Who says we don’t need bible scholars?

John Loftus criticizes the Courtier’s Reply. How dare he? I thought it was Holy Atheist Writ by now.

But the Courtier’s Reply as an answer for theology needs to be discussed critically. First off, I do not expect anyone to understand any particular theology in order to reject it. We all do this easily. I doubt very much anyone understands all of the religions they reject. I don’t. No one does. We reject them all for the same reasons, because they have not met their own burden of proof. So I agree very much that neither PZ Myers nor Richard Dawkins needs to fully understand the various forms of Christianity in order to reject them all. They can certainly use the Courtier’s Reply, and for them it’s legitimate, as it is for me when rejecting Hinduism, which I know little about. Christians do not fully understand the other Christianities they reject, so why should anyone expect this from skeptics?

But here’s the problem. PZ Meyers and Richard Dawkins, and others, have the clout to recommend those of us who do understand the various Christianities that exist who know how to debunk them on their own terms. But perhaps, and I’m only suggesting perhaps, they are so committed to the Courtier’s Reply when it comes to their own lack of understanding of Christian theology that they don’t realize this will not do if they want to change the religious landscape. If they do, then may I humbly suggest they recommend the work of Biblical scholars like Robert Price, Hector Avalos, Bart Ehrman and others like them, as well as philosophers like John Shook, John Beversluis, Richard Carrier, Keith Parsons, Matt McCormick and others like them. But they can’t do it, because they are committed to the Courtier’s Reply, and that’s a shame. I can embrace the Courtier’s Reply when it comes to religions I reject. But given the power and influence of Christianity in particular, they need to recommend and embrace those of us who know it and argue against it. The Courtier’s Reply may some day be the blanket response to religion. It isn’t yet. Until then let them recommend those of us who do understand the dominant religion of our land, both philosophers and biblical scholars. It takes all of us together with all of our talents, all of our knowledge, and all of our abilities.

No, no, no. Loftus is making the same misinterpretation I’ve heard from creationists and theologians: that the Courtier’s Reply is a call for ignorance and an excuse for not trying to understand religion. It’s not. Rather, it’s an amusing way to tell someone that they haven’t established their premises (the existence of deities), and that all their phantasmagorical elaborations on their fantasies are irrelevant. Cut to the core issue; if you haven’t shown that Jesus even existed, it’s silly to be arguing about the color of his socks.

I have no disagreement with the approach of the scholars listed above; in fact, I’m a big fan, particularly of Carrier and Avalos. They’re taking a different angle: even if we set aside the fundamental fallacy of the premise, we can assay the ramshackle rationalizations and irrational excuses and shoddy scholarship and show that the whole construction is bogus from root to crown.

For me, the Courtier’s Reply is sufficient because I’m not wedded to any particular doctrine; it’s enough for me to see that the core is rotten and hollow. But I entirely agree that for most religious people, the existence of a god isn’t even an issue — it’s assumed and taken for granted. What most people have locked into their brains is a pattern of ritual and dogma and pseudohistory so intricate that it obscures the central assumption, and to chip through that we need Biblical scholars who grapple with the details.

We just don’t need Bible scholars who layer on more crud.

Enlightened professions perpetuate problems

As a member of the professoriate, I like to think that we are egalitarian and do our very best to correct the social inequities that are so prevalent outside of our relatively benevolent, enlightened institutions. Only…not. It looks like women get screwed over in academia, too.

The gender gap in faculty pay cannot be explained completely by the long careers of male faculty members, the relative productivity of faculty members, or where male and female faculty members tend to work — even if those and other factors are part of the picture, according to research being released this week at the annual meeting of the American Education Research Association.

When all such factors are accounted for, women earn on average 6.9 percent less than do men in similar situations in higher education, says the paper, by Laura Meyers, a doctoral candidate at the University of Washington. The finding could be significant because many colleges have explained gender gaps by pointing out that the senior ranks of the professoriate are still dominated by people who were rising through the ranks in periods of overt sexism and so are lopsidedly male, or that men are more likely than women to teach in certain fields that pay especially well.

Maybe the disparity is because equality is only just now beginning to percolate upwards from the new faculty? Nope, they corrected for that. Is it because we have more women in the low-paying sociology departments than we do in the higher paying computer science departments? No, they corrected for that. Is it because women are less able to do the work and are too busy gossiping about babies and needlepoint to do the work? No, they corrected for that.

Darn. I guess the simple fact of the matter is that we’re paying women less than they deserve. From which the important, obvious lesson to be learned is that we ought to hire more women, because we’re getting equal work for cheap.

Perhaps I should mention that to our hiring committees.

I am getting a very poor impression of astrobiology

I received email from one of those astrobiologists, the people behind the Journal of Cosmology, in this case Carl H. Gibson. I was…amused.

Dear Professor Meyers:

I understand you have some problem with our interpretation of Richard Hoover’s article proposed for the Journal of Cosmology. I certainly hope you will write up your comments for publication in a peer review, along with the article.

Attached is an article that might interest you on the subject of astrobiology. Have you written anything in this area?

Regards,
Carl

Ah. He understands that I had some problem with Hoover’s article. I think if he takes a slightly closer look at what I wrote, he might be able to notice that I think the whole article was a creaky, broken cart loaded with rotting donkey bollocks. I thought it was perfectly clear, but I guess I have a thing or two to learn about expressing my opinions unflinchingly.

No, I haven’t published anything in the field of astrobiology. It’s not my area of interest at all, and I don’t seem to meet any of the qualifications, all of which involve being an engineer, a physicist, or a crackpot. I’m only a biologist.

I do have to thank Dr Gibson for the very interesting article he sent along. It was quite the silliest thing I’ve read in days … which is saying something, given the kind of stuff creationists like to throw over the transom. I had no idea the field was such a mucking ground for foolishness.

The paper is titled, “The origin of life from primordial planets”, by Carl H. Gibson, Rudolph E. Schild, and N. Chandra Wickramasinghe, and you can find it in the International Journal of Astrobiology 10 (2): 83-98 (2011), if you’re really interested. Almost all of it is physics and cosmology, and it’s way over my head, so that part could be absolutely brilliant, and these guys really could be shaking up the entire discipline of cosmology and I wouldn’t be aware of it. So let me just grant them that part of their story, although to be honest, the parts that I do understand make me really, really suspicious.

Anyway, they’re pushing a new cosmological model called HGD (hydro-gravitational-dynamics) in opposition to the standard ΔCDMHC model (that stands for dark energy cold-dark-matter-hierarchical clustering). They really like their acronyms, which made the paper a hard slog, but my impression is that they’re arguing that planets formed first out of turbulence in cosmic gases, congealing into dark clumps that were home to life first, and then colliding together to form stars. I have no way to tell if the physics is BS, other than that it isn’t any part of the standard models I’ve read in popular physics books, but the basic premise is that first masses condensed, then life evolved, then stars formed. Yeah, seriously.

The onset of prebiotic chemistry and the emergence of life templates as a culmination of such a process must await the condensation of water molecules and organics first into solid grains and thence into planetary cores. Assuming the collapsing proto-planet cloud keeps track with the background radiation temperature, this can be shown to happen between ~2-30 My after the plasma to neutral transition. With radioactive nuclides 26Al and 60Fe maintaining warm liquid interiors for tens of My, and with frequent exchanges of material taking place between planets, the entire Universe would essentially constitute a connected primordial soup.

Life would have an incomparably better chance to originate in such a cosmological setting than at any later time in the history of the Universe. Once a cosmological origin of life is achieved in the framework of our HGD cosmology, exponential self-replication and propagation continues, seeded by planets and comets expelled to close-by proto-galaxies.

That’s right. Life arose 14 billion years ago. They say it again in the abstract: Life originated following the plasma-to-gas transition between 2 and 20 Myr after the big bang, while planetary core oceans were between critical and freezing temperatures, and interchanges of material between planets constituted essentially a cosmological primordial soup.” We’ve also got a diagram.

i-a4f05a8a7c9c8d45eba6124517386b3e-bigbang.jpeg

That is awesomely weird. So, somehow, life evolved under the bizarre physical conditions of the early universe, under conditions completely unlike anything on earth, survived the formation of stars, incredibly low population densities, extreme variations in temperature and radiation, and drifted through space for billions of years to finally settle on the relatively warm, wet, thick oceans of ancient Earth, and found itself right at home.

And this is somehow a better explanation than that life arose natively.

Why? All they’ve got to justify this nonsense is the long discredited views of Hoyle and Wickramasinghe that 4½ billion years is not enough. And their alternative explanation is that the Big Bang produced a universe-spanning interconnected soup in which evolution occurred.

In view of the grotesquely small improbability of the origin of the first template for life (Hoyle & Wickramasinghe 1982) it is obvious that it would pay handsomely for abio- genesis to embrace the largest available cosmic setting. The requirement is for a connected set of cosmic domains where prebiology and steps towards a viable set of life templates could take place and evolve. In the present HGD model of cosmology the optimal setting for this is in events that follow the plasma-to-gas transition 300000 years after the big bang. A substantial fraction of the mass of the entire Universe at this stage will be in the form of frozen planets, enriched in heavy elements, and with radioactive heat sources maintaining much of their interior as liquid for some million years. The close proximity between such objects (mean separations typically 10-30 AU) will permit exchanges of intermediate templates and co-evolution that ultimately leads to the emergence of a fully fledged living system. No later stage in the evolution of the Universe would provide so ideal a setting for the de novo origination of life.

Never mind. I don’t think any serious biologist has any significant problems with the probability of life originating on this planet, but I think we’d all agree that the ancient planetary nebula was an even more hostile environment than the Hadean earth. I think their team needs some more competent biologists contributing — they may have the “astro” part down, but the “biology” part is looking laughable.

I do hope there is intelligent life in astrobiology, and that there are better qualified scientists who will take some time to criticize the cranks in their field.

You don’t really want to be like Ray Comfort, do you?

Last week, I made a post criticizing poor atheist arguments, and in particular, citing atheists who fall back on the limp crutch of the dictionary to justify their beliefs. This made many people upset. I have been named idiot of the week for failing to understand the meaning of atheism, and I’ve got one wanking manic obsessive on twitter insisting that I must make a public apology for daring to try to redefine the meaning of the word “atheism”. Commenters are declaring that they are proud to be Dictionary Atheists.

They’re all wrong. I’m not redefining atheism, nor am I declaring the dictionary wrong: I’m saying it is insufficient. Also, no one is a Dictionary Atheist, and the folly lies in pretending that you are one.

I do not have the power to redefine the word, and I’m also smart enough to know it. I only wish those readers had been smart enough to realize that, too. My article was not a top-down commandment (it’s peculiar and revealing that so many thought it was), but was instead a bottom-up recognition of an obvious fact.

Everyone who is an atheist is so because of other, prior ideas. I’m not saying that there is one set of ideas that make for a True Atheist™, but rather that if you claim there are not, if you pose as someone who is an atheist simply because you don’t believe in gods, you are failing to consider your own philosophical foundations. Calling yourself a Dictionary Atheist is like taking pride in living an unexamined life.

That’s it. And that’s what really annoys me, people who can’t recognize that there’s more to their atheism than blind acceptance of what a dictionary says.

It’s sad to see that so many atheists have something in common with Ray Comfort. As you might expect, Comfort completely distorts what I wrote to claim that I was “pointing out the non-existent foundations of atheism.” Not so, of course, since I was saying the precise opposite: that atheism has strong and rich foundations, and is not simply a blanket rejection of deities.

That’s what Dictionary Atheists imply. Not me.

Death Cult Ray is feeling peevish

Poor little Ray Comfort is out of sorts because I accused him of promoting a death cult. He does, of course; he wanders about, accusing people of being sinners damned to hell, and pretending that they can be save by believing his Jebus stories.

The amusing part about his latest whine is that he misspells my last name multiple times, even gets my initials wrong once, and also misspells Larry Moran‘s name. I don’t think his brain is working right. He also accuses me of backing out of a radio debate with him — he knows that is not true, and was informed by the radio station that it was their decision.

In addition to the bad brain, I think he just likes lying.

I get email

Greg Abell wrote to me, requesting answers to his questions, which he doesn’t ask, and since he caught me in a cranky moment, I felt like answering.

Hello,

I wanted to ask a professional scientist how something can come from nothing?

No, you didn’t. You wrote as an excuse to preach at me, and are not asking any sincere questions. You’re a phony.

If there is no God, you have to prove how this is possible.

Matter had to come from somewhere. Space had to have a beginning. Time also has to originate right?

Ask a physicist. I’m a biologist. It says so right over there under my picture to the left, where you got my email address. So why are you pestering me with questions way outside my expertise? I wish these loonies would write to me asking about biological events within the last half-billion years, where I might be able to give a pretty good answer. Big Bang stuff, ask an astronomer/physicist; origin of life stuff, ask a biochemist; rock stuff, ask a geologist.

Why aren’t you harrassing Vic Stenger or Neil deGrasse Tyson or Lawrence Krauss or Sean Carroll about these subjects, instead of me? You’ve already pissed me off with your inappropriate, clueless questions — and I can already tell you’re an insincere, pretentious twit who won’t pay any attention to any answers I might give, anyway.

You got your assertions wrong. Matter had to come from nowhere: we aren’t talking about Private God digging a hole in one place for dirt to fill a hole in another. We are talking about the creation of matter, space, and time out of nothing. Inventing a god who did it doesn’t solve the problem: it just postulates that there was no nothing, but instead an anthropomorphic superman with magic powers, which is the kind of hypothesis a five year old might make. And not a smart five year old, either.

If you landed on an alien planet and discovered something that looked like plastic, had buttons and a screen. You would say it looked like a computer. You would also have to deduce that some kind of intelligence made this.

Yes, by analogy with similar devices on Earth, I’d make a reasonable hypothesis about how it was manufactured.

If I saw a herd of small purple alien creature with tentacles and three eyes scuttling about organically and gnawing on the fragrant hoobatchie trees, though, I’d suggest that they got there by procreation and that there were mommy and daddy hoobatchie nibblers around, and that they come from a long line of autonomous biological replicators. No intelligence on the part of the organisms is required. You, on the other hand, would postulate that a robed and bearded humanoid strolled across the planet, snapping his fingers and conjuring the plants and animals into existence…because that scenario requires very little intelligence and zero evidence on your part.

YOU don’t give your self enough credit. Your Brain is 100 times better than a computer!!!!!!!Plus you have hands and fingers and senses and you are telling me that this just happened as if I could destroy a watch with a hammer, throw the pieces in a bag and if I were able to shake the bag long enough, eventually I would get a watch??????

I wouldn’t tell you that, because only an idiot would think smashing a watch is a relevant experiment.

PLEASE SMELL WHAT YOU ARE SHOVELING!!!

I thought you were asking questions? You’ve already decided that any answer I might give is ordure.

I hate to be rude but you really need to get over yourself and grab ahold of the only possible way of escaping a place that has no love because God is Love, This Universe is Filled with His Love. If you choose to reject God in this life by not accepting the fact that He sent His Son to be The sacrifice for our unrighteousness, then God will give you what you want and He will remove Himself from you which is what Hell is.

We enjoy love in our lives, We understand the concept. God is Love, Remove God, Remove Love and Compassion and etc…..multiply that by eternity and that’s what Hell will be like and it is a real place.

This universe is filled with vacuum, gas, dust, radiation, and uninhabitable chunks of rock and ice. Imagining a magic man in the sky doesn’t change reality and fill it with candy floss and puppy dogs.

Your Jesus was just another in a long line of holy con artists. Why should I believe him over Mohammed, or Thor, or Krishna, or Buddha? That he did a tawdrier class of magic tricks during his brief life does not impress me, nor does the logic of blood sacrifice by another to atone for the imaginary sins of my many-times-great grandmother. He’s already absent from my life (and from yours too, I will note: that you pretend to have an invisible friend doesn’t make him real), and I’m feeling pretty good: a wonderful wife, three great kids, and a job I enjoy doing. If this is Hell, bring on more.

Your idea of science is fundamentally flawed. Your science starts off by limiting the possible answers. From the word Go, your science does not allow for the Super Natural!

My science begins with doubt and disbelief, which turns out to be a powerful foundation. It means I don’t accept crazy claims from random rubes on the internet, but instead expect verifiable evidence for those claims. It certainly does allow for the supernatural…as long as the supernatural phenomena affect the natural world in some measurable way.

You can go to the Big Bang which I kinda believe in because God “Spoke” the Universe into existence!

The word “Universe” simply means ONE VERSE/ ONE PHRASE

That phrase was “Let there Be”

No, it doesn’t. From the Merriam-Webster dictionary:

Etymology: Middle English, from Latin universum, from neuter of universus entire, whole, from uni– + versus turned toward, from past participle of vertere to turn

You’re making stuff up.

A RELATIONSHIP with Jesus is the only way you will be able to be free and escape the never ending agony of being in a place where God’s presence is not there.

I will be praying that the Holy Spirit Convicts you and that Almighty God would allow your heart to accept The Truth!!!

You don’t get it. I’m not in agony. I’m feeling damn good. Your god is a god of misery and promises of relief from horrible, awful pain; your god is a delusion for broken people. If ever I am in a situation where I am suffering (an inevitable state, since I’m not pretending that I’m immortal), I should hope I wouldn’t be so brain-damaged that I believe a retreat into fantasy is the solution. I believe in reality, and hard work, and the redeeming power of knowledge; I don’t believe in magic.

May God Bless you and your family Mr. Meyers

I would really appreciate any feedback you might have and thank you for your time.

OK.

You started by claiming you wanted to ask a scientist a question, and then instead of asking anything, you made a series of ignorant assertions, ranted about your goofy Jesus idol, and closed by misspelling my name. And now you want feedback?

You’re an arrogant ass, Mr Abell. Your faith makes a lot of noise about humility, but I’ve found almost all of its followers to be poisonously full of themselves, and you are no exception. I get letters like yours on a daily basis, and I assure you — all they do is repeatedly emphasize to me that religion breeds stupidity and lazy thinking and unconscionable pomposity. You are an anti-proselytizer. You are a walking, talking, preaching object lesson on why I despise religion. If you want to convert people, a better strategy for you would be to shut up and go hide in a cave where no one might listen to you and be frightened away from your daft pratings, because all you do is affirm my conviction that faith is for fools.

I get email

I have sad news to report. John A. Davison has gone insane. No, I know, he’s been nuts for a long, long time, but I was just purging the ol’ trashed mail folder today and discovered that he has been writing to me two or three times a day, usually just by dumping his latest comment on his poor dead blog, which mainly consists of him talking to himself about how everyone is ignoring him, and isn’t joining his crusade against Richard Dawkins, Wesley Elsberry, and PZ Myers, and how we’re all terrified of JA Davison and Darwinism is going to disappear any day now to be replaced by his theory.

As I skimmed through a sampling of the 106 tirades he has sent to me this summer, I felt sorry for the poor old guy. There he is, sitting in Vermont, shaking his fist at his imaginary enemies who don’t even notice his existence until they find his missives clogging up the spam trap. He’s the most quixotic kook I’ve ever encountered.

So here you go, pathetic old man. A little sop to your ego. If you’d like, you could imagine me seething with rage and fear, pressing the button to dispatch my team of ninjas to take you out once and for all…but they all refuse, trembling with trepidation at getting JAD cooties, and citing the importance of guarding the copy of the Origin of Species in my house. I tried to send the cyborg zombie squid, but they all mentioned that Vermont is land-locked. So you’ve foiled me for now, Davison, but mark my words, someday…someday my minions will play on your lawn.

Dear Pee Zee,

gary hitch

Thank you for your support but this is not the place to give it. Nobody pays any attention to this weblog. I get an average of 20 hits per day. The place to go after these degenerates is on their own turf, Pharyngula, After The Bar Closes, Panda’s Thumb and Uncommon Descent, all venues from which this scientist is banished. I refuse to assume aliases, use suberfuge or any other device to penetrate their cowardly defenses. The only way these egomaniacal tyrants will be defeated is by a mass uprising generated by real intellectuals like yourself who have properly identified them as the danger to our society they have become.

I read their blogs and see no support for my science anywhere. Like my sources I too do not exist. We have never been allowed to exist. There is also no place for a personal God in science and the Christian right is just as guilty as the Atheist left. My name is not mentioned at any of these weblogs because the heads of those weblogs are terrified of the message that I and my sourcse have alway delivered: there is absolutely nothing in the Darwinian model that ever had anything whatsoever to do with any aspect of the ascending creative sequence that the fossil record so obviously displays.

In an earlier response I asked you to demonstrate that you have challenged our adversaries. Have you done so? Where can I find your challenges? It is nice to have another supporter but that doesn’t feed the bulldog. What is needed is a confrontation in which the enemy is forced to confront their adversaries in a public forum, something that they are loathe to do because they know they will lose. I have done everything in my power to achieve this result and I have failed. If there really are those who agree with me, where are they to be found? I can’t find them. One thing is certain. If and when they speak they must use their real names if they expect to be taken seriously by either freind or foe. Everyone knows who this investigator’s primary enemies are. They are Clinton Richard Dawkins, Paul Zachary Myers and Wesley Royce Elsberry along with their thousands of dedicated followers. Now where are those who will lend their real names to mine and demand that this conflict be resolved.

I now propose that a public confrontation be arranged between those who subscribe to the Darwinian model and those who reject that model in favor of a guided phylogeny in which chance has played a trivial role.

I present this in the form of a petition which requires that those in favor of this resolution signify their approval by submitting to me via my private mail their full name and a description such that their identity is properly revealed to be that of a real person. Which side they represent is of no consequence.

I will present those names right here. Now we will see who really wants this crisis resolved by the only means it ever will be resolved, by real people with real names, people who have real convictions that they are willing to stand by with the time honored tradition that “a man is as good as his word.”

nosivadaj@msn.com

I will list those names as they appear here.

John A. Davison, Professor Emeritus of Biology, University of Vermont. Mailing address: L4 Grandview Drive, South Burlington, VT 05403

Dear Professor Dawkins,

The above petition, message #260, has yet to produce a single signature. Not a soul has offered to support my suggestion that the Meyers/Elsberry/Dawkins Darwinian Triumvirate should face this critic in a public confrontation. I find such apathy appalling. It reveals an evolutionary community completely cowed by the atheist “Darwinista.” Refusing to join with me in a most reasonable request offers a tangible explanation why Darwin’s infantile dream persists. That reason in a word is APATHY.

We are dealing with a brutal intellectual tyranny whose primary goal is to remove God from every aspect of Western Civilization.

Thomas Jefferson understood the role of silence when confronted with danger –

“All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.”

Those who remain silent support the enemy. Darwinian mysticism has gained far more than a foothold. It has come to dominate even our institutions of higher learning as I and others know from personal experience. That dominance will continue to grow unchecked until such time as an enlightened citizenry realizes what is happening to it and acts. I have offered such an opportunity in the form of the above petition. While, personally, I am bitterly disappointed, I am not surprised.

All great civilizations have ultimately failed and ours is no exception.

Sincerely,

John A. Davison, Professor Emeritus of Biology, University of Vermont. Mailing address: L4 Grandview Drive, South Burlington, VT 05403

And then I pushed the delete key and they all disappeared.

If he starts increasing the frequency of his email now, I might report back…in December. He’ll need a Christmas present, after all.

A science section on Huffpo? Sweet Jebus, no!

JL Vernon is lobbying to have Huffpo dedicate a section of their undeservedly popular, cheesy website to science. He makes a superficially reasonable argument: to work within the belly of the beast to promote good science, in opposition to the tripe they usually publish. I’m sympathetic, really I am, but I see the Huffpo as a dead cause.

I also think Vernon fails to grasp the problem here. For instance, he complains about the refusal of anti-creationists to debate the opposition.

The most resounding message emerging from the opposition is the idea that having “real science” share a platform with “bad science” will ultimately tarnish the reputation of the legitimate scientists and science communicators who choose to participate. This is essentially the same argument Richard Dawkins, PZ Meyers and others take when refusing to debate evolutionists. The concept here being that by sharing the stage with creationists, scientists lend credibility to the creationist arguments. In some ways, I think this is a cowardly response. If you have a sound argument, the opposition should not win the debate.

That’s wrong on multiple levels. First, a debate is not won by sound argument; it’s by persuasive rhetoric. Many creationists have that skill (I have to repeat a mantra I’ve got: creationists are not stupid, just ignorant and misled by ignorant arguments), so it is a serious tactical error to think that because all the facts and science are on your side, you’re going to win debates. That’s a recipe for consistent failure.

The other problem here is that I’ve “won” most of my debates…because the other side is just nuts. Jerry Bergman and Geoff Simmons, to name two, were raving loonies who made me embarrassed to be sharing a spotlight with them. There was no gain for me, and plenty for them. You get two possibilities: you’ll face an eloquent rhetorician who will run rings around you despite your command of the facts, or you’ll get a nutcase who makes you feel like you’re sharing the podium with a brain-damaged hobo. Neither are great options.

The final big problem is that creationist debaters willingly lie and distract to win their arguments. The Gish Gallop is just one of the tools they use; they sputter out dozens of claims that are false and falsifiable, if you had an hour to address each one. And then, of course, if you do “win”, they’ll cheerfully lie to their little closeted evangelical audiences that they not only defeated you, but that you were a big abusive meanie who was rude and accused the creationists of making stuff up.

I have little hope for Vernon’s endeavor if he doesn’t grasp these basic realities of dealing with kooks.

As for Huffpo, he has a couple of hurdles. He has openly announced his intent to expose the “bad science” on HuffPo — while I like that idea, does he really think Ariana Huffington is going to look kindly on that proposal?

Also, we know that Huffpo editors censor articles. There isn’t going to be any criticism of the site’s major goals, the promulgation of Newage garbage, getting through unbutchered.

But let’s assume Vernon succeeds, and gets a good science section with reputable contributors writing about good solid science and criticizing the pseudoscience and quackery otherwise rife on Huffpo. If it acquires even a scrap of prestige and respect, I can predict exactly what will happen: Deepak Chopra and Robert Lanza will ask Huffington to include their raving madness in that section. They write about “science” and “medicine”, after all. And a credible science section on Huffpo will be quickly subverted to promote quackery.

Convergent Revolution agrees that Huffpo Science would be a bad idea. Huffpo is tainted fruit — stay away from it altogether.

What ever happened to Paul Kurtz?

The Paul Kurtz I remember was the serious, scholarly fellow at the forefront of the atheist movement, who wasn’t shy about saying it the way it was. The New Kurtz is a more timid observer, who wants to criticize religion mildly without giving offense, and is more concerned about policing his fellow humanists and atheists than actually working to overcome the folly of religious belief.

In the latest issue of Free Inquiry magazine, Kurtz has an editorial that is all about tone rather than content; it de-emphasizes what we say and wants to make how we say it the most important criterion. It’s titled “Toward a Kinder and Gentler Humanism”, and it makes me wonder who chopped Kurtz’s balls off. (To be fair, I should say upfront that it briefly mentions me — or rather, my jerkwad alter ego, P.Z. Meyers — to accuse me of being “strident”.)

He lays out his plan. They are going to take the “high road”, they are not “shrill”, they will not “resort to ridicule”, yadda yadda yadda. Again, tone, tone, tone. Who cares? The low point for me, though, was this bit:

I must say, though some colleagues at the Center may disagree, that I have serious misgivings about recent programs undertaken by the Center and the Council that laid heavy stress on blasphemy. Although I agree that it is vitally important to defend the right to blaspheme, I am displeased with the Center’s decision last year to celebrate Blasphemy Day as such. Similarly, although cartoons make a point and can be used, I am disturbed about poking fun at our fellow citizens in the public square. Speaking personally, I am particularly offended by the cartoon that won the Council’s Free Expression Cartoon Contest this year. I think that it is in poor taste. I do not object to others in society doing this, but I do not think that is is the role of the Council for Secular Humanism or the Center for Inquiry to engage in such forms of lampooning.

So, we’re going to reserve the right to blaspheme, but we’re not actually going to do it, out of respect for the beliefs of others. When some religious nut demands our obeisance to something he regards as holy, we’re going to say that we could disagree, but instead we’re going to self-censor and bend a knee to his gods…have no fear, though, while we’re busy kowtowing, we’ll be sure to declare that we could stop any time.

You have not protected the right to blaspheme if you also gag yourself and say you won’t; you are particularly in the wrong if you are a respected leader of a godless institution and you use your influence to insist that we should not blaspheme at all. It is our responsibility as the opposition to poke fun at our fellow citizens in the public square; what good is an opposition that muzzles itself and insists on giving religion the privilege of not even being laughed at?

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By the way, here is that cartoon that won the contest he referred to above. I share some of Kurtz’s disappointment, because I don’t care for it much. However, it’s not because it’s offensive or in poor taste — please, a cartoon cannot possibly be as offensive as the child-raping behavior it targets — but because it’s not particularly funny. I have higher expectations of one of the premiere organizations for secular humanism than this!

What Kurtz fails to appreciate is that we must offend. We are rejecting the power of invisible gods and refusing the promise of eternal life in paradise, and further, we’re in the business of telling believers that their most cherished fantasies are lies. If we aren’t offending them, we are hiding the implications of our ideas and are not doing our job.

Fortunately, as the editorial reveals throughout, the Council for Secular Humanism and the Center for Inquiry are defying their founder’s demands that they hobble themselves (and there is definitely a note of resentment coming through, too). It’s a shame that Kurtz is willingly trapped in an ineffectual past, but at the same time, I think he has built a solid foundation for those organizations, and there is hope that they, if not their former leader, are working to advance.

I am offended!

Another day, another outraged Christian. Parents in a Utah school district were horrified to discover a link on the district web page to an evil essay:

The new battle centers on a link on the district’s Web page that was quietly removed on Feb. 16. Titled “America: Republic or Democracy?” the link led directly to an essay by William P. Meyers, a California-based writer who heralds his belief that Jesus Christ is one in a long string of “historic vampires.”

I, too, am deeply offended. Meyers doesn’t know how to spell his own name, and everyone knows Jesus wasn’t a vampire — he was a zombie.

But here’s another weird thing: you can read the offensive essay, and what you’ll discover is that it says nothing about Jesus or vampires. It’s about the nature of the US government, which he explains is not a simple democracy, but a republic that evolved towards more democratic representation gradually, which is not a contentious issue at all, or shouldn’t be. It also points out something that is probably even more offensive to the purists who worship the founding fathers like a council of demigods: among the motives of the American revolution was a demand to protect the institution of slavery, and the desire of acquisitive land speculators to seize more native American land.

Uh-oh. Questioning the nobility of our forefathers? Trouble.

And then the essay concludes with another obvious, simple piece of reporting:

There are no longer any voter-qualification impediments to democracy in the United States. But many have noted that the will of the people has tended not to prevail, and that a majority of people eligible to vote are so discouraged that they do not vote. The main reason for this is the buying and selling of elections and politicians by the wealthier class of citizens and their special interest groups. A year or more before elections take place, the winner is decided by those who vote with dollars. But this is a defect in democracy, not a reason to abandon it. The answer is to cure the defect, not to attempt to destroy our representative democracy.

Hmm, I think I like this guy even if he does consistently misspell his name. Unfortunately, to constitutive conservatives like the yahoos in Utah, the message in the essay is…creeping socialism! And they get even more hysterical:

[Meyers] believes in anarchy, pagan worship and that Jesus was just a leader of a small cult and is a real vampire! He advocates radical socialism, limiting families to two children, abortion to term, homosexuality, worshipping the sun instead of a ‘dead Jesus,’ saying that Mary was just an unwed pregnant teenager, and many other socialist political views, just two clicks from the district’s home page. … All this was linked directly from Alpine School District’s Web site.

No, it wasn’t. It actually took a fair amount of digging to find out what the heck they’re talking about. Here is his position on abortion and birth control — it’s not at all inflammatory, and includes some simple common sense, like “It is not an appropriate role of government to try to boss people’s sex lives around.” He does not advocate sun worship, in fact proposes quite the opposite. The vampire story is an introduction to a book, and isn’t even on the same site.

If it weren’t for a howling mob of witchhunters trying to find cause to censor a short, simple essay on American history that they found offensive, I wouldn’t have found any of that. It is interesting that they don’t actually address any of the content of that one essay, but instead have to resort to mad, flailing character assassination to silence a simple explanation of historical facts that did not fit their deranged view of the world.