A feminist embarrassment

I cringed reading this woman’s lament that evolutionary biology is responsible for the oppression of women, starting with Darwin. It’s one long colossal failure of logic.

The argument has some genuinely true facts embedded in it, which then get spun out into a series of false conclusions. It is true that the Victorian gentlemen who formulated and expanded upon the theory of evolution tended to be 19th century chauvinists who made up stories about the inferiority of the feminine mind, and Darwin was right among them. It is also true that there are contemporary biologists who still make up similar stories and engage in blatant retrofitting of the data to rationalize sexism or racism (Satoshi Kanazawa comes to mind as one of the most egregious examples).

But don’t confuse cause and effect! Sexism predated evolutionary theory, and is a product of the wider culture. And creationism, most obviously, is extremely sexist, with its predefined gender roles and gender-based assignment of blame for the entirety of our wicked nature. To single out a late 19th century scientific theory and accuse it of promoting a deplorable cultural attitude that was both present before the theory was discovered, and present to an even greater degree in the individuals who strongly opposed the theory, is ridiculous in the extreme, and embarrassingly stupid.

But I’m not done. The entirety of the edifice of her logic is built on exactly one essay, one attack on evolution, by one guy. And that guy is the rabid squirrel of creationism, Jerry Bergman.

Bergman is so awful, so incompetent, so dishonest, that citing him in any way in support of your position (let alone allowing his lying slander of Darwin be the sole source) instantly discredits anything you might say. It says you have no discernment or capability of critical evaluation of your sources.

I’m sorry to say that the taint of incompetence has now also spread to Loretta Kemsley.

(Also on Sb)

#OCCUPYMORRIS

I never thought it would happen, but the flaming radicals here in rural Minnesota are actually rising up to overthrow the system. Tonight, 1 November, at 6pm, the 99% (which should be about 4,950 people, given the population of our town) are meeting on the campus mall to MARCH ON MORRIS. Which means about a ten-minute walk.

I’ll be there. Everyone should show up. All you townies and students, country farmers, vagrants passing through, faculty and staff, hardworking blue-collar wage slaves, come on out tonight!

I’m hoping this will be the seminal event that crystallizes the whole movement and shatters the dominant paradigm. It could happen. You don’t want to miss it, do you?

A feminist embarrassment

I cringed reading this woman’s lament that evolutionary biology is responsible for the oppression of women, starting with Darwin. It’s one long colossal failure of logic.

The argument has some genuinely true facts embedded in it, which then get spun out into a series of false conclusions. It is true that the Victorian gentlemen who formulated and expanded upon the theory of evolution tended to be 19th century chauvinists who made up stories about the inferiority of the feminine mind, and Darwin was right among them. It is also true that there are contemporary biologists who still make up similar stories and engage in blatant retrofitting of the data to rationalize sexism or racism (Satoshi Kanazawa comes to mind as one of the most egregious examples).

But don’t confuse cause and effect! Sexism predated evolutionary theory, and is a product of the wider culture. And creationism, most obviously, is extremely sexist, with its predefined gender roles and gender-based assignment of blame for the entirety of our wicked nature. To single out a late 19th century scientific theory and accuse it of promoting a deplorable cultural attitude that was both present before the theory was discovered, and present to an even greater degree in the individuals who strongly opposed the theory, is ridiculous in the extreme, and embarrassingly stupid.

But I’m not done. The entirety of the edifice of her logic is built on exactly one essay, one attack on evolution, by one guy. And that guy is the rabid squirrel of creationism, Jerry Bergman.

Bergman is so awful, so incompetent, so dishonest, that citing him in any way in support of your position (let alone allowing his lying slander of Darwin be the sole source) instantly discredits anything you might say. It says you have no discernment or capability of critical evaluation of your sources.

I’m sorry to say that the taint of incompetence has now also spread to Loretta Kemsley.

(Also on FtB)

Let it be the start of an avalanche

The Texas Freethought Convention last month was a hoot, but the 2012 Global Atheist Convention in Melbourne in April promises to be even bigger and more fierce. The Australians are warming up already — they’ve broadcast a story on the Texas event, playing up our opposition to the follies of faith in a state led by that foolish goon, Rick Perry. I’m in it briefly (Hi, Mom!), but the bulk of the footage is dedicated to Christopher Hitchens, and rightly so.

If you don’t think that you can make it to Australia in April, though, shoot for the Reason Rally in Washington DC in March. This is our time, rise up and stand!

John Haught is a coward and a theologian

I’ve been in debates and arguments where I felt I missed the mark or didn’t do my best job, and I shrug and move on — and I also figure it’s all public and it’s all going to end up on youtube. It also ends up on youtube when I do a good job, which is a bit of a pain in the butt: I have to keep coming up with new talks because I know the crowd that listens to me tends to churn through internet content so thoroughly. It’s part of the job nowadays, I fear. Talks aren’t just public, they get preserved forever on the internet.

John Haught doesn’t get it. Maybe it’s because he’s a really, really old guy (why, he’s got to be a whole ten years older than me, and even has a few years on that geezer Coyne) and hasn’t kept up. Maybe it’s because he’s a Christian and thus unaware of the nature of the universe. Maybe it’s because he’s the opposite of a gentleman and a scholar. John Haught is suppressing the video of the debate he had with Jerry Coyne. He signed off on permission before the debate, but has now reneged, claiming he did poorly because of the presence of “Jerry’s groupies”, and that the event “failed to meet what I consider to be reasonable standards of fruitful academic exchange”. He got his ass kicked, in other words.

I find this deplorable and disgraceful. As I say, it’s a nuisance that I have to keep writing new talks because they get so thoroughly exposed on the internet, but that’s also a benefit: it means tens of thousands hear a talk that I gave to an in-person audience of only a few hundred, and it means my words are not only heard, but are open to criticism. That’s important. That’s also an obligation and responsibility of any public intellectual.

Oh, well, as it stands, that just means Jerry Coyne’s account of the debate is definitive.

By the way, it’s not just Haught that fails the test of a scholar: the Gaines Center at the University of Kentucky, which sponsored the debate and recorded it, must also be held accountable for going along with the craven suppression. Their reputation is being sacrificed on the altar of John Haught’s vanity — I’m not impressed.

Why I am an atheist – Kirsten Seymour

I grew up in a largely secular household. Although I was christened in the Anglican church, my exposure to religious ideas was limited to a children’s book of bible stories (from my grandmother), occasional visits to church (when my parents were out of town and I had to stay with gran), and a week every summer spent at church camp. The bible stories I treated just as that – even from an early age, I recognized them as stories only. My occasional church visits I found entirely boring and I don’t remember ever actually listening to anything that was said.

Church camp was probably the most influential religious experience I had. I should say that I only ever went to church camp because there was always a week in the summer where my mom went out of town and my dad worked and my parents thought it would be best to send me off to camp with other kids. There were very few (if any) live-in summer camps in our area that weren’t run by churches, and my parents were of the opinion that a week of religion wouldn’t kill me. For the most part they were right. There was the one summer where a scheduling conflict forced them to send me to a Pentecostal camp instead of the Anglican camp that I usually went to. Pentecostal camp featured 4 hours of church every day, which included adults speaking in tongues and performing “miracles” on demand, and lots of kids with their hands in the air, crying (literally) for Jesus. I remember being bitter that I wasn’t allowed to listen to my new Natalie Cole cassette tape because it wasn’t about God. I found that camp creepy, and my mom was pretty shocked by the stories I told when I came home. Needless to say, I never went there again. The Anglican camp was better. There was always some sort of short service each day (usually held outside in a little clearing in the forest), but for the most part we played games, sang songs, swam in the ocean and did normal kid stuff. I enjoyed camp, and it gave me the impression that believing in God wasn’t all that bad. I enjoyed the camaraderie with other kids and the feeling that we were all a part of something.

In all my life, I don’t remember ever having a fervent belief in God. I thought it was tradition to be a part of a religion, but I didn’t realize that you had to actually believe in it. As a teenager, I started to philosophize on religion and what I really believed. At first, I came up with the argument that “god” or “gods” were present in all societies around the world, so maybe there was something to it. But I didn’t think that any one religion had it right. I guess this was my phase of “spirituality” where I thought there might be some higher being, but I couldn’t subscribe to any one belief system. In university, I spent a weekend at a friend’s house and devoured the book “Conversations with God”, which is written on the premise that the author is actually able to communicate with God, and God explains why there are all these contradictions in the world – why babies die, why some parts of the world experience extreme poverty and suffering while others were relatively prosperous, why God doesn’t show himself. I thought the book made some sense, and I remember thinking that if there was a God, I’d like to think that he’d be practical and merciful like the author of that book explained. Of course, I realized that the book didn’t jive with any religious doctrine that I knew of, so I was back to thinking that there might be something out there, but no religion had it right.

I think that my “spirituality” dissolved gradually through university as I strengthened my science muscles. I took a class as an elective towards the end of my B.Sc. that focused on society and the environment. The class was full of hippies and “spiritual” folks who had an idealistic view that “alternative reasoning” could solve all the world’s problems – I would have fit right in during high school. In the course, I heard the argument all the time that “if we just let go of our western ideals and ways of thinking and take a holistic approach to environmental management, we’ll save the environment”. Nobody ever explained what that meant. Meanwhile, I’d spent 2 summers as a research assistant investigating how land use affected fish populations in different regions of the province, and finding that the “doom and gloom” opinion that most environmentalists had regarding logging and the environment didn’t apply to all ecosystems. I was thinking critically, investigating claims, and finding that science had more answers to everything. I think it was around this time that I ditched the idea of a god entirely. In the same way that I couldn’t envision how “non-Western thinking” could solve the world’s environmental problems, I just couldn’t wrap my mind around the idea of a man in the sky, responsible for everything, meting out vengeance on anyone who didn’t blindly believe in his glory. Even “spirituality” seemed silly and childish – I was fed up with woo, “alternative thinking”, eastern/western reasoning, etc.. In the end, it all comes down to facts, and the fact is that no higher being has ever presented me with a single reason to believe he exists.

I’m still an environmentalist, but instead of standing in a cutblock, smoking weed and chained to a tree, I’m actively involved in the science that goes towards managing environment effectively for everyone. And instead of hanging out in a coffee shop discussing god, spirituality, and the driving force behind nature, I’m discussing with everyone who will listen the reasons why I’m an atheist.

Kirsten Seymour
Canada