In August 2011, Dawkins posted a response in the Washington Post to a statement by presidential candidate Rick Perry about evolution. In it, he rants in typical Dawkins style about the republican party, creationism, intelligent design and the United States.

I think Dawkins gets more and more … readable, actually. I like his ideas, have always liked them, and agree with many of the things he says, although I feel he is not doing a very good political job by the way he states them. It is most certainly extremely condescending and arrogant.

However, this has reached a certain threshold of silliness for me that I can laugh about it. I find it amusing. He has become one of the old grumpy people, which does not invalidate his points.

“In any other party and in any other country, an individual may occasionally rise to the top in spite of being an uneducated ignoramus. In today’s Republican Party ‘in spite of’ is not the phrase we need. Ignorance and lack of education are positive qualifications, bordering on obligatory. Intellect, knowledge and linguistic mastery are mistrusted by Republican voters, who, when choosing a president, would apparently prefer someone like themselves over someone actually qualified for the job.

Any other organization — a big corporation, say, or a university, or a learned society – -when seeking a new leader, will go to immense trouble over the choice. The CVs of candidates and their portfolios of relevant experience are meticulously scrutinized, their publications are read by a learned committee, references are taken up and scrupulously discussed, the candidates are subjected to rigorous interviews and vetting procedures. Mistakes are still made, but not through lack of serious effort.

The population of the United States is more than 300 million and it includes some of the best and brightest that the human species has to offer, probably more so than any other country in the world. There is surely something wrong with a system for choosing a leader when, given a pool of such talent and a process that occupies more than a year and consumes billions of dollars, what rises to the top of the heap is George W Bush. Or when the likes of Rick Perry or Michele Bachmann or Sarah Palin can be mentioned as even remote possibilities.”

Read the whole thing!

A dear friend of mine sent me this five-minute Youtube video about two years ago in which Richard Feynman talks about doubt, uncertainty and religion. I like it a lot and have therefore quoted it many times since.

I was excited when I found a lecture yesterday Feynman gave as part of a lecture series in 2011. A transcript of the speech was posted on a blog, and after reading it on the airplane today and decided to repost it.

There are some typos in the original transcript, I corrected a couple, but it is a very long text, and I’m sure you’ll be able to read it, even with some mistakes in it.

Some things I don’t agree with, but there are many things we can learn a lot from. I will post the most important quotes first – if you’re in a hurry, at least read these – and then post the whole lecture below the excerpt.

Excerpt:

‎If you ask [any scientist] intelligent questions — that is, penetrating, interested, honest, frank, direct questions on the subject, and no trick questions — then he quickly gets stuck. It is like a child asking naive questions. If you ask naive but relevant questions, then almost immediately the person doesn’t know the answer, if he is an honest man. It is important to appreciate that.
[…] Read the rest of this entry »

KWTX.COM:

Faith-Healing Couple Found Guilty In Infant Son’s Death

Bobby Henderson wrote a comment on that. He is the founder of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I find myself very often concurring with him, because he regularly draws a very sharp line between criticizing what people do, and what people believe.

“Some believe this case illustrates how evil religion is. [...] I believe the Church of FSM is not just another anti-religion club. A lot of us have the view that religion is harmful and antiquated, but a lot of us also accept that a huge number of people feel they get something positive out of their faith and their religious communities.

So I am cautious about posting things that promote the idea that the world would be better off without religion. Because, more than anything, I don’t believe it’s in the scope of the Church of FSM to make that statement.

The point I want to make is this: instead of drawing the line between the religious and non-religious, let’s draw the line between the reasonable and unreasonable. Let’s criticize a culture that values faith over reason, rather than religion itself.

Why? We know plenty of religious people and we realize that the majority of Christians do not reject modern medicine for their children. We personally know people who get something positive from their religious communities and yet still act with reason.

These are the people who might believe in some scripture, but they also realize that their faith does a poor job of explaining the natural world. They are not blinded by faith, they are reasonable. We need these people to promote the value of reason within their communities.”

The full statement can be found here.

If you want to learn a bit more about this organization (the serious parts), a good overview can be found on the about page of the FSM website.

In a letter to his brother-in-law in 1861, Alfred Russel Wallace wrote:

… I remain an utter disbeliever in almost all that you consider the most sacred truths. I will pass over as utterly contemptible the oft-repeated accusation that sceptics shut out evidence because they will not be governed by the morality of Christianity … I am thankful I can see much to admire in all religions. To the mass of mankind religion of some kind is a necessity. But whether there be a God and whatever be His nature; whether we have an immortal soul or not, or whatever may be our state after death, I can have no fear of having to suffer for the study of nature and the search for truth, or believe that those will be better off in a future state who have lived in the belief of doctrines inculcated from childhood, and which are to them rather a matter of blind faith than intelligent conviction.

Interestingly enough, Wallace, especially towards the end of his career became greatly interested in spiritual topics. He promoted spiritualism in such a strong way that it was his old friend Charles Darwin who, in 1879, tried a rally support among naturalists to get a civil pension awarded to Wallace. Joseph Hooker – Darwin’s best friend, and one of the greatest British botanists and explorers of the 19th century – replied:

Wallace has lost caste considerably, not only by his adhesion to Spiritualism, but by the fact of his having deliberately and against the whole voice of the committee of his section of the British Association, brought about a discussion of on Spiritualism at one of its sectional meetings. That he is said to have done so in an underhanded manner, and I well remember the indignation it gave rise to in the B.A. Council.

Wallace eventually did receive his pension, though.

Ooooookay …….. I think I need to shift the focus of this blog a bit ;)

“My booby prize for sheer spinelessness goes to the 60 percent of American high school biology teachers who, according to a survey published earlier this year, take a neutral stance on evolution in their classrooms.”

What is this all about? Susan Jacoby writes in the Washington Post National about a study published in the January 28 issue of Science, authored by Michael Berkman and Eric Plutzer, professors of political science at Penn State.

This study is concerned with a National Survey of High School Biology Teachers, a representative sample of 926 public high school biology instructors. The results:

“Only 28 percent of public high school biology instructors consistently use lesson plans, recommended by scientific organizations, that present evolution as the unifying theme linking different areas of biology. About 13 percent of teachers explicitly teach creationism or intelligent design in defiance of federal court decisions. The other 60 percent—the spineless majority—try to avoid controversy, often by substituting a phrase like ‘changes over time’ for the taboo E-word.”

The New York Times also offers an opinion about the Survey.

Randy Moore, a professor of biology at the University of Minnesota:

“With 15 to 20 percent of biology teachers teaching creationism [...] this is the biggest failure in science education. There’s no other field where teachers reject the foundations of their science like they do in biology. [...] If they weren’t going to teach real biology, they shouldn’t have become biology teachers.”

To understand the significance of this, keep in mind that teaching creationism in public schools has consistently been ruled unconstitutional in federal courts over the last ten years.

Why the debate came up (once again) in Louisiana is explained on the website of the National Center for Science Education:

Despite the overwhelming support for SB 70 from scientific and educational organizations around the state and across the country, the Louisiana Senate Education Committee voted 5-1 to shelve the bill on May 26, 2011, according to a blogger for the Baton Rouge Advocate (May 26, 2011). If enacted, SB 70 would have repealed Louisiana Revised Statutes 17:285.1, which implemented the so-called Louisiana Science Education Act, passed and enacted in 2008. As Barbara Forrest recently explained in a column for Louisiana Progress (May 18, 2011), the LSEA “was promoted only by creationists. Neither parents, nor science teachers, nor scientists requested it. No one wanted it except the Louisiana Family Forum (LFF), a religious organization that lobbies aggressively for its regressive agenda, and the Discovery Institute (DI), a creationist think tank in Seattle, Washington, that couldn’t care less about Louisiana children.”

A couple of days ago the earth vanished in a devastating apocalypse. I’m telling you in case you shouldn’t have realized this yet.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were nice enough to put up a FAQ explaining how to get through Armageddon safely.

“Identify your emergency contacts. Make a list of local contacts like the police, fire department, and your local zombie response team. Also identify an out-of-state contact that you can call during an emergency to let the rest of your family know you are ok.”
“Plan your evacuation route. When zombies are hungry they won’t stop until they get food (i.e., brains), which means you need to get out of town fast! Plan where you would go and multiple routes you would take ahead of time so that the flesh eaters don’t have a chance! This is also helpful when natural disasters strike and you have to take shelter fast.”
“If zombies did start roaming the streets, CDC would conduct an investigation much like any other disease outbreak. CDC would provide technical assistance to cities, states, or international partners dealing with a zombie infestation. This assistance might include consultation, lab testing and analysis, patient management and care, tracking of contacts, and infection control (including isolation and quarantine).”

(Actually, this does not seem to be a hoax … just someone with a good sense of humour)

PS.: all the 100.000.000.000 predictions of apocalypse that were uttered since humans started to think about things like the ending of the world were wrong. Maybe, just maybe that should get you thinking …

A big part of the people protesting in Egypt on the Tahrir Square are religious people – mostly Muslims, but also Christians.

Since the protesters were regularly attacked within the last 72 hours by Mubarak supporters, apparantly Muslims are protecting Christians when they are praying, and the other way around, by building a defensive circle around the worshippers.

If religion in general would work like that, oh boy would I support the idea of believing in something that isn’t there. I hope that the people who experienced this will not forget it, that they will become a bit more tolerant. Which in itself is not possible from a pure cognitive point of view, because being religious per se means that other people must be wrong, which is quite interesting considering the fact that there are thousands and have been millions of different religions. But maybe people will change their thinking nonetheless and start being a bit nicer to each other.

Just six weeks ago, 23 Christians were killed during the new years eve service in Alexandria by a muslim extremist. People need a common goal – in the best case a common enemy – to move closer together. Let’s hope they find one on the long run (Mubarak will not be there anymore in a couple of days, I presume); in the best case somebody or something that cannot be burned or tortured or raped or killed.

It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people.
– “Good Omens”, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman

Source: tagesschau.de

Tagesschau.de fasst einen Artikel der Süddeutschen zusammen:

144 katholische Theologie-Professoren aus Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz haben einen Aufruf zu tiefgreifenden Reformen unterschrieben. Laut “Süddeutscher Zeitung” wollen sie das Ende des Pflichtzölibats, Frauen als Geistliche, Beteiligung des Kirchenvolks bei der Auswahl der Bischöfe und ein Ende des “moralischen Rigorismus”.
[...]
Etwa ein Drittel der insgesamt etwa 400 Lehrstuhlinhaber für katholische Theologie haben der Zeitung zufolge ihren Namen unter den Appell “Kirche 2011: Ein notwendiger Aufbruch”gesetzt

Da kann man gespannt sein, wie der Vatikan reagiert.