After playing an unbelievably bad atheist philosophy professor in God’s Not Dead, Kevin Sorbo is going to stretch his range by playing an unbelievably bad atheist doctor of medicine in Let There Be Light. Watch the trailer and be in awe of Jerkules’ acting chops!

Can you spot the Christian tropes in the plot summary?

After suffering the traumatic loss of his youngest son to cancer, Dr. Sol Harkens (Kevin Sorbo) loses faith and heads down a path of darkness. Distancing himself from his ex-wife Katy (Sam Sorbo) and their two remaining sons, Sol turns to alcohol to numb his pain. Soon his bad habits catch up to him, and Sol is involved in a serious car accident that leaves him dead for four minutes before he is resuscitated. What Sol experiences during this time changes his outlook on life and brings him closer to his family and faith.

I see…

• Atheists are angry at the gods because of some trauma.

• Leaving the gods sends you down a path of darkness.

• You’ll lose all your friends and family if you don’t follow the gods.

• When you’re near death, boy will you regret not believing in the gods.

• Dreams and the confabulations of the unconscious mind are objective evidence of the existence of the gods.

Poor Kevin seems to be making a career of playing a caricature of an atheist, poorly, who then undergoes a miraculous conversion, unconvincingly. The most persuasive part of the trailer for me is when Sorbo accepts Christ into his life after suffering a traumatic brain injury, and as a reward, Satan (played by Sean Hannity) shows up to offer him a chance to appear on Fox News. Nope, I’m convinced. No way will I ever drink the Christian Kool-Aid.

Peter Boghossian blurted this out tonight.

There are right angles in nature. We also have social constructs built around ideas about right angles — look, Boghossian just made one, stating an idea about right angles and the nature of our interactions with them. I am baffled and have many questions.

• Is he drunk-tweeting?

• Does he have some point that he is trying to make, poorly and insipidly?

• Is he so annoyed that humans are social animals who build mental models of how the world works,
  and that the map is not the terrain, that he is lashing out in defense of some kind of Platonic absolute?

• Is he a very bad philosopher?

• Is he not very bright?

A lot of the people I follow are currently rather flabbergasted at this flaming nonsense.

This is painful to watch, so I’ll summarize it and spare you.

Ron Wyatt, biblical fantasist extraordinaire, claims to have found dried blood in the rocks below the place where Jesus was crucified. He took it to an Israeli lab where they reconstituted it, and then cultured it in a growth medium, and discovered that the blood was still alive. A miracle! Especially since if you took some old rock scrapings and threw them in growth medium you probably would get something to grow…it just wouldn’t be human cells.

Then, further, they looked at it under a microscope and counted the chromosomes. How, I don’t know; you can’t see chromosomes with a light microscope unless you squash the cells undergoing mitosis and stain them, which would require killing Jesus’ cells.

But they counted them anyway, miraculously, I guess. They discovered that Jesus’ cells — we have now leapt straight into the assumption that this is actually blood from a named person 2000 years ago — contained 24 chromosomes. Twenty three from Mary, which gave him his human form, and a Y chromosome from Jehovah to make him male. So the old joke is right: the “H” in his name is for “Haploid”. Also, he’s aneuploid.

Of course, it’s a bit odd. Old guy comes into the lab with some flaky red stuff scraped off a rock; lab technicians accept that it’s two millennia old human blood. They cultivate it on growth medium and get some cells, and they still accept his claim that these are human. They magically count chromosomes in these cells, and they have a non-human number; they still assume it’s human, and even that it is from a specific human. None of this makes any sense.

After that revelation, the video goes on and on about another old evangelical Christian chestnut: there is a molecule called laminin that is vaguely cross-shaped, which is somehow supposed to imply that we’re held together by Jesus. Only (?) problem is this guy spells and pronounces it “liminin”.

We are compelled to accept the inevitable truth. Jesus was haploid, and he was from New Zealand.

The only other possible explanation is that Ron Wyatt is a liar, and these gullible Christians are mind-bogglingly stupid. But that can’t possibly be.

If you’ve been paying attention to the Skepticon blog, you’d know that they’ve been trickling out announcements about their speaker roster. It’s looking good so far! At least this is one conference I know isn’t going to screw it up with a bunch of alt-right jerks.

You can register for the con right now! Be prepared to open your wallet and pay…nothing. It’s free, except for that sometimes painful business of traveling to Springfield, Missouri. If you’re feeling flush, do donate so those less prosperous can experience the event.

I’m going! I’ll see you late in the evening of 10 November, and all weekend long!

Mythcon, this conference by Mythicist Milwaukee, has lost another one. Aron Ra withdrew from participation over the fact that the con was featuring a trio of alt-right-leaning, incompetent pseudoskeptics, the Armoured Skeptic, Shoe0nHead, and worst of all, Sargon of Akkad (see previous post on the bad history of the alt-right). Now, surprisingly, Seth Andrews has announced his withdrawal as well. I say “surprisingly” because he was the one lashing out most viciously against critics of the conference. Like this:

Agreed. It's the frothing hyperbole and fear-pimping by bad-faith agents of chaos that I stand against.

— Seth Andrews (@SethAndrewsTTA) September 15, 2017

He wasn’t accusing alt-right neo-Nazis of frothing hyperbole and fear-pimping by bad-faith agents of chaos: the bad-faith agents of chaos were those fellow atheists who saw him being exploited by people who wanted his name on a roster just to legitimize those three awful people. That’s been his reaction ever since — accusing anyone who said he should not use his (formerly) good name to support this group as part of the Outrage Brigade, among numerous other insults.

Unfortunately, while announcing that he is respectfully withdrawing from the conference, a large chunk of his tirade is, once again, aimed at everyone who told him this was a bad idea. Here is his third and longest point in his announcement.

The hysterics (who I’ve winkingly dubbed The Outrage Brigade) warned that MythCon would be some kind of frothing Thunderdome, a roiling cauldron of racism and misogyny, a white male circle jerk, and (my favorite) a neo-Nazi training camp. (Of course, the participation of Iraq-born Faisal Saeed Al Mutar and Singapore-born Melissa Chen would make this the most bizarre Klan camp in history.)

Extreme voices like Dan Arel – who broadcasts from his latest residence in the town of Oblivion – gleefully poured gasoline on every spark, going so far as to call the hotel with alarmist tales of possible disaster. (Remember that this is the same guy who thinks we should punch Nazis, and that all police officers are terrorists. We can move on, folks. Nothing to see here.)

I watched with my jaw on the floor as The Outrage Brigade digitally tarred and feathered friends, fellow activists and wonderful humanists (Dillahunty, etc) with accusations of being white supremacists, rape apologists, and a long laundry list of other disgraceful slanders. It’s unconscionable.

Beyond the ALL CAP, profanity-spewing freak-out fringe, there has also been a swell of legitimate, good, mature, and genuinely concerned people who feel, correctly, that Sargon doesn’t represent good faith and respectful dialogue, but has instead demonstrated a penchant for inflammatory, click-bait, shock-jock controversy unworthy of a seat at the adult table.

Man. The thing is, that he is now being compelled to admit that all of his critics were right about this conference, that Sargon is a disgrace, the other two are “vague, lazy, hyperbolic”, and Jesus but does he resent being exposed as wrong. If hyperbole is a sin, what does he call what he just wrote? Maybe he thinks pettiness is his salvation. I’ll also note that he threw me into his Outrage Brigade, and here is what I wrote about the event. I forgot to include the ALL CAPs. I even forgot the profanity. I must have been sick that day.

And then he ends with this sentiment.

We have a long way to go, but I desperately want for us to find and travel the High Road toward a more rational, more compassionate, more beautiful world.

Sorry, guy. Your High Road looks rather ugly. That you’re oblivious to it doesn’t make it attractive to the rest of us.

I’ve mentioned this odd duck conference sponsored by Mythicist Milwaukee before…now Martin Hughes clarifies what bugs him about it, too. The meeting has been doing some unusual things. They’ve been advertising some well-known attendees — not speakers, just popular atheists who will be doing the hard work of showing up — which is the first time I’ve seen that.

On Saturday, September 30th, 2017, several atheist celebrities will be at the fourth annual Mythicist Milwaukee Mythinformation Conference. The more well-known names include Matt Dillahunty, Richard Carrier [Wait! I thought we destroyed his reputation and his career! At least, he claims we did that, and is suing us for one million dollars for it], Aron Ra [edit: Aron Ra has recently decided not to attend. His wife cited the reasons here), and Seth Andrews. Their presence at this conference is being well-publicized.

But the people coming to hear these people speak are going to be disappointed. Because none of them are giving a talk.

Which is…weird. I mean, Matt Dillahunty, the one exception, will only serve as a moderator for a debate; he’s not speaking.

Some of them, like Seth Andrews, have been awfully defensive (and offensive) about it, too. I’m curious about a couple of things.

• Are you being paid, or at least having your travel costs covered, to be an attendee and to promote the meeting?

• Are you comfortable being window-dressing?

No condemnation if they were to answer yes to either of those questions — it’s just that it would make me a little uncomfortable, and I wouldn’t accept an invitation to a conference on those terms.

But then the next question is, when you’ve got Dillahunty and Andrews and briefly, Aron Ra, why are they being sidelined? Who are the even more brilliant speakers being showcased at this meeting?

Why, in a conference attended by so many shining stars of the atheist movement, aren’t any of the celebrities speaking?

It’s a simple mystery. Here’s the clue: All the speakers at this skeptic conference are anti-SJWs who, for the most part, haven’t had a prominent voice on the atheist conference scene before.

A bit of background: See, the three YouTubers speaking were not given opportunities to speak at VidCon 2017, the major YouTube conference. In spite of the fact that they are fairly popular on YouTube, they have been unable to cross over into a legitimate, respectable level of status…possibly because their views were considered disrespectful to marginalized groups, and the organizers of the conference didn’t want to give those views a platform.

Now that anti-SJW YouTubers have failed to gain legitimacy in the arena of YouTube, it seems they need a stepping stone. Enter the much smaller American atheist community.

And honestly…the conference seems to be a way to give their views legitimacy in the atheist community. I mean, why else would you have these anti-SJWs (who aren’t known as much, these days, for criticizing religion) speak, and have atheist “celebrities” merely come to watch, acting as window-dressing, than to give their more sidelined views legitimacy?

That sounds a little too conspiracy-theorish for me — I don’t think it was a conscious plan by these rather unpleasant youtubers, but more of a conference organizer with anti-SJW leanings seeing an opportunity to both promote their personal ideas, stir up some publicity for their organization, and cheer on a couple of haters they like. That’s it. I suspect the rot is imbedded in Mythicist Milwaukee.

In spite of the well-publicized phenomenon of the atheist celebrities showing up, this is not your average atheism conference. These celebrities, it seems, are there as window dressing — a way to give additional prestige to these voices in a way that seems engineered to give anti-SJW thought greater legitimacy in American atheism, and to show that social justice ideals might be as ill-placed and mythical as religion. Perhaps this anti-SJW perspective failed when it came to the more respectable, “legitimate” corners of YouTube, but if its representatives can get a respectable, influential platform in the much smaller atheism community…maybe they can build on it.

And, so far as I can see, this conference is less about criticizing religion, and more about giving anti-SJW views that platform.

Which, admittedly, may make the atheist community more uncomfortable for me, but there’s no sense in denying the obvious…

Oh, gosh, suddenly a couple of more questions suddenly arise for the window-dressing.

• Why are you willing to prop up an openly anti-social justice conference of the type that makes many women and minorities “uncomfortable” (to put it mildly) with atheism?

• If your defense is Free Speech! and that you’re all about the open discussion of ideas,
  why is this conference so one-sidedly promoting anti-humanism? I mean, here’s Martin Hughes speaking about social justice and atheism — the kind of talk not represented in Milwaukee.

Again, for the Free Speech! dogmatists, this isn’t saying that Mythicist Milwaukee can’t hold a Nazi rally if they want, but it’s clear that they are trying to legitimize blatant anti-feminist, racist views as a respectable part of atheism. Why would anyone support that? Unless they’re sympathetic, of course.

Too, too true: a former creationist writes about the strategies they were explicitly taught to use in debates. You won’t be surprised to learn that they’re bogus, dishonest, and only effective with people who don’t know much biology.

The main thing that they taught us was that most people don’t know a whole lot about biology. Most people just take what is taught them and they regurgitate it for a test in the classroom without ever thinking about what they’ve regurgitated. So they hammered on a lot of the various things that were taught in biology class and then they simply reframed them in a new way and asked us to think about them… really, really think about them. Of course, since we were kids, we needed to be walked through how to think about them. Of course, they were more than happy to shepherd us.

I’ve noticed that creationists don’t like to argue with anyone who is knowledgeable — with me, they constantly try to steer the discussion away from my expertise towards geology or astronomy or nuclear physics, stuff they know less about than I do, but which I’m not going to be as comfortable addressing.

But they don’t worry, even if they are talking with an expert. They’ve got another ace up their sleeve. Say stupid shit to piss off your opponent! Then you win.

The first thing they asked us to notice was that there was a dialectic (they didn’t use that word, but that’s what they pointed out). That is to say, that the argument wasn’t really about Science at all. Science, they pointed out, was a *METHOD*. It wasn’t a team or something to cheer. Heck, it wasn’t something to get emotional about at all. But look at how emotional all those scientists got when we were arguing Creationism, they pointed out. And that’s not all! Look at how emotional all of these “Evolutionists” got throughout history! They gave us one of those quotations that’s attributed to everyone from Augustine to C.S. Lewis: “The Truth is like a lion. You don’t have to defend It. Get out of Its way. It can take care of Itself.”

The problem with that, and it’s a fact that scientists are often reluctant to acknowledge, is that we don’t become scientists out of dispassion. Good scientists are enthusiastic about their work, and they also care deeply about the truth. Seeing someone who is dishonest and cavalier with the facts is offensive and disturbing, and yes, we’ll be angry with someone who lies. Who lies to children. Who misleads public policy.

Also, fuck CS Lewis. Here’s another quote for you: “A lie will go round the world while truth is pulling its boots on”. The truth is often hard. It takes work and knowledge and experience to defend it. Any ass with a Bible can defend a lie.

The other thing they learned was to seize upon examples where scientists were initially enthusiastic, and then found to be in error. The example he uses is Nebraska Man, an erroneous classification of a pig’s tooth as belonging to an ancient hominin.

It was the exuberance that they had us focus on. Not the fact that there was nowhere *NEAR* consensus among scientists at the time. Certainly not the fact that once it was found out that stuff was retracted appropriately. It was the enthusiasm for finding this stuff in the first place. The statements that rubbed it in the face of people who believed in The Bible. The drawings. Oh, goodness. The drawings. “They made these drawings of people after they found *A TOOTH*!” (“From an *EXTINCT* pig!”)

The author gets it wrong, still. Nebraska Man was not published in any journal; it was entirely promoted by the newspaper media of the time, the reconstructions were commissioned by the press. Even in explaining what they were taught, the author is still getting it wrong, and exaggerating the scientific response.

Think about more recent and more solid discoveries. The initial response to reports about Homo floresiensis, the hobbit was a combination of enthusiastic interest and outright dissent about the interpretation of the specimens. Look at Homo naledi. Is it significant and representative, or is it a weird relict population of doomed oddballs? Where does it fit on the family tree? Did they actually practice crude ritual burials? Scientists tend not to leap on new discoveries with the certainty the creationists attribute to us — there’s a lot of questioning and demands for more evidence.

So instead the creationists memorize lists of things they barely understand, to use as a confrontational tool.

And then, at that point, it became VITALLY important that we each learned what “really” happened. We had to learn the names and dates of the so-called hoaxes. We had to learn, by memory, the differences between (deep breath) Piltdown Man and Nebraska Man and Java Man and Peking Man and we had to have these facts at our fingertips. (Keep in mind: This was before Smartphones were a thing.) We had to be able to argue this stuff at a moment’s notice because…

Java Man and Peking Man were not hoaxes. That’s one of the dangers here — they blur fact and fiction together, because that’s a way to taint the facts.

Among the tools we were given to expose the dialectic was The Gish Gallop. Named after Duane Gish, this is when you give 12-15 “whatabouts” in a very short period of time. Again: this was before the internet. So the people we were talking to didn’t have all of human knowledge in their back pocket. The best part about the Gish Gallop is that, in a very short period of time, it communicates familiarity with the various theories and, since it’s probably impossible for anybody under the best of circumstances to deal with 12-15 “whatabouts” in a very short period of time, it communicates *GREATER* familiarity with the subject than the person with whom we were arguing. That doesn’t really help with the person you’re arguing with, but wasn’t necessarily about changing the mind of the person we were arguing with.

There have been a few satisfying incidents in my time when I’ve been arguing with a creationist who isn’t smart enough to change the subject to a field I don’t know much about, and they give me those 12-15 “whatabouts” and I’m able to answer every one. It requires a little luck, because I don’t know everything so they can stump me, but there was this time a creationist had been getting batted down with every point, so he dragged out an obscure one — a fossil bed in Peru with many whale fossils, which he argued was proof of a global flood. I’d coincidentally read the paper that morning, so I was able to tell him all about it (it was a shallow beach, the site of frequent strandings over a long period of time), and even cite the source.

Speaking of getting emotional…he was standing there with his mouth open turning purple. It was hilarious. Honestly, though, usually they succeed in bringing up something I haven’t heard of at some point, and I shrug and say, “I don’t know”, which is fine for any scientist to say, but they treat it as some kind of grand victory.

And then there’s the grand kicker, the strategy that you still see in frequent use.

Yet another tool: The Odious Conclusion. You can see this trick above in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. Either this good thing is true or this odious conclusion is true. Since we want to avoid the odious conclusion, therefore, the good thing is true! How this worked for Young Earth Creationism was to invoke eugenics. If you were arguing with someone only passing familiar with the theory of evolution, it was easy to set them up and get them to argue that there was a choice between Young Earth Creationism and some particularly odious statement. “If evolution was true, doesn’t that mean that eugenics could work?” was a fun one (remember: no internet in the back pocket). You’d find that most people had never even thought about the question and it was fun to ask questions focusing on whether evolution leads to odious conclusions. Then, of course, you could point out that if God created everyone equal, you didn’t have to worry about whether or not the eugenicists had a point. Force them to choose between something pleasant and something odious.

Unfortunately, that still works on lots of people. “Do you want to die someday, or do you want to live forever” is difficult to address when the honest answer is that everyone is going to die eventually, while the Jebusite gladhander is lying and saying he has the magic formula to live forever. It’s the same con that the alt-medicine frauds use: “Do you want to suffer with chemotherapy, or take my juice cleanse and poop the tumors away?”, said as if both treatments were equally effective.