TWO Pointless Petitions!

The haters created a petition to remove Rebecca Watson from Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe. It’s ridiculous; Steve Novella isn’t going to pay any attention to a clearly biased sample, especially since the response is pathetic. 70 people have signed on, including Hoggle and his tiny crew of cretins. And if you read the comments, you’ll notice that it looks like about half of them are yanking the creators’ chain.

Watson is dogmatically dedicated to unproven ideas like “rape is bad” and “blacks should be allowed to vote”. That’s not what skepticism is about! Skepticism is about making me feel super smrt for not believing in Bigfoot! How can I feel smrt around a girl?!?! Her withering glare makes my penis feel even smaller than its two inches.

In contrast, another petition to keep Rebecca Watson on the show has been made. It’s just as pointless — Novella isn’t going to pay any attention to it, either — but notice the numbers: it already has 306 signatures.

Feel free to crash either one.

I’m back

But still a little shell-shocked. I had a terrible flight back from Denver, thanks to the incompetence of the staff at the Delta desk and the weather, and landing at the airport after 10pm and having a 3 hour drive back didn’t help, either. I just staggered up now and took a shower and desperately need a cup of tea.

But I wanted to quickly mention two things. One was something weird in my talk. I was (once again) making the argument that there had to be more to the atheism movement than just the dictionary definition, and I first made the case that we’ve comfortably accommodated much bigger, loftier goals than not believing in gods, by pointing out that we readily accept science as part of the atheist parcel. And then I moved on to asking whether there were other things we’d be willing to say that atheists, as a movement, ought to fight for. What are the secular causes?

“Science Education?” I asked. And the audience said “yes”.

“Environmentalism?” I asked. And the audience said “yes”.

“Civil rights for minorities?” I asked. And the audience said “yes,” loudly.

“Gay marriage?” I asked. And the audience yelled back “yes”.

“Feminism?” I asked. And the audience shouted “yes”.

It was weird. I kind of expected that at some point the audience would start tapering off or even saying “no,” and they didn’t. They got louder (which was also due to getting warmed up, I’m sure.) Here I was, all prepared to talk about the importance of each of those, and they just rolled over and made it easy for me. In the Q&A, I was later asked, in response to my suggestion that atheist organizations ought to have more prominent special interest groups to pursue specific sub-goals of the movement, if that wouldn’t dilute the focus of the whole organization, which was a reasonable concern, but that was the only reservation I heard. See, weird…from all the pushback we see on the web, you’d think there’d be more objections. I’m pretty sure it’s not my awesome personal charisma that overwhelmed any dissent.

Later in the talk, a similar thing happened. I showed a slide with just this on it:

The audience erupted into applause before I even said anything! I really missed an opportunity — I should have just done an Atheism+ talk and gotten wild accolades. I actually didn’t say a lot about it: I was making the case that the strong response to this idea should be telling every atheist organization something…that there is a huge swell of interest in their potential membership in making social justice issues a much bigger part of the movement.

Oh, and the second thing: I was having lunch with Matt Dillahunty and AronRa, and the possibility of doing a freethoughtblogs conference came up. We bounced around some really cool ideas about making it different from all those other conferences (for instance, what if we did it in Cincinnati, and made challenging Answers in Genesis part of it? What about bringing teenagers in to plan the social part of it all?), but it’s all very tentative and remote at this time — don’t get your hopes up. I thought I’d ask, though…would there be interest in having a free or very inexpensive con ala Skepticon centered around the FtB roster and our pet issues? Should we think a little more seriously about it?

That was quick. Video of the talk is now available.

The New Molly

You may recall that when I imposed the new rules on the site I also announced that there would also be changes to how the Molly awards were given: instead of giving them to commenters, we’d award them to specific comments. I suggested at that time that you might all start making note of exceptional comments — now it’s time to refer back to those notes.

Here’s the way it works: People should repost a link and quote from their favorite comments here; you can also just chime in and voice your approval for people’s choices. I’ll let you guys chime in here for a few days, and develop a preliminary list. I’ll then pick out the top three and post them in their entirety in a top-level post on Wednesday, and you’ll all vote (Yes! An online poll!) for the best.

So go to it. Think back over the last month or so and tell me what comment you found most enlightening, entertaining, provocative, or otherwise stimulating.

The Primate of All Ireland speaks

I don’t follow the who’s who of the Catholic hierarchy; when I hear the phrase “Primate of All Ireland”, I think of Ussher, the fellow who notoriously calculated the age of the earth using a combination of crude genealogy and numerology. He’s gone down in history for getting it all wrong; so will this one.

While I felt that Ireland as a whole had begun to progress, Cardinal Sean Brady recently issued a statement declaring that any attempt made by the government of Ireland to legislate for abortion due to a judgement made by the European Court of Human Rights would be; “vigorously and comprehensively opposed by many”.

This is nothing new. The Catholic church has always taken a strong stand against human rights.

Republicans speak to the invisible man

Marco Rubio spoke to the RNC last night, and reminded everyone that we atheists aren’t Americans after all.

We are special [We are?] because we’ve been united not by a common race or ethnicity [This is true of many countries. What about Canada?]. We’re bound together by common values [Again, trivially true of most countries]. That family is the most important institution in society [Is there a country that doesn’t have and value families?]. That almighty God is the source of all we have [Nope. Wrong. We built that].

Special, because we’ve never made the mistake of believing that we are so smart that we can rely solely on our leaders or our government [Nice sentiment in a speech where he’s trying to convince us to rely on Mitt Romney].

Our national motto is "In God we Trust," reminding us that faith in our Creator is the most important American value of all [Fuck you too, Marco Rubio].

And special because we’ve always understood the scriptural admonition that "for everyone to whom much is given, from him much will be required." [Say what? So the rich should pay more taxes?]

We are a blessed people [Nope. We’re lucky. Some of us are rich. But millions are poor and hungry and ignorant. Don’t forget them]. And we have honored those blessings with the enduring example of an exceptional America [What seems to be making us particularly exceptional among wealthy nations is the idiocy of our leaders and the piety of our population, neither of which is anything to be proud of].

I think it was a theme. They brought on Clint Eastwood to make a stumbling address to an invisible man in an empty chair, and Rubio to do the same thing with a bit more polish.

The Republicans can kiss the atheist vote goodbye, but it makes me wonder…are there any atheists left in the Republican party, besides Karl Rove?