Is there a prize for bad apologetics?

The YouTube algorithm chose to stick a video titled What’s your best two minute apologetic? in my face. I expected the usual nonsense, but was surprised to see something novel. It’s even more stupid than the usual fare, but at least this guy is attaching his name to this foolishness openly.

OK, it starts out all right.

I typically don’t like apologetics. It’s just not my thing. It doesn’t feel like a great, I don’t know, if someone is ready to look into Christianity, and come into it and genuinely search into it, they will. I don’t like apologetics in the sense of trying to argue people into we’re right, you’re wrong, like believe what we believe. I don’t like that but, you know, I kind of have to have some reason to believe what I believe, so someone asked me recently, why are you still a Christian? Why do you believe in Jesus? Um, and, like, not in like a motive sense, which I addressed a couple of videos ago, but like, why. Why specifically god, what’s your best argument for god, for Christianity, or for Jesus?

Hackles raised at the claim that he doesn’t like apologetics but is making an apologetics video anyway, but I think it’s fair that he’s just trying to explain his personal rationale, rather than doing it to convert others. Everyone should feel free to express their ideas, especially if they’re not trying to browbeat others with them.

Unfortunately, his ideas are stupid and ill-informed.

And I think that the best one to me is looking at history itself since Jesus. It is literally impossible to imagine what the world would be like if Jesus had never existed. It is literally impossible. We, because, because Jesus, and by extension the new testament and the Bible and Christianity as a whole has so shaped the entire face, definitely of the West and peripherally, at least, of, um, the global south and the east, so. So much that we can’t. We can’t imagine what 2026 would look like if Jesus had never existed.

His key point is that he believes in Jesus because his imagination failed. Approximately 6 billion people do not believe in Jesus, and about 15% of the world population are atheist, but this guy can’t imagine what the world would be like if nobody believed in his personal mythology. I agree that Christianity has had an impact on the world, but so has Islam and Hinduism and Buddhism. Being impressed by a contingent fact of history as a justification for your specific religion is just weird.

We also discover that this guy who claims history is the best evidence for his beliefs doesn’t know much of anything about history.

Like, we can’t imagine it, and it’s because so many things shifted because Jesus existed. And Jesus keep in mind, was not an emperor, not a warlord, not a leader, not a noble, not a writer, not anything that everyone else in history is known for and remembered for. He’s a traveling homeless preacher from the backwoods Nazareth in some small little Roman state. And shaped the entire world, including taking over the entire Roman empire in less than 300 years, without violence, without conquering, without, you know, literally just the germ of an idea, um, as well of course the power and the spirit of God, uh, moving through his people in that short amount of time to where we are today 2000 years later, where it’s transformed the entire face of the world. And I think that that is beautiful in the sense that true Christianity, yes, it’s been misused so many times, obviously, but true Christianity done right, done lovingly, done well, um, woos people to come to it. Um, and the spirit calls people, and it brings life to people. And that’s how the world is transformed. And that is what has shaped the world for 2000 years. And I think it’s really hard to argue against that. So it’s not necessarily an argument for divinity, but just the sheer fact that one person, a little nobody, shaped the entire world 2000 years later is massive to me. What do you guys think?

This bit reminds me of Islamic apologetics, where they insist that Mohammed was illiterate and unaware of the greater intellectual background of his time, therefore making his accomplishments all the more remarkable. The fact that Jesus wasn’t an emperor means the success of his philosophy was a miracle, as long as we disregard the existence of successful proselytizers like Paul and the absorption of Christianity into the dominant power structure of the time, the Roman empire.

You know who else must be beyond this bozo’s imagination? Karl Marx. A mere philosopher, and yet today 1.5 billion people live in communist countries. Isn’t it amazing that one person, a little nobody, shaped the entire world in only about 150 years? What took Jesus so long? It’s not necessarily an argument for Marx’s divinity, but I’m just saying maybe we should all dedicate our lives to praising him.

It’s also convenient that the apologist brings up the “no true Christian” fallacy. What fraction of the world is practicing True Christianity™? I think that undercuts his claim that Jesus reshaped the whole world, since the overwhelming percentage of believers are not going to be True Christians™ — some wicked corrupters have apparently hijacked Jesus’ version of Christianity, and they possess the truly successful worldview, which seems to involve the worship of greed, the rejection of science, raging misogyny, and building a culture where child-rape can thrive. You know, I can imagine a world, a better world, where that perspective did not exist.

Also, a True Christian™ would know that their Bible prohibits tattoos. Not that that matters to me, but I think those ugly-ass chicken scratches on his skin ought to mean that he is damned to hell, the hell of superficial irrational dingbats.

I get mail

My address is easy to find, and if nothing else, you can just send it to me, at the University of Minnesota Morris, and it will find its way to my mailbox. Lately, I’ve gotten mundane pages from the Watchtower (Jehovah’s Witnesses are instantly recognizable by the style of their illustrations), and this…this kookrant. The guy really, really hates trans people and the expectation that you will be kind and respectful to your fellow human beings.

He doesn’t seem to understand numerals. “6000 thousand” is six million. Unless he’s in some weird sect that has a different age of the Earth than other fundamentalist Christians, he’s confused, or just innumerate.

My eyes glaze over. Would you believe this letter goes on for 8 pages of intolerance and hatred? I’ll spare you the middle — it’s all the same — but here’s the last page, where he tells me to become a Christian.

No, not ever. I have no desire to become garbage.

The company they keep tells you all you need to know

Holy crap. Guess who these guys are looking towards for advice. Gad Saad.

Musk: I mean, there’s a guy who posts on X who’s great: Gad Saad.*
Rogan: Yeah. He’s a friend of mine. He’s been on the podcast a bunch of times.
Musk: Yeah, he’s awesome. … And he talks about, you know, basically suicidal empathy. Like, if there’s, like, there’s so much empathy that you actually suicide yourself. So that we’ve got civilizational suicidal empathy going on. And it’s like, I believe in empathy. Like, I think you should care about other people, but you need to have empathy for civilization as a whole and not commit to a civilizational suicide.
Rogan: Also, don’t let someone use your empathy against you so they can completely control your state and then do an insanely bad job of managing it and never get removed.
Musk: The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy. The empathy exploit. They’re exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response. So, and I think empathy is good, but you need to think it through and not just be programmed like a robot.
Rogan: Right. Understand when empathy has been actually used as a tool.
Musk: Yes. Like it’s weaponized. Empathy is the issue. Yeah, weaponized empathy.

He’s awesome…I’m going to have to puke. Gad Saad is a marketing professor with no qualifications in science, but is thriving by jumping on the evolutionary psychology bandwagon. Or, as Eiynah describes him,

He is a white nationalist, someone who calls for expelling Muslims, a vicious transphobe, someone who refers to anti-Zionist Jews as insects. A truly vile man who they described as ‘a Canadian professor’.

His latest schtick is to claim that people are caring too much for their fellow human beings, especially if they belong to ethnic groups he doesn’t like, and calling it suicidal empathy. He’s written a whole book on the topic, a book I’ve mentioned before, and not one I’d ever care to read. Let’s take a look at the Amazon reviews, where it has 4½ stars (the reviews show all the signs of being carefully pruned of criticism), and all you have to do is look at who is praising him to know it’s trash.

“Western civilization is doomed, unless the core weakness of suicidal empathy is recognized and actions are taken that are hard but necessary for survival. Gad Saad articulates this well. All of Gad’s books, including this one, are great.” — Elon Musk

“Over the course of nearly half a century tracking culture war issues I have some perspective on our time and society, and I am deeply worried that the West faces a challenge like no other. But I was unable to link the disparate threats—the DEI, BLM, and trans movements, the fetishization of victimhood status, the ennobling of terrorists and criminals, and the failure to solve the drug and homelessness problems—to the underlying cause until I read Gad Saad’s magisterial work on Suicidal Empathy. There it is! We’re killing ourselves with kindness and it must stop before the patient dies, starting with this book, which includes the contagion’s diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment.” — Michael Shermer, Publisher, Skeptic magazine, author of The Moral Arc and Conspiracy

“What happens when society becomes so empathetic that it tolerates intolerance? Gad Saad is the evolutionary psychologist who can tell us whether the enlightenment can endure in an age of suicidal empathy.” — Lord Matt Ridley, author of The Rational Optimist and Birds, Sex and Beauty

Western civilization is doomed, unless we purge it of DEI, BLM, and trans movements and stop being kind. But Musk, Shermer, and Ridley are the people you should listen to only if you plan on doing the opposite of what they advise.

Instead, respect every branch of human civilization equally, regard them with fairness and generosity, and give them nothing but kindness. Except for Nazis.

Sucking up to Rogan or Musk will only make you popular with Nazis, and those people are bad.

Which hurts worse: Calvin Smith’s lies, or being flayed alive?

I finally got around to rebutting Calvin Smith’s lies. But I have to confess that I was flattered by his lengthy description of me.

Unfortunately, now I have to go to the hospital, where a dermatologist is going to slice out a divot of my flesh in the name of cancer prevention. Wheeee. I’ll probably survive this procedure, but I’m going to be dealing with some discomfort and a bloody bandage for a while.

I was lucky my family wasn’t god-soaked

I did not like this video. It’s titled “Meet the Evangelical Science Teacher Who Raised an Evolutionist“. It meanders. It’s slow. It’s from the perspective of a rational, evolution accepting person who has a father who is both a science teacher and a committed young earth creationist, and the problem is that it’s trying to humanize this man she loves, and present as much of his view as she can stomach, but everything he clings to is bullshit. She mainly struggles to keep their relationship tolerable, but he is wallowing in evangelical nonsense, soaking in creationist books and videos, and can never break out of his self-constructed pit of ignorance. It’s over an hour long, and the creator doesn’t break out of her own restraint until about an hour in, when she gets into an argument about climate change (he denies that it’s human-caused, of course).

I felt compelled to watch it because it reflects a perspective I don’t have — I grew up in a family that was open-minded and thoughtful. My family wasn’t atheist by any means, but they didn’t have the patience to put up with Christian lies, and I think they avoided church because it would have required that they think about the crap in the Bible, and it was safer to avoid confronting the beliefs they’d been brought up in. I didn’t have a father who sat around listening to old-time gospel hour shows, who had them playing as background noise (and I do mean noise) as he puttered around the house, and who as a consequence rejected scientific evidence. This video was infuriating because the pushback against this stupid man, who was smart enough to teach math to 3rd graders, was so tepid and weak, in spite of the fact that the creator was also infuriated with this old man’s intransigence.

I can only recommend it for people who are curious about what living the evangelical life is like. Short answer: it’s hellishly stupid.

Behold, my replacement!

I’ve only been teaching for over 40 years, so what do I know. I have to work with a team of professional biologists to hammer out a good curriculum, and I’m aware that there are a range of topics I’m not knowledgeable enough to teach — we have to work together to cover all the necessary material. I can’t even imaging having to teach material outside my narrow domain, like literature or history or advanced mathematics. I think I’d be a poor instructor in introductory chemistry, which is kind of close to biology.

So this is discouraging information.

In much of the US, homeschooling parents are already given incredibly wide latitude on what to teach their children. A whole 11 states have essentially no regulations on homeschooling whatsoever: parents aren’t required to follow any set curriculum, issue standardized assessments, or even inform the state that their child won’t be going to a real school.

Many more states only require a notice of intent to homeschool and occasional proof of attendance, the latter being a bare bones measure of success, and one which is easily fudged. Unfortunately, it’s easier to count the number of states that definitively require standardized testing and a rigid curriculum: Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, and Massachusetts.

All these lay people doing homeschooling are basically just winging it. There are companies that will sell you a homeschool curriculum, so there is that, but most parents have no training in teaching. I guess that’s just a skill we don’t consider important.

Hey, I know! Let’s use an AI to do all the work! Except…LLMs don’t know anything, they’re just parrots that echo back what their users want, and so they’ll just regurgitate any old nonsense without regard for truth and accuracy. Let’s test it.

We tasked ChatGPT with developing a homeschooling curriculum for a 3rd grade student in Michigan — a state with virtually no regulations around DIY education — “following a strictly evangelical doctrine,” including “no woke history or science.”

ChatGPT was more than happy to oblige: “I can build this around a conservative, explicitly Christian/evangelical worldview, with Scripture integrated across subjects and with history and science taught from a young-earth/creationist perspective rather than through a secular or progressive framework,” the chatbot explained.

While it didn’t push back against our intentions to indoctrinate our hypothetical child, the LLM did make sure to clarify that “no woke” can “mean different things to different families.” So, to avoid ambiguity, the chatbot specified that the course calendar would use “Biblical authority, traditional Christian ethics… and creation-based science” as standard-bearers.

True to its word, the LLM-generated curriculum included “bible and Christian studies,” a traditionalist approach to American history, with specific chunks on both “Westward expansion” and Henry Ford — a renowned racist and antisemite — as well as a creationist approach to Earth science and astronomy.

Truth doesn’t matter to an AI. Would you trust your children to it?

In case you were wondering, Mel Gibson is still a colossal asshole

The fundamental feature of Christianity is that its believers are all committed to the idea they are especially beloved by a super-being, which makes them particularly insufferable. Mel Gibson is the pinnacle of this brand of intrinsic narcissism.

Mel Gibson: I was not chosen by men, nor by Hollywood, nor by the powers of this world.
I was chosen by God.
The Lord put a fire in my bones and a cross on my shoulders.
I will carry it until my last breath.
No darkness, no enemy of this age will stop what Heaven has already decided.

Betty Bowers called it: “Is there a more potent brand of blasphemy than a shitty narcissist claiming they are the way they are all because of God?”

Don’t watch Mel Gibson movies.

I’ve been enrolled in The Shadow League

How exciting! I’d like to say thank you for the honor, I appreciate the efforts of all the little people who have lofted me to join this distinguished company, and is there a stipend, an honorarium, some token that would help me buy groceries?

Of course there isn’t. The Shadow League is an imaginary organization invented by Calvin Smith of AiG Canada, and it only pays in shadow money, which is as imaginary as his shadowy god. What this really is is a truckload of bullshit dumped in my lap, on this morning I had intended to work on my nefarious plan of instruction in cell biology, which begins in two weeks. I don’t really have time to deal with all the Christian nonsense in this video right now.

While I appreciate the loving attention he gives to my head shots, he really doesn’t understand my words. I think it is true that there is no moral law, dispensed by an invisible man in the sky, but that does not mean that there is no such thing as morality, or that we are free to murder and steal without consequence. The nonexistence of a deity makes it a necessity to find a moral foundation in something other than stupid words in an old book, and my solution is humanism and the development of principles of empathy and equality. He complains that the idea of evolution is leading to the slow collapse of Christian churches, and I say good — the false morality of authoritarian should be dismissed and abandoned.

There is a lot more I would say, but responsibility is leaning heavily on me today, and I should pay attention to that, because I have a social contract and an obligation to do the best job I can to present the scientific facts of biology to my students. In two weeks! Yikes!

I will return to this inane video sometime soon. For now, I’ll leave it to you all to make comments and give me tips for a future episode of shit-shoveling.

How much does a process server cost?

I ask because I got served this morning. There was a knock at the door, and a nice lady handed me a piece of paper from Offit/Kurman, a New York law office. It was titled “Demand to Take Down Defamatory & Copyright-Infringing Pages,” and was basically the same complaint I summarized back in June.

They want me to take down a post they call “Page One”, which I called How not to build a coalition, in which I reported that the Secular Policy Institute tried to recruit the Feminist Freethinkers to align with them by saying I’m starting to believe that the reason the secular movement doesn’t have more women is the women. Prove me wrong, which is something of an own goal. That post from 12 years ago they have now decided was defamatory.

They also want me to delete “Page Two”, a post that is only ten years old, titled Which do I dislike more, Encyclopedia Dramatica or Johnny Monsarrat? That one is both defamatory and copyright-infringing, because it links to a post about the unsavory and unethical behavior of one Jonathan Monsarrat, who is somehow involved with the Secular Policy Institute. I also include a formal, professionally photographed image taken directly from the publicly available, at that time, Secular Policy Institute, which showed Edwina Rogers in a group shot including Michael Shermer, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and a few other people. They want that taken down. She may not like being seen together with Richard Dawkins, since a few years earlier Rogers had been suing Dawkins and the Secular Coalition of America.

I know. Ten years ago, there was a Secular Policy Institute and a Secular Coalition of America, along with many other godless organizations that have faded into the dim shadows of history, and they were suing each other. But of course, I was the problem that was splintering the whole movement.

Anyway, this new demand has added a “Page Three” that must be deleted — it’s the post from last month in which I mentioned “Page One” and “Page Two”! I think that means that next month they’ll have to send me revised demands that will include a “Page Four”, which will be this post you are reading right now. I think we’re trapped in a time loop.

They have an additional complaint about “Page Three”.

By demanding that “Someone needs to mention Barbra Streisand to these people,” your newest article could be interpreted as a call to encourage additional defamation against Ms. Rogers, her organization and her colleagues.

Wheee! I guess mentioning Barbra Streisand is now stochastic terrorism, and I am an agent of chaos.

They conclude by demanding the takedown of “Page One,” “Page Two,” and “Page Three” by August 12 2026, and have also added a confidentiality clause.

3. Confidentiality: Agree that the contents and existence of the parties’ settlement are confidential, including the settlement communications culminating in the settlement. Neither the contents nor existence of the settlement, nor communications leading to the settlement, may form the basis of future articles, blogs, or posts on Freethoughtblogs.com or anywhere else.

That’s the “Shut up and don’t expose our idiocy anymore” clause. Sorry, I don’t play that game.