Grave issues

Naturally it was with some measure of surprise that I learned from no less august a source than the interweb that I am not just a firm nontheist humanist, huzzah! But apparently a not inconsiderable 48% Scientologist, bah! And a frankly worrying 61% reform Judaist, oy vey!

It was a relief then dear reader to discover that the United States Department of Veterans are being so inclusive, nay generous on their list of available emblems of belief for placement on government headstones and markers.

I suppose what with one thing and another, the current campaign in Mesopotamia dragging on a little longer than hoped and the revelation that so many of us are in fact both Neo-Pagan and Sikh they had to do it.

Whilst it's never a nice sight to see a gravestone, there could be something curiously heroic about a 21st Century war grave. Regimented lines of headstones united forever in death bearing witness to the Wiccans, Buddhists and Mormons who made the ultimate sacrifice for their country.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

All Hail the Belief-o-Matic

It's a hoot.

Typical of these kind of things, the questions themselves show the bias of the survey architect. It asks a series of 20 seriously skewed questions, then suggests which set of beliefs best matches your answers.

I'll show you mine. Show me yours.

1. Secular Humanism (100%)
2. Unitarian Universalism (90%)
3. Nontheist (76%)
4. Theravada Buddhism (72%)
5. Liberal Quakers (71%)
6. Neo-Pagan (60%)
7. Mainline to Liberal Christian Protestants (52%)
8. Taoism (47%)
9. New Age (43%)
10. Reform Judaism (33%)
11. Mahayana Buddhism (33%)
12. Bahá'í Faith (28%)
13. Jainism (27%)
14. Orthodox Quaker (26%)
15. Sikhism (23%)
16. Scientology (22%)
17. New Thought (20%)
18. Hinduism (18%)
19. Christian Science (Church of Christ, Scientist) (15%)
20. Seventh Day Adventist (14%)
21. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) (10%)
22. Eastern Orthodox (8%)
23. Islam (8%)
24. Mainline to Conservative Christian/Protestant (8%)
25. Orthodox Judaism (8%)
26. Roman Catholic (8%)
27. Jehovah's Witness (5%)

Why not a hardcore Secular Humanist? I like nature. And naturism.

Secular state? Pull the other one!

I have mentioned on a few occasions in the past my disgust at the privileged status afforded to religious groups and individuals in the UK by the government. Here is a prime example of what deeply concerns me.

Reg Vardy is a successful car dealership owner in the UK who also happens to be a fundamentalist Christian. He believes that the earth was formed less than 10,000 years ago and says every word in the Bible is fact and should be taught as such. Vardy has set up the Vardy Foundation which is campaigning to take over "failing" schools in England. The schools, prior to their take over, were vunerable because, being in poor areas with disadvantaged children, it easy to criticise them as "failing" (even when exam results have improved dramatically in the years immediately prior to take over).

Vardy has found a way to further his fundamentalist views by exploiting the government's city academy scheme which encourages private enterprise to both fund and take an active role in the curriculum at state run schools. All he has to do to receive £20 million in funding is pledge to contribute £2 million of his own money. For that, not only does he get £20 million from the government, running costs and salaries in perpetuity, but he also gets to have a controlling infulence over what is taught in those schools. So, for an investment of only 10%, he gets to have creationism taught as science in his schools and the tax payer is left with the rest of the bill - 90% of the costs!

It is not surprising that Tony Blair and Reg Vardy are old cronies. The Prime Minister opened another Vardy Foundation sponsored school in Middlesborough recently and has awarded Vardy with a knighthoond for services to business and "education".

I think this is a truly appaling situation and deeply worrying for the future of state education in this country.

The full article on which I based this post can be found at RichardDawkins.net

Demonstrable maturity

As some people might know WhiteBoyBob is currently in the process of upping sticks and relocating to a whole new continent. Just to be on the safe side I've noised up an alternate job that's on offer in a different location.

I know he's got the database skills, but I'm not quite sure if he fits all of their requirements.

The secrets of the great world religions, revealed at last!

Click here, if you dare.

But fair warning -- everything you think you know about the world may feel a little different after you do.

Dawkins interviews

An interesting interview with Professor Dawkins. I wish I could be as eloquent, and patient, as him. Not that Jeremy Paxman is doing anything other than his job as devils advocate.

Now, the interview with Pastor Ted Haggard is frankly scary. It's a shame that I can't find the full length interview where Prof Dawkins, and the film crew, were chased off Haggard's property by Ted and his armed goons in a pickup. He was screaming something about how Dawkins had said his children were monkeys.

House of Lords debate the non-religious

Peers, sitting in the UK's upper chamber this morning will debate the position of the non-religious in Britain today. In contrast to an increasingly faith-based approach by government, Lord Harrison of Chester, a member of the All Party Parliamentary Humanist Group has called the debate to highlight how the majority non-religious in Britain are affected by policy.

Polls and surveys consistently show that many if not most people in the UK do not define themselves as religious. 63% of people in an ICM poll last December said they were not religious, and a survey of 12-19 year olds for the DfES in 2004 showed 65% saying they were not religious. Only a minority of marriages are religious ones, most people are not baptised, fewer than a million people go to church each week, and in a MORI poll last year, the domestic group most people thought had too much influence on government was ‘religious groups and leaders’.
(poll results and notes)

For the last ten years, however, the Government has privileged religion and religious representatives, including financial incentives for religious schools and Bishops sitting in the unelected House of Lords.

Welcoming the debate, the British Humanist Association Chief Executive Hanne Stinson said, "A proper consideration of these issues is long overdue".

It might seem a little wishy-washy as debates go "Debate: on those who profess no religion" but I suppose it's a start...



UPDATE
Clicketty for the Hansard transcript. It's generally that rarest of things - a debate about religion that remains courteous at all times. Just reading it gives me a rather warm glow about the upper chamber, outdated anachronism or not, they've got class. As Baroness Carnegy of Lour notes rather archly "the noble Lord, Lord Harrison, is one of the more perspicacious Members of your Lordships’ House"

There is a total "Though for the Day" headscratcher moment from the Archbishop of York, which is either a trite joke fallen flat or he really is a twat.

"Twenty-seven years ago I was chaplain to a young offenders remand centre, Latchmere House. Every inmate was asked to declare his religious affiliation, and four young men were registered as having no religion. One Sunday, all the inmates were offered the chance to go to worship. The four young men with no religion declined the offer, while their fellow inmates on the A wing took up the offer. The prison officer, not wanting the four men to remain locked up in their cells, asked them to clean the toilets on the wing. The following Sunday, our four non-religious young men took up the offer to go to worship. The prison officer was puzzled why they had opted in this week. “Why are you going to chapel?” he asked. The four replied, “Sir, we didn’t like the ‘No Religion’ place of worship”. Crudely as they put it, those four young men were saying in their naivety that we are all essentially religious."

Buh? Wah?

Gunning for u.s.

Chris and I both referred to the politicizing of the Virginia Tech shootings in the comments for the "Target Practice" post.

I made the argument that the anti-gun control advocates were playing politics by stressing that anyone on the Left who brought up gun control was exploiting a tragedy for political gain.

I'm sure that they are. But the pundits on the right are more full of shit for politicizing the issue, then claiming that they're not.

The first example, by way of Glenn Greenwald's column in Salon.

Charles Krauthammer on Fox News on Wednesday night:

KRAUTHAMMER: What you can say, just -- not as a psychiatrist, but as somebody who's lived through the a past seven or eight years, is that if you look at that picture, it draws its inspiration from the manifestos, the iconic photographs of the Islamic suicide bombers over the last half decade in Palestine, in Iraq and elsewhere.

That's what they end up leaving behind, either on al Jazeera or Palestinian TV. And he, it seems, as if his inspiration for leaving the message behind in that way, might have been this kind of suicide attack, which, of course, his was. And he did leave the return address return "Ismail Ax." "Ismail Ax." I suspect it has some more to do with Islamic terror and the inspiration than it does with the opening line of Moby Dick.

Not so fast. In Krauthammer's column in today's Washington Post:

What can be said about the Virginia Tech massacre? Very little. What should be said? Even less. The lives of 32 innocents, chosen randomly and without purpose, are extinguished most brutally by a deeply disturbed gunman. With an event such as this, consisting of nothing but suffering and tragedy, the only important questions are those of theodicy, of divine justice. Unfortunately, in today's supercharged political atmosphere, there is the inevitable rush to get ideological mileage out of the carnage.

...

Perhaps in the spirit of Obama's much-heralded post-ideological politics we can agree to observe a decent interval of respectful silence before turning ineffable evil and unfathomable grief into political fodder.

I find Krauthammer, too often, to tie everything in his worldview to his consistently neo-con, hawkish, blindly pro-Israel views. It's unfortunate that his hard-line stance is consistent with perceptions of the Pro-Israel lobby in the U.S. Most jews, in both the U.S. and Israel, thend to be far more centrist than the U.S. lobby would suggest.

Or, how about this one, from Michael Medved:

The horrifying shootings at Virginia Tech have produced all the sad, shabby, predictable reactions from misguided commentators trying to make sense of mass murder. On TV and radio, we've already heard that the killing spree was the product of too many guns, or too few guns, or violent video games, or the breakdown of the family, or ill-considered immigration policies or, even, global warming. Glib, shallow explanations allow us to turn away from the one real lesson of these events: that evil exists, and that dark forces - forces believers would call demonic or diabolical - play a powerful role in our world. Regardless of the background or motivation of the killer, Virginia Tech reminds us of the most important truth of our time: that terrorist monsters can't be explained, or excused, or appeased, or ignored, or negotiated into civilized behavior. They must be confronted and destroyed - before they destroy more of the decent and the innocent.

Evil. Yeah. That's it.

What really makes my brain bleed is not the pundits. It's the news anchors who have lived under the cloud of this administration for so long that they think nothing of adopting the talking points, the party line, as the basis of their fact gathering. Whether it's the Speaker of the House visiting Syria or the NRA-centric view of guns, there's no time spent checking facts. They make statements as fact that are, at best, signs of journalistic sloth. At worst, they're perniciously advancing the "shut up, be scared, and respect your Elders" message of the Administration.

Again, via Greenwald, this is what we need.

Boston Globe reporter Charlie Savage won a Pulitzer Prize for his series of articles on the Bush Administration's outrageous claims of expanded executive power. Boston Globe Editor Martin Baron had this to say about Savage:

What Charlie does and the reason he won this richly deserved Pulitzer is because he covered what the White House does, not just what it says,

Bravo.

T Rex was Forghorn Leghorn's Grandpa.

I was interested to read on the BBC's science and nature website that palaeontologists have discovered proteins in a T Rex fossil that shows very a very close resemblance to those of chicken proteins. This is not entirely surprising as it’s pretty much accepted that modern birds have a direct evolutionary line to dinosaurs.

What is really amazing is that organic material can survive the fossilisation process. As Mary Schweitzer of North Carolina State says, “It has always been assumed that preservation of [dinosaur bones] does not extend to the cellular and molecular level. The pathways of cellular decay are well known for modern organisms. And extrapolations predict that all organics are going to be gone completely in 100,000 years, maximum."

I wonder what lame gaps the creationist losers are going to come up with?

On a related note: -
http://www.mcsweeneys.net/links/lists/11DavidNg.html

http://www.fstdt.com/

Target practice

A study released by Harvard University last week confirms something that should be patently obvious - higher rates of home firearm ownership correlate to higher rates of suicide. Now, you might argue that correlation does not equal causation.

I don't know about you, but I've known several people who've attempted suicide. Thankfully, most of them are still alive. Except the ones who used guns. I don't think the ones who used guns were any more hell-bent on death than the others, they just had a more efficient tool.

I won't have guns in the house. I ask the parents of their friends whether they own guns. If they do, the kids don't play at their houses. Sorry. You might think I'm being overly alarmist. You're right. Nothing bad would probably ever happen. Statistically.

Jane Smiley wrote a wonderful essay in the Huffington Post about attitudes towards handgun violence. She's much more eloquent than I could ever hope to be. But she's paid to be eloquent. I'll quote from it, here:

Here's what I think about guns--guns have no other purpose than killing someone or something. All the other murder weapons Americans use, from automobiles to blunt objects, exist for another purpose and sometimes are used to kill. But guns are manufactured and bought to kill. They invite their owners to think about killing, to practice killing, and, eventually, to kill, if not other people, then animals. They are objects of temptation, and every so often, someone comes along who cannot resist the temptation--someone who would not have murdered, or murdered so many, if he did not have a gun, if he were reduced to a knife or a bludgeon or his own strength. I wish that the right wing would admit that, while people kill people and even an "automatic" weapon needs a shooter, people with guns kill more people than people without guns do.

A few hundred people wrote comments in response to her essay. Pretty much writing what you'd expect. But it got me curious about something. How many firearm-related deaths happen in the home each year? Domestic arguments. Children getting their hands on guns. Suicides.

If you factor out the homicides that can be linked to criminal activity (gang-related), and factor out the unlicensed firearms that go along with that, how many firearm deaths are linked to licensed versus unlicensed firearms.

The 2nd Amendment cliche that "if you take guns away, only criminals will have guns." is fatuous. I'm not worried about criminals. I can safely avoid criminals. I'm much more worried about my neighbors shrieking at each other every night.

God is my Co-practitioner

According to a University of Chicago study, forty percent of physicians in the U.S. believe that God directs their patients' health.

Another case of, "If I don't understand something, that must be God."

In your face, brainiac!

It concerns me that the massive upsurge in support for ID and, to a slightly lesser extent, creationism shows no sign of abating. I can see these sort of places popping up in the UK very soon (if they haven't already). The media isn't helping much as it gives this patent nonsense a great deal of airtime and respect. I don't know whether or not you've seen Mike Judge's film, Idiocracy, but it certainly feels as though the yahoo is winning the war of superstition vs reason.

What really concerns me is that, unlike the US, the UK does not separate state from church, and Tony Blair is actively backing (i.e. giving tax revenue to support) religious schools that teach creationism as fact. No wonder the number of students taking sciences at university is falling so dramatically.

Tony has said that he thinks all sides of the argument should have an equal voice. So Tony, you think I should give as much credence and weight to some stories written many, many years after the actual events were alleged to have occurred by many different people with no evidence as I should to robust theories that are observable, repeatable, verifiable and that have withstood peer review by thousands of other professionals? Why should I do that? It makes no logical sense.

Just because a large number of people believe something that does not make it true.

Pay no attention to the man behind the collar.

Invite anyone you'd like.

Anyone who'd feel comfortable discussing faith (or the lack thereof).

Without shouting or insulting.

And without giving offense, or believing that they're the victim of offense.

Okay?

Everybody in the pool.

P.S. Feel free to mess around with the template at will.

Of course I'm peeing on the floor. Isn't that what you want?

Flipper got sick on Friday night. He tried to make it to the bathroom, but instead left a three foot puddle of vomit on the carpet. The beige carpet. We threw a wet towel on it, and left it to clean in the morning. All of the Sysmidgets had dentist appointments in the morning. I took them, and left the Sysmistress to fend with the giant vomit stain. I was pulling pack up to the house as she was pulling out of the driveway. The carpet cleaner had busted, and she was running out for a replacement part. Damned handy, that woman. As we passed, she asked if I would take a basket of food to the church to get blessed. Sure.

The Sysmidgets and I were in the lobby of the church, with about 50 other families. What I had been expecting to be a 5 minute process turned into a 20 minute children's sermon. I saw quite a few parents poking and prodding their young children to participate in dialog with the priest. The symbolism of the food was the topic. Including Peeps. Oh yeah, the priest insists on the pronunciation "Geez-US!", using the linguistic subtlety similar to using a baseball bat to break an egg.

We were back at home, with our sanctified butter, about the same time the Sysmistress was arriving back home.

"How'd it go?" she asked.

"Fine," I said, "but they were really milking it."

We had Easter dinner at our house. We didn't go to services. None of the practicing Christians in the family said one word about the holiday itself. They were more concerned about the Master's gold tournament. No one said "Grace." It was really just an excuse for a family gathering. Mind you, my religious beliefs are not something that I dwell on with my family. As far as they're concerned, I'm benignly non-practicing. So no one was avoiding any topics of faith for fear of starting an unpleasant discussion with me. They just don't come up. Never have. Not at Christmas either.

In that sense, it's pretty easy being a non-believer in a family that really doesn't make a big deal out of believing in the first place.

Now for one of those segues that's not a segue.

The SysmMutt and I have been having some difficulty lately. He has been too rough with the boys. Jumping and biting. And I've had to establish with the dog that I am the alpha in the house, and if he messes with the kids, he will be disciplined. So, to show that he gets it, he's been showing that he is submissive. One of the ways he shows it is by peeing on the floor. I don't want the dog to be afraid of me (unless he's doing something wrong). And it's been driving me crazy that when he's being good, when he's listening, and when he's getting praise from me, he's still peeing.

So I read up on it. He is trying to please, the best way he can. In the dog world, submissive urination is supposed to be the signal that you are being completely "with the program." I need to adjust my body language to avoid sending the signals. I shouldn't look him in the eye. I should squat next to him instead of stand in front of him.

It's working. He's still listening better. And I'm not setting off whatever mental buttons that release his bladder. We all win.

I've been reading a bit lately. Juggling books by and about C.S. Lewis, Richard Feynman and Albert Einstein. They all address faith in an interesting manner. Obviously, Lewis was a prominent Christian. Feynman and Einstein both admitted to a spirituality, in a way, but not a spirituality that fits into conventional ideas of an organized dogma.

I think I can run with a version of Feynman's version. To put it into my own language - I think it's extremely unlikely that we could ever understand the scope of the universe. When things become beyond our grasp, and beyond our ability to even think of how we could think about them, it's tempting to label those things as "God". But why should we expect to have the capacity to understand everything, any more than I expect my dog to be able to understand the things that I do? It's a monumental display of hubris to say that if humans can't figure something out, then that topic is mystical. More accurate would be to say that that area of knowledge is beyond our operating parameters.