Category: Pointless polls • Skepticism
There is a poll in Germany that will determine who will win a "Dedication Award" for service to the community. You can vote on it! In fact, you better vote on it! Here are the top 5 leaders in the votes right now.
Elisabeth von Wedel, Homöopathen ohne Grenzen e.V.
1514 Stimmen
Raul Krauthausen, SOZIALHELDEN e.V.
1208 Stimmen
Jürgen Dangl, Hofgut Himmelreich gGmbH
634 Stimmen
Dr. Stefanie Christmann, Esel-Initiative e.V.
510 Stimmen
Margit Adamski, Zweites Leben e.V.
344 Stimmen
Notice the leader with 1514 stimmen, or votes? To translate, that's "Homeopathy without borders," a team of quacks that travels the world treating the sick and dying with tiny ampules of water.
I suggest that everyone get over there and vote for the current second place group, SOZIALHELDEN, or "Social Heroes". Once they've got a solid lead, we should work on bringing up all the other nominees. Just click on the "Stimme abgeben" beneath their name to vote for them. To see how the voting is going, click on the "Jetzt Ranking Anzeigen" button at the top right of the page.
Homeopaths. <spit>. Worthless frauds and snake-oil salesmen who don't even have the guts to squeeze a snake.
Posted by PZ Myers at 11:17 AM • 65 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Politics • Religion
The Supreme Court just heard arguments in the case of Buono v. Salazar, a case which is challenging the use of a gigantic cross on federal land, which was initially erected to honor WWI dead but has now become a cause celebre for the wanna-be theocrats who want official endorsement of America as a Christian nation. This exchange with Scalia is simply stunning: the man is an incompetent ideologue who I wouldn't trust to rule on a parking ticket. Can we have him impeached?
Here's how he reacted when told that non-Christians might object a teeny-tiny bit to having their dead memorialized with a gigantic Christian symbol.
"The cross doesn't honor non-Christians who fought in the war?" Scalia asks, stunned.
"A cross is the predominant symbol of Christianity, and it signifies that Jesus is the son of God and died to redeem mankind for our sins," replies Eliasberg, whose father and grandfather are both Jewish war veterans.
"It's erected as a war memorial!" replies Scalia. "I assume it is erected in honor of all of the war dead. The cross is the most common symbol of … of … of the resting place of the dead."
Eliasberg dares to correct him: "The cross is the most common symbol of the resting place of Christians. I have been in Jewish cemeteries. There is never a cross on a tombstone of a Jew."
"I don't think you can leap from that to the conclusion that the only war dead the cross honors are the Christian war dead," thunders Scalia. "I think that's an outrageous conclusion!"
Far less outrageous is the conclusion that religious symbols are not religious.
Since Scalia is such an open-minded syncretist, I suggest that when he dies, right after all the partying and celebration, we atheists pass around a hat and get a collection going to erect a huge Muslim crescent over his grave. Not only will it honor the dead man, but it'll let us do double-duty when we all line up to piss on it. Everyone wins!
Posted by PZ Myers at 10:59 AM • 133 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Politics
Would you believe that Tom Coburn (Repugnant, Oklahoma) has introduced a bill to end funding for political science research? He even suggests that people should just watch Fox News or CNN instead, as if those are examples of objective, empirical research.
Well, heck, if that's the way it works, let's just get rid of the NIH and NSF altogether, and instead tell people to watch those nifty keen 'science' programs about UFOs and Bigfoot on the History Channel. That's what the scientists sucking on the public teat do all day anyway, right?
Oops. I hope I didn't give him any ideas.
Posted by PZ Myers at 9:44 AM • 32 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Religion
By now, you probably already know that Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Thomas A. Steitz and Ada E. Yonath won the Nobel in chemistry for their work on the structure of the ribosome, and a well-deserved award it is. They (and many others) put a lot of work into puzzling out how this central feature of the cell works.
However, wouldn't you know it, there are always religious parasites around who want to coopt a scientific discovery.
What strikes me today, however is that scientists who receive these honors win such praise for what they discover, not what they create. Through their cleverness, hard work, and remarkable brilliance, they have asked new questions and devised creative methods to unwrap hidden mysteries in the universe. But their success is detective work, not invention. This year's award for the explanation of how ribosomes work is notable and certainly deserved. But these scientists discovered wonder that was already there - put there by the Creator!
Our deeper delight today is the surprising and vivid new window this work has created for those of us who want to give honor and glory to God, our Maker. The work of these Nobel laureates is a profound act of worship to the One who thought up the very possibility of "LIFE" and is slowly but eagerly giving us the right and capacity to uncover His secrets. As we honor those who discovered and explained ribosomes, we also pause to praise and honor God the Creator of ribosomes!
No, we don't. Your god did not create ribosomes — they evolved. Not only did your god not have anything to do with it, his priests and unthinking followers, like the wanking cheerleader at beliefnet who wrote that piece, made no contribution to our understanding of how life works, and in some cases either discouraged knowledge-seeking or drew away resources for their pan-handling churches that could have been used, for instance, to educate the poor and bring up a generation of smarter, more productive citizenry who might have helped broaden and deepen our understanding.
Notice, too, how the fraud who wrote the piece also gives credit for the work of discovery to his god — as if he were giving us the ability to figure it out.
That freeloading moocher, that imaginary phantasm, deserves and gets no credit for anything. The bottom feeders of faith just want people to bestow their gratitude on the coffers of their churches, nothing more, and they will lie and steal credit for their personal benefit.
Posted by PZ Myers at 9:14 AM • 56 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Science
The Digital Cuttlefish tells me in rhyme that a new ring has been discovered around Saturn, a huge (13 million km radius) but low density cloud of dust that is responsible for splattering Iapetus with dark material. Very cool.
The Cuttlefish also informed me that lazy ol' Phil Plait hasn't covered it yet because he's distracted with some TAM in London, so how could I resist scooping him?
Posted by PZ Myers at 11:18 PM • 18 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Godlessness
Yeah, probably. It's a letter from Einstein that we'll have to brandish next time some faitheist claims Einstein for their cause.
The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weakness, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still purely primitive, legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this.
Wow. He's so strident.
Posted by PZ Myers at 9:59 PM • 46 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Godlessness
I was looking for a Hallmark card with that on the cover (and also, preferably, a sad-eyed puppy dog) to send to Josh Rosenau and Chris Mooney, but they didn't have one, so I had to settle for a blog post. Here's the sad puppy, at least.
Oh, Internet, you are like a giant greeting card store that is always well-stocked with lovely cliches.
What seems to have scrambled their brains is that Richard Dawkins said, in an interview for Newsweek, that "there are many intelligent evolutionary scientists who also believe in God" and accepts that "there is that compatibility". Shock! He must have changed his mind! He's coming around to thinking like an accommodationist!
Actually, I suspect the damage must have occurred earlier, caused by all that masturbatory wacking away at a straw man. The real shock to both of them ought to be that they haven't been paying any attention to what all these New Atheists have been saying all along. Dawkins didn't say anything at all different from what we've all been saying all along — his position is practically the party line among the New Atheists.
For instance, Jerry Coyne was very clear:
First of all, nobody doubts that science and religion are compatible in the trivial sense that someone can be a scientist and be religious at the same time. That only shows one's ability to hold two dissimilar approaches to the world simultaneously in one's own mind. As I've said umpteen times before, you could say that being a Christian is compatible with being a murderer because a lot of murderers are Christians. Yet Mooney, and Scott, make this argument, and Mooney touts it as "powerful."
It isn't. This is not what we mean when we say science and faith are incompatible. Got it, folks?? Let's not hear the "there-are-religious-scientists" argument any more. It's trivial, and insulting to anyone who can think.
I similarly spelled it out.
I have now discovered that I was trying to make the same points Lawrence Krauss is doing in the Wall Street Journal: religion is wrong. It's a set of answers, and worse, a set of procedures, that don't work. That's the root of our argument that religion is incompatible with science.
That word, "incompatibility", is a problem, though. The uniform response we always get when we say that is "Hey! I'm a Christian, and I'm a scientist, therefore they can't be incompatible!" Alexander was no exception, and said basically the same thing right away. It's an irrelevant point; it assumes that a person can't possibly hold two incompatible ideas at once. We know that is not true. We have complicated and imperfect brains, and even the most brilliant person on earth is not going to be perfectly consistent. When we talk about incompatibility, we have to also specify what purposes are in conflict, and show that the patterns of behavior have different results.
It's a shame. We've been writing this stuff repeatedly for so long, and these critics have failed to pay any attention. It's as if rational discussion doesn't sink into their heads. It makes me sad. We need another sad puppy; maybe they'll notice that.
With some obvious exasperation, Jerry Coyne has also revisited this clueless distortion of our position, and best of all, since we were all together in Los Angeles this weekend, he got Richard Dawkins to testify.
All I was saying is that it is possible for a human mind to accommodate both evolution and religion because F. Collins's mind seems to manage the feat (along with lots of vicars and bishops and rabbis). I also needed to make the point that TGSOE [The Greatest Show on Earth] is not the same book as TGD [The God Delusion] because many interviewers who are supposed to be interviewing me about TGSOE have simply ignored it and gone right back to assuming that it is the same book as TGD.
Despite all this clarity from our camp, Mooney still doesn't get it. He now has an article in the Huffington Post (booooo) in which, even though he has read Richard Dawkins' unambiguous statement that he was simply stating the position that he has held all along, Mooney has to continue to fellate his strawman some more.
And that makes puppies cry.
And worse, Mooney draws a ridiculously untenable conclusion: that Dawkins is backpeddling and regrets the association of evolution and atheism.
In other words, Dawkins appears to be grappling with a communication problem. Linking together atheist advocacy and the defense of evolution, as he has done so prominently, poses a pretty big problem when you hit the US media with a new book on the latter. After writing a million-selling atheist "consciousness-raiser" and "come-out-of-the-closet" book, is it at all surprising that Dawkins now finds his evolution book being prominently linked to atheism in the media mind?
Jebus. Guess what? Dawkins is as adamant an atheist as ever. That's just wishful thinking on Mooney's part. More puppies for delusional journalists!
Posted by PZ Myers at 9:55 PM • 182 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Personal
I'm in Cincinnati — I was flown down here to give an interview for a Canadian show, as I mentioned before. They bumped up the time of the interview to shortly after I arrived here, which was nice…I'm all done now! Free in Cincinnati! Of course, then I fly out early tomorrow afternoon, so I don't have much time to be free. But I'll be back home tomorrow evening, anyway.
Posted by PZ Myers at 9:36 PM • 16 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Communicating science • Entertainment
This is a promotional video for CSIRO, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization. When I meet any Australian scientist in the future, I will be expecting them to break into song.
Posted by PZ Myers at 12:08 PM • 47 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
…and this is a 
