Callie Wright interviews the guys who are putting on Mythcon. They’re terrible. Here’s the reason they justify inviting Carl Benjamin aka Sargon of Akkad to be a speaker there: he’s an entertainer. Atheist conferences need to bring in new, exciting speakers.

I’m just wondering what is entertaining about Carl Benjamin? They compare him to George Carlin and Sarah Silverman.

They also point out that attendance at atheist conferences is down, and we need to spark new interest, so they’re looking for novel voices in the entertainment industry. If they’re dredging the bottom of the barrel to find people, I don’t think that’s going to help stimulate interest.

Jesus. Benjamin is an “entertainer” now. Gosh. Let’s bring in “entertaining” Nazis to conferences, too.

I’m glad some people are skeptical about the so-called “sonic attacks” on the American embassy in Cuba. It’s absurd.

It’s also easily tested. If bad guys are pumping energy into embassy rooms with some kind of mysterious device, that’s testable. We’ve got wackaloons running around claiming they can detect non-existent ghosts with simple electronic gadgets — real physicists could easily place real recording devices that are sensitive to a wide range of frequencies in these rooms and get concrete evidence of a real phenomenon, if it exists. Why haven’t they? You’d think the first thing they would do, on suspecting that they’re getting zapped by sonic rays, is call up the NSA or the signal corps, and they’d stick a few widgets around and detect any anomalous signals.

Have they? If they have, we’d know and have specific measurements to pin the fault on something. If they haven’t, it means they’ve got nothing but ghosts. And ghosts don’t exist.

Or rather, when creationism is a symptom of profound ignorance that is also manifested in health care woo. It seems that Eric Hovind has been peddling “Vitamin B17” — a bit of quackery he inherited from his con artist father, Kent Hovind. He was recently warned by the FDA that he needs to stop selling it.

The name “Vitamin B17” is an example of lying with labels. It’s not a vitamin. It’s better known as amygdalin, or even more infamously, laetrile. It’s a fake cancer cure that does not work and has never worked. Here’s the summary of this compound from NIH:

• Laetrile is another name for the natural product amygdalin, which is a chemical constituent found in the pits of many fruits and in numerous plants.

• Hydrogen cyanide is thought to be the main anticancer compound formed from laetrile via in situ release.

• Laetrile was first used as a cancer treatment in Russia in 1845, and in the United States in the 1920s.

• Laetrile has shown little anticancer activity in animal studies and no anticancer activity in human clinical trials.

• The side effects associated with laetrile toxicity mirror the symptoms of cyanide poisoning, including liver damage, difficulty walking (caused by damaged nerves), fever, coma, and death.

• Laetrile is not approved for use in the United States.

• Inappropriate advertisement of laetrile as a cancer treatment has resulted in a U.S. Food and Drug Administration investigation that culminated in charges and conviction of one distributor.

Hovind has been criticized for selling snake oil before. All that’s happened is that he’s now a little more circumspect about making false claims about curing cancer with apricot pits, but he is still selling these useless products. In fact, that’s about all he sells in the “health” category on his site, with one addition…he’s selling an anti-vaccination book.

In this book you will read the findings of medical doctors and researchers who tell us that vaccinations are not only unsafe, but they actually work against our God given immune system.

It just goes to show that nothing a creationist says can be trusted, and that you shouldn’t be taking advice from any of the Hovinds on either science or health.

Gary Farber listened to a very odd podcast — it’s all about how the atheists and Marxists conspired to take over science fiction. It’s hosted by a guy named Max Kolbe, who runs a blog titled Escaping Atheism: Because atheism is bullshit” (I guess his biases are obvious, at least), and he’s interviewing an author named Brian Niemeier, who is pleased to have been one of the Sad Puppies, so you know where he is coming from, too. Niemeier’s introduction to the interview is weirdly self-congratulatory and back-patting.

YouTuber Max Kolbe recently had me on his show to explain how the SJW convergence of tradpub science fiction happened. Max is particularly interested in the sudden shift from stories that took the Christian worldview for granted to overtly atheistic, anti-religious works. We discussed how John W. Campbell ended the reign of the pulps and how the Futurians fomented a Marxist revolution in SF publishing.

The episode garnered a lot of praise. Listen in and learn how sinister forces relegated the once-dominant SFF genre to a cultural ghetto.

Max himself is an unabashed sci-fi fan from way back, and I couldn’t help nodding along as he related how he drifted away from the genre about twenty years ago. He’d also been led to think of the post-1937 Campbell era as the “golden age” of SF and to regard everything that came before as trash.

The interview itself is a ghastly mangling of history with a great deal of lumping together of everything they dislike: notice how atheist, Marxist, and SJW are all used pretty much interchangeably?

Here’s the nonsensical premise of their discussion. There was a time in the past when science fiction was much more Christian, and readily embraced Christian themes. Then John Campbell abruptly forced all of science fiction to become atheist in 1937, and he was aided and abetted by a coalition of 50 godless liberal New York editors. The evidence for all of this is in an appendix in the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide.

I don’t know what to say in the face of such an onslaught of bullshit.

There has always been a strain of irreverence in science fiction, and there have always been authors who explore novel ideas both in and out of the context of religion. Start with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; very irreligious, but exploring the roles of the creator and created. Is it an atheist book? Atheist-influenced, certainly, and written by a freethinker, but its relationship to religion is complicated. CS Lewis wrote science fiction. Tolkien was religious. Mary Doria Russell is an acclaimed, even by this atheist, author of books that have a strongly Catholic perspective. On the other hand, Isaac Asimov was an atheist…but religion is orthogonal to most of the stories he told (I must be a traitor to atheism to say that Russell is a far, far better writer than Asimov ever was). I’m sure a lot of contemporary SF authors are godless, but it would be tough to tell from reading their work. I simply do not see a pattern in the history of SF that would support a transition from religious to non-religious, or even that religious ideas are suppressed in contemporary work.

Ah, but you must look at their evidence. Here it is: Appendix N from the AD&D Dungeon Master’s Guide, published in 1979. It’s Gary Gygax’s personal reading list of science fiction and fantasy books that influenced him. According to Kolbe and Niemeier, this is a very spiritual list that if not openly Christian, takes Christianity for granted. WTF? These books?

Anderson, Poul: THREE HEARTS AND THREE LIONS; THE HIGH CRUSADE; THE BROKEN SWORD
Bellairs, John: THE FACE IN THE FROST
Brackett, Leigh
Brown, Frederic
Burroughs, Edgar Rice: “Pellucidar” series; Mars series; Venus series
Carter, Lin: “World’s End” series
de Camp, L. Sprague: LEST DARKNESS FALL; THE FALLIBLE FIEND; et al
de Camp & Pratt: “Harold Shea” series; THE CARNELIAN CUBE
Derleth, August
Dunsany, Lord
Farmer, P. J.: “The World of the Tiers” series; et al
Fox, Gardner: “Kothar” series; “Kyrik” series; et al
Howard, R. E.: “Conan” series
Lanier, Sterling: HIERO’S JOURNEY
Leiber, Fritz: “Fafhrd & Gray Mouser” series; et al
Lovecraft, H. P.
Merritt, A.: CREEP, SHADOW, CREEP; MOON POOL; DWELLERS IN THE MIRAGE; et al
Moorcock, Michael: STORMBRINGER; STEALER OF SOULS; “Hawkmoon” series (esp. the first three books)
Norton, Andre
Offutt, Andrew J.: editor of SWORDS AGAINST DARKNESS III
Pratt, Fletcher: BLUE STAR; et al
Saberhagen, Fred: CHANGELING EARTH; et al
St. Clair, Margaret: THE SHADOW PEOPLE; SIGN OF THE LABRYS
Tolkien, J. R. R.: THE HOBBIT; “Ring trilogy”
Vance, Jack: THE EYES OF THE OVERWORLD; THE DYING EARTH; et al
Weinbaum, Stanley
Wellman, Manley Wade
Williamson, Jack
Zelazny, Roger: JACK OF SHADOWS; “Amber” series; et al

Here’s the deal: if your story is a medieval European fantasy, like Anderson’s or Bellairs’, then yes, Christianity is taken for granted, usually. It’s part of the environment, like castles and swords and dragons. But the others…have they even read Burroughs or Howard? There ain’t no Christianity in them, but there is a lot of disrespect for priests and gods. Fritz Leiber’s books had magic and pagan deities and demigods that could be poked with a sword. Moorcock’s Elric stories are about a battle between the gods of chaos and law; he’s also the guy who wrote the obscenely blasphemous book, Behold the Man (which I recommend!). Manley Wade Wellman…sure, he was religious. He wrote stories built around Appalachian folk Christianity, also good stuff. I really don’t see a consistent religious or non-religious theme in this list.

Oh, and H.P. Lovecraft? This is your representative of spiritual Christianity in old SF? The interview waffles around the criteria, but eventually reveals that if a story features clear-cut good and evil, that’s enough to define it as spiritual and Christian-based. Apparently moral ambiguity and complexity are the vices the SJWs and Marxists have inflicted on genre fiction. Which sounds like praise, to me.

As for the “50 SJW editors” who control the SF publishing world from their citadel in New York, I don’t know. I can’t say that I have much familiarity with big name SF editors. What little I do know suggests that there’s more diversity than this conspiracy theory can tolerate. Jim Baen published a lot of stolid old school and military SF, stuff that the Sad and Rabid Puppies probably consider just fine, and the one true acceptable kind of science fiction. I’ve met Teresa and Patrick Nielsen-Hayden — they’re not atheists, but definitely on the progressive/liberal side of social issues. Maybe it’s just my lack of knowledge, but I’m just not seeing an atheist/Marxist/SJW cabal out there.

Maybe the real world is more ambiguous and complex than the crystal-clear distinction of good and evil that these Catholic fanatics imagine it to be.

In case any of my readers are interested in doing that (and some of you are! I get your email all the time), here’s a WikiHow article on how to convert atheists. It’s very simple, and I can summarize it in one sentence: be very nice, and for the love of god, don’t talk about Christianity.

I’m not kidding! Every recommendation is about demonstrating how you’re a nice person, but if the atheist confronts you with any of their disagreements with Christian doctrine or mythology, you’re supposed to back away gracefully and avoid addressing any of their points. Let me just inform any of you proselytizers out there that this tactic would simply increase my contempt for your religion, so don’t bother. Thanks.

You know, I read the educational literature to figure out better ways to get ideas across to my students, and there are effective ways to communicate and inform. I’m trying to imagine doing a better job of teaching cell biology by forming a personal rapport with my students, being friendly and kind, but running away every time I’m asked a question about mitochondria. I don’t think it would accomplish any of the goals I have for the class.

---

Wait! I found another site that reveals what happens when Christians do talk about the specifics of their religion. It’s called PROVING THE INSANITY OF ATHEISM BY FACTS PHYSICS HAS NO FOREKNOWLEDGE, WHICH IS A FACT.

So physics could have never known in advance that man’s body could produce knowledge.

By knowledge we take the proper food to eat which then by our organs becomes blood, and obviously we need this to live because life is in the blood. Even if you eat or if the food becomes blood you are still dead. So what happened to evolution? Who knew in advance that after food becomes blood you need veins all over your body, so the blood can flow throughout your body and also that you need a pump to keep circulating the blood? Is this a proven technology or a myth of physics? And also who knew the heart has to keep pumping constantly otherwise you are dead? Do you put the food into your mouth or evolution does? You do. If you eat food you grow, but if you do not then you do not grow. What do you see here, that food makes you grow or that evolution makes you grow?

So physics puts the food into your mouth or your knowledge puts the food in your mouth? For food to become blood, you must have different organs working to form it. Every organ has a special workmanship in order to complete the foreknowledge of the personality, but again, not by physics because physics has no foreknowledge. The atheists claim it is by physics, however. So the atheists do not understand wisdom.

Welp, I sure am convinced.

Pity poor Jon Del Arroz! The sad far-right science fiction author first came to my attention a short while ago when he was complaining bitterly that the SJWs had taken over science fiction, using cherry-picked and misleading statistics. He’s got a persecution complex big enough to fill the San Francisco bay, where he lives.

Now he’s getting picked on again! He claims to have been blackballed from a local convention — he’s spoken there before, but he was not invited this year. After going on and on about reviews for a recent book, and praising himself mightily, he cuts to the chase.

The reason I was disinvited was because it is well known that I support the President of the United States, duly elected and all, and that I’m happy about the way the country is being run. You know, like most normal people are. That’s the only thing that’s changed between then and now. It’s the same dangerous rhetoric out there that many of these folk who run the convention post on such a consistent basis that has turned Facebook from a “fun catching up with friends” website to a hellhole of fear, anger and hate (which as Master Yoda taught us, leads to suffering!). It’s impossible to communicate anymore, and as such, there is a small but vocal power structure of people in the convention scene and publishing that can’t tolerate the concept of seeing my pretty face. I am a minority that’s been discriminated against, not because of my race, but because of my ideas. In Science Fiction, ideas are everything, and it’s frightening to think about those being shut down as a consequence. These people want my career to fail, and they believe they can accomplish that by silencing me and giving me the cold shoulder.

There’s one little problem with this woeful narrative. We have the letter the conference organizers personally wrote to him after he complained.

Dear Jon,

Thank you for your interest in BayCon 2017. We have made some changes to the programming which are discussed in detail here: http://baycon.org/bcwp/programming-2/

At this time we are not issuing you an invitation for this year’s convention. You are definitely on our guest list for 2018 and we hope very much to see you there.

Sincerely,

BayCon Programming

He wasn’t blackballed. He’s even on their list for next year. They just like to rotate their speakers a bit, and not bring in the very same people every year — which is a good policy. I like hearing from new people.

Jon Del Arroz thinks getting one invitation to speak means he is now invited to speak at every con every year in perpetuity. He’s an idiot. He’s such an entitled ass, I have to wonder about BayCon — why have they invited him back for next year? Have they no standards in invited speakers? That’s not a good sign.

By the way, I have a similar example: I was a speaker at Skepticon multiple times. One year they decided they needed new blood, so they invited some other people, instead of me. If I were like Jon Del Arroz, I would have made a big stink over the violation of tradition — they invited me once (actually, a couple of times), so now they must invite me every time. Every year. Over and over. Until attendees are sick of me, and even then they aren’t allowed to stop.

That isn’t the way this works. I approve of diversity in the line-up. I think it’s great that they have enough people with interesting things to say that they can have a different roster of speakers every year. I’m perfectly willing to step aside, especially since it means I can just attend and enjoy the event without having to give a talk.

But then, I didn’t vote for Donald Trump. Maybe it’s all those rabid Republican dude-bros who run Skepticon who have blackballed me.