Atheism, fuck yeah!
Welcome atheists, skeptics, freethinkers all,
to this little corner of godlessness.
~Mooglets

“Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it.”  – Christopher Hitchens

Julea Ward, in case you are wondering, was a student at Eastern Michigan University who was kicked out of a school counseling graduate program after she refused, on religious grounds, to affirm homosexual behavior when serving clients. Judge George Caram Steeh of the U.S. District Court in Detroit dismissed the suit, saying that the university “had a right and duty to enforce compliance” with professional ethics rules that bars counselors from discrimination, and ruled in favor of the university.

We’ll Have None Of THAT…!

ThinkProgress reports that the Michigan House passed HB 5040 (Julea Ward Freedom Of Conscience Act). This bill transcends Christian colleges and will, if passed, also effect non-Christian (read: real) colleges that will allow students to refuse to provide any counseling that compromises their religious beliefs. Including those pesky gays…

According to HB 5040, this bill is,

“A public degree or certificate granting college, university, junior college, or community college of this state shall not discipline or discriminate against a student in a counseling, social work, or psychology program because the student refuses to counsel or serve a client as to goals, outcomes, or behaviors that conflict with a sincerely held religious belief of the student, if the student refers the client to a counselor who will provide the counseling or services.”

Legislation should dictate ethical standards in a university setting, but this bill seeks to dodge it.

Wayne, Manners…

ThinkProgress closes their article by reporting that activist Wayne Besen said,

“Counseling should be about the client, not the self-serving needs of the therapist.”

Michigan’s distaste for their LGBT community was solidified when they banned all domestic partnerships, and again when they attempted to create a “license to bully” in schools. Their illustrious Governor, Rick Snyder (R), as expected wouldn’t even meet with anyone from the LGBT press.

The Michigan State Motto should be changed from “Si quaeris peninsulam amoenam circumspice” (If you seek a pleasant peninsula, look about you) to “Si vos peto bigotry , vos mos reperio is hic” (If you seek bigotry, you will find it here)

Freethought blogs

Whereas employers traditionally fought over classicists because they were seen as the most rounded graduates, students with degrees in evolution would soon gain a similar reputation, the author and renowned atheist said.

Although no such course exists in Britain, with the subject principally being confined to biology programmes, Prof Dawkins said degrees in evolution were sure to appear in future and their students would achieve “polymathic status”.

Reading evolution would broaden scholars’ horizons by giving them a better understanding of economics, social science, philosophy, engineering, medicine, agriculture, linguistics, physics, cosmology and the history of science, he argued.

The author of The God Delusion was speaking as he accepted an award for Distinguished Services to Humanism from the British Humanists Association last weekend.

He told the Daily Telegraph: “I think evolution would do a good job of uniting not just biology and geology and the obvious scientific subjects, but also philosophy, history, economics.

“Rather like classics it gives you the skills of debating, a perspective on life … it would do what classics has always done, which is just teach people how to think.”

Prof Dawkins, who is employed by Oxford University but is also affiliated with A.C. Grayling’s New College of the Humanities, added that he would happily lecture on such a course.

Explaining the common ground shared by evolution and behavioural economics in his speech last weekend, he said: “Everything has to be paid for, there is no such thing as a free lunch. You have to pay for whatever you do now in the form of lost opportunities to do other things in the future.”

The evolutionary subject of sexual selection, the relationship between parents and their children and the significance of sex ratios are “rife” within economic thinking, he added, according to a Guardian blog.

Engineering principles such as the refinement of designs to make them more efficient and effective are “central to evolutionary theory” while the modern-day study of molecular genetics is effectively “digital information technology”, he said.

All doctors should be followers of Darwin, he continued, saying that “If doctors had been wise to natural selection we wouldn’t have the problem we have now with antibiotic resistance evolving by natural selection by bacteria”.

Yesterday I blogged about a new Gallup poll revealing that 46 per cent of Americans hold creationist views, but today attention shifts around the globe to South Korea, following news that school textbook publishers are to remove several references to evolution from future editions as a result of a successful petition by a creationist organisation.

According to a report in the latest issue of Nature, the Society for Textbook Revise, an offshoot of the Korea Association for Creation Research, launched a petition calling on the South Korean Ministry of Education, Science and Technology to ask publishers to remove examples concerning the evolution of the horse and Archaeopteryx, a winged Late Jurassic creature believed to be an ancestor of modern birds. After the Ministry passed on the petition to textbook publishers, several took the decision to remove the examples from their books.

The focus on the specific example of Archaeopteryx represents a common creationist tactic, whereby genuine disputes among evolutionary biologists are exploited in an attempt to undermine the science as a whole. Archaeopteryx has long been believed to have been an ancient ancestor of birds, but more recent studies have suggested the connection to modern birds may not be as clear as was previously thought. Having successfully taken advantage of that particular scientific debate, the Society for Textbook Revise are apparently now aiming to persuade publishers to remove references to “the evolution of humans”.

Figures for those not believing in evolution in South Korea are relatively high, with almost one-third of those surveyed in a 2009 poll saying they did not. Considering that only 26 per cent of Koreans are Christian, it is possible that the problem lies with science education rather than religion – 41 per cent of those disputing evolution in the 2009 survey cited “insufficient scientific evidence”, compared with 39 per cent who cited religious beliefs. Speaking to Nature Dayk Jang, an evolutionary scientist at Seoul National University, suggests evolution is not taught widely enough in the country’s universities, with “only 5–10 evolutionary scientists” teaching the theory to students across the entire university system.

—-

New Humanist

This doesn’t surprise me. This is my neck of the woods right now, and the sheer amount of crosses I see, on every damn street, flashing neon from roof-tops, Religious Iconography in windows and store-fronts…I swear, it’s worse than America.

~Mooglets

Trust in Science Has Also Declined Among People Who Frequently Attend Church  

WASHINGTON, DC, March 29, 2012 — While trust in science remained stable among people who self-identified as moderates and liberals in the United States between 1974 and 2010, trust in science fell among self-identified conservatives by more than 25 percent during the same period, according to new research from Gordon Gauchat, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill’s Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research.

“You can see this distrust in science among conservatives reflected in the current Republican primary campaign,” said Gauchat, whose study appears in the April issue of the American Sociological Review. “When people want to define themselves as conservatives relative to moderates and liberals, you often hear them raising questions about the validity of global warming and evolution and talking about how ‘intellectual elites’ and scientists don’t necessarily have the whole truth.”

Relying on data from the 1974-2010 waves of the nationally representative General Social Survey, the study found that people who self-identified as conservatives began the period with the highest trust in science, relative to self-identified moderates and liberals, and ended the period with the lowest.

In addition to examining how the relationship between political ideology and trust in science changed over almost 40 years, Gauchat also explored how other social and demographic characteristics—including frequency of church attendance—related to trust in science over that same period. Gauchat found that, while trust in science declined between 1974 and 2010 among those who frequently attended church, there was no statistically significant group-specific change in trust in science over that period among any of the other social or demographic factors he examined, including gender, race/ethnicity, and socioeconomic status.

“This study shows that the public trust in science has not declined since the mid-1970s except among self-identified conservatives and among those who frequently attend church,” Gauchat said. “It also provides evidence that, in the United States, there is a tension between religion and science in some contexts. This tension is evident in public controversies such as that over the teaching of evolution.”

As for why self-identified conservatives were much less likely to trust science in 2010 than they were in the mid-1970s, Gauchat offered several possibilities. One is the conservative movement itself.

“Over the last several decades, there’s been an effort among those who define themselves as conservatives to clearly identify what it means to be a conservative,” Gauchat said. “For whatever reason, this appears to involve opposing science and universities and what is perceived as the ‘liberal culture.’ So, self-identified conservatives seem to lump these groups together and rally around the notion that what makes ‘us’ conservatives is that we don’t agree with ‘them.’”

Another possibility, according to Gauchat, is the changing role of science in the United States. “In the past, the scientific community was viewed as concerned primarily with macro structural matters such as winning the space race,” Gauchat said. “Today, conservatives perceive the scientific community as more focused on regulatory matters such as stopping industry from producing too much carbon dioxide. Conservatives often oppose government regulation, and they increasingly perceive science as on the side of regulation, especially as scientific evidence is used more frequently in the work of government agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency and in public debates over issues such as climate change.”

The study also found that the declining trust in science among conservatives was not attributable to changes among less educated conservatives, but rather to rising distrust among better educated conservatives. “It is a significant finding and the opposite of what many might expect,” Gauchat said.

As for the study’s implications, Gauchat said it raises important questions about the future role of science in public policy. “In a political climate in which all sides do not share a basic trust in science, scientific evidence no longer is viewed as a politically neutral factor in judging whether a public policy is good or bad,” said Gauchat, who is also concerned that the increasingly politicized view of science could turn people away from careers in the field. “I think this would be very detrimental to an advanced economy where you need people with science and engineering backgrounds.”

ASA

An interesting read.

~Mooglets

AN ATHEIST GROUP has called on a teacher training college to remove notes from its curriculum which say that atheism produced “the worst horrors history has ever witnessed”.

Atheist Ireland says the module on religion at Hibernia College is unfair on people who don’t believe in god or who are not Roman Catholic.

It has called on the college to revise the religion module in its HDip in primary school education to teach students in an “objective, critical and pluralistic manner”.

Students at the college who are training to become primary school teachers are given course notes during the module which say that “atheist humanism produced the worst horrors history has ever witnessed, namely Nazism, Fascism and Marxism,” according to Atheist Ireland.

Students are also expected to answer ‘True’ to the exam statement: “Atheist humanism produced the worst horrors history has ever witnessed”.

Atheist Ireland has called on the college to remove the statements from the course notes and examinations, calling them “disgraceful” and “untrue”.

“Hibernia College should not be teaching the disgraceful [coursework] that very few modern atheists are bothered about the causes of the worst atrocities in history, and that we feel anything is morally justified in the absence of gods,” the group said in a letter today.

In Ireland, we have got used to Roman Catholic educational institutions discrimination against atheists and against religion people who are not Roman Catholics. It is sad that we now find Hibernia College, a nonreligious educational institution, doing the same.

A call to Hibernia College had not been returned by this afternoon.

thejournal.ie

Michael Gove, the education secretary, is at the centre of an escalating row over how faith schools discuss homosexuality in sex education classes.

The TUC has accused Gove of failing in his legal duties by insisting that equality laws, which prohibit discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation, do not extend to the school curriculum.

The TUC complains that the current situation sends mixed signals to the playground, because schools are legally obliged to condemn discrimination on sexual-orientation grounds but free to use religious materials that equality campaigners claim is homophobic.

Brendan Barber, the TUC’s general secretary, wrote to Gove in December expressing alarm that a booklet containing “homophobic material” had been distributed by a US preacher after talks to pupils at Roman Catholic schools across the Lancashire region in 2010.

The booklet, “Pure Manhood: How to become the man God wants you to be”, discusses a boy dealing with “homosexual attractions” which it suggested may “stem from an unhealthy relationship with his father, an inability to relate to other guys, or even sexual abuse”.

The booklet, which claims that “scientifically speaking, safe sex is a joke”, explains that “the homosexual act is disordered, much like contraceptive sex between heterosexuals. Both acts are directed against God’s natural purpose for sex – babies and bonding.”

Referring to the Equality Act 2010, which prohibits discrimination against individuals, Barber said: “Schools now have a legal duty to challenge all forms of prejudice. Such literature undermines this completely.”

But Gove insists: “The education provisions of the Equality Act 2010 which prohibit discrimination against individuals based on their protected characteristics (including their sexual orientation) do not extend to the content of the curriculum. Any materials used in sex and relationship education lessons, therefore, will not be subject to the discrimination provisions of the act.”

Gove’s response has triggered anger from the TUC. “Having written to the education secretary to express our worry about the distribution of homophobic literature in faith schools, his lack of concern is very alarming,” Barber said.

A DfE spokesman insisted: “Any school engaging in the promotion of homophobic material would be acting unlawfully.” But the row highlights a grey area over the teaching of sex education. A review intended to provide new guidelines on what was appropriate for schools to teach was kicked into the long grass when the last election was called.

“It would certainly be helpful if there was clarity as to what is appropriate for young people of all ages,” said Ben Summerskill, chief executive of the gay rights group Stonewall. “The water could no longer be muddied by people pushing age-inappropriate sex material on the one hand and fundamentalist anti-gay religious materials on the other.”

The row comes at the end of an extraordinary week in which the role of religion in society has come under acute scrutiny.

The chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, Trevor Phillips, said religious rules should be left “at the door of the temple” and give way to the “public law” laid down by parliament. Phillips said: “Once you start to provide public services that have to be run under public rules – for example, child protection – then it has to go with public law.” Phillips spoke out after Baroness Warsi, the Tory minister, warned Britain was under threat from a rising tide of “militant secularisation”.

Lord Carey, the former archbishop of Canterbury, warned that Christianity was being marginalised. Days earlier, the high court ruled that councils had no statutory power to hold prayers in meetings, while the Christian owners of a bed-and-breakfast lost an appeal against a ruling that their policy of restricting double rooms to married couples discriminated against a gay couple.

Concerns that faith matters are being marginalised at school has prompted the creation of a new coalition of faith groups and politicians. The Religious Education Council of England and Wales is to back the creation of an all-party parliamentary group that will focus on protecting religious education in schools and stressing its value to young people.

Since the Supreme Court’s 1962 decision banning prayer in the public school classrooms, conservative evangelical Christians have been at war with public education. Many conservatives point to that decision as the harbinger of America’s moral decline. For years, Christian Right organizations and their leaders have railed against teachers’ unions, opposed tax increases to improve public education, and have even gone so far as to encourage Christian parents to withdraw their children from the public schools. During this period, the Christian Right ran stealth school board candidates and took control of the decision-making process in numerous school districts.

Now, it appears the movement has found another way of imposing its religious views in the public schools; through thinly disguised afterschool Bible study programs.

An unexpected discovery

Most parents with elementary and junior high school-age children are busy focusing on the nuts and bolts of day-to-day life — getting their kids ready for school, preparing lunches and providing the requisite lunch money, emptying out and restocking backpacks and signing notes from teachers, making sure homework is done, providing rides to the school’s doorstep and picking up their kids after school - to get too deeply involved with everything going on behind schoolhouse doors.  

In January 2009, Katherine Stewart, a novelist, journalist, and mother, learned that her children’s school in Santa Barbara, California, had added a Bible-study class to its list of afterschool programs. The afterschool group was called, innocuously enough, the “Good News Club.”

Curious as to what this “Good News Club” was about, Stewart discovered that it was part of a nationwide effort, sponsored by a conservative evangelical organization called the Child Evangelism Fellowship (http://www.cefonline.com/), a group aiming to “take back” America’s public schools. Backing this effort, she found, are three long-term Christian Right founded and funded legal enterprises, the Alliance Defense Fund, the Liberty Counsel, and the American Center for Law and Justice,.

Stewart didn’t stop at merely being surprised by the agenda of the “Good News Club” (http://www.cefonline.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=ca tegory&id=13&Itemid=100049). She explains in the introduction to her new book, The Good News Club: The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children (Public Affairs, January 2012), that doing the research for the book took her to “dozens of cities and towns across the country … . [where she] found religion-driven programs and initiatives inserting themselves into public school systems with unprecedented force and unexpected consequences.”

The Good News Clubs is a nationally based effort “coordinated and given strategic direction by extremely well financed groups whose leaders write the scripts that are followed in classrooms, playgrounds, and courtrooms from New York to California,” Stewart writes.

Good News Club v. Milford Central School

Religious-based after school programs burgeoned after the Good News Club v. Milford Central School (a K-12 school in upstate New York) Supreme Court decision in 2001.  Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for the 6-3 majority, “laid out a philosophy that essentially destroyed the postwar consensus on the separation of church and school,” Stewart reports. Religion was now redefined “as nothing more than speech from a religious viewpoint.”

The Supreme Court’s decision essentially made it seem like the Good News Club’s sponsoring organization, the Child Evangelism Fellowship, was not a fundamentalist Christian organization that actually claimed that salvation was only available to those that believed Jesus is their savior, but rather just another group offering a religious viewpoint. The decision essentially allowed religious organizations access to the same public school facilities as other non-sectarian groups.

“Unfortunately, the Supreme Court upheld the right of CEF to meet in public schools at the end of the school day,” Rob Boston, Senior Policy Analyst with Americans United told me in an email. “In some parts of the country, the group is very active and creates the impression that it is a school-sanctioned extended day-care program.”

Good News Clubs take hold

Stewart found “student athletic programs turned into vehicles for religious recruiting”; “services [taking place] at dozens of the hundreds of school facilities that double as taxpayer-financed houses of worship”; and “children … [that] have been subject to proselytizing in classrooms and school yards.” She met with “school board officials” that are “rewriting textbook standards to conform to their religious agendas,” talked with many of “the people promoting and attending `Bible Study’ courses that turned out to be programs of sectarian indoctrination,” and she “sat in on training sessions with instructors for the Good News Club, which now operates in nearly 3,500 public elementary schools around the country.”    

One parent described to Stewart how members of a newly-formed Good News Club in an elementary school in Seattle, Washington, “came in like a bunch of gangbusters”: “They started putting a Statement of Faith in kids’ mailboxes. They distributed flyers. They were doing everything they could to have as big a presence on campus as possible.” The Club’s three-foot-high signage made sure to note that candy and cookies would be available.

Stewart cites numerous examples of Good News Clubs running amok in the public schools; inspiring culture clashes between children with different faiths and from different ethnic backgrounds. In many cases, young children who cannot yet read are fooled into thinking the Bible sessions are official school activities.

Good News Clubs were set up by the Child Evangelism Fellowship (CEF), a worldwide organization founded seventy-five years ago in Warrenton, Missouri, by J.I. Overholtzer, a man who, according to the CEF website, “dreamed of an army of child evangelists encircling the globe.” years ago.

The website points out that Overholtzer’s dream “has largely become reality,” as the ministry is embedded in 175 nations and “reach[es] over 10 million children in face-to-face ministry annually.” In addition to the Good News Clubs, the ministry runs the “Truth Chasers Club,” “Camp Good News,” Military Children’s Ministries,” Ministry to Children of Prisoners,” and “Wonderzone.com,” a ten-year-old “site allows trained counselors to disciple children in a real-time, interactive environment.”

In pulling a latter-day Sara Diamond (the pioneering researcher and author of books on the Religious Right, who attended numerous movement meetings in the early 1980s) Stewart’s most eye-opening experience came while attending CEF’s May, 2010, triennial National Convention, held at the Shocco Springs Baptist Convention Center in Talladega, Alabama.

(Neither Will Ferrell, John C. Reilly nor Sacha Baron Cohen would be there to get her through those Talladega Nights.)

The vast majority of the 450 or so attendees were affiliated with CEF, including senior officials, staff, regional leaders, and heads of CEF’s youth, military and prison ministries. Stewart points out that, “We’re going to kick in the doors of every public school in the country!” is a phrase she keeps hearing.

“This is an old organization with ties to well known evangelical mission groups,” Talk2Action’s Rachel Tabachnick told me in an email. “But CEF has mastered stealth evangelism of children, one of the goals for infiltrating society from the grass roots up, instead of top down.”  

Tabachnick added: “CEF is a good example of how stealth evangelism” operates successfully in hundreds of communities across the country.

As anyone who witnessed the recent Focus on the Family-sponsored television commercial during a Denver Broncos football game — which used young children to explain what the Bible verse John 3:16 (one of Bronco quarterback Tim Tebow’s favorite Biblical verses) is about — understands that children are frequently used by conservative evangelical leaders as tools to spread the “Good News.” So it should not be surprising that children from 4-14 are seen as fertile recruiting ground.

The Child Evangelism Fellowship “targets very young children,” Americans United’s Rob Boston pointed out. “The group has even produced a `wordless book’ for children who are too young to read,” he said.

“Religious nationalism has now become part of American political theater, and we take notice of it mostly during election campaigns,” Stewart writes.

“When it shows up in our backyard, in our schools and local communities, we reach instinctively for our First Amendment, interpreting the whole matter in terms of whose rights are being respected and whose feelings are being hurt. The most important issue before us, however, is not just a question of the rights and feelings of individuals. The fact is that there is a movement in our midst that rejects the values of inclusivity and diversity, a movement that seeks to undermine the foundations of modern secular democracy. It has set its sights on destroying the system of public education - and it is succeeding. Unless we confront that fact directly, we may well keep our rights but lose the system of education that has long served as the silent pillar of our democracy.”

Boston added: “In light of the Supreme Court ruling, parents need to be diligent. They should not assume that any group operating in a public school is secular. The hard-core proselytizers are out there, often finding homes in public schools.”

Talk To Action

Leading scientists and naturalists, including Professor Richard Dawkinsand Sir David Attenborough, are claiming a victory over the creationist movement after the government ratified measures that will bar anti-evolution groups from teaching creationism in science classes.

The Department for Education has revised its model funding agreement, allowing the education secretary to withdraw cash from schools that fail to meet strict criteria relating to what they teach. Under the new agreement, funding will be withdrawn for any free school that teaches what it claims are “evidence-based views or theories” that run “contrary to established scientific and/or historical evidence and explanations”.

The British Humanist Association (BHA), which has led a campaign against creationism – the movement that denies Darwinian evolution and claims that the Earth and all its life was created by God – described the move as “highly significant” and predicted that it would have implications for other faith groups looking to run schools.

Dawkins, who was one of the leading lights in the campaign, welcomed confirmation that creationists would not receive funding to run free schools if they sought to portray their views as science. “I welcome all moves to ensure that creationism is not taught as fact in schools,” he said. “Government rules on this are extremely welcome, but they need to be properly enforced.”

Free schools, which are state-funded and run by local people or organisations, do not need to follow the national curriculum. Scientific groups have expressed concerns that their spread will see a reduction in the teaching of evolution in the classroom.

Several creationist groups have expressed an interest in opening schools in towns and cities across England, including Bedford, Barnsley, Sheffield and Nottingham. Critics say they seek to promote creationism, or the doctrine of “intelligent design”, as a scientific theory rather than as a myth or metaphor.

One creationist organisation, Truth in Science, which encourages teachers to incorporate intelligent design into their science teaching, has sent free resources to all secondary schools and sixth-form colleges.

A BHA campaign, called “Teach evolution, not creationism”, saw 30 leading scientists and educators call on the government to introduce statutory guidance against the teaching of creationism. The group said if the government would not support the call, an explicit amendment to the wording of the funding agreement could have the same effect. Last week the Department for Education confirmed it had amended the agreement, although a spokesman denied it was the result of pressure from scientists. He said the revision made good on a pledge regarding the teaching of creationism given when the education secretary, Michael Gove, was in opposition. “We will not accept any academy or free school proposal which plans to teach creationism in the science curriculum or as an alternative to accepted scientific theories,” the spokesman said, adding that “all free school proposals will be subject to due diligence checks by the department’s specialist team”.

The revised funding agreement has been seized upon by anti-creationists who are pressing for wider concessions from the government.

“It is clear that some faith schools are ignoring the regulations and are continuing to teach myth as though it were science,” Dawkins said. “Evolution is fact, supported by evidence from a host of scientific disciplines, and we do a great disservice to our young people if we fail to teach it properly. “

A spokeswoman for the BHA said: “The government’s new wording is quite wide and in practice could prevent those who promote extreme religious or particular spiritual or pseudoscientific approaches from including them as part of the school curriculum as science or as evidence-based.”

The Guardian

Thanks to pintucks for the submission :) 

~Mooglets