There’s this story going around about why believers are afraid of atheists, and here’s a video that summarizes it.
It annoys me in a couple of different ways, I’m sorry to say.
Good on him: Dan Dennett has pulled out of the World Science Festival because they’re sponsored by the Templeton Foundation, a very good reason.
What’s widening the rifts? The fact that growing diversity within movement atheism is tearing away from a bitterly misogynistic core. A core that is becoming the fringe.
Harassment and excluding people from your movement will be your downfall, atheism. Please take this as a warning, and an attempt to right the wrongs within your movement before it collapses. From now on, I’m a secular humanist, feminist, mangina-loving, vegetarian socialist, and nothing else, until you clean up your act.
Jenny McDermott
I’ve just seen the ad for the upcoming International Atheist conference. Europe is a little less uptight than the US, I guess.
Here’s a weird mashup for you: Dark Buddhism, one man’s attempt to fuse Buddhism with Randian Objectivism. To his credit, he’s quite clear on the flaws in the Cult of Ayn Rand, but it’s still strange to care so much about Rand’s bogus philosophy that you want to rescue it by stitching it up: building a hybrid of selflessness and selfishness is a contradiction sure to spawn deepities.
Were you all following the big fight yesterday? No, not the overhyped, overpaid sight of two rather repellent grown men pounding each other, but the one between Sam Harris and Noam Chomsky. I wouldn’t be surprised if you missed it, or tuned out after the first couple of blows, because they were grossly mismatched, and it was kind of a rout.
Here’s a round-by-round summary.
Brown has always been a strident defender of religion, and over the years he’s said a lot of incredibly stupid things. But now I have to partly agree with him on this problematic Cult of Dawkins. This is getting embarrassing.
At the RDF website, there is a fundraising page. Fundraising is fine, organizations do have to do that, and so I don’t chide them for having a necessary function on the web; but I do criticize them for two things. What the money is for, and how they are raising it.
But in the current state of the atheist movement, it unfortunately is right now.
Oh, how I despise Salon. I was an early adopter — I was an avid reader from the day they first opened their doors. A news site with a politically progressive slant? Yes, please. And then they turned evil. It was the same with the Huffington Post, although I think they were evil from the very beginning.
Unfortunately, people still send me links to their crappy crap. The latest is this abomination: 9 “scientific” facts about breasts. At least they had the kindness to slap scare quotes around the word “scientific”.
It’s a fascinating example of motivated reasoning. Bill Maher has been raked over the coals on his irrational, anti-scientific attitude towards vaccines; his own guests have scorned his views on his own show; he’s been confronted repeatedly with the evidence and the rebuttals. He’s got to know by now that there is no rational justification for claiming that vaccines or thimerosal cause autism, or that the drug companies are profiting hugely by including poisons in their vaccines (which makes no sense, even if you do believe in greedy pharmaceutical mega-corporations).
So what does he do? He invites anti-vax crank extraordinaire, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., to sit around and commiserate with one another about how they’re called cranks and liars for merely denying the scientific consensus.
