I guess someone at Wikipedia noticed

I pointed out that their article on ‘ropen’ was biased mush from a crank, and lo! The article is now flagged.

This article is being considered for deletion in accordance with Wikipedia’s deletion policy.
Please share your thoughts on the matter at this article’s entry on the Articles for deletion page.
Feel free to edit the article, but the article must not be blanked, and this notice must not be removed, until the discussion is closed. For more information, particularly on merging or moving the article during the discussion, read the Guide to deletion.

This article may present fringe theories, without giving appropriate weight to the mainstream view, and explaining the responses to the fringe theories. Please improve the article or discuss the issue on the talk page. (August 2014)

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Answers in Genesis would rather you didn’t talk about this

They’ve been awarded an $18 million tax break. AiG will, as usual, declare that they weren’t actually given any money directly, but instead got a deal with the state that says they won’t have to pay as much. Because, as we all know, having to pay less of your revenues to cover the costs of infrastructure and maintenance and subsidized transport — you know, like all those roads two thirds of the country will be driving on to get to their over-priced carnie show — isn’t actually a benefit. It’s just what a god-fearing Kentucky ought to do.

But that’s not what they’d like you to avoid bringing up. No, it’s that in their state-subsidized operation, which makes them subject to state and federal hiring laws, they have a peculiar hiring requirement: they demand that all employees swear to abide by their statement of faith. That statement requires that all employees believe:

The only legitimate marriage sanctioned by God is the joining of one man and one woman in a single, exclusive union, as delineated in Scripture. God intends sexual intimacy to only occur between a man and a woman who are married to each other, and has commanded that no intimate sexual activity be engaged in outside of a marriage between a man and a woman. Any form of sexual immorality, such as adultery, fornication, homosexuality, lesbianism, bisexual conduct, bestiality, incest, pornography, or any attempt to change one’s gender, or disagreement with one’s biological gender, is sinful and offensive to God.

Oops. They just violated a few equal opportunity laws.

They also insist that:

All human life is sacred and begins at conception (defined as the moment of fertilization). The unborn child is a living human being, created in the image of God, and must be respected and protected both before and after birth. The abortion of an unborn child or the active taking of human life through euthanasia constitutes a violation of the sanctity of human life, and is a crime against God and man.

And of course there are a whole lot of religious requirements that only fit Christians. And not just any Christian: a very narrow, very specific version of Christianity that’s going to include only fundamentalist Protestants with a literalist interpretation of the Bible.

So there will be no Jews, gay men, lesbians, transgender men or women (or even individuals with gender dysphoria), Muslims, pro-choice citizens, Seventh Day Adventists, Scientologists, Catholics, Episcopalians, Buddhists, agnostics, pantheists, feminists, Sikhs, Quakers, or atheists employed at the Creation “Museum”. Also no honest physicists, geologists, or biologists. Karen Armstrong couldn’t get a job there, and neither could Neil deGrasse Tyson or Ken Miller. Me, either…and here I was pinin’ for an opportunity to move to the lovely Cincinnati area and get a prestigious job helping the public learn about science. Hecky darn.

But they don’t want anyone to talk about that. They’re going to nominally claim to follow state and federal guidelines, while somehow, magically, without any discrimination on their part, all the employees working as grounds crew, security, advertising, zip line guides, or accountants will just happen to all be conservative heterosexual attendees of Ken Ham’s favorite local churches.

And that may be a fair description of their applicant pool, since they’re clearly setting up a hostile work environment for anyone who doesn’t conform.

Christians, stop doing this

It makes you look very, very stupid. Kevin Sorbo doesn’t understand why atheists might be angry.

“I’m a Christian myself and had to play an atheist. I see the anger of these (atheist) guys on TV and it’s like ‘wow, how do you get so angry at something you don’t believe in?”  Sorbo said.

Guy, it’s pretty simple. We’re not angry at any gods. We know they don’t exist.

We’re angry with you.

If I had an address, I’d send him a copy of Greta Christina’s book. I wouldn’t do that for every stupid Christian (there are so many it would be a total transfer of every penny of my income to Greta), but my kids were huge fans of Hercules, so I’d be willing to do that for him.

At least Xena seems to have left god behind.

Refreshingly vigorous

We’ve been battling the stupid philistines within our own communities so long that it’s easy to forget the atheist tone police — those people who like to chide atheists for being too harsh on religion, who make excuses for faith, and who recoil from confrontation with nonsense. Alex Gabriel will have none of that.

It is a form of privilege to be an atheist who’s never experienced religious abuse, as many of us have who are antagonistic.

It is privilege blindness to expect — without a clue what we’ve experienced or what it means to us — that we give up our self-expression so that you can form alliances with faith communities that deeply injured us.

It is tone-policing if when you’re not telling us to shut up about it, you’re telling us how to talk about it. How dare you tell us to be more respectful.

It is splaining if your answer when we detail histories of religious abuse is ‘Yes, but’ — or if you tell us we can’t blame religion for it since not all believers do the same. We know the details. You don’t.

Ah, excellent. I’ve never been fond of the milquetoast approach to atheism.

I’m one of the privileged people in the first line quoted. I used to think I’d been brought up religious, but I revised my opinion as I met more people who really had been abused by dogmatic religion as children — my liberal Lutheranism and secular parents with only nominal associations with religion was more of an inoculation with a dead virus than an exposure to the real disease. But it was enough to trigger a strong reaction when I did encounter religious stupidity.

Just yesterday, I got in my car to run some errands, and the radio had been left on to a local station (my wife listens to music on her commute), which on Sunday was broadcasting a sermon. It was a generous and liberal sort of sermon — the guy was going on about how we have to be open to change, and receptive to new ideas, which I thought was a nice message…until he started yammering on about why we should be that way. We need to be generous in thought because that’s how Jesus was. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus — he started spinning out this revisionist biography of Jesus that fell just shy of declaring that Jesus had been a gay democrat who campaigned to save the whales.

It annoyed me. I could change the tuner and probably find a Christian preaching a wrathful Jesus, or a law-and-tradition-abiding Jesus, or an American Jesus who wants the brown people executed. Jesus, the Stretch Armstrong of Christianity.

I didn’t experience the pain of a religious upbringing, but I did experience a science education, and I will say this: how you know something matters. If you want a mind that adapts and responds intelligently to changing evidence and circumstances, you don’t get it by telling your children to worship and obey a myth. You don’t invent imaginary heroes who were paragons of perfection and tell the kids to follow them — even if you are promoting ideals I personally find copacetic, you are committing child abuse by short-circuiting their capacity for critical and independent thinking.

So I agree with Alex, but for different reasons…and I respect those differences. Fight on, everyone. And don’t try to demand that everyone on your side must have the very same perspective on the struggle that you do.

How to shut Sye Ten Bruggencate up

His only trick is to tell everyone else that they aren’t certain that they are right, while he is absolutely certain that he is right, and therefore he must be right. Most of this video is taken up with wordy attempts to pin him down, but the simple solution comes up at the end: just tell him to knock if off with his one and only line of argument, and then he jumps up and goes away.

We now need to compile a list of magic words that make other creationists disappear.

One of the many fine moments at #whc2014

Maryam Namazie making a comment at Richard Dawkins’ talk:

I’ve been saying it for years: there are a bunch of adjectives applied to atheists by Christians and Muslims that are just absurd in context. “Aggressive”. “Militant”. “Arrogant”. I don’t understand how people who believe that the Ruler of the Entire Universe cares personally about their diet, their hair styles, and their sex lives can call atheists these things without the small gods of irony striking them dead and calling their shriveled little souls home to Hypocrisy Heaven.

And now, with the Islamic State on the march, murdering people en masse, blowing up art and architecture, and torturing at will, we can see what aggressive, militant, and arrogant really look like. Atheists are merely confident.

Richard Dawkins still doesn’t get it

Dawkins spoke at #whc2014 this morning, in an interview with Samira Ahmed. Ahmed held his feet to the fire a bit, and grilled him on the recent rape comparisons on Twitter. Unfortunately, he made the same justifications all over again. Basically, his argument was that his critics are:

  1. Irrational, incapable of grasping the lucid logic of his argument.

  2. Emotional, driven entirely by a visceral reaction to rape.

  3. Suppressive, unwilling to discuss the issues calmly. They never discuss some topics, like rape and pedophilia.

He received resounding applause from a receptive audience, and he would have deserved it if there had been any truth at all to his claims. There isn’t.

  1. Most of us understand the logic of “X is bad, Y is worse” not being an endorsement of X. To argue otherwise seriously disrespects your opponents (I would not be surprised if some individuals fail to get that, but they aren’t representative).

  2. When you are making an intentionally emotive argument, as Dawkins admitted, you lose the privilege to complain that your opponents have an emotional reaction. As he knows, some subjects are inherently threatening and are appropriately dealt with using a strong emotional component…not to reject logic, but to recognize the motivation that drives the importance of the topic.

  3. This one is extraordinarily aggravating. Feminists talk about rape all the time. The flip side of that complaint is to suggest that they’re reveling in victimhood and should just shut up about rape. You can’t win!

    It’s not that you aren’t allowed to talk about rape, but that you have to include some sensitivity to the fact that certain groups, such as men in prison and women in all situations, are particularly at risk and have a much deeper interest and awareness of the magnitude and impact of the problem, and that if you are outside those categories, you need to tread with great caution. It is especially galling when the outsider assumes they know best how to address the issue, because logic.Patronizing logic.

    Honestly, women have been wrestling with this deep problem in our culture for a long time. It was a bit like something else I’ve experienced: having a creationist march up to me and accuse scientists of never ever considering problem X with evolution.* Yeah, we have, and with more knowledge and evidence than you’ve got, guy.

Another problem is context. We’ve been dealing with political figures, like Todd Akin, who have been using an artificial hierarchy of wrongness of rape to argue for placing the blame for some rapes on women…on the victims. This is, as Dawkins would say, completely illogical, and I’m confident that Dawkins himself is not thinking that way. But people who have been threatened with rape know full well that the world is not logical — if it were, they wouldn’t be worried about other people violating their autonomy. Vulcans don’t rape, and rapists aren’t logical, so reducing a life-threatening issue to a simplistic logic problem is illegitimate, and we also know that irrational people will abuse any hierarchical ordering of crimes to justify policies that do great harm.

Zero points to Team Dawkins on this issue. He hasn’t grasped the critics’ arguments at all, and is still hammering away with this irrelevant logic, logic, logic complaint.

One point for defining humanism as atheism plus an ethical stance, which is pretty much what Atheism Plus is all about.

One point, maybe, for clearly announcing that he is a feminist, and further declaring that it is self-evident that everyone should be a feminist. I reserve the right to adjust that score if he’s talking about a Christina Hoff Sommers kind of faux feminist.

Generally, it was a good talk with lots of red meat for the godless, but it had that big disappointing chunk in the middle where he addressed criticisms with misperceptions of the critiques.

~

*Curiously, we had an example of that in the Q&A. A fellow got up to the microphone and announced that he was a medic, and that genetic scientists had never considered the problem of the number of genes — that they used to think there were hundreds of thousands of genes (factually wrong: when I was a genetics student in the 70s, my prof, Larry Sandler, told us the best estimate was a few tens of thousands), and that we’d never dealt with the reduction in the number of genes in the HGP. There aren’t enough genes to make a human, he claimed. He was getting ranty, and couldn’t manage to state a question, so he was unsubtly dragged out of the building.

That was an appropriate response. I wonder if he’s at a pub somewhere right now, regaling the other patrons with a fanciful tale about how Dawkins was unable to process his logical argument, got all emotional, and had to silence him?