I weep for America

December 17, 2012 • 3:23 pm

UPDATE: Reader Krishan has called my attention to New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik’s outraged response to the child-killing lobby. I rarely see Gopnik this exercised, but enough is enough. An excerpt (my emphasis):

And now it has happened again, bang, like clockwork, one might say: Twenty dead children—babies, really—in a kindergarten in a prosperous town in Connecticut. And a mother screaming. And twenty families told that their grade-schooler had died. After the Aurora killings, I did a few debates with advocates for the child-killing lobby—sorry, the gun lobby—and, without exception and with a mad vehemence, they told the same old lies: it doesn’t happen here more often than elsewhere (yes, it does); more people are protected by guns than killed by them (no, they aren’t—that’s a flat-out fabrication); guns don’t kill people, people do; and all the other perverted lies that people who can only be called knowing accessories to murder continue to repeat, people who are in their own way every bit as twisted and crazy as the killers whom they defend. (That they are often the same people who pretend outrage at the loss of a single embryo only makes the craziness still crazier.)

So let’s state the plain facts one more time, so that they can’t be mistaken: Gun massacres have happened many times in many countries, and in every other country, gun laws have been tightened to reflect the tragedy and the tragic knowledge of its citizens afterward. In every other country, gun massacres have subsequently become rare. In America alone, gun massacres, most often of children, happen with hideous regularity, and they happen with hideous regularity because guns are hideously and regularly available.

The people who fight and lobby and legislate to make guns regularly available are complicit in the murder of those children. They have made a clear moral choice: that the comfort and emotional reassurance they take from the possession of guns, placed in the balance even against the routine murder of innocent children, is of supreme value. Whatever satisfaction gun owners take from their guns—we know for certain that there is no prudential value in them—is more important than children’s lives. Give them credit: life is making moral choices, and that’s a moral choice, clearly made.

__________________

I don’t need to comment on this, except to apologize for my country:

According to the Raw Story, the faithful have added yet another another culprit besides the First Amendment to the school shootings: evolution. It was only a matter of time, of course.

A Tennessee pastor on Sunday told his congregation that the number of mass shooting were escalating because of schools were government “mind-control centers” that taught “junk about evolution” and “how to be a homo.”

Old Paths Baptist Church Pastor Sam Morris began speaking about last week’s school massacre in Newtown, Connecticut by warning that “this sermon will not be pleasant.”

It wasn’t.

“Why do you still send your kids to the governmental schools?” the pastor asked the congregation. “What’s behind this shooting that we saw on Dec. 14 in Newtown, Connecticut and the other one’s like it? What’s going on. Well, number one, deception… I got news for you, when you kicked God out of schools, you’re going to be judged for that.”

Morris insisted that “humanism” in schools taught Lanza that he was God and “he can just go blow away anybody he wants.”

“When I got in high school, man, I started learning all this kingdom, phylum stuff, all this junk about evolution,” he recalled. “And I want to tell you what evolution teaches — here’s the bottom line — that you’re an animal. That’s what it teaches. So, you’re an animal, you can act like an animal. Amen.”

“So, here you are, you’re an animal and you’re a god! So, what are we going to teach you about in school? Well, we can teach you about sex, we can teach you how to rebel to you parents, we can teach you how to be a homo! But we’re definitely not going to teach you about the word of God! Amen.”

He added: “They think homeschoolers are a bunch of crazies, man. But I’m going to tell you something, I’ve never seen a police officer or a medal [sic] detector at a home school. Never. Amen. Now, there’s plenty of guns at my home school. Amen. I guarantee you we’re not going to have a mass shooting at any of the schools that are represented in this building today. I guarantee you, if there is a shooting, it won’t last very long. Amen.”

You can hear the tape of his sermon at the Raw Story link above.

Does not love Darwin or "homos"
Does not love Darwin or “homos”

h/t: Grania

Evangelical Christianity on the wane—or not?

December 17, 2012 • 11:24 am

I’m confused.  I’ve just finished Tanya Lurhmann’s When God Talks Back, an anthropological study of the practices of the Vineyard Christian Fellowship, an evangelical sect comprisingly mostly well-off and intelligent people. (The review of the book by Joan Acocella in The New Yorker is right on the mark.)  In her penultimate chapter, Luhrmann talks about the explosion of evangelical Christianity in America:

In 2005, Newsweek found that nearly 40 percent of Americans said that “the main reason” they practiced religion was “to forge a personal relationship with God.”  There are still theologically conservative Christians who do not believe that God will speak back; they still hold, as they put it, that revelation is “closed.” But probably half of the conservative Christians in America are experientially oriented. Membership in charistmatic congregations has exploded since the 1960s.”  (p. 311).

She goes on to suggest that supernaturalism is increasing because the faithful want to talk to God—they want a personal relationship that includes miracles, in which God intercedes in their lives and answers prayers. They don’t want Sophisticated Theology™.

In contrast, an opinion piece in Sunday’s New York Time, “The decline of evangelical America,” suggests otherwise.  It’s by John Dickerson, an evangelical minister, and he bemoans the emptying of evangelical pews.  The times identifies the author:

John S. Dickerson is the senior pastor of Cornerstone Church and author of the forthcoming book “The Great Evangelical Recession: Six Factors That Will Crash the American Church … and How to Prepare.”

And he reaches precisely the opposite conclusion as Luhrmann (whose book was published this year).  Dickerson:

In 2011 the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life polled church leaders from around the world. Evangelical ministers from the United States reported a greater loss of influence than church leaders from any other country — with some 82 percent indicating that their movement was losing ground. . .

. . . evangelicals, while still perceived as a majority, have become a shrinking minority in the United States. In the 1980s heyday of the Rev. Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, some estimates accounted evangelicals as a third or even close to half of the population, but research by the Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith recently found that Christians who call themselves evangelicals account for just 7 percent of Americans. (Other research has reported that some 25 percent of Americans belong to evangelical denominations, though they may not, in fact, consider themselves evangelicals.) Dr. Smith’s findings are derived from a three-year national study of evangelical identity and influence, financed by the Pew Research Center. They suggest that American evangelicals now number around 20 million, about the population of New York State. The global outlook is more optimistic, as evangelical congregations flourish in places like China, Brazil and sub-Saharan Africa.

But while America’s population grows by roughly two million a year, attendance across evangelical churches — from the Southern Baptists to Assembles of God and nondenominational churches — has gradually declined, according to surveys of more than 200,000 congregations by the American Church Research Project.

And so on. What is Dickerson’s theory for the decline? That “evangelicals have not adapted well to rapid shifts in the culture,” and by that he means the secular trends of supporting same-sex marriage, abortion rights, etc.  But Dickerson lays the greatest blame at the door of evangelical hubris—the tendency of evangelicals to chastise and proselytize rather than just comport themselves according to the dictates of Jebus:

I believe the cultural backlash against evangelical Christianity has less to do with our views — many observant Muslims and Jews, for example, also view homosexual sex as wrong, while Catholics have been at the vanguard of the movement to protect the lives of the unborn — and more to do with our posture. The Scripture calls us “aliens and exiles” (1 Peter 2:11), but American evangelicals have not acted with the humility and homesickness of aliens. The proper response to our sexualized and hedonistic culture is not to chastise, but to “conduct yourselves honorably among the Gentiles, so that, though they malign you as evildoers, they may see your good deeds and glorify God” (1 Peter 2:12).

But such humility is impossible for evangelical Christians—at least as long as they ground their faith on the claim that salvation comes only through accepting Jesus as one’s savior.  The other side of that coin is that those who don’t will go to hell (70% of Americans believe in hell, by the way).  And the idea that those who aren’t with you will fry forever is deeply repugnant to non-evangelicals.  It goes against the arc of increasing morality that Pinker so clearly demonstrates in The Better Angels of our Nature.  The proper response to a faith that says, “Believe as we do or boil in molten sulphur” is “you’re insane.”

And so Dickerson’s prescription is impossible, for evangelical Christianity demands a stance that alienates more liberal believers, and the alienation will only increase.

Now I’m not sure who is right about the spread of evangelical Christianity—Dickerson or Luhrmann—as I lack the time to do the research.  But it’s telling that Dickerson sees the waning faith as an opportunity:

Some evangelical leaders are embarrassed by our movement’s present paralysis. I am not. Weakness is a potent purifier. As Paul wrote, “I am content with weaknesses … for the sake of Christ” (2 Corinthians 12:10). For me, the deterioration and disarray of the movement is a source of hope: hope that churches will stop angling for human power and start proclaiming the power of Christ.

Well, I applaud his call for a withdrawal from politics (the Vineyard Fellowship, after all, does virtually no political or social work: that’s one of Acocella’s criticisms of Luhrmann’s “neutrality” about the sect).  But the power of Christ cannot withstand the inexorable tide of secular advance. I f believe with all my heart that some day America will end up like Scandinavia: virtually godless. I won’t live to see it, but I’m confident it will happen, and the trend is in that direction.

 

h/t: Greg Mayer

The stupid gets worse: gun organization blames anti-gun lobby for school shootings

December 17, 2012 • 6:49 am

First it’s God, who let the shootings happen because he was pouting at being banned from schools. Now, from Salon, we hear that the murders are the result of the bleeding-heart liberals who have banned guns from school zones:

The advocacy group Gun Owners of America [GOA] know exactly how the Newtown massacre might have been averted: Guns in schools.

And in the hours after the tragedy, Larry Pratt, the group’s executive director is calling on state and federal lawmakers to overturn any bans on guns in schools. More hauntingly, he is suggesting gun control advocates “have the blood of little children on their hands.”

Here is his statement [JAC: I’ve embedded the full statement from the GOA website]:

“They have blood on their hands

A gunman whose name we do not need to memorialize took advantage of our gun control laws to slaughter some 20 children and seven adults in a Newton, Connecticut elementary school.

In addition to the gunman, blood is on the hands of members of Congress and the Connecticut legislators who voted to ban guns from all schools in Connecticut (and most other states).  They are the ones who made it illegal to defend oneself with a gun in a school when that is the only effective way of resisting a gunman.

What a lethal, false security are the Gun Free Zone laws.  All of our mass murders in the last 20 years have occurred in Gun Free Zones.  The two people murdered a couple of days earlier in the shopping center in Oregon were also in a Gun Free Zone.

Hopefully the Connecticut tragedy will be the tipping point after which a rising chorus of Americans will demand elimination of the Gun Free Zone laws that are in fact Criminal Safe Zones.

One measure of insanity is repeating the same failure time after time hoping that the next time the failure will turn out to be a success.  Gun Free Zones are a lethal insanity.

We must tell our elected officials that they are acting as the criminals’ friends as long as they continue to support legislation that only protects criminals, not decent people

Oh, and we must also insist that these criminal friendly elected officials not even try to blame gun owners and our “gun culture” for what a criminal did.  Had a few of us been available with guns at the Newton school, most of the victims might still be alive.”

The GOA uses as its slogan Ron Paul’s endorsement as “the only no-compromise gun lobby in America.” That’s for sure!

For those who say, “banning guns won’t keep them out of the hands of criminals,” I say, “Bosh!” Make it illegal, as it is in Britain, to own a handgun of any sort, and rifles will be for target shooting only. The Second Amendment to our Constitution was for an armed militia, not for citizens to carry weapons around whenever they feel like it. And I don’t care what the Supreme Court says; there is simply no need for citizens to possess handguns, semiautomatic or otherwise.

Will it work? I think so.  Many murders or accidental deaths are caused by the presence of easily-obtained guns lying around, and if you can’t get them, the average citizen won’t bother. Of course there will still be a criminal black market in guns, but with sufficiently tough legislation that should abate.

Here’s what The Economist says:

After a couple of horrible mass shootings in Britain, handguns and automatic weapons have been effectively banned. It is possible to own shotguns, and rifles if you can demonstrate to the police that you have a good reason to own one, such as target shooting at a gun club, or deer stalking, say. The firearms-ownership rules are onerous, involving hours of paperwork. You must provide a referee who has to answer nosy questions about the applicant’s mental state, home life (including family or domestic tensions) and their attitude towards guns. In addition to criminal-record checks, the police talk to applicants’ family doctors and ask about any histories of alcohol or drug abuse or personality disorders.

Vitally, it is also very hard to get hold of ammunition. Just before leaving Britain in the summer, I had lunch with a member of parliament whose constituency is plagued with gang violence and drug gangs. She told me of a shooting, and how it had not led to a death, because the gang had had to make its own bullets, which did not work well, and how this was very common, according to her local police commander. Even hardened criminals willing to pay for a handgun in Britain are often getting only an illegally modified starter’s pistol turned into a single-shot weapon.

And, to be crude, having few guns does mean that few people get shot. In 2008-2009, there were 39 fatal injuries from crimes involving firearms in England and Wales, with a population about one sixth the size of America’s. In America, there were 12,000 gun-related homicides in 2008.. . .

I am willing to believe that some householders, in some cases, have defended their families from attack because they have been armed. But I also imagine that lots of ordinary adults, if woken in the night by an armed intruder, lack the skill to wake, find their weapon, keep hold of their weapon, use it correctly and avoid shooting the wrong person. And my hunch is that the model found in places like Japan or Britain—no guns in homes at all, or almost none—is on balance safer.

As for the National Rifle Association bumper stickers arguing that only an armed citizenry can prevent tyranny, I wonder if that isn’t a form of narcissism, involving the belief that lone, heroic individuals will have the ability to identify tyranny as it descends, recognise it for what it is, and fight back. There is also the small matter that I don’t think America is remotely close to becoming a tyranny, and to suggest that it is is both irrational and a bit offensive to people who actually do live under tyrannical rule.

Is there any credible justification for allowing Americans to own guns and carry them around concealed? I haven’t heard one.

Sadly, the author (they’re anonymous at The Economist) pulls his/her punches at the end, saying that America is a democracy and we love our guns and therefore nothing is going to happen:

I personally dislike guns. I think the private ownership of guns is a tragic mistake. But a majority of Americans disagree with me, some of them very strongly. And at a certain point, when very large majorities disagree with you, a bit of deference is in order.

Deference? This isn’t religion—it’s guns! People are getting killed by guns, and at the same rate now as that cited above for 2008-2009: about 33 per day—add another 55 per day if you include suicides committed with guns.  Now’s not the time to say “guns will always be with us” (a mantra similar to that used by accommodationists, and just as false).  Now is the time to fight, and get Obama to take serious action about gun control.  I don’t for a minute mean to use the slain of Newtown as political capital, but the national sentiment for gun control is going in the right direction, and that means we should apply pressure. I’m deeply embarrassed by the failure of our government to ban guns (and really, what excuse is there for semiautomatic weapons?), and even more so by the yahoos that defend their right to have as many guns as they want, and to take them into school zones. What fulminating idiocy!

One of my personal Rules for Living is that if more than one friend tells you you’re behaving badly, they’re probably right.  Now we have nearly every democracy in the world telling America that we’re wrong on gun control, and yet those benighted folks fond of their Glocks won’t listen.

You can sign a petition to the White House here, and write your representatives and senators in Congress (email addresses here and here).

____________

UPDATE: See the powerful article about America’s obsession with guns in the Telegraph, pointed out by a reader below.

Country music week: Day 2

December 17, 2012 • 4:45 am

I got this comment from “Christopher” last night about my first post on “Country music week”:

I am unsubscribing from this list after hearing
How you like inbreed country music!! These country hillbillies are dumb and are proud of being dumb!! I didn’t expect this from you! What else do you like fox news??!!
Completely disgusted!!

Well, my good man, don’t let the door hit your butt on the way out. I won’t miss you!

Today and the next five days are devoted to my favorite (ergo the best) country songs—at least those that had a life on the pop charts as well. I’m omitting instrumentals, as that would take me too far afield and turn one week into several weeks.

Skeeter Davis (1931-2004) was really named Mary Frances Penick, and nicknamed “Skeeter” after the American southern term for “mosquito.”  I really couldn’t name another song she did, though she had a very successful career in country, but this, her signature tune recorded in 1962, was covered by many artists, with the best version, in my view, being Karen Carpenter’s (click the link to hear it). Wikipedia notes this (the song was written by Arthur Kent and Sylvia Dee):

Davis’ recording of “The End of the World” has long been considered one of the foremost examples of the Nashville Sound of the 1960s – smooth vocals and a slick, sophisticated production appealing to audiences far beyond the traditional country music audience. The song was played at Chet Atkins’ funeral in 2001 in an instrumental performance by Marty Stuart and later, Davis’ recording was broadcast over the speakers of her 2004 funeral at the Ryman Auditorium.

This live version is from the Bobby Lord Show in 1965.

Dolly Parton (b. 1946) is simply over the top. I’m not a fan of either her acting or most of her recordings, which sound like Alvin the Chipmunk, but she’s an adept songwriter. Her several thousand compositions include “I will always love you,” made famous by Whitney Houston. “Here you come again”, which I think is her best, was written in 1977 by the famous duo of Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil. It won Parton a Grammy.

Of all the male country singers who ever lived, I think Randy Travis (b. 1959) has the best voice (Doc Watson and Gordon Lightfoot are close behind): definitely country and nasal but quite beautiful.  He’s gone a bit downhill in his troubled later days, but this live performance shows him off well. It’s pure country, both the voice and the lyrics: completely unpretentious and moving. “Deeper than the holler” was written by Paul Overstreet and Don Schlitz and released in 1988.

Spiders: dimorphic, mimetic, and fluorescent

December 16, 2012 • 2:26 pm

I’ve discovered another superb photographer of arthropods: Melvyn Yeo, who has some amazing photos on his site. He calls himself a “just a hobbyist,” but, as you’ll see below, he’s selling himself way short. I’ll put up just three of his spider pictures to show you:

This one, Gasteracantha arcuata, has extreme sexual dimorphism: in this case females are large and ornamented, while males are drab and much smaller. Female above, male below (more information here):

gasteracantha_arcuata_by_melvynyeo-d3kqnbh

5880901073_5d3063afce_b

This crab spider imitates mimics a bird dropping (for more pictures and information go here):

The araneid spider Pasilobus sp. builds its web at night close to bushes and small trees.
The araneid spider Pasilobus sp. builds its web at night close to bushes and small trees.

And here’s a harvestman, with Yeo’s photo passed on by Bug Girl, who said on Twitter:

It’s not just scorpions that fluoresce under black light! Harvest men (daddy-longlegs or Opiliones) also glow.

Remember that although harvestmen are arachids (that’s a class), they’re not spiders, for they’re in the order Opiliones, while “true” spiders are in a different order, Araneae.

Picture 2

Islamic creationism: London debate on Islam and evolution cancelled because of Muslim student opposition

December 16, 2012 • 10:02 am

In my studies of on how people try (and fail) to accommodate science and religion, I’ve tried to investigate faiths other than Christianity (the main religion concerned with such reconciliation) and Judaism.  But with Islam it’s a dismal failure, for there aren’t many decent books dealing with the topic (for one, see Tanir Edis’s An Illusion of Harmony: Science and Religion in Islam. Prometheus Books, Amherst, NY).  But even Edis’s book is mostly about Turkey, and doesn’t go into the depths (if that’s the word) attained by Christian theologians like John Polkinghorne or Alvin Plantinga.

Most Islamic “accomodationism” simply reports that everything we know about science is already in the Qur’an, so there’s no contradiction.  One example, and it’s typical, comes from a book by H. T. M. B. Nurbaki, Verses from the Holy Qur’an and the Facts of Science. (2007, Kitabbhvan, New Delhi, India).

If you want to see how far this ludicrous scientific exegesis of the Qur’an goes, here’s an example, in which Nurbaki shows that the secrets of OXYGEN were revealed to Muhamed. On p. 133, Nurbaki explicates this Qur’anic verse:

“The fire you kindle arises from green trees”

as a divine revelation of the oxygen molecule, arguing “It was impossible 14 centuries ago for unbelievers to  understand the stupendous biological secret this verse contains, for the inside story of combustion was not known.” There are books full of this nonsense, and it almost makes you laugh.

But in none of these books have I seen a reconciliation between Islam and evolution, for that’s simply out. The Qur’an tells us we created by Allah in a manner similar to the description of Genesis. But that’s not interpreted metaphorically; nearly all devout Muslims reject evolution.

Thus it’s no surprise that, as Friday’s Telegraph reports, a Muslim think tank, the Deen Institute, has had to cancel a planned conference on Islam and evolution because of Muslim student opposition.  (notice of the upcoming conference here; no words about its having been cancelled or rescheduled). The Deen Institute, which operates in both the UK and the US, seems to be a sort of BioLogos for Islam: an organization dedicated to comporting the Muslim faith with the facts of science. And, according to the Telegraph, it’s succeeding about as well:

The Deen Institute, a Muslim debating forum which promotes critical thinking, had hoped to hold a conference entitled “Have Muslims misunderstood evolution?” early next year. Among the speakers invited to attend included Muslim scientists, imams who have promoted the compatibility of Islam and evolution as well as those who preach a form of Islamic creationism.

The initial plan was to hold the event next month at Imperial College London, one of the country’s foremost universities for scientific exploration and debate, in cooperation with the local Islamic student society. But the Deen Institute said it was forced to pull out when it became clear that opposition to the event from supporters of creationism began mounting. It is now being held without input from any Muslim student society at Logan Hall, a conference centre owned by the University of London.

“We eventually had to give up of getting any support from student societies because it was seen as simply too controversial,” Adam Deen, co-founder of the institute, told The Independent. Deen, who describes himself as a “conservative Muslim” who encourages critical thinking, said he was surprised to receive such opposition at a place of scientific study, particularly as he had made sure to invite all sides of the debate including those who preach creationism.

“It’s symptomatic of a bigger problem in the Muslim world where people representing practical Muslims have to be seen to be more literalist,” he said. “It’s almost like there’s an intellectual mafia movement who won’t allow any freedom of thought.”

And that’s a surprise?  While several students expressed support for the conference, they couldn’t overcome the baying ignoramuses.  But knowing Islamic “accommodationism,” I wasn’t surprised:

The row is informative because it illustrates some of the controversies currently occupying the Muslim world about the compatibility of science and whether critical thinking is being closed down by more literalist schools of thought.

Muslims believe the Qur’an is the indisputable word of God and therefore any scientific discovery which risks proving something within their holy book as incorrect is highly controversial, particularly among the more literalist schools of thought. For example, most Muslim scholars have long accepted scientifically proven cosmology but even up until his death in 1999, Sheikh Ibn Baaz, the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, continued to insist that the Sun revolved around the Earth based on his interpretation of Islamic texts.

Naturally, the debate will prominently feature Islamic creationists, including minions of the infamous Harun Yahya (Adnan Oktar):

Much of this newfound enthusiasm for attacking evolution has been pushed by Harun Yahya, a prominent Turkish theologian whose writings have been seized upon by literalists and those who exhibit a theological suspicion of science. Dr Oktar Babuna, a representative from the Harun Yahya movement, is scheduled to speak at the conference alongside Shaikh Yasir Qadhi, an influential imam who accepts evolution at a micro level but refuses to countenance the idea that man evolved from anything other than Adam himself.

Two Muslim scientists, American biologists Ehab Abouheif and Fatimah Jackson, will also speak alongside Usama Hasan, a British imam who preaches the commonly held scientific view that man is descended from ape-like forebears.

You may remember Hasan as I’ve posted on him before; a while back he was scheduled to give a talk on Islam and evolution in London, but then bailed because of death threats from his coreligionists. I have no problem with his withdrawal; I might cancel a talk too if I got credible threats. But Hasan subsequently retracted some of his views on evolution; not surprisingly, his “apology” was rejected by fellow Muslims. It will be interesting to see what he says in his rescheduled talk.

A word on the mission of the Deen Institute, which again reminds me of BioLogos; its “vision” is shown below: 

As Muslims living in modern society, we must engage with a diverse range of ideas and belief systems. The Deen Institute has been established to provide students with the necessary tools of understanding and dialogue.

Our aim is to navigate this challenging situation in light of the Islamic tradition; through our commitment to knowledge and learning. Taught in a comfortable and welcoming environment, our structured courses cover a range of subjects and levels.

The Deen Institute welcomes all who are curious and eager to learn, regardless of faith or background.

With this in mind, the Institute’s primary objectives as represented by each pillar are as follows:

pillar1

To help the wider public understand the Islamic tradition in light of contemporary ideas and beliefs.

pillar2

To raise awareness about the sound use of critical thinking and intellectual thought throughout Islamic heritage, and to share this wisdom with modern day thinkers and intellectuals.

pillar3

To supply the UK with a platform where common issues and questions can be openly examined from various viewpoints, with mutual respect and civility.

pillar4

To release research publications focused on the Islamic perspective on common issues pertaining to topics such as ethics, philosophy, history and science.

pillar5

To promote critical thinking and rational thought within philosophical cogency in the educational sector and to revive intellectuality within the Muslim community.

These are doomed, of course, so long as Muslims take the Qur’an as the ultimate truth and authority on everything. As far as I know, Muslims are far more literalistic about their scriptures than Christians, even American Christians, so “promoting rational thought” within Islam could never mean questioning the Qur’an.

To show this, just have a look at the logo for the evolution meeting below. The “progression of humans” shown at the top, their take on a classic evolution graphic, would make me chuckle—except I don’t think it’s a joke.

Picture 2

Finally, a graphic from a paper in Science (reference below: pdf available free, I think), showing how abysmal the statistics are for acceptance of evolution in Islamic countries:

acceptance-of-islam-muslim-countries

h/t: Malgorzata

____________________

Hameed, S. 2009. Bracing for Islamic creationism. Science 322:1637-1638.

Someone doesn’t understand free will

December 16, 2012 • 7:11 am

Here’s a comment submitted by reader “Jane,” who of course won’t ever post here again. But it’s interesting to see how easily people misunderstand what I think about free will. I made one of “Jane’s” comments a post on December 3, which included the classic sentence, “Jerry has to deny praise and blame because he did nothing in his life and let his parents down.” A reader sprang to my defense (thanks, but no need, really), with the quote that begins her post.

“If your parents were disappointed in you they must have had ridiculously high expectations. You’ve got a science doctorate, a job as a professor at a university, and you are a published author.”

but jerry never was a daddy, which is what most parents want from there kids. Hes a public speaker about how blameless humans are for there attrocities. I bet dad is REALLY proud. Still Im just waiting now for jerrys next sick article defending the school killer recentely. After all ACCORDING TO JERRY he had no free will can accept no blame whatsoever. Yes you read right, the school child killer of 20, is BLAMELESS!!!! according to jerry coyne. I hope you posters enjoy reading the site of this sick fuck.

Jane, if you’re going to troll here, at least try to understand what I’m saying, which is that of course there is blame for what one does, and punishment must be meted out for bad deeds.  But of course “Jane,” who hasn’t yet learned to spell, just wants to fulminate.

The internet is full of these morons.  Bye, Jane!