Thank you, crowepps

Bad news: I’m informed offline by Mattir that fellow hordeling crowepps has passed away, not particularly expectedly.

She wasn’t the most loquacious commenter here, and I didn’t know her at all aside from reading what she wrote here. But I always liked what she had to say.

She was funny:

I am boggled by the lack of logic behind “Make me a sammich.” Seriously, so you don’t want to listen to someone’s opinion, you want to treat them as having no more value than a household appliance, so you send them into the kitchen, where all the *poisons* are, to prepare food? Want a side of Valium overdose with that, or just a garnish of the traditional rat poison?

I didn’t know her well enough to say with certainty that she made the world a better place — those who knew her can weigh in on that — but she definitely made Pharyngula a smarter place. Thanks for that, crowepps.

 

Why should anyone have to read your goofy holy book?

This is truly getting ridiculous. The Independent has published a story claiming that atheists face an Islamophobia backlash, and the first thing I have to do is take exception to the premise. A “backlash”? Seriously? Dawkins has been hit with this “backlash” nonsense from the day The God Delusion hit the stands in 2006; he has had a colony of fleas (like this one, for example) leaping on his coattails and announcing that the great backlash has begun from the very beginning. I daresay there was a “backlash” on the day the first hominin looked at the rock his tribe was worshipping and grunted, “it’s just a rock” — of course, the backlash then was more like a backswing with a handaxe, but it was the same sentiment.

When the popular culture has been howling for centuries in protest at any expression of the idea that there is no god, you don’t get to use the word “backlash” any more, OK? You don’t get to pretend that this nonsense is something new. It’s just a “lash”, yet another in the commonplace droning torrent of complaint. And they don’t have a single original idea in that complaint, either.

This is the crux of their disagreement.

The opening broadside began earlier this month with a polemic from Nathan Lean on the Salon.com website. Lean, a Washington DC native and Middle East specialist who has recently written a book about the Islamophobia industry, was prompted to pen his attack following a series of tweets last month by Professor Dawkins attacking Islam in snappy 140 character sound bites.

“Haven’t read Koran so couldn’t quote chapter & verse like I can for Bible. But often say Islam [is the] greatest force for evil today,” the Cambridge evolutionary biologist wrote on 1 March.

For a man who has made a career out of academic rigour the admission that the author of the God Delusion hadn’t studied Islam’s holy book surprised many and led to a flurry of responses from both fans and critics alike. Three weeks later – in an apt illustration of Godwins’ Law (the idea that as an online discussion grows longer the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one) – Dawkins added: “Of course you can have an opinion about Islam without having read Qur’an. You don’t have to read Mein Kampf to have an opinion about Nazism.”

Richard Dawkins hasn’t read the fucking Koran. He hasn’t read every word of every hadith, either, neither Shia nor Sunni. He isn’t an Islamic scholar. He doesn’t know Arabic, so he hasn’t read the text in the original language, either, which purists will insist is the only way to study it…and if you study it, the purists will also insist that you are not allowed to criticize it. Once again, atheists are getting hit with the Courtier’s Reply, and it is rank bullshit.

The holy books of any religion are just collections of rationalizations, inconsistent and incoherent, with only the weakest relationship to the religion as it is practiced. Most of the practitioners of a religion have not dedicated their life to studying the texts, either; they have lives to live. You can get a better idea what a religion is about by studying what the believers actually say and do, and what practices are current in their culture: Christians, Jews, and Muslims all claim to be built on the Abrahamic foundation of the Old Testament, but studying that text isn’t going to allow you to predict what each of those religions are doing. Sunni and Shia both claim to be following the Koran; Quakers and Catholics claim to follow the Bible. Somehow they’ve built completely different faiths from the same starting point. If I am concerned about priestly pedophilia in the Catholic church or female genital mutiliation by some followers of the Koran, it is simply a distraction to tell me to go read their holy books — they won’t have anything to say about the subjects.

I can condemn pedophilia and FGM without knowing a word of Arabic or Aramaic, without spending a few years in a seminary, without receiving detailed interpretations from a sanctified religious authority. To imply that not reading those worthless books is a failure of academic rigor is sleazy and dishonest, because the atheists in question are not making a critique of the text, but of the politics and behavior of individuals and culture.

Even if I hadn’t read any of the Bible, I could still castigate the violence and oppression carried out by so many good Christians, in the name of their lord, against gays or women or Muslims or anyone different or foreign. Similarly, without reading word one of the Koran, I can categorically reject honor killings and terrorism and misogyny.

In addition, if I’m confronted with a strong claim made from a holy book, I can compare the specific argument with reality; I can have the believer explain to me what it means to him or her, and then address that interpretation directly. For example, without reading the whole of the Koran, I could discuss a 58 page exegesis of Muslim embryology by a true believer, and critique what he said, what his translation of the text said, and what he claimed were direct predictions of his interpretations. Are you going to tell me that I really needed to learn Arabic and read the whole of the Koran to do that?

Because that’s exactly what the gullible faith-heads want to tell me to do, too. When I criticized the two sentence summary of all of embryology from the Koran (shouldn’t it be enough to point out the necessary poverty of such a brief explanation?), one blithering believer told me my problem was that I couldn’t read the rich and very expressive language of the Koran…so rich and expressive, apparently, that an entire modern biology text fits into a few lines of poetry.

Knowing both languages; Arabic and English, I clearly understand why Hamza Tzortis needed to use many dictionaries to explain the meaning of this verse in such a script. The Arabic language is rich and very expressive. The translation can never give you a clear picture. From having a first language education in Arabic, I can tell you that the words in the Quran are not as simple as a “drop of fluid” but do need this much explanation that he provided to make the words’ meaning be shown. Having an advanced study in Biology, I can directly relate and fully agree that the words of the Quran are an exact match to embryonic development stages in humans. Furthermore, I can assert that the knowledge from the Quran extends beyond this to all stages of human life and after death and describes in great detail the stages of the first creation of man which was different from the usual process of reproduction, thereby superseding the current level of scientific knowledge.

That’s simply goal-post shifting and dishonesty: I don’t believe for one minute that the author of that excuse had any advanced knowledge of biology.

As for the Mein Kampf argument, I consider it totally appropriate and a perfect example of what I’m talking about. Does anyone really need to read Hitler’s manifesto before they can honestly decide whether the Holocaust was a good thing, or a bad thing? Is it OK if I think right now that starting a global war that led to 60 million casualties is an unforgiveable evil, or are you going to tell me that somewhere in Mein Kampf there might just be a cunning justification that will cause me to change my opinion? Only if I read it in the original German, of course.

Spare me. Yet another unoriginal whine from the tens of thousands we’ve gotten from the faithful in the last decade, not one word of which addresses the source of the conflict between atheist and theist, leaves me cold and unimpressed.

But I’ll tell you what. Show me one scrap of reasonable scientific evidence that this Allah character actually exists, and I promise I’ll read the whole of the Koran. If it’s really convincing I’ll go off and study Arabic. But until then…telling me to waste a big chunk of my life reading another collection of pretentious babbling mythology is not going to be a good enough excuse to stop me from rejecting the stuff you actually say and do and believe in the name of an imaginary ghostly ape in the sky.

Nightmare fuel: Kermit Gosnell exposed

gosnellclinic

The grand jury’s report on the Gosnell Women’s Medical Services clinic (pdf) is freely available online, with photographs. It’s 281 pages of gag-reflex-inducing horror.

Gosnell was living the good life: the report estimates he was bringing in almost $2 million a year, a number that is only approximated from the number of abortions he was doing and the amount he was charging, because he always dealt in cash. He had a small group of poorly trained, non-professional people doing much of the ‘medical’ work — including at least one high school student who was administering tests and drugs to patients — and idled at home most of the day, coming in in the evening to do procedures. Procedures that he himself was not qualified or certified to do.

He carried out many late-term abortions, often past the legal cutoff (his procedure was to do a crude ultrasound, manipulate the results, and claim the fetus, no matter how old it was, was 24.5 weeks old). His style was cheap, lazy, and harmful to the woman. The standard procedure was for the women to come in during the day, and his staff would administer drugs to induce labor — even in women 30 weeks or more pregnant — and then send them in to the bathroom, where they would ‘deliver’ into the toilet. The toilet would sometimes get clogged with aborted fetal tissue.

Sometimes the fetus would be delivered alive, and at an age where, if this were done in a hospital, the newborn would have a good chance of surviving. Gosnell’s job as a doctor was to take these squirming, sometimes crying babies, and stab them in the back of the neck with a pair of scissors to kill them.

Sometimes, too, the women died.

All this was done in a filthy clinic cluttered with obsolete and broken equipment. There were bloodstains on the stirrups of the gynecological tables. There were jars with bits of fetuses snipped off and stored in preservatives. He was constantly late in paying for medical waste pickup and disposal; there were leaking bags of aborted tissue in piles in the basement. The staff complained that sometimes he was lazy and left the dead fetuses in shoe boxes out in the clinic, so they’d be greeted by the reek of rotting flesh when they walked in the door in the morning.

He had been doing this for decades. His clinic was constantly overlooked or given a pass by the government agencies responsible for inspections and standards. That’s the stunning part of this story, that he actually got away with murder for so many years. How could that happen?

Bureaucratic inertia is not exactly news. We understand that. But we think this was something more. We think the reason no one acted is because the women in question were poor and of color, because the victims were infants without identities, and because the subject was the political football of abortion.

I suspect that part of the abortion football game was the fact that women who were desperate, who knew they were stretching the boundaries of legality and convention, were unlikely to complain to the authorities about a clinic that was delivering services (incompetently and often fatally) that they needed. Gosnell was living high on the absence of clean, licensed, professional women’s medical services in many parts of the region — he could get by with criminally substandard treatment because our government has been actively destroying the ethical and competent competition.

If my abbreviated summary above is enough to sicken you, I strongly recommend that you don’t read the grand jury report. It’s hundreds of pages of explicit evil.

They shall regret feeding my megalomania!

I’ve read some of the comments on this post by Richard Carrier, and the comments on his video, and together with all the comments I get declaring that I am the God-Emperor of Atheism+, that it’s all my idea (and that it’s an evil, awful idea), and that Freethoughtblogs has a uniformity of thought dedicated to promoting Atheist+ Purity, I’ve decided to give up and just accept the role that has been foisted on me and all of this network. So, first, I’m launching the new Atheism+ recruitment drive.

killthisdog

Next on the agenda is the coup that has long been in planning. Ed Brayton is nominally in charge of FtB, but as we all know, he’s only my puppet. It’s time for me to emerge from the shadows, depose the frontman, and seize the throne. To Rebel Is Justified! FtB will be my base of operations for world domination.

Next, I will be seizing control of the means of production and the propaganda organs of Atheism+. I understand there is a group of other people who think they are the leadership, but they are mere poseurs — the people have declared that I am the Great Leader, so we shall take care of them with a triumphant Revolution. Any recidivists will be purged in the subsequent purification. Smash the Gang of However Many They Are!

We will then begin Atheism+’s Great Leap Forward, with industrialization and collectivization of the masses to advance the cause, for Great Victory. Peasants Shall Be Workers! All Will Unite Beneath ME!

Finally, appearances will at last conform to the reality that is floating fuzzily about in the heads of our enemies.

Did Richard Carrier have to remind me…

…that I was responsible for the Thunderf00t fiasco here? I don’t pay any attention to his videos any more, but Richard carried out an amazingly thorough dissection of one of his recent videos that, as seems to be common nowadays, rants and raves about Freethoughtblogs, feminism, me, and of all things, minorities in atheism. I spot-checked some of Richard’s claims about the video — he references timestamps throughout — and was astounded to hear Thunderf00t actually sneer with contempt at the idea of broadening atheism’s appeal to a wider audience.

You know, all these deranged angry anti-social justice atheists are always complaining that FtB is trying to kick them out of atheism, but we aren’t — we don’t have that power or any authority at all (do they even realize that this is just a blog network with no jurisdiction over anything other than our local traffic?) The real situation is that people like Thunderf00t are doing an awesome job of marginalizing themselves.

#HumanistSolidarity with Bangladesh

The International Humanist and Ethical Union has issued a call to action on the Bangladesh situation. It’s gotten worse than I thought.

bangladesh-anti-atheist-protest

Islamist political parties have provided government with a list of 84 "atheist bloggers" and are demanding the death penalty for "insulting religion". Several bloggers have already been arrested and a government official promised to pursue all those listed.

Crowd at Islamist rally against atheist bloggers in Bangladesh

Last week, we said the government would be "walking into a trap set by fundamentalists" if they gave any succour to these demands. But they did. And on Friday a rally on the order of 100,000 Islamists marched in Dhaka (video) calling for a new blasphemy law and for the execution of the atheist bloggers. Earlier this year a prominent atheist blogger was murdered in a machete attack at his home, so we are also concerned about the safety in public of those accused of "blasphemy".

So there’s something else that would disappear in a world without gods.

It’s a call to action; so what are we supposed to do?

They have four simple suggestions: express your dissent online (I know you can do that!), rally and protest, contact your ambassador to Bangladesh and express your concerns, and contact the Bangladeshi embassy. They have suggestions at the link for how to do that.

You know, it’s getting very hard to argue that atheism is not a human rights issue when people are being jailed and murdered for expressing their conscientious beliefs.

I had a vision last night. A vision of a world without gods.

I went on a twitter rampage last night. It was just too much: a day of incessant bland dumb Mormon bleating at me, then the skeptics once again expressed their contempt for atheism (more about that later), followed by a parade of stereotypes about us awful atheists, who are unlike our skeptical brethren in hating our religious family members and coming to our conclusions by irrational means and being just generally dumb and average, they say. It was exceptionally irritating to once again see people who should be allies sweeping atheist concerns aside with an air of smug superiority.

Oh, gosh, so that’s what it feels like for women and minorities…

Anyway, the final straw was DJ Grothe, who, in replying to someone who said they wanted him to pay as much attention to atheist issues as he does gay issues (a point I definitely strongly disagree with: no one gets to dictate what matters to someone else), made the statement that gay concerns are very, very different than atheist concerns, and we shouldn’t conflate the two. Again, a point I agree with 100%.

But then he had to take a step too far and suggest that atheists don’t even have clearly definable goals. He asked, “What would winning look like?”, as if we lacked any kind of vision at all.

You know, all I have to do is look at all the aggravations, great and small, petty and significant, that are caused by the overwhelming privileges given to the religious in this country, and I can see clearly a lot of things that would improve if faith were kicked off its undeserved pedestal.

So I buried poor DJ for about an hour, just riffing on how life would be different if religion weren’t so oppressively dominant. I probably drove off a few twitter followers, but hey, it was so easy…and I could have kept going for a few more hours. You should feel free to add your own to this list.

  • You want a list?

  • Atheists could get elected to high office.

  • Piety wouldn’t be a qualification for high office.

  • Our kids wouldn’t be bullied because they don’t attend church.

  • Idiots wouldn’t be defining public policy by its conformity to the Bible.

  • Our schools wouldn’t be silent on “controversial” topics like evolution.

  • America wouldn’t be launching crusades against the foreign heathen.

  • Women could get abortions when they needed them.

  • There would be rational, evidence-based sex education in the schools, rather than religiously dictated abstinence only.

  • Nor did I say they would be. RT @DJGrothe: Wouldn’t be similar. Atheists not in a struggle for liberation equal to oppressed minorities

  • Huge chunks of every community’s tax base wouldn’t be stolen to support lies.

  • .@DJGrothe You asked what winning would look like for atheists. I’m telling you. I’m not saying it would be the same as gay rights.

  • My car wouldn’t be keyed if I had a darwin fish on the bumper.

  • Environmental policy wouldn’t be shaped by people who believe the world is going to end in their lifetimes.

  • Neither would foreign affairs or military policy.

  • Maybe the arts would be as well funded as religion.

  • I wouldn’t have public chimes installed down the street that blare hymns at me every 15 minutes.

  • And a city council that considers enforcing a noise ordinance sacrilegious.

  • The local high school would stop bringing in anti-gay, anti-drug, up-with-god groups for assemblies.

  • I agree it was false. You’ve said we can have different goals. I’m explaining them. RT @DJGrothe: I just pointed out the false equivalence

  • Women wouldn’t be forced to wear the burqa.

  • Women wouldn’t be executed for “immodesty”. Honor killings would end.

  • Condoms would be distributed in Africa. Everywhere, for that matter.

  • Victims of disease & accident would be seen as victims of chance, not stigmatized as sinners.

  • Churches would close. Not all of them, but enough to be replaced with *real* community services.

  • 46% of the American population wouldn’t believe the earth is less than 6000 years old.

  • No more war on Christmas! Secular holidays that prioritize families and people, not sterile rituals and dogma.

  • Institutions that shelter child rapists would be dismantled.

  • We could have death with dignity.

  • Puritans wouldn’t be dictating our sexual relationships.

  • A Baptist could marry a Lutheran or a Jew a Catholic, and their families wouldn’t freak out.

  • Children wouldn’t be labeled by their parent’s irrational beliefs. They wouldn’t be pigeonholed at birth.

  • The science section in your local bookstore might be as big as the faith and religion section.

  • I would stop getting email that contains litanies of my post-mortem torture.

  • Children wouldn’t die in agony because their parents believe in faith healing.

  • Scoundrels and charlatans would have a harder time fleecing their flocks without god’s imprimatur.

  • We’ll recognize that our fate is in our hands, not some invisible benign being’s.

  • We wouldn’t have to put up with football players claiming the Almighty Lord of the Universe helped them get that goal.

  • The Gideons would be handing out real literature rather than the same dumb book over and over. They’d promote literacy, not faith.

  • No more bible colleges. Liberty University would close. Young people would have to get real educations.

  • We’d see ourselves as one tiny fragile speck in a vast universe, rather than the privileged focus of all creation.

  • Humans would no longer see themselves as the only important organisms on the planet. We’d have to recognize our place in an ecosystem.

  • An end to god-soaked talk radio!

  • Imagine Republicans no longer able to swaddle themselves in God and Country…just Country.

  • We’d expand stem cell research — no more pretense that a blastocyst was a full human being…or had the same rights as a woman bearing it.

  • The God Particle would just be called the Higgs Boson.

  • Priests & other believers wouldn’t be haunting the sick & dying in our hospitals any more.

  • Theology would be as dead as alchemy. It would be replaced with history, anthropology, psychology, sociology…real disciplines.

  • We’d no longer pretend that memorizing the Bible was a fit qualification for counseling unhappy people.

  • Priests would finally be free of the need for pretense. They could be people again, and serve in secular ways.

  • Marriage wouldn’t be a prison, but a partnership that could be dissolved without guilt, or maintained by mutual respect and love.

  • We could question EVERYTHING. End religious shibboleths.

  • Religiosity would no longer be a shortcut to morality. People would actually have to BE good, to be regarded as good.

  • No more consoling the grieving by telling them lies. No more fear-mongering with stories of hell.

  • Donating money to a church would no longer be considered charity. How about donating to a real charity instead?

  • Mormons would have to wake up to the fact that their history is bullshit.

  • Goodbye, missionaries. Hello, secular aid.

  • Televangelists would be scorned as scoundrels.

  • All those poor sad priests would have their vows of celibacy lifted. And there will be rejoicing. By the priests, at least.

  • Pope: fired. Vatican: turned into a really great museum.

  • Islamists would stop killing apostates. Authors and comic artists could live free again.

  • Ultra-orthodox Jews would stop spitting on little girls. Liberal Jews would stop mutilating little boys’ penises (so would everyone else).

  • Religious butchers could stop torturing animals in the name of halal and kosher foods.

  • The ordination of women priests would become a moot point.

  • The ordination of gay priests would become a moot point.

  • The shortage of Catholic priests would no longer be of any concern.

  • We would at last recognize that Timothy Dolan has absolutely no qualifications to be consulted on matters of public policy.

  • Ditto, Rick Warren.

  • We could admire churches for their architecture, rather than deplore them as centers of oppression.

  • No more madrassas. No more replacing knowledge & understanding with rote memorization of dogma.

  • “Tradition” is no longer sufficient reason to keep doing stupid things.

  • No one sensible will try to claim the Ten Commandments are a fit foundation for jurisprudence.

  • Atheist organizations will shut down, their job done.

  • Writing lists of how good life would be without God will be as silly as writing lists of how good life would be without ghosts.

Small things, big things. It’s only when you stop for a moment to think about it that you realize how much faith-based noise we’re drowning in here in the US. I don’t have a god-shaped hole in my heart as much as I do a huge amount of Jesus-shaped deadweight piled on my shoulders.

The dark side of open access journals?

The New York Times has an article on the rise of predatory, fake science journals — these are journals put out by commercial interests with titles that sound vaguely like the real thing, but are not legitimate in any sense of the word. They exist only for the resource that open access publishing also uses, the dreaded page charge. PLoS (a good science journal), for instance, covers their publishing costs by charging authors $1350; these parasitic publishers see that as easy money, and put up cheap web-based “journals”, draw in contributors, and then charge the scientists for publishing, often without announcing the page charges up front, and often charging much, much more than PLoS.

Nature has also weighed in on problematic journals, again emphasizing that it’s a bad side of open access. I think that’s the wrong angle; open access is great, this is a downside of the ease of web-based publishing, and is also a side-effect of the less than stellar transparency of accreditation of journals. There are companies that compile references to legitimate journals, and they are policing the publishing arena by refusing to index fake journals, but that isn’t going to be obvious to the reader.

One really useful resource, though, is this list of potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access journals. I notice that our old friend, The Journal of Cosmology, is listed, deservedly (I wonder if Jeffrey Beall, the author of the list, has had his face photoshopped onto pictures of obese women in bikinis as a reward?) It’s missing De Novo, the fake journal created by Melba Ketchum specifically to publish her Yeti DNA paper — but maybe that one isn’t threatening to sucker in authors, since it’s more of a vanity project.

I also notice that the major creationist journals aren’t on the list: Acts&Facts, the Answers Research Journal, and BIO-Complexity. Maybe it’s because they’re real journals?

Ha ha ha ha. Sorry, couldn’t resist. Scientist humor.

Maybe it’s because they’re so obviously fake and associated with such blatant ideological nonsense that no real scientist would be tempted to publish there.

Yet another case of anti-atheist discrimination in Tacoma

The incredibly talented and pleasant Shelley Segal is going to appear in Tacoma, Washington! You should go, every time I’ve heard her I’ve enjoyed it. Only thing is, the venue that was originally booked suddenly pulled out (at least this one gave advance notice!)

We had originally booked a coffee and ale shop called Anthem in the middle of downtown Tacoma. It was a new venue (for us), the staff was incredibly friendly, and it looked like the perfect all ages venue for a show like this. We discussed doing the event there, and they were on board.

That fell apart this morning, when I received an email from the booking folks. It was a polite, professional email, but the intent was very clear. I’ll quote the relevant part:

This isn’t something that we feel comfortable promoting or hosting because it doesn’t align with what we believe and stand for.

Anthem Beverage & Bistro, Tacoma

Additionally, the CC field included an address at “Eternity Bible College,” something that wasn’t in the original thread. So, we we’ve been booted from the venue, and they wanted us to know why.

Man, Christianity ruins everything, doesn’t it? Strangely the coffeeshop has a statement of vision and values that nowhere mentions obedience to fundagelical bullshit, and instead babbles about “integrity” and “community” and stuff that the atheist community also values…but apparently they’re all talk, no action.

They have a yelp page, but since they did at least give the organizers a little time to find a new venue and didn’t pocket any profits, they aren’t quite as vile as Oklahoma Joe’s. You might drop a note there about their hidden Christian agenda, though.

What you should definitely do, though, is give your custom to Doyle’s Public House, the new venue. You should especially go there this Sunday, 14 April, at 5pm to see Shelley Segal in a free show!

Argumentum ad Batman

I experienced a brief moment of doubt about my atheism this morning as I was browsing the webcomics. Thanks, Zach Weinersmith!*

argumentumadbatman

I’ve seen this argument before — there are theodicies that claim that evil allows for “adversarial growth”, that the human moral senses are exercised and sharpened by confrontation with evil. But I don’t know…throwing in Batman made it strangely persuasive.

Fortunately, I clicked on the red button at SMBC and was immediately whipsawed back into line.

*By the way, I got to meet Zach this past weekend. He gave a provocative and interesting and intelligent talk — maybe more skeptic/atheist groups ought to consider branching out and inviting him and other people outside the sphere of the usual movement atheists to their meetings.