward to hearing how the atheists and those oh so clever scientists and secular media propagandists explain these ghosts
have 'evolved' into being as they believe everything has. Won't hold my breath.
-- David Thomas, North Wales

Hard to know where to begin, isn’t it?

Technorati Tags: ghost,stupid,daily mail

Daily mail invents outrage

2011-11-12T07:32:00.001Z

Technorati Tags: homosexuality,homosexual,gay,pride,tesco,daily mail,religious intolerance

It’s not much of a shock. This time, it has noticed that Tesco has stopped sponsoring the Cancer Research Race for Life – a charity for which it has raised hundreds of millions of pounds over more than a decade – and is coincidentally sponsoring Pride London. This, the headline tells us, is an outrage. It tries to hide behind the highly dubious idea that cancer research is inherently more important or deserving but this is a thinly veiled cover for simple homophobia because the two events are not connected anyway. Corporate sponsorship deals don’t work that way and Tesco themselves have said that the one is not a replacement for another. They are funding hundreds of other events too, but there’s no suggestion that any of these is less worthy of funding than Pride.

Naturally, they drag in some mainstream religious organisations to make ignorant comment. I don’t suppose they had to try too hard to get the quotes they wanted. Francis Phillips of the Catholic Herald said:

Tesco is a supermarket.
Its remit has been to sell good-quality food and other items at very reasonable prices, and in this it has been hugely successful.
Why has it now aligned itself with an aggressive political organisation such as Pride London?
‘Why has it given up its sponsorship of Cancer Research? Or at least…why hasn’t it taken up with another mainstream charity such as the British Legion or Age UK?
‘There are thousands of ex-servicemen and wounded soldiers needing help in this country, and millions of elderly people in danger of neglect.
‘They are a fundamental part of the fabric of our society – the kind of fabric that Tesco should be reflecting.’

I rather think Tesco can choose whatever remit it likes. I assume Phillips would be perfectly happy if Tesco were to give money to that other aggressive political organisation, the Catholic Church. Her last paragraph is particularly interesting. She obviously thinks that homosexuals are not a fundamental part of the fabric of our society.

David Skinner of Anglican Mainstream has written to Tesco to complain about the fair treatment of LGBT people:

For Tesco to sponsor a tiny homosexual minority – according to the Office for National Statistics, that amounts to little more than 1 per cent of the population – will be showing the utmost contempt for a large proportion of British society that still adheres, more or less, to the morality and values of the Ten Commandments.’

This is another extraordinary statement. I imagine Skinner would not object to Tesco supporting other charities that addressed a small percentage of the population. It’s also interesting to see the near panic with which he tries to downplay the number of homosexuals. I imagine him staring around in terror with bloodshot eyes, back to the wall of course.

They both want people to boycott Tesco for promoting the idea that people should not be discriminated against on the basis of their sexuality.

Misused phrases

2011-11-10T07:56:00.001Z

For some reason, these amuse me. I’m talking about well-known phrases which people have misheard and then go ahead and misuse. The more priggish they sound when they misuse them, the better.

I’ve often promised that I’ll put together a list of these one day, but I keep forgetting, then I keep forgetting the misused phrases too. Here’s a first stab at a list, I’ll add more as I think of them.

There needs to be a name for this sort of thing and for all I know there is. ‘Misused phrases’ is a bit lame. Malapropism isn’t quite right because in some cases the phrase as (mis-)used has the same meaning as the original phrase. It’s just that the words within the phrase are changed so they make no sense at all. If anyone has a better idea, let me know.

Here’s the list so far (there are lots more, I just can’t remember them at this moment):

1. Wallah! (instead of Voilà). This is hilarious because…. well, what do people think they’re saying? Trying to sound clever, you are doing it rong. I’ve heard this said out loud a few times and I might have misheard it. But I’ve also seen it in comment threads loads of times and often without being ridiculed.

2. It’s a doggy dog world (instead of It’s a dog-eat-dog world). Again, what is it these people think they are saying? To be fair, the ‘correct’ phrase is bewilderingly stupid anyway. I have never once seen a dog eat a dog. While I daresay it occasionally happens, for me it is not the main defining feature of the planet. (I know the original phrase is a bizarre invoking of a counterfactual world where dogs eat dogs to get ahead in dog society, but that doesn’t actually make a great deal of sense either.)

3. It’s a removable feast (instead of It’s a movable feast). An interesting one, this. Phrases are often things that have an identity separate from their actual words. They become a bit like a word themselves in that we don’t think of the constituents. In this case, someone has changed one of the words in the phrase anyway, preserving the spirit of its modern usage by adapting it to a new situation, but decoupling it from its origins and resulting in it making no sense at all. So it seems to be taking a phrase, breaking it apart into words, changing the words, then assembling it back into a phrase which is not supposed to have a literal meaning. A moveable feast is a celebration like Easter which happens on a different date every year. A removable feast sounds like you’re sitting at the table, knife and fork in hand, tablecloth tucked into your shirt, gazing forlornly as someone takes all the food away.

4. For all intensive purposes (instead of for all intents and purposes). Well, perhaps people think they’re talking about those purposes that are especially important or crucial, but this is such a different meaning from the ‘correct’ phrase that it’s hard to know what was going on in people’s minds when they heard the original used correctly.

5. Begging the question. This annoys me less than it used to. It has a technical meaning, which is a logical fallacy related to circular reasoning (you assume the answer in the very asking of the question) but it’s often used to mean that something raises a question. In some ways, it seems fair enough. Some situations actually do seem to beg questions. Or rather, for questions to be answered. Perhaps people should say it begs the answers. But on the other hand, the phrase has an existing technical meaning and there’s no need to steal it for another purpose. Get your own phrase, you moocher.

6. Escape goat (instead of a scape goat). I have no idea at all what’s going on here. What’s an escape goat supposed to be? If anything, it seems like an escape goat might be the exact opposite of a scape goat. Someone heard the phrase, completely failed to understand what it meant and used it anyway.

Gentleman/scholar/acrobat owns coward/blaggard

2011-11-01T14:02:00.001Z

On 12th October, Jerry Coyne debated the theologian John Haught about whether science and religion are compatible. SPOILER ALERT: they aren’t.

Both parties gave their permission for the event to be filmed and it duly was. But now Haught is blocking its release to the public because, he says, it “failed to meet what I consider to be reasonable standards of fruitful academic exchange.”

He doesn’t say what standards those are or how the debate somehow doesn’t meet them. And he says he won’t comment further. You can read more about this on Jerry’s site and on Pharyngula.

It’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that Haught recognises that he lost the debate in a spectacular fashion and is trying to stop people finding out. This doesn’t really meet what I consider to be reasonable standards of fruitful academic exchange.

So I wrote him a letter:

Professor Haught,
I was disappointed to read on Jerry Coyne's site that the video of your debate with him on 12th October will not be released to the public because you've blocked it. Your statement that the event “failed to meet what I consider to be reasonable standards of fruitful academic exchange" might be a lot more plausible if you'd explain it further. What standards are those? In what way do you feel they weren't met? Please feel free to be as specific as possible.
I'd like to encourage you to change your mind and agree to release the video or at the very least explain in much more detail why you will not. While you refuse, the only conclusion we can glean is that Jerry made you look like a fool through superior argument and you're embarrassed.
Don't be embarrassed, Professor Haught. If you were beaten fair and square, chalk it up to experience and face the consequences. If you feel there was unfair play or that you won the debate but for some reason the public shouldn't see it, by all means tell us why.
Kicking over the Scrabble board fails to meet what I consider to be reasonable standards of fruitful academic exchange.
I look forward to hearing from you,
Regards,
r

I don’t expect he’ll reply.

Playground arguments

2011-10-27T19:16:00.001Z

That guy picked on you every day for years because he was jealous.

Words can never hurt you.

If you refuse to do something stupid – because it’s stupid – then you must be scared.

None of these arguments were convincing in the playground and I’m less inclined to believe them now. But I’m not a professional philosopher like Daniel Came so presumably I’m wrong.

Came argues that Richard Dawkins’ refusal to debate a fool means that he’s scared.

Because we all know, don’t we Daniel, that if someone challenges us to do something, we’re automatically obliged to do it and if we don’t you’re entitled to make up any shit you want to explain why.

Well, I say Came “argues”. It’s difficult indeed to locate an argument.

Fuck it, if you can find one, I’ll give you a prize. Really.

Until there’s a winner, I’m going to go with my gut feeling that if you nock someone for not rising to a stupid attack, you’re a fucking idiot.

The greatest moral force the world has ever known

2011-10-19T23:23:00.001Z

Yes, I know, I know, I KNOW, alright? I know that the Catholic Church has been complicit in stealing a generation of Spanish children because they didn’t like the look of the parents. Some of them were women, for goodness sake. I’ve just been busy and it’s taken a long time for me to get around to it. And by now everything’s been said.

This is what happened: 300,000 women were told by nuns that the baby they’d just given birth to had died, when in fact the nuns had sold it to a family they decided was better. This happened a lot to unmarried mothers.

It apparently began under Franco as political (if it can be called that) move, but the church was complicit throughout and carried on the practice into the 90s, long after Franco had gone.

Let’s just say that again: parents were told that their babies were dead. Instead, they were stolen and sold.

It’s hard to imagine anything more cruel.

The greatest moral force the world has ever known.

Nice work, Simon: Let’s test Psychic Sally

2011-10-13T15:47:00.001Z

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/oct/13/sally-morgan-prove-psychic-powers

Sally: all you have to do is say what it is you can do, agree to the protocol that will test what you yourself claim and then go through with the test. And than – and I understand that this might be the part you have difficulty with – stand by the results.

I don’t have any psychic abilities but let me make a prediction anyway: Sally will noisily accept the challenge…. and then never, ever actually take the test.

Stop persecuting yourself

2011-10-13T08:53:00.001Z

I don’t know what a Centre for Transatlantic Affairs is, but it’s director has written a particularly insipid article for the Huffington Post which says Christians in the UK are being persecuted by an increasingly secular society. Well he problem is the usual one, isn’t it? Christians think they’re being persecuted if they aren’t heaped with undeserved respect. Secular societies are naturally going to strip away some of this privilege in favour of, you know, actual fairness and so Christians will surely decide they are being persecuted. My heart does not bleed.

For anyone who follows the British media's reporting of American politics, the continuous attempt to run down certain American politicians on account of their faith rather than engaging with their politics has now become a rather boring familiarity.

When I first read this, I had a hard time working out what the guy was on about.

Bush and Palin are crazed evangelical fundamentalists we are forever being told, oh yawn, is this kind of cheap and lazy defamation really what we have to make do with for journalism?

Oh…. Bush and Palin…. Well… I guess we did run them down based on their crazed fundamentalist evangelism…. but they’re hardly very relevant now, are they? And that’s rather the point: Obama is a Christian, but we don’t tend to attack him for it. We were disparaging and – let’s face it – scared of people like Bush and Palin because they are batshit insane, not solely because they are Christians. We ran them down because they manifestly wanted to turn the planet into their own personal brand of theocracy. That’s plainly and obviously crazy and that’s why we found them problematic.

Yet what is far more concerning is what is happening to Christians here in our own country. It is only when one steps back and takes an overview of the litany of cases where Christians have been discriminated against for their religious convictions, that it is possible to appreciate what resembles a sustained assault against the Christian communities in Britain.

These guys never say who’s doing the attacking or why, do they? Nobody’s more atheist than I am, but I have no interest in attacking Christian communities in Britain and I don’t know anyone who does. But let’s have a look at all these attacks, shall we?

Whether it is the case of the nurse who was suspended for offering to pray for a patient, the van driver who faced disciplinary action if he refused to remove a palm cross from his dashboard, the couple who were prohibited from fostering because of their Christian beliefs or the supply teacher who was dismissed when she mentioned praying for a child's family. The list goes on and on.

Seriously? The list goes on and on and these are the best examples? Even if those stories were as true as they are presented here (they aren’t) then they would hardly constitute a ‘sustained attack on Christian communities’.

It is as if there is a systematic effort to extrapolate British society from its Christian heritage and the values that have for centuries served as a basis for British culture and identity.

Well that’s embarrassing. But in any case, it isn’t like that at all. Nobody argues that Christianity isn’t culturally important. Nobody’s trying to marginalise Christians. We secularists want to marginalise the impact of Christianity – and all religion – on public life, but few of us are interested in attacking Christians, Christian heritage or anyone’s values. The latter claim, by the way, is especially strange. How can an attack on values be extrapolated (see what I did there) from one man’s employer telling them not to display a cross? He hasn’t thought this through.

A systematic effort would imply that we all get together to work out how best to hurt Christians. I must have missed the meeting where we all decided to ban that guy’s cross and tell the nurse off.

Those who have been responsible for these moves have often advocated for them on the grounds of creating a more secular and therefore a supposedly more inclusive and pluralistic society for everyone.

Have they? Is that what the cross-banning employer or the hospital were trying to do? Besides, how can increased secularism possibly be less inclusive, as he implies? All it can possibly mean is that the religious end up having the same amount of influence on public life as everyone else.

Yet it is hard to escape the fact that it has often been the very same people who have promoted secular values when it has come to driving out Christian aspects of public life, who have simultaneously lent their support for the establishment of a parallel religious legal system in the form of Sharia law courts.

Who are these people? I don’t know of anyone who simultaneously promotes secularism and the introduction of Sharia courts. Neither does Tom J Wilson, apparently, since he doesn’t name names or explain his astonishing claim further.

Instead, he turns it into a case of fatwa envy:

How is it that the media has often lambasted Christian individuals who have found themselves dismissed from work or even in court on account of their views on sexuality and yet concurrent to this we hear so relatively little about those hard-line Islamic preachers who have openly preached hate over issues of gender and homosexuality, issues that the liberal press claims to champion.

He proceeds to compare some apples with some oranges and decides for no particular reason that this is proof of systematic attacks on Christians by unnamed forces.

It is as if Christians and their faith have become fair game.

This is the crux of Wilson’s argument and the basis of his misunderstanding. Christians are fair game. So is everyone else. That’s what secularism is about. Nobody gets unfair influence and nobody is protected from ridicule or offense because of their religion.

Those who cannot bring themselves to understand this will naturally also prove unable to appreciate what it means to actually be British and our society will continue to suffer from the chronic loss of values and any sense of purpose that currently seems to be at the heart of so many of the social challenges that we now face.

That’s a nice little tidbit to through in at the end as though it were an unassailable fact.

Damned whether you do or not

2011-10-12T06:40:00.001Z

PZ talks about a couple of incidents. In the first, a Muslim actress has been sentenced to 90 lashes and a year in jail for acting. She acted in this film, made in Australia, which describes part of the plight of women in Iran. I wish I could say that the irony will burn more than the lashes, but it won’t. Ninety lashes. Of a whip. On flesh. And a year in jail. For doing her job.

In the second, a Muslim student is thrown off a plane for looking Muslim. This was after a ‘random’ ‘second screening’ and other various hurdles to get on the plane in the first place. In the end, the captain decided that he couldn’t fly with someone muslim-looking on the plane because it made his crew uneasy. The idea that pilots can decide to discriminate that way against passengers is news to me, but it probably shouldn’t be. I can’t help but imagine plane ‘captains’ (a fucking ludicrous title for a pilot) leading passengers in prayer over the tannoy before agreeing to take off.

I have two stories of ridiculousness while attempting to fly. The first happened not too long after 9/11. I was passing through New York airport on the way to somewhere or other, Chicago, possibly. I’d managed to fly all the way from the UK with my regulation bottles of deodorant etc. in their regulation plastic bags, but these were confiscated in New York as being dangerous, even though they met the proper guidelines. Well, OK, a minor inconvenience. But while I was waiting in the queue to board the plane, there was a sign saying that if I was carrying a gun, I should report it to staff. Carrying a gun is apparently perfectly acceptable on internal flights – as long as you report it - but a tin of Lynx is dangerous.

The second is more whiny but illustrates the attitude of airport staff. The last time I flew out of the UK I was selected for a ‘random’ drugs test. I’m not sure what profiling boxes I ticked, especially now I’m pushing forty, but they wanted to swab my bag for traces of drugs. That’s fine by me, I’ve never attempted to traffic drugs and if I did I probably wouldn’t elect to use my own hand luggage to do so. The swab came back clean of course, but the airport staff were clearly disappointed with this outcome.

“We couldn’t find anything”, they said, huffily. Not “There was nothing there, you’re innocent, thanks for your cooperation” but “We know you’re guilty, we just can’t prove it…..yet… I suppose we have to let you through security, but we’ve got our eyes on you”

I wasn’t a problem for me and I don’t mind being checked to see if I’m trafficking drugs (although I’m not sure what would have happened if they’d somehow found traces of drugs on my bag even though there were no drugs inside – would I have been allowed to travel? Would I have faced other charges? I’ve no idea). What bothers me is the attitude of airport staff. I was automatically guilty because I ticked some boxes on a profile. It didn’t occur to them that I might be innocent.

In my case it was a minor inconvenience because I didn’t have any drugs. The problem is that people with darker skin or Muslim attire are bang to rights by this despotic regime. I fully expect to see this kind of bullying discrimination in America, but I mourn to see it here in the UK.

Special pleading?

2011-10-11T12:32:00.001Z

Here it is argued that scientists should be allowed to check stories about their work before they are published. Some people from Cardiff University claim that science stories are qualitatively different from other types of story and should be treated accordingly. As exasperated as I get at science reporting, I don’t buy it. They lavishly overstate the value, purpose and process of peer review and befuddlingly misrepresent what science journalists are actually trying to do.

To properly represent a body of scientific work, the same journalistic skills are needed whether the work is peer reviewed or not, so their argument that peer review gives scientific work special license that nobody else gets is obviously nonsense.

I agree wholeheartedly that much science reporting is woeful and probably harmful. But I don’t see – and nor do the authors successfully argue – how allowing scientists to check publications about that work will help. How would it work? Would we get to veto negative stories? Would we spend weeks working with journalists to make an article acceptable, only to find the window has been missed in any case?

It would be preferable to have principled science reporters following a well-established code, which could be easily policed. Are there primary sources? If so, they should be provided. Are the results peer reviewed or not? They should say so. Is a controversy being manufactured where none actually exists? This is where journalistic balance comes in. I’m no fan of he-said-she-said journalism, but when an extraordinary claim is being made, we really do need more conservative types to explain whether or not it’s something the community really disagrees with (eg intelligent design, vaccines, global warming).

In other words, this is about journalistic integrity and competence (as journalists rather than scientific experts) and the fact that peer reviewed journals have provisional academic integrity has nothing to do with it.

H/T Tracy King @tkingdoll

Damn you, PZ

2011-10-11T06:33:00.001Z

Well thanks for that, PZ. I’ve just spent nearly two hours going through your list of banned people and reminding myself of their stupidity instead of doing the million work I have to do.

It was like friendsreunited. Remember that annoying little shit at school who wouldn’t leave you alone and then was satisfyingly jailed for sexual assault on 15th January 2005 and ordered to register as a sex offender for 7 years for molesting a seriously ill homeless woman, abusing a position of spurious power he disgustingly manipulated her into because of her desperate circumstances? No? Just me? Well anyway, reading through the banned list and their various offenses is almost as satisfying as that.

{Jason Spayne (perhaps formerly) of Valley Road, Northallerton, North Yorkshire and (definitely) a former guest of Her Majesty: I’m not even slightly surprised. You were an evil, selfish, stupid little troll at school. It’s a pity you never managed to learn how to be a decent human being and a shame indeed that you hurt someone so badly because of your putrescent sense of privilege. I wish I could believe you’ve since learned something.}

*ahem*. Nothing to see here.

Bill O’Reilly crushes Richard Dawkins

2011-10-10T09:36:00.001Z

He says so and you can’t say it if it’s not true, right?

He does no such thing, of course. He misrepresents the book as some kind of atheist plot to mock god and when Richard says no it isn’t and explains why, Billo just says yes it is.

It’s physically painful to watch Bill O’Reilly in action. He famously calls his show a spin-free zone, but it’s manifestly festooned with spin. His claim to have ‘crushed’ Dawkins aside, he begins by claiming that Richard is on a crusade to “convince believers they’re idiots.” That’s not spin? How about introducing him as “atheist Richard Dawkins”. Not “biologist Richard Dawkins” or “author Richard Dawkins” or even just “Richard Dawkins”. Bill thinks that “atheist” is an unpleasant epithet and will influence his audience’s opinion of what follows. Isn’t this the very definition of spin? That’s why I called him Billo earlier: it makes him sound like a clown, which is what it is. That’s spin. I just don’t claim I don’t use it.

Bill then says that Richard’s book mocks god. He doesn’t provide any evidence for this. He doesn’t even provide an example. In his mind, saying that science can explain something is mocking god.

There’s an extraordinary part where Richard explains the format of the book. He says that every chapter starts by describing a myth. Billo the Clown points at him and bellows “HA!” and smiles in a self-satisfied way as if that somehow proves his point. From then, he’s relentless. The fact that Judeo Christian myths are in a tiny minority in Richard’s book is a matter of ‘semantic games’, according to Bill. What Richard really wants to do, despite The Magic of Reality not being about that at all, is to tell people they’re idiots if they believe in god.

Well they are, but the book is about science. It’s about good and bad reasons to believe things. Bill is just lying.

Dear Emma B: A moving post

2011-10-04T10:27:00.001Z

I remember this from when PZ first posted it and now it’s been deservedly nominated for an award. It’s an open letter PZ wrote to a child who was proud of asking a stupid question. She was proud because it was what Ken Ham taught her to say and she thought she was doing a good job. The incident threw the horror show of Ham’s ‘teaching’ into sharp relief. As PZ points out, the question Emma asks is a bad one for all sorts of reasons. It doesn’t do a thing to determine whether a proposition is true or false. It was meant (by Ham, presumably not by Emma B) to ridicule; to cast doubt on science in the minds of people who already want to believe it’s wrong.

PZ’s letter is excellent. It describes why the question is a bad one and offers a better question to ask instead. It’s a beautiful piece of writing, too.

This

2011-10-02T08:17:00.001Z

This then this.

It's basically all or nothing

2011-09-22T12:15:00.001Z

Euan Murray plays rugby. But not on Sundays. Because the bible says not to play rugby on Sundays.

The Glasgow-born prop, 31, has chosen to prioritise his faith this weekend, meaning he will miss Scotland's Pool B clash with Argentina on Sunday.

I’m reasonably certain that if he chose to prioritise going out on the rancid piss on Saturday night and spending Sunday in bed, his bosses wouldn’t be so sympathetic. Personally, I can’t see the difference.

"I don't see why there have to be games on Sundays," said Murray. "I hope things will change in future."

Well, it’s for the same two reasons shops now open on Sundays. First, people want them to. Christians shop on Sundays just like everyone else. And second, it’s an economic necessity.

But he isn’t paid for his economic or socio-political skills. He’s paid to run into people and things. And we might well admire him for having the courage of his convictions:

Murray will hope that he has done enough in previous matches to get his place in the team back for next week's match against England, which takes place on a Saturday.

He’s taking a risk for his beliefs, which some might indeed find admirable. But he kind of spoils it:

"It's basically all or nothing, following Jesus. I don't believe in pick 'n' mix Christianity. I believe the Bible is the word of God, so who am I to ignore something from it?”

Well where do we start? He obviously trims his beard and sideburns, which is specifically forbidden in Leviticus 19:27. Do you think he eats pork? He looks like he eats pork. If he does, Leviticus 11:8 has something to say to him. I’m entertaining a fantasy that rugby balls are made from pigskin, in which case he wouldn’t be allowed to even touch them and might successfully argue to his boss that he be paid for never touching the ball, but I’ve never yet noticed reality living up to any of these fantasies so I don’t hold out much hope. I’ve also failed to uncover evidence that he bears tattoos or tattoos bears, at least one of which is forbidden, but I know for a fact that he wears polyester and other fabric blends. That’s sinful. Leviticus 19:19 says so quite clearly. Hopefully he doesn’t eat shellfish because they are also strictly verboten. It’s not just shellfish though, plenty of other animals get the same treatment: camel, rock badger, rabbit, eagle, vulture, buzzard, falcon, raven, crow, ostrich, owl, seagull, hawk, pelican, stork, heron, bat, winged insects that walk on four legs unless they have joints to jump with like grasshoppers (!), bear, mole, mouse, lizard, gecko, crocodile, chameleon and snail. I’ve eaten some of the things on that list, rendering me sinful. I hope Euan hasn’t because that would be pick ‘n’ mix religion.

Well, you get the idea. But scripture goes rather further than telling us what not to do. It tells us what we must do, too. For example, Exodus 31:15 tells us to kill anyone who works on the Sabbath. Does Euan do that? Has he righteously slaughtered his team-mates? Does he pop round to his local newsagents on Sunday morning and pop a cap in the shopkeeper?

"It's basically all or nothing, following Jesus. I don't believe in pick 'n' mix Christianity. I believe the Bible is the word of God, so who am I to ignore something from it?”

Who indeed?

Psychic Sally Replies

2011-09-20T10:41:00.001Z

She’s innocent! She says.

Psychic Sally still in business

2011-09-20T07:37:00.001Z

Despite being caught cheating by using an earpiece, Psychic Sally Morgan still seems to be in business. I daresay this fraud is safe from prosecution due to the ‘for entertainment purposes only’ disclaimer, but I wish her audience would wake up and see Morgan for what she really is. With little hope though: Peter Popoff is still in (big) business years after being debunked on live TV by James Randi.

Well done to Chris French and The Guardian for publicising Morgan’s dishonesty. Perhaps a few people will get the message.

Literally

2011-09-18T10:12:00.001Z

Theology is a strange field (if, as Richard Dawkins wonders, it’s even a proper subject at all). It’s an exercise in making stuff up to save faith from the ravages of scientific evidence. With such an empty premise, it’s hardly surprising that the content is so often equally void of content.

Theologians tie themselves in especially hairy knots when it comes to the literal truth or otherwise of Genesis. Modern genetics shows us that humans can’t have originated from a single pair of ancestors. In fact, we know that at some point in our hominid past, our ancestors went through a bottleneck of a few thousand individuals, but certainly not only two.

So theology trips over itself trying to reconcile it with the account in Genesis. Usually, this is pretty easy: you just say it’s a metaphor and leave it at that. Nevermind that there are no instructions saying which bits of the bible are supposed to be metaphors and which are supposed to be true, that – after all – is what theology is for. You see, making stuff up to wallpaper over uncomfortable truths.

But it’s harder in the case of Adam and Eve because of the sorry doctrine of original sin. The whole point of Christianity is that Jesus came down to Earth from his magic star to redeem us of the guilt, carried by semen (so theologians say) from Adam down, into every one of us. For some reason, Jesus’ weird proxy blood sacrifice is meant to absolve us of these sins (you know, the ones we didn’t even have the pleasure of committing).

Nonsensical as all this is, it poses a problem for theologians. Either the Genesis story is literally true or it’s a metaphor. If it’s a metaphor then the central premise of Christianity is broken: there’s no original sin so Jesus couldn’t have died to redeem it. But we know with certainty that the story isn’t and couldn’t be literally true, so where does theology go from there?

It makes stuff up!

Mark Shea claims here that there were lots of other people around at the time of Adam and Eve. Adam is the ancestor of all living humans, but not the only ancestor, since Adam and Eve’s children were impregnated by all the other people around at the time. Problem solved…. except that isn’t what the bible says. There’s nothing in it about all these other people. It’s all just made up so that the story makes (very slightly) more sense. It can be literally true if you fudge the details in a way that’s not at all supported by biblical text. That kind of practice is hardly bubbling with intellectual honesty or even internal integrity. And besides, if the story of Genesis is a metaphor, what’s it a metaphor for? As a metaphor for the big gang, the formation of the galaxies and evolution, for example, it’s rather sadly lacking.

But as Jerry Coyne reports here, theologians are nowhere near done making stuff up. In his words, the Catholic Church says that lies are truer than truth. He quotes Mike Flynn:

The mythic language is truer language than newspaper language, because it brings us to the heart of what happened, which is far more important than a photographic record of what happened.

Which glosses over the idea that for something to be truer, it has to be true in the first place. The photographic evidence would at least determine whether the event happened and then by all means ask further questions that the photograph itself doesn’t answer. But the point is that if all you’ve got is the photograph, you can’t just make stuff up to support what you want it all to mean.

That’s what is meant here by ‘mythic language’. It means you can have your magic bread and eat it too. It means lies are truer than truth. And it means you can explain away the fact that science proves Genesis – and therefore the entire central premise of Christianity – wrong, and still believe it’s right anyway.

Defenders of marriage

2011-09-16T15:26:00.001Z

“We love them to death, and we love them without being judgmental,” the 62-year-old Chandler, Ariz., retiree said. “But the actual marriage I cannot agree with.”

Barbera Von Aspern says she loves her daughter but won’t go to her wedding because she’s marrying a woman. It pains her – she unrealistically claims – that she won’t be at her daughter’s wedding, but her religious beliefs (she’s a Mormon) mean that she’s had to choose this course of action.

“It was very difficult," Von Aspern says. "We had to bring them to the house and hug them and love them and tell them these things and not let that keep us apart."

This woman ‘had’ to tell her daughter to not let the fact that she wouldn’t attend her wedding - because she felt her marriage was an abomination – keep them apart. This is the most astonishing display of passive aggressive behaviour I think I’ve ever seen. Barbera wants her daughter to suffer because she herself is a bigot. She just can’t swallow her religious bile for a day and be part of her daughter’s celebration.

And this is where the hypocrisy smashes through like the Hulk with IBS. She uses the ceremony as a sort of proxy for the bigotry of what she’s committed to believing. How fucked up does a person have to be to convolute themselves into a position like that?

Barb presumably wishes the couple well and doesn’t object to the relationship, but to justify her belief in stupidity she has to draw an arbitrary line in the sand. A line that – presumably – nobody was interested in crossing anyway.

Too bad the cost is so high. Oh, not the cost to Barb. There’s no cost there. Piety is it’s own reward and if you can mince in a little martyrdom so much the better. Barb *revels* in her supposed pain.

The cost to the daughter is probably pretty high, though. She probably wanted her mother to be at her wedding. She probably wanted her mother to share in her own joy on a day that will change her life.

But let’s strip this of the drama. My parents believe that no marriage is really properly valid unless it’s a Christian marriage. My marriage was not Christian. But they came to the wedding. They wanted to be a part of it, even though they didn’t approve. They don’t think of me and my wife as not married, even though they don’t think secular marriages really count.

Similarly, I think that promising god that you’ll love, honour and obey is a pretty poor way to do things even if you believe in god or that people should obey one another. I hate the mumbo as much as the jumbo and don’t like going to church weddings. But I still go, despite HOW MUCH IT BURNS.

It’s such a small price to pay, isn’t it, to hold your tongue for a couple of hours? And the idea that someone might approve of the marriage but not of the wedding is plain incoherent.

Nobody buys that, Barb. You hurt your daughter to make yourself feel pious. I hope she realises she’s better off conducting her relationship with you on her terms rather than on yours.

That damnable cuttlefish puts it better, as usual.

Danny Penman of the Daily Mail is a credulous idiot

2011-09-13T12:03:00.001Z

Or a sensationalist liar. Penman has a PhD in biochemistry and claims to be a skeptic. For a skeptic, he believes a lot of strange things for no good reason and does his level best to convince other people to believe them too.

Here’s a list of some of the things he seems to believe in:

‘Psychic’ Sally Morgan is really psychic
His broken leg healed in half the time it would have because he meditated
People might be able to kill goats by staring at them
Poltergeists might exist (in South Shields of all places)
We might be able to transplant human souls and heart transplants might also transplant memories and character to the new owner
Hypnotism alone can block pain
Faith healing works

It’s not that he explicitly says these things are true. He uses a standard daily mail trick of saying “the overwhelming majority of evidence is against this, BUT…..” and then adding some reference to a deeply emotional anecdote. The reader is supposed to focus more on the but than on the fact that evidence doesn’t support it. It’s an effective trick and the reason I think Penman might be a liar rather than an idiot, selling people things they want to read rather than what’s, you know, actually true.

His article on Psychic Sally is topical because there are reports that last night she was caught cheating:

Sue went to see psychic Sally Morgan last night in the Grand Canal Theatre. She was great in the first half but during the second half Sue began to hear somebody talking loudly at the back of where she was sitting. She thought it was somebody heckling but she soon realised that everything he said Sally was repeating on stage. He would say a name like David and she would repeat it onstage. Other callers who were also at the show tell of similar experiences.

We’ve seen this shtick before.

It’s funny. In just about every article I’ve read about Sally, she’s offered to do a reading for the interviewer, even if they seem skeptical. However, her number one complaint seems to be about people who ask her to give readings at dinner parties. They just want to trip her up. She has described a charming story in which a man at a party asked her to tell him something about himself, so to shut him up, she told him and his friends that he suffered from rectal bleeding and had recently been digitally examined by a doctor. And yet…. she always offers to do readings for journalists she has appointments with. Could this possibly be anything to do with Google?

Penman writes:

I was trained to be a cynical hard-nosed scientist. My PhD in biochemistry taught me that logic, rationality and devotion to the truth are the most important qualities for any scientist. When I became a journalist, I kept these values close to my heart.

*Snortle*.

Recently my ‘rational' view of the world was shattered [by Morgan].

Sally offered (as usual) to do a reading. She began by delivering a bombshell:

"You're going to Greece," she said.

A few days earlier I'd decided to go on holiday to Crete. It was the beginning of a long list of insights that left me physically shaking and chilled to the core.

Really, insight? Lots of people go to Crete, so it was a good bet. Perhaps Greek holidays were especially cheap that year. If Penman hadn’t had plans to go there, she could have insisted that it was to be at some time in the far future. To the credulous, that would count as a hit. If he was going to somewhere close to Greece, that would count as a hit too. If he’d recently been to Greece or even if he remembered it fondly from his youth, that would have counted as a hit too. What seems like an impressive coincidence at first becomes a lot less so when you consider that it was practically impossible for her to ‘miss’.

When I showed her a picture of my girlfriend, Sally said that she would soon be moving to either Oxford, Cambridge or, most likely, Bristol. The previous month my girlfriend had accepted a job as a lecturer at a college in Bristol. Sally could not have known this.

Couldn’t she? It’s surprising what you can find out with Google. Did she have a blog? Facebook or Twitter account? If not, has Penman ever mentioned her in an article? When I Googled Penman, the first link was to his agent, with convenient contact details. Sally is in showbiz too: does she know the agent? Could she have called and asked questions about him? Perhaps he mentioned the new job to his agent in passing? Could she have found out from the agency website what other clients that agent has and reasoned that some of those people might know Penman? Perhaps she knows some of them personally, could she have talked to them?

This is all pure speculation, of course and I’m not claiming this is how she did it. It might have been a pure guess, for example. Besides, all she really needed to do was find out that she was an academic and then mention three good universities. First, this makes the prediction seem more impressive: she didn’t mention academia specifically. That would have been suspiciously accurate. But by mentioning Oxford, Cambridge and Bristol, she established that connection in Penman’s mind. This could be just a mysterious way of revealing something she already knew. And second, once again, if Penman’s girlfriend hadn’t been moving to Bristol, it would still be counted as a hit because – as an academic – it might well be something she intended or aspired to do in the far future.

So I’m not impressed so far.

One of the most stunning revelations concerned a long-running argument between my parents - a dispute Sally cannot have known anything about. When my parents married in the early 1950s, my mother wanted to keep her maiden name. My father was equally determined that she should accept his surname. Sally could not have known anything about this argument. And yet she knew about the dispute in detail. It was obviously not on any official records and I doubt if anyone outside the family knew anything about it.

Interestingly, unlike the previous examples, Penman doesn’t quote her verbatim on this issue, with the result that we don’t know what ‘detail’ she actually uncovered. We don’t know whether, for example, she led him to reveal the information himself, which is a popular tactic of psychics. Afterwards, it would seem as though she herself had supplied the information. I would like to see a transcript of their conversation before being impressed.

Sally had only three working days to gather information about me from such official sources as births, deaths and marriage certificates. Even a skilled detective would have problems building up a comprehensive picture about my family in the time available. However, even if Sally had unlimited time and money, much of the information she gave me was simply unavailable.

Would a private detective have such difficulties? I don’t really know, but I doubt it. I don’t think Penman knows either.

We can always look at the previously-mentioned article by Robert Chalmers for some indication of the actual – as opposed to Penman’s imagined – difficulty of this sort of thing:

The following morning, I get a call from Richard Wiseman. With no assistance from a spirit guide, he has discovered the first names of my mother and brother. He put my name into a search engine, which led him to my publisher's website, where he found my place of birth. Then he consulted a site called genesunited.com. "I put in Manchester, and your name," he says, "which produced a list of records. From those I found your mother's maiden name, which led me to your brother. The whole thing took me a little under 90 minutes." Continuing the process myself, via the online registry of births, Friends Reunited and a school website, I find my brother's middle name online: this was a fairly laborious process of trial and error, which took the best part of an hour.

These are people who – unlike private detectives or Psychic Sally – don’t do this for a living.

Penman is just engaging in wishful thinking to justify his credulity. As for the ‘unavailable’ information, see above. Maybe, maybe not. There are unofficial sources in plenty, after all, and there’s the distinct possibility that she was leading him to reveal information and making it seem like she came up with it herself. That’s what psychics do after all.

I quickly ruled out the possibility that Sally was lucky and simply guessed the details of my unusual and chaotic family. Her reading was just too detailed and accurate for that.

This would make a lot more sense if we knew what detail should be considered too much for coincidence. But this brings up another trick magicians often use: they use different methods to pull off the same trick. For example, suppose they produce something from thin air. You know they’ve palmed it or it’s come out of their sleeve or something. So they produce more objects, this time showing that they couldn’t have done it that way. They might even make this part of the act: they might say that you probably think I pulled it from my sleeve and roll their sleeve up the second time. Then they might say you probably think I palmed it and do the trick in some other way that means they couldn’t have palmed it. They’ve done the trick in several different ways but we have a tendency to assume there was only one trick. Perhaps in the last case, the magician really did pull it from his sleeve, but by that time he’s already demonstrated that the trick can be done without doing that. Since we assume he is using the same method each time, it looks more mysterious. I expect Sally did the same thing. Some Googling, some cold-reading, some guesswork…

I was then left with two possibilities, both of which were equally ‘irrational'. Firstly, Sally had interrogated me under hypnosis, extracted deeply buried stories from my past and then fed them back to me. The second possibility was that my dead relatives really had come back to talk to me and proffer advice for the future.

You should always be suspicious when you find yourself with only two alternatives, especially if they are both insane. If you genuinely can’t think of more alternatives, you’ve probably been fooled. You’re probably trying to explain the wrong thing.

I decided to secretly test Sally by sending along three customers. Two were equipped with surveillance gear to see if Sally was hypnotising her customers.

After my exhaustive investigation, I can confidently say that Sally was not hypnotising or manipulating her customers in any way.

First, he can only at best be confident that she didn’t manipulate those customers and second, I think he’s already demonstrated that he is not competent to judge whether people are being manipulated. I suspect he doesn’t know about the tools of cold-reading so doesn’t know what to look for. Third, the investigation doesn’t sound very exhaustive to me. Why didn’t he get in touch with James Randi? Or Richard Wiseman? Or any number of other high profile ‘debunkers’ of psychics? Robert Chalmers did when he interviewed Sally. And why did only two of the three have surveillance devices? What kind of scientific test is this?

Here are the views of the people we sent along to test Sally:

The views? What have their views to do with it? What kind of way is this to conduct a test? Why didn’t he publish recording or transcripts of the readings? Why didn’t he send along a magician or an expert in the psychology of cold reading?

Penman sums up:

With varying degrees of accuracy, in all three cases Sally had provided at least some amazing insights that defied rational explanation. But was her ‘gift' paranormal? After my encounters with her, I have come to believe that the idea is not as far-fetched as many claim and that there are possible explanations from within the world science.

This should be good. He continues:

Strange as it may seem, in scientific principle at least, time can theoretically flow forwards and backwards. If this were to happen in practice, Sally might be able to ‘recall' events that have yet to take place in our own ‘real' time (fans of Back to the Future will find this easier to comprehend).

This is pure babble. Penman is referring to the fact that the laws of physics do not require that time run in any particular direction. This is a long way from saying that time sometimes moves backwards somehow. Besides, the idea isn’t even internally coherent. Where, exactly, is time running backwards? In Sally’s brain? Then why isn’t her brain running backwards? There’s no way I can frame this theory of psychic phenomena in a way that makes the slightest sense. And there’s certainly no evidence for it (evidence of what?) It’s just an out-and-out stupid thing to say.

The other possibility, of course, is that we really do live on after our physical bodies die. The universe is composed of energy that ceaselessly fluctuates in space. Given that our minds may reside in energy fields generated by our brains, isn't it at least possible that our consciousness somehow becomes imprinted on the fabric of the universe where those with special skills can detect it?

Penman is pulling a Chopra here. He’s sprinkling the word ‘energy’ around like salad dressing in the mistaken belief that it explains anything. What he suggests is ‘conceivable’ only in the sense that we could imagine such a thing. But then we’d have to ask what substrate it is that our minds get imprinted on and how the software runs when our brains aren’t involved. Why do they get imprinted? Lots of other things generate ‘energy fields’ too. Are they also imprinted on the ‘fabric of the universe’? It’s just another incoherent idea with no hypothesis of how it might work and most importantly no evidence for it at all.

And yet Penman has the gall to suggest that his deranged speculations have something to do with science. He’s got a science PhD, for goodness’ sake, he should have a reasonably keen understanding of what constitutes science.

Above all, the fact that we cannot understand how psychics such as Sally operate does not mean that they are not genuine.

Wait, what? Of course it doesn’t. Why would it and why would anyone claim it did? But more importantly, Danny, less of the “we”. I think I have an excellent grasp of how ‘Psychic’ Sally operates and so do many others. You can read all about it here on our very own web. You could have too, if you’d troubled yourself. Don’t assume that everyone else shares your expansive ignorance.

There’s a very simple way to find out whether Sally is really psychic. You test her properly. I’m certain that the JREF would be delighted to do it and if she’s on the level, Sally could earn a million dollars for a few hours work. She certainly qualifies to apply for the JREF Prize.

Let me assure you, Danny, that their tests will be a lot more competently designed than yours, so perhaps you’d rather keep your fingers in your ears.

The monstrous Pearls

2011-09-10T11:38:00.001Z

These people are monsters. They preach what they call a biblical and Christian method of bringing up children or, as they charmingly put it, training them. I’m not sure why they call it biblical, though, since little or none of what they teach appears in the bible. What they seem to be doing instead is justifying their views on dealing with children. It’s saying something when even the bible isn’t as awful as these people.

The Pearls believe in isolation. They think that children should never be out of their parents’ sight. At church, they must sit with their parents, not their friends. After church, they must stand with their parents rather than playing with their friends. Since they must also be homeschooled, it’s worth asking how they can have any friends in the first place, especially because, according to the Pearls, “slumber parties are sin parties”.

There’s no privacy or freedom at home, either. Children are to be supervised at all times. There must be no physical way for them to access the web. They are not allowed in their bedrooms except to sleep or to read quietly and the door must be open at all times, except for a strict 2 minutes to allow them to dress.

Phone calls are limited to 3 minutes and must be supervised, the list goes on.

Any transgression is dealt with by beatings. Virtually any transgression at all. Beating is the first resort. Not with the hands of course. Hands are for ‘loving and helping’. So obviously they must be beaten with an instrument. They recommend 1/4 inch plumbing line:

“It will fit in your purse or hang around your neck. You can buy them [sic] for $1.00 at Home Depot or any hardware store,”

How convenient. But it gets better. The pipes, explains Pearl,

“come cheaper by the dozen and can be widely distributed in every room and vehicle. Just the high profile of their accessibility keeps kids in line.”

Elizabeth and Kevin Schatz of California bought the Pearls’ book. Then they followed its advice, beating their 7 year old adopted daughter to death and hospitalising her sister. The former had got a word wrong in a homeschool lesson. The other was deemed to be a “liar” and a “bad influence”. So the Schatz’ beat them for hours, taking breaks only to pray.

Kevin Schatz pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and torture and was sentenced to two life terms; he will serve a minimum of 22 years. Elizabeth Schatz pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter and infliction of unlawful corporal punishment and received a sentence of 13 years. During the trial, Zariah addressed the court. She spoke in a soft voice and occasionally broke down in sobs. She said Lydia had meant the world to her, and she said, “I don’t know what I did to deserve what you did to me.”

The Pearls say they have sold more than 650,000 copies of their book. The book that tells parents to constantly beat their children with plumbing pipes. Even without the beatings their doctrine is monstrous. It’s evil to isolate children or to subjugate them to your will. It’s barbaric to force them to behave as if they’re not children and to forbid the simple joy of running around like an idiot.

Would you date an atheist?

2011-09-10T08:22:00.001Z

Quite good, quite good. I was going to say that this sort of thing seems less of a problem in Britain than it is in the US, but then it occurred to me that my own sister would certainly never consider dating an atheist. And I thought about some of the religious people I know – mostly Catholics and Muslims– who I’m sure would be horrified if their children dated atheists.

Is this the same thing? I get the impression that it is probably not. My sister would not date an atheist, but I don’t think she hates and fears us: I think she’s just can’t imagine sharing her life with someone who doesn’t share her beliefs. Those Catholics (and others) would probably react the same way to anyone who wasn’t a Catholic, rather than picking on atheists in general. Some might even be more prejudiced against Protestants or Muslims (and vice versa) than against atheists.

Something slightly different seems to be the case in the US. A lot of people really seem to hate atheists because they are atheists rather than because they are not specifically a member of their own group. In fact, people who only nominally ally themselves with a particular religious group hate and distrust atheists. These people don’t go to church, they spend only a few moments of their lives thinking about any or all gods. They are pretty close to being atheist in practice, but they nevertheless hate atheists in principle.

I’m not saying that the situation here in the UK is anything other than tedious and pathetic. But it does seem qualitatively different and quantitatively better than the situation in the US. Let’s hope it keeps going in the right direction.

Nobody’s bothered

2011-09-07T10:04:00.001Z

Loath as I am to link to the Daily Mail, this article claims that 2/3 of schools in England ignore their nonsensical legal requirement to provide a daily act of ‘collective worship’.

So that’s good. 2/3 of schools aren’t wasting their or their pupils’ time by teaching them magic.

Some of the comments are astonishing though, as you’d expect from Mail readers. Here’s a few at random.

This one seems to be a threat of some kind, but I can’t for the life of me work out what the threat is or who is being threatened:

UK: Your Godlessness is a vacuum and it is will be filled. You can look to your roots in Christianity if your wish to remain identifiable British (barely at this point), or be replaced. There are several groups up to the task and IN your nation. It's up to you.

- Phil, Ottawa, Canada

Sully seems unaware of the irony in his own post:

I'm glad, we should go back to worshipping God, we were a better off country with respect for each other and morals. All of you atheists who disagree, get off this planet. It's for the God worshippers

- Sully, Yorkshire

Jones hasn’t troubled him or herself to read the 10 commandments before endorsing them. I’m struggling to understand why teaching kids metaphors that are so poorly constructed that you have to spend even more time explaining the supposed morality tale within is a better idea than just teaching them about morality in plain English. Especially since the parables are invariably told as though they are true stories.

It would be a shame if it were banned. It was one way to teach people right from wrong, to teach them some moral behaviour, how to behave towards each other. I don't believe in God or an afterlife, but I think the ten commandments aren't a bad piece of guidance and the parables and other stories could illustrate or model good behaviour. You can listen to the stories and sermons, take what is good from them and make your own minds up if there is a God or not.

- Jones, Germany

I’m pretty sure I was behind this guy in the supermarket queue the other day. He was buying mint imperials and string and leather driving gloves:

People seem to forget that we are a Christian Country and from time began we prayed to God, no matter how mythical it may seem. It It is the duty of a Christian Country to teach and pray. Unfortunately those growing up today have no idea of what happened in the last two wars but pray we did for victory over our oppressors. We have so much immigration that our religion seems to be second when it should be first. Other religions will attempt to take over if we let religion die a natural death in the UK. I have been through two world wars and all people prayed at school and church. I believe I am better because of it but do not attend Church very often. Bring it back in all schools.

- Don , East Anglia

And finally, of course, atheists are paedophiles:

all children should be made to study the Book of Proverbs. It will save them one day and bring up decent folk. Unlike the unruly, free thinkers what our society is becoming. Looting, drunkenness, adultery and selfishness the way of life now. Next thing, the Me, Myself and I society will be fighting for their rights to have sex with our kids. Its coming, just read daily how more and more women paedophiles (in schools too) are on the increase along with the general public beginning to accept kids in various risky adult pose. Isnt there an article here about a mother dressing up her toddler to look like the prostitute in the movie Pretty Woman? No one stopped it? Silence is as good as acceptance. Go on, red flag me and prove me right,.. this is a godless society and its perverted.

- mutal, uk, 7/9/2011 3:37

Who would win in a fight? Sad vs Angry? Michael Pearl delights in hating people who have suffered tragedy

2011-09-06T19:26:00.001Z

Only look at this if you’re made of stronger stuff than I am. It’s very upsetting.

A woman suffered a miscarriage and it tore her world apart. The death of a foetus is itself a grief I’m not sure I can comprehend. The reactions of her friends and family, although probably sympathetic, didn’t help her. She felt that her husband didn’t feel the grief she did. She was told by another (presumably well-meaning) family member that she probably hadn’t felt the baby kicking at all. She’d just felt the corpse floating around.

This tragedy changed her perspective. She stopped going to church and she stopped believing in prayer. She couldn’t believe that this was a test of her faith especially since she’d had a pretty poor time of things already, having suffered abuse of one sort or another for most of her life.

She began to wonder how the god she’d always believed in could possibly be the god that let this happen, as well she might.

She told her painful story to Michael Pearl in the hope he’d be able to help others in similar situations. She said:

I don’t know if you have an article on coping with a miscarriage (I checked before writing this) but if you feel compelled to write one, many women would be grateful.

I’m going to quote Pearl’s response verbatim. It’s hard to know what to add. Awfulness and inhumanity drips from every sentence but I don’t think you have to go any further than the second word to feel your heart plummet into your bowels. Pearl turns her grief into anger so he can send a self-righteous message that does nothing to help this woman or anyone else.

Your anger is based on the assumption that you know better than God what is best. Your child is now in the presence of God beholding the face of the Father (Matthew 18:10). “It is not the will of your Father which is in heaven, that one of these little ones should perish (Matthew 18:14). Your child will appear again in the Millennium as a child to be raised by someone—possibly you—to maturity, and so make a choice concerning the Savior. In reference to the Millennium the Bible says, “And the streets of the city shall be full of boys and girls playing in the streets thereof’’ (Zechariah 8:5). One of those playing children is your little one. Jesus held your child before your did. Are you angry at him for drawing this little one to himself? He said, “Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God” (Mark 10:14).

Are you thinking about what is best for your child, or what you think is best for yourself? Do you know that this little one would be born whole to live a normal life? Do you know that he/she would not suffer from a chronic disease? Do you know that you child would have grown up to honor God and life a fruitful life? If your child was not going to be saved, would you still want him/her to come into the world and live such a short time just to spend eternity in hell? How can you be so sure that you know what is best? Like Job you need to be humbled and face the fact that your world has revolved around you. It is time you resigned as chairman of the universe and leave it to God to do a little “baby sitting” until you get there to take over for him. I am sure your baby is in the best of hands.

This response is as hateful as it is bewildering. She wasn’t angry, she was asking someone she apparently trusted to help other people who might be as grief-stricken as her. Along the way she started to lose her faith and Pearl caricatured that understandable way of thinking as anger at god and her as a dreadful person who deserved her lot and needed to be ‘humbled’ for daring to ask whether there were resources to help other people cope with similar things.

It’s about the most shameful thing I’ve ever read. I just can’t bring myself to comment on it, the hatred speaks for itself.

Pastor Mike responds

2011-09-01T15:19:00.001Z

I wrote here about Pastor Mike, who a year ago wanted to make a list of atheists so he could harass and try to bankrupt them. More recently, PZ wrote about it here and Hemant Mehta wrote about it here. This focussed a lot of attention on Pastor Mike’s site and he responded by making his blog private so that only his friends could see it. Not a very brave or consistent act for someone who wants to put all atheists on a harassment list.

I emailed Pastor Mike and to my surprise, he responded. Here’s my email:

Hi Pastor Mike,

First, let me say that since I understand you have suffered from or are suffering recent illness, I hope you are well on the road to recovery.

Second, I expect you have a lot of messages about your atheist registration scheme and rightly so. It's an idea that certainly needs rethinking. Since you've likely been deluged with information, I won't add to it here. I just wanted to say that I've written about your crackpot scheme here: http://lookatthestateofthat.blogspot.com/2011/08/if-youve-done-nothing-wrong-theres.html

If you or any of your members would like to respond, you'd be very welcome indeed. I'd rather know more about your actual motivations than to speculate about them.
Hoping you have a speedy recovery,

r

Pastor Mike responded by posting on my blog as follows:

For what its worth , I have abandoned the entire idea and have no desire to do any "atheist list." It was written mostly in parody ( jokingly ). Instead , I am simply going to continue praying for the salvation of all the lost.
The continued hate mail I get is already validating my point.
God bless you and yours -
Pastor Mike

I posted on the aforementioned blogs that I’d received this message and wondered whether it was the One True Pastor Mike. He responded:

Yes , it was the ‘real me.’ I invite you all to check out my latest post on my I-net church at:

http://pastormikeschurch.blogspot.com/

I feel I have extended the olive branch , which is all I can do.

God bless and keep you all –

Pastor Mike

And I can now confirm that it really does seem to be the real Mike. Brilliant. Let’s look at what he has to say (from his new blog) and ask a few questions of Pastor Mike:

For what its worth , I have abandoned the entire idea and have no desire to do any "atheist list." It was written mostly in parody ( jokingly ). Instead , I am simply going to continue praying for the salvation of all the lost.

Why did he abandon the idea? When did he abandon it?

If it was a parody, what was it a parody of? A parody is something cast in the style of something or someone else for humorous purposes. What is the something or someone else in this case? Where is the humour? And if he means “joke” rather than “parody”, where is the punchline? Where did threatening atheists become funny, because I’m struggling to see the joke?

The continued hate mail and character assassinations I continue to get have already validated the point I wanted to make.

It’s indeed a shame if Mike has received hate mail. I’ve had hate mail and it isn’t much fun. We have to be careful though: there tends to be a marked difference between what I’d call hate mail and what religious fundamentalists like Pastor Mike might call hate mail. For example, I would consider threats as probably belonging to that category but disagreements with my stance as probably not. So it would be interesting to know what sort of mail Mike has received, whether it’s really hate-filled by any reasonable judgement, and whether it stacks up to his own clearly stated hatred of atheists. He’s welcome to clear that up here: he knows the URL now and I post anything that’s not spam.

But more import is Pastor Mike’s idea that this alleged hate mail has somehow validated his point. Which point was that, Mike? I thought it was all a joke. Either you meant it all as a joke and therefore didn’t have a point, which can therefore not be validated by hate mail, or it wasn’t a joke in which case you’re a liar.

I am instead , simply placing it in The LORD's Hands , and am continuing to pray for the salvation of all the lost. Feel free to drop by here from time to time and read upcoming sermons , VOD's , and simply proclaiming the truth of God's Word.

Placing what in those hands, exactly? Pastor Mike, you were the aggressor and the bully here. We were all just sitting around minding our own business and not believing in any gods when you suddenly decided you wanted to know where we lived. What is it you’ve placed in the Lord’s hands? Our punishment? Well have the decency to say so.

Thank you all for your "tolerance."

Please, Mike. You began by attacking us. What tolerance do you expect? We don’t believe what you believe, but we shouldn’t be pissed off if you want to make a list so you can discriminate against us and bankrupt us?

You will note that atheists aren’t trying to do the same thing to believers.

We aren’t the ones lacking in tolerance.

This will be my LAST statement in reference to the "atheist list" (that was never going to happen to begin with).

And yet there was an actual list, according to a few people who read your old site before you locked it down. From what these people have said it included snail and email addresses of atheists and you promised to supply IP addresses on request.

Would you care to deny that, Mike? Or perhaps you’d like to answer some of the many questions I and others have posed to you. Answer here, if you like.

If you’ve done nothing wrong, there’s nothing to be frightened of…

2011-08-29T08:41:00.001Z

Edit: I keep meaning to add that Pastor Mike wrote his piece about a year ago and nobody noticed until people like PZ picked it up recently. Since getting all that attention, Pastor Mike has made his blog private, so that only his friends can read it. I’ve pasted the entire text of his post at the bottom of this one.

It’s a brave move for someone who wants atheists on a public list so he can hassle and discriminate against them. He already restricted comments to members, ensuring nobody said anything he didn’t approve of. Now he doesn’t want anyone even reading the blog unless they already agree with what it says. Brave indeed. Pastor Mike, you can always comment here if you want to explain your actions.

This guy wants a (US) national registry of atheists. Why would this be of any use or interest to anyone at all?

Registering atheists like Richard Dawkins ( above ) would at least let people know who - and WHERE - they reside

(emphasis his)

Sorry, Pastor Mike, I’m still not sure I follow. Why would you want to know that? I suppose at least Pastor Mike might learn that Richard Dawkins doesn’t live in America, but I’m pretty sure everyone else knew that anyway. Fortunately, Pastor Mike further explains his reasoning:

I mean , think about it . There are already National Registrys for convicted sex offenders , ex-convicts , terrorist cells , hate groups like the KKK , skinheads , radical Islamists , etc..

And we’re straight into the assertion that atheists are directly comparable to sex offenders. Is there really a national registry for terrorist cells? You’d think that would make counter-terrorism quite easy. Just look up the cells on the register and you’re done.

I’m not convinced at the usefulness of national registers for sex offenders (or at least, publicly accessible ones), but at least there’s an argument to be made about protecting the public. What protection does Pastor Mike feel he needs from atheists?

Well, he doesn’t say. This is because his real reason for wanting to register atheists is so he can harass them and encourage people to boycott their businesses.

Now , many (especially the atheists ) , may ask "Why do this , what's the purpose ?"Duhhh , Mr. Atheist , for the same purpose many States put the names and photos of convicted sex offenders and other ex-felons on the I-Net - to INFORM the public ! I mean , in the City of Miramar , Florida , where I live , the population is approx. 109,000 . My family and I would sure like to know how many of those 109,000 are ADMITTED atheists ! Perhaps we may actually know some . In which case we could begin to witness to them and warn them of the dangers of atheism . Or perhaps they are radical atheists , whose hearts are as hard as Pharaoh's , in that case , if they are business owners , we would encourage all our Christian friends , as well as the various churches and their congregations NOT to patronize them as we would only be "feeding" Satan .

Pastor Mike, sex offender registries are indeed – rightly or not - about informing the public. Informing them of potential dangers. They aren’t there to provide the public with a list of people to discriminate against and harass. That’s why access to those lists is usually tightly controlled.

Frankly , I don't see why anyone would oppose this idea - including the atheists themselves ( unless of course , they're actually ashamed of their atheist religion , and would prefer to stay in the 'closet.' ) .

Pastor Mike has already made the reasons pretty clear. There’s every reason to be scared of Pastor Mike and his fellow thugs. They already think we’re basically the same as sex offenders and criminals. They already want to boycott our businesses and relentlessly preach to us or shun us. And this is before they’ve even got started with the list. We don’t have to be ashamed of our atheism to be concerned about your nutjob agenda, particularly in a country where crimes against atheists are unlikely to be met with much sympathy by the police and courts.

Part of that agenda, of course, is to try make us ashamed by trying to marginalise us with local communities. To shame us into professing belief. And if we don’t - Pastor Mike threatens - he’ll try to put us out of business. Not because he doesn’t want people to be atheists, but because he doesn’t want anyone to be allowed to say they’re atheists.

I’m not ashamed of being an atheist and Pastor Mike can put me on his list if he wants. I think I’m pretty safe from his disgusting plan here.

Pastor Mike’s original post

Brothers and Sisters , I have been seriously considering forming a (Christian ) grassroots type of organization to be named “The Christian National Registry of Atheists” or something similar . I mean , think about it . There are already National Registrys for convicted sex offenders , ex-convicts , terrorist cells , hate groups like the KKK , skinheads , radical Islamists , etc..

This type of “National Registry” would merely be for informationpurposes . To inform the public of KNOWN ( i.e., self-admitted) atheists . For example , let’s say you live in Colorado Springs , Colorado , you could simply scroll down ( from the I-Net site /Blog ) I would have , to the State of Colorado , and then when you see “Colorado Springs” , you will see the names of all the self-admitted atheist(s) who live there ( e.g., if an atheist’s name happened to be “Phil Small” ) . The individual’s physical address , and other known personal information would NOT be disclosed ( though , perhaps a photo could be ) .

Now , many (especially the atheists ) , may ask “Why do this , what’s the purpose ?” Duhhh , Mr. Atheist , for the same purpose many States put the names and photos of convicted sex offenders and other ex-felons on the I-Net – to INFORM the public ! I mean , in the City of Miramar , Florida , where I live , the population is approx. 109,000 . My family and I would sure like to know how many of those 109,000 are ADMITTED atheists ! Perhaps we may actually know some . In which case we could begin to witness to them and warn them of the dangers of atheism . Or perhaps they are radical atheists , whose hearts are as hard as Pharaoh’s , in that case , if they are business owners , we would encourage all our Christian friends , as well as the various churches and their congregations NOT to patronize them as we would only be “feeding” Satan .

Frankly , I don’t see why anyone would oppose this idea – including the atheists themselves ( unless of course , they’re actually ashamed of their atheist religion , and would prefer to stay in the ‘closet.’ ) .

Inventing agency

2011-08-24T07:21:00.001Z

It’s often hypothesised that gods were invented to help explain things that are out of our control. We didn’t understand why crops fail, why floods and droughts happen, why stuff sometimes catches on fire and since we’re somewhat wired to see agency, we saw it in natural disasters and invented gods. Then we compounded the error by developing superstitious behaviour: we made sacrifices and next year the river didn’t flood. While we’re excellent at inventing agency, we’re terrible at spotting things like regression to mean so we ploughed ever more resources into those superstitions. And maybe that’s how a somewhat-wired tendency to spot agency where none exists became religion. Other human tendencies make us into our own policemen. Why else do Catholics confess to priests when their god is supposed to be able to see everything anyway? And that seals the deal. We’re trained to think that if we don’t buy hook line and sinker into the superstition, we have to mortify ourselves.

But this view of the origins of religion is usually seen as glib by the religious. They feel that their religion answers big and deep questions (spoiler: the answer is always goddidit in some mysterious fashion) and that it can’t be attributed to instinctive needs of this sort.

I have a question for these apologists. How come every time there’s an earthquake, people all over the planet fight for airtime and column inches to tell us why it happened? It’s usually claimed to be a result of homosexuality or some other perceived immorality. But as PZ reports, people can and will invent any old madness. The East Coast earthquake today, for example, was apparently due to extracting oil from the planet, which would otherwise act as a lubricant, preventing earthquakes.

Isn’t that the exact same thing? What about gamblers who imagine there’s such a thing as a lucky streak? What about lovers who see the agency of destiny in their getting together? Faith-heads, why do you reject some putative explanations for personally inexplicable events and embrace others? Why do you embrace any explanations without evidence anyway?

Cornfields remain unlooked at and goats are not on fire due to squeaky wheels

2011-08-21T06:44:00.001Z

As everyone on the Internet now knows, Dennis Markuze/Dave Mabus has been arrested pending psychiatric evaluation to determine whether he’s fit for trial. The whole place has gone quiet. Though I was by no means a major Mabus target, his footprint was everywhere. It’s like a persistent noise that suddenly stops and everyone wakes up and asks “what’s that?”

I hope Markuze gets the help he so obviously needs and I’m glad he’s unable to cause mischief. But being me, I can still find something to complain about.

Markuze was reported to the police years ago, when he was just an enormous nuisance. He was reported again and again as he became more aggressive and threatening. I wrote to the Montreal police myself. Lots of other people who were far bigger targets for Markuze did likewise.

And nothing happened. The Montreal police didn’t care. They didn’t care when he turned up in person at an atheist convention, after making thousands of death threats against atheists. They didn’t care until they got a taste of Mabus’ medicine. And they didn’t like it. They didn’t like it at all. A petition was set up by Kyle VanderBeek, which got nearly 5000 signatures. Each one sent a message to the Montreal police. Who immediately started complaining about spam! Meanwhile, some Twitter savvy gent baited Markuze into including the Montreal police in some of his threats.

And the deal was done. Markuze was arrested. Two decades ago, when people started complaining, would have been better. So what’s the deal? Did the Montreal police just not realise how much of a nuisance he was making of himself? Did they not take his threats seriously? Or did they just not care about a bunch of Internet geeks until it was made too inconvenient for them to ignore?

Nobody has Markuze’s footprint, but I’ve had maybe a dozen death threats from random Internet people over the last couple of decades. I didn’t take them seriously. Would the police have taken them seriously if I’d reported them? Would they have taken them seriously if they’d arrived by snail?

The New Testament by someone who hasn’t read it

2011-08-19T14:17:00.001Z

This via Skepchick. Someone who was brought up Jewish and is now an atheist has little reason to have been exposed to the New Testament. But she tells the story of Jesus as she understands it, based on Christmas Specials and the trailer to Passion of the Christ.

She does a better job than many Christians. I particularly like the part where Jesus wanted to cut a baby in half.

It reminds me of this, which is a video of someone who hasn’t seen Star Wars explaining the plot.

Sign like you’ve never signed before

2011-08-18T15:24:00.001Z

Here’s a petition to the UK government urging them to treat creationism and intelligent design like the idiocy it is.

Creationism and ‘intelligent design’ are not scientific theories, but they are portrayed as scientific theories by some religious fundamentalists who attempt to have their views promoted in
Technorati Tags: petition,creationism,intelligent design,UK government
publicly-funded schools. At the same time, an understanding of evolution is central to understanding all aspects of biology. Currently, the study of evolution does not feature explicitly in the National Curriculum until year 10 (ages 14-15). Free Schools and Academies are not obliged to teach the National Curriculum and so are under no obligation to teach about evolution at all. We petition the Government to make clear that creationism and ‘intelligent design’ are not scientific theories and to prevent them from being taught as such in publicly-funded schools, including in ‘faith’ schools, religious Academies and religious Free Schools. At the same time, we want the Government to make the teaching of evolution in mandatory in all publicly-funded schools, at both primary and secondary level.

Sign the thing.

Non-fiction? Science? £12.89?

2011-08-17T23:49:00.001Z

Sadly, I navigated to this book from the Non-fiction->Science->Biology section of www.audible.co.uk. It is a madness.

This section from the blurb is probably all you need to know:

These questions and many more are put to the test by Lloyd Pye, an expert in evolutionary theory from alien genetic manipulation.

It’s rather hard to imagine how one could be an expert in evolution theory from alien genetic manipulation or what that expertise might look like.

It doesn’t even matter what the ‘questions’ are, but for the record, Pye seems to think that people didn’t evolve from apes. There are only dozens of bones to work from, he says, so it’s apparently much more likely that we were engineered by aliens.

Pye is one of those universal crackpots who believes virtually nothing established science says is real and that it’s all down to aliens. Naturally, he thinks humans couldn’t have built the pyramids and thinks – for no reason at all – that a perfectly ordinary deformed human skull is of alien origin.

You might know him from his crazy book Everything you know is wrong. This excerpt from an Amazon review of that book is revealing:

Pye draws heavily on the writings of Zecharia Sitchin and subscribes to the idea that the Earth was struck by a rogue planet, known by the Sumerians as Nibiru, which apparently circles our Sun in an eccentric orbit and passes close by the Earth about once every 3,600 years. Nibiru was inhabited by a race known as the Annunaki, who were the Earth colonisers as described above.

This, he contends, is more likely than evolution. You see, the aliens were a bit short of cash and so came here to get their scaly hands on our gold, which presumably also has value in space. But due to their cashflow problem they naturally had to genetically engineer the locals so they’d be smart enough to help with all the mining. This took 350,000 years, by which time you’d have thought the price of gold might have gone down anyway. Plus, I’ve heard that those cash for gold offers are a scam. But this all accounts, he says, for the 4000 genetic problems Homo sapiens has, which is ‘far more than other mammals’. Sadly, however, I’m just repeating this from one of the reviews as I haven’t read the book, so I can’t enlighten you about what –if anything- this might possibly mean.

Charmingly, although he dismisses evolution, he’ll have nothing to do with creationism either. His ‘theory’ (read bugfuck insane self-indulgent fantasy) addresses the weaknesses in both. He says.

The reviews on the UK Amazon site are pretty positive, but there’s a particularly revealing one, which might help to explain why:

The only part I could not believe was concerning Nibru (also known as planet X), I just could not buy into that, I keep an open mind but there are some things I need to see in order to believe, with my own eyes! And that's why it only gets 3/5 - worth the money I paid.

This character is rating the book based on how much of it he decided arbitrarily was true, any actual evidence be hanged. Also, it seems that his eyes are his major organs of belief, which seems odd.

If anyone finds any of his books in a charity shop, send me a copy and I’ll review it more fairly. In the meantime, shame on Audible (a subsidiary of Amazon) for classifying this nonsense….this….piffle lite…. as science.

Vatican punishes bishop for compassion

2011-08-12T09:19:00.001Z

The Vatican is finally investigating one of its Bishops. Not for covering up child rape though, for working with organisations that advocate the dignity and rights of homosexuals.

He thinks homosexual behaviour is a sin, but doesn’t want gay people to be stigmatised by society. He thinks abortion is wrong, but doesn’t think women who have abortions should go to jail. In other words, he’s a decent – if misguided – human being. Damn right the Vatican had better reel him in. Can’t have bishops going around being compassionate.

GAWD vs GWAR: intellectual dishonesty

2011-08-10T10:56:00.001Z

I’ve said this often, but PZ puts it well.

Gods retreat into gaps as science advances. It’s inevitable and there’s nothing faith-heads can do about it but squirm dishonestly. Here’s how they do it:

They believe in a god with the various trappings of their religion, such as omnipotence, omnipresence and goodness. They believe their god created the universe. They believe in miracles.

As Dawkins has pointed out, many Christian priests dismiss Adam and Eve as metaphors if you confront them with genetic evidence, then go right back to describing that story as fact from the pulpit first thing Sunday morning. I’m sure there are similar attitudes from faith-heads of all varieties.

And when you confront them with evidence for the big bang, many appeal to a god that’s somehow ‘outside time’, whatever that means.

And when you ask them for evidence – any evidence – that their god exists, they go one step further still: they say that while they can’t prove their god exists, you can’t prove it doesn’t. God pervades the entire universe but exists somehow outside it and so can’t be detected within it. They’re right, of course, that nobody can prove that such a god doesn’t exist.

But there are two problems. First, such a being could never be the god their religion demands. That would require it to interfere with the universe in some way, whether it’s answering prayers, performing miracles, directing evolution or whatever. If it interferes with the universe, then we can throw that blasted science at it and further narrow the gap that god has to squeeze into, which is why they brought us here in the first place. Second, on Sunday morning they go right back to preaching about all the times their god has interfered with the universe anyway.

This flip-flopping between two concepts of god to avoid difficult questions is tiresome and that’s why PZ makes the distinction between what he calls GAWD (gods as working deities) and GWAR (gods who avoid reality) in the article linked above. It’s a smart and funny article, which should really annoy some non-thinkers.

I’ve dealt with this argument countless times, distressingly often from people close to me. I think they know they’re being dishonest. They know that there argument evaporates under scrutiny, but they’re less concerned with honesty than with fantasy.

So the questions remain:

If you believe in GAWD, tell me what you believe. Tell me that you believe prayer works. Or that miracles happen. Tell me which things written in your holy books are true. Or whatever. Tell me what it is you believe, without obfuscation. These are by definition testable claims and science can be applied. I’m not scared of the outcome of properly conducted scientific tests of any of these things, are you?

If you believe GWAR, explain why. Since GWAR doesn’t interfere with the universe, how do you even know about it? You can’t point to a holy book, especially if – like most – it is claimed to either be written by or inspired by GAWD. That would constitute an interference. The books are all chock full of acts of GAWD. You can’t point to personal revelation. That would be interference again.

So either show us the evidence for your GAWD, or explain why you believe in GWAR. There’s no middle ground.

Class action suit against homeopathy

2011-08-08T06:55:00.001Z

On 31 August 2010, Gina Delarosa filed aclass action lawsuit against Boiron, Inc.stating the company is “..defrauding Californians by claiming that a tablet called “Children’s Coldcalm” pellets will provide relief from: sneezing, runny nose, nasal congestion, sinus pain, headaches, and sore throat.”

More here.

All win. Well, apart from the homeopaths

2011-08-08T06:49:00.001Z

The Advertising Standards Authority tells homeopaths to remove claims about efficacy of their products in treating certain medical conditions.

We’ve told marketers of homeopathic treatments and services about whom we’ve received a complaint to remove marketing claims that refer to, or imply, the efficacy of homeopathy for treating or helping specific health conditions. This is because the ASA considers there is insufficient robust scientific evidence to support these claims.

Fucking whales, how do they work?

2011-08-05T15:52:00.001Z

http://animals.howstuffworks.com/mammals/whale1.htm

My throat grooves hurt

And don’t even TALK to me about my uro-genital slit.

What he said

2011-08-05T07:22:00.001Z

This post by PZ at the all-new Pharyngula is a good one and I agree without caveat. It’s always seemed to me that that while a person can feasibly call herself a skeptic if she believes in a god, she’s got a lot of explaining to do. Religion is fair game and always in season.

When the spectre of accommodation first began to manifest in public (that is, when we all started arguing about it), I mused about its history. I understand why organisations like CSICOP and later the JREF adopted the policies they did on religion. They chose to be neutral on religion apparently because some of the people they wanted on their boards were sympathetic to religion and wouldn’t otherwise have joined. They wanted the skill and enthusiasm of those people and the price they paid for including them was to stay quiet about religion. This might come as a surprise, but in context, I say fair enough. They were small, fledgling organisations and – I think – didn’t adopt this policy to swell the numbers of members. I’d have made a rather different choice, but I don’t particularly criticise theirs, in context.

These days, things are rather different. Due largely to the efforts of these organisations, skepticism is a big deal and the community very large and active. There’s no longer a perceived need to accommodate to get the staff you want, because there are lots of talented, hardworking people in the movement. Accommodation is now about recruitment of members and that is not acceptable. It’s not acceptable because a few board members of a skeptical organisation shouldn’t get to decide what the community cares about.

And yet those early decisions haunt us, for some reason. The reasons for laying off religion seemed superficially plausible back then, but makes no sense at all now. So why does the movement allow those policies to influence it? At the first TAM London, there was quite a lot of (to me and many welcome) sniping at religion. And while it went down pretty well, lots of people in the audience were visibly and vocally offended. I don’t know if this is because they were religious or because of the reach of those insidious decisions. I know that in at least some cases it was the latter, because I talked to people. They blustered about religion being off-limits because of ‘deeply-held beliefs’. They blustered about putting people off joining the skeptical movement because their particular variety of stupid was being ridiculed. They blustered about negative evidence. Bottom line: they blustered. If they can’t resolve those feelings in an environment jam packed full of smart people, then good fucking riddance.

PZ is right: since we want diversity in the movement, we should simply stick to the principles. There’s only one, really: show us. If religious people want to join the movement they should be welcomed providing they understand that that they’ll have to show us. Their particular bullshit is no more exempt than anyone else’s. If they think they have a good reason for believing what they do, they should show us what it is. And if it turns out that reason is not so very good after all, they shouldn’t expect much sympathy.

Skepticism is about having good reasons to believe things and the fun part is arguing about what are good and bad reasons. Argument is how we sharpen our teeth and people who don’t care for argument probably have only a marginal place in the skeptical movement these days.

I’ve previously argued against the concept of a ‘skeptical movement’, whatever that means. I was wrong. I was basing my ire on the fact that the people who seemed to be trying to define the movement were determined to tell us what we should think. But the movement exists and it is doing what it collectively wants regardless of what anyone who thinks they’re in charge says and in that capacity I’m a member of that movement and support it in everything I do.

Liz Jones in Somalia

2011-08-04T11:43:00.001Z

There’s a fake twitter feed hilariously masquerading as being written by Liz Jones in Somalia. Quite a lot of people didn’t realise it was a fake, somehow. Some others decided that the feed was somehow making fun on the tragedy in Somalia. In fact, the author’s stated purpose was to raise awareness of the tragedy and to ridicule the awful Liz Jones. There’s an explanation here, along with an appeal to donate money. Which you should definitely do.

Meanwhile, we can look forward to the ‘real’ Liz Jones’ first Somalia article on Sunday…

Church sex abuse inquiry not needed

2011-08-02T15:20:00.001Z

It’s not needed. We wouldn’t learn anything new from digging up all that old business where we raped children into unconsciousness. We didn’t know it was wrong back then, you see. These days we do know it’s wrong. Somehow we didn’t know it was wrong back then.

Think I’m misstating any of this?

Here you go.

"I don't think they'll learn very much more ... I'm convinced we've done the best we can in more recent years."

By refusing to hand over information about child abuse? By protecting perps and demonising victims? I’ve got a little feeling that you might have done a bit more. Starting with not raping anyone in the first place, I’d have thought.

But Bishop Connors on Tuesday said not even revelations from Detective Sergeant Kevin Carson that 26 young men had killed themselves after being abused by priests and brothers in Ballarat convinced him that more would be learnt from an inquiry.

"I think we've learnt a lot of things about what is appropriate behaviour and what's not appropriate behaviour," Bishop Connors said.

"I think people are very well informed nowadays as to what's inappropriate approaches from a male."

While conceding the abuse of children was wrong, he said that in the past it had not always been clear to everyone what was appropriate and inappropriate behaviour.

Nothing to be learned here, nobody will benefit from finding out how it was allowed to happen, happen so often or happen for so long. Nobody will benefit from knowing how it won’t be allowed to happen again.

"In the past a lot of ignorance was there on the part of lots of people. Parents didn't understand, sometimes bishops didn't understand. We have no excuse now."

Which can only mean that you think you had an excuse then. An excuse – let’s be perfectly clear – to rape children.

"I can't remember them saying they were victims of Brother Best as well," he said.

You can’t remember? You can’t fucking remember? What were you doing during these horrific revelations? And…. “as *well*”? It’s better that they only got raped by some priests instead of all priests? Well, I suppose it is… technically….

Liz Jones of the Daily Mail is a horror show

2011-08-01T11:15:00.001Z

Somehow (presumably because I don’t read the Fail), Liz Jones of the Daily Mail has only just appeared on my radar with this piece. Jones is fortunate enough to be able to afford private healthcare so she doesn’t need to “scrape and scrabble at the coal face of the NHS very often.”

For some reason, the Mail has seen fit to send this dreadful person to report on the famine in Somalia (I genuinely can’t imagine what she will come up with) and she needed vaccines. Her private GP could give her only one of the jabs she needed that day, so she phoned her local NHS GP:

'Hello!' I said cheerily. 'I am not registered with you, but I live two miles away. I wonder if you could possibly squeeze me in today to complete my jabs for travelling to Africa, and fill in my malaria prescription, as I need to start taking the tablets on Sunday.'

Unsurprisingly, the health centre was not very sympathetic. It was busy dealing with patients who were, you know, actually registered with them. Unlike the private clinic, they have extremely aggressive quotas. An egotistical reporter’s inconsequential demands don’t trump everyone else’s needs.

The conversation doesn’t go well. She claims that the vaccinations are an emergency, so the GP’s office suggests she go to A&E.

“I'm sure they wouldn't classify a routine jab as an emergency. I mean, it's a global crisis. Millions of people are dying and you won't put yourself out to allow me to be seen by a nurse, not even a doctor, for five minutes?”

This probably tells you all you need about Liz Jones. She’s such a humanitarian! She goes on to compare her treatment to the appalling goings on at the Winterbourne View care home exposed on the Panorama programme, where inmates were routinely beaten and humiliated. It’s this sort of attitude that convinces me she won’t be the world’s most sympathetic reporter on the crisis in Somalia. She’s more important than anyone else – and than the rules that are there to protect everybody – because she’s been asked to write about something important.

What would it have cost this woman on Friday morning to have said: 'Sod the protocol – everyone needs to know about this famine, Miss Jones, so I am going to speak to the GP and see what we can do.'

Well, it could have cost her job and quite rightly so. If Jones turned out to be allergic to the vaccines (they didn’t have her notes) then it could have cost Jones her life too. And it could also have had consequences for others if they were bumped down the queue because of Jones’ lack of preparedness.

But no. People no longer talk in such a way. They follow the rules. They never put themselves out. They never look at the bigger picture.

Personally, I don’t want medical professionals getting too creative with the rules. There’s no bigger picture. The crisis in Somalia will not be abated by a hateful person writing about it.

She’s really quite a joy:

“I don’t understand women who think clothes are not important when they have power.”

“It's your own stupid fault if your brats trash the house.” (says a woman with no children)

“I hate dirt and smells. I have no patience with people who can't help themselves, who remain ignorant despite a free education, libraries, the internet...”

In this last quote, she’s talking about the homeless. She goes on to explain that she feels guilty for displaying contempt for the homeless and utter cluelessness of their plight (she assumes homeless people all live in bedsits, showing as little comprehension of English as she does compassion for anyone who isn’t her.) She picks a particular homeless person and vows to track him down and ‘help’ him. This was in 2009. I think we can be certain that she never went to that bench in Bristol where he lives.

Susan Greenfield, you are truly the Baroness of Hearts. Now fuck off.

2011-07-30T16:28:00.001Z

Seriously, Sue: has it occurred to you recently to stop completely making shit up and do some actual science instead?

You are an absolute fucking disgrace. A humanities undergrad could see through your many piteous cries for undeserved attention.

'It's almost as if people are living in a world that's not a real world, but a world where what counts is what people think of you or (if they) can click on you,' she said.

Hmm….

Bullied to death

2011-07-29T06:51:00.001Z

Another moving poem by Digital Cuttlefish. Bullying of children by other children is dehumanising. It isolates children, making them dread school, dread social events and feel entirely alone. There’s often nowhere they can go for help. Parents often don’t understand how bad bullying can get or they might unhelpfully tell their offspring to ‘just fight back’. Telling teachers is often out of the question for obvious reasons. It can seem to children as though there’s no end to torment in sight and hard to imagine in any case what a life free of torment might be like.

When a child feels so isolated, organisations claiming to care and to offer support have a special organisation to listen, defend, encourage, advise and heal. Their top priority should be the bullied child, who they should treat with sensitivity and respect. What they shouldn’t do is this.

Over the past two years, a total of nine teenagers have committed suicide in a Minnesota school district represented by Rep. Michele Bachmann—the latest in May—and many more students have attempted to take their lives. State public health officials have labeled the area a "suicide contagion area" because of the unusually high death rate.

Some of the victims were gay, or perceived to be by their classmates, and many were reportedly bullied. And the anti-gay activists who are some of the congresswoman's closest allies stand accused of blocking an effective response to the crisis and fostering a climate of intolerance that allowed bullying to flourish.

Bachmann and her allies have opposed attempts to promote tolerance of homosexuals in schools. They imagine a ‘homosexual agenda’ which aims to somehow recruit young people into being gay. And their braying, spittle-crusted maws are open wide in howls of protest. They blocked a proposed Gay-Straight Alliance Club at Fred Moore Middle School (now Anoka Middle School for the Arts) by postponing meetings for months citing the need for legal vetting. Let’s be clear about this: they were blocking a club which would have provided support for bullied, frightened and lonely children.

At least four of the nine children who killed themselves over those two years were LGBT, or at least perceived as such by their schoolmates and bullied because of it. However, the Parents Action League and the Minnesota Family Council blame activists against gay bullying for the suicides. You see, the children were ‘indoctrinated’ into homosexuality by groups promoting tolerance and killed themselves because they were encouraged to adopt an ‘unhealthy lifestyle’. This is a remarkable piece of logic to say the least.

These groups have worked with schools to encourage children to preach to their gay classmates and tell them they’re going to hell. They handed out t-shirts to kids promoting a ‘day of truth’. Fifteen-year-old Justin Aaberg hanged himself shortly after this event: his mother – understandably - blames it for his suicide.

It’s beyond my understanding how anyone could deliberately deny support to an unhappy child, let alone actively hound that child out of school and society and – in some cases – the world. These people are scum. Their views are disgusting. They’re using the power handed to them by the unthinking privilege religion enjoys in society to commit evil, evil acts.

These are the kinds of question that bother me, too

2011-07-23T08:23:00.001Z

Jerry makes several points here, but the one I want to pick up on is this:

Now Rabbi Yoffie is a Jew, so he doesn’t accept the New Testament. So what kind of morality can he get from the Old Testament? Well, here are a few of the things that Yahweh approves or sanctions in that book:

slavery

genocide, including women and children

the killing of adulterers

the killing of homosexuals

the stoning to death of nonvirgin bride

That stuff was okay by God. Is it not okay by Rabbi Yoffie? If not, why not? Was it okay back then, but not now? Or if it was never okay, then why doesn’t the Rabbi approve of this stuff? Could it be that Yoffie picks and chooses his Biblical morality based on secular considerations? Maybe he should read Plato’s Euthyphro.

Why indeed? It’s such a transparently obvious question that I can’t believe all these ‘sophisticated theologians’ we keep hearing about haven’t thought about it. But instead, they seem to blithely pretend it doesn’t exist.

Yoni has a stab at the question in Jerry’s comments at the above link. He begins by entirely missing the point, then just throws out what he calls ‘nuance’, but is in fact just using deeper-sounding words: ‘natural morality’ instead of ‘secular reasoning’. Even if we accept that ‘natural morality’ has a meaning distinct from a changing zeitgeist or whatever else we might wish to call it, we still face the problem of where that comes from, why it’s there and why it differs so much from scripture.

And MWalton mentions the man who was stoned to death for gathering sticks on the Sabbath (Numbers 14:33) and hilariously wonders whether gathering the stones shouldn’t also carry the offense of stoning…

Thursday unprofessionalism. What is unprofessional?

2011-07-21T05:46:00.001Z

While I was looking for something to post, this page caught my eye. I don’t know the context of why this information exists, but it seems clear that it’s a list of responses to a survey on examples of unprofessional behaviour some group of people has experienced.

It’s quite interesting what we consider unprofessional. Some of the examples seem pretty straightforward and clear-cut. For example:

Employee stole some secrets and left the company and made his own company.

That seems fairly transparently unprofessional to me. He did pretty much the exact opposite of what he was paid to do. But some of them are harder to call. For example, there are several complaints about the use of profanity in the workplace. Is this unprofessional? It’s easy to see situations where it would be. If it offended a client, for example, that would be unprofessional. What if it offends an employee? Creating an environment in which an employee feels uncomfortable could be considered unprofessional, I guess. Some of the complaints are about people discussing their drunken adventures outside work. Is it unprofessional to have riotous nights out or just to discuss them at work? Why should it be more unprofessional to discuss this than the sunday school picnic?

The concept of professional behaviour is a strange one. There are some rules of conduct which we’re all supposed to abide by at work, but nobody ever tells us what they are. And more importantly, nobody ever tells us why we’re supposed to abide by them. Is swearing at your computer going to cause any loss of revenue? Do employees work harder if they’re dressed according to arbitrary conventions?

This site has a list of the top twelve unprofessional behaviours, based on complaints they’ve received. Here they are, I don’t know whether they’re in any particular order:

1. Sexy or sloppy attire – Shirts that show cleavage, low-riding pants, tops that look like underwear, torn jeans, flip-flops, t-shirts with slogans, micro-short skirts

2. Poor hygiene – Body odor, bad breath, greasy hair, dirty clothes

3. Profanity – F-word, S-word, B-word, A-word, and many other colorful expletives

4. Fragrances – Perfume, cologne, aftershave, and any other source of scent

5. Food odors – Heated leftovers, tuna sandwiches, microwave popcorn (yes, lots of people hate that smell)

6. Irritating noises – Gum popping, knuckle cracking, food crunching, stomach rumbling, nose blowing, whistling, radio playing

7. Loud talking – Speaker phones, hallway socializing, yelling from cube to cube, cell phone chatter

8. Crude jokes – Humor related to sex, bodily functions, racial/ethnic characteristics, gender issues

9. Improper chitchat – Making public comments about customers, complaining to customers, gossiping about coworkers, spreading rumors

10. Sermonizing – Forcing religious information on coworkers, asking coworkers about their beliefs, leaving religious literature in public areas

11. Personal slurs – Using derogatory terms related to someone’s ethnic origin, race, gender, age, or any other personal characteristic

12. Cluttered workspace – Messy piles of paper, files stacked on the floor, dozens of knick-knacks, tools scattered around

Many of these complaints seem to be about things that can be annoying when a bunch of people who are connected only by the fact that they work in the same building are forced to spend large amounts of time together. But some of them are just plain preachy. Take item 2, for example. I can see why people might be annoyed by smelly people since it creates an unpleasant environment and in most cases shows lack of thought about or consideration for others. But what about dirty clothes? How does that affect anyone? And what about item 12? Are people concerned because there’s an actual problem with the clutter (it’s getting in the way) or because they don’t work like that and don’t think anyone else should? And is any of this really unprofessional anyway?

Clearly, when we work with people there’s an implied social contract. We should try not to do things that annoy them. What annoys people doesn’t depend only on our behaviour, but on the nature and status of our relationship with them. For example, if we know our coworkers well and particularly if we socialise with them, swearing in our interactions with them might be entirely appropriate. If we don’t know them so well, it probably isn’t. Why not? Because it makes assumptions about the nature of your relationship with that person. It assumes a familiarity they might not be comfortable with. This is an aggressive act.

So perhaps ‘professional behaviour’ is all about the fact that the status of relationships in the workplace are often ambiguous. In a crowded office, everyone can see, hear and smell what we do so we cater for the most-easily-offended denominator. We formalise behaviour so that we’re demonstrably not making assumptions about the status of our relationships with coworkers.

This accounts for smelling bad, but what about dirty clothes? Perhaps clean clothes are an ostensible sign that we’re capitulating with the social convention. We’re saying “look, I’m not being annoying”. Even if we are. That’s the problem with arbitrary formalisation of social conventions. People can cheat and still fall within the rules. The biggest idiots in any organisation are the ones who hide behind ‘professionalism’ while screwing everyone over.

Anyway, those are my random thoughts on what professionalism – at least in the workplace – might be about. It all seems batshit insane to me. So presumably I’m the one everyone is complaining about.

Update: I forgot to point out that in item 1, people seem to be complaining about women displaying their sexuality. For heterosexual males and gay women, sexual cues seem to be largely about things like the shape of the nape of the neck and the curve of the waist toward the hips as well as the more obvious secondary sexual characteristics. These things are best displayed by uncovering them, which is what the complaints are about. For heterosexual women and homosexual men, the main sexual cues seem to be about things like broad shoulders, tapered waist, muscular buttocks etc. which – it strikes me – are quite well displayed by wearing business attire. Jackets enhance shoulder width and hide fat, ties create a visual cue to the waist, which is delineated by a belt, tailored trousers can hide a multitude of flaws. So here’s my bonus hypothesis on this particularly unprofessional Thursday: the convention has somehow become skewed so that men are encouraged to enhance their sexuality even by default, whereas if women do exactly the same thing, it’s regarded as unprofessional. Which seems, to my mind, unprofessional.

Update 2: While I’m at it, fuck, shit, bastard, arse.

Experience the Holy Land. In Florida.

2011-07-20T05:35:00.001Z

I was told about this place by a man who also insists that the Paris Las Vegas Hotel and Casino is better than the real Paris, which might tell you something about his sense of reality. He’s the perfect model for theme park designers everywhere and he’d definitely find the Holy Land Experience better than the real Israel (although I’m told Bethlehem is almost as gaudy).

The Holy Land Experience has it all! Take a look at the daily schedule. That’s right, Jesus is crucified every day at noon, so you have plenty of time to have a spot of lunch first take in The Wilderness Tabernacle, where they’ve recreated the actual mobile tabernacle used in the exodus from Egypt (a journey that historians agree never took place); do some serious, proper research in The Scriptorium; perhaps drop off your kids at The Smile of a Child Adventure Land featuring this astonishing statue, which would certainly make me smile:

and visit the four prayer gardens, all before Jesus’ triumphant resurrection at 5! You even get a personal miracle!

If you can’t make it to Florida, then shame on you. You’ll miss out on the authentically reproduced Israeli holy sites, including the Bethlehem Bus Loop, the Jesus Boat, and the actual field where the angels appeared to the shepherds at Jesus’ birth. All authentically reproduced.

But there’s no need to despair if you’re still saving up (don’t forget pastors get in free): you can get a sense of the park’s majesty and life-changing seriousness by watching the video on the front page. I want to experience love, peace and joy!

On reflection, next time I visit Florida, I might be able to find something better to do with my time.

A tiny bit more on Ruse

2011-07-18T07:06:00.001Z

As I say, I take a lot of flak for arguing that science in itself does not refute all religious beliefs.

Sorry Michael, but that isn’t what you’ve been saying. You’ve been saying that religion is compatible with science and ain’t true.

You seem to be slowly changing your story and never once admitting where you were wrong along the way.

Michael Ruse’s confusing life

2011-07-18T07:01:00.001Z

I’ve criticised Ruse in the past for his accommodationism (he relentlessly pushes the idea that science and religion are somehow compatible) and because of his apparently wilful misinterpretation of arguments to the contrary. Now he’s written a rather odd article in which he doesn’t change his mind…but seems to go almost all the way toward it, only to balk at the final fence.

There are days when, I swear to God, I am all set to enroll under the banner of Richard Dawkins and anathematize all religions and those who subscribe to them. I take a lot of criticism from my fellow atheists, including my fellow Brainstormers, for arguing that science and religion are compatible. I still think that, but increasingly I cannot for the life of me see why any decent human being would want to be religious, and increasingly I think one should be ashamed to be religious.

Well, some classic Ruse there. He just can’t resist having a pop at Dawkins and it wouldn’t be Ruse if there wasn’t a blatant strawman in there somewhere. But if he’s all set to wash his hands of accommodation, what’s stopping him? Confusingly, he doesn’t say. He ‘increasingly’ can’t understand why anyone would want to be religious and ‘increasingly’ thinks it’s a matter of shame. Why? Has he found some of his illusions stripped away by current events? It kind of seems so and he mentions some infuriating things religion has done recently, which I’ll get to in a moment. But he doesn’t actually say it. It’s a shame, because that would have been an interesting and probably touching article.

Far be it for me to tell someone what article they should have written, of course, but the one he actually did write seems pretty confused.

On medical grounds—I have blood-pressure issues already—I won’t go into the views of the crop running for the Republican nomination for the 2012 presidential race. Nor here will I pick up in detail on the news coming out of Ireland. A new report, the Cloyne Report, says that the Vatican was “entirely unhelpful” when it came to enforcing moral and legal practices by priests towards vulnerable children. The bishop of the diocese, John Magee—former private secretary to no less than three popes—flagrantly ignored solid evidence that children were being abused, and he himself has admitted to an “inappropriate relationship” with a young man.

I’ve written about Magee and the Coyne report here and here. The situation is infuriating and unforgivable and Ruse seems to agree. Good man.

Now, however, I want to turn to the Muslims, specifically in the city of Toronto, in Ontario, Canada.

I won’t quote Ruse in full here because the quote would pull in half the article and you can just go and read it yourself instead. Ruse explains that a school in Toronto runs a prayer meeting for Muslims on Fridays. I don’t really have much of a problem with that providing it is voluntary. And by voluntary I mean truly voluntary. I wouldn’t want those officiating informing students’ parents if they didn’t attend prayers, for example. But there are two severe problems with this case, one of which Ruse points out. Women aren’t allowed to sit up front with men. They have to sit at the back and shut up. And menstruating women have to sit even farther back and shut up even more, segregated from everyone else.

Ruse mentions the latter and is rightly outraged by it. Personally, I’m outraged that this practice happens at all whereas everyone else seems to be complaining that it’s happening in a school. But it’s all bad and I’m glad Ruse is incensed by it. Although I suspect he’s got it wrong:

Let me spell it out. Girls with their periods are not sinful. They are not sick. They are not weak. That anyone would think otherwise in this day and age boggles the mind.

I agree entirely, except that I don’t think the practice is about sin or sickness. It’s about Ick. I think there’s a culture of disgust regarding menstruation, probably because it makes sex slightly inconvenient for men for a few days every month. The sin and the sickness is just a convenient religious veil for the feeling of Ick. But good man anyway.

Ruse goes on in this vein and makes some perfectly good points:

But the point is not about legality or illegality. It is not illegal to poop on your living room carpet, but decent people don’t do this. And decent people, responsible for the welfare of children, don’t allow prejudice against girls with their periods. They don’t, they really don’t.

Well OK, that’s a rather unfortunate remark because of the equation between pooping on your own carpet and forcing segregation on menstruating women, but I doubt Ruse meant it that way. It was an appeal to decency and I don’t fault that.

And arguing that allowing the practice ensures that kids don’t go to the mosque and then skip school after the prayers is no answer. If the prayers are so important, then the Muslim community should provide buses and monitoring.

I don’t know if anyone is making such an argument, but the point that the onus for making prayers work one way or another should be on the Muslim community that insists on it is a perfectly good one, which deserves to be made more widely.

So OK. Ruse has described some bad things religion has done very recently. This, he says, sometimes makes him feel that religion as a concept and practice should be discouraged or even railed against. He makes a strong statement along those lines:

Ultimately though, the wimps on the Toronto District School Board are not the villains, nor really are the craven-hearted politicians who are desperately afraid of losing the immigrant vote. It is religion and religion alone that is at fault.

He’s quite right. Religion infects people and makes them do bad and stupid things. It’s what makes school boards into wimps and makes politicians craven. It has infected Ruse, even though he’s not a believer. It has infected him so much that he can’t take that final leap and say RELIGION IS BAD! LET’S DO AWAY WITH IT! He’s seen that religion is at fault for a whole bunch of awful things. He’s said that he sometimes feels he wants to embrace the Gnu way. But he just can’t quite do it.

Of course there have been, and still are, many people who do good and noble things because of religion. Read and weep about the young people in the White Rose group in Munich during the war who went to their deaths because, in the name of their Lord, they opposed Hitler publicly. But there is such a dark side to religion. Why do people not see this?

Why are you only just seeming to see it, Michael, after we Gnus have been badgering you about it for years? And why hasn’t it changed your stance on the privileged position of religion which is of course the reason we’re discussing this in the first place?

As I say, I take a lot of flak for arguing that science in itself does not refute all religious beliefs. I also think that it is politically stupid to argue otherwise in a country like America where so many people are religious.

Let’s make this a mantra for New Atheism. Let’s make it politically stupid to not argue that science and religion are incompatible.

Why should political stupid be different from just plain regular stupid?

Contrast

2011-07-17T17:00:00.001Z

I like contrast. I’m a computer scientist and what we deal in primarily is abstraction. We think of worlds in which a whole bunch of conflicting requirements, constraints, madnesses and tantrums make sense, then we make that world so. Abstractions are about contrast, about drawing lines. The lines don’t always have to be fine or clear. The interesting abstractions overlap in many dimensions and differently at different times. But nevertheless, the point is to say this kind of thing is definitely on this side of the line and that thing definitely on the other, even if we have to sweep some inconvenient mess under the carpet. It’s how we build complicated stuff.

So here’s a contrast that appeals to me. On the one hand, we have The Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, claiming that the religious are deserting our shores to gain religious freedom, just like what happened with the Mayflower (he really did actually say that). He is “alarmed” by the fact that our nation is slowly closing the few final loopholes that enable discrimination on the grounds of things like what sex we are and what sex we like. He is “concerned” about the “prevailing template of equality” because it doesn’t guarantee special pleading for religious institutions who want the freedom to discriminate. This is how they seem to see it: they want freeing so that they can oppress other people, an astonishing sentiment.

On the other hand, we have Terry Sanderson, the president of the National Secular Society saying this:

“If by religious freedom the Chief Rabbi means religious privilege, it is clear that he would be happier in some kind of theocracy,”

I’d go a little further. I’d say this is precisely what the Chief Rabbi means and exactly what he wants.

“Rather than fleeing this country, he should thank his God that he lives here and knows that he and his people are safe and free to practice their religion within the law.

“The equality laws that he disparages are a wonderful achievement and something that most people – including many Jews - welcome as progressive, just and long overdue.”

And there’s your contrast. Those laws are an achievement. That anyone could regard them as a step backward and actually demand freedom from the laws that protect others is beyond satire. Secularists want everyone to abide by the same laws. The religious want special laws for themselves and throw a tantrum if they can’t have them. Contrast.

You can take your bat in, Sacks, you won’t spoil our game. You can run crying to your mum and she can tell my mum if she wants, I’ve been dragged home by my ear before. I’ve never tolerated bullies, though, so pardon me if I grin while your privilege is slowly but inevitably stripped away and I find you cowering in the showers like the rest of us.

We all know that secularists are going to win so be thankful that we’re not the bullies you lot are. We won’t deny you any rights we don’t enjoy. We’ll even let you have a kick of the ball at playtime if you promise to play by the rules.

I bet you won’t, though.

Primate gets in on the not-pology racket

2011-07-15T10:40:00.001Z

Cardinal Seán Brady has kinda-sorta apologised for the child abuse in Coyne. Somehow, however, I don’t think he was very sincere.

“It is a very bad day,” Cardinal Brady said in Portadown yesterday when asked what the report meant for the Catholic Church. “It saddens me greatly. I am very upset. I want to apologise – as Archbishop Clifford has apologised – to all the victims of abuse and to their parents and families.

The day the report comes out, laying out the abuse and the lies for all to see, is the bad one. I don’t think the victims will see it that way. We can only hope that their darkest days are behind them. Doesn’t Brady think this might just be a little insulting?

“If there is one positive thing to come out of this it is the confirmation that the church structures have been proven to be effective,” he added.

Excuse me? Effective? Effective at what, exactly? At protecting the church from scandal, presumably. Certainly not effective at protecting children. Again, I’m not sure the victims will see it quite the same way as Brady.

Like everyone else in the church queuing up to apologise, Brady goes in for crazy levels of indirection to make it all seem like a little bit of unpleasantness rather than a horror show. He’s a master of it:

Welcoming the Cloyne report, he said it represented “another dark day in the history of the response of church leaders to the cry of children abused by church personnel”.

This is a response to the ‘cry’ of children, not a response to the fact that priests are raping children. Children cry all the time about the least little thing. Doesn’t sound quite so bad that way, does it?

Evil Bishop Magee lied about child abuse on his watch

2011-07-15T10:16:00.001Z

The Coyne Report about sexual child abuse in the diocese of Coyne is out and pretty damning. It has prompted the Minister for Justice, Alan Shatter, to announce that the withholding of information about serious offences against a child is to become a criminal offense.

Because that’s what John Magee, Bishop of Coyne, did: he knew about cases of abuse and not only did he cover it up, he lied about it:

The report found that the Bishop of Cloyne, John Magee, misled the minister for children by claiming the church’s guidelines for handling abuse cases were being fully complied with. It also found he falsely told the Health Service Executive (HSE) that allegations of abuse were being reported to Gardaí.

2/3 of the complaints made between 1996 and 2008 were in fact not reported to the Garda and not a single case was passed to the HSE.

And look at those dates. This is about what’s happening RIGHT NOW.

“It is truly scandalous that people who presented a public face of concern continued to maintain a private agenda of concealment and evasion,” Mr Shatter commented.

It’s a point a lot of people don’t seem to get. The church claims higher moral authority than the rest of us and yet cares more about itself as an institution than the vulnerable people it has promised to protect. It’s the very act of the church placing itself in that moral position that has allowed so many vulnerable people to be placed in their care in the first place. This is one of the reasons that abuse by church institutions is worse than abuse in some other professions. Society insists that we pay church institutions unearned respect and howls at us if we criticise them. And they aren’t living up to that responsibility.

“I am sorry that this happened and I unreservedly apologise to all those who suffered additional hurt because of the flawed implementation of the church procedures, for which I take full responsibility,”

It doesn’t seem like much of an apology. Even while he’s apologising, he’s playing down serious of what happened and distancing himself from it. This is not a matter of failing to implement guidelines in a sufficiently enthusiastic manner: it’s about wilfully failing to report cases of child abuse to the authorities and then lying to officials about it. It’s about his damning children to torment to protect his beloved church, which he cares more about than the people he’s supposed to be protecting. The torment of these children is an inconvenience to him and even when he’s laid bang to rights by a 341 page report, he can’t bring himself to admit that he had the ability to prevent many cases of abuse.

But he didn’t care.

This is the kind of drivel we have to put up with

2011-07-13T11:34:00.001Z

Here is an article from The Irish Times entitled Why Dawkins’s case against religion creaks at every joint. It’s author, James P Mackey, is a proper theologian and everything (if there is such a thing):

James P Mackey is visiting professor in the school of religions and theology at TCD and professor emeritus of theology at the University of Edinburgh.

It doesn’t make very much sense.

RICHARD DAWKINS sold himself very short indeed in Dublin recently. For he was mainly concerned with securing the claim that “if science can’t get at the truth, nothing else can”; and then with securing not just the equality but the superiority of science over religions and their theologies.

I don’t think that was Dawkins’ chief concern at all – he was answering questions, mostly – but he certainly made the claim, as he has many times, that science is the best tool we have for understanding the universe. Note that this is a very specific claim: the superiority he was claiming is superiority in finding out what’s true and what isn’t. It’s a difficult argument to refute. Science really is a very good way of finding out what’s true. We can test its claims and predictions and we throw away whatever fails the test.

By way of contrast, religion doesn’t do any of that. It makes predictions, to be fair, but many of them are far too vague to be tested properly and any ‘truths’ they reveal are not true in any normal sense of the word. Besides, many of the predictions made in holy books have turned out not to be true (for instance, the second coming of Jesus “within the lifetimes of some of you here”) and yet they haven’t been discarded from the religion. They are still considered true even though they are – by their own standards – false. Tell me again what truths religion reveals? But I’m drifting off topic.

Dawkins’s case is built on twin platforms. First, that evolution offers a full and adequate explanation of how the world came to be as we now know it; and this makes creator gods superfluous.

Then, second, that creator gods, and especially the Christian version, are nothing short of agents of immorality, both by example and in terms of their actual moral teachings, and the horrendous punishments threatened to enforce these.

This is an astonishing statement. Dawkins’ case against religion was put down very clearly in The God Delusion and he makes neither of these points.

In fact, not only has he never made the first claim, he has argued repeatedly that it is false. I suspect Mackey is confused by a few similar claims that Richard has made:

All life on Earth is a product of evolution
Life elsewhere in the universe is very probably also a product of evolution: we know of no other method by which it could have occurred.
This goes for gods too: even if god did create life on our planet or life on all planets or the universe itself, then god would have to have come about by natural selection or something directly analogous.

Richard certainly hasn’t claimed that evolution “offers a full and adequate explanation of how the world came to be as we now know it”. It’s a piece of the puzzle. We have no reason to believe that evolution requires any gods.

Mackey’s second point is….incoherent. Richard has certainly said that gods as depicted in holy books are creatures that display consistently vile behaviour. He’s also said that religion is capable of making good people do bad things. He’s also said that threats of eternal punishment are wicked. Is this what Mackey means? It’s impossible to tell.

Whatever he means, this isn’t Richard’s case against religion. His case is that:

It’s not true. We know this because there’s no evidence. We’ve looked, and there’s no reason to suspect that any of the supernatural claims made by religions are true, and
We’d almost certainly be better off without it.

All of which nullifies any remaining possibility of good moral behaviour on the part of a race already apparently only too prone to immorality, and increasingly so as its powers of destruction grow apace.

This is an outright lie by Mackey. Richard has written one book (The Selfish Gene) which is all about the evolution of altruism and he’s spoken and written about this many times. He’s also spoken and written many times about how he favours liberal, moral societies and despises cruel and immoral behaviour. He’s put his own money where his mouth is numerous times by donating large sums to charitable causes and encouraging others to do the same. These are not the actions of someone who believes there’s no good in people.

After these barely coherent and generally untrue statements, Mackey lets his ignorance run riot.

The first platform for Dawkins’s case against religion – that evolution theory makes creator gods obsolete – creaks at every joint. Since a full understanding of it requires a broad acquaintance with both physical science (especially quantum physics) and metaphysics and few, possibly including Dawkins (a mere biologist, if not just a zoologist) can claim such broad expertise, it is sufficient to note briefly here how those properly endowed do handle it. Then we can pass on quickly to Dawkins’s moral argument; for we are all endowed by nature with a moral sense and an impressive moral repertoire.

Richard doesn’t claim to know everything about how the universe works. Why on earth would or should he do that? Is one person’s admitted ignorance of every corner of the universe sufficient to topple the fact that there’s no evidence for god? The argument just doesn’t make the slightest sense.

First, evolution names a process, not an agent. It simply tells us that whatever agency causes this world to come to be what it now is, did not create the world in the beginning in the form in which we now know it.

Evolution doesn’t tell us that at all. It says nothing whatever about any such ‘agency’. The theory explains how life got from it’s starting point to where it is now and makes predictions about what sort of things we should find in the fossil record. I suspect Mackey is trying to say that evolution doesn’t account for the existence of the universe. He’s right. Nobody says it does. Especially not Richard, even though Mackey claims he does.

Rather did the agency create the world in the beginning in such a manner that a certain randomness in the “units” out of which the world is made, is always combined with it. This is never without sets of laws that govern the cosmic dance of the “units” ever alternatively coming together and breaking apart, until the world we now inhabit continues to come to be.

Who knows what Mackey is on about here. What ‘units’? What is the ‘it’ that contains the randomness? Is it the mysterious ‘units’? Is it the universe itself? What is this randomness? Where does it come from and how does it manifest itself? The ‘laws’ are presumably the laws of physics, but what is it that Mackey is actually trying to say here? That the universe is different now to how it used to be? Well….duh….. Why didn’t he just say that?

And because the randomness in the “units” offers the possibility of virtually infinite combinations and permutations, regulated by laws themselves designed to evolve apace, contemporary science holds out the possibility – for some more than a possibility – of innumerable worlds, according to either the multiverse or the many-worlds formula.

Yes, but so what? Mackey seems to be stringing together every half-remembered bit of every pop-science article he’s ever read with no clear purpose. I genuinely have no idea what argument he’s trying to make at this point.

Second, quantum physics challenges the notion that the original “units” consist in atomic particles that are in effect hard balls of solid matter. It suggests instead that these are more akin to pure geometric forms, like one-dimensional strings or triangles for example; and these, like the laws, look more like mental constructs.

What the WHATNOW? Technically, this kind of argument is called ‘blinding by science’, but I really don’t want to dignify this drivel with that name. What Mackey is doing here is exactly the same sort of thing people like Deepack Chopra do. He’s throwing in quantum physics and making it sound all mysterious so he can make the breathtaking non sequitur that sub-atomic particles might be vaguely analogous in some way to ‘mental constructs’ (whatever that means) at some astronomical level of abstraction.

Again, so what? This is what:

So that it is matter that emerges from mind, rather than mind from matter; and Dawkins’s imagination may be the one that is too impoverished to see the full implications of quantum physics.

Um…. Right. So let me try to follow the argument:

Evolution is a process.
Quantum theory is weird. Therefore:
Matter emerges from mind and so presumably god created the universe.

Does anyone really have to point out the childishness of this argument? Did Mackey feel pleased with himself for making it?

Scientists who work in quantum physics and regard the mind-born entity called knowledge as the main formative, causative factor in the making of the cosmos, normally assure us it is not as advocates of any religion that they arrive at these views.

Do they? Are there any such people? There are plenty of pseudo-scientists who say nonsensical, incoherent stuff like this. I don’t know of any quantum physicists who talk like that. Pity Mackey didn’t think to cite some of them. Almost as if they don’t exist.

Finally, Dawkins freely admits science still cannot see how life, much less mind, can have emerged from lifeless matter.

This, of course, is another lie. He’s explained in at least one of his books how life might have begun. Nobody understands every aspect of it, of course, just as we don’t yet understand everything about minds or their evolution.

But once again: so what? The lie is particularly stupid because science really is quite ignorant of some of the steps in this process. It’s no secret. It’s nothing science should be embarrassed about. And it doesn’t undermine any case against religion in the slightest.

But that leaves his totally evolutionary explanation of the coming to be of the cosmos still looking at a yawning gap in the evidence offered for his theory; requiring, it would seem, a leap of faith to cross it. But that, surely, could not be science; and one cannot but recall all Dawkins has to say about leaps of faith.

But Richard has never proffered any such explanation of the coming to be of the cosmos, so the entire argument is a strawman from the getgo. But in any case, gaps in the theory do not require leaps of faith. They require more evidence. And the great thing about theories is that they predict what evidence ought to be found if the theory is correct.

Scientific theories aren’t like a chain of inference. They don’t fall down if there’s a gap in knowledge. This is because each bit of the theory is independently supported by evidence. If we find evidence that fills in the gaps, our confidence in the theory’s correctness is increased. If we find evidence that contradicts the theory, it’s a signal that we might have to modify the theory or throw it away entirely and begin with a new hypothesis.

Mackey’s article makes no sense from beginning to end. I don’t think he even knows what argument he’s making. He certainly doesn’t know (or deliberately misrepresents) the arguments Richard makes against religion and he does an astonishingly bad job of trying to debunk even that strawman.

Is this childish nonsense what we should expect from professors of theology?

BINGO

2011-07-13T05:39:00.001Z

it’s awesomeness

2011-07-12T16:26:00.001Z

The book they didn’t want you to read

2011-07-11T09:18:00.001Z

Richard Wiseman has written a book about the psychology of the paranormal and why we’re so inclined to jump to paranormal explanations of fairly mundane phenomena. It’s called Paranormality and you can read Richard’s description of it here.

It covers a lot of ground. It has psychics, spiritualists, ghosts, out of body experiences, prophecy… It begins each subject as a well-researched story about the claims or practices of some individuals claiming paranormal abilities, then describes some of the psychology behind why those claims can be so satisfying. Well, the structure is actually a bit more chaotic than that. It appears to go off at tangents from time to time. But those apparent tangents are skilfully woven back into the central point and are shown to be devices to help us understand a psychological trait that we might not otherwise have connected with the subject at hand.

This all works very well and is done in a chatty and engaging style as usual. Experienced skeptics will likely have a broad understanding of the subjects already. I think few of us would struggle to describe cold reading for example. But Richard takes the approach of describing cold reading as psychological techniques and then explaining how to manipulate these techniques for cold reading. This is an interesting approach, which he uses throughout the book.

The book was described by Rebecca Watson as a kind of modern version of Flim Flam by James Randi and that was exactly the impression I got too. Flim Flam is great, but would benefit from a modern retelling and Richard’s book does a good job of it.

Paranormality has been doing well in the UK and has been taken up by publishers throughout Europe. However, publishers in the US have declined on the grounds that there’s no market there fore debunking nonsense. How sad. Fortunately, Richard is publishing the book himself in the US and it’s now available on Kindle there.

The book also comes with quite a lot of additional material presented as QR codes for those of us with barcode scanners on our phones and URLs for those of us who prefer to use a larger screen. This includes things like interviews with some of the people referred to in the text.

Read it if you’re a hard-core believer in the paranormal and it will make you feel uncomfortable. Read it as someone curious about the paranormal and you’ll learn a lot. Read it as a hard-core skeptic and you’ll still learn something and you’ll be entertained on every page.

Talking ‘bout a revolution. Honesty in scientific reporting

2011-07-11T08:14:00.001Z

CreationRevolution is actually quite hard to stay mad at. I mean, it’s bugfuck crazy, no two ways about it, but it’s almost endearing in the way it desperately and almost amiably redefines the world so it can shoehorn bits of it at a time to fit its crazy preconceptions. It might be tremblingly insisting that rabbits don’t chew cud although they do although they don’t or warning us about false prophets such as Andrew Gonzales, who’s a professor of biology at McGill and wrote a paper in Science, which CreationRevolution does not link to, about yeast. There’s some stuff about it here. Gonzales is a false prophet because…..he uses the word ‘evolution’ to refer to…..evolution. It’s all so clear now.

So you see how I tend to look upon this site as generally delightful. Its contributors are only looking at the world in a way that isn’t focussed through the blinkers of evolution and of course their notion of truth is just as valid as the evolutionists’ version because it explains things just as well.

And isn’t at all completely wrong, batshit insane and not even internally consistent.

These lovely dears, in the form of R.L David Jolly, wrote an article about Honesty in Scientific Reporting. Here it is. It’s the sort of thing we’re all worried about, isn’t it? We sometimes accuse creationists of being a bit less than honest, so it’s nice that they’re making sure that the rest of us live up to the same standards. Let’s take a look at those standards.

As I was reading this interesting article on another unique design feature in nature, I fully expected to read something explaining the photoreceptors in the sea urchins as being some type of primitive precursor to the evolution of eyes in higher animals. To my surprise, the only statement made which referred to evolution was:

“Charles Darwin and other evolutionary biologists were bewildered by the eye’s complexity and wondered how this kind of structure could have evolved through natural selection.”

Needless to say, I was quite pleased to see such a statement from a source that regularly reports on nearly every claim made by the evolutionary community. It’s refreshing to see some honesty in reporting, even if it is just this one time.

I had to wonder whether this was a wind-up. The notion that Darwin – and later scientists – couldn’t explain eye evolution is probably the most common and most egregious creationist canard around today. Here’s the relevant quote from On the Origin of Species:

To suppose that the eye [...] could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.

This sentence is trotted out ad nauseum by creationists. Even Darwin couldn’t explain how eyes evolved, the argument goes, so evolution cannot possibly be true. It’s a stupid argument on many levels. Darwin was wrong about many things, as you might expect. He didn’t know about genetics and made some (in hindsight) slightly foolish hypotheses about how heredity might work. None of that has the slightest bearing on whether evolution is true. That’s decided by the evidence we have now, not what one person wrote in 1859.

It’s a dishonest argument because it pretends Darwin’s ignorance is evidence that his theory is wrong. But it’s also dishonest in a much more straightforward way because the quote is unashamedly cherry-picked. The next two sentences in Origin read as follows:

When it was first said that the sun stood still and the world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of Vox populi, vox Dei, as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science. Reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect can be shown to exist, each grade being useful to its possessor, as is certainly the case; if further, the eye ever varies and the variations be inherited, as is likewise certainly the case and if such variations should be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered as subversive of the theory.

He then goes on to explain in detail exactly how eyes might evolve. It’s all here. Look it up, if you don’t believe me.

There’s really no reason for creationists to keep using this non-argument. They do it either because they haven’t bothered looking at the relevant chapter of Origin themselves or because they know that most of their readers won’t do so.

Either way, it’s about the most dishonest type of reporting possible. It’s either deliberate, wilful ignorance – which is unforgivable in such a widely circulated book and especially when it is freely available on-line in a fully searchable form – or it’s an outright lie.

But we have some bonus dishonesty. I posted a comment politely pointing out that the Darwin quote is an obvious rhetorical device. He’s saying that it might seem crazy that eyes could evolve, but when you think about it in the right way, it isn’t. And here’s how it might have happened… I pointed out that the text is available online and anyone can easily look it up. And I closed by saying that it was good to clear up this matter and now the myth would never have to be repeated again.

The comment has been languishing in moderation since 6th July. So have my follow-on comments explaining why it’s dishonest to ignore the full context of the Darwin quote.

I’m forced to conclude that the article’s author, R.L. David Jolly, is a dishonest reporter of the second kind: a liar. He knows where to find the relevant passage and it seems that he’s deliberately refusing to admit to his readers that he and his argument are wrong.

OK, maybe it’s an over-reaction now

2011-07-05T21:18:00.001Z

http://skepchick.org/2011/07/the-privilege-delusion/

While I’m on Rebecca’s side and I think Richard’s comments were clueless and that he damn well should have known better, I’m not keen on taking my bat in. Richard has the opportunity to learn something here. If he does learn the lesson and has his consciousness raised, then he’ll be the better for it and so will lots of other people. If he fails to learn the lesson, then Rebecca is right and Richard is nowhere near as cool as we thought.

I’m not sure Rebecca is right to say he doesn’t care. I suspect he probably does, but somehow doesn’t understand the problem. It’s bewildering, he kinda oughta should and I can’t quite imagine how it’s lost on him, but ignorance is OK. Refusing to learn is not.

Let’s see how he responds in the coming days. If he comes to understand the point and changes his tune I’ll admire him all the more. If he doesn’t…. I’m not sure what I’ll think.

OOOOhhhh Gillian (McKeith)

2011-07-05T16:59:00.001Z

It’s never too late for a bit of good old fashioned Gillian McKeith mockery.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqGGrO5hjy8

http://stablesound.co.uk/mp3/drgillian.mp3

Jury ‘duty’

2011-07-05T13:10:00.001Z

I wondered about whether jurors in the UK have to swear on bibles or what. The Current Mrs Latsot knows about this kind of stuff and sent me the answer (from Wikipedia):

Religion Oath/Affirmation Scripture

Roman Catholic, Mainstream Protestant, Orthodox Christian, Jewish, Rastafarian

I swear by almighty God that I will faithfully try the defendant and give a true verdict according to the evidence.

The Bible; New Testament

Islam

I swear by Allah that I will faithfully try the defendant and give a true verdict according to the evidence.

The Koran

United Brethren swear:

I, being one of the United Brethren called Moravians, solemnly, sincerely and truly declare and affirm that I will faithfully try the defendant and give a true verdict according to the evidence.

Not all Christian sects believe in swearing oaths.

Quakers affirm:

I, being one of the people called Quakers, solemnly, sincerely and truly declare and affirm that I will faithfully try the defendant and give a true verdict according to the evidence.

Quakers do not believe in swearing oaths.

Sikhs can swear:

I swear by Waheguru that I will faithfully try the defendant and give a true verdict according to the evidence.

Waheguru

Hindus

I, swear on the Gita I will faithfully try the defendant and give a true verdict according to the evidence.

Gita

Atheist/Agnostics; Jehovah's Witnesses

I solemnly, sincerely and truly declare and affirm that I will faithfully try the defendant and give a true verdict according to the evidence.

None

Religion	Oath/Affirmation	Scripture
Roman Catholic, Mainstream Protestant, Orthodox Christian, Jewish, Rastafarian	I swear by almighty God that I will faithfully try the defendant and give a true verdict according to the evidence.	The Bible; New Testament
Islam	I swear by Allah that I will faithfully try the defendant and give a true verdict according to the evidence.	The Koran
United Brethren swear:	I, being one of the United Brethren called Moravians, solemnly, sincerely and truly declare and affirm that I will faithfully try the defendant and give a true verdict according to the evidence.	Not all Christian sects believe in swearing oaths.
Quakers affirm:	I, being one of the people called Quakers, solemnly, sincerely and truly declare and affirm that I will faithfully try the defendant and give a true verdict according to the evidence.	Quakers do not believe in swearing oaths.
Sikhs can swear:	I swear by Waheguru that I will faithfully try the defendant and give a true verdict according to the evidence.	Waheguru
Hindus	I, swear on the Gita I will faithfully try the defendant and give a true verdict according to the evidence.	Gita
Atheist/Agnostics; Jehovah's Witnesses	I solemnly, sincerely and truly declare and affirm that I will faithfully try the defendant and give a true verdict according to the evidence.	None

Two things strike me. The first is that atheists and agnostics are bundled with Jehova’s Witnesses, which is simply extraordinary. The second is that swearing on holy books is given consideration in the legal system. It doesn’t matter what holy book it is. And in the case of us Atheist Witnesses, it doesn’t matter whether we have a holy book at all. But as long as people swear on such a thing, there’s apparently a greater chance that they’re telling the truth.

The very idea of promising to tell the truth is embarrassing, much more so when it invokesreligion.

How should I feel?

2011-07-05T12:53:00.001Z

That.

Cuttlefish, you’ve done it again

2011-07-05T11:13:00.001Z

Very nice.

Checking in

2011-07-05T10:46:00.001Z

I’ve been too busy for skepticism for a few days but in the spirit of procrastination I want to say a few words about Rebecca Watson in a lift.

At the World Atheist Convention in Dublin, Rebecca was socialising with a crowd of people until early in the morning. She then announced that she was exhausted and was going to bed. One of the crowd followed her into the lift and propositioned her for sex.

Some other stuff happened after that: she later spoke about the incident, was criticised for it and criticised the critics, for which she was criticised. But I don’t want to get into all that.

People seem divided on the matter of whether Rebecca was right to be offended by the advance. Some say it was an honest, if clumsy, request for sex and Rebecca is over-reacting. Nothing wrong with asking for sex. Others say it was predatory and unacceptable.

I fall into the latter camp. I can see nothing wrong with casual, no-strings sex, but I can see a problem with trying to solicit it out of the blue, especially in a situation where the target is likely to feel vulnerable (such as a lift in a foreign country at four in the morning) and especially when the target is female. If you want casual sex, there are places you can go to find like-minded partners: people who – in that situation – don’t mind being objectified, since their intent is the same as yours. They advertise that intent in one way or another.

People using lifts to get to their hotel rooms aren’t advertising availability. Soliciting sex out of the blue objectifies those people in an unpleasant way. It suggests that the person doesn’t care about the other enough to make some kind of connection before making an advance. People on the whole don’t want to be objectified and so doing it is a form of aggression. Doing it in a confined space with no means of escape is more so because it can create pressure to accept and be genuinely frightening.

Did Rebecca overreact? I don’t think so. I think she was reacting to the fact that a lot of men feel it’s OK to do this kind of thing and are blind to the reasons they shouldn’t. Some of the reactions at places like this seem to prove her point. Those of us who are privileged don’t often recognise it. It’s hard to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes when we can’t even see the things that set us apart from other people. In this case, men have a lot less to be frightened of than women and a long history of being objectified and coerced into complying with male whim.

I don’t think it’s acceptable to solicit sex in this way, not because of prudery or disdain for casual sex, but because of how it makes the target feel. And it’s important for people to explain this because so many people don’t get it.

One of the people who doesn’t get it is Richard Dawkins, surprisingly. In comment #75 at the above link, he writes this:

Dear Muslima

Stop whining, will you. Yes, yes, I know you had your genitals mutilated with a razor blade, and . . . yawn . . . don't tell me yet again, I know you aren't allowed to drive a car, and you can't leave the house without a male relative, and your husband is allowed to beat you, and you'll be stoned to death if you commit adultery. But stop whining, will you. Think of the suffering your poor American sisters have to put up with.

Only this week I heard of one, she calls herself Skep"chick", and do you know what happened to her? A man in a hotel elevator invited her back to his room for coffee. I am not exaggerating. He really did. He invited her back to his room for coffee. Of course she said no, and of course he didn't lay a finger on her, but even so . . .

And you, Muslima, think you have misogyny to complain about! For goodness sake grow up, or at least grow a thicker skin.

Richard

I don’t much care for the sarcasm, but I’m hardly one to troll for tone. The real problem is that Richard is committing the fallacy of implying that because someone else’s plight is worse, we shouldn’t be concerned with less egregious difficulties. He’s also buying into the euphemism of ‘coffee’ with faux naiveté. He knows perfectly well that coffee isn’t what the man had in mind and pretends he doesn’t, which is rather dishonest.

Lots of people are shocked. They can’t quite believe it’s really Richard. I couldn’t, either. He defends himself:

> Did you just make the argument that, since worse things are

> happening somewhere else, we have no right to try to fix

> things closer to home?

No I wasn't making that argument. Here's the argument I was making. The man in the elevator didn't physically touch her, didn't attempt to bar her way out of the elevator, didn't even use foul language at her. He spoke some words to her. Just words. She no doubt replied with words. That was that. Words. Only words, and apparently quite polite words at that.

If she felt his behaviour was creepy, that was her privilege, just as it was the Catholics' privilege to feel offended and hurt when PZ nailed the cracker. PZ didn't physically strike any Catholics. All he did was nail a wafer, and he was absolutely right to do so because the heightened value of the wafer was a fantasy in the minds of the offended Catholics. Similarly, Rebecca's feeling that the man's proposition was 'creepy' was her own interpretation of his behaviour, presumably not his. She was probably offended to about the same extent as I am offended if a man gets into an elevator with me chewing gum. But he does me no physical damage and I simply grin and bear it until either I or he gets out of the elevator. It would be different if he physically attacked me.

Muslim women suffer physically from misogyny, their lives are substantially damaged by religiously inspired misogyny. Not just words, real deeds, painful, physical deeds, physical privations, legally sanctioned demeanings. The equivalent would be if PZ had nailed not a cracker but a Catholic. Then they'd have had good reason to complain.

Richard

There are several problems here. First, Richard was quite obviously making that argument and it’s surprising that he’s now trying to wriggle out of it. He plainly compared the two situations and the entire point of his satire was that one was worse than the other. Muslim women certainly have it worse, a fact Rebecca is well aware of. But Rebecca’s point was about how male privilege blinds us to how women might feel in that sort of situation and Richard unwittingly provides an exemplar.

It’s really not the same thing as gum-chewing because while that implies a certain cluelessness, it doesn’t equate to objectification and it isn’t a potential threat. A better example might be the two youths on a crowded train last Thursday who thought it was acceptable to play a movie on a laptop at full volume…. but it’s still not quite the same thing.

He’s since written:

Many people seem to think it obvious that my post was wrong and I should apologise. Very few people have bothered to explain exactly why. The nearest approach I have heard goes something like this.

I sarcastically compared Rebecca's plight with that of women in Muslim countries or families dominated by Muslim men. Somebody made the worthwhile point (reiterated here by PZ) that it is no defence of something slightly bad to point to something worse. We should fight all bad things, the slightly bad as well as the very bad. Fair enough. But my point is that the 'slightly bad thing' suffered by Rebecca was not even slightly bad, it was zero bad. A man asked her back to his room for coffee. She said no. End of story.

But not everybody sees it as end of story. OK, let's ask why not? The main reason seems to be that an elevator is a confined space from which there is no escape. This point has been made again and again in this thread, and the other one.

No escape? I am now really puzzled. Here's how you escape from an elevator. You press any one of the buttons conveniently provided. The elevator will obligingly stop at a floor, the door will open and you will no longer be in a confined space but in a well-lit corridor in a crowded hotel in the centre of Dublin.

No, I obviously don't get it. I will gladly apologise if somebody will calmly and politely, without using the word fuck in every sentence, explain to me what it is that I am not getting.

Richard

A few weird things here. I don’t think anyone should apologise for being wrong or for offending people. But the post shows that Richard still doesn’t get it. The harm is not zero. The harm to Rebecca was fairly minimal, I’d guess, but the harm in this attitude being perpetuated generation after generation is significant. The harm of objectifying people – especially women – speaks for itself. The harm of feeling coerced or pressured because of the background and environment should speak for itself also. The ‘escape’ Richard mentions isn’t from the lift, but from the situation. But the point is that nobody should have to worry about how to escape from a situation like that. And Richard is being disingenuous in suggesting that the hotel corridors were “crowded” at 4am.

And another weird thing. A lot of people have lost all respect for Richard over this. I haven’t. I think he’s wrong and I’ve explained why. I’m optimistic that he’ll understand eventually and have his consciousness raised another notch.

What is it with people that they insist high profile people agree with them on everything? I’ll be disappointed if Richard doesn’t change his mind on this issue, but it won’t stop be being a fan of his other work.

I wanted to write something about reactions to the erosion of privilege, but this post is already horribly long. Next post.

I want to go to meatland

2011-07-05T08:40:00.001Z

Brilliant.

Thursday unprofessionalism

2011-06-30T12:02:00.000Z

1. A lesbian couple shared a kiss at a baseball game in Minneapolis. A security guard reprimanded them, telling them “we don’t play grab ass here”, whatever that means and telling them they must “adhere to the 10 Commandments” while they were at the stadium.

Here they are (the first version, anyway):

You shall have no other gods before Me
You shall not make for yourself a carved image--any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.
You shall not take the name of the LORD your God in vain.
Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.
Honour your father and your mother.
You shall not murder.
You shall not commit adultery.
You shall not steal.
You shall not bear false witness against your neighbour.
You shall not covet your neighbour's house; you shall not covet your neighbour's wife, nor his male servant, nor his female servant, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor anything that is your neighbour's.'

Not a lot in there about kissing at sporting events. While it bothers me that the idiot didn’t even know the commandments he was accusing others of breaking, the issue here is of course that a security guard should think it’s part of his job to berate people on what he considers to be their moral failings. This is different from a random stranger accosting them: he was abusing his power.

It could have been worse though. He could have thrown them out. In Kentucky, two men were thrown out of a public swimming pool for being gay. This was especially sad because the men had developmental and intellectual difficulties. They already felt excluded and pointed at by society for their differences and they were further humiliated by being prevented from doing something everyone else is allowed to.

The Pavilion staff immediately entered the pool area and asked my clients and their staff to leave the Pavilion," stated Shirlyn Perkins, Executive Director of Mending Hearts, Inc. "My staff asked The Pavilion staff why they were being asked to leave, and they were informed that 'gay people' weren't allowed to swim there. My staff told this man that what he was trying to do was discrimination. The man stated that what he was doing was in the Bible and he could do it.

My emphasis, his idiocy.

He also said:

We own this place and can tell you to leave if we want to.

This is a public pool, owned by the public, which includes the men who were ejected. More abuse of power, even more horrible than the other.

Hate the sin, not the sinner, eh?

Believing in evolution

2011-06-29T09:06:00.001Z

Jerry has beaten me to it. I had a post in mind inspired by the recent news of the answers given by Miss USA contestants who were asked whether evolution should be taught in schools.

I was less horrified by those answers than many people, but I suspect that’s largely due to the fact that I attach no importance at all to the views of Miss USA contestants. I understand that these things are more culturally significant in America than here in the UK and that people will probably listen to what they say, but I found it hard to get excited about. What I did find disquieting was the fact that they presumably wouldn’t have been chosen as finalists if they hadn’t given answers in the heats that were popular in the states they were from, which says something about those states.

But anyway, it has revitalised the question of whether we should talk about “believing” in evolution and that’s what Jerry’s post is about. We broadly agree on his conclusion, but I have to say I disagree with the majority of the post.

First, the conclusion: I think we should probably be careful with our language in this area. In particular, we should be mindful of our audience and be aware of how they might take what we say. To many, evolution is a proposition that requires faith. To many, contradictory propositions can be equally valid. Professing a ‘belief’ in evolution might be seen to relegate it to the status of religion - a faith position – when we know this isn’t the case because evolution is a fact.

So to communicate effectively, we might have to be careful about what we say, especially in public. But having said that, I don’t agree that there’s a problem with professing a belief in evolution. Or in gravity. I believe in evolution because it happens to be true. I believe in other things that are true and in some things that are probably true. I probably believe in some things that aren’t true, although not knowingly.

The difference between my believing something and a faith-head believing in a god is that curious word ‘faith’. Faith is not a good reason to believe something. Evidence is a good reason. I believe evolution because there’s so much good evidence for it. I don’t have faith in evolution, because there’s no need for it.

I think this is the message we need to get across: not specifically that evolution is a fact, but that there are good reasons and bad reasons for believing things and things can be true or false independently of whether we happen to believe them. So that’s my strategy: I’m happy to say I believe in evolution, but I’d always qualify why that’s different to a faith position. But I still think there are good reasons to be mindful of our audiences and of how they might take our words.

The art of evolution

2011-06-23T11:33:00.001Z

http://darryl-cunningham.blogspot.com/

Darryl Cunningham has written a comic about evolution. It’s very good indeed. I particularly like the way I kept thinking “Hm… He’s made too big a leap there, I can already think of some objections the loonies will make about that.” And then in the next panel he deals with those objections.

I don’t think I’ve seen a simpler, more cunningly put-together introduction to evolution. It draws heavily on the examples we’re all familiar with and I’m pretty sure I can tell what books Darryl read when he wrote it

You should also read his other work, including the excellent Psychiatric Tales, which you can buy in print form at places like this.

Thursday Unprofessionalism

2011-06-23T07:18:00.000Z

PZ reports here about a bunch of Young Earth Creationists who organised a field trip at a meeting of the Geological Society of America and carefully hid their agenda. They didn’t tell anyone they were YECs or that they’d spring their lunatic ideas on everyone once the trip was underway and nobody could back out. They gibbered about a young Earth for a while then later claimed that they’d convinced the experts. I doubt that.

This is all grossly unprofessional. They lied by omission about their motives and intentions. They wasted the attendees’ time. Then they lied about convincing the experts. One of them – Marcus Ross – presented a paper at the conference which directly contradicted his belief that the planet is less than 10,000 years old. When challenged on it, he was at first evasive then said:

I am not speaking as a young earth creationist here. When I speak at young earth creationist meetings I use a different framework than when I speak at the Geological Society of America meeting."

Ross is doing (presumably) proper science, but only as a means to gain respectability to lend false weight to his crazy assertions of a young Earth. This is called “hypocrisy” and “lying” and is deeply unprofessional.

Yay, I’m fashionable! However, Trevor Philips is a bit of a dick

2011-06-22T14:16:00.001Z

Trevor Philips is the Chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission. I don’t really know what that is, but according to Wikipedia, pretty much everyone has resigned since he took over. He seems to have a habit of defending free speech unless anyone says something he doesn’t like, when he tells them they should shut up. And he feels “under siege” as a faith-head from atheists whose views he feels are (presumably lamentably) ‘fashionable’. I don’t think I’ve ever been fashionable before.

"The thing I've become anxious about in recent times is this – there is certainly a feeling amongst some people of belief that they are under siege, that they are often disadvantaged, that they are looked at and considered in some way different and their faith makes them less worthy of regard," he said.

Well boo fucking hoo. Belief for no good reason is not worthy of regard. Nobody else with unsupported beliefs gets to claim they’re under siege if people denounce them. Well they can, but people are likely to suspect they are mentally ill. Someone guffawing “BWA HA HA! FOOLS! THEY SAID I WAS MAD, MAAAAAD, BUT I’LL SHOW THEM! I’LL SHOW THEM ALL!” is usually the first clue that something is not quite right with that individual. But if you’re religious, not only do you get to behave like this, you’re bound to have swarms of atheists agreeing with you. It is by far the most astonishing phenomenon of our times.

He gets creepier and more mealy-mouthed as he goes on. Especial kudos due for his saying it’s perfectly fair that women are excluded from being priests in the Catholic church; that the government shouldn’t interfere with church business (presumably including discrimination, the covering up of widespread, institutional child rape and the routine subjugation of half the population); and that ‘old fashioned’ religion (apparently defined as stuff Philips personally doesn’t agree with) is bad, but modern religion (which seems to quite closely match his own views) is awesome.

But this is what grabbed me the most:

"Our business is defending the believer. The law we're here to implement recognises that religious identity is an essential part of this society. It's an essential element of being a fulfilled human being.”

So which is it? Am I unfulfilled or inhuman? According to Philips, I can’t be both.

Does any of this sound like equality to you? Doesn’t sound that way to me.

A good cause, nicely and unpatronisingly described

2011-06-22T08:21:00.001Z

Ex rugby player Ben Cohen has started a foundation to campaign against bullying in general and especially bullying of LGBT people. He just gave a very impressive interview about it on BBC Breakfast. Very open and straightforward, without ego.

Support it! I can and will not abide bullying of any kind. Cohen seems intelligent and sensitive and has a huge following. I’m delighted that he’s putting all that to work.

Thursday Unprofessionalism

2011-06-16T09:03:00.000Z

A bit of a crossover topic this week since today’s Thursday Unprofessionalism is about creationism being taught in schools. In UK schools, as it happens, which is if anything worse than in some other places because we have things like a national curriculum which says you can’t do it.

In 2006, it was found that 59 schools were using materials supporting Intelligent Design.

Nick Cowan, head of chemistry at Bluecoat school, in Liverpool, said: "Just because it takes a negative look at Darwinism doesn't mean it is not science. I think to critique Darwinism is quite appropriate."

Appropriate indeed, providing the criticism makes sense. But the criticism espoused by the ID proponents doesn’t. It asks us to simply ignore – for no reason at all – the mountains of evidence in favour of evolution. It offers instead some cherry picked examples for which it fudges the significance and posits appeals to ignorance and false dichotomy (we don’t know every precise detail about everything, so a euphemistic designer must have done it). At least, this is the relatively respectable variety of ID. The more prevalent variety just goes ahead and shamelessly lies. It says there are no transitional fossils, regardless of how many they are shown. It claims that if evolution is true, we should see fronkeys and crockoducks.

This is not an appropriate critique of evolution. An appropriate critique would make some hypothesis about evolution and try to falsify it. So the ID approach is unprofessional in two separate ways: it teaches nonsense as though it’s the truth and it teaches a false and harmful version of critical thinking.

Occasionally we get people in UK politics who speak sense, possibly by accident:

The [then] chairman of the parliamentary science and technology select committee, the Lib Dem MP Phil Willis, said he was horrified that the packs were being used in schools.

"I am flabbergasted that any head of science would give credence to this creationist theory and be prepared to put it alongside Darwinism," he said. "Treating it as an alternative centralist theory alongside Darwinism in science lessons is deeply worrying."

The teaching packs were sent to all secondary schools by the least inappropriately-named group in history: Truth in Science, which can’t help lying every time it opens its mouth:

"We are not attacking the teaching of Darwinian theory," said Richard Buggs, a member of Truth in Science. "We are just saying that criticisms of Darwin's theory should also be taught."

Which is a lie. They do attack the teaching of evolution. And they don’t want to teach valid criticisms of it, because there aren’t any.

"Intelligent design looks at empirical evidence in the natural world and says, 'this is evidence for a designer'.

Which is another lie. ID doesn’t deal in evidence because evidence has to be for something. You form a hypothesis and then you see what evidence supports it. ID looks at stuff and then claims it’s evidence, but without the discipline of the hypothesis-forming and careful testing. The government explicitly said that schools shouldn’t use these packs, but some apparently were. How unprofessional can you get?

Fortunately, few schools apparently teach creationism of any form in science classes, but some seem to. For example, there’s strong evidence that at least some of Peter Vardy’s Christian faith schools have taught creationism as science (for example, ex-pupils have said so and senior members of the foundation and a former principle of two of the schools have publicly espoused creationism.

Teaching creationism as science is deeply unprofessional because it’s not science. It’s unprofessional because it teaches incorrect critical thinking and a wrong view of how science works. It’s also a very thinly disguised means of propagating religion. In all these senses it is child abuse, carried out by people who are trusted to protect and educate.

Suddenly nipples

2011-06-16T05:54:00.001Z

Our society has a hard time with nipples. Less so in the UK and much of Europe, where it’s not that much of an issue, but the US in particular seems to face extraordinary and daily anguish about nipples. Male nipples are alright, of course. It’s only female nipples that are obscene. It’s fine for women to walk about without a shirt on… providing they cover their nipples with stickers. The US Supreme Court upheld a rule made by yokels in some hick town or other to force strippers to wear the stickers too. Note that this isn’t a law about protecting women from objectification. It’s not about protecting women at all. It’s about protecting the men who might otherwise be driven stark insane at the obscene prospect of seeing a nipple. Unless it’s one of their wife’s nipples, presumably, which are not obscene.

If you *ahem* ‘accidentally’ show a female nipple at the Super Bowl, it will cost you $550,000. If you’re breastfeeding in public – making use of the actual primary biological function of your nipples - be prepared to have strangers verbally abuse you with little restraint. Men and women alike will feel entitled to tell you what they think of you.

As if all this isn’t weird enough, it’s always fun to look at borderline or extreme cases to throw the idiocy into sharp relief:

Thomas Beatie is a man who used to be a woman who carried a child to term. He posed topless in many pictures with his nipples exposed. Many celebrity women pose naked while pregnant but always with their nipples covered because they are obscene. Beatie’s nipples are not obscene, for some reason. Are they not female (and therefore obscene) nipples because he has a beard? And doesn’t shave his armpits? He has sufficient ladyparts to construct a baby, but his nipples are definitely male and therefore acceptable.
This is an anecdote, but seems plausible: there was a show in the US about plastic surgery on transsexual women. The ‘before’ shots showed uncensored ‘male’ nipples, but the ‘after’ shots, following breast augmentation, had censored nipples. The only part censored was the only part that hadn’t changed – the nipples – which everyone had already seen anyway.
This case turns the idiocy up to eleventyone. Andrej Pejic is a model famous for being androgynous. At work, he frequently dresses in traditionally female costume. He appeared on the cover of the magazine Dossier in this pose, with a vaguely Monroe-like styling. Barnes and Noble deemed his nipples obscene and demanded that it’s copies of the magazine be wrapped in opaque plastic.

The problem, of course, is not these outliers. It’s the fact of the inequality between what men and women are allowed to show. The extreme examples are just cases where society has become confused by its own double standards.

The double standard exists for very much the same reasons women in many countries and cultures are required to wear burkas: it’s purely a control issue. Men want to control who can see and interact with ‘their’ woman’s body. In case we think that the burka is the most extreme example of this, I’ve occasionally wondered whether foot-binding in China, which went on until the middle of the 20th century, wasn’t the pinnacle. It looks to me like a particularly fetishised version of the same thing: women with bound feet literally couldn’t walk very far or do very much because of their unspeakable deformities. Talk about exercising control over someone. For once, this was propagated not by religion but by some notion of social class. Poor women needed to work so couldn’t have bound feet. Binding the feet of ‘your’ women was a mark of social and economic class. That’s right, tortured women were objects of envy.

We’re so obsessed with this idea of who’s looking at our birds that the sight of a couple of square inches of every female’s flesh ended up as a taboo. We don’t call the nipples of animals we milk commercially ‘nipples’, we call them ‘teats’. We also call the drinking attachments on babies’ bottles ‘teats’ rather than ‘nipples’ (at least in the UK: I’ve occasionally heard them called nipples in the US). We can’t even mention female nipples, let alone display them.

As it happens, there are lots of places where it’s legally fine for women to be topless. The UK (as I understand it) is one of them. It’s also widespread through Europe and there are places in the US where female nipples are not – at least legally – obscene. Few people take advantage of this fact in the UK. Given our police officers’ well-known unfamiliarity with the law, it’s unlikely that anyone who did would go far without being arrested anyway.

It’s not entirely surprising that prudery is linked so strongly with religion. If there was ever a mechanism that could convince people en masse that it’s right that they’re discriminated against by fostering societal shame in return for, say, half the population wanting to take their shirt off on a hot day, it’s religious indoctrination.

Fun observation: websites always get a lot of mealy-mouthed males commenting on issues like this. Many insist that it’s not the nipples but the fact that female nipples reside upon breasts that’s the problem. Breasts are considered sexual objects and so…. well, you see in what question-begging direction this preposterous argument lies. What if we cover up the breasts and show only the nipples then? Won’t peephole bras solve the problem? The issue isn’t and has never been about what’s actually on display: it’s about arbitrary rules imposed on half of society for the purposes of control.

To be a cuttle

2011-06-14T15:13:00.001Z

A post by Cuttlefish that resonates with my business about choice in dying. Here you go:

http://digitalcuttlefish.blogspot.com/2011/06/dance-naked-at-my-funeral.html

It’s a lovely poem and a strange story. I love the idea of people nakedly mobbing my funeral – not that I’ll have a funeral – to cavort about for no particular reason.

It’s what I would have wanted, had I lived.

Great Ormond St finally says sorry to Baby P whistleblower

2011-06-14T15:04:00.001Z

Sorry to copy the headline, but that’s almost sort of what’s going down. See here.

An environment where experts – especially medical experts – can’t stick out their necks and say what their expertise tells them, is a wrong kind of environment.

Choice in dying

2011-06-14T07:05:00.001Z

There was a documentary by Terry Pratchett last night about assisted dying. You might still be able to see it on iPlayer if you’re quick. It’s a topic of some concern for him because he was diagnosed in 2007 with early onset Alzheimer’s disease. He wants to be able to die when he’s ready, in peace, without having to worry about those he’ll be leaving behind. He’s famously said he wants to die while sitting in a chair on his lawn in the sunshine with a glass of brandy in his hand and Thomas Tallis on his iPod.

Pratchett and his assistant went to Switzerland to visit the Dignitas clinic to find out about how they operate. The guy in charge showed them round the apartment where the dying takes place and described the procedure: you’re met by two people – not doctors – who ask you many times at each stage if you’re sure you want to go ahead. If you are, you first drink something to prepare your stomach, then – if you’re still sure – you drink the poison, quite quickly go to sleep and then stop breathing.

Pratchett then attended the death of a motor-neurone disease sufferer, Peter. Peter was perfectly clear about his desire to die now, while he could. He’d obviously made his mind up and understood his options. He’d discussed it with his wife – who was there with him – and although they disagreed on the timing (she wanted him to wait a bit), she’d accepted it as his decision and was obviously as well-prepared as she could be under the circumstances. Peter very calmly and not at all mournfully took the poison and died. It was very moving: sad, obviously, but there was a very strong sense that this is what Peter wanted and in the end he got it. As he was dying, he thanked Pratchett and the film crew: it was all very British.

The striking thing about the documentary was that Pratchett and his assistant were clearly struggling to decide what to think about the whole business. They were quiet, sad and rather shocked at what was happening. They seemed to show some distaste about the location (a rather garish flat on an industrial estate, sometimes with two families occupying it at once) but Pratchett in particular praised how the assisted suicide was carried out.

Pratchett’s case highlighted the problem with the Dignitas approach (which I’m sure is the only approach it can take). The organisation made it clear that if Pratchett wanted to die now, while mostly in control of his faculties, that would be OK, but if he were to leave it much later when his mind had largely gone, they wouldn’t be able to help him. They’d have to be sure it’s what he wanted at the time and as his illness progresses, there’ll be a point at which they could no longer be sure. So if Pratchett wants to die at Dignitas, he’ll have to do it earlier than he might otherwise have wished. Assisted suicide is about controlling your own death and with some illnesses, this choice is at best limited, even in Switzerland.

There was a Newsnight programme immediately afterwards, but I couldn’t bear to watch it. From what I’ve heard, this was a good decision. There’s a description here including some bizarrely edited video of Jeremy Paxman interviewing Pratchett. It was Paxman I wanted to avoid. The documentary was very sensitive, plainly striving for the dignity those people featured desired. I’ve little doubt that Paxman did his usual in fixating on some footling aspect of a turn of phrase with lurid glee and at blaring volume. I didn’t want to see that. Naturally, there was a Bishop there. Just what we need:

The Bishop of Exeter, the Right Reverend Michael Langrish, said: "I want to see much more emphasis put on supporting people in living, than assisting them in dying."

If there’s one thing we can actually be certain we own, it’s our own lives. But Bishops, of course, will tell you that we don’t even own that. They’ll tell us what we’re allowed to do with them when we’re alive and won’t let us give them up if we want to. Of course we want to see more emphasis placed on supporting people in living, that was never the argument and nobody is saying otherwise. Plainly the Bishop was using a banal rhetorical ploy to deflect attention from the fact that he’s advocating the suffering of others to preserve his personal ideals, which he got from a book. Sadly – very, tragically, sadly – he gets to impose his views on countless others and influence the law just because.

There was also some shameful hyperbole:

But Alistair Thompson, a spokesman for the Care Not Killing Alliance pressure group, said: "This is pro-assisted suicide propaganda loosely dressed up as a documentary."

It was hardly propaganda. It was very sad and didn’t hide any of the realities of assisted dying. As I said, Pratchett, despite being in favour of assisted dying, is clearly somewhat disturbed and doesn’t quite know what to think about what has happened. This isn’t exactly the way propaganda is done.

Mr Thompson said: "The evidence is that the more you portray this, the more suicides you will have.

Well, perhaps, although I’d want to see some impressive evidence before I accepted that claim. But it begs the question anyway: it assumes that suicide is automatically bad. So I guess it’s just more of the usual: thoughtful, moving documentary, stupid, knee-jerk reactions, with clergy stoking the fire.

For more about assisted dying and other topics, see Choice in Dying.

Who voted for you, Your Grace?

2011-06-13T13:47:00.001Z

Well this is fairly hilarious. I had the germ of the same idea when this weasel first started criticising present day politics but I didn’t work it through. It’s entirely my fault: I hadn’t realised that the church had caught up with Darwin yet, let alone the UK government coalition, so he caught me off guard. The link is very funny, but as usual I’m going to up the ante.

The king of the Church of England, Dr Rowan Williams, has criticised our government for doing things nobody voted for. That’s not quite how democracy works, of course. We don’t get to yank our leaders out of power because they didn’t shut up that barking fucking dog next door like the nice man who called on election day promised he would. He wasn’t even all that nice and, if anything, the dog has barked more since. But on the other hand, I didn’t actually vote for him, so I’m not sure what moral authority I’m actually entitled to.

This is the exact reason democracy doesn’t work like that. We don’t vote for policies, we vote for parties we hope might implement policies.

There’s a problem with Williams complaining about politics, which is that he wields his own political power. Many millions of people submit to or at least acknowledge his made-up moral authority. Many of those will back the dubious political cause Williams seems set on.

But Rowan: nobody elected you. You are speaking as a representative of millions, yet nobody got to vote you in there. And, as the article says, nobody voted for the ten commandments either.

Russell Crowe disturbs everyone by talking sense, the media attack him

2011-06-13T10:53:00.001Z

Presumably media outlets have bots scanning celebrity twitter feeds looking for words they might be able to make a story out of. They might as well get the bots to write the half-arsed, ill-conceived stories as well. Russell Crowe strikes me as being a bit of a tool, but he seems to have said some sensible things anyway. Someone asked him whether they should circumcise their child. Why anyone would ask Russell Crowe to decide that is fairly bewildering. Here’s Crowe’s response:

'Circumcision is barbaric and stupid. Who are you to correct nature? Is it real that GOD requires a donation of foreskin? Babies are perfect.'

I have to agree with Crowe that circumcision is stupid. Male circumcision itself isn’t all that barbaric, especially compared to the unspeakable horror of female genital mutilation. However, the act itself certainly is barbaric. It’s a means of indoctrination and control and it’s divisive by design. I also agree that male babies are not improved by removal of their foreskin, much less so that females are improved by the sickening mutilation of their genitals and its consequences.

I’d have gone further. I’d have called circumcision stupid, barbaric and child abuse. I’d have called the Jewish religion stupid, child abuse and responsible for much barbarism.

However, needless to say, Crowe has been branded by some random people on Twitter as being anti-sematic and the media have played up without pointing out that the accusation is nonsensical. Despising some Jewish practice in no way implies hatred of Jews. You have no right not to be offended and if you are offended, flinging moronic, unfounded accusations around seems unlikely to help.

Unfortunately, Crowe later issued a rather fawning apology. No problem in setting the record straight, but he apologises for seeming to mock the beliefs and traditions of others. Again, I’d have gone rather further by saying I mock stupid beliefs because they’re stupid. I’d have rammed the point home by mocking them further and – to show that I am an equal opportunities mocker – I’d have done bonus mocking of some other stupid beliefs.

It would be nice if he could have stood up for himself. I say this in the knowledge that this would be a lot more difficult for Crowe than it is for me. How did society get so screwed up that a perfectly reasonable statement – when made by a celebrity – causes a wave of collapses as people clutch their pearls too tightly.

Two reasons spring to mind: the hold we know religion has on people and our insistence that celebrities must somehow share our views or we’re allowed to punish them. We gave them their fame and we can take it away if they don’t pander. Why would anyone make a hero of someone they can control? I’m sure these two reasons are somehow closely related, but I don’t have time to tease it out right now.

Crowe said another decent and sensible thing. Someone asked him what they obviously considered a loaded question:

'I'm still waiting for @russellcrowe to give his opinion on abortion since he loves babies and all...'

and Crowe replied:

Abortion should always be a woman's choice, there is no benefit to "forced" motherhood...you got it? don't like it then bye.'

Again, nothing tricky here. I’d have gone further on this one too: if you think abortion is bad for religious reasons, you really need to re-examine your priorities.

Greta Christina on Damon Fowler and being awesome

2011-06-11T17:11:00.001Z

I posted about Damon Fowler here. It was a sad story. It turns out there is some extra sadness and a bit of happiness as described by Greta here.

The sad is that extra worse things happened to Damon. The happy is that lots of people rallied to help him out. It shows that atheists can be nice people.

Greta puts it very nicely:

But when Damon Fowler was suffering and in need, the atheist community stepped up. It provided compassion. It demanded justice. It offered emotional support. It offered practical support. It opened its wallets. It made it unassailably clear to Damon Fowler that he was not alone: that although his school, his community, even his parents, had all turned their backs on him, atheists would take care of him, as best they could, until he could take care of himself. It made it clear that, even though he no longer had a home in Bastrop, he had a home in this movement. When Damon Fowler was suffering and in need, the atheist community proved itself to be a real community.

If atheism means we just do whatever we want to do... then apparently, what we want to do is take care of each other. Apparently, what we want to do is help people who have been injured. Apparently, what we want to do is speak out against wrongdoing. Apparently, what we want to do is put a stop to injustice. Apparently, what we want to do is make sacrifices for people in need.

A whole lot more than the Christians in Bastrop, Louisiana.

But then the sad again is that this was necessary at all. That courage can consistently be rewarded with hatred is an international disgrace. We should have done more for Constance McMillen, shouldn’t we?

Rebecca Watson at the global atheist convention in Dublin

2011-06-11T08:36:00.001Z

Rebecca took part in a panel discussion on communicating atheism. She did something important: she pointed out that there are barriers to women communicating atheism that simply don’t exist for men. She illustrated this by reading out some emails she’s received which threaten rape among other things. Her message was that you can certainly be a successful female atheist activist, but you’ll open yourself to risk by putting your head above the parapet.

Now look at the comments. Rebecca herself points out this one in particular, which is odious:

The fuck, AdamLore, is that she made a good point very well and you’ve just proved that point even further.

There are some other examples:

Woman this woman that... Spesial woman needs that... Bla bla bla... *yawn*

Woman at risk... Evil men.... Blablabla... So tired of this shit... Have a cup of "Shut the f**k up!"

Godfred78 27 minutes ago

Godfred78: Rebecca doesn’t demand special treatment. She just rather feels that she doesn’t deserve to be threatened with rape and death solely because she’s a female who communicates atheism and skepticism. She doesn’t deserve to be told to shut the fuck up: if you can argue with her, go ahead, but don’t pretend what she has to say isn’t relevant or valuable. And don’t embarrass me as a male by proving her point even more. You’re tired of women wanting to be treated equally and your response is to demand that women shut up? What a man. Did I say man? I meant wanker.

What Sarah Churchwell said

2011-06-10T13:16:00.001Z

Well, what she said. About AC Grayling’s New College for the Humanities. Let’s wait and see, but I think the benefit of the doubt is called for, isn’t it?

Beyond awful: woman jailed for being raped

2011-06-10T13:06:00.001Z

The very concept of being jailed for adultery is itself beyond belief. But look at the kind of thing it leads to: women jailed for being raped.

Although the article is generally vaguely sympathetic, take a look at this:

Ms Gali spent eight months in a Dubai prison after the alleged assault by three co-workers while drinking at the resort bar in June 2008.

Why is the fact that she was drinking at the time of the alleged assault in any way relevant? I’m tempted to think that Dan Nancarrow - who wrote the article - has some sympathy with the argument that women are asking to be assaulted if they drink, are friendly or dress in a particular way.

Grayling’s school

2011-06-10T12:49:00.001Z

Anthony Grayling is opening a university. He found some investors, did his sums, wrote a business plan and rounded up some genuine superstars to teach there. What’s not to like? Well, it’s a private school so it can charge more than the maximum for state universities of £9000 a year. And it is: double that, in fact. And this seems to have annoyed some people. For example, Terry Eagleton, who calls it ‘odious’.

Anyway, why should anyone be surprised at the prospect of academics signing on for a cushy job at 25% more than the average university salary, with shares in the enterprise to boot?

What would prevent most of us from doing so is the nausea which wells to the throat at the thought of this disgustingly elitist outfit.

There’s always been private education in the UK. I don’t see a problem with it providing that everyone has equal access to state schools and that state schools are as good as they can be (which is where we might, admittedly, have a problem). Why should universities be different to schools? The rich will have access to better education just as they have access to better (or at least more expensive) food, clothes, cars and houses. Personally, I’d rather focus on improving state education – and access to that education – than complaining about someone who wants to provide high-quality education privately. Mostly to rich people, to be sure (although 20% of students will receive scholarships), but I don’t see the part where having more educated people is a bad thing.

Eagleton conjures up a fantasy world where Grayling’s outfit is a piratical entity like the insurance company in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life. The notion that it could be harmful to the education system as a whole is laughable. The charge that the lecturers are abandoning the ailing university system and leeching off its misfortune is equally muddled. They don’t have a duty to the university system. Indeed, at least one – Richard Dawkins – has already been forced to retire by that very system. It strikes me that his talents as a teacher are better used in actual – you know – teaching than in – say – not teaching. It’s difficult to see how this constitutes a betrayal of educational ideals.

Eagleton’s distaste seems to stem from a dubious thin-end-of-the-wedge argument. But this argument is a rather strange one: we should strive for mediocrity to ensure equal access to education? And again, the rich already have routine access to better education at school level. What’s the difference? I understand his discomfort to some extent. The argument is one of opportunity: it doesn’t seem fair that the rich might receive more and better opportunities solely because of their wealth. But this seems to me a systemic problem related to how we measure and regulate the quality of education. Our last government was less concerned about standards than about bums on seats, which I think was more harmful to the university system than anything Grayling is up to.

Another of Eagleton’s complaints is that the college is funded. Yes, he really finds a problem in the fact that rich people have invested in something designed to make them money. He’s not above being disingenuous either:

This piece of the so-called private sector will actually be parasitic on the public one, rather like surgeons who use public facilities for private operations. The college's degrees will be awarded by the University of London, which ought to know better than to collude in an enterprise which could result in seeing its professors poached by those with the biggest bank balances. London Uni will share its libraries and other facilities too, thus ensuring that its own students are forced to share resources with those who have bought their way in.

First, I think we can be pretty sure that London University will charge for use of its facilities, in one way or another. Second, students will not be ‘buying their way in’. They’ll also need the grades. He’s trying to make it sound as though money is the only qualification required.

The new college, staffed as it is by such notable liberals, will of course be open to all viewpoints. Well, sort of. One takes it there will not be a theology department.

No, and there aren’t physics or biology departments either, so what?

Eagleton’s piece is a string of personal attacks, the presentation of speculation as fact and outright fabrication. This is my favourite part:

There will be a number of private unis where students are assigned fags and expect to stroll into the Foreign Office with a third-class degree, and a lot of other places which cannot afford to paint the walls.

Calm down, Terry.

PZ MYERS MUST BE SILENCED

2011-06-10T11:24:00.001Z

Sometimes I think that what some people really can’t stand about people like PZ is that they are entertaining. We already have accommodationists telling us we have to be more serious and gloomy: are they really so concerned about offending believers or are they jealous that nobody is taking any notice of them?

Blog posts and videos from the World Atheist Convention 2011

2011-06-08T06:29:00.001Z

Some blog posts. Some videos.

At the moment there are only two videos from the event, but I’m sure more will appear soon.

A superb example of utter nutjobbery

2011-06-08T06:20:00.001Z

Look at this. Just look at it.

This man is obsessed with finding phallic symbols (which are of course evil) in the artwork and even the very design of……. Denver airport. It’s quite an extraordinary thing to devote a life to.

Atheists need not apply

2011-06-07T11:40:00.001Z

Jerry Coyne posts on WEIT about a Pew Survey showing what US voters are looking for in a presidential candidate for 2012.

Here’s the depressing part:

Having served in the military seems to be more desirable than possessing the hands-on experience of a former governor. Personally, I struggle to see why military service should count as a qualification for political office, but here we are.

People seem reasonably open to the idea of a female president, which is nice, but somehow sex makes more difference than colour. The cynic in me suspects that people think it’s not OK to appear racist, but fine to appear sexist. Or perhaps people are blind to their own sexism.

Atheists don’t stand a chance. A candidate would be better off admitting an extramarital affair than a lack of belief in god. Notice the wording of the category as well: the A-word isn’t even used. We can’t blame this on confusion over the word ‘atheist’ which many people wrongly equate with a nihilistic viewpoint. This is people not trusting people who don’t believe something irrational.

My own score would be no difference right down the line except for a preference for people with relevant experience. I haven’t decided whether I’d be less likely to support someone who’s had an extramarital affair. On the one hand, everyone makes mistakes, I have no desire to be judgemental and I can’t bring myself to generalise about this kind of thing. On the other, it’s evidence of dishonesty. But on the other (third) hand, it’s not clear to me that dishonesty of that sort necessarily counts against being able to do the job. Would I feel differently if the category were “committed fraud” or “stole candy from baby”? Probably not: I’m less concerned with whether a crime has been committed as I am with whether someone has been hurt through dishonesty.

I suppose this means I’m more results-oriented than emotional, but we knew that.

Maryam Namazie at the World Atheist Convention

2011-06-07T09:21:00.001Z

Maryam Namazie's brilliant speech at the World Atheist Convention.

Back

2011-06-07T09:18:00.001Z

I’m back from the Global Atheist Convention in Dublin and very good it was too. I’m too busy and guilty about taking time off to write much about it, but I have to congratulate Atheist Ireland for putting on an excellent gig.

If I have a complaint, it’s that the panels could have been designed a little better. For example, the one on sexism in atheism was uncomfortably one-sided, but fortunately this was addressed later by Rebecca Watson. While I’m delighted that none of the panel have encountered much in the way of sexism, I doubt this is the typical experience. The joint message of the panel and Rebecca’s talk was that women can succeed if they push themselves forward, but that they expose themselves to risk by doing so. Given what I know of some of Rebecca’s past battles along these lines, I was puzzled that she wasn’t on the sexism panel anyway. She’d have been the first person I’d have asked.

The accomodation/confrontation panel seemed a bit of a wasted opportunity. I’d expected it to be a discussion between people with different views on the subject. At the least, I expected a discussion about the relative merits of each. Instead, most of the panellists talked about their experiences of confrontation which – while interesting – weren’t really on topic. Only Richard Green of Atheist UK really seemed to understand that there even is an ongoing battle. Unfortunately, he was rather dull and I fear his message might have been lost on many.

These niggles aside, it was a great event. We were invaded by some Muslim creationists, seemingly led by Hamza Andreas Tzortzis. He or one of his cohorts made a nuisance oh himself during one of Dawkins’ panel sessions by barking the usual creationist questions at him (video here, thanks Jerry). You can hear his disingenuity (“no, really, I’m a student, I just want to learn”. Sure.) and the reaction of the audience, which is onto him immediately. The group remained outside for the remainder of the conference, spamming the twitter feed relentlessly with inconsequential babble and accosting people they wanted to ‘engage’ with.

Ah, but it’s a slippery word, ‘engage’. It became increasingly clear that what they meant by ‘engage’ was ‘agree’. When anyone argued with them, they said it wasn’t engagement and went back to gleefully saying that PZ and Richard refused to engage with them, knowing full well that they were inside the conference listening to talks.

According to the twitter feed, at one point PZ was talking to them outside when Dawkins walked out and saw what was happening, sighed “fuckwit” and went back inside. I don’t blame him, they were every bit as dull and fuckheaded as any other variety of creationist. If anything, they were ruder and more bewildering than the average, constantly interrupting and changing the subject mid-sentence. There’s no point in talking to such people.

PZ and Aaron Ra had a go, which you can see here. Don’t expect anything but babble from the creationists.

The Daily Mail’s war on science

2011-06-02T07:42:00.001Z

The Fail has outdone itself with this idiocy.

Women have called the shots at home for millions of years, scientists claim

Scientists may finally have confirmed what every woman from Raquel Welch to Wilma Flintstone has always suspected.

Even back in prehistoric times, the female of the species was very much the boss.

A study has found evidence of ‘alpha cavewomen’ roaming the plains and calling the shots while the menfolk slobbed at home.

Needless to say, the study said no such thing. It said that in one area there’s evidence that more females than males had arrived from outside the area. Here’s how Nature reports it. There’s no suggestion at all that the result imply females were alphas: that was entirely fabricated by the Daily Mail.

The Mail again, in possibly the most stupid collection of ‘paragraphs’ ever written:

It also raises the intriguing possibility that Fred Flintstone, the eternally henpecked half of the cartoon partnership with Wilma, might actually have mirrored life on Earth all those centuries ago.

And that Raquel Welch, the doeskin-bikini-clad heroine of One Million Years BC, could have got her movie portrayal spot on.

Alpha cavewoman appears to have travelled far wider than her male counterpart, the research showed. She might even have been the one who went out clubbing, so to speak – reversing the popular conception that it was the bloke who bashed the girl on the head and dragged her home by the hair.

But something seems to have happened to the evolution of the species after those times between 1.7million and 2.4million years ago.

A couple more millennia would have to pass before female independence re-emerged with the bra-burning liberation of the Swinging Sixties.

Not only is this astonishingly stupid, ignorant and glib, it also manages to be numbingly sexist. The ‘joke’ that women are in charge because as everyone knows they nag their husbands was never funny. Besides, in the Flintstones, Wilma was confined to the house doing housework, so the ‘joke’ doesn’t even work. But at least it was an excuse to put a picture of Raquel Welsh in a fur bikini.

But we all know that Mail readers are terrified that women might one day achieve equality. The greatest harm of this article is to science. Look at one of the first comments:

What a silly conclusion these scientists arrived at! All right, so the evidence of strontium in teeth showed that men largely lived and died near their birthplaces, while half of women were likely to find new homes during their lifetime. Since when does this translate to "alpha cavewomen roaming the plains and calling the shots?" The real explanation is obvious. It was men, warriors, who owned and guarded tribal territory. This remained largely unchanged except for new conquests, so more men stayed put. Women on the other hand were traded and exchanged with other tribes, possibly in exchange for property, possibly taken in raids on occasion. However it was done, swapping women among different tribes was a healthy practice that avoided the problems of inbreeding. Naturally this meant far larger numbers of women than men were moved around during their lifetime.

- Cal Brock, Phoenix, Arizona, 02/6/2011 06:44

OK, so the guy’s an idiot and there’s no reason at all to take any notice of what he says. I hardly know where to begin pulling his bullshit apart. But he demonstrates very well that when the media fabricate stories, people believe them. They believe that scientists are stupid, that science is a pointless exercise at best and that science funding should be cut, except possibly for researching cures for whatever their family members died of.

Shame on Paul Harris and Fiona Macrea (wait a minute, it took two people to write this?) for writing this sexist, anti-science, idiotic crap.

Ireland’s disappeared

2011-06-01T06:51:00.001Z

Foul indeed. It’s horrific. Ophelia Benson on Ireland’s disappeared:

…it was Ireland’s hidden scandal: an estimated 30,000 women were sent to church-run laundries, where they were abused and worked for years with no pay. Their offense, in the eyes of society, was to break the strict sexual rules of Catholic Ireland, having children outside wedlock.

lookatthestateofthat

The UK government is above the law because it says so, allows mandatory prayers in council sessions

Religion’s place in government

John’s Cole and Sentamu

Things that can happen in elevators

The Pope thinks that gay marriage is a threat to the future of humanity

Christopher Hitchens is dead

PZ on free will

Scooby-doo is a morality tale for secular humanists. Unfortunately, it is shit.

Driving destroys virginity

Where to begin? Oh, I see now

Jesus and Mo do it again

Even stupider comment to a stupid daily mail article about ghosts

Daily mail invents outrage

Misused phrases

Gentleman/scholar/acrobat owns coward/blaggard

Playground arguments

The greatest moral force the world has ever known

Nice work, Simon: Let’s test Psychic Sally

Stop persecuting yourself

Damned whether you do or not

Special pleading?

Damn you, PZ

Bill O’Reilly crushes Richard Dawkins

Dear Emma B: A moving post

This

It's basically all or nothing

Psychic Sally Replies

Psychic Sally still in business

Literally

Defenders of marriage

Danny Penman of the Daily Mail is a credulous idiot

The monstrous Pearls

Would you date an atheist?

Nobody’s bothered

Who would win in a fight? Sad vs Angry? Michael Pearl delights in hating people who have suffered tragedy

Pastor Mike responds

If you’ve done nothing wrong, there’s nothing to be frightened of…

Inventing agency

Cornfields remain unlooked at and goats are not on fire due to squeaky wheels

The New Testament by someone who hasn’t read it

Sign like you’ve never signed before

Non-fiction? Science? £12.89?

Vatican punishes bishop for compassion

GAWD vs GWAR: intellectual dishonesty

Class action suit against homeopathy

All win. Well, apart from the homeopaths

Fucking whales, how do they work?

What he said

Liz Jones in Somalia

Church sex abuse inquiry not needed

Liz Jones of the Daily Mail is a horror show

Susan Greenfield, you are truly the Baroness of Hearts. Now fuck off.

Bullied to death

These are the kinds of question that bother me, too

Thursday unprofessionalism. What is unprofessional?

Experience the Holy Land. In Florida.

A tiny bit more on Ruse

Michael Ruse’s confusing life

Contrast

Primate gets in on the not-pology racket

Evil Bishop Magee lied about child abuse on his watch

This is the kind of drivel we have to put up with

BINGO

it’s awesomeness

The book they didn’t want you to read

Talking ‘bout a revolution. Honesty in scientific reporting

OK, maybe it’s an over-reaction now

OOOOhhhh Gillian (McKeith)

Jury ‘duty’

How should I feel?

Cuttlefish, you’ve done it again

Checking in

*I* want to go to meatland

Thursday unprofessionalism

Believing in evolution

The art of evolution

Thursday Unprofessionalism

Yay, I’m fashionable! However, Trevor Philips is a bit of a dick

A good cause, nicely and unpatronisingly described

I want to go to meatland