Truth has a Liberal Bias!

Those damned college professors! They're always teaching the facts! And everyone knows that Truth has a liberal bias. Well, these students aren't taking it lying down:

Conservative College Students Launch Website to Battle Liberal Academia

What courage! Real conservatives, standing up to those liberal professors ... but wait ...

Alas, it turns out these students aren't really concerned about conservative politics. They're Christians, and they're angry that the professors don't respect their beliefs, which probably include creationism, suppression of homosexuality, and the subjugation of women. According to Editor-in-Chief Zachary Freeman:

"I think perhaps we (as a nation) have lost our faith and our understanding. The College Conservative works to indirectly promote the biblical truths."

In other words, they want

Republican "Value Voters": Belief in Evolution Disqualifies Presidential Candidates!

I got busy and was going to skip blogging today, but this is too much. It seems that anyone who believes in evolution is unqualified to run for President of the United States!

At the "Value Voters Summit" this weekend in Washington, D.C., Bryan Fischer of

Why Atheism will Replace Religion, and Why Capitalism Cares

Here's a question that's bugged me for years: why aren't all Christians strong socialists? As Carl Gibson at HuffPost wrote the other day:

Christians would do well to vote for those who actually practice what they preach. While Perry and Paul demand cuts to public programs and health care for the uninsured, President Obama is finding his inner Luke and asking the richest Americans to share their possessions to help lessen the burden of deficit reduction already on the shoulders of working families.

If Jesus demanded a socialistic approach to helping the poor, then why are evangelical Christians almost universally against socialized medicine, unemployment insurance and a decent Social Security system?

Because it's bad for religion, that's why.

Nigel Barber did some fascinating research about atheism. He wanted to know why atheism is so strongly correlated with wealth. Along the way, he discovered the fascinating answer: It's security, not wealth, that drives people to religion.

Evangelical Scientists: Creationism is Wrong!

At last, some serious conservative scholars who are also respected evangelical Christians are coming "out of the closet" regarding Creationism. They don't believe it. According to a fascinating NPR story, they're admitting that the Genesis account of creation can't possibly be right. To believe that we all descended from Adam and Eve "would be against all the genomic evidence that we've assembled over the last twenty years."

And over at BioLogos, there's a long blog about a Christianity Today story that lays out the position

Shhh! Keep Gov. Perry's Idiocy a Secret from the Republicans!

OK everybody, I know you're incredulous at Texas Governor Rick Perry's idiotic pronouncements. But STFU! It's a secret! If we can just keep quiet and let Perry win the Republican nomination, the 2012 election will be ours!

Seriously, people ... can we really have a leader of the free world who uses a controversial and unapproved stem-cell medical procedure, but at the same time doesn't believe in evolution or global warming? Can the President of the United States lead the world if he believes prayer is the only solution to our problems?

Maybe when pigs fly. This kind of stuff scares even moderate Republicans. But don't tell the Tea Party! The evangelical right has hijacked the Republican party, and they're totally drunk on their success. They've become blind to Perry's hypocrisy and anti-science views. They're elated! They honestly think they can drag the entire country from the twenty first century back into the dark ages.

But they're going to have a really hard time getting Perry elected. The Governor of Texas doesn't even know what's going on in his own state! He recently claimed:

Is Christianity Dying? Miley Cyrus Gets a New Tattoo

Miley Cyrus got a new tattoo ... and not just some dumb decoration. This is a pro-gay tattoo! It's actually pretty amusing, an equal-sign "=" on her middle finger. (Think, "give 'em the bird"). It might seem ambiguous except that she tweeted "All LOVE is equal!"

This might seem like just another amusing story about a young starlet, but it shows yet again why Christianity is dying a slow death in America.

Homosexuality and LGBT rights have become the Achilles tendon of conservative Christianity. The out-of-the-closet movement that started in the 1970s has worked: virtually all teens and young adults have

Good News for Atheists: We're Worse than Muslims

Is this a milestone for secularism? A new Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life survey asked evangelical leaders what worried them the most. If you guessed Islam, you guessed wrong. It's secularism!

When asked about major threats to Evangelical Christianity, secularism topped the list at 71%, followed by consumerism (67%), and sex and violence in pop culture (59%). Islam came in a distant fourth at 47%.

(I was amused that the "influence of Catholicism" is also on the list at 10%. I guess these evangelical Christians don't count Catholics among their brethren.)

This is really good news. It means secularism and atheism are making genuine progress around the world. You know you're making a difference when the opposition can't ignore you any more. And when you're their top concern worldwide, it means whatever you're doing is working.

The Pew survey had a few other fascinating

Miss USA 2011: Evolution Answers a Disgrace to Women

The Miss USA competition claims to judge women based on more than just how they look in swimsuits. But the video below is a rather shocking illustration that the competitors are scientifically illiterate. I'll issue the same challenge as my fellow blogger Hemant over at Friendly Atheist: Can you watch the whole thing, or will you turn it off in disgust before it's done?

The young women were asked, "Should evolution be taught in schools?"

I did a quick count. Something like thirty six contestants said or implied "Teach both sides." About a half dozen said that evolution shouldn't be taught at all. Only three (Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Mexico) said "yes" without waffling. But even those three gave weak answers.

But not one gave the right answer. The right answer to this question is, "Yes, evolution should be taught because it's solid, proven science and is the foundation of all biological sciences. If we don't teach evolution, our students will be second-class citizens in the modern scientific world."

This leaves us with two choices. It could be that the Miss USA contest has

How Memes Die: Southern Baptists Confirm Hell is Real

Well, the Southern Baptists have confirmed that they still believe in Hell. And it's still the horrible place where a sadistic God sends most of us to be cruelly tortured forever, merely because we don't fall for that whole strange story about Jesus.

Their declaration was a rebuttal to the immensely popular Pastor Ron Bell's new book, Love Wins, in which Bell questions the traditional view of Hell. Bell, like most thoughtful Christians, rejects the outdated eternal-torture idea of Hell. He sees Hell as grossly immoral and a misinterpretation of gospel.

I love this sort of infighting. It's like watching evolution in real time, something we don't get to do very often in the biological world. When we view religions (and all of human culture) as a vast set of interacting and competing memes, we become detached from the details of the you're-right-I'm-wrong battles. Instead of caring about the fine points of the competing theologies, we can be objective observers who record the outcome of an evolutionary struggle. We actually get to see the survival-of-the-fittest battle of religion memes in their ecology, the collective brains of humanity.

In this case, we get to see the Baptist memeplex losing territory because

Bad Creationism: 50% of US Meat Contaminated by Drug-Resistent Bacteria

There was yet another article on CNN this morning about the meat industry's use of low-dose antibiotics in farm animals. Scientists have been horrified by this practice, but until now the meat industry has ridiculed the scientists' predictions that it would cause the rise of "super bugs," bacteria that were highly drug resistant.

But this time there was some "meat" behind the grim message. A scientific study found that fully half of all meat sold in the United States is contaminated with drug-resistent bacteria. And not just one drug – in one quarter of the meat samples, the bacteria were resistant to three drugs.

This is a direct result of this country's religion-fueled anti-evolution, anti-science attitudes.

Evolutionists and biologists warned the FDA decades ago that feeding low-dose antibiotics to farm animals was a terrible idea, and have continued to sound the alarm ever since. In Europe (where science is respected) most countries banned the use of low-dose penicillin and tetracycline over thirty years ago.

But here in the USA, the FDA has consistently ignored the warnings of scientists and kowtowed to

60% of Science Teachers Are Afraid to Teach Evolution

Did you know that sixty percent of science teachers in America don't teach evolution? And it's not because they don't believe in evolution. It's because they're afraid.

The theory of evolution, the very foundation of modern biology and the best-proved theory in the history of the world, is being censored because the right-wing Christian campaign of fear is working. Teachers are afraid that teaching the truth will cost them their jobs.

If any of my readers think it's time to be optimistic, think again. I'm one of the most optimistic of the atheist bloggers (see my Is Christianity Dying series), but my optimism was seriously tempered this morning.

Intelligent Design Proponent Says God Must Be Stupid

Our friends over at the "Discovery Institute" (a misnomer if ever there was one) have in essence told us that God is just plain stupid. What's even funnier is that their boneheaded leader, Dr. Cornelius Hunter, doesn't even seem to realize what a gaffe he just pulled.

We do not know evolution to be an obvious, compelling explanation of the data—beyond any shadow of a doubt. Yet this is precisely what evolutionists claim. ... Here, for example, is what one professor recently wrote to me:

"An omnipotent god could do anything (we guess), but one who is omnipotent, serious, and thoughtful (at least as serious and thoughtful as an exemplary human) would not route wiring from giraffe’s larynx around its aorta."

How does the professor know that an omnipotent, serious, and thoughtful god would not route wiring from the giraffe’s larynx around its aorta? What does the professor know about omnipotent, serious, and thoughtful gods? And what does the professor know about creating giraffes? Precious little, I’m afraid, in both cases."

Wrong, wrong, wrong!

OK, Dr. Hunter, let me explain it in plain simple terms.

Killing Babies: Why Spanish Conquistadors are like Male Chimpanzees

I received a fascinating email from R.H., a professor at a university in Texas. R.H. drew a clever parallel between infanticide in animals and the history of the Spanish Conquistadors in America.

In nature there are numerous examples of infanticide carried out by "step fathers." For example, when a new male joins a chimpanzee troop he will often kill infants. While this horrifies us, it makes evolutionary sense. When a female chimpanzee enters her fertile period she will typically mate with almost all of the males in her troop. This means that the males in the troop have no idea which male fathered which baby. If a male from the troop kills an infant, it could be his own.

But when a new male joins the troop, he can be certain that he's not the father of any of the babies. If he kills the babies it causes their mothers to become fertile again, and he has a higher probability of passing his genes on. So that's exactly what he does.

You see this in humans too. Sadly, human step fathers are roughly fifty times more likely to kill a step child than the natural father of a child – remarkably parallel to the statistics you find in chimpanzees and many other species. We'd like to think we're evolved, that we've moved past our animal instincts, but it just isn't so. You see this pattern throughout nature: a new mate (male or female) is far more likely to kill the "step children" than the natural parent.

So what on Earth does this have to do with Conquistadors? I thought you'd never ask...

Professor R.H. wrote, "The Spanish destroyed many temples, idols, and customs that connected the indigenous population to their ancient religion." That's an understatement. They also killed

Atheism IS where morality originates

One of the claims of theists that really bugs me is that morality comes from God. No, actually its worse than that. Theists claim that morality can only come from God, and they go on to suggest that without religion, the world will devolve into an amoral chaos of murder, thievery and rape.

And to add insult to the equation, theists claim that whatever morality atheists have is borrowed from religion! They assert that we atheists grew up immersed in a Christian, Jewish and Islamic culture and so we absorbed their morality. Atheists, they claim, are sort of unwitting Christians, Jews and Muslims when it comes to morals.

Its time to turn the theistic argument on its head and show why exactly the opposite is true. The fact is that theists have stolen their morals from human nature. They claim morals come from God, but in fact humans merely put the words in his mouth. The real origin of morality is in our evolutionary heritage.

The truth is, both God and morality are made-up human concepts. We made God in our own image and then we imbued him with our own natural understanding of right and wrong.

When it comes to morality, theists are nothing more than plagiarizers, stealing and giving no credit to the original.

You can easily see this by just educating yourself. Take any freshman college course in cultural anthropology and you'll learn two things:

Science vs Creationism: Arrogance or Truth?

In most social situations, we respect those who are recognized experts. If you were at a party and complemented your host's new marble countertop and a geologist said, "Yes, it is beautiful, but actually, it's granite," you wouldn't argue. And if you did, nobody would feel sorry for you for embarrassing yourself by contradicting the expert.

So why is it that on one specific topic, the age of the Earth, creationists feel qualified to overrule the experts? More to the point, why do they drop the usual social norms? Why do they think it's OK to disagree with a scientist on this one topic, something they would never do on any other subject?

A high-school teacher can tell a student, "No, you are mistaken. Here is the right way to understand this problem." From a sociological perspective, the teacher is the alpha, the dominant person, and the student is submissive. There is no social faux pas when the teacher corrects the student. It's not considered arrogant; the teacher is supposed to be more knowledgable and is supposed to correct the student in front of his/her peers. Nobody is embarrassed by this social dynamic.

But when a creationist violates the normal respect granted to experts by making claims that are scientifically impossible, the scientist has two choices: to become like the high-school teacher, correcting the creationist in front of everyone, or to remain silent and avoid embarrassing the host and other guests.

Creationists have huge gaps in their knowledge when it comes to science. It's not merely that they are ignorant of scientific facts, but rather they don't even know what science is. They often assume that science is a belief system, another set of opinions about the nature of the universe, one that's on equal footing with other belief systems.

This is completely, utterly wrong.

Dr. Cornelius G. Hunter, Biochemist and Fool

I just discovered Dr. Cornelius G. Hunter, the "scientist" attack dog from the Discovery Institute who is wasting his life defending creationism. I probably should ignore the guy. He's such a sad waste of talent. But like so many of the leaders of the creationist movement, he actually manages to fool a lot of people, and that's not something you can ignore.

Hunter has a PhD in biophysics and computational biology, which gives credibility to his sham science. For every article he's written, you can easily find ten from reputable scientists that resoundingly refute his crazy "proofs." Real scientists spend their time discovering new things and improving our lives. Hunter seems to spend all of his time trying to destroy the work of others. That alone shows his dishonesty – if creationism (aka "intelligent design") was a real branch of science, Hunter could find gainful employment making new discoveries of his own.

I'll leave it to the biochemists to refute his complex, convoluted arguments about DNA. But even an amateur like me can find this guy's mistakes. Hunter wrote a paper with holes so big that even a freshman science or philosophy student could drive a truck through them.

Creationism is a Form of Insanity?

Why is it that when talking about religion, a person can make claims that in any other topic would be considered literally insane?

Consider these three people...

"The army says my husband was killed in Iraq, but that would be awful so I know it's not true."

"Our company spent all its money, but that can't be right because we'd go out of business, so let's keep spending."

"The doctor says my baby died, but I don't believe it because I love her too much."

Sad and absurd, right? Anyone who said these things would be headed for psychiatric help. So consider this article by Joe Sobran, who is trying to "prove" that Darwin's theory of evolution is wrong. Sobran starts by lambasting Dan Brown for the historical errors in his book, The Davinci Code, and then morphs that argument into an anti-Darwinism rant. And here's the heart of his logic:

"Children must be taught that nature has no purpose, beyond 'survival of the fittest' – though even survival is, strictly speaking, an accident rather than a purpose. We owe our existence, our humanity itself, not to anything intelligent, but to the chance mutations of stupid matter. This is the dogma of Darwinism, which passes for 'religious neutrality'..."

Mr. Sobran makes it clear that this unpleasant fact, all by itself, makes Darwinism unacceptable. How can it be that there is no purpose to life, no reason for our existence?

In other words, Mr. Sobran refuses to believe in evolution because it is unpleasant.

If Joe Sobran was a lone philosopher, it would be no big deal.

How to Shut Up Pesky Creationists

This talk by Dr. Ken Miller is really amazing both in how clearly it refutes creationism / intelligent design, and also because it illustrates the uphill battle that science faces against religion.

Science is hard. This is highly technical stuff, and it is beyond the grasp of the average American. It's a complex, technical argument, but worse, it takes five minutes of paying attention. How can Dr. Miller convince a nation that thrives on sound bites and watered-down science to pay attention?

Happily, my audience has a longer attention span. Enjoy, it's great stuff!

The Anti-Rationalism Meme is confirmed by science

One of my favorite topics (I wrote about it in The Religion Virus) is called The Anti-Rationalism Meme. It's the idea that faith is more powerful than reason, that when there is a conflict between your mind and heart (more scientifically, your logic and your emotions), that faith must ultimately win.

"Divine revelation, not reason, is the source of all truth."
– Tertullian of Carthage (150-225 AD)

Strong words indeed. Basically the Anti-Rationalism meme declares that all of physics, mathematics, chemistry, biology and archeology can be dismissed out of hand if you believe something is true.

So I couldn't pass up this headline: When science clashes with belief? Make science impotent. The article describes some clever social experiments where they investigated people's willingness to discard scientific evidence or dismiss science as irrelevant.

The basic problem is that everyone wants to feel well educated and modern. They want to think of themselves as enlightened and informed. You can't just dismiss science as wrong and still get any respect. So science still rules the roost when it comes to respect.

And yet ... what do you do when you want to believe something that science says can't be true?

Evolution Predicts: Benedict Will Dig Catholic Church's Grave

The Roman Catholic Church is falling victim to one of the best-understood aspects of Darwin's evolution – sexual selection. They're becoming a self-perpetuating failure.

Sexual selection is one of the most interesting and weird aspects of evolution. I'll explain using an example. Suppose some women, due to random genetic variations, just happen to like men with unusually large noses. Who will they marry? Probably men with large noses. Now think about the children of these unions: They'll inherit the large noses from their fathers, and they'll inherit their mother's fondness for large-nosed men. So at the next generation, and on down through their descendants, men with small noses won't have very good luck, and men with larger and larger noses will be favored.

We see this all the time in nature. The tailfeathers of peacocks and birds of paradise, the huge antlers of moose and the elaborate dances of fruit flies are all excellent examples. We even find it in ourselves. For example, a woman's shapely figure is purely "for show." Other great apes such as chimpanzees and gorillas have no trouble producing milk without large breasts. And we men have genitals that are something like four times the size, relative to our body mass, of the other great apes. It's purely for show, and has nothing to do with our ability to have sex. The other apes do it with much smaller "equipment."

What does this have to do with the Roman Catholic Church? Everything.