I get email

This is new! I usually don’t get rape fantasies, but Thunderf00t’s angry rabble have opened up exciting new vistas.

The whole point of free-thinking is to express what you have been thinking to others; what would the point of Socrates’ trial have been if he had not made the impressive speeches he made? If the people judging him had simply written him off as ‘too out there’ and simply condemned him five minutes into his talking? The point I’m trying to make is that as much as I think Watson is at a minimum misguided, you are culpable for much worse. Free Speech is the fundamental human right; without it, we are all doomed. You removing his website because you disagree on a matter of opinion makes you as bad as the papacy banning books, or Iran banning books, etc. etc…. In other words, by shutting off free expression you have sauntered effortlessly to lines the old and evil; too much information is bad, we decide what you should be exposed to, let’s have Salman Rushdie killed for writing something we don’t agree with. You have not tried to have Tf00t killed yet(my, what restraint you have), but at this point I wouldn’t be surprised to see that either. You’re supposed to be a scientist; a little open-mindedness goes a long way in investigating the truth.

In this modern world the only way to survive and live well is to laugh, rather than cry… A little cynicism never hurt anyone.

Anyway, I don’t believe I shall be reading your blogs any more; at least until you apologize to Mr. f00t; if you don’t all I can to is hope you get raped to death by Jaguars in the Yucatan. Next time think with your brain instead of your balls, and maybe over time I’ll grow to trust and respect you again. until then, eat shit. I mean, you’re supposed to be a scientist, for Christ’s sake.

I could swear some more but based off what I know of you you’re probably bawling already. Nobody likes a crybaby. You old cunt.

Thanks for your time!

Phil Krstulich,

someone who actually believes in equality of right for all humankind, and who isn’t a two-faced fuck who pretends to be in favor of free speech while trying to stamp it out.

Curses! My plan to have Thunderf00t killed has been exposed!

I have now seen a teeny tiny fraction of what Anita Sarkeesian gets.

Episode CCCXLV: Nerds, geeks, dweebs

I’m about to depart for #cvg2012, the CONvergence con, where I shall spend a long, exhausting weekend with My People: the weirdos, the science nerds, the kids who were too smart to try out for the football team, the laughing accepting tolerant folks who don’t have to conform to the comfortable median. It shall be fun. It will almost certainly be distracting — here’s my schedule of the panels I’ll be on, and there will be others I’ll be attending — so this might be a slow weekend for the blog. Sorry, I’ll be busy.

You could always come on out to the con yourself — we’re partying all night long with the Skepchicks.

(Episode CCCXLIV: Just for the girls.)

A poll to determine whether Northern Ireland sucks

The National Trust of Northern Ireland should be embarrassed: they’ve taken one of the geological wonders of their country and slathered it in creationist bullshit in a visitor’s centre at the Giant’s Causeway.

The trust said that the exhibit gives recognition to the fact that, for creationists, the debate about the age of the Earth is still ongoing.

A statement read: "The Giants’ Causeway has always prompted debate about how it was formed and how old it is.

"One of the exhibits in the Giants’ Causeway Visitors’ Centre interpretation tells the story of the part the Giants’ Causeway played in the debate about how the Earth’s rocks were formed and the age of the Earth.

"This is an interactive audio exhibition in which visitors can hear some of the different debates from historical characters.

"In this exhibition we also acknowledge that for some people, this debate continues today and we reflect and respect the fact that creationists today have a different perspective on the age of the Earth from that of mainstream science."

The National Trust worked alongside the Caleb Foundation, which represents mainstream evangelical Christians in Northern Ireland, during the development of the centre.

Its chairman, Wallace Thompson, said he is pleased with the result of the engagement and the inclusion of the creationist view.

"We have worked closely with the National Trust over many months with a view to ensuring that the new Causeway Visitor Centre includes an acknowledgement both of the legitimacy of the creationist position on the origins of the unique Causeway stones and of the ongoing debate around this," Mr Thompson said.

Just because idiots disagree with science doesn’t mean there is a serious debate. There is no scientific argument over whether the earth is less than 10,000 years old or more then 4 billion, just as there is no scientific debate over whether stars are little holes punched in the firmament, or whether the moon is a great wheel of cheese drifting overhead. That a creationist organization is now claiming that their views have been legitimized by their inclusion ought to give them second thoughts.

There is a poll. Maybe Northern Ireland doesn’t suck too much, since it’s already going in the right way…but clearly they’ve got a lot of gullible faithheads in positions of responsibility in their government.

Do you think creationist views should be represented at the Giant’s Causeway Visitors’ Centre?

Yes 21.0%
No 78.6%
Don’t know 0.4%

Why I am an atheist – Beth

I went to Baptist church and Baptist school until fifth grade. One day during religious class, after the teacher said that people who don’t take the lord as their savior go to hell, I asked what happens to all the people who never have the chance to hear about God. “Everyone has heard about God,” she said. That just can’t be true, I pointed out— there are still remote tribes being discovered in the Amazon, for example, and that was even more true 200, 300, and 500 years ago. There have been literally billions of people who never had the chance to hear the Bible version of God, did they all go to hell? She just stubbornly maintained that EVERYONE has had the chance. It was so completely and obviously wrong that whatever child-like faith I’d had broke and drained away in an instant.

[Read more…]

Manhunt for Edamaruku

You want a lesson in bullying, take it from the Catholic church. Sanal Edamaruku is being hunted by the police at the behest of the Catholic church in India, all for the terrible crime of exposing a Catholic icon as nothing more than a leaking pipe. The latest news is that the police are actively trying to arrest him, at which time they will throw him into prison for an indeterminate length of time…probably just long enough for the church to organize a kangaroo court.

If you haven’t already, sign the petition. It is a travesty that exposing religious fraud is considered a crime anywhere in the world.

What kind of atheist are you?

I am accustomed to annoying people. A year and a half ago, I made this post about Dictionary Atheists that sent almost as much hate mail winging my way as desecrating a cracker did, and because I just love to poke people, I’m going to revisit it now.

I’ll admit that I took a rhetorically wrong approach that led many people to come away with the wrong impression. I was saying that dictionary atheists, those people who say they’re just atheists because they don’t believe in god, were simply reciting an equivalence and not addressing any of the interesting reasons why they were atheists, the stuff that we need to communicate to get other people to recognize our values and appreciate them. Somehow, in some people’s minds, this got turned into Tyrant PZ telling all the atheists what they have to believe, I think because they interpreted my criticisms of superficial explanations and a request to acknowledge deeper cognitive mechanisms to be a demand that there is only one good way to think, which is not true at all.

So I’m going to try something different. I’ve been reading all these “Why I am an atheist” stories, as well as various atheist blogs, and what I see is a couple of major strands of atheist thought. Let’s put together a brief and preliminary taxonomy of atheists! Maybe it will help clarify things, because I consider all of these ways of being an atheist as being perfectly valid, so it should be clear I’m not being judgmental or trying to shoehorn everyone into my flawless mold. But I do think we should all try to be aware of the underpinnings of our ideas.

I see four major categories of thoughtful atheists: scientific atheists, philosophical atheists, political atheists, and humanists. I’m going to describe what I think are the major strengths and weaknesses of each; you can tell me whether you think we need more divisions and better defining characteristics, but be warned, taxonomically I’m more of a lumper than a splitter.

[Read more…]

We told him to do that

Ian Cromwell has some fun with the mythology outsiders have about Freethoughtblogs — did you know it’s a radical feminist hive mind here? I have to say, whenever I see someone talk about “radical feminist” unironically, I have the same frisson of rising ridicule I get when I see them babble about “militant atheist”.

By the way, despite all the furor lately (or because of it), I’m getting a number of requests from people wanting to join Freethoughtblogs, and asking how to do it. It’s not easy, especially right now.

We have a vaguely defined limit on how many blogs we want to take on. I think the major limitation is that right now, Ed Brayton has all the administrative duties, and we don’t want to break him. We’re getting close to what he can handle already.

Up to this point, we’ve been rather casual about it all — the bloggers discuss it, every once in a while someone emerges from those discussions as really good, and we send an invite. It’s worked exceptionally well so far, and I think we’ve got a great collection of people here, but it is going to have a significant failure rate, as we’ve recently discovered. We’re in the process of tightening up our procedure right now. That means we’re a closed shop for a little while, until we’ve resolved everything.

We don’t and won’t have an admissions boss — no one will have unilateral say on who gets in. We have an admissions committee to do preliminary review, but I’m not on it (and I won’t tell you who is), so there’s no point to sucking up to me. Again, it’s a consensus thing.

So don’t ask us, we’ll ask you is really the answer.

Your best strategy: write a really good blog. Write well. Write consistently. Talk about subjects the FtB bloggers are interested in. But of course, if you can do all that, you don’t need to be on FtB.

Also, did I ever tell you that early in my science career I was a surgical assistant, and my main job was carving into animals’ skulls with dental drills and using a stereotaxic to insert probes and cannulae that I’d then fix into place permanently with great globs of dental acrylic? Check our bloggers heads for little lumps of pink plastic with wires dangling out.