ET, call Lexington

If you needed more evidence that we're living in surreal times, some scientists have collaborated with the Tourism Board of Lexington, Kentucky to send a message to aliens inviting them to come to the city for a visit.

The message was sent via infrared laser toward TRAPPIST-1, a multi-planet system about forty light years from Earth.  Astonishingly, they actually got permission from the Federal Aviation Administration -- not a government office known either for its flexibility or its sense of humor -- to beam the message out.  The message, in coded bitmap form, contained information regarding the intent of the transmission, some photographs of the Lexington area, and an audio recording of blues musician Tee Dee Young.

"The bitmap image is the key to it all," said Andrew Byrd, a linguistics expert at the University of Kentucky, who was one of the scholars involved in the project.  "We included imagery representing the elements of life, our iconic Lexington rolling hills, and the molecular structure for water, bourbon, and even dopamine because Lexington is fun."

It also contained the message, "Come to Lexington!  We have horses and bourbon.  Just don't eat us."

I feel obliged to interject here that I'm not making any of this up.

The Lexington Tourism Board's promo art for the project, which I also did not make up

Regular readers of Skeptophilia know that the possibility of alien life -- perhaps intelligent life -- is a near-obsession with me, but I'm not sure this is really the way to go about trying to contact it.  While TRAPPIST-1 isn't a bad choice given the fact that it's fairly close and we know it has seven planets, there's no indication any of them host life.  Four of the planets appear to orbit within the star's "Goldilocks Zone," where the temperatures are "just right" for water to exist in liquid form, but that doesn't mean the planets have liquid water, or even atmospheres.  The fact that the planets have such tight orbits -- the farthest one only has an orbital radius six percent of Earth's, and orbits its star in nineteen days -- suggests they're probably tidally locked, meaning the same side of the planet always faces the star.  (I wrote about the difficulty of life evolving on a tidally-locked planet a year ago, if you're curious to read more about it.)

Then there's the problem of waving hello at aliens who might be vastly more powerful than we are and would respond by squashing us.  Stephen Hawking addressed this in stark terms back in 2010, saying, "We don't know much about aliens, but we know about humans.  If you look at history, contact between humans and less intelligent organisms have often been disastrous from their point of view, and encounters between civilizations with advanced versus primitive technologies have gone badly for the less advanced.  A civilization reading one of our messages could be billions of years ahead of us.  If so, they will be vastly more powerful, and may not see us as any more valuable than we see bacteria."

Of course, if there are intelligent aliens out there, they probably already know about us.  At least the ones under 104 light years away do, because there's an expanding bubble of radio and television transmissions sweeping outward from us at the speed of light that began with the first commercial radio broadcast in 1920.  Assuming any aliens on the receiving end are at least as smart and technologically capable as we are, they're probably already decoding those transmissions and listening to Fibber McGee and Molly and watching Lost in Space, after which they will definitely think we're no more valuable than bacteria.

The last issue -- and this may be the good news, here, if you buy what Hawking said -- is that because TRAPPIST-1 is forty light years away, any aliens who might live there won't receive the message until 2064, and the earliest we could get a response is 2104.  Even if they have some kind of superluminal means of travel and jumped into their spaceships as soon as they got the message, it wouldn't be until the 2060s that they could even potentially get here.  

At least the Lexington Tourism Board has a good window of time to get their hotels ready for the influx of alien tourists.  And if they turn out to be hostile, at that point (if I'm still alive) I'll be over a hundred years old, and I figure that an alien laser pistol blast to the face is about as dramatic a way to check out as I could ask for, so I suspect I'll be fine with the Earth being invaded regardless which way it goes.

So the Lexington Tourism Board's efforts fall squarely into the "No Harm If It Amuses You" department.  And I guess the more time people spend focusing on this sort of thing, the less they'll spend dreaming up new and different ways to be awful to each other.  So as far as that goes, I'm all for sending messages to the stars.

Even if the best things you can think of to talk about are horses, bourbon, and dopamine.

****************************************

Straw man induction

There's a general rule of debate, and it goes something like this: you don't score any points by picking out some absurdly weak line of reasoning, characterizing your opponents as holding that view, arguing against it, and claiming victory.

This is called the straw-man fallacy, and is all too common.  It's why we have conservatives arguing that all liberals want to give away America to illegal immigrants, lock, stock, and barrel.  It's why we have liberals arguing that all conservatives want to sell us out to big corporations, and along the way, deny rights to everyone but white Christian males.

The truth, of course, is more nuanced than that on both sides, but this requires (1) thought, and (2) an admission that your opponents' views, when represented fairly, are worthy at least of intelligent consideration.  And that seems to be beyond a lot of people these days.

To take two examples of this -- one from each side of the aisle, to demonstrate that straw man arguments are no respecter of political leanings -- let's take a look at two different views of yesterday's eclipse.  Neither, I hasten to state, appears to be a parody, although you'd certainly be justified in thinking they might be.

First, we have a group called "Kentuckians for Coal," who actually protested the eclipse, claiming that even freakin' astronomical objects were conspiring to take attention away from the plight of coal miners.  The protest took place in Hopkinsville, which was along the path of totality, something that struck the Kentuckians for Coal as not being a coincidence.

Here's their mission statement:

Kentuckians for Coal is an ad-hoc coalition of miners, union officials, family members and coal users created to defend the Kentucky coal industry against encroachment from renewable energy industries and from economic development initiatives aimed at lessening America's dependence on coal.  Kentuckians for Coal stands against the eclipse and those who worship it.

Well, I think the eclipse is pretty cool, but "worship" goes a bit far.  And it's hard to see how you could be against clean, renewable energy.  I get that we're talking about people's livelihoods, here; but at some point, there needs to be a choice made whether a particular industry is worth saving when it's balanced against the long-term habitability of the Earth.  (And, I might add, that a lot of this would be moot if the government would step in and fund retraining of these out-of-work miners, and guarantee them jobs in the renewable energy industry, which is one of the fastest-growing professions in the United States.)

A few of the signs carried at the protest read as follows:

• A Mine Is A Terrible Thing To Waste
• Climate Change Is a Hoax!
• You can count on coal 24/7. You can't always depend on the sun! 
• Still Think Solar Makes Sense?
• Coal Never Quits
• You Can Depend On Coal!
• The Solar Industry Is Modernizing Us Out of Jobs!
• Coal was good enough for my forefathers, it's good enough for me!
• This much time and money spent for 2 minutes and 40 seconds

To their credit, the person carrying the last-mentioned sign was followed by someone carrying a sign saying, "That's what she said."

[image courtesy of photographer Luc Viatour and the Wikimedia Commons]

But lest the liberals in the studio audience start crowing about how much smarter and more sensible they are than the silly ol' conservatives, allow me to direct your attention to an article in The Atlantic by Brooklyn Law School professor Alice Ristroph, entitled, "Racial History in the Solar Eclipse Path of Totality," which says basically that the path of yesterday's eclipse was inherently biased against minorities.

Don't believe me?  Here's a sample:

It has been dubbed the Great American Eclipse, and along most of its path, there live almost no black people...  [A]n eclipse chaser is always tempted to believe that the skies are relaying a message.  At a moment of deep disagreement about the nation’s best path forward, here comes a giant round shadow, drawing a line either to cut the country in two or to unite it as one.  Ancient peoples watched total eclipses with awe and often dread, seeing in the darkness omens of doom.  The Great American Eclipse may or may not tell us anything about our future, but its peculiar path could remind us of something about our past—what it was we meant to be doing, and what we actually did along the way.

No, Professor Ristroph, what the Great American Eclipse reminded us of is that when something gets in front of the Sun, it casts a shadow.  End of story.

But that doesn't stop her from telling us about how terrible it is that the path of totality excludes minorities; in fact, the Moon seems to have chosen its path with deliberate bigotry in mind:

About a third of Kansas City, Missouri, is black, but most of the city lies just south of the path of totality. To get the full show, eclipse chasers should go north to St. Joseph, almost 90 percent white and about 6 percent black...

Moving east, the eclipse will pass part of St. Louis, whose overall population is nearly half black. But the black residents are concentrated in the northern half of the metropolitan area, and the total eclipse crosses only the southern half.

Of course, even by her own admission, her whole argument kind of falls apart when the eclipse gets to South Carolina, but by this time, any credibility she might have had is down the toilet anyhow.  So even if you got that far -- and the article is a long one -- I doubt that'd salvage whatever it was she was trying to point out.

Now don't misunderstand me.  There are huge racial inequities in the United States, and those deserve serious attention.  Likewise, apropos of the Kentuckians for Coal, the issue of displaced workers, poor communities, and lost jobs is not one we should scoff at.

But claiming the eclipse has a damn thing to do with either one is pretty fucking ridiculous, and you're not doing your argument any good by claiming that it does.

So the take-home message is, "let's keep our eye on the ball, shall we?"  If you want to draw attention to the plight of the unemployed or the problems of race and privilege, have at it.  But saying the whole thing boils down to astronomy is idiotic.  And throwing together a straw-man argument is not going to convince anyone who wasn't already convinced.

The holy book deal

UPDATE:  I'm deleting this post.  Turns out, I (and millions of others, including the editorial staff of USA Today) were the victims of a hoax.  Kim Davis did not receive a book deal -- for which I am, honestly, very grateful.

The origin of the story was The National Report, a satire site.  To my credit, if the source had been The National Report, I would have realized it -- TNR is sort of a less clever version of The Onion, and I've seen their stuff before.  But such is the way of things that bullshit stories sometimes gain unmerited credence by working their way up the media ladder, and this one duped the people at USA Today and other more reputable media outlets -- and thus, yours truly here at Skeptophilia.

All of which reinforces that we all need to check sources carefully.  Thanks to the folks who let me know that I'd fallen prey to Poe's Law.

We'll be back to our regularly scheduled (and, with luck, more reliable) programming tomorrow.

Tantrums over Kim Davis

I told myself that I wouldn't comment on the whole Kim Davis thing, that other and better voices had already said what needed to be said.  The Rowan County, Kentucky county clerk who refused to follow the law of the land and issue marriage licenses to LGBT couples on the grounds that it was inconsistent with her Christian beliefs has been jailed for contempt of court, and there you are.

But of course the whole kerfuffle has resulted in the Christian Persecution Party roaring back with a vengeance.  This movement was started a few years ago by evangelicals who think that (1) not getting your way is the same as being oppressed, (2) it's persecution if you're not allowed to visit your own beliefs on every other citizen in the United States, and (3) the 74% of Americans who self-identify as Christians represent an embattled minority.

Think I'm exaggerating?  Let's start with online loudmouth Joshua Feuerstein, who had the following to say:

I told you a long time ago, ladies and gentlemen, that the LGBT community has one agenda and that is to come after Christians.  That has been the agenda all along. They want to put the clamp on Christianity in America, and you either back them and support them or you’re going to jail… 

… I challenge you to get there, to Rowan County, and let’s make sure that Kim is let out of jail.  It’s not fair that a Christian is persecuted and thrown in jail simply for not endorsing gay marriage.

Sorry, Josh, but that's a lie.  Kim Davis isn't in jail because she is a Christian.  She's in jail because she is an elected official who refused to follow a federal law even after being ordered to do so by the court.

Then we had the ever-baffling Mike Huckabee weighing in:

Kim Davis in federal custody removes all doubts about the criminalization of Christianity in this country.  We must defend Religious Liberty!...  Look, you would have hated Lincoln, because he disregarded the Dred Scott 1857 decision that said black people aren’t fully human.  [Lincoln] disregarded [Dred Scott] because he knew it was not operative, that it was not logical.

Wait a moment.  You are... you are seriously saying that Kim Davis is like Lincoln because she's denying rights to a group of American citizens?  And then defending that comparison by showing how Lincoln did the exact opposite?

And finally, no BizarroFest would be complete without a contribution from Ted Cruz:

Those who are persecuting Kim Davis believe that Christians should not serve in public office. [...] Or, if Christians do serve in public office, they must disregard their religious faith–or be sent to jail. 

Today, judicial lawlessness crossed into judicial tyranny.  Today, for the first time ever, the government arrested a Christian woman for living according to her faith.  This is wrong.  This is not America. 

I stand with Kim Davis.  Unequivocally. I stand with every American that the Obama Administration is trying to force to chose [sic] between honoring his or her faith or complying with a lawless court opinion.

No, Ted, we think Kim Davis belongs in jail because she refused to do her fucking job.

But you know, the whole thing smacks of hypocrisy anyway.  What do you think these same braying wingnuts would say in the following situations?

• A Muslim food store checkout clerk who refused to ring up a customer because he was purchasing pork.
• A Quaker who worked for the sheriff's office and refused to issue an adult a handgun license.
• A vegan who worked for the US Fish and Wildlife Service and refused to issue a hunter a deer hunting permit.
• A Christian Scientist clerk in a pharmacy who refused to sell customers any drugs at all.

Think they'd support any of those?

Yeah, right.

Jean-Léon Gérôme, The Martyrs' Last Prayer (1883) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

How about calling it like it is?  You are perfectly within your rights to refuse to do a job that interferes with your religious beliefs.  But in that case, you should not hold that job.  If Kim Davis had resigned because she wasn't comfortable issuing marriage licenses to LGBT individuals, that would have been intolerant of her, but at least the honorable way to follow her religious precepts.  That she expects to keep a job, while using her religion to get out of doing it, is ridiculous.

The Religious Right positively relishes the opportunity to cast themselves as this century's Christians being eaten by lions in the Colosseum, when exactly the opposite is true; they are the ones attempting to use their position to force their belief system on everyone else.  So instead of deriding Kim Davis as a shirker who is getting paid for a job she refuses to do, or a scofflaw who sticks up her middle finger at the law of the land, she's given shouts of acclamation for being a staunch True Believer in the face of dreadful persecution.

So it's time to say it to their faces: throwing a tantrum because you'd like to force everyone to dance to your music, and no one's cooperating, is what toddlers do.

Grow up.

Lawsuits and sinking ships

It's been a bad week for the creationists.

First we had the news in Kansas that U. S. District Judge Daniel Crabtree has dismissed a lawsuit by Citizens for Objective Public Education that claimed that teaching evolution amounted to the endorsement of atheism, calling it "without merit."

COPE objected to the Next Generation Science Standards, which are unequivocal in their support of the evolutionary model, saying that they "lead impressionable students into the religious sphere by leading them to ask ultimate questions like what is the cause and nature of life in the universe — 'where do we come from?'"

This casts science teachers in the role of theologians, COPE says, even though science "has not answered these religious questions and never can."

What's interesting about this is that they're partly right.  Science is closing in on more and more of the big questions -- how the universe began, the origins of life on Earth, whether life might be possible on other planets orbiting other stars.  But where they get this badly wrong is that these aren't religious questions.  Religion answers these questions one way -- "god did it" -- and then promptly says "q.e.d." and closes the book.  It makes no tests of its claims, runs no experiments, does not revise the model if new data comes to light.

Science teachers aren't theologians.  Far from it.  Science and religion as methods are diametrically opposed to one another.  If science and religion come to different answers about a question, you have to choose one or the other.  There is no reconciling them, because their ways of arriving at the truth have little in common.

But in a way, by teaching evolution, we are making a statement with some theological import.  We're saying that science works, that it is in this case a better way of knowing the truth than religion is.  But this isn't that shocking, really.  Even most extremely religious folks trust science in a host of other areas.  It's not like fundamentalists are asking us to jettison the periodic table in favor of revealed truth regarding the composition of matter.  Evolution has become something of a last-stand battleground, where science's evidence-based answers and religion's evidence-free claims are coming to blows.

Crabtree, predictably, danced around that point a little, merely claiming in his ruling that COPE had not been able to provide specific enough details of the injuries NGSS is supposed to have inflicted upon innocent children.  I guess it wouldn't be politic for a federal judge to come right out and say, "Get your damn noses out of the science classroom."


So this has understandably put creationists on the defensive, and far be it from Ken Ham not to be the leader of the pack.  He announced this week that he's starting a billboard campaign in Kentucky, aimed at people who have laughed at his "Ark Encounter" project:

What I find most amusing about this is that he has somehow linked an understanding of science with being liberal, which last I checked weren't the same thing.  But as a ploy, it's pretty shrewd, given that he's operating in a part of the United States where "liberals" are right up there with "baby eaters" in popularity.

But as Hemant Mehta points out, there are a number of other problems with Ham's claim, first and foremost being that atheists could care less if Ham builds an ark, we just want him to follow the law while he's doing it.  (Recall that the whole project came under legal scrutiny when it was found that Ham was requiring all of his employees to sign a contract promising that they'd adhere to biblical literalism, which is illegal for a for-profit corporation that is in line for $18,000,000 in state tax breaks.)

And as Mehta also mentioned, you can't sink this ship largely because it's on land, and we're not really friends.  But Ham has never been known to allow reality to intrude on his vision, so there's no reason we should expect him to start now.

In any case, these efforts strike me as desperation, and it may be that we're seeing the last gasps of this fundamentally anti-science worldview.  At some point, they're bound to give up, right?

One can only hope.  If the creationists are struggling in states like Kansas and Kentucky, it might be that as a nation we can finally move past Bronze Age mythology as a primary basis for understanding.

Falling for fear talk

Ignorance and fear go together.  They grow in the same environments, and feed off each other like some sort of bizarre pair of symbiotic life forms.  The antidote to both is knowledge and understanding.

It's astonishing, though, how resistant some people are to taking that particular medicine.  For example, consider what happened last week in Louisville, Kentucky, where a teacher resigned over parental fears that she was carrying Ebola after a trip to Africa.

Susan Sherman, a religious education teacher at St. Margaret Mary Catholic School, had recently returned from a mission trip to Kenya.  When she got back home, the administration required her to produce a health note from her doctor, and to take a "precautionary 21 day leave."

Parents began to call in with concerns.  Would she be quarantined during that time?  What if this wasn't sufficiently long to cover the incubation period of the disease?  Was it safe to let her come back at all?

So Sherman resigned.

Can we just clarify one thing, here, to you provincial Americans who failed high school geography?  Africa is not one country.  It's lots of countries.

And it's freakin' huge.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The continent of Africa is larger than Europe, China, India, and the United States combined.  The distance between Kenya (where Ms. Sherman was) and Nigeria (the nearest country that had a case of Ebola in the recent outbreak) is about 2000 miles -- about the same as the distance between Washington, D. C. and Phoenix, Arizona.

So if there'd been some cases of Ebola in Arizona, would you force teachers in Washington, D.C. to take 21-day leaves "just in case?"

Look, I understand why people panic about this thing.  Ebola is one terrifying virus.  The end stages of the disease are about as grotesque as anything I can think of.  But the situation isn't going to be helped by succumbing to the media's perpetual fear-talk.

Listen to the scientists.  I know, it's a radical proposal, but still.  And the scientists say:

1. Ebola is hard to catch.  You have to come into direct contact with the body fluids of a person who has active Ebola symptoms in order to catch the disease.
2. The disease is not transmissible at all during its incubation period.
3. This outbreak has been limited to West Africa, in particular the countries of Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia.  All of the people who have contracted Ebola have had contact with individuals from that region.
4. The handful of verified cases in the United States have been managed through quarantine and aggressive medical treatment, and all but one of them have survived the disease.

So basically: calm down.  The likelihood of this becoming a global pandemic is slim to none.  

Not that this is going to help Ms. Sherman, who is now out of a job because of the ignorant fears of a few parents, and an administration who didn't have the sense to stand up to them.  Instead of telling those parents, "Read the medical literature.  Also learn some geography," they allowed hype to rule the day, in the name of "precaution."

And in the end, the students and staff of St. Margaret Mary Catholic School were exactly as safe as they were to start with (i.e., very safe), and a teacher who decided to go to Kenya to help people is having to search the employment ads.

Hiring a crew for the ark

I've written before about "Ark Encounter," the biblical theme park currently under construction in Williamston, Kentucky.  The centerpiece, a giant replica of Noah's Ark, is scheduled to open for visitors in 2016, and the park has received promises of millions of dollars in state tax breaks as an incentive.

Simon de Myle, Noah's Ark on Mount Ararat (1570) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

It is this last-mentioned bit that has created controversy, because as a clearly religious attraction, to have what amounts to government financial support for something like Ark Encounter raises serious issues of the separation of church and state.  But no more, really, than the fact that churches themselves are exempt from property tax, a practice that I find frankly baffling.

But now the Ark has ended up in further hot water because Ark Encounter's executive president, Mike Zovath, has begun looking for employees for the park, and has issued a statement that any applicants need to sign a statement that they believe in biblical inerrancy in general, and the veracity of the Great Flood in particular.

Gil Lawson, communications director for the Kentucky Tourism, Arts, and Heritage Cabinet, said that such a practice would run counter to the law, and would result in Zovath's enterprise losing its tax breaks.  "We expect all of the companies that get tax incentives to obey the law," Lawson said, which seems unequivocal enough.

It does raise a couple of questions, though.  The first is, why would anyone who doesn't believe in the Great Flood even want to work there?  I certainly wouldn't, mostly because it would require my keeping both my temper and a straight face when talking to people who believe that somehow one dude from Palestine rounded up pairs of every species on Earth, including musk ox from the Yukon, and put them all on a single boat.

Not to mention believing that a six-hundred-year-old man and his four-hundred-year-old sons built said boat in less than a year, despite the fact that huge crews of construction workers, using modern tools, started working on an ark four years ago and still aren't done.  Good thing we're not counting on them to save us from a Divine Flood, isn't it?

But that's not the only problem.  In one sense, isn't Zovath in the right for expecting that his employees will support the mission of the company for which they work?  Recall the hue and cry over Martin Gaskell's disqualification for a directorship at the University of (guess where) Kentucky's astronomical observatory back in 2010 because he was a biblical literalist, who therefore disbelieved in not only the Big Bang but in the size and age of the observable universe.  Secularists, including myself, said, "Well, duh.  Of course he's not qualified.  He doesn't believe in the fundamentals of the field he's representing."

The problem is, the knife cuts both ways, and in fact in the piece I wrote about Gaskell (linked above), I even used the example of an atheist who applies for a position as a minister of a Christian church, and then complains when he doesn't get hired.  Isn't that what's happening here?

Zovath, of course, is a little panicked, because the loss of the tax credits could cost his company an average of 1.8 million dollars a year.  And it's not like they haven't already had their money woes; they've had repeated delays because of funding issues.  "We’re hoping the state takes a hard look at their position, and changes their position so it doesn’t go further than this," Zovath told reporters, when the state's objecting to his hiring practices hit the news.

So I find myself unexpectedly on Zovath's side, here.  On the other hand, the whole thing would never have become an issue if the state of Kentucky hadn't flouted separation of church and state laws by giving them tax incentives in the first place.

In any case, it'll be interesting to see how the whole thing plays out.  If I can indulge in a moment of schadenfreude, I have to admit that no one will be happier than me if the whole Ark Encounter capsizes; the last thing we need is more glitzy opportunities to pass off Bronze Age mythology as science to children.  But it does place the state of Kentucky in a peculiar quandary.  Either they have to push Ark Encounter into a hiring practice that might result in their having employees who think what they're doing is idiotic, or they have to admit that they were wrong to give a purely religious enterprise government-funded tax incentives.

Which, I believe, is called "the chickens coming home to roost."

SATs, STDs, and school prayer

Yesterday, we saw one example of mistaking correlation for causation -- that being a skeptic (or materialist, or rationalist) is why two prominent skeptics had apparent serious moral lapses.  Today, we'll look at a second -- a group that is claiming that the elimination of school prayer is why student SAT scores have dropped in the United States.

The American Family Association of Kentucky currently has a petition out asking people to vote on whether or not prayer should be allowed in public schools.  First, we have the following photograph, to put us all in the right frame of mind:

And then, there's the meat of the argument, if I can dignify it with that term:

Prayer was in our schools for over 200 years before the anti-God forces took it out in 1962. After prayer was removed from our schools, teen pregnancy went up 500%, STD’s went up 226%, violent crime went up 500% and SAT scores went down for 18 years in a row, opening the door for the AIDS epidemic and the drug culture.

WE NEED PRAYER BACK IN SCHOOLS!

We need to do this, the author of the petition (Frank Simon) says, in order to "return God's protection to America."

Wow.  Where do I start?

First off, if someone is claiming that two things are not only correlated, but exist in a causative relationship, the first thing to do is to determine if there really is even a correlation.  So I looked up the Commonwealth Foundation's breakdown of SAT results state by state.  If god really does care about SAT scores, to the point where he awards the best scores not to the kids that are the smartest or the hardest working but to the kids who pray the most, there should be a correlation between the most religious states and the highest scores, right?  Interestingly, in three states that are pretty solidly Christian -- Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana -- only 4%, 8%, and 9% of qualified high school students even took the SATs last year, although admittedly the average scores of the students who did take it land those states solidly in the middle of the pack.  And I guess even god can't give you good scores on an exam you didn't take.

So what about teen pregnancy?  Once again, if you think the spread of atheism has caused this supposed 500% increase in teen pregnancy, you should see the godly states having lower rates than the ungodly ones, right?  So I looked at the National Campaign to End Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy's page on state data, and guess where Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi fell?  14th, 8th, and 2nd worst (i.e. highest teen pregnancy rates) overall.  Other states in the top ten were Tennessee, Georgia, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Texas, also so-called "Bible-Belt" states.

Hmm.  I guess that when it comes to preventing teen pregnancy, sex education and availability of birth control work better than praying.  Whoda thought?

And because I'm nothing if not thorough, I decided to check STD rates state-by-state, so I went to the Center for Disease Control's Data Atlas, and guess where the most new cases of STDs in 2012 were?  Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama.  In that order.

Well, well.

I think what bothers me most about this, though, is the way these people are framing this as a religious freedom issue -- the subtitle on the petition page says, "Restore Student Religious Liberty."  One of my first mentors, when I started teaching, was a wonderful science teacher who was also a devout Christian.  I was discussing religion with him one day, and he said something that was very interesting.  "I never bring up religion in class," he said.  "My own beliefs are irrelevant in the classroom.  But more than that; teachers need to keep in mind that they are talking to captive audiences made up of kids of diverse backgrounds and beliefs.  Because of that, you have to be extremely careful when discussing anything that has bearing on political or religious issues.  The best teachers challenge all of their students, not just the ones they disagree with."

So, the bottom line is, students are free to pray in their churches.  They are also free to pray, silently, during class, or any other time during the day.  (I suspect a lot of prayer goes on prior to my administering exams.)  On the other hand, it is not ethical for teachers or administrators to lead prayers in public schools.  At that point, it is no longer an issue of religious liberty, it is an issue of forced proselytization.  And that, actually, is the opposite of liberty.

Builders of the lost ark

New from the "I Wish I Were Kidding" department, today we have a story that as much as $37.5 million in taxpayer-funded rebates could go to the building of a theme park in Kentucky called Ark Encounter whose goal is to prove that the story of Noah's Ark is "plausible."

You may have heard about this before.  In fact, regular readers of Skeptophilia might recall that I mentioned it in a post a year ago, but in the context of a project that seemed doomed to fail because of lack of investment.  Well, to misquote Twain, rumors of its demise were great exaggerations.  A story in Reuters yesterday indicates that plans for the theme park are indeed going forward, and the application for the tax incentives -- set to expire if they are not claimed by May 2014 -- will be refiled if good Christians don't step up to the plate with donations.

Patrick Marsh, the design director for the park, says that the point of the attraction is to show visitors that Noah could actually have had two of each terrestrial animal on Earth on a 500-foot-long wooden boat for forty days.  (Well, actually, it may not have been two.  Genesis 7:2 says that Noah needed seven of each "clean beast" and two each of the "unclean beasts;" only six verses later, we're told that it was two of everybody.  Since both verses are the unchanging, infallible word of god, we're forced to the conclusion that 2=7, which should definitely be worked into public school math classes next year.)

The current estimate for the number of animal species on Earth, just for reference, is (at a low estimate) five million.  That's ten million animals, if you believe Genesis 7:8 and not Genesis 7:2.  Idealizing the Ark as a rectangular solid, 500x100x100 feet in its length, breadth, and height respectively, that comes to five million cubic feet.  So each animal on the Ark, including the giraffes, gets exactly 0.5 cubic feet in which to stretch its legs.  Oh, yeah, and don't forget that these people believe that the dinosaurs were on there, too.  You'd think that just having one brachiosaurus on board would be enough to kind of cramp things, wouldn't you?

Remind me again about how this is plausible.  I keep losing that point.

Marsh says that there could be some ways of getting around this objection, however.  "If you start with a wolf, you can basically generate all of these dog-like kinds," said Marsh. "As for large animals like dinosaurs, Noah could have brought them on as eggs or juveniles, to save room."

Wait, now, hold on just a moment.  From wolves, we could "generate dog-like kinds?"  I.e., starting with a wolf, and given some ecological selective pressures, we could eventually end up with a hyena, a fox, a chihuahua?  Hmm, Mr. Marsh, I think there's a name for this process.  I've forgotten what it is just now... give me a moment, I'm sure it'll come to me.

Oh, but a giant wooden boat is not all Ark Encounter will have!  Since the whole message of Noah's Ark was that the all-knowing, all-seeing god produced humans who became so unexpectedly wicked that he had to press the "Smite" button and start over, the theme park will also have a mock-up of a pagan temple, with pagan ceremonies done in a "Disneyesque" way, whatever that means.  There will also be a "Ten Plagues" ride.  ("Hey, Dad!  Let's do the 'Ten Plagues ride' again!  I loved when the rollercoaster cars slowed down in front of the 'Killing of the Firstborn Children' display!")

I know you think I'm making this up, but I'm not.  In a direct quote that I am not nearly creative enough to fabricate, Marsh said, "You want everyone to have fun and buy souvenirs and have a good time, but you also want to tell everybody how terrible everything (was)."

What I can understand even less than I get why anyone believes that this obviously mythological nonsense is true, is how the public tax incentives for this project don't violate separation of church and state.  How are the ACLU and various atheist and secular humanist organizations not challenging this in court?  Maybe there are actions going forward which I haven't heard about, but at the moment, most secular legal groups seem to be just watching and waiting.

As for Marsh, and Ark Encounter senior vice president Michael Zovath, they are completely unapologetic about what they're doing.  "If somebody wants to come into Kentucky and build a Harry Potter park and teach all the fun things about witchcraft, nobody would say a word about it - they'd just think it was so cool," Zovath said.  "But if we want to come in ... and build a Biblical theme park, everybody goes crazy."

Yes, Mr. Zovath, that's because everyone knows that Harry Potter is fiction, whereas you seem to be under the mistaken impression that the bible is fact.  My guess is that if someone tried to set up "Hogwarts" in Kentucky, and was making claims that they were actually teaching kids to cast spells and to ride brooms, there would be a bit of a hue and cry.

So, anyway, that's the latest from the Bronze Age mythology = literal truth crowd.  I keep thinking that people have to come to their senses eventually and realize that these folk-tales-become-fact are no more plausible than the idea that earthquakes are caused by Midgard's Serpent having bad dreams, but the biblical literalists just won't go away.  In any case, I'd better wind this up.  I've got to finish up the drawings of my suggestions for the "Cattle Disease" and "Rivers Turning to Blood" features of the "Ten Plagues" ride.