The Halloween Threat Down!

I'd like to see PZ do a "best of" video like this.

His stuff makes this look tame.

Has Science Made a Foothold in Pop Culture?

It seems so, in a strange kind of way. Stephen Hawking is getting the same kind of internet treatment that is usually reserved for pop icons like Tom Hanks, Miley Cyrus and Harrison Ford: Internet rumors of his death. I'd love to read what PZ has to say about all this, but I'd guess Pharyngula is being overloaded with hits. I certainly can't get the page to load.

I hadn't seen the rumors yet myself, until I hit a link taking me to Yahoo Answers, where someone said with some authority that Hawking was killed by a Christian Fundamentalist because he was close to close to a final proof of the non-existence of God.

I mean just that phrase alone "Final proof of the non-existence of God" should have tipped people off, but people don't think.

The problem is that the voices of reason are being overwhelmed in the forums and on Twitter by the sheer momentum of this ridiculous rumor.

Just stop and think about it.

Anyway, it seems that a lot of this is a corruption of an old Onion radio broadcast (yes, there are still people out there that think The Onion is real news, sad to say):

Old Fashioned Book Burning and Chicken BBQ Nite at the Church:

They're burning all those heretic bibles... you know, everything except the KJV in English and a handful of translations based on the KJV.

They're burning all of Satan's music... vile stuff like country western, easy listening, contemporary christian, and southern gospel.

They're burning books by heretics like Mother Theresa and Billy Graham.

Because THEY'RE divinely inspired, even if their web designer wasn't (wear sunglasses if you're going to click on over to their link)

And you thought religious ignorance was dead?

You haven't gone to Amazing Grace Baptist Church in Canton, NC

Even a God-fearing Conservative "REAL AMERICAN" is only an instant away...

Yesterday afternoon I rode home on the bus from the local hospital, where I was a guest for several days in a semiprivate room. I'll save for another time the story of how admissions sent someone up to my room every morning before breakfast to ask me how I'd like to pay my copay ($550 for the hospital stay, on top of which they tried to charge me the ER visit until they realized that since they own my insurance plan, they couldn't do) and how much I'd like to put down as a downpayment (the minimum downpayment to be $275) and how they treated my offer of every last cent of my cash on hand (all 13 of them) and seemed to think I was joking when I suggested unless I could somehow convince the US government to increase my Social Security to compensate for my increased medical costs, that they would have to wait until I applied for their community care program (which covers 6 months back medical bills), which I promised I'd do as soon as I could include my next two upcoming surgeries.

Instead I'll just talk about how riding home on that bus, escorted by my two teens for my own safety (and they could carry my change of clothing and the small library I'd been working my way through during my little visit) we gazed out at the Sandias, frosted lightly with snow. I sighed and said, "Look how beautiful that is!" And my daughter brought me back to reality by saying "Look how COLD it is." I immediately knew where she was coming from and said "Honey, CERTAINLY Albuquerque housing has switched over the swamp cooler to the furnace today while we were gone... after all, they started conversion a week ago!"

But when I walked through the door, they had not. More than that, upon calling housing maintenance, I learned that maybe they'll get to us next week. After reminding them this is a health issue and letting them know I spent the previous days a guest of our local hospital, we started trying to warm the house up with the dryer (which is electric) and the oven (which is gas) and as night fell, we kept up with alternating hot water in the shower and running the dryer, which allowed us to keep the temperature hovering around 50° rather than the external temperature.

Just so it's clear what "maybe next week" means, here's our forecast for next week, with the overnight lows:



Now when I complain about Albuquerque Housing and this sort of problem (yes, I do pay rent) I invariably get some right-wing conservative asshat who are willing to share some of there wisdom with me like "if you don't like it, move" (as if I live in public housing when I could AFFORD to live somewhere else) or the old conservative standby, "get a job"... as if I gave up my nice teaching job and my $40K pay check so I could raise my family on less than $1000/ month in social security payments, just enough NOT to qualify for foodstamps for the family or medicaid for myself, so that in a month like this I could be nagged by a hospital to pay a total monthly bill(after medicare) that exceeds my income.

For some reason these pinheads think I don't understand their argument. I can sum it up quite concisely: "if you're not ME or MINE, and you're in poverty, it's because you for some reason DESERVE to be." There are times I wish I didn't delete a lot of my previous blog here with the intent of separating out a whole lot of personal stuff and travel and science stuff, because I had a rather interesting conversation with an individual about his assumptions about me, from the very first one, that I obviously can walk because I was clearly standing in my profile photo (I was, in fact, seated in my profile photo). But the fact of the matter is that people see what they want to see, and it gives some people a vast amount of comfort to assume that bad things only happen to drug addicts, drunks, homosexuals and sluts.

I grew up in a God-fearing, Conservative, "REAL AMERICAN" household. My family were German immigrants, protestants, and so stereotypical of the 50's family that you expected mom to yell out the door for The Beaver. I remember growing up how dad sat me on his knee and told me about King and his people getting uppity down in the south, and how they were going to ruin it for all the hard working people... and how someone needed to shoot him to shut him up. Grandma warned me about Catholics (who were, after all, no better than witches: they ring little bells and their god comes). I grew up being a good little protestant white girl, complete with my little white gloves for Sunday at church.

Except, of course, that I wasn't white. My mother would no doubt say that she nursed a viper at her breast ... except that breast feeding was "unnatural", and of course the fact that I was adopted, which also meant that I was one of those "filthy squaw babies foisted off on unsuspecting white women".

Yup, I grew up in a "REAL AMERICAN", even though by some genetic mishap, I happened to be a total poser.

I started getting an education in life pretty quick. So even though I was living the REAL AMERICAN lifestyle (started working on the farm at 11, but already had my little home enterprises that brought a good profit to the family at age 5, from shoveling driveways to doing custom embroidery work for weddings) I was meeting people (especially people of color) and seeing things (in those liberal breeding grounds they called schools) that made me question some of those basic assumptions that went with being WASP.

The problem is that too many people never challenge those basic assumptions themselves.

It's much more comforting to look down on someone else and sneer "get a job" than to try to imaging falling ill, having a disabling accident, or losing a job and having someone else sneer the same at you. There's this hostility that helps isolate you from responsibility when you can remind a person that you're paying their social security (even though they paid your mom's for decades) as if that gives them some sort of right to do with you (or say to you) whatever they please.

But it only takes an instant, a diagnosis, or a pink slip, to come down this far... to have lost everything... and there is nothing about being conservative, Republican, or white that will insulate you from those everyday risks of living.

See you at the bottom.

What Rift?

There's a certain amount of ignorance in all this. The people who are reporting this and talking about "schism" are still thinking of atheists in terms of having some sort of doctrine that we all agree on. There's no doctrine. There's no religion. The one thing that we do agree on (not because you have to agree to become a "member", like some sort of atheist catechism) is the non-existence of some sort of being who demands our worship.

I find the idea that there is an "Atheist movement" silly. What you might be seeing is a civil rights movement, however: Individuals who want to uphold the bill of rights with regard to state supported religion, and to eliminate prejudice against atheists.

There is no "rift" there is only disagreements on how to best support the rights of individuals who do not believe in God... rather like any other civil rights movement, there is a pretty good spectrum of how it's best to get through to the public. I'd think that most of you who didn't live through it have at least read about the history of the black civil rights movement to be able to see parallels in political and public awareness technique.

Next, there's a profound amount of ignorance in some of this because people can't tell the difference between an atheistic argument and a scientific argument. There are some people who don't understand that saying there is no empirical evidence for the existence of a god is not an atheistic argument, it's a scientific argument. Even as a Christian, I knew that there is no empirical evidence of God, that the only evidence of a god that I required was my own, personal faith. A lot of argument has come about because of the situation in our education system and the attempt at certain religious groups to replace scientific knowledge in our schools with religious beliefs as part of a conversion strategy, and exactly the kind of behavior the first amendment was created to prevent.

How to best deal with that often is at core of the rift: Do atheists simply state there is no god, and these beliefs are therefore nonsense? Or do scientific minds state the argument against the beliefs that are counter-indicated by scientific discovery?

For a long time, people have assumed that they have to tone down or water down statements of scientific truth to allow for "cultural differences" or to "honor the other's belief" But recently more and more atheists have stood up and said "Why do we have to honor a belief that is not only ridiculous, but has become the foundation of a movement to discredit science, and threaten the advancement of man... not to mention causing wars and all manner of social injustices?"

... and of course from there it's a small step for some atheists to stop saying "you're beliefs are foolish" to saying "you're foolish for believing"

This isn't a breaking of a group or movement, there was no universal organization or doctrine to begin with. These are individuals who have come to certain realizations independently and developed certain reactions to those realizations independently... which is why you have a wide variety of approaches by atheists towards religion.

Finally, I'd like to point out that the most interesting thing is that the religious are so narrow minded and have their own sense of denominational organization and doctrine so ingrained in them, that they simply can't imagine any individuals who don't have a doctrine or who live by faith, but instead live by empirical evidence and objective reasoning.

As an individual, it's frightening to me that there are so many people who will believe whatever they're told to believe, without questioning the evidence or questioning the first assumptions. That goes for both religion AND science. The difference is that science can back up it's claims, and that religion can only be a matter of faith. For some people, that faith is fine, but if they chose to believe they have an invisible friend protecting them and who will torture them forever if they don't do what they say... if that's their faith, sure: they have every right to say that. They don't have every right to use public funds to teach other people's children that this is a truth, and they certainly don't have any right to beat up on those who's invisible friend has a different name, or who doesn't have an invisible friend at all.

OH CRAP

I CAN'T not post politics and religion. The Radula is still here.