Culture Wars
tfk | January 29, 2011Shorter Sam Harris: A Response to Critics:
People are saying mean things about my bad book and I don't know what to say.
[6600 words later]
If I pretend morality is just like health, then all the objections are wrong.
tfk | January 21, 2011I started writing this post hoping to craft an argument that Ayaan Hirsi Ali â a Somali-born atheist (formerly Muslim), a former member of the Dutch Parliament, a screenwriter threatened with assassination for helpng Theo van Gogh (who was assassinated) criticize Islam's treatment of women, a feminist critic of Islam who has won acclaim across the political spectrum in the US and Europe â ought to avoid testifying in forthcoming hearings on Islamic terrorism out of enlightened self-interest. The hearings have never been about anything but attacking Muslims in America, continuing the crusade…
tfk | January 9, 2011In my post yesterday about the shooting of Rep. Gabby Giffords, I tried hard not to say that Loughner's mass murder was caused by insanity, or by violent political rhetoric. We don't know anything about that, and we'll know more once he goes to trial. What we'll find at trial is surely that his actions had complex causes that are hard to untangle: that's the nature of most things people do. But we can still look for major causes, even if they can't explain all of his tragic decisions.
Vaughan Bell has an important essay at Slate, making clear that "he did it because he's crazy" isn't…
tfk | January 8, 2011President Josiah Bartlet:
The streets of heaven are too crowded with angels tonight. They're our students and our teachers and our parents and our friends. The streets of heaven are too crowded with angels, but every time we think we have measured our capacity to meet a challenge, we look up and we're reminded that that capacity may well be limitless. This is a time for American heroes. We will do what is hard. We will achieve what is great. This is a time for American heroes and we reach for the stars.
Today, Representative Gabrielle Giffords was shot in the head while meeting constituents…
tfk | January 7, 2011Wonk Room reports that Wichita-based Koch Industries is suing. Someone sent out a spoof press release in Koch's name, claiming they were going to stop funding climate change denial groups, and now:
Pollution machine Koch Industries is taking to court to defend its reputation as a cesspool of global warming denial. The right-wing carbon industry giant, owned by Tea Party billionaires David and Charles Koch, has filed a lawsuit in Utah to punish anonymous pranksters who claimed on the companyâs behalf that it was discontinuing funding to climate denial front groups. According to Kochâs lawyers…
tfk | January 4, 2011The sky is blue. Winter is cold. Jerry Coyne is upset with NCSE. These are the implacable truths anchoring us in reality. The interesting question is not whether Coyne is upset with NCSE, but what he's upset about this time.
Today, Coyne is upset that the award-winning, NSF-funded website Understanding Evolution addresses a common objection to evolution. (Full disclosure: NCSE assists Understanding Evolution and is listed as a co-organizer of the site. I've never worked on the site, but I work at NCSE. As it says in the sidebar, this blog is my own private thing, not NCSE's. Look…
tfk | January 4, 2011To be clear, my last post was not a defense of a phrase that I use. I searched my archives, and don't see any instances where I referred to atheists as "militant." Indeed, that post is the only one where I used the word "militant" without quoting someone else! I don't think it's the best term to use, I don't think others should use it, and I don't use it. I just don't like people redefining words because they don't like their implications.
I also wanted to point out a comment from Jeff Shallitt, who looked at the "militant atheist" meme back in 2007, including this gem of an observation:…
tfk | January 4, 2011PZ Myers points to a governor of Pakistan's assassination, and insists: "Don't ever call atheists militant, except where they do something like this."
Which is all well and good, and I suppose I wouldn't want to be called militant either. But I also wouldn't want to contradict the dictionary. Here's the OED on "militant":
A. adj.â¦3. a. Combative; aggressively persistent; strongly espousing a cause; entrenched, adamant.
b. Aggressively active in pursuing a political or social cause, and often favouring extreme, violent, or confrontational methods.â¦
B. n. 1. a. A person engaged in war or…
tfk | January 3, 2011Ophelia Benson has a post up looking at an interview between Benjamin Nelson (a sometime commenter here) and Chris Mooney. Nelson summarizes the interview, and the broader accommodation/confrontation conflict, by writing:
[Mooney's] stance is self-consciously political. At least to some extent, there is a âdifference in goalsâ between Mooney and the activist atheists â by which, I think, he means a difference in priorities. Mooney does not think that speaking out against religion is a priority, and that it is on the whole detrimental to science education; while others think it is a priority…
tfk | December 31, 2010Denyse O'Leary â I call her D'OhLeary for short â quotes John Templeton making the ontological argument for God:
Would it not be strange if a universe without purpose accidentally created humans who are so obsessed with purpose?
But this is an awful argument, and especially badly stated here. Let's try something:
Would it not be strange of a universe without Japanese tentacle sex monsters accidentally created humans who are so obsessed with Japanese tentacle sex monsters?
Or in a more classical form:
Would it not be strange of a universe without a horse for everyone to ride accidentally…
tfk | December 25, 2010Attention conservation notice: A couple thousand words that can be summarized as: "Someone is wrong on the internet."
Jerry Coyne has a longish reply to my post yesterday. He seems quite upset about it. He seems to think I'm very, very wrong. And yet he cannot manage to characterize my argument correctly, and offers nothing at all that would refute my argument (or even refute his mischaracterization of that argument). It's odd. He's basically conceding that I'm right that no evidence was offered, and he knows of no evidence. He seems upset that I bothered to point out that lack of…
tfk | December 24, 2010The nice thing about being an agnostic is feeling comfortable saying "I don't know" when there's not enough evidence to say yes or no.
I mention this because I want to be clear that I mean no criticism by saying that I don't know if Ophelia is right about the positive effects of New Atheism. She's picking up on a study which yet again demonstrates that Americans overstate their church attendance. The latest is based on a study comparing churches' attendance figures with people's self-reported church attendance. Earlier demonstrations of this effect included researchers counting cars in…
tfk | December 21, 2010I'll be in and out of internet contact for the next few days, so I may or may not respond to any new wingnuttery from Michael Egnor. But it's worth making a few broad points.
First, nothing I've written should be taken to suggest that fetuses (especially in the third trimester) don't have moral status as people. My previous posts in this vein have been dedicated to showing that Egnor's criteria for making that judgment from the moment of conception are flawed and lead to pernicious and absurd results. I think I've succeeded there.
Second, in discussing abortion, I don't think the really…
tfk | December 19, 2010Michael Egnor is still upset. Earlier, he penned an inaccurate, misleading, and ⦠well ⦠egnorant defense of his views on abortion, responding to my critique of his claim that personhood is easy to define.
His earlier reply repeatedly and incorrectly attempted to associate the content of this blog with my employer. As the sidebar on every page makes clear, the opinions expressed here are not those of NCSE. People who try to tag content here as reflecting NCSE policy or views instantly lose a lot of credit in my accounting of their literacy.
Egnor continues that trend in his latest…
tfk | December 17, 2010Shorter Martin Cothran: More evidence for Global Warming:
English winters are cold and snowy, therefore Al Gore is fat global warming is a hoax.
Outside the fictional world of Martin Cothran â where Lost Cause mythology counts as history, as does Noah's Ark â scientifically literate folks know that 2010 is shaping up to be the warmest year on record.
For context, here's the 12-month moving average of global temperatures as of last June:
Note that the last measurement is the warmest 12-month average temperature in recorded history.
tfk | December 16, 2010Stephen Post tells Science & Religion Today that civility isn't the solution to the problems of modern politics:
civility rests ultimately on deeper notions of respect for and love of humanity. Love is an affirming love of the otherâs being, respect is a modulation of love, and civility is an expression of the respect, as is etiquette.
The problem in our politics, and across our culture, is deeper than the loss of civility. It is a problem of the loss of those things deeper than civility upon which civility rests. The sad thing about American politics today is that our politicians have…
tfk | December 14, 2010Having defended Holocaust deniers and crusaded against gay parents, I shouldn't be surprised that Martin Cothran, lobbyist for the Kentucky affiliate of Focus on the Family and occasional shill for the Disco. 'Tute, would defend treason. In defending the secessionist States, Cothran mostly just whales away at a straw man, offering but one real person's views to which he objects:
the comments of Bob Sutton, chief historian for the National Park Service, who reminds us that "Slavery was the principal cause of the Civil War, period."
That's it. Yes, there's much sanctimonious talk about…
tfk | December 12, 2010Shortly after Michael Egnor launched his first defense of creationism at the Disco. 'Tute's blog, the wags at Panda's Thumb coined the term "egnorance," to describe "the egotistical combination of ignorance and arrogance." It was funny, and remains so years later, because it's true.
Which brings us to Egnor's reply to me, about the morality of abortion, etc.. His first basic error lies in the opening words of his title: "NCSE's Program Director Josh Rosenau: Human Dependency Obviates the Right to Life." It's true that I work at NCSE, but this blog is not an NCSE product, there's a clear…
tfk | December 7, 2010I know Christopher Maloney is a quack because this is how quacks act. PZ Myers wrote a blog post way back when pointing out that Maloney is a quack, a naturopathic "doctor" in Maine. He urged parents to skip vaccinating their kids, and to have them drink berry juice and take garlic pills instead. That isn't how the real world works, alas. The flu vaccine really does stop the flu, while black elderberry has nothing like the clinical evidence required for this sort of recommendation.
Rather than taking that criticism to heart, Maloney had his wife, a lawyer, send nastygrams to the hosts of…
tfk | December 4, 2010Michael Egnor is trying to pick a fight over abortion with P.Z. Myers. Egnor is building a bog-standard argument that every human zygote has an inherent right to life, therefore abortion is immoral (the unargued assumption being that a woman's right to life doesn't really matter). It's a reminder why the Discovery Institute, whose website Egnor clutters up with his occasional screeds, has been overtaken in media attention by old-school young earth creationism: Disco. and ID creationism are static, while young earth creationism always finds new ways to surprise you.
Anyway, in reiterating…