More Hitchens!

Christopher Hitchens was in another debate with his brother, Peter Hitchens. From the quoted material and the video clip at that link, Christopher was brilliant and lucid, and Peter…well, his argument was basically that things were better in the good old days when everyone had that old time religion, without noting that it was only better if you were white, heterosexual, and male.

Peter also makes an awesomely stupid series of arguments about morality: that if it were independent of god and religion, it would change (surprise! It does!), and that if it changes it wouldn’t be what he calls morality. And further, he claims that there are a whole bunch of sinful, evil things that he would do if he didn’t have religion restraining him.

That latter claim always leaves me shaking my head. We’d better keep Peter Hitchens shackled up tight, then.

Godless get good press

Jerry Coyne has been given a good bit of space in the cheesy but widely read newspaper USAToday, and he used it to pen a maniacally unapologetic Gnu Atheist screed. It’s beautiful. I can’t wait for the indignant reactions to pour in. Distracted businessmen will be reading their free copies over their hotel coffee tomorrow, and getting goosed when they open it to that page.

Also, the LA Times covered the secular humanism conference. It’s a bit of a mixed bag; it claims that there was scorn heaped on believers, and that attendees were calling them ignorant and stupid. This was not the case. Even my contribution, which was fairly outspoken, did no such thing.

On the other hand, it did quote me a couple of times, so the reporter got something right. I’ve been told several times that people loved that simple line where I said hearing about ‘spirituality’ made me want to puke…I have to confess, though, that I put about zero thought into that line. It was spontaneous and entirely from the heart.

I know you can’t get enough Chris Mooney

We did an impromptu Point of Inquiry podcast this afternoon, which could appear at any time now. It’s a little odd, because Jennifer Hecht was drafted to moderate, but she forgot her role, I think, and it turned into a 2-on-1 argument. I was the 1, I’m afraid.

I’m going to go listen to Sam Harris for a few hours, so I probably will be busy when it goes online. I wouldn’t listen to it, anyway!

The podcast is now available.

It’s like he was reading my mind

Steve Zara has a nice article at RD.net that is actually saying the same thing I’ve been arguing at recent talks: There is no possibility of evidence to convince us of the existence of a god.

I propose a new strident atheism. No playing the games of theists. No concessions. No talk of evidence that can change minds, when their beliefs are deliberately placed beyond logic, beyond evidence. Let’s not get taken in by the fraud of religion. Let’s not play their shell-game.

The nature of this god is always vague and undefined and most annoyingly, plastic — suggest a test and it is always redefined safely away from the risk. Furthermore, any evidence of a deity will be natural, repeatable, measurable, and even observable…properties which god is exempted from by the believers’ own definitions, so there can be no evidence for it. And any being who did suddenly manifest in some way — a 900 foot tall Jesus, for instance — would not fit any existing theology, so such a creature would not fit the claims of any religion, but the existence of any phenomenon that science cannot explain would not discomfit science at all, since we know there is much we don’t understand already, and adding one more mystery to the multitude will not faze us in the slightest.

So yes, I agree. There is no valid god hypothesis, so there can be no god evidence, so let’s stop pretending the believers have a shot at persuading us.

Confrontation all the way

I was on a panel discussion of “Confrontation vs. Accommodation” yesterday at the Secular Humanism conference. It wasn’t an entirely satisfactory format; there were four of us (Chris Mooney, Eugenie Scott, Victor Stenger, and me), and we each gave a short spiel and then answered questions. There wasn’t much opportunity for long engagement with each other; the Q&A rolled around, I’d just heard Mooney and Scott talk for 40 minutes, and I had to say little more than 2 or 3 sentences in response to a question. We didn’t even scratch the surface of our differences!

Anyway, here’s a dump of my statement to the crowd.

I’m going to begin with where I entered this conflict — and make no mistake, it’s a real battle — with my experience in science education, and specifically with the teaching of evolution. Biology has been a lifelong passion for me, and when I first began teaching way back in the 1980s, it was a shock to discover students who had nothing but contempt for the great unifying principle of my discipline, who were happily wallowing in self-inflicted ignorance and who outright denied plain and simple facts about science. And when I discovered that there were ministers who came onto our campus and lied to our students, presented half-truths and weird fantasies to substitute for evidence, i was outraged. We Gnu Atheists have a reputation for being militant, but make no mistake: we didn’t start this war. If you want to place blame, put it on the backs of religious zealots who have been poisoning the minds of the young for a long, long time.

This is another theme in this conflict: Gnu Atheists are so dang angry. Damned right we are. The real question is why everyone else isn’t. If you aren’t angry about what’s being done to undermine education in this country, you haven’t been following along.

But we also respond rationally. My early incredulity about the nonsense being promoted by creationists was followed by a lot of fact-finding. You can do it too — look up the history of creationism, and you find that we’ve been fighting this same battle for at least half a century, and dealing with the same inane arguments over and over again. Where once Duane Gish was the creationist dinosaur roaming the earth, he was replaced by Kent Hovind, and he is now superseded by Ken Ham and Ray Comfort and Eric Hovind. Nothing has changed but the names. We have had a succession of court cases: Epperson v Arkansas in 68, McLean v Arkansas in 82, Edwards v. Aguillard in 87, Kitzmiller v Dover in 2005 — are they coming to an end? Did any of these trials diminish the influence of creationists? One flareup will be squelched, and next year there will be another. Similarly, we see a succession of politicians come and go, and nothing changes. Ronald Reagan becomes Santorum becomes Bush becomes another dreary chain of Republican know-nothings at every election cycle. It’s 2010, and guess what: Christine O’Donnell is running for the senate, and I’ve still got a local fundamentalist pastor coming on to my campus every week to instruct my students in the video fables of Brother Kent Hovind.

We have been treading water for 50 years. In one sense, that’s a very good thing: better to stay afloat in one place than to sink, and I am deeply appreciative of organizations like the NCSE that have kept us bobbing at the surface all this time, and please don’t ever stop. But isn’t it also about time we learned a new stroke and actually made some progress towards the shore? Shouldn’t we move beyond just reacting to every assault by Idiot America on science education, and honestly look at the root causes of this chronic malignancy and do something about it?

The sea our country is drowning in is a raging religiosity, wave after wave of ignorant arguments and ideological absurdities pushed by tired dogma and fervent and frustrated fanatics. We keep hearing that the answer is to find the still waters of a more moderate faith, but I’m sorry, I don’t feel like drowning there either.

There is an answer, and it’s on display right here in this room. The solution, the only longterm solution, is the sanity of secularism. The lesser struggles to keep silly stickers off our textbooks or to keep pseudoscientific BS like intelligent design out of our classrooms are important, but they are endless chores — at some point we just have to stop pandering to the ideological noise that spawns these unending tasks and cut right to the source: religion.

That’s where the Gnu Atheists get their confrontational reputation. We’re fed up with fighting off the symptoms. We need to address the disease. And if you’re one of those people trying to defend superstition and quivering in fear at the idea of taking on a majority that believes in foolishness, urging us to continue slapping bandages on the blight of faith, well then, you’re part of the problem and we’ll probably do something utterly dreadful, like be rude to you or write some cutting sarcastic essay to mock your position. That is our métier, after all.

There is another motive for our confrontational ways, and it has to do with values. We talk a lot about values in this country, so I kind of hate to use the word — it’s been tainted by the religious right, which howls about “Christian values” every time the subject of civil rights for gays or equal rights for women or universal health care or improving the plight of the poor come up — True Christian values are agin’ those things, after all. But the Gnu Atheists have values, too, and premiere among them is truth. And that makes us uncivil and rude, because we challenge the truth of religion.

Religion provides solace to millions, we are told, it makes them happy, and it’s mostly harmless.

“But is it true?”, we ask, as if it matters.

The religious are the majority, we hear over and over again, and we need to be pragmatic and diplomatic in dealing with them.

“But is what they believe true?”, we ask, and “What do we gain by compromising on reality?”

Religion isn’t the problem, they claim, it’s only the extremists and zealots and weirdos. The majority of believers are moderates and even share some values with us.

“But is a moderate superstition true?”, we repeat, and “How can a myth be made more true if its proponents are simply calmer in stating it?”

I mean, it’s nice and all that most Christians aren’t out chanting “God Hates Fags” and are a little embarrassed when some yokel whines that he didn’t come from no monkey, but they still go out and quietly vote against gay and lesbian rights, and they still sit at home while their school boards set fire to good science.

It’s all about the truth, people. And all the evidence is crystal clear right now: the earth is far older than 6,000 years. Evolution is a real, and it is a process built on raw chance driven by the brutal engines of selection, and there is no sign of a loving, personal god, but only billions of years of pitiless winnowing without any direction other than short-term survival and reproduction. It’s not pretty, it’s not consoling, it doesn’t sanctify virginity, or tell you that god really loves your foreskin, but it’s got one soaring virtue that trumps all the others: it’s true.

You won’t understand what the Gnu Atheists are up to until you understand that core value. I have been told that my position won’t win the creationist court cases; do you think I care? I did not become a scientist because I want to impress lawyers. I have been told that I must think promoting atheism is more important than promoting good science education; tell me how closing my eyes to claims of an imaginary deity using quantum indeterminacy to shape human evolution helps students better understand reality. I’ve been told to hush, there are good Christians who support science, and a vocal atheism will scare them away…and I have to ask, you question my support for science education, when you pander to people who you admit will put their superstitions above science if someone says a harsh word about Jesus?

I have to follow the advice of Tom Paine:

A thing moderately good is not so good as it ought to be. Moderation in temper is always a virtue; but moderation in principle is always a vice.

And I will insist that a principle worth holding is worth fighting for. We must confront untruths; letting them lie unquestioned is simply a way to allow them to fester and grow.

I have to quote something I recently read by Ed Yong, the science journalist who blogs at Not Exactly Rocket Science. He has an excellent post up asking, “Should Science Journalists Take Sides?“, and while it’s specifically addressed to journalists, it applies equally well to scientists, or humanists, or just plain citizens. To summarize it all, the answer is yes: journalists should take sides, and I’m going to generalize it and suggest that we should all take sides. Here’s what Ed wrote:

A veteran science journalist recently wrote: “Reporters are messengers – their job is to tell, as accurately as they can, what has been said, with the benefit of such insight as their experience allows them to bring, not to second guess whether what is said is right”. That’s rubbish. If you are not actually providing any analysis, if you’re not effectively “taking a side”, then you are just a messenger, a middleman, a megaphone with ears. If that’s your idea of journalism, then my RSS reader is a journalist.

Too many of the godless believe in something even more: to avoid rocking the boat, to refrain from challenging dogma, to deftly avoid the issue when someone raises some religious folly. If you think you’re helping the cause with your cautious silence, then a brick wall is a public intellectual.

Then Ed has this bit, which could have been written by a Gnu Atheist:

As I said earlier, this is about taking sides with truth. It’s about being knowledgeable enough to make a decent stab at uncovering the truth and presenting the outcomes of that quest to one’s readers, even if that outcome lies firmly on one side of a “debate”.

It’s about doing the actual job of a journalist, by analysing, critiquing, placing into context and so on, as opposed to merely reporting.
It’s about acknowledging one’s own biases and making them plain to see for a reader.

In the end, this is about transparency and truth, concepts that are far more important than neutrality or objectivity. After all, the word for people who are neutral about truth is ‘liars’. It shouldn’t be ‘journalists’.

I have to repeat that. The word for people who are neutral about truth is “liars”. It shouldn’t be “scientists”. It shouldn’t be “humanists”.

Earlier today we heard Paul Kurtz speak, and while I have great respect for his contributions to this secular movement, he did mischaracterize atheists, and I have to call him on it. One of the most common canards applied to us, and especially to the Gnu Atheists, is that we’re negative, that we lack a positive center that we stand for. This is completely false. When you look at the body of work that the prominent leaders of this movement have put together, when you look at the books of people like Dawkins and Harris and Dennett and Coyne and Stenger, you do not find them nattering on for hundreds of pages about how much they hate religion. Quite the contrary. What you find are authors who write about reason and evidence and science, where front and center you find an appreciation for a universe rich with natural phenomena that, with a little honest effort, we can reach out and comprehend. We atheists live a purpose-driven life, to steal a phrase, and that life is dedicated to deepening our understanding and learning about this world. Call us merely negative, or merely angry, or merely anti-religious, and you haven’t been paying attention. You haven’t been reading our books or articles for comprehension.

What may have confused some people, though, is that we also believe you can’t love the truth without detesting lies. That an honest way of dealing with those lies is to confront them openly, head on, and unapologetically, and while some might rationalize accommodating unjustifiable distortions of the truth as a strategic option, there are a number of us who consider that principle to be one on which we will not compromise.

Oh, and the peanut gallery was out in force at Coyne’s place — would you believe that some of them had the temerity to criticize me, and Larry Moran was bored.

Michael Shermer coming to Minneapolis

Hey, don’t miss this: Shermer will be speaking at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities next week, 14 October, at 7pm in Willey 175 (West Bank). There is a charge, but it’s cheap: $1 CASH members (advance sale only), $2 advance tickets through CASH tabling or at general meetings, and $4 at the door. All this is through the UM’s Campus Atheists, Skeptics, & Humanists.

I wish I could make it, but I’ll be all tied up that night.

What did you do for Blasphemy Day?

Today is the official Blasphemy Day, and I hope you all had a good time. I’m afraid I didn’t do anything in particular, because every day is Blasphemy Day for me, and I’m a walking talking affront to god.

CFI had a video contest and announced the winners today. Here’s the top choice in their Protect Dissent campaign:

That’s very nice, and an excellent message. I’m afraid, though, that it has been upstaged by a real champion: Carlos Celdran. Celdran went all out and disrupted a Catholic mass, holding up a sign that said “DAMASO” (a reference to a cruel priest in a novel well-known in the Philippines), and told the church to stop getting nvolved in politics — the Catholics, as you might expect, have been fighting a basic reproductive health bill in the country. The Philippines have strict anti-blasphemy laws that make “offending religious feelings” a crime, and the church has an unfortunate amount of influence on the nation.

That’s blasphemy — not just a random act of desecration, but an intentional act directed at discomfiting the faithful.

Atheists have conquered America by being really good at trivia

The Pew Forum surveyed Americans on their knowledge of religion, and discovered that the group most generally knowledgeable about world religions was…those unshriven hellbound godless folk. This does not sit well with many believers, who have long preferred to relegate atheists to a hell of total unawareness of the gods, smugly assuming that if only we knew what they knew, we’d be True Believers in god in general and their specific, narrow sect in particular. That we might actually know what they believe and not only choose to not believe, but also to regard their superstitions as ridiculous, is unthinkable.

You will have a difficult time finding someone more offended by reality than John Mark Reynolds, professor of Catholic rationalization at the Bible Institute of Los Angeles. He’s got an excuse: atheists are trivia kings but bad thinkers. We’d do well on the home Bible version of Jeopardy, but you see, we really don’t understand the facts, and we lack the wisdom to hear the secret music of theology.

This surprises me. Apparently, the Trinity is trivia, an idea I can sort of sympathize with, but Professor Reynolds’ own Catholic faith waged bloody wars over the Arian heresy—people by the thousands were slaughtered because they didn’t believe that Jesus and the Holy Ghost had equal status and substance with the One True God. Ask the Visigoths. Oh, you can’t — they’re all dead.

And now we learn that transubstantiation is also trivial! Where was John Mark Reynolds a few years ago? I could have used his help calming the raging hordes of Catholics who were outraged that I should desecrate a cracker. He was on their side, damning me as a vandal of all that was right and good, you say? Oh. I guess it wasn’t all so trivial after all. And again, representatives of his faith have in the past used the sanctity of their magic crackers as an excuse to slaughter thousands of Jews, men, women, and children, for imagined slights against that trivia. What a shame that they died over something so unimportant.

John Mark Reynolds is not done undercutting his own points right there in the title of his article, though. No, he pens an incoherent, inconsistent, contradictory mess of assertions because atheists outscore his team in trivia contests. The Christian martyr complex is on full display here.

As a boutique belief system in the United States, atheism has a good many advantages. There are so few atheists and agnostics that they do not run all the risks of a populist movement. Not for them is the burden of dealing with the masses of a global population, their idiosyncrasies, worries and all.

Since Christians make up three-quarters or more of the American general population, we have the burden of accounting for almost everybody’s problems. Sadly, we are much less well represented in elite education, media, and government. This is not because religion is incompatible with elite education, but because “skepticism” about religion has become a sociological way for the elite to mark themselves off from the rest of us. In this sense, anti-religion (and in particularly anti-Catholicism) serves the same function that joining the “right” church used to serve in another era.

See, atheists are the ones who are trivial — we’re so few in numbers that we hardly count, and since we make no difference at all we escape responsibility. We’re negligible, just the thin scum riding on the surface of the deep ocean of Christianity. And Christianity…oh, man, poor Christians. They’re the responsible ones who have to take care of all those sick people and maintain the economy and work so hard to maintain everyone else’s moral probity. Atheism is just the fashionable façade of the “elites” (I do so wish the people who sneer at “elites” would look up the meaning of the word. It is not a synonym for “dregs”).

I did learn something new here. Despite the pitiful fact of our miniscule numbers and complete irrelevance, teachers are mostly atheists, Fox News and CNN are run by atheists, and most our senators and representatives and governors are atheists. It’s as if we belong to a secret sinister cabal that has sneakily taken over the entire culture.

I wish!

It’s a strange state of civilization that Reynolds imagines. Christianity is entirely responsible for all the important stuff, but somehow, this insignificant film of godless elitists are entirely responsible for every one of the faults of society. We have a culture of entertainment that is all the fault of a tiny minority, and no, no, no, Christians didn’t participate in or create any of it.

The secular elite has provided most of us with wretched religious education by all but banning it as a topic for serious enquiry or discussion. Meanwhile, they know just enough about religion to get some “facts” right on a pop-religion quiz, but have no grasp on why, despite all temptations, some thoughtful folk remain religious. They know some of the lyrics of religion, but cannot hear the music.

You might blame Christian education in churches for this problem, except a culture of entertainment has reduced most Americans ability to tolerate difficult discussions. Pity the pastor, with seminary training in ancient languages and a carefully constructed sermon, who must face a congregation taught by television to anticipate education with Muppets and Katy Perry.

Damn you, Veggie Tales, you spawn of the Global Atheist Conspiracy! Elmo is Satan!

Reynolds returns to his contradictory message that only Christianity does good, while atheism tells people to commit criminal acts that will get them sent to jail.

Weirdly, Christians must clean up the mess of broader culture, but we have had little power to create pop culture in the last fifty years. The poor and the disadvantaged are always the first to bear the brunt of bad cultural ideas and only the religious remain on the ground to try to help. Christians, for example, try to keep people from doing the things that get men sent to prison, but then work hard to help prisoners once people fail.

In this sense it is easier to be an agnostic or atheist. You have rejected the mainstream of American history, which means you don’t have to take responsibility for its failures, though you can appropriate its successes.

But wait, Professor Reynolds! Isn’t this whole essay patently about denying Christian responsibility for the current state of affairs, placing the entire blame on the shoulders of a minority you simultaneously deride as being so tiny they can’t take credit for anything? How do you get a professorship when your brain is so confused and inconsistent?

Oh, right. He’s at Biola. Never mind. Being a fervent defender of the faith is enough there.

But wait, we have to look at a peculiar tangent the Catholic professor takes. He’s open-minded, he’s advocating learning more about lots of religions, so he has to suggest that we learn more about all kinds of weird cults and sects and beliefs, and that means even learning about the Latter Day Saints.

For example, one of the most influential books first published by an American is the Book of Mormon. It appears in almost no American government school curriculum, though it exercises a global influence and impacts the lives of millions of Americans. This is foolish. I am, to say the least, no Mormon partisan, but there are entire states in our nation that cannot be understood without some grounding in Mormon thought.

How many American college graduates have a more charitable comprehension of the indigenous culture of Paris than of Salt Lake City? Mormon Utah can only wish it were treated as gently as “other cultures” are in a politically correct curriculum.

That’s interesting. I lived in Salt Lake City for seven years. I frequently left the walled enclave of the University of Utah to explore Mormon culture — I’ve heard the Tabernacle Choir, I read parts of the Book of Mormon and The Pearl of Great Price (but not their entireties, there are limits to the schlock I can digest), I took the official tours, I’ve read on the history of Utah, I visited the genealogy archives, I’ve shopped at ZCMI and played with my kids at Liberty Park. I know Mormon culture about as well as a curious Gentile can, so once again, here’s an atheist with significant knowledge about a faith he denies.

And you know what I learned about Mormonism? It’s a lot of wacky bullshit, with some very nasty misogynistic undertones. I also encourage everyone to learn more about this foolishness, one of the many brands of pretentious nonsense advocated under the guise of religion, but I will not suggest that our views of this poison have to be “charitable”. Why should they be? It’s far wiser and not at all trivial to recognize that millions of people live lies and believe in fairy tales that are wrong.

I have been informed that Reynolds is not Catholic. He belongs to some weird Eastern Orthodox sect. Knowing this, however, is simply trivia, so I can’t feel too guilty about missing the details of his superstition. He might think it’s non-trivial, though, since he did almost lose his job over it.

Show me

Larry Moran is as exasperated as I am with these so-called allies who accuse the Gnu Atheists of ignorance of the ‘sophisticated’ modern arguments for gods and the rationality of theists. We keep being told we’re know-nothings who are simply unaware of the great stuff that believers actually believe, yet somehow, these defenders of the faithful never quite manage to continue their train of thought and tell us what those great ideas are. So he has issued a simple challenge:

I challenge all theists and all their accommodationist friends to post their very best 21st century, sophisticated (or not), arguments for the existence of God. They can put them in the comments section of this posting, or on any of the other atheist blogs, or on their own blogs and websites. Just send me the link.

Try and make it concise and to the point. It would be nice if it’s less than 100 years old. Keep in mind that there are over 1000 different gods so it would be helpful to explain just which gods the argument applies to.

I’d be looking forward to the replies, if I wasn’t confident that what he’ll get instead is a lot of evasions.