That off-his-rocker conspiracy theorist at Florida Atlantic University has been fired, despite being tenured. I would defend the right of a professor to argue for whatever wacky idea he wanted — that’s the whole point of tenure — except that he crossed a line, and there really are lines that even tenure won’t protect you from.

A major factor in Tracy’s firing was an op-ed in the Sun Sentinel by Lenny and Veronique Pozner, whose 6-year-old son, Noah, was shot and killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School on December 14, 2012. The couple wrote that Tracy sent them a certified letter demanding proof that Noah had lived, and that when they refused to respond, he blasted them on his blog and accused them of accepting government payoffs to feign grief. In an angry Facebook post, Tracy wrote that the Pozners’ op-ed was an attempt to intimidate his employer into firing him because of the extensive research he’d done on the Sandy Hook shooting. The Pozners, alas, are as phony as the drill itself, and profiting handsomely from the fake death of their son, he wrote.

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Believing that the slaughter of innocents at Sandy Hook was staged is totally nuts — it belongs up there with believing the moon is made of cheese, the earth is flat, and that there is a god that loves you. But you don’t get to fire professors for that; you also shouldn’t use their weird little hobbies as grounds for not hiring them, if they’re competent at doing the job they’re supposed to do.

But when your obsession turns into harassment, when you start hounding people who, with good reason, disagree with you, then it’s time to stop allowing you to use your position to launch these ill-founded crusades.

Secondarily, that he calls making up bizarre conspiracy theories extensive research also calls into question his competence.

Some of us have been saying this for a long time: Michael Shermer is a poor excuse for a skeptic. Now John Hawks takes him out to the woodshed over a recent SciAm column, in which he spins out a violent fairy tale about the Homo naledi fossils.

But Shermer is wrong to ignore the evidence that already exists. The editor of Skeptic magazine failed to do the one thing that any journalist should do: simply ask someone whether he was missing some important evidence that might make him look like a fool. I’m very sorry that he has misled so many Scientific American readers about the nature of evidence about Homo naledi and how we approach the science of human origins.

Hawks, of course, is one of the primary investigators of the H. naledi work, and knows what he’s talking about. I have to wonder again why SciAm continues to keep Shermer on as a columnist.

They’re liars. Kent Hovind attempts to explain the contradictions in the Bible, and it’s easy. The Bible is a trap. God intentionally put in errors so he can catch the people smart enough to notice them, and drive them away from the faith. Because, apparently, he only wants irrational people to believe in him.

If I was god…I would write the book in such way that those who don’t want to believe in me any way would think they found something — “a-ha, here’s why I don’t believe” — and then they could go on with their own life, because they don’t want to believe in god any way.
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I would put things in there that appear, without digging, to be contradictions. I don’t think that’s deceptive, that’s really wise for our heavenly father to weed out those who are really serious.

I know this is difficult for an ethically-challenged person like Hovind, but that actually is deceptive.

See, this is useful. We need to know what makes this god business work, and apparently, you need to be up high in the sky, and you need to be undistracted by those demons in a long metal tube, that is, plebeian airline passengers, so definitely no flying in coach, and even first class isn’t good enough — you want to talk with god, you need to have your own private jet.

Well now I know why I’m an atheist — I’ve had a lack of opportunity for conversations with gods. All you Christians out there need to click on that donate button in the left sidebar a lot. I’m sure I could be brought to Jesus if only I had my very own Gulfstream and a pilot on retainer.

It would be nice if the IRS could hear that rationalization from the prosperity gospel practitioners, but I rather suspect that the IRS also only listens to you if you’re calling on a satellite phone from your private jet.

By the way, the video cuts out just before we get the Biblical revelation of Amos 6:1, so here it is:

Woe to them that are at ease in Zion, and trust in the mountain of Samaria, which are named chief of the nations, to whom the house of Israel came!

What it means, I don’t know, and I wasn’t interested in tracking down their interpretation. It probably means something about how they need to upgrade to a bigger, more luxurious jet.

There’s this insanely popular mullah, Zakir Naik, with lots of videos flooding youtube. He reminds me a lot of Kent Hovind and Ken Ham: the same ignorance, and the same absolute confidence that they’re always right, but with no evidence to support their conclusions other than their own belief. But then I ran across this video, and I actually agreed with Naik in the first part.

He argues that if a school is hiring a teacher, it ought to matter whether they believe 2+2=4 or 2+2=3, and they ought to employ only the one who’d teach the correct answer. I was floored! I’d argue exactly the same thing. Of course, he doesn’t carry through on that ideal: he’s also a creationist, of exactly the same primitive ilk as Hovind and Ham.

Where it all gets familiar and stupid is in his answer to the original question, which is why Islamic countries don’t allow places of worship for other religions, while Western nations allow a diversity of faiths to flourish. His answer is that that’s because Muslims know absolutely that Islam is true, so why should they allow false religions to proselytize? And how does he know that Islam is true? Because the Koran says so. When pressed on the fact that many Christians are as adamant about the truth of their beliefs, he simply asserts that the reason other countries allow mosques to be built is that they are less confident that their native religions are true.

It was a mistake to have Bill Nye debate Ken Ham. The debate I really want to see is Ham vs. Naik. They’re indistinguishable from each other, but both are totally convinced that the other is completely wrong. Please make it happen!

Not that I expected much, but this review of Sam Harris’s latest with Maajid Nawaz confirms what little I did expect.

It quickly becomes clear, however, that Sam Harris is illiterate when it comes to history. He has a tendency, both in his online writings and in this book, to reduce all 1,400 years of the Islamic past to jihad. The world, he says, witnessed “a thousand years of jihadism” before Bin Laden sent airliners to mutilate the New York City skyline, and Islam spread “primarily by conquest, not conversation.” The historian Zachary Karabell wrote an entire book refuting this simplistic repackaging of history.

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At one point, Harris even bizarrely rationalizes the Crusades. Remember, he tells readers, the Crusades “were primarily a response to 300 years of jihad” — the emphasis here is his. The Crusades were a “reaction,” he laments, and in any event, holy war was a “late, peripheral” development within Christianity. This ought to be news to the flayed bodies and burned heretics and massacred dissidents put to death by Christianity’s sword. Muslim empires were authoritarian, as were Christian empires. Muslim clerics gave fatwas declaring jihad, and Pope Urban II gave his own decree explicitly calling on Christian subjects to take up arms and reclaim the Holy Land from the Mohemmadans. Why Sam Harris feels the need to take sides in the fanatical squabbles of our barbaric ancestors eludes me.

All of this can be excused, but only up to a point. What is inexcusable, and what should preclude Sam Harris from participating in any more projects on Islamic Reformation, is his complete lack of awareness about Muslims as they actually live today. He censures American Muslims for paying more attention to the coldblooded massacre of three American Muslims at the University of North Carolina than to the crimes of ISIS — proximity to Raleigh over Raqqa may explain why — before going on to say that hate crimes against American Muslims are “tiny in number, often property-related, and still dwarfed five-fold by similar offenses against Jews.” Reread that sentence and take in the moral callousness of this thinker.

At least I enjoyed the review.

It’s a start, anyway. Here are Ten Facebook Pages You Need to Stop Sharing. They are:

InfoWars
Foodbabe
Eat Clean. Train Mean. Live Green.
Joseph Mercola
Prevention Magazine
Natural News
Collective Evolution
MindBodyGreen
Spirit Science
The Mind Unleashed

There’s a lot of pseudo-nutrition and quackery in there, and also a fair bit of “spirituality”. But there are so many other pages that are about as bad! I bail when I see the words “spirit”, “detox”, “cleanse”, “toxins”, as well as anything to do with religion.

Apparently, I need to periodically explain what freethought means, because right now I’m being helpfully informed by many people who don’t have a clue that it means thinking any damn thing you want.

My response: If naive etymology were your guide, then freeways don’t have any traffic rules.

Look, I know a lot of people experience total brain lock when they see the word “free” — just see the usual response to the phrase “free speech” — but you’re wrong. Free speech does not mean there are no limitations on what you can say, it just means the government can’t control the expression of opinions. You still don’t get to yell “Fire!” in a crowded theater, or commit libel with impunity, or be obnoxious without social repercussions.

Likewise with freethought. We don’t need a damned philosophy to allow you to think whatever you want — there is no way anyone can control your mind. Of course you can think freely! But freethought refers to something more specific: having ideas that are not dictated by dogma or authority, but by reason and empirical evidence. It means free of dogma, not free of all constraints. If you are using the phrases “because that’s the way it’s always been”, “because it’s human nature”, “because the Grand Poobah said so”, “because it’s written down that way in this book”, you are certainly free to think that, but you are not being a freethinker.

I know this is going to blow some minds, but reason and empirical evidence are limitations on your thinking. We impose them on our minds because we value consistency, reproducibility, consensus, and independent confirmation of our conclusions, and those restrictions enable us to achieve that. If we didn’t care about those requirements, well then Jesus loves me and I can fly and weeee, let’s go all kittens and fluffy pillows and pass me that cloud, I need to get high.

The same people who insist on the dictionary definition of atheist seem incapable of reading the dictionary definition of freethought, or even the wikipedia entry. But then, those definitions are more complicated and difficult than off-the-cuff knee-jerk not-thinking that they specialize in, so it’s no wonder they shun the actual evidence.