Ken Ham waxing about how atheists are persecuting Christians.

A story has been floating around the blogosphere about a man who was upset to find his child was being taught nonsense science claims at a private school he was sending his child to.

Children are being taught in the classroom that brontosaurs were refereed to as a behemoth in the the book of Job and are encouraged to answer the question "The next time someone says the earth is billions (or millions) of years old, what can you say?" with the answer "Were you there?"

Creationism Quiz Claims Dinosaurs Lived With People

Picture of the offending quiz.

Of course Ken Ham could not put up with the affront to justice that this father, who expected this school to teach science in the science classroom, represented and Ham fired back with a response.  

Intolerant Atheists Viciously Attack Christian School

Now mind you, nothing in the published story even states the religious beliefs of the father in this story so there is no reason to assume he is an atheist, but this doesn't stop Ham from going off into conspiratorial ramblings about how atheists are out to get Christians. He really seems to believe that Christians are all some poor belabored minority.  

He even presents some "examples" in a box to the side of the article of persecution they face:

Billboards promoting atheism and attacking Christianity have popped up across the country.

Because apparently free speech is now persecution.

The American Humanist Association has launched a special website for children to indoctrinate them in atheism.

The site he is referring to is this one kidswithoutgod.com. It isn't aimed at converting children but giving resources to children who already don't believe.  However, even if it were aimed at conversion so what? Christians spend millions if not billions of dollars a year on hundreds of thousands of programs aimed at converting children to their religion. This website is totally passive, you have to go to it to see the content, yet many of the aforementioned Christian programs actively seek out children even when doing so violates church state separation. Why is it totally fine for them to put their ideas out there for others to consider but when we do it it's "indoctrination?"

An atheist rally in Washington DC last year had a special promotion to encourage kids to attend their atheist camps.

The program his talking about is Camp Quest. It is not an "atheist" camp, it's a secular came for children that focuses on teaching kids about science and critical thinking. It's a good program and I plan on sending my kids to it once they get old enough. I have good memories of some of the camps I went to when I was younger (minus the religious teachings of course) and I want my kids to have such memories too.

In any case, this is typical damned if you do damned if you don't criticism. Christians criticize atheists for doing nothing but attacking Christianity but offering no replacements for the "helpful social programs" that churches offer such as summer camps for kids.  Now that our movement has had a chance to establish itself we start putting together such programs and now we are accused of "indoctrinating" kids.

Atheists have been increasingly using terms like “child abuse” to describe the efforts of Christians who seek to teach their children about creation, heaven, and hell.

Several prominent skeptics including Lawrence Krauss have claimed that teaching creationism or teaching them that god sends unbelievers to hell are mild forms of child abuse, in much the same way that teaching your child that the earth is flat would be a mild form of child abuse. I happen to agree with the sentiment, however no one is suggesting that this is the same as physical abuse or that the state should necessarily take a child away from a parent for this sort of thing, though clearly we hope the children will manage to learn better than their parents and try to provide the facts to make that happen.

Many atheists claim that children belong to the community, not to their parents.

I don't know any atheists who think this. However, I do think that, though a parent has quite a bit of leeway to parent as they wish, children are still individuals separate from their parents who have rights and deserve a modicum of protection by the state from certain kinds of parental actions. I don't believe, for instance, that Christan Scientists have a right to allow their children to die from lack of medical treatment because of their belief that modern medicine is immoral.

Atheists have actively opposed any effort in public schools to even question a belief of evolution or suggest there are any problems with it.

And now we get to the dead horse Ham likes to beat, evolution. It should be noted that it is not only atheists that oppose the teaching of creationism or intelligent design in classrooms. There are theistic scientists who promote evolution like Catholic Ken Miller, so Ham's claim is not even accurate, but there are good reasons to promote good science in science classrooms, and evolution is good science.  It's nothing but Ham's biases and lack of understanding of science that leads him to believe that evolution is untenable.

Christians are not being persecuted when they aren't allowed to promote odd pseudo-science in the classroom anymore than a crypto-zoologist is being persecuted when the biology class won't let him share his evidence for Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster.

If Ken Ham spent as much time actually learning something about science as he did complaining about how atheists are persecuting him he would realize how silly all this actually sounds.

Arizona campus preacher tells anti-rape protesters: ‘You deserve rape'

Christian preacher Dean Saxton wants women to know that they deserve to be raped. 

'You Deserve Rape' sign causes controversy on UA campus.

Arizona campus preacher to anti-rape protesters: ‘You deserve rape’

Saxon was quoting as saying:

if you dress like a whore, act like a whore, you’re probably going to get raped. I think that girls that dress and act like it, they should realize that they do have partial responsibility, because I believe that they’re pretty much asking for it.

Feeling that Christian love yet?

A short message for Saxton: No one deserves to be raped. Even if a woman is doing naked cartwheels in front of you don't have a right to force yourself on her. If you really look at a woman in a mini-skirt and think that her skimpy dress gives you (or anyone else) the right to sexually assault her there is something wrong with you not her.  The only time it is reasonable to have sex with someone is when they also want to have sex with you, this shouldn't even be that complicated.

According to Turkish scientist atheism is a form of autism.

Ran across this yesterday.

All autistic kids are atheists 

Turkish scientist Fehmi Kaya, a Muslim from what I have read, is arguing that atheism is a form of autism.  From the article:

"That is why they don’t know how to pray, how to believe in God. It is needed to create awareness in these children through methods of therapy.” Kaya added that autistic children should undergo treatment to “create areas of faith in their brain."

Yes, you heard it right, Kaya  is advocating for treating atheism as a mental illness which he wants to cure. He literally wants to force people to be religious against their will. Any guess as to which religion he wants to force on them?

At least he isn't blaming vaccinations, but then I can see some conspiracy nuts using this a way to claim vaccinations are the governments way of turning people into atheists.

Debate on Homosexuality/Gay Marriage: Argument from "Just Saying"

Vocab offered as part of this debate something I have heard from Christians and other theists before, the notion that if we know that certain life style choices (like homosexuality) are unhealthy they feel required to let those people know, because they care about people's well being.  This is an attempt to answer the charge that fundamentalists are either homophobic or bigoted towards homosexuals. To a certain extent I actually accept this argument. Of course to be clear I think there are quite a few people out there both Christian and not who are in fact bigoted towards gay people but I accept that many Christians like Vocab are in fact well meaning in their assessment even if their conclusions are not well supported by the science.

I do have several problems with this statement though. First, as I have shown, much of the information that fundamentalist Christians are providing are either outright wrong, subject to conformation bias, or presented in a such an obviously biased manner that no one really takes it seriously. Vocab, who is certainly one of the more knowledgeable believers I have debated this topic with, still falls prey to these same problems. The point is just to ask a simple question, would you rather get medical advice from a doctor or a theologian? Christians like Vocab want to give homosexuals medical advice but the advice is typically very bad and given by the single group that homosexuals are least likely to listen to anyway. It is like being told that eating red meat is dangerous to your health by a member of PETA. Even if they turn out to be right you know there are other motivations there at work besides your physical health.

The reality is that everything involves risk, it's not like heterosexual sex can't put you at a higher risk for some things as well. For this reason doctors and psychologists don't generally set out to control people's behavior, they simply offer people advice to avoid as much risk as possible and then let people make up their own minds. Yet, when I tried to Google search homosexual health risks while writing this I noticed that the entire first page of results were filled with sites from Christian groups most of whom included many factually incorrect claims and at best failed to correctly reference the studies they based their claims on, I had to go to the second search result page to get a legitimate medical website. Since people can easily find out what they are at risk for by consulting with a doctor, and that information is likely to be more reliable than the advice coming from religious groups, I might humbly suggest that fundamentalist Christian apologists might want to stay out of medicine. If their efforts have any effect at all it is probably to stymie access to real medical information.

I said at the beginning of the show that every time I dig into a new statistic that some religious groups has come up with on this topic I find out that the study was flawed in some serious way. Nothing in this discussion suggests I'm wrong about that estimation.

To wrap up this series of posts, during the debate vocab asked us what the government should encourage.  A good question, my answer is that we should encourage social justice and equality. We should create a society where people are allowed to marry the person they love. I can also tell you what I don't want to encourage. I don't want to encourage a society where people's rights are limited because of things like the shoddy ad-hoc pseudo-science that often seems to fly in fundamentalist circles.

Debate on Homosexuality/Gay Marriage: Sexism and it's impact on the debate.

In the middle of the debate Vocab said something that I hear quite a bit from people who advocate against gay marriage or for more traditional gender roles in general. He said that marriage between a man and woman is needed in society because men are socialized by women, I suppose making them kinder and less violent, and that women get protection from men. I think this is a fair representation of his position but if he feels I  misunderstood his point here he may feel free to correct me.

At the time I said he was unfairly representing the sexes in this argument, but I will actually go a step further here and say that this line of thinking is sexist. Now before Vocab or any other Christians reading this get angry at this assertion, let it be known that I really try to careful in my application of words like sexist, but I do think it applies in this case. To be clear I don't think the statement was indented to be sexist, but few people actually realize they are being sexist when they do it. I know for a fact that I have said and done things in my own past which I only later realized were sexist. So I don't mean this statement as a personal attack but as a conclusion based upon thoughtful consideration about how I think men and women should relate.

In between segments the subject of Pastor Steven Anderson came up. This guy is a local preacher who believes our country was wrong to give women the right to vote. Friendly Atheist has written about him before. Vocab, rightly, distanced himself from Anderson's position the same as I would, but there is a fallacy of extremes that is often employed here where people feel their position does not qualify as sexist, racist, or some other "ist" simply because they disagree with someone with a more extreme position than theirs. If I talk about racists, for instance, most people think of the KKK or skinheads, but most racism is far less overt that this. For that matter, even Anderson probably doesn't think he is a sexist, though he is probably aware that many people think he is. He would excuse it by saying those people have been influenced by worldly values. So the fact that Vocab would likely reject the designation does not change the fact he advocated for limiting the rights of specific humans (I.E. homosexuals) based upon generalizations about gender. His statement was no better than suggesting a woman shouldn't be a CEO because they aren't competitive enough.

But what about all those studies that show men and women are different?  Well the problem is that the evidence actually does not suggest major psychological differences. Take a look at this recent study:

Men and Women May Not Be So Different After All

The interesting thing is that I have found when looking at studies like this is that when they take men and women as whole groups they can see a small statistical difference in psychological makeup. However, when they work from the other direction, that is when they take an individual's psychological profile and try to determine gender by this factor alone the difference seems to disappear. The reason for this can be seen in how the two groups over lap in a bell curve. In two bell curves that overlap closely, like the one on the right, most of two groups fall within the overlap. This means that while there may be notable differences on the fringes of the two an average person in either group will usually be indistinguishable from a person in the other group. So when fundamentalist Christian groups start claiming that science backs up their position on gender differences you should now be able to point out why they are wrong.

Vocab's position is therefore sexist in the way it portrays men and women in these stark terms while ignoring the aforementioned overlap between the two groups. Men are presented as being without self control until a woman somehow fixes them, I have seen similar arguments employed by people making apologetics for rapists. The notion that men are just barely containing desires to sexually assault should be offensive to men everywhere but it should also not be a surprising that anyone who believes in the concept of original sin would think this way. I also find it equally offensive that women are portrayed as weak and needing protection. I've written before on how I view Fundamentalist Christian thinking to be inherently sexist here: No war on women? I beg to differ. So you can read that if you want to hear more of my thoughts on the issue.

It is interesting to me that this argument could be used not just against gay marriage, but to favor forcing people to marry, after all a single man in his 30's is just rapist waiting to happen according to this argument. How can we get men to behave if there isn't a woman around to force them? How do women who don't marry manage to survive? More importantly how does one deal with the reality that violence is much lower in the modern world while marriage, particularly marriage the way Vocab envisions it is less prevalent than most of human history. Further, the modern countries with the most traditional views of marriage are the ones with the worst problems of violence against women. As an argument against gay marriage or even an argument for traditional marriage in general it fairs very very badly.

Debate on Homosexuality/Gay Marriage: Statistics Part 2

The subject of ex-gays was also brought up quickly but we didn't really get a chance to delve into it much. Fist I don't much care whether people occasionally change their sexual orientation, that may be possible, but I find it irrelevant. For one thing these people may actually be bisexual and not aware of it. However my main problem with this is that even if sexual preference was 100% personal choice, even if I could simply wake up one morning and decide to be gay (and even most fundamentalists would not claim this) I would not care. Support for gay marriage about supporting the rights of people to marry whomever they love, regardless of gender, choice is a red herring in my opinion.

However, I will go one step further though and point out that the whole concept of ex-homosexual is undeniably wrapped up with gay conversion therapy, and the statistics there show that these programs rarely work and people who go through them have much higher rates of depression and suicide. so it seems a bit ridiculous to claim this is a healthy option.

Vocab claims to know ex-homosexuals, I'll happily admit he may know such people but who cares? I know others who are, and in fact I am, an ex-Christian. I'm sure Vocab would not like anyone limiting his civil rights to practice his religion just because some people like myself decided to stop following said religion. This isn't how civil rights work for good reason.

On the subject of gay marriage Vocab brought up a study done in Sweden suggesting that rates of divorce are much higher than that of heterosexual couples. Upon further research this turned about to be a perfect example of the poor way in which people in his camp frame statistics to make their case look strong when it is weak. First off, divorce is just as an important aspect of marriage laws as the actual marriage is. Relationships that end amicably are fine, but any relationship that ends badly may need legal involvement and marriage gives us such a system.

Secondly, marriage is simply not a very big deal in Sweden, most heterosexual couples don't even bother getting married themselves. It is clear that marriage and relationships are envisioned very differently in that country than here so it is pointless to extrapolate from this data how gay marriage would play out in our country.

So what about studies of divorce rates in other countries?

Do Gays Have Lower Divorce Rates Than Straights?

Divorce & Marriage Rates for Same-Sex Couples 

Divorce Rates Lower in States with Same-Sex Marriage

So the first link here shows a study in which they measured the rate of dissolution of civil partnerships for homosexuals in Great Brittan (they don't call it marriage there yet) and found that the statistics actually show lower rates than heterosexual couples. On top of that male homosexual couples actually had lower dissolution rates that the female couples.

The second link shows statistics that indicate that in states where same sex marriage is legal the divorce rates are again lower than than of heterosexual marriages. This one I find especially interesting because they are figures from the U.S.

The third study is interesting because it shows that the states with legal same sex marriage divorce rates for heterosexuals are lower than the national average as well.  Of course I am not suggesting that homosexual marriage is directly responsible for this, these numbers were lower before it was legalized. The point is that the states who are generally most religious and have the the largest number of people complaining that gay marriage will destroy the sanctity of the institution have the highest rates of divorce. It is interesting to say the least.

Debate on Homosexuality/Gay Marriage: Statistics Part 1.

One of the studies brought up claimed that Canadian homosexuals had an average life span equal to people living in 1871 in the same area. I managed to actually find this a published copy of this study. 

Modelling the Impact of HIV Disease on Mortality in Gay and Bisexual Men

First off this study's goal was to demonstrate that the effect AIDS was having on the gay community in that area. The first problem with this study is that it is rather old, it was published in 1997 and most of the figures were gathered in the early 90's. Not only was AIDS infecting more people at this time but medical treatments for it have improved greatly in the last 20 years. On top of that the published study states that there were certain factors they did not control for like the fact that suicide rates are higher in most homosexual populations. Given the limited nature of the study as well as the age it is difficult to make any definitive conclusion here.

He also brought up gay bowel syndrome. I must confess that I was actually unfamiliar with this term though perhaps I had heard in before and had just forgotten it. I looked this term up too and was unsurprised that this term is no longer used by anyone in the actual medial community. It was a term coined in 1976 that was an umbrella term for a large number of problems. Even as early as 1985 a journal of gastroenterology had this to say about the diagnosis:

The "gay bowel syndrome" was first used to describe not a syndrome, but a list of conditions. The term hides the problems facing the gastroenterologist. Firstly, the sexual orientation of a patient may not be easily ascertainable in the setting of a general outpatient clinic. Secondly, many infections of the gay bowel are asymptomatic and are missed without full microbiological screening. Thirdly, coinfection is common and the organism isolated may not be causing the symptoms and signs. Finally, the bowel has limited and non-specific clinical and histopathological responses to many infections.

There seem to be a myriad of reasons why the medical community do not view this as an actual medical condition, so the fact that it is brought up at all by Vocab begs a question about the quality of the research he is relying on.  It is also worth bring up the general problem I have in bringing up an argument like this seems to be built upon an assumption that sexuality, and indeed in particular anal sex is the only meaningful thing about the relationships of gay men.  I've met quite a few gay men who would disagree with that. (I.E. all of them)

Another host of statistics were also brought up talking about how promiscuous the average homosexual is, on the statistics he brings up I cannot really speak in great detail because; though I looked, I could not find any reputable sites that verify any of the figures Vocab gave. I found many sites published by religious believers and other anti-gay advocates repeating these figures but no links to any studies or abstracts that I could examine to see how reliable these figures are.

I did, however, two studies that offer different figures. The first study can be found here, "So you think gay men are promiscuous?". This one is based upon figures tabulated from OKCupid questions. It's fairly recent, but to be fair it's a self selected group so it may not be representative of the average gay person. However, it does at least show that there are some gay people who do not fit the stereotype.

Another study can be found here, The New England Journal of Medicine: Homosexuality. I found this study four pages deep in a Google search on the Wiki page about promiscuity. Though slightly older (1994) it has this to say:

Of heterosexually active adults in the general population, about 20 percent of men have had 1 sexual partner during their lives, 55 percent have had up to 20 partners, and about 25 percent have had 20 or more partners11. Some older studies conducted before the epidemic of the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) indicated that homosexual men were more likely than heterosexual men to have had a very large number of sexual partners14. More recent population-based studies have found this to be relatively uncommon. For instance, Fay et al.10 found that of men who had homosexual contact after the age of 20, almost all had 20 or fewer homosexual partners in their lifetimes. Of 1450 men in the sample, only 2 were reported to have had 100 or more same-sex partners10. The inconsistency in the data on the number of sexual partners of homosexual men probably reflects flaws in the sampling techniques of the earlier studies (e.g., recruiting subjects in gay bars) and their completion before the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) epidemic.

So there we have it, according to The New England Journal of Medicine, the studies Vocab brought up are generally discredited because of poor sampling techniques just like the study by Paul Cameron I brought up early on in the debate.

I don't fault Vocab for not giving me the actual study names in the short discussion we had but perhaps if we continue this discussion at a later date he can provide links to the actual papers that make these claims. I won't hold my breath on this one though because similar figures have been repeated among Christian circles for more than two decades now and I have yet to find someone who can actually point to a viable peer reviewed study backing them up. These figures usually come from conservative Christian think tanks and upon close examination the studies don't hold up very well.

Tomorrow I'll be posting about some of the studies about gay marriage that were brought up.

Debate on Homosexuality/Gay Marriage: Introduction.

Just before the American Atheist convention I did a debate on Homosexuality/Gay Marriage with Vocab Malone and here it is. I have a few posts to put up about this debate which will be going up in the next few days.

Homosexuality/Marriage DEBATE [04/14/2013]

Like with most short form debates there are simply lots of things that can't be said in the time allotted. Points were made by my opponent which I was unable to give response to due to time constants and and also points I made which I believe I should clarify here since there are no time constraints on my blog. In fact we covered so many topics that I have broken this post up into several shorter posts rather than ask you to read what could easily amount to ten pages of writing all at once.

A lot of this debate came down to who had the better statistics. Now after explaining why I had a problem with Paul Camron's methodologies I stated that what I generally discovered across the board with the statistics quoted by people arguing against homosexuality was that the studies were either badly flawed or the figures were poorly contextualized. It was therefore interesting to me that Vocab spent most of the debate doing what I just described. He quoted a lot of statistics in the third segment which we did not have a chance to fully discuss because of time constraints, and also because he quoted several studies which I was unfamiliar with and thus could not really comment on. I have had a chance to review some of those statistics/studies now and so I will be posting a few articles over the next few days reviewing them as well as a few other claims made in the debate that I felt deserved closer analysis.

Before I delve into the particulars of the problems with some of  Vocab's arguments, I would start by pointing out that even if the claims were right it would not really change my conclusions about gay rights very much. Most of his arguments did not, and could not really speak to the morality of homosexual behavior, and his references to the bible and people being made in the image of God were pointless since he cannot demonstrate that any of those claims are true.

Furthermore, many of his statements were based upon a naturalistic fallacy. For instance claiming that anal sex is bad because the rectum is designed for expelling things rather than having things enter them. We as humans do many things we were not "designed" to do. In any case, potential risk alone cannot be the sole measure of right or wrong, we must, at a minimum, also measure potential benefits as well. What are the benefits in this case you might ask? Well, for one thing people who accept themselves as they are are generally better adjusted and happier, this is one of the reasons homosexuals who go into programs to cure them of their homosexuality are known for having higher rates of depression and suicide. I'll be talking about this more in a separate post.

It is also problematic that Vocab seems to distil the entirety of what it means to be gay down to "butt sex is unnatural." Most gay people would point out that there is more too it than that. Further, we could also argue that sexual organs are not meant to be put in ones mouth but this doesn't stop heterosexuals from having oral sex either, and many of the health concerns he mentions can apply to heterosexual sex too. Of course we didn't actually address that point so I suppose it's possible Vocab is against both oral and anal sex between heterosexuals too.

In any case, tomorrow I will go into some of the problems with some of the statistics Vocab brought up.