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The next time you hear the word fitness in an evolutionary context picture the fit sloth, the one who moves so slowly predators can’t believe he’s actually made of meat.
—Martin Willet
Teach the Controversy
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The Devil's Dictionary
ritualism: n. A Dutch Garden of God where He may walk in rectilinear freedom, keeping off the grass.
—Ambrose Bierce
In a review, a film critic for the Dutch paper NRC Handesblad says the message of Geert Wilders’ film is straightforward: the Koran calls for violence and Muslims are receptive to that call.
In “Fitna” we see an edited verse from the Koran in which the faithful are called on to hunt the enemies of Allah with “all force.” There then follows footage of the attacks on the World Trade Centre and Madrid railway station. In the smoke of an explosion we see the face of an Islamic leader saying: “What pleases Allah? Allah is pleased if non-Muslims are killed.”
And so on.
Obviously, Wilders’s point has been made long before the collage has been published. If Islam is a religion of peace, then they would shrug this incendiary flick off. Given the many voices that wanted the flick banned (sight unseen) for fear of violent reprisals from Muslims, Wilders’s message is loud and clear: You can’t call violent Islamists as you see them, because they’re violent and may kill people or destroy property or attack embassies or… I haven’t read news to find out if any of the latter has happened yet, but just ask the explosive turban cartoonist.
The Europeans face a dire problem. It’s tough enough to integrate Muslims into European societies, but the Sixth Columns bankrolled by Saudi Arabia make this even dicier. The European response is shameful—I’ve vented about the disgrace also known as “multiculturalism” before and as Pat Condell puts it, rather than rolling over and playing dead, European nations should apply their existing laws, take off the kids gloves where Islamist extremists are concerned and toss them out on their ears if need be. While it’s not right to condemn all Muslims for the actions of their share of radical Islamists, I don’t see a reason why any religion should be exempt from being insulted.
Primary school children should be eligible for the DNA database if they exhibit behaviour indicating they may become criminals in later life, according to Britain’s most senior police forensics expert.
Gary Pugh, director of forensic sciences at Scotland Yard and the new DNA spokesman for the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo), said a debate was needed on how far Britain should go in identifying potential offenders, given that some experts believe it is possible to identify future offending traits in children as young as five.
‘If we have a primary means of identifying people before they offend, then in the long-term the benefits of targeting younger people are extremely large,’ said Pugh. ‘You could argue the younger the better. Criminologists say some people will grow out of crime; others won’t. We have to find who are possibly going to be the biggest threat to society.’
Pugh admitted that the deeply controversial suggestion raised issues of parental consent, potential stigmatisation and the role of teachers in identifying future offenders, but said society needed an open, mature discussion on how best to tackle crime before it took place. There are currently 4.5 million genetic samples on the UK database - the largest in Europe - but police believe more are required to reduce crime further. ‘The number of unsolved crimes says we are not sampling enough of the right people,’ Pugh told The Observer. However, he said the notion of universal sampling - everyone being forced to give their genetic samples to the database - is currently prohibited by cost and logistics.
Clearly, the race is on which nation can be the most Orwellian.
To begin with, profiling and stigmatizing 5-years-olds strikes me a very bad idea, on general principle as well as the highly dubious ‘science’ (read: woo) behind it. I’m not sure how a DNA database helps prevent crime in any case. There’s a huge amount of petty crime for which any kind of DNA tracking is prohibitively expensive—if “cost and logistics” prohibit a blanket database, it’s not going to happen as a matter of routine investigation. It also won’t be long until somebody uses DNA traces to frame somebody or major criminals figure out how to not leave DNA evidence behind. Then there’s the problem that a lot of crime is a spur-of-the-moment event and all the surveillance cameras and DNA databases in the world won’t prevent somebody from snapping.
And of course, it is an outrage that “the notion of universal sampling” “is currently prohibited by cost and logistics” only. I trust that all the cops and unconvicted felons (i.e. everybody willing to be elected to public office) have had their samples taken and databased together with everybody else’s?
The published sneak preview of Expression Engine 2.0 looks tasty. They’ve only shown the control panel so far, though. I wonder what features and modules they’ll add in the new release. More importantly, did they redesign my pet peeves away?
Science and religion have often been at loggerheads. Now the former has decided to resolve the problem by trying to explain the existence of the latter
Illustration by Stephen Jeffrey
BY THE standards of European scientific collaboration, €2m ($3.1m) is not a huge sum. But it might be the start of something that will challenge human perceptions of reality at least as much as the billions being spent by the European particle-physics laboratory (CERN) at Geneva. The first task of CERN’s new machine, the Large Hadron Collider, which is due to open later this year, will be to search for the Higgs boson—an object that has been dubbed, with a certain amount of hyperbole, the God particle. The €2m, by contrast, will be spent on the search for God Himself—or, rather, for the biological reasons why so many people believe in God, gods and religion in general.
“Explaining Religion”, as the project is known, is the largest-ever scientific study of the subject. It began last September, will run for three years, and involves scholars from 14 universities and a range of disciplines from psychology to economics. And it is merely the latest manifestation of a growing tendency for science to poke its nose into the God business.
By all means, try to figure out exactly what makes the believers tick. Who knows, there might be a way to cure them or to inoculate future generations.
And, slightly tongue in cheek, Dr Wilson quips that “secularism is very maladaptive biologically. We’re the ones who at best are having only two kids. Religious people are the ones who aren’t smoking and drinking, and are living longer and having the health benefits.”
Slightly tongue in cheek?
That quip, though, makes an intriguing point. Evolutionary biologists tend to be atheists, and most would be surprised if the scientific investigation of religion did not end up supporting their point of view. But if a propensity to religious behaviour really is an evolved trait, then they have talked themselves into a position where they cannot benefit from it, much as a sceptic cannot benefit from the placebo effect of homeopathy. Maybe, therefore, it is God who will have the last laugh after all—whether He actually exists or not.
That quip doesn’t make any interesting points at all and the closing paragraph puts the author into the wanker category.
A genetic predisposition towards religiosity—probably a real maladaption to boot—is in line with my expectations and not a new idea by any means. We benefit from that knowledge, because it helps to know what we’re up against. I don’t really expect a cure for religiosity, nor do I expect that a purely secular world is necessarily a paradise. I don’t get the homeopathy comparison, though. Does the author mean the believers can’t benefit from knowing that they suffer from a hereditary disease?
Remember the infamous guy from Canterbury who suggested that Muslims should be exempt from equal protection under the law and who received the roasting below from Pat Condell?
The headline suggests that he’s attacking creationism, which would be good if he would leave it right there.
The Archbishop of Canterbury has attacked Creationism calling it a “questionable science pretending to be theology”.
Dr Rowan Williams, said “Neo Darwinism and Creationist science deserve each other. Creationism is a version of slightly questionable science pretending to be theology, and Neo Darwinism is a questionable theology pretending to be science.”
Dr Williams admitted that Neo Darwinism, a theory supported by Atheist Professor Richard Dawkins, is “most problematic” to theology, but he called it “a pseudo science” and “deeply vulnerable to intellectual challenge because it is trying to be a theology.”
In a sideswipe at evolutionary scientists such as Professor Dawkins, Williams warned “Science can be seduced into making exaggerated claims.” He added “Neo Darwinism of Dawkins’ kind carries with it a rather subjective agenda…It is as vulnerable as Christianity”. Both Neo Darwinism and Christianity are telling stories, the Archbishop continued, Christianity acknowledges that fact, Neo Darwinism doesn’t.
If you have some tinfoil handy, now might be a good time to fashion a hat. At the Digital Living Room conference today, Gerard Kunkel, Comcast’s senior VP of user experience, told me the cable company is experimenting with different camera technologies built into devices so it can know who’s in your living room.
The idea being that if you turn on your cable box, it recognizes you and pulls up shows already in your profile or makes recommendations. If parents are watching TV with their children, for example, parental controls could appear to block certain content from appearing on the screen. Kunkel also said this type of monitoring is the “holy grail” because it could help serve up specifically tailored ads.
Translation: They’re experimenting with a new idea of targeting ads and try to find something that would sell such an intrusive technology to the desensitized public.
How long will it take until somebody hacks these cameras? Probably a split-second longer than it would take me to stick some duct tape in front of the camera.
It is the kind of stunt that has many fearing the worst: Dutch right-wing populist Geert Wilders plans to release a film about Islam. Politicians worldwide are already trying to stop the project, before a single scene has been shown. Critics fear the film could lead to bloodshed in many countries.
Let us summarize what has happened to date. On Nov. 2, 2004, an Islamic fundamentalist murdered Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, a descendant of the painter Vincent van Gogh, in broad daylight on a street in Amsterdam.
The killer, a 26-year-old Dutch citizen, the son of Moroccan immigrants, shot the filmmaker at 9 a.m. as van Gogh was riding his bicycle. He then slit his throat and, using a knife, pinned a note to his victim’s chest, claiming responsibility and explaining his motives. The killer’s true target was politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali. But she, unlike van Gogh, was under 24-hour police protection. The bloody act was also a declaration of war against Dutch society, which, as the murderer was convinced, was controlled “by the Jews.”
Wilders, who believes that the Netherlands has been “taken hostage” by well-intentioned people on the left, wants to see the country “returned to the people.” He wants both the Koran and Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” to be banned in the Netherlands, because, as he claims, they incite people to commit acts of hate and violence. He also wants the country to deport criminals with dual citizenship to their countries of origin. Wilders was voted “politician of the year” by Dutch public broadcaster NOS in December 2007.
I don’t buy his right-wing agenda, but he has a point about European nations being held hostage by multiculturalists (something unlikely to be found on the political right).
In late November 2007, Wilders announced that he was working on a film that would depict “the intolerant and fascist nature of the Koran.” Spokespeople from the Dutch interior and justice ministries expressed their concern about the project, but they also stressed that they had no power to dissuade the parliamentarian from going through with his plan or to prevent the film from being broadcast.
Since then, a film that no one has seen and of which no one can say that it will ever exist has become a daily topic of discussion and speculation in the Netherlands. Wilders is fueling the debate by occasionally announcing how far along the project is. In an article he wrote for the newspaper De Telegraaf in late January 2008, he announced that the film would be released in March. According to Wilders, it would be shown on a split screen, with verses and suras from the Koran on one side and examples of Sharia law being carried out on the other, including a beheading and a stoning. If Dutch television networks are unwilling to broadcast the film, Wilders said he would show it on YouTube.
This triggered a panic in the Netherlands that could only be likened to the dread leading up to a massive storm. The Dutch ambassador in Malaysia warned that protests could lead to “dozens of deaths.” Dutch ambassadors in Islamic countries were instructed to increase security measures and distance themselves from the Wilders film, while counterterrorism experts at home began making preparations for the day of the broadcast. These included meetings with representatives of Muslim congregations, who Dutch officials hoped would have a moderating effect on their brothers and sisters.
The obvious problem is that there’s no shortage of intolerant and fascist Islamists in Europe and elsewhere and all the angst about this flick is already making his point.
A Roman Catholic bishop has likened books which criticise the teachings of the Church to works that deny the Holocaust took place.
The Rt Rev Patrick O’Donoghue, Bishop of Lancaster, told MPs that books critical of the Catholic faith should be banned from school libraries.
Asked if that applied to works by authors such as Karl Marx and Albert Camus, he told the Commons Children, Schools and Families Committee: “Suppose you went into a school and found in the library material that said the Holocaust never took place?”
I don’t know which books he has in mind, but it’s another example of this insane arrogation of privilege. I’d really like to know which books he’d like to have banned, because I want to make sure our kids get to read it.
A Catholic bishop has accused the gay community of leading a “conspiracy” against Christianity by allying itself with Holocaust survivors.
The well-known homophobic conspiracy strikes again. Given that homosexuals were among the first to be sent to the concentration camps, it’s not at all unreasonable for the gay community to ally itself with Holocaust survivors.
The Bishop of Motherwell, Joseph Devine, says a “homosexual lobby” has aligned itself with minority groups, including Holocaust survivors, to gain persecuted status.
With homophobes like Devine, who can blame them?
He said there was a “huge and well orchestrated conspiracy” taking place in the “gay movement”, which the Catholic Church neglected “at our peril”.
And exactly what is the peril of the CC? People dissenting with the morally bankrupt moral teachings of the CC—in word and deed? And exactly what should the CC have done about it?
In an attack on openly gay actor Sir Ian McKellen the bishop said: “I saw actor Ian McKellen being honoured for his work on behalf of homosexuals, when a century ago Oscar Wilde was locked up and put in jail.”
I’d really like him to spell out what he’s trying to convey. Is he in favor of Sir McKellen being incarcerated for being gay? Should Sir McKellen be grateful that he can be openly gay? What?
He made the comments during a lecture on “Christian faith and inconvenient questions” in Glasgow on Tuesday and has since stood by them, “These groups are defending their position, I am defending mine”, he said. “It is all about a lifestyle alien to the Christian tradition. There is a giant conspiracy against Christian values, an agenda here.”
A spokesman defended the bishop’s comments, “Anything which attacks the sanctity of marriage and the family will be opposed by the church,” he said. Civil partnerships are “an abuse” of the church’s teaching on marriage, he told Times Online.
Heard it all before.
Calum Irving, director of Stonewall Scotland, which promotes equality and justice for gay people, said the bishop was “deluded”.
He told The Scotsman: “Such a continued attack on gay people is distinctly un-Christian and deeply out of step with the views of most Scots today.”
I concur. Trying to push a homophobic agenda within a society that predominantly doesn’t take issue with homosexuality anymore is a sucky job.
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