You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘Education’ category.
Wow, if you ever need to get your blood pressure up just look up the abortion tag in wordpress. The amount of anti-woman propaganda that is out there is deeply depressing. Thankfully the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada has a nice mission statement summarizing why abortion is necessary:
Our Mission
Our Mission: To ensure women’s reproductive freedom by protecting and advancing access to abortion and quality reproductive health care.
Our Vision
The ARCC is “pro-choice” and affirms the following:
* To achieve equality, all women must have the right to decide for themselves whether and when they will bear children, and how many. Without control of their fertility, women cannot have autonomy over their lives and cannot play a full and equal role in society.
* Women have a constitutionally-based right to unrestricted, fully-funded abortion, without legal or other barriers or discrimination due to gender, class, ethnicity, race, age, location/region (or area of residence), or any other characteristic, including reasons for choosing an abortion. The rights of pregnant women must not be abridged—a pregnant woman is “one person” under the constitution.
* Women have the right to receive a full range of reproductive healthcare options, services, and information, including (but not limited to) medical and surgical abortion, contraception, family planning services, and comprehensive sexual health education.
* Women have the right to access reproductive healthcare services safely and in a timely manner, in an atmosphere of dignity, privacy, respect, trust, and compassion.
* All abortions are medically required—not “elective”—and fall under the protection of the Canada Health Act (just like all childbirths). The delivery and funding of abortion and other medically required reproductive healthcare services must meet the Act’s five principles.
* Providers of reproductive health care services have the right to deliver such services free of discrimination, harassment, and violence.
Doctor Myers is one of the great atheist luminaries of recent times. I pilfered his speech from his blog Pharyngula because the speech describes much of what rational secular people are up against in our societies today and the battles that have been fought and are being fought today. I also believe it is a heartening speech that demarcates what has been done and still what needs to be done with no reservations and no regrets for rocking the boat as far as offending religious “sensibilities” are concerned. It may look TL:DR, but it is worth your time to peruse all of what PZ has to say, you’ll just have to trust me on this one. :)
I’m going to begin with where I entered this conflict — and make no mistake, it’s a real battle — with my experience in science education, and specifically with the teaching of evolution. Biology has been a lifelong passion for me, and when I first began teaching way back in the 1980s, it was a shock to discover students who had nothing but contempt for the great unifying principle of my discipline, who were happily wallowing in self-inflicted ignorance and who outright denied plain and simple facts about science. And when I discovered that there were ministers who came onto our campus and lied to our students, presented half-truths and weird fantasies to substitute for evidence, i was outraged. We Gnu Atheists have a reputation for being militant, but make no mistake: we didn’t start this war. If you want to place blame, put it on the backs of religious zealots who have been poisoning the minds of the young for a long, long time.
This is another theme in this conflict: Gnu Atheists are so dang angry. Damned right we are. The real question is why everyone else isn’t. If you aren’t angry about what’s being done to undermine education in this country, you haven’t been following along.
But we also respond rationally. My early incredulity about the nonsense being promoted by creationists was followed by a lot of fact-finding. You can do it too — look up the history of creationism, and you find that we’ve been fighting this same battle for at least half a century, and dealing with the same inane arguments over and over again. Where once Duane Gish was the creationist dinosaur roaming the earth, he was replaced by Kent Hovind, and he is now superseded by Ken Ham and Ray Comfort and Eric Hovind. Nothing has changed but the names. We have had a succession of court cases: Epperson v Arkansas in 68, McLean v Arkansas in 82, Edwards v. Aguillard in 87, Kitzmiller v Dover in 2005 — are they coming to an end? Did any of these trials diminish the influence of creationists? One flareup will be squelched, and next year there will be another. Similarly, we see a succession of politicians come and go, and nothing changes. Ronald Reagan becomes Santorum becomes Bush becomes another dreary chain of Republican know-nothings at every election cycle. It’s 2010, and guess what: Christine O’Donnell is running for the senate, and I’ve still got a local fundamentalist pastor coming on to my campus every week to instruct my students in the video fables of Brother Kent Hovind.
We have been treading water for 50 years. In one sense, that’s a very good thing: better to stay afloat in one place than to sink, and I am deeply appreciative of organizations like the NCSE that have kept us bobbing at the surface all this time, and please don’t ever stop. But isn’t it also about time we learned a new stroke and actually made some progress towards the shore? Shouldn’t we move beyond just reacting to every assault by Idiot America on science education, and honestly look at the root causes of this chronic malignancy and do something about it?
The sea our country is drowning in is a raging religiosity, wave after wave of ignorant arguments and ideological absurdities pushed by tired dogma and fervent and frustrated fanatics. We keep hearing that the answer is to find the still waters of a more moderate faith, but I’m sorry, I don’t feel like drowning there either.
There is an answer, and it’s on display right here in this room. The solution, the only longterm solution, is the sanity of secularism. The lesser struggles to keep silly stickers off our textbooks or to keep pseudoscientific BS like intelligent design out of our classrooms are important, but they are endless chores — at some point we just have to stop pandering to the ideological noise that spawns these unending tasks and cut right to the source: religion.
That’s where the Gnu Atheists get their confrontational reputation. We’re fed up with fighting off the symptoms. We need to address the disease. And if you’re one of those people trying to defend superstition and quivering in fear at the idea of taking on a majority that believes in foolishness, urging us to continue slapping bandages on the blight of faith, well then, you’re part of the problem and we’ll probably do something utterly dreadful, like be rude to you or write some cutting sarcastic essay to mock your position. That is our métier, after all.
I am going to use the discussion points found on RichardDawkins.net as the basis of this feature.
Calilasseia is the author of the post and deserves many rich accolades for assembling so much useful information in one spot. This constitutes an open thread of sorts, please leave your opinions and observations in the comment section.
Enjoy!
[21] “The universe is meaningless without my magic man”
To which the short answer is “so [frakking] what?”
Leaving aside for the moment the total failure of supernaturalists to support the assertion that their particular pet species of magic man actually exists, which also impinges upon [20] above, the idea that the universe needs this entity to impose meaning upon it is a piece of intellectual constipation that I, for one, find mind-numbingly boring, tedious and unimaginative. Douglas Adams said it best – “Isn’t it enough to realise that the garden is beautiful as it is, without having to imagine fairies at the bottom of it?”
Likewise, why should the universe be required to genuflect before supernaturalist anthropocentric conceit, and be required to be meaningful only because an invisible magic man that we have invented decrees thus?
We are beings that are capable of eliciting meaning for our own lives, and the world around us, without outside interference. Erecting an imaginary source of outside interference is nothing more than a gargantuan Little Orphan Annie complex, a wish to remain a child with a nice Daddy figure to run the world around us so that we don’t have to get off our arses and expend the effort. This is such an utterly lame stance to adopt. It’s indolent, naive, simplistic and dumb. Surely there is far more majesty in knowing that the universe, quixotic and capricious though it may seem to be at first sight, is comprehensible by diligent intellectual human effort, and that exercising that effort not only leads to a breathtaking vista of understanding that adds to the majesty, but gives us the power to work toward a better destiny for us all in a manner that produces real, substantive results? Once again, the evidence we have is that fabricated magic men are superfluous to requirements and irrelevant in this vein, and indeed, are increasingly a hindrance. “Magic man did it”, once again, is little more than a synonym for “don’t bother asking questions, don’t bother being curious, don’t bother trying to learn”. What gives meaning to the world around us is the effort we exert to understand the world and put that knowledge to constructive use.
The Naturalistic fallacy is yet another argument put forth by the religiously deluded that holds no water. Eequalsfb puts together a nice little video on how silly this particular argument is.
I am going to use the discussion points found on RichardDawkins.net as the basis of this feature.
Calilasseia is the author of the post and deserves many rich accolades for assembling so much useful information in one spot. This constitutes an open thread of sorts, please leave your opinions and observations in the comment section.
Enjoy!
[21] “The universe is meaningless without my magic man”
To which the short answer is “so fucking what?”
Leaving aside for the moment the total failure of supernaturalists to support the assertion that their particular pet species of magic man actually exists, which also impinges upon [20] above, the idea that the universe needs this entity to impose meaning upon it is a piece of intellectual constipation that I, for one, find mind-numbingly boring, tedious and unimaginative. Douglas Adams said it best – “Isn’t it enough to realise that the garden is beautiful as it is, without having to imagine fairies at the bottom of it?”
Likewise, why should the universe be required to genuflect before supernaturalist anthropocentric conceit, and be required to be meaningful only because an invisible magic man that we have invented decrees thus?
We are beings that are capable of eliciting meaning for our own lives, and the world around us, without outside interference. Erecting an imaginary source of outside interference is nothing more than a gargantuan Little Orphan Annie complex, a wish to remain a child with a nice Daddy figure to run the world around us so that we don’t have to get off our arses and expend the effort. This is such an utterly lame stance to adopt. It’s indolent, naive, simplistic and dumb. Surely there is far more majesty in knowing that the universe, quixotic and capricious though it may seem to be at first sight, is comprehensible by diligent intellectual human effort, and that exercising that effort not only leads to a breathtaking vista of understanding that adds to the majesty, but gives us the power to work toward a better destiny for us all in a manner that produces real, substantive results? Once again, the evidence we have is that fabricated magic men are superfluous to requirements and irrelevant in this vein, and indeed, are increasingly a hindrance. “Magic man did it”, once again, is little more than a synonym for “don’t bother asking questions, don’t bother being curious, don’t bother trying to learn”. What gives meaning to the world around us is the effort we exert to understand the world and put that knowledge to constructive use.
Extra points if you can spot what is wrong with this picture.
The Globe and Mail has a stinky carcass of an article entitled “Are men being robbed of their masculinity?” Zosia Bielski the author in this homage to misogyny tackles the tough issue of Men and the Emasculating Culture they face.
“The movie [Mr.Munday] is just the latest in a string of emasculating offerings in popular culture.”
The War on Maleness is a rising crescendo of hateful messages that Men have to deal with. How can the dominant segment of culture ever survive?
“With the “mancession” hitting men hard during the economic downturn and traditional gender roles mutating, there is rabid concern that men are being robbed of their essential masculinity. The debate heated up after the Pew Research Center reported in January that women have outpaced men in education and earnings growth: 22 per cent of husbands have wives whose income now exceeds theirs, compared to 4 per cent in 1970. The rise in women’s earnings corresponds with an upsurge in their education. (The women were quickly dubbed “alpha wives.”)”
Oh my FSM! We are being robbed of our ‘essential masculinity’? What the hell is essential masculinity? The term is never defined in the article but boy, it seems like this is turning into an apologists piece for patriarchy and the male privilege it grants to men in our culture. Like the the religiously deluded christians who cry ‘persecution’ while in majority status this piece reeks of persecution of the minority with regards to the privileged status men hold in our society.
What is the best way to prove Masculinity is in decline? Mention an Asian outlier subculture:
“An extreme illustration of the slide away from masculinity may be the asexual “herbivores” of Japan, young heterosexual men who are wholly uninterested in pursuing women, material goods or careers. Multiplying after the recession, herbivores live reclusive, uncompetitive lives dominated by the Internet.”
Yes menfolk run! Beware! The World of Warcraft is coming to steal your testicles and carve an indelible mangina into your psyche. The horror!
We do need to give the author some credit as he does mention some facts that are at least loosely connected with reality.
“Boys who resist macho behaviours such as aggression and “emotional stoicism” have better mental health and social relationships, according to Carlos Santos, an Arizona State University researcher who studied 426 middle school boys and presented his findings at the American Psychological Association’s convention in August.”
You mean not acting like completely privileged douche is good for your mental health and ability to work well with others. Go Figure.
“Men have more to gain than lose from the “down with macho” movement, says Jennifer Berdahl, an associate professor of organizational behaviour at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management.”
Another kernel of wisdom in this otherwise putrid article. It is amazing after so many years that people still deny the existence of the Patriarchy and Male Privilege. If people could actually be bothered to read a little about feminism we could avoid some the atrocious pap that regularly appears in the “life” section of newspaper.
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
Your opinions…