Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
In this week’s news-and-snark piece, Bill Maher offers a piece that may be controversial, for it’s about how men need to be “men” again. He avers that the loss of masculinity in males is one reason why women are disappointed in men, and why people are having less sex. The data are eye-opening; for example, 44% of Gen Z men say they’ve had no relationship experience at all during their teen years. That means up to age 20! And you might be interested in the new genre of literature he describes: “romantasy”, in which women get involved with animals or half-animals like centaurs.
His solution? Men should “man up”. His example: Taylor Swift being engaged to football star Travis Kelce (“old-school wood”) after writing songs about all the lame men she was once involved with. (He describes songs by other women.) Is he right? I have no idea.
The issue of Jeffrey Epstein has brought up a question that still puzzles me. Granted, the man was a horrible pedophile and sex trafficker (he was convicted of it at least once) who probably deserved years and years in prison after his second arrest, but took his own life to forestall that fate. Granted, Epstein sought out a fair number of intellectuals and individuals, associated with some, flew a subset of them around—sometimes to his private island where bad stuff occurred—and gave other intellectuals money for their research. Granted, some of those who palled around with Epstein should have known better than to associate with a convicted pedophile, take his money, or visit his island. Others were involved in rather pathetic interactions with Epstein, like Larry Summers, who asked Epstein for romantic advice. That’s not a crime, but it doesn’t look so good.
Now it seems that almost every academic of note not only had some connection with Epstein, but also has been denigrated and demonized for it. You can be tarred even if you’re several people removed from Epstein: even I get emails and comments on the website (which are trashed) demanding to know why I am friends with people who had some tangential connection with Epstein (viz., Steve Pinker, Richard Dawkins, etc.).
You can look yourself up on the Epstein files at this site, and of course I did, though I never met or had anything to do with the man. I was amazed to see that my name appears ten times! But every mention has to do with my literary agent, John Brockman, who was one of the people cultivated by Epstein (Brockman is the agent for nearly all popular-science writers.)
Below is one example: an email from Brockman to many of his authors calling our attention to an article about him that appeared in the Guardian. I have no idea why this email is in the Epstein files. Email addresses have been redacted.
What puzzles me is that people whose connection with Epstein was tangential or minimal are nevertheless demonized, sometimes with great glee (P. Z. Myers is a great proponent of such glee, expounded in his frequent “Two Minutes of Hate” posts). I really can’t explain it, except that if you already dislike somebody (perhaps because they’re more famous than you), finding that they’re in the Epstein files gives you even more of an excuse to dislike them, and to flaunt your dislike.
I mentioned Steve Pinker, whose connection with Epstein appears limited to flying on his plane to a conference (not to the island!), being at two conferences where Epstein was in attendance (with Epstein more or less forcing himself to get photographed with Steve and even to sit down at Pinker’s table for a bit), and , finally, for helping Alan Dershowitz when Dersh defended Epstein in his first trial. In that case the “help” was free, and rendered because Pinker knew Dershowitz and wanted to help him out with the proper linguistic analysis of a statute. (See Inside Higher Ed for some tarring.) As you’ll see below, Steve has apologized for that help. But I really don’t think that such an apology is necessary, as even a rich person deserves a good defense. Remember that I was on O. J. Simpson’s defense team (refusing a fee), because I thought that even Simpson deserved a decent defense and because, at the time, the FBI was using “match probabilities” for DNA in a manner I considered prejudicial. (Match probability was my area of expertise.) I make no apologies for that, and was appalled when Simpson was found “not guilty.”
At any rate, Pinker has publicly explained his connection with Epstein on Andrew Sullivan’s site (here and here), and I’ll reproduce Steve’s mea culpa below. Greg Mayer put the entire explanation/apology together for me:
You asked “What was Steven Pinker thinking?” with the implication that I was a willing associate of Epstein. I know the question was rhetorical, but let me answer it.
I disliked Epstein from the moment I met him, judging him to be a sleaze and an impostor. I never sought his company, never solicited or accepted funding from him, was never invited to his mansion or island, and would not have accepted. But as we know, Epstein was an obsessive collector of celebrities, including academic celebrities, and he was tight with an astonishing number of my close colleagues, making it difficult to escape associations with him. These included my Harvard colleague and co-teacher Alan Dershowitz; my PhD advisor, department chair, and dean Stephen Kosslyn; my Harvard colleagues Lawrence Summers, Lisa Randall, and Martin Nowak; my former MIT colleague Noam Chomsky; my literary agent John Brockman; and the Director of the ASU Origins Project, Lawrence Krauss. I am astonished that these smart people took Epstein seriously. On the two occasions when I was forced into his company, I found him to be a deeply unserious and attention-deficit-disordered smart-ass.
Nowak, Brockman, and Krauss were prolific impresarios of academic conferences covertly funded by Epstein, and he would often show up unannounced. At one Harvard conference someone snapped a photo with me and Epstein in the frame; it has plagued me ever since. On another, Krauss begged me to allow Epstein to join my meal table for a chat, and the resulting photo has also been endlessly circulated to smear me. In a forthcoming article in a major online magazine, Krauss publicly apologizes for forcing me into that situation. Epstein was also a donor to other Harvard projects, not all of them public.
It’s also important to keep in mind the timeline. I did join a group of TED speakers and attendees (including Brockman, his wife and agency president Katinka Matson, Richard Dawkins, and Dan Dennett) whom Brockman had invited to fly on Epstein’s plane to the conference in Monterey, California. This was in 2002, many years before any of Epstein’s crimes came to light. Nothing suspicious took place on the flight.
My other association with Epstein came when Dershowitz asked my advice, as a psycholinguist, on the natural interpretation of the wording of a statute which, it turned out, Epstein had been accused of violating. Alan and I were colleagues who had just co-taught a course, and he often asked me for advice on the linguistic interpretation of laws and constitutional amendments. Dershowitz is, of course, famous for legally defending odious defendants such as O.J. Simpson and Mike Tyson on the Sixth Amendment principle that even the most despised defendants have a right to vigorous legal representation. I was not a paid expert witness but was doing a colleague a favor. Still, I deeply regret this, because while Dershowitz is willing to apply his professional efforts to push this principle to the limit, I am not. (Note, too, that in 2007 the full extent of Epstein’s crimes were not known.)
Epstein was a sociopath and, we now know, a heinous criminal. He also was a maniacal collector of famous people who knew how to slosh around enough money to gain entrée into prestigious circles. Perhaps I was too polite to run away on occasions when I should have, but it was almost impossible for me to escape being associated with his far-flung social web.
This is about as straightforward as you can get, and I can’t see that Steve did anything wrong—not even helping Dershowitz clarify wording of a statue for Epstein’s first trial. Steve says he “deeply regrets this,” and I believe him, but I don’t think he has much to regret. Expert witnesses help all kinds of people, rich and poor (as I did, though I mostly helped indigent defendants for public defenders). Ensuring that the law is administered correctly is nothing to be ashamed of. Indeed, one could make the case that I was far worse than Pinker, as I helped O. J. Simpson, who was later exculpated for a double murder but, in my view, was almost certainly guilty. I knew there was a substantial chance that Simpson did it, but I wanted to be sure that the prosecution used its DNA data properly, just as Steve gave his best linguistic interpretation of a statute. Remember, the prosecution’s job is not to convict, but to present evidence that is supposed to show the accused is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. That is not supposed to involve twisting the facts, though it does far too often, which is why poor people, assigned overworked public defenders, don’t get the same justice as rich ones.
The big question today is: why are people in almost a moral panic about Epstein? As I said, he was almost surely guilty of odious crimes (I allow him a benefit of the doubt, as does the law, though his associate Ghislaine Maxwell was found guilty, and there is other eyewitness testimony.) And yes, perhaps some people, like Prince Andrew, were complicit in Epstein’s crimes. But others were guilty only of associating with him, some more than others and some, like Pinker, hardly at all. Why the demonization of Pinbker? And why should I also be tarred because I’m friends with Steve?
None of this, of course, is meant to exculpate Epstein, nor to minimize the pain and misery that his victims suffered and suffer now. I simply want to discuss a question about a moral panic and its apparent excess.
Greg Mayer brought all this to my attention, and I called him to ask his explanation for the moral panic affecting some people who didn’t deserve it. Besides my own view that people love to see the mighty fall, Greg had three other reasons:
a.) People tend, in moral crises, to believe ridiculous and palpably false things about those considered guilty. An example is the McMartin preschool trial, in which people were arrested for child molestation despite the most ridiculous and unbelievable accusations, including Satanic rituals and flying witches (see here for some of them). It turns out that nobody was found guilty and the allegations were not substantiated. Much of the childrens’ testimony seems to have been due to prompting by therapists. To Greg, who teaches pseudoscience and related matters at U. Wisconsin-Parkside, this is an extreme example of what can happen to a “believe the victim” mentality even when there’s no good evidence.
b.) People believe what they want to believe, and will believe ludicrous or disproven claims if they buttress what they would like to be true. Greg used the example of “facilitated communication“, in which “facilitators” supposedly helped nonverbal people “talk” by holding their hands near a keyboard. We now know that this process has been entirely discredited. Like using a ouija board, the facilitators were actually guiding people’s hands to specific keys. This relates to Epstein in a way similar to my own thesis: people want to believe that some people they already dislike are guilty, and so rush to associate those people with Epstein, despite the lack of evidence that some of the “accused” had anything to do with Epstein’s crimes.
c.) Greg also said that since the 1980s, as inequalities among Americans began to grow, those who had thinner slices of the pie became eager to blame the rich and elite for their troubles. We see this resentment in many places, including politics. And Epstein, of course, gravitated to the rich and elite, as he apparently thought that some of their panache would rub off on him. This is why, Greg says, there are so many articles about the “Epstein elite” being published these days.
At any rate, Pinker’s apologia prompted me to think about all this, and after reading it I really cannot find him guilty of any missteps—even the help he gave Dershowitz. I know I’ll get pushback from people who dislike Pinker, or think that the acccused should not be given help by experts, especially when the crimes involved are dire. But I stand by my claim: I don’t think Pinker did anything wrong. And that is probably true of quite a few people who are being tarred via guilt by association.
Dean Graetz has come through with a set of images from the outback of Australia. His notes and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them. Dean has added links to two videos, one of them his.
And send in your wildlife photos! Once again, this is the last batch I have.
Australian Landscape Images
Being geo-patriots, we frequently travelled and camped in the remote Australian Outback, aka ‘The Bush’, which is about 70% of the continental area. Our interest was landscapes – their vista, and the living and fossil lifeforms they contained. Here is a series of landscape photos chosen by their appeal summarised as one word.
Bliss
Dusk: Site chosen on extensive plain – see horizon. A table set for two, one-saucepan meal on gas burner, and swags (bedroll) to be positioned and occupied last. A near cloudless sky with dry airmass promises a dome of stars all night. Bliss!:
Beginning
It is always entrancing to witness the silent illumination and transient colours of a landscape as our world turns to the Sun. Always, you see detail and colours that you didn’t appreciate during the previous dusk. This is a sandy bed of a large but ephemeral creek – a great campsite. The stark, dead (Eucalypt) trees germinated with the 1974 floods only to be killed by a wildfire some 20 years later. Such is life:
Reboot
A ‘Spinifex’ (actually Triodia) grassland wildfire: hot and lethal, reducing all in its path to ashes. This hummock grassland type covers about 25% of the continent. Ignited by lightning or people, such fires are frequent. With the first rain post-fire, the Triodia regenerates from seed and roots, faster than competing woody plants. So, repeated fires – burning your neighbours – is a sustainable way to persist:
Success
Heavy rains in 2009 triggered a massed pelican breeding. Thousands of birds gathered at one location, mated and successfully bred. More details are here. Success in this time-dependent gamble is shown by the chicks (darker heads) are now as large as the parent birds. All life is a Game: If you win , you stay in the Game:
Bugger
A feral camel (Dromedary [Camelus dromedarius] single hump) enjoying an uncommonly lush grassland. Imported in the mid-1800s, camels facilitated the exploration and settlement of Outback Australia. Displaced by motorized vehicles in the1920s, instead of a bullet, they were abandoned to die out. But they didn’t. Then a couple of hundred camels is now a large feral population of at least 600,000 damaging pests – a significant multi-million dollar problem. In the Southern Hemisphere, a well-intentioned action resulting in a disastrous outcome is widely known as a Bugger, made famous by this Toyota video:
Mute
A rock engraving, a graphic message from a pre-literate time, meticulously pitted on a vertical rock face. What can be inferred from it? In order of certainty, it was done by a male, likely over a working period of 3-5 days, at least 10,000 years ago. In spite of much speculation, we cannot ever really know the message or the audience, a realization that sometimes evokes a puzzling tinge of sadness:
Harsh
The Pilbara region is Australia’s harshest landscape. It is hot –(recorded 160 consecutive days of above 100°F (38°C)), and essentially water- and treeless, and rendered unfriendly by the swarm of small spiny hummocks of Spinifex (Triodia). Yet prospectors and geologists continue to search here for mineral riches. After we found the rocks containing a fossil stromatolite, dated at 3.4 billion years, and then thinking about Deep Time, we forgot about the current temperature and Spinifex spines:
Serenity
Why do we find a slow-flowing river so timeless, relaxing and peaceful? In 1925, two men, Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein, wrote their explanation as the words of the song ‘Old Man River’. A truly timeless contribution to our culture that you are probably silently singing right now:
Awe
This image captures a mind-stretching contrast in ages between the biological world and the geological world. In the foreground are several species of ephemeral plants – bright, colourful, with a life spans of months to a year or so. In the background, the blood red rocks looking sharp edged and resistant, are dated at more than 2.5 billion years. The smallest units of geological dating, millions of years, are beyond the reckoning of biologists, yet life was present on earth when those background rocks were being formed. The Deep Time of Life is right up there with the Rocks:
Me
A densely painted gallery in Arnhem Land, northern Australia. The gallery contains older figures – devil-devil figures (LHS), a python and several crocodiles (Middle) – all overpainted by numerous, modern (less than 100 years) ‘hands’. The ‘hands’ are not stencils or imprints. They are deliberate drawings infilled with colour. The overall impression of the modern ‘hands’ layer is just exuberant happiness celebrating ‘Me’, ‘Look at Me’, by the many painters who contributed. No deep cultural significance just an expression of the ‘joy of life’ in vivid colour. The longer you scan this image, the more surely you will smile:
Renewal
It was a hurried camp selected in falling light with the best site option being a desert track in the sea of (flowering) Spinifex. All that is forgotten now as you slowly wake in the golden light of a quiet and calm dawn, along with the smell of dew-dampened sand. Life is good!:
Welcome to Monday, Februay 16, 2026, as this month wings by, bringing each of us closer to extinction. It’s Presidents Day, a federal holiday but not one here at the hard-working University of Chicago. Here is Mount Rushmore, Sculpture of Presidents, before and after construction:
Before:
National Park Service, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
And after. I’m surprised Trump hasn’t mounted an initiative to add his head to the monument:
*The Washington Post highlights six Congressional orimaries this coming up that could tell us where the country—and the Presidency—is going politically in the future. The races are in Ohio, Texas, North Carolina, Kentucky, Maine, and Illinois (the last one, to fill Dick Durbin’s Senate seat, is reliably Democratic, but there’s a range of candidates from moderate to progressive). Here are two of them (article is archived here). In many places, like Texas, political redistricting could throw things off balance. Here’s a bellwether election in Ohio on May 5:
Rep. Marcy Kaptur(D-Ohio)has fended off everything Republicans have thrown at her over the years.
Kaptur, 79, has represented northwest Ohio for more than four decades and is the longest-serving woman in congressional history. Thanks to her deep connection with her working-class community and the weaknesses of a string of imperfect Republican candidates, Kaptur has managed to hold on as the Rust Belt has moved further and further right in the Trump era.
This time, Ohio Republicans, at Trump’s urging, redistricted the state and changed Kaptur’s from a district that marginally leaned toward Republicans to one that overwhelmingly favors them. “Let the Columbus politicians make their self-serving maps and play musical chairs,” Kaptur said in response. “I will fight on for the people.”
More than a half-dozen Republican candidates are running for the chance to challenge her in November — a crowded, noisy primary that, like past contests, could hobble them in their effort to finally remove Kaptur.
Derek Merrin, the former Ohio state representative Kaptur defeated in 2024, is on the ballot again, along with Ohio state Rep. Josh Williams and Air Force veteran Alea Nadeem. But Republicans are growing more excited about Madison Sheahan, the former second-in-command at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, who jumped into the race in January.
Are Republicans determined to field a candidate closely aligned with Trump’s record, like Sheahan, even as polling shows broad disapproval of ICE and immigration enforcement? Or will they turn to more traditional, less MAGA-aligned candidates? Their choice in races like this one may be what matters most in November.
And in Kentucky on May 19
There are probably few people that Trump would be happier to see go down to defeat than a fellow Republican, Rep. Thomas Massie of deep-red Kentucky. On issue after issue, Massie has loudly stood up to the president, most notably by pushing the legislation that forced the release of millions of government files on the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.\
Trump has called the six-term lawmaker a lightweight, a grandstander and a loser. And he recruited and endorsed Ed Gallrein, a farmer and former Navy SEAL, to challenge him.
. . . What could save Massie, he believes, is the effort he has put into establishing his own identity in his home state. “I’ve taken a lot of care to explain my votes when it’s not intuitive that they are actually the conservative positions,” Massie said.
Other Republicans will no doubt be watching the Kentucky primary closely. It could be this year’s biggest test of whether the GOP remains in the iron grip of an increasingly unpopular president, or whether more of them can feel safer charting their own course forward.
I already have my mail-in ballot for Illinois, but will take some time to figure out who to vote for. The problem is that the ads for the Democratic candidates for Durbin’s seat are all identical: Trump, Trump, Trump, ICE, ICE, ICE. Finding views on other issues is going to take a bit of time.
Former hostage Arbel Yehoud revealed in an interview broadcast Friday that she attempted to end her life several times while held captive by Palestinian terrorists in Gaza, but ultimately decided not to after her captors showed her video of a protest in Israel where she saw her face on a poster, and she understood that people were fighting for her.
In a separate interview, Yehoud indicated that she had faced sexual assault on an almost daily basis among widespread abuses she suffered while being held alone.
“One of the times, not long before my release, I saw drone footage from Hostages Square [in Tel Aviv]. I saw people holding signs of people I don’t know, and then suddenly I saw signs of people I knew. I saw a sign for Ariel [Cunio] and a sign for me, signs of people from the kibbutz,” Yehoud told Channel 12 news in an interview alongside Cunio.
“From the moment I saw that, I didn’t try to put an end to my own life there.”
Amid the two-year war, tens of thousands of people staged weekly Saturday night protests in Tel Aviv and around the country, demanding that the government reach a deal to bring the hostages home.
“That was the last time I tried,” she continued, noting she attempted to kill herself at least three times while in captivity. “When I saw the drone footage and understood that people who I don’t know are fighting for me as if I were their sister or daughter, I have a duty to return to Ariel and my family, but also to those fighting for me.”
Cunio recalled the terror of their abduction and being torn apart once they entered Gaza.
“I told her, ‘The most important thing is that we stay together. As long as they don’t separate us, we’ll be okay.’ Half an hour later, that is what happened,” Cunio said. “It happened so fast, there wasn’t even time to say ‘I love you, be strong.’”
“I didn’t manage to tell him bye, I didn’t get to see his eyes,” Yehoud added.
While many of the 251 hostages were held together in small groups by Hamas, both Yehoud and Cunio were held by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which kept them separate and alone.
In addition, Yehoud says she endured interrogations, forced conversion attempts and starvation.
There is a lot she says she is still unable to talk about.
“Because it was a very long time, and the things I went through, I went through from beginning to end, so they are in a sealed box,” she told Channel 12.
Nobody ever mentions that kidnapping of civilians and holding them for ransom is a human rights violation, much less rape or assault of woman hostages, nor have the Red Cross or UN paid much attention to the hostages in general. Finally, I’m pretty sure that other women hostages endured sexual assault, but are too traumatized to talk about it. (Remember that women assaulted during the Oct. 7 massacre were killed thereafter.)
*The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) used to be accused of being right-wing because it defended Lefties accused of Wrongspeak, and accused universities of suppressing free expression because of a left-wing ideology. Now, according to an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer, those accusations are wrong, for FIRE is busy cleaning up after Trump’s depredations. The article is free, and is called “From ‘cancel culture’ watchdog to Trump antagonist,” with the subtitle, “FIRE, the Philly-based free speech organization, is now defending universities it long criticized” (h/t Ginger K.)
. . . . the full power of the federal government is trained on universities and individual students who disagree with it. The stakes have grown exponentially, as became clear early on when federal agents detained Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts University Ph.D. student on a visa, after she cowrote an op-ed in a student newspaper. She then spent 45 days in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention in Louisiana. (FIRE submitted an amicus brief in Ozturk’s ongoing federal case, in which a federal judge ruled last month that the administration had no grounds to deport her.)
More recently, federal agents arrested and charged journalist and former CNN anchor Don Lemon with federal civil rights crimes for his coverage of an anti-ICE protest inside a Minnesota church. Of his arrest, the organization wrote, “FIRE will be watching closely.”
The question FIRE faces today is whether it can effectively meet the moment, and overcome skepticism from the left and from other free-speech advocates, some of whom argue the group helped lay the groundwork for an authoritarian crackdown.
Those critics say the present free-speech crisis is partly the predictable result of FIRE stoking a conservative panic over campus politics, effectively handing the federal government a well-crafted rationale for suppressing progressive voices.
FIRE’s leaders say they were not wrong before about cancel culture. Things were bad, they argue. But this is far worse.
“The threats we’re seeing right now, to me, often feel damn near existential,” [legal director Will] Creeley, 45, said in a recent interview. “The incredibly important distinction is that what we’re seeing now from the right is backed by the power of the federal government.”
. . .It can sometimes feel as if FIRE has been involved in nearly every major free-speech flash point of the last year — part of an intentional strategy to build the organization’s profile and raise awareness about speech violations, said Alisha Glennon, 41, the group’s chief operating officer.
Among dozens of ongoing cases, FIRE is suing Secretary of State Marco Rubio in federal court over the administration’s targeting of international students who reported on or participated in pro-Palestinian campus activism.
FIRE has also been outspoken in its defense of Harvard University. After the Trump administration sent Harvard a list of demands this spring — including banning some international students based on their views, appointing an outside overseer approved by the federal government to ensure “viewpoint diversity,” and submitting yearly reports to the government — the university refused to comply. Trump then sought to cut off billions of dollars of federal funding in response.
Harvard sued, and FIRE submitted an amicus brief supporting the university, noting that because of its own “longstanding role as a leading critic” of Harvard as a center of cancel culture, it was not less but more alarmed by the government’s “wielding the threat of crippling financial consequences like a mobster gripping a baseball bat.”
FIRE is also preparing to potentially sue Texas A&M University after the university instructed a philosophy professor in January to remove some teachings of Plato from an introductory philosophy course, citing new rules barring public universities in the state from offering classes that “advocate race or gender ideology.” FIRE wrote to the university, calling the move “unconstitutional political interference.”
Removing Plato from an intro philosophy class is the type of absurd, taken-to-the-extreme free-speech dispute that has long been FIRE’s
It goes on, but FIRE deserves your support if you value the First Amendment.
*The shooter who killed 8 people in British Columbia on February 10 was a trans-identified male, but was initially reported as a woman. The fact that shooter Jesse Van Rootselaar was a male suffering from gender dysphoria is relevant to his story, but, as recounted in Quillette, the press ignores both that and his biological sex in favor of hewing to a gender-activist narrative.
On 10 February, Jesse Van Rootselaar (also known as Jesse Strang) killed eight people in the remote British Columbia mining town of Tumbler Ridge. The first two victims were the killer’s mother and half-brother, whom Van Rootselaar shot at home. Van Rootselaar then went to a local secondary school and murdered six more people—five of whom were twelve- or thirteen-year-old students—before committing suicide. Twenty-seven others were injured. It was the deadliest Canadian school shooting in almost four decades, and the highest-casualty mass-shooting event in the nation’s history.
Nothing I write here can properly convey the anguish that surviving family members must now endure. The population of Tumbler Ridge is only about 2,400. Most residents likely know one or more people connected to the tragedy in some way, and so they will share in the trauma as well. Like Columbine and Sandy Hook, the words “Tumbler Ridge” will now become indelibly associated with senseless violence and unfathomable sorrow.
When news of the tragedy was first reported to Canadians on the afternoon of 10 February, it appeared to include a striking anomaly: The killer, we were told, was a “woman.” There are scattered examples of female killers in the annals of Canadian crime. But this would be the first time in the recorded history of Canada and its colonial antecedents—going back more than 400 years, to the early seventeenth century—that a woman had gone on this kind of murderous rampage.
It soon became clear, however, that Van Rootselaar wasn’t a woman. He was an eighteen-year-old man—a gun-obsessed, middle-school dropout whose many mental-health afflictions happened to include gender dysphoria. The mass murderer called himself a woman. But that doesn’t mean he was, or that the rest of us have to live in the imaginary universe he (literally) built for himself.
According to Royal Canadian Mounted Police deputy commissioner Dwayne McDonald, Jesse was “a biological male” who “approximately six years ago began to transition to female and identified as female, both socially and publicly.” In keeping with Canadian policies implemented by Justin Trudeau’s government in 2017, McDonald and other police officials then proceeded to refer to the killer with female pronouns, as if he actually were a woman.
This kind of institutionally mandated misuse of language is dishonest at the best of times. But it is especially offensive when it serves to misrepresent reality on behalf of a murderer (posthumously or otherwise). While Jesse Van Rootselaar’s criminal motive is unknown, he left a trove of digital clues about his identity—all of which paint a picture of a deeply disturbed young man with a stereotypically male fixation on firearms and violence.
Why proper identification and reporting matters:
Needless to say, no one personally affected by the Tumbler Ridge massacre is in a state to care about culture-war arguments over the killer’s identity. But policies that allow male and female criminals to be miscategorised on the basis of self-declared gender identity can actively hinder law-enforcement efforts to identify and monitor future killers before they strike.
Men are more violent than women, which is why they account for more than ninety percent of the world’s prison population, and commit about ninety percent of all homicides. For acts of mass murder, US data puts the corresponding figure at 98 percent. This greater tendency toward violence is rooted largely in male evolutionary psychology, and doesn’t get erased when a man changes his pronouns or puts on a skirt. Simply put, being male (and young) represents one of the most important risk factors that exist when it comes to violent crime. And so a constabulary seeking to prevent the next school shooting, whether in Canada or anywhere else, would naturally focus most of its limited resources on men, whatever their claimed “gender identity.” And yet, Canadian policy since 2019 has been to categorise homicide suspects not according to sex, but rather according to the “gender a person publicly expresses in their daily life,” including “at work” and “while shopping.”
. . .Moreover, the ideological excesses of the gender-affirmation movement actively inhibit dysphoric youth (such as Van Rootselaar himself, though we know little of his case history) from receiving proper scientifically grounded care for such psychiatric comorbidities. This is because it is now ideologically fashionable to imagine that all such conditions will resolve themselves in some mystical way, as if by exorcism, once a patient’s soul-like “gender identity” is aligned with his or her outward identity—a form of magical thinking debunked by Dr Cass.
This is one of the reasons why Britain’s scandal-plagued Tavistock gender clinic was shuttered in 2024: If a troubled child presented at a psychiatrist’s office in England with a list of complaints that included gender dysphoria, he or she would summarily be dispatched to Tavistock, where the single-lane therapeutic focus was on transgender affirmation and rapid transition. Meanwhile, most or all of the child’s underlying psychological problems were ignored, on the conceit that they were mere artefacts of a trapped gender soul crying out for release.
All of this serves to explain why Van Rootselaar’s identity as a man suffering from gender dysphoria is highly relevant to his criminal back story. And journalists are fully justified in noting it plainly in their reporting—much in the way that they might note other significant mental-health afflictions.
As I said, Luana suspected that the shooter was a trans-identified males from the moment the shooter was identified as female. I reserved judgement, but it turned out she was right. As the article says, keeping track of one’s sex and gender are important for keeping accurate records and for sociological/psychological analysis, but, most important, for giving objective therapy that doesn’t necessarily cater to an adolescent’s wishes.
No one, presently, sees the Moon rotate like this. That’s because the Earth’s moon is tidally locked to the Earth, showing us only one side. Given modern digital technology, however, combined with many detailed images returned by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), a high resolution virtual Moon rotation movie has now been composed. The above time-lapse video starts with the standard Earth view of the Moon. Quickly, though, Mare Orientale, a large crater with a dark center that is difficult to see from the Earth, rotates into view just below the equator. From an entire lunar month condensed into 24 seconds, the video clearly shows that the Earth side of the Moon contains an abundance of dark lunar maria, while the lunar far side is dominated by bright lunar highlands.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili was lost again:
Andrzej: I was looking for you everywhere.
Hili: Even a cat needs some peace and quiet sometimes.
In Polish:
Ja: Szukałem cię wszędzie.
Hili: Nawet kot potrzebuje czasem świętego spokoju.
From Masih, a 15-year old shot by the Iranian regime’s police:
Can you read the writings of a 15-year-old and not cry, not act?
“Today, the last day of summer, I feel so excited for the first day of school.
I want to study electronics and electrical engineering.
I hope a bright future awaits me and my family.
In the silent night, the house… pic.twitter.com/0obGMMTqbO
From Simon; the AP celebrates Larry’s 15th anniversary at Downing Street:
Larry the cat, the Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office, is celebrating 15 years as the British government’s official rodent-catcher. The unofficial first feline has served under six prime ministers. pic.twitter.com/f2GIZTO06L
From Luana, who says, “The Democrats are committing suicide.”
BREAKING: Palestinian activist Aber Kawas is running for NY State Senate.
She’s said 9/11 was America’s fault due to “capitalism, racism, white supremacy, and Islamophobia,” is endorsed by NYC DSA and Zohran Mamdani, and has worn a Hamas headband.
This French Jewish boy was gassed to death as soon as he arrived in Auschwitz. He was six years old, and would be 90 today had he lived. https://t.co/aB8JNMLgHv
Two from Dr. Cobb. The first, the cover of “Tapestry” turned 55 years old on Feb. 10. And the cat prominently featured on the cover has surely crossed the Rainbow Bridge. From Wikipedia:
A&M staff photographer Jim McCrary took the cover photograph in the living room of King’s home at 8815 Appian Way, Laurel Canyon, California. It shows her sitting barefoot on a cushion on a bench beside a window, holding a tapestry that she had hand-stitched, with her cat Telemachus, named after the mythological son of Odysseus, near her foot.
55 years ago today one of the greatest and biggest pop albums was released: “Tapestry” by the legendary Carole King. The album won several Grammys and was one of the biggest selling and longest charting in history. She has inspired decades of singer songwriters.@carolekingofficial.bsky.social
Yes, we’re severing ties with the Marine Biology Lab in Woods Hole, MA. But our ties aren’t that recent. And yes, we so have money woes, as do many schools.
As money woes hit the University of Chicago, the oldest private marine laboratory in the United States is striking out on its own. https://scim.ag/4trAN3l
Well, I might as well reveal part of my very long list of “best music”. This time I’ll post my choice of the best “songs about aging or dying” for Baby Boomers. These aren’t necessarily all good (I’m not a fan of Mellencamp, for instance), but they’re all notable. And yes, I realize that “Long May You Run” is really about Neil Young’s car (a 1948 Buick Roadmaster hearse he called Mortimer Hearseburg), but it’s still appropriate. Further, some of the songs are about lost love, but all refer to the sadness of passing time.
Father and Son Cat Stevens
Touch of Gray The Grateful Dead
When I’m Sixty-Four The Beatles
Boys of Summer Don Henley
Cherry Bomb John Mellencamp
Long May You Run Stills-Young Band
All Summer Long The Beach Boys
Caroline No The Beach Boys
Nick of Time Bonnie Raitt
When We Was Fab George Harrison
All those Years Ago George Harrison
Rockin’ Chair The Band
Taxi Harry Chapin
Cat’s in the Cradle Harry Chapin
Old Friends (Bookends) Simon and Garfunkel
Don’t Fear the Reaper Blue Öyster Cult
Wasted on the Way Crosby Stills & Nash
I welcome readers’ suggestions, and I’ll put up five of the songs that I think are particularly good and underappreciated:
“Boys of Summer” (1984). For some reason this song absolutely brings back my own teenage years, and quite vividly:
“All Those Years Ago” (1981). Nobody seems to remember this song by George Harrison, but it’s not only great, but a moving tribute to his late fellow Beatle, John Lennon. It’s clear that despite their tiffs, Harrison really loved Lennon.
“Taxi” by Harry Chapin (1972). I’m sure this song is long forgotten, but it’s among the very best ones on the list. The “soprano” part is sung by “Big John” Wallace, Chapin’s bassist; everybody thought that the original record used a female voice. You can end the song at 7:31; it just repeats with the lyrics shown.
“Nick of Time” by Bonnie Raitt (1989). I love this song; the tune is excellent, with a good hook, and the words are wonderful:
I am SO tired of people demonizing J. K. Rowling for being a transphobe and a bigot without ever having paid attention to what’s she said and written. In fact, she’s sympathetic to trans people, but, like me, thinks that trans rights on occasion clash with the rights of biological women, and in those cases the rights of natal women can take precedence (this occurs in sports, prisons, and a few other circumstances). And, like Rowling, I have been somewhat demonized by taking a stand identical to hers (I was, for example, recently branded “anti-trans” by the head of our department’s DEI Committee, clearly by people who have ignored what I’ve written, too).
But I kvetch. This Substack post by Katie Pinns tries to un-demonize Rowling by actually showing us what she wrote. Now you know that won’t change the minds of those like Emma Watson who have parted ways with Rowling on no good grounds: gender ideologues are impervious to the facts. But at least Pinns has Rowling’s statements down in black and white, and I’ve added one important link. Click screenshot to read:
I’ll give some quotes from Pinns (indented) who in turn quotes Rowling (doubly indented). There are several pages worth, so check for yourself if you think I’m cherry-picking.
Few public figures attract as much noise as J.K. Rowling. For many people, the controversy around her name has become so thick with slogans, screenshots, and second‑hand outrage that her actual words have been buried under the reaction to them. People repeat that she “hates trans people,” or that women’s crisis centres are “transphobic,” without ever checking what she has actually said.
So this piece goes back to the source. Not the discourse. Not the memes. Her words.
Rowling’s central point is simple: sex is real, and it matters. She has said:
“If sex isn’t real, there’s no same-sex attraction. If sex isn’t real, the lived reality of women globally is erased… It isn’t hate to speak the truth.”
This is the foundation of her position. She argues that biological sex shapes women’s lives, especially in relation to male violence, discrimination, and safeguarding. She also says explicitly that recognising sex does not erase or demean trans people.
Her concern is that if society stops acknowledging sex, women lose the language they need to describe their experiences. That’s not a fringe view; it’s the basis of decades of women’s rights advocacy.
Rowling has repeatedly said she supports trans people’s right to live free from discrimination:
“I respect every trans person’s right to live any way that feels authentic and comfortable to them. I’d march with you if you were discriminated against on the basis of being trans.”
She also describes feeling “kinship” with trans people because both women and trans people are vulnerable to male violence. Her objection is not to trans people themselves, but to the idea that acknowledging sex is inherently hateful.
And, as Pinns notes, Rowling makes these pronouncements not to “erase” or demonize trans people, but to prompt a discussion about clashes of “rights” as well as whether there’s a need for affirmative care, including surgery, on people below an age of consent. As Pinns says, “Much of the public anger directed at her is based on claims she never made. Her insistence on correcting the record is part of why she continues to speak.”
There are more quotes from Rowling, and you can read her longer explanations of her views at places like this one. She has of course been subject to a multitude of threats of violence, but she’s stood her ground, responding with humor and not a small amount of snark, which makes her enemies even madder. Here’s a quote from her sober and revealing essay linked in the first sentence of this paragraph:
Well, I’ve got five reasons for being worried about the new trans activism, and deciding I need to speak up.
Firstly, I have a charitable trust that focuses on alleviating social deprivation in Scotland, with a particular emphasis on women and children. Among other things, my trust supports projects for female prisoners and for survivors of domestic and sexual abuse. I also fund medical research into MS, a disease that behaves very differently in men and women. It’s been clear to me for a while that the new trans activism is having (or is likely to have, if all its demands are met) a significant impact on many of the causes I support, because it’s pushing to erode the legal definition of sex and replace it with gender.
The second reason is that I’m an ex-teacher and the founder of a children’s charity, which gives me an interest in both education and safeguarding. Like many others, I have deep concerns about the effect the trans rights movement is having on both.
The third is that, as a much-banned author, I’m interested in freedom of speech and have publicly defended it, even unto Donald Trump.
The fourth is where things start to get truly personal. I’m concerned about the huge explosion in young women wishing to transition and also about the increasing numbers who seem to be detransitioning (returning to their original sex), because they regret taking steps that have, in some cases, altered their bodies irrevocably, and taken away their fertility. Some say they decided to transition after realising they were same-sex attracted, and that transitioning was partly driven by homophobia, either in society or in their families.
. . . .Which brings me to the fifth reason I’m deeply concerned about the consequences of the current trans activism.
I’ve been in the public eye now for over twenty years and have never talked publicly about being a domestic abuse and sexual assault survivor. This isn’t because I’m ashamed those things happened to me, but because they’re traumatic to revisit and remember. I also feel protective of my daughter from my first marriage. I didn’t want to claim sole ownership of a story that belongs to her, too. However, a short while ago, I asked her how she’d feel if I were publicly honest about that part of my life, and she encouraged me to go ahead.
I’m mentioning these things now not in an attempt to garner sympathy, but out of solidarity with the huge numbers of women who have histories like mine, who’ve been slurred as bigots for having concerns around single-sex spaces.
Finally, I’ll quote Pinns again:
Much of the backlash against Rowling spills over onto women’s crisis centres, rape support services, and safeguarding charities that maintain female-only spaces. These organisations often base their policies on:
– the reality of male violence
– the needs of traumatised women
– legal exemptions that allow single-sex services
– safeguarding obligations
Rowling’s position aligns with these long-standing principles. Calling such services “transphobic” erases the reasons they exist.
Despite the headlines, Rowling has not said that trans people shouldn’t exist, shouldn’t have rights, or are a threat. She has not argued against healthcare for trans adults. She has not advocated discrimination.
As the West starts to realize that it’s unfair for biological men, however they identify, to enter some women’s spaces, or to compete in women’s sports, or that there are dangers in “affirmative care” doled out to adolescents who aren’t of age, I’m hoping that Rowling will no longer be immediately dismissed by ideologues, but that her arguments will be taken seriously and answered.
Even the title of this New Yorker article is dumb: “faith in atheism” is an oxymoron, for a lack of belief in gods is not a “faith” in any meaningful sense. But of course the New Yorker is uber-progressive,”which means it’s soft on religion. And this article, recounting Christopher Beha’s journey from Catholicism to atheism and then back to a watery theism, is a typical NYer article: long on history and intellectual references, but short on substance. In the end I think it can be shortedned to simply this:
“Atheism in all its forms is a kind of faith, but it doesn’t ground your life by giving it meaning.. This is why I became a theist.”
So far as I can determine, that is all, though the article is tricked out with all kinds of agonized assertions as the author finds he cannot “ground his life” on a lack of belief in God. But whoever said they could? But it plays well with the progressive New Yorker crowd (same as the NY Times crowd) in being soft on religion and hard on atheism. The new generation of intellectuals need God, for to them, as to Beha, only a divine being can give meaning to one’s life.
Christopher Beha, a former editor of Harper’s Magazine, is the author of a new book, Why I am Not an Atheist, with the subtitle Confessions of a Skeptical Believer. The NYer piece is taken from that book
You can read his article for free as it’s been archived. Click below if you want a lame justification for theism:
Beha, considering nonbelief after he gave it up in college, decided that there were two forms of atheism: a scientific form and a “romantic” form. Quotes from his article are indented below, though bold headings are mine,
Scientific atheism
Among other things, this reading taught me that atheists do hold beliefs, not just about morals and ethics but about how the world actually is and how humans fit into it. Of course, not all atheists hold the same beliefs—just as not all theists do—but I found that modern atheist belief tends to cluster into two broad traditions.
The most prevalent atheist world view goes by many names—empiricism, positivism, physicalism, naturalism—but the term that best captures the fullness of its present‑day iteration, as I see it, is scientific materialism. Roughly speaking, this view holds that the material world is all that exists, that humans can know this world through sense perception, that the methods of science allow us to convert the raw data of these perceptions into general principles, and that these principles can be both tested and put to practical use by making predictions about future events.
As world views go, scientific materialism has a lot to say for it. It tells us that humans are capable, without any supernatural aid, of coming to understand, and ultimately to master, all of reality. It tells us that the store of human knowledge is constantly increasing and continuously improving our material conditions. To this end, it points to the astonishing human progress that has occurred in the time of science’s reign. And it encourages us to enjoy the fruits of this progress as much as possible, since our life here on earth is the only one we’ll get.
Most people who subscribe to scientific materialism take it to be so obviously correct that it could not be denied by any rational person who truly understood it. But my reading showed me that this world view has its shortcomings. The most basic is perhaps inherent to any world view at all: it rests on a set of principles which often can’t be proven, even by the standards of proof the world view embraces. The general principle that all real knowledge is derived from sense perception of material facts cannot itself be derived from the perception of facts in the world, and thus can’t really be sanctioned by scientific materialism’s own methods. Indeed, no general principle can be. The very legitimacy of deriving general principles from the particulars of experience can never be established from experience without already having the principle in hand.
Of course I don’t give a rat’s patootie if we can’t establish from first principles that we can understand the world through our senses. The answer to that blockheaded objection is that yes, that’s right, but only the scientific method construed broadly (i.e. empirical work with testing or replication) actually WORKS. If you want to establish where typhoid comes from, and then prevent it or cure it, then you must use a secular, empirical method: science.
Now Beha admits that this world view does “work”. But then he says it has problems. Fur one thing, it doesn’t give you meaning, nor, he adds, does it explain consciousness:
If by “works” one means that it can be put to good use, this is unquestionably so. But, if we mean that it captures within its frame all the notable features of our experience, that’s a different matter. In fact, what materialism can’t adequately capture is experience itself. Consciousness is not material, not publicly available through sense perception, not subject to the kind of observation that scientific materialism takes as the hallmark of knowledge. By the standards of the materialist world view, it simply doesn’t exist. For me, this limitation proved fatal. I spent far too much time within the confines of my mind to accept a world view that told me whatever was going on in there wasn’t real.
Here the man is deeply confused. Of course subjective experience is “real” to the subject, but it’s very hard (“the hard problem”) to figure out how it arises in the brain. And denying that consciousness arises through materialistic processes in the brain (and elsewhere) is just wrong. We know it’s wrong, for we can affect consciousness by material interventions like anesthesia and psychological tricks, so the phenomenon must, unless it comes from God, be “material” in origin. Here Beha seems perilously close to Douthat saying that because science can’t explain consciousness, there must be a god.
Romantic atheism
Luckily, I’d by then come into contact with the other great family of modern atheist belief, which I eventually came to call romantic idealism. This is the atheism of Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger and their existentialist descendants, which begins in precisely the place where scientific materialism leaves off, with the will of the subjective, conscious agent. At its most extreme, romantic idealism treats each of us as willing our own world into being, creating the reality in which we live. Even when it does not go quite this far, it treats our subjective experience as the proper subject of knowledge, in fact the only thing we can ever be said to know.
Romantic idealism arose in the post‑Enlightenment era, and it grew in opposition to the principles of Enlightenment rationality as much as it did to religious authority. Although atheism is often associated with hyperrationality, this form of it is unapologetically irrational. In place of reason, observation, and scientific study, it valorizes emotion, imagination, and artistic creativity. The ethics of romantic idealism are an ethics of authenticity: the greatest good is not maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain but living in a way that is true to our subjective reality. The movement rejects religious belief not for being empirically false but for being a ready‑made and inherited response to existential problems that we must work out for ourselves. The appeal of this world view—particularly for a young person engaged in just such a working out—should be obvious, and I soon found myself in thrall to it.
Like scientific materialism, romantic idealism does not have a solid foundation in any provable universal truth. But it revels in this condition: it is the lack of any such foundation that makes it possible for each of us to construct our own truth. This relativism carries clear dangers. Since the time of Locke, empiricism has been closely linked with political liberalism, whereas romantic idealism is associated with rather darker political forces. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, one of the founders of Romanticism, was a great inspiration for the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror. He argued that liberalism’s supposed universal rights were covers for bourgeois self-interest. This argument was later developed at great length by Nietzsche, one of several thinkers in this tradition who inspired the rise of fascism.
But romantic atheism also fails to give us “meaning,” and Beha desperately wants and needs meaning!
A more basic problem with romantic idealism occurs on the personal level: building meaning from scratch turns out to be an incredibly difficult task. The romantic-idealist approach is fraught with fear and trembling, a fact it doesn’t deny. It is not a route to happiness; indeed, it seems to hold the goal of happiness in contempt.
Once again we see Beha desperately looking for a world view that gives his life meaning—and happiness. That much is clear from not only the above, but from other stuff.
Beha wants “meaning”, and that meaning must come from faith (Some quotes)
Anyway, I wasn’t really looking for practical guidance. To ask “How am I to live?” is to inquire as to not just what is right but what is good. It is to ask not just “What should I do?” but “How should I be?” The most generous interpretation of the New Atheist view on this question is that people ought to have the freedom to decide for themselves. On that, I agreed completely, but that left me right where I’d started, still in need of an answer.
. . .After nearly twenty years of searching unsuccessfully for a livable atheist world view, I began, in my mid-thirties, to entertain the possibility that atheism itself might be part of the problem. There were many steps from here to my eventual return to robust belief, but I started with the notion that for me the authentic life might be one of faith—one that recognized the existence of both the external material world and the internal ideational world and sought to reconcile them, and one that accepted an absolute foundation to things and attempted to understand, in some provisional and imperfect way, the nature of this foundation and what it wanted from me.
I’m not sure how “faith”—Beha is curiously reticent to tell us what he actually believes—is supposed to provide us with an “absolute foundation”, unless you become a traditional theist who thinks that God interacts with you personally and that it is this God that gives your life meaning. But he won’t say that in clear, explicit terms. One hallmark of the new “liberal” religion is that it’s both fuzzy and slippery.
Beha goes on to argue that “liberals” (aka people who don’t buy Trump) adhere to both forms of atheism, but, in the end, to ground not just life but also society requires theism, for theism is our only source of “rights”:
Meanwhile, the failure of these traditions to respond adequately to the challenge is bound up with the problem identified by their earliest proponents: they have a very hard time articulating their foundational justification. When liberalism runs smoothly, it does a remarkable job delivering the goods it promises. For most people, this is a sufficient achievement to quiet any worries about its philosophical underpinnings. But when many people within liberal societies do not feel that the system is working, when the practical case for liberalism comes into question, secular liberals don’t have much else to go on.
. . .Locke had the empiricist’s healthy suspicion that we could never have metaphysical certainty about what the Creator’s will was, which meant that no person should impose his answer to that question on another. It is for these reasons that faith must be treated as a matter of personal conscience, but also more generally that a regime grounded in a social contract must be one that respects individual freedoms. Our status as creatures of God confers on us certain rights that can’t be handed over as part of the social contract, rights that are at once natural and inalienable.
“Our status as creatures of God”? How does he know there is a God? Is it because science can’t explain emotions and other subjective experiences—that we don’t understand consciousness? In the end, Beha apparently thinks there’s a God because it makes him feel better, and gives his life meaning.
Well, good for him! But there are plenty of us who derive “meaning” as a result of doing what we find fulfilling and joyful (see this interesting post and thread). I, for one, never pondered the question “what must I do to give my life meaning?” That meaning arose, as for many of us, as post facto rationalization of doing what we found to be fulfilling.
At any rate, this is a curiously anodyne essay, absolutely personal and not generalizable to the rest of humanity. It is the story of a journey, but one that ends with embracing a god for which there’s no evidence. Excuse me if I can’t follow that path.
*************
Beha, clearly flogging his newfound theism, has a guest essay in the Feb. 11 NYT, “My conversion to skeptical belief” (archived here), which emphasizes that his beliefs are inextricably intertwined with doubt, and so he repeats what many believers have said before. An example:
In the face of this I attempt — with varying degrees of success at varying times — to take a page from Montaigne’s book and embrace skeptical belief. I’m well aware that religion has often served as precisely that “one great truth” that people are punished for refusing to accept. But it has also served as an expression of the fundamental mystery at the heart of reality and the radical limitations of human understanding. It is a way of living with skepticism.
What does this mean in practice? Embracing skeptical belief does not mean believing things without “really” believing them. It means understanding your beliefs as limited, contingent and fallible, recognizing that they can’t be proved correct, that someone else’s refusal to come around to them does not indicate stupidity or obstinacy or bad faith.
Similarly, a skeptical believer recognizes doubt as an essential component of belief, rather than its opposite. To a skeptical believer, the great mark of sincerity is the extent to which you attempt to live out your beliefs in your own life despite your own doubts, not the extent to which you silence those doubts or the doubts of others.
. . . To push ahead of someone on the train, to refuse a dollar to the woman selling candy with a baby on her back, to make a snarky remark at the register about my misunderstood coffee order, all while I have ashes on my head, would announce to anyone who cared to notice the disjunction between my supposed beliefs and my life in the world.
What I try instead to do on this day is simply meet each choice I face with my fallible and limited beliefs, and respond to that choice in the way those beliefs actually commend.
Of course the worldview of humanism could yield the same results, except you needn’t ground your acts and beliefs in a Sky Daddy. Why must actions be somehow grounded in the supernatural instead of in a philosophy that you should be kind and helpful to your fellow humans?
