I was just reading Pharyngula, and PZ has a post about David Barton which made me smile. Barton loves the naturalistic fallacy, and uses it to “prove” that even without God in the equation, abortion and homosexuality are evil. Naturally, PZ gives him his comeuppance with a quite but effective refutation of his arguments, but I wanted to go into a list of a few things that would also be evil or good in a world where the naturalist fallacy were a basis for human behavior.

1. Infanticide GOOD!
Oh don’t make that face, you knew I’d start here. One behavior that happens fairly regularly in nature is the killing of children. When a new male lion, for example, overthrows the head of a pride of lions, they will often kill the cubs. That way, the mothers aren’t distracted by mommying duties from their baby-making duties with the new alpha, and his genetics get the immediate chance to thrive. And it ain’t just lions, it happens all over the place in the animal kingdom. Obviously, if it happens in nature, it has to be good.

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I know that I’ve talked about this before here, but I don’t think I’ve ever gone into any real detail. Today, I want to talk about wonder. Regularly, you hear people talk about how faith leads to wonder, and that one of the least appealing things about science is that it destroys wonder. I disagree implicitly.

In the words of Inigo Montoya from the movie The Princess Bride, you keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. Wonder actually has a variety of meanings, but the one that people are referring to when they talk about faith-based wonder is interchangeable with the word awe.

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I have trouble sometimes reading The Crommunist’s blog, but I’m fairly certain that this trouble is largely due to my being a white, privileged male in a society that loves that. I don’t think of myself as privileged, which adds to my confusion. I’m poor and struggling to make ends meet, I have worked for what little I have, and far from being propelled forward, I am often held back by people. But the truth of things, and I know this, is that lots of people have it far worse than I, and for reasons that come right down to things like the color of their skin, the faith they hold dear, and the community they live in. When I say I have trouble with The Crommunist, I mean that I have trouble seeing the truth in that regard, but I’m trying, and I read his blog because more often than not when I really think about his posts, he’s right and I’m wrong.

The post of his that I just read, however, is one that I can definitely relate to. It’s called To Deceive And Project, and talks about the disgusting underbelly of the police. His post is largely about those undercover cops whose job appears to be inciting trouble from within activist groups, but I can relate on my own level.

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Someone asked me this question on Facebook, and I figured I’d answer it here. I love television. I don’t love all of it, but there are shows I quite enjoy. Most of them are brain candy, and I don’t feel at all guilty about that. For a guy who does as much as I do, I think a little bit of vegging out is sometimes exactly what a guy needs. With a PVR, I can watch the programming I want when I want it, and that just works really nicely in my life.

But there are a lot of other shows that I watch, things like science programming and various documentaries that I really enjoy, and that the Lovely Lady enjoys as much if not more than me. I’m also happy to watch shows like Mythbusters and Penn And Teller Tell A Lie with the Demon so that we can exercise that skeptical mindset. Sometimes I’ll even watch the news, but usually only when something has happened and I want to find out more about it. That’s hardly the only source I go to, but it works. And when Neil Degrasse Tyson’s re-do of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos comes on, you can damn sure bet we’ll be watching that.

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It has been far too long since I got to spend time with my kids, but I’ll be on a plane tonight to see them. This pleases me greatly. It’ll probably be a quiet weekend for blog posts, but you never know when the ole’ vitriol will start to flow. The news is always awash with so much ridiculousness, and I can blog from my phone, so we’ll see what happens.

I love flying places. I hate waiting at airports, but I love flying. Fortunately, I’ll have my laptop, complete with several movies I’ve bought but haven’t got around to watching just yet, so I’m sure I’ll handle the boredom. When I came back from Amsterdam, I had a 13 hour layover in Houston from 10:00 pm to 11:00 am, so this is nowhere near that bad. I just have to be there an hour early.

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I don’t believe that shopping is the major threat to the world that some do, nor do I mind the consumerist nature of Christmas. The way I sees it, Christmas is a time of year when people try very hard to do nice things for the people they love. Buying stuff isn’t how to go about that, but that’s getting into semantics. I don’t personally believe that people rushing around to buy things for the people they love is a bad thing. But Black Friday is, because it brings out the worst in people.

I remember as a kid when people were getting into brawls over Cabbage Patch Kids. I remember fisticuffs over Tickle Me Elmo. I don’t believe these things happened on Black Friday to the day, but the behavior is tied to what Black Friday represents. It is the fear that you won’t find The Perfect Gift. It is the irrationality that says you deserve to be the one to buy The Perfect Gift. And it leads to ridiculousness.

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A few days ago, my dear friend Rachael came by to interview me. She’s a news editor for The Reflector, a newspaper and online media site for Mount Royal University, and she wanted to talk to me about atheism, blogging, and all the weird stuff that makes me me. And it’s going to be a multimedia extravaganza! She videotaped me talking, and we filmed some B-roll. Today she’s going to pop by to get some more B-roll.

What’s B-roll? I’m stunned you don’t know! I mean, I didn’t know until she used the term and then explained it a few days ago, but now that I know I can get all smug and bet stunned that you don’t know!

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In 1997, the VPD and the RCMP had evidence that a man named Robert Pickton had attempted to murder a sex worker on his farm near Vancouver. It took them another three years to arrest Pickton. In the ensuing time, he murdered 14 more women. There are those who might find that unacceptable.

I would be one of them.

Now, RCMP Corporal Catherine Galliford is about to testify to the Missing Women Commission of Inquiry that, at least in her opinion, the raging misogyny of the task force who would rather watch porn and skip work than do their jobs led directly to the deaths of these 14 women.

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Once again, reading Crommunist’s blog has me thinking. This time, it’s an article entitled When should we stop? which is about Affirmative Action. It’s a frustrating topic, because we really aren’t in an equal society. The points made in his article are totally valid and I find them difficult. I’m going to provide my rather uncomfortable comments, and I’m going to overuse the word honky to mask my discomfort.

Sometimes I forget that I live in a city that has a great deal of race troubles. I’m a honky, and we aren’t exactly having trouble being represented in government, but it isn’t just my white guy naivete, we’ve made some actual progress. Our mayor isn’t a white guy, and race really didn’t seem like it mattered in the election, although I’m sure some hate the fact that our mayor is brown. But if you look at our Aldermen, only one is a visible minority (John Mar, alderman of Ward 8). According to our 2006 census data, we’re still a very white city, so perhaps this is legitimately representative. It’s a little hard to tell with this data the exact breakdown of ethnicity. It would appear that we have nobody from Africa living here, which seems highly suspect, and tells me that I probably don’t have all the information.

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Well, I’m glad you asked. It went super awesome.

That isn’t to say I couldn’t do better, but I think the difference between the stand-up I did back in college is striking, and the amount of improvement between my show last month and this one was amazing. I did what makes sense this time, and that is that I took the time to really look at my jokes and cut the hell out of them.

Let me give you a fake example. Let’s say I was telling a joke featuring a day with my kids:

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