Announcements

We are hosting a debate between Matt Slick and John Shook. It will occur on Wednesday, April 29, 6:30 pm, in Humanities A51. The topic is “Christianity or Secular Humanism: Which is ethically superior?”  Expect to see more advertisement of this event soon.

Some of you may have seen the signs on Bruin Walk which say “Is God a Delusion?” This event is hosted by the Lutheran Campus Ministries (the same people who have that “Religion is for the weak” table in front of Pauley Pavilion). The talk, given by Angus Menuge, occurs on Thursday, April 16, 6:00 PM in Broad 2100A.

David proposed an idea: BASS talks. If there’s any topic you find interesting, and think BASS should find interesting too, then you can contact any of us. You can give an organized presentation, about 10 minutes without being interrupted. This gives you an opportunity to practice public speaking, and allows us to devote a small section of meetings to a more structured discussion. (Of course, the opportunity to give a talk was always available, but now we’re making it official.)

Meeting Discussion

We started out by watching a video with James Randi, Hugh Laurie (actor of House), and an Astrologer. And then we watched a clip from Alexander Pelosi’s documentary, Friends of God.

The latter video showed a lot of cute kids parroting creationist mantras. Some of us find this a little disturbing. On the other hand, kids can just as easily be taught to say the opposite the next day, so maybe there’s no need to read too much into it. Another discussion point was the phrase “War on Christians” which was used near the end of the video. Some find this persecution complex to be unjustified, since Christians constitute a powerful majority. Maybe they’re referring just to Fundamentalist Christians, who compose only 25% of the population (still a powerful majority).

To kick off a more politically oriented topic, we watched a video of a “man of truth” who advocates getting rid of paper money. From what I understand, the New World Order plans to make your paper money worthless in the very near future. We started discussing why the gold standard is supposedly good, and why it is supposedly bad. Matthew explained that money is currently worth something because it’s backed up by the government. If we were using the gold standard, then money would be worth something because it’s backed up by gold, which has been historically very consistent in its value. Matthew questioned the need for a persistent currency. Ben thought that having a depreciable currency stimulates the economy because it encourages cash flow. After more back and forth, we watched Scrooge McDuck’s explanation of money.

To cap the meeting, we watched this strange advertisement for the Nation for Marriage, an organization which opposes gay marriage. I would like to see some of the claims in this ad supported by evidence, wouldn’t you?

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again.  If you are a member of BASS, this is your website to use.  If you want to contribute a story about your experiences tabling, or if you just like to share silly science videos, you can do it here.  Just contact us.

Meeting discussion:

We first talked about the inauguration. Reactions were mixed, but several people were very happy with Obama’s mention of “non-believers” as Americans. However, someone cited a quote by George W Bush which also positively mentioned people with out faith (see some quotes here). We were amused by the fact that after the oath got messed up, Obama later redid it without a Bible. Imagine the reaction on Fox News.

Most were unhappy that Rick Warren gave the invocation. His prayer specifically referred to the Christian god and how we would all eventually answer to him. Why did Obama invite this guy again? While the answer might be “to be more inclusive”, BASS members suggested other possibilities as well. Perhaps it was an attempt to symbolically ally with evangelicals, so that he can get away with actions like lifting the abortion gag rule. Perhaps it was in order to put Rick Warren on the defensive; he had to moderate himself because the public eye was focused him.

We also watched the first two and a half minutes of the Daily Show episode.

Shifting gears a bit, we discussed the evolution of altruism. A lot of it is mindless chatter, but the following points came out of my attempted distillation:

• Once we have reputation, altruism leads to evolutionary fitness.
• Because of game theory, a tit for tat strategy often works best.
• Altruism to offspring and relatives is easily explained because they share genes with you.
• If a population has limited resources, evolution should favor altruism so that they minimize the amount of resources wasted on conflict.
• But what if you are the only liar in an honest society?
• Is there an advantage to having an “outgroup”?
• Perhaps at least part of the explanation is memetic rather than genetic. But this doesn’t explain altruism in other species.

From there, we drifted into the topic of the nature of morality. Someone drew a distinction between genetic morality and philosophical morality. Genetic morality explains our predispositions, but we need philosophical morality in order to become comfortable with those predispositions. Just because an action promotes fitness from an evolutionary stand point is not sufficient to make it morally correct.

But these instances do not constitute the only time the military junta has screwed over its own people. Of all the megalomaniacs, it is perhaps only General Ne Win and his successors who relied heavily on astrology and other superstition to chart out national policy…

A relatively harmless example of this is the practice of yadaya – a practice loosely resembling voodoo where a person essentially dresses up and impersonates an enemy to “steal” his or her powers. Thus on numerous occasions Burma’s generals have been known to dress up in drag as pro-democracy advocate and elected leader of the country Aung San Suu Kyi.

However, this story takes an ugly turn as, when told by his astrologer and numerologist that his lucky number was 9 and that he would live to be 90 if he “surrounded himself” with such auspicious digits, General Ne Win appeared before his country in 1987 and informed them that most of their money was now worthless. New money would be issued… not on the metric scale but rather in 45 and 90 kyat bills – since (for example) 45 is a product of and its digits add up to 9.

Yes, it’s a real 90 kyat bill. General Win was really that fucked up in real life.

The result to the country was catastrophic. While 5 and 10 kyats remained legal tender, the now-invalid 50 and 100 kyats that were the mainstay of most of the middle class’s savings in the nation resulted in a collapse in purchasing power and Burma being named least developed nation in 1987. Perhaps the saddest part of the story is that Ne Win’s astrologer was right – the good general lived to be 91 years of age. Maybe this article should be titled “Brutal Narcissistic Military Dictator Proves that Astrology Works!”

You can hear the entire sermon here (thanks to Crooks and Liars for the link) -

I realize that John McCain needs to appeal to the Religious Right to secure the Republican base… so despite being a die-hard partisan and Obama apologist, I don’t think his seeking Hagee’s endorsement is that big of a deal. But my question is – why is this (in my opinion) profoundly evil man still allowed to preach his message of hate and divisiveness without being marginalized by even the Religious Right? Why is John Hagee not in Fred Phelps/Westboro Baptist Church territory right now? Does he have to personally defecate on a soldier’s grave to merit the outrage and negative press that he so well deserves?

We will be rescheduling this for the upcoming Fall 2008 quarter. See you then!

Today’s hard right seeks total dominion. It’s packing the courts and rigging the rules. The target is not the Democrats but democracy itself.

From Theocracy Watch

This presentation by Eddie Tabash is a sobering and chilling account of how a shift of just one vote on the U.S. Supreme Court could usher in a religious tyranny, and how the upcoming presidential election is pivotal to the future of the Court and to our most basic freedoms.

Eddie Tabash is a constitutional lawyer in private practice in the Los Angeles area. He graduated from UCLA, magna cum laude, with a B.A. in political science. He graduated from Loyola Law School of Los Angeles in 1976. He chairs the national legal committee of Americans United for Separation of Church and State and Chairs the First Amendment Task Force of the Center for Inquiry and Council for Secular Humanism. He also represents the atheistic viewpoint in debates against some of the world’s foremost religious philosophers on the question of the existence of god. He will be speaking on the “Threat of the Religious Right to Our Modern Freedoms.”

What: Talk by Eddie Tabash on the threat of the Religious Right
When: Tuesday, May 27
Time: 7:00-8:00pm
Where: Public Affairs 2250 (Map)
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This is a FOX Opinion News Network documentary propaganda piece featuring Newt Gingrich that appeals to their right-wing audience and runs through all the talking points of why church and state should be joined at the hip. They never mention specifically what kind of religion the US should adopt, but it’s pretty obvious by looking at the logo.

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1:00:52 – Hitler’s views on superior races mirrors Darwin’s own theories, and a necessary pre-requisite to Nazism was Darwinism. At the time, many eugenicists used Darwin’s theory to justify the slaughter of Jews, Slavs, and infirms en masse.

The Anti-Defamation League respectfully disagrees -

“The film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed misappropriates the Holocaust and its imagery as a part of its political effort to discredit the scientific community which rejects so-called intelligent design theory. Hitler did not need Darwin to devise his heinous plan to exterminate the Jewish people and Darwin and evolutionary theory cannot explain Hitler’s genocidal madness. Using the Holocaust in order to tarnish those who promote the theory of evolution is outrageous and trivializes the complex factors that led to the mass extermination of European Jewry.”

It’s sad that Stein resorts to Godwin’s Law to bring his points across. Persons of all walks of life supported the Nazi Regime because, like the fascist regime in Italy, it promised to get the economy back on track and the trains running on time. Genocide is not linked with atheism – in fact, the Bible details and supports the genocide of the Caananites in Deuteronomy of the Old Testament, and the arrogance and superiority complexes of many Christians played a major role in the near-genocide of the Native Americans. There have been so many genocides that have taken place since even before Darwin came up with his theory, and many of those have been committed by people claiming to be Christians as well as persons of other religions.

1:13:21 – Stein quotes from Darwin’s book The Descent of Man, and seems to make the claim that Darwin was for weeding out those “undesirables” in society just like Hitler and the Nazis after him.

James Watson is a racist, but one cannot discount his research on the double helix because he was, just as one cannot discount Martin Luther’s claims that the Catholic Church of the time needed to be reformed because he was an anti-Semite. That’s not to say that Darwin was even a eugenicist; Stein conveniently omits the next passage in the book (this taken from Expelled Exposed) -

“The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated, more tender and more widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, if so urged by hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature.”

1:25:27 – Richard Dawkins doesn’t know how the first self-replicating molecule (life) came to be. How could the exemplar of Darwinism not know? Surely Intelligent Design has won…

He’s evil and communist. How could Stein’s righteousness not prevail?

While there is no hard evidence, see Tom Cech’s Experiments under Part II of my refutation. While definitely more experiments need to be conducted, especially in finding an evolutionary basis for an RNA-based polymerase, but there is already far stronger evidence for abiogenesis than Intelligent Design.

1:25:55 – Dawkins claims that an advanced civilization evolved through Darwinism and then could have “seeded” this planet with life. Dawkins is only against God as an intelligent designer.

It’s an entirely plausible explanation that requires no supernatural forces that we can’t prove exist or don’t exist. In any case, this was not the crux of Dawkin’s argument and more of an aside; the film again disingenuously exploits this quote to try to push through the supposed ignorance of the evolutionists.

1:28:33 – In a speech, Stein says that “America is all about freedom”, and that the freedom to impose intelligent design as a legitimate theory in the scientific community is an essential right of the people!

We’re not out to squelch your personal views; you could be a Young Earth Creationist and I wouldn’t particularly care. But to say that ID is legitimate science when it doesn’t even follow the scientific method and instead basically says “I give up, God did it” is something that the film overlooks.

1:28:53 – Stein basically mirrors his own staged speech with Reagan’s memorable speech at the Berlin Wall.

I’m not particularly a fan of Reagan, but that speech did take political courage and was definitely one of his better moments. But to mirror where Ben Stein basically paid pro-ID people to give a seemingly spontaneous standing ovation after the speech is ridiculous.

If you don’t believe me, see for yourself (it’s a vidcap, so quality is terrible) -

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4TQlljLfhM

If you ever needed another case of an exemplar of the religious right engaging in depraved behavior that s/he has spent his/her life decrying and passing legislation against*, then look no further than GOP Congressman Vito Fossella of New York.

According to Ontheissues.org, Fossella is a “hard-core conservative” who voted for mandatory school prayer in public school, is a hard-liner on reproductive rights, and has the following ratings from the following advocacy groups:

Americans United For Separation of Church and State – 0%

Human Rights Campaign (Pro-LGBT) – 0%

NARAL Pro-Choice America – 0%

National Right to Life Committee (”Pro-Life”) – 82%

Christian Coalition (Pro-Theocracy) – 81%

But aside from Rush’s drug use or Larry Craig’s Minneapolis lavatory trysts, this story probably takes the cake. According to the New York Times, Fossella got drunk as hell at a local watering hole and got pulled over with a blood alcohol level of 0.17%, three times the legal limit.

Mr. Fossella was asked to recite the alphabet between the letters D and T. “The subject immediately started and said ‘A, B,’ ” the officer wrote in his report. After the officer explained the test again, Mr. Fossella started: “D, E, F, H, G, H, I, J, L,” and then was able to finish.

As a result, the Congressman may have to spend a mandatory 5 days in jail. But suspicions arose of an extramarital affair when Fossella, possibly still drunk, called a woman by the name of Laura Fay rather than his wife to pick him up from the police station while claiming that he was going to go see his 3-year old daughter. One thing led to another, and Fossella eventually admitted not only to the rumored extramarital affair, but that also said 3-year old daughter was a love child between himself and Laury Fay.

According to the same NY Post article, Fossella’s wife no longer sees him as a muscular, gun-toting bull-riding conservative family values man-hunk but rather a bespectacled latte-sipping NPR-loving liberal swinger who drives a Prius, and rumors are that she plans to leave him.

*If you’re wondering why I omitted Mark Foley, it’s because he was actually quite socially moderate even for the GOP – he was endorsed by the Log Cabin Republicans and even voted against defining marriage as between a man and a woman; clearly his case is another matter.

EDIT: It looks like Obama over performed in both North Carolina and Indiana by 10% over what most of the polls were claiming. All the pundits at this point say that the primary is basically over and that he won – so I was completely wrong about the first part.

Yes, ‘wrongness’ is an actual word; I looked it up. And unfortunately for the candidate who I hope to have the privilege to vote for in November, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright Affair has again reared its ugly head and threatens Barack Obama’s chances of winning Indiana and even North Carolina in the primaries.

Granted, many of the comments were taken out of context, and I think that it is extremely important to have a long-overdue discussion about the many times the United States has committed wrong during its long history than the “we’re the best country in the world, cover your ears” crap that has become the mainstay of political commentary. On the other hand, Wright wasn’t very tactful in driving across any of his points, and other contentions such as “the government created AIDS to harm black people” simply have no basis and definitely are insulting.

It is clear that Reverend Wright’s radicalism stems mostly from his political rather than religious views; all his points are political and are not mired in the fundementalist rhetoric used by Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. Unfortunately Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens took the bait and automatically attributed Reverend Wright’s political views as his religious views; in my opinion Jeremiah Wright would still hold such views regardless of his religion or even if he were a non-believer. But as I discuss below, religion may have played a role in his personal decision to come out last weekend and create even more controversy.

Of course Barack Obama had to respond to such a scandal, and defied political convention in his Philadelphia Speech by trying to shift the political discourse towards trying to understand the simmering interracial tensions that persons of all colors feel to a degree and away from the one-dimensional tirades of his former pastor. As part of this discourse, Obama refused to disown his pastor and instead urged the public to understand that Wright was a “child of the 60s” who had gone through the pain of the Civil Rights Struggle only to see that African Americans in his community were just as destitute as before; such an experience, Obama argued, molded the political views of Wright and more than a few of his colleagues and formed a generational as well as a racial rift.

Wright finally broke his silence over the weekend, appearing on a three-stop “media tour” which included the Bill Moyers Show, the NAACP, and the National Press Club. Wright’s appearance on Bill Moyers was harmless enough, and he did a good job at framing his previous arguments in the appropriate context. But upon appearing in front of the NAACP, Wright essentially caricatured himself and at one point resorted to a painfully bad imitation of John F. Kennedy. Things only got worse at the National Press Club, where Wright defended both Louis Farrakhan’s denunciation of Judaism as a “gutter religion” as well as his own comments about the government causing AIDS. So essentially Rev. Wright again adheres to his black-and-white caricatures on race, having this whole non-issue being brought up to the forefront again is – and I am certain that Wright is aware of this – very damaging to Obama. Keep in mind that Obama did essentially the opposite, took a political risk, and defended Rev. Wright earlier.

So what does this whole debacle have to do with religion? Well, it appears that the root of the problem is with the capacity (or lack thereof) of individuals to change their beliefs or admit their own mistakes in the fact of reality. I will be the first to admit that we are all guilty of this no matter what belief system we adhere to. This applies for atheists too – Christopher Hitchens, for example, still adheres to the hideously flawed foreign policy of the neoconservatives. However, would not the knowledge that an omnipotent, static entity endorses your belief system be the greatest encouragement for both arrogance and absolutism?

So my question is (and keep in mind I’m not quite sure about this myself) – did the fact that Jeremiah Wright is a pastor and the possible belief that he was justified by God compel him to defend indefensible comments as arrogantly and vociferously as he did, or something else? Or do you think that old age, resentment of Obama, some other non-religion-related factor was the primary reason why he decided to appear at the National Press Club and make those outrageous claims?

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Here is a list of Senate Committees that have something to do with research or science-related policymaking in this country and anyone on such a committee who has any grounding in science at all. I’m grasping at straws with some of these people, but here goes -

• Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation: One engineer (John Sununu, R-NH), One veterinarian (John Ensign, R-NV)
• Committee on Environment and Public Works: One batshit crazy global warming denier (Jim Inhofe, R-OK)
• Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions: One doctor (Tom Coburn, R-OK), one veterinarian (Wayne Allard, R-CO)
• Committee on Energy and Natural Resources: One teacher (Daniel Akaka, D-HI)
• Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry: One organic farmer (Jon Tester, D-MT)

I’m not implying that this nation should be some sort of technocracy of scientists; such a system can easily fall out of touch with the average citizen and is the stuff of dystopian science fiction movies. I also realize that going into law and business are more or less natural routes into a political career and that it is pretty much inevitable that a large portion of not an outright majority of our lawmakers will have gone down this path.

However, ask yourself this – On a committee where the latest in scientific research and related policymaking is discussed on a daily basis, how confident do you feel that the right decisions will be made if the vast majority of the committee members probably could not even interpret a PubMed article on their own?

It would be reassuring if at least a few politicians on such a committee were able to interpret and disseminate scientific information provided to them like they are easily be able to do with issues of constitutionality, foreign policy, and general domestic policy. But in a nation where the current administration supports intelligent design, set us back six years on stem cell research to pander to the religious right, and still shows lingering doubts about the validity of anthropogenic global warming… maybe that’s too much to ask.