Freeze Peach!

Finally–finally!–I’ve gotten around to putting together a freeze peach design. People have been wanting t-shirts for a while. If you’re one of those people, click on the image to be taken to Zazzle. You’ve got until tomorrow to use their 15% off holiday code and six days to order for shipping by Christmas.

Peach in ice block with text: Freeze Peach! Not Sure What It Is, But It's Mine.
Also available with white text for dark backgrounds.

Peach in ice block with text: Don't Take Mah Freeze Peach!
Also available with white text for dark backgrounds.

Have text you’d rather see on the shirt? Leave a comment below. Also, all the designs in my Zazzle store can now be viewed in my Swag tab for easier browsing.

Freeze Peach!
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Saturday Storytime: Since You Seem to Need a Certain Amount of Guidance

I’ve featured a story from Alexander Jablokov here before, but this one cried out to be shared too. What can I say? I like meta sometimes. It might just be time to give in and pick up his short story collection.

You’re waiting.

You’re waiting for the Awful Thing. Cheery people from the future always have an Awful Thing. That’s what makes them interesting. To you.

We are soulless zombies living a life of manufactured illusion.

Our pleasurable lives depend on the oppression and torture of a small child, or genetically modified subhumans, or cognitively boosted, deeply suffering rodents.

Our lives are meaningless because of their very ease, and we wait for a release of plague, or radiation, or giant carnivorous creatures from another dimension to give them meaning again. We might even be waiting for one of you to time travel to our own time and start murdering us.

Our machines are sad because they want nothing more than to be human, like us, a blessing we withhold.

We are not humans at all, but telepathic insects that are just pretending to be us.
We desperately envy the wonderful vibrant scrappy life of your own era.

Sorry. We think about a lot of things, but how to be interesting to you is not one of them. None of these things is true.

Keep reading.

Saturday Storytime: Since You Seem to Need a Certain Amount of Guidance

Unholy Days

Red holiday ornament siting in the snow.
“Ornamental Snow” by James Jordan. Some rights reserved.

“You’re an atheist? Oh, you must be lonely and miserable during the holidays.”

“No, not at all. I celebrate too.”

“What? What do you celebrate?”

You know how it goes. People who have never gotten far enough outside Christianity to look back in and realize that Santa Claus isn’t Jesus and eggnog wouldn’t have kept well in Israel just can’t wrap their heads around the idea of secular holidays. They can’t quite figure out how we manage to make festive without the bible, even though theirs doesn’t make an appearance when everyone is sitting around the Christmas tree.

So we’re going to help them out. The only catch is that to do that, we’re going to need some help.

On Sunday, December 23, at 9 a.m. Central time, we’re going to do a special holiday edition of Atheists Talk. It’s going to be all about what we do, as atheists, as everyone else is celebrating Christmas or Ramadan or Yule or making a big deal out of Hannukah for the sake of the children or going out for Chinese food and a movie.

In order to do that, we need to hear from people about what they do. More specifically, we need to hear from you.

What do you do over these dark days? Do you keep the old traditions minus the churchy bits? Do you still go to church for some reason? Does Santa visit? Do you do a big family meal? Do the people you spend the holidays with know you’re atheist? Do you decorate? If you do, what kinds of symbols do you include? What new traditions have you carved for yourself? What movies define this time of year for you? How do you really feel about Christmas music? What’s the most unholy holiday you’ve ever had?

Everybody does this time of year differently. We want to know what you do.

On that Sunday, you can call us in the studio at 952-946-6205 or you can send us your story ahead of time. Drop a comment here or email it to [email protected].

We sometimes call this the season of lights. Let’s shed a little this year, shall we?

Unholy Days

Atheists Talk: Douglas Whaley on "Imaginary Friend"

Perhaps no character in literary history has gone as quickly from cherished hero to reviled villian as Franklin Whitestone of Douglas Whaley’s novel, Imaginary Friend.

Franklin Whitestone finds himself an unwitting hero after surviving a terrorist bomb attack in a crowded stadium. After television crews film him playing a critical role in the safe escape of himself and other victims, he is instantly transformed into a national celebrity. Franklin is is flown in high style to New York to appear on a live call in-show to recount his experience. The interview starts out well, but when a caller ask if he was praying to God for strength during his ordeal, he scoffs and proudly boasts about not having an “imaginary friend”. He goes on to ask the caller why God should be credited for getting him out of the mess, but not blamed for the terrorist attack happening in the first place. The studio erupts in shock and outrage.

Before he understands what has happened, Franklin finds him the subject of hatred, anger, reproach and pity. Everything he holds dear is threatened by his new noteriety, and a dangerous religious extremist – one of the same men who helped free the Franklin from the stadium – sets out to “save him” a second time.

If you have ever suffered social rejection or for your non-belief, Imaginary Friend will haunt you. Franklin’s detractors spout familiar religious criticisms of atheism, but Whaley’s charcters are complex; they have minds and flaws of their own, and don’t always respond in the way we wish they would. The story is thrilling, heartbreaking, at times infuriating,and always hard to set down.

Tune in this Sunday when Douglas Whaley joins Atheists Talk to do a live reading from Imaginary Friend, answer questions about the book, and we’ll discuss the question of whether there are times when it’s appropriate or not to come out as an atheist.

Related Links:

Listen to AM 950 KTNF this Sunday at 9 a.m. Central to hear Atheists Talk, produced by Minnesota Atheists. Stream live online. Call in to the studio at 952-946-6205, or send an e-mail to [email protected] during the live show. If you miss the live show, listen to the podcast later.

Atheists Talk: Douglas Whaley on "Imaginary Friend"

Once You Look Past the Headlines

If you read blog comments or follow discussions on Facebook or Twitter, you probably know by now that a few people are relatively desperate for everyone to know about this interview that Rebecca Watson did with Swedish Skepchick back when she was in Europe for the Berlin World Skeptics Congress. There are various parts of it they would like you to pay attention to, but, well, we’ve already discussed priming once this go ’round.

Still, since this is apparently now an important interview, it will be good if everyone has full access to the whole thing. In order to facilitate that, and to keep the utility of quote mining to a minimum, I’ve produced a transcript.

You will find the occasional [?], which indicates this is my best guess at what was said. You will also find the occasional number in brackets. That refers to text that follows the transcript. However, I still suggest you read the entire thing (or listen to the full interview) before reading any of my take on things. Continue reading “Once You Look Past the Headlines”

Once You Look Past the Headlines

Everyone Expects the Naturalistic Fallacy

There is an odd line of argument that comes from evolutionary psychologists when people object to poor quality research on rape coming out of their discipline. A form of this argument is in Ed Clint’s post on Rebecca Watson’s Skepticon talk.

Portait of a man built up from trees, rainbow, sun, and birds.
Some natural things are quite nice.

The naturalistic fallacy. One can hardly find a more pristine example of this fallacy than in criticism of evolutionary psychology, and Watson’s remarks were  no exception. She spelled it out clearly at 38:30 “men evolved to rape… it was used as a well it’s natural for men to rape”. The problem to Watson is that some evolutionary psychologists study the phenomena of rape as a potential adaptation, or a product of adaptations such as the use of violence to obtain what one wants. Watson assumes that if rape is about sex, and sex is good because sex is natural, then rape must be natural and therefore good. This is an absurdity of course; it’s every shade of wrong from the rainbow of ultimate wrongness.

Well, no, but before I get into discussing why this is wrong, here’s another example of the argument in the wild, provided by Clint. Buss & Schmitt argue:

More generally, we believe that proponents of all theoretical perspectives should keep an open mind about the scientific hypothesis (and it is only that, a hypothesis), that men may have evolved adaptations for sexual coercion. It should go without saying that rape is illegal, immoral, and terribly destructive to women, and should in no way be condoned, whatever the ultimate causes turn out to be. Unfortunately, what should go without saying has to be repeated over and over, since those who advance evolutionary psychological hypotheses are unjustly accused of somehow condoning or excusing rape. The naturalistic fallacy, mistakenly inferring an ought from an is, seems to be a particularly stubborn error committed by critics of evolutionary psychology, despite the many published descriptions of this error (e.g., Confer et al. 2010).

As Vandermassen (2010) points out, the two central contenders for explaining sexual coercion are (1) adaptations for rape, (2) byproducts of adaptations that evolved in non-rape contexts (e.g., desire for sexual variety; male use of aggression for other instrumental goals), or some combination of the two. We concur with Symons’s 1979 summary that the then-available evidence was not “even close to sufficient to warrant the conclusion that rape itself is a facultative adaptation in the human male” (Symons 1979, p. 284). We believe that his conclusion is as apt today as it was then. Nonetheless, absence of evidence does not qualify as evidence of absence. Scientists from all theoretical perspectives have a responsibility to uncover the actual underlying causes of rape, even if they turn out to be unpalatable or repugnant. Whatever the flaws inherent in the Thornhill-Palmer book, it is perfectly reasonable for them to advance their two competing scientific hypotheses. It is a gross disservice to current and future victims of rape to prematurely discard either of them.

I’ll mostly be talking about this example, as it indulges less in telling us what someone is thinking and is closer to the primary source. It also contains a glaring error that should tell you what critics are actually objecting to. I’ll save that for a little later though. First, the problem with just saying, “naturalistic fallacy”. Continue reading “Everyone Expects the Naturalistic Fallacy”

Everyone Expects the Naturalistic Fallacy

Not at All Targeted

In the comments on yesterday’s (very early) morning post, spartan suggested I’d done well right up to the end.

“The critiques Rebecca shared in this talk are not unique. Singling her and this talk out as anti-science while ignoring other, well-respected people who make these critiques is as ridiculous as the other ways she’s been targeted in the last couple of years. Really, it all needs to stop.”

I was mostly with you up until this point, I see nothing in Clint’s critique that is even nearly ‘as ridiculous’ as the other ways she’s been ‘targeted’ (in scare quotes as I don’t believe Clint is targeting her at all, I’m not saying that she hasn’t been targeted by anyone).

I admit that this assessment is based on information not everyone may have. So it seems fair to share the experience of watching the target being placed on Rebecca, since it’s all public anyway. Continue reading “Not at All Targeted”

Not at All Targeted

Spam Attack

Those of you subscribed to comment threads may have already noticed this. Hell, all of you may have noticed this because it’s been so pronounced, but either Akismet has glitched or someone has figured out how to get reams of spam past it.

I hate spam. I don’t want it on my blog. I don’t, however, want to feel that removing those comments requires my constant vigilance. For the duration, I’ve turned on first-comment-approval moderation. I don’t like that either, as it messes with the flow of discussion in comments, but…yeah, bleah all around.

Spam Attack

Science Denialism? The Role of Criticism

Have you seen Rebecca Watson’s Skepticon talk yet? You should. It’s a brief, entertaining look into some of the ways evolutionary psychologists abuse science when it comes to gender essentialism. Just a word of warning, though, that Rebecca* repeats some ugly arguments about things like rape and sexual harassment. She’s using a good deal of sarcasm, but when you’ve heard enough of them, sometimes you’ve just heard enough.

One good reason to watch the talk now is that Ed Clint has posted a criticism of sorts of the talk. Continue reading “Science Denialism? The Role of Criticism”

Science Denialism? The Role of Criticism