My blog archives are back up, at last

My back catalogue of blog writing used to be hosted on OnlySky, until it shut down earlier this year. For a while, my archives had no home. I’m happy to report that situation has been rectified.

You can now find all my older writing on my personal website, daylightatheism.org, which I intend to keep online forever. It’s very simple and bare-bones at the moment, more a holding area than anything else. I’d like to improve it over time, adding features and making it look spiffier.

But the important stuff is there. It has my entire archive, including all my blog posts back to when I started writing regularly in 2006 (!). It encompasses the eras when I wrote for Big Think (2011-2012), Patheos (2013-2021), and the first iteration of OnlySky (2022-2023). There are index pages organized by year, so to browse the archives for, for example, 2019, you can do:

http://www.daylightatheism.org/2019/

This archive is complete through March 2024. All my posts since then are on Freethought Blogs.

Compiling this was an exercise in personal archaeology. Unlike people who are wedded to a dogmatic worldview, I don’t believe changing your mind is a bad thing. As is proper for a rationalist, I strive to always be open to new evidence, and to be amenable to persuasion when I’m presented with a good argument.

As a consequence, my views have evolved over time. Not about everything – I’m as fierce an atheist as I ever was – but about some other subjects, my views have evolved. For instance, I’ve become more skeptical of capitalism as time goes by. I also see a lot more complexity and nuance in defining sex and gender than I used to.

Because of this, a few of these posts now feel outdated or obsolete to me. But I hope that the majority still hold up and still represent what I believe. As for the handful that don’t, I’m leaving them as is. I’m not editing or deleting them, in the interests of honesty and transparency (and, frankly, because it’d be too much work to go over every one with a fine-tooth comb).

Although I haven’t altered the content, I’ve done my best to clean and tidy it up. I’ve updated the links to be internally consistent, so posts from different eras that link to each other all go to this site and not to Patheos or OnlySky versions that no longer exist. Despite my best efforts, there are probably still some errors and omissions. If you’re perusing it and you come across anything that’s missing or broken, let me know.

One of my great regrets is that I couldn’t bring along the comments. I’ve learned a lot from my commenters over the years, even some of the ones that criticized me. Some of my older posts, especially the Atlas Shrugged series, had truly excellent discussions I wish I could have preserved, but I wasn’t able to. That’s one of the biggest flaws of commenting systems like Disqus: your data is held captive by a third party, you can’t download it if you go elsewhere. It goes to show the benefits of open-source interoperability over capitalist walled gardens.

New on OnlySky: Glimpses of the solarpunk future

I have a new column today on OnlySky. It’s about a better world that’s coming, and that may not be as far off as you’d guess. The technologies we need to create this world aren’t sci-fi; they all already exist. They just need to be put together in a single package. When they do, civilization is going to be radically transformed.

In the near future, ultra-cheap renewable energy is going to drive out expensive, polluting fossil fuel. Advanced agricultural robotics will take over the jobs that once required grueling human labor. Automated manufacturing will end sweatshops and allow every community to make the things it needs for itself. Electric mass transit and self-driving cars will bring about the end of car culture and suburban sprawl. When you put all these pieces together, what does the completed jigsaw look like?

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but paid members of OnlySky get some extra perks, like a subscriber-only newsletter and the ability to post comments.

At the top of the list is solar power. Solar (and renewable energy in general) has two crucial traits: it’s incredibly cheap—now far cheaper than fossil fuel—and it’s available everywhere, which makes it inherently decentralized. These facts point to a radically different future than the world we’re used to, where oil, gas and coal have to be transported over long distances from where they’re dug up to where they’re burned.

There are other transformative technologies in the pipeline as well. When you combine them with abundant clean energy, you can glimpse one possible future, like catching sight of a distant valley through a gap in the clouds. Call this possibility the solarpunk future, after the name coined by literary and artistic dreamers.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

Sex and gender are constellations

Bright stars in a night sky

My recent post on Richard Dawkins versus the science of sex and gender sparked a conversation in the comments, so I wanted to explore the subject in more detail.

For purposes of this post, let’s say that sex consists of the biological traits that relate to reproduction and childbearing, and that gender is the social roles we stack on top of that: things like what clothes you wear, what emotions you’re expected to express, what roles you’re expected to perform at home, in the workplace and in society in general.

Many people, including Dawkins, believe sex and gender are a straightforward binary. You’re either male or female, a man or a woman, end of story.

But if that were the case, it should be easy to come up with a rule that tells you which sex a person is. However, that turns out to be not nearly so simple. The more you look, the more you find that any such rule is fraught with complications, exceptions and judgment calls. No matter the criteria, there are cases that don’t fit neatly on either side of the line.

Genetics. The first place to look for an A-or-B rule is the genes. If you have XY chromosomes, you’re male; if you have XX, you’re female. Nothing could be simpler than that. Except it’s not so simple.

The “master” gene on the Y chromosome is called SRY. When present, it switches the fetus to the male development path – usually. But not always. Mutations in SRY can result in Swyer syndrome, a person who has XY chromosomes but a biologically female body.

People with Swyer syndrome are usually infertile, but not always. In one remarkable case, a woman with XY chromosomes got pregnant and gave birth… to a daughter who was also XY.

Even a functional SRY gene doesn’t guarantee a male body. A different group of mutations result in androgen insensitivity syndrome, in which cells fail to respond to the signal of SRY. A person with this condition always has testes (but they may be internal, so this may not be obvious), but in other respects, their bodies can be intersex or physiologically female.

It can happen the other way, too. The X and Y sex chromosomes are usually exempt from swapping of genetic material during meiosis, but not always. On occasion, SRY moves from the Y chromosome to the X. This results in XX male syndrome: a person with XX chromosomes and a biologically male body.

Thus, knowing a person’s chromosomes doesn’t necessarily tell you what sex they are. What else can we try?

Gametes. Another frequently heard suggestion is to determine sex on the basis of gametes. This has the advantage of having, seemingly, only two options. If your body produces eggs, you’re female; if sperm, you’re male. Nothing could be simpler than that!

However, this definition has some flaws. To name the most obvious, what sex are you if your body produces neither?

People with Klinefelter syndrome (XXY) have biologically male bodies, but smaller testicles that often produce no sperm. Are they male or not?

The female equivalent is Turner syndrome (XO). Like Klinefelter syndrome, people with this condition have biologically female bodies, but often lack functional ovaries. People with Swyer syndrome, mentioned above, also usually have nonfunctional “streak gonads” that don’t produce gametes.

That’s not even to mention people who’ve had testes or ovaries surgically removed. Using this as the sole definition would suggest that, if a person’s body is incapable of producing gametes, there’s no way to tell what sex they are. Obviously, this is absurd.

Anatomy. If genetics and gametes don’t yield a bright-line rule, the next place to look is a person’s genitals. A male has a penis and testicles; a woman has a clitoris, uterus and ovaries. Nothing could be simpler than that… except, again, it’s not so simple.

Male and female genitals develop from the same primordial structures in the fetus. Due to hormonal irregularities, some people are born with atypical genitalia that aren’t exactly one or the other. They may have genitals that resemble either a small penis or a large clitoris, or a partially fused labia similar to a scrotum. What should the rule be for people with these intersex conditions?

In days past, doctors often took it upon themselves to “fix” this “problem” with plastic surgery, assigning the infant to one sex or another before they were old enough to voice an opinion on the matter. Many of those people grew up to resent what had been done to them without their consent, and it’s now widely considered a human-rights violation.

Even beyond these cases, it’s easy to see why sex shouldn’t be defined solely on the basis of genitals. If a man lost his penis and testicles in a traumatic accident (say, a soldier who stepped on a land mine)… or if a woman had a full hysterectomy (say, to treat uterine cancer)… would they cease to be their former sex because they no longer had the equipment?

There are real-life stories that show it doesn’t work that way. One is the infamous case of David Reimer, who suffered a botched circumcision as an infant. On the advice of a psychologist, he was given sex reassignment surgery and raised as a girl. But he never accepted it, and his life ended tragically because of it.

An even more fascinating case is the Guevedoces: a community in the Dominican Republic where some children are born appearing female, but develop a penis and testicles at the onset of puberty. (How is this possible? Read the linked article for details.)

Hormones. Another popular proposal is that sex is determined by hormones. Men have higher levels of testosterone, while women have higher levels of estrogen.

Recently, this has been the preferred solution for professional sporting bodies. Some have ruled that women with naturally high testosterone levels wouldn’t be allowed to compete unless they take drugs to reduce them.

Whatever you think about the fairness of this rule in elite athletics, it would be infeasible for the general population. As with the other traits, hormone levels fall along a spectrum of variation. One study found that 16.5% of men had testosterone below the normal male reference range, while 13.7% of women had testosterone above the normal female reference range.

As men age, their testosterone levels naturally decline. Other medical conditions, like pituitary gland problems, can also cause low testosterone, as do conditions like Klinefelter syndrome. If a man’s testosterone level falls below the clinical standard, does he cease to be a man and become a woman?

Secondary sex characteristics. Unless you lead an unusual lifestyle, you probably don’t know what genes, genitals or hormone levels your friends have. Instead, we judge by people’s outward appearance, especially musculature, breasts, voice pitch, and facial and body hair.

However, these traits are even more clearly a spectrum. Some women are stronger than some men: for example, I’m never going to lift as much weight as Mary Theisen-Lappen, but I don’t think that makes her a man or me a woman.

Many people are androgynous, not easy to classify at a glance. Some women have hirsutism (excess facial and body hair) while some men have gynecomastia (enlarged breasts). We may consider these conditions unusual, but we don’t believe they make a person a sex other than the one they identify as.

* * *

When these conditions and others are taken into account, it’s virtually impossible to come up with an unambiguous rule that defines what sex someone is. You either have to resort to “I know it when I see it” vagueness, or write a rule that classifies some people as what seems clearly the wrong sex.

You might say that intersex conditions are rare anomalies, so we shouldn’t allow them to overturn an otherwise useful rule. It’s true that they’re rare, but that doesn’t make them irrelevant. No good scientist would say, “There are some exceptions my theory can’t explain, but those probably aren’t important, so I’m just going to ignore them.”

On the contrary: scientists know that anomalies are valuable, precisely because they show the incompleteness of our current models and point the way to a better understanding. Transitional fossils are rare, but that doesn’t mean they should be disregarded. Rare or not, they show that evolution is true and the presumed discontinuity of species is false. Just the same way, intersex conditions show that sex is more a spectrum than a binary.

I certainly don’t consider myself an expert on this topic. I’ve been learning a lot about it, especially in the last few years. My views may change further, but here’s where I’m at now: I believe that sex and gender are constellations.

What do I mean by that?

A constellation is a group of stars that form an image in the sky. In one sense, constellations are real: the individual stars that make them up are obviously real, and astronomers can agree on which stars belong to which constellations. They’re stable patterns whose boundaries are widely agreed upon and which haven’t changed over the millennia.

In another sense, constellations are arbitrary. They’re artifacts of our imagination; the patterns don’t have an objective existence of their own. We could divide the night sky up into different constellations, and it would work just as well. What’s more, the stars in a constellation are at different distances from Earth and from each other, and they’re all in motion over cosmological time scales. It’s only our vantage point in space and time that makes them appear to go together.

Sex and gender are the same category of thing. The “stars” are the facts on the ground – the biological traits a person either has or lacks and the cultural beliefs and roles a person either accepts or rejects. The “constellations” are the way we group them together, deciding what belongs with what.

But constellations are cultural constructs. There’s nothing sacrosanct about them. If we choose, we can group them in a different way – or we can just accept that our classifications don’t map onto any fundamental division of reality. Rather than insisting that everyone is either 100% male or 100% female, we can accept that some people have some traits that point one way and other traits that point another way. To argue otherwise is the same as demanding to know which constellation a star “really” belongs to.

The sky is full of stars, each one unique and beautiful. We don’t need each and every one to fall into a set of arbitrary boxes for us to appreciate them.

The United Kingdom enters the post-theist age

The Union Jack flag

It’s going to get awkward that the U.K. still uses “God Save the King” as their national anthem:

For the first time in history, the UK now has more atheists than people who believe in the existence of a god, researchers have found.

This eyebrow-raising conclusion comes from Explaining Atheism, a collaborative research project on secularism by several British universities. As researchers put it, the nation is entering its “atheist age“.

Although it’s a right-wing tabloid, the Daily Mail has a surprisingly comprehensive and sympathetic report:

Figures from 2008 showed that 41.8 per cent of Britons believed in God while 35.2 per cent did not.

Within a decade, by 2018, this had reversed, with 35.2 per cent believing and 42.9 per cent not believing.

This project was funded by a grant from the Templeton Foundation, which normally pays scientists to praise religion. The fact that Templeton-backed researchers are reporting this result is a good indicator of its reliability. It fits the criterion of embarrassment.

It also fits the pattern of previous studies, like the one which found the U.K. was up to 25% atheist a few years ago. In 2019, only 1% (!) of young people belonged to the Church of England, and we’re seeing the fruits of that.

The rapid rise of atheism in the United Kingdom, mirroring similar trends in other countries, pours cold water on the claim that humans are genetically hardwired to believe in God. If that were true, we might see different religions rise and fall, but the number of out-and-out atheists would remain statistically insignificant. It would just be the tiny minority of mutants who lacked the god gene.

That’s not what’s happening. Religion is fading, and it’s not being replaced with anything else. This is conclusive evidence that religious belief is a cultural trait, one that can rise or fall like any other. It’s not an immutable part of our genetics, much less a spiritual longing implanted in us by a divine creator.

The Explaining Atheism project isn’t just a demographic survey. It also studied what causes lead people to become atheists, what atheists do believe in if they don’t believe in gods, and their general outlook and how they live their lives. While results like this will be extremely obvious to us, it’s something that many people still don’t know:

The team also discovered that the stereotype of the ‘purposeless unbeliever’ – that atheists lead lives devoid of meaning, morality and purpose – simply isn’t accurate.

Instead, many atheists and agnostics endorse objective moral values, human dignity and rights, and see family and freedom as important for finding meaning in the world, the study showed.

Another thing atheists might have guessed, but that it’s good to get confirmation of, is that religion doesn’t persist because it satisfies deep-seated needs, like assuaging the fear of death, or giving rules and structure to life. Rather, it persists mainly because parents pass it on to their children. This, too, fits with the theory of religion as an arbitrary cultural trait:

Common explanations for why people believe in God or not, such as intelligence, fear of death, or need for structure, have little empirical support.

The strongest influences on belief are parental upbringing and societal expectations regarding belief in God.

As for what this might mean for British politics, I’m not an expert. I’d guess the impact will be limited, since the U.K. doesn’t have a religious right that acts as a cohesive political force in the same way that the U.S. does.

However, there are still official privileges for Christianity enshrined in the British government. (I’m looking at you, bishops in the House of Lords.) As the U.K. becomes a majority atheist state, these archaic measures are ripe for disestablishment.

The U.K. may be leading the pack, but given its cultural similarities to the U.S., this is a herald of what’s coming here too. All the industrialized countries are moving along the same secularization curve, some further ahead, others behind. The religious right has been a more powerful and noxious force in America, but its time is drawing to a close. We can see it coming, and it may not be as far off as you think.

Image credit: geishaboy500, released under CC BY 2.0 license

New on OnlySky: I still want to go to Mars, but not if Elon Musk punches the ticket

I have a new column today on OnlySky. It’s about the feasibility of a Mars settlement… and the trustworthiness of the people currently best known for advocating it.

Mars is the closest place to Earth where human beings could even theoretically live. But, right now, the best-known supporters of establishing a human presence on the red planet are a gang of billionaires who are notorious for their unreliable, failure-prone technology, their long string of broken promises, and their Ayn Randian, libertarian-supremacist views. They’re absolutely not the kind of people anyone should trust to be in control of the oxygen supply.

So if they’re not the ones who should take us to Mars, who is? Or this is even a goal we should pursue at all?

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column requires membership to read, but you can sign up for free. (Paid members of OnlySky get some extra perks, like a subscriber-only newsletter and the ability to post comments.)

It’s not just Musk. The same goes for all the self-declared rationalists and tech-bro billionaires who think they’re head and shoulders above the common herd. Far too many of them prove to be con artists, like Sam Bankman-Fried, or swollen with lethal hubris, like Stockton Rush, or wannabe mad scientists who believe that rules are for little people, like Marc Andreessen.

None of them are trustworthy. None of them have wisdom to match their wealth or their lofty rhetoric. If we’re going to go to Mars—and, for the record, I do hope we eventually go to Mars—it shouldn’t be the private vanity project of a billionaire. It should be a shared commitment on behalf of all humanity, with only our best representatives selected for the mission.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

They’ll say anything rather than admit scientists were right

[Previous: The revolt against reality: Harassment of scientists is escalating]

Climate change isn’t a distant future danger, but a crisis that’s already rolling over us. In the midst of the 2024 hurricane season, America is experiencing that firsthand.

Hurricane Helene wreaked devastation on the South. In Tennessee, 54 people were rescued by helicopter from the roof of a flooded hospital. In the mountains of western North Carolina, hundreds of miles from the coast, it brought apocalyptic floods and mudslides that obliterated houses, crumpled bridges, downed trees and swept people to their deaths.

Many rural communities were linked to the rest of the state by just one or two roads that were washed away in the floods. Now they’re completely stranded and isolated. It’ll be weeks, likely months, before they can be reconnected.

(Reading these stories, I had an unavoidable thought: how is this going to affect the outcome of the 2024 election, given that thousands of rural voters in Georgia and North Carolina are cut off from civilization, and there’s no way all those destroyed bridges and washed-out roads can be repaired before Election Day?)

Helene is the deadliest hurricane to strike the U.S. since Hurricane Katrina in 2005. But it may not hold that title for long. Just a few days after it passed through, an even bigger and more powerful storm, Hurricane Milton, formed in the Gulf of Mexico.

Milton grew to Category 5 faster than any other storm on record, leaving forecasters stunned and frightened by its size and strength. It made landfall this week in Florida, spawning dozens of tornadoes and bringing massive storm surges. But don’t worry, Ron DeSantis and the Republicans of Florida are on the case… by making it illegal for state government to use the words “climate change”.

No one can say that this is surprising or mysterious. It’s basic meteorology that a warmer world fuels more powerful, more destructive storms. This is the exact scenario that climate scientists and progressive politicians have been warning about for decades. There was an Oscar-winning documentary about it, for truth’s sake.

So, of course, right-wingers flatly refuse to believe it. As the wind howls and the water rises around their ankles, they’re churning out conspiracy theories at a furious rate. The most popular one is that Hurricane Helene isn’t natural, but was somehow created by the U.S. government:

The “Meteorologists” Facebook page has 51,000 followers, an iffy grasp of grammar rules, and outsized confidence in the United States’ weather engineering capabilities. “They are Aiming this KILLER Monster Hurricane Right at FLORIDA!” one user said of Hurricane Milton on Sunday morning, shortly before sharing purported photos of dinosaurs living on Mars.

By Monday afternoon, Milton had strengthened into a Category 5 storm, and the internet conspiracies were intensifying, too. People shared videos of themselves asking their Alexas, “What kind of hurricane was Hurricane Milton?” and getting answers in the past tense — proof, surely, that the government orchestrated the whole storm. “Never ever seen a hurricane form in the western Gulf and head directly EAST… It is not right,” other users mused in the comment sections of their local weather channels. A search for “cloud seeding” on Facebook further turned up dozens of posts tracking flight paths for planes belonging to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and sharing photos of ominous-looking clouds as evidence that the “government is involved.”

Meteorologists are being spammed with hate and threats just for reporting on what’s happening:

This hurricane season, Cappucci and the other meteorologists I spoke with say, conspiracy theories have been flooding their inboxes. The main one that people have seemed to latch onto is the accusation that the government can control the weather. This theory seems to be amplified with climate change creating worsening storms combined with a tense election year, and the vitriol is being directed at meteorologists. “I’ve been doing this for 46 years and it’s never been like this,” says Alabama meteorologist James Spann. He says he’s been “inundated” with misinformation and threatening messages like “Stop lying about the government controlling the weather or else.”

And of course, wherever there’s a conspiracy theory, you’ll find Marjorie “Jewish Space Lasers” Taylor Greene at the head of the mob. She reshared a conspiracy claim that storm damage from Helene was suspiciously precise:

“The storm seemed to almost methodically miss the bluest parts of those crucial swing states, while simultaneously ravaging the red parts. What a crazy coincidence!”

As usual, conspiracy theorists can’t even get their basic facts straight. The storm also ravaged Asheville, a Democratic stronghold. (But if it were true, what would that imply? When I read about this, I feel like Lucius Fox in the Batman movies: “Let me get this straight: you believe that Democrats can control the weather, and you’re voting against them?”)

These conspiracy theories are ego protection for conservatives. They can’t face the fact that their multi-decade campaign against climate legislation is the cause of their misfortune. Rather than reckon with their complicity, they concoct wild accusations so that they can blame someone, anyone else rather than admit scientists were right. It’s the same thing that happened during COVID.

For decades, conservatives have treated climate change as a partisan football that they could spike for their own advantage. They acted as if pro-climate legislation was a win for Democrats; therefore, blocking it was a win for Republicans. But they failed to realize that, no matter who wins elections, we all live on the same warming planet. There’s an underlying reality that campaign ads and gerrymandered legislatures can’t alter. Now that this is becoming clear, they’re retreating into self-delusion rather than admit their mistake. But when the rain falls and the seas rise, no amount of conspiracy posts will protect them.

Put your shoulder to the wheel

This is the most important election of our lifetimes. Again. What are you doing about it?

Americans defeated white nationalism and Christian supremacism in 2020, but like every horror-movie villain, it’s come back for one more try. The good news is, we have every chance to beat them for good. We can deal these fascists an overwhelming defeat in 2024, consigning them once and for all to the trash heap of history. But that will only happen if good people stand up and fight. I want to do my part to make that happen, and you should too.

Reasons for, not just against

Unlike Republicans, we have more to run on than just fear and hatred of the other side. Progressives can point to a long and impressive list of wins we’ve gotten in the last four years from the Biden-Harris administration.

Joe Biden passed the Inflation Reduction Act, far and away the most transformative climate law in American history, as well as a massive infrastructure bill. He’s the most pro-union president we’ve ever had.

He ended forced arbitration in sexual-harassment cases. He’s taken steps to legalize cannabis, made Juneteenth a federal holiday, bolstered the IRS to catch tax cheats, ended the occupation of Afghanistan, won Medicare the ability to negotiate drug prices, capped insulin costs, and brokered an interstate agreement to conserve the Colorado River, among many other underpublicized progressive wins.

And he’d have done more if he could. Most notably, we could have had full student-loan forgiveness and prosecution of Donald Trump for his many crimes, if both of those hadn’t been stymied by wacko far-right judges. But that isn’t Democrats’ fault. If anything, it shows the vital necessity of winning more elections so we can appoint the next few Supreme Court justices.

I’m not satisfied yet. I want to defend all these wins, and I want more of them. I have every confidence that Kamala Harris will extend the winning streak of the Biden administration, on top of the historic nature of her own candidacy. I’ll proudly cast my vote for her to be our next president this November.

Oh yeah, but what about Israel?

Progressives are often hampered by our own sense of morality and nuance. We argue, we agonize, we second-guess our decisions. Too many of us withhold our votes as protest, waiting for a perfect candidate who will never materialize.

Meanwhile, religious conservatives have no such reservations. They worship their golden calf with cultish devotion, they ignore every one of his lies and outrages, and they don’t care what harm he might inflict on themselves, the country or the world. Too often, this means that thoughtful people of conscience lose, while the worst side wins.

I’m not saying we need to take lessons from the right in how to be more mindlessly obedient. But I am saying this is a perverse dynamic that leftists should be able to step back and appreciate. Too often, we let the perfect become the enemy of the good. We end up actively hurting our interests for the sake of ideological purity, rather than taking our wins where we can get them.

It’s okay to support Democrats even if you still have disagreements with them. Voting isn’t a religious pledge of eternal loyalty, it’s a utilitarian exercise in harm reduction. It’s simply an answer to this question: given the choices available to me, which is the best one? Which one most pushes the world in the direction I want it to go?

I wish I could cast a vote in this election to end the latest round of Middle East wars, but I can’t. But I can cast a vote to protect future generations from even worse climate change; to protect immigrants from white supremacy and mass deportation; to protect women’s reproductive rights from anti-choice attacks and abortion bans; to preserve Obamacare, Social Security and other safety net programs from plutocracy; to protect and advance unions; to do something about gun violence in America; to defend science against aggressive anti-intellectualism; and to help the people of Ukraine resist the invasion of a tyrannical aggressor. My vote can’t stop every evil in the world, but I’m not going to let that dissuade me from doing the good I can do.

So, with that in mind, here’s what I’m doing in 2024 in addition to voting:

• I’m writing postcards to voters in swing-state races all around the country. I’ve signed up with Postcards to Voters and Activate America. You choose a campaign and how many postcards you want to send, and they e-mail you a list of addresses and an approved message to write.

I’ve been writing ten postcards per week, and I plan to do more as the election draws near. This is my favorite method of outreach because it’s easy and flexible. You can write whenever you have a spare moment, and send out as many or as few as you’re capable of doing.

I also think it’s less intrusive and less annoying than other methods of contacting voters, which makes it more likely to be effective. A friendly, handwritten postcard is a good reminder to vote that people can keep and stick on their fridge.

• I’m donating money, as my budget allows. I dream of a post-capitalist world where money is no longer a factor in elections, but that world doesn’t exist yet. Where possible, I try to donate to local and overlooked races, rather than big national campaigns that get the lion’s share of funding.

• I volunteered to canvass for two competitive races in my backyard, one for the New York state senate and one for the House. I wanted to travel further afield, maybe to Pennsylvania, but unfortunately my son’s school schedule and my wife’s work schedule just made it unworkable. If you can travel to volunteer, you should consider doing so.

• As Election Day draws nearer, I also want to sign up for text banking. I’ve done phone banking before, and I’m not a huge fan – I find I have to make calls for an hour or more to reach just one real person, which doesn’t seem like a great return on investment for my time. But text banking seems like an acceptable compromise.

• Last but not least, I have this hat:

The author in a Harris-Walz camo hat

I don’t know what’s going to happen in November. There are reasons to be anxious, but there are also many reasons for hope and optimism. Unlike the frequently-wrong-but-never-in-doubt Christian prophets, I don’t claim to be able to see the future.

But, win or lose, I want to be able to say I did my part. It takes millions of people working together to shift the course of democracy, and I want to be one of the people who helped push it in a better direction. I imagine that one day, when he’s an adult, my son will ask me about this election. I want to honestly tell him that I did everything I could, for his sake and for the sake of the world he’s going to grow up into.

Richard Dawkins keeps getting smaller

[Previous: Why I lost faith in New Atheism]

I haven’t thought about Richard Dawkins in a while, but he’s still around. At the age of 83, he’s going on a lecture tour that’s being advertised as his farewell bow. Ross Andersen, writing for the Atlantic, attended one of these talks.

It really is a tragedy what Dawkins has become. Those of us who once looked up to him, including me, admired him for his earnest desire to bring the spirit of scientific wonder to the masses. It was his first passion in life, and that was always obvious when he was speaking about it. I had the impression that his atheist advocacy wasn’t separate from that, but came from the same wellspring of wanting everyone to know the true nature of reality. Next to the power of real understanding, the tall tales of religion are shoddy counterfeits.

The attendees at the talk (though lacking a certain diversity) still reflect some of that spirit:

The packed theater looked like a subreddit come to life. Bald white heads poked above the seat backs, as did a few ponytails and fedoras. This being an assembly of freethinkers, there was no standard uniform, but I did spot lots of goatees and black T-shirts. The faded silk-screen graphics on the tees varied. One was covered in equations. Another featured a taxonomy of jellyfish extending onto its sleeves. These people had not come here merely to see a performer; Dawkins had changed many of their lives. A man in the row behind me said that he had attended Dawkins’s show in Newark, New Jersey, the previous night. As a Christian teen, he had sought out videos of Dawkins, hoping that they would prepare him to rebut arguments for evolution. He ultimately found himself defeated by the zoologist’s logic, and gave up his faith.

However, the evening immediately took an ugly turn. The introduction, from a member of Atheists for Liberty – a hard-right organization – gave a hint of what was to unfold:

Jake Klein, the director of the Virginia Chapter of Atheists for Liberty, told a similar conversion story onstage, before introducing Dawkins. Klein said The God Delusion had radicalized him against the Orthodox Judaism of his youth. Millions of other creationists had similar experiences, Klein said. He credited Dawkins with catalyzing an important triumph of reason over blind superstition. Klein’s opening remarks, to that point, could have described Dawkins of 20-odd years ago, when he was first going on the attack against religion’s “profligate wastefulness, its extravagant display of baroque uselessness.” But then things took a turn. Klein told the crowd that they couldn’t afford to be complacent. Human ignorance was not yet wholly vanquished. “Wokeness and conspiratorial thinking” had arisen to take the place of religious faith. Klein began ranting about cultural Marxists. He said that Western civilization needed to defend itself against “people who divide the world between the oppressors and the oppressed.” He sounded a lot like J. D. Vance.

Regrettably, this wasn’t a case of an overstepping host seizing the pulpit to preach his own weird ideas. Dawkins himself has embraced this worldview, to his detriment:

For nearly an hour, Dawkins stuck largely to science, and it served him well. The latter half of the evening was heavier on culture-war material. To whoops and hollers, Dawkins expressed astonishment that anyone could believe that sex is a continuum, instead of a straightforward binary. He described safety-craving college students as “pathetic wimps.” It all seemed small, compared with the majesty of the ideas he’d been discussing just minutes before.

But… sex is a continuum. That’s not political correctness or woke culture gone mad. That’s science!

Sexual reproduction evolved from precursor species that were asexual, and nature doesn’t do binary, saltationary jumps from one state to another. Evolution works through gradual transitions and slow accumulations of complexity.

If you think sex is a straightforward binary, then how do you explain the many species that are hermaphroditic, producing both male and female gametes? What about the species that change sex in response to life cycles or environmental cues?

Even if you confine the discussion to human beings, there are people whose bodies defy simplistic notions of a gender binary. There are people with chimeric sex chromosomes, ambiguous genitalia, and bodies that don’t match what a genetic scan “should” lead one to expect. Dawkins, who’s a biologist, has no excuse for not knowing any of this.

Richard Dawkins, of all people, has done the same thing creationists are so often guilty of. He started with an ideological premise – in his case, that transgender and non-binary people shouldn’t exist – and allowed that belief to dictate his factual conclusions. Certainly, you can make philosophical arguments about what makes a person male or female, or debate how we should allocate rights based on sex or gender. But there should be no room for denying the facts of nature to support a political preference.

The saddest part of this is that, even while echoing the language and the preoccupations of right-wing culture warriors, Dawkins doesn’t seem to understand why they cheer him:

The day before, on a video call, Dawkins told me that he was puzzled—and disquieted—by the support he has received from the political right. He tends to support the Labour Party. He loathes Donald Trump. The New Atheist movement arose partly in response to the ascent of George W. Bush and other evangelicals in Republican politics.

This is the only thing Andersen has to say about this video call – no further detail, no direct quotes – and his article suffered from the omission. I wish we could’ve heard more details from that call. Why does Dawkins think he’s getting support from right-wingers?

Does he have any idea? Even a wild guess? Or is he just writing it off as a mystery he has no desire to speculate about?

When it comes to culture-war issues like this, Dawkins isn’t just on the same side as the right; he’s on the same side as the religious right. You’d think that he, of all people, would have noticed the stark incongruity of this.

Obviously, I don’t choose my opinions based on the company it puts me in. But if I found that my allies on one issue were people I vehemently disagreed with about almost everything else… at the very least, I’d want to do some serious reflection to figure out why that was. Dawkins seems remarkably incurious about it.

Andersen suggests that Dawkins built his reputation on defending evolution against creationist attacks. Now that that’s no longer a burning culture-war issue, he doesn’t know what to do with himself and he’s casting about for another target worthy of his attention:

Dawkins seems to have lost his sense of proportion. Now that mainstream culture has moved on from big debates about evolution and theism, he no longer has a prominent foe that so perfectly suits his singular talent for explaining the creative power of biology. And so he’s playing whack-a-mole, swinging full strength, and without much discernment, at anything that strikes him as even vaguely irrational.

I think this misses the mark. At best, it’s only a partial explanation.

Rather, Dawkins possesses an all-too-human flaw: he can dish it out but can’t take it. He delights in skewering other people’s sacred cows, but when it’s his own cherished assumptions under attack, he lashes out with the same knee-jerk defensiveness he so often encounters from religious believers. (Remember when I wrote an article in the Guardian offering some criticisms of Dawkins, and he flew into a rage and accused me of wanting to stamp out all dissent with my verbal jackboots?)

Like I said, Dawkins built his persona on scientific skepticism, on willingness to question what everyone “knows” to be true. In The God Delusion, he wrote: “I am hostile to fundamentalist religion because it actively debauches the scientific enterprise. It teaches us not to change our minds, and not to want to know exciting things that are available to be known.”

Now he’s abandoned that principle entirely. It’s almost a cliche: the scientist who made great achievements in his youth, but ossified into stubborn crankery in his old age, resisting any new ideas he wasn’t personally responsible for.

When confronted with sex and gender issues or social-justice controversies that he had no personal experience with, his own principles should have led him to be gracious, considerate and open-minded. Instead, he entrenched himself, exactly like the fundamentalists he deplores. He concluded that he was right and everyone else was wrong and that he had nothing left to learn. It’s small-minded, mean behavior, unworthy of a true scientist. It’s a grand shame that, at the twilight of his career, he’s made this his last act and the way he wants to be remembered.

New on OnlySky: Be an average citizen of the future, now

I have a new column today on OnlySky. It poses a thought experiment: If you were flung hundreds of years into the past, how would your modern morality clash with the sentiments that were commonly held then?

The past wasn’t a nice place, and most of the moral ideas we take for granted today only won out after long struggle. In ages of monarchy, of empire, of colonialism, of patriarchy, of religious supremacism, our modern beliefs in democracy, equality, human rights and tolerance would be shocking, outrageous notions that would put you in league with the most radical thinkers of those days.

Now slide the lesson forward: What beliefs do we hold that the future will abhor? And what does that tell us about what we should be thinking and doing right now, knowing that our era will one day stand in the judgment of history?

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column requires membership to read, but you can sign up for free. (Paid members of OnlySky get some extra perks, like a subscriber-only newsletter and the ability to post comments.)

So, what would you do as a modern person trapped in the past?

Hopefully, you’d be a shining light to those dark ages. You’d join the visionaries and reformers who stood against popular prejudice. You might become a crusader for free thought, sheltering religious dissenters from the wrath of the Inquisition, writing books that defended people’s right to make up their own minds. You might take up arms in the revolution and fight for democracy.

You might oppose imperialism and speak up for indigenous rights against colonizers who wanted to exterminate them. You might make your dwelling a station on the Underground Railroad, a secret shelter for people escaping from slavery into freedom. You might hide Jewish families from pogroms. You might march in the nascent movements for women’s suffrage or civil rights.

You’d do these things, not just because you’d have the benefit of knowing you were on the right side of history, but because you’d know it was the right thing to do. Your conscience would demand no less.

Continue reading on OnlySky…