Foundation Beyond Belief in Oklahoma

May 21, 2013 By Leave a Comment

The Foundation Beyond Belief is collecting monetary donations to provide disaster relief for victims of the devastating tornado in Oklahoma. Do your part and FBB will act as a clearinghouse distributing the money to charities. Go to the donation page to see updates on the crisis response.

In situations like this, the American Red Cross is always a good charity as well. They also maintain a Safe and Well Listing for those with family in the region.

For those of you outside the US, or otherwise out of the loop here, a tornado blasted through the suburbs of Oklahoma City yesterday afternoon. Some early reports estimate the tornado was over a mile at the base (!) and that it covered almost 20 miles during the 40 minutes it existed. Frankly, these are numbers I would have said were impossible just a few days ago. The chaos is such that death tolls and injury reports are unreliable.

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God Has Legs?

May 21, 2013 By Leave a Comment

David Hayward, AKA nakedpastor, sketched his version of the atheist/theist argument:

The post is titled, “how an atheist reaches out to a believer,” but obviously the image shows that it goes both ways. The cartoon is inspired by Steven Olsen, who wrote a piece on counter-evangelism.

In his post, Olsen compares belief in a deity to belief in Bigfoot. Hayward responds:

I’ve never understood how some atheists leap from God to Bigfoot. Some ideas or theories are valid to consider and others are not. I think the possible existence of God, or the idea of God, or the theory of God, is more valid to explore than the possible existence of Bigfoot, or the idea of Bigfoot, or the theory of Bigfoot. Some ideas, some possibilities, have better legs than others.

Well, Bigfoot has some legs. He’s got to, they have to support those feet. Meanwhile, anthropomorphic Gods are out of fashion, so no legs for Him … er, It.

Seriously, I’m not sure how Hayward arrives at his assessment of probability. I have a hunch that it comes down to the differing presuppositions between a theist and an atheist.

While my default stance is to believe that Bigfoot doesn’t exist, the idea of it’s existence doesn’t seem invalid. The existence of Bigfoot would not require many new assumptions, since we’ve got primates and human, and since we still occasionally stumble across unknown species. If Bigfoot exists, the field of biology will not change in the slightest.

In contrast, the existence of a deity that fits the classic model of the Christian God would change things a great deal. God is timeless – what does that even mean? God is all powerful – where exactly is this energy coming from and where is it going? God is immaterial – but how does something without substance operate? God is beyond human categories and understanding, yet we know that He loves us – wtf?

Occam’s razor states that among competing hypotheses, the hypothesis with the fewest assumptions should be selected. The existence of a God requires whole new realms of assumptions. Physics would have to be rewritten to account for such a force or being.

At the moment, there doesn’t seem to be much need for the God hypothesis to explain the workings of the universe. With all the new assumptions necessary, the God hypothesis seems like a razor bait if there ever was one. The existence of Bigfoot seems unremarkable by comparison.

Filed Under: Christianity, Science Leave a Comment

Carnival with the Camel

May 20, 2013 By Leave a Comment

If you haven’t seen it, Daniel Fincke over at Camels with Hammers is hosting the first ever Patheos Atheist Blog Carnival, with a round up of the best in the months blogging from the Atheist portal at Patheos. It’s a chance to find out what the atheist bloggers that you don’t ordinarily read are up to.

Go give it a look see and let him know what you think. If this goes over well it will hopefully be a regular occurrence.

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Mapping Hate

May 20, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Dr. Monica Stevens, assistant professor of geography at Humboldt State University in California, has turned her academic focus in an interesting direction. Working with a team of undergrads, Dr. Stevens has sorted through over 150,000 tweets containing racial or sexual slurs and produced a map of America showing the distribution of their origin.

The result is a “hate map” that shows which areas of the United States produced the most tweets, which can be filtered for various types of slur. Here’s New York’s distribution of tweets containing homophobic slurs:

Dr. Stevens explained the purpose of this map to a New York channel:

“So these are just looking at where the tweets are that are most hateful and hurtful. These are the communities where we see gay kids really struggling and needing projects like the ‘It Gets Better’ project,” said Dr. Monica Stephens from Humboldt State University.

Stephens says what makes her research special is that her team actually read every tweet to determine whether it was meant in a negative or positive way. Stephens says places that have high frequencies of hateful tweets, such as Lake Placid, Saranac Lake and Massena, should use this as a wake-up call.

Those three cities are in the Adirondack region, or the upper right of the image. More interesting to me is the large red dot between Buffalo and Rochester. Anybody know what’s going on in the Lockport/Medina region?

The full map is available here.

Dr. Stevens contributes to the blog Floating Sheep, and the process is explained there.

Filed Under: Science, Sexuality Leave a Comment

Kent Hovind Teaches World History

May 19, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Kent Hovind’s PhD thesis is circulating again, thanks to wikileaks and blogs like Leaving Fundamentalism. This thesis for a doctorate in Philosophy of Christian Education was submitted to Dr. Wayne Knight of Patriot Bible University, pictured right.

It’s bad.

Oy.

Folks like Adam Benton have been picking out favorite quotes. It’s hard to know where to stop with a thesis that begins “Hello, my name is Kent Hovind. I am a creation/science evangelist. I live in Pensacola, Florida.”

What’s interesting is that Hovind seems to believe that evolution has always been with us. It’s basically a religion, started by Satan – literally – that has spread around the world and influenced nearly all non-monotheistic religions. I think he gets this from Henry Morris’ The Long War Against God, which basically makes that claim. Anyway, as evidence – or just to fill pages – Hovind goes through world history and world religion to classify ideas as godly or evolutionary.

And of course the whole thing is written like Hovind was talking to school children. We get sections like this: “Aristotle was the tutor to a man named Alexander the Great. Alexander the Great was the leader of the Greek Empire of the Third Century B.C. He spread the teachings of Aristotle all around his empire.”

Can you say “Hellenization” boys and girls? Good, have a candy.

Or consider this section:

The five major Eastern religions that developed during this time were Hinduism, Confucianism, Zoroasterism, Buddhism, and Taoism. Because of the atheistic and pantheistic philosophies of these religions, and the lack of importance placed on God, the entrance of communism into these countries was very simple. When the evolutionary doctrine was taught in these countries, the people did not have to change their religion in order to include it. Evolution and communism blended in fine with the Eastern religions. In about 1895, a man named Yen Fu translated Thomas Huxley’s book into Chinese. That was probably the turning point in China. It led the way for communism to take over so many of the oriental countries.

It’s just fractally wrong.

Filed Under: Bible, Christianity, Science Leave a Comment
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