More juicy stuff for Minnesotans

Sorry, all you foreigners who don’t live in an awesome state like Minnesota, but I have to mention another cool local series of events. The Hennepin County Library is sponsoring DNA Day, with multiple opportunities to learn about genetics, genetic diseases, cancer genetics, and genetic family trees. I don’t know why it’s called DNA Day, though, because they have multiple events spread out between 19 April and 1 May at various libraries around Minneapolis. There is limited space, so registration is required (these events are free, though), and you’d better get in there fast.

Prideful buffoons

Oh, dear. The Way of the Master is after “PZ Meyers and his limited vocabulary”. They caught me at the Reason Rally, and I dismissed Sye Ten Bruggencate with a laugh and called him a “slimy motherfucker”. The segment of interest begins at about 9:30.

What they don’t tell you is that I’d been strolling about the rally all morning, and this was the fourth time Sye Ten Bruggencate or Eric Hovind had come up to me with their inane presuppositionalist argument…the same dim argument that they always make (you may notice that at one point, I say “…like I said…” — I was referring to previous encounters with these jerks). And what was that argument?

Well, you may recall that there was a zombie invasion a while back, in which a mob of Hovind acolytes suddenly showed up en masse and started babbling repetitively. You can find the totality of their reasoning on that thread.

I can summarize their argument very briefly:

  • Your ability to reason comes from god.

  • Therefore, if you use reason, you prove the existence of god.

  • If you use reason to disprove god, you actually prove god.

  • If you claim any of their arguments are logically fallacious, you are using reason, which comes from god, therefore you prove them correct.

  • Demanding evidence for a claim presupposes that you should support claims with evidence; they make no such requirements, therefore they are exempt from providing evidence for their god.

  • This god just happens to be the god of the talking snake and the guy who was nailed to a big stick.

  • They know this for certain because god told them he was god.

That’s the totality of their argument. It just goes around and around and around; it’s like getting trapped on a merry-go-round with a ranting, defective, and very limited Eliza program…one written in an old and very slow BASIC interpreter, by a very lazy programmer who only coded it with about ten phrases that are cued semi-randomly.

Ray Comfort thinks Sye Ten Bruggencate is brilliant. Enough said.

The President is running a poll

The White House is asking you to nominate candidates for the Presidential Citizens Medal, an honor awarded for ‘exemplary deeds of service’.

I can think of a few dozen people in the godless/scientific community I’d nominate, but looking at your contrary performance in that last poll I brought up, you’d probably just pick the one who looked most like a cat. Or owned the most cats. Or likes cats the most. So you’re just on your own here.

I guess that means Jerry Coyne is a shoo-in…

First recommendation: Jessica Ahlquist. She probably likes cats. But despite that, she’s an excellent choice to push.

Wait, I just got home!

I have to catch up with all of my classes now, but I also have to prepare for the next couple of weekends. Next on the agenda:

  • I’m flying off on Friday for the Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism in New York. I’ll be talking about squid.

  • Next weekend is the Freethought Festival 2012 in Madison, Wisconsin. I shall be talking about the scientific method, and why it’s incompatible with religion.

  • Then I get a few weekends to stay at home and get through finals week. Yay!

  • On 18 May, I’ll be at Imagine No Religion 2, in Kamloops, British Columbia. I forget what I’m talking about there, something sciencey, I’ll figure it out later.

  • Also on 18 May, I won’t be attending the Women in Secularism conference in Washington DC, because I can’t be in two places at once. However, my daughter Skatje will be my proxy there and will be reporting back on it in her own cantankerous and independent-minded style (I have no idea where she gets that from).

I do have to say something about the Women in Secularism conference: some people are being condescendingly stupid about the fact that we can have a special purpose conference within the broader domain of secularism. It is embarrassingly idiotic that we actually have clueless atheists who are demeaning the idea that there is worth in dedicating conferences to specific issues: would there be any of this dismissal if it were a conference on secular parenting, separation of church and state, secular lobbying, race and religion, or the pernicious influence of religion on education? Because these are all pressing concerns, as is the importance of involving women in atheism, and it is a mark of the growth of atheism and secularism and humanism that we do have focused conferences. Expect to see more of this sort of thing in the future.

But somehow, macho assholes seem to think women are unimportant. Sorry, guys, this is the future coming at you: institutions will be egalitarian or die. And the only thing that’s unimportant is addressing the whines of spoiled man-children who break into tears and rage at any diminution of their privilege. Bye-bye, testosterone-addled dinosaurs.

See also this article at CFI.

Look, people, and yes guys, I’m talking to you specifically. This conference is not about “separating” women from men, it’s about having the spine as a movement to say that women deal with prejudices and oppression that are unique to them, thanks to religion, and at the same time recognizing that our own community has a LOT of work to do in how we treat, acknowledge, and highlight our female half. It’s not a conference exclusively FOR women, but yes, about them. Our boss Ron Lindsay says men absolutely should attend. PZ Myers says men should attend. And I’m telling you, too. If you think it’s a problem to have a conference like this, I challenge you to buy a ticket, show your face, and talk about it like a grownup. No more nameless Internet thuggery.

By the way, there are a limited number of $25 student registrations still available for the women in secularism conference.

Now you know what I did last week: a quick review of the Global Atheist Convention 2012

Right now, in my bleary, jet-lagged state, I thought it would be a good moment to scribble down what I found most memorable about the Global Atheist Convention.

  • First and foremost, the attendees. It’s an unfortunate characteristic of conference organization that the speakers get all the attention…but of course, they’d be nothing without someone to listen and occasionally shout back. I had the best time outside the conference, talking to all those swarms of jubilant godless folk.

  • Christopher Hitchens. He’s gone, but both Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss gave excellent testimonials. And the very best is this video, Hitchens distilled down to his sharpest, most acerbic self.

  • The organizers. Whoa, but this conference was smoooth — everything on time, we speakers were pampered and tended and delivered on stage professionally, the conference center was lovely, and there wasn’t a hitch in sight (and no Hitch, either, but not their fault). I’d be interested to hear the attendees perspective, but I don’t think this was an event where they felt neglected or bored either.

  • The humor. This has become a signature of atheist conventions: we don’t have hymns, we don’t have a liturgy, but we do have comedy (which sometimes misfires horribly — bitter misogyny is not funny — but OK, exploring the boundaries will sometimes lead to failure). Our godless future is apparently going to have us laughing a lot.

  • The protesters. We had a couple of Christian groups and one Muslim group appear outside the conference hall with microphones and amplifiers, at which time they howled at us. Note, they did not talk with us — it was all top-of-the-lungs screaming about how much they loved Jesus and how much they wanted to decapitate Ayaan Hirsi Ali. They came off as desperate, stupid, and pathetic…thank you very much!

  • The weirdness. This is a combination of the attendees and humor: Australians are a wild and crazy lot. So yes, Martin Pribble and I had a hug-off.

  • Profit! OK, this was a little odd; I didn’t find as much time to do podcasts with rational Australians as I’d have liked, but I got collared by one persistent fellow with a professional video rig and a cameraman and taken aside for about an hour of solid recording in an interview. Afterwards, I signed a release and he gave me a great big wad of cash, to my complete surprise — so much cash that all my incidental expenses for this trip were covered, and I came home with a nice bit of extra money. Weird. And then later I was informed that my interviewer was a Seventh Day Adventist and creationist, so you can expect that interview to come out in little edited dribs and drabs in the future. It felt like Expelled all over again.

    It was kind of silly, too: I would probably have given a sharper, pithier interview if I’d known what it was about. At least I was able to pass on warnings to other speakers at the conference afterwards.

  • Australia. We did find time for a little sight-seeing: a museum, the zoo, the aquarium. It’s a lovely continent. I wish plate tectonics would hurry up and send it a little closer to us, though — it’s far too far away.

  • I had an interesting evening with Stedman and Cannold. What can I say that’s pleasant about Stedman? He’s a very, very nice guy, and he would be an excellent liaison to the religious community if only he’d stand up for secularism rather than this interfaith bullshit, which simply panders to wacky people with ridiculous beliefs.

    I have to say, though, that my highlight of that evening debate was the after-party at Embiggen Books. Now that is a bookstore; I wish they were all that good. Imagine a bookstore with all the New Age dross and religious self-help wankerism swept away, and all that was left was the intelligent stuff. That’s Embiggen Books.

  • The future. I am optimistic. We keep growing, the people are happy and ambitious. We are going to win. You’re all going to the next GAC (the organizers, I’m sure, don’t even want to think about that right now), which will be even bigger, right?

Bleh

We got back safely last night after about 24 hours of travel from Australia. I slept like the dead. I am now risen and staggering about zombie-like, and will now lurch off to my 8am class.

You aren’t expecting new content here for a little while, are you? Really?

Why I am an atheist – Kassiane

I am an atheist because there is no god.

I was raised in an increasingly religious environment–the parents I grew up with took us to church every week (Catholic & eastern Orthodox), and they sent us to Catholic schools. I listened, I tried to believe, I memorized everything they told us in Religion class & tried to understand how people believed it.

But I could not believe.

After my parents split up, my mother became gradually more religious. Here’s the fun part: I am autistic & have temporal lobe epilepsy. My mother went from a bit off to absolutely convinced that I was possessed by demons. Eastern Orthodox don’t even really do the exorcism thing-certainly not the way evangelicals do-but I had not one, not two, but three exorcisms. Being waterboarded with holy water is still being waterboarded. Could any really loving god allow this, or my mother’s increasing use of church and marathon prayer sessions as punishment? I’m thinkin’ not.

So I survived years of abuse because “god told me to do it”. No god I knew or was told about would do that, but I kept trying to believe. I got straight As in religion class. We had to pass a religion test to graduate high school; I scored high enough to get “advanced scholar of catechatical knowledge” on my diploma.

Yet still I had doubts.

That summer I went to an Eastern Orthodox church camp to coach Special Olympics for a week. Being teenagers, all of the volunteer coaches snuck out of our cabins and stayed out way too late. I was surrounded by kids with whom I should have a lot in common, except they seemed to have no doubts at all, while I saw all the ritual as a routine, but nothing that meant anything to anyone but the people doing it.

It hit me that I am an atheist that summer. We were laying in the outdoor volleyball court looking for shooting stars. It was beautiful-I had never seen so many stars, and had certainly never seen so many shooting stars. We were all very quiet except for the occasional muttering about the beauty of God’s creation–and at that moment I knew, absolutely KNEW, that there was no god who put all those stars there. There was no god who made us and the plants and the stars and the things so far out we did not know about them. It was so vast and beautiful that saying some guy in the sky (but not really the sky-some kind of other dimension or something) put them there just for us was far too conceited and just didn’t make sense. There’s so much out there humanity may never experience, and no one put it there, and that was far more awe inspiring to 17 year old me than “goddidit”.

I was born an atheist, I couldn’t learn not to be, and reality is so much cooler anyway.

Kassiane