Funniest thing I’ve seen today: Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s The Woman’s Bible is available for free in the Kindle store, so many good Christians have downloaded it…only to discover that it’s a wretched, evil work of Satanic god-denying feminism. Read the reviews!
There’s an odd phenomenon that crops up now and then. Every once in a while, an old thread is revived and the discussion gets lively again…and often it’s because yet another deluded fanatical creationist has been searching the web using the magic phrase “Kent Hovind” and found my site. And then they’re all offended because I point out that Hovind is a deeply ignorant fraud and tax cheat who was sentenced to 10 years in prison (currently serving his time in Florence, Colorado; expected release in 2015).
By the way, you should listen to his phone calls from jail. Criminal mastermind, he is not.
Anyway, it’s happened again. Some creationist dufus has hurled himself into a three-year old thread. So what I’m going to do is close that thread, and send the conversation here, where everyone can join in and have fun.
I am an Atheist because I was raised without religion and figured out pretty quick that it was silly all on my own. My parents are both Atheists, but when I was young, they certainly didn’t try and convert me to their beliefs. I believed in God as a child, in a private personal way in that I believed that I had come from “Heaven” and that I had slid down an invisible slide into my mummy’s belly. I discarded God before I even discarded Santa and with much the same calm sense of understanding, like an imaginary friend I had outgrown. My parents were always open to questions and my Father in particular was my favourite bouncing board for all the questions I had about religions, he answered my questions as clearly and accurately he could; needless to say none of it ever made any sense to me. I am 19 and I still have fascinating conversations with my Father, I have questions, he gives me the best answers he can, if I don’t know and he doesn’t know, and it wasn’t a half rhetorical philosophical/sociological question then I do what research I can; it’s that simple. I went to church for a while as an “adult”, so that I could join a choir, and I still don’t understand what all the fuss is about, a lot of frivolous mumbo jumbo really. I am a practicing Atheist; I do celebrate the big Christian holidays like Christmas and Easter, except in a secular-almost-pagan way, celebrating the opportunity to be with family more than anything else. I am a third generation, non-theist and a second generation Atheist, no Grandma who tried to guilt me back into the faith, no parents threatening to disown me, I probably had a less stressful childhood than most, no fear of coming out to my parents (BTW I don’t actually intend to tell them as I am as of yet undecided but if I end up being serious enough with a woman to bring her home to meet the parents, I’m pretty sure they would roll with it) no confusion when learning evolution (in high school they had us divide into groups and each group would teach the rest of the class a section from the text book in the evolution unit—the video PZ posted on fish diversification in the Congo made a really good example—I totally rocked it) and most of all no fear of asking questions. Being an Atheist isn’t a bad thing especially when growing up, Atheist children are raised to think critically, to ask questions, to weigh social actions against social reactions as opposed to divine ones; In other words, I believe in thinking, I believe in learning, and I believe in not being a dick. Why do people have a problem with Atheists again?
E. Knight
Canada
I’ve known a lot of wonderful people who are Catholics; I’ve even met some Catholic priests who do great and ennobling social work. And then there are all those ordinary American Catholics who ignore all the doctrine, like the ban on birth control, and yet keep on going to church every week. The one thing I always want to ask these people is…WHY DO YOU STILL SUPPORT THAT BACKWARD, MEDIEVAL NONSENSE? There’s such a tremendous disjoint between the thuggish, conservative church and these people’s lives that it is so wrong that they continue to support it.
Now Annie Laurie Gaylor hits one out of the park with an excellent open letter to liberal and nominal Catholics. Go read it, even if you’re an atheist already. If you’ve got Catholic family, forward it to them — it can be your ‘coming out’ announcement!
Also, the FFRF is trying to raise money to publish it as a full page ad in the NYT. Help them out. If nothing else, it’ll be hilarious watching Bill Donohue rupture himself in an apoplectic fit.
Have them teach you what they know. Here’s an animation made from elementary school kids’ imaginative renditions of an evolving population of animals. It’s pretty darned good!
(via io9.)
It’s been flabbergasting to see kooks jumping all over Richard Dawkins, all claiming that Dawkins is softening in his views (do follow that link to Paula Kirby’s article, it is most excellent), when he’s actually just saying the same thing he’s always said.
Now I’m experiencing a similar discombobulation. Last week I had a discussion with Greg Epstein on the radio, in which I said all the same things I’ve always said about religion. The question was “How should atheists talk about religion?”, and here’s a summary of the main points I tried to get across:
The answer is obvious: any and every way they want to. There is no dogma here, so there is no “should”: let a thousand voices roar. So we can have angry atheists and conciliatory atheists, and since there is no central authority, no pope of atheism, no one can say that one or the other is “wrong”. So, ultimately, there can be no disagreement between Greg and I except to acknowledge that we belong to different schools of thought on tactics and priorities.
Those differences, though, don’t mean I get to tell him how to manage his humanism or vice versa. Most of the strain between atheist communities comes from a perception that someone is disparaging our way: we more militant atheists get a lot of flak from the milquetoast atheists that we’re wrong, we’re driving believers away, we’re too obnoxious, that sort of thing…and it works both ways of course: we do things like call milquetoast atheists milquetoast atheists, and have little patience for soft and fluffy approaches.
But I think the final answer has to be that we need all approaches. I wrote something today that pointed that out: that what I favor is the combined arms approach to changing culture, and where I personally might favor the artillery for the biggest bangs, I know we need engineers now and then to repair and rebuild.
But here’s a central issue of contention: FAITH. No one word personifies the absolute worst and most wicked properties of religion better than that. Faith is mind-rot. It’s the poison that destroys critical thinking, undermines evidence, and leads people into lives dedicated to absurdity. It’s a parasite regarded as a virtue. I speak as a representative of the scientific faction of atheism: it’s one thing we simply cannot compromise on. Faith is wrong.
So then we see this one subgroup of atheists and humanists cheerfully endorsing the umbrella of “interfaith” and it drives us into a rage: it’s a betrayal. It’s an abandonment of a core principle of our atheism. We wonder what the heck is wrong with these people — it’s like being a dedicated pacifist and seeing like-minded war haters working with the Pentagon and saying good things about military drones.
I know the usual arguments: there are good religious people doing good work, and it’s a way to join in to those causes as secularists. And it’s true, there is no denying that there are good religious people…but they are laboring under a delusion, this nonsense of faith, and it’s pandering to the bad in order to do good. I can’t do that, and I won’t do that, `and I’ll confess, it annoys me to see atheists doing that. If they are religious people doing good work in the real world, then do it as a secular effort…don’t give the most foolish part of the endeavor credibility by calling it “interfaith”.
So today I got an email from the Harvard Humanists. You wanna see dishonest spin? I’m gonna show you dishonest spin.
Speaking of Humanists and tradition, Greg recently debated biologist PZ Myers, one of the most popular science/atheist bloggers, on the topic of “How should the atheist movement talk about religion?” Myers has at times been a fierce critic of Humanist community work but in this forceful showing, Greg won some major concessions as the two found a surprising degree of common ground. Check out the debate on our website here.
Epstein ignored everything I said and just sailed on over me. And now he’s going to claim he won some major concessions”? Was he even listening to what I said?
I think what he really meant to say in that email was that he learned that his caricature of the New Atheist position was false, so he did manage to hear some things we’ve always been saying this time. Unfortunately, now he’s trying to turn his blithe ignorance our position into a triumph, and selectively turning a blind eye to our differences.
This press release sounds like something from the Discovery Institute. It’s a completely dishonest representation of the discussion. We have not reconciled. And their freakishly fraudulent spin makes me trust them even less.
It’s the natural news site to go to for the announcement that Andrew Breitbart has died, at a surprisingly young age. He had a history of heart problems and collapsed suddenly: I have no sympathy for his views at all, but I can sympathize with that. It’s kind of how I expect to go someday.
I feel powerful. A silly gang of people stung by the criticisms of the New Atheists met for dinner to grumble about us, and my name came up a few times. It’s kind of like being a superhero and learning that nefarious villains are teaming up to shake their fists at you and make plans to thwart you…only in this case, it’s more like the League of Nitwits, which just sucks all the glory out of it. My nemeses are sadly disappointing.
Two atheists – John Gray and Alain de Botton – and two agnostics – Nassim Nicholas Taleb and I – meet for dinner at a Greek restaurant in Bayswater, London. The talk is genial, friendly and then, suddenly, intense when neo-atheism comes up. Three of us, including both atheists, have suffered abuse at the hands of this cult. Only Taleb seems to have escaped unscathed and this, we conclude, must be because he can do maths and people are afraid of maths.
The author is Bryan Appleyard, that tired hack of British crank journalism, anti-Darwinist and self-admitted terrible writer.
John Gray is one of those atheist apologists for religion, who claims that beliefs don’t matter — all that stuff about Jesus being the son of God, requiring your devotion in order for Christians to get into heaven? They don’t really believe that. They just like going to church for the company and the rituals and those comfy pews or something.
He’s quite right, the New Atheists haven’t been picking on Nassim Nicholas Taleb much, but it isn’t because he knows math (really — here we are, a largely science-dominated community, and Appleyard thinks we’re afraid of math? Gimme a break) — in my case, it’s because I never heard of him before. I had to look him up. All I know is that Taleb doesn’t like atheists, and likes religion for a stupid reason.
You’ve written a lot about chance and probability. Do you believe in God?
I’m in favour of religion as a tamer of arrogance. For a Greek Orthodox, the idea of God as creator outside the human is not God in God’s terms. My God isn’t the God of George Bush.What’s your view of the “new atheists”, people such as Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris?
They’re charlatans. But see the contradiction: people are sceptical about God, yet gullible when it comes to the stock market.
Yeah, he’s some stock market guru. It seems to me that the only way to really make money in the stock market is by getting paid for telling people how to make money in the stock market; Taleb tells people how to make money in the stock market, which sort of says everything you need to know about him, and also makes his accusation of charlatanry particularly ironic.
Oh, and he also likes Ron Paul. Not impressed.
The final guest at this peculiarly petty dinner party is Alain de Botton. Haven’t we heard enough of the silly de Botton lately? He’s the atheist who has been straining to crawl up religion’s asshole and take its place.
De Botton is the most recent and, consequently, the most shocked victim. He has just produced a book, Religion for Atheists: a Non-Believer’s Guide to the Uses of Religion, mildly suggesting that atheists like himself have much to learn from religion and that, in fact, religion is too important to be left to believers. He has also proposed an atheists’ temple, a place where non-believers can partake of the consolations of silence and meditation.
Right, because that’s exactly what atheists want, a new religion. And now he’s shocked that atheists sneer at his temple, and reject the papacy of Pope de Botton.
To rationalize this pity party, Appleyard tries to define the New Atheism by listing the three legs of our position. Would you be surprised to learn that he gets every one of them wrong? No, you would not, because this is Bryan Appleyard. You would be startled if he got something right.
First, a definition. By “neo-atheism”, I mean a tripartite belief system founded on the conviction that science provides the only road to truth and that all religions are deluded, irrational and destructive.
Atheism is just one-third of this exotic ideological cocktail. Secularism, the political wing of the movement, is another third. Neo-atheists often assume that the two are the same thing; in fact, atheism is a metaphysical position and secularism is a view of how society should be organised. So a Christian can easily be a secularist – indeed, even Christ was being one when he said, “Render unto Caesar” – and an atheist can be anti-secularist if he happens to believe that religious views should be taken into account. But, in some muddled way, the two ideas have been combined by the cultists.
The third leg of neo-atheism is Darwinism, the AK-47 of neo-atheist shock troops. Alone among scientists, and perhaps because of the enormous influence of Richard Dawkins, Darwin has been embraced as the final conclusive proof not only that God does not exist but also that religion as a whole is a uniquely dangerous threat to scientific rationality.
Heh. His weird misunderstandings say so much about Appleyard, and so little about atheism.
Wrong. Science provides evidence that all religions are wrong or vacuous. The charge of scientism is a common one, but it’s not right: show us a different, better path to knowledge and we’ll embrace it. But the apologists for religion never do that. You’ll also find that we recognize that there are obvious attractions to religion — most of them don’t require a gun to the head to get adherents — but that they get the facts of the universe fundamentally wrong, and building on error is a bad policy.
Wrong. We’re quite aware of the difference between atheism and secularism. I do not teach atheism in the classroom, nor do I encourage teachers to do so; I want a secular educational system. I do not argue that only atheists be allowed to serve in government, but that government only implement secular, non-sectarian, non-religious decisions that are appropriate for a pluralist society. You may notice I’ve got a badge over on the right sidebar to Americans United, a secular but not atheist organization that I whole-heartedly support.
Wrong, but hilarious. Darwin is not proof of the non-existence of gods. He showed how life actually diversified and changed on this planet, and he provided a mechanism that works without divine meddling of any kind. He makes gods superfluous. I love the fact that this kook finds science as threatening and scary as an AK-47, though. It says a lot about him.
Appleyard was so enthused about his new buddies in the We-Hate-New-Atheists movement that he had to get right on the phone and call up his buddy, Jerry Fodor, the philosopher who wrote an anti-Darwinian evolution book and got thoroughly panned everywhere. A new recruit for the League of Nitwits!
Of course he complained about me. And complained dishonestly.
Furthermore, the rise of evolutionary psychology – an analysis of human behaviour based on the tracing of evolved traits – seemed to suggest that the human mind, too, would soon succumb to the logic of neo-atheism.
It was in the midst of this that Fodor and the cognitive scientist Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini published What Darwin Got Wrong, a highly sophisticated analysis of Darwinian thought which concluded that the theory of natural selection could not be stated coherently. All hell broke loose. Such was the abuse that Fodor vowed never to read a blog again. Myers the provocateur announced that he had no intention of reading the book but spent 3,000 words trashing it anyway, a remarkably frank statement of intellectual tyranny.
Fodor now chuckles at the memory. “I said we should write back saying we had no intention of reading his review but we thought it was all wrong anyway.”
No, I haven’t read and won’t be reading the book by Piattelli-Palmarini and Fodor. But that article he’s whining about wasn’t a review of his book at all, and I plainly said so! It was a review of Fodor’s article in New Scientist, and I did read the whole thing. I am impressed that I and the other critics have completely driven him away from blogs; now if we can just scare him away from books, magazines, and television, he can spend the rest of his life happily rocking away in an empty room.
Appleyard closed his meeting of the shocked, traumatized, trembling victims of New Atheist ferocity with the tepid call of the religious apologist:
Religion is not going to go away. It is a natural and legitimate response to the human condition, to human consciousness and to human ignorance. One of the most striking things revealed by the progress of science has been the revelation of how little we know and how easily what we do know can be overthrown. Furthermore, as Hitchens in effect acknowledged and as the neo-atheists demonstrate by their ideological rigidity and savagery, absence of religion does not guarantee that the demonic side of our natures will be eliminated. People should have learned this from the catastrophic failed atheist project of communism, but too many didn’t.
I’m pessimistic that religion will go away in my lifetime, too, but not because it is a valid and reasonable reaction to the world around us. It isn’t. It’s the invisible friend the fearful cling to in the darkness, it’s the lie the desperate tell themselves in denial. But there is a better solution: you can turn on the light, and the invisible friend evaporates, the dangers are all exposed to be dealt with, and the truth emerges. Atheists are the ones who’ve flipped on the light, and found the universe to be not quite as scary as the ignorant claim it to be, and even better, to be full of wonders — wonders that we are part of, that aren’t painted on a fabric of myth.
And it really feels good. Religion can go away, every one of us atheists is testimony to that, and it leaves us better, stronger, and happier. I see no barrier to the complete eradication of religion someday, other than the fearfulness of craven little shadow-huggers like Appleyard.
The Minnesota legislature is working up a new law that makes it justifiable to pull a gun and shoot someone on mere suspicion of a threat. Don’t run away, don’t avoid trouble, just open fire!
The just-passed Minnesota bill to expand “Castle Doctrine” gun rights should be called the Shoot First law. The Minnesota law—and bills like it pending in Texas, Pennsylvania and other states—allows gun owners to use deadly force outside of their homes on the basis of merely feeling threatened. No longer would there be any onus to retreat from perceived danger. That’s why the term Shoot First is appropriate.
Under HF1467, you can shoot somebody:
[6.25] to resist or prevent what the individual reasonably believes is an offense or attempted offense that imminently exposes the individual or another person to substantial bodily harm, great bodily harm, or death; or
[6.27] (3) to resist or prevent what the individual reasonably believes is the commission or imminent commission of a forcible felony.
I was horrified to see who’s defending this bill, but totally unsurprised.
Sen. Bill Ingebrigtsen, R-Alexandria, said, “This bill is about good folks and giving them an opportunity to defend themselves.”
I voted against Ingebrigtsen in the last election — I could tell he was just another pig-ignorant Republican thug. Now it’s confirmed.
Somehow, I have this notion that “good folks” aren’t all about hair-trigger firearms use.
Somebody ought to mention to the sponsors of this bill that it allows atheists to carry a gun, and use it. Don’t forget, we’re untrustworthy and not good folks.
