The Atheist News Podcast

First the good news. Last Tuesday the Washington DC city council for the second time voted in favor of a measure that would legalize and recognize same sex marriage in the District of Columbia. All that stands before this becoming law is the signature of Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (he has affirmed that he will sign) and a 30 day legislative review period. By next Spring, Washington DC will legalize same-sex marriage, and the peasants rejoiced.

Now the bad: This has sparked the ire of the local Catholic archdiocese. They have threatened to halt all social services in the city including drug treatment, homeless shelters and foster care if the bill passes and becomes law. This would leave around 68,000 of the city’s residents even needier. The archdiocese claims that it’s main contention with the bill is that charities doing business in the city would have to extend spousal benefits to same-sex partners.

Apparently cutting off services to tens of thousands is preferable to the Catholic Church loving their neighbors as they love themselves (why does that phrase sound somehow familiar?). This sort of “WAH! I’m taking my toys and going home” mentality is by no means a new M.O. for Catholic organizations. When Massachusetts stopped barring same-sex couples from adopting, the Catholic Church halted all operations that facilitate any adoptions. Specific operations in other states that have legalized gay marriage have also been halted, but should the archdiocese make good on their threats, this will dwarf these in scale.

So it’s getting to that time of year where we start seeing the spaces in stores previously occupied by pumpkins and turkeys being filled with holly leaves and all sorts of trinkets that hearken the year’s end. No one can be bothered by the fact the health care bill limped out of the house as a crippled shell of itself or that tens of thousands of additional troops will be shipping to try to stabilize a part of the world to which the Mongols, Soviets, the Greeks, and the British have all at some point said “fuck that”. But no one can be bothered by that. There’s too much stress and consumption involved in the time of year that’s been perfectly crafted so that no matter what religion one ascribes to, there’s and excuse to bust out that credit card, crank up those lights, and compromise every value you hold and shop at Wal-Mart. It’s that time of year that always made me feel isolated in my cynicism and surrounded by a huddled mass willing to ignore all the problems of the world and suckle eagerly from the teat of over consumption.

And this was when I was in high school and still believed in God.

In case it isn’t blatantly obvious yet, the end year holidays are an institution I feel jaded about on a level equal to marriage and professional sports. This however is the first Christmas I’ll go through as a realized atheist. So what this brings to me is an important question that all non-theists must answer at sometime or another: How do you deal with the religious holidays as an atheist? Although there are religious holidays throughout the year, this question comes up particularly in December, since during this month so many different faiths find some excuse to buy shi… I mean celebrate their faith it’s become ingrained into our economy and culture at large and is thus unavoidable. So what obstacles and challenges, if any, are you faced with? Do you go through the motions to satisfy your family? Do you take a defiant stand against any and all festivities?

Personally, I think Christmas lost almost all of it’s religious significance ages ago (if it ever really had any). This makes it easy to regard any family gatherings as nothing more than what they are on the surface. An excuse to see relatives I don’t see often enough and give away books of mine that I’ve already read several times.

Religious or not, this can be a stressful, depressing, and hectic time of year. I wish you all the best in confronting it.

Richard joins me for another fabulously entertaining episode of the Atheist News Podcast. This week we start the show off with a candid discussion about why Dragon Age is likely to ruin my life. We also talk a bit about my printing misadventure as well.

In the news this week: The Catholic Church is apparently bursting at the seams with uninsured gay couples, unrepentant fetus defenders, doing God’s work, mamby-pamby Muslims, bankrupting the baby-boffers one diocese at a time and PRAYNAPPING® for Dummies.

Stream this episode!

As an atheist in America, there are a lot of religious ideas my country communicates that I disagree with. Ideally, the constitutional separation of church and state should make this a non-issue, but in a similar fashion to Iggy Pop not being recognized as the true king of rock and roll, there is often a large disparity between what should be, and what is. How this impacts us at home is important, but what fascinates me more is how religion in America informs the perception of our nation abroad.

The image America projects is not nearly as God-centric as it used to be in the days when the government worked tirelessly to differentiate us from the “godless communists”, and with such recent developments as President Obama declaring that America is “not a christian nation” to the world, our image is continuing to shift in the right direction. There are still several aspects of our country though that falsely perpetuate the notion of our rights and freedoms as being the effect, not the cause, of religious practice in America. The facet of this I will explore here is religion in the U.S. military.

It would be naive to say that there is no religious pressure put on young men and women serving in the military. Several of us working on the blog and podcast are no strangers to the presence of religion in the armed forces and can attest to it personally. Assertions that there is no such thing as an atheist in a foxhole (there is actually) help to make religion, rather than freedom from it, the social norm.

I remember my first day at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot where we were stripped of everything that made us individuals and given new clothes, titles, routines, and a shiny new pocket sized bible and a rosary for any catholics. This didn’t irk me significantly. It’s not as if anyone had much down time to ever read it. On Sundays we were offered to go to one of several different religious services offered for recruits. These are enticing to recruits both religious and otherwise as a means to escape the drill instructors for an hour.

In the fleet, religion is still always present. Each unit at the battalion level has a commissioned officer who is ordained in a religious faith serving as the unit chaplain. In the entire four years I served, only twice did I see one of these that wasn’t a Christian (one Jewish and one Muslim). Besides counseling services that would be much better handled by a mental health professional, performing religious services, and the occasional charity function, they serve little practical purpose.

This does have several unintended consequences as well ranging from indirect discrimination against atheists in the military to emboldening hostile forces who perceive conflicts with America as being religious in nature. The image of the American Crusader (a term invoked both by Bush and Bin Laden) has damaged relations with other nations and emboldened our enemies.

What do you think? Do you perceive the US military as having an overly religious element? What do you think should be done about this?

Happy belated Halloween everybody!

Halloween is a favorite holiday of mine, and of course–because it’s fun and there is no Jesus involved–it’s under fire from the loonies. Richard joins me for a SPOOOOKTACULAR Atheist News Podcast show in which we discuss topics such as DEMONCANDY, God naming rights, the terminally credulous (some dead, some only sweaty), Michael Beeheeatch, the thwarting of political tomfoolery and which days of the week it is and is not acceptable to pick your nose. And, not to be left out, the Pope had some stupid shit to say about Halloween as well.

Enjoy!

Download Episode 017!

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This is just too amazing to not propagate.  Pharyngula links to this spectacular piece of right-wing kitsch that depicts Jesus (Caucasian, like he should be) personally delivering the Constitution to a group of awed on-lookers who include, children, school teachers, US Founding Fathers (including, ironically, notoriously atheistic Thomas Payne), Ronald Reagan, dead astronauts, black soldiers (specifically), and a godless group of professors, Supreme Court Judges, politicians, and Hollywood producers.  Every individual and object in the picture has a nice little mouseover text (eat your heart out, Randall Munroe!) describing how that individual either worked to create the United States of Jesus America, or how he is working to bring Satan (can you find him in the picture?) into the White House.  This is absolutely golden.  Enjoy!

Jesus delivers the Constitution

I like apocalypse movies just as much as the next guy, but this one was far better than any other I have seen in quite a while.  Left behind, the end all of Kirk Cameron christian apocalypse movies, I laughed! I cried! It was better than Cats! And yes the Russians are the bad guys, why not they were the bad guys in all other christian movies, plus all older christian guys love Red Dawn.  Apparently Jesus was against communism, he didn’t much care for the whole people living equally thing, and he hates the color red.

So Kirk Cameron is playing a guy named Buck Something, we will just call him Buck Futt.  Before I get started I just want to point out that no matter how many times Buck Futt gets injured below the waist they manage to patch him up with out taking hit pants off, by I shit you not, stitching him up through the hole in the knee of his pants he got when he was standing next to a car bomb.

So buck Futt is a reporter, and some guy in the middle east makes some grow all drug thing that makes shit grow in the desert.  So he is covering the story in Isreal and there is some giant fucking attack, like 100,000 planes, seriously there are more planes in the movie than there are on the entire planet (including scrap yards, museums and the ones on the bottom of the ocean).  Then somehow he gets dragged into this “top secret” underground base and then all the planes blow up very dramatically, apparently God found out how shitty the special effects were and decided to unleash some wrath onto the cgi set.

So then Buck Futt is on a plane heading back to the us, he didn’t get hurt, hes fucking Kirk Cameron, and holy shit half the people on the plane dissappear!  (I should mention that this movie jumps around a lot, making it nearly impossible to follow).  Apparently  the Rapture (a mythical mass abduction discribed in Revolations) happens on the plane.  At this point Buck is not a Jesus freak, I can just imagine him doing an interview about the movie saying something about how it was really hard from him to play a non-christian on screen, overall being a pretentious prick.

So he gets home and guess what a russian sniper is following him and his buddies around  (all his buddies that didn’t get “left behind”).  There is a confusing mass of informants he uses and blah blah blah, they all get killed, some shot, and some in car bombs, which is how he get injured and subsiquently healed through a hole in the knee of his pants, It was just to riscay to take his pants off on screen, he didn’t want to put naughty thoughts into any little girls heads.

So then throught a Buck Futt in the story line, Buck Futt gets to go hang out with the “anti-christ” whose name is Nicholai Carpathia, Like I said earlier, the russians are bad bad people.  The movie ends quite soon after when Nicolai shoots some world leaders in the head, yeah he has some mind controll shit going on too.  I really wish that Tbn was having a marathon and showed the other movies in the series because I really want to keep drinking and yelling at the television into the wee hours of the moring.  But alas I have to save my 40ozers of PBR until next sunday when they continue to Buck Futt public access television.

Ps… If any of you know any religious movies I should watch and then make fun of, let me know I am open to anything I can find in a video store or on the internet…

I arrived at the AAI conference and got registered. That was pretty slick, they had a press and VIP line, so I got to skip the line.

There are a number of booths around the convention center representing different organizations which I am going to try to visit later.

I’m currently sitting in on the live broadcasting of the Dogma Free America podcast featuring Sunsara Taylor, William B. Davis and PZ Myers in one of the conference rooms.

If you haven’t listened to the show before, it is quite similar to the Atheist News podcast; covering several current-event type news articles.

Sunsara Taylor is a writer for Revolution newspaper and an atheist and womans rights activist.

William B. Davies is perhaps better known as “the Cigarette Smoking Man” from the X-Files and is also an “outspoken skeptic, a proud atheist and a great admirer of Richard Dawkins.”

PZ Myers probably needs no introduction, but he is a biology professor at the University of Minnesota Morris and his Pharyngula blog is probably the most popular atheist / science blog today.

I am not going to cover what was said, you can go check it out on iTunes, just search for Dogma Free America. I’ll add a link later when I’m at a computer.

More to come…

There has, over the centuries since Darwin posited his theory of natural selection–and, more specifically, of the descent of man from early ape ancestors–been much wailing and gnashing of the teeth.  One of the more frequently wailed notes (translated into language that can be understood by reasonable people) goes something like this: if Darwin was right in even the broad strokes about the origin of humanity, where are all the links between our old-world ape-like ancestors and modern humans?  Why, that is, don’t we see more fossil records of things that look not quite human, but not quite ape-like either?  Discounting the fact that there are a multitude of such forms on record already, where (the wailers say) are our early hominid fossils?  Where, that is, are our Bigfoot fossils?

There are a lot of reasonable answers on record to this.  Even Darwin recognized what he called the “problem of transitional species” in the Origin of Species, and he went out of his way to address it: “[W]e should bear in mind that animals displaying early transitional grades of [any given] structure will seldom continue to exist to the present day, for they have been supplanted by the very process of perfection through natural selection.  [...] Hence the chance of discovering species with transitional grades of structure in fossil condition will always be less, from their having existed in lesser numbers, than in the case of species with fully developed structures” (this is near the middle of chapter five, page 209 in the 2003 edition of the Origin of Species edited by Joseph Carroll).  Darwin’s response to this objection raises a few philosophical problems–perhaps chiefly, it leads us naturally to ask what the hell he means by “perfection through natural selection”–but, I think, the core of his resolution rings true.  Fossilization is an extraordinarily rare phenomenon: it requires precisely the right conditions (rapid burial in sediment) that just don’t obtain very often, at least considering the number of organisms that might be fossilized.  This seems particularly true for even the early hominids, which might well have had the resources to avoid such burials in ways that other animals wouldn’t have been able to take advantage of.

Those points aside, it looks like there’s yet another link in the chain.  Wired reported yesterday on a recent discovery of another early hominid skeleton.  This one predates the previous record holder–Lucy–by at least one million years, and suggests that the line of species that eventually led to humanity originated in the forests rather than the Savannah, as previously thought; the new fossil, which the scientists have named “Ardi,” had thumb-like toes for climbing, walked upright, and had a thick coat of fur.  The artist’s rendition in the Wired article looks suspiciously like the paradigmatically “missing-link” Big Foot.  Perhaps more interesting than the physical features, though, are the hypothesized cultural features that Ardi might have shared with us: based on tooth and jaw structure, the evolutionary anthropologists have postulated that Ardi and her species lived together relatively peacefully, had a cooperative social structure, and generally lived more like humans than like chimpanzees, which have a relatively violent society.  This suggests that our cultural evolution may have been as important in the history of our species’ development as our physical evolution–indeed, the two may be closely linked.

In any case, this is just another piece of evidence for the evolution of man, not that the theory needed any more bolstering.  Any bets on how long it will take for a creationist to point out that now there are two more transitional forms required?

I’m sitting in the lounge car hanging out on the train. We just left San Francisco and I am bored senseless. Over all, the trip has been pretty fun though. I got about 4 hours of sleep before we hit Sacramento and the train attendant woke the whole damn car up evicting people back to their actual seats.

That was when I found out that they gave out free pillows; after I slept.

I got a chance to make a couple videos yesterday and one today. Richard confided in me that he’s never been on a train before, so I might a video tour of the train so that he doesn’t feel left out.

If you didn’t watch the videos I posted you might not have caught the little drama moment I had yesterday, but I misread my train ticket and ended up missing my train in Portland. My wife raced me down to Eugene in a crazed attempt to beat the train down there. In the end, Ms. Andretti was victorious and I made it onto the train.

Brains, beauty, personality and stunt driving skills, what’s not to love?

Well, not too much more to say. If Woody Harelson and Wesley Snipes show up to rob the train, I’ll let you know.

I know that I said that we’d release the name of the Atheist News blog contest winner on the 30th, but with the trip to California for the AAI convention, we’re going to have to push back announcing the winner until probably the 11th of October. I am going to be in California until the 8th and won’t have much time to collaborate with the blog posse on picking a winner until after I get back.

But…!

If we can do it sooner, we will!

I’m really sorry for the wait guys, but we got a lot of good submissions and we want to make sure that we do this right.

Thanks for your understanding!

–Joe

Sweet Jesus on toast!

I have a new appreciation for people who travel to conventions frequently. My wife and I spent all day washing clothes, ironing, packing, checking bank accounts, moving money around, and running errands. And only one of us is even going anywhere! My business cards turned out fairly unimpressive and they wanted to charge me $117 for them after quoting me around $40. To their credit, they lowered the price to $70 and were very gracious about it and–at the very least–they didn’t subject me to religious bigotry of the variety I received from Minuteman.

But, for all that, everything is done and packed and I am ready to roll. My Swiss-Army-Wife not only does laundry, irons and packs things for me, she is also a talented hairdresser, so I can look forward to a much needed haircut in the morning.

Tomorrow I am probably going to do the first of several video logs of my trip which will be posted on YouTube for those of you who really want the candid play-by-play of my trip experience.

So there you go guys: mobile blogging, twitter and a travel video diary. I don’t know if I mentioned this before, but my Blackberry kicks ass.

Only 12 hours until departure for the AAI convention, more to come…

To quote the sage wisdom of Dr. Gregory House, everybody lies. It’s generally understood in civilized society that lying is usually wrong and frowned upon, but everyone does it. Distinguishing fact from fiction is a fundamental (IMHO the fundamental) conflict that every person must confront on a day to day basis.

When kids are thrown into the equation though, a whole new mess of circumstances apply. Children usually lack the critical thinking skills to see through most deceptions and they also usually intrinsically trust their parents word since, for lack of a better way to say it, they haven’t been here long enough to figure out what the hell is going on. This makes lying to them much easier. It is my understanding that lying to one’s kids, whether blatantly or through omission, is a common. The reasons for doing so range from parents saving face when they don’t know something, protecting the childrens’ supposed interests and innocence, incentivizing morality and/or obedience, or outright impatience and laziness.

The big three that most children in western societies are exposed to (outside of religion as a whole of course. For the sake of this article I’m focusing on lies that parents themselves know aren’t true) are the tooth fairy, the Easter Bunny, and Santa Claus. My parents broke the mold a bit. They were themselves very religious, but they spared me the deception of St. Nick, even to telling me to just play along when my uncle would call every December pretending to be Santa. Easter and Christmas were always about religion, not marketing symbols (wait a minute…). Granted while the religion behind the holidays is false, I still credit them at least telling me lies that they themselves believed rather than subbing in quick, easy, and socially accepted explanations.

So what I’m asking is this: Did your parents clue you in to the big three or did they string you along for whatever reason such as social cohesion with your peers or whathaveyou? Additionally, if any of our readers themselves have children (or plan to), how are you going to address these?

Well, it’s official gang: I’m going to the AAI convention in Burbank California! Thank you so much for both your words of support and your extremely generous donations–without which I would not have been able to go.

I have decided to blog about the trip from my Blackberry, so this is my test post to see if it ends up looking wonky. Included should be a pic of me and my son in which I am wearing my brand new, hand made “We Call Them Pirates” beanie, which was sent to me by PinkoKnitter! She’s a member of the Chariots of Iron Ravelry group at ravelry.com. The beanie is awesome and I’m going to wear it in California, even though it will probably give me heat stroke.
Right now I am at home, getting packed for my 30 hour train ride… I can’t wait until we get bullet trains. But, I am going to use my time on the train to send thank-you emails to all the people that donated for the trip and I might try to take some videos from my phone and post them online if I can figure out how to get that set up. Otherwise, I have some videos on my ipod about game theory from MIT’s Yale’s fantastic Open Courseware Open Yale Courses* website and I have a Nintendo DS. If you haven’t played Scribblenauts yet, you are totally missing out.

I am printing up some business cards to hand out at the show and I was trying to do it from a Minuteman, which is sort of like Kinkos only it’s a franchise. I get everything set up with the guy over the phone, finish the cards and format them the way he wants them, email him to him, and when I call the guy to confirm that we’re good to go, he tells me that he’s a Roman Catholic and he’s been to this site and since he didn’t like what I had to say about his Church, he wasn’t going to print my cards…

So, I caved and I’m doing them through a Kinkos. They have been surprisingly helpful.

Anyhow, I’ll post again tomorrow with more from my pre trip packing adventure.

–Joe

*I am a moron. It was the Yale website that I got the Intro to Game Theory courses from, not MIT’s. Sorry.

The Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski, in a speech at the Brookings Institute this morning, said that the FCC would be taking a greater interest in enforcing net neutrality in the US in light of developments both recent and longstanding. “I am convinced that there are few goals more essential in the communications landscape than preserving and maintaining an open and robust Internet.”

The idea of net neutrality is anything but new. It is essentially what we enjoy now in that broadband internet service providers must give equal access to all content. In recent years, the internet has exploded in terms of usage and versatility. Several people, like myself, have abandoned television entirely because of this. For these reasons, major providers such as AT&T and Comcast have shown interest in new business models wherein other companies can purchase from providers the capability for their websites to be favored in terms of accessibility and bandwidth. This development would put a strain not only on small businesses operating online, but it would absolutely strangle any non-profit that couldn’t pony up the costs (any non profit that doesn’t take massive weekly collections from it’s members that is). Free speech becomes much more expensive.

Genachowski proposed regulations that stress “nondiscrimination and transparency” in broadband providers network management practices meaning that providers cannot discriminate against, block, or favor any content and that they must clearly demonstrate this. Although taking a stance on this issue shows prescience for what will inevitably become a bitter conflict, caution must be exercised. If the case for net neutrality is defeated here, then it will open the doors for an internet where independent media outlets and small businesses have to subsist on the scraps of bandwith left over from the major media conglomerates expensive feast.

How the FCC plans to do this exactly hasn’t been spelled out yet, but the idea is already drawing opposition from the right. Republican Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas said “The case has simply not been made for what amounts to a significant regulatory intervention into a vibrant marketplace,” as he introduced an appropriations bill amendment to deny FCC funding for exploring ways to regulate broadband providers in a way to enforce net neutrality.

Net neutrality is in the balance and broadband providers are biting their nails. Let’s all hope for the best.

For more information:

Openinternet.gov
NPR report