“he Orlando Sentinel has an article on Christian homeschooling that had me banging my forehead on my desk. It’s a good article, but we’ve been saying this for decades: Abeka, Bob Jones University (BJU), and Accelerated Christian Education are fucking awful curricula. They are promoting Christian ignorance and lying to the kids, and this crap is getting subsidized by the state of Florida.

The social studies books downplay the horrors of slavery and the mistreatment of Native Americans, they said. One book, in its brief section on the civil rights movement, said that “most black and white southerners had long lived together in harmony” and that “power-hungry individuals stirred up the people.”

The books are rife with religious and political opinions on topics such as abortion, gay rights and the Endangered Species Act, which one labels a “radical social agenda.” They disparage religions other than Protestant Christianity and cultures other than those descended from white Europeans. Experts said that was particularly worrisome given that about 60 percent of scholarship students are black or Hispanic.

This is routine. What’s frustrating is that educators and scientists have been pointing out the deficiencies and dishonesty of these companies for years, and it feels like every year someone somewhere will gasp in dismay at the crap being taught, and wonder why no one has done anything about it. This is a different year, same old bullshit, and the state government just keeps on rubber stamping it through.

The Sentinel surveyed the 151 private schools newly approved by the education department to take scholarships for the 2017-18 school year. Seventy-five of the schools provided information about their curriculum either on their websites or when contacted by phone, and 30 of those, or about 40 percent, reported Abeka, BJU or ACE was a part of their academic offerings.

Only half were willing to disclose what they’re teaching? Makes you wonder what the silent, secretive half are doing.

Also, anybody qualifies as a teacher at these schools.

“Honestly, with our curriculum … a certified teacher is not required,” Natasha Griffin, district superintendent of Esther’s School, which has seven campuses in Florida, told the Orlando Sentinel last year.

At Esther’s School in Kissimmee, 11 of 18 teachers lacked college degrees last year, according to a document Griffin sent to the education department. For two of them, 11th grade was their highest educational level. Almost all of the school’s nearly 60 students are on state scholarships this year.

Would like to say that a responsible government would strip these schools of any subsidies and declare that they are no longer accredited in any way. But they won’t.There’s be another article next year exposing the miserable teaching standards at Christian home schools. And there will be another the year after that. And the year after that. I ought to save them up and use them as kindling for my Viking funeral.

Don’t watch the video at the link unless you really like seeing dullards dully defending their bad curricula.”

If education is not liberating the individual in all ways that matter, if education is not creating social capacity to transcend the errors of previous generations, if education is not systematically weeding out obviously false beliefs (like flat-earthism or young earth creationism), and if education is not playing a large role in creating thinking, thriving and fully engaged people capable of doing good in the world, then we have a problem.

If we’re not doing everything we can to provide nurturing and richly supportive systems for children in the world in order to ensure that they’re the best versions of themselves they can be, what are we doing and who do we think we are?

German Pz. V “Panther” medium tank near Vitebsk, Soviet Union, June 21, 1944. [Bundesarchiv, Bild 101I-694-0303-20A / Meyer; Wiltberger / CC-BY-SA 3.0] https://www.instagram.com/p/BzQp52tJ8pi/?igshid=1klu00idstq9v

I want to start a blog that makes epidemiology accessible to the general public. Do you have any recommendations on how to achieve the correct tone (interesting, friendly, and understandable to most people), and do you know of any blogs that take scientific information in whatever field and make it easy to understand? Thank you!

Thank you for the question! I’ve written on the topic here before, and @grison-in-labs did a kind and different take in this post addition.

I would not take my tone as a model for a good tone to use.  I believe you may be asking because you thought my writing on dogs or gardening was interesting. For every 100 people who really like that style of writing, and find it informative or amusing, there is one person who loathes it and rejects it - and the content with it. 

You can’t afford those stakes when you’re writing about something important.

I don’t really read science blogs on purpose, but much of my social circle is devoted to Pharyngula. PZ Meyers has a good healthy beard, and declaims intelligently upon whatever strikes his fancy - evolutionary biology, social justice, vintage ads - in an accessible style.

PZ Meyers aka Pharyngula from Free Thought Blogs has an encounter with some terfs.

Where I grew up, people had this way of spitting the word “Christian,” wielding it like a spear. That’s not Christian. We’re Christian. Krischin. Krisschin. They didn’t mean “Christian,” they meant Like Me, for better or worse. Only Like Me is neutral, requires context, can even be bad if you happen yourself to be imperfect. That’s not how they meant it of course.

Krisschin meant deserving of respect. Krisschin meant reasonable, normal, relatable. They’re Krisschin meant they’re (possibly) deserving of human decency, and by elimination, everything outside that category you could deal with how you liked. The bare text of the Bible, was, of course, acknowledged, but the implicit undercurrent that ran through the word Krisschin was that these are the things that apply between ourselves. Love your neighbor (he’s Krisschin). Treat others (other Krisschins) how you want to be treated.  Blessed are the meek (if they’re Krisschen), maybe, if you’re lucky.

 I’m appealing to a personal narrative here to give weight to this perspective, but by itself it’s not remarkable. I shouldn’t find it insidious or even particularly interesting to note that assholes are everywhere, and religion is not anti-asshole insurance. Assholery is a function of the human condition, not of religion, and it’s not an indictment of a faith to say some people who profess that faith are dicks, either on doctrinal or organizational grounds. That has, in fact, been my relationship to Christianity for most of the time since letting my Catholicism quietly extinguish itself: there’s this book, with some nice bits and some weird bits, which inspired a religion, which has mostly nice people and a few jerks, like all groups of people everywhere. Surely all people are like that; there is no reason Christianity should be different.

Except. Except then I started singing Sacred Harp music.

Look, you don’t have to believe in God to sing Sacred Harp. You sure as shit don’t have to believe in Jesus. There are Jewish Sacred Harp singers--there’s a community of singers in Israel, even--there are nonreligious Sacred Harp singers, and yeah, there are Christian sacred harp singers of every stripe. You do have to not actively despise religion, which is a high bar for some people to clear (my SO for instance), so I think there are few or no Sacred Harp singers who don’t respect religion. But if you’re the sort of person (as pretty much everybody who sings this stuff is) whose first exposure to hearing Sacred Harp music was “...” “...” “...oh my god that’s amazing,” followed by “I want to do that!” then it doesn’t seem to much matter about your personal relationship to religion.

I have passed through my own various phases of irreligion in life; I started out believing God existed because my parents and teachers told me God existed, and much like F=ma and the conservation of volume, I had no reason to doubt them. I read PZ Meyers’ blog religiously (ha ho) for a while, and went through a phase where I thought on balance religion was probably a net negative for humanity, even if I was never a bitter anti-theist. I have identified as atheist and as agnostic, and I still don’t literally believe in the existence of God, but that feels much less important to me now than it did when I was nineteen.

Sacred Harp did two things for me. One, it gave me an emotional connection to the things it talked about. Catholicism, when you are ten, is a lot of people talking at you about what you should believe: your religion teacher, the priest, etc. It can feel very academic and abstract, and honestly, I never felt that transubstantiation or the wording of the Nicene Creed had a very strong effect on my life (btw, the current translation is shit: “all things seen and unseen” sounds way better than “visible and invisible,” though I know why they changed it. They’re wrong). When you are twenty-seven, and you sing in a chorus words by Isaac Watts or Charles Wesley that talk about grief and terror and hope for salvation better than anyone you have ever heard in your life, that can, uh, have an effect on a person. So yeah, it changed how I related to the topic. Not just the general idea of a benevolent God, but the specific idea that no matter how shitty or ugly or awful you feel in the moment, or even for your entire life, you can hope to be redeemed.

The second thing it did was make me angry at everyone who had ever presumed to teach me about religion in my entire life. More than that: it made me angry at the Krisschins, the ones I grew up around, and the ones I have encountered since. There is something to Christianity, something I never encountered in hours and hours of Mass, or in any religion class, or in any hand-wavy non-answer from the Catholic catechism about whether the Jews are going to hell, but which I do find in 285t, and 30b, and 168. It’s hard to put into words. Something like this: you are suffering now. It’s not your imagination; it’s real, and it’s because the world itself is fucked up and has been from the beginning, but it will be okay. Not now, not soon, and not maybe for a long time to come. But it will be, and when it is, all of this will be worth it, I promise. Only, because it’s music, and not just words, and because it’s music better than all of the shitty, anodyne hymns that passed for church music in Catholicism put together,it actually has weight to it. Even if you don’t believe it, you know Watts and Billings and all the rest did, with every fiber of their being, and that counts for something.

So while intellectually I may think that Christianity is a two thousand year old diverse intellectual movement with murky origins sometime in the first few decades CE with as many disparate interpretations as there are distinct denominations (and there are many, even among pre-Reformation churches and heresies), and therefore despite competing claims to legitimacy no single authority to say what is or isn’t definitely Christian. On the other hand, on a gut level, it feels like someone ripped back a curtain and showed me a fiery luminous jewel, whose light is an abject love for everyone alive. And I look at this jewel at the one hand, and I compare it to the ordinary messiness of the human condition of which the Krisschins are only one not-particularly-terrible example, and I am so. Fucking. Angry.

Part of the problem, perhaps, is that Christianity was not meant to rule. It was, it can be agreed, an initially small offshoot of an already minority religion, that only latterly became the faith of an empire, whose first bishops led their churches from basements and private homes, not from thrones which they sat on in glittering robes. No movement can endure the negative attentions of authority if it fails to mention the virtue it places on humility and respect; and no king can rule if he says to peasant whose throat he’s stepping on that he is, in the final accounting, just as wretched. I don’t know whether that shining jewel was the totality of what James preached in Jerusalem before Paul came along, and I don’t know for certain that the Pope and the Ecumenical Patriarch have no knowledge of it as they sit on their thrones. But if there is anything in religion you want to point to as self-evidently good, as a tangible and universalizable righteousness without arrogance or pretense, that is it. No utopian idealist, no flag-waving revolutionary, no prince however wise and no philanthropist however generous has ever promoted a cause more worthy to be cherished, more challenging to or more fulfilling of human nature, and its only competition in that respects tends to a diluted version of it (or the same light from a different direction).

I did not know when you said “Christian” that by it you could mean this jewel; no one ever showed it to me before. Having seen it, I don’t know how you could mean anything else. I don’t know what else, in comparison, could really be important, and spitting the word Christian until it becomes a meaningless phonetic hiss to cut apart the body of the human race, becoming obsessed with the doctrines and the failures that form a kind of klipah that obscures and is utterly opposed to that essential truth, which overthrows all the others, can be considered nothing but human failure.

Except it’s worse than that, if you actually believe. If you actually believe Jesus Christ was God, then you believe your God, ancient beyond time, wise beyond comprehension, good beyond anything any human being could ever aspire to, took the form of a human being and suffered and died for no reason other than love. Failure to endure the brightness of that jewel--turning aside for a moment, or for a day, or for a lifetime--might be ascribed to mere human weakness; but to valorize your failure as orthodoxy, as what your God wanted when he died choking on a hill outside Jerusalem two thousand years ago, to despise or shun or judge or sneer at your fellow human beings and to call that Christianity, is the ugliest blasphemy I can imagine. Your God died because he loved everyone alive without reservation, and how dare you spit on him like that.

I’m a big believer in calling yourself what you aspire to be. A rationalist is someone who aspires to be more rational; an artist is someone who aspires  to make beautiful art; the best we can hope for, if we want to be a good person, is to aspire to do as much good as we can. If you call yourself a Christian, and you do not at least aspire toward that kind of abject love, whatever my intellectual knowledge about the messiness of real-world religious movements and the scotsman fallacy say, in my heart of hearts I will believe you to be a hypocrite and a liar.

I will feel more genuine respect for any random selfish asshole who thinks they got theirs, so fuck everybody else, than I will for someone who uses a word that should mean “aspiring toward abject love stronger than you can imagine” to mean “condescends toward people who are different from me,” “silently judges people a bunch of Italians in funny hats told me are going to hell,” or “clutches my pearls every time someone with skin darker than Pantone 2309 comes within fifteen feet.” And I have no respect for doctrines, which, claiming that love as their wellspring and their heart, as the example of all that they aspire to, betray it with a laundry list of bullshit they have furiously rationalized to themselves and their followers.

Something’s shifted in me, has been shifting for a while; I have felt the urge, driven by Sacred Harp, more and more to find some way in my life to give expression to religious modes and thoughts, emotionally, personally, the space for such things is inside a Catholic church, but there’s too much there that feels like a lie, and not a comforting one, an ugly, crass lie where we have taken our worst failures and renamed them holiness. Protestantism has no particular connection for me, emotionally or intellectually, even the liberal denominations that people like to make fun of as not believing in anything (say what you will, at least they’re not hypocrites). So I guess for now I will continue to what I have been doing semi-regularly for the past year, and once a week I’ll go out on Thursday nights, and I’ll sing.

Tagged by @lesbe-homodachi (I know I’m late don’t judge pz)

Rules: tag nine people you want to get to know better

-relationship status: single (obv knowing me)

-favorite color: purple AND baby pink

-lipstick or chapstick: chapstick

-last song i listened to:  Secondcity - I Wanna Feel

-last movie I watched: Passengers

-top 3 tv shows: (since I can’t pick just 3) Sailor Moon, Kamisama Kiss, Noragami, Westworld, GoT, TVD, The 100, Reign, The Flash, OUAT, Gilmore girls, Vikings, Younger, Stranger things, The Shannara Chronicles.....

-top 3 characters: Daenerys Targaryen, Bellamy, Tomoe...

-top 3 4 ships: FEYSAND, Bellarke, Marecal, Daenerys Targaryen x The Iron Throne

-books I’m currently reading: *hysteric laugh* Fifty Shades Freed (don’t judge) and trying to read The Lunar Chronicles:Cinder by Marissa Meyer

Tag tag tag tag: @red-lipstick-curly-hair @taratjah @phantomrin @meabhd @feyre-archerons-scrapbook @annjonesbooks @courtofdaydreams @courtoffansandmates

I'm wondering how to interpret PZ Meyer's statement. Is he living in a progressive news bubble and never saw the numerous examples of professors being intimidated or forced out? Or is he gaslighting?

— David Marshall (@DMarshall113) April 9, 2019

via health - Google Newshttp://news.google.co.in/news?gl=in&pz=1&cf=all&ned=in&hl=en&q=health&output=rss

, she said. I told my husband, I said, ‘Ed, we have to be a little more flexible, or we’re going to run out of movies!’

“I know your pain, Mrs. O’Connell. I can no longer enjoy Rob Schneider movies, myself. But look on the bright side: we can still hate Susan Sarandon together!

We also have the tiresome Jonathan Haidt, professional apologist for conservatives, who is very concerned about how we “react” to the actions of right-wing craptastic nincompoops.

We are in a trust spiral, said Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University. My fear is that we have reached escape velocity where the actions of each side can produce such strong reactions on the other that things will continue to escalate.

The whole article has this tone, that gosh, it’s awful how people are horrified at what the current administration is doing, and we should all just stop being upset and be nice to the Mrs. O’Connell’s of America. Conservatives are wrecking the educational system, they plan to demolish the EPA, they’ve made a goddamn racist the Attorney General, but those rude liberals are making people uncomfortable at Meryl Streep movies. The New York Times, and lots of media outlets, love these stupid little stories that let them be all charitable towards cranky old racist people who elected a cranky old incompetent racist, while at the same time chastising those horrible liberals and practicing a little veiled extortion. You better tell Mrs. O’Connell how sweet she is, or else!

Protests and righteous indignation on social media and in Hollywood may seem to liberals to be about policy and persuasion. But moderate conservatives say they are having the opposite effect, chipping away at their middle ground and pushing them closer to Mr. Trump.

Oh, fuck that noise. If ‘moderate’ conservatives think they have to vote for a bumbling buffoon who is taking a wrecking ball to our country because a hippie called them a mean name, then they weren’t so moderate to begin with, and they are making bad decisions on invalid grounds. I will not have sympathy for that, and it doesn’t matter how sternly Jonathan Haidt wags his finger at me.

These pieces are annoyingly common: we need to understand these awful people. We need to empathize with them, or they’ll keep doing the same stupid things. Unfortunately for these myths, the strategy doesn’t work. The people in the NYT story are unrepentant, would do it again, and all they’ve got is so-called moderates threatening to do it some more if they don’t get their way! I don’t believe it. This is what the regressives always do: “give me a cookie and maybe I’ll stop doing this.” Then, a minute later, “Ha ha, suckers!”

As for understanding, here’s what these stories always miss: yes, we already understand these people. We understand them all too well. Why are you whining at us? We’re not interested in trying to understand them even more, but in getting them to stop wrecking everything. That’s all.

Here’s a case in point: a very long, very thorough explainer about 4chan, lulz, Pepe the frog, anonymous, gamergate, and the rise of Trump, etc., etc., etc. We know it all already. There’s this subculture of young adults who are resentful of their circumstances (I can even sympathize with some of that resentment — they can have valid reasons for their unhappiness with those circumstances). Some may be single and living in their parent’s basement, for instance, and I know it’s tough getting a job, getting a job with prospects for advancement, finding a partner, finding a partner who actually respects you as a person, and so forth — but that does not justify erupting into ranting anti-feminism, just as the unemployment rate does not explain lashing out and electing a billionaire (reputedly) who isn’t going to do a thing to help those circumstances…but might cause others to suffer, too. We’re told over and over again about how miserable these shitlords are, and I understand, but I’m done with understanding. I want to know what to do next.

So that extremely thorough article ends with this:

However, as we have seen, the right’s anti-feminist message is one that only provides a momentary sense of relief (“you are acting powerful by retreating into video games and the internet!”) but like scratching a mosquito bite, it ultimately causes more dissatisfaction. That is to say, they only solution they can offer is, “keep retreating!” Likewise, Trump and the mocking cruel anguish he represents is not a genuine solution to the electorate’s powerlessness, but rather, simply the one closest at hand.

An adult does not freeze in mute horror when a child throws a tantrum. Nor do we generally regard such emotional outbursts as meaningless. Likewise, the left should not be paralyzed with horror by the deplorables, but rather view them of as a symptom of a larger problem, one which only the left can truly solve.

Fine. They’re spoiled children. My wife and I are familiar with kids: we raised three. And yes, when they were very young, they would occasionally have tantrums, and we would patiently (or impatiently) reprove them, and remove them from the circumstances that triggered the problem, and we gave them time and opportunity to learn and grow up, and they got better, much better, and became responsible, thoughtful, intelligent adults. Parents are familiar with these behaviors, and responsible parents can deal, and lead children to more mature responses.

The 4channers are in their 20s and 30s. Mr Medford, the guy who complains about being ‘pushed’ to vote for Trump, is a 46-year-old business owner. Mrs McConnell is 72. Or look at PewDiePie, the 27-year-old who gets paid $15 million a year to shriek on YouTube for the gratification of alt-right wanna-bes. What are we supposed to do? Give them a time-out? Tell them no, they don’t get to buy that cheap plastic toy at the supermarket check-out stand? Be patient and wait for them to grow out of this phase?

The answer so far seems to be that we’re supposed to reassure them that the mean liberals will be clucked at if we call them out, they’ll get a fawning interview with Bill Maher, and the NYT will run a reassuring feature on their sad plight. Even after they put a blundering, bush-league, racist, sexist in the most powerful position in the country.

Yeah, there’s a larger problem. The responsible Left is not going to solve it by continuing to coddle and reward stupidity, even if it is perpetrated by privileged 72 year olds having a tantrum and demanding special treatment.”

-----------------------

This essay by PZ Meyers seems spot on to me.  

Surely more dialogue and face-to-face open listening would help overcome some of the political division in this country.

But we’re lying to ourselves if this is all we do.  In my view we have to recognize that human experience allows to make an increasing number of conclusive judgments about what works and what doesn’t politically and economically.  For instance, deregulating pollution doesn’t end pollution, it makes it worse.  Cutting money for education doesn’t improve education or the financial situation for college students, it worsens the problem.  Outlawing abortion doesn’t end abortion, it only jeopardizes the lives of women.  Teaching evolution the schools doesn’t lead to the collapse of morality.  Refusing to teach sexuality education doesn’t reduce teen pregnancy and STDs.  And on and on.

I think it’s now possible to make the case that, say, 95% of conservative policies are based not on empirical evidence showing improvements in human well-being and other ameliorating outcomes, but on debunked ideological dogmas.  Conservatives from the the populist mass to elites in elected office largely exist mentally in a fictionalized and falsified universe.

Conservatism in most of its manifestations, conservatism as mentality, disposition, as systems of belief and value--these are themselves social problems, problems of consciousness to be solved, problems of education and procedures of truth.

It goes without saying we can’t look to people like Haidt to adequately problematize and theorize the problem of conservatism.  For this we need more serious scholars and thinkers on the left, as well as new approaches. 

Seth Andrews Gaslights His Critics. With PZ Meyers & Kevin Logan

Oh shit:

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/nosacredcows/2017/10/neil-degrasse-tyson-accused-of-rape/

Pz Meyer’s was dickish about the case:

https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2016/01/27/disgraceful-exploitation/

Although he might have a point about the University of texas part.

I am still gonna keep an eye on this

I was going to point and laugh at Donald Trump for hanging a fake Time magazine cover in his golf clubs, but then I realized — we all fake this stuff to inflate our egos. Right? Perfectly normal. Entirely natural. I mean, I’ve got photos of my 3 kids hanging on my wall at home. Two of them are totally fake (I won’t reveal which). I’ve been inflating the number of children I have just to make myself seem more virile. But then, you all claim to have more kids than you really do, I’m sure. It’s ordinary human behavior. I’m supposedly able to drive, but — true confession — I actually don’t have a driver’s license... My wife has a photo of Jennifer Aniston taped to her credit card, it fools all the police who’ve stopped her for her autograph... Having pathologically engorged narcissistic tendencies is simply part of the human condition, as I’m sure you all agree. It’s normal. You can’t condemn Trump for lying, you know, or being an egomaniacal buffoon, especially since Obama faked being president for a whole eight years, and nobody complained about that.

PZ Meyers, “That’s some ego the guy has,” Pharyngula. Free Thought Blogs

Join the famous PZ Meyers with local scientist Hannah LoRene Smith, as they present on science denialism and climate change. Doors open at 6 p.m., at the Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre.