Bad Chart Tuesday

Taking a leaf out of SkepChick's Bad Graph Thursday, I'm going to show you a graph. This is not just any graph. This is a graph showing the correlation between attitudes towards sushi, and attitudes towards gay marriage across generations. This is a graph presented without any irony whatsoever, and it proves... something. Thanks, Mother Jones!

In all its glory:

Ken Ham, Once Again Missing the Point

Oh, Ken Ham. Your writing is so often mental, so often self-aggrandising, always devoid of reason. I follow your blog, but not for the photos of you standing next to random evangelical pastors. No, I follow your blog for posts like this.

For the posts where you get so close to understanding the truth, before your cognitive dissonance valve unblocks and you go back into denial-shutdown mode. The opening sentence:

It is interesting to note how secularists continue to modify their ideas about supposed biological evolution when they find new information.

Welcome, Mr. Ham, to the fascinating world of science. The world where we learn new things all the time, and don't assume that the stuff we read in a book a long while ago will necessarily always be true for ever more. How's the Bible working out for you?

My Snidey Sense is Tingling

I follow a couple of fitness bloggers. Mostly because it's easy to injure yourself doing any resistance training with bad form, and regular videos on good form stop me getting in to bad habits. But, as is always the case with fitness, what few useful (and true) pieces of information come my way  are almost universally drowned out by mountains of utter bull.

I'd thought I'd finally found a set of blogs which don't get into too much of the bullshit, after hours of shit-sifting. Then I was pointed to StrongLifts, and in particular, one of their reviews of a fitness books. The link was titled: The Fitness Holy Grail. I was getting some serious bullshit vibes off of this. You might even say I smelled bullshit. And I was right. The entire review is covered in lines like "Outlaw Bodybuilder From New Jersey Reveals Amazing Secret Diet That Replaces Steroids And Forces Your Fat To Melt Like Butter In A Microwave!" and "most people - even the "experts" - will tell you it's impossible to lose fat and gain muscle at the same time unless you're born with superhuman genetics..."

It has everything, all of the pseudoscience alarm bells: promising impossible change, representing the discoverer as a regular guy, denigrating the "experts". God, those experts, eh? What do they know?

But my favourite line is this:

Here's how: few guys know this but muscle size is directly related to strength gains. This is not only a scientific fact, but also an anecdotal one: 7x Mr Olympia Arnold Schwarzenegger could Deadlift 710lb. Well, the fastest way humanly possible to gain rock-hard muscle is using my StrongLifts 5x5 program.

That's some rock-hard scientific understanding he's got going on there.

Ken Ham, so near and yet so so so far

Ken Ham sometimes manages to cut so close to the truth it almost hurts. Today is one of those days. If you haven't heard of Ken, he's the homophobic, woman-hating and, oh, yeah, young-earth creationist head of Answers in Genesis ministries. AiG are, for want of a better word, the leading young-earth creationist group - their Creation Museum (presumably) has visitors, and their website looks like a mongrel cross between Scientific American and Watchtower, the Jehovah's Witness periodical. The Ark Park, a proposed Kentucky amusement park which will combine all the fun of an inundation-themed day out with a hefty dose of biblical literalism, is going to be built just as soon as they can find enough morons to fund the thing. Or, failing that, Republicans.

So, it's not really possible for a person to be more openly wrong about the origins of the earth and life on it. Evolution? Didn't happen, too difficult. Earth more then 7,000 years old? A scientific conspiracy to destroy faith in the bible. Dinosaurs? Lived in the garden of Eden.

But there is one fact on which he and I agree. His ideas about the Bible make more sense than liberal Christians'. Don't get me wrong, wooly-minded accommodationist Episcopalians are my natural political ally within that wide, wide range of beliefs that is Christianity. But I can't help feeling that ken Ham has a point when it comes to reading the Bible:

In the sermon, the pastor challenges the accepted definition of inerrancy, claiming that the Bible has no original autographs.

There is no such thing as an original autograph of the Scripture, and to claim such a manuscript is the basis for the inerrancy is intellectually dishonest.

While it is true that we do not possess the original manuscripts today, Kremer is arguing that they never existed. He even goes so far as to claim that “the Bible is not a history book,” “the Bible is not a philosophy book,” and “the Bible is not a science book.” With all those caveats, what exactly can we trust in the Bible? More importantly, how can we trust all that it has to say about Jesus Christ? Well, that’s an exception, says Pastor Kremer.

When you come to talking about the character of God, the Bible is indeed inerrant. When you’re talking about the revelation of God in Christ, we can trust that information with perfect confidence.

My question to Dr. Kremer is this—“Who decided you can trust this section but not the rest? On what basis did you determine this? Or is it just your fallible human opinion?”

And here it is: a legitimate question. The Bible is a book filled with disgusting morality, with obvious scientific inaccuracies and with the odd bit of good stuff. How can we honestly reject the shit stuff while accepting the good stuff on the strength of the Bible alone? We can't. To effectively decide what is and is not moral in the Bible, we need another source of information. We need something else to tell us what is good and what is not. And since godless bastards like me have a perfectly good moral compass (gays: great, women: great, people of colour: great, everybody else: also great), I might go so far as to suggest that Biblical accommodationists are imprinting their own morals upon the Bible and claiming their ideas are divinely inspired.

At least old Kenny is honest, and submits all of his judgement to some random book plucked out of history rather than just the bits he happens to agree with. After all:

After all, if we take secularist Richard Dawkins’s views of evolution and millions of years to the Bible, why not take his views that reject the Resurrection and Virgin Birth and reinterpret the Bible too?

Quite.

Either the Bible is inerrant truth, or it isn't. If it is, then there should be no real evidence against its account of history. If it is, then every tenet of the Bible must surely fall under scrutiny. That's not to say that every passage is wrong, just that we should no longer consider any of it 'sacred' and beyond real criticism.

Ken Ham is so close to the truth - if we reject literalism, we have so many good reasons to reject the whole thing. He just fails to reject literalism.

Animal Rights

It's a fraught issue, I think... To be honest, I only started giving the animal rights thing a lot of thought after my little sister came to visit. She's not a deer or anything, it's that she's just gone vegan and joined some animal rights group at her uni (I think it's the ALF [although, now I've finished this piece, I've found out that I'm actually wrong on that front: it's a small Kent-based group who're a bit less crazy-nuts bonkers]).

You see, as an argumentative and scientific-minded sort, I found something to disagree with on my sister's assertions that all creatures have a right to exist and [something something something...]. I stopped listening after a while. But my sister definitely got me thinking, so I suppose she succeeded in at least one sense. Since I'm basically a geek, my curiosity got the better of me, and lo and behold I found myself reading animal rights law at 2am on a work night. After a little research, here's what I found:

The Law as it Stands

The first thing to note is that the Animal Rights legislature in Britain is actually fairly up to date. The last major paper, the Animal Welfare Act, was introduced in 2006 (2008 in Scotland, with a few changes). Its remit is for the care of domesticated and farm animals, and is actually pretty strict. What it doesn't cover is laws on humane slaughter for meat, minimum space requirements for kept animals or using animals in scientific procedures or experiments.