23 years ago yesterday, as my friends Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney were driving through Oakland, California on their way to appear at a Santa Cruz rally against clearcutting California’s remaining old-growth redwoods, a bomb exploded beneath the driver’s seat. Judi was in that drivers’ seat and nearly died of her wounds. She lived in constant pain until cancer took her life seven years later. (Thankfully, Darryl’s injuries were not as severe.)

The bomb was a home-made nail-filled pipe bomb with a motion-sensitive trigger. (The explosion happened as Judi and Darryl were driving past a middle school’s bus stop at Park and Macarthur boulevards in Central Oakland: it’s a wonder no one else was injured in the blast.)

Judi and her daughters after her release from the hospital. David J. Cross photo

At the time of the bombing, Judi, Darryl, and their fellow Earth First! activists in Northern California had been the targets of a campaign of sustained harassment, including death threats. Mailed leaflets featuring Judi’s face with superimposed crosshairs, for instance. A few weeks before the explosion, Judi had been run off a rural Northern California road Silkwood-style by a logging truck. The local cops told her “if you get killed, then we’ll investigate.”

The context for this was that some time earlier, a local timber company — Pacific Lumber — had been bought out leveraged-style by junk bond trader Charles Hurwitz. Hurwitz  and his shell company Maxxam then started to liquidate PL’s holdings to generate cash. Among those holdings were some of the 5 or so percent of remaining old-growth redwood forests in California, which PL had previously been logging slowly enough that some people actually called the company a sustainable timber firm. Those trees started getting cut really quickly, endangering wildlife, the safety of timber workers , and the lives of people who lived downhill from the clearcuts.

Activists countered with a campaign modeled on the Civil Rights movement’s sit-ins, originally called Mississippi Summer In The Redwoods. Before long Judi and Earth First! had become central to the campaign, whose name was quickly shortened to Redwood Summer.

It was a really tense time in Northern California. Maxxam/PL managed to persuade some workers that the hippies were threatening their jobs, and the consequent conflict was ugly. That ugliness made the press fairly often. What didn’t make the press was the fact that Judi was an old-school union organizer: she identified more with the loggers than did most enviros, and she built some serious bridges between the two camps. Among other things, she got Earth First! in Northern California to renounce tree-spiking. She helped unionize a timber firm. Above all, she worked with timber workers to point out that sustainable logging meant sustainable employment, and that Maxxam’s cut and run practices meant mills would be closing as soon as the last tree was cut.

Still, those threats were out there and continuing. As horrified as we were when the bomb went off, it wasn’t particularly a surprise. What was a surprise was that the FBI arrived at the crime scene within minutes, and that the Oakland Police Department arrested Judi and Darryl before they’d been extracted from the ruins of Judi’s Subaru, charging them with transporting an explosive device.

The interior of Judi’s Subaru, the blast damage showing that the bomb was directly beneath the driver’s seat and not in the back footwell. Oakland Police photo.

The architect of this legal strategy? Mythbusters’ bomb expert Frank Doyle, then a special agent with the FBI.

Four weeks before the explosion, Doyle had run what was called a Bomb Investigator’s Training Course in Eureka in which law enforcement agents blew up cars with pipe bombs and then examined the wrecks for forensic evidence. There are two things that are especially spooky about this confluence of events. First was that Doyle, on arriving at the corner of Park and Macarthur, told his fellow first responders — four of whom had attended that course — “this is your final exam.” His statement was caught on tape.

The second spooky coincidence was that the bomb’s construction closely paralleled that of the practice bombs used at Doyle’s “bomb school.”

Doyle told the press that the damage to the car showed that it had been carried behind the driver’s seat, therefore was visible to the passengers, therefore they knew it was there and were deliberately transporting it. That lie was thoroughly shredded in a later court case, but at the time the press ran with it. Within two months all charges against Judi and Darryl were dropped for lack of evidence. You still hear people refer to them as the “people who were carrying that bomb.” The act of character assassination worked — a sentiment with which a Federal court judge and jury agreed.

Judi died of metastatic breast cancer in March 1997, leaving behind two young daughters. In 2002, that federal judge ordered Oakland cops and FBI agents to pay $4.4 million to Darryl and to Judi’s estate for violating their civil rights. During the trial agents admitted tracking Judi and Darryl for weeks before the bombing. The forensic evidence was clear. It was pretty much an open and shut case.

I am not saying that Frank Doyle had  other than an after-the-fact a role in the attempted murder of my friends, though it wouldn’t shock me if I found out that he did. But Doyle absolutely did thwart an effective investigation of that attempted murder. That’s a matter of established record. He ignored obvious leads, misrepresented evidence, and worked to frame activists for a horrible act of violence against them.

And nonetheless, Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman decided to use Doyle as their go-to guy for explosives on Mythbusters. Despite the fact that Doyle tried to destroy two lives with a myth of his own concoction.

Let me be clear about one thing. Judi was not just targeted for being an environmental activist. The worst harassment, the worst threats that Redwood Summer activists received were directed at women. My friend Karen Pickett got some of those threatening letters too, and they were rife with misogyny to the point of being nearly laughable, before the bomb went off. (The accusation that women Earth First! activists were “box lunch eating lesbians” got used a lot.) One of the prime uninvestigated suspects in the bombing, a blithering godbag calling themself the “Lord’s Avenger,” claimed responsibility for the bombing and said it was in retaliation for Judi doing clinic defense at the Ukiah office of Planned Parenthood. That may or may not be true, though the Lord’s Avenger did apparently possess some interesting knowledge about the bomb’s construction.

Either way, Judi’s feminist activism definitely played a more than significant role in her being targeted. Male Earth First! activists got threats, and some of them were scary indeed. But it was the women who bore the brunt of the threats and harassment, and Judi paid the biggest price.

The film “Who Bombed Judi Bari?” screened on the outside of the Mythbusters building in San Francisco, May 24 2013

Which raises a question. For all the criticism it has received for being sensationalist and superficial, Mythbusters essentially serves as a public face of Skepticism to viewers who have never heard of Skepticism. Yet apparently it’s no big deal for Adam and Jamie to support, employ, and publicize a man who may have helped target a feminist environmental activist for unbelievably painful harassment, and who certainly provided effective cover for the people who tried to kill her.

Darryl Cherney, who has plowed some of the proceeds from the court settlement into making a film about Judi, is trying to get Jamie and Adam to explain why they employ Frank Doyle. They’ve been reluctant to answer, even though Darryl went so far as to offer a free screening of the film on the wall of Mythbusters’ building this weekend.

Anyone concerned with the role of women in the Skeptics’ movement ought to ask them for an answer.

Atheists are not popular. This comes as no surprise to us or anyone, really. As far as I can tell we are dead last in every poll in which we are included and explicit terrorists, Nazis, and the Westboro Baptist Church are not.

I suppose the cultural assumption that ‘you need God to be good’ should be explanation enough for our banishment from the realm of the acceptable (Would you want your sister to marry one? Would you want to be one? Nuh uh.)  But I keep running into a common plea that no, the problem is not really atheism. Atheism isn’t necessarily okay, of course … but after all it’s a free country and people have the right to believe what they want to believe. It takes all kinds. Just be nice and you’re okay.

No, the problem isn’t atheism itself – it’s atheists. But not all atheists. The tolerant believers discern critical distinctions in the group. There are Good Atheists who don’t manage to believe in God themselves but who still manage to show the courtesy to respect those who do. And then there are the ones like Richard Dawkins . The outspoken ones, the militant ones, the shrill ones who won’t shut up and try to blend in and instead write books and articles and letters meant for the general public. The stigma is focused like a laser on the atheists who act ‘just like fundamentalists’ by trying to convert people and thereby change their minds. The arrogant. The not-nice.

Gnus.

It’s an insidious trope which appeals to values like respect, acceptance, and inclusion: why would anyone be so  rude as to try to get other people to not believe in God? What about diversity? Diversity is good. We ought to let people be who they are.

Outspoken atheists then are disparaged even by those who claim to be “fine” with atheism because we are seen as breaking the social contract which values diversity and individuality. Atheists attack people’s deepest identity the way racists attack race or bullies attack those who are different than them. When you get right down to it — they’re bigots. Telling people their religion is wrong is being judgmental.

This is apparently a major charge made against us. I feel as if I see and read and encounter variations of it all around. I suspect most of us do. It’s a theme which seems to run more often through liberal communities than the conservative ones (which are usually just fine with the assumption that you can’t be good without God) but many of us live in such communities and engage regularly with those who seem so frustratingly on the edge of rationality.

So I’ve been attempting to figure out exactly what is happening and why,  working it out mostly here and there in parts and pieces. Since PZ gave me the keys while he’s away, though, I’ll take advantage and will to try to expand a bit, to see whether people in this forum think it makes sense. Because I think that, once again, theists are making a category error when it comes to religion. And they’re getting a lot of non-theists to go along with them because they are appealing to values which are essentially not religious, but humanist.

Bottom line, there is a sort of equivocation going on with the concept of “diversity”  – and it’s helping to fuel the general antipathy towards atheists.

Consider it this way: it might be said that there are two basic frameworks in which we value ‘diversity’ as a modern virtue. One of them is what I call the Diversity Smorgasbord. The other is what we can call the Diverse Problem-Solving Group.

The Diversity Smorgasbord is one where everyone brings their favorite “dish” – their preferences, their lifestyles, their values, their choices, and everything else that contributes to their identity, to what makes them them and not someone else. Maybe you bring a chocolate cake and I don’t like chocolate cake. That’s fine. No judgment here – it’s not a cooking contest. Take what you need and leave the rest.

It’s all good. Some people like living in the country and some people like living in the city. Some people are brown and some people are white. Some people prefer Star Trek over Star Wars and some people choose banking over a career in modern dance. Whatever floats your boat, whatever you love … whoever you are. A humanist society focuses on the rights and flourishing of the individual. The more diversity, the better.

That’s an important point. No right, no wrong – just different. Genuine tolerance demands that you accept people just as they are. Come into a Diversity Smorgasbord with the idea that you are going to criticize, debate, or set people straight and you’re a bully, a bigot, or both. That’s because the stakes of the argument are so inherently personal. If one person “wins,” then the other person loses in a battle for status and identity. You’re wrong to like the music you like. You’re wrong to love the person you love. You’re wrong to be the person you are. Because I’m better than you and you’re lower. In such a contentious atmosphere it is not safe to express yourself.

That is what we mean when we say someone is being “judgmental.”

So no. Trying to change someone’s mind in a Diversity Smorgasbord is seen as harmful, disruptive, and rude. You’re not supposed to do that (unless the other person can take it in good spirit and agrees to go along.) In a civil society we’re not just supposed to accept differences – we’re supposed to welcome them. Doing otherwise displays an unbecoming arrogance and insensitivity. It’s judgmental.

But then there is the Diverse Problem-Solving Group. The diversity here has a different purpose than allowing self-expression to flourish unhindered. In a problem-solving group individuals are united together on common ground: they share a problem. They’re trying to find an answer or a solution or an agreement reached. And this search for consensus can only be as good and open and honest as it gets if you have both an assumption of equality and a lot of diversity, a lot of contending ideas being sifted through and argued for and argued against to provide checks and balances against the tendency towards human error. The more diversity the better, yes – but not as the goal.

The ultimate goal is to find out what is right and what is wrong: solve the problem.  Judge. Not who is right — as if all anyone cared about was expressing their individual “opinion” and there it rests.  It’s the marketplace of ideas and so  there are winners and losers. But if you honestly care about the problematic issue then every defeat is a victory. You made a mistake and we all learned something – including you. Win-win.

For example: all the fish are dying in our lake. Why? Is the lake polluted? How? What should we do? Should we do anything at all? Arguments and evidence and ideas are bandied about and every time someone says “you’re wrong” and can prove it then we’ve got a healthy situation. The diverse group is making progress. They are finding a solution. There is no progress if nobody can make a mistake. You can shut down an idea … but you better not shut down a voice. That voice might be the very check and balance you need.

Assuming, that is, that you care more about discovering truth than you care about protecting your turf, your ego, and your identity.

And this I think is the crux of the matter when it comes to gnu atheism and the charge of bigotry: categorization. Where does the general category of “religion” go? “Religious beliefs?” When push comes to shove and we get right down to what religion actually is about — which Diversity Group does it go under?

You have already guessed. Yes, atheists place ‘religion’ in the Diverse-Problem Solving Group.

The religious place “religion’ in the Diversity Smorgasbord.

AND they put it in the Problem-Solving Group, too. It gets to be both. Such is the insidious, sneaking, self-referential nature of “faith” and the idea that what you believe about God is all going to come down to a reflection of the kind of person you are and the “choices” you make because of this.

Philosopher Stephen Law talks about “immunizing strategies” – mental tricks and tactics which follow bad ideas along in order to protect them from critical scrutiny (like a dowser suddenly and forever more insisting that dowsing ‘can’t be tested’ after a failed test.) If what a person believes about God is treated like a fundamental unit of self-identity then religion falls into the Diversity Smorgasbord and it can’t be touched. Try to change someone’s mind and you’re trying to take who they are away from them. “Differences” need to be respected here, not challenged. Don’t be judgmental.

And thus religion manages to ride to credibility and acceptance on the back of a general public agreement for harmony which is grounded in humanistic tolerance. No, we don’t want to be judgmental, do we?

Which would all be fine if all religion was and all spirituality entailed was a sort of aesthetic appreciation for nature and virtue and art. If religion were like knitting and it’s okay if you don’t knit or are allergic to wool then there would be no problem with the Smorgasbord approach. But it isn’t. Religion is a model of the world. It’s supposed to involve knowledge about the way reality works, how it’s set up — and what we ought to do about that. They look and observe and think and draw conclusions that the natural world is not a sufficient explanation. These are the religionists own standards: the meaning of life and the key to wisdom and understanding.

Whether God exists or not is supposed to matter. It’s an empirical conclusion which is supposed to be right … and atheism is supposed to be wrong.  It’s supposed to be wrong regardless of whether or not the atheist is “nice” enough to shut up and respect the rules of the Diversity Smorgasbord. The so-called Good Atheists are kidding themselves if they think the God-believers on the other side really, really have no problem with them because hey, it’s all a matter of taste, right? No. Not really.

The pious need to pick a horse and ride it. If religion is nothing more than a matter of taste, a personal inclination which expresses feelings and concerns – then stop the endless emphasis on God, God, God and how important it is that God exists and how important it is to believe in God. You don’t give a crap about whether it exists: you’re only going with what works for you as part of your identity. As Daniel Dennett puts it, you believe in belief.

But if whether your religion is actually true actually matters – then take religion off of the Diversity Smorgasbord and place it firmly in the Problem-Solving Group. Advance “the existence of God” as a proposed explanation for observations and enter an honest debate. Don’t suddenly shift back into the Smorgasbord when you encounter active resistance and demand respect for your private little “choice.” And don’t then slip right back into the Problem-Solving Group when you get together again with those seekers who have found the same solution you have. We atheists are in on the search, too. We are part of your group. We share the common ground. Win-win.

As I said above, I think there is more than just a desire for self-protection behind the back-and-forth equivocation in how believers want religion to be categorized. I think there’s a fundamental confusion which comes directly from entangling the concept of “faith” into how we derive conclusions about the supernatural.

When it gets right down to it religious faith isn’t “belief without evidence.” It’s believing on evidence which is insufficient to convince a low, narrow, arrogant, cold, heartless, closed-minded person – but which is sufficient to convince someone like you! It’s a personal commitment to always and forever spin the evidence in the “right” direction. Faith is the psychic mind call to the higher minds — those rare individuals with the deep, humble, warm openness of heart that allows them to connect with the divine and appreciate the sacred. Bypass reason — or at least curtail it. With faith, people are supposed to derive their conclusion (“therefore, God exists”) by drawing on their identity (“I want to be the kind of person who believes.”)

And this entire set-up screws not only epistemology; it screws the atheist. It removes us from the common ground of rational debate and places us in the situation of being a very sorry dish indeed on the Smorgasbord of Personalities. It takes away our reasons and arguments and forces not-believing-in-God into the role of self-expressive personal choice. And no matter how liberal and spiritual a believer may be, being the ‘kind of person” who doesn’t believe in God is not good. We have brought liver-and-onions to the Cake Table.

When religion is considered part of the Diversity Smorgasbord it doesn’t contribute to the harmony and tolerance of diverse viewpoints. On the contrary. Because ‘religion’ is supposed to be in the Diverse Problem-Solving Group – because it belongs in that group as long as the truth of the beliefs matter to the believer  – then this move only effectively shuts up a voice by shutting down dissent. It’s divisive. And it ends up being a form of bullying and bigotry itself.

It seems to me that using this conceptual model of diversity – the Diversity Smorgasbord vs. the Diverse Problem-Solving Group – has helped me clarify my thoughts somewhat and perhaps aided my understanding of the automatic hostility often directed towards atheists from people who don’t seem to fall into the usual You-Need-God-to-Be-Good crowd. The diverse diversities might even help explain some of the reasoning behind the anti-gnu atheists, the faitheists and accomodationists who would never, ever be so rude as to try to change another person’s religious beliefs. They’re letting the religious set the framework. They’re buying into the equivocation. And then they’re being reasonable, fair, tolerant, accepting, and good. They’re not judgmental.

No. I think we need to go back and look at categories. The religious have turned category error into an art form. Don’t let them get away with it. Solve a problem. Judge.

(from Sastra)

Slippery slope to accepting atheist Boy Scouts: Column
USA TODAY
Groups representing atheists, agnostics and other unbelievers have not hesitated to tie their own campaign against the Boy Scouts to that of homosexual activists. Austin Cline, writing for an online agnosticism/atheism guide, complains, "It's ...

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I’m at the humanist conference on “Education, Science and Human Rights” in Bucharest, sponsored by Asociatia Umanista Romana, the International Humanist and Ethical Union, and the European Humanist Federation…and you’re not. I’m not going to be live-blogging it, I’m afraid — I’m so tired right now I’m going to be using my currently limited cognitive faculties to simply pay attention. But I thought in these moments before the knowledge starts flowing I could at least let you know I’m sitting on lovely leather-bound seats beneath a gigantic chandelier in huge auditorium surrounded by marble pillars. I think my expectations for conference accommodations have now taken a giant leap upwards in opulence.

I’m also looking at the schedule — this is the first I’ve seen it — and feeling a great relief that I think my talk will fit right in with all these other people’s. Well, unless that talk on religious education in Romania is in favor of it…then I might be in trouble.

Daily Mail
According to map, China leads world in atheism
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According to a new "atheist map," which lists the number of non-believers, it's apparent that mainland China leads the globe in terms of self-identified atheists. China has the highest amount of atheists living in a single country by far, with nearly ...
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Who well deserves it, I think. It’s “presented every year to honor an outstanding atheist whose contributions raise public awareness of the nontheist life stance.” Very laudatory and gratifying press release here.

I just finished reading his Better Angels of Our Nature: Why violence has declined. I thought it a well-reasoned and researched testament to the power of humanism and a excellent resource for rebutting the folks who think the world is worse than it has ever been and people never more wicked. One would think that evidence to the contrary would be welcome … but it’s not. My neo-pagan spiritual friends would have none of it. I hold out even less hope for the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Last year’s recipient was also excellent: Eugenie Scott. Perhaps not quite a ‘mirror’ representative of  “the uncompromising nontheist life stance of Dr. Richard Dawkins” — but quite solid on the raising of the public awareness of science. Pinker, then, is a twofer.

 

He’s also an excellent speaker. I plan on attending the Atheist Alliance of America’s national convention to see him receive the Dawkins. It’s taking place on  Aug 30 – Sept 2 … in Boston. The Alliance’s conventions are imo one of the best. Everyone should go. And now there’s Pinker to tempt you.

(from Sastra)

Hello, all. Sastra here doing a guest post for PZ, who is toiling hard, very hard, in Romania. Or sleeping. Either; both. Please bear with me then as I try to figure out how to work this thing. Trial and error…

My title echoes an old one from the Onion. The Cracker People are at it again.

Are traditional religions all moving closer to humanism? Is Catholicism? Perhaps.

Two days ago the new pope appeared to come very close to saying that “it doesn’t matter what you believe – as long as you’re a good person.” While giving a short sermon ( a “homily”) during Wednesday’s mass, Pope Francis suddenly began to address the status of the non-Catholic – yea, even the atheist – regarding salvation … and he pronounced it good.

“The Lord has redeemed all of us, all of us, with the Blood of Christ: all of us, not just Catholics. Everyone! ‘Father, the atheists?’ Even the atheists. Everyone!”.. We must meet one another doing good. ‘But I don’t believe, Father, I am an atheist!’ But do good: we will meet one another there.”

Really? Just “do good?” Does that include intellectual integrity? Say, something along the lines of approaching the existence of God as a hypothesis whilst taking all our scientific evidence regarding cosmology, evolution, and neurology into account? Does that include objectively applying Occam’s razor to God? We atheists are very good at that. It’s a fine form of  virtue. One of our finest.

It’s odd, though, if he really does mean that. I suspect not — given that he is the Catholic Pope.

The relationship between Catholicism and humanism is a strange one. While the roots of humanism — with its emphasis on reason and science and its focus on human rights and virtues – go back to classical Greece, the gradual infusion of ancient philosophy into a Church concerned with both scholarship and apologetic lead to contending views regarding the role of nature in theology. “Catholic humanism” may sound like a contradiction, but it seems there is a thin thread of Renaissance liberalism feeding into what is a far more varied religion than its proponents usually say it is. This thread sometimes weaves itself into a culture which is increasingly humanist in sentiment.

Most of my relatives are Catholic. They mostly know I am an atheist, too.  But “Don’t worry,” I’m reassured. God is large. God knows my heart. Christ died that all might be saved and surely the virtue in the life that I live will speak for me at the end. And so they calmly rationalize and dismiss what is undoubtedly a very contentious issue within their church. How much of religion is specifically religious? One would think doctrine matters. It can’t all be some sort of literary effort and performance art.

Like most Catholic pronouncements, however,  the interpretation of the homily is a bit open. A Father Martin clarified the pope’s position thus:

“Pope Francis is saying, more clearly than ever before, that Christ offered himself as a sacrifice for everyone. That’s always been a Christian belief. You can find St. Paul saying in the First Letter to Timothy that Jesus gave himself as a “ransom for all.” But rarely do you hear it said by Catholics so forcefully, and with such evident joy. And in this era of religious controversies, it’s a timely reminder that God cannot be confined to our narrow categories.”

Uh huh. This clears up nothing. Of course we all know that Christ died “for everybody.” Say it with as much joy as you want and you still won’t match the current general hysteria on this point, an excitement shared by fundamentalist Protestants.

Clarify the terms, padre. The question is whether those who are said to “reject” this bizarre human sacrifice and thus end up damned include everyone who is not Catholic or everyone who is not Christian or everyone who doesn’t believe in God … or just the “bad” people (who are…?) When Francis says that “we will meet one another there” is the “there” supposed to be heaven – or the Holy Mother Church, where the newly converted atheist has been led by his or her good works to finally adopt the religion of the One True God?

My guess is that some will take it one way, others will take it another way .. and each side will think the other side lacks Understanding. Because the pope was “more clear than ever before.”

Perhaps that is not a high bar.

The day after the pope’s apparent inclusion of the nonbelieving damned into salvation, the Vatican went into damage control.

On Thursday, the Vatican issued an “explanatory note on the meaning to ‘salvation.’”

The Rev. Thomas Rosica, a Vatican spokesman, said that people who are aware of the Catholic church “cannot be saved” if they “refuse to enter her or remain in her.”

At the same time, Rosica writes, “every man or woman, whatever their situation, can be saved. Even non-Christians can respond to this saving action of the Spirit. No person is excluded from salvation simply because of so-called original sin.”

Rosica also said that Francis had “no intention of provoking a theological debate on the nature of salvation,” during his homily on Wednesday.

I’ll bet he didn’t. But no fear: the Vatican easily spins it as business as usual. You must still enter into the Church. So no big deal.

Except that this is not how the pronouncement is being spun in the media, is it? From what I can tell one and all seem to be treating it much more along the lines of “it doesn’t matter what you believe … as long as you’re a good person.” Even Dave Silverman is displaying a cautious approval. Well then.

So let us hope this impression is augmented by various Protestants furiously protesting the wickedness of the Papists and their false god.

 

Works vs. faith. The world moves on.  Eventually  “works” like saying the rosary and taking communion are going to give way to being charitable and refraining from serial killings. Humanism triumphs and Catholicism turns into a quaint ceremonial term used mostly by history buffs and its rituals are adopted by the goths. Amen.

 

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Raw Story
Wolf Blitzer's awkward atheist encounter
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An October 2012 survey found that one in five Americans is religiously unaffiliated, but barely 2 percent of Americans identify as atheists. Even of the religiously unaffiliated, about two-thirds have some form of belief. So to reach into a crowd of ...
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Atheist Oklahoma Tornado Survivor Awarded $10000 For Being Honest
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Remember that awkward interview CNN's Wolf Blitzer conducted with Oklahoma tornado survivor Rebecca Vitsmun? Where Blitzer asked her, "Do you thank the Lord for that split-second decision?" and she sheepishly replied, on-air, "I-I'm actually an atheist.

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Rebecca Vitsmun, the Oklahoma tornado survivor who told CNN's Wolf Blitzer that she is an atheist, is going to be receiving tens of thousands of dollars in donations from the secular community, who decided to support her for speaking out about her ...

So Ron Lindsay just said this on twitter:

Free inquiry. Free expression. Not only are these indispensable in our quest for the truth but they’re necessary conditions 4 human dignity

A lovely sentiment, and completely misleading. This long-running argument has never been about “free speech” — no one’s free speech has been denied, as any glance at the raging and constant torrent of abuse will show. It’s been about the responsible recognition of what kind of speech supports that “human dignity” he wants to cloak himself in; it’s about realizing that free speech as we see it in that unfettered medium called the internet is going to produce mostly noise with only a little signal; it’s about the responsibility of organizations to pluck out and amplify the good and damp down the stupid.

It really is about taking sides.

Not taking sides — pretending to have a false objectivity that values all speech equally — is actually favoring the noise. It’s the pretense that a statement on twitter like “It is honorable, noble and good to change your mind if you are wrong” from Lauren Becker has equal weight with “Get out, Amanda, you not welcome here. Take your dogma elsewhere (you too, Ophelia)” from a troll who doesn’t deserve to be named. It’s the refusal to recognize that some of the people who support the same causes as CFI have been barraged with incessant hatred for about two years now — and that that hatred has been aimed at women and the people who support women’s rights. It’s a willingness to let your organization be affiliated with websites dedicated to misogyny.

A Voice for Men is essentially a mouthpiece for its editor, Paul Elam, who proposes to “expose misandry [hatred of men] on all levels in our culture.” Elam tosses down the gauntlet in his mission statement: “AVfM regards feminists, manginas [a derisive term for weak men], white knights [a similar derisive term, for males who identify as feminists] and other agents of misandry as a social malignancy. We do not consider them well intentioned or honest agents for their purported goals and extend to them no more courtesy or consideration than we would clansmen [sic], skinheads, neo Nazis or other purveyors of hate.” Register-Her.com, an affiliated website that vilifies women by name who have made supposedly false rape allegations (among other crimes against masculinity), is one of Elam’s signature “anti-hate” efforts. “Why are these women not in prison?” the site asks.

Oh, right. That’s just free speech. Where is the human dignity, though?

It’s also about being smart enough to see through the dishonesty of thugs who puff themselves up and call harassment a right, who claim tawdry garden-variety sexual bullying “free speech”. Amanda Marcotte has the clarity of thought to see right through this game.

If it seems baffling to you that people are “into” harassment, I don’t know what to tell you. Why else would people harass? (Don’t say autism, for the love of god. People on the spectrum struggle to interpret social signals. Harassers, on the other hand, are masters at manipulating social rules and actual physical space to creep people out as much as they can get away with. It requires careful study of social signaling, not the opposite.) I got harassed on the sidewalk the other day, because that’s just part of the atmosphere of being female. I didn’t catch exactly what the guy said, because he muttered it, but what he wanted out of the situation couldn’t have been clearer. He had that sly smile, that glint in his eye that harassers get when they manage to capture their target’s attention and make them uncomfortable. It’s the feeling of power they have over you, the little jolt they get from putting a bitch in her place. Why people harass is not a mystery. It makes them feel good to exert power. This motivation is all over the Twitter rampage from the pro-harassment forces. They love drowning out useful tweets about real information with their anti-feminist garbage and ranting. It makes them feel good, like they have power. They can harass you and get under your skin and make you write blog posts about them, and then they feel powerful. It’s all of one cloth, and it’s not about unexamined privilege. It’s about being an asshole. We’re asking them to give up this jolt of feeling powerful they get from making other people sad or angry. No wonder they resent us.

When they photoshop our faces onto porn, when they call us “manginas” and “cunts”, when they flood CFI conference streams with denigrating insults to the speakers, they are not making “free inquiry”, they are not using “free speech” in a “quest for truth” or to advance “human dignity”. It’s embarrassing to see the leader of a major freethought organization making excuses for the toxic, petty viciousness from the anti-feminists that has been plaguing this movement since a woman dared to politely ask for her share of that human dignity.

This is why I’ve lost all confidence in Ron Lindsay. He can talk about human dignity, but he doesn’t have the vision to actually lead CFI towards greater support for that principle.

We need a leadership that is willing to take sides. Otherwise, what’s the point of it all?

See also Secular Woman’s post on privilege.

Not stated is whether they manage to lose weight, nor whether they still get cavities or develop diabetes. But a recent article in Science shows that cockroaches evolved an aversion to glucose after glucose was used for a number of years as a poisoned bait. That is, the cockroaches developed an aversion to the bait rather than a resistance to the poison. The Science article is kind of written in Greek In response to the... Matt Young http://www.mines.edu/~mmyoung

Aron Ra brings up a minor incident from the past, in reference to the iERA’s recent denunciation of the Woolwich murder.

However I must remind anyone reading this that the iERA is headed by one Hamza Tzortzis who PZ and I met when he crashed the World Atheist Convention in Dublin Ireland. Hamza tried to convince PZ to get into an iERA car where they intended to take him to an undisclosed location for a private discussion. Sensing the insanity of that invitation, I altered the challenge to invite Hamza onto the Magic Sandwich Show instead.

While on our show, DPR Jones asked Hamza what would be the appropriate and reasonable response to apostates, and Hamza Tsortzis, head of the iERA said non-believers should be decapitated. He said it was the only humane thing to do, as he belives sawing someone’s head off to be a merciful and painless way to correct opposing opinions.

Aron did not have to try very hard. When a group of indignant Muslims who have just spent 20 minutes telling me that every word of their holy book is literally true ask me to take a ride with them, I am not at all tempted. The same would be true if they were a gang of clean-shaven Christian fanatics.

Can you imagine anything more boring and infuriating than being trapped in the company of loquacious Abrahamic zealots? Even without considering the neck-chopping thing, it would be an awful experience.

Factor in the predilection for decapitating their perceived enemies by some of them, and others’ refusal to so much as condemn violent murder, and is it any wonder that most people give them a wide berth?

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New 'atheist map' of the world dominated by China where half the country¿s ...
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