I don’t get many creationists around here. Even fewer that stick around and strike up a discussion with me. However, there’s one in the comments here.

I point this out for a couple of reasons. The first is that not all creationists are created equal. I had one here a few years ago who debated with me for months, first in comments then over email. He was very wrong, but he clearly was pretty smart and had really thought about the whole of modern science in relation to his religion. No such claims about the current one can be made.

The notable feature of this current discussion is how little discussion there is. I didn’t feel like answering the standard creationist points at the beginning, but I changed my mind after some attempts to turn my claims about not responding back on me and after he built up a list of claims. When I answered them, he dropped the majority of them and came up with new ones. New ones to the discussion, that is, since they were all standard creationist points.

This isn’t an uncommon occurrence. There are a list of global warming denialist claims and ones for any pseudoscience. If anything, it’s a defining characteristic of pseudoscience. There’s a list of basic claims that your average believer latches onto and underneath there’s a core of people generating the supporting lies and half-truths that keep it alive. The believers don’t really understand the arguments generated, but if it gives them a quick talking point, it goes on the Internet and never dies.

This is sad.

How long is it going to take until we get to this point with gay marriage? I’m looking forward to the day when we officially recognize that banning gay marriage is nothing but uninformed bigotry. It doesn’t affect me, but we all should be happen when injustices are remedied.

It seems that as of a few days ago, I’ve been spouting off on here for five years. 1,940 posts and 2,450+ comments so far.

Let’s say the average post takes 15 minutes to compose. That’s 485 hours. 20.2 days. Nearly three weeks. Add in 522 comments at 5 minutes apiece and you have another 43.5 hours. So let’s call it 23 days.

23 days of my life I have spent writing to no one in particular. Occasionally people read what I write, but there’s no guarantee. When those few people make themselves known, half the time I argue with them (often rather impolitely).

Shouldn’t this be a mental disorder or something?

John Derbyshire on the Intelligent Design movement:

There is only a gaggle of fools and fraudsters, gaping and pointing like Apaches on seeing their first locomotive: “Look! It moves! There must be a ghost inside making it move!”

I move we make that the new dictionary definition of Intelligent Design.

Connecticut Woman Says She Stole Hundreds of Paintings to Prepare for Apocalypse

WATERBURY, Conn. — A 53-year-old Waterbury woman has pleaded guilty to stealing more than 150 paintings reportedly after God told her the end of the world is near.

Diane Catalani was arrested last year. According to court documents, Catalani told a psychologist that she hoarded what she stole to show God before the Apocalypse that there are still good people in the world.

The prosecutor says it’s clear that Catalani was suffering from mental illness at the time she stole the paintings.

I don’t know, you’d think God would have been able to see the paintings and incorporate their existence into his judgment. Then again, I think it’s obvious that prayer is pointless if God is omniscient, so what do I know?

There seems to be a spectrum for the clarity of your “personal relationship” with God. A feeling that God exists is par for the course, a personal relationship with Jesus Christ is a little weird, receiving various bits of trivia for your TV show is crazy (but not mental hospital crazy), and being commanded to do something is a trip to the psych ward. The fuzzier your signal, the less crazy you are.

There are quite a few online music sellers these days. I occasionally wonder if I should start using one or the other, but they’re obviously not at the point where I get much out of them. So I get to thinking, what would work for me?

My music comes primarily from downloads right now. I don’t download a ton of music, but it’s a significant amount. I also buy CDs, though I buy fewer CDs than albums I download (I buy more CDs than I would if I didn’t download, however). I also almost exclusively download whole albums. The process generally goes I download an album, I like or don’t like it, if I like it enough I buy the CD at some point in the future. I buy CDs for essentially two reasons: supporting the band and sound quality. I don’t get to go to many shows out here, so buy a band’s CD is the best way I have to support them. As far as sound quality, I like having the option of popping a CD in my home theater setup and listening with my Sennheisers. Burned CDs from MP3s don’t cut it.

So the current online models don’t help me much. I don’t download music to have digital copies of it, I download it because it’s easy access to a lot of music and I don’t have to waste money to hear a new album I may or may not like. So I shy away from actually buying digital copies of songs. I also run Linux, which means DRM essentially ends any compatibility with existing services. Of course, if I weren’t running Linux, I still wouldn’t put up with DRM. The selection on some of these services also sucks. My taste runs from pretty mainstream (Radiohead, The Decemberists), to less popular but widely available (Opeth, Porcupine Tree), to pretty obscure bands (The Pineapple Thief, Do Make Say Think). It’s hard for any online service to span that range.

What would I support, then? A subscription based service might work. A monthly fee and I can download a certain amount of good quality MP3s, DRM-free. On top of that, the option to purchase lossless copies and/or CDs of what I’ve downloaded would be good. It would have to be a pretty significant discount from typical store prices, but it could work. The selection obviously has to be wide enough to make it worth the cost, which is maybe the biggest problem. The store also has to work on my OS, meaning it should probably be web-based and not an application like iTunes.

I’ve bought maybe 7 CDs this year so far. That’s probably $80-$90 in four months. That’s $20-$22 a month. At $8 a CD, that’s $56, leaving $30 or so for a monthly fee, which works out to $7.50 a month. $8 a CD and $7.50 a month? That doesn’t seem implausible to me. If you go less than that, I’m probably saving money by switching to the service.

Maybe it is implausible. I don’t really know. But that’s what it would take.

Well, I went and saw Expelled. I was not impressed.

The first thing that wasn’t impressive was the fact that the theater had the reels out of order. The first two reels were swapped, so there were no opening credits until a third of the way through the movie (right before they mocked panspermia). That’s not the documentary’s fault, though.

The film opens (for most people, anyway) with a discussion of those who’ve been “expelled” by the “Darwinian establishment” for their pro-ID ways. Unfortunately for Stein, he’s almost entirely wrong about these cases. Everyone likes martyrs, but there aren’t any to be found here.

The film talks all the leading lights of the Discovery Institute and the ID movement along with prominent anti-religion scientists. I characterize them like that for a reason, which I’ll return to in a moment. As other reviews have noted, the film’s lack of any real discussion of ID or evolution is striking. People say it’s science, it’s creationism, it has good supporting evidence, it doesn’t, etc, but there’s not discussion of any of those points. Granted, this is a pro-ID documentary and there really isn’t any pro-ID evidence, but you’d think they’d at least attempt to make the case that ID is a legitimate theory, rather just asserting its legitimacy. No one coming out of that film will have any idea if ID is any more credible than holocaust denial. Also, David Berlinski is sitting in the worst chair for talking head footage. Sit up, dammit.

The flow of the film is somewhat incoherent. We bounce around from talking to IDists, scientists, talking about court cases, watching Ben Stein in Germany, etc, all interspersed with footage from the Soviet Union and the Nazis. Much of the film’s message consists of demanding an open debate in academia about ID. Then they starting talking about court cases over the content of science classes in high schools. They avoid explaining how the two are related in order to pile it on as more suppression of ID. Then they go off and discuss how Darwinism inspired the Nazis. Is the message that we need open debate or that Darwinism causes evil? Of course the connection of Darwinism and the Nazis is quite dishonest. Anti-semitism and selective breeding existed long before Darwin. Science gives us descriptions of the mechanisms of how the world works. A scientific theory does not tell us how to act. It’s a description that’s either true or not true. What made the Nazis so bad was not what scientific opinions they held, but how they acted on them and other beliefs. The documentary could have criticized replacing morality with science, but it didn’t. It criticized Darwinism when it was used for illegitimate purposes.

There’s always lots of controversy about how scientists should engage the public on scientific issues like ID, which is grounded in religion. Someone like Dawkins is an outspoken and very open atheist. In the film he reads a passage describing the Hebrew god from The God Delusion. It’s one of my favorite quotes from the book, but it’s not likely to win anyone over. A similar situation exists with P.Z. Myers and Daniel Dennett, though Myers was very soft spoken and Dennett’s comments were limited. This is sort of an issue, but I don’t think it matters in the end. We who dislike religion should talk about it and we have every right to be angry. What does matter is the dishonesty in using almost exclusively outspoken non-religious scientists as the other side in the movie. Talk to someone like Ken Miller? That would just upend their entire argument. Science has certainly deconverted a lot of people (me included), but you don’t have be an atheist to be a successful scientist. You just can’t ignore the facts and try and publish papers that argue for your religious views and expect scientists to have much respect for you.

In any case, the film does appear to be a flop. I went to a late showing, but there were only four people in the theater, at least three of which weren’t there looking to be convinced of anything. I mean, I assume the guy behind the two of us who called Eugenie Scott a “fucking cunt” was already on a side. I know little about filmmaking, but my brother, a film student, said the documentary appeared to be shot by a “third grader with down syndrome,” so I don’t think it was good from a technical standpoint, either. The documentary is very much the Michael Moore formula, with interspersed animations, footage of the documentarian in his search for truth, attempted gotchas, and entering some place uninvited only to be kicked out. None of it’s done particularly well and with the content being mostly lies and distortions, it doesn’t add up to much of a documentary.

I’ve been debating whether I should go see this or not, since it’s playing here in town. On the one hand, I’ve read about its claims elsewhere and I don’t want to contribute to an incoherent anti-evolution movie. On the other, I’ll feel better about criticizing it if I actually go see it.

In any event, here’s the NCSE’s rebuttal page.

So now both Obama and Clinton are pandering to the anti-vaccine crowd, just like McCain.

Obama is the least worst here, though not by much. McCain says there’s strong evidence a preservative in the vaccines is causing autism. This is obviously and dangerously wrong. Clinton’s answers to the questionnaire indicate she is going to work to remove thimerosal from vaccines and fund investigations into the link between vaccines and autism. That’s advocating unnecessary, but not obviously dangerous actions. Obama simply said the science is inconclusive and more research is needed. That’s wrong, but contains fewer unnecessary actions than Clinton’s position (then again, he doesn’t say he doesn’t support removing thimerosal from vaccines).

Still, this is all very annoying. Stop pandering to obnoxious idiots, please.

You’ll find none here. God saved the missionaries and lit a 15 year old on fire. Sounds like a good plan to me.

I tend to have that reaction whenever anyone says something like that. Clearly, you’re just that important. Conversely, God having a plan also explains unexpected deaths and hardships, so I’m not entirely sure of the explanatory power of a plan where every conceivable event confirms it.

On the other hand, this kind of thing does make me understand why people thank God for being blessed and all that. I’m pretty sure I’d go all paranoid if I believed in a god who consigns much of the world to terrible poverty with only a slim chance of hearing his message. Oh, and the rest of us are subject to random acts of violence, natural disasters, and fraud, with no apparent regard for the beliefs, actions, or responsibility of those victimized.

It certainly doesn’t sound comforting.

Continue reading ‘Humility?’