Chariots of Iron

I want to start by saying a couple things about the blogging here. I started some months ago putting up regular posts, and then inexplicably stopped. This was due to some internal wrangling between Joe, Lamar and myself as to what this website was going to be, how it related to what’s going on at atheiskeptihumanist.com and atheistnews.org. I think these have all been worked out and I’ll be posting here again.

Now, on to the show.

As many of our listeners are aware (and will definitely be aware of after the next show) I spent last weekend at the AAI Convention in Burbank California.  The folks at AAI were nice enough to provide both myself and Joe with press passes for the event, and I’m hoping we make good use of that privilege in the coming weeks. At this point I have heaps of audio to sift through, clean up and edit for use in upcoming shows where we’ll cover who the speakers were, what they talked about and what we think about it. Currently Lamar (who was unable to attend) has all the raw audio so he can get himself up to speed. I also took the time to talk to many of the notable attendees about appearing on upcoming shows and was generally met with a positive response.

The convention was a lot of fun and it was announced that the next years convention would be in Montreal. let me say, if you can go, DO! It was well worth the time, money (I, unlike Joe, covered my own expenses, thanks to the Atheist News listeners for making sure I had some company)  and exhaustion. The people I met there were intelligent, friendly and most possessed great senses of humor. I’m not going to list out a heap of thank-yous and the like as I’m almost sure to overlook someone, but I did want to give a special thanks to three folks:

• to Noelle Dildine, head of the AAI Ambassador Corps and founder of the SECULAR Center charity who acted as a wonderful hostess to myself and Joe during our time at the convention.
• to Viktor Nagornyy, AAI convention director, for putting on such an event and being an overall class-act.
• and of course to Richard Haynes, for making sure Joe and I got to meet with just about every speaker on the list, and being a source of both the fun and the funny throughout the entire convention.

That Said, on to the speakers. I spent most of my time listening to speakers at the convention, and nearly every one of them was both interesting and informative.  My favorites were many and disappointments few, If i had to pick a top three they’d be Jerry Coyne, PZ Myers and Russell Blackford, all of which spent time lampooning the anti-science and anti-intellectual/educational stance of the fundamentalists.  Of course the “big-names” all put on wonderful presentations (Dawkins, Dennett, etc), although I must express a small amount of dissapointmetn with Dawkin’s presenation near the end of the convention which was merely a overview of  the final chapeter of his latest book, The Greatest Show on Earth.

Much has been written already of the controversy over the AAI Convention/RDF presenting and Award to Bill Maher, however I think this was handled well, and Maher seems to have stopped retreating form the word “atheist” when, during the streaming presentation f the taping of Real Time, Maher introduced Richard Dawkins as “my fellow atheist”. I wonder if Dawkins had a little chat with Bill before the show?

I’ll be sure to have more thoughts as my brain continues to digest all the information, I’m currently reading one of the many books I picked up at the convention, Donald Prothero’s Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters. I’m not too far into it, he spends the first part of the book giving a history of creationism, it’s  a great overview of the origins of the creationist movement, and the writing is concise and entertaining, I’ll have more to say about this book as I delve further into it. My daughter is big on dinosaurs right now as I want to be armed with as many facts to answer her queries as i can be.

A new PR campaign has been launched in the UK, “Science: So What? – So everything”.

It is my sincere hope that Obama and his new administration would strive to bring something akin to this campaign to the US. Ignorance, mistrust and misunderstanding best describe the general population of the United States’ attitudes toward science and scientific research.

With 2009 being the anniversary of a couple great scientific landmarks it is far beyond time that not only scientific research got the federal funding it deserves, but also an effort is made to educate the public in the value of such research. If the US is to keep a shred of it’s dignity a new generation of scientists and engineers is going to be absolutely vital, we need a new “inspired generation”.

Just as my generation was inspired by David Attenborough and Carl Sagan, new public faces will be needed. Unfortunately the over-saturation of media is a difficult obstacle to overcome. Cable came late to the small town I grew up in, and even then cable television was only tens of channels instead of the hundreds available to me now. How do we get children and adults to see the message when there’s a dozen christian broadcast channels and 24-hour Reality TV networks?

I don’ t know how to overcome these obstacles, but I feel it is necessary, perhaps entertaining and educational science videos sponsored by the National Academies mandatory in school science classes?

This fundig is just as important as the money going to directly fund research, in the long term it will pay back tenfold, ensuring a higher quality of life in prepetuity, not just for americans but around the world.

We’ve heard it before but a recent comic nabbed by PZ Myers over on Pharyngula makes it more clear than ever. The attempts by biblical literalists are not just aimed at defending their precious scripture but at undermining science and the public’s trust of science at its very core.

This is not some pot shot “we disagree”, this is an orchestrated propaganda campaign focused at the very heart of science because, the truth is, that literalists are losing. Every year brings numerous discoveries which contradict literal scriptural interpretation while at the same time improving the quality of human lives. The mountain of evidence is so huge now that those on the defensive can no longer refute every individual piece of evidence, the only tactic left to them is to destroy the foundation.

The bronze-age myths of the past are being swept away, the reality is there for anyone who bothers to look. We are the Greeks who have reached to top of Mount Olympus only to find some rocks and lichen. If, of course, that lichen cured disease and those rocks contained veins of precious metals.

The gifts of science are numerous, on my desk alone are literally over one hundred of examples of the ways science has improved our lives, from the computer I type this on to the latte in my coffee cup to the metallurgy which allowed this pair of scissors to be both effective and cheaply manufactured.

The gifts of religion are much more ephemeral, and could all be done away with and replaced by philosiphies which are much more liberating and less divisive quite easily, it is a decision made at the individual level, all we have to do is accept it.

Episode 16 is in the can and will be posted shortly. I know I’ve been pretty quiet with the blog posts recently, but I chalk this up the the weather and the holidays. Now that it’s officially 2009 and the family isn’t calling on a near-daily basis I can turn back to wasting the time of complete strangers.

After recording this past weekend Bo and Luke were discussing how they’d like to spend a bit more time on the show ripping apart religious arguments. As I’m all for this I thought I’d jump the gun a bit and post here soliciting arguments from our readers and listeners. So if you’ve heard/read or have your own arguments please post a link to or the full text of the argument you’d like to hear us shred to this post, or alternately you can email it to us (if you listen to the show, you know the address), or even post it over on our group at Atheist Nexus (where this message will be cross-posted).

Hopefully, with the combination of our listeners and the google-fu of the Charioteers, we will have enough inanity to fill years worth of shows in the span of a couple months. We will of course choose the more recent and novel arguments above the old and tired ones.

As we talked about in the last podcast Australian students in religious education classes are going to be given some education about Humanism and it will be pointed out that “there is no evidence for god. Of course Ken Ham has a bit of a reading comprehension problem, and this explains a lot about Mr. Ham, in his recent blog post he claims that Australian Students are to be taught “there is no god”.

Allow me to be the first to point out that “there is no evidence for” and “there is no” are two distinctly different statements. It is further into Mr. Ham’s inanity that I take a certain level of umbrage, he claims that “religious education” is the place for this discussion because “atheism is a religion”.

This old one again, and frankly one I’m a bit sick of. Atheism, is specifically the absence of religion, in the way that “darkness” is not in itself a “thing” but merely the absence of light, so is atheism an absence of religion. Humanism could be thought of as a religion in some ways, however a more proper definition would be that Humanism is a philosophy as most religions deal with supernatural claims and are most marked by some form of worship, and philosophies are not.

Of course where atheism and religion cross is when secularists point out that freedom of religion, in order to be truly a “freedom” must include freedom from religion. If I told you that your “freedom of being punched” meant you got to choose wether I punched you in the face or in the gut, I do not believe you’d think very highly of such a “freedom”.

Over on my favorite blog (well besides my own) PZ Myers was kind enough to post some hate-mail he’d received over the recent Zoo/Creation museum controversy.  While Professor Myers does not respond to these directly, there was one comment I wanted to call out, and decided, since I’ve been lazy this week, that I’d do so here, as it is representative of a common claim from fundamentalist religious types.

Scientist thought the universe revolved around the earth about 1000 years ago,they thought the earth was flat 500 years ago and 200 years ago man couldn’t fly so as we progress we find science is very fallible.

What the author of this statement fails to realize is that the above three statements were believed by early “scientists” because the religious institutions at the head of most civilizations said that these things were so.  I also think the authors dates were a bit off… but all three are examples of dogmatic truth overthrown by scientific inquiry. While it is true that as more data is collected by scientists theories are revised, overthrown and corrected. But that is the strength of science not it’s weakness. The ones holding onto outdated beliefs are the religiously faithful. Here they chide scientists for being wrong in the past centuries yet somehow holding onto beliefs over 2000 years old is “correct”.

News flash, you were wrong 200 years ago, get over it, while scientists may have been wrong in the past, they’ve at least the intellectual honesty to change thier beliefs in concert with the facts rather than railing against the facts in order to hold onto thier beliefs (although there have been individual sceintists who have held onto overthrown theories, this is speaking of the scientific community in general, not individual scientists). Let’s also add that scientific methods and the introduction of peer-review and widely distributed (at least amongst the professionals) scientific journals have added much to the accuracy of the scientific method, no longer are authorities allowed to dismiss arguments when evidence is presented that all can see and experiments are easily replicated and predictions confirmed. The internet has made this process more efficient but has also caused some data to get out to the general public before the peer-review process is complete, hence my common detraction of popular science websites in favor of established scientifc journals.

In an article over on sciam, researchers have found that meteor-like impacts can also catalyze the formation of life’s chemical precursors.This could be in contradiction or in complement to asteroids and comets being the delivery vehicle for such molecules.

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Disaster continues for this fine nation I live in and the forces of the “christian right” (as opposed to the respectable right, the fiscal conservatives) are galvanizing and pushing their religious agenda harder than ever. Shortly after becoming absolutely incensed over Bill-O the clowns remarks concerning the Atheist sign in Washington state (which has now gone missing). We’ve got this revisionist historian airing his opinions in the Miami-Herald.

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While I often trash National Geographic (along with other popular-science magazines) in favor of true Scientific Journals, this one is a bit interesting, and states that the paper reflecting this find is due to appear in Geology. According to NeoGeo they’ve found some stone tools predating the earliest Homo Sapiens remains by 80,000 years. These tools are apparently sophisticated enough that they are attributed to Homo Sapiens, and date to about 276,000 years ago (the oldest Homo Sapiens remains are about 195,000 years old).

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While I do not always agree with Roger Ebert in his movie reviews, I must say that of any movie critic in the popular press i find his reviews the most useful. Weather or not he liked the movie I can usually determine if I would personally enjoy a film from his review. This speaks volumes, so it was a little concerning a few months back when on Roger Ebert’s website a Q&A about creationism appeared. Something about it didn’t quite sit right with me. Mr. Ebert seemed to intelligent to buy into creationism, so I thought it was either a prank, joke, or someone at the Sun-Times with access pulling a fast one.

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