A reply from Seed

Since I posted that open letter to Seed, it’s only fair to post the reply I received the other day.

We’ve just signed off with Six Apart, the makers of Movable Type, to begin Phase I of our registration program. You won’t actually see too many changes with this phase – we’re essentially just cleaning up technical glitches within the system and making sure it’s performing properly.

Included in this phase are:

  • Commenter Authentication Fixes — meaning that you should be able to turn on Movable Type’s native registration option without commenting errors occurring
  • Load Balancer fixes
  • Server Analysis and Recommendations
  • Movable Type 4.3 Upgrade
  • Plugin Maintenance
  • Comment Enhancements for Sponsored Blogs — enabling us to offer sponsors special features they request for their blogs such as comment threading that our readers haven’t demonstrated as much interest in

Phase II will be where all the actual registration features come in, once we’ve got everything shipshape. [We] will be in touch about what will be involved from your end with implementing Phase I — probably at least an overnight posting freeze while we upgrade, as we’ve done in the past — when we have more details about when this will happen, but Six Apart should have resources available to us within the next two to three weeks.

So the good news is that they’re going straight to the pros at Six Apart to fix our problems; the bad news is that that means some more delays while we wait for the experts. Hang in there.

The ups and downs of radio

Yesterday, I got a brief mention of a botch of a radio show on NPR that nattered on about a “deep rift” in atheism, but this morning on MPR you could have heard Richard Dawkins talking about evolution. He got the better gig.

This interview does make clear one difference in strategy between Dawkins and myself. The interviewer tries to hammer him on being less than respectful to religious believers, and Dawkins is always polite and tries his best to downplay the conflict. In a similar situation, I’d simply say, “Yes, I am openly contemptuous of religious belief. You want to make something of it?”

I guess I’m meaner than Dawkins.

Uh-oh! Deep rift, deep rift, DEEP RIFT!

A salvo in the War on Christmas

You’ve got a whole 66 shopping days until Christmas, but as you all know, the War on Christmas is fought all year ’round. I’m already getting email from people who have started their Christmas shopping (I hate you all) and who toys and games to educate and introduce kids to science and learning (OK, you’re forgiven.) This is a tough call, especially if you want something to do with evolution — it has been deemed ‘controversial’, you know, so there has been a kind of de facto self-censorship going on among those manufacturers who want our money, but want Christian money just as bad.

One suggestion I’ve been sending to parents of young kids is to check out Charlie’s Playhouse, a place that specializes in evolution toys and games.

Notice that my cunning plan to undermine Christmas is to encourage secular people to celebrate it…bwahahahahahaaa!

Donohue rants some more

Bill Donohue, the vitriolic cranky grandpa of the Catholic League, has a guest column in the Washington Post. It’s not very interesting — it’s more of Donohue’s tedious yapping about communists, godless libertines (that is, those wicked gays), and how the ACLU is out to smash Judeo-Christian culture — but it ends on a strange note I hear a lot lately.

The culture war is up for grabs. The good news is that religious conservatives continue to breed like rabbits, while secular saboteurs have shut down: they’re too busy walking their dogs, going to bathhouses and aborting their kids. Time, it seems, is on the side of the angels.

Where does this nonsense come from? It’s wishful thinking and weird stereotyping and a kind of desperate hope that, while they may be totally outclassed on the intellectual front, religious conservatives can find solace in mindless rabbity procreation. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather not have my children propagate by way of the wastefully prolific r strategies. They are human beings, and they shouldn’t aspire to be lagomorphs or rodents or blatellids.

Also, when I recollect the many godless people I have known, most are fairly conventional middle class couples (self-selection, of course — most of the people I know are like me, conventional and middle class); most have a small number of children; most are concerned with raising those kids well. I also know gay atheists, atheists who are unmarried, atheists who are young and getting married, atheists who are in childless relationships by choice, etc. It’s true, I don’t know any atheists who have chosen to breed like rabbits.

Strangely enough, though, I also know a number of ordinary Christian people, and they all seem to have roughly equivalent demographics: middle class, some with kids, some without, some heterosexual, some homosexual, all diverse and following their own paths. I did know a few Mormons who bred like rabbits in Utah (one woman I knew had 15 kids!), but that was also correlated with a weird kind of poverty that was deeply dependent on government support, and wasn’t a model for family life that I was ever tempted to follow.

I suspect that the whole of the difference in reproduction rates that people like Donohue find so essential to propping up their self-esteem has nothing to do with atheism or religion at all, but is more a matter of affluence: people with wealth and education choose to have fewer children and invest more in the few that they have, and also people with more education tend to abandon conservative religious beliefs. That’s the real enemy of religion that Bill needs to rail against: intelligence and material success.

Which leads to my deepest wish for Bill Donohue and all the people like him. May your children and grandchildren be prosperous, healthy, and happy, and may they all succeed in finding wisdom in learning. And if my wish should come true, your grandchildren and great-grandchildren will be more like me than like you. Godlessness is cultural, not genetic.

Oh, and in a final ironic twist, I am a fellow of perfectly ordinary conventional morality with a family and three healthy, well-adjusted, and well-educated children. Mr Donohue is divorced and has two children. Despite my radical secularism and cultural nihilism, I’ve managed to outbreed him!

I wish I could have seen that

There was a debate yesterday, on the motion “The Catholic Church is a force for good in the world”. On the affirmative side, the Catholics had Anne Widdecombe, a conservative British politician, and Archbishop Onaiyekan of Abuja, Nigeria. On the godless side…Stephen Fry and Christopher Hitchens.

Just look at that lineup and you can predict how it went. It was a complete rout.

The problem (from the Catholic point of view) was that the speakers arguing for the Church as a force for good were hopelessly outclassed by two hugely popular, professional performers. The archbishop had obviously decided that it would work best if he stuck to facts and figures and presented the Church as a sort of vast charitable or “social welfare” organisation. He emphasised how many Catholics there were in the world, and that even included “heads of state”, he said, as if that was a clincher. But he said virtually nothing of a religious or spiritual nature as far as I could tell, and non-Catholics would have been none the wiser about what you might call the transcendent aspects of the Church. Then later when challenged he became painfully hesitant. In the end he mumbled and spluttered and retreated into embarrassing excuses and evasions. He repeatedly got Ann Widdecombe’s name wrong. The hostility of both the audience and his opponents seemed to have discomfited him.

So it was left to Ann Widdecombe to defend the Church single-handedly. She did well, showed a light touch and took Hitchens to task for exaggerations and so on. But in the end Hitchens and Fry were able to persuade decisively by simply listing one after another the wicked things that have been done in the Church’s name over the centuries. More than anything they focused on the “institutionalisation of the rape and torture and maltreatment of children”. That’s what Hitchens called it – that’s pretty much what it was – and Fry returned to it. I don’t blame them for harping on about these unspeakable crimes, because there is no answer to them. Then they talked about the Church’s teaching on homosexuality. When Zeinab Badawi in the chair asked the archbishop whether Christ himself ever actually said anything about homosexuality, he replied by saying “that’s not the point” or words to that effect, and sounded slippery.

Ah, fish in a barrel, defended from a pair of professional big game hunters and explosives experts by a pair of ditherers. That’s entertainment!

Such casual bigotry, delivered with such deft thoughtlessness

A couple of Republican district chairmen took it upon themselves to defend Senator Jim DeMint (R, Crazytown). Uh, maybe.

There is a saying that the Jews who are wealthy got that way not by watching dollars, but instead by taking care of the pennies and the dollars taking care of themselves. By not using earmarks to fund projects for South Carolina and instead using actual bills, DeMint is watching our nation’s pennies and trying to preserve our country’s wealth and our economy’s viability to give all an opportunity to succeed.

I bet that if you sat those two down and asked them if they knew what was wrong with that first sentence, they’d just look at you all wide-eyed and innocent and tell you they can’t see a bit of bigotry or stereotyping there at all.

And their next sentence would be, “Some of my best friends are Jews!”

And after that, they’d defend their argument…“We’re saying Jim is going to make us all as rich as Jews! That’s a good thing!”

Aaaah! Horrible wretched wicked story of faith and foreskins!

I happen to be male. I found myself unable to read the following story without feeling an urge to double over and cup my crotch, which was really awkward when sitting in a public coffee shop. So stop here if you are prone to sympathetic pains.

A man in British Columbia decided that he and his four year old son needed to be circumcised.

Already, half my readership has decided to flee to less cringe-inducing websites. That’s OK, just leave quietly, and close the door behind you.

[Read more…]

How much plastic did you throw away today?

There is a gigantic pile of plastic garbage accumulating in the Pacific. It’s concentrate by currents into one floating mass of bottle caps and detergent bottles and nylon debris, all slowly breaking apart into broken bits of polymer bobbing in the waves. It’s not good for marine life.

One of the most vivid demonstrations of the effects is this series of photos of dead sea birds on remote Midway Island — all completely undisturbed and photographed as found. Finding decayed bird corpses reduced to bones and feathers isn’t at all surprising, but some of these remains look more like the remains of some colorful cyborg, half biological and half industrial byproduct.

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Recycle, and buy food that doesn’t use plastic packaging. That stuff is a poison pill for the environment.