Pharyngula: Protect the sanctity of heterosexual marriage!

Here's a great post by PZ Myers that really hits the nail on the head. I'm sure it's been said by others, but I always love PZ's style. Go read it and laugh and be angry at the same time.

Protect the sanctity of heterosexual marriage! @ Pharyngula

SURE Site is Live!

Check it out: ucsbskeptics.com

UCSB's secular student group finally has its website... I'm hoping UCSB atheists and secularists of all types will find it when they search for a group like ours. We need more of a presence, and I think a proper website will definitely help.

Pardon the dust.

SURE Website Coming Soon!

I got SURE's Director of Public Affairs position! So now it's time to get to work...

I've been working on a website so we have more of an official central hub of information on the net (something better than facebook), and it's going pretty smoothly so far, despite having almost no experience with this stuff. I've been looking through SSA Affiliate sites to get ideas for stuff I want to include - the Bruin Alliance of Skeptics and Secularists won the SSA's recent best website award, and I also like the site from the Secular Alliance of IU.

Lots of these sites are sort of blog-website hybrids (lots are on wordpress), so that might be a good design to follow: right now I'm hosting it on blogger and building it to look like a regular website, but it'll include a blog function. Even though we get free hosting from the OSL, I'm trying it here first since that's what I have the most experience with.

Here's what I have so far:


It'll be active by sometime this summer.

Running for SURE's new Director of Public Affairs

I presented my little candidacy speech today for some of the members of SURE, the atheist/agnostic/freethought/secularism group on campus at UCSB - I had to cut out a bunch of stuff from my speech to fit it all in under the five minute limit, but still had some good points to talk about. Too bad it turned out I should've practiced the speech a bit more to get it down pat, so I could have avoided being all weird and awkward in front of everyone... but I'm pretty sure I gave a good enough speech to have a good chance to be the next DPA. Here's the speech outline for anyone who's interested: SURE speech outline. It's pretty rough as it is, but that's how I roll.

I said something about not putting up offensive posters in the speech... what I meant was that our posters shouldn't be part of a negative campaign that portrays religious people as stupid (I think there might be room for possibly portraying religious practices, or something, as stupid, but not the people). The poster that said "Don't believe in fairy tales? Neither do we" was great, because it's showing what the group is, and provides a welcoming tone to fellow nonbelievers. Whatever we put up will be offensive to some people just because of the fact that we're a secularist group in the first place. I'm not advocating worrying about every single person who might possibly get offended, I just wanted to say that our ad campaigns should definitely portray us positively - I'm all for lighting a fire with some controversial ads, I just want to avoid looking like a dick.

Other than that, I'm looking forward to helping out with the group next year, no matter whether I actually get elected to a position.

California Academy of Sciences

Over spring break I went to the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, and it was AWESOME! They really did a wonderful job on the remodeling - it used to be kind of a dumpy place with mediocre and pretty boring exhibits, but now it's a really cool place to visit.

Here are a few photos from the visit... you can find more here.

The evolution room a really awesome - they had a line-up of skull replicas delineating human evolution, and you could actually touch and be close to the skulls... I didn't get so many shots in here since it was so dark, but it was a nice little side-room to visit. It also had some live penguins at the very end of the room, which was a nice touch. I kept wondering how a creationist would react to all that evolution in one place, and if there were any creationists in the crowd (I doubt it). But anyway...

I got a few nice shots of Emma in the evolution room. This trip will probably turn out to have helped make me spend lots more money on camera stuff, since there were plenty of people with nice cameras there, and I kept craving a speedlite set-up. Fortunately, I brought fast enough lenses to cope pretty well in the dark evolution room, but still! WANT MOAR CAMERA STUFF!!

The aquarium portion was really amazing. I really liked how the main viewing pool was connected to the rainforest exhibit upstairs. The diver here was actually taking questions from the audience, using little suction cups to stick to the glass. That sounds like a pretty cool job.

The last exhibit we visited was the rainforest sphere thing... it has representations of four different rainforests from around the world, with animal and plant specimens in smaller rooms within the sphere. There were also birds and butterflies (and maybe some other stuff) flying around freely inside the dome. We had to check our clothes for butterflies before leaving.

So overall it was a great trip... the food was really good too (I had some kind of lemon chicken with rice MMMM).

It was an awesome place to go to - I definitely recommend checking it out when in the San Fran area... along with the Exploratorium. That reminds me, I want to go to the Exploratorium...

Tough Guy Challenge 2009 on The Big Picture

I was testing out my new Westinghouse 22" LCD monitor by looking through The Big Picture when the photoset for this year's "Tough Guy Challenge" caught my eye... I was intrigued. Something called "tough guy challenge" with a photo of some guy running through flames must be good. And then there's this guy:



I cracked up at number 14.

Atheist Bus Campaign

The Atheist Bus Campaign has been all over the news lately, sending 800 buses out in the UK and elsewhere having a poster reading, "There's Probably No God. Now Stop Worrying and Enjoy Your Life." It's a great comeback against religious ads that basically berate nonbelievers and others for not believing, and I think these ads will brighten many people's days.

Now I think there's some sort of law of nature that states, "no matter how gentle and benign an atheistic statement is, it will be attacked as offensive and attempts to censor it shall be made by religious people." Following this law, the ads are being attacked as offensive and have been reported to the Advertising Standards Authority. The main claim to the ASA is that the ads violate this statement:

[M]arketers must hold documentary evidence to prove all claims, whether direct or implied, that are capable of objective substantiation.

Steven Green, national director of Christian Voice, said that the statement on the ads is

…given as a statement of fact and that means it must be capable of substantiation if it is not to break the rules. There is plenty of evidence for God, from people’s personal experience, to the complexity, interdependence, beauty and design of the natural world.

From that quotation, I would be amazed if his arguments hold up. First off, the ads say there's probably no "god." It isn't specifying any one god, and each of the mass of gods can be argued for with Green's weak rationale. Probabilistically speaking, the statement on the ads is much more likely to be true than any one of the gods that remain unspecified by the ads.

Second, Green's arguments are embarrassingly weak (embarrassing for him). Personal experience, again, can be argued for any god, but Green presumably only thinks the Christian god is legitimate. So what about all the other gods whose followers have "personally experienced" his/her/its presence?

The "complexity, interdependence, beauty and [apparent] design of the natural world"? One word: Evolution*. This argument is a tepid grope at trying to explain himself in some way other than "I was offended by the ad and want to censor it. Period."

These ads are so gentle as to make it amazing to me that religious people would blatantly display their double standards and want to remove them, despite religious ads that tell you you'll burn in hell unless you believe our particular stories and myths.

By the way, I just bought one of the campaign's T-Shirts! They can be ordered here: link.


*and science in general.