By now, many of you have read about the shocking discovery at CERN that muon neutrinos might travel faster than light, a fact that, if confirmed, would upturn much of the theoretical basis for modern physics.
Does this mean we can’t trust scientists? Of course not. If anything, this shows how awesome the scientific method truly is.
Miss California knows evolution is true, and thank GOD she won.
Big surprise. 49 out of 51 Miss USA contestants don’t believe evolution should be taught in school, or believe that the choice to teach it should be up to individual localities.
This doesn’t account for how they completely misunderstand evolution (most of them refer to biogenesis, which is different) and how they don’t remember ever learning evolution when they were in high school six months ago. It seems the only thing they took away from school is that high school students get to decide what’s true and tell their teachers to shove it.
Tim Minchin‘s poem ‘Storm’ is probably the funnest, most cutting and sympathetic case against casual supernatural inclinations that I’ve ever seen. For those of you who haven’t had the pleasure, here’s a friggin awesome animated version:
Thank you Boing Boing.
The time has come. Just like their eventual admission that the Earth orbits the Sun (1822), and that species evolve from other species (Oh, wait…) the Catholic church has decided at last that between condoms and HIV, condoms are the lesser evil.
Once again, dogma has proven maleable, but not without the suffering of millions, and after like, 100 years or so.
Let’s all fuck bareback to celebrate, the way God intended (but later revised.)
In a radio interview that I linked to yesterday, Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association said something that got me thinking. He said “[...] we believe sanctity of life has got to be central to any genuinely conservative movement, belief in a creator and to defending natural marriage and resisting homosexual agenda.” (emphasis added)
Now, obviously his insistence that our country’s military should be weakened by discrimination against gays is deplorable, and his denial of the validity of their relationships and families is equally shameful. But his belief that viable human embryos deserve the same right to life that a full-born human enjoys is one that I can respectfully disagree with. I am also on the fortunate side of this debate because of a certain SCOTUS decision that protects women from government intrusion into their medical treatment.
But what if the opposite were true? What if a future US Congress, led by so-called “Right to Lifers” were to pass a Constitutional amendment protecting the ‘sanctity of life’?
No doubt you’ve had this conversation with someone you know:
A: Nothing can go faster than the speed of light.
B: How do you know?
A: Science.
B: Do you know the science, or did you just believe someone who told you the science?
A: I know that scientists agree.
B: That’s not the same as knowing.
A: Shut up, dick.
B: You know I’m right.
Or maybe your version was about the Big Bang, or about quantum mechanics, or that the earth is round and whether there’s a teapot orbiting the sun. Either way, it’s all the same thing: we take those things on faith that we can’t know ourselves.
