A new horseperson? Jeffrey Tayler rides again, attacking Obama’s execrable performance at the “National Prayer Breakfast”

February 16, 2015 • 11:30 am

Jeffrey Tayler, whose articles I’ve highlighted four times previously, is shaping up to be the new “Strident Atheist” to replace Christopher Hitchens, although I’d really nominate the underappreciated Ayaan Hirsi Ali to be Hitchens’s replacement horseperson.  (Why, when atheists call for greater diversity in New Atheism, arguing that it’s dominated by “rich old white men”, do they neglect Hirsi Ali, who is black, a woman, an ex-Muslim, relatively young, enormously accomplished, and with two excellent books under her belt? She’s lived the horrors that the rest of us only observe and criticize from afar. Yet she’s denigrated for working for a conservative think tank. But that’s just dumb, for she’s a liberal and they let her say what she wants.)

But I digress. Tayler is a contributing editor at The Atlantic, and doesn’t pull any punches when it comes to calling out faith, or, in his newest article, Obama’s unctuous coddling of religion at this month’s National Prayer Breakfast.

Tayler’s piece is called, awkwardly, “Faith-fueled forces of hatred: Obama’s religion speech was troubling—but not for the reasons the right alleges.” The subtitle is “It’s not that religion gets twisted and misused for evil. The cruelty is embedded in the very texts.” And it’s in Salon, which in other places has heaped the greatest scorn on New Atheism. Tayler himself can’t redeem that odious site, but his piece is very good. You should read it.

I talked a bit about the prayer breakfast on MSNBC (at least as far as Lawrence O’Donnell would let me speak), and echoed Tayler’s thesis, which is pretty much embodied in his title. But his prose is sharp and blunt at the same time, and reminds me a lot of Hitchens.  Here are a few quotes that should inspire you to read the article:

Progressives, it turns out, actually have more reason for rancor. Start with Obama’s attendance itself. No functionary, least of all the Democratic president of a country with a government proudly founded on the separation between Church and State, should show up at such an affair in an official capacity. Doing so lends credence to faiths that, by any humane standard, long ago discredited themselves and should certainly not be legitimized with Washingtonian pomp and reverence.

Indeed, and we still have a National Day of Prayer, which survived a constitutionality challenge by the Freedom from Religion Foundation. But seriously, can you imagine such a thing being officially proclaimed in France, Germany, or Sweden? It’s embarrassing, and really, it is unconstitutional. And Obama’s pandering to faith at the stupid Prayer Breakfasts is unseemly.

Tayler goes on, emphasizing a point I feel strongly about (and will post on tomorrow): whether or not ISIS and similar organizations represent “truth faith.” Of course they do! It’s just a form of faith different from other people’s! It’s like saying that a schizophrenic who thinks he’s Jesus has a truer form of delusion than one who thinks he’s Napoleon.  Tayler:

Soon after, Obama launched into what so riled conservatives — musings about faith being, as he put it, “twisted and misused in the name of evil.” His words deserve close scrutiny. I’ll quote at length:

“From a school in Pakistan to the streets of Paris, we have seen violence and terror perpetrated by those who profess to stand up for faith, their faith, professed to stand up for Islam, but, in fact, are betraying it. We see ISIL, a brutal, vicious death cult that, in the name of religion, carries out unspeakable acts of barbarism — terrorizing religious minorities like the Yazidis, subjecting women to rape as a weapon of war, and claiming the mantle of religious authority for such actions.”

“Betraying” Islam? Really? The Charlie Hebdo assassins were executing the death penalty against “violators” of injunctions inscribed in the Quran and the Hadith that forbid the depiction and mocking of the Prophet Muhammad. Indeed, Al Qaeda and ISIS, to which the killers may have been linked, find sanction in these texts for beheadings, the enslavement of women and much else. To justifiably claim that any of these jihadis are “betraying” Islam, we have to ignore the meaning of words in such injunctions and interpret them to suit our tastes. Unfortunately, neither the Charlie Hebdo assassins nor the butchers of ISIS choose to do this.

I’d love to see Tayler debate Reza Aslan. He goes on in this vein, and eventually works himself up to sounding positively Hitchens-ian:

Obama went on to blame [religiously inspired violence’ on “a sinful tendency that can pervert and distort our faith.” But slaughter and mutilation occur as natural, almost inevitable phenomena among those believers – and they have been no trifling minority – who take literally their canon’s commands to conduct themselves savagely. After all, if, as a wannabe martyr, you think you’re carrying out the demands of “the Almighty,” with everlasting hellfire or the threescore and twelve virgins of paradise as the stakes, what will you not do?

We should not ascribe vile behavior to misreadings of the canon. It does not help us to suppose that its all-too-human authors penned words like “behead” and “enslave” expecting that they would be metaphorically interpreted. (You can perhaps imagine the absurdity of one of the benighted scribes, resurrected before a Religion 101 class, declaring, “By ‘smite off the infidels’ heads’ I really meant ‘give the unbelievers a stiff talking-to.’”)  After all, they were writing in barbarous ages. The inevitable conclusion: Most folk of the faiths in question behave decently only to the extent that they “pervert and distort” – that is, ignore – the more macabre dictates of their sacred credos.

And finally, a rousing peroration:

Instead, after some bland excogitations on rights to freedom of speech and religion, [Obama] declared:

“. . . the protection of these rights calls for each of us to exercise civility and restraint and judgment. And if, in fact, we defend the legal right of a person to insult another’s religion, we’re equally obligated to use our free speech to condemn such insults and stand shoulder-to-shoulder with religious communities, particularly religious minorities who are the targets of such attacks. Just because you have the right to say something doesn’t mean the rest of us shouldn’t question those who would insult others in the name of free speech.”

Here Obama obliquely incriminates the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists for the satire of the Prophet Muhammad that led to their deaths. This is outrageous. It is not up to the president or any other government official to pronounce on the artists’ motives. In drawing their images, they were not so much acting “in the name of free speech” as exercising their lawful right to free speech. This in no way constitutes an “attack” on anyone. Obama’s use of the word implies that they deserved what they got. Such clever verbiage really signals one thing: capitulation. Easier to pay false homage to the ideals of multiculturalism than to state the politically inconvenient truth: Islamists murdered cartoonists for their cartoons.

And neither President Obama nor anyone else in the government should dare tell us that we are “obligated to use our free speech” to denounce anyone for insulting religion. The First Amendment contains no proviso regarding insults, let alone excluding them from its protection; that would eviscerate the very right the amendment proclaims. To be free, speech must be free to offend. Even less are we required to show solidarity with “religious communities” of any stripe, no matter what the issue. Rather, we should stand for rationalism and the values of the Enlightenment, not bolster pernicious, backward-looking belief systems out of misbegotten notions of “tolerance.”

Obama’s quote is execrable, echoing Pope Francis’s sentiment that we shouldn’t criticize religion. Indeed, Obama goes further than Francis by saying that we are OBLIGATED to defend religion against its critics. What has he been smoking?

I once said I thought Obama was a secret atheist, and I was roundly criticized for that. But I still entertain that thought, simply because I think that somebody that smart—and he is smart—couldn’t possibly be a believer. Perhaps I’m just naive.  But it doesn’t matter, for  even if he’s not an atheist, Obama pretends he’s a fervent believer, and at the Prayer Breakfast went much farther than he had to to simply acquire a veneer of faith. He was positively pandering.

As for the “no true Muslim,” fallacy, well, I’ve dealt with that before and will highlight it again tomorrow. The idea that there are “true” versions of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism is simply ludicrous. All you have to do is look at the sacred texts to see that, if you think the truest versions are those that hew most closely to the texts, then extreme right-wing Christianity and “extremist” Islam are indeed “truest” versions of those faiths. Yet those are the versions decried as false.

 

BuzzFeed post on animal reproduction

February 16, 2015 • 9:55 am

I’m starting to get really wary of “aggregators,” those sites that simply steal stuff from other sites, don’t give them credit, and usually compile lists of things that seem to attract people, like “The 7 things you need to know to have great sex,” or “You won’t believe what this cat did!”.  What bothers me is the lack of attribution; the use of other people’s work to get $$ for the aggregators. If you want to learn how these things work, and how the sites care only about profit and not journalism, read the article from the January 5 New Yorker, “King of Clickbait” by Andrew Marantz (free read). It’s about Emerson Spartz, a Chicago boy who made good by creating one aggregator site after another. It’s an eye-opening piece and should give you a distaste for the whole enterprise.

That said, I’ll now be hypocritical and call your attention to a piece I contributed to (before I’d read the above article!) on animal reproduction. They wanted someone with “authority” to remark upon the reproductive habits of animals, and so I said some stuff about spiders, mites, and bowerbirds. Here’s the click-attracting headline, and you can go to the piece by clicking on the salacious screenshot.

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“Get laid”? Really? Is that the way to turn kids onto biology, or only raise their hormone titer?

But I must admit that the quote about chocolate and roses is mine. I am a bad person.

But I am not responsible for this headline about the mating structure built by red mites. I wish people wouldn’t have to porn up animal reproduction, which is fascinating enough without this kind of embellishment.

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SERIOUSLY?

 

 

Muhammad on flies and disease: the scientific wisdom of the Qur’an and hadith

February 16, 2015 • 9:00 am

In my readings for The Albatross on how Muslims reconcile science and the Qur’an, I found a strong strain (not so prevalent in Christianity) of sycretism, or rather what I call “coincidentalism,” an accommodaitonist tactic I describe in my book. Muslims will parse the Qur’an or the hadith, find something that sounds vaguely scientific, and then claim that Muhammad anticipated all of modern science. These claims include the fields of physics, chemistry, biology, evolution, and even quantum mechanics. Christians sometimes do the same thing, saying that the Genesis story supports the Big Bang or (because of the order of creation, which of course varies between Genesis I and II) even evolution. This pathetic endeavor shows that religionists really do want empirical support for their faith, for why else would they try to show that their God accurately prophesied the findings of science?

Here’s an excerpt from The Albatross showing how far this endeavor can go:

Muslim accommodationists, who, like most Muslims, take the Quran literally, have their own form of scientific creationism, asserting that the book is not only scientifically accurate on all issues, but actually anticipated every finding of modern science. The results are both pathetic and amusing. Dr. Halûk Nurbaki, for instance, collected fifty verses from the Quran, striving mightily to show that they predicted the discovery of gravity, the atomic nucleus, the Big Bang, and quantum mechanics. He translated one such verse as, “The fire you kindle arises from green trees.” Nurbaki sees this as a divine indication of the oxygen produced by plants and consumed by fire, adding, “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.” All this shows is how far some people can twist scripture to comport their faith with science.

But today’s attempt to reconcile Islam and science is even more ludicrous. Reader Dermot sent me a clip from MEMRI showing not only that the hadith and Qur’an are scientifically inaccurate (proving that Allah didn’t know squat about science), but are positively injurious. Click on the screenshot below to see a short clip on a “Koranic scientist” claiming, well, listen to the short clip yourself or read MEMRI’s transcript below:

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Following are excerpts from a program featuring Dr. Ahmad Al-Muzain, a Palestinian expert on Koranic science, which aired on Al-Aqsa TV on September 19, 2008: [JAC: my emphasis]

Ahmad Al-Muzain: The Prophet Muhammad said: “If a fly falls into your drink, you should dip it in the drink, and then dispose of the fly, because one of its wings bears a disease, and the other wing bears the cure.” This hadith was included in the Al-Bukhari collection. This hadith makes it absolutely clear that the Prophet Muhammad confirmed a clear scientific fact: If a fly falls into a vessel – before a person drinks from this vessel, he should dip the fly in his drink, before disposing of it. Then he should drink the beverage, because it won’t do him any harm. Why? Because one of the fly’s wings bears the disease, and the other one bears the cure.

. . . In Germany, the Church paid a very large sum of money to two scientists to disprove this hadith. Since this hadith appears in the Al-Bukhari collection, we cannot claim that it is unreliable or anything, and so they thought that if they could prove that this hadith contradicts science, they would be dealing a devastating blow to Islam.

. . . The scientists took samples from the wings of flies, and began to examine them, analyze them, and take samples from their surface, in order to expose what existed on each wing. The devastating result constituted a slap in the face. The truth was devastating, and it backfired on them. The two scientists reached an astounding conclusion. They said that on one of its wings, the fly carries a huge amount of different types of bacteria, which adhere to it when it lands on rotting pieces of food that it eats. As for the other wing, Allah has given the fly the great ability to carry antidotes to these microbes.

. . . When Bayer, one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, learned about this study, it derived great benefit from it. It established biological breeding farms, where they would raise flies and extract antibiotics from their wings – the strongest antibiotics in the whole world. This antibiotic was made into a course of five pills, which is given to the patients, and it is used – believe it or not, my brothers – to treat AIDS patients. It strengthens their immune system, and destroys all types of microbes with which they are afflicted. This is all thanks to the power of this antibiotic. Obviously, this antibiotic is very expensive, and one course costs more than $500, but it is very strong and effective. How did they discover it? From this hadith.

. . . Did the Prophet Muhammad have labs to carry out research? Did Abu Bakr know anything about entomology, parasitology, or bacteriology? Of course not. Absolutely not. So how did they make all these scientific accomplishments? The only logical conclusion is that this science was revealed to the Prophet Muhammad by the Creator.

Oy vey! First of all, I strongly doubt the assertion about Bayer, and in fact I’ll give anybody an autographed hardback copy of WEIT (now out of print) who can substantiate the claim about Bayer, the antibiotics from fly wings used treat AIDS, and the $500 pills. I guess Allah didn’t know that AIDS is caused by a virus (yes it is, Deepak!) rather than a bacterium. Allah should have put antivirals on that fly wing (is it the right or the left wing, or is there fluctuating asymmetry)?

And of course dipping a fly in your drink is a good way to get sick. Allah should have known better! What he should have said, which many have noted before, is to give us a little information about washing our hands after defecating and before eating. Was that beyond Allah or the Christian and Jewish God? Instead, Allah tells us how to infect ourselves.

 

Noms in Hattiesburg

February 16, 2015 • 7:59 am

TRIGGER WARNING: Lots of meat. The posting rules are simple; if you try to denigrate the food I ate, or tell me that my diet in Hattiesburg was unhealthy, I will delete your comment. I have stated a gazillion times that I eat like this only on seminar trips, and that my usual diet at home is healthy. Leisure fascists and food police aren’t welcome here.

*****

I took advantage of my Darwin Day talk at Southern Mississippi University to sample the local comestibles. All too often on seminar trips, the hosts take you to generic “continental” restaurants where you eat generic and bland cuisine. But my hosts at SMU kindly acceded to my request to sample the indigenous cuisine: Southern and seafood.

As soon as we pulled in town, and before I checked into my hotel, we went to Leatha’s BBQ, rated by TripAdvisor as the #1 restaurant in Hattiesburg. It was a classic BBQ joint, simple and humble, with the all-important smoker out back. This is an improvement from the shack that, I’m told, Leatha’s used to have before the owner moved it into town. (Leatha died not long ago and her daughter runs the operation.) And this is what you want a BBQ joint to look like:

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And this is what you want your plate to look like. I had three meats: pulled pork, pork ribs, and beef ribs, with a side of their “famous slaw” and potato salad, along with the Wine of the South: sweetened ice tea. Extra BBQ sauce is in the cup at the top, and the rolls are an afterthought (cornbread or hushpuppies are far superior). I found it good but not great BBQ, with the ribs being a bit mushy. It was still an excellent meal, but not comparable to the place we visited for lunch the next day.

Dinner

After dinner I asked if I could see the smoker, where all the meat is smoked before cooking. Here it is: a 30-year-old smoker that resembles a Russian space capsule. The meat is smoked for about six hours with pecan-wood smoke, and then finished inside in an oven. The guy who starts the fire and smokes the meat comes in at about 3 a.m.

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The pecan wood is burned in this attachment to the smoker capsule, with the smoke then fed through the tube to the right and up over the meat:

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The critical smoker chamber. It’s clearly not been cleaned in 30 years, and you don’t want it to be!

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The pecan logs. If there’s no smokehouse, and they’re not using real wood, don’t go to that place for BBQ. Much of American “BBQ” is severely debased, infused with “artificial smoke” and cooked to a jelly-like mushiness.

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For lunch the next day we went to a truly superb place: Strick’s. It’s larger and fancier, but the food was excellent, especially the pulled and chopped pork. It was hard to choose, for it was crawfish season and I could have had a huge plate of boiled crawfish (not shown here) instead of BBQ. But I opted for the BBQ buffet—only about $12 for all the artery-clogging food you could eat.

The highlight was an entire BBQ pig, and you could simply ask the guy to slice off your preferred cut, which he’d then chop into pieces. That’s is the way you want it, with the tender inside bits mixed with the crispy bits. You can also add sauce, but really good BBQ needs no sauce: the smoke and the meat suffice. This place was not stingy, so you could go back for seconds and thirds of pig. Other meat was also on tap: fried chicken and pork ribs.

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Buffet, part I: turnip greens, creamed corn, unidentified dish, cole slaw, fried chicken, and unidentified dishes.

buffet

Buffet, part II: green beans, baked beans, unidentified dishes, fries, jalapeño cornbread muffins (excellent!), hush puppies, and onion rings:

Buffet 3

Buffet, part III: Salad. Useless filler; only for weenies or those on a diet (but why go to Stick’s if you’re on a diet?):

Salad

A properly composed BBQ plate: chopped pork, a pork rib, a jalapeno cornbread muffin, a slice of cornbread, a hush puppy, turnip greens, creamed corn, and a big glass of sweet tea.  I had seconds and then dessert.

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Half of the desserts: banana pudding (a classic southern dish) and chocolate pudding. I had the banana pudding and then came back for the hot, freshly made peach and blackberry cobblers (sadly, not photographed):

Pudding

For dinner after my talk, six of us repaired to Marlin’s Grill where I had another classic southern item: shrimp and grits (a sublime and impossibly rich meal, one that everyone should make or try at least once). When properly prepared, it’s a world-class dish (photographed with my iPhone). Grits, cheese, cream, tomato, spices, and many plump shrimp.

Shrimp and grits

Finally, I expressed a wish for oysters, which are abundant and good in the Gulf (Hattiesburg is only an hour away from the shore). On the way to the airport, the chairman took me to the Half Shell Oyster House so I could indulge. (We have good oysters in Chicago, but they’re hideously expensive.)

I started with a half dozen raw oysters, though they offered them prepared in several ways, including grilled. I favor the naked bivalve. Ketchup, Tabasco sauce, lemon, and horseradish come on the side.

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And the main course: a fried oyster po-boy (“submarine sandwich”), perhaps my favorite sandwich in the world. I favor these in New Orleans (Casamento’s makes a great one), but the Half Shell’s po-boy was also great. Note that this is indeed a sandwich; there is a long roll underneath all those oysters. Cheese grits are on the side, and, of course, iced tea.

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Sure good eating! Y’all come back, hear?

 

Monday: Hili dialogue

February 16, 2015 • 5:25 am

Oh hai! It is Monday, and Chicago had yet more snow yesterday. But, thank Ceiling Cat, it was light—nothing like in New England, where Boston had yet another blizzard yesterday, and so it’s had more snow in the past three weeks than in any entire winter in recorded history. It’s also President’s Day in the U.S.: a holiday in many places but not at the University of Chicago, where academics is srs bzns.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is cracking the whip on her staff.  I am a bit worried, I must say, as she looks rather “fluffy” these days.

Hili: We have to increase productivity.
A: We are doing the best we can.
Hili: This is not a good enough reason to be self-satisfied.
(Photo: Sarah Lawson)
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In Polish:
Hili: Musimy podnieść wydajność pracy.
Ja: Robimy co w naszej mocy.
Hili: To nie jest jeszcze powód do samozadowolenia.

(Zdjęcie: Sarah Lawson)

Darwin Day at the Dinosaur Discovery Museum: report

February 15, 2015 • 4:11 pm

by Greg Mayer

Jerry has just returned from his Darwin Day activities in Mississippi, and I’m sure we’ll be receiving a report on how things went (including in the culinary department). In the meantime, here’s a report on how things went at the Dinosaur Discovery Museum’s Darwin Day event last weekend.

The museum has one main exhibit hall, having a very large number of dinosaurs (especially theropods); most are high quality reproductions. In the lobby, I set up a temporary exhibit table on the theme of “Highly Evolved Tetrapods”, meaning ones that have lost or rearranged major parts of their skeletons. My table, manned by my son Christian and myself, featured live animals.

The tetrapod table.
The highly evolved tetrapod table.

The hit of the exhibit was Vivian, an adult ball python (Python regius). Many people, as urged to by our signage, asked to see Vivian’s hind legs.

Vivian-- the star of the show.
Vivian– the star of the show.

Most people (even biologists) don’t know that some extant snakes have vestigial hind limbs, and my son and I have always liked to show them off. Once, when he was in grade school, he told a naturalist at a creationist nature camp (admittedly an odd combination) about the legs on a python they had on exhibit. She demurred, but my son, in good faith (he didn’t know they were creationists) persisted, and offered to show the legs to her. She allowed as she had seen the structures, but that they weren’t legs. He again persisted, stating (correctly) that the leg bones and pelvis were still there, and that they were legs. She could only sputter that they were not legs “in my world view”!

Curator of Education Nick Wiersum with a friend.
Nick Wiersum, Curator of Education, ain’t afraid of no toad.

The giant toad (Bufo marinus; called cane toads in Australia, but native from Texas to Argentina) was also quite popular. You can see the large ellipsoid poison glands behind the eye, and the swelling of the body to make swallowing difficult, another defensive attribute. We also had an American toad (Bufo americanus; common throughout most of the eastern United States and Canada) for comparison. Both are good-sized adults.

American Toad vs. Giant Toad
American Toad vs. Giant Toad

We also had Slidey, a red-eared slider (Trachemys scripta elegans); we’ve noted before here on WEIT how highly evolved turtles are.

Slidey the Red-eared Slider
Slidey the Red-eared Slider

My paleontological colleagues Summer Ostrowski and Chris Noto set up a temporary exhibit featuring small, touchable fossils and a very fine selection of plastic animals.

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The plastic animals (all high quality collector-grade pieces) were arranged in correct phylogenetic arrangement. Although you can barely see him under the mammoth’s chin, humanity is represented by a 3D print of Charles Darwin as depicted in the sitting statue of him at the Natural History Museum in London.

The pyhlogeny of plastic animals.
The phylogeny of plastic animals.

Chris and I also gave lectures in the museum’s downstairs class room, on “How Evolution Works” (me) and “What the Fossil Record Tells Us about Evolution”. Nick Wiersum, Curator of Education, led special activities in the main exhibit hall.

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“I once caught a fish, this big.”

I think the event was quite successful, with events suitable for kids, students, and adults. There was a good crowd, from kids through adults, with steady numbers the whole day, and lots of good questions. The attendees included WEIT readers, some who came from Milwaukee and Evanston– thanks so much for the support, and it was good to meet you!

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Thx for pix: Chris Noto, Jim Shea