The ducks are gonna get you

Some poor young girl, deeply miseducated and misled, wrote into a newspaper with a letter trying to denounce homosexuality with a bad historical and biological argument. She’s only 14, and her brain has already been poisoned by the cranks and liars in her own family…it’s very sad. Here’s the letter — I will say, it’s a very creative argument that would be far more entertaining if it weren’t wrong in every particular.

I’ve transcribed it below. I couldn’t help myself, though, and had to, um, annotate it a bit.

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Religion is only one source of irrationality

So now aliens are bigger than Jesus.

According to a recent survey carried out by the makers of the new alien-shoot ’em up video game ‘XCOM: Enemy Unknown’, an estimated 33.1 million inhabitants in the UK believe that life exists on other planets, while only 27.5 million – less than half the country – believe there is a God.

52 percent of the population believe evidence of UFOs has or would be covered up, because the fact of their existence would threaten the stability of the government.

10 percent of the country claim to have seen a UFO, with almost a quarter more men claiming to have done so than women.

Although the source of the survey might have skewed the results a bit, I can believe it. I’ve met a few UFOnuts, and they’re pretty dotty…and worse.

By the way, I may have a brief appearance on the UK Conspiracy Road Trip series soon — Jerry Coyne was on the episode with creationists last week. I’m not the draw in the show, though. It’s the deranged theories. One guy tried to tell me that Jews were reptiles from another planet.

Well, I won’t do that again

So, after a long grueling week of travel and work, I land at the Minneapolis airport, where my plane gets parked for half an hour while we wait for our gate to clear, and I open up Twitter. And am greeted by a pile of fan mail from someone called @SammyBoal, who had created their account just an hour before in order to vomit up innuendo and insults at me and Rebecca Watson. This was pretty awful stuff — sexual smears and contempt for women. Fortunately, twitter makes blocking people easy, so I did and all of those wretched comments vanished…and I also made this statement:

These sickos will sink to amazing depths…the slymepit mentality is appalling.

@SammyBoal didn’t last long after that. The wave of revulsion, with people clicking on block, block, block to this bozo, led to the software at Twitter suspending the account. I wasn’t the only one appalled.

But then the hyperskeptics kicked into action. I got dunned with people claiming that the slymepit really wasn’t that bad, how dare I damn them with this accusation, I should research the place before making such accusations (never mind that I’ve had past experience with it, that I see its denizens commenting all over FtB, and that it’s fucking called the fucking Slymepit).

@SammyBoal isn’t a Slymepitter – please research that crap before putting it out there. Thanks.

Your pit doesn’t seem much better. You just like it because of the way it agrees with you & vice versa.

Having read all the posts there (yes, I have – bronchitis has afforded me a lot of time), don’t see that kind of asshatery.

Oh, really? I am skeptical of your hyperskeptical hyperskepticism. But OK, I’ll go look. Briefly. And right away I found one of the Slymepit denizens disavowing @SammyBoal.

What this person – https://twitter.com/SammyBoal – is doing is quite another, fucking repugnant, and I hope he/she/it isn’t hanging around here on The Slyme Pit. If he/she/it is, please speak up so I can ignore your vile crap now.

That’s a good start, but when your regulars think a person like @SammyBoal could be a likely hanger-on, you’ve got a problem. Even they think it is entirely possible that this was a pseudonym for one of their long term Watson/Myers haters.

But have no fear. The party line quickly absolved them of guilt: it was an ally of Watson putting on an act to make the Slymepit look bad.

I think it’s a sock to make her disagreers look extra bullying, rapey, and stuff

Right. So for years and years, Rebecca Watson’s bestest friends have been cobbling up sock puppet accounts to send her hate mail. Those thousands of revolting youtube comments? All buddies putting on an act. If we carry this logic further, the Slymepit itself is a great big pretense put on by all of her pals who make daily piles of insults and threats just to make her feel good about herself.

Ahh, but the best part: the haters were all fired up because the video of Rebecca Watson speaking at HFA has just been released…and their response was to post photos of obese women in degrading situations. Over and over. Amplified and made worse because everyone quotes the original ‘witty’ photo, so you end up with a whole page of fat woman photos, with people tittering over them and speculating whether it’s a drunk Rebecca Watson or Stephanie Zvan, and somehow they start whining about Natalie Reed and Ophelia Benson. The whole impression is of a bargain-basement 4chan where all of their childish ire is aimed at women on freethoughtblogs.

Who knew bronchitis affected the eyes?

Oh, well. I am vindicated, and next time some blinkered asshole tells me to hyperskeptically examine my well-founded assumptions about the slymepitters, I’m just going to direct them to this post, because I’m not going to read that vile collection of misogynistic scum again, no matter how hard they try to guilt me into it.

Why I am an atheist – Jeff Duval

I’ve been an atheist since before I knew the word “atheist” existed.  It still seems silly to me that we need a word to describe people who aren’t convinced by a claim that has zero evidence behind it.  After all, we don’t waste time talking about a-ghostism or a-sasquatchism as if these were worldviews that had content and needed followers gathering weekly to reinforce.

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They’re coming to get your kids…and expecting you to pay for their activities

Have you read Katherine Stewart’s The Good News Club: The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children? You should. It’s about how Christian evangelicals have taken advantage of a court ruling requiring that schools open their doors to after-school clubs with no viewpoint discrimination…and how they’re exploiting that opportunity to proselytize and indoctrinate children. It’s chilling stuff.

They’re in Minneapolis. One school tried to restrict their activities. Here’s what happened.

The Minneapolis school district will abide by a federal appeals court ruling that the district cannot exclude a Bible-oriented club from its after-school activities program.

The decision not to appeal the ruling clears the way for similar clubs in other schools. A settlement approved by the school board Tuesday will cost the district $100,000 in legal fees to the organization sponsoring the club.

Ouch. Not only do they have to allow this creepy club to recruit children, they’re going to have to cough up a big chunk of money. And what will they do with all that cash?

Dave Tunell, the Child Evangelism Fellowship’s state director, said he hopes three or four more after-school clubs could emerge from summer events conducted by churches in city parks.

Clearly, we need a better strategy for coping with these cultish freaks. They’re not stupid, and they’ve come up with a smart way to exploit the system.