Thinking for Free

Where have all the bloggers gone?

2011-08-16T08:34:00.004-04:00

For those of you who might have come here from Why Evolution is True, you know where Kizhe has gone. As for Theo Bromine and Eamon Knight, we are now blogging for CFI Ottawa: blog.cfiottawa.com

Hey, we're almost famous!

2010-08-12T22:58:00.005-04:00

My wife just ran across this YouTube video from last year's foray to Ken Ham's Kook House. The young guy is Derek Rogers, who got kicked out of the place (well, sort of: he got hassled by Security as we were walking through the exit hall anyway) for wearing an atheist bus T-shirt, then for expressing an opinion on the KHKH in the hearing of some tender Christian ears. PZ Myers is to Derek's right; we are right of PZ. Theo manages to make a few intelligent remarks while I lurk in the background grinning foolishly.

Orion's High in the Southwest Sky

2010-03-20T00:05:00.005-04:00

....as the song says. Except last week, when we were in Buenos Aires on vacation (short version: we got a cheap opportunity to spend a week in an exotic-sounding place, so we took it). And one clear night it occurred to me to have a look at the southern stars. Which was kind of hard, being in a big city with tall buildings and light pollution, but I managed to find Orion pretty quickly -- only somewhat higher in the sky than I'm used to and upside down. And of course Orion is closely followed to the southeast by his hunting dog, Canis Major, with the star Sirius -- the brightest star in the sky, and easily visible even through the city's sky glow.

So far, these are still things visible from southern Ontario where I've lived my whole life, just shifted to an unfamiliar angle (Buenos Aires is at 35 degrees south latitude). But continuing a little further south from Sirius I found another bright star: Canopus, or Alpha Carinae. At -52 degrees declination, it is never visible from home.

We spent a while mucking with Google Sky and trying to find a spot with a good southern horizon to check out the circumpolar stars, but never managed to identify anything. Unlike the case in the northern sky, there aren't a lot of bright stars around the south celestial pole, and it's too hard to make out constellations when you can't see a big swath of sky all at once. So we contented ourselves with having "bagged" Canopus.

Back home, I went for a walk about 9pm the other night -- and there was Orion back where he usually is, half-way up the sky, and with his sword hanging below his belt. And for some reason, more than any amount of exotic architecture, foreign money, or a different language, that made me realize that I'd been to a far-off land.

Best. Rebuttal. Ever.

2010-01-20T01:00:00.002-05:00

....of the Fallacy of the Golden Mean:

Origin of Species: The Chick Flick

2010-01-19T19:25:00.004-05:00

Just joking! Creation is much better than that. "Skeptical" Jon Abrams thinks so too.

Minor historical gripes: Annie was not the Darwin's first child, but the second. And she died in 1851, while the bulk of the movie's plot clearly takes place in 1858 and 1859, with the arrival of Wallace's letter precipitating the completion of Origin of Species. Was Darwin really a cranky hysterical for seven long years? I know, time gets compressed in Movieland....

Ken Ham: Liar, Hypocrite and Hate-Monger.

2010-01-14T11:26:00.004-05:00

Ken Ham doesn't trust us:

The Scripture tells us [atheists] “suppress the truth in unrighteousness” (Romans 1). Basically it comes down to the fact that they don’t want to have to answer to anyone—they want to set their own rules. They generally want to abort babies if they want or make marriage whatever they want to make it to be (or reject it altogether). They want to do what is “right” in their own eyes! Thus, a Creator who owns them, to whom they owe their existence, and against whom they have rebelled, is anathema to them!

It baffles the mind as to why these atheists even bother to try to aggressively convert people to their meaningless religion—after all, what’s the point? The only reason they would even bother is if they are engaged in a spiritual battle. Otherwise they wouldn’t care. They know in their hearts there is a God, and they are deliberately suppressing that, as the Scripture so clearly tells us.
[.....]
I’m sure most of you realize that you often can’t trust what atheists say. After all, if there is no absolute authority, there is no basis for right or wrong (just one’s own opinion). Thus, atheists can say whatever they want—even if it is not the truth.

Dear Ham-head: I've read your website. I've been in your joke of a museum. I even exchanged brief words with you, some years ago. Substitute "creationist" for "atheist" in the last paragraph above and then it might be somewhere in the same ballpark as the truth. You wouldn't know truth if it ran over you on the Interstate.

And while I'm on the subject of Christian douchebags, I may as well as join the chorus pointing out that Pat Robertson is an evil old man whose God is created very much in his own image.

Chronology of a Cold

2010-01-14T11:22:00.001-05:00

Day 1: You feel like you're coming down with something.
Day 2: You definitely have a cold.
Day 3: You feel like you're gonna die.
Day 4: You wish you'd just hurry up and die already.
Day 5: You realize you're not going to die.
Day 6: You start feeling better.
Day 7: You're mostly better.
Day 8: Back in the pink of health.

Currently working on Day 5.....

2009 in Review

2009-12-31T10:57:00.003-05:00

Actually, this isn't, but that's what you're supposed to write on New Year's Eve, so stickler for tradition that I am....

I/we are obviously not the world's most prolix bloggers -- this post will be #37 for the year. I'm a dreadfully slow essayist, and have other hobbies. And it doesn't help when some of your output goes to another blog, in this case the Humanist Association of Ottawa (to which I really also ought to contribute more). Posts that went there and not here this year were:

They're So Cute When They Play "Science Museum": part 1, part 2, part 3; a series about our visit to the Creation Museum in Kentucky back in August, in company of PZ Myers, Hemant Mehta, Ed Kagan and about 300 others. There is actually a Part 4, currently bogged down in the edit space.

A post-event followup to Blasphemy Day: Blasphemy: Free Speech or Obnoxiosity?

Merry Newtonmass 2009

2009-12-25T00:55:00.013-05:00

Today marks the 367th anniversary of the birth of Sir Isaac Newton, on 25 December 1642. Here is our traditional Newtonmass carol, with a new verse for 2009:

God rest ye merry, physicists
Let nothing you dismay.
Remember Isaac Newton
was born on Christmas Day!
His gravity and calculus and "f" equals "m" "a"!
Oh, pillars of physics and math, physics and math,
Oh, pillars of physics and math!

A factor of big G - the same
for flea and giant star.
Then multiply the masses
and divide by square of "r".
The force that keeps us on the earth
and orbits moons afar!
Oh, pillars of physics and math, physics and math,
Oh, pillars of physics and math!

Now, calculus is math for those
who change things bit by bit.*
To figure out derivatives
and get the curve to fit.
Then integrate and you can find the area under it!
Oh, pillars of physics and math, physics and math,
Oh, pillars of physics and math!

*little bits, not computer data bits

[Yes, Newton was something of a religious nut, but nonetheless significantly advanced humankind's understanding of our universe.]

How We Are Celebrating the Season

2009-12-18T16:25:00.005-05:00

My grown sons showed up last weekend, along with the partner of the older one and a college buddy of the younger one. So we spent a couple of evenings playing Dungeons & Dragons.

'Cuz hacking through a cavern full of kobolds with edged weapons is such a great, family-friendly activity, no?

And at a certain moment, a sacred rite was enacted. Dice were rolled. Tables were consulted. Libations were poured. Libations were quaffed. And poured again. And quaffed again. And poured....um where was I? Oh yes: Candles were lit. And one member of the party intoned an arcane incantation in the ancient holy language of her ancestors. And this was the scene:

So like, Happy (belated) Chanukah, eh?

And then they go and spoil it....

2009-12-02T23:39:00.019-05:00

It's that time of year again. I mean of course, the season when we wish each other good cheer and good fortune...in ways which seem to be increasingly fraught with anxiety for some people. There's so many choices of occasion to observe: Christmas, Solstice, New Year, Chanukah, Kwanzaa...what to say?

Now personally, I don't much care what people wish me. Christmas as it has come down to us is a syncretistic mish-mash of ancient European pagan winter solstice rites, Christian legends about the Nativity and Saint Nicholas, heavy overlays of Victorian sentimentalism, hours of music of highly variable quality, and a good helping of modern commercial consumerism. If you want an excuse to party this time of year, there's plenty in there to pick from. Thus my agnostic family-of-origin celebrated a basic Western-cultural sort of Christmas with a tree, presents (whether they came from Santa or Mom and Dad was often somewhat ambiguous), carols on the stereo, and a big dinner with friends. I have happy memories of all that, and tried to give my kids some of the same.

So: "Merry Christmas" works for me, both personally and with respect to my ancestral culture. "Happy Chanukah" picks up my wife's ancestry, so that's good too. But in the unlikely event someone wishes me "Happy Kwanzaa", I won't know what's expected of me (aside from a non-plussed "Um...sure...and the same to you"). I won't be offended (it's too small a thing to get worked up over, and presumably the speaker means well), but I really won't understand what I've been wished. If I respond in kind, am I comitting myself to something? It would feel socially awkward. So it would seem, at the least, courtesy to bestow good wishes in the name of a festival the recipient actually celebrates -- in much the same way as you try to pronounce their names correctly.

Now imagine you're an overworked, underpaid retail employee trying to be polite to (frequently obnoxious) customers during the busiest time of the year. And as part of that you're required negotiate the mine-field of cultural sensitivities contained in an apparently simple greeting. Some stores try to finesse this by mandating the generic "Happy Holidays", but somehow it doesn't have the same ring to it. If only you could read minds....

....and someone has come up with what, at first sight, seems like an excellent idea: sell little buttons bearing the reassuring message "It's OK: Wish Me A Merry Christmas". I like it: it cues the poor store clerk on your preferred salutation, in a light, friendly way. I can see a whole line of these, for Chanukah, Kwanzaa, Solstice, etc, etc. It could be great ecumenical outpouring of mutual respect and understanding! Peace on earth and goodwill to men! Why, one might almost say that it's, well, very much in the spirit of Christmas....

....until you go read the rest of the website. "Happy Holidays"? Did you think it was just a way to be culturally inclusive? (Or even, just a convenient abbreviation signifying Christmas, New Year, and the week in between?) Guess again: it's the "....forces of darkness that are attempting to silence the good news...." (cue scarey music). And I bet you thought "Merry Christmas" was just a customary way of expressing hope that the recipient's last week or so of the year would be a safe and happy experience of spending time with family, attending congenial social gatherings, relaxing at home, and maybe getting some cool new toys, right? Nope. What you're really doing is "....telling them that there is good news and that the God of the universe has put into motion a wonderful plan to offer them salvation...[It] is indeed nothing less than the first step in opening a door to offer someone salvation." Well, golly: all that time when I was growing up godless, I never realized I was actually preaching the occasional Gospel sermon all through December. Who knew?

Of course, no good evangelistic crusade would be complete without a little Shoppin' For Jesus:

[Wearing the button] tells people you are not just shopping for a winter festival, but what you are buying is celebrating your Lord’s birth.

Which irresistibly reminds me of this fleeting shot from Terry Gilliam's dark comedy Brazil:

Seriously, shopping as sacrament? Only in America.... Whereas Jesus cast the money-changers out of the temple, these folks want to bring the temple in to the shopping mall -- Baptisms in the Jacuzzi store? Men's Bible Study in Home Depot; Women's in the Kitchen & Bath department? (For lulz, check out the joy on the "Kudos" page, in honour of adverts for the "Christmas Super Saturday sale" and other great proclamations of faith).

And, Mr. Merchant, if you dare wish us "Happy Holidays", we will be offended (PDF), offended I say! Because the phrase "Merry Christmas" is very very special, and the organizers of this campaign want everyone saying it to each other, all the time (but especially in stores):

As the cycle of wishing and being wished a “Merry Christmas” begins, the forces of darkness in our nation will be affected. Light will be proclaimed. Hope will be announced, and the spiritual atmosphere will be changed.

Kind of like Harry Potter casting a spell, only you don't need to wave a wand to make the magic happen.

Like I say, on the whole I don't care how people choose to express good wishes to me. But if I get the feeling that there's more going on than a simple exchange of human goodwill, that there's an agenda being pushed, I am....inclined to push back. So on the off chance that someone wearing one of those buttons walks up to me, says "Merry Christmas", and stands there expectantly, I shall be very tempted to paste on my biggest smile, and reply in my loudest, cheerfullest voice:

...because some people really, really need to get over themselves.

Hat tip: Friendly Atheist

Seeing the Forrest

2009-10-29T18:57:00.007-04:00

Readers of talk.origins may have run across a poster called Richard Forrest, a British palaeontologist specializing in plesiosaurs, and also author of a hilariously, um, revisionist history of evolutionary science.

Now you can see the man himself, enthusing over the skull of a monster pliosaur recently discovered in Dorset.

That's a lotta money!

2009-10-24T23:11:00.008-04:00

I learned a new word yesterday: "yotta". Strictly speaking, it's not a word; it's the SI prefix indicating 10 rasied to the power of 24 (abbr: "Y"). That's a thousand times bigger than the largest SI prefix I previously knew about (zeta), and is currently the largest official prefix. Really, it's a useful unit to have. For example, the power output of the Sun is 383YW. By comparison, the province of Ontario consumes about 25GW on a hot day when everyone is running their air conditioners. Which means the Sun is equivalent to about 15 peta-Ontarios.

Borderline-Asperger geeks like to know these things. We'd be loads of fun at cocktail parties, except we never go to any because we hate people. (That, and no one ever invites us more than once. I don't care; you're all boring. Yes, all of you.)

The way I found this out is weird: it seems that, in what has to be the record-holder for ridiculous damages claims, someone is suing the Bank of America for 1784 billion trillion dollars. Yes, that's 1.784 yotta-bux.

That's a lotta bux (as in: waaaay more than are in the picture at right).

OK, just to raise the intelligence quotient of this post above of the yocto-level, here's Monty Python's Money Song. Enjoy:

A Day of Two Books

2009-10-22T22:40:00.007-04:00

So, I'm on the bus this morning, reading Dawkins' The Greatest Show on Earth, and he spends a couple of pages explaining how, before Darwin, everyone thought species had essences; they were natural kinds, which of course makes it very hard to imagine how one species could turn into another. But Darwin showed us how to think of species in terms of populations containing lots of variation, and the average of the distribution can shift over time until it's so different we no longer call it the same species. This narrative about how the idea of "species" changed (as opposed to the species themselves changing, if you get my meaning -- like, I'm talking in a meta-level here...oh, never mind), Dawkins credits to biologist Ernst Mayr, who explained it all to us back in the 1950s.

Then the bus gets to work, and I spend a few hours doing workish things.

And when I return home this evening, there is awaiting me a padded envelope which opens to reveal this book:

...by this guy.

And of course John wastes no time (as in: right in the Prologue, before we even get to Chapter The First) telling us that Mayr got it all wrong, in fact the whole book is about how wrong he was, almost no one was an essentialist, ever.

It's fun when that kind of thing happens.

Today's the Day

2009-09-30T08:00:00.000-04:00

....which is to say, my mother's 89th birthday. Well, except that she sort of missed the occasion by three years and a few months. So I guess that means she won't be wanting any cake or candles.

What, you thought I meant some other kind of day? Well, Mom was never much of a blasphemer. I mean, she was an agnostic all her adult life, which I guess counts for something in that department. But she was really a rather quiet, reserved woman. About the closest she ever got to overt blasphemy was that, in moments of frustration, she would mutter "Damn!" under her breath (which these days, hardly counts as blasphemy at all). And that's probably about the limit for an English girl of her generation.

Personally, I'm not big into explicit blasphemy. Even my hammer-on-thumb expletives tend to draw on the lexicon of bodily function, rather than theology. So I'm a bit ambivalent about Blasphemy Day. Somehow, it smacks of the big boys on the playground teaching some little kid all the naughty words. To me, just saying "God doesn't exist" remains a quite sufficient blasphemy -- what else needs to be said?

But my ambivalence goes deeper than that.

One chief aim of Blasphemy Day is to make it safe to diss religion. Trouble is, I've not personally spent much time in any space where religion-dissing wasn't safe. To start with, my family of origin was agnostic. My parents didn't run down religion, but they thought it was false, and told me so. When I hit the cynical adolescent stage, religion was certainly among my targets. And then when I did get religion myself, it was one that in the local context was a somewhat eccentric minority sect -- and I do this while I'm in an age group that punishes non-conformity (not that I ever had much chance of being part of the in-crowd: I was a hopelessly geeky misfit, even without the religion). Then I go off to university, and where I am conspicuously not into certain prominent facets of dorm life. So my religion, at least, was never quite respectable. A few years later I finally get into a more mainstream religion -- and soon after that, I discover Usenet, where absolutely nothing is sacred, or off-limits.

So for most of my Christian period, I seemed to have a talent for innocently wandering into free-fire zones.

Now I'm an atheist -- and therefore part of another minority religious group (using "religious" here in a loose sense). And yeah: Danish Mohamed cartoons, rampant Islamism, thin-skinned Irishmen passing anti-blasphemy statutes, the Smallkowski affair and all the other small-minded small-town bigotry that percolates out of the American hinterland by way of the internet these days -- I know all that, but very little of it is here, in Ottawa, in my face. So let's not overstate the case: in this particular neck of the woods, we have it pretty easy.

It may be that my very first personal encounter with the Thou Shalt Respect Religion meme was in the context of the Ottawa Atheist Bus Campaign, in which several city councillors thought that their personal offense at the rather mild advertisement was grounds for controlling other people's speech rights. And that experience made me realize something: we don't, in pluralistic, liberal urban Ontario, go in for the kind of bare-knuckle bigotry of some places.What we've done instead is, in a very polite-Canadian way, to bury the religion debate and agree not to discuss it. There may not be a lot of overt piety in the Canadian character, but there's a lot of Dennett's "faith in faith" -- it's a Good Thing, so don't question it too hard. That's Not Nice. Running the bus ads broke that taboo -- hence the reaction.

So a few of us (I don't know how many; I'm not planning it) are apparently celebrating Blasphemy Day by going downtown tonight wearing appropriately irreverent T-shirts. I'm going, because I think that taboo should stay broken. Because I think the thin-skinned types who wanted to squelch the bus ads should continue to be offended and uncomfortable, until they get over their own self-importance. Because I think unbelief should advertise itself the same as belief does, daily, on every corner where there is a church or mosque or synagogue. Because I think that, opening that space for out-and-explicit unbelief here helps to open it everywhere.

Because I think.

Postscript on Felines and Fiction

2009-09-20T10:12:00.009-04:00

People (particularly data-entry staff at veterinary clinics) would sometimes ask where we got the name of our late pet from (usually after they've asked how to spell it, or if they encountered the written form first, how to pronounce it. It's: KEE-zhay). Classical music lovers generally recognize the reference to Sergei Prokofiev's Lieutenant Kizhe orchestral suite, and are further aware that the music was originally written for the 1934 film, which in turn is based on the novella by Yuri Tynyanov.

The action of the story revolves around the efforts of the Russian Imperial court to hide from the vain, mercurial Tsar Paul I the fact that he has made a mistake: that the name and persona of "Lieutenant Kizhe" is the result of a scribal error. The afore-linked Wikipedia article adequately describes the plot of the novella (the movie changes a few non-essential things), so I won't belabor the details. Though intended as a satire on the Tsarist bureacracy, one can't help wondering if there is not also a subtle jibe being levelled against the Stalinist regime under which both the book and film were made.

We discovered only yesterday that the film (with English subtitles) is now available at the Internet Archive and Google Video. (I think it's been a while since we last searched for it). So last night, in memory of our furry friend, we hooked up the laptop to the TV and sat down to watch....
I'm a lousy movie critic: about the best I can manage is "Liked it" or "That sucked". But this flick is definitely the former. It is made early enough in the "talkies" era to have preserved some of the silent-film propensity for sight-gags. For example, the prison commandant, presented with the non-existent Kizhe for incarceration, with perfect gravity searches the ground around the guards for this "confidential prisoner, who has no shape". No dialog is spoken, or needed. Later, the entire sequence of Kizhe's wedding comprises about 10 minutes of high absurdity. While there is understated slapstick, it never reaches the over-the-top level of the Keystone Cops. And behind it all is Prokofiev's music; the elements of what later became an orchestral classic.

So: it's a quirky kind of closure. We've loved the music for years (enough to name our seventh cat after it), and been fascinated by the back-story, so it was great to at last see that story played out. And we learned one detail about the doubly-fictional Lieutenant, which is perhaps a fitting memorial for the cat who lived in a non-believing household; who always knew what he wanted, and always let you know about it. From the film's closing soliloquy -- a kind of reverse eulogy on his now-deceased officer -- delivered by the Tsar:
Good-bye, little friend.

(Movie poster from WikiMedia Commons)

A Passing

2009-09-17T22:14:00.007-04:00

With sadness, we announce the loss earlier today of our companion of the last eight years, and occasional co-blogger, Lieutenant Kizhe the Siamese cat. For the past four months Kizhe had been suffering from a series of stubborn bacterial infections and an associated inflammatory condition, which eventually progressed to the point of open sores. Kizhe endured one surgery and several rounds of antibiotics and steroid treatment, however the sores were not healing and he was growing progressively weaker and more anemic. It became apparent that he was uncomfortable and that recovery was unlikely, hence The Decision was made. He was euthanized at home this morning, on his favorite chair in the sunroom, surrounded by the sounds and smells of the backyard. This picture was taken a few days ago:
Many thanks go to the vets and staff of the Merivale Cat Hospital, in particular to Dr. Emma Thom who spared no effort in her attempts to diagnose Kizhe's condition, including consulting with experts around the world via the internet, and also to veterinary technician Jessica who assisted Dr. Thom with the euthanasia.

Kizhe in younger days, contemplating the possibilities of the internet:(And you thought this post was going to be about that folk singer, right? Yeah, she'll be missed too)
===================================================================
Update, 28 September: The necropsy results are back, and contrary to biopsies taken back in May, it was cancer. Specifically, a rare form of lymphosarcoma. Apparently, experts all over the continent are fascinated by Kizhe's case, and papers may even get written on it. Being science geeks, we're actually rather...comforted? gratified? at having managed, at least, to contribute something to the vet-med literature....

Cosmic Coincidence?

2009-07-26T20:33:00.002-04:00

So last Monday, y'all got drunk and celebrated the 40th anniversary of the moon landing, right? (OK, maybe not the drunken part). But how many of you knew that the moon landing occurred 25 years to the day after the unsuccessful assassination and coup attempt against Adolf Hitler, carried out by some of his senior officers? There was even a movie made about it last year, but I don't think I'll be seeing it -- I'm not sure I could suppress my gag reflex at seeing that much of Tom "I love Scientology" Cruise.

Now the second part of this coincidence is that, exactly 25 years after the moon landing (well, plus or minus a couple of days, because it didn't happen all at once), Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 impacted on Jupiter. On that occasion, I could almost persuade myself that I could make out a black blemish on the planet's face through my 4.25-inch Newtonian and the July heat shimmer. Or I may have been hallucinating: my keenest memory of that event is trying to stand very still and steady at the eyepiece, on a hot humid night, while feeling about a million pin-pricks in my legs as every mosquito for miles around attacked the only human in Kanata insane enough to be outside at 4am.

As a postscript we got a repeat performance this year: just one day before the 40th anniversary of Apollo (and therefore the 15th anniversary of SL9), something else biggish hit Jupiter.

What does this all mean? Absolutely nothing, except for the human tendency to see patterns (mostly by tossing out all the data that doesn't fit) where there aren't any.

One Small Step....

2009-07-20T16:17:00.002-04:00

If I've done this right, this post will appear at 20 July at 20:17 UTC -- 40 years to the moment from when a manned spacecraft from Earth first touched down on the surface of another world.

I was 12 years old and my family was on vacation, camping at Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado, right up by the continental divide. We had been into town for something -- I don't recall what, maybe a restaurant dinner; I don't even recall which town -- and on our return in the evening, stopped at a little country store to pick up whatever. I stayed in the car while my parents went inside.

A few moments later my Dad re-emerged, beckoning frantically at me to come inside. In the store, I found a crowd of people gathered around a dutch door at the back that gave into the owner's living quarters. The upper half was open, and everyone was watching a small black-and-white TV perched on the kitchen counter. On that screen was Neil Armstrong taking his first few steps on the moon. Not that I could see much: by the time the low-bandwidth lunar signal had been received, converted to broadcast format (by pointing a TV camera at the slow-scan monitor in Mission Control!), been broadcast by the networks, filtered through the local weather (as I recall it was raining, maybe even thundering) and made its way to the rabbit ears of this little receiver way up in the Rockies, all that was left was a bunch of monochrome blobs that moved every so often.

Back at camp, I fell asleep in our tent trailer that night listening to the radio coverage. Before turning in I made a last visit to the washroom. At our altitude it was pretty cold for July; but the weather had cleared and the sky was crystal clear as only a high mountain sky, far from any city, can be. The moon was full and dazzlingly bright in my memory.

And a 12 year old boy looked up and realized: that's not just a light in the sky. It's a world -- and there is a man walking on it!

Way Cool....

2009-07-18T10:19:00.002-04:00

This image, from the Lunar Reconaissance Orbiter, of the Apollo 14 landing site, in which you can see the LM, an instrument package, and the footpath where the astronauts walked:

This and more NRO Apollo images here.

I wish there were more of those.

Winnie the Pooh

2009-07-17T18:46:00.005-04:00

Mike links to Trish relating the story of the origin of Winnie-the-Pooh. While the bear was named after the city of Winnipeg, he (she?) actually came from White River, Ontario, which we passed through a few years back, in the course of circumnavigating Lake Superior. In the Museum there stands this wood carving of Winnipeg the bear and his owner, Lt. Harry Colebourn:

Crackergate in Canada

2009-07-08T14:24:00.005-04:00

So, according to news reports (eg here and here), Canadian Prime Minster Stephen Harper has created a "scandal" by not properly taking communion at a Catholic funeral.

Monsignor Brian Henneberry, vicar general and chancellor in the Diocese of Saint John, says that if Harper accepted the host but did not consume it, "It's worse than a faux pas, it's a scandal from the Catholic point of view."

Amazingly, this puts me in the position of defending Stephen Harper (yikes). But here's the thing: It is not up to Harper, even if he is Prime Minister, to be cognizant of the church rules for a church of which he is not a member - it is the height of arrogance for the Roman Catholic Church to have such an expectation. If the holy body of their Lord Jesus Christ was improperly handled, it is entirely the fault of the priests for not providing proper instruction (not to mention the fact that presumably they should have known that Harper was not a Catholic, so they should not have given him the wafer in the first place).

[I am not, and never have been a Catholic, but I have been to a few Catholic masses, where, in preparation for Communion, the priest provides instructions indicating that the elements are only to be consumed by members of the Catholic Church, and inviting those who are ineligible to partake of the elements to fold their hands and receive a blessing from the priest instead. If the priest did not provide such instructions in this case, they have no one to blame but themselves.]

Compact Paradox?

2009-05-25T19:49:00.004-04:00

So: We're all replacing incandescent lightbulbs with compact fluorescents, thereby saving electricity, thereby reducing carbon emissions, thereby saving the planet, right?

Or are we?

A comment on another blog prompted me to check that truism. The point is made that, during the heating season (which around here runs from about October through April, depending on how tolerant you are to wearing sweaters indoors) we derive some benefit from the waste heat of electrical appliances like light bulbs. If we switch to more efficient bulbs, that heat must be made up by the furnace, which is presumably burning a fossil fuel.

So the question is: which is more efficient in terms of carbon emissions? Burning carbon-rich stuff for heat, or using electrical heat which includes a component generated from non-fossil sources (dams and nukes)?

Let's do some arithmetic:

I have a recent-model natural gas furnace which is advertised to be better than 95% efficient (ie: out of every joule of heat generated in the burner, 0.95 joules winds up warming the house). How much carbon does my furnace emit to deliver, say, 1 megajoule of space heating? First, to get that 1 MJ delivered, we need to burn about 1.05 MJ worth of fuel. Natural gas is mostly methane, the heat of combustion of which is 55.5 MJ/kg, so that 1 MJ of heat-made-good requires 1.05/55.5*1000 = 19 grams of gas. Methane (CH₄) has a molecular weight of 16, only 12 of which is carbon, so the net carbon emission is 14.2 grams.

What about electrical heat?

The biggest loss in thermal-source electrical generation is right at the turbine. The maximum theoretical efficiency of any apparatus that converts heat into work is limited by the temperature difference between the input and the output. Given available materials, this means that the process that turns boiling water into electricity can never be more than about 40% (and that's generous). Knock off a little for transmission losses, and let's say that the overall efficiency -- from burning the fuel to lighting the bulb -- is 35%. That looks pretty bad until you consider that, in a typical power grid not all the electricity comes from fossil sources. Ontario Power Generation (to use the locally relevant example) gets only 27% of its power from fossil fuel plants (mostly coal, though with some contribution from oil or gas).

(Aside: That OPG page is pretty cool. The big number at the right shows the amount of power currently being generated in the system, continuously updated. As I write, Ontario is running on about 11.5 gigawatts. During summer heat waves, it gets up around 25 GW or more. Clicking on the hydro, nuclear and fossil links at the left lets you see how much is being contributed by each source. Really, engineers are fascinated by this sort of thing. That, and my late father worked for OPG's predecessor Ontario Hydro, so I have a familial interest in the old place. I've been in some of those stations, when he would take me out on a job.)

But back to the arithmetic: Anthracite coal yields 27MJ/kg when burned. So generating 1MJ of electricity emits (1/27)/35%*1000 = 106g of carbon. However, only 27% of OPG electricity comes from fossil sources, so we can discount that amount down to 28.6 grams.

Which is still twice as much as just running my furnace. You'd have to be using a crappy old furnace that was only about 50% efficient to be as bad as electric heat. And in the summer of course, there's no question: every watt of heat you don't produce in the house is one watt your air conditioner doesn't have to scavenge up and move outside.

Conclusion: Even when you allow for the space heating contribution of incandescents, compact fluorescent bulbs still win by a good margin.

[Note: to keep it simple (translation: I'm too lazy to do all the research) I've ignored a lot of upstream carbon contributions here, such as: manufacturing light bulbs; building the different kinds of power plants; mining, processing and transporting coal or uranium. Also, the generation mix I used is the cumulative figure for 2007, which does not necessarily reflect what OPG might be running on a typical cold January night.]

Reboot the Franchise, Scotty!

2009-05-14T18:48:00.005-04:00

Phil Plait has written a much, much better review of the new Star Trek movie (complete with astronomical notes), so go read his instead.

You're still here? *sigh* Let's see what I can come up with. First, the obligatory warning:

~~KLINGONS~~ SPOILERS OFF THE STARBOARD BOW!

What, still here? OK, you asked for it:

The Kirk character has a heavy whiff of Mary Sue about him -- what, from obnoxious, know-it-all cadet to captain of the Enterprise, just for saving Earth from destruction once? Methinks he skipped about four ranks (and at least one more saving-everyone's-ass) there. Pity, too: it might have made the (inevitable) sequels more interesting to see him work his way up from Ensign through Lieutenant and Commander, before he gets to kick people out of the Big Chair whenever he wants to.

Several of the supporting characters seem to be played for comedy -- caricatures, really, of their older counterparts on classic Trek (not that that cast didn't descend, at times, into self-parody, especially by the fourth or fifth movie).

I'm also not entirely sure I approve of destroying Vulcan. I kept expecting them to fix the time-line and put everything back the way it was, allowing history to proceed along Canonical lines -- it was fairly late in the movie when I realized that, no, this is the new normal. Of course, Spock Prime knows about the supernova, giving them over a century to prepare to save Romulus (and thereby the villain's wife, Kirk's dad, Vulcan, and Spock's mom). Or as a commenter at Bad Astronomy pointed out: Nero the Romulan could have done the same thing, instead of going off on his mission of vengeance.

I think time travel and its associated paradoxes will always be a dramatic weakness. Back to the Future managed it, but only as comedy (and of course, Doctor Who -- another show that has never taken itself seriously, in either of its incarnations).

But enough kvetching: as a dying Kirk says, "It was fun". Enjoyably demented villain, plot that keeps moving along, plenty of fights and swashbuckling, some kick-ass space hardware and lots of explosions. The retro-industrial look of the Enterprise engine room looks more back to the Enterprise TV series than forward to either classic or Next Generation Trek. The Onion review (no, really!) gets it about right: "A fun and watchable action-packed thrill-ride".

My First, Last and Definitive Comment on Recent Reports of Miss California's Bigotry, and that She May Lose Her Crown for Excessive Self-Exposure

2009-05-07T18:59:00.003-04:00

It is beneath my dignity to acknowledge that anything of significance, or worth the attention of any intelligent person, has occurred during, at, near or otherwise associated with a beauty pageant.

That is all.

Gullible isn't in the dictionary?

2009-05-05T22:48:00.005-04:00

"Yeah, right," you say, and expect that next I will provide you with a link to a video with a cool catchy tune. But no, really:

(Original screenshot - not a single pixel was harmed or even altered!)

Stood up by Jesus?

2009-04-28T22:19:00.008-04:00

Joshua Sullivan at Think Atheist has some complaints about the oft-heard evangelistic slogan "Christianity isn't a religion; it's a relationship". As a former participant in that end of Christianity, I think I can shed a little light on the subject for him.

First, where and when did this meme come from? I became a fundamentalist in 1972 (I'm now fully recovered, thank you), and I encountered the slogan within a year or two after that. So I think it's safe to say it was invented by at least the early 1970s.

Notwithstanding my conversion to goofy religion, I wasn't completely stupid, so I never took it in a completely literal way. The evangelical Christianity I was inducted into was, among other things, about God and the afterlife and other "religious stuff", so obviously it was by any normal definition, a religion. I understood the "relationship" slogan as an attempt at what we now call "re-branding" -- in this case, that Christianity wasn't this stereotype of a tedious ceremony that took place once a week in stuffy old buildings where you had to sit very straight and be very quiet while wearing uncomfortable clothes. It was (according to the sales pitch) a happy, dynamic thing -- a ongoing "relationship with Jesus", a "walk with the Lord" (cue a certain sappy hymn on this theme). Keep in mind the spirit of the times: the counter-cultural churnings of the 60's had not yet petered out; the Jesus Movement (ie. the Christian branch of the hippies) was going strong. So it makes a lot of sense that the times would create a Christianity that, whatever else it might be, certainly wasn't your parents' boring old religion.

In that context, it's not a bad pitch, either: like any good slogan it tries to capture a provocative idea in a way that has some punch, and of necessity leaves out a lot of nuance. Of course, there are more than a few enthusiastic amateur evangelists out there who treat that slogan the way they treat the Bible: it's literally true, and we'll just re-define "religion" so it only refers to other folks' god-talk -- not ours.

But back to this notion of having a "relationship with God". It takes (at least) two to have one of those, doesn't it? And Communication is Very Important (so say all the relationship books, and it turns out that even applies here). So how is that supposed to work, when one of the partners seems a bit....invisible and intangible, so to speak?

As explained to me, our half works when we pray. And we know Jesus is listening, if for no other reason than that it goes with the omniscience thing. Sprinkle with a few appropriate Scripture passages, and we've got the uplink side covered. (I work in wireless telecom. "Uplink" is one of the things I get paid big bucks to spend all day worrying about).

But what about the reverse direction? (Another good chunk of my salary comes from worrying about "downlink").

Well to start with, sometimes God even answers prayer -- the thing you asked for happens! Giving little gifts is always good for a relationship, right? Of course, more often than not, his answer is "No". 'Cuz like, that particular thing wouldn't be right just now -- it's "not in his perfect will for you". But it's way cool when he says "Yes", and that makes up for the other times.

Can you say "confirmation bias", children? Of course you can.

But God is also supposed to speak more directly than that. Some of the more cynical people on my side interpret this to mean that Christians have auditory hallucinations. While that obviously happens to some believers (and in more Pentecostalist circles may even be accepted as a genuine Word from God, instead of a neurological issue that should be treated by a competent doctor), that's not the main way it's understood in the calmer waters of mainstream evangelicalism. It's much subtler. In the groups I hung out with (mostly Navigators), the idea seemed to be that while you were reading your Bible (which you are presumed to do faithfully, every day), a verse might "stand out" in some way, or while praying you might get a little "feeling" that God wanted you to know or do something, and that was God speaking to you. (I don't know what you're supposed to do if the "stand out" verse is, say, one of the more obscure ceremonial laws in Deuteronomy. I suppose that rarely happens, as even the most devout Bible-reader must sleepwalk through those passages. Really, there are whole chapters in there that are simply unreadable.)

It's pretty obvious that this process of listening for God's Little Hints is open to all sorts of free-associative and autosuggestive effects. Feeling a little low-level guilt about some minor thing? There's probably a Bible verse that will bring it to the surface - Yep, God wants you to repent of that! Wondering if you should pursue a particular course of action? Again, there's probably some verse that, if squinted at in just the right way, can be made to apply.

Funny that it never seemed to happen to me. I think that, even at that young age (ie. late teens), I just didn't trust this sort of subjectivism. I knew that my inner monologue was capable of tossing up all sorts of random stuff, and there was no reason to take any of it as anything more than the usual stream-of-conciousness noise. If Jesus wanted to be heard over that, he'd just have to speak louder. Which as far as I could tell, he never did.

Maybe it would have helped if I had taken up Buddhist mediation techniques, which are supposed to be good for learning to quiet the internal mental noise. But in those days, I think I regarded that sort of thing as Satanic, and thus definitely verboten. Ironic, that.

So as far as I'm concerned, I tried to to have a relationship with Jesus, but he never showed. Nowadays of course, I realize there's a very good reason for that....

Reflection on Earth Day

2009-04-22T09:00:00.002-04:00

Before the turn of the century, so-called “future-watchers” often predicted the advent of the “paperless office”, and by extension, the “paperless society”. Nine (or perhaps eight) years into the new millennium, it seems that if anything more people now have more paper than ever before. The proliferation of personal printers and photocopiers is, in many ways, even more astonishing than that of personal computers. Because the production of printed matter is now so cheap and accessible, the material we have is becoming more and more banal and ephemeral. Our forests are being denuded, simply for the purpose of informing potential customers of their next unique opportunity to spend money they don’t have to buy things they don’t need.

Paper pushers defend their right to free speech and conspicuous consumption, saying that all that paper gets recycled anyway. But, looking at my lawn in the spring, I know that there is a lot of it that is simply tossed away. And, the last time I visited my local stationery store (to buy the supplies I needed to feed my own shameful paper habit), I discovered that the cost of recycled paper was actually 10-30% more than standard paper! I steadfastly bought the more expensive recycled pack, and when I got home, I made sure to hug my favourite trees, telling them what I went through on their behalf (they were not very sympathetic).

I do my best to conserve paper, subscribing to paperless billing where possible, re-using the second side of printed paper for drafts, attempting to cancel subscriptions to advertising – I have even put up a no-flyers sign above my mailbox, but apparently, even though there is as much or more paper than ever before, reading comprehension is still sadly lacking for many of the delivery people who still saddle me with their useless notices.

But recently I committed a dreadful transgression, and was taken to task by my own son! I had suggested that maybe it was not strictly necessary for him to extract all the recyclable paper from the large wad of paper and tape that he had retrieved from our recently mounted garage sale signs (technology made it so easy to print all those signs…but I digress). So, here I am, writing my penitential essay. It seemed like such a little thing, but of course everyone knows all the platitudes about how it’s the little things that make a big difference in the long run.

I promise, I won’t ever do it again – and please: Don’t tell the trees!

Three Scientists, Two Great Talks

2009-04-17T23:00:00.007-04:00

....and one grandstanding git.

It's been a very biological week here.

The Chimp Lady

On Wednesday night, Jane Goodall spoke to a packed Centrepointe Theatre. I remember stories about Goodall in National Geographic, back in the 1960s, but sort of lost track after that. Her talk was largely autobiographical, covering the period from her childhood to the Gombe years. She told one amusing anecdote about how, at the age of about five, she hid in the hen house so she could see for herself that, yes, that big egg really did come out of the chicken. She also talked about the formation of the Root and Shoots program, which attempts to bring together conservation and development concerns, so that there is not a continual confict between the two.

The Finch Folks

Tonight was Peter and Rosemary Grant at Carleton, giving the final Darwin Week lecture (if it seems this is a little late for Darwin Week, that's because the Grants spend February in the field. I can see how the Galapagos is probably preferable to Ottawa in February). Their talk centred on mechanisms of speciation and adaptation in their study of Darwin's finches on Daphne Major and Genovesa.

The Galapagos finches are famed for their wide variety of beak shapes and sizes, each adapted for exploiting a particular food source in the sparse environment of the islands. Peter Grant talked a little about two genes (bmp4 and CaM, if I recall the names) that control respectively, beak length and thickness. Then he talked about how rainfall variation from year to year affected average beak morphology among two smaller finch species Geospiza fortis and G. scandens, by affecting the abundance of their preferred seeds.

Rosemary took over to talk about hybridization and genetic diversity. G. fortis and G. scandens differ in beak size, but are otherwise fairly similar. Though hybridization is possible, they are mostly kept separate by mating preference, which is based partly on morphology, but even more on having different songs. Now here's the fun part: the song an individual finch will sing throughout its life is learned as a nestling, from its father (when asked just now whether this constitutes cultural inheritance, our household social anthropologist looked very thoughtful, but refused to commit himself on the question). Female finches mate only with males that sing the right song. However, once in a while a nestling will imprint on the wrong species' song. When it grows up, it will most likely mate with the other species, producing hybrid offspring having an intermediate beak size.

Field surveys show that hybrids are just as fit as either parent species. So what keeps fortis and scandens from merging into one species? Answer: the fact that a hybrid will only backcross to the parent species that sings its father's song. However, even this small amount of gene-flow helps to maintain genetic diversity within each species.

It was a great talk -- straight-up science from the people who did the work. Stuff you had to pay attention to. Unfortunately, just as Rosemary Grant got down to the last few slides, the fire alarm went off, and the Q&A had to be adjourned to the courtyard . Which brings us to.....

....The Grandstanding Git

Before the talk started, we noticed an old acquaintance sitting a few rows back -- Jonathan Cucan, from CORE. After the evacuation we were all just standing around outside (fortunately, it was a pleasant night), he made a bee-line for Peter Grant, so I hung back within earshot. I didn't catch everything that was said (let alone remember even that much), but the exchange went something like this:

Cucan said polite things about the Grants' talk, then asked whether "he agreed with Dr. Einstein and Dr. Hoyle" about the complexity of the cell (or something along those lines -- Johnny's current schtick seems to be about biochemistry). When Dr. Grant worked with these marvelous organisms, didn't he see the hand of God? Grant shook his head, no he didn't, and went into an explanation about molecular biologists having theories which they are testing of how to form DNA and cell membranes etc, and gradually build up complexity. Cucan came back that "Dr. Hoyle" had proved that it was impossible to form a cell spontaneously....at this point, one of the organizers came to Grant's rescue and pointed out that other people probably wanted a turn to talk. Cucan left, no doubt satisfied that he had successfully delivered his payload of weapons-grade sanctimony into the enemy's stronghold.

I must confess I was disappointed: I was sort of hoping Cucan would at least try to argue something relevant to Grant's talk (my Inner Creationist managed to think up a couple). But our boy Johnny has a bit of a one-track mind.

I do like how Cucan specifically used the full titles for Einstein and Hoyle -- like, waving around a doctorate is supposed to impress someone who has one themselves. And a GIGO calculation by an astronomer (several decades ago, IIRC?) is supposed trump actual experts working on that specific problem? Pack it up, folks -- Fred Hoyle has spoken, and Johnny Cucan is his prophet! A lovely case study in creationist's slavish devotion to intellectual authority.

Exile and Outrage

2009-04-03T22:47:00.002-04:00

I have just sent the following email to my Member of Parliament Gordon O'Connor, with CC's to Prime Minister Steven Harper and Minister of Foreign Affairs Lawrence Cannon. I urge every Canadian of conscience and decency to take similar action (non-Canadians, too -- it can't hurt to show how this harms our international reputation). Let's bury this government in outrage, until the weight of anger and contempt forces them to do the right thing.

Mr. O'Connor,

I am writing you as a constituent to express my outrage at my government's shameful treatment of Abousfian Abdelrazik, whom as you are no doubt aware, has again been refused travel documents to allow him to return to Canada and to his family.

As a Canadian citizen I am appalled by the capricious behaviour of my government, in the person of Minister Lawrence Cannon, in its setting up of successive barriers to Mr. Abdelrazik's return -- a game Minister Cannon has been playing for some months, now. This latest refusal appears entirely arbitrary, and not only without legal justification, but in clear violation of the Charter right of every Canadian citizen to enter this country. The most recent excuse offered -- an appeal to some unspecified risk to "national security" -- is scarcely credible in light of Mr. Abdelrazik's clearance by both CSIS and the RCMP. This is just one more example of the way that catch-phrase has become a pretext for the restriction of liberty, and for tyrannical behaviour on the part of government. If Mr. Abdelrazik can be denied his legal right of return at the sole discretion of a Minister of the Crown, then any of us can be denied any right, without recourse to due process.

I appeal to you to use your influence within caucus and Cabinet to see to it that this government fulfills its legal and moral duty to one of its citizens, currently being held in effective exile in Sudan.

Respectfully,
[my real name here]

I used to have dreams like this....

2009-03-21T15:16:00.003-04:00

xkcd gets it right:
When I was an undergrad in the late '70s I had nightmares like this. Typically in my version, I would have gone home to my parents' place in Toronto, and suddenly I would realize: Ohmigod, I'm supposed to be back in Kingston writing an exam AT THIS VERY MOMENT!!! Quick -- if I jump in the car and drive like hell, can I make it in time to salvage something?

That dream recurred throughout the years of my program, and for a couple of years after graduation, then sort of petered out.....

....fast forward 15 years....

....and I'm back in school again, doing a Master's. And damned if that nightmare doesn't start up all over....

Sort of makes me wonder if it's such a good idea, taking another degree after I retire. At that age, my heart might not take that kind of stress....

An Honorable Ignoramus

2009-03-17T18:02:00.010-04:00

Everyone has by now read about how Gary Goodyear, our, um, excitable Minister of State for Science and Technology, replied to a question about his scientific views by proclaiming his religious opinions:

Canada's science minister, the man at the centre of the controversy over federal funding cuts to researchers, won't say if he believes in evolution.

“I'm not going to answer that question. I am a Christian, and I don't think anybody asking a question about my religion is appropriate,” Gary Goodyear, the federal Minister of State for Science and Technology, said in an interview with The Globe and Mail.

Oddly, it's not the creationism angle that bothers me the most about this. Yeah, that bothers me too, but many otherwise intelligent people fall for that, and still manage to be rational and competent at their jobs. It seems to me that the potential harm here depends on exactly how much control the Minister has over specific funding decisions (at least, such seems to be my subconcious rationalization).

But what really got me was this comment (emphasis mine):

“Now I have got a portfolio that I am absolutely passionate about and frankly connected to,” he said, adding that his days of experimenting with engines in high school automotive class gave him an appreciation for what it feels like to come up with something new.

“When I was in high school, we were already tweaking with a coil that would wrap around the upper [radiator] hose and it got an extra five miles to the gallon. … So I've been there on this discovery stuff.”

Well, ain't that folksey? I also really dig "being there on this discovery stuff". Sounds like George W. Bush with an impact wrench, doesn't he?

Magic devices that dramatically improve gas mileage are an old standard of urban legends and scams -- and even among that sorry gallery, frigging with the cooling system seems one of the less likely candidates for improved fuel economy. That much should be obvious to anyone with even the smallest inkling of how engines actually work. It's bad enough that the government is cutting basic research in favour of "get[ting] some of these technologies out of the labs onto the factory floors. Made. Produced. Sold" (though even a creationist chiropractor could probably manage that kind of short-sighted mandate). But with the gas-mileage remark, Goodyear reveals himself as a gullible ignoramus who not only does not understand science, he's also clueless about technology -- he can't tell (as they say) shit from shinola. He's a jumped-up amateur mechanic who believes in woo -- chiro-woo, creation-woo, or car-woo; taken together it forms a pattern of consistent ignorance and anti-scientism.

And in case there is any remaining doubt of the man's complete babbling idiocy, he dispells it in this CTV interview (quoted at MacLean's blog):

We are evolving, every year, every decade. That’s a fact. Whether it’s to the intensity of the sun, whether it’s to, as a chiropractor, walking on cement versus anything else, whether it’s running shoes or high heels, of course, we are evolving to our environment. But that’s not relevant. And that’s why I refused to answer the question. The interview was about our science and tech strategy, which is strong…

I don't expect Ministers to have Ph.Ds, or be professional scientists. But I do expect them to have at least a basic appreciation of the nature of the field they are responsible for -- enough that they're willing to listen to those who are expert in those fields.

Gary Goodyear shows himself to be utterly unfit for any position with influence over science or technology.

Fire. Him. Now.

A Mighty Caterer Is Our God

2009-03-12T18:31:00.010-04:00

If you're old enough to remember The Cross and the Switchblade, then you know that David Wilkerson (played by Pat Boone in the movie) is the Pentecostal preacher who in 1958 moved from rural Pennsylvania to New York City to work with troubled youth. As I recall, it's quite a story -- if you're inclined to take the word of someone who claims God speaks to him every now and then.

But I bet you didn't know that Wilkerson is still around, and runs the Times Square Church. And according to the WingNutDaily, God still tells him stuff from time to time. Like on the night before 9/11:

Then Wilkerson felt God telling him something that seemed rather bizarre. He felt God telling him to make sandwiches – lots of sandwiches. What were they for? Who would eat them? That part wasn't clear, but his church did what they believed God was telling them anyway.

And on the 10th of September they stayed up all night making hundreds and hundreds of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. By morning they had about 2,000 sandwiches. At 8:46 a.m. the first plane hit the World Trade Center and Times Square Church was ready to feed and minister to rescue workers and victims of our nation's worst attack.

Yep, there's a reason for Brayton's Law, which states that when you see "WorldNetDaily Exclusive", it means that what follows is something so colossally idiotic that no one else would print it. And unsurprisingly, the story turns out to be bogus (as the added Editor's Note says -- but not before blogs all over the Christian Loonosphere picked it up! Google on "wilkerson sandwich" to see what I mean).

But never mind that detail; let's just run for a moment with the sandwich story as-is: 3000 people are about to die horribly, and what does the Almighty do about it? Gets a holy roller church to make fracking sandwiches. Like, it didn't occur to him that just maybe, tipping off the FBI with the names of the hijackers and the flight numbers might be more useful? I mean, it's great that Wilkerson's church pitched in to help in a terrible crisis -- but wouldn't it be a whole lot better if that crisis were averted?

Does it not occur to any of the fans of this sort of story that, really, this is a piss-poor waste of omniscience? What is wrong with these people?

Hat tip: my favorite source for this kind of thing.

=============================================================
Update @ 13/3/09 11:33pm: Well, ain't that interesting. Above, I link to posts on two other blogspot blogs. And within an hour or so, Blogger automatically added the trackbacks over there (I checked).

Today they're gone. Both of them. (And the comment I dropped at Debbie's place hasn't appeared either).

Do you suppose those folks just don't like links to places that are, well, less than properly reverent? Or maybe Blogger just got confused by the re-title and re-post operation. Yeah, that must be it....
=============================================================
Upperdate @17/3/09: I partially take it back. For the record: Debbie posted my comment.

God and City Council

2009-03-11T23:58:00.007-04:00

[I'm going to resist the temptation to do yet another Bus Sign. For one thing, I can't think of a good punchline off-hand]

At Ottawa City Council today, God could be found hiding in the corner behind Policies and Procedures. Or at least, that's where his erstwhile defenders were, when Councillor Alex Cullen presented his motion to overrule OC Transpo's decision to refuse the atheist bus ads.

Cullen gave an impassioned address about free speech and the need for municipal government to uphold it. It probably didn't hurt his case that the city's solicitor had prepared a memo outlining the legal issues involved in carrying "viewpoint" advertising in public facilities -- and pointing out that Transpo's current policy was almost certainly in violation of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and the city would likely get its ass handed to it in the event of a lawsuit. It boils down to: mere likelihood of public offense isn't enough to ban an ad. IOW: deal with it, pearl-clutchers.

Then the nay-sayers had their turn. Marianne Wilkinson continued to complain that she was offended, but acknowledged that the policy was problematic. She proposed amending Cullen's motion, replacing the directive to run the ads with a directive to review Transpo's policies, and bring them in line with the Charter. Cullen replied: What a great idea, and proposed amending his own motion -- by adding the review directive to his own, rather than replacing it. Councillor El-Chantiry had his say; I don't recall what except he also didn't like them, and the same from Councillor Bloess. But the real comedy came from another councillor, I think Bob Monette, who claimed the ads were from "some young people who thought it would be funny" -- and in the blissfully unselfaware manner common to ideologues, went on to complain that the ads were derogatory (OK, at 51 I guess I should accept "young people" as a compliment). Then there was some blather from that side about how Council was wasting time on irrelevancies like this when we still hadn't got the bus system back to full capacity following the strike -- as if putting (revenue-paying!) signs on the sides of busses was in some way impeding doing maintenance and getting them on the road. But the main theme from the opponents was that it was some kind of sin to override the Process -- that Transpo's bureaucrats had made a decision in keeping with Stated Policy (though we know that Policy has not been consistently applied in past cases of pro-religion ads), and while we should fix the Policy, we shouldn't overrule the bureaucrats, because....well, because. Exactly when the Policy would get fixed, and the ads get approved, wasn't quite clear.

Then Hizzoner Larry O'Brien almost gave us a surprise: he started off talking about how clergy on the Ottawa Interfaith Council (of which he is chair) were pretty unanimous in support of the ad; that they welcomed the opportunity for dialog. And for a moment we thought he was going to change his earlier reported position and vote Yes. But then he reversed course, sought refuge with his cronies in Policy and Procedure, and announced he would be voting No.

There was a little confusion in the voting process, because first Council had to approve adding the policy-review directive to Cullen's motion, then vote on the motion as amended. Both votes passed 13-7, with presumably the same councillors voting the same way on both (I didn't keep track).

Various media were there -- at least Metro, A-Channel, the Citizen, the Sun -- filming and photographing Council and the dozen of us sitting in the gallery wearing our protest T-shirts. After the vote, we filed out, and there occurred in the corridor what I believe is called a "scrum" -- we shook Cullen's hand and thanked him; the journalists talked to people at random; I suddenly found a bright light shining in my face, through which I could dimly make out a camera lens, a mike, and a nice lady asking my opinions what had just happened. I managed to blurt out something about free speech (hopefully without sounding too pompous) and about how some people want religion to be immune from criticism, and it shouldn't be. Maybe they'll edit me into the Slavering Baby-Eating Atheist Monster, I dunno. There's a reason I don't work in PR.

A few people had to take off for other commitments, and the rest of us had a celebratory dinner at an Indian buffet on Laurier. On the way back, we just had to take the picture above, which is an artwork hanging in the elevator lobby off the parking garage (sorry for the quality; the only camera we had was a Blackberry). While we were doing that a woman came out of the elevator, and asked immediately recognized the ad on the shirt. She was very pleased to hear that Council had voted our way, and left saying something favorable (I don't recall exactly what) about Hitchens and Dawkins. Funny how you run into people....

All the other kids have already posted this video, but I especially like the fact that the guy looks like Mayor O'Brien:

Hat tip for the video: Mike.

You've been thrown out of better places than this!

2009-03-05T22:13:00.002-05:00

According to available information, the situation is this:
In Brazil, a nine year old girl is sexually abused by her step-father (note: he hasn't been convicted, so I hereby make the obligatory genuflection towards Our Lady of the Presumption of Innocence) and becomes pregnant (with twins!). When her mother finds out, she seeks an abortion for her daughter, which the medical system is willing to grant, given both the rape and the fact that she's still too young to safely carry even one child to term, let alone twins (thus managing to hit not one, but two exceptions to Brazil's general ban on abortion).

And the Catholic Church, displaying the matchless Love of Jesus, tried to prevent it.

Fortunately for this poor kid, her doctors went ahead and did the abortion anyway.

So the local Archbishop excommunicated them. And the girl's mother. There's no word on whether the anathema also applies to the evil bastard who's responsible for the whole mess in the first place.

BTW, the Brazilian Catholic Church seems to be on a roll these days: just last week, they suspended a priest from his duties, for his advocacay of gay rights, and the use of condoms as a public health measure.

But back to the excommunications: the girl is off the hook, as she's too young to be held accountable. However, I can't help thinking that as she grows up, she will remember what her Church did for her in the darkest hour of her young life, and react appropriately. As for her mother and the medical personnel: I also can't help thinking they're better off being on the outside of this insane institution.

Bus ads update

2009-03-05T11:11:00.002-05:00

The motion to overturn OC Transpo's bus ad ban was tabled at the 4 March Council meeting, and will be discussed and voted on at the 11 March meeting.

There is an on-line petition here; we invite everyone to write letters to city councilors, at that site and also here

Some other ways you can help:

come to the council meeting at City Hall on Wednesday, 11 March (more information here)
write a letter to your city councilor (email addresses and suggestions here)
donate to the Canada wide atheist bus campaign (tax deductible)
or, direct your donation specifically to the Ottawa atheist bus campaign (not tax deductible)
join the FaceBook group - tell your friends

A Voice Falls Silent

2009-03-04T17:56:00.004-05:00

The following arrived in my RSS reader today (don't bother clicking the links; it's gone, folks):

Note To All My Regular Readers
from Primordial Blog by blank
I know a lot of my regular readers have been wondering what happened to this blog so I thought I would post a quick note of explanation.

My employer was not too happy to discover that I had been writing a blog and thought that my choice of topics reflected badly on them and on my position in the community. As I prefer receiving regular paychecks to blogging, we came to the agreement that it would be best if the blog was removed from the internet.

Thank you to all the kind people who have enjoyed my writing over the years and have stopped by to comment - it's been great getting to know many of you, but now it is time for me to move on to other things. I'll still stop by to visit the atheist blogosphere from time to time, though not under my own name.

I don't know whether his employer objected to the sometimes-bumptious religion debates, the occasional pictures of nekkid wimmin, or what. As far as I can recall, references to the community, the school, and the kids he taught were generally pretty positive. Whatever the reason, I'll miss my semi-regular dose of Primordiality.

And of course, it also emphasizes the reason that many people prefer to use a 'nym online.

Ad Omnibus

2009-02-19T18:01:00.001-05:00

Everyone knows the back story by now: OC Transpo has turned down the "Probably No God" bus-side ads, justifying this decision by a series of prevarications. As it stands, Ottawa busses can carry ads for the evangelistic Alpha Course, the Anglican Diocese, pro-life pregnancy counselling services, and (appearing soon) random capsule Bible lessons. But suggesting there's no God? That might offend people! Nooooooo!

So, the issue went before the city's Transit Committee today -- and actually made the tag end of the six o'clock news. After some nice pics and a sound-bite from some of my fellow Ottawa Humanists, we got committee chair Alex Cullen:

To say that this particular group cannot speak -- if you follow the logic -- means that no Christian can speak, no Muslim can speak, no Hindu can speak, no Jew can speak, because these are all....[interruption by another committee member]

Cullen gets it (and so, to his credit, does the guy running the Bus Stop Bible Studies): If "viewpoint" advertising is allowed at all, then everyone gets their shot at it. If Cullen ever runs for mayor, I'm voting for him (unless of course the other Alex runs again).

Then, cut to Councillor Marianne Wilkinson (whom I believe was the interruptor):

I think that to actually demean religions groups in this city is not what we should be doing at OC Transpo, so I can't support this and I think that you were wrong Mr. Chair that it doesn't do that, because to me as a Christian it does...

No, Marianne. Let me explain "demeaning" to you: "Anyone who believes in God is a moron" -- that would indeed be demeaning of religious individuals and groups. But: "There's probably [not even definitely] no God"? In what universe is that "demeaning"? If I saw that ad 25 years ago, I would have said "No, I disagree", and then had the argument -- but demeaning? How about: "Marianne Wilkinson is a thin-skinned twit" -- yes, that's personally demeaning. Unfortunately, you're providing evidence that it's true.
=========================================================
Our folks made the Metro tabloid:

Darwin Week in Ottawa

2009-02-03T21:35:00.006-05:00

Just because we don't worship Charles Darwin doesn't mean we will refrain from celebrating all those round numbers: Carleton University has a series of lectures planned next week (plus one in April) to celebrate the Darwin anniversaries.

http://www.carleton.ca/fass/darwinweek/index.html

Monday Feb 9th
"Darwin and the Evolution of Reasons" – Daniel Dennett
(Reception following this event is sponsored by the Humanist Association of Ottawa)

Tuesday Fed 10th
"Darwin's Landscape Vision" - Michael Summerfield

Wednesday Feb 11th
"Putting Darwinism and Religion in their Place" - David Livingstone

Thursday Feb 12th
"The Struggle for Existence in the World of Climate Change" Charles Krebs

Friday Feb 13th
"Killing Time: An Explanation for the Contrivances of Males for Seizing and Restraining Females that Darwin Did Not Attempt to Explain" - Dr Patricia Gowaty

I'm an A-bus-ist, Too!

2009-02-02T18:47:00.004-05:00

Though the transit strike is officially over, apparently it will take several weeks to get the busses back on the road again. (What, these things fall apart just sitting in the garage?) So while there is some talk of bringing the atheist bus ad campaign to Ottawa, for the next little while this is going to be the main sentiment of Ottawans, of any or no religious persuasion:
Ironically, that's also the current situation back where the bus campaign started.
(Image generated by Bus slogan generator)

Now that's a BIRD!

2009-02-01T15:21:00.005-05:00

This handsome guy or gal was perched in our backyard about noon today. We couldn't get a look at its back, but identify it as a probable Cooper's Hawk (Accipiter cooperii). Apparently, they're not unknown around Ottawa. It seemed to be hanging out with three crows, who were perched in the other tree, and they all flew off together while I was walking around the yard.

Mirror, Mirror

2009-01-26T20:42:00.003-05:00

Among the newly-installed President Obama's first acts has been to lift the ban on US foreign-aid funding for groups that facilitate abortion. This was quite predictable,as it follows a pattern of recent history going back to Reagan, of Republican presidents imposing the ban, and their Democratic successors lifting it. Also predictable was reaction from Certain Quarters -- like the Vatican, as represented by Archbishop Rino Fisichella, president of the Pontifical Academy for Life:

....the arrogance of someone who believes they are right....

What is important is to know how to listen, without locking oneself into ideological visions with the arrogance of a person who, having the power, thinks they can decide on life and death. If this is one of the first acts of President Obama, then with all due respect it seems to me that we are heading toward disappointment even more quickly than we thought

The irony of a dogmatic church complaining about someone else's "arrogance" and "ideological visions"....needs no further comment from me. And as for "life and death": this is the same Church whose bizarre views on sex and reproduction have almost certainly worsened the AIDS crisis in Latin America and Africa.

I think we should take up a collection to buy a bunch of mirrors, to be installed in the Vatican. They really need them over there.

Darwin Worship?

2009-01-10T15:14:00.003-05:00

Sure, the Darwin fish is a joke, and a clever one at that. But most committed Christians, especially fundagelicals, are not known for their sense of humour - they take themselves very seriously, and often expect that others see (or should see) the world in simple black and white, just as they do. So, a Christian puts a fish on his car - maybe just the icon, or maybe it contains "Jesus", or the Greek acrostic "ΙΧΘΥC" (Jesus Christ, God's Son, Saviour). By this they identify themselves as followers of Jesus. Then the Christian sees a car decorated with a fish (with feet - yay tiktaalik) that says "DARWIN". The logical deduction: Jesus:Christian::Darwin:Atheist. Not true, of course, but hard to fault them for reaching that conclusion.

(I prefer the fish with "GEFILTE" inside - now that's really funny, and unambiguous enough even for the Christians.)

Meh. Who Cares?

2009-01-09T21:00:00.001-05:00

Everyone is no doubt aware of the Atheist Bus Campaign in Britain, mounted by (among others) the British Humanist Association. As of this week, there are some 800 public transit busses in various cities bearing an ad reading: "THERE'S PROBABLY NO GOD. NOW STOP WORRYING AND ENJOY YOUR LIFE". Around the atheist blogosphere, there has been some discussion of (and complaints about) the fact that the PTB who regulate British advertising required the insertion of the qualifier "probably", as the non-existence of God is not considered absolutely proven (this is the same reason that commercial ads rarely say anything definite enough to constitute an actual claim). As Larry Moran notes, such standards of evidence are not uniformly applied across all forms of public expression. Be that as it may, I actually prefer the qualified version, so I consider the amendment serendipitous.

Partly, it's a personal quirk: I don't like absolute statements. At all....at least, not much....OK, on occasion I suppose.... Alright, you get the idea. To me, our attempts to grasp reality are full of nuance and uncertainty, and I feel compelled to acknowledge that. So the qualified version fits my temperament.

But there's also a practical advantage: I think the qualifier makes the message less confrontational, and thereby increases the number of people who will accept it -- and yet, I think it still moves its target audience in the same direction, and by roughly the same distance. I know, some atheists prefer a no-compromise, no-quarter-given approach. I just happen not to. There's certainly a time to be absolutely blunt, with no subtleties -- but it shouldn't be the default. A little friendliness rarely hurts.

To put it another way, there are multiples ways of expressing atheism. One is: "No, there IS NO GOD, DAMMIT! Now bugger off and take your imaginary friend with you!" But that response is essentially forced on atheists by a certain kind of aggressive religion. (Not me personally -- in meatspace I lead a pretty sheltered life. I have to go online if I want to find someone trying to re-convert me). As part of an ongoing interaction, it's undoubtedly justified in some circumstances. But I take the bus ad as a way of starting a conversation, and the blunt opening "There is no God" gives more importance to the "God Question" than is warranted. It accepts the premise that "Does God exist?" is an important question -- maybe even the Most Important Question Of All (especially when backed up by thinly veiled threats). I used to agree with that premise -- I thought it really mattered. Certainly, back when I was an intellectually-oriented Christian with an interest in apologetics, proofs of (the Christian) God's existence seemed very important to me. Over time, however, the subjective importance of that question diminished. When I finally became an atheist, it wasn't so much that I came up with a definitive refutation of the God hypothesis -- it just stopped mattering to me. So my expression of atheism tends to be along the lines of: "Probably not and the question isn't really all that interesting. I've got more enjoyable and productive ways to spend my time, than thinking about it".

So to my ears, that word "probably" gives the bus ad a certain off-hand spontaneity, just the right air of casualness -- and thereby denies the premise of the evangelists, that the matter is so supremely important that we must all dedicate ourselves to figuring it out. It's not -- any more than agonizing over the existence of unicorns or gremlins. In itself, the God Question doesn't deserve to be taken seriously. If it weren't for the historical-cultural weight this concept carries, we wouldn't even be having this conversation.

Is there a God? Meh -- who cares? Not me.

Bus photo credit: Jon Worth / British Humanist Association

Hey, Atheists: It's all your Dad's fault!

2008-12-29T21:44:00.003-05:00

Atheism Ascendent?

In presumed observance of Boxing Day, Citizen senior writer Robert Sibley gives us one long ad hominem argument against the New Atheists. His screed takes the "Four Horesmen" (Dawkins, Dennett, Harris and Hitchens) to task for their criticism of religion as being irrational, and encouraging of violence, extremism and inhumanity. According to Sibley, they should quit bitching, because in fact atheism has already won (!):

By all appearances atheism is deeply embedded in the contemporary mind. Modern philosophy, natural science and psychology are, more often than not, atheistic in outlook. So, too, are many of our social and political institutions. It is a virtual taboo for a Canadian politician to refer to his or her religious faith in public life. The school system teaches students about sex and drugs, but classroom prayers have largely been cancelled.

First, Sibley seems to confuse "secular" (making no reference to religion) with "atheist" (in the strong sense of denying gods). To a certain school of thought, any statement that does not begin with an invocation and end with a benediction, is ipso facto impious. But let's be honest: the party whose ox is being gored here -- whose prayers are now omitted from school, whose scriptures are no longer taught during "religious instruction" -- is not just some generic "faith", not some non-denominational "spirituality": it is Christianity (and please, don't give me any tokenistic crap about "Judeo-Christianity", just to prove that you're not really a bigot.) And that is what official secularism is for: because inevitably, officially sanctioned observances are always one party's prayer, but not someone else's; it always comes down to the government endorsing one faith over another. Several centuries of blood were spilled in Europe before we finally got the clue that government must be for all the people, not just for one group (or even a loosely-defined coalition of groups). And as for politics: while it's true that Canadians don't seem to like American-style political piety, in which candidates proclaim that they'll do what God wants, it is still the case that more Canadians believe in God than not. We may not be religious enough to suit Sibley -- but neither is atheism "deeply embedded in the contemporary mind".

(I don't at all understand where he's going with the comment about natural science. Sibley certainly isn't a fan of Creationism, as he has previously written:

Science-based evolutionists who seek "mutual understanding" with those who promote creationist doctrine as equally scientific are effectively committing intellectual suicide. The reality is that some ideas, some principles, are mutually exclusive, and to "respect" those who hold unintelligible views is to retreat in the face of fanaticism.

Whatever his motivation, science has been "atheistic" at least since Pierre-Simon Laplace found he "had no need of that hypothesis [ie. God]" to complete his Mécanique Céleste, and will remain so until someone figures out how to weigh and measure God.)

But back to the alleged triumph of atheism. Yes, Western society is far more secular than it used to be: you can no longer be jailed or worse for disagreeing with the state church on a point of doctrine; you're no longer routinely expected to be some sort of Christian (well, at least if you live in many of the large cities in the US or Canada -- there are lots of places where that's still not true); discriminating on the basis of religion is illegal. I assume that Sibley agrees all this is a Good Thing. But it hardly equates to some sort of atheist hegemony. In Sibley's world, apparently are no Christian fundamentalists trying to sneak Creationism in to school science curricula (and coming damned close to succeeding); no fanatical Muslims flying airplanes into buildings (oops -- I see he has an excuse for that, which we'll get to later); no Pentecostals from Alaska capturing the hearts of the Republican party....um, aren't journalists supposed to be better plugged into current events than that?

But never mind that Sibley's opening premise is (to be charitable) grossly overstated: if we atheists are winning, then why are the New Atheists still complaining? In fact, why in general are atheists, atheist?

Father & Son

Apparently, it's all Dad's fault. Alluding to the writings of Christian psychologist Paul Vitz (see here for an sample essay on this topic), Sibley advances the suggestion that the trouble with the New Atheists (and indeed, with atheists in general) is that they had either absentee fathers, or bad relationships with their fathers:

Absent full-scale biographies -- or personal revelations -- it is perhaps presumptuous to apply a psychological approach to the new atheists. Still, there are tantalizing hints that psychological factors are at play in their militancy.

But even self-confessed presumptuousness isn't enough to stop Sibley from charging full steam ahead into some free-wheeling speculation that Dawkins' atheism is caused by his military father's absence during WWII (Dawkins was born in 1941). Really, this is pretty thin gruel, and his attempt to psychoanalyze Hitchens is even weaker:

Christopher Hitchens attributes his atheism to parents who avoided the topic of religion for psychological reasons of their own. "My parents did not try to impose religion," he says, noting that his father "had not especially loved his strict Baptist/Calvinist up-bringing," while his mother "preferred assimilation -- partly for my sake -- to the Judaism of her forebears."

....which says precisely nothing about not getting along with his father, only that his parents did not teach him religion. Sibley seems to have lost sight of his own argument (Vitz's "bad dad" theory) and gone off on a tangent about general parental influence. In response, I must point out that right across the board, children usually end up being of the same persuasion as their parents. While this no doubt tells us something about the psychology of belief formation, as an argument for or against religion it invalidates everyone's opinions equally. I have to wonder what he would make of my experience: raised by agnostic parents, in an intact functional family -- and I became a fundamentalist at age 15, an atheist at 44. Which conversion was in reaction to exactly which aspect of my relationship with my father?

But Sibley's excuse for Islamic terrorism takes Vitz's hypothesis in a bizarre direction. It's not too much religion, or the wrong kind, it's about fatherhood again:

It's worth pointing out that most acts of terrorism, whether the 2001 terrorist strikes on the United States or the recent attacks in Mumbai, involve young men. Is it possible that the violence atheists attribute to religious faith is in fact rooted in psychology? Is Islamist terrorism a pathological response to the weakening of the traditional patriarchal culture in the Muslim world?

OK, I'm sympathetic to explanations of extremism that supplement dogma with social factors and geo-political grievances, but this is simply the nadir of silly. I don't know, Robert -- is it in fact the case that Muslim patriarchal culture is breaking down? Did the 9-11 hijackers have bad relationships with their fathers? Either provide some evidence for your speculations, or admit you're just making it up, OK?

Vitz Fits?

Since Sibley rests so much of his argument on Vitz's ideas, his essay itself is worth a brief perusal. Near the top he lays out terms of reference which explain a lot about the Sibley article:

Before beginning, however, I wish to make two points bearing on the underlying assumption of my remarks. First, I assume that the major barriers to belief in God are not rational but-in a general sense- can be called psychological. I do not wish to offend the many distinguished philosophers-both believers and nonbelievers-in this audience, but I am quite convinced that for every person strongly swayed by rational argument there are many, many more affected by nonrational psychological factors.

This is why Sibley never attempts (beyond invoking John Haught to deliver a predictable Courtier's Reply) to grapple with the first prong of the New Atheists' critique: that religion is irrational. Now in my opinion it is true that everything we believe is some combination of rational and irrational -- even the choice to use rational decision-making cannot itself be rationally justified without peril of circularity. As a matter of personal history, the stimulus which gets an individual thinking seriously about issues like the existence of God, or the reliability of church dogma, may be some entirely contingent stressor like the untimely death of a parent. But this does not constitute a license to ignore one's opponents rational arguments in favour of speculative psychologizing, as Sibley does. To do so is to commit the Ad Hominem fallacy.

To support his claim that most atheists are being irrational, Vitz uses himself as a case study, citing his experience in an academic environment where piety was frowned upon. He confesses: "....it is now clear to me that my reasons for becoming and for remaining an atheist-skeptic from about age 18 to 38 were superficial, irrational, and largely without intellectual or moral integrity". Feh: just because he was stupid and venal, doesn't mean the rest of us are. There's this thing called projection -- as a psychologist, Vitz may have heard of it.

Vitz goes on to cite specific examples of prominent atheists with paternal issues: Freud, Marx, O'Hair, Nietzsche. But surely this is proof by anecdote? A scientific approach might, say, systematically survey many atheists and believers on their family histories, and attempt to discern correlations, not just cherry-pick a few historical examples. Isn't psychology a science?

Religion as Social Glue

Sibley concludes by citing the work of Rene Girard, who advances the idea that religion (especially its sacrificial rituals) arose as a way of mitigating violent competition among individuals, thus making orderly society possible. Personally, I'm not competent to critique Girard (read: damned if I can make head or tail of him), but he may have a point. In general, I agree with those who argue that religion played a role in expanding the "in-group" beyond the local clan, all of whom were relations by blood or marriage. This is a Good Thing, as far as it goes -- but it must be noted that the process fell short of truly universalizing the in-group; that it ground to a halt at a point where we had larger, mutually hostile groups. It's only in the past few centuries that we've begun to unravel the residue of these old rivalries -- Catholics and Protestants (mostly) kissed and made up, then they allowed that Jews maybe weren't such bad folks after all, and now they're even making nice with the Muslims (not all of whom are returning the favour, but they've got similar issues to work out themselves). And the impetus for this outpouring of tolerant brotherly love was precisely the growth of secularism (oops, "atheism") springing from the Enlightenment -- the determination to bury the theological hatchets, and seek identities beyond the denominational.

However, even if religion enabled the rise of civilization, this does not warrant the conclusion that getting rid of religion will bring back the Stone Age -- history is not so simply reversible. Establishing that thesis would require data from modern society, say on the correlations between religious belief and observance, and violence, across the Western world. And in fact, some data on that topic is available, in a paper in the Journal of Religion and Society. What it shows is that for many reasonable measures of societal health (rates of homicide, young adult suicide, teen pregnancy and STDs), there is little correlation with measures of religiosity -- and where there is correlation, it appears to be negative, ie. higher rates of belief go with worse outcomes (the USA being a prominent outlier among Western democracies -- among the most religious of the bunch, and also by far the most dysfunctional).

Sibley concludes:

So long as the seed of "resentment" remains embedded in the human psyche -- and it will so long as we remain "human" -- uprooting religion is unlikely to produce a peaceful world.

Well, no it probably won't: we humans are a cussed bunch, and have always fought over resources, if nothing else. But eliminating organized and enforced irrationality -- which frequently explicitly encourages violence -- can't really hurt, either.

=================================================================

Update: Dan Gardner, who is AFAIK the sole voice of rationality left at the Citizen, has posted a short-but-delicious smackdown of his colleague's piece. I was not previously aware of Dan's blog, but it's now in my RSS subs. Hat tip: Paul @ Unscrewing the Inscrutable.

Day 12 - Merry Newtonmass

2008-12-25T22:57:00.005-05:00

It's Newtonmass, and as is our annual tradition, we will share our favourite Newtonmass carol, with a new verse for 2008:

God rest ye merry, physicists
Let nothing you dismay.
Remember Isaac Newton
was born on Christmas Day!
His gravity and calculus and "f" equals "m" "a"!
Oh, pillars of physics and math, physics and math,
Oh, pillars of physics and math!

A factor of big G - the same
for flea and giant star.
Then multiply the masses
and divide by square of "r".
The force that keeps us on the earth and orbits moons afar!
Oh, pillars of physics and math, physics and math,
Oh, pillars of physics and math!

Day 11: Merry Kittehmas & Riddle Answered

2008-12-24T21:48:00.007-05:00

I'll say one thing for our humans: they're persistent. Yesterday they went out again and came back with another tree! This one is different: it smells fascinating, but doesn't taste so good. I guess we won't eat this one.

That means dangling decorations! Yay!

Anyway, it's time to reveal the answer to the riddle I posed the other day: why do I like Greg Lake's song I Believe in Father Christmas? Thanks, bPer for trying, but you're not really very close. The musical clue is the instrumental refrain that keeps coming back in that song: that part is not by Greg Lake, it's by Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev. It is taken from his Lieutenant Kije Suite (I can't help it if everyone spells it wrong), specifically from the Troika movement, which depicts a ride through the snow in a sled drawn by three horses (unfortunately, I cannot find an online audio excerpt).

In the meantime, I see that the humans have finished hanging stuff on the tree -- time to play!

Day 10: Warren Christmas & Pope Maledict

2008-12-23T20:41:00.007-05:00

OK, I get that Obama is trying to do the Big Tent thing, and getting a prominent evangelical to deliver the invocation at the Presidential inauguration is part of that. But: Rick Warren? The guy who endorsed California's Proposition 8, to strip gays of a right they already had? And of course, he wouldn't vote for an atheist -- 'cuz everyone knows getting hints from the Big Guy Upstairs is soooo important to a president, right? I mean, look how well that worked out for GWB on the Iraq thing.

To put it into perspective: Would it be Big Tenting, to invite a pastor who was on record as wanting to revoke the franchise from blacks, and who wouldn't vote for a Jew because, really, you need Jesus to hold your hand in the Oval Office?

But speaking of The Bigots vs. Gays game, the Pope has issued a warning of the perils of TEH GAY and, indeed, the whole notion that gender is a social construct. Apparently, blurring the lines between the sexes will lead to the "self-destruction" of humanity, just as surely as if we trash the environment:

We need something like human ecology, meant in the right way. The Church speaks of human nature as 'man' or 'woman' and asks that this order is respected.

This is not out-of-date metaphysics. It comes from the faith in the Creator and from listening to the language of creation, despising which would mean self-destruction for humans and therefore a destruction of the work itself of God.

As a matter of fact Benny, yes it is out-of-date metaphysics: to insist that Male and Female are some sort of transcendent "natures" is Neo-Platonic horseshit, and the phrase "comes from faith in the Creator" is here synonymous with "invented out of whole cloth way back before we knew enough biology to study it properly". Male and female are facts of purely earthly biology, and inconsistent ones at that -- never mind that many organisms get along without sexual differentiation, or switch sexes as needed; even among humans there are those whose anatomical and/or chromosomal characteristics are ambiguous or inconsistent. And the specific cues we customarily use to indicate gender (and the roles we assign) are almost purely social constructs.

Day 9: Santa-ism

2008-12-22T22:04:00.009-05:00

I am astonished at the vituperative comments and personal attacks over at Recursivity after Jeff Shallit "confessed" that his family does not subscribe to the religion of Santa-ism. Accusations of ruining the spirit of Christmas, destroying the wonder of childhood, and being self-righteous, dour and humourless abound.

Eamon and I were Christians (albeit fairly liberal by that time) when our children were young. The fact that, when we ourselves were growing up, Eamon's family was agnostic, and mine was secular Jewish, and neither of us had a tradition of Santa-belief probably made it easier for us. One of the main reasons we decided not to deceive our kids about Santa being real and bringing Christmas presents was because we felt that knowingly lying to our kids about Santa would cause them to doubt the veracity of other things we taught them to believe in - ie about Christianity and God. (This does seem rather ironic, in retrospect, as the 21-year-old pointed out to us recently.)

So from an early age, our kids knew that Santa was pretend. And none of the Christmas gifts we gave were "from" Santa, though when he was about 5, our younger son (who happens to have been born on December 25) decided he should dress up as Santa and give out the presents. (Oops, I guess that could not have really happened, since our kids apparently were raised to have no imagination.)

One of the commenters on Recursivity said,

You never know how a child will react to anything you do. My parents took the same approach that you have chosen to take. Santa was never real, just a story. Now that I am older and I hear the stories of my friends from when they were young and I see the joy in children's faces when they think that Santa is coming or when they are writing him a letter, I know my parents robbed me of an experience that I will never be able to duplicate.

Parents and children can have shared joy in pretending, even when everyone knows it's make-believe. There was no pretense about Santa Claus for my kids, but someone filled their stockings with candy and toys while they slept. Everyone knew there was no Easter Bunny, but someone hid plastic eggs around the house. My kids even left notes for the Easter Bunny on a few occasions.

I'll certainly stand up for the imagination and wonder with which I raised my kids against the cynicism of this commenter:

We use the fallacy of santa to control our kids. It worked when I was a kid, and it works with my kids. Soon after you learn the truth, you also learn why it is such a great tool. Kids don't have to grow up so fast.

It's this sort of attitude that results in kids being scared to tell their parents they don't believe because they think they won't get presents any more. Perhaps even worse are the kids who have stopped believing in Santa (at around 9 or 10), but they see that this myth seems to be so important to their parents that they continue to pretend. This is not an approach that fosters open communication between parents and children.

The tilt of the earth's axis is the Reason for the Season

2008-12-21T21:12:00.004-05:00

Happy Solstice everyone. Let's celebrate the wonder and beauty of science, which tells us that the days are going to start getting longer again (even though winter has only just begun), and we didn't even need to sacrifice a goat (or worse) to convince the Sun God to come back to us.

And, in the interests of equal-opportunity celebrating whichever winter holidays we want, however we want to observe them, happy chanuka everyone. We had latkes (potato pancakes) for dinner tonight. Lest anyone accuse us of having turned into traditionalists, note that there were both white potato and sweet potato latkes, and we also had bacon. (And just how did a new world vegetable like the potato become the iconic food of a holiday that came here to North America from the Middle East via Europe?)

Day 7: Caturday War on Christmas

2008-12-20T20:25:00.005-05:00

That's my slightly stupid friend Bertrand Alfred Russell Wallace North Whitehead Insufficient Delta-Vee (but everyone just calls him Russell), and he is the latest Warrior Against Christmas.

The other day, our humans decided they wanted to put up a tree. Since they didn't have one, they went out in the car (Yikes. How can anyone stand being in those things?) and came home with a box. As soon as they got the tree out of the box, Russell decided it had a flavour and started with the noms. The humans didn't like that, so they put the tree back in the box, and put the box back in the car. So: no Christmas tree. Which means no decorations to play with.

Stupid Russell. You're supposed to wait until they aren't looking.

Oh well. I still have my favorite Christmas song. (Can you guess why? Anyone? AJ?)

Day 6: Bah! Humbug!!

2008-12-19T20:17:00.003-05:00

So, Tom Flynn of the Council for Secular Humanism thinks that humanists shouldn't celebrate Christmas. Not even under alternate guise as Solstice or Yule or Newtonmas (no word on what he thinks of Happy Monkey). By which he means: no tree, no lights, no gifts (I think you're allowed to eat and drink. Maybe even in excess. Just don't enjoy it.)

Flynn's reason for this Scroogism? Basically, he's trying to make a political statement: that Christmas (notwithstanding its pagan roots and modern commercial accretions) is an irredeemably Christian holiday, and celebrating it sanctions the right-wing Christian assumption of cultural dominance. Not celebrating it makes the statement that there is nothing special about this day; that you have neither interest in nor respect for the myth behind it.

Meh. I see Flynn's point, but methinks he takes himself way too seriously. I assert that there is no unique or unambiguous "meaning" to holidays, especially one as heavily syncretized as Christmas. It means whatever you use it for; there is no other ultimate authority or source of "meaning".

I find his point that Christians, seeing you putting up a tree and exchanging gifts, will assume you are also a Christian, rather weak. In the more secular parts of the world this would be a very foolish inference, and anyway so what if they did? People will always make assumptions (and often they will be wrong) about you based on what you do. It's silly to let other people's hypothetical opinions about you have that much influence on your life -- to do so is to open yourself to the Tyranny of the Busybodies. The fable of The Man, the Boy and the Donkey seems relevant here.

But I think my single biggest source of resistance to Flynn's proposal is this: I refuse to subject all my pleasures and entertainments to some sort of ideological purity test. In fact, that's exactly what I recall fundamentalists doing: Should I see this movie, or is it too immoral? What about dancing? Playing D&D? Don't go to bars -- what if one of your non-Christian friends sees you, and gets the wrong impression of you or Christians? I ditched that whole attitude when I gave up fundamentalism, over 20 years ago. Why the hell would I, as a freethinker, go back there now?

Not that we're actually planning any big celebration this year: about the best I can say is we will not deliberately refrain from celebrating Christmas -- "not bother much" would probably come closest to our holiday plans. I decided several years ago that putting up lights was too much work (like, freezing my fingers while risking my neck up a ladder at what has to be the worst time of year to be up a ladder?). Ditto a Christmas tree (and anyways, the cats would eat it, to their mutual detriment). We've got no plans to go anywhere or see any one, except my older son + GF are coming in for a few days after Christmas. We've got a couple of family birthdays next week, so gifts will change hands in various directions. I booked the next two weeks off work -- which I plan to spend cleaning up the basement and catching up on projects.

And getting that crap done gives me all the good cheer I need!

Day 5 - BUY, BUY, BUY!!! (part 2 - the Christian perspective)

2008-12-18T23:04:00.006-05:00

On the new blog of the Centre for Inquiry, Tom Flynn, incoming Exceutive Director for the Center for Secular Humanism, discusses his rationale for why freethinkers should not participate in Christmas celebrations, and in fact should avoid any winter holiday celebrations, lest the evil Christians use examples of this type of participation as evidence that inflates the statistics regarding the pervasiveness of Christianity.

Fortunately, freethinkers tend to be a independent lot, and as one might expect, some are in agreement, but based on the comments, more are of the opinion that people (even, or rather especially freethinkers) should be under no constraints to celebrate or refrain based on some popular guy's say-so. More in depth discussion on this is coming up later in the war - stay tuned.

Meanwhile, one of the comments on the blog is astonishing in its geocentrism and christiocentrism. (Perhaps it is actually a parody, though I have not found any indication to that effect):

What would it be like if [Jesus] hadn’t made the journey? There would be no Christmas - the world would be in a deep economic depression. The millions of people who spend there life making toys and presents would be out of work.

So, we are to believe that Almighty Jahweh sent his only begotten son 2 millenia ago just so there would be enough stuff to buy and sell in order to our keep us from being completely swallowed up by the current depresson. It boggles the mind.

Day 4 - BUY, BUY, BUY!!!11

2008-12-17T23:20:00.005-05:00

I've been aware for some time that sales during the Christmas season were very important to retailers. Just *how* important was highlighted recently by a news reporter's statement that most retail establishments don't even start to make money until mid-November. So, if I have this straight: The Canadian and US economies will rise or fall based on the number of people who use money they don't have to buy gifts they can't afford for people they don't like. Somehow, there seems to be something wrong with that arrangement.

Day 3 - the war on salutations

2008-12-16T23:55:00.002-05:00

Like Eamon, I have no problem being wished a Merry Christmas, though I tend to respond with "Happy Holidays". I have often seen my (secular Jewish) father offer a hearty "Seasons Greetings", accompanied by a warm handshake.

Here are some other suggestions I have run across lately (most of which are thought-provoking, even if unlikely to catch on as social memes):

"Reason's Greetings"

"Merry Xmas, Ymas, and Zmas" (our family will be celebrating Ymas this year)

"Happy Solstice" (at the risk of being mistaken for a pagan)

and, of course, the American Humanists ' "be good for goodness' sake"

Day 2: The True Origins of the War

2008-12-15T21:29:00.004-05:00

I have a lot of happy childhood memories of Christmas. As soon as I was old enough, it became my job to decorate the tree. I enjoyed the annual ritual of putting on a LP of Christmas carols, assembling the tree (we had an artifical one), unpacking all the baubles and lights and hanging them just so, for the best effect. My family of origin was agnostic, and the Nativity was just one cute story among several that marked the season -- the Saint Nicholas myth, Night Before Christmas, Dickens' A Christmas Carol (which as I recall, fails to mention Jesus much if at all), Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer (in a televised model animation), the silly TV announcements on Christmas Eve that NORAD radars had detected Santa on his way. In those years when it was our turn to host the annual Christmas dinner for my parents' circle of friends, I got to decorate the rec room -- I recall hanging one large banner reading "Season's Greetings". Apparently, the War On Christmas goes back as far as the mid-1960s.

During my Christian period, these secular syncretisms on the whole neither added to nor detracted from my observance of the Nativity. I simply ignored the parts I didn't like (Santa Claus, for instance: far removed from his origins as patron of the poor, now transmogrified into some shopping mall deity of conspicuous consumption). On the whole, I've always been pretty good at ignoring stuff I find personally irrelevant, while being happy to allow others to enjoy it as they please.

So really, I couldn't care less what the Costco greeter (I avoid Walmart) says when I walk in the door. "Happy Holidays"; "Merry Christmas"; "Salubrious Solstice" -- it's all good as far as I'm concerned. I find labels mostly arbitrary, so I really don't care what we call this year-end excuse for eating and drinking too much, and giving a few (hopefully non-extravagant, non-tacky, and non-useless) gifts to people you care about. I don't mind calling it Christmas any more than most (Anglophone) Christians seem to mind having their other major festival named for an ancient fertility goddess. As far as I could tell, the "War On Christmas" was an invention of a few (mostly American) professional blowhards, looking for an excuse to whine about how persecuted they are.

However, I suppose I can imagine someone who explicitly does not celebrate Christmas (say, because it's not part of their ancestral culture) getting a little tired of smiling graciously while being given good wishes in the name of someone else's festival. The obvious case in point would be Jews, who have a history some 17 centuries long of trying to maintain their separate identity on the margins of an overwhelmingly Christian society. What to my secular (though ancestrally Christian) self is a greeting with no deep significance could be taken as an affront. Which brings us, as it happens, to the real origins of the "War On Christmas", as reported recently at the Daily Beast.

Apparently, it really is all about the Jews. Who knew?

12 days of the War on Christmas - a boo and a boon for Pat Boone

2008-12-14T09:35:00.000-05:00

The War

Yes, I know that the 12 days of Christmas really starts on Christmas day and goes to Epiphany, but after Boxing Day everybody is sick of Christmas, and cutting over to year-end retrospective mode. (And besides, why should I be bound by the rules around a syncretistic holiday celebrating the mythical birth of the theoretical son of an imaginary god?)

Now, as far as I am concerned the "War on Christmas" is entirely in the imagination of BillO and his cronies. As a matter of fact, when I was a Christian, I thought that the fact that Christmas was embraced by most of the secular western world was a Bad Idea, because it detracted from the actual religious significance of the holiday (more about that later in my "War on Santa Claus" post). But if it is war they want, I'm up for the fight, so for the next 12 days, Eamon, Kizhe and I will be warriors of words in this annually recurring epic battle.

Day One

On the first day of the War on Christmas, I will give a gift to Pat Boone!

In an article in WingNut Daily, Hate is hate, in India or America, Boone complains about protests against California's proposition h8:

The [US] Constitution says nothing about marriage, and shouldn't. Marriage is not a governmental creation; it is a time honored and biblically ordained institution that is subject not to the government but to the will of the people.

Um, ok: If marriage is not a "governmental creation", then it doesn't really belong in legislation at all, does it? So why are people complaining about how changes to broaden the legal definition of marriage affect their personal relationships?

Of course, complaining about stupid things said in WND, and/or stupid things Pat Boone says is like shooting fish in a barrel, but then Boone plays the terrorism link card:

What troubles me so deeply, and should trouble all thinking Americans, is that there is a real, unbroken line between the jihadist savagery in Mumbai and the hedonistic, irresponsible, blindly selfish goals and tactics of our homegrown sexual jihadists

My mind is boggling, so I will let the venerable Charles Babbage speak for me: I am not able rightly to apprehend the confusion of mind that would lead to such a conclusion.

But the Human Rights Campaign has an inspired (if passive-aggressive) tactic in response: People are invited to donate to HRC in Mr Boone's name.

Merry Christmas, Pat.

Like, you all care....

2008-11-25T19:55:00.013-05:00

....but self-absorbed exhibitionism social networking is what Web 2.0 is all about, right?

Mike Haubrich tagged us with the Six Things Meme. The rules are:

Link to the person who tagged you. [see above]
Post the rules on your blog. [well, you're reading this, aren't you?]
Write six random things about yourself. [below]
Tag six people at the end of your post and link to them. [below]
Let each person know they’ve been tagged and leave a comment on their blog. [yeah, yeah, I'll get around to it]
Let the tagger know when your entry is up. [more YYIGATI]

My Six Boring Trivial Dumb Random Things:

I have an earring. I got it when I was 38yo, just for the hell of it (or maybe it was a subconcious midlife-crisis-oh-god-lets-pretend-we're-still-23 thing). Anyway, it sort of goes with the beard/pony-tail/hippy image. I had heard that having an earring on the right side was signalling that one was gay, so I decided to get mine on the left. It's not that I object to people thinking I'm gay, but, well, I believe in clear communication (assuming the left-right thing is true, which it may not be anyway).
I still have a scar on my right knee from falling off my bike when I was about 8yo. I was trying to do a 180 on the street when I hit a patch of gravel. The bike slid out, and I went down with my leg underneath, against the pavement. Ouch, with significant quantities of blood.
The other night when there was that big boloid over Saskatchewan? I also saw a meteor. I was standing outside work waiting for my ride, about 6:30pm. It was pretty bright, though no where near the Saskatchewan rock. From memory of my days in the astro-hobby, I dredged up that late November is the Leonids meteor shower.
I have not one but two fishponds in my backyard. Why? Because it's less trouble than cutting the grass in those spots.
My other silly hobby is model trains. That's good: the trains and the ponds sort of complement each other, season-wise. Serious model railroaders are really pretty obsessive. Not only do they build these miniature worlds in excruciating detail, they even run their trains on a schedule, carrying imaginary passengers and freight, and observing the proper operating rules to prevent collisions etc. Sort of like war-gamers, only with a self-propelled element to the game pieces. I also have a blog for that hobby, but I can't point you to it because that would reveal my True Identity, and then I'd have to kill you (well, those of you who don't already know me in Real Life, anyway).
But speaking of True Identities, I'll use my sixth item for a Revelation -- maybe even a Confession. You may have noticed occasional references to local Christian blogger Deborah Gyapong. I also drop the occasional comment over there. What most people don't know (except a few I've told in person) is that we used to know Debbie in real life. Between roughly 15 and 20 years ago we were in a fellowship/Bible study together. It's safe to say that we've been moving in diametrically opposite directions ever since. I don't think she's figured out who her occasional critic is. If she happens to read this -- which I doubt, but you never know -- she'll have no difficulty figuring it out (it wasn't that big a group).

Surprisingly, not quite everyone in my RSS subscription list has been tagged yet by someone else, so:

A.J.Milne
Chris Nedin at Ediacaran, an old talk.origins friend.
Duae Quartunciae, another old t.o'er.
Adina, because she hasn't posted anything in a long time.
Andrew Arensburger at Epsilon Clue, yet another old Howler.
King Aardvark, who will probably kick me there for doing this to him.

CBC Fail

2008-11-15T15:36:00.003-05:00

Not as bad as their last fail, but it's always a bit pathetic when an error correction itself contains an error.

It seems that a few nights ago, the CBC Radio program As It Happens referred to lobsters as "molluscs". OK, that's a bit of a fail right there, and they seem to have received some feedback on it, as last night they issued an on-air correction: lobsters are Crustaceans, part of the phylum Anthropoda. That's right: not Arthropoda (joint-footed), but Anthropoda (man-footed).

Maybe they mean something like this:

More Lessons From Plato

2008-11-14T20:40:00.001-05:00

In today's reading, children, we learn how to cure hiccups, and the origin of the euphemism "Greek Culture".

Hiccup Cure

When one of the Symposium guests has an attack of the hiccups, Dr. Erixymachus advises:

....let me recommend you to hold your breath, and if this fails, then to gargle with a little water; and if the hiccough still continues, tickle your nose with something and sneeze; if you sneeze once or twice, even the most violent hiccough is sure to go.

Apparently, the traditional folk remedies have a longer history than I had imagined. However, none of them sound like as much fun as this one:

In case you're wondering: it worked. And speaking of sex, that brings us to....

Greek Culture

The diners elect that they will discourse on the topic of Love. The first oration is given by Phaedrus, who speaks of the custom in their society, that an older man would take under his wing a youth. The relationship is one of companion and mentorship, but obviously goes beyond simple instruction and advice:

For I know not any greater blessing to a young man beginning life than a virtuous lover, or to the lover than a beloved youth.

The following speaker, Pausanias, distinguishes between two types of love, which respectively emanate from the "common Aphrodite" and the "heavenly Aphrodite".

But the Love who is the son of the common Aphrodite is essentially common, and has no discrimination, being such as the meaner sort of men feel, and is apt to be of women as well as of youths, and is of the body rather than of the soul....

The goddess who is his mother is far younger, and she was born of the union of male and female, and partakes of both sexes. But the son of the heavenly Aphrodite is sprung from a mother in whose birth the female has no part, but she is from the male only; this is that love which is of youths only, and the goddess being older has nothing of wantonness. This who are inspired by this love turn to the male, and delight in him who is the more valiant and intelligent nature....

And in choosing them [ie. a man choosing a youth] as their companions, they mean to be faithful to them, and to pass their whole life with them, and be with them....

....and the coarser sort of lovers ought to be restrained by force, as we restrain or attempt to restrain them from fixing their affections on women of free birth.

Another speaker, Aristophanes, tells an origins myth, according to which humans were primevally double, having four arms, four legs, two faces, and so on. Moreover, there were three sexes: male; female; and the androgynous union of the other two, and each human individual comprised parts of all three sexes. But these humans rebelled against the gods, who as punishment, divided them each in two parts, the navel being the spot at which the skin on the cut surface was drawn together and re-sealed. And ever since then, every human has been seeking for their lost other half, that they may be whole again -- hence, the idea that each of us has a soul-mate, a perfect life partner. He goes on (emphasis mine):

....and after the transposition, the male generated in the female in order that by the mutual embraces of man and woman they might breed, and the race might continue; or if man came to man they might be satisfied, and rest and go their ways to the business of life...Men who are a section of that double nature which was once called Androgynous are lascivious; adulterers are generally of this breed, and also adulterous and lascivious women: the women who are a section of the woman don't care for men, but have female attachments; the female companions are of this sort. But the men who are a section of the male follow the male, and while they are young, being a piece of the man, they hang about him and embrace him, and they are themselves the best of boys and youths, because they have the most manly nature. Some indeed assert that they are shameless, but this is not true; for they do not act thus from any want of shame, but because they are valiant and manly, and have a manly countenance, and they embrace that which is like them. And these when they grow up are our statesmen, and these only, which is a great proof of the truth of what I am saying. And when they reach manhood they are lovers of youth, and are not naturally inclined to marry or beget children, which they do, if at all, only in obedience to the law, but they are satisfied if they may be allowed to live unwedded; and such a nature is prone to love and ready to return love, always embracing that which is akin to him.

So there you have it: to the old Greeks, not only was gay OK, but in some ways even superior to us straights. Suck on that, fans of "traditional marriage"!

PS: An Anachronism

Being currently under the pleasant post-prandial influence of a couple of glasses of Pelee Island Merlot, I must mention that a few pages later, a drunken Alcibiades refers to the proverb "In vino veritas" (if you don't know what that means, I'm sure that Google Is Your Friend). Which prompts the question: Why is a pre-Roman Greek quoting proverbs in Latin? Or equivalently: Why did the legendary Jowett choose to translate a (presumably) Greek phrase into Latin, as part of his English translation of the text?

(Thanks to my Lost-and-Found Other Half for taking dictation on the lengthy Aristophanes excerpt. Half way through, it occurred to us that the text is doubtless available online).

A Tale of Two Rowans

2008-11-13T18:40:00.000-05:00

Last week in a Pharyngula comment, I managed to confuse Rowan Williams (Archbishop of Canterbury) with Rowan Atkinson, a.k.a. Mr. Bean. Now as much as I like British humour, I do have a little trouble keeping their standup comedians straight. And today, Daniel Florien kindly provides me with a perfect excuse why I would get those two confused:

It's a word....It's a face...It's pareidolia!

2008-11-12T17:40:00.005-05:00

BEHOLD:

My parents were married on the ninth ofJune, six days after Eamon's birthdate.
Eamon's parents were married on the sixth of January, nine days after* my birthdate.
Our first son was born on November 24th, the anniversary of the publication of Darwin's origin of species.
Our second son was born on December 25, a day widely celebrated as the birthday of someone famous.

* but some years before

DO YOU KNOW WHAT THAT PROVES?

a) Absolutely nothing.

OR

b) Humans are exceptionally talented at finding patterns, even when there aren't any.

For more evidence (of what, I'm not sure), check out these videos:

A person-shaped Cheeto that makes people think of an orange Jesus

A Cheeto that (to me at least) doesn't look much like a person at all

A floor drain stain that looks vaguely like a large, wide woman with a cloak

and, the pig that lives in my bathroom door:

hat tip and a chocolate chip to Greg Laden

Thinking for Free - Pass it on

2008-11-09T13:22:00.004-05:00

Saturday afternoon, and it's pouring rain. My doorbell rings, and on my way to answer it I try to decide if it will be kids selling chocolate bars to raise money for schools or sports teams, or someone who thinks I should pay less (or at least pay them) for my gas or electricity bill. Wrong on both counts - upon opening the door, I see a well-dressed man of 30 or so, accompanied by a boy about 10 (I surmised that they were father and son). The man says that they are going around my neighbourhood talking to people about what is important in life. and asks if they could leave me a pamphlet to look at. (I think they might have identified their church, but it was said so quickly I didn't catch it, but I am reasonably certain that they were neither Mormons nor JWs; likely just run-of-the-mill fundamentalists.)

OK, my sign says "No Flyers Please", but I guess they figure that a pamphlet which proclaims the good news of salvation does not qualify for my prohibition. So, I politely decline, saying that I don't need any more paper. A split second later, I decide that was a pathetically wimpy way to turn away evangelists, and add, "We are atheists here". The man looks a bit surprised, and says something like, "I see. Well, have a nice day", and off they go.

Did the boy ask his father what an atheist is, as they walked down the street, or later that day? I certainly hope so, and I wonder what the father will say in response. (I did feel a twinge of guilt for potentially disturbing the child's faith, but quickly decided that was silly - they were the ones who came to *my* door, and I said nothing rude or otherwise inappropriate.)

Rants & ROMinations

2008-11-05T23:05:00.001-05:00

The day following PZ's talk at CFI found us back at the Royal Ontario Museum (along with a few additional family members). Aside from just wanting to visit a museum (and see the diamonds exhibit), I wanted to see whether my earlier negative impression of the shiny new Michael Lee-Chen Crystal would hold.

And it's official: I still hate it. So did everyone else in our party. Previous comments on the architecture of the Crystal still hold, only even more so. The damn thing looms angrily over the sidewalk. The corrugated exterior siding is just ugly: stand it all up straight and square, and it would be right at home in any suburban industrial park. Skewing the walls at funny angles doesn't magically make it clever: it just makes it look like a suburban industrial building that's falling down. Inside, the walls lean at crazy angles and cock-eyed pillars shoot through the space.

I toured the paleo galleries again, and got even more annoyed. There is a serious lack of interpretive material to tell the viewer what they're looking at and why it matters. In one display case is a series of Jurassic fossil insects, each one accompanied by a similar modern bug skewered on a pin. They're all nicely identified, but so what? What exactly is this display telling me? Is it about relationships among ancient and modern insects? About insect taphonomy? Or should I take from it the creationist lesson that grasshoppers are still grasshoppers, and they all got buried in the Flood? I have no idea. And across from that there's another case in which dead bugs ancient and modern are jumbled together with no order, identification or explanation at all. And no, the video displays don't replace decent placards: only one party can use them at a time, and I don't see why I should wait in line to see if the TV has the answer to whatever question I have. And speaking of placards: would it be too hard to add a little graphic to each one, showing a schematic of the geological timescale, and a marker saying "this critter comes from here"? That would beat just saying "Jurassic", for those who don't already know that it comes between the Triassic and the Cretaceous (geek that I am, I've known since I was about 8yo -- but my FIL pointed out that he didn't). There's no obvious "path" guiding you through the exhibits, and the overall impression is less of a museum gallery than of a storage room. And how much money did these copper-clad monoliths cost, that might have been spent instead on the displays?But enough kvetching already. It is, at any rate, still a museum full of neat stuff.

That's one mean sardine:

Hey, he's chomping an ammonite! Bad mososaur! Bad!

Poor Bruin here looks a bit disconsolate about all these new-fangled changes to his abode:

This camel on the other hand, just looks smug:

Drinking Philosophically?

2008-11-04T00:32:00.000-05:00

So, being respectably ahead on my book club reading, I took a break from that to read a Pratchett (Making Money. Amusing, but sort of disjointed and not up to the usual standard). Having finished that, I decided to start reading some Serious Philosophy. Plato's Symposium, to be precise. Like much of Plato's output, the work is a dialog on philosophical subjects, placed in a fictional narrative framework. In this case, the frame narrative is a dinner party given by one Agathon, a playwright.

This morning on the bus, I got through about four pages, enough for the characters in the story to have a short discussion and reach their first conclusion. And what pearl of wisdom did they arrive at? What eternal verity hath the father of Western thought bequeathed to us?

They decide that the meal will be served teetotal, as most of them are still suffering hangovers from yesterday's boozing.

And I bet you thought that it was only in Monty Python that philosophy was so much fun.

PZed Myers comes to TO

2008-11-03T22:35:00.019-05:00

TO is also known as Toronto, Ontario (Canada), and not to be confused with t.o aka usenet newsgroup talk.origins, (where I had my first encounter with PZed, known to some as PZ, some mumblety many years ago).

PZed's Toronto talk was sponsored by the Centre for Inquiry, Ontario. Co-opting the gourd carving meme from the local religious observance, the CFI displayed a cephalopumpkin*:

and also this:

- possibly a flower, or a ghost with a belly-button, but I interpret it as a curcurbit representation of electron orbits around the atomic nucleus.

On to the talk - an overview of various aspects of the conflict between religion and science education
.

Though some have commented that PZed was preaching to the choir, so to speak, everyone was very surprised to see Ken Ham in attendance! Here's a picture of Ken at the pub asking Jesus (who was just hanging around at the bar) to sign a copy of the book He wrote.

The symposium (original Greek usage) following the meeting continued for some time after Eamon and I wimped out.

* not to be confused with a punkin-head

My Pessimistic Prediction for the American Election

2008-11-03T18:45:00.002-05:00

Barring divine intervention, it appears certain that Barack Obama will win tomorrow's presidential election in the USA.

No, that's not the pessimistic part -- I, in fact, hope that Obama wins, if only because he can't possibly be as bad as McCain and Bible Spice (Especially the latter. If she ever gets to sit in the Big Chair, I give civilization six months before she starts WWIII in the belief it will make Jesus return quicker). Being part of the 95% of the world that doesn't get to vote in this election, I'm not obliged to be better informed than that (even so, I still seem to be better informed than some of the folks who do get to vote).

The pessimistic part is this: I predict that Obama (or McCain, should that come to pass) will serve but a single term, and his presidency will be regarded as a failure. Which sucks in so many ways, only one of which is the comfort and encouragement it will give to those who say a black man should never be president of the United States. [Aside: If you're one of the people who refuse to vote for Obama because he's black, then you're a racist bigot, no matter how hard you pretend otherwise. If you're refusing to vote for him because he's a Muslim, then you're both stupid and a bigot, because he's not, and it shouldn't matter anyway. And if you're refusing to vote for him because he has a "Muslim name" then...there are no words for what you are. "Stupid bigotted mouth-breathing knuckle-dragging moron" doesn't even begin to cover it. Yeah, I realize none of the people that is addressed to read this blog, but I've been wanting to get that off my chest for a while. End digression.]

The reason for my pessimism is that, whoever takes office in January will inherit a mucking fess. There's the financial meltdown, a gift which will not cease giving for some time to come. On Iraq, Obama has the choice between allowing the troops to continue being slowly ground up to no good effect, or pulling out and taking the blame for the likely blood-letting that will follow. Afghanistan? Prospects aren't much better (and we still haven't found Bin Laden!). Then we have a looming oil shortage -- only postponed by the economic slump -- and the first harbingers of climate change. And, and, and. Some serious shit is going to hit the fan in the next few years.

And the incumbent, justly or not, will get blamed for it.

[PSA at Canadian Cynic goes on in the same vein at greater length and deeper depressivism]

World Vision and Arguing With Wilkins

2008-10-25T17:07:00.001-04:00

We happen to sponsor two third world children through the Christian aid agency World Vision. Historically, this is a hangover from our Christian days, and I occasionally wonder if we should divert our contributions elsewhere (eg. Plan Canada), but thus far have nothing about it. My inaction stems partly from inertia, but also partly because despite my atheism, I have no general or rigid objection to contributing to faith-based organizations, providing the help they provide is material rather than "spiritual" (ie: evangelism). The world's need is too great to start cavilling at the ideological motivations (within broad limits) of this or that aid group. Getting the job done, efficiently, would seem to be of higher importance.

So it is of some concern to me when someone I respect highly, namely John Wilkins, in the course of a rather scattershot post spouts some recommendations on charities to support, finishing with the following deprecation:

Whatever you do as an official reader of my blog, do not contribute to the evangelical and anti-family planning WorldVision, who, I was once told by a fieldworker who had been there, effectively kicked off the Ethiopian marxist dictatorship by their callous behavior during a famine. I also heard from a donor who travelled to the Philippines that their "child" was not seen more than once per year to get photographed and write the year's letters. Yet another worker at WorldVision themselves in Melbourne told me they engage in nasty accounting practices - sending money from one country to their sister organisations overseas so they can claim a set percentage is used overseas. All this anecdotal stuff is three decades old, but leopards rarely change their spots. Anyway, true or not, this is what my official readers should do.

I'd hate to lose my status as an official reader of Evolving Thoughts (if only because the decoder ring is way cool), but I'm not changing my charities without something more substantial than unverified anecdotes (and also allowing for the fact that Wilkins is almost always at least half-joking). I count four distinct criticisms in that paragraph (I don't regard "evangelical" as a criticism, at least not in the context of this discussion), which I will examine as best I can.

The Dry Holes:

A Google search (FWIW) turns up nothing indicating problems about WV's involvement in Ethiopia, so as serious an allegation as it is, I'll have to put that aside for now as neither confirmed nor refuted. Similarly, short of an auditor's report being published, I have no way of checking into allegations of creative accounting (and which may only apply to WV Australia anyway -- the national chapters seem to be semi-independent).

On Child Sponsorship:

With respect to the complaint about the handling of sponsored children: I'm actually inclined to believe that one, but it's not clear to me that I should object to the practice. My understanding is that support of specific individuals is simply not an efficient or effective way to give aid. In fact (and the WV literature does say this) the money from all sponsors is pooled and goes to the development project of which the child's family or community is a part. But it's easier to get Westerners to open their wallets if you can put an individual human face on their donation, so the kids get used as a sort of advertising proxy. (Note that World Vision is not the only organization using this approach -- the secular Plan Canada mentioned above also does sponsorships).

Now as it happens, I am getting a little tired of the whole "child sponsorship" gimmick. I find signing and sending back (along with a further donation!) some card or trinket every few months to be a minor annoyance on top of dealing with the usual mail deluge, a chore I detest. I'd really rather just send an annual check to the organization itself, for some amount sufficient to relieve my middle-class guilt, and be done with it. Maybe some donors get the warm fuzzies from writing personal letters to their sponsored child, but I'm not one of them. Between being a horribly lazy correspondent and a generally anti-social cuss, I'm never going to be Warren Schmidt, pen-pal to some waif in Timbuctoo. So I may very well (ie. if I ever get off my lazy ass and figure out how) opt out of the sponsorship racket in favour of straight donation, whether with WV or any other organization.

On Family Planning:

Googling '"world vision" "family planning"' turns up a fair bit on this, mostly contradicting Wilkins' assertion:

From the World Vision Australia FAQ "Does World Vision support the use of contraceptives?":

World Vision programs support modern contraceptive methods as part of an integrated approach to effective family planning....Given the high risk for sexually transmitted infections (including HIV), dual protection methods are encouraged. Examples of protection methods include abstinence, consistent and correct use of condoms, use of a contraception method, and mutual monogamy.

A World Vision USA case study published by USAID (abstract and full PDF), reports on the effectiveness of teaching family planning and contraception in rural India. Contraceptive methods explicitly mentioned include IUDs and the Pill (I mention this to forestall suspicions that "family planning" might here be only a euphemism for less effective "natural" methods of pregnancy prevention).
This briefing paper to the UN Commission on the Status of Women, in a chapter on ending early marriage in Ethiopia (pp.24&ff) discusses lack of access to contraception and family planning as negatives.
This 1999 web article from a notorious "pro-life" site criticizes WV for supporting "population control", and promoting IUDs, the Pill and condoms. (Yeah, LieSiteNews ain't my favorite source either -- but in this case, I'm inclined to believe them on the grounds that they would not be likely to criticize another conservative Christian group unless there was something to it. And it is consistent with the material above from WV itself). (See also this article by the Catholic group Vida Humana, complaining about WV El Salvador's participation in the production of a manual on teen sexuality).

A possible counterpoint to the above might be WV's position on abortion. Again from the WV Australia FAQ:

Does World Vision support women to have abortions?
World Vision defines family planning as the provision of information and services to assist individuals and couples to responsibly determine the number, timing and spacing of their children. From World Vision’s perspective, family planning does not include abortion services and World Vision does not provide, recommend or support abortion.

The question would be whether staying out of the abortion business makes someone "anti-family planning". Although the point could be argued, I would say not: if you're doing everything except that, then it seems perverse to apply the label. Now, if there was a group whose "family planning" advice consisted of advocating having lots of kids, and teaching only the rhythm method as a timing-and-spacing strategy, then I'd have little hesitation about calling them "anti-family planning". Another objection might be the refusal of WV US to provide emergency contraception (search for "World Vision"), or even referrals, to refugees. Problematic though this is (especially in cases of rape), it again does not seem to justify calling the entire organization "anti-family planning".

There could, of course, be issues I'm missing in my Web search, e.g. the situation on the ground might be different from what is implied in the official reports; some of the language used is open to intepretation; I might easily have missed less favorable items among the umpteen hundred hits Google turned up. But what I did find says that World Vision does indeed provide effective, modern family planning advocacy and services, contra Wilkins' assertion.

I welcome hard information that might change my mind.

A SHOUT OUT FOR INTERNATIONAL CAPSLOCK DAY!!

2008-10-22T23:11:00.004-04:00

ONLY A FEW MINUTES LEFT TO CELEBRATE!

AND IN OTHER NEWS: IT'S NOT SOYLENT, BUT IT IS GREEN, AND IT IS PEOPLE (AND IT ISN'T EVEN PAREIDOLIA)

A Fate Worse Than Death?

2008-10-20T21:32:00.002-04:00

OK, suppose you have a heart attack. And the paramedics arrive and start doing CPR -- chest compressions to keep the brain perfused with oxygenated blood. They have to be done regularly, about 100 times per minute. So, how might you give a paramedic a rhythm to follow, to keep them on time? Well, one obvious way would be music; preferably something with a good strong beat. In fact, specifically (and ironically): the 1977 Bee Gees' hit Stayin' Alive.

Frankly, if I come to in the ambulance and the first thing I hear is Disco, my first thought will be that I died and went to Hell.

I was kind of ticked when they killed him off

2008-10-14T23:41:00.003-04:00

And I'd love to have one of those spring-loaded quarter-staff thingies!

(Hat tip: Evolving Thoughts)

Rituals

2008-10-14T23:07:00.005-04:00

Today I performed a meaningless religious ritual. You know: something that has pretty much bugger-all effect on the real world, but you do it because you feel obliged to, in the service of some big abstraction. So I did it.

I voted.

The incumbent (who was never my choice of candidate) was predicted to again win by a clear majority, and sho 'nuff currently available returns show him doing just that. So even strategic voting isn't a useful option. Which makes bothering to show up at the polling station at all seem like a futile exercise, no?

Nonetheless, I did. You see, I believe in this big abstraction called Democracy, and its chief sacrament is Voting, so I feel compelled to observe the ritual, just as I have at every election at every level for the past 30+ years.

I voted Green, largely because I'd like to see their concerns get more prominence in the political process. Were they ever to have a shot at real power, I might have to pay attention to whether they were competent to run anything, but for the forseeable future there appears little danger of that. So I have the luxury of choosing how to waste my vote without giving it a lot of serious consideration. Really, my opinion on the Canadian election has only slightly more significance than my opinion on the American presidential election, and quite honestly theirs is both more entertaining (who have we got to compare with the Hockey Mom from Alaska?), and the outcome is likely to affect my life almost as much.

No, I'm not particuarly happy about this. We need electoral reform, badly. It failed in Ontario last time round, but we need to keep trying. Most other civilized countries dumped First-Past-The-Post years ago. It's time for Canada to join the 21st century.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Update: Darin at The Squid Zone also weighs in (with comprehensive statistics, all in a neat table!) -- I mention him because whereas I've never voted Tory in my life, he has a history of doing so. This is not a partisan issue: it goes to the root of what we all mean by, and value in, our democracy.

I Always Knew....

2008-10-12T22:38:00.004-04:00

....that lawns were evil. They require vast quantities of fresh water to keep them green in summer, regular applications of insecticides to keep bugs from munching out on them (it's a frackin' monoculture, duh -- pests love a monoculture), and more applications of herbicides to keep Mother Nature from turning it into, well, not a monoculture any more. (You've heard that Nature abhors a vacuum? It's a lie: the universe is pretty much all high-grade vacuum, but biological monocultures don't last long without a lot of effort.) Then there's the mowing, usually with some stinky two-cycle engine that puts out as much smog as a badly-tuned city bus.

And unlike the other grass monocultures we humans go to great trouble to maintain, lawns don't even feed hungry people. Mostly, they feed the status-conciousness of insecure suburbanites, and the bank accounts of the lawncare companies who do the heavy lifting required to keep our homes surrounded by a surface that resembles a billiards table. What the hell use are they? Approximately none.

And now my long-standing contention on the turpitude of turf is confirmed: in Beacon Woods, Florida, you can go to jail for not keeping your lawn green. It seems that retiree Joseph Prudente had the bad luck that his sprinkler system broke and his lawn died. So the local Home-Owners Association invoked a local deed covenant, requiring him to re-sod his property. Which he couldn't afford to do. So they got a court order telling him to do it. Since that didn't magically make him able to afford it, he still didn't. So on Friday he reported to the county jail, apparently to remain there until he sods his lawn. (One hopes that other residents of the county will send the bill for his incarceration to the Beacon Woods Civic Association, as a hint that the justice/penal system has more important issues than brown grass to deal with.)

It has been said that, in America, it is a crime to be poor. In Beacon Woods, FL, it's apparently even a crime to be not quite as solvent as your stuffed-shirt superficial middle-class neighbours. But the real crime here is having a rule like that in the first place. Look, morons: if the grass dies because the sprinkler system broke, then you obviously have completely the wrong conditions to be even trying to grow the stuff. Get a fracking clue, will you? Grow some native Florida vegetation or something.

(For the record: we have been steadily finding other things to fill the yard with besides grass. What lawn remains includes a mix of spring bluebells, feral violets and clover. Much healthier -- and much better-looking, too).

Aww, give Sarah a break....

2008-09-29T23:02:00.002-04:00

....'cuz she's just a gurrrllll. And that meltdown in the Katie Couric interview? She's just appealing to her Pentecostal base by speaking in tongues.

But never mind: Sarah is OK, 'cuz she's got character. And what, you may ask, is this "character" quality? I'm not sure, but it doesn't seem to include telling the truth or understanding anything about the job. It doesn't seem to preclude hanging out with lunatic clergy (unless of course, it's the other guy's lunatic clergy).

But none of that matters, 'cuz if you've got character[tm], when push comes to shove, and the chips are down, and your back's to the wall, and the crick is rising, and the rubber is meeting the road, and the cliches are coming thick and fast: you'll do the Right Thing.

So I'm still not real clear on this "character" thing, but I have a vague impression it has something to do with shooting Muslims. Or maybe moose. They probably look the same through the 'scope of Sarah's rifle.

Tentacled Horrors Invade Ottawa Pub!!

2008-09-28T13:16:00.006-04:00

OK, really only a few toys and some geeks:

L to R: Epinephrine, bPer, AJ Milne, Eamon Knight, Theo Bromine
Table centre: Various cephalodic things, siezing firm control of the condiments.
Behind the camera: Nic (who doesn't read Pharyngula, but tagged along to offer the occasional insight from a Soc-Anthro perspective).

The beer was (of course) great. But for some bizarre reason the Clocktower doesn't serve calamari.

Ottawa Pharyngufest TONIGHT! Be there....

2008-09-26T23:50:00.005-04:00

...or be the last one eaten!

For all local fans of Pharyngula (or anyone else who just wants see what these strange people and/or this strange town is like): tomorrow night is the appointed time for the first ever Ottawa Pharyngufest!

When: 8pm, Saturday 27 October
Where: Clocktower Brew Pub, 575 Bank St.

View Larger Map

Yaaaaarrrrrrrr

2008-09-19T15:38:00.002-04:00

Q: What do you say when you discover that the pirates are plotting to take over the world?

A: Avast! Conspiracy!

And there was dancing in the aisles.....

2008-09-14T21:54:00.000-04:00

A final surprise set from Genticorum, last thing Sunday night:

Yann Falquet:
And on Jew's harp:Pascal Gemme:
Alexandre de Grosbois-Garand:
And just to prove I wasn't lying in the post title:If you like an energetic blend of traditional folk and modern folk/jazz/celtic/whatever -- then be sure to see Genticorum if they come to your town.

Even I was dancing. This was taken Friday at the Dance Tent, doing....well, I don't think it was square dancing as such, but some sort of organized group choreography with a caller telling us what to do next. I blame the (excellent) beer I'd just drunk for loosening my normally shy, self-effacing inhibitions to reveal the party animal that lurks within:

It was a fantastic Festival; the Dance Tent is a great idea (though they need to turn down the volume for the sake of the other west field stages). Looking forward to next year already.....

A.C.Grayling on Humanism

2008-09-13T10:37:00.004-04:00

At the end of a thorough fisking of Steve Fuller's (who attempted, at the Kitzmiller trial, to defend ID's legitimacy as science on rather post-modern grounds, thus proving that the Absolutist Right will happily fraternize with the Relativist Left whenever it is convenient) views on Intelligent Design and the historical relation between science and religion, Grayling almost tangentially delivers the following gem on the definition of "humanism":

Humanism in today's acceptation of the term is the view that our ethics and politics should be premised on our best understanding of human nature and the human condition, as revealed to us by empirical enquiry and by the arts, literature, reflection, and the grown-up conversation of mankind. It refuses to accept that instructions for how to live, act and believe come from the far past or outside space and time, and it refuses to believe that the whole point of life is to get membership of a posthumous choir.

Definitely deserves more prominent exposure.

Hat tip: Evolving Thoughts.

Announcing My Reconversion

2008-09-07T23:27:00.006-04:00

Sorry, fellow atheists, but I really can't argue with the logic of this:

(OK, as PZ points out, I can argue with it. But why spoil the joke?)

D'oh!Leary

2008-09-07T21:28:00.005-04:00

It feels sort of surreal when you find your own jokes being used as serious arguments by other people. The other day I commented thusly at Dispatches from the Culture Wars, regarding Sarah Palin's foreign-policy experience:

Hey, she's spent most of her life and all of her career sandwiched between Roosha and Socialist Canuckistan! Obviously she's got lots of experience defending Amerika from it's enemies! Screw McCain -- Palin for Prez!

And wouldn't you know it? Today the ever-risible Denyse O'Leary, in defending Palin from a criticism by Ben Stein, raises exactly that point -- apparently in all seriousness:

Stein thought Palin couldn't handle foreign affairs or the economy. Hmmm. Palin's state sits between Canada and Russia - I wonder how many American states have two foreign neighbours?

Yep. Being off in the hinterland of your own country, with your nearest neighbours being the hinterlands of two other countries, being about as far as it's possible to get from the centres of power of any of those three countries -- according to Denyse, that counts as foreign policy experience.

Am I supposed to laugh or cry?

ARGH! WHAT HAVE THEY DONE?

2008-09-05T20:57:00.004-04:00

OK, I gave them a chance for a whole week. And I tried to get used to it, really I did. But the verdict is in:

I HATE YOU, CBC!

I HATE YOU!!

I've been listening to CBC FM/Stereo/Radio 2 all my adult life. I was really attached to waking up in the morning to a bit of Mozart or Schubert, occasionally varied with a little soft jazz. I mean really attached. Nothing too jarring before breakfast, please. And a strong preference for instrumentals over solo voice.

And now, just when I hit the demographic (50+) CBC 2 is supposedly aimed at they take it away. Instead we get...I don't even know what that genre is called -- Soul? R&B? Some kind of recombinant DNA mish-mash of jazz, rock, blues and I don't-know-what, with all of the worst aspects of each and none of the better. Yesterday morning Tom Allen even played Michael Jackson. Michael. Fornicating. Jackson. Is this really what my generation is supposed to like? I must have missed the memo.

No more. We bought a clock radio with a built-in MP3 player. Load up a bunch of decent music, and wake up to that, instead. The news, we can get off the web. Buh-bye, CBC....

Credits: Kitty-vid found on YouTube.

UPDATE:
The good news (as I discovered today by accident) is they still have Jurgen Gothe, who reliably plays decent music. The bad news is he's been banished to a single hour, late Sunday afternoon. grumble, grumble

The Tao of Folk Music

2008-09-04T23:18:00.006-04:00

More Folk Festival pix, this time of Tao Rodriguez-Seeger and his accompanists. I wonder if he ever gets tired of being "the grandson of...."
Tao's fiddler:
Communing with his bassist:
In full cry on guitar:
Genticorum got around a lot this Festival. Yann Falquet joined Tao for part of the set:
Photos taken on the fly sometimes capture odd poses and expressions -- which suggest comic possibilities (well, if you've got my warped sense of humour, anways....):

Colin Linden

2008-08-27T23:10:00.005-04:00

I'm not actually a big fan, but I happened to catch the end of his Saturday night main-stage set, and I liked these pictures. Hope you do, too (all three of you):

And a big power chord to finish:

A Living Legend

2008-08-26T23:04:00.003-04:00

Odetta was late for her set, having been delayed by "a dental emergency". About 4pm Saturday she was brought on-stage in a wheelchair, and received an instant standing ovation:

Born in Alabama in 1930, Odetta trained initially as a classical and operatic performer, but then turned to folk music. She was dubbed "The Voice of the Civil Rights Movement" and is credited with influencing dozens of musicians of the 60's and later. For us, she gave a solid performance of good old folk, blues and spirituals.

Two points to note about the picture below, which I snapped as Odetta was being brought on stage. First: The guy on the left in the red shirt is Tao Rodriguez-Seeger, grandson of the famous Pete Seeger -- another musical friend of Odetta from the old days (more on Tao in a later post). Second: Note the woman who is wheeling Odetta, and getting her set up -- what is her skin colour? Now reflect that, when Odetta was born, and for the first several decades of her life, it would have been unthinkable (certainly in the Southern US, maybe even up here) for an elderly black woman to have a white attendant.

How far we have come. And Odetta was among those who helped make that change.

Two banjo players and a musician went to the Folk Festival

2008-08-25T22:52:00.011-04:00

A few pictures from the 2008 Ottawa Folk Festival, held two weekends ago at Britannia Park.

Left is Riley Baugus, from North Carolina, playing and singing "old-time" style. He was traveling with fiddler Dirk Powell. I don't seem to have any pictures of them together, but they sure sounded good. On this particular stage he was teamed with Anne Downey (one-third of Finest Kind) who seems to taking her banjo very seriously.

Providing a little balance to this workshop was Tara Nevins, from Donna the Buffalo (warning: link triggers a long and apparently unstoppable music video!).

Anne Downey looks a lot happier back on her double bass:

Here's Anne in another workshop, flanked as is more usual by Ian Robb and Shelley Posen, doing their trademark a capella harmony (I think this song was "No More Fish, No Fishermen", to the tune of the hymn "See Amidst the Winter's Snows").

It was a great weekend, and I took around 370 pictures -- more of which as I get around to selecting them and wrapping some prose around them.

The New Ride, The Old Stompin' Grounds, and Degrees of Separation

2008-08-05T21:48:00.008-04:00

Spent the August long weekend in Toronto, doing....stuff.

The New Ride

Saturday, after having lunch from the stalls at the St. Lawrence Market, we headed off to the Urbane Cyclist to get me a recumbent bicycle. The HPVOoO folks told me to try and get Carey to show me the bikes. He was busy, so I wound up with a guy called Chris.

First, I tried a model with underseat steering (this one, or one much like it). As I mounted for a test ride, Carey and Chris had a little disagreement on the proper way to start riding with USS, for someone inexperienced on 'bents. It didn't matter, anyways: whatever way I tried, it was painful and terrifying, like being 6 years old again and learning to ride a bike for the first time. Eventually, I fell off trying to do an uphill start (fortunately, falling off a stationary, low-slung recumbent is not particularly hazardous), so I wheeled it back to the shop. At this point I was feeling discouraged enough to give up on the whole idea, go home, and get used to my upright bike again.

Instead, I got Carey to show me a couple of long wheel-base machines. I was pleased to discover that I could actually ride these quite comfortably; they have almost the same feel as a conventional bike (only you're sitting in a nice comfy chair). I was on the point of buying the Bacchetta Agio when I decided to give short wheel-base one more chance, but this time with over-seat steering. The second one I tried, I decided was the one -- a Bacchetta Giro-20 TT. It's different from riding an upright, but not like learning all over. I took it out tonight for a quick trip to the store, and found it wonderfully comfortable -- there's no suspension, but the seat itself provides great cushioning when riding over bumps and curbs. Give me a couple of weeks of training (I'm horribly out of shape) and I'll be commuting to work on it! (Somebody please bother me about that around Labour Day, OK?)

So: Thanks go to Carey and Chris et al at UC for helping me pick the bike, and for prepping it in time to be picked up before closing. If you're ever in TO looking for some self-propelled wheels: Urbane Cyclist are the go-to guys.

The Strip

Went for dinner at the Korean Grill House on Yonge Street (definitely recommended if you're at all into that barbecue-your-own-dinner schtick), then wandered a few blocks down the famous Strip. Growing up in TO, I used to go down there fairly regularly, and it was neat to see that essentially it hasn't changed. Yeah, the billboards are now fancy-flashy animated LED signs, Sam the Record Man is now just a sad facade, and the crowds aren't nearly as lily-white as they were 30 years ago (if anything, the colour mix has reversed), but basically Yonge Street is still the same garish trashy hodge-podge of small stores selling everything, bars, bistros, cinemas -- and of course, strip joints. Hogtown's perennial floating party.

Museum Musings

Sunday was the AGM of the Humanist Association of Canada. I attended the morning session, which was about all my allergy to meetings and group politics could handle, and after lunch I wandered across to the ROM to see if that new pointy thing facing Bloor Street looks as horrible from the inside as it does from the outside. Yeah, I get that this thing is supposed to suggest the angles and striations of a quartz crystal, and I don't object in principle to weird-shaped buildings -- but an annex should respect the architecture of the existing structure, and to me the Crystal just clashes horribly with the old Gothic stone of the original ROM. Meh.

Inside it's not so bad: the Crystal works fine as an entry hall, and the galleries are bright and airy. There's a great display of Jurassic ichthyosaurs and other marine reptiles. However, I'm not so crazy about what they've done with the dinosaurs and mammals: I preferred the old dioramas. Instead these things are just stuck out on white platforms with signs to tell you the name and age. But there isn't nearly enough explanatory material to tie the whole thing together -- something about the affinities and ecology to make the specimens more than just a bunch of mounted skeletons.

A lot of the original ROM seems to be undergoing renovation: the old Invert Paleo gallery was boarded up; all that was on display were a couple of cases out on the balcony -- and disappointingly, most of the Burgess material was removed for study. I can't find anything on the ROM website indicating where and when we'll be getting those exhibits back. The beautiful old rotunda, demoted from grand entry hall, now looks sadly abandoned -- I hope they find something worthy to do with that space (a big dino like the barosaur in the entry of the AMNH wouldn't be out of place, albeit a bit derivative).

If I sound a little upset, it's because the ROM has a lot of good memories for me. As a kid, I used to beg my parents to take me there on Saturday to see the dinosaurs. Then as a teenager with the astronomy bug, I spent a lot of time next door at the McLaughlin Planetarium (now defunct). As little as three years ago at the last Toronto Howlerfest, it was still recognizable as my old ROM -- but now I go back, and find it's all different.

At least the two big totem poles still stand in the old stairwells.

After hours, we HAC people got a talk and private tour of the travelling Darwin exhibit, from its curator Chris Darling. We originally saw it last fall in Chicago, and it was interesting to see the differences from that venue. The Weston Hall, in addition to being an irregular shape instead of rectilinear, is much better lit than the Field Museum gallery.

Also from Dr. Darling, we learned out that plans for a Gallery of Evolution at the ROM are on indefinite hold, as they can't find a corporate sponsor, just as they couldn't for the Darwin exhibit. Apparently even in enlightened Canada, the E-word is too controversial and scares off anyone with a "brand" to protect. Damn these creationists for shoving their bigotted ignorance on the rest of the world.

Degrees of Separation

The HAC dinner speaker was Brian Alters, famous for having a research grant denied by a Canadian government granting agency because his proposal failed to provide "adequate justification for the assumption in the proposal that the theory of Evolution, and not Intelligent Design theory, was correct." To this day, SSHRC has failed to provide a satisfactory explanation of exactly what was meant by that. Alters (who was also a plaintiffs' witness at the Kitzmiller trial) gave a lively and humorous talk covering choice bits of the ID-Creationist/Evolution controversy. Much later in the evening, he regaled a few of us stragglers with anecdotes about the late Stephen Jay Gould, whom he knew at Harvard. So, having shaken hands and conversed with Brian Alters, we now have a Gould Number of 2.

Another talking head at the HAC evening was president Dr. Robert Buckman, who in addition to being an oncologist, has also worked in broadcasting, both in science journalism and comedy. He worked with John Cleese on the 1979 Amnesty International benefit event The Secret Policeman's Ball -- meaning we now also have a Monty Python Number of 2.

At the HAC dinner there was also some guy who's been in the news recently (some small dispute about something or other), receiving a Humanist Lifetime Achievement Award. We didn't actually meet him personally, but others did, so I guess that gives us a Henry Morgentaler Number of (also) 2.

Gyapong Gets It Wrong

2008-07-13T15:25:00.004-04:00

One of Deborah Gyapong's favorite topics is the various Human Rights Commission hate-speech proceedings against people she considers her heroes. I actually have some sympathy insofar as I support free speech, and view hate-speech laws with misgiving (or else I just hang out at Ed Brayton's place too much). But that's a can of worms to open some other time.

However, on one recent free speech rant, Gyapong drags in (with tenuous relevance) a bit of Christian apologetics. I left a brief comment over there, but decided to also bring it back here for a more thorough fisking:

When I took Philosophy 101, one of the debates that, according to our professor, had never been solved was whether God existed or not.

Well, whether that question has been resolved might depend who you ask, but never mind....

Even Christian mystics and philosophers like Blaise Pascal have granted that you really cannot prove definitively one way or the other. That's why Pascal's famous wager says you have far less to lose if you choose to believe God exists and live as if He does and discover after death that He is in fact real, than to believe He doesn't exist, live as if He doesn't and discover, whoops! you are going to hell.

Even if you believe in God and discover after death He does not exist, you have at least led a good life.

I guess Deborah's Phil 101 class didn't also cover the criticisms of Pascal's Wager. First of course, note that it does not even claim to be an argument for the existence of God. Rather, it is a strategy for maximizing your welfare over the span of your mortal life, and possible after-life, in the face of objective uncertainty about the existence of God. As such, the Wager is of legitimate interest to philosophers as an abstract exercise in probability and decision theory.

However, as a strategic reason for adopting religion it fails badly. It doesn't even begin to work unless the "believe in God" choice is singular and well-defined. If (and this is actually the case in the real world) there are multiple competing and mutually-anathematizing sects, each advancing its own god(s), each with his/her/their particular criteria for admission to posthumous bliss, then the decision process fails. The Wager gives no guidance on how to choose between Christianity and Islam -- or even between Catholic and Baptist belief. It simply swallows whole the assumption that we know what the postulated God wants us to do to be considered righteous.

One more thing: I can't let pass without comment, the casual bigotry implied by: "Even if you believe in God and discover after death He does not exist, you have at least led a good life." Apparently, whether or not God exists, you can only lead a good life if you believe in him/her/them/it.

However, it seems Gyapong's invocation of Pascal is mostly meant to set up the false dichotomy at the core of her argument:

We live in a universe of unsolved mysteries. I can look at the heavens and like the psalmist say they testify to God's glory, that they and all the beauty of nature are like a book that testifies to God's design and God's laws. But others look at the same universe and see primordial slime and nothingness and random chance natural selection.

[I have to break in here to note that Gyapong's confusion of the fields of astronomy and biology suggests that, while she may have taken Philosophy 101, she never took Science 101. Here's a quick remedial lesson, Deborah: no one thinks the stars came from "primordial slime" (of course, I also don't know anyone who thinks life did either, in quite those terms, but I'll let it go) or were subject to natural selection -- a process reserved to entities that reproduce themselves with at least moderate fidelity. Either she knows roughly nothing about science, or is just tossing rhetoric around in a fact-free attempt to impress. But I digress:]

In other words, we both base our beliefs on a priori assumptions about existence that cannot be proven, even though we could both say there is evidence to support our views. My a priori assumptions are religious, Christian, and rely on revealed truth in holy Scripture and holy Tradition. The a priori assumptions of secular humanists are based on Darwinism, and materialism that are just as much faith-based as my beliefs, though God is not in the picture for them.

That paragraph is a remarkable example of managing to get just about everything wrong.

First of course, there's the obligatory abuse of the term "Darwinism", an almost sure sign you're dealing with someone who knows nothing about the subject, except that whatever it is they don't like it.

Secondly, she seems to assume that, just because she's accepted the terms of Pascal's Wager (albeit without justifying her particular choice of god and "Tradition"), it follows that we Darwinist-materialist humanists also have, only we're betting on the other side. Wrong, wrong and wrong, Deborah: I (and most other "materialists" I know) reject the Wager, partly for the reasons I outlined above, but additionally because having examined the available evidence, we conclude that the question of God's existence is resolvable in the negative to a reasonable degree of certainty -- at least enough that we can pretty much ignore the question and get on with our lives. This is not the result of some "a priori assumptions" we hold -- I and many other atheists were practising Christians (or other religion) at some time in our lives; we did hold those religious priors, but came in time to see that they did not match reality. You see, in the real world, "assumptions" are not like mathematical axioms, where all that matters is internal consistency (though religious claims frequently fail even that criterion) -- at some point, incorrect assumptions tend to collide with that real world. You start to run into situations where you find yourself saying: "My assumptions imply that the world should look like This. In fact, it looks like That. Better re-think those assumptions...." That's the way science works, and the only a priori of science is something like: the universe works consistently, and if we study it in a disciplined way, we can figure it out.

There's a lovely irony in Gyapong's argument. If you read her blog for any length of time, you find that one of the other epithets (ie. in addition to "Darwinist" and "materialist") she likes to toss out is "postmodernist" -- a school of thought which among other things denies absolute universal truth in favour relative, individually constructed truths. But her assertion that our understanding of the Universe is completely determined by arbitrarily-chosen priors essentially sets up the same kind of relativist epistemology. The only difference between this and "classic" postmodernism is that in the latter it is social factors like one's race, gender and economic class that determine one's worldview. And on the whole, scientists (including most of those dreaded "Darwinists") have little use for post-modernism.

Of course, this whole digression into bad apologetics is just a lead-up to Gyapong's favorite hobby-horse, the supposed persecution of Christians by the Human Rights Commissions:

As Ezra Levant points out today, we have a new state religion. We can't really call it a theocracy because God is missing from the creed. But it is a faith nonetheless with its own strictures, its own moral code, its own high priests and priestesses and its own inquisitors. And these new inquisitors share a similar zeal for enforcing their dogma on heretics and schismatics.

This "state religion" at least as she sets it up, is a bogey man of her own devising. Gyapong is advancing a dichotomous view in which there are only two sides: the conservative Christians, and the Darwinist-materialists who are out to get them. In fact (as anyone who isn't determined to fit the facts into the straight-jacket of their martyr complex knows), there are are all sorts of "sides" in our society. At the very least, there are: conservative Christians who rail against the modern world; the leftist po-mos whose views I find just as silly and anti-intellectual; the scientific view in which evidence decides matters of truth (and is in itself largely independent of ideological commitments); and libertarians who believe in free speech as a principle, even for fools and bigots (for an example of the last view, Deborah should go check out Ed Brayton's Dispatches From The Culture Wars: a harsh critic of religious excess, who regularly jeers at creationism, and fiercely defends gay rights -- but who has also defended Ezra Levant on strict free-speech grounds).

There are aspects of the Stephen Boissoin case that I am unhappy about (or would be, if they were to be confirmed by a source that wasn't so obviously grinding an axe over it), but Deborah's bogeyman of materialism, Darwinism and a priori philosophical assumptions have nothing to do with it.

[As an aside, I should note that Stephen Boissoin is being persecuted for being an ignorant bigot repeating the standard lies of the Christian Right. One can defend him on the principled basis that even ignorant bigots should enjoy the right to free speech, and the proper response is public refutation and ridicule -- but to defend him as a persecuted Christian says something about the kind of Christianity you endorse.]

In support of PZ's right to be impolite and insulting

2008-07-12T10:56:00.006-04:00

With regards to this news story, and this response on Pharyngula:

It may be a fine distinction, but I do not see PZ's impoliteness and insults as directed at the Catholic faithful who believe that God is present in the communion wafers, however much PZ would disagree and consider them to be naive and/or deluded and/or misguided. Rather he is (verbally, of course) attacking those who think it is appropriate, or even understandable, to respond to blasphemy and sacrilege with physical force and death threats.

Here is a letter I sent to the President of UMM:

Dear Dr. Bruininks,

I firmly believe that, in addition to transmitting knowledge on various topics, one of the important roles of a university is to encourage students to think critically and question their own and their world's basic assumptions. I think that Professor P.Z.Myers does an excellent job in all of these areas, and is a credit to UMM.

Recently, I have seen blog posts by Dr Myers in which he has encouraged desecration of Catholic religious symbols. Bill Donohue has stated that "It is hard to think of anything more vile...". While the comments and proposed actions by P.Z. Myers may be insulting and impolite, surely there are many things in this world far viler than denigrating symbols and beliefs.

I hope you will disregard the demands from the Catholic League for the removal or other discipline of Professor Myers, and support his right to voice his opinions, however controversial they might be.

Two more reasons not to read the Citizen

2008-07-07T23:12:00.007-04:00

We dumped the Ottawa Citizen years ago, as it gradually slid into banal fluff. The last few days reminded me why we continue to not take the rag.

First, on Saturday columnist David Warren celebrated changes to the Ontario Human Rights Commission by preemptively proclaiming his own martyrdom:

As a writer who does not subscribe to the "politically correct" ideology, it is reasonable to expect that, sooner or later, they will come for me.....I was born a free citizen of the Old Canada and before her God I declare, that I will go to jail rather than acknowledge the legitimacy of any "human rights" commission.

Wow. I predict that David Warren will be arrested the day they criminalize self-important windbaggery with pomposity aforethought. But not, I think, before then (unless of course, he deliberately provokes it).

Then on Monday, Reuven Bulka writes a column on the Sanctity of Life and how we need God -- apparently, to keep us from offing all the old people and cripples (something like that). Along the way he invokes Ben Stein's "well done documentary" Expelled, which tells "the story of scientists expelled from their universities for looking positively on the notion of intelligent design, rather than embracing holus bolus the Darwinian theory of the evolution of the species". Someone should tell him that the persecution stories in the movie are (to put it charitably) significantly exagerrated.

That was just the start. It goes downhill from there:

Although Darwin somewhat arrogantly called his work The Origin of Species, it is clear that he did not explain how life actually originated. He did not know, nor do scientists today know.

The choice of title would be because Darwin was writing, not about how life began, but specifically about how new species arose in nature -- a live scientific question throughout the nineteenth century (and in many ways, still today). While I've often heard creationists assert that our ignorance of life's beginning is some fatal blow against evolution, I must say I've never before encountered that objection based on such a grossly illiterate misconstrual of the title of Darwin's book. (But note the implicit invocation of the God of the Gaps argument).

Bulka blathers on:

You are left wondering why seemingly intelligent people have zero tolerance for intelligent design. It is not as if intelligent design is any less scientific than the gaping hole in how life began that Darwinists greet with an "I do not know" shrug.

As a matter of fact, it is as if ID is "less scientific". Lacking a coherent hypothesis beyond "Evolution can't do that", it's not scientific at all. And concerning how life began, scientists know a good deal more than pious ignorami like Bulka are aware of.

By the way, for the record, I have no problem with evolutionary ingredients in creation. This can co-exist quite comfortably with intelligent design, or God's design, which is stretched out on an evolutionary canvass.
Mr. Stein takes the viewer on a Columbo-like journey trying to get to the bottom of this visceral and categorical rejection by the Darwinists. He skillfully shows how Darwinism moves people to reject religion, and some of the major tenets of faith, such as the notion of afterlife and the meaning of existence, including having a code of values.

Of course, Stein "shows" this by "skillfully" interviewing only prominent atheists like Richard Dawkins and P.Z.Myers, ignoring devout pro-evolution scientists such as Ken Miller and Francis Collins. Bulka then goes on to swallow Stein's science-hatred hook, line and sinker:

In a Darwinist system, with everything happening on its own, we are bereft of values. And the scientists seemingly want it that way. If nothing is sacred, anything goes - there are no restrictions.

I have no idea what Bulka means by a "Darwinist" system, but the rudiments of morality -- compassion, cooperation, reciprocity, mutual aid, observance of social rules -- seem to be built in to our psychology, and that of our closest relatives. We don't need abstract notions of sacredness to avoid the "anything goes" apocalypse: simple enlightened self-interest gets us a long way down that road.

Of course, no anti-evolution rant would be complete without dragging in the ghost of Stalin, and the Hitler Zombie.

That brings us to ask whether we ever had such a world, a Godless world, and yes we did. Stalin killed in the tens of millions, Hitler's evil is well documented, and there are others who in the absence of any values wreaked immeasurable havoc.

That Hitler was "Godless" of course explains why he wrote copiously about his duty to God on behalf of the German people, and why the buckles on WW2 German uniforms bore the slogan "Gott Mit Uns". And Stalin (to those who have even passing familiarity with Darwin's ideas, and know what the term actually means) was anything but a "Darwinist": official Soviet dogma during his era rejected Darwin's proposed mechanism of organic change (variation and natural selection) as being incompatible with Marxist theories of history. In its place Stalin substituted the neo-Lamarckian ideas of Trofim Lysenko (with disastrous results for Soviet agriculture).

But really, the foregoing are just minor historical gaffes compared to the real fallacy of that paragraph, which is that the Stalinist and Nazi visions were far from "values-free". What they both were, were ideologies which invented and elevated certain "values" (the achievement of the Workers' Paradise through the inexorable outworking of Marxist dialectic; the perfection and triumph of the Aryan Race) over, well, pretty much every other value, including the liberty and lives of individual humans. It's not about values vs. no values: it's about which values.

Of course, Bulka is careful to throw in a token acknowledgement of the known evils of religion -- but you can tell he doesn't really mean it by his attempt to pull a No True Scotsman move (emphasis mine):

This is not to suggest that religion is free from taint. Too many have killed in the name of religion, and history past and present is discoloured by so-called religious figures who espouse, encourage, and reward killing.

And after that diversion, it's back to the real villain -- science:

As bad as religion may be, the argument can be made that absent religion, things would be worse. Mr. Stein drives this point home incessantly, as he juxtaposes scientific tyranny with Nazi imagery.

The good Rabbi doesn't explicitly mention the movie's use of Holocaust imagery -- perhaps he heard about the Anti-Defamation League's deprecation of the film as "misappropriat[ion]" of that sad episode in history, and thought it prudent not to call close attention to that aspect of it:

Using the Holocaust in order to tarnish those who promote the theory of evolution is outrageous and trivializes the complex factors that led to the mass extermination of European Jewry.

Bulka continues:

A valueless society enslaved by scientism desacrilizes life. And Mr. Stein is not oblivious to the scientism of eugenics as it impacted then, with the implicit warning that it could happen again.

I don't quite know what this "scientism" Bulka complains about is, but science is about discovering how the world works, with all its wonders; and the "Darwinism" (properly: evolutionary biology) Ben Stein derides is very much a part of that discovery. Bulka is welcome to argue all he wants for the sacredness of human life, either as a principle, or as a practical bulwark against atrocity -- but his argument is ill-served by credulously regurgitating nonsense from a film well-known to be propaganda, and which places blame on all the wrong people.

[Afterword: while surfing up references for this post, I happened across this thoughtful and nuanced essay on Expelled by an Evangelical Christian at the American Scientific Affiliation site. I don't agree with everything Schloss says, but he tries very hard to be fair to both sides, and correctly identifies the movie's many flaws. Recommended reading, especially for those who might default to Stein's camp.]

Hat tip: Dr. Dawg (though I must also credit Deborah Gyapong, who of course agrees with Bulka).

I love it when I guess right

2008-07-06T10:08:00.003-04:00

Back in May, conservative blogger Deborah Gyapong (who in RL lives fairly close to me) posted a bit of hysterical granny spam in opposition to Bill C-51 (for non-Canadians: tightens up regulations governing Natural Health Products, which currently occupy a middle position between foods and full-blown pharmaceuticals). I replied with a comment referring her to Barry Green's informative series of articles on the Ottawa Skeptics site. Along the way, I tossed in a speculation of my own:

....has it occurred to you that it might be astro-turf from the NHP industry?

I haven't been following the issue that closely, so it was only recently I discovered that, a few days after I posted that comment, it turns out that my guess was right. The anti-C51 campaign seems to originate from the website stopc51.com, which makes hysterical claims such as....well, the ones found in that granny spam. Claims which are outrageous enough that they should automatically set off any thoughtful person's bogosity alarm (giving garlic to your child as a home remedy can get you arrested?!).

StopC51 is owned by a certain Mr. Ian Stewart. And what does Mr. Stewart do in his day job? He runs a mail-order supplement company called Truehope Nutritional Support Ltd. (in fact the contact phone number for StopC51 goes to the Truehope offices). Truehope sells a rather expensive multi-vitamin supplement known as EMPower, which is claimed to treat all sorts of psychological or neurological problems from mood disorders to Tourette Syndrome -- unproven health claims which have gotten them in trouble with Health Canada in the past.

The gory details are in the eSkeptic article, so I won't repeat them here. Suffice it to say that Stewart is one who cannot even live within the NHP regulations as they currently exist -- so it's no wonder he's dead against any increased restriction in those regs. There may be legitimate criticisms to be made about C51 (there always are, for any complex piece of legislation). There may even be merit to having a larger philosophical argument about the extent to which the government should protect consumers from questionable product claims vs. taking a caveat emptor approach.

But you're not going to get any of that by listening to a manufactured panic emanating from an obvious snake-oil salesman.

AMC Ad, Updated

2008-06-30T23:17:00.005-04:00

For those who can't see the animation (and for after it has disappeared), here's a composite of three screen-caps that give the gist. The caption in the last one reads: "The intelligent way to go the movies". I really can't help wondering if they did that deliberately.

BTW, we just got back from Indiana Jones: The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull -- a fun romp and worthy successor to the earlier ones. And it's every bit as good a documentary as Expelled!

Meandering with Jesus

2008-06-29T23:04:00.008-04:00

Due to overwhelming popular demand (ie. one commenter, and email from some Christian friends), after what I realize has been a whole year, I now pick up the continuing saga where I left off.

Looking back on my whole Christian phase (a total of 28 years and a few months), I see a process of continuously discarding bits and pieces of an initially-adopted fundamentalist orthodoxy. I am constitutionally incapable of not asking questions, both about the external world and the contents of my own head -- and that is absolutely fatal to any sort of rigid dogmatism. My constant questioning is what led me from the naive agnosticism of my childhood (anything you believe in your early teens is almost by definition naive) into Christianity, and then gradually back out to a mature rationalism.

The first discard (though as already explained, it was really a non-starter) was of course strict young-earth literalism. Then I started actually reading the Bible -- every word, from Genesis to Revelation -- and ran into books like Job. Was it really likely that this guy would compose epic poetry while sitting in misery amidst the ruins of his life? And was there anything really lost from the central theme of the book by reading it as an abstract inquiry into the question "Why do bad things happen to good people?", rather than a literal history? (BTW, the answer as eventually presented by God seems to be: Because I'm God and I can do whatever I choose, and I'm way smarter than you. So just STFU.) Similar considerations apply to Jonah. So, I accepted the idea that the Bible could still bear a message from God, even if the narratives were partially fictional. Note that this is not, strictly speaking, a repudiation of Biblical inerrancy -- it's just a question of interpreting the intent of a particular book. If Jesus taught in fictional parables, why couldn't some whole books be the same sort of thing?

The second major discard was the kind of crude salvationism that goes like: "Pray this magic prayer and you get to go to heaven. Otherwise demons will torture you for all eternity". I'd like rant about that at length, but for now I'll put it succinctly: if that message doesn't stick in your craw, then you seriously lack a sense of moral proportion and human compassion. If you worship a God who really operates that way, then you worship a psychopathic monster worse than Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot combined and multiplied a hundred-fold. Indeed, many or most evangelicals I meet seem to have found some way to soften that stark anathema, and I was no exception. In this I was much influenced by the writings of C.S.Lewis (particularly The Great Divorce), who took a much more nuanced view of the whole salvation/damnation issue. Lewis' view isn't that God gets permanently pissed off at you for every slight misdeed, but rather that sin is, at base, the act of rejecting God, and thus rejecting the very Source of Life and Ground of Being. Consequently, one becomes a less "complete person". Post-mortem, that process continues, like the damned in The Great Divorce, collapsing into self-centredness and self-loathing. God does not damn us to Hell; we damn ourselves to the hell of our own mental solitude. As a theology, it's sort of a combination of Plato and modern psychology.

The main point of all this rambling is that holding such a position makes the answer to the question "Who can be saved?" somewhat less obvious. And if it's no longer strictly limited to those who have "accepted Jesus into their hearts", then the way is open (though not inevitable) to make it steadily more inclusive.

Notwithstanding the above, at the time I graduated from university (and got married) I was still a practicing Evangelical. At Queens I'd been involved with the Navigators (which if you know much about the Evangelical scene, you know as one of the most gung-ho "Are you saved yet? Let me read you this tract...." groups out there), and kept that up after moving to Ottawa. However, there were other influences at work. One was the rise of the American Christian Right, culminating in the election of Ronald Reagan. I've blogged on this before, the net effect being to drive me socially away from fundamentalism, to go along with my growing intellectual differences. A second one was entering the normal life of work and meeting a greater variety of people -- school in many ways can be a bubble where you only know other students, all of whom are about your age, and hang out with only a certain clique of that already-restricted society. And of course, I now had leisure to read and think about things other than next week's problem set.

But the Big Event that gave a real kick to the process of slow apostasy was the impending arrival of our first child. As I contemplated how we were planning to raise this child, I realized that I just couldn't, with a straight face, impart to him Christianity as I knew it. I claimed (even to myself) that I still believed most of the important conservative doctrines, but when I really stopped to examine the state of my belief, I realized it was a shell: my heart was no longer in it, and never could be again.

So I quit going to church. And stayed that way for about two years. When we resumed, rather than to the evangelical churches of my past, it was to a local United Church of Canada -- a denomination spanning the range from moderate conservative to way-out liberal (and I think I traversed that entire spectrum in the 15 years we spent there), with a strong emphasis on social action and practical Good Works. And the best part was: no one cared how orthodox you were, and no one asked how your spiritual life was going. It was a great place for a refugee from fundamentalism to have a good long think -- and it was a great relief to give up feeling the obligation to support beliefs that no longer seemed supportable.

This post is now getting plenty long, so I'll leave off there. I promise that it won't take another year to finish the story!

Images from Wikimedia Commons:
King James Bible, 1611
Paradise and Hell, Hieronymous Bosch, c. 1510

AMC Advertising Appropriately

2008-06-28T18:42:00.004-04:00

While looking up showtimes for Indiana Jones, I discovered that Expelled has arrived at our local movie-plex. Knowing what I know about the latter movie's contents (including stuff coming from the flick's producers), I am unlikely to see it. Not only do I refuse to enrich this bunch with the royalty from my ticket purchase, I've got more enjoyable and productive ways to spend 90 minutes of my life (like bathing the cats, or going to the dentist).

However, the AMC website blurb is worth seeing, just for the ironic humour value. Click here, choose the "Synopsis" tab, scroll down so you can see the Movietickets.com ad below the text -- and watch (but do it before the ad goes away -- who knows how long this turkey will last?)

Natalie MacMaster

2008-06-16T23:55:00.007-04:00

Natalie MacMaster at the 2005 Ottawa Folk Festival

About once a year, I manage to take a photograph I'm really proud of. In this case, it was beginner's luck. We had bought DSLRs (his-'n-hers Nikon D70s's) a few days before the Festival and I decided to bring one along to play with on the weekend, just to get used to the camera.

Two things I immediately appreciated about digital:

The ability to change my "film speed" on-the-fly -- from ISO 200 for high-resolution under full sun, to ISO 1600 for night-time ambient stage light (as in the above).
The freedom to click away with wild abandon, without exhausting a 24 or 36 exposure roll -- or worrying about the cost of film and processing! One thing I noticed a few years ago about the professional photographers is that they burn film. Yes, they know all about exposure and lighting and composition -- but they also take lots of pictures, because some things you just can't control for, especially on non-posed, non-studio shots. So they'll take, like, a dozen -- or a hundred -- shots to get the one that gets published.

The above picture was taken maybe 20 meters from the stage, with the zoom maxed out at 300mm, hand-held. I hadn't yet heard the rule of thumb that you shouldn't shoot slower than the reciprocal of the focal length, and at 1/30 of a sec or so, a lot of the shots came out blurry due to camera shake.

But a few didn't, and the one above is the lucky winner: just caught the magic moment with Natalie backlit by a purple spot, leaning into her fiddle, with a little motion blur on the bow hand so you can almost hear the music happening.

Full disclosure: Image shot in landscape and cropped to tighten up the composition; some reflected highlights (notably: the sheen on the drummer's bald head!) toned down using GIMP.

Damn right, we're proud, AGAIN!

2008-06-13T23:52:00.006-04:00

So, a mere six days later, and we're back in Ontario, where the handsome guy at left received a diploma in Instrumentation Technology (Computer & Automation), with distinction, from this place.

This time, the recipient of the obligatory "Thank you for coming and speaking to our graduates" appreciation certificate was Vicki Keith, who got famous by swimming across a bunch of large bodies of water, and now works with disabled kids (I expect someone already pointed her to the obvious video).

So: two kids all college edumacated. When do I get go back? I'm tired of them having all the fun, while I just get to pay for it.....

Damn right, we're proud!

2008-06-08T02:30:00.008-04:00

We're currently in a small town in Illinois, where today the young man pictured at left (name of Nicholas) was awarded a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology & Sociology (with a minor in Computer Science), Summa Cum Laude, from this college.

They also gave a degree to this elderly lady (below). I think she's some kind of American politician. No one important, anyhow.

Stay tuned for the next stop on the Great 2008 Graduation (and Furniture Moving) Tour....

Almost Caturday....

2008-05-30T23:08:00.004-04:00

The Shuttle is Carrying What?

2008-05-30T22:11:00.004-04:00

Am I the only one to notice this? Or am I the only one whose mind is....well, the kind of mind that would point it out?

The current space shuttle mission, STS-124, is carrying two important cargoes for the International Space Station.

One, about 50cm long, is a replacement pump for the ISS's zero-g toilet. If you understand even a little basic physics, you can see that excretion in free fall has certain, um, unusual hazards associated with it, and as a consequence the toilet facilities have to be rather high-tech. And it's a bit of a nuisance when a piece of that technology goes on the fritz. So the ISS crew are looking forward to getting the space-loo working properly again.

The other, and much larger item (about 11 meters and 15 tonnes) is a Japanese lab module to be affixed to the side of the ISS. The name of the module is (wait for it).....

Kibo

In Japanese, this means "hope". So let's hope the crew makes sure to install the correct item in the correct place....

OK, I'll admit it's childish.

What do these people have in common?

2008-05-29T22:33:00.014-04:00

Answer: They both believe that there is a mystical magical power that uses the forces of nature to punish wrongdoing in the here and now.

On the left is John Hagee, pastor of Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas. He is on record as claiming that Hurricane Katrina was sent by God to punish New Orleans for being too friendly to Teh Gays. On the right is actress Sharon Stone, who speculated that the recent Chinese earthquake was due to "karma" because of Chinese mistreatment of Tibet and its people. Now, I do have some sympathy with Stone's concern for Tibet, whereas I think Hagee is just a vile stupid bigot. Moreover, Stone has apologized and perhaps somewhat retracted the remark, while as far as I know, Hagee still has it in for gays and The Big Easy. However, that doesn't change the fact that they have something else in common: they're both wrong. As in: you have to be a bit stupid and superstitious to have thought that way in the first place (but then, charismatic preachers and actors are not, in general, classes of people known for their intellectual prowess).

Something else Hagee and Stone (actually, their respective Cosmic Avengers) have in common: they've got lousy aim and produce lots of collateral damage. The earthquake didn't hit Beijing, and take out just the Chinese leadership (ie, the people actually responsible for Chinese policy on Tibet). Instead, it hit a few thousand kilometers away in Sichuan, and killed about 70000 (and still counting) mostly ordinary folk. In New Orleans, the worst-hit areas were not the "gay village", but regular middle and working class neighbourhoods. Which is another reason why it's stupid to believe that natural disasters are divine/karmic retribution.

Actually, it's worse than just silly to believe that: it's potentially very dangerous. Consider the following hypothetical: Suppose that we live next door to each other. Further suppose that, according to my religion, my god disapproves of you in some way -- your sex life, your rival religious opinions, your dietary practices, whatever.

Now, if I believe that you'll have to answer to my god in the afterlife, I may try to warn you of your posthumous peril, but not do much more than that. At worst, I'm likely to become an obnoxious boor, and a pain to have as a neighbour. However, suppose that I think my god is so pissed off at your behaviour that he's likely to take direct action to abate it sooner than that AND that he's got the aforementioned tendency to overdo things -- well, now I'm afraid of becoming collateral damage. So I'm likely to take some preemptive action of my own. And if there's enough people who also think like me, things could get very ugly for you.

I'll grant that there are some significant differences between Stone and Hagee. For one thing, Sharon Stone is a lot thinner and better-looking. Another is that Stone's Western-celeb Buddhism probably renders her not much of a threat to those she disapproves of (and besides, her concept of "karma" seems rather vague). But Hagee specifically believes in a God who punishes whole cities for tolerating the activities of some individuals. He even encourages other people to believe the same. And that is beyond stupid, beyond even dangerous: it is evil.

Photo credits: John Hagee from ibabuzz.com; Sharon Stone from sharonstone.net