Waa waa waaaaa

Jeffrey Jena, one of those right-wing kooks, is upset about something terribly traumatic that happened to him. Someone unfriended him on Facebook for being a wingnut! Don’t you know that lefty liberals are supposed to always pretend to be friends with the goons and thugs of the right?

Have any of you been dumped on Facebook for being racist, homophobic gun toting morons lately? Have some of your tolerant, diversity seeking “Progressive”friends tossed you under the bus for having the temerity to express a conservative opinion based on facts?

He’s so upset about the fact that people judge him on his hateful views that he has created a facebook group of his own, Conservatives “Un-Friended” by a Liberal for Political Opinions. What a sense of absurd entitlement.

You know, I’ve had a few people write to me to say that they weren’t going to be my friend on facebook because I was some kind of deranged Jesus-hating socialist. As if I cared. Really, any of you who are my friends on facebook can leave right now, no hard feelings, if you dislike my positions on anything. Go ahead. I don’t mind. I promise I won’t crawl sobbing into my bedroom, weeping because someone clicked a button on their facebook page.

Poor Jeffy. He only has 1682 friends right now. To make him feel better, everyone should send him a friend request right now. Then, after he accepts it, drop him and make him cry.

And if he doesn’t accept it, he must be one of those nasty intolerant bigots who can’t stand people with different political opinions.

Don’t give them ideas!

A Florida teacher was assaulted by two fellow teachers…who splashed her with holy water because she is an atheist. This is a serious concern — they’re on to us. What am I going to do if someone flings holy water onto me? I might start smoking and my flesh will melt and then I’ll disintegrate with an unholy wail as Satan drags me down.

Or I might start giggling. One or the other.

Gotta make sure the Christians don’t find out about this. Stakes through the heart and silver bullets…completely harmless to atheists. Holy water, though, and garlic terrify us. Especially if it’s a garlic with butter and lemon on calamari, I’m just paralyzed with fear when I see that. Shhhh, don’t tell anyone.

You can tell where this is going, but you can hardly believe it when it gets there

Some men have a particularly oblivious sense of privilege — these are the kinds of evil freaks who murder their children at the prospect that their ex-wife might get custody. The fact that they are men is used to blind them to the fact that there are these other human beings called women out there who have just as much right to their lives as they do.

Here’s the opening paragraph of a blog post by a self-proclaimed anti-feminist.

When men have something women have less of, such as money or power, women simply take it by force. It’s called affirmative action and feminists believe it’s right. I am not going to argue against that. I accept that as a lost cause. So instead I am going to embrace forced equality and demand it for men as well.

What do women have that men don’t? Vaginas. So poor pathetic Eivend Berge is asserting his right to rape. He’s quite open about it: “it is about time men in feminist countries such as Norway stop thinking of rape as wrong” and “Rape is equality.” You’ll find his type is fairly common among a group who call themselves “Men’s Rights” proponents, where Men’s Right seems to be to maintain economic and social inequities that benefit them.

I’m afraid he needs to learn that legal corrections to a long and ongoing history of economic oppression of women are fair and just, and not comparable to using violence to abuse and degrade and physically and emotionally harm women. I should also point out that women have lived with this fear of rape for essentially the entire history of the human race, so his self-serving manifesto isn’t exactly novel.

Just to warp your perception of rotten males a little more, some of the comments there are all about giving him tips on improving his appearance to be a better pick up artist (PUA). Sometimes I’m really embarrassed by my gender. I’m also wondering now if the fact that we’ve got our oh-so-sensitive testicles dangling gently in a place just ripe for a savage kick isn’t an example of cosmic justice, after all.

I’m a stay-at-home kind of guy

People are still asking me to come speak at various places, and I’m just going to have to put my foot down. Here’s my calendar for the next few months:

And that’s it. I’m pleased that I managed to keep this time right around now free to get some work done, and then there’s a flurry of European travel in mid- to late June, and August is free so I can get prepared for teaching. But otherwise, that’s it, I’m staying home. I’m discouraging everyone from sending me more invitations until the Spring term. If you really want me to visit Miami or Hawaii in February, I might be coaxed out of my hermitage, but that’s it.

Don’t complain, I know I’m turning into a regular J.D. Salinger here. Now go away and leave me alone.

What ever happened to Paul Kurtz?

The Paul Kurtz I remember was the serious, scholarly fellow at the forefront of the atheist movement, who wasn’t shy about saying it the way it was. The New Kurtz is a more timid observer, who wants to criticize religion mildly without giving offense, and is more concerned about policing his fellow humanists and atheists than actually working to overcome the folly of religious belief.

In the latest issue of Free Inquiry magazine, Kurtz has an editorial that is all about tone rather than content; it de-emphasizes what we say and wants to make how we say it the most important criterion. It’s titled “Toward a Kinder and Gentler Humanism”, and it makes me wonder who chopped Kurtz’s balls off. (To be fair, I should say upfront that it briefly mentions me — or rather, my jerkwad alter ego, P.Z. Meyers — to accuse me of being “strident”.)

He lays out his plan. They are going to take the “high road”, they are not “shrill”, they will not “resort to ridicule”, yadda yadda yadda. Again, tone, tone, tone. Who cares? The low point for me, though, was this bit:

I must say, though some colleagues at the Center may disagree, that I have serious misgivings about recent programs undertaken by the Center and the Council that laid heavy stress on blasphemy. Although I agree that it is vitally important to defend the right to blaspheme, I am displeased with the Center’s decision last year to celebrate Blasphemy Day as such. Similarly, although cartoons make a point and can be used, I am disturbed about poking fun at our fellow citizens in the public square. Speaking personally, I am particularly offended by the cartoon that won the Council’s Free Expression Cartoon Contest this year. I think that it is in poor taste. I do not object to others in society doing this, but I do not think that is is the role of the Council for Secular Humanism or the Center for Inquiry to engage in such forms of lampooning.

So, we’re going to reserve the right to blaspheme, but we’re not actually going to do it, out of respect for the beliefs of others. When some religious nut demands our obeisance to something he regards as holy, we’re going to say that we could disagree, but instead we’re going to self-censor and bend a knee to his gods…have no fear, though, while we’re busy kowtowing, we’ll be sure to declare that we could stop any time.

You have not protected the right to blaspheme if you also gag yourself and say you won’t; you are particularly in the wrong if you are a respected leader of a godless institution and you use your influence to insist that we should not blaspheme at all. It is our responsibility as the opposition to poke fun at our fellow citizens in the public square; what good is an opposition that muzzles itself and insists on giving religion the privilege of not even being laughed at?

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By the way, here is that cartoon that won the contest he referred to above. I share some of Kurtz’s disappointment, because I don’t care for it much. However, it’s not because it’s offensive or in poor taste — please, a cartoon cannot possibly be as offensive as the child-raping behavior it targets — but because it’s not particularly funny. I have higher expectations of one of the premiere organizations for secular humanism than this!

What Kurtz fails to appreciate is that we must offend. We are rejecting the power of invisible gods and refusing the promise of eternal life in paradise, and further, we’re in the business of telling believers that their most cherished fantasies are lies. If we aren’t offending them, we are hiding the implications of our ideas and are not doing our job.

Fortunately, as the editorial reveals throughout, the Council for Secular Humanism and the Center for Inquiry are defying their founder’s demands that they hobble themselves (and there is definitely a note of resentment coming through, too). It’s a shame that Kurtz is willingly trapped in an ineffectual past, but at the same time, I think he has built a solid foundation for those organizations, and there is hope that they, if not their former leader, are working to advance.

That’ll teach us!

We really hurt the true believers of Islam with Draw Mohammed Day. They are angry and frustrated, and they want to strike back against secularists equally well, in ways that will also infuriate us. To their credit, though, some realize that threatening to decapitate heretics isn’t exactly smart and civilized…they need something that will illustrate to us how hurtful violating their religious precepts was.

What to do, what to do…

One Muslim genius has come up with the answer: EVERYBODY RESEARCH HOLOCAUST DAY. On 30 June, he is encouraging everyone to engage in “critical study” of “the foundational myth of the secular cult”.

Much of the injustice that takes place in our world stems from ignorance. We reject being emotionally blackmailed by Hollywood tales and holocaust museums which legitimize the war crimes and crimes against humanity of the extremist Atheist regime of Tel-Aviv.

So this guy proposes to reply to drawing stick-figure Mohammeds with holocaust denial and the negation of history? Yeah, that’ll improve the reputation of Islam as the domain of rational thought. He also has his own justification, that tries to claim the moral high ground in this disagreement.

The difference is that you draw Lies about Muhammad and we draw Truth about you. That you seek to bring unrest and conflict, and we wish to uncover the reality so injustice is no more

He does make one good point, though. He asks if he’s free to question the holocaust, just as we are free to question Islam. I’d say yes, he should be, but I know that some European countries have put special restrictions on this one area of inquiry — you are not allowed to express a certain wrong opinion about the holocaust without risk of penalty, and that’s not right.

These people should be free to say awesomely stupid things so we can point and laugh and watch their whole effort collapse in stupidity.