Why I am an atheist – Patrick Kelley

I was raised alternately in general Protestant and Lutheran churches, and my parents can’t be blamed for a lack of trying.  I can’t claim ignorance, so I’m among the worst of the damned in the eyes of some.  I started out believing, right up until I got a less than satisfactory answer to the doctrine of ignorance and original sin and salvation.  I came from an abusive home, and obsessed over fairness since punishment in my home was often disproportionate and arbitrary.  It was at that moment I recognised God as he’d been described as an abusive parent.  I could not believe that such a being as my stepfather ran the universe, or rather one so apparently powerless as my mother stood by and allowed suffering and death.  I was eight.  This was the beginning of my doubts.  I realized that the people claiming to know God’s will were like me claiming to know when I’d be yanked out of bed over a dirty dish, or yelled at for literally doing nothing. Whatever there was, they had no idea when it would act or why.   

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Thunderf00t/Phil Mason, treacherous hack

Fuck Thunderf00t/Phil Mason. The accounts that Zinnia and Natalie and Ashley have revealed are true: for the past month, Thunderf00t took advantage of a security exploit to hack into our private mail server; when the hole was closed, he tried multiple time to use the same exploit to get back in. He knowingly and willfully violated a confidential email list. And worse, what he has since been doing (and this is how we discovered the security flaw in the first place) is disseminating some of this email to third parties.

Yeah, this is the guy who expressed such outrage at people ‘dropping docs’ on him, but he has absolutely no qualms about breaking legally binding confidentiality of an LLC, and thinks it’s just fine to hold hostage personal information on pseudonymous posters who, under the promise of privacy, had discussed personal matters and job-related issues. He is a colossal hypocrite.

Just to make matters even worse, I woke up this morning to find some reassuring email from some friends of his, who had basically staged an intervention, trying to get him to back off from his unethical behavior. I was told that he had listened and agreed, and piously assured everyone that he thought the goals of the freethought movement were most important, and that we should all step away from the petty divisiveness and concentrate on education, science, secularism, and politics. His friends wrote to me and they sounded quite convinced that he was sincere and high minded.

And then he turned around, no doubt chortling to himself, and posted another slimy, sneering, lying article about freethoughtblogs. It’s appalling. Not only has he stabbed FtB in the back, but he has no qualms about lying to and betraying the people he still regards as friends.

Yes, we want to make Thunderf00t/Phil Mason a pariah in the atheist movement, and for good reason: he’s a dishonest scumbag. The nice thing for us is that he’s making it easy: Phil Mason is destroying his own reputation with his sleazy behavior. Who in their right mind would ever trust that guy with any confidence at all?

Don’t go into the light…until I’ve milked this story for another book

A while back, I wrote a couple of articles on near-death experiences: The NDE delusion and Near-death, rehashed. It’s a topic I’ve been following off and on for quite a few years.

So I was quite surprised to see this name popping up in the news lately: Melvin Morse. Morse is one of those gullible paranormalists who has a couple of sloppily breathless books out about NDEs — he gets mentioned a couple of times in this nice article debunking a couple of well-known cases. His specialty is describing NDEs in children.

Yeah, children. Which adds a little extra disgust to the news.

He has been arrested for waterboarding his own daughter, punishing her by holding her head under a running faucet so she couldn’t breathe.

The daughter told police she “could never understand what she did to be punished” and felt scared, court documents reported. Once, she said, her father told her he “was going to wrap her in a blanket and do it so that she could not move.” In another instance, she said Melvin Morse told her that “she could go five minutes without brain damage.”

…

After her father did these things, the girl said she would “go outside and cry,” prompting Melvin Morse to come outside and then “hold her nose and mouth with his hand,” police said in court records.

“He would tell her she was lucky he did not use duct tape,” police said in the documents. “He would not let go until she lost feeling and collapsed to the ground.”

It sounds like he was trying to do a little “research” on his own child. There’s good money in almost-dead children, you know.

Baseball game settled by a poll?

It’s time for a ball game tomorrow evening: the Mr Paul Aints vs the Amarillo Sox, sponsored by Minnesota Atheists. A few people in the Texas media are a bit concerned about participating in a godless game, and they’ve put up a poll about whether the Amarillo team should forfeit rather than throw their ball around while atheists stand around and watch.

Do you think the Amarillo Sox should still participate in the game?

Yes 58%

No 42%

To their credit, the team is not considering abandoning their responsibilities, so they’ll be there. It’s sad that about half the Texans would boycott us.

I’ll also be there! Minnesota Atheists will be having a tailgate party beginning at 5 in the stadium parking lot. Midway Stadium is at 1771 Energy Park Drive St. Paul, MN 55108. I’ll be there in my official Mr Paul Aints jersey, stroll up and say hello.

A little victory against a wingnut

Everyone go congratulate Chris Rodda. She’s been battling that dishonest dirtbag David Barton for a long time, and now he’s getting his comeuppance (although without acknowledgment of her contribution): NPR slammed him hard, and now his publisher has yanked his latest book off the shelves for it’s crappy scholarship.

Here’s a taste of his sloppy knowledge of history. Did you know the founding fathers already had the creation/evolution debate? And decided in favor of creationism?

I’m ready for my close-up

I’m getting a bit peeved at all this new technology. Why, back in the day when I was doing electron microscopy work, I’d spend days slicing up tiny fragments of zebrafish embedded in epon-araldite with an ultramicrotome, and I’d end up with hundreds of itty-bitty copper grids that I’d put in the EM one by one, pumping the chamber down to a good vacuum and scanning and focusing and taking pictures. On a film cartridge! That I had to take into a darkroom and process myself! Both ways, uphill, in the snow!

And now look at this. These guys can make a single thin section slice of the whole larva, throw it in a machine, and step back while it automatically scans everything, and then throws it all onto a digital image. Of course, in this case it took their machine 4½ days to shoot over 26,000 images and then stitch them all together, but that’s still far faster than I ever was. I’d slave away to get just one good picture of a chunk of synaptic neuropil maybe 20 micrometers on a side.

Damn. Now I know how John Henry felt.

So here’s a transmission electron micrograph of a zebrafish at low resolution, just to help orient yourself. Ah, this is all familiar stuff; I spent most of my time hanging out in the nervous system, but those blocks of muscle (pink) on the left are always beautiful to look at. That big hole in the middle is the swim bladder, and the guts are slung underneath that. This is a parasaggital section — just off the midline — so it slices nicely through the eye (the big dark circle on the right) and also catches one nostril, above (that’s right, not where you might expect it*) and to the right of the eye. The scattered fragmentary stuff at the bottom, in front of the swim bladder, are sections through the pharyngeal arches. Take a look at the pretty cartilaginous rods sliced through in there.


The virtual slide was recorded at 120 kV with a magnification at the detector plane of 9460. A set of points was manually selected to outline the zebrafish and the convex hull of these points was used to define the data collection area. A total of 26,434 unbinned 4k × 4k images was collected with a FEI Eagle CCD camera (>8 s readout time full frame) in 4.5 d. The sample was maintained at −1 µm defocus throughout the whole data collection. The resulting slide of 1,461 × 604 µm2 consists of 921,600 × 380,928 pixels of 1.6 nm square each. The net data content of this slide is 281 Gpixel.

This is at high enough resolution that you can browse around the brain and find synapses and vesicles. Oh, you can’t see that? Go to the visual browser, and you’ll be able to zoom in and in and in. Easily. With no effort. Just glide on in there and find what you want.

Unlike my old experience with EM. Hey, if any of you have a time machine handy, could you grab one of these gadgets and drop it off for me in Eugene, Oregon, about 1982? Thanks.

*In case you’re wondering how nostrils can be above the eye, visualize a bulldog. Now grab it by the snout, and lift upward, stretching the face up so that a forward view is just a shot of the jaws with eyes on either side. Or, better than a bulldog, start with Admiral Ackbar.

Frank G.A. Faas, M. Cristina Avramut, Bernard M. van den Berg, A. Mieke Mommaas, Abraham J. Koster, Raimond B.G. Ravelli (2012) Virtual nanoscopy: Generation of ultra-large high resolution electron microscopy maps. Journal of Cell Biology 198:457-469 DOI: 10.1083/jcb.201201140.