You might want to tune into Atheists Talk radio this morning

It’s at 9am Central time (you remembered to adjust your clocks, right?), and this week Atheists Talk radio features Geeks Without God to mock Ray Comfort and his new ‘movie’, The Atheist Delusion. They’re going to have to work hard to top the hilarity of Matt Barber’s serious review of the movie, though.

I mean it when I say “The Atheist Delusion” is the most persuasive and captivating answer to atheist questions I’ve ever seen on film. Without giving too much away, let me just say that non-believers and believers alike will be moved emotionally, spiritually and intellectually. I have no doubt that many who claim atheism at the beginning of the film, will be left well on their way to admitting His existence and infinite glory toward film’s end.

Geeks Without God can meet that challenge, I’m sure. Unless Minnesota’s atheist comedian/podcasting group was converted to Christianity by the movie.

I am deeply offended

This is a story about sex dolls — specifically, male sex dolls. By the way, totally NSFW.

I was horrified and offended. Not by the sex dolls, though, or the fact that some people really want these things — that’s fine, whatever floats your boat — but by a comment the owner makes. She’s asked by the reporter where these dolls are most popular, and she says “Texas, Minnesota, and Michigan…Republican states“.

I will have you know that Minnesota is not a Republican state.

I may have to sue for the damage to our reputation.

Who are the grown ups here?

Wow. You’ve probably heard about the Harvard men’s soccer team scandal — they’ve been compiling a yearly “scouting report” of the women’s soccer team, rating each team member’s appearance and speculating about their sexual preferences and other such juvenile shit. They ought to be deeply embarrassed. Their team has been suspended, which is an appropriate step, although if it keeps up it ought to be just completely shut down, but I doubt that the boys who thought such nonsense was funny are at all ashamed.

But then you need to read the response by Kelsey Clayman, Brooke Dickens, Alika Keene, Emily Mosbacher, Lauren Varela, and Haley Washburn, members of the women’s soccer team. The boys write like a puerile gang of inflamed testicles, the women write like thoughtful and intelligent human beings.

The sad reality is that we have come to expect this kind of behavior from so many men, that it is so “normal” to us we often decide it is not worth our time or effort to dwell on. Yet as the media has taken advantage of the Harvard name once more, it has become increasingly difficult to evade the pervasiveness of this story, harder still to elude the abhorrent judgment of our peers and the outrageous Internet commentary of the public, and hardest to subdue the embarrassment, disgust, and pain we feel as a result.

In all, we do not pity ourselves, nor do we ache most because of the personal nature of this attack. More than anything, we are frustrated that this is a reality that all women have faced in the past and will continue to face throughout their lives. We feel hopeless because men who are supposed to be our brothers degrade us like this. We are appalled that female athletes who are told to feel empowered and proud of their abilities are so regularly reduced to a physical appearance. We are distraught that mothers having daughters almost a half century after getting equal rights have to worry about men’s entitlement to bodies that aren’t theirs. We are concerned for the future, because we know that the only way we can truly move past this culture is for the very men who perpetrate it to stop it in its tracks.

Having considered members of this team our close friends for the past four years, we are beyond hurt to realize these individuals could encourage, silently observe, or participate in this kind of behavior, and for more than four years have neglected to apologize until this week.

I know who impresses me and who disappoints me, and it’s a shame the difference falls along such strong gender lines.

What also worries me is that I read this satirical (?) article on McSweeney’s right after that, and you know, it sounded less like satire and more like a really good idea.

The Constitution? Yeah, we’re done with that. We’ve enlisted a group of multi-racial women, The Founding Mothers, to draft a new document, The Socialist Mixtape, which will become the law of the land. We’re only going to let non-white, low-income women vote for the first 150 years or so — just until things settle down enough to let white men have a say.

Right now, if it were announced that the US was going to disenfranchise all white men (which includes me) until they learn a little intellectual maturity as a group, I wouldn’t be too horrified. I’d at least regard it as an idea that might have some merit. I’d worry more that it was a proposal that was going to anger the largest bloc of armed assholes in America.

Behe is still comfortably ensconced in a niche of ignorance

Back in the 1990s, when Behe first came out with his idea of irreducible complexity, I recall that there was some consternation in our little community of anti-creationist activists. Behe had done something novel: instead of denying all of the accumulated evidence, he instead turned the focus on the gaps in our knowledge. It’s something of a cunning plan, if you think about it; the scientific literature is full of papers where scientists say that now we understand Step X, but we still need to figure out Steps Y and Z, so let’s work (and get funded) for Y. In a sense, it’s brilliant, because instead of relying on creationist ignorance to advance his argument, he would use honest scientific ignorance instead.

So, have we worked out every single step in the evolution of the blood clotting pathway? No? Then all the gaps are filled in with God Design. Flagellum? Nope. Must have been design then. Resistance to anti-malarials by plasmodium? Clearly, if you haven’t isolated every genotype in the progression of the resistance, there is room for an invisible magic man done did it.

His other clever shuffle was to admit that there are natural processes at work, so every evolutionary change is the consequence of both the understood mechanisms and what he claims are necessary miraculous events, but that you can’t always tell which steps are caused by mutation/selection, and which are Designed. Which means that the scientists have to do all the work of documenting every step, while Behe sits back, does nothing, and gives credit to his unnamed Designer for all the parts that aren’t done. As Matt Herron points out:

Dr. Behe admits (in The Edge of Evolution) that there is “…great evidence that random mutation paired with natural selection can modify life in important ways,” so his view is that life’s diversity and complexity are best explained by a combination of natural and supernatural processes. In fact, I think that’s a fair summary of intelligent design in general. So to falsify intelligent design for a particular example, it’s not enough to show that natural processes are mainly responsible for its origin. No, you’d have to show that supernatural causes played no role at all, no matter how minor.

That’s the funny business that has kept him going for a quarter century now. He doesn’t have to do the work of showing that any of his hypothetical supernatural mechanisms actually operate anywhere, he does not have to test for Design, and in fact he has zero positive evidence for any of the processes that he claims must have been ticking away for millions of years. Meanwhile, real scientists have been measuring and demonstrating the phenomena described by modern evolutionary theory — drift, selection, recombination, etc. — and identifying specific instances of these mechanisms in action. Behe shrugs them off. He’s built a rationalization that allows for the existence of natural processes while demanding that all of the gaps be filled in with his Designer…who seems to be a reflection of his Catholic faith.

It’s infuriatingly dishonest, but he’s found a thriving niche. All the scientists think he’s a kook, while all the creationists who are so gullible that they believe in a great flood and 6000 year old earth look upon him as some kind of super-scientific genius.

Not going to worry about anything anymore

I got a solid 10 hours of sleep last night — I’m hoping that has cleared the last wisps of fog from this chaotic week out of my brain. I have decided I’m also not going to worry about this election any more: it’s out of my hands because I know who I’ll be voting for, the monstrous orange nincompoop has been wrecking the support of minorities and women, and they’re the ones who are going to decide this year, and most importantly, I have learned that Beyoncé is campaigning for Clinton. Game over, man.

I will worry about the aftermath later, but I think our homegrown candy-floss Hitler has effectively put a bullet in the brain of the Republican party, and there may be long-drawn-out and furious thrashings to come (it never used that brain much, so it’s not an insta-kill), but we’ll deal with those as they arise. Not even going to try and guess what the world will be like on Wednesday.

For now, I’m going drink some coffee and retire to my happy place. Even though that happy place is full of papers I need to grade.