Hilarious creationists

This comes from a silly creationist site that has no authority on anything to do with science or common sense.

There is no scientific evidence that a species can change the number of chromosomes within the DNA. The chromosome count within each species is fixed. This is the reason a male from one species cannot mate successfully with a female of another species.

There is specific evidence for this occurring. Currently Darren Wong is painstakingly going through each creationist claim from that site piece by piece. He has yet to get to this bit, but I will leave it up to him since he’s willing to go into such enormous detail on everything. (Though for the time being, here is one version of what he’s going to say.)

What I want to address here is the last sentence in the above quote. I mean, really? This creationist thinks the reason a male from one species is prevented from reproducing with a female from another has to do with chromosome count? Really? So then I should expect an orangutan to be able to reproduce with a hedgehog since they both have 48 chromosomes?

Merry Christmas

“Basically the atheists are just stupid…” … “Lol.”

An atheist group has a sign up in the Illinois state capitol which reads as follows:

At this season
OF THE WINTER SOLSTICE
may reason prevail.

There are no gods,
no devils, no angels,
no heaven or hell.
There is only our natural world.
Religion is but
a myth and superstition
that hardens hearts
and enslaves minds.

This is the same message that was posted in the Washington state capitol last year. If you click that link, you’ll see Bill O’Reilly’s take on the issue. Now he has the genuinely dumb Ann Coulter chiming in this year.

First Billo says atheists are stupid for making people angry. Really? Bill O’Reilly is making this a central part of his argument? It’s a strategy that has clearly brought him success.

The next point he makes is that this is a “Christian-generated holiday”. First of all, Christmas has its roots outside Christianity. Second of all, it’s a federal holiday that the Supreme Court has ruled has been secularized to the point where it sufficiently lacks enough religious connection to be allowable as a holiday in the first place. As I said last year, if it was deemed to simply be a Christian celebration, it would not be a federal holiday today. Third, the Illinois state capitol does not endorse Christianity.

For some bizarre reason, Billo then says that atheists are demanding to be allowed to call people “idiots” for believing in Christianity or Christmas. First, no. Second, I ‘believe’ in Christmas. I plan on celebrating it like I have every year. I don’t intend on telling everyone at the Christmas party to stop being idiots, myself included. Third, the atheist group is stating its position that belief in gods and devils and angels and other such things are false beliefs. If a Jewish group put up a sign saying there is no hell, that would inherently be telling hell-believing religions they are wrong. Would Billo and Little Anny Coulter be jumping down their throats? Christ. It’s a group promoting its view. Deal with it.

Billo next says it’s just insulting to be called an idiot. Again, no one did that here, but if it makes him feel better, I can get rid of this strawman for him: Billo. You’re an idiot.

Little Anny then goes off into kook land and claims that the U.S. was established on the belief in God and makes distinctions between religions. She’s an idiot, too.

Finally Little Anny tries her hand at analogies. Being someone who is genuinely dumb, she fails – as one should expect. She says this is all like everyone bringing in a picture of his or her pet but then one person brings in a sign that says “I hate Fluffy and Fluffy sucks”. She concludes that this doesn’t fit within “the public forum definition” and thus shouldn’t even be tolerated. (Conveniently, she just defined herself as a bigot for me. Thanks, Anny.) In other words, the Illinois state capitol is open to religious displays and religious displays only. I find this fascinating since Little Anny has time and again argued that atheism is a religion. I guess if atheist signs should be banned for not being religious, then atheism isn’t a religion. Crazy! Who would have thought a genuinely dumb person would hold entirely contradictory positions at once?

The tenability of unsourced claims as they pertain to objective morality

Is it possible for a believer in objective evil to determine what actually is evil without either invoking his god (or claimed objective standard) or undermining his entire position? Examine.

For the sake of expediency, “God”, here, can refer to any deity of a belief structure which is viewed as creating some ultimate standard for evil. This includes polytheistic belief structures in many cases. “Evil” can usually be read to include both good and evil.

Here’s the common stance: In order to determine what is ultimately right or wrong, one must make an appeal to a source which has final standing. Without such an appeal, right or wrong has no universal meaning, only local meaning, and that is ultimately meaningless. (On an aside, that only addresses the value of local meaning on a universal scale – something obviously addressed simply in terminology. It says nothing of the local value of local meaning.)

With this stance comes some questions. If that ultimate source is necessary for ultimate right or wrong (and exists), how can one know what he/she/it has to say on any given human moral affair? Is it possible for one to have access to all this source has to say? Are humans limited in access?

The common answer to the first question comes in the form of holy texts. The Torah, Bible, and Koran are “the big three”. They give specific decrees on things that are right and wrong while claiming to be from God. In them murder is universally wrong. Theft, sex before marriage, dishonoring one’s parents. All, and many more, are described throughout these books. They and other holy texts act as the most direct source to knowing what is right or wrong as declared by an ultimate source.

The second question is where moral claims by believers run into trouble. Is it possible to have access to all an ultimate source has to say by virtue of holy texts? Obviously not. It isn’t possible for all moral situations and conundrums to be addressed via individual books. More directly, not all such instances are actually addressed.

So does this limit human access to this ultimate information? If holy texts account for the only manner by which one can attain such knowledge, then yes. If there are alternative routes, then those must by explored. Meditation, inference, and prayer offer the most promising paths. But first it is necessary to tie everything together.

The accuracy of any declaration on right or wrong is called into question in any holy text since they are all written by fallible human beings. This must be acknowledged for the sake of truth-seeking. However, for the sake of argumentation, it will be necessary to side-step the issue. Instead, the focus must go on to the second question. The possibility of having access to everything God has to say is nil if holy texts are the only source. What this importantly means is that if a moral issue arises which is not addressed within any holy text, then it is not possible for a believer to make an objective stance. One topical issue can be grabbed from the headlines to make the point.

Abortion is not addressed in any of the big three holy texts. Vague passages can be interpreted as such (much like Dr. Seuss’ “Horton Hears a Who” has been abused), but nothing is ever really said. This means that if a believer is to make a claim that abortion is objectively evil (remember, or good) here, he has no ground on which to stand. At least he has no ground by his own position that objective evil must come from an objective source. By chance he may be right that his objective source believes abortion is evil (he has a 50/50 shot, afterall), but his determination is based upon some other source. What that source may be or is bears no importance here. It is enough to say that it is emphatically not God.

For the further sake of expediency, it should be readily pointed out that even should abortion prove to be the wrong example for this exercise (though it isn’t), then others abound. Is capitalism evil? Communism? Social security? Even wearing mismatched socks? No holy text says anything of these issues or a number of others.

Back to the third question, human access may not be limited to just holy texts if meditation, inference, and prayer are options. These all fail, however. Should meditation and prayer reveal any information on a moral question, they are not valid beyond the targeted person. While it is possible that God revealed that something is objectively evil to a particular person, that largely argues for a local meaning. That is, Susie may know that it is objectively evil to spin in circles after sunset because God told her, but that information is entirely reliant upon Susie – the standard can only be determined to be subjective (even if it really is objective). As for inference, that can only be done using holy texts or prayer in the first place. So let us not forget the very first question: is it possible to determine what is objectively evil without invoking God. Susie may have an alternative source, but it is still God. She may be able to infer from what God has revealed, but she still must invoke his existence.

So what if a believer says “X is objectively evil” but has no holy text or revelation to back up such a claim? That is, there is no source which says “This is what God says about this issue” and there is no source which could directly indicate what God says. How can the believer then say something is objectively evil? This necessarily undermines his entire premise. If something can be determined to be objectively evil without first invoking God, then there is some other method by which the believer is making his statement. He obviously cannot logically maintain saying he knows objective standards exist because God exists and God exists because objective standards exist.

In short, no, a believer cannot “determine what actually is evil without either invoking his god (or claimed objective standard) or undermining his entire position”. He must invoke his god or undermine his whole argument. As has been demonstrated, he must cite his god (or objective standard). He often cannot do that. In those situations if he then says he has determined that something is objectively evil anyway, he is either wrong or he has admitted that his objective standard is not actually necessary for purposes here.

On a final note (one for clarification), this argument can be applied to any declaration on evil by a believer in objective standards. If it is necessary for objectiveness to exist in order for evil to exist, then the position is still undermined whenever a believer declares something evil without any sort of source beyond himself. The argument is precisely the same, but the terms are clarified: “evil” always means “objective evil” in the given context.

Thought of the day

Happiness is happiness and morality is morality and sadness is sadness and joy is joy because it all must end.

Silly atheist, celebrations are for religions

Oh no! Christmas is coming upon us! Me, but a lowly atheist, what am I to do?

As is well-known fact, all atheists are merely “jealous of the Yuletide season”. Isn’t it obvious? We have no Jesus. We have no God. We have no cause to celebrate anything!

So what am I suppose to do this Friday? Sure, I’ve bought presents. My brother, who I hope isn’t a regular reader at the moment, will probably be pretty psyched about his Super Nintendo (complete with Super Mario Kart). And yeah, the rest of my family will be happy to receive their gifts. And yes! I know! All my second cousins, many yet to hit double-digits in age, will glow with joy while A Christmas Story plays in the background during their present opening. And gosh darn it! It’s no secret my aunt and uncle and cousins and (older) second cousins and great aunt and great uncle and parents and brother and grandmother will all be so happy to be together to catch up and remember and reacquaint and even just see each other even though some may have seen each other just the week before. (Deep breath after that one.) But so what? There’s no Jebus!

I mean, honestly. How could I ever derive a cause to celebrate out of all that? I have no deity to worship. I have no stranger-filled church to attend. Where o where might I find reason to do anything this December 25th?

Morality, step by step

The idea that morality from God is morality at all is rather absurd. Should one devote a moment of thought to the matter, it quickly becomes obvious that behaving a certain way because some entity said to do so is entirely devoid of any concern for humanity. That concern may be there as a supplement, but it is not the cause for any action. (In reality it is, but the Moral Majority likes to pretend they’re doing it all for God, not out of some more substantial source of morality.)

Before going on, however, there is one idea that needs to be done away with here. It’s this notion that morality must be objective in order to be morality. This entirely false. There is nothing which inherently demands that morality be ultimately objective in order to exist (well, except for that pesky Moral Majority – but their demands are subjective opinions, so scoff).

Morality derived from religion is merely morality as dictated by men (and only men) of the past. That’s it. But let’s suppose it actually means something. Let’s suppose that an all-powerful god really has told humanity what is right and wrong. What stops God from suddenly changing the rules? If God decrees that rape and murder are totally awesome things, then so it is. The characteristic of being all-powerful demands it. But how many people would readily accept such things? Far from being meaningful, this pernicious idea of ‘objective’ morality has no viscosity; it is allowed to flow and move. More importantly, it allows for no input from any human.

A subjective morality – the only tenable morality – is in the hands of humanity. The closest thing it can have to an objective basis is that of reality. Our morality may move and change with the facts and evidence, but we can go beyond such temporal constrictions and base it on universal principles. Most of mankind once believed that it was okay to enslave certain people because they demonstrated some characteristic or (more often) trait which made them inherently lesser. With the advance of science (and to the chagrin of religion), it has been empirically determined that there is no such inherent lessening property. People of different races are not fundamentally different. In fact, the Human Genome Project taught us that people of the same race can be more genetically diverse than people of different races. (Of course, there was good evidence long before that to help us determine the sameness between and among races and groups.)

The universal principle by which we live in regards to slavery is that it is wrong to make humans do work against their will without just compensation. (A child being forced to eat his peas, for instance, would be given just compensation in the form of health.) We derive this principle partially out of empathy. What if it was me who was enslaved?. Importantly, this is far from simply being a selfish desire. Instead, it is that if we allow some humans to be enslaved, we allow ourselves to be enslaved, and this undermines the goal of doing anything productive, something for which we all strive on some level.

This, of course, raises the issue of why it is good to be productive. (The term does not refer to a particular level of productivity, but rather taking in more energy than is released overall, i.e., living.) Again, the question regresses to yet another question because the answer is that most humans want to live. Why is it good to live?

The answer here is that it isn’t good or bad to live. Living is something which simply is. Our desire to do it (which, incidentally, we could call objective in at least one sense) is powerful. We want life, whether good or bad. That is universal to us as a species. This is ultimately our source of morality, and in several senses. First, our desire to live is borne of the very fact that we are alive: we are here because we are descended from a long line of ancestors who shared the exact same desires. Second, it is agreed upon by humanists, atheists, secularists, Buddhists, theists, and philosophers that in order to call something moral, it must have some sort of basis. “It is wrong to enslave” has its basis in the principle described above. “It is good to live” has its basis in our inherited desires. Every other normative claim can have its basis ultimately boiled down to that phrase (which itself, again, has a basis).

(Had I not a response to it) the most glaring flaw in the above paragraph would be that we have desires to do a lot of things, but that doesn’t make anything right or wrong. Agreed. However, those desires are not universal to us as a species. The ones which are universal all come down to living (such as eating). Furthermore, it is necessarily true that the only ultimate desire we can ever maintain is the desire to live. By virtue of being alive we inherit this desire.

What, though, of the minority who doesn’t wish to be alive? What of the Alan Turing’s, Budd Dwyer’s, and Kurt Cobain’s of the world? These cases can always be boiled down to environmental factors, not inherent desires. Turing faced chemical castration and a heap of undue scorn for who he was; Dwyer had been criminally indicted and faced serious jail time and ruination of his career; Cobain was heavily depressed and a drug addict.

But rather than all this, perhaps a more salient point on this matter would be that humans inherently have moral systems. With what we fill those systems may be subjective, but this still goes to an earlier point: morality need not be objective to exist. It is with our familial and personal desires, universal principles and philosophies, experiences and empathy that we create our morality. Ultimately, the vast majority of humans come to a consensus on at least one basis: it is good to live. We need not go further to continue to find middle ground. If we agree on an underlying principle, and if all which follows in our discussions is based upon that agreement, then it is meaningless to then say that we disagree on some other principle.

Finally I turn my attention to an oft-ignored idea. What is the point of morality? It certainly isn’t to demonstrate that one can act according to some objective idea. This goes to the first point that acting without concern toward humanity is not morality at all. Indeed, instead of morality being inherently defined as something objective (which is a notion taken for granted by so many), it is rather defined as something which is a human concern. Go beyond humanity and you’ve gone beyond morality. This, fundamentally, is what morality is all about. Our systems of morality are inherent in all of us and the reason is their utter usefulness. We need and want them in better utilizing our role as individual members of humanity.

Hubble and monkeys

Well, Hubble and an ape, but “monkeys” made for a funnier title.

Non-acceptance and intolerance

Time and again I find myself coming across people who think they’re making some grand point when they call me (or those who share my views) intolerant. It is utterly evident that these people have no working definition of “intolerance”. They are completely unable to make even the simplest of distinctions (which fits with why they tend to be conservative).

The most common instance of this has to do with same-sex marriage. It’s a definitional fact that those who oppose same-sex marriage are bigots. They deny that marriage is a right for all and base their conclusions on a lack of acceptance for homosexuality. This lack of acceptance, though wholly ignorant and pathetic, is legally and morally acceptable on some level because it does not infringe on the rights of others. However, the conclusions based on that lack of acceptance are morally reprehensible and (more relevantly to government) legally unsound. They are non-acceptance turned intolerance. And intolerance is the cornerstone of bigotry.

With that in mind, it should be obvious that those in favor of same-sex marriage are not intolerant. Most commonly it is when one (especially I) uses the word “bigot” to describe anti-same-sex marriage people. It can’t be helped that the word is perfectly suited for the subject, but that does not equal intolerance. No one is infringing upon anyone’s rights or freedoms or liberties. No one is forcing Catholics (the bigoted driving force behind Maine’s recent bigotry) to accept anything. More over, no one is forcing anyone to do or believe anything whatsoever which infringes upon anything remotely important (i.e., rights, freedoms, liberties).

The confusion here is mind-boggling. It’s as if people have no ability to distinguish between intolerance and non-acceptance. What’s more, when non-acceptance shows up as a lack of respect, people further believe there is intolerance afoot. Puh-lease. If I say, for instance, that the belief that God created the Universe in the middle of the well-established civilization of the Sumerians is, in fact, a very stupid thing to think, I am not being intolerant. Where have I infringed upon anyone’s rights? Where have I stopped someone from having the freedom to hold such a stupid thought? The answer is that I have not done that. It’s simply that I, as well as most educated people, cannot give deference to such silly things. That’s a lack of acceptance, not intolerance.

Excellent thought of the day

I’m done with this semester.