Some atheists get it

Next October, the People of Color Beyond Faith Network, Black Skeptics Group, Houston Black Non-Believers, Black Freethinkers, the American Humanist Association and African Americans for Humanism are sponsoring the second Moving Social Justice conference, to be held in Houston, Texas. These are people who are as godless as it gets, and somehow they’re able to recognize that social justice issues can and ought to be front and center in a secular, rational, religion-free community.

I am perpetually baffled by other atheists who think it shouldn’t even be on the map.

Own it

It’s been a long busy day, and I am exasperated that I get online now and discover that my fellow atheists have been desperately gleeful to have discovered excuses to justify evading any responsibility for the murders of Deah Shaddy Barakat, Yusor Mohammad, and Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha. The killing was over a parking spot; he was one of those crazy gun-fondlers. Let’s sieze any excuse to deflect an obligation to think. It’s just like with Elliot Rodger: he didn’t shoot those people because he hates women, it was because he was mentally ill.

That he was a member of my group is just a coincidence, we’re blameless, it’s his membership in some other group that is at fault!

[Read more…]

Bill Maher, nevermore

I never watched Oprah, because she was a gullible woo-artist; I don’t watch Dr Oz, because he’s quack; and now all I can say is fuck Bill Maher, because he’s a crank on so many things. On his latest show, he surrounded himself with Marianne Williamson, a “spiritual teacher” and proponent of prayer, Amy Holmes, a news announcer for The Blaze (Glenn Beck’s spinoff), and some guy who didn’t say much, and he went off on a grand tour of kook talk, confident that his panelists wouldn’t disagree with him. Watch. Be embarrased for him.

[Read more…]

They’re made of PEOPLE!

I can’t really recommend this long article about MRAs. It’s not awful, but it seems determined to demonstrate something no one had questioned: “golly, not all MRAs are neckbearded trolls. They’re humans too!” OK, I know and agree; there are circumstances in which anyone could have a civilized conversation with them…which the author proceeds to do, talking to a random MRA named Max in Chicago, and also calling up Paul Elam and Roosh, and in every case doing his very best to put them in a good light, while not easing up on their awful opinions.

[Read more…]

David Brooks gives atheists some advice

Uh-oh. For a moment there, I thought I was going to have to agree with David Brooks, and then I’d have to retire from the internet and live in a cave and flagellate myself until the stupidity was purged. He has written a column in which he says secularism has to be more than simple rationalism, and the opening had me worried that it was going to sound like my schtick:

As secularism becomes more prominent and self-confident, its spokesmen have more insistently argued that secularism should not be seen as an absence — as a lack of faith — but rather as a positive moral creed. Phil Zuckerman, a Pitzer College sociologist, makes this case as fluidly and pleasurably as anybody in his book, “Living the Secular Life.”

[Read more…]