Sexism is a problem we should address

Let us dig up a grave and gnaw on some old bones. USA Today has just now gotten around to an article on that elevatorgate tempest. Fortunately, I think it takes the right tack; it takes the perspective that sexism isn’t particularly a problem of the atheist community, but that what’s going on is that the atheist community is taking the problem seriously and is trying to address it.

Yet many, including Watson, say Elevatorgate is less a calamity and more an opportunity to welcome women and other minorities into a community that’s long been dominated by white men.

“The majority of emails I have gotten have been from men who said, ‘I had no idea what women in this community went through, and thank you for opening my eyes,'” Watson said. “There has actually been a net benefit coming out of this that I think has made everything worthwhile.”

No one is suggesting the freethought community is more sexist than other segments of society — after all, the most famous American atheist, the late Madalyn Murray O’Hair, was a woman. [And what about Ellen Johnson, Margaret Downey, Susan Jacoby, and so many other atheist leaders? –pzm]

Nonetheless, the incident has struck a chord, perhaps because atheists and other skeptics pride themselves on reason and logic — intellectual exercises that theoretically compute to equality.

They’ve got a few quotes from me in there, too. I tried to make the point that whenever I’ve brought this subject up with meeting organizers, they’ve been very receptive, recognize the problem, and try to deal with it. What this one incident did was expose a small, fringe group of obsessive sexists who suddenly had the privileges they took for granted questioned…and oh, how they did squeal, and continue to squeal.

The bad news is found in the comments. It’s as if most of the commenters didn’t even bother to read the article. The comments section at USA Today is a grisly sight — I don’t recommend it unless you’re strong of stomach. A few samples:

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Dr Oz crosses the line

Usually, Oz just dispenses pointless pap and feel-good noise, but now he’s antagonized the agriculture lobby. On a recent show, he claimed that apple juice was loaded with deadly arsenic — a claim he supported by running quick&dirty chemical tests on fruit juices, getting crude estimates of total arsenic, and then going on the air to horrify parents with the thought that they were poisoning their children.

One problem: his tests weren’t measuring what he claimed. The FDA got word of the fear-mongering he was doing, and sent him a warning letter.

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How stupid is your worldview?

Gah, I hate flowcharts. And I hate pathetic attempts to explain philosophy with a flowchart.

Most people, I’ll wager, have a pretty hazy relationship to spiritual beliefs. For example, there are Christians who don’t go to church, Jews who don’t believe in God, and agnostics who don’t really believe in God but also say they’re spiritual. If you know exactly what you believe in, then consider yourself lucky. For the rest of us, this handy infographic, created by Cameron Blair of The Fellowship for Evangelism in the Arts, lays out an astonishingly wide array of religious thought into one deceptively simple flowchart.

Ugh. That thing is hideous — it’s another example of how religion makes ugly everything it touches.

It forces everything into simple binary choices: “deceptively simple” is right.

The entire right two-thirds of the graphic is dedicated entirely to Christian suppositions, asking questions that only matter to an evangelical Christian. The worldview of the ‘artist’ is all that’s explored here.

The left side does nothing but fuss over where the godless find meaning, as if that’s the most important thing we ever worry about. And then all it does is split everyone into categories…categories that are not mutually exclusive.

As long as we’re making flowcharts that are ugly, pointless, and simplistic, I thought I’d make my own, which is mine, which is far better than the one above.

Does god exist? → NO → Correct. Have a cookie.

↓
YES
↓
You’re a deluded moron.
Goodbye.

There. Done. Easy.

I can take a suggestion. Here’s a prettier version of my flowchart.

Believe in mad rubbish because it’s good for you

Scott Stephens is the Religion and Ethics editor for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation online, and he’s a bit of a whacker — he’s one of those cranky apologists for religion, and he really, really despises those awful New Atheists, as you’ll see. He was recently in an intelligence2 debate, on the proposition that “Atheists are wrong” — his side, the affirmative, lost. He has just posted his position on the debate, titled The Unbearable Lightness of Atheism, and it’s easy to see why he didn’t fare so well. It’s a bitter diatribe informed only by his own ignorance and his deeply held conceit that god is real and religion is good, and therefore atheists must be wrong.

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Lists

As I’ve mentioned before, one annoying property of Christians is that they keep lecturing us on what atheists believe…and they’re always wrong. Here’s a suggestion next time they do this to you: tell them to go look at these two lists written by atheists and get their stories straight.

My favorite creationist web page of all time

I just had to share. Look at this sample: at least 5 different fonts, 6 different colors, shadowed text, and all superimposed on an irrelevant and elaborate background.

And then there’s the content: It’s a creation museum! It’s a taxidermy collection! And it’s run by some antique tools!

Savor the Creation Museum and Taxidermy Hall of Fame of North Carolina; I don’t think it will change any time in the near future, so there’s no hurry. It’s so nice of creationists to erect these monuments to stupidity and tastelessness on the web.

(Also on Sb)

I think his money is safe

A professor at the University of Minnesota, Steven Miles, is offering a $1000 reward for the name and release of the medical records of the person Michele Bachmann says became mentally retarded after getting the HPV vaccine. I’d like to see that, too.

One unexpected consequence of Bachmann’s accusation: Rick Perry is now defending science.

Perry himself has weighed in. “You heard the same arguments about giving our children protections from some of the childhood diseases, and they were, autism was part of that,” he told NBC News. “Now we’ve subsequently found out that was generated and not true.”

I guess Rick Perry just lost Jenny McCarthy’s vote.

Next debate, I’d like to see Bachmann promote creationism and pooh-pooh global climate change, just for the unusual spectacle of seeing Republicans rushing to puncture her claims by citing real science.