Dust that Sings

PZ Myers mentioned this video on Pharyngula today, and in spite of it being 12 minutes or so I decided to watch…and he was right, it’s a good message about atheism. It manages to capture both skepticism toward religious claims, and an expression of non-religious awe.

A skeptical preacher with a virtual pulpit

I’m thinking Dave will agree with this one, but there are days when I think I would have ended up a decent preacher in another life. It’s stuff like this latest DKos diary that gets it out of my system, I suppose.

It gets difficult to express, without recourse to profanity, what it feels like to read stories like this one. Where some hapless would-be mother, a victim of quirky fetal development, is forced into suffering and pain by the state. Where would-be caregivers are instead mandated to perform unnecessary procedures and read from government-written scripts that have nothing to do with modern medicine, but everything to do with guilt-tripping vulnerable women from one bad choice to the other.

Where some bunch of crusty old priests in their funny hats wax philosophical on the inexcusable sin of ending a life, even one that promises to be nothing but pain and suffering, all the courtesy of their pet god-concept and the games it purports to play with our universe.

It’s my rage, I’m entitled to make light of it. This is something that’ll never happen to me. I’m just an observer. Wouldn’t wish it on anyone, though. Not even Rick Perry.

Quick edit: Didn’t expect that would be so highly recommended, but there it is! Happens every so often, not as often as I’d like of course, but oh well. At least this one has a good story behind it, and it’s that story that I hope gets read, not so much my ranting about it.

Nasty and false!

That was the first comment on my latest DKos posting, about the pope. Not that the commenter had anything more to say…I think perhaps he just wanted to stifle discussion with the overt negativity.

Shouldn’t have bothered, really. Most of my diaries/posts don’t garner much attention, although one of them inexplicably did. I credit that one to a slow day.

Anyway, just another rant about a believer employing the ‘atheists caused Hitler!’ argument and thus, pulling a Godwin. After reading about the pope doing it and then some others doing it through an article on Pharyngula, I couldn’t resist the urge to counter.

Thor cooks!

…violently. In another episode of It Came from Pharyngula, have we discovered Dave’s secret YouTube life? A glimpse of the Battle Chef to be?

Oh, there’s a whole series of Regular Ordinary Swedish Meal Time, and now I must watch them all. Now we must cook. With more knives. And pre-dinner mayo. And SCREAMING!

The comments on Pharyngula are great, too. More leads on…interesting videos.

On bad apples

What if it’s Saint Bad Apple?

A news item of particular revulsion — or amusement, depending on your sense of humor — came from Pharyngula today. In 1996, in response to the growing pedophilia scandal, Ireland’s catholic bishops decided to begin helping the police. And in 1997, a newly revealed letter shows that Pope John Paul put the kibosh on that policy.

The letter undermines persistent Vatican claims, particularly when seeking to defend itself in U.S. lawsuits, that Rome never instructed local bishops to withhold evidence or suspicion of crimes from police. It instead emphasizes the church’s right to handle all child-abuse allegations and determine punishments in house rather than give that power to civil authorities.

Signed by the late Archbishop Luciano Storero, Pope John Paul II’s diplomat to Ireland, the letter instructs Irish bishops that their new policy of making the reporting of suspected crimes mandatory “gives rise to serious reservations of both a moral and canonical nature.”

Storero wrote that canon law, which required abuse allegations and punishments to be handled within the church, “must be meticulously followed.” Any bishops who tried to impose punishments outside the confines of canon law would face the “highly embarrassing” position of having their actions overturned on appeal in Rome, he wrote.

And, yes, of course, the Vatican is directly linked to more pedophilia by overturning the locals, by its insistence that the church should handle such crimes rather than civil, secular authorities.

Storero warned that bishops who followed the Irish child-protection policy and reported a priest’s suspected crimes to police risked having their in-house punishments of the priest overturned by the Congregation for the Clergy.

The 2009 Dublin Archdiocese report found that this actually happened in the case of Tony Walsh, one of Dublin’s most notorious pedophiles, who used his role as an Elvis impersonator in a popular “All Priests Show” to get closer to kids.

Walsh was kicked out of the priesthood by a secret Dublin church court in 1993 but successfully appealed the punishment to a Vatican court, which reinstated him to the priesthood in 1994. He raped a boy in a pub restroom at his grandfather’s wake that year. Walsh since has received a series of prison sentences, most recently a 12-year term imposed last month. Investigators estimate he raped or molested more than 100 children.

Although that particular incident took place before the 1997 letter, it does show a pattern. One might wonder if this revelation will affect the swift campaign to make the old pope into a saint. One might; but I don’t. I expect this to be adroitly ignored, and the campaign will continue apace.

JP2′s beatification, if it proceeds as scheduled, will have been the fastest on record — six years, from death to finish, edging out the previous record holder, Mother Teresa, by just a few days.

Record holder — sounds like sports talk fitting of the Onion SportsDome. If there was one thing John Paul learned during his tenure, it was that the people sure like new saints. It seemed to turn into a marketing strategy. He sped up the process, and Benedict has chosen to return the favor, I guess.

This is the church I left, the church that most of my family is still a part of. I know, catholics, I have heard the plethora of excuses; that the church leadership doesn’t affect or define you, that your church or your priest isn’t like that — it’s sort of like loving your Congressperson while hating Congress, eh? Oleaginous prattle. The money catholics put in the collection plate, and the allegiance they offer, that buys influence for those higher-ups, those ‘bad apples’ as the saying goes. Like it or not, the rank and file support these bastards with their donations, with their connection to the church.

And the Vatican will go on taking its cut from the collection plate, so long as catholics are silent and continue to donate. And you’ll soon have a saint who was party to hiding the church’s crimes from its adherents; a saint willing to reinstate child molesters, to overturn churches trying to protect congregations and seek justice. Like PZ, it brings forth a sense of warped amusement for me.

Is that basically saying that if locals do anything other than work with the Vatican to quarantine child-rapers, the Vatican will do whatever they can to put the rapist right back into his position? Sweet. They really don’t care at all about their congregations, do they?

On violent rhetoric

Although the earlier WoW post reveals that I am not still raging over the shootings in Tucson from Saturday, I am definitely still thinking about it, and of course I’m not alone. In a somewhat less skepticism-oriented episode of It Came From Pharyngula, PZ has mouthed off a bit about it too, with predictable results for his much more popular blog. Lots of comments.

Interesting among the responses is the basic right-wing reflex to scream ‘you too!’ and find any example of violent rhetoric from the left, from anywhere, anytime, in order to defend themselves from the righteous indignation of the rest of the country.

For example, some right wingnuts found a map Democrats used to target certain states for campaign activity…with scary bullseyes. Built into the map is rhetoric suitable for the ‘you too!’ defense, along with the means to shoot it down: Democrats targeted states, not people. Shoot it down — what am I saying! Violent rhetoric!

But beyond this simple error of false equivalence, or citing decades-old stories about left-wing terrorists or political parties from Europe…what about that ‘you too!’ defense. Yes, the appeal to hypocrisy rears its fallacious head outside of skeptical circles. What I have not seen as much of is to simply point this out as fallacy. The argument is crap. Done.

I understand Keith Olbermann cancelled his ‘worst persons in the world’ again and he’s already cited and apologized for a case of ‘hostile rhetoric’ on his part. That’s a reasonable response to calling out someone, or being called out for poor rhetoric, if you believe it is indeed poor. Pot, kettle etc. What is not a reasonable response is to find someone else doing it and scream ‘you too!’ This does not excuse either person. If it’s wrong, then it’s wrong for them, and you. You can show someone is a hypocrite that way — but you’re still wrong.

Unless, of course, the right wingnuts don’t think the violent rhetoric is wrong. Maybe they like it! They may think this, but they’d never own up to it right now. So instead, they pull the hey, look, Elvis! distraction tactic and keep doing what they’ve been.

Left and right alike have the capacity to look for violence in their rhetoric, and to tone it down or cut it out. Time will tell on who actually changes their behavior. The ones who don’t, well. This will show what they really think. I suspect the right wing’s violent rhetoric will keep on keepin’ on.

Light! More light!

…i.e. that which sends the cockroaches running, that which illuminates the unpleasant (for some) truth.

In another episode of It Came from Pharyngula, PZ drops the latest bad news for the anti-vax movement; the discredited and retracted Wakefield study has been shown to be outright fraud. An extended summary of the entire sordid case can be found here. And the video on Pharyngula from Anderson Cooper’s show where he interviews Wakefield on the demonstrated fraud was amusing, in a sick sort of way.

I looked that latter page up in response to some of the comments at Pharyngula, which mentioned a failed libel lawsuit filed by ex-Dr. Wakefield against the investigative reporter, Brian Deer. Libel eh? Yeah, that interested me.

Throughout the investigation, Wakefield refused to co-operate, filed complaints, and issued statements denying every aspect. He also initiated, and then abandoned with some £1.3m ($2m) costs, a two-year libel lawsuit, financed by the Medical Protection Society, which defends doctors against complaints from patients. In reply, Deer and Channel 4 openly accused Wakefield of being “unremittingly evasive and dishonest”. His conduct in the litigation was also damned by a High Court judge, who said that Wakefield “wished to extract whatever advantage he could from the existence of the proceedings while not wishing to progress them”, and that the doctor was using them as “a weapon in his attempts to close down discussion and debate over an important public issue”.

Interesting that Wakefield and his supporters speak of conspiracies and Big Pharma working to silence them while the former doctor (license revoked) tried to use the courts to silence his detractors. Well, far be it from me to be surprised by a little hypocrisy amongst the credulous.

Moreso to see how new outbreaks of usually vaccinated and eradicated disease have claimed lives, not to mention that Wakefield seems to have had it in mind to cast doubt on the MMR routine in order to promote his alternative.

In June 1997 – nearly nine months before the press conference at which Wakefield called for single vaccines – he had filed a patent on products, including his own supposedly “safer” single measles vaccine, which only stood any prospect of success if confidence in MMR was damaged.

Now, one might wonder how Wakefield sleeps at night, given the demonstrations of fraudulent research designed to line his pockets from the alternative vaccine he had set up in advance. Clearly this was the plan. …and I woulda got away with it, too, if it weren’t for you meddling kids!

Right, so Wakefield is a villain. What I am more curious about are the supporters, the Jenny McCarthy types who continue to back this fellow as he battles against what is hopefully a slow march to jail. Of course, it’s not hard to find the apologetics. They readily excuse ‘discrepancies,’ they trot out defamation (this after the sham of a libel suit), they adapt to the growth in cases even after vaccine formulations have been changed. It is a moment of supreme irony to see the anti-vaxers hit upon the essence of the problem that they continue to perpetrate.

The phenomenal growth in autistic children ‒ from one in 2000 in 1987 to one in 64 today ‒ is of epidemic proportions and cannot all be explained away as improvements in diagnosis. No one, least of all Deer and the BMJ editors, can explain why the tragedy of autistic regression is happening to children and families.

This bold ‘no one can explain’ smacks of the incredulity of a creationist. But it is interesting to see, given that the Wakefield study, after all, was intended to do just that — explain why — and how the anti-vaxers continue to claim they know why. It is in their label. Hard to miss! If no one knows why, including these folks, what business do they have blaming vaccines, refusing to vaccinate kids, and consequently spreading disease in our society which had been gone and by rights should still be gone? What business do they have killing kids with measles outbreaks and the like? If they don’t know why?

Ah well. I can’t really out-mock The Onion, so I’ll just leave it at that.

“Some people may call me a bad parent for not having my children vaccinated. Other people may call me an irresponsible asshole. But personally, I don’t see why I can’t be both.”

The shiny, candy-like button!

Will she hold out? Can she hold out? This was the thought rattling around my brain-pan while reading this opinion piece by one Sarah Elizabeth or “S.E.” Cupp, ex-atheist in training. Well, that last part is pure speculation. But given her conservative political leanings, I have to wonder how far she can parlay her atheist street cred before the diabolical urge to go religious — like everyone who signs her paychecks — takes over.

I was originally going to write her an email about this, since the address is left on the article, but that’ll just get ignored or worse. This way is more fun. So I will copy what I had planned to write to her here instead. That way, someone might actually read it. heh.

I read with interest your recent opinion piece exhorting the ‘new atheists’ to embrace humility and stop with the insults, snark and condescension…while applying said insults, snark and condescension quite liberally. I hope it isn’t too snarky of me, but I found that rather amusing. Especially the mention of “more than 95% of the world finds some meaning in faith”, as if what is true were a popularity contest.

You mention having gone back to school to study religious beliefs you say you know little about. Have you learned anything interesting about them? Is it a ‘spiritual’ quest? Is that what it means to be on a ‘spiritual’ quest? Have you learned answers about questions like ‘is there more to life than this?’ Or have you shared my experience in that regard, and learned about the statements of faith offered in lieu of answers?

It seems odd to me that while you cite such apparently condescending statements as “Religion is my bitch.” or “Yes it is a myth. Deal with it. All delusions are myths.” …only to conclude from these that the rejections are not of faith itself but rejection of its adherents. Where is that to be found precisely? I see attacks on religion. On myths. On delusions. Are you reading something into these statements? If so, are you sure it’s even there? Or is an attack on religion equivalent to attacking a religious person? Since when were ideas given a free pass? The bible does not cry when I bash it, any more than it would cry when a fundamentalist believer thumps it.

I think this idea that ‘new atheists’ are willfully ignorant of some important truth is wrong on two counts: the data suggests that they are not willfully ignorant of religion; and no important truths from it have been demonstrated. Did you miss this Pew poll from a few months back perhaps? Why should atheists and agnostics score highly on religious knowledge tests if they are as ignorant as you claim? What don’t they know? Or is it just that they don’t treat it as important or special?

Finally, as you are a lifelong atheist, I’d like to know what you would say to the genocide survivor you cite, Immaculee Ilibagiza. Would you tell her that her faith in Jesus makes the religion true? Have you converted yet? If not, why not? Do you find it untrue? Delusional? Just don’t want to say?

Or perhaps you’d have enough tact to leave it alone, if said faith isn’t brandished as a rhetorical club. It seems a bit sad that you would use it in such a way, while she apparently hasn’t. Yet.

I always find hypocrisy amusing to point out in the process of busting an argument down to its component atoms, and S.E. Cupp’s article is rife with it. What is the point exactly of attacking snark as bad…with snark? If snark is bad, yours is too! And if yours is not bad, then what’s wrong with theirs?

I also figure I would toss in a term like ‘liberal’ just to make a conservative squirm when it applies to them. Malice aforethought, I has it.

The Pew poll dates back to September, first spotted through Pharyngula as PZ Myers gleefully bashes the ‘know-nothing atheist’ straw man with it. Reality, it is a real slap to the face sometimes for the credulous.

But the genocide survivor is an interesting case, and were it not for this conservative using it like a club on me, I really would be curious to know Cupp’s answers about that.

In the end, if she is still an atheist, she must think the poor victim is…wrong! People find ways to cope with adversity, religion beats the ‘deal with it’ of atheism if you can get past the nonsense of it…I can’t blame the woman for hoping for ultimate meaning and justice when the world certainly isn’t offering any. But there is a certain justice to the grave, to the heat death of the universe, to oblivion.

Of course, religion’s offer of deferred justice, meaning, pleasure, what have you, contains something of a trap, which is why I am wary of it. How else could you get religious nutbags to fly planes into buildings? The promise of heaven is balm for the suffering, true; but it is also a means to make people suffer, too. To ruin this life or flat-out discard it in the vain hope for a better afterlife. And since this life seems to be all we have, I count this among the most outrageous ideas perpetrated by religion. How dare they con people into throwing away the one life we do have for some pipe-dream?

Anyway, the opinion writer is of course just hawking a book anyway, so who gives a damn. I suppose I do, in a way.

So, ex-atheist in training, that’s what I figure. Religion is the history eraser button. The beautiful, shiny button. The jolly, candy-like button. She already admits to possessing ‘Judeo-Christian values’ and admiring the Ten Commandments. She already admits to the strong atheistic foundation of drunken benders in college talking about Nietzsche. Somehow, I don’t think the leap of faith is going to be that much of a jump for Ms. Cupp.

Oh, sorry. There I go again with the snark.

Christian charity

In the latest episode of It Came from Pharyngula, PZ Myers clues me in to some overtly offensive practices of the Salvation Army, inspiring me to skip dropping my change in their buckets from here on. There once was a time when I wouldn’t concern myself overmuch with what so-called xian charities did with their money, assuming that (being xians) they would be relatively responsible about it.

Cue cynicism routine…

The Salvation Army says it refuses to distribute Harry Potter and Twilight toys collected for needy children because they’re incompatible with the charity’s Christian beliefs.

I’m no particular fan of either…franchise, but trashing toys because of some perceived spooky magic/monsters references seems a bit much.

So donors may have handed over popular toys for distribution, not knowing that the destination was going to be the landfill. And it’s not because the Salvation Army is concerned about the quality or educational value of the toys…

PZ’s next excerpt mentions how a plastic M-16 rifle is perfectly fine (turn the other cheek anyone?) but Harry Potter toys aren’t distributed, can’t even be handed over to some other organization so they can distribute them.

The policy has alarmed a Calgarian who volunteered to sift through a southeast warehouse full of unused, donated items and was alarmed when he was told by Salvation Army officials that the two kinds of toys are “disposed of” and not given to other charities.

“I asked if these toys went to another charitable organizations but was told no, that by passing these toys on to another agency for distribution would be supporting these toys,” said the man, who wouldn’t give his name due to his occupation.

So while I might pity the folks who stand outside…well, most everywhere, ringing bells for the Salvation Army, I’ll be skipping out on donating myself, so long as my mind and memory holds out.

Commenters on the article have chimed in about the SA’s policies on gays. So I had a look around to enlighten myself further.

The Salvation Army’s position is that because it is a church, Section VII of the U.S. Civil Rights Act of 1964 explicitly guarantees its right to discriminate on the basis of its religious beliefs in its hiring. To reinforce its position, it threatened to close all soup kitchens in New York City when the city government proposed legislation that would require all organizations doing business with it to provide equal benefits to unmarried domestic partners.^[30]

Discrimination hiding behind freedom of religion again. Ironically, this is their stated mission that I found when perusing the SA’s own website.

The Salvation Army, an international movement, is an evangelical part of the universal Christian Church.

Its message is based on the Bible. Its ministry is motivated by the love of God. Its mission is to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ and to meet human needs in His name without discrimination.

Without discrimination…fail.

Cosmos, planting seeds

In another episode of It Came from Pharyngula, PZ reminds us that today would be Carl Sagan’s birthday.To celebrate, he links this video.

It’s a worthy reminder of how Sagan brought up ideas in Cosmos that are being reiterated today, and yet today they are seen as somehow strident. If some god created the universe, where did the god come from? And if it somehow created itself, or has always existed, or it’s an unanswerable question, why not save a step and apply that to the universe?

There’s a reason why theologians like William Lane Craig rely on a variant of the cosmological argument about things that ‘begin to exist’ in order to grant their god-concept a special exemption — or special pleading, in other words. It’s why they fixate on the Big Bang and try to make the case for a universe that hasn’t always existed, the better to shoehorn in their god-concept as the cause. Of course, causality seems to break down at this level…and they’re certainly willing to exempt their gods from it. Why not the universe? Save a step.

This kind of simple parsimony, economy of concepts, explanations…it characterizes Sagan’s thinking on the matter. And mine as well. Somehow he got away with it, planting seeds of reasonable skepticism into his TV series. I’d like to give Carl some credit for my own change of ways, but it’s hard to be sure.

If nothing else, he provided us with some tools — curiosity, skepticism, reason — and with those tools, we can learn to save a step. Of course, Cosmos was also suffused with a sense of wonder, probably the main reason I still look back on it fondly. I defy any believer to defend their supposed meaningless, shiftless life of the skeptic. The universe is wondrous enough.