Objective Morality

is Bullshit.

While I think the quest for an objective metric of morality is often well intentioned it is extremely misguided. This is particularly the case for quests for scientific metrics of morality. Science is by nature, in the business of figuring out how things work. This helps us hugely in informing our ethical systems, though giving us a better understanding of things like sentience, and its possible implications for other species and so on. What it does not do is provide us with moral imperatives.

Moral imperatives are wholly subjectively derived. I would go so far as to say they are inter-subjectively derived but no further. What I mean by this is that we construct our ethical beliefs based on what subjective effects actions have on other ethical beings (by this I mean being capable of ethical thought). We may be able to detect through brain activity what effect some actions may potentially have, but this does not tell us what is good, only what *IS*. We must then appeal to our ethical construct, which has been inter-subjectively defined. This is what I mean by science informing morality, but not constructing it.

More on this in the future.

We Are Not So Smart

We Homo sapiens often like to champion ourselves as the most intelligent species. In fact by all known metrics of intelligence, we are. However as whole, our species doesn't act intelligent. Take Creationism for example. It is a sad indictment of the intelligence of our species when educated people who in other aspects of life are 'smart', yet still manage to accept something so vapid, so devoid of truth of which all evidence points to the contrary as true. This phenomena itself is clearly evidence of evolution. No intelligent creator would craft a brain that so easily deludes itself into believing things as stupid as creationism.

This doesn't mean I think all creationists are stupid though, they simply have a faulty brain. We all do. I once was a creationist because I was led to believe it as a child by adults who didn't know any better. When I learned more about it I rejected it, but for a number of years, I looked at the evidence and rejected it, opting instead for a position of faith. Some people may never end up giving up cretinous beliefs and it is sad to realise this. Humanity is not as smart as we delude ourselves to believe. Sometimes, some people are smart at some things, but in general, we are not so smart.

Fear-Mongering, Propaganda and Poor Journalism in the New Zealand Herald

An article in the New Zealand Herald today was brought to my attention via Facebook, and to say the least I was quite shocked. The title of the article was "Sex at 14 - I learned all about it in class" by Elizabeth Binning. It (kind of) tells the story of a teenager from the Hibiscus Coast (North of Auckland) who is pregnant at the age of 17. 'Big deal' so far right? My gripes with the piece started right from the title, and continued through just about every single sentence all the way to the end.

The "Journalist" Elizabeth Binning is pushing for an anti-Sex-Ed angle throughout the whole story, which already shows her colours. Comprehensive sex education is demonstrably the best way of reducing teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections. Abstinence-only education has proven to be a complete failure in the United States (Guardian) and has been ineffective in general (Wikipedia). People who push propaganda against teaching teenagers sexual and reproductive health are not only counter-productive but they are chewing away at the progress that has been made in many places.

Beyond the anti-sex-ed angle of the piece, it is very poorly written, and seems to indicate at one point in the article that the girl in question was raped. "I didn't wind up pregnant because I didn't attend a class. I know all about contraceptives and safe sex. It was purely the fact that I was drunk, it was New Year's, and some older male thought it would be fabulous to take advantage of me." But after emailing the editor expressing concern that the journalist didn't seem to care about the rape, an acquaintance of mine through my University feminist group received a reply that the girl was not raped, but rather that she was drunk and was deceived by the older male that 'pulling out' was an effective contraceptive method. Either way, it doesn't paint a very good picture of the man in question, and it would in my opinion have been much better to focus on that aspect of her story. I have heard it said that the general attitude towards rape in New Zealand is rather blasé, which I find extremely appalling. I believe our rape laws are in dire need of revision, but that is a discussion for another day.

Binning also quotes from this ignorant child as if she was an authority on the matter. No references to studies to back up what the girl is saying? No checking her story to see whether the health teacher at the school was actually getting kids to taste flavoured condoms? I don't know about you, but I'm simply not going to take the word of a 17 year old who got pregnant because she was lead to believed that 'pulling out' was an effective contraceptive method, when "She said teaching young teenagers about contraception won't help reduce New Zealand's high rate of teenage pregnancy rates." I'm sorry, but all the data goes the other way.

Here are some quotes from the article

"A pregnant teenager says sex education in schools does not prevent young people from having sex - if anything, it encourages it."

Really? Data please?

"Amber-Leigh has spoken out in the hope it may help other young teenagers to learn about the importance of having protected sex - or preferably waiting until they are older."

So how about educating them about contraception? I distinctly remember being told when I was 14 years old that "just pulling out doesn't work". Either she wasn't paying attention or her teacher was crap.

This article was not a one-off event either, recently Elizabeth Binning has written 4 "articles" with the same propaganda against sexual health education. Some of the others display even poorer journalistic integrity than the most recent one. Quoting from anonymous sources with no apparent fact-checking is indicative of at the very least an incompetent journalist, at worst someone pushing a dangerous agenda.
The titles of her other 3 articles are:

• Too much 'grubby stuff', so dad steps in - No sources mentioned, story is about a father whose 12 year old son was supposedly recommended to engage oral sex by his sex-ed teacher. I call absolute bull shit.
•  Sex ed shock for angry parents - "Children as young as 12 are being taught about oral sex and told it's acceptable to play with a girl's private parts as long as "she's okay with it"." I call Bull Shit!
• Readers up in arms over sex education - "children as young as 12 are being taught about anal and oral sex and ...Children as young as 11 are being taught how to put condoms on cucumbers, and in some schools 14-year-old girls are practising on black plastic penises.
In one, a female teacher went as far as to give her class of 15-year-olds a rendition of the noises she makes during orgasm." I call BULL SHIT!

No sources are attributed to any of those claims.

More Evidence That Creationists Are Lying Sacks of Shit

Since I'm subscribed to CMI's newsletter I regularly get infuriating items in my inbox. This particular example from today is no exception. Some time ago, Creation Ministries International started a "Question Evolution" campaign to encourage Christians to reject science. They produced a small document with 15 questions for evolutionists to answer. Understandably, the questions were stupid, unbelievably so.

Here are the first 3

1. How did life with specifications for hundreds of proteins originate just by chemistry without intelligent design?
2. How did the DNA code originate? 
3. How could copying errors (mutations) create 3 billion letters of DNA instructions to change a microbe into a microbiologist? 

 Yes, the bolded code was part of the original. The questions demonstrate a complete ignorance of biological processes. Anyway, the 15 questions are not the focus of this post, their responses to so-called objections are what I really want to talk about.

In their newsletter, they claimed that "atheists have attempted to answer the points we raised ... But the answers fall short as we show in our rebuttal."

Here are the so-called-objections to their 15 questions.

Question 1:
Answer 1: Abiogenesis is not relevant to the discussion of evolution—it is a separate topic (this has been a very common claim).
Answer 2: Life/non-life isn’t a dichotomy. Rather, there are many examples of ‘proto-life’ such as viruses, prions, etc.
Answer 3: Some experiments show that the early earth’s atmosphere was optimal for life.

Really? No one pointed out to them that their question is a complete strawman? No scientist that works on abiogenesis would EVER say that the first 'life' was complex, and there is no way that it would have required hundreds of proteins. This just shows that CMI are not interested in honest science, but prefer to peddle blatant lies to their all too willing flock of sheep who gobble that bullshit up like it was chocolate mousse.

Question 2:
Answer 1: This is not an evolution question, because evolution starts with an already-reproducing organism.
Answer 2: Originally, life used RNA instead of DNA to encode information.
Answer 3: It is disingenuous to argue from the current DNA code, because the original code would have been much simpler.
Answer 4: The question of how the modern code emerged from these early predecessors is evolution itself. Random deviations in the nucleic acid structure would change the by-product produced, if the by-product was more efficient at replicating, it would overwhelm less efficient codes. This gradual change in the complexity of the underlying code is useful in explaining many aspects of biological theory. Such as why RNA is used as an intermediate between DNA and protein synthesis.
Answer 5: The words ‘code’ and ‘language’ are only metaphors when applied to the DNA code, and they have no reality outside our own mental constructs. In reality, the whole thing is dependent on chemical properties.
Answer 6: It is easy to create amino acids and the building blocks for RNA by running an electrical charge through mineral-rich water.

At least some of these touch on the key issue. Unsurprisingly they didn't really respond to any of them in any capacity with things like "Secular scientists refer to the nucleobases of DNA as ‘letters’, so it’s hardly original to us." This just ignores the metaphor criticism altogether. To answer 3 they say "This is most disingenuous. So many evolutionists have appealed to the common DNA code to “prove” common ancestry." This to me shows an intentional misunderstanding of the response, either that or they are absolutely brain-dead (which is a very real possibility!).

Question 3:
Answer 1: If only eight mutations per year were passed on for three billion years, that gives 3 gigabytes of information.
Answer 2: Computer models have shown how mutations can lead to large-scale change.
Answer 3: Using words such as ‘accidental’ and ‘mistakes’ is misleading and misses the point entirely.

As with the first question, the objections are relevant, but 2/3 miss the fundamental problem. CMI, and their fans do not understand what a mutation is, and they perpetuate the myth that all mutations are harmful and only remove information. They aren't interested in understanding what mutations really are and what they really do, just like they aren't interested in doing any actual science. All they are interested in doing is lying for Jesus. If they seriously wanted to try and answer objections to their idiotic questions, they would have responded to something like RationalWiki's article. Their actions speak louder than words, they find a handful of criticisms that while valid, don't cut to the heart of the issue. These issues are complex scientific issues and to understand an objection to the flawed misunderstandings that creationists have takes time. Creationists, the dishonest, disingenuous, ignorant lying sacks of shit that they are, simply do not want to put the effort in to learn real, honest science.

Here's a link to RationalWiki's article again, because it's good.

Top Ten Quackronyms

If you haven't figured it out, a Quackronym is an acronym for something related to Quackery of some sort.
Let's start at my number 10.

10. EVP - Electronic Voice Phenomena
This is something you see on those Ghost Hunter shows, where they claim the noise or interference picked up by their recording device comes from a paranormal source. The people who believe in this nonsense could learn a lesson or two from Scooby Doo.

9. EHF - Extraordinary Human Function

Skepdic says: "An extraordinary human function would be something like the ability to read messages with one's ears, forehead, fingers or some other part of the anatomy besides the eyes. There have even been accounts of reading by sitting on the message. The latter was popular in China in the late 1970's, when the study of EHF became a major research topic at Beijing University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences."

There's a little something called evidence, perhaps these folk should learn what it is.

8. ET - Extra Terrestrial
The reason ET's are so far down this list, is because there is a high probability that some form of life exists somewhere else in the universe. People who think aliens visit earth and that people get abducted by aliens are still crazy though. There is almost no chance that any alien life is close enough to visit earth. If however some alien race were visiting earth, I do not believe for one second they would be at all interested in abducting some of our least sane members of society.

7. DHEA - dehydroepiandrosterone
DHEA is a naturally occurring steroid produced in the adrenal gland. In fact DHEA is very abundant in the human body. However it has been marketed as a "miracle drug" by quack and quack alike, as a cure for everything ranging from auto-immune disorders to weight loss. Quackwatch has a good article on it.

6. NDE - Near Death Experience
Near Death Experiences are often touted as evidence for life after death. I have a few things to say to people who accept this as evidence: Oxygen deprivation, brain damage and hallucination. Here's a link for more information.

5. OBE - Out of Body Experience
I was tempted to combine this into a single category with NDE's, but they are also related to another piece of quackery that doesn't make a nice acronym: Astral Projection. Here's a link to a Michael Shermer video on the 'God Helmet' and Out of Body Experiences. Here's a link to another video about the same helmet. What is abundantly clear from the realistic explanations of these last 2 Quackronyms is that the Human Brain is highly susceptible to manipulation and hallucination. Anyone who has taken some kind of hallucinogen knows this.

4. ESP - Extra Sensory Perception
Believers in ESP are probably either really gullible or Alien-abductee type crazy. No credible evidence has ever been produced for such phenomena, nor any mechanism suggested. Penn and Teller did an episode of 'Bullshit!' that featured an ESP class at a home-based Psychic School. It's good for a laugh.

3. MLM - Multi Level Marketing
Multi Level Marketing just makes me sad. Most of the people that get sucked into it are victims of a scam, plain and simple. They were most likely recruited by other people who  are most likely also victims of the same scam. The simple fact of the matter is that the overwhelming majority of people who try MLM do not make any money. They're not supposed to, it's simply a disguised pyramid scheme, the products they sell are only secondary to the recruitment. When you pay to sign up, the people higher up the pyramid make money.

2. YEC - Young Earth Creationism
I wanted to include Intelligent Design (ID) as another category, but then I would have had to remove one of my other list items, or make it a top 11, which just isn't cool (unless you're Spinal Tap). The reason Young Earth Creationism is so high up on this list (or low down if you prefer it that way) is because to be a YECer you literally have to deny just about all of the findings of science from the last 200 years. Creationists are Quacks of the highest calibre.

1. CAM - Complementary and Alternative Medicine
This blight upon humanity is at the number one spot for a very good reason. With the potential exception of DHEA, none of the other list members have the potential to do any physical harm beyond affecting the intelligence and sanity of the believer. Alternative medicine can cause serious harm, and in some cases result in death, as believers will of avoid getting real life-saving treatments for diseases. What really makes me furious though is that some parents make the choice on behalf of their children, like this Sydney couple who only gave their baby daughter homeopathic remedies and she died from septicaemia and malnutrition.

The Huffington Post Celebrates Indoctrination

I thought I'd take a look at what was happening around the world in religion, and I found an interesting (read: nauseating) article on the Huffington Post entitled: "The Importance Of Teaching Religion Well". The article starts out explaining how most people who quit religion, do so before they turn 24. According to this journalist, this means that they have been dealt an injustice —an inadequate religious education — and that their new-found lack of belief is the result of a poor understanding of religious practice and belief. She thinks that this appalling statistic of ~16% of Americans who have disassociated themselves from religion could be fixed by providing children with more effective religious education programmes.

Hold it right there, before you go all evangelical on me with your Qur'an quotes, I have to straighten something out. I take huge offense to your suggestion that people leave faith because they lack understanding of it. In my case, and in the case of most other comrades in heresy, it was quite the opposite, we decided to opt out because of our understanding. Understanding the humble human origins, and in some cases, the pretentious human origins spurred us into rethinking our commitment.

Before I continue, I'd like to warn you that you may wish to fetch a bucket, or have a toilet bowl handy, this may induce severe vomiting. (Omissions were purely for length)

"When I was in the second grade at our mosque's Religious Education Center ... I thought I saw God. ... Our teacher told us that if we closed our eyes and prayed ... we would be able to see and talk to God. She said we should try it right then and there. So we, as a class, being as obedient as we were in our innocent youth (that would change later), closed our eyes and prayed.


... So with my eyes closed, I conjured up an image of an old man in my mind's eye. He had a long white beard and wise eyes, and he held a staff ... He smiled at me kindly.


When we all opened our eyes, I made sure my hand was the first one to be in the air. When my teacher called on me, I proudly declared,  "I saw God! He has glasses!" My teacher observed me. I waited for her to dispute me, call me ridiculous and explain that it was just a metaphor. But she didn't. She smiled at me kindly.  "Excellent!" she said.  "See? It just takes faith."

It saddens me greatly that someone who could otherwise be considered to be educated, has continued her whole life under the pretence that her childhood imaginary friend is actually real. Not only that, but she is advocating that we make a better effort to indoctrinate children to prevent them from learning how to aptly use their mental faculties. We should not be teaching children to have faith in things, but rather teaching them how to reason, and make up their own minds. That's not to say we should prevent them from playing 'make-believe', but to allow the fantasies of children to take such a deep root in their psyche that they still play make-believe in their 30's is atrocious.

I should know better than to expect stellar articles from the Huffington Post (though to their credit, they sometimes do, although rarely), but this trashy excuse for journalism has pushed you almost as low as Fox News on the credibility scale.

Doomsday in Two Weeks

You may remember my post a while ago about the doomsday cult that believes that May 21st 2011 is Judgement day. It just so happens that date is only two weeks away now. Have you made any mocking celebration plans yet? If not here are my suggestions

1) On the Friday before Judgement Day, get drunk enough so that you'll have an atrocious hangover on the day that you're supposed to be judged.
2) Keep drinking and partying on Judgement Day to celebrate your sanity.
because
3) You can sleep in and recover on Sunday.

If anyone has any other suggestions for what to do on Judgement Day I'd love to hear them.

Just a Different Philosopy?

A friend of mine posted an interesting link on facebook to a study that was done on some potential medical uses for cannabis, and we started up a discussion about it. It was all going well until someone wrote this.

"There's one called Sativex which is legal here... but as any herbalist will tell you, there's a huge difference between the whole plant or a herbal tincture, and an isolated compound from it produced by a pharmaceutical company."

I responded by saying that there is a difference because the isolated compound is the one that actually performs the required function. In the case of this cancer study, it was the THC that inhibited the Epidermis Growth Factor, the other compounds are simply not required for the task and could perhaps even be counter productive.

The aforementioned person then jumped into a conspiratorial barrel of quackery with this statement.

"Then we might as well condemn all herbs to the rubbish bin, discount millions of years of evolution, throw out all knowledge about nutrition, agree that no plant can have any impact on human health, and survive entirely on synthetic chemicals men in white coats agree are *required for the task*, right? Just sayin' :P "

Now I do not know this person, so I don't want to make any judgements about them, but the attitude that I get from this is extremely anti-science. If you want to bash science based medicine, and take herbal remedies instead, go for it, I won't stop you, but what will you do if/when you get so ill, and none of your alternative medicine seems to do the trick? Don't go grovelling to a real doctor, because as you have clearly shown us, you have a deep seated contempt for those evil "men in white coats". FSM forbid, if you need an organ transplant, or any other kind of surgery, it would be awfully painful without those horrible synthetic chemicals that we call anaesthetics.

Needless to say, I responded to their nonsense, trying my best to hold onto my sanity. I was graced by a reply that really disappointed me. They replied by saying: "Think we're just coming from totally different philosophies on health and herbs KJ. But each to their own."
Yes, we have different philosophies, mine is based on evidence and reason. When evidence and reason show my position to be false, I change it. Your philosophy seems to be irrational ranting and delusional belief based, sorry to break it to you, but alternative medicine is baloney.

This whole ordeal reminded me of a song I discovered via. Pharyngula a while ago, if you're of the skeptical mindset, and don't mind a bit of country music, I urge you to check out this video

Debating a True-Believer™

Recently I was having a discussion on a Facebook group forum. It was an anti-vaccination group and I'd only gone there to look at some of the things they were saying, and what I saw amazed me. I had never seen such convoluted reasoning before in my life. People were giving anecdotes for why their particular belief was true, while simultaneously saying that they weren't basing their views off anecdotes. When pressed to give data supporting their position, they would go on a rant about how scientists are being paid off by big-pharmaceutical companies. When I would mention the fact that most medical scientists could earn a lot more money if they converted to alt-medicine, because people like them would buy any books they would write, they would have another anecdote about a scientist they know. When the nature of their argument was shown quite clearly to be circular, they would continue repeating the same things ad nauseum. Perhaps attempting to engage 'True Believers' is pointless......
What motivates me is that some of them are out there doing real harm to people, and perhaps if one person turns their back on medical quackery, then there might be one child who doesn't have to die in the hands of an incompetent homeopath

Does being a dick pay off?

After watching Phil Plait's speech from TAM, I've been thinking about the whole concept of being friendly to antagonists a whole lot more. I rewound my brain to remember whether people insulting my beliefs had anything to do with my deconversion. It may have had some small effect on my pride, but to be quite honest, there was probably only one single person who impacted my deconversion more than all the others combined. I don't even know his name, but we used to debate on Myspace group forums about religion, evolution, science and everything in between. Even though I said a lot of things which I would now regard as being rather moronic, he seemed to keep his cool amazingly, while I was the one going off the rails, not with insults but with incoherent ranting, and copy/pasting things I had seen on apologetics websites.

One time I sent him a private message to convince him to read an apologetics book, which I mentioned in my deconversion post over a year ago, 'I don't have enough faith to be an atheist'. He in turn recommended a book to me, 'The Age of Reason' by Thomas Paine. I highly doubt that he ever read the book I recommended to him, and I hope he doesn't, because when I re-examined the book years later it wasn't all I thought it had been.
Some 4 years after he recommended that I read Thomas Paine, I bought a copy of the book, read it and was completely intrigued the entire way though. I had never looked at the bible that way before. Even though Paine was fervently arguing for the Deistic position, by the time I had finished reading The Age of Reason, I was agnostic about whether god existed or not. At that point I no longer considered myself a Christian, but still had a desire to believe in god.


I'm certainly not advocating the complete elimination of offensive words, because a well-placed insult can add a great dramatic flair to a passionate argument, especially when it comes to things like Chiropractors manipulating the spines of infants and young children I can't help but throw wild insults, that shit makes me sick!

NZ Annual Skeptics Conference

This Saturday/Sunday I'll be attending the NZ annual skeptics conference, if any of my readers is interested in attending you still can, it costs $80 or $60 for the unwaged.

Here's a brief outline of the programme

Session 1: Mass Delusions

Session 2: Warts and All: misinformation and adverse events.

Session 3:A Smear Campaign: Responses to 'A History of the "Unfortunate Experiment" at National Women's Hospital'.

Session 4: Nibiru arrghh!! We're all gonna die

Session 5: The demonization of fat:

Session 6: Dealing with wingnuts - which way to turn?

Session 7: Near Zero Inc: a sadly prophetic company name

Session 8: No god ads

Session 9: The science behind the MMR hoax

Session 10: Yet more reasons why people believe weird things

Session 11: A practical guide to analysing psychic readings         

Biblical Miracles: Jericho

This is one of those stories that you learn about in sunday school, but as with everything else taught there, the facts are left out completely. The story goes like this, God commands Joshua to tell his army to walk around the city of Jericho for six days, rather odd I know but it gets better. Seven priests were to wield rams horns (probably sounded a bit like a vuvuzela), and on the seventh day they were to walk around the city 7 times blowing the horns, and then the walls of Jericho fell down and the Israelites took over the city. Here's what the bible says about the aftermath.

Joshua 6:21 

they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword.

6:24  

they burnt the city with fire, and all that was therein: only the silver, and the gold, and the vessels of brass and of iron, they put into the treasury of the house of the LORD.

This is where I find the story gets rather interesting. Based on the chronology in the bible, this would have happened around 1400 BCE, so digging up the city of Jericho we should expect to find that the city was destroyed around that time. Instead of confirming the biblical account, the archaeological evidence makes an absolute joke out of the bible. At the time of the supposed reign of Joshua, the city of Jericho was uninhabited. Jericho had been destroyed several hundred years earlier.

If you want a miracle, here's your miracle: Joshua destroyed a city that wasn't even there. - Bill Dever (Archaeologist)

Creationists and Debates

I was just browsing Conservapedia looking for something that would make me angry, and don't worry I found something on every single page that I looked at. I stumbled across a page called 'Creation scientists tend to win the creation vs. evolution win debates' and although I wasn't as angry at this page as some of the others (for example their page on atheism) I thought that it needed refuting.

It seemed rather appropriate that they had featured a picture of Duane Gish on this page, he virtually invented the debate style used by nearly every single creationist today. The debate style that I'm talking about is sometimes referred to as the Gish Gallop. Here is what RationalWiki says about the Gish Gallop:

  "The Gish Gallop is an informal name for a rhetorical technique in debates that involves drowning the opponent in half-truths, lies, straw men, and bullshit to such a degree that the opponent cannot possibly answer every falsehood that has been raised, usually resulting in many involuntary twitches in frustration as the opponent struggles to decide where to start. It is named after creationism activist and professional debater Duane Gish."

 It should be fairly obvious to you that this kind of debate tactic is about as dishonest as you can possibly get. If the debate topic is evolution, which is already an enormous topic, creationists will draw upon things like astronomy, cosmology, physics, thermodynamics, abiogenesis, and many other fields of science within a short span of time. The creationists who use this pony-show debate tactic don't really seem to care that all their arguments have been thoroughly trounced by real scientists many times over, but that is the reason they use the Gish Gallop in the first place. I suspect that they actually realise that Creation-science and Intelligent design aren't scientific at all, otherwise they wouldn't have to resort to such pathetic tactics and could publish scientific papers instead.

Then they go on to criticize Richard Dawkins for refusing to debate creationists and ID proponents. Can you really blame him though? If you were debating someone, and instead of responding to your points and your rebuttals, they just start bringing up dozens of fallacies that are barely related to the original content matter, you would never debate them again right? On top of that, many prominent creationists such as William Lane Craig are professional public speakers and debaters, while many scientists are lab-recluses, or in Dawkins case, writers. Science doesn't make or break on the debate podium, it's done in the lab and published in journals. Winning a debate doesn't mean jack shit when it comes to the advancement of science, so while cretins like the Discovery Institute are beating their chests claiming victory over evolution because scientists won't debate them, science is progressing, leaving ID in the dust.

Dennis Markuze, DM, Dave Mabus

EDIT: (08/2011) Since this post still gets traffic I'll just explain a little. Dennis had been spamming my blog and was sending me emails for hours on end and I was getting rather sick of it. If you scroll down to the comments section you can see some lovely death threats. The posts of DM's that are deleted were several pages long each, if he said something new, or something directed at me at the beginning of the 3-page long spam I quoted it in a following comment.

Ted Bundy: Porn Victim?

I just watched this video from the YouTube user jordanowen42 arguing against the idea that Ted Bundy was inspired by porn to kill all the people that he did. Jordan brings up some very good points as to why he thinks the whole thing is a load of crap. He first brings up that it was a last ditch effort by Bundy to clear his name, similar to an insanity plea, where the murderer invokes an outside source saying that was what made them do it. In Bundy's case he said that pornography "snatched him" out of his "good Christian family", and that he was just a normal person made evil by porn. Jordan then brings up the point that if this was true, we'd have to protect criminals from society and not the other way around, by removing any and every thing that is 'stimulating' to us. Murderers have been "motivated" by a whole raft of different things, Jordan mentions one who was motivated by the book 'Catcher in the Rye'. We shouldn't take away cars from the general public just because there are a few morons who like to drive whilst inebriated.
Ted Bundy is trying to play the victim card, and to buy into his façade is to spit on the graves of all his victims. If you blame porn for making Bundy do the things that he did, then you also have to blame soccer for all the deaths and injuries that happen during after-game riots all across the world from Brazil to the U.K. You would also have to blame religion itself for all the acts of insane depravity done in its name. Normal people don't bomb abortion clinics or murder doctors who perform abortions at point blank range. Normal religious people are also normal people, and don't do those things. You never hear cries to ban Christianity after some nut-job fundie blows up an abortion clinic do you? So why would anyone buy into the ludicrous idea that pornography turns normal people into violent serial rapists/murderers? Studies have actually shown that in places where pornography is available, rape numbers go down, and so do sexually related murders.

Here's Jordan's video if anyone wanted to watch it.

Anti-Vaxxers are at it again.

What is it with some people? These anti-vaccination people are as deceitful as creationists, quote-mining, lying and pretending that they are the ones promoting honest inquiry.
New Scientist has an article about how the Australian Health Care Complaints Commission had to issue a warning about the misleading information being promoted by the Australian Vaccination Network. Apparently the AVN have been saying some rather absurd things, like measles is a "non-threatening illness" and "vaccines have never been tested". They try to give the impression that they just want parents to make informed decisions about whether to vaccinate their children, while simultaneously feeding them lies. The more that people speak out against their anti-science quackery the less people will be influenced by these charlatans. (hopefully)

Anti-Choice Ideology in the Confectionery Aisle

Perhaps I'm just picking a fight over nothing, but I couldn't help notice the name of one particular product in the supermarket today. It was a particular brand of Jelly Babies.

So you may be wondering what the brand name was, and you may be shocked to find out they were called "Pro-life Jelly Babies". There was one other product there from this brand, which were also jelly confectionery, "Pro-life Jelly Snakes", but I suspect they may have been making the snakes just to cover their asses. Please keep your religious ideology out of my fricken candy!

People are too Credulous

This issue relates directly to two things I've posted about recently, conspiracy theories, and my Christian Deception post. This fact is very obvious, and can be demonstrated simply by the existence of a website like Snopes. If people weren't so damned gullible then Snopes wouldn't exist. If you are unfamiliar with Snopes, they're basically in the business of debunking urban myths, particularly ones that get spread around the internet.

A reader called Jamie posted a comment asking me to do a post about this, here's what he said.

Can you do a post on why some Christians send those forwarded emails that that are obviously hoaxes or are blatant lies? Or maybe who makes them up? (Its modern day dishonesty) Some that I have seen include: claiming that the remains of the red sea chariots have been found thus proving the bible, giants have been found (you posted that one lol), Albert Einstein didn't believe in evolution - you get the picture :)

 This reminded me of a whole bunch of these kinds of religious rumours that propagate so freely on the internet. With a brief search on Snopes I found 3 common Christian chain-mail rumours that I had seen before.
Einstein humiliates atheist professor - False
Nasa Discovers Joshua's lost day - False
Airlines will not pair a Christian pilot and co-pilot in case they are taken by the Rapture - False

With regard to the chariot wheels from the exodus, that idea originated with Fundie "archaeologist" Ron Wyatt who claims to have found Noah's ark, the Biblical Ark of the Covenant, the location of Sodom And Gomorrah, the Tower of Babel, the true site of Mt. Sinai, the true site of the crucifixion of Jesus, and the original stones of the Ten Commandments (from truthorfiction.com). His ideas were never independently verified by any actual archaeologists, and many of the pictures of 'chariot parts' that he claimed were real turned out to be nothing more than coral formations.

What I think it all comes down to in the end is really just a willingness to believe fantastical stories, especially when they claim to confirm some aspect of a person's belief system as a fact. It most certainly isn't unique to Christians, or even to religion at all (though it is common within religious groups). You'll see similar behaviour relating to conspiracy theories, alternative medicine and even just general urban myths. People simply seem to have a strange attraction to believing the unbelievable. I can't think of any other explanation for it.

On the other hand you have the people who actually make this stuff up. I suspect many of the myths that float around the internet have very boring origins, for example some teenager thinks it'd be funny to go around claiming that Mountain Dew makes your testicles shrink, or something similar, and before long the story has make its way onto the internet and people are spreading it like gospel. Other myth origins are simply a result of a misunderstanding, as was the case with the claim that some hair-ties are made from used condoms, which was not quite true. The reality was that a chinese condom company was using condoms that didn't pass quality control to make hair-ties. When it comes to people like Ron Wyatt, Ken Ham, Kent Hovind, the Discovery Institute, all creationists, Fundamentalists in general, political propaganda and religion at large I am quite baffled at the lengths they go to in order to spread their lies. To call it anything else would be dishonest, they are clear-cut lies. Creationists are liars.

Conspiracy Mentality

For some reason or another, while inebriated at a party, the topic came around to discussing a movie called Zeitgeist and other various assorted conspiracy theories. I have come up with a hypothesis of my own, although it isn't a conspiracy, it does relate to the people that formulate and believe in conspiracies.

My hypothesis is very simple, so I'll do my best to explain it as such.

Conspiracy theorists and believers of conspiracies always tend to accept a whole battalion of conspiracy theories. I have never met a person who thinks 9/11 was an inside job that doesn't also believe in multiple other conspiracies. Other common conspiracies that they tend to believe in are New World Order conspiracies, Illuminati, Moon Landing Hoax, World Bank conspiracies and even some conspiracies dating back hundreds of years. So with this in mind, I propose that perhaps some people are more prone to conspiratorial thinking than others. I'm not a neuroscience expert, but I suspect that it is a result of brain conditioning or that critical thinking skills aren't being applied consistently that causes some people to be more susceptible to believing grandiose conspiracies.

I hope that made sense...

Friday Atheist Fundies

So far my Friday Fundies posts have only been from Christians, so in the interest of balance I'll do an atheist one. I definitely wouldn't call this person a fundamentalist atheist, but most certainly would call them arrogant/militant/angry/bigoted. The person I'm talking about is 'Human Ape' who commented on my post about Theistic Evolution. I removed his comments from the page, since he primarily came here to promote his blog, and is now censoring all dissenting comments on his own blog.

Here are some quotes from him.

"Most definitely Christianity is a mental illness, and unfortunately this disease is usually incurable. If a brainwashed child is still a Christian retard at age 21, he or she will always be a retard."

"By the way Christian morons, how does this heaven business work?

If I understand your cowardly belief correctly, your soul (whatever that is) magically flies up to the clouds (or who knows where) and then magically transforms itself into your disgusting dead body, except that now you're alive again, living in some magical place infested with other Christian idiots like yourselves. Jeebus must be waving his magic wand like crazy to make this bullshit work. And your magical selves live forever in this fantasy land, for trillions and trillions of years. Long after the entire universe goes extinct, you're still alive playing with your harp, bored out of your fucking mind."

From my experience trying to dialogue with him over the last day it is quite obvious that he's not interested in any kind of discussion about anything. He's not open to any new ideas and instead of taking criticism like an adult, he resorts to ad-hom attacks like this

"Wait a fucking minute. You call yourself an atheist and you think atheists have beliefs? You're worse than an atheist wimp. You're a fake atheist."

 Instead of listening to my reply to that, he just censored my comments and called me a wimp again. Bravo 'Human Ape'... You just proved that you're exactly what you claim everyone else is. He's so afraid of opposing views that he censors them and then insults them.

Not only is his insult vocabulary incredibly small (so it gets very tedious very fast) but his blog is an eye-sore. It's nearly as bad as jesus-is-savior.

So, if you are mildly interested in seeing the obnoxious rants of a self professed asshole atheist, be my guest. Here's a link to his blog.