Ben Carson says abortion is like slavery, advocates automatic weapons, suppression of free speech at colleges, etc., etc. etc.

October 25, 2015 • 12:00 pm

Ben Carson is simply a horrible man, but his odious views are belied by his calm—almost tranquilized—demeanor. The video below shows this morning’s interview of Ben Carson by Chuck Todd on “Meet the Press”.

Even though most readers here probably despise the man, you owe it to yourself to listen to the nineteen minutes of religiously-inspired hate from someone who might be next year’s Republican candidate for President. Carson’s numbers are rising above Trump’s in the polls, and Jeb Bush is in trouble. God help us all: the Republicans may go for Carson in 2016. And if they do, he’ll lose—but he’ll still get rich and renowned. Remember Sarah Palin, an equally moronic candidate? It’s a huge embarrassment to America that this man, as was Palin, is taken seriously as a politican, and as a potential leader of this nation.

At 2:30, Carson defends his frequent use of Nazi/Holocaust tropes for Obama’s policies, and says that he’s heard approval from Jewish people for such statements (who are they?). He adds that had Jews been armed in the 1940s, the Holocaust would have been averted.

At about 5:30, he argues that there should be few limitations on American’s “Second Amendment right” to have whatever weapons they need to protect themselves, and that we should be able to have automatic weapons.

And, about 6 minutes in, he begins talking about abortion, saying things like this (transcripts via PuffHo):

“During slavery — and I know that’s one of those words you’re not supposed to say, but I’m saying it — during slavery, a lot of the slave owners thought that they had the right to do whatever they wanted to that slave. Anything that they chose to do. And, you know, what if the abolitionist had said, you know, ‘I don’t believe in slavery. I think it’s wrong. But you guys do whatever you want to do’?  Where would we be?”

What the bloody hell is he talking about here? The argument for slavery is by no means comparable to the argument for abortion, and Carson’s simply using one hot-button issue to arouse emotion about another. Is he really making an analogy between a slaveholder having a slave and a woman having a fetus in her womb? If so, that’s even dumber.

Carson goes on—read the following carefully:

CHUCK TODD: Okay.  Do you want to see Roe v. Wade overturned?

DR. BEN CARSON: Ultimately, I would love to see it overturned.

CHUCK TODD: And that means all abortions illegal?  Or is there still an exception that you would have?

DR. BEN CARSON: I’m a reasonable person. And if people can come up with a reasonable explanation of why they would like to kill a baby, I’ll listen.

CHUCK TODD: Life and health of the mother?

DR. BEN CARSON: Again, that’s a extraordinarily rare situation. But if in that very rare situation it occurred, I believe there’s room to discuss that.

CHUCK TODD: Rape and incest?

DR. BEN CARSON: Rape and incest, I would not be in favor of killing a baby because the baby came about in that way. And all you have to do is go and look up the many stories of people who have led very useful lives who were the result of rape or incest.

Seriously, a “reasonable person” would make no exceptions to forcing a woman to have a child conceived by rape or incest? That, of course, comes from his religion—his view that life begins at conception and that a dependent fetus is equivalent to a free-living adult. This man (a creationist Jehovah’s Witness) is a theocrat.

Finally, at 14:10 Caron discusses his views on how the government should monitor colleges for incorrect speech, which he calls “propaganda” and “indoctrination”. Todd properly calls him out by saying that Carson’s “propaganda” is someone else’s free speech. Carson’s response is lame.

Can there be anybody more wrong on all the issues? I count 100% divergence between his views and mine.

Brother Tayler’s Sunday Secular Sermon in Salon

October 25, 2015 • 11:10 am

Jeffrey Tayler continues his anti-theism in today’s Salon, and for him there’s no Geneva Convention in the war on faith. His piece, “They really want a theocracy: the GOP candidates who want to make you bow to their Lord,” is pretty much a reprise of his excellent talk at the Atheist Alliance of America a week ago. It may be preaching to the choir on this site, but Salon gets millions of views a week and has a history of attacking New Atheists, so it’s all to the good. I’ll give just three excerpts, one of which includes some shameful self-promotion on my part:

This is new to me:

A new PPP survey reveals that Republicans are afflicted most, with 44 percent now favoring installing Christianity as the United States’ official religion. (Lest we forget, the GOP’s roster of potential 2016 candidates is stocked with rabid believers, and even faith-faker Donald Trump is courting evangelicals.) A shocking 28 percent of Democrats are also theocratically inclined. Only 53 percent of Republican and Democratic voters combined oppose declaring Jesus jabberwocky our national faith.

The upshot: almost three out of four adult Americans would, in effect, junk the First Amendment, and with it, our gloriously godless system of governance.

I’m a bit unsure of the math here: if 53% of all voters oppose Christianity as our national faith, how does that translate into “three out of four adult Americans wanting to junk the First Amendment”? Regardless, the 44% and 28% figures are pretty shocking.

And I love this bit of rhetoric because, frankly, I’m tired of faitheists and apologists claiming that religion has nothing to do with inspiring bad actions. There are some actions, including killing blasphemers and heretics, foisting creationism on public schools, or killing your sick children via “faith healing”, that are virtually unimaginable without religion.

In the fight for free speech about religion, Islam presents us with semantic confusion stemming from the widely used balderdash terms Islamophobia and Islamophobic. Yet accepting the sort of pseudo-logic offered by denouncers of Islamophobia – that finding fault with the dogmas of Islam is racist – leads one to inescapably racistconclusions.

How so? Well, are Syrians and Iraqis just naturally prone to beheading people?  They really would behead even without the Quran telling them to smite the infidels at their necks?  Men in the Middle East are just born wife-beaters?  Or might instructions on wife-beating in the Islamic canon have something to do with it?

(We should recall there’s one and only one U.N. Convention on Human Rights. The Convention doesn’t make exceptions for culture or religion.)

The don’t-blame-religion trope also fails in the United States. Two examples suffice to prove this: is a certain County Clerk named Kim Davis just naturally inclined to deny same-sex couples their marriage licenses? Or might her Christian beliefs be involved? Are some loving parents congenitally disposed to deny their children medical care, and de facto murder them? Or does Christian Science have something to do with it? On the latter point, you might read Jerry Coyne’s “Faith Versus Fact,” if you have any doubt. But I’m sure you don’t.

Well, I appreciate the plug. The piece continues, and I’ll add one more bit, but read the rest for yourself:

We arrive at certain inevitable conclusions about what sort of person you have to be if you persist, despite the evidence, in believing in God. If you think little girls’ clitorises should be sliced off, then religion is for you. If you think holding one belief instead of another, or renouncing a belief, is a capital offense, then religion is for you. If you think an outbreak of atheism among ISIS’s ranks would do nothing to slow that group’s commission of atrocities, then religion is for you. If you think women need to wear a certain form of headgear or be considered whores, then religion is for you. If you hold that an aging, kindly-appearing male should rightfully hold sway over whether women can moderate their own reproductive cycles, then religion is for you. If you believe women should submit to their husbands as unto the Lord, then religion is for you. If you think the myths and nonsense embedded in the Bible qualify that book to serve as some sort of public-policy guidebook, then religion is for you. In short, if you’re incapable of thinking straight, and you’re willing to lead your life in accordance with wild metaphysical jibber-jabber, then religion, I’m sorry to say, is for you.

 

 

Note on WordPress glitch and black cat photos

October 25, 2015 • 10:00 am

I haven’t yet heard from WordPress about this issue, but I continue to receive a large number of comments from readers called “Anonymous,” who have no information with their comments. Apparently something’s happened so that readers can no longer count on all their devices to automatically enter their names and email addresses into their comments. So, when submitting a comment, please be sure that your name and email address (and URL, if you want one included) are entered into the boxes.

Also, I have only four photos of readers’ black cats to run next Saturday, on Halloween. If you have a black cat (no tuxedo cats, please), which I define as a cat whose white bits are limited to a small “locket on the chest,” send me one photo (and a few lines of description, including cat’s name), and I’ll run it on Halloween Caturday. I know there are black cats out there!

Public education in Ireland is Catholic

October 25, 2015 • 8:30 am

Reader and contributor Grania, who sent me the “loaves and fishes” photo below, tells me that around 90% of Irish students go to Catholic schools. Such is the hegemony of Catholicism in Ireland that athough these are what we Americans call “public” schools, funded by the government, they’re run by the Church. And, up to the high school level, they include religious instruction. While students can opt out of that religious instruction, which is of course Catholic, they are forced to sit in study hall or engage in other unproductive activities; in other words, they’re marginalized. As a two-year-old piece in The Atlantic notes:

Irish primary schools are essentially publicly funded, but privately run. The government pays for school construction, teacher salaries and grants based on school enrollment, but private groups—mostly churches—provide the education. They are required to teach a standard state curriculum, and 30 minutes per day is set aside for religious instruction. For the vast majority of children who attend Catholic schools, that means preparation for Communion and Confirmation is part of the state-sanctioned school day—an unwelcome reality for some parents.

If you include other religions that run “public schools,” then 96% of Irish schools are church-run. As Irish Catholics become less pious, and more Irish become “nones,” this is a problem, one that Irish secular and atheist organizations are tackling. After all, it amounts to a serious entanglement of church and state, one that wouldn’t, for instance, be tolerated in the U.S.

I became aware of this problem after Grania sent this photo below, one taken by an Irish parent. It’s from a textbook beginning to be used in public-school religious education classes, and is part of the “Grow in Love” curriculum. That curriculum started this fall for “junior and senior infants”—they get them young—and will be phased in for everyone by September, 2018.

The photo below is offensive because it not only conflates religion and science, but also implies that miracles are “natural” phenomena. In fact, it’s counterproductive to most religious beliefs, since miracles, or so I thought, are supposed to be contrary to nature: that’s why they’re called “supernatural”. But St. Augustine the Hippo says otherwise.

The photo depicts a modernized Jesus pointing out the loaves and fishes “natural phenomenon.” At first I thought he was in a lab coat, which I’d find truly offensive, but I think it’s just robes.

 

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At any rate, have a look at the Grow in Love website, and realize that most Irish schoolchildren are exposed to this regardless of their wishes.

 

Credit for photograph & links: John Hamill

Wake up and watch the whooping cranes take off!

October 25, 2015 • 8:08 am

A team of dedicated bird-lovers at Operation Migration is helping the endangered whooping cranes (Grus americana), hand-raised in Wisconsin, migrate to Florida. (There are only about 440 birds in the wild, supplemented by about 165 in captivity.) The inexperienced birds are guided by ultralight aircraft. Can one be more dedicated than that to saving a species? The guided flight will last several weeks, I’m told.  For the past two days the birds have been grounded by high winds, but it looks as if today they’ll continue on their journey.

Apparently the cranes spend the night in enclosures, and the big excitement is at takeoff. As the weather is propitious, that will apparently happen soon, so click here or on the screenshot below.

The cam is operating 24/7 and will continue to do so until the cranes depart on their first migration with the aircraft in mid-October. From that time, we will switch to the TrikeCam and broadcast LIVE directly from inside the aircraft. On days when weather prevents the team and the cranes from advancing we will set it up as a static camera from the travel enclosure.

There are two videos documenting the flight: click on the first photo below to see the action at takeoff, and then on the screenshot below that to see the view from the ultralight aircraft. (Note: the takeoff cam operates sporadically, so check back if you don’t see anything.) Also note that the plane pilots wear crane suits!
MigratingCranes01

Flight cam (click on photo to see plane’s-eye view:

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Readers’ wildlife photos

October 25, 2015 • 7:30 am

I still have some photos in the queue, but the tank is getting dangerously low again. Remember, I run readers’ photos at least six times a week. So, if you’ve got good photos, send them along.

Reader Mark Sturtevant sent four insect photos; his captions are indented:

Here is a longhorn beetle, I think an oak borer (Elaphidion mucranotum).

1longhorn

Below I’m holding the beetle and it is not happy about it. I always like how the compound eyes sort of wrap around the base of the antenna in this family. Notice the wicked spines on its antennae. It went positively rigid while being held, and I am sure the spines on all of its limbs and elytra would make this thing unpleasant to swallow.

2angrylonghorn

A carrion beetle (Oiceoptoma noveboracense). I am sure everyone knows the important duty that these insects play in the scheme of things.

3beetlecarrion

Big spiders always make my day. This is a nursery web spider (Pisaurina mira). This fine lady was guarding her nursery of spiderlings (which you can barely see in the background). I have become curious about these spiders in that they seem to come in different colors. This is a dark form, and here are various pictures of others that include a lighter, boldly striped form. I have pix of one of these too, which I am saving for later. The thing I most remember about taking this picture was that it was beside a lake, and I had several distractions. First, the parents watching their kids on the beach nearby were openly conversing about who was this strange person with the camera. Second, I was sitting very near a bumblebee nest, and the residents kept coming out to ‘ask’ me to leave. Finally, there was a big female garter snake that kept creeping out from her hiding spot to investigate my shoes. Every time I turned to try to take a picture of her, she would whisk away under cover. Then, while I was snapping away at the spider, I would hear her slowly slithering back out again.

4NurserySpider

Sunday: Hili dialogue

October 25, 2015 • 4:47 am

Well, I’m sad to see that the inexorable decline of temperatures that leads to winter is beginning: here’s the weather predictions for Chicago this week, with highs only touching 60°F (16°C). And we have the added bonus of rain showers:

Screen shot 2015-10-25 at 4.40.22 AM

Time to put on a coat and prepare for real cold. Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is expressing her own religion as Ultimate Concern:

Hili: Do you happen to know why this bowl is empty?
A: I do, but I don’t know how to tell you.

When I asked Malgorzata to clarify what Andrzej meant, she replied, “One of our Polish readers explained to those who didn’t understand: “The bowl is empty because the cat food is hidden – inside the cat”.

P1030495

In Polish:
Hili: Nie wiesz przypadkiem dlaczego ta miseczka jest pusta?
Ja: Wiem, ale nie wiem jak ci to powiedzieć.