Religion
Related: About this forumThe Reason Rally ought to have some standards
March 18, 2012 at 9:00 am PZ Myers
Oh, joy. Senator Tom Harkin will appear in a video message at the Reason Rally. While he may be a lifelong Catholic, as he declares in the announcement, and while he is one of the biggest supporters of acupuncture, chiropracty, herbal and homeopathic ‘healing’, and all the alt med bullshit he can fling millions of federal funds at, we’re apparently supposed to grovel in gratitude that a sitting senator deigns to patronize us atheists.
Why?
This is a man who takes pride in being affiliated with a patriarchal, hierarchical, medieval institution that oppresses women, celebrates poverty, wallows in its own wealth and privilege, and has actively disseminated pedophiles into communities all around the world…and has worked hard to protect and defend these child rapists. This is an organization that is currently fighting for the right to refuse life-saving care to women, that even opposes making contraception available to men and women, that endorses discrimination against gay couples.
This is a man who pushed through the formation of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative ‘Medicine’, a gigantic boondoggle that sucks federal research dollars out of the hands of qualified scientists studying real phenomena and into the hands of quacks and con artists peddling bogus therapies. This is a man who so poorly understands science that, when his pet quackeries all failed when examined, declared his disappointment because he said NCCAM was supposed to “validate alternative approaches”, and instead was “disproving things rather than seeking out and approving things.”
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/03/18/the-reason-rally-ought-to-have-some-standards/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+freethoughtblogs%2Fpharyngula+%28FTB%3A+Pharyngula%29
How to win friends and influence people.
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cbayer
(146,218 posts)for inviting this particular person escapes me.
In the comments to this article there is also a lot of discussion of the inclusion of Bill Maher on the schedule, but it certainly makes more sense that he be there than Harkin.
Goblinmonger
(22,340 posts)so are you saying Harkin is the problem or the Reason Rally or the writer of the essay in the post?
rug
(82,333 posts)I'm sure the organizers had good reasons to invite him, Myers' approval or no.
trotsky
(49,533 posts)Myers gets an opinion whether you like it or not. It's especially fun since you really, really hate it when Myers speaks his mind. But I'm sure he appreciates the traffic you send his way! Thanks for supporting Freethought Blogs, rug!
deacon_sephiroth
(731 posts)cbayer
(146,218 posts)This is Sen. Tom Harkin, and I welcome all of you to Washington. I also welcome you to our National Mall, which has hosted so many historic events, including the 1913 women’s suffrage march and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s great march for jobs and freedom in 1963. On the Mall, we celebrate America’s amazing diversity of ideas, beliefs and, yes, disbeliefs.
We also celebrate the freedom, tolerance, nondiscrimination and right of dissent that are enshrined in our Constitution — that define us as Americans and as a truly free people…
That is why, I welcome to the Mall all of my fellow Americans, including those who reject my beliefs — or indeed, those who reject all religious faith.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2012/03/16/an-excerpt-from-senator-tom-harkins-reason-rally-speech/
I think it's the message of tolerance and acceptance that they are pushing with his inclusion.
deacon_sephiroth
(731 posts)cbayer
(146,218 posts)“We’re proud to have Senator Harkin’s support,” said Jesse Galef, a spokesman for the Reason Rally. “Politicians are starting to realize that Secular Americans are a growing force in this country, and that we deserve respect. If political figures can speak at churches, it shouldn’t be controversial for them to speak to a nonreligious gathering.”
According to Galef, Harkin, who received an “A” grade in 2009 by The Secular Coalition for America, will tape a video message that will be broadcasted at the event. Rep. Pete Stark (D-Calif.) is the only other member of Congress scheduled to appear.
http://www.talkradionews.com/quick-news/2012/03/09/harkin-to-appear-at-godless-gathering.html
excuse the source, but that's where I found it.
immoderate
(20,885 posts)Harkin adds some tolerance and ecumenism to the event. Do we only want hostility from the opposition?
It's hard to change people's beliefs. But we can get them to behave.
Harkin has run afoul of skeptics and PZ is right to skewer him, and inform the people. 
--imm
Rob H.
(5,351 posts)They shouldn't have Harkin or Maher there, imo, Harkin because he's a homeopathy booster and Maher because he's an anti-vaxxer. Why don't they just invite a climate change denialist, an astrologer, and a sasquatch hunter while they're at it?
(Note: I would probably go if I lived closer and had the money. I'd just find better things to do while Harkin and Maher are up.)
another true believer with Spanish Inquisition Fetish. But like it or not, the pseudeskeptic cryptoreligion of PZ et alii has no copyright on REASON and as cryptoreligionists they behave quite unreasonably.
edhopper
(33,579 posts)hogwash.
The complete and utter bullshit about atheism, skepticism or secular humanism being a religion
is just tiresome.
tama
(9,137 posts)The materialistic cryptoreligion that hides behind perfectly respectable positions of atheism, skepticism and secular humanism just tries to give those respectable positions a bad name.
"Atheists" who are really antitheists and worshippers of technocratic Deus ex Machina, "skeptics" who allready know and stop questioning, "secular humanists" that worship State hierarchy over everything else... we've seen them and we constantly see them proselytizing on DU and especially in Religion Group to convince others to buy their belief system.
it's only the atheist who accept your altered view of reality that are true atheist. It's only the skeptics that accept the unproven and unscientific that are true skeptics.
It's only the secular humanist that are also anarchist that are true humanist.
In other words "Everyone who doesn't agree with my unprovable mumbo jumbo isn't legitimate."
Anyone who accepts the materialistic world view is an idiot or a scoundrel.
Hmmm?
tama
(9,137 posts)This is religion group and participants in these discussions hold on to their religious and cryptoreligious belief systems, which is fine, sort of, but in the spirit of rational inquiry and critical evaluation I like to aim my skeptical criticism towards the cryptoreligious crowd that preaches most loudly.
Because - whether you believe or not - I'm profoundly anti-religious.
I'm not saying people don't have the right to believe in homeopathy, but they shouldn't confuse what is patently rubbish with genuine medicine. They can knock themselves out, believe whatever they want, as hard as they want, but guess what? There's plenty of evidence--real, actual, scientific evidence--that homeopathy is pseudoscientific, magical-thinking-based hogwash. Homeopathy pushers can also show up to the Reason Rally by the busload if they like, but they probably shouldn't expect many people to take them seriously, assuming anyone would.
Dara O'Briain makes the point much more succinctly (and humorously) than I ever could:
There was also an article that appeared online back in 2010 that actually did the math:Homeopathy by the Mind-Boggling Numbers.
Unlike most medication, it didn't list the actual dose of the active ingredient that each pill contains, so I checked the British Homeopathic Association website. On their website it nonchalantly states that to make a homeopathic remedy, they start with the active ingredient and then proceed to dilute it to 1 per cent concentration. Then they dilute that new solution again, so there is now only 0.01 per cent of the original ingredients. For my 30C pills this diluting is repeated thirty times, which means that the arnica is one part in a million billion billion billion billion billion billion.
The arnica is diluted so much that there is only one molecule of it per 7 million billion billion billion billion pills.
It's hard to comprehend numbers that large. If you were to buy that many pills from Boots, it would cost more than the gross domestic product of the UK. It's more than the gross domestic product of the entire world. Since the dawn of civilisation. If every human being since the beginning of time had saved every last penny, denarius and sea-shell, we would still have not saved-up enough to purchase a single arnica molecule from Boots.
Then the process of consuming enough pills to get that one molecule also boggles the mind. You can try imagining Wembley Stadium completely filled with people, all drinking pints of medicine at the rate of two an hour. For just one of these people to eventually consume one molecule, you would need a million Wembley Stadiums all at full capacity with people who have drinking pints constantly since the Earth formed 4.5 billion years ago. Oh, and you'd need 737 million such Earths.
Emphasis mine.
tama
(9,137 posts)and not interested in discussing homeopathy but you mentioned also anti-vax (etc. etc. etc. in your broad brush against those excluded from your private club of Reason) and I have had hot lava poured over me by pro-vax fundamentalists for suggesting that not all vax are allways necessary - no matter what Big Pharma and politicians and scientists on their pay-roll say - and sometimes even harmfull, e.g. recent cases of narcolepsy.
Rob H.
(5,351 posts)There's no evidence that Pasteur recanted and, indeed, evidence that he did not. He also never said Beauchamps was correct.
For what it's worth, I'm not too keen on Penn Gillette as a guest, either. On his show Bullshit!, he was parroting (and giving a forum to) the Center for Consumer Freedom, a right-wing group that lobbies on behalf of the fast food, meat, alcohol and tobacco industries. Of course, they talked to the director of the CCF and billed him as a "consumer advocate" without mentioning any of that. Whatever a person's opinion about PETA, Penn & Teller were completely dishonest about the way they criticized them.
Silent3
(15,212 posts)...nor any of his old conspiratorial rants about the food we eat being designed to be bad for us by supposedly the same people selling us medicine for the problems caused by their food.
I don't know if that means he's toned this stuff down for PR reasons, or if maybe he's actually begun to see the contradiction between these things and his own ranting against creationists and global warming deniers for refusing to accept well-established science.
Humanist_Activist
(7,670 posts)due to the insane and stupid pseudoscience that is anti-vaccine hysteria?
For fuck's sake, let's put it this way, vaccines save lives, anti-vaxxers kill them.
