Call Ripley! A little bit of Holiday Honesty, for a change.

I totally stole this from the Atheiskeptihumanist forums (so extra-special thanks to UberPest!). My "penance" is to tell you all to go register there! It's a pretty simple portmanteau, you can bookmark it if you can't spell it, and the community needs more members - which means that the earlier you get there, the more relevant you'll be! And while you're at it, you should also check out Atheist Nexus, too. It's like the Facebook of atheism. On to the news!

Boss Creations is dedicated to putting Christ back into Christmas. Don't laugh, this is Serious Business. OK, laugh because it's stupid and nobody with half a brain gives a shit. Also, laugh because they're literally jamming their symbol of medieval torture into a pagan symbol of a pagan holiday in a desperate bid for cultural relevance, just like the church did in metaphor when they tried to co-opt the holiday all those years ago. You see, the church can't torture people into believing any longer, so now they just bludgeon us all with symbolism - as Boss' front page says, "It's not just a tree - it's a movement!"

What. The. Fuck.

So I'm kind of alarmed by this whole thing, but I find their misguided attempt at cultural dominance to be cutely honest. I'd like to see Jesus up there, myself, beaten bloody with a little INRI above his head, maybe a banner wrapped around his naughty bits saying something like, "Blood Sacrifice is Just Awesome! Fuck Yeah!" Oh, for a fun time, ask any Christian away from the internet what INRI stands for - ten bucks says they won't know, but we need a statistically relevant sample, and I guarantee I'll come out on top across, say, a couple hundred randomized trials.

I also wish these nutters were somehow forced to accept the historical fact that Christmas was co-opted from pagan solstice celebrations. Seriously, the evergreen decked out with shiny baubles and fairy lights, the gift-giving, mistletoe, all that crap - pagan, pagan, pagan! The real killer, though? Christmas trees are against the Bible, for serious! Someone needs to inform Marsha Boggs, Boss Creations' owner-slash-crazy-ho-bag-in-residence, who apparently hates inclusion because it doesn't show her particular sect the special deference it does not deserve at all. I'd love to see the look on her face when Jeremiah 10:2-4 is read to her.

Of course, she'd probably do the Christian thing and ignore reason. She knows what she believes, don't confuse her with the facts. Christianity is whatever she says it is, godammit, and there's no way the Bible could be against her because... wait, there is no because, that's just a fact. Right, guys?

Call Ripley! Mormon calls it like he sees it, and winds up right.

source

TL;DR version: "Hey! Mormons! Look, honest people sometimes get weirded out when they find out some facts about our religion's history! If you want to talk to them, you need to understand this and take it into account."

Call Ripley! AI vs. AI in a No-Holds-Barred Video Game Contest!

Fine, not quite; but AIs are playing Super Mario Brothers! No joke!

Baumgarten's AI also had some pleasant surprises. Without programming, the AI learned to grab the shells from defeated enemies and use them to destroy other enemies.

"This nice behavior sometimes just appears," said Baumgarten. "We try to optimize the behaviors that will lead to success."

They're learning! Or at least "acting as if learning," which is close enough (and what we do, anyway, once you get past the whole "self-awareness" issue). Now, this may be premature, but I welcome our new robot overlords. I can't wait for the day when we as a species outgrow our cyberpunk adolescence and move on to a postcyberpunk utopia.

Call Ripley: One door shuts, one window opens

Gays may not be able to marry in California again yet, but gay men can certainly be voted Prom Queen!

Sergio Garcia of Fairfax High ran for Prom Queen after noticing that the qualifications did not include sex.  After giving a speech that convinced students he was not trying to pull a stunt, Garcia won in what I can only call a remarkable display of permissivity.

"I didn't really know if the school approved. I thought 'Why can't I do it?' " Garcia said. "I see myself as a boy with a different personality. . . . I don't wish to be a girl; I just wish to be myself," he said.

Some teachers and students were encouraging, others told him not to "stir things up," he said. But his close friends continued to support him, and after his speech, the campus community seemed to be coming around to the idea.

Well, way to stir things up!  Way to challenge the status quo and raise the bar for our cultural standards!  After winning the election, Garcia said, "I feel invincible."  Savor it, Sergio:  you've earned it.

In other news, Adam Lambert seems to be standing pat with the genderqueer card.  Rockin'!  As society continues to make room for different sexualities (hetero, homo, bi, celibate, etc.), it looks like our sex (male/female) and gender (masculine/feminine) categories are due for expansion as well.  This is another strike against the "tyranny of the discontinuous mind," Richard Dawkins' term for the manner in which essentialist inclinations drive us to shove everything in the world into these discrete little boxes whether they fit or not:

Of course, there are those who seem to need a definition of his sexuality nailed down. "Calm down," Lambert says, and "keep speculating."

Lambert knows that such an ambiguous role model is unlikely, and he's glad he had the chance to add something unexpected in this year's competition. "It feels really amazing to be able to try and pass that on to kids and young adults who don't have a role model like that," he says. "It feels great because I never had a role model like that."

Sure, we might have some good boxes that hold lots of stuff, but there will always be things that just don't fit, and we need to be comfortable with those things just being what they are and resist the temptation to demand that they go into this or that box.

Call Ripley! Christians and sex

So I was catching up on Savage Love the other day, and I came across this little jewel: Dan Savage, in honor of Rick Warren's Saddleback Church, is trying to get "saddleback" defined in common parlance as a sex term inimical to said church.

I voted for number 5:

"Saddlebacking" should be the term for the phenomenon of Christian teens engaging in unprotected anal sex in order to preserve their virginities. "After attending the Purity Ball, Heather and Bill saddlebacked all night because she's saving herself for marriage." Please, please adopt this definition!

Colorful as some of the others are, I think that 5 strikes the perfect balance of irony and user-friendliness.

Reading through the archives, though, I was struck by a rather curious fact. A pair of facts, really: 1) Abstinence-only education has led to teenagers thinking that anal sex is not sex and has no risk of STDs, and 2) Gay teens, in an effort to prove how straight they are to their peers, are impregnating one another in record numbers.  (Both issues discussed in the DTMFA-a-Thon.)

So, just to recap the effects of Christian prudishness: gay kids are having straight sex, and straight Christians are sodomizing each other. Clearly, not teaching kids about "bad things" stops them from doing those "bad things." Actually, in that light, maybe it's not so surprising that Christian methods are proving counterproductive to their goals, after all.

I feel a great swell of sympathy for the gay kids who feel the need to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that they're not who they are. They're forcing themselves through acts which ought to bring with them the very height of human pleasure as some kind of twisted penance for being different from their peers - a penance which they should never feel the need to pay in the first place. Not only that, the children they bring into this world as a product of these unloved acts are... well... no, I can't say that they're all unwanted, and perhaps some of them will be loved dearly and raised well - but most of them are likely to wind up unwanted, in a dysfunctional house, in orphanages, or in foster homes.

As for the Christians, this is further evidence that abstinence-only education both does not work and is tantamount to criminal neglect. The idea of "virginity" is a primitive notion in the first place, predicated as it is on the genetically advantageous desire for a male to hedge against the risk of raising an unrelated child. We're beyond this, scientifically speaking, and ought to be beyond this, culturally speaking. "Never having had sex" is just not a virtue, plain and simple, and we as a people need to recognize this! Furthermore, the legalistic idea that anal sex somehow "preserves virginity" (by which Christians can only mean "leaves the hymen intact") is asinine.

Truly, these children are suffering for the wrongdoings of their forebears. This is the second time today that I've referenced the Bible, but I think it's appropriate here.

Finally, on a lighter note, Dan's remark on the logical consequences of this view (that anal sex "preserves virginity") is fucking priceless: "I've been preserving the shit out of my boyfriend's virginity for 14 years now." Fucking.  Priceless.