Martian Wet Dreams

There is water on Mars, according to NASA.

Good old H2O.

Let me reiterate, for those who might not have picked up on my excitement:

THERE IS WATER ON MARS!!

Those grainy pictures of a few tiny little ice flakes should get the blood of any card-carrying science fiction geek pumping. Those crystals conjure grandiose visions of colonization and terraforming and attractive women in chain mail thong bikinis.

NASA Mars Photo
(Official NASA Photo from Phoenix Lander)

But the more (dare I say it?) down-to-earth reaction to this news is that we’ve discovered one of the crucial elements of life (as we know it) on another rock in our very own solar system. In the distant past when Mars was a warmer place with a denser atmosphere, this ice would very likely have been liquid water. The presence of liquid water dramatically increases the chance that some primitive form of life may have evolved on Mars at some point, and that discovery – even if it’s nothing more than a frozen microbe carcass – could change our perspective on the nature of life and biology like nothing has since Og the caveman noticed his friend Ug didn’t wake back up when he fell asleep from being hit on the head by a rock.

The discovery of even minute amounts of water on Mars will also likely generate some real excitement – not to mention investment – in space exploration, and that creates jobs and spurs technological advancement and gives me something much more interesting and positive to listen to than politicians and zealots could ever dream of.

Mars Rover Photo

Fear of Fiction

The Catholic Church has a long history of warring against the infidel (especially if there’s plunder to be had), and even the modern Church has men on call day or night for when a demon needs exorcising. But there’s one facet of evil that starts the Pope quaking in his golden bunny-slippers: Fiction. Tell a story that involves the Church or an analogous institution and paints it in a less-than-perfect light, and suddenly the Catholic League is up in arms.

They ranted about the DaVinci Code movie, but that was nothing compared to their apoplexy over The Golden Compass. Here was a story written by a man who was (gasp!) openly atheist, and portrayed a too-powerful, corrupt religious organization at odds with the forces of reason.

Their most recent fit, and the inspiration for this entry, is the reaction to “Angels and Demons”, a new film based on a book by DaVinci Code author Dan Brown. They’re worried that a church might be used in the making of this new piece of blasphemy, and so:

The Vatican has banned the makers of a prequel to The Da Vinci Code from filming in its grounds or any church in Rome, describing the work as “an offence against God”.

Angels and Demons, the latest Dan Brown thriller to be turned into a film, includes key episodes that take place in the Vatican and Rome’s churches. Archbishop Velasio De Paolis, the head of the Vatican’s Prefecture for Economic Affairs, said that Brown had “turned the gospels upside down to poison the faith”.

I’ve not read any of Mr. Brown’s work, nor do I have any plans to see the movies; but if the Church keeps banning them, I’ll probably have to pick one up to see what all the fuss is about.

The Catholics are right to see threats in such stories, of course. Popular fiction can introduce and reinforce news ideas that go against long-standing conventions, slowly enlightening the masses as they become accepted more eagerly than simple, blatant truths tend to be. If I stand up and say, “the Catholic Church’s doctrine is bullshit”, I’m dismissed as a lunatic or a competitor or someone with an agenda; but if I write a good story that gets people to think a little about why the church’s doctrine is bullshit, I’ve chipped away a little more at its crumbling stone walls. History is full of examples where fiction has helped change the world for the better; one that immediately springs to mind is the effect on racial relations in the US of Mark Twain’s portrayal of black characters as actual thoughts-and-feelings human beings.

The irony is not lost on me, when hearing of these expressions of holy outrage, that the Church is protesting against fiction that endangers their own fiction; they’re engaged in a war of interesting lies where only one side is willing to admit they’re just making it up as they go along.

This Week in Fundamentalism, Vol 9

It’s been a fairly quiet week for Christian-based fanatical nonsense, but there are always plenty of stories from our friends in the Islamic world to make for a long TWiF post.

The Reader’s Digest web site has an interesting article about a moderate Muslim woman and the death threats she faced from her fellow believers in “the religion of peace” when she spoke out against the treatment of women in her culture. It seems to me there’s a bit of a double standard at work when a woman who speaks out gets death threats, but a man who speaks out for women’s rights in Iran only gets arrested. But I guess a man with funny ideas is a lot less dangerous to society than an uppity female.

That’s not to say the life among Islamic fundamentalists is easy on the menfolk, however. For instance, if you’re deemed to be less than diligent in memorizing your Koran verses, your teacher could take it upon himself to kill you. And if you’re dead, you can’t strap a bomb to your back and die in a glorious suicide attack, so study hard!

Parts of Africa have been mentioned in previous installments here over literal witch hunts against children and the elderly. Turns out that in Tanzania, there’s another endangered group: albinos.

Discrimination against albinos is a serious problem throughout sub-Saharan Africa, but recently in Tanzania it has taken a wicked twist: at least 19 albinos, including children, have been killed and mutilated in the past year, victims of what Tanzanian officials say is a growing criminal trade in albino body parts.

Many people in Tanzania — and across Africa, for that matter — believe albinos have magical powers.

Apparently there’s quite a profit to be made in the albino body part market, and, of course, whenever religion meets a profit motive, somebody’s gonna have a leg sawed off.

Religion and profit can lead to atrocities, but religion and government tend to make atrocities systematic. Canada issued an official “Oops! Sorry!” on June 9th to the few remaining native people of a group of tens of thousands…

who were taken from their families and sent to church-run boarding schools where they were forbidden to speak their own languages. Many were sexually and physically abused.

I’m sure the apology makes it all better.

Louisiana’s House of Representatives has passed a measure allowing creationism to be taught in that state’s schools. Let the legal challenges begin! If I were a member of that legislative body, I would have tried to append a rider to the “Louisiana Science Education Act” that officially changed the name of the state to “Lose-iana”.

The final item this week is from the Dept. of Please Don’t Try to Help Us:

An atheist student at the U of Virginia has written a game where the player is challenged to travel through history murdering religious figures. Let’s leave the simulated killings of infidels to the religious folks’ video games, shall we? It’s bad enough so many of them assume that anybody who doesn’t believe in (fill in your deity of choice here) that we’re out to kill them all – creating games like this just weakens the secret secular atheist liberal America-hating cabal that we’re all members of, so cut it out, alright? Don’t want the Grand Satanic Poobah sending his shock troops out after you, do you? (Uh-oh! Have I said too much?!?)

Habeus Corpus Restorus By Courtus

(Please forgive the horrible fake Latin.)

The US Supreme Court has ruled 5-4 that the Bush administration does not have the right to detain prisoners indefinitely without charges at Guantnamo. While it’s frightening that four justices would actually vote against something that’s been a legal human right since the Magna Carta, it’s still a victory, and those of us who have watched in disapproval what our current crop of leaders have done to this country have to take what we can get.

Who knows, maybe some day, actual American citizens will have their Habeus Corpus rights restored as well?

This Week In Fundamentalism, Volume 8

Six Nigerian churches were destroyed in May to protest the recovery by police of two Christian girls who were kidnapped by Muslims to marry them off to Muslim men in an attempt to breed more Muslims. To believe that either the kidnapping or the follow-up actions are in any way justified is of course ridiculous and outrageous, and only in a society dominated by ridiculous and outrageous beliefs would anyone even try. It’s a good thing the Christians that are so dominant here in the USA never, ever stoop to such evil tactics as turning children into breeding stock.

The Iraqi woman who fled her home after her husband and sons beat her daughter to death has been gunned down, likely as punishment for not finding her husband’s actions acceptable. Sadly, this will probably be the terrible end of a horrible story, because the odds are against the perpetrators of these crimes ever facing any sort of justice. Maybe we could hook the murdering father up with the Georgia woman who killed her husband because Jesus told her to.

Are you a True Christian? Not if your politics aren’t right, says at least one evangelical organization. You know, if these people can’t even figure out what it takes to be real member of their gang, why should anyone trust them on the whole “existence of God” thing?

This Week In Fundamentalism, Volume 7

This entry would of course be more accurately labeled “The Past Two Weeks in Fundamentalism”, but the standard title is clunky enough as it is.

A California Ford dealership became embroiled in controversy this month over a radio ad it ran:

“Did you know that there are people in this country who want prayer out of schools, “Under God” out of the Pledge, and “In God We Trust” to be taken off our money?

“But did you know that 86 percent of Americans say they believe in God? Now, since we all know that 86 out of every 100 of us are Christians who believe in God, we at Kieffe and Sons Ford wonder why we don’t just tell the other 14 percent to sit down and shut up.

“I guess maybe I just offended 14 percent of the people who are listening to this message. Well, if that is the case, then I say that’s tough; this is America, folks — it’s called free speech. And none of us at Kieffe and Sons Ford are afraid to speak up. Kieffe and Sons Ford on Sierra Highway in Mojave and Rosamond: if we don’t see you today, by the grace of God, we’ll be here tomorrow.”

The dealership has since issued an apology for the ad, the owner claiming he didn’t remember approving it. Does he normally just pay a fee to an advertising agency and tell them “do whatever you want”? He goes on to say that “We’re obviously sorry that it offends a given segment who identifies themselves as atheist.”

I’m guessing it also offends a number of given segments who identify themselves as members of non-Christian religions, as well as Christians who are sensible enough to see that it’s against their best interest to have this sort of nonsense representing them in the media.

I’d like to see Ford issue some statement at the corporate level about this ad, but so far nothing has been forthcoming.

Marriage has been a big topic of late, with the discussion primarily revolving around the court decision upholding same-sex partnerships in California. The zealots are in an uproar about this, of course, and rightly so – because if Janet Folger of WingNutDaily is correct, gay marriage will lead us to nothing less than… THE END OF THE WORLD (DUM! DUM! DUUUUUM!).

Texas authorities are trying to keep their state from vying with Utah for the title of Polygamy Capitol of the United States; another cult down there is under investigation for the usual allegations of abuse sexual and otherwise, injury to children, etc. The cult’s 73 year old leader is pretty spry for his age:

Although members deny that they practice polygamy, former members say Yisrayl Hawkins has at least two dozen wives — and state records show that he fathered two babies last year with women ages 19 and 22.

The holidays must be hell with all those mothers-in-law around.

Many of the stories posted here about Islam paint a picture of a culture where women are treated as property, bereft of rights and privileges, but this is of course not universally the case. No, in fact, in some Muslim cultures, women are accorded special rights that even the men don’t have. A recent example is the Saudi woman who is divorcing her husband because he dared to look under her veil. It’s heartening to see Saudi women escaping the influence of religious fanaticism.

As always, the poor, persecuted Christians of the world are lovingly and peacefully fighting back against their oppressors. Whether it’s a slashed tire on the car of an educator who assailed them by gluing a Darwin fish to his bumper or the burning to death of witches in Kenya, the battle for a return to Godly morality goes on. Still, the fight ahead will be a long and difficult one; even here in the US, many believers are still unfairly persecuted. Why, just last week, a Baptist megachurch minister was arrested apparently for the crime of being Christian while soliciting sex from a minor on the internet.

That’s all for this round. I’ll sign off with a call to arms directed at my fellow atheists: we’re not working hard enough! A recent survey by Coral Ridge Ministries lists us as tied for 8th place with “Cults and false religions” on their ranking of the greatest dangers to America’s spiritual health.

Eighth? Come on, people – we lost to “Pro-homosexual indoctrination”, fernobodyssakes! And why did the ACLU come in first – haven’t they been known to defend religious people? And aren’t they just a bunch of lawyers, anyway?

We have to do better next year!

The Fight To Mandate Ignorance

The holiday weekend, a busy schedule, and some massive battles in the Ettenmoors kept last week’s This Week from being more than abstractly thought about, so of course there’s a lot of catching up to do. It turns out that a good number of recent news items have dealt with the push to force mythology into our public school science curriculum, so I’ve decided to split what would be a huge This Week column into this post on education and another, later entry that covers some of the other recent nonsense.

There seem to be few limits to the dishonesty to which people will sink in order to have a better chance of cramming God’s Word into America’s should-be-secular public education system. Witness, for instance, the metamorphosis of creationism into intelligent design – same shit, different legal paradigm, or at least that’s what they were hoping. Still, though, Reason has won some high-profile victories such as the Dover, PA legal battle against surrogates of the Discovery Institute and its allies, who failed in yet another attempt to inject magic into the science lesson plan.

We won, right? Aren’t our schools safe now?

Hardly. Apparently delusion and persistence go hand in hand.

One “solution” to combating the evils of Evolution is to simply ignore the courts and go ahead and teach some form of Intelligent Design anyway. Turns out, as one survey suggests, that about one in eight high school biology teachers presents intelligent design as a viable alternative to the scientific theory of evolution. Now I understand that good teachers are hard to find and good science teachers even harder, but belief in holy sorcery over scientific evidence should automatically disqualify you from the job, because obviously you weren’t paying much attention in science class as a student.

Sneaking the bible into schools isn’t enough, though; many fundamentalist sorts won’t be happy until it comes barreling through the front door. Don McLeroy, creationist head of the Texas Board of Education – an organization that through its sheer size has tremendous influence on the nature of textbooks made available to schools all over the country – has used the English curriculum as a warmup before tackling state science standards.

teachers and experts had worked for two and a half to three years on new standards for English. So what did McLeroy do? He ignored all that work entirely, and let “social conservatives” on the board draft a new set overnight.

… and then the conservatives who dominate the school board voted their standards in before anyone outside their little clique even had time to review them. What do you want to bet that their upcoming science curriculum has “King James Edition” stamped on the cover?

Texas, of course, is not alone in experiencing legislative myth creep in its schools. In Tennessee, a “Bible in Schools” bill has passed; while the bill’s claimed intent is to “create a non-sectarian high school course about the Bible and its impact on the world”, what are the odds this will be presented in any sort of objective way? And why single out one particular mythology as deserving of its own, separate treatment, when there are so many others whose influence can be felt worldwide? Where is the “Eddas in School” bill, or the “Works of Homer in School” bill? Why single out the Christian Bible unless the intention is to present it from a biased point of view?

Louisiana is also gearing up to teach Magic Sky Faerie theory at taxpayers’ expense. A bill ironically titled the “Louisiana Science Education Act” has reached the House floor there. If passed, it would introduce Untelligent Design to that state’s classrooms. How far the bill will go remains to be seen, but at least one newspaper has come out against it:

That prospect worries the Baton Rouge Advocate’s editorial board, which wrote (May 21, 2008) that the bill will “provide a full-time living for dozens of lawyers in the American Civil Liberties Union. They will have a field day suing taxpayer-funded schools as groups use Nevers’ language to push Bible-based texts in the schools. That’s unconstitutional, and we can see the taxpayer paying — and paying, and paying — for this policy in the future.”

This Week in Fundamentalism, Volume 6

Abdel-Qader Ali of Iraq became famous earlier this month when, after he discovered his daughter might have developed feelings for a British soldier, he trampled, suffocated, and stabbed her to death. A new follow-up article in the Guardian reveals that he did so with the full support of the authorities –

Abdel-Qader, 46, a government employee, was initially arrested but released after two hours. Astonishingly, he said, police congratulated him on what he had done. ‘They are men and know what honour is,’ he said.

– and of the men in his community.

Death was the least she deserved,’ said Abdel-Qader. ‘I don’t regret it. I had the support of all my friends who are fathers, like me, and know what she did was unacceptable to any Muslim that honours his religion,’ he said.

Yes, his daughter’s death at his hands has received the stamp of approval from his version of the Almighty.

‘I have only two boys from now on. That girl was a mistake in my life. I know God is blessing me for what I did,’ he said, his voice swelling with pride. ‘My sons are by my side, and they were men enough to help me finish the life of someone who just brought shame to ours.’

Ah, the joys of Iraqi McFreedom and God’s love….

The Baltimore Examiner reported this week on an investigation into the death of an 18 month old who went missing two years ago and whose remains were found in a suitcase in Philly. It seems the child wouldn’t say ‘amen’ at meal times or follow other cult rules; and really, at 18 months it’s alright to struggle with “ma-ma” and “da-da”, but c’mon, “amen”? Should be an easy one. Anyway, the boy was clearly a demon, or possessed by one, so appropriate action had to be taken:

A witness told homicide detectives Javon was “beaten, physically abused [and] deprived of food and water, which led to the child’s death,” according to Khadan-Newton and records obtained by The Examiner.

Not to worry, though; death is only a minor setback for the devout.

After his death, Javon was placed on a mattress, on which cult members said God would resurrect him from the dead, documents state.

Speaking of resurrections, police apparently interrupted an impending one when they entered the home of two leaders of a local church in Madison, Wisconsin this week. Tammy D. “Sister Mary Bernadett” Lewis and Alan A. “Bishop” Bushey were arrested for “causing mental harm to a child” because Lewis’ two kids were living in the house with the two adults and the decaying corpse of a 90 year old woman propped up on the toilet in their bathroom.

Why did they leave her there? God said to, of course!

Lewis told the deputy that “God told her Alvina would come back to life if she prayed hard enough.” Bushey told the deputy that “Lewis was obedient and served the Lord just as she should.”

I suppose these arrests are just another sad story of our evil secular society persecuting Christians for acting on their beliefs.

Another notable fundamentalist legal entanglement this week involved Adnan Oktar, famed Islamic creationist author, who has been sentenced to three years in a Turkish prison. Details on the specifics of the case are sketchy in the article, but the crime was described as “creating an illegal organization for personal gain”. In other words, he was using religion to make himself rich. He should have come to America, where that kind of thing doesn’t get you arrested; it gets you invitations to dinner at the White House.

One organization that will have a tough time turning a profit in the near future is the Catholic diocese in Vermont, which has lost a suit over sexual abuse by a priest. Lost it to the tune of 8.7 million dollars, in fact.

A grim Bishop Salvatore Matano, who attended the six-day trial, said in a brief, separate interview that the size of the verdict could pose serious problems for the diocese. He called the looming predicament a “sad and tragic moment in our history.”

Allow me to slip into babytalk mode for a moment:

Aww, does the poor widdle Bishy-wishy foresee financial hardship coming for his widdle kingdom?

There. Had to get that out of my system.

A note to Bishy-w – er, ahem, Bishop Matano: If your organization has spent decades (at least) systematically covering up the frequent sexual abuse of minors, its collapse should be seen as a good thing. Good luck with all those other pending lawsuits.

The Pledge, Revisited

Just a few days after my rant about the Pledge of Allegiance, PZ Myers has reported on Pharyngula that three Minnesota students have been suspended for refusing to stand for the Pledge. It’s not clear what their reasons were, so there’s not much more comment I can make at the moment. What’s curious about the case is that the controversy is not over refusal to say the Pledge; non-recital is recognized as a right in most states. No, they’ve been punished because they didn’t want to stand during the Pledge.

We technically can’t punish you for not swearing your daily oath of fealty, but we’ll get you for not at least looking like you’re taking part.