My criticisms of Ayaan Hirsi Ali seem to have annoyed a lot of people. I have been told that I am completely demonizing
her and that I’ve been assailling
her, and of course any criticism of a right-wing anti-muslim person produces frequent accusations that I’m a “dhimmi”. It’s kind of amazing.
Greta Christina has followed up on EbonMuse’s challenge to theists, listing the kinds of evidence that would convince them that their beliefs were true.
If I’m such an open-minded atheist — if I really am an atheist because I think the God hypothesis is unsupported by the evidence — what evidence for God would I accept? What would it take to change my mind?
I’m going to take a rather different approach: I’m going to tell theists to not bother.
One of Kent Hovind’s buddies has recorded a long phone call with the guy in jail. It’s exactly what would wind him up: he was asked to critique the Hovind wikipedia page, so it was an excuse to talk about himself for an hour. Here’s the whooooole thing.
Jon Ronson has written a book about public shaming (confession: I have not read it yet, but I have read Ronson’s other books and enjoyed them greatly), So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed
Many of us are familiar with The Brick Bible, retellings of Bible stories using Lego bricks. The author made a stunning announcement on facebook today.
I’m going to be speaking in Köln, Germany on the 22nd of May, at the International Atheist conference. They just posted some videos from previous events — I was last there in 2012. I listened to the first bit of this talk (really, I can’t bear to watch videos of myself) just to remind myself of what I talked about then, and to make sure my planned talk doesn’t overlap (it doesn’t). But I did learn something important from my brief glimpse.
Eric Hovind gave a talk at a public high school in Georgia. He titled it “Critical Thinking”, and tried to claim that it wasn’t an out-and-out creationist talk.
He lied.
Jonny Scaramanga makes some excellent points about debates. He’s talking about his appearance on the BBC’s The Big Question, but it’s the same thing: what makes for drama is to have two sides battle it out, and you get even more dramatic drama if one side is a collection of extremists who are committed to a set of demented views.
After that peculiar documentary on atheism that made it seem like we’re all just white men pinin’ for a church, CNN makes partial amends with an article on black atheists by Mandisa Thomas.
