The Rationalist Association has started The Apostasy Project — they’re trying to provide resources for people who want to leave their religion. As recent events in Bangladesh have shown, apostasy is regarded by some as a terrible crime.
If you can, help them out with a donation. Apostasy is something to praise and encourage!
I was on another show with this odd New Covenant group — these are people very deeply steeped in Christianity, and it shows in their modes of thinking. Not all of them call themselves atheists, but they’re definitely freethinkers, and so I chattered with them for two hours. The topic for this one was on the crucifixion, and I argued that it was more than just false, this myth of sacrifice by proxy is abhorrent poison.
The other thing that makes them different from scientists and atheists is they’re just too nice — I’m really put on edge by compliments.
Wait, not really. I should change that headline to “Pareidolia found on Mars!”, but then you’d all shrug your shoulders and say, “so what else is new?” I’ve got to do something to suck you in.
Anyway, there’s this whole weird subculture that’s been around since at least the 90s — I recall spending some time arguing with Mark Carlotto, an “expert in image processing”, at a lecture in Philadelphia some years ago, and these people were off-the-wall even then. The fudging and cheating he was doing to turn Mars Orbiter photos into vistas of ancient ruined Barsoomian cities was disgraceful. But even he showed some integrity with to the tools of image enhancement (not much, some) compared to the other bozos who spend hours staring at photos from Mars and imagining all kinds of weird and amazing things. For example, here’s one that’s supposed to be a “complete side view of a fossilized fish”. Look upon it, and believe!
Oh, I better explain. The photo in the middle is an actual fossilized fish, from Earth. The picture at the top is a Martian mesa which someone thought looks like a fish, kinda like how this cloud outside my window right now looks like a woman’s breasts. In case you are unconvinced by the resemblance, the bottom picture is the same as the top one, with the fish drawn in by hand. That should persuade you, right?
Conveniently, they tell you what photo it’s taken from: it’s Mars Global Surveyor M0807345. Here’s a higher resolution photo of the same feature. The fishiness is even less apparent.
NASA also provides the scale for the image. That mesa is about 750 meters long! Somehow I don’t think it’s a fossil fish, unless they grew really big on Mars.
But there’s more! Here’s a feature that looks like a sculpted Olmec head, if you squint so hard your eyes are closed.
Those of you who didn’t quite close your eyes might have noticed something else: this is the very same feature that was called a fossil fish above. One orientation, fish; rotate it 90°, it becomes a stylized human head.
Shouldn’t someone have stopped at this point and realized that the similarities are entirely in the viewer’s head? But no, that’s no fun, not when you imagine you’re on the track of Martians. So let’s get weirder.
Here’s a picture of the Martian landscape; you can see the “fish” near the top. The rest looks like a jumble, so we’ve got to fix that with some sophistimacated image processing techniques. See the red line? They’re going to take everything on the right side of that line, and duplicate its mirror image to the left side, because apparently that’s how Martian brains work.
And when you add a plane of mirror symmetry, MAGIC!
It’s a tiger! Don’t you see it? It’s obvious!
You know, this is what our brain does all the time. Add a hint of bilateral symmetry (or cheat blatantly and artificially create the bilateral symmetry), and our brains fill in the details and impose an interpretation on it.
I’m sorry, Martian fan-guy, but all your photos show are rough-hewn mesas and barren fields strewn with rubble.
Sye Ten Bruggencate, the obnoxious presuppositionalist, has been on a spammin’ rampage lately — he’s got some new video he’s plugging, and I suspect it’s the usual tripe — you can’t disprove god, and the True Atheist has to set aside some tiny bit of provisional doubt for his premise, therefore… ☆ ☆ JESUS ☆ ☆.
The True Pooka describes how to deal with this nonsense.
I’ve been sharing the same message for years — in fact, just last night I did a podcast on The Place with Dr. Michael W. Jones (I’ll include a link once it’s available) in which I discussed the Christian bait-and-switch of announcing they have evidence for “god”, which is usually some natural feature which is evidence for the existence of our universe, not their zombie-onna-stick. I don’t share this trait with Jerry Coyne, who reserves some remote possibility that a god exists; I’m willing to go on the record and state with complete finality that no god exists. That’s not because I have complete knowledge of everything in the universe, but because the believers are utterly incapable of telling me exactly what their god is — it seems to be quantum jello, oscillating at an impossibly high frequency with an amplitude that spans galaxies.
So let them get specific. Let them describe their god with sufficient detail that I can actually test its existence; so far, the only consistent detail they’re willing to offer is that it is invisible and untestable (which leaves one wondering how they know about it). It puts them in an interesting state, in which our lack of knowledge is the only thing that allows them to make extraordinary claims about nonexistent beings, but committing to any one detail collapses the whole vibrating edifice and makes it testable — and then the whole lie unravels.
And don’t let the “scientific” skeptics fool you: wobbling in a state of pointless vagueness is not somehow an epistemically superior condition to having specific testable claims, it’s far, far worse. It’s a state of being not even wrong.
Oh, no. I had just begun to absorb the astounding implications of the Space Ape Theory, when along comes Henry Gee to blow my mind with a new theory of proboscidean evolution.
Q: Why do elephants paint the soles of their feet yellow?
A: So they can hide upside down in bowls of custard.
So, all you need to do is find elephants with yellow feet, and the fun can begin. Elephants have trunks, obviously, which they can use as snorkels while so submerged, and also as navigational aids – the tip of the trunk is very sensitive to touch, which is useful in an opaque medium such as custard. Their thick, leathery skin is quite plainly an adaptation against the heat of the custard. Tusks are devices for forcing an elephant’s way through custard that has started to congeal.
I am sure you can think of more.
You may laugh, but think about it: the whole story hangs together perfectly. Every feature of the elephant can be explained in the context of this theory. Furthermore, it’s predictive and guides future research: as an example, the greater diversity of proboscideans in the past implies that there may have been a more diverse array of puddings available in the Miocene-Pliocene, and different species may have specialized to hide in tapioca or spotted dick. Further, there may have been co-evolution; dare I suggest that perhaps the currants in some puddings evolved to feed the elephants and encourage them to hide in their bowls?
That “I am sure you can think of more” is typical British understatement, but bodes well for the productive future of this powerful theory.
Catherine Deveny, that wonderful godless Australian comedian, was kicked of out of a hotel tonight — but not for being a god-hating militant atheist. She was ejected for being a pacifist who has been criticizing our eternal state of war.
The Grand cancelled my booking after pro war trolls objected to my anti war stance. The Grand cancelled my booking on the ground I damaged their brand. Tellingly The Grand was very happy to take a booking from Today Tonight trolls to harass me, other customers and Mildura residents. Today Tonight exists solely to make dumb and hateful people dumber and more hateful. You choose. Every time you spend a dollar you vote on how you would like the world to be.
I just asked them on their facebook page ‘If a comedian with anti war opinions damages your brand, what is your brand and what do you stand for?"
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Quality-Hotel-Mildura-Grand/245077038846605
She may have left that comment on their site earlier, but it’s gone now.
What really pissed off a lot of people is that she dared to criticize ANZAC Day, that sacred commemoration of the perpetrators and victims of war.
As you might expect, many of the furious patriots defending their national honor from an uppity woman responded with rape threats. I don’t think they know what honor means.
It’s a very familiar story: atheist student sits in class, looks up, notices the school administration has plastered the walls with pious Bible nonsense, and sics the FFRF on ’em.
The usual response occurred: the town is up in arms, local churches whine about “Christianity under attack!”, bullies begin lashing out at those who don’t go to church, Christians start claiming that the majority rules, therefore they get to violate the constitution.
The amazing thing is that Pulliam is still optimistic that he’ll be able to finish up his last year of high school there without serious repercussions. He has high hopes that the students and teachers will not hold his actions against him. I hope he’s right — not just for his sake, but because it would be good to see signs that the religious fanatics can back down when they’re clearly in the wrong.
Gary Marcus, the psychologist who wrote that most excellent book, Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind
Marcus goes after two representatives of this fuzzy-thinking concept. Schmidhuber is an acolyte of Kurzweil who argues for a “computational theology” that claims that there is no evidence against his idea, therefore the universe could be a giant software engine written by a great god-programmer. Eagleman is a neuroscientist who has gotten some press for Possibilianism, the idea that because the universe is so vast, we should acknowledge that there could be all kinds of weird possibilities out there — even god-like beings. “Could be” is not a synonym for “is”, however, and science actually demands a little more rigor.
Some people love to claim that an absence of a single definitive test against an idea means that it is perfectly reasonable to continue believing in it. Marcus will have none of that.
In particular, Eagleman, who drapes himself in science by declaring to “have devoted my life to scientific pursuit,” might think of each extant religion as an experiment. Followers of many religions have looked for direct evidence of their beliefs, but (by Eagleman’s own assessment) systematically come up dry. And, crucially, statisticians have shown decisively that a collection of failed efforts weighs more heavily than any single failed effort on its own. The same thing happened, of course, when scientists looked for phlogiston, and cold fusion, too. Nobody has proven cold fusion doesn’t exist, but most scientists would assign a low probability to it because so many attempts at replicating the original have failed. Any agnostic is free to believe that his favorite religion has not yet been completely disproven. But anyone who wishes to bring science into the argument must acknowledge that the evidence thus far is weak, especially when it is combined statistically, in the fashion of a meta-analysis. To emphasize the qualitative conclusion (X has not been absolutely proven to be false) while ignoring the collective weight of the quantitative data (i.e., that most evidence points away from X) is a fallacy, akin to holding out a belief in flying reindeer on the grounds that there could yet be sleighs that we have not yet seen.
That’s why I’m an atheist. Not just because there is no evidence for any god, but because all the available evidence points towards natural processes and undirected causes for the entirety of space and time. I wish people could get that into their heads. When we atheist-scientists go off to meetings and stand up for an hour talking about something or other, we generally aren’t reciting a religious litany and saying there’s no evidence for each assertion; rather, we go talk about cool stuff in science, how the world actually works, what the universe really looks like…and our explanations are sufficient without quoting a single Bible verse.
Ray Comfort is a very nice person in person, but there’s a price to pay: Heina warns us all of the deceptive uses of politeness. I agree, but then I’m from Minnesota, where assassination by niceness is endemic (we transplants are fully aware that “nice” is a wicked backhanded compliment when used properly, which native Minnesotans seem to be able do unconsciously and effortlessly).
Don’t worry, I’m not likely to forget that while he’s smiling at you to your face, Comfort is also disgorging toxic waste and ignorance out of his ass.
I’d apply, except that 1) I already have a job, 2) I don’t meet most of the qualifications, and 3) my ferocity might frighten David Silverman.
Public Policy Director
American Atheists, Inc., a non-profit and nonpartisan educational and advocacy organization dedicated to the separation of religion and government and the equality of atheists, is seeking a qualified individual to take a leadership role in the development and implementation of its public policy activities. Responsibilities may include:
• Arranging and taking meetings with Congressional and Administration officials.
• Drafting action alerts for mass emails to American Atheists members.
• Collaborating with coalitions of national nontheistic and secular organizations to create better outcomes for the nontheistic community in everyday life.
• Monitoring federal legislative and administrative policies.
• Monitoring state actions for bills and laws that violate the separation of religion and government.
• Developing policy proposals related to secularizing the tax code
• Preparing comments and other position statements.
• Other tasks as assigned.Candidates should have at least 3 years of professional experience in public policy and legislative affairs and have a degree in law or related to public policy as well as knowledge of the Constitution, federal government, and the tax code; excellent analytic and problem solving skills; creativity and leadership; knowledge of the legislative process; ability to work independently; and excellent written and verbal skills.
Well-qualified candidates will have Capitol Hill experience and a demonstrated commitment to the nontheistic community or separation of religion and government issues.
American Atheists’ headquarters is in New Jersey; this position will be based at a satellite office in Washington, D.C.
Salary will be commensurate with experience. Additional benefits include paid sick, holiday, and vacation days; health insurance and dental insurance.
Please send a cover letter, resume, and a writing sample related to public policy or a public policy issue to [email protected]. Applications will be considered on a rolling basis until June 3, 2013.
Ooh, “Developing policy proposals related to secularizing the tax code”? Hint, hint. More of that please.
