I have to apologize to Thom True (@G2RSTL)

He’s the organizer for the Gateway To Reason conference coming up this July in St Louis, and apparently, a few of my hatin’ leeches have been pressuring him to drop me from the speaker lineup. Most ironically, a blogger who declares himself a voice for inclusiveness in the atheism and skepticism movements is now writing to all of the other speakers, asking them to add to the pressure to get me booted (I also apologize to all of you, too). This kind of thing happens a lot: I’ve had kooks write to all of the faculty at UMM to denounce me. It gets old fast, I’m afraid.

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We got mentioned on Boing Boing!

That’s the good news. The bad news it’s in an article about rage-blogging, click-baiting, witch-hunting professional victimizers who profit greatly from online hate.

Oh, not us. I know those are accusations frequently leveled against freethoughtblogs, but the irony is that it’s the other side that has been doing a really good job of monetizing obsessive hatred. While we struggle with really ugly ads (we hate them too) just to keep a maintenance level of support for our small community of writers, the gamergate goons and people like Phil Mason have tapped into a much more lucrative income stream: misogyny pays.

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I get email

Did you know there are actually a bunch of low traffic, negligibly interesting, obsessive web sites out there dedicated to hating me? I know. Weird. I can understand disliking me, that’s not at all surprising…but to really, really detest me, and then spend hours scrutinizing every post and every comment on Pharyngula to find things you don’t like, and then to spend more time scribbling up poorly written rebuttals on the most obscure website you can create, well, that’s what I find incomprehensible.

What I do sort of understand, though, is the desire to be noticed. Invariably, these same sad obsessives who have been toiling away at an utterly neglected blog will write to me, demanding that I notice them.

I do.

Imagine how you would feel if someone spent months gathering shit and then sculpting it into a crude bust of yourself (well, they say it’s you…but it’s more like a lump of sagging sludge), and then unveiled it to you and declared their intent to expand it into a monumental equestrian statue, because they hate you so much. “Look at me, look at me!” they scream.

OK, look at “Bob Jones”.

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Farewell, Avicenna

One of our colleagues at Freethoughtblogs, Avicenna, has been on the receiving end of an astonishing flood of hate and patently baseless accusations. An online group of trolls, ironically many of the same people who are quick to accuse us of “witch hunts” and “lynch mobs”, have been baying for his blood for months, questioning his profession, his training, even his ancestry — all nonsense and known to us as completely bogus, pure dishonest attempts to harass him. Almost all of the accusations were lies.

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We’re going to need a lot more funerals

A Catholic nun was so distressed by the abortion of an unnamed fetus that she made arrangements to give it a funeral and a name. That sounds nice, except that it is also extremely creepy.

With permission to proceed granted, she began making arrangements for his memorial service by first giving this child a name. A beautiful small wooden urn would be engraved– but what name should she choose, she wanted to know? I gently suggested “Victor”, in honor of her mother, Victoria who had passed away two days earlier and she happily agreed. The middle name would come to her in an equally tender way as she told me of a conversation with a young woman she had met the previous day.

This woman had confessed to Sister that she had aborted her baby, an action she deeply regretted. But she could never give her little girl a proper burial since the remains were lost, and this deep sorrow haunted the mother’s memory. But when Sister told her about her plans for Victor and that she could include her baby’s name, Marie, with his, it greatly consoled her.

And so the service was held on Thursday May 2, 2013 – the same day Sister’s mother was buried miles and miles away. A fellow nun, a lay associate, two deacons, a priest and a bereaved family mourning the recent loss of their own stillborn child gathered around the altar for Holy Mass with little Victor Marie in their center.

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In defense of Avicenna

It’s hazardous duty, writing on FreethoughtBlogs. There’s a small squad of vicious trolls waiting to make up stories about you, and the latest target of their venom is Avicenna. It’s gotten ridiculous: the myth they repeat over and over again is that he’s constantly lying on his blog. The latest “evidence” is that some of the email from haters that he has posted can also be found on public sites.

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