I was looking for a Hallmark card with that on the cover (and also, preferably, a sad-eyed puppy dog) to send to Josh Rosenau and Chris Mooney, but they didn’t have one, so I had to settle for a blog post. Here’s the sad puppy, at least.

Oh, Internet, you are like a giant greeting card store that is always well-stocked with lovely cliches.

What seems to have scrambled their brains is that Richard Dawkins said, in an interview for Newsweek, that “there are many intelligent evolutionary scientists who also believe in God” and accepts that “there is that compatibility”. Shock! He must have changed his mind! He’s coming around to thinking like an accommodationist!

Actually, I suspect the damage must have occurred earlier, caused by all that masturbatory wacking away at a straw man. The real shock to both of them ought to be that they haven’t been paying any attention to what all these New Atheists have been saying all along. Dawkins didn’t say anything at all different from what we’ve all been saying all along — his position is practically the party line among the New Atheists.

For instance, Jerry Coyne was very clear:

First of all, nobody doubts that science and religion are compatible in the trivial sense that someone can be a scientist and be religious at the same time. That only shows one’s ability to hold two dissimilar approaches to the world simultaneously in one’s own mind. As I’ve said umpteen times before, you could say that being a Christian is compatible with being a murderer because a lot of murderers are Christians. Yet Mooney, and Scott, make this argument, and Mooney touts it as “powerful.”

It isn’t. This is not what we mean when we say science and faith are incompatible. Got it, folks?? Let’s not hear the “there-are-religious-scientists” argument any more. It’s trivial, and insulting to anyone who can think.

I similarly spelled it out.

I have now discovered that I was trying to make the same points Lawrence Krauss is doing in the Wall Street Journal: religion is wrong. It’s a set of answers, and worse, a set of procedures, that don’t work. That’s the root of our argument that religion is incompatible with science.

That word, “incompatibility”, is a problem, though. The uniform response we always get when we say that is “Hey! I’m a Christian, and I’m a scientist, therefore they can’t be incompatible!” Alexander was no exception, and said basically the same thing right away. It’s an irrelevant point; it assumes that a person can’t possibly hold two incompatible ideas at once. We know that is not true. We have complicated and imperfect brains, and even the most brilliant person on earth is not going to be perfectly consistent. When we talk about incompatibility, we have to also specify what purposes are in conflict, and show that the patterns of behavior have different results.

It’s a shame. We’ve been writing this stuff repeatedly for so long, and these critics have failed to pay any attention. It’s as if rational discussion doesn’t sink into their heads. It makes me sad. We need another sad puppy; maybe they’ll notice that.

With some obvious exasperation, Jerry Coyne has also revisited this clueless distortion of our position, and best of all, since we were all together in Los Angeles this weekend, he got Richard Dawkins to testify.

All I was saying is that it is possible for a human mind to accommodate both evolution and religion because F. Collins’s mind seems to manage the feat (along with lots of vicars and bishops and rabbis). I also needed to make the point that TGSOE [The Greatest Show on Earth] is not the same book as TGD [The God Delusion] because many interviewers who are supposed to be interviewing me about TGSOE have simply ignored it and gone right back to assuming that it is the same book as TGD.

Despite all this clarity from our camp, Mooney still doesn’t get it. He now has an article in the Huffington Post (booooo) in which, even though he has read Richard Dawkins’ unambiguous statement that he was simply stating the position that he has held all along, Mooney has to continue to fellate his strawman some more.

And that makes puppies cry.

And worse, Mooney draws a ridiculously untenable conclusion: that Dawkins is backpeddling and regrets the association of evolution and atheism.

In other words, Dawkins appears to be grappling with a communication problem. Linking together atheist advocacy and the defense of evolution, as he has done so prominently, poses a pretty big problem when you hit the US media with a new book on the latter. After writing a million-selling atheist “consciousness-raiser” and “come-out-of-the-closet” book, is it at all surprising that Dawkins now finds his evolution book being prominently linked to atheism in the media mind?

Jebus. Guess what? Dawkins is as adamant an atheist as ever. That’s just wishful thinking on Mooney’s part. More puppies for delusional journalists!

I’m supposed to remind you down-under people that the 2010 Global Atheist Convention, The Rise of Atheism, is taking place on 12-14 March in Melbourne. You have to sign up soon or you won’t be in the uprising, and you’ll find yourself trampled beneath the iron treads of our all-conquering robot army. Register now! The High Priest commands it!

You will also notice that, in the list of presenters — Richard Dawkins, Catherine Deveny, Phillip Adams, Taslima Nasrin, Peter Singer, PZ Myers, Dan Barker, Stuart Bechman, Sue-Ann Post, Kylie Sturgess, John Perkins, Tamas Pataki, Max Wallace, Russell Blackford, Ian Robinson, AC Grayling, Robyn Williams, Jamie Kilstein and Simon Taylor — Bill Maher is noticeably absent! And there is much rejoicing.

Oh, and non-Aussies are also welcome to attend. It’s probably recommended, even, since otherwise you’ll miss the Rise of Atheism and will have to take a subsidiary role as minions and/or lackeys.

(By the way, I’m getting a lot of requests to stop by this place and that place in Australia, and everyone is offering me beer if I show up. I have to figure out my schedule, but I do plan to do some jitterbugging about the country, since I can’t very well go all that way and miss out on a little tourism! I’ll probably have to demur on many of the beer offers, however, since the quantity suggested will be enough to fix my soft tissues, making me only suitable for touring the country as a pickled exhibit in a freak show.)

Uh-oh. It seems membership in the Atheist Nexus Pharyngula group has been slipping, and has actually fallen behind Atheist News. I’ve been challenged to encourage more people to join Atheist Nexus and join the Pharyngula group, so we can take the #1 position.

You’re probably all going to join Atheist News, too, and make this membership drive futile, aren’t you?

Thanks to Jim Lippard for taking this picture of two of the the Mr Deity crew:

Boy, I’m looking tired. It’s been a long day, but I still have to get down to the Atheist Nexus party, and say hiya to the internet on the live stream they’re running.

I mentioned that Dennett, Dawkins, and I had dinner together tonight. Someone — and all we know from the waiter was that it was a woman — sent a nice bottle of wine to our table. I know I speak for both Dan and Richard when I say thank you, anonymous lady! It was appreciated!

Can I call it a ceremony? It wasn’t very ceremonious at all.

We sat down first to watch a live video stream of Bill Maher’s show, with special guest Richard Dawkins. It was good, it was funny, it was abrasive, and Maher didn’t say anything crazy at all. Dawkins did not get much of an opportunity to say much, again; that’s a problem with some of these shows, like Colbert, where the personality of the host leaves little room for the guests. Dawkins acquitted himself well, though.

After the Maher show, we got to listen to Mr Deity. This was pretty darned cool; not only did he show video clips, but the whole cast was there, and they recreated a couple of the episodes live. We learned that Lucy is, in real life, married to Mr Deity, which would seem to mean that Satan is actually Mrs Deity. The theological implications of this revelation were not discussed, but should have been. Mr Deity is also an ex-Mormon, yet another bit of theological dynamite that will no doubt shake all of organized religion to its core.

Maher and Dawkins arrived near the end of Mr Deity’s talk, and I know that’s what everyone wants to hear about. I was seated at the same table with Maher, but sadly, there was no opportunity to have a conversation with him. Dawkins introduced him, he gave a short speech, he got surrounded by a photograph-taking mob, he left.

The good news for all the critics of this choice is that Dawkins pulled no punches. In his introduction, he praised Religulous and thanked Maher for his contributions to freethought, but he also very clearly and unambiguously stated that some of his beliefs about medicine were simply crazy. He did a good job of walking a difficult tightrope; he made it clear that the award was granted for some specific worthy matters, his humorous approach to religion, while carefully dissociating the AAI from any endorsement of crackpot medicine. It won’t be enough, I know, but the effort was made, and talking to Dawkins afterwards there was no question but that Maher’s quackery was highly objectionable. I also got the impression that he felt the critics of the award were making good and reasonable points, and that he felt the awkwardness of the decision.

Maher’s talk was hilarious, too. He’s definitely one of us in his opposition to religion’s influence on the culture, if nothing else.

OK, and just to make you all jealous, I went out to dinner afterwards with Richard Dawkins and Dan Dennett. If it makes you feel better, Dan had some criticisms of my talk — I was arguing that it’s a mistake to talk about design in evolution, Dan wants to salvage the word from the hands of creationists and thinks we can talk about design without implying intent at all. I am not convinced, but he does make an interesting case.