Why I am an atheist – JB

I’m an anti-theist.  I used to be an atheist but I realized that it did not describe my true feelings.  And let’s face it somewhere between theist, atheist, and anti-theist it’s all about your belief system.  I grew up Mormon in the deep south.  My family are multi-generational Mormons active in both their faith and church leadership.  I left my religion at the age of 18 as I watched friends of mine coming back off their missions.  Young men and women who had been brainwashed and inculcated into the hyperbolic microcosm that is the mormon religion.

[Read more…]

A curious bit of frivolity

There’s this game called Minecraft (oh, have you heard of it?) which is a kind of world-builder game — you gather resources like wood and ore and meat, and you craft stuff out of it. I’ve learned something odd about it.

You gather wool from sheep. You can make colored wool with dyes.

Nice revelation: you can dye whole sheep and harvest colored wool from them. That was unexpected: it grows back in the color you dyed it. That’s not physiological!

And then…if you dye a sheep and then breed it to produce more sheep, the color breeds true. Dye two sheep lime green, and you can generate a whole flock of lime green sheep.

I don’t know whether to be appalled or delighted. It opens the door to exploring rules of Lamarckian inheritance, except there doesn’t seem to be any room for any kind of selection or predation or variation in anything that affects survival or reproduction. Someone tell the game makers to get a biologist as a consultant, there are possibilities here!

(I hear I can breed wolves, too, but I haven’t tried it. Do they vary in any interesting ways? Can I select for sheep-eating wolves?)

Rick Santorum finally says something that is true

Give him credit, everyone: he actually gets it right. At the Values Voter Summit, he declares 'We will never have the elite, smart people on our side…our colleges and universities, they won’t be on our side'.

He claims that instead of intelligence and education being allies of the conservative movement, there are only two things that count: church and family. He can keep his church, but he doesn’t get to claim sole ownership of family. Family is whatever human beings bring to it; family evolves; what I consider family, Rick Santorum and his cranky cronies disparage and reject and deny. Family is greater and broader than the narrow, bigoted, and patriarchal version that he wants to promote.

And my ideal of family is not incompatible with intelligence and knowledge and expertise. My families can grow cooperatively and with love and affection while embracing the entirety of human knowledge, seeking more, and adapting to the truth rather than dogma.

My families can go to colleges and universities and come away richer and wiser. At least, those who can afford it…and I want to make that education reachable by more people, unlike Santorum, who wants to limit it and despise it because it undermines his ideology of ignorance.

Speak louder, Catherine Deveny!

That Deveny…she’s always causing trouble. And good for her.

She recently appeared on a panel debate show on Australian TV, Q&A, with Peter Jensen, an Anglican bishop. Jensen is smug, smarmy ass: when he wasn’t whining that we need a respectful discussion about the issues, he was announcing that women should submit to men in marriage, that same-sex marriage is unbiblical, that homosexuality is a disease, and no, the homophobia of the church can’t possibly contribute to gay teen suicide rates. He’s one of those guys who puts on his politeness with his clerical collar, and thinks both make him absolutely right, and able to say the most vile lies with smooth confidence.

Catherine Deveny was brash, smart, and assertive, and openly atheist. She is also a woman. She spoke the truth — that the church is a medieval institution promoting homophobia and misogyny, and that the facts and an unbiased morality of equality do not support Jensen’s claims.

Guess which one got all the negative press?

…I should not have been surprised at the fall-out from Catherine Deveny’s appearance on ABC’s Q&A this week. Deveny’s opposition to Anglican Archbishop, Peter Jensen, resulted in an onslaught of vitriolic criticism and abuse – even from those who claim to support her positions on asylum seekers, same-sex marriage and women’s equality.

Even the Australian weighed in with an editorial reprimanding Deveny and the ABC for failing to show the Anglican Archbishop of Sydney ‘proper regard’ and ‘respect’.

While the Australian characterises (or more accurately, caricatures) Deveny as mocking, crude, crass and intolerant, Jensen is ‘frank, concerned and conciliatory on homosexual health issues’. Deveny, we are told, was guilty of ‘shouting down’ the Archbishop.

Don’t they realize that the proper regard and respect to show a leader of institutionalized dogma is to turn him away at the door, and to spit in his eye every time he demands a respect to his position that he won’t show to women, gays, the poor, the disabled, the disenfranchised? Catherine Deveny, rather than being excesively rude, showed remarkable restraint at having to sit next to the poisonous old fraud.

But no, Chrys Stevenson documents the insults flung at Deveny — she was a crazy bitch who should shut up and brought down the whole tone of the event by dominating the conversation. What about that?

Curiously, as this was one of the rare Q&A’s where the women (Catherine Deveny, Concetta Fierravanti-Wells and Anna Krien) outnumbered the men, the male guests (Peter Jensen and Chris Evans) still managed to dominate the conversation 55 per cent to 45 per cent.

To the contrary of her critics, I think the other panelists were all dreary bores who said a range of things (some sensible, some odious) and Deveny was the only person who made the event interesting. But this attention that the public pays to mouthy women (even when she clearly gave everyone else a chance to speak their piece) ought to be recognized for what it is: being nice is a tool of the status quo; complaining about tone is an attempt to silence the passion and outrage of the oppressed; privilege perpetuates itself by labeling difference as deviancy.

Keep on speaking up, Catherine Deveny!

Why I am an atheist – James Yakura

Because of Santa Claus.

Yes, this is going to take a bit of explaining. I was raised by parents who encouraged creativity and curiosity, who had shelves upon shelves of books on all walls of the house. And I had access to books as well: science fiction, fantasy, nonfiction. I remember quite clearly reading and rereading a science encyclopedia aimed at young children. I remember regular trips to the museum in Denver. I remember learning about how science worked by observing the world, and rejecting a belief if what was observed did not match the belief.

[Read more…]

Kanazawa pushback

I mentioned that Satoshi Kanazawa has a new column on Big Think. Now I’ve got two flavors of responses for you!

  1. Flavor #1 is spicy! Adam Lee, who is also on Big Think, is indignant that standards have dropped so low.

    I can only speculate as to the lapse in editorial judgment that must have occurred for Big Think to extend this racist, sexist, genocide-advocating pseudoscientific bigot a platform. Were they unaware of his views? Were they aware, but went ahead anyway because controversy is good for traffic? (Racism can’t be good for traffic, can it?)

    I don’t want to be accused of giving any extra publicity to Kanazawa, so I won’t be writing to criticize him again. However, I want to make it clear in the most emphatic terms that I think him utterly vile and contemptible. And rest assured, I intend to follow up with Big Think’s upper echelons to find out who made this decision and why, and I’ll update when I know more.

    Apparently, he did talk to the upper echelon at Big Think, because a nameless editorial source posted a response, which is Flavor #2.

  2. Flavor #2 is oleaginous, lumpy, and full of sugar — it’s a kind of lard-flavored ice cream, with bullshit chunks (Hmm, what would Ben & Jerry’s call that? “Fecal Globsplosion”?). The editors support Kanazawa with many adjectives.

    Having tracked his thinking for years, including having him appear for an interview on Big Think, we cannot help but admire Satoshi’s convictions to freedom of thought, even if sometimes we too have cringed at his missteps . At its best, it yields wondrous new perspectives on confounding aspects of modern life, such as the challenge of dating in big cities. At its worst, it yields the intellectual equivalent of shock-jock antics which serve as a call-to-arms for the legions of self-righteous self-promoters eager to decontextualize and oversimplify matters into stark injustices they condemn into oblivion across the cable news airwaves.

    Our support for his approach to thinking, and intellectual purview, should not be confused with an endorsement of his conclusions and prescriptions, to the extent that he actually argues on behalf of any specific outcome or conclusion in any given instance. The best and fairest criticisms of his work are truly academic in nature and involve just how far his cross-cutting postulates (one might call them intellectual mash-ups) can extend on the backs of the (current) consensus theories that underpin them and the empirical data he marshals alongside them (often circumstantially).

    Whoa. Read the whole thing. It reeks of desperate justifications, but it’s entertaining to watch this person twist themselves into knots trying to simultaneously praise Kanazawa while also trying to make sure they don’t get splashed with the slime from his certain eruptions.

Why I am an atheist – Ruthy McCoy

I wouldn’t have called myself an atheist during my childhood, but I certainly was un-churched and if someone had asked me about my opinion of god I would have shrugged my shoulders and said “I don’t know.  Maybe”.  But my friends believed in him and he seemed important to them, so I decided to test his existence by asking for him to show me a tornado because I had always wanted to see one.  I mean, he was supposedly all powerful and such, so that shouldn’t be such a difficult task, right?  I lived in Colorado where tornados were fairly common and I found that even under what should have been easy circumstances to produce a tornado (inclement weather), god could not do it when I asked.  I mean, god, god, you couldn’t even give me a god damn tornado when it was like all windy and lightning-ing and thundering everywhere?  Pathetic.  And so I decided there was probably nothing out there.

[Read more…]