CoR is everywhere

i-68a94b1012601667ed52443badfa9671-CoR_NY.jpeg

Those rascals at the Coalition of Reason are stirring up mischief again — people are sending me all these news stories about ads going up in the NY subways, Boston, Chicago, and so forth. They are making trouble for atheists! Didn’t they get the word that we’re supposed to be as quiet as mice, laying low and avoiding antagonizing the elephantine majority that might just squish us? Any active response by a subset of atheists will also mean that some other subset will be doing something different, which will create Deep Rifts, and we can’t have that.

Nah, I’m just pulling your leg. Get out there and make some noise. CoR seems to be doing a fine job of coordinating national awareness campaigns.

Oprah may not have puked at the mention of atheism! It’s a breakthrough!

Greg Laden reports that Oprah actually had positive things to say about the quality of life in Denmark, and may even have been non-condemning in a brief comment about their godlessness. I am shocked, shocked I tell you, that Greg spends his afternoons watching Oprah. But after that, I’m mildly and pleasantly surprised. I doubt that much was said about it (parts of the program are online, but no, I simply can’t bear to watch it), but at least it’s one tiny step toward mainstreaming atheism.

Promising new developments

Scienceblogs grows a little more, with the addition of two new blogs.

We now have Pamela Ronald talking about food and farm science at Tomorrow’s Table. That should fill a gap in the coverage here!

The other entry might be of more interest to readers here, because of the topics covered. We’ve drawn David Sloan Wilson away from the awful Huffington Post, and he’ll be posting on Evolution for Everyone. He’s a very big name in evolution, and I’ve commented on his work before: I think he’s provocative and interesting, but disagree strongly with him on some parts of his ideas about religion. I’ll also be very interested in seeing him present his case for group selection.

Piling on Bill Donohue again

It’s cruel, but he is such a tempting target, so full of himself and so, so crazy. It seems The Simpsons tossed out some mild one-liner making fun of communion (“What kind of civilized people eat the body and blood of their savior?”), and Bill Donohue has fired off another angry fax (“mocking the heart of any religion always crosses the line, and mocking the Eucharist does it for Catholics.”)

Too bad, Bill. Silly superstitions will always be a magnet for mockery.

You can see the whole Simpsons episode and Donohue’s full complaint at The Friendly Atheist.

Homeopaths on a poll — redux

I already sent you off to vote on this German poll that would have awarded homeopaths a prize…and you all did good, giving the good guys, SOZIALHELDEN (Social Heroes), a solid lead over the dangerous crackpots, Homöopathen ohne Grenzen (Homeopaths without borders).

Unfortunately, the poll didn’t end then. It’s been going on all this time, and the quacks have been creeping up, and are actually getting close to winning. So I must send you off again: go vote, or “Stimme abgeben”!

Dawkins vs. Hewitt

Whoa. Richard Dawkins appeared on the Hugh Hewitt show. Hewitt, in case you didn’t know, is one of those far right radio wingnuts, a lawyer with a blog who defended George W. Bush, the Iraq war, and always sides with religious conservatives in the culture wars.

It’s a fairly long interview, and you can see Hewitt trying to make lawyerly probes to lead Dawkins away from the book, and he’s also good at making lawyerly innuendo for his already anti-Dawkins audience — he’s constantly trying to cast doubt on the evidence for evolution, for instance — and you can tell that Richard is getting increasingly exasperated with the silly line of interrogation…until he finally snaps.

RD: Okay, do you believe Jesus turned water into wine?

HH: Yes./p>

RD: You seriously do?

HH: Yes.

RD: You actually think that Jesus got water, and made all those molecules turn into wine?

HH: Yes.

RD: My God.

HH: Yes. My God, actually, not yours. But let me…

RD: I’ve realized the kind of person I’m dealing with now.

I’m sure he’s overwhelmed right now with his book tour, but somebody needs to warn him about exactly what he’s walking into before he gets in front of a microphone. Hewitt is a ridiculous puffed-up blowhard of very little brain, and a remarkably calm, polite discussion while he ducks and dodges and blows a dog-whistle for his crazy listeners doesn’t work very well.

If Dawkins is going on the Glenn Beck show, though, I want to know about it.

(via Instaputz)

News from Australian atheists

I guess we have somebody worried.

Atheist Foundation of Australia and Global Atheist Convention Websites Attacked

The Atheist Foundation of Australia and Global Atheist Convention websites suffered a DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack yesterday, which caused the websites to be taken offline.

These attacks affected our upstream providers and numerous other websites, cost a large amount of money and time, and have left the Atheist Foundation of Australia and the Global Atheist Convention websites without hosting for the interim.

While we do not have enough information to confirm the source or reason for the attacks, they came in the wake of news that The Rise of Atheism Global Atheist Convention, to be held in Melbourne next March, has already sold 1,000 tickets and is set to become the largest gathering of atheists in Australia’s history.

AFA President, David Nicholls, says, “We have been informed that the Atheist Foundation of Australia and the Global Atheist Convention sites were the specific target of the attacks. This may be not just an attack on atheism, but an attack on freedom of speech.”

Nicholls says that the Global Atheist Convention is not about attacking the beliefs of individuals but, rather, opposes the undue political influence of religious institutions and lobby groups in society.

“The Atheist Foundation of Australia supports freedom of thought, and that includes freedom of religion. Our aim is to keep the Australian government, education and welfare systems secular,” says Nicholls. “Unfortunately, some people in our society find that very confronting.”

The Atheist Foundation of Australia has raised this matter with the appropriate authorities and is discussing this situation with them.

The Atheist Foundation of Australia technical staff are working hard to restore the site and once it is restored, tickets for The Rise of Atheism Global Atheist Convention will again be available at http://www.atheistconvention.org.au.

Fun with Twitter

Apparently, twitter tracks hot trends in the tiny little conversations flying about, and the #1 hot topic today was “No God”. The amusing reason why is that someone posted that boring and fallacious cliche, “Know God…Know Peace. No God…No Peace”, a lot of Christians retweeted it, and a few atheists contributed to the confusion by saying “no god”, and that’s all it took to single out that one phrase and turn it into the top few words being bandied about.

Just to make it even more hilarious, various Christian twitterers (or whatever they call them) freaked out and started frantically submitting their magic mantra even more, which just blew it up even higher. And all the atheists are sitting back laughing and writing “no god” again!

Combine stupid text searches with a human feedback loop, and look at the silly behavior it can evoke.

Ray Comfort is a parasite

In this case, it’s unintentional, though. His mangled version of Darwin’s Origin is currently the #1 result of searches for the Origin on Amazon. It’s not there honestly, though: it’s because Amazon’s indexing system has a deep flaw. It doesn’t seem to actually track which edition is the most popular…it just gladly gives Comfort’s edition full credit with every other edition of the same book. This also means that the star rating for the Comfort edition is elevated; he’s getting a leg up by appropriating all the reviews for all the other editions.

Here’s a video to explain the situation.

Amazon needs to fix this, and fix it soon. Otherwise, I predict, every single lousy creationist out there is going to grab any out-of-copyright, reputable science book out there and come out with their own edition by slapping a dishonest foreword on it, and get a free ride on the reputation of the original authors.

I’ll also add that if Ray Comfort has the tiniest scrap of integrity in his itty-bitty body, he’ll be leading the charge to demand that Amazon give credit where it is due and sort out their scrambled ratings system.