Wow!

I’m busily tied up for the most of the day at the Twin Cities branch of the University of Minnesota — Skatje is taking the new student tour because she plans to transfer here in a year — but I also took advantage of this visit to get my own copy of Haryun Yahya’s Atlas of Creation. My thanks to Aaron Barnes, who rescued a copy from a recycling bin here, It’s a behemoth!

As everyone has said, it’s full of pretty pictures, but the content … well, it leaves much to be desired. It’s mostly a collection of pictures of fossils and animals that asserts a non-existent contradiction between them and what evolution predicts, followed by text that claims most of the fossils we have are fakes.

I haven’t had a chance to look closely, though. Skatje won’t let me have it — she’s leafing through it and giggling.

A general predilection for delusion

The first review of my talk yesterday is in! Too bad it is from somebody who wasn’t there and who is a world-class fool. Yes, it’s Michael Egnor again, and he’s got a lengthy post up with the pretext of giving me advice on future talks, but is really an attempt to preempt my arguments and chide me for my crazy materialist position. He doesn’t even come close to any of my arguments, and he makes false assumptions all over the place about what I and the audience think. I’m used to straw men from creationists, but this is ridiculous.

Here’s what I actually said at the talk.

[Read more…]

Links to satisfy the ravening heathen

So I’m hanging out at a coffeeshop prior to lecturing people with a primer on basic neuroscience and the limits of the adaptationist paradigm (in addition to telling a group of atheists that there are rational reasons for people to be religious—that’ll be fun*), so you’ll have to get your godless harangues from someone else for a while. I’ll recommend:

*Don’t worry, my concession is mitigated by the fact that it is a rational conclusion derived from incomplete and faulty information, and that their conclusion is wrong. Wouldn’t want you to think I’ve lost my edge!

My eyes are dry and clear

It’s a personal tragedy that Tammy Faye has died, but someone else will have to let their mascara run. She and her husband bilked thousands of people, lied lied lied, perpetuated superstitious myths, lived lives of gag-inducing hypocrisy, and wallowed in outrageous self-pity when their empire of corruption crumbled. I’m sorry she lived a wasted and deluded life, but beyond that … good riddance.

It’s a good thing I’m traveling today and will have to miss the sanctimonious, dishonest media accolades.

They’re looking at you, people!

In an article that suggests you can judge a blogger by their commenters, we get a snap assessment of Pharyngula and you, the commenters:

Pharyngula writes smart stuff that looks down on religion; he gets smart and dismissive commenters.

I wouldn’t reject that characterization, but there has to be some appreciation of the diversity of people here. We do have some very dumb people who defend religion blindly, obviously, and some atheists who aren’t very smart, and some smart people who are religious. I can see where the proportions are skewed in predictable ways here, and we’ve got a different character than Crooked Timber or LGM, and we’re nothing like Freeperland, but I don’t particularly care for the thorough lumping of the description.

Obviously, though, I’m going to have to purify the comments section. If you don’t obediently parrot the Pharyngula party line, I’m afraid you’re going to have to go. Sorry. All non-smart and non-dismissive commenters will please immediately report to one of those other blogs, thank you very much.

Promoting a few links up top

The open thread produced a couple of interesting articles I thought worthy of highlighting.

The first is a story from Canada about the growing godless movement. It’s very positive and avoids the cheap tactic of presenting this as a scary or worrisome prospect.

Ms. Gaylor [of the Freedom From Religion Foundation], who said her group has grown from 7,000 to more than 10,000 since the fall, is not sure that the recent rash of books is winning converts to atheism, but she is certain it is emboldening those in the closet.

When Herb Silverman became a professor of mathematics at the College of Charleston in South Carolina in 1976, people would say to him: “You’re the only atheist I know,” and he would respond: ” No I’m not. You know hundreds of atheists, I’m just the only one who acknowledges they’re an atheist.”

I predict a slow, steady growth of atheism in the coming years — not because all these vocal atheists have been converting people, but because they are removing the stigma from atheism and getting people to take some pride in their freedom from faith. And what are all these atheists going to do? One of the annoying, baffling habits some people have is to dismiss the idea, because all atheists could possibly do is sit around and talk about nothing. Not true!

“Big questions have been monopolized by religious institutions,” says Justin Trottier, 24, who has a degree in engineering, comes from a secular Jewish background and is the centre’s executive director. “Atheists are just as interested in questions of meaning, purpose and beginning. Why shouldn’t we have a place where we can chat?”

See, we can talk about and do important stuff, the same as goes on in religious institutions … we just do it without larding it full of supernatural monkeypoop, or worse, elevating the monkeypoop to the status of the Most Important Issue. A secular institution should be more effective than a religious one in any significant endeavor, since it doesn’t bear the burden of commitment to dogmatic malarkey.

This other story from the LA Times is more depressing. It’s about a reporter, a fervent Christian, who joyously leapt into the religion beat, and steadily lost his faith to the incessant corruption of pedophilic priests, greedy Prosperity Christians, and faith-healing frauds. I see another goal for the godless here:

My soul, for lack of a better term, had lost faith long ago — probably around the time I stopped going to church. My brain, which had been in denial, had finally caught up.

Clearly, I saw now that belief in God, no matter how grounded, requires at some point a leap of faith. Either you have the gift of faith or you don’t. It’s not a choice. It can’t be willed into existence. And there’s no faking it if you’re honest about the state of your soul.

It’s a painful piece, and you can tell the writer is grieving for the loss of his faith — but faith is not a gift. Faith is a delusion. This is a man who should be grateful that he has opened his eyes. He’s opened them to an ugly, disillusioning world, true enough, but now he is better able to do something about it. Something far better than praying for an intervention that will never come from an entity that doesn’t exist. There should be no sorrow in casting the scales from your eyes.

They can’t shut me up!

Tomorrow, Sunday, at 1:00 in the Roseville Library, I’ll be giving a talk on “There Are No Ghosts in Your Brain: Materialist Explanations for the Mind and Religious Belief”. Come on down and argue with me!

Now I have to get back to polishing this talk up. I suppose no more than ten powerpoint slides of equations is the limit? (Nah, not really—there’s no math in this talk at all. A few pretty pictures, though…).

By the way, if you listened to the Horgan/Myers Show, there was an unfortunate characterization of atheist organizations as groups of people congratulating one another on how much smarter they are than those crazy theists. As you can see, we actually do have issues of substance to discuss, and it actually helps to talk about them in an explicitly non-supernatural way.

And as everyone knows, the backslapping chatter about our plans for world domination are confined to the business meeting.