The Damned

An article from Truthout was posted a few days ago. Here's the interview Keith Olberman did with Mikey Weinstein

Truthout's reporting on the Army's so-called "spiritual fitness" test was featured on Thursday by MSNBC host Keith Olbermann on Countdown.

Mikey Weinstein, president and founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, discussed Jason Leopold's report detailing the forced spiritual testing of over 800,000 uniformed soldiers as part of the Comprehensive Soldier Fitness Program.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

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Thanks to LWS for the link
Joel Barlow's disavowal of Christianity as the basis for US government in the 1797 treaty of Tripoli is a mystery

John Adams, who served as US president between 1797 to 1801, signed the treaty of Tripoli without comment. Photograph: Time Life Pictures/Mansell/Getty Images
On 3 January 1797, 214 years ago, Joel Barlow, an American poet pressed into service as the US consul-general in Algiers, drafted and signed the treaty of Tripoli. Its article 11 states: "The government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion." In 1797, to those who had drafted and signed the declaration of independence and the constitution, it seemed a statement of plain truth. American newspapers reprinted the treaty of Tripoli without igniting public debate. The US Senate approved it unanimously and without discussion. President John Adams signed it without comment.

In the past two generations, a "Christian nation" movement in the US has made article 11 of the otherwise-forgotten treaty of Tripoli's an occasional point of debate. In a sense, article 11 is a bit of an enigma. Why was the disavowal of Christianity included in the treaty? Did Barlow intend it to mollify the Bey of Algiers and other Muslim leaders of the Barbary states, whose piracy exerted an expensive toll on US shipping in the Mediterranean? Was it meant to rally European revolutionaries, who had become Barlow's friends and allies? Did it aim to consolidate the authority of Thomas Jefferson and other secularists in America, whose achievements Barlow prized? It is not clear, and Barlow never explained.

It may not be clear why Barlow put article 11 in the treaty of Tripoli, but it is clear that he had once had religion, and lost it. Following his 1778 graduation from Yale, he entered the ministry and, in 1780, became a chaplain in the revolutionary army. In 1784, the Connecticut general assembly even made Barlow the state of Connecticut's official translator of the Book of Psalms. In 1792, however, after four years in London and Paris, he published Advice to the Privileged Orders, a revolutionary work which, basically, offered members of the European aristocracy their lives in exchange for their surrender.

November 30, 2010

These words are part of a coordinated multi-organizational ad campaign slated to launch tomorrow. It is designed to raise awareness about people who don't believe in a god. Ads proclaiming this message will appear on the sides of "T" buses traveling in Fort Worth and other Tarrant County cities. They will continue until the end of the year.

Placed by the Dallas-Fort Worth Coalition of Reason (DFW CoR), each ad features the words displayed over an image of an American flag made up of the faces of real atheist and agnostic people. The campaign is designed to help those interested find the fifteen area nontheistic groups that make up the DFW coalition.

"We'd have run these ads on Dallas buses as well," noted DFW CoR Coordinator Terry McDonald, "but when we approached DART, they chose to stop running all religiously-related ads rather than include ours."

The Fort Worth bus ads are also part of a national effort sponsored by DFW CoR's parent organization, the United Coalition of Reason. Thus there have been similar transit ads this year in Detroit, Northwest Arkansas, Philadelphia and Washington DC as well as billboards in Austin, Des Moines, Louisville, New Orleans, Oklahoma City, Jacksonville, St. Augustine, St. Petersburg, Tampa, Tucson, Sacramento, St. Louis and Seattle. Last year such billboard, bus and subway ads appeared in 20 cities, including Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Chicago, Cincinnati, Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, Tulsa, Phoenix and San Diego.

"The point of our national campaign is to reach out to the millions of humanists, atheists and agnostics living in the United States," explained Fred Edwords, national director of the United Coalition of Reason. "Nontheists like these sometimes don't realize there's a community out there for them because they're inundated with religious messages at every turn. So we hope this will serve as a beacon and let them know they aren't alone."

Reaching out to a secular audience isn't the only goal of the campaign, however. "We want religious people to understand that non-believers are basically the same as everyone else," added Terry McDonald. "We are as 'good', as moral as any other group. If you look you'll find us among your friends, neighbors, coworkers and family members. There are about 50 million non-religious people in the United States. It's time we were recognized and granted our rightful place in society."

For more details on the Fort Worth campaign and for hi-res images of the ad, free for media use, go to <www.dfwcor.org>.

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Sarah Ameigh, of the American Humanist Association, on Tuesday at a sparsely attended presentation of a national ad campaign.

Just in time for the holiday season, Americans are about to be hit with a spate of advertisements promoting the joy and wisdom of atheism.

Four separate and competing national organizations representing various streams of atheists, humanists and freethinkers will soon be spreading their gospel through advertisements on billboards, buses and trains, and in newspapers and magazines.

The latest, announced on Tuesday in Washington, is the first to include spots on television and cable. This campaign juxtaposes particularly primitive — even barbaric — passages from the Bible and the Koran with quotations from nonbelievers and humanists like Albert Einstein and Katharine Hepburn.

The godless groups say they are mounting this surge because they are aware that they have a large, untapped army of potential troops. The percentage of American adults who say they have no religion has doubled in the last two decades, to 15 percent, according to the American Religious Identification Survey, conducted by researchers at Trinity College in Hartford and released in 2008. But the ranks of the various atheist organizations number only in the tens of thousands.

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Reversing a longstanding policy, the federal government said on Friday that human and other genes should not be eligible for patents because they are part of nature. The new position could have a huge impact on medicine and on the biotechnology industry.

The new position was declared in a friend-of-the-court brief filed by the Department of Justice late Friday in a case involving two human genes linked to breast and ovarian cancer.

“We acknowledge that this conclusion is contrary to the longstanding practice of the Patent and Trademark Office, as well as the practice of the National Institutes of Health and other government agencies that have in the past sought and obtained patents for isolated genomic DNA,” the brief said.

It is not clear if the position in the legal brief, which appears to have been the result of discussions among various government agencies, will be put into effect by the Patent Office.

If it were, it is likely to draw protests from some biotechnology companies that say such patents are vital to the development of diagnostic tests, drugs and the emerging field of personalized medicine, in which drugs are tailored for individual patients based on their genes.

“It’s major when the United States, in a filing, reverses decades of policies on an issue that everyone has been focused on for so long,” said Edward Reines, a patent attorney who represents biotechnology companies.
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Thanks to Kim Z for the link

IN DOVER, Pennsylvania, five years ago, a group of parents were nearing the end of an epic legal battle: they were taking their school board to court to stop them teaching "intelligent design" to their children.

The plaintiffs eventually won their case, and on 16 October many of them came together for a private reunion. Yet intelligent design and the creationism for which it is a front are far from dead in the US, and the threat to the teaching of evolution remains.

Cyndi Sneath was one of the Dover plaintiffs who had a school-age son at the time of the trial. She has since become an active member of the American Civil Liberties Union and a member of the Dover Area School Board. "My interest in public education and civil liberties was certainly sparked by the trial," she says. "And that interest permeates our family discussions."

Chemistry teacher Robert Eschbach, who was also a plaintiff, says the trial has made teachers less afraid to step on people's toes when it comes to evolution. It "forced me to be a better educator", he says. "I went back and read more of the history around Darwin and how he came to his conclusions."

None of this means that the Discovery Institute, the Seattle-based think tank that promotes intelligent design, has been idle. The institute helped the conservative Louisiana Family Forum (LFF), headed by Christian minister Gene Mills, to pass a state education act in 2008 that allows local boards to teach intelligent design alongside evolution under the guise of "academic freedom".
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Thanks to Skepticato for the link

I was born in Den Bosch, the city after which Hieronymus Bosch named himself. 1 This obviously does not make me an expert on the Dutch painter, but having grown up with his statue on the market square, I have always been fond of his imagery, his symbolism, and how it relates to humanity’s place in the universe. This remains relevant today since Bosch depicts a society under a waning influence of God.

His famous triptych with naked figures frolicking around — “The Garden of Earthly Delights” — seems a tribute to paradisiacal innocence. The tableau is far too happy and relaxed to fit the interpretation of depravity and sin advanced by puritan experts. It represents humanity free from guilt and shame either before the Fall or without any Fall at all. For a primatologist, like myself, the nudity, references to sex and fertility, the plentiful birds and fruits and the moving about in groups are thoroughly familiar and hardly require a religious or moral interpretation. Bosch seems to have depicted humanity in its natural state, while reserving his moralistic outlook for the right-hand panel of the triptych in which he punishes — not the frolickers from the middle panel — but monks, nuns, gluttons, gamblers, warriors, and drunkards.

Five centuries later, we remain embroiled in debates about the role of religion in society. As in Bosch’s days, the central theme is morality. Can we envision a world without God? Would this world be good? Don’t think for one moment that the current battle lines between biology and fundamentalist Christianity turn around evidence. One has to be pretty immune to data to doubt evolution, which is why books and documentaries aimed at convincing the skeptics are a waste of effort. They are helpful for those prepared to listen, but fail to reach their target audience. The debate is less about the truth than about how to handle it. For those who believe that morality comes straight from God the creator, acceptance of evolution would open a moral abyss.
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Thanks to Miranda Celeste for the link

Yesterday I had an unexpected treat. Richard Dawkins, the world-renowned evolutionary biologist, was making a stop at Duke on his national tour promoting his new book, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution. At the last minute I was asked to join a small group having brunch with him and was given a front-row seat at his talk in the afternoon.

Dawkins is quintessentially upper-class British. Well-spoken, gracious, dressed impeccably even on a Sunday morning, he has a sharp wit that can be quite cutting in a subtle kind of way when he wants it to be. Great fun when you're on his side, not so much when you're not. Yesterday there were lots of laughs for the folks who fall on the side of Dawkins's cause célèbre.

That cause is evolution: that Darwin's theory of evolution is largely fact, not conjecture or speculation or hypothesis. And that is certainly the case. In his talk yesterday, as in his many popular books, he does a magnificent job of explicating the science, the evidence, and the history of how that science and evidence were developed.

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Via onegoodmove

Bill Maher interviews Richard Tillman

Thanks to TheRationalizer for the link

RICHARD FEYNMAN, Nobel laureate and physicist extraordinaire, called it a “magic number” and its value “one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics”. The number he was referring to, which goes by the symbol alpha and the rather more long-winded name of the fine-structure constant, is magic indeed. If it were a mere 4% bigger or smaller than it is, stars would not be able to sustain the nuclear reactions that synthesise carbon and oxygen. One consequence would be that squishy, carbon-based life would not exist.

Why alpha takes on the precise value it has, so delicately fine-tuned for life, is a deep scientific mystery. A new piece of astrophysical research may, however, have uncovered a crucial piece of the puzzle. In a paper just submitted to Physical Review Letters, a team led by John Webb and Julian King from the University of New South Wales in Australia present evidence that the fine-structure constant may not actually be constant after all. Rather, it seems to vary from place to place within the universe. If their results hold up to the scrutiny, and can be replicated, they will have profound implications—for they suggest that the universe stretches far beyond what telescopes can observe, and that the laws of physics vary within it. Instead of the whole universe being fine-tuned for life, then, humanity finds itself in a corner of space where, Goldilocks-like, the values of the fundamental constants happen to be just right for it.
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I’ve been pretty hard on Francis Collins, what with his mixing faith and science and telling people that there’s empirical evidence for God’s existence. But that makes it extra incumbent on me to give him kudos when he does something right. I mentioned the other day his support of stem-cell research, which is discussed in a new article, “The Covenant,” in The New Yorker. Maybe I was too eager to get in a lick against Christianity, so let me say that I much appreciate his going to bat for good science and humanitarian medicine. And then there’s this:

Collins strongly disputes that assessment [Craig Venter's pronouncement that the Human Genome Project has contributed little to medicine]. He says that after reading the Times story he sat down and wrote out a list of breakthroughs directly attributable to the advances in genomics, among them providing new understanding of age-related macular degeneration, Crohn’s disease and the role of autophagy, and Parkinson’s disease and the central role of alpha-synuclein aggregates; and the development of a recent drug for lupus. “It’s revolutionized everything that we do,” he says. He has discussed some of this with his friend the militant atheist Christopher Hitchens: “As you might have heard, Christopher has esophageal cancer, and I have actually been spending a fair amount of time with him and his wife, Carol, trying to help him sort through the options for therapy—including some rather cutting-edge approaches based on cancer genomics.”

I’m not going to pull my punches if Collins continues his public harmonizing of science and faith, but any Christian who would try to cure the world’s most vocal atheist is a Christian I can appreciate—and live with.
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PZ Myers is an associate professor of biology at the University of Minnesota at Morris and the man behind the popular science blog Pharyngula.

Q: What’s the first thing you read in the morning?
A: My site, Pharyngula, of course. I have to clean up spam, catch up with the conversation, and feed the fires with my own contributions.

Q: What newspapers and magazines do you subscribe to or read regularly? What do you read in print versus online or mobile?
A: I read Nature, Science, BioEssays, Development, Developmental Biology, PNAS [Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences] regularly, and a few other journals irregularly. I read almost nothing printed on paper—I prefer to download PDF’s and read them on my laptop or iPad.
Newspapers I might read occasionally for the novelty, usually if there’s one left on the table at the coffee shop. I do browse The New York Times online

Q: What books have you recently read?
A: I read a book every day or two, except lately when I’ve been swamped with work. Last book read was Lone Frank’s Mindfield: How Brain Science Is Changing Our World, before that was Oren Harman’s The Price of Altruism, Erik Larson’s Thunderstruck, a fun little book called Quirks of Human Anatomy by Lewis Held, it goes on and on. I tend to slurp up any printed matter that stumbles before my eyes.

Q: Has your reading of professional journals changed in the past 10 years? If so, how?
A: Not in subject matter, which remains almost entirely in developmental and evolutionary biology. I have picked up browsing the PLoS journals. The big change is in the switch to electronic media—10 years ago, it was a matter of regular trips to the library to photocopy papers. Now I just stuff PDF’s onto a hard drive.

Q: Do you read blogs? If so, what blogs do you like best?
A: My faves right now are Why Evolution Is True, Sandwalk, Butterflies and Wheels, ERV, a few others—anything where the personality of the author shines through, and I do favor hard-edged godless science writers who don’t mince words.
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A Beavercreek couple who left their infant daughter's fate to God rather than seek medical treatment for a mass that grew over her left eye will face charges of first-degree criminal mistreatment.

Prosecutors revealed Thursday during a custody hearing that a grand jury has indicted Timothy and Rebecca Wyland, members of Oregon City's Followers of Christ church.

The Wylands' 7-month-old daughter, Alayna, was placed in state custody earlier this month after child-welfare workers received a tip about the untreated and ballooning growth. Doctors said that the condition could cause permanent damage or loss of vision.

The Wylands were indicted within the past few days and probably will be arraigned next week, said Colleen Gilmartin, the deputy district attorney handling the custody case in juvenile court.

Under Oregon law, it is a crime for parents to intentionally and knowingly withhold necessary and adequate medical attention from their children. First-degree criminal mistreatment is a Class C felony punishable by up to five years in prison.

The Wylands and their church reject medical care in favor of faith-healing -- anointing with oil, laying on of hands, prayer and fasting. The parents testified at a juvenile court hearing last week that they never considered getting medical attention for Alayna.
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