News from Australian atheists

I guess we have somebody worried.

Atheist Foundation of Australia and Global Atheist Convention Websites Attacked

The Atheist Foundation of Australia and Global Atheist Convention websites suffered a DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack yesterday, which caused the websites to be taken offline.

These attacks affected our upstream providers and numerous other websites, cost a large amount of money and time, and have left the Atheist Foundation of Australia and the Global Atheist Convention websites without hosting for the interim.

While we do not have enough information to confirm the source or reason for the attacks, they came in the wake of news that The Rise of Atheism Global Atheist Convention, to be held in Melbourne next March, has already sold 1,000 tickets and is set to become the largest gathering of atheists in Australia’s history.

AFA President, David Nicholls, says, “We have been informed that the Atheist Foundation of Australia and the Global Atheist Convention sites were the specific target of the attacks. This may be not just an attack on atheism, but an attack on freedom of speech.”

Nicholls says that the Global Atheist Convention is not about attacking the beliefs of individuals but, rather, opposes the undue political influence of religious institutions and lobby groups in society.

“The Atheist Foundation of Australia supports freedom of thought, and that includes freedom of religion. Our aim is to keep the Australian government, education and welfare systems secular,” says Nicholls. “Unfortunately, some people in our society find that very confronting.”

The Atheist Foundation of Australia has raised this matter with the appropriate authorities and is discussing this situation with them.

The Atheist Foundation of Australia technical staff are working hard to restore the site and once it is restored, tickets for The Rise of Atheism Global Atheist Convention will again be available at http://www.atheistconvention.org.au.

Fun with Twitter

Apparently, twitter tracks hot trends in the tiny little conversations flying about, and the #1 hot topic today was “No God”. The amusing reason why is that someone posted that boring and fallacious cliche, “Know God…Know Peace. No God…No Peace”, a lot of Christians retweeted it, and a few atheists contributed to the confusion by saying “no god”, and that’s all it took to single out that one phrase and turn it into the top few words being bandied about.

Just to make it even more hilarious, various Christian twitterers (or whatever they call them) freaked out and started frantically submitting their magic mantra even more, which just blew it up even higher. And all the atheists are sitting back laughing and writing “no god” again!

Combine stupid text searches with a human feedback loop, and look at the silly behavior it can evoke.

Ray Comfort is a parasite

In this case, it’s unintentional, though. His mangled version of Darwin’s Origin is currently the #1 result of searches for the Origin on Amazon. It’s not there honestly, though: it’s because Amazon’s indexing system has a deep flaw. It doesn’t seem to actually track which edition is the most popular…it just gladly gives Comfort’s edition full credit with every other edition of the same book. This also means that the star rating for the Comfort edition is elevated; he’s getting a leg up by appropriating all the reviews for all the other editions.

Here’s a video to explain the situation.

Amazon needs to fix this, and fix it soon. Otherwise, I predict, every single lousy creationist out there is going to grab any out-of-copyright, reputable science book out there and come out with their own edition by slapping a dishonest foreword on it, and get a free ride on the reputation of the original authors.

I’ll also add that if Ray Comfort has the tiniest scrap of integrity in his itty-bitty body, he’ll be leading the charge to demand that Amazon give credit where it is due and sort out their scrambled ratings system.

A reply from Seed

Since I posted that open letter to Seed, it’s only fair to post the reply I received the other day.

We’ve just signed off with Six Apart, the makers of Movable Type, to begin Phase I of our registration program. You won’t actually see too many changes with this phase – we’re essentially just cleaning up technical glitches within the system and making sure it’s performing properly.

Included in this phase are:

  • Commenter Authentication Fixes — meaning that you should be able to turn on Movable Type’s native registration option without commenting errors occurring
  • Load Balancer fixes
  • Server Analysis and Recommendations
  • Movable Type 4.3 Upgrade
  • Plugin Maintenance
  • Comment Enhancements for Sponsored Blogs — enabling us to offer sponsors special features they request for their blogs such as comment threading that our readers haven’t demonstrated as much interest in

Phase II will be where all the actual registration features come in, once we’ve got everything shipshape. [We] will be in touch about what will be involved from your end with implementing Phase I — probably at least an overnight posting freeze while we upgrade, as we’ve done in the past — when we have more details about when this will happen, but Six Apart should have resources available to us within the next two to three weeks.

So the good news is that they’re going straight to the pros at Six Apart to fix our problems; the bad news is that that means some more delays while we wait for the experts. Hang in there.

The ups and downs of radio

Yesterday, I got a brief mention of a botch of a radio show on NPR that nattered on about a “deep rift” in atheism, but this morning on MPR you could have heard Richard Dawkins talking about evolution. He got the better gig.

This interview does make clear one difference in strategy between Dawkins and myself. The interviewer tries to hammer him on being less than respectful to religious believers, and Dawkins is always polite and tries his best to downplay the conflict. In a similar situation, I’d simply say, “Yes, I am openly contemptuous of religious belief. You want to make something of it?”

I guess I’m meaner than Dawkins.

Uh-oh! Deep rift, deep rift, DEEP RIFT!

A salvo in the War on Christmas

You’ve got a whole 66 shopping days until Christmas, but as you all know, the War on Christmas is fought all year ’round. I’m already getting email from people who have started their Christmas shopping (I hate you all) and who toys and games to educate and introduce kids to science and learning (OK, you’re forgiven.) This is a tough call, especially if you want something to do with evolution — it has been deemed ‘controversial’, you know, so there has been a kind of de facto self-censorship going on among those manufacturers who want our money, but want Christian money just as bad.

One suggestion I’ve been sending to parents of young kids is to check out Charlie’s Playhouse, a place that specializes in evolution toys and games.

Notice that my cunning plan to undermine Christmas is to encourage secular people to celebrate it…bwahahahahahaaa!

Donohue rants some more

Bill Donohue, the vitriolic cranky grandpa of the Catholic League, has a guest column in the Washington Post. It’s not very interesting — it’s more of Donohue’s tedious yapping about communists, godless libertines (that is, those wicked gays), and how the ACLU is out to smash Judeo-Christian culture — but it ends on a strange note I hear a lot lately.

The culture war is up for grabs. The good news is that religious conservatives continue to breed like rabbits, while secular saboteurs have shut down: they’re too busy walking their dogs, going to bathhouses and aborting their kids. Time, it seems, is on the side of the angels.

Where does this nonsense come from? It’s wishful thinking and weird stereotyping and a kind of desperate hope that, while they may be totally outclassed on the intellectual front, religious conservatives can find solace in mindless rabbity procreation. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather not have my children propagate by way of the wastefully prolific r strategies. They are human beings, and they shouldn’t aspire to be lagomorphs or rodents or blatellids.

Also, when I recollect the many godless people I have known, most are fairly conventional middle class couples (self-selection, of course — most of the people I know are like me, conventional and middle class); most have a small number of children; most are concerned with raising those kids well. I also know gay atheists, atheists who are unmarried, atheists who are young and getting married, atheists who are in childless relationships by choice, etc. It’s true, I don’t know any atheists who have chosen to breed like rabbits.

Strangely enough, though, I also know a number of ordinary Christian people, and they all seem to have roughly equivalent demographics: middle class, some with kids, some without, some heterosexual, some homosexual, all diverse and following their own paths. I did know a few Mormons who bred like rabbits in Utah (one woman I knew had 15 kids!), but that was also correlated with a weird kind of poverty that was deeply dependent on government support, and wasn’t a model for family life that I was ever tempted to follow.

I suspect that the whole of the difference in reproduction rates that people like Donohue find so essential to propping up their self-esteem has nothing to do with atheism or religion at all, but is more a matter of affluence: people with wealth and education choose to have fewer children and invest more in the few that they have, and also people with more education tend to abandon conservative religious beliefs. That’s the real enemy of religion that Bill needs to rail against: intelligence and material success.

Which leads to my deepest wish for Bill Donohue and all the people like him. May your children and grandchildren be prosperous, healthy, and happy, and may they all succeed in finding wisdom in learning. And if my wish should come true, your grandchildren and great-grandchildren will be more like me than like you. Godlessness is cultural, not genetic.

Oh, and in a final ironic twist, I am a fellow of perfectly ordinary conventional morality with a family and three healthy, well-adjusted, and well-educated children. Mr Donohue is divorced and has two children. Despite my radical secularism and cultural nihilism, I’ve managed to outbreed him!

I wish I could have seen that

There was a debate yesterday, on the motion “The Catholic Church is a force for good in the world”. On the affirmative side, the Catholics had Anne Widdecombe, a conservative British politician, and Archbishop Onaiyekan of Abuja, Nigeria. On the godless side…Stephen Fry and Christopher Hitchens.

Just look at that lineup and you can predict how it went. It was a complete rout.

The problem (from the Catholic point of view) was that the speakers arguing for the Church as a force for good were hopelessly outclassed by two hugely popular, professional performers. The archbishop had obviously decided that it would work best if he stuck to facts and figures and presented the Church as a sort of vast charitable or “social welfare” organisation. He emphasised how many Catholics there were in the world, and that even included “heads of state”, he said, as if that was a clincher. But he said virtually nothing of a religious or spiritual nature as far as I could tell, and non-Catholics would have been none the wiser about what you might call the transcendent aspects of the Church. Then later when challenged he became painfully hesitant. In the end he mumbled and spluttered and retreated into embarrassing excuses and evasions. He repeatedly got Ann Widdecombe’s name wrong. The hostility of both the audience and his opponents seemed to have discomfited him.

So it was left to Ann Widdecombe to defend the Church single-handedly. She did well, showed a light touch and took Hitchens to task for exaggerations and so on. But in the end Hitchens and Fry were able to persuade decisively by simply listing one after another the wicked things that have been done in the Church’s name over the centuries. More than anything they focused on the “institutionalisation of the rape and torture and maltreatment of children”. That’s what Hitchens called it – that’s pretty much what it was – and Fry returned to it. I don’t blame them for harping on about these unspeakable crimes, because there is no answer to them. Then they talked about the Church’s teaching on homosexuality. When Zeinab Badawi in the chair asked the archbishop whether Christ himself ever actually said anything about homosexuality, he replied by saying “that’s not the point” or words to that effect, and sounded slippery.

Ah, fish in a barrel, defended from a pair of professional big game hunters and explosives experts by a pair of ditherers. That’s entertainment!