Hemant Mehta's Blog, page 1857

This Alternative to Natural Selection Makes Perfect Sense

Matthew Inman, the cartoonist better known as The Oatmeal, recently spoke at Zach Weinersmith‘s BAHFest, “a satirical conference on evolutionary biology” in which you present bogus theories using credible research.

Inman’s brilliant and hilarious speech offered an alternative to natural selection:

All hail King Jibbers Crabst.

I’m actually impressed by how he stretched a one-note joke into an 11-minute explanation…

Also, the woman doing the sign language is just fantastic.

In Lake Worth (Florida), An Atheist’s Invocation Offered Thanks to Allah, Zeus, Satan, Buddha, Krishna, and Thor

Earlier this week, atheist activist Preston Smith delivered the invocation at the Lake Worth (Florida) City Commission meeting.

Not only did four of the five commissioners walk out before he had said a single word, Smith showed what happens when the door to giving invocations is wide open thanks to Christians wanting to pray at government meetings. (Blogger Lynn Anderson said that Commissioner Christopher McVoy remained in the room, as did the city manager and city attorney.)

City Commissioners leave the room as atheist Preston Smith steps up to the podium to deliver an invocation

[After seeing commissioners walk out on him] Duly noted.

Our collective atheism — which is to say, loving empathy, scientific evidence, and critical thinking — leads us to believe that we can create a better, more equal community without religious divisions.

May we pray together.

Mother Earth, we gather today in your redeeming and glorious presence, to invoke your eternal guidance in the universe, the original Creator of all things.

May the efforts of this council blend the righteousness of Allah with the all-knowing wisdom of Satan. May Zeus, the great God of justice, grant us strength tonight. Jesus might forgive our shortcomings while Buddha enlightens us through His divine affection. We praise you, Krishna, for the sanguine sacrifice that freed us all. After all, if Almighty Thor is with us, who can ever be against us?

And finally, for the bounty of logic, reason, and science, we simply thank the atheists, agnostics, Humanists, who now account for 1 in 5 Americans, and [are] growing rapidly. In closing, let us, above all, love one another, not to obtain mythical rewards for ourselves now, hereafter, or based on superstitious threats of eternal damnation, but rather, embrace secular-based principles of morality — and do good for goodness’ sake.

And so we pray.

So what?

And with that, the four commissioners came back inside to say the Pledge.

To be sure, Smith’s invocation is not the one I would’ve given, but that’s not the point. The point is that if the commissioners aren’t happy with this, there’s a simple solution: Do away with invocations altogether. Stop wasting time with prayer and get down to business. Otherwise, they should expect more of these in the future.

In fact, Chaz Stevens, another activist we’ve covered on this site before, saw Smith’s speech as inspiration. He just sent the same Commission an email requesting to deliver a Satanic invocation.

(Thanks to Nikki for the link)

Once Again, a Todd Starnes Tale of Anti-Christian Bias Doesn’t Hold Up After All the Facts Are In

Something you notice when you follow Fox News’ Todd Starnes is that he’s always very quick to write about a particular story. And there’s a simple reason for that: He puts out his side of the story (the Christian Persecution version) before the other side even knows what the hell is going on.

By the time they’ve corrected the misinformation or even offered their perspective, it’s too late. The bullshit has spread everywhere.

Starnes knows this perfectly well. A real journalist would give the other side a fair amount of time to respond before moving forward with a story. But Starnes isn’t a real journalist.

That explains why he was so eager to complain about Disney when he received an email about a girl named Lilly… without waiting to hear their side of the story:

Now, Lilly loves the Disney Channel — and as she was browsing the channel’s website she noticed a question. The Disney Channel wanted to know what she was thankful for. So Lilly typed in her answer.

“God, my family, my church and my friends,” the 10-year-old wrote.

Lilly pressed the return key and waited for her answer to appear on the website. But her response did not appear. Instead, a message written in red popped up on the screen.

“Please be nice!” the message read.

…

Sure enough, when they removed the word “God” from the post — the Disney Channel approved Lilly’s message.

…

I do wonder what sort of message the Disney Channel is sending when they tell children that mentioning God in public is bad manners.

Again, a real journalist would’ve contacted Disney to ask why that happened and waited at least a little while for a response, especially since their response is so important here.

Hell, even a shitty journalist would have at least acknowledged the possibility there was just an over-aggressive filter on the website.

Starnes never considered that option. He jumped right to Disney hates God.

And wouldn’t you know it, a day later, Disney issued a statement that was quietly appended to Starnes’ article:

“Disney employs word filtering technology to prevent profanity from appearing on our websites. Unfortunately, because so many people attempt to abuse the system and use the word “God” in conjunction with profanity, in an abundance of caution our system is forced to catch and prevent any use of the word on our websites. The company would have been happy to explain our filtering technology to the inquiring family had they contacted us.”

So it was essentially a filter issue. There’s certainly no anti-Christian conspiracy. And Starnes doesn’t give a shit because he’s not in the business of providing accurate stories. His job is simply to tell Christians exactly what they want to hear without providing honest information that might change their mind. Kind of like church.

That statement from Disney was released, by the way, right before Fox News Channel interviewed the girl and her mother on air… and when the host asked for their reaction to the statement, the mother stumbled through a pathetic explanation that was along the lines of, I guess that makes sense… but still!

Starnes hasn’t issued an apology for jumping to conclusions… again.

Not that anyone’s expecting him to.

Praise Jesus, Who Gives Immunity From Ebola; Send Your Generous Donation Today!

Behold, a recent mailing from the Jesus Film project.

Want immunity to Ebola? God is at work, Jesus is the way, and operators are standing by.

As Mark Twain knew, “Religion was invented when the first con man met the first fool.”

(via Imgur)

Radical Islam Makes Most of Its Victims Among Other Muslims; Female Nigerian Bombers Offer the Latest Example

In Islamic countries, and by swaths of the political left in the West, condemnations of radical Islam are often rejected as attacks by bigoted Westerners on a culture and religion that these critics do not understand. This is then presented as prima facie evidence of Islamophobia and racism.

One of the things that habitually gets lost in that tiresome trope is that the people who suffer the most at the hands of Muslims are… other Muslims. While we rightly deplore the relatively rare atrocities that radical Islamists carry out in America and Spain and Russia and the U.K. and France, the day-to-day death-and-misery toll inflicted on non-Islamic countries by Muslim terrorists pales in comparison to the violence that these radicals rain down on fellow followers of Islam.

Nigeria’s Boko Haram is almost the poster child for this horrible phenomenon. Via the New York Times:

A wave of attacks across northern Nigeria, including two on Monday — a suicide bombing at a market and an assault on security facilities — showed that the Islamist terrorist group Boko Haram remained able to strike at will in the region, especially against civilian targets. … The attacks followed a bombing on Friday in a central mosque in Kano, the principal city of northern Nigeria; 120 people were killed in that attack.

[I]n Maiduguri, … women detonated suicide bombs in the city’s biggest market. A similar bombing by two women last Tuesday killed at least 45 people.

Good to know that in the thoroughly misogynistic cult of Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau, women are still good for some important tasks, such as blowing up the wrong kind of Muslims.

The bombing in Maiduguri was apparently carried out by two women wearing traditional Muslim clothing. Witnesses said one woman in a hijab carrying a bundle was stopped and questioned by civilian vigilantes as she approached a busy area where chicken vendors have their stalls. The vigilantes insisted on checking her bundle, and as she protested and shoppers gathered to see what was going on, she detonated two bombs.

A second woman who was entering a shop at the market at that time detonated another explosive, witnesses said. “There were two women, both of them dressed in Muslim hijab,” The police at first said that only a half-dozen people had been killed, but witnesses reported seeing many more bodies. The Nigerian authorities routinely understate casualties in their reports. A worker at Maiduguri Specialist Hospital said 25 wounded people and 16 corpses had been brought there.

The mosque that the terrorists bombed on Friday

… is next to the palace of the emir of Kano, one of the highest-ranking figures in Nigerian Islam. Kano is one of Africa’s largest predominantly Muslim cities, and it is outside the usual zone of Boko Haram attacks. The emir — Lamido Sanusi, a former governor of the country’s central bank — has been outspoken in his criticism of the federal government in Abuja, the capital. He recently urged citizens to defend themselves against Boko Haram, in the absence of an effective military.

(Image via Shutterstock)

Arkansas Homophobes Paint Slurs On Signs Promoting Tolerance

In Fayetteville, Arkansas, a civil rights ordinance has brought out some people’s least civil sides.

Chapter 119 of the city code is a measure that protects people from discrimination on the basis of race, religion, gender identity and sexual orientation. In Fayetteville’s upcoming special election, voters will have a chance to repeal the ordinance (because why wouldn’t they hold an election just to strike down a pro-equality law?), and a few brave Arkansans are stepping forward to support the law staying put. Early voting on the measure began Tuesday.

In a true example of how classy the anti-gay activists are, a Fayetteville man found the word “FAG” spray-painted over the sign in his yard promoting the anti-discrimination bill. Other signs have reportedly been stolen and otherwise destroyed.

Police filed a report on the spray-painted sign as a criminal mischief misdemeanor but won’t be investigating because they lack evidence and suspects. It’s also been reported that no officers were dispatched to photograph the vandalized sign.

From Keep Fayetteville Fair, the pro-LGBT campaign:

“I saw the vandalism with my family this morning. I have very young children and now I have to explain to my kids why there is hate scribbled across a sign encouraging inclusion,” Michelle Bell, Fayetteville student and resident said. “I get to tell my kids that if they grow up and are LGBT we might no longer belong to a place that will accept who they are. My family moved to Fayetteville because it was a place of acceptance. I am going to keep fighting to keep Fayetteville fair.”

What’s more: The anti-gay group has chosen a website domain conveniently similar to that of the other side, tricking people into finding their stuff. More specifically, fairfayetteville.com leads you to the campaign for tolerance and equality, while keepfayettevillefair.com is the hatemongering pro-repeal site. It redirects to repeal119.com, which tells constituents:

Even with multiple amendments, this ordinance attacks rights guaranteed to us by the Constitution of the United States as well as the Arkansas Constitution. This ordinance also creates an environment where sexual predators can use the cover of an anti-discrimination law to enter previously gender-private areas causing a major public safety risk.  Finally, the new regulations also put businesses in danger of being criminally charged for the complaints of a disgruntled employee.  While some intentions of the ordinance may be good, this law is bad for safety, bad for business, and bad for our individual freedoms.

The repeal campaign is also soliciting donations — probably for more spray paint or something? Sleazy as it gets.

(Thanks to Richard for the link)

Bus Shelter Ads Call Out Canada’s Publicly-Funded Religious Schools as a “Human Rights Disgrace”

Beginning in the last week of November, a series of ads focused on public funding for Catholic religious schools showed up in Winnipeg bus shelters. The ad campaign, deliberately distributed mainly in the vicinity of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights to target its visitors with food for thought, has been financed and assembled by OneSchoolSystem.org, an Ottawa-based advocacy group.

The four ads appearing in Winnipeg are as follows:

Okay, so they’re not exactly showcasing Canadian diversity or practicing the inclusion they preach. Nonetheless, they make a valid point: why is government funding used to finance an exclusionary system that propagates religious dogma and doctrine? Canadians generally pride themselves on having a just and tolerant society: after all, we’re so polite and nice! Scratch the surface, though, and you’ll find some nasty discrimination that’s well worth talking about.

The ads have been installed in Winnipeg bus shelters by Outfront Media, formerly known as CBS Outdoor… but they’re not the first company One School System approached. Originally, the ads were submitted to Pattison Outdoor, which refused to accept them. Dr. Richard Thain, speaking on behalf of One School System and its ad campaign, explained that the company cited violations of the Canadian Code of Advertising Standards as a reason to decline the ads. However, he added, “Pattison Outdoor has never told me which words or phrases they thought violated the Ad Council code.”

He went on to say:

It is embarrassing and disgraceful to be told by the UN Human Rights Committee that Canada/Ontario is guilty of religious discrimination. Hopefully these ads will encourage others to speak out and join the growing number of Canadians who think it is time for our government to treat all citizens equally… It is shocking that Pattison Outdoor arbitrarily denied my right to express my view on the one-school-system concept, a view that has been expressed numerous times in editorials and opinion pieces in newspapers across Ontario in recent months. I am presently considering my legal options.

Thain refers to the United Nations Human Rights Committee’s 1999 ruling that Ontario was practicing religious descrimination by funding Catholic education while refusing to fund religious education for other groups. While the ruling holds Canada at large to account, any practical response to the ruling must be made at the pronvicial level. While the roots of government-funded Catholic education go back to the original Canadian Constitution of 1867, many Canadians feel that the system has outlived its usefulness.

Thain expressed gratitude towards Outfront Media, characterizing them as people “who understand the fundamental principle of freedom of expression and have enabled me to express this view.”

Anyone interested in the group’s advocacy efforts can visit OneSchoolSystem.org to learn more or offer support.

A New Study Shows Americans May Not Be As Confident in Creationism, but There’s Still Reason to Worry

Over the summer, when Gallup released its biennial Creation vs. Evolution survey, we learned that 42% of Americans believed in Creationism (God created humans in our present form), 31% of Americans believed in God-guided evolution, and 19% of Americans were actually right:

The numbers have been more or less like this for a few decades, as you can see, with only minor fluctuations.

But a new study put out by Dr. Jonathan Hill of Calvin College (a religious school) with the help of the BioLogos Foundation (which seeks to reconcile science and religion) sought to go into more depth about what people actually believe.

Slate‘s William Saletan summarized the findings and writes that, while Creationism is still pervasive in our culture, not everyone is of the Ken Ham variety. In fact, only about 15% of Americans would agree with him and say they’re absolutely or very certain God created us in our present form over the last 10,000 years.

That might sound nice, but in a more scientifically literate society, every one of those bars would look more like this:

Still, Saletan says, there’s reason to be optimistic. For example:

The next most popular statement was that “Adam and Eve, the first humans according to the Bible, were real, historical people.” Fifty-six percent of respondents affirmed this statement. But when they were pressed, only 44 percent said they were absolutely or very certain about it. A majority became a minority.

My concern, though, isn’t that less than half of people are pretty damn certain Adam and Eve existed. It’s that most Americans still harbor delusions that they existed at all, even if they’re not confident about it.

This is the pretty much the case down the line. There’s no reason for me to think things are getting any better, even if there may be silver linings everywhere.

What about teaching science in science class? Once again, look at Saletan’s summary:

When people were asked whether evolution, creationism, intelligent design, or “some combination” of them should be taught in public schools, only 18 percent said evolution should be taught exclusively. A majority, 55 percent, preferred “some combination.” But these people are pluralists, not absolutists. Only 19 percent of respondents said that creationism — the theory “that biological life was directly created by God in its present form at one point in time” — should be taught exclusively.

Those 55% may be pluralists… but they clearly have a gross misunderstanding of what constitutes science. In their world, any popular theory should be taught in the classroom regardless of how much evidence there is for it.

That’s the bigger problem here. That’s what the problem always has been. It’s not just that there are way too many Creationists out there. It’s that even people who aren’t Young Earth Creationists think there’s some validity to those beliefs, and they have no problem with those beliefs being taught in school.

This is why other countries laugh at us when it comes to science education. What’s obvious to everyone else is still in doubt in large parts of America.

Even if only 15% of Americans are bottom-of-the-barrel Creationists, there are plenty more — still a majority of Americans — whose views have nothing in common with where the evidence leads. There’s little to be excited about to that end.

Catholic League Billboard Compares Different Kinds of Christian Persecution

The Catholic League’s Bill Donohue recently announced his group’s latest billboard, going up in Los Angeles:

NOT ALL CHRISTIAN HATERS ARE EQUAL:
ABROAD WE’RE BEHEADED
AT HOME WE’RE BASHED

THE DIFFERENCES ARE PROFOUND;
SO ARE THE SIMILARITIES

HAVE A PEACEFUL AND JOYOUS CHRISTMAS

Riiiight. Because the people who fight for church/state separation are totally similar to members of ISIS who behead Christians.

Says Donohue:

… both need to be challenged. Christians are fed up with the barbarians abroad and the bigots at home. It’s time all these bullies learned to practice the virtue of tolerance and the meaning of diversity.

It’s also interesting to note that Donohue is condemning the beheadings while his group’s logo includes a weapon used to kill other people. I’m sure that irony escaped him completely.

It’s a logo that screams, Have a peaceful and joyous Christmas… OR ELSE!

The billboard will be up through December 28.

Why is the U.S. Becoming Increasingly Secular? A New Book Explains This and More

Phil Zuckerman is a professor of sociology and secular studies at Pitzer College who writes about atheism beyond the issue of God’s existence. His previous books include Society Without God and Faith No More: Why People Reject Religion. (In case you missed it, he was also a recent guest on our podcast.)

His latest book, Living the Secular Life, is all about how atheists get by without God.

In the excerpt below, Zuckerman offers an explanation of why the religious demographics are shifting in our direction:

What is going on? How do we explain this recent wave of secularization that is washing over… so much of America as well?

The answer to these questions is actually much less theological or philosophical than one might think. It is simply not the case that in recent years tens of millions of Americans have suddenly started doubting the cosmological or ontological arguments for the existence of God, or that hundreds of thousands of other Americans have miraculously embraced the atheistic naturalism of Denis Diderot. Sure, this may be happening here and there, in this or that dorm room or on this or that Tumblr page. The best-sellers written by Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris — as well as the irreverent impiety and flagrant mockery of religion by the likes of Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Bill Maher, House, South Park, and Family Guy — have had some impact on American culture. As we have seen, a steady, incremental uptick of philosophical atheism and agnosticism is discernible in America in recent years. But the larger reality is that for the many millions of Americans who have joined the ranks of the nonreligious, the causes are most likely to be political and sociological in nature.

For starters, we can begin with the presence of the religious right, and the backlash it has engendered. Beginning in the 1980s, with the rise of such groups as the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition, the closeness of conservative Republicanism with evangelical Christianity has been increasingly tight and publicly overt. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, more and more politicians on the right embraced the conservative Christian agenda, and more and more outspoken conservative Christians allied themselves with the Republican Party. Examples abound, from Michele Bachmann to Ann Coulter, from Mike Huckabee to Pat Robertson, and from Rick Santorum to James Dobson. With an emphasis on seeking to make abortion illegal, fighting against gay rights (particularly gay marriage), supporting prayer in schools, advocating “abstinence only” sex education, opposing stem cell research, curtailing welfare spending, supporting Israel, opposing gun control, and celebrating the war on terrorism, conservative Christians have found a warm welcome within the Republican Party, which has been clear about its openness to the conservative Christian agenda. This was most pronounced during the eight years that George W. Bush was in the White House.

What all of this this has done is alienate a lot of left-leaning or politically moderate Americans from Christianity. Sociologists Michael Hout and Claude Fischer have published compelling research indicating that much of the growth of “nones” in America is largely attributable to a reaction against this increased, overt mixing of Christianity and conservative politics. The rise of irreligion has been partially related to the fact that lots of people who had weak or limited attachments to religion and were either moderate or liberal politically found themselves at odds with the conservative political agenda of the Christian right and thus reacted by severing their already somewhat weak attachment to religion. Or as sociologist Mark Chaves puts it, “After 1990 more people thought that saying you were religious was tantamount to saying you were a conservative Republican. So people who are not Republicans now are more likely to say that they have no religion.”

A second factor that helps account for the recent rise of secularity in America is the devastation of, and reaction against, the Catholic Church’s pedophile priest scandal. For decades the higher-ups in the Catholic Church were reassigning known sexual predators to remote parishes rather than having them arrested and prosecuted. Those men in authority thus engaged in willful cover-ups, brash law-breaking, and the aggressive slandering of accusers — and all with utter impunity. The extent of this criminality is hard to exaggerate: over six thousand priests have now been credibly implicated in some form of sex abuse, five hundred have been jailed, and more victims have been made known than one can imagine. After the extent of the crimes — the rapes and molestations as well as the cover-ups — became widely publicized, many Americans, and many Catholics specifically, were disgusted. Not only were the actual sexual crimes themselves morally abhorrent, but the degree to which those in positions of power sought to cover up these crimes and allow them to continue was truly shocking. The result has been clear: a lot of Catholics have become ex-Catholics. For example, consider the situation in New England. Between 2000 and 2010, the Catholic Church lost 28 percent of its members in New Hampshire and 33 percent of its members in Maine, and closed nearly seventy parishes — a quarter of the total number — throughout the Boston area. In 1990, 54 percent of Massachusetts residents identified as Catholic, but it was down to 39 percent in 2008. And according to an “American Values” survey from 2012, although nearly one-third of Americans report being raised Catholic, only 22 percent currently identify as such — a precipitous nationwide decline indeed.

Of course, the negative reaction against the religious right and the Catholic pedophile scandal both have to do explicitly with religion. But a very important third possible factor that may also account for the recent rise of secularity has nothing to do with religion. It is something utterly sociological: the dramatic increase of women in the paid labor force. British historian Callum Brown was the first to recognize this interesting correlation: when more and more women work outside the home, their religious involvement — as well as that of their families — tends to diminish. Brown rightly argues that it has been women who have historically kept their children and husbands interested and involved in religion. Then, starting in the 1960s, when more and more British women starting earning an income through work outside the home, their interest in — or time and energy for — religious involvement waned. And as women grew less religious, their husbands and children followed suit. We’ve seen a similar pattern in many other European nations, especially in Scandinavia: Denmark and Sweden have the lowest levels of church attendance in the world, and simultaneously, Danish and Swedish women have among the highest rates of outside-the-home employment of any women in the world. And the data shows a similar trajectory here in America. Back in the 1960s, only 11 percent of American households relied on a mother as their biggest or sole source of income. Today, more than 40 percent of American families are in such a situation. Thus it may very well be that as a significantly higher percentage of American moms earn a living in the paid labor force, their enthusiasm for and engagement with religion is being sapped, and that’s playing a role in the broader secularization of our country.

Living the Secular Life is available in bookstores and on Amazon beginning today.

…

Excerpted from Living the Secular Life by Phil Zuckerman. Reprinted by arrangement with Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, A Penguin Random House Company. Copyright © Phil Zuckerman, 2014