Blogs / Bad Astronomy

On this day, the anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the United States, it’s common for people to look back at what they were doing at that time, how they were involved, what they were thinking. It’s human nature to look back on big anniversaries, both happy and otherwise, and recollect.

It’s also natural to seek meaning in such acts, try to make sense of them, fit them into our view of how the world works and how it should work. Sometimes the pieces fit. Sometimes they don’t.

Today I saw once again a picture that’s been floating around the web for a few years now. It shows the Twin Towers, and the caption reads, "Science flies people to the Moon. Religion flies people into buildings." It’s an interesting quotation. It’ll guarantee enraging religious folks, while self-satisfying people who are antireligious.

But is it accurate? After all, it was science that created the airplanes, science that built those buildings, science that developed the technology to bring the two together at high velocity. You might then say yes, but religion was the pilot; it was the fundamentalist jihadic brand of Islam that guided those men to do what they did.

And I say, yes. Exactly. In this case, both science and religion were tools, used for nefarious ends.

Defining science can be difficult. It’s a method, a way of looking at things. It’s a compendium of facts, knowledge, data. It’s a tool, used to investigate the world and to make sure we don’t let our biases, egos, and wishes get in the way of finding what’s real. Science (and skepticism) boil off the dross and leave the pure nugget of reality.

Religion, to those who are religious, is similar in that they believe it is a way of making sense of the world. It is of course entirely different than science in its methodology, but it holds no less thrall over the way people see reality. To someone who is very religious, there is no other way to perceive life.

In that sense, religion and science are different because to a scientist science is a tool used to help understand the world, but to the religious religion is the way to see the world.

However, religion can be a tool as well. It was used to brainwash 19 young men, to convince them to do something that countless generations of evolution have almost completely bred out of our systems: commit suicide. With fantasies of an afterlife and admonitions of the greater good, those men flew multiton jets into buildings, and changed our lives forever.

But it’s not hard to imagine things being a little different. Had those men not been subjected to that fringe religion, had they instead grown up in a more open environment, exposed to things like diversity, open-mindedness to other people’s ways of life, and the realization that they may be wrong and that all knowledge is tentative… we might not be spending this day in remembrance.

Still. They were immersed in their beliefs, told what to think, how to think. In this case, religion was a tool for abuse.

It’s not difficult to create a list of both good and bad things both science and religion have brought us. Such lists have been debated and used as bludgeons for years, so I won’t belabor them here. The point is, as tools, science and religion are neither good nor evil. They can be used either way.

Note that I am not saying any particular religion is right, or even that any of them accurately portrays the Universe for what it is — it should be clear by now I don’t think that at all. As a tool to seek truth in the Universe, I don’t think religion works very well. But as a framework for many people, and as tool to inspire them, its motivational abilities are without question. For good or for ill.

I’m not necessarily trying to make any grand point here. All I’m doing is making an aside, if you will, a mumbled comment amidst all the rhetoric that will no doubt fly today about moderate versus fundamentalist religion, about atheism versus religion, about us versus them, and this versus that.

In the hand of a carpenter a hammer can build a house, and in the hand of a madman it can stave in a skull.

Which will you be today?

This post deals with religion, evolution, lies, and Nazis. Because of this, I am warning folks at the start: be very, very careful if and when you leave comments on this post. I will not tolerate flame wars or abuse here. Keep the discussion reasonable, rational, and evidence-based. Emotions are fine — you may notice some in my own post — but keep them controlled. Obviously, Godwin’s law will be temporarily suspended here, since reductio ad Hitlerum is the very topic of this discussion. So have a care.

I was laughing off the whole PZ-expelled-from-Expelled thing, but I’m now seeing a particularly evil side of this, a distortion so horrid I cannot keep quiet about it.

On the official Expelled website is a post that consists of an email from someone who was at the movie when PZ was evicted, and describes the movie itself. Remember, this was posted on the official Expelled site, giving it their tacit approval.

Sitting down? I hope so. The post on the Expelled website says this:

The film can best be described as subtly clever and occasionally funny. Emotions are stirred up especially built around the movies overall theme*, and many scenes especially later in the movie might be difficult to watch based on one’s ethnic and religious background.

and the footnote therein says this:

*SPOILER!! [...]
Many scenes are centered around the Berlin Wall, and Ben Stein being Jewish actually visits many death camps and death showers. In fact, Nazi Germany is the thread that ties everything in the movie together. Evolution leads to atheism leads to eugenics leads to Holocaust and Nazi Germany.

Think on that for a moment. Nazism is what ties all this movie together, meaning it says that evolution leads to the cold and ruthless slaughter of millions of people.

Right from the start, this is an total and abhorrent lie. This false connection between the Holocaust and the teaching of evolution is a gross and profound twisting of reality. Creationist love to say that Hitler used evolution as an excuse for genocide, but actually he makes it clear that religion played a major role in his decisions. For example, in a 1922 speech Hitler said "My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter." Oddly, the creationists never seem to mention that.

Despite whatever reasons Hitler gave for his reasoning — and honestly, how much can we trust him? He was Hitler — that doesn’t mean that evolution leads to atheism leads to Nazis. Evolution, like all of reality, is a fact, and how we use it is independent of that reality itself. I can just as easily point out how many people have been slaughtered in the name of Jesus. Both arguments are grossly unfair when used in this manner. I can use a hammer to build a house, or to beat someone’s brains in. In what way is either the fault of the hammer?

It’s unfair to lay the blame of human faults on religion or the lack thereof. It’s how humans use or abuse these tools that’s important.

For the producers of this movie to continue this Big Lie tying evolution and Nazis together is an irony almost too big to comprehend, given that this is precisely how Nazi propaganda worked. In a rich field of creationist ironies, this may be the elephant in the room. They are projecting onto their enemies the very thing they are guilty of.

For Ben Stein to go to concentration camps and promote creationism is beyond the pale. It’s a lie, it’s ugly, and it should spark universal condemnation from every thinking human on the planet. This movie is founded on falsehoods, the producers lied to get interviews, they’ve used decidedly shady tactics to promote it, and the movie evidently has a huge lie as its very premise –a lie to which the producers themselves have admitted.

We must continue to discuss this, to air it out, to show these people for what they are. Like any noisome and foul thing you find under a rock, exposure to sunlight is the best cure.

What hath God wrought?

For years, the conservative movement in this country has increasingly used religion as a weapon, sometimes with extreme Machiavellian motives. Now, of course, it’s impossible for anyone to get elected to any position of authority — Repub or Dem — without declaring themselves not just as religious, but as a certain type of religion. If you’re not Judeo-Christian, you might as well give up now.

This is coming back to haunt them.

Right now, John McCain is dealing with backlash from being endorsed by John Hagee, an extremely venomous far-right snake. Hagee is many things: a bigot, a misogynist, a war-monger, and a plain old creepy guy who wants us to attack Iran to bring on the Biblical end times.

I think it’s not only OK to jump on McCain for accepting such an endorsement, it’s required. Worse — far worse — is that McCain actively sought Hagee’s endorsement for months. McCain wanted this.

But it gets more interesting. Hagee, who claims his church is non-denominational, is not so enamored of Catholicism. To say the least.

Enter Bill Donohue, a guy who is the president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights and himself a bigot and something of a nutbag. He has been railing against Hagee and McCain, saying that McCain should reject the endorsement of Hagee. Mind you, Donohue has been clear that it’s only Hagee’s hatred of the Catholic church that he finds so offensive. Apparently, all the other horrid things Hagee has said are fine with Donohue.

I forget. In which part of the New Testament does Jesus preach unbridled hatred?

I would find this situation funny if it weren’t so deadly important. The far-right religious groups have slowly and very successfully grown to be a huge influence over the political landscape in the past 20 years or so. To become a leader in this country it’s simply accepted that you have to brownnose them.

But look what that cozying up to these fundamentalist hate-mongers has done. They are feeding on their own now. And it gets crazier: there have been numerous attacks by the far right on Obama, intimating he’s a Muslim, but Obama is himself Christian. Self-proclaimed moral arbiters have no issues slinging as much mud as they can, hoping it sticks, despite the Bible having some pretty clear things to say about such issues.

There is a clear lesson here: when you beg for the hand of fundamentalist hate-mongers, you will suffer the slings and arrows of the other fundamentalist hate-mongers. Perhaps, then, it’s best to reject them all.

McCain did reject them, back in 2000. But now he is actively and quite hypocritically courting them. He brought this on himself, the end-product of kowtowing to fundamentalism. They have been actively engendering such a disaster for years, so they too have brought this on themselves.

The vast majority of religious people are good, decent folks — we may disagree on some of the basics of their religion, but I know these people want to do good, and that hypocrites like Hagee and Donohue don’t speak for them. But as I have pointed out time and again, if you don’t speak up, then these people speak for you. It’s very hard to find moderate religious people in the media, but they exist. Support them.

And finally, I would suggest the hate-mongers among the fundamentalists actually sit down and read Galatians VI. Because even after supposedly reading the Bible their whole lives, and supposedly basing their lives on it, they still haven’t quite figured out that as ye sow, so shall ye reap.

Guillermo Gonzalez is an astronomer who thinks Intelligent Design creationism is a scientific theory. Iowa State University is an educational institution where he wanted to help spread such silliness. ISU is also a place that said Gonzalez could take his nonsense elsewhere, and denied him tenure.

Discovery Institute is a "think tank" full of people who like to lie and say that creationism is correct. They whined and moaned when ISU told Gonzalez to take a hike. Gonzalez appealed to ISU, hoping that they would be foolish enough to say "Golly, maybe we should throw hundreds of years of scientific discovery out the window!"

They didn’t. In a 7-1 decision they told Gonzalez that his hike can still be taken.

As I said before, that is 100% the correct decision. Tenure is given for many reasons, but one criterion is how well the candidate will represent the University. Supporting Intelligent Design would reflect very poorly on ISU. They know that, so they dumped him. Well that, plus a host of other problems they had with Gonzalez.

I’m sure the Disco ‘tute will have some sort of golden parachute to soften the blow to Dr. Gonzalez. But I hope that other institutes (the real kind) will look to ISU as an example of how to deal with a shoddy track record and science blinded by faith.

Hat tip to Aetiology.