Atheism

The world is explicable by purely natural means!

Ho hum

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I sometimes feel like I’m walking in a world of stupidity. Some examples why:

1) From this weeks New Scientist. A comment article by Michael Zimmerman who founded the Clergy Letter Project to counter the anti-scientific nonsense that many religious people are fed about the fact and theory of evolution. This is a fine thing to do. However within the article we have the following paragraph:

The clergy involved in Evolution Weekend do not set out to provide detailed information about evolution to their congregations. Rather, the aim is to outline the complementarity of religion and science, while recognising the power of science’s dependence on the scientific method and on the concept of falsifiability, along with its limitations. That is, they understand that there are areas of importance to humans that fall outside the reach of science – subjective areas that are not open to rigorous hypothesis testing.

Why are there any areas of importance that fall outside the reach of science? Who says so? Granted the imaginary deities and made up stuff the religious believe is beyond the reach of any form of investigation in the real world. They don’t exist after all. But there are things related to why people believe them that are very much open to scientific investigation. We can use neuroscience to investigate why people believe in things without evidence. We can also investigate the evolutionary advantages in belief systems within early human societies and groups. We certainly don’t have to ring fence some groups belief in the supernatural just cause they say its outside the realm of scientific investigation.

2) Looks like the UK Government is going to allow some faith schools in the UK to have their own inspectorate. That’s just so daft I couldn’t be bothered commenting on it past highlighting it here.

3) Church dentistry. That’s not an attempt at a Googlewhack. The Bishop of Carlisle, who is a mad as a fruitcake, has let it slip in a speech in the House of Lords that some church groups are bidding to offer dental services in the UK. He also said that the church should be exempt from the usual scrutiny that government welfare providers are subject to. Read the whole gory details here. The question is whether the government are actually considering things like this or they are just humouring the Bishop and his crazy fellow travellers?

Is it the 21st Century? Didn’t we settle all this tripe in the Enlightenment?

My irony meter just exploded

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The Bishop of Wales is whining about atheistic fundamentalism. The money quote –

But he said “virulent, almost irrational” attacks on it were “dangerous” because they refused to allow any contrary viewpoint and also affected the public perception of religion.

Oh, the irony. Has he done any history? Does he know what happened to people who gainsaid the church teaching in the past? Has he heard of Giordano Bruno? Has he heard about the others persecuted in the name of religion?

Us atheists, fundamentalist or not [1], don’t want to burn anyone at the stake or deny them from practising their religion. We might think it is superstitious nonsense but that’s not the point. The point is that some of the religious wish to impose their irrational beliefs on the rest of us. They want to restrict a women’s right to choose what happens to her own body. They want to restrict our choices in medical research. They want to use tax payers money to pay for repairs to churchs when they have huge property portfolios that they could sell to fund the repairs. And so on.

All this whining about christianity being downtrodden looks like the last gasps of a dying organisation to me. The Enlightenment is still working to smoother the last irrational life out of it. The sooner the better.

[1] How can you be fundamentalist about a lack of belief?

Call it Christmas for christ sake!!

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Michael Bywater has a rant on The New Humanist website about atheists not calling Christmas by that name. I agree with him. It’s known as Christmas to everyone and their dog. It’s not a religious festival for very many people that I know. From what I can see it’s not a religious festival anymore in the UK at all. Christmas is a national holiday to eat too much, spend too much and have a good time. Religion has nothing to add.

But we can and should call it Christmas. Lets avoid the so called War on Christmas drivel that gets trotted out and just have a good time over the holidays. Don’t worry about offending anyone. Religious or non-religious.

BTW: this is what a real War of Christmas would look like:

War on Christmas Click picture for larger view

The Golden Compass

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I’ve written about Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy here before. I liked the ideas, but the books didn’t grab my imagination by the scruff of the neck. The film version of the first book comes out this week: The Golden Compass. Hopefully the books will translate in to good movies. If they expose more people to the ideas then that will be a good thing™. Mark Morford has written a nice column on the flap the film is causing amongst the “faithful”. Well worth a read.

Climate change is NOT the biggest threat to the planet

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Just heard some twerp from the people who are setting up the camp near Heathrow Airport on BBC News 24. She said that climate change was the be biggest issue around and that it was a survivability on the planet issue. What tosh. even in the worst case scenarios humanity will be able to adapt to the changes that occur. It will not wipe us out. Does this mean that we shouldn’t try to mitigate the effects? Of course not. We should use cleaner energy technologies to reduce our emissions etc. Should we limit the flights people can take? No. Should we use better engines and fuels? Yes.

The twerp on BBC News 24 (who probably wouldn’t understand climate science if you slapped her round the head with it) also called BAA climate criminals. Hmm. Apparently we also need to go back to a more sustainable level of living. Bollocks. What we need to do is make better use of the resources on the planet for the betterment of the whole population. Not retreat backwards. And we need to start planning to use the resources on the other bodies in the Solar System.

Flying above the clouds

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I was on a flight this week from East Midlands airport, near Nottingham in England, to Belfast. It was about 19:00 and it was sunny with broken cloud cover when the flight took off. Once we got above the clouds the view out the window was stunning. Really beautiful. The cloud cover was almost complete when looking down, but there were lots of gaps as well. The gaps in the clouds were filled with a sort of thin mist. The sun was low near the western horizon and the light shinning through the mist in the cloud gaps coloured them milky-blue. It made them look like lakes in ice covered land. The low sun was also casting long shadows so the relief and 3D appearance of the whole scene was quite striking. Also quite alien. Our brains didn’t evolve in an environment where we saw many scenes like that. I wish I had a camera with me. A quick Google turned up the picture below. This is similar to what could be seen from the plane, although there were more clouds in reality. Still it gives an impression of the scene.

Clouds2 Click picture for larger view

God is not Great – Christopher Hitchens

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I finished God is not Great by Christopher Hitchens last week. It’s the most recent of the string of popular anti-religion books that have been published over the last year (Sam Harris, Dan Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Victor Stenger and others have trampled the grass on this path recently). many people think that Richard Dawkins is a bit strident in his anti-religions views. I don’t, for the record. BTW, why does it seem that none of the people who have responded to Dawkins’ latest book, with arguments that he is too strident or hasn’t studied some obscure theological text, that they haven’t actually read his book for comprehension (or at all)?

Anyway. If you thought Dawkins was strident you’ll either love or blanch completely at Hitchens’ latest book. This is a real polemic. Wide ranging as well. Dawkins focused on Christianity to a large extent. Hitchens covers Judaism, Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism and others. Hitchens has a writting style and background that will appeal to a more literary audience than Dawkins et al. As such it is a welcome new addition to the anti-religion canon. A good synopsis of the book is given in a lecture by Hitchens presented by the Seattle Town Hall Center for Civic Life and University Book Store.

BTW: This was the first book I read on an eInk device. A Sony Reader.

Unfortunate comment

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There is a story in this weeks Nature about the withdrawal of the Downe House site, where Charles Darwin lived when writing The Origin of Species and other works, from the process to make it a World Heritage Site. The withdrawal is due to an unfavourable evaluation by a body that advises the Committee that makes decisions on new World Heritage sites. Apparently sites only get a single chance at becoming a listed site so the Downe House site has been withdrawn and will be resubmitted at a later date. That’s all fine and probably quite sensible. In the Nature article however we have the following quote:

“I can’t think of anything more important to do for the history of nineteenth-century science than to protect the whole environment Darwin inhabited and exploited,” says James Moore, a Darwin scholar at the Open University in Milton Keynes and one of the first historians to explore the importance of this rural refuge to Darwin. “Muslims go to Mecca, Christians go to Jerusalem, Darwinians go to Downe,” he says.

No, no and thrice no! There is no religion called Darwinism and no Darwinian followers! I can probably accept that the above quote is likely out of context and of the cuff, but shame on Nature for perpetuating the fatuous idea that there is a religion of Darwinism similar to other religions. There is not; outside of the warped minds of creationists and intelligent design advocates.

Evolution by natural selection, as originally outlined by Darwin (and Wallace), and as expanded upon over the last 150 years, is both a scientific theory and a fact. The theory provides an explanatory framework to explain the fact that populations of organisms evolve over time. It also makes predictions about what we should find in the natural world as a result of changing environments, what we should see in the fossil record and also the biochemical relationships between organisms.

Alluding, falsely, that people who visit Downe House are doing so for reasons comparable to religious pilgrims is very unfortunate (to put it mildly).

Reinvigorating the “call to action”…

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This blog entry by P.Z. Myers over on Pharyngula is worth reading.

i agree completely. What we have on our hands here is a battle for Enlightenment values. We will need to defend them, and that means confronting and opposing the vendors of superstition and dogma.

Comments closed for this post. Please comment over at Pharyngula if you need to respond.

Life, the Universe and…

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Most people know my view about life and the Universe. We’ll all be dead a long time and therefore we should do what we want during our lives to make ourselves happy (as long as it doesn’t adversely effect others). Steve Jobs articulated this view well in his Commencement Speech to Stanford University graduates in 2005. You can read the whole speech at the link above or watch it via YouTube (see below). I quote the following from it:

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

For the last while I’ve been using a similar process myself in relation to my job. At the start of the year I switched jobs. I think that my answer to the question posed in Jobs’ speech above has been No far too many times recently. I’ll need to rectify that…

Nice use of satire

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Peter Olofsson has written an excellent satirical review of the latest Anne Coulter book. Check it out at the Richard Dawkins’ site. Coulter is to be pitied rather than engaged with. Satire is a good way of doing it. 🙂

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