How can smart atheists be bamboozled by Joseph Atwill?

Atwill is this guy who claims to have evidence that Jesus wasn’t real: Christianity was a cunning product of a Roman imperial conspiracy, intentionally designed to placate those troublesome Jews, and he claims to have a Roman confession that he’ll reveal next week.

I think a few too many atheists are seeing “Scholar Says Jesus Was Fake” and are not thinking any more deeply than that. The whole idea is ridiculous.

The Roman idea of social engineering was to plant a legionary fortress, or retire a bunch of legionaries, into an area that they wanted to pacify. Incorporating regional gods into their pantheon by synonymizing them, sure; far-fetched long-term plans that would require centuries to mature into a tangible result, no.

Has there ever been a religion that was created by a government that actually caught on? Most religions die young; they have a very low success rate. It’s not a smart investment — it’s like buying a lottery ticket. If Romans had been in this game of inventing religions to win over the natives to Romanism, we’d see more examples of failures than long term success.

What would you think of a conspiracy theorist who announced that Joseph Smith had been a secret government agent with the mission of persuading a large number of people to settle that barren Utah territory? Or that L. Ron Hubbard was J. Edgar Hoover’s boy, part of a plan to provide an alternative to the Communist Party for impressionable youth? There are always people to whom a conspiracy theory is attractive, but more rational people would just laugh at the very idea.

Finally, as Russell Glasser points out, real scholars don’t spring the evidence on their audiences by press release or by public lecture — it is first reviewed by independent scholars for authenticity.

If you’re one of the many atheists who gleefully forwarded this to me or credulously mentioned it on twitter…hello, there. I see you’ve already met the good friend of so many half-baked wackos in the world, Confirmation Bias.

Richard Carrier demolishes Atwill in detail.

Skepticon: It’s a mystery

Perhaps you are familiar with this scene from Shakespeare in Love?

Philip Henslowe: Mr. Fennyman, allow me to explain about the theatre business. The natural condition is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster.
Hugh Fennyman: So what do we do?
Philip Henslowe: Nothing. Strangely enough, it all turns out well.
Hugh Fennyman: How?
Philip Henslowe: I don’t know. It’s a mystery.

That’s Skepticon. Every year they struggle to meet the budget of the largest free skeptical conference in the world, and strangely, it all turns out well, and what’s more, the organizers always seems so cheerful about it right up to the instant the curtain lifts. At least, that is, they’re cheerful in public — they might be rending their garments and gnashing their teeth in private, but it doesn’t show, anyway.

They need those last few big bags of cash to pull it off, but it’s no mystery how they do it: they ask you to DONATE. Help them out, it’s going to be excellent!

Also, just like Shakespeare, my talk isn’t done yet. That’s a sign of quality, right?

The problem is that scientists are human

Unfortunately. What that means is that an endeavor that ought to be impartial and based on reasoned evaluation of the evidence is tainted by bias and unavoidable cultural preconceptions. We’ve got religion turning some people into credulous twits, but just as poisonous, we have sexism skewing our analyses.

The first thing we did was look at more than 3,000 articles published between 1980 and 2006 in 12 leading peer-reviewed international relations journals. We then controlled for every possible factor that could contribute to one’s citation count including the quality of the publication, its venue, methodology, the subject matter, and the researcher’s home institution (to name a few). We suspected that an article written by a tenured professor from an elite university, published in a top journal and written on a popular topic would get more citations than an article written by an untenured professor at a liberal arts college on an esoteric topic in a second-tier journal. What we didn’t know was whether gender would matter once you held all of these factors constant. Did knowing the gender of the author make other scholars cite an article more or less?

The results were striking. Even when we controlled for an enormous range of factors, gender remained one of the best predictors of how often an article would be cited. If you were female, your article would get about 0.7 cites for every 1 cite that a male author would receive.

This paper has garnered a lot of press here, here, and here, not because it’s telling us something we hadn’t already suspected but because the data are incontrovertible. Crunch the numbers in different ways and the results are always the same: articles written by women in IR are cited less than men, all else equal.

The authors of that study have some productive suggestions. One is anonymous review: publishers should mask out the authorship and affiliations when sending papers out for review. You’re judging the work on its own quality, right, so who wrote it shouldn’t matter. I do something similar when I’m grading papers — I refuse to look at the students’ names until I’ve evaluated the whole thing.

This would also diminish that other unfortunate bias, judging papers by what institution they came out of, rather than their content.

Another suggestion is simply to have first and middle names always reduced to initials. That’s not a perfect solution, but it helps. (It doesn’t help if you’re already known by your initials, but that’s a different problem.)

I have another suggestion: maybe graduate students should all get some kind of education in equality as part of their training, so they don’t go on to be bigoted asshats when they go on to full science careers. I’ve heard it all: prejudice against women, against blacks, against Asians, against historically black colleges, against liberal arts institutions. Maybe scientists should learn not to pay only lip service to that scientific virtue of objectivity.

Charles Pierce: The clearest vision of politics

He has the whole sorry lot of the 113th congress pegged.

This is what they came to Washington to do — to break the government of the United States. It doesn’t matter any more whether they’re doing it out of pure crackpot ideology, or at the behest of the various sugar daddies that back their campaigns, or at the instigation of their party’s mouthbreathing base. It may be any one of those reasons. It may be all of them. The government of the United States, in the first three words of its founding charter, belongs to all of us, and these people have broken it deliberately. The true hell of it, though, is that you could see this coming down through the years, all the way from Ronald Reagan’s First Inaugural Address in which government "was" the problem, through Bill Clinton’s ameliorative nonsense about the era of big government being "over," through the attempts to make a charlatan like Newt Gingrich into a scholar and an ambitious hack like Paul Ryan into a budget genius, and through all the endless attempts to find "common ground" and a "Third Way." Ultimately, as we all wrapped ourselves in good intentions, a prion disease was eating away at the country’s higher functions. One of the ways you can acquire a prion disease is to eat right out of its skull the brains of an infected monkey. We are now seeing the country reeling and jabbering from the effects of the prion disease, but it was during the time of Reagan that the country ate the monkey brains.

He breaks it down into the individual Republican idiots who are screwing up the country, and not to be unfair, he also characterizes the Conservacrats who’ve been enabling them.

What else did people think would happen when we started fetishizing the notion that government was bad, and electing people to govern who just wanted to shut government down and sell it off to the plutocrats? Libertarians and Republicans are all poisoned by the same lunacy that infected the US in the 1980s, and the Democrats are all lurching towards the lure of money and the same damn attitude.

This seems appropriate, from last night’s Daily Show.

$6672? MORE!

We’re still idling along, raising money for Light the Night and our battle against cancer. I promised another post on mechanisms of cancer when we hit $7500 — you don’t want me lying about, doin’ nothin’, growing fat(ter) on the government teat, do you? Make me work, reach our next goal.

The current sum doesn’t yet include the contents of the envelope that came in the mail today: 500 Hong Kong Dollars! Which I will exchange next time I’m near an airport.

HK500

How cute

Answers in Genesis has gotten in the billboard business, just in time for Christmas.

To all of our atheist friends: THANK GOD YOU'RE WRONG

To all of our atheist friends: THANK GOD YOU’RE WRONG

To which I can only say…but I’m not wrong, there’s no god to thank, so why are you talking to yourselves so publicly and loudly? It’s a bit embarrassing, actually.

Just in case you think you’re talking to us, I’m sorry — that message isn’t going to change our minds in the slightest.

Isn’t there a dank dark hole you should be crawling into somewhere?