Belief matters, and bad beliefs hurt us all

Tell me if you’ve heard this excuse for religion before. Religion isn’t really about what people believe — all that stuff about salvation and an afterlife and heaven and hell and holy books isn’t that important, it’s instead all about comforting rituals and emotion and feelings. It’s like art, like poetry — nobody really believes in that stuff literally, except crazy people, so all those rabid atheists are barking up the wrong tree.

That is so tired, so old, so familiar that anyone who tries to advance such a stupid argument ought to be ashamed at how out of touch they are. John Gray, that favored religious apologist for the British press, drags out the old fleabag and tries to coax it around the track once more. That horse is dead, though, and all the flogging is doing nothing but making the bones and hide bounce about.

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The light will illuminate the lives of a select few

Richard Dawkins’ new book, The Magic of Reality: How We Know What’s Really True will be available on 4 October (lucky folk in the UK have it right now), and you know what that means? Book tour. Poor Richard will be dragged hither and yon in a frantic schedule that would leave me exhausted — I have no idea how he does it. You can find his UK tour schedule online; the US gets him for about two weeks in early October, and you can look that schedule up in a pdf. Miami, New York, Charlottesville,
Lynchburg, Richmond, Houston, Rochester, and Detroit win the lottery this time around.

Did he miss you? He missed me, too, although I will catch up with him in Houston.

Also, James Randi is touring, but he’s only going to Canada. I choose to interpret all this as a tacit acknowledgment that the western half of the United States is so much more enlightened than the places the luminaries are visiting, that we don’t need them.

…says the guy in the small town with 15+ churches.

Calling all Swedes

I made an error, too, because I can’t read Swedish. The blog listed below is someone else explaining Khalid’s situation; Khalid’s blog is here, and it’s in English!

Your country is about to make a major mistake! They are preparing to deport Khalid and his family — his wife and three children — back to Pakistan, their native country. One problem: he’s one of those noisy blogging atheists, and while I can appreciate that they’re an annoying, obnoxious lot, kicking him out of Sweden means he’ll be sent to Pakistan. Sweden is refusing his request for asylum, which basically means that he’s being given a death sentence. It doesn’t mean that the Pakistani government will have him directly executed; they have a subtler plan. Under the laws there, any good Muslim who kills an apostate faces no punishment.

I don’t know who to contact, and the information I was sent provided no recommendations for how to address this looming problem (we only have a few days to act). If anyone has any idea about who we should be howling at, let me know in comments or email, and I’ll add it to this post.

Sexism is a problem we should address

Let us dig up a grave and gnaw on some old bones. USA Today has just now gotten around to an article on that elevatorgate tempest. Fortunately, I think it takes the right tack; it takes the perspective that sexism isn’t particularly a problem of the atheist community, but that what’s going on is that the atheist community is taking the problem seriously and is trying to address it.

Yet many, including Watson, say Elevatorgate is less a calamity and more an opportunity to welcome women and other minorities into a community that’s long been dominated by white men.

“The majority of emails I have gotten have been from men who said, ‘I had no idea what women in this community went through, and thank you for opening my eyes,'” Watson said. “There has actually been a net benefit coming out of this that I think has made everything worthwhile.”

No one is suggesting the freethought community is more sexist than other segments of society — after all, the most famous American atheist, the late Madalyn Murray O’Hair, was a woman. [And what about Ellen Johnson, Margaret Downey, Susan Jacoby, and so many other atheist leaders? –pzm]

Nonetheless, the incident has struck a chord, perhaps because atheists and other skeptics pride themselves on reason and logic — intellectual exercises that theoretically compute to equality.

They’ve got a few quotes from me in there, too. I tried to make the point that whenever I’ve brought this subject up with meeting organizers, they’ve been very receptive, recognize the problem, and try to deal with it. What this one incident did was expose a small, fringe group of obsessive sexists who suddenly had the privileges they took for granted questioned…and oh, how they did squeal, and continue to squeal.

The bad news is found in the comments. It’s as if most of the commenters didn’t even bother to read the article. The comments section at USA Today is a grisly sight — I don’t recommend it unless you’re strong of stomach. A few samples:

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Dr Oz crosses the line

Usually, Oz just dispenses pointless pap and feel-good noise, but now he’s antagonized the agriculture lobby. On a recent show, he claimed that apple juice was loaded with deadly arsenic — a claim he supported by running quick&dirty chemical tests on fruit juices, getting crude estimates of total arsenic, and then going on the air to horrify parents with the thought that they were poisoning their children.

One problem: his tests weren’t measuring what he claimed. The FDA got word of the fear-mongering he was doing, and sent him a warning letter.

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How stupid is your worldview?

Gah, I hate flowcharts. And I hate pathetic attempts to explain philosophy with a flowchart.

Most people, I’ll wager, have a pretty hazy relationship to spiritual beliefs. For example, there are Christians who don’t go to church, Jews who don’t believe in God, and agnostics who don’t really believe in God but also say they’re spiritual. If you know exactly what you believe in, then consider yourself lucky. For the rest of us, this handy infographic, created by Cameron Blair of The Fellowship for Evangelism in the Arts, lays out an astonishingly wide array of religious thought into one deceptively simple flowchart.

Ugh. That thing is hideous — it’s another example of how religion makes ugly everything it touches.

It forces everything into simple binary choices: “deceptively simple” is right.

The entire right two-thirds of the graphic is dedicated entirely to Christian suppositions, asking questions that only matter to an evangelical Christian. The worldview of the ‘artist’ is all that’s explored here.

The left side does nothing but fuss over where the godless find meaning, as if that’s the most important thing we ever worry about. And then all it does is split everyone into categories…categories that are not mutually exclusive.

As long as we’re making flowcharts that are ugly, pointless, and simplistic, I thought I’d make my own, which is mine, which is far better than the one above.

Does god exist? → NO → Correct. Have a cookie.

↓
YES
↓
You’re a deluded moron.
Goodbye.

There. Done. Easy.

I can take a suggestion. Here’s a prettier version of my flowchart.

Believe in mad rubbish because it’s good for you

Scott Stephens is the Religion and Ethics editor for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation online, and he’s a bit of a whacker — he’s one of those cranky apologists for religion, and he really, really despises those awful New Atheists, as you’ll see. He was recently in an intelligence2 debate, on the proposition that “Atheists are wrong” — his side, the affirmative, lost. He has just posted his position on the debate, titled The Unbearable Lightness of Atheism, and it’s easy to see why he didn’t fare so well. It’s a bitter diatribe informed only by his own ignorance and his deeply held conceit that god is real and religion is good, and therefore atheists must be wrong.

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Lists

As I’ve mentioned before, one annoying property of Christians is that they keep lecturing us on what atheists believe…and they’re always wrong. Here’s a suggestion next time they do this to you: tell them to go look at these two lists written by atheists and get their stories straight.

My favorite creationist web page of all time

I just had to share. Look at this sample: at least 5 different fonts, 6 different colors, shadowed text, and all superimposed on an irrelevant and elaborate background.

And then there’s the content: It’s a creation museum! It’s a taxidermy collection! And it’s run by some antique tools!

Savor the Creation Museum and Taxidermy Hall of Fame of North Carolina; I don’t think it will change any time in the near future, so there’s no hurry. It’s so nice of creationists to erect these monuments to stupidity and tastelessness on the web.

(Also on Sb)