I have a Twitter account, and there’s nothing special about it except one nuisance: Dennis Markuze/David Mabus spams it constantly, creating dozens of new accounts every day and sending me hundreds of messages every day, typically repetitive stuff on the lines of “You are a NAZI!” and “We’re going to chop your head off!” It’s awesomely tedious drivel, fortunately easily handled by a single click to block each account, causing all of the noise to quickly disappear.

Unfortunately, I have now also attracted the attention of another kook, Deepak Chopra. He recently wrote:

Did you know that Deepak Chopra has half a million followers on Twitter? Half a million gullible, credulous, voluble, whiny, mindless, woo-loving followers — and many of them have been babbling at me, saying stuff like “You are all bound by attachment to individuality, preferences and conceptual thought”, and “Fervent emotion is reflective of the defense of a personal viewpoint (ego)”, and “scientific extremists are just like religious extremists – stubborn and closed minded”, and “I just revert to this thinking: Wait til they see their angels as they transition. Everyone transitions into love” and “i think some one should let go his big profesore EGO ;) Have it you SNOB ;-DDD You such a slaver of your self ;)” and so, so much more. All night long, all day long.

I have been given the curse of Chopra. I am being flooded with the twitterings of banal idiots. Sandbags! I need more sandbags!

Oh, and Chopra on Twitter is just as brainless as he is everywhere else. A sample:

Aaargh! I am not a subatomic particle, and someday, I will die, even while people are watching and machines are monitoring me. This is more quantum nonsense.

Although, if ever I meet this goon, I know how to frighten him: I’ll close my eyes and cover my face with my hands, and then he’ll panic over the idea that he might suddenly decay.

Do we really need another wretched Texas governor in the White House? Rick Perry wants to be our president, and he has the backing of Bryan Fischer. What a combination…

Other countries of the world: watch out if this comes to pass. At that point, we’d officially be a pariah nation—your only salvation would be that we’d be in total economic and cultural meltdown, and wouldn’t last much longer.

Someone needs to tell Jerry Coyne that I adore calamari. Could he reply in kind if I posted a photo of fricasseed cat? Oh, wait, maybe it should be barbecued.

Now we all know who the truly heartless, callous atheist is.

I’ve landed in Chicago. Only about 5 more hours before I’m home.

It does make me sad that US Customs and the TSA work so hard to make me feel like a criminal for traveling abroad.

The first part of the Magic Sandwich Show from Dublin is now available on youtube. You know you want to watch it.

There were Muslims lurking about here at the Dublin conference, and I spent a few minutes talking to them and grabbing some of their literature. I can tell you this: don’t bother. They were boring and utterly unoriginal — everything they said was the same old crap, patently cribbed from the Christian creationists, with the new stuff (what little there was) being incoherent and inane.

Here’s an example. I picked up a pamphlet titled “The Man in the Red Underpants”, and the only novelty in it was the title annd the weird metaphor that was briefly mentioned and then dropped. The titular man is part of a story: you are awakened at 2am by a knock at the door, and when you get there, it’s a man wearing nothing but red underpants who says he’s there to read your gas meter. You’d send him away, right, because “you’d use reason, logic, and common sense to make sense of the man in the re underpants, just as we do for most things that happen in our lives.”

Now that the booklet has convinced you that you are obviously a reasonable human being who values evidence and reason, it asks you to use those virtues to determine that Islam is the one true religion and that God, not evolution, created life on earth.

Wait, you might have been thinking, the man in the red underpants isn’t a metaphor for crazy religious people with ridiculous claims? Nope. It’s apparently a metaphor for science. And the rest of the book is a chattily-written, sloppy rehash of tired old arguments for creationism.

Tell me if you’ve heard this one before. “What if I told you that I was walking along in the desert of Arabia (where there is lots of oil and sand) and picked up a mobile phone which I found just lying there…” yeah, seriously: watches and heaths are so 19th century, let’s update it to cell phones and deserts.

There’s more. They trot out fine-tuning, the Big Bang, the first cause argument, la de da, the same old stuff we’ve heard a thousand times from Christian ignoramuses. It’s nice to know we don’t face any real challenge here, but dismaying that we’re going to be stuck hammering away at the same stupid arguments for the next 20 years. These people are impenetrably dense.

Then there is a longish section that “proves” Islam is the one true religion, because by defining god as the being with the properties asserted by the Quran, they can show that the Quran precisely predicts and describes God. They also explain that — again, stop me if you’ve heard this before — we have a choice whether Mohammed was a liar, deluded, or the one true prophet of Allah, and since the first two are obviously false, you must agree that he really was the Messenger of God.

One mildly interesting bit: it freely admits that the Quran says men can beat their wives, that women’s testimony is worth half of men’s, that men can marry multiple wives, and that there are apparently barbaric laws with “hand chopping for thieves, and death for apostates and adulterers…and homosexuals”, but that you can’t use that to argue against its divine origin. “Does the fact that the Quran teaches certain things the customs and norms that we are used to, mean that it is not from the Creator?”

That’s quite right, it doesn’t. The author suggests that “perhaps the Creator doesn’t like modernity or any other man-made ideology.” That’s also quite true.

So what they’re arguing is that their One True Faith involves worshipping a medieval tyrant who doesn’t like women and does love mutilation and murder. At this point, I don’t even care whether their god is true or not; I’m not going to worship their barbarian despot.

I’m impressed, though, that Islam seems to be yet another religion where the more I learn about it, the more I despise it.

I’ve been hanging out with AronRa and DPR Jones, and it looks like I might be drafted to appear on The Magic Sandwich Show on Sunday, at 8pm GMT. Tune in!

That’s the conference venue here in Dublin, appearing briefly in the video.

I’ve been hanging out with AronRa and DPR Jones, and it looks like I might be drafted to appear on The Magic Sandwich Show on Sunday, at 8pm GMT. Tune in!

That’s the conference venue here in Dublin, appearing briefly in the video.

The first panel (DPR Jones, Lone Frank, Richard Dawkins) at the Wotld Atheist Convention has got us off to a roaring good start. Lots of interesting discussion and disagreement within the panel and the audience, good questions, not too many audience manifestos.

There is a delegation of Muslims here, one of whom stood up to ask a question that instantly marked him as a moron: he asserted the common inanity that Dawkins believes in a universe of nothing but chance. There were boos, Dawkins ripped him a new one, but of course he was undeterred. Now the Muslims are hitting the twitter hashtag #wac11 hard.

The basic conflict raised was by DPR Jones, who expressed a rather pessimistic view that religiosity was an inevitable consequence of human psychology, and we’re not going to escape it. I disagree. I didn’t raise my hand and comment, though, because the Q&A should be for Qs — those things that end in question marks — and I have my own soapbox. 

Psychology is not an issue of inevitability. We grow and change all the time, and to suggest that one state is determined because we can developmental evidence for it is misleading. An example: there is a game that children play that palls for us adults. It’s called peek-a-boo. That one year olds can be naturally thrilled by hiding and reappearing  says nothing about adult behavior. Unfortunately, we live in cultures that have enshrined peek-a-boo as an act of reverence, that couples weekly peek-a-boo sessions with sociability, and tells everyone they’ll be horribly punished if they aren’t good at peek-a-boo. Don’t tell me it’s an inevitable aspect of human nature, because my response will be to tell you to just grow the fuck up. Some of us already have.

They have an official wish list. it’s mostly “drill, baby, drill” and other heedless, short-term indulgences and catastrophes, but it also openly advocates ignoring science.

In California’s dry central valley, ensure that no federal scientific report … requiring water for endangered fish be allowed to interfere with farmers’ rights to their historical maximum allocations.

That bodes well. Bugger evidence, let’s do whatever maximizes profit now!