Good Friday and Easter

James McGrath has a great post on Good Friday and the Easter experience.

Back in Galilee, some time later, the disciples had dreams, visions, encounters that persuaded them that Jesus was alive, that God had taken this individual who mistakenly thought the dawn of the Kingdom of God was imminent, and had made him Lord of that very Kingdom, which was yet to dawn fully.

That was Easter. When it occurred, and how it relates to the conviction that something monumental happened “on the third day”, is hard to discern through the tensions and obscurities in the evidence.

Read the entire post.  It’s worth reading.

The Bone Man

Ever wanted to assemble a disarticulated sperm whale skeleton?  Have a complete moose skeleton you want to display?  Maybe a sea otter skeleton or an owl?  The you should really check out The Bone Man.  Lee Post has a remarkable collection of books dedicated to cleaning and articulating mammal and bird skeletons.

It isn’t something I see myself doing, but it’s still fun to poke around that website.

Religion and atheism

While it’s easy to criticise religion as irrational and a vehicle for intolerance, that doesn’t change the fact that there is real value to organised religion.  Mike Haubrich got at one value that people put in religion – the idea of “purchasing” immortality.  But religion also has more tangible value.  A few months ago our pastor, Amy, preached a sermon on “Being Christian as if God didn’t exist”.  She asked the question “what would you do differently?”  The answer was “not an awful lot”.  The value of church as community isn’t dependent on the existence or non-existence of a supernatural being.  The value of service to your (local and global) community exists regardless of whether a supernatural being exits.

Chad Orzel of Uncertainty Principle hits the nail on the head

Trying to get rid of religion by telling believers that their beliefs are stupid is like trying to get rid of fraternities by telling frat boys that the whole enterprise is silly. The smarter ones will shrug and say “Yeah, so?” or invent endless arguments as to why they’re not silly. The less-smart ones will bristle and bluster and tell you to fuck off, and draw into a seige mentality that will make it almost impossible to effect any kind of useful change.

He also gets at a weakness of the atheist movement – that it doesn’t replace the social benefits of religion.

This is the element that I think is missing from the whole atheist project online. Religion exists in large part because it fills a social need for believers, and attacking the silly and objectionable beliefs directly isn’t going to change things. What you need to do is to encourage or create new communities that fill the same social needs without the objectionable beliefs. If you do that, you’ll provide an outlet for people who aren’t entirely happy with their current church, but who don’t see any alternative that provides similar community benefits.

Climate denialists vs creationists

Who’d have thought that climate change denialists were even more amusing than creationists?  My post on Climate Debate Daily really brought out some strange ones.  While I wasn’t looking, the libertarian capitalists have embraced the logic and language of the Soviets.  “Freedom” means denying reality (climate change) in order to prop up the approved systems of production, no matter how outdated or inefficient they are.

The IDists have already embraced Lysenkoist “science”.   Now their friends, who call themselves “capitalists” (but defend a statists model of government designed to funnel public money into the hands of their cronies), seem set to embrace the rest of the Soviet model.  Fun, fun.

Expelled

PZ Myers went to see Expelled! tonight…and was expelled – he was pulled out of line and ordered off the premises. While the hypocrisy of his being expelled from Expelled is funny enough, that’s just the beginning…

This is just too funny!

Kristine has details…she actually was allowed in.

Climate Debate Daily

Climate Debate Daily is a website which claims to offer “a new way to understand disputes about global warming”:

Climate Debate Daily is intended to deepen our understanding of disputes over climate change and the human contribution to it. The site links to scientific articles, news stories, economic studies, polemics, historical articles, PR releases, editorials, feature commentaries, and blog entries. The main column on the left includes arguments and evidence generally in support of the IPCC position on the reality of signficant [sic] anthropogenic global warming. The right-hand column includes material skeptical of the IPCC position and the notion that anthropogenic global warming represents a genuine threat to humanity.

On the surface of it, it sounds promising. Present all the evidence to people and let them make up their own minds. Isn’t that what informed democracy is all about? Sadly, no. Science isn’t a democracy. Good science is separated from bad based on the weight of evidence. In order to evaluate the evidence, you need to understand the field as a whole. Context is everything – and if you don’t understand the context, it’s almost impossible to gauge the significance of any one paper.

The site is run by two philosophers – Douglas Campbell a doctoral student in philosophy at the University of Arizona (who is impressed by the breadth and depth of the scientific evidence supporting the theory of anthropogenic global warming) and Denis Dutton, an associate professo at the University of Canterbury (who is skeptical about the degree to which human activity has contributed to the general warming trend). Therein lies the first problem – philosophers have a bad habit of weighing arguments instead of weighing evidence. I’ve seen that approach among philosophers and historians of science in the evolution-creation debate – some of them seem almost naive in their willingness to suspend judgment.

Looking a little deeper at the site, more red flags pop up. It pits a graduate student against an associate professor. Hardly a battle of equals. It is funded by Peter Farrell, who is skeptical of the threat of anthropogenic global warming. That shifts the balance of power even more.

Farrell is quoted as saying “Let the best argument win”. Sadly, that is the problem that’s at the heart of the issue. Science isn’t a battle of rhetoric – it’s a battle of evidence. And whatever its public policy implications, climate change is a scientific issue.

A quick search on Google turns up quite a few links to this site. Most simply document its existence, or broadly fall for its spin. A few sites call it for what it is – a website playing the Fox News game of deception “we report, you decide”. And then there’s a wealth of libertarian/Objectivist sites which, unsurprisingly, are almost giddy over the site. Perhaps that the most telling bit – the people who are praising the site are all “skeptics”. No one pro-science seems to have anything positive to say about the site. Only the “skeptics”. Curious, isn’t it?

David Brin pays tribute to Arthur C. Clarke

Writing at Daily Kos, David Brin paid tribute to Arthur C. Clarke.

Arthur has long and deservedly been called one of the finest “hard” science fiction authors, for good reason.  From the beginning of his career as a writer, he explored frontiers of human knowledge, pondering the implications of everything from cetacean intelligence to planetology.  From the logic of John Von Neuman’s universal self-replicator to the possible motives of beings far in advance of ourselves.

And yet, what most intrigues me about Arthur’s work is something else — his ongoing fascination with human destiny — a term seemingly at-odds with the scientific worldview.

Read the rest of it.

What surprised me most was that David Brin is a contributor at dKos, and has been a regular contributor since January 2007.  As Markos said: “It’s things like this that make this site so darn cool”.

Huckabee defends Wright

Mick Huckabee has come out in defense of Obama on Wright, and somewhat in defense of Wright himself.

[Obama] made the point, and I think it’s a valid one, that you can’t hold the candidate responsible for everything that people around him may say or do. You just can’t. Whether it’s me, whether it’s Obama…anybody else. But he did distance himself from the very vitriolic statements. Now, the second story. It’s interesting to me that there are some people on the left who are having to be very uncomfortable with what Louis Wright said, when they all were all over a Jerry Falwell, or anyone on the right who said things that they found very awkward and uncomfortable years ago. Many times those were statements lifted out of the context of a larger sermon. Sermons, after all, are rarely written word for word by pastors like Reverend Wright, who are delivering them extemporaneously, and caught up in the emotion of the moment. There are things that sometimes get said, that if you put them on paper and looked at them in print, you’d say “Well, I didn’t mean to say it quite like that.”

Via LizzyPop at dKos.

Yoghurt containers as mini-greenhouses

Willem van Cottem of Desertification has a very interesting post about the use of transparent containers as mini-greenhouses. You can use them to get seedlings started indoors in the Spring, or in arid environments (since it cuts down on water usage prior to transplantation). They are also useful for transporting the seedlings.

I would be a little concerned about hardening the seedlings – that they might not be able to handle the desiccation without significant die-back – but I suspect that he has taken that into account.

The mortgage crisis, in simple terms

The Subprime Primer explains the financial crisis in simple (and amusing) terms.

H/T Kate Sheppard at TAPPED.