Intimate Portraits of Bees

TheBlaze.com
Atheist Comedian Bill Maher Excoriates the God of the Old Testament -- and ...
TheBlaze.com
It's no secret that comedian Bill Maher is an outspoken atheist who regularly lambastes both theology and people of faith and his latest remarks are no different: this time calling the God of the Old Testament a “psychopathic mass murderer.” When ...

Ohio Officials Do Something With Christian Crosses After Atheists' Lawsuit ...
TheBlaze.com
Officials in Stratton, Ohio, were forced to remove crosses that stood for decades on the village's municipal building after receiving threatening letters from an atheist activist group. While some local leaders are frustrated by the decision to take ...

ChristianToday
Faith Swap: Christian and atheist exchange lives for one month
ChristianToday
Ever wondered how the other half live? Premier Christian Radio has organised a unique experiment that allows two friends to find out just that; an atheist and a Christian have swapped their religious daily commitments for a month. This January ...

Can you be a Jewish atheist? Ask this Humanist Rabbi
Religion News Service
Then, in a Tablet profile published last month, American Atheists president David Silverman argued the opposite: that Judaism is incompatible with atheism, and that you can't be a nontheist and Jewish. At the same time, communities for nontheists have ...

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Photograph by Ed Neubaum. Photography contest, Honorable Mention. Panthera pardus – African leopard, Kruger park, South Africa.... Matt Young http://www.mines.edu/~mmyoung

It’s cold out there. So cold that last night, I got this weather alert:

The Stevens County Sheriff is advising NO TRAVEL in Stevens County. It is unsafe to travel and roadways are blown closed with hard packed snow. The County plows will not go out until the wind goes down. Again, NO TRAVEL ADVISED IN STEVENS COUNTY until conditions improve.

That’s right, it was so cold and blizzardy that the snow plows weren’t running. So we waited to hear what the university was going to do. And we waited. And waited. UMM’s official policy is to send out notices about any class cancellations due to weather by 5am on the day of the affected classes, so of course we get notice at…5am this morning. The university is opening 2 hours late, so morning classes are cancelled (which doesn’t affect me or my students at all).

I can understand the dilemma. University schedules are tight; unlike the public schools, which can simply add extra days to the end of the school year to make up snow days, any lost classes are just that, lost. Students are paying good money for those classes, and our curricula are often fairly tight, so losing a day without a makeup can mean some critical subject isn’t as well covered in lecture.

On the other hand, dying or getting injured on hazardous roads blows an even bigger hole in the learning experience.

I think university administrators are quite aware of the conundrum. You’d think students would be aware, too — they’re paying $12,000/year for these classes, you’d think they’d express some resistance or at least hesitation about wanting classes shut down.

Not at the University of Illinois. Some students really, really wanted a snow day. What do they think this is, sixth grade? They got so irate about the fact that the chancellor did not cancel classes today, that they took to Twitter to complain bitterly about having to go to school…and very quickly the complaints descended into sexist and racist remarks about the chancellor, who is a woman of Asian descent.

Don’t do that, children.

College students are adults. You weigh the consequences. UMM is largely a residential school, so it’s not a big deal when we have to stay open during bad weather…but some students do commute, and are going to have a more difficult time. I say, think about your personal circumstances and do what you have to do; you can’t make it to class without putting yourself in peril, then don’t. I have students who’ve written to say that they can’t make it, and that’s all right, I understand and won’t penalize them. I’ll help them go over the material if they stop by my office later.

That’s how adults handle these little setbacks.

But if you’re pissed off because the university tells you that you don’t get a day off from school, a day you’ve already paid for, so pissed off that you start ranting like this:

@goombatoomba
Asians and women aren’t responsible for their actions #FuckPhyllis

@AndreiAndreev33
It’s going to be -27 without wind chill tomorrow morning and I have class at 8 #FuckPhyllis #Cunt #Bitch #Whore

@kimiskis
phyllis can go shove tomorrow’s weather up her wideset vagina. #fuckphyllis

@kelsbear9
In a room with Phyllis Wise, Adolf Hitler, and a gun with one bullet. Who do I shoot? #fuckphyllis

You know, I don’t think the university would be out of line to add an additional requirement that you take a course in Remedial Humanity before they allow you to graduate.

Atheist Group Sends 'Freethought' Books To Prisoners As Alternative To Religion
Huffington Post
Where were the options for those behind bars who are atheists, like her? "Not all prisoners are religious, and I wanted them to know that to turn your life around and be a good and productive member of society does not require a belief in God,” she said.

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Atheist Group Sends 'Freethought' Books To Prisoners As Alternative To Religion
Huffington Post
Where were the options for those behind bars who are atheists, like her? "Not all prisoners are religious, and I wanted them to know that to turn your life around and be a good and productive member of society does not require a belief in God,” she said.

and more »

We need a measure of just how far out into space a commentator has launched themselves. I propose that we use the unit, the TomPerkins.

Last week, he sent a letter to the opinion page of the Wall Street Journal, and they published it, despite the fact that it is certifiably nuts, because Tom Perkins is an obscenely rich venture capitalist. Never mind what he says, he’s rich. Yet this letter blithely compares the fate of obscenely rich venture capitalists to that of European Jews in World War II.

Writing from the epicenter of progressive thought, San Francisco, I would call attention to the parallels of fascist Nazi Germany to its war on its "one percent," namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the "rich."

Whoa. He kind of red-lined my TomPerkins meter there.

But now you have to go read his book. Yes, he’s written a whole book, and it’s not what you think it is: he was once married to Danielle Steel, and this book is pure one-percenter porn. Go read the excerpts and gag, or you can buy your own copy on Amazon. The latter is not recommended; while the article says it’s available for 1 cent online, it doesn’t seem to be true any longer — there has been a run on Tom Perkins literature, no doubt driven by aficionados of awful writing.

This is a map of all the American schools that are officially teaching creationism with the full permission of the state educational system, either through voucher programs or state laws that allow nonsense to be taught (Louisiana and Tennessee stand out as gangrenous spots, don’t they?).

Tax Funded Creationism

It minimizes the problem. Minnesota looks pure and clean, but that’s because our laws expressly forbid teaching creationism here…but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t snuck under the table. About a quarter of our teachers give instruction in creationism without state endorsement.

Crossmap
Nebraska's Atheist Lawmaker Introduces Bill to Revoke Church Property Tax ...
Crossmap
... On January 27, 2014. Text size: Small · Medium · Large. Email; Share · Print; Comment. Tweet. An atheist lawmaker in Nebraska has proposed a bill that seeks to revoke property tax exemptions for religious organizations in the state, including churches.
Atheist Senator Ernie Chambers Tells Religious Organizations: 'PAY YOUR ...Huffington Post
'Render unto Caesar': Atheist lawmaker targets Nebraska churches' property tax ...Raw Story
Atheist Nebraska senator proposes bill banning tax exemption for religious ...UPI.com (blog)
Examiner.com
all 56 news articles »

Brief background: We have two copies of each non-sex gene. Each version of the gene is called an allele: one inherited from your genetic mother, one from your genetic father. It is generally thought that each allele is expressed (turned out) at the same intensity. But, there are some examples where this isn’t true. The most notable occurs on the X chromosome. Females with two X chromosomes inherited one X chromosome from each parent, but... M. Wilson Sayres http://mathbionerd.blogspot.com

ChicagoNow (blog)
Atheism isn't a moral stance, secular humanism is
ChicagoNow (blog)
When people believe that humans are solely responsible for the safety, liberty and livelihood of our generation and future generations, that's humanism. The word atheist in itself is not synonymous with virtuous. The same can be said for any religious ...

The pope and some kids released a pair of “peace doves” to symbolize something or other, when this happened:

Symbols seem to be prone to getting hijacked. Or attacked by birds.

The Huffington Post has published A Conversation Between Two Atheists From Muslim Backgrounds. It would be more interesting if it weren’t full of logical fallacies — in places, it’s more of an exercise in beating up liberal straw-people.

I think 21st century westerners generally don’t appreciate what they take for granted, because somebody else fought for these rights before they were born. I have given so many speeches around the country and I have heard many statements like, "The United States is the worst country on Earth," and, "We are no better if not worse than the Middle East when it comes to women’s rights and gay rights." These laughable statements generally come from people who have not been outside the United States, let alone even left their zip code. So I think most of the lack of appreciation of the freedoms in this nation or other Western nations have come from ignorance and lack of experience.

It’s quite possible that they have heard a few comments like those quoted — both the left and right contain stupid people. But I do think those are grossly misrepresentative, as well as simply wrong.

I don’t know anyone who thinks the United States is the worst country on earth — we can point to ‘witches’ being burnt alive in Africa, to gays being oppressed and murdered just about everywhere, to women being denied even the most basic freedoms in many Islamic countries. But we can also point to the satanic ritual abuse mania, the epidemic of violence against trans people, endemic racism, and inequity here, too. That the US is not quite as bloody-minded domestically (we’re pretty bloody-minded when it comes to foreign policy, unfortunately) as, say, Afghanistan does not mean we need to shut up and not worry about cleaning our own house. It does not mean we must live in denial about the diminished career opportunities for women in America because women in Saudi Arabia are being stoned to death for adultery.

We must remain focused on injustice everywhere. We cannot excuse a lesser crime here because a greater crime occurs somewhere else.

Even if you’re focused entirely on the greatest offenses against humanity, there are good practical reasons to address them everywhere. For example: Ireland is a western democracy; I’d rather live there than in the Sudan, or Uganda, or Iran. It’s a very nice place, for the most part, with some ugly history and unfortunate relics of theocracy lurking about, like their blasphemy law and their acknowledgment of a deity in their constitution. Minor problems compared to countries that are actively and oppressively theocratic, right? But some Islamic nations love to point to the blasphemy laws in Ireland as legitimizing their own tyrannical laws.

Further, the Irish people can work to change their laws to a more enlightened state; Irish or Americans or French people can’t do much to change Iranian law, other than by setting a good example, or more unfortunately, throwing threats and bombs at them until they change (and the record shows that those tactics aren’t particularly effective).

And may I say that I find it particularly irritating for someone to say that westerners are just sitting back and coasting on the labors of their ancestors, as if Grandpa solved all of America’s problems, and there are no battles left to fight. Tell that to women, to minorities, to gays — go ahead, tell them that Stonewall was just a little party, that the Selma-to-Montgomery march was just a meaningless stroll, that the people who have been campaigning against our aggressive military or corporate abuse aren’t putting their livelihoods on the line.

How would Muslims feel if we declared that they have to shut up and stop with the pity party until North Korea is cleaned up? Because of course there is only room for one Hell on earth, and all the rest of the planet is a paradise.

Do you see that that is as much of a false dilemma as accusing the West of wasting time on their own failings?

John Wilkins discusses the utility of believing in nonsense. He knows some members of a branch of the Plymouth Brethren down there in Australia; they’re a pretty distinctive sect here where I live, too. The interesting thing about them is their intentional isolation. They don’t proselytize, they don’t even talk much to us outsiders, and as John says, these are probably survival tactics for the sect — silly beliefs can flourish if you only talk to other people who share the same silly beliefs.

So what do you do when your opponent avoids engagement?

What does this mean for practical purposes? How do we counter these false beliefs? There is no simple answer. In the short term we can insist that our functional bureaucracies and social institutions do not give credence, but that will only harden those who deny the facts in their beliefs. At best it will slough off the fence sitters, and reduce the core denialists to a rump. That is one good thing, but we want people to face reality when it really matters. A better, but longer term solution is to insist that education teaches not the facts, but the methods by which we understand those facts, in order that people can develop their cognitive stances appropriately. This denies the next generation of denialists their replacements, until they become at best an extremely small minority. Education is the solution, which the denialists well understand. This is why we have objections to even discussing these “controversial” matters in schools, and why the denialists (whether of evolution, global warming, or whatever) continuously try to insert their agenda into public education. An uneducated community is more easily controlled and manipulated.

This is a good general approach, not just for dealing with creationists, but for teaching the general population. Teaching to the test just generates competing authorities, and we can’t win that battle; parents, peers, and coercive religion hold all the trump cards. But teaching kids to think for themselves…now that’s where we totally rule.

But I think there are a couple of issues that John didn’t engage in that blog post. Yes, please, better teaching. But what about these problems?

The Brethren or the Amish or any other sect that withdraws from the larger society really isn’t a long-term problem. They’re going to fade away or evolve eventually. The reality is that, at least in America, we have to deal with evangelical religions: Answers in Genesis or the Southern Baptist Convention aren’t simply retreating into their own navels, they are actively proselytizing bad beliefs. Simply trying to erode their base away with good teaching hasn’t worked here, at least (or possibly, we just don’t have good teaching), and direct and aggressive opposition is necessary.

Even religions that have insulated themselves and just want to be left alone do harm. Consider just the problem of faith healing; we have laws in the US that shelter ideas that lead to dead children. Unless we’re willing to say that society as a whole has no interest in kids, and parents are free to abuse them intellectually and medically, intervention is often called for. Our local Brethren aren’t proselytizing directly, but apparently they have quiet clout: they’ve compelled the school board and local businesses to avoid ‘controversial’ issues by threatening to withhold their custom or withdraw their kids from school. They’re smart and are using passive techniques to prevent kids from getting good educations.

Finally, if we’re going to concede that creationists are following a rational social strategy (and I do!), then we also have to recognize the godless complement: while many scientists and naturalists certainly follow the similar tactic of cloistering themselves with their like-minded colleagues, many of us are rationally pursuing a strategy of active, public opposition to believing in silly things. While teaching children how to think and learn is part of our goal of taking over the world, another important aspect is consolidating and reinforcing a non-believing community.

The inward-looking community is one approach to sustaining and strengthening a group: look to those Brethren or most academic departments, for instance, and you’ll see that in action. But the flip side is forming outward-looking communities — Answers in Genesis has a little bit of that, poorly done because they can’t really afford to engage the evidence, but it’s a fairly natural direction for science-based communities to take … we’re supposed to be evaluating new ideas all the time.

Also, we do it for the lurkers. Exclusive sects aren’t very good at gaining new recruits.

Atheist groups cater to a captive audience: Prisoners
USA TODAY
Leslie Zukor was a 19-year-old student at Reed College studying prison rehabilitation programs when something jumped out at her. While there were programs tackling drug abuse, physical and sexual abuse, technical training and more, all of them were ...

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Written by Johnny O’Coileain (Add him on Facebook)

Editor, One Nation Under Nothing

One of our One Nation Under Nothing readers, Matt, submitted the following question for this week’s reader-focused article:

 Do you think religion will ever fade away for the most part as science and medicine advances?

 As we glance back in history, and traverse into modernity, this has happened, and continues to happen. From what I’ve gathered, the fastest growing demographic are people who don’t identify strongly with religion. A few reasons I’d deduce are: apathy, scientific reasons, self-evident morality, and disgust with religious abuse or hypocrisy. The fading away of religion is a slow fade. With progress in general, George Orwell explained it like this:

“Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.”

In the annals of human history, religion was the explanation for nearly everything. The origins of the cosmos, life’s beginnings, various natural phenomena, all traced their answers to dogma. Because the nature of dogma is (mostly) unchanging, it couldn’t keep up with human inquiry. Eventually, as science and medicine developed ideas like the germ theory of disease, someone vomiting due to demons became irrelevant.

 As scientific explanations replaced First Century ones, the relevance of Abrahamic totalitarianism entrenched its last stand in the realm of morality. Today, the idea of moral philosophy predominates most discussions on religion. The concreteness of science, by force and clarity, invalidated any dogmatic hold on empirical concerns. Thus, the last bastions of religion seek refuge in the forest of morality due to its highly relative (and subjective) nature. 

 With morals, you’re dealing with opinions stacked upon opinions, piled upon interpretation after interpretation; and when morals are interwoven into fairy tales, the scene is more muddled. It’s a giant case of: If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit. Hiding out in the fog and haze is a safe place for religion; but fog can and does eventually clear. For example, gay marriage: Theism purports that opposition to gay marriage is morally justified, when its actually bigotry shrouded in a moral veneer.  

 Ideas like “Being good for goodness sake,” and other advances in practical philosophy, are taking root more than ever. People are beginning to see that talking snakes and water-wine magic tricks are not prerequisites for morals to operate. The slow moving nature of progress, like the small hand of a clock, makes this hard to notice. But it moves.

 To answer the question more directly: As long as progress keeps constant, the religions of today will be relegated to the mythology and fiction shelves at Barnes and Noble. Will it fade completely? Probably not. But mostly it’ll be thought as mythical as the memoir of George W. Bush. Ralph Waldo Emerson stated it well:

“The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next.”

If you trace written history from the Renaissance, to the Enlightenment, Industrial Revolution, and into modernity, you see the grip of religion become less and less. We have science to thank, but also a host of other factors.

 The last stand of Abrahamic theism is morality. The biggest task at hand, as free thinkers, is to formally divorce morals from mythology. We shall prove that both are not intimately linked, and morality functions perfectly fine without ghosts, demons, and conversationally fluent house plants. Occam’s Razor, the principle of economy, teaches us to shed off unneeded assumptions if an idea functions perfectly well without them. Science and morality fall in this category: If they operate smoothly without being entangled in fairy stories, then the stories can be discarded as part of empirical explanations. 

Highly accurate predictive photo of what Morris will look like tomorrow.

Another annoying weather prediction: we’re getting a big ol’ blizzard tomorrow!

For those unfamiliar with weather patterns in the upper midwestern plains, we don’t get a lot of snow, but what we do get stays with us all winter long. Right now, the ground is covered everywhere with about a foot of very dry, powdery white stuff, and tomorrow we’re probably not going to get a lot of new snow. Instead, we get extreme cold and high winds that are going to…rearrange… our snow all day long, throwing it up into the air into a fluffy white haze.

We’re going to be homebound. I made a trip to the liquor store. It’s the only thing you can do.