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Bob obviously hasn’t been paying attention:

And this is why Vox Day can’t be honest about his beliefs concerning the conflict between evolution and the Bible. He can say he’s an evolution skeptic, because people are willing to put up with a certain amount of cognitive dissonance, but if he was consistent and said he was also skeptical about the truth of the Bible, which teaches that there wasn’t death before the creation of man, it would adversely affect how his core audience viewed him.

Right, I’m so concerned about how my core audience views me and I stick so closely to conventional Christian interpretation of the Bible that I had to INVENT A WORD just to clarify my point criticizing a belief that many of them hold. I’m not at all skeptical about the truth of the Bible, neither do I consider it to be word-for-word the inerrant and literal Divine Word of God.

I speak three languages, more or less, and have studied a fourth. I therefore am more aware than most of the dangers inherent in translation; Umberto Eco’s book Mouse or Rat is a very entertaining and illuminating look at them. For example, Italian has one word where English has three, hence the need for all the gesticulating and repeating everything three times so that the listener can identify your meaning by triangulation. Even a simple praise song will often have a slight contextual variation that only someone reasonably comfortable in both languages is likely to detect.

Being translated from other languages, the English Bible is obviously an imperfect translation, just as the original manuscripts Man’s imperfect translations of the literal Word of God. And yet, none of that matters. Being human, fallen and seeing through a glass darkly, we are incapable of distinguishing between that which has perfectly translated from divine to mortal and that which has been imperfectly translated. Thus, minor errors in translation and petty inconsistencies don’t concern me in the slightest, for I see the Bible’s divine inspiration in the way that its words, however flawed we might perceive them to be, are still wiser than the best that humanity alone can devise with the benefit of two millenia to its advantage.

I don’t merely believe in the truth of the Bible, I believe in its metatruth.

Daniel raises a mild objection:

That having been said, the statistics you quote on divorce are too incomplete to draw good references from. They don’t seem to address people who remarry. Comparing 26.4 percent of divorced atheists to 15.7 of Baptists, is all well and good if you marry once and either stay married or divorce and stay divorced forever, but, given Baptists marry more often, it seems reasonable to also presume they remarry more often.

A larger percentage of divorced baptists who remarried would mean that you were missing more divorces that you should have counted in the Baptist group than in the Atheist.

Barna informs us that 18 percent of all those who have ever divorced have been divorced multiple times. So, the impact of remarriage on the divorce rate here is limited to 2.8 percent of Baptists and 4.8 percent of atheists. Even if we eliminate the maximum number of potential multiple divorces from the divorce percentage, that still leaves a divorce rate of 21.6 percent for atheists and 12.9 percent for Baptists, reducing the divorce delta between atheists and Baptists from 68.2 percent to 67.4 percent, a massive reduction of 4/5ths of one percent.

Nor is there any evidence to suggest that Baptists are actually under more pressure than atheists to remarry, especially considering the Baptist teaching that remarriage after divorce is tantamount to adultery. One could also point to the example of leading atheists such as Bertrand Russell (4 wives) and Richard Dawkins (3 wives).

Therefore, the conclusion stands.

Dr. Helen points out a contradiction in two media reports:

If these articles were trying to make a case against female leadership, they could not have done a better job–the stereotypes of women as demanding nags who are described as “queens” at home without any authority in the public sphere are hardly a ringing endorsement for female leadership.

The reason most women can’t lead effectively is that they are intellectually crippled by a lifetime of using their ability to grant or deny sex to the men who pursue them. This is why middle-aged women complain about suddenly becoming invisible and socially impotent, they are bankrupt in the only currency they have ever possessed. It is dangerous to expect to find much philosophical truth in pop songs, but Good Charlotte summed it all up in a nutshell when they sang “boys will laugh at girls when they’re not funny”.

Women tend to have different talents and preferences than men. They generally prefer multi-tasking, micromanagement and an emphasis on personal relations, combined with a desire to avoid responsibility, accountability and criticism. Therefore, we can reasonably conclude that they’re likely to succeed in leadership positions that don’t require focus, delegation, objective metrics, responsibility, accountability or flexibility.

But the biggest flaw I’ve seen in the business environment is female managers who attempt to treat their employees like children. Even worse is when they attempt to get a leg up on their peers or even superiors by doing so.

On a tangential note, one of Dr. Helen’s commenters cuts right to the heart of what every man despises about far too many women: “One thing that drives me bonkers are women who complain about how much they have to do when most of what they are complaining about IS VOLUNTARY.”

There’s nothing like sitting at a coffee shop and trying to write while being forced to listen to a group of overstuffed 50-somethings with androgynous haircuts spending the entire afternoon taking turns complaining about how busy they all are and what a bunch of useless husbands they all possess. Listening to five minutes of that irrational garbage is enough to convince anyone that the next growth market will be for a combined package of divorce plus an Eastern European trophy wife.

I don’t know why it is so hard for these supposedly intelligent women to learn that the more you complain, the less anyone listens to you. Economists call it the Law of Diminishing Marginal Utility. If you don’t get it, consider this blog and how often I upset someone enough to make them fling an insult in my direction. Now, how could I possibly care about receiving one more insult? What is that one additional insult going to do that the previous one thousand didn’t?

Christian or Hindu. It doesn’t matter. All parents delude themselves alike:

I should note that I doubt very seriously that the “Hey-let’s-have-a-makeover-and-subsume-ourselves-to-men!” subliminal message of the Bratz is going to get much traction with Athena; for as much as she likes to torture me with the Bratz, I think she gets what my opposition to them is, and between me and Krissy, she gets enough counterprogramming to make their impact negligible.

Alas, if only the parents of stoners, hookers and lawyers had thought to let their children know of their disapproval, so many bad life choices would have been averted!

I wish John the best of fortune in keeping his daughter off the pole, but I couldn’t help smiling about the paternal optimism he expresses. It rather tends to reminds one of the Christian parents who send their daughter off to pursue a degree in Women’s Studies, confident that they’ve let her know what they think about feminism.

My advice is that if you think it’s mentally poisonous junk, don’t tolerate it. You cannot control all of the intellectual inputs into a child’s mind, but you can certainly control those you permit entry in your house.

First, let me say that I don’t believe there is any excuse whatsoever for Christian women to get an abortion. But I also think it’s worth pointing out that the statistics do not show that Christian women are as likely to get abortions as other women.

Madam Defarge leaves off her knitting long enough to cite some statistics:

Women identifying themselves as Protestants obtain 37.4% of all abortions in the U.S.; Catholic women account for 31.3%, Jewish women account for 1.3%, and women with no religious affiliation obtain 23.7% of all abortions. 18% of all abortions are performed on women who identify themselves as “Born-again/Evangelical”.

The American Religious Identification Survey 2001 survey indicates that Protestants make up 52 percent of all Americans, Catholics 24.5 percent, Jews 1.3 percent and atheist/agnostic/no religion 14.1 percent. (The definition of Born Again/Evangelical in the two studies is either too different to reasonably compare or Evangelical women average around 50 abortions apiece. I’m going to assume the former.)

In other words, Protestant women commit 38 percent fewer abortions than the average, Catholic women commit 28 percent more, Jews precisely hit the average and atheist women commit 68 percent more abortions than the norm.

Another interesting aspect to the study is how it explodes the idea that Christians are more likely to get divorced. While it is true that 3 percent more Baptists – who along with Episcopals have the highest rate of Christian divorce – are divorced than atheists, only 34 percent of atheists are married in the first place. In other words, 26.4 percent of atheist marriages fail compared to 15.7 percent of Baptist marriages, even though a much lower percentage of atheists ever get married.

This sort of thing is why simply directing people to the Talk Origins FAQ may not be considered a conclusive citation:

The reports of the soft tissue, though remarkable, have been sensationalized further. The tissues were not soft and pliable originally. The tissues were rehydrated in the process of removing the surrounding mineral components of the bone (Schweitzer et al. 2005).

Moreover, it is unknown whether the soft tissues are original tissues. Fossil flexible tissues and nucleated cells have been found before in which the original material was not preserved (Stokstad 2005).

The age of fossils is not determined by how well they are preserved, because preservation depends far more on factors other than age. The age of this particular bone was determined from the age of the rocks it was found in, namely, the Hell Creek Formation. This formation has been reliably dated by several independent methods (Dalrymple 2000).

DNA has never been recovered from any dinosaurs nor from anything as old as them, and researchers do not expect to find DNA from these soft tissues (though they can still hope). DNA has been recovered, however, from samples much more than 10,000 years old (Poinar et al. 1998), even more than 300,000 years old (Stokstad 2003; Willerslev et al. 2003). If dinosaur fossils were as young as creationists claim, finding soft tissues in them would not be news, and recovering DNA from them should be easy enough that it would have been done by now.

From the Washington Post: “We have a laboratory where we do cellular and molecular paleontology, so we do cut into bones,” Horner acknowledged. Still, he added, the discovery of what appeared to be soft tissues in the matrix of the fossilized femur was “serendipitous” because the team broke the femur simply because it would not otherwise fit in the helicopter….

He suggested that other researchers would find more soft tissues if they overcome their reluctance to cut up their exhibits.

“Oh, that’s right, for sure,” said Ohio University’s Witmer. “Until now, we never thought we could find something like this, so we never looked. A big part of research is not only knowing what to look for, but also knowing it’s there.”

As I’ve said before, I’m merely an evolutionary skeptic, not a Young Earth Creationist. But I have to say, the more I read on the pro-evolution side, the weaker their case looks. I mean, economists know that they don’t understand everything about how the economy works, even though we have a pretty good understanding of certain processes. We have no problem admitting some of the things that we don’t know… but I’ve never read more weasel phrases like “may be caused” and “might explain” and “could be attributed to” than in my recent perusal of various evolutionary papers.

Perhaps PZ is right and many of the ID and Creationist standard bearers are liars. I don’t know, I’ve read very little that isn’t on the pro-evolution side. But it’s apparent that despite what seems to be the scientific consensus, the evolutionary case, as it currently appears to be explained, may contain logical holes that could be large enough to drive what might be considered a truck through.

Mark Steyn points out a few realities of a successful European battle against overpopulation:

In Europe, (I happen to be in Spain at the moment) it’s very weird to go to a Mediterranean wedding with tons of aunts, uncles, gram’pas, gran’mas, but no kids, or to a German suburb built for families and to hear no children playing in the street. Yes, you’ll have more space, in the sense that a poor mill town has more space after the mill’s closed: the young folks have fled but at least ol’ Bud and Earl won’t have to wait for stools at the lunch counter, assuming it hasn’t gone out of business….

So don’t delude yourself: If the English and Scots and Belgians and don’t want to have children, it won’t mean a return to bucolic pastoral vistas, it will just mean the places of the kids you never had will be taken by immigrants. If Yemen cuts its fertility rate, Yemen will empty out. If Britain cuts its fertility rate, Yemen will move in.

It’s positively haunting to walk through some of the nearly abandoned towns and villages of Italy. There’s one place that we like to go wandering in the mountains where perhaps thirty people live in a place that used to be home to hundreds. In several visits, we’ve never seen a single sign of a child outside any of the habitations that aren’t abandoned yet.

Didn’t the vision of a humanity without children used to belong to dark and dystopian sci-fi? I picked up a magazine at the fitness club the other day and happened to open it to a list of the 15 largest cities in the world now and projected for 2015. It was interesting to note that none of them were in Europe and that the story was lamenting the possibility that Europe would become less and less important in the world as its percentage of the global populace shrank relative to Asia, Africa and the Americas.

This is happening faster than I expected:

Psychological tests are increasingly being used to assess job applicants because university degrees have become so devalued, according to researchers. Academic degrees are no longer seen as a reliable indication of students’ numerical and reasoning skills, the survey of more than 200 firms found.

I can’t even get a degree in what I do from any top university. The gap between higher education and the skills required to succeed in life is large and it’s only going to grow wider.

It’s also interesting that it is psych tests, not knowledge tests that are replacing degrees as the primary metric. This indicates that they expect to have to teach you how to do everything anyhow, so what’s the point of hiring some clueless moron who thinks he knows what’s going on because he took two classes that are superficially related to the field.

It’s important to remember that a college degree is something that colleges are selling. You should be as skeptical about the product as you are about anything else being marketed by a big corporation.

However, students themselves seem to be less keen on taking the tests.

I’ll bet the little straight-A regurgitation specialists are shaking in their skirts over the idea of an objective measure of competence.

President Bush continues with his arrogant and futile idiocy:

President George W. Bush insisted Thursday America could still win the war in Iraq, despite a bleak picture of progress in the war-wracked nation painted by a White House report. As Bush tried to quell a Republican revolt and thwart rising Democratic demands to bring troops home, he argued there were still grounds for optimism, especially in the area of security.

“I believe we can succeed in Iraq, and I know we must,” Bush said at a press conference called to defend his unpopular strategy, and ruled out any troop withdrawals based on souring public opinion on the war.

I’m beginning to enjoy watching Bush crash and burn, I just wish it wasn’t costing the lives of American soldiers in the meantime. You cannot win even a mid-size war without the support of the people, which is the whole reason for Congress declaring war and making sure that the people are fully behind the war in the first place.

Bush and the neo-cons thought they could finesse the issue, and they could have had they been content to take out Hussein, declare victory and come home. Instead, they pushed all their chips back in and bet that they could remake the Middle East via an Iraqi democracy. They’ve already lost their bet, but like a gambler who thinks just one more hand might do the trick, they refuse to leave the table.

Every politician thinks he’s got the game figured out, that he knows better than the Founding Fathers did. It’s interesting to see how often attempts to circumvent the Constitution winds up biting the circumventer in the backside.

President Bush says he believes we can succeed. That’s nice; it’s also not the issue. The point is that the vast majority of Americans don’t think we can. He was given the benefit of the doubt and plenty of time to seal the deal and he didn’t perform. Game over.

When the Vikes didn’t go after David Carr, who is a functional starter when he has more than two seconds to throw the ball, or draft a QB, I assumed that Tarvaris Jackson must be the real deal. After all, everyone was pretty skeptical about Culpepper before he became the starter too. Apparently that wasn’t the case, Childress is just a procrastinator or something:

Although Tarvaris Jackson remains the clear favorite to win the starting quarterback job in Minnesota, there’s talk in league circles that the Vikings are hoping to find a veteran backup before the start of training camp.

Our guess is that coach Brad Childress (and perhaps some folks in the front office who might be in jeopardy if owner Zygi Wilf decides to dump the coach) wants to have a solid Plan B in place in the event that Jackson can’t cut it. Currently, the alternative is Brooks Bollinger, who might be a decent in-game injury replacement but not the guy on whose shoulders a coach should pin his career.

Seriously, who does this? Start looking for a quarterback in July? I guess the potential upside is that if Childress is as hopeless as he is beginning to appear to the outside observer, Cowher should be available for the 2008 season. Am I missing something here or is there something seriously wrong in Winter Park?

A gunslinger like Holcomb isn’t the worst bet, I’ve always liked him, but he’s not exactly the hold down the fort and steady the ship for the young guy either.