Sometimes you just luck into things. I have my Tivo set up to record anything with Groucho Marx in it. On Sunday I discovered that it had recorded CBS Sunday Morning, because it had a profile of the comedy legend. As I was fast forwarding to get there, I saw Julia Sweeney and Christopher Hitchens zip by. It turns out the show also had a story on atheism. That’s appropriate; both the Marx Brothers and atheism are about subverting authority.

I’ve been waiting for someone to post the segment to YouTube. The first copy was a crappy kinescope(!), but here’s a cleaner copy:

(YouTube page is here.)

In that video, Stephen Prothero made a common mistake. He claimed that atheism is just as guilty as religion for the world’s suffering. He claimed that “atheistic regimes” such as Stalin’s USSR are responsible for millions of deaths. Stalin murdered millions of people, but it had nothing to do with atheism.

Those millions of deaths were not done in the name of atheism. They were done in the names of paranoia, power-grabbing, and greed. When did Stalin ever say or imply that he was killing people because they believed in God?

Just because the USSR was officially atheistic doesn’t mean you get to blame all of their bad behavior on that. By that logic, religion comes off hundreds of times worse than it already does. After all, more than 90% of the population believes in God. That means we can blame religion for every murder, rape, and other atrocity committed by a theist. That’s millions per year.

That’s obviously a ridiculous claim. We only blame religion for the acts that are specifically committed in its name: Wars, murders, suicide bombings, fatwas, etc. It’s still a big list, and you religious people should be ashamed of it. All of those atrocities are the logical progression of your illogical beliefs.

Don’t try to squirm out of it, either. You label things with absolutes. “Right!” “Wrong!” You threaten people with extreme rewards (heaven, paradise) and punishments (eternal damnation in a lake of fire). It’s little wonder that some people get a little too wrapped up in this fantasy and start shooting abortion doctors or blowing up Israelis.

You religious people are responsible for creating an atmosphere in which this thinking can occur. Just because your particular flavor of fairy dust doesn’t do these things doesn’t get you off the hook. You created the mess. You’re responsible for it.

For the next three nights (Tuesday–Thursday), CNN is running a three-part report called God’s Warriors. It airs at 6 PM, 9 PM, and midnight Pacific time. If they only have one satellite, then adjust accordingly for your time zone.

Here’s the schedule:
Tuesday: God’s Jewish Warriors
Wednesday: God’s Muslim Warriors
Thursday: God’s Christian Warriors

(If you let the kids stay up late to watch it, make sure they wear their Armor of God PJs.)

The 67th Skeptics’ Circle is up at The Bronze Blog. Although the Skeptics’ Circle is supposed to be about all unfounded crazy ideas (astrology, psychics, alien abductions, etc.), it specifically limits its religion coverage to creationism and related crackpottery. Despite this, the bulk of the entries this week are about religion. I wonder if that’s a barometer of the relative threats to society by nutty ideas.

The Circle’s entry that I found the most interesting was Blake Stacey’s dissection of Michael Behe’s appearance last week on The Colbert Report. Behe is an especially dangerous creationist, because he doesn’t sound as crazy as most of them. If you saw the interview and were wondering about a few of Behe’s claims, rest assured that evolution is not wrong; Behe is.

During my academic career way back in the 1980s, I seriously considered becoming a science writer. I do have a moderate ability to take a complex subject and explain it to people lacking a technical background. I figured that I could hone this skill and turn it into a career. To pursue this, I enrolled in a science writing class.

(If you’re wondering why I abandoned this dream, it was because the class taught me just what mainstream magazine editors were after, and it wasn’t pretty. I couldn’t bring myself to dumb down the articles as far as the editors thought was necessary. I also couldn’t stand the tricks that they required to hold the reader’s attention. You couldn’t just introduce a subject and start to explain it. You had to come up with anecdotes to give the reader someone to relate to: “Mary Johnson wasn’t feeling, well…” and then explain everything in the context of how it affected Mary Johnson. Go ahead and check the feature articles in the science section of your local paper or in the popular science magazines. They’re all written that way or use similar stunts to hold your interest.)

For my first article, I checked around to see what sort of research the university professors were doing. I came across one (to protect the innocent, let’s just call her “Dr. L”) who was doing research in agricultural methods to reduce pesticide use. That fit with my flaming liberal ideals, so I made her my first victim.

Polyculture vs. Monoculture

The specific problem she was working on was whether polyculture had lower pesticide use than monoculture. A “monoculture” is the planting of only one crop in a field, whereas a “polyculture” is the planting of multiple crops in the same field.

The traditional American model of agriculture is to have giant fields of just one crop. We’ve even immortalized this approach (“amber waves of grain”) in one of our most famous songs. The problem with modern American agriculture is that it is heavily dependent upon pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, fertilizer, and whatever other chemicals Dow and Monsanto can dream up. Aside from the high costs, these chemicals leave residues on our food, deplete the soil, and contaminate streams, rivers, and groundwater.

Dr. L was trying to come up with ways of reducing the need for quite so many chemicals. Polyculture was the approach that she was investigating. (By the way, the Bible specifically prohibits polyculture (Leviticus 19:19), so this is one more example of how atheist liberal academics are trying to undermine God!)

The working hypothesis here attempts to explain what happens when a crop pest comes flying along and decides to rest his weary wings. For the sake of illustration, let’s assume that it’s some type of ravenous corn beetle. If he lands in a field planted with just one crop (corn), then no matter which plant he lands on, it will be a luscious banquet. After he eats his fill, he takes a short hop and lands on another corn plant. Oh, happy day! More food! You can see that the beetle has no incentive to leave this area. It isn’t long before he finds a female beetle, and they do the nasty right on your future corn flakes.

Compare that to a polyculture, let’s say a field planted with corn, soy, and oats (although I don’t actually remember which crops were under study). If the beetle lands on a plant, the odds are good that it isn’t even one he’s interested in. Even if it is a corn plant, the beetle will eventually take a short hop to another plant. The odds are that he’ll land on a non-corn plant, and he’ll be more likely to take a longer hop next time, probably taking him out of the field entirely. That was the hypothesis, anyway.

I was interviewing Dr. L to find out about her work. She told me that she was about to leave for Mexico, where they were going to be planting some fields as monocultures and some fields as polycultures. After the crops were harvested later that year, they could compare the results to see if there was a difference in pesticide use or crop yields between the two methods.

Now here comes the important part. I said, “What do you expect to find?”

She said, “I don’t know.”

Stop and think about that for a moment. She said, “I don’t know”!

Real Science

That is real science at work:

1. Dr. L was trying to solve a problem. She had an actual goal in mind (reducing pesticide use). In other words, she had an agenda!
2. She had come up with a possible way of solving this problem. She had a hypothesis (polycultures were better than monocultures). It would sure make the rest of her studies easier if this solution of hers actually worked. (If it didn’t work, she’d have to go back to the drawing board and try to come up with another approach. That’s a lot of additional work.) In other words, she had a stake in the outcome. She was rooting for one particular outcome!
3. Despite all this, she didn’t know what the result would be. She was going to let the data decide the outcome!

Therefore, her agenda and self-interest do not interfere with the results.

Now compare that with how a creation “scientist” operates:

1. The creationist is trying to prove the Bible. In other words, he has an agenda.
2. He comes up with some convoluted explanation that’s necessary to reconcile known facts (reality) with the apparently-contradictory story in the Bible. He wants the Bible to be true, so he has a stake in the outcome.
3. He “knows” in advance what the outcome must be, so he has to find a way to make his serpentine explanation work. In other words, he lets the outcome decide the data!

Therefore, his agenda and self-interest do interfere with the results!

There are many real, legitimate scientists working on Biblical issues, whether it’s the Dead Sea Scrolls or Biblical archaeology. Unfortunately, I have yet to find the real, legitimate scientific method being applied to creation “research”.

(BTW, I never did find out the results of Dr. L’s research. If anybody is interested, you’ll have to do a literature search. That’s another characteristic of legitimate scientists: They publish in respected, peer-reviewed journals.)

From Unfairly Balanced:

Fundie news site The Church Report has a brief piece telling us that PBS’s Nova plans to air an episode devoted to the Dover, PA creationism trial:

PBS plans to air a re-enactment of the trial in which U.S. Middle District Court Judge John E. Jones III ruled that the teaching of Intelligent Design in public classrooms is unconstitutional. “I thought in retrospect that the lawyering was so good and the witnesses were so impactful, positive and negative, that the public should have seen it,” Jones told The York Daily Record in Pennsylvania.

The two-hour special called “Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial” is scheduled to air Nov. 13 on the PBS science program NOVA. Paula Apsell, the executive producer, told the newspaper NOVA shows usually run half that time but they thought the story was too complex to present in one hour.
    
Plans for the episode include interviews with people who witnessed or participated in the trial, and actors will re-enact the proceedings based on court transcripts.
    
The PBS producer said the trial served as excellent scientific instruction with a thorough explanation of both sides taking place in the courtroom. “This is a scientific, a religious, and also a very, very personal issue,” Apsell said.

As you know, the fundies got soundly trounced in this case. The court found that “Intelligent Design” is nothing more than creationism, which is nothing more than religious fantasy and a violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

For an overview of the case, you can see this Wikipedia article.

Damn Those Activist Judges!

Conservatives of all stripes are always complaining about “activist judges”. For the most part, this label is pure fantasy. The judges are only “activists” when they rule against conservatives. When the courts rule in favor of conservatives, far too numerous to count, we never hear a peep from the Right.

So who is this “activist judge” who ruled against the Dover school district? His name is John E. Jones III, and he was appointed by George W. Bush!

Judge Jones actually anticipated this complaint, so he wrote in his opinion (emphasis added):

Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of an activist judge. If so, they will have erred as this is manifestly not an activist Court. Rather, this case came to us as the result of the activism of an ill-informed faction on a school board, aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a constitutional test case on ID, who in combination drove the Board to adopt an imprudent and ultimately unconstitutional policy. The breathtaking inanity of the Board’s decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has now been fully revealed through this trial. The students, parents, and teachers of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources.

Reader Sarah just left a comment on my article about James Dobson cowering in fear from Harry Potter. The article Sarah points us to is about how James Dobson proudly relates the story of how he beat his dog! (No, that’s not some weird euphemism, like “choking the chicken” or “spanking the monkey”. It’s a real dog, although it is a wiener dog! Hmmm… This Mr. Dobson has some serious issues to work out!)

Dobson writes:

What developed next is impossible to describe. That tiny dog and I had the most vicious fight ever staged between man and beast. I fought him up one wall and down the other, with both of us scratching and clawing and growling and swinging the belt.

What I want to know is how the dog managed to get the belt away from Dobson.

Anyway, Dobson continues his lurid tale, proudly relating how he used his much larger size and strength to prevail. This is pretty much the definition of “bully”, and Dobson wears the label proudly.

What’s worse about this whole incident is that Dobson uses it as an illustration of how it is completely appropriate to flog your children. If he considers this violent episode to be an acceptable level of response to the dog’s “disobedience”, I shudder to think how he treats children.

Here’s how one famous dog reacted when he heard this story:

(If you’re reading this via the RSS feed, the audio player won’t be visible. You’ll have to visit my web site.)

I’ve received a bit of flack, both in the comments on this site and elsewhere on the web, for my humorous but negative articles on the Duggar family. Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar are extreme fundamentalists. Their irresponsible and rampant fertility strains an already overpopulated world.

One of the things that bothers me the most about the Duggars isn’t limited to them. Almost all fundies are equally at fault on this one point (it’s just more obvious with the Duggars). That point is:

A parasite is an organism that sucks life from its host and provides nothing in return. This would be bad enough if it were merely freeloading, but a parasite actually burdens the host. Pile enough parasites onto one host, and it dies.

Christian fundamentalism and its toxic products (creationism, theocracy, superstition, misinformation, prejudice, fear, hate, etc.) are spreading. They even managed to get one of their own elected president.

The Duggars and almost all fundies suck all the benefits they can from the modern world—most notably the miracles of modern medicine—yet they deny evolution, the very core of modern biology, that makes all of this medicine possible.

As their ilk continue to press for the evisceration of science standards taught in the public schools, they are weakening the very host that gives them life.

I found a couple of excellent articles at Look Out, It’s Evil!. In the first article Professor Bleen has altered the Duggar family portrait to make the following point:

[T]he reason that the Duggars have [seventeen] live, healthy children, instead of nine or ten clinging to life with varying success, is the triumph of science over the medieval superstition they teach their children—and want taught to all American schoolchildren—in place of science.

That’s right. Without modern science, without modern biology, without evolution!, their healthy, giant family would be neither healthy nor quite so giant. Yet they advocate policies that would destroy the very miracles that they enjoy.

Professor Bleen has another article that is even better. He writes:

I rant about the Duggars not for their beliefs per se, but because they insist they have the right to force their medieval view of Nature on the rest of us Americans, while simultaneously feeling entitled to the benefits of the very science that they decry.

Professor Bleen does more than just complain. He offers a solution, which I heartily endorse:

With this in mind, here’s my proposal: anyone who lobbies, publicly, in favor of abandoning modern biology, should forfeit all the advantages that modern biology has provided us. It only makes sense.

It makes perfect sense, Professor! It’s time to put a stop to these scientific tapeworms.