Justin Griffith just re-enlisted in the military, something that gives me palpitations — I have a son in the army, I don’t know if I want to make that kind of behavior sound positive. Griffith also had one of those chaplain creatures give him the oath, another thing I’d like to discourage. It is, however, nice that he was allowed to leave god out of the oath.
Wait. Now I’m disturbed that we can find such a trivial omission at all significant. What’s god doing in there in the first place?
Did someone rattle the monkey cage recently? I have been getting a sudden wave of email from defenders of Kent Hovind, which is not good. Of all the creationists, Hovind spawns the most illiterate, incomprehensible mess; I think you have to be of very low intelligence to find anything at all appealing in that guy.
Anyway, here are two examples. I’d kind of like to be game-fully employed — does that mean I just sit around all day playing games? Because I suppose that could be fun.
Your assessment of Kent Hovind
You are an arrogant jackass. Your pompousness is only exceeded by your stupendous idiocracy. The fact that you are game fully employed is proof that we were created and it was obviously not survival of the fittest. If there were any true justice in this country, you would be the one sitting in jail. Hey ape-man, go back and crawl under the rock from witch you came and do the world a favor…
Have a wonderful day
This next one is just weird. He spelled my name right, but misspelled Hovind’s, which is a first. He’s also very confused — I think he has the impression I’m a Hovind supporter.
Kent hovend
as much as I love Kent hovend I have to say he is guilty
any one who has listened to any of his video’s has seen him say don’t pay your tax’s
I don’t if he did not say that in his video’s they would have left him alone
however there is a good part he get’s a captive ears that need to here what he has to say
we have copied his videos & passed them around
any one that watched them loves them
he makes it easy to understand
keeps it light [ funny ]
none of it is boring unlike most all church’s most guys drift off
in to never never land our wife’s have to nudge us
where no one that watch’s Kent never drift’s off everif he get’s out some day he will maybe in a few years
tell him not to talk about tax’s for or not just shut up about it
he can do more good out than in jail
on the good side when he gets out he will have a new set of suckers to
debate the old one retire or die off
hes still a young man & he has his son’s to take over
yes I did signed your paper to get him out
about a year ago
remember it is better to use a little honey to get them on your side than to
make them pissed off & wont talk to him any more
yes I know its not as much fun hahahhaha
Those are the strange line breaks in the original. I get the feeling he was trying to write a poem.
(Also on Sb)
Hey, I know the Elwha river! I think we stopped there on my honeymoon. Lovely place, the Olympic Peninsula. And getting even lovelier if they are ripping out unneeded dams and restoring the rivers. There’s something so satisfying about a timelapse of a dam being demolished.
Next, restore the watershed and the salmon runs. Whatever, I’ve got to find an opportunity to relax on the peninsula someday again, before I die.
(Also on FtB)
Did someone rattle the monkey cage recently? I have been getting a sudden wave of email from defenders of Kent Hovind, which is not good. Of all the creationists, Hovind spawns the most illiterate, incomprehensible mess; I think you have to be of very low intelligence to find anything at all appealing in that guy.
Anyway, here are two examples. I’d kind of like to be game-fully employed — does that mean I just sit around all day playing games? Because I suppose that could be fun.
Your assessment of Kent Hovind
You are an arrogant jackass. Your pompousness is only exceeded by your stupendous idiocracy. The fact that you are game fully employed is proof that we were created and it was obviously not survival of the fittest. If there were any true justice in this country, you would be the one sitting in jail. Hey ape-man, go back and crawl under the rock from witch you came and do the world a favor…
Have a wonderful day
This next one is just weird. He spelled my name right, but misspelled Hovind’s, which is a first. He’s also very confused — I think he has the impression I’m a Hovind supporter.
Kent hovend
as much as I love Kent hovend I have to say he is guilty
any one who has listened to any of his video’s has seen him say don’t pay your tax’s
I don’t if he did not say that in his video’s they would have left him alone
however there is a good part he get’s a captive ears that need to here what he has to say
we have copied his videos & passed them around
any one that watched them loves them
he makes it easy to understand
keeps it light [ funny ]
none of it is boring unlike most all church’s most guys drift off
in to never never land our wife’s have to nudge us
where no one that watch’s Kent never drift’s off everif he get’s out some day he will maybe in a few years
tell him not to talk about tax’s for or not just shut up about it
he can do more good out than in jail
on the good side when he gets out he will have a new set of suckers to
debate the old one retire or die off
hes still a young man & he has his son’s to take over
yes I did signed your paper to get him out
about a year ago
remember it is better to use a little honey to get them on your side than to
make them pissed off & wont talk to him any more
yes I know its not as much fun hahahhaha
Those are the strange line breaks in the original. I get the feeling he was trying to write a poem.
(Also on FtB)
Look who we’ve signed up for Freethoughtblogs: Maryam Namazie. We’ve got a few more joining us real soon, too.
Haught finally gave permission to release the video of the Coyne-Haught debate — you can watch it now.
Haught had to get in the last word, though, he released it with a letter. It’s quite a letter, too. He explains that he didn’t withhold the video because he was a coward, oh, no — it’s entirely because Jerry Coyne was such an awful, bad, wicked man.
But let me come to the main reason why I have been reluctant to give permission to release the video. It is not for anything that I said during our encounter, but for a reason that I have never witnessed in public academic discussion before. I’m still in shock at how your presentation ended up. I was so offended both personally and as an academic by the vulgarity of it all that I did not want other people to have to share what I witnessed that night in October. I still don’t.
That makes you want to watch it even more, doesn’t it?
Rather than answering my point that scientism is logically incoherent–which is really the main issue–and instead of addressing my argument that the encounter with religious truth requires personal transformation, or for that matter instead of responding to any of the other points I made, you were content to use most of your time to ridicule several isolated quotes from my books. I was absolutely astounded by your woeful lack of insight into, or willingness to grapple with, the real meaning of these passages. Sophisticated argument requires as an essential condition that you have the good manners to understand before you criticize. Your approach, on the other hand was simply one of “caricature and then crush.”
I’m listening to it right now. So far, I’ve only gotten into Haught’s mealy-mouthed babble, and I don’t have much sympathy for him. What does “encounter with religious truth requires personal transformation” even mean? It’s a bald assertion. He gripes that science couldn’t detect cosmic purpose…why? And why should we believe theology can?
I’ll also add that Haught’s letter is a rather nasty, vicious, personal attack in itself. I’ll report back after I’ve heard Coyne’s part — I’ll be listening to see if it’s quite as cantankerous as Haught makes it out to be.
Yeesh. Haught’s closing statement is to tell us to read our bibles and consider kenosis and revelation — it’s pure theo-babble. Where does Haught get any kind of reputation as anything other than a very silly man? He’s just going on and on with this ridiculous crap.
I’m halfway through Jerry’s talk. No ad hominem so far; he’s arguing that there is a conflict between science and religion, and he quotes a few comments from Haught, but I’m not hearing any insults. Coyne disagrees with Haught, which is the whole reason they’re having the debate…is Haught upset because his opponent dares to present an argument in opposition to his?
I am totally baffled by Haught’s complaints. Coyne’s entire talk is on topic, emphasizing that science assesses reality effectively while religion…doesn’t. He points out that theologians, including Haught, fall back on the claim of the metaphorical interpretation, but that’s not an insult, that’s the simple, obvious truth. Sure, he points out that Catholicism has committed evil acts, but that’s part of the argument — if religion were a true source of great moral knowledge, as the religious claim, then why isn’t it legitimate to show that those claims are patently false?
Coyne’s sin is making his case strongly. Nothing more. It was a good, thorough dissection of Haught’s claims, and I can see why Haught would resent it being made publicly available, since he does a great job of making theology look feeble and ineffective and phony. But Haught’s 3-page open letter is far more defamatory than anything Coyne said.
Well I am one because that’s what you call someone who is not a theist, whatever you think that is. So I don’t believe in gods because I don’t see any need to. It seems that the only thing different between believing and not believing is that not believing means you get to do what you want on Sunday and you don’t have to do all the other stuff believers believe they should do. Like be bored to death in church and hate others because they don’t believe what you do.
Everything else is the same. The supposed god does not in any way affect what goes on. He does not answer prayers or intervene in floods and other disasters. He doesn’t reward good behavior. Same result as not praying or not believing.
Someone, Voltaire I think once said, “If there were no god it would have been necessary to invent him”, possibly so, if your goal was to control people. I don’t need that; I’m not a king or government. And since I don’t care for any more authority than is necessary, I don’t see the need to maintain the invention.
I discarded belief in god because it was worthless. The days when an espoused belief was an asset are fading. Politicians in this country still can’t get elected without it, but I’m not a politician. There are other human interactions where ‘having religion’ is still looked on as a plus, but I choose not to get involved with many of those and when I do, such as at funerals and weddings, I just keep quiet, or sit with my sister and laugh and make jokes.
Oh, and last but not least, believing in gods and all those made up stories about him just seems stupid. I mean, none of it holds up to scrutiny. It’s all silly nonsense.
Doubting Thomas
United States
Feministe has a long, thorough, and scholarly overview of the most common kind of rape: acquaintance rape. It’s not the stereotypical violent assault that is going to affect most women, but the guy who gets them drunk and assaults them quietly, in situations with reasonable deniability. The article is loaded with triggers for you women who have experienced those situations, so I’ll just briefly summarize. The good news: it’s only a small percentage of men who are these kind of sexual predators. The bad news: they do it repeatedly, and usually get away with it. A few guys are making the rest of us look bad, and are inspiring a culture of fear in women.
One very useful part of the article is a summary of what we can do to isolate and stop the recidivist rapists.
(1) Men who inhabit cis- and het- identified social spaces need to listen to women. The women we know will tell us when the men they thought they could trust assaulted them; if and only if they know we won’t stonewall, deny, blame or judge. We need to listen without defending that guy. That guy is more likely than not a recidivist. He has probably done it before. He will probably do it again.
(2) The same men need to listen to other men. The men who rape will all but declare themselves. The guy who says he sees a woman too drunk to know where she is as an opportunity is not joking. Men who rape look for assurance that their social license to operate is in effect; they look for little confirmations that if he takes home the drunkest woman at the party and she says the next day that she said no, that she’ll be blamed and not believed. Choosing not to be part of a rape-supportive environment actually tells the rapist that his behavior has risks, and not everyone will take his side against an accuser.
(3) We need to change the culture of discourse about rape (and I mean all of us). Rapists know that the right combination of factors — alcohol and sex shame, mostly — will keep their victims quiet. Otherwise, they would be identified earlier and have a harder time finding victims. Women need social permission to talk frankly about sexual assault, because the more women can say what happened to them, the more difficult it is for the same man to rape six women without facing legal or even social consequences.
(4) Because the rapists have a fairly well-developed modus operandi, is is possible to spot it and interrupt it. We can look for the tactics and interrupt the routine. We can spot the rapist deliberately getting the woman drunk or angling to get the drunk woman alone in an unfamiliar place, and intervene. A guy offering a drunk woman a ride home may just be offering a ride, but if he is insistent when someone else offers a ride, this ought to raise a flag. If a guy is antagonistic towards women and places a lot of emphasis on sex as scoring or conquest, and he’s violating a woman’s boundaries and trying to end up with her drunk and alone, we don’t have to be sure what he’s doing to be concerned, and to start trying to give her exit ramps from his predatory slide.
I think #2 is going to be the toughest one. The men who engage in that sort of behavior tend to hang together and reinforce each other, and the men who will speak out and shut down predatory behavior in their pals at its onset will quickly find themselves excluded from the wolf pack. The problem, as we’ve seen in online behavior by the self-centered pigs, is that there’s no shortage of men (and women!) willing to form a support group for misogyny and rape culture.
