Bye bye, RA

I suspect that soon there will be at least one religious person who will claim he converted from atheism who I will believe. The Raving Atheist is getting ripe: he’s been ramping up the irrationality for some time now, precessing like a top slowing down, and I expect that soon enough he’ll flop over for Jesus. I’m not questioning his sincerity—he is an atheist, all right, and there is no doubt about it—but his sympathies are getting weirder and weirder.

This is not a new development. I’ve discussed his radical pro-life position before, and now Punkassblog and Amanda bring to my attention his latest post, in which he foreswears saying an unkind word about Christianity ever again, and in which I learn that he’s been actively working with one of those ghastly dishonest “crisis pregnancy centers” that offer no services other than propaganda (and, apparently, free teddy bears) and exist only to mislead women worried about pregnancy.

You know, I think I’d forgive an open conversion to Christianity far more easily than I can his irresponsible affiliation with those charlatans and fanatics.

His rationalizations for pro-life extremism simply don’t make sense: he seems to think something special happens at fertilization that unambiguously and unarbitrarily defines a human being. Diploidy is not the scientific term for ensoulment. Genetic specification is not sufficient to specify an individual. Potential is not a synonym for actuality. Fertilization is not a switch that triggers an ineluctable program towards individuality. The combinatorial uniqueness of an individual’s genome is inadequate to define the individual. Amanda notes that most opposition to abortion comes from either religious convictions, a commitment to a sexist social order, or I’d add, a rather primitive and unthinking desire to tightly control reproduction in potential mates and kin. I don’t know which of these apply to RA, but his weak excuses clearly rule out that it might have been an intellectual decision on his part.

He’s welcome to his convictions about abortion, but he needs to face it: they aren’t reasonable, and they’re as batty as Dawn Eden.

Please go laugh at UncommonDescent

DaveScot is one of those genuinely deranged ID supporters, and I don’t like giving him any attention…but Richard Hughes just sent me a note mentioning this long defensive thread he has started at UncommonDescent, and he’s just done something so darned funny and stupid I can’t resist.

He’s arguing about gravity. At one point, he claims that “By the way, gravity is the strongest force in nature.” As you might guess, he’s jumped on for that, and so he rushes off to find some supporting evidence…and gets it, he says, from John G. Cramer, professor of physics. Here’s the part he quotes:

Curiously, in some ways gravity is also the strongest force in the universe. It always adds, never subtracts, and can build up until it overwhelms all other forces.

The hilarious bit here that is so characteristic of creationists is that this is a highly selective quote. He left out the first sentence of the article.

Gravity is the weakest force in the universe.

Doesn’t that just say everything about IDists approach to science?

Where did you all go, Coulterites?

A strange thing, after I clarified my Coulter challenge and requested that her fans get specific and tell me what they supported and why in her book…the e-mail from them all dried up. Pffft. Gone.

Maybe they just got bored with me, but it’s sad that no one has even tried to suggest a single good paragraph in all of Godlessssss. It’s as if they’re willing to play mindless cheerleader, but actually committing to thinking and supporting specifically a single thing she says…well, that’s just not going to happen.

A clarification

Responses to my challenge at the end of this article are trickling in, but so far, none of them are filling the bill. Let me explain what is not an appropriate reply:

  • Cackling that Coulter must be right because she’s got “liberal panties in a twist” is not cogent.
  • Telling me that the “WHOLE BOOK PROVES LIBERALS ARE THE PROBLEM WITH AMERICA” is not cogent.
  • Promising to pray for me, or assuring me that I will burn in hell, is not cogent.
  • Explicit details about how Ann Coulter is sexier than “fat harry hippie jew girls” is not cogent.

Here’s the simple summary. Ann Coulter has written this long book full of creationist gobbledygook. I can’t possibly take the whole thing apart, so I’m asking the Coulter fans to get specific in their support. Pick a paragraph that you agree with and that you believe makes a strong, supportable point about science—anything from chapters 8-11 will do. Don’t be vague, be specific. I’ll reply with details of my disagreement (or heck, maybe you’ll find some innocuous paragraph that I agree with—I’ll mention that here, too.)

Because the letters I am getting suggest that those fans have some comprehension problems, I’ll spell it out.

  1. Read Coulter’s book, Godless. (uh-oh, I may have just filtered out 90% of her fans with that first word.)
  2. Pick ONE paragraph from chapters 8-11 that you think is just wonderfully insightful, and that you agree with entirely.
  3. Open up your email software, and compose a message to me. You can use a pseudonym, but please do use a valid email address. I won’t publish your address, but I’m not going to reply to people I can’t contact.
  4. Type in the paragraph that you think is solid and believable. Yeah, it’s a tiny bit of work, but it’ll save me the trouble of typing it in myself. You’re a believer, it’s worth it, right?
  5. Explain briefly why you think this paragraph is good stuff. If you want to explain a little bit of the context in justification, that’s good too.
  6. Send it to me.

That’s not so hard now, is it? I’m finding that Coulter fans are fervent and enthusiastic and insistent, so asking them to take baby steps with me and show me the simplest first fragments that will lead to my comprehension of the wit and insight of the faboo Ms Coulter shouldn’t be too much to ask.

I promise to post any submissions that meet those criteria, with my reply, as long as I don’t get too many cut&paste jobs at once.

By the way, would Coulter critics please stop focusing on her appearance and dress, or speculating about her sexuality? I don’t find that any more appropriate than the guy who wrote to me about all those liberal women with armpit hair.

Ann Coulter believes every Democrat is an atheist

One more thing about the odious Coulter…Amanda takes note of the bigotry lurking under her schtick in the way she uses “Jew” like it was a dirty word. But look at her book: her weird attitude is right there in the title, Godless. I really thought nothing of it except, well, she’s at least acknowledging us irreligious people, until I saw her on Leno where she made this same point, and read this Townhall column, Party of rapist proud to be godless.

My book makes a stark assertion: Liberalism is a godless religion. Hello! Anyone there? I’ve leapt beyond calling you traitors and am now calling you GODLESS. Apparently, everybody’s cool with that. The fact that liberals are godless is not even a controversial point anymore.

I suddenly realized that she intended the title as some kind of ghastly, unforgivable insult, and she’s disappointed that no one was taking it that way. When someone calls me godless, I scratch my head, wonder what the big deal is, and agree…I sure am, and proud of it. I may argue with my fellow liberal/progressives who call themselves the Christian left, but I can guess how they would react. They’d scratch their heads, think that was absurdly wrong, and wonder what the insult was supposed to be. Sort of like if someone called me a Jew; I’d just think they were wrong, wouldn’t be bothered at all, and wonder what the heck was wrong with someone who thought it was powerful slander. Everybody’s cool with it because it’s revealing the slimy nature of Coulter’s character, not ours. So I’m not complaining; I think it’s bizarre that someone believes everyone in the Democratic party is an atheist.

Since GODLESS didn’t have the effect she wanted, I guess she’s going to have to ramp up the hysteria further in her next title. Maybe it will be JEW or GAY, or maybe she’ll go all the way and drop the TOLERANT bomb on us…and we’ll all be scratching our heads again.

By the way, the “rapist” in “party of rapist”? Bill Clinton, of course.

Coulter is simply certifiable.

Ann Coulter: No evidence for evolution?

I’ve now read all of the science-related (that’s applying the term “related” very generously) stuff in Ann Coulter’s awful, ghastly, ignorant book, Godless, and it’s a bit overwhelming. This far right-wing political pundit with no knowledge of science at all has written a lengthy tract that is wall-to-wall error: To cover it all would require a sentence-by-sentence dissection that would generate another book, ten times longer than Coulter’s, all merely to point out that her book is pure garbage. So I’m stumped. I’m not interested in writing such a lengthy rebuttal, and I’m sure this is exactly what Coulter is counting on—tell enough lazy lies, and no one in the world will have time enough to correct them conscientiously. She’s a shameless fraud.

What to do? Well, we can’t take apart the whole thing, but what we can do is focus on individual claims and show that Coulter is outrageously wrong—that she has written things that indicate an utter lack of knowledge of the subject. Some of us at the Panda’s Thumb are going to be doing just that—look there later for more—and what I’m going to do here is address one very broad claim that Coulter has made repeatedly, and that is also common to many creationists.

That claim is that there is no evidence for evolution. I know, to anybody who has even a passing acquaintance with biology, that sounds like a ridiculous statement, like declaring that people can live on nothing but air and sunlight, or that yeti are transdimensional UFO pilots. Yet Coulter baldly makes the absurd claim that “There’s no physical evidence for [evolution]”, and insists in chapter 8 of her new book that there is “no proof in the scientist’s laboratory or the fossil record.” This is like standing outside in a drenching rainstorm and declaring that there is no evidence that you are getting wet.

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