Westboro Baptist Bribed to Leave VT Funerals Alone

Via Prof. Friedman:

Westboro Baptist Bargains Away Virginia Tech Funeral Picketing For Radio Time

By Howard Friedman

Plans (previously reported here) by virulently anti-gay members of the Topeka, Kansas Westboro Baptist Church to picket funerals of the Virginia Tech victims have now been called off in a deal with a radio talk show host. The blog Straight, Not Narrow reported yesterday that church spokesperson Shirley Phelps-Roper will get 3 hours on the air with conservative radio host Mike Gallagher in exchange for calling off the funeral demonstrations. While a posting on Gallagher’s website is somewhat apologetic about the deal, Westboro describes the deal in contractual terms on its website. The church's earlier posting announcing the picketing of the first of the student funerals had said that the Virginia Tech killings were explainable as God "punishing America for her sodomite sins and for persecuting Westboro Baptist Church for warning America of her doom". Another of its postings says "The 33 Massacred at Virginia Tech died for America's sins against WBC."

I seriously expected one of the WBC to be added to the casualty list. If my son, or daughter, or wife, or sister, or mother, was lying dead in a casket and these people were standing a few feet away screaming that their death was God's wrath on butt sex, I would lose it. I would seriously, seriously lose it. And thus God would probably then use me as an instrument of his wrath to kill one of those hate-filled idiots.
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Technorati tags: God, Religion, Atheism

New PNAS Paper on Flagellum Evolution

Unfortunately, the paper, “Stepwise formation of the bacterial flagellar system,” is already getting reamed.

By Matzke:

Today the prestigious journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) put out an Advanced Online Publication paper on flagellum evolution entitled, “Stepwise formation of the bacterial flagellar system.” The paper is freely available via Open Access. I was initially excited that PNAS had published a paper on this topic, and furthermore that it cited the Pallen/Matzke essay on flagellum evolution, and Ian Musgrave’s excellent book chapter in Why Intelligent Design Fails.

Unfortunately, as I read the paper, my delight turned to concern, and then dismay. The paper makes some potentially useful points and explores new territory in a few areas. But much of it ranges from dubious to just irremediably wrong.

I am not talking about minor issues, like the fact that the authors endorse the “flagellum first, type 3 secretion derived” position, which is currently debated by the experts. I am talking about things like the conclusion of the paper...

That stinks. We'll have to wait and see how the data and arguments pan out. Also see his update to the original post. I'm a little skeptical that it could've made it through peer-review if it is so poor as Matzke says, and I made a comment which is a little critical as to his method of rejecting the BLAST homologies on structure maps alone:

We all know that protein structure and protein homology are notoriously difficult to correlate – elsewise, Pande wouldn’t have a gazillion PCs crunching the folding data. I, for one, would rather see the sequence data than the structural maps.

Matzke has a double B.S. Biology and Chemistry, although I don't know how hardcore his biochemistry and protein science knowledge is. This is definitely a very interesting paper and I am sure it will become fodder for ev/cre arguments for a while to come. I'll be following this closely.
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Technorati tags: Intelligent Design, Evolution, Creationism

Backlash at Haggard's Church -- When Giants Fall, Ripple Effects

As much as Christians want to believe that they can divorce their "truth" from those who deliver it to them, when the prophets are publicly exposed for their corruption, it simply ain't so:

As part of a severance package that will pay Haggard through 2007, Haggard agreed not only to leave town but to refrain from discussing the scandal publicly. He did not return messages Wednesday. Haggard's most recent annual salary was about $138,000, benefits excluded.

His former congregation has felt the sting of the scandal. Since Haggard's fall, attendance has fallen 20 percent and giving has dropped 10 percent, said Rob Brendle, an associate pastor. As a result of the decline, the church laid off 44 employees, or 12 percent of its work force. [emphasis mine]

Christianity, Judaism and Islam all claim to have messages from God. Of course, God is a funny character, who really needs us (for some strange reason) to convince each other that It exists. So when the "really special" ones among us, prophets and such, turn out to be "really fu^*&ng nasty", it raises a few question marks around the issue of whether the message was tainted by the messenger.

For instance, imagine that we found incontrovertible evidence that St. Paul used to rape children, even during his "vessel of truth" days. Do you really think that the faith people have in his writings as being inerrant would remain strong? Not so much.

Despite Christian attempts to convince us that their faith is never (mis)placed in a person, we all know better: the 'bibbal and the whole damn religion were written and constructed by people.

Lots of Christians claim that apostatasy can be blamed on fallen leaders. Perhaps in some cases it can. But in the same breath, they say contradictory and stupid things that insult the veracity of the ex-believer's once-genuine faith. They can't admit that some people see through the sham, facilitated by fallen heroes. Instead, they want to make it the apostate's fault for being let-down or, worse, 'just' an excuse.

Prof. Ruth Tucker lists those 5 myths concerning believers who leave the faith:

1) "They are angry and rebellious."
2) "They can be argued back into faith."
3) "Doubters can find help at Christian colleges and seminaries."
4) "They abandon their faith so that they can go out and sin freely."
5) "They were never sincere Christians to begin with."

I know I've certainly been accused of leaving Christianity due to numbers 1, 4 and 5. I've also heard all five of these myths about apostates. I do find it rather humorous when people think that atheism is necessary for #4 -- as an excuse -- they tell me I'm an atheist so I can "do what I want", or something of the sort. The funniest thing about that is that one can believe in God and do what one wants.

There are Hedonist Christians, liberal Christians, and Evangelicals are nabbed all the time in sex scandals, child porn cases, as closeted homosexuals, etc. So is it necessary to abandon ones faith in order to pursue sin/pleasure? No. Certainly you could argue whether these people truly believe, but there is simply no way to prove it one way or the other.

Just ask Phillip Distasio, leader of Arcadian Fields Ministries, who was charged with sexually abusing 9 disabled boys. Just ask the Rev. Daniel Schulte, 53, of Chicago, IL, who was recently convicted for child porn. Just ask the Baptist minister Rev. Eugene Paul White, 71, recently sentenced to 180 years to life in prison for 12 counts of lewd and lascivious acts with a minor under 14, convicted of molesting his 4 adopted foster daughters. Just ask Shawn Davies, 33, of Scott County, KY. Shawn is charged with 9 counts of 2nd-degree statutory sodomy, 7 counts of furnishing pornographic materials to minors, 5 counts of use of a child in a sexual performance, 2 counts of endangering the welfare of a minor, and 4 other charges...one of the sodomies took place with a boy under 14 at a church youth lock-in, where he was the youth minister, at First Baptist Church in Greenwood, KY...

Need I go on? Any of you who subscribe to Freethought Today know of their "Black Collar Crime Blotter" section, which every month is [sadly] filled with these exact same clergy-related crime stories.

In other words, if #4 were true, it would not be necessary to "abandon faith", I could still go to church every Sunday, pray (or not), read the Bible (or not), and repent of my sinful ways (or not). I'm sure that if you asked these fellows, they surely wouldn't tell you they were atheists. If I wanted to be like them, I could keep both my unbelief and my sins secret, couldn't I?

So at the end of the day, Christians want to call each other a great "man of God," yet prevent from associating the substance of the message with the messenger, yet at the same time blame apostates who stop thinking that any "special people" have an inside line to Jeebus, and accuse them of using excuses and/or being angry.

They don't see that the #4 above is destroyed by people like Ted Haggard -- they show us that there is no rational cause to abandon one's faith, or at least pretenses thereof, if all that one wants is a little sin on the side.
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Technorati tags: God, Religion

BattleCry San Francisco, Another Rally for Militant Theonomy

Rolling Stone has an excellent new article, "Teenage Holy War", on the fundamentalist BattleCry movement, and links to lots of video on it:

"Just as the events of September 11th, 2001, permanently changed our perspective on the world," Luce writes, "so we ought to be awakened to the alarming influence of today's culture terrorists. They are wealthy, they are smart, and they are real."

Luce is forty-five, his brown hair floppy, his lips pouty. On the screens above the stage, his green eyes blink furiously. "The devil hates us," he exhorts, "and we gotta be ready to fight and not be these passive little lukewarm, namby-pamby, kum-ba-yah, thumb-sucking babies that call themselves Christians. Jesus? He got mad!" Luce considers most evangelicals too soft, too ready to pass off as piety their preference for a bland suburban lifestyle. He hates what he sees as the weakness of "accepting" Christ, of "trusting" the Lord. "I want an attacking church!" he shouts, his normally smooth tones raw and desperate and alarming. He isn't just looking for followers -- he wants "stalkers" who'll bring a criminal passion to their pursuit of godliness.

I mentioned BattleCry a while back. The militant theonomists like Ron Luce have been working hard to infuse the imagery of "spiritual warfare" into the minds of teens and kids. They want these kids to see themselves as "warrior for God," and we secularists as "enemies," or "fighting for Satan." ABC Nightline had a segment on Battlecry which I'm posting below.


Last year, Sunsara Taylor wrote an article on BattleCry, a ministry which uses military allegories and targets youth in rallies, entitled "Fear and Loathing at Philadelphia's BattleCry."

Immediately afterward, a preacher took the microphone and led the crowd in prayer. Among other things, he asked the attendees to “Thank God for giving us George Bush.”

On his cue, about 17,000 youths from upward of 2,000 churches across America and Canada directed their thanks heavenward in unison.

Throughout the three and a half hours of BattleCry’s first session, I thought of only one analogy that fit the experience: This must have been what it felt like to watch the Hitler Youth, filled with self-righteous pride, proclaim the supremacy of their beliefs and their willingness to shed blood for them.

And lest you think this is idle paranoia, BattleCry founder Ron Luce told the crowds the next morning (May 13) that he plans to launch a “blitzkrieg” in the communities, schools, malls, etc. against those who don’t share his theocratic vision of society.

Blitzkrieg.

Nothing like a little Nazi imagery to whip up the masses...

...Luce put great emphasis on following every word in the Bible, treating it as an “instruction book,” even when a person doesn’t understand or agree. This is, of course, the logic that leads to the stoning of gays, non-virgin brides, disobedient children and much more—because the Bible says so.

Chillingly, when I confronted Ron explicitly about these passages, he refused to disavow them. During the afternoon preceding the May 12 rally, Luce and about 300 BattleCry acolytes (almost entirely youths) rallied in front of Philadelphia’s Constitution Hall—the location having been chosen because Luce wants to “restore” the Founding Fathers’ vision of a religious society (never mind that the Founders enshrined in the Constitution an explicitly secular framework of government).

I and about 20 people representing various anti-Bush, atheistic and anti-Iraq-war factions made our way into the rally and began interacting with the youths assembled. Some said openly that it was OK that George Bush’s lies have cost the lives of thousands of Americans and Iraqis. Why was it OK? Because “God put him [Bush] there.”

For more on that story, see two articles on DailyKos:
1) DailyKos 1
2) DailyKos 2

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Technorati tags: God, Religion, Church-state, Politics

Disco Institute's "Darwin v. Design"...With No Darwin

It's always easier to win a scientific dispute when you only bring one side to the table.

Remember Disco's last "scientific conference" in Knoxville? This time, at SMU, things turned a bit ugly: dissenting voices were forcibly removed from the "conference" by police, and hate text messages were received that said, "shut the f*** up," and "shove that sign up your ass." From the article:

He [Lee Strobel] also decided to preach about how he believed the world's creator and designer was the "God of the Bible," as he said. That's interesting, seeing as how he said nothing of the God of the Jews, Muslims and other religions; apparently Christianity's God is the only one we have to believe in. And his entire speech dealt with differentiating atheists from Christians, where he seemed to use the word atheist as a synonym for "Darwinist" or "evolutionist."

At this point, we were fed up with the sheer lack of science being discussed. (Remember, ID theorists claim to support a science, not a religion.) So we held up our signs. They bore questions such as, "Why do we have wisdom teeth if they do not fit our jaws?" and "Why did it take 20 species of elephant to go extinct to get two species that survived?" and "Why do the ribosomes (protein synthesizing machinery) in our mitochondria match those of bacteria?" to name a few.

Well, after holding up these signs for a while, the men on stage noticed and decided to answer one of them. They chose the last one, regarding ribosomes. Immediately, the only person on stage with any knowledge of biology, Michael Behe, took up the question.

His answer was that ID theory does not allow for explanations regarding interspecies commonalities such as those implied in the question.

In short, his answer was that he couldn't explain it with ID theory.

But then he went on, describing how a Creator may have given humans similar ribosomes for no good reason. His logic was that when one sees a car with a radio, one can ask how that radio got there and there are many explanations.

One such explanation was provided by Behe, and it was so very realistic: He said the radio could've fallen from an apartment and landed in the car, suggesting that a Creator could have simply thrown ribosomes all over the place, and they just landed in humans by chance. Very likely, indeed.

Check it out. Both hilarious and sad. I hope Dr. Moore is right and those jokers are being slowly bled dry as the foaming fundies jump ship financially for good ol' YEC.

In fact, it was so friendly that as I was waiting in the auditorium lobby for the conference to start, I struck up a conversation with Todd Norquist, one of the Discovery Institute's employees in the Center for Science and Culture (the department that advocates for Intelligent Design). I asked him how many of these conferences were planned by the Discovery Institute, and he seemed hesitant, telling me that he didn't know if any more of them were going to be possible, since the costs were too high for the Institute to handle. He mentioned something about it costing $70,000, although I don't recall if that was the amount to produce the Dallas event alone, or if that was the current cost for the whole series thus far (the only previous event being in Knoxville). He complained that there had been virtually no money allocated for advertising, the sole contribution being $1000 paid to Scott Wilder for an "interview" of Stephen Meyer a week previously. He then told me (quite openly, also, which I thought was odd) that the financial situation of the Discovery Institute was grim, and that they were "bleeding money" and were "barely able to keep the lights on in Seattle."

I think it was at about this point that he may have realized that he probably shouldn't be advertising this, and so he abruptly asked me if I was a Christian. I shook my head no, and said, "not anymore, but I used to be." He nodded silently, and then quickly found somewhere else to be. But right after he left, I started chatting up another guy who claimed to be skeptical of "macroevolution," so I spend the next half hour or so explaining the molecular evidence.

But it's probably too much to hope for -- there are always suckers with religious fervor coupled to money, ready to throw it at anything that makes them feel more secure in their magical and wishful thinking.
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Technorati tags: God, Religion, Intelligent Design, Evolution, Creationism

Exchange With Dan Marvin

A few weeks ago, a comment got left on a fairly old thread here by Dan Marvin, and we started an exchange. He then commented at Gator Freethought on the Tabash-Friel debate, and since I saw that he was trying to appeal to me personally I decided a switch to email would probably be more apropos than using our group's website. After the last email he sent me, Dan left a few more remarks at the Gator Freethought site, but I deleted them and am opening up this thread for the conversation to continue (if he should want it to) in this comment section. Dan feels I misrepresented his remarks (threats) about my wife going to hell, so I've reproduced all the emails in their entirety.

-----Original Message-----
From: S. nsfl
Sent: Wednesday, April 11, 2007 5:36 PM
To: Dan Marvin
Subject: Re: comment

Dan,

Really easier to email than leave comments back-and-forth.

Now, we are certainly going to disagree on many things, but I want to cut to the chase: the onus is on you. What I mean by that is that scientists have published hundreds of thousands of articles full of data on evolutionary biology. Physicists have published about the same number on topics that address the evolution of stars, our cosmos, the age of the earth, sun, galaxy, and even the universe. You reject it all. They have laid out their case in a systematic, logical fashion, displaying their presuppositions and evidences clearly. You just heard some arguments from people you think are trustworthy (Debmski, Wells, Meyers...all the Disco ID-iots), and so you're convinced that the global scientific community, of all creeds, races, religions, and backgrounds, are all, universally and emphatically *WRONG*.

Who is the burden of proof on? You!

Therefore, I ought to make you be more specific. When you say, "the flagellum," for instance, *which* flagellum? Did you know that a huge distinction must be made between extant bacterial flagella and archael flagella and eukaryotic flagella? Probably not. The ID-iocy movement doesn't like details.

http://wiki.cotch.net/index.php/Flagellum

Perhaps you would be interested in reading something I've written that addresses the supposed irreducible complexity (IC) of the flagellum:

http://nonserviamergofiatlux.blogspot.com/2006/11/responding-to-id-review-of-their.html

It's very important to get creationists to give you a definition of information. If they can't even define it, then it should tell you (in a hurry) that they are relying upon colloquial "instincts" about information, rather than having a sound argument based on mathematics. There are really only two commonly accepted ways to define information, covered by either Shannon or by Kolmogorov. Both of these rely heavily upon the adage that, "complexity is non-compressibility" when it comes to information.

I can prove this to you by asking you to write a program that generates a given string of characters. The more complex the string, the less compressible your program or algorithm(s) will be. *THIS* is the sort of highly-technical, formal, *genuine* information theory that real mathematicians and computer scientists are quite familiar with. The sort that Dembski and others rely upon is the idea that "information is a message!" Which can be true, but can also be quite false.

I strongly recommend checking out computer scientist Mark Chu-Carroll's work in debunking the "information problem" for evolution. Start with the first two posts on what information *is*, then move on to the three indices: http://recursed.blogspot.com/2006/03/nancy-pearcey-creationists-miss.html http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2006/08/qa_what_is_information.php http://goodmath.blogspot.com/2006/06/information-theory-index.html http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/bad_math/debunking_creationism/ http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/information/infotheory.html

Edward Max also has a nice write-up (see section 1.2.2):

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/fitness/

What you find in a hurry, my friend, is that the creationists don't know their hands from their asses, which is something we scientists have not been surprised about for decades.

If you think my web sources are wrong/dumb, I have a simple request of you: go to the nearest university, and ask a professor of mathematics or computer science how to define information, and thus how you might go about measuring the "information content of DNA" or some such other exercise that creationists love to hint around about but display their inability to produce any answers to whatsoever.

In the end, my suggestion is that you take each of these supposed "disproofs" of evolution and examine them *thoroughly*! Talk to all kinds of different experts, read books and articles at the library...actually do *research* on it instead of *trusting* these people who make money off of your credulity! That's what scientists do. People like them, all they do is take our (scientists) research and write books purporting to show how our work supports their anti-evolutionary stance, this despite the fact that only a fraction of actual scientists reject evolution. Think long and hard about that factoid.

Take care Dan, and don't write me back until you've done some HW. You can tell that I have.

With warm regards,
nsfl

-----Original Message-----
From: Dan Marvin
Sent: Thu, 12 Apr 2007 15:51:49 -0700
To: S. nsfl
Subject: Re: comment

nsfl,

I respect the fact that you may not want to be humiliated in a public forum like your blog so we can do this in private.

“What you find in a hurry, my friend”

If 15-18 years is in a hurry then fine.

“When you say, "the flagellum," for instance, *which* flagellum? “

Bacterial flagellum is what I wrote right.

“You reject it all.”

One reason is that there is no logic in most of the arguments. (The classic frog turns into a prince fairytale) The Bible is clear and makes sense.

I admit some of the links you gave me went right over my limited brain. You are missing some huge point’s dude, and you are dodging the key point made here that God exists.

I am beginning to believe there is nothing that God can do to prove his existence to you, buddy. You will search so hard to find an alternative answer like your friend Eddie in that debate. I cherish how God simplifies things for us for us to comprehend, example: Jesus came to take the punishment that we deserve for breaking his laws, the Commandments. I am partial to Astrophysics I must admit, they use simplified terms to describe things because the universe is complicated enough. If you see spots on the sun they call it sun spots and if you see a hole in the universe that is black they call it black holes. They actually try to help people understand things in terms an 8 yr old understands. You, my friend, might not be like that.

I believe atheists have an ignorance fallacy that is very common. Explaining away Bacterial flagella or Origin of Information in some form that you accept as truth will not help you in your last days here on earth. Think about when you die, why would you delay to repent and put your trust in the savior? Are you waiting for a better offer? What does God have to do to prove his existence to you? Remember Todd pointed out the parable of the rich man and Lazarus what more “evidence” do you need. 1 Corinthians 1:19,1 Corinthians 2:14

I feel for you because you believe to have all the answers when actually God views you as a fool Psalm 14:1

Think about it, can man really explain what God knows.

“Do you know how many hairs are on the back of a fully grown male Tibetan yak? Probably not. I think, therefore, that it is reasonable for me to conclude that there are some things you don't know. It is important to ask these questions because there are some people who think they know everything. Let's say that you know an incredible one percent of all the knowledge in the universe. To know 100 percent, you would have to know everything. There wouldn't be a rock in the universe that you would not be intimately familiar with, or a grain of sand that you would not be aware of. You would know everything that has happened in history, from that which is common knowledge to the minor details of the secret love life of Napoleon's great-grandmother's black cat's fleas. You would know every hair of every head, and every thought of every heart. All history would be laid out before you, because you would be omniscient (all-knowing).

Bear in mind that one of the greatest scientists who ever lived, Thomas Edison, said, "We do not know a millionth of one percent about anything." Let me repeat: Let's say that you have an incredible one percent of all the knowledge in the universe. Would it be possible, in the ninety-nine percent of the knowledge that you haven't yet come across, that there might be ample evidence to prove the existence of God? If you are reasonable, you will be forced to admit that it is possible. Somewhere, in the knowledge you haven't yet discovered, there could be enough evidence to prove that God does exist.” Ray Comfort

I will help you out in any way but you must understand that I can find a tremendous amount of flaws in Richard Dawkins theories and yes I have examples, but that will not help me or you when we face God on THAT DAY. BTW did you read my response to you on my blog?

For Him,

Dan

-----Original Message-----
From: S. nsfl
Sent: Thursday, April 12, 2007 4:51 PM
To: Dan Marvin
Subject: Re: comment

Dan,

Humiliated? Riiiiiiiight...(Dr. Evil) I don't want to clutter up my freethought group's webpage with a 1-on-1 conversation with you. Tell you what, feel free to post *all* of my two emails and comments to you on your own blog, so that I will be publicly humiliated.

There are eubacteria, archaea bacteria, and then eurkaryotes, all of which possess versions of cilia and flagella, and all of which are different. ID-iots don't tell their followers about it, because it confuses the issue (and they don't like details).

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/87/12/4576

The Bible is clear and makes sense? That's why there are 5,000 denominations of Christians and why the Jews and Muslims use the same OT that you do? Once again, cue in Dr. Evil..."Riiiiiiiiiiiight..."

Okay, so let's keep it simple. Information's complexity *can* be measured, using Shannon or K-C theories. This is pure math, that's all. What does that tell us? That the more random and stochastic a string, the more information it contains. These are the most difficult to compress or to express in algorithmic form.

Evolution is based upon stochastic, random processes in chemistry and biology. There is MUCH noise generated in the processes of genetics. Thus, it makes *perfect* sense that information is generated by evolution. Information and noise are interrelated. The creationists have no way to present any intelligible argument against this, so they, like Ray Comfort, use *analogies* which appeal to our human understanding of human activities. For example -- "if you see a book, that didn't happen by chance!" Yes, sure...right...because we know what books are, who makes them, their language and how they are made.

On the contrary, when we "read" the "book" of DNA, what do we find? Lots of very very complex things that have arisen through millennia of random and stochastic processes accumulating. For example, a friend of mine once issued the following simple challenge to show a creationist how silly the "information disproves evolution" argument really is:

Sequence 1: cag tgt ctt ggg ttc tcg cct gac tac gag acg cgt ttg tct tta cag gtc ctc ggc cag cac ctt aga caa gca ccc ggg acg cac ctt tca gtg ggc act cat aat ggc gga gta cca agg agg cac ggt cca ttg ttt tcg ggc cgg cat tgc tca tct ctt gag att tcc ata ctt

Sequence 2: tgg agt tct aag aca gta caa ctc tgc gac cgt gct ggg gta gcc act tct ggc cta atc tac gtt aca gaa aat ttg agg ttg cgc ggt gtc ctc gtt agg cac aca cgg gtg gaa tgg ggg tct ctt acc aaa ggg ctg ccg tat cag gta cga cgt agg tat tgc cgt gat aga ctg

Please use your 'procedure', whatever it may be, to measure the 'genetic information' content of these two sequences. Please write down the step-by-step process by which you measured the 'genetic information' content of these two sequences, being as clear and/or specific as you can.

http://www.creationtalk.com/message-board-forum/post-27800.html#27800

(I'm "Skiddum" on that board)

There's an old saying about catching a bullshitter by forcing him to walk you through something step-by-step and explain it. Oh, wait...no there's not, but there should be.

Now, here's my challenge to you -- find me *anyone* who can tell me what the "information content" of that sequence is. Anyone. The only requirement is that they explain it all the way through. Please note that this doesn't mean "find me someone who knows the codon triplets and can tell me which amino acids these encode", although that would be an added bonus.

The logical fallacy argumentum ad ignorantium is when we try to use something we don't know *as evidence* that is supposed to support something we do. Here are two simple examples, (i) "Jim, how many miles are on that car? Jeez, Pat, I don't know, I've never seen it before. But, the miles on that car prove that it's old!" (ii) "Tommy, my mommy and daddy told me babies come from a sperm and an egg? No way Jackie! I don't know where they come from, but I know that the stork brings them!"

These are two examples of someone postulating a possibility (i) the car is old; (ii) the stork brings babies, and trying to use their ignorance as if it is *evidence* for those propositions.

In the world of creationism and ID-iocy, it is: "Scientists Asimov tells me that the universe is 13 bln years old, and he explained why scientists think that way. But he doesn't know what came before that! Therefore, God exists!" and "Evolution can't fill in every single hole in our knowledge, and has unexplained questions. Therefore, creationism is true!"

What you guys suffer from is a basic inability to grasp your own non sequiturs. Even *if* evolution was wrong, it would *not* mean that the Evangelical YEC is true. There are an infinity of other possibilities, from natural explanations to other religious myths. It is simply a false dilemma to claim that, "Either evolution or YEC."

That's why Ray Comfort's argument below is wrong and stupid. I don't *have to know* anything. I simply claim, "I don't believe in your God, for reasons X, Y and Z." End of story. Do I claim that I know everything? Of course not! But when you claim that you *DO* know, and I ask you *HOW* you know, you can't answer me by asking me if I have all the answers! I don't claim to. You do! You're the one who claims to know all this stuff that is contradicted entirely by modern science. And then when I ask you to give me some semblence of a rational answer, you would just try to debunk science, as if this automatically means you would win. Even if science is wrong, if you have no comparable evidence and methodology, then you have nothing but blind faith! Which is exactly all you have.

In the end, all you can say is, "My god might exist!" To which I shrug my shoulders and walk away -- millions of gods *might* exist. I need evidence and compelling arguments to believe in any one of them, which I don't have. That's why I'm an atheist. It's not because I know it all. It's because you know nothing to make me believe otherwise. You're a dying breed, my friend, and your particular brand of religion is just one of millions that has co-evolved with humanity and its culture for eons. Some have gone extinct, and others have adapted, like yours.

With warm regards,

nsfl

PS: Get a Gmail account. Hotmail is outmoded.

-----Original Message-----
From: Dan Marvin
Sent: Thu, 12 Apr 2007 23:01:00 -0700
To: S. nsfl
Subject: Re: comment

Dude,

You are cracking me up. I don’t care if you actually know how to split atoms into mutated beer making zygotes. You are a draft dodger.

“Okay, so let's keep it simple. Information's complexity *can* be measured, using Shannon or K-C theories”

Are you listening to yourself? Really that is keeping it simple? Really? Are you kidding? Are you trying to flex in front of a mirror or something? How about this: Let’s keep it simple, have you ever lied? The 9th commandment in Revelations 21:8 it says all liars will have their part in the lake of fire. (Unbelievers also for that matter) Umm are you a believer nsfl?

“That's why there are 5,000 denominations of Christians”

I have done some advanced studies about this subject and they all may be wrong, I don’t know yet. That is one of the debates that I want to either be in or be in the audience. My opener would be “The mere fact there are different denominations negates the one true way as talked about in Jeremiah 32:38-40 . I did studies about the word church in the bible and found this: "Church" in the original text is "Ecclesia”. Ecclesia means convocation, gathering, congregation, meeting, etc. "Ecclesia tou demou" (meeting of the citizens). Not a building but a gathering.

On my site I have a link to verses that point to the possibility that Church is not the answer God still is. If you belive you must go to church, I give you this.

Again, on ignorance fallacy here is an example

“Hundreds of years ago, scientists made the same claim against bacteria – “I don’t see it, so it must not exist. These early skeptics fell into the trap of appealing to their own ignorance – another type of fallacy.”

I submit this:

For hundreds of years, atheists made the same claim against God – “I don’t see it, so it must not exist. These early skeptics fell into the trap of appealing to their own ignorance – another type of fallacy.”

“What you guys suffer from is a basic inability to grasp your own non sequiturs”

Great! Now you have me looking up Latin. You have me in stitches you are a funny nerd (a compliment because I claim geek status myself) if I was there next to you I would pinch your cheeks. God hates prideful boasters BTW so stop the flexing, muscleman. Yes, you think your brain is big, we get it, but that is just not the case (according to God) although I like you.

“I need evidence and compelling arguments to believe in any one of them, which I don't have”

Yes you do but you are choosing to hide behind man made arguments against God but none of it will work with God. You will claim to him “but God you haven’t shown me enough evidence” and he will spew you out and send you to the abyss. I would love nothing more to share a coffee with you in heaven someday and we say to each other ‘whew that was close, I almost didn’t take that leap of faith and ended up in hell” Just put Jesus on like you would a parachute dude, you claim you need proof and God says he will give it to you and will manifest himself to you but you must go to him on his terms not yours. He manifested himself to me and gave me undeniable proof without a doubt and I would die for him gladly. I am not afraid of a guy with a gun but I am afraid what God will do to him if he pulls the trigger when it is pointing at me.

PS: Get a Gmail account. Hotmail is outmoded.

I am old school, I know and I even own Google stock. I do have Gmail accounts but I can not sign in with multiple emails at least I don’t think I can still. Unfortunately I am using Outlook and I can not configure Gmail to it so I wait until I either stop using outlook or Google comes up with something with as many or same features.

In the end, all you can say is, "My god might exist!"

God does exist. Do you want to see your wife in hell burning forever? I went to your web site and saw your wife (marriage umm invented in the bible I believe) and my heart aches to think that because of your stubbornness and “she stands by her man” that she may not get to go to heaven. Do the leap of faith for her, challenge God himself. Pray to him and ask him to manifest himself as promised in John 14:21 and you promise to repent and trust in him in faith. HE WILL I wouldn’t lie to you, at least he wouldn’t. Give it time, and grow in his word (The Bible) I thought I was a Christian for years but I just believed in Jesus but that doesn’t matter (I found out later) what matters is if Jesus knows who YOU are. When he knew me he manifested himself to me and changed my heart forever. If you only knew me before I was a Christian then after you would be a believer easily.

Do you know what marriage is, God created it for us to have role play because when we get to heaven we followers of Christ will be his Jesus’ bride. He is the head and we are the body. In marriage on earth YOU are the head and your wife is the body of the family and she submits to you because you are the “captain” of the ship and have ultimate responsibility of the family (I assume you don’t have kids, if you do you will see how God works, I have three). What if someone was to rape your wife or mine and never gets caught would you consider it justice? Don’t you want a system of perfect justice? God makes sure there is justice in this perfect universe. God is the bully’s bully and I can relate to that. We can go into later how evolution removes morals and that survival of the fittest condones raping of woman and children to advance the seed of the strongest and God’s morals does not, Seals gets raped everyday all the time, but I am getting tired I have a life to lead.

I really care enough about you to tell you that you are wrong. Perfect love is a constant confronter. It takes far more love to confront then to just ignore the situation. I can’t watch a child perish in a burning home and I cannot stand idle watching you perish. We may disagree but your salvation is the most important thing in the world even more then your kids or wife or school or anything. In a plane you are instructed to put your oxygen mask on first then your kids so you do not pass out and you both die. So nsfl save yourself, put the mask of God on and then you can put one on your wife and future kids. He is right here waiting for you to put on the mask then he will save you. Go talk to him not me but if you need help I am here for you.

With love,

For Him,

Dan

At this point, Dan may take over my comment box and go wild. I have very little left to say to him unless he moves back into an intellectually-tenable position. We started out on scientific arguments, which he promptly avoided when I called his bluff. He quickly moved to question-begging and emotive pleas by telling me to think of my wife burning in hell. These guys are pretty weak, and it shows -- they can't win an argument so instead choose resorting to the "You better believe, or else!". If evidence is lacking, try threats!
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Technorati tags: God, Religion, Atheism, Philosophy, Intelligent Design, Evolution, Creationism

Dixie County's Liability Insurer Drops Coverage -- County Faces Huge Potential Losses

John Pieret pointed out an angle on the 10C case in Dixie County that I had not yet thought of:

...it is unlikely that any insurance carrier the county might have would consent to Liberty Counsel representing its interests, so that probably means that the county is uninsured or, as was the case in the Dover Intelligent Design case, the county commissioners are violating the standard policy provisions, allowing the insurer to disclaim. [bold emphasis mine]

After doing a little digging, I found out that he was dead on target:

The Board voted unanimously to let Liberty Counsel represent the county in the lawsuit filed by the ACL. The ACLU filed the lawsuit in an attempt to have the Ten Commandments monument moved from the courthouse steps. County Attorney Leenette McMillan informed the Board that by choosing Liberty Counsel to represent the county in the lawsuit, the county will not be covered by its existing liability company. The Board chose Liberty Counsel because of the firm’s expertise in this type of lawsuit. Liberty Counsel has agreed to represent the county free of charge. (source) [bold emphasis mine]

Wow. I am going to make some more phone calls and find out more about the ramifications of losing your liability coverage. I want to know exactly how much risk they're taking here, and their citizens deserve to be informed. I know the ACLU's policy is not to pursue much in damages (if any -- in this case, it is "not to exceed $20"), but I wonder if that "kid gloves" strategy ought to be amended in the face of stubborn and stupid decisions like Dixie County has made...

My detailed analysis of the legal issues can be found here, and everything I've written on this situation, including extensive local media coverage, here.
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Technorati tags: Religion, Church-state, Politics

Nice Article on Chimps in the NYT

John Wilford's article, "Almost Human, and Sometimes Smarter", is on chimp's superior memory, their moral sense and their culture in general. "Just animals?" Sure. And so are we. Also see the article on Jane Goodall.

Almost Human, and Sometimes Smarter
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD

CHICAGO — Observed in the wild and tested in captivity, chimpanzees invite comparison with humans, their close relatives. They bear a family resemblance that fascinates people, and scientists see increasing evidence of similarities in chimp behavior and skills, making some of them think on the vagaries of evolution.

For some time, paleontologists and evolutionary biologists have known that chimp ancestors were the last line of today’s apes to diverge from the branch that led to humans, probably six million, maybe four million years ago. More recent examination shows that despite profound differences in the two species, just a 1.23 percent difference in their genes separates Homo sapiens from chimpanzees, Pan troglodytes.

And certain similarities between the two species, scientists say, go beyond expressive faces and opposable thumbs.

Chimps display a remarkable range of behavior and talent. They make and use simple tools, hunt in groups and engage in aggressive, violent acts. They are social creatures that appear to be capable of empathy, altruism, self-awareness, cooperation in problem solving and learning through example and experience. Chimps even outperform humans in some memory tasks.

“Fifty years ago, we knew next to nothing about chimpanzees,” said Andrew Whiten, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. “You could not have predicted the richness and complexity of chimp culture that we know now.”

Jane Goodall, a young English woman working in Africa in the 1960s, began changing perceptions. At first, experts disputed her reports of chimps’ using tools and social behavior. The experts especially objected to her references to chimp culture. Just humans, they insisted, had “culture.”

“Jane suffered early rejection by the establishment,” Richard Wrangham, a Harvard anthropologist, said. “Now, the people who say chimpanzees don’t have emotions and culture are the ones rejected.”

The new consensus framed discussions in March at a symposium, “The Mind of the Chimpanzee,” at the Lincoln Park Zoo here. More than 300 primatologists and other scientists reviewed accumulating knowledge of chimps’ cognitive abilities.

After one session, Frans de Waal of Emory University said that as recently as a decade ago there was still no firm consensus on many of the social relationships of chimps. “You don’t hear any debate now,” he said.

In his own studies at the Yerkes Primate Research Center at Emory, Dr. de Waal found that chimps as social animals have had to constrain and alter their behavior in various ways, as have humans. It is a part of ape inheritance, he said, and in the case of humans, the basis for morality. The provocative interpretation was advanced in his recent book, “Primates and Philosophers.”

Other reports shortly before the symposium had elaborated on the abilities of chimps as toolmakers. Jill Pruetz, a primatologist at Iowa State University, described 22 examples of chimps in Senegal making stick spears to hunt smaller primates for their meat. Dr. Goodall was the first to call attention to chimps as hunting carnivores, not strictly vegetarians.

Dr. Pruetz observed several chimps jabbing the spears into hollow tree trunks where bush babies often dwell. Just one attempt was successful. Previously, chimps had been seen using sticks mainly to extract termites from their nests.

A team of archaeologists led by Julio Mercader of the University of Calgary reported finding stones in Ivory Coast that chimps used 4,300 years ago to crack nuts. Today’s chimps have often been videotaped using rocks as a hammer to open nuts. The old stones with starch residues from nuts, the researchers said, were the earliest strong evidence of chimp tool use, and the finding suggested that chimps had learned the skill on their own, rather than copying humans.

Other researchers combine field work showing chimp behavior in natural habitats with laboratory experiments that are created to disclose their underlying intelligence — what scientists call their “cognitive reserve.”

For example, chimps on their own would not sit at a computer responding with rapid touches on the screen as a test of their immediate memory. Videos of their doing just that at Kyoto University in Japan especially impressed the symposium scientists.

Tetsuro Matsuzawa, a Kyoto primatologist, described a young chimp watching as numbers 1 through 9 flashed on the computer screen at random positions. Then the numbers disappeared in no more than a second. White squares remained where the numbers had been. The chimp casually but swiftly pressed the squares, calling back the numbers in ascending order — 1, 2, 3, etc.

The test was repeated several times, with the numbers and squares in different places. The chimp, which had months of training accompanied by promised food rewards, almost never failed to remember where the numbers had been. The video included scenes of a human failing the test, seldom recalling more than one or two numbers, if any.

“Humans can’t do it,” Dr. Matsuzawa said. “Chimpanzees are superior to humans in this task.”

Dr. Matsuzawa suggested that early human species “lost the immediate memory and, in return, learned symbolization, the language skills.”

“I call this the trade-off theory,” he continued. “If you want a capability like better immediate memory, you have to lose some other capability.”

Other experiments at Kyoto’s primate center demonstrated the ability of chimps to recognize themselves and focus attention on others. Masaki Tomonaga, who conducted the tests, said that an infant made eye contact with its mother at about 2 months and that sometime after the first year was able to maintain a gaze as the mother moved about.

Dr. Tomonaga said such “gaze following” developed in humans about the same age, “though infant humans generally have more complex interactions.”

Misato Hayashi, also from Kyoto, described experiments with infant chimps’ manipulating nesting cups and square and cylindrical blocks. They were slower to learn than humans, but the manual dexterity was there. A human starts stacking blocks shortly after age 1, he said; chimps are almost 3 before getting the hang of it.

In experiments with mirrors, researchers showed that chimps had an awareness of themselves that is absent in monkeys but present in dolphins and all the great apes. Similar tests by Emory scientists showed some self-recognition among elephants.

These behaviors were reported by Dr. de Waal and his associate J. M. Plotnik, who said that they “may suggest convergent cognitive evolution probably related to complex sociality and cooperation well documented in both chimpanzees and elephants.”

Other researchers said that when confronted with problems obtaining food from the other side of a fence, chimps were not only clever on their own and often competitive with a fellow chimp, but they also showed a willingness to cooperate with one another to get the job done.

Brian Hare of Duke University and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, said bonobos outperformed their chimp relatives in cooperative tasks and shared food more readily.

The emotions of caring and mourning have been observed, as in the case of the chimp mother that carried on her back the corpse of her 2-year-old daughter for days after she had died. After fights between two chimps, scientists said, others in the group were seen consoling the loser and acting as mediators to restore peace.

Devyn Carter of Emory described the sympathetic response to a chimp named Knuckles, who was afflicted with cerebral palsy. No fellow chimp was seen to take advantage of his disability. Even the alpha male gently groomed Knuckles.

Dr. Wrangham of Harvard said the challenge to primatologists working in the field was to learn how much of the behavior and “surplus cognitive capacity” observed in captivity applied in the wild.

The answer seems to vary from one isolated chimp community to another. Scientists said that indicated the role of social learning — picking up skills by emulation — and responses to different opportunities in separate cultures.

At Gombe, the site in Tanzania where Dr. Goodall made a name for herself, the chimps with stick tools are accomplished extractors of termites from their nests. But termite fishing is rare in Bossou, Guinea. At Bossou, and not Gombe, chimps have learned to make use of many other tools, including stones for cracking nuts.

Dora Biro of the University of Oxford in England has studied tool use by chimps at the Bossou site. They fold leaves in a mat to sponge water out of tree hollows and scoop algae off stream surfaces. They collect edible ants with sticks. They take stouter tree branches and pound the juicy palm fiber to a pulp, preparing another favorite food.

Videos of Bossou nutcrackers show adult chimps, often female, placing a nut on a flat stone anvil and slamming down on it with a smaller rock. Two or three youngsters sit around watching. The adults do not appear to be giving instructions, except by example.

“What we’ve learned is that manipulation of objects begins around 1 year of age,” Dr. Biro said. “If it involves two or three objects, as in cracking nuts, that happens at 3 ½ to 5 years. If it is not learned by 6 or 7, it will never be acquired.”

At a dense forest in the Congo Republic, Crickette M. Sanz of the Max Planck institute said the chimps seemed as curious about her as she was about them. Groups came forward, calling others to join them. Sometimes, they sat with her for hours, eating fruit, grooming and even mating.

For a more detached study, Dr. Sanz deployed 18 video cameras at remote locations and recorded 84 hours of chimp tool use. Leaf sponging was the simplest, she concluded, and collecting honey with a long stick required the most effort and risk, with termite fishing having “the highest element of success.”

Dr. Sanz, who has worked with her husband, David B. Morgan, on some of the research, described mother chimps’ carefully withdrawing from a hole sticks swarming with black termites while their infants looked on. These social interactions, she said, passed on essential techniques and behaviors to the next generation.

“Socially transmitted adjustable behavior,” Dr. de Waal said, is a hallmark of culture.

Chimp behavior sometimes turns violent, particularly in territorial clashes. In Uganda, John Mitani of the University of Michigan observed chimp patrols regularly policing the forest boundaries of their communities. One patrol was seen assaulting an adult male, killing and emasculating him.

Kristin Bonnie, another Emory primatologist, said the transmission of behavior could be benign and spontaneous, with the prospect of reward being secondary. “It is the desire to act like others, an identification with certain others,” she explained, citing as an example the way chimps usually clasp hands while grooming each other.

At the symposium, researchers said the interest in learning more about chimps was not just a case of knowledge for the sake of knowledge. Their behavior and intelligence, scientists say, may offer insights into the abilities of early human ancestors like Australopithecus afarensis, the apelike “Lucy” species that thrived more than three million years ago. A more urgent motivation for the research, primatologists say, is that these are sentient beings and the closest living relatives of humans, and their survival is threatened.

Elizabeth V. Lonsdorf, a primatologist at the Lincoln Park Zoo and a symposium organizer, said researchers needed “to keep their eyes out for ways to improve the care of chimpanzees.”

Diseases like ebola and anthrax are taking their toll. Hunting chimps for “bush meat” is increasing. Many of the forest habitats of chimps in central Africa are being cut by loggers and land developers. As a result, Dr. Lonsdorf said, “Groups of the animals are getting closer together, which increased the threat of chimp violence and territorial disputes.”

Dr. Goodall recalled that when she went to Africa nearly a half-century ago, at least a million chimps lived in the continent, and “now there are perhaps only 150,000.” In that time, they have impressed scientists with physical and emotional reminders of their kinship to humans and their occasional triumphs over them at a computer screen.

They've impressed perhaps a few thousand scientists, but they've scared millions of creationists who piss their pants at the fact of these animals' being our cousins.
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Technorati tags: Evolution, Creationism

God is a Dick, Cont'd

Perhaps blessed with some degree of prescience, I wrote on Monday night, "God is a Dick": articulating why the idea of an all-powerful, all-knowing and all-good god (tri-omni) is completely illogical. In my piece, I used one particular sort of tragedy to highlight how inconsistent this version of god is with our reality: a terrible accident in which 7 children died, and whose grandfather had a heart attack and died when he heard the news. The reason I picked it was to talk about the sorts of evils that are not the result of anyone's intent. It was a terrible and tragic accident -- the trucker did not mean to kill.

For volume two, we have the fresh tears and blood flowing from Blacksburg to consider.

Yesterday, I walked through Turlington Plaza, and found Joey Johnsen preaching, as is par for the course. We talked about it a while, and he basically said it was evidence that men were sinners. The manifold problems with this way of thinking all center on the fact that if God is all-powerful, all-knowing and all-good, then there is an obligation to act to prevent harm and suffering in the creation to the greatest extent which is logically possible. As I've argued elsewhere, there are ways to do that which do not violate freedom of will.

Listen to a fellow alumnus weigh in as regarding the tragedy at VT:

The line stretched by the Baptist Student Union and Latter Day Saints outreach centers. The BSU had a big sign out reminding us that God is real, hears our prayers, and is able to move to heal us. Apparently, He is simply unwilling to move to save us in the first place. I am an atheist with respect to every god I’ve met in religious literature, and an agnostic on the concept of god in general. This kind of event seems more explicable as a person’s response to something horrible in his finite, physical mind and taking action in a finite, physical world. What is the alternative? A demon torturing his soul, and an all-powerful God who lets the innocent die? A God who is willing to clean up the mess by healing the survivors, but would not intervene to save those killed?

Albert Mohler, the guy who only thinks biotechnology is useful for curing "teh gay", has now weighed in on VT:

The Bible never flinches from assigning responsibility for moral evil. Human beings are capable of committing horrible acts of violence, malevolence, cruelty, and killing.

The Bible locates the problem of moral evil in the human heart.

Riiiiiiiiiiight (Dr. Evil). And the question of why God didn't create creatures who freely choose only good is still unanswered.

In taking moral evil seriously, the Bible affirms that we are responsible creatures. Our Creator will hold us fully accountable for our actions. All are sinners. Some sinners embrace evil with virtual abandon -- leading to horrors such as these killings on a university campus. We dare not attempt to minimize this moral responsibility.

Then, as C. S. Lewis so powerfully reminded us, we must trust that God's perfect justice will destroy evil and reset the moral equilibrium of the universe.

Sort of like a husband who beats his wife on their honeymoon, but then promises her flowers for the rest of eternity, God's rectifying a bad situation is supposed to absolve him of responsibility/blame for allowing it to occur in the first place?

A central tenet of the Christian faith is the claim that, on the cross, Jesus Christ willingly suffered the full force of evil, even unto death -- and that in raising Christ from the dead, the Father vindicated Christ's victory over sin, death, and evil.

The Virginia Tech horror reminds us all what human beings can do to each other. The cross of Christ reminds us of what Jesus did for sinners in bearing the full punishment for this evil.

Sort of a problem to argue that the Incarnation makes sense of the problem of evil. Allowing an innocent person to suffer for those who are guilty is not justice, or mercy, but a grave injustice. Only a twisted sort of logic could see it otherwise.

Christianity does not deny the reality of evil or try to hide from its true horror. Christians dare not minimize evil nor take refuge in euphemisms. Beyond this, we cannot accept that evil will have the last word. The last word will be the perfect fulfillment of the grace and justice of God.

In the meantime, we are witnesses to the true nature of moral catastrophes such as the killings at Virginia Tech. We mourn with those who mourn, and weep with those who weep.

Who could calculate the pain and suffering of these victims and their families? Even as I pray for those who grieve and suffer such excruciating loss, I place my confidence in the assurance that God will bring all things to the perfect conclusion of his judgment. Without this confidence, how could I make sense of what surely appears to be senseless evil and violence?

And yet to me, it is only in a world where an all-powerful, all-good, all-knowing Being sits on its thumb that the world is senseless. In our world, the real world, human minds are organic and can thus malfunction, causing some people to be mentally ill and to kill for no reason whatsoever. In a world with supposedly nonphysical minds, one wonders how mental illness occurs...

Cho Seung-hui Had a MySpace Page

I was wrong about this -- turned out to be a fake page.

Wired News and others have asked about the shooter's online writings. I may be the first person to have found what appears to be Cho Seung-hui's MySpace page: http://www.myspace.com/choseunghui

I wrote a message to this account to accuse anyone who may have opened this after-the-fact of being a macabre and heartless soul. I think it's authentic, because it's set to private -- who would open it and label it with "Ismail Ax" but not try to throw crap out there for attention? I can't verify this independently, of course, but someone will.

**UPDATE: Check out the video page of this MySpace user. I exploited a small privacy weakness on MySpace which allows you to view the video page of any user, whether their profile is set to private or to public. Interestingly, it says, "California, US" as the location. It doesn't yet appear that he ever lived there, but I don't know how significant this would be, since the red "Ismail Ax" appears on the front page. If this page was modified since the shooting, then we know this page is a fake. If not, then we have a high degree of certainty that it is genuine -- the "Ismail Ax" is a clincher piece of evidence. I wrote to MySpace using their contact form and asked them to see if the page had been modified since the shooting, since this would appear to impinge on their identity theft policy, not to mention being a cruel hoax. If anyone hacks the page, please let me know, since I seem to be the first person to have found this.**

**UPDATE 2 (12:50 pm): Commenter Max below alerted me that the source code on the MySpace page in question (CTRL-U shows the source code of the page you're looking at) says that the last login was today (4-18-07). I did notify the MySpace authorities earlier this morning, so I wonder if they logged in to the account; I'd love to hear back from them to find out what is going on -- whether that login was them checking the profile or what. For now I'll play it safe and remove the wikipedia reference.

**UPDATE 3 (2pm): Exploiting another weakness in the MySpace privacy system, which I don't care to elaborate on, I found the following information:

First Name: Seung-Hui
Orientation: No Answer
Motive: Friends
Gender: Male
Age: 23
Location: , California, US
Profile Updated: Apr 17, 2007 7:22 PM

Therefore, this page is a fake. These people doing this are just fucktards. Please, send them a message telling them so.

**Final Update: I just received the following email from MySpace

-------- Original Message --------

Subject:	RE: Not Found (2) - Imposter Profile
Date:	Fri, 20 Apr 2007 03:17:36 -0700
From:	Imposter Report, imposterreport@support.myspace.com

Hello,

Thank you for reporting this profile. The profile in question is
scheduled to be deleted.

Thank you,

MySpace.com

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Technorati tags: Virginia Tech, Hokies

An Email I Just Received from the Alumni Assoc. at VT

I just got this from the AA at VT, and wanted to pass it on so that people can have the info to give something to the families affected:

A SPECIAL MESSAGE TO ALL ALUMNI OF VIRGINIA TECH

To our Virginia Tech alumni, I write the kind of message I never expected to have to write in my entire career serving the university. On Monday, the 16th of April, a campus resident senior student shot two students in Ambler Johnston residence hall and proceeded shortly thereafter to the other side of the Drillfield, entered Norris Hall and randomly shot more than 40 students and faculty in several classrooms. He then turned his gun on himself and took his own life. As I write this, 32 students and faculty who were among his victims have died. Others remain hospitalized. An ongoing investigation will answer so many facts and questions still unknown at this time.

This is the most horrific scene in the history of this or any university. Our hearts go out to the families and loved ones of the victims. Our hearts go out to the friends, classmates and others who witnessed this tragedy. A Memorial Convocation is scheduled today (Tuesday afternoon at 2:00 p.m. Eastern Time) and will be nationally televised. President and Mrs. George W. Bush are expected to attend, along with Virginia Governor and Mrs. Tim Kaine and other dignitaries.

This is a shocking crime with crime scenes that have attracted national and international press, all broadcasting their live news shows from the Holtzman Alumni Center. President Charles Steger, himself an alumnus, has personally expressed with utmost compassion his condolences to the families who have been notified and are still being notified. His leadership through this tragedy has been extraordinary. All of us at the university wish to demonstrate our compassion especially to our students who have experienced a kind of horror and tragedy that hopefully they never will again. We share in their deepest sorrow and grief.

Other universities and institutions across the country, and indeed around the world, have communicated with us to express their shock and sympathy. Many of our alumni have communicated with us and also with each other to share expressions of support as well as their personal grief. I am confident that Virginia Tech will heal from this in whatever time it may take, and will do so because of its strong support from a family of caring alumni numbering over 200,000, including our current students and all their families. The faculty, staff and entire surrounding community are committed to helping our students and faculty recover from this terrible, terrible event. Those who will follow them will continue to embrace the true meaning of our motto “That I May Serve,” that bonds the entire Hokie Nation.

The Alumni Association placed a single wreath in the Campus Chapel within hours of the tragedy, and the Corps of Cadets has posted an honor guard with it to symbolize a university honoring those it has lost so tragically. It is but one symbol of the enormous grief that an entire campus and family of alumni around the world must bear. Many have asked how they may send financial memorials… any memorial gifts, payable to the “Virginia Tech Foundation,” designated specifically for the “Virginia Tech Family Fund,” should be mailed to University Development, 902 Prices Fork Road (0336), Blacksburg, VA 24061.

Thank you for your genuine concern and expressions of support for all of us at the university. And please keep those who lost their lives and their grieving families in your thoughts and prayers.

Tom Tillar
Vice President for Alumni Relations

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Technorati tags: Virginia Tech, Hokies

A YouTube Tribute to VT

A tribute. Many more will surely follow.

The outpouring of sympathy is great, but I tire of hearing the trite, "God bless VT" and "our thoughts and prayers are with you." Maybe it's just the angry atheist in me, but this sort of slacktivism pisses me off. If you really care about these victims, don't waste your time talking to your invisible magic friend. Go donate blood. Have your organ donor status certified. Go offer some money to a scholarship fund for one of many dead students or offer money to the widow/widowers. Go volunteer time with one of the students as an informal grief counselor. Give them hugs.

Do something tangiable and real.
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Technorati tags: Virginia Tech, Hokies

This Hokie Grieves

Tragic.

Heads are going to roll, unfortunately.
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Technorati tags: Virginia Tech, Hokies

Shooting at My Alma Mater -- Virginia Tech

It appears that many people dead in Blacksburg due to someone's rage. I graduated from VT in May '04 (BS Biochemistry, BA Chemistry). So sad. Tragic.

As of now, the news is multiple fatalities (at least 20) and that the shooter is dead. Here is some of the earliest YouTube footage.

Keep up with breaking developments on it here.
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Technorati tags: News

Don Feder on Atheism in today's USA Today

Don Feder, author of Who's Afraid of the Religious Right? has an article in today’s USA Today on atheism. Overall, the article is fairly meh, but it contains many errors of fact. Let us analyze:

(By Don Feder Mon Apr 16, 7:15 AM ET)

Oh, for the days when one could safely stroll into a bookstore without tripping over the latest atheist title. Ironically, by writing their tracts, in the long run atheists might boost belief.

Oh for the day when religious, new age, pseudoscience and generally silly books will collect thick coats of dust due to customer disinterest.

My local Barnes & Noble has the following titles on display -Atheist Manifesto: The Case Against Christianity, Judaism, and Islam ; The Quotable Atheist; Letter To A Christian Nation; God: The Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist; and The God Delusion, which is a New York Times best-seller.

Actually, a few of them are NYT best-sellers.

Rep. Pete Stark, D-Calif., has become the first member of Congress to announce that he doesn't believe in God. He's probably just looking for a book deal.

I doubt it. He was targeted as part of a contest, he didn’t “just up and decide” to do it. He obliged because he is hugely popular and doesn’t fear losing his seat. Many others would if they could also do so without political fallout…

Why the sudden outpouring of atheist advocacy? Perhaps it's a way for the cultural left to assert itself in the face of the religious right. Or maybe it's meant to show that the anti-God argument can be framed more intelligently than in a Bill Maher monologue. Whatever the impetus, as a believer, I welcome the phenomenon. After all, the great enemy of belief isn't disbelief but indifference.

The former of those, combined with the general tenor of religious fundamentalism globally.

Let the godless write their books and the faithful answer them. The disillusionment with religion that dominated British intellectual circles after World War I helped to shape the great Christian apologist C.S. Lewis. The surviving son of atheist icon Madalyn Murray O'Hair is an evangelical Christian.

I agree that apathy is the enemy. At least making there is a benefit without conversion: the loony are forced to become more logical (not that this means they are now consistently or fully logical).

The books referenced above assert that the debate is over and that atheism has won, but atheists have been saying that for more than 200 years. Since the French Enlightenment, the death of God has been confidently proclaimed. Religion has been made obsolete by egalitarian revolution, industrialism, or science, they insisted. Yet, early in the 21st century, faith endures.

And it will continue to do so. Unlike religion, atheism has no “prophets” nor should it. It will never be obsolete so long as the cultural “package deal” that it offers has no serious competition: socialization, pre-packaged ethics, life instruction and support…

Outlasting the Soviet Union

For 70-plus years, the Soviets tried everything imaginable to kill religion: show trials, mass murder of clerics, confiscations, indoctrination and even attempts to co-opt religious symbols and ceremonies. But belief survived, while scientific socialism is now defunct.

The communists have traded one set of fantasies for another.

In China, where communism's war on God continues, the home-church movement thrives. Half a world away, America has the highest weekly church attendance in the industrialized world, notwithstanding attacks on faith from Hollywood, academia and a judiciary seemingly intent on purging religious symbols from public spaces.

But the trends are reversed now – the growth of faith in China and the former USSR now far outpaces the loss thereof here. People will not tolerate being told what to think and believe, and I, like Voltaire, would fight alongside the religious to preserve their right to 1^st Amendment protections.

In the USA - the most science-oriented society in history - Christian bookstores, radio stations and TV programming proliferate. It seems as though a hunger for the Creator is imprinted on the human heart.

The USA may be called “science-oriented”, but it sure as hell isn’t “science-literate.” Instead, the average citizen’s science competency is atrocious, and creationists fight to worsen it all time. There is a clear bifurcation between the elite status of our science and universities and the average denizen of Kansas City, MO. I would also say that the better-scoring industrialized nations (Japan, especially) on science literacy tests are much more atheistic as well:

Here are some numbers to consider, reported as the % answered correctly (2006 SE, Table 7-10):

1. The center of the Earth is very hot. (True) 78
2. All radioactivity is man-made. (False) 73
3. It is the father’s gene that decides whether the baby is a boy or a girl. (True) 62
4. Lasers work by focusing sound waves. (False) 42
5. Electrons are smaller than atoms. (True) 45
6. Antibiotics kill viruses as well as bacteria. (False) 54
7. The universe began with a huge explosion. (True) 35
8. The continents have been moving their location for millions of years and will continue to move. (True) 77
9. Human beings are developed from earlier species of animals. (True) 44
10. Does the Earth go around the Sun, or does the Sun go around the Earth? (Earth around the Sun) 71

Now, compare these numbers to the 2002 SE report:

1. 70% of American adults do not understand the scientific process;
2. Double digit percentage gains in belief of haunted houses, ghosts, communication with the dead, and witches in the past decade;
3. U.S. depends heavily on foreign born scientists at all degree levels, as high as 45% in engineering;
4. Belief in pseudoscience is relatively widespread and growing;
5. 60% believe some people posses psychic powers or extrasensory perception (ESP);
6. 30% believe some reported objects in the sky are really space vehicles from other civilizations;
7. 30% read astrology charts at least occasionally in the newspaper;
8. 46% did not know how long it takes the Earth to orbit the sun (1 year);
9. 45% thought lasers work by focusing sound waves (they focus light);
10. 49% believe antibiotics kill viruses (they kill bacteria);
11. 66% don't believe the Big Bang theory widely accepted by scientists;
12. 48% believe humans lived at the same time as the dinosaurs;
13. 47% don't believe in evolution which is widely accepted by scientists;
14. 55% couldn't define DNA;
15. 78% couldn't define a molecule; (particularly sad to me, a chemist)
16. 32% believe in 'Lucky Numbers'.

So there's always plenty of superstition to fill in people's heads when knowledge and reason are absent. I don't see religion going away anytime soon, so long as general scientific illiteracy abounds and pervades.

What would a world without God look like? Well, for one, morality becomes, if not impossible, exceedingly difficult. "Thou shalt not kill" loses much of its force when reduced from commandment to a suggestion. How inspiring can it be to wake in the morning, look in the mirror, and see an accident of evolutionary history - the end product of the random collision of molecules?

This is standard tripe – our motivation to be moral is much more rational when we transfer the basis of self-interest from, “If you don’t do X, you’ll burn in hell,” to “Doing X is good for you and everyone else.” Normativity based on Divine Command Theory has been considered problematic for millennia due the Euthyphro Dilemma.

A universe that isn't God-centered becomes ego-centered. People come to see choices through the prism of self: what promotes the individual's well-being and happiness. Such a worldview does not naturally lead to benevolence or self-sacrifice.

It does by the law of symmetry in ethics and Kant’s categorical imperative. We cannot expect a society in which we may benefit from altruism without participating in altruistic behavior ourselves.

An affirmation of God can lead to the Ten Commandments, the Sermon on the Mount and the Declaration of Independence. In terms of morality, a denial of God leads nowhere.

I would love to a rational argument for democracy based on the theocratic policies instituted by YHWH. Basing our ethics on self-interest and rational consequentialism leads somewhere.

There are no secularist counterparts to Pope John Paul II, Mother Teresa, William Wilberforce (the evangelical responsible for abolition of the British slave trade), Martin Luther King Jr., or the Christians - from France to Poland - who rescued Jews during the Holocaust.

Wow. Breathlessly stupid. And completely wrong. In ancient Greece, some of the greatest thinkers to have ever lived were not theists in any Western sense. In modern times, people like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet gave $30 BILLION to charity. This is ridiculous.

True, terrible things have been done in the name of religion. Terrible things have been done in the name of every noble concept, including love, charity, loyalty and kinship. Yet, the worst horrors of the modern era were perpetrated by godless political creeds. The death toll from sectarian conflict over the ages is dwarfed by ideological violence, from the Jacobinism of Revolutionary France to the charnel houses of communism and fascism.

This ground gets trodden over and over and over…Those tyrannical dictators traded religious delusion for political delusion. There is no logical connection between atheism and militant communism or anything of the sort that led to the 20^th century’s horrors. These horrors resulted from people taking away the rights of others in the name of an abstract “greater good” – both religious and political fascism has seen it this way. There was no logical correlation between atheism and these murders – only communism.

As Sam Harris and Rick Warren recently discussed,

Rick, Christianity has conducted itself in an abjectly evil manner from time to time. How do you square that with the Christian Gospel of love?
WARREN: I don't feel duty-bound to defend stuff that's done in the name of God which I don't think God approved or advocated. Have things been done wrong in the name of Christianity? Yes. Sam makes the statement in his book that religion is bad for the world, but far more people have been killed through atheists than through all the religious wars put together. Thousands died in the Inquisition; millions died under Mao, and under Stalin and Pol Pot. There is a home for atheists in the world today—it's called North Korea. I don't know any atheists who want to go there. I'd much rather live under Tony Blair, or even George Bush. The bottom line is that atheists, who accuse Christians of being intolerant, are as intolerant—

HARRIS: How am I being intolerant? I'm not advocating that we lock people up for their religious beliefs. You can get locked up in Western Europe for denying the Holocaust. I think that's a terrible way of addressing the problem. This really is one of the great canards of religious discourse, the idea that the greatest crimes of the 20th century were perpetrated because of atheism. The core problem for me is divisive dogmatism. There are many kinds of dogmatism. There's nationalism, there's tribalism, there's racism, there's chauvinism. And there's religion. Religion is the only sphere of discourse where dogma is actually a good word, where it is considered ennobling to believe something strongly based on faith.

WARREN: You don't feel atheists are dogmatic?

HARRIS: No, I don't.

WARREN: I'm sorry, I disagree with you. You're quite dogmatic.

HARRIS: OK, well, I'm happy to have you point out my dogmas, but first let me deal with Stalin. The killing fields and the gulag were not the product of people being too reluctant to believe things on insufficient evidence. They were not the product of people requiring too much evidence and too much argument in favor of their beliefs. We have people flying planes in our buildings because they have theological grievances against the West. I'm noticing Christians doing terrible things explicitly for religious reasons—for instance, not fund-ing [embryonic] stem-cell research. The motive is always paramount for me. No society in human history has ever suffered because it has become too reasonable.

At least Don cedes some of this:

This is not to say that atheism leads naturally to guillotines and gulags, but, just as "love your fellow man as yourself" can be corrupted, so too can liberty, equality and fraternity.

They can indeed, and this corruption is, if anything, exacerbated and accelerated by the hybridization of government and religion. Fascism throughout history shows a trademark mixture of the two, and the forms of communism that were practiced were a form of religion.

Signs throughout history

There is no irrefutable evidence for God's existence or non-existence. But, if you look closely, his footprints can be discerned in the sands of time.

Jews introduced the world to monotheism. They also were the first people to perceive history as linear- an unfolding story moving toward a conclusion. Is it a coincidence that this tiny, originally nomadic people generated the ideas that shaped the Western world, including equality, human rights and a responsibility to our fellow man? Jews are the only people to maintain their identity during two millennia of exile, and then return to their homeland and re-establish their nation.

Wow. This first sentence is breathlessly stupid. Monotheism was practiced in ancient Egypt and via Zoroastrianism long before Israel existed.

As for the fate of the Jews, I think it should be remembered that had the Roman Empire not instituted Christianity, and instead had paganism remained superlative, we wouldn’t have the same world today. Second, the influences of Israel’s neighbors upon her are almost always ignored and trivialized. She survived because she posed no threat to the greater empires which gave her everything she had: trade and knowledge. And it should be realized that Judaism is one of the few ancient religions whose national and religious identities were one, and enforced by death penalty (see Phineas). No other religions were so egocentric and insulated from “contamination”.

Mark Twain wrote: "The Egyptian, the Babylonian, and the Persian rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, then faded to dream-stuff and passed away; the Greek and the Roman followed, and made a vast noise and they are gone; other peoples have sprung up, held their torch high for a time, but it burned out and they sit in twilight now or have vanished. … All things are mortal but the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?" Had Twain been a believer, he might have answered his own question.

This really depends on your interpretation. Consider that Egypt is still alive in the blood of inhabitants of many nations. Ditto with the others. The same is not true of Judaism at all, whose isolationism has made it statistically insignificant in terms of population impact and global distribution. I don’t see the ”magic” here. But Don sees God's "chosen" -- God is a little bit of a bigot.

America's survival and rise to global pre-eminence are equally improbable. Challenging the greatest empire of the 18th century, America should never have won its independence or should have self-destructed during the Civil War.

Ah, the standard “America was chosen by God,” the mantra of the Religious Right. Funny, isn’t it, how every country has this same view of its divine Providence? If those two wars were “blessed by God,” then God is quite a dick for choosing them over, say, peaceful means.

Alexis de Tocqueville observed that the genius of our infant republic lay not in its farms and workshops but in its churches whose "pulpits flame with righteousness."

This is false. He said many things in his Democracy in America (1835), but not this. Only by the mouths of stupid Religious Right sycophants do these sorts get repeated, always without specific citation, of course, and many others cherry-picked out of context from various Founding Fathers. Many others are lies made up by Barton and his ilk. In addition, Tocqueville said some other things that completely run contrary to the RR agenda, and thus they never quote them.

For instance,

“I know of no country, indeed, where the love of money has taken stronger hold on the affections of men, and where the profounder contempt is expressed for the theory of the permanent equality of property.” (Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1835))

And also,

“They all attributed the peaceful dominion of religion in their country mainly to the separation of church and state. I do not hesitate to affirm that during my stay in America I did not meet a single individual, of the clergy or the laity, who was not of the same opinion on this point.” (Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1835))

I don’t even find it remarkable anymore that the supposed “scholars” and ”intellectuals” of the RR, like Feder, make such gross blunders of fact. They may even lie knowingly. Whatever accomplishes their goal.

Atheists are free to disbelieve and to try to propagate their disbelief in books and other intellectual forums. But saying the debate is over doesn't make it so. A bit of humility might make their case more convincing. Then again, humility is itself a religious concept.

Why, thanks for your permission in that first sentence. I agree the debate is not over regarding general arguments for a god’s existence, and that it ought not be. But insofar as creationism and YHWH go, those ideas are intellectually bankrupt, and no degree of false humility obscures a falsehood.
*update: See KoS also, I can't find anything else yet*
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