Christopher Maloney responds

Posted on May 23, 2010 by Michael

Maloney has responded to my complaint about his ‘practice’. I would gladly post it, but I’ve read some vaguely worded confidentiality information in relation to all the documents I have. I presume it pertains to the state, not me, but I’m going to side with caution. Besides, anyone can probably guess roughly what he has said. I will, however, mention that using one’s own mug as part of a letterhead isn’t the most snazzy or humble looking thing I’ve ever seen on a piece of paper.

Once I offer my response and Maloney becomes an agenda item at a board meeting, I will make everything public. And really, that’s the point. I have my fair doubts that anything direct will come of all this. After all, the State of Maine has already given naturopaths far more than they deserve as it is. (If only we could take after the states that have explicitly made their dangerous malarkey illegal. Sigh.) However, I am hopeful I can bring attention to the issue. I think that’s the key in fighting these people. For instance, take chiropractors. They’re basically quacks (sometimes with limited, legitimate physical therapy training – but usually not). Until a few years ago, even I thought they were honest practitioners with something medically valuable to offer. But then PZ Myers and others went out of their way to point out the quackery of these people. That helped to make me aware and completely change my perspective of chiropractors, thus saving me money and hurting their business scams. The same has to be done with naturopaths and most other alt-med people. Like I’ve said before, even my tiny campaign for the well-being of Augusta residents has probably resulted in preventing Maloney from writing more letters to the editor.

Now if Mainers can just get together and outright ban naturopaths, the state might be a safer place.

Filed under: Pure bullshit | Tagged: , | 1 Comment »

‘Stop trying to play God!’

Posted on May 22, 2010 by Michael

There’s a lot of empty rhetoric floating around in light of the immense achievement of Craig Venter. Most of it is coming from anti-science conservatives, as one might expect. The Catholic Church is no exception.

Another official with the Italian bishops’ conference, Bishop Domenico Mogavero, expressed concern that scientists might be tempted to play God.

“Pretending to be God and parroting his power of creation is an enormous risk that can plunge men into a barbarity,” Mogavero told newspaper La Stampa in an interview. Scientists “should never forget that there is only one creator: God.”

“In the wrong hands, today’s development can lead tomorrow to a devastating leap in the dark,” said Mogavero, who heads the conference’s legal affairs department.

What makes this interesting is that the Church keeps urging caution for where this will all lead. But if they think Venter is playing God, then we already have a good answer: it will lead to terribly designed organisms which have a lot of junk, non-sense organ routes and parts, and which are bound to the mistakes found in their ancestors – unless of course we keep failing and cause 99% of everything we create to go extinct.

Filed under: News, Religions, Science | Tagged: , , | 4 Comments »

For the sake of language

Posted on May 22, 2010 by Michael

He or she must ask himself or herself whether his or her sense of style could ever allow himself or herself to write like this.

~Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

Filed under: Misc | Tagged: , , , | 5 Comments »

Thought of the day

Posted on May 22, 2010 by Michael

Texas is the last place that ought to play a leadership role in education.

Filed under: Misc | Tagged: , | 1 Comment »

Hubble, WISE, and VISTA

Posted on May 21, 2010 by Michael

Hubble is great and all, but it’s better in a bundle.

In order: Hubble, WISE, VISTA. And no, not the OS.

Filed under: Astronomy/Cosmology/Physics | Tagged: , , , , | 3 Comments »

Christians jail gay couple

Posted on May 21, 2010 by Michael

In overwhelmingly Christian Malawi two men have been sent to prison for 14 years for being gay.

The harsh sentence was immediately deplored by human rights groups around the world, but Magistrate Nyakwawa Usiwa Usiwa, in reading his judgment, seemed adamant in his ruling. He said he was especially offended that the two lovers celebrated their relationship in public with an engagement party.

“I do not believe Malawi is ready at this point in time to see its sons getting married to other sons, or cohabitating, or conducting engagement ceremonies,” the magistrate said. “Malawi is not ready to smile at her daughters marrying each other. Let posterity judge this judgment.”

Posterity will judge this judgement precisely the same as the majority of today’s generation judges 19th century America. There is no reasonable justification for what Malawian Christians are doing to Tiwonge Chimbalanga and Steven Monjeza – hence the use of religion to bring about yet another horrendous event in history.

The nation’s clergy have been united in condemning the gay couple. “God calls homosexuality an abomination, which is greater than a simple sin,” the Rev. Felix Zalimba, pastor of the All for Jesus Church in Blantyre, said Thursday. He said church and state were aligned in agreement: “These two must repent and ask God’s forgiveness. Otherwise, they will surely go to hell.”

Aww, that’s so sweet. I guess Malawian Christians are just looking for out the spiritual well-being of the couple.

Malawi is a welfare state that suffers from massive poverty. That poverty, as demonstrated here, goes far beyond monetary woes. And while the educational system has improved dramatically over the years, it still lags severely; it’s about what one would expect from a so-called third world nation. This presents a dilemma. Donor nations might be tempted to withdraw funds in protest of such fervent bigotry, but that would act to also cause harm to all the people who just need clean water and enough food.

I say do it.

Remove all monetary funds from the nation. Still donate food and practical goods, but force it to come up with its own cash. No nation of any common sense ought to be donating money that’s going to partially go towards funding prison operations in Malawi.

Better yet, let’s not just give direct resources; let’s also direct funding. Promote secular ideals and education. Make the nation more than 80-some percent literate; the power of the Catholic Church was long centered on the low literacy rates around the world – someone who cannot read is powerless to fight the lies of priests. The Malawian Christian tragedy is no different.

What’s really ugly about all this is just how obvious it is that religion is the fuel to this fire. This is an extension of the sort of religious fire that burns in the U.S. against gays. In Maine it took roughly a decade to make it illegal to fire someone for being gay. (‘You want to work that cash register? No, faggot!’) In most other states, it remains legal to fire based upon sexual orientation. People who hate gays want to strip them of their basic rights – and more importantly, their basic humanity. The only impediment in the U.S. to the criminalization of homosexuality is the civil libertarian strengths of the Constitution. (Not to be confused with economic libertarian strengths: no such thing exists.) Without those influencing the very cultural of America, who knows just how far the religious would take their bigotry? Perhaps a high rate of literacy would help hold back criminalization to this extreme, but it’s difficult to say. After all, a number of states have had laws which made sodomy a crime.

Another significant issue in the bigotry of Malawian Christians is the lack of separation of church and state. Without any barrier, any rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, religious dogma holds an undue sway on government. Those who are silly enough to think freedom of religion somehow doesn’t also inherently mean freedom from religion ought to reflect on the jailing of Chimbalanga and Monjeza. Their fate has in large part been dealt to them by religion and its entanglement with government.

Filed under: News, Politics and Social, Religions, Rights, Same-sex marriage | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | 35 Comments »

Buddy Holly

Posted on May 21, 2010 by Michael

He was really convinced Peggy Sue had made a serious error in judgement.

Filed under: Misc | Tagged: , | Leave a comment »

Thought of the day

Posted on May 21, 2010 by Michael

Fire, chairs, and PBR do mix well.

Filed under: Misc | Tagged: | 1 Comment »

Craig Venter wasn’t lying

Posted on May 20, 2010 by Michael

Craig Venter is a brilliant scientist who has been working tirelessly to create life in the lab. In recent years he has been really pushing that the event is getting close. It looks like he has made a huge technical step.

Craig Venter has taken yet another step towards his goal of creating synthetic life forms. He’s synthesized the genome of a microbe and then implanted that piece of DNA into a DNA-free cell of another species. And that…that thing…can grow and divide.

Anyone who has worked with DNA for more than 30 seconds can appreciate at least some of the difficulty entailed in such a feat. Most DNA falls apart after a few thousand base pairs using modern molecular techniques of replication. Even with PCR and the use of a high-grade enzyme like Taq, no one sets out to copy something too terribly long. (And depending on what the DNA is needed for, it may only be necessary to replicate a few hundred base pairs – a fairly common event.) So Venter and his team used bacteria and yeast as major components in their synthesis instead. What they created is more or less a copy of a genome of an organism that already exists, but the important aspect here is the transfer of the synthesis into the cell. That’s the major technical feat that’s going to act as the next step in Venter’s quest to create artificial life.

Filed under: News, Science | Tagged: , , | 6 Comments »

Objective morality

Posted on May 20, 2010 by Michael

The idea of objective morality doesn’t even make sense. It’s the biggest sham, the most ludicrous game out there. It’s this meme that just falls apart, landing with a thud. It’s just a crashingly bad notion.

There are two definitions of objective which are important here. First, there’s the ultimate sense sort of objective which transcends all life, thoughts, actions, events, etc. Then there’s the second sort of objective which means without bias, without personal preference. For instance, when I say the Tampa Bay Rays are doing really well this year, that’s an objective statement in that there is no input of my team preferences or any such thing. It’s just that they’re a good baseball team right now. This is the same sort of “objective” people tend to want in their journalism.

It’s unfortunate that the two terms get confused so easily and often, but alas, it happens. But with this distinction now in hand, it is possible to move on to the next point.

To say a moral claim is objective is to say there is some sort of ultimate source which dictates it be so. This is always God and it’s a bunch of malarkey to beat around the bush and pretend it isn’t. But this claim is itself a subjective one. Who is deciding that God is an objective source? Of course, within the useless field of theology, it is God who has made the decision, but in reality, people are making the call. They are making the choice to believe their holy books. They are the ones who are interpreting the ‘data’, the ones who are determining truth from fiction. Whether they’re right or wrong is besides the point. What’s important is that even a claim of objective morality is a subjective position.

The next point theists (especially on FTSOS’ Facebook Page) like to make is that this also means science is subjective. Yes, but it only means it in this ultimate sense. Science is still objective in that it is without bias, without personal influence (at least ideally). The sole reason for pointing out the necessary subjectivity of science is to bring about a false equivalence, a favorite tactic of creationists and their theists in arms. Science still remains the most powerful tool for gaining knowledge in the world, and it does so because it objectively analyzes the Universe. To get a little more specific, a double-blind study is objective because no bias can possibly be introduced to the raw data. (Incidentally, that’s why homeopaths never subject their bullshit to such rigors of science.) This doesn’t mean the results of the study are ultimately true – one can always go back to philosophy 101 and ask how anyone even knows any of this is real – but they are true in the operation of the real world. But, I lament, the theist will distinctly and intently drive on by this point.

The interesting point here is when the theist is asked to defend why something is right or wrong. If he’s simply, he’ll just say “because God said so”, relying on his subjective interpretations. But if he thinks he’s clever, he’ll answer with some common basis which goes beyond religion, usually reflecting some ethical theory of some sort. Take the teabaggers. They’re all religious nutbags, but they’ll loosely reflect libertarian ideals (until they become inconvenient, but I digress). Those libertarian ideals say that personal liberty and autonomy is good. Of course, this runs counter to much of what Christianity teaches them, but they’ll still stand behind their reasoning. The reason is that while libertarianism is not a very good ethical theory, it is a defensible one. And more importantly, people think it’s objective morality when they can apply particular situations to the principles of certain theories. For instance, using libertarian principles as a basis, it is possible to say that most taxes are objectively bad. In this instance, “objective” references a particular standard. In other words, when applying X event (taxes) to Y principle (liberty is good), it is possible to reason out a correct answer. Of course, X event may be a great thing according to the principles of another theory. That’s where the subjectivity comes in. It’s still possible to apply X event objectively within a certain construct, but that presumes there’s agreement with said construct.

Filed under: Atheism/Humanism | Tagged: , , , , , | 13 Comments »

« Previous Page — Next Page »