Category: Uncategorized

The irony of the evolutionarily faithful:

The majority of Republicans in the United States do not believe the theory of evolution is true and do not believe that humans evolved over millions of years from less advanced forms of life. This suggests that when three Republican presidential candidates at a May debate stated they did not believe in evolution, they were generally in sync with the bulk of the rank-and-file Republicans whose nomination they are seeking to obtain.

Independents and Democrats are more likely than Republicans to believe in the theory of evolution. But even among non-Republicans there appears to be a significant minority who doubt that evolution adequately explains where humans came from.

No doubt evolutionists will argue that this is significant proof that Independents and Democrats are smarter than Republicans. Of course, it’s interesting to note that those presumably less intelligent Republicans are also wealthier, happier, are more likely to possess a college degree and live longer than their more evolutionarily-correct Democratic counterparts.

The lowest average life-expectancy in the nation is 72.6, in Washington DC, which at 90 percent Democratic is far and away the most Democratic voting community in the nation. The most Democratic state proper, Massachusetts (62 percent Democrat), has a life expectancy of 78.4. Meanwhile, the most Republican state, Utah, (72 percent Republican) has an average life expectancy of 78.7.

Democratic Hawaii has the highest life-expectancy, 79.8, but let’s face it, that probably has more to do with life on the beach than politics….

I’m not anti-evolution per se, I’m probably best described as an evolutionary skeptic. And while I’ve read far more evolutionary literature than anti-evolutionary literature – I’ve never even cracked open an ID book – I find the most convincing argument against evolution is the psychological one based on the behavior of its adherents. These people simply don’t behave like economists who know precisely how and why the Law of Supply and Demand exists and works like it does, they behave more like religious individuals full of self-doubt and terrified that their faith will be shattered at any moment.

It’s not like there aren’t as many, if not many more, intellectuals advocating ludicrous economics as there are individuals arguing what evolutionary biologists would consider to be ludicrous biology, and yet one never sees an economist being reduced to the rabid rhetoric of a Dr. PZ Myers or a Richard Dawkins. And there’s no shortage of evolutionarily correct individuals who wholeheartedly subscribe to economically absurd propositions that were conclusively disproven before Darwin first contemplated the various sizes of finch beaks.

When there are more evolutionary engineers than evolutionary theoreticians, I expect the average individual will be more inclined to accept whatever truth there is to be found in evolution as an explanation of human origins and continuing human development, such as it is.

When science is conclusive, it is a very simple matter of demonstrating the empirical evidence, one does not provide an endless circle jerk of citations of other people’s citations of other people’s suppositions. The fact that evolutionists can never supply this evidence and constantly substitute epistemological and ontological arguments in its place is the primary reason that so many intelligent and successful people will continue to reject their increasingly hysterical case.

Perhaps George Bush and the neocons should be contemplating an invasion of Europe if the absence of democratic rule is still considered a justification for an invasion meant to force regime change:

Insiders say that the Dutch are more worried than Britain about the EU signing up to anything that might require a referendum. “Their bar for a referendum is even lower than ours, and they fear they would lose it again, so that would help nobody,” the source said.

Modern “democracy” is little more genuinely democratic or expressive of the will of the people than the single-party voting systems that boasted 99-percent participation of the former Soviet Union or Ba’athist Iraq.

And they’re all super nice totally smart sex goddesses who only want world peace and universal applause for every expressed opinion and personal decision, however momentary:

The guilt over sex and food that women feel shows how deeply misogynist the notion of female “selfishness” is. Most of the time, the word “selfish” marks a behavior that is indulged for self at the expense of someone else, but when women are accused of selfishness for creating $51 billion in health care costs eating or spreading venereal diseases fucking, the behavior in question doesn’t actually hurt anyone else.

And you can see what a vicious cycle it is. Men hate women, which makes women feel bad, which makes women eat, which makes them fat, which makes men not want to have sex with them, which makes women feel bad, which makes women eat more… except for those women who deal with the pain of suffering mysogyny by attempting to win men’s approval through promiscuous sex, which makes men want to have sex with more than one of them, which makes women feel bad, which makes women seek male approval through more sex….

Women are not selfish, you see, they’re just sad and suffering. Except they’re not and they don’t need your contemptible patriarchal pity, they’re strong independent woman who don’t need a man, just a box of Krispy Kremes and a were-seal romance novel.

Still, speaking as a proud, pro-sex member of the Patriarchy, I’m delighted to learn that I have feminist sanction for having sex with anyone I want any time I like secure in the knowledge that I am not being selfish or hurting anyone.

You go, grrl!

I do enjoy watching their much-ballyhooed icons implode. Anyone who knows anything about sports knew that Michelle Wie was unlikely to ever be a champion of any kind, let alone one capable of playing with the big boys:

Even against the men, Michelle Wie hasn’t shot this big a number since she was in the ninth grade.

Wie’s woes continued Saturday at the LPGA Championship when she shot an 11-over 83 at Bulle Rock, leaving her in last place by five shots among the 84 players who made the cut and uncertain if she would show up for the final round….

An LPGA Tour official clarified midway through the back nine that “Rule 88,” in which non-tour members are banned for a year if they fail to break 88, would not be an issue because it only applies before the cut is made. A week ago, Wie withdrew at 14 over par with two holes to play with a bad wrist, raising speculation that she was worried about losing the rest of her LPGA Tour schedule with two more bogeys.

People always forget that because women mature faster than men, many women will never be any more athletically capable than they were in ninth grade. Every year, in track-and-field, eighth and ninth grade girls win state championships and the newspapers predict that they might be dominant for the next four years. And while this does happen occasionally in the case of an unusually talented athlete, usually their performance begins to decline their junior year.

That’s not necessarily the case in sports wherein experience and practice is as important as raw athletic ability. But golf is a game that is as much, if not more, mental than physical, and Wie has always been mentally shaky despite her physical abilities. I thought it was a huge mistake to throw her in with the men at a very young age; it increasingly looks as if those pushing her to compete at a higher level than she was ready for have succeeded in destroying her confidence and possibly even her career at the less-competitive level of the Ladies PGA.

I always appreciate female athletes who demonstrate respect for their sport by refusing to play along with the feminist cheerleaders. Mia Hamm, in particular, was great when after numerous reporters who knew nothing about soccer asked her how badly the World Cup-winning US women’s team would beat the men’s team. She just looked at them as if they were insane and answered them accordingly.

More blitheringly stupid Three Monkey jabber:

Pre-January 2009, can this marriage be saved? You know, as his luck would have it, staying together is worth it for the kids. And every once in a while — say, if there’s a Supreme Court opening this summer, as has been rumored, and he nominates a judge like Alito or Roberts – President George W. Bush may just remind us why we fell for him in the first place. It might not be the best marriage, but we share a love — a love of country, a love of democracy, a love of the Constitution. Yeah, he created a dubious Cabinet department. But we also haven’t been attacked for six years under his presidency.

Lopez would defend Bush if he sacrificed the twins to Quetzalcoatl live on Fox News… and explain why he was only doing it for America. We did get attacked under his presidency. 9/11 was Bush’s failure, not Clinton’s. I don’t think Bush is particularly enamored of “that damned piece of paper”. He’s ignoring the clearly expressed will of the people on illegal immigration. And if you love your country, why would you try to turn it into Mexico North?

I heard a story yesterday which made my blood boil. To repeat the details would be to risk identifying an innocent child, so I will give no more than a bare outline.

It happened at an apparently happy and tolerably well run primary school. Two boys, both six years old, were playing merrily together during morning break. They are the best of pals. One is white, the other is black. In the course of the game the white boy, giggling all the while, said his friend was a “little monkey”. The black boy giggled just as heartily. All would have been well, but a teacher overhead the awful words. The white boy was in big trouble.

Dawkins has described a touching picture of a long transtemporal line of women, each holding hands with their daughters, stretching all the way back from modern women to genuine apes or quasi-chimpanzees of some sort or another, I can’t recall. But I noticed that he never quite got around to describing what color the hands were as they were getting increasingly more furry.

I understand that evolutionary biologists believe human variance to be very slight and that there is only the one species. But obviously someone, somewhere, has to be in possession of genes that are more evolutionarily advanced than the next individual. Who might that be? Dawkins is very passionate about the need for humanity to take control over our Darwinian destiny, and yet, he never seems to have much to say about exactly what that control might be, how we are to go about taking it or what we should do with it.

I wonder why that might be?

BigTexasRob proves his point:

1) Harris states one could be almost certain that the religion of an unknown suicide bomber was Islam.”

In fact, it IS easy to guess this hypothetical bomber’s religion, but we couldn’t tell that given the part of the original text that you conveniently left out. You neglected to mention the part where Harris writes

“Although saddened to have lost a son, [the bomber’s parents] feel tremendous pride at his accomplishment. They know that he has gone to heaven and prepared the way for them to follow. He has also sent his victims to hell for eternity. It is a double victory. The neighbors find the event a great cause for celebration and honor the young man’s parents by giving them gifts of food and money.”

Why would anyone assume that the “adamantly secular” Tamil Tigers (likely to have grown up in a Buddhist or Hindu community) would have such parents?

I’ll want to do a bit of checking on how the Tamil Tigers celebrate their suicide bombers, of course, but since I never considered that paragraph for a second I was clearly wrong to hammer Harris on that particular point. Nicely caught.

Now, I still think this is a somewhat deceptive way for him to begin a book in which he’s attacking all religious faith as dangerous, and yet all he’s saying here is that it’s obvious that Christians, Hindus, Buddhists etc. don’t commit suicide bombings. And based on the population percentages alone, you’ve got a one in six chance of being right even if you leave out the suicide bombing and just say a young man is on a bus, guess his religion.

As for the second point, which we agree I did not misrepresent, let me lay out the logic for you:

If A=safe, B=deadly and A+B=deadly, which is the dangerous element that should be eliminated, A or B? The answer is obviously B.

Now, Religion does not threaten the planet nor has it ever been capable of doing so. We agree that Harris states that the planet is now threatened by Religion + Technology. Technology alone is clearly capable of threatening the planet. So then, if we are in dire peril demanding action, which is the dangerous element that should be eliminated, Religion or Technology?

Ergo, Harris is INADVERTANTLY making a logical case against technology/science. Of course he’s not intending to do so, he’s trying to attack religion. But the logic is clear that based on his claim that the imminent peril to the planet demands something be eliminated from the equation, it is technology/science that must be eliminated.

And that’s just one of the many examples of Harris’s woeful incompetence.

Scott Adams’ post on The Great Debate to which my lengthy post below was a response simply up and disappeared yesterday, hence the bad link. I don’t know why it vanished, perhaps he was threatened by angry hordes of atheists or Christians threatening a West Coast Crusade, but in any event, I’ll relink to it if it reappears.

From the Digg comments:

Stupid.
Makes up numbers out of thin air. No sources for his claims of who caused what wars.
Total crap.
This proves nothing, and is merely opinion.
Buried as inaccurate due to NO supporting evidence.

The source is here. I also informed everyone how they could use Wikipedia to independently verify the statistics if they doubted them.

There are also major logical weak spots in terms of confusing correlation with causation. Take “percent of wars” (how on earth is that calculated?). If it’s by population, then explicit atheism and population correlate by time, making a spurious correlation of atheism and war deaths.

The percent of wars is calculated by the number of wars waged divided by the total 1,763 wars recorded.”

Which is a wholly useless measurement. Who defines a war versus a skirmish? If war broke out in Korea, would it be the Korean war continued after a very very long ceasefire, or a second war? When did WWI stop being a bunch of a little wars and become a big one? Etc. It’s just statistically useless.

I see. So Dawkins and Harris can run around spouting off with their ontological argument about how religion implicitly causes war on the basis of no evidence whatsoever, and they are to be taken seriously, but the citation of a 1,502-page reference work completely devoted to the subject is “just statistically useless”. In answer to the question, it would surely be considered two wars, just as we refer to World War I as being distinct from WWII. For example, there are three different Covenanter’s Rebellion’s listed, in 1666, 1679 and 1685, all of which are classified as religious wars.

The definitions of the wars were decided by nine professional historians who compiled the encylopedia, including the director of the Centre for Military History and the head of the Centre for Defence Studies.

I find it all too typical of many supposedly rational atheists that their commitment to science, reason and empirical evidence only lasts as long as it supports their preconcieved prejudices. When presented with the evidence they claim to require, they are as quick to cry “I don’t like your facts” and desperately rationalize them away faster than the most benighted backwoods Bible thumper.

And that’s one of the several reasons the book is entitled “The Irrational Atheist”.