Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
Professor Ceiling Cat (Emeritus) is poorly with a sore throat today, and so will soon go home to work from the supine position. Posting will in all likelihood be very light, but I’ll do my best. On this day in history, Henry VIII was excommunicated by the Pope (1538); having lost his father figure, he proceeded to execute his wives. And WTF is this from Wikipedia???: on his day in 1862, “American Civil War General Ulysses S. Grant issues General Order No. 11, expelling Jews from parts of Tennessee, Mississippi, and Kentucky”. I had no idea! Why the Jews? On December 17, 1997, “the British Firearms (Amendment) (No. 2) Act 1997took effect, banning all handguns with the exception of antique and show weapons.” Enacted by the Blair government in response to the Dunblane school massacre the year before in Scotland, it’s exactly what the US should be doing now. If the UK can do it, why not America? Finally, on this date in 2011, Supreme (not Dear) leader Kim Jong-Il was assumed bodily to heaven to join his father, President for Eternity Kim Il-Sung. Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is upset because her very favorite tidbit, ham, has gone down Andrzej’s gullet. Look at her expression!
Hili: What happened to the smoked ham?
A: I ate it.
In Polish:
Hili: Co się stało z tą wędzoną szynką?
Ja: Zjadłem.
As lagniappe, watch this short CNN video (click on the screenshot) to see the story of a tiny kitten, Murphy, saved at the last minute from a mess of recycling headed on a conveyor belt toward blades and a trash compacter. Lucky kitten!
I can’t brain much today, so—moar cats. Here’s a pretty funny exchange between Taylor Swift and John Cleese on the Graham Norton show (BBC America). Both are cat lovers, but differ in what they see as a “proper cat”. Later on, Cleese makes an invidious remark about women, and Taylor responds appropriately. It’s a few funny minutes to end the day.
This comes from Matthew Cobb, who unaccountably isn’t claiming authorship of this post. I’d save it for Christmas, but I already have a cat Christmas post in the wings, so let’s just use it to get ourselves in the Christmas (and Coynezaa) spirit:
When I say “religion shouldn’t mix with politics,” it’s not because I don’t think that, in principle, religion shouldn’t influence people’s stands on issues. It’s just that when it does, at least in the U.S., it’s rarely for the better. The opposition to gay rights and gay marriage, as well as to abortion; the promotion of prayers and legally-taught creationism in public schools; views on euthanasia; the “just world” view of the poor (“the poor deserve what they get”); and even opposition to global warming—all of these views (and virtually all promotion of creationism) simply wouldn’t be as pervasive without religion. And I won’t even mention the politics of countries like Iran and Saudi Arabia, which are not only harmfully infected with Islam, but are almost coincident with Islam.
In contrast, when people do good in the name of faith, I suspect they would have done good anyway, for they’re simply good people. I really do think Steven Weinberg was on to something when he said, “Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.” Well, it can also take unthinking ideology, as in the case of the Nazis and Stalinists. But it’s the invidious effect of religion on politics and morality, and faith’s ubiquitous side-effect of proselytizing, that convinces me that we should be deeply suspicious of politicians who get advice from God, or even who claim that their faith informs their politics.
But Kristina Keneally, former head of Australia’s Labor party and premier of New South Wales (now a commentator on Sky News), thinks otherwise. Or so she argues in a new Guardian piece, “Of course my faith influenced my political decisions, as did my gender. So what?” She’s a pious Catholic, which makes it more worrisome. While arguing that most of the decisions she made had nothing to do with her faith, she starts off on a bad foot:
Religion isn’t silly, of course. Neither is politics, most of the time. Occasionally the two intersect.
Well, yes, religion is silly, both its tenets (a man’s death on a cross redeemed us all from a sin committed by two nonexistent progenitors of all humans) and its trappings (have you seen what the Pope and his cardinals wear?). And it’s based on the firm belief in things that either cannot be demonstrated or have been disconfirmed. So yes, religion is silly: it’s a childish thing that humanity should have long ago put away.
Keneally’s argument that it’s no more irrational for religion to inform politics than gender, or economics, as in the quote below, is bogus:
Yes, I believe in Jesus Christ but I am also a disciple of Joseph Stiglitz. Why did no journalist ever ask how much my economic thinking influenced my political decisions?
Well, maybe it’s because at least you can adduce evidence for views on economic policy (Paul Krugman does this regularly in the New York Times), but you can’t for Christianity. And as for gender, if a woman has experienced discrimination, it sensitizes her to its ubiquity and bad effects in her country, and so it’s perfectly rational to inform your politics with gender. I would argue, in fact, that the natural stand on abortion by women should be pro-abortion (or its euphemism “pro-choice”) rather than “pro-life,” since laws forbidding abortion take away a woman’s choice over what she does with a parasitic fetus (see Judith Jarvis Thompson’s “parasite” argument).
Likewise, it’s rational to inform your politics with your ethnicity. That’s exactly what American blacks did in the Sixties, and of course that produced the Civil Rights act and a new era of legal equality. The view that the U.S. would be better off without segregation didn’t come from a revelation or scripture (which usually says the opposite)—it came from observation and reflection.
But where Keneally really goes off the rails is when she explains why we shouldn’t trust atheist politicians:
. . . In fact I have often wondered about atheist politicians. Surely the logical conclusion to atheism is nihilism, in which case, why bother engaging in political activity, trying to improve the lives of your fellow citizens and make the world a better place? Which politician is scarier: the one who insists there is ontological meaning and transcendental purpose to our lives, or the one who denies objective truth and believes that existence is ultimately a useless void?
I’d say the former! The religious-activist politician in the U.S. is likely to be an evangelical Christian Republican, and we know what they’re trying to do to the country. Further, Keneally is simply dead wrong when she claims that atheists are nihilists and therefore wouldn’t make good politicians. Is she aware of the fact that there are atheist politicians (not many will admit to that in the U.S.) and that, more important, many atheists are out there doing good? We don’t lie abed all day, dumbstruck by nihilism. One would think that someone with two neurons to rub together would realize this and jettison the “atheists-are-nihilists” argument. It’s simply dumb.
Keneally’s trump card: religion has always been with us, and always will:
There are those who argue religious belief has no place in civic discourse. Yet from the earliest periods of recorded history we are presented with evidence that human beings possess a spiritual dimension. The people with the longest continuous cultural history on Earth, Aboriginal Australians, tell rich spiritual stories to explain creation and humanity’s relationship to it.
Human beings are physical and they are spiritual. They bring their spiritual selves, however expressed, to their political discussions. This is not a threat to civil society. For thousands of years the spiritual life of human beings has supported and encouraged the extension of human rights, the establishment of civic communities, promulgation of the public good and extraordinary acts of self-sacrifice for one’s fellow citizens.
Here she’s confusing “spirituality” with “morality”. Those of us on this site—most of us, I suspect—who favor gay rights, equality of women and ethnic minorities, and other liberal values, don’t do so out of our “spiritual dimension,” but because we think these stands have salubrious effects on society.
So yes, let’s keep religion out of politics, and by all means let us ask politicians to tell us whether and how their political views are colored by their faith. That’s a perfectly fair question.
What do we replace religion with, then? Why, with secular humanism and secular morality—much better guides to running societies.
I’ll leave it to the Aussie readers to tell me how Keneally fared as a politician in their land.
I guess that many of you will have seen this, but to my surprise, I see we have never posted it here. This is from 2010:
What’s noteworthy is that give or take a few anachronisms (T. rex and Stegosaurus were not alive at the same time), this is reasonably accurate – in particular it has a Dimetrodon-like organism as Homer’s ancestor, which indeed it was (or rather, it was our ancestor).
It does however skip over the transition to an early chordate and then to a bony fish in a remarkably brief time. And it suffers from the terrible sin of presentism, whereby the last few hundred years take up as much time as scores of millions of years deep in the past.
But hey, you know what? Humans don’t have yellow skin and bug eyes. It’s a cartoon, folks!
For once, I think, the National Rifle Association (NRA)—a group of unrepentant evildoers—is feeling beleaguered. Americans, traumatized by a series of terrorist shootings here and abroad—many involving assault weapons—are starting to wonder if largely unrestricted access to guns is really so great after all. The governor of Connecticut has just issued an executive order banning sales of guns to those on the “no fly” list—about the weakest kind of gun reform we can enact, yet one opposed by Republicans. And the New York Daily News, a tabloid but also the fourth most circulated paper in America, has come out swinging against the NRA and in favor of gun control.
The headline after the Paris attacks:
The headline the San Bernardino shootings:
Of course the NRA being the unreflective and odious organization that it is, they immediately mustered one of their flaks, Dana Loesch, a conservative radio host, commentator, and author of that famous screed Hands Off My Gun: Defeating the Plot to Disarm America, which makes her eminently qualified to be the Voice of Evil. And so she put out a video, which I’ve embedded below and which The Washington Post describes like this:
After the mass shooting in San Bernardino, Calif., the Daily News deployed all of its tabloid cover in an attack on what it called America’s “gun scourge” and the “cowards,” meaning the politicians, hiding “behind meaningless platitudes” instead of fixing the problem. “GOD ISN’T FIXING THIS” was the headline. Now the National Rifle Association has fired back, with its own screaming headline, directed at the Daily News specifically and the “Godless Left” in general. Narrated by a grim-faced Dana Loesch, and interwoven with video footage of what appears to be first responders, the NRA video leaves no stone unturned and none of its demons unscathed as it connects the dots, as the video’s introduction says, between “the global alliance of elitists, media activists, Hollywood celebrities, campus radicals and political power mongers who have openly attacked sacred American values and the people who cherish them with ruthlessness, contempt and downright hatred,” and who share “the same fanatical fervor to tear apart the foundations of America as the terrorists who threaten our very survival. Only hours after an attack of radical jihadi terror on American soil,” says Loesch, a conservative radio host, in the video, “the New York Daily News became the loudest, vilest, most condescending voice for what many people call the Godless Left. “These false prophets at this failing excuse for a newspaper claimed to enjoy special knowledge of God’s plans somehow … even as they mocked the entire concept of religion. But they weren’t alone. As a horrific act of terror unfolded in real time, the majority of Americans turned to earnest prayer for the dead, the wounded, their families and the world — while political and media elites joined forces to insult and mock and disparage them … and in so doing, laid bare the utter moral depravity of the Godless Left.”
Here’s the five-minute video, which doesn’t miss a single right-wing talking point, including God, the “media elite,” “the moral depravity of the godless left”, and “the Queen of the movement,” Hillary Clinton. Obama is criticized for asking for the prohibition of assault weapons. The “godless left” is even blamed for creating the San Bernardino massacres, by promoting an environment in which the shooters’ neighbor didn’t want to report suspicious activity.
I can only imagine what Europeans would think of that video! But it embodies everything you need to know about the NRA
If you can handle any more of Loesch’s gun-nuttery, here’s a one-minute video in which she argues why a good American Mom should have a gun:
Loesch says “I am the National Rifle Association of America,” which is extremely scary. But the sick thing is that it’s true. I can only hope to see a day when the NRA loses all its credibility. Once an organization promoting gun safety, it’s now become a vicious pit bull defending the rights of anybody to have a gun of any kind, including assault rifles.
I’m pleased to see that reader Sastra has won the Jesus and Mo contest, in which people were asked to give the captions in the last frame of this cartoon:
The artist notes this:
This is the winning entry in the J&M script-writing competition. Sastra’s entry stood out from among a strong field for it combination of profundity and brevity. Congratulations, Sastra! Your signed book will be winging its way to
you soon.
