This just isn’t right. Jen reports that women atheists are being described as “pretty” at conferences. This has got to stop. It’s discriminatory and rude.

I am really annoyed that we guys are being left out. Jen even says that she wouldn’t “stoop to suggesting we need to recruit hot guys to lure in the ladies to solve our gender problem”, which is a disgraceful slap in the face to all of us hot guys. I’m going to have to insist that from now on, whenever anyone is tempted to discuss the virtue to the atheist movement of having pretty young women on our side, that they also mention ME as an example of lovely godless eye candy who attracts people to join our organizations, for balance. If they’re doing a presentation, I’m willing to give them permission to use this photo to titillate the audience.

GODLESS EYE CANDY!

I think that should do the trick. There’s no need to include a link to this site, or mention anything I’ve said or written, or even bring up my name — just flash the picture, leer a little bit, and imply that this is what awaits the infidels when they sign up for the cause.

Because, after all, this has long been the atheists’ prime recruiting strategy: using gorgeous faces to attract the shallow, superficial people who don’t think much. That’s why The Humanist magazine is so hard to distinguish from People, and why Free Inquiry has photo spreads just like Playboy.

Although, technically, using my image may not equalize the reprehensible sexist bias since I was, after all, the most influential female atheist of 2009.

The World Atheist Conference in Dublin is now sold out. You’ll have to plan on attending the Global Atheist Convention in Melbourne instead.

It’s interesting — these things are all selling out their tickets amazingly quickly. My event here in DC also sold out. I guess the market for the godless isn’t saturated just yet.

That long-winded charlatan, Deepak Chopra, has scribbled up a whiny criticism of Hitchens’ address in absentia to the American Atheists. Hitchens wrote a wonderful, brave, and inspiring exposition on his mortality, and urged everyone to keep up the gallant fight; Chopra carps and squirms, trying to find an excuse to reject Hitchens’ argument. He fails pathetically.

This was a tough one to address thoroughly, because every sentence, practically every phrase in Chopra’s essay is foolish and wrong, so I’ve instead taken the path of annotating the central chunk of Chopra’s chunder. My comments are in red; Chopra’s are in Comic Sans, of course.

By making belief in God their enemy, atheists deprive themselves of what spirituality is really about: a process of inner growth. [What does that mean, “inner growth”? Believing in ghosts or gods or cosmic intelligences does not make one wise, there is no entailment of knowledge or deeper understanding — chasing imaginary entities does not make one grow in any way but foolishness.] There are wisdom traditions around the world that do not use the word God (e.g., Buddhism, Vedanta) or advocate religious worship in the conventional sense. [So? People like Hitchens or Dawkins or myself don’t give a bloody goddamn about which particular and peculiar brand of superstition one follows — we’re concerned about recognizing freaking reality.] Countless people [Does that matter? Are we voting on truth now?] have seen through the faults of organized religion and turned instead to their own spiritual journey. [“Spiritual journey” is one of those New Age phrases that means nothing: it means not going anywhere, not learning anything new, only wallowing in one’s preconceptions and justifying it with bafflegab about “spirituality”, which is also undefinable and unmeasurable and utterly useless.] Hitchens and other atheists stand at the door to that journey and slam it shut, [Wrong. We stand at the door to real knowledge, and tell people to come this way, don’t take the path into ignorance] assuring all who approach that to seek God, the soul, or higher reality is a fool’s errand. How do they know? [Turn that question around. How do the priests and spiritual con-artists know? We reject them precisely because we’ve asked how a Pope or a Chopra or the local holy god-botherer knows…and it’s painfully apparent that they don’t know, and they can’t rationally justify their hokum, and they can’t even provide the barest tinge of evidence for gods or spirits.] It’s not as if they have inquired deeply into the great saints and sages who have successfully traveled such a journey. [Every single one of those saints and sages lived lives of squalor or opulence, and died at the end, just like every other man. We’ve had millennia of so-called saints making pronouncements about the nature of the universe, and they’ve all been wrong, and they’ve made no difference to humanity, other than inspiring a few wars, or sucking up the wealth of society that they then dispense at their whim. Show me a saint, I’ll show you a sanctimonious parasite.] Hitchens dismisses every spiritual person out of hand, which means that he dismisses William Blake (the source of his phrase, “mind-forged manacles,” which Blake applied to modern industrial life, not religion) in the same breath that he dismisses Bible Belt preachers. [No. He dismisses the faulty thinking of every ‘spiritual’ person, not the person in their entirety. I can admire William Blake for his poetry and detest that he wasted some portion of his life in nebulous nonsense; I can similarly appreciate Newton’s physics while laughing at his quaint religiosity.]

By discounting the whole notion of spiritual awakening, atheists make a claim to false knowledge. [Again, completely wrong. Scientists and atheists have set reasonable standards for evaluating truth, and like to point out that the claims of religion not only fail to meet that bar, but also are contradictory, both within and between the different mythologies. We know the multitudes of bizarre spiritualities can’t all be true, and given that they won’t even try to justify their beliefs with evidence, we may righteously discard them all until they make an effort to show that they actually possess some tiny fragment of truth.] They haven’t walked the walk, yet somehow they know, with dead certainty, that Buddha, Socrates, Plato, Jesus, Confucius, Zoroaster, Saint Paul, Rumi, Kabir, the Prophet Muhammad, Rabindranath Tagore, and countless others aren’t just wrong; they are stupid and blinkered compared to any everyday atheist today. [You know, that’s just plain lying. I know many quite ordinary theists — we don’t have to dig up the dusty corpses of Jesus or Mohammed to make this point — who are quite intelligent. But intelligence does not equate to infallibility, especially when you’re brought up in a culture that proselytizes for delusions from the day of your birth onwards.] I have my doubts. The atheists I’ve met went through a period of personal disillusion with religion, and on that basis alone they became atheists. [Not me. I became an atheist because I became aware of the power of science…then came the disillusionment when I discovered that religion promoted counterfactuals.] Could anything be more subjective for a crowd that decries subjectivity? [How odd. That we objectively evaluated the extravagant claims of religion (and quacks like Chopra) and found them wanting does not in any way that atheists made a subjective decision to disbelieve.] Could anything be more idiosyncratic for a group that claims to represent universal reason? [That we used reason and evidence to arrive at our conclusions would only appear idiosyncratic to a loon.]

As with any time I have to deal with that quack Deepak Chopra, now I have to go wash my hands. They feel slimy every time I write about him.

I cannot allow this to stand. Look here at the state of our progress in raising money for Camp Quest:

The craven horde — I’ve lost track of how many little goblins they’ve now recruited to combat my awesome and singular majesty — has narrowed my lead to a mere $1890. This is intolerable. It means I achieve only a crushing humiliation of my foes rather than absolute annihilation. Feed more money to the Pharyngula fund-raising machine. It is our destiny.

You’re all going, right? They’ve just announced the next Global Atheist Convention for 13-15 April, in Melbourne, Australia, with Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens committing to attending. There are a few other noisy rude arrogant atheists that I’ve heard will be showing up, but they’re going to dribble out the announcements to torment you.

By the way, the Australian government has been forced to recognize that the last GAC was pretty darned successful, and this time they’ve actually agreed to subsidize it to a small degree, like any other profitable convention that would help the local economy. Progress!

Chris Mooney was on Point of Inquiry recently. I know, he’s always on PoI anymore, which was the big reason I’ve tuned that podcast out, but in this case, he’s in the hot seat with Ron Lindsay interviewing him on accommodationism. Lindsay is excellent, just calmly and quietly asking killer questions that Mooney flounders over. Ophelia Benson has a short summary of the highlights, if you’d rather not sit through it all.

Once again, the problem revolves around a central argument for the Mooneyites: that harsh criticism of cherished beliefs, like religion, leads to an immediate, emotion-based shutdown of critical faculties by the target, and makes them refractory to rational evaluation of their ideas. To which I say, yeah, so? I agree with that. I know that happens. It’s what I expect to happen.

But that’s all short-term thinking, and I don’t care what happens in the mind of a believer five minutes or a day after I make an argument (the usual domain of the psychology experiments accommodations love to cite in defense of their position; there’s an awful lot of psychology done in our universities with horizons no longer than the next publication deadline). What I’m interested in seeing happen is the development of a strong cadre of vocal atheists who will make a sustained argument, over the course of years or generations, who will keep pressing on the foolishness of faith. I also don’t mind seeing believers get angry and stomping off determined to prove I’m a colossal jackhole — that means they’re thinking, even if they’re disagreeing with me. At the very least, I hope that a few of them will realize, even if they don’t change their mind about the god nonsense, that quoting the Bible at me has no effect, and maybe some years down the road I won’t be hearing as many idiots telling me “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God'” as if they’ve made a profound point.

I’ll also cop to the obvious fact that, knowing that reason will not get through their skills, I’m happy to use emotional arguments as well. Passion is persuasive. Look at all those assertive Gnu/New Atheists — they are not making Spock-like dispassionate arguments only, although there is a strong rational core — we are hitting people in the gut and telling them to open their eyes. It gives us that unseemly aggressive reputation, but at the same time it’s a very effective way to let people know we think they are dead wrong.

And that’s the other flaw in the accommodationist position: they are so concerned with being nurturing and sensitive to beliefs — no gut-punching for them! — that they end up being really, really boring to read, and they also end up affirming religious idiocy through neglect. Somebody has to set up the conflict so that someone, maybe even the accommodationists, have leverage to set up the resolution. But someone must voice the objections with clarity and without wooly excuses.

So…the Washington Post asks Richard Dawkins about the goofy Harold Camping/End of the World nonsense, and he gives the perfect answer:

Why is a serious newspaper like the Washington Post giving space to a raving loon? I suppose the answer must be that, unlike the average loon, this one has managed to raise enough money to launch a radio station and pay for billboards. I don’t know where he gets the money, but it would be no surprise to discover that it is contributed by gullible followers — gullible enough, we may guess, to go along with him when he will inevitably explain, on May 22nd, that there must have been some error in the calculation, the rapture is postponed to . . . and please send more money to pay for updated billboards.

So, the question becomes, why are there so many well-heeled, gullible idiots out there? Why is it that an idea can be as nuts as you like and still con enough backers to finance its advertising to acquire yet more backers . . . until eventually a national newspaper notices and makes it into a silly season filler?

It’s not just Camping. Any Christian eschatology is so much bullshit.

Christopher Hitchens writes about losing his voice.