Scenes from the proposal

Finally, here are those pictures from Threadgill's as promised. Thanks, Keryn!

The chorus enters

"She flew across the nation..."

"Yes," says the back of my head

Cool thing for tonight

No real time to pound out a major blog post today, so I thought I'd leave you with some kickass science news. More later.

900'-tall Jesus steps on Oral Roberts

And another one bites the dust. What a card that God is! He tells Oral that Oral will be summarily killed if the money isn't raised to keep his faith healing center afloat. And so Oral gets the money, and then the center shuts down three years later anyway! Then God waits until the fellow is basically decades older than the average human life expectancy, and kills him then, without a warning or cash extortion attempt of any kind. God, you joker you!

Oh, well, actually, God was never involved in any part of it. Oral was just another huckster who struck it rich exploiting ignorance and gullibility, and enjoyed the sort of long and prosperous life that, if we lived in a just world, honest people would be more entitled to. But I suspect even Oral wasn't as shady as the federally-investigated Kenneth Copeland, seen below administering a kind of Christian rolfing to the ORU patriarch. If you wish to commemorate Oral's passing by captioning/LOLing this, we won't stop you.

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Addendum: Here's mine. Forgive me. (In the event it gets flagged and taken down as "inappropriate," I've taken a screenshot.)

The bus-banner campaign we really need

Dave the Happy Singer, one of the stalwart Australian AXP fan contingent, has just launched a site that, so far, has nothing on it but this.

Which I happen to think is a fine, fine sentiment and not the least bit militant. I mean, we already know that the Christians get all hot under the collar when they see a really threatening atheist message. So I think something a little more even-tempered ought to be just the thing. I don't know what else Dave plans for this charming little graphic, although coughcoughtshirtscough I could probably think of an idea or two.

Oh, here's another helpful message from Dave. He's just full of them!

Email: Why can't science ever prove God?

Andrew writes:

I've stumbled across your show and personal beliefs aside, I just have to say that people are really stupid. As a Catholic, I'm ashamed of the logic of Christians trying to prove the existence of God as it presents itself on your show. I do have a question which I don't get about what atheists state: God can never be proven through science. If something exists, it can be proven. Yet with the logic that the Christians use, they change Christian belief and twist it into personal assumptions rather than going by fundamental doctrine. I guess my questions are: 1) Why can't science ever prove God? ; 2) What, besides God walking up to you, can be proof for the existence of God?

And by God, I mean a physical entity that can come down and walk amongst us, wrestle with us and looks like us. Basically, if you stood next to God, you'd see that humans were created to be in the image of God. I know how you love to get definitions of God.

Andrew,

You have to understand that we can only respond to claims that we are offered about God, and there are thousands of conflicting versions of God. I know many atheists have put forth the case that God should be possible to investigate through science, and have suggested specific ways that the claim could be testable.

However, to understand how much the waters have been muddied, you ought to familiarize yourself with the history of the creationism movement. A hundred years ago, it was illegal to teach evolution in schools at all. By the 1960's, evolution was accepted as standard science. However, there was a movement to demand that creationism must be taught as science by law. This was finally rejected because creationism, at the time, was considered purely religion with no scientific merit.

So in the mid 60's there was a push to create "scientific creationism." At the time, creationists still attempted to make testable claims, generally centered around a literal interpretation of the Bible. For instance, they attempted to prove that the global flood was real. But the problem with such specific claims is that science can not only test them; it can prove them wrong. And it did, which eventually led to more legislative defeats for creationists.

Since that time, creationists have gotten a lot more crafty in trying to advance a watered down form of creationism in schools. The 1990's saw the rise of "intelligent design" which, while heavily borrowing elements of traditional creationism, made the definition of "the designer" continually more vague and without specific testable claims. In their effort not to be labeled as yet another drive to teach religion in schools, they refuse to say anything specific about God. They just say "we logically infer that there must be a designer" and they don't propose any claims about what the designer is like or how he could be tested.

This achieves the objective of being harder to counter with observable facts, yes, but it also renders meaningless any efforts to actually investigate "God" or some other sort of designer.

So can science investigate God? It depends, of course. If the concept of God is attached to specific claims about the way he interacts with the world, then yeah, you're right, that God should in principle be testable. Of course, no scientific investigations have ever revealed anything like the God of the Bible.

But on the other hand, when people propose a God that is deliberately made vague, that is untestable. An amorphous "intelligent designer" can't be investigated, and as I've explained, that is pretty much on purpose. Likewise, vague claims like "God is love" or "God is a universal consciousness" don't lend themselves easily to testing. If we ever said that God is not a scientific concept, you can bet that we were probably responding specifically to a person who was advancing this kind of nonspecific notion of God.

As for your second question: "What, besides God walking up to you, can be proof for the existence of God?" Well, I mean, God walking up to me would be a pretty good one. It's not even all that outlandish a request. After all, according to the Bible, God used to appear to people all the time. He talked to Moses in a burning Bush, he showed his puncture wounds to Doubting Thomas, he dropped in on Saul of Tarsus, he told Abraham to kill his son (before going on to say "just kidding!").

If God is bothered by the existence of atheists, then clearly he knows how to fix that. What's weird is that God is seemingly so selective. A few scattered people get to have a fireside chat with God. The rest of us apparently have to make do with clearly apocryphal stories about the appearances, and believe blindly with no such concrete evidence whatsoever. If this is the way God works, then either he enjoys playing mind games with the millions of atheists on the planet, or else he really does want them to remain atheists.

As for me, I don't think there is a god. If it turns out I'm wrong, he knows where I live.

Last night at Threadgill's

All right all right, I hyped up the surprise at dinner after the show, so I feel like I should just get it out and not wait on pictures to surface.

The Everything Else Atheist and I are now engaged. There, I said it. In a highly unconventional move, since we are godless heretics who scoff at tradition, she proposed to me.

Obviously none of this was a surprise to me since I announced it in advance. We had discussed marriage already and I already knew that she was planning to pull this off at dinner. What I was not expecting, though, was that she enlisted three of her coworkers at Texas Campaign for the Environment to show up dressed as the Bad Horse chorus from Doctor Horrible's Singalong Blog. They sang the song, but the lyrics were, er... modified, to warn me of dire consequences unless I said yes.

I said yes.

The turnout was great, with about 30 people in total showing up. Among those attending were my son Ben, and a rare appearance by my sister Keryn and her husband Michael, and of course the usual crew along with numerous show cohosts.

Thanks everyone, for being there! And to everyone who knew exactly what was about to happen, thanks for keeping the secret.

"You're just trying to put a unicorn in my mouth!": Open thread on 12/13 show

Thought it was a fun one today, even with our original big surprise having to be pre-empted. Have at it, gang.

Alert canceled :(

I seriously apologize for getting everyone interested and then yanking the rug out, but the idea we had for the show had to be postponed at the last minute. Hopefully it will run on January 10.

However, the post show dinner is still going to be interesting, and not even Martin knows why. ;)

Heads up for the Atheist Experience show this weekend

Let this be a teaser to all you viewers out there:

Something unusual is happening on the show this weekend. It is my guess that it will either be a successful something that will make this a widely discussed show, or it will be a spectacular flame-out. Either way, you won't want to miss it. A new thread will appear a few minutes before the show ends so you can discuss which it was.

Word on the street is that something entirely unrelated but no less unusual and cool will also happen at the post-show dinner at Threadgill's. If you are in Austin, You. Will. Attend.

Update: I really apologize for this, but due to circumstances beyond our control, the unusual thing for the show is postponed until next month. The dinner thing is still happening. Again, I am sorry for getting up everyone's interest prematurely.

This holiday season, shop at "naughty" retailers!

Better call the waaaaambulance. The "War on Christmas" is in full swing in fundieland, and the first casualties are rolling in. Or not.

Got an email heads-up tonight about the "Naughty and Nice 2009" list cooked up by the American "Family" Association. Right-wing fundamentalists absolutely love their collective persecution complex. It's the only thing they have, really, that gives them any empowerment.

The feelings of entitlement behind the nonexistent "War on Christmas" essentially have to do with Christians not liking the fact that anyone other than themselves exist, as well as not liking the fact that this secular world out there happens to be filled with people who enjoy celebrating the holiday season too, and last of all, going batshit insane over the fact that there are some retailers out there who approach the holiday shopping season with an eye to inclusiveness rather than exclusion. Fundies simply don't want retailers to cater to anyone but themselves. So they've decided that if holiday advertising says things like "Happy Holidays!" instead of "Merry Christmas!", then these are godless evil Christian-hating lefty tree-hugging commie hippie faggot hellbound devil-worshiping retailers who want to make the Baby Jesus cry, and good Jesus-loving Amerikans have a duty to boycott them.

For those of you who don't want to abuse your eyeballs and brain cells by following the link to the AFA page (though there are some abusive comments there that are pretty sweet), I'll just repost their list of "anti"-Christmas retailers below — these would be retailers who cheerfully greet those who celebrate Channukah, Kwanzaa, the Yuletide, or who just enjoy the secular celebrations of gift-giving, sharing love and warmth, and scrumptious turkey and dressing, in addition to Christmas-celebrating Christians. It saddens me that so many Christians are so childish and selfish that they want to deny happiness to all but themselves this time of year. But that's the evil of religion. Thinking you belong to the chosen people of the creator of the universe tends to do ugly things to the egos of people who lack the moral development to respect their fellow humans as much as they demand respect from us.

Companies marginalizing "Christmas" (according to the AFA, this means the company "refers to Christmas infrequently, or in a single advertising medium, but not in others")

Bass Pro Shops
Banana Republic
Barnes & Noble
Best Buy
Gap Stores
Hancock Fabrics
Hy-Vee Stores
Old Navy
Safeway
Starbucks
Toys R Us
Whole Foods

Companies against "Christmas" (this means the company "may use "Christmas" sparingly in a single or unique product description, but as a company, does not recognize it")

Advance Auto Parts
Aldi
Barnes & Noble
Best Buy
CVS Pharmacy
Dick's Sporting Goods
Home Shopping Network
Kroger
Limited Brands
Office Depot
Radio Shack
Staples
SUPERVALU
Victoria's Secret

So what about the companies who are "for" Christmas? Well, you can shop with them too, if you like! Because as atheists, we believe in freedom of choice and conscience, both on the part of shoppers and the companies that service them, and we'd never tell you not to shop somewhere simply because we thought they offended some precious inviolable ideology of ours (and atheists don't really have those kinds of ideologies, anyway). Sure, we might suggest that people shouldn't patronize one business or another if it could be shown that they were engaged in unethical or illegal practices, but in that regard, we're no different than the BBB. So hey, shop anywhere you like this holiday season. And, just to tweak the hateful, empty people at the AFA, throw a few more extra dollars than you planned at the folks they've red-flagged. Spread the love the AFA hasn't got!

This just in: Dunbar not running for another SBOE term

From a TFN email I just got:

We wanted TFN members and supporters to be among the first to learn about developing news at the State Board of Education. News reports today revealed that Cynthia Dunbar, R-Richmond, has decided not to run for re-election to her seat on the Texas State Board of Education. As TFN members know full well, Dunbar has been an outspoken leader of the far-right faction on the board, repeatedly using the state's public school classrooms to wage her own personal culture war.

While Dunbar has not yet revealed the reason for her decision, her extremist track record has clearly made her a damaged brand in next year’s election — and TFN has been the leader in exposing that record.

• TFN introduced the world to Dunbar's 2008 book, One Nation Under God, in which she called public education a “tool of perversion,” “tyrannical” and unconstitutional.
• TFN broke the story about Dunbar's attacks against then-candidate Barack Obama, authoring an opinion column that labeled him a terrorist sympathizer who wanted another attack on America so that he could declare martial law and throw out the Constitution.
• TFN exposed her efforts to politicize our children’s social studies classrooms and to promote creationist arguments against evolution in science classrooms.

Unfortunately, the candidate Dunbar has handpicked to be her successor shares many of her anti-science and extremist views. A blog post today at TFN Insider reveals some troubling information about Brian Russell, whom Dunbar has apparently recruited to fill her shoes on the board. So our work is not done.

Dealing with right-wing creationist d-bags is like playing Whack-A-Mole. But you gotta keep whacking.

Okay, so now that we're all agreed we don't play nice...

Via PZ and WikiLeaks, in case you hadn't seen this bit of timeless comedy gold, you can now download Kent Hovind's entire "doctoral dissertation" for "Patriot Bible University," a farcical Christian outfit housed in a doublewide offering correspondence courses. If the above is an example of what "Patriot Bible University" considers an acceptable lead-in to a dissertation, then let's just say the whole preposterous charade that is fundamentalist "education" is even more hilarious than you think.

While we're on Hovind (and it's worth noting that this remains one of our most trafficked posts ever), I'd like to add a rider to remarks that Kazim and several commenters made in the preceding post. I agree it's most important to attack ideas and not the people expressing them — but only to a point. Yes, the ad hominem attack is a fallacy, and is most commonly used simply to score cheap shots (and yes, I've been guilty of that one), or when the arguer has run out of intellectual steam and can't muster rebuttals to strong points made by his opponent.

But this is a very different thing from attacking people when they have demonstrated, by their statements or actions, that they are not merely wrong but bad and foolish people. Kent Hovind is a case in point. First off, I don't see anything unacceptable about calling a person who is convinced to the core of his being that dinosaurs walked the earth alongside humans an "idiot." This is not name calling, but merely descriptive, in the same way I have pointed out that Richard Dawkins' referring to Ray Comfort, the World's Stupidest Christian™, as an "ignorant fool" and my referring to him by his unofficial title of World's Stupidest Christian™ are not insults but descriptors*. Listen to Ray talk and read his writings, and his stupidity is on raw display. It cannot be denied any more than you could deny getting wet while standing in a thunderstorm. There is simply no way to refer to him other than to call him what he is: a stupid, ignorant fool.

Hovind is a man who is not merely ignorant but arrogant and entitled. He is convinced he is above the law, and remains unrepentant even when a ten-year jail sentence served to show him he was wrong on that point. Moreover, he has had an impact on a number of sycophantic followers, whom he has taught to lie and prevaricate just as he does. Read the comments from Hovind's defenders in that old post of ours, and you'll see them spouting the usual run of tortured, self-serving falsehoods to claim Hovind's conviction on rather blatant tax fraud was Christian persecution at the hands of a Satanic government. So, QED, Kent Hovind has significantly damaged not merely the intellectual but the moral development of hundreds if not thousands of people. He has caused demonstrable harm.

He is also, in his self absorption, utterly cold and heartless to those who really do care about him. Listen to the audio clip between Hovind and his wife Jo. Listen to her try to express her feelings to him, her concern over the rightness and wrongness of the situation they find themselves in, and then listen to him shut her down with icy finality. He's right, he's always right. Because he's God's wingman. He doesn't need to change, he's perfect. It's she who needs to "advance." You have to wonder if we witness, in that exchange, the entire dynamic of fundamentalist Christian marriage in microcosm. Is this really a world in which unfeeling, authoritarian men are simply deaf to any of their wives' emotional and moral concerns? Sure seems that way.

So, yes, I will always concentrate on attacking arguments first. But I will not refrain from condemning people worthy of condemnation. So go laugh at Kent Hovind's "dissertation," and then laugh at Kent. Because he's an ignorant, arrogant, entitled, cold-blooded, self-absorbed, self-aggrandizing, felonious piece of shit. Quote me.

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*Speaking scientifically, I know I cannot prove that Ray is necessarily the world's stupidest Christian. There may well be many who are much much stupider. But if so, then they — unlike Ray, who proudly flies his stupid flag in public at every opportunity he gets, many of which he instigates himself for the attention — have the sense to stay out of the spotlight about it. Which, in turn, would make them smarter than Ray by just that much. So perhaps it can be proved that Ray's the stupidest after all.

We don't play nice

Basically this post could be a big "What PZ said": The notion that there is anything "new" about "New Atheism" other than having the boldness to speak out is ridiculous; but the notion that there is a newer, better atheism that doesn't like to make waves against religion is far more ridiculous.

I am occasionally baffled by emails such as this one that we received two days ago (as per an earlier post, this is just an excerpt):

I was going to call in to ask what you guys think about the following. Some of my friends have suggested that the "militant atheism" strategy pursued by scientists like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, etc., may turn out to achieve precisely the opposite of its goal. The strident, aggressive stance taken by these "atheist preachers" can easily be seen by many theists as offensive, and consequently strengthen their faith and encourage the formation of a stereotype which sees the atheist as "the enemy".

How can anyone wonder what we think of those guys? We are those guys. Oh sure, we're not bestselling authors or anything, the crowds we draw are much smaller, comparatively speaking (although fairly high if we're allowed to count "every single person who eventually watches each show" as part of a crowd).

But really, the entire draw of the Atheist Experience is that we are out there every single week being a walking, televised billboard saying "Hey look, here are some guys who think that it's irrational to believe in God. Call us and argue. PLEASE." I mean, sure, we try to do so in a manner that is polite and respectful -- most of the time. (Then again, Jeff's rants are legendary.) But in generally I try to follow a guideline something like "People deserve respect and dignity. Their flawed claims do not."

Are we abrasive? Are we offensive? Sometimes I don't know how to answer that question. But I will certainly say this: it is offensive to me to claim that there are ideas out there that are beyond the scope of public dispute.

Wasting your life?

We received a letter from a theist who sent us the following question:

I came across [a Youtube Video] where one of the gentlemen on your show said that spending time, “in prayer or in church is a waste of your one precious life”…If atheism is correct and the end of life is oblivion of one's consciousness, then how is anything one does during their "precious" life a waste of time? If [2+4+75+15]*0 does equal 0 and [43-58-1002-67]*0 also equals 0 then in what real way are these problems different?... whether or not one is a theist or an atheist/agnostic there are many things you can do in this lifetime to further progress or hinder future generations. But the personal end result is always the same so I can not understand how anything you do could, at the end, be viewed as wasted.

This was the kernel of the question. The writer also pointed out that some ritualistic behaviors, such as prayer, can make some people feel good, and offered that perhaps these activities may not be a “waste” from that perspective, even if the god isn’t actually there. I replied to this particular query, and was asked to post my response to the blog. So, here it is:

Most people who put any effort, time, or resources toward attaining a goal, and then find the effort did nothing to help them get any closer to that goal, would use the term “waste” to describe that expenditure of effort. It’s simply the definition of the word “waste”—inefficient, ineffective efforts.

All we have in life are time, energy and resources. So, if those are wasted, it’s not really outside the bounds of standard definitions to call that “wasted life.” If we send money to buy a product that promises to make our clothes whiter, and we use it, and it doesn’t work—then we say it was a “waste” of our money. There’s nothing semantically or philosophically tricky about it. And whether we have no end of money (an eternal afterlife) or that was all the money we had (no eternal afterlife)—in fact, especially if that was all the money we had—the transaction is fairly, honestly, and understandably (to most people), labeled “a waste of money.”

If I hired Jim to work for me for a year for $75,000, and at the end of the year Jim came by to get paid, and I had cleared out of town without a trace, Jim would be very reasonable to conclude that he wasted a year of his life on doing work for me for nothing. He worked hard in an effort he believed would help him net a desired goal of $75k—but really the effort was fruitless in getting him anywhere close to his personal goal of $75k.

If I tell Jim to cheer up, that one day he will be dead, so the year and the money don’t actually matter—Jim probably wouldn't like that advice very much. And I have no trouble grasping that Jim would want that year back in a bad way and feel it was “wasted” and stolen from him—even if Jim didn’t believe in an afterlife (in fact, especially if Jim didn’t believe in an afterlife—and this life/time is all he gets). I suspect Jim would spend at least some time trying to hunt me down (with a blazing vengeance) to get at least some of that compensation of which I defrauded him, so that his year wouldn't be a "total waste" in his estimation.

For someone in my position, there is an ethical obligation if I have any regard for my fellow humans, if I meet Jim, to explain to him that caution is in order, since there is no valid evidence this company has ever paid out a dime to anyone it has ever employed, and to alert him that working for the company is a waste of his life, if he sincerely believes he will receive the promised compensation for his efforts. I won't physically try to stop Jim, but certainly issuing a warning is a fair and reasonable effort.

The question to Jim, then, is this: "Would you work for this company for a year even if they didn't pay you at the end of the year?" If the answer is "no," then working for the company would constitute a waste of life for Jim--based on Jim's own assessment. If the answer is "yes," then Jim has some other motivation beyond the $75k that he hasn't told me about yet, that needs to be revealed before an evaluation of "waste" could be made.

I have yet to see a person who felt anything but robbed in Jim’s situation—regardless of their religious or nonreligious leanings; and a great many ex-theists who contact us express that they feel like Jim (that their time involved with religion represents wasted life of which they often describe that they feel defrauded), and for exactly the same reasons Jim would. I hope this helps to clarify the position.

This is the end of the e-mail response. But I would like to add the following thoughts:

First of all, kudos to this theist, who replied to my e-mail to say that it helped him greatly to understand the meaning of what was said, and that he appreciated my effort to explain it. I will fully admit that I was braced for some petty semantic argument—but instead I received a nice response showing that he’d read and understood. That’s a wonderful change of pace in dealing with correspondences from theists.

But his original letter actually made me think further. Anyone could easily see my $75k analogy as being related to an afterlife promise. But actually, it is only intended to represent “motive.” In the question of theism versus atheism, everything hinges on whether or not a god exists. So, the question to Jim would translate to, “If there was no god, would you still do this?”

Interestingly, the response to the question results in a Catch-22 I had never previously considered. If the theist says, “Yes, I would still pray—even if I was convinced there is no god,” that means that for this particular theist, praying serves a primarily secular function, since whatever benefit he derives from prayer would still be there—according to him—even without a belief in god.

Alternately, if the theist says, “No, I would not continue to pray if I did not believe god exists,” then it’s fair to say that if no god exists, and if I were to help him recognize that, I would be helping him avoid wasting some portion of his life—in the same way warning Jim could salvage a year of Jim’s life.

I have heard from ex-theists who have written to our list to say things like, “I still stress over some things—like coming to grips with my own mortality,” but I have yet to get the letter that says, “My life was wonderful as a theist, and you ruined everything by convincing me god does not exist.” On the contrary, I have seen countless letters come through our list from ex-theists who want to thank us and express heavy gratitude to us for helping them get their lives back and escape from the bonds of delusional thinking. Honestly, the only people who write to us to express that taking away someone’s belief in god has ruinous results, are people who believe in god and, for whatever reason, are convinced that losing that belief would be ruinous—I assume to them? But their imagined fear contradicts the real feedback from every ex-theist who has ever contacted us.

Ironically, people who write to tell us they’ve gotten their lives “back,” must have been people who were expending a great deal of their lives on their belief in god—otherwise, why write to thank us? What have we really done for them if they weren’t devoting much, or anything, to god? They write because they were devoting quite a lot to belief in god, and now they can redirect their energy, time and resources toward something that will yield actual results in reality for them and others—not just in their minds. So, taking a person who is putting a lot of energy into belief in god, and stripping him of that belief, in reality results in a profuse “thank you,” despite the theists who claim it will result in a loveless, bleak, meaningless, doubt-filled, fear-based existence that offers a person no reason to get out of bed in the morning.

The theist who offers this prophecy of doom, though, is only speaking from his own fear—the real cord that keeps him bound to his belief. And he is so strongly gripped by this fear that it’s beyond his capacity to imagine anyone else not being held sway by such terror. So, he projects those fears onto others because that’s all he is honestly capable of. He really, and sadly, has accepted the childhood indoctrination message that a life without god would be an awful and meaningless existence.

If you are a theist, and you think this way, please understand that this is a big, flashing sign that you are in the iron grip of irrational, mind-twisting fear that was drilled into your brain during indoctrination as a child. The fear you feel is real, I understand, but the basis for it is a lie your tiny child mind was pressured to accept by well-meaning, misguided adults. You’re accepting a lot of religious rubbish because you’ve been convinced that to not do so would have catastrophic results in your life. It’s hard to take that first step, when you’re gripped by the terror that one false move can doom you for all eternity. To be honest, many theists don’t have the nerve. When push comes to shove, a lot of them cave and just accept belief in god as best they can, in order to stop the pressure they think will never stop otherwise. Don’t believe the lie that the only choice is to accept god or live forever in fear and doubt. There is another option.

What you fear exists only in your mind. The religious claim that the only escape from it is to accept all these beliefs about god, is a lie. There are ex-theists who have rejected these beliefs and who have worked through these same fears and made it out, very successfully—to bright futures where their lives have been fully restored to them. Consider talking to some ex-theists. Don’t tell them that their lives without god are meaningless and terrible, ask them if their lives did, in fact, become terrible and meaningless after letting go of faith.

If you will listen and learn, it could save you from a wasted life.

Question for readers on publishing email

So sometimes, as you know, we get email. Sometimes we publish the email. PZ Myers has been doing it for years. And before I was a blogger, I used to publish every piece of email that I got from my web page response to Amway. (I no longer do this, but I've set up a guest book to let people self-publish their feedback.)

Because I am such a polite heathen, I usually ask people's permission before posting the text of an exchange on a blog, and I will generally honor someone's request to have their stuff taken down. However, I have until recently considered it fair game to post whatever I receive at my discretion, and only a matter of etiquette to do what they want.

But recently I had a reason to go and look up the law, and I was surprised by what I found. It turns out that legally, the writer of any message has an implied copyright on everything they produce. While the copyrights are rarely enforced, intellectual property experts generally agree that it is a significant ethical violation to post somebody else's material without permission, even if you are just responding to it. You can paraphrase it, you can include perhaps short excerpts, but you should not simply repost it verbatim.

I'm not a lawyer so I don't know all the details all that well. What do you think, dear readers? Are we committing copyright fraud every time we post one of those amusing "we get email" messages, when we have not obtained explicit permission in advance?

I don't think we'd ever be taken to court for it -- after all, just look how much Something Awful routinely gets away with for comedy purposes. However, as an ethical humanist with morality based on real world consequences, I'd like to reason this out and avoid validating claims that atheists are immoral sinners.

Winning winnification that's full of win

Full story here. Gotta love the look of resignation on the woman's face. Jesus didn't warn you to expect that, did he, fashioncakes?

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PS: What's really funny about this is that corduroy is a cotton blend, and blended fabrics really are a sin!

It's not just the economy

Bogus miracles, fake news, intellectual and moral cowardice

Okay, this is fun.

The other day we got an email from a fellow who described himself as an atheist, but who professed he was a bit taken aback by a miracle claim that had come his way, about a Florida doctor who is supposed to have prayed a man back to life. He pasted a news story into his email, and some quick Googletronic Googlefication confirmed my suspicions: that this is one of those stories making the rounds in fundagelical circles, that they email one another as a big social reinforcement exercise, but for which there are no accounts — either confirming or disconfirming — from a secular source anywhere.

I tracked the story down to one website (which probably isn't the one that originated it, but they're certainly spreading it), Australia's Catch the Fire Ministries. Here you may read the 2007 story in full. It is written in the form of a press release, but it comes from Assist News Service, one of those phony Christian "news" services that feeds press releases to the likes of the 700 Club, and probably WorldNutDaily, the AFA's One News Now, and so on. The medical "conference" at which this miracle testimony was given is — you guessed it — a "Christian doctors' conference". If it dismays you that there are people out there with at least enough going on between their ears that they can pass eight years of med school, eight years of residency, go on to become M.D.s, and who are yet gullible and nonskeptical enough to swallow bullshit about Jebus doing miracle resurrections in the ICU, it should. And really, they're everywhere.

Anyway, in response to the first comment on that page I linked to, where some dimwit tries to say that "...unbelievers will ignore the doctor’s eyewitness testimony and will cite the fact that they have never witnessed such an event," I wrote:

No, we will point out that there’s not a shred of evidence that this anecdote is true. A Christian doctor gives a testimonial in front of other Christian doctors abut praying a man back to life, and hallelujah! they believe him. Big surprise there. No religious confirmation biases at all, nosiree.

Christians have a little problem understanding that the plural of anecdote is not data.

You should not be surprised that my comment was not approved. Unlike atheist sites, many Christian sites are completely closed to comments from dissenting voices. (This is perhaps the one regard in which Ray Comfort can be said to be better than most of his ilk. But then, baiting atheists is really the only shtick Ray has.) We only turn moderation on to prevent outright spam and trolling from guys like Dennis Markuze. But we love it when guys like Seth R. in the Mormon thread, or "MrFreeThinker" drop by to mix it up.

But that isn't the most fun part. Guess what is. Catch the Fire Ministries sent me a concern-trolling evangelizing email! They wouldn't let my comment through, but they will use my email address for stuff like this. Hilarious.

May the one true living God bless you Martin, atheists and all people with His Saving Truth and Everlasting Love! (John 3:16-21)

We at Catch the Fire Ministries will keep praying for you to believe the Bible (Word of God) as the mighty Voice from Heaven that calls, “I died on the cross for you and rose from the dead to save you from eternal death, hell and destruction! Repent of your unbelief / doubt and surrender your life (past, present and future) to Jesus Christ as your personal Savior and Lord before it is too late!”

Time is running out as we will soon stand before Him face to face as our Final Judge! (Revelation 20:11-15)

Say, 'Yes to Jesus, Yes to Heaven Forever!'

Say, 'No to Jesus, Yes to Hell Forever!'

Make the Right Choice, Your Eternal Future Depends On It!

I wrote back:

Hello, and thanks for writing.

So, it's the usual thing, in other words. Lacking evidence, Christianity must resort to threats to compel belief. Most atheists have heard this tiresome routine before, and it always makes us shake our heads sadly that you do not realize how much it confirms both how intellectually and morally adrift your religion is.

And anyway, I notice that in your zeal to evangelize you utterly failed to refute or even respond to my point. Where precisely is the evidence that this doctor prayed a man back to life? "Uh oh, gotta thump my Bible harder!" is not a way to deal with tough questions.

So, what else you got?

Martin

PS: I noticed you refused to approve my comment. The kind of cowardice that suppresses dissenting opinions and hard questions rather than addressing them is indicative not of righteousness, but insecurity and weakness.

(And before some creotard latches onto my PS, thinking he's found a "gotcha" quote exposing atheist hypocrisy about intelligent design, be aware the scientific community has addressed ID, comprehensively, and shown it to be vacuous and utterly nonscientific rubbish. It's kind of what the whole Dover trial was about.)

Christianity is peddling an inferior product. Its adherents know this, and yet they cannot allow their reason to overcome their emotional investment in the fear of death and desire for a celestial daddy who'll keep them safe from the monsters under the bed. So this is why, when you ask a tough question, many times they'll just stick their fingers in their ears and sing "Mary Had a Little Lamb" in a loud voice until you're done, at which point they'll switch on Witnessing Mode, ignoring everything you've said. I know the answer to my last question: they got nothin', and they'll prove it by writing me back (if they do) with just more Bible quotes, more emotional appeals, more veiled threats of the dire fate that awaits me if I reject God's "love," and ad infinitum into the moral wasteland and rhetorical cul-de-sac that is evangelism.

If they do write back, I will naturally let you know.

And now, a spirited debate over the ontological argument

Which, I'm happy to report, reaches the obvious conclusion that cats are worthier of worship than any stupid old deity any day, and besides, cats exist. Hugs all around!

Christianity and the allure of "cheap grace"

One aspect of religion that has often come under atheists' critical fire is the way in which it enables the most egregious hypocrisies amongst its most devout adherents. Considering how important Christians will tell you Scripture is to their lives, it's remarkable how selective they are in their reading of that Big Book of Multiple Choice. The warnings against hypocrisy among believers that comprise most of Matthew 6 would be sufficient to shut up almost the entirety of the American Christian Right, if they were the kinds of people who practiced what they preached.

But I think there is something about religion that's even more insidious than hypocrisy, and that's the way it puffs up believers' hubris, allowing them to think they're more special and entitled and deserving, even (and especially) without having done anything to earn it. Religion tells people they're part of a select group, favored over others by God. And yet these are the same people who routinely like to attack unbelievers — and the intelligentsia many unbelievers are part of — as "elitists." What could be more elitist than believing everybody but you deserves eternity of torture in hell, simply because you belong to the Jesus Fan Club and they don't?

I've been thinking about this over the last couple of days since my attention was drawn to something that hasn't really turned up on atheists' radar: the Manhattan Declaration. This is a kind of manifesto that has recently been put together by several prominent conservative Christian figures — among them arch-bigot Tony Perkins and Kazim's old pal Chuck Colson — as something of an ideological purity test. It begins as follows:

We are Orthodox, Catholic, and evangelical Christians who have united at this hour to reaffirm fundamental truths about justice and the common good, and to call upon our fellow citizens, believers and non-believers alike, to join us in defending them. These truths are:

1. the sanctity of human life
2. the dignity of marriage as the conjugal union of husband and wife
3. the rights of conscience and religious liberty.

Some quick Googlage has revealed that this Declaration has already ruffled the feathers of liberal, progressive Christians, who have quickly called the whole thing out as an effort to enshrine conservative prejudices as "fundamental truths about justice and the common good." Only the most smug and arrogant bigots could claim with a straight face that a Declaration that openly repudiates GLBT marriage equality is one that favors "justice" in any form. I think that word, to quote The Princess Bride for the 80 billionth time, doesn't mean what they think it means.

Basically, the highfalutin language of the thing does little to disguise the fact that it's a huge anti-gay-rights and anti-abortion petition, and it takes a Bushian "with us or against us" attitude that is nothing less than a gauntlet thrown down to all those liberal Christians who haven't toed the Hate Line to the satisfaction of their conservative betters.

Surfing the blogosphere, I come upon this post by blogger Hugo Schwyzer — who, as an avowed pro-GLBT liberal feminist Christian, is about as far from the fundies' notion of ideological purity as a guy can get — where he takes the Manhattan Declaration to task for being little more than a reactionary pushback against the tendency among the younger generation of modern Christians to reject right-wing fundie obsessions with "pelvic morality" (basing culture war talking points on sexual and reproductive issues to the near exclusion of everything else) in favor of broader moral concerns — saving the planet, helping the needy — that are generally of interest only to those damn latté sipping libs. Schwyzer makes an astute point about the "cheap grace" enjoyed by fundies whenever they beat their chests and pontificate over such narrow-minded issues: that these are fights they love precisely because they have nothing at stake.

Here’s the thing: fighting against abortion and gay rights is, in the end, cheap. It requires no particular personal sacrifice or reflection on the part of those who claim these are the top issues. Men who will never get pregnant; heterosexuals who have the privilege to marry those whom they love — they surrender nothing precious to them by fighting tooth and nail against reproductive and glbtq rights. The struggle against global poverty and the struggle to save the planet from environmental degradation, on the other hand, make radical claims on all of us — particularly on the affluent in the West, whose unsustainable consumption patterns are directly linked to human and animal suffering. Fighting against climate change and poverty require that the wealthy transform their lifestyles; fighting against gay rights requires nothing more than censorious and self-righteous indignation.

Bam! — direct hit, below the waterline. But I'd caution Schwyzer not to forget that, in a very real way, "cheap grace" is at the heart of all Christianity, not just the version practiced by wingnutty Sarah Palin and Carrie Prejean fans. Christianity presents believers with this odd notion about morality, sin, and fate: that, merely by virtue of being alive, a person is a worthless sinner damned to eternal agony because of the Fall; but hey, not to worry, because Jesus took all of that punishment upon himself, poor chap, and now by virtue of his sacrifice, you're good to go, and all you need to do is make sure (at some point before you die) you publicly high-five Jesus for taking one for the team, accepting him as your savior. So, we're damned, but we're not, and eternal salvation is ours simply by the rough spiritual equivalent of clicking a confirmation email.

So right from the outset, Christians are more or less raised in the extremely confident belief that all the heavy lifting for their own personal redemption was already done 2000 years ago. Their own efforts require no personal sacrifice at all. If this is not cheap grace, what is?

The very thing that Christianity tries to sell as its most morally and spiritually profound element — salvation by proxy — in fact cheapens the entire notion that in life, self-respect, the respect of others, and an enduring reputation as the kind of good person whom the rest of us should want to emulate, must be earned. The whole notion of salvation by faith and not works (which, admittedly, might be more favored by conservative Christians than liberal ones, though I think God, if he's up there, ought to do his job right and clarify matters) gives Christians the ability to think pleasingly of themselves as among the saved elect, regardless of how they might actually behave in their lives. The popular Christian bumper sticker "Christians aren't perfect, just forgiven" conveys egotism, not humility, as it's basically saying, "Yippie! I'm a Christian, and I never have to change, never have to better myself, never have to take responsibility at all." The very hypocrisy Matthew 6 rails against is enabled by Christianity's entire salvation mechanism. How else could so many arch-scumbags (insert names here, but off the bat I think of Kenneth Lay and Jim Bakker) preen with such pride while living the sleaziest, most immoral lives they could manage?

So, while I'm always pleased to see liberal Christians who aren't afraid to take on the Right Wing Noise Machine (a thing we have pointedly challenged them to do for a decade on AETV), I'd caution Schwyzer and his liberal Christian brethren not to overlook the cheap grace at Christianity's very foundation. But to be fair, perhaps the fact that guys like him, at the very least, do try to live decent lives of higher personal responsibility, supportive of the real meaning of terms like "justice" and "equality" that the wingnuts simply treat as pious catchphrases, means they're more aware of it than they might like to admit.

A Pretty Good Resource

I'm working on some research for the psychology of childhood indoctrination, and had some trouble finding actual data on this topic. I finally found a very good article, but was actually wowed by a number of essays presented at this site:

http://www.askwhy.co.uk/truth/index.php

I wanted to share it because it deals with a variety of topics with which counter-apologists are often presented, and it handles them in a very clear, readable and reasoned fashion that I think just about anyone can appreciate, or at least comprehend. The really surprisingly helpful aspect of the several articles I perused was that they include many quotes from Christian writers and preachers to help make their points more clear by contrasting explanations with apologetics.

I won't go long on this, but just thought it might be a helpful resource to some, and so wanted to provide the link for the record.

Vic Stenger visited Austin at the end of October

Dr. Victor J. Stenger, author of the New York Times best seller, "God: The Failed Hypothesis" was in Austin at the end of October promoting his new book, "The New Atheism: Taking a Stand for Science and Reason". He gave a lecture and did an interview with me. For various reasons, we have not publicized these until now.

Since the Atheist Experience is on break, it seems like a good time to unveil them.

"A Conversation with Vic Stenger"

Mp3 audio is available here.


"The New Atheism: Taking a Stand for Science and Reason"

Mp3 audio is available here.

Hooray, Mormons!

So, after all my jealous whining every time Kazim has a story to tell about religious types knocking at his door, yesterday evening I got a visit from a couple of Mormon missionaries. You know, the young guys riding around on bicycles in white shirts, black slacks and ties and calling themselves "Elder" although they're all of 20 or 21, if that.

No, I didn't bite their heads off and drink the blood from their spurting neck stumps. These were a couple of nice guys, and I thought, we'll, here's a chance to pin them down on their beliefs and see how they respond to a tough question now and again. I told them up front I was an atheist, affiliated with a local atheist organization, co-host of a TV show and moderator of a blog, both on atheism. They were like, Oh, okay, and asked me a couple of questions about the difference between agnosticism and atheism.

So, to the highlights. I kept the tone entirely pleasant all the way, just in case they were worried. I suspect that these guys put up with a lot of "No thanks" and slammed doors, but generally aren't accustomed to dealing with someone who both openly identifies as atheist and then eagerly proceeds to engage them. (And one of the guys later on said as much.) My main question was one right from the AETV playbook: Exactly what do you guys believe and why do you believe it?

It is always interesting to question believers like that, because right there, in that most basic of all approaches to religious discussion, you will see just how differently theists and atheists approach thinking about religion and its claims. They essentially told me about their belief in God as a loving father figure, etc., and instead of giving me a solid "why" for what they believed, they merely asserted the strength of their belief as some kind of validation for it. The thing is, I don't think they were playing dodgeball. Cognitively, this is just how a lot of theists are. Passion equals proof, more or less. I think they thought they were giving me a very solid why, without understanding why "I know it in my heart" or whatever descriptive phrase they call into play does not, in fact, answer, why. I could have hammered the point home, demanding to know why they knew it in their hearts so strongly, but I know that for an answer I'd have ended up on a rhetorical merry-go-round.

Where the conversation got interesting — to keep this post short — was when I asked them why they believed Christ's sacrifice was necessary. It all went back to original sin, as in mainstream Christianity, though where Mormons split from mainstream Christians is in rejecting the Trinity (at least, that's what they told me). Jesus, in their belief system, is the Son of God, but was not God in the flesh. Anyway, this led to my asking about sin, and why God would allow such a drastic flaw in his creation in the first place, thus necessitating Christ's sacrifice years later. Their answer was interesting. Apparently, Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden were perfectly innocent, like "three year olds." They didn't reproduce because, in their innocence, they didn't know how, poor things. But here's the strange part. God apparently realized that this childlike, innocent bliss was stifling, stultifying. He introduced sin, they told me, so mankind could be happy. Certainly, introducing evil into the world brought with it much strife, but it also brought humanity the ability to exercise their free will to choose happiness over evil.

I had to admit this was a new take on the theology to me, but it still didn't really pass the smell test. For one thing, I told them I couldn't figure out why a perfect being like God, what with being omniscient and all, couldn't have come up with a better and more consistent business plan. Wouldn't God have know how to get it right from the start, without wasting so much time by first creating a world of innocent, developmentally arrested and hopelessly boring children romping around a meadow doing nothing in particular, only to think to himself "Nah, this ain't working" and change the rules? God here resembles those artists who are said to be such great masters at their craft that they introduce deliberate flaws into their work simply so they themselves don't get bored with it. But even those artists aren't all-powerful and all-knowing, so why wouldn't a perfect being have simply done the job to his satisfaction the first time?

The discussion went back to the whole free will thing, which led me to ask if there was free will in Heaven. After all, Heaven is supposed to be a place of eternal bliss. Why, if the Earth was such a drag in that condition, should Heaven then be a place we aspire to? Do people in Heaven have free will? Yes, they told me. So, if that's true, then is it possible for people to do evil in Heaven? Yes, they said, only in Heaven, well, it's such a great place that up there, you just wouldn't want to.

Okay, hang on, I said (thoroughly enjoying myself by now). Why can't Earth simply be that kind of place, one where you can choose to be evil, but are so content with your life that you don't? Because, if that's the definition of Heaven, I'd have to say I'm already there. I choose not to do evil, because I see too many reasons not to, and even more reasons to be good, plus, I simply have no impetus towards evil acts. It seemed that the more these guys described Heaven to me, the less it seemed like there was any notable difference between it and Earth. (And besides, I had to point out that Lucifer chose evil while in Heaven and rebelled against God, which kind of threw cold water on their assumption that no one would want to.)

Well, you might be able to see where this is leading: they finally admitted (I'm big on body language, so I couldn't help noticing one of the guys take a big step back as he gave me this answer) that in the end, it boils down to faith. Well, of course it does, and if I'd bet myself a ten-spot we'd eventually end up at this point, then...well, I'd have a ten-spot. I was encouraged to read the Bible and the Book of Mormon and study it, but — and here's the kicker — check those hard questions and skeptical thoughts of mine at the door, and just allow the message to wash over me. Now, without shifting from my Mr. Nice Atheist persona, I couldn't let them off the hook with this one. I told them I simply couldn't do that. Whatever I read, I think about it, and if there are hard questions to ask, then goshdarnit, I ask them. You have to. Indeed, the more important the issue at hand, the more there is at stake (and if the claims of Christianity are true, then there is quite a lot at stake), the harder your questions have to be. What they didn't realize was that by insisting I had to treat their holy book different from anything else I might read — simply choosing to exercise little to no critical thinking in the reading of it — they were all but admitting that their holy book could not stand up to such intellectual scrutiny. And that's hardly the way an all-powerful, all-knowing being would go about his business in spreading his Word, wouldn't you say?

Anyway, there are more details about the conversation I could go into, but those were the highlights. We parted cordially, I told them it was nice to meet them and good luck in their efforts, and I hope I left them with some food for thought. If nothing else, I suspect that they'll be telling their fellow missionaries at the church on Sunday about the atheist guy they talked to. I hope they come back.

Allah Flummoxed by Swine Flu

I wanted to share with you the very first news item I saw on television this morning. It was a story about swine flu concerns surrounding hajj. Hajj is the pilgrimage to Mecca that is required of all Muslims who are able to make the trek. Google "hajj+'swine flu'" to find related articles.

Apparently, if adherents are required to destroy skyscrapers and execute unbelievers for jihad, the god will ensure their success. But protecting adherents from a flu bug, while they make the required hajj, is a bit too much to ask from the all-powerful creator of everything.

Happy 150th, Origin!

Today is the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species, and, reports have it, the mainstream media has decided, in its infinitely misguided goal to be "fair and balanced" about things, to give publicity to ignoramuses. So, I'm told, Stephen Meyer spouts his usual string of canards on CNN, and Time has apparently weighed in by interviewing some dimwit named Dennis Sewell on Darwin's "Dark Legacy" (ooooooo!). You know, the usual Godwinning, "evilushun is to blame for school shootings oh noes!!!" feces. Well, I choose to ignore ignorance. And I'm not linking to it, because blithering anti-science idiocy does not deserve to be rewarded with links. Instead, I'll simply raise a toast to one of the greatest and most important works of science of all time. Long after Christianity — and indeed, the human race — has settled into dust, whatever living things remain on this earth will continue to evolve, and the panoply of life will continue. Which is the reason Roger Ebert has described evolution as the "most consoling of all the sciences." Because it not only tells us that life will find a way, but it tells us how. All thanks to Chuck D. Well done, sir.

Thanks for not using "No True Scotsman"

I found this letter to the editor in yesterday’s Austin American-Statesman interesting. It was in reference to a statement in an earlier article regarding the recent Fort Hood shootings:

Religious radical?
Re: Nov. 12 article "Suspect alarmed doctors."

The story noted that Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan's doctors and colleagues "viewed him at times as belligerent, defensive and argumentative in his frequent discussions of his ... faith."

That pretty much describes every member of the religious right that I've ever encountered.

Rev. Bill Young

How often have I, and others, said that liberal Christians need to be more vocal in their condemnation of their more extreme brethren--instead of falling back on the "No True Scotsman" fallacy? In fact, it’s their silence and solidarity as much as their support of irrationality that lends credibility to the extremists in their ranks. So, this statement undermines at least one of the pillars supporting fundamentalism in Western Christendom. I hope other Christians will follow suit.

When I first read the content, I thought, “No Christian will hear anything an anti-religious person submits in this vein.” Then I saw the signature and was happy. It’s like reading about a lawsuit to bring down a religious statue on public property and finding the plaintiff is theist. It’s sort of a relief to know we aren’t going to be accused of bias and targeted for criticism or ugly insults—at least not this time. That’s not a bad feeling now and again.

Thanks Bill.

You blog readers are so very silly

After I wrote my last post about Nazis disapproving of Darwin, Ruud pointed out that another reader had converted the post into film format on YouTube.

No reading, no dramatic enactment, just the text of the post -- written in an old timey, grainy black and white film format, with German music playing over it. Watch it here!

It is my hope that Prophiscient will also give this post the same treatment, because that would lead to a delightful kind of double-infinite-self-reference loop.

Another reason not to blame Darwin

Atheist Experience viewer Ruud from the Netherlands just drew my attention to another excellent reason why it's is ridiculous to blame evolutionary theory for Nazism extermination. Checking out the Index to Creationist Claims, I see that it's already on there, but since it was new to me I thought I'd share it.

The University of Arizona's site hosts a list of books that were banned in Germany in the 1930's. Among them is... take a wild guess...

Writings of a philosophical and social nature whose content deals with the false scientific enlightenment of primitive Darwinism and Monism (Haeckel).

And just for good measure, there's also this:

c) All writings that ridicule, belittle or besmirch the Christian religion and its institution, faith in God, or other things that are holy to the healthy sentiments of the Volk.

That ought to settle the issue. But of course, you know it won't.

Don't fear to let bad guys talk

There are many lines that you can expect to hear on just about every episode of The Atheist Experience. One is "Tell me what you believe and why you believe it." Another is "Promoting positive atheism and the separation of church and state." However, I think one of the most important repeated lines is: "If you disagree with us, then we will try to get to your call more quickly."

To me, that's a vital component of intellectual honesty. Anyone can barricade themselves in a mental fortress of belief, deciding on what is true "in their hearts" early in life, and refusing to listen to any evidence to the contrary. However, if you want to have as many true beliefs and as few false beliefs as possible, you simply have to step out of your fortress and really listen openly to what people are saying who don't agree with you. There is no other way to expose the false beliefs you hold and the true beliefs that you lack.

That's why I generally want to make it a point in life to read the Bible, listen to Christian radio, argue with Jehovah's Witnesses, and take all the callers I can.

That's also why I'm kind of disappointed, though not really surprised, by the apparent terror that, ah, certain people seem to have these days over putting 9/11 terrorist Khalid Sheikh Mohammed on trial in a civilian court.

As I understand it, there are two major concerns at play here, both of them (not to put too fine a point on it) cretinous. One of them is that Mohammed will escape from jail and go on the most horrifying killing spree the world has ever known. The other is that if Mohammed is allowed to defend himself in court, then the dulcet tones of his voice spouting terrorist propaganda will surely incite more violence against the United States.

Ezra Klein masterfully dismantles both arguments in just a few short sentences. Regarding their escape:

These guys took down a plane with box cutters. They used crude weapons to attack a far more sophisticated and effective fighting force. The most fearsome of them was captured at home, in his pajamas. It's not like we're putting Magneto on trial and need to keep him away from metal filings.

And regarding letting him talk:

Trying these guys publicly, as well as holding them in normal prisons like common criminals, is good public relations. Being a terrorist is a more appealing prospect if the world's sole superpower appears to cower before your might than it is if you end up trapped in the American legal system, forced to submit to endless cross-examination and consultation with attorneys and other bureaucratic humiliations. Lots of people want to be super villains. But who wants to be a henchman? Being held on a fortified military island and tortured by a country that can't seem to get you to talk is a much more glorious finish than a long and dull trial that ends with you serving time in central New Jersey.

When you come right down to it, Mohammed is really just another extreme religious crackpot, and talking and listening to religious crackpots is what we on the Atheist Experience want to happen. We want it to happen because crackpottery thrives on remaining mysterious. If you can frame your crackpottery in a few pithy sentences appealing to some seemingly high minded ideals, then it sounds superficially convincing. But when you start probing their beliefs in depth, that's when you get to have conversations like this...

"Tommy Davis previously denied the Xenu story, asking CNN reporter John Roberts if it 'sounded ridiculous' and saying the story was 'unrecognisable' to him. The Xenu story has also been denied by actor Tom Cruise and other famous Scientologists."

And this...

"Wait. Mormons actually know this story and they still believe Joseph Smith was a prophet? ...No, it's a matter of logic! If you're gonna say things that have been proven wrong, like that the first man and woman lived in Missouri, and that Native Americans came from Jerusalem, then you'd better have something to back it up. All you've got are a bunch of stories about some asswipe who read plates nobody ever saw out of a hat, and then couldn't do it again when the translations were hidden!"^*

And this...

"Religion has convinced people that there’s an invisible man… living in the sky. Who watches everything you do every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a list of ten specific things he doesn’t want you to do. And if you do any of these things, he will send you to a special place, of burning and fire and smoke and torture and anguish for you to live forever, and suffer, and burn, and scream, until the end of time. But he loves you! He loves you. He loves you and he needs money!"

That's what we want to have happen with the beliefs of fuckwits like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. We want an American lawyer to stand up in front of this guy on the witness stand, and let him spout off his beliefs. And then we want our lawyer to shake his head in disbelief, and say "Mr. Mohammed, are you freaking kidding me????"

What we don't want is for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to get away with no trial at all, or a tribunal under cover of darkness. We don't want him to be executed without a chance to air out his horrific, vile sounding views. We don't want to give people an excuse to make a martyr out of him without laying his idiocy bare for the entire world to see.

I'm sure some people will object that someone will hear his words and say "Hey, ya know? This jihad business sounds pretty reasonable to me." And I'm sure that that's true; I can imagine that there are probably a (very, very, very small) number of people who were not already looking to sign up for the terrorist lifestyle, but will be persuaded by Mohammed's silver tongue to join the cause.

But you know what else? I'm willing to take that chance, because I'm seriously betting that the number of people who will be moved to sympathy for America and disgust for Mohammed and his ilk would tremendously dwarf the number of people who would fall for his recruitment speech.

I am firmly of the belief that you can't prevent bad ideas from being heard, but you can shed light on them and make them look foolish. I think it's the ideal of free speech that we should all strive for. If I didn't think that, then I would have to conclude once and for all that our little public access show is a bust, simply on the grounds that we have allowed so many more bad ideas to get air time than would have gotten it otherwise.

Call me a naive idealist for having some faith in humanity that they can be dragged to a reasonable position. The ones to really watch out for are the small-minded, pathetic people polluting the airwaves, who are afraid to hear Khalid talk. Somehow they must feel that his beliefs are so reasonable and so seductive that millions of people will become America's enemies just by listening to a defeated criminal speak on a docket. And frankly, I feel sorry for them, for the fear of the world around them that they must feel every day.



* Note: It was pointed out in the comments that the quote about Mormonism from South Park, while funny, is not an accurate representation of the Mormon story.

A beautiful day, sans creationist fools

Okay, so I read on Pharyngula this morning that Ray Comfort, the World's Stupidest Christian™, rescheduled his giveaway of his bowdlerized Origin of Species on university campuses for today instead of tomorrow, evidently because he heard that people were preparing to counter it by printing up information from the NCSE's enjoyable Don't Diss Darwin site. So naturally, he had to do an end-run around that, since his pathetic, ignorant twaddle sinks like the Titanic when faced with the iceberg of scientific fact.

So I'm trying to make up my mind whether or not to go down to the UT-Austin campus and confront the dopes handing out books. But I'm not sure I really feel like it. For one reason, unless you're a student, or you live down there or have business there, the campus isn't very visitor-friendly. Traffic is a headache, and parking is a righteous pain in the ass at the best of times. And anyway, it would be amusing for a few minutes, I suppose, but then, like all dealings with creationist fools, it would simply get aggravating and tedious.

Finally, I step outside, and I see this.

And I think to myself, Wow, an absolutely perfect autumn day. Which is rare enough in Austin, I can tell you. Seriously, we're talking deep blue, cloudless, endless skies, and the temperature like Goldilocks' porridge. Not too hot, not too cold. Just right.

And then I think, now who would I rather spend a gorgeous day like this with? A gaggle of hopeless anti-science morons, or someone with more charisma and intelligence than all of them put together? Say, this guy:

It was not a difficult decision. Grab the leash, dial up a little Miles Davis on the iPod, and it's off to the park we go, big boy!

Really, some days are just too beautiful to ruin.

---

So, I have no idea yet how the UT giveaway went, and what fireworks may or may not have erupted. I've put an email in to some folks with Atheist Longhorns I know, so maybe they'll have a report for me later.

Oh, the Irony

I had to chuckle when I read about the recent study that investigated the alleged link between homosexuality and pedophile priests, only to find no connection. The Catholic Church has been blaming gays, pop culture, and even the victims for their problems. Now, it seems they have one less group to blame. (Don't hold your breath on them stepping up to the responsibility plate, though.)

What made this study even more delicious is that the Catholic Church funded it. It reminds me of the 2006 intercessory prayer study that the Templeton Foundation funded that showed that nothing fails like prayer. I'm willing to bet that in both cases, the funding agency thought for sure that their world view would be vindicated. Both groups each had millions of dollars riding on the bet.

Reality bites, sometimes.

I think these are both excellent uses of religious funds.

Dinesh D'Souza, Christianity's silliest intellectual poseur

In the wake of the Ft. Hood shootings, which are looking more and more to have been influenced at least to some degree by shooter Nidal Hasan's increasing affiliation and correspondence with extremist anti-American Islamist clerics, Dinesh D'Souza has popped up with a USA Today editorial that demonstrates — again — how poor a thinker he can be when attempting both to defend theism from blame for evil deeds theists commit, while in the same fevered breath indicting atheism for all the world's evils. D'Souza is usually pitiful, true, but this is lame even for him.

Remember, this is the clown to tried to blame "cultural liberalism" for the 9/11 attacks, claiming, in a manner similar to Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, that the Islamic world was so incensed by America's tolerance for things their religious culture found offensive (you know, homos, abortion, porno, etc.) that they just couldn't contain themselves any longer. Apart from being an egregious exercise in victim-blaming, the claim reflected total pants-on-head ignorance of several decades of the evolving political landscape over there that eventually led to the rise of bin Laden and al Qaeda. Easier, after all, to blame the whole thing on godless tree-hugging hippie faggots.

The gist of "Don't Blame God for Terrorism" is that we shouldn't pick on religious people for being crazed killers, when there have been crazed-killer atheists too. He then drags out his well-worn talking points about Stalin, Marx, Pol Pot, blah blah blah. He tries to make a special pleading argument about Islamic terrorism, claiming its "motives are secular," ignoring the fact that 9/11 terrorist Mohammed Atta had a list of instructions in his possession that was chock full of prayers mentioning God's name no fewer than 88 times in five pages, and that it is also widely known (and been the subject of jokes ever since) that the 9/11 gang were taught they'd be rewarded with a harem of 72 virgins in the afterlife. While it may be the case that the al Qaeda masterminds who recruit these idiots to do their bombings for them have complex political motives, the fact that they're happy to use their religion, its xenophobia and its promises as key elements in their recruitment propaganda cannot be brushed aside as if it were utterly irrelevant, as D'Souza idiotically tries to do. Once you get some wild-eyed wacko yelling about God in the context of mass violence, guess what: his religious beliefs are involved.

If D'Souza actually wants, with a straight face, to make the special pleading argument that "suicide terrorism in its origins has nothing to do with religion or the afterlife" when we have a suicide terrorist's letter saying things like "Oh God, open all doors for me" in evidence, then he's not merely ignorant but a lying tosser. (And the qualifier about the secular "origins" of suicide terrorism is irrelevant, since something with secular origins can very easily be co-opted for religious purposes, just as something with religious origins can be co-opted for secular purposes.)

D'Souza's dishonesty flowers in this passage:

If religious beliefs in life after death are the source of terrorism, where are the Buddhist suicide bombers? Nor has anyone been able to identify the Christian bin Laden, the Christian equivalent of al-Qaeda or Hezbollah, or the Christian "nation of martyrs" patterned along the lines of post-Khomeini Iran. The vast majority of people in the world believe in God and the afterlife, yet hardly any of them launch suicide attacks in the hope of hastening their journey to heavenly bliss.

Well, duh, you idiot. The fact that there are numerous benign religions out there is not under debate. Every atheist acknowledges this, including Dawkins and Hitchens.

But that does not mean that we must ignore the malignant religions that freely exercise their capacity to become violent and fanatical through appeal to the supposed will of their Sky-Daddy. History has shown this occur time and again.

And in the case of benign religions, while I'll happily mollify D'Souza by agreeing that there aren't any Buddhist suicide bombers out there, it's still the case that benign religions are as false as the malignant ones, and in a cage-match, the malignant one will win. Why, it's almost Darwinian. An Islamist bomber will take out a hundred peaceful Wiccans and Buddhists as easily as anyone else, and the prayers, incantations and deities of those victims won't protect them from the explosion any more than Allah will turn up with a hot virginal fuckbunny troupe for the bomber. While atheists do often criticize religion for enabling atrocities, our main criticism is still that religion is simply false. That certain religions also happen to inspire violence is just grist for an already active mill.

And no, it isn't that belief in an afterlife alone, in a vacuum, inspires terrorism. One can forge religious beliefs that include an afterlife, and then, the tenets and dogmas of those religions can go one of two ways: they can be benign, or malignant. You can believe in an afterlife and think the way to get there is by contemplating your navel all day in the lotus position, or you can think the way to get there is by killing infidels. D'Souza's big lie here is in claiming that atheists don't distinguish between benign and malignant religions. We do, but of the two, we will be more concerned about the malignant ones, as they're actually killing people. Duh twice.

Having lamely tried to dismiss the religious element from religious violence, D'Souza then goes on with his usual atheism=Marxism blather. To point out that D'Souza's concept of Marxism is simple-minded and shallow would be generous. But while atheism was neither "absolutely central" or "the whole point" of Marxism or communism (communism sought to create a classless and stateless society, and religion was rejected, like capitalism, as a tool of oppression), even if it were, what's D'Souza's point? This is the most crucial factor that D'Souza cannot grasp, expressed in his woeful misunderstanding (or perhaps intentional distortion) of Dawkins: Atheism only describes what a person does not believe, not what he does. When people act, they act based on what they do believe, not on what they do not.

Now it's true that what you don't believe can inform what you do believe. But there is no hard and fast rule — for instance, in the case of atheism — that illustrates that the disbelief in God will necessarily result in a specific set of commensurate beliefs among all atheists everywhere. You could, for example, be an atheist, who then decides that all religion everywhere is just bad juju and ought to be stamped out by force of arms, and so you become a dictator for the purposes of achieving this end. But even there, you would be acting based on what you do believe — religion should be stamped out — and not on your disbelief in God alone.

And the fact that the vast majority of your fellow atheists would disagree with you, and indeed be actively opposed to you (most of us tend to be humanists and rationalists, after all, and I'll happily reassure Dinesh that we're not down with the whole "let's oppress and kill people unlike us" thing) pretty much proves Dawkins' point that D'Souza distorts, that there is no logical path from atheism to evil deeds. The very idea of "Because I do not believe in God, I will do bad things" makes no sense on its face. It is a blatant and crystal-clear non sequitur, no different than "Because I do not believe in [insert random mythological creature], I will do bad things." An atheist could say that, but then he'll have taken an illogical path from his atheism to evil deeds. Because — unlike the Koran with its numerous passages advocating the killing of the unfaithful — there is no central atheist dogma dictating a similar fate for the faithful. And if there were, we'd have long ago rejected it as illogical and irrational.

In contrast to the above, consider the sentence, "Because God/Allah/The Great Pumpkin wills it, I will destroy the infidels, paint the walls with their blood and make orphans of their children!" Now, while another theist might say, "Dude, you're doing it wrong! God is love and all that!" you cannot argue that there is no logical path from the crazed believer's theism to his evil deeds. Because, as long as the existence of gods remains conveniently unproven, then the religious have the luxury of being (and this is demonstrably true all down history) remarkably indifferent to anything but their own passionate fanaticism. Believers create their gods in their own image, which is why a benign Christian's God, or a benign Muslim's Allah, is a very different deity from the God of Fred Phelps or the Allah of Mohammed Atta. And there is a very logical path from an evil belief in a malign deity, to evil deeds.

But while D'Souza is eager to stress that the "vast majority of people in the world believe in God and the afterlife, yet hardly any of them launch suicide attacks in the hope of hastening their journey to heavenly bliss," he isn't willing to give the same credit to the vast majority of the world's unbelievers, who aren't going around founding totalitarian states and instigating pogroms. D'Souza's whole schtick is little more than a big "same to you and more of it!" whine, attempting to condemn atheism on the same grounds theism finds itself condemned whenever violence happens in the name of a theistic belief. But he can only make this argument if he distorts the nature of belief versus disbelief, freely ignores the openly stated religious motivations of terrorists and the easily referenced scriptural passages in their actual holy books, and reveals himself to be a hopeless hypocrite whose arguments were all bought at a discount from Fallacies-R-Us. In other words, business as usual for Christianity's silliest intellectual poseur.

We get creationist email #2

This is a follow-up to this dialogue. Martin has politely asked me if I would increase my blogging activity over the next few weeks, so that we can make up for the lack of new shows. Since I enjoy writing posts that react to something else, I'll probably carry on with this sort of thing as long as I can. Besides, it's good to stay in practice.

This email will be abridged so you don't have to see increasingly wide quote boxes.

From: thelambstruth

Hola :)

[Regarding Kazim's statement that "neo-Darwinian evolution is the most widely accepted explanation for how the diversity of life came into existence"]

Majority is correct? That's extremely flawed. I'm sure you perhaps meant something differently?

Nope. This is not an argument from popularity, although you might regard it as an argument from authority. In brief, I am not a scientist, but I understand the scientific method and recognize that it relies on results that are repeatable and can be independently verified. I also recognize that among the people who devote themselves to the serious study of biology, i.e. published biologists, only a vanishingly small number of them have any beef with the claim that biological evolution occurred.

Science is based on converging consensus based on common repeatable observations. If you'd like me to explain the scientific method in more depth then I will.

[Responding to Kazim's statement that fossilization is a rare event]

However that was not my question. I was stating that in order for fossilization to occur, some pretty drastic things had to happen. So, what was this (these) process (processes) basically?

I'm sure you're fully capable of doing your own research. But here, let me google that for you.

[Regarding Kazim's remarks about the temporal proximity of pyramid building to the flood]

Well there is: " The building of the first temple can be dated to 950 B.C. +/- some small delta, placing the Flood around 2250 B.C. Unfortunately, the Egyptians (among others) have written records dating well back before 2250 B.C. (the Great Pyramid, for example dates to the 26th century B.C., 300 years before the Biblical date for the Flood). No sign in Egyptian inscriptions of this global flood around 2250 B.C." However the Flood occurred 4400.

Reference, please? Where are you getting these numbers? As I understand it, there are two perspectives. The young earth creationist view is based on numbers cooked up by Bishop Ussher, who concluded that the flood occurred in 2348 BC.

The position of the scientific community, on the other hand, is that there is no indication whatsoever that a global flood ever occurred.

[When called out for posting long lists of objections to science from web sites, without providing detail]

Haha, my bad. I admit, I was in a bit of a hurry, which caused me to get some points from book/site. I'll elaborate in a future message.

Okay. I've got time to wait.

[Further pressing for a reaction to the web site ostensibly showing ancient pictures of dinosaurs]

Yes it is subjective, however if you want to deny how amazingly (try to think objectively) accurate the paintings/carvings/etc looked, then whatever. How can someone do so with such accuracy? Has there been any other examples such as these? If it would've been a drawing of some random monster, then yea, so what? This is significant because they didn't know anything about the dinosaurs (supposedly), so how can they just so happen to draw such pictures?

As I already said, I don't think that they are amazingly close to dinosaurs. Although I will also note a couple of other points:

1. There is actually good reason to believe that people found dinosaur bones in ancient times...
http://www.enchantedlearning.com/subjects/dinosaurs/dinofossils/First.shtml
http://www.amazon.com/First-Fossil-Hunters-Paleontology-Times/dp/0691058636

2. There is nothing inherent in evolution that says that the dinosaurs could not have survived past the presumed extinction event. It's unlikely, but wouldn't fundamentally change the scientific understanding of how evolution works.