drl2Blog

It seems as if every day there’s some new scandal or story of stupidity involving members of the holier-than-thou set. Except on Sundays, of course, which are their days of rest. You’d think they’d be lying low for a while after the recent national embarrassment of PZ Myers’ expulsion from Expelled! Let’s Show Pictures of Hitler (while Richard Dawkins walked right in), the subsequent attempts to make excuses for their ineptness, and most of all, the recent tragic news of the 11 year old girl who died because her fundamentalist parents thought prayer would be an effective cure for her diabetes. But no, they soldier on, almost as if they don’t understand that these stories reflect negatively on them…

As the latest of my occasional attempts to coerce myself into posting more often, I’ve titled this post “This Week In Fundamentalism, Volume 1”. The “Volume 1” part implies there will be more, and the “Week” part implies that it might appear something close to weekly. Maybe I’ll take the hint I’m dropping myself, but it’s hard to tell; sometimes I can be pretty thick-headed.

Anyway, on to the subject at hand:

I remember a story from while back about an outspoken atheist named Rob Sherman, who fought a court battle against a mandatory Moment of Silence at his daughter’s school. I was less than thrilled by this action, because there was never a mandatory prayer involved (though the word “prayer” was in the name of the act that created the MoS) and there was no indication that it would be anything other than a quiet moment when those who wanted to pray or gather their thoughts could do so. Railing against an optional, voluntary, quiet, unguided religious rite seemed to me to play right into the stereotypes religious folks have about militant atheists who want to take their rights away.

Mr. Sherman’s recent actions, however, I heartily approve of. He’s involved in the investigation of some shady dealings involving the Illinois governor’s alleged funneling of $1 million to a religious school, and it was during his testimony before a House committee on April 2nd that he was verbally assaulted by a legislator:

Davis: I don’t know what you have against God, but some of us don’t have much against him. We look forward to him and his blessings. And it’s really a tragedy — it’s tragic — when a person who is engaged in anything related to God, they want to fight. They want to fight prayer in school.

I don’t see you (Sherman) fighting guns in school. You know?

I’m trying to understand the philosophy that you want to spread in the state of Illinois. This is the Land of Lincoln. This is the Land of Lincoln where people believe in God, where people believe in protecting their children.… What you have to spew and spread is extremely dangerous, it’s dangerous–

Sherman: What’s dangerous, ma’am?

Davis: It’s dangerous to the progression of this state. And it’s dangerous for our children to even know that your philosophy exists! Now you will go to court to fight kids to have the opportunity to be quiet for a minute. But damn if you’ll go to [court] to fight for them to keep guns out of their hands. I am fed up! Get out of that seat!

Sherman: Thank you for sharing your perspective with me, and I’m sure that if this matter does go to court—

Davis: You have no right to be here! We believe in something. You believe in destroying! You believe in destroying what this state was built upon.

(Audio of the exchange here)

Eric Zorn, the Chicago Tribune reporter who covered the story, made an excellent point:

“Consider what the outcry would have been if a lawmaker had launched a similar attack on the beliefs of a religious person.”

I also wonder if Rep. Davis – a black woman – sees any irony in standing in front of a legislative body attempting deny a person’s rights based on his beliefs, when it wasn’t so very long ago in this country when she would very likely have been similarly shouted down when fighting for her rights in front of earlier generations of righteous bigots who would see her as an uppity negro or a woman who didn’t know her place.

I was intrigued by her repeated “Land of Lincoln” reference. Intrigued enough to see if I could find some information on Honest Abe’s thoughts on religion. The results of a quick Google search are quite interesting; there exist a large body of quotes attributed to him that seem to indicate a belief in the Christian god, but also a number of quotes that seem strong indicators that his view of the world might have been a little closer to Mr. Sherman’s than to those of the representative who invoked his name. Perhaps he presented one face publicly, knowing he needed the support of the religious community, while presenting another in private? Maybe he was simply a deist like most of the founding fathers, believing in some sort of creator but rejecting dogmatic attempts to understand that being.

My earlier views of the unsoundness of the Christian scheme of salvation and the human origin of the scriptures, have become clearer and stronger with advancing years and I see no reason for thinking I shall ever change them.

What is to be, will be, and no prayers of ours can arrest the decree.

The Bible is not my book nor Christianity my profession.

The United States government must not undertake to run the Churches. When an individual, in the Church or out of it, becomes dangerous to the public interest he must be checked.

There was the strangest combination of church influence against me. Baker is a Campbellite; and therefore, as I suppose with few exceptions, got all of that Church. My wife had some relations in the Presbyterian churches, and some in the Episcopal churches; and therefore, wherever it would tell, I was set down as either one or the other, while it was everywhere contended that no Christian ought to vote for me because I belonged to no Church, and was suspected of being a Deist and had talked of fighting a duel.

(All of the above, along with some testimonials written by people who knew Lincoln personally, are collected at PositiveAtheism.org)

And there’s this one, which seems almost prophetic these days:

America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.

Land of Lincoln, indeed.

On the international front, the leader of the Russian doomsday cult who had his followers holed up in a cave since November awaiting the end of the world, was understandably upset when it didn’t happen. So upset, in fact, that he tried to commit suicide by beating himself on the head with a log.

In the spirit of modern American foreign policy, I suggest embarking on a policy of preemptive log-beatings to guard against this sort of behavior in the future.

At first I just laughed at this Autoblog article:

Bow your heads: Kansas man forming Mustang Church of America

Charles Ales is into Ford Mustangs. In fact, he owns several; his collection includes all three BOSS variants and four new Shelbys. Over years of collecting cars and hobnobbing with others who share his interests, he noticed that the real car people’s enthusiasm for their rides borders on religious fervor. An idea popped into Charles’ head last summer, and The Mustang Church of America and Museum was born. It’s even got its own logo: the Christian fish symbol with the running pony inside.

Built next to the house in which he was born, the facility is set to open later this summer and will display Mr. Ales’ collection of Mustangs. He also plans to host car shows, swap meets and two Mustang blessings a year. Charles and his adopted son Robert Brunch, both ordained ministers, will preside over Sunday services in the non-denominational church. “I’ll preach goodness and helping my fellow humankind. I’ll preach what we’re supposed to do – make this a better world than we found it,” he told the local Pittsburg, KS Morning Sun newspaper.

The mural behind his pulpit will show Jesus at the wheel of a ’66 Mustang. Bet you don’t have one of those at your church.

But when I thought about it, I was struck by the fact that there is, in fact, solid and irrefutable proof for the existence of the Ford Mustang. I wish I’d seen this article a few days earlier so when I got pulled over last week I could have argued with the state trooper that I wasn’t speeding, I was engaging in a sacred religious rite, and her interference constituted a violation of my rights.

Normally I’m hesitant to post just to show a single image or link, but I came across this on The Stubborn Curmudgeon and had to share:

(Edit 3/29/08 – Forgot a title!)

After posting my earlier entry, it occurred to me that I could expand much more on my response to the items involving our genetic relationship to the great apes. In that vein, I present my first-ever Top Ten List:

Top 10 Reasons Why Apes Are Better Than Creationists

• 10. To a chimpanzee, a banana is just a banana.
• 9. Monkeys hang onto tree limbs with their heads upside down. Creationists hang onto dogma with their heads in the sand.
• 8. Two words: DUNG FIIIIGHT!
• 7. Gorillas don’t knock on your door early Saturday mornings to hand out pamphlets about the Invisible Sky Chimp.
• 6. No Orang-utan has ever left a comic strip about sinners going to hell in any public rest room or waiting room.
• 5. Bonobos get to stay home on Sundays.
• 4. Hands already hairy so no danger from masturbation.
• 3. Monkeys are repressing religious people and waging a WAR ON CHRISTMAS!
• 2. Chimps not terrified of the vagina.
• And the number one reason why apes are better than creationists:
  …
  …
  No ape has ever stood over a fallen foe and screamed, “Die, in the name of God!”

I haven’t been closely following the twin brouhahas in Florida and Texas, where fundamentalist school board members are pushing to add Intelligent Creationism-In-Disguise Design to the science curriculum, and science-minded folks and supporters of church-state separation are fighting tooth and nail against it. I have, however, skimmed a little of the IDers’ propaganda and seen a number of their most common arguments posted various places around the net.

I’d like to address this post directly to the CreationIDsm supporters out there and offer some helpful advice that will help to keep you from sounding like morons in front of anyone with an open mind who paid attention in their high school biology classes. The crux of that advice would be the following:

Attack science all you want. Science is a big boy, it can handle the teasing. The advancement of science progresses when rational, intelligent people find flaws in our understanding of the universe and point them out and try to find better explanations. Believe me, if any of you really do at some point come up with a valid, testable alternative or addendum to the theory of evolution, eager scientists will flock to your door.

Here’s where you seem to have the biggest problem, though. You only get to attack actual science. Arguments against assertions that scientists have never made will only fly among people who are just as willfully ignorant as you have decided to be. You don’t get to make up your own phony straw-man scientific theory and disprove that.

Let’s take a look at some of the creationist arguments I’ve come across and how they distort some of the basic premises and evidence for evolutionary theory.

“Nobody’s ever seen one kind of animal turn into another!”
I’ll wager nobody’s ever seen anyone outside of religious circles claim that this is what Darwin’s theory predicts. I guarantee there is no scientific journal that ever published a prediction that a goat and a lemur would tap limbs together, shout “Wonder twin powers, activate!”, and turn into a food processor and a racehorse. Evolution, for those people who for some reason haven’t figured this out yet, is caused by the accumulation of minor changes in each new generation of a species over time.

“If we come from apes, then why are there still apes?”
There are still apes (including ourselves – see below) because we haven’t managed to make the surface of the planet unlivable just yet. The modern creatures we refer to as apes simply share a common ancestor with us, but have evolved differently to suit the environments where they’ve lived.

“No way do I come from an ape!”
Yes you do. Your mother is an ape. Dad too. So are you, and George Bush, and me, and Angelina Jolie, and everyone you’ve ever met. Big brains and less body hair do not a Get Out Of Hominidae Free card make. If this is merely a clumsy way to argue that you can’t possibly be related to anything that can’t read a holy book, your DNA begs to differ.

“There are no transitional fossils!”
Bullshit. Every fossil is a transitional fossil. I can spend an afternoon digging with my hands along the C&D Canal and bring home fifty transitional fossils. Just because we haven’t found preserved specimens of every single life form from the earliest glop of protein up to, say, John Travolta (yeah, I know some evolutionary leaps are smaller than others), doesn’t mean they never existed. Stuffing God into those gaps is akin to me watching your favorite Veggie Tales movie with you, and when it skips a few frames from a scratch on the DVD, shouting, “See! I told you this was a drama about Hispanic street gangs in 1930s Chicago!”

“Believing that something as complex as a human could come about randomly is like believing that a tornado in a junkyard could assemble a 747!”
There is a certain amount of randomness to mutations themselves, but the evolutionary process itself is anything but random. The phrase “Natural Selection” should be a dead giveaway.

In order for your 747 analogy to work, the junkyard would have to have all the basic building blocks of the 747 in great number. Further, those parts would have to be inclined to naturally link up with the correct matching parts whenever they come in contact, the way the substances that make up living things are inclined to chemically bind with one another. Lastly, and here’s the really important part: whenever correct parts link together they stay together. Survival of the fittest. Now spin your tornado for 4.5 billion years, give or take. Maybe, given all those conditions, your – uh… no, never mind, it’s still a stupid analogy.

How about if we try it this way: If the tornado selects for characteristics that allowed flight and two airborne pieces of scrap metal could share a special kind of hug, nine months later you’d have a swarm of little baby gliders, and their great, great grandchildren might develop little propellers, and on, and on.

The point here being that the construction process of a 747 is significantly different from the development of a life form – even the observable, single-generation process of a child forming in the womb – so comparisons of the two just don’t work even if you do have some clue about evolution.

“No one has ever seen one species evolve into another!”
Well, despite the fact that evolution is a process slow enough that it seldom happens at a rate where major changes accrue over a time span so sort as a human lifetime, speciation has been observed.

“I accept microevolution – small changes from one generation to the next – but not macroevolution, or large changes.”
Macroevolution is nothing more than the cumulative effects of micro. Pretty simple and straightforward.

“The [eye, bacterial flagellum] is too complicated to have evolved by chance!”
There you go with that ‘chance’ thing again. Natural selection. Selection selection selection.

In the specific case of the eye, scientists actually have a pretty good idea of its evolution from the simplest of photosensitive cells – perhaps enabling an organism to find sunlight for warmth, or to warn it of movement nearby – to the complex (but flawed – your creator is a lousy engineer) mechanisms I’m using to help me proofread this before I hit the ‘Publish’ button. As for the flagellum, I think the Dover, PA court battle brought to light that its “irreducible complexity” was in fact very reducible, as each and every one of its component parts was found to serve a purpose independent of the flagellum assembly as a whole.

There, I hope I’ve given you a good starting point. Now scamper off and work on coming up with some new arguments, this time against a non-hallucinatory target.