Photograph by Jim Norton. Photography contest, Honorable Mention. Sarcodes sanguinea – snow plant, a saprophytic plant with no chlorophyll. King’s Canyon National Park, California, July 3, 2010.... Matt Young http://www.mines.edu/~mmyoung

5 reasons atheists shouldn't call religion a mental illness
Religion News Service
A few days ago, in a post on faith healing, American Atheists president Dave Silverman wrote: “We must recognize religion as brainwashing. We must recognize the (hyper) religious as mentally damaged.” He's not the first to equate religion with mental ...

Christian News Network
Atheist Activist Group Demands Michigan City to Cease Prayer at Council ...
Christian News Network
An atheist activist group is demanding that officials in a Michigan city cease prayer during their council meetings out of its assertion that the practice is unconstitutional and alienates Godless residents. The Madison, Wisconsin-based Freedom From ...

Patheos (blog)
“WHY I'M AN ATHEIST WHO BELIEVES IN GOD” (My New Book goes on Sale ...
Patheos (blog)
On May 15, 2014, my new book WHY I'M AN ATHEIST WHO BELIEVES IN GOD How to create beauty, give love and find peace will be published. Here's an excerpt. I hope you'll read the rest. CHAPTER 1. Love sharpens loss. Grief demands reflection.

There is no test for competence before any old yahoo can get elected to congress. Take Al Melvin, a Reagan Republican from Tucson, who recently joined in the vote against implementing the Common Core standards in Arizona. He has a fabulous reason for voting down the standards.

Pressed by Bradley for specifics, Melvin said he understands some of the reading material is borderline pornographic. And he said the program uses fuzzy math, substituting letters for numbers in some examples.

Holy crap! Math that uses letters? Abomination! I expect to see this become an important issue in the Republican Party platform.

Don’t tell him that the math also uses Arabic numbers, and that algebra comes from an Iranian (well, it was called Persia then) Muslim named Muhammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī — he’ll die of apoplexy.

These are the people running the country. Fills you with confidence, doesn’t it?

Atheist Mocks Right-Wing Jesus by Denying an Unborn Child Is A 'Real Baby'
NewsBusters (blog)
Leftist “funny man” Jamie Kilstein posted a YouTube video titled “Recuiting Tools for Atheists” that travels pretty much to where you would expect a repeat guest of Melissa Harris-Perry's on MSNBC. After mocking conservative Christians for wanting a ...

and more »

I don’t subscribe to HBO, so I missed the new documentary on creationism, Questioning Darwin. I did manage to catch a few clips, like this one from Gawker. Hear creationists say what they really think!

Amanda Marcotte has a sound take on their position. It’s not stupidity driving these weird excuses, it’s fear.

By going back and forth between creationists and Darwin’s life story, the documentary crafts a compelling image of the conflict between two world views: That of curiosity and that of incuriosity/fear. I agree with the New York Times reviewer that the creationists are presented non-judgementally, but as these clips amassed by Gawker make clear, the creationists do all the work for you anyway. There’s a pastor explaining he would have to accept it if the Bible said “2+2=5″ and people talking, over and over again, about the strategies they have to employ to shut down their minds in the event that they’re presented with an opportunity to think more broadly.  The major emotion that comes off them in waves is that of fear: Fear of asking questions, fear of the “world” (which is always talked about negatively), fear of difference, fear that thinking might lead them into dark places, fear that they really aren’t special that manifests in making up a God who loves you so you never have to go a moment without that feeling, fear that they will fall into the abyss without blind obedience to authority, and, of course, fear of death.

Exactly. These people are not incapable of understanding evolution; they are instead practicing motivated reasoning, and are being entirely rational in fleeing into irrationality, because they don’t know how to cope without their beloved myths and fantasy stories.

Arguments from Ed the Internet Atheist
Patheos (blog)
I think once again the theist is trying to find ways to attack atheists, and as there are few lagitimate arguments for the theist they resort to things like this, some sort of hypocrisy, although you don't have to be a rocket scientist to tell the ...

Is it really worth it to order from Amazon? Read this exposé of Amazon’s labor practices — they are ruthless, demeaning, and evil.

At the Allentown warehouse, Stephen Dallal, also a “picker,” found that his output targets increased the longer he worked at the warehouse, doubling after six months. “It started with 75 pieces an hour, then 100 pieces an hour. Then 150 pieces an hour. They just got faster and faster.” He too was written up for not meeting his targets and was fired.27 At the Seattle warehouse where the writer Vanessa Veselka worked as an underground union organizer, an American Stakhnovism pervaded the depot. When she was on the line as a packer and her output slipped, the “lead” was on to her with “I need more from you today. We’re trying to hit 14,000 over these next few hours.”

Beyond this poisonous mixture of Taylorism and Stakhnovism, laced with twenty-first-century IT, there is, in Amazon’s treatment of its employees, a pervasive culture of meanness and mistrust that sits ill with its moralizing about care and trust—for customers, but not for the employees. So, for example, the company forces its employees to go through scanning checkpoints when both entering and leaving the depots, to guard against theft, and sets up checkpoints within the depot, which employees must stand in line to clear before entering the cafeteria, leading to what Amazon’s German employees call Pausenklau (break theft), shrinking the employee’s lunch break from thirty to twenty minutes, when they barely have time to eat their meal.

That’s just a small sample. If you work for Amazon, you’re a modern serf, relentlessly monitored and given increasingly unreachable goals.

Jeff Bezos has a net worth of 27 billion dollars. Do you think he works even a tenth as hard as the wage slaves he’s got working in his “fulfillment centers”?

One thing this story makes clear, at least, that a key element in the process of achieving some kind of equality is a vital labor movement.

It’s always amusing to see sexists pretending to be rational. Martin Daubney tries so hard to be reasonable when he argues that chivalry is dead and feminism is to blame.

There is an abundance of male behaviour that is deserving of fierce criticism. But I lose the will to live when feminist bloggers find sexism in places where it doesn’t exist, and draw a line from something trivial and stupid (say, a pink child’s bib with the logo “born to shop” on it) to something serious and frightening (eg rape culture). [I think you'll find that most feminists are quite conscious of the degrees of sexism. But who are you, Martin Daubney, to say where the line is to be drawn? Do you have the privilege to say what is acceptable sexism?]

Wolf whistles, the “pinkification” of children’s toys, The Sun calling high-profile women “fillies” – these seem more sad and silly to me than genuinely sexist.[Uh, you know that sexism can be sad and silly, right?]

The problem is, this remorseless public shaming of men doesn’t just out the morons. [It's done a pretty good job of outing Martin Daubney.] It drives the rest of us [Seriously? You think you're not one of the morons?] into hiding. As the This Morning survey showed, the broader collateral damage is that men are not as nice towards women as they were. [I've never gotten this argument. Shouldn't we be nice towards our fellow men, too?] Chivalry is withering on the vine. [That sounds like good news to me!]

I think our problem is our definition of “nice” is different. I think it’s “nice” to treat other people as equals. Martin Daubney thinks it would be nice to exercise a patronizing chivalry that makes him a better person than those helpless little women.

'Atheist's History' is evolving story that's beyond belief
The Missoulian
“As the son of a Manx Methodist atheist and a refugee German Jewish atheist,” Matthew Kneale tells us in the first sentence of “An Atheist's History of Belief: Understanding Our Most Extraordinary Invention,” “I have never been much of a believer.” It ...

and more »

Book by atheist tries telling the story of human belief
Press of Atlantic City
"As the son of a Manx Methodist atheist and a refugee German Jewish atheist," Matthew Kneale tells us in the first sentence of "An Atheist's History of Belief: Under-standing Our Most Extraordinary Invention," "I have never been much of a believer." It ...

and more »

After prolonged unrest and violence in the streets, the Ukrainian parliament voted to oust President Yanukovych — which Yanukovych called a “fascist coup” while trying to flee the country. Meanwhile, as the corruption of his regime dissolves away, peaceful protestors march on the presidential compound. What do they find? Impressive opulence and that the president had his very own private zoo.

A peaceful transition that kicks out the rich exploiters and opens the doors to the public? Yes, please. Can we have one of those, too?

I don’t say this lightly, but Saletan is one of the more dishonest pundits out there — I’ve read multiple columns by this guy where he lies with numbers and fudges the evidence to fit his preconceptions, and this is no exception. He’s once again arguing that creationism is compatible with science, and he has to make some dodgy claims to do so. Look here:

And what about the engineers in Ken Ham’s videos—the guys who made demonstrable contributions to science and technology while declaring themselves young-Earth creationists? Those men are what a good social scientist would call “evidence.” They back up the hypothesis that you can be a perfectly good engineer while believing nonsense about the origins of life. We can’t wave that evidence away, any more than we can wave away fossils.

The alternative hypothesis, advanced by McElwee, is that “to espouse [creationism] is to preclude practicing science.” The engineers in Ham’s video falsify that hypothesis. They espouse creationism while successfully practicing science.

Do you see the lie? He eases into it so artfully; these are guys who made “contributions to science and technology” drifts into “you can be a perfectly good engineer” and then he wraps it up by noting that the engineers in Ham’s claims practice science.

Engineers can practice real science, but an engineer is not the same thing as a scientist. I agree that creationists can be perfectly good engineers, but how can you trust the scientific acumen of someone who insists that the earth is only 6,000 years old? That says right there that they have no respect for the evidence. How can Saletan ignore Ham’s bogus distinction between historical and observational science, in which he flatly rejects any possibility of inference about the past from the present? This creationism is utterly incompatible with biology, anthropology, geology, astronomy, climate science, geochemistry, cosmology, and any other science that deals with cause and effect and history. These sciences apparently do not matter to Saletan, as long as engineers make satellites and doctors do surgery.

Saletan cites Ham’s videos as falsifying the claim that creationism is incompatible with science. Ken Ham makes a big deal of this, too.

AIG

There are a few problems there. Who says Ray Damadian invented the MRI? Why, Ray Damadian. The Nobel Committee disagrees, since they gave the 2003 prize to Lauterbur and Mansfield for their work on the MRI. Damadian contributed to some aspects of the engineering, but he didn’t ‘invent’ the thing — there was a whole series of people who contributed.

But even if he had been the sole inventor, as Ray Damadian and creationists love to pretend, it doesn’t change the fact that creationism, and Ham’s ignorant redefinition of science, does irreparable harm to science and science education. That two non-scientists, Ken Ham and William Saletan, are urging everyone to ignore lies and delusions and misrepresentations, does not change the fact that any science that takes history seriously gets flushed away by their foolishness.

The image of creationism as an oncoming threat rather than a receding symptom is just another hypothesis. So is the claim that you can’t practice good science while being a creationist. These hypotheses are much beloved among liberals, atheists, and scientists. But the facts are opposed to them. Give them up.

“Much beloved”? What the fuck? What we see is bad science being promoted by a kook with a religious agenda, and useful idiots like Saletan promoting blissful neglect and agreeing with creationists. I am not giving up on biology, which is what Saletan is asking me to do. I am giving up on Saletan.

As pointed out in the comments, Atrios has an excellent takedown of Lord Saletan. I agree with every word.

There’s a new app called Spreadsheets. This is not new; there are millions of apps, and 95% of them are crap. Spreadsheets purports to use the accelerometer and microphone in your smartphone to measure your sexual performance — a kind of fitbit for sex (do not tell my wife, she’s already slightly obsessed with her fitbit stats).

I find the whole idea a little weird, and have zero interest in the thing, but whatever floats your boat, ‘k? But here’s what I find offensive and stupid: calling the noise from these smartphone stats a study of sex duration in America. It’s basically a sex toy that will be used sporadically and idiosyncratically, and you’re not going to get anything that could be called “information” out of it. Case in point: look at the data on intercourse duration.

That makes no sense. Why would you even expect variation to fall in the arbitrary boundary lines of the states? For instance, the part of Minnesota where I live is, culturally and geographically, very similar to the Dakotas, yet somehow I’m supposed to believe that there’s some kind of remarkable transition in sexual behavior over there? Why? Show me the variance in the data. Give me a somewhat finer grained breakdown. What these data show is that what they’re measuring is patternless and random.

The one message I take from that figure is this: dudes, your app doesn’t work.

When I rule the universe, there shall be a sacred rule: thou shalt not mingle images of the holy cephalopod with those of the wicked feline, for these are FALSE IDOLS which shall evoke my righteous wrath.

Yuko Higuchi

Atheist group objects to police chaplains
WXOW.com
Atheist group objects to police chaplains. story image. Feb 21, 2014 10:09 p.m.. LA CROSSE, Wis. -- A group of atheists wants Wisconsin police departments to stop using chaplains. The La Crosse Tribune reports that the Freedom from Religion Foundation ...
Atheist group to La Crosse police: Stop using chaplainsGreen Bay Press Gazette

all 17 news articles »

Atheist group objects to police chaplains
WXOW.com
LA CROSSE, Wis. (AP) - A group of atheists wants Wisconsin police departments to stop using chaplains. The La Crosse Tribune reports that the Freedom from Religion Foundation has sent a letter to the La Crosse police department, arguing that the ...

Right now! They’re battling it out on the nature of the universe in a God and Cosmology Debate.

The preliminaries started at 7, my time. You missed the opening prayer in which the officiant begged god to lead everyone to a deeper understanding of the truth, concluding with the declaration that Jesus is the truth. I think the deck is stacked.

Well, sort of. I expect Carroll to mop the floor with Craig, because he has the understanding, Craig just has the rote rhetoric.

We’re at the intermission. Here’s the short summary of the debate so far:

Craig: I’m going to pretend to be a physicist and use sciencey words to retrofit modern cosmology to my primitive, crude, vague theistic sensibilities, and religion explains the universe better than physics because I can make up any ol’ shit I want.

Carroll: No, you get everything wrong, you’ve quote-mined and misinterpreted all these papers you cite, and cosmological theories must be rigorous and describe details of the universe beyond simply “it started”.

Carroll is speaking with authority — he knows this stuff, and it shows. This is why qualified scientists with expertise in public communication are so important — they can talk about the real science with depth, and recognize when their opponent is spouting bafflegab.

Really, I don’t know this stuff. Except now I’m learning a lot from listening to Sean Carroll. It would be nicer if Craig would shut up, sit down, and try to learn something too, since he is so far out of his depth.

They’ve locked the video down and made it private. I’m sorry to see that; Carroll was extremely edifying and did a terrific job of exposing Craig’s pretenses. Maybe it will be made available later, or we’ll just have to keep reading Sean Carroll’s blog to learn what physics really says.

My Armor: “Debating” Christianity with an Atheist
Patheos (blog)
What does the Bible say in regard to discussing Christianity with not just non-believers, but atheists? Most atheists become convinced of their stance toward God from an intellectual point of view. But remember- there are a lot of really bright ...

and more »