But atheists can be secularists

Jacques Berlinerblau just really dislikes atheists. I don’t know how else to account for this bizarre article in which he announces that Secularists are not atheists. Oh, yeah, I say? We know. I’m a big fan of Americans United…and I know full well that it is not an atheist organization. I also know that the history of church-state separation in the US, and that it was driven not by atheists (who were nearly nonexistent until the last century), but by diverse religious interests.

So why is Berlinerblau complaining? Because of two factors: fundamentalist Christians who want to make secularism synonymous with atheism to demonize the cause, and because atheist organizations have risen in strength and numbers enough to have built lobbying organizations that fight for secularism. Who is the villain Berlinerblau will chastise? Guess what: it’s not the Christian fanatics who abuse the term. It’s atheists who dare to speak up in support of secularism.

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Satoshi Kanazawa is back

Now he’s got a gig at Big Think. Kanazawa, you may recall, is the evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics who loves to make racist arguments and then go racing to the data to find selective support for them; he’s a terrible scientist. I’m no big fan of evolutionary psychology, not because I think its premises are wrong (evolution did shape how our brains work), but because it is trivially easy to find lazy, bad scientists who have hopped on the bandwagon because it is an easy path to media sensationalism — and Kanazawa is the kibitzer dancing in the locomotive cabin, constantly yanking the chain to make the whistle blow.

Kanazawa is the guy who claimed to look objectively at the data and thereby determined that black women are ugly (he also thinks Africans are stupid), and whose data were examined and found to have been selectively extracted. He got a lot of flak for that, and while he wasn’t kicked out of Psychology Today, where he had his column, he hasn’t posted anything there in over a year, so I suspect there was some pressure applied. Which is too bad…every time he opens his mouth, he’s a great target for beating up bad science.

So now he’s at Big Think, and his first column is…the same old thing all over again. The first half of it is all defensive bluster, in which he claims he’s just a dedicated scientist following the data where ever it might go, and his enemies are all Politically Correct cowards and leftists (yeah, he’s also a vicious right wing nutter). And then he goes on to defend, once again, his claim that black women and Asian males are ugly.

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Crown Clade of Creation

I’ve been writing at Coyote Crossing/Creek Running North for nearly a decade, and in the decade’s worth of archives there are a handful of posts that really seem like they ought to live here. So every month or two I’ll dust one of them off, if it’s not too horribly outdated, and put it here for your delectation or dissection.

This one is a 2006 review of the abysmal “biology” “textbook” Biology: God’s Living Creation, published by the creationists at A Beka Books.

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I can learn more from an ant than I can from Christianity

Answers in Genesis gets email, and they recently published a critical message which they then thoroughly rebutted. Not.

Their critic pointed out the absurdity of believing the earth is only 6000 years old and that dinosaurs and humans lived together, and also made the point that an indifferent nature is not influenced by biblical beliefs. AiG answered, and it’s actually rather interesting as a condensed summary of their fallacies.

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Why I am an atheist – Nick Chackowsky

I was a “moderate” Christian (Lutheran, then Anglican) on and off for many years, but the more I learned about the history of religion and the nature of the universe, the more mental gymnastics I found myself going through, much to my cost. Okay, I can believe X if by X I mean Y. It was one of those moments at a Good Friday service a few years ago–Okay, I can accept that I’m a hopeless sinner if by hopeless sinner I mean… what?– that forced me mid-service to pick up my vestments and exit the choir, to which I haven’t returned.

The other issue I just could not reconcile, gymnastics and all, was theodicy: explaining how a good, wise, and powerful god could allow needless and vast pain and suffering. I’ve never heard an explanation that made sense! The misery of billions, human and otherwise, testifies to the absence of any god like that.
And so, rather painlessly and much to my gain in mental health, I’ve renounced god, the church, and all their empty promises.

Nick Chackowsky
Canada

Needless intrablogular drama-stirring

I recognize that there are certain aspects of Pharyngula’s corporate culture that are to be trifled with only at the risk of great social peril. I also recognize that Freethought Blogs as a whole might well be leary of new people coming on board and then immediately posting things that run counter to everything the community here stands for. PZ and I have agreed that my participation here is on an “at will” basis for that very reason. It’s a sound and well-justified measure.

But there are times when a person must say what she or he must.

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Anti-caturday post

How can you limit yourself to cats in a world full of strange creatures? Here’s a mammal I never even heard of before: it’s incredibly rare, it has a very limited range, it’s the lonely relic species (only two species, one in Spain and one in Russia, of its group left, all the rest are extinct) of a once diverse and successful tribe, and it’s really weird. It’s the Pyrenean Desman.

It’s a small aquatic mammal with a long snout fringed with sensitive whiskers, large hindlimbs with webbed feet, and small forelimbs; it lives in mountain streams in Spain and the Pyrenees, foraging for small crustaceans and snails in the muck. It’s a talpid, of the family of moles, but it’s uniquely adapted to swimming rather than digging.

It’s going extinct. Dams and development are destroying its habitat, and it seems to be particularly sensitive to pollution.

Wait, I say. Here is this exotic, obscure mammal with unique adaptations and its own special history, the product of a long, independent lineage of many tens of millions of years, and now, here in my brief lifetime, just as I learn about it, it looks like that novel genetic lineage will be shortly snuffed out, lost forever?

That seems to happen a lot around us humans. We need to learn to make room for our other partners on this planet.