The Daily Jokelahoman

NASA is continuing its search for water on the moon using a very interesting method:  Hitting the moon with a very large, fast moving projectile.  Unfortunately the HuffPo chose their words poorly when they wrote the title to the article.  If I’m reading this right, NASA is not actually bombing the moon with explosives, but just hitting it really hard with a solid projectile.

The comments on this article are absolutely ridiculous.  If people honestly think that this is going to have some effect on the lunar environment, lunar orbit, or the earth, then they are morons.  The moon is massive, especially compared to the projectile, and there is no way that this could somehow push it out of its orbit and have ill effects on the Earth.   It would take a considerably larger object to actually change the orbit of the moon.

There is also no environment on the moon to hurt.  It is a lifeless rock with no atmosphere that is hit by space debris all the time.  Were it not for our atmosphere, erosion, plate tectonics, etc, the Earth would look very similar to the moon.  The moon has survived countless impacts from larger objects than this one and I think it can easily survive this.

This just proves the sad state of scientific literacy in our country.  We have fallen far behind most of the developed world in education.  People are just unable to grasp how this mission could be important.  They think NASA is basically just going to fly a plane over the moon and drop a few bombs on it just because they can.  We need to go back to the days where NASA was popular and when people would gather around the TV just to watch the launch of a rocket or the Space Shuttle.  I fear America has lost its fascination with space exploration, and that is a sad thing to lose.

Ray Comfort in his infinite knowledge of absolutely nothing, apparently because a few forum posts have been critical of his giving away copies of Charles Dariwn’s “Origin of Species” now all atheists are super mad that he is doing this.

Here is the post of Comfort’s website.

Should atheists be angry that Comfort is giving away copies of “Origin” with his own tripe printed before the science?  Not in the least.  It’s the same tired old arguments against evolution that have been debunked time and time again.  Complexity, complexity, what good is half an eye?  Complete unscientific dribble.  He also goes we the traditional creationist tactic of trying to set up Mr. Darwin as a straw man because he thinks evolution caused Hitler to kill six million Jews (the church help considerably more than evolution).  Even if Darwin was an anti-Semite or a racist, it doesn’t make his theory of natural selection invalid.  It has continually been upheld by the scientific evidence over the past 150 years.

We should also be happy that anyone near one of the college campuses involved can go get themselves a free copy of “Origin of Species”  with a little comedy at the beginning.  I plan on going to the University of Florida down the street from my house and getting myself another copy.  I don’t think Ray Comfort’s “genius” is going to persuade me away from hard science.

Unfortunately it seems that the PDF file of the introduction seems to be removed from Comfort’s website, but I can assure you that there is nothing new in it.

Well, I have finally escaped the not-so-great state of Oklahoma for sunny Florida.  I hope that all of you still stuck in the conservative buckle of the bible belt escape someday too.  I was thinking about changing the name of my blog, but I decided that would be far too much work and just confusing.  And I do plan to continue to make fun of the right wing lunacy in Oklahoma every chance I get, because there is just way more of it there than here in Florida (especially Gainesville, the Austin of Florida, Go Gators!).  Hopefully I will have more free time to actually post more often on here, at least until I actually find a job.

Greg Laden posted a link on his blog to an article in the St. Petersburg Times about a photo that has been making the rounds in the wingnut Republican blogosphere.  The photo is supposedly of the tea party that occurred on the Washington mall on September 12th, 2009.  Well, here is the photo:

(source)

Well I noticed that the photograph looked just a little too familiar, and here’s the story behind it.

It’s October 1997, I am 12 years old and am on a charter bus with my dad and a bunch of other men from the Pleasant Valley Church of Christ in Little Rock, Arkansas.  We are on our way to Washington D.C.  When we get there we get off the bus in Alexandria, VA and make our way to the metro station so we can get to D.C.  We leave the train at I believe the Federal Triangle station and all of us walk over to the Washington Mall.  The reason we are there:  The Promise Keepers convention on October 4, 1997.  This is the picture of the mall that they sold near the end of the rally and my dad has this EXACT same photograph on the wall of his office at home.

I believe that it is YOU (crazy right wing Republicans)  who are lying this time.

Why is the United States allowing Karzai to pass some of the laws he is passing without really much pressure to not pass them?  He most recently passed a law that basically allows husbands to legally rape their wives.  Yes, this is an Islamic republic, but that does not mean the U.S. cannot exercise some of its influence when there are obvious human rights violations going on.  The law also allows the husband to deny his wife food if she doesn’t not have sex with him at least once every four days.  Are you freaking kidding me?  Seriously Islam, this is just one of the many reason that the rest of the world is not a big fan of your religion.  At least most of Christianity has moved on from treating their women like complete crap.  Though I will say that I’m sure this does not represent all of Islam.  I’m sure there are many very good Muslim husbands who respect their wives and treat them well, just not in the Middle East.

If Karzai wants continued U.S. support and protection from his many assassination attempts then we should require him to treat women like people or just leave him to the Taliban.  This kind of crap should not be allowed to fly in the 21st century.  If you want to follow your crazy, evil, dark ages nonsense religion, don’t legislate the craziest stuff that it is says, or that you interpret it to say.

Though it’s really not that surprising, the Texas State Senate passed a bill requiring all public schools in the state of Texas to offer an elective course on the bible and its influence on culture.  Now, I am generally in favor of such a class, at least one that treats the bible as just another text, and not the divine revelation of god.  I completely agree with having a class that shows how the bible was supposedly passed down throughout history and gives the scholarly consensus of the accuracy of the translations, where the books came from, and why the certain books were chosen.  Because it is in this that I think maybe some of the kids will see how inaccurate translations are and how pretty much the entire bible is not based on historical fact.

Unfortunately this is Texas we are talking about.  The problem with the bill (HB 1287) is that it really doesn’t set many overall standards for how the individual schools are going to handle this.  It leaves it up to the individual districts to govern the curriculum.  The major problem with this is that some of the small schools that don’t have many students and have one church in that town that literally everyone goes to may abuse this and use the class to continue to preach to the students on the taxpayer’s dime.  It should not be much of a problem in the larger schools, but Texas isn’t exactly a bastion of free thought.

Another problem is that they do not specify one or a list of translations that the classes are supposed to use.  If you are teaching a class on the historical influence of the bible then each student should be required to have at least a copy of the King James Version of the bible, since it was used for such a long period of time, and maybe an English translation of the Latin Vulgate.  Some translations are indeed superior to others, but, they have not been used for a very long period of time and there do not have much historical impact (i.e.  the NIV, etc.).

I’m sure that the ACLU is already researching a lawsuit against this bill, but I disagree with this.  Let them have the bible classes as long as they are taught without proselytizing.  If some school abuses it and then they find out, yes, by all means bring a lawsuit against that district, but don’t punish all of them.  I’m going to reiterate what I heard on The Non-Prophets yesterday by saying that I would not be surprised if the first person to bring a lawsuit against this bill is actually a fundamentalist Christian.  I know that there are some very conservative congregations that teach the King James Version of the bible as god’s completely literal English translation of the scriptures, even though it is one of the worst.  We all know how completely and totally sane some of these right wingers are and if their version of the bible is not completely taught from I would not be the least bit surprised that they would bring a lawsuit against this or at least pitch a huge fit.

Well Texas, the ball is in your court, don’t screw this up (though you probably will).

I have heard a few different explanations from other people for why I left the faith and became an atheist.  Some say I just didn’t want to have to be accountable to god anymore for my actions because I enjoyed “sinning”.  Others I was never actually a true Christian (I’ll probably address that one some other time).  But the one that frustrates me the most is that I’m just pissed off at god, religion, and the world.  Why do people think that they know what my reasons are without even asking me about them?  I don’t pretend to know why other people chose the path of unreason when they joined a religion because it could be any number of reasons.  I would much rather ask them what they believe and why than just speculate that they are all idiots, because I am sure that isn’t true 99% of the time (though unfortunately that 1% that is tends to be the most outspoken).  Don’t rush to judgment about something you don’t know.

As for being angry at god, how can I be angry at something I do not believe exists?  I guess I could compare it to a Christian being angry at Poseidon for causing hurricanes.  It doesn’t make any sense.  I assume it stems from the belief that some people hold that even atheists know that there is a god, but we just refuse to acknowledge it.  I suppose I could be angry at the concept of god and the use of his presumed teachings by his followers, but this would fall more under the category of being angry with religion.  I’m not really even angry with religion in general.  I admit that it can be used as a force for good in the world through the helping of others.  But people shouldn’t require religion to force them to do good deeds for their fellow man.  Helping should be a reward in itself.  You don’t need the promise of eternity in heaven to force you to be kind to others.  If there is anything that I am angry with it’s the use of religious doctrine for evil.  Once dogma is used to oppress other people I immediately have a problem with it, and I believe that it is the job of secularists and liberal religious people to make sure that such things do not happen.

This is still not why I left the faith.  I left the faith because I saw no evidence in favor of believing that there is a god up there and that the bible is a true historical document.  If you want to know exactly what I believe and what I don’t believe, just ask me.  I don’t have all the answers and I don’t pretend like I have them.  I only ask that you be civil and don’t pretend like you have all of the answers.  I really enjoy having conversations about such things and I think that they are necessary if anyone is going to grow as a person.  Just don’t be rude about it.

Atheism is racking up the celebrities.  The cool ones, you can keep Kirk Cameron and Mel Gibson.

via NY Daily News

I am going to preface this blog post by saying that this is totally my opinion and I’m well aware that many people will not agree with me, but I can live with that.

Recently Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum published a book call Unscientific America. In their book they cover the war on reason that is occurring in America and how we seem to be allowing pseudoscience to have the same standing as actual hard science. I have read Mooney’s last book The Republican War on Science, which I thought was a very good book (though half the book was a big middle finger to Sen. Jim Inhofe) despite the fact that Mooney is a journalist, not a scientist. However, his most recent publication is not doing too well in the science blogosphere. PZ Myers, Jerry Coyne, and others have been quite critical of the book because of its pandering to the religious right and its harsh criticism of the “New Atheists” and their effect on the fight against anti-science and pseudoscience. Needless to say the crap has hit the fan.

It has lead to quite the blog war between Mooney and PZ Myers (read here, here, here,  here, and here). Now I have not read the book, though it is on the list, and may be slightly biased to agree with the real scientist, but Professor Myers arguments are quite persuasive and Mooney’s rebuttals tend to be quite adolescent. Mooney’s argument is that the New Atheists are hurting the pro-science camp’s efforts to get science back into a prominent place in America. He insists that people like Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers should not be attacking religion because it is dividing society into a science camp, and a religious one that views science as the enemy (see his article in Newsweek). What I have gathered from all that I have read is that criticizing religion on scientific grounds should be considered taboo in the scientific community and that the New Atheists are bad. On this point Mr. Mooney and I disagree.

I would say that there is definitely a place for figures like Coyne, Dawkins, Dennet, Myers, Hitchens, etc. Religion is NOT off limits to science. Most major religions claim that their deity in some way interacts with the physical world; this automatically enters he/she/it into the realm of science. If there is interaction between a deity and nature, then it should be observable using the scientific method. Yet whenever such a claim is made, there ends up being a plausible naturalistic explanation for the event. For example, the prayer study that was done recently showed no correlation between the recovery time of sick individuals and whether or not they are prayed for.

The New Atheist has filled a niche that has been left void for some time. They are not scared to challenge religion on the claims that they make and pull no punches when criticizing the ridiculousness of these claims. Some people just need to be shocked in to actually questioning what they believe and why they believe it. I was one of those people. When I picked up Richard Dawkins’ book The God Delusion I still considered myself an evangelical. But, upon reading the book I began to realize that I had not studied in depth really anything that I believe, so I began to and it took me in a completely different direction. I have heard other stories similar to mine. Some people do not respond to a tap on the shoulder, so they need a punch in the face.

As a bit of a side note.  I did read an excerpt chapter from Unscientific America about the reaction to Pluto no longer being a planet. This is one of the most ridiculous things I have ever read.  So now science is supposed to consult the public on matters of science to make sure they’re okay with it?  Science is not a democracy, it is governed by the evidence.  Pluto no longer fit the criteria to be considered a full planet, therefore it was taken off the list of planets and given the classification “plutoid”.  Science should not care if people get really angry because something is declassified as something.  It should only be concerned with communicating to the public why such a change was made.  It should NEVER cave to public opinion when it is fully supported by the evidence.