This comes via Sports Illustrated, about a new book exploring the nature of god belief on the sports field (and behind the scenes) and why it seems to be so commonplace these days to see prayer circles and thanks to god for successful touchdowns etc. The book is called Onward Christian Athletes by Tom Krattenmaker.

There’s no intent to alienate people, only to share Biblical truth, said Vince Nauss, president of Baseball Chapel, which provides chaplains to every major league baseball team.

“If there’s an exclusivity, it’s because Jesus put it out there,” Nauss said. “So I don’t think there’s anything to apologize for, or to dance around in a politically correct environment.”

The influence of Christianity in locker rooms can be traced to people such as baseball pioneer Branch Rickey, the executive who brought Jackie Robinson to the Brooklyn Dodgers. In 1954, Rickey agreed to help college football coach Don McClanen found the influential Fellowship of Christian Athletes.

Baseball Chapel was established for players like ex-New York Yankee Bobby Richardson, who was mobbed at local churches on Sundays, Nauss said. By 1975, it had established programs for every major league team.

Another prominent group, the international sports ministry Athletes in Action, places about half of the NFL’s chaplains.

Krattenmaker said evangelical ministries have a near monopoly in pro clubhouses because they seized the chance, then won the teams’ trust by not exploiting their access. Other faith groups simply haven’t done the work, he said.

“The conservative Christians got their upper hand in the sports world the old fashioned way,” Krattenmaker said. “They earned it.”

Same way a lot of Christian groups have gotten the upper hand over the years, I think – be they missionaries or conquerors.

Krattenmaker’s stance on this is better than expected. He’s not against the religiosity of it all, he’d just like to see players and teams acknowledge the fact that their fans might not believe what they do, so to use some sense and tact once in a while. Plus,

He also sees a credibility-bruising selectivity in the theologically and politically conservative messages evangelicals in sports trumpet.

In his book, for instance, he highlights retired Indianapolis Colts coach Tony Dungy’s public stance against same-sex marriage. But Jesus’s teaching that “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God” doesn’t get much attention among hyper-wealthy athletes, he said.

Big surprise there. Cherry picking at its finest. And, their faith doesn’t encourage them to be better people, necessarily. The article offers up a few names of players who are adamantly Christian but made headlines for less than Christian behaviour. Charlie Ward, a Heisman trophy winner, claims

he tried to show his Christianity through his struggles.

“I wanted people to see that I was real, but also to wanted (them) to see humility and how you handle certain situations and allowing your faith to kind of be shown through your hang ups,” he said.

Ward said he knows that everyone doesn’t want to hear about his faith. But he said Christians are also exposed to messages in the media they don’t want to hear, and there’s a quick solution.

“They can turn off the television,” he said.

And you know what else? People could boycott those sports entirely and encourage everyone who’s annoyed with overt religious expressionism on the field and floor to do the same. Think a drop in revenue would send a message?

Still mulling over the last post and why a kid that young would look to a bible for a little light reading during quiet time. I wonder what part she was reading, and if it was a whole bible or a child-sized bowdlerized pretty stories and pictures edition. (And I didn’t know Jesus made a zombie girl until just now. Where’ve I been?)

I’ve been mad over books since I sorted out how to read and write. I wish Mom had hung onto those scribblers I’d filled with creative prose back then. I recall nearly filling one on a two hour drive once. Yes, kiddies, there was a day before computerized toys, car sized TVs and portable music players kept people silent and privately occupied in a vehicle. It was a day not that long ago at all…

Anyway, two authors I know I liked reading back then were Peggy Parrish and Beverly Cleary.

Amelia Bedelia was one of the funniest characters ever created, I think. I loved how mixed up she’d get with colloquialisms. I didn’t know that word back then, though, but instructions to “dress the turkey” left Amelia scrounging for clothes that would fit the thing and “draw the curtains” required her to drag an easel and paints into the living room, much to the perplexity of her employers when they got home.

And Beverly Cleary’s Ramona Quimby is still one of the sweetest, inventive kids ever put in a series. She wasn’t the brightest crayon in the box sometimes either – like the first time in a new class when the teacher said, “Sit here for the present” and Ramona refused to shift her butt all day because she thought she’d be getting a gift. And the days of the hard boiled egg fad in the lunch room when she mistakenly packed raw eggs and slapped one on her forehead to crack the shell. I think that’s in the Age 8 book, actually.

What else did I like… there was a short book called Pig and the Blue Flag about a capture-the-flag game at school and Pig who really hated gym but had to play it.

Charlotte’s Web, of course. Probably Trumpet of the Swan, too. I loved Magic Elizabeth, and Follow my Leader, a couple older Scholastic books I’d found on the book rack in the classroom.

Oh, and Judy Blume, obviously. Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing and Superfudge got read more than few times although I remember nothing about them now, aside from Fudge being the crazy little brother.

But enough about me. What books set your little minds on fire?

Saw this in New Scientist the other day. It validates my “no shit!” belief completely:

“Intuiting God’s beliefs on important issues may not produce an independent guide, but may instead serve as an echo chamber to validate and justify one’s own beliefs,” writes a team led by Nicholas Epley of the University of Chicago in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Volunteers were given a few tasks. The volunteers who claimed they were religious had to describe their views on controversial topics, but also explain what they thought other prominent and well known people thought about them. For these people, their views corresponded with whatever they thought God thought about these topics.

Next, the team asked another group of volunteers to undertake tasks designed to soften their existing views, such as preparing speeches on the death penalty in which they had to take the opposite view to their own. They found that this led to shifts in the beliefs attributed to God, but not in those attributed to other people.

“People may use religious agents as a moral compass, forming impressions and making decisions based on what they presume God as the ultimate moral authority would believe or want,” the team write. “The central feature of a compass, however, is that it points north no matter what direction a person is facing. This research suggests that, unlike an actual compass, inferences about God’s beliefs may instead point people further in whatever direction they are already facing.”

Robert J. Sawyer, a science fiction writer I like (responsible for Flash Forward if you love or hate it – the book is, of course, better), had something similar to say during a talk I went to in June of this year, that people are going to read what interests them, and probably won’t find a dissenting view in it unless it sideswipes them by surprise.

That compass analogy is an interesting one. The Good Atheist has a good post related to this, and one of the comments (thanks Duckphup) is worth pointing at, a quote from Robert A. Heinlein, another famous science fiction writer:

“We define thinking as integrating data and arriving at correct answers. Look around you. Most people do that stunt just well enough to get to the corner store and back without breaking a leg. If the average man thinks at all, he does silly things like generalizing from a single datum. He uses one-valued logic. If he is exceptionally bright, he may use two-valued, ‘either-or’ logic to arrive at his wrong answers. If he is hungry, hurt, or personally interested in the answer, he can’t use ANY sort of logic, and will discard an observed fact as blithely as he will stake his life on a piece of wishful thinking. He uses the technical miracles created by superior men without wonder or surprise, as a kitten accepts a bowl of milk. Far from ASPIRING to higher reasoning, he is NOT EVEN AWARE that higher reasoning EXISTS… yet he classes his own mental process as being of the same sort as the genius of an Einstein. Man is not a rational animal; he is a rationalizing animal.”

I love that last sentence. Back to New Scientist:

“The experiments in which we manipulate people’s own beliefs are the most compelling evidence we have to show that people’s own beliefs influence what they think God believes more substantially than it influences what they think other people believe,” says Epley.

Finally, the team used fMRI to scan the brains of volunteers while they contemplated the beliefs of themselves, God or “average Americans”. In all the experiments the volunteers professed beliefs in an Abrahamic God. The majority were Christian.

In the first two cases, similar parts of the brain were active. When asked to contemplate other Americans’ beliefs, however, an area of the brain used for inferring other people’s mental states was active. This implies that people map God’s beliefs onto their own.

I’m aware that fMRI once got a reading off a dead fish, but let’s assume these boys and girls knew what they were doing and got accurate results from their testing procedures.

I think it’s fair and accurate to suggest that the only way to get God’s beliefs about anything would be out of our own heads. Looking at how much God has changed as a deity in the bible alone (and there’s no point pretending or claiming He didn’t because atheists know where the verses are that prove it) it seems clear that a god needs to be what people need. If people need a vengeful god, they will believe in one. If they need a god that won’t punish them for being racist curs, they’ll believe in one. If they need a kind and loving god (unless people are gay), they’ll believe in one, even if it actively contradicts all other beliefs in the same deity (but that’s explainable because those people aren’t “True Christians(tm)”).

We’re not rational animals. We’re rationalizing animals.

1. They believe it wholeheartedly and seek to demonstrate through the best possible verses why.
2. They don’t believe it and seek to demonstrate through the worst possible verses why.
3. They’re well read anyway and recognize a quote as being from the bible, whether they believe the book is truth in print or not.
4. They’re familiar with the phrase from other sources and may not know or care if it’s from the bible because the phrase passed from elitist knowledge to common knowledge years ago and the origin doesn’t matter as much as the meaning does.

Are there more reasons? Could I break those down better? Maybe, but you see what I was intending, at least.

I’ll give you an example from some other cultural reference point.

Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.

You don’t have to Kobayashi Maru your way out of that one (necessarily), but you do have to have a big enough knowledge of Star Trek to clue in, and specifically have a recollection of the episode in TNG where the phrase was uttered and why.

If you watch the video, it won’t help you a bit, but it’s just a little slice of Sims 2 awesome I had to share, which I was reminded of because of Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra. Oh, you just gotta go where the brain wants to go, you know?

Anyway, in this particular episode, Picard and company wind up dealing with a planet where the culture speaks in metaphor. Sure, the universal translator can tell them what the folks are saying, but not what they’re talking about, so there’s a lot of confusion for the first while. It’s meme to the extreme, where everyone speaks of new events by acknowledging an event known to the whole group from sometime in past. So how do you establish communication when you can’t speak the same experiences?

I haven’t seen the episode since it first aired but according to the Wikipedia article, Picard winds up telling his captor the story of Gilgamesh as best he can with limited vocabulary and sign language, particularly the part where Enkidu dies and Gilgamesh mourns him. The Tamarian is at risk of death at the time, so the story resonates with him and he understands Picard’s intention completely. We discover later that “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra” refers to two enemies reaching common ground. Picard is able to use what he learned, and what he shared with the Tamarian, to sooth ruffled diplomatic feathers at the end.

Why use Gilgamesh instead of finding some relevant bible story to throw in as a reference point? My guess is that since Star Trek was not a show that pushed religion on people, writers were not going to add any, no matter how easy it would have been to use a religious story there. Too many people still believe the bible is touched by god and has his fingerprints all over it. The Epic of Gilgamesh is even older than the bible (and available in Klingon). It’s considered mythical but Gilgamesh was a king of his land at one time and the poems that were scratched into clay and preserved and later translated probably have some truth in them. Plus, the similarities between that epic and what got put into the first few books of the bible is also interesting but off topic.

The Washington Times has an article about an author promoting bible literacy. I get why this keeps coming up. People want the text to be relevant, want people to still think it’s relevant, want people to quote it and know precisely what it is they’re quoting so they don’t twist the meaning around to suit some nefarious purpose (unlike when religious folk do it for their own purposes…). The author is Timothy Beal,

who has written a book connecting popular references to biblical stories. “Biblical Literacy: the Essential Bible Stories Everyone Needs to Know” was published in October.

“I think you can’t be culturally literate without being biblically literate,” Mr. Beal said in an interview in his snug, book-lined office at Case Western Reserve University.

“These biblical stories and even images are pervasive in our language; they are all over our culture, from high culture to low culture, from Michelangelo to the Simpsons.”

Mr. Beal thinks people who are unfamiliar with these or other biblical references in everyday life are missing a lot.

“When we don’t know these stories, when we don’t hear these resonances, and we’re not familiar, we’re really missing half the conversation,” said Mr. Beal, who has written 10 books and teaches Bible literature and the method and theory of the study of religion.

And I’m going to reiterate something I’m sure I’ve mentioned in this blog at other times about this same topic – maybe it’s time to put the bible down. Our societies and communities and neighbourhoods aren’t designed with WASPs in mind anymore – at least, they shouldn’t be. Nobody ever suggests having a good handle on the Koran or Rig Veda in order to be well-read public speakers. It’s always the bible getting pointed at as evidence of cultured dialogue. Why? There are lists of books all over the place that we could be quoting to sound sophisticated and spiritual. Why the bible? Why continue to treat that book with so much reverence and cultural significance?

It’s a habit. We could just as easily quote Mark Twain:

“Patriot: the person who can holler the loudest without knowing what he is hollering about.”

Or Charles Dickens:

“I only ask to be free. The butterflies are free.”

or the current Dalai Lama:

“If you have a particular faith or religion, that is good. But you can survive without it.”

and sound just as insightful and on topic. It’s just that bible stuff seems so pervasive and recognizable, which is probably another reason why people like to quote it – not because they buy it, but because they know their audience will.

Still the simplest and most sensible explanation for species adaptation, still the most misunderstood concept by all those who claim it’s wrong.

On the Origin of Species was published 150 years ago today. And no, I haven’t read it. I suppose I should but I haven’t gotten around to it. I don’t have to read it to know it’s on target, though, because scientists all over the world agree it’s on target and experimentation over the years has verified the inherent truths of Charles Darwin’s evolutionary model. It’s the best scenario we’ve got that can explain how we got to this point that doesn’t rely on any supernatural nonsense to make it work.

Religion Dispatches has a nice article about the evolution/ID argument today. Lauri Lebo does make the mistake of claiming Kirk Cameron was on Family Ties; it was actually Growing Pains, but I can see how she’d mix those up. Still doesn’t excuse something that easy to check, but anyway, the article:

Most recently, last week, former Family Ties child actor and born-again Christian Kirk Cameron and evangelist Ray Comfort, led a crusade at college campuses around the U.S. and Canada, distributing free altered copies of Origin of Species.

Because Origin is in the public domain, Comfort was legally able to add to the book his own new 50-page introduction, in which he quotes from Mein Kampf in order to link Darwin to Adolf Hitler, accuses Darwin of being sexist, and argues falsely that there are no transitional fossils in the fossil record.

And he deleted chapters 9-12 or something. I saw a copy of it and the sneaky turd doesn’t even put his name on the cover to let people know it’s not the original Origin. Pretty much everything that made Darwin’s case got pulled out.

Next month marks the four-year anniversary of the decision of Kitzmiller v. Dover, in which Judge John E. Jones determined that intelligent design was merely religion masquerading as a scientific conceit and therefore unconstitutional to teach in the public schools.

Since then, evolution’s opponents have been struggling to redefine their message.

But the underlying point remains the same. As a woman distributing Comfort’s altered copies of Origin last week explained to CNN, it was important to her because evolution “impacts a person’s eternal destiny.”

I don’t see how, personally. Evolution has nothing to do with a person’s personal belief in heaven or hell. Why would it have to be one or the other? Is it totally necessary to faith to buy into the 6000 year old earth, or is it possible to finally admit that’s an unfounded fallacy and move on to what’s proven fact? Of course I already know the answer to that one. I recently found a comment by someone basically claiming God made a mature earth just to take the mickey out of future scientists and their radio carbon dating. I’m surprised I haven’t seen any arguments claiming osteoporosis killed the dinosaurs because their bones were already “millions of years” old and fragile when they hatched in the first place…

It’s going to take a lot more than scientific evidence, rational thought and reasoned debate to get people to accept the very real fact that in the scientific community, there is no debate over whether evolution is real. Sadly, most of the fighting continues to take place in the U.S., where our tradition of anti-intellectualism and history of religious fundamentalism provided fertile ground for the battle over religion versus science. (In a 2006 survey of western nations, Turkey was the only country in which fewer people accepted evolution than in the United States.)

According to Ron Numbers’ The Creationists: From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design, in the wake of the publishing of Origin, Christians in America were, for the most part, able to make peace with Darwin’s theory and evolutionary principles. It wasn’t until the early 1900s, when a series of religious pamphlets, The Fundamentals, were published arguing for the acceptance of the Bible as literal truth that a widespread backlash to evolution was born.

Four books worth of Fundamentals pamphlets were published in 1915. 1925 marked the official banning of evolution in the classroom, but Intelligent Design as an idea grew out of scientific advancements in the late 1950s, according to Lebo, and have continued to make headway. Four years ago, Kitzmiller v. Dover took science’s side but that hasn’t stopped people from trying to manipulate science classes to make room for creationism as a theory equal to (or better than) everything we’ve built on since Darwin wrote his book.

The new creationist/intelligent design strategy has been to pressure states and school districts to water down the teaching of evolution until it’s virtually meaningless and to raise doubts in children’s’ minds about the validity of science.

As Don McLeroy, one of the members of the Texas Board of Education, who led efforts to instill intelligent-design friendly language into his state science standards, said during hearings this spring, “Somebody has to stand up to the experts.”

And that should be up to other experts who have a better theory and can demonstrate it with verifiable scientific experimentation. Don’t just point at some dude caressing a piece of fruit while he jabbers towards a camera and some dopey child star oohs and ahhs. That’s not proof of anything.

Last week, Comfort was quoted in Charisma saying he doubts intelligent design will ever be taught in schools alongside evolution. “That’s because we have to remember who we are as Christians,” he said. “We’re the folks who believe in Adam and Eve [and] Noah’s Ark … and so in the name of science, they are going to resist as much as they can.”

Well of course we will. Bible stories are for religion class. Science class is supposed to introduce kids to how the world works and what we think we know about the universe. It’s not the place to fill their heads with shit they’ll need to take on faith. It’s the place to fill their heads with facts that have been demonstrated as most likely answers to life, the universe and everything and encourage them towards those fields to prove or disprove any fact or hypothesis or theory they dare to take on. We will never have all the answers. We will always find more puzzles that need solutions. But no matter what, “God did it” will never be a sufficient or verifiable answer to anything.

Who cares? Parents, probably. I don’t know why anyone else would. It still seems like a waste of memory skill to me. I can quote Shakespeare but it doesn’t make me a thespian. I can quote bible verses and it doesn’t make me Christian. What’s the point of making Christians do it? Does it really make a person a better Christian to be able to parrot portions of the book? But I suppose it looks good, which is probably the point. Look how biblical my kid is. My home-schooled kid won a Bible Bee. Nevermind if he never learns about evolution, he knows the bible backwards and forwards..okay, not backwards, because that’s a sign of the devil, probably…

Well anyway, the Salt Lake City tribune:

Under the bright stage lights, Daniel Staddon, an 18-year-old home-schooler from Salem, W.Va., squeezed his eyes shut as he methodically recited verse after verse from the Bible at the inaugural National Bible Bee.

The concentration technique came in handy as he recited the first 20 verses of the fifth chapter of Ephesians and the 21 verses of Psalm 145 in the tie-breaker round on the stage of the JW Marriott Hotel ballroom. His skills paid off, earning Staddon first place and a $100,000 prize.

“Dad suggested closing my eyes,” said Staddon, adding that his seven siblings helped him study for months for the contest earlier this month.

Competitions for spelling and math long have brought young people to national stages to test their vocabulary and prodigious memories. But now the “bee” concept has gone biblical. Culled from more than 17,000 students ages 7-18, the National Bible Bee finals grilled 21 children on their knowledge of Scripture. The five-hour finals were preceded by regional competitions in 49 of 50 states in September, oral contests and SAT-like tests for 300 contestants.

Spelling is a necessary skill in order to communicate ideas coherently. Some spelling rules might be insane, but I still follow them to the literal letter. I also remember having a fun time in English class with the vocabulary handouts. We had to write stories that included all twenty words, properly used. I’d been trying to write short mystery stories at the time so it was easy work to plop a couple characters into those scenarios. I wish I’d kept them now. I thought they were pretty good. I can’t recall if my teacher did, though.

As to math, remembering Pi to a bunch of digits makes a cool party trick, but understanding the methods required to solve the problems takes more than memorization and rote learning of multiplication tables. I was trying to divide $1.38 in half the other day at a grocery store and I couldn’t even do it in my head in time to answer someone else. How sad is that?

But why decide to memorize the bible? I suppose the money helped entice people, but still. Why that?

“Kids are learning to spell words,” Mark Rasche, executive director of the bee, recalled the benefactor saying. “That’s great, but there’s no eternal value.”

I break in to disagree with that. Spelling and language and communication is what keeps a civilization from getting stagnant. Language you can have without spelling, but without rules set down for the letters, how can two people read what each other wrote? Spelling evolves, but the need for the knowledge it can impart remains eternally.

Students and parents alike, chatting between breaks in the competition that required mastery of six books of the Bible, seemed to agree.

Jacob Manning, 14, a Minneapolis public high school student, said he considered his participation in the bee “really an investment in eternity” because he expected the words to remain with him forever.

“The Bible says my word shall never pass away,” he said. “Jesus says that.”

Manning didn’t win. While his knowledge of the Word might stay with him forever, did he really come out of this with any useful skills? He could have spent the entire time required to learn that stuff delivering newspapers instead or raking leaves or mowing grass for the elderly. Made a difference in someone else’s life. He could have taken up painting or writing or whatever. He could have learned something new instead of repeating the past verbatim.

But whatever, congrats belatedly to the winner. Don’t spend the money all in one place.

—-
Edit 7:34 am – Hemant Mehta has a list of things these kids needed to memorize and again about the point. What can these kids possibly do with this information afterwards? It has no use out in the world at large.

Does any one person have the right to impose a personal set of values on the rest of society? Ex-library employee Sharon Cook thinks so and stands by her morals, even though her actions also got another woman fired. The offending book happened to be a graphic novel in the The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series.

She was, she says, simply appalled that a child could find a book that contained so many outright visually obscene graphics in the Jessamine library where she worked. So nine months ago, she challenged its right to be included in the collection, and when that failed, she simply checked it out herself.

She’d renew and renew and renew the thing, putting sticky notes in, marking the most offensive pages. But one day she couldn’t renew it again because there was a hold on the item. Cook checked the patron records to see who wanted it and discovered an eleven year old girl behind the request. She told other co-workers about this, and one of them deleted the girl’s hold so the girl wouldn’t get the thing, nor would her parents ever see it. Next day, both women were fired.

What followed has become a battle of principles that is larger than the women ever imagined.

It has become a question of what public libraries are enshrined to do, what role they are to play in monitoring children and whether they get to decide what people get to read.

What complicates this is that the graphic novel in question meets no standard of obscenity by the law.

While it does contain many images of varied and explicit sexual behavior, it has been the subject of academic study. It was named by Time Magazine as one of its Top 10 Graphic Novels of 2007 and called “genius,” applauded for its ability to “pluck out the strange and angry and contradictory bits that underlie so much of the culture we live and think with today.”

Saskatoon Public Library has always permitted kids to borrow anything they want with their cards, the only restrictions being movies labeled 14A, 18A or R. Graphic novels have a similar rating for teen and adult level, but we’ve never stopped a kid from taking out one aimed at grown ups. It’s not the library’s role to police what children want to read. The library’s role is to provide a wide variety of materials to the city, province and country for that matter. Any and all subjects from boring car manuals to explicit sex how-to’s, the library has the option to buy any and all. Moreover, our library looks at it as having a duty to the public to provide whatever they might require, even if we think it’s stupid or junk.

Bottom line, we ultimately leave it up to the parents to decide what’s age appropriate. If they don’t take an interest in keeping their kids from reading trash, who are we to judge? And if a parent later comes in to complain about a book, we’ll let him or her write out all the challenge information but the complaint will likely be dismissed anyway. We will not cater to a particular and restrictive moral/value judgement. Books should be available for everyone, whether they want The Secret, Scientology shlock, trashy sex-filled fiction or the Bible (which might also be considered trashy sex-filled fiction by some people).

On Oct. 21, at its first meeting after the firings, the library board of directors found they needed a policy for public comment. Fifty people showed up unannounced to tell the library what they thought on the board’s recent personnel actions.

Also on hand were Cook and Boisvert, who had prepared a power-point presentation of their case. It wasn’t, they say, about keeping their jobs. It was about the fact that they had thought the book they found on the shelves of the library had originally been a mistake.

And the shock, they say, was that it wasn’t. (The book had been bought originally because a patron had requested it.)

I suspect it was a patron who requested The Book of Genesis Illustrated at ours. I was quite amused to see the thing on a cart waiting to be worked on. We will, of course, be shelving that with adult graphics.

They were most upset to not get to do their powerpoint presentation on “conservative community values” and “I’ll know it when I see it” value judgements on obscenity. Director Critchfield wrote an open letter to the Jessamine Journal:

“As customers of a public library there is a First Amendment expectation to respect the rights of all persons — what one person might view as questionable might be quite important and relevant to another.”

Right. One person’s value judgement cannot be the rating by which all books are judged. The books are for everyone. If you don’t like what’s in that one, don’t read it. Don’t let your kids read it (no doubt they’ll find a way, though). Nobody has the right to take away the right for everyone else to read it.

Cook says she consulted with a manager at the library at almost every step in her decision-making process about the graphic novel. She says when it first came to her attention, “someone suggested we spill a cup of tea on it. Instead I checked it out.”

She then went through the proper procedure of challenging the book, something any patron can do. That required a committee, including Cook, to read the book.

“People prayed over me while I was reading it because I did not want those images in my head,” she says.

Sorry, the prayer thing just makes me laugh. Why not just shout “White elephants!” in her ear while she reads? It’d work as well. She had to read with her eyes open anyway and a graphic novel already has the images.

The book was off the shelf for months while the committee reviewed it.

Cook says she found the book back on the shelves before she received a letter denying her request to have the book removed. She says she again told management she would check out the book indefinitely. She says she was not warned that this was a firing offense.

Then came Sept. 21.

Cook says that she never wanted the book taken off the shelves so adults couldn’t see it.

“I’m an adult. I do not want you telling me what I can read,” she says adamantly when you ask.

She just didn’t want this book in the Graphic Novel section, which is located next to Young Adult Fiction. She didn’t want it adjacent to what she calls “exaggerated comic books,” like the X-Men series, and real comic books, like Spider-Man, which are so enticing to children.

Maybe the library’s bigger beef with her is the fact that she encouraged another employee to break a rule and cancel a hold on September 21st without a valid reason and likely never told the parents of the child, either. They arbitrarily denied a patron the right to borrow material. They should not have been poking around the records of anyone, child or otherwise, to find out who was next on the list. It was none of their damned business.

If her complaint really is about where it’s shelved, then she should have taken it up with the Young Adult librarian and stated her concerns properly, not kept the book so not even adults can borrow it. If she only wanted YA and Adult graphics separated better, why not go that route instead? If she wanted it shelved with adult material, take it up with the adult collections librarian.

If she has no plans to give the book back, she should just pay for the damned thing and keep it. The library will likely buy a replacement copy anyway so her effort here is essentially wasted.

So, a creationist film crew went to Galapagos this year to film a movie that can completely debunk Charles Darwin by showing just how wrong Darwin was when he made some very astute observations about that small archipelago cut off from the rest of the developing animal world.

“The subtitle of Darwin’s landmark book is often overlooked: “the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life,’” Phillips observed. “Darwin’s ideas should not be celebrated on the anniversary of his book, for they have contributed to the dehumanization and murder of millions through the rise of Nazism, the proliferation of racism, Marxism, widespread abortion, and the horrors of eugenics.”

Favoured by natural ability, or an environmental/geological niche, not Aryan breeding processes. These ignoramuses need to stop preaching that tired fallacy but I know it’s the only argument they have, which is why they keep bringing it up. If they really want to freak out over the nature of eugenics, they should take it up with dog, cow, sheep, and horse breeders who manually designed every single one of those and tweaked traits for skill, milk, wool and power. Darwin looked at animals that had been isolated on those islands, away from the gene pools on the continent and marveled over the various ways each species adapted over there, in terms of food sources, etc.

You don’t even have to be alive a million years to see species adaptation in action. Richard Dawkins reports on an interesting thing in his recent book, The Greatest Show on Earth, about guppies. Back in the 1970s, a biologist by the name of John Endler studied the ones in Trinidad and the work was later redone and added upon by others to find links to sexual behaviour , and how adaptation and evolution are linked to mortality rates. In waters where death was likely, the females matured sooner and had a lot more young and the males were duller in colour to blend in with their surroundings more. In waters where risk was minimal, the females selected the best and brightest males to mate with since they didn’t need the camouflage to survive. And the differences between generations is noticeable within months when the risks are altered.

So anyway, about this movie.

The Mysterious Islands, a cinematically beautiful adventure film, was shot earlier this year and examines the same unusual creatures Darwin saw while on the Galapagos Islands and shows where he erred. Told through the eyes of 16-year-old Joshua Phillips, the documentary presents a remarkable quest to “Darwin’s Eden” with Joshua, his father, and a team of scientists and investigators, including Dr. John Morris, president of the Institute for Creation Research.

Says Doug Phillips about the location itself,

“The Galapagos Islands are a showcase of God’s creation, not a laboratory for evolution, as Darwin claimed,” noted Doug Phillips, executive producer of The Mysterious Islands. “Our film captures the wonder of the intriguing flora and fauna of the Galapagos, even as it shows where Darwin went wrong in his observations. And we are excited to be able to show this contrast to audiences around the country through our new film.”

I wonder if any of them read Origin of the Species before going. I haven’t even read the book but I’m sure Darwin’s conclusions are far more accurate than anything these dunderheads are claiming.

I’ve never even heard of The Ball and the Cross so it’s great that revelife provides a rundown of the plot of G.K. Chesterton’s story. It sounds interesting enough to seek out.

It involves an atheist journalist and a Catholic who’s angry enough over what the atheist has written that he insists a duel needs doing. The atheist is simply tickled someone’s even bothered to get bothered by his articles (sounds like me, har!) and enthusiastically agrees. From revelife:

The two men are hampered in their efforts to fight their duel, however–firstly because duels are illegal, but also because every person they encounter tries to talk them out of it. “Religion is–a–too personal a matter… The most religious people are not those who talk about it,” says one. “…You ought to be more broadminded,” says another. And (while I won’t spoil the ending for you), as the two men flee from place to place throughout England searching for a quiet place to have their duel, they find that they are quite coming to like each other.

It is that which I love about atheists. They think that these questions of reality or existence are worth fighting for, worth arguing over. They think that it matters whether God is or is not.

I guess what ultimately gets me down is the fact that matters. Why? Why can’t a person just say, “I’m a Christian,” and another person say, “I’m an atheist,” and then both just get down to the business of living to the best of their abilities? Why does god-belief have to enter into any of it as a reason to get fired up and hotheaded? Let’s just play cards or something. I mean really. Do you have any eights? No? I’ll go fish then…

I guess I will have to read the story to see if I agree more with the passionate duelists or the apathetic public. My library doesn’t have a book by this name listed but I put holds on a couple Chesterton collections so hopefully it’ll be in one of those. If it’s not there maybe something else will be worth writing about instead. All is shiny and bright regardless.

I keep a blog not because I want to knock down religions like dominoes. I just want to be a voice and offer a viewpoint. Nobody has to agree with me. I’m not going to force anyone to dump years worth of (wasted?) devotion if they aren’t seriously prepared for the fallout that kind of decision can create. Don’t look to me for suggestions on how to do that. I’ve always been an atheist, unlike others.

I don’t think it should matter what people think about mortality and immortality and all that stuff so long as nobody’s getting physically hurt by it. Hurt feelings and offended hearts can heal, given patience and time and loved ones (and sometimes psychologists). But whether one buys the tales of heaven and hell or not, death is forever.

Death is forever.

Is the hope of winning this centuries old argument worth it? To either side?

I fervently hope not.

—
edit 6:44am: Just found Black Sun Journal’s take on beliefs and rituals and look what got written:

Humans have performed rituals for all sorts of nonsensical reasons throughout history. Believe it or not, I’m OK with that so long as no one gets hurt…

The similarity just caught my eye while I was reading. Now I’ll finish reading that article. It looks like a good one.

The province is gearing up for a whole new library system. The new format for the library catalogue comes online at the start of December in some parts of Saskatchewan (new library cards will be necessary) but cataloguers and aquisitions and my part of the job (processing/materials linking) are getting something of a head start now.

Ideally, we’ll have templates set up for many of the things we’d be doing every day, but even if not, I have at least found a workable solution to a little problem I was going to face.

With our old setup, I could link multiple copies of a book to the catalogue record quite quickly. A few item specific tweaks may have been necessary for the first copy (price, volume, requestable or not) but after the first item, all I had to do was zap a barcode and key in what library would own it, then zap and key and zap and key until I’d done all forty copies in less than five minutes. Easy peasy.

Prior to today, it was looking like I’d have to tweak an item in every necessary way, add the call number, zap the barcode and save that record before starting from scratch with the next. Time consuming is the politest way to describe that nonsense. But, I found what might be an easier shortcut where I can choose a field and copy/paste the info down from item #1 to #45 and then switch fields and do the same routine. Not ideal, but certainly better than the horrible chore I was anticipating.

Obviously Millennium is designed for a radically different workflow than what our library does. It appears to be set up so the catalogue work (including the location info and barcode linking) could be accomplished before any labels are printed for those materials. Linking is the last step we do here before we send the stuff out.

The “automatic label” making seemed like a great idea when we first heard we’d be switching, but now it looks like I’ll have to do them all with Word like before anyway. Millennium is not designed to print 50 spine labels on an Avery sheet like we do. It’s built for universities and other setups that use the Library of Congress call numbering system instead of the Dewey, and will also print labels to stick on cards/pockets like back in the day when people physically stamped books when lending them out. How many libraries still do that? Seems like such an archaic thing now.

But enough job related stuff. I’m just glad I sorted out a minor worry. Let the big job worries sit on someone else’s shoulders. Like the fact that since we’re ready to catalogue before the patron side of this is online, the cataloguers will have to do their work twice, as will Aquisitions – once in the old system (so patrons can still see what’s new and put holds on it all) and once in Millenium (because they can’t search for stuff in there yet). As of yet, I don’t know if I’ll even start linking any of the stuff ready to go out. I don’t really want to wait a month to start shuffling this stuff out of here, but whatever. We have enough work waiting on carts and boxes without a bunch of last-step stuff waiting around, too. Will see later how that works out, I guess.