Why I am an atheist – Alan-Michael White

At the age of fifteen, the fetid stink of religion became unavoidable.  Every rotten iota of institutionalized religion became unignorable and unavoidable.  My faith doubled down to brace for this assault.  I read the Bible cover to cover and my philosophy changed to one of personal behavior.  I could no longer believe atheists went to Hell when so many horrible Christians went to heaven.  This was, for me, my first run in with the hypocrisy of belief and religion.  My once firm and indomitable belief that the Bible was the literal word of God had been undermined by the behavior of its followers and the text it contained.

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“uncomfortable by my presence”

Do not wear humorous t-shirts on a plane. Do not mock the absurdity of the TSA security theater. And most of all…

Having been booted from our flight, the transit police now began to aggressively question us. At one point, I was asked where my brother lives (he was the one who gifted me the shirt). A bit surprised by the irrelevant question, I paused for a moment before answering.

“You had to think about that one. How come?,” she asked. I explained he recently moved. “Where’d he move from?” “Michigan,” I respond. “Michigan, what’s that?,” she says. At this point, the main TSA agent who’d questioned me earlier interjected: “He said ‘Michigan’.” Unable to withhold my snark, I responded with an eye-rolling sneer: “You’ve never heard of Michigan?”

This response did not please her partner, a transit cop named Mark. Mark grabbed his walkie-talkie and alerted his supervisor and proceeded to request that he be granted permission to question me further in a private room. His justification?: “First he hesitated, then he gave a stupid answer.” Michigan, my friends, is a stupid answer.

And then, he decided to drop any façade of fair treatment: the veil was lifted, this was about who I was and how I looked: “And he looks foreign.”

…do not look foreign.

Arijit got to experience the full weight of our stupid airport security system: he was thoroughly screened, held over and questioned at length, and ultimately kicked off a flight because he made the bigot sitting at the controls feel “uncomfortable”.

(A prediction: someone in the comments will blame the victim. He shouldn’t have been wearing a scary t-shirt, they will say, or he should have been deferential and cast his eyes downward and answered every stupid question politely. Just so I don’t have to reply to every such inanity, I offer you this preemptive reply: fuck you. Attitude is not and should not be a crime. Nor should be flying while brown.)

You have disappointed me, New Zealand

John Banks is a Bible-believing Christian in New Zealand who accepts the literal truth of the book of Genesis.

John Banks told Radio Rhema that he has no doubts the first chapters of Genesis are true.

"That’s what I believe, but I’m not going to impose my beliefs on other people, especially in this post-Christian society that we live in, especially in these lamentable times.”

"There are reactionaries out there, humanists in particular, that overrun the bureaucracies in Wellington and state education.”

How nice that he’s not going to impose his views on others. Unfortunately, John Banks is the Associate Education Minister. Don’t ask me, I have no idea how these kooks get positions of responsibility like that.

I’m also disappointed in the NZ Herald, that chose to end the article with this dull clunk.

Bible scholars are divided over whether this is a literal description or an allegory to help people understand how the world came into being.

Really? Doesn’t this rather suggest that if “bible scholars” can’t agree on this issue of consistency with reality, we should just ignore “bible scholars” instead of citing them as vague authorities in news articles?

Academic realities

Oh, great, another depressing article about the state of American academia.

My friend is an adjunct. She has a PhD in anthropology and teaches at a university, where she is paid $2100 per course. While she is a professor, she is not a Professor. She is, like 67 per cent of American university faculty, a part-time employee on a contract that may or may not be renewed each semester. She receives no benefits or health care.

According to the Adjunct Project, a crowdsourced website revealing adjunct wages – data which universities have long kept under wraps – her salary is about average. If she taught five classes a year, a typical full-time faculty course load, she would make $10,500, well below the poverty line. Some adjuncts make more. I have one friend who was offered $5000 per course, but he turned it down and requested less so that his children would still qualify for food stamps.

Why is my friend, a smart woman with no money, spending nearly $2000 to attend a conference she cannot afford? She is looking for a way out. In America, academic hiring is rigid and seasonal. Each discipline has a conference, usually held in the fall, where interviews take place. These interviews can be announced days or even hours in advance, so most people book beforehand, often to receive no interviews at all.

By the way, five course per year — the standard 3/2 load — is what I teach. It represents about 20 contact hours per week, and doesn’t include all the preparation time. Or in the case of adjuncts, the commute time: I knew of adjuncts in the Philadelphia area who taught 5 or 6 or more courses, each one at a different university.

And as the article points out, there are additional costs to being in the professoriat. I’m at a small university, and we get several hundred dollars per year for travel (although we’d be in trouble if every faculty member tapped into that fund), but adjuncts typically get nothing, and are entirely on their own. A lot of journals also have page costs if you want to publish…that has to come out of your pocket if you’re an adjunct.

This is a telling quote from the article:

The adjunct problem is emblematic of broader trends in American employment: the end of higher education as a means to prosperity, and the severing of opportunity to all but the most privileged.

Howdy, neighbor!

Oh, look. Guess who just moved in to the north of me, in Fargo? Anil Potti. He is the cancer ‘researcher’ who is known to have fabricated data in 18 papers, made up credentials on his CV, and most entertainingly, hired an online reputation manager to bury his sordid record in a barrage of online pablum.

The Wikipedia article on Potti is fairly thorough. He published in a number of high profile journals, NEJM, Nature Medicine, PNAS, Lancet Oncology, for instance, and wrote about cancer diagnosis and therapeutics — poor work made up to generate buzz, and since retracted. And now he’s working in…a cancer center. Remind me if ever I come down with a cancer, not to go to the Cancer Center of North Dakota. I’d rather have a doctor who doesn’t make stuff up.

The czar and the patriarch

Forgive me, I haven’t been keeping up with the Pussy Riot story — this is just the worst possible time of the year for me, with classes starting tomorrow. But I strongly recommend Eric Macdonald’s summary: this is a collusion between an old school tyrant, Putin, and the Russian Orthodox church to silence criticism, and to promote an unthinking, dogmatic nationalism. It’s not just Russia, either, but similar forces are at work in the United States, where God and Country are deeply entangled, and it’s a recipe for world-wide catastrophe.

The problem with Pussy Riot is that they see this clearly, and their music opposes both czar and patriarch. Look at their latest video and you can see their contempt for both.

(You don’t like their music? Tough. I thought it was wonderfully loud and angry and political, and if you don’t care for it, I’m pretty sure Lawrence Welk is still available in reruns on cable. Also, you don’t have to like it to respect the freedom of artists to express themselves.)

There’s also a third cause they’re clearly opposing: the historical confinement of women to very specific gender roles. I don’t know exactly what is going on in Russia, but it seems to be the women who are leading the charge against tyranny. Take a look at the Ukrainian FEMEN, too. Women are becoming the bravest of us all.

They aren’t just fighting against a tyrant and orthodoxy, but against the gender police. I’ve got to admire that.