Thank you for doing the right thing on the ANWR vote. I look forward to joining you in continued opposition to opening up ANWR for oil drilling.

In regards to the filibuster, don’t you think it a rather odd double-standard to accuse the Democrats of being uncooperative with regards to judicial nominees when the Republicans used the very same tactics against the Clinton administration? I believe it will damage the credibility of the Congress if you rubber stamp Bush nominees. I also believe that any weakening of the filibuster is a direct attack on the history and integrity of the Congress. I’d also remind you that this sword cuts both ways.

Please do not support weakening of the filibuster. It is un-American.

Michael Koppelman

Over at Pharyngula PZ is providing a forum for Bible literalists to expose their ignorance. It’s a hoot. I’ve droned on and on about so-called intelligent design, which is a fancy word for creationism. I haven’t really beaten up on the Bible literalists because it is so fucking crazy that it isn’t really worthy of mention. Yet, here I go mentioning it.

To say the earth is 6000 years old is completely nuts and ignornant and stupid and crazy and idiotic. There are about a dozen entire branches of science that a 6000 year old earth is at odds with. These include geology, biology, astrophysics and archeology.

The thing that PZ sums up really well is the following:

You know, creationists who have almost no education in the relevant fields…are perfectly comfortable with accusing virtually every biologist in the world of being incompetent, of knowing nothing, of fraud, of practicing a religion rather than science, etc., etc., etc. It’s kind of appalling, actually; most of us would be embarrassed if we were caught lecturing crazily on some subject of which we know nothing by someone who had dedicated years of their life to studying that subject. But not creationists.

To all the creationists I would say, go get a PhD in evolutionary biology and then tell us about your crazy theory. For those that think the earth is 6000 years old, go get a PhD in geology and then tell us about your crazy theory. If you are not an expert on these subjects you have no business coming up with crazy theories.

As an astronomer of sorts, I can tell you that we would not see all the things we see in the sky if the universe was 6000 years old. Certainly we wouldn’t see the Andromeda Galaxy, which is no less than 2,000,000 light-years away, not to mention the kazillion of galaxies we see in the Hubble Deep Field.

The Bible is not a science book. That should be obvious to everyone.

In regards to the Terri Schiavo case…

If my quality of life has disappeared to nothing and I’m unresponsive and in a vegetative state, I would be appalled if the religious right kept me alive because of their beliefs. They would let me continue to suffer for years because of what they want? FUCK THEM. I don’t give a rats ass what mother fucking Tom Delay wants when it comes to my goddamn life.

Clearly, we want close controls over these issues. We aren’t going to let people kill people just because they are disabled. This case has had many such controls. It has been scrutinized profusely. This is not a case of some cruel husband that wants to kill his wife.

That the House, Senate and our dumb-ass President think that their beliefs should keep this poor woman in a suffering state perpetually is insane and cruel. I believe her husband and thus I believe that her wishes are not being taken into account and that is criminal.

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.

It would be easy to assume if you read some of my blog posts that I am a proponent of class warfare and I hate rich people. I don’t at all. I try not to judge people on things like race, sexual preference, religion or “class”.

Yet I do have a serious problem with the war that (many) rich people wage against taxes. I can see how if you make a lot of money and you pay a lot of money in taxes and you look around and see a lot of people paying far less taxes that you wonder if that is fair. I have paid a lot of taxes in my day, too, and it sucks.

Or it would if I didn’t believe we live in a great country that has a great government that does a lot of great things. (Note I am saying this proudly even though I think the current administration is appallingly lame.) I love my country. I am a patriot, a capitalist and a small “D” democrat. All of this, to me, means that I should see the money I pay in taxes as a good and necessary thing.

I believe we have a struggle in this country between the haves and the have-nots. The haves want a small government because they know that they have to pay for it. Yet they want a large military because they have the most to protect. The have-nots want a big government so that concentrated wealth does not concentrate into a plutocracy. The haves see anything remotely socialist as a threat to their wealth and the have-nots see laissez-faire capitalism as a road that ultimately leads to plutocracy.

This is a struggle that really always has been and always will be. The fundamental test of fairness is when you walk a mile in the other guy’s shoes. If we all can do this we can find the right balance between these two seemingly opposing ideologies. Rich people should not want a plutocracy. Not-rich people should not want a government to strip wealth from individuals. There is a proper balance but we don’t get there by tending towards the extremes. We get there with a willingness to compromise.

We all do better when we all do better.
  –Paul Wellstone

(A tip o’ the hat to Ben for the “grain of sand”…)