You can find them in Asociación Paraguaya Racionalista, and you can even listen to them at Observatorio Racionalista.

They’re lurking in the Associação Ateísta Portuguesa. We’re everywhere!

This may be a trend — I mention that one country has a gang of organized atheists, and then someone else writes me to say I need to mention their country. I’m glad to do it, so here’s a shout out to the Cyprus Freethinkers!

“La fe NO mueve montañas, la ciencia sí”

¡qui está! El evento ateo más esperado del año.

Con un importante
grupo de especialistas y expositores que no querrás perderte.

Asiste al Primer Coloquio de Ateísmo en México. Conoce
nuestra visión de este movimiento internacional que rebasa fronteras
culturales y políticas, uniendo a ateos, humanistas y otros
librepensadores en una comunidad definida por nuestro compromiso con la
libertad de expresión, libertad de conciencia, derechos humanos,
pensamiento crítico, razonamiento lógico y ciencia.

El acontecimiento tendrá lugar en la ciudad de México y es organizado de manera conjunta por Atheist Alliance International, El podcast de Masa Crítica y Ateísmo desde México.

En un solo día se abordarán varios temas de interés para los no
creyentes; Como la relación Iglesia-Estado, el papel de la religión en
la educación, La teoría de la evolución y su relación con la biología
moderna, la lucha contra el fundamentalismo, entre otros.

El grupo de ponentes incluye a íconos del librepensamiento, así como
académicos y activistas de México y el extranjero.

¡No te lo puedes perder!

Todos los precios incluyen:

• Acceso total a las conferencias
• Refrigerios
• Acceso al espacio de exposición
• Kit de bienvenida

Sitio Oficial:

http://www.ateosmexicanos.org/coloquio

…Uganda! Freethought Kampala is the voice of reason in that country.

We’re going to take over everywhere, aren’t we?

They aren’t all Greek Orthodox (nor are they Zeus worshippers any more), and they have a blog, Atheia. That’s all Greek to me, but they’ve had mercy on the rest of the world and also offer an English translation. Well, unless you’re looking for a Chinese translation…

Oh, jebus. Josh Rosenau has another post where the whole point sails over his head. He’s basically thrashing away again at the whole accommodationist/confrontationist conflict with more of his imaginary pragmatism and his weasely approach to the truth. If he had the slightest inkling of comprehension about the Gnu Atheist position, he simply wouldn’t bother saying stupid things like this:

The point being, it’s impossible to constantly be telling “the whole truth,” and no audience really wants you to do that. You pick and choose which truths (as you see them) you want to expound. Part of the way you do that is by thinking about how much of the truth you can express without driving your audience insane. Hopefully you also select your slice of the truth based on what will convince your audience that your central point is, in fact, true. Omitting parts of the truth that will drive your audience away (or insane) is not dishonest, and may well be the best service you can do for the truth.

Listen, Josh baby. Pay attention.

I don’t claim to possess the whole and complete truth. I don’t claim that science has the whole truth, but only that we have tools that allow us to work towards the truth.

But I do know what I hold to be true, and I will not be dishonest to myself and pretend to be something else, simply to make other people comfortable. If the free expression of ideas drives some people insane, then so be it; those who can’t cope with reality are better off in the asylums than running the country, anyway.

And I’m very sorry to break this news to you, but pandering to your audience and hiding the truth is lying to them, and in someone supposedly trying to promote science education, represents intellectual cowardice and a lack of integrity. I’m not going to do it. That you actively advocate it is shameful.

Jason Rosenhouse has a lovely long reply to Rosenau’s ridiculous pseudo-pragmatic approach. And by pseudo-pragmatic I mean not practical at all; if you are fighting for an idea, it is counterproductive to embrace facile strategies in which you deny the idea to avoid offending people, simply because various psychological studies show that people don’t like to be offended. Well, la-de-dah.

In defense of the New Atheist strategy of creating tension and making atheism visible we have a body of research on advertising that shows that repetition and ubiquity are essential for mainstreaming an idea. We have the historical examples of social movements that changed the zeitgeist by ignoring the people urging caution, and by working around the people whose value systems put them in opposition to their goals. We know that hostility towards atheists was at a fever pitch well before the NA’s arrived on the scene, a time during which accommodationist arguments were common but vocal atheism was not. And we have the all-important verdict of common sense, which says that you don’t mainstream your view by getting down on your knees and pleading with people to treat you nicely.

Against this Josh has a few papers breathlessly reporting that people don’t like it when you offend them. It is on this basis that he gives smug lectures about communications strategies.

I am underwhelmed.

I am unconvinced by these feeble appeasement tactics that don’t really advance the ideas, but do leave people unperturbed from their comfortable positions of ignorance. But here’s something else to consider, if the marshmallows of accommodationism are still committed to convincing me otherwise. Even if Rosenhouse’s argument wasn’t valid, if there were a thousand concrete empirical studies demonstrating that my approach was turning people into fundagelical Christians faster than a tent revival, it wouldn’t matter. I’d still be me. I’d still express myself as I do, as I want, because that is all I ever do here — I have never considered myself to be competing in a popularity contest.

It’s actually rather revealing that these guys would think that what their opponents say is somehow calculated to optimize positive reactions in the broadest possible demographic. They really don’t have a grasp of this mysterious truth thing.

I guess I have to continue this discussion, even though I felt like I hammered it to death last time, since the comment thread is getting so long I have to close it, and since Jerry Coyne still disagrees with me. I’ll aim for brevity instead of exhaustion this time.

The disagreement is over whether we can find any evidence for a god. Here’s a small part of Jerry’s argument against my claim that we can’t.

First, though, I find it curious that an atheist would assert, a priori, that nothing could make him believe in a god. While some atheists may assert simply that there is no god, most of us claim that we see no evidence for a god, and that’s why we don’t believe. But to make a statement like that presumes that there could be some evidence that would make you accept God’s existence.

I’m pretty fond of evidence myself, but I think we have to ask ourselves, “evidence of what?” Now if a believer makes a specific claim, such as that his gods answer prayers to heal disease, I would say that we could measure and test that idea: we could have him mumble over some beads, begging his gods to repair a series of sick people, and we could assess whether the bead-mumbling has any significant effect. It could fail (most likely), or it could work, surprising me and causing me to re-evaluate my opinion of the power of bead-mumbling, and say that we have evidence of the efficacy of bead-mumbling in treating illness.

But I say that we wouldn’t have evidence of any gods.

I won’t repeat my previous explanations, but will simply summarize by saying that the god hypothesis is incoherent, causally inadequate, unsupported by any other line of evidence, inconsistent with what we do know about how the universe works, and also internally inconsistent in all religions. Gods are simply bad ideas that don’t even deserve the dignity of being treated as an alternative explanation for anything.

We can have the logical possibility of finding phenomena in the natural world that have been traditionally hidden from explanation by sweeping them into the category of “the gods did it,” but I say that gods have never been and never can be an adequate answer. Once you’ve got evidence for something, it’s no longer a member of the set of mysteries under godly purview.

It’s like the old joke, “What do you call alternative medicines that have been shown to work? Medicine.” What I’m asking here is what should you call supernatural explanations that actually work and lead to deeper understanding of the universe…and the answer is science. All gods vanish in the first puff of understanding.

The New York Times has what I consider a skewed but also personally flattering summary of the Secular Humanist convention. Skewed, because it focuses rather more on the disagreements on tactics that were on display, but weren’t really the focus of most of the discussions — it was actually an amicable meeting. Personally flattering, because it dwelt more on that firebrand Myers (my full remarks are on the record) than was actually deserved. It read as if I were flailing among the dissenters, smiting the impure atheists with the jawbone of an ass, when I was really one among many in diverse discussions.

I’m going to take it as favorable coverage, though, because the conclusion does accurately convey my views.

Mr. Myers and other “confrontationalists” surely do alienate some potential Christian allies. But they may also give comfort to people like Claire, who feel like an invisible minority. Mr. Myers is way out of the closet as an atheist — proudly, outrageously so. We’re here, he’s saying. And we don’t believe. And we have science and reason on our side. Get used to it.

Yay, me.

Not everyone is happy, though. Matt Nisbet calls inviting me a “strategic blunder”, whines about me being a “bomb-thrower” and compares my readers to “libertarians” (!) and the Tea Party movement, and also uses his vast “framing” skills to mischaracterize the discussion in the most misleading possible way.

On one side, “accommodationists” argue that non-believers should build bridges with others around shared values in order to work on common problems such as climate change and failing schools. On the other side, “confrontationalists” argue that they should close ranks and engage in relentless attack and ridicule against all forms of religion, a Holy Grail pursuit to eliminate religious faith from the world.

That last bit? Completely wrong. But then, Nisbet doesn’t care — he’s built his whole career on spin and avoiding uncomfortable truth…he really ought to be selling soap. Although that probably wouldn’t work out so well, since he’d just spend all of his time complaining about those annoying people flaunting their good hygiene, and suggesting that maybe we ought to aspire to more rapprochement with filth.

The good news, though, is that I’m finding it hard to imagine a more irrelevant kibitzer than Matthew C. Nisbet.

I have been challenged by Jerry Coyne, who is unconvinced by my argument that there is no evidence that could convince me of the existence of god. Fair enough, I shall repeat it and expand upon it.

1. The question “Is there a god?” is a bad question. It’s incoherent and undefined; “god” is a perpetually plastic concept that promoters twist to evade evaluation. If the whole question is nebulous noise, how can any answer be acceptable? The only way to win is by not playing the game.

2. There’s a certain unfairness in the evidence postulated for god. I used the example of a 900 foot tall Jesus appearing on earth; there is no religion (other than the addled hallucinations of Oral Roberts) that ever proposes such a thing, so such a being would not prove the existence of any prior concept of god, and will even contradict many religions. It’s rather like proposing a crocoduck as a test of evolution.

3. Many of the evidences proposed rely for their power on their unexplainability by natural mechanisms. There isn’t much power there: the vast majority of the phenomena that exist are not completely explained by science. For instance, I don’t understand every detail of Hox gene regulation (no one does), and I don’t understand all of the nuclear reactions going on inside a star (maybe someone does), and pointing at an elegantly patterned embryo or at our Sun will get me to happily admit my ignorance, but my ignorance is not evidence for a god.

4. Often when people try to convince me that I’m wrong on this, they add increasingly elaborate, detailed intricacies to an invented scenario, piling up improbabilities until they’ve got an event so wildly unlikely to be as close to impossible as possible, and then, aha, I’m expected to admit that if that happened, I’d have to be convinced that the extremely unlikely explanation of a deity must be the best explanation. But I’m not arguing from probabilities at all; personally, I’m ridiculously improbable, being the product of random recombinations of complex strands of DNA and a personal history full of accidents and coincidence, but I’m not god, nor do I think any other peculiar set of accidents amount to a god.

5. These elaborate proof-scenarios also have another problem: they haven’t happened, yet people believe in god anyway. We have millennia of history of devoted god-belief, but now you’re trying to tell me that loud voices from the heavens, flocks of angels, healed amputees, and personal messages direct from a manifested Jesus would be sufficient to convince me of a deity’s existence? Well, if that’s our standard of proof, then all existing religions have been disproven.

6. One other odd feature of the proposed evidence for god is that it is all so petty and superficial. Remember, this omnipotent god we’re talking about has been called “the ground state of all being” and is supposed to be omnipresent and essential to the maintenance of the universe, so I expect the evidence for god to be rather more fundamental. No one seems to think to invent a property of nature that is supernatural; even the terms are self-contradictory. But shouldn’t a god be as ubiquitous and consequential as bosons? Despite calling some particles “god particles”, though, the fact of existence makes them natural and immediately disqualifies them from godhood.

7. The case for the non-existence of god is not simply a negative one, drawn from the absence of evidence, which can be corrected by throwing in evidence for a miracle. We are atheists because we have a scientific understanding of how the universe works, and the phenomena we observe do not seem to require divine intervention to function. So sure, show me a tap-dancing Jesus poofing loaves and fishes into existence with a snap of his fingers…and I’ll ask how his existence influences chemistry, how the silly bearded man matters in the last few billions of years of evolution, and why he isn’t publishing in the physics journals, where his omniscient insight into the machineries of the world might be better appreciated. Even there, though, I’d question whether adding tap-dancing Jesus to the long list of existent phenomena really helps us understand anything.

8. There are always better explanations for unexplained phenomena than god: fraud and faulty sensory perception cover most of the bases, but mostly, if I see a Madonna appear in a field to bless me, the first thing I’d suspect is brain damage. We have clumsy, sputtering, inefficient brains that are better designed for spotting rutabagas and triggering rutting behavior at the sight of a curvy buttock than they are for doing math or interpreting the abstract nature of the universe. It is a struggle to be rational and objective, and failures are not evidence for an alternative reality. Heck, we can be fooled rather easily by mere stage magicians; we don’t need to invent something as elaborate as a god to explain apparent anomalies.

That last point does imply, though, that there is one path that could convince me of the existence of god: major brain damage. I don’t think that wacking me in the skull with a ball-peen hammer counts as evidence, however.

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Some of you are already disagreeing with me in the comments. This is pointless, because I do have a trump card that I can play against all the nay-sayers. I learned it from the theists.

If you do not concede to me, it’s because my arguments are too subtle and sophisticated for you. Hah, take that!