I pointed out that their article on ‘ropen’ was biased mush from a crank, and lo! The article is now flagged.

This article is being considered for deletion in accordance with Wikipedia’s deletion policy.
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This article may present fringe theories, without giving appropriate weight to the mainstream view, and explaining the responses to the fringe theories. Please improve the article or discuss the issue on the talk page. (August 2014)

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They’ve been awarded an $18 million tax break. AiG will, as usual, declare that they weren’t actually given any money directly, but instead got a deal with the state that says they won’t have to pay as much. Because, as we all know, having to pay less of your revenues to cover the costs of infrastructure and maintenance and subsidized transport — you know, like all those roads two thirds of the country will be driving on to get to their over-priced carnie show — isn’t actually a benefit. It’s just what a god-fearing Kentucky ought to do.

But that’s not what they’d like you to avoid bringing up. No, it’s that in their state-subsidized operation, which makes them subject to state and federal hiring laws, they have a peculiar hiring requirement: they demand that all employees swear to abide by their statement of faith. That statement requires that all employees believe:

The only legitimate marriage sanctioned by God is the joining of one man and one woman in a single, exclusive union, as delineated in Scripture. God intends sexual intimacy to only occur between a man and a woman who are married to each other, and has commanded that no intimate sexual activity be engaged in outside of a marriage between a man and a woman. Any form of sexual immorality, such as adultery, fornication, homosexuality, lesbianism, bisexual conduct, bestiality, incest, pornography, or any attempt to change one’s gender, or disagreement with one’s biological gender, is sinful and offensive to God.

Oops. They just violated a few equal opportunity laws.

They also insist that:

All human life is sacred and begins at conception (defined as the moment of fertilization). The unborn child is a living human being, created in the image of God, and must be respected and protected both before and after birth. The abortion of an unborn child or the active taking of human life through euthanasia constitutes a violation of the sanctity of human life, and is a crime against God and man.

And of course there are a whole lot of religious requirements that only fit Christians. And not just any Christian: a very narrow, very specific version of Christianity that’s going to include only fundamentalist Protestants with a literalist interpretation of the Bible.

So there will be no Jews, gay men, lesbians, transgender men or women (or even individuals with gender dysphoria), Muslims, pro-choice citizens, Seventh Day Adventists, Scientologists, Catholics, Episcopalians, Buddhists, agnostics, pantheists, feminists, Sikhs, Quakers, or atheists employed at the Creation “Museum”. Also no honest physicists, geologists, or biologists. Karen Armstrong couldn’t get a job there, and neither could Neil deGrasse Tyson or Ken Miller. Me, either…and here I was pinin’ for an opportunity to move to the lovely Cincinnati area and get a prestigious job helping the public learn about science. Hecky darn.

But they don’t want anyone to talk about that. They’re going to nominally claim to follow state and federal guidelines, while somehow, magically, without any discrimination on their part, all the employees working as grounds crew, security, advertising, zip line guides, or accountants will just happen to all be conservative heterosexual attendees of Ken Ham’s favorite local churches.

And that may be a fair description of their applicant pool, since they’re clearly setting up a hostile work environment for anyone who doesn’t conform.

It makes you look very, very stupid. Kevin Sorbo doesn’t understand why atheists might be angry.

“I’m a Christian myself and had to play an atheist. I see the anger of these (atheist) guys on TV and it’s like ‘wow, how do you get so angry at something you don’t believe in?”  Sorbo said.

Guy, it’s pretty simple. We’re not angry at any gods. We know they don’t exist.

We’re angry with you.

If I had an address, I’d send him a copy of Greta Christina’s book. I wouldn’t do that for every stupid Christian (there are so many it would be a total transfer of every penny of my income to Greta), but my kids were huge fans of Hercules, so I’d be willing to do that for him.

At least Xena seems to have left god behind.

We’ve been battling the stupid philistines within our own communities so long that it’s easy to forget the atheist tone police — those people who like to chide atheists for being too harsh on religion, who make excuses for faith, and who recoil from confrontation with nonsense. Alex Gabriel will have none of that.

It is a form of privilege to be an atheist who’s never experienced religious abuse, as many of us have who are antagonistic.

It is privilege blindness to expect — without a clue what we’ve experienced or what it means to us — that we give up our self-expression so that you can form alliances with faith communities that deeply injured us.

It is tone-policing if when you’re not telling us to shut up about it, you’re telling us how to talk about it. How dare you tell us to be more respectful.

It is splaining if your answer when we detail histories of religious abuse is ‘Yes, but’ — or if you tell us we can’t blame religion for it since not all believers do the same. We know the details. You don’t.

Ah, excellent. I’ve never been fond of the milquetoast approach to atheism.

I’m one of the privileged people in the first line quoted. I used to think I’d been brought up religious, but I revised my opinion as I met more people who really had been abused by dogmatic religion as children — my liberal Lutheranism and secular parents with only nominal associations with religion was more of an inoculation with a dead virus than an exposure to the real disease. But it was enough to trigger a strong reaction when I did encounter religious stupidity.

Just yesterday, I got in my car to run some errands, and the radio had been left on to a local station (my wife listens to music on her commute), which on Sunday was broadcasting a sermon. It was a generous and liberal sort of sermon — the guy was going on about how we have to be open to change, and receptive to new ideas, which I thought was a nice message…until he started yammering on about why we should be that way. We need to be generous in thought because that’s how Jesus was. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus — he started spinning out this revisionist biography of Jesus that fell just shy of declaring that Jesus had been a gay democrat who campaigned to save the whales.

It annoyed me. I could change the tuner and probably find a Christian preaching a wrathful Jesus, or a law-and-tradition-abiding Jesus, or an American Jesus who wants the brown people executed. Jesus, the Stretch Armstrong of Christianity.

I didn’t experience the pain of a religious upbringing, but I did experience a science education, and I will say this: how you know something matters. If you want a mind that adapts and responds intelligently to changing evidence and circumstances, you don’t get it by telling your children to worship and obey a myth. You don’t invent imaginary heroes who were paragons of perfection and tell the kids to follow them — even if you are promoting ideals I personally find copacetic, you are committing child abuse by short-circuiting their capacity for critical and independent thinking.

So I agree with Alex, but for different reasons…and I respect those differences. Fight on, everyone. And don’t try to demand that everyone on your side must have the very same perspective on the struggle that you do.

His only trick is to tell everyone else that they aren’t certain that they are right, while he is absolutely certain that he is right, and therefore he must be right. Most of this video is taken up with wordy attempts to pin him down, but the simple solution comes up at the end: just tell him to knock if off with his one and only line of argument, and then he jumps up and goes away.

We now need to compile a list of magic words that make other creationists disappear.

A little while ago, I got this email from a reporter.

My editors and I feel that in the wake of Dawkins’ series of tweets last week about what rapes are worse than others it is time to ask the question:

Is Richard Dawkins an asset or a liability to movement atheism?

Would you care to weigh in on this? Would anyone else you know care to? I know this is more than touchy and am open to allowing anonymity – with a discussion first.

You may have seen the final article. You might have noticed that there was nothing from me in it. There’s a reason for that: I thought the whole concept was odious, and did not dignify it with a reply. I also knew what would happen — that the result would be a set of statements in which some decide that he’s a bad witch, some that say he’s a good witch, and some that struggle to straddle the middle ground and express some of the complexity of the question, and on the whole it was going to be a meaningless mess. It’s an attempt to place a person on a simple linear scale, and to make it worse, get diverse people with diverse views to produce a hodge-podge of assessments that would be impossible to reduce. It was an invitation to play Numberwang, and the only way to win is not to play.

It also struck me as a very Abrahamic exercise. Are you on the side of the angels or the devils? When the Lord weighs you on the scale, will you be found wanting? Let’s stand in judgment of your whole life, and decided whether you deserve heaven or hell.

This is not to say you can’t criticize forcefully. Richard Dawkins has demonstrated a lack of empathy for women’s issues; give him hell. But he’s also a brilliant storyteller who has been a driving force for atheism; send him roses. Brian Dunning is a convicted con artist, but he’s also…well, I’m sure his family loves him. PZ Myers was a petty little shit last Tuesday, but on Wednesday he was a sweetheart.

This is the way humans are. It tempts our minds to find cognitive shortcuts and place a simple label on everything — good guy, bad guy, idiot, genius, villain, hero — and try to reduce everyone to a number in a ledger, but people aren’t reducible.

Try it yourself. What number are you? On a linear scale from -10 to +10 (oh, look, I’m providing an opportunity for more nuance than that article, which only asked plus or minus), where are you? Do you think the number changes from day to day, or minute to minute? Would everyone you know agree with your number? Do you think a public poll on what number you deserve would be more useful than assigning it with a random number generator? (I just tried one; it turns out I’m a 5.)

You’d think that people would recognize that trying to rank human beings is rather like trying to rank rape. No good can come of it.