Sexual Harassment & Freethought KookeryMany of us already know that “Freethought” blogs is just a front for groupthink. That should be evident by the way “freethought” bloggers like JT Eberhard, PZ Myers and Greta Christina arbitrarily censor intelligent dissent. While skimming through the “freethought” blogs I couldn’t help but notice they’ve given “Cristina Rad” a forum now. Anybody else sense the irony? To me, the subtext reads:
“We’re sophisticated rational atheists and women should not be objectified!”
“Hey, let’s give this hot, popular blonde a forum!”
Oh, Yeah, Big Difference!So I’ve been checking out the nice links y’all left in the Gnu Survey. In response to Charlotte Allen’s poignant article, Atheists: No God, No Reason, Just Whining, a self-proclaimed “angry atheist” named Landon Ross writes,
[Allen] is blind to her own argument as she spews vitriol throughout. The quotes she cites are either taken out of context, with some clever editing, or false altogether. Sam Harris is quoted as saying “that it ‘may be ethical to kill people’ on the basis of their beliefs.” This is a blatant misrepresentation. Harris, in fact, makes plain that only if one believes that the canon they subscribe to is the divine word of god, does it become ethical, or seem reasonable, to kill someone for their religious belief.
LOLOLOLOLOL! And the haters say *I* nitpick and split hairs! Friends, this is pure comedy. Nah, Harris didn’t say it “may be ethical to kill people” on the basis of their beliefs, not at all. After all, we atheists are moral! Respectable! We’d never spout a line of tribalistic paleolithic nonsense because by golly, we’re atheists, we’re modern, and we’re more evolved! Harris only said it may be ethical to kill people “if they believe the canon they subscribe to is the divine word of God.”
In other words, Harris said it may be ethical to kill people on the basis of their beliefs. In other words, Allen’s reporting was spotless, and Landon Ross confirms her depiction of your average atheist as a whiny hater spouting anger and vacuity. By the way, since Landon conveniently neglected to cite his atheist pal, what did Harris actually say?
Some beliefs are so dangerous that it may be ethical to kill people for believing them —Sam Harris, The End of Faith, pp.52-53
In other news, I’ve added a Gnu category to TWIM. LOL!
Study Suggests Atheists Suppress The TruthThere’s been a lot of hubbub over this “Atheists and Asperger’s” study that recently surfaced at the Scientific American blog. For me, this was the interesting line:
In a second experiment, Heywood and Bering compared 27 people with Asperger’s with 34 neurotypical people who are atheists. The atheists, as expected, often invoked anti-teleological responses such as “there is no reason why; things just happen.” The people with Asperger’s were significantly less likely to offer such anti-teleological explanations than the atheists, indicating they were not engaged in teleological thinking at all. (The atheists, in contrast, revealed themselves to be reasoning teleologically, but then they rejected those thoughts.)
On Evidence & Proof, Pt. II: Questions From LifeguardIn Pt. 1, we discussed SI's version of the oft-repeated "no evidence for God" argument. In the thread, Lifeguard asked a few good questions:
Can an ironclad case for God’s existence can be made? Absent an ironclad case, regardless of why such a case cannot be made, then what is a believer left with besides the naked decision to believe? If even an IRONCLAD CASE does NOTHING without having ALREADY made the decision to believe, then what does that say about the warrant for belief in the absence of an ironclad case? Doesn’t this amount to saying that evidence for the existence of God only becomes evident when you’ve already made up your mind to believe? Isn’t that putting the cart in front of the horse?
I believe answering these questions as clearly as possible is mandatory in making myself understood here, so let's tackle the necessary definitions first.
Authority Effectively UnderminedI was cruising around the blogosphere this morning when I found this post at DaylightAtheism. Although I don’t necessarily share all of Haught’s conclusions as expressed in the source material, I felt Ebonmuse’s response was fraught with inconsistencies.
First on the list is the following peculiarity:
…Haught presumes for himself the right to judge which atheists are or are not sufficiently “serious”
Why should that be any sort of problem? After all, Ebonmuse certainly presumes which theists are sufficiently serious, for example, he says all that believe in demons are ignorant regardless of actual intelligence and should be unilaterally mocked. This makes Occam’s razor look more like a guillotine! As my heart goes out to the closet GLBT kid with a sternly homophobic and closed-minded dad, similar for the otherwise rational person who’s had experiences reasonably interpretable as psychic (‘psychic’ as in the Jungian sense of archetypal), spiritual or biblical in their ultimate nature. Such hasty generalization and harsh criticism in this regard can only effect cognitive dissonance, which is of little use in uncovering the truth.