A glimmer of hope?

This is one of the outcomes of Skepticon.

Optimism? Am I ready to be optimistic again?

If you’ve been out of touch with the secular movement for a while, you may not be aware that we—the politically correct, SJWs, Outrage Brigade, the wokist scolds, or whatever other term of derision you might have heard for those of us wanting a more inclusive movement—won the secular culture wars. Movement humanism is working on being actively humanist. Secular activism recognizes issues far beyond public crosses and prayers. New leadership is clear that they’re shaking things up.

I am not sure. What I see is an incoming tide of hateful religious scumbuggery, and atheism managed to splinter itself between the people who oppose that, and the people who see an opportunity for grift and are willing to align themselves with fundamentalism in the name of hating LGBTQ people and Muslims and anyone with a different color skin or a vagina. They’re all atheists. Some of them are just more interested in pretending they’re superior and sneering at foolish people while promoting a regressive agenda.

It drove me away, and I think it alienated the good people in that photo. Maybe they’re more resilient than I am, because sheesh, I feel burned. But then, as Nathan Robinson explains, we still NEED atheism to counter the villainy of evangelical fundamentalism.

And yet: even though I have spent much less of my time arguing about God in the last ten years, and I think that is healthy, I increasingly feel as if—and I am not alone in this—atheism needs to make a comeback. The religious right in the United States was not, in fact, defeated. In fact, religious conservatives now dominate the Supreme Court, and have recently successfully revoked one of women’s core constitutional rights. Their movement is on the march, and they have a very clear, terrifying agenda that Democrats have proven themselves totally incapable of effectively countering. As journalist Elle Hardy has documented, while young Americans may not be especially religiously faithful, around the world, evangelical Pentecostalism is attracting astonishing numbers of converts, and with it pushing a toxic and often apocalyptic brand of hard-right politics.

Maybe, just maybe, I can stoke up the ol’ fire in my belly for a more positive, humanist atheism. I’ll have to try, but somebody pissed on the coals and has hidden my matches, so it might be a bit of a struggle. But yeah, let’s bring back a positive atheism, and I’m ready to at least follow other people’s inspiration.

What a sideshow at the American circus

While I was away, I missed all the news about Alex Jones’ trial. Would you believe he’s been brought before a court now to answer for his cruel lies about the Sandy Hook shooting, ten years ago? Justice is a slug.

Anyway, he’s being sued for defamation by parents of children murdered, because Jones was such a dishonest asshole about their pain and sicced mobs on them. The parents are still in fear for their life, because they’re still being harassed by Alex Jones fans. Jones himself has been dodging the trial — his lawyers probably told him his testimony would be a liability, although he is scheduled to take the stand today — so instead we’ve got the testimony of Owen Shroyer. Owen Shroyer! I’m sorry, that guy was an obvious stooge and dullard from the beginning of his career with InfoWars, and it must have hurt to have to rely on that bozo to represent the organization. I hope it hurts worse from now on.

Here’s a bit of Shroyer’s defense against the charge that he’d defamed Neil Heslin, the father of a six year old girl killed at Sandy Hook.

It was brutal. And yet Karpova was only the second worst witness of the day, because after her came Owen Shroyer. Shroyer is an Infowars host who pushed the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory, called for former President Barack Obama to be lynched, and is currently charged with unlawfully entering the Capitol on January 6, 2021, an action he likens to those of Jesus Christ and the Dalai Lama.

Plaintiffs’ attorney Kyle Farrar got the ball rolling by getting Shroyer to agree that deceptively editing videos is bad. Also airing unvetted stories and videos from random sources, because people can get hurt, and that, too, is bad.

Golly, wherever could this line of questioning be going?

Surprise! It was going to Shroyer using a deceptively edited video from some rando on the internet without doing a single moment of vetting in an apparent effort to smear Heslin and get back at Megyn Kelly.

In a spectacular act of cruelty, Shroyer took a “story” from an anonymous internet source to suggest that Heslin was lying when he told Kelly he’d held his dead son in his arms. Based on a snippet of video from the coroner explaining that the bodies were so riddled with machine gun fire that he’d opted to allow the parents to identify their children by photograph rather than in-person, Shroyer inferred that the state had confiscated the bodies and never returned them to the parents at all.

“You would remember if you held your dead kid in your hands with a bullet hole, that’s not something you forget,” Shroyer said gleefully in the broadcast, played multiple times for the jury.

“I could have done a better job,” Shroyer conceded.

“You could have done a job,” Farrar shot back.

When Shroyer protested that he was live on air when the story came to him and didn’t have time to check it, Farrar pounced

“Is ‘I didn’t have time’ an excuse for defamation?” he demanded.

Shroyer conceded it was not.

Jones knows this is not going well, and has filed for bankruptcy to escape the $150 million judgment that is barreling down the tracks at him. This is for one set of parents and one child! I hope all the others join in and hammer this fraud deep into the ground.

It’s a lesser issue, but the court also hammered the InfoWars cronies about the “supplements” he sells. It’s all one big marketing scam for selling quack pills. Would you believe he makes $600,000 per week on that crap? And he can’t shut his mouth — he’s going on air on his program to brag about how he’s gaming the system.

Wreck him. Wreck him bad.

Where’s Paul Joseph Watson in all this? Did he bail on InfoWars to escape the wrecking ball?

Skepticon is trying to teach me how to be a better person; will it ever sink in?

Yesterday was a good day Skepticon. I got my talk out of the way early — I talked about how gross oversimplifications of Mendel were used as justifications for racism and all kinds of discrimination.

Later, Jey McCreight talked about how sexual development was far more complex than most people assumed, and could use his own life as a trans man as an example. He’s an excellent speaker and has changed so much since the time I met him when he was an undergraduate.

Greta Christina spoke about the pros and cons of following your dreams in a capitalist society, and her own struggles as a writer who is currently not writing. Greta is always good.

The most affecting speaker of the day was Eli Heina Dadabhoy, who told a story of his deceased grandmother, a deeply religious person, who was still able to love him as a trans apostate. It was hard to hear over the sniffles of the audience, but was still a good lesson in tolerance.

One of those things is not like the others. Some people are able to express themselves and their feelings while talking about relevant issues, and some of us are privileged straight white guys who can afford to repress their emotions because their identity is never questioned. That same person couldn’t bring themselves to attend Skeptiprom because expressing themselves creatively while having a good time is not possible.

It’s good to be here to see how it’s done.

Not to worry, I’m also an expert in suppressing the symptoms.

Are we surprised by this story about Dr Oz?

No, we are not.

Even without Fetterman’s highly effective campaign, this kind of quackery is why I don’t want Oz in the senate. He’s a dishonest fraud. So is Dr Phil. In fact, any of the stable of goofballs squirted out of the gullible brain of Oprah ought to be rejected if ever they appear on any political slate.

An atheist response…and an invitation to a livestream

I was bored and trawled through a Christian site to address some silly questions.

Hey! Next week I’m planning to do a livestream to talk about Lucy Cooke’s Bitch, an excellent book about biology’s long history of bad science whenever the subject of women comes up, and going through many examples of the complexity of sex in zoology, and also talking about the short shrift women get in science. If you have any interests along those lines, or have read the book, or are, like, a woman who’d like to make sure the man talking about this subject stays in line, send me an email and let me know what times work for you, and maybe we’ll talk.

I waded through the filth so you don’t have to

Ugh. Ugh ugh ugh. Kent Hovind, creationist, is bad enough, but Kent Hovind, groomer, is enough to disgust anyone. There have been some developments in the revelations about what goes on at Dinosaur Adventure Land. Unfortunately, no one involved in discussing the story can write, so you have to sit through long rambling videos to extract the facts.

I’ll spare you that. If you must drill down through the slime, there’s a video on YouTube by Cindi Lincoln (Hovind’s ex-wife) and another on UGetTube, a right-wing conspiracist site, by a YEC who doesn’t like Hovind. I had to sit through a commercial for MyPillow to see that one.

OK, here’s the short summary. Kent Hovind has a good buddy named Chris Jones — they’ve been friends for 30 years, Hovind says — who showed up at DAL with a young boy in tow. The problem: Chris Jones has been “convicted on multiple charges of lewd acts against minors” and is on a sex offender registry. The kid is not related to Jones.

Normal people in that situation would ask many pointed questions of their pedophile friend and would call the police. No, not Kent Hovind! He says the charges against Jones were trumped up, just like the charges against him that put him in jail for ten years. Most of us would be extremely suspicious of a convicted pedophile showing up with an 11 year old boy, but what Kent did instead was put the man and his mysterious child in an empty house, with nothing but a mattress on the floor, for 5 days.

And then the kid disappears. People are looking for him, but Kent says it’s fine, his pedophile friend had the permission of the child’s mother to take charge of him. Now he’s been found, and his mother is grateful for the return of her boy, and has reported Chris Jones to the police.

Hovind still defends Jones. He went on the awful Brett Keane YouTube show to protest his innocence, and in the process, admit that he put a convicted child molester and a child in a house, unsupervised.

Does evangelical Christianity have the molestation of children as one of its precepts? Get out while you can!

Another development: the boy is pressing charges against Chris Jones, so Kent Hovind calls him a “moron”. Not Jones, his victim.

The Jehovah Witnesses don’t do door-knocking anymore?

Nowadays they send idiotic mail to harass you, instead of a pair of idiots. I miss the personal touch. So yes, I got some mail.

I didn’t censor out the return address, because that’s not a private home. That’s the JW Kingdom Hall here in Morris, go ahead and stop by and knock on their door.

To answer their question, though: no, the “kingdom of god” is an archaic fantasy, a myth built up by people who couldn’t imagine an alternative to their own situation, living in the city-states of the ancient Middle East. I don’t believe in a heaven, but if I did, it would be a decentralized anarchic association of individuals with no kings, and also no angels or devils.

Also, my correspondent is only telling half-truths. Daniel 2:44 says,

And in the days of these kings shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom, which shall never be destroyed: and the kingdom shall not be left to other people, but it shall break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms, and it shall stand for ever.

It’s not very specific, although it implies that God’s kingdom is going to be an earthly one, set up to compete and defeat all other kingdoms. It seems to be a rather primitive conception, don’t you think?

Yes, they included a tract, in that classic, easily recognized Jehovah’s Witness style.

Sorry, that doesn’t persuade at all. It’s a lot of empty promises of a utopia, and the only evidence cited for it all is the Bible. Typical. The Kingdom Hall is only about a kilometer away, I oughta walk over there and give them a copy of Cat’s Cradle, and throw them into the chaos of Bokononism. They’ll be better people for it.

How can anyone believe in a benevolent god?

Once again, the god side defeats their own claims.

I’m trying to figure this out. So if you don’t compel your children to pray to your god, he will send a gunman to murder them in school.

Do they even realize that that is not a benign act? That’s the logic of a tyrant and the rationalization of a fool. It’s so much easier to recognize that this cosmic villain does not exist, but that wicked people use the threat of this monster to compel others to do as they want.

Counterpoint: here’s a teacher who prayed earnestly and sincerely while the gunman god sent to remind everyone to pray killed all 11 of his 4th grade students.

In this world of gullible prayers, a good god would grant Arnulfo Reyes wish and send Steven Scalise to hell. I think I know how this will turn out, and we should learn that if god did exist, he’s a motherfucking Republican.

We’ve only just started. Look at this Christian!

A Texas-based Christian extremist preacher is calling on the government to round up “every single homosexual,” put them on trial, convict them, and put them to death by shooting them in the head, which he falsely says Jesus Christ commands.

Dillon Awes of the Stedfast Baptist Church on Sunday also falsely claimed every gay person is a pedophile, every heterosexual pedophile is a “fag,” and “sodomites” are responsible for school shootings. None of those claims are factual.

Everything is only going to get worse.