Losing Weight Helps the Planet?

Here's an interesting idea. Edward Humes, author of Monkey Girl, has a new book out called Eco Barons. It's a series of profiles about environmentalists who devote their lives to saving the planet. I was listening to a podcast on IT Conversations discussing the new book and I heard a couple interesting tidbits that he said he discovered in working on the book.

For example, eating less red meat helps save the planet. Yeah, your steak cookouts is contributing to ruination of the planet. I wouldn't have thought of that either.

Articles are here, here, and here to help illustrate the point. I'm definitely not of the hippie tree-hugging variety consumer, but some of what they claim makes sense. It takes a lot of land to raise animals for meat and so there's more deforestation related to farming, but as we increase production of animals for consumption (or overconsumption in the case of the U.S.) there is also an increase in greenhouse gases due to animals passing gas. Yes, all those little puffs of methane add up, apparently.

Guess that can be added to the list of things that are bad about meat along with the obligatory "increases risk of heart attack and stroke and cholesterol and..." stuff we hear periodically.

There was also a claim about losing weight helping the environment. Lose 10 pounds, and you help the environment.

Apparently the production of food is a significant contributor to environmental damage. Think about it; we in the U.S. don't eat food that is in season anymore. The cost of growing food out of season for an area has associated storage and transportation costs, both of which impacts the environment. We also tend to overeat and overconsume, so anything that helps reduce the amount of food that must be produced, stored, and transported would be beneficial to us as a whole.

The podcast (linked near the beginning of the post) is about 1/2 an hour long and Edward Humes comes off as being very moderate in his environmental views. He is sharing in the interview the various things he's learned in doing the book; not preaching that we should all join communes and sing Kum-By-Yah. Believe me. If I thought it was what I've come to call Hippy-Dippy, I can't stand listening to the whole thing. I found his insights to be fascinating, right down to the reminder of Carter's incentives for reducing our country's dependence on foreign countries for energy (we had solar panels on the White House? Yes, yes we did. They were promptly removed by the next administration) and George Bush's endorsement for hydrogen energy as being eco friendly with a twist (yes, it's clean burning, except the technology for producing it isn't...). There were a number of tidbits that were educational and interesting.

I strongly encourage everyone to take half an hour and listen to what was said on the podcast. Go here and download it or listen to it from the page! It's free, no obligations, no strings attached. Go and learn something for the cost of a half hour of your time.

Creationism Bugs Me

I think I am beginning to understand one of the biggest reasons that the creationism movement bugs me so much. I got to thinking about it while skimming a book called Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, Religion, and the Battle for America's Soul at a bookstore not long ago. It's the story of the semi-recent court battle over teaching Creationism in the classroom in Dover, PA. Sorry, Intelligent Design. Unfortunately there's a long history of bending semantics to try shoehorning the same idea into the curriculum of academia (see the evolution of the phrase "Creation Science").

What follows may be offensive to the more religious-minded. If you don't like having your ideas challenged you might as well quit reading now.

I have seen repeatedly that a significant percentage of atheists understand the Bible better than the majority of Christians. I don't necessarily mean quoting the Bible; I'm talking about understanding it. Anyone with time on their hands can memorize Shakespeare without understanding what Hamlet is really saying when telling Ophelia, "Get thee to a nunn'ry!" (Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1) Getting into an argument over Biblical trivia is pointless.

The part that bugs me is quite simple. I would summarize Creationism thusly:
A magic being in the sky one day decided to create the Earth and various creatures on the Earth culminating in His ultimate creation, Man. Why he did it we don't know. He just did it. All creatures are the way they are because the magic invisible being just decided to do it.

This is, of course, paraphrasing. "Magic being" can be replaced with a number of different names, the most common of which in this area is God.

After poring over various Biblical passages the fundamentalists thus conclude that the Earth is 6,000 years old. Six thousand years ago God decided to create everything and at various points told people to record the events in a series of scrolls that later become the Bible (although most professing a strong belief in it don't seem to know the history of the Bible's origins)

That's pretty much it. Uncomplicated. Simple. Magic invisible being waved his magic stick and everything just popped into existence. The magic being has no origin, no end, nothing explaining where it came from. It's pretty simple to understand and any questions are usually dismissed with some vague hand waving.

Ask the good Creationist believer to summarize evolution and you usually get an equally vague explanation. Just some idea of creatures changing over time, if you're lucky, or the common one I had run into was that life just "sprang from nothing."

While the idea of Creationism is fantastically simple to understand...an invisible all powerful magic being who often is depicted looking like Milton Berle or Gandalf just decided one day that this is how things should be...evolution takes actual comprehension to understand. The people who want you to disregard the science usually have no idea what Evolution entails (especially the ones that say Evolution is bunk because life can't come from nothing; it's ironic both because they don't understand that evolution isn't a theory of the origin of life and also because these are the same people that say they believe in a magic being that has no origin, literally popping into existence from nothing. Or some idea of "always existing" or "exists outside this dimension". But evolution is simply way too crazy an idea for creationists to accept.

If you're going to cite that, demonstrate that you understand the math behind such an idea. Otherwise it's about as legitimate as The Force from Star Wars.

Unlike the idea of Creationism, Evolution has actual observable and provable hypothesis creating the foundation upon which it is based. It can be disproven; this is one of the fundamental ideas behind any empirical scientific theory. You can assert whatever you want. But it's not a scientific theory unless in some way it could be proven or disproven.

That is exactly why Creationism is not a science. It cannot be disproven or tested. This is a fundamental idea upon which science is based. How do you prove the nonexistence of God?

You can't.

Rather than rant or rave about that, here's my proposal. If a Creationist can accurately teach someone what evolution is, the actual science of evolution, so that that person understands evolution accurately then I would take them seriously in a discussion. They have to be able to teach evolutionary theory in their own words. Seems pretty simple.

The only way you can teach an idea to someone without simply regurgitating what a book states is to understand the idea. If you can teach someone else an idea in your own words; you understand the subject, and far too many people are proclaiming a strong believe in Creationism without having the faintest idea what they're talking about.

That is another bit of doublethink that leaves me baffled; if you are one of those people proclaiming a belief in an immortal soul, don't you kind of owe it to yourself to make sure you're right about your belief? I mean, that's quite a thing to leave to chance. So why hide behind dismissive hand waving and such when you probably should be devoting time to educating yourself about what you're investing your eternity in? Not just the memorization of Bible passages. Any goof can sit and memorize sequences of words. Rather, dedicate time to finding out what the other side is trying to tell about logical fallacies and mistakes, and understanding the history of the document which you are gambling your "soul" upon.

It's sad...there are far too many people who are entrenched in the idea that they are right about this magical history when they don't even know that the Bible wasn't a single document written in English.

Not that it matters much. True believers are often the move vehemently against exploring ideas that may contradict their belief system; they're too invested, emotionally, in the belief system to see beyond the world of comfort on which they rest their worldview. It may be psychologically damaging for them to entertain the idea that they are wrong about something so fundamental.

Or for many it's just easier to accept the simple explanation...magic, essentially...over learning what chromosomes and DNA are and how they work.

Creationist Museum Seen By Academia

Those who know me know it's no secret that I'm not big on the whole "creation science" movement. It's not a science. If you don't understand that it's not a science, it's because you don't understand the definition of science.

But that's not what this post is about. This post is about the 70,000 square foot Creationism Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky. Apparently some paleontologists topped off a conference in the area with a group tour of the facility.

Some of them happened to be Christian and were still surprised, saddened, and shocked at the material they found in the museum.

My favorite quote from the article:
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"It's sort of a monument to scientific illiteracy, isn't it?" said Jerry Lipps, professor of geology, paleontology and evolution at University of California, Berkeley.
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Not a big surprise. Usually the responses I see when academics criticize these things is simply dismissal of their claims. I think it comes from a friction between reason and faith; I can't fully claim to understand it because I'm simply wired differently. I cannot easily take something that runs contrary to observed or reasonable evidence. People who are very much invested in their beliefs...no matter what evidence is shown to the contrary, no matter how much you show that they hold views that conflict with each other...the doublethink will prevail for them. The Creationist museum is a prime example of this.

I mean...the Tyrannosaurus Rex was a vegetarian until Eve ate from the tree of knowledge? Really?

I should hope that the quote I believe is attributed to Jerry Lipps from the article is correct..."Like Sunday school with statues... this is a special brand of religion here. I don't think even most mainstream Christians would believe in this interpretation of Earth's history."

What Is a Christian Nation?

In the various arguments I've seen regarding religion in the US, I've often bumped into people supporting their views by saying that we're a "Christian Nation". I don't know what exactly they are referring to.

Is it the "In God We Trust" on our money? Became our country's official motto in 1956. It actually has its roots in religious sentiment from the Civil War. But it was hardly because of anything having to do with our country's founding or its founding fathers.

As a bit of trivia, Theodore Roosevelt opposed putting that slogan on money. He considered it an act of sacrilege.

Indeed, contrary to what many of the citizens seem to believe, many of our founding fathers were Deists, although sadly I'm not sure most of our nation's citizens are even aware of Deism. Here's a quick quote from Wikipedia:
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Deism is a religious and philosophical belief that a supreme god created the universe, and that this and other religious truth can be determined using reason and observation of the natural world alone, without the need for faith. Deists generally reject the notion of divine interventions in human affairs - such as by miracles and revelations. These views contrast with a dependence on revelations, miracles, and faith found in many Judeo-Christian,^[1][2] Islamic and other theistic teachings.
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What got me thinking about this was an article on the Jefferson Bible. Scratching your head yet?

Apparently our 3rd president of the United States extracted the parts of the Bible that he found to be contradictory or unreasonable, creating a version that was purely consisting of the moral teachings of Jesus Christ; it was also arranged in a manner that made a consistent narrative. The result was called the Jefferson Bible, or The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazereth. The article said that the resulting book was 46 pages long.

It was also Jefferson credited with the idea of "separation of church and state." He was an admirable man; he believed in God, but did not believe in supernatural revelation, and as such didn't feel it was right to legislate his beliefs onto the people he was elected to lead.

Thomas Jefferson was indeed a remarkable man with more achievements than most people could hope to attain in his lifetime. From the Wikipedia entry on him:
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When President John F. Kennedy welcomed forty-nine Nobel Prize winners to the White House in 1962 he said, "I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent and of human knowledge that has ever been gathered together at the White House – with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone."
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Homeland Security Doesn't Understand Comics

The irony of this is delicious.

Worse, news of it spread like wildfire because you really shouldn't let ignorant morons mess with someone working in a field loved by geeks.

Mark Sable was detained by airport security because he had a script for one of his latest comic book projects, Unthinkable, had information that paralleled the 9/11 attacks. The mini-series follows a group in a government thinktank that comes up with 9/11-type scenarios that are now coming true; the story is based on the real-life proposal from the government asking writers to come up with scenarios for terrorist plots, and in the comic Mark took it to the next step and asked what would happen if these scenarios came true and then the people coming up with the scenarios would become suspects.

Mark Sable is known for his work with DC and Image Comics, as well as Unthinkable under the Boom! umbrella.

He said in the story that the TSA agents had trouble understanding that they were looking at a script for the next issue of a comic book because apparently these macadamia nuts didn't know that comics weren't all about superheros.

That'll teach him. Next time you're going to delve into an issue that requires some form of cerebral interaction, make sure you throw Superman into the mix or some idiots will think you're planning to blow up a plane. A big thank-you to these goofs that are keeping us safe from having convenient travel plans!