The 2007 Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded jointly to Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Gore, who actually would have won the 2000 US presidential election were it not for his conceding prematurely to Dubaya after the “spoiled ballots” fiasco in Jed Bush’s home state, earlier won an Academy Award for his film An Inconvenient Truth.

Needless to say, American political conservatives have been critical of the film, of the choice of Gore as recipient of the Nobel Prize, and of the abundant inconvenient-to-greed scientific data concerning the undeniable fact of global warming. The inconvenient truth, which dismays liberals as much as conservatives, is that we cannot with impunity continue to abuse the environment.

Liberals, meanwhile, have responded with declarations that Gore should announce his presidential candidacy or that he is proving to be a beneficial influence and should continue on his current course.

The difference, of course, between liberals and conservatives has been the willingness of liberals to accept the unpleasant news and to express concern for the environment. Conservatives, undoubtedly motivated largely by the big business lobby, have denied the facts and ridiculed any who warn of the unwelcome news that we must curb fossil fuel emissions. Those conservatives who have finally acknowledged that the planet is indeed warming, include many who continue to deny the anthropogenic component of this trend.

. Take Action .

. Watch the Trailer .

. The Science Behind the Warnings .

MSNBC: Warming Signals . Ice at the Edge Interactives : Carbon trade game . The greenhouse effect . Cooling the planet . Eyeing the ice . Capturing CO2 . Melting mountains . Melting mountains .

British Royal Society: comment on Nobel Peace Prize . Climate change controversies: a simple guide .

environment, Blog Action Day, An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore, Nobel Prize

 Themes will include:

• The Age of American Unreason
• The Next Islamic Enlightenment
• Science and the Public
• Student Freethinkers Speak Out
• Secularism through History: from Spinoza to JFK

“Conservative Christians will throw down the gauntlet to the Archbishop of Canterbury this week by demanding that he openly disowns the American church over gay bishops.”

I did not post this because I care whether or not the Church of England splits from the American Anglican Church. I noticed this because ultraconservative Wycliffe College at the University of Oxford has recently run afoul of university authorities. However, the entire petulant fiasco is much what one can expect from religionists who threaten boycotts and schisms when their bigotted, narrow, absolutist, hatreds are not honored. My advise: to Anglicans, gain rationality and embrace humanist tolerance; to Church officials, grow up, gain rationality, and embrace humanist tolerance.

At the time of the original furor over New Hampshire’s gay bishop, Gene Robinson, I saw him interviewed on television and was impressed by his genuine ‘goodness’.  This suitability by virtue of personal qualities should be the determinant of election to a post, and it really should not matter what life partner he has chosen.

Apparently, the bigoted fundamentalists of the CofE’s ’Reform’ group are delivering the ultimatum because the ‘Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has said that homosexuality is not a “disease” on the eve of a crucial decision that could split the Anglican Church worldwide.’

One definition of reform is this: ‘make changes for improvement in order to remove abuse and injustices’. [source] Typically, fundamentalist reformers are not interested in moving forward to remove abuse and injustices, but instead wish to return to archaic abuse and injustices.

The bigotted CofE group would have been more honest if they had called themselves ‘Regress’.  I can only hope that Rowan Williams will stand up to their pressure.

C of E faces boycott over gay priests row

8 October 2007: Church of England gay clergy row intensifies

4 October 2007: Church leaders on the brink of schism

26 September 2007: For now, US Anglicans give in to Archbishop

25 September 2007: Anglican Church could split by end of year

23 September 2007: Homosexuality not a ‘disease’, says Archbishop

23 September 2007: Archbishop prays for miracle in gay rights row

16 September 2007: Archbishop fears split over gay clergy

On October 15th, bloggers around the web will unite to put a single important issue on everyone’s mind – the environment. Every blogger will post about the environment in their own way and relating to their own topic. Our aim is to get everyone talking towards a better future.

Blog Action Day is about MASS participation. That means we need you! Here are 3 ways to participate:

• Post on your blog relating to the environment on Blog Action Day
• Donate your day’s earnings to an environmental charity
• Promote Blog Action Day around the web

MORE 11th Hour Action & Links 

No news in that, I guess. The latest creationist ploy was to run to YouTube demanding removal of videos posted by the Rational Response Squad that criticized the Creation Science Evangelism ministry*. (Not that there is really anything scientific about Christianity, but most fundamentalist creationists are too cognitively challenged to know that. Still, the site is hilarious in a Monty Python Parodies God mode—if you enjoy the antics of the terminally deluded, that is.)

WIRED magazine reports that under pressure from Hovind’s Hounds, YouTube not only pulled the critical videos, but suspended the Rational Response Squad’s account.  Kent Hovind, the founder of the Creation Science Evangelism who is serving a 10-year prison sentence for tax evasion, had encouraged use of the content on the ministry’s web site.

The RRS wrote an open letter citing fair use under the provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which was passed in 1998. The videos were eventually reposted, so they should be getting lots of traffic thanks to the publicity generated by the ‘Christian Anti-science Fundamentalist’ ministry. The Rational Response Squad’s account has also been reinstated.

Needless to say, the CSE website will now be using YouTube to air its own videos for its deluded followers :

“Exciting things are happening here at CSE as we further the creation message! We now have YouTube and GodTube accounts. There you can view our promos and other recommended resources. These will help equip you in introducing the world to Christ our Creator. Subscribe to us and be notified of new videos. We’ve also released a new promo . . .”

Kinda makes you wonder why God Himself didn’t get a YouTube account to post videos in support of his revelataions. Better yet, why doesn’t God perform a miracle and upload video footage of miracles from His archives?  After all, an Omnipotent Omniscient Being should find uploading archival videos, or better yet, footage of new miracles a synch.

Oh, I know why CSE has to go to all this trouble—there really is no God, just deluded Earthlings.

 * why a link to googling rather than the site.

Creationist vs. Atheist YouTube War Marks New Breed of Copyright Claim .

It appears that Oxford University is not immune to ignorant attitudes. 

Do not despair! The University is reported to have noticed the problem: 

“The teaching of theology at the University of Oxford has suffered a serious blow with a damning report that recommends ending the admission of school-leavers to some of its colleges.” 

and . . . 

“The review, conducted by a university panel headed by Sir Colin Lucas, a former vice-chancellor, concludes that Oxford’s seven Christian private halls risk failing to provide a rounded learning experience in keeping with Oxford’s liberal ethos.” 

and . . .  

“Halls could risk losing their Oxford University licences altogether if they teach a fundamentalist Biblical doctrine on sexual ethics and in other areas of theology.” 

In the words of the known b*g*t, “The fundamentalist doctrine is that any sex acts outside of marriage between a man and a woman are wrong. Period. Full stop.” 

I guess that this means that homosexual acts are fine. It certainly indicates that marriage is merely church-sanctioned fornication. The b*g*t protested that Oxford Universities insistence that narrow moralistic preachings are not acceptable in a place of higher learning are tantamount to declaring, “Immorality Essential at Oxford”. How histrionic!  

* a b*g*t is a religionist of narrow views who argues emotively and without knowledge

“Research suggests that liberals and conservatives have different personality traits and “cognitive styles”: while liberals are more intellectually curious and tolerant of ambiguity, conservatives have a greater desire to reach decisions quickly and are more consistent in the way they make those decisions.

It was found that those who considered themselves to be conservatives made more response errors when upon presentatin of the infrequent letters than those who considered themselves as liberals (respectively, 47% and 37% of the time).  

The EEG data showed that, during the trials in which the infrequent letter was presented, the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) was twice as active in liberals than in conservatives.

The ACC is one of the brain’s executive control centres, and is hypothesized to be involved in detecting and signalling conflicts in information processing. So liberals showed significantly more conflict-related brain activity when confronted with a situation in which they are required to break an old habit.”

 Neuroscience and neuropsychology research is often criticized as not being science.  Such criticism is ironic considering that it often originates in the sorts of reflexive anti-science polemic that attacks science while praising the “proofs” demonstrated by “creation science”.

Research into the neurosciences is confounded by a combination of ethical and technical limitations. Although these factors render the neurosciences more challenging for scientific inquiry than chemistry, for instance, they do not signify that neurosciences are not scientific. Imagine that you are in an electronics store in which banks of loudspeakers are simultaneously playing different outputs from banks of CD players.  Now try to identify which output belongs to which player. It is not that there is not an “explanation” for each output, it is merely that this is difficult to decipher against background activity.

I found the ACC-Conservatism study interesting because it provides a neural correlation with a behavioral pattern that I have observed repeatedly.  I have long maintained that there is cognitive processing deficiency that underlies a commonly observed cluster of personality traits. 
 

Elsewhere: Red Brain, Blue Brain: Politics and Gray Matter : Persistence of Untruths and Flexibility

Dinesh D’Souza, author of a book entitled The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11, is not someone with whom I’d expect to agree on much. In Mother Theresa’s Dark Night of the Soul, D’Souza misses the point that so many Christians have a crisis of faith precisely because all the evidence points away from a God, rather than merely not providing evidence for belief. However, the emotional emptiness that Mother Theresa described cannot be taken as equivalent to knowing “that “religion is a human fabrication,”” It could be, it could not. It could simply be that the fact that there is not a loving God who actually touches lives and hearts leaves some who have relied on the promises feeling, as Mother Theresa describes, empty and lonely. Since there is no God, those who imagine there to be one are either deluding themselves over a personally generated sense of connection or, like Mother Theresa, are deluding us.

According to D’Souza, upon reading of her crisis in Time, Hitchens changed his line of attack on Mother Theresa from “self-satisfied dogmatist” to depicting her “as a secret unbeliever.” Not that “secret unbeliever” is a particularly inflammatory remark, particularly in view of the fact that, based on Mother Theresa’s diaries, she was at the very least a secret doubter.

I have not read Hitchens’ books, and as an atheist, I have no need to. I am already convinced that the supernatural does not exist, so why would I spend money to read what is widely touted as personal vitriol? I can find that in abundance on the Internet.  

However, I would agree with D’Souza that indiscriminate attack of iconic believers would give atheists a bad name. Expressed hatred attracts animosity toward those religiously motivated bigots and zealots who attack others. Indiscriminate attack on believers is as unconvincing to the fair-minded as accusing all atheists of virulent attitudes simply because some write as Hitchens reportedly writes. 

Has D’Souza merely taken a couple of words from Hitchens’ books and distorted Hitchens’ level of animosity? This certainly appears possible and would be in line with the thinking of someone who would blame an Islamic atrocity on the cultural left. Judging by Teresa, Bright and Dark, Hitchens actually takes a fairly soft line on Theresa.

However, Hitchens does point out that private doubt can drive individuals to even greater public protestations. The public anti-homosexual protestations of U.S. Senator Larry Craig, arrested for soliciting gay sex in a public washroom and subsequently pleading guilty, are a recent example of this phenomenon of protesting too much. I am not fooled, as some have been, by Craig’s accusations against the police that he only levelled after the story leaked into the media. In Craig’s case, I think that the root cause of problems such as his lie in American entrenched bigotry. In Canada, the gay marriages of elected politicians are mostly well received by the public.

Back to the original topic: So, Mother Theresa had a crisis of faith! So what! My sympathy is actually with the sense of loss that she endured. I think that the real point is that whatever her private religious anguish, she continued to be dedicated to humanitarian values. She is not the only person to have dedicated a life to alleviating suffering, and probably not the only person amongst those to have suffered a loss of faith. My only objection to Mother Theresa’s particular case of failed faith centers on her having crusaded crusade against divorce, abortion and contraception. I should have objected to such narrow moralism whether or not she imagined herself to be communing with some imaginary God or suffering a crisis of failed expectations. 

Hitchens is undoubtedly expressing some personal angst in his books and he and his publisher undoubtedly know that colorful language sells better than logic. Having read Hitchens’ quite moderate and intelligent remarks in the Newsweek article, I’m inclined to think that I should buy his books and see for myself. 

 One of the commonest misconceptions that I see concerning morality and compassion is that atheists are somehow emotionally empty, amoral, or lacking in humanity. The truth is that some atheists may well be like this – Nietzsche, for example – yet most secular humanists simply practice morality without need for religious belief. 

 ”Secular humanism” has joined “bleeding-heart-liberal”, “tree-hugger”, and “atheist” in the vocabulary of religiously-directed, moral absolutists.  Those believers who subscribed to a narrow, dogmatic morality use these terms as though they are dirty words.