The usual daily workflow around here will be temporarily diverted

Did you get my message? HELLO? I spent the whole night howling into the giant white porcelain telephone we keep in the bathroom, trying to let you know I wasn’t feeling well and probably wouldn’t make it in to work today, and that you’ll have to get your internet entertainment somewhere else.

Hello? HELLO?!? Maybe it was a really bad connection. There was this ghastly background echo of gagging and retching. I also wasn’t firing smoothly on all circuits: I was delirious and dehydrated, and I think I briefly turned into a worm, all endoderm and smooth muscle and peristalsis. The hindbrain emesis circuitry was working just fine, though, and was doing a fabulous job of moving my dinner through my digestive tract. Backwards. Let me tell you, I really regretted all those jalapenos I’d put on my salad.

I tried to warn you. I was sending out warnings to every one of you every 45 minutes all night long. I was pretty frantic. Oh, well, maybe they’ll show up in your voicemail later.

Uh…one thing. I might have accidentally uploaded an attachment. I pushed the button on the upper right of the porcelain phone’s console, and it made a wooshing sound like it was sending something big off into the world.

You might not want to open that.

An email FYI

So you want to get in touch with me? That’s been getting harder and harder as my email gets busier and busier, and also because my email software finally up and died in protest at the load last month, so I had to make some major changes.

My email is now split. If you’re trying to contact me at my umn.edu address, don’t. I sort that out separately and handle it at my office, and have filters in place that prioritize messages from other umn.edu addresses. That is so students and colleagues get priority and their email doesn’t get buried in all those other sources. Of course, if you are a student or colleague at UM Morris, you should use that address.

All you strangers and friends out there should use pzmyers@gmail.com. It peels out all my professional/job mail, so it has slightly less volume now. Only slightly. And it also has a ruthless set of filters on it, so even there it may not work to contact me. Sorry. I may also be setting up a third public address specifically for those of you who want to contact me about speaking engagements, and I’ll put that in the about page when it’s ready.

As for all you trolls and haters: write it on a piece of paper, eat it, crap it out, and flush.

I’m back

But still a little shell-shocked. I had a terrible flight back from Denver, thanks to the incompetence of the staff at the Delta desk and the weather, and landing at the airport after 10pm and having a 3 hour drive back didn’t help, either. I just staggered up now and took a shower and desperately need a cup of tea.

But I wanted to quickly mention two things. One was something weird in my talk. I was (once again) making the argument that there had to be more to the atheism movement than just the dictionary definition, and I first made the case that we’ve comfortably accommodated much bigger, loftier goals than not believing in gods, by pointing out that we readily accept science as part of the atheist parcel. And then I moved on to asking whether there were other things we’d be willing to say that atheists, as a movement, ought to fight for. What are the secular causes?

“Science Education?” I asked. And the audience said “yes”.

“Environmentalism?” I asked. And the audience said “yes”.

“Civil rights for minorities?” I asked. And the audience said “yes,” loudly.

“Gay marriage?” I asked. And the audience yelled back “yes”.

“Feminism?” I asked. And the audience shouted “yes”.

It was weird. I kind of expected that at some point the audience would start tapering off or even saying “no,” and they didn’t. They got louder (which was also due to getting warmed up, I’m sure.) Here I was, all prepared to talk about the importance of each of those, and they just rolled over and made it easy for me. In the Q&A, I was later asked, in response to my suggestion that atheist organizations ought to have more prominent special interest groups to pursue specific sub-goals of the movement, if that wouldn’t dilute the focus of the whole organization, which was a reasonable concern, but that was the only reservation I heard. See, weird…from all the pushback we see on the web, you’d think there’d be more objections. I’m pretty sure it’s not my awesome personal charisma that overwhelmed any dissent.

Later in the talk, a similar thing happened. I showed a slide with just this on it:

The audience erupted into applause before I even said anything! I really missed an opportunity — I should have just done an Atheism+ talk and gotten wild accolades. I actually didn’t say a lot about it: I was making the case that the strong response to this idea should be telling every atheist organization something…that there is a huge swell of interest in their potential membership in making social justice issues a much bigger part of the movement.

Oh, and the second thing: I was having lunch with Matt Dillahunty and AronRa, and the possibility of doing a freethoughtblogs conference came up. We bounced around some really cool ideas about making it different from all those other conferences (for instance, what if we did it in Cincinnati, and made challenging Answers in Genesis part of it? What about bringing teenagers in to plan the social part of it all?), but it’s all very tentative and remote at this time — don’t get your hopes up. I thought I’d ask, though…would there be interest in having a free or very inexpensive con ala Skepticon centered around the FtB roster and our pet issues? Should we think a little more seriously about it?

That was quick. Video of the talk is now available.

Silly harassers

OK, you pests out there. Could you get some consistency? I routinely get odd magazines sent to me by someone subscribing me to them…I get a few issues, and then when I respond to their requests for money by telling them I didn’t subscribe to them, they fade away.

For a while, you were randomly subscribing me to gay lifestyle magazines. Then it was chicken fanciers, and I got a lot of information about building a coop in my backyard. Now it’s a bunch of motorcycle magazines.

Could you go back to the gay magazines? There at least I got useful grooming and clothing tips.

Although if I win the Free Harley Giveaway contest in this one, that could change.

I resign from the Atheist Papacy

All the time now, I’ve got people yammering at me about how I’m an awful, terrible, wicked person because I’ve become what I hate. I’ve got one guy calling me the “god of atheism”, another person calling me part of the “high priesthood of atheism”, illustrated with that lovely photoshopped image to the right. Then I’m accused of “believing [my] own press” and “thinking [I] can do no wrong” because my “swarm of mindless groupies” are all telling me my every word is golden.

You know, if I actually started believing my press, I’d have to go shoot myself. The only people lauding me as an atheist god or pope are the people who detest me; there are whole sites out there dedicated to spitting on Pharyngula, and my mailbox is full of missives telling me how arrogant/stupid/evil/ugly/Jewish/female (yeah, they think those last two are insults) I am, and very few praising what I’ve written. Here on my own blog, some people despise me, and even my allies nag and carp and pick at every phrase (which is what I expect). Ah, what I’d give for at least one blind, obedient minion who’d revere me as a deity…why, I might pay as much as a quarter.

You have to have a thick skin to be an assertive blogger on the internet; my primary input from the world is not that I’m coddled in a little bubble of approval, but that I’ve put myself in a prime position for every rock-thrower out there to take a shot at me. I don’t post with the attitude that I’ll get accolades for every word, but as an act of defiance.

And then we got complaints like that one on bitchspot, which dismiss every one who even partially agrees with me as “highly fanatical followers” who must “Stop being a groupie. Stop bowing before the altar.” That isn’t legitimate, valid criticism. That’s a kind of blindness in itself, treating everyone who might align themselves with my position as incapable of independent thought. It is a dishonest, dismissive tactic. What we have here is a horde of thoughtful, often angry people who think science, social justice, and the Enlightenment are good things, and are willing to fight for their causes.

Whining that I am an atheist pope is also incredibly dishonest, but OK, I resign. I’ll stop doing the things that make me equivalent to a high-ranking priest. I’ll give up my non-profit status. I’ll sell off my Italian villas and all their exquisite, priceless furnishings and art. I’ll give up the support of a well-established atheist institution, staffed with lawyers and professional apologists and PR persons. I’ll step down from my official position at the top of the atheist hierarchy. I’ll stop dogmatically pushing the infallible words of Charles Darwin on the populace. I’ll take off my uniform that grants me special privileges and respect.

I’ll just become an ordinary citizen, a guy with a blog. Will that do? Or is it expected that I also shut that down and be silent?

Because that’s all these baseless criticisms of my godless papacy are about: I’m already nothing but a guy with a blog, and there isn’t much more I can give up to satisfy these wanking whiners.

I agree with Larry

They used to call us the Statler and Waldorf of talk.origins, so you just knew whose side I’d take in this discussion of civility. There’s a place for it, but not in a battle with malicious fools.

When I use the word “IDiot” I fully intend to bash the IDiots for their stupid ideas. Why? Because their ideas are stupid and they really are idiots.

Passion and anger are two of our weapons. I’m not going to let the ninny nannies disarm us.

Skip Evans is gone

Well, shit.

An old pal from the days of talk.origins, and also formerly of the NCSE, Skip Evans, has died. He’s been active in the freethought community in Madison, Wisconsin, and now I really regret not looking him up last time I was out that way.

Skip was notorious for getting his hands on Kent Hovind’s Ph.D. dissertation. That’s the kind of thing he was good at: tearing up the creationists and leaving us all laughing.