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Why I am an atheist – mouthyb May 5, 2012 at 9:21 am  PZ Myers 
My childhood sounds like the word “jesus,” repeated until it falls into noise, and you realize that it never meant anything to begin with. My mother used to repeat it in the car, on road trips. She spent twelve hours of reminding us of this: jesus said that he had no mother, no brother, and that no one would get into heaven but by loving him more than anything or anyone else. It was okay that she didn’t love me, she said. It meant that she was going to heaven. That book would be so useful in an argument May 5, 2012 at 9:08 am PZ Myers Anyone know where I can get a copy? I’m already a penis-haver, so I’m good in that department, thanks.  More discussion of profiling, pro and con May 5, 2012 at 8:57 am PZ Myers I have to return to Same Harris’ defense of profiling, because he’s added an addendum, and although it tells us more about why Harris is focused on this issue, it doesn’t actually address my objections, and thinking about it, it does expose some deep differences between me and Harris. The problem is this assertion:
Let me change that around a bit, not just to make a point for me, but also to try and move the debate away from race.
If you step back and look at the world today, the major source of death and strife and terrorism isn’t Islam, it’s America — the country with hands down the largest arsenal and the will to use it. A few cunning Islamic terrorists did manage to murder several thousand Americans in a stunning attack, it is true; but in retaliation, we killed a hundred thousand or more Iraqis (a nation not involved in that attack!) and have wrecked two countries, Iraq and Afghanistan, and threaten to wreak similar havoc on a third, Iran. We have drones flying over Afghanistan right now, ready to blow up any small group of people seen gathering in public. You cannot call those drones anything but state-sponsored terrorism. Of all the people lined up behind the security barrier at the airport, it’s those American voters who are currently the most dangerous. The only reasonable objection to my claim that we should profile Republicans is that everyone who voted for the Democrat Obama is also culpable. I will agree with Harris, though, that frisking little old Republican ladies at the checkpoint is ridiculous, because suicidal terrorism isn’t their game — that’s the desperate tactic of the otherwise powerless, and as he points out, it’s almost entirely perpetrated by Muslims.
This is true. Republicans would never make the self-sacrifice of smuggling explosives on a plane to kill themselves and the other passengers — it’s not their thing. So if we’re focused on just stopping this one strategy of disrupting our economy and politics, I agree that after the fact we’re likely to discover that the perpetrator was a Muslim. It’s also true that some vocal Muslims are likely to express credible death threats against individuals — like Ayaan Hirsi Ali or Salman Rushdie — using Islam as a justification, and those people certainly have good cause to fear Islam. But that does not make “Muslim” a useful criterion for preventing terror attacks. The majority of Muslims are just as harmless as the elderly woman featured in Harris’ article (probably more harmless: they aren’t voting Republican). When you single out the 30 year old traveling Pakistani engineer with a family and a career for specially invasive inspection, you are committing just as much of an outrage as when you pull out the 70 year old white grandma.
This logic simply doesn’t work. It’s not political correctness: it’s basic numeracy. Since terrorists are extremely rare in airports, you could also argue that the whole strategy of randomly frisking individuals is a waste of limited resources: since the probability of any of those people, either Muslim or non-Muslim, being a terrorist is so ridiculously low, each search is a waste of time that could allow the real problem people to go unobserved. The numbers just don’t work. I agree with Harris that special screening for white-haired old ladies is absurd, but it’s also absurd for brown-skinned young men with an accent. Another reason it’s ridiculous: we keep fighting the last terrorist. They aren’t going to keep doing the same thing, over and over; 9/11 was a one-shot event, airlines have made other changes in their protocols that will prevent that. Yet TSA keeps following one step behind. Some guy smuggles explosives aboard in the soles of his shoes, so now we have to take off our shoes for inspection before boarding; it doesn’t matter that the shoe bomb didn’t work. I thoroughly sympathize with frustration at the mindless, pointless security theater we go through all the time. I don’t think it helps us at all, though, to turn it into an opportunity to selectively punish people who “look Muslim”. That’s theater that adds a fresh new layer of pointless othering and tribalism to the pointless pretense of security. “Political correctness” is a phrase too often used to justify racism and oppression; you can’t just defuse criticisms of poor policies of discrimination by claiming political correctness. It’s really about recognizing the fact that religious affiliation is not a good indicator of a propensity for violence. Step into any mosque, church, or synagogue, and what you’ll find is a congregation of people who are typically more concerned with getting along with their neighbors than in blowing stuff up. Sure, you’ll find a scattering of people who want do destroy Great Satan America, or shoot abortion doctors, or overthrow ZOG, but they’re a minority, and they also tend to segregate themselves off to more reactionary cells in more radical religious groups. I think it’s a huge mistake for atheists to repeat this claim that religion makes you fly planes into buildings; it’s simply not true, and the overwhelming majority of religious people who gather on holy days to pray are looking at us like we’re insane and deluded for suggesting it. That isn’t “political correctness”, that’s truth, and that’s what the people of reason should be focused on. Not damning the whole for the crimes of a few. Not equating Muslim with terrorist. I really think the atheist movement ought to be focusing instead on one general truth: almost all of the people in that mosque, church, or synagogue believe in stupid ideas. They aren’t evil, they’re wrong, and their credulous beliefs make them more gullible and susceptible to exploitation. I’m not in the least bit interested in punishing the religious for their beliefs in any way; they’re victims of bad tradition and poor education, and if you want to end religious terrorism the best strategy isn’t to make bodies bounce in the rubble or isolate and suppress, but to educate, educate, educate. Open up economic opportunities, increase the security of people’s lives (not just privileged wealthy white people’s lives, but everyone’s), and teach people how to think and learn. At the end of his addendum, Harris offers to open up his blog to an expert on airline security to discuss the topic. The good news is that he’s willing to learn: he’s now promising to publish something from Bruce Schneier, which I find very encouraging. The late John A Davison May 4, 2012 at 4:02 pm PZ Myers As regulars here may know, I’ve been getting crank email from John A. Davison for many years now. Until recently, he was sending me his tirades almost every day — and they were just piling up in my spam folder. He was remarkably persistent. Here is his very last email to me, fished up out of that spam folder, from 26 March.
There are about 50 others in there (I really need to flush out that folder), and they’re all this same incoherent angry ranting, the same attitude that got him banned for his obsessive commenting all over the net. That was definitely the last message I’ll ever be getting from him. Shortly after sending that, he was diagnosed with metastatic prostate cancer, and succumbed rapidly: John A Davison died last week. His favorite catch phrase, typically used in all kinds of weirdly inappropriate situations, was “I love it so”. I can’t use it here — I’m just sorry he wasted so much of his life flailing wildly for his failed cause, creationism. At least it sounds like he refocused his life on his family in his last weeks. New merch in the Pharyngula store! May 4, 2012 at 2:51 pm PZ Myers Oh, look, new tentacular stuff for sale! I quite like the tentacle arm.  Hey, wait a minute…that isn’t right. Idiots — they have the model wearing it on his arm. That’s completely wrong, everyone knows that the first thing every guy (and at least half the women) does when they get this baby is install it in their pants. The more modest will snake it down one pant leg with the tip coyly peeking out the cuff; the more flamboyant will wear it proudly erect, bobbing about as they strut around the room. (I’m trying to make the phallicarp fashionable again). Think of the fun you’ll have at parties! OK, if that’s too outre for you, there is always the lovely travel mug. I use that one all the time. The giant tentacle is admittedly just for special occasions. Right-wing communication skills on display May 4, 2012 at 10:05 am PZ Myers The Heartland Institute has begun a new ad campaign. I’ll put the billboard below the fold, but first you have to try and guess what direction they’ve taken. Facts to consider: it’s a right-wing think-tank committed to climate change denial. They’re pro-corporate and anti-science, and apparently they don’t know much about logic, either. And a final hint: it’s a place full of sleazy Republicans, and this campaign aims to outsleaze their presidential campaigning. Before you read the rest, try to imagine what kind of wretched ratfuckery they could be up to. Why I am an atheist – Laura Stokes May 4, 2012 at 7:20 am PZ Myers
I was raised in a Southern Baptist church, in Tennessee in the 1980s and 1990s. Although I was only dimly aware of it at the time, this was a period when the virulently fundamentalist wing of that church slowly began to take over from the more moderate members, systematically driving them out of the Southern Baptist convention altogether. What this meant in terms of my religious upbringing is that I was exposed to more liberal and rational people – like my parents and some of their friends – and I was exposed to more conservative, dogmatic people – like a Sunday School teacher who once read us a “story” about how we would all have to march to heaven with all our sins visibly marked on our bodies, making us repulsive, until we got to the gates of Heaven, where Jesus would wash us clean. (You can only imagine the effect this had on ten pre-teen girls, already insecure about our bodies and our appearance.) Episode CCCXXIV: I’m surrounded by morons May 4, 2012 at 6:51 am PZ Myers I get email May 4, 2012 at 6:43 am PZ Myers Andre has the inside scoop on what his god thinks of me.
You know, actually, not a lot of Christians are big on forgiveness. They say they are, but when it gets right down to it they’re as much into forgiveness as they are into poverty and humility — it all sounds good and noble and admirable, but they still act petty and nasty and wish the worst of everyone. Like Andre does in the rest of his email, which I pretty much ignore as Christian hate fantasy. But I had to point out the glaring misconception in the first sentence. |
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