A quick-round up for the start of the week – then it’s back to work for me!
Firstly – Jim Wallace is not happy about ethics classes being offered to students from NSW as an alternative to scripture… Opinion, The Age: You can’t teach ethics without referring to Christianity:
With our nation having just played host to a big atheist convention trumpeting the intellectual superiority of unbelief, many may well be wondering why we still bother gazetting an extended long weekend to celebrate the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. For future generations this perplexity will grow if the NSW Government, dancing to the tune of intolerant secularists, has its way in our schools.
…it just gets nastier from then on in. You have been warned.
Please read Leslie Cannold’s article to compare – Find these kids an alternative, for god’s sake.
If you would like to know more about the Towards an Ethics-based Option to Scripture in NSW Primary Schools (pdf) - you can also check out the St James Ethics Centre and listen forthcoming podcast interview I plan to do with Stephen Law.
NEWLY LAUNCHED! Woo-Fighters! Tune into the next Skeptically Speaking radio show this Friday (Saturday for those in Australia) to hear not only the creator, Prof Barbara Drescher, but my soon-to-be-published by Random House friend, Michael McRae! The purpose of the Woo Fighters organization is to promote critical, skeptical, and scientific thinking by inspiring students to become active promoters of scientific skepticism and defenders of science. At present, the founding chapter of Woo Fighters is a recognized entity at California State University, Northridge.
What’s been happening on Twitter? A discussion on whether he recent ‘it’s not actually true‘ statement by Prof Richard Dawkins about the ‘arrest the Pope’ claim has anything to do with skeptical activism:
Needless to say, I did NOT say “I will arrest Pope Benedict XVI” or anything so personally grandiloquent. You have to remember that The Sunday Times is a Murdoch newspaper, and that all newspapers follow the odd custom of entrusting headlines to a sub-editor, not the author of the article itself.
What I DID say to Marc Horne when he telephoned me out of the blue, and I repeat it here, is that I am whole-heartedly behind the initiative by Geoffrey Robertson and Mark Stephens to mount a legal challenge to the Pope’s proposed visit to Britain. Beyond that, I declined to comment to Marc Horme, other than to refer him to my ‘Ratzinger is the Perfect Pope’ article here: http://richarddawkins.net/articles/5341
…Even if the Pope doesn’t end up in the dock, and even if the Vatican doesn’t cancel the visit, I am optimistic that we shall raise public consciousness to the point where the British government will find it very awkward indeed to go ahead with the Pope’s visit, let alone pay for it. [My emphasis]
So, people starting up Facebook groups urging Dawkins to Rugby-tackle the Pope into an arrest are clearly just being a little too enthusiastic.
This also had the likes of Skeptic’s Daniel Loxton discussing what is the best path for skeptics to take (as shown in the screen-shot), including:
I quite liked Reed Esau’s balanced approach too: “Skepticism has a defined scope, as established by CSICOP during its founding. See also Loxton’s WDWGFH [PDF - Where Do We Go From Here?]… agreed that skepticism does have broad application, but if an activist wants to get shit done, pragmatically she has to limit scope.”
Although I will say that Daniel Loxton’s : OK, we need a baseline. Show of hands. Who thinks, “Who was the best Star Trek captain?” is within the cope of scientific skepticism? is utterly bonkers and he will be buried in Tribbles for daring to ask such a question. It’s clearly Jean-Luc Picard.
Thanks to a find by Leslie Cannold, the BBC recently stated what I kind of thought was ‘the bleedin’ obvious’: Internet child health advice ‘wrong’ – Many people use the internet to find health information!
Typing your child’s medical problem into Google is unlikely to deliver much in the way of good advice, UK researchers have said. The Nottingham-based team used the search engine to find UK-based advice on five common issues, including breastfeeding and autism. Only about 200 of 500 sites offered correct information, Archives of Disease in Childhood reports. Government-run sites were the only completely reliable source, they found.
Finally – Big Hollywood – Autism Needs Progress, Not Self-Obsessed Celebrities. Well said…
Then, I turned to the Internet and saw Jenny McCarthy begging people to vote for her anti-vaccination charity, Generation Rescue, to win $250K from the “Pepsi Refresh Everything Project.” In a somewhat crazed plea, McCarthy promises that she will spend everyday for the rest of her life helping raise money for these autistic kids. And then I heard something from way out in left field. Yoko Ono was named the first-ever “World Autism Ambassador” by Autism Speaks. Huh?
The month was getting off to a bad start and then something good happened. HBO aired “A Mother’s Courage: Talking Back to Autism.”… Apparently, the type of awareness that Jenny McCarthy and Holly Robinson Peete are spreading is not helping Margaret Dagmar Ericsdottir or her son. This former businesswoman turned full-time mother was so starved for helpful information that she had to travel the globe with a film crew to find a way to actually help her severely autistic son, Keli, communicate. “A Mother’s Courage” was refreshing in that it moved past hearing about how hard it is for parents to accept an autism diagnosis and move toward improving the quality of life of autistic individuals. Acceptance, understanding and progress are what autistic people need, not celebrities selling books and declaring war on the CDC.
Feel free to keep commenting on my site and ask questions – remember that the podcasts are still coming out even though I won’t be here much for this week!
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Good mixture of the funny and tragic in all of that! People are really thinking that ‘arresting the Pope’ is going to happen? There have been riots in London before, over religious matters, and if England does that in the face of not only the observant there, but in regards to other countries like Italy (and especially?) Ireland?
I’d say that skeptics should certainly, if they consider themselves atheists and socially-concerned as well, be quite worried about the record of the Catholic church and their abuses, let alone other abuses being committed world-wide. But to say it’s a ‘skeptic thing’ is a little too ‘let’s make “skeptic” be my hobby-horse for everything and run the risk of the term being conflated once again with other things, like Global Warming Denialists”.
Thanks for the shout out, Kylie!
But this is bittersweet as I have discovered that you, my dear, have gone off the deep end. James T. Kirk is, was, and will always be, the ideal starfleet captain.
Which raises the question for me as a skeptic and atheist, how do I object to the pope and the undemocratic political maneuverings of the RCC without people perceiving me as doing it as a skeptic or atheist for that matter?
Interesting – I might raise that in a forthcoming interview?
It amuses me that the churches are so threatened by the possibility of ethics classes being taught in school. The impression they give is that when presented with a secular alternative parents and students will overwhelmingly choose it over the religious classes.
Maybe they’re right to think that. They certainly don’t seem to have a lot of faith in their own product.
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