Atheist group appeals lease for Big Mountain Jesus statue
Ravalli Republic
An atheist group seeking to remove a statue of Jesus from Whitefish Mountain Resort has taken its case to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The Freedom from Religion Foundation lost its initial case last June when U.S. District Judge Dana ...

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Atheist group appeals lease for Big Mountain Jesus statue
The Missoulian
HELENA — The Freedom From Religion Foundation is asking the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to overturn a federal judge's decision that allowed the U.S. Forest Service to renew a 10-year permit for a statue of Jesus that was placed on a northwestern ...

The hedgehog and tenrec diverged from one another over 100 million years ago. To put that in perspective the lineages leading to human and mouse also diverged roughly 100 million years ago (maybe closer to 90ish). And yet, the tenrec and hedgehog have independently evolved very similar features, likely because of similar environmental pressures. This independent evolution of features is called convergent evolution, and it is just fantastic to observe. Tenrecs are found in Madagascar... M. Wilson Sayres http://mathbionerd.blogspot.com

This is the school where my daughter has just started graduate work, and now a scathing review of the philosophy departments’ practices has been released. Turns out it was a nest of snakes. (Fortunately, my daughter is in the computer science department, and believe me, she’d be speaking out if things were this bad there).

…it is our strong conclusion that the Department maintains an environment with unacceptable sexual harassment, inappropriate sexualized unprofessional behavior, and divisive uncivil behavior. Members of most groups we talked to report directly observing inappropriate behavior. This behavior has harmed men and women members of every stakeholder group in the Department.

Some assistant and full professors (both male and female) report responding to this situation by working from home, dropping out of departmental life, and avoiding socializing with colleagues. Several faculty members’ reputations for bad behavior place a higher service work burden on colleagues. Women are leaving or trying to leave in disproportionate numbers. [note: the report does not name names or describe specific incidents. --pzm]

The female graduate students report being anxious, demoralized, and depressed. Some female students report that they avoid working with some faculty members because of things that they have heard about those faculty members. Some female students report avoiding working with faculty members because they directly witnessed or were subjected to this harassment and inappropriate sexualized unprofessional behavior. There was and is a lack of support for students who lost their advisors or instructors due to sanctions. The female graduate students would like more women in the department but they cannot recommend this department as a good place to come.

In addition, male graduate students report being extremely worried about the climate of harassment. They are worried that they will be tainted by the national reputation of the department as being hostile to women. They are worried about getting a job letter from someone who has a bad reputation when the student does not know exactly who has a bad reputation. They are concerned that the lack of administrative support for the Department resulting from the climate of harassment [i.e. “provost saying, ‘no more departmental support until the department shapes up’”] will negatively affect their abilities to succeed. They avoid some faculty because they do not want to have a reputation that might come with being advised by a harasser (a problem exacerbated by lack of certainty about who the harassers are). And some are angry in discovering the severe problems in the department that they didn’t know about before they arrived.

It’s good to see that they point out that an epidemic of sexism is bad for the men as well as the women.

Man, I hear this kind of thing all the time about philosophy departments — philosophy and engineering seem to be the major repositories of sexist behavior in academe. You’d think philosophy would enable a rational perspective, and it’s a mystery to me why so many suddenly go so stupid on sexual harassment.

Although this paragraph suggests a possible reason.

The Department uses pseudo-philosophical analyses to avoid directly addressing the situation. Their faculty discussions revolve around the letter rather than the spirit of proposed regulations and standards. They spend too much time articulating (or trying to articulate) the line between acceptable and unacceptable behavior instead of instilling higher expectations for professional behavior. They spend significant time debating footnotes and “what if” scenarios instead of discussing what they want their department to look and feel like. In other words, they spend time figuring out how to get around regulations rather than focusing on how to make the department supportive of women and family-friendly.

Ah, that’s how the power of philosophy can be corrupted to do great evil: it’s a whole mob of people trained in the virtues of reflexive devil’s advocacy.

Larry Moran has been given a quiz to test our comprehension of Intelligent Design creationism. Unfortunately, it was composed by someone who doesn’t understand ID creationism but merely wants everyone to regurgitate their propaganda, so it’s a major mess, and you can also tell that the person writing it was smugly thinking they were laying some real traps to catch us out in our ignorance.

Larry has posted his answers. I’ve put mine below the fold (I sorta subtly disagree with him on #2). If you want to take a stab at it untainted by our answers, here’s the original quiz, untainted by logic or evidence, so you can view them in their pure naked ignorance.

Also, another thing: the person who composed the quiz clearly expected simple yes/no answers, yet wrote questions that demand explanation. Yet again, the idiocy of the IDiots is exposed. I’ve actually troubled to explain my answers.

1. Is Intelligent Design compatible with the truth of evolution, with evolution defined (as per wikipedia) as change in the inherited characteristics of biological populations over successive generations?

Yes, by that limited definition of the fact of evolution. Evolutionary theory also encompasses specific mechanisms, however, and ID is not compatible with the consilience of explanations.

2. Is Intelligent Design compatible with common descent, with common descent defined as the claim that all living organisms share a common biological ancestor?

I might disagree with Larry here. Yes, it is compatible if your model is one of a tinker constantly meddling with lineages — if your template is, for instance, how human agriculture has continuously selected for and modified domestic plants and animals. That does require continuous intervention, though, which would be detectable. It is not compatible if, as I’ve often seen, the model they are using is that frontloading nonsense, where they claim an original species was prepared with genes for all subsequent forms, and evolution is a literal unfolding of predetermined potential. That is incompatible with reality. The third alternative, that rather obviously all too many ID cranks hold near and dear to their hearts, is basically special creation — each species is individually conjured into existence by a creator…and that is completely incompatible with common descent.

But then, I’ve never found an ID creationist with a consistent, specific model with evidence for their theory, that is also coherent and consistent with common descent. Behe tries. But his ideas are pretty much in conflict with the actual evidence.

3. Does Intelligent Design, as offered by its most noteworthy proponents (Behe, Meyers, etc) propose to explain any purported incident of design by appeal to miracles or “supernatural” acts of any kind?

Hmmm. Does Meyer get that superfluous and wrong terminal “s” as often as I get an extra “e” added to my last name?

This question ignores the history of ID, which was intentionally formulated in response to court decisions that prohibited gods and faith-based arguments — they literally rewrote their texts to exclude god (anyone remember “cdesign proponentsists”?) to circumvent church-state conflicts. So nominally, no, not usually. It’s all behind the scenes. But Phillip Johnson has been quite clear that he came up with this legalistic excuse called ID as part of becoming a born-again Christian, and William Dembski declared ID as “the Logos theology of John’s Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory.” To deny the religious foundation of ID isn’t just madness — it’s intentionally lying.

4. Does Intelligent Design, as offered by its most noteworthy proponents, argue that any given purported incident of design must have been performed by God, angels, or any “supernatural” being?

This is simply a restatment of question 3, with a different set of supernatural phenomena. They consciously avoid saying so in public, but sometimes slip up when speaking to the faithful, and by implication, many of their rationalizations must include supernatural phenomena. Behe, for instance, is among the most meticulous in avoiding god-talk, but his explanations require constant, intentional intervention by an intelligent designer in the evolution of every family/genus on earth over billions of years. Without saying “god”, the inference that it requires a god-like being or beings is unavoidable.

5. Is Intelligent Design, as offered by its most noteworthy proponents, compatible with atheism?

No. You’ve got Berlinski as a counter-example, but he’s more of a pompous contrarian who can’t advance a rational alternative. Atheism says that we are here as a product of natural processes, no guidance from beyond required; ID says natural processes are inadequate, intent, planning, and constant intervention by a capital-D Designer required. Read any of Meyer’s books: they sneer at all of biology and propose an ineffable being of great power to replace it.

6. Does Intelligent Design, as offered by its most noteworthy proponents, rely on the bible, or any religious document? (as a source of evidence, etc)

There he goes again, repeating the same core question as 3 and 4. Creationists love padding their arguments with noise.

7. Hypothetical scenario: a designer starts an evolutionary process. The designer arranges the environment and the organisms involved in the process in such a way so as to yield a particular, specified and intended result, with no intervention on the designer’s part aside from initially setting up the situation, organisms and environment. Is this an example of Intelligent Design in action, according to ID’s most noteworthy proponents?

That’s the frontloading scenario. It doesn’t work. The natural processes that we know exist and function interfere with the production of a “particular, specified and intended result” — it’s as if they want to pretend that chance has no input in descent with modification.

Yes, it is a fairly common explanation offered by intelligent design creationism proponents. It’s also stupid.

8. Revisit 7. Stipulate that designer only used completely “natural” means in setting up the experiment and successfully predicting the result. Is this still an example of Intelligent Design, as offered by its most noteworthy proponents, in action?

Since we understand that many natural mechanisms are going to produce chance outputs, which will make that “particular, specified and intended result” an impossibility, it is a stipulation that makes the proposal completely incompatible with intelligent design creationism. Therefore it cannot be an example of intelligent design. Unless ID is so vacuous and empty of meaning that it accepts any possible explanation of organic change as ID.

9. An ID critic proposes that intelligent aliens, not God, may be responsible for a purported incident of Intelligent Design – for example, the origin of the bacterial flagellum. Has the ID critic proposed a scenario which, if true, would disprove Intelligent Design, as offered by its most noteworthy proponents?

Padded questions and convoluted logic — yes, I can tell a creationist mind is at work.

This is a meaningless gotcha. We can point right now to bio-engineered organisms, creatures that were modified by human intelligent design; similarly, we can imagine non-human interventions that modify organisms, although of course we have no evidence that such intelligent non-human beings exist. Our creationist interrogator is trying to play a game of suggesting that individual examples of intentional variation in organisms is a disproof of a theory that proposes there was intentional variation in organisms.

He’s an idiot, in other words.

He’s also dodging and squirming from what ID actually says. Look at their books: they are almost uniformly about claiming that evolutionary theory is inadequate to explain the origin of species. Showing that there are novel mechanisms outside the processes that have driven evolution for four billion years does not say anything about the sufficiency of those unguided natural processes.

10. A creationist argues that evolution must be false, because it isn’t mentioned in the Bible. Has the creationist made an Intelligent Design claim?

No. I’ll make this easy for you. Intelligent design claims are arguments that natural processes are insufficient to account for the biology of life on earth, that are consciously designed to walk a gray line imposed by the local and parochial laws of the United States that prohibit the teaching of religion in public schools. They would not mention the Bible by design — it’s part of the definition of what ID does.

But look deeper. All of the major proponents of ID creationism are religious, most are closet Christian apologists, and will testify about their faith-based, traditional beliefs at religious venues. Let’s not pretend there isn’t a colossal biblical component to their ideas, all buried under layers of legalisms that are used to skirt the American Constitution.

Texas student sells shirts with Christian message after atheist group forces ...
al.com (blog)
RUSK COUNTY, Texas -- A Texas high school student took to Facebook to speak his mind and sell T-shirts with a Christian message after his teacher was forced to remove a religious poster from a classroom. Cameron Franks, a senior at Rusk High School in ...

Photograph by Erik Duerr. Photography contest, Honorable Mention. Petroica macrocephala – South Island tomtit, New Zealand. Mr. Duerr writes, “I would never have been able to get such a close up photo of such a small bird if it weren’t for the fact that birds in NZ are designed not to be afraid of humans.”... Matt Young http://www.mines.edu/~mmyoung

Australian Geographic

You know, I’ve been keeping a list of those who need to take a ride in the tumbrels, but all the challenge and fun is going out of it. The scoundrels keep standing up and proudly volunteering! Take Peter Schiff, please — he just blithely walked into an interview for the Daily Show and started talking out of his ass — what fun is it to get a confession out of the parasites when they think they’re gloating?

Some movie makers are trying to raise money to distribute their film, and it looks good and sends the right message. It’s titled Hug an Atheist.

I don’t mind an occasional hug, but remember, though: some people are very uncomfortable with personal contact, and being an atheist is not a label that says you have permission to cross boundaries.

Except at the mandatory Satan-worshipping orgies. Oh, wait, did I let that slip?

(via Lousy Canuck.)

My children are fortunate to all be fully grown, so I can’t warp them in their formative years by exposing them to children’s programming like this:

Actually, even as a grown up myself, I’m feeling a bit perturbed by all that. Perhaps it isn’t too late!

On the eve of the Bill Nye/Ken Ham debate, it’s nice of the Secular Coalition of Australia to apologize for sending Ken Ham to us. But, to be honest, I cannot accept the apology. Ken Ham’s ideas were forged in the crucible of raging American fundagelicalism — he has explicitly credited The Genesis Flood: The Biblical Record and Its Scientific Implications by Whitcomb and Morris as his inspiration for the idiocy he promotes, and it really is the bog-standard Young Earth Creationism formulated in the 1960s by frustrated American creationists who were trying to appropriate scientific respectability for their religious cause. So we are ultimately responsible for poisoning the entire planet with this nonsense (you aren’t alone, either; Turkish creationism is really just regurgitated bilge from The Genesis Flood, too).

I do think the Australian suggestions for what Bill Nye ought to do to Ken Ham to be possibly acceptable, however — if only someone could translate them into English.

So on Tuesday, when you’re roasting the Ham and his patently ridiculous ideas on the rotisserie of logic, tell him you’ve got a message from Australia. Tell him from us that we used his state-issued Akubra hat to cover a hole in the national chookhouse shed, that he is no longer entitled to use his formal Australian name (Kenno) and that he is now forbidden any Tim Tams – ever again. Also, that whenever his name comes up at Christmas, while we sit around drinking white wine in the sun, there will be a formal awkward silence of twenty to forty seconds, until someone brightly offers everyone pudding. And if you could manage to kick him in the shins and tell him and his ilk to leave our kids alone, Bill – we’d owe you one.

This should be good: Jennifer Ouellette has a new book out, Me, Myself, and Why: Searching for the Science of Self . From her description of the contents, it sounds like it’s a sensible approach to the current state of the science, recognizing that there is a genetic component to human behavior and a large learning component.

No worries, everyone! You’re not going to have to make any sacrifices, change life styles, or invest in alternative energy sources, because there is a shortcut: just ask god to fix it.

The Utah Farm Bureau asked the public to join in prayer and fasting for moisture for livestock and crops as part of its Harvesting Faith event Sunday.

Utah dairy farmer Ron Gibson told the Deseret News that farmers "can’t go to the Legislature to ask for help, (so they instead) decided to go to the guy upstairs."

Think it’ll work?

Oh, you atheists, I know you’re all thinking that it’s not nice to pick on stupid ideas, especially since this was an interfaith service.

Rajan Zed, who organized the Nevada service, says it drew Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish and other faith leaders.

Don’t you know that if you gather together a diverse enough collection of idiotic ideas, they magically become sensible? If only they’d brought in the Satanists, the Scientologists, a mob of ghost hunters, some ancient astronaut fanatics, Bigfoot, and a crack team of dedicated UFOlogists, they would have reached critical mass and it would be raining buckets in the West right now.

Obama mentioned that women make 77 cents on the dollar compared to men. You know what that means? Cue the jerks making bogus statistical arguments to make the gap go away — in this case, wouldn’t you know it, Christina Hoff Sommers.

What is wrong and embarrassing is the President of the United States reciting a massively discredited factoid. The 23-cent gender pay gap is simply the difference between the average earnings of all men and women working full-time. It does not account for differences in occupations, positions, education, job tenure, or hours worked per week. When all these relevant factors are taken into consideration, the wage gap narrows to about five cents.

“When all these relevant factors are taken into consideration” is code for “I’m going to make excuses to justify the difference” — it’s not that the average woman is going to find herself 23% richer when Sommers is done, it’s just that she’s going to unthinkingly apply some fudge factors to the numbers to tell us that a yearly income of $23,000 is actually the same as $30,000. And of course there are people who will seriously believe that.

But she gives the game away in that paragraph. The 23 cent gender gap is actually real, because it’s an overall measure of the average man’s and woman’s earnings — Obama wasn’t wrong at all, he just wasn’t respecting anti-feminists’ dishonest manipulation of the data. When we appreciate that total earnings are a result of multiple factors, if we catalog all those factors and then dismiss all the ones that show discriminatory patterns of reward in society, then we can explain the difference as fair and natural.

So what factors does she list as contributing to women’s lower income?

• Men and women differ in their college majors. Does she stop and ask why? Why are women more likely to major in social work than engineering? Why should women be less likely to enter engineering? I know women who are engineers, physicists, mathematicians, computer scientists — it’s not as if breasts get in the way of doing factor analysis, or as if a penis makes one incapable of caring about human beings.

• The professions favored by women pay less well than the professions favored by men. Does she stop and ask why? Why are social workers paid less than engineers? Why should we consider social work less important than engineering? In Sommers’ list of majors and their average earnings, does even give the briefest consideration to the curious fact that most of the top ten most remunerative professions are men dominated, while most of the bottom ten least remunerative professions are women dominated?* No, not in the slightest.

  Women, far more than men, appear to be drawn to jobs in the caring professions; and men are more likely to turn up in people-free zones. In the pursuit of happiness, men and women appear to take different paths.

  Even if we take that as a given (I don’t; I think social pressures push people into jobs they may not desire as much as Sommers thinks), it leaves unanswered the big question: why does society reward “people-free” jobs more than it does caring ones?

There is a point to working out all the contributing factors to average income: it’s to identify where the inequities are being generated, so that we can correct them and reward people fairly for their work. Not to Christina Hoff Sommers, though:

Much of the wage gap can be explained away by simply taking account of college majors.

That says so much. She’s looking for ways to explain away the differences. She’s not looking for answers, or ways to more fairly treat human beings, or any understanding of the very real economic differences between men and women. Here’s a shorter Christina Hoff Sommers: women get paid less because their work is less valuable.

And she isn’t even aware of how profoundly sexist her entire rationalization is.

What if we lived in a world where equal education and training and investment in preparing for a job led to jobs where the pay was equal? A social worker with a masters degree and ten years of experience should be getting roughly the same pay as an engineer with a masters degree and ten years experience, in a just world. We should appreciate that we need functional communities about as much as we need bridges and pipelines.

And why shouldn’t some men find social work a better fit to their personality than engineering? Or what are women with an aptitude for engineering doing in jobs that don’t fit their personality — because peer pressure tells women that math aptitude is manly?

Grr. Every time I read anything by Sommers, I come away appalled at how superficial and self-serving her analyses are. She’s a true champion of the status quo.

*By the way, she uses a really sneaky tactic in her lists: for the richest professions, she tells us what percent are men; for the poorest professions, she tells us what percent are women. The numbers may be perfectly accurate, but you can tell exactly how she wants to bias our perception of them.

Actually, I’m always appalled at any position taken by the anti-feminists — they rarely think in any way beyond justifying their prior views. This comic catches that attitude perfectly.

xkcd

TheBlaze.com
What Happens When an Atheist and a Devout Christian Intentionally Swap ...
TheBlaze.com
Organized by Premier Christian Radio, a faith-based outlet in the U.K., “Faith Swap” is an experiment involving Bentley Browning, a committed Christian, and Simon Capes, an atheist. The two U.K.-based comedians agreed to swap religious practices for ...
'Faith Swap' Experiment Has Christian And Atheist Exchange Lives For One MonthHuffington Post

all 4 news articles »

'Faith Swap' Experiment Has Christian And Atheist Exchange Lives For One Month
Huffington Post
That's the premise behind the Faith Swap experiment organized by Premier Christian Radio, which follows the journey of committed Christian Bentley Browning and his atheist friend Simon Capes who are exchanged their religious daily commitments for one ...

and more »

Seattle won the game part.

The commercials were won by Coca Cola.

Apparently, right wing nuts are having a meltdown over the desecration of using non-English lyrics. I don’t know why, they ought to be overjoyed to see a megacorporation cunningly using diversity and natural beauty to sell people sugar water and making patriotic music an ode to capitalism.

Atheist group puts giant anti-Catholic Super Bowl sign at site of big game
BizPac Review
With Christmas behind us, atheists in search of new opportunities to display their animosity toward people of faith are turning to the Super Bowl. And why not, considering that Super Bowl Sunday is all but a national holiday and has come to rival ...

'Faith Swap' Experiment Has Christian And Atheist Exchange Lives For One Month
Huffington Post
That's the premise behind the Faith Swap experiment organized by Premier Christian Radio, which follows the journey of committed Christian Bentley Browning and his atheist friend Simon Capes who are exchanged their religious daily commitments for one ...

and more »