Zeteticon…next week!

The advertising for Zeteticon has been a bit low key, so it’s a good thing I happened to check my calendar! And then I looked at the roster, and it’s a good bunch — Beth and Matt and Fred and Aron and Richard and August and David and Katie, who I have not met before. Come on out to Fargo, ND this next weekend!

I notice I don’t have a title listed, which suggests that once again mail from an organizer has been snared in my spam trap, and I’ll have to go dig it up, but in case they see this, the title of my talk is “Synteny and Creationist Sins of Omission: They always forget about those pesky genes.” It’s about molecular genetics and the ignorance of creationists, if you can’t guess.

Nietzsche is not S.E. Cupp, OK?

Every review of Nick Spencer’s Atheists — the Origin of the Species leaves me less inclined to even want to read it. The man can’t possibly be as big an idiot as the reviewers make him out to be, can he?

The latest paean to Spencerian inanity comes from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. It always puzzles me how such a secular country can have a major media outlet that so blithely props up religious twits, but here they go again with the director of the Centre for Public Christianity, Simon Smart, who’s apparently spent his whole life trying to defy the name he was saddled with at birth.

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More words from JREF

Randi writes.

Hello everyone, Randi here.

As you now know, there are major changes taking place at the JREF.

We’ve been successful in our mission as an educational resource, but for some time we have felt that we could be doing more to make a difference, especially with regards to cultivating a new generation of critical thinkers. So, our prime focus for the future will be to build our educational content, and to develop more and greater opportunities to promote critical thinking in the classroom.

I also want to reassure you that, never fear, the Million Dollar Challenge lives on!

And, in exciting news, we are beginning to plan TAM 2015 — our 13th! JREF Fellow and long-time volunteer Ray Hall has agreed to be the Program Chair for the next summer’s meeting. Ray says to expect a full agenda of scientific skepticism, critical thinking, Sunday Papers, informative and inspirational talks, new insights, the warmth and family of the TAM community, and all the usual magic that is The Amazing Meeting.

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Holy crap, major shakeup at the JREF

DJ Grothe is out, and the Los Angeles office is closed.

In order to achieve cost-savings and greater efficiency, the Los Angeles office of the JREF has closed effective September 1, 2014. All operations have been moved to Falls Church, Virginia.

DJ Grothe is no longer with the JREF. James Randi has taken over as acting President.

This restructuring is part of an enhanced educational agenda aimed at inspiring an investigative spirit in a new generation of critical thinkers by engaging children and their parents, as well as educators and the general public, in how to think about the many extraordinary claims we hear every day.

More: they’re cutting the JREF forums loose.

The time for change has come. The long-running JREF online Forum at forums.randi.org is soon to head off on its own. 

JREF staff is in the midst of arranging a transition to a new owner. Various people are currently working to preserve the integrity of the forum content to the greatest extent possible with the privacy concerns of users in mind.

Well, that was abrupt. There is no hint about what the board is thinking, or what direction they’re planning to take, other than that vague “enhanced educational agenda”.

I’d make a joke about them only engaging in this drama for the traffic and attention, but this is a rather serious change in direction for them. I hope we’ll be seeing a new and better JREF. One positive hint is that Adam Savage joined the board this past summer, and that may be part of the change in focus.

Here’s one obvious reason:

JREF Revenue: 2011: $1.56M, 2012: $1.29M, 2013: $887.5K.

They’re down to 60% of their 2011 revenue. That’s a good reason to change directions.

Did you know teaching is a skill?

It really is. I will readily confess that the professoriate doesn’t give it much appreciation either — we’re all just tossed straight into the classroom with negligible preparation — but at least we’ve got a kind of Darwinian mode going on to weed out the worst. Jonnny Scaramanga has a guest post from someone who was subjected to Christian fundamentalist education. It’s ugly.

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Victor Stenger has died

I am saddened by the news: Victor Stenger was a hardcore physicist with the sensibilities of a liberal arts professor. His books and essays are excellent — he always presented the physics without compromise, but he also explained how we came to understand what we know. I like my science leavened with that historical perspective, and he always delivered.

God and the Atom, for example, starts with ancient Greek philosophy and works its way forward…and convincingly argues that our earliest views of physical science were godless, and that only later did the mystery religions creep in and taint productive avenues of thinking. His very latest, God and the Multiverse, is sitting on my desk right now. I’m very much looking forward to reading it.

I got to meet Vic many times — somehow, we seemed to end up as the sciencey pair, one physicist and one biologist, at a lot of atheist conferences. He was also a genuinely nice guy, friendly and fun to talk to, and I was always pleased to see we’d both be at an event. I’m missing him already.

Here’s Vic at Skepticon 3. I have to mention that there are plenty of essays and discussions available at the link to his home page up top.

Feuerstein’s new folly

Joshua Feuerstein, excitable youtube preacher, is now offering a $100,000 prize to anyone who can prove god doesn’t exist. I feel like asking him how he has proven that Thor doesn’t exist, so I can just swap in the name Jesus and walk away rich, except I don’t believe that there is such a thing as “proof” in science, so it would be something of a betrayal of my principles. Also, I doubt that he’s honest: does he actually have $100,000 to give away? Does he have funds in escrow? How is this affair managed and judged? It looks to me like he just took a sharpie and scribbled a claim on a piece of cardboard and held it up in front of a cell phone camera, which doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence that this is a legitimate offer.

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