Here we go again, another session of Christians complaining about atheists…specifically, these danged “New Atheists” who don’t show the proper respect that the old atheists did. And of course they start with an annoying definition.

I have a couple of friends who are New Atheists and have had conversations with several more. If you haven’t run across them, New Atheism is a sort of grassroots movement among atheists that has gone beyond holding the position that no god exists to the position that theism is actively bad for the world and that atheism should “evangelize” actively to move people away from theism and religion. The movement is spearheaded by the writings and stylings of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, and Sam Harris.

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We thought political commentators could actually have some snap and bite, and wouldn’t let folly pass by without mocking it. Boy, were we ever wrong, as Jimmy Fallon enthusiastically demonstrated for us.

On Thursday, Jimmy Fallon had Donald Trump on the Tonight Show and ended the segment by saying, “Donald I want to ask you, because the next time I see you you could be the President of the United States. I just want to know if there is something we could do that’s just not really presidential, really – can I mess your hair up?” Trump let him and the NBC audience roared with laughter. But, for many of us, this is very far from being a joke.

Giving comic cover to Trump just isn’t funny when he’s unleashed forces of anti-blackness and anti-immigrant sentiment. He’s labelled Mexicans rapists, raised the prospect of a ban on Muslims, patronized and insulted African Americans while pretending to be a potential new hope. As a result, Fallon managed to come over as one powerful white man protecting another.

Not only was it not funny. It didn’t do anything to take Trump down a notch (if it was even meant to). Instead, it humanized him, boosting him on that stupid metric so many Americans use when choosing a president: “Hey, he’s a guy I’d want to have a beer with! Look at him, letting Fallon have fun with him!”

I’d threaten to boycott Fallon’s show, but I never watched it anyway. Oh, yeah, I never watched Jay Leno, either.

We see you, Jimmy Fallon. You are as “apolitical” as the wretched Jay Leno was, a champion of the status quo. You think the idea of Trump in the White House is as harmless as your face on a pint of Ben and Jerry’s.

Maybe it is to you, as a powerful white man on TV who doesn’t have to worry about life as a woman, Muslim, Black or Latin person, immigrant, or queer American living under Trumpism (an era which has already begun and will continue, regardless of whether Trump is elected). Your skit was nothing like Charlie Chaplin’s Great Dictator, which brilliantly skewered a rising leader of the right. In fact, you did the opposite, making Trump seem more palatable. When history looks back on this moment, we may well say: Jimmy Fallon, you helped build a monster.

If you want further dissection of how media personalities are often grossly incompetent at actual critical thinking, read Jen Gunter’s analysis of the Oz-Trump interview. I’d boycott Oz, too, except that’s another show I already never watch.

Sam Kriss really doesn’t like me, or any atheists, for that matter. He name-checks me in a recent essay, Village Atheists, Village Idiots, in which he simultaneously makes the claim that the premises of atheism are obviously true, but that atheism induces dementia, which is slaughtering all prominent atheists in grisly ways.

Something has gone badly wrong with our atheists. All these self-styled intellectual titans, scientists, and philosophers have fallen horribly ill. Evolutionist faith-flayer Richard Dawkins is a wheeling lunatic, dizzy in his private world of old-fashioned whimsy and bitter neofascism. Superstar astrophysicist and pop-science impresario Neil deGrasse Tyson is catatonic, mumbling in a packed cinema that the lasers wouldn’t make any sound in space, that a spider that big would collapse under its own weight, that everything you see is just images on a screen and none of it is real. Islam-baiting philosopher Sam Harris is paranoid, his flailing hands gesticulating murderously at the spectral Saracen hordes. Free-thinking biologist PZ Myers is psychotic, screeching death from a gently listing hot air balloon. And the late Christopher Hitchens, blinded by his fug of rhetoric, fell headlong into the Euphrates.

Well, actually…

Richard Dawkins seems to be doing quite well after his minor stroke, and is going to tour the US this Fall. “Wheeling lunatic” has never been a very good description of his behavior; he’s always calm, even as he says things I disagree with.

Neil deGrasse Tyson is also doing fine. As we’ll see, he still criticizes basic errors, which turns out to be Kriss’s real objection to him.

I rather agree with his description of Harris. He is a kind of paranoid racist Vulcan.

I don’t think I’m psychotic, but then, if I were, I probably wouldn’t think I was, would I? Again, “screeching death” is also terribly inapt, and why has he put me in a hot air balloon?

Christopher Hitchens is still dead. It wasn’t a fug that killed him, or even his own rhetoric, but cancer.

Speaking of rhetoric, though, isn’t it bad form to begin an essay that’s going to accuse people you don’t like of being hysterical and excessive with such excessive histrionics of your own? Not to mention howling about how they’re all diseased and dying.

It isn’t just the beginning, either. He’s just getting warmed up. The whole dang essay is Sam Kriss doing a war dance and screaming about those awful atheists.

Critics have pointed out this clutch of appalling polemic and intellectual failings on a case-by-case basis, as if they all sprang from a randomized array of personal idiosyncrasies. But while one eccentric atheist might be explicable, for all of the world’s self-appointed smartest people to be so utterly deranged suggests some kind of pattern. We need, urgently, a complete theory of what it is about atheism that drives its most prominent high priests mad.

But wait, Sam: you’ve just shrieked that all those atheists are insane and mad and deranged, but you haven’t actually made the case that we are. Applying extravagant adjectives and adverbs to people doesn’t make them more true. Fortunately, he’s going to give us his “complete theory” of what drives atheists mad, and it’s going to explain a lot. A lot about Sam Kriss, that is, but not really anything about those atheists.

His theory, which is his, is that atheists are saying things which are true and obvious too often. No, really, that’s the entirety of his complaint.

Whatever it is, it has something to do with a litany of grievances against the believoisie so rote that it might well (or ironically) be styled a catechism. These New Atheists and their many fellow travelers all share an unpleasant obsessive tic: they mouth some obvious banality—there is no God, the holy books were all written by human beings—and then act as if it is some kind of profound insight. This repetition-compulsion seems to be baked right into their dogma.

Weird, huh? And to make his case, he goes on and on about Neil deGrasse Tyson and his mockery of the rapper BoB, who claimed that the Earth was flat, and then Tyson pedantically explained multiple times that we can show that it is actually round, which Kriss found so annoying because isn’t it so obvious the Earth is round? And shut up Neil deGrasse Tyson, you think you’re so smart and that question is so easy and I know how to use a thesaurus so how come you’re so famous, and I’m not? And Bill Nye sucks, too.

There, you’ve got the gist of the whole thing, and unless you’re really into seeing people name-drop Kierkegaard 11 times, you can skip the rest.

It’s an odd performance. You know, I think creationism is obviously false, but that doesn’t mean everyone can or should shut up about it — it’s still an active political and theological force, even if all (and I mean all — even the latest bluster from the Discovery Institute is rehashing ancient arguments) of its arguments were demolished almost 200 years ago. We have to keep plugging away against ignorance, even if it is obviously wrong. To the person promoting it, it isn’t.

I’m currently teaching cell biology, as I have been since 1993. I wouldn’t be a very good teacher if I started yelling at a class of 19 year olds that “Jesus, the chemiosmotic hypothesis is so obvious! You never heard of proton gradients before? I’m not going to waste time teaching you about them, but they will be on the exam, because you should already know it!”

This seems to be how Kriss would run my class (he clearly knows everything there is to know about proton gradients and all the details of electron transport, because it’s all obvious, so I’m sure he could step right in to the job), because apparently calm repetitive didacticism that addresses the ignorance of different individuals is a sure sign that you’re dying of some fatal form of obsessive dementia.

It’s also strange that he would hate on Neil deGrasse Tyson for publicly refuting a flat-earther, when Kriss himself has written, I’ve always been mildly obsessed with the flat-earth truth movement. Is this just professional jealousy, that the criticisms of an astronomer against flat-earthers get more attention than the criticisms of…whatever the hell Sam Kriss is?

It’s curious, too, that Kriss would say that it’s obvious that “there is no God, the holy books were all written by human beings”, but not notice that there’s a substantial majority of people in the United States, and elsewhere, who would vigorously dispute those claims. And if repetitively addressing ignorant claims is a hallmark of insanity, what are we to make of Sam Kriss? This isn’t the first time he’s raged at Neil deGrasse Tyson for explaining something obvious, which makes him guilty of exactly the same thing, only with more hyperbole.

It’s also not the case that he reserves his squawking for atheists; you should see what he has to say about Hillary Clinton.

Hillary Clinton, a blinding-white astral demon made of chicken gristle and wax-paper, doesn’t even pretend that she’s running for any reason beside her own personal hunger for power. She wants to rule the world; it’d be hers by birth, only she wasn’t born, she emerged like a lizard out its egg from the cold undeath of money, fully formed.

Even his word salad is grossly unappetizing.

There are spit-takes galore in this video of Stephen Meyer, but don’t worry, he’s so slow and tedious and pompous that you’ll see them coming way ahead of time.

He confesses that the “intelligent design community” (you know, that dying horse that twitches occasionally) has avoided the issue because it has become strangely toxic within Christianity, and then he meanders on about how you can come to either a young earth or an old earth conclusion just by how you look at the evidence, which is very much a Ken Ham/Answers in Genesis sort of perspective.

But don’t worry, he and Ken will still be in opposition. He later admits to being an Old Earth creationist, with the peculiar reservation that he thinks the paleontologists/anthropologists are all wrong, and that humans were spontaneously created by god much more recently than is believed.

But he thinks the age of the earth is a tertiary issue, and The first issue is the reality of god — is god real or imaginary?. I think it’s clear that they have no evidence for a god of any kind, especially the twitchy nasty Christian patriarch he believes in, but it’s strange to argue that the age of the earth is unimportant. It’s a fundamental question: do you accept physical, scientific evidence, or don’t you? The age of the earth is really a relatively simple, straightforward question which has a largely indisputable answer that is supported by multiple lines of hard evidence. If you can’t agree on a basic physical parameter of our world, measured with multiple techniques to a high degree of confidence, you aren’t even speaking the same language.

I’d also say that if you think you can argue that Homo sapiens is only tens of thousands of years old, you’re talking gibberish.

But the real lesson of this video is that Stephen Meyer is a very silly man. I had a tough time listening to all 10 minutes of it because it’s just Meyer giving a stupid answer to a stupid question, and he is unbelievably long-winded, pedantic, and full of himself (a tone he can sustain for a painfully long time, as attested by those horrid doorstops that he has written). What really annoyed me beyond his drone, though, was that when he finally gives up the microphone, he immediately takes it back to praise, of all people, Lee Fucking Strobel, one of the worst, most dishonest, most unconvincing Christian apologists out there. I know atheists who left Christianity after reading that guy’s schlock nonsense. And here’s tedious superficial Meyer claiming he’s persuasive.

Donald Trump is going to demonstrate his fitness to be president by appearing on the Dr Oz show. Real life has become confused with reality TV, just like real medicine has become confused with a medicine show. Trump and Oz deserve each other.

That’s an important question to ask if you’re about to watch a David Barton video.

Something I’ve noticed about progressives and liberals is how careless they are when throwing false claims around.

Question answered. I’m dead. Will have to continue blogging from beyond the veil, using my spirit form. He killed me with his very first sentence.

This is David Barton, god-emperor of the fabricated historical quotation, claiming that progressives make stuff up. I just…I just…sorry, can’t comment. Got an ectoplasm clog right now.

What is the “false claim” that has him riled up?

For example, I was recently on a national television network where I was introduced as having a doctorate. A progressive instantly ran stories claiming that I don’t have a doctorate. That false claim is amusing on so many levels.

Oh. It’s false? Then what I expect is that he’s about to provide some verifiable evidence that he does in fact have an earned doctorate. That’s easy to do, you know.

But no, he’s going to explain that he doesn’t have to.

First, things like health information, and tax information, and college education information are fully protected by privacy laws, so they don’t know whether I have a doctorate or not, and I’ve always chosen not to talk about it.

Uh, no. Your educational records, stuff like grades and classes attended, are protected by FERPA. But obviously, stuff like whether you graduated from a specific institution are not: if someone puts “Ph.D., Harvard” on their CV, you can contact the registrar at Harvard and ask for a degree verification, and they’ll tell you whether that was earned or not. They have to be able to do that, otherwise people like me might start slappin’ the names of prestigious bible colleges on their CVs to look fancy.

So this is just a bogus dodge.

But what does he do immediately after declaring his degree status a private matter?

Second, just for the record, I do have an earned doctorate. There it is. <waves at a couple of framed pieces of paper in the background>

Third, not only do I have an earned doctorate, I have two honorary doctorates.

No. Your degree is not a piece of paper. It’s a record of academic work. I don’t even know where my version of that certificate I got 31 years ago is located — probably buried in a box somewhere. I certainly don’t have it framed, and putting it in a frame does not add extra weight to its importance.

Here’s how you do it, David Barton: you simply state the name of the institution, and the year you got it. It’s that easy. Then anyone can verify it. For instance, I got a Ph.D. from the University of Oregon in 1985. There’s even a service, National Student Clearinghouse, where you can get verification for $12.50. To do that, though, you need to provide the name of the institution. It would also be nice to state what field you got those degrees in. It should also be an accredited college, because those fly-by-night goofy diploma mills probably don’t submit degree information to national databases.

Good thing I’m already dead, because claiming to give us information while not giving us information is classic Barton.

Isn’t Barton devious? He says he doesn’t need to tell you about his degrees (he’s so modest!), but then he deigns to tell you anyway, except that he doesn’t give you the information he pretends to be giving you.

Some people scrutinized those blurry images, though, and got a little tentative information.

As we and others pointed out, Barton’s assertion seemed a little odd since he never actually stated where or when he “earned” his supposed doctorate and the documents in the background to which he pointed were difficult to read, though one clearly came from Pensacola Christian College, from which Barton received an honorary doctorate. The other two documents appear to have come from Ecclesia College and Life Christian University, an unaccredited Christian university that has also awarded Ph.D.s in theology to televangelists like Joyce Meyers and Benny Hinn.

Somebody needs to tell Barton that Ph.D.s from unaccredited diploma mills don’t count as “earned”.

But, like everything David Barton does, he stands by his words. Which is why Barton has taken down that video. I guess he didn’t make the framed diplomas blurry enough.

And now my spirit is going to have to spend some time finding a new corpse to reanimate. I knew there was a reason we bought a house so close to a cemetery.

I’ve been reminding everyone for 12 years now that Paul Nelson made a specific, quantifiable creationist claim and failed to deliver a promised explanation. This is not unusual. Jeffrey Shallit describes the common elements of the so-called ‘scientific’ creationist, and it’s astonishing how widespread these traits are. One of them is their eagerness to make explicit claims coupled with a reluctance to actually back them up.

The illustrious Robert J. Marks II, professor at Baylor University, is an example of this last characteristic. Back in 2014, he made the following claim: “we all agree that a picture of Mount Rushmore with the busts of four US Presidents contains more information than a picture of Mount Fuji”. I wanted to see the details of the calculation justifying this claim, so I asked Professor Marks to supply it. He did not reply.

Nor did he reply when I asked three months later.

Nor did he reply when I asked six months later.

Nor did he reply when I asked a year later.

It’s now been two years. Academics are busy people, but this is pretty silly. Who thinks the illustrious Professor Marks will ever show me a calculation justifying his claim?

That sounds so familiar. Maybe if you wait 13 years he’ll show you a calculation? Hope springs eternal!