Kevin DeGraaf’s Blog

I reject the claim that the Bible is the inspired word of a holy god. As a result, according to several people with whom I’ve had ever-so-enjoyable dialogues, I have no basis for morality. One even went to far as to say that without belief in a god, “sexually violating a three-month-old girl is as morally value-free as brushing your teeth”.

What would it be like if I did base my morality on the Bible? From a recent post at God Is For Suckers!, we can get a general idea:

• The punishment of all women because Eve dared to eat from the Tree of Knowledge
• The destruction of nearly every living thing, because God got it in his head that “the wickedness of man was great”
• Completely uncriticized slave-banging and otherwise legitimizing slavery as a legal activity
• A Bible hero offering up his virginal daughters to an angry mob (and them subsequently raping him)
• God insisting that Abraham be willing to stab his son to death on a sacrificial altar, and surely traumatizing the kid in the process
• Members of the YHWH’s favorite family avenging a single act of rape by tricking an entire city of men into getting circumcised and then killing them all
• After killing a young man the Lord deems wicked, killing his brother for not wanting to impregnate his sister-in-law
• God randomly trying to kill his right-hand man, Moses
• The plague after plague unleashed on the Egyptians - including the slaves and animals - because God hardened Pharaoh’s heart so he wouldn’t let the Israelites go and have a picnic in His honor. And making an annual celebration of the killing of every firstborn Egyptian.
• Yahweh claiming ownership of every firstborn male, including of the human variety, with the seeming implication that he wants them sacrificed in his honor
• Meting out punishment not only on infidels, but on three or four generations of their offspring
• Repeated calls to execute people who work on the Sabbath
• A 9/11-sized massacre of fellow Israelites because they dance around a golden idol
• Endless descriptions of reasons and methods for absolving human sins by ritually sacrificing animals, including rituals where one animal is soaked in the blood of its butchered brethren
• The Good Lord burning two children alive for lighting some incense, and then forbidding their father - His #1 priest - from grieving the loss

On Tuesday, PBS aired a much-anticipated episode of their NOVA science documentary program entitled Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial, which covered the 2005 Kitzmiller v. Dover court battle.

If you’ve been living under a rock, I’ll catch you up: back in 1987, the SCOTUS smacked down the teaching of creationism in public schools as the blatant First Amendment violation — and utter disgrace to real science — that it is. Never ones to give up easily, the creationists repackaged their nonsense by removing explicit references to “God” and changing the name of their position to “Intelligent Design“.

According to Wikipedia, ID holds that “certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection.” The blatant mischaracterization of natural selection as being “undirected” aside, this assertion is the intellectual equivalent of “I can’t think of how this might have evolved… so… umm… God did it! (Err, I mean, an unspecified intelligent entity did it!)”.

Naturally, the scientific community, which has this closed-minded, dogmatic tendency to reach conclusions based on things like “facts” and “evidence” and “logic”, overwhelmingly rejects both creationism per se and its modern politically-correct incarnation.

Anyway, the NOVA documentary was very well-done. It was my impression that they presented both sides of the argument fairly, and did a good job of explaining, in an accessible manner, why ID is such a horrible idea — it is obviously not science, and it clearly is religion in disguise.

Here are some excerpts from the transcript:

KENNETH MILLER: Intelligent design is a science stopper.

KEVIN PADIAN: Intelligent design is not anywhere a scientific concept. It’s not a field of science. It’s not being actively researched by anyone.

KENNETH MILLER: It’s a violation of everything we mean and everything we understand by science.

NARRATOR: Citing what he called the “breathtaking inanity” of the school board’s decision, [the judge] found that several members had lied “to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the intelligent design Policy.”

JUDGE JOHN E. JONES III: The crushing weight of the evidence indicates that this was a, a considered pattern by this School Board that the board set out to get creationism into— science classrooms. And intelligent design was— simply— the vehicle that they utilized to do that.

JUDGE JOHN E. JONES III: In an era where we’re trying to cure cancer— where we’re trying to—prevent pandemics, where we’re trying to keep science and math education on the cutting edge in the United States. To introduce and teach bad science to ninth grade students make very little sense to me. You know, garbage in, garbage out. And it doesn’t benefit any of us who benefit daily from scientific discoveries.

I’d highly recommend watching the episode, which is available on PBS’s website. (If, like me, you’d prefer to download the whole episode as one Xvid file, you can easily go through the usual channels to do so.)

Another stupid email chain letter has been making the rounds lately:

There will be a new Children’s movie out in December called THE GOLDEN COMPASS. It is written by Phillip Pullman, a proud athiest who belongs to secular humanist societies. He hates C. S. Lewis’s Chronical’s of Narnia and has written a trilogy to show the other side. The movie has been dumbed down to fool kids and their parents in the hope that they will buy his trilogy where in the end the children kill God and everyone can do as they please. Nicole Kidman stars in the movie so it will probably be advertised a lot. This is just a friendly warning that you sure won’t hear on the regular TV.

They are hoping that unsuspecting parents will take their children to See the movie, that they will enjoy the movie and then the children will want the books for Christmas. That’s the hook. Pullman says he wants the children to read the books and decide against God and the kingdom of heaven.

The Catholic League has issued a warning against allowing Christian children to see the movie or read the books (and for the low, low price of $5, they’ll send you a booklet with further details).

In related news, Lisa recently sorted through some of her papers and found a “membership booklet” from her former church. I thought I’d share an interesting portion of that booklet:

• Sound doctrine is of high priority (Jude 3; I Timothy 4:1-4).
• Doctrine is the basis of fellowship (Ephesians 4:11-16; I John 1:5-7; 2 John 1-4).
• Falsehood is dangerous because it is infectious (I Corinthians 15:33; Galatians 5:7-9; II Timothy 2:15-18).
• Those who teach falsehood are to be identified (Romans 16:17; I Timothy 1:19-20; II Timothy 2:17; 4:15-15).
• Those who teach falsehood are to be avoided (Romans 16:17; II Corinthians 6:14; 7:1; Ephesians 5:11; II John 10-11).

Why are Christians so scared of exposing themselves to (or allowing their children to be exposed to) anything that might corrode their position?

If Christianity were true, why would Christians need to urge each other to steer clear of children’s fantasy movies with (gasp!) anti-religious tones? Why would a God who actually existed have any problem with his adherents being exposed to the “infectious” reasoning of those who reject his existence? If Christian doctrine really were grounded in reality, shouldn’t it gladly welcome challenges (atheist or otherwise), all of which could be easily defeated through reason and evidence?

The answers to these questions (”they wouldn’t”, “he wouldn’t”, and “of course”) and the implications thereof should be obvious. Christianity, like any other religion, is a delusion. “Holy” books such as the Bible are laden with “in-group/out-group” warnings, exhorting the faithful to avoid fraternization with evil unbelievers, precisely because religious belief systems are completely unfounded (to put it gently) and cannot stand the bright light of rational scrutiny.

Update: here is another great example.

There’s a great deal of “buzz” in the blogosphere about Congressman Ron Paul (R-Texas), a Republican presidential contender. (For more information, see his Wikipedia entry and his official campaign website).

As a card-carrying Libertarian, I agree with the vast majority of Ron Paul’s positions. He is opposed to the occupation of Iraq, unbalanced budgets and deficit spending, high taxes, the USA PATRIOT Act, a national ID card system, torture, warrantless surveillance, ceding of sovereignty to the UN, restrictions on free trade, amnesty for illegal aliens, abuses of eminent domain, the mandated Post Office monopoly, unnecessary government agencies (e.g. the IRS, Dept. of Education, Dept. of Energy, DHS, FEMA, ICC), gun-control laws, Social Security, the welfare state, the draft, prohibition of drugs, the curtailing of civil liberties including that of habeus corpus, and unconstitutional governmental “scope-creep” in general.

So far, so good. I find myself cheering “Yes!” (well, figuratively, anyway) to Ron Paul’s opposition to everything I just mentioned. Compared to the mess that the (normal) Republicans and Democrats have made of our country, a Ron Paul presidency would seem to be a breath of fresh air. His decision to remain affiliated with the Republican party, as opposed to the Libertarian party, could be seen as a purely tactical decision, since third-party candidates are basically unelectable under the current system.

But wait — there’s a problem: he’s a fundy religious nutbag whose rantings make Bill O’Reilly sound sane:

The Christmas spirit, marked by a wonderful feeling of goodwill among men, is in danger of being lost in the ongoing war against religion.

Through perverse court decisions and years of cultural indoctrination, the elitist, secular Left has managed to convince many in our nation that religion must be driven from public view. The justification is always that someone, somewhere, might possibly be offended or feel uncomfortable living in the midst of a largely Christian society, so all must yield to the fragile sensibilities of the few. The ultimate goal of the anti-religious elites is to transform America into a completely secular nation, a nation that is legally and culturally biased against Christianity.

[...] The notion of a rigid separation between church and state has no basis in either the text of the Constitution or the writings of our Founding Fathers. On the contrary, our Founders’ political views were strongly informed by their religious beliefs. Certainly the drafters of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, both replete with references to God, would be aghast at the federal government’s hostility to religion. The establishment clause of the First Amendment was simply intended to forbid the creation of an official state church like the Church of England, not to drive religion out of public life.

The Founding Fathers envisioned a robustly Christian yet religiously tolerant America, with churches serving as vital institutions that would eclipse the state in importance. Throughout our nation’s history, churches have done what no government can ever do, namely teach morality and civility. Moral and civil individuals are largely governed by their own sense of right and wrong, and hence have little need for external government. This is the real reason the collectivist Left hates religion: Churches as institutions compete with the state for the people’s allegiance, and many devout people put their faith in God before their faith in the state. Knowing this, the secularists wage an ongoing war against religion, chipping away bit by bit at our nation’s Christian heritage. Christmas itself may soon be a casualty of that war.

Ugh. Tearing down the wall of church-state separation (or pretending it never existed at all), thereby allowing religion to intrude upon people’s lives, is definitely not a libertarian position.

I strongly believe that religion is a delusion. I realize that not all of my readers agree, but any thinking person should be able to grasp the idea that using public property (funds, real estate, etc.) to advance one’s religious beliefs is not only unconstitutional, but arrogant and self-centered.

Furthermore, the statements that the Founding Fathers envisioned a Christian nation and that the Constitution is replete with references to God are so laughably wrong as to be scary. Do your own research, and you will see that the Fathers were, in general, deist, not theist (and certainly not Christian). You will also find a glaring lack of references to God in our Constitution.

More commentary along these lines is available here and here.

Would I vote for Ron Paul? Based on his current poll numbers, the question is largely academic, but at this point, I would, reluctantly, have to say “no”. I can’t, in good conscience, vote for someone who wants to dismantle American religious separation, and the protection it brings, even if his policies are otherwise overwhelmingly appealing.

The designers and programmers who unleashed Microsoft Exchange upon the world should be shot.

That is all.

This blog has been deluged with spam comments over the last few days. I was on vacation with limited Internet access, but now that I’ve returned, I have cleaned up all the spam and enabled two anti-spam measures: captchas and comment moderation.

Although your comments will be held until I have a chance to approve them, my comment policy still stands. I will delete them only in cases of spam, illegal content, or other obvious cases of abuse. Comments that disagree with my positions are fine; in fact, they are encouraged — I love good, healthy debate!

The Michigan state government is, at the time of this writing, on the verge of shutting down. Our fiscal year begins on October 1st (Monday), and unless the Republican retards and Democratic douchebags can end their eight-month budgetary battle this weekend, all non-essential services will be shut down and Michigan will officially become a national laughingstock.

If you want to be disgusted, read more: NY Times, MLive, Free Press.

As if that weren’t bad enough, the sleazy politicians are finding plenty of time to produce attack advertisements.

I have had it with this economy. I have had it with the contemptible creeps in Lansing. I’ve rejected several out-of-state job offers in the past, due in no small part to loyalty to my home state. Screw that. When the next good offer comes along, Michigan is going to lose yet another college-educated technical professional, and I will shake the dust from my shoes as I cross the state line.

Is there any rational justification for this whatsoever?

Christian fundamentalists: if you enjoy being a group of grown human beings with an invisible friend, that’s your business. If you want to ignore the portion of your “holy” book that claims that the alleged son of said invisible friend magically produced alcohol for a party (and thereby endorsed its consumption), that is also your prerogative.

However, your religious blue laws have absolutely no place in free, civilized societies. How dare you push your delusional beliefs onto the rest of us, interfering with the right of private parties to utilize their property as they see fit and using the power of the government to suppress perfectly moral behavior because it, in your opinion, offends your imaginary friend?

For what it’s worth, I’m issuing a plea to email users everywhere: if you receive a message and feel the urge to forward it along, please engage your critical thinking skills instead of blasting it out to everyone in your address book. If an email makes too-good-to-be-true promises, warns of dire consequences for failing to take some action, or spreads vicious rumors about well-known people, there’s a good chance that it’s complete nonsense. Don’t assume that something is true simply because it came to you through the series of tubes in the interwebs.

Note: In this particular blog post, I’m not really arguing against the forwarding of jokes, optical illusions, brain-teasers, tests, religious stories and the like. While such forwards are irritating to most technically-savvy users of email, what I’m really complaining about are those email chain letters that make specific, absurd, and easily debunked claims about the nature of reality.

Example #1:

REMINDER 11 days from today, all cell phone numbers are being released to telemarketing companies and you will start to receive sales calls. You will be charged for these calls! Even if you do not answer, the telemarketer will end up in your voice mail and you will be charged for all of the minutes the incoming (usually recorded) message takes to complete. You will then also be charged when you call your voice mail to retrieve your messages. To prevent this, call 888-382-1222 from your cell phone. This is the national DO NOT CALL list; it takes only a minute to register your cell phone number and it blocks most telemarketers calls for five years.

Example #2:

My name is Bill Palmer, founder of Applebees. In an attempt to get our name out to more people in the rural communities where we are not currently located, we are offering a $50 gift certificate to anyone who forwards this email to 9 of their friends. Just send this email to them and you will receive an email back with a confirmation number to claim your gift certificate.

Example #3:

Back in 1969 a group of Black Panthers decided that a Black man named Alex Rackley needed to die. [...] Rackley was first tied to a chair. Safely immobilized his “friends” tortured him for hours by, among other things, pouring boiling water on him. When they got tired of torturing Rackley Black Panther member Warren Kimbro took Mr. Rackley’s outside and put a bullet in his head. [...] How in the world do you think that these killers got off so easy? Well, maybe it was in some part due to the efforts of two people who came to the defense of the Panthers. These two people actually went so far as to shut down Yale University with demonstrations in defense of the accused Black Panthers during their trial. [...] O.K., so who was the other Panther defender? [...] The other Panther defender was, like Lee, a radical law student at Yale University at that time. She is now known as The Smartest Woman in the World. She is none other than the unofficial Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate from the State of New York - our lovely First Lady, the incredible Hillary Rodham Clinton. [...] And now, as Paul Harvey said; You know the rest of the story. Pass this on! This deserves the widest possible press. Also remember it when she runs for President.

All three of these letters either made it to my inbox directly, or were submitted to me for analysis. All three are, to put it gently, crap. The offer mentioned in Example #2 is ludicrous on its face. Example #1 is a well-intentioned, plausible-sounding warning, but it, too, is false. Example #3 is not only fabricated, but a disgusting personal attack.

A little bit of Googling will reveal the truth about these deceptive emails. In particular, I’d like to mention the excellent Urban Legends Reference Pages (a.k.a “Snopes”) website. This site contains an enormous repository of refuted hoaxes, including the three I mentioned: cell phones, Applebee’s, and Hillary. If you receive a suspicious email, verify its claims against Google and Snopes. It will almost certainly turn out to be garbage, and you should delete the email and/or set the sender straight.

The latter myth deserves further commentary. I am aware that several of my readers are die-hard Republicans who passionately loathe Hillary Clinton. Although I am not a Republican, I am not a Democrat either (as explained elsewhere, I am a Libertarian) and I’m not a fan of Hillary’s policies. However, when presented with blatantly-false trash-talk about someone, I feel compelled to stand up for the truth and protest the spread of bald-faced lies.

It’s one thing to vote Republican because you have given serious thought to a wide range of issues (not just abortion and gay marriage) and have come to honest conclusions, but it’s quite another to deepen an existing hatred of a Democratic candidate based on a completely fabricated story. It’s even worse to spread such misinformation, uncritically, due to a strong confirmation bias.

Another scientific body, the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, has spoken out against the idiotic Creation Museum in Kentucky.

From the article:

The Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, a world-wide scientific and educational organization concerned with vertebrate paleontology, contends that the museum presents visitors with a view of earth history that has been scientifically disproven for over a century.

The Creation Museum’s fossil exhibitions, though artistically impressive, include a vast number of scientific errors, large and small. These errors range from implying that the Earth’s sedimentary rocks were deposited by a single biblical Flood, to claiming that humans and dinosaurs lived alongside one another, to denouncing the reality of transitional fossils.

“Ken Ham is not recognized as a scientist or educator among experts in the fields of geology and paleontology, and his views on the interpretation of Biblical texts are extremist. Visitors to his ‘museum’ may arrive knowing little about these sciences, but they will leave misled and intellectually deceived,” said Dr. Kevin Padian, professor and curator, University of California, Berkeley and president of the National Center for Science Education.

“That’s the real danger of such a place – undermining the basic principles of science, eroding the public’s confidence in science, and causing a general weakening of science education in the country,” commented Dr. Glenn Storrs of the Cincinnati Museum Center.

I don’t have much to add to this, other than to echo the sentiments of this song.