Random Rants from a Space Nut

After roughly a year of inactivity, it's time for me to try to resume posting.  I'll kick off by issuing a retraction.  I never thought I'd say so, Ken Ham kind of has a point here . It's okay to teach about religion in schools.  And as part of a class project involving this education, it's perfectly all right to show kids just how thoroughly detached from empirically-testable reality uncritical religion can become with a little trip to Ken Ham's park(*). Unfortunately, our country doesn't currently have multi-million-dollar parks dedicated to the unusual claims of fundamentalist Islam, or the odd claims of fundamentalist Hinduism, or the strange claims of any other fundamentalist world religion; they'd be nice to have, so that school curricula that want to do this don't have to be afraid of being accidentally biased.  I'm sure Ham will get right on that. Sarcasm aside, though, he accidentally nails the problem.  He wants to allow "c...

If we were really a country with a Christian heritage, we'd have state books of the Bible. I mean, we have an enormous and rather silly pile of official state things scattered throughout our land.  State flowers.  State birds.  State fossils.  State insects.  State minerals.  State nuts.  State *dough*nuts.  State cookies.  State muffins.  State reptiles.  State vegetables.  State horses.  State fruits.  State beverages.  State colors.  State songs.  State grass . Even if we limit ourselves to the Protestant Bible and its relatively small collection of sixty-six books(*), that's more than enough room to pick a distinctive choice.  I don't think any state is going to go for Amos(**).  There's still lots of other books to pick from, though. I could just imagine the esteemed Christian leaders in a state getting together to pick the official book.  What book would reflect their iden...

With all the creationism, anti-environmentalism, and climate change denial running rife through Evangelicalism, you might expect that they openly hate science.  They don't. And so I don't find it surprising that interviews and surveys like this one indicate no hatred of science among Evangelicals.  All a survey does is tell us how people perceive themselves -- and, possibly, how they want to be perceived.  But surveys alone can't tell us whether or not those perceptions and desires map well to reality.  The better measure for gauging whether or not hostility actually exists among Evangelicals towards science, then, is their actions (*). Consider the sheer amount of money and resources Evangelicalism has spent to deny the basic facts of human reproduction and how contraceptives work to try to argue that contraceptives are really "abortifacients" and win the day in court -- and that this denial of reality is part of their religious identity, according to th...

When I was young, I adored time travel stories for the paradoxes(*).  I enjoy paradoxes in general.  The way you can describe them, but peeling them apart logically by themselves is impossible, makes my brain spin a little bit.  The vertigo that reaults from perspective ratcheting back and forth and upside down is something I find pleasurable.  I would go nuts for a really well-executed grandfather paradox or bootstrap paradox(**), and I kind of still do. As I got older, of course, I craved character-driven drama.  A story is interesting because of what it tells us about people .  So even though my brain enjoys the exercise of a good mental tale, if there isn't anything in there to show us characters growing and changing, it feels a bit empty and pointless. What I love about Steins;Gate is that it does both.  The story is deeply moving, paradoxically allowing a lot of character growth and change despite not really leaving a few days' worth of ti...

Bodie Hodge gets rock layers wrong .  (But he's a creationist, so that's to be expected.)  He uses this laughably incorrect understanding to "explain" why there are no transitional fossils.  (You can find a list of transitional fossils here .  Really, in the age of the Internet, creationists have absolutely no excuse for the level of ignorance required to make claims to scientific legitimacy.) Hodge tries to make it all scientific-looking by including tables.  He takes roughly half a billion years of time(*) and compresses it into one year of global flooding. Of course, part of the problem is that no modern organism has ever been found in Precambrian rock -- rock that he places between the fall and the flood.  All of the strata -- the ones he places before, during, and after the flood -- are extremely well-sorted, with no mixing ever discovered.  All Hodge would have to do is show one fossil out of place, and our understanding of the geologic...

"A lot of damage has been done in citing Proverbs 22:6 to parents," says Richard Beck on his blog . I have to agree.  If you're not familiar, that's a verse that says (NASB): Train up a child in the way he should go, even when he is old he will not depart from it. It's been used to put a lot of pressure on parents to keep their kids in the faith.  If you do it right, they won't stray from your fine instruction.  If they misbehave or wander from the officially approved dogma, well, that's on you, Mom and Dad. We also abuse Proverbs 31 to put a lot of pressure on women.  That chapter waxes long about the qualities of a fine woman, and much Christian-brand ink has been spilled to try to convince Christian women that as daughters of God, they ought to exhibit all those qualities -- and that any struggles they face in their family life is simply a result of not conforming their personalities and lives to those qualities perfectly(*). This seems espec...

Here's an interesting analysis of the 100 largest churches in the United States , which might give some kind of insight into the state of Christianity in America today. None of them welcome LGBT folks as full and equal members.  Ninety-three of them are led by white pastors.  One has a female pastor, though she serves as "co-pastor" with her husband. Much as it concerned me that Donald Trump's support might give people the wrong ideas about the sort of persona they should adopt to enjoy political success, I'm somewhat concerned that the actions of these churches might give other churches the wrong idea about what kind of public face they should present in order to "grow".  (Others will see this sort of public face as evidence of God's tacit approval.) It is the case that exclusion and tribal homogeneity can produce "growth".  Unfortunately, I'm inclined to believe that using these tactics is not the sort of thing a group can do ...