So nice, and so wrong

What do you do on airplanes? I usually devour a book or two, usually something popcorny and light, sometimes something I need to get read for work. On my trip home from Washington DC, I lucked out: I was handed a book the day I took off, and it turned out to be a damned good read.

Jason Rosenhouse is my co-blogger at Scienceblogs — he’s a mathematician, but he’s also neck-deep in the evolution/creationism wars. He was in town for the Reason Rally (wait: from the description, he left before my talk. Cancel the review, gotta pan him instead…nah, I guess I’ll forgive him this one time), and he gave me his brand new book, Among the Creationists: Dispatches from the Anti-Evolutionist Front Line.

Jason regularly goes to creationist conferences. I often drop in on the small local stuff — creationists ranting in midwestern churches — but Jason goes to the big events, the major conferences with swarms of concentrated inanity babbling at large audiences who have made a special trip just to bathe in theistic lies. It’s a different environment; he just shows up, listens and takes notes, politely asks questions to make them struggle a bit, and then leaves…to write up the full story in his blog and now this book.

This isn’t the book where the scientist dismantles in detail every bogus argument the creationists throw at us. Instead, it’s a personal account of the audiences and speakers at this event, and there’s something that comes through loud and clear, that I’ve also experienced: they’re all so damned nice. They haven’t got a leg to stand on with the nonsense they’re talking about, but they try to make up for it with friendliness and manners and all these other psycho-social arts of persuasion. They don’t compensate for being wrong, but you can see how they manage to win over so many people who don’t know better.

It’s a valuable perspective to have. Know your enemy; don’t underestimate them, and don’t demonize them as evil. But be aware of exactly how they manage their image, how they cajole people into believing in ideas that are horribly wrong, and what they are precisely saying. Jason’s book is an essential personal view of our foes.

Also, we noticed that the cover uses a very similar minimalist design and color scheme to my book that will be coming out in the fall. Buy them both as a matched pair!

(Also on Sb)

Manology 101

There I was, minding my own business, when out of the blue some random guy going by the name “principles101” tweets at me…

@pzmyers time for some real biology lessons: goo.gl/obiC

Oh hellz yeah, I think, I love me some biology lessons. So I follow the link, and it’s a free textbook, it says. Only it’s at some site called Manhood Academy, with cheesy clashy glarey page design, and … you can guess where this is going. Sure, it’s a free “book” that you can download, but there isn’t a speck of biology in it. It cockily calls itself “The Principles of Social Competence“, but it isn’t even that — it’s a ridiculous fantasy novel, 292 pages long, in which the authors stroke themselves by inventing elaborate dialogs and scenarios in which the manly men they are instructing all emerge victorious, with gorgeous cowed women clinging tremblingly to their burly powerful arms.

Mostly this is accomplished by pretending that women are like puppy dogs, and it is the man’s job to train her. For instance, if you encounter a girl who doesn’t know how to take a compliment, there’s a little script for what you should say:

“No that’s the wrong answer. You don’t just say, ‘Hah, right.’ That’s a total turn off. You need to learn how to show some appreciation. When I tell you that I like the way you smile, that it turns me on, you should say, ‘Oh my god! That’s soooooo sweet of you!!!! Thank you!!!!.’ See, just like that. That’s the right way to do it.”

You know, if I tried that on a real woman, rather than the Barbie doll the author is posing in his mind, she would either be rightfully creeped out and run away, or she’d focus her withering scorn on my assumption that her purpose in life is to “turn me on”.

Apparently, though, I just have to be persistent.

By consistently punishing a woman’s dysfunctional behavior, she will eventually submit to your will. This means she now fears your authority and values your expectations.

Once a woman submits to your authority, you need to reward her with your praise and affection to maintain her submission.

Give her a biscuit, too, and if she forgets her training, slap her on the nose with a rolled up newspaper.

There’s the usual caricature of feminism — “At its heart, feminism represents women’s desire to control men” — lots of long-winded pop pseudopsychology, all larded up with so much random clip art that it will make your eyes ache. Oh, and please do read the section beginning at page 238: “How to handle bitch behavior”. Apparently, the best way to handle a woman is to just call her a “bitch” over and over again until she cries and succumbs to your irresistible manhood. Then you can call her a “cunt” to make her beg for your lovin’.

It’s an eye-opener. There are actually men in existence who are that stupid that they believe that BS. Look and laugh: if you’ve ever been curious about what exactly is so unbelievably inane about MRAs and PUAs, it’s a useful example.

The Child Catchers

I like a good horror story, but sometimes I get so terrified I want to crawl under the covers and not emerge for a good long while. The books that terrify me, though, aren’t the one ones by Stephen King or Clive Barker — supernatural horror just makes me laugh — it’s the real-world scary stuff that makes me tremble. For a long time, my standard for nightmare fuel has been Jeff Sharlet’s The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power. That’s a book that makes you aware of a kind of malevolent insanity gripping a significant chunk of the leadership of our country, a malignancy that goes unquestioned and even with approval. There really are monsters at the top.

But move over, Sharlet, here’s a new book that’s even scarier: The Good News Club: The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children, by Katherine Stewart. The monsters aren’t off in Washington DC, they’re right next door, and they’re coming for your children.

Stewart first notices these odd little happy Christian clubs popping up in her child’s schools, and then she digs deeper: she talks to their representatives. She attends their conventions. She takes their training courses. She sees precisely what they’re doing, and gets the words straight from their mouths: they’re out to convert every child in the world to their hateful, narrow, “Bible-believing” dogma, even while in public they claim to be ecumenical and kind and loving.

Who is “they”, you ask. It’s the Child Evangelism Fellowship, and just the name ought to chill you: this is an organized, well-funded group of people dedicated to proselytizing specifically to 4 to 14 year old children, the prime age for conversion.

They also have other goals, among them the total obliteration of public education. It’s ironic: they often take advantage of our institutions, leasing our public school buildings for church services and Sunday schools (They’re cheap! Professional, well-maintained buildings available at minimal cost), trading on the credibility of the schools (They try mightily to produce the illusion that their efforts are sanctioned by and part of the official school curriculum), yet privately they detest the whole principle of universal education, and their goal is to subvert the whole endeavor and turn education into Christian indoctrination.

They found something called “Good News Clubs” at schools, led by community volunteers, which superficially promote a kind of generic moral religiosity which often wins over culturally diverse communities — you know the ones I’m talking about, the kind where they might detest gay-hatin’, science-despisin’, Pat Robertson-style fundamentalism, but nod in happy agreement at the importance of faith, and blandly accept that religion in general is good and virtuous and that we should encourage our children to adopt a faith tradition…for their moral upbringing in an environment of conscience, don’t you know. What they don’t realize is that the Good News Clubs stealthily promote that gay-hatin’, science-despisin’, Pat Robertson-style fundamentalism directly to their children, while asking them not to talk about it to Mommy and Daddy. They will cheerfully take in the children of Catholics and Jews, so that they can tell those children that Catholics and Jews will burn in Hell.

These people are just plain evil. Sure, they’re kindly old grandmas and sincerely pious ordinary joes, but they’ve also got it in their heads that they must inject their poisonous beliefs into everyone’s children. And they are dedicated: they will make time and invest money in their cause. Fear them. They lie and fight dirty and will use your own liberal and progressive values to undermine those same values in gullible children.

These Good News Clubs are springing up all over the place, so the first thing I did when I finished the book was to look to see if there were any Good News Clubs in the Morris area schools. I found plenty in other schools — often in cheerfully bland announcements in PTA newsletters or school websites — but nothing about Morris. I breathed a sigh of relief, and thought that was one nightmare I’d dodged…and then…and then…

Child Evangelism Fellowship is targeting Minneapolis/St Paul for a major conversion effort this summer!

Capture a city for Christ! That’s the battle cry of over a hundred workers from across America who join together to “jump start” a Gospel outreach to children in a target city.

This coming summer, CEF workers will gather in the Twin Cities of Minnesota where volunteers from local churches will be trained to reach children in their area for Jesus. These same churches will continue ministry in the fall by sponsoring Good News Clubs in the public elementary schools nearby.

It’s like the monster jumping out of the grave at the very end of the horror movie! They’re coming to get us!

Listen, Minnesotans, this is your only chance. Read The Good News Club now, before it’s too late. These people will be making proposals to your schools to install a fifth column of radical evangelical Christians into privileged positions, all in order to snare the local children into a hell-and-damnation, sulfur-and-brimstone, Satan-is-out-to-get-you, boogety boo version of hateful Christianity. Your local mega-church pastors and conservative wackjobs will be encouraging this because it’s what they believe anyway; your gentle-souled namby-pamby neighbors who see nothing wrong with faith will go along because they are ignorant and unaware.

Sound the warning. They’re here already! You’re next!

Or perhaps, more accurately, the Child Catchers are coming to town.

A Better Life

Here’s a wonderful project: a photographer is creating a book portraying the happiness of atheists. Titled A Better Life, he’s looking for support through kickstarter, where donations can also get you a copy of the completed book. Maybe you should get a couple of copies, so you can give them out as presents to those annoying fundy relatives.

The beginning of this video shows exactly why the book is necessary.

Tentacular erotica for a good cause

Here’s a call for submissions for an anthology of erotic stories featuring tentacles. The deadline is 30 June, so get writing — I want some hot summer time reading. I’d send in something myself, but I’m afraid it would be so weirdly specific and technical that no one else in the world would want to read it.

Also, as a most excellent bonus, this is a charity anthology, and all proceeds go straight to Oceana, a cause I can definitely support.

I want to see Alvin Plantinga pwned

You know, I really despise Alvin Plantinga’s ‘philosophy’ — it’s more of an obsessively masturbatory exercise in theological babbling. Jerry Coyne has been slapping him around a bit, in part because there is a new book out called Science and Religion: Are They Compatible?, in which Dan Dennett and Alvin Plantinga go at it.

I really want to read that book. It’s got to be at least as entertaining as Bambi Meets Godzilla. But they don’t have a Kindle version! So go read Coyne’s post, and go order the book for yourself if you’d like, but could you also click on the “Tell the Publisher! I’d like to read this book on Kindle” button? For me? Pretty please?

Looking ahead to Spring term already

I know how I’m going to spend the entirety of my Christmas break: preparing to teach my new Cancer Biology course. And since I’m going to be dwelling on cancer for the next month or so, I think it’s only fair that my students and any passers-by should also get a faceful of the stuff. So here are the texts I’ve settled on for the course:

There will also be a few papers assigned throughout the term, but that ought to get everyone started on a good long depression.