Pharyngula

Posted by: David Utidjian | August 26, 2008 3:09 PM

Hahaha... love it! Will make a good gift for my students.

Sorta off topic: The History Channel just played all the extant episodes of "Evolve" (Eye, Guts, and Jaws) spanning noon in my area (NJ, USA). Nice to see them again all at one go. Though the "Evolve" shows are not perfect, they are still very very good and beat the hell out of most sciency programming.

-DU-

Posted by: Ouchimoo | August 26, 2008 3:10 PM

EGADS! I LOVE IT!!! Now I really wish I was a scientist :(
Well at any rate:

WANT

Posted by: The Chemist | August 26, 2008 3:16 PM

@ Reginald Selkirk,

Who do you think is going to help us escape to another solar system?

*points to self*

Posted by: Qwerty | August 26, 2008 3:19 PM

From the CSA's safari PDF: "Evolution has become the cultural mythology of the state religion... a bizarre mixture of atheism and pantheism."

The Chemist had it right: What a fucktard!

Posted by: Richard Harris | August 26, 2008 3:32 PM

Hey, come on you guys! It's us engineers that make it all work.

Posted by: spyderkl | August 26, 2008 3:37 PM

I see my little sister's birthday present. Since she's now the boss, she could probably get away with it under her lab coat. I think.

Posted by: Holbach | August 26, 2008 3:45 PM

How about; SCIENTIST: Use in case of emergencies, and liberally when religion runs amuck.

Posted by: Benjamin Franklin | August 26, 2008 4:09 PM

Scientist-

Reusable, and Recyclable!

Posted by: protocol | August 26, 2008 4:20 PM

Oh c'mon; this is too indulgent.... whoever seriously thinks this way about scientists needs a good dose of Lewontin...

Posted by: John C. Randolph | August 26, 2008 4:29 PM

Bah!

Scientists just tell you what's happening. You need an engineer figure out how to change it, and a mechanic to actually do it.

-jcr

Posted by: IceFarmer | August 26, 2008 4:33 PM

Well, I'd think, with a few amendments of course, that this could be turned into a great pair of Joe Boxer's or G'strings as the case may be. We would then be able to test if this statement really matters at the moment of truth. But I'm married so some other nice single men and women would have to carry out the test on my behalf. I sense a bit of fun social science in the making. Anyone interested?

In the mean time, I'll roll down the street wearing one of these playing with my iphone and see if any fundies have a problem with me. There is a Jehovah's Witness Kingdom Hall up the street!

Posted by: SteveM | August 26, 2008 4:49 PM

I do wonder what sort of an emergency would require space exploration.

You are kidding right? It's not like the earth ever gets hit by anyhing from space that could do any real damage, like wipe out an entire species or anything. Nope, never happens.

Posted by: gdlchmst | August 26, 2008 5:00 PM

Hey, come on you guys! It's us engineers that make it all work.

Who said engineers aren't scientists? If you use math and physics to put a man on the moon, you are a goddam scientist.

Posted by: The Chemist | August 26, 2008 5:12 PM

@John C. Randolph #21

Don't hate. I said "SCIENTIST". Are you saying physicists aren't scientists? Well, maybe just the string theorists. ;-)

Besides, how have we been getting into space so far? Physical rockets? I didn't think so.

@Richard Harris and jcr,

Engineers? When did engineers start curing disease? Man am I behind. Engineers wouldn't know a tau lepton if it took the hard hat off their head!

I'm just kiddin'. Engineers are cool too. But you guys already have good t-shirts. One I gave to my mechanical engineer cousin to wear in front of his civil engineer uncle (my dad):

"Mechanical engineers build weapons.
Civil engineers build targets."

@protocol,

Too self-indulgent? Yeah. What's your point?

Posted by: Annie | August 26, 2008 5:19 PM

Crash this poll alert: MSNBC has a question about using the In God We Trust motto on coinage. I trust that YOU know what to do....

Posted by: catta | August 26, 2008 5:30 PM

Ooooh. Brilliant. Only it needs to say "apply liberally"...

Posted by: Flaky | August 26, 2008 5:37 PM

It's not like the earth ever gets hit by anyhing from space that could do any real damage, like wipe out an entire species or anything. Don't you think that it'd be a bit too late to try to save that species by means of space exploration if such a catastrophe was imminent?

Posted by: SteveM | August 26, 2008 5:46 PM

Engineers? When did engineers start curing disease?
Look around a modern hospital, doctors depend on a helluva lot of technology.

Don't you think that it'd be a bit too late to try to save that species by means of space exploration if such a catastrophe was imminent?

I did not say it was imminent, space exploration is neccessary to prevent it from becoming an emergency. But if it ever does become imminent, hopefully we will have advanced our space capabilities sufficiently to use it to respond to it.

Posted by: llewelly | August 26, 2008 5:51 PM

It's not like the earth ever gets hit by anyhing from space that could do any real damage, like wipe out an entire species or anything.

Don't you think that it'd be a bit too late to try to save that species by means of space exploration if such a catastrophe was imminent?

Posted by: Karley | August 26, 2008 6:13 PM

Space exploration has provided us with the ability to predict orbits tens of thousands of years in advance. The more space exploration we do, the more likely it is that any dangerous object would be discovered long before said catastrophe became imminent.

Of course, as soon as scientists announced any such impending Doomsday object, the conservatives would be all like "Nuh-UH the Bible says this and that, and besides that would be bad for the economy, teach the controversy blah blah blah" and the nation would just sit on its ass until the object came and wiped us all out.

Posted by: BobC | August 26, 2008 6:54 PM

Hello Holbach. I strongly agree with everything you said. God or god or sky fairy, whatever it's called, has never existed. But I like to say Darwin killed God. There was nothing to kill of course, but the idea there's a god was killed. Or at least the idea should have been killed. Obviously there's still a few people who still believe the magic man nonsense.

I'm definitely an atheist, a very anti-religion atheist, an atheist who wishes he could live long enough to witness the complete eradication of all religious beliefs.

Anyway I'm a big fan of scientists. Their hard work has helped make my atheism stronger than ever.

Posted by: drdave | August 26, 2008 7:07 PM

Got me one.

Posted by: negentropyeater | August 26, 2008 7:27 PM

...only got a problem with the and/or ignorance bit.

Posted by: negentropyeater | August 26, 2008 7:36 PM

Engineers? When did engineers start curing disease?

I wonder how any research would be done without the tools, instruments, and equipment that are developped by engineers and made by technicians.

Posted by: tim Rowledge | August 26, 2008 7:48 PM

Science, engineering, technology, cleaning staff.... we need them all to form a civilisation. We need a civilisation to be able to support any meaningful level of science. Sheesh, we even need marketing people if we want a functioning capitalist economy, painful though it is to admit.

Now if we could get our technology to Culture (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture) levels then we wouldn't have a scarcity economy and we wouldn't have to suffer the inanities of capitalism. Then we really could kill all the lawyers/marketers/salesdroids/account-exectutives

Posted by: Holbach | August 26, 2008 8:01 PM

BobC @ 42 Good reply, and nice to know we are of a mind against religion and all for science. An apt quote from a good friend of our hero Charles Darwin: "Science is simply common sense at its best - that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic."
Thomas H Huxley

Posted by: The Chemist | August 26, 2008 8:08 PM

Timothy Wood, #47

"Science" as opposed to "Scientist" are now available for our non-scientist friends. This is the URL (Take heed because it's different, thanks to Cafepress wonkiness).

Posted by: Holbach | August 26, 2008 8:28 PM

BobC Quick follow up: Read your posts at "Bingo Every Time". Good stuff there, and neglected it by scrolling to quickly. I am convinced, and do offer more!

Posted by: The Chemist | August 26, 2008 8:44 PM

#136

IAWTC

Posted by: s9 | August 26, 2008 10:55 PM

The word "reusable" is the one that makes me smile.

Posted by: teatime | August 27, 2008 7:48 AM

I do wonder what sort of an emergency would require space exploration.

A third term of GWB would do it..

Posted by: Sam | August 27, 2008 9:41 AM

How about this as an alternate:

SCIENTIST
Use at your own risk for the following applications:
Developing and using nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons; developing and using more effective machine guns; finding new ways to strip the earth of its resources; and conducting experiments on humans that they find to be expendable.

I think that does just as well, don't you?

Posted by: Sam | August 27, 2008 12:13 PM

Chemist #65, nice attempt at a dodge! Well done indeed. Let's look more closely, shall we?

"Now seriously Sam, don't be dense. Scientists don't kill people, people kill people."

So which way do you want it? Is it the case that flawed people do bad things even when the identity group to which they profess allegiance calls for them not to do those bad things, or that the identity group in general can be tagged with evil when members of that identity group do bad things? One way or the other, please.

"What I mean by that is that the various political and social interactions of humanity ensure conflict. Scientists are people too, and unfortunately tend to participate."

And yet, we are told, scientists are Rational. They use Reason. It is those religious wackos, without Reason, remember, who kill and maim.

"Scientists may have invented machine guns,"

And why would they invent machine guns? What measure of effectiveness entered into the calculation to invent them? Did they find it more in accordance with the dictates of Reason that people should be able to kill as many people as possible, as quickly as possible?

"but you have to remember that they also aided in the population expansion that aggravated the conflict, and ensured that there were packed cities to bomb and multitudes of soldiers to kill. You have to take the bad with the good."

Except on this site, of course...

"Scientists didn't invade Czechoslovakia and Poland. Hitler did, and he would have done this with or without crappy guns."

Would he have been able to do so? It seems to me that the scientists who developed the tanks, the titanium armor, the types of weapons, certainly were complicit in the invasion that you mentioned.

And the experiments on humans who are otherwise useless?
http://www.hsl.virginia.edu/historical/medical_history/bad_blood/

This clearly was done in the name of Science, and, presumably, Reason. Just look at all of the information on syphilis that we gained! Heck, it was just a few poor black sharecroppers near the end of their lives, they're pretty much useless anyway, weren't they? We're Scientists, we follow no dictates but Reason.

Again, Chemist, nice try at a dodge.

Posted by: Mr P | August 27, 2008 2:30 PM

@The Chemist - Years back in high school, my chemisty teacher used to have a tee shirt that read 'chemists have solutions'. I think he had the bumper sticker as well.

P

Posted by: speedwell | August 27, 2008 4:13 PM

I work in IT, training engineers to use the software I support. We call our various software tools "Enterprise Solutions." I frequently break the ice and raise a chuckle in my classes by asking the engineered chemicals people what sort of solvent we use.

Posted by: Nick Gotts | August 28, 2008 8:24 AM

Sam,
What are you doing posting on the internet, and using a computer? Don't you know these things were developed by evil scientists? Now this has been pointed out to you, if you post a response to this, we'll all know what a hypocrite you are!

Posted by: Sam | August 28, 2008 9:05 AM

Nick #72--
How very clever of you! Charming.

For those who can think with more than one track, here's the thing. Science, the study of the material world, has provided us with tremendous benefits (and the Church has supported this study with gusto, for those who are willing to remove their anti-Christian ideological blinders and prejudices for a moment or two).

It can also lead us to destruction on a previously inconceivable level--as Theodor Adorno said, progress is most accurately seen as progress from the sling to the atom bomb; as Chemist #65 noted with rare honesty here, "Scientists are people too, and unfortunately tend to participate." The ideal to which the good Prof. Myers and so many of his acolytes here aspire, the freeing of Reason and Science from the shackles of Religion, leads ultimately to Hiroshima and to Tuskegee.

So, let's try another poster, shall we?

SCIENTISTS:
WHEN ONLY COMPLETE ANNIHILATION WILL DO

How does that work for you?

Posted by: Nick Gotts | August 28, 2008 9:17 AM

Sam,
I'm not sure Giordano Bruno would have agreed with you about the Church's support for science. Odd that it's the most religious of scientifically advanced countries that gave us both Hiroshima and Tuskegee, isn't it? Suggests to me that while science does indeed need to be subject to moral considerations, both in its means and its ends, religion isn't the best source for those considerations. So, too, does the record of Christianity - two millennia of killing, torturing and silencing non-Christians, not to mention each other. Christians started this as soon as they had the power to do so, and continued as long as they retained that power. The record of most other religions is not much better. Incidentally, why do you capitalise the initial letters of "science", "reason", and "religion"? Is it sheer ignorance, or is there some deep significance I'm missing?

Posted by: Nick Gotts | August 28, 2008 11:28 AM

RE: Giordano Bruno. Do a tad more research; he was executed for theological heresies, not for his scientific studies or conclusions. - Sam
Crap. One of the main charges against him was a belief in the plurality of worlds. It was his refusal to recant this that led to his death.

Ditto for the "two millennia of killing, torturing, and silencing non-Christians."

Well, starting with the oppression of pagans, Jews, and rival Christian sects in the later Roman Empire; we proceed through through the Crusades (both in the Near East and in Europe) and other medieval persecutions of Jews, Muslims and "heretics"; the witch-burnings, the religious wars of the Reformation and counter-Reformation; the enslavement of millions of native Americans and Africans, often justified on religious grounds, plus forced conversions and the destruction of indigenous cultures through most of the world in the colonial era; the savage "white terror" of the French Revolutionary period - which killed far more than the revolutionary terror preceding it; the essential Christian support for fascism and Nazism in the twentieth century, without which its atrocities against the Jews and others would have been impossible; and coming right up to date, events such as the central role of the Dutch Reformed Church in apartheid, the mutual butchery between Catholics and Protestants in N. Ireland and between Catholics, Orthodox and Muslims in the Balkans, and Christian-Muslim clashes in places such as Nigeria, Lebanon and the Philippines. Will that do for a start?

Posted by: Sam | August 28, 2008 1:05 PM

Nick #76
"Suggests to me that while science does indeed need to be subject to moral considerations, both in its means and its ends, religion isn't the best source for those considerations."

And what would you suggest is? Reason alone?

Posted by: David Marjanović, OM | August 28, 2008 1:57 PM

my chemisty teacher used to have a tee shirt that read 'chemists have solutions'.

If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate!

Posted by: David Marjanović, OM | August 28, 2008 2:06 PM

From the Pharyngula quote collection:

If you want to do evil, science provides the most powerful weapons to do evil; but equally, if you want to do good, science puts into your hands the most powerful tools to do so. The trick is to want the right things, then science will provide you with the most effective methods of achieving them.

-- Richard "Boogeyman" Dawkins

Posted by: David Marjanović, OM | August 28, 2008 2:28 PM

The Crusades? Primarily a defensive war

You're confusing it with the Reconquista. (At best.)

against a rapidly spreading and very strong invasive force that had, shall we say, a less advanced view of human rights than even the Christians at the time.

Details, please.

Do you really think that the cause of Science would be advanced if Europe were under the control of one or several Muslim empires?

Who knows what it would be like by now? At the time of the crusades, the Christian empires were way behind the Muslim empires in terms of science (...and hygiene and whatnot).

The whole idea of science and the scientific method came out of that precisely Christian Europe whence the concept of the university emerged

Do you know how old the al-Azhar university of Cairo is?

And the peaceful citizens of the New World? You've got to be kidding me. They barely stopped carrying out wars among themselves to combat the invading European plunderers.

Tu quoque.

Hitler specifically repudiated Christianity

Depends on how strict your definition of Christianity is. Fun quotes:

And if there is anything which could demonstrate that we are acting rightly, it is the distress that daily grows. For as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people. And when I look on my people I see them work and work and toil and labor, and at the end of the week they have only for their wages wretchedness and misery. When I go out in the morning and see these men standing in their queues and look into their pinched faces, then I believe I would be no Christian, but a very devil, if I felt no pity for them, if I did not, as did our Lord two thousand years ago, turn against those by whom today this poor people are plundered and exploited.
-- Speech, April 12, 1922

My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God's truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in his might and seized the scourge to drive out of the temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was his fight against the Jewish poison. Today, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profpoundly than ever before that it was for this that he had to shed his blood on the Cross. As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice [...].
-- From the same speech

I believe today that my conduct is in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator.
-- Mein Kampf, p. 46

And the founder of Christianity made no secret indeed of his estimation of the Jewish people. When He found it necessary, He drove those enemies of the human race out of the Temple of God.
-- Mein Kampf, p. 174

Catholics and Protestants are fighting with one another... while the enemy of Aryan humanity and all Christendom is laughing up his sleeve.
-- Mein Kampf, p. 309

Secular schools can never be tolerated because such schools have no religious instruction, and a general moral instruction without a religious foundation is built on air; consequently, all character training and religion must be derived from faith [...] we need believing people.
-- from a speech made on April 26, 1933, during negotiations leading to the Nazi-Vatican Concordate of 1933

I believe today that I am acting in the sense of the Almighty Creator. By warding off the Jews I am fighting for the Lord's work.
-- Speech before the Reichstag, 1936

I am now as before a Catholic and will always remain so.
-- to Gen. Gerhard Engel, 1941

Sure, Hitler wasn't alone in the party. Himmler, for example, was more into reviving the Germanic religion. But Göring, for counterexample, wasn't:

God gave the savior to the German people. We have faith, deep and unshakeable faith, that he was sent to us by God to save Germany.

And finally, you should ponder this quote:

Any violence which does not spring from a spiritual base, will be wavering and uncertain. It lacks the stability which can only rest in a fanatical outlook.
-- Mein Kampf, p. 171

"Good people do good things, and evil people do evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion." Where "religion" has the broad sense of including all irrational ideologies.