I was sent this as an “open letter” — I don’t know if it’s posted anywhere else, but since it’s “open”, I’m happy to let everyone read it.

Dear PZ,

Can I please ask you to refrain from insulting and writing about Sam Harris in the negative. I don’t know what you expect to achieve by constantly writing Sam Harris hit jobs. You are tearing the atheist community apart.

Does it not hurt you knowing that you are contributing to the toxicity of the atheist community? Do you not care about, as Sam Harris says, that his daughter will one day have to read articles about their father being a racist, and Islamophobe? Even if you don’t agree with Sam or Richard Dawkins, can’t you please get in line. They’re the ones on the front lines. They’re are the ones that will bring enlightenment to the masses.

Don’t you care about the damage you are doing? Imaging someone who is considering the notion of god and reads Sam Harris and thinks, “yes this makes sense, I no longer believe”. Now imagine that this person has major influence in society. Imagine that maybe this person becomes president. Imagine the good they could do.

Now imagine that they then read a PZ Myers blog post, and they read you saying Harris is a bigot and racist etc. You just prevented that president from being enlightened and doing great work as president, because they instead read something religious and became religious.

These are the stakes. We are not cultists, we are just pragmatic, for the greater good. I compel you. But I bet you have your mind made up and are not willing to listen to my sound reasoned arguments.

I feel a duty to at least try to persuade you and your readers. Please just write something positive about Sam, at least that way you appear neutral and unbiased.

kind regards,

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I feel like I have to explain who Immanuel Velikovsky was, it’s been so long that he pinged on the radar. He was a crackpot who published a series of pseudo-erudite books in which he used a combination of bullshit Bible scholarship and bad physics to bamboozle audiences –and it worked, because physicists couldn’t address the claims about what the Bible said and the Bible scholars were cowed by the physics. But he had Venus erupting out of Jupiter and ping-ponging around the solar system at the time of the Exodus, and sailing past Earth to rain down manna on the Hebrews (turns out he couldn’t tell the difference between carbohydrates and hydrocarbons, either). It was stupidity squared, but had a brief surge in notoriety when some scientists suggested that his book be banned.

Anyway, I hadn’t heard much about Velikovsky in years, and was thinking that was one kook who’d finally been forgotten, but now I learn that a remnant strain of Velikovskyism lurks in an unsurprising place: among the climate change denialists.

This doesn’t warrant a long article but it ended up being longish. It’s just to comment on the fact that Anthony Watts has published another article from Tim Ball, pushing Velikovsky’s crank ideas as science. Tim argues that scientists shouldn’t point out dumb and wrong notions posing as science. Tim calls such behaviour “scientific elitism”.

Anthony Watts gives an excuse (if you can call it that) for publishing such nonsense, saying that he promotes Velikovsky “in the context of learning” and seems to think the Director of GISS NASA is a coward for not doing the same.

Well, hey, Velikovsky does well among those who don’t understand physics or chemistry, so I guess it’s not unusual that he would thrive among the denialists. He has found his people.

And…Michael Shermer tells us he’s supporting Donald Trump.

ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED?

What he likes about him is that he makes deals, and doesn’t have any specific plans. Because that’s a major plus.

Fuck me. Not only am I going to make the rifts a little deeper, I’m going to use the trench for a latrine.

Over on Violent Metaphors, Colin reported on his adventures on the Conspira Sea cruise, a cruise ship full of people absolutely convinced that vast shadowy evil empires were out to personally get them. Now Jezebel reports on the same cruise. It’s all very entertaining. It sounds like the Jezebel reporter, Anna Merlan, got a more hostile reaction from the cruise participants than did Colin.

I’ll be plunging in again to something just as weird, but not quite as paranoid, this spring. I’ll be attending the Paradigm Symposium in mid-May, right there in Minneapolis, and will post a few summaries here. I don’t expect a hostile reception (well, not too hostile, anyway). These aren’t generally conspiracy theorists. Rather than believing in malignant shadow forces, they generally believe in exotic, other-worldly influences on the ancient past and fleeting encounters with strange entities today.

Needless to say, they’re both equally wrong.

Atheist Alliance International carried out a census, and discovered that their members 73% men…and most remarkably, they thought that was a problem! So instead of making excuses about how this was simply the natural order of things, they’ve released a report with recommendations for improving the gender balance.

< Atheist Alliance International has released a report on Gender Imbalance in the atheist community, its sources, and its possible responses and solutions.

Gender imbalance in the atheist / humanist community has been noted for many years, including in AAI’s own Atheist Census project. AAI has determined this gender imbalance to be a problem in our community, rooted in centuries-old patriarchal systems and promoted and defended by many of the world’s religions.

In today’s modernist world with recognized human rights for women as outlined in the UN’s Convention on Women’s Rights, AAI believes that gender imbalance, both in our own communities as well as in the general populace, is an important issue for atheists to embrace and work to overcome as part of our responsibility to our humanity.

The report has been added to AAI’s Position Statements webpage and can be read there.

I just read it — it’s short, just 9 pages — and I can tell that a few people are going to be furious. Yay!

The Understanding Science website at Berkeley is generally a good resource, but unfortunately, they also promote a dishonest approach to religion and the supernatural, presumably out of a desire to avoid offending anyone. Being nice is not a good excuse for compromising on the principles of science, however.

I refer specifically to their section on the limits of science. Science certainly does have limits, but this isn’t one of them.

Science doesn’t draw conclusions about supernatural explanations
Do gods exist? Do supernatural entities intervene in human affairs? These questions may be important, but science won’t help you answer them. Questions that deal with supernatural explanations are, by definition, beyond the realm of nature — and hence, also beyond the realm of what can be studied by science. For many, such questions are matters of personal faith and spirituality.

Baloney. If the question involves only personal faith and spirituality, if it’s just a dialog going on in your head with no material consequences that might affect the world or other people, than sure, science doesn’t deal with that, and can’t deal with that. But the instant you claim that your supernatural beliefs impinge on the natural world, boom, science is on it.

Prayer can heal your cancer… boom. Cancer is something we study.

God’s love will end war… boom. The interactions between societies is not simply a matter of personal faith and spirituality.

God told me the earth is only 6,000 years old… boom. The earth is under our purview, and the rocks say differently.

Worship makes me feel good… boo…oh, wait. No. That one’s OK. Of course your subjective experiences can have subjective effects, and your mind even has some control over your physical body.

But the principle of that argument at the website is wrong. Supernatural explanations of natural phenomena are no longer outside the realm of nature, and are therefore subject to scientific inquiry. Just saying that your explanation for something is supernatural is not a get-out-of-science-free card.

Of course, your supernatural explanations for supernatural events are not subject to scientific constraints. Go ahead and tell stories about deities zapping other deities with magic bolts of ectoplasm that nobody has seen and that did not affect anyone. No one can argue with you — it’s like debating who would win in a contest between the DC and Marvel comic book universes. Evidence and reason won’t come into it, but also, it’s irrelevant to how the world works.

The Smithsonian is sponsoring a traveling exhibit called Exploring Human Origins: What Does It Mean To Be Human?, which is going around the country to various libraries. By all accounts, it’s an excellent exhibit, and they also promote good education: they offer workshops on human evolution to local teachers (they also offer tours to local clergy — they’re additionally sponsored by the Templeton Foundation).

The exhibit is in Cottage Grove, Oregon right now. You’ve all seen Cottage Grove — the big parade scene in Animal House was filmed there. But it’s also a nice little town south of Eugene. I’d be there right now, if I were still living in Oregon. World-class educational exhibit on evolution in my former back yard? Yes, sounds awesome.

Except…other groups are free to piggy-back on the exhibit, and wouldn’t you know it, the Discovery Institute is going to exploit it to spread their special lies all over it on 10 March.

Science and Human Origins—What does the Evidence Really Say? Thursday March 10, 6-8 PM

Did human beings evolve from earlier animals? Was the process that produced human beings guided or unguided? And does it matter? Here is your chance to learn about the current state of the scientific evidence, to separate fact from speculation, and to explore why it matters.

Speakers at this event are: Ann Gauger, co-author of Science and Human Origins, a Senior Research Scientist at the Biologic Institute, and Director of Science Communication at the Discovery Institute. Richard Sternberg is a Senior Fellow with the Center for Science and Culture at Discovery Institute. He previously served as a staff scientist at the National Center for Biotechnology Information and as a Research Associate at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. Event hosted by various local Cottage Grove Churches.

Ugh. I don’t even know what to say.

Did human beings evolve from earlier animals? Yes. I suspect the DI will try desperately to weasel around that question, so I’m surprised they ask it. They are opposed to natural mechanisms for evolution, some of their fellows are young earth creationists, and they’ve been trying to walk the line between just saying that life evolved, but with the assistance of intelligent super-beings, and avoiding the whole issue for fear of alienating their YEC allies.

Was the process that produced human beings guided or unguided? There is no evidence at all that it was “guided”, but this is the DIs whole schtick — they’ll be in the middle of this evolution display trying to argue that evolution can’t work, therefore this-being-they-avoid-naming-called-God.

And does it matter? Here we go, the other side of the DI: moralizing about “cultural renewal”. At least John West isn’t there so you might not hear much about Hitler. But you never know.

I hope competent, knowledgeable Oregonians will attend and call out the frauds. Hey, if you do, send me a report on the event, too.

Ken Perrott of New Zealand SciBlogs waded into the controversial Dawkins disinvitation, and wrote a load of typical bullshit. That is, he tries to logic all critics of Dawkins into some kind of fallacy, because they must be mistaken, and we cannot examine the flaws in Dawkins worldview without first dismissing everyone who disagrees with him as irrational. Therefore, suggesting that Dawkins has said some terrible things…

…is so mistaken I think only people who are already hostile or desperately searching for something to confirm their anti-Dawkins or anti-male bias would actually fall for it – or promote it. But that is the sort of thing we get on social media – especially Twitter.

This is the fallacy of faulty generalisation – or more precisely, faulty induction. Very often resorted to by people with a large axe to grind.

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