What should atheists support?

I received a long email complaining about the priorities of American Atheists. To distill it down a lot…

To use American Atheist (AA) resources to continue
pressing issues that are predominantly
LGTB is, in my opinion, a dereliction of duty, unwise
and possibly actionable.
…
Please remember that AA members are,
primarily and traditionally, interested in
separation of church and state issues.

Why?

I agree completely on the importance of church/state separation, and I think it’s important to get religion out of our schools, for instance. But why? Think about the deeper motivations behind atheism.

There are many reasons why people should oppose religion. I oppose it because it’s antithetical to good science, and that religion is used by people to endorse ideas that are contrary to the evidence. I consider that a very good reason.

Another very good reason, though, is that religion is behind many of the most repressive policies in this country. It fosters misogyny, child rape, the oppression of LGBTQ people, and a whole raft of vicious discriminatory ideas that harm those who don’t conform. It’s antithetical to healthy social practices, and that is a perfectly valid reason for atheists to fight back. It’s not just for science, or for anti-clericalism, or for legal agendas…many oppose religion because it is a social ill, and they may legitimately find common cause with other atheists for that reason. LGBTQ people need atheism, too, and they may care about other aspects of our culture than that “In God We Trust” is on our money.

It’s funny how Big Tent Atheism only wants to share the tent with cis het privileged white people who only want to talk about the Constitution as holy writ.

Also, it’s really weird to send me a letter like that when I’ve been ostracized from the formal atheist community for arguing that social issues ought to be as important to us as the scientific and legal ones. They don’t know me very well, I guess.

Our own little basket of atheist deplorables

Peter Boghossian has a new book out. I can guarantee I won’t be reading it if the cover contains blurbs from these people:

“If these people like this book, you should run screaming from its presence. Or chant ‘Klaatu Barada Necktie’ at it.”

Except maybe Sapolsky. What is he doing in that list? Don’t tell me he’s been sucked into the Intellectual Dork Vortex, too!

Speaking of Boghossian, the Portland State IRB has found him guilty, guilty, guilty of violating their guidelines. He’s now prohibited from doing any research with human subjects, or even applying for research grants, until he undergoes remedial ethics training.

That’s some letter he’s proudly waving around. It’s a gigantic black mark on his record that he’s advertising — if some person I didn’t know applied for a job at my university that included a university condemnation of their propriety and ethics, and prohibited them from applying for grant funding, that application would be round-filed so fast it would leave scorch marks as it exited the filing cabinet. That’s a kiss of death.

Wingnut welfare to the rescue! I’m sure a conservative think tank will consider that a beauty mark rather than a blemish. Maybe Prager U will want him?

Cargo cult science in defense of right-wing bias

I found this article on Gateway Pundit. GP doesn’t get enough attention simply because it is run by the dumbest man on the internet and publishes the dumbest articles, so people tend to ignore it, except for its audience of very dumb people, but I thought I’d dredge up some of the sludge because this one pretends to be Science™. Why, just look at this illustration!

Image 1: Sample of the facial analysis results for one video frame out of about 120K frames analyzed.

That looks like a color glossy with circles and arrows, sure enough, and it’s probably got a paragraph on the back explaining what each one was to be used as evidence against Omar. It’s also got polygons! And multiple graphs! And lists! And colors! It’s just densely packed with barely legible information, and kind of reminds me of computer screens from science fiction movies in its generally uninterpretable and confusing layout, designed to bewilder with the awesome technology of it all.

You will not be surprised to learn that this heap of pseudoscientific, meaningless noise is being used to accuse Ilhan Omar of being a liar, since this is Gateway Pundit, after all.

An study of Ilhan Omar through facial, speech and virtual polygraph analysis shows Ilhan Omar is a pathological liar or just not being honest about her stories related to her immigration to the US!!!

Huh. Real polygraphs are useless and inaccurate, I wonder how reliable a virtual polygraph would be? All this “analysis” comes from a crank conspiracy theorist named Yaacov Apelbaum who has software that goes through video clips frame by frame and assigns emotional values to every facial expression, that counts blinks, “umms”, and pauses, and arrives at an interpretation defined by the user, that is, Yaacov Apelbaum. It’s garbage science, mangled by a biased kook, presented as fact.

Does this even count as real data?

Impressive multi-colored squiggles all over the chart, but the end result is a smear. She’s talking about an encounter her family had in Somalia with armed militia who shot up her home, and her stress about that event is being interpreted as proof that she is lying about everything. Worse, though, is that every change in her expression is twisted to mean she’s faking her story, rather than that she is recounting a traumatic incident in her past.

Remember this, everyone. If anything awful has happened to you, the only trustworthy to tell it to anyone is with a stony impassive face, no blinking, and with no pauses or stumbles or stutters, or it’s going to be judged by crackpots like Apelbaum or the goons at Gateway Pundit.

Knock me over with a feather!

Incredible. DJ Grothe — you remember Grothe, right? If not, ask Carrie Poppy, or Stephanie Zvan, or Jason Thibeault, or search for his name on the timeline of harassment and sexual assault allegations, or any of a great many people who faced his mismanagement of skeptic conferences while he was president of the JREF. He opposed anti-harassment policies, buried harassment reports, and was just generally an enabler of all kinds of shenanigans.

Anyway, he just posted this:

I don’t know, DJ. Do you have a mirror handy? A CT scanner? An MRI? An endoscope?

Lots of people struggled so long against his oblivious incompetence, and he has the nerve to ask that question.

A glimpse into the darkness

I police my social media fairly heavily, since I really don’t want to waste time on major bozos. This one snuck through, though.

Yeah, no. Ozone is a greenhouse gas, although a short-lived one that decays fairly quickly. Putting more ozone into the atmosphere isn’t going to help reduce global warming, although the stratospheric ozone layer is a useful radiation filter.

You don’t want to follow that clown. I looked, and it’s all flag-waving MAGA racist garbage, as you might expect.

Would Chris Coons want me to talk about my faith, if I were running for office?

Coons biases are showing nakedly in this essay in which he says Democrats need to talk about their faith, using the example of Sherrod Brown, who got all this attention from the electorate for openly making a big deal of his Christian beliefs. So, he argues, everyone needs to make it part of their stump speech.

What’s implied is that this is a fine strategy for Christians.

Unfortunately, choosing not to talk much—or even at all—about faith and religion has become common in today’s Democratic Party. That choice, I believe, is the wrong one for two important reasons.

First, it hides away the deep, passionate, and formative faith backgrounds of so many Democrats who are seeking or serving in office. At our weekly Senate prayer breakfasts, for example, I’m consistently inspired and moved by the words of my colleagues whose faith is fundamental to their life and their work, but who rarely talk about it publicly.

Second, choosing not to talk about our faith as Democrats ignores the clear fact that America is still an overwhelmingly religious country, and that the Democratic Party, too, remains a coalition largely made up of people of faith—including tens of millions who identify as deeply religious.

I guarantee you that if I were running for office (fortunately, I’m not) Coons would be telling me to hush about the atheism thing. If I were Muslim and running for the presidency, my religion would be a huge issue; that’s a campaign that wouldn’t even get off the ground, all because people like Coons and Brown are making their Christianity a ploy in their run for office.

Someone like Coons would not be consistently inspired and moved by the words of a godless colleague, or one who worshipped Allah, or a Satanist friend. The implication is that only the dominant beliefs in a culture are worthy, and should be expressed loudly, and anyone else should shut up.

How about if instead we recognized that your goofy, irrelevant, evidence-free beliefs should not be part of our government, directly or indirectly, and that making it a prominent part of a campaign is pandering to a biased segment of the electorate? That goes for atheists who might make it a central feature of their campaign for office. I want to know your position on the issues and your proposed solutions, not what phantasm (or absence thereof) you talk to.

Shermer’s disgrace continues apace

Not that it will cost his reputation in the skeptic community anything — he is the master of falling upwards. But recently he has been saying really stupid things on Twitter to defend the alt-right, including this bizarre declaration:

Yeah, right. As we’re seeing in the American concentration camps today, German Nazis didn’t have a monopoly on evil. Ordinary, not-very-bright American Trumpkins are doing a phenomenal job of imitating them right now. Shermer had even more to say, though, including this astonishing canard: Good to remember that Nazi=National Socialism. Not far right but far left. Do we really need to debunk this exercise in naive etymology anymore?

Also, in case you didn’t get the memo, Nazis were not atheists, but were generally Lutherans and Catholics. They also weren’t demonic satanists incarnate.

Anyway, just enjoy Rebecca Watson’s thorough takedown of this skeptic fraud.

Sunday Sacrilege: Expanding Minds & Inspiring Service

I haven’t done one of these in a while — it’s a dispiriting time to be an atheist — but I was inspired by a sign near my house. This is a truly excellent motto.

Expanding Minds & Inspiring Service

That would be a great theme for an atheist community, but of course, that sign was posted outside the Campus Lutheran Ministry Christus House, which is cause for some reservation. Religion does not expand minds, but instead narrows them. You would not go into the Campus Lutheran Ministry and find the pastor explaining how you should question everything, explore the wide world of ideas, and be reluctant to accept dogma, because their mission is to get you to accept their peculiar, limited, tightly circumscribed interpretation of Jesus Christ. The place where you’ll get your mind expanded is a few blocks north, on the campus of the University of Minnesota Morris, a secular institution.

I’m not going to accept the literal truth of that part of the sign. It’s a nice ideal, though. Too bad they don’t implement it.

The second part of the sign, though, “Inspiring Service”, is more legit. I remember from my church-going days that that was a serious and important message. Some of it was self-serving: service meant volunteering for the church or donating money to the church. Some of it was well-intentioned but horribly harmful: we were regularly exhorted to support missionary efforts in Africa. There was also, however, real good that was done. There were food drives to help the poor, visits to shut-ins, call for donations to help those who had fallen sick, requests to assist the elderly. I mowed the lawn of one little old lady who would invite me in afterwards to say a little prayer and praise the Lord. I went along with it, to be nice, and because she definitely didn’t need an argument.

A while later, she died, and she left me a gift in her will: a giant print of “Christ knocking at the door” in a fancy gilt frame. I was told it was because she’d noticed me looking at it in her house, which was true — I had found it remarkably unattractive. I think I would have preferred a decorative lamp as a Major Award, but OK, I accepted it in the spirit with which it was given. It was a nice thought.

My point, though, is that there is an honest and sincere spirit of service in many church-goers, and I think that is a good thing. An important part of a successful movement has to be an ideal of community, and that requires effort to maintain. It requires service.

That got me thinking about atheism. Unfortunately, I think atheism exhibits the inverse of the traits of religion with respect to that motto.

There are close-minded people within atheism, I can assure you of that, but at its best, atheism practices that ideal of expanding minds. I have been involved in programs specifically geared to discuss science, and there are others who’ve worked hard to communicate principles of philosophy ad logic. We can probably all list a hundred individuals who are more interested in taking advantage of the profit potential of atheism — we have our Joel Osteen types — but there are far more atheists who are honestly interested in learning and teaching. We know their interest is sincere, because the ones who do it for pure motives are also the ones who don’t make bank off lecture tours.

But “inspiring service”? Oh god. Ask that of an atheist group and the vast majority will look elsewhere and wander off. The libertarians will clamor for a hanging. YouTube videos will appear condemning everyone of trying to build a petty empire off the membership, or simply shrieking, “HELL NO” at the very idea, and screaming about SJWs taking over. If we wanted to do “service”, we’d join a church. That’s telling, actually. You can’t build a community out of a mob of arrogant individualists who consider contributing to the greater good to be a crime against their independence.

Imagine, though, what a powerhouse atheism could be if it actually implemented the ideals in that sign. Imagine a movement built on teaching and learning, and also on sharing and working together in a community where every member was respected.

We could also imagine if a church actually worked towards both ideals…they’d stop being part of a religion and turn into a secular community. That wouldn’t be a bad outcome, either.

I’m afraid neither are going to happen, though.

Tired, not wired

Wired, the magazine, has a promotional spot for their Team of Experts. I hate it.

Bill Nye, James Cameron, Ken Jeong, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, former NASA astronaut Scott Kelly and neuroscientist Anil Seth answer the most interesting science questions from Twitter.

Let me count the ways this is bad.

  1. It’s all men. Did you notice? Let’s foster the impression that cool science nerds are only boys.
  2. These are all men who are comfortable with pontificating on science — that seems to be the primary criterion for their selection. James Cameron, for instance, is not good at engaging with an audience of learners. Bill Nye’s answer to a stupid question isn’t at all insightful, and is somewhat wrong, because he’s not an evolutionary biologist.>
  3. The format is stupid: those are not “the most interesting science questions from Twitter”.
    In fact, I’d say that if you’re going to Twitter for science questions, you’re already fucked. If we evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys? Just shoot me now.
  4. What’s with the sciencey toys scattered on the desk? They don’t use them. They’re only there because someone thought a scientist’s desk would be covered with toys. Nope. My desk is covered with books and papers and computer cables. So many cables…
  5. Getting bad questions from Twitter means you’re going to get short, glib answers. It’s blipvert science. They’ve taken a complex process and boiled it down to a game of snappy answers to stupid questions.
  6. The worst thing to me — that women are ignored would be the worst, except that it’s a blessing to women that they aren’t associated with this crap — is that this is exactly the attitude that wrecks TV, YouTube, and other media as tools for education. It encourages the idea that the purpose of learning about science is to enable you to crush fools with your witty erudition. The people who rise to the top are those best able to punch down, which turns the whole thing into an aggressive hierarchy. That’s not science, although it may reflect the ugly side of the social institution of science.

You know what might make for a good science show? Go to scientists, and ask them what difficult questions are bugging them. Then have them explain the background to the question, what’s been done so far, and speculate about what the answer might be, and how they’d know it if they saw it and how it would affect their perspective on the field. Unfortunately, that’s hard and wouldn’t give you snappy blipverts that make people feel smarter than the rubes. It would require a goddamn conversation.

But this Wired thing? It’s a vision of science as an authoritarian cult as imagined by a libertarian who learned his science on Reddit.