“I’m saying people have gotten things wrong throughout the 5,500-year history of our planet.”

An advisor to Trump and member of the transition team just bare-faced asserted that the Earth is less than 6000 years old. This was after Anthony Scaramucci tried to invalidate modern science by arguing that scientists once argued that the Earth was flat and that the universe rotated about it. Never mind that those ideas preceded modern science and were relatively rapidly dispelled as evidence was acquired.

Watch those irony meters, gang.

Scaramucci wasn’t convinced. Later in the conversation, he said the Trump team simply wanted common sense solutions. Non-ideological.

Some of the stuff that you’re reading and some of the stuff I’m reading is very ideologically-based about the climate. We don’t want it to be that way, he said.

This has become the latest insult from the deeply ignorant: “You’re ideological!” Always said as they espouse some stupid ideological position of their own.

Rebecca Watson addresses this latest Trumpery more entertainingly.

It is that day

I give my final final exam of the semester today, in a half hour. My feelings:

After the exam, I shall retreat to my lair to grade them. I have made a cell biology final exam that is all essay questions. I’m expecting the students to synthesize all the information I have given them this turn, and to defend their arguments with details. There are some options here.

  • I will moan and weep and struggle for hours over terrible answers that tell me I have completely failed. Then I’ll have to go searching for candy canes to stab into my eye sockets.

  • I will be dazzled and impressed, and my students will vindicate all of my efforts, and I will dance with joy, and then I’ll have to go attend the midnight showing of Rogue One to restore my natural pessimism and ruin everyone’s day with spoilers.

  • Realistically, I’ll probably get some exams that are rewarding and interesting and some that will disappoint me. It’s OK. Then I’ll wonder if I should go to the midnight showing or just get some sleep.

Dilemmas. But no matter what, I intend to get all my grading done today. That will be good.

Oh no! Racist Twitter is mocking me!

They’re all amused that I don’t understand biology, as evidence by my criticisms of Boghossian’s blatant biases. Would you believe Jordan Peterson chimed in, too? Oh, how I tremble in terror and shame. I have roused a loud army of dumbasses (get used to it, Trump generation).

Except…I’m reasonably confident in my knowledge, and my opponents seem to be grossly ignorant and pandering to the twin trickster gods of prejudice and common sense. Never trust those guys. So I’ll keep it simple. They don’t understand that distinction between brute fact and social knowledge.

Here’s a brute fact: John produces sperm. Jennifer produces ova, sometimes. There’s no denying these simple, measurable observations. Further, we’ll stipulate that these are healthy eggs and sperm, and that I can extract these cell types in the lab and combine them in a dish and create a healthy, growing diploid zygote, that I could then implant in an individual who has a uterus and grow to adulthood. In fact, if I wanted to engineer a master race, I could go through the population and segregate out the individuals who make sperm and those who make ova and begin doing all kinds of interesting biological experiments.

Now, here are some social facts: John is a man. Jennifer is a woman. And Racist Twitter is saying, “Of course!” Except that that has taken a simple brute fact, the presence of organs that produce gametes, and extrapolated it into the socially loaded gender terms that carry huge amounts of baggage and imply lots of details in our heads that aren’t necessarily true. For example, you might then imagine John is a bit larger and physically stronger than Jennifer, which, on average, is probably true, but not necessarily so.

Or you might assume John would be a better scientist than Jennifer, which is not at all true.

In their study, Moss-Racusin and her colleagues created a fictitious resume of an applicant for a lab manager position. Two versions of the resume were produced that varied in only one, very significant, detail: the name at the top. One applicant was named Jennifer and the other John. Moss-Racusin and her colleagues then asked STEM professors from across the country to assess the resume. Over one hundred biologists, chemists, and physicists at academic institutions agreed to do so. Each scientist was randomly assigned to review either Jennifer or John’s resume.

The results were surprising—they show that the decision makers did not evaluate the resume purely on its merits. Despite having the exact same qualifications and experience as John, Jennifer was perceived as significantly less competent. As a result, Jenifer experienced a number of disadvantages that would have hindered her career advancement if she were a real applicant. Because they perceived the female candidate as less competent, the scientists in the study were less willing to mentor Jennifer or to hire her as a lab manager. They also recommended paying her a lower salary. Jennifer was offered, on average, $4,000 per year (13%) less than John.

Having functional testes is not a requirement for a lab manager, yet our society as a whole has this mental shortcut that categorizes the suitability of individuals to particular jobs on the basis of a raft of irrelevant, but usually easily detectable, characters. This is a reality that those who want to reduce people to a definition based on sex are ignoring. Even when a social fact is turned into a brute fact by social scientists like Moss-Racusin, they deny. It’s kind of depressing.

Furthermore, I snuck in another social fact in that paragraph introducing John and Jennifer. Did you notice?

Why is the sperm-producing person named “John”, and the ovum-producing person named “Jennifer”? These are arbitrary signifiers that we associate with a gender, and then to their roles in culture, and to traits like their qualities as lab managers. Imagine if I’d started that paragraph “Jennifer produces sperm. John produces ova, sometimes.” Many people would be confused. They’d think I’d made a mistake. I’d created a conflict between their social assumptions and the brute fact of biology. But there are people named John who have ovaries.

Hmm. I wonder how good they are at lab management?

By the way, allow me to introduce Jessie*. Jessie doesn’t produce sperm or ova, or maybe they do, but their behavior intentionally prevents reproduction. They do not dress in a socially conventional way for either gender. They do not engage in any of the standard courtship and mating customs of their culture. They ask you to use the non-gendered plural pronouns when addressing them.

But…but…there are only two sexes! We will struggle internally to fit Jessie into one of the two gender boxes convention allows. We must. We need to find some indication to help us accommodate our stereotypes.

Then we learn that Jessie is employed as a lab manager, and we are relieved. Jessie must be a “man”, then. We’ll be polite and continue to use the non-gendered pronouns, though. Or perhaps we’re an asshole like Jordan Peterson, and we’ll insist on forcing them into our biased pigeonholes.

And thus do we close the loop in our stereotypes and maintain the fiction of a binary reality, despite all the complicating evidence otherwise.

*Note that I snuck in yet another social fact for you to deal with: I chose what we consider a gender-neutral or ambiguous name for this person. But it can also be that someone named Jane or Joe chooses to defy those gender stereotypes, and then what happens? Everyone assumes Jane is female, of course. Even if Jane has testes hidden away under their school uniform. Because the gender binary must be served.

P.S. I forgot to mention the other criticism they’re shouting at me: “Myers is all ideological!” They’re completely oblivious to the fact that their position is blatantly ideological, too.

I admit to it. My ideology is to consider all of the evidence, even the stuff that makes my understanding of a situation more complicated.

Their ideology is to always make the evidence conform to their prior assumptions.

Is that in my job description?

Lance Wallnau explains what college professors do:

Anything we do regarding abortion, prayer, marriage, he said, anything we do that doesn’t get into the educational narrative that is affecting the minds of students will be lost within eight to 10 years because you’ve got gatekeeper priests, there are priests of Baal at the top of the university mountain, poisoning the minds [of young people.] They’re like intellectual pedophiles molesting the virgin territory of your children’s imaginations.

Funny. That stuff isn’t in any of my classes. I guess Wallnau just needs to lie about us molesting brains and worshipping Baal because he thinks it sounds less idiotic than admitting that we, for instance, teach that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old rather than 6,000.

If we’re going to allow piano lessons, we must also allow penis-chopping

It must be fun-with-philosophers day, because Ron Lindsay has written an article for CFI declaring that male circumcision should not be a major concern for humanists. He has several bad arguments to support this idea.

One is that he doesn’t think it’s very important. No, really; he’s in charge of ranking our priorities.

The head of the affiliate said they were going to concentrate on making an all-out effort to ban circumcision. I remember thinking to myself: of all the ills of a society on which a humanist organization could concentrate, this organization is going to focus on saving the foreskin?

STOP EVERYTHING. I say the biggest crisis looming over our heads is climate change, so of all the ills our society faces, why is the Center for Inquiry wasting their time opposing religion? Get some perspective, people!

Another reason he gives is that the foreskin is so teeny-tiny, and people aren’t seriously harmed by lopping it off, so it’s a trivial matter, especially compared to real problems (don’t forget, Ron Lindsay is the arbiter of what matters).

For humanists who are concerned about how the bodies of children are permanently shaped by their parents, I suggest they concentrate on how children are educated. We need tougher regulation of homeschooling and we need to prevent public funding of religious schools— something which seems quite possible under the new administration. The appropriate response to male circumcision is a shrug of the shoulders; it’s just not that significant an issue. We have other work to do.

I agree that education has a greater effect on children than circumcision. But this is just the fallacy of relative privation: that problem A has more severe consequences than problem B does not mean you should ignore B until A is completely solved. There’s always other work to do. It never ends. I taught two courses this term, but when the work piled up in one I couldn’t just tell the other class to stop meeting and stop learning until I’d caught up. You make do.

I’ll also point out that Lindsay was head of an organization of many people, and that he didn’t do all of CFI’s work. Ron Lindsay could ignore one cause; that doesn’t mean the entire organization isn’t allowed to work on it.

Then he dismisses the entirety of the autonomy and consent arguments!

The other reason I think many humanists are so opposed to circumcision is their adherence to a philosophical principle which, superficially, has strong appeal, namely that no permanent changes should be made to someone’s body without that person’s consent. Seems eminently reasonable—the problem is that it is impossible to comply with this principle with respect to the most important part of our body, namely our brain, and the possible harm that may be done to us via the shaping of our brain when we are young makes the loss of a foreskin trivial.

Yes. The universe is not perfect. We have to compromise all over the place. The fact that we cannot control what people teach their children means, what the hell, let ’em make any ol’ cosmetic change to their children’s bodies that they want. They have the right to teach children that Jesus is real, so we shouldn’t complain if they want to tattoo a picture of Elvis on their forehead. Or snip off the end of their penis.

Because piano lessons.

Most developed countries do exercise some control over the training and education children receive, imposing various legal standards and restrictions, but even so, wide scope is given to parents in terms of how they raise their children. Homeschooling is permitted in the United States, for example, with minimal oversight in most states. (Interestingly, homeschooling is forbidden in some European countries, such as Germany—again a significant cultural difference.) With respect to training in music or sports, parents can subject their children to extensive training, just short of physical abuse. Hour after hour of piano practice or swimming lessons. When grown, these children might be grateful for their training, or they may resent the physical or psychic pain they had to endure while forced to pursue an activity which they never liked. On the other hand, some children will receive no training in music or sports, something which they may regard as a handicap in later life. Either way the bodies of these children will have been permanently altered by their parents.

It’s true! Excessive focus on one discipline, whether it’s football or piano, can be damaging to a child’s development, especially if they have no talent or interest in the subject. These wrongs therefore justify another itty-bitty wrong, docking their penis. Or tattooing Elvis on their forehead, as long as we’re building arguments around hypotheticals.

He wraps it up with this pile of garbage: we should impose limits on what parents can do to their children, but elective cosmetic surgery doesn’t cross that line, because maybe it helps something.

Nothing in the foregoing analysis should be interpreted as saying we should allow parents to change their children’s bodies in any way they regard as suitable just because their role in shaping these bodies is inevitable. Clearly, limits should be— and are —imposed on what parents can do. Parents cannot inflict disabling injuries on their children. But, as indicated, the evidence regarding male circumcision is that it provides some small benefits. It cannot plausibly be characterized as medically necessary, but, with appropriate use of analgesia, it’s not harmful. The energies that some devote to opposing male circumcision might be better spent lobbying for tighter regulation of homeschooling. The cerebral portion of young male bodies should receive as much attention as the genital portion.

I’ve read the CDC summary, and some of the papers that claim there are benefits to circumcision. I’m unimpressed. There are multiple reasons why those arguments of a benefit are weak.

  • They fail to show any benefit to American children. Some claim to have found significant benefits to some African populations, which are under a very different regime of infectious diseases.

  • Even those effects in African populations are inconsistent. Some claim statistically significant reductions in infection rates, others don’t.

  • The studies that do show an effect show that late, voluntary circumcisions are as effective as post-natal circumcisions. So why force it on babies?

  • All of these studies are carried out under a complicated set of biases. Americans have high rates of circumcision, Europeans don’t. Strangely, American studies say it’s not a problem, European studies find it harmful. Isn’t that odd? It’s almost as if cultural biases influence the results, although we know that can’t possibly be.

  • The CDC summary is not without strong dissent.

    The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have announced a set of provisional guidelines concerning male circumcision, in which they suggest that the benefits of the surgery outweigh the risks. I offer a critique of the CDC position. Among other concerns, I suggest that the CDC relies more heavily than is warranted on studies from Sub-Saharan Africa that neither translate well to North American populations nor to circumcisions performed before an age of sexual debut; that it employs an inadequate conception of risk in its benefit vs. risk analysis; that it fails to consider the anatomy and functions of the penile prepuce (i.e., the part of the penis that is removed by circumcision); that it underestimates the adverse consequences associated with circumcision by focusing on short-term surgical complications rather than long-term harms; that it portrays both the risks and benefits of circumcision in a misleading manner, thereby undermining the possibility of obtaining informed consent; that it evinces a superficial and selective analysis of the literature on sexual outcomes associated with circumcision; and that it gives less attention than is desirable to ethical issues surrounding autonomy and bodily integrity. I conclude that circumcision before an age of consent is not an appropriate health-promotion strategy.

Lindsay is comfortable with dismissing people’s objections to circumcision because he thinks it is a trivial problem, but somehow, a trivial and disputed positive effect is enough to justify disregarding any concern about an unnecessary surgery routinely performed on infants for no good reason at all. Does he even realize that circumcisions were not performed because there was evidence that they helped at all?

This makes no sense.

But then, Lindsay also put a priority on chastising women at a feminist conference. He also, as a humanist, thinks the death penalty is just fine. He knows what issues are really important.

You know what’s much more important than circumcision, or state executions, or the ongoing harassment of women, women in his own organization?

Chupacabras, that’s what. That is the other work CFI must do. Valuable and scarce resources must continue to be invested in debunking this plague on our nation, while the only appropriate response to those other nuisances is a shrug of the shoulders.

Even so-called “moderate” Republicans are unfeeling reptiles

Case in point: Kasich has signed a law outlawing abortion in Ohio after 20 weeks.

Ohio Governor John Kasich, who is not a moderate or a doctor, today vetoed Ohio’s proposed “heartbeat bill,” which would have effectively banned abortion altogether by outlawing it at six weeks of pregnancy, when many women don’t know they’re pregnant. This isn’t good news, by the way, just a distraction from Kasich’s decision to sign off on another ban on abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy. And because we live in the Republic of Gilead now, the ban includes only one limited exception for the health of the patient—but not for cases of rape or incest, or for fetal abnormalities.

The 6 week bill was insane — not only are most women unlikely to know they’re pregnant, but even if they are, they’re unlikely to have any indications of potential problems, and some of the tests that can detect subtle problems take weeks to process…and you’re not going to have them done if you think it’s a routine pregnancy.

The 20 week bill isn’t much better. The standard recommendation for prenatal care is a check up once a month, and that check up is typically a simple pelvic exam and a measurement of external growth — it will detect gross problems in development but not the sneaky ones that will become apparent later. You might get one ultrasound examination, but it depends on your goddamn insurance. If you’re poor or have lousy insurance, you’re going to get nothing but the routine checkup, and we already know what Republicans think of health care.

The first fetal movements the mother can detect are at 13-16 weeks. Say there’s a problem; Mom and her doctor are going to be unconcerned if there is no quickening at the 12 week visit, but the doctor is going to get worried at 16 weeks and might give the pregnancy extra scrutiny, and might ask for extra tests (if the insurance will let you), but the alarm bells might not start ringing loudly until that 20 week visit. I kind of expect Ohio doctors will be putting a lot of extra effort into the 16 week visit from now on, but even then, it’s hard to justify extra tests if there are no apparent negative indications. Maybe Kasich is also investing much, much more money into prenatal care and screening for all Ohioans to catch problems earlier? (Hah. We know that’s not going to happen.)

There are going to be a lot of poor Ohio women — and well-off women whose pregnancies develop late problems — who are going to be told their pregnancy is life-threatening or non-viable, and who are simultaneously told that it can’t be terminated because it’s past the arbitrary deadline John Kasich decided would be the time he could get away with legally forcing them to host a dead or dying fetus. This is extreme ratfuckery. It is heartless and arbitrary. It is the act of an ignorant dumbass and a Republican…but I repeat myself.

I can guess at the political calculus going on right now. Women are less likely to vote for Republicans anyway. Pregnant women are only a small fraction of all women. Pregnant women with serious fetal problems are even rarer, so this is a negligible fraction of the electorate. Meanwhile, white male evangelicals who reflexively reject any expectation of bodily autonomy among their feeemales are the major electoral force that must be appeased. So, balancing intense, acute suffering of a few women vs. fostering the smug piety of Christian men, we know which one wins in Kasich’s mind.

As if that mind can empathize at all with women, that is.

Aren’t you ashamed of your job?

Franklin Graham thinks all you technical people, you computer programmers and IT managers and such, have nothing to be proud of in your work.

“This is terrible. I live in North Carolina where so much of our manufacturing base has gone to other countries,” he insisted. “And people are out of jobs, are out of work. And they say, ‘But we’ll retrain you, we’ll let you be a computer programmer.’”

“They don’t want to be a computer programmer!” Graham continued. “They want to do the same job as their fathers and their grandfathers. There was pride in the manufacturing and the building. And we’ve taken all that away and it’s sad.”

Gosh. I wonder what he thinks of college professor. We don’t build nothin’.

Well, I guess I could go back to my roots. My father pumped gas for a good long while, and then worked as a diesel mechanic. I can’t honestly say that I ever dreamed of doing that for a living, but he was good at his job and worked hard.

His father before him was basically a seasonal farm worker, I think. I could aspire to apple-picking in Yakima during the fall, and working in the canneries in the winter, I suppose.

His father before him was also, I think, a migrant worker. His father before that was a farmer in Iowa who lost the farm in the aftermath of the Civil War. I suppose I could join the army and get malaria and lose everything I own. There has to be some pride in being host to millions of Plasmodium.

Before that, I don’t know many of the details, but I get the impression my family comes from a long line of scalawags and ruffians, which certainly does sound like something I could aspire to.

I wonder what Graham manufactures? At least I know there were no worthless, no-account, shameful, lying preachers in my ancestry.

An epistemological battering

Peter Boghossian has a schtick: he presents some simple, logical rules that are great for smacking down irrational claims and getting people to engage in critical thinking, and he shows how they can be applied effectively to ideas he doesn’t like. But then he pulls a switcheroo, and starts promoting his own biases, and never applies his own tools to them. It’s weird, annoying, and inconsistent, and it means I can never take him seriously. In his case, it’s obvious who shaves the barber — it’s no one, and he runs around absurdly unkempt and shaggy.

Siobhan does a marvelous and entertaining job of tearing Boghossian down. Go read that. I could just stop here, case closed, Siobhan has hammered all the high points, but I can’t help myself: Boghossian punched a few of my buttons, so I have to be all superfluous and redundant.

  1. There’s the “It’s all the Left’s fault!” mantra, which we’ve heard from the Sam Harris wing before.

    It’s fascinating. I would be lying to you if I told that I wasn’t genuinely concerned about Trump’s presidency. I think the Left bears considerable responsibility in him being elected.

    I think Boghossian would have no problem dealing with an accusation that “it’s atheists like you who make people turn to Jesus!”, but somehow he can’t recognize the inconsistency here. People who voted for Trump got him elected, not the people who didn’t vote for Trump. You could legitimately argue that poor decision-making and over-confidence by the Left contributed to Clinton’s loss, but let’s not let the people who pulled the lever for the horrible plutocrat off the hook. Do you deny them agency?

    But here’s another thing that bugs me: what side are you on? If you yourself are a left-leaning, social justice, anti-racism and misogyny type (as they all say they are), why are the complaints always phrased as “they lost the election” rather than “we lost the election”? These guys always refer to the losers in the second or third person, distancing themselves from the outcome. If you’re aligning yourself with the right wing, be confident and say so. Again, apply your reasoning to yourself. Are you willing to bear some of the responsibility for this election? What will you do in the future? Besides blaming everyone else.

  2. Then there’s his small-minded version of post-modernism.

    Disciplines such as gender studies don’t have a dialectic. They’re not truth seeking enterprises. They think they’ve already found they truth and exist to indoctrinate students. There is no dialectic at the core of those disciplines like there is in philosophy. And there are profoundly negative consequences for peoples’ views of reality — it untethers them from what’s real.

    This is so completely, utterly the reverse of the truth. Post-modernism does have a very severe dialectic, and in fact is all about dialectics, which I’ll remind Boghossian is the discipline of investigating or discussing the truth of opinions. It is actually the very heart of skepticism, although most people who call themselves skeptics are more interested in bigoted dismissal than, you know, investigating it. I’ve written about postmodernism before, so I’ll just quote Michael Bérubé here:

    Sokal’s admirers have projected almost anything they desire–and they have desired many things. In early 1997, Sokal came to the University of Illinois, and quite graciously offered to share the stage with me so that we could have a debate about the relation of postmodern philosophy to politics. It was there that I first unveiled my counterargument, namely, that the world really is divvied up into “brute fact” and “social fact,” just as philosopher John Searle says it is, but the distinction between brute fact and social fact is itself a social fact, not a brute fact, which is why the history of science is so interesting. Moreover, there are many things–like Down syndrome, as my second son has taught me–that reside squarely at the intersection between brute fact and social fact, such that new social facts (like policies of inclusion and early intervention) can help determine the brute facts of people’s lives (like their health and well-being).

    I love that counterargument. People like Boghossian like to thunder about how they know precisely what a fact is, yet never seem to recognize how strongly shaped their version of “fact” is conditioned by their social world, and never consider the possibility that social facts can represent a significant truth. Consider race, for instance. Race is scientific nonsense; people’s perception of “race” does not coincide with the patterns of descent they purport, and ought not to be used to justify the discrimination and prejudices they endorse. But at the same time, race is a social fact, and ignoring those perceptions has “profoundly negative consequences for peoples’ views of reality”. Declaring that all humans came from Africa is true, but doesn’t do a thing to negate the harsh realities of how society’s have judged humans on the basis of their skin color.

    Denying social facts, as Boghossian does, is harmful.

  3. Boghossian’s specific rant in this case is about gender, and again, he scores an own goal by failing to perceive his own social facts. In response to a quote from a transgender studies professor who rightly points out that biological sex is a complex, messy topic that doesn’t divide neatly into the boy-girl binary, he makes this ranting non-argument.

    That is the most asinine, ridiculous, preposterous piece of ideological tripe. The only way someone could possibly believe that is they’ve been sufficiently indoctrinated by radical Leftists. I was once covering a lecture for a colleague and this topic came up. I said: “If sex were really a cultural construction, why don’t men menstruate? Why don’t men have babies? Why are there no women on professional football teams?” And an individual from the back of the class got up and started yelling, “Fuck you,” gave me the middle finger, shouted at me and stormed out of class.

    That student did the right thing, and I give them credit for speaking out. Professors are supposed to be informed on a subject, and Boghossian just outed himself as an ignoramus.

    He’s a philosopher, for dog’s sake, and he just proudly created an ontological framework and declared it to be an absolute. Women are people who menstruate, have babies, and don’t play football; men are people who don’t menstruate, don’t have babies, and play football.

    Is he even aware of how intensely socially constructed his list is? Does he consider all the exceptions? He’s blitheringly oblivious. If I declared that, for example, women have long hair and men have short hair (which is not as absurd as it sounds — Americans of my parent’s generation took that as a fact), then I have just made Rachel Maddow a man and Fabio a woman. If you bounce back and rightly explain that there are multiple factors, not just one criterion, then you have admitted that the gender binary is already false. Thanks for doing my job for me.

    And if you try to play the “biological reality!” card, I’ll just point out all the exceptions to your claims that women menstruate (not all do), women have babies (childless women aren’t men), XX chromosomes (not always), and anatomy.

    Boghossian is not a biologist, yet he’s always claiming biological authority for his narrow-minded views. He’s a lot like creationists that way.

    4. Boghossian ends by citing his supporting sources, which is a good idea, but in his case, undermines everything he says. Who supports him? Dave Rubin, a right-wing pundit on youtube. Christina Hoff Sommers, anti-feminist hack and lackey of the right-wing American Enterprise Institute. Joe Rogan, misogynistic and unfunny comedian. And a Twitter account I’d never heard of before, @RealPeerReview, which is nothing but a person loudly laughing at gender studies articles they don’t understand. Some of those papers are terrible, I agree, but I seem to have frequently found papers in biology that are terrible (it’s actually not hard to do at all), and yet I don’t think all of biology is wrong, because I understand the theory and the evidence behind what I criticize. I can’t say that for Boghossian’s sources.

    Goddamn, but organized atheism has enabled a lot of cocky asswits who like to hide behind “objective reality”.