I think we all know how I feel about the Hypnotoad.

I think I have that one somewhere in the back basement room, too!

One of the two pysicists is Bech Nielsen of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen. You probably recognize from his famous proposal that the Veneziano model was actually a theory of strings*.  A distinguished physicist indeed.

Nielson along with Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto (less famous–doesn’t have a Wikipedia entry) propose that Higgs boson particles created by scientists in the future, travel backwards through time to prevent scientists in the present from discovering them.

Seriously.

Now I’m the first to sympathize with scientists forced to use metaphor.  Communicating an absurdly complicated topic to an untrained public is challenging.  I’m also sympathetic to the problem of the media in relating these metaphors to the public: how literal are they meant to be taken? Is the cat *really* alive and dead at the same time? Is space *actually* a rubber matt displaced by bowling balls? And so forth.

But, as far as I can tell, the Terminator metaphor above is meant to be taken literally.  Just substitute Higgs boson for Arnold, and anything-to-do-with-discovering-Higgs-boson for Sarah Connor.

The list of things sabotage possibly engineered by Higgs: the cancellation of the planned Superconducting Supercollider in the US in 1993, the various mechanical problems of the Large Hadron Collider, and the arrest of a resident physicist on suspcion of Al-Qaeda affiliation.

Seriously.

Of course, thinking like scientists, they’ve come up with a plan–a peer reviewed, up-for-publication-in-a-real-journal plan.  It goes a little something like this:

Seriously.

*I had no idea who he was either.

**Since it would cost, like, a billionth as much as their other bullshit experiments, why haven’t they done it?

Right now I’m reading “Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement” by Katherine Joyce, and I keep running into a problem- I cannot understand these people at all. I can understand them as well as I understand gyroscopes: I can describe to you what they are going to do, but for the life of you I can’t wrap my mind why.

For those of you who don’t know “Quiverfull” is a blanket term regarding people who are believers in a Biblical Patriarchy (women submit to their husbands or fathers- and I do mean “submit”), and more importantly, who are staunchly anti-birth control; no condoms, no pills, no sterilization, no rhythm method, nothing but “God’s Will”. The phrase comes from Psalm 127:5 “Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them(children). They will not be put to shame when they contend with their enemies in the gate.” Quiverfull people believe that they are in a cultural war with liberal secularists, and they intended to win through demographics alone. They believe that these roles and behaviors are “god’s will” and that they are on the side of righteousness. Frequently, they are into seriously modest dress and homeschooling.

I keep running into the same problem with these beliefs- I don’t understand why they would want to worship this god. I’m fairly anti-authoritarian: I want to choose which authority I follow, and at the end of the day I think I am ultimately responsible for any action I take, whether or not someone in power over me told me to do it or not. I don’t want to risk my health and my life. I am drawn towards debate, and I am occasionally smarter than my husband. These proscribed roles, in other words, would make me MISERABLE (and my husband miserable too). So, if the Quiverfull people are correct, and there is a god, and he made me the exact opposite of what I’m supposed to be (indeed, a lot of Quiverfull talk about how women have an inherently rebellious nature because of Eve), which sounds like a recipe for misery, then god’s a dick. Why should I worship a dick? The general answer of “because of heaven and hell” is 100% unsatisfying to me- I’m supposed to toady up to a bully just to avoid getting beat up? That’s not moral- that’s cowardly.

So, this post is for any lurking Quiverfulls. Heck, if you’re just a person who thinks god cares more about what we do with our genitals than whether or not we hurt people, you can post too. I’ll leave off the “prove that god even exists part”- for this exercise I’ll just go with it for now. I need support for “if god exists, why should we worship him?” Make your case.

EDIT: Like all things I want to know, I had to search google to see if it had any knowledge. The first website had a post that made exactly zero sense to me, but the answer was

We worship Him because He commands it. We worship Him because He alone deserves it, knowing what He is and what He does. We worship Him because without so doing we cannot rise to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.

So…yeah, worship a bully because a bully says so? Even though he’s a bully? And I don’t want to be a bully?

I really wish I knew someone in real life who held these views and would talk to me. I’m missing something important here- something that’d snap it into place.

“I was not truly mad at the right person,” he says. “I kept going up a ladder, and I was looking at cardinals and even the Pope knew, you know, that this was this bad. That’s what truly upset me.”

Now Turner is in court again — suing the Vatican.— Abuse Victims Seek Court Date

Apparently, it’s remarkable that the Vatican might be held to account for its systemic concealment of sexual abusers. Which rather highlights the utter stupidity of giving an already large and powerful religion its own country to play with. Let’s start with this fucked up, patriarchal institution with enormous wealth, resources, and devotees so brainwashed so as to make most generals salivate. Then, let’s give it sovereign immunity and treat it as an equal amongst nations. That’s going to work great.

It’s almost enough to make you think that all the Zionist conspiracy theories floating around are ultimately encouraged by the Church, to keep people from delving too deeply into what, exactly, all those funny old men in point hats are doing.

No? Well, let me help you, then.

The Pope’s Christmas Gift: A Tough Line on Church Doctrine Vigorous Support of Ten Years to Life in Prison For Teh Homos*

and

Split in Episcopal Church hits new level
Conservatives who fled liberal views of Scripture believe that Teh Homos should be publicly reviled and burn in Hell have formed a breakaway church in North America.

There–much more accurate. Don’t they want their message gotten across more clearly? I’m sure they do!

*The pope also says, Stop touching each other before Mass–we can’t tell which of you are Teh Homos when you do that!

(First Kyso’s “ilk” and now PZ’s…wonder how many “ilks” I can associate myself with…I’m such a wannabe “ilker,” I’m ashamed, ashamed I tell you. I need to find my own person to offend.)

But anyway, PZ mentioned yesterday that there might be some mention of him in the Washington Times today. In case anyone was wondering what it would take for me to actually go online and deliberately try to find something written in the Washington Times, this is the first time that’s ever happened.

(A small side story: when I first moved to the DC area years and years ago, I bought a subscription to the Washington Post–even in Bumfuck Kansas where I grew up, I’d heard of the Post. My husband at the time remarked sniffily that I wasn’t going to get a complete unbiased picture of the news if all I did was read that bastion of blatant liberality and I should really also get a subscription to the Times as well–as I recall, he was motivated to suggest this from something some radio talk show host dude named G. Gordon Liddy said on his program. I pointed out to him that said dude might possibly have a personal reason to slam the Post, but I went ahead and bought a subscription to the Times anyway. I even tried to take the articles contained therein seriously, peppered with typos and grammatical errors as they were, but found myself unable to really swallow anything presented in such an incredibly unprofessional way regardless of the content that I gave up after a few issues. Maybe they’ve improved their print copy since then, though?)

Struck gold, too!

Professor solicits hosts to desecrate

With a super-cute picture of PZ even.

And I also now know that his first name is Paul.

An anti-religion Minnesota biology professor expects to receive dozens of consecrated Communion wafers in response to his public solicitation that people send him the hosts in order that he may publicly desecrate them.

They clearly pulled the wrong picture out of the archives. This one’s way more in the spirit of the story:

The University of Minnesota is coming over as pretty cool and sane, though, in spite of the obvious attempts by whomever was interviewing them to get them to say something juicy. Check it out.

Short version: Sarasota Planned Parenthood and Habitat for Humanity team up with a plan that will help Planned Parenthood with some zoning issues and help Habitat get some almost-free land. For their altruism, they’re repaid with the nastiest of the nasty anti-choice contingent:

“We could have put up any building we wanted,” said Barbara Zdravecky, president of Planned Parenthood. “We wanted to donate the land so Habitat could build more attainable housing.”

But after Habitat donors learned about it and complained, Habitat International told the local board to drop it. The local Habitat board dropped the deal Tuesday night, less than a month before it was set for a final vote by the city.

…

The barrage of e-mails started with James Sedlak, vice president of the American Life League, a Virginia-based group that has led protests at Planned Parenthood offices in Sarasota. They said it showed a cozy relationship between Habitat and Planned Parenthood, which the league has accused of pushing pornography to children, among other things.

The American Life League must be so pleased. They’ve managed to screw over woman and poor people in one fell swoop.

Donate to Habitat, but let them know how you feel about them caving to pressure from anti-woman nutjobs.

Hat tip: nom_de_grr.

Vatican: Excommunication for female priests

I’d be shocked and disgusted, if only I cared more about the Catholic church or even about the moral sensibilities of the people who want to be a part of it.

Catholic church says it’s following Christian tradition

You can’t argue with that.

The decree was published Thursday by Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, which in a headline called the ordination of women a “crime.”

‘Nuff said.

Now, I do understand that a big part of the character of most atheist types is an aversion to being a “joiner.” Yep, I do understand that…but c’MON, folks, he says that the area staked out was easily big enough for 200 people!…so that the 35 or so who showed up were kinda ambling around their large empty space in polite nerdy silence, triangulated between those in an ecstasy of Catholic wish fulfillment (a horde, on both sides) and to the rear a large loud vocal contingent of anti-Catholic Christians who spent a lot of time shouting “Celibacy is Demonic!” (Not that I don’t feel that way about it myself, especially when it’s mine and it’s involuntary.) However, he did snap a few shots of two of the more distinctive atheists present (see below) as well as a policeman who, in spite of the far more vigorous crowds surrounding the tiny atheist contingent, kept his video camera aimed at Teh Godless the whole freakin’ time. The cops shooed them all away before noon, so no Pope pics. Oh well…

To combat their message, I’d been working up my own atheist rap-metal single called “Abortin’ Your Soul” with my band, The Self-Loathing Pastors. Thanks to Sara Robinson at Orcinus, though, I can shelve my secular stylings. She discovered a study done by the Barna Group, an Evangelical polling and research firm, that shows younger generations turning away from Christianity in droves.

The Barna chart says it all:

Perhaps as importantly, Sara notes that the folks who aren’t identifying as Christians have grown fed up with fundie baloney:

Ten years ago, “the vast majority” of non-Christians had generally favorable views of Christianity. Now, that number stands at just 16%. When asked specifically about Evangelicals, the number are even worse: only 3% of non-Christian Millennials have positive associations with Evangelicals. Among the Boomers, it’s eight times higher.

When Kinnaman asked senior pastors if they were seeing this too, half of them told him that, yes, they are finding their work to be an uphill battle — “because people are increasingly hostile and negative toward Christianity.” And his research bore this out. When he ranked young non-Christians’ most common perceptions of Christianity, nine of the 12 most common attributes they named were negative ones. According to the study, “Common negative perceptions include that present-day Christianity is judgmental (87%), hypocritical (85%), old-fashioned (78%), and too involved in politics (75%).”

I have to disagree with old fashioned, though. This is wicked fresh: