This is day four of my back being out. It's slowly getting better, but it still hurts to stand up. This is ridiculous.

On an amusing note, have you seen Science Against Evolution? It's a hilarious Web site. It's not just the "my nephew made this" look and feel; it's how the people who created this have managed to put together a laughable set of "theses" to support their idiocy. Of the two officers of this non-profitr organization with a listed background, their science background consists of electrical and civil engineering. There's no anthropology, astronomy, genetics or anything else which might actually relate to the subject matter at hand (astronomy counts, but it would be a long digression).

Here are the "theses" numbered 15 through 17:

15. "Abiogenesis" is the belief that life can originate from non-living substances through purely natural processes.
16. The theory of evolution depends upon abiogenesis as the starting point.
17. If the theory of abiogenesis is false, then the theory of evolution is false.

Number 15 is almost correct. Strike the work "belief" and replace it with "hypothesis". When they have such a subtle twist on a straightforward definition, you know something's amiss. I wonder if this was deliberate? Their general lack of sophistication suggests to me that it's not.

Number 16 is also subtly twisted. The theory of evolution depends on life being created as a starting point. Many religious people believe a supernatural entity created life and let evolution take over (just as the Catholic church). Catholics don't require abiogenesis as a starting point for evolution. I wonder why these people aren't telling you this?

Of course, their subtle psychological attack in number 15, combined with their distortion of point 16 leads to the outright lie in point number 17. Are they cognizant of this lie? I doubt it, so maybe it's not a lie per se, but this inability to reason about something is the sad state our education system has left so many people in.

Of course, many who support the theory evolution are often no better.

I will, however, give the people behind the "Science Against Evolution" Web site credit for at least understanding that there's a difference between the origin of life and the evolution of life. Most creationists I've talked to don't even understand that.

The Atheist Bus Campaign, started by comedy writer Ariane Sherine (disclaimer or gratuitous name-dropping: we used to work at the same company. She's got a wicked sense of humor), has done remarkably well. The intent of the campaign is to buy advertising on the side of London buses reading "There's probably no God. No stop worrying and enjoy your life."

To do this, they needed to raise £5,500 to buy the advertising. As of this writing, they've raised a whopping £109,294.83! This is fantastic news and it's a great way to stand up for freedom of thought.

A religious group named Alpha International seems to like this idea and they're also trying to buy signs for buses. However, they're thinking big. Rather than try to raise a paltry £5,500, they're going all out and asking for £100,000!

They've racked up £367 so far.

*snerk*

In the spirit of the pagan festival Samhain, which the Catholic church co-opted by moving All Saint's Day to November 1st and eventually became the secular Halloween festival, I present yet another celebration of evolution: how to evolve a watch (via: reddit).

ID proponents routinely use the "watch implies a designer" argument as a rebuttal against evolution. What they forget is that there's a crucial difference between watches and living things: watches aren't alive. They don't breed. They don't mutate. They don't compete for limited resources. Those are three key things for living organisms. So the author of the "How to evolve a watch" decided to write software to find out what would happen if watches could do those things (competing for natural resources is referred to "natural selection", but it's the same thing). The results are fascinating. Complicated yet accurate watches, some with four hands, evolve.

But some people will say that since the author wrote the software, that implies that he's a designer. This is false. It's the abiogenesis/evolution confusion. The two should not be conflated. Abiogenesis is complicated and science cannot explain it. Perhaps science never will. Who knows? The author merely provided the initial conditions necessary for "life" (abiogenesis). He did not design the watches (evolution).

For those desiring a more (recently) traditional topic, here are my pumpkins from a couple of years ago.

You know, I honestly don't go looking for this stuff, but when I came up on Digg, I couldn't help but click. The behavior of these scientologists is absolutely repugnant. How can anyone think that this insulting behavior, physical intimidation and general verbal abuse is appropriate behavior?

So I had to go looking and it seems this isn't that unusual. It's apparently something called "bullbaiting", a term Hubbard co-opted. One or more scientologists get very abusive and offensive to make others lose their temper. If it's something that they practiced in house, that would be their business, but to subject others to it? Disgusting.

The film maker Brett Hanover is no fan of Scientology. Working in close consultation with many ex-Scientologists and the folks over at Operation Clambake, he managed to put together an hour long film covering a young lady who had just achieved "Clear" status in Scientology. The movie is very slow and the story is dull, but according to this review and others like it I've read, the story does a good job of portraying what life is actually like for many Scientologists.

The author wanted people to watch this movie, so he released it free to the Web. So why didn't I link to it? Well, it's not on Google Video any more. Brett Hanover has apparently changed his mind. He's asking blog authors to remove entries about the movie (google cache is here). I hear he's also tried to get the movie pulled from Bit Torrent (I don't use BT, so I don't know if that's possible). If you go to his Web site, his "Films" link is also broken now. Seems that once the movie was released, the Scientologists weren't too happy about it. You can put two and two together on this one and I'm sure you'll reach the right answer. In the meantime, seems that archive.org still hosts the movie. Of course, you'll find the film deathly dull, but I think that was part of the point.

There is a terrible irony in the fact that many ancestors of Americans fled to the new world to escape religious persecution yet their descendants are still fighting the same battle. When I was growing up, I was a Christian. Today, it seems that all you have to do is say "I'm a Christian" and whether or not you follow the tenets of Christianity is almost irrelevant. There are many good, decent Christians out there. However, in the crisis the US faces today, they've been largely silent. I firmly believe that silence is agreement, so when the Christian Taliban tries to take over our political process and the masses of Christians remain silent, I blame most US Christians for this evil.

The following is presented with the view of Christianity I held when I was a Christian. Much of the following is just from memory, so my apologies if I get little bits of it wrong.

( Modern Christian Hypocricy! )

A recent study has found strong correlations between how strong a country's belief in Christianity is and how high their levels of violence and teen pregnancy are. (The survey wasn't about Christianity, per se, but it focused on mostly Christian and formerly Christian nations, with the exception of Japan). One result from the study:

A few hundred years ago rates of homicide were astronomical in Christian Europe and the American colonies (Beeghley; R. Lane). In all secular developed democracies a centuries long-term trend has seen homicide rates drop to historical lows (Figure 2). The especially low rates in the more Catholic European states are statistical noise due to yearly fluctuations incidental to this sample, and are not consistently present in other similar tabulations (Barcley and Tavares). Despite a significant decline from a recent peak in the 1980s (Rosenfeld), the U.S. is the only prosperous democracy that retains high homicide rates, making it a strong outlier in this regard (Beeghley; Doyle, 2000). Similarly, theistic Portugal also has rates of homicides well above the secular developed democracy norm.

And for those who find reading studies boring, you can read this somewhat opinionated summary.

It is possible that part of the problem here is that those who "believe" often look down on those who don't. I and many of my friends back in the US can readily testify to this. It should go without saying that when you have a self-righteous group looking down on those who don't share their views, societal tension is a natural result. But if you're tempted to respond to this, read the study first, regardless of whether or not you agree with me.

Update: if this stuff intrigues you, you have to read the reply by chromatic. chromatic and I have differing viewpoints on this topic and makes a brilliant response to this. He and I disagree a lot about these issues, but I can't help but respect his point of view.

Before we start today's class, boys and girls, let's watch a short video¹. Timmy, you're the class nerd, you get to set up the projector.

Good. Now that we've done that, children, turn to the person next to you and observe them. Did they laugh? Did the chuckle? Did they roll their eyes in disgust? If so, they're mocking God. Kill them.

Only kidding! Whoops. Little Timmy didn't get the joke. We'll all miss Sally.

Class, class, pay attention! We'll just tell Sally's parents that she fell down the stairs or something.

Now, if the child next to you watched the video with rapt attention and was nodding along in agreement, now you should kill them. It would be doing a them kindness. These children are gullible and will grow up to lead pathetic lives, agreeing to any stupid thing they hear, so long as it reinforces their beliefs. (Wow. Little Timmy sure can run, can't he?)

For tomorrow's class, children, we're going to take a field trip. We're going to find the guy holding the banana and explain that God wants him to die. I'm sure he'll enjoy our little joke. Before we kill, though, we need to give him a bit of history lesson. You see, the banana the bad man was gripping so lovingly is not a "wild banana". It's a "Cavendish" banana, a banana which has been carefully bred for centuries to have the characteristics the bad man attributed to God.

In fact, the original banana was a small, finger-sized fruit with large seeds. Humans made what that guy was holding.

1. Once you see this video, you might assume that it's satire mocking typical creationist idiocy with a splash of homoerotic humor tossed in for fun. It's not. Instead, it's part of a program of half-truths and distortions cooked up to push the Christian faith.

I'm not going to talk about intelligent design proponents. I'm going to call a spade a spade and refer to them as creationists. Let's just get this straight: there is no "intelligent design". There are creationists who explicitly embrace God and ID proponents who lie and pretend that religious zealotry is not what's behind their campaign of deceit. Of course, I'm sure that God doesn't mind a little intellectual dishonesty to prop him up, right? Clearly the ID folks have realized that faith ain't enough, praise the Lord!

This is not to say that all who believe in Creation are liars. There are many well-meaning people out there who sincerely and devoutly believe in the story of creation and there are more folks who are swayed by the creationists arguments because the creationist campaign of lying and their very selective use of information has created a propaganda machine that politicians can only envy. However, when you look closely at the creationist claims, most of it boils down to one thing: evolution supporters don't know everything, therefore they're wrong, praise the Lord!¹

It's tough to find a better example of how far we are willing to go to lie to ourselves. It's tough to find a better example of the self-deceit we are willing to engage in when we can accept such a specious argument. And it's tough to keep a straight face while listening to it. So I won't. Praise the Lord!

( Creationists want to eat your babies )

By now there's a good chance that you've heard the story of Farris Hassan, the 16 year old Florida boy who traveled to Iraq to see firsthand what was going on. He was taking a class in immersion journalism and took it a bit more seriously than most. There was one passage from news stories which disturbed me, though:

Diving headfirst into an assignment, Farris, whose parents were born in Iraq but have lived in the United States for about 35 years, hung out at a local mosque.

The teen, who said he has no religious affiliation, added that he even spent an entire night until 6 a.m. talking politics with a group of Muslim men, a level of "immersion" his teacher characterized as dangerous and irresponsible.

Let's reword that a little bit to see just how appalling that is:

Diving headfirst into an assignment, Farris, whose parents were born in the USA but have lived in China for about 35 years, hung out at a local church.

The teen, who said he has no religious affiliation, added that he even spent an entire night until 6 a.m. talking politics with a group of Christian men, a level of "immersion" his teacher characterized as dangerous and irresponsible.

So hanging out at a house of worship and talking to believers is "dangerous and irresponsible"? I certainly hope the teacher's words were taken out of context because it is attitudes like this which are causing so many problems. The vast majority of Muslims are like the vast majority of Christians: peaceful. Unfortunately, people take quotes from the Qu'ran which can seem just as violent as many quotes from the Bible and claim that the Qu'ran teaches Muslims to be violent. This is rubbish.

Islam, like Christianity, has a long history of both violence and peace. Religion, in this context, is akin to a gun. People point to the tool and forget that it must be wielded. If you took away Muslim's religion, many would simply find different tools to accomplish their goals.

There are many Muslims today who hate the West but I submit this is because the West has long failed to accept any responsibility for our behavior in the Middle East. We've worked hard to keep many nations in poverty to ensure that they do not become rivals and many of those nations happen to be Muslim. Unfortunately, rather than try to unravel the Gordian knot of historical grievances in the area, many people are content to adopt simplistic and frequently incorrect attitudes such as "they hate freedom" or "Islam teaches violence". People have always found it easier to chant slogans than to think.

Important: Note that I did not delete any of the "deleted" posts. The author of the posts chose to do that. So long as the commentary is honest and deliberate, I will not delete posts. Only when the commentary is abusive or clearly "trollish" will I do so.

(Note that I've sourced a bunch of the stuff here, but it's getting late and trying to source all of it is becoming too tedious. If you don't believe what I'm writing, look it up for yourself. Also, though I take some digs at Christians, those are primarily aimed at Christians who are using lies to spread their beliefs.)

First, some people tried forcing our children to learn creationism in lieu of evolution. Because that's clearly a religious belief, our courts threw that out.

Then, some people tried forcing our children to learn "creation science" alongside evolution. Because that's clearly a religious belief, our courts threw that out. (Hint: if it has the word "science" in the name, it probably isn't).

Now these people are trying to force our children to learn "intelligent design". They keep trying to force their religious beliefs on others. The courts keep shutting them down, but since they have no respect for the First Amendment of the US Constitution, they don't care. They're sitting in court lying their asses off as if somehow God won't mind deceipt in his name.

Their first assault on science lies in claiming that evolution is "just a theory". There are plenty of flaws with ID, but let's start with the "just a theory" part. What the Christians pushing "intelligent design" (ID) want us to think is that "theory" more or less means "guess". It doesn't.
( More Christian Hypocricy )