Education

You may have heard - the Vatican has said that it is OK to believe in E.T. No, not that silly puppet, but actual aliens, "our brothers" (like this kind?):

VATICAN CITY - Believing that the universe may contain alien life does not contradict a faith in God, the Vatican's chief astronomer said in an interview published Tuesday.

The Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes, the Jesuit director of the Vatican Observatory, was quoted as saying the vastness of the universe means it is possible there could be other forms of life outside Earth, even intelligent ones.

"How can we rule out that life may have developed elsewhere?" Funes said. "Just as we consider earthly creatures as 'a brother,' and 'sister,' why should we not talk about an 'extraterrestrial brother'? It would still be part of creation."

Because - I shit you not -

Ruling out the existence of aliens would be like "putting limits" on God's creative freedom, he said.

OK, the previous editions of "Confession Time" have been fairly light-hearted and fun. The rules were simple:

Confess to a guilty pleasure you have within that topic, and explain why it makes you feel guilty.

But I'm going to be serious this time. Because I am angry. Very angry.

I don't get angry often. Oh, I get ticked about this or that, annoyed at someone's behaviour (including my own), sometimes really pissed off. And on those occasions I can be a grump, muttering about what I would like to see happen to the thing/individual/world that has gotten my ire. But true anger - the sort of thing that makes me sit down, shut up, and coldly start planning what I am going to do next - that's very, very rare.

Via BoingBoing, news of just how vigilant they are in Detroit to make sure you read the label of any beverage you are served:

Boy, 7, taken from family after drink mixup at Tigers game

The sign above the Comerica Park concession stand said: "Mike's Lemonade 7.00.''

So when Christopher Ratte of Ann Arbor ordered one for his 7-year-old son at the April 5 Detroit Tigers game, he had no idea he was purchasing an alcoholic beverage.

Or that his son would end up spending three days and two nights in the custody of Children's Protective Services.

A park security guard spotted 7-year-old Leo Ratte drinking the Mike's Hard Lemonade, confiscated the bottle and took the family in for questioning.

Gotta love it. The folks over at Feministing get the usual kind of misogynist hate mail you would expect, but sometimes things turn out a little bit differently from what the sender intended:

Anti-feminist mailbag (the missing 5% edition)

We receive a lot of hate email here at Feministing, and this one was too good not to share.

Men are better than women look at the comparison in IQ men are scientifically proven to have a higher IQ by roughly 5 points, or 5% you cannot dispute science sorry and if you want a much better website than your shitty one you might want to go to [redacted]. I think you would gain a lot more knowledge from that website and you might learn about the truth that way you would not be so stupid and ignorant you stupid cunts.

In what will undoubtedly be used to fire up the faithful about "judicial interference", the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled for the separation of church and state:

3rd Circuit: Coach's Moment of Silence Constitutes Endorsement of Religion

In a closely watched school prayer case, the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that a New Jersey high school football coach's First Amendment rights were not violated when school district officials ordered him to stop his practice of getting on bended knee with his players as they bowed their heads for a moment of silence before a game.

Reversing a lower court's decision in favor of East Brunswick High School football coach Marcus Borden, the appellate court found that since Borden had led the team in prayers for 23 years, his new practice of engaging in the silent acts of "taking a knee" and bowing his head would be reasonably perceived as an endorsement of religion.

If you know me at all, from personal experience or just from my writings, you might be a bit surprised to know that when I was a kid I was considered bookish, uninterested in athletics, a bit nerdy. I distinctly remember being pushed to close whatever book I was quietly reading, and to go outside and play 'like a real boy'.

Ah, yes, in the continuing saga of "Stupid Things Authorities do thanks to the War On Some Drugs":

8-year-old suspended for sniffing marker

Eight-year-old Eathan Harris was originally suspended from Harris Park Elementary School for three days. Principal Chris Benisch reduced the suspension to one day after complaints from Harris' parents.

Harris used a black Sharpie marker to color a small area on the sleeve of his sweatshirt. A teacher sent him to the principal when she noticed him smelling the marker and his clothing.

"It smelled good," Harris said. "They told me that's wrong."

That's right, kid - enjoying childhood is WRONGWRONGWRONG!

But even more wrong was the idiotic, authoritarian decision. No, that's not just me saying that, it also comes from a real toxicologist who knows about, well, things that can be used to get high:

In his letter suspending the child, Benisch wrote that smelling the marker fumes could cause the boy to "become intoxicated."

OK, just in case you haven't seen this over at PZ's or elsewhere, here's a hilarious and brilliantly done satire:

It takes some deconstructing, but the consensus is that it is indeed pro-science/skepticism.

UPDATE: Here are the lyrics, and here is a brief bit on the 'cast' - kudos to both authors!

Jim Downey

The following is making the rounds, so I apologize if you've already seen it. But it's kinda fun, and actually does hit a number of good points from my perspective (that of someone who graduated from High School in '76). And yes, "the good old days" weren't really as good as people would like to think - but that doesn't negate the value of looking back.

School 1967 vs. School 2007

Scenario: Jack goes quail hunting before school, pulls into school parking lot with shotgun in gun rack.
1967 - Vice principal comes over, looks at Jack's shotgun, goes to his car and gets his own shotgun to show Jack.
2007 - School goes into lockdown, the FBI is called, and Jack is hauled off to jail and never sees his truck or gun again. Counselors are called in to assist traumatized students and teachers.

Scenario: Johnny and Mark get into a fistfight after school.
1967 - Crowd gathers. Mark wins. Johnny and Mark shake hands and end up buddies
2007 - Police are called; SWAT team arrives and arrests Johnny and Mark. They are charged with assault and both are expelled even though Johnny started it.

(This post is part of the Blog Against Theocracy Blogswarm.)

OK, now that I have your attention . . .

. . . let's talk about sex. Or, more accurately, how religious nuts want to control your sex life, your access to information about sex, and your sexual health - all through the government.

Theocracy, anyone?

Specifically, I want to talk about how some in the health-related professions think that they should have the "right" to deny you services or information if something about your sex life disagrees with their religious beliefs.

First off, here's a nice bit from Illinois:

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. — A group of pharmacists asked the Illinois Supreme Court on Tuesday to throw out a rule that forces them to dispense emergency contraception despite moral objections, claiming it amounts to illegal coercion.

Hello, I'm reeling with a lot of new ideas gathered from you people, and this is a rewrite of my first blog entry which basically sucked.

Here's one of the main reasons I came here.

My brain was altered by the Methodists' "dogmagicians" starting when I was almost 6 years old.

Before then, my agnostic dad kept religion out of my life and off my back, but my mother couldn't live with herself, let alone anyone else, so she split and I got moved into her parents' home and church.

Something has to give, when the people you love and trust tell you with a straight face that a guy was killed and then a few days later, he woke up and walked out of the tomb and flew up to heaven where he's been hanging out ever since, waiting for the big day.

So what exactly is it that gives?

Kids in the cult I was forced into get the dogma drill around 5 or 6, by which time they've begun to feel good about their ability to figure things out for themselves.

In following the news of the new Pew Research survey of religious belief in the US, I enjoyed the discussion over at PZ's place. But this passage in particular got me to wondering:

It's not all good news, though, and this one point here is something we must address.

A good friend uses this quote from Robert Heinlein (from Time Enough for Love) as part of her .sig:

"There is no such thing as luck.
There is only adequate or inadequate preparation to cope with a statistical universe."

Which is a nice reformulation of my favorite Louis Pasteur quote:

"Chance favors the prepared mind."

Which is why I grieve for the future of my country when I read things like this:

Walking home to her Upper East Side apartment (from the NY Public Library following the 9/11 attacks), she said, overwhelmed and confused, she stopped at a bar. As she sipped her bloody mary, she quietly listened to two men, neatly dressed in suits. For a second she thought they were going to compare that day’s horrifying attack to the Japanese bombing in 1941 that blew America into World War II:

“This is just like Pearl Harbor,” one of the men said.

The other asked, “What is Pearl Harbor?”

So, last night I was listening to NPR, and I heard a long piece they did on Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee's religious references in his various speeches. Fine, fine, we all know Huck wants to put the Law of Heaven above the Law of Man, et cetera. Right?

Well, maybe, maybe not.

See, what NPR found out when they started asking people about Huckabee's use of those allusions was that most people just didn't get 'em.

Huh? We're an overwhelmingly religious nation, according to just about any poll or measure you can come up with. Something on the order of 80 - 85% of Americans self-identify as one variety of Christian or another. Yet here's an excerpt from the NPR report, where they have gone out onto the National Mall in Washington, D.C. and talked to people:

We started by recounting this story: In November, as Huckabee surged in the polls, a student at Liberty University asked him what was driving his startling success. Huckabee responded, "It's the same power that helped a little boy with two fish and five loaves feed a crowd of 5,000 people."

I wrote this personal item for my blog this morning, but then realized that it was in many ways a perfect summation of how I see the world. Feel free to ignore.

Jim D.

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I commented via email to a close friend yesterday about the persistent fever my MIL has been running, 2 to 2.5 degrees above her normal. We'd seen fevers come and go for the last several months, but this one seems to have settled in for a while. I got back this:

Any particular reason for it, or is she just being like a star that's going into its final flameout?

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

An attorney friend sent me this juicy item:

ABA Asked to Examine Accreditation of Pat Robertson's Law School

On Friday, a Houston civil rights lawyer sent a complaint letter to the American Bar Association asking the group to examine the accreditation of Pat Robertson's Regent University School of Law after the school allegedly violated his client's free speech rights.

***

"As a Christian and as a Lutheran, Mr. Key has religious convictions that religious leaders be held to high standards and that it is permissible to criticize any wrongful behavior," the complaint letter states. "When Mr. Key refused to conform to Regent's religious and political views, he was suspended and ultimately removed from law school."

"What they're doing is they are creating a bunch of lawyers who don't believe in free speech," says Kallinen, who wants the ABA to revoke the law school's accreditation.

I think this will be of interest to some of the folks here, though since I wrote it for my own blog and pertaining to my novel, I feel a little awkward about posting it to the front page.

Jim D.

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I've mentioned previously the work of science historian James Burke. This past weekend I finished watching the last couple of episodes of his ground-breaking series Connections. Overall, you would probably enjoy watching the series, and will find a lot of chuckles over what was "high tech" in 1978 versus the reality of what we have today. But the closing bit was just stunning - it was a prediction of the need for and use of the Internet before DARPA had even begun to let the cat out of the bag. Here's the last ten minutes:

Via PZ, news of an incident in Janesville WI a couple of weeks ago, in which a student stood up for his First Amendment rights - and so frightened the school administrators they had to take unspecified disciplinary actions. One of his classmates was so terrified that she has refused to return to the school, and her sister has likewise transferred. What horror did this student perform to cause such a ruckus?

He tore up a bible.

From the news report:

"He took the Bible and he said, 'I'm going to do this because I can. I'm going to do something that your stupid, little minds aren't going to be able to comprehend and he took the Bible and started ripping out pages."

School officials said that they know about the incident.

"We take this extremely seriously," said Dr. Karen Schulte, Janesville School District safety and security coordinator.

. . . you have, you know, any doubts that waterboarding is torture, I direct you to this fairly amazing first-hand account of it. From the account:

Here's what happened:

The water fills the hole in the saran wrap so that there is either water or vaccum in your mouth. The water pours into your sinuses and throat. You struggle to expel water periodically by building enough pressure in your lungs. With the saran wrap though each time I expelled water, I was able to draw in less air. Finally the lungs can no longer expel water and you begin to draw it up into your respiratory tract.

It seems that there is a point that is hardwired in us. When we draw water into our respiratory tract to this point we are no longer in control. All hell breaks loose. Instinct tells us we are dying.

I have never been more panicked in my whole life. Once your lungs are empty and collapsed and they start to draw fluid it is simply all over. You [b]know[b] you are dead and it's too late. Involuntary and total panic.

In my neck of the woods here there is a lawsuit that's been filed against a high school history teacher asserting that he makes anti-christian remarks in his classroom.

"He's only giving one side – that's not thinking critically at all," said Farnan, 16, who does not plan to attend his AP European History class again until Corbett is removed. "This might be a college-level class, but it's in high school, so he doesn't have the same rights."

I didn't realize that you have to be a college professor to have the right to foster debate.

It looks like yet another case of someone getting bent out of shape over criticism of their beliefs. I find it ironic that the kid whose parents filed the suit states "I am a strong Christian believer". If he's such a strong believer why doesn't he stay in the class and defend his views?

It's encouraging that many of the teacher's former students are coming forward in support stating that his classes promoted critical thinking. There is so little done in high to teach kids how to actually think that it's sad when someone gets into hot water for actually doing it.