Is the GSS trying to kill The Peak?

Obviously, I’m biased in the upcoming SFU Graduate Student Society elections regarding the referendum question that asks whether grad students want to continue funding the Peak, but I think anyone has to consider the following referendum phrasing to be misleading and biased against continued support:

Do you agree that the Society discontinue collecting the special membership fee for the Peak Publication Society, effective Fall 2010, resulting in a reduction of $4.90 per full-time student and $2.45 per part-time student per term in the Graduate Student Society Activity fee?

Notice the negative phrasing, i.e. to support the Peak you have to vote “No,” and the unnecessary inclusion of the cost per term in the question.

So, I submitted the following grievance to the GSS election committee, except their provided email address [email protected] is a dead link and instead I had to type in the proper email [email protected]. I advise you to do the same if you’re an SFU graduate student and care about honest and fair elections. Feel free to copy my letter verbatim or modify it as you see fit:

Graduate Student Society Election Committee,

I would like to submit a grievance with the wording of referendum question 3:

"3.Do you agree that the Society discontinue collecting the special membership fee for the Peak Publication Society, effective Fall 2010, resulting in a reduction of $4.90 per full-time student and $2.45 per part-time student per term in the Graduate Student Society Activity fee?"

I feel it is dishonest and unfair to phrase the question in the negative and biases the referendum against continued support of the Peak. I further feel that the discussion of the cost per term is unnecessary and further meant to bias respondents against the Peak. Can the election committee explain the rationale behind this phrasing? Further, will the committee rephrase the question in a more neutral stance such as:

"Do you support the continuation of the Society collecting the special membership fee from every graduate student for the Peak Publication Society beyond Fall 2010?"

Ian Bushfield

Treasurer, Physics Graduate Caucus
MSc. Physics Student at SFU

Update:

I got a reply from the GSS Election Committee, and the wording of referenda fall under the control of the GSS President and Council. Email you concerns to Josh Newman at [email protected], also email your councillor.

The Peak explodes

Lots of controversy in this week’s issue of the SFU weekly newspaper, The Peak.

After my column last week attacking creationism, I sparked two text responses:

Hey Bushfield: know before you speak.

Well said Ian Bushfield!!!

Opinion editor Graham Templeton attempted to defend his editorial record over the past couple terms, trying to emphasize that he had published more left than right wing articles, but he included this nifty quote that will likely incite some responses.

Not everything can be published, of course, and I have certainly received well-written articles that I’ve refused to publish due to the utter inanity of their thesis. This is called editorial discretion, and its inherently arbitrary nature is what leads to these sorts of controversies. I have turned away some creationist articles which are simply full of falsehoods, while I have published others (see: this week’s opinions section,) with which I simply disagree strongly, but which do not contain outright lies. [emphasis added]

Speaking of creationist articles, here’s Isaac Seo’s, international piano-e-competition champion, rant responding to my last article. I won’t respond to it in print (paper’s rarely publish a back and forth between two authors), and his arguments are repetitive and lame so I won’t respond here unless there’s demand in the comments.

There’s also an article by Dan McPeake (yes that’s his real name) about secularism and the burqa in France. I have to grant his thesis to him, although he glazes over the fact that many Islamic women are not making a choice and that it is rather being made for them, but it’s a fine line between secularism and defending an egalitarian society.

Finally, my latest piece is in regards to recent minor vandalism of the SFU Skeptics’ “There’s probably no God…” banner.

Only cowards censor

By Ian Bushfield

The SFU Skeptics have had a banner hanging around campus in various locations for the past month, but on the evening of March 11, someone decided that this banner was so offensive that they had to attempt to censor the student group. The banner was found crumpled under a railing the next morning.

So what phrase was so objectionable that it needed to be suppressed? Simply, “There is probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.”

This is the same slogan that Richard Dawkins plastered across buses in London,which subsequently run in cities across the world from Barcelona to Christchurch. Many other transit authorities and city councils attempted to ban the upbeat message, as though the phrase was as objectionable as “fuck Jesus.” But by trying to block the message, the censors unwittingly gave the atheists a platform to cry foul in the media.

It is almost hard to imagine this phrase as being so offensive. Having an enjoyable life should not be that offensive of an idea, so it must be the fact that there are some of us who are willing to state publicly that we do not believe in a higher power.

Yet we even admit that we may not be right by using the “probably” qualifier; you won’t get honesty like that in a Sunday morning sermon.

Perhaps people take offense to the concept that you can be moral without God. This should be an absurd notion, as countless atheists around the world, including myself, are not constantly murdering and raping. The fact that some theists believe that this is what would happen if they did not have a cosmic babysitter ought to tell you far more about their own personal morality than anything else.

Regardless of how offensive you find the banner or the justification for that offense, it does not change the fact that the banner was approved and sponsored by the Simon Fraser Student Society with a student group grant. The SFSS obviously believes in the right to free speech, and that every sanctioned group has the right to put a message across campus.

The right not to be offended does not exist in this country. The proper response to a message that you disagree with is dialogue, not censorship. This banner serves as a response to the countless religious clubs who are pervasive at this school and in society. It seeks to counter the notion that you cannot be good without God.

Alternatively, when your ideological adversaries are increasingly vulgar, sometimes the proper response is ridicule. My favourite counter-protests to Fred “God Hates Fags” Phelps’s picketing of funerals are the ones with absurdist signs with phrases such as “I like donuts,” “God hates shrimp,” or “I have a sign too!”

The only other approach to take with such content is to simply ignore it. Had there been no fatwa against the Danish cartoonist for his portrayal of Mohammed, almost no one would have seen the relatively humourless depictions.

If we permit the silencing of someone’s right to free speech, we risk threatening the core of the democratic ideal. Only when ideas can compete with one another on fair footing do we have any hope of discovering which ones are closer to the truth.

Tearing down posters and crumpling banners is downright cowardly. Most of us come to university with an open-mind, ready to learn new things and hear different ideas. I guess some of us are just not ready for that intellectual challenge.

So to the miscreant who crumpled the banner I ask one thing: would Jesus vandalize?

While I keep saying that I’ll write one thing and then end up submitting another, for next week I had thought of submitting a piece about humanistic ethics to respond indirectly to Isaac’s article and general misconceptions, but instead I’ll likely be hoping to publish a piece defending The Peak from the upcoming graduate student referendum that seeks to cut all graduate funding from the Peak, which would thereby end my writing days as grad students wouldn’t get to publish if they weren’t paying for the paper.

Also, this Wednesday, as a multi-published writer I have the fortune to vote for the Peak’s editorial staff for this summer, so basically this summer I’ll have a hand in the blame if it isn’t remarkable. Leave a comment or email me if there’s any considerations I should be taking into account on this vote (since most SFU students who pay for the Peak don’t get a vote, I’m willing to take any opinions into account that have no influence).

The Peak – Keep creationism out of science classroom

I submitted another article, and this one got published with a neat little picture. I feel better about my grammar in this one, and I only noticed one mistake that slipped passed the editor (see if you can spot it).

Keep creationism out of the science classroom

By Ian Bushfield

In a story that sounds like it came straight from the Bible belt of the USA, a newly formed group, the Kamloops Centre for Rational Thought, has announced that the Kamloops Christian School is teaching Biblical creationism in their science class, on equal footing with evolution. On the matter of private school, I mostly believe that schools can teach whatever they want. While I disagree with indoctrinating children in one’s personal religious beliefs, people are generally free to raise their children responsibly. My support for this right, however, ends when public funding is extended to such indoctrination, as is the case with Kamloops Christian School.

Don’t get me wrong, pluralism is a commendable goal. Greater school choice sounds great on paper, and increased knowledge of the various religions and beliefs of the world can only help serve to ease many of the religious tensions across the world.

However, this narrow-minded propaganda serves to reinforce an us-versus-them mentality and closes minds. There is a reason Richard Dawkins considers indoctrinating children with religion to be a form of child abuse.

Even worse is the conflation between religion and science that occurs when students are taught pseudo- and anti-scientific beliefs as fact alongside the well-established laws of nature. Science class is the place to develop the tools to view the world methodically and skeptically. Science asserts that evidence is required before we can decide whether an idea has any merit to it.

Meanwhile, creationism starts with the premise that the Bible is the inerrant word of God and then argues that the facts of the world are wrong if they conflict with a narrow interpretation of scripture. Declaring that evolution and creationism are on equal scientific footing is akin to considering astrology to be as accurate as astronomy.

Even if we could accept the Bible is as credible a source of knowledge as the systematic accumulation of evidence to confirm hypotheses, then there are countless other beliefs we ought to be including in science classes across the province. These include the various aboriginal stories of creation, the Hindu story, those of the Ancient Greeks and Romans, and even the tale of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Each of these stories has its believers who see it as divinely inspired, and each story has as much evidence for its validity as the Christian Bible.

But mainly, I object to a secular, democratic government, which is supposed to represent all people, religions, creeds, and races, to not push any one religion, belief, or non-belief over any other. Were Christians in the minority and atheists in the majority, Christians would equally be crying foul were publicly funded teachers declaring in science class that science has disproven God, or at the very least, that students ought to take a “critical look” at the evidence of the Bible.

There are countless Christians and theists who have no difficulty with evolution. In fact, they are likely in the majority. A small minority, however, remains committed that the only way they can reconcile their belief in a vengeful Old Testament God is to deny the fundamental basis of all modern biology. Yet the fact that many of them hold influential positions of power, like Minister of State for Science and Technology Gary Goodyear, or Treasury Board President Stockwell Day, is something that ought to scare all secularists, religious or otherwise.

Religious beliefs and discussions have their place. However, when the state sponsors one religious belief to the exclusion of others, we enter a case of discrimination and forced indoctrination. As the anti-religious adage goes, don’t pray in my school and I won’t think in your church.

I think my next one will focus on the anti-vaccination and naturopathy movements. I still need to check a bunch of facts, so hopefully I can get it pounded out for Wednesday.

Published in The Peak

Recent levels of conservative articles in SFU’s student newspaper The Peak prompted me to submit an article which got published today. While this isn’t my best writing (a few awkward sentences survived the editor), I am planning to write a bit more frequently for the weekly paper, so hopefully it improves.

It’s also worth noting that my story was one of the highlights listed on the front page.

My article, appearing on page four is reprinted here:

Conservatives are eroding Canadian values

Stephen Harper hates Canada, or at least he has indicated as much. He and his brand of Reform Party theo-cons have every intention of tearing down the institutions that make our country great.

The most recent evidence of this is Immigration Minister Jason Kenney’s personal interventions to remove references to homosexual rights from Canada’s latest immigration brochures. Rather than have new immigrants know that Canada was among the first countries in the world to extend the right of marriage to same-sex couples, the Conservatives would rather paint a picture of Canada as they want to see it. Similarly, the brochure also omits any reference to health care and feminism, and plays up our history of armed conflict while downplaying our role as world peacekeepers.

Yet these Conservatives’ pasts haunts them. In 2003, as a member of the neoconservative group, Civitas, Harper stated that to achieve the goal of a conservative social policy, the Conservatives must win over immigrants and make “incremental” movements to the right, knowing full well that an abrupt change of course toward their true goals would scare most Canadians.

So after six years as leader of a minority government, we have watched Harper make deep cuts to our federal income streams. Lowered income from the GST, as well as corporate and personal income taxes has put the country in a deficit, to which the only available answer for the neoconservative is an attack on the foundations of our modern Canadian society – the welfare state.

In a similar vein, to reform our society, we have witnessed massive cuts and legislation changes to cripple several decades of progress fought for by this nation’s feminists. Status of Women Canada is a shell of its former self, and, after the 2009 budget, it is now harder for women to achieve equal pay for equal work.

Even our democratic systems suffer as our prime minister is in contempt of the will of Parliament, and thereby the will of the majority of Canadians, who are demanding documents that will confirm the claims of whistleblower Richard Colvin or clear the names of our soldiers. Rather than provide these documents, Harper again dishonestly shut the door on democracy and hid behind claims that the opposition hates our troops. If Harper truly cared about our troops he would present the documents that clear their names of what must be wrongful accusations. At least, they must be wrongful as that is what the government keeps saying.

But we don’t have to look as far as Ottawa to see the anti-progressives at work. Mirroring tactics that were used by Ontario campus conservative groups to destroy their Public Interest Research Groups; campus conservatives here have taken up a crusade against SFPIRG under the banners of “democracy” and “accountability.” The argument is that SFPIRG needs improvement, and few would disagree, yet the claim that they are arbitrarily appointing people to their board is absurd. Have these conservatives attempted to join SFPIRG and reform the group from the inside?

As was pointed out, if there are too few candidates for the board, acclamations are granted to those few who step forward to actually do the work. Otherwise you have shit disturbers who lobby the SFSS and student body to destroy a group that they have the ability to opt-out of.

But it is too easy to write these actions off as a grand right-wing conspiracy. Rather, we have a minority subset of society that hates the institutions we have fought for in this country, and is working incrementally at various levels to take away many of the things we take for granted.

Most of my future articles will be on skepticism / atheism / Humanism, and I’m hoping to have something to submit most weeks (I may post here even if it ends up on the digital floor of the Peak).

Wiccan for Jesus?

Dear Ivy Ash,

I read your article vilifying atheism [Leave religions alone, February 8] and I had to comment. Perhaps it is cowardly of me, but I chose to copy most your letter because you express unoriginal thoughts on a subject that is far more simple than you think. You’ll find I make no apologies.

There is a certain truth to what you’re saying. Graham Templeton is as bigoted as your postmodern relativism. His article reads as a blind attack at people. And there are Christians, Muslims, Jews, and even Wiccan atrocities. Yet there is actual substance to the critiques of religion that are being provided, and ad hominen attacks back and forth solve little. And it’s easy to conflate an attack on blind, irrational faith with one directed at the believers themselves.

There’s more to atheism, Ms. Ivy Ash (a funny name for a fundamentalist Wiccan – see that, we can all use useless ad hominens and oxymoronic terms to emotionally bias our readers) than just bigotry. There’s love, for one thing, and tragedy (those exist in every human). There’s critical thinking. There’s understanding that, as Richard Dawkins points out, without an understanding of the Bible, “you can’t understand English literature and culture.” But there’s also a greater subtlety to atheists critiques then you seem to comprehend. These include realizing that the Bible is a myth that was written and rewritten by human beings over long periods of time. It’s realizing that the ethnography of the Bible is more likely a fictitious myth, as no actual evidence that the events of Exodus exists. But you can throw a few more ad hominens in to ensure that if your shoddy arguments aren’t enough, you can at least make fun of us.

Now, lest you think I may be an atheist, I’ll tell you right now, I am. But I’m also more than that. I’m a humanist, a person who finds inherent worth in every person.I’m a naturalist, someone who accepts the scientific method as our greatest source of knowledge, and that method has yet to reveal any evidence of something beyond this world. And I’m a skeptic, someone who only accepts claims that are backed up by objective evidence. Our views have also survived Roman Catholicism’s widespread eradication efforts of the past, and present. And yet to this day, religious bigotry still targets atheists as immoral and subhuman.

Now we need to talk about the truth. Since you seem to believe in a postmodern, relativistic form of truth, in that whatever works for you is true, I think I ought to take a second to explain what’s behind the apparent aggravation of atheists (alliterations are always awesome). Atheists, in general, arrive at their worldview via a critical evaluation of the claims that are made by various proponents of the true faith. Similarly, when new evidence is presented, atheists are generally open to evaluating that evidence to see if there’s an inconsistency within their worldview. To date, there hasn’t been enough evidence for the vast majority of us to require supernatural explanations. If there’s anything the success of the sceptical scientific method has taught us, it’s that an objective truth does exist outside our minds (this keyboard I type on exists). Yet postmodernists are making intellectual war on the existence of objective truths in an attempt to destroy several hundred years of scientific progress. That is, progress that has led to the ability for you to write an article on your computer, email it to the Peak, and for it to appear within the hands of tens of readers within a week.

Now, I’ll be honest. I don’t have the highest esteem for theists. In fact, since most theists rank atheists the least trustworthy demographic, there’s evidence of a deep seated, and in this case hypocritical, bigotry. Why? Apparently in your case it’s partly daddy issues. Or as you admit more likely, you were raised with a bigoted view that sees belief in a god as necessary for a meaningful and moral life. Both of which are demonstrably false by the growing number of happy, fulfilled atheists across the world. Of course, we can all get annoyed by fools with whiny diatribes, but that by no means gives you the right to write off all atheists as assholes. I’m not about to declare all Wiccans as overly-sensitive hypocrites because of your piece.

Finally, who is it that you think you’re talking about? Who, exactly, are you preaching to? Obviously you are writing to Mr. Templeton and trying to publicly chastise him for writing such tripe, but 90% of the articles in The Peak are crap. More likely you feel you need a stage to showcase how progressive and accepting your Wiccan beliefs are. You try to save yourself a little at the end, by admitting there are “fine upstanding atheists who aren’t bigoted at all.” And I will agree that Graham’s (suddenly you’re on first name basis?) article was offensive, but you failed to define it as either hate-filled or hypocritical. Clearly, the only hate literature that’s appropriate in Canada is anti-atheist hate literature. Or perhaps, you might want to understand that free speech is still allowed in Canada, but hate literature, defined as literature that incites and advocates violence, is properly regulated.

Most sincerely, Ian Bushfield

P.S. Because you couldn’t fit enough ad hominens in the actual 958 word letter, you had to give us a pointless post-script.

If no one attended, it’s not news

Oh the SFU Peak. So thin on content that they still publish stuff by Sam Reynolds (who a few weeks ago tried to argue that torture’s cool as long as it’s called “enhanced interrogation”), like today’s “Campus News” piece entitled “Pro-life demonstration draws few supporters.”

Of course titles are generally chosen by the section editors, so we don’t know what Sam’s first choice title would have been.

The article focuses on a recent event by SFU Students for Life (they’re anti-choicers, not perpetual students I think) that tried to use the shock value of the abortion-Holocaust comparison. The article spends about 2/3s of its length to explain what happened at the event, where only 17 actual human beings were (likely including Sam Reynolds, the speaker, and SFU SFL president).

Think about this: Almost no one attended the event (I had noticed the posters which were lacklustre white pieces of paper posted inconspicuously around campus), yet they now have the opportunity to use the News section (i.e. not the opinions) to spread their comparison.

Now, campus apathy makes a good story in regards to student politics and perhaps lacklustre student life, but picking a single event that tried to push an agenda almost everyone on campus hates and then making it our to be headline news? I call bias.

And notice that I choose to publish this here on my blog as opposed to sending anything in to the Peak, since there’s no reason to give this “debate” any more voice than it’s already received.

If it smells like a cult…

I sat myself through another Christian presentation today for some reason (boredom?), not having learned my lesson after Friday’s yawner. Today’s lunch hour event was titled “Reasons to Believe” and featured Every Nation International’s founding pastor Rice Broocks presenting his sermon.

I’ll jump to the end for you, the reasons were mostly emotional and despite the promise of a more dialogue-centred event, he ended up talking up until almost the end of the time we had (I had to run out at the end of this one to TA).

He’s “skeptical” of evolution, which mainly comes from his necessity to have an original sin, but he mentioned something about finding astronomical findings intriguing. I took him to be an Old-Earth Creationist (may be wrong). He did seem to think that evolution led to Hitler (touched on this very briefly) and that the information in one DNA molecule could fill books which would fill the Grand Canyon (the human genome is estimated at 750 MB in raw information which translates to roughly 100,000 pages or 200 copies of the Origin of Species, not quite a Grand Canyon full).

I did ask him if evolution was antithetical to his faith, to which he responded that while there are many Christians who accept evolution he thought the evidence was lacking for evolution (he expects every animal in history to have fossilized) and it seemed that evolution just didn’t jive right in his mind with Christianity.

The biggest stun I got out of him (there were only about 10 people there, 4-6 of whom seemed associated with his ministry already), was when he was talking about his encounter with a skeptic who he offered the deal that if after he responded to every one of the skeptic’s questions adequately (by the skeptic’s standards), if the skeptic would “serve God.” The skeptic replied that he wouldn’t serve God, so the Pastor didn’t spend his time arguing if the skeptic wouldn’t believe in the end. I challenged him and said that perhaps the skeptic would believe in God, but would refuse to serve.

It caught the otherwise well-spoken and thought out pastor for a second (he’s obviously spread the word a lot – and discussed his travels across the globe), and he finally decided that belief in the Bible means to serve, which is a bit of a cop-out. I don’t know if it’s ever crossed his mind that someone could read the Bible, believe what it says, but then still reject Jesus.

I’ve stated as much that if the Christian God were proved to me, I’d reject his authoritarianism over my soul.

Now, let’s look at where this creationist was coming from: Wikipedia informs me that the Every Nation ministry has 400 churches around the world, likes to focus on campuses, and is awkwardly associated with the Maranatha Cult of the late 1970s and 80s. While this cult didn’t “drink the Kool-Aid” (Broocks did make reference to what he called “Comet Cults” which would do that to land on the comet and then return), it was known for authoritarian ways and its pressure on campuses.

Of course this isn’t helped by the fact the key members who organized this event approached every single person who entered, gave a “hi, what’s your name” speech and generally exuded a slightly-over-zealous-but-not-quite-creepy quality.

Anyway, prior to this event, some of the SFU Skeptics and I were postering for tomorrow’s Evolution Day event on campus (a showing of Judgement Day, to which I won’t be making it due to TAing), which attracted the attention of several of the ministry people. Broocks did allude to the “Skeptics” on campus in his talk and I think his crew may be planning to crash the party tomorrow.

And there’s still the potential of the Banana Man’s cronies to be distributing their desecrated Origin editions too.

Update: A little more digging into Every Nation reveals quite a bit.

Embracing the Strawman

I sat through a talk today by Dr. Elmar Kremer, a theologian and philosophy emeritus from University of Toronto entitled “The Classical Christian Concept of God and the Straw man of the Atheists.”

Dr. Kremer used his hour long talk to attempt to argue that the True Christian God of the Bible is more of a deist being, that is something that made the universe and didn’t need to interfere in it after. Of course he doesn’t call himself a deist, and perhaps if his talk had been “on my personal faith in Jesus” we may have seen some more theism in this talk. So instead of arguing for the existence of God (not just a deist god) he replaced the supposed “straw man” God of Dawkins/Dennet/Harris with a more nebulous concept and some fuzzy theological buzzwords and left us with a (deist) god.

But he had some great words introducing the topic before he got into his semantics and wordplay. Apparently publishing books and getting a media presence constitutes “aggressive atheism,” which pales in comparison to the aggressive Christianity of the past and present:

Nevertheless, he mentioned the atheist bus campaign, which he took to have two objectives. First, to actively deny God, claiming all intelligent people are atheists and second, to insinuate belief is oppressive with the phrase "relax and enjoy your life." He didn’t really explain how the logic of this worked, but did mention that his Christian daughter would be stressed if she didn’t believe in God.

With that he began to define his vision of the "Christian" (which he emphasized repeatedly was also the view of the Jews and Muslims) view of God. This God is so great he said, that he didn’t even need to create the world. Basically he, and many theologians believed that the world need not have existed.

Of course we can take this statement to mean several things. I would agree that this exact world not only didn’t have to come about, but compared to all possible worlds, it was amazingly unlikely that it even would come about. But it did.

We could also say though, that any world need not have been created. Now that seems vanishingly unlikely. There’s been a couple good formulations of this principle from Lawrence Krauss and Victor Stenger (both physicists conveniently) which boil down to the idea that nothing is incredibly unstable. In the vacuum of empty space, there’ exists a vacuum energy due to quantum mechanics. Put simply, if you have nothing long enough, eventually something will pop out (of course the net energy is still 0 within quantum uncertainty). So I utterly reject his principle that a universe did not have to be, and life only exists because “God is Good.”

He continues on and introduces his theological buzzwords for what God’s like:

Simplicity
Fullness of being
Goodness
Immutability
Eternity
Incomprehensible

Of course these are such subjective terms that you can earn multiple degrees just defining one or two of them in a novel way, adding almost nothing to the collective human experience (this is why science turns to testable predictions). It’s very noteworthy that he traces these characteristics to the middle ages. I guess theology isn’t a fast-paced field of research.

The last one of those characteristics is especially important to our speaker, since the response to every atheist argument he presented was “God’s not like us so we can’t possibly understand Him.” For example:

Atheist: “If God’s all-knowing and all-powerful why wouldn’t He create the best possible world?” Kremer: “You can’t presume to know God’s will.”
Atheist: “Why doesn’t God prevent evil?” Kremer: “You can’t presume to know God’s will.”
Atheist: “Why didn’t God answer the prayers of those who died in hurricane Katrina?” Kremer: “You can’t presume to know God’s will.”

A hypothesis that explains everything explains nothing.

That last argument came from Sam Harris’ Letter to a Christian Nation to which Kremer further replied that God doesn’t have “observational knowledge” like we do, since He has no sense organs. Rather He knows by “doing” (Kremer used the example of how he knows his fingers are crossed behind his back). This begs the question: If god doesn’t listen, why do people pray? Furthermore, it also makes us ask: If God knows us by “doing” are we not free-willed individuals but rather puppets of the ~~big guy in the sky~~ (sorry, that’s anthropomorphizing) creator of the universe?

He ends by claiming that his depiction of this deistic god is in fact the same God that Richard Dawkins describes as “arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”

To Dr. Kremer I say: Your God is not the god believed in by the billions who think the world is 6000 years old, and you need to climb down from the ivory tower and meet some actual religious folk and consider what is actually believed.

Then you’ll see who’s created the straw man of a deity.

Stimulus Starts at Home

Apparently the local SFU campus branch of Canada Post is closing on this upcoming Sunday due to “lack of profits” (the words of the local clerk).

SFU is on a freaking mountain, students and staff living on campus (either in residence or the expanding UniverCity community of what’s supposed to be a self-contained city) now have to make the 15 minute bus ride or drive down to the bottom of the mountain to find the nearest post office.

I thought Canada Post was supposed to be a service to Canadians, not a business that we’re making money off of.