Topless march in Farmington

Posted on April 30, 2010 by Michael

After protesters marched topless in Portland for equal rights, Andrea Simoneau, a 22 year old student at the University of Maine at Farmington, decided to organize a similar march in her school’s town.

Hundreds of spectators poured into the street and lined the sidewalks to watch, while clusters of protesters held up signs in opposition to the march.

That’s roughly the desired outcome. Make something that shouldn’t be a big deal into a big deal. It’s too bad that there were so many non-news cameras all over the place, but it can’t be said that that wasn’t expected. Nor could it be said that it was unexpected that some people on the other end of the spectrum would go too far.

Resident Elaine Graham took on the most active role of protest, following topless women with a blue blanket and holding it up to cover them during and after the march.

That’s really not okay. Graham was being disruptive of what was a legal protest in Maine. She really needed to stay at an appropriate distance with a sign or some other form of non-interfering expression. Of course, this isn’t the first time Elaine Graham has gone too far.

Meet Elaine Graham of Farmington, Maine. This is Elaine Graham being expelled from a Judiciary Committee work session on the same sex marriage bill last April. I have no idea at all what she is screaming. However, Ms. Graham is holding three crudely crafted signs. The top one reads: “Mission Homosexual Movement CHANGE WORLD MORAL ORDER.”

(I added the link to the image.)

No stranger to silliness, Graham has again and again publicly expressed her sexual immaturity in ways more inappropriate than what’s par for the course. It’s sad and pathetic, really. Burdened with hatred based in Christianity, she cannot accept that other people have a more adult view than she when it comes to sex, the human body, and even love.

Finally, here’s one of the pictures from the march. Obviously I’m not going to upload bare breasts on WordPress (nor am I going to link to anything besides news images, should images be floating around out there), but I think it’s worthwhile to upload this particular picture because it captures the whole event so well. Graham is there, misbehaving out of sexual immaturity, while who knows how many men take video and pictures of the event.

This contrasts so much with a show I saw in Portland last night. The bulk of the show had three bands/musicians (one of which was Theodore Treehouse), but in between sets there was a belly dancer. Any person would have fallen over him- or herself if this woman merely made eye contact, but notably, everyone refrained from recording. There were a couple of photographers for the show itself, but no one in the audience pulled out a camera or cell phone and started snapping away. It wouldn’t have been appropriate by and large, but it also would have really distracted from what was actually a very skilled and talented performance. Of course, the reason for this difference in reaction is the certainly higher sexual maturity present in the audience at that show versus the sexual maturity of those who showed up to gawk in Farmington. People were able to recognize that the belly dancing was not a sexual act; many (though certainly not all!) in Farmington saw the topless march as a sexual display. It wasn’t.

Filed under: News, Politics and Social | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments »

If you desire it, truth will come

Posted on April 12, 2010 by Michael

When in discussions and/or debates with the religious, I cringe before I bring up the point that, yes, of course atheism does lack a certain sort of comfort. Afterall, do people really have no fear of death? But this does not mean that fear ought to motivate one to believe in any sort of god or afterlife. An emotion, no matter how strong, does not make something true. And, frankly, it’s bizarre that anyone would ever try to make that sort of argument. But alas, I’ve encountered it a number of times.

The reason, however, I cringe is that as soon as a lack of a certain comfort is admitted*, the theist jumps up and proclaims, “Aha! So you do desire a god/an afterlife!” But this isn’t so. I certainly do not desire to live with the redneck described in the Bible. But what’s really perplexing is how illogical the theist’s whole point is. You desire X, thus X is true. Or sometimes with some condescension, You desire X, so maybe you ought to reflect on that a little more. The assumptions there are that 1) I haven’t reflected on these sort of issues and 2) all it takes is reflection on a desire to come to believe in a god. The first assumption is obviously wrong and the second shows the theist’s ignorance: I want evidence, not a belief motivated by fear.

Honestly. The logical argument is that people have fear and seek to soothe that feeling; religion makes sense in light of this fact (though it needs far more than that to explain it). The theist, however, then tries to turn logic on its head and say that fear is somehow a sensation put in place by some religion’s god and that’s why we feel it. Such shenanigans completely circumvent the whole giving-evidence-for-one’s-beliefs thing – it is such a nuisance for believers, afterall.

The whole crazy argument is a Field of Dreams sort of fantasy: If you desire it, truth will come.

*I keep saying “a certain comfort” because there is a greater comfort in believing what is true and in enjoying life for the sake of life.

Filed under: Religions | Tagged: , , , , | 3 Comments »

Where are these boundaries anyway?

Posted on March 28, 2010 by Michael

Believers are often railing that atheism, and especially Richard Dawkins, goes beyond the bounds of science in its claims. What is never actually articulated is how. How does atheism go beyond these bounds?

But that other comment about going “beyond the boundaries of science” is a curious one. Where? I think that when you invoke an invisible, undetectable ghost in the sky who diddles quanta or turns into a man who raises the dead, then you are going beyond the boundaries of science. When someone points out that there is no evidence of such activities, that the claims of supernaturalists are contradictory and unreasonable, or explains that the material claims of priests are fair game for critical examination, they are actually operating entirely within the domain of science.

Atheism is not science, but as I’ve said in the past, it reflects the essence of science.

Acceptance without proof is the fundamental characteristic of Western religion. Rejection without proof is the fundamental characteristic of Western science. ~Gary Zukav

While Zukav is otherwise uninteresting, his quote is concise and spot on. The onus is on the positive claimant to show his evidence. This is why the common comparison of God and gods to gnomes and unicorns is so apt; atheism is a rejection of certain claims which have no proof.

Of course, an absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. But an absence of what should be present is evidence of absence. This is just common sense we use all the time; if a prosecutor claims John shot his friend but there is no bullet hole in the friend and there hasn’t been time for anything to heal, then that is evidence that John never did shoot his friend. Faith, the basis for all religious belief, is not good enough here. It’s laughable.

To put it another way,

If Susie tells us she stopped a train in its tracks a la Superman, we would rightfully demand some real evidence of this (assuming we didn’t outright reject her claim as obviously false). We would even call Susie’s claim impossible. But that isn’t to actually say it is impossible. In theory, at least, it could have happened. All the atoms which made up the train could have spontaneously disassembled in a manner consistent with how they would have been altered had Superman actually been standing in front of the train. Of course, there is a huge difference between something being possible and something being plausible. This scenario fits the former while falling far short of the latter.

Atheism is much the same.

Atheism does not violate any boundaries of science (though it is not required to fall within a scientific purview to be true); instead it is a reflection of science. It is not built upon superstition or faith or unevidenced claims. Atheism is a rational view of reality which does not overstep anything. In fact, it embraces particular bounds – the bounds of human knowledge. “There probably is no God” perfectly reflects current human knowledge because, to date, there is no evidence for any gods. None. Let that sink in. It isn’t that the evidence is disparate, poorly argued or presented, poorly collected or organized…no. No, it’s that there is no evidence for any supernatural being. It cannot, with any respect for reason, be asserted that atheism is the boundary-stomping culprit here. Atheism is a standing demand for evidence as a result of a standing lack of reason, rationality, knowledge, and, well, evidence.

Filed under: Atheism/Humanism | Tagged: , , , , , , | 6 Comments »

Hilarious attack on Dawkins

Posted on March 18, 2010 by Michael

This article by Melanie Phillips about the recent atheist convention in Australia is hilarious not because she has a stinging wit or sharp tongue, but rather because it’s just…just so silly.

LIKE revivalists from an alternative universe, 2500 hardcore believers in the absence of religion packed into the Global Atheists Convention in Melbourne last weekend to give a hero’s welcome to the high priest of belief in unbelief, Richard Dawkins.

This reminds me of when Christopher Maloney went about spamming the Internet, calling PZ Myers a “Reverend” (complete with quotation marks for some reason). The difference here is that Phillips is aware of the irony of her term “high priest” (Maloney didn’t seem to know who PZ was at all). But with the normal flea-ish weakness of the rest of her post, she may actually think she’s made some grand point.

This was even after (or perhaps because) he referred to the Pope as a Nazi, which managed to combine defamation of the pontiff with implicit Holocaust denial.

Dawkins called Pope Pious XII, not the current pope, a Nazi. (Although he could have said the same of the current pope – it would be disingenuous, but accurate. At any rate, he said it of a past pope – and the lack of action on the part of the Catholic Church in WW2 should not be ignored.)

For someone who has made a career out of telling everyone how much more tolerant the world would be if only religion were obliterated from the human psyche, Dawkins manages to appear remarkably intolerant towards anyone who disagrees with him.

It’s sad that so many people seem unable to tell the difference between non-acceptance and intolerance. How is Dawkins suppressing others views? How is he making it harder to practice religion (other than through argumentation)? What restrictions is he placing upon anyone’s beliefs?

While he was writing about the “selfish gene” and the “blind watchmaker”, he received a respectful reception even from those who might have disagreed with him but were nevertheless impressed by the imaginative brio and dazzling fluency of his argument. But then he left biology behind and became the self-appointed universal crusader against God.

So Dawkins stopped writing about science and biology in 1986? He hasn’t written multiple other books, made several science DVDs, been on who knows how many panels, explained the basis of biology countless times, or recently written a book on the evidence for evolution? Is the 2006 publication of The God Delusion retroactive? I’m not sure why Phillips would want to say wrong things.

He became the apostle of scientism, the ideology that says everything in the universe has a materialist explanation and must answer to the rules of empirical scientific evidence

The former is called naturalism, the latter a strawman.

As for Dawkins’s claim that religion is responsible for the ills of the world, this is demonstrably a wild distortion. Some of the worst horrors in human history – the French revolutionary terror, Nazism, communism – have been atheist creeds.

First, the possessive apostrophe needs not that extra “s”. Second, what part of atheism leads to such varied histories? Why is atheism the same as capitalism and socialism? I don’t understand this argument.

And although terrible things indeed have been done in the name of religion, the fact remains that Christianity and the Hebrew Bible form the foundation stone of Western civilisation and its great cause of human equality and freedom.

Except for all those nasty misogynistic bits. Oh, and all the parts about slavery and other minor jazz like that.

Just why is he so angry and why does he hate religion so much? After all, as many religious scientists can attest, science and religion are – contrary to his claim – not incompatible at all.

Oh. People can think things are compatible? It must be true.

A clue lies in his insistence that a principal reason for believing that there could be no intelligence behind the origin of life is that the alternative – God – is unthinkable.

That piece of crap Expelled movie ends with an interview where Dawkins bends over backwards to say, yes, aliens could have done it. And he goes to length in numerous other places to spell out that some divine creator could be at work. But to go further with these possibilities, he asks for evidence. He’s a real stickler about that stuff.

And so the great paradox is that the arch-hater of religious intolerance himself behaves with the zeal of a religious fundamentalist and, despite excoriating religion for stifling debate, does this in spades.

…what? Dawkins does not argue that religion stifles debate. The debate is about religion. It might stifle scientific discussion because it is an antithetical distraction, but where are all these arguments Phillips keeps attributing to Dawkins?

I don’t understand why someone would want to lie like this. Why isn’t Phillips honest? Why does she make things up? Is she doing it for fun? Does she hate honesty? Does she think of herself as clever? Why would she think that? Is she on some sort of medication? I don’t understand how people come to think the sort of string of words people like Phillips put together is worthwhile.

Filed under: Atheism/Humanism, Religions | Tagged: , , , , , , | 52 Comments »

Religion-based violence continues in Nigeria

Posted on March 8, 2010 by Michael

The religious-based violence has only been intensifying in Nigeria.

Funerals took place for victims of the three-hour orgy of violence on Sunday in three Christian villages close to the northern city of Jos, blamed on members of the mainly Muslim Fulani ethnic group.

While troops were deployed to the villages to prevent new attacks, security forces detained 95 suspects but faced bitter criticism over how the killers were able to go on the rampage at a time when a curfew was meant to be in force.

Media reported that Muslim residents of the villages in Plateau state had been warned by phone text message, two days prior to the attack, so they could make good their escape before the exit points were sealed off.

Survivors said the attackers were able to separate the Fulanis from members of the rival Berom group by chanting ‘nagge’, the Fulani word for cattle. Those who failed to respond in the same language were hacked to death.

Don’t be fooled by the use of a language barrier. That only acts as a tool for what is yet another case of religiously-based violence. Remove religion from this situation and these acts of violence have no real label, hardly a root.

“Nigeria’s political and religious leaders should work together to address the underlying causes and to achieve a permanent solution to the crisis in Jos.” [said a Vatican spokesman]

There is no permanent solution to violence. There are only best solutions. In this case, it is necessary that religious divides be destroyed – and the only way that will happen is either if one group absolutely dominates the landscape or if both groups dissipate. There is nothing like the organizing power of religion and bizarre beliefs (i.e., no depictions of a misogynistic asshole or, say, belief in Jew zombies – and inconsistent beliefs, at that) to get a whole pot of hate and violence stirring.

However the archbishop of the capital Abuja, John Onaiyekan, told Vatican Radio that the violence was rooted not in religion but in social, economic and tribal differences.

“It is a classic conflict between pastoralists and farmers, except that all the Fulani are Muslims and all the Berom are Christians,” he said.

Fulani are mainly nomadic cattle rearers while Beroms are traditionally farmers.

That must be why there are so many battles in the western U.S. where cattle herders and farmers cross paths. Wait. Wait. That’s right. There’s a homogeneity to the religion of America. And when there were ‘battles’, they were highly localized and not based upon religion.

This whole herders v farmers argument is hand-waving bullshit. No one is denying that there are almost always a number of factors that lead to violence, but that is a far cry from being able to discount religion’s culpability, especially in this situation. Nigeria has a long history of violence based upon unnecessary ethnic divisions that were primed and exacerbated by religion. It has always been religion that has intensified Nigerian history, not merely fence-cutting and grazing in the wrong place. In fact, one of the major obstacles to better governance in Nigeria is the massive number of political parties as organized by religious affiliation. (And this is probably still better than what we can expect from Iraq in coming years.)

And what the archbishop above is omitting is that Nigeria is still very much an agrarian economy. Nearly 2/5 of the population lives directly off the land. Doesn’t it seem just a little suspicious that it is where Christians and Muslims collide that the violence is occurring?

Filed under: News, Religions | Tagged: , , , , , , | 25 Comments »

Those hateful atheists

Posted on February 26, 2010 by Michael

The Obama administration invited the Secular Coalition for America to the White House for a meeting on national policy.

President Barack Obama was not scheduled to make an appearance at the meeting, nor were any policy changes to be announced, McClatchy news service reported.

But that didn’t stop a number of religious conservative groups from attacking the meeting as a sign the president has an anti-religious agenda.

Really? This holds as much water as claiming Obama was born in Kenya or that he’s a Muslim. The U.S. presidency will be held by pro-religious administrations for a long, long time to come, despite this encouraging meeting.

The title of the article I found is Right wing slams White House for meeting with atheist ‘hate groups’. Here are some quotes.

“It is one thing for Administration to meet with groups of varying viewpoints, but it is quite another for a senior official to sit down with activists representing some of the most hate-filled, anti-religious groups in the nation,” said Council Nedd, chairman of the religious advocacy group In God We Trust.

…

“People of faith, especially Christians, have good reason to wonder exactly where their interests lie with the Obama administration,” Donohue said in a statement. “Now we have the definitive answer. In an unprecedented move, leaders of a presidential administration are hosting some of the biggest anti-religious zealots in the nation.

And from this article,

The fact that this meeting is happening at all is an affront to the vast majority of people of all faiths who believe in God.”

You hear that? Secular, largely atheist organizations are filled with hateful zealots and it’s offensive that they would even get a voice in public policy. Why don’t those damned atheists just shut up?

This is one of the biggest problems facing atheists; the religious feel they have a right to use offensive, derogatory language at will, whether justified or not, and they aren’t afraid to apply it towards atheists – without fear of political fallout. And the truth is, they do have that right. The problem, however, is that they believe only they have that right. Anyone who says religion is bad should just sit down and shut up because their very existence is offensive.

Oh, and all those hate-filled comments from the atheist group?

“We are committed to the separation of church and state and to equality for non-believers in the political arena. Religious speakers must not continue to be given special privileges.”

Equality? HATEFUL!

“I have witnessed firsthand how [military] service members who are openly non-theist have been harassed by their commanders, leaders, and peers, and have been disrespected by their subordinates for failing to hold certain religious beliefs,” said American Atheists vice president Kathleen Johnson.

SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP! ZEALOT!

Johnson called on the Obama administration to make non-theists “a protected class throughout the Armed Services on par with the protections afforded to women, minorities, and those belonging to minority faith groups.”

What? They want equality for themselves and for faith groups? THAT’S SO ANTI-RELIGIOUS!*

*No special privileges for Christians = anti-religious.

Filed under: Atheism/Humanism, News | Tagged: , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Pay your damn taxes

Posted on January 21, 2010 by Michael

As the upstanding citizen I am, I just finished getting through all my taxes. As it happens, I am getting money back, but I would have certainly paid up if that’s how the math worked out. Maybe I wouldn’t be doing that in January, but I would do it by April 15th. Paying taxes as they are due is just such a basic concept that one must be ignorant, stupid, or a crook to do otherwise. It turns out the Mormon Church is run by crooks.

The Mormon church worked to hide its involvement in the 2008 effort to ban gay marriage in California, telling the Proposition 8 campaign that it wanted “plausible deniability” in its connections with the movement, documents revealed in a California courtroom Wednesday show.

In the seventh day of testimony in the landmark gay-marriage trial in San Francisco, lawyers for the gay-rights side presented emails showing “close links between the Proposition 8 campaign and leaders of the Catholic and Mormon churches,” the Los Angeles Times reported.

Any reasonable person would have to conclude that this sort of political involvement demands the Mormon Church pay its taxes. Maine had this same problem with the Catholic Church recently. In both cases, no taxes will be rendered. It doesn’t make any sense. Ignoring for a moment that religious institutions generally should not be tax-exempt (except as they function as charities), if government is going to grant certain groups privileges, those groups should have to abide by the rules. They constantly and consistently do not do this. No one is saying “No! You can’t support cause X!”. Go ahead, support your bigotry or yearning for a theocracy. Just pay your damn taxes when you do it.

Filed under: News, Politics and Social | Tagged: , , , , , , | 10 Comments »

Egyptian Christians riot

Posted on January 8, 2010 by Michael

It isn’t just Muslims who get upset.

Thousands of enraged Christians clashed with the police in Egypt on Thursday in response to a drive-by shooting the night before that left six Christians dead and nine wounded.

The attackers, who are still at large, had opened fire on several groups of Christians gathered to celebrate Coptic Christmas in the southern Egyptian city of Nag Hammadi, the Interior Ministry said in a statement.

The killings seemed to be an act of revenge tied to accusations in November that a Christian man raped a Muslim girl, the statement said.

Take religion out of the equation and there is no excuse for this violence. Not all violence disappears (despite the strawmen often drawn from the previous sentence), but there lacks a motivation for these type of attacks. Religion is largely what divides these Egyptians.

Clashes between Muslims and Christians have grown increasingly common in recent years, especially in Upper Egypt, where there is a large Christian population and a strong culture of vendetta killings. Those killings typically spring from unexceptional disputes that spiral into full-blown conflicts that have to be settled by security forces. There are no official statistics on the size of the Christian minority in Egypt, but the generally accepted figure is 10 percent of the population.

Again, that 10% share a number of commonalities with the 90%. The key dividing factor, as always, is religion. And if there was any doubt,

During a funeral procession on Thursday for the victims of the shooting, thousands of angry Christian protesters chanted, “With our souls, with our blood, we will sacrifice ourselves for the cross,” and pelted police cars with stones. The police fired tear gas to disperse the crowds.

…

“There is a prevailing atmosphere of sectarianism and religious incitement which has led to this behavior,” said Gamal Asaad, a Coptic intellectual and former member of Parliament. “People deal with each other now as Muslims or Christians, not as Egyptians.”

Filed under: Religions | Tagged: , , , , | 22 Comments »

A real trend

Posted on December 27, 2009 by Michael

Being an irrational person, Bill O’Reilly cited a single poll and claimed it was evidence for a trend. He’s genuinely dumb. He’s also wrong anyway.

A Gallup poll of Americans’ attitudes towards religion released on Christmas Eve found significant recent increases in those responding either that they have no religious preference, that religion is not very important in their lives, or that they believe religion “is largely old-fashioned or out of date.”

But it isn’t all good news.

57% still say religion has answers to most of the world’s problems.

What does religion say of HIV? Or cancer? Maybe it has some insight into how best to tackle global warming? Does Jesus say what we should do about the recession? I guess the poll must not have asked “Does religion have the correct answers to most of the world’s problems?”

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

Religions would squirm

Posted on October 18, 2009 by Michael

Recent evidence suggests Europa has enough oxygen for life.

The global ocean on Jupiter’s moon Europa contains about twice the liquid water of all the Earth’s oceans combined. New research suggests that there may be plenty of oxygen available in that ocean to support life, a hundred times more oxygen than previously estimated.

The research says various openings in the top of Europa’s massive oceans could provide a pathway for oxidizers to deliver an oxygen content which could quickly exceed that of Earth’s oceans.

All this makes me wonder. What would the religions of the world do? What would they do if life was found elsewhere? I know many would adapt their teachings pretty quickly; they would ignore that a central part of their beliefs is that humans are special (the arrogance!). It may take a period of adjustment, but none of them would let go of what they’ve always believed. They’d just pretend like their holy book was ballparking its claims and move on (just like they do when they claim “days” really means “millions of years”). But what about the other guys? The creationists and likewise country bumpkins? While they tend to be some of the most dishonest people around, I do think they would maintain their point of view. Whereas most of religion would shift uncomfortably for a period, the more literal-minded mooks would squirm. They’d deny facts, twist evidence, make false associations and accusations. I guess I’m basically saying they’d continue exactly what they do now.

Filed under: Astronomy/Cosmology/Physics, Creationism, Religions, Science | Tagged: , , , , , | 1 Comment »

« Previous Page — Next Page »