A third secular blogger has been viciously hacked to death there: Ananta Bijoy Das has been added to the list of folk murdered for godlessness in Bangladesh, on top of Washiqur Rahman and Avijit Roy. If atheists want to claim status as a persecuted majority, there’s at least one country where that is literally and horribly true.
Except Dan Dennett, that is. Philosophers are A-OK.
But otherwise, he’s written a remarkable post, a farewell to the skeptic and atheist movement, in which he goes down the line and expresses his distaste for everyone associated with that broad group. Sam Harris seems to have triggered the latest round of dissociations, but he also takes swipes at Neil deGrasse Tyson, Michael Shermer, Jerry Coyne, Lawrence Krauss, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens. Or maybe it’s not so much that he detests them all, as that he considers himself far superior to them.
On 19-20 September, cool things will be going on in Winnipeg — you all should come! I’ll be there…OK, you’re unimpressed. Hector Avalos will be there! And Stephanie Zvan! Greta Christina, too! All kinds of Canadians! And it should be well before the first snow! (That is, chances of being snowed in and trapped in Manitoba for the entire winter are fairly low. Also, the polar bears don’t usually come down that far south. And just the average fraction of Canadians live in igloos there.)
This is also far enough ahead that you can tell me in the comments what I should talk about. Go ahead, anything goes.
There’s this story going around about why believers are afraid of atheists, and here’s a video that summarizes it.
It annoys me in a couple of different ways, I’m sorry to say.
Good on him: Dan Dennett has pulled out of the World Science Festival because they’re sponsored by the Templeton Foundation, a very good reason.
What’s widening the rifts? The fact that growing diversity within movement atheism is tearing away from a bitterly misogynistic core. A core that is becoming the fringe.
Harassment and excluding people from your movement will be your downfall, atheism. Please take this as a warning, and an attempt to right the wrongs within your movement before it collapses. From now on, I’m a secular humanist, feminist, mangina-loving, vegetarian socialist, and nothing else, until you clean up your act.
Jenny McDermott
I’ve just seen the ad for the upcoming International Atheist conference. Europe is a little less uptight than the US, I guess.
Here’s a weird mashup for you: Dark Buddhism, one man’s attempt to fuse Buddhism with Randian Objectivism. To his credit, he’s quite clear on the flaws in the Cult of Ayn Rand, but it’s still strange to care so much about Rand’s bogus philosophy that you want to rescue it by stitching it up: building a hybrid of selflessness and selfishness is a contradiction sure to spawn deepities.
Were you all following the big fight yesterday? No, not the overhyped, overpaid sight of two rather repellent grown men pounding each other, but the one between Sam Harris and Noam Chomsky. I wouldn’t be surprised if you missed it, or tuned out after the first couple of blows, because they were grossly mismatched, and it was kind of a rout.
Here’s a round-by-round summary.
Brown has always been a strident defender of religion, and over the years he’s said a lot of incredibly stupid things. But now I have to partly agree with him on this problematic Cult of Dawkins. This is getting embarrassing.
At the RDF website, there is a fundraising page. Fundraising is fine, organizations do have to do that, and so I don’t chide them for having a necessary function on the web; but I do criticize them for two things. What the money is for, and how they are raising it.
