Month: March 2014

Taking Boys Out of the Box

Dana Hunter19 Comments

I didn’t like being a girl. It was harder to duck behind a tree when nature called when we were out playing in the woods. I sometimes had to do cruel things to the boys to prove I was tough as them. One of my friends wouldn’t let me play with his army men because I was a girl, and girls don’t play soldiers (I quickly disabused him of that notion, much to his astonishment).

But a lot of the time, I didn’t notice I was a girl. I was wearing pants and jumping my bike and getting in the mud and building stuff and commanding the pack, just like one of the boys.Hell, I was even more hardcore than some of them. When I crashed my bike on a road chip-sealed with cinders and road-rashed myself from toe to waist, I told ’em I’d be right back, and hobbled home for some quick patching up. Alas, my mom decided someone with that many bleeding wounds needed to stay inside, but my friends respected the fact I hadn’t shed a tear. One of our buddies would head sobbing for home the instant he stubbed a toe. None of us wanted to be like that. Continue reading “Taking Boys Out of the Box” →

Taking Boys Out of the Box
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Unidentified Flying Dinosaur: North Creek Woodpecker, Plus Bonus Frog Pick-Up Lines

Dana Hunter9 Comments

Spring’s coming. I can tell this because a few of the fruit trees have a scattering of blooms, some of the more enterprising rhodies are flowering, and the frogs are trying to get laid.

Soon, I’ll be bopping down the North Creek levees with the sun on my face and the wind in my hair. It will be much like it was this day, in the late summer of 2012, when I was bopping with sun wind etc. and heard a rapping. Continue reading “Unidentified Flying Dinosaur: North Creek Woodpecker, Plus Bonus Frog Pick-Up Lines” →

Unidentified Flying Dinosaur: North Creek Woodpecker, Plus Bonus Frog Pick-Up Lines

Why I Would Wish Religion Away

Dana Hunter20 Comments

Many folks seemed to think I was being a bit naive, thinking religion to be at the root of many of our problems. Problems would remain, they protested. Religion doesn’t cause them all.

I’m completely aware of that. I’d hoped this sentence would prevent misunderstandings:

When we go chasing after invisible gods, all of our worst human tendencies remain, but are given God’s stamp of approval.

I obviously should have done a better job at clarifying that I didn’t think our problems would magically vanish once religion was gone. Let me do so now:

Humans are shits. We can be right arseholes to each other. Excise religion, and humans would still be shits.  Atheists are right arseholes to each other all the time.

But.

But. Continue reading “Why I Would Wish Religion Away” →

Why I Would Wish Religion Away

Adventures in ACE VI: Vacuous About Volcanoes

Dana Hunter, , , 14 Comments

People, it took me days to fact-check the 31 (thirty-one) pages of Science PACE 1086. I’m boggled. I have no idea how they manage to get so much wrong. It doesn’t even make sense – I mean, there are several creationist canards, and I know why those are there, but they fail at facts that even Answers in Genesis gets right. It’s like they got their information about rocks from a source translated from French, which was translated from Tagalog, which was translated from a paper written in Pig Latin by someone who’d never seen a rock in their life, but heard something about them once.

Image is a demotivational poster of a derpy looking cat. Caption says, "SMRT. I am so smrt, s-m-r-t."

Take their inability to get famous volcanoes right. Not to mention their myths about medicine. Continue reading “Adventures in ACE VI: Vacuous About Volcanoes” →

Adventures in ACE VI: Vacuous About Volcanoes

Taking Liberties: A Book We Need Right Now

Dana Hunter, , 4 Comments

So you may have noticed lately that the right-wing ratfuckers in state governments are busy trying to roll us back to the Dark Ages. Women aren’t people, they’re “hosts” to those precious babies that will be cherished so long as they’re in the womb; once they’re out, both host and infant will be despised as social parasites if they have the audacity to be unmarried and/or poor. Some jackass is trying to slip prayer into schools by forcing teachers to read congressional prayers. In my former home state of Arizona, the frothing fundies boiled over, and decided to give religious people the right to discriminate against gays, because apparently, refusing to let them patronize your business is an act of worship. Other states have jumped on that horrible bandwagon. And let’s not forget the Russia-envy they’ve got going on. They’ve got a stiffy for totalitarian shitlords who hate on the same groups they do.

Outraged? Good. Here’s a book that will help you channel that rage more productively: Continue reading “Taking Liberties: A Book We Need Right Now” →

Taking Liberties: A Book We Need Right Now

Adventures in Christianist Earth Science Education IIIa: In Which A Certain Atmosphere is Created

Dana Hunter, , , 6 Comments

After the absurdities of ACE and the travesty that is Bob Jones University’s idea of the earth sciences, it is almost with relief that I turn back to SPC. Oh, granted, it is also full of creationist crap – but there were some useful, even educational, bits, and I hope to find more.

Alas, my hopes are dealt a blow by the introduction to Unit I: Meteorology and Oceanography. Beneath the facing photo of sailboats, Psalm 115:16 sez God gave humans the earth, and the first sentence of the chapter is, “God created the earth’s atmosphere…”

Let us pause here to observe just how such a statement can send you haring off in the wrong direction. Continue reading “Adventures in Christianist Earth Science Education IIIa: In Which A Certain Atmosphere is Created” →

Adventures in Christianist Earth Science Education IIIa: In Which A Certain Atmosphere is Created

Keeping Up With the Creationists Vol. I Issue 5: Freedom to Impose Your Religion on Everyone Else

Dana Hunter4 Comments

My, the religious right frothers have been busy lately. It’s not enough for them to reduce women to the status of walking incubators: now they’re trying to define religious freedom as the freedom to impose their bigotry on anyone they suspect might not use their genitals in the Fundamentalist-Approved Way™.

My old home state of Arizona certainly made a ginormous jackass of itself, passing a right-to-discriminate bill that would basically turn anyone they suspect of being homosexual, queer, transgender, or any other type of person they hate into an outcast. Businesses would have been allowed to turn anyone they wished away. This would have been a nightmare for everyone, but especially those poor folks living in one of Arizona’s middle-of-nowhere communities, where finding someone willing to serve you might require several hours’ worth of driving. Even some of the fuckwads pushing that bill realized after the fact that it might be a horrific mistake – one suspects they figured out their language was so broad that Good Christians™ like themselves would’ve found themselves targeted, too. Not to mention the impact it was having on business and tourism in the state. So Jan Brewer vetoed it. We won’t see its like again for, oh, I’d imagine at least a whole week. And Arizona’s just one of the worst offenders – there are plenty of states trying to turn the LGBTQ community into untouchables.

Image is a drawing of a waiter talking to a diner. Caption says, "Congratulations to gay Arizonans on still being allowed to eat where people hate you."

Let’s see what other ridiculous nonsense Christianists in government are trying to foist upon us. Continue reading “Keeping Up With the Creationists Vol. I Issue 5: Freedom to Impose Your Religion on Everyone Else” →

Keeping Up With the Creationists Vol. I Issue 5: Freedom to Impose Your Religion on Everyone Else

How Religion Targets the Vulnerable: Beyond Belief

Dana Hunter8 Comments

Give me a genie and three wishes, and I’d probably ask for the following: an end to poverty worldwide, give people the desire and ability to protect and restore the environment, and an end to religion.

Religion is at the root of much of what’s wrong with the world. When we go chasing after invisible gods, all of our worst human tendencies remain, but are given God’s stamp of approval. I’m sure you’ve noticed how what God wants so often matches the desires and prejudices of the person saying what God wants. That, or they’re parroting what the people who wish to retain power over them tell them God wants. Either way, the desires always track back to people.

Image is the cover of Beyond Belief

And in Beyond Belief: The Secret Lives of Women in Extreme Religions, we see just how destructive and devious religion can be. This book is full of slices of fundamentalist life from a broad range of faiths. The editors, Susan Tive and Cami Ostman, wanted to explore the commonalities between women who found themselves sucked (or born) in to extremely restrictive religions. They weren’t intending “to refute or belittle religion.”

They didn’t have to. The religions do that quite well all by themselves. Continue reading “How Religion Targets the Vulnerable: Beyond Belief” →

How Religion Targets the Vulnerable: Beyond Belief

Adventures in Christianist Earth Science Education IIc: A Secular Chaser

Dana Hunter, , 9 Comments

So, we’ve now endured two Christianist textbooks. Let’s see how a genuine secular earth science textbook compares.

Glencoe Science Earth Science: Geology, the Environment, and the Universe (GEU) cover.
Glencoe Science Earth Science: Geology, the Environment, and the Universe (GEU)

Well, for one thing, Glencoe Science Earth Science: Geology, the Environment, and the Universe (GEU) is written by a whole lotta actual professional science people, plus National Geographic, plus it relied on a ton of science consultants, and was reviewed and tested by a cadre of teachers. Like science, it was a collaborative effort.

Millions of years, in reference to a rock formation, is front and center in the opening of the Unit Intro. And no qualifications or compromise: evidence sez millions of years, we accept (provisionally, o’ course: this is genuine science, and always has room for revision as new data comes in). There’s an activity right up front to help kids understand scientific communication, and practice communicating accurately. One of the major differences between this book and the Christianist texts is the fact that mistakes and miscommunication aren’t attributed to deception, but presented as unintentional. This book already thinks better of people than fundie Christians do. Continue reading “Adventures in Christianist Earth Science Education IIc: A Secular Chaser” →

Adventures in Christianist Earth Science Education IIc: A Secular Chaser