The Black Skeptics have put out a call to sign a petition for Abortion on Demand and Without Apology. I signed it, so should you.
There will also be an abortion rights caravan that will be stopping in North Dakota on 1 August — I may have to make a short hop up the road to Fargo to participate in that.
Woe is me and alas! Pity me, for I am a secular humanist and gnu atheist embarked on trying to read the quintessential New Age non-dualistic blueprint for spiritual transformation, Dr. Helen Schucman’s A Course in Miracles.
And it is heavy going indeed. All I’ve done so far is download the free excerpt from kindle (which goes on and on past the 9th chapter at least), I’m 88% through, and I’m not sure if I have the heart to continue. According to the book I don’t, of course – but more on that later.
It’s not that the book is hard to read. Nor is it even particularly hard to understand. I was an English major and now I am old and I have read plenty of books which were far more philosophically and technically difficult, to be sure. But I keep alternating between frustration, boredom, anger, and an almost stupefying astonishment that the book is really as bad as it is. I am, however, learning quite a lot. It’s just not what I am presumably supposed to be learning.
I’m also surprised. A Course in Miracles was not quite what I expected.
We may have the answer to all of the big problems in physics! Or not.
My money is on “not”.
Marcus du Sautoy, a very smart mathematician and the fellow who occupies the chair for the public understanding of science at Oxford formerly held by Richard Dawkins, made a stunning announcement.
Two years ago, a mathematician and physicist whom I’ve known for more than 20 years arranged to meet me in a bar in New York. What he was about to show me, he explained, were ideas that he’d been working on for the past two decades. As he took me through the equations he had been formulating I began to see emerging before my eyes potential answers for many of the major problems in physics. It was an extremely exciting, daring proposal, but also mathematically so natural that one could not but feel that it smelled right.
He has spent the past two years taking me through the ins and outs of his theory and that initial feeling that I was looking at “the answer” has not waned. On Thursday in Oxford he will begin to outline his ideas to the rest of the mathematics and physics community. If he is right, his name will be an easy one to remember: Eric Weinstein.
There are a few peculiarities to this story. Weinstein is a consultant to a hedge fund, not an academic physicist. That’s not a major criticism of his theory, but the fact that he hasn’t shared his ideas with anyone other than one mathematician…that’s a problem.
This is not how anyone does science. No paper has been published or submitted for peer review, not even so much as a copy put in arxiv.
No, my beef is with the Guardian for running the article in the first place. Seriously: why was it even written? Strip away all the purple prose and you’ve got a guy who’s been out of the field for 20 years, but still doing some dabbling on the side, who has an intriguing new idea that a couple of math professors think is promising, so he got invited to give a colloquium at Oxford by his old grad school buddy. Oh, and there’s no technical paper yet — not even a rough draft on the arxiv — so his ideas can’t even be appropriately evaluated by actual working physicists. How, exactly, does that qualify as newsworthy? Was your bullshit detector not working that day?
But wait, there’s more. He was invited to present his ideas at Oxford, but then no one bothered to let the physicists know.
“I’m trying to promote, perhaps, a new way of doing science. Let’s start with really big ideas, let’s be brave and let’s have a discussion,” du Sautoy told The Guardian. Great idea! Except it’s not really a new way of doing science. And as Oxford cosmologist Andrew Pontzen pointed out in a New Scientist op-ed, nobody thought to invite any of the Oxford physicists. You know, the people most qualified to evaluate Weinstein’s work. It’s hard to have a collegial dialogue that way, especially with no technical paper on hand to provide the necessary background information. This seems more like trying to do science via press conference.
Oh, I remember science by press conference: I got to attend Pons and Fleischmann’s big announcement of the discovery of cold fusion at the University of Utah. We all know how that turned out.
The New Scientist article is damning.
Exciting news: all the problems plaguing physics have been solved. Dark matter, dark energy, quantum gravity – one amazing insight has delivered us from decades of struggle to a new knowledge nirvana.
There’s a catch, however: I’m unable to tell you what that insight is. Neither I, nor any of my professional physicist friends, have the faintest clue. In fact, nobody except Eric Weinstein and mathematician Marcus du Sautoy are sufficiently familiar with the claims to venture an opinion.
It’s interesting that just yesterday at this conference I’m attending I was asked a good question: when we’re dealing with high level scientific explanations that are far beyond what our background allows us to assess, how do we judge whether they’re valid or not? Do we have to rely on faith in the scientific authorities?
And I told him no, that we have other means than simple faith. The methods of science are completely open — scientists show their work. You can review the papers describing their conclusions, and even if much of it is beyond your grasp, you can at least see that they aren’t hiding their procedures. They don’t say, “Here’s a miraculous leap,” they instead may show you a pile of incomprehensible math, but it’s available to study, anyway.
And then you can also expect other independent scientists, who do have the background to understand the math, to weigh in and evaluate the evidence. They can explain the steps.
It’s like someone claiming to have been up on a roof, and you don’t see how she could have gotten up there, and you have no personal desire to be up there yourself, but she can point to the ladder she climbed, and you can also see others climbing up it, so you can trust the individual rungs to work. It’s not faith-based at all, but is based on the step-by-step evidence that the procedure actually performs as promised.
And that’s the problem with Weinstein’s claims. He claims to have been tap-dancing on a high, inaccessible roof, yet so far he hasn’t shown us any way to climb up there, and no one else has even been given an opportunity to climb his ladder. So why should we believe him? That would require an act of faith, and I reject that.
I am not a physicist. I have to wait to see the ladder. And that Eric Weinstein seems to be hiding it makes me very, very suspicious.
Andrew Pontzen has written to me about his statement that ‘nobody thought to invite any of the Oxford physicists’.
Unfortunately this statement now turns out to be wrong. Marcus Du Sautoy did in fact think to invite the Oxford physicists, sending an email to the head of department along with A3 posters; unfortunately no-one spotted the talk because, unbeknown to Du Sautoy, the email was not widely circulated or advertised on the internal web page.
So it was an error, not an intentional evasion.
It’s still bad science.
Atheists are not popular. This comes as no surprise to us or anyone, really. As far as I can tell we are dead last in every U.S. poll in which we are included and explicit terrorists, Nazis, and the Westboro Baptist Church are not.
I suppose the cultural assumption that ‘you need God to be good’ should be explanation enough for our banishment from the realm of the acceptable (Would you want your sister to marry one? Would you want to be one? Nuh uh.) But I keep running into a common plea that no, the problem is not really atheism. Atheism isn’t necessarily okay, of course … but after all it’s a free country and people have the right to believe what they want to believe. It takes all kinds. Just be nice and you’re okay.
No, the problem isn’t atheism itself – it’s atheists. But not all atheists. The tolerant believers discern critical distinctions in the group. There are Good Atheists who don’t manage to believe in God themselves but who still manage to show the courtesy to respect those who do. And then there are the ones like Richard Dawkins . The outspoken ones, the militant ones, the shrill ones who won’t shut up and try to blend in and instead write books and articles and letters meant for the general public. The stigma is focused like a laser on the atheists who act ‘just like fundamentalists’ by trying to convert people and thereby change their minds. The arrogant. The not-nice.
Gnus.
It’s an insidious trope which appeals to values like respect, acceptance, and inclusion: why would anyone be so rude as to try to get other people to not believe in God? What about diversity? Diversity is good. We ought to let people be who they are.
Outspoken atheists then are disparaged even by those who claim to be “fine” with atheism because we are seen as breaking the social contract which values diversity and individuality. Atheists attack people’s deepest identity the way racists attack race or bullies attack those who are different than them. When you get right down to it — they’re bigots. Telling people their religion is wrong is being judgmental.
This is apparently a major charge made against us. I feel as if I see and read and encounter variations of it all around. I suspect most of us do. It’s a theme which seems to run more often through liberal communities than the conservative ones (which are usually just fine with the assumption that you can’t be good without God) but many of us live in such communities and engage regularly with those who seem so frustratingly on the edge of rationality.
So I’ve been attempting to figure out exactly what is happening and why, working it out mostly here and there in parts and pieces. Since PZ gave me the keys while he’s away, though, I’ll take advantage and will to try to expand a bit, to see whether people in this forum think it makes sense. Because I think that, once again, theists are making a category error when it comes to religion. And they’re getting a lot of non-theists to go along with them because they are appealing to values which are essentially not religious, but humanist.
Bottom line, there is a sort of equivocation going on with the concept of “diversity” – and it’s helping to fuel the general antipathy towards atheists.
Consider it this way: it might be said that there are two basic frameworks in which we value ‘diversity’ as a modern virtue. One of them is what I call the Diversity Smorgasbord. The other is what we can call the Diverse Problem-Solving Group. [Read more…]
So Ron Lindsay just said this on twitter:
Free inquiry. Free expression. Not only are these indispensable in our quest for the truth but they’re necessary conditions 4 human dignity
A lovely sentiment, and completely misleading. This long-running argument has never been about “free speech” — no one’s free speech has been denied, as any glance at the raging and constant torrent of abuse will show. It’s been about the responsible recognition of what kind of speech supports that “human dignity” he wants to cloak himself in; it’s about realizing that free speech as we see it in that unfettered medium called the internet is going to produce mostly noise with only a little signal; it’s about the responsibility of organizations to pluck out and amplify the good and damp down the stupid.
It really is about taking sides.
Not taking sides — pretending to have a false objectivity that values all speech equally — is actually favoring the noise. It’s the pretense that a statement on twitter like “It is honorable, noble and good to change your mind if you are wrong” from Lauren Becker has equal weight with “Get out, Amanda, you not welcome here. Take your dogma elsewhere (you too, Ophelia)” from a troll who doesn’t deserve to be named. It’s the refusal to recognize that some of the people who support the same causes as CFI have been barraged with incessant hatred for about two years now — and that that hatred has been aimed at women and the people who support women’s rights. It’s a willingness to let your organization be affiliated with websites dedicated to misogyny.
A Voice for Men is essentially a mouthpiece for its editor, Paul Elam, who proposes to “expose misandry [hatred of men] on all levels in our culture.” Elam tosses down the gauntlet in his mission statement: “AVfM regards feminists, manginas [a derisive term for weak men], white knights [a similar derisive term, for males who identify as feminists] and other agents of misandry as a social malignancy. We do not consider them well intentioned or honest agents for their purported goals and extend to them no more courtesy or consideration than we would clansmen [sic], skinheads, neo Nazis or other purveyors of hate.” Register-Her.com, an affiliated website that vilifies women by name who have made supposedly false rape allegations (among other crimes against masculinity), is one of Elam’s signature “anti-hate” efforts. “Why are these women not in prison?” the site asks.
Oh, right. That’s just free speech. Where is the human dignity, though?
It’s also about being smart enough to see through the dishonesty of thugs who puff themselves up and call harassment a right, who claim tawdry garden-variety sexual bullying “free speech”. Amanda Marcotte has the clarity of thought to see right through this game.
If it seems baffling to you that people are “into” harassment, I don’t know what to tell you. Why else would people harass? (Don’t say autism, for the love of god. People on the spectrum struggle to interpret social signals. Harassers, on the other hand, are masters at manipulating social rules and actual physical space to creep people out as much as they can get away with. It requires careful study of social signaling, not the opposite.) I got harassed on the sidewalk the other day, because that’s just part of the atmosphere of being female. I didn’t catch exactly what the guy said, because he muttered it, but what he wanted out of the situation couldn’t have been clearer. He had that sly smile, that glint in his eye that harassers get when they manage to capture their target’s attention and make them uncomfortable. It’s the feeling of power they have over you, the little jolt they get from putting a bitch in her place. Why people harass is not a mystery. It makes them feel good to exert power. This motivation is all over the Twitter rampage from the pro-harassment forces. They love drowning out useful tweets about real information with their anti-feminist garbage and ranting. It makes them feel good, like they have power. They can harass you and get under your skin and make you write blog posts about them, and then they feel powerful. It’s all of one cloth, and it’s not about unexamined privilege. It’s about being an asshole. We’re asking them to give up this jolt of feeling powerful they get from making other people sad or angry. No wonder they resent us.
When they photoshop our faces onto porn, when they call us “manginas” and “cunts”, when they flood CFI conference streams with denigrating insults to the speakers, they are not making “free inquiry”, they are not using “free speech” in a “quest for truth” or to advance “human dignity”. It’s embarrassing to see the leader of a major freethought organization making excuses for the toxic, petty viciousness from the anti-feminists that has been plaguing this movement since a woman dared to politely ask for her share of that human dignity.
This is why I’ve lost all confidence in Ron Lindsay. He can talk about human dignity, but he doesn’t have the vision to actually lead CFI towards greater support for that principle.
We need a leadership that is willing to take sides. Otherwise, what’s the point of it all?
See also Secular Woman’s post on privilege.
Ah, Glenn Beck: bizarre as always. He’s now claiming that Wolf Blitzer Was Set Up, that “forces of spiritual darkness” maneuvered him into asking an atheist on air about whether she wanted to thank the Lord, just so she could denounce God publicly. Now everything is a conspiracy theory to these guys.
But what I also found interesting in his long ramble is his challenge to Christians to prove themselves worthy by getting out there and doing something that atheists can’t. This sounds like the inverse of Christopher Hitchens’ challenge: “Name me an ethical statement made or an action performed by a believer that could not have been made or performed by a non-believer.” There is an assumption that somehow, Beck’s Christian followers have some mysterious capability that atheists don’t, although he never specifies what it is. I’d love to hear it, though.
Perhaps…standing by and doing nothing in the face of tragedy other than praying, and somehow feeling self-righteous about it? They do seem to have an almost magical lock on sanctimony.
Some people are upset that Rupert Sheldrake is a pseudoscientific kook whose nonsense has been purged from the official collection of TED talks. To my surprise, I just learned that it is all my fault.
Talks from Rupert Sheldrake and Graham Hancock given at the TEDx Whitechapel event titled “Visions for Transition: Challenging Existing Paradigms and Redefining Values” were both banned following recommendations from a faceless “Science Board,” which turned out to be heavily influenced by the most unsavory of militant atheists. The most active in the controversy appears to be PZ Myers, who is accustomed to being publicly denounced by even atheist organizations and figures for inflammatory writings and such tone-deaf stunts as ripping out pages of the Qur’an, piercing them with a nail, throwing them in the trash with coffee grounds and a banana peel, and proceeding to photograph the scene for his blog.
I found the logical progression interesting: from “Science Board” to “the most unsavory of militant atheists” to inflammatory me to desecrating the Qur’an.
I’m happy to be called an unsavory atheist, but let’s be clear here: I am not an any board associated with TED, I do not consider myself particularly influential in that way, the fact that my writing is regarded as inflammatory and that some atheists detest me does not make me “militant”, and my acts of desecration have nothing to do with the issue at hand anyway (by the way, it’s weird to say I just tore up the Qur’an — I got two letters from Muslims afterwards, one approving and another saying it was irrelevant because I defamed a translation, which doesn’t count; I also desecrated a copy of The God Delusion, with no objections and even approval from its author; and I destroyed a communion wafer, which prompted uncounted masses of letters and emails and public denunciations from the Catholic League).
How can anyone trust the logic of someone like the author of that cranky blog post who gets everything wrong?
Go to twitter now: David Silverman (@MrAtheistPants) is tearing the atheist trolls a new one. This is really what I like to see: a leader of a major atheist organization taking an unambiguous stand against this ulcer in our midst, and repudiating the spammy, photoshopping, lying behavior of the anti-feminist clique.
How much do I appreciate it? With my dollars. My wife is going to sign us up for a lifetime membership in American Atheists while I’m away. It’s not a casual investment, so not everyone can do that, but you could send them a donation to let the organization know that you like a leader with a spine.
The fact that dumb-as-dirt Wolf Blitzer still has a job is one of those ineffable mysteries that I can’t explain.
Don’t worry, though: I caught a bit of CNN this morning, and it’s a lot of people praising god and saying they prayed continuously through the storm. It’s like they’re overcompensating now.
Some people have considered the recent criticisms of the CEO of the Center for Inquiry to be a wholesale attack on the organization (well, “some people” meaning “freakin’ loons”). Nothing could be further from the truth. I’m a supporter; I think many of their causes are essential; I appreciate the work of many of the people there. Let’s not forget that the whole of the organization is not the brain of the CEO, whether it’s Paul Kurtz or Ron Lindsay, both of whom have also done good work. We have to trust in the quality of the group to overcome the flaws of the individual.
So I thought I might throw out an occasional post to let you know about a few of the commendable efforts of CFI — you know, try a little positive reinforcement in addition to my usual spiked bludgeon of criticism.
CFI has an Office of Public Policy.
The Office of Public Policy (OPP) is the Washington, D.C. political arm of the Center for Inquiry. Our mandate is to advocate for public policy based on reason, science, and secular values. This includes lobbying at all levels of government — Congress, the Administration, and the international community, including the United Nations — to promote and defend separation of church and state, the role of scientific evidence and secular ethics in policymaking, and basic civil and human rights.
This is the unit that lobbies the government directly for secular causes — if there is something that pisses you off about public policy, this is an effective place to ask for assistance. The director of the OPP is Michael De Dora, who has been working his butt off to get things done. He’s also their representative to the UN.
He meets with the State Department on issues of international concern for secularists, and as we all know there have been a number of those lately, with atheists being persecuted in several countries. He lobbies to keep religion and politics out of science, and has fought against the corruption of our educational system.
He’s also stood up for women’s issues, opposing restrictions on emergency contraception and abortion. You can find a good summary of his position in his speech at the Unite Women rally.
If CFI had really felt it necessary to tap a high-ranking man to give an introduction at the Women in Secularism conference, it would have been a good choice to delegate it to De Dora, who has a solid record on women’s issues and would definitely have been politic enough to avoid throwing a few rhetorical grenades into the crowd. In the past I’ve said some rude things about a few remarks he made about creationism, but…he got better. I’ve met with him a few times, and I’m confident in his abilities in his job — and he’s one of a lot of faces at CFI who do great work.
So keep on criticizing where criticizing needs to be done — it’s how the organization gets better. But let’s not forget that CFI also does invaluable work on our behalf.
Michael De Dora of CFI addressing the Unite Women rally
