Twitter Trolls

You may not have noticed, but a certain insane troll best known for repetitive spam to multiple blogs and fora, and who makes frequent references to Depeche Mode and decapitating certain atheists (including yours truly), has been relatively absent from blog comments for a while. That’s because he has discovered Twitter, and is happily spamming that service instead.

If you have noticed — it’s become a bit of a joke that if I reply to anyone on twitter, they immediately get a flood of spam from the obsessive crank, so you may have — here’s a summary of tools to clean up your twitter feed. You might find it handy.

I actually prefer that he infest twitter, since all I have to do is block his account once, and all of his noise disappears instantly, and because everyone reports his spam to one central authority which may at some point do something to throttle him.

Htargcm Retsila

I am astounded. Alister McGrath wrote something that was correct!

Reason needs to be calibrated by something external. That’s one of the reasons why science is so important in the critique of pure reason — a point that we shall return to in the next article.

Of course, it’s only two sentences embedded in a great gross tangle of wrong, and he does accompany it with a threat to screw it all up in his next essay, but let’s give him credit for finally, after years of pretentious mumbling, managing to say one thing I can agree with.

It is exactly right. I’ve had the experience of putting together beautiful theories to explain phenomena I’ve seen in the microscope, simple, clean, elegant explanations that would be efficient and sufficient…if only the biology actually worked as I deduced. And then I’ve done an experiment or made an observation or read a paper with new data, and immediately had to discard my lovely logical construct. This is routine and expected. Science is built on a foundation of empiricism.

And it’s not just science. I remember looking for a used car in my teenaged years, and finding a sweet-looking used machine in my price range, and I could imagine cruising the town and picking up chicks with it…and then my father the auto mechanic had me turn the engine over and explained to me what all those strange grindy sputtery noises meant, and I looked in the rear view mirror and noticed that James Dean wasn’t sitting in the driver’s seat, and a lot of lovely fantasies came crashing down under the oppressive weight of reality. Dammit.

A much smarter man than I also had something to say about it.

Science is organized common sense where many a beautiful theory was killed by an ugly fact.

TH Huxley

It’s what most mundane science is about. It’s not the sudden eurekas that drive the process, but the regular, repeated check and recheck and double-check and triple-check, plodding forward by constantly comparing our logic and expectations against the actual terrain.

I’m glad McGrath noticed. So why does he get everything else exactly backward?

McGrath asserts that the Gnu Atheists are prisoners of “mere rationality”, that we’re trapped in the “dogma of the finality of reason”, and even claims that we’re just rehashing discredited 18th century philosophy that claims a sufficiency of logic and reason to discern the nature of the universe. It’s utterly bizarre that at one point he can notice that foundation of science in reliance on empirical evidence, and then go on to complain that these Gnu Atheists, who he generally likes to accuse of scientism and overly demanding of mere evidence, are now a gang of armchair pontificators who insist on the primacy of reason alone!

It’s simply not true. Gather a mob of unruly atheists to confront theologians like McGrath, and we are not chanting demands for them to expand on their logical ‘proofs’ for the existence of gods (those freakin’ bore us), we’re more likely to be chanting “evidence, evidence, evidence” and pointing out that their fantasies are built on weak to nonexistent foundations.

And then there’s this:

The New Atheism seems to think Christianity refuses to have anything to do with reason — a delusion that can only be sustained by refusing to read the many Christian writers who take it seriously, such as Thomas Aquinas and C.S. Lewis.

That’s wrong. I’ve mentioned this a few times: I’m very impressed with the logical abilities of theologians, who construct the most intricate, elaborate, methodical apologetics imaginable (I don’t include C.S. Lewis among them, though — that man conjured up flimsy, weak appeals to mindless sentiment and inanity). The gripe isn’t that they’re stupid or incapable of rationality, it’s that they build fantastical castles in the clouds and expect you to ignore the absence of testable, observable support.

Although, come to think of it, I do agree that dedicating your life to constructing elaborate rationalizations while never questioning or testing the premise of the divine origin of a badly written book is rather stupid.

McGrath reverses everything, though, and tries to argue that the scientists who constantly question their hypotheses and measure them against empirical reality are the prisoners of mere rationality, while the dogmatists who build a cage of improbable extrapolations from flawed and limited ancient texts are wandering about free. He’s literally engaging in double-speak and reversal of meaning.

For Christian writers, religious faith is not a rebellion against reason, but a legitimate and necessary revolt against the imprisonment of humanity within the cold walls of a rationalist dogmatism. The Christian faith declares that there is more to reality than reason discloses – not contradicting reason, but simply transcending it, and escaping from its limitations.

As I have said several times now, science and the Gnu Atheism are not about using reason to discern reality, but using observations of reality itself as the yardstick for determining the validity of our modeling of the universe. Reason is important, but not sufficient.

It is revealing that McGrath is willing to argue that abandoning reason is a virtue, while still failing to bring up any empirical evidence that his imaginary magical explanations actually reflect anything particularly relevant about the universe.

The sad saga of Jeremy Stangroom

Mr Stangroom has developed an obsession — an obsession with civility. It’s an unfortunate condition that leads to tunnel vision, an infatuaion with the superficial, and most alarmingly, an increasing incivility on the part of the proponent of civility. I fear it can only end in an implosion of self-loathing.

He has a philosophy blog in which his latest project is to document instances of incivility among those pesky Gnu Atheists. No one else is deserving of the hall monitor treatment but atheists, I guess, and among those he’s been singling out Ophelia Benson, Jerry Coyne, and most especially Russell Blackford are particular targets. It’s not very impressive, though: every couple of days, Mr Stangroom announces one more example of rudeness by a Gnu. If we were really as incivil as his deep concern would warrant, you’d expect it to be easy to produce a deluge of horrors to make a prim young man blush. Right now, it’s more like an occasional slow drip to which Stangroom is frantically gesturing while shouting that we’re all gonna drown.

Of course, now he has discovered…me. That should help increase the flow of rude examples to something more noteworthy. This post of mine is the first to give the poor man the vapors.

Mr Stangroom does have one little problem now if he’s going to come after me. I’m proud of my rudeness; every time he points at something awful I wrote some time back on my blog, I’ll just squint at it, reread it, smirk, and say, “Yep, that was a good one. Coulda been a bit stronger.” I get the impression he thinks the Gnus will all slink away in shame when their crude assertiveness is waved beneath their noses, but hey…I think being rude to the snotty stupidity of religion is entirely appropriate and the least that it deserves. So?

I don’t think Mr Stangroom read the post he cited very carefully. He might want to look at the conclusion again.

I have zero sympathy for intelligent people who stand before a grandiose monument to lies, an institution that is anti-scientific, anti-rational, and ultimately anti-human, in a place where children are being actively miseducated, an edifice dedicated to an abiding intellectual evil, and choose to complain about how those ghastly atheists are ruining everything.

Those people can just fuck off.

Mr Stangroom lives in a world where millions of people believe in witches and demons, where education is poisoned by superstition, where religion spreads its pious wings and gets praised by politicians, and his crusade is against the atheists who aren’t polite enough for his sensibilities. He will save the world with courtesy.

You know what you can do, Jeremy.

You can fuck off.

I was joking!

Look, when I said this, my point was that it was absurd to use these tactics of asking embryos to testify.

But even if they do get a nice image of a curled, fishlike embryo that is maybe a tenth as sharp as the worst images of zebrafish embryos that I see in my low-power dissecting scope, so what? It’s not testifying. It’s twitching. You’d get a more intelligent response if you dragged a cow in front of the committee and asked it to moo against slaughterhouses.

But wouldn’t you know it, the animal rights extremists are now arguing that they should adopt the tactics of the anti-choice movement, and are carrying it even further than I would have imagined.

Without taking a position on the substantive issues involved, animal liberationists are encouraged to pay close attention to the anti-abortionists’ tactics and strategies and, as activists, we must note the stronghold their cause is gaining. They have begun to move away from theology to secular-based arguments [this is total nonsense, of course –pzm] geared toward the greater population. Many of us have begun to move away from arguing our “theology” of rights toward engaging people on the issues with which they are already concerned (e.g., health, vanity, abuses of tax money).

We need to gain traction despite complacency and by any means necessary.

Moreover, within the past month, a group calling itself “Americans United for Life” (AUL) has successfully introduced bills that are being considered in South Dakota, Nebraska, and Iowa. The proposed legislation seeks to expand the definition of “justifiable homicide” to include murder committed in defense of an unborn child. The logical extension of their efforts is to expand the definition further to include murder committed in defense of an imprisoned and tortured nonhuman animal.

Someone tell those Republican farmers in South Dakota that kooks have found common cause with their abortion arguments, and think they justify gunning them down. Bringing in a cow to testify would be sane compared to what they propose to do.

Do not taunt Anonymous

I agreed with Doctorow that the recent shutdown of the Westboro loons was a stunt by WBC itself. Now Anonymous has spoken out in an interview with Shirley Phelps-Roper denying any involvement. Here’s the hilarious bit, though: midway through the interview, after Phelps-Roper’s prolonged ranting and raving, the Anonymous spokesman calmly announces that they were going to shut down one of her sites, right then and there. And he did.

In the immortal lines of Ash: “Good, bad, I’m the one with the gun.” Do not tease the guys with the high tech weapon when all you’ve got to defend yourself is a loony book of Iron Age dogma.

Disbelief in gods is only one of the beginnings of reason

But it’s not enough on its own. Case in point: the Raelians have put up a sign in Las Vegas.

i-b12424b1ef85923d34a50751343434eb-rael.jpeg

It does have a helpful statement from a Raelian spokesman to help you sort the rationalists from clowns, if the flying saucer in the billboard isn’t enough for you.

If you drive the freeway between Vegas and Los Angeles, you’ll see several signs warning drivers to follow the Bible or else face eternal hell,” he said. “Those signs are designed to make viewers feel fear and guilt. We want to counterbalance that fear by letting them know there is no God or Devil. There’s no need to live in fear. We should enjoy our precious lives to the fullest while of course giving love all around us. Surely that’s a message even Christians recognize as one that Jesus taught. But, whether the source is the Bible, the Koran, or Greek or Roman mythology, all gods are myths, just as there’s no Santa Claus or Easter Bunny etc. What there are, however, are human beings who were advanced scientists who created all forms of life, known as the Elohim. You can read about them in the oldest versions of the Bible, and the oldest versions are always the less polluted versions.

Just the same old ‘magic men in the sky’ dogma. They’re also helpful in telling us how to distinguish Raelians from sensible people.

The God of the Koran is mythical to Christians and the Gods of Hinduism are myths to monotheists,” Roehr said. “Whether he’s a Jew, a Muslim or a Christian, one man’s true religion is always another man’s myth. We Raelians just deny the existence of one more God than they do. Yet there’s a very important difference between most atheists and the Raelians: We’re still Creationists! The Raelian Movement is an atheistic religion that is preparing humanity to welcome back its true creators, the Elohim, without fear or guilt.

Yes, Virginia, atheist creationists do exist. And they’re just as insane as the religious kind.

Richard Dawkins Goes to Heaven

Here is the last of Anthony Horvath’s ghastly morality tales. This one is the easiest to summarize, because there isn’t much to say about it: Richard Dawkins dies, goes to heaven, is judged, and sent to hell. It’s short, only seven pages long, and five of them are spent in loving description of the disintegration of Dawkins. It’s nothing but a horror story for Christians in which the bad guy meets a grisly end.

[Read more…]

Antony Flew Goes to Heaven

Anthony Horvath is responding to my reviews with some flustery bluster. He’s insisting that you must buy his stories in order to have any credibility in questioning them, which is nonsense: I’m giving the gist of his fairy tales, and he could, for instance, clarify and expand on the themes of his story, explain what I’ve got wrong and where I’m actually seeing the True Christian™ message, but instead he chooses to run away and hide while flogging people to buy his stories.

He does throw out a hilarious complaint cloaked in his refusal to address anything I’ve written, like this:

As before, I have no interest in responding in any detail, although I might say some things when he is done. I will say: “PZ, what makes you think Antony awakes in a garden?”

Well, hey, how about the fact that the very first sentence of the story is:

When the man opened his eyes the first thing he beheld was a garden.

I’m looking forward to his denials that the Dawkins story isn’t torture porn tomorrow.

This is the weakest of Horvath’s trilogy of morbid tales of dead celebrities. It’s just not very interesting. One flaw is the protagonist: not to disparage Flew, who was an entirely respectable philosopher, but he wasn’t much of a star outside the world of academic philosophy. His sole claim to any kind of popular prominence was driven by the fact that evangelicals loved that he backed away from atheism to adopt a kind of fuzzy deism in his dotage.

He was a rational atheist until almost the end, though. He was best known for arguing that one should follow the evidence, and that until real evidence for any gods was disclosed, one ought to assume atheism as the default position. He later converted to deism, claiming (erroneously!) that the argument from design was persuasive.

Horvath’s story is mainly a tiresome exercise in mocking Flew’s arguments. The vehicle is that dead Flew wakes up in a garden, and a gardener comes along and has a boring dialogue with him.

[Read more…]

Phelps v. Anonymous? Or Phelps v. Phelps?

I saw the open letter from Anonymous threatening to shut down the Phelps gang and the Westboro Baptist Church. It didn’t sound right. WBC is not at all reliant on the web, but they are always on the lookout for more opportunities at promoting themselves through the media…so it seemed to me like a futile exercise, with any damage Anonymous might do being entirely tangential to the operation of the GodHatesFags gang, and actually gaining them more notoriety and news.

Cory Doctorow has a more plausible angle. This is WBC itself playing games to draw more attention. He also suggests that the WBC site has been left open as a honeypot to draw in hackers, who would then be traced and sued by the infamously litigious family. I don’t know if I’d go that far; I’d give the Phelps’ credit for cunning and devious legal acumen, but I haven’t heard that they’ve got the specific skill set they’d need to beat hackers at their own game.

Goodbye, Kiribati

It’s a triumph of hope over reason, and that means the residents of the Kiribati Islands, an archipelago of tiny islands with an average altitude of 6.5 feet, are doomed. They’ve got faith, you know, but one thing they haven’t got is any reason. NPR reports on their dire situation as the waters slowly rise and the climate changes:

“I’m not easily taken by global scientists prophesizing the future,” says Teburoro Tito, the country’s former president and now a member of Parliament.

Tito says he believes in the Biblical account of Noah’s ark. In that story, after God devastates the world with a flood, he makes a covenant with Noah that he will never send another.

So while Tito does acknowledge that global warming is affecting the planet and that he has noticed some impacts, he says rising sea levels are not as serious a threat as Tong and others are making them out to be.

“Saying we’re going to be under the water, that I don’t believe,” Tito says. “Because people belong to God, and God is not so silly to allow people to perish just like that.”

Tito is not alone in his views. Of the more than 90,000 people counted in Kiribati’s last census, a mere 23 said they did not belong to a church. According to the most recent census, some 55 percent of citizens are Roman Catholic, 36 percent are Protestant and 3 percent are Mormon.

As a result, many are torn between what they hear from scientists and what they read in the Bible.

That’s just sad. They’re sure they’re safe because God doesn’t allow people to die for stupid reasons…but people do die for stupid reasons all the time.