Je suis Charlie, que tout le monde devrait

Greetings, readers!  It's been a while since I've posted on the blog, and there's really little more to it than being insanely busy working long hours through the would-be holidays and all.  It's more than a little bit annoying that CES happens pretty much the first working week of January (after the New Year's holidays and all).  Well, it was like this last year as well, and this year, the crunch was not quite as bad, but there was a lot more shown from my department this time.  Anyway, during all this, there was the attack on Charlie Hebdo after a supposedly insulting-to-Muslims cartoon appeared, and there's already plenty out there about the attack itself.  What I wanted to get on was the so-called "liberal" reaction.

We generally expect the atheist community to have a problem with the attacks, but the flavor of multiculturalism that imbues the so-called liberal viewpoint comes out with every condemnation of violence hedged and qualified.  "Freedom of speech is incredibly important but..."  "Violence is inexcusable but..."  If there's a "but" in that sentence, it means that you're willing to make exceptions for that principle, and that already puts you on a spiral of wrongness.  All the "but"s regarding the Charlie Hebdo attack basically lead down this view that insulting religion is inherently wrong, and therefore, Charlie Hebdo brought it on themselves.  One article on Time suggested that anything that could be construed as an insult to Muslims automatically means you're not a bastion of free speech.  The Daily Beast said that being deliberately provocative isn't really part of free speech.  Really?  Then what is?  The worst part is that this is also a sentiment coming from the right wing religious nutbars (in a thinly veiled effort to intimate that they, too, should be shielded from all criticism).  If you're a self-described social liberal, and you find yourself agreeing with Bill Donohue, there's a chink in your armor somewhere.

If This is How You Question Darwin...

After the Bill Nye-Ken Ham debate that showed just how clearly Ham has no hope of ever being considered scientifically-minded to any degree, there's been a lot of stressing the point.  All over the web, there's a lot of harping about the most important moments of the debate, and most of all, the Q&A where Bill gives examples of evidence that would change his position, while Ken Ham says flatly that nothing would ever change his mind.  The biggest thing about this is that it completely shatters Ham's contention that science is closed-minded and locked on to philosophical naturalism, while simultaneously showing that it is he who is indisputably closed-minded.  It's amazing how clear-cut he makes it for us.

Well, not long afterwards, HBO aired a documentary that featured Ham as well as plenty more incredibly closed-minded people who think...  uuhhh...  well, maybe "think" is the wrong word...  approach reality with the same fractured intellectual modality as Ken Ham and his ilk.  Doing the rounds through the atheist blogosphere are clips from the film, specifically of die-hard creationists and fideists who make even Chuck Missler (Mr. "Comets-aren't-made-of-ice-because-ice-cubes-don't-form-a-tail!") look almost sane.

See the video on Gawker for yourself, and read my thoughts below the jump --
http://gawker.com/watch-creationists-talking-about-creationism-1520841986

This is not from The Onion

Bryan Fischer proves rather conclusively that there are plenty of ways to be more stupid than previously thought possible.  I've seen plenty of clips of him on Right Wing Watch wherein he tries to make the claims that bigotry and misogyny are all good things because Jesus.  Or that gay marriage is actually a socialist conspiracy.  Or that birth control causes tiny micro-babies to collect inside the womb...  seriously, this guy is for real.  And then I see this gem, and I'm just speechless.

Unfortunately, the video is apparently blocked from embedding, but here's the direct link --
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YP8bM87awiY

I...  what on Earth...?  Seriously?  I don't even think a word can be invented to sufficiently describe the stupidity I see here.

First of all, even if we didn't already have gluons in the standard model,  and have experimental observations of their existence...  let's just say that this is an unsolved problem.  So he's using the god of the gaps fallacy, no surprise there...  but then there's the little point of "now we know".  Now?  People looked into the atomic nucleus and only now found Jesus?  Boy, that guy's pretty tiny if they had to look down there to find him.

Now Jesus is an elementary particle?  Gluons died for my sins?

Lo, is it not written?
That the lord so loved his baryons that he sent down his own vector gauge boson to the nucleus to save all matter!  Right.  Sure.

Arkansas Proves Itself Worthy of Notice

...  by showing that they, too, can set new and previously unimaginable benchmarks in human stupidity and downright evil.  So we all expect this sort of thing out of states in the deep South like Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, etc.  Arkansas technically falls under the same wing when you think about it, but because the stupid burns so deep in those other areas, and also quite recently, that Arkansas kind of just never really gets noticed.  After seeing the Texas Republican Party proclaim proudly that they are against thinking, I made it clear that they deserve a mighty eradication from existence.  But now, I feel it is only fair to include Arkansas Republicans in the picture, too.

Congratulations, Jon Hubbard, Charlie Fuqua, and Loy Mauch.  You, too, much like the entire Texas Republican Party, Michele Bachmann, Todd Akin, Rick Santorum, Paul Broun, et al. all deserve to be launched directly into the sun where every last molecule of your physical substance will be vaporized and all of existence will be better off.

Atheists in America

In the comments of an earlier post, a little point came up about nonbelievers who are not so direct and "out there" about their atheism.  Indeed, there is some value in choosing the right time and place to "come out", and there are those who wear their anti-religion stance on their sleeves like myself.  In addition to those who are merely being cautious, there are those who simply want to avoid telling anyone or just say the word "agnostic" in lieu of "atheist" order to save face and/or avoid confrontation entirely.

It kind of begs the question as to why there is such a conflict in the first place?  Here in the United States, especially, you have people who view atheists as being among the most loathsome of all creatures.  In the episode of Family Guy where the dog (Brian) reveals his lack of belief, a news report brands him as "Worse than Hitler?"  The sad part of this is that such a reaction is hardly an exaggeration.  Why should it be that way?  This is supposed to be the country that has more Nobel Laureates than any other.  This is the country where people come to to get the best healthcare on the planet (assuming you have the enormous wealth required to get it).  This is the country which has put men on the moon and created the friggin' Internet.

And yet, this is also the country where state legislatures propose that women who have been raped should be raped one more time by an ultrasound machine so that she can be guilt-tripped out of an abortion.  This is also the country where people paid to provide us with an education believe that the universe has only existed for 6,000 years and man and dinosaurs lived at the same time.  This is also the country where the state which is generally considered to be the most socially liberal in the entire nation still passed a law to outlaw gay marriage.  This is the country where the Constitution demands that no religious test be required for any office in government, and yet there is not a single elected official in government who can avoid a religious test at the hands of its populace.

So what the friggin' hell is America's problem?

Are they really that stupid?

About a year ago, I came across an example page out of a "Christian Science" textbook.  To be exact, it was a textbook published by Bob Jones University expressly for use by Christian homeschooling parents.  This particular page scan was actually a margin note/caption about the nature of electricity.  Here, you can see the actual scan from BJU's great and wonderful 4th-grade level "science" textbook.

There are just so many things wrong with that... where do I begin?  Oh yeah!  About the same place I begin with Bill O'Reilly's insane argument that the tides are an unexplained phenomena!

Grown-ups can't be healed

Just over a week ago, I was sitting down at a cafe noshing on a tabouleh salad and at a table behind me, there was a guy I wanted to murder.  Okay, I'll rephrase that -- there was a guy at a table behind me who was preaching to his compatriots that he'd discovered that The Scripture^TM has healing powers.  Oh, the many mortifyingly moronic manifestations of mindlessness I did hear.  (Why yes, I do have a fondness for alliteration!)

Among the most fun of them was when he draw a parallel between the power of the Holy Spirit and the Marvel Comics character, Wolverine.  I later discovered that this man apparently believed that the Wolverine character was based on a real person who had historically been mistaken to be Bigfoot (but was in fact Hugh Jackman's father?), but more on that later.  The basic thesis this guy was pushing was that there's apparently some mystical energy intrinsic in the Word of God, and that it provides an unexplainable and unknowable power that can physically heal wounds, cure sicknesses, and raise the dead.  I guess he must have been taking lessons from Randy Demain.

Well, at the cafe, I was quiet about it, but a few days ago, I ran into the same fellow again, and this time, he was trying to sell others (myself included) on his claims rather than simply preaching to the choir.  Though I was eating my lunch, I was unable to keep my mouth shut at this point.  I will say, though, that I didn't murder the fellow.  I did better than that -- I ripped him to shreds to the point where he just plain walked away silently realizing he had no hope of getting anywhere.

That was a happy moment.