Why "Atheism is a Relgion," Reason One

Because atheists and nutjobs like Pat Robertson both have "beliefs," right? Pat Robertson blames the recent earthquake in Haiti on "Haiti's deal with the Devil," whereas atheists blame the earthquake on plate tectonics.




Well, the two are both "beliefs," right? They're equal but different "opinions," correct? Therefore, that's one example of how "atheists have their own belief system," right? Therefore, we atheists not being stupid is as much of a "religious practice" as Pat Robertson's ritual of not thinking is a form of science, right? Not bringing God into the earthquake makes the science of plate tectonics a religion, just as not bringing God into the classroom "makes the science of evolution" a violation of the separation of church and state, isn't that right, people?

Do I have that down pat, Michael Ruse?

UPDATED: Well, we'll see what happens - I asked a Muslim online who also asserted that "atheism is a religion" if women walking around naked was a form of hijab.

Here's a turnabout - and oddly enough, I've thought this, too: a review of the Creation Museum pronounces it "soulless."

I spent a lot of time in the Eden picnic area, trying to wrest some sort of spiritual buzz, a sense of the majesty and the mystery, but it’s conspicuously absent. Literally beaten to death. This is Ripley’s Believe-It. It is irredeemably kitsch. In fact, it may be the biggest collection of kitsch in God’s entire world. This is the profound represented by the banal, a divine irony. (The penchant for kitsch is something that gay men and born-again Christians share.) This tacky, risible, and rational tableau defies belief, beggars faith. Compare it to the creation story in Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, Masaccio’s expulsion from Eden, or any of the thousands of flickering images, icons, and installations based on faith rather than literalist realism. It truly makes you wonder, Is all this righteous ire, all this money, all this Pentecostal flame-throwing the best they can come up with? This cheap county-fair sideshow—this is their best shot? It may be more replete with proof than a Soviet show trial, but this creation is bereft of any soul.

I once, in a film review, called a tediously religion-thumping (if not Bible-banging) film "faithless." (A kid's mother gets killed by an errant baseball, and all this annoyingly righteous little twit can say is, "There are no accidents" and "I am God's instrument"? Are you kidding me? The protagonist cares more about the mother's death than her own child does? What a pompous little brat! The film became one distasteful justification of her death after another from that point on.) This is what really pisses me off: that those who engage in the knee-jerk argument that "atheism is a religion" do not address the essential nihilism - the lack of wonder, the hankering after certainties - in what is often called "faith."

I have no delusion that science, or life, is going to hand me many certainties. (Remember, I'm studying statistics.) Does it not occur to these folks that the more they pound the "atheism as a religion" gavel too hard, the more they make atheism sound like one of the few, or perhaps the only, "religion" that does not molest children en mass, or condemn victims for their misfortunes, or set fire to churches/mosques/temples, or rake in the kind of dough that televangelists regularly do? With apologies to Nietzsche, supposing atheism is the only "religion" that actually fulfills religion's ostensible goals of uniting humanity in peace, what then? Is that an argument that anti-atheists really want to [unwittingly] make?

This New-Fangled Halloween

Halloween is coming - and you know what that means. It's the time of year for book burnings. So, what's going up in flames this year? Harry Potter? Porn? The Ultimate Sudoku Challenge? Nope - this year, it's Bibles.

Come to our Halloween book burning. We are burning Satan's bibles like the NIV, RSV, NKJV, TLB, NASB, NEV, NRSV, ASV, NWT, Good News for Modern Man, The Evidence Bible, The Message Bible, The Green Bible, ect.

These are perversions of God's Word, the King James Bible...

We will also be burning Satan's popular books written by heretics like Westcott & Hort, Bruce Metzger, Billy Graham Rick Warren Bill Hybels , John McArthur, James Dobson, Charles Swindoll John Piper, Chuck Colson, Tony Evans, Oral Roberts, Jimmy Swagart, Mark Driskol, Franklin Graham, Bill Bright, Tim Lahaye, Paula White, T.D. Jakes, Benny Hinn, Joyce Myers, Brian McLaren, Robert Schuller, Mother Teresa, The Pope...

Man. It sure is confusing, trying to keep up with the book-burners these days. But that's not all - if you want to see a true Halloween horror, check out this ministry's website, via this page (scroll down for the link - I'm not linking directly to these nuts). It looks like they licked a piece of candy-corn and wrote it on a puddle of melted crayons.

Since the author freely admits that he cannot read Hebrew, Greek, or Latin, how does he know that the King James Version is the only faithful English rendering of the Bible? Easy! The KJV tells him so! Wow. Such logic makes me weak in the knees.

Speaking of weak knees, apparently they don't make ghosts like they used to.

Ouch! That's awkward. I can see this Halloween shaping up to be just peachy. Therefore, I thought I'd rent The Shining again just to revisit a classic piece of horror by my favorite director. Wow! Was I disappointed!



Give me a break. This movie wasn't really that scary at all! What a rip-off. I don't remember it being so...so heartwarming. So now how is one supposed to have a scary Halloween?



Good old Mary Poppins! Yes, as I recall, it was this movie (and not Alien) that made me jump high enough to stand straight up on my theatre seat backrest.

But seriously folks, you can have a great and spooky Halloween without any television. Just go to hulu.com and check out their huluween specials, or my favorite classic shows: "Night Gallery," "Alfred Hitchcock Presents," and "Outer Limits." (They also have "Dark Shadows," but it's the 1990s remake, not the original series, which I love - but I have parts of that on DVD.)

When I was very small, I saw part of a TV show that scared the living crap out of me so badly that I had to leave the room - it was worse than the famous third story from "Trilogy of Terror," which I actually could sit through. ("Trilogy of Terror" is not at Hulu, but you can watch it on YouTube.)



This particular program, I remember, had something to do with red, glowing eyes following a man on the street in the dark before attacking him. Then, there was a scene in which a man trapped in a basement watches in helpless terror as a creature with two glowing red eyes reaches its hairy paws into the window to pull the bars open and come in. I remember that, knowing that the show was about to end, I waited outside the room until all the scary noises had died down, then ran in to see the very last scene: a dark puddle of something on the floor, out of which, suddenly, two red eyes opened and glowed.

Not having any idea what the title of this show was, or if it was a TV movie or part of a series, I searched IMDb and Google and YouTube for this show that had terrified me, without any luck, until a few weeks ago I stumbled upon it by pure chance at Hulu! I could not believe that I had finally found that silly show that had made me scream bloody murder! (And no, it didn't have the same effect on me now.)



It was a "Night Gallery" episode, "There Aren't Any More MacBanes," starring a very young and weird Joel Gray, and (coincidence upon coincidence) including a walk-on role by a young Mark Hamill, who was later to cause me so much adolescent-girl-puppy-love-trauma as Luke Skywalker in Star Wars. Too funny! It's a small Hollywoorld!

This year, the ghosts are not on the television - the ghost is our television! Television is dead. We can rebuild it; we have the technology. The average ghoul who wants more control over her Halloween viewing now has more choices than ever before. Between Netflix, Hulu, and LikeTelevision, along with all the online world news/entertainment channels to be had, and online mp3s of Old Time Radio shows, this promises to shape up to be a happy (and cheap) Halloween after all.

(What's that, you say? "Twilight Zone"? I didn't forget TZ - I have the entire collection on DVD. I don't even need an internet connection - I can watch it whenever I want! Bwahahahahaha! *evil laughter*)

Shimmies to Ed Brayton at Dispatches, and Book Patrol at Seattlepi, and all my ghosts and ghoulies out there.

P.S. Any "Twin Peaks" fans out there? You can watch seasons one and two for free at IMDb.

Don't Lose Weight! Because...

...you might rewrite the laws of gravity and make everything fly apart! Because, you see, William Dembski, still having a problem with a computer program that Richard Dawkins wrote back in the 1980s, in Apple BASIC no less, makes yet another claim that Dawkins is perpetuating a fraud *yawn* on the public (and naturally I had a problem with that).

*Gasp*

WilliamD: Gentlemen: If Dawkins is tuning the parameters differently for the program as described in the book and for it as exhibited in the BBC documentary, isn’t he in effect using a different program?

Me: Uh, duh, no! Great job, Mr. Isaac Newton of Information Theory.

This man is a mathematician? Would he like a secretary/quasi-librarian/archivist and belly dancer to explain programming principles to him? He and his followers still have a problem understanding how an algorithm in a program that was, yes, programmed by Dawkins is an analogy for natural selection?

Of course, Dr. Dr. "I'm not jealous of Dawkins at all" has been verrrry quiet since making that gaffe.

I have news for you Dr. Dr. Dembski - April is fast upon us. You can run but you can't hide (or add, it appears).

UPDATED: Wesley has a post up about how long it's taken Dembski to "reproduce" Dawkins' code, and so does Ian Musgrave. Of course PZ has weighed in. I don't have time for this - I'm writing a paper about how archival theory could be informed by anthropology, evolutionary theory, ecology, and information theory, and I've already wasted too much time trying to get Joe G. to answer me about what he really knows about information theory.

SECOND UPDATE: I love this sarcastic riposte by "CS." Remarks by wags like that convince me that even if intelligent design belonged in schools, only an anti-IDist would be qualified to teach it.

Attention, Creationists!

You're driving me nuts! All over the internet you are confusing Information Science with Information Theory, and using the two interchangeably. Hello, these are two completely different areas of research and study. Do you think you have a right to confuse yellow with purple? Would you please stop it?

This is my future field, Information Science. (It is not William Dembski's field. It is mine.)

And this is Information Theory. (And though he claims to be an expert in it, this is not William Dembski's field, either. Selling William Dembski's books to people taken in by William Dembski is William Dembski's field.)

Okay? Can we at least get our definitions straight?

If you want a really good introduction to Information Theory, check out Mark Chu-Carroll's post on the matter. As he concludes, the argument of the "impossibility" of the creation of new information becomes transparently fallacious.

So - what happens if I take a string in very non-compressed format (like, say, an uncompressed digitized voice) and send it over a noisy phone line? Am I gaining information, or losing information?

The answer is: gaining information. Introducing randomness into the string is adding information.

"AAAABBBB" contains less information than "AAAABxBB".

The way this is used to refute bozos who claim things like "You can't create information" should be obvious.

Shimmies to Good Math, Bad Math