All it takes is a breakfast cereal to trigger a confession?

Being for civil rights, for equality, and for science is so obviously anti-Christian. Why would want to be associated with Christianity then?

Yeah, I know Ham likes to pretend that views contrary to his are anti-science, but keep in mind that this is a guy whines when science points out that the Earth is over 6000 years old, that T. rex didn’t use its teeth to eat coconuts, and that humans showed up on Earth over 60 million years after dinosaurs went extinct.

I’d love to visit Italy, but I don’t think I could afford the fines

An Italian photographer, Oliviero Toscani, made a few casual remarks about the Catholic church on a radio show.

Imagine to be an alien who has just landed in Italy. You enter in a beautiful Catholic church, without knowing anything about religion. You enter and you see a bloodied man hanged and nailed to a cross, an altar with naked babies flying, Saint Bernard without the skin… I believe that a masochist club wouldn’t be such at the upfront.

I’m not an alien, and I was raised as a tepid Lutheran, but I have to say that’s exactly right. That’s how I’ve always felt about Catholic churches — the iconography is brutal and extreme, with bizarrely explicit statues of a dying man writhing on a cross, and worship of saints who died grisly deaths. Catholic churches in North America aren’t even the worse — I visited a cathedral in Quito that had the most horrible illustrations of Hell proudly displayed all around. An Edward Gorey book is less infatuated with miserable deaths than the Catholic church. I find a John Wick movie less unsettling than a Catholic ‘Lives of the Saints’ book.

Toscani wasn’t saying anything remarkable, just what ordinary people who aren’t steeped in the Catholic tradition see. Except that Italy has blasphemy laws, and he was tried and convicted and penalized €4000 for his remarks. The judge even said this:

Defining Christ on the cross as “someone hanged” is a manifestation of the profound disrespect for the values of Christianity, disrespect comparable only to the worst propagandist language of a Muslim fundamentalist preacher.

I take it, then, that I’m allowed to insult Muslim fundamentalism in Italy, but not Catholic fundamentalism? Cool, cool.

I guess the United States isn’t the only nation with a judiciary corrupted by religion.

Classic nutritional quackery

Mikhaila Peterson has a snazzy name for her diet: The Lion Diet.

The Lion Diet: Ruminant meat, salt, and water. Organs incorporated if you’d like but not necessary. High fat cuts to stay in ketosis or added tallow (ruminant meat fat). Fasting as you feel necessary. Eating every day isn’t necessary but most people like 1-2 meals per day.

That’s not quite right. If you look at her list of allowed foods, it includes a lot of green leafy vegetables, and just minimizes carbohydrates, so it’s not as horrible as it sounds. A diet of nothing but meat is something that no human society has ever tried, so you know that it’s not something we’re well-adapted to…but lots of individuals have tried all kinds of wacky combinations.

What’s really horrible about it are her exaggerated medical claims. It seems to cure just about everything. She hasn’t yet gone on to claim that it cures cancer, too, but give her time.

CEO of The Lion Diet, Inc. #𝐋𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐃𝐢𝐞𝐭 : 𝐁𝐞𝐞𝐟, 𝐬𝐚𝐥𝐭, 𝐰𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐫 = complete remission from severe autoimmune arthritis, and depression.

She really relies on the notoriety of her father to “sell” this crap (it’s not clear what this CEO could be selling, other than Patreon memberships; you’ve already got the complete summary of the diet). She claims to have “cured” him of all kinds of problems.

My dad suffered from a number of health problems too. Not like me, but the same depression and similar fatigue and weight gain. Gum disease and skin problems and GERD. He’s fixed too. He lost 50 pounds in the first year on this diet. For anyone who watches his videos, you can see the difference from December 2015 to now.

Sure. His emotional problems are all gone now. He’s not a weeping wreck anymore.

Poor man. It’s weird how he breaks down because mobs of people criticize him on the internet, but his advice to everyone else is “Man up, bucko”.

Speaking of hypocrisy, it’s also amazing how so many skeptics gullibly follow anecdotal dietary advice and accept grand claims of cures simply because the quack peddling them is related to the guru they follow.

Atheism as a fandom

Oh god…I’m watching this video about how the alt-right infiltrates fandoms, and the tactics they use to radicalize members, and I’m suddenly realizing he could be talking about movement atheism, and that I watched this all play out in the last decade.

For instance, there’s the bit where they redefine the bits they don’t like, like feminism, as political, and we can’t have our group divided by politics…and at the same time conveniently redefine alt-right attitudes as apolitical. Then there’s the elevation of micro-celebrities as representatives, not because they’re particularly good people, but because they conform to the mores of the vocal minority. Or the fact that poor arguments are repeated over and over, precisely because they are bad arguments and aren’t going to win anyone over on their quality, so they have to reaffirm it to themselves and find solidarity as a chorus.

Have you ever heard an atheist declare that “all atheism is is a disbelief in god”? Think about it. That’s an argument that’s going to win no one over; it’s certainly not going to persuade anyone outside the core fandom that “Hmm, maybe I ought to give that a try”. Yet it’s the go-to claim of insular atheists to shut down any substantive discussion of goals and principles! This pseudo-apoliticism is exactly what’s allowed atheism to become a haven for the right. While on one hand feminism is declared to be a cancer that causes Deep Rifts, on the other, well, Libertarianism is just natural good sense.

Think about the takeover of the Atheist Community of Austin while watching the video. He’s not talking about atheism specifically at all, but it fits so well.

The good news is that it makes me feel better about having been mobbed out of the movement. The bad news is that atheism has been knocked out of the social conversation as a force for bettering humanity. It’s become just another toxic fandom.

Emerson McMullen and the non-existence of history

Emerson Thomas “Tom” McMullen has opinions about evolution. He is a Historian of Science, Technology, and Medicine, though, and his opinions are hosted on the official website of Georgia Southern University, so maybe we should take a look at them. He has a lot of them, and they all seem equally well-founded, so I’ll just peek in at one, his claim that common descent is not scientific. Here’s his short summary of his thesis:

While we see natural selection in nature, we do not observe descent from a common ancestor happening today. That fact, taken by itself, makes the idea unscientific. Nevertheless, the idea of descent from a common ancestor does make testable predictions. These are: 1. Over time, life changes significantly. 2. The change is from simple to complex. 3. The change is from one ancestor to diverse offspring. 4. The change involves many transitional forms/intermediates.

Right away, I’m stopped cold by the claim that we do not observe descent from a common ancestor happening today. What a peculiar thing for a historian to say! Common descent is a historical process that occurred over billions of years, so of course it isn’t happening “today”. Similarly, the rise and fall of the Roman empire went on for over a thousand years; does the fact that we don’t see Romulus and Remus building a city, Augustus inheriting an empire, and the Byzantines falling to the Ottoman Turks today mean that none of it happened? This makes no sense. Just as the rest of his arguments make no sense.

So here we go. 1. Over time, life changes significantly: he claims this is false because…

Stomatolites [sic] were made by algae that were thought to be extinct. Then in the 1950s, a scientist found them alive at Shark Bay, Australia, where a high saline environment deters predators. These algae have remained unchanged over eons. They did not evolve. How about that? The oldest living beings we know about never changed!

He has a philosophy degree, but he doesn’t seem to understand that you can’t disprove a general, diverse phenomenon with a single example. What about all the organisms that did change? There weren’t any monkeys or spiders or dinosaurs in the Precambrian. There aren’t any dinosaurs in the Cenezoic. You don’t get to ignore all the significant changes to Earth’s biota to claim that one example means none of it occurred! Further, I’d add that superficial similarities don’t mean that modern stromatolites are genetically identical to ancient ones.

His next argument is to say that evolution claims 2. The change is from simple to complex. This isn’t true! Evolution makes no such claim, so it is a false criticism.

All the Cambrian fossils abruptly appeared, complex and fully adapted to their environment. This is the anomalocaris, which can grow up the six feet long. One of the animals it eats are trilobites. The authors of The Fossils of the Burgess Shale (Briggs, et al.) remind us that “the appearance of diverse shelly fossils near the base of the Cambrian remains abrupt and not simply an artifact of inadequate preservation.” Obviously, this complexity is not predicted by descent from a common ancestor, which says life began simple and became more complex.

Except…no. What he slides right over is that the Cambrian was about a half billion years ago, with 3½ billion years of evolution before it. Living organisms were complex before multicellularity and hard parts evolved, and this was a transition in response to a changing environment, with phenomena such as bioturbation and increasing atmospheric oxygen. Furthermore, the Cambrian wasn’t an instantaneous event — we’re talking about ten million years of change, at least.

You could argue that the evolution of the first cell was an example of increasing complexity, and I’d agree. However, that complexity arose rapidly, and what’s been happening over the last few billion years is an exercise in permutations.

Next is an odd one, 3. The change is from one ancestor to diverse offspring. He doesn’t think the fossil record illustrates a long history of diversity.

I have seen biologists write that evolution explains diversity, but the evidence from the fossil record is just the opposite. As mentioned earlier, during the “Cambrian explosion of life” many different animals, like trilobites, abruptly appeared with no predecessors. The late Stephen J. Gould wrote a popular book, Wonderful Life, on the diversity of Cambrian fossils in the Burgess Shale. Gould points out that these Cambrian fossils include “a range of disparity in anatomical design never again equaled, and not matched today by all the creatures in the world’s oceans.”

That’s a new one. So, the fact that biologists have described spectacular examples of biological diversity, and that far more diverse forms have existed than are now extant, is evidence that evolution doesn’t produce diversity. He’s putting biologists in the untenable position of every example of diverse, new forms is, to his mind, an illustration that diversity did not and never existed.

So now let’s lapse into foolish familiarity with 4. The change involves many transitional forms/intermediates. Oh, no, the no transitional forms argument!

In his [Darwin’s] Origin he asks: “Why then is not every geological formation and every strata full of intermediate links?”(p.280) He answers that the geological record is incomplete. But that was nearly 150 years ago. We have found billions of fossils all over the world since then. The prediction of innumerable transitional forms falls flat on its face, and, from a philosophy of science standpoint, the idea of descent from a common ancestor is falsified.

Finding lots of fossils does not refute the idea that the fossil record is incomplete, and Darwin’s original explanation is still entirely correct. For instance, Stegosaurus species span something on the order of 10 million years in the late Jurassic, and there had to have been billions of them living over that time. We have about 80 fossils. If we doubled that number, would we have a complete fossil record of the genus?

Like so many of Dr McMullen’s arguments, they fall apart into a rubble of innumeracy, illogic, and ignorance. It’s curious that he became an emeritus professor at Georgia Southern, and they let him teach courses on his version of “science”, and that he’s got all this bogus crap on a university website.

This is the price of academic freedom, I guess. I don’t understand how he got past a hiring committee, though — how did a history department end up employing someone who doesn’t understand history? There’s a story there, but since it isn’t happening today we obviously are unable to examine it, and like all of history, only happened in the fleeting moments when we open our morning newspaper.

Just wives

For all you masochists out there who want all the details, Stephanie Zvan has published a thorough timeline of David Silverman’s firing.

I want to bring up one thing that bothers me deeply, but doesn’t get emphasized much. Silverman’s actions, even if they were consensual (and I don’t believe they were) lacked consent from one other significant person: Silverman’s wife. I don’t even know her name, but her long relationship with this man was cruelly wrecked by his actions, and that’s a betrayal that strongly affects my feelings about the guy. It was a rotten thing to do, and he did it repeatedly. Even if he were magically reprieved of everything else (again, not that I think he can be), it means that personally I would never be able to trust him again. How you treat your partners in the deepest relationships in your life matters.

Likewise, Richard Carrier cheated on his wife, another nameless person who is left out of the narrative.

I have no problems with the diverse forms of relationships human beings can have; open marriages, polyamorous relationships, no sexual relationship at all, whatever. It’s all good when all participants have mutually agreed to the terms. People who unilaterally break those terms and harm the people who trusted them…those are actions of deep shame and require greater amends than this casual dismissal of an event that broke apart families and caused lasting hurt. Yet now those women are discarded and ignored.

So no, those men can never be my real friends, and I hope for the best for those ignored women.

He seems unperturbed by his own actions.

Fuck off, Dave.

Remind me to never cross Sikivu Hutchinson

Not getting up from this one.

She wields a Broadsword of Brutal Honesty +5.

The recent decision by Atheist Alliance International (AAI) to hire the former leader of American Atheists, David Silverman, to its executive director position is yet another indication that this business-as-usual rehab strategy also applies to movement atheism, which can be just as corrupt, cronyistic, and swaggeringly hostile to women as corporate America. Last year, Silverman was fired from American Atheists after allegations of sexual misconduct and financial impropriety were made against him. The claims leveled against Silverman by two female accusers were extensively detailed by BuzzFeed‘s Peter Aldhous, whose 2018 article notes that one of the women was reluctant to use her full name “because of concerns about hostility experienced by other women who have made allegations of sexual misconduct against prominent atheists.”

As I wrote in a September 2018 piece for RD, Silverman was one of several male atheist leaders who’d been accused of sexual misconduct. According to The Friendly Atheist blog, AAI reached out to Silverman via a friendship with a board member, then created a paid executive director position expressly for him. Must be nice. While women of color in all sectors are routinely shut out of entry level, middle, and executive management positions, white males get carte blanche, have positions of authority created for and handed to them; then receive multiple breaks and opportunities for redemption when they screw up.

Is AAI paying attention? Their choice of a shiny* new paladin just alienated a leading light of the black atheist community, and got decapitated for his trouble. This is probably the biggest PR screw-up an atheist org has committed in ages.

*It’s only shiny because of the thick layer of slime around his armor.

You don’t have evidence for most of your beliefs. Get used to it.

Spotted on Facebook. Hated it.

I am a very critical thinker, which is why I am an Atheist — I don’t believe in things for the most part, unless there is evidence.

That’ bullshit. I’m an atheist, too, and I’m trained in science, and shocker…most of the things I know I don’t have evidence for. I can’t possibly. There are too many things. I haven’t tested whether brushing my teeth every morning actually prevents tooth decay. I haven’t even read any papers on the subject! It makes sense, and I suspect it’s probably true, and it’s a reasonable practice, so I’ll keep doing it. If I have to, like if there were some surprising statement that countered my subjective belief, I might look it up, and I trust that there have been scientific experiments to verify it, but right now I believe it in the absence of known evidence.

Likewise for every other mundane experience. There is electrical current coming out of my wall sockets when I plug things in, and I accept that as evidence that the wiring in my house is actually functional, and that it’s hooked up somewhere to a power supply, but I haven’t actually traced that wiring back to the (probably) coal plant that is generating electricity for me. The fact that my computer is working right now is evidence for something, sure, but the majority of the “things” that make it work are mostly assumptions on my part.

What I actually have is a consistent worldview built on a model I’ve tested on a few key points, and that seems to hold up well under most circumstances. That’s all any of us have. You can be a devout Catholic who believes in transubstantiation and the trinity and dead saviors rolling back stones, and you can say exactly the same thing — your model of the universe simply includes some fundamental assumptions mine doesn’t, and vice versa. You can even carry out the same logical process that I do with my wiring. You can say you’ve done spot checks of the pieces of your theology that matter to you now, and they hold up, but just as I haven’t visited the coal plant, you haven’t yet visited Heaven. You get satisfaction out of your weekly Mass, just as I’m happy with my house wiring and tooth-brushing, and that’s enough for now.

One difference, though, is that I’m a fan of testing my assumptions, mostly. We have this scientific method we use that allows us — even encourages us! — to examine and verify the stuff we don’t know, even if, to be perfectly honest, we can’t possibly examine everything. A scientist or a philosopher is going to inspect key assumptions now and then, and try to build better models of the world as they go, sometimes throwing out perfectly serviceable models, like religion, for others that get some, but never all, of the details better. Never lose sight of the fact that we’re all dealing in approximations, however, and most of what we think is true is actually simply consonant with our current model.

That’s one of the dangers of the kind of atheism held by the guy I took that quote from. It was taken from a conversation in which he actually refuses to consider evidence against his deeply held belief that women who accuse men of harassment are not trustworthy, and he offered up that statement as a testimony that his beliefs are all true, because as an atheist, he doesn’t believe in false things lacking in evidence. It’s a dangerously cocky dogmatism that far too many naive atheists support, where the fact that he has examined a few key points in his worldview (although, more likely, he’s had them handed to him when he read a book by Dawkins), means he has therefore verified all of his opinions with evidence. If he believes it, it must be a fact, because otherwise he wouldn’t believe it.

You’re supposed to practice this idea called epistemic humility. An awful lot of atheists seem to lack it.

The parasitic load just keeps getting bigger

Yesterday, Secular Woman posted an article about these harassing lawsuits by harassers, specifically mentioning the pending litigation by Richard Carrier and David Silverman. These are just the facts.

Richard Carrier was accused of persistent sexual advances and responded by suing two of his accusers, a nonprofit organization that reported banning him from their events, one blogger who collected reports of his behavior from him and others into one place (full disclosure: Stephanie Zvan is vice president of Secular Woman), one blogger who reported receiving reports for further investigation, and both blog networks on which these posts appeared.

Three years after his original suit was filed, Carrier is reduced to two remaining lawsuits. He continues to sue a former student group leader and the atheist blogger who said the claims against Carrier would be investigated. The other suits were dismissed with prejudice for jurisdiction or because the statute of limitations ran out while Carrier fought to keep his suit in a state without anti-SLAPP statutes. None of his claims or those against him have been heard in court, despite him recently telling a judge that was all he wanted. The defendants have spent well over $100,000 on their defense.

In April 2018, David Silverman was suspended from American Atheists after unspecified allegations were made against him. Shortly thereafter, he was fired after a review of “internal documents and communications related to the initial complaint as well as evidence relating to the additional allegations brought to the Board’s attention”. A Buzzfeed News article states that the original allegations involved “financial and personal conflicts of interest” and the additional allegations involve sexual assault.

In September of this year, Silverman filed suit against Buzzfeed, American Atheists, its president, and its chair. He also filed suit against another board member and both his accusers, claiming they had conspired against him. He did this despite both claiming he’d only been damaged by the financial allegations and being on record elsewhere as knowing one of these accusations dated back to at least 2013.

The purpose of these lawsuits is to disrupt and dissipate our efforts. The people who do these things are not our allies — they are opportunists and parasites. As atheism has grown, it’s become a fertile field to exploit, and there have been a lot of bad people taking advantage of us.

The only things lawsuits like these can do is use up the time, money, and energy of our movement and further discourage our activists from speaking up about how they have been treated. As a movement, we’ve spent years fighting past legal threats to warn people about those among us who abuse their power, like Lawrence Krauss and Michael Shermer. This work is critical to keeping our activists and building a stronger movement. If we want them to work for and support us, we must look out for them.

Secular Woman has a simple suggestion.

We at Secular Woman know that many secular organizations and activists already privately denounce lawsuits like these. Some do so publicly. We thank you for that. But we also urge that, as a movement, we work to get better at not rewarding disruptive, punitive, costly lawsuits like these.

Like, for instance, giving the litigious leeches prominent leadership positions in your organization.

Reminder: Marcus is auctioning off knives for our legal defense fund. I’m beginning to think that big, sharp, wicked-flashy knives are the most appropriate item for atheists to acquire nowadays. Also, as always, you can donate directly to our legal defense fund.

AAI did what? They hired who?

Atheist Alliance International has hired David Silverman to be their executive director.

I can’t even.

Silverman is the controversial former head of American Atheists. He was fired after allegations of financial conflicts and sexual assault. He used his position of power to manipulate women and abuse them, and was swiftly drop-kicked out of the movement when these allegations came to light.

“He physically pressed me to the wall and began to kiss me forcefully, grabbed my breasts, and put his hand into my leggings where there was actual penetration of my vagina,” she wrote.

R. believed Silverman knew she was interested in BDSM and wrote that he began using insulting language, calling her a “dirty little whore.” He then pushed her to her knees, “where his penis briefly made contact with my mouth,” she wrote.

R. got her feet and said “no,” she wrote. Silverman then lightly slapped her face and said, “You don’t get to say no to me.”

At that point, R. said the widely used BDSM safe word, “red,” which stopped him, and then she left. The next day, R. took photographs of bruises where she said Silverman had grasped her, and these pictures were included in her complaint to American Atheists.

Silverman has admitted to taking advantage of his position to indulge in infidelity and have sex with women in the movement. And this is who AAI thinks would be a great person to have on board?

Wishing David a very warm welcome, Gail Miller, AAI’s President said, “David is a well-known public atheist, a powerful leader and a compelling public speaker. He has proven management and organizational skills including leadership of national & local organizations in the U.S. He is a personality who makes things happen.

He will grow public awareness of AAI and our campaigns, he will help the board develop strategy and he will help manage campaigns to ensure they deliver for atheists everywhere.

I’m thrilled to have him on the team.”

Is she even aware that he is currently suing his former employer, and various other people, for his dismissal? This litigious person with a sordid personal history is who they’ve chosen to represent their organization? I agree with one thing, that he will grow public awareness of AAI. It just won’t grow the kind of reputation they want.

This is simply the weirdest, most controversial PR decision they could make, and I don’t understand any of the reasoning behind it. I’m going to assume that some rich, #metoo hating guy somewhere — there’s no shortage of misogynistic jerks in atheism — is applying pressure to the organization to hire the alleged sexual abuser, because that’s what they do. I’ll be curious to discover who’s making big donations to AAI, because this is not an act to make the rank and file happy, but is more likely to be catering to some privileged asshole. Or, I suppose, Gail Miller could be outrageously ignorant about what’s been going on in atheist communities.

What an interesting message this sends: if you’re caught out slapping women and trying to force them into sexual behavior, you might get fired from one atheist organization, but there’ll be another waiting to rescue you and put you in another position of power and influence. Like the Catholic Church, they’ll just shuttle you off to another parish.

Good people are jumping ship from AAI over this hiring decision.

It’s looking a bit like the Atheist Community of Austin debacle, with heavy handed regressive individuals wrecking a solid community.