Texas and The Flintstones

Most of Rationality Now’s readers are probably quite familiar with the influence Texas has on our country’s textbooks… and the mind-numbing inanity of some Texas Board of Education members, like Don McLeroy, who wield that influence. Fortunately, there are some school board members who have their feet firmly planted in reality, but they’re in the minority (still?) and they’ve got a continuous battle on their hands to keep Texas education standards from drowning in an anti-intellectual, anti-science, and anti-reality flood of woo.

Sadly, they get far too little support from the general population of their state, at least according to a University of Texas/Texas Tribune poll. 51% of Texans surveyed disagree with the statement that humans developed from earlier species. 22% say that they believe life existed in its present form since the beginning of time. Almost a third (a third!) believe that humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time… or, as A Simple Prop says, a third of Texans apparently think The Flintstones is a documentary.

That a horrifyingly large number of people who blatantly reject scientific facts in favor of ancient mythology.

Perhaps that’s not fair. Perhaps they aren’t rejecting facts. Perhaps they are ignorant of the facts. Perhaps they’ve never spent the time to do any actual research (apart from reading the bible, which doesn’t really count). Perhaps they’ve just been taught that the bible is all they need to know and so haven’t been exposed to the actual facts.

So perhaps it’s not an arrogant rejection of facts. Perhaps it’s just an ignorance of facts. However, I would wager that the ignorance is, in most cases, suffused with a strong bunker mentality built of bibles and hallelujahs… a nearly impenetrable wall designed to keep out any reality that contradicts the bronze and iron age dogma so prevalent in Texas.

However, arrogance or ignorance, it’s a disgrace that people who reject reality have any influence whatsoever in the education of our children and the running of our government. It’s bad enough when the influence is on a local level, but when that influence is able to reach every corner of our country, as it is with Texas education standards and textbooks, it approaches a level of crippling absurdity that threatens to flush our country’s intellectual integrity into the sewers.

…if it hasn’t been flushed already.

Refusing to debate denialists

Orac, over at Respectful Insolence, has a post titled “Debating Denialists” that talks a bit about how pointless it is to debate denialists, whether they be Holocaust deniers, anti-vaxxers, creationists, or 9/11 Truthers. Deborah Lipstadt, a Holocaust historian, uses the phrase “trying to nail a blob of Jello to the wall” when referring to debating them.

Orac explains…

[…] for a debate to be an intellectually useful exercise, there have to be two reasonable points of view being argued, points of view that have evidence to support them. The evidence doesn’t have to be of equal quantity and quality on each side, of course, but it should at least be somewhere in the same ball park–or on the same planet.

He goes on to say that denialists crave the respect that real science receives and desperately want to be taken seriously by people in relevant fields of study. Being put on the same stage or the same screen as genuine, respected scientists and scholars gives them exactly what they want, so it’s best to just avoid the debate in the first place. Richard Dawkins has taken the same position for the same reasons, refusing to debate creationists.

In his article, he quotes Lipstadt’s listing of a number of tactics that I see all the time from denialists and it’s disheartening to see them, especially when otherwise intelligent people fall into the denialist sewer and veritably flaunt their ignorance and misinformation as though they are spreading enlightenment to the huddled masses. “We need to educate people,” they claim, while deliberately spreading misinformation. “People need to hear the truth,” they say, while making certifiably false claims. “People are just falling prey to the mainstream media,” they cry, while basing their own claims on religious and political ideologies rather than facts.

Regarding the denailist tactics, Orac says [emphasis mine]…

[…] there is a commonality among cranks in the types of fallacious arguments and twisting of data that they engage in. Being a “denialist” is not a matter of what is being argued, but how it is being argued. It’s about bad reasoning, bad science, cherry picking data, and misrepresenting sources to support a preexisting agenda.

Which is why in a debate they are so damned hard to pin down. Like Jello.

Indeed.

The Pale Blue Dot

About twenty years ago, Voyager 1 looked back toward it’s launching point and took the now famous “Pale Blue Dot” photograph. The arrow points to us. That’s Earth… from about 3.7 billion miles away, which is just a little bit outside our solar system. In the grand scale of the universe, that’s hardly any distance at all. Given that our sun is one of about 200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy which is, in turn, one of an estimated 125 billion galaxies in the universe, Voyager 1 was sitting virtually on top of Earth when it took this picture.

We live on an mind-bogglingly tiny speck of dust.

Voyager 1 - Pale Blue Dot

Carl Sagan was much more eloquent than I, of course. His words in 1996 (from Wikipedia)…

Look again at that dot. That’s here, that’s home, that’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

A very small stage, indeed.

Religious Bill of Rights… huh?

Yesterday, Phil Plait posted about people in Colorado proposing a “Religious Bill of Rights” for public schools, an idea which sounded disturbing even before I read the text. After reading it, it was pretty evident that the bill is a monument to absurdity. As Phil said, it’s simply not needed and some of the items are basic issues of freedom of speech. However, other items are “unacceptable.”

Phil does a good job of pointing out which items are questionable, which are irrelevant, and which are absurd, so I’ll leave you to your own devices to check out what he says.

However, the “Legislative declaration” section of the bill also does a reasonable job of pointing out its own irrelevance.

For instance (yes, it’s in all caps):

MANY INDIVIDUALS ARE UNAWARE OF THEIR EXISTING CONSTITUTIONAL RELIGIOUS RIGHTS. BECAUSE THESE RIGHTS ARE COMING UNDER INCREASING ATTACK IN THE PUBLIC SCHOOL SYSTEM, A METHOD TO RECOGNIZE, PROMOTE, AND ENFORCE THESE RIGHTS IS OF GREAT IMPORTANCE TO STUDENTS, PARENTS, TEACHERS, AND EMPLOYEES.

Religious rights are coming under increasing attack? Perhaps a more accurate statement would be “Attempts to inject religious preference into public schools are being denied.” That aside, if individuals are unaware of their Constitutional rights, perhaps, instead of creating a separate (and silly) “religious” bill of rights, students rights could be “recognized, promoted, and enforced” based on the actual documents used to found and govern this country. I think that would probably be a better use of time and money.

And again…

IT IS BENEFICIAL TO RAISING MORALS AND OBEDIENCE WITHIN THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS TO FOSTER AN ATMOSPHERE THAT RECOGNIZES AND ENCOURAGES THE CONCEPT AND UNDERSTANDING OF RELIGIOUS LIBERTY THAT WAS SO IMPORTANT TO THE FOUNDERS OF OUR NATION;

I’m afraid this points seems a bit incongruent. Morals and obedience increase with an understanding of religious liberty? The whole statement makes me vaguely uncomfortable and I’m not sure whether it’s because of its general incoherence or because its subtle combination of “obedience” and “religion” sounds darkly theocratic (to say the least).

Phil points out…

And the most pernicious part of all this is it’s clear that the motivation behind this bill is not in the name of religious freedom and tolerance, it’s in the name of freedom and tolerance for one specific religion. As I point out above, I don’t think a radical Muslim would be treated the same way under this declaration as a Christian would. While that may be outside the scope of the bill, it’s important to keep in mind.

Anyway, the entire point has become a mere speed bump in the rearview mirror because the bill has died in committee. Or, as the official statement reads, it has been “postponed indefinitely.” It was rejected on a party-line 4-3 vote, unsurprisingly, but was rejected nonetheless.

When something like this gets full support from Republicans, I often wonder why. Does it show a lack of understanding of our Constitution? Do they really think our country should be a theocracy? Do they really want all non-Christian religions subjugated? Do they really, truly believe that  imposing the Christian religion on everyone is good for this country? Are they so, so blinded by religious fervor that they cannot understand the secular guarantees provided in our country’s founding documents?

I’ll close with the words of Mike Wagner, one of the commenters on Phil’s blog…

“The fact that 3 people voted for it makes me sick to my stomach.”

Past Presidents on The Wall of Separation

In honor of President’s Day, Americans United for Separation of Church and State put together a list of quotes from various presidents regarding religious liberty as it pertains to government. It’s a wonderful list including presidents from Washington to Grant to Carter.

The article starts off with this introduction…

Most people know that Thomas Jefferson and James Madison were great champions of church-state separation. But did you know that James K. Polk had some interesting things to say, as did U.S. Grant?

Some of my favorite quotes from the list:

James K. Polk: “Thank God, under our Constitution there was no connection between Church and State.” (Diary entry, Oct. 14, 1846)

Theodore Roosevelt: “I hold that in this country there must be complete severance of Church and State; that public moneys shall not be used for the purpose of advancing any particular creed; and therefore that the public schools shall be nonsectarian and no public moneys appropriated for sectarian schools.” (Speech, Oct. 12, 1915)

Lyndon B. Johnson: “I believe in the American tradition of separation of church and state which is expressed in the First Amendment to the Constitution. By my office – and by personal conviction – I am sworn to uphold that tradition.” (Interview with Baptist Standard, October 1964)

Check out the rest of list to see some thoughts from our past presidents.

These quotes are an important reminder that, despite the preferential treatment the religious right feels they deserve when they claim the United States is a “Christian nation,” our Constitution was very explicit, both in what it says and what it doesn’t say. There is no mention of any gods or creators… no mention of the Christian religion or the Ten Commandments… no mention of any special rights for Christians or any religion. It does, however, explicitly say that no laws can be passed “respecting an establishment of religion” and that government cannot “prohibit the free exercise thereof.”

Those two clauses in the First Amendment of our Constitution, called the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause,  are generally considered the foundation of our wall of separation between church and state. As Justice David Souter said in a 1994 Supreme Court case, Board of Education of Kiryas Joel Village School District v. Grumet, “government should not prefer one religion to another, or religion to irreligion.”

So, even putting aside the irrational, baseless nature of many claims of theistic religions, our country’s founding document gives no religion any preferential treatment by the government or, indeed, any preference in the general running of our country. If Christians (or any other religion, though fundamentalist Christians are the ones who seem to whine the loudest about this issue) want their ideas to be seriously considered, then they should give serious reasons for their consideration.

…and quotes from the bible are most definitely not serious reasons.

Satire is a beautiful thing

Amazingly enough, there are still people who claim to understand the science behind global warming, yet make the mistake of thinking localized cold temperatures, such as the recent snowstorms in the Eastern United States, are somehow a refutation of global warming. It’s almost as if they don’t understand the meaning of the key word “global.”

Jon Stewart captures it (and mocks it) perfectly in this Daily Show clip.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
Unusually Large Snowstorm
www.thedailyshow.com

That bit makes fun of the “local versus global” aspect of global warming denialism and it is amusing, but at its heart is a serious issue… the denialist combination of ignorance and arrogance fueled by political and/or religious ideology. It’s a combination that inspires deniers to manufacture evidence, take evidence out of context, twist and distort evidence, and cherry pick evidence in their attempts to bolster their cause.

What makes it worse is that the denialist propaganda seems to be having its intended effect. Despite overwhelming evidence showing that our planet is warming faster than what natural cycles would indicate and that the warming is strongly affected by human activity, fewer and fewer people accept the science. What makes the denialist position so successful? Is it because their “evidence” is valid? …because their position is somehow warranted? Or is it, perhaps, that climate science is complicated… and therefore boring to a lot of people? Could it be that it takes too much effort to research the basics in order to gain a modicum of understanding of the science? …that real science is hard?

Here’s a hint. It’s not because denialist “evidence” is valid (and yes, the scare quotes are warranted).

Certainly, it’s far, far easier to look out the window at an above-average snowfall and conclude that no warming is occurring… and if that nicely-boxed conclusion is spruced up by your strongly-held ideology or by a level of (perhaps understandable) apathy that makes you susceptible to the loud voices of denialism, then it’s fairly easy to consider the matter closed and ignore any further evidence to the contrary.

That’s the scary result of politics trying to invalidate science… or religion trying to invalidate science. People get bad information and then they get the idea that there’s a controversy (where none should exist), or they start to think that scientists are full of crap, or that a biologist is the same as an astrophysicist (ie… a scientist is a scientist is a scientist), or that politicians have some sort of special “in” when it comes to the truth. People start to think that the scientific process is broken, or that a single mistake invalidates years (or even decades) of research, or that a scientist in a bitchy mood indicates that scientists are corrupt, or that scientists should be automatons who never get cranky when quote-mined by some junk-science-peddling politician.

The denialists’ position against global warming science is political, pure and simple. It can be summarized by the idea that, because the fix would be a hassle (or expensive), they want nothing to do with it. On that foundation is built their structure of misinformation… with twists, distortions, and lies… that only continues to stand because they yell loudly, they yell repeatedly, and they yell authoritatively. They do it with a self-righteous arrogance, implying that anyone who disagrees is not only wrong, but unpatriotic and stupid… perhaps socialist, too. They set up towering straw men to burn to the ground with their trite arguments, paying no mind to whether the argument is scientifically valid.

Despite all the denialists’ blustering, the thing they lack is truth. Perhaps truth isn’t important to them as long as they get their way, but truth is the intended destination of science.

The scientific process is self-correcting. Mistakes are sometimes made, but through the process, those mistakes are found and corrected. Science moves on, leaving behind an understanding of our world that is just a little bit better than before. That’s what science does. It moves. It progresses. It refuses to settle. It refuses to stop.

…and all the denialist blustering in the world won’t keep it from moving ahead.