The Senate voted today to allow drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). 51 evil right-wing bastards somehow equate oil drilling with wildlife refuges? 51 dipshits think that energy independence means continuing our irrational and self-destructive oil addiction. 51 morons who should be run out of town chased by an angry mob for betraying the deep care and pride that Americans have for our few remaining wildernesses.

If your senator voted Nay on this vote you should call him up and ream his ass and then make damn sure he/she never wins an election again.

This is a disgrace.

I must tip my hat to Norm Coleman R-Minnesota for doing the right thing on this vote. If the Yea’s had one more vote I’m sure the GOP wouldn’t have lent him his balls back for this one…

A very good friend of mine is a pastor. A man of the cloth, as it were. Tom, like many Christians in the world, is a top-notch, compassionate, caring and logical person. He is not at all what I would describe as the Christian Right. Yet he is very Christian, to the point that he has dedicated his life to service in the church.

Tom and I agree on a great deal of things. (I’m sure we disagree on some as well). What surprised me most was a recent conservation with Tom about homosexuality. There is a well known Bible quote that the Right-Wingers use to prove that God hates fags. I mentioned this to Tom and he said a lot of wise things. First, he said, you can’t take the Bible out of context. Everything you read in the Bible was written from a certain perspective and in a certain context. The example he used was divorice. Jesus said you shouldn’t divorice your woman. Tom pointed out that in those times a divoriced woman had virtually no rights and lived on the streets in poverty. Jesus was protecting women from this when he said that about divorice. This is the Jesus I wish Christians focused on — the one who always put love and compassion before anything else.

Tom also pointed out that homosexuality was in ways a practice abusive of young boys in the days of the Bible. Again, the point of the verse was to protect people from abuse. It was about compassion, not about condemning people.

I wish I knew the word that Tom used but his point was that you cannot pull a snippet out of the Bible and use it as proof of a particular point of view. It must be taken with the totality of the faith. This from a guy that probably knows as much about the Bible as any person on earth.

I am waiting for the true Christians of the world to take the faith back from the Religious Right. These so-called Christians who think Jesus would be for the death penalty and the war in Iraq do not deserve to call themselves Christians. Jesus spoke and lived a life about love and compassion. I don’t believe in Hell but if I did I would bet that these evil bastards who hate and kill in Jesus’s name have an especially uncomfortable place waiting for them.

There was a beautiful letter to the editor in the Minneapolis Star Tribune on March 8th, 2005.

One small stipulation

Let’s keep the Ten Commandments up in public spaces. Just put a sticker on them that reads, “This text contains material reported to be dictates of a deity. God is a theory, not a fact. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully and critically considered.”

What’s good for the secular goose is good for a fundamentalist gander.

Richard Luka, Maple Grove.

Right on, Richard!

Andrea commented on my recent post on Intelligent Design (ID) and asked:

“Do you believe that it is an idea better off ignored, or is it too dangerous of an idea to leave untouched? I can’t help but think that we are feeding into the movement by validating their right to a position in the evolution debate.”

If this were a philosophical debate, I would agree. Just like we don’t argue with white supremacists, we needn’t argue with people that think science should look to the Bible for answers to the questions of biology or cosmology. In a philosophic debate we could easily just write them off as people so clueless as to be ignored.

Unfortunately, this isn’t a philosophical debate, it’s a debate over curricula — what we teach in schools. When the ID folks manipulate their agenda to more closely masquerade as science, we need to take the offensive lest people confuse their philosophy with actual science. We need to soundly crush the notion that you can introduce supernatural beings into science and still call it science.

As an ex-Catholic, it would be like me going into church every day and publicly arguing with the priest that he did not, in fact, turn that piece of bread into the body of Christ. Science has no business introducing itself into the mystical faith of Catholics. Nor do Christians have any right to introduce their faith into science textbooks.

To conclude, I don’t have any problem with people believing in creation as an explanation for matters biological or cosmological. I have a serious problem when they try to introduce it into science curricula.

Bill O’Reilly said, and I quote: “I’m declaring war on the ACLU. I think they are a terrorist group. They are terrorizing me and my family. They are terrorizing me. I think they are terrorists.”

Right-wingers bitching about the ACLU is nothing new but I am still stumped by it. The ACLU’s mission, according to their web site, is as follows:

The ACLU is our nation’s guardian of liberty. We work daily in courts, legislatures and communities to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to every person in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States. Our job is to conserve America’s original civic values – the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

Raise your hand if you are against that mission. Raise your hand if you are annoyed that people are out there defending the civil liberties of the American people.

What. The. Fuck.

We’ve all heard of the ACLU defending some stuff that stretches our sensibilities, let’s say. They are pretty ballsey in that they do not avoid issues that will be unpopular. Al Franken, on his show, mentioned that the ACLU sued on behalf of some neo-Nazis that wanted to have a parade or something. It sounds nuts until you think about it: do you want the government to decide which points of view are allowed parades and which points of view are not? We, the American people, decided on this funny thing called the First Amendment that protects our right to express even the most looney and wildly unpopular ideas. This is the same amendment that lets Bill O’Reilly say all the stupid and often untrue shit he says. It’s the same ones that lets Christians preach everyday on the campus where I take classes.

When Bill O’Reilly says insanely stupid shit like I quote above he is saying that the government should not grant rights to people he disagrees with. Bill O’Reilly is against liberty! How else can you interpret that statement?

I really encourage you to read about the ACLU’s mission. It is a necessary and honorable one.

The right is wrong, as usual.

The Intelligent Design (ID) folks are trying really hard to characterize their agenda as science. They are even distancing themselves from the creationists a bit. Their point is not completely irrational: good science should not exclude design as a possible explanation. They think that evolutionary science is biased because it does not include design as a possible method for what we see in terms of the intricate complexity of organisms.

So, shockingly, let me agree with the ID folks on this one thing: I agree that science should not exclude design as a possible explanation.

If I could, though, I want their agreement on something in return: design should be the very last thing that science ever considers. As soon as science turns to design as an explanation it is basically saying that you can’t explain the phenomena naturally. This in turn implies that the “designer” who is normally called God in every other context, broke the laws of physics at various points in the evolution of the earth and its creatures.

I can illustrate why it is imperative that design is the very last explanation that should ever be relied on from an example from a talk I was at recently by Eugenie C. Scott, director of the National Center for Science Education, entitled “Intelligent Design and the Creation/Evolution Controversy”.

There are things called faerie rings which are perfectly circular mushroom patches that appear overnight. You’ll go out in the forest one day and where there was nothing the day before is a perfect circular ring of mushrooms. These are called faerie rings because in the olden days people thought that the faeries had a party there the night before and created and danced around in this ring.

When the speaker showed a picture of a faerie ring the very first thing that popped into my head was design: this did not look like something created naturally. My suspicion was that someone had planted whatever you plant to create mushrooms years or aeons ago and occasionally they spring up overnight, which mushrooms can easily do.

The truth is much more simple. The particular kind of fungus grows underground concentrically, like the roots of a tree. The circular pattern seems immediately very natural when you thing about it this way. The fungus grows out from the center and when conditions are right all of the “roots” of equal age (i.e. equal distance from the center) bloom at once.

If one were to focus on the explanation which involves design (this had to be people who created this) you would completely miss the more simple and natural explanation. The science stops the second you invoke design and instead of looking for a natural explanation the quest turns to a search for the designer.

Thus, if we are to practice good science, we can never invoke design as an explanation unless there is overwhelming proof of such design. I suspect that such proof can never exist because even if we watched some unexplainable magic happen right before our eyes, scientists would still seek a natural explanation. This is because that is what science is — natural explanations of natural phenomena.

Look — there might be a God and he might do magical stuff every now and then. I don’t exclude that possibility. From the vast, deep, broad and thorough body of science we have, there is no proof of this. This does not in any way mean that science says there is no God, it means that God, if he exists, works through science and not outside of science.

This is the inexplicable core of ID that we science types just don’t get. The ID and creationist folks want to live in a world where you can prove the existence of God. They want science to go: wow, look, this must mean there is a God. Science ain’t ever gonna do that. Science says: wow, look, something we don’t understand, let’s try understand it. Scientists would love to get their hands on the water Jesus walked on, do tests on Lazerus or get Jesus to turn water into wine in the laboratory. There would be some fascinating science there. That’s our job — look for the science and exclude the magical.

So as the ID folks desperately try to craft their agenda as science it just can’t be. As soon as you introduce the supernatural, by definition, it ain’t science anymore. If God exists and there is scientific proof that God exists, science will look for the science behind God. They will never just say: oh well, looks like God did it. I don’t get why the ID folks want them to say that.