An atheist response…and an invitation to a livestream

I was bored and trawled through a Christian site to address some silly questions.

Hey! Next week I’m planning to do a livestream to talk about Lucy Cooke’s Bitch, an excellent book about biology’s long history of bad science whenever the subject of women comes up, and going through many examples of the complexity of sex in zoology, and also talking about the short shrift women get in science. If you have any interests along those lines, or have read the book, or are, like, a woman who’d like to make sure the man talking about this subject stays in line, send me an email and let me know what times work for you, and maybe we’ll talk.

I waded through the filth so you don’t have to

Ugh. Ugh ugh ugh. Kent Hovind, creationist, is bad enough, but Kent Hovind, groomer, is enough to disgust anyone. There have been some developments in the revelations about what goes on at Dinosaur Adventure Land. Unfortunately, no one involved in discussing the story can write, so you have to sit through long rambling videos to extract the facts.

I’ll spare you that. If you must drill down through the slime, there’s a video on YouTube by Cindi Lincoln (Hovind’s ex-wife) and another on UGetTube, a right-wing conspiracist site, by a YEC who doesn’t like Hovind. I had to sit through a commercial for MyPillow to see that one.

OK, here’s the short summary. Kent Hovind has a good buddy named Chris Jones — they’ve been friends for 30 years, Hovind says — who showed up at DAL with a young boy in tow. The problem: Chris Jones has been “convicted on multiple charges of lewd acts against minors” and is on a sex offender registry. The kid is not related to Jones.

Normal people in that situation would ask many pointed questions of their pedophile friend and would call the police. No, not Kent Hovind! He says the charges against Jones were trumped up, just like the charges against him that put him in jail for ten years. Most of us would be extremely suspicious of a convicted pedophile showing up with an 11 year old boy, but what Kent did instead was put the man and his mysterious child in an empty house, with nothing but a mattress on the floor, for 5 days.

And then the kid disappears. People are looking for him, but Kent says it’s fine, his pedophile friend had the permission of the child’s mother to take charge of him. Now he’s been found, and his mother is grateful for the return of her boy, and has reported Chris Jones to the police.

Hovind still defends Jones. He went on the awful Brett Keane YouTube show to protest his innocence, and in the process, admit that he put a convicted child molester and a child in a house, unsupervised.

Does evangelical Christianity have the molestation of children as one of its precepts? Get out while you can!

Another development: the boy is pressing charges against Chris Jones, so Kent Hovind calls him a “moron”. Not Jones, his victim.

The Jehovah Witnesses don’t do door-knocking anymore?

Nowadays they send idiotic mail to harass you, instead of a pair of idiots. I miss the personal touch. So yes, I got some mail.

I didn’t censor out the return address, because that’s not a private home. That’s the JW Kingdom Hall here in Morris, go ahead and stop by and knock on their door.

To answer their question, though: no, the “kingdom of god” is an archaic fantasy, a myth built up by people who couldn’t imagine an alternative to their own situation, living in the city-states of the ancient Middle East. I don’t believe in a heaven, but if I did, it would be a decentralized anarchic association of individuals with no kings, and also no angels or devils.

Also, my correspondent is only telling half-truths. Daniel 2:44 says,

And in the days of these kings shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom, which shall never be destroyed: and the kingdom shall not be left to other people, but it shall break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms, and it shall stand for ever.

It’s not very specific, although it implies that God’s kingdom is going to be an earthly one, set up to compete and defeat all other kingdoms. It seems to be a rather primitive conception, don’t you think?

Yes, they included a tract, in that classic, easily recognized Jehovah’s Witness style.

Sorry, that doesn’t persuade at all. It’s a lot of empty promises of a utopia, and the only evidence cited for it all is the Bible. Typical. The Kingdom Hall is only about a kilometer away, I oughta walk over there and give them a copy of Cat’s Cradle, and throw them into the chaos of Bokononism. They’ll be better people for it.

How can anyone believe in a benevolent god?

Once again, the god side defeats their own claims.

I’m trying to figure this out. So if you don’t compel your children to pray to your god, he will send a gunman to murder them in school.

Do they even realize that that is not a benign act? That’s the logic of a tyrant and the rationalization of a fool. It’s so much easier to recognize that this cosmic villain does not exist, but that wicked people use the threat of this monster to compel others to do as they want.

Counterpoint: here’s a teacher who prayed earnestly and sincerely while the gunman god sent to remind everyone to pray killed all 11 of his 4th grade students.

In this world of gullible prayers, a good god would grant Arnulfo Reyes wish and send Steven Scalise to hell. I think I know how this will turn out, and we should learn that if god did exist, he’s a motherfucking Republican.

We’ve only just started. Look at this Christian!

A Texas-based Christian extremist preacher is calling on the government to round up “every single homosexual,” put them on trial, convict them, and put them to death by shooting them in the head, which he falsely says Jesus Christ commands.

Dillon Awes of the Stedfast Baptist Church on Sunday also falsely claimed every gay person is a pedophile, every heterosexual pedophile is a “fag,” and “sodomites” are responsible for school shootings. None of those claims are factual.

Everything is only going to get worse.

OH NO! If that’s the audience, I don’t want to be popular

This is an odd looking graph of traffic to my latest YouTube video.

You might want to congratulate me on that sudden surprising surge of traffic in the middle of the night, but don’t. Apparently, that’s when the magical YouTube algorithm started recommending the video to others, and it brought an influx of Peterson worshippers, as the comments reveal.

all these years and you still can’t get 10 k subs??? JP just hit 5 million and growing. You’re in the final stage of your life, stop being so jelous. Btw, you shpould check out JP’s interview with Roger Penrose, eat your heart out.

But here’s the thing: I’m not concerned about traffic. I look at the most popular videos on the medium, and it’s garbage like Pewdiepie and the Paul brothers and bizarre twisted animated children’s videos designed to milk clicks out of babies. I’m content with my tiny little niche. I’ve also got a real job, fortunately, and the $50 my channel brings in every month is fine.

Then there are the feeble defenses of Peterson:

Peterson clearly states that what he is saying is highly speculative. If your going to critique the man at least do it honestly.

There’s a whole bit in my video where I point out that Peterson is flinging about the word “speculation” as a get-out-of-jail-free card. Useful speculation has to be built on some kind of empirical, testable framework. Peterson is lazy and doesn’t do the work of justifying it.

Most common, though, are the people who deny his transphobia (the thing that made him famous!) and have a knee-jerk hatred of social justice.

I realize Peterson’s claims about consciousness traveling up and down the micro and macro levels is nonsense, but so are the accusations of transphobia towards Peterson and Dawkins. Myers never really bothers to explain how they’re transphobic. At least not in this video. I think Myers should maybe spend more time investigating his own biases and irrationalism than those of Peterson if he has such obvious blind spots.

I thought Peterson’s transphobic comments have been so thoroughly covered elsewhere that I didn’t have to discuss them, and could focus on where he intrudes stupidly on my area of expertise, biology. I guess I was wrong. Do I need to make my next video about that? I’d rather not, because Peterson is such a twit.

Of course, there are still swarms of anti-SJW clowns out there.

I am not going to talk much about Peterson, but here is my problem. PZ Myers is supposed to be a scientist and yet he let’s social justice which has nothing to do with Science leak in.

I help a Transgender person overseas and help feed him and fix his bike, so this isn’t about hate or anything, but pronouns and having many sexes is against the Scientific data.
It’s more like a problem with the mind itself and social justice should not be mixed with Science.

This is why I am upset, because if you are a Scientist, you should have NOTHING TO DO WITH STUFF THAT”S NOT SCIENCE AT ALL, it’s more pseudoscience than actual real science.

Disappointed in you PZ, I thought you would be better than that.

This is really shameful and I think that’s worse than whatever Peterson is going on about.

What Scientific data is against pronouns and having many sexes? I suspect he couldn’t name anything.

I’m also unsurprised that there are people who think social justice should not be mixed with Science, but then have no problem at all with the irrational, unjust garbage that Peterson freely mixes in to his science-free babbling.

I guess I’m going to have to make more spider videos to flush away these clowns and get my traffic down where it’s supposed to be.

The Peterson delusion

Yesterday, Jackson Wheat sent me a link to this ‘discussion’ between Jordan Peterson and Richard Dawkins. I don’t recommend listening to it. I only made it through the first 5 minutes before the gag reflex kicked in. Peterson does most of the talking; the opening is Peterson simpering about how Bill C16 was compelled speech, and Dawkins agreeing and praising his courage.

You’ll understand why I then glanced at the timer and saw it was an hour and a half long and closed it with a few disgusted curses.

Then an excerpt from somewhere later in the video was posted on Twitter. It’s mostly Peterson explaining why two intertwined snakes are representations of DNA, which he saw clearly while on psilocybin. It is totally bonkers. It’s stupid and insane and infantile.

A brief summary if you don’t want to listen to it (or if, like me, you don’t want to listen to it a second time).

It reminded me a bit of that old video, much loved by creationists, in which creationists got into his office on the pretext of a filming an interview, and he just stopped, arrested by his British reserve, and was too polite to give them the ass-kicking they deserved. Jordan Peterson is a stark raving batshit dipsy-doodle con man.

It’s too bad Dawkins couldn’t see that the rest of Peterson’s schtick is just as groundless and loony.

I couldn’t take Gilder seriously after he decided to rename molecular biology adguacyth

Way, way back in 2004-2007, one of my prime targets for my ire was George Gilder, the pretentious twit who was one of the founders of the Discovery Institute. He was such an easy target, so full of hot air and ignorance, that it was fun to take potshots at him as he bobbed about like a zeppelin that had lost its steering. Then he faded away into backrooms where he could babble nonsensically with no one around to criticize him, and I lost track (and interest) in what he’s been doing.

But he’s back now. He came out with a shiny new book a few years ago — sorry I’m late, I didn’t care enough to notice — and he has a new hobby horse. It’s blockchain of all things. Here’s an entertaining review by David Gerard.

Gilder predicts that the Google and Silicon Valley approach — big data, machine learning, artificial intelligence, not charging users per transaction — is failing to scale, and will collapse under its own contradictions.

The Silicon Valley giants will be replaced by a world built around cryptocurrency, blockchains, sound money … and the obsolescence of philosophical materialism — the theory that thought and consciousness needs only physical reality. That last one turns out to be Gilder’s main point.

Right, that’s why he was promoting Intelligent Design creationism so assiduously. No surprise here.

But Gilder never quite makes his case that blockchains are the solutions to the problems he presents — he just presents the existence of blockchains, then talks as if they’ll obviously solve everything.

Blockchains promise Gilder comfort in certainty: “The new era will move beyond Markov chains of disconnected probabilistic states to blockchain hashes of history and futurity, trust and truth,” apparently.

Pure Gilder. He loves to talk. Unfortunately, much of what he talks about is his personal fantasy about how the world should work.

There are so many beliefs Gilder has that ought to make him a figure of contempt, but what I can’t figure out is why people pay any attention to him.

Gilder despises feminism, and has described himself as “America’s number-one antifeminist.” He has written two books — Sexual Suicide, updated as Men and Marriage, and Naked Nomads — on this topic alone.

Also, per Gilder, Native American culture collapsed because it’s “a corrupt and unsuccessful culture,” as is Black culture — and not because of, e.g., massive systemic racism.

Gilder believes the biological theory of evolution is wrong. He co-founded the Discovery Institute in 1990, as an offshoot of the Hudson Institute. The Discovery Institute started out with papers on economic issues, but rapidly pivoted to promoting “intelligent design” — the claim that all living creatures were designed by “a rational agent,” and not evolved through natural processes. It’s a fancy term for creationism.

Gilder insisted for years that the Discovery Institute’s promotion of intelligent design totally wasn’t religious — even as judges ruled that intelligent design in schools was promotion of religion. Unfortunately for Gilder, we have the smoking gun documents showing that the Discovery Institute was explicitly trying to push religion into schools — the leaked Wedge Strategy document literally says: “Design theory promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions.”

Read the rest. It’s very thorough, and discusses Gilder’s ongoing machinations with people like Peter Thiel. Maybe I shouldn’t have let him drop off my radar, but my interest in him waned when his influence via the ID movement was discredited in the Dover trial. He’s been a cunning and influential little ratfucker since then, though!