by Hemant Mehta
Dave Silverman appeared on The Alyona Show (with substitute host Abby Martin) Wednesday night to talk about the state of atheism in America.
It’s a long segment with time for some substantive discussion — pretty unusual for television news airing in America.
I’ve posted frequently about Atheists Helping the Homeless, the group from Austin, Texas that has helped over 1,500 homeless people in the area.
I’m happy to announce that they’re expanding! Now, there’s a Dallas/Ft. Worth chapter.
Their first event is June 3rd at 9:00a and it’d be great to have a large group assembled to help those less fortunate.
If you’re not in the DFW area but would like to help out somehow, you can always contribute a little something so they can purchase the goods they need for the giveaways.
Pastors in Georgia have a brilliant idea for fixing the school system in the city of Columbus: Ignore federal law and institute school prayer.
[Paul] Voorhees, a local business owner and chaplain says, “We are not asking them to do anything other than give us their blessing and get it on a state ballot, we would like the people of the state of Georgia to vote if they want bible study and prayer in our schools.”
Voorhees is leading what he and other pastors call a movement. “We are going to bring a proposal to the state of Georgia to put it on the ballot and allow local school districts to vote in favor of school prayer and study the Bible in our schools.”
They’re not even being subtle about this. They want it put to a vote because they live in a majority Christian community and they believe the majority should get whatever it wants — the rights of the minority be damned.
Muslims? Jews? Hindus? Atheists? Those students’ rights don’t matter.
The fact that Christian students can already pray (privately) in schools if they’d like? That’s not LOUD enough!
In the video, Voorhees — the host of “Ranger Joe’s God & Country Show” — also makes the case that, because they have Bible studies and prayer in jail, prisons are safer than schools.
Riiiiiight. I’m sure Christians everywhere can’t wait to enroll their kids behind bars. Anything but a science class.
Oh! And that’s not all! When Voorhees was explaining why this referendum would be *totally* legal, this was his reasoning:
“There’s no law that says we cannot,” Voorhees told councilors. “There’s some rulings that say it’s unconstitutional, but when that was done it was an all-white (Supreme Court). Now that we have some color (on the court), that would never pass.”
What the… I don’t even… huh?!
You make sense of that.
Mayor Teresa Tomlinson was probably just being courteous when she thanked him for his presentation. I hope that, in her head, she was just wondering why these people were wasting her time trying to implement a plan that would invite lawsuits from every civil liberties organization in the country.
Mayor Tomlinson, thinking, 'You're kidding me, right?' (via wsfa.com)
(Thanks to Brian for the link)
Harrison Hopkins is a rising sophomore at Presbyterian College in Clinton, South Carolina. At the end of his senior year of high school, he challenged the prayer at his graduation and won. He was down in Columbia recently and met up with A Matter of Doubt podcast and did an interview detailing his own deconversion and the story of how he challenged the school district. I think it’s a great interview to listen to, especially for some high schoolers out there who are interested in challenging their schools but don’t really know the process or where to begin.
(I also did one a few weeks ago, but I guess mine is less exciting!)
Marc Murphy of the Courier-Journal (Kentucky) says a lot with one image:
(Thanks to Aaron for the link!)
Penn Jillette is coming to East Lansing, Michigan on June 6th to promote the paperback version of his book God, No!: Signs You May Already Be an Atheist and Other Magical Tales and CFI-Michigan is sponsoring the event.
If you’d like tickets, get them while you can!
Somehow, Charles Worley, the pastor who wants to put all gay people inside of electrified fences, has followers.
One of them, Stacey Pritchard, attempted to defend her pastor’s comments on CNN last night. Anderson Cooper threw her softball after softball and she completely whiffed on every single one of them. This is seriously mind-boggling to listen to:
Blogger John Shore has a very calm-but-frustrated take on the whole video. He tries really hard to understand where people like her are coming from…
I’m not saying this pretty woman is stupid; she doesn’t seem particularly organically stupid at all. But that’s she’s pretty dramatically uneducated is painfully obvious. She seems to have almost no capacity for the most elemental kind of reasoning — the kind of reasoning that is the first and primary benefit of even a solid elementary school education.
And her anger is palpable; she positively radiates hostility. And I don’t blame her for being angry. It’s a terrible thing to even say, but the truth is that the world is generally a terribly harsh place for people who are uneducated. When you don’t know how to at all reason — not to mention when you’ve been trained to believe there’s not really much you personally can do to impact the quality of your life — your world gets real small real fast.
…
People like her get me itchy. They make me want to start storing food and buying weapons. And I’m not sure that here in America today we’re producing any more of any kind of person than we are people like her. I think she’s the norm these day. If not, she’s way too freakin’ close to it.
I agree — this sort of hatred against gay people is the norm. Certainly in the Christian community. They won’t all be that extreme, but the Christians who claim to “love” gay people are the same ones who want to deny them equal rights, who fight against anti-bullying legislation, who don’t even want others to bring up the word “homosexual” (because, you know, that’s how teh gey is spread).
Those Christians will be quick to denounce Pritchard, Worley, and that entire church. Meanwhile, their own pastors cloak their bigotry in less outward hate while saying virtually the same things… but they’re totally fine with that.
When I saw the headline “Wanted: Bigfoot hair samples for European study,” I assumed that this was either a wild distortion of an actually serious study or the goal of some fringe professor.
Both kinds of stories regularly find themselves in the “Science” section of mainstream news sites far more often than they should. As I researched further, however, I found myself in the odd situation of being slightly alarmed that the various sources echoing the news had not distorted a thing and this wasn’t coming out of a fringe center. It was coming out of Oxford University:
The Oxford-Lausanne Collateral Hominid Project invites institutions and individuals with collections of cryptozoological material (cryptozoology: the search for animals whose existence is not proven) to submit details of the samples they hold, and then on request submit the samples themselves, particularly hair shafts, for rigorous genetic analysis. The results will then be published in peer-reviewed scientific journals.
Professor Bryan Sykes, who is leading the effort, explains that modern techniques of DNA analysis offer an opportunity to test samples for their species of origin that was previously unavailable to those collecting “Yeti samples”… and this is where I become torn.
Bigfoot. Or a guy in a gorilla suit. Whatever is more plausible. (Via: Wikipedia)
On the one hand, I think that real science has a necessary role in keeping pseudoscience and general insanity at bay. If testable evidence is being offered in favor of a claim that seems ridiculous, it would be irresponsible to not take the chance to disprove it — or, in a much less likely turn of events, accept it. This sort of testing is what lets us say without wavering that there is no link between autism and vaccinations, and that homeopathic medicine is ultra-diluted snake oil.
Some people will never be convinced, of course, but we owe it to those who can be convinced to put claims to the test and not give ammunition to conspiracy theorists who will take a refusal to test as a “sign that the mainstream scientific establishment is afraid of this.”
On the other hand, the mere sight of a press-release by the excellent Oxford University making serious reference to “cryptozoology” makes me cringe.
Yeti sightings belong in the realm of crackpottery. I wonder about the wisdom of wasting limited research funds on extremely unpromising research and whether putting the weight of a world-class university behind the Yeti myth — even if only to finally disprove it — will only contribute to its credibility.
When all the tests come back negative, I doubt a single believer will be convinced. But they will be able to add “Oxford has taken this seriously!” to their list of arguments in favor of this silliness.
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