There are jerks on Mastodon, too

It’s too bad that social media has to have that “social” component — as we all know, Hell is other people. I got some comments on this post about the ongoing atrocities in Israel/Palestine on Mastodon that earned someone an instant block. Look at this facile nonsense:

@escarpment@mastodon.online
@pzmyers It says in your profile you are an atheist yet you still seem to have been convinced by the religious moralizers that there exists a clearly defined objective standard of good and evil, which there is not.
@escarpment@mastodon.online
@pzmyers Also, though many people claim half-heartedly to condemn both Israel and Hamas (which in my view is unjustified), they spend the majority of the time and effort condemning Israel, therefore tacitly endorsing Hamas. They hold rallies against Israel, not against Israel and Hamas. They bring cases to the ICJ against Israel, not against Israel and Hamas.


First, they argue that because I’m an atheist, I can’t recognize good and evil. Those are religious concepts only! As if an atheist can’t have a moral standard based on entirely human values, and as if religious values aren’t totally fucked up and invalid. Checkmate, atheist! You are not allowed to condemn violence and genocide, because you don’t have a holy book telling you what’s right!

Next, now that they have established themselves firmly on the moral high ground vs. the trough of futility and despair that is the atheist position, they go on to read my mind. My condemnation of Israel and Hamas is “half-hearted”? Say what? I despise both with my entire heart — even an atheist and humanist can regard terrorist violence as brutal and cruel. That’s their justification for suggesting that I am “tacitly endorsing Hamas”?

No, I am not. I think both the Hamas leadership and the government of Israel should be dragged before the Hague and receive their just punishment. The difference between the two is that 1) right now, the Hamas leadership is being bombed into bloody gibs, and 2) my country is actively supporting the state-run terrorism by Israel, so I feel that condemning the violence my government is “tacitly endorsing” is more important today. There’s also the fact that the Palestinians are clearly the underdog, with about 24,000 dead citizens so far.

No matter, though: my perspective as an atheist and humanist is that no one should be butchering either Israeli or Palestinian civilians. No one should be arming the butchers, either.

Oh no! Our atheist origin myth has been obliterated!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then we get to the meat of the review.

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

Who? Never heard of him.

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

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

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

A very bad sign, that.

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

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

So what’s his argument?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are spiders attracted to Sephora cosmetics?

I’m suddenly reading a viral anecdote all over the place — the claim that a “body butter” (whatever that is) called “Delícia Drench” and marketed by the cosmetics company, Sephora, attracts wolf spiders.

SCENT ATTRACTS WOLF SPIDERS
If you’re scared of wolf spiders- watch out for these lotions lol. I wanted to love them sooo bad, but one of the ingredients is like kryptonite to wolf spiders! When I put it on instantly one will come out. Normally I’ll see one every like 3 years, used this and it was every day. I stopped using it and haven’t seen one since…. oh and one time, the spider wanted to eat whatever ingredient it is so bad that it chased me. I swear on everything. I’d run left, it ran left, I ran right, it ran right. Like it was legit following the scent. And no, the scent isn’t that good, nothing a $5 vanilla cream can’t match. So yeah, do be careful if you’re frightened of spiders, especially the big wolf ones. Also, plz don’t hurt them if you do wear this & they appear. Use a cup and put them outside. Sorry for a disappointing review.

There are a few red flags here. It’s a negative review written by someone who apparently wants to discourage purchase of the product. It’s an account that says little more than that the writer noticed lots of spiders. I hate to tell you this, but I don’t use “body butter” and I can see swarms of wolf spiders in season — they’re ubiquitous and common. Wolf spiders scamper all over the place, they’re very active animals, so telling me that one seemed to be chasing you is unimpressive.

And that’s it. One anecdote. Why would anyone think it’s particularly interesting?

OK, then someone came up with a reasonable explanation for a particularly unsupported and unrepeated observation.

Hello. I just did a little dive into chemicals that attract spiders because I really don’t like bugs. Ao according to studies? There is a two component female produced pheromone of spider. It basically signals for sexual communication. The chemical analysis reveals that “farnesyl acetate, diisobutyl phthalate and hexadecyl acetate of the spider webs exhibited higher relative abundance in sexually receptive females” also, “Two choice behavioral essays verified that the blend of farnesyl acetate and hexadecyl acetate attracted males”.

Farnesyl acetate is primarily used in skincare for fragrance and same for Hexadecyl Acetate (cetyl acetate) for fruity smell and waxy appearance. Cetyle acetate is commonly used as a thickening agent for body cream and lotion.

Marchingkoala

Vaguely interesting. Spiders do a lot of chemical signaling, so finding that two common chemical signals are also present in the ingredient list of a beauty product does add the faintest patina of plausibility to the anecdote, which, I must add, has not been validated at all. I’m also dubious that a spider would find the the exact combination of these two chemicals on a surface at all appealing, and also not be thoroughly put off by all the other goop found in a product called “Delicia Drench.” It’s like suggesting that a dab of androstadienone, a putative human hormone, would make a compost heap irresistible to passing women.

I would need to see some actual empirical testing before I’d believe any of this. It’s possible but unlikely, and there’s no verified phenomenon that needs explanation. If I had some Delicia Drench in the house, I might test it in the spring — it would be easy, put a drop of the stuff in a cup at the bottom of a pit trap, and measure the frequency of wolf spiders caught relative to traps without the stuff. I’m just not interested enough to buy some Sephora gunk to see if it does anything.

Also, there’s no point: Sephora has rushed to claim that they have removed farnesyl acetate and hexadecyl acetate from their products!

I do not know if wolf spiders are actually sensitive to Delicia Drench, but I can at least say that capitalist corporations are extremely sensitive to rumors that might compromise profitability.

Please, everyone, learn to question tenuous claims that lack any empirical support!

True, the charlatans have not gone away

William Brinkman received a fund-raising letter from an unusual source: some people have access to the James Randi Educational Foundation mailing list, and they’re using it to beg for money. This is already a dodgy thing to do — the people who willingly joined that list weren’t signing up for spam from anyone who found the mailing list, they were supporting the JREF. The list should have been erased when the JREF dissolved, but mailing lists are valuable things, so someone is taking advantage of it.

The fundraising pitch aims at an appropriate target for James Randi supporters, but it’s pretty damned ironic. We’re supposed to oppose charlatans, you know.

Meanwhile, the charlatans of the world have not gone away. Indeed, we see more pseudo-psychic nonsense than ever, with alleged psychics being only a phone call away, ready and eager to take money from grieving or worried people.

Unfortunately, the fund-raising is to benefit a convicted charlatan, Brian Dunning. Dunning ran a cookie stuffing scheme that pocketed millions of dollars from users of eBay, and was sentenced to 15 months in prison, back in 2014. Dunning is a smart guy who saw the money-making potential of the internet in the early 2000s, and jumped into the ‘scientific skepticism’ niche despite having no credentials in science or philosophy or anything at all relevant–he’s a salesman. I guess he’s continuing in that vein now that he’s out.

I would trust him to pick my pocket, but not anything else.

Isn’t it odd how the people who should have imposter syndrome don’t?

The rising of the full loon

If you’re really curious, my recent debate with Hendricks is now online as a video, with the full Q&A. It’s a cell phone video, so not great quality, but the whole thing is there.

But I want to talk about another problem with doing debates: it stirs up the crazies. I’ll give you some examples. This is an email I got the other day.

For what science and religion, not to mention the rest of us, thought impossible has now happened. History has its first literal, testable and fully demonstrable proof for faith and it’s on the web.

The first wholly new interpretation for two thousand years of the Gospel
and moral teaching of Christ is published and on the web. Radically
different from anything else we known from history or tradition.
Redefining all primary elements including the very nature of Faith, the
Word, Law, Baptism, the Trinity, the Holy Spirit and especially the
Resurrection, this new moral teaching is predicated upon the ‘promise’ of
a precise, predefined, predictable and repeatable experience of
transcendent omnipotence and called ‘the first Resurrection’ in the sense
that the Resurrection of Jesus was intended to demonstrate Gods’
willingness to reveal Himself and intervene directly into the natural
world for those obedient to His Command, paving the way to confirm and
justify, by faith, to the power of divine Will, Purpose, Law, covenant,
and the absolute certainty of ultimate proof!

Thus ‘faith’ becomes an act of trust in action, the search along a defined
path of strict self discipline, [a test of the human heart] to discover
His ‘Word’ of a direct individual intervention into the natural world by
omnipotent power that confirms divine will, law, command and covenant,
which at the same time, realigns our flawed mortal moral compass with the
Divine, “correcting human nature by a change in natural law, altering
biology, consciousness and human ethical perception beyond all natural
evolutionary boundaries.” This is the discovery of the ‘true self’ and
thus is a man ‘created’ in the image and likeness of his Creator.

So like it or no, and most won’t, a new spiritual teaching offering a
testable, predictable, moral wisdom not of human intellectual origin,
transcending subjectivity, wholly testable by faith, meeting all
Enlightenment criteria of direct, evidence based causation and definitive
proof now exists, and carries all the implications that suggests. Nothing
short of an intellectual, moral and spiritual revolution is getting
underway.

Links on request.

I did not request a link.

I think this is a guy trying to stir up interest in his peculiar Christian cult. I made the point before that these debates are often a conflict between certainty and doubt, and here comes someone offering the absolute certainty of ultimate proof! No thanks.

Here’s a fun YouTube comment. Try and figure this one out:

Unfortunately its 2 archytypical minds at work in believers & non believers. In both camps this gets in the way often.

And you must understand current concesus science was authorativly imposed through actvist judges and politics it did not win over the arena of thoughtful science. It violated America’s main rule that we would never impose physical prescriptions upon each other because they was a aware of newtons infinite sums of approximating probability and was very aware of how hard it is to tell where physicalism begins and ends. Interpretations are not hurtful but physical prescriptions are damaging to society and nations.

Its the wrong question, this is typically only formulated by a chaldean mind or thought.
What isn’t God ,is the correct formulated question to ask.

This is hard for a Babylonian deterministic quantitative evolutionary mythological Euclidean mind to think of because its dictated by a radicalized environment governed by these extreme physical lawism structuralisms.
It rather stay in platos cave granting unification & simplicity in the top of the higher archy even if its made up , it needs to connect dots and force the evidence to fit the grand theory of everything to fill in missing links.
It rather live in complexity of many different disciplines cults within cults. Its unaware of its triality navagating this dualistic system.

War time powers of Ww2 & the modernization act traps America back under this chaldean mind model because the classical American mind triality recognized such necessary evil structuralism must give the unity & simplicity to the top so that 18 year old troops deal with Entropic turn over of infinite sums of approximating probability & complexity .

This type of believer says God is universe big bang with math & time is his actual fingertips and through mult verses he chose this one here etc etc etc.

The classical American mind is the only one to ever escape the chaldean mind or platos cave.

It state man made language, time & maths are inspired by god, only by his grace do we have a mind that can read his left over fingerPRINTS that’s legable.
This mind follows the evidence where it leads it knows the human dashboard can never removed from the system thus this system is the proper place to unify individual systems .
God is not in a rock or under a rock he was separated from his creation at different points but through us thy will be done. Through Jesus salvation the unification of tripartite nature of man past present and future. It is the grand unification of objects physica cause l,subjective secondary effect & idealogical minds. Mind body and soul. You know whole deal ,father ,son holy spirit represents the 3 natures of our reality .

What kind of archytypical mind do you have, a chaldean mind, a Babylonian deterministic quantitative evolutionary mythological Euclidean mind, or a classical American mind triality?

Does God exist? Perry Hendricks & I argue about it

I was drafted to participate in a debate on my campus last night, and first I have to admit that yes, I have been quite vocal in my opposition to the utility of debates. As an excuse, I was asked by our students to do this, and I’m a sucker for student requests.

Secondly, the topic was, “does god exist?” That’s a real groaner of a subject, and normally I’d demand something more specific and manageable, but again…students. Also, my opponent, Perry Hendricks, seems to be a nice guy, so I went with it. It’s not as if we’re going to actually answer the question, or that the answer would matter.

We had an audience of about 100 people, mainly students taking a break before finals week hits them next week. I’d asked that it be recorded, but unfortunately it was not. But fortunately, I’d brought a pair of clip-on mikes, so I was able to capture Perry’s and my remarks in audio. Unfortunately, those mikes did not capture the audience’s questions, which is too bad since there were a lot of questions (mostly for Perry) and they were good sharp questions, too. I end this recording at the start of the Q&A, I’m sorry to say.

The format was straightforward. Perry got 20 minutes for an opening statement, then I got 20 minutes, then we go 10 minutes each for responses, and then we descended into a flurry of back-and-forth that again, my rudimentary recording set up could not cope with.

Partial transcript/commentary below the fold.

[Read more…]

Pray for me

In about an hour I’m strolling over to be sacrificed in this godawful debate.

It will be recorded, apparently. I’ll see what I can do to get a copy.

I dream of the day when these kinds of debates are banished to the domain of public arguments about whether Santa Claus is real.

Science contest at the Ark Park!

It sounds contradictory to combine science and their fake, unscientific ark, but that’s what Answers in Genesis plans to do. They are hosting something called the Answers STEM Challenge, a contest where people stand a chance to make some big money. Here are the prizes:

First place prize—$5,000
Second place prize—$2,000
Third place prize—$1,000

That’s pretty good money for what is basically a sort of science fair. I say “sort of” because unlike most science fairs, the students are told exactly what they have to do, so it’s fairly strongly constrained. Participants must build a wind turbine, which must have:

• Generator (provided)
• Housing (Nacelle)
• Blades
• Tower
• Base

It also must fit on a 1.2m x 1.2m base, so it’s basically a small model that will be propped up in front of fans and the power output measured.

OK, so it’s more of an engineering challenge. It’s also somehow tangled up in their version of Biblical literalism. So far, it sounds like something even I could do: assemble some basic stuff with cardboard and duct tape — or if I wanted to be fancy, build it with acrylic or 3D printing, buy some large propellor blades on Amazon, and show up. The only difficult part would be the electronics…but they provide that for everyone? There doesn’t seem to be a lot of scientific/engineering work involved. There is one obstacle for me, though.

This event will equip and encourage participants to hold to the authority of God’s Word while learning about STEM from a biblical worldview! Form your team, register, and get designing today!

One of the requirements in the official rulebook is : Application of biblical worldview to the design task. Participants are required to explain how their design is Biblical.

Team showed the importance of standing on the authority of God’s Word when faced with complex environmental issues.

Uh, where in the Bible does it talk about wind turbines and electricity and wind power? Or about “complex environmental issues”? The Biblical perspective on environmentalism is that humans must subdue and rule the natural world, and AiG has some rather regressive views on that.

While some, like Dr. Michael Nortcott, think — as he expresses it repeatedly in his recent book A Moral Climate: The Ethics of Global Warming — that we must choose between people’s rising out of poverty and protecting the environment, as if either prevented the other (a bifurcation fallacy), we believe the two are not exclusive alternatives but mutually interdependent. A clean, healthful, beautiful environment being a costly good, and wealthier people being able to afford more of a costly good than poor people, it follows that growing wealth — accompanied by ethics and values informed by Scripture, and in the context of a just civil social order — can protect and improve our surroundings (the real meaning, by the way, of the word environment) rather than degrade them.

I don’t know whether that’s derived from the prosperity gospel or effective altruism, they can be hard to tell apart. I do know that they’re reading an awful lot into the Bible, and I wouldn’t want to contribute to that.

I will be interested to see what ludicrous lump of propaganda wins the contest — it’ll be held in November 2024.

Oh god no

I forgot all about this debate.

These signs will be going up around campus, so I guess I’m committed. Or should be committed.

At least I insisted that “god” needed to be defined, so I’m going to be debating the nonexistence of “an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent being.” The other side has to defend the absurdly difficult proposition that such a being exists in the absence of any evidence for it, so at least I’ve got that going for me.

I am going up against a philosopher, though, so I dread the haymaker deepities he’ll throw at me.

We won’t have Michael Voris to kick around anymore

I’ve featured Michael Voris several times here — he was the front man for an organization called the Church Militant, a small mob of disgruntled TradCaths, and Voris does a YouTube show called The Vortex which is usually him complaining about the gays, the liberals, the Pope, that sort of thing.

Michael Voris has resigned. Can you guess why?

I still don’t know. He rambles on about “demons” and “moral failings” and “horrible stuff” without dishing out any details.

Here’s another Church Militant weirdo who makes an empty statement on his resignation. Near as I can tell from this evasive complaint, Voris stopped praying with the staff a few years ago. Prayer is so important! No wonder he lapsed in some mysterious way.

We do know that he was “asked to resign for breaching the Church Militant morality clause,” so there was probably something sordid going on, like that he kissed a boy or donated to a social justice organization or, you know, didn’t pray enough. As much as I would be entertained by a tale of decadence and degeneracy, I suspect that his downfall was brought about by some simple thing that the rest of the world would find quaint, but that his insane community would have been horrified by.