Dawkins confronts school science teachers

The Pub Philosopher watches the final episode of Dawkins on Darwin, in which Dawkins talks to science teachers:

There was an embarrassed silence as the penny dropped. Indoctrinated by years of multi-cultural relativism, these scientists had found themselves saying that science was just one way of understanding how the world was created. Whether or not they believed that was beside the point. Judging by their faces, I dont think they did but they knew what they had to say to survive in todays classrooms.

Good grief! I agree with Deepak Chopra!

Who kidnapped Deepak Chopra, and where have they hidden him?
Normally, Deepak Chopra’s contributions to HuffPo and other forums have been unadulterated woo; pure mystical New Age claptrap. But today he nailed Rick Warren’s fatuous Saddleback forum in uncompromisingly blunt language..

For McCain, it’s all as simple as what Reaganism carved out almost thirty years ago: Gay marriage is bad, abortion is bad, activist judges are bad. Winning in Iraq is good, getting Osama bin Laden is good, offshore oil drilling is good, and freedom is great. Obama talked about the hard work and sacrifices we need to make in order to overcome energy dependence and academic mediocrity, also the respect we need to accord others on the abortion issue–not quite as stirring as reactionary platitudes.
In short, McCain appealed to our escapist magical morality, Obama appealed to reason and practicalities. That has been the story throughout the campaign. Everyone concedes that Obama’s way is more mature, realistic, and ultimately right. But I doubt that’s enough to cure a case of sweaty palms.

Christianity needs science, to reinforce its paranoia

Matt watches Richard Dawkins trying to teach children about Darwin, and comes up with some useful terminology:

While its true that the creationists featured in the documentary certainly displayed a fundamental ignorance of evolutionary theory, it quickly became obvious that clearing up their misconceptions had no real impact on their beliefs. As one of the pupils at the school Dawkins visits in part 1 so concisely explained: It wasn’t that he didn’t understand evolutionary theory, it was just that his religion told him it was wrong. Through (I assume) a combination of bribes, threats and social pressure, his religious beliefs had managed to shut down a large part of his capacity for critical thought.
This is – what I’d call – “Regressive Theology”. It teaches that the Truth has already been revealed, and all knowledge which challenges it must be rejected. Failure to do so often results in the most extreme punishment conceivable.
At the other end of the spectrum[…] is “Progressive Theology”. This religious view of the world is built around the idea that understand (sic) of (the) God(s) is incomplete and one of the best ways of advancing it is through increasing our knowledge and understanding of “Creation”.

Many religious people need to feel threatened. It is one of the supreme ironies of our time that in the USA, easily the most religion-soaked country in the so-called “First World”, religious leaders get worked up into a frenzy about how Christianity is under vicious attack from a minuscule number of militant secularists. And of course the Pope joins in, to try to whip his flock into line. For these religious leaders, science – especially evolution – is, literally, a Godsend! The greater the progress of science in explaining the origins of the cosmos, the emergence of life on our planet, and the evolution of one rather curious species of hominids, the better they like it.
In part, I suspect, it’s a matter of tradition. The semi-mythical founding figure of Jesus is represented as a revolutionary, persecuted by Jews and Romans alike, and like other wacko sects during the latter part of the Roman Empire the Christians were a subversive underground movement. ((Odd that the Rick Warrens of this world seem to skate over that awkward fact.)) And fear is a great way of building solidarity. Once Christianity had achieved a near monopoly of power, it was forced to build up various forces – Satan, demons, witches, the mentally ill – as omnipresent threats, simply to instill fear and obedience. The rise of Islam was another Godsend – if Mohammed had not been born, the Pope would have had to invent him.
How many religious leaders do you hear in the USA (or Europe, for that matter), saying, “Relax; it’s OK. A handful of ‘new atheists’ may be selling a few books, but Christianity isn’t under any serious threat. In fact we’re being more and more successful in persuading politicians to pander to our prejudices and accomodate our unconstitutional demands. So chill, my flock; keep tithing and enjoying your SUVs and reality TV. There’s no danger from secularism.”
Are you kidding? That’s no way to energize the masses!
(And yes, I could have written almost the same account of Islam. I’ll leave the substitutions as an exercise to the reader.)

Selections from an atheist's library

A long time ago, when I was using different blogging software, I used to maintain a book page, in which I listed some of the more important atheism-related books in my library. I’ve decided to revive this, and I’m using my Amazon Associates aStore to do so. If you click through to the store, you can browse about 50 of the more influential volumes that I’ve read which are relevant to the subject of atheism. I don’t agree with all of them – that would be tedious – but all have made me think. The list is relatively light on works of academic philosophy, because in the near future I’m going to organize my favourite philosophy books along similar lines.
I’m adding a permalink to the store in the right sidebar of the blog.
Anyway, enjoy the list. And no, I’m not looking for click-through sales. I’m just using this as a convenience, and letting Amazon.com do the heavy lifting for me.

"If this is a success, I'd hate to see a failure."

Juan Cole comments on recent Republican claims of success in Iraq, and the way journalists are writing about them.

It is a measure of the Orwellian state of the US media and politics that he should have to bother. I mean, the place is a burned out hulk where hundreds die every month in political violence, where armed militias are ubiquitous, where nearly 5 million people remain displaced from their homes, where you have unemployment rates of 50% in some major cities, and where pro-Iranian Shiite fundamentalists face off against Sunni Arab nationalists and Salafis and Kurdish separatists. If this is a success, I’d hate to see a failure.

Building a nervous system from everyday parts

File this under “things that I expected to happen, but not so soon”:

Researchers from the Cybernetic Intelligence Research Group at the University of Reading have developed a robot whose movements are controlled by neurons growing in a culture dish.

The really beautiful bit of the experiment is that the neurons seem to have self-organized into a trainable network. I wonder what happens when we scale up and go 3-D….
UPDATE: This may not be as radical as first thought. I still think it’s really cool.

"You really cannot have it both ways."

Andrew Sullivan on the hypocrisy of American protests over Russia’s actions in Georgia:

Once you trash the international system, declare yourself above the law and even the most basic of international conventions against war crimes, you have forfeited the kind of moral authority that the US once had. Bush and his cronies speak as if none of this has happened. Their rigid, absolutist denial even of the bleeding obvious allows them to preach to the world about international norms that, when they would have constrained American actions, were derided as quaint and irrelevant. You really cannot have it both ways.

Utterly, unredeemably negative

I went to see “The Dark Knight”. I saw it in Cinerama, in a packed cinema, and I was in the middle of the row. This meant that I couldn’t easily do what I wanted to: leave.
I hated it.
It was, without doubt, the most negative, life-denying film I have ever seen.
This was quite clearly a post-9/11 film. Back on September 16, 2001, Dick Cheney notoriously said:

We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will. We’ve got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies, if we’re going to be successful. That’s the world these folks operate in, and so it’s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective.

In this film, there is only the dark side. The light side is lost, swallowed up in the shadows. Oh sure, the director tosses us a bone in the form of the two ferries at the end, but by then the pointless, inchoate mayhem has numbed us to the point where we can hardly appreciate it. All of the good guys have given up on the values they professed, and the best we can do is lie about them or make them our scapegoat.
As we left the cinema, I looked around me. Everybody seemed subdued; nobody looked happy. For myself, I jammed my headphones into my ears and cranked up the loudest music that I had on my iPhone; when I got home I knocked back half a bottle of wine in a couple of minutes. I felt as though I had lost something. I want to un-see the film, to have that bit of my life back.
Brilliant? Oh, sure, but so very, very cynical. Others have invited us to look into the pit, have shown us the fragility of civilization – Dante, Picasso, Golding, Bosch, Spiegelman – but none of them laughed at us as they did so.
UPDATE: I’ve been reading some of the reviews over at RottenTomatoes. Only one reviewer seems to have seen the film as I did: Armond White of the NY Press. Money quote:

Aaron Eckhart’s cop role in The Black Dahlia humanized the complexity of crime and morality. But as Harvey Dent, sorrow transforms him into the vengeful Two-Face, another Armageddon freak in Nolan’s sideshow. The idea is that Dent proves heroism is improbable or unlikely in this life. Dent says, “You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become a villain.” What kind of crap is that to teach our children, or swallow ourselves? Such illogic sums up hipster nihilism, just like Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World. Putting that crap in a Batman movie panders to the naiveté of those who have not outgrown the moral simplifications of old comics but relish cynicism as smartness. That’s the point of The Joker telling Batman, “You complete me.” Tim Burton might have ridiculed that Jerry Maguire canard, but Nolan means it—his hero is as sick as his villain.

And here’s the oddly-named Camila Batmanghelidjh in the Independent:

What worries me even more than the violence was the lack of human compassion surrounding it. Human life is presented as worthless. For me, the apathetic bystanders who facilitate violence are more disturbing than the Joker himself. His perversion, at least, has a sad logic to it. The indifference of the onlookers, though, is shocking.