Happy Monkey

Since it is Christmas, I'll post a link to a nice godless Christmas article I read.

SDAs in the news again (a follow up)

I guess the New York Times article that I referenced in an earlier post had a few facts wrong. Maybe the crashing economy isn't driving attendance at churches.

Happy Solstice

I know I'm a few days late getting this post up, but I was too busy celebrating by building alter shaped mounds of snow along side my driveway to compose anything worthy of the occasion. Now that the time for celebration is past I thought I would stop and ponder the significance of the Winter Solstice.

The winter solstice occurs at the instant when the Sun's position in the sky is at its greatest angular distance on the other side of the equatorial plane from the observer's hemisphere. The seasonal significance of the winter solstice is in the reversal of the gradually lengthening nights and shortening days.

This simple result of orbital physics is marked by festivals celebrating rebirth in the religions of most cultures. The most pervasive and obscene for its displays of materialism is Christmas. Others holidays include: Amaterasu, Beiwe, Deygan and Midvinterblot.

So, while it is easy to get caught up in the hype of parties and shopping and desecrating nativity scenes, we should not forget the true reason for the season. That science has given us the ability to observe, predict and understand the changes in the seasons and that we can move beyond ritualistic appeasements to ill tempered divine figures so that they will cause the spring to come again.

SDAs in the news again

I noticed another SDA reference in the news this morning. A preacher is finding joy in the suffering of others. A Texas State University study shows that evangelical churches grow when the economy is poor.

“I found it very exciting, and I called up that fellow to tell him so,” said the Rev. Don MacKintosh, a Seventh Day Adventist televangelist in California who contacted Dr. Beckworth a few weeks ago after hearing word of his paper from another preacher. “We need to leverage this moment, because every Christian revival in this country’s history has come off a period of rampant greed and fear. That’s what we’re in today — the time of fear and greed.”

Organized religion is ready and waiting to use the misfortune of others to their own ends. I guess I'd have to agree with Rev. MacKintosh. Greed and fear are religion's most effective tools.

Wow

First praying over the golden calf in Manhattan and now this? Christians are really confused about their beliefs regarding idol worship. The whole power of prayer thing is getting bizarre as well. Oil streaked foreheads and SUVs on the platform at church. Again I say 'wow' and chuckle to myself.

Blog Roll Love

I've added a few links to my blog roll recently. I'm really enjoying the Evil God series at Unreasonable Faith. And Debunking Christianity has some serious Bible scholars posting there.

Out of Thin Air [chapter 1]

I just watched the first sermon of the Out of Thin Air presentation. Not surprisingly, I was unimpressed and unsurprised at the content. There was actually very little content. The main points I was able to pick up are:
- life is meaningless without god to give us purpose.
- Darwin is wrong because evolution does not account for the origin of life.

There is nothing new to see here. We all know that life's purpose is what you choose for it to be. And the theory of evolution does not pretend to describe the origin of live. Not that the origin of life is a fruitless area of study. These standard talking points were accompanied by the usual anti-intellectual lies. As we learn more the theory of evolution is weakened. Louis Pasture proved that life cannot originate from non-life. These are either the result of willful ignorance or deliberate prevarication.

The thing that bothered me the most was a quote from George Wald. The only place I could find the quote online was from conservapedia. Which means authenticity is questionable.

When it comes to the origin of life, we have only two possibilities as to how life arose. One is spontaneous generation arising to evolution; the other is a supernatural creative act of God. There is no third possibility...Spontaneous generation was scientifically disproved one hundred years ago by Louis Pasteur, Spellanzani, Reddy and others. That leads us scientifically to only one possible conclusion -- that life arose as a supernatural creative act of God...I will not accept that philosophically because I do not want to believe in God. Therefore, I choose to believe in that which I know is scientifically impossible, spontaneous generation arising to evolution." - Scientific American, August, 1954.

Assuming this is even an accurate quote, and I have my doubts since Wald has been quote mined in other fora. There are even several permutations of the quote sourced to the same article in Scientific American in on the conservapedia page. That is enough to convince me that some one has messed with Wald's words. This could ultimately be resolved by looking up the article. But as I said in my last post, one man's opinion is inconsequential to the theory of evolution. It doesn't matter if he won the 1967 Nobel Prize for Medicine. But just to give Wald the benefit of the doubt, the article he wrote for Scientific American in 1954 also includes this passage:

When one has no means of estimating the probability beforehand, it must be determined by counting the fraction of successes in a large number of trials.

Our everyday concept of what is impossible, possible or certain derives from our experience: the number of trials that may be encompassed within the space of a human lifetime, or at most within recorded human history. In this colloquial, practical sense I concede the spontaneous origin of life to be "impossible." It is impossible as we judge events in the scale of human experience.

We shall see that this is not a very meaningful concession; For one thing, the time with which our problem is concerned is geological time, and the whole extent of human history is trivial in the balance.

In other words the common conception of what is impossible is different from what can be understood scientifically. Based on this quote it would seem that Wald is not arguing for life originating spontaneously despite the evidence, but that the fact that there is life means that it must have happened at least once.