Fun at the Atheist Alliance of America meeting

October 19, 2015 • 9:00 am

I was in the suburbs a fair amount of time during the AAA convention, being a “handler” for Jeff Tayler and Inna Shevchenko, so I didn’t take a ton of pictures of the meeting itself. Fortunately, Mark Gura did, and posted a lot of them on his Facebook page’s AAA album). I’ll put his photos first, and mine toward the bottom.

Our master of ceremonies for the two days was none other than our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, played by Harry Shaughnessy. He had some kind of mechanized skateboard and glided around like a divine being.

These were all speakers at the meeting. First, Dale McGowan:

Dave Silverman, president of the American Atheists:

Herb Silverman, who debated Dave Silverman in a “Silverman vs. Silverman Smackdown”, the topic being “Can you call yourself a Jewish atheist?” Herb said yes, Dave no. Although people seemed to think that Dave got the upper hand, I’m not going to stop calling myself a secular atheistic Jew.

Left to right: JT Eberhard, Richard Hayes,Hugh Mann and Tim Branin.

Mandisa Lateefah Thomas:

Stephanie Guttormson:

Richard Hayes (my photo):

Outgoing AAA President Jana Weaver and her husband Richard Halasz (they were married by Dan Barker at an FFRF convention).

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And my photos. The hotel is very near the Atlanta airport, and since I got up early I could see the planes stacked up to land before dawn. Here they make their final approach as the sun comes up:

Below are the strident atheist Jeff Tayler of The Atlantic (and author of Sunday Secular Sermons on Salon), and his colleague and friend Inna Shevchenko, head of the activist organization FEMEN (Jeff wrote about Inna and FEMEN in his book Topless Jihadis: Inside FEMEN: The World’s Most Provocative Atheist Group. They’ve both had fascinating lives and both gave great talks. Inna got a standing ovation at two of the three talks she gave in the area.

Jeff and Inna doing a joint Q&A after their separate talks at the Southern Crescent Freethinkers meeting. I can’t find a YouTube video of Jeff talking about religion, but there’s a recent one of Inna giving a TED talk, “I will not stop speaking out loud.”

This was only Inna’s second visit to the U.S. (she’s originally from Ukraine, and is now a political refugee in Paris), and Jeff’s first visit to the American Deep South (he’s lived most of his life overseas, the last 23 years in Moscow). I had great pleasure in introducing them an echt Southern barbecue meal at The Barbecue Kitchen, which I highlighted the other day. We all had chopped BBQ pork, with three vegetable “sides”. Inna also essayed sweet tea, the “table wine of the south.” And they both cleaned their plates. (The place is good!)

The night before that, we exposed our visitors to another Southern food experience at Mary Mac’s Tearoom, a famous place to eat down-home Southern food in a fancier atmosphere. It’s an Atlanta institution. Here we all are about to chow down (the waiter took the photo). I had chicken and dumplings with tomato pie (a fantastic side) and squash souffle. And sweet tea, of course. At the right is Melissa Dawn, the brand-new president of the Atheist Alliance of America.

The bread basket at Mary Mac’s includes corn muffins, cinnamon rolls, and yeasty dinner rolls. Uncharacteristically, I forgot to take pictures of our main courses!

Readers’ wildlife photographs

October 19, 2015 • 7:30 am

We have a new contributor (I love new contributors!): Benjamin Taylor, who sent in a huge pile of photos (I’ll dole them out over time) with the note:

Last month I went on a camping trip around southern Africa (Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, and Zambia) and took quite a few photographs.

Sociable weaver (Philetairus socius) nest:

JAC: Here’s a photo of a sociable weaver (what a great bird name!) from Wikipedia:

Desert plant inflorescence (species unknown)

View from the Elim Dune (Namib-Naukluft National Park, Namibia):

Monday: Hili dialogue

October 19, 2015 • 4:57 am

Today Professor Ceiling Cat (Emeritus) heads back to Chicago, and I’ll be landing at Midway at about 1 p.m. I’ve had a great time on this monthlong trip, but it will be good to be home. Posting will be light for a few days until I catch up, but bear with me. Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, the Furry Navel of the World is down by the Vistula, contemplating climate change. I suspect, though, that she’s worried about its effect on the supply of rodents. On the other hand, maybe she’s just distressed by the onset of cold weather.

Hili: Somebody must be to blame.
A: Blame for what?
Hili: For all these climate changes.

P1030468

In Polish:

Hili: Ktoś musi być winien.
Ja: Winien czego?
Hili: Tym wszystkim zmianom klimatycznym.

Jerry walks Leon

October 18, 2015 • 3:00 pm

It’s taken me a long time to post this on YouTube, but I reported earlier (with photographs) on how I was allowed to take Leon the Hiking Cat for a walk on his leash. We went to a forest preserve outside of Włocławek, where Leon lives with his staff of Elzbieta (she’s at the beginning of the video) and Andrzej, and I took the moggie for a 30-minute stroll. Here’s a clip of part of it, filmed by Andrzej. Malgorzata and the other Andrzej, whom I visit in Dobrzyn, are also in the clip. A good time was had by all!

Notice how carefully Leon sticks to the path, and how he continually looks back to check if the humans are there.

By the way, is anybody old enough to remember Norma Tenega’s song, “Walking my cat named dog”?

Democrats go for gun control

October 18, 2015 • 2:00 pm

Bernie Sanders has a lot of things going for him, but one of them is not gun control. He’s historically tiptoed around that issue, voting against the Brady Bill and background checks. (His excuse is that he was elected to represent the gun-loving people of Vermont.) But, according to the Washington Post, he, along with other Democrats, is at least coming around to the view that yes, guns do kill people.

After years of deadly mass shootings across the country, and with President Obama voicing deep frustration with inaction by Republicans in Congress, the Democratic candidates led by Hillary Rodham Clinton vowed in a debate here Tuesday night to toughen restrictions on gun owners and gun manufacturers.

. . . In a sign of how potent this issue has become among Democratic primary voters, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) — who represents a rural state with a rich hunting tradition — has shifted position after past Senate votes in favor of gun rights. He now says he supports a comprehensive approach that includes expanding background checks for gun purchases, eliminating what is commonly known as the gun-show loophole and addressing the scourge of mental illness.

Here’s the exchange between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders on gun control in the Democratic debate.

Note that Sanders doesn’t mention the NRA, but decries gun-show loopholes (good position) and mentions the “mental health” issue. But he avoided the Elephant in the Room: the National Rifle Association. Clinton, however, courageously stood up against the NRA, one of America’s most powerful lobbies:

“We have to look at the fact that we lose 90 people a day from gun violence,” Clinton said at the CNN event. “This has gone on too long, and it’s time the entire country stood up against the NRA.”

For that she aroused the NRAs ire, and, believe me, they’ll go after her big time:

“The only problem with the Democrats’ anti-Second Amendment strategy is that the vast majority of Americans disagree with them on this issue,” NRA spokesman Andrew Arulanandam said.

Well, Presidents aren’t just supposed to slavishly follow the will of the people; they’re also supposed to lead. That’s why they’re called “leaders”. The NRA is, as usual, threatening people who favor any restrictions on guns.

Grover Norquist, a conservative activist who is on the NRA’s board, went so far as to predict Democrats would “now lose the presidency” for speaking out on guns.

“When they start to say that people with guns are the problem, that they don’t trust people with guns, and that people with guns are somehow connected to mass murders, that’s what turns voters off,” Norquist said.

Norquist’s statement is a lie; of course “people with guns” are surely connected with mass murders! Who else commits them? But I’d go further and say that we’d have fewer mass murders if we severely tightened restrictions on gun ownership; in fact, I favor the British style of stringent gun control.

The Post sees a political calculus behind Democrats’ new emphasis on gun control (Obama, when running, largely avoided the issue):

Arkadi Gerney, who focuses on gun safety at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, said that “leading Democrats today feel that being for strong laws on issues like background checks is a winner in general elections and an absolute necessity in primaries.”

Clinton’s ardent pitch on guns fits in with her overall campaign strategy. Rather than putting an emphasis on winning over moderate voters or demographic groups such as “NASCAR dads,” Clinton is doubling down on the coalition that propelled Obama into the White House: African Americans, Latinos and women, especially those in the suburbs in swing states such as Virginia and Ohio. Many of those voters support bolstering gun restrictions.

Well, regardless of whether this is a strongly held political position or simply electoral calculus, I don’t care. All I care is that whichever Democrat gets elected—and I’m betting Clinton will—actually then DOES something about the issue as President. She may fail, and probably will fail, but I want her to try. If she doesn’t, I’ll be deeply disappointed.

p.s. If you doubt that more guns lead to more homicides, have a look at these studies.

h/t: Diane G

If religion gets some credit, does it also get some blame?

October 18, 2015 • 11:41 am

This question is inspired by various talks I’ve heard the past few days at the Atheist Alliance of America conference.

We all know that theists are constantly touting the good things that religion does: inspires charity, gives people comfort in time of need, and so on. They have no problem imputing these things to religion. But that brings up a question, one that I’ve probably raised before:

Why are religionists so eager to give religion credit for inspiring people to do good things, but then so loath to blame religion for inspiring people to do bad things?

I’ve long thought that the claims of people like Karen Armstrong and Reza Aslan—that religion cannot be and is not behind any acts of violence or malfeasance—is pure bunk. One example: Christian faith-healing that kills children, and the tendency of extremist Islamists to kill apostates, infidels, and blasphemers. Such act are inconceivable without religion. But at any rate, what kind of logic gives credit to religion for prompting good acts but denies religion blame for prompting bad ones?

Bad science journalism: The Express reports that scientists have “proved” that God didn’t create the universe

October 18, 2015 • 10:15 am

I should start giving an award for the Most Misleading Science Journalism of the Year. If I did, this article from The Sunday Express would surely be a contender. Here’s the headline (click on it to go to the article):

The piece starts like this:

A TEAM of scientists have made what may turn out to be the most important discovery in HISTORY–how the universe came into being from nothing.

The colossal question has troubled religions, philosophers and scientists since the dawn of time but now a Canadian team believe they have solved the riddle.

And the findings are so conclusive they even challenge the need for religion, or at least an omnipotent creator – the basis of all world religions.

Now the story, which I grant is well written and quite detailed for science journalism (and I realize that the headlines probably weren’t written by the article’s author), is based on a paper by Ahmed Farag Ali, Mir Faizal and Mohammed M. Khalil in The Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics. The bad journalism is not the reporting of the theory itself, but the way it’s sold, both in the headline and in snippets of the article.

I haven’t read the original paper, and even from the article can’t fully understand the revolutionary new findings (if they are revolutionary), but they are apparently an elaboration of what we know: in a quantum vacuum, virtual particles can pop in and out of existence, and that can eventually produce the Big Bang and our present Universe. Here’s a brief summary of what the article says; readers are invited to explain the big new finding in the comments.

Scientists have long known that miniscule particles, called virtual particles, come into existence from nothing all the time.

But a team led by Prof Mir Faizal, at the Dept of Physics and Astronomy, at the University of Waterloo, in Ontario, Canada, has successfully applied the theory to the very creation of existence itself.

He said: “Virtual particles contain a very small amount of energy and exist for a very small amount of time.

“However what was difficult to explain was how did such a small amount of energy give rise to a big universe like ours?”

Under Inflation Theory the tiny energies and lifespan of the virtual particle become infinitely magnified, resulting in our 13.8 Billion-year-old universe.

Just to make things more complicated Dr Mir says we have been looking at the question ‘how did the universe come from nothing?’ all wrong.According to the extraordinary findings, the question is irrelevant because the universe STILL is nothing.Dr Mir said: “Something did not come from nothing. The universe still is nothing, it’s just more elegantly ordered nothing.”

Well, this is above my pay grade, but of course even Lawrence Krauss’s book, A Universe from Nothing, which explained the creation of particles in a quantum vacuum, was attacked by theists and philosophers because, they said, a quantum vacuum is NOT NOTHING. That vacuum, they said, already instantiates the laws of physics and “fields”. As David Albert said in his review of Krauss’s book in The New York Times:

The fundamental physical laws that Krauss is talking about in “A Universe From Nothing” — the laws of relativistic quantum field theories — are no exception to this. The particular, eternally persisting, elementary physical stuff of the world, according to the standard presentations of relativistic quantum field theories, consists (unsurprisingly) of relativistic quantum fields. And the fundamental laws of this theory take the form of rules concerning which arrangements of those fields are physically possible and which aren’t, and rules connecting the arrangements of those fields at later times to their arrangements at earlier times, and so on — and they have nothing whatsoever to say on the subject of where those fields came from, or of why the world should have consisted of the particular kinds of fields it does, or of why it should have consisted of fields at all, or of why there should have been a world in the first place. Period. Case closed. End of story.

That’s the way the theists and philosophers have argued that Krauss’s “nothing” isn’t really “nothing.” I won’t get into that debate now, except to say that my own feeling is that David Albert was proffering a version of the Cosmological Argument, and that the ultimate answer to why there are fields and particular laws of physics is simply “that’s just the way things are.” Or perhaps, “We don’t know.”

But how does the new theory “prove” (note the misleading scare quotes in the article’s headline) that there is no God? Leaving aside the fact that science isn’t in the business of proving anything, here’s what the article says:

And the findings are so conclusive they even challenge the need for religion, or at least an omnipotent creator – the basis of all world religions.

. . . Asked if the remarkable findings and the convincing if complex solution removed the need for a God figure to kick start the universe Dr Mir said: “If by God you mean a supernatural super man who breaks his own laws then yes he’s done for, you just don’t need him.“But if you mean God as a great mathematician, then yes!”

The first statement doesn’t disprove God because one could always claim that God created the laws of physics in such a way that they’d give rise to the Universe. A similar claim is made for evolution: God needn’t have created all species ex nihilo: He simply created a world in which the process of evolution would produce the creatures He wanted. Now why an omnipotent God worked so indirectly in these cases (and, for evolution, using a wasteful and painful process) is another question, but let’s leave that to the theologians.

The second snippet is a mixed bag. The first part about dispensing with supernatural intervention to explain the universe is good: we can explain its origin starting with a quantum vacuum—no breaking of the laws of physics is required. And it’s remarkable that we can explain how the universe began in that way using known laws of physics. This is one of the great triumphs of the human intellect.

But the second bit, about God being a great mathematician, is simply the kind of sloppy language that enables religion and gives succor to theists. I doubt that Dr. Mir really thinks that God created the beautiful laws of physics that helped produce the Universe. But if he does, then why does the article have a headline claiming that Mir and his colleagues showed that God didn’t create the Universe? It’s a self-contradictory article if you take Mir’s statement at face value.

But even if you don’t, there’s nothing in the piece that says anything about disproving God. What it says is that we’ve come closer to explaining the Universe using pure naturalism and rationalism. We may never understand why the laws of physics are as they are, but to say that “God made them” says exactly nothing. “God made them” is formally equivalent to “we don’t understand,” and so the burden of proof remains on the theists to find their God in the Big Bang. Regardless of what Feser or Craig say, you can’t simply conjure up an omnipotent being from philosophy alone: one needs evidence.

Andrew Seidel, a lawyer for the Freedom from Religion Foundation who called the Express piece to my attention, summed up this problem on his Facebook page:

Sloppy language like that combined with a desire not to offend religious sensibilities (which religion imposed on us after centuries of abuse), gives us quotes like Einstein’s “God does not play dice with the world.” Even though he clearly said, “the idea of a personal God is a childlike one” and called himself an agnostic.

Faizal is seeking some “purely mathematical theory describing nature,” not god and not religion. So he should stop using the language of god to describe these things. There are better ways to talk about math, science, perfection, immutable laws, and the beginning of everything than by invoking an idea that, as Hitchens put it, “comes from the infancy of our species.”

h/t: Andrew Seidel

My new toy!

October 18, 2015 • 9:30 am

Sue Strandberg, who notes that she comments on this site under the name “Sastra,” is responsible for designing the Richard Dawkins Award trophies and getting them made. Each statue is tailored to the work or interests of the recipient. The only limitation is that the object must be a replica of a fossil. So, for example, Rebecca Goldstein got an Australopithecus skull and Steve Pinker a Cro-Magnon skull. I was eager to see what my fossil was, but despite my pleas Sue wouldn’t tell me in advance.

Well, what I got was totally appropriate, and I love it (all photos by Mark Gura):

It’s a Smilodon, the extinct saber-toothed cat. Not only that, but Sue noted that it was the color of cowboy boots, making it even more appropriate. As she’s an artist, she also touched up the teeth to make them even more fearsome. I hope the TSA doesn’t confiscate this when I fly back tomorrow because the teeth could be considered weapons.

Here’s Sue giving me the award:

Richard had taped a lovely introduction, which I think will be online eventually. Here is a screenshot from it, using one of my quotes that he admired:

My thanks to the Dawkins Award committee, to Sue, and to the Atheist Alliance of America for this very great honor. As I said in my acceptance speech, echoing the words of Garth and Wayne, “I’m not worthy!”

I’m still collecting pictures of the meeting and its participants, and will post those soon.

	Debi on Jesse Singal on the ridiculous…
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