Wow

This Women of Color Beyond Belief conference looks excellent. I’ve been so disappointed in the atheism movement of late, and and it’s reassuring to see people working to revitalize it with more enlightened perspectives.

Black Nonbelievers, Inc., the Black Skeptics Group and the Women’s Leadership Project are partnering to launch the Women of Color Beyond Belief Conference, scheduled for October 4th-6th, 2019 at the Marriott Midway Hotel in Chicago, Illinois. The event will be the first national secular forum exclusively focused on the perspectives of women of color atheists, agnostics, humanists, freethinkers and skeptics. The conference will highlight the social justice work of women of color within the secular community and provide an intersectional, feminist vision of leadership and activism in secularism. According to conference organizers Mandisa Thomas, Sikivu Hutchinson and Bria Crutchfield, “The conference aims to create more inclusive opportunities in secular organizing, policy and practice. Although the majority of women of color in the U.S. identify as religious, a growing number are examining and rejecting the fallacies of organized religion. Over the past decade, women of color secularists have challenged mainstream secular leadership, pushing for social, racial, and gender justice against the evangelical, conservative right wing tide. We hope this conference empowers more secular women of color to speak up, understand that there are more of us out here, and become motivated to get involved.”

Are you planning a conference?

Then you need this book, How to Respond to Code of Conduct Reports, by Valerie Aurora and Mary Gardiner. It’s free! My first thought was that wouldn’t this deserve a short pamphlet, at best? But no — it’s incredibly thorough, explaining all the hows and whys of codes of conduct, giving examples and showing the advantages, and also why you’re going to get screwed if you don’t implement one. Since it’s free and comprehensive, you have no excuse for ignoring it…and if you do ignore it, it just means you’re going to have a poorly managed conference.

It also has links to other resources, like this article, No more rock stars: how to stop abuse in tech communities. Oy, but that one resonates. Not just for tech communities, but atheist/skeptical communities — we have a plague of “rock stars” who suck resources and may also draw valuable attention to events and movements, until ultimately and seemingly invariably, they turn into black holes of bad PR. Read it before you start inviting speakers.

The latest numbers from Dan Phelps

The latest numbers for attendance for the Ark Park are in, and as one might expect, show a steady decline.

This year in November 2018 the Ark Encounter sold 40,193 tickets.
Last year, November 2017, the Ark Encounter sold 51,914 tickets.

About -20% from the previous year, eh?

A nightmare for Ken Ham, but it is entirely possible that hoards of 4 year olds are overwhelming the place, brought by their lifetime member parents or guardians.

I can’t wait to see what winter months bring. It might be financially wise to close the place for January and February, but Ken Ham can’t lose face by doing such a thing.

Here are all previous numbers since the safety tax began, for your convenience.

2017:

July: 142,626 (Safety Fee amount: $71,313.00)
August: 106,161 ($53,080.50)
September: 83,330 ($41,665.00)
October: 93,659 ($46,829.50)
November: 51,914 ($25,957.00)
December: 36,472 ($18,236.00)

2018:

January: 13,250 ($6,625.00)
February: 17,961 ($8,980.50)
March: 62,251 ($31,125.50)
April: 67,613 ($33,806.50)
May: 73,353 ($36,676.50)
June: 113,901 ($56,950.50)
July: 135,922 ($67,961.00)
August: 98,106 ($49,053.00)
September: 69,207 ($34,603.50)
October: 89,434 ($44,717.00)

A few words of caution in interpreting these numbers. The Ark Park is absurdly overpriced, and Ken Ham is raking in a heck of a lot of profit…so the numbers would probably have to drop a lot more before he goes in the red. Also, the numbers come from reported attendance, used to calculate a safety fee or tax to the city of Williamsburg. Ham is such a venal little toad I wouldn’t be surprised if he intentionally under-reports (if he can) to save a little money.

I’m also unsurprised. Any theme park will have a drop off in attendance after the shiny newness wears off. 20% in a year, though…ouch. AiG is probably frantically trying to think of new ways to spark interest in their ridiculous young-Earth pretense.

I recommend that they should jump on the flat-earth, no moon-landings, anti-vaxx bandwagon. There’s no end of gullible people in that crowd. They won’t bat an eye at the claim that the Earth is less than ten thousand years old.

Satire is dead, again

Some alt-right wackaloon has announced a new vidyagame, Jesus Strikes Back: Judgment Day. It features a gun-toting Jesus, “Dolph”, an Austrian with a toothbrush mustache (not to be confused, they insist, with Hitler), an orange blonde guy named “Tromp” (not to be confused, etc.), “Pootin” (ntbc…), “Mussolino”, etc., etc., etc. as the heroes, who are on a mission to kill “radical social justice warriors,” “radical feminists,” “radical LGBT militants,” oh god I’m already bored and tired of this bullshit game, and it hasn’t even been made yet. Oh also, one class of enemies are “Doctors”, who vaccinate people.

The story of JSB:JD is so utterly complex that it simply cannot be conveyed by mere words on a webpage. It is a story so beautifully crafted and rich in detail that it could of very well been written by Tolstoy himself. A story so powerfully moving that it is guaranteed to bring a tear to the eye of even the most reserved, indifferent man.

JSB:JD follows the story of seven different men on their own one-man-crusade to destroy the radicals and the New World regime, and how this shared goal forces their destinies to entwine. With the odds stacked against them, they have nothing to rely on except the triumph of the will if victory is to be theirs. Although they may not share the same beliefs or characteristics, their shared hatred of the radicals and New World regime unites them together, ultimately forming mankind’s last hope for salvation against the tyrannical regime.

They may not always see eye-to-eye, but they must put aside their differences if they ever wish to liberate the world back to rightful law and order. They must struggle against all odds – against the whole world – if they are to be victorious.

Fuck, I don’t care. I don’t care if they’re trying to satirize SJWs, anti-SJWs, or whatever…this is just bad, clumsy, unfunny, tedious crap.

If it makes them feel better, they can go ahead and claim they owned me. Don’t give a damn. Except to say that my cynical despair over the state of humanity is confirmed once again.

We can all stop worrying about climate change now

Thanks for the reality check, Steve Milloy!

All we need to do now is learn how to live with temperatures of 465°C (870°F for the benighted among us) –we’ll need to use some kind of refrigerator for baking, since that’s a little on the high side. I suppose we could breathe CO2 if we completely changed our biochemistry and metabolism. I guess while we’re doing that, we could also learn to stand unharmed in concentrated sulfuric acid at 90 atmospheres of pressure. Small changes. You know, nothing like the unbelievable stuff the Warmists are proposing, like meters of sea level rise.

This is Milloy’s bio.

Co-founder http://BurnMoreCoal.com . Trump EPA transition team. Eagle Scout. Biostatistician. Lawyer. Author. FOX News contributor.

I think the new Trumpster slogan ought to be “Turn Earth into another Venus”, since there are nothing but good associations with the goddess of love.

How can you not want to live there?

Everything is a religion, according to Andrew Sullivan

I’m away. I’m on a break. I’m distracted by an adorable baby granddaughter. But even with those diversions, the stench of Andrew Sullivan’s latest column has disturbed my rest. It is just too stupid. I was stunned by the first paragraph, staggered a little further, and collapsed in defeat.

Everyone has a religion. It is, in fact, impossible not to have a religion if you are a human being. It’s in our genes and has expressed itself in every culture, in every age, including our own secularized husk of a society.

I’ve seen this a thousand times before, and I know what will follow. Sullivan is going to give us his own, personal, idiosyncratic definition of “religion” that he has made so broad and nebulous that he can assign it to everyone, no matter how godless they might be, and he’s going to rely on general human properties that he can then interpret as “religious”.

By the way, no genes for religion have been identified. Not one. He’s lying, unsurprisingly for someone who liked The Bell Curve. He links to a book by some guy named Dominic Johnson, who does have a degree in evolutionary biology, and from what I can see relies entirely on bullshit evolutionary psychology to make his claims.

Here comes his redefinition:

By religion, I mean something quite specific: a practice not a theory; a way of life that gives meaning, a meaning that cannot really be defended without recourse to some transcendent value, undying “Truth” or God (or gods).

I see that he has also redefined the word “specific”, because that is broadly vapid nonsense, not specific at all. A “practice”? So is writing garbage for NYMag his religion? Appearing on Bill Maher’s show is a religion? Except that it is specifically not a theory, but at the same time it requires a “transcendant value” that gives “meaning”. This is such a muddled mess of contradictions and immeasurable assertions that it in itself gives the lie to the idea that it could be based on something as concrete as a gene. He really wants us to believe that this wobbly bullshit is a load-bearing pillar…of jello. And it’s all set up to support this groaner of a familiar assertion by theists.

Which is to say, even today’s atheists are expressing an attenuated form of religion.

If your definition of religion is so amorphous that you can claim everything is a religion, then you’ve said nothing useful. You’ve turned religion into white noise. Religious people ought to find that as offensive as atheists do.

Their denial of any God is as absolute as others’ faith in God,

Wait. I thought religion was a practice, not a theory. But now he’s including “faith” and ideas about a hypothetical concept. He can’t even stick to his own definition!

…and entails just as much a set of values to live by — including, for some, daily rituals like meditation, a form of prayer.

So now it’s defined by daily rituals? I get up in the morning, brush my teeth, have a cup of coffee…this is now, in the mind of Andrew Sullivan, a religion. Hey, if I didn’t get out of bed, my life would be meaningless, if I never brushed my teeth, I’d be disgusting and would die of dental disease, and no coffee…that would be an unimaginable hell.

Also, my spiders spend their days in the endless ritual of maintaining their webs, and their lives would end without them. Therefore, spiders are religious. Maybe they don’t have a concept of a god (which I don’t know for sure), but remember…religion is a practice that gives meaning to life. And is genetic. If you can claim that atheists who explicitly reject gods and religion are religious, we’re at the point where you can’t stop me from claiming spiders are religious.

…(There’s a reason, I suspect, that many brilliant atheists, like my friends Bob Wright and Sam Harris are so influenced by Buddhism and practice Vipassana meditation and mindfulness. Buddhism’s genius is that it is a religion without God.)

OK, I’m done. I can read no further than the point where he claims Sam Harris is a brilliant atheist because he follows some Buddhist practices.

When will NYMag wake up to the fact that they’ve got a columnist who writes drivel? Probably never, since the NY Times has a similar problem, and will never change.

Clenched fist salute to Eric Sprankle of Minnesota State University

We Minnesota professors have to stand together in solidarity, and Dr Sprankle spoke truth in a way that got attention.

He wrote: “The virgin birth story is about an all-knowing, all-powerful deity impregnating a human teen. There is no definition of consent that would include that scenario. Happy Holidays.”

He later added: “The biblical god regularly punished disobedience. The power difference (deity vs mortal) and the potential for violence for saying ‘no’ negates her ‘yes.’ To put someone in this position is an unethical abuse of power at best and grossly predatory at worst.”

Yes! The gods are abusers!

Best of all, he roused the ire of that popular dimbulb, Tucker Carlson, who thought this was a statement significant enough to require repudiation. How shallow of him, said the king of shallowness, and used it as an excuse to berate the dire state of the academy (I thought it was a good insight. Yes, we should think about how our culture has glorified the misuse of power, especially at the expense of women, and consider that this kind of story is the foundation of a lot of patriarchal attitudes). The only sense in which it is shallow is that it is trivially and obviously true. Then it gets weird.

The host interjected that religious critics never target the owners of technology companies.

It’s not even brave, Carlson responded. They never criticize Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world. Or Apple. Tim Cook. Or Google. They suck up to people in power and then beat up on evangelicals and call themselves, you know, countercultural. I mean, it is pathetic.

Wait, what? He thinks lefty atheists don’t criticize billionaires?

If I had the power, I would strip Bezos of most of his wealth and use it for more worthy causes. Apple has obscene amounts of money sequestered away in tax havens. There are libertarian atheists who might think excessive wealth is a sign of virtue, but a great many of us disagree and will happily criticize all of those people and organizations.

But then, Carlson has consistently demonstrated that he’s the dumbest man on Fox News, and I’m comparing him even to those morning pundits that Trump adores.

What does “university-level course” mean?

The Discovery Institute is touting something called a “university-level course” by Michael Behe. I have no idea what that means. A real university course is part of a curriculum, a program of study that leads to a degree; there is supposed to be an integrated body of knowledge behind it and surrounding it. We also emphasize lab work in the sciences, so there’s a mix of lecture and hands-on research. We also tend to rank the level of a course by how many prerequisites are required — you don’t get to take my development course unless you’ve also taken cell biology first, or you’d be wasting everyone’s time.

So what is this “course” Behe is offering? It’s 41 video episodes. No prerequisites. They don’t say if you get college credit for taking it, but I can safely say the answer is “Hell No.” They’re using “university-level” as a meaningless adjective. It’s not offered through any accredited university, it’s just YouTube for creationists.

In these videos, Behe discusses the history of thought on evolution and intelligent design, and then delves into the science behind natural selection, random mutation, and irreducible complexity. He covers criticisms of ID as well as relevant new discoveries.

The lectures are accompanied by quizzes to help track your progress, perfect for everyone from high school students up through college professors! Don’t miss it.

The course is a $50 value. But you can get it free by pre-ordering Darwin Devolves.

Oh, it has quizzes. Is Michael Behe going to grade them? You know, we don’t just test students for the heck of it — it’s to assess how they’re doing, how the material is being received, whether we’ve got good comprehension. I’ve often looked at test results and said, “Uh-oh, they didn’t get concept X…I better go over that again, try a new approach, get them to engage these ideas”. Will Behe be interacting with his “students” at all?

No, of course not. I wish people would learn that there’s more to teaching than just marching through a series of presentations.

I also like how they claim it is a $50 value. How did they determine that? Are they even aware that that would be a ridiculously low price for what they’d like to pretend is equivalent to a 3-credit full semester course (3 class hours a week for 15 weeks…of course, we don’t even know how long each of these videos are)? And then it turns out it’s not $50, it’s completely free when you buy a book.

That tells me it’s worth $0, which is a fair price for the value.

I shouldn’t be surprised. They’ve been pretending to be scientists for years, now they’re pretending to be educators…and are equally incompetent at both.

How adorable

Every year, American Atheists has their annual convention on Easter weekend — it’s smart, because this is one group that won’t have conflicts with religious holidays. This year, it’s in Cincinnati, which has Answers in Genesis concerned, because that’s real close to their odious little theme park for the gullible, so they’ve decided to have their own conference at the same time! I really don’t think there will be many attendees who will be conflicted about which conference to see, so that’s also a smart move. These are two events with nearly perfect 0% overlap.

AiG seems to think it’s all about them, though.

Recently, the group American Atheists announced they are bringing their annual conference to Cincinnati during Easter 2019! And from what we’ve heard from reliable sources, they particularly want to be in our area because this is where Answers in Genesis, the Ark Encounter, and the Creation Museum are located.

We’ve also heard about some of the possible things the atheists might be planning in their attempts to oppose our creation-gospel ministry. So while the atheists are running their conference, we’ve decided to hold our own conference. Titled “Answering Atheists—an AiG Easter Conference,” this four-day event will be held at the Ark Encounter’s new Answers Center. We will equip Christians to answer the skeptics and to effectively share the truth of God’s Word and its life-changing gospel message.

How odd. I haven’t heard anything about any focus on AiG at the atheist conference. They haven’t announced any speakers yet, but they have put out a call for proposals.

Past proposals that have been selected include presentations on: activism and organizing; politics, public policy, and advocacy; community building; personal experiences with leaving religion; science, technology, and education; communications and marketing; and litigation and constitutional rights.

Musicians, comedians, poets, artists, and other performers are also invited to submit proposals.

Hmm. Nothing in there about “cunning ways to fuck over AiG”. Nothing specific about the Ark Park or the Creation “Museum”. I suspect there will be people discouraging everyone from bothering to visit the over-priced novelty show in Kentucky, although some might slip away out of curiosity to check it out, so if anything, they might get a few additional skeptical visitors, which will bump up their declining attendance very slightly.

Also, we always oppose the anti-scientific bullshit AiG peddles, 365 days a year, so this will be nothing new.

On the other hand, the AiG conference seems to be full of anti-atheist nonsense from all the usual, tired suspects. Ray Comfort is the keynote speaker, if that tells you anything. Like that it’s going to be a load of tiresome baloney. He’s going to be talking about “keys to reaching atheists”, which is amusing, since Comfort is one of the worst people at reaching atheists, which really says something, since all the AiG clowns and Living Waters bozos are all totally unconvincing to anyone who doesn’t accept the authority of the Bible.

I do notice that the registration for AiG’s event is set at $50 less than the full price of the AA conference. I expect, though, that the AA speakers will be more substantial and numerous than the 3-4 droning preachers per day that AiG has lined up. (I qualify for discounts that would make the atheist conference cheaper than the bible-thumpers conference, anyway).

I won’t be holding my breath waiting for AiG to extend a speaking invitation to me, to pad out their thin lineup, even though I’d probably add a little excitement to their schedule. Since I’m persona non grata with atheism right now, I guess I won’t wait for one from AA, either. My family doesn’t do Easter, so it looks like me and the spiders hanging out and mocking the holiday this year. They’re better company than Christian zealots, anyway.

OOPARTS

I haven’t heard about OOPARTS in ages — they’re a fad that seems to have faded. Pierre Stromberg sent me a note that he has rediscovered an OOPART, the notorious Coso Artifact, and I hadn’t heard about that in years, either.

OOPARTS are “Out Of Place ARTifactS”, and there was a time, back when the Ancient Astronauts craze was producing all kinds of crackpot books and magazine articles, unearthing and bizarrely interpreting artifacts that they couldn’t explain — so they resorted to a) claiming that aliens brought them to earth, or b) they were evidence that ancient humans were advanced, as the Bible shows(?), and that we’ve been in decline since the Fall. Watch this amusing little video from 2004 in which Donald Chittick mocks the von Dänikenites for thinking there were astronauts from outer space instead of God’s people here on Earth.

(Note: You can hear the weird consonants and cadences of Kent Hovind in Donald Chittick — it’s like these old school creationists are clones of each other. He also goes on and on about “man’s opinions” and different “interpretations” of science, just like Ken Ham.)

(Also amusing: the bit where he shows off a Homo erectus skull with a bullet hole, which he proves by running a metal rod through it to reveal the larger exit hole…the foramen magnum.)

Among the favorite pieces of garbage creationists trotted out as proof that ancient people were technologically sophisticated was a peculiar object that they claimed was found in a geode (which would make it very old, except…it wasn’t a geode), made of ceramic and metal rods.

Unfortunately for the whole delusion of OOPARTS, it turned out to be … a spark plug from a 1920s Model T, imbedded in some hardened muck. It then disappeared, and the creationists all stopped talking about it, and OOPARTS kind of shamefacedly disappeared from the lexicon.

Stromberg wrote to tell me, though, that it has been rediscovered! He has updated his article on the Coso Artifact, and has “arranged for Seattle’s Pacific Science Center to display the artifact starting December 1st as part of their new exhibition titled, ‘What Is Reality’.” So now you know where to go if you want to see another piece of creationist evidence.

Check out the Chittick video. It’s amazing how many off-the-wall crazy ideas he throws out one after the other, almost all of which creationists have discarded out of embarrassment.