101. Mormons urged to back ban on same-sex marriage

Comment #202971 by Cartomancer on July 2, 2008 at 7:31 am

This O'Brien fellow really is quite an unpleasant little man isn't he? Now he starts off on some kind of pseudo-racist screed about "pure blood" and other weird quasi-medieval nonsense much beloved by fascists the world over.

Keep up the good fight gentlemen...

102. Richard Dawkins on Doctor Who

Comment #202944 by Cartomancer on July 2, 2008 at 7:04 am

Well, this is a light entertainment thread, so the most appropriate put-down as far as dear crazy clearmind/wooter is concerned would be rendered in some kind of light entertainment oeuvre. Ah yes, I think I've got the one (apologies to any purists out there for mixing the film and stage musical versions together) - best appalling cockney accents please my american brethren...

When trying to enlighten him, it's such a waste of mind,
To delve his dreadful dialogues and question what you find.
A candid little insult keeps the condescension clear,
So here's a way to try to say just what he needs to hear:

Wooter's-badly-formed-theistic-nonsense-is-atrocious!
Every single claim he makes is based on hocus-pocus,
Such a scale of ignorance is frankly quite precocious
Wooter's-badly-formed-theistic-nonsense-is-atrocious!
Um diddle diddle diddle um diddle aye
Um diddle diddle diddle um diddle aye

For him, when all are thinking, spouting drivel will suffice.
Now if he had a brain, he might have used it once or twice!
I'm sure we'd be much better off without him on the net,
We post him reasoned arguments and this is what we get!

Oh, Wooter's-badly-formed-theistic-nonsense-is-atrocious!
If he read some science books he might be less unfocussed,
Sadly Doctor Dawkins hasn't fluffed the diagnosis,
Wooter's-badly-formed-theistic-nonsense-is-atrocious!
Um diddle diddle diddle um diddle aye
Um diddle diddle diddle um diddle aye

He thinks that evolution is no more than random chance
If that were so it wouldn't even get a second glance!
And scientists in labs from Timbuktu to Northern France,
Have found a mound of evidence in animals and plants!

Oh, Wooter's-badly-formed-theistic-nonsense-is-atrocious!
Never mind his ego is so fervid and ferocious
maybe it's a symptom of encephalosclerosis
Wooter's-badly-formed-theistic-nonsense-is-atrocious!
Um diddle diddle diddle um diddle aye
Um diddle diddle diddle um diddle aye

Dawkins:(spoken) Of course, you could argue it the other way around, that the rest of the world is deluded and this "clearmind" is the only one who can see the truth, but that would be going a bit too far I think.

Ensemble:(spoken) Indubitably…

So when the screen is filled with tosh, there's no need for despair!
Just summon up this phrase and then pretend he isn't there!
Ignore that shocking grammar and the mangled words as well,
He might just be a robot but it's very hard to tell...

Yes, Wooter's-badly-formed-theistic-nonsense-is-atrocious!
Wooter's-badly-formed-theistic-nonsense-is-atrocious!
Wooter's-badly-formed-theistic-nonsense-is-atrocious!
Wooter's-badly-formed-theistic-nonsense-is-atrocious!

103. It can be right to discriminate against the religious

Comment #202327 by Cartomancer on July 1, 2008 at 10:00 am

"Religious discrimination" is terribly hard to pin down. It usually means "discrimination based on participation in the practices of a recognised major cult group", such as christianity, islam or sikhism. Independently-minded theistic people who have dreamed up their own pantheon of spirits and cobbled together their own hedge religion by themselves almost never come under the spotlight in these cases - they're generally written off as nutters alongside the tinfoil helmet crew and the flat earth society. Technically anything could be the subject of "religious" belief or practice, from a mild superstition that makes you queasy about putting shoes on tables (and hence prevents you working in a shoe shop) to a deep-seated psychological compulsion to conduct cannibalistic blood rites every full moon (which makes you an ideal candidate for the catholic priesthood).

Where does "personal conviction" end and "religion" begin? Answer, it doesn't. All religion is nothing more than acting on personal conviction. But it's not the convictions we legislate about, it's the acts they lead to.

104. Who Was More Important: Lincoln or Darwin?

Comment #202039 by Cartomancer on June 30, 2008 at 4:53 pm

I too wish to condemn the parochial americanism of this article. What has Abraham Lincoln ever done for those of us who do not live on that benighted continent? I see him more as a populariser of silly hats than a credible international superstar.

Let us try another, rather more anglocentric, pairing based on the same shares-a-birthday logic. I'm sure you'll all agree it's a much, much more important one than insignificant old Darwin and Lincoln:

June 13th 1976 - who made a greater contribution to British popular music - Kym Marsh or Jason from Five?

105. Charles Darwin was not the father of atheism

Comment #202030 by Cartomancer on June 30, 2008 at 4:21 pm

Scenes from George Pitcher's Fevered Imagination:

Charles Darwin: Salutations my good man on this fine winter morning, It is I, Charles Darwin, and I have yet more business with which to engage your superlative bureaucratic services.

Patent Office Clerk: I hope it's not another theory of biological development Mr. Darwin, because we had a hell of a job sorting out that debacle with you and Mr. Wallace on the last one. A new model of your famous electric barnacle scoop perhaps?

CD: No no, even better than that good sir - I've invented a wonderful little something called Atheism and would like to apply for a patent as soon as possible.

POC: And what would this "Atheism" do exactly Mr. Darwin?

CD: It's a hobby I came up with to pass the time between beetle-collecting trips. Basically what you do is sit there, doing whatever you would otherwise, but while you're doing it you try as hard as you can not to believe in god.

POC: I see. Which god would that be, Mr. Darwin, that you try not to believe in?

CD: All of them my good man, absolutely all of them! That's what makes it so much fun. I started out with the easy ones like Isis and Thor and Vishnu, and gradually moved up to Allah, Yahweh and even Mother Nature herself. When you get the number of gods down to zero you've won the game and can go and have a nice cup of tea to celebrate, but if you start believing in any of them at a later stage then you've got to start playing again until you're back down to zero. I've been playing it for several years now, and it really is a wonderful way to occupy one's leisure hours.

POC: Fascinating. I doubt it'll catch on, but that's beside the point - I can't give you a patent for that Mr. Darwin, it's already been invented.

CD: It has? Oh that is a shame. Was it Wallace again or has someone else pipped me to the post?

POC: It's been around for quite a while actually. The last gentleman we had in here with a patent for something like it was that gruff Mr. Hume from Scotland. But they played it in ancient Greece you know. Except they used different gods and there was a rule where you had to take a drink each time you got it wrong. I think the board was smaller too and there was a pack of chance cards which made things more interesting.

CD: The Sybilline Books you mean?

POC: I think those were the ones, yes sir.

CD: Sounds rather more complicated than my version, but it's a fair deal. Oh well, never mind. It was worth a shot. Maybe my friend Huxley's "agnosticism" game is sufficiently different that it will qualify.

POC: There's always hope sir, wouldn't want to discourage great minds like yours from doing their thing.

CD: Indeed not. Okay, well, thank you anyway.

POC: Any time Mr. Darwin.

CD: You wouldn't like to take another look at the barnacle scoop while I'm here would you?

106. CFI-UN Hamid Karzai Letter

Comment #202016 by Cartomancer on June 30, 2008 at 3:39 pm

...given the treasures of Japanese art and of German literature...

and don't forget German art and Japanese literature either - men and women like Albrecht Altdorfer, Hans Holbein, Murasaki Shikibu and Yoshida Kenko would doubtless be rather riled to learn that their creative efforts have gone unrecognised...

107. Aliens need Christ's redemption, too

Comment #201569 by Cartomancer on June 29, 2008 at 8:13 pm

What makes catholics so keen on reason? Easy - up until about the fifteenth century it seemed to support most of what they were saying. Much medieval science sort of did shore up catholic religious claims, but as science advanced and the evidence came in their picture became less and less tenable. The central middle ages were the golden age of catholicism - before there were any pesky protestants to mess things up and the church was involved in all kinds of fun stuff, like crusades and tithing and the inquisition - so naturally they look back on this period with some fondness.

Most of the definitive catholic authors, Aquinas foremost among them, were writing at this point and were thoroughly imbued with this idea that reason could be a pillar of the faith. Hence it became a cornerstone of the identity of catholics, or of the intellectual ones anyway.

108. Aliens need Christ's redemption, too

Comment #201562 by Cartomancer on June 29, 2008 at 7:58 pm

First of all, I have to comment on what I find the most disturbing aspect of this man's thought processes: he seems utterly medieval in his outlook on the world. Sure, he's picked up some bits and pieces of modern science and modern culture, but the beating, throbbing heart of his thought is solidly Aristotelian. Observe:

While modern philosophers idle away their time deconstructing the meaning of language, and telling us nothing means anything, St Thomas Aquinas in his magnificent Summa erects such a complex and complete logical argument that even the latest atheist book off the presses must confront and wrestle with the Thomistic arguments (usually, it must be said, to their discomfort). That is a powerful use of reason, if it commands a living and pertinent argument centuries after it was written.

I am tempted to ask "which of his summae would that be?" but i'll resist the urge. To anyone with even a smidgen of historical understanding this translates blatantly as "I don't like modern philosophy, therefore medieval philosophy must be true". Now, postmodernism is far from well-liked in these parts, and I'm certainly no fan, but taken as an historical phenomenon it does demonstrate quite effectively that, in the seven hundred odd years since Aquinas, human thought has got considerably more complicated. The old certainties that thirteenth century writers could deal in have melted away. Rational thought and reasoned argument have advanced well beyond the Aristotelian syllogisms employed by Aquinas. In fact later medieval logicians would make some interesting contributions in the field of logical studies. More obviously though, even if all of Aquinas' arguments were logically impeccable (which is far from the case), they would still be wrong because they use as their premises "facts" which are demonstrably false. Geocentric universe, hylomorphism, vitalism, time as the measure of motion - take your pick from the vast gamut of quaint and discredited medieval scientific notions. Observe further:

Any rational being, by virtue of his reason, even if his psychology is utterly non-human, would nonetheless contain a rational soul, and in this be like God.

No student of medieval thought could read this without heavy leaden alarm bells ringing in his ears. "Rational" as a distinct, metaphysically real quality of objects is so Aristotelian it hurts. It comes straight from the definition of man as a rational animal which separates the three levels of vivifying souls into vegetative, sensitive and rational. We don't talk about vegetative spirits and the actualisation of transparency anymore when dealing with vital and sensitive processes, so why on earth would anyone still talk about thought and reason using this twenty-three century old paradigm as modified seven hundred years ago?

Secondly, I must grumble as loudly as I can about the dismissive way this author tries to define his genre as "naturalistic". It's a horrible piece of snobbery among certain literary types to look down on fantasy and science fiction literature, and even for science fiction fans to look down on fantasy through some imagined pair of horn-rimmed sneering spectacles burnished with the caveat that "real" sci-fi doesn't use supernaturalistic themes. The terms "soft sci-fi" and "space opera" and similar nonsense are all hopelessly pejorative. It's the same snobbish mind-set that leaps in and says things like "of course Paradise Lost is not science fiction" or "no, the Odyssey and the Tempest aren't fantasy literature" - the implication being that these are somehow inferior genres and "canonical" works of literature (chosen by generations of elderly professors in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the main) can't possibly be besmirched by such suspect associations.

No, science fiction encompasses the fantastical and the supernatural just as assuredly. Why should a graceful humanoid alien using psychokinetic force to hinder his opponents be considered any more "naturalistic" than an elven wizard casting spells to the same effect? Neither magic nor psychokinesis has a basis in real science, and just using scientific-sounding Greek words instead of superstitious-sounding Latin or Germanic ones to describe the phenomenon does nothing to change that fact. It's only a matter of conventional vocabulary that renders the same object a ring of invisibility in one setting and a personal cloaking device in another - remember Asimov's "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"?

Which brings me on to my final point, which is that in my view religion and science fiction go together very naturally. Religion IS science fiction - usually very violent science fiction - the difference being that one is taken seriously by its practitioners and the other is not. Almost all the science in religious texts is fictional - they depict strange other universes where magic is real, cosmic super-intelligences actually exist, life began in a different way, history is different, the future will be different, and fictional people actually exist and actually have strange powers. Religious sci-fi stories often bear much LESS relevance to the real universe than those traditionally called sci-fi: at least some traditional sci-fi scenarios actually COULD happen, whereas religious stories are simply counterfactuals.

109. A War On Science

Comment #200088 by Cartomancer on June 26, 2008 at 8:25 pm

I never said that theology was an easy degree, but there is certainly that perception out there. I can imagine a few unscrupulous types who might be swayed by the reputation if not the reality.

110. A War On Science

Comment #200019 by Cartomancer on June 26, 2008 at 4:03 pm

I really wonder what it must be like to be an academic theologian as far as belief and atheism goes. Of all people, they are perhaps uniquely placed to grasp the true inanity of theology - nobody studies and analyses theological arguments more closely than a professional theologian after all, so surely atheism should be rampant among their number?

Obviously a lot of them are terminal faith-heads whose rational faculties have been well suppressed and are capable of ignoring even the most obvious disjuncts. But not all of them, surely. I suspect a lot of the rest have started out studying theology for religious reasons (I can think of few other reasons to do so, save getting an easy degree or trying to understand the theistic mind-set, neither of which would be much incentive to make a career out of it), and before they know it end up teaching theology for a living. As they progress they probably keep thinking "yes, but there's so much more to look at, it'll all make sense eventually if I just push on". By the time they're writing papers on it for journals of theology they probably have far too much invested in the subject to come out openly and declare that it's all nonsense. It is, undoubtedly, possible to be an atheist theologian (it'd be like being a literary scholar who knows that Hamlet wasn't real) but I suspect being an openly atheistic theologian is somewhat frowned upon by the majority of the species, and a very peculiar anomaly to the rest of us.

So many of them just keep on doing their theology, keep their heads down, and steer themselves into the less ridiculous parts of it, such as biblical history, medieval philosophy, ancient languages and so forth. Others maybe don't worry too much that it isn't adding up and concentrate on ethical and humanitarian issues - figuring that doing good works is its own reward, and far more important than metaphysical quibbling.

111. Stop distorting young minds!

Comment #199838 by Cartomancer on June 26, 2008 at 12:04 pm

Sadly the government isn't displaying a great deal of nous on this issue either. I suspect it's because an unhealthy number of them are actually secretly anousic themselves. It really is a travesty.

But I'm certainly going to be using this new term from now on. Plato would warmly approve methinks...

112. The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete

Comment #199829 by Cartomancer on June 26, 2008 at 11:52 am

Reminds me of the way the majority of nineteenth century academics (mainly German ones) used to do Classics and History - simply gather as huge and compendious a selection of documents as possible then edit them all in as much painstaking detail as you can, publish in huge cyclopean volumes of anriquarian lore and call it scholarship. Very useful for giving us properly edited classical texts, but for understanding the way the Greek and Roman worlds worked? Not so bright there...

113. A War On Science

Comment #199747 by Cartomancer on June 26, 2008 at 10:01 am

Do you mean Maimonedes? (or is it Maimonides?). And you think a variant of the razor is to be found in Aquinas? If so which work?

Yes, Maimonides is simply the more common hellenised name of Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon. He was also known to some by the acronym Rambam - Ra(bbi) M(oses) b(en) (M)a(i) m (on) - and as Abu Imran Mussa bin Maimun ibn Abdallah al-Qurtubi al-Israili to the arabic-speaking world.

Aquinas' formulation of the razor is to be found in the Summa Contra Gentiles, lib. III, cap. lxx:

"Quod potest fieri sufficienter per unum, superfluum est si per multa fiat: videmus enim quod natura non facit per duo instrumenta quod potest facere per unum."

or in English:

"If a thing can be done adequately by means of one, it is superfluous to do it by means of several; for we observe that nature does not employ two instruments where one suffices."

Of course, the standard "Entia non multiplicanda sunt praeter necessitatem" formulation attributed to Ockham is to be found nowhere in his writings. It can be traced back to Leibniz in the 1670s and no further. The closest Ockham comes is probably "frustra fit per plura quod potest fieri per pauciora" in the Summa Totius Logicae. The term "Ockham's Razor" was first used in 1852 by Sir William Hamilton.

114. God hates Mars

Comment #199726 by Cartomancer on June 26, 2008 at 8:54 am

I do get a twinge of guilt every now and then when charging with gusto into a tangential conversation like this one on RD.net. Still, I can justify it in this case because the article pretty much says all that needs saying - there's not much more we can add to illuminate the depths of Rob Hood's abyssal stupidity.

I've never liked Belgian chocolate. Far too bitter. Too much cocoa butter, not enough milk and sugar. I went to Belgium once expecting great things, but came back thoroughly disappointed with the chocolate-flavoured fayre on offer.

For my money Cadbury's is easily the best chocolate in the world. No contest. It tastes of my childhood. I will gladly wolf down pounds of the stuff of an evening. In fact there's a half-finished 500g bar of Dairy Milk sat next to me right now. Thank biology for my volcanic metabolism and stubborn inability to weigh more than 13 stone.

I don't like French food either. In fact most of my diet is bought from KFC and the delightful mobile cuisineries that frequent Oxford of an evening. People call me a philistine when it comes to food, but I just know what I like and what tastes good to me. Food criticism is 99% needless snobbery in my opinion - De gustibus non disputandum est.

115. A War On Science

Comment #199717 by Cartomancer on June 26, 2008 at 8:33 am

Oh, I agree that it's useful practically, but as a rule of thumb rather than something on which grand epistemological structures should be built. As far as the question of god is concerned, I think the evidence speaks for itself and the razor is largely unnecessary.

I suppose I'm just more used to seeing it in its original medieval context (it actually crops up in Moses ben Maimon and Aquinas before Ockham) where it was given some kind of intrinsic epistemological value and actually used to solve problems outright.

116. A War On Science

Comment #199706 by Cartomancer on June 26, 2008 at 8:10 am

Perhaps the most powerful principle of that method is Ockham's Razor - don't unnecessarily multiply entities.

I'm undoubtedly a huge Ockham fan, don't get me wrong. The Venerable Inceptor has won me more rounds of "fantasy scholastic disputation team" than Peter Abelard and Robert Grosseteste combined. I am still waiting for the blacksmith to finish my engraved replica of the razor. Nevertheless I do struggle with the ultimate underlying justification for it in principle.

Yes, the razor seems to produce good results, and overall is more a tool for weeding out likely theories than for justifying which is true, but why should the most parsimonious explanation necessarily be the best one? Ockham's own justification for the razor would be based on some intrinsic principle of economy in the universe, probably related to the perfection of god. I guess some play on the laws of thermodynamics might replace that in a modern context. In the context of his own intellectual millieu the razor was very useful, because the ideas he was choosing between were all horribly complicated messes of Aristotelian physics that his fellow scholastics had made up in their heads. There was precious little evidence for any of them and at bottom Aristotelian physics works in a very commonsense, everyday kind of way. This is what fourteenth-century scholastic nominalism (as opposed to thomistic and scotistic realism) was all about.

Let us take an example. I see what appears to be a rock in the distance. There are plenty of rocks out there, so the simplest explanation is that it got there the same way all the others did - geology. It would be unparsimonious to suggest that someone came along and put it there specially. Nevertheless, I am wrong, because that rock is in fact a papier mache hollywood prop left there after a film shoot, not even a real rock at all. There are many more entities responsible for it than my parsimonious explanation has accounted for, and the razor has actively misled me here.

What I really need to do is go and examine the rock to gather evidence.

So should I go around doubting that any rock I see is real? Obviously not, but I think that's more because I am unable to go and test them all and quite frankly don't need to do so than because the razor helps me here. By definition, any problem of this kind for which we have no evidence cannot be resolved. It is not technically correct to say that the parsimonious explanation is more likely because, in the absence of any evidence to guide us, we simply cannot assign any kind of likelihood value to a solution - the matter is an imponderable and the only sensible response is to put it to one side and ignore it. Once we have some evidence we can make a reasoned judgement, but we have also put aside the need for the razor. All things are now not equal and we can go on evidence alone.

For which, in the case of god, there is none.

117. God hates Mars

Comment #199436 by Cartomancer on June 25, 2008 at 6:53 pm

Oh, and while we're on the subject the simple old 15p Cadbury's Fudge (the one in the red wrapper) is easily the best chocolate bar in the world. You can hardly find them these days, but there's nothing better. And that includes Milky Ways and the king-sized Twix. So there.

118. God hates Mars

Comment #199433 by Cartomancer on June 25, 2008 at 6:50 pm

Frisking the merry men I believe...

Politicians get all the fun don't they...

119. God hates Mars

Comment #199426 by Cartomancer on June 25, 2008 at 6:39 pm

Am I the only one who has noticed that this guy is called Rob Hood and he makes the suggestion that money be taken from those who have it and then given to those who do not? I wonder if Friar Tuck, Maid Marian and Little John are going to issue a press release denying any links to The Conservative Voice?

Actually, he's really an intellectual Robin Hood in reverse. He takes ideas from those who can't think of any decent ones (the religious community) and then tries to force those with an abundance of good ideas (the sensible community) to accept them.

Where is that blasted Sheriff of Nottingham when you need him?

120. Mormons urged to back ban on same-sex marriage

Comment #199182 by Cartomancer on June 25, 2008 at 9:31 am

Well, yes Animavore, a lot of gay people do find the idea of marriage a bit archaic and irrelevant these days (by beloved among them), but another lot of gay people also see it as relevant and important. We should at least be given the choice of conforming or standing out don't you think?

There are also real benefits to marriage offered by society: tax breaks, inheritance issues, hospital visiting rights etc.

121. Mormons urged to back ban on same-sex marriage

Comment #199147 by Cartomancer on June 25, 2008 at 8:41 am

Actually, thinking about it, in Britain at least it should technically be possible to sue a religious organisation for not offering gay marriages under the 2007 goods and services (discrimination) act. After all, marriage is a service - just like buying a car or adopting a child - and catholic adoption agencies are explicitly NOT exempted from this provision on adoption as the high-profile media coverage at the time it was passed demonstrates. Why should religious dogma be ANY excuse for not offering the same services to everyone who can use them?

Of course, I doubt anybody would really want to have their marriage conducted by somebody who disagreed with it in principle and was only forced to by legal injunction. Well, I say anybody, I'm the sort of bloody-minded bugger who would positively enjoy the look of discomfort on the vicar's face throughout the service (as it happens I always imagined my own wedding would look rather like the end of the "I can make you a man (reprise)" scene from the Rocky Horror Picture Show). It would be an interesting test case to bring.

122. Mormons urged to back ban on same-sex marriage

Comment #199082 by Cartomancer on June 25, 2008 at 7:10 am

I'm beginning to wonder if the best option might not be to just abolish the official legal institution of marriage altogether. The various tax benefits could then be rationalised on a fair basis and legislatures the world over would be freed from discussing this sort of asinine nonsense and could turn their attentions to more profitable things.

People who had a hankering for ceremonial pageantry could then do it entirely their own way and nobody else would give two hoots how they choose to define marriage for themselves.

123. Saudi Marriage Officiant : 'It Is Allowed To Marry A Girl At The Age Of One'.

Comment #198684 by Cartomancer on June 24, 2008 at 11:14 am

The sad thing is that many, many muslims out there see nothing wrong with calling the unlovely union of a middle-aged man with a six year old girl a legitimate "marriage" and yet would be mortally offended at the idea of two loving, committed women or men getting married to one another.

Liberalartist has the right of it. To this mindset marriage is property contract. It's like buying a car or a house or a camel. And it actually assumes that women NEED to be bought and sold and "protected" by marriage, and will be GRATEFUL for it. And I dare say many poor women in benighted islamic countries actually ARE grateful.

124. Gay brains structured like those of the opposite sex

Comment #198620 by Cartomancer on June 24, 2008 at 10:08 am

It's not Robinson I'm worried about - she's a politician and last time I checked there was no requirement that politicians be sane people who are not reaping the fruits of madness.

The one who concerns me is her pet psychiatrist, the one whose christian beliefs inspire him to offer "treatment" to homosexuals. Last time I checked there actually was a requirement that medical professionals be competent, impartial and keep up to date with their field of medicine. Surely such a witch-doctor should be struck off at the very least, and preferably convicted in court for malpractice?

125. World Youth Day condom protest against Pope

Comment #198584 by Cartomancer on June 24, 2008 at 9:19 am

Apparently it's a very ill-kept secret among the world's governmental intelligence agencies that ratty is a big fat queen himself. So my friend from the Israeli intelligence service says anyway. That'd certainly explain a lot of his homophobia, nasty old bigot that he is.

But what a crowd! Stern, Dawkinsean atheists rubbing shoulders with mad-as-hatters raelians, happy-clappy christian milksops, flamboyant gay rights folk and rabid socialists waving Das Kapital and singing the battle hymn of the republic at full blast. I can hardly imagine what the pope might do if personally confronted by such a motley crew - well, apart from growl angrily and shoot lightning bolts from his fingers like he did to Mace Windhu in Return of the Sith. Fortunately with all those rubber condoms around our plucky band of heroes will be properly insulated from such an attack, rendering ratty impotent to resist their demands.

So Say No to Pope children! If anyone comes up to you in the playground offering you pope, just say no. The smallest amount could get you hooked - many addicts started off with just a half cardinal or a handful of bishops before moving on to the hard stuff. Even if all your friends are whacked out on pope (also known on the street as papa, pontiff, holy father, vicar of christ, old man ratty and by many other names) resist their calls that you join them. Pope ruins lives, wrecks families and alters your brain. You might end up with no rational faculties at all, wearing a dress and dribbling insanely as you chant Latin canticles and wave a thurible over your head. The St. Bonaventure Home for Terminal Pope Addicts on Vatican Hill is full of such unfortunates. Don't do it!

126. Sarcasm Seen as Evolutionary Survival Skill

Comment #198407 by Cartomancer on June 23, 2008 at 7:36 pm

Comment #198367, Steve Zara

Oh, I don't know, thanks to our feminine-patterned brains we're apparently much better at multi-tasking than the average naff. I dare say it was relatively easy in the old days to palare with the fruits while simultaneously charpering a dishy chicken for trade and still keeping a straight ecaf so as not to alert lilly.

Working out what the hell other gay people were talking about must have been a nightmare though...

127. Sarcasm Seen as Evolutionary Survival Skill

Comment #198328 by Cartomancer on June 23, 2008 at 3:06 pm

What? You mean I had it the wrong way round all these years?

I thought sarcasm was the base state of human communication. As far as I was concerned sincerity only developed in the relatively recent past as a quick way of conducting business with slow-witted Americans, dour whippet-fancying northerners and the terminally elderly.

In fact the only time my friends and I stop being sarcastic to one another is to hurl imaginative insults and argue over why it's not my round again.

128. The Flea Delusion

Comment #198109 by Cartomancer on June 23, 2008 at 8:19 am

Serendipity1 -

Both forms are grammatically valid in modern English usage so it doesn't really matter which to choose on that score, as long as you are consistent. Essentially the possessive apostrophe replaces the "e" of the "es" genitive suffix from old and middle English, where the correct form would have been Dawkinses. The choice between Dawkins' and Dawkins's is thus the difference between using the apostrophe to replace just the "e" or the whole "es".

I generally prefer the -s' form in most cases, but Richard himself uses Dawkins's so I have adopted that for his particular case.

129. On this Day: Galileo Sentenced for Believing Sun Is Center of Universe

Comment #197828 by Cartomancer on June 22, 2008 at 6:07 pm

Hmm, I think a thousand years of the history of ideas deserves rather more than idle counterfactual speculations myself, but I'm not really in the mood to lecture people on medieval intellectual history at the moment. Suffice to say the cause of European intellectual decline in the centuries after the collapse of the western Roman Empire had little to do with christianity and much to do with unstable power structures and the decline of the classical city state. That, and isolation from the Greek world, which had always been the intellectual powerhouse of the antique world. The revival of learning during the high and central middle ages (the Carolingian and Twelfth Century Renaissances) is a similarly complex and multifarious phenomenon. It occurred under the auspices of powerful christian rulers who could provide for the needs of an educated elite, in overtly religious monasteries, cathedral schools and universities, but it derived the freshness and vigour of its achievements just as much from the assimilation of non-christian ideas. If one wants to look at why learning flourishes or declines in a society, one needs to look at the infrastructure which supports that learning, not the ideas it comes up with. I doubt I need to point out that the societies which inherited and advanced Greek learning during the early middle ages were muslim societies with all the socially oppressive nastiness that entails.

People are too keen to buy in to the rhetoric of renaissance humanists and paint the middle ages as a period of backwardness, which europe had to get over before it could really take off. This is pure nonsense - the renaissance could only happen thanks to the changes in european society which the middle ages wrought. Petrarch did not turn round one day in the fourteenth century and decide that he should really stop fooling around with glosses on the psalter and commentaries on Peter Lombard so he could read Cicero and proper classical authors instead. Francis Bacon did not write the Novum Organum on a whim, and would never have done so had not his medieval predecessors from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries done so much work on the original Aristotelian Organon to demonstrate its flaws. Roger Bacon, mad, strident and lacking in substance though he was, managed to come up with a remarkably modern-sounding list of what was wrong with medieval science in the middle of the thirteenth century, and he wasn't alone in trying to improve matters. Where would we atheists be without William of Ockham's famous razor to swing above our heads? (I love this image so much that I'm having a replica broadsword made up to hang on my wall, with a version of the razor in Latin etched into the blade)

In fact, the very Nikolaus Copernicus mentioned in this article, poster-boy of Renaissance scientific rationalism, managed to get his theories published with little fuss precisely because an anonymous preface was appended to them discussing how they fit in with the partially heliocentric model of the solar system described by the late antique educational allegorist Martianus Capella, whose work was a standard of the medieval schools.

Renaissance rationalism evolved seamlessly from medieval rationalism, and it's about time people recognised the fact.

130. The Flea Delusion

Comment #197644 by Cartomancer on June 22, 2008 at 12:23 pm

If writing flea books is this easy I might just have a go myself. Got to be an easier way to make money than academia, surely? All I have to do is fill page after page with poor arguments, non sequiturs and lame jokes then come up with an unimaginative parodic title to bundle the whole crock of badly-written nonsense in. Maybe not so different from academia after all on second thoughts. Ok, how about...

The Cod Diffusion - Migratory Patterns in Marine Fish and how they prove Richard Dawkins is Wrong -
by Vincent Poffley and the British Seafood Marketing Board

Chapter one, Why the Roman Catholic Church almost certainly exists

Chapter two, Why the Roman Catholic Church almost certainly shouldn't exist

Chapter three, Why Richard Dawkins almost certainly doesn't exist

Chapter four, The Larch

Chapter five, Stalin ate my neighbours, therefore Jesus...

Chapter six, The Larch

Chapter seven, St. Thomas Aquinas ate my neighbours, therefore Jesus...

etc.

131. The Flea Delusion

Comment #197548 by Cartomancer on June 22, 2008 at 10:08 am

Some kind of high-level meta-delusion? Sounds suspiciously like Neoplatonism to me...

132. 'I despise Islamism': Ian McEwan faces backlash over press interview

Comment #197506 by Cartomancer on June 22, 2008 at 9:12 am

Highly amusing, isn't it, that people can talk about McEwan's dislike of islamism as a possible "hate crime" while simultaneously ignoring the much more hateful things that are the stock in trade of every islamist you're ever likely to meet.

It's yet another case of the ghastly double standards religion expects and receives in public discourse. Imagine if Ian McEwan had written a book which said "I think all women should wear veils and stay at home, men should beat their wives and all homosexuals and infidels should be shot", and then some bearded mullah had retorted "we dislike Ian McEwan and his readers intensely and would stand up to the kind of world he envisions". Would the mullah then be guilty of a hate crime?

133. Christianity 'could die out within a century'

Comment #197491 by Cartomancer on June 22, 2008 at 8:54 am

Is it just me who can't work out how many different studies this very short article is discussing?

I counted up to four:

i. The "Research by the Orthodox Jewish organisation Aish" on people's perceptions of the future of religiosity in Britain

ii. The study which found that four in ten people would "choose to be a christian" in a hundred years' time. I suspect this is actually the same as the first one, but the phrasing of the response seems very strange if it is the same one.

iii. The YouGov poll of 2000 people. Again, this might be the same thing, but the first sentence told us that Aish conducted the poll themselves, not that they merely stole the YouGov results and commented on them. Did they do it for YouGov or something?

iv. The results published earlier this year on church attendance, which is probably a different poll but might not be given the imprecision of the journalistic language. Since this survey deals with real concrete attendance figures rather than simply perceptions is probably the only one worth thinking about.

At any rate, what sort of a silly question would give information on whether people "choose to be a christian"? Did the researchers really go and ask people "Imagine you're still alive in 2108 and you have to pick a religious position to belong to, which religious position would you pick?" What other question could get that response? And why does anyone think that the idle counterfactual speculations of people in the street will have anything useful to contribute to our prediction of future trends?

134. Gay brains structured like those of the opposite sex

Comment #197482 by Cartomancer on June 22, 2008 at 8:29 am

And I thought I was prone to wittering on for paragraphs and making the same point over and over again...

Well, Stacey, I appreciate your disclaimers to tolerance. Ultimately that's all that matters as far as civil interpersonal discourse goes. Nevertheless I do have to take issue with your somewhat archaic understanding of homosexuality as outlined in the above post.

First of all, "species" is entirely the wrong word to use in this context. We are all members of the same species - homo sapiens (or maybe homo wooterensis in some cases) - male and female (and intersex) versions of that species are still the same species. You probably should have used "sex" or "gender", but even then nobody is claiming that homosexuals are a different gender from heterosexuals, merely that they prefer the sexual company of a different gender. This is why we use the term "orientation" in the west, though in certain societies (I am thinking of some Hindu societies here) the term "third gender" is often used. But it's certainly not a part of modern scientific discourse.

Now, as to your main misunderstanding. You seem to have a very dissociative view of sexual and emotional bonds and an uncomfortably teleological understanding of human biology. I also get the impression that you largely disregard the deterministic influence of brain chemistry and physiology on human thought processes and in so doing render them down entirely to a matter of free choice. While that might be an edifying flight of whimsy for the ego a rationalist it is so far from the truth of the matter as understood by science that it falls flat on its face. In fact a more plausible case could be made for humanity lacking free determination at all.

Yes, it is perfectly true that human beings can have sexual relations with other human beings and yet not develop emotional ties with them. It is also true that they can develop strong emotional ties and yet not desire a sexual relationship from it - be that because the other person is of the wrong gender, not sexually appealing, a relative or for any number of reasons. This, however, does not negate the fact that human beings (and other animals, such as penguins and elephants) have an innate instinctive tendency to form emotional and sexual pair-bonds for extended periods of time. Love does contribute to the enjoyment of sex and sex to the enjoyment of love. It's a well observed and understood phenomenon - the brain chemistry of it all has been studied in some depth. Only one operating under the most facile of postmodernistic world views could deny that love and sex are intimately connected in human thought processes, and that both have a biological basis.

Now, as to preference for same or opposite sex partners, research like the study discussed in this article has consistently show that this too has a firmly biological basis. We used to be unsure whether social conditioning or underlying biological factors were responsible for sexual preferences, but increasingly the results are in and showing a strong degree of biological determination (see LBraschi's comment #64 for a reading list). Even if you hadn't read these studies, it is obvious that there is a strong biological basis for it because there are homosexual individuals in pretty much all non-human species that have been observed, where cultural factors are simply not an issue. Just because some human beings choose not to act on their biological urge for same sex partners, out of a desire to conform to oppressive social customs say, this does not mean they do not have those desires and are not biologically homosexual. Likewise, just because I could choose not to write with my left hand and end up producing an even more illegible scrawl than normal with my right, that does not stop me from being biologically left-handed.

As for this "what you're designed for" nonsense, that too is flawed. Most obviously because human beings were not designed but evolved through blind natural processes. Yes, sexually reproductive species have evolved, among other things, to possess complementary genitalia but that's merely a quirk of evolution and has nothing to do with how those items should or should not be used. Genitals are not "for" anything in a teleological sense, they can fulfil a range of functions, sexual pleasure being just as much if not more a function of the genitalia than reproduction. In fact it is highly likely that some degree of adaptation in many species for improved homosexual intercourse has occurred. I can think of little other reason why the highly sensitive prostate gland should be so conveniently positioned for stimulation during anal intercourse in the human male. We know there are many species which have thrived by developing survival strategies involving non-reproductive individuals within populations - the classic "gay uncle looks after the kids" set-up or some such - and there is no reason why human beings should be considered exempt from this. Through kin-selection and various other processes the passing on of genetic traits which prevent their vehicle from reproducing directly is perfectly possible. Just look at a beehive.

Consequently, with my evolved brain that tells me to seek only male partners for love and sex, and my evolved body which provides me the tools for enjoying them emotionally and sexually, I see no way it is possible to call me a biological heterosexual without invoking discredited religious teleology that doesn't even stand up on its own merits.

And why are you so convinced that all this stems from some feeling of shame or a desire to apologise? I feel no shame in being gay, and I am keen to find out and explain why I am thus purely out of intellectual curiosity. I get irritated when people make false statements about the origins of my sexual orientation for the same reason I get irritated when they make false statements about the origins of life or complexity or the universe. In both cases, almost without fail, the false claims are used as a springboard into some kind of oppressive religious nastiness.

135. Bright Chunks At Phoenix Lander's Mars Site Must Have Been Ice

Comment #196680 by Cartomancer on June 20, 2008 at 10:24 am

Bush was hoping for oil I suspect...

136. Lawsuit filed over 'I Believe' plates in S.C.

Comment #196673 by Cartomancer on June 20, 2008 at 10:18 am

What really gets me is the low degree of conviction among christians that the consumption of gaudy paraphernalia like this implies. Yes, so you believe in the magic sky goblins - good for you - but why do you need to shout it from the rooftops and staple a bit of iron with cross on it to everything you own in order loudly to proclaim the fact? Surely just believing is enough? Why declare this particular belief with trinkets and gewgaws and not other things you also happen to believe? Why is there no agitation for number plates proclaiming belief that the second world war happened, or that the sky goes dark at night, or that you like crunchy nut cornflakes?

Perhaps because these things are self-evident and you don't need to constantly remind yourself of how much you really should believe in them in case you suddenly realise what twaddle they are and stop? That's all the crass symbolism of this boils down to - empty vessels making the most noise.

137. Darwinists for Jesus

Comment #195802 by Cartomancer on June 18, 2008 at 8:43 pm

Of course the magic sky goblins are an explanation. You can explain just about anything with magic sky goblins - wonderfully versatile little things. I never said they were a very good explanation however...

As far as belief and behaviour goes I generally recommend the approach of the cynical Japanese warlord Oda Nobunaga in his dealings with christian missionaries, which was essentially "what do I have to believe in order for you to give me all those guns?"

138. Darwinists for Jesus

Comment #195797 by Cartomancer on June 18, 2008 at 8:26 pm

If we evolved, and evolution explains our foibles. Whither original sin?

Surely that should be "whence" original sin? "Whither" means "where is it going?" rather than "where did it come from?".

The answer, in any case, is doubtless some variant on magic sky goblins.

139. Lying for Jesus?

Comment #195708 by Cartomancer on June 18, 2008 at 5:37 pm

Magic sky goblins I tell you! They design everything on the back of their celestial fag packets when they're in the pub! It's true I tell you!

140. Gay brains structured like those of the opposite sex

Comment #195706 by Cartomancer on June 18, 2008 at 5:31 pm

Check out conservapedia's homosexual entry
http://www.conservapedia.com/Homosexuality

I was shown this by my gay friend a year or two ago. It appears to have grown exponentially in the meantime, filling up with rank, diseased bitterness much as infected boils and suppurating pustules tend to. I must admit I am struggling to think of a more blatantly biased and disingenuous document that I have come across in recent years. But the highly tendentious "homosexuality and creationism" bit was amusingly awful - methinks those crazy creationsts are wearing their shoehorns to stubs trying to wedge their views in anywhere they can just about get them. The sound of a thousand barrels being scraped is ringing in my ears.

Though given the high incidence of blatant hypocrisy among odious conservative bigots the world over I would not be at all surprised if the authors of this article are frequent partakers of homosexual entry. Probably with expensive rent-boys and crystal meth.

141. Lying for Jesus?

Comment #195686 by Cartomancer on June 18, 2008 at 5:11 pm

Do any of you talk to Dawkins. I heard through some very reliable sources that he is starting to question himself and might even be contemplating making a public statement in regards to his uncertainty of Macroevolution.

Would these "very reliable sources" be the same magic sky goblins who wrote your special book and tell you what to do all the time?

142. Gay brains structured like those of the opposite sex

Comment #195682 by Cartomancer on June 18, 2008 at 5:02 pm

I guess a binary either-or model of sexuality is a tidier and more easily grasped one than a continuum model. Biological sex itself is pretty much a binary characteristic, though there are a tiny number of exceptions, and I suspect that this distinction is fairly deeply ingrained in our evolved brains and serves as a natural starting point for our conceptions of other sex-related phenomena.

On logical grounds one could say that by taking both ends of the spectrum you are implicitly including the middle as well. After all, we generally think about sexuality in terms of sexual acts, which usually focus on a member of one gender not of both. A sexual preference only comes into play when you examine the rationale behind such acts.

But then again we also think of many other continuum-based differences in binary terms. Race for instance - it is perfectly unremarkable to talk of "blacks" "whites" "orientals" and so forth ("yellows" would technically be the proper equivalent, but that sounds rather racist these days in a way the other two do not) but in reality the dividing lines are far more blurred than with sexuality. The term "mixed race" is far more unrealistic than "bisexual" because at least bisexual can be strictly defined as combining two similarly well-defined concepts - in reality everyone is "mixed race" because "races" are in no way discrete entities.

I suspect it has something to do with the human tendency toward neatness, schematisation and systemisation.

Nevertheless, in the case of sexuality I am loath to abandon the binary model entirely. The evidence we have of human sexuality suggests a continuum of behaviours, but that could be explained in several ways. It could, for instance, be that there is an underlying biological sexuality which is inborn and binary - either homo- or hetero-, but this can be altered and modified to some extent by cultural conditioning. Thus someone might be biologically homosexual but de facto bisexual or even heterosexual. Whether such an individual would exhibit precisely the same reactions on a biochemical and psychological level to same-sex and opposite-sex attractions is a question I cannot answer, but I suspect there may well be differences in the mechanisms involved. If such a model were accurate it would not mean that bisexuality is less real or authentic than the other options, merely thanks to different mechanisms.

Alternately bisexuality could be an awful lot more closely linked to biology, and different levels of bisexuality might be inborn and immutable, perhaps but not necessarily linked with different degrees of gendered brain states. There could be some cultural fine-tuning on top of such a model too of course. The precise means of disentangling the two influences is a puzzle I will leave to scientists working in the field, because I cannot easily conceive of how it might be done.

One consideration to bear in mind when deciding on how much emphasis to give to continuum versus binary models as thought aids however is the numbers involved. Returning to the example of biological gender mentioned earlier, the tiny numbers of intermediate intersex individuals in the human population means that it makes more sense to see gender as a binary thing. Likewise, if you take chirality (handedness) then that too works better on a binary model because the numbers of ambidextrous people are tiny compared to either right or left handed people (even though there is a massive disparity with dextrals outnumbering us sinistrals nine to one). Moreover, there is a continuum of handedness - some right-handed people are much more adept with their left hand than others, but still routinely use the right for delicate tasks etc., and can train to improve their sinistral skills. Were it shown that individuals with bisexual tendencies are much rarer than either homo- or heterosexuals then again a binary model makes more sense.

Continuing the handedness analogy, a right-handed person might very well choose to try writing with his left hand once in a while - to see what it's like or how good he is with it. His left-handed fellow might even be forced by overbearing religious authority to conform to societal norms and write with his right hand all the time. Does this make them any less dextral and sinistral respectively? Replace right and left with straight and gay, and writing with same or different sex partnerships, and does the example look much different? Perhaps, but an intimate understanding of the brain physiology behind each phenomenon would be required to say for certain.

Having ruminated on the matter, however, I should probably declare that my own experience leads me to consider that entirely straight or entirely gay individuals are very much out there. Probably in great numbers. When I was growing up I was exposed to hardly any evidence that homosexuality existed at all. I think I only really came to understand that there was an alternative to heterosexuality when I was about 15 or 16. Nevertheless, throughout my childhood and my adolescent years I was always possessed of a strong conviction that all this heterosexual lifestyle rubbish simply wasn't anything to do with me and never would be. I wasn't willing to admit to myself or the world at large that I was gay for a long time, but I was certainly keen to deny that I was straight.

It is just possible that I slipped into exclusive homosexuality through sustained personal self-definition, but it sure doesn't feel that way.

143. Lying for Jesus?

Comment #195479 by Cartomancer on June 18, 2008 at 9:50 am

I think the dear Reverend Dark has outdone himself with the queasiness-inducing invented deities this time. A truly remarkable example of the art.

I'm off to scrub my mind out with bleach now...

144. Lying for Jesus?

Comment #195474 by Cartomancer on June 18, 2008 at 9:45 am

Designoid - It was pretty much Richard's term for things that look designed but aren't necessarily designed. He contrasted it with simple things like rocks on the one hand and designed things like watches on the other (I can still remember the colourful plastic trays). They show complex features which we would normally associate with design, but could have arisen without it through natural selection or an analogous process.

Basically "designoid" is a sub-category of "complex" and "designed" is a sub-category of "designoid".

145. Lying for Jesus?

Comment #195468 by Cartomancer on June 18, 2008 at 9:34 am

Richard himself coined the term "designoid" in his Growing Up in the Universe series. Might that have the appropriate nuances?

Maybe "constructed"? or "operational"? "mechanical" sounds too human-contrived, but possibly an alternative backformed adjective might be coined? Machinic? Mechanismal? Organoid? Fungent?

146. Oystein Elgaroy - the Christian defender who became an Atheist

Comment #195389 by Cartomancer on June 18, 2008 at 6:44 am

*Blushes with tremendous embarrassment*

I really must learn to keep my acid tongue under control in public places. I hope no offense was taken - certainly none was intended. Actually, the more I read this story the more elegant a demonstration of the power of rational thought it seems. And eleven publications at 27 - that just makes me horribly jealous!

147. Oystein Elgaroy - the Christian defender who became an Atheist

Comment #195094 by Cartomancer on June 17, 2008 at 5:53 pm

Don't be an apostate... re-discover how awesome Jesus Christ is

In order to be an apostate one actually has to have been a part of the religion in the first place, and in order to rediscover something one actually has to have discovered it in the first place. I'm sick of this pathetic assumption among moron theists like yourself that everyone must have started out in their silly little cult of the magic sky goblin and atheism is therefore the abandonment of it. Many of us have never believed in your or any other brand of theistic nonsense at all and merely laugh at the narrow-mindedness of its world view.

But yes, Oystein Elgaroy, wonderful story - a textbook case of reason and rationality winning out in the end. He could well be the poster-boy of the New Atheism if he didn't look like one of those faces in children's activity books that you can turn upside-down and see a different face the other way up...

148. Gay brains structured like those of the opposite sex

Comment #194907 by Cartomancer on June 17, 2008 at 11:50 am

Well, the fact that identical twins don't both exhibit the same sexual orientation is fairly strong evidence that orientation is not entirely genetic, though that doesn't mean that there isn't an important genetic factor (and since most twin studies DO show a much higher incidence of identical twins being of the same orientation than fraternal twins, some genetic component is very likely). The phenotypic effects of the gene could be triggered by something else, say a hormone surge in the womb, but that doesn't mean the gene doesn't do most of the work. I'm sure someone with a greater knowledge of genetics could enlighten further.

But a similar upbringing does not necessarily always result in very similar personalities for identical twins. Child development is not entirely a matter of inputs. Sure, there will be some similarities, but often (especially if the parents are keen to encourage individuality, like mine were) the twins will consciously try to diverge from each other, or define themselves with reference to but in opposition to one another. I must say I grew up with a hyper-sensitive appreciation for sameness and difference, and an overactive tendency for self-examination and self-definition, and I generally attribute it to that. When I was finally comfortable with my sexuality, at age 22, it slotted into the overall "equal and opposite" identity framework that we had constructed very nicely.

149. Gay brains structured like those of the opposite sex

Comment #194628 by Cartomancer on June 17, 2008 at 5:32 am

Apologies for generalising but I was under the impression that gay people of both genders broadly speaking assumed one sexual "role" or the other. I can understand in that context how brain structure as described here or proposed hormonal factors would explain male receivers or female givers but I still haven't seen anything that would explain both opposites

It's a common assumption, especially among straight people, that being active or passive in the sexual act must necessarily be a gendered phenomenon - that active participation fits with a masculine personality and passive participation fits with a feminine one. Now, I can see where the assumption comes from - it's firmly rooted in our culture - at least here in the west, where it stems from graeco-roman ideals of masculinity founded on Hippocratic medicine and Aristotelian science. Granted, cultural factors have a powerful effect on the erotic imaginations of individuals, and for a gay person who is thoroughly imbued with the "penetrative = masculine, receptive = feminine" model, it can and does form the basis for a sexual identity.

But there are many more gay people who are not influenced by the graeco-roman model, and do not associate passive participation with a feminine role (and dress and behave accordingly). Thus to say it has a biological component is probably going too far here. In my own experience it has been impossible to tell whether someone prefers the active or the passive role ("top" or "bottom" in modern parlance) based on how traditionally masculine or feminine their behaviour is. I've met several incredibly masculine men who only enjoy the passive role, and plenty of screamingly camp ones who are entirely active. In fact most people seem to be versatile and will try both "roles" - in my case based on mood but others can be entirely amenable to either, or choose based on the partner they are with. As with all things sexual, and particularly all things imaginative, it's far from binary.

To be honest there is a whiff of the patronising about the traditional model, which suggests that somehow we are trying to ape heterosexual relations and set the male-female interaction up as the ideal for our own activities. It's also rather patronising to straight people too I would imagine, assuming as it does that traditional masculine and feminine traits are somehow prescribed simply based on possession or lack of a y chromosome. Why can't straight men, for instance, enjoy "feminine" behaviours, or even passive sexual gratification, if they want to?

150. Saving Us from Darwin

Comment #194033 by Cartomancer on June 16, 2008 at 9:52 am

And Cartomancer, why would I come up with anything new? If the truth is the truth, why would it change? It seems to me that science is changing all the time and finding falicies w/ past theories and developing new ones. Which one is the truth? The one that steadfastly doesn't change or the one that changes daily?

Mutability has little or nothing to do with the truth. Statement of that which is, as discerned through reliable epistemological methods, is how we determine which theory is the truth. Funnily enough science has been doing this for hundreds of years...

But the main reason you should try to come up with something new is because we have all got thoroughly bored of your old material by now. It doesn't hold up under intelligent scrutiny and it never did, but more importantly than that it is so unbearably tedious and repetitive. You are here, after all, purely for our entertainment - You're clearly not here to learn, because if reasonable argument worked on you then you would not be a ridiculous delusional theist, clinging to the childish imagined certainties of a brutish age and pretending that a magic goblin in the sky tells you what to do.

As such, might I suggest you take up juggling or ventriloquism or conjuring as a side-line? This stand-up comedy routine with its quirky child-like characters is all very well, but you've died on your feet and should really try to make the act more appealing. I advise against mime (though it would have the advantage of rendering you gloriously silent), but a well-executed contortionist act might impress - given your propensity for twisting the evidence and avoiding the questions you might well be a natural.

So no, we're not laughing at your pathetic "journey", because the humour value has long since passed its sell-by date. But if you want to come up with some novel and interesting silliness to show us then we would be more than happy to laugh at you until the cows come home.