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.

Christian hypocrisy and profiteering at Oklahoma Joe’s

It’s very common for restaurants to partner with local causes, declaring a special night where some percentage of the profit from the evening will be kicked back into the charity. It seems like every week I’m getting an email from some university organization teaming up with Pizza Hut or Pizza Ranch or some place — it’s a good deal for everyone involved, because the restaurant gets extra business, the organization gets a few dollars, participants get food.

So Camp Quest Oklahoma teamed up with Oklahoma Joe’s Bar-B-Cue and hosted a night where 10% of the receipt would support Camp Quest.

Except…

At the very last minute, the restaurant announced that they were a Christian business and refused to honor the deal. After all the promotion was done, they reneged on the 10% deal.

The owner/asshole generously offered to allow all the incoming atheists to spend their money at his goddamned business, but wasn’t going to honor the agreement to donate part of it to the cause. They benefit from the advertising, obviously, but got out of any payout — pure profit at the expense of the heathens.

Hemant is asking everyone to donate to Camp Quest Oklahoma to compensate. But then, he’s nicer than I am.

Allow me to mention Oklahoma Joe’s review pages on Yelp and TripAdvisor and Urban Spoon. I think it is only just that everyone warn other atheists and freethinkers of the unfriendly and bigoted atmosphere of this parasite’s restaurant. I wouldn’t want to make the mistake of going there if I were in town, and I’m sure other atheists would appreciate the information.

Donating to Camp Quest Oklahoma would also be nice.

JT is also promoting a little punitive internet justice.

Head and heart, atheists

Talk about sucking all the motivation out of me…I was all primed to write today about this Islamophobia nonsense that is still going around. It seems to be the latest bogus argument against atheism: why, atheists are just all bigots who hate Muslims, the complainers say, instead of actually addressing the fact that religion a) lacks a truthful foundation, b) lacks any method for investigating the accuracy of its claims, and c) uses that lack of evidence to excuse the most odious social behaviors. While there certainly are islamophobic individuals, to claim that this is the primary motivation for New Atheism is simply ridiculous and contrary to everything the major proponents (I refuse to call them “leaders”) of this movement have written.

And then Sam Harris wrote his response to the controversy.

I just give up. And not in a good way, mind…I think he shot himself in the foot again. He has made a set of arguments that completely ignore what the critics have been saying and don’t rebut much of anything at all.

First off, beginning by accusing all of your critics of being bigoted poopyheads for calling you a bigoted poopyhead…not a good move.

A general point about the mechanics of defamation: It is impossible to effectively defend oneself against unethical critics. If nothing else, the law of entropy is on their side, because it will always be easier to make a mess than to clean it up. It is, for instance, easier to call a person a “racist,” a “bigot,” a “misogynist,” etc. than it is for one’s target to prove that he isn’t any of these things. In fact, the very act of defending himself against such accusations quickly becomes debasing. Whether or not the original charges can be made to stick, the victim immediately seems thin-skinned and overly concerned about his reputation. And, rebutted or not, the original charges will be repeated in blogs and comment threads, and many readers will assume that where there’s smoke, there must be fire.

If calling Sam Harris a “racist” is a low blow and unfair and difficult to disprove, what about calling people “unethical”? I don’t think Glenn Greenwald is unethical at all; I think he has been a consistent and ethical proponent of liberal and progressive values throughout his career. He has not shown the kind of frothing derangement at confronting atheists that Chris Hedges has shown, for instance. Greenwald objects to things Harris has written, and explains why. Harris does seem thin-skinned. He has said a few things that many others disagree with, me included, and to get upset at principled disagreement on those matters reeks a bit of objecting to any criticism at all.

I don’t think Harris is islamophobic, but I disagree on other things, and for disagreeing with him on racial profiling and agreeing that the atheist movement is not perfect, I got labeled “odious”, “unscrupulous”, a “troll”, and responsible for distorting his views and damaging his reputation. The mechanics of defamation can work both ways, Dr Harris, and you seem to be very capable of it yourself, while simultaneously placing your affronted dignity on a pedestal and being outraged that anyone would question it. Defending your views would look less thin-skinned if you weren’t constantly prefacing your defense with that exasperated sigh that it is so unfair and demeaning that you have to do so.

It’s just more footshooting. And then, for further target practice on distal digits, the third paragraph is a beautifully written, lucid distillation of exactly what annoys many people about Harris. He’s got a real talent for this.

Such defamation is made all the easier if one writes and speaks on extremely controversial topics and with a philosopher’s penchant for describing the corner cases—the ticking time bomb, the perfect weapon, the magic wand, the mind-reading machine, etc.—in search of conceptual clarity. It literally becomes child’s play to find quotations that make the author look morally suspect, even depraved.

Aaargh. That’s the whole problem. Look, Spock is a caricature, not a paragon; retreating behind the fog of philosophical abstraction is precisely the kind of behavior that has given atheists a bad name. When talking about profiling people to improve airport security, forget about the fact that it is targeting human beings for special indignities. When talking about the possibility that torture might work sometimes, forget about the reality of human beings causing and receiving dehumanizing agony. When considering the possibility that Muslim fanatics might get nuclear weapons, argue that we might just be justified in vaporizing millions of human beings to prevent that possibility.

There’s a place for playing philosophical games when thinking about trolleys and vats and logic puzzles, but when it comes down to real world thinking, reducing hugely complex problems to simplified abstractions does not provide clarity at all, only confusion and false conclusions. Right now, this country is facing the consequences (well, a good portion of the country is trying to ignore the consequences) of this kind of robotic pseudophilosophical argument. We had people making rationalizations for all-out warfare against a country that we claimed to be a clear and present danger on the basis of having weapons of mass destruction, that we argued was ruled by a brutal dictator who should be prevented from doing more harm, and on the basis of those widely promoted “corner cases”, we murdered hundreds of thousands of civilians, shattered a country’s infrastructure and opened it up to corporate exploitation, and drained our finances dry pouring more and more cash and blood into a brutal war.

You do not get to make these cold calculations while leaving out the human element — the fact that we atheists, as a people supposedly dedicated to reality and truth and respect for the potential of the human mind, can so callously dismiss personal experience and the lives of the people at the heart of these hypothetic scenarios and thought experiments is precisely the reason their author is so easily made to look “morally suspect, even depraved.”

Harris does a good job of bringing up the fuller context of some of the quotes that he feels have been excerpted to misinterpret him, but he seems incapable of recognizing that what he considers a justification merely compounds the problem. Somehow, the moral calculus only goes one way. We are allowed to contemplate (in a rarefied philosophical way, of course) bombing or torturing or isolating people who have a slim chance of contributing to harm to us, but somehow we never consider that perhaps the people on the other side are making the very same calculation, considering that they are amply justified in bombing or torturing or isolating those privileged Westerners, because we might harm them.

And sadly, they have better empirical evidence of real threat.

Now I’m not excusing terrorist actions. Quite the opposite: I reject them unambiguously and fault them for failing to appreciate the humanity of their opponents. And if I do that, I cannot fail to similarly reject such actions taken to protect my side. No excuse can justify nuking or torturing my people, so no excuse can justify nuking or torturing anyone else…especially considering that the United States has more blood on its hands than any other nation.

This is not the time to invent elaborate philosophical justifications for abhorrent actions — it is time to unhesitatingly reject them, to express our grief and shame and horror at these options. It is not enough to bloodlessly pretend it’s a philospher’s penchant. We need to consider the human cost, and weight that most heavily.

Harris’s ability to distance himself from everything and view people’s personal pain dispassionately, as he does in all of his responses, is what’s hurting him, and he doesn’t even seem to be able to recognize it. Even when I share his respect for philosophy and science, I cringe at his inability to express a proper appreciation of the humanity of his subjects. I don’t think he’s a robot, but when he dries up and goes all academic and philosophical, he gives an awfully good impression of one, and I think he makes a lot of his arguments from that arid ground of the abstract, rather than the heart of his humanity. I’d pass along a suggestion from another philosopher who was able to see the importance of the individual:

We have to touch people.

Virginia is for lovers…of similar skin tone and opposite sex who don’t touch each other’s genitals with anything other than their own

The worst attorney general in the world has to be Virginia’s Ken Cuccinelli, who has been on a crusade to promote a far right conservative social agenda.

The Washington Post wrote that Cuccinelli has been ”the most overtly partisan Attorney General in Virginia history” and ”has waged war on Obamacare, harassed climate-change scientists, sanctioned discrimination against homosexuals and embraced Arizona’s (now mostly gutted) immigration law.” Cuccinelli waged an all-out assault on academic freedom by using state resources to sue a University of Virginia Professor who was researching global warming, and bullied members on the State Board of Health into shutting down abortion clinics by threatening to sue them.

But I’m hoping now that he has finally crossed the line with an effort to control people’s sex lives.

Although most people think sodomy laws have been unconstitutional since the Supreme Court’s 2003 ruling in Lawrence v. Texas, Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli would like to explain why — in his view — that’s not so.

What’s more, he wants the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals to agree with him and uphold the constitutionality of Virginia’s sodomy law — which makes anal and oral sex between people of any sex a crime — in the process.

Yes. Ken Cuccinelli has a platform of outlawing blow jobs. Anyone campaigning against him in the future needs to remind the Virginia electorate of that.

The ark builders

Apoplexy is such an antique disease. I’d hate to die of it, just because is so unfashionable, but every time I read one of these stories about Answers In Genesis, I feel an attack coming on.

Yeah, they’re working on building a replica of Noah’s Ark. It’s all part of their plan for defrauding the public. The author talked to people at the existing creation “museum”, and hit one of those points that spike my blood pressure.

When I was at the Creation Museum I got talking to Greg Duck, an industrial courier who was visiting from Texas. He said his favourite part was a video where a creationist paleontologist who is digging alongside one of his peers says: “I start with the Bible. My colleague does not. We come to different conclusions because of our different starting points.” Duck said: “That is tremendous perspective.” I asked him if he believed in creationism. “Oh yeah,” he replied. “You’ve got to follow the facts.”

It’s the first lie the Creation “Museum” hammers at you: ‘we’re all using exactly the same evidence, it’s just that we’re using that same evidence plus the bible.’ Yet the reverse is true.

What AiG doesn’t tell you is that there is a vast and consilient array of facts that demonstrate that a dinosaur fossil, for instance, is over 65 million years old. We’ve accumulated all these methods that lock together to agree on the age; and these are the same methods that lock together to support modern technology. They provide for a gigantic library of facts tested and reinforced by reality that testify to the age of the earth.

The Bible has one brief poetic passage on its first page that gives a cursory, non-specific, unverifiable assertion by authority that the creation was brief and teleological, with no date specified. Some Christians, not all, have interpreted those passages to mean the earth is less than 10,000 years old. In fact, historically fundamentalist and evangelical Christians have accepted the old age of the earth; this demand that it must be 6000 years old is a fringe belief that was made mainstream by fanatics in the 1960s. It requires actively rejecting the majority of the data, the testimony of the rocks and stars, in order to make a completely nonsensical claim.

The gullible courier is not following the facts. AiG has to hide the facts and lie about their determination in order to make this utterly outrageous claim that they are taking the totality of the information into account.

Besides being built on lies, their intent is simply vile. They are true believers in Old Testament morality.

Marsh, the ark designer, has similar concerns. He said he had watched humans “become more sensual, more dangerous, more self-centred” – just as they did in the licentious society punished by the biblical flood. As a reminder, before park visitors reach the ark they will walk through a stucco-walled sin city filled with the evils of pre-flood society, which he has decided will include prostitution, torture and cage fighting. On the other side will be a Tower of Babel and a ride themed on the plagues unleashed on Egypt, among them a river of blood and swarms of locusts. “We basically have retribution through this whole thing,” Marsh said.

Shouldn’t it bother us all that the basis for their arguments about morality are built on fear of a retributive event that didn’t happen? That we’re supposed to quiver in fear of a godly wrath that is nothing but a falsified myth?

Happy 9th Paul Nelson Day!

It’s a dying holiday, I’m sorry to say — I completely forgot it last year. But I was reminded this year, so I’ll mention it again. I think the proper way to celebrate it is simply to laugh at a creationist today.

The source of the holiday is a remarkable exhibition from Paul Nelson, who like several other creationists, loves to register and present at legitimate science conferences. The barriers are low, and many conferences are intended to give students an opportunity to present, so you’ll often find that all you have to do is send in a fee and an abstract and you’ll be allowed to put up a poster in an allotted space for a few hours of time. So Nelson showed up at the Developmental Biology meetings in 2004 with a poster titled “Understanding the Cambrian Explosion by Estimating Ontogenetic Depth” in which he and Marcus Ross claimed to have been collecting data measuring some parameter called “ontogenetic depth” in various organisms.

I was at that meeting. I asked him about that in person, and also in blog posts afterwards. How do you measure ontogenetic depth? Share your procedure so I can assess and replicate it, which is what scientists are supposed to do. He hemmed and hawed and hmmphed and in typical Nelsonian fashion babbled and burbled on, and the upshot was that he couldn’t tell me just then, but he had something he was writing and he’d polish it up and get it to me the next day, 7 April. He didn’t. We’ve been watching the 7th of April pass by for nine years now.

I think he’s felt the sting of mockery. In 2010 he announced that my criticisms were invalid, but he was inventing Ontogenetic Depth 2.0, which still isn’t defined and still doesn’t have a procedure.

In 2011 he posted some more essays on his fictitious method, in the first of which he announced that ontogenetic depth is A Biological Distance That’s Currently Impossible to Measure. Yeah? So why was he presenting a poster at a serious scientific meeting in which he and his colleague claimed to have been measuring it? Sounds like scientific fraud to me.

But then, Intelligent Design creationism has been scientific fraud all along, so I guess he was just following hallowed tradition.