Answering Atheism
Patheos (blog)
The main weakness of the majority of the books I have read regarding atheism in apologetics is that I also found that these books were not ones that I would really suggest an atheist to read. While reading them I reflected that if I was still an ...

Atheism trending across the nation
Oaklandpostonline
The growth of atheist groups at universities is very noticeable in America, but in other countries the numbers have been higher for a long time. According to a study published by adherents, a website that contains numerous statistics regarding all ...

At least, that’s what right-wing überlöön (so metal, he deserves a 3-umlaut title) Glenn Beck. Watch his meandering monologue* in which he accuses science and science education of being on the wrong side of history, and literally accuses Nye of persecuting creationists.

*In Beck’s case, that’s redundant.

In Memory Of Tom Ferrick: America's First Atheist Chaplain Died
Huffington Post (blog)
My old boss and mentor, the world's first ever avowed atheist to become a university chaplain, died recently. Tom Ferrick, the Humanist Chaplain at Harvard University from 1974 until I took over for him in 2005, had been an orphan in Cambridge, MA ...

The Ohio Supreme Court today denied John Freshwater’s motion to reconsider his appeal of the decision to terminate him as a middle school science teacher in the Mt. Vernon City Schools. This brings to an end the involvement of the state courts in the affair. (I’m on a mobile and can’t post a link to the case page-someone can do so in a comment.) Freshwater’s only remaining possibility is to convince the U.S. Supreme Court... Richard B. Hoppe

Elyse talks about abortion, and there she goes, undermining the conventional narrative.

And when we talk about abortion, we talk about the hand wringing. The indecisiveness. The longing to keep the baby. The understanding that the woman already knows a part of her will always regret her decision. There’s pacing around the house. There’s sleepless nights trying to make a decision. There’s waffling. And there’s tons of crying. So much crying. When we talk about abortion, we imagine every woman feeling nothing but profound sadness over the decision she is trying to make. Choosing between herself and her child.

But fuck that narrative. It’s bullshit. It robs women of their right to be viewed as fully actualized human beings. We are not people who are a lot like men but with a psychological and biological mandate to become mothers one day, struggling to figure out if that day is today, worried that if we don’t seize this opportunity, right here and right now, we will never become what we were always meant to be: moms. We are people. Just like men are people. And just like men, some of us want to be parents. Some of us do not.

And we need to stop talking about pregnancy like it’s some kind of fucking alternative to ecstasy. Women who are carrying pregnancies they planned don’t always bond with their babies-to-be. To paint the picture of the unwanted, unplanned pregnancy as one that causes grief because of instant maternal instinct that begins around two minutes after pissing on a stick is harmful to women. It’s harmful to families. It teaches us that mothers like me are less than. We don’t love enough. We’re broken. It’s hard enough to try to nurture and support a person who moved into your abdomen and that you don’t necessarily like. It’s harder when you think not loving them makes you a sociopath.

All is made clear.

Oh, no, it left one off:

Blogs: A dated description of what it’s like to eat a donut, with links to other blogs by people who like donuts, and excoriations of blogs by people who don’t like donuts.

Apparently, Martin Cothran believes that there is no life elsewhere in the universe, and that this unimaginably vast emptiness is evidence that a god created us. I don’t understand the logic, but then I don’t understand most of his weird leaps in this post on how life on other planets is like believing in the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

First, there is the naive scientific oversimplification.

We are told by many New Atheist scientists in particular (who like to mark their territory) that a belief can only be scientific if it is falsifiable. This is their demarcation criterion of choice and they use it to ruthlessly guard the borders of science. This is one of the reasons, they say, we must reject Intelligent Design. This idea comes generally from Karl Popper, a philosopher, who said that a theory cannot be considered scientific merely because it admits of possible verification, but only if it admits of possible falsification.

Oh, go away, Karl Popper. He seems to be the only philosopher of science the creationists have heard of. Falsification is one criterion; it’s part of a general effort to solve the demarcation problem, a problem I don’t think can be solved because the boundary between science and non-science is a grey murky haze. Personally, I think observation and evidence are more central to science than falsification.

How can a creationist even talk about applying falsification to science, though? They believe in so many things that have been falsified.

They don’t even get our jokes.

It is this general idea that is behind Richard Dawkin’s "Flying Spaghetti Monster." The Flying Spaghetti Monster exists just outside the range of the most powerful telescopes and the more powerful the telescopes, the further away the monster gets so that we are never able to actually detect him. There is therefore, no way in which belief in him may be disproven.

The Flying Spaghetti Monster is Dawkin’s send-up of the belief in a theistic God, belief in Whom has the same status as his imaginary monster: there is no evidence that can possibly count against his existence. God can never be disproven.

Dawkins didn’t invent it. Bobby Henderson did.

The flying spaghetti monster is a collection of absurdities intended to mock religious goofballs like Martin Cothran, so I guess it’s unsurprising that he doesn’t get it. It was clearly made up out of whole cloth, so it lacks any supporting evidence — just like religion. It makes ridiculous claims, like that pirates prevent global warming, with no mechanistic relationship and that are clearly false — just like religion. It makes untestable promises of an afterlife — just like religion. You can’t distinguish pastafarianism from Christianity on any criterion, not just the Popperian one, so Cothran’s single-minded focus on falsification is inappropriate.

But come on, let’s get to the claims about life in outer space.

Okay, now take the belief that life exists somewhere else in the universe. This is a common belief among atheist scientists. In fact, Dawkin’s himself conjectured that life on earth may have come from other planets. But how can that belief possibly be falsified?

There is a possibility that, if true, it can be proven true simply by finding it somewhere in our outside our own solar system. But if it is false, how could we ever know that it was false? If it was false and the universe were infinite, as many scientists believe, then would could never know it to be false even theoretically. And if it was false but the universe was finite, there is no practical way we could ever know it to be false even though it is theoretically possible–although there is some question whether it is even theoretically possible for humans to investigate a universe as massive as we know ours to be.

Once again, Cothran fails to grasp the argument or understand the science.

Here’s the key point: the hypothesis that life exists on other worlds is not about astronomy. It’s about life. It’s a religious premise that the purpose of the universe is all about us, and you’ll find that the most fervent opponents of the idea of life beyond earth are religious people who dislike anything that detracts from their geocentric view of the universe. That’s unscientific. To be fair, you’ll also find many science-fictiony types who populate the universe with aliens because they can’t write a drama that doesn’t involve interactions between sentient beings. That’s understandable, but also unscientific.

But no one came up with a scientific hypothesis of extraplanetary life because they looked outward and saw signs. The primary evidence for that derives from the study of biology. Life is just chemistry. There is no clear sharp boundary between what is alive and what is a chemical reaction. Chemistry is a ubiquitous property of the universe; it’s really just a subset of physics. So if you want to say no life exists elsewhere, you have to argue that there is something unique about Earth to only allow that chemistry to occur here.

The creationists are actually on the right track when they try to claim that life is a historical product of a design intervention; that would be a kind of event that could be restricted to a tiny subset of worlds. Unfortunately, their work to date has consisted of shouting assertions (COMPLEXITY ONLY ARISES FROM DESIGN!) that have been falsified (oops, hoist by your own petard, Cothran), or that rely on vague and poorly stated premises (what the heck is specified complexity?) or require distorting and lying about the actual evidence.

Biology has not found anything unique, supernatural, or exclusively dependent on exceptional properties present only on this one planet. Absent a restriction, the null hypothesis is that other worlds with similar physical properties are also likely to contain self-propagating, energy utilizing chemical processes. If creationists want to claim otherwise, that Earth is unique, they are obligated to provide the specific and unique property of life that confines its origin to one planet.

They have to make the falsifiable claim, not us.

This doesn’t count. It’s just stupid.

Even in this latter case of a finite universe theism would be less problematic since a theist could simply say "Well, we will find out after we die." And since everyone will certainly die, at least he has that to go on.

So there you have it. Belief in extra-terrestrial life. The Flying Spaghetti Monster. Theoretically indistinguishable. And taking this into consideration, how is believing in God any more or less scientific that believing there is life on other planets?

Again, the expectation of extraterrestrial life is based on studying life on earth and knowing its properties. No one has studied any gods, including the flying spaghetti monster, in any scientific way. That makes the claims trivially distinguishable.

So theism is a more scientific idea because it’s falsifiable, and it’s criterion for falsification requires testing it by dying? By ceasing to exist?

That violates another criterion for science. How will you publish?

Atheist Union of Greece protests outdated blasphemy laws
Index On Censorship
According to the Atheist Union of Greece, the popularity of Loizos' Facebook page following his satirical remark angered right wing and religious groups in the country. Golden Dawn, the now banned Greek neo-fascist party, took advantage of the uproar ...

So, so tired of the gun-fondlers in my in-box…their arguments are so bad, so stupid, so off, and they don’t see it. It’s like the creationists who write to me with their sloppy reasoning and wacky assumptions — they aren’t persuading me, they’re just convincing me how wrong they are.

Here’s the latest.

Dear Dr. Myers:

I have e mailed you before to present the other side of the issues you talk about on your blog. I would like to try to explain the concept of how firearms prevent crime.

Yeah, he’s mailed me multiple times. Every time I start reading them, go “gaah, what an idiot”, and trash them without reply. Since he’s not going away when I ignore him, time to let everyone else laugh at him.

Let me begin by assuming you have gone into a restaurant or cafe where police officers are eating. Because they are police officers, doesn’t that make you feel more at ease? But not only that, doesn’t the fact they have a gun contribute to that feeling of well being? I would venture to say the chances of the place becoming a crime scene, at least while the police are inside, are close to zero. Another example is that of an armored car. The little “ports” you see on them allow the guys inside to stick their guns out if anyone was to try something. There are also warnings on the vehicle “do not approach”. It is essentially the threat of looking down “the business end” of a gun that is the true deterrent. Wouldn’t you agree that the chances of an attempted robbery are close to zero with an armored car because of guns and the possibility of being shot? Again guns are preventing crime.

Did he just compare trained police officers with responsibilities, a uniform, and a specific role in the community to random jerkwads with a pistol tucked in their pants? That the police dissuade crime is their job; I would not feel more at ease in a restaurant if everyone was sitting there, armed. Quite the contrary.

If most of us are unarmed, relying on a few delegated officials to suppress crime, it’s true, we’re less likely to have crime scenes erupting all over the place. If everyone’s carrying a gun, we’re more likely to have criminal activity that turns into a blazing bloodbath. Not interested. Not convinced at all.

And then he goes on to suggest my daily life would be improved if I were living in the equivalent of a fucking armored car? This guy is nuts.

Now let’s take this a step further to the ordinary citizen. Do you think a criminal is going to try to commit a crime somewhere he might get shot by a law abiding citizen carrying a concealed gun? A criminal, who by definition has no regard for the law, will go and commit crimes in “Gun Free Zones” like churches, schools, hospitals and other places the local authorities deem should be “Gun Free”. Look where mass shootings like Sandy Hook and Aurora took place. Also look at places like Chicago that have a lot of gun violence, because, until recently, law abiding citizens have been unable to carry concealed firearms to defend themselves against criminals. Criminals know where they can commit gun crime without fear of being shot. I’d be willing to go so far as to say that men can be “taught not to rape” if there were the probability of being shot by the woman!

Right. Let’s trade gun-free schools, churches, and hospitals for places where we all walk in fear, just so these obsessed kooks can strut about with weapons. How about instead if we regulate guns more tightly, cut off the killers at the source, and have fewer guns in our communities? That would also reduce the problem. And that’s his solution to rape? Make women carry firearms around and shoot people? Fucking barbarian.

But oh, I forgot — this is all about giving gun-fondlers carte blanche to cling to their object of affection everywhere they go.

Of course there are no statistics on crimes that have not been committed. It is not known exactly how many crimes have been prevented by law abiding citizens carrying concealed guns. The best way to extrapolate how many crimes have been prevented is to look at the crime rate, which has been steadily falling since enactment of concealed carry laws. Just try to “think like a bad guy” with this. Our elected officials can enact all the gun control legislation they want, but that is NOT going to stop criminals one iota.

They do love that fraud, John Lott. Lott is the primary source for this claim that concealed carry laws and an armed populace reduce crime. He’s been exposed as a phony way back in 2002.

Earlier this year, Lott found himself facing serious criticism of his professional ethics. Pressed by critics, he failed to produce evidence of the existence of a survey — which supposedly found that “98 percent of the time that people use guns defensively, they merely have to brandish a weapon to break off an attack” — that he claimed to have conducted in the second edition of “More Guns, Less Crime”. Lott then made matters even worse by posing as a former student, “Mary Rosh,” and using the alias to attack his critics and defend his work online. When an Internet blogger exposed the ruse, the scientific community was outraged. Lott had created a “false identity for a scholar,” charged Science editor-in-chief Donald Kennedy. “In most circles, this goes down as fraud.”

My correspondent is not only making a bad argument, it’s a dishonest one.

You suggest keeping a telephone by your bedside. Fine and well. By the time the police arrived, you could very well be dead. 1500 feet per second is the response time that I advocate in dealing with someone who has broken into my house. Often, just showing the gun to a perpetrator is enough to diffuse the situation.

Oh, god. The 1500 feet per second bullshit. If I’m at the point of having to outrace a goddamn bullet, it’s too late and a gun isn’t going to help. What I have to do in these situations is make it so hanging around isn’t cost effective anymore, and knowing that the police are on the way is a good deterrent.

Besides, the speed of my signal down the fiber optic line to my house is 300,000,000 meters per second. I win on that facile and stupid comparison.

Gun control advocates are quick to blame guns for high murder rates. But let me ask you; when a kid throws a rock through your picture window, do you blame the rock? Or do you blame the kid?

Does he think rational gun control advocates imagine that guns are floating about autonomously blasting away at people? Of course not. We know that the problem is that guns are in the hands of the weapon wankers. When a kid throws a rock through a window, the plan is to tell him to stop throwing rocks.

Also, you know rock throwing isn’t as casually lethal as firing a gun, right? Right? I’m not so sure these guys are that clever.

Expanding from our local communities and states to that of a National level, to namely our Armed Forces, who, with other tools use GUNS to prevent the invasion of foreign powers unfriendly to us. It is the presence of GUNS and the threat of retaliation by us that protects and defends the sovereignty of The United States. It is the presence of the very GUNS you despise that affords you the freedom to be a godless liberal. GUNS also afford you the freedom to post mindless ejaculations on the internet.

Again, this buffoon is trivializing the specific purpose and specific training of police and military forces to equate them to his fellow gun-lovin’ goons. No, I don’t rely on armed guards to be able to post on the internet, you goddamned thimble-witted gun-waving dogma-loving right wing ideologue. Fuck off and stop sending me your feeble parroting of NRA bullshit.

I attended the Cancer Genomics Symposium, hosted at UC Berkeley ( http://qb3.berkeley.edu/ccb/cancer-[…]s-symposium/). A lot of great research was discussed, but it really struck me that every talk highlighted the importance of understanding evolution if we are going to tackle cancer. My general take-home messages from the Symposium are: - Cancers evolve, so treatments need to keep up. - Next-generation sequencing is a sensitive diagnostic tool and allows for earlier detection. - Therapies can be fine-tuned... M. Wilson Sayres http://mathbionerd.blogspot.com

The State
Top 12 pastor stunts: Living as an atheist is just the latest ministry gimmick
The State
A California pastor made headlines this month when he announced that he will live like an atheist for a year to see what it's like on the other side of belief. But Ryan Bell is actually just the latest “stunt pastor” to use unorthodox means to draw ...

and more »

There has been another school shooting, this time at Purdue. One person is dead, and the shooter has been arrested.

Meanwhile, in Florida, a pair of Republicans have proposed rewriting their “stand your ground” law…to expand it.

The current bill would amend the state’s expansive Stand Your Ground law—which permits residents to use deadly force in numerous circumstances—so that it also allows the nebulous "threatened use of force." In effect, it means that gun owners could walk free for brandishing their gun in a threatening manner or firing a shot indiscriminately to "warn" a potential assailant.

That also means gun owners would get blanket immunity from the state’s "10-20-life" law, which mandates an automatic 10-year sentence for anyone accused of flashing or using a gun in the commission of a felony.

Oh, boy — a whole state full of Yosemite Sams, waving their guns in the air and shooting away, all completely legally.

But the two Republicans didn’t write the bill, they’re just sponsoring it. Who wrote it? A former president and current lobbyist for the NRA, Marion Hammer. Being a politician sure is the cushy life. No work at all; if you’ve got a bill to regulate an industry, you just ask the industry to write it for you.

Margaret Downey, Famous Atheist, to Give Villa Park a Reason for Being at ...
OC Weekly (blog)
but in the meanwhile, something, ANYTHING is happening there tomorrow as local atheist group the Backyard Skeptics invite a famous atheist to spread the gospel of No Gospel in one of America's Christian hotbeds. To the press release! And Villa Park ...

This is Thunderdome, the unmoderated open thread on Pharyngula. Say what you want, how you want.

Status: UNMODERATED; Previous thread

The only thing keeping me from assuming that Grantland, which published that awful outing of a transgender woman, is a haven of unethical wankerism, is that one of their writers, Christina Kahrl, seems to get it.

It was not Grantland’s job to out Essay Anne Vanderbilt, but it was done, carelessly. Not simply with the story’s posthumous publication; that kind of casual cruelty is weekly fare visited upon transgender murder victims in newspapers across the country. No, what Hannan apparently did was worse: Upon making the unavoidable discovery that Vanderbilt’s background didn’t stand up to scrutiny, he didn’t reassure her that her gender identity wasn’t germane to the broader problems he’d uncovered with her story. Rather, he provided this tidbit to one of the investors in her company in a gratuitous “gotcha” moment that reflects how little thought he’d given the matter. Maybe it was relevant for him to inform the investor that she wasn’t a physicist and probably didn’t work on the stealth bomber and probably also wasn’t a Vanderbilt cut from the same cloth as the original Commodore. But revealing her gender identity was ultimately as dangerous as it was thoughtless.

What should Grantland have done instead? It really should have simply stuck with debunking those claims to education and professional expertise relevant to the putter itself, dropped the element of her gender identity if she didn’t want that to be public information — as she very clearly did not — and left it at that. “That would have been responsible,” transgender activist Antonia Elle d’Orsay suggested when I asked for her thoughts on this road not taken. It’s certainly the path I would have chosen as a writer making this sort of accidental discovery, or would have insisted upon as an editor.

The editor of Grantland, Bill Simmons, on the other hand…ouch. He’s got a long, long mea culpa out that at least clearly admits that they screwed up, but also admits that the problem runs very deep.

Before we officially decided to post Caleb’s piece, we tried to stick as many trained eyeballs on it as possible. Somewhere between 13 and 15 people read the piece in all, including every senior editor but one, our two lead copy desk editors, our publisher and even ESPN.com’s editor-in-chief. All of them were blown away by the piece. Everyone thought we should run it. Ultimately, it was my call. So if you want to rip anyone involved in this process, please, direct your anger and your invective at me. Don’t blame Caleb or anyone that works for me. It’s my site and anything this significant is my call. Blame me. I didn’t ask the biggest and most important question before we ran it — that’s my fault and only my fault.

So it was run past more than a dozen editors at Grantland, and none of them had a problem with the fact that it was all about othering a trans woman, a woman who killed herself over the story? Wow. Grantland really sucks.

He’s also still making excuses for Caleb Hannan.

As for Caleb, I continue to be disappointed that we failed him. It’s our responsibility to motivate our writers, put them in a position to succeed, improve their pieces as much as we possibly can, and most of all protect them from coming off badly. We didn’t do that here. Seeing so many people direct their outrage at one of our writers, and not our website as a whole, was profoundly upsetting for us. Our writers don’t post their stories themselves. It’s a team effort. We all failed. And ultimately, I failed the most because it’s my site and it was my call.

That’s nice. Right. As he explains, Hannan was writing this long independent piece on a putter that didn’t gel for them until he added this twist that the designer was exposed as one of those weird trans people, making it supposedly compelling and interesting…to a large team of editors that didn’t include one member of the trans community. Yeah, Grantland has a big problem, but that doesn’t excuse Hannan at all.

I’ll also point out the assessment of the article by Boing Boing. The story wasn’t that good; it relied on bringing out a string of gotchas culminating in the big weird reveal of a dead trans woman.

Another thing: critics keep saying that Hannan’s article was great storytelling, hiding terrible ethics. No. It’s a lurid mess. It’s written and paced like a 90′s-era daytime TV thriller, copying the structural and sensational qualities of other works without caring for how and why they work.

As for me, I continue to be disappointed that Grantland failed Dr V.

This entirely not-safe-for-work video purports to tell the true, scientifically accurate story of the Teenage Ninja Turtles. I don’t know — it seems to think all turtles are the same.

Kathimerini
New Democracy asks Tsipras to clarify whether he is an atheist
Kathimerini
New Democracy has demanded that SYRIZA leader Alexis Tsipras informs the public about his religious beliefs after one of the leftist party's officials claimed the politician is an atheist. “The Greek public must know what Mr Tsipras believes,” said New ...

and more »

Guardian Liberty Voice
Ireland Turning Atheist?
Guardian Liberty Voice
A new poll just released shows a whopping 400% increase in atheism in Ireland over the last ten years. Is Ireland giving up its traditional religious history and turning atheist instead? Last year, it was revealed that lessons about atheism would be ...

and more »

Stan Rife