Once upon a time, there was a man who thought rather highly of humanity’s potential. Sure, there were things humans did that were awful — they could be violent, and careless, and short-sighted — but they also did amazing things like science and art that other species didn’t. Overall, he thought that calling someone “human” was a high compliment. And this idea colored his thinking in such a way that it began to shape his expectations of people; maybe we should expect human beings to do more than eat and excrete and reproduce, and maybe we should recognize that the word “human” meant an awful lot more than just a certain flavor of meat or the species of your parents.

He also noticed that every single human being he ever met, without exception, was more than a perambulating set of chromosomes. Some were good at math and others liked to dance and others were kind and yet others liked to argue, and these were the virtues that made them good and interesting, and made them…human, in this best sense of the word. So when he praised being human, it wasn’t for the accident of their birth, it was for the qualities that made being human meaningful.

Unfortunately, not all humans liked having the fact that words carry greater connotations than the most narrow, most literal, most concise, dictionary-style definitions, despite the obvious fact that they all do. They got quite irate.

“I am a human because I am not a squirrel, or a hyena, or a fish, or broccoli,” some said, “and I resent the fact that you think there’s more to me than being a not-squirrel!”

“You expect me to be good at math to qualify as human?” complained some of the slower, less alert people, who failed to notice that the man had made no such specific requirements.

“The only thing that all humans have in common is that they were born to other humans, and can only reproduce with humans,” said other complainers, “therefore, that is all that ‘human’ can imply or mean. How dare you taint my pure and perfect language with complications and nuances and expectations!” 

And the man listened to their arguments for a while, and argued back for a while, and then he came upon a simple solution. He told the not-squirrels and identity-by-rutters and functional illiterates and simple-minded machine-coders to fuck off, and it was good.

“Ad hominem!” they squeaked.

“Who cares what barely human people think, anyway,” he shrugged.

We Gnu Atheists, and atheists of all kinds, are often accused of following “just another religion.”  I’m not particularly fond of the usual riposte — something along the lines of sarcastically pointing out that atheism is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby — because I think we sell ourselves short when we pretend atheism is an absence of values rather than a positive and powerful collection of strong modern beliefs, but also because there are distinct differences in the way atheists should think, relative to theists. I say “should” because, often, where I see the starkest contrast is in atheist apologists for religion, who sometimes seem to be unbelievers still trapped in old modes of thought.

Jaques Berlinerbau is one such infidel locked in a medieval mind; he links approvingly to a long-winded, plodding essay by R. Joseph Hoffmann, who reminds me of nothing so much as a pompous clergyman, who has little too say but will puff it up into a good solid tendentious drone ands mercilessly slaughter all of his critics with ennui. They have another old criticism of the Gnu Atheists: we have a shocking deficiency of martyrs.

Say what? We’re supposed to build our movement on corded stacks of dead atheists, preferably ones murdered by torture, or Hoffmann and Berlinerbau will not take us seriously? I can’t think of a better example of the blinkered brains of our critics. Religion, especially Catholicism, loves to dwell on torment and death and finds validation, even, in the agonies of the faithful; why, God must be really, really important if his followers will throw their lives away for him. Hoffmann seems to be impressed with this line of thought, and tries to argue that atheists should grant more credit to the distinguished line of martyrs, often believers, who died to advance the cause of freethought. He thinks we ought to be more appreciative of Bruno and Servetus and Hus and Aikenhead for their deaths in the name of a cause.

Personally, I recoil in disgust at the thought. We should celebrate the lives of good people, not their deaths. Their deaths do not contribute to a cause, they only stand as testimonials to the bloody oppressive nature of our enemies; all would have served humanity better had they lived. We should no more find vindication in the execution of heretics than doctors would revel in the glory of millions of miserable deaths to typhoid and cholera and smallpox and childbed fever — we should want to simply end these horrors. A trail of tears is not a victory parade.

Atheists should not want martyrs, and neither should we desire the deaths of our opponents. Death is an end and a loss and not any kind of virtue, and that Berlinerbau and Hoffmann have these antique fantasies of good godless corpses piling up to lend gravitas to the movement, or that the vocal Gnu Atheists even imagine such a story would be desirable, says quite a bit about their inability to think beyond their obedience to a theological mindset. While they reject the notion of a god, they continue to pay homage at the altar of religious morality.

It’s god to see I’m not alone in rejecting their entire premise. Both  Jerry Coyne and Ophelia Benson express similar sentiments. There really is a coherent and consistent Gnu Atheist consensus that is very different from the horrid old modes of religious thought, and it takes an unimaginative and narrow mind to think otherwise.

I have learned that today is Christopher Hitchens’ birthday. I hope he gets many more.

What is it with all these New Atheist birthdays in the springtime, though?

I have a request to all of you. Some of you hate me, so you’d enjoy this, but it’s more important that those of you who have a mild and distant affection for me take a stand, too. If, sometime in the future, when the billions of dollars role in, if you learn that I’m flying in children for sex, I don’t want you to defend me. Don’t use friendship as an excuse, just come out loud and clear and denounce my behavior, with no qualifiers. Please. There aren’t any justifications or rationalizations possible.

I am not planning to turn into a leering old degenerate, but you never know…I could suffer traumatic brain damage that radically alters my behavior, turning me into either a lecher or a Christian. If such a horrific event occurs, consider me dead and start abusing the bankrupt personality residing in my corpus, OK?

Ditto if I start robbing banks, beating up little old ladies for their social security checks, praising the Templeton Foundation, or become a Mormon. That stuff is just wrong.

Lawrence Krauss has sent me a guest post discussing his debate with William Lane Craig. As he notes, these debates with cranks are always a mistake; debates in general are a format tailored to give the weak side, even the side that has no credibility at all, an equal standing with the stronger side at the beginning, and then the conclusion is resolved by the rhetorical ability of the two opponents, not the evidence. William Lane Craig is an expert debater, but he is otherwise a vacuous moron, but because he has a series of familiar syllogism that he always trots out in these debates, and because his audiences tend to be packed with the kind of people who automatically find any mention of Jesus laudatory, he tends to “win,” i.e., he gets the approval of people who reject the atheist without thinking.

You can watch the whole debate on YouTube. Warning: Craig goes first. You may not be able to stomach it — it’s a confident display of obtuseness. When he isn’t lecturing on Christian ‘physics’ — with Lawrence Krauss right there — he’s throwing out assertions and calling them evidence. For instance, he declares that Jesus’ tomb was found empty…as part of his litany of evidence for Jesus’ divinity. It’s the kind of thing that he can only get away with in front of a friendly audience that will never, ever question the assumptions of their faith.

Craig is much more polished and self-congratulatory than Krauss, and I can see that another irritation here is William Lane Craig’s smug post-mortem and the dishonest distortions of some attendees. For example, the theists claim that Krauss rejected logic in his opening remarks. This is false. What he points out in the beginning is the evidence trumps your preconceived notions, no matter how carefully you’ve worked them out, and that the observations described by physics, such as the rate of falling of two objects of different weights or the results of the two-slit experiment, are not trivially derivable by logic alone, in the absence of evidence demonstrating the phenomenon. The debate was supposed to be all about the evidence, which demands some awareness of the concept of empiricism, and Craig and his acolytes don’t even seem to know what the word means. That the Big Bang occurred 13.7 billion years ago was not determined by a theologian deriving it from his religious principles, or by a physicist standing at a chalkboard and working it all out from pure mathematics — it is a measurement from data.

Also, Craig claims to be using Bayesian logic. No, he is not. Scribbling a few trivial equations on his slides does not substitute for Craig’s painful ignorance of physics.

You can find more thorough, non-religious discussion of Craig’s fallacies at Debunking Christianity.

@JoeCienkowski is a motor-mouthed creationist who hangs out on Twitter. His wife, Brandy Evans Cienkowski, is much less vocal and considers herself one of those ‘liberal Christians’, and she apparently got fed up with Joe (he has also been arrested at least once for battery in January, which is not a good sign) and left him…and then was, presumably, reconciled and rejoined him, at least by Joe Cienkowski’s account. Strangely, Brandy has gone completely silent since this reconciliation, and Joe has has also spluttered to a trickle of tweets, all unresponsive to questions about his wife’s status. This has roused suspicions, and there is a call out for contact. If you know Brandy Evans Cienkowski, let people know here or on Twitter.

The beans have been spilled. I lied. I am not the Digital Cuttlefish, I am not leaving Scienceblogs, I have no talent for poetry, and I am not a nice person.

I am highly untrustworthy, though. I had people asking all day if I was really in Elmhurst and if I was really going to the local pub last night. I’m a little worried that I’ll get home to find the wife has changed the locks on me.

Aaargh! Dueling events on Thursday night!

Oh, well, they’re easy to resolve spatially. If you’re somewhere near Minneapolis, you should attend JT Eberhard’s talk in Smith Hall at 7. He’s going to be talking about “Campus Preachers: An Excuse to Build Forts and Other Shenanigans”, so I’m sure there’ll be tips on what to do when Brother Jed comes to town.

I can’t go! I’m going to be in the Twin Cities on Thursday night, down near the airport, because I’m flying out to speak at Elmhurst College on Friday. But I’ve got another commitment for this Thursday night. I’m appearing on Virtually Speaking with Jay Ackroyd, a kind of talk show that takes place in Second Life. I’ll be tottering about with a poorly controlled avatar, and you can join in by creating your own avatar, or you can just listen in as if it were a live podcast.

So you can listen to me if you’re anywhere in the world, but you’ll need to physically come to Minneapolis to see JT.

It’s another godless birthday. March must be a good month for birthing ferocious atheists — so procreate in June/July!

Today is the man’s 70th birthday — I didn’t see a thread of well-wishers on the RDF site, so let’s start one here.

Hey, he and I are both Pisces, there must be something to this astrology stuff.

---

I’ve been informed that my knowledge of astrology is deficient, and that his birthdate falls under some other sign. Therefore, astrology is wrong.