That’s a serious question. The United States of America has become a seething nest of snakes; we talk about getting out the vote and campaigning and making reasonable, evidence-based arguments, but here’s an example of what we’re confronted with. Alex Jones, everyone, ranting about lesbians:

It’s not just Alex Jones, either. It’s people who think Hillary Clinton ran a child sex slave ring out of the basement of a pizza parlor. It’s Nazis. It’s people who think Republicans will work for the good of the country. It’s Donald Trump. It’s a whole system that makes it lucrative to be an extremist nutbag, and that amplifies the voices of the loons unfiltered.

No apocalyptic novel I know of ever predicted that the US would be destroyed by a dangerous and contagious insanity, but here we are. Future historians are going to look back on us and wonder about the causes of this catastrophic collapse.

Jordan Peterson is notorious for his desire to annihilate a liberal arts education, wanting to throw out the humanities and social sciences (except psychology, apparently) as tainted by post-modernism. We’re supposed to fire all those bad professors who teach bad ideas, false facts, and unacceptable interpretations of the evidence.

I guess that means we can fire Peterson, then.

This article correctly identifies him as The Professor of Piffle. In addition to his intolerance and failure to understand modern literary criticism, it turns out that he, a professor of psychology, doesn’t understand how the brain works.

To fully grasp the depth of Peterson’s belief in power hierarchies, take his commitment to IQ testing: “If you don’t buy IQ research,” he has told his students, “then you might as well throw away all of psychology.” Peterson rejects the theory of multiple intelligences (emotional intelligence, musical intelligence, and so on) and insists that all of human intelligence is biologically determined, essentially unalterable, and expressed in a single number that can be ranked. Your IQ, he says, will govern where you end up in life: with an IQ of 130, you can be an attorney or an editor; at 115, you can be a nurse or a sales manager; at 100, you can be a receptionist or a police officer; at 90, you can be a janitor.

Peterson’s defence of IQ rests on shaky foundations. While he tells students that IQ was empirically established through Charles Spearman’s factor analysis, he does not share the well-known critique of that method: factor analysis supports both of the contradictory causal explanations of intelligence (intelligence as innate versus intelligence as the product of environmental advantage). Peterson then stacks the deck in favour of biology, citing brain size and neural conduction velocity (essentially, the speed at which an electrical pulse moves through tissue) as the determinants of IQ. Again, he does not tell students that both explanations were discredited by later research.

In the tradition of nineteenth-and early twentieth-century pseudo-scientists, phrenologists, quacks, and scientific racists, Peterson’s commitment to IQ is simply the reflection of his commitment to an unalterable hierarchy of human beings. And this is why his dismissal of “unnatural” and “made up” gender pronouns, alongside his casual sexism—his belief that women would be better served by having babies than careers and that male feminists are “creepy”—turns out to be central to his intellectual project, which seeks to resurrect the conventional patriarchal pecking order. For Peterson, transgender people and powerful women upset the “male dominance hierarchy” that forms the centerpiece of his thought. His world view is predicated on the promise of restoring authority to those who feel disempowered by the globalism, feminism, and social-justice movements he derides.

I have to object to the phrase “stacks the deck in favour of biology”, because no sensible biologist would accept that load of crap as in any way valid. It is not good that “the most famous professor in Canada”, as the article calls him, is promoting bad science.

The atheist community is buzzing about this story: a popular host of the Recovering From Religion podcast, Scott Smith, has died. I have briefly met Smith but didn’t know him at all well; the founders of Recovering From Religion, Darrel Ray, Nathan Phelps, and Jerry DeWitt are very well known. Most of what I’m seeing about his death is shock and dismay and testimonials about what a good guy he was. I didn’t know him well enough to say whether he was a good guy or not, but the facts of the story tell me that he was NOT a good guy at all. This is a terrible story of an awful person who apparently had a lot of people fooled.

Authorities have identified the man and woman who were found dead in a North Side San Antonio home after a suspected murder-suicide shooting.

William Scott Smith, 54, is believed to have fatally shot his wife, 46-year-old Jennifer Smith, before turning the gun on himself. Their three young children were at school during the killing.

Though William Smith’s motive is still unclear, court records indicate that Jennifer had filed for divorce earlier this month.

Let’s get this straight. This man was facing a divorce, and his wife wanted to be free of him.

So he murdered his wife.

He murdered a woman, full stop. Because she wanted to be free of him.

He murdered someone for the crime of wanting her independence.

There is nothing that Smith could have done in his life that could possibly atone for the criminality and inhumanity and selfishness of the circumstances of his death. His behavior was reprehensible and unforgivable. That he killed himself afterwards was not an act of atonement, but of cowardice.

Further, he orphaned three children, who get a life’s dose of trauma and grief right now. This, too, is unforgivable and irresponsible.

Don’t grieve for Scott Smith. Grieve for his victims.

His facebook page now has a brief memorial note at the top:

We hope people who love Scott will find comfort in visiting his profile to remember and celebrate his life.

Nope. Don’t celebrate the life of anyone who ended it with the murder of his wife, the mother of his children. Jennifer Smith is the one who should be remembered.

Perhaps the only good result of the dissolution of Scienceblogs is that I’m no longer even distantly associated with National Geographic. I say this because, as usual, the magazine is indulging in religious pandering to the old people who still subscribe to it.

They are reporting on the age of “Jesus’ tomb”. That is, they found some mortar in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre that dates back to Roman times…which is not news. Jerusalem was a Roman city in Roman times, it contains many ancient buildings, and finding Roman structures is not evidence that this particular hole in the ground is the specific tomb of a specific executed criminal in 33AD, nor that a slab of rock is specifically where Jesus was laid out after death. The mortar was dated to 345AD, which compounds the confusion — how is the erection of a temple 300 years after the purported execution evidence that this is Jesus’ hole in the ground?

Also, the identity of this particular spot was generated by a Christian zealot, Helena, mother of the Emperor Constantine, who went swanning about Jerusalem around 325AD, pointing at rocks and sticks and random plots of ground and declaring them to be sacred Christian treasures. She claimed to have found the True Cross™, the True Ropes™ that bound Jesus to the cross, the True Nails™ that staked him to the cross, the True Tunic™ that Jesus wore, and the True Tomb™ where he was buried, purportedly briefly. It’s all nonsense and not credible, but NatGeo makes it a big feature in their magazine, and it’s also going to be the subject of a documentary on the National Geographic Channel on Sunday.

It’s part of the tradition. Helena and Constantine contrived a set of fake holy sites to fleece the ancient and medieval rubes, and NatGeo regularly contrives phony stories about Jesus to fleece the more modern, but still equally gullible, rubes.

Of course you would, because you know creationists believe a lot of stupid things. I decided to answer on of their sillier assertions.

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In case you don’t want to listen to a whole half hour of this, here’s my concluding statement:

Look. I’m an atheist. This stuff plays directly into my hands — if your religion demands that every statement in your holy book must be absolutely, inarguably true, and that your entire faith hinges on a complete lack of metaphor, poetry, allusion, and analogy in that book — that it is as dry and literal and factual as a table of measures in an engineering text — then I’ve got you. I am going to win over your children to my side, and you know it.

As an atheist, I’m often told that I don’t understand your religion. But I do. I understand it better than the fanatical literalists, anyway. Religion has a long history of struggling to reconcile reality and belief, to find humanity’s place in a largely unknown and complex and frequently hostile universe. If there is any saving grace in faith at all, it is that it is an attempt to find a rock of certainty in the unpredictable chaos of life — it is aspirational, a search for truth. As such, religion changes over time. It evolves.

Where it fails is when people like Ham and the Hovinds give up on the search and the struggle and decide that they have an absolute lock on an irrevocable and ultimate truth, one that will no longer bend to the evidence, that will no longer care about the nature of reality, but only the nature of one antique interpretation of the words of a book. They will not change any more. They will cling stubbornly to this one unmoving stone of dogma, and they will insist that everything else is wrong. They will close their eyes and grasp tighter and tighter to that one illusion of certainty as it crumbles around them. By refusing to bend, they commit themselves to someday breaking.

The movie goes on like this for another hour and a half: more tiresome and tired old creationist arguments interspersed with brief episodes of bad CGI accompanied by a slow, lugubrious voice of god. It ends with another 10 or 15 minutes of fast cuts between their cast members, all testifying and preachifying about the glory of god and how lovely Jesus makes them feel.

It just makes me terribly sad. These are lost minds committed to battling against the real world.