Ignorance and Bigotry

When I was a youth, it was commonplace to link bigotry with ignorance. We were taught that racial bigotry came from ignorance of other people. That linkage probably did more to isolate and undermine the culture of explicit racial bigotry than any law or court opinion.

This NCR interview with P.Z. Myers shows the same linkage between Myers' bigotry and his own palpable ignorance.

Some excerpts:

That Myers has the equivalent of a junior high school education in religion is glaring. He understands little about the history and function of the Catholic Church and even less about the place of the Eucharist in the lives of Catholics. When I told him that many have laid their lives on the line to protect the Blessed Sacrament, he recoiled in disbelief, saying, “Really? People really do that!?”

Although Myers goes on and on about the "death threats" he received - by which he refers to an e-mail where the sender expresses his anger in the hyperbolic form of "if you were here, I'd kick your ass" - the overwhelming majority of e-mails he received were as he described later in the interview, statements by people trying to explain why his actions caused individual harm to them as individuals. Myers response on his blog was to sneer at these e-mails and absolutely refuse to credit the underlying sentiments as having any truth whatsoever.

As his interview makes clear, Myers is totally ignorant and, worse, his pride allows him to project his ignorant opinions as the norm for other people.

That would be the picture next to the definition of "bigotry."

There is also this:

I decided to call his bluff. “Has Christianity contributed anything to humanity?” I asked him.

“Well,” he said in a matter-of-fact tone, “there is this general property of religion — it’s great at building community. Religion has been a good thing for many individuals; it has brought them together and given them comfort. But over all, religion … holds back humanity.”

What, I asked, about the Church’s role in founding the first Western hospitals, universities, banks and even many breakthroughs in science? He interrupted me, irate and incredulous:

“No, people made those contributions to Western Civilization.”

That the Church was involved in the very foundations of our Western culture is, according to Myers, irrelevant.

“That’s like saying,” he continued, “that because for so many years people got smallpox, smallpox is to be credited for all the virtue men have done.”

As I talked with Myers I was struck by an irony: For a scientist whose job it is to observe cause and effect, he has a poor understanding of the cause, Catholicism, and its effects on world culture. He does not see Christianity as an elevating force in the world, but rather as a strange superstition — akin to banging a pot to scare away the moon.

I like the point about Myers' refusal to see cause and effect.

But, of course, Myers does see cause and effect when he wants to. Hence, when something bad happens it is not "people" who do the bad thing, but Christianity.

Double standards are a classic symptom of bigotry.

Thre is also this:

I asked Myers, “You have, throughout your blog, described Catholics as stupid, stupider, scary, dark age fanatics” and words that we can’t print. This language doesn’t strike you as bigoted?”

“Why should it?” he replied. “I am making honest characterizations of individual people.”

“But in desecrating the Eucharist,” I continued, “you have insulted and hurt thousands of Catholics. What do you have to say for that?”

Myers’ answer was true to form: “The whole silly part of this whole episode is that I’ve got so many people writing me and saying that I have seriously hurt them. But what have I done? I have thrown away a cracker.”

Amazing.

Angry Atheists, part 2.

David Klinghoffer dissects P.Z. Myers bullying response to Biology post-grad Jonathon McLatchie.

Let's say you had no opinion on evolution and no background in evolutionary developmental biology but were simply presented with a video of this exchange. What would it tell you about the character of the individuals involved and the respective strength of their positions?


The exchange is between an older man, heavy and bearded, hardly a distinguished scholar but a professor nonetheless who's a popular writer on atheism and science, speaking before an adoring audience at a Glasgow pub; and on the other hand, a physically slight young man setting out to embark on his own professional training in the same field. The young man is earnest and nervous. He talks a little too fast and seems unaccustomed to public jousting. The older man, on being challenged, is bullying, abusive, and personally insulting.

Is this the way an educator behaves when he's got the truth on his side? As the exchange proceeds and the young man tries to formulate responses despite continuing jeers and shouts from a crowd of other bullies all around him, you can just feel the poor guy's heart galloping in his chest. In his place, that's how I would feel.

Yet putting feelings aside and considering it as a specimen of scientific discussion, the interchange is telling. When Jonathan references a sheaf of peer-reviewed research papers he has brought with him, Myers mocks him for it. Presumably, if he offered no documentation, he would have been mocked for that too. When Jonathan fully articulates his challenge, Myers ridicules him for going on too long. When Jonathan compresses it to a sentence, Myers mule-headedly misrepresents what Jonathan is asking. In his prodigious written posts here, including a recent response to P.Z. Myers, Jonathan has already amply demonstrated that, despite his youth, he is impressively on top of his subject matter.

Again, does this sound like the professor has science on his side? To me, it sounds like a secular version of the old stereotype of the domineering, oppressive religious-school teacher who tolerated no questioning and gave faith a bad name.

I keep emphasizing Jonathan's youth contrasted with Myers's age and, in the eyes of this audience of so-called Glasgow Skeptics anyway, his status. That's because there is something outstandingly contemptible about such abuse in a case like this where it's being directed so clearly down the ladder of rank.

And:

So too in other situations where there's a power differential. In an employment context, if you want to try intimidating your boss or supervisor and see how far you get, you're a fool and will have to learn that for yourself when you get fired. However there's nothing morally contemptible about it, as there would be when the intimidation is aimed downward in the opposite direction.


You can see how Myers plays it up for the audience not by straightforwardly answering Jonathan's challenge or correcting his misconceptions but by ridiculing and intimidating him. The next questioner timidly apologizes for asking what she says she's afraid may be a "stupid question," but this time Myers is gentle and accepting because she, unlike Jonathan, hasn't actually challenged Myers or his views.

So I return to the question I began with. Is this how they educate young people at the good old U. of Minn. Morris? It's a highly effective way of enforcing groupthink, which is why Myers has advocated it to fellow Darwinists, but what about as a method of honest pedagogy? You may question your professor in order to get clear in your mind and thus to accept and digest his opinions -- that's OK. But if you question him and intimate that you're not entirely convinced that he's right in what he teaches -- if you are, in a word, a skeptic -- then you can count on being met with a barrage of obscenity and abuse.

Contrast this with William Lane Craig's invariably direct responses to atheist challenges.  Craig habitually treats the question as sincere and responds to the gist of the question, long after I would lose patience with the explicit taunting in which the question is phrased.

But the question of "what are they teaching at the good-old U of M, Morris?" is totally fair.  Recall that Myers is the guy who desecrated a eucharist in order to show his contempt for the feelings of others. For him, teaching is clearly a species of indoctrination.

Reviewing my files, I noticed that the point that Myers' missionary efforts are more likely to convert people to Creationism has been made before, by none other than paleontologist Robert Bakker.
From this interview, here is an excerpt:

[Switek] Finally, as someone who works with the "bones of contention" and the fossil record, what do you think about the current controversy surrounding evolution in the United States? How can we do a better job of communicating science to the public?

[Bakker] We dino-scientists have a great responsibility: our subject matter attracts kids better than any other, except rocket-science. What's the greatest enemy of science education in the U.S.?

Militant Creationism?

No way. It's the loud, strident, elitist anti-creationists. The likes of Richard Dawkins and his colleagues.

These shrill uber-Darwinists come across as insultingly dismissive of any and all religious traditions. If you're not an atheist, then you must be illiterate or stupid and, possibly, a danger to yourself and others.

As many commentators have noted, in televised debates, these Darwinists seem devoid of joy or humor, except a haughty delight in looking down their noses. Dawkinsian screeds are sermons to the choir; the message pleases only those already convinced. Dawkins wins no converts from the majority of U.S. parents who still honor a Biblical tradition. Hitchcock is a far better model. He had his battles with skepticism. He did worry that the discovery of Deep Time would upset the good people of his congregation. But Hitchcock could view three thousand years of scriptural tradition and see much of value - and much concordance with Jurassic geology.

Concerning the Sacred and the Social Autism of Certain Atheists

The socially autistic Universtity of Minnosota Biology Professor - and cult figure for internet atheists - P.Z. Myers has made good on his promise to desecrate the Eucharist.

Although his venom is aimed at Catholics - who he refers to as "F*ckwits" - he included a few pages of the Koran and Dawkin's "The God Delusion" in the act. He writes:

By the way, I didn't want to single out just the cracker, so I nailed it to a few ripped-out pages from the Qur'an and The God Delusion. They are just paper. Nothing must be held sacred.

"Nothing must be held sacred"????

Really????

Not human life???? Not the advance of knowledge through science???

Nothing???

Well, then, by all means, let's see Myers' canvass his supporters for a human corpse so that he drive a a rusty nail through it, or otherwise desecrate a dead human body.

Of course, that kind of thing would lay him open for a tort action by family members based on intentional infliction of emotional distress because - Professor Myers' statement to the contrary nothwithstanding - there are many sacred things, some of which are entitled to legal protection.

The natural human feelings that a family has for the body of a loved one - which is intrinsically nothing more than meat - is the reason that the law gives a legal remedy to family members for the profanation of a grave (see e.g., this article), and, moreover, is the reason that grave desecration and corpse desecration are often made into criminal acts.

Some people ...O.K., me...don't really get the value assigned for disturbing the resting places of dead folk. Corpses don't know what's happening, after all, and the hyperventilation of families seems a bit "wrought."

But the point of respecting the sacred, and of civil society, is to respect the right that other people have to determine their own sense of the sacred, with the caveat that other people's sense of the sacred doesn't interfere with well-ordered liberty. Some people clearly do have an elevated - or, perhaps, normal - sense that there is something very wrong with profaning the "rest of the dead", and, in a society that values well-ordered liberty, we do not give a "heckler's veto" to those with an autistic sensibility about other people's sense of the sacred to allow them to intentionally inflict emotional distress.

Myers' knows all this on that deep level where he is not actively engaged in denying normal human sensibilities. He understood, for example, why the Danish cartoons could be provocative and insulting to the sensibilities of Muslims by profaning what they held sacred (even if he didn't use that terminology.) He must also know when he is not posturing that there are things he holds sacred - free inquiry for example, teaching the truth, his own conscience.

Which is why his post is such an intellectual disgrace for the University of Minnesota. The post is illogical and specious. It is patently untruthful in a way that should embarrass any educational institution that employed a person who wrote in such illogically and unreflective language.

Myers' conduct also displays the emotional maturity of an autistic eight year old, hardly the conduct of a professor, an educated man or the teacher of youth. Certainly there must be equally qualified biology professors who have a sense of the responsibilities of their position who are as deserving of public employment.

It also ought to be a red-flag for the university's EEOC Compliance Officer. UM now knows that it is employing a religious bigot. Should Myers ever cross the line in class in a way that give vent to his bigotry, Myers' blog gives first-rate evidence of his bigotted animus.

The damage award, including punitive damages, could be significant. UM would be well advised to end its exposure by cutting its ties with this loose cannon.

Further, what cost does this impose on the University of Minnesota? Minnesota's taxpayers include Catholics whose taxes are being collected to pay Myers' salary. It runs counter to public confidence and the fostering of public support for a sizeable percentage of the population to know that they are subsidizing religious bigotry.

Jimmy Akins and Mark Shea have called for Myers' termination. I am opposed to the idea of "hate speech" and political correctness, but Myers' conduct - more than his speech - is the issue in this case, in the same way that burning a cross, painting a swastika on a synagogue or desecrating a grave involve conduct and not speech.

Even if Myers' childish behavior gets characterized as a hate crime, the best way to end a bad law is to see that it gets enforced equally.

Atheist Professor P.Z. Myers asks his blog readers to provide him with some paint so he can desecrate the local Jewish Synagogue with Swastikas.


No, that's not right.

Everyone knows that would be wrong.

Actually, he's asking his readers to give him the Consecrated Host from a Catholic Mass so he can desecrate it on YouTube.

Mark Shea describes him as "crazy bag Lady Screaming at Traffic"

Uber-Darwinist P.Z. Myers - who makes his living taking tax money from, inter alia, Catholics - offers this in support of a college student who decided to desecrate the Body of Christ that he obtained under false pretenses from a Catholic Mass:

Got that? If you don't like what Webster Cook did, all you have to do is complain to the university, and they will do the dirty work for you of making his college experience miserable. And don't assume the university would support Cook; the college is now having armed university police officers standing guard during mass.

I find this all utterly unbelievable. It's like Dark Age superstition and malice, all thriving with the endorsement of secular institutions here in 21st century America. It is a culture of deluded lunatics calling the shots and making human beings dance to their mythical bunkum.

So, what to do. I have an idea. Can anyone out there score me some consecrated communion wafers? There's no way I can personally get them — my local churches have stakes prepared for me, I'm sure — but if any of you would be willing to do what it takes to get me some, or even one, and mail it to me, I'll show you sacrilege, gladly, and with much fanfare. I won't be tempted to hold it hostage (no, not even if I have a choice between returning the Eucharist and watching Bill Donohue kick the pope in the balls, which would apparently be a more humane act than desecrating a goddamned cracker), but will instead treat it with profound disrespect and heinous cracker abuse, all photographed and presented here on the web. I shall do so joyfully and with laughter in my heart. If you can smuggle some out from under the armed guards and grim nuns hovering over your local communion ceremony, just write to me and I'll send you my home address.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is what passes for a tolerant, open-minded atheist teaching at one of our finest public universities.

And the comments are a fine example of the shallow bigotry that passes for deep atheist thought.

Quite embarrassing for secular atheists.

The Catholic League's response.

Here is Myers follow-up post where he is shocked - shocked! - that some Catholics react quite strongly to being called names and being told that an essential element of their faith should be disrupted and desecrated for his amusement. Apparently, in Myers' bizarro-land, Catholics are engaged in intolerance and hate crime against him.

Francis Beckwith's commenters are worth reading.

My personal hope - and prediction - is that the University will take no steps against Myers for what would be "hate speech" against any other group and that will be a step toward ending the "heads I win, tails you lose" system which is "hate crimes/hate speech."

Just saying.

Update:

On the other hand, I'm all for social pressure causing idiots like Myers to feel the costs of their idiocy.

The Left has certainly advanced its agenda by hedging its positions with sacred icons that no one dare disrespect, and there is nothing wrong in equal treatment for equal things.

On that note, there is this e-mail to Jonah Goldberg in the Corner:

You write:

A professor who advocated desecrating the image of, say, Martin Luther King Jr. in a similar way (which would be idiotic and offensive, for the record) would lose his job and his career. But such repugnant disrespect for more traditional icons is routinely considered clever and insightful in our intellectual culture.

I understand that your heart is in the right place here, but the analogy is completely inadequate. We Christians are quite accustomed to have our _images_ treated scornfully, in a way that the Academy would never tolerate for images of politically correct heroes. But the Eucharist is not an image: it is, in the teaching of the Church, the Body of Christ itself. People have died rather than obey their captors' command to desecrate the Eucharist. To a believer, there is simply no analogy between the Eucharist and mere objects, any more than there is between a person and a photograph of a person.

I don't ask Meyers to accept or even respect the teaching — he can ridicule all he likes. But when he undertakes actually to desecrate the Eucharist itself, not because it means anything to him, but solely because it means a great deal to Catholics and he wishes to outrage us, that's just plain hate — or, at least, it's well short of the minimal respect for other people's viewpoints that one would expect from a faculty member at a state-supported university. And when the university fails to act, as it probably will, we Catholics will learn once again that we are citizens of the lowest caste — that what is to us the holiest thing on earth deserves far less consideration than, in your example, a mere photograph of Martin Luther King.

Too true.

And isn't that the point that Myers is making? Isn't he saying that Catholics are a ower class - "fuckwits" is his term for believing Catholics - who don't deserve respect, but do deserve it when atheists lie and steal to disrupt their most sacred thing?

How is he doing anything but modeling hatred and bigotry for the students he teaches?

Second Update:

Myers wrote this about the Danish cartoons:

There are some things a cartoonist would be rightly excoriated for publishing: imagine that one had drawn an African-American figure as thick-lipped, low-browed, smirking clown with a watermelon in one hand and a fried chicken drumstick in the other. Feeding bigotry and flaunting racist stereotypes would be something that would drive me to protest any newspaper that endorsed it—of course, my protests would involve writing letters and canceling subscriptions, not rioting and burning down buildings. There is a genuine social concern here, I think. Muslims represent a poor and oppressed underclass, and those cartoons represent a ruling establishment intentionally taunting them and basically flipping them off. They have cause to be furious!

Understand that Myers is not sympathetic to Muslims, but he is beholden to a liberal secular mindset that is sympathetic to those who it defines as "minorities", which doesn't include Catholics or, I imagine, evangelical Christians.

Which is why it is permissible in his mind for a tenured professor of a public university to advocate the harassment and discrimination against Catholics.

Tolerance is not a principle in Myers' book.

Which is why we should oppose the New Atheists, who, undoubtedly, will resemble the Old Atheists of the Soviet Union, once they get power.

Civil War in the leper colony.

Bart Ehrman's book on "Did Jesus Exist?" - which, not to bury the lede, is answered in the affirmative - has kicked off a civil war on the liberal/radical/crazy side of the scholarship/pseudo-scholarship continuum. (This Huffington Post column appears to be the proximate cause of the war.) There are a lot of hurt feelings out there as the "Jesus is a Myth" ("Mythers") go-to guy, Richard Carrier, expresses personal umbrage at the attack on his scholarship. Ehrman has responded in kind. Other folks have weighed in.

Good times, good times.

Apparently, based on his vast knowledge of grasshoppers gleaned from teaching teen-agers at a state school in Morris, Minnesota, P.Z. Myers - best known for using his state-funded gig at the University of Minnisota, Morris to offend Catholics by desecrating the Eucharist - has magisterially weighed in to defend Carrier's scholarly reputation.

This is what Myers has to say:

Jesus is a legend, like King Arthur or Robin Hood or Paul Bunyan. There may have been some individual in the past who inspired the stories, but he’s not part of the historical record, and the tall tales built around him almost certainly bear little resemblance to the long-lost reality. It’s simply bad history to invent rationalizations for an undocumented mystery figure from the distant past.

Well, then, there you go. Case closed. A guy who works for the government in teachign pimple faced teenagers all about animalsin a village of approximately 5,000 souls in western Minnesota has exerised the "magisterium of science" to tell us what's-what about history.

Myers' magisterial pronouncement has resulted in this terrific putdown by R. Joseph Hoffman:

I’ll make a deal with PZ Myers: I don’t try to lecture him on grasshoppers and he doesn’t lecture anybody on Jesus and “bad history.” I can’t quite imagine that the combined religion faculties at Harvard, Claremont and Tuebingen are awaiting further instruction on Bayes Theorem from Richard Carrier or packing up their offices, having been served notice that an associate professor of biology at the Morris campus of the University of Wisconsin has discovered that Jesus is just like Robin Hood—and Paul Bunyan. I know it gives the mythtics a rush to think that the scholarly establishment discourages revolutionary ideas but in fact it is designed to discourage error and non-revolutionary discredited ideas.

And:

The free thought rabble have chosen Carrier as their standard bearer, without any reason to put their trust in his inane conclusions and methods—a man who has never published a significant piece of biblical scholarship, never been peer reviewed (peers?), never been vetted, and never held an academic position. His “reputation” depends on deflecting his mirror image of himself as a misunderstood, self-construed genius onto a few dozen equally maladroit followers. This billboard for poor method, we are now asked to believe by freethought’s bad boy, PZ Myers, has cold-cocked a senior New Testament scholar for saying something as reasonable as “Jesus existed.” Only in the age of instant misinformation and net-attack is this kind of idiocy possible. Only in the atheist universe where the major premise– “religion is a lie so the study of religion is a study of lying”—infects everything is this kind of lunacy possible. Unfortunately, we have Richard Dawkins to thank for the original formulation of that premise.

Let's sit back and enjoy the digital blood-letting.

The Myers Shuffle, or Why Terry Eagleton thinks that Richard Dawkins is a Disgrace to Atheism

Edward Feser writes:

Well, the New Atheists have incorporated this “‘give-it-a-name’ maneuver” into their own rhetorical bag of tricks, and the name they’ve chosen is “The Courtier’s Reply.” The label comes from Dawkins’ fellow biologist and atheist P.Z. Myers, and it refers to an imagined defense a court sycophant might give of the naked emperor of Hans Christian Anderson’s famous story: “Haven’t you read the detailed discourses of Count Roderigo of Seville on the exquisite and exotic leathers of the Emperor’s boots?” etc. The idea is that complaining about a New Atheist’s lack of theological knowledge is no better than the courtier’s complaint that the naked emperor’s critics haven’t read the works of Count Roderigo. In other words, it is just the same old question-begging “Leprechology” and “Pastafarianism” pseudo-defense, now tarted up with a clever marketing tag.


How does it work? Well, suppose you confront a New Atheist with the overwhelming evidence that his “objections” to Aquinas (or whomever) are about as impressive as the fundamentalist’s “chicken/egg” objection to evolution. What’s he going to do? Tell the truth? “Fine, so I don’t know the first thing about Aquinas. But I’m not going to let that stop me from criticizing him! Nyah nyah!” Even for a New Atheist, that has its weaknesses from a PR point of view. But now, courtesy of Myers, he’s got a better response: “Oh dear, oh dear … not the Courtier’s Reply!” followed by some derisive chuckling. One’s intelligent listeners will be baffled, wondering how shouting “Courtier’s Reply!” is supposed to excuse not knowing what one is talking about. And one’s more gullible followers—people like the www.infidels.org faithful who have been buying up The God Delusion by the bushel basket—will be thrilled to have some new piece of smart-assery to fling at their religious friends in lieu of a serious argument. In the confusion, the New Atheist can slip out the back door before anyone realizes he hasn’t really answered the question. Call it “the Myers Shuffle,” and feel free to fling that label back at the next fool atheist who thinks yelling “Courtier’s Reply!” should be enough to stop you in your tracks.

So, the New Atheist covers up one fallacy with another. But how do otherwise-intelligent people get themselves into this rhetorical regress in the first place? Here we need to turn from logic to politics and psychology. Dawkins and Co. have an enormous political stake in the claim that religion is inherently irrational. They want a society in which religious believers are no more welcome in the public square than racists or Holocaust deniers are. To admit that there really are respectable arguments for religion—that it is something about which reasonable people can disagree—would be at once to admit that all the extremist talk about religion being tantamount to child abuse, no more worthy of respect than belief in the tooth fairy, etc., goes out the window. It would have to be conceded that Catholic theologians and Jewish rabbis, say, have as much right to be heard on matters of public policy as boozy Vanity Fair columnists and writers of popular-science books.

Of course, it would for the same reason mean that as yet unsold copies of The God Delusion, Breaking the Spell, God is Not Great, The End of Faith, etc., would be consigned to the remainder bin, where they belong, for ill-informed extremist political tracts is really all they are. And that brings us to the last, psychological reason the New Atheists have worked themselves into such a fit of irrationality. One final thought experiment: Suppose you are Richard Dawkins, the former Charles Simonyi Professor in the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University. You’ve spent years criticizing creationists and Intelligent Design theorists for not doing their homework before attacking Darwinism. You’ve staked your reputation as a scientist (or as a science popularizer, anyway) on a years-long crusade against religion, dismissing it as the province of ignorant, bigoted yahoos and without a single serious argument in its favor. You’ve sold hundreds of thousands of copies of The God Delusion, presenting it as a once-and-for-all demonstration of the truth of this proposition. Experts in the relevant fields—theologians and philosophers of religion—have criticized you for not knowing what you are talking about. Fellow atheist academics have done the same. And you have dismissed them all as the objective allies of the fundamentalist bigots. The people who actually know the stuff are wrong (you claim) and you are right—despite the fact that this is the very attitude you condemn in fundamentalist bigots themselves.

In short, you’ve dug yourself into a very deep hole, and seem irresistibly compelled to keep digging. What are you going to do at this point—admit that the critics are right? Admit that you’ve been making a fool of yourself for decades and leading many less intelligent people to do the same? That you’ve done a grave injustice to the religious believers you despise, and who would relish your public humiliation? That you are a hypocrite? Not a chance.

Pride goeth before a fall. And before a fallacy. So “Courtier’s Reply!” it is, and damn the torpedoes. The New Atheism must of necessity be a New Philistinism, deliberately closing its mind to the wisdom of millennia—to the serious consideration, or even the reading, of the arguments of writers like Aristotle and Plotinus, Augustine and Aquinas, Leibniz and Clarke, lest these dangerous ideas tempt one to doubt the secularist creed. Or, in the words of a better-known exercise in doublethink: “Ignorance is strength.”

Terry Eagleton is the Marxist-Atheist literary critic and author of Reason, Faith and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate.  Eagleton's book is an interested, pointed attack on the writings of Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins for, among other things, simply being bone-headed stupid for writing about things they haven't the slightest knowledge of.  I'm midway through it, and while I don't agree with Eagleton's assumptions, he has a way with a wicked turn of phrase. For example:

Predictably, Dennett's image of God is a Satanic one. He also commits the Ditchkins-like blunder of believing that religion is a botched attempt to explain the world, which is like seeing ballet as a botched attempt to run for the bus.

And:

There are always topics on which otherwise scrupulous minds will cave in to the grosses prejudice with hardly a struggle.  For most academic psychologists it is Jacques Lacan; for Oxbridge philosophers it is Heidegger or Sartre; for former citizens of the Soviet bloc it is Marx; for militant atheists it is religion.

And:

This straw-targeting of Christianity is now drearily commonplace among academics and intellectuals - that is to say, among those who would not allow a first year student to get away with the vulgar caricatures in whcih they themselves indulge with such insousiance. Ditchkins on theology is rather like someone who lays claim to the title of literary criticism by commenting that there some nice bits in the novel and some scary bits as well, and it's all very sad at the end.

And:

Hitchen's God is not Great is littered with elementary theological howlers.  We learn that the God of the Old Testament never speaks of solidarity and compassion; that Christ has no human nature; and that the resurrection means that he did not die.

And:

God is not Great is also a fine illustration of how atheistic fundamentalists are in some ways the mirror image of the Christian ones.  And not just in their intemperate zeal and tedious obsessiveness.  Hitchens argues earnestly that the Book of Genesis doesn't mention marsupials ; that the Old Testament Jews surely couldn't have wandered for forty years in the desert; that the capture of the huge bedstead of the giant Og, king of Bashan, might never have occurred at all, and so on.  This is rather like someone vehemently trying to convince you, with fastidious attention to architectural and zoological detail, that King Kong could not possibly have scaled the Empire State Building because it would have collapsed under his weight. This is not to relegate the Bible as a whole to the realm of myth, poetry and fiction, thus shielding it conveniently from rational or historical investigation.  It is simply to indicate that the relations between these domains and historical fact in Scripture are exceedingly complex, and that on this score as on many another, Hitchens is hair-raisingly ignorant of generations of modern biblical scholarship.

They almost make me a creationist

I'll admit that I have no time for creationists. I think they positively ignore the data - lots of old bones of animals that haven't been around for a long time - in favor of a reading of the bible that isn't strictly compelled by the text. St. Augustine, for example, had a version of evolution. St. Thomas Aquinas also knew that some animals must not have been created when all the other animals were created based on people's observations of the data found in nature.

Flies, for example, as St. Thomas knew from the best scientific observation of his day, were generated from putrefaction (decaying meat) and so could not have been created with the other living animals.

Alright, so the science of St. Thomas' day was not "state of the art modern." The point is that St. Thomas was entirely comfortable with the idea that the Bible had to be understood in the light of observation; St. Thomas certainly disagreed with any notion that we had to tailor our observations to fit our flawed understanding of the Bible.

Yet, when I read the mean-spirited hectoring of uber-Darwinists P.Z. Myers and Richard Dawkins, all that goes away and I find myself becoming more and more sympathetic to Creationists.

Part of my reaction is that I respect religiously motivated Creationists who are fighting a quixotic battle to preserve something they think is good in the light of the advances of science. Myers and Dawkins and others seem to be engaged in nothing other than a kind of intellectual bullying.

Of course, their intellectual bullying is a symptom of the peculiar "social autism" that they are afflicted with; what Mark Shea compares to a "bag lady screaming at traffic." So, in a perverse way, Myers and Dawkins merit our sympathy, as well.

It is terrific, nonetheless, to see that Dinosaur scientist Robert Bakker - author of "The Dinosaur Heresies" - understands the reaction that Myers, Dawkins, et al. provoke in normal people. From this interview, here is an excerpt:

[Switek] Finally, as someone who works with the "bones of contention" and the fossil record, what do you think about the current controversy surrounding evolution in the United States? How can we do a better job of communicating science to the public?

[Bakker] We dino-scientists have a great responsibility: our subject matter attracts kids better than any other, except rocket-science. What's the greatest enemy of science education in the U.S.?

Militant Creationism?

No way. It's the loud, strident, elitist anti-creationists. The likes of Richard Dawkins and his colleagues.

These shrill uber-Darwinists come across as insultingly dismissive of any and all religious traditions. If you're not an atheist, then you must be illiterate or stupid and, possibly, a danger to yourself and others.

As many commentators have noted, in televised debates, these Darwinists seem devoid of joy or humor, except a haughty delight in looking down their noses. Dawkinsian screeds are sermons to the choir; the message pleases only those already convinced. Dawkins wins no converts from the majority of U.S. parents who still honor a Biblical tradition. Hitchcock is a far better model. He had his battles with skepticism. He did worry that the discovery of Deep Time would upset the good people of his congregation. But Hitchcock could view three thousand years of scriptural tradition and see much of value - and much concordance with Jurassic geology.

He really is a heretic.

[Via Mark Shea]

Bullard High Teacher Wins Prestigious P.Z.Myers Award

Discover Magazine tasked human toothache and uber-prick P.Z Myers to select the best video explaining evolution in two minutes.

The winner is the current Biology teacher of Bullard High School in Fresno, which is my old alma mater, local evolution blogger Scott Hatfield.

My Biology teacher at Bullard High was Emil Evanko.  Mr. Evanko was - I believe - a Creationist.  At least, he did not "believe in" evolution. One time in class, Mr. Evanko arranged a debate on Evolution v. Creationism.  I took the Evolution side against 7 or 8 "creationists" and mopped the floor with them.  Mr. Evanko's position didn't have any influence on me, and his exercise - which he handled in a neutral and fair manner - had the saluatory effect in my view of establishing how very weak the Creationist position is. 

That's one reason why I view hysterical evolutionists like P.Z. Myers as, basically, "needing to get a life."  There is not a conspiracy against evolution.  Knowing evolution is as important as, say, knowing about the heliocentric universe, but it will not change your life or ruin it, for that matter.  The best way to approach evolution is to put other approaches on the table and the strength of evolutionary theory - i.e., the hard data and its explanatory paradigm - will convince people by itself without the need to shout down the alternatives or treat those alternatives as things that should never, ever darken the inside of a science classroom.  I think that Mr. Evanko handled the subject exactly right.

Incidentally, it turns out that Scott's wife works next door.  So, small world and all that.

Finally, although Myers is a human toothache and seems to foster a kind of Asperger's syndrome when it comes to his horde of hate-filled Darwinian zealots, I think he made the right choice.  Scott's contribution is clearly better than the alternatives.  The other alternatives sound like the kind of hum-drum science films that should be narrated by Ben Stein - "Anyone?  Bueller?" - whereas Scott's is just fun.

Check it out for yourself.

The arrogance of ignorance.

Jonathan Wright review Philip Pullman's "The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ" and finds that Pullman has "written has written one of the most self-indulgent books I've read in a very long time."  Wright rips into Pullman's bad writing and lazy posturing and asks some very good questions along the way:

The reviewer should never reveal all of the author's narrative twists and turns so I've only provided a bare bones account. Fortunately, the plot of Pullman's book isn't terribly important. It is simply a vehicle for his modish and muddle-headed agenda. So far as I can tell, he wants to hammer home a couple of ideas.


First, the transformation of Christ's teachings into what we'd now call the Gospels was a scandalous affair. Second, the powerful institution that grew up in Christ's name (with all the attendant structures, orthodoxies, canonical texts and persecutions) betrayed its origins.

The Good Man Jesus of the title hates the very notion of an organised Church. Its creation would make the devil "rub his hands with glee". It would be ruled by power-seekers who "build great palaces and temples to strut around in" and it would regularly launch crusading armies against its manufactured enemies.

This is interesting territory, but let's be clear about a few things. Serious people spend entire academic careers trying to trace how Christ's message turned into the New Testament: the chronologies, the authorships, the mechanisms and imperfections of transmission, and, yes, the political manoeuvring and theological upmanship all add up to a scholarly quagmire.

What on earth entitles ill-informed toe-dippers to suggest that they know what Christ really meant? Do they have access to some unsullied, unmediated texts? If so, I wish they'd let us know. Point two. There is lots of room for a serious debate about how the enforcement of order and orthodoxy influenced the nature of Christianity.

The trouble is Pullman shows few signs of understanding these intricate processes: he possesses, or so this book suggests, a cartoonish conception of early Christian history. If you are going to re-cast Christianity's founding narrative in order to write a novella (and there's nothing wrong with such a pursuit) you really ought to do some homework.

Abuses of the novelistic art are always regrettable. When they pollute the waters of a crucial discussion I'm apt to get rather cross. I seem to spend far too much time denouncing the ludicrous excesses on both sides of the so-called God debate. It would seem that fiction is now infected.

Pullman's book will doubtless sell hundreds of thousands of copies; it will become one more cultural bauble discussed earnestly by tedious talking heads on television and radio, but no one will benefit.

I cherish sensible adjudications (including the negative ones) of Christian history. I also enjoy intelligent, scurrilous anti-Christian polemic from time to time (Diderot is one of my heroes) and I'm all for a weird and wonderful take on the story of Jesus (I have the Life of Brian in various media formats).

What I can't tolerate is stale, lazy thinking. Pullman is an intelligent man of considerable influence and he's certainly entitled to have his say about Christianity. I'm just not convinced that his latest book (spleen wrapped inside a fairy tale) makes a meaningful contribution to a debate that, on all sides, relies far too often and far too heavily on reductive peanut gallery-pleasing antics.

I particulalry like the question about "What on earth entitles ill-informed toe-dippers to suggest that they know what Christ really meant? Do they have access to some unsullied, unmediated texts?"

It's as if there is an a priori truth that states that "being intelligent means being anti-Christian" so that anyone who is anti-Christian is intelligent even if they are really stupid.

On which point, Vox Day has run up a typically sharp post on the banality of P.Z. Myers' "Courtier Reply."  The "Courtier's Reply" is the device used by Myers, Dawkins and other New Atheists to explain why they they think they can talk about subjects beyond their narrow specialization in bugs, twigs and whatnot without having actually done the spadework of learning anything about the subject.  The Courtier's Reply is a post-script to the fable of the Emperor's New Clothes where a courtier replies that the child who said the obvious - to wit, that the Emperor was naked -can't possibly know what he was talking about without having studied fashion.

This just about positively establishes that Myers shouldn't be permitted to even attempt philosophy or reasoning or logic or anything outside of his specialty of teaching biology to bored underclassmen at Gopher Swamp University.  Arguments have to bear some resemblance to the subject they are critiquing, which the "Courtier's Reply" does not.  The point of the story about the "Emperor's New Clothes" was that the Emperor really had no clothes and everyone knew it but was too candy-assed to tell the Emperor.  Lst time I checked, everyone really doesn't know that God does not exist, and hence applying reason to metaphysics or phenomena in a logical, scientific and trained way isn't the same as being a deluded, sycophantic courtier until some proof is produced showing that the too are the same.

In other words, Myers' Courtier's Reply is a case study in "begging the question."

Vox Day writes:

As if Richard Dawkins knows the first thing about the theology of Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Tertullian, or even CS Lewis. But this example of Dawkins is far from the only one and many more can be found on PZ's own site for those with the fortitude to slog through that swamp of pseudo-scientific smuggery. The core problem with The Courtier's Reply is that it is a category error. PZ does not understand that while the discussion of God's Will or divine characteristics are conceptually related to discussions of God's existence, they are not synonymous. The Courtier's Reply is that of the innumerate individual claiming that because no one has ever shown him a "one" or a "two", it is a waste of time for mathematicians to go on at length about rarefied imaginary numbers and delicate points of calculus. The fact that religion and the theology from which it derives makes real, material, and observable differences in the lives of its practitioners, be they for good or for ill, is sufficient to justify its study regardless of whether one can establish its ultimate source to the satisfaction of scientists or not. And only a complete ignoramus who knows nothing of history, economics, socionomics, or demographics would be foolish enough to assert that the material effects of theological differences are too unimportant to bother with the matter.


The thing that is so ridiculous about latter day atheists like PZ is that they are not only theologically ignorant, but they know next to nothing about secular philosophy either. Intelligent atheists have known for decades that science can never provide the replacement for religion that fantasists like PZ and Sam Harris believe it can for the simple reason that science does not and cannot dictate values. This is why a strong dedication to rational science, with or without the additional complication of atheism, so readily produces monstrous leaders like Hitler, Lenin, and Stalin in such short order, monsters of the sort that were so few and far between in the centuries prior to the Enlightenment.

Theology is the precise opposite of useless because it provides that which science intrinsically cannot; a basic framework upon which guidelines for human behavior can be structured in a viable manner that is coherent, self-consistent and understandable even to the non-believer. Consider how it is entirely normal for the atheist to criticize the Christian for failing to live up to the standards set by Christian theology; to what scientific standard can the non-atheist ever hope to hold the atheist?

Trust us, we're scientists.

It's hard to take the atheist cadre's mantra that they are atheists because of "science" when they honor with their prestigious "Richard Dawkins Award" for advancing public knowledge of science Bill Maher, who is a "anti-vaccination wing-nut."

P.Z. Myers is counseling the fringe element of the atheist movement who questions the wisdom of giving a prize for science education to someone who denies "germ theory" to be patient - all will be made clear at the eschaton. He doesn't want to trigger a shouting match. That would be unseemly. Calm discourse must prevail. Myers advises:

If you find yourself with a chance to ask Richard Dawkins questions, though, please stick to issues that interest him. If you ask him about acupuncture, he's going to be as dismissive as all of us other skeptics, so there really isn't much point to going on about it. Don't waste an opportunity to converse with Dawkins on a bunch of annoying noise. OK?

In other words, Dawkins is a rock-star, a demi-god; please don't annoy the great man.

We should pray that atheists will follow Myers' example of calm discourse in insulting Catholics by desecrating the Eucharist.

Never forget that atheists are so much smarter than us because they have science degrees.

Making the world new

I've been waiting for the other shoe to drop on the Raving Atheist's announcement of his conversion to Christianity. Hope is a transcendent Christian virtue, but not being taken in by a stupid prank - like that perpetrated by this dillweed - is a pragmatically human desire.

But the conversion is real.

A few observations.

Raving inhabited a lonely corner of atheistdom because he was pro-life. I remember one post he put up a few years ago where he argued that being an atheist did not require that one accept the propositions that human beings were not human being before their birth and how he was pilloried by the atheist community for being a turn-coat and such.

Logically, it would seem that there is no necessary connection between a belief in God and a belief in the transcendent value of human life, but but as former Edward's campaign staffer, anti-catholic bigot and feminist-atheist Amanda Marcotte writes:

I’m almost a little worried about engaging on this topic, though I’m grateful to Auguste for pointing out that the Raving Atheist finally completed his conversion 2 and a half years after I said that he would have to or the cognitive dissonance would break him down.

Then, there is this charming post by P.Z. Myers:

Another mind poisoned
Category: Godlessness
Posted on: December 23, 2008 1:24 PM, by PZ Myers

Once upon a time, one of the more popular atheist sites on the web was The Raving Atheist. Then the blogger became the raving anti-abortionist, and most of his readership left — they even set up an independent forum where they could continue their discussions without the weirdo in charge of the blog butting in ...

It's almost as if a job description for being an atheist is the ability to hold the opinion that you are uniquely qualified to decide who qualifies as human and who should live and die.

God complex much?

Myers also writes:

There's an interesting analysis of the process of deconversion to be made here. I suspect he's been getting a lot of personal support and attention from Christians actively interested in converting him over the years, and it's that emotional massaging that convinced him to throw his brain out the window.

Deconversion? Well, that's giving away the show. After all, normally we are told that atheism is the absence of a belief, not a belief itself. So, the movement to atheism is not supposed to be a conversion, i.e., an act of faith, but one of reason. This would of course mean that there should be no "deconversion" when one moves from atheist to Christianity.

But there it is, "deconversion", which makes atheism a "faith", which it is.

Naturally, many of the comments by atheist show a vituperative emotionalism best seen in people who feel that someone has betrayed them as a, well, group defined by transcendent faith, rather than as a group defined by an absence of one particular belief.

The irony of this appears to be lost on these atheists.

So, basically, you're saying that Stalin did kill people because he was an atheist.

P.Z. Myers argues that atheists - who he likes to call "freethinkers" - are by their adherence to atheism inherently leftist - which he likes to call "progressive":

Maybe there should be more overt activism for civil rights in general, in addition to the more focused attention given to atheist/humanist issues. Freethought movements should be about human dignity and freedom in all domains, not just religion. We should own these issues; we need to be on the right side of history. And on the purely self-interested side, these organizations can also grow their base by embracing greater equality. Let's be the opposite of Jim Wallis and the Sojourners (who I could never stand, anyway).


Of course, such a move would piss off the libertarian/conservative wing of the atheist movement, but I can't see a down side to jettisoning them, anyway.

Myers' post is entitled "Godless goals are progressive goals," which is pretty much the way that Stalin would have phrased it.


Vox Day points out the amazing cognitive dissonance of atheists on "what it means to be an atheist" that Myers' argument illustrates:

One thing I always enjoy about atheists is the shameless way they perform the Atheist Dance. They are such hopelessly muddled thinkers that they constantly define and redefine words as it happens to suit them at the moment, not infrequently contradicting themselves multiple times in a single article, blog post, or book. An atheist will claim that there is absolutely nothing that can be determined about him by the mere fact of his atheism except for his non-belief in a creator God, then immediately turn around and insist that of course he doesn't believe in the power of crystals or Noah's Flood... because he is an atheist and therefore obviously doesn't believe in anything insufficiently "proven" by science... except for historical events that a sufficient number of people believe to be true... except for those related to religion. And so forth.

Vox Day also has some interesting data on the gender imbalance in abortion rates:

And it is amusing that PZ thinks that murdering unborn children is "the right side of history"; I have absolutely no doubt that the atheists of the future will be denying that pro-abortion equalitarians were motivated by their atheism in much the same way that atheists today deny that rabidly murderous Communists were motivated by their atheism.


Calling a feminist a feminazi is an insult to the German National Socialist Workers Party. The feminists and equalitarians have FAR more blood on their hands than the National Socialists ever did. Consider that in India, there are only 893 girls born for every 1,000 boys. In China, the girl/boy birth ratio is .855. And the more educated and wealthy a woman is, the more likely it is that she will murder her daughter.

New Atheist Aphilosophy.

Michael Egnor deconstructs some really awful answer to basic question provided by New Atheist P.Z. Myers.

Why is there anything?


Myers: 
 Nothing is unstable.

Me: "Nothing" is not unstable. Nothing is not stable. Nothing is not metastable, nor hypostable, nor quasi-stable. Nothing is nothing. Nothing has no properties. "Nothing is unstable" is gibberish. Hence its central place in New Atheist atheology.

If by "nothing" Myers is referring to the emergence of matter by quantum fluctuations (today's trendy New Atheist evasion of theism), I observe that a quantum field isn't "nothing." A quantum field is very much something, in need of explanation. A quantum field gives rise to particles, not to itself. You have to explain the existence of the quantum field. Nice try.

The question "why is there anything" is fundamental. The classical theist answer is that God's essence is His existence, and He is the ground of existence. Note that God (as understood classically) does not need explanation or cause. The uncaused nature of God is demonstrated, not stipulated, by classical theism (see Aristotle's Prime Mover argument and Aquinas' First, Second, and Third Ways). Furthermore, the Prime Mover argument (Aquinas' First Way) demonstrates that God's existence is necessary even if the universe was eternal and had no beginning; His existence is necessary for existence of the universe at every moment.

New Atheists don't understand the question, don't understand the terminology, and don't understand their own rudimentary logical contradictions. New Atheist ignorance doesn't mean that classical theism is true; it merely means that New Atheism has nothing to say. But I sort of suspected that.

Via Wintery Knight.

Great Moments in Atheism

Remember - oh so long ago - when Minnesota state employee P.Z. Myers was using his taxpayer funded sinecure to encourage bigotry and intolerance?

One of the things that Myers found unacceptable!!!! was that his livelihood was threatened and, he claimed, one or two "God-botherers" had "threatened his life" by offering to punch him in the nose if he ever wanted to stop by and visit with them.

Silly and inane stuff to be sure.

Well, pot/kettle, mote/beam, ox/gore, today is today and Myers has organized his cult of "free-thinkers" in order to threaten the livelihood of a pharmacist with a conscience, with the predictable result that the pharmacist is receiving threats.

Thank heaven for enlightened bigots.

New day, new president...

...assassination is chic, again.

If it wasn't for double standards, these people would have no standards.

 "A British GQ writer pondered on Twitter if President Obama could "murder [Donald] Trump and [Mike] Pence" and then pardon himself.

The tweet from Rupert Myers, whose describes himself on Twitter as a political correspondent for British GQ, has since been deleted. It was first reported by The Daily Wire.

Myers didn't apologize for the Wednesday post, instead stating he was joking."

Error has no rights.

Living advertisement for secular atheism's Asperger's syndrome - P.Z. Myers - fires with all phaser banks at the notion that a mere Christian can give him suggesions about how not to act like a total walking pustule on the body politic of Christendom.

Some choice bits:

We're getting advice from Christians now! Look and laugh at this list: Five things that would make atheists seem nicer. It's gone awry even with the title. I especially appreciate the word "seem," because Lord knows there's nothing that could make us actually nice, and obviously we need the suggestions of a Christian, since we're all such not-nice people. I should make a counter-list of "five things that would make Christians seem intelligent" — maybe then one of them would notice the nasty implications of this clown's title.

But I'm the wrong guy to do it. You see, I'm not nice, and proud of it. I have no interest in being nice, and I think it's rather pathetic to start an argument by baring your throat to my teeth and begging for mercy before you've even started. It just makes me smirk and snap. It doesn't help, either, that his list is so snide and feeble…so sneebly.

There is projection all over this one. A charitable assumption might be that the original author was implying that atheists were "nice" but unfortunately weren't able to communicate their essential niceness.

On the other hand, if the original author was implying that atheists were not capable of being "nice," then didn't Myers' response prove that point?

And:

Science uses both inductive and deductive logic. Induction is the idea generator, the process that spins out tentative hypotheses that can be evaluated by observation, experiment, and deductive logic. Science is not infallible, and no one ever claims that it is, but it has something that religion lacks: a process of testing claims against real-world observations. To claim that science is as open to abuse as religion is ignorant nonsense. You can claim virtually anything about gods in religion, and all that matters is how many rubes you can persuade to believe it. Scientific claims are constrained by evidence.

And, yet, despite being constrained by evidence, fraud is rife in science.

For example, where is the base-line data supporting Global Warming, which is now allegedly lost, and which its developers were extremely reluctant to produce for critical examination? And where is Myer's outrage over that breach of scientific protocol?

Did Cyril Burt "cook the books" for his famous twin study? Even today, we don't know, but shouldn't science be able to answer that question since it is based on pure "evidence"?

What about the fact that no one has been able to replicate the study on the brain structure of homosexuals, on which study is based the claim that there is a "gay gene"?

Cold fusion?

The interesting thing is that the notorious frauds generally confirm the popular belief, or, more specifically, the worldview that the scientist wants to confirm. This is hardly surprising since science is a human enterprise engaged in by real humans and not the Spock-like creatures of science fiction. Human beings are fallen and drawn by their concupiscent desires to see what they want to see. Worldviews shape the data because worldviews determine what counts as "evidence" in the first place.

And to claim that scientific fraud and false belief are innocuous is an embarrassing kind of special pleading.

Just ask those who were sterilized in the name of eugenics.

Tomorrow is "Blasphemy Day."

From the Catholic League:

The Center for Inquiry will launch the first International Blasphemy Day on September 30, the anniversary of the 2005 publication of the Danish cartoons that so inflamed Muslims worldwide. Billed as a free speech event designed to oppose such things as a Muslim-sponsored U.N. resolution banning criticism of religion, the day has drawn the support of people like PZ Myers. Myers, a professor at the University of Minnesota known for intentionally desecrating a consecrated Host, says the day was established to “mock and insult religion without fear of murder, violence, and reprisal”; he wants every day to be Blasphemy Day.

Catholic League president Bill Donohue spoke to this event today:

The Center for Inquiry is factually incorrect to say that “Free speech is the foundation on which other liberties rest.” Freedom of conscience is the first liberty, and it is inextricably linked to freedom of religion. Moreover, the whole concept of inalienable rights presupposes a belief in the Creator. In other words, atheists have the right to mock religion because our Christian Founding Fathers afforded them human rights.

They are all such phonies. The stated purpose of Blasphemy Day has nothing to do with any religion but Islam, yet there is not one scheduled event insulting Muslims. We can only guess why. So who have they chosen to mock? You guessed it—Christians.

Artist Dana Ellyn will wander to Washington, D.C. to show her masterpiece, “Jesus Does His Nails,” a portrait of Jesus polishing a nail jammed into his hand. In Los Angeles, there will be a film about a gay molesting priest and another about a boy who is so angry about being sent to bed that he asks God to kill his parents. Oh, yes, American Atheists will conduct “De-Baptisms” in New Jersey.

Nice to know that even the atheists know that Christians can be counted on to react to their antics like good Christians. Which is why there will be no violence.

Of course, if Christians did anything like this toward other religions, atheists would cite it as evidence of the "divisive spirit" of religion and a reason that religion must be extirpated.

Yesterday, I was listening to Dan Barker in a debate with Dinesh D'Souza prattle on about how religion "divides" people - all while completely ignoring the fact that Christianity and Islam in their own ways created a way of breaking down divisions into new, more inclusive communities - and advocate the elimination of religion, as if that wouldn't be "divisive."

Religious people don't act this way for two reasons: (a) they generally have a mature view of the fact that the world is filled with other people who have feelings and who wouldn't do to others what they wouldn't want to have done unto them and (b) they don't uniformly suffer from Asperger's.

Civil War in the Leper Colony.

New Atheism is going through schism. Apparently, the left leaning doyens of New Atheism - P.Z. Myers and Richard Carrier and others - have decided that it is not enough to be merely socially autistic; now they've decided that they have to be politically correct and socially autistic.

Will their quest for acceptance spurred by being given "swirlies" in high school gymn class never end?

Here's the article:

In the passionate world of American atheism, the venom usually directed at believers has now been turned against the wrong kind of atheists.

The cause of this freethinking furore? A new movement called Atheism+. According to its website, "Atheism+ is a safe space for people to discuss how religion affects everyone and to apply skepticism and critical thinking to everything, including social issues like sexism, racism, GLBT issues, politics, poverty, and crime."

A+ was born when Freethought blogger Jen McCreight (the mind behind Boobquake) made a passionate call for a "third wave" of atheism, one that extends atheist activism into progressive politics and calls for a part of the movement to be one where women can exist free from the harassment that has plagued women publicly involved in the atheist movement.

The founders of Atheism+ say clearly that "divisiveness" is not their aim, but looking through the blogs and voluminous comments in the two weeks since A+ was mooted, trenches have been dug, beliefs stated, positions staked out and abuse thrown. A dissenting tweeter is "full of shit", while, according to one supporter, daring to disagree with Atheism+'s definition of progressive issues and not picking their side makes you an "asshole and a douchebag".

It took 700 years from Constantine renaming Byzantium in his own honour to papal legates circulating letters of anathema that split the Roman and Orthodox churches. Atheism, in its public, online life, has started exchanging internet anathemas – perhaps we should call them inathemas – in little more than a decade.

People are being told to wipe the spittle off their chins, take their heads out of their asses. The Life of Brian's lines about the various fronts for the liberation of Judea are being oft-recycled. 140 character brickbats are being thrown on Twitter under #atheismplus.

PZ Myers, soft-spoken in person but trenchant in print, said of A+ critics:

"It really isn't a movement about exclusion, but about recognising the impact of the real nature of the universe on human affairs. And if you don't agree with any of that – and this is the only 'divisive' part – then you're an asshole. I suggest you form your own label, 'Asshole Atheists", and own it, proudly. I promise not to resent it or cry about joining it. I just had a thought: maybe the anti-Atheist+ people are sad because they don't have a cool logo. So I made one for the Asshole Atheists:
A*"

Fellow Freethought blogger Richard Carrier goes further. When one commentator suggests "atheism does not have the luxury of kicking people out of its movement", Carrier gives him a rare old quilting in most splendid prose:

"Yes, it does. Atheism+ is our movement. We will not consider you a part of it, we will not work with you, we will not befriend you. We will heretofore denounce you as the irrational or immoral scum you are (if such you are). If you reject these values, then you are no longer one of us. And we will now say so, publicly and repeatedly. You are hereby disowned."

How like Pope Leo's letter to the patriarch of Constaninople in 1053 accusing him of "many and intolerable presumptions, in which if – as heaven forbid – he persist, he will in no way retain our peaceful regard". Even at this most serious moment for the future of Christianity, the pope managed to resist the urge to call the patriarch immoral scum, an asshole and a douchebag.

Here is the "safe space" for these people.

It's weird that they think they need a safe space. Usually, when they are on other people's blogs, they act like a group of Visigoths with OCPD.

If only there was some social institution that we could use to foster the idea that having children is a good and desirable thing. 

Something that would pair men and women up in a permanent relationship oriented toward having and raising children in a way that is most likely to ensure their social, intellectual and physical health.

Nah, crazy idea.

Wall Street Journal - A California Drought: Not Enough Children

Ever since the Gold Rush, the majority of Californians has been born elsewhere. That pattern began to change in the 1990s, when migrants were attracted by the lower cost of living and rapid growth in other Western and Southern states. Then, the housing bust and 2008 financial crisis hit California harder than most states. By 2010, more than half of all adults 25 to 34 years old were born in California.

At the same time, the state's birthrate fell to 1.94 children per woman in 2010, below the replacement level of 2.1 children, according to the study. California's rate is lower than the overall U.S. rate of 2.06 children in 2012, according to the Central Intelligence Agency.

The shrinking pool of youngsters coincides with a bulging population of older people. Nationally, "we are approaching a period of very large retirement, something like two million people a year for the next 20 years," said Stephen Levy, director of the Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy, an independent research group.
In 1970, California averaged 21 seniors for every 100 working-age adults. By 2030, that ratio is expected to rise to 36 seniors per 100 working-age adults, according to the report. That retirement wave will place "massive pressure on institutions and programs for an aging population," the report said.

Today's children will be the workers who pay for those programs and who take jobs vacated by boomers in the state's high-technology hub in Silicon Valley, its entertainment industry in Los Angeles and its farm belt in the Central Valley.
"Unless the birthrate picks up, we are going to need more immigrants. If neither happens, we are going to have less growth," said Mr. Levy. The report wasn't optimistic, saying that "with migration greatly reduced…outsiders are much less likely to come to the rescue."

Investments in the state's education system will be vital to meet labor-force needs and prevent the economy from contracting, said Mr. Levy. With less migration to the state, the skills and human capital necessary to keep California's economy afloat will need to be homegrown, both Mr. Levy and Mr. Myers said.

With more than 90% of the state's children under age 10 born in the state, "the majority of the next generation of workers will have been shaped by California's health and education systems," Mr. Myers said. "It's essential that we nurture our human capital."
Many of those future workers, however, will have grown up in poverty. More than 20% of children in California now live below the federal poverty level
 

Notice how the word "marriage" doesn't show up in this discussion, which after all concludes with the idea about "nurturing" California's "human capital"?

So the problem is not enough children and the children that we do have growing up in poverty?  Social science has proven repeatedly that marriage - healthy, Western-style, lifelong, companionate, monogamouse marriage - is the answer to both problems, and it doesn't cost a thing.

And, yet, we are driving a stake through the heart of that kind of marriage.

We are insane.

How you can tell who lost the debate.

Lawrence Krauss explains how William Craig is a "liar" and how he was too nice to Craig:

I believe that if I erred at all, it was in an effort to consider the sensibilities of the 1200 smiling young faces in the audience, who earnestly came out, mostly to hear Craig, and to whom I decided to show undue respect. As I stressed at the time, I did not come to debate the existence of God, but rather to debate about evidence for the existence of God. I also wanted to demonstrate the need for nuance, to explain how these issues are far more complex than Craig, in his simplistic view of the world, makes them out to be. For this reason, as I figured I would change few minds I decided also to try and illustrate for these young minds the nature of science, with the hope that what they saw might cause them to think. Unfortunately any effort I made to show nuance and actually explain facts was systematically distorted in Craig's continual effort to demonstrate how high school syllogisms apparently demonstrated definitive evidence for God.


Let me now comment, with the gloves off, on the disingenuous distortions, simplifications, and outright lies that I regard Craig as having spouted. I was very disappointed because I had heard that Craig was more of a philosopher than a proselytizer, but that was not evident the other evening.

Of course, he offers his candor to the amen corner at P.Z. Myers' blog.
Rather than claim that he was bested by Craig's Jedi mind-tricks, Krauss would be well advised to take a step back and listen to what he was saying.

For example, Krauss started the argument arguing against "logic."  Myers has tweaked Krauss's argument for him - Krauss wasn't arguing against "logic" as such, he was arguing against the idea that one can ascertain empirical truths purely from logic.

OK, fair point, that was kind of the argument that Krauss made, but Krass wanted to stretch the cash value of the argument to indict all metaphysics, which put him in the silly position of sounding like he was saying that only scientifically provable statements count, which, of course, isn't scientifically provable.

Hello, contradiction.  Worse still, he apparently doesn't understand that when he says things like that he is actually doing metaphysics, not science. 

Second, Krauss argued that we really can't know anything until we go out and check it scientifically because reality is strange and you never can tell what the truth is. 

Krauss' cash value here is to argue that Craig's argument that nothing can't cause something can't be accepted because it hasn't been scientifically proven, and, hey, reality is strange.

First, how stupid is this.  If there is one thing we can be sure of it is that "nothing cannot cause something."  Even Krauss knows this because everything he called "nothing" and said "caused something," he had to admit was actually "something."

Which makes him look rather much like someone trying to deceive to score debate points.

Second, notice how the "reality is stranger" claim gets jettisoned when it comes to a bit of strangeness that Krauss doesn't like.  Hence, when it came to the resurrection of Jesus, we don't get Krauss saying "well, heck, that could have happened because, you know, reality is strange and who am I to say that there couldn't possibly be one case of 'spontaneous ressurection' among trillions of deaths."  Nope, there we get told that we shouldn't believe that kind of thing because we know that kind of thing doesn't ever happen and we need "extraordinary evidence to prove extraordinary claims."

But remember he thinks that "nothing could cause something," which would certainly count as one heck of an extraordinary claim.

So, he strains at gnats and swallows camels, and he thinks he's the rational one.