Irish meeting in a bar tonight

I know, unbelievable, isn’t it? They’re gathering to congratulate Paul Gill on completing his traverse of Ireland to protest the blasphemy law. It sounds like it’s been a successful consciousness-raising effort.

People all along the west coast have been incredibly supportive. Many people have refused to take payment for meals and staying at campsites, and comedian Tommy Tiernan met Paul to express his support. And you can give him a boost by joining him today, either on the final leg of the walk or later in Sandino’s bar, or else by texting him a message of congratulations to +35386 7325365.

We’re going to break his cell phone, aren’t we?

What ever happened to Paul Kurtz?

The Paul Kurtz I remember was the serious, scholarly fellow at the forefront of the atheist movement, who wasn’t shy about saying it the way it was. The New Kurtz is a more timid observer, who wants to criticize religion mildly without giving offense, and is more concerned about policing his fellow humanists and atheists than actually working to overcome the folly of religious belief.

In the latest issue of Free Inquiry magazine, Kurtz has an editorial that is all about tone rather than content; it de-emphasizes what we say and wants to make how we say it the most important criterion. It’s titled “Toward a Kinder and Gentler Humanism”, and it makes me wonder who chopped Kurtz’s balls off. (To be fair, I should say upfront that it briefly mentions me — or rather, my jerkwad alter ego, P.Z. Meyers — to accuse me of being “strident”.)

He lays out his plan. They are going to take the “high road”, they are not “shrill”, they will not “resort to ridicule”, yadda yadda yadda. Again, tone, tone, tone. Who cares? The low point for me, though, was this bit:

I must say, though some colleagues at the Center may disagree, that I have serious misgivings about recent programs undertaken by the Center and the Council that laid heavy stress on blasphemy. Although I agree that it is vitally important to defend the right to blaspheme, I am displeased with the Center’s decision last year to celebrate Blasphemy Day as such. Similarly, although cartoons make a point and can be used, I am disturbed about poking fun at our fellow citizens in the public square. Speaking personally, I am particularly offended by the cartoon that won the Council’s Free Expression Cartoon Contest this year. I think that it is in poor taste. I do not object to others in society doing this, but I do not think that is is the role of the Council for Secular Humanism or the Center for Inquiry to engage in such forms of lampooning.

So, we’re going to reserve the right to blaspheme, but we’re not actually going to do it, out of respect for the beliefs of others. When some religious nut demands our obeisance to something he regards as holy, we’re going to say that we could disagree, but instead we’re going to self-censor and bend a knee to his gods…have no fear, though, while we’re busy kowtowing, we’ll be sure to declare that we could stop any time.

You have not protected the right to blaspheme if you also gag yourself and say you won’t; you are particularly in the wrong if you are a respected leader of a godless institution and you use your influence to insist that we should not blaspheme at all. It is our responsibility as the opposition to poke fun at our fellow citizens in the public square; what good is an opposition that muzzles itself and insists on giving religion the privilege of not even being laughed at?

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By the way, here is that cartoon that won the contest he referred to above. I share some of Kurtz’s disappointment, because I don’t care for it much. However, it’s not because it’s offensive or in poor taste — please, a cartoon cannot possibly be as offensive as the child-raping behavior it targets — but because it’s not particularly funny. I have higher expectations of one of the premiere organizations for secular humanism than this!

What Kurtz fails to appreciate is that we must offend. We are rejecting the power of invisible gods and refusing the promise of eternal life in paradise, and further, we’re in the business of telling believers that their most cherished fantasies are lies. If we aren’t offending them, we are hiding the implications of our ideas and are not doing our job.

Fortunately, as the editorial reveals throughout, the Council for Secular Humanism and the Center for Inquiry are defying their founder’s demands that they hobble themselves (and there is definitely a note of resentment coming through, too). It’s a shame that Kurtz is willingly trapped in an ineffectual past, but at the same time, I think he has built a solid foundation for those organizations, and there is hope that they, if not their former leader, are working to advance.

Atheists gathering in Montreal

These conventions are popping up all over the place. Every time I mention one, I know there’ll be a bunch of people complaining that it is too far or too expensive, but the hope is that one will be in your region and in your price range. This one is in Montreal on 1-3 October.

One huge relief: the Richard Dawkins award this year is going to Susan Jacoby, a wonderful choice. There will be no controversy at all this time, and it’s well-deserved: if you haven’t read Freethinkers yet, you should.

Although…they couldn’t resist. It’s like a red cape to a bull. They just had to put a poll on their site.

Are you excited about going to Montreal?

Yes 100%
No 0%

Can’t make it 0%

Since the majority of the people in the world cannot possibly go to this event, all you have to do is answer honestly and they’ll have to pull the poll as not quite good PR.

By the way, I wonder if a certain Nostradamus-lovin’ kook will attend? Having a psycho yelling “YOU ARE FINISHED!” to signal the end of each talk might be useful, although the constant setting of goats on fire might be disruptive.

Irking accomplished. Continue.

Draw Mohammed Day is over now, and we’re getting the reactions now. Some people didn’t get it, including
Greg Epstein.

There is a difference between making fun of religious or other ideas on a TV show that you can turn off, and doing it out in a public square where those likely to take offense simply can’t avoid it. These chalk drawings are not a seminar on free speech; they are the atheist equivalent of the campus sidewalk preachers who used to irk me back in college. This is not even “Piss Christ,” Andres Serrano’s controversial 1987 photograph of a crucifix in urine. It is more like filling Dixie cups with yellow water and mini crucifixes and putting them on the ground all over town. Could you do it legally? Of course. Should you?

Epstein completely misses the boat on this one. No, it isn’t like those crazy campus preachers who shout hellfire at passing students; it’s more like the students who are amused at the bombast and use it as an opportunity to point and laugh, which is an entertaining and productive response. Would Mr Epstein have been irked at the students who mocked and made fun, shushing them and telling them their reaction to being told they’re degenerates who are going to hell was totally inappropriate, and that they should simply listen quietly and respectfully?

What Epstein is also overlooking is that this is not simply a dismissal of the Muslim religion — it’s a humorous response to a gang of thugs who have threatened to kill people over a few sketches. You do not surrender to bullies. You also do not respond in kind, threatening to kill people who believe in the sanctity of stick figures. What you do is ridicule and weaken the blustering insistence on special privilege by showing repeatedly that they are powerless and look hypocritical and silly.

That was the primary point of this exercise, to show up radical Muslims as ineffectual buffoons. Note that the campaign was not “Draw Buddha Day” or “Draw Vishnu Day”…not because those beliefs aren’t equally absurd (they are), but because Buddhists and Hindus have not demanded special protection for the dignity of their faith, while threatening to murder anyone who violates their holy rules.

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The idea to scatter dixie cups and crucifixes across campus would be a good one…if the Catholic Church suddenly announced that immersing the figure of Jesus in water was a crime punishable by burning at the stake. They haven’t, yet, which makes that a pointless endeavor. If they do, I’ll be first in line at the dollar store to pick up a few icons, disposable cups, and food dye.

Greg Epstein can stay home and complain that the people asserting their freedom from religious dogma are irking him.

We can’t cure the disease by praising the symptoms

Karl Giberson, who I’ve bashed once or twice, has a fresh new pile of nonsense on the Huffington Post. Jerry Coyne has already tackled it, but it pushes a few of my buttons, so I’ve got to say my piece, too.

To summarize the Giberson nonsense briefly, he claims that Intelligent Design creationism is not dead, but is thriving, and in order to defeat it, we need to shut the atheists up who are making people choose between gods and science. I disagree with every bit of it.

ID is not only dead, it was stillborn. No one believes in it; it is a sterile abstraction with no evidence that was cobbled up entirely to pass the church/state separation tests in the courts. Phil Johnson, the fellow who invented it, has plainly stated that he is a born-again Christian lawyer, and his goal with the development of ID was to create a legal construct that could not be excluded from the schools, because it left out any mention of gods. Yet all the major players on the ID side are devout: Dembski is a crazy evangelical, Behe is a Catholic, and if you go through the roster at the Discovery Institute, you’ll find similar religious/ideological leanings throughout (except, maybe, Berlinski — but he’s his own unique brand of supercilious lunacy).

The Dover trial laid it bare. ID was simply the façade a troop of fervent Christian creationists used to conceal their true motivations. ID isn’t the problem. The problem is wide-spread sectarian Christian beliefs that want to masquerade as science — they finally realized after three quarters of a century of courtroom failure that going about with bare-faced Jesus freakiness was going to get them nowhere, so they’ve pulled down ID as a handy mask. It doesn’t work. Everyone can see right through it, and the cdesign proponentsists rely on a lot of wink-wink you-know-I-love-god-even-in-my-labcoat games to get support.

ID is dead, except as a political tool, which is all it ever was anyway. The only people who use it are plain old creationists; strip away ID, and they’ll just grope for a new guise.

Giberson drags out 4 bad arguments for why Intelligent Design is still vital.

1) The complex designs of many natural structures that have not yet been explained by science. As long as there are ingenious devices and intricate phenomena in nature (origin of life, anyone?) that we cannot understand, there will be ID arguments.

2) The remarkable, finely-tuned structure of the cosmos in which the laws of physics collaborate to make life possible. Many agnostics have had their faith in unguided materialism shaken by this, most recently Anthony Flew.

3) The widespread belief that God — an intelligent agent — created the universe. The claim that an intelligent God created an unintelligent universe seems peculiar, to say the least.

4) The enthusiastic insistence by the New Atheists that evolution is incompatible with belief in God. Most people think more highly of their religion than their science. Imagine trying to get 100 million Americans to dress up for a science lecture every Sunday morning — and then voluntarily pay for the privilege.

Hang on, wait a minute. I’ve heard all of that from the Intelligent Design creationists, but I’ve also heard it somewhere else…where could that be…hmmm. Hey, I know! Those are the same arguments that the theistic evolutionists use on the Biologos website!

As long as we don’t understand every detail of how life originated, the theistic evolutionists will be claiming a role for gods in it. As long as they’re preaching about souls, they’re rooting beliefs in ignorance about how minds work.

The theistic evolutionists make a big deal of fine-tuning arguments. I fail every time to be surprised that life like ours exists in a universe where the physical constants allow the formation of stars. Oh, and please, Antony Flew’s late-life fame seems to derive entirely from the fact that he tepidly embraced ID when he was fading into senility and was being coached by a sympathetic advocate for creationism.

Theistic evolutionists believe a god or gods created the universe!

Theistic evolutionists get really peevish at all those atheists pointing out that their belief in magical beings is very, very silly. They now use that as a recruiting tool, trying to convince people that they can have their science and still believe in ghosts and spirits and demons and angels. You know, Ken Ham tries the same thing, coupling dinosaurs to biblical literalism. It’s awfully hard to distinguish the principles and tactics of Biologos from those of the Creation “Museum”.

Weird, isn’t it? It’s as if Giberson doesn’t realize that demolishing the foundations of Intelligent Design creationism would also undermine theistic evolution…and that maybe the atheists he is complaining about are aware of this, realizing that creationism, intelligent design, and theism all share precisely the same faulty construction — we can’t get rid of one without shattering all the others.

I do agree with Giberson on one thing. Most Americans do think more highly of their religion than science. But there’s a significant difference: I think that having a citizenry that worships irrational, fact-free thinking and zombie gods and believes in a coming apocalypse — which they consider an event to be greatly desired — is a bad thing. Giberson regards it as a virtue. That difference dictates that we’ll have different strategies: I want to break people’s habits of gullibility and supernatural delusions; Giberson wants to prop them up. If you really want to defeat ID, the way to do it is to defeat religious thinking.

Giberson wants to claim that a godless scientific approach is a failure, and as an example, he uses the persistence of astrology.

Consider astrology. A 2009 Pew Poll showed that some 25 percent of Americans “believe” in astrology. President Reagan “believed” in astrology. Twenty million astrology books are sold each year. What is going on here? Didn’t science thoroughly discredit astrology at roughly the same time it was establishing the motion of the earth? How can an idea so thoroughly refuted be so popular?

If the scientific community cannot successfully convince Americans to abandon belief in astrology — which is not tied to any powerful religious tradition or even to belief in God — what hope is there to refute an idea like Intelligent Design, which is so much more complex than astrology?

What an odd argument. The Bible condemns astrology; Jehovah wants his chosen people to have no truck with divination, sorcery, omens, witchcrafte, necromancy, or any attempt to contact the dead. Yet still 25% of Americans, many of whom must be Christians, still persist in it! What hope is there of refuting bogus ideas like astrology or ID with an Abrahamic religion, which has a 3,000 year record of failure?

I’ve looked into both ID and astrology, and again, Giberson is completely wrong. Astrology is much more complicated. It has accreted many centuries of rationalizations and anecdotes and weird thefts of bits and pieces of mathematics and astronomy. There’s virtually nothing to ID but hot air in comparison.

Of course, I don’t accept one bit of astrology. However, it does have widespread appeal because it can provide a long history of tradition and dogma, scholarly works that go back to the Middle Ages, an endearing habit of claiming that the entire universe is all about you, and thousands of sects and variants that one can fall back on if a prediction in one schema fails. It has all the properties of religion!

I would argue that one reason that astrology (and religion) haven’t gone away is that people like the answers they provide, even if they’re wrong, and that celebration of wishful thinking is an epidemic in the populace. And one reason it persists is that we have a significant number of our citizens dutifully trotting into churches every Sunday, where they are told by solemn authorities that the universe loves them personally, and look, here’s an old book reassuring us that it is so. Religion is a cultural parasite that weakens our intellectual immune system, and opens the door to lots of other opportunistic infections. Jesus cults and astrology and scientology and snake oil and the Secret and quantum woo are the Kaposi’s sarcoma of a deeper disease—faith.

We’re just now beginning the process of rooting out the causal agents of that disease, and what we need to do is promote more intellectual hygiene, like skepticism, which is the rational equivalent of washing your hands. The wishy-washy, ridiculous theism that Giberson promotes echoes the medieval scholars who tried to argue that bathing was a nasty habit.

Giberson doesn’t want that. We’re supposed to endorse one version of humbuggery, religion, while deploring another, ID, all in the name of keeping everyone comfortable in their prejudices, no matter how erroneous.

If the scientific community wants to dislodge ID, they need to start by admitting that their efforts have been an abysmal failure so far. And then they need to turn their considerable analytical skills on the problem of explaining that failure. If they do this, they might discover that enthusiastic pronouncements like “ID is dead” or “science has proven God does not exist” or “religion is stupid” or “creationists are insane” are not effective. They might discover that affirming that the universe is wonderful, despite our bad backs and the nonsense in our genomes, makes it easier for people to accept the bad design in nature.

And above all, they need to decide that it is OK for people to believe in God. For millions of Americans belief in ID is tied to belief in God. Unless people can find a way to separate them — and not be told by agnostic bloggers this is impossible — ID’s coffin will remain empty.

Yes, we godless scientists are often affirming the wonderful qualities of the universe. But, and this is an important distinction, we do so by discussing what is real, not the awesomeness of some imaginary phantasm that the theists want us to worship. We are not going to succeed at getting people to embrace reality if some dufus in a clerical collar keeps trying to insert some ridiculous proxy he calls a god into our understanding, and further, insists that we can really only appreciate physics and chemistry and biology if we deeply adore a particular dead prophet.

ID and a belief in gods are all tangled together, and they are inseparable. Killing one requires killing the other, and it seems to me that only the atheists are recommending the practical approach of tossing out the whole religious package with its attendant absurdities, and rebuilding an ethical, rational vision of the world that does not require any supernatural bullshit at all.

You don’t exist if you’re godless in Maryland

I encourage young people to organize and promote freethought — it’s the way we’ll grow and become more influential. But there’s no denying that sometimes it is hard, with even friendly, innocuous groups receiving public opposition. People resent the fact that other people don’t need their god.

Here’s a great example: Rising Sun High School in Maryland has the standard default take-it-for-granted attitude that Christianity is just fine — there’s the usual well-funded and usually teacher-promoted evangelical groups, like the Fellowship of Christian Athletes — and when one student tried to form a club for non-religious students…well, you can guess what happened. All their signs were torn down and destroyed, and the students were threatened by their peers. There were also letters to the editor of the local paper.

My daughter comes home today and informs me they have started a new club in Rising Sun High School. The club is known as NRS, which stands for Non Religious Society.

The members of this club have proceeded to hang posters along the halls of the school. When a student tore the posters down, because they offended him, he got suspended from school. Apparently the students are not allowed to touch these posters.

To say I was shocked is putting it mildly. My daughter does not hang posters of her Catholic religion throughout the school, and I expect the same type of respect from others. We cannot control what others think or their beliefs, nor do we want to. But I will not have this type of atrocity taking place without having my voice heard.

My daughter has my permission, if she sees these posters around school, to put up her own. I challenge the principal to say one thing about this. I guarantee you do not want a religious war taking place, as I have God on my side and you’ll lose.

Schools usually have policies about what can be posted on the walls; random messages and commercial ads and that sort of thing are no-nos, but announcements of student events and groups are just fine. If his daughter wants to set up an organization for Catholic students, that shouldn’t be a problem. But that’s not what’s bother this jerk, obviously: he’s irate that a godless organization even exists.

It is now the end of the school year, and that means it is time for the yearbook, when students and student organizations are all acknowledged. Except, unfortunately, for the Non-Religious Solutions student group, which has been blackballed and is not mentioned anywhere. The Christian groups are proudly represented, however. Here are some excerpts from the yearbook:

“The FCA… is an outstanding embodiment of Christian spirit.”
“Students gather together… to reflect on their on (sic) God.”
“…lesson is presented in the form of Bible readings,”
“Before closing, everyone gathers in the center of the room to join hands in prayer.”
“…the opportunity to pray with their fellow students to revel in what God has done for them.”
“Every meeting is finished by joining hands in prayer to prepare for the oncoming day.”

Well, aren’t they a fine bunch of pious toadies. It’s fine for the book to recognize that there are large numbers of sanctimonious public exhibitors of their superstition in the school — they are there, and it’s right that they be represented — but it is simple exclusionist bigotry that the staff decided that NRS would not be mentioned at all.

Wanna bet that the reason is that cretinous parents like the Catholic daddy quoted above put pressure on them?

Clarity

A very nice statement by Dawkins: the virtue of the New Atheist is clarity, not shrillness, not certainty, not militancy, and the problem is our opponents all have to be obscurantists to make excuses for folly.