From Unscrewing the Inscrutable

Carnival Of The Godless Guidelines

1. The post you send in must be from a godless perspective and address something such as godlessness, atheism, church/state separation, the evolution/creation debate, theodicy, philosophy of religion as it relates to godlessness, etc. There is a huge amount of wiggle room in the post subject and we will consider every submission carefully for inclusion.

2. You may only submit one post per carnival. More may be accepted at the host's discretion. If you submit a post that you really think ought to be included from another blog, and the author of that blog also submits a post, we'll use their post. This should be considered a great way to get one of your excellent, but (for whatever reason) unknown or underrated posts in front of a potentially huge audience. Grab the bull by the horns!

Time frame

The Carnival Of The Godless will be posted every two weeks on Sunday. The cutoff date for submissions will be the preceding Friday. If we get the submissions chosen and sorted out before Sunday, it will be posted earlier.

Vergin said an autopsy determined the girl died from diabetic ketoacidosis, an ailment that left her with too little insulin in her body, and she had probably been ill for about 30 days, suffering symptoms like nausea, vomiting, excessive thirst, loss of appetite and weakness.

The girl's parents, Dale and Leilani Neumann, attributed the death to "apparently they didn't have enough faith," the police chief said.

They believed the key to healing "was it was better to keep praying. Call more people to help pray," he said.

The mother believes the girl could still be resurrected, the police chief said.

The girl has three siblings, ranging in age from 13 to 16, the police chief said.

"They are still in the home," he said. "There is no reason to remove them. There is no abuse or signs of abuse that we can see."

• Transmetropolitan -- I know nothing about it save to say that it's comes recommended to me by a list of people longer than my arm.
  
• V for Vendetta -- which I have read, and do endorse. It's a lot better than the movie, and has a much more 'meaty' feel to it.
  
• The Watchmen -- I'm in the process of reading it right now, I'll let you know.
  
• Persepolis -- I heard that this was made into a movie, and it's about growing up secular in the shah's Iran, it sounds interesting.
  

...Nader, actually.

Since his announcement yesterday that he was entering the presidential race for 2008, Ralph Nader has got me thinking. I've already made it known who I'm supporting in this dog-and-pony show, but I have a confession to make: in 2000, I would've voted for Nader.

Yes, that's right, silly little 16-year-old me, if forced to choose between a potential leader with all the personality of a plank of wood, and a potential leader dumber than a sack of rocks, I would have chose option C. Granted, I would have chose option C in California, where it didn't make much difference. Yet I remember at the time -- and some people around me still fervently believe -- the sentiment that 'A vote for Nader was a vote for Bush'. They base this tenuous logic on the assumption that votes for Nader would have gone to Gore, and that not voting for Gore was equivalent to voting for Bush.

These kind of mental contortions make wonderful fodder for debate because any first-year logic student can see through the monumental effort to make this logical house of cards stand.

First off the obvious point:

• Not voting for Gore is voting for Bush

This is a common logical fallacy called the False Dilemma, where someone assumes that given choices A and B, choosing [not A] is equivalent to choosing B. It's true enough to say that either Bush or Gore was going to be elected in 2000, but to assume that someone chose option [not A] they must prefer option B is incorrect. There were several other things people could have done in the situation (not voted, wrote in, voted for a different third party, fled the country, etc...) and none of these are tantamount to an endorsement of B instead of A.

Next up:

• Votes for Nader would have gone to Gore.

This is either one of two fallacies, the first is that it's an Appeal to Belief, albeit of a certain kind. It appeals to the belief that many people share -- that only a Democrat or a Republican is worth voting for in an election, and that to vote for a third party is a sign of lunacy. Democrats therefore believe that people who voted for Nader were crazy when they voted for him, and would have voted for Gore if they'd been sane.

It's also a Hasty Generalization. To assume that people who voted for Nader would have voted for Gore instead ignores the possibility that there were people in the 2000 election who would have voted for Bush had Nader not been running. Admittedly, this group might be small, but that doesn't mean an assumption to the contrary is a legitimate one.

Both of these are lead-ups to the underlying sentiment:

• Nader cost the Democrats the 2000 election.

Overshadowing other logical fallacies that are inherent in this statement is that this is a blatant Appeal to Spite. Democrats around the nation were furious that their plans for continued political dominance were frustrated by a tree-hugger and a man with a pint-sized brain in a ten-gallon hat. Instead of blaming the responsible party (the candidate with all the charisma of a bump on a log), they externalized the blame to a man who got about 5% of the popular vote. That fact does say something -- albeit not what the Democrats would want it to say -- it means that both candidates in the 2000 election were so bad that 1 person in 20 couldn't bring themselves to vote for either of them.

Updating now for 2008. Now that Nader is running again, in the same kind of election as 2000 (one without an incumbent), what's the vote for him going to be like? I doubt it will be the same as in 2000, because this is the year that Democrats (hopefully) understand that 4 more years of Republicans in power could only be a bad thing™ and will go out and vote in droves for whoever wins the primary, ignoring Nader as a viable option. Republicans who would rather have a theocratic loon in power will probably stay home rather than vote for someone the religious right has actively condemned.

So what are Nader's chances this time around? About the same as a snowball's in hell. All the same, I applaud the man for running, I think he should run, and that he has every right to. I think people who vote for him are genuinely voting for him, and not voting against someone else. I'm all for third parties mixing it up in our two-sides-of-the-same-coin political world.

But I really won't be happy until these guys could become a viable party in America, because by then we will be so enlightened in our understanding of humanity that people of no faith will be just as legitimate a voice in government as people of faith.