The Amazing Atheist reveals his lack of humanity again

I’m sure you’ve all heard the tragic story of Amanda Todd, the teenage girl who killed herself after prolonged bullying. Normal human beings will read about her and be near tears; she was broken by callous sexual predators, her life made miserable, and she finally gave up on it.

The Amazing Atheist is not a normal human being.

Instead, The Amazing Atheist raged at the fact that this young woman was getting attention when other people have died, too. She was a well-off Western girl with plenty of privileges, so how dare we consider her story particularly tragic? There are so many other people who are worse off than she was!

Well, you know, we have a couple of choices in our lives.

We could, for instance, search the world for that one person who is in the worst circumstances of anyone; the person who is suffering the very most right now. We can do this while turning up our nose at each other afflicted individual who isn’t hurting enough for our standards; why, you’re a quadriplegic dying in a ditch? But you don’t have shingles! And both your eyes are intact! I’m sure we can find someone worse off than you. And then when we find that ultimate person in pain, we can promise to do everything we can to help them.

But I’ve noticed that people who make that kind of argument aren’t actually offering to help anyone. Their perversely inverted, demanding standards are really an excuse to turn away from the miserable they consider undeserving, to justify refusing to help…because that ultimate sufferer will never be found.

But you do have a choice. The other thing you could do is recognize deep pain in others and do what you can to help them. If one person had sincerely and honestly turned to Todd when she was being abused, and offered to help, maybe she’d still be here, and the world would be a slightly better place.

She wasn’t asking for much.

The Amazing Atheist begrudges her that much.

I don’t see any difference between him and the bullies who beat her up and mocked her on facebook and poured scorn on her in school.

And some people wonder why there is a growing rift in the atheist movement. All you have to do is look at people like the Amazing Atheist to see that some atheists, people who are convinced that there is nothing beyond ourselves, that we are dependent entirely on our fellow human beings and nothing more, lack that humanity that is our only source of unity and our only true reason for living.

Don’t be surprised that some of us want nothing to do with such sociopaths.

The ducks are gonna get you

Some poor young girl, deeply miseducated and misled, wrote into a newspaper with a letter trying to denounce homosexuality with a bad historical and biological argument. She’s only 14, and her brain has already been poisoned by the cranks and liars in her own family…it’s very sad. Here’s the letter — I will say, it’s a very creative argument that would be far more entertaining if it weren’t wrong in every particular.

I’ve transcribed it below. I couldn’t help myself, though, and had to, um, annotate it a bit.

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Well, I won’t do that again

So, after a long grueling week of travel and work, I land at the Minneapolis airport, where my plane gets parked for half an hour while we wait for our gate to clear, and I open up Twitter. And am greeted by a pile of fan mail from someone called @SammyBoal, who had created their account just an hour before in order to vomit up innuendo and insults at me and Rebecca Watson. This was pretty awful stuff — sexual smears and contempt for women. Fortunately, twitter makes blocking people easy, so I did and all of those wretched comments vanished…and I also made this statement:

These sickos will sink to amazing depths…the slymepit mentality is appalling.

@SammyBoal didn’t last long after that. The wave of revulsion, with people clicking on block, block, block to this bozo, led to the software at Twitter suspending the account. I wasn’t the only one appalled.

But then the hyperskeptics kicked into action. I got dunned with people claiming that the slymepit really wasn’t that bad, how dare I damn them with this accusation, I should research the place before making such accusations (never mind that I’ve had past experience with it, that I see its denizens commenting all over FtB, and that it’s fucking called the fucking Slymepit).

@SammyBoal isn’t a Slymepitter – please research that crap before putting it out there. Thanks.

Your pit doesn’t seem much better. You just like it because of the way it agrees with you & vice versa.

Having read all the posts there (yes, I have – bronchitis has afforded me a lot of time), don’t see that kind of asshatery.

Oh, really? I am skeptical of your hyperskeptical hyperskepticism. But OK, I’ll go look. Briefly. And right away I found one of the Slymepit denizens disavowing @SammyBoal.

What this person – https://twitter.com/SammyBoal – is doing is quite another, fucking repugnant, and I hope he/she/it isn’t hanging around here on The Slyme Pit. If he/she/it is, please speak up so I can ignore your vile crap now.

That’s a good start, but when your regulars think a person like @SammyBoal could be a likely hanger-on, you’ve got a problem. Even they think it is entirely possible that this was a pseudonym for one of their long term Watson/Myers haters.

But have no fear. The party line quickly absolved them of guilt: it was an ally of Watson putting on an act to make the Slymepit look bad.

I think it’s a sock to make her disagreers look extra bullying, rapey, and stuff

Right. So for years and years, Rebecca Watson’s bestest friends have been cobbling up sock puppet accounts to send her hate mail. Those thousands of revolting youtube comments? All buddies putting on an act. If we carry this logic further, the Slymepit itself is a great big pretense put on by all of her pals who make daily piles of insults and threats just to make her feel good about herself.

Ahh, but the best part: the haters were all fired up because the video of Rebecca Watson speaking at HFA has just been released…and their response was to post photos of obese women in degrading situations. Over and over. Amplified and made worse because everyone quotes the original ‘witty’ photo, so you end up with a whole page of fat woman photos, with people tittering over them and speculating whether it’s a drunk Rebecca Watson or Stephanie Zvan, and somehow they start whining about Natalie Reed and Ophelia Benson. The whole impression is of a bargain-basement 4chan where all of their childish ire is aimed at women on freethoughtblogs.

Who knew bronchitis affected the eyes?

Oh, well. I am vindicated, and next time some blinkered asshole tells me to hyperskeptically examine my well-founded assumptions about the slymepitters, I’m just going to direct them to this post, because I’m not going to read that vile collection of misogynistic scum again, no matter how hard they try to guilt me into it.

Hypocrisy alert

Representative Scott DesJarlais of Tennessee is a fanatical Tea Party Republican who campaigns on his fanatical pro-life stance and his fanatical ‘family values’ who fanatically touts the importance of traditional marriage.

You know exactly where this is going, don’t you? I could just stop writing right here and you’d be able to fill in the rest of the story.

Yep, his marriage fell apart thanks to his philandering, and now we have a recording of a phone call with his ex-mistress in which he’s urging her impatiently to get an abortion. The only thing we’re missing so far is a gay fling and voting “yes” on a Democratic health care bill to confirm his demonic status.

Not that it matters. He’s still leading in his election campaign. The Tea Baggers don’t actually give a damn about their so-called values — you don’t have to live them if you just shout them angrily enough.

Newsweek panders to the deluded again

I’ve got to wonder who is responsible for this nonsense, and how it gets past the staff at Newsweek. Every once in a while, they’ve just got to put up a garish cover story touting the reality of Christian doctrine, and invariably, the whole story is garbage. This time around, the claim is proof of life after death, in Heaven Is Real: A Doctor’s Experience With the Afterlife. This time, we have a real-live doctor who has worked at many prestigious institutions, as we are reminded several times in the story, whose brain was shut down and who then recites an elaborate fantasy of visiting heaven.

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Uh-oh, he’s on to us!

Rats. Paul Broun (Ridiculous, Ga) sees right through us.

All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and the Big Bang Theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of Hell. And it’s lies to try to keep me and all the folks who were taught that from understanding that they need a savior.

So…this guy gets elected down there in Georgia?

Nerd life forever

Oh, no, there are more reasons I can never run for public office in the United States.

Colleen Lachowicz is a Democrat running for the state senate in Maine. The Republicans are running attack ads against her, arguing that she isn’t fit for office because she plays an orc rogue in World of Warcraft. It’s not clear whether she’d be OK if she’d been playing an elf paladin.

Alas, I think I’m worse. I play an undead warlock. Also, I’m an atheist. Doooomed.

Oh, no! I just noticed in that picture…I’m also wearing a dress! Crap, I’m just going to have to resign myself to spending the rest of my life sucking at the public teat, never contributing anything, aren’t I? I’d move into my mother’s basement, but she doesn’t have one.

A pointless clarification

That dull, boring, moronic slimepitter ScentedNectar has put out a youtube video (which I will not link to) accusing me of nefarious and underhanded manipulation of the ads on FtB to get an unfair edge in revenues. I’d call it a lie, but it’s clearly a product of her stupidity and incompetence. Just to clarify: 1) I have absolutely no control over the ads here at all. Ed Brayton handles all the accounting and ad placement. I don’t even want to have to deal with ads. 2) All revenue from ads at FtB, without regard to their source, is put into a common pool and shared out to all blogs on the basis of their page views. If I were somehow gaming the system to bring in extra ad money, it would go into the pool and benefit everyone blogging here.

I don’t know why I’m bothering to respond, since she also whines that I’d just lie and make excuses anyway, so she’s not going to care about the facts. But I hate being accused of somehow scamming my colleagues here — this network is about building a cause, not lining my pockets. If I cared about nothing but the money, I would never have left Scienceblogs — their rates are much better!

AAAAAAAIEE! CATHOLICS!

All right, Deacon Duncan owes me. He cruelly pointed me at a site where a Catholic tries to justify his faith.

Just that phrase alone is enough to send alarms in your head whooping, doesn’t it? You know it’s going to be a pointless exercise in sophistry, and the only reason you might be tempted to follow the link is to see how awful it is. If you are a connoisseur of bad reasoning, go ahead — it’s an excellent example of the genre.

After the prelude, in which he says that he’s trying to explain his belief to atheists why Christians exist, here is his very first sentence.

Any philosophy that claims that there exists nothing supernatural cannot grant purpose to suffering.

I lost my will to read further. He needs to examine his premises: why must there be a purpose to suffering?

I had stopped caring. But I glanced ahead through the long, tortured prose and shameful excuses for logic (purposelessly, I suffered), and found this little jewel of a dingleberry of thought:

All atheism has its ultimate source in Jesus Christ then, for by his death he negated the existence of God. And in his death, sin itself died, for he became sin itself. And if sin died, suffering died, for suffering is the result of sin. And if all suffering died, than death itself — the ultimate human suffering — dies.

What the hell…do not try to understand. It’s a Catholic thing. Just soak your cortex in a childhood of lies, and while it will never make sense, you’ll just accept without questioning, which is all a good Catholic wants.

I gave up. But I thought I’d check the comments to see if somehow, magically, that fecal slurry somehow resonated with anyone, and gosh, it did.

I love how simply you put it when you said “Christianity doesn’t end suffering. It just redefines it as a positive.” I think a lot of Christians don’t understand why they suffer, and knowing that their suffering is united with Christ’s is beyond comforting.

Catholics. Their logic is of another realm.