It’s that time of year when Skepticon gets needy. Skepticon loves you. Skepticon wants to have a conversation with you. Skepticon wants commitment. Skepticon is worried about the state of your relationship — you have a hot date scheduled for 21-23 November, and they want to make sure they can afford to treat you as you deserve. Skepticon wants you to look pretty.
I’m back from Zeteticon 2014 — you’ll all have to go to Zeteticon 2015. It was a well-organized and entertaining conference. Although everyone’s talks were interesting, I just want to comment on David Silverman’s.
Why aren’t there more women atheists? According to Harris, because atheism lacks that estrogen vibe.
It’s always the changing story that gives the liar away. We have a couple of accounts of the night in question, when Michael Shermer is accused of taking advantage of a young woman at a conference, and both of them come straight from Shermer himself. Here’s the story from Shermer written shortly after the event.
This afternoon I got a strange tweet.
Lol OMG @badrescher freaking out on FB that "PZ" RTd her thread bashing Amy Roth. "Here come the rage bloggers," BUT- pic.twitter.com/ohKuD1woKc
— So-calledAdultFemale (@VitaBrevi) September 10, 2014
Say what? I thought. That’s really weird; I don’t follow Barbara Drescher, I have no idea what she’s talking about here; I haven’t commented on anything she’s written in quite some time. But apparently she dreads the idea that I might notice something she has posted publicly, so I looked to see what it was about.
He just gets worse and worse. He’s now defending Mel Gibson and Passion of the Christ (hey, it made lots of money!) and he just casually mentions something damned ugly.
This time, it’s Albert Einstein, who endorsed a psychic in 1932. Einstein said “She told me things no one possibly could know,” the standard cry of the credulous upon encountering a persuasive con artist. He got scolded by a writer for The New Republic.
I once read a book by Jason Lisle — it might have been his “Ultimate Proof of Creation”, or maybe “Logic and Faith”, I can’t really remember, it was such a tedious droning bore — and was unimpressed. If you claim to be using pure logic to determine the nature of the universe, and arrive at the conclusion that your idiosyncratic, culturally determined religious mythology is literally and perfectly true, it’s safe to say that you’re doing something wrong.
The advertising for Zeteticon has been a bit low key, so it’s a good thing I happened to check my calendar! And then I looked at the roster, and it’s a good bunch — Beth and Matt and Fred and Aron and Richard and August and David and Katie, who I have not met before. Come on out to Fargo, ND this next weekend!
I notice I don’t have a title listed, which suggests that once again mail from an organizer has been snared in my spam trap, and I’ll have to go dig it up, but in case they see this, the title of my talk is “Synteny and Creationist Sins of Omission: They always forget about those pesky genes.” It’s about molecular genetics and the ignorance of creationists, if you can’t guess.
A couple of years ago, when I was looking to score some sweet fresh Jesus for a little home art project, it would have been so convenient if he’d come in an easy-open package. The future has arrived. Behold, mass-produced, factory-sealed, god in a plastic container!
