Norfolk eaglets released

July 30, 2011 • 10:26 pm

Spare a thought for the three eaglets of Norfolk, Virginia, whose mother was killed by a plane in April, forcing the triplets to be raised by hand.

WVEC television reports (with a nice video) that the eagles were released, along with two other orphans, three days ago.  Two of them appear to have taken to the air well, and are hanging around in the area, while the third, a female fitted with a radio transmitter, had a “failure to launch,” presumably based on inexperience and overheating. She’ll be returned to the rehab center pending a relaunch in the next two weeks.

More death threats from religious folks

July 30, 2011 • 9:33 am

Perhaps some atheists have issued death threats against religious people, but I don’t know of any, and, at any rate, they must be much rarer than those aimed in the opposite direction.

Yesterday Blair Scott, communications director for American Atheists, was on the FOX News show America Live with Megyn Kelly. You can see the show here; sadly, I can’t watch it in Russia.

As soon as Scott returned home after the show, his inbox began filling up with hate mail and threats.  Equally distressing, the Fox News Facebook page was soon inundated with death threats aimed at Scott and atheists in general, comments that are being taken down rapidly (see the report by William Hamby in the Atlanta Examiner).

The American Atheists web page has put up some screenshots of those comments posted on the Fox FB site.  Here are the words of some loving Christians, with their real names:

So much for the beneficence and love of the faithful!  And all for the crime of not sharing their superstitions! Now I’m not saying that these are serious threats, presaging murder, but I bet if these folks were given guns, and the law were suspended for one day . . .

h/t: Diane G

Caturday Felid: Lincoln and cats

July 30, 2011 • 5:25 am

by Greg Mayer

During this 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War, it is edifying to recall that Abraham Lincoln was not only a great president, but a great cat-lover.  “Disunion”, the NY Times series on the 150th anniversary  (which is generally quite good), in a piece on regimental mascots and pets, notes that

Even President Lincoln wasn’t immune to the solace provided by animals during the war. When Mary Todd Lincoln was asked if her husband had a hobby, she replied, “cats.”

Lincoln on $5 bill and cat.
(From The PeraLion on tumblr)

The National Park Service elaborates on his aiulurophilia:

Abraham Lincoln, our sixteenth President, loved cats and could play with them for hours. When asked if her husband had a hobby, Mary Todd Lincoln replied, “cats.” President Lincoln visited General Grant at City Point, Virginia in March of 1865. The civil war was drawing to a close and the enormous task of reuniting the country lay ahead, yet the President made time to care for three orphaned kittens. Abraham Lincoln noticed three stray kittens in the telegraph hut. Picking them up and placing them in his lap, he asked about their mother. When the President learned that the kittens’ mother was dead, he made sure the kittens would be fed and a good home found for them.

Darwin, who was born on the same day as Lincoln, preferred dogs.

Francis Collins is ticked off at atheists

July 29, 2011 • 10:39 pm

Speaking at an editorial board meeting at USA Today, National Insitutes of Health director Francis Collins, an evangelical Christian, has struck out at atheists. He’s particularly upset at some critical comments made by Steven Pinker that were first reported on this website.  Collins now argues that the conflicts between religion and science are “overstated.”

Asked about complaints from researchers such as Harvard’s Steven Pinker, over an avowed Christian heading a scientific agency, Collins said, “angry atheists are out there using science as a club to to hit believers over the head.” He expressed concern that prominent researchers suggesting that one can’t believe in evolution and believe in God, may be “causing a lot of people not familiar with science to change their assessments of it.”

“A person’s private beliefs should not keep him from a public position,” Pinker wrote in 2009. “But Collins is an advocate of profoundly anti-scientific beliefs, and it is reasonable for the scientific community to ask him how these beliefs will affect his administration,” he added. Collins later support for NIH human embryonic stem cell research later earned him more favorable reviews from scientists such as Alan Leshner of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

And Collins is still an advocate of profoundly anti-scientific beliefs, including the notion that the laws of physics indicate fine-tuning by a deity (the same one who freezes waterfalls in three parts), and that human morality—which he calls “The Moral Law”—can’t be explained by evolution, ergo Jesus. (I’m publishing a response to the latter idea within the next few days.)

I’m still awaiting evidence for Collins’s accommodationist claim that those who argue for an incompatibility between science and faith have turned many people away from science.  What we do know is that those arguments have turned many people away from faith, which is of course a good thing.

Collins has, of course, again overstepped his boundaries as NIH director. To see this, imagine if he was an atheist instead of a Christian, and “struck out at angry religious people” for trying to blur the boundaries between science and superstition. Imagine if he said that religious people were using Jesus as a club to hit the scientifically-minded over the head. Collins would be fired in a millisecond, and religious people would come down on him like a ton of bricks.  His ability to get away with this as America’s most famous government scientist shows the profound asymmetry between theists and atheists in America.

Here’s my response to Collins’s claim of science/faith comity, published last year in USA Today.

Rabbi Yoffie defends “religious” morality

July 29, 2011 • 10:05 pm

A week ago I criticized Rabbi Eric Yoffie for claiming that he gets his morality from religion, noting that the “morality” adumbrated in the sacred book of his faith, the Old Testament, is horrendous, condoning all sorts of acts that modern folks find immoral and repugnant.

Rabbi Yoffie has responded to me, agreeing that the morality given in the Bible was wrong, and noting that after due consideration, much pilpul, and lengthy weighing of subtle nuances, scholarly Jews have decided that God didn’t mean what he said in the Old Testament:

“Jerry Coyne’s response is not serious. His position: if you take the Bible seriously, that means accepting stoning and genocide. But as I wrote, my moral decisions derive from studying and considerin­g a 2500-year conversati­on among Jews and between Jews and sacred texts–one that involves not only considerin­g the Bible but the Talmud, the responsa and rabbinic literature in all of its richness. This is a literature that rejects stoning and genocide. It is also a literature that does not always arrive at a single conclusion­; nontheless­, by immersing myself in that literature and in a long tradition of thoughtful religious discussion­s, I am able to benefit from profound insignts and make moral judgments that I find far more compelling than those that derive from secular systems.”

I would argue that these revised moral judgments are in fact not based on religion, but on secular morality.  What the learned rabbis have done is simply realize that, by all human lights and standards, the stoning of nonvirgin brides, genocide, and murder of homosexuals is wrong.  But the Bible nevertheless says they’re okay!  The Old Testament, obviously, does not comport with our innate views of right and wrong—a secular morality that takes precedence over the pronouncements of God. Just because these moral judgments are made by a bunch of rabbis and religious Jews does not make them religious.

Similarly, if a Catholic layperson decides that using condoms or having extramarital sex don’t really constitute mortal sins, that doesn’t make those decisions “religious.”

St. Petersburg: The Hermitage

July 29, 2011 • 9:31 am

The internet in my hotel is wonky, so I dare not even try to upload photos.  Because of this, I’ll postpone my “holiday snaps” and commentary on this gorgeous city after I return to the U.S. on Wednesday.  But I did want to note that I spent four hours this morning in the Hermitage, the former palace of the Russian czars that has been converted into an art gallery.  It’s not as large as the Louvre, but is almost as exhausting, with a collection that ranges from ancient Egyptian art through the Impressionists (something the Louvre doesn’t have).

But you’ll see from the pictures I’ll post that the setting for the paintings is incomparably better in the Hermitage than the Louvre, for the imperial corridors and apartments have been restored to their former glory.  There are inlaid floors, ceiling frescoes and gilded plaster everywhere, and, because the paintings are mostly in exterior corridors, lots of natural light to view the paintings.  In fact, some of them aren’t even behind glass, so you can inspect, for example, the impasto of van Gogh from only a few inches away. (Given this people-friendly but painting-unfriendly presentation, and the lack of climate control in the building, I worry about the longevity of these artworks.)

And, unlike the Louvre, the Hermitage has a basement loaded with working cats, whose job is to keep the museum rodent-free.  Sadly, I didn’t see any of them, and, given the formality of this museum, I doubt that I’ll try.

Anyway, a while back I published a list of my ten favorite painters (and two wild cards), which follows:

1. Rembrandt
2. van Gogh
3. Picasso
4. Michelangelo
5. da Vinci
6. Dürer
7. Johannes Vermeer
8. Raphael
9. Caravaggio
10. Monet
11. Turner
12. Toulouse-Lautrec

Wild cards:

Kandinsky
Feininger

Paintings by #1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 9, and 10 were on view today.  There were a handful of lovely van Goghs that I hadn’t seen in reproduction, a ton of Matisses (not one of my favorites), at least 20 Rembrandts (including The Return of the Prodigal Son), and, best of all, two da Vincis. There was also a wonderful room of Kandinskys (my favorite Russian artist, though I’m having a look at Ilya Repin in the Russian Museum tomorrow), including his early representational work. I believe,though I’m not 100% sure, that Kandinsky was the first “modern” artist to create an abstract painting.

Based on my viewing today, I’m going to put the Hermitage in at least a tie with the Louvre as the world’s best museum of art (no, I haven’t seen them all, but I have been to many touted museums, including the Prado), and I want to revise my list of painters above.  I’m swapping da Vinci with Michelangelo. Only about a dozen authenticated da Vincis exist, and I’ve now seen more than half of them, unfortunately not including The Last Supper.  His paintings have an ineffable tenderness and humanity, combined with the most exquisite technique, that puts them in a class with Rembrandt (about whom I’ll have more to say—and show—when I get back).

My favorite da Vinci, which I’ve seen in the Louvre, is St. John the Baptist:

After gorging on this great art, I sought out my first meal on my own (up to now we’ve been fed, amply, by the organizers of our conference), and I wanted something Russian.  I managed to find a sort of Russian McDonalds that had fast but traditional foods, and consumed a blini (Russian pancake) filled with egg and shredded cabbage, and a big glass of kvass, a slightly alcoholic drink made from fermented rye bread.  I’ve always wanted to drink kvass, since it features largely in the work of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, and I found it tasty and refreshing.

As usual when I present a “favorite” list, I invite readers to weigh in with their own choices.  This time, why not list your five favorite artists?

UPDATE: I forgot to list my favorite painting, which I know I’ve mentioned before. It’s the Isenheim Altarpiece by Mathias Grünewald, and I’ve never seen it in person. Yours?

The importance of religiosity to US voters

July 29, 2011 • 4:58 am

by Sigmund

The Public Religion Research Institute is a Washington based group that describes itself as “a nonprofit, nonpartisan, independent organization dedicated to research at the intersection of religion, values, and public life”. Amongst its activities is the collection of data regarding religious views and opinions of the general public in the US. They recently carried out a telephone poll of a random sample 1012 adults in the US that provides some interesting data on just how important the general public currently regards the religiosity of politicians.

It’s a very brief survey, with only a few questions asked – mainly concerning the knowledge of members of the public about the religion of potential candidates for the upcoming 2012 Presidential election, namely Barack Obama, Mitt Romney and Michele Bachmann.

The results are, unsurprisingly, that most people don’t have a good idea about the actual stated religion of any of the candidates (18%, for example, think Obama is Muslim – again, not a shock.)

The one result to note, however, is that of the question:
“How important is it for a candidate to have strong religious beliefs, regardless of whether those beliefs are the same as yours. Is it very important, somewhat important, not too important or not at all important?”

The results indicate that ‘very important’ and ‘somewhat important’ got the highest response (as expected for a US survey) with 30% and 26% respectively.

The surprising thing is that ‘not at all important’ is also 26%, with ‘not too important’ being 17%.

Considering that the USA public has in the past been shown a high importance in religiosity, particularly in regards its politicians, it is interesting that the proportion of the population that regards being religious is unimportant in a politician is currently not too far behind those who find it essential. With much higher levels of religiosity found in the elderly US population compared to the young  it is not out of the question that European levels of disregard for religiosity might be on the cards within the next generation on simple demographic grounds alone.

Squeeee – baby hippo underwater ballet (with added epistemological question)

July 29, 2011 • 2:19 am

by Matthew Cobb

This great video from San Diego Zoo. The calf is called Adhama, and she was 5 months old when this was posted at the end of June. She seems to be having fun. Or is she just learning how to swim? This comes back once again to the big epistemological question we’ve debated here many times: how could we know what an animal is feeling?

h/t: My ex-student Karlina Ozolina