Rationalizations

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Even skeptics do them. Brian Dunning is out of prison, and he’s written a lengthy rationalization to explain that he wasn’t really a criminal. His excuses: he’d been suspicious, his partner in the scheme was the shady one, he hadn’t been scamming eBay at all, he was just a scapegoat, he was only sentenced to 29 months, not 20 years. He just explains that all he did was imbed 1×1 invisible pixels in his site that got eBay to willingly plant cookies on visitor’s sites, that allowed him then to reap rewards every time that visitor bought something through eBay. Not his fault!

Of course he also reveals that the 1×1 invisible pixel publishing business was astonishingly lucrative, bringing him an income of $1.1 million. But hey, that’s just about what a good corporate job would pay. So it must have been all right!

I make nowhere near that amount at the education business, and even less at the blogging game. Maybe my mistake is that I need to make my efforts very tiny and invisible, and then I’d get rich?

How to interpret the Bible literally

Bodie Hodge of Answers in Genesis wants you to know that you’ve been talking about the book of Genesis all wrong. Heretics, every one of you.

  1. The globe looks like it does today: This would specifically be before the Flood in Genesis 6–8.

  2. Leaving open evolutionary ideas

  3. Not including extinct creatures like dinosaurs on Day Six

  4. Putting modern variations of animals in the creation scene

  5. Drawing Adam and Eve with very light skin and blond hair and blue eyes

  6. Making an apple the fruit

  7. Having a serpent without some form of upright posture or appendages during the deception: Genesis 3:1 calls it a serpent

  8. Neglecting that God sacrificed animals to cover Adam and Eve

  9. When illustrating Cain and Abel, we often get the impression they were the only two kids Adam and Eve had at the time

  10. Ark looks like a bathtub with happy animals sticking out of it

  11. Not including dinosaurs and pterodactyls (e.g., dragons) on the Ark

  12. Putting too many individuals of a kind on the Ark

  13. Tower of Babel being rounded

  14. Tower of Babel reaches so high into the atmosphere that its top is covered with high cirrus clouds

  15. The Tower being only partially built (i.e., a foundation)

  16. Not using biblical dates

  17. Calling the accounts “stories”

  18. Don’t paraphrase the Bible—use a respectable translation

  19. Placing the Garden of Eden based on post-Flood geography

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We need to encourage more youtubers to engage in progressive atheism

YouTube is generally a blighted mess for atheism — but I’m seeing more people pushing back (but the comments there are still full of fulminating argle-bargle from the usual noisemakers). Here’s an example:

I do want to mention one thing I see a lot. You’ve heard it: tell a self-labeled proud atheist that they should value equality and other progressive ideals, and the immediate rebuttal is “Atheism just means I don’t believe in god. Go be a humanist if social justice is your thing.”

Humanism is not your get-out-of-jail-free card. The existence of humanism does not mean that calling yourself an atheist exempts you from all responsibilities to normal human concerns — you don’t get to foist off all the obligations involved in being a functional member of a healthy society on those humanists over there.

It’s as if they’ve carried the negativity of the minimal definition one step further: atheism means disbelief in god, and disbelief in any concept of social justice. We’ve been making some great strides in improving the cultural perception of atheism over the last decade, but there are still way too many atheists who are committed to associating atheism with sociopathy.

And they all seem to be hanging out on YouTube.

The Harris Formula

It’s nice to be able to sit back and let Mano take on Sam Harris. He’s laid out all the flaws in the standard Harris formula.

  • Invent incredibly contrived scenario in which all that you love and hold dear is imperiled.

  • Make the villain Muslim, especially a “Muslim jihadi”, who are especially dangerous because they look like all other Muslims, except that they are amoral fanatics who will die to kill you.

  • Resolve the scenario with an otherwise morally reprehensible solution that we would not accept in any real-world situation.

  • Sit back, preen a bit about how he is the only person brave enough to contemplate the unthinkable so coolly and objectively.

  • When people point out the absurdity of his excuses and his perniciously vile efforts to justify amoral acts, fall back on accusations that his critics didn’t actually understand what he wrote. He didn’t mean “Muslims”, he really meant “People other than Jerry Seinfeld,” for instance.

  • PROFIT.

He isn’t using reason at all. He’s making appeals to strong emotion (They’re going to murder your daughter!) and bigotry (They’re Muslims, so deranged by their evil religion that they will die for their wicked cause!). His fans accept those premises, and then fall all over themselves to condemn anyone who disagrees with the Harris Formula of wanting to help Muslims kill little girls.

Would you like to volunteer to work at the Ark Park?

Notice: I didn’t ask whether you’d like to get paid to work there — just whether you’d like to work totally for free. All you have to do is fill out the application!

This is a non-trivial exercise. It’s a long form, and you also have to be prepared to give your church references. Well, I’m out!

You also need to answer 12 questions, in detail. I’ve filled it out with my answers.

To be considered you must provide answers to the following questions. After those questions you need to utilize the blank space below to provide two detailed statements. The first statement is your Christian salvation testimony. The second statement is your belief about creation. Applicants that do not answer all questions and do not submit both statements will not be considered.

1. How does one get to heaven when they die? (One doesn’t.)

2. Why do you believe YOU will go to heaven when you die? (Nope.)

3. What would cause anyone to go to hell? (There is no hell.)

4. Do you believe suffering in hell is eternal? (No. See #3.)

5. What do you believe to be the main difference between Christianity and other religions? (Irrelevant and silly differences in doctrine.)

6. Do you believe the earth is thousands of years old or millions of years or does it matter? Explain your thoughts. (Billions. The evidence says so.)

7. “I believe that the ONLY legitimate marriage sanctioned by God and given in Scripture is the joining of one natural born man and one natural born woman. All other unions are contrary to clear Biblical teaching.” Do you agree with this statement or disagree? (I don’t really care what the Bible says.)

8. Please provide a brief statement regarding your Christian Testimony of Salvation. (I don’t believe in salvation. Brief enough?)

9. Please provide a brief statement of your position regarding Creation. (It’s nonsense.)

10. Please provide a brief statement about your position as relates to the inspiration, inerrancy (100% accuracy) of the Bible as the ONLY true Word of God. (It is neither inspired nor inerrant.)

11. How would you respond to someone who said “The Koran or the Book of Mormon are equally the Word of God.”? (I agree!)

12. Please confirm that you have a valid email address with regular access and confirm that you will periodically check email for forms and information from AiG. (Eh. Probably not.)

I wonder what the people who apply for paying jobs there have to do?

I get mail

I still get lots of plain old US Mail — it’s almost always from a crank or religious apologists, so it’s kind of entertaining. I’m not a big fan of certified mail, though. That usually means someone is going to bluster and threaten to sue me for something. I got some yesterday.

To provide a little context, I pointed out in 2008 that the latest stuff published at a meeting by Richard H. Lambertsen represented a serious decline in quality from the previous work of this rather well-known cetologist. He did not take it well. Lambertsen wrote me an email in which he suggested that I need to read some of his papers to appreciate the depth of his thinking.

I did. This was my reply then, in 2011.

In particular, they don’t explain how the evolution of the craniomandibular articulation in baleen whales was the enabling mutation that permitted the occurrence of free will, what this has to do with Einstein’s special theory of relativity, the significance of the death of the largest blue whale known on 20 March 1947, and how you tie all these disparate observations into the conclusion that humanity is about to undergo a speciation event. I looked in particular in the paper on lunge feeding for evidence that George W. Bush stole your driver’s license, as you claimed in your paper, to no avail.

Long silence.

He has now written to me again, by certified mail. I’ve scribbled on it a bit, I hope you don’t mind.

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They had t-shirts made!

How odd. The cultists who believe the world will end today had bright yellow t-shirts and hats, and professionally printed signs, and have been waving them around to announce their imminent demise. That seems like strange behavior if you really believe the entire world will be annihilated. It’s almost as if they’re less interested in their assumed facts, and more interested in advertising their dogma.

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Also, the person on the right seems lacking in confidence: The End of the World, question mark? If the world does actually end today, they’re going to be roasting in hell for their lack of faith, which means they lose whether the world ends or not.

Here we go again

Jaclyn Glenn has been caught plagiarizing Matt Dillahunty now.

I just don’t get it. Plagiarism eventually outs; if you’re using it to build content and get more popular, then the more popular you are, the more likely your sins will be discovered. It’s a strategy that lets you bull ahead fast…straight towards a brick wall.

It’s also unfortunate because, while I was never a fan, it’s one more example that will tar the reputation of atheism…and we’ve had more than enough of that.