I have my disagreements with Chris Stedman — he’s kind of representing the ooey-gooey side of atheism, while I’m typically on the harsh, strongly worded side (I know, you’re surprised). So, goddamn it, I hate it when I have to admit that he’s right, and that my side has been too accommodating to the fanatically godless side, which just luuurves ’em some alt-righties.

I’m still an activist, but after nearly a decade of active participation in online atheism (a loose community of forums, blogs, YouTube channels, and fandoms of figures like evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and writer Sam Harris), I mostly stepped away from the online side of atheism a few years ago. One of the biggest reasons for this was my growing concern over its failure to adequately address some of its darker currents—such as overt sexism, racism, and anti-Muslim bias.

I’ve been backing away myself, and I was smack in the middle of online atheism for years. It’s for the same reasons.

By neglecting to address its darker currents, online atheism has perhaps unknowingly planted the seeds for the alt-right’s harvest. Three years ago Reddit’s atheism subforum, perhaps the largest community of atheists on the internet, was found to be the website’s third most bigoted—meaning not just tolerant of overt displays of bigotry, but actively supportive of them. Last year, the Daily Beast revealed that the study’s most bigoted Reddit subforum, the Red Pill, was founded by Robert Fisher, a Republican state lawmaker who is also an atheist.

The problem is more widespread than figures like Spencer and Fisher, too. While championing liberal views on some issues, many of atheism’s most prominent advocates—the majority of whom are, like me, cisgender white men—have expressed troubling sentiments that align with views held by the alt-right and faced little to no consequences.

Last year Sam Harris hosted Charles Murray—who has famously argued that black people are genetically predisposed to lower IQs than whites—on his immensely popular podcast, calling Murray a victim of “a politically correct moral panic.” Harris has in the past called for profiling “Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim.” (When I challenged him on this, he suggested I “wear a t-shirt stating ‘There is no God and I am Gay’ in Islamic countries and report back on [my] experiences.”) Outspoken atheist Bill Maher rightly came under fire last summer for using racist language on air. He has also argued that “most Muslim people in the world do condone violence,” told “transgendered” [ sic] people to be quiet, and gave alt-right darling Milo Yiannopoulos a sympathetic interview on his HBO show. Lawrence Krauss, a popular skeptic who now faces numerous sexual harassment allegations, has criticized the #MeToo movement. Richard Dawkins, perhaps the most famous atheist in the world, has mocked women for speaking out about experiences of sexual harassment, shared a video ridiculing feminists, and railed against “SJWs” (short for “social justice warriors,” a derisive term for social justice activists). Look beyond atheism’s biggest names and you will find vocal Trump supporters like author Robert M. Price and immensely popular atheist YouTubers with more than a million subscribers. Their views are likely shared by more atheists than many would like to admit.

Yeah, what good is atheism as a philosophy if it can’t even find within itself a reason to condemn Nazis, bombing campaigns against Muslim countries, and discrimination and harassment against women? I know that several of the big organizations, like the Freedom From Religion Foundation and American Atheists, are quite clear that they are pro-feminism and anti-Nazi, but it seems like the base have been drifting away to the siren song of the anti-Muslim, racist right (or, as they prefer to call themselves to the point that the word has lost all meaning “centrists”).

Trav Mamone has identified one of the deeper problems in the atheist movement.

One thing I suggest is getting rid of the concept of the atheist celebrity. By declaring just a handful of prominent atheist activists to be the movement’s leaders, it creates a hierarchal system where the same arguments against God get repeated ad nauseam, and newer ideas about how to put humanist values into action are ignored. Everyone should be a leader in the atheist movement, whether that person is fighting for church and state separation in a small town in Pennsylvania or creating a community for liberal atheists living in the Bible Belt. Martin Luther King once said, “You don’t have to know the theory of relativity in order serve.”

There’s always got to be a figurehead, apparently — even MLK has become one. I agree wholeheartedly that we have to get out of that stupid “four horsemen” mindset and recognize that an effective movement has ten thousand leaders, and no one is just a follower, and we’re always ready to criticize, and listen to criticism. Another of our problems is that our “leaders” have been remarkably thin-skinned and unwilling to tolerate disagreement, let alone act on it to change course. We need to be more adaptable.

Until we achieve that kind of breadth and resilience, though, clearly we need to make Trav the King of Atheism. All bow down and worship their wise words.

It’s like they can’t believe just one wacky thing, they have to express saturated stupidity.

Remember when you were kids, and people would prank each other with mild little jokes, and it was OK at first, and then it would get a bit tiring as the day went on, and as you got older the tiring phase would come earlier and earlier in the day? Well, I’m 61 goddamn years old, and the tired bit started at 12:01 am, like it does every day.

But that isn’t all. The fools have taken over, 365 days a year. Have you heard of Q/Anon? Here’s the inside dope.

There is a high-ranking official in the government calling themself Q, who is privy to dramatic state secrets that they have chosen to reveal on 4chan. Q claims the country is actually run by a gigantic pedophile ring (this is an echo of PizzaGate) fronted by the Democrat party, and that Donald Trump is a super-genius who has been playing 13-dimensional chess with everyone. Robert Mueller isn’t actually investigating Trump; that’s a ploy to distract everyone, while Mueller is actually preparing surprise indictments against Obama and the Clintons, basically overthrowing all of the Democrats and vindicating himself while saving the entire country from child-traffickers. Any day now it’s going to happen. Obama and Hillary will be in jail or kicking from a gibbet s o o n. It’s a weird old scam built on obscure, cryptic fragments of text delivered to a receptive audience that built one of the scummiest citadels of hate and lunacy on the internet, touted by conspiracy theorists like Roseanne Barr and led by rat-fucking cockroaches like Jerome Corsi.

If you’re one of those pitiful poseurs who think some goofy blog post or twitter comment or facebook meme is the high-larious highlight of your wit and humor, give up. Q/Anon has outpunked us all. There’s no further point to even trying.

I suggest we repeal April Fools altogether. Or maybe recast it as November Fools and schedule it for the day after our elections, cause we all sure got screwed on that date in 2016.

Usually, around this time of year, I get a battery of snickering Christians giggling over an old joke in my email: Did you know that the official atheist holiday is April Fools Day?

Those jokes all seem to have dried up this year. I wonder why?

Oh, well, they’ll probably back at it next year.

Racist pseudoscience keeps creeping back into the culture, and I like the point made in this article by Gavin Evans that one mechanism is by the alliance of the pseudoscience of race with the pseudoscience of heritable intelligence, both “slippery concepts” that allow an amazing amount of sloppiness in which to inject one’s biases. You know you’re dealing with a charlatan when they start making very specific claims about the genetics of intelligence in humans, something that has been extraordinarily difficult to measure and test, in correlations with the genetics of race, a concept that is poorly defined. They’re trying to build a skyscraper when the only materials they have to hand are buckets of watery jello and porridge — it turns out they don’t make steel when combined.

My personal views are that populations have structure, and there are rivers of genes that run through different lineages, but that the structures don’t align well with the exclusionary, constructed concept of race. Those genetic patterns are interesting and important, but their study is ruined by the know-nothing yahoos, like Charles Murray, who keep intruding and trying to warp the data to fit their preconceptions about how the human social order ought to be, which somehow is always conditioned by archaic and crude ideas about the inferiority of the Other. There is no higher or lower, there is only difference.

As for intelligence, the entire point of the human brain is plasticity and sensitivity to experience and novelty. There is no such thing as high intelligence — but there is such a thing as high adaptability. Since intelligence is actually a response to the environment, it’s disappointing and absurd that there are actually scientists arguing for some mysterious hard-wiring of the brain for some difficult to describe ability like “performance on IQ tests”. Don’t they realize that that’s the antithesis of what human intelligence is? You have a property that is all about interacting with complex environmental challenges in diverse ways, and you think you can capture it in a simple, constant parameter, one that doesn’t include the environment? Weird.

Yet people still push this contrary notion. Charles Murray is one; so is Steven Pinker; among the worst and clumsiest promoters of racial IQ science is Sam Harris, whose career has been all about defining boundaries between people, and making evasive suggestions about what ought to be done with the Other. When Harris brought on Murray for an interview, this is how he introduced him:

People don’t want to hear that a person’s intelligence is in large measure due to his or her genes and there seems to be very little we can do environmentally to increase a person’s intelligence even in childhood. It’s not that the environment doesn’t matter, but genes appear to be 50 to 80 percent of the story. People don’t want to hear this. And they certainly don’t want to hear that average IQ differs across races and ethnic groups.

Now, for better or worse, these are all facts. In fact, there is almost nothing in psychological science for which there is more evidence than these claims. About IQ, about the validity of testing for it, about its importance in the real world, about its heritability, and about its differential expression in different populations.

Please, please, please…someone define this curious property that Harris has labeled “intelligence” which doesn’t change and which is hardly at all malleable, even in childhood. Anyone who has had a child knows that their minds grow and change over time — I see it even in the 18 year olds who enter college and then leave 4 years later with often great changes in maturity and outlook. Yet none of that is part of Harris’s understanding of “intelligence”.

We know that living in poverty, suffering trauma, lead exposure, poor schools, social isolation, abuse, and poor nutrition all affect academic performance and people’s roles in society, yet somehow none of these involve the ineffable subject of the term “intelligence”. “Intelligence” is fixed and intrinsic, with perhaps 20% that can be modified by stuff like education and experience. Or is it 50%? I don’t know. I don’t even know how you can peg it to a single number, or what it means for someone to be 20% more or less intelligent than I am.

Also, contrary to Harris’s claim that this assertions are facts unopposed by psychological science, Vox found 3 psychologists specializing in intelligence who, um, opposed his views.

This infuriated Sam Harris.

He went on a tweet rampage — apparently, showing that he is wrong, and that his opinions are not universally shared, is “defamatory”. He is very upset that once again someone has publicly pointed out that his statements sure sound awfully racist, and that what was published against him is “nothing less the total destruction of a person’s reputation for the crime of honestly discussing scientific data”. He made a suggestion that Ezra Klein, editor of Vox, should engage with him in his podcast, and published the emails that bounced back and forth between the two as they negotiated.

It’s a remarkable exchange. You should read it. Also remarkable is that Harris willingly posted it, thinking it would demonstrate the rightness of his position, when all anyone can see is that Klein is patient and friendly, while Harris is increasingly testy and self-righteous. Harris challenges Klein to do a podcast, he accepts, and then there’s this long weird gripe about how he was defamed, yet he doesn’t want to discuss this subject with qualified psychologists (which Klein suggests), but only with Klein — and then he doesn’t want to discuss the claims about race and science he obligingly approved of in his discussion with Murray, because, he says, it would be “boring” to his listeners.

This “boring” dismissal seems to be routine with Harris when he senses the argument isn’t going his way. He did the same thing with Omer Aziz, recording a 4 hour session and then deciding not to air it, because it was “boring”.

He also likes to pull this stunt when he meets someone who dismisses him of posting the email exchanges between them with this strange notion that somehow they redeem him — he did this when Noam Chomsky refused to debate him. It’s a curious phenomenon, because he seems to think his prickly whining makes him look like a good guy, but all it really does is reveal him as a pompous ass. But he might be wise in doing it, because there are always a mob of ardent fanboys who afterwards reinforce Harris’s opinion of himself.

Ezra Klein has responded by pointing out how Harris pandered to Murray, and rejecting the claim that psychological scientists even have the ability to assess an intrinsic component to IQ.

International evidence suggests oppression, discrimination, and societal resentment lowers group IQs. As the New York University philosopher of neuroscience Ned Block has written, quoting the work of anthropologist John Ogbu, oppression has a clear effect on marginalized groups globally. “Where IQ tests have been given, ‘the children of these caste-like minorities score about 10-15 points … lower than dominant group children,’” he writes.

Block’s point, and this is important, is not that IQ isn’t heritable, or even that it’s impossible to imagine it differing among groups. It’s that it’s impossible to look at the cruel and insane experiment America has run on its black residents and say anything useful about genetic differences in intelligence.

He makes a measured response. It’s a solid article that politely rips Harris’s views strongly. It should win over rational people, which doesn’t include the blinkered goons who love Sam Harris no matter what he says.

But that doesn’t matter. Sam Harris has won over 4chan.

St Paul has a Scientology center. I’ve seen it. It always looks kind of…dead, not exactly a thriving enterprise. I guess it really is fading, because here’s an article on our local Scientology scene, and it includes what I thought were really useful numbers.

A scientologist (now an ex-scientologist) was sent here several years ago to recruit and shore up the membership. The church claims to the public that there are 10,000 active scientologists in this region. Internally they have a different story.

The church gave him a list of “950 people who were supposedly Scientologists” in a five-state region that included the Dakotas, Iowa, and Wisconsin. His task was to make sure they were still involved. If they weren’t, he would work to regain them.

Shelton soon found that most had barely any connection at all. One, who was listed as a trained auditor, had merely bought a copy of Dianetics at a flea market once.

“That’s how goofy the church’s records are,” Shelton says.

In the end, he could find only 100-150 legitimate members in the entire five-state area.

Welp, that looks like one religion that might just die out in my children’s lifetime. Now we just have to finish off all the others.

I guess I’m going to be attending Secular Women Work this August! Will I see you there?

Look who is coming to my campus.

I may attend, just because I’ve never seen a turd speak before.

A while back, I attended Eric Hovind’s extravaganza, Genesis: Paradise Lost. I panned it. Now Paulogia has begun a whole video series to take apart the bad science in the movie. This should be good! Here’s the first episode.

He spends some of the time dismantling Charles Jackson, which I also mentioned. Jackson is the guy who proudly announces that he has four degrees, unlike those evolutionists, who typically only have three (I only have two. I am so ashamed.) It was a ridiculous argument, but I guess it passed against the background of so many ridiculous arguments in the movie.

The new academic problem is the bad information spread by Peterson, Boghossian, Lindsay, that ilk. I suspect it wasn’t so bad when these ignoramuses just turned up their noses and ignored philosophy, but now they’ve decided that they completely understand it, and they don’t like it, nosir, so they’ve begun active disinformation campaigns that are infecting college-aged students. A professor writes in to Reddit to vent:

But in the past few months internet outrage merchants have made my job much harder. The very idea that someone could even propose the idea that there is a conceptual difference between sex and gender leads to angry denunciations entirely based on the irresponsible misrepresentations of these online anger-mongers. Some students in their exams write that these ideas are "entitled liberal bullshit," actual quote, rather than simply describe an idea they disagree with in neutral terms. And it's not like I'm out there defending every dumb thing ever posted on Tumblr! It's Simone de fucking Beauvoir!

It's not the disagreement. That I'm used to dealing with; it's the bread and butter of philosophy. No, it's the anger, hostility and complete fabrications.

They come in with the most bizarre idea of what 'post-modernism' is, and to even get to a real discussion of actual texts it takes half the time to just deprogram some of them. It's a minority of students, but it's affected my teaching style, because now I feel defensive about presenting ideas that I've taught without controversy for years.

Peterson is on the record saying Women's Studies departments and the Neo-Marxists are out to literally destroy western civilization and I have to patiently explain to them that, no, these people are my friends and colleagues, their research is generally very boring and unobjectionable, and you need to stop feeding yourself on this virtual reality that systematically cherry-picks things that perpetuates this neurological addiction to anger and belief vindication–every new upvoted confirmation of the faith a fresh dopamine high if how bad they are.

I just want to do my week on Foucault/Baudrillard/de Beauvoir without having to figure out how to get these kids out of what is basically a cult based on stupid youtube videos.

Honestly, the hostility and derailment makes me miss my young-earth creationist students.

I haven’t had to deal with this yet in my classes — post-modernism isn’t part of the biology curriculum, and since I address sex and gender from the ground up with genes and molecules and signaling in my genetics class, by the time we would get to cultural aspects (we don’t, they’ll have to go to the social sciences or humanities for that), they’re already accustomed to the fact that the biology is complex and plastic and variable. But I’ve definitely seen this intransigence and stupidity online. Peddling simplistic misrepresentations of science and philosophy seems to be a major money-maker for those who understand neither.

That last line, though…yeah, I’d rather deal with young earth creationists. The difference is that creationists, whether they’re aware of it or not, have a serious case of science envy. They’re all wanna-bes who are constantly trying to rephrase the Bible in sciencey-sounding terms, thinking they can explain the Flood with geology, or constraints on evolution with genetics. That’s the whole point of Intelligent Design creationism, to provide pseudo-scientific, rather than religious, justifications for their beliefs. They can’t, but it means their arguments can be spanked by somebody who understands the scientific discipline better than they do.

It’s their greatest weakness, actually. It’s why they don’t make greater inroads into academia, because everyone who is well-trained in the sciences can see right through them.

But these anti-philosophy gomers are taking a completely different approach. They don’t want to be philosophers, or sound like philosophers, because they hate philosophy and women’s studies and sociology and all those other disciplines. Rather than trying to learn just enough of what they’re complaining about to try and turn the jargon against them, they’re in flat-out denial and a total rejection of everything to do with, for instance, post-modernism. They’re engaged in simple-minded anti-intellectualism (creationists come out of a religious tradition that usually respects an intellectual foundation, or at least a pretense to one), and the know-nothings who eat that crap up won’t even listen to word one from someone who has the educational background to know what they’re talking about.