Homosexuality is next on the list. More and more educated Evangelicals seem to feel they must find a compromise between the inherited party line and their liberal social conscience. This is especially true with seminarians and young ministers. And such theological accommodations are not hard to find. It doesn’t take as much text-twisting as slave-abolition or feminism, that’s for sure.

[snip]

Recent surveys indicate that more and more Evangelicals are questioning or rejecting the doctrine of an eternal hell as well as the idea that non-Christians will not be saved in the afterlife. You can see where this is headed: they are making their way toward being one more tolerant, live-and-let-live mainstream denomination.

[snip]

But the thing that will sooner or later bring the Evangelical Wailing Wall down is sex. More and more, Middle School, High School, and College Evangelicals admit to having sex in the same casual way as their “unsaved” contemporaries. That is, pre-marital, recreational sex…

From the standpoint of sect-maintenance, this shift is fatal… if this fundamental plank of the Evangelical platform rots and snaps, you can find little of similar magnitude to point to as the signal difference between the saved and the unsaved.

I think Price is basically right about hell and the salvation of non-Christians. At Notre Dame, at least, universalism (the doctrine that everyone will be saved) is endorsed by at least a couple Evangelical-identified grad students in the philosophy department. It’s a matter of series discussion (rather than dismissal as an obvious heresy) at the Center for Philosophy of Religion pub nights. And there are people at Notre Dame who try to make room for the salvation of non-believers, without going as far as universalism.

I can’t say I’ve seen so strong a shift on sexual matters, however. What Price is missing about casual sex is that admitting to having it doesn’t entail any attitude change. In high school, I knew a number of Evangelical girls who were having their share of casual sex, but they were sure to feel guilty about it afterward. Then there are the tales of Campus Crusade members wearing shirts saying “I’m not doing it” when they were. The Evangelical community has worked out a not-obviously-unstable approach to sex that’s one part outright hypocrisy and one part resignation to human sinfulness.

This approach may not “work,” but to its practitioners that’s not the point. Michelle Goldberg’s book Kingdom Coming had a great quote on this from “abstinence educator” Pam Stenzel:

AIDS is not the enemy. HPV and a hysterectomy at twenty is not the enemy. An unplanned pregnancy is not the enemy. My child believing that they can shake their fists in the face of a holy God and sin without consequence, and my child spending eternity separated from God, is the enemy. I will not teach my child that they can sin in safety.

Few would put it in such extreme terms, but many Evangelicals have decided that they can accept teen pregnancy, STDs, and high divorce rates, as long as people don’t go around saying that premarital sex is okay. (See also: Bristol Palin’s career as an abstinence spokeswoman.)

With homosexuality, the situation is more complicated. I’ve never met anyone of my generation who was enthusiastic about being anti-gay (except the kids from the Bible college who used to come to Madison once a week to hand out tracts). Still, among the young Evangelicals I’ve met, the text twisting Price alludes to hasn’t caught on. And I don’t buy Price’s claim that this issue is easier than feminism: the Bible may say that women aren’t to speak in Church, but there is obviously no Biblical prooftext requiring them to be nurses rather than doctors, grade school teachers rather than professors, or secretaries rather than MBAs.

The best most Evangelicals can come up with on homosexuality is to say it’s one sin among many. If they’re well-informed and think things through enough, they’ll shun conversion therapy and propose that God wants gays to be celibate. The trouble with this solution is that while most Evangelical talk about sin amounts to “repent and try to sin a bit less in the future,” here Evangelicals are asking certain people to give up on expressing a core part of who they are. It’s no easy sell. No matter how much Evangelicals try to love the sinner, I predict gays will soon become severely under-represented in Evangelical churches–or at the very least, this will happen once everyone figures out being a closet case is bad. Nevertheless, many Evangelicals seem comfortable with the “one sin among many” approach for the time being.

So what’s Evangelicalism’s long-term forecast? In the short term, it looks like it can adapt to the abolition of a clear distinction between the saved and the damned. The fate of Evangelicalism will likely be all about sex. I think it can resist giving in to temptation to open up to straight fornication. But the question of whether to loosen up to gay sex may be the problem it can’t solve. And perhaps once Evangelicals don’t think more secular folks are going to hell, they won’t mind imitating their sexual habits.

On the other hand, perhaps in two hundred years even the biggest cities in the bluest states will have been overrun by the highly-fertile spawn of Evangelical shotgun weddings.

In spite of thinking this, I’ve recently started to wonder about Harris’ dismissal of religious moderates on the Muslim side, partly because of the controversy over the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque,” organized by alleged moderate imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, and also because of encountering criticisms of another alleged moderate Muslaim, Tariq Ramadan.

My doubts here stem from thinking about what makes a “moderate Muslim”–and what makes a “moderate Christian.” In the present-day US, the varieties of Christianity that manage to get any attention at all range from stereotypical fundamentalism (young earth creationist, sexually repressive, and convinced everyone else is going to hell) to uber-liberal Christianity (often atheism in all but name, as in the case of John Shelby Spong). The moderate label doesn’t get used much, though I suppose you could apply it to the sorts of religious academics who try to save as many beliefs of their conservative brethren as possible, while admitting the Bible may not be quite inerrant.

But put things in the context of Christianity’s 2000-year history, and it begins to look like even most of the “fundamentalists” deserve the name “moderates.” Most “conservative” Calvinists are moderate relative to the historical Calvin, insofar as they don’t support burning Unitarians at the stake. True, there are exceptions in the U.S., and the situation in the U.S. is not the global situation even today (see: killing gays in Uganda). But the fact that these strains of Chrsitianity exist today does not make them live options for most believers in the US.

In this environment, it is hard to see that the “moderate” strains of Christianity do much good. What many US Christians need isn’t someone to stop them from becoming Christian Reconstructionists. They just need someone to point out to them that they hardly believe any of the things they think they’re supposed to believe. Someone to tell them not to fear giving up their Christian identity.

With Islam, though, from what I’ve seen “moderate” Muslims tend to correspond to the US’s “conservative” Christians, or at best the more-nearly-liberal Evangelicals. Even Irshad Manji, in her book The Trouble With Islam Today, wasn’t quite willing to give up on Koranic inerrancy. This makes her closer to the Evangelicals who try to show the Bible never condemns homosexuality than to the uber-liberals of US Christianity.

When we talk about Muslim “extremists,” we’re talking about something whose Christian analog ceased to be a force in Europe and North America during the Enlightenment. But Muslim extremism remains a force in Islam’s traditional strongholds. There have been plenty of people in the Muslim world who’ve thought the fatwa against Salman Rushdie was just, or who’ve idolized Osama bin Laden. Muslims in the US tend to be of the “moderate” sort described above, but I understand that the “extremist” variety of Islam is having some success in Europe. (This is probably a symptom of Europe’s overall problems assimilating immigrants.) And importantly, US Muslims are still likely to be in contact with parts of the Muslim world where extremism is a force, creating an avenue for the promotion of Muslim extremism here.

In this context, it doesn’t seem crazy to think that moderate Muslims leaders are doing important work giving US Muslims an alternative to the extremists, and generally helping them assimilate into US society. This could be true even if there’s much to dislike about the so-called moderates. There’s much I dislike about Rick Warren, but I recognize that he’s preferable to Torquemada. Similarly it could be true that Rauf is, in Ilya Somin’s summary the charge against him:

seems to praise much of the ideology of Iran’s repressive theocratic regime, refuses to admit that Hamas is a terrorist group… claims that the US was ‘an accessory’ to the 9/11 attacks, and sometimes draws a kind of moral equivalency between US foreign policy and Al Qaeda

and at the same time true that he’s no bin Laden. The difference is just that we don’t need Rick Warren in order to convince people that the Inquisition was a bad idea, but it might help to have Rauf to convince people Al Qaeda is a bad idea.

Sometimes, a “moderate” Muslim leader will be suggested as a candidate for “Islam’s Martin Luther,” an unfortunate comparison given Luther’s ideas on what we should do to Jews. A more enlightening comparison might be to John Locke. Locke’s “Letter on Toleration” leaves much to be desired. It never made clear whether he thought anyone but Protestants deserved religious freedom, and appeared to endorse the idea that believing the wrong things would damn you–the very dogma which had provided the original need to suppress heresy at all costs. At the same time, the value of Locke’s letter is undeniable.

On the other hand, recognizing that the relatively moderate may do some good is no reason to refrain from criticizing them. The fact that Locke advanced the cause of liberty does not mean that Spinoza and Thomas Paine hurt it by attacking many of the traditional dogmas Locke held dear. So, in spite of what I’ve just said, we probably shouldn’t be afraid to criticize “moderate” Muslims.

Here’s how he starts off:

Instead of relying on the merits of the arguments, which is what critical thinking and evidence-based reasoning is about, it seems that vitriol and venom are on the rise.
…

Let me ask you a question: how many of you here today used to believe in something — used to, past tense — whether it was flying saucers, psychic powers, religion, anything like that? You can raise your hand if you want to. [lots of hands go up] Not everyone is born a skeptic. A lot of you raised your hand. I’d even say most of you, from what I can tell.

Now let me ask you a second question: how many of you no longer believe in those things, and you became a skeptic, because somebody got in your face, screaming, and called you an idiot, brain-damaged, and a retard? [Very few hands go up]

Okay, obviously that kind of behavior is unlikely to be productive. The problem is that, to my knowledge, literal screaming in-your-face name calling sessions are rare. I’ve never seen one take place, even during a game of bait-the-street-preacher.

Things that could be called vitriol and venom, sure. But it’s not clear at all that they’re on the rise. Worse, even though they seem obviously negative, it’s hard to find much reason to think they do much harm.

First of all, skeptical people being dicks has a very long and honorable history. David Hume and Bertrand Russell, two of the greatest free-thinking philosophers who’ve ever lived, were also world-class penners of dickery. Here’s Hume:

Were there a religion (and we may suspect Mahometanism of this inconsistence) which sometimes painted the Deity in the most sublime colours, as the creator of heaven and earth; sometimes degraded him so far to a level with human creatures as to represent him wrestling with a man, walking in the cool of the evening, showing his back parts, and descending from heaven to inform himself of what passes on earth; while at the same time it ascribed to him suitable infirmities, passions, and partialities, of the moral kind: That religion, after it was extinct, would also be cited as an instance of those contradictions, which arise from the gross, vulgar, natural conceptions of mankind, opposed to their continual propensity, towards flattery and exaggeration. Nothing indeed would prove more strongly the divine origin of any religion, than to find (and happily this is the case with Christianity) that it is free from a contradiction, so incident to human nature.

and Russell:

My own view on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race. I cannot, however, deny that it has made some contributions to civilization. It helped in early days to fix the calendar, and it caused Egyptian priests to chronicle eclipses with such care that in time they became able to predict them. These two services I am prepared to acknowledge, but I do not know of any others.

Somehow, skepticism and freethought managed to survive having such dicks for advocates. But then again, Hume and Russell tempered their attacks with irony, and on the whole managed to retain an air of being refined, sophisticated Brits and not at all the sort of people who scream insults into someone’s face.

So maybe Phil wasn’t talking about such sophisticates. Maybe he was talking about the sort of people who compare the beliefs they want to debunk to belief in fairies. Like James Randi. Okay, so I’m not the first one to make this point but I’m going to repeat it, because Randi is such an excellent example.

At his height, Randi had an enormous reputation for being a dick. I once heard one of his targets refer to him as a “hatchet man,” and even Carl Sagan (very politely) called Randi a dick in The Demon Haunted World. But not only did this not prevent him from being extremely effective in his exposes of Uri Geller and Peter Popoff, but Randi’s main contribution arguably was that he was willing to be such a dick.

When Geller was big, there were lots of other magicians who had the expertise to see through Geller, but a lot of them were saying “oh, leave him alone, what he’s doing is silly and harmless.” Part of Randi’s contribution was to get up and say, “no, he’s a fraud and a disgrace to honest magicians.” And to point out that the excuses being made for Geller were similar to the excuses Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had made for belief in fairies. Would Randi have been more effective if he triangulated his way to a position like “I tend to think that Geller is more than a bit silly and might possibly do some harm”?

So when Phil talks about a rise in “vitriol and venom” he has to be talking about someone worse than Randi. At this point he only thing I can think that he might be referring to is the fact that yes, the internet does provide a platform for people who have nothing better to do than call people idiots all day, and for whom anonymity removes all fear of doing just that. In other words, there are people within the atheist internez who act like /b/tards. However, as someone who spends a lot of time on atheist websites, I don’t encounter these people very often. Literally none of them ever build a following. (You don’t have to like the Rational Response Squad, but no, they are not an example of this.)

So much for that. But one other bit of the transcript got me thinking:

I think I can sum up my points like this: first, always ask yourself what your goal is. […] Is this argument necessary? What is your goal? What are you trying to accomplish? Before you talk, before you leave a comment, before you engage a pseudoscientist, before you raise your hand, before you sign that email, ask yourself: is this going to help? Is this going to allow me to achieve my goal? And you also need to ask yourself: will this impede me from achieving my goal? Is this just to make me feel better, or am I trying to change the world?

Again, this sounds commonsensical. But again, when you think about this, it makes very little sense. When has it helped to pause before speaking to ask yourself “will this help to change the world?” Who ever knows what the long range effect of an utterance on the world as a whole will be? Who even knows in retrospect what the long term effects of some particular utterance were? On the other hand, in retrospect it seems an awful lot like we make progress through people speaking their mind without worrying overmuch about the long term effects of their utterance.

So, as long as you’re not risking offending relatives or losing your job, don’t worry too much about the effects of particular instances of speaking your mind. Seriously, you often can’t know which means you’ll go crazy if you do. And it’s the negative reactions that people always shove in your face, which can give you a skewed perspective. I hate to think how history would have turned out if humanity’s great thinkers had taken that kind of shit seriously. But if you make a habit of speaking your mind whenever you’re likely to get away with it, you can go to bed at night knowing that you’re participating in something that will have a good effect, in the long run, probably.

Note: after I figured out what I wanted to say with this post, I found this post suggesting that Phil’s speech was a response to problems on the JREF boards. Aside from the fact that I think my post is more interesting if we ignore that possibility, if that’s what was up with Phil’s speech, it should have been directed towards members of that board, not vaguely aimed at the skeptical community as a whole.

Shouldn’t that be the big story here? Take out Catholics, and you realize that two-thirds of non-Catholic believers belong to groups run by creationists. This shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s followed the U.S. evolution/creation controversy closely: it’s well-known that the Catholic church hasn’t officially opposed evolution, but anyone who’s followed the issue also has plenty of reason to suspect that anti-evolutionism is mainstream among U.S. protestants. Now we have data to confirm that suspicion–and the confirmation is even stronger than it appears at first, given that megachurches weren’t counted in the data.

In fact, this data makes the Clergy Letters Project and similar efforts to convince people evolution and religion are compatible look pretty ridiculous. The main reason the Clergy Letters Project looks like a good idea to most people is that a lot of people still think of “churches” in terms of the liberal denominations that used to have a rationale for calling themselves “mainline.” This data, though, brings into focus just how much trouble these denominations are having.

For these sorts of reasons, intelligent discussion of tone is always in order. The problem is likely to be that a lot of discussion of tone is just not very intelligent – how many reviews of The God Delusion have you read that show a tin ear for Dawkins’ control of tone? Many reviews don’t show any sensitivity at all for the varied tones: the humour; the quiet thoughtfulness and introspection; or the comical intoxication with language itself in Dawkins’ famous denunciation of the Old Testament deity. Generally speaking, the reviewers just don’t “get” it. But the cure for that isn’t less discussion of Dawkins’ tone; it’s more intelligent discussion of Dawkins’ tone. A hackneyed adjective such as “strident” doesn’t cut the mustard.

To say that intelligent discussion of tone is always in order is not to accept that the tone of political, scientific, or philosophical discussion should always be calm and respectful. There’s plenty of room for passion, mockery, and outright denunciation. Not all the time, perhaps, but in their place. Some things deserve to be denounced or mocked, and sometimes it’s necessary to use these elements of language to bring home the essential implausibility or even absurdity of a position. Someone who can adjust forever to logical arguments, in the process moving to a wildly implausible but internally consistent position – may well be shaken into seeing how the whole thing looks from the outside.

Complaints about tone can be misguided, as in this link, and they sometimes seem like attempts to evade other matters to do with the cogency of arguments or the correctness (or plausibility) of conclusions. But again, discussions of tone should not written off as automatically illegitimate or intellectually bogus. Rather, the point is to insist that discussions of tone be intelligent and that judgments about tone be relevant to matters at hand.

A lot of this is right. But it misses something important: the matters of “tone” that people tend to care most about are inseparable from issues of content. You can’t always separate what you say from how to say it. For example, I think that many self-styled experts on science and religion are really propagandists who regularly say things that can only be interpreted as outright lies or, at best expressions of inexcusable ignorance. I think that many religious teachings are as morally repugnant as those of Nazism, and these doctrines have very harmful effects on real-world human behavior. I think that much of what is said on religion is just an attempt to stop necessary discussions from happening in public.

These three sentences express content, thoughts I’ve had for a long time, not tones I choose to take on this particular occasion. They’re hard to read as anything but denunciations, though, and Blackford himself lists “denunciation” as a kind of tone. Simply by stating them in simple language, I’ve set myself up to be read as taking a certain tone, and there is very little I could do to change the perceived tone of those statements without changing the content.

A good writer can use euphemism, understatement, and a variety of other devices imply a conclusion without openly stating the impolite truth. I recognize that. It matters. As I pointed out in a previous post on dealing with liars, accusing someone of “egregiously misquoting” rather than “lying” in your book review might get them to link to your review and say what a nice review it was. However, whenever you decide to merely imply something out of politeness, you’ve changed the literal content of your message, so that’s not an example of separating form and tone. Describing the decision to state rather than imply as one of tone obscures the real decisions writers often face.

Better examples of tone of where tone in some purer form matters aren’t hard to find, for example, determining whether or not a statement was a joke, and what the point of the joke was, though that typically isn’t relevant to the science and religion discussions that breed the discussions of tone Blackford is talking about. There’s also the decision to throw in the extra “choice word” or two. It would be interesting to see an honest (i.e. no claiming “PZ called all believers fuckwits”) discussion of when a choice word or two makes sense. That’s more relevant here, but still doesn’t seem to be the main thing people are talking about when they talk about tone. So I’d be curious to hear from readers, what else they think worries of tone, as separated from content, might be about.

Look at the details and you’ll also notice that a Christian company is behind the survey. That explains why the statistics are being spun the way they are: the people behind the survey want to alert their fellow Christians to the fact that, horror of horrors, not everyone in America is a fundamentalist Christian, and hope that will get them agitated and ready to take some kind of action (though I wonder if the survey takers know what their comrades are supposed to do).

In fact, it’s been true for awhile that lots of people who are Christians are “mushy Christians” (as the pollsters say), that lots don’t bother going to church on a regular basis, that most people don’t make it to church every week even if they have a vague commitment to trying to do so, and that only one-third to one-half of the population will agree to the more conservative Christian doctrines.

This is a situation that naturally makes a lot of people unhappy: if you think all non-Christians are going to Hell, it should worry you if half the country is somehow unaware of this fact. If you don’t believe in Hell, it should worry you if even a third of the country thinks you deserve to go there for not sharing their beliefs. But that doesn’t make statistics like these news.

One statistic is new to me, though: the number of young people who identify as atheist (6%) or agnostic (8%). Previous surveys I’ve seen show a fair number of people (10-20%) with no religious affiliation, lots of people who say they don’t believe in God or aren’t sure whether he exists, but only a very few (1-2%) who are willing to call themselves atheists or agnostics. The higher numbers of self-identified atheists and agnostics indicates that the taboo has come off these words. That genuinely is encouraging.

The psychology today blogger describes this as a “silly reason,” and obviously he means to make it sound embarrassing. But it makes the most sense if you understand it in a less crude way. I grew up in a liberal Protestant family that took for granted that I would go into some career requiring specialized post-high school training, and get married no earlier than my mid-twenties (and even that would be young). Once I figured out that, contrary to what our sex-phobic “health” classes would have had us believe, there were lots and lots of people in the world having premarital sex without anything bad happening to them, the idea of delaying sex until marriage ended up seeming pretty silly to me. Nowadays, as a grad student, I’m used to hanging out with people who will agree with me when I say I have trouble relating to old friends who got married right out of high school.

But let me tell you about one of those friends. My friend was pretty smart, a couple teachers really liked him, but his parents didn’t encourage him to go on to college and eventually he told me that he just didn’t consider himself the college-attending type. Though I didn’t know her as well, my impression was that the situation with his older sister was the same: teachers liked her, but she didn’t have much motivation to go to college. My friend got married to his high school girlfriend a couple years after graduation. Though I never thought of it this way before reading the psychology today post, when you’re in that kind of sub-culture, the idea of delaying sex until marriage (or at least engagement) isn’t going to seem so obviously absurd.

What’s unclear here is why religion should be linked to sexual attitudes. The link does seem to be there, but why is it there? This issue becomes more puzzling when you notice that not all religions seem to endorse the same sexual ethic. The earliest books of the Bible seem to have been written for polygamous, slave-holding aristocrats, whole St. Paul’s letters seem to have been written for poor men who had no chance at a Solomon-like harem and who naturally resented men that had them.

I’m sure social scientists have interesting theories on the link between religion and sexual mores, but up til now I haven’t invested much effort in understanding them. So if you’ve read a good book (or even a good article) on the subject, do drop a comment with a mention of it.

Actual issue at question was the attempt by Tennessee father to ban a biology textbook with the following statement:

In the 1970s and 1980s, antievolutionists in Arkansas, Tennessee and Louisiana passed identical bills calling for ‘equal time’ for teaching evolution and creationism, the biblical myth that the universe was created by the Judeo-Christian god in six days. But a court ruled that the ‘equal-time’ bill was unconstitutional on the grounds that it violated the separation of church and state.

The father, you see, didn’t like creationism being called a myth. But PZ’s accusation of witless wanking and pablum peddling wasn’t directed at the father, it was directed at Center for Inquiry blogger Michael De Dora basically agreeing with the father. A month ago I mounted a partial defense of De Dora, suggesting he might just be a bad writer and not motivated by anything pernicious. In this case, though, the shock is hard to convey. CFI is one of the most important organizations in the world for defending secularism and debunking pseudoscience. To find a CFI blogger saying biology texts shouldn’t say anything negative about pseudoscience feels like stepping into a Star Trek-style mirror universe.

De Dora’s argument is that because creationism is a religious idea, science can’t disprove it. He seems to be taking his cues from Pigliucci, whose ideas about this I’ve criticized here, but he takes Pigliucci’s merely misguided nitpicking and draws the seriously absurd conclusion that we can’t say creationism is wrong in science class. Scientists can’t do that unless they “put on the philosopher’s cap,” which you’re not supposed to do in a biology classroom. The silliness of De Dora’s position becomes acute in this paragraph:

Some have argued that teaching the Earth is 4.5 billion years old is the same as denying the Earth is 6,000 years old. But one clearly imparts scientific knowledge; the other clearly denies a religious idea. One is constitutional; the other is not. Scientific knowledge makes many ideas seem crazy, but there is no reason for a high school biology teacher to actually go into denying all of them, specifically the religious ones.

Logically, though, the Earth’s being 4.5 billion years old entails its not being 6,000 years old. This means that by “philosopher’s cap,” what De Dora means is basic logic. Oh, there’s a small philosophical issue there insofar as a few oddballs in the history of philosophy have denied that the logical law of non-contradiction holds, but science would be crippled if scientists had to constantly kowtow to philosophical worries about logic. Is there a single mathematically informed paper that’s ever been written that could still have worked if we took exotic skepticism about logic (and related mathematical principles like “4.5 billion is not 6,000″) seriously?

Also, there’s nothing inherently religious about the idea that the Earth is 6,000 years old. The only sense it in which it is a religious idea and the idea that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old is not is this: The latter is thoroughly supported by all our scientific evidence, while all our scientific evidence points us towards rejecting the latter and as a matter of sociological fact hardly anyone believes the former except because they are in the grip of religious dogma.

The practical absurdity is that you can’t make the evolution-creation issue go away simply by not talking about it. Every high school teacher whose curriculum comes anywhere near a controversial issue knows that they run the risk of getting angry phone calls from parents even if they do their best to avoid the controversy. Thus, in middle school and high school, I never had a teacher who could talk about evolution without a little disclaimer along the lines of “we’re not saying anything’s wrong with creationism, we just want you to understand evolution.” (This problem wasn’t restricted to science class–even our English class’s unit on Greek mythology came with a disclaimer.)

The question is not whether to let creationism be an issue in biology classrooms, but how to address it. I actually think creationism is a wonderful teaching opportunity, given that the creationist literature is so full of false scientific claims and correcting those falsehoods is an excellent way to explain current evolutionary theory and the evidence for it. A great deal of what I know about evolution I owe to popular-level debunkings of the claims of the antievolution movement. What’s De Dora’s objection to that approach to teaching evolution? That instead we should vaguely tell students about the falsehoods “some people” have promoted in an attempt to defend unspecified “non-scientific ideas”?

I won’t say De Dora’s view, if taken seriously, would damage science education in the U.S., because U.S. science education is already in such bad shape. Taking De Dora seriously certainly would impair efforts to improve science education, though, and that’s why I worry about it much more than Pigliucci’s nitpicking.

As for Pigliucci: scroll to his second to last paragraph, and you’ll see him apparently claiming that people who disagree with his philosophical claim are guilty of taking a “cavalier attitude toward the substance, rationality and coherence of one’s arguments.” As fun as it would be to complain about the hypocrisy of throwing insults like this, the real issue is why anyone would make such absurd statements. Why are people who are basically on the same side as Dawkins, Myers, et al. so eager to write firey denunciations of them based on minor disagreements?

I’m not saying the issues shouldn’t be aired, I find them fascinating (much as I find the discussion over Sam Harris’ TED talk, which I largely disagreed with, fascinating). But why try to turn these disagreements into proof that the New (read: Bad) Atheists are screwing everything up? This is very disappointing to see coming from Pigliucci given that, on the one hand, he’s done real good in the fight against creationism, but on the other it’s hard to come up with an interpretation of his behavior here that makes him come out looking good.

EDIT: After a bit of reflection, what bothers me about Massimo’s post is the level of eagerness to trash the people who happen to be some of the most currently successful communicators on science and religion issues. That eagerness is weird and wrong. I could speculate on the causes, but the main thing to notice is how widespread it is. Also, those who are interested can read PZ’s responses to De Dora and Pigliucci here and here.

Of everything that’s been said about this, the best is Andrew Sullivan: “It’s over now.”

Yeah. It’s over for the Catholic Church now. My bet is that a few decades from now this will be remembered as the point where the Church took a blow it would never recover from. The Catholic Church will go on existing, and will no doubt have millions of members for the remotely foreseeable future, but it’s so large that that would be true even if 95% of Catholics left the church tomorrow.

And they will leave. A Slog blogger has written about how his grandma left the church in the 90s over the scandals that happened then. But this is 100 times worse than the 90s. I fully expect membership statistics for Catholicism to drop by hundreds of millions in the next few decades, as what’s happened sinks in, as people connect the dots, and as more and more people decide “okay, it’s past the point where my family has any business being upset if I stop going to mass.”

Partly because it’s the Pope. But partly because Catholic leaders, because they’re freaked out and started saying things to defend themselves that showed how utterly morally corrupt they are. Instead of adopting a sane damage control strategy, something like “We don’t agree with everything that’s been said about the Church in this controversy, but we realized we’ve handled this poorly and are taking steps to make sure those mistakes are never repeated,” they’ve accused everyone involved in airing this story of being evil agents of the atheist-homosexual agenda engaging in petty gossip equivalent to what the Nazis did to the Jews (how petty gossip can be the same as mass murder I’ll never know). Luke posted Jon Stewart’s take, but Stewart is off his game here. The video is only worth watching to see that the rhetoric of Catholic leaders is too absurd to make jokes about. And Stewart didn’t even use the quote from the Spanish bishop warning that 13 year olds will “provoke you.”

Even the less absurd defenses of the Church make no sense to anyone who thinks about them. As one of Sullivan’s readers pointed out, other churches can get rid of bad priests in a day if necessary. There’s no excuse for the Catholic Church’s inability to do the same.

Again, this is hardly the only black mark on the Church’s reputation. But for a long time, the Church has had people convinced that everything bad it had ever done was either in the past (crusades, inquisition, that orgy involving the chestnuts) or perfectly normal things for a religious organization to do which would be bigoted to object to (lying about condoms and AIDS). This, though, is something ongoing that ordinary people can understand and can’t be defended as a normal part of religion.

A final embarrassment could come if a country in Europe decides it’s willing to arrest the Pope. Dawkins and Hitchens are trying to make that happen in Britain. If a British court won’t do it, maybe a German one will. I doubt the Pope would actually be arrested, but he might find himself with a Kissinger-like inability to travel to certain countries for fear of arrest, and if that happened, people would be occasionally reminded of it so long as the Pope is alive.

The one thing I may be wrong about is how this will play outside North America and Europe. The Church is already floundering there anyway, it’s strength is in the developing world. I would be surprised if this scandal had no impact there, however. Anyone who knows more about that angle than I do, I’d love to hear from you in the comments.

A criticism of evolutionary psychology that literally centers on insulting the opposition’s mating fitness and social status?

Now that’s irony.

–A comment on BoingBoing

Also: the people in the comments who say feminism isn’t monolithic are absolutely right. Some definitions make you as “they have a word for that?” while in other contexts feminism seems to be the view that that girl Jenny is, like, such. a. total. slut.