David Silverman, a principled atheist

Go to twitter now: David Silverman (@MrAtheistPants) is tearing the atheist trolls a new one. This is really what I like to see: a leader of a major atheist organization taking an unambiguous stand against this ulcer in our midst, and repudiating the spammy, photoshopping, lying behavior of the anti-feminist clique.

How much do I appreciate it? With my dollars. My wife is going to sign us up for a lifetime membership in American Atheists while I’m away. It’s not a casual investment, so not everyone can do that, but you could send them a donation to let the organization know that you like a leader with a spine.

That controversial O’Reilly interview with David Silverman

I’ve been privy to some of the behind-the-scenes arguments among atheists about this episode of the Bill O’Reilly show, in which they discuss (if anything is ever discussed with O’Reilly) an aggressive billboard sponsored by American Atheists.

Most of the complaining I’ve heard has been about David Silverman’s performance, and I think that’s misplaced. Silverman was good: he’s confident and a bit flippant, which is exactly what you need when dealing with a pompous blowhard like O’Reilly. Silverman isn’t the problem, it’s the sign, and he was stuck defending an awful message.

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That is one ugly-ass sign. Rebecca Watson has this one covered: she’s precisely right that it is a badly designed, ugly sign. If your intent is to be newsworthy and assertive and get yourself noticed, you don’t want to undercut yourself when you do make the national opinion shows by having to show off a sign that looks like it belongs on your refrigerator with your children’s other drawings.

Seriously, if you’re going to sink money into a billboard, hire a professional graphic designer. Get something that looks good first. For a good example, look at the Coalition of Reason. Their signs don’t hurt your eyes when you look at them, and the focus of any public argument is the message. It also helps to develop visual branding. I can recognize a CoR sign from a long way off. The message I take home from the visual inconsistency of American Atheists is that they’re an anarchic mob of amateurs with copies of Paintshop Pro.

The other problem with that sign is the message. I’m fine, as you all know, with an aggressive message, and I think it also makes sense for American Atheists as a kind of content branding — they’ll be the brash wing of the atheist movement. But that message does not work.

Bill O’Reilly would have been floundering if the message had been “Religion is a scam”. That’s something atheists are comfortable with wrestling over, and it’s something most of us godless folk do agree on. They could have spent their time arguing about the validity of religion’s truth claims. The problem is sticking that “You KNOW” in front of the phrase, because that suddenly moves the message into the realm of the indefensible. And look again at the O’Reilly interview — it got derailed right into a long, pointless harangue about the “You KNOW” part of the sign. That was a wasted opportunity right there.

You could try to argue that the billboard is only aimed at atheists who agree with the sentiment, but then it’s admitting that this is an in-house game you’re playing and isn’t part of an outreach campaign. The one thing you cannot do is try to argue that most of the church-going public agrees with you. They don’t. Most people who go to church, I’m sure, are sincere in their beliefs and really, really believe in Jesus and Heaven and Hell. They’re wrong and they don’t think very deeply about those beliefs, but it’s honestly what they believe. Trying to tell them what they really believe when it’s not is incredibly annoying.

We atheists get that all the time. How often have you heard the claim that we actually do believe in God deep down, but we just hate him? How persuasive do you find that approach? The only thing persuasive about it is that it convinces me that the person making that claim is a blithering idiot with no comprehension of atheism at all. Likewise with religious people: going up to them and suggesting that they don’t really believe in God is only going to convince them that you’re wrong.

I do have one criticism for Rebecca Watson and also Colbert, who made the original comparison: don’t criticize David Silverman for looking like Satan. It’s really obnoxious because we don’t have much of a choice in what we look like; it’s like carping at me because I look like an old bearded white guy, or at Rebecca because she looks like a snarky hipster girl. Sure, I could shave, and Rebecca could start dressing like S.E. Cupp or Ann Coulter, but is that really the straitjacket we need or want to wear? And seriously, turning into a young black woman isn’t an option for me, nor can David Silverman turn into a blond Aryan football player.

Also, another subtle point is that the reason Silverman looks like Satan is that the standard renditions of Satan are based on stereotypes of Semitic facial features. I’m sure everyone has noticed that Jesus is typically painted as a white European, but perhaps you’ve missed the fact that Satan is usually drawn as an Eastern European Jew caricature…so criticizing someone for “looking like Satan” ends up being a suspicion of anyone who looks to be of Middle Eastern descent.

The bottom line for American Atheists: Keep David Silverman, I think he does a good job. Crack down a little bit on branch chapters of AA and enforce some standards of presentation. Hire a professional ad agency with some skills in graphic design to come up with a visual brand for the organization. Keep up the assertive style, but make sure that what you put on your signs and literature is stuff you actually want to argue.

Oh no! Our atheist origin myth has been obliterated!

Paleoconservatives are such an odd and scary group. They tend to be delusional, they’re often (but not necessarily Catholic), and they use lots of old, tired, dead arguments, so they aren’t even very entertaining. They also aren’t very stable. I was laughing at arguments from a group calling itself “Intellectual Takeout” years ago, but they’re gone now; they got absorbed by a right-wing think-tank called the Rockford Institute, which also splintered to form the Howard Center for Family, Religion (you can guess what they’re about), which has renamed itself the Charlemagne Institute. They were big supporters of Pat Buchanan, which should help focus their goals in your mind, because they sure are hard to track, they’re so busy covering their trails with new names and new organizations.

Anyway, they publish online something called Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture. They’re probably not worth following unless you’re the SPLC and are tracking neo-Confederates or are just a connoisseur of stupid.

I’m the latter. How could I resist an article titled A Stand-Up Comic Stands Up for God: Evan Sayet Obliterates the Atheist Origin Myth, which is purportedly a review of the book illustrated on the right? The review starts thusly:

To be on the left is to be humorless. This makes sense when you consider how the left views the world as a perpetual occasion for an oppression fest, where the clock is ticking on their quest to free all the world’s intersectional victims before the climate apocalypse kills everyone. Sure, in line with their Manichean, comic-book ideology, they take an adolescent delight in hypocritically bullying everyone who dissents from their disordered views, and they equally detest and fear those opponents who give back in return to them more than they get. This is especially so if the opponent uses humor to buttress the case for dissent with ridicule.

I do appreciate the irony of a criticism that uses “Manichean” as an insult while simultaneously splitting the world into Left and Right and characterizing the entirety of the Left as a humorless monoculture. I was going to point out that a lot of great comedians, like George Carlin and Janeane Garofolo and Sarah Silverman and David Cross, etc. etc. etc., are godless liberals, while the conservatives limp along with the likes of Greg Gutfeld and Steven Crowder and Dennis Miller, etc. etc. etc., but then I realized that no one from the Charlemagne Institute would find George Carlin funny at all, so that argument would be pointless. Humor is a matter of personal taste.

But sure, open your review by levying baseless accusations at people you don’t like. It’ll rally the troops on your side.

Then we get to the meat of the review.

It is why the left loathes and fears people like Evan Sayet.

Who? Never heard of him.

It is with good reason. Consider his remarks about his latest book, Magic Soup, Typing Monkeys, and Horny Aliens from Outer Space: The Patently Absurd Wholly Unsubstantiated and Extravagantly Failed Atheist Origin Myth: “Trying to litigate against atheism is like trying to litigate against the Emperor’s clothes; atheism needs to not just be disproved but ridiculed for the patent absurdity that it is.”

Uh-oh. The book title gives the game away: Evan Sayet is an anti-evolutionist. Like the reviewer, he is going to mischaracterize the thing he doesn’t like, in this case science, and presumably he’s going to do it with jokes, because right-wing creationists are far funnier than left wing bullies who are competing in the oppression olympics, obviously. I hope the book is funny, although the title isn’t, and Sayet’s bona fides aren’t exactly promising.

A stand-up comic who has written for television shows such as Politically Incorrect w/Bill Maher,

A very bad sign, that.

Evan Sayet has tested and proven his mettle as a political observer and activist. Behind the scenes, Sayet has counseled and penned speeches for presidential candidates and, eventually, a president. Further, risking his livelihood in the leftist-controlled entertainment industry, Sayet has courageously and continually expressed his trenchant insights on television and with the written word. He has not shied away from rich targets for his pointed wit, no matter how powerful.

Wait wait wait — I thought it was lefties who were involved in an oppression fest, but now we’re told that Evan Sayet has been oppressed by a leftist-controlled entertainment industry? And simultaneously he has been counseling a president (I can guess which one)? It must be Schrodinger’s Oppressor. He’s everywhere on all sides all at once.

So what’s his argument?

Sayet refuses to let the atheists off the intellectual hook, even skewering them with science to salt the wound. Starting with teleological arguments of Intelligent Design and “Fine-Tuning,” and, ultimately, in his own inimitable fashion moving on to St. Thomas Aquinas’ “Five Ways” (Quinque Viae from the Summa Theologiae): (1) argument from motion, (2) argument from efficient cause, (3) argument from necessary being, (4) argument from gradations of goodness, and (5) argument from design. Sayet employs all of these methods and more to demonstrate the existence of God.

Great. As is typical, a conservative site considers the philosophical arguments of a 13th century theologian to be definitive. We’ve been soaking in that nonsense for eight centuries, and it’s been unpersuasive to everyone other than shallow poseurs.

(1) The unmoved mover could be a physical agent, a singularity or Big Bang, not your peculiar and specific god-thing. We don’t need to propose the Unmoved Mover was any kind of god at all.

(2) Likewise, the first cause could have been a hiccup in the firmament, a twitch in the fabric of space-time, and invoking a sentient, humanoid entity is superfluous.

(3) Again, the problem is that you think you know who the ‘necessary being’ was, and how its mind worked (if it even had one), and its intent. It could have been a cosmic fart, for all any of us know.

(4) “Goodness” is a matter of human perception. It is not a universal force. The universe, in general, seems to be a pretty nasty place, so why you would think there must be a Supreme Good Guy is a mystery.

(5) The argument from design boils down to pointing at complicated things you don’t understand and announcing that someone smarter than you must have made it. This is trivially refuted by revealing that dumb processes can make some pretty complex things.

None of those arguments demonstrate the existence of God, a concept, I note, they don’t bother to define, probably because they just assume that God is the body of superstitious theological assumptions they already believe. Like I said, these are just old, tired, dead arguments that we’ve heard time and again; Sayet is incredibly unoriginal and uninteresting.

Thus, does Sayet proceed to plumb the shallow depths of militant atheists’ theological Sitz bath, and he drowns them with the proofs for God’s existence.

Whoa, I started reading this article warned that I was going to be obliterated, and we instead end up relaxing in a Sitz bath? How nice. It’s kind of hard to drown in a Sitz bath, you know. I suppose it could be done if you contort yourself and use it improperly, but I’ll leave the twisty delusional distortions to the Christians.

What a horrible idea…please do it

David Silverman, the disgraced former president of American Atheists, floated a trial balloon on Twitter.

If I created a non-woke atheist convention, focusing on atheist activism and fun, starring notable canceled speakers and stars, would you be…
Very interested 23%
Somewhat interested 18%
Not interested 59%

Who are the “canceled speakers and stars” he’d invite? It’s not as clean an identity as he imagines. Is Richard Dawkins one of them? Because people have expressed their strong dislike of his views, but he’s not exactly broke and living on the street, and he would still be a strong draw. Would I be one of them? I’ve been canceled by a huge number of atheists, and never get invited to speak at conferences anymore 😢.

It’s interesting that even in the limited, select group of regressive atheists who follow David Silverman, his poll couldn’t even break 50% in favor. Not that it actually matters, this is a kind of Elon Musk non-poll where the pollster is going to just ignore the numbers.

P.S. I’m only going to attend if there is a ball pit.

The Genocide Party had their yearly get-together

One pleasant bit of non-news is that CPAC is dying. For a couple of decades now, the Conservative Political Action Conference has been a yearly spectacle of far right conservative speechifying, when the radical Republicans could let their hair down and let their freak flag fly, and the media would dutifully report on their gibbering mania, and we’d point and laugh, and then some of the kooks would get elected to high office. Remember when David Silverman tried to get American Atheists represented at CPAC? That was an omen.

This year, I hadn’t even realized it was going on until several days into the conference, it was that much of a yawner. Attendance is way down, and the ratfuckers are giving speeches to nearly empty seats. Prospective presidential candidates are skipping the whole show. It’s a “who cares?” event now.

However, as it’s relevance declines, the participants are reaching for the big bottle of crazy evil to spark excitement, and as we all know, the Republican party has become unhealthily obsessed with what’s in other people’s pants. They’re trying to pass laws to restrict people’s civil rights, they’ve developed a weird hatred of Mrs Doubtfire, they want to burn books that even mention the existence of non-traditional non-heterosexuals. What’s next? How can they top the insanity they’re perpetrating right now?

How about genocide?

The Right’s war on queer and trans people took center stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference as Daily Wire host Michael Knowles openly called for the public eradication of transgender individuals. During his speech on Saturday, Knowles told the crowd, For the good of society… transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely — the whole preposterous ideology, at every level.
…
In his speech, Knowles used a convoluted line of thinking and false logic while trying to prove his horrifying point that trans people should not exist. There can be no middle way in dealing with transgenderism. It can be all or nothing, he said. If transgenderism is true, if men really can become women, then it’s true for everybody of all ages. If transgenderism is false — as it is — if men really can’t become women — as they cannot — then it’s false for everybody too. And if it’s false, then we should not indulge it, especially when that indulgence requires taking away the rights and customs of many people. It if is false, then for the good of society — and especially for the good of the poor people who have fallen prey to this confusion — then transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely — the whole preposterous ideology, at every level.

We’ve seen where this line of thinking goes, we don’t need a roadmap to recall our history. First we have to silence the Badthought with bookburnings and firelit marches and shrieking news articles. Then we pass laws criminalizing drag shows (Tennessee just made appearing in drag a felony with a 6 year prison sentence). Next we have to isolate the bad people in concentration camps, and then we have to move on to a Final Solution.

You would think that Ben Shapiro, Knowles’ big boss at the Daily Wire, would be aware of the comparison. Knowles himself is being made aware that he said the evil parts out loud, and is lashing out at the media that is reporting on his words and demanding retractions.

You said it, big boy. Be thankful that the only pain you might suffer is a little public humiliation, rather than a prison sentence or a beating or a gas chamber, like your victims have to deal with all the time.

Atheists for Liberty flying their colors

Atheists for Liberty, that horrid far-right reactionary organization, is now campaigning at CPAC. At long last, David Silverman (he’s on their advisory board) has got his wish, finding a front that will support his dream of an atheism that reeks of conservative values. Take a look at the books they are selling!

Those authors are all on their board of advisors, except Hitchens, who is dead. Also on board: Ron Lindsay, to my disappointment. They seem to be recruiting anyone who shows the slightest right-wing tendencies. I wonder why they haven’t invited me to join their board?

Also no surprise: they’ve gone anti-vax. Their argument is that there are religious exemptions, and rather than working to end them, they want to expand them to include atheist exemptions.

Every time this guy opens his mouth, he proves how wrong I can be

Once upon a time, I thought David Silverman was a good guy — a bit aggressive, maybe, with a few weird ideas, but heck, he was going on Fox News to fight the good fight, and he proudly declared himself a feminist. Then he got caught coercing sex from young women, was fired, and now…

I look at him now and wonder how bad a judge of character am I? How did I miss the warning signs? He’s an object lesson in how vulnerable we all are to believing what we want to believe.

By the way, on just the objective facts of the case, Rittenhouse is a gun freak who traveled out-of-state to drop in on a protest and murder a couple of people with a high-powered rifle. He is a murderer. He killed with intent. He’s also probably going to walk because our justice system is a joke, and he got a lunatic as a judge.

Cops are useless

Dynamic shot of police leaping into action to defend the citizenry from terrorists!

Have you ever read the news and wondered how the loons and right-wing terrorists can get away with it all? We had an insurrection on 6 January, 10 months ago, and the wheels of justice, we are told, grind exceedingly slow, so all we see is slaps on the wrists delivered to the low-level dupes. The ring-leaders are sheltered by doubt and fear, the propaganda sources continue to spew poison in the name of “free speech”, and Donald Trump gets to run free and plan his 2024 campaign for president. It’s doubly unjust, because while the so-called “patriots” get all the benefit of the doubt, their victims get swift and decisive condemnation from the opinion pages of the New York Times, the offices of Fox News, and too often get executed by the police. IOKYAR — It’s OK If You Are Republican — has somehow become the unwritten law of the land.

Reuters has published an article on the ongoing campaign of fear.

In Arizona, a stay-at-home dad and part-time Lyft driver told the state’s chief election officer she would hang for treason. In Utah, a youth treatment center staffer warned Colorado’s election chief that he knew where she lived and watched her as she slept.

In Vermont, a man who says he works in construction told workers at the state election office and at Dominion Voting Systems that they were about to die.

“This might be a good time to put a f‑‑‑‑‑‑ pistol in your f‑‑‑‑‑‑ mouth and pull the trigger,” the man shouted at Vermont officials in a thick New England accent last December. “Your days are f‑‑‑‑‑‑ numbered.”

The three had much in common. All described themselves as patriots fighting a conspiracy that robbed Donald Trump of the 2020 election. They are regular consumers of far-right websites that embrace Trump’s stolen-election falsehoods. And none have been charged with a crime by the law enforcement agencies alerted to their threats.

They were among nine people who told Reuters in interviews that they made threats or left other hostile messages to election workers. In all, they are responsible for nearly two dozen harassing communications to six election officials in four states. Seven made threats explicit enough to put a reasonable person in fear of bodily harm or death, the U.S. federal standard for criminal prosecution, according to four legal experts who reviewed their messages at Reuters’ request.

You can shout all the terroristic threats you want because FREEEEZEPEEEECH, you can try to intimidate others at will because FREEEEEEEEEEDOMMMMM. The intimidator/terrorist gets the freedom, though, at the cost of the terrorized. And part of it is that the cops and justice system are useless at best, enablers most often, fellow terrorists at worst.

The examination of the threats also highlights the paralysis of law enforcement in responding to this extraordinary assault on the nation’s electoral machinery. After Reuters reported the widespread intimidation in June, the U.S. Department of Justice launched a task force to investigate threats against election staff and said it would aggressively pursue such cases. But law enforcement agencies have made almost no arrests and won no convictions.

In many cases, they didn’t investigate. Some messages were too hard to trace, officials said. Other instances were complicated by America’s patchwork of state laws governing criminal threats, which provide varying levels of protection for free speech and make local officials in some states reluctant to prosecute such cases. Adding to the confusion, legal scholars say, the U.S. Supreme Court hasn’t formulated a clear definition of a criminal threat.

I’ve had a small taste of that. Remember Dennis Markuze, the nutjob who sent death threats to me practically every single day for years? He wasn’t alone, either; I still get email, at a lower frequency, fortunately, from people who make explicit threats. I’ve had people announce that they were going to show up at my university office and shoot me in the head. I’ve gotten detailed descriptions from Catholics and atheists (it turns out, atheists were the worst) telling me how they were going to cut me up at public events, and horrific threats against my family. There was a time when I would document them all, gather IP addresses and even names and home addresses of these lunatics and take them to my local police department and ask them to forward them to the parties that could take action. I’d get dumb cow-like looks, nothing more, and the information would get filed away and ignored.

I eventually just learned to accept the fact that someone could promise to murder me, and all I could do was note it down so that maybe the investigation into why I was turned into a bloody corpse would have a lead. I don’t even have that confidence anymore. What I see in the justice system is that justice doesn’t matter anymore. I could be murdered in public in broad daylight and I think the cops would spend their time trying to rationalize why the culprit did it, and the media would be speculating about what I did to deserve it.

And I’m a privileged white guy! I can’t even imagine the despair and futility minorities must feel in this country. I’m a member of the older white demographic that is trampling all over decency in America, and that won’t protect me at all.

Most galling is that the 9 people who made these over-the-top threats in the story are not ashamed at all and aren’t even shy about confessing their identities and admitting that yes, they did tell an election official that they were going to “pop” them and talk about firing squads and torturous deaths; they leave abusive phone messages with horrific promises of murder with clear intent to threaten them, they get passed on to the bumbling, incompetent cops, and what do they do? They hide behind excuses to do nothing.

The officials referred the voicemail to state police, who again declined to investigate. Agency spokesperson Adam Silverman said in a statement that the message didn’t constitute an “unambiguous reference to gun violence,” adding that the word “popped” – common American slang for “shot” – “is unclear and nonspecific, and could be a reference to someone being arrested.”

Legal experts didn’t see it that way. Fred Schauer, a University of Virginia law professor, said the message likely constituted a criminal threat under federal law by threatening gun violence at specific individuals. “There’s certainly an intent to put people in fear,” Schauer said.

The article includes the recorded audio from a number of these messages. You can’t possibly listen to them and think that golly, the wording is ambiguous…they are crystal clear and no doubt is left in the listener’s mind that this person wants to do them serious harm to prevent them from doing their job. The journalists consulted multiple legal scholars about whether these were actionable threats, and got responses that were rather different from what the cops would say.

Three legal experts said the message met the threshold of a threat that could be prosecuted under federal law. “The whole purpose of the threats doctrine is to protect people from not only a prospect of physical violence, but the damage of living with a threat hanging over you,” said Timothy Zick, a William & Mary Law School professor.

Yeah, that’s the whole story, over and over again, at length. Angry crank screams death threats at an official. Cops shrug and do nothing. And then we all wonder why the madness is escalating.

Ken Ham, conjuring atheists into existence

Let’s get all Manichaean on their asses!

Caroline Matas attended an Answers in Genesis conference, and was chilled by what she saw. She was the only one wearing a mask, and was most concerned with why American evangelicals have so much contempt for modern science and medicine. I think Ken Ham delivered the answer.

Secular scientists might claim that they allow observation and replicable experimentation to dictate their conclusions, but Answers in Genesis argues that scientists are deluding themselves about their true “starting point.”

Ham famously argues that there are only two religions—conservative Christianity based on a literal and univocal reading of God’s word and secular humanism derived from “man’s word.” At this week’s conference, he went a step further, claiming that secular scientists cannot claim a “neutral position,” because any worldview that is not actively in service of his version of orthodox Christianity is “hostile” to God and “desperately wicked” in its thinking.

“If it’s not for Christ, it’s against,” Ham told a cheering audience.

Well then, count me in as against Christ. I think there are a lot of Christians out there who don’t accept Ham’s narrow-minded, pig-ignorant view of their faith, and are going to be surprised to learn that they are against Christ, but OK. It’s nice for us atheists to have abruptly become the majority.

However, this also reminds me of the time I was paired up to present at a humanist meeting with David Silverman. His message was that everyone there was actually an atheist — every Christian humanist, every Jewish humanist, every agnostic, every one who still went to church but thought god was a more complex concept than an anthropomorphic old guy in the sky, even deists like Thomas Jefferson — if you didn’t subscribe to an orthodox, literal-minded version of your religion, you were an atheist, and you should admit it to yourself and everyone else. It did not go over well. There was much eye-rolling and head-shaking in the audience, and I had to amend my talk on the fly to explain that I did not endorse Silverman’s views.

I think David and Ken would have gotten along famously. They have exactly the same sentiments about religion.

The terrible thing about this perspective is that as soon as you make everything us-vs.-them, you’ve got a tool to shoehorn everyone into opposing camps on every issue. It doesn’t matter that the Bible says nothing about vaccines — you can tell everyone that you don’t like ’em, and you’re a man of God, therefore anyone who is a true man of God should despise vaccines.

Studying evangelical media has made me keenly aware of how quickly and thoroughly this narrative can be employed to train consumers in the orthodoxy of the moment. What matters is not what happens to fall in its crosshairs: critical race theory, secular humanism, same-sex marriage, vaccine mandates; the fuel running the machine is a belief that this world is split into two “religions”—the “true” one and the “false” one whose aims are unceasingly hostile and evil.

Or, hey, if you are a misogynistic sado-masochist who bullies women and is the former head of a major atheist organization, then every true atheist should be a misogynistic sado-masochist. I think there are a few too many atheists who would go along with that.