Atheists in the clergy

Yeah, that would be news. Fundamentalists who don't believe much of anything science has to teach on the House Science Committee?  Says Paul Broun (R-creationist doctor with three ex-wives):

“All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and the Big Bang Theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of Hell,” Broun said at a banquet for a church sporting club. “And it’s lies to try to keep me and all the folks who were taught that from understanding that they need a savior.”

Ho hum, not worth a thought from big media political journalists.

In a wingnutshell

"An Inconvenient Truth" is an apt description of a huge part of reality as perceived by Republicans:

What was Mr. Rubio’s complaint about science teaching? That it might undermine children’s faith in what their parents told them to believe. And right there you have the modern G.O.P.’s attitude, not just toward biology, but toward everything: If evidence seems to contradict faith, suppress the evidence.

Over and over and over again, Republicans rely on propaganda to overcome falsehood. They know they can't win on the empirical truth, so they try to win on bullshit, repetition, and disproven received authority from traditional sources.

As usual, Paul Krugman is right on. Read the whole thing.

Being ignernt was good enough for my daddy

It shouldn't be a surprise that Texas Teapublicans (i.e. the entire Republican Party) prefer ignorance - they've given us Duhbya and Rick Perry, not to mention a host of dismal ignoramus dinosaurs. From their state party platform (PDF):

American Identity Patriotism and Loyalty – We believe the current teaching of a multicultural curriculum is divisive. We favor strengthening our common American identity and loyalty instead of political correctness that nurtures alienation among racial and ethnic groups.

Only white conservatives are allowed to nurture racial and ethnic alienation.

Controversial Theories – We support objective teaching and equal treatment of all sides of scientific theories. We believe theories such as life origins and environmental change should be taught as challengeable scientific theories subject to change as new data is produced. 

We all know their standard is not the truth but the bible and the oil industry.

Early Childhood Development – We believe that parents are best suited to train their children in their early development and oppose mandatory pre-school and Kindergarten. We urge Congress to repeal government-sponsored programs that deal with early childhood development.

That last sentence is the repeal of Head Start. They believe their faith-based constituents need more time to turn their children into credulous followers.

Knowledge-Based Education – We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.

They're not interested in a populace that can think, hell no. Too much ridiculous bullshit in their platform to subject it to the scrutiny of critical thinking.

It's an extremist document, and not just on education. In 22 pages, there are possibly four things I agree with, other than a few completely mom-and-apple-pie items.

(h/t Education Week)

Answers in Genesis

Wrong answers of course.  There is no way in hell two of every species in the world of bird, animal, and "creeping thing of the ground" could fit on this non-seaworthy three-story tub.

Argument from ignoramus incredulity

It's easy to see why Bill O is so popular in the ignoramus caucus. His basic message is that anything he's ignorant of isn't cause for learning since it proves that god exists.

This use of god as a safe container for ignorance is actually a basic philosophical problem of many arguments that claim the world shows the existence of god.  The more we explain naturalistically, the smaller a sphere remains for a god.

When Intelligent Design creationists claim irreducible complexity, they are trying to dress this same principle in sciency truthiness.  In their logic, the science is unable to explain something (undeniably true in many cases), therefore, ahem, mumbo jumbo, bafflegab, there is no explanation other than god.

Of course, so far, every so-called example of irreducible complexity the ID creationists have raised has been shot down by real scientists.

The forces of ignorance can't win in science.  They should stick to politics, where they completely dominate the Republican Party, especially its base of religious and free-market fundamentalists.

(h/t Salon)

Two-step

Click image for full Tom Tomorrow/Salon cartoon.

Some logic required

Click image for full Ted Rall cartoon.

Today's oxymoron

"Advanced Creationist Studies."

Doesn't exist. Creationism is about holding back learning and advancement in the belief that a book transcribed from oral culture a few thousand years ago and perfectly matching the conventional ignorance of the day is literally inerrant, perfect, and god-given.

Look, most of the Old Testament is not only completely devoid of science, most of it is awful morality, again perfectly illustrating the first halting steps out of the violent, tribal state of nature in which it was written.

Know nothings

It's an article of faith in modern journalism that the reporter is not allowed to know anything. No, that's not quite right. The modern reporter is allowed to know what the conventional wisdom is.

Everything other than the conventional wisdom is controversial.

Take evolution. (Please!) Anyone who is willing to engage with the evidence knows that the Genesis accounts of creation are not natural history - or, if they are, they're dead and provably wrong. Young earth creationism is farcically laughable and a lie.

So-called intelligent design is not far behind. It's not a research program; it's a polemic.

Mass media, though, has to have bullshit balance between reality and fantasy. Wouldn't want to alienate the idiot demographic. After all, they'll buy things from the advertisers.

Update: ... which is why only 39% of Americans believing in evolution is a great advancement.

Fooling around

I haven't commented on the latest Bigfoot hoax, but this National Geographic story makes me realize that, even though it's not political, it tickles many of my underlying themes.

Choosing to believe bullshit

Most people believe what they choose to believe. That alone is enough to explain why Duhbya is President and why someone as detached from reality as John McCain still might possibly succeed him. Voters don't reason from facts. They choose factoids that satisfy their needs and braille their way to a non-rational conclusion. It's funny that the very people who most resent the family relationships of humans to other animals also most exhibit reliance on instinct over reason.

Purveyors of bullshit thus have an audience that is not only willing but eager. The so-called experts burned a "hair" off the ape suit and found that it burned like a synthetic, petroleum-based fiber instead of like a hair, but they didn't say anything about it until after the hoax was exposed. They didn't follow the facts until they had to.

"Experts"

The so-called experts also waited for the ape suit to thaw and didn't have the smarts to do any definitive testing. They must have been trying to confirm the bullshit instead of falsifying it.

If it lies on the ground like bullshit and smells like bullshit and contains masticated grass like bullshit, it probably is bullshit. At best, it may have been adulterated with possum guts.

Monstrosities

The Montauk Monster is another good case. This is not about Georgia hicks. It's about New Yorkers who think they're sophisticated and not taken in by the bullshit that might fool a rural American. No surprise that Fox News is front and center. Is there any truth to the rumor that Neal Cavuto is related to this monster?

The press is useless in sorting out bullshit, though they will report when someone else sorts it out. Sometimes.

This is why creationism (hellooo, Sarah Palin) and ancient astronauts and astrology and fundamentalist religion are dangerous. They make us fall for obviously stupid claims. Meanwhile, the Chinese are working on stuff that actually matter.

Loonier even than usual

This creationist is way loonier than even the usual run of creationist, and that's saying something. Even so, his buddies among the Christian fundamentalist martyr-wannabes defend him.

Update: Finally the story reaches CNN.

Texans determined to remain stupid

Can creationists really teach science that they actively disbelieve despite the evidence? Of course not, but they fervently want to get their fundie soldiers into position to poison the minds of children against reality.

For cryin' out loud, the ICR is a young earth creationist outfit. They've been purveying captious lies for more than thirty years in my own experience. They not only disbelieve biology, paleontology, and geology but also physics, cosmology, and astronomy. Maybe they believe chemistry. Maybe. They are lunatics.

(Not all Texans, mind you, just the ones in charge. Y'know, Duhbya's successors.)

LDS history

Mitt Romney's speech, which I didn't bother to watch, has opened the floodgates for the journalistic deconstruction of Mormonism. Everyone who had an article in development is trying to get it published before Mitt vanishes after Iowa and New Hampshire choose Huckabee and who-the-hell-knows-who.

This piece makes the LDS (say "Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints" and you'll know why the abbreviation is popular) sound similar to Scientology when someone crosses over the line into saying what really happened with Joseph Smith/L. Ron Hubbard. Sure, LDS is not as imperialistic with nonbelievers, nor as likely to sue, but both want to keep the curtain closed on the Wizard.

I would really like to read a secular explanation of how a cult grows large enough to graduate to mainstream religion. Paul had something really powerful going on inside him. What was it? How did he pull in other people as fervent believers? The official line of the Catholic Church and indeed of its Protestant sects is that Christianity is the one true religion. That's explanatory for a believer but loses its probative power in light of all the other cases from other religions. What did Muhammad have that Mitt Romney would love to have a little of?

What gives a person the charisma to attract disciples, not just fellows? Sure, most people have a desire to believe, and many of them want to retreat to childhood's refuge in a dominating parent, but this is not just a few quirky personalities. This is practically everyone, leaving unbelievers like me to be the quirky ones.

I'd really like for some astute psycho-socio-histo-genius to explain it to me because I haven't met an explanation that satisfies me. Of course, I'm not going to become the genius's disciple; I just don't have the personality for that.

What struck me most about the article was way down in p. 3:

But these books and articles also worried conservatives within the church. In 1981, Mormon apostle Boyd K. Packer, a leading conservative, famously cautioned: "Some things that are true are not very useful." Mormon historians who do their work "regardless of how they may injure the Church or destroy the faith of those not ready for 'advanced history,' " he said, may find themselves in "great spiritual jeopardy."

There's a critical conflict inherent in this that I've noticed for a long time, though I'm just recently beginning to appreciate its central importance.

When my sixth grade teacher, a sweet pious woman no bigger than I even though I was just eleven, said to me, "You can believe evolution if you want, but I just don't think it's nice," I didn't understand at all what nice had to do with anything. Yet here a Mormon elder is dressing up essentially the same ordering of the universe, albeit in more threatening terms.

For me, what's actually true about the world takes precedence over what I want to be true about the world. The fact that one girl or another didn't actually love me mattered much more than my fervent crushes on them. Even if I would be happier as a Christian, I can't believe myths about the universe to sustain the faith. It's not just ridiculous Genesis-literal creationism I can't believe. The myth of Jesus's uniqueness in the vastness of the visible heavens is too much to swallow, too, now that we know what the firmament of stars really is.

I was thinking along these lines recently about the First Amendment, which guarantees our free exercise of religion and our free speech. These two rights can coexist only if those who freely exercise their faiths do not as part of that exercise arrogate the right to suppress speech on the ground that their religion is more important. To say the least, their coexistence has been uneasy.

Of course, Boyd Packer is not bound by the First Amendment inside LDS. But I have to wonder just how eternal a religion can be if it requires suppression of the unkempt and inconvenient truth. Aren't we adults? Shouldn't the first assumption in all cases be that we can handle the truth?

That's what I think even on the face of it. Never mind that the consistent pattern throughout history has been that the suppression of evidence is a matter of self-interest, often lamely rationalized as the common good, but nonetheless dressed up in a raiment of lies. What I want to know is how the charismatics get away with it.