The SURE Blog

Gender disparity in atheist groups

2010-08-06T21:59:00.000-07:00

I just saw the recent SMBC comic:

(Click to go to comic page)

Just replace "mathematics" with "nontheist student groups" - same problem: plenty of guys with maybe a few gals showing up to meetings, sometimes*. It's been discussed and analyzed in many nontheist campus orgs, including SURE. One of the problems is that, like in the comic, invariably the idea that we just need to make disbelief more girly is proposed: make some pink signs or something... organize an atheist knitting group.

The problem has been written about before, so I'm not providing much analysis or many solutions (mostly I'm just lazy), but I don't know if the problem is that there's the same kind of stigma of girls being atheists or in atheist groups as there is for girls being interested in math - it doesn't seem like it fits into the same category. I think it's just that there isn't as much interest in joining a group like ours.

Solutions? Something that comes to mind is that we should have more active/interactive outreach - not necessarily outreach designed specifically for the ladies, just going out on campus and doing more than tabling to get our name out. We need more visibility.

There are probably other actions we could take to try to attract women to the group... maybe as far as having a panel event in which female SURE members talk about being female atheists? I don't know. Things to ponder.

*Although there are actually a reasonable number of girls that show up to our meetings...

Context!!!

2010-02-22T15:39:00.000-08:00

Here's a good video from NonStampCollector on Youtube. It's one of the most frustrating arguments we encounter when we're tabling - any atrocious or despicable excerpt from the Bible or any "holy" book is brushed off and explained away as obviously being out of context, misunderstood, mistranslated, etc. The argument is terribly transparent, of course, betraying an obvious double standard when no cries foul are heard when one of the few nice places of the Bible are quoted.

This is one of the most insidious ideas that takes hold in religionists' minds - it's like they just decide that anything conflicting with what their pastor/youth leader/religious counselor tells them must be wrong somehow, ignoring that what they're deciding is wrong comes directly from the book that's supposed to be the root of their religion. It's much easier and less annoying to argue with someone that concedes the "bad stuff" in the Bible than it is to argue with someone who simply ignores it. It's like, isn't this stuff central to what you believe? If you've changed it so much as to deviate so far from what your religion actually says, why do you still worship it above any other idea that you've had? Why is it still holy if you've applied your own morality to it, distorting it beyond recognition past its name and its most contemporary teachings?

Looking at it objectively, the collection of bronze-age ravings of backwards men that is the Bible really is atrocious, and it's a shame and a danger that it's still taken seriously.

I Got My Copy!

2009-11-19T19:56:00.000-08:00

(See our previous post, Objections to Ray Comfort's Foreword to Darwin's On the Origin of Species, for a member-submitted rebuttal to Comfort's creationist introduction)

Kirk Cameron and Ray Comfort's corrupted copies of Darwin's Origin of Species got passed out at UCSB today! (Apparently not every university team had plans to go in a day early, so we got our books on the original planned date). SURE was ready - we passed out counter flyers from Don't Diss Darwin, distributing them to most of the people who got a book. At least one of the people passing the books out was actually very nice, and graciously welcomed our counter-efforts. The other main hander-outer was a little less welcoming, trying to dodge away from our main horde, but everyone was on good terms.

It seemed like there were lots of people getting the book who either knew about Ray Comfort's foreword, or just laughed when they found out it was a creationist introduction. All in all, I don't think this stunt will have the effect intended by Comfort and Cameron, at least at Santa Barbara.

Here I am with my copy:

They still had plenty of copies when I left, and said they might be back at it tomorrow, but it was just a maybe. We'll keep an eye out.

Objections to Ray Comfort's Foreword to Darwin's On the Origin of Species

2009-11-18T09:48:00.000-08:00

(Note: The National Center for Science Education has excellent resources that debunk Comfort's foreword as well, available here: Don't Diss Darwin)

Here is a deconstruction of Ray Comfort's creationist introduction to Darwin's great book, On the Origin of Species. It was put together by Nick Santos, one of our members.

A .pdf version can be viewed here: Objections to Ray Comfort's Foreword

Comfort's introduction is available here: (pdf) link

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

(Note: The paragraph numbers might not be completely accurate; I counted partial paragraphs and block quotes as paragraphs. Also I added a lot of personal commentary, so sorry if you don't like it.)

P 5 ¶ 2: The quotations from Darwin are cast in a light to make him seem more sympathetic to religion (red indicates the parts that Comfort quoted):

Formerly I was led by feelings such as those to the firm conviction of the existence of God, and of the immortality of the soul. In my Journal I wrote that while standing in the midst of the grandeur of a Brazilian forest, "it is not possible to give an adequate idea of the higher feelings of wonder, admiration, and devotion, which fill and elevate the mind." I well remember my conviction that there is more in humans than the mere breath of the body. But now the grandest scenes would not cause any such convictions and feelings to rise in my mind. It may be truly said that I am like a man who has become color-blind, and the universal belief by people of the existence of redness makes my present loss of perception of not the least value as evidence. This argument would be a valid one if all people of all races had the same inward conviction of the existence of one God; but we know that this is very far from being the case. Therefore I cannot see that such inward convictions and feelings are of any weight as evidence of what really exists. The state of mind which grand scenes formerly excited in me, and which was intimately connected with a belief in God, did not essentially differ from that which is often called the sense of the sublime; and however difficult it may be to explain the source of this sense, it can hardly be advanced as an argument for the existence of God, any more than the powerful though vague and similar feelings excited by music.

P 10: Thaxton’s paper: DNA, Design and the Origin of Life, was presented at Jesus Christ: God and Man, an international conference in Dallas, Texas, November 13-16, 1986 and he is a fellow of the Discovery Institute, so he is definitely biased.

P 10-11: Francis Collins is an openly religious scientist, although he doesn’t seem to let his religion affect his scientific results. These are basically appeals to authority.

P 11 ¶ 2: Information doesn’t require intelligence, a grain of sand has a lot of information in it if you were to try to record every aspect of it, but it was formed in the absence of intelligence.

P 11 ¶ 3: The comparisons between the DNA sequences of various species depends a lot on how you count the way they match. A pure one to one nucleotide comparison will yield very low results because an extra nucleotide would shift all others off by one. What they do instead is allow single strands of human and chimpanzee DNA to commingle and the base pairs will join where they match and the inconsistencies lead to weaknesses in the DNA which can be measured. Furthermore a figure like 86% is still very compelling evidence of common ancestry (just perhaps more distant in time).

P 11 ¶ 4: Tries to impress people with big numbers of differences in base pairs, based of course on assuming the lowest value of shared DNA. Rather than looking at all the research figures on the DNA common between humans and chimpanzees and picking a mean value.

P 11-12 ¶ 5: Tries to then twist the DNA commonality in favor of ID (can he make up his mind?) and he talks about architects borrowing materials and designs between different buildings. According to this view one wonders why some features of organisms for a particular function seem to be so poorly (or indirectly) suited to that function. This is of course because as humans we have the luxury to compare evolutionary approaches to similar conditions among different species and determine (perhaps subjectively) which is best adapted.

P 13 ¶ 2: Finding something half-man half-monkey as the common ancestor is fallacious thinking. Going to the example used a few paragraphs previous, the 50% DNA commonality between bananas and humans doesn’t mean that the common ancestor between them is half-man half-banana, that’s just ridiculous.

P 13 ¶ 3: Evolution is said to have occurred in the past by virtue of it continually occurring. It isn’t as though scientists say that all that evolution stuff is behind us, its just the fact that we live for such a short time that evolution is harder to perceive, but can of course still be observed.

P 13 ¶ 4: The quote from Grasse is refuted by the Lenski E. coli experiments, we have seen the process of evolution.

P 13 ¶ 5: The process of fossilization depends on very unique conditions and thus fossils are rare, but there are still fossils of almost every transition from one type of life to another. Furthermore to suggest that without fossil evidence, evolution would not be provable is a lie. The use of fossils to help prove evolution was and is due to its convenience compared to other types of evidence.

P 13 ¶ 6: Full quotation:

Long before having arrived at this part of my work, a crowd of difficulties will have occurred to the reader. Some of them are so grave that to this day I can never reflect on them without being staggered; but, to the best of my judgment, the greater number are only apparent, and those that are real are not, I think, fatal to my theory.

These difficulties and objections may be classed under the following heads: Firstly, why, if species have descended from other species by insensibly fine gradations, do we not everywhere see innumerable transitional forms? Why is not all nature in confusion instead of the species being, as we see them, well defined?...

As natural selection acts solely by the preservation of profitable modifications, each new form will tend in a fully-stocked country to take the place of, and finally to exterminate, its own less improved parent or other less-favoured forms with which it comes into competition. Thus extinction and natural selection will, as we have seen, go hand in hand. Hence, if we look at each species as descended from some other unknown form, both the parent and all the transitional varieties will generally have been exterminated by the very process of formation and perfection of the new form.

But, as by this theory innumerable transitional forms must have existed, why do we not find them embedded in countless numbers in the crust of the earth? It will be much more convenient to discuss this question in the chapter on the Imperfection of the geological record; and I will here only state that I believe the answer mainly lies in the record being incomparably less perfect than is generally supposed; the imperfection of the record being chiefly due to organic beings not inhabiting profound depths of the sea, and to their remains being embedded and preserved to a future age only in masses of sediment sufficiently thick and extensive to withstand an enormous amount of future degradation; and such fossiliferous masses can be accumulated only where much sediment is deposited on the shallow bed of the sea, whilst it slowly subsides. These contingencies will concur only rarely, and after enormously long intervals. Whilst the bed of the sea is stationary or is rising, or when very little sediment is being deposited, there will be blanks in our geological history. The crust of the earth is a vast museum; but the natural collections have been made only at intervals of time immensely remote.

P 14 ¶ 1: First he says that the situation (fossil record) hasn’t improved much over the last 150 years then says we have cataloged 100 million fossils.

P 14-15: He brings up fossil frauds to try to discredit the idea of transitional forms, of which numerous fossils exist. He also criticizes extrapolations from bone fragments which do indeed prove to be wrong sometimes, but a lot can be told from bone fragments and fragmentary fossils.

P 17 ¶ 4: A lack of evidence is not evidence to the contrary. Though saying there is a lack of evidence is still a complete misrepresentation of the facts.

P 17 ¶ 5: Horse evolution is clearly understood: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/horses/horse_evol.html

P 18 ¶ 4: Full quotation:

On the sudden appearance of whole groups of Allied Species.—The abrupt manner in which whole groups of species suddenly appear in certain formations, has been urged by several paleontologists, for instance, by Agassiz, Pictet, and by none more forcibly than by Professor Sedgwick, as a fatal objection to the belief in the transmutation of species. If numerous species, belonging to the same genera or families, have really started into life all at once, the fact would be fatal to the theory of descent with slow modification through natural selection. For the development of a group of forms, all of which have descended from some one progenitor, must have been an extremely slow process; and the progenitors must have lived long ages before their modified descendants. But we continually over-rate the perfection of the geological record, and falsely infer, because certain genera or families have not been found beneath a certain stage, that they did not exist before that stage. We continually forget how large the world is, compared with the area over which our geological formations have been carefully examined; we forget that groups of species may elsewhere have long existed and have slowly multiplied before they invaded the ancient archipelagoes of Europe and of the United States. We do not make due allowance for the enormous intervals of time, which have probably elapsed between our consecutive formations,—longer perhaps in some cases than the time required for the accumulation of each formation. These intervals will have given time for the multiplication of species from some one or some few parent-forms; and in the succeeding formation such species will appear as if suddenly created.

P 18 ¶ 5: I really don’t think Comfort read the full paragraph above, he would see that Darwin was arguing against the type of argument in this paragraph. Again, a lack of evidence is not evidence to the contrary. Nothing showed up “virtually overnight” as Comfort puts it. The Cambrian Explosion took place over 70-80 million years and it may appear to be overnight because as humans we have a hard time of conceiving of such time scales and when looking at the strata of that time frame only accounts for several meters of rock (I don’t know the real figure, but I hope you get my point). Furthermore the Cambrian explosion resulted in the formation of hard-bodied organisms that could fossilize much easier and thus a more distinct line appears than truly might have existed.

P 19 ¶ 6: Full quotation:

For example the Cambrian strata of rocks, vintage about 600 million years, are the oldest ones in which we find most of the major invertebrate groups. And we find many of them already in an advanced state of evolution, the very first time they appear. It is as though theywere just planted there, without any evolutionary history. Needless to say, this appearance of sudden planting has delighted creationists. Evolutionists of all stripes believe, however, that this really does represent a very large gap in the fossil record, a gap that is simply due tothe fact that, for some reason, very few fossils have lasted from periods before about 600 million years ago. One good reason might be that many of these animals had only soft parts to their bodies: no shells or bones to fossilize.

Just more of Comfort’s quote mining.

P 20: The micro-macro distinction of evolution is misunderstood here. They both rely on the same underlying principles which Darwin established and to accept one is to accept the other. http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-speciation.html

P 20 ¶ 5: Comfort says “…responsibility on mutations to accidentally create complex new body parts…” Everyone who accepts evolution by natural selection knows that a single or hand full of mutations doesn’t accidentally lead to a new body part. It is the accumulation of beneficial mutations through natural selection that may over a long period of time eventually lead to a new body part. Comfort really doesn’t grasp the concept of natural selection it appears.

P 21 ¶ 3: Again I link here (5.3): http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-speciation.html

Fruit flies are very flexible in regard to speciation probably because of their fast reproductive rate. Now it’s obvious that there are certain limitations to fruit fly mutation given certain generation constraints. But given the right environment and enough time a significant amount of change could occur.

P 21 ¶ 5: Characterizing a mutation as a typing error can only go so far. What he claims evolution puts forth isn’t true. Nobody is saying that wings came out of nowhere. In fact the study of homology proves that nobody accepts such notions. Also the claim that the amount of genetic information would have to increase in order for a new body part to appear isn’t strictly true. A mutation that affects embryological development could potentially lead to the activation of normally dormant DNA that can lead to unexpected results.

P 22 ¶ 2: Increases in genetic information are understood. Gene duplication and later mutation can increase the number of base pairs in the DNA. Just look at the cause of Down syndrome, an extra 21st chromosome and given different manifestations such gene duplication could be beneficial and thus be selected for. http://aob.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/82/suppl_1/37.pdf

Talk Origins explanation

P 23 ¶ 2: Comfort was actually making some sense up until this point. A mutation is one of three types: beneficial, neutral of deleterious, the beneficial ones are defined as such by making the organism better suited to its environment. The mutations are indeed rather random, but the process which acts upon them turns that randomness into a better adapted organism over many generations.

P 23 ¶ 3: Every stage of the development of the wing was indeed beneficial to the organism and because you can't think of how it was or was not beneficial doesn't make it untrue. Furthermore the idea that a wing forms from nothing is simply false. The more probable scenario is that an organism would benefit from the addition of another pair of limbs which then much later in time evolve into wings. Indeed looking at bat evolution and asking what purpose was a proto-wing would be silly, it was clearly derived from its forelimbs as homology can show. The evolution of limbs does indeed have much greater incremental benefits in its development.

P 23 ¶ 5: The Gould article tries to address the question that is posed in the quotation and if Comfort actually bothered to read it, he might stop wondering how a wing could evolve. The concept of the functional shift of an organ or appendage from one purpose to an unrelated but also beneficial purpose is clearly understood by evolutionary biologists.

P 23 ¶ 6: Michael Denton is another one of the few creationist 'scientists'

P 24: I really don't see the point of these cartoons other than to try to discredit Darwin or to show the historical context in which his ideas were received, Comfort is of course doing the former.

P 25 ¶ 1: Comfort is equivocating the word 'purposeful', the mutation doesn't have a purpose in the act of occurring, but the manifestation of the mutation in the organism may serve a purpose. Secondly nobody claims that mutations alone create transitional forms, but rather mutations, natural selection and perhaps environmental change work in conjunction to lead to speciation. Finally, it doesn't matter if 150 scientists or 10,000 don't believe in evolution by natural selection, it is still a demonstrable fact.

P 25 ¶ 3: Denton is not an evolutionist, Comfort uses this title to make a schism where one doesn't exist.

P 25 ¶ 4: Denton's appeal to common sense is completely unscientific, many things in science go against common sense (quantum theory?) and this is why they have to be tested by the scientific method.

P 26 ¶ 2: Environmental change doesn't affect the 'direction of mutation' (whatever that means), but it does change what characteristics are selected for and thus change in a very noticeable direction over time can be seen. I don't know why Comfort thinks that the fact that environmental conditions don't affect the randomness of mutation is a big flaw in evolutionary theory. It really just stems from ignorance about the process of natural selection.

P 27: Comfort tries to show the circulatory system as irreducibly complex even though his list of animals with different degrees of heart complexity illustrates the fact that evolution can indeed occur. The evolution of the heart occurred very early in the history of multicellular life because it is necessary to support organisms above a certain size. So unfortunately the evolution of the early heart will probably not be seen in fossil evidence. However postulation on the development of the early heart can be extrapolated from the existing and relatively simple hearts in organisms like worms.

Powerpoint on evolution of circulatory system

P 27 ¶ 8: The eye argument has thoroughly been debunked and every stage of the evolution can been seen going from eye-spots to pit-eyes to lens-less eyes to lens eyes. Barely worth refuting when the work has already been done.

P 28: The eye is not the most perfect instrument that Comfort claims it is. The peripheral resolution is very low, there is a blind spot, at the very focus of our retina (the fovea) we have densely packed cones with no rods so in the dark it is harder to perceive light sources when looking directly at them (star gazers use a technique called averted vision to avoid this problem).

P 28 ¶ 7: Full quotation (perhaps the most commonly mined quote of Darwin):
To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree. Yet reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist; if further, the eye does vary ever so slightly, and the variations be inherited, which is certainly the case; and if any variation or modification in the organ be ever useful to an 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, can hardly be considered real. How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light, hardly concerns us more than how life itself first originated; but I may remark that several facts make me suspect that any sensitive nerve may be rendered sensitive to light, and likewise to those coarser vibrations of the air which produce sound.

P 29 ¶ 2: Claiming that advanced eyes are found in simple creatures is a very subjective evaluation. Through the evolutionary prism one would look at things as adaptive or maladaptive and I'm certain that a 'simple' creature with 'advanced' eyes would be seen to be very adaptive on the whole.

P 30 ¶ 5: The term 'devolution' is a complete misrepresentation evolution does not necessarily lead to more complexity but rather to better adaption to the environment. In fact when one considers the fact that resources are no longer being wasted on building and maintaining a vestigial organ it certainly seems like a sensible change (I use the word sensible hesitantly).

P 30 ¶ 6: Although there may be residual uses for what are commonly considered vestigial organs this is in fact still proof of evolution in the sense that the organ has undergone functional shift which Comfort completely ignored the idea of earlier. There are still good examples of vestigial organs or 'vestigial' body plans such as the recurrent laryngeal nerve.

P 31 ¶ 2-3: I really don't understand this argument; is it meant to counter evolution or the big-bang theory? The fact that humans can't create something from nothing stems from the conservation of mass. This doesn't disprove the big-bang theory either since (according to my understanding) nothing other than speculation has been done about what existed at times previous to one plank time after the big bang, although work is being done in that direction. But more to the point, evolution and abiogenesis are separate issues and they both conserve mass.

P 31-39: First of all whether or not Darwin's other ideas about the world were wrong is of no relevance to the truth of his theory of evolution. Secondly the application of Darwinian ideas outside of the scope of biology indeed show the danger of not truly understanding Darwin's ideas. Also, the historical context of any scientist must be taken into account, not as a justification for bad ideas, but rather to understand why an otherwise reasonable person would hold other unreasonable beliefs. It is known that Newton practiced alchemy and looked for biblical codes, but nobody discredits calculus for that.

P 39 ¶ 2: Darwin's views on religion are irrelevant to its acceptance among atheists. Furthermore there is a strong correlation between atheism and acceptance of evolution, but there is no causal link. Atheism is only a response to theism and therefore has no dogma or set of beliefs that all atheists should hold. The same is true for morality.

P 39 ¶ 3: Comfort playing atheists-advocate isn't very convincing. No reasonable person claims that everything came from nothing and he doesn't clarify if he means this in the cosmological or biological sense. The fact that Comfort can't conceive of how the universe could start or how abiogenesis could occur is by no means a refutation of those ideas.

P 39 ¶ 4: Things may appear to be designed or too perfectly fined tuned for life to exist, but it has to be kept in mind that as humans we are very prone to seeing patterns and 'design' when they don't exist. The idea that the universe is so finely tuned for life only exists in our minds because there are minds to think about it.

P 40 ¶ 1 &3: Argumentum ad populum: a lot of people can believe some very silly ideas, we just have to look at history for examples.

P 40 ¶ 4: Religious scientists is more a sign of the time and god-of-the-gaps approach rather than a benefit to science. Keep in mind the church actively worked against many of the scientists listed.

P 40 ¶ 6: Getting from intelligent designer to the god of the Bible is an impossible task in my view because any intelligent designer can only be judged on the merit of the designs. These designs do not point to a three-O god.

P 41-46: Comfort judges which religion is correct based on ideas from the Bible (Why would a Buddhist be worried about the "reality of hell"). I also find it interesting how he leaves out Judaism since his stupid analogy doesn't really work if that were included. His critiques of other religion's approaches to the 'leap' try to use common sense arguments about why their ideas are ridiculous, but says nothing about their truth value.

Faith vs. Evidence

2009-09-22T08:35:00.000-07:00

One of the Christians that was arguing with me while I was passing out flyers yesterday was was saying things like "it requires a huge amount of faith to accept that the big bang happened... to accept that we all started from a single celled organism... what do you think about that, atheist?? God could have created the earth five seconds ago, and could have planted the evidence that the earth is 5 billion years old! Isn't God awesome??"

No, it doesn't require any faith to accept those scientific findings, since we have evidence for them. Masses of evidence. What requires tons of faith to accept is the claim that an all-powerful supernatural being created the universe and cares about what we think about him/her/it and plays a role in everyone's life, and has human needs and emotions, and that all this is explained in a book written thousands of years ago by desert nomads. It's evidence vs. the Genie theory of everything.

This new video from Qualiasoup tackles this misunderstanding of what it means to have evidence as opposed to having faith in something.

Cameron and Comfort Giving Tainted Copies of Darwin's Origin

2009-09-16T22:36:00.000-07:00

Kirk Cameron and Ray Comfort (of banana fame), evangelical Christian propagandists who love to lie for Jesus - to others and to themselves (how do they really believe the things they say?) - have decided to release a "150th Anniversary Edition" of Charles Darwin's On The Origin of Species. The special edition will contain a 50-page introduction by Comfort arguing that Darwin's theory isn't sound, that the theory included racism against black people, that his theory was responsible for Hitler's genocide of millions of people during the Holocaust, and other disgraceful lies. Comfort uses those fifty pages to list some of the silliest non-arguments, red herrings, and propaganda that creationists have come up with. Hopefully they didn't alter the actual text of Origin, but I wouldn't put it past them.

You can read the 50 page introduction here: link (pdf)

The tag team is going to be handing out 50,000 free copies of the book on 50 campuses in the US in an effort to promote Jesus Brand™ scientific illiteracy, and yes, apparently they're coming to UCSB!

Read more...

So what do we do? I like the idea of going to the campus distributors and getting as many copies of the book as possible. If we take as many of the books out of circulation as we can, it might make some difference.

A number of campuses will undoubtedly be holding counter-tabling efforts.

Maybe I have too much faith in the intellect of today's university students, but I don't think this will be a huge deal. The ideal reaction of someone picking up the book and reading the intro would be laughter - some of the arguments in the intro are just so ridiculous that they're actually entertaining to read. This introduction is a joke, and should become one of many laughing stocks left by Kirk and Ray. It might even prove to be a catalyst of rational thought: if students have never heard of the Banana Man, this is their chance to see how low these two will stoop to spread their virus of ignorance.

On the other hand, the cynical side of my mind is making me worry about what will happen if my fellow uni students aren't as bright as I'd hoped. Will they actually be convinced by a foreword? I hope not.

I see this as an act of vandalism that will be forgotten for the most part. It will probably be promoted by students who were already convinced of these falsehoods, derided by those who know anything about evolution and science, and ignored by those who don't care.

Pharyngula: Protect the sanctity of heterosexual marriage!

2009-09-11T21:23:00.000-07:00

Here's a great post by PZ Myers that really hits the nail on the head. I'm sure it's been said by others, but I always love PZ's style. Go read it and laugh and be angry at the same time.

Protect the sanctity of heterosexual marriage! @ Pharyngula

More great stuff from RDF TV

2009-07-17T12:08:00.000-07:00

RDF TV is off to such a great start that I think it's worth posting about it twice in a row! They have a few new videos that are basically Richard Dawkins explaining some common misconceptions and "arguments" against evolution, which he of course does a nice job on. They're like knowledge nuggets.

I'm really liking the accessibility of these little videos - easy to grasp, easy to link to, and short.

Go to the RDF TV page at RichardDawkins.net to see the new vids.

RDF TV: The Baloney Detection Kit

2009-06-25T11:33:00.000-07:00

The Richard Dawkins Foundation has released its first RDF TV video, The Baloney Detection Kit, in which Michael Shermer of Skeptic Magazine describes the ten point skepticism kit:

RDF TV is off to a great start! This is a nice little kit for examining claims using a scientific and skeptical toolbox, together with good commentary from Shermer.

This kind of reasoning is a very important skill to practice, especially with the all too commonplace "baloney" being slung at consumers and other targets touting miracle supplements, magnet cures, other alternative medicines, free energy, intelligent design, etc.

Too cool not to post: Darwinius masillae

2009-05-26T18:33:00.000-07:00

This is a photo of the fossilized remains of a juvenile lemur-like creature that died about 47 million years ago. The bones are present and preserved in the death position in great detail. And see the dark outline around the skeleton? That's where the flesh used to be. How awesome is that? There was even some food matter found inside.

PZ has a nice write-up at Pharyngula, so read through that too. For me, it's just really cool that it's so well preserved that you can basically look back in time at this 47 MILLION year-old ancestor of ours.

Welcome to the SURE blog!

2009-05-23T18:35:00.000-07:00

This is the new blog portion of the new site for UCSB's secular / freethought / atheist / agnostic campus group - Scientific Understanding and Reason Enrichment. This blog is meant as a supplement to the main site. Hopefully it can be a place where officers and maybe other members can share interesting ideas and opinions, like a regular blog for the general group.

More stuff to come!

Edit: I've imported all the posts from Faithless (our old blog) below. There are plenty of great posts from that blog - read through for some interesting and informative stuff! I've added attributions to all the original authors at the top of each post.

The New Year is Here

2008-09-26T19:42:00.000-07:00

Posted by Matt Homer

Wooo! The new school year started this week. Welcome back all returning students and welcome to all you damn dirty freshmen. We have a lot of stuff planned for this coming year.

Meetings will be held every Wednesday at 6 pm in Building 387 Room #101. The first meeting will be next Wednesday October 1st.

First up SURE films is presenting Monty Python's The Life of Brian on Friday October 17th at 6 pm in the Student Resource Building (SRB) multipurpose room.

The next month in Conjunction with the Secular Student Alliance and the Freedom From Religion Foundation SURE presents Dan Barker Co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation and author of Losing Faith In Faith: From Preacher To Atheist and Godless: How an Evangelical Preacher Became One of America's Leading Atheists. Dan will kick off his west coast university speaking tour at UCSB on November 12th at Embarcadero Hall.

As SURE is a community service organization we are planning two events for fall quarter. We will be having a beach cleanup at some point and we are planning on volunteering at a soup kitchen downtown. We did both last year and had tons of fun.

Also on the horizon is Darwin Week next February for which we are planning a few special events.

This quarter is going to be a lot of fun, we look to have a lot of new people and I hope to see many of you at the meetings.

Hollywood Palin

2008-09-11T16:50:00.000-07:00

Posted by Collin

I came across this article today.

American Taliban

2008-08-30T19:35:00.000-07:00

Posted by Matt Homer

Via PZ Myers at Pharyngula comes a story about "Joel's Army" a quasi militia looking to set up a Christian Taliban in America. Disappointingly the majority of the followers of this dominionist nutbag are young. It also seems that Sarah Palin's church is connected to them. More below.

Read more...

These guys seem almost too crazy to be true. I'm mostly going to let them speak for them selves.

In fact, what takes place onstage at the Florida Outpouring looks more like a pro wrestling extravaganza than church. On stage, Bentley and his team of pastors, yell, chant, and scream "Fire!" and "Bam!" while anointing followers.

Not all that suprising to anyone who's been to a pentacostal church.

Joel's Army followers believe that once democratic institutions are overthrown, their hierarchy of apostles and prophets will rule over the earth, with one church per city.

...

According to Joel's Army doctrine, the enforcers of the five-fold ministry will be members of the final generation, for whom the landmark Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade constituted a new Passover.

...

"Everyone born after abortion's legalization can consider their birth a personal invitation to take part in this great army," writes John Crowder, another prominent Joel's Army pastor, who bills his 2006 book, The New Mystics: How to Become Part of the Supernatural Generation, as a literal how-to guide for joining Joel's Army.

"As the church begins to take on this resolve, they [Joel's Army churches] will start to be thought of more as military bases, and they will begin to take on the characteristics of military bases for training, equipping, and deploying effective spiritual forces," Joyner wrote. "In time, the church will actually be organized more as a military force with an army, navy, air force, etc."

In a sort of disclaimer, Joyner writes at one point that God's army "will bring love, peace and stability wherever they go." But several of his books narrate with glee what he describes as "a coming civil war within the church." In his 1997 book The Harvest he writes: "Some pastors and leaders who continue to resist this tide of unity will be removed from their place. Some will become so hardened they will become opposers and resist God to the end."

Two years later, in his book The Final Quest, Joyner described a vision (taken as prophecy in the Joel's Army world, where Joyner is considered an "apostle") of the coming Christian Civil War in which demon-possessed Christian soldiers enslave other, weaker Christians who resist them. He also describes how the hero of the novel -- himself -- ascends a "Holy Mountain" in order to learn new truths and to acquire new, magic weapons.

...

Michael Barkun, a leading scholar of radical religion, notes that in 1958, Branham began teaching "Serpent Seed" doctrine, the belief that Satan had sex with Eve, resulting in Cain and his descendants. "Through Cain came all the smart, educated people down to the antediluvian flood -- the intellectuals, bible colleges," Branham wrote in the kind of anti-mainstream religion, anti-intellectual spirit that pervades the Joel's Army movement to this day. "They know all their creeds but know nothing about God."

...

According to Gruen's report, students at the school were taught that they were a "super-race" of the "elected seed" of all the best bloodlines of all generations -- foreknown, predestined, and hand-selected from billions of others to be part of the "end-time Omega generation."

...

one that is still frequently cited by Joel's Army followers: "Those in this army will have His kind of power. ... Anyone who wants to harm them must die."

Jesus Christ. The whole article is well worth the read. It is almost unfathomable to me that these people can actually believe this, but then I think back and realize I've been to churches like this back when I was a believer. I suppose it should come as no suprise that the people behind Jesus Camp are affiliated with these nuts.

One more quote:

"Some people snort cocaine, others snort religions," Joel's Army Pastor Roy said while ministering a morning program at Todd Bentley's Lakeland, Fla., revival in late May.

Pander McPanderson Chooses a Creationist for VP

2008-08-29T14:48:00.000-07:00

Posted by Matt Homer

John McCain has chosen Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate. Not that I had high hopes for the McCain campaign, but I had hoped the man who called Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson agents of intolerance wouldn't have chosen a fundamentalist as his running mate. Alas Palin is an extremely conservative fundamentalist who supports the teaching of creationism in public schools.

In unrelated political news Senator Elizabeth Dole (R-NC) attacks democratic opponant Kay Hagan for attending a fundraiser hosted by non-believers. Read more at The Friendly Atheist.

Evolving the Winning (and Losing) Stance

2008-08-24T14:34:00.000-07:00

Posted by Garrick Garcia

Today being the end of Bejing’s awesome Olympic debut, I’d like to add a little science to what Olympic viewers might like to know: winning and losing poses are evolved human behaviors.

A recent study reported earlier this month that the poses us humans strike when we win(arms in the air, head thrown back, and a puffed out chest), and lose(shoulders slumped inward and a narrowed chest) are found in all humans and are not culturally induced.

The study documented the behaviors of winning and losing athletes during the 2004 Olympic and Paralympic games among sighted people, those born blind, and those who became blind later in life. They found throughout all of them, that their behaviors were very similar.

There was a difference among whether or not certain cultures chose to display their reactions though. Sighted athletes in Western cultures that value individualism would less likely exhibit behaviors of shame in losing, probably because westerners are taught to withdraw from showing shame. Those cultures who value collectivism, like many Asian countries, still do and are taught to show behaviors of an Olympic fail.

The report shows that those who were blind at birth had no way of learning how to react to a win or a loss, and that their reactions must have been naturally authentic. Their behaviors demonstrate that how we react is a part of human nature.

The winning pose, exhibiting the expansion of the body, lets others know that you are bigger than you appear and establishes your victory with a display of dominance. It shows that you are powerful and in control; this behavior would have been selected for over the course of human evolution to display success.

The losing pose, having a shrunken, closed body, demonstrates that you’ve recognized your loss and are submissive to those around you. Admitting that you just messed up and are willing to submit to others could have been selected for, as dominance is such an important factor. A display of shame had become a trait all humans can show.

This isn’t just for us sapiens either; the other primates have shown this just as well. Chimps also sport the inflated look of power and deflated look of shame in their dominance displays, but studies have yet to be done on what exact behaviors lead to their displays.

With the Bejing Olympic Games now at a close, look for the poses athletes strike in their moments of glory or defeat, and know that it’s just another thing that makes all similar. It truly is a fascinating thought that evolutionary behaviors can somewhat unite us as a species, whether we win or lose.

Credited article to LiveScience, and Emilee Wong for telling me.

Idiot Wind

2008-08-20T23:57:00.000-07:00

Posted by Matt Homer

Today's* lesson in absurdity comes via Dennis Prager at WingNut Daily. I really need to stay way from this site; every time I go there I end up really pissy all night. Reading through this abortion of an argument I ended up pounding my palm into my face every other sentence. I his article Prager gives "14" reasons why it would be bad if there is no god, in reality these reasons boil down 7 basic objections and a big fat argumentum ad consequentiam. More below the fold.

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Lets get started. Bonus exercise see if you can count how many logical fallacies appear in the article.

What one almost never hears described are the deleterious consequences of secularism – the terrible developments that have accompanied the breakdown of traditional religion and belief in God. For every thousand students who learn about the Spanish Inquisition and the Salem Witch Trials, maybe two learn to associate Gulag, Auschwitz, the Cultural Revolution and the Cambodian genocide with secular regimes and ideologies.

Can Christians please come up with some with some new arguments? Please? This canard has been dealt with innumerable times. Richard Dawkins covers it effectively in The God Delusion. Christopher Hitchens demolishes it in God Is Not Great. Sam Harris debunked it in The End Of Faith, then, when Christians missed the point and brought it up he covered it again in the afterword to the paperback edition. I'll deal with it in more depth a little bit later.

For all the problems associated with belief in God, the death of God leads to far more of them.

That remains to be seen.

Without God, there is no good and evil; there are only subjective opinions that we then label "good" and "evil." This does not mean that an atheist cannot be a good person. Nor does it mean that all those who believe in God are good; there are good atheists and there are bad believers in God. It simply means that unless there is a moral authority that transcends humans from which emanates an objective right and wrong, "right" and "wrong" no more objectively exist than do "beautiful" and "ugly."

Really? You're gonna open with that? The Euthyphro dilemma was first put forward by Plato; basically Socrates asks "Is that which is good commanded by God because it's good, or is it good because God commands it?" The dilemma shows us that morality dictated by a god is just as arbitrary as the relative morality decried by Prager and his ilk. The fact that the Buddha and Confucius had conceptions of the golden rule and other moral precepts five hundred years prior to the life of Jesus and with no exposure to Judeo-Christian writings or philosophy stands in stark contrast to Prager's claim. In addition there is relatively new research in to the evolutionary origins of morality. These evolutionary origins are a very interesting topic that deserves a post of its own at some other time. Suffice it to say that god did it is not a sufficient explanation for proto-morality in great apes.

Without God, there is no objective meaning to life. We are all merely random creations of natural selection whose existence has no more intrinsic purpose or meaning than that of a pebble equally randomly produced.

This is true enough, I could facetiously say that our purpose in life is to pass on our genes with as little error as possible, but that is not what Prager means. Prager is appealing to the worst solipsism in our nature, claiming that we need to be special - the universe was created with me in mind. This is simply vanity; the universe couldn't care less if you live or die, if you fail or achieve, if are good or bad. That scares people, they want to be important, they want to make a difference. And they do. We have an impact on the people we encounter in our lives, and isn't that enough? We make our own purpose in life and that's fine. For more on this subject check out this essay by Penn Jillette.

Life is ultimately a tragic fare if there is no God. We live, we suffer, we die – some horrifically, many prematurely – and there is only oblivion afterward.

Somebody call the whambulance. Do you really want to live forever, doing nothing but praising god forever? As Christopher Hitchens says a "Celestial North Korea." Ya it sucks that some people die early, get over it. Its only the people who survive that care. To quote/paraphrase Epicurus:

Why should I fear death? When I am, death is not. When death is, I am not. Why should I fear that which cannot exist when I do?

These words really struck me the first time I heard them and I haven't been afraid of death since then. I don't want to die but I will and that's ok.

Human beings need instruction manuals. This is as true for acting morally and wisely as it is for properly flying an airplane. One's heart is often no better a guide to what is right and wrong than it is to the right and wrong way to fly an airplane. The post-religious secular world claims to need no manual; the heart and reason are sufficient guides to leading a good life and to making a good world.

This is basically the same point as number two and it didn't become any more cogent the second time around. We are evolutionarily programmed to be able to survive - just like any other animal. Homo sapiens has been a distinct species on this planet at least 100,000 years and maybe as long as 250,000 years; Judaism has been around 6,000 years at most, Christianity 2000. Humanity survived for 194,000 years without some Judeo-Christian instruction manual we can do it again.

If there is no God, the kindest and most innocent victims of torture and murder have no better a fate after death than do the most cruel torturers and mass murderers. Only if there is a good God do Mother Teresa and Adolf Hitler have different fates.

Hey this looks familiar, oh its the same as point three and its still irrelevant(this is going to be a recurring theme). If you read the Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice by Christopher Hitchens you might come to the conclusion that Mother Teresa is vastly over praised and not deserving of the respect she gets. Regardless it doesn't matter, death is final accept it and be happy, enjoy the one life you do get.

With the death of Judeo-Christian values in the West, many Westerners believe in little. That is why secular Western Europe has been unwilling and therefore unable to confront evil, whether it was Communism during the Cold War or Islamic totalitarians in its midst today.

Please. Some of the most famous atheists in the world are very loud in their condemnation of Islamic extremism. Christopher Hitchens is one of the biggest warhawks around and led a demonstration in support of the Danish cartoonists. Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Sam Harris are also staunch critics of Islam. I do agree that often times liberals are unwilling to criticize Islam to the degree that it should, but these tend to be liberal Christians, and even President Bush is quick to say that Islam is a religion of peace, and that we are only fighting the extremists in it.

Without God, people in the West often become less, not more, rational. It was largely the secular, not the religious, who believed in the utterly irrational doctrine of Marxism. It was largely the secular, not the religious, who believed that men's and women's natures are basically the same, that perceived differences between the sexes are all socially induced. Religious people in Judeo-Christian countries largely confine their irrational beliefs to religious beliefs (theology), while the secular, without religion to enable the non-rational to express itself, end up applying their irrational beliefs to society, where such irrationalities do immense harm.

Wow. Abandoning irrational religious beliefs makes people more irrational. Also religious people don't inject their irrationality in to society? George Bush thinking God is telling him to invade Iraq isn't doing immense harm? The position of the Catholic Church on contraception is one of the most harmful beliefs in the world today. In sub-saharan Africa where huge swaths of the population are infected with HIV the Catholic clergy lies to people saying condoms don't prevent HIV and that AIDS is a conspiracy to kill blacks. Millions of people hear them spew these lies, often times in remote villages where the clergy is the only authority on contraception. Because of the lies that these people spew millions of people have been infected and millions more will become infected and die from HIV. The story is nearly identical here in the U.S. where religiously motivated politicians are blocking research involving stem cells - research that could save thousands of lives and alleviate the suffering of millions more here in the U.S. And Dennis Prager has the gall to say that religious people are more rational than non-religious people.

If there is no God, the human being has no free will. He is a robot whose every action is dictated by genes and environment. Only if one posits human creation by a Creator that transcends genes and environment who implanted the ability to transcend genes and environment can humans have free will.

This has to be a joke. Free will is impossible in a world with a being such as the Abrahamic god. By definition an omnipotent and omniscient being would know everything past present and future. Meaning that the future is set and there is no free will.

If there is no God, humans and "other" animals are of equal value. Only if one posits that humans, not animals, are created in the image of God do humans have any greater intrinsic sanctity than baboons. This explains the movement among the secularized elite to equate humans and animals.

Why put other in scare quotes? We are animals and there is nothing wrong with that. Most behavior expressed in humans is also expressed in many animals. We see proto-morality in both great apes and cetaceans. We see language abilities in Gorilla who learn sign language and Orcas have distinct dialogues in their speech patterns broken down by pods. We are not all that far off from many animals and that does raise some ethical questions with regards to their treatment. Note one behavior exhibited in humans that to the best of my knowledge does not appear in the animal kingdom - war.

Without God, there is little to inspire people to create inspiring art. That is why contemporary art galleries and museums are filled with "art" that celebrates the scatological, the ugly and the shocking. Compare this art to Michelangelo's art in the Sistine Chapel. The latter elevates the viewer – because Michelangelo believed in something higher than himself and higher than all men

Without God, nothing is holy. This is definitional. Holiness emanates from a belief in the holy. This explains, for example, the far more widespread acceptance of public cursing in secular society than in religious society. To the religious, there is holy speech and profane speech. In much of secular society, the very notion of profane speech is mocked.

Atheists can't create art? Berlioz (Life of Berlioz, 1903, p. 298) didn't create art? Brahms (Letters of J. Brahms: The Hersogenberg Correspondence, English translation 1909) Bizet? John Lennon? Pink Floyd? This is the same asinine crap as the instruction manual from number four.

Without God, humanist hubris is almost inevitable. If there is nothing higher than man, no Supreme Being, man becomes the supreme being.

With or with out god religious hubris is a given. It is somewhat poetic that the man who was just whining about how humans have to be special and set apart from animals is going to accuse someone else of hubris. This man claims to know the mind of a god, to know who this god character wants you to sleep with, what you are supposed to eat, how you are supposed worship, and that this god cares about him personally; and hes going to talk about arrogance?

Without God, there are no inalienable human rights. Evolution confers no rights. Molecules confer no rights. Energy has no moral concerns. That is why America's founders wrote in the Declaration of Independence that we are endowed "by our Creator" with certain inalienable rights. Rights depend upon a moral source, a rights giver.

I have to be honest here, I don't really have an understanding of the philosophy involved in this question. So here is a collection of essays on morality and atheism.

"Without God," Dostoevsky famously wrote, "all is permitted." There has been plenty of evil committed by believers in God, but the widespread cruelties and the sheer number of innocents murdered by secular regimes – specifically Nazi, Fascist and Communist regimes – dwarfs the evil done in the name of religion.

Here Prager opens with Dostoevsky's famous quote. There is just one problem with that: Dostoevsky never actually wrote it. It is an accurate description of the philosophy espoused by Ivan Karamazov in Brothers Karamazov, but Ivan admits in the book that he doesn't really believe this, and it is unclear if Dostoevsky actually believed it either. Not that relevant but still, can we have some fact checking?

Speaking of fact checking, Prager's ignorance of history is almost embarrassing. To call fascism a secular ideology is abjectly false. Fascism was, if anything, a movement of the Roman Catholic right wing in Europe and later in Latin America. Mussolini, Franco, Pavelić (Croatia), and Pinochet were all practicing Catholics in majority Catholic countries. Hell Andrej Hlinka, the leader of the fascist movement in Slovakia, was an ordained Catholic priest. The fascist movement as a whole had a close relationship with the Vatican. This is not to say that the Catholicism in these countries was the cause of fascism and the brutality associated with it (with the exception of Croatia where religion probably played the major role). There were numerous economic and nationalistic factors that also played major roles in the turmoil of the time. My point is a) fascism was certainly not a secular ideology and b) the religiosity of those countries did nothing to mitigate the atrocity.

Of particular note is the extreme brutality of the Ustaše regime in Croatia. The Ustaše engaged in a brutal campaign of persecution against the orthodox Serbs that lived in Croatia. Estimates range from 300,000 to 700,000 Serbs murdered, with another 250,000 forcibly expelled from Croatia, and a further 250,000 forced to convert to Catholicism. The brutality of the Ustaše regime was so extreme that the German army officers stationed in Croatia were stunned by the horror.

The Catholic clergy was also complicit in the smuggling of war criminals, such as Klaus Barbie and Dr. Joseph Mengele, out of postwar Europe and into South America where they would aid the brutal dictators of that region during the 1970's.

Nazi Germany was a more complex situation. Adolf Hitler was most certainly not an atheist. However it is not fair to call him a Christian. Hitler's beliefs were a mash up of the Catholicism he was raised in, the Lutheranism that was prevalent in Germany, and Aryan blood myths.

Now, Stalin probably was an atheist, and he did engage in persecutions of religious groups in the Soviet Union. However, as is often the case there are multiple factors to consider. First we have to look at the context of the Soviet Union in the 1930's. Russia was not that far removed from the brutality of the Tsarist government; a government that was among the most brutal in history. In Tsarist Russia the Russian Orthodox church controlled massive amounts of money and land. The Tsar ruled by divine right and was considered to be something a little more than human. After the Bolsheviks took over they engaged in systematic persecution of the Russian Orthodox Church because the church was a threat to them, other religious groups also got caught in that net. It is also worth noting that Stalin's atheism was very different from the rational atheism of Richard Dawkins. For example Stalin rejected Darwin's Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection as too capitalistic. In summation Stalin was an atheist who committed great atrocities, but he committed those atrocities in the name of communism not atheism.

All that said, this article is just a big fat red herring. None of the arguments put forward by Prager are at all relevant to the question of the existence of any god, much less the existence of the specific god of his choosing.

As noted at the beginning, none of this proves, or even necessarily argues for, God's existence. It makes the case for the necessity, not the existence, of God.

Oh so you know that, and yet you still wrote the article. Even if every point he made were true; it wouldn't mean a damn thing. To quote the great Bob Dylan, "You're an idiot babe, its a wonder that you still know how to breathe."

Hat tip to The Atheist Experience for pointing me to this steaming pile of stupidity.

* The article is actually a couple of days old, I started writing this the day it came out but my abstract algebra midterm today got in the way.

Bigfoot in Your Mouth

2008-08-20T16:24:00.000-07:00

Posted by Garrick Garcia

In the past couple of months, there’s been a lot of buzz in the world of Bigfoot sightings and urban myth. Two figureheads in the quest to find Bigfoot, Matt Whitton and Rick Dyer, announced on YouTube in July that a full carcass of a species known as the legendary Bigfoot was discovered, encased in a block of ice.

“Everyone who has talked down to us is going to eat their words," Whitton said at the time.

Just days ago, the supposed “evidence” for Bigfoot was thawed out, revealing that it was nothing more than a rubber gorilla suit. I haven’t heard of any comment from Whitton or Dyer about the failed discovery of a Bigfoot.

This raises more eyebrows about the search for such urban legend and modern mythological creatures. There’s been none or such little scientific evidence for the existence of such creatures like Bigfoot, Loch Ness, and others, and still many people are so intrigued with the idea and so adamant about discovering their existence.

These kinds of things grasp our imagination and our quest for discovery. Unfortunately, because they’ve come close to things we already know, human ancestors and dinosaurs respectively, Bigfoot and Loch Ness come close to being real. Close, but not enough to be. Our minds love to make interesting things out of nothing, compelling us to see what we want. Loch Ness turned out to be a piece of driftwood, or flock of birds. Bigfoot turned out to be a man in a hairy costume, or a frozen gorilla suit.

I really don’t see why they’re that interesting in the first place. They’re cool ideas I guess, but the world and universe we already know is much more fascinating! These urban legends might’ve more interesting if they actually had some substantial evidence, but after all these attempts, none has shown up.

What’s really interesting here, are those who dedicate their lives to chasing after fairy tales. It really is quite sad and desperate, and I’d be a little more sympathetic if I weren’t snickering at how ridiculous it all is.

A rubber gorilla suit, hahaha!

Credited article to Time.

Pumping in Prayer

2008-08-20T15:11:00.000-07:00

Posted by Garrick Garcia

So there’s been a recent sharp drop in U.S. gas prices, from an average of $4.00 a gallon to $3.80. I guess that’s a pretty big drop, and Rocky Twyman knows just how it happened.

Twyman, 59, started the group Pray at the Pump back in April, holding meetings nationwide at gas stations to hold hands and pray for lower gas prices. Celebrating their success, the group sang "We shall overcome," changing the words of the hymn to "We'll have lower gas prices".

"We don't have anybody else to turn to but God," Twyman told the BBC. "We have
to turn these problems over to God and not to man."

It really is a shame that they’ve given up on human endeavors, turning to an invisible someone who’s failed billions of times before.

The group is quite confident that market forces had nothing to do with lowering gas prices, and that it was their actions that caused the drop. Prayer at the Pump will continue their meetings in hopes to reduce gas prices even further.

"We believe not just in prayer - because we believe that faith without works is
dead. So we've encouraged people to car-pool more and organize their days more,
because it's a combination of faith with these other factors."

But wait, didn’t they just say man couldn’t solve these problems? Never mind, at least they’re trying.

Well, isn’t that just dandy? I guess prayer must really work! Or not! I wonder why god couldn’t have reduced gas prices down to an even lower price! Why not make it free and create an abundance of fuel? Also, I’m sure there were fluctuations in price between April and now, what took god so long? Maybe they had bad reception.

This all just shows a shining example that if you pray and you get the result you want, you may rejoice in how much it “worked,” given that it something that actually may happen with or without your dialogue with they sky. If you don’t get what you want, your prayers just aren’t being “answered” right away and you keep on truckin’. Either way, you win.

If someone’s going to pray for some solution to fuels, maybe someone should pray for an unlimited, clean, and free source of energy. Then, if it falls out of the sky, maybe I’ll reconsider about the effects of prayer.

Credited article to the BBC.

Score One For the Good Guys

2008-08-15T17:15:00.000-07:00

Posted by Matt Homer

Federal judge in Los Angeles issues summary judgement in a lawsuit against the University of California. The suit was filed by Calvary Chapel Christian School. They claimed that the University's rejection of their courses amounted to a violation of their students first amendment rights under the free exercise clause. Several courses were excluded such as " Christianity's Influence on America" supposedly a college prepatory U.S. history class.

For instance, a UC professor who reviewed Calvary's proposed Christianity's Influence on America class said the course used a textbook that "instructs that the Bible is the unerring source for analysis of historical events," "attributes historical events to divine providence rather than analyzing human action," and "contains inadequate treatment of several major ethnic groups, women and non-Christian religious groups."

Also rejected was a biology course. From the introduction to the textbook used in the class:

Biology for Christian Schools is a textbook for Bible-believing high-school students. Those who do not believe that the Bible is the inspired, inerrant Word of God will find many points in this book puzzling. This book was not written for them.

Wait the facts of biology change based on whether you are a Bible believing Christian or not? The authors of the textbook betray themselves in the very first paragraph of the introduction. If the information presented in the book were true then it would apply to everyone. More:

The people who prepared this book have tried consistently to put the Word of God first and science second. Paul exhorts Christians to live to live in such a way that "in all things [Jesus Christ] might have the preeminence" (Col. 1:18). To the best of the authors' knowlege, the conclusions drawn from observable facts and presented in this book agree with scriptures. If ... at any point God's Word is not put first, the authors apologize.

Wow. Theres not much I can say to make them look anymore rediculous, so i'll let them speak for themselves.

Some of the conclusions a Christian must reach differ from those expressed by secular sources.

No. This is disgusting from a "science" book. This supposed science class runs completely in opposition to what science is supposed to be. In science you should take the facts and let them lead you to a conclusion, some Christians (i.e. intelligent design creationists) take a conclusion and try to manipulate the facts to fit their conclusion. These clowns toss the facts out completely and assert their conclusion.

The same encyclopedia article may state that the grasshopper evolved 300 million years ago. You may find a description of some insect that the grasshopper supposedly evolved from and a description of the insects that scientists say evolved from the grasshopper. You may even find a "scientific" explanation of the biblical locust (grasshopper) plague in Egypt. These statements are conclusions based on "supposed science." If the conclusions contradict the Word of God, the conclusions are wrong, no matter how many scientific facts may appear to back them.

Translation: "LALALALALA I'M NOT LISTENING LALALALALA."

Lets see what Robert Tyler, attorney for the plaintiffs, has to say.

Tyler said he fears schools will become afraid to teach from a Christian perspective.

"We're worried in the long term, Christian education is going to be continually watered down in order to satisfy the UC school system," he said.

You mean they can't lie to their children anymore? Dear god what next? Actual facts in science class?

As a student who regularly gets screwed over by the UC adminstraion (hooray for tuition hikes) I can sympathize with Mr. Tyler. Just kidding this "education" they provide is such a huge joke; I'm forced to take the side of the UC administration... I feel so dirty.

Check out missingthepoint for more detailed legal analysis.

Go Gauchos

2008-08-14T21:26:00.000-07:00

Posted by Matt Homer

UCSB alum swims greatest anchor ever.

Christians Demand Removal of Ten Commanments

2008-07-30T00:24:00.000-07:00

Oh wait, "satanic" ten commandments.

Posted by Matt Homer

Wingnutdaily brings us the story of a Christian group called The Resistance, and their crusade to take down the Georgia Guidestones. Browsing the website of The Resistance reveals them to be a kooky mix of 9/11 truth, new world order conspiracy crap, and Christian fundamentalism - pretty much a perfect storm of self-delusion. Normally considering the source I would just ignore this, but the story does give some insight into the kind of thinking that allows people to believe this stuff. The comedic value is pretty high too. Continued below the fold.

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"We have atheists and Satanists getting the Bible's Ten Commandments removed from public property," said Mark Dice, spokesman for the group The Resistance, "yet the satanic Georgia Guidestones have stood for decades, and nobody seems to care. Well, we do."

Lets look and see exactly what these "satanic" commandments are.

Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.
Guide reproduction wisely – improving fitness and diversity.
Unite humanity with a living new language.
Rule passion – faith – tradition – and all things with tempered reason.
Protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts.
Let all nations rule internally resolving external disputes in a world court.
Avoid petty laws and useless officials.
Balance personal rights with social duties.
Prize truth – beauty – love – seeking harmony with the infinite.
Be not a cancer on the Earth – leave room for nature – leave room for nature.

Ok. The first two unnerve me a little bit because of the potential pitfalls of eugenics, but in principle they would make for a sustainable society and go a long way towards preserving the environment. The rest of the stuff seems innocent enough, though for all intents and purposes most of them are impossible in our society. I'm having a hard time seeing where Mr. Dice gets satanic out of that.

If I were to be charitable and assume that Mr. Dice actually understands what LaVeyan Satanism is and what it represents, then describing the monument as satanic is tenuous at best.

LaVeyan Satanism favors indulgence over abstinence, and emphasizes individualism. Thus the statement "Balance personal rights with social duties" does not fit into a satanic philosophy. Some of the other "commandments" such as "Avoid petty laws and useless officials" do fit into a satanic worldview, but that is almost universally accepted. Except by useless officials and petty lawmakers of course.

I am going to assume that Mr. Dice does not understand LaVeyan Satanism and he actually meant people who worship the biblical Satan. The Satan of the bible is a creature of destruction and discord, its hard to see where guidelines towards living in harmony with nature fit in with that. It seems most likely to me that Mr. Dice simply assumes anything that doesn't fit within his fundamentalist worldview is the work of the devil and thus satanic.

All that said, even if this guy is a wacked out conspiracy theorist it doesn't mean hes wrong about removing the monument. Religious symbols should not be on public land. I don't know if this monument should be considered religious or not. It seems to be some kind of vague new-agey type of deal that may or may not qualify as a religious symbol. However, the establishment clause of the first amendment is one of the most important principles in the constitution, so we should err on the side of caution and not put anything remotely religious on public land.

Dice told WND his group is contacting officials of the Elberton community, trying to rally citizens of the town to pressure their leaders and hoping to generate grassroots opposition from around the country. Since the land the monument sits upon is owned by a private trust and is not public property, Dice said, the battle against the monument will have to take place in the court of public opinion, rather than a court of law.

Oh.

Coming Soon!

2008-07-29T16:31:00.000-07:00

Posted by Matt Homer

The official blog of Scientific Understanding and Reason Enrichment, a student group at the University of California Santa Barbara promoting free thought, skepticism, and community service. Regular posting will pick up as the school year approaches.