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As you can see in the following Twitter exchange, captured by Elevatorgate, it sounds like the Women in Secularism 2 conference got off to an interesting start yesterday. Dr. Ron Lindsay, president and CEO of the Center for Inquiry, opened the conference. From what I observed on Twitter (#wiscfi), the reactions to Dr. Lindsay's opening comments were quite negative. Some felt that he minimized the role of privilege. Others accused him of "mansplaining." And many seemed to be upset primarily because Dr. Lindsay, a man, opened the conference. [View the story "Conversation with @rebeccawatson, @RALindsay, @MistressOfFrog and @bluharmony" on Storify] Dr. Lindsay said that he will post his comments online so they can be read by anyone who is interested. He was true to his word, and you can find the text of his talk here. I think this is a wise move, and I look forward to reading it. Subscribe to Atheist Revolution

WASHINGTON, DC—The Secular Coalition for America today sent a letter to the White House, pointing out additional Internal Revenue Service failings, including neglecting to investigate churches and religious charities that engage in “politicking from the pulpit.”

In its letter, the Secular Coalition said “religious charities have been flaunting their flagrant disregard for [IRS] laws for years. Over 1600 pastors participated in last year’s Pulpit Freedom Sunday, where pastors not only violated the law by lobbying and endorsing candidates, but filmed their illegal actions and mailed them to the IRS.”

The Secular Coalition’s letter comes on the heel of another letter sent to the White House by Franklin Graham earlier this week, asserting that the IRS is improperly targeting religious charities for investigation, including the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. Graham’s complaint is one in a series of allegations this week that the IRS is unfairly targeting churches for scrutiny.

“Churches and religious organizations are being singled out—for special treatment,” said Edwina Rogers, executive director for the Secular Coalition for America. “Churches and other religious organizations have been using their tax exempt statuses for years to politick from the pulpit are rarely even investigated for their flagrant disregard of IRS law.”

In fact, churches are heavily insulated against general procedures and investigations that other secular non-profits are subject to. The Church Audit Procedures Act, §7611 of the Internal Revenue Code, stipulates that only “an appropriate high-level Treasury official” can initiate an investigation, if there is suspicion that the church is incompliant with 501(c)(3) requirements. The Act defines “appropriate high-level Treasury official” as “the Secretary of the Treasury or any delegate of the Secretary of the Treasury whose rank is no lower than that of a principal Internal Revenue officer for an internal revenue region.”

In October 2012, despite an influx of complaints to the IRS regarding churches that had become too political, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) officially halted tax audits of churches until it can adopt rules that clarify which high-level employee has the authority to initiate them, resulting in outright non-enforcement of electioneering restrictions.

Under current 501(c)(3) law, churches are barred from electioneering and limited in other political activity. Specifically, the anti-electioneering provision prohibits any section 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization from endorsing or opposing any candidate for public office. Churches are allowed to engage only in “insubstantial” lobbying, spending no more than 20 percent of the church’s budget on lobbying—a restriction nearly impossible to uphold since churches are not required to submit 990 forms indicating their income or expenditures.

“Not only are churches shielded from basic investigations in a way that no other non-profits are, but the laws that are in place for them are nearly impossible to uphold,” Rogers said. “Because churches do not have to submit a 990 form how then can the IRS hold them accountable for breaking other IRS laws that limit the amount the amount of political lobbying they do?” 

Secular 501(c)(3) organizations that surpass the 20 percent cap on lobbying or electioneer in any way are in jeopardy of losing their tax exempt, and investigations and can be initiated by low-level IRS officials.

To address concerns of religious privileging in the tax code, , the Secular Coalition has urged Congress to require religious nonprofits to submit 990 forms like other nonprofit organizations, and to enforce the largely ignored current IRS rules that bar churches from endorsing political candidates.

Earlier this month, the Joint Committee on Taxation for included the Coalition’s recommendations on removing religious privileging from the tax code, in a report submitted May 7, 2013 to the House Ways and Means Committee. The Secular Coalition is now urging the House Ways and Means committee to adopt the SCA’s recommendations in the final bill the Committee puts forth to the full House.

The Secular Coalition for America represents atheists, agnostics, humanists and others who don’t possess and absolutely belief in God on Capitol Hill. The Secular Coalition lobbies to protect and strengthen the secular character of the government as the best guarantee of freedom for all. The Coalition is comprised of 11 member organizations and 118 endorsing organizations. The Secular Coalition has chapters in all 50 states that lobby lawmakers at the state level.

This is just a note to let you know that the blog may become inaccessible for a while this weekend.  I have finally decided to migrate the blog from MovableType to Wordpress.  This will hopefully address a few problems: 1.  It will hopefully get rid of a lot of the spambots that constantly (thousands of times per day) hit my commenting script. 2.  It will hopefully resolve some of the issues people have trying to comment here. 3.  It will let me get some newer features, as I'm running a pretty old version of MovableType and attempts to upgrade to newer versions have failed abysmally in the future. 4.  I'll be able to leave pingbacks on Wordpress blogs I link to. 5.  I've used Wordpress and decided I just like it better.  (Okay, not really a problem, but hey.) I've been hesitant to do this, but I discovered there's a new site out there called tp2wp.com that streamlines the migration process.  And while it costs $50, I figure that resolving the above issue is worth it. To support this, I will be disabling all comments and trackbacks on this blog in a few minutes (relative to this blog's posting time) to "freeze" the database. From your standpoint, the way this plays out should look like this: 1.  You may see the blog as it currently is, but will be unable to comment. 2.  You may then see nothing.  Or a blank blog. 3.  You will (hopefully) eventually see this blog, but with a different cosmetic appearance.  Hopefully, there will be a brief post from me announcing that the migration was a complete success and it's back to business as usual. As an aside, I will be doing a full backup of the site's static pages and other files (e.g. images).  If something goes horribly wrong (or I just get frustrated before I work through the dozens of minor gotchas the migration site forgot to mention), I should be able to restore the MT version of this blog.  In that case, rather than step #3 above, expect to see a blog post from me muttering and cussing. At any rate, wish me luck and I'll hopefully catch you on the flip side!

Recently, I read two articles about dying for a cause. The first, on these pages, by Sally Quinn, addressed the Dalai Lama’s lack of compassion for not criticizing the self-immolation of more than 100 Tibetans since 2009 to protest China’s occupation of Tibet.  The second article concerned 813 Italians who were just declared “saints” by the Catholic Church because they chose death in 1480 rather than convert to Islam. 

Different religions have formulated arguments about what constitutes a “just war” and causes worth dying for. Some of history’s most brutal wars have been holy wars, perpetrated by people who expected heavenly rewards for killing countless “heretics.” They justified their massacres because designated infidels either did not believe in “the one true god” or did not worship the one true god in the one true way. Most of the civilized world now condemns those who take innocent lives, regardless of the cause. More nuanced is whether we can justify taking our own life for a cause, the theme in both articles mentioned above.

I can respect, if not agree with, those who believe their suicide will save additional lives and increase the happiness of others. That was the goal of the self-immolators trying to free Tibet and bring back the Dalai Lama. On the other hand, I always look for ways to resolve problems without loss of life. This is why war must always be a last resort.

I reserve my harshest criticisms of religion for its practices that intrude on the lives of those outside the religion. This doesn’t mean I can easily ignore religious practices I find ridiculous, which brings me to Catholic sainthood. How many miracles does it take to change a dead human into a saint? The Catholic Church says two, but no such miracle has ever been as documented as, say, would be a televised prayer that results in a light bulb changing itself.

Continue reading at Washington Post's On Faith.

Congress is disturbed that a law they, if memory serves, passed in haste has been misconstrued to read what it, apparently, says. Yep, you read that right. Congress hastily passed The War Powers Act after 9/11. It allows the President to start and maintain a small-scale war anywhere he or she wants, as long as al-Qaida can be associated with it in some way. I'm not sure if this little fact proves that when Congress acts, it has an astonishing ability to screw up (Patriot Act, anyone?) or that we shouldn't be surprised to learn that when Congress passes a law, it, as a body, might not understand what its actually doing. (The other possibility: that most Senators, etc, don't read the laws they vote on isn't a surprise and is, as far as I can tell, normal legislative behavior.) Now we sit back and wait for Fox News to go ballistic [sic] about Obama's overreach, executive arrogance, etc. Carolyn Ann

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In spite of my chronic disorganization when it comes to email and not checking it nearly as often as I should, it has inspired a great many posts and continues to do so today. I was recently asked an interesting question via email by an atheist who indicated that she is feeling disillusioned with the online secular community due to what she described as the "irrationality" and "intolerance of dissent" she attributed to some prominent bloggers and many of their more vocal fans. I can certainly understand that sentiment. After telling me that she is thinking of having nothing further to do with online atheism because of this, she posed a question I wasn't expecting:

If you were just starting out today and had seen all this shit, would you even bother starting an atheist blog?

This question caught me off guard, and I was not initially sure how best to respond. I knew where she was coming from. I have heard this sentiment from others, and I'd be lying if I were to say that I'd never had similar thoughts. Yes, I think I would start an atheist blog today. I do not think I would be deterred by the toxic elements in the atheist blogosphere. There are plenty of things happening in the online secular community today that might give me pause in considering whether I would want to start a new atheist blog, but I do not believe this would be one of them. When I look around the atheist blogosphere today, it is far more crowded than it was in 2005 when I started Atheist Revolution. The upside of this is that there are many great atheist bloggers who have not divorced skepticism, embraced dogmatic ideology, or made their careers by promoting paranoia and an irrational threat narrative. Consider blogs like Friendly Atheist, Deity Schmeity, and Reason Being that manage to produce informative and thought-provoking content for the secular community. Notice how Freethoughtify, Bitchspot, and God is a Myth are breaking down boundaries and introducing the secular community to diverse viewpoints. We have science blogs like Epiphenom, blogs on teaching like Teach Not Preach, and satirists like Laughing in Purgatory. This is the atheist blogosphere of which I am happy to be a part. I understand why someone might be discouraged by some of the behavior of a few atheists. But instead of letting the bad behavior of some discourage a new voice from entering the atheist blogosphere, I'd say this bad behavior is why we need new rational voices. Much like we encourage moderate Christians and moderate Muslims to speak out against the extremists among them, we should be empowered to address the consequences of dogma and bad behavior in our community and to push for change. Subscribe to Atheist Revolution

Yesterday, I blogged about the following statement by Tim Keller:

If you say to everybody, 'Anyone who thinks homosexuality is a sin is a bigot,' . . . you're going to have to ask them to completely disassemble the way in which they read the Bible, completely disassemble their whole approach to authority. You're basically going to have to ask them to completely kick their faith out the door.

In that post, I talked about the quote from the perspective of seeing the fear that seemed to motivate and permeate it.  Today, I want to talk about it from the perspective of seeing the privilege that seems to motivate and permeate it.  Because if I may be honest -- and I'll try to do so as graciously as I know how -- I find something deeply ironic about an evangelical minister objecting to the fact that other people might be asking him to change the way he thinks or even "kick his faith out the door." Dear readers, that's exactly what every single evangelical Christian is asking of every single person who follows a different religion or no religion at all:  "Give up your faith and what you believe and believe what I think is right instead."  So effectively, Tim Keller is objecting to other people (allegedly) asking him to do exactly what he calls upon every Jew, Wiccan, atheist, agnostic, Buddhist, Hindu, and Santerian[1] to do without giving it a second thought.  That's boilerplate unexamined privilege right there. It also underlines to me the biggest problem with unexamined privilege:  It's often the enemy of empathy.[2]  Here's an opportunity for Tim Keller to consider how (feeling like he's) being asked to give up something so important to him feels to him and try to imagine how those he evangelizes to might often feel the same way.  And yet, because I suspect he doesn't even make that connection (or avoids it by insisting it's somehow different), he's missing out on an opportunity to (1) empathize with those he's trying to evangelize to and (2) think about how that empathy might influence how he handles his attempts to do so. I don't necessarily want Tim Keller or others like him to quit sharing his beliefs or inviting others to join his faith.  However, now that he and those like him have experienced being on "the other side" of the conversation, I'd like them to let that experience and their capacity for empathy to inform their mission. Also, it would also be nice if their empathy would help them to understand that yes, if they really want others to be open to their message, they're almost certainly going to have to be likewise open to others' messages.  Otherwise, they're expecting something from others that they are unwilling to offer up to others.  And one thing I that think is near-universal if not truly universal among humans is that we tend not to like double standards. Note:[1] Not an exhaustive list, I assure you.  But hopefully I've named enough religions and non-religious people to make the point that it's a lot of people he's asking this of. [2] Or maybe the lack of empathy contributes to one's failure to examine privilege.  Personally, I suspect it may be a bit of both, not to mention a self-reinforcing cycle.

I’ll admit that I was surprised to see John Loftus’ new book The Outsider Test of Faith. On one hand, the OTF has been Loftus’ signature argument for six or seven years now. On the other hand, it’s fundamentally a simple argument.

The OTF, boiled down, states that you should evaluate your faith from the outside. As Loftus puts it, “The only way to rationally test one’s culturally adopted religious faith is from the perspective of an outsider, a nonbeliever, with the same level of reasonable skepticism believers already use when examining the other religious faiths they reject.”

So, in short, the OTF is nothing more than the golden rule: You should treat your own religion exactly as you treat other religions, and evaluate your beliefs using the same criteria that you use to evaluate others’ beliefs. It’s a sound and powerful argument. Granted, stepping outside oneself and one’s own upbringing is one of the most difficult things to do. Still, do we really need an entire book to explain it?

Answer: no, but we do need an entire book to defend it. Loftus’ first couple of chapters describe the OTF and the thought process behind it. His last two chapters work through the OTF and explain some of the implications. But half of the book is Loftus responding to critics.

Loftus is a magnet for apologists, so he’s got quite a rogues gallery of people to work through. He does a good job of condensing arguments that likely took up long comment threads on one blog or another, but there’s still a lot of ground to cover.

All this does leave me with a problem. The natural audience for this book are people like myself who are stuck in to the world of apologetics and counter-apologetics. This new work gives us a nice handbook where all the likely moves of the debate are spelled out. People who avoid these debates – known in the trade as sane people – might be better off sticking with Loftus’ shorter description of the OTF in the collection The End of Christianity.

I  wish Chicken would stop doing that... Yet again, she leaped from the deck fence, and landed with a thud just outside my office window. It's really disconcerting to have this feathery blur, followed by a "thump!" happen just over the top of the laptop screen! Critters! :-) Carolyn Ann

As some of you have noticed, the site has been experiencing intermittent availability issues over the past many months.  I’ve been working with our hosting company to try to find and fix the problem(s) – but they’ve proven themselves to be feckless, yet earnest.

So please be aware that we may be experiencing some hiccups over the next few days/week as I’m going to be working under the hood to see about picking up and moving to a different hosting company.  I’m hoping the move will be seamless, but I have always had a curse upon me – to always be plagued only by errors and bugs inexplicable, and never by anything run-of-the-mill.

I’ll report back with news, should there be any.  Wish me luck.  :-|

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by Metavirus @ Library Grape - The Best in Politics, Culture and Delicious Snark

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Neat. Harley riders in China! :-) (I'm not generally a fan of Harley's, but in this case I am!) Some of those folk look like the Village People gone slightly askew, but that last picture is Just Awesome. :-) Carolyn Ann

This post seems to draw people to the site and generate comments even years after the fact, so I might as well follow it up by commenting on the series Hannibal. Also, yes, I am deliberately writing more on pop culture since politics is so damn boring at the moment.

I think the show’s great. I really do. I hope this is correct and it gets a full or at least another partial season. The show is more in the Manhunter/Silence of the Lambs tradition than the later and less successful films, where it’s a story about a person, rather than a story about Hannibal. I like Hugh Dancy’s Will Graham, he’s a little less internal than William Petersen’s, but projects the same kind of wounded vulnerability. And Mads Mikklesen’s Lecter is restrained and utterly top-notch. Certainly a more interesting Hannibal than Hopkins’s version, more in line with Bryan Cox’s interpretation. Really, it does feel a lot like Manhunter in the best ways, with an appropriately updated style and all. 

What’s surprising about the series so far is that it’s actually succeeding in making Hannibal Lecter an interesting, deeper character than he ever has been (in the movies). They’ve actually made him capable of surprise again! The series has played coy with its advertisements and such, and it doles out information about the character only as necessary. I’m not entirely sure where along the line he is in his journey to cannibalism and complete alienation from humanity, but he’s not quite there yet, and quite often the show surprises me by having him do something, then you wonder why he did that, and then ultimately it’s revealed in a way that makes sense and defies expectations. It’s ever-so offbeat, and this is highly appreciated by me. Bryan Fuller’s accomplishment here is distinctive, but most impressive is that he’s actually made a version of Hannibal that could probably carry a show. I am happy though that it’s still Will Graham’s show, as I fear that a Hannibal-centric series would be inevitably soulless, and having a Graham or a Clarice figure really is essential to making the thing work.

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by Lev @ Library Grape - The Best in Politics, Culture and Delicious Snark

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Matt Yglesias’s wide-angle take on the Star Trek franchise is great, even if his rankings contain serious deficiencies. But I won’t get into that. I agree entirely with his belief that a new TV show is the best option for the future, and in terms of the economics and business approach, as well as the creative latitude. It’s sort of an ironic turnaround. The movies with the original cast allowed for a lot more variety in terms of the kinds of stories that were told. Just check out this home-made chart, comparing the first six movies with the original crew, and the second six (the four TNG films, and the two by JJ Abrams to date):

 

Admittedly, this chart is a little propagandistic. Simply having the same elements doesn’t mean you automatically tell the same stories. First Contact was also about revenge, and a threat to destroy earth, and had one main villain for the crew to defeat. However, that movie was redeemed by the ingenious twist of making the vengeance Picard’s, rather than the Borg Queen’s. This made it a movie about the psychological battle going on within Picard’s mind, rather than a pedestrian plot to stop an unambiguously evil supervillain bent on destruction (though, admittedly, every movie in the second sextet aside from First Contact has this very story, with the most modest of variations between them). And obviously there are quibbles: Chang from The Undiscovered Country could be counted as a main villain, though I see the cross-species conspiracy of hawks to be the villain of that film, and Chang is merely their muscle. Also, trying to accomplish specific political goals is different from the mad ambition of, say, a Khan, who is uninterested in doing anything other than indulging his own grief and anger at Kirk.

But nonetheless, I think this chart does say a lot. For one thing, it’s not fair to blame J.J. Abrams alone for the problems with Trek movies, those started even before his Felicity days. If anything, he’s found a better way of combining all those elements so that they’re more entertaining to watch, even if he can’t payoff anything to save his life, such that every movie he’s ever made has had a shitty climax. In the first six movies, pretty much every movie represented a change in tone, theme and content from what came before. The only two that really resemble each other are The Wrath of Khan and The Undiscovered Country, i.e. II and VI, which happened to have the same writer-director and thus a lot of the same preoccupations, such as aging. But even in that case, the aging theme was updated and developed. Khan was a movie about adapting to middle age, while Country was about adapting to old age. That’s moving the ball forward, not stagnating. And it told a different kind of story: Country was all about politics, and Khan was not. But other than that, about half the movies kept the spirit of the show alive by often centering around dealing with different kinds of life from us, and all featured at least some sort of moral or ethical dilemma. Admittedly, some of those were more sophisticated than others. Also interesting to note that the two original cast movies with main villains and the two in which Earth was threatened were not the same movies. The more recent half-dozen, on the other hand, present the audience with a simple moral situation where it’s not even a question of who’s right or wrong, and then it’s all about taking out the bad guy. Really, it just makes a person appreciate First Contact more and more–problematic as the script to that movie was, it fundamentally told a human story, one that made some logical sense and was pretty compelling, and presented us with at least some kind of challenging questions about our characters. I doubt we’ll ever see its like again.

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by Lev @ Library Grape - The Best in Politics, Culture and Delicious Snark

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Userpage icon for pro-choice (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Women in Secularism 2 will be held in Washington DC this weekend, and many in the secular community are using it as an occasion to reflect on the relationship between atheism and feminism. Some of the resulting discussion has been thought-provoking and productive; some has not. Feminism continues to be a controversial topic for many atheists. Some in our community have had difficulty separating feminism from the bad behavior of a small minority of prominent atheist bloggers who identify themselves as feminists; others have found it tough to separate disagreement from misogyny. And so the atheist world turns. The controversy received a recent jump-start in the form of a recent article on Women in Secularism 2 in The Houston Chronicle. The author, intentionally or otherwise, seemed to pit Justin Vacula against Amanda Marcotte on the subject of whether atheism is consistent with feminism and/or pro-choice positions. Justin has been getting some heat for one part of the article in particular:

As Justin Vacula of Skeptic Ink Network said in response to another piece from conference speaker Amanda Marcotte, “I fail to see how refusing to believe in God leads to the ‘logical conclusion’ of abandoning the belief that women exist to serve men.”

I come to this as someone previously unfamiliar with Marcotte's work and as someone who has the impression that some of the parties involved in discussing atheism and feminism seem to be talking past each other. This may be amplifying disagreement unnecessarily. Frankly, I think that both feminism and atheism are important enough that we should be able to have meaningful discussions of them. Opinions Formed By Personal Experience In Amanda Marcotte's 2012 article for RH Reality Check she explained,

Feminism and atheism are intertwined for me both on a philosophical and pragmatic level.

She's talking about herself and how feminism and atheism have been related in her experience. This makes perfect sense to me. Even though I have experienced atheism and feminism as being fairly distinct domains, I can certainly understand how they could be connected for others. After reading her description of her experiences with feminism and atheism, I see why they would be intertwined for her. She says something similar about pro-choice positions. This time, I have an even easier time understanding where she is coming from because I share her experience of the two (i.e., atheism and being pro-choice) as being at least somewhat linked. In her experience and in mine, the two have been at least somewhat connected. After all, most of the anti-choice arguments I have heard have been religious in nature. I enjoyed Marcotte's article, and I appreciated how she allowed the reader to walk in her shoes and understand how her experience has informed her opinions. I found myself in agreement with much of the article right up until I read the final paragraph:

Of course, all these arguments depended on an atheist movement comprised of people who saw the way that religion and patriarchy are intertwined, and saw that refusing to believe in God, if followed to its logical conclusion, means abandoning the belief that women exist to serve men. In my interactions with the atheist movement, I would say most activist atheists do see these things and have logically come around to feminism because of it. But as Natalie Reed and others have discovered, a not-insubstantial percentage of atheist men have convinced themselves they can both not believe in a god and somehow still conclude that women were put (by who?) here on Earth for the purpose of pleasing and catering to men. And that therefore women who rebel against that by, say, demanding the right not to be sexually harassed just because some guy feels like it, are evil witches who need to be fiercely attacked. All these years, irrational sexists have thought they needed a God to rely on to tell women that our bodies belong to men and not to us. But it turns out that plenty of men feel that they themselves are the only authority needed to take away this basic right of women’s.

The first sentence of this paragraph struck me as being inconsistent with the rest of the article. What arguments is she referring to? Up until this point, she's been talking about herself and her experience. She's provided great explanations of how her experience led to her beliefs. She repeatedly referred to herself and the conclusions she has reached on the basis of her experience. She did not seem to be stating conclusions that would apply to others. With this sentence, she makes an abrupt shift to suggesting that others in the atheist movement ought to see things as she does ("that religion and patriarchy are intertwined"). Just because her experience supports a particular perspective for her (one which makes good sense based on her description of her experience) does not mean that this is applicable to anyone else. I'm not sure what happened here. Atheism and Feminism To understand the relationship between atheism and feminism, I think there are three relevant questions we need to ask and answer:

1. Is atheism consistent with feminism and/or pro-choice positions?
2. Is atheism intertwined with feminism and/or pro-choice positions?
3. Does atheism logically lead to feminism and/or pro-choice positions?

Is atheism consistent with feminism and/or pro-choice positions? Yes! Of course it is. Atheism is consistent with everything besides god belief. There is nothing about the definition of atheism that precludes feminism, pro-choice positions, or anything else except for god belief. So yes, atheism is consistent with feminism and pro-choice positions. Of course, if we understand the meaning of atheism, we realize that this isn't a particularly useful question. Is atheism intertwined with feminism and/or pro-choice positions? This is where things become more interesting and far more useful. The answer to this question depends on the person. For some people, atheism is absolutely intertwined with feminism and pro-choice positions. For Amanda Marcotte, it appears to be intertwined with both. Based on her descriptions of her experience, this is understandable. For me personally on the basis of my experience, atheism is intertwined with pro-choice positions but not with feminism. For Justin Vacula, it might not be intertwined with either. We've had different experiences, and as Marcotte so clearly illustrates up until that puzzling last paragraph, experience matters. Do feminism and/or pro-choice positions logically follow from atheism? That is, should we expect all atheists to be feminists and to hold pro-choice positions because such views are a logical consequence of atheism? No. This does not seem to be the case. Marcotte notes that there are atheist men who reject feminism. I'm not sure why she neglects to mention that there are also plenty of atheist women who reject feminism, but they do exist. Moreover, there are atheists who are not pro-choice. One does not follow from the other. If Marcotte wants to suggest that one should follow from the other, she'd going to need to do much more than provide a good summary of why they have been connected in her life. It was this last question that Justin Vacula was addressing when he wrote:

I fail to see how refusing to believe in God leads to ‘the logical conclusion’ of abandoning the belief that women exist to serve men.

He is saying here that Marcotte did not provide an argument for feminism being a logical conclusion of atheism in her post, and he's correct on this point. She did not provide any such argument. I'd like to end with something that should be encouraging. There are plenty of atheists who accept many aspects of feminist ideology and who are pro-choice. I am one of them, and I know I am not alone. There are those of us who see no need to try to force atheism and feminism together; we find value in both even if we are not convinced that one logically follows from the other. There are those of us who are happy to see the discussion occurring around such important topics. And yes, there are those of us who think that both Amanda Marcotte and Justin Vacula make worthwhile contributions. Subscribe to Atheist Revolution

A Twitter IPO? That doesn't even make sense! Here's the gossip: there's an article over on The Street about how Twitter, when it makes its eventual and almost inevitable IPO, should think long and hard and probably pick someone other than Morgan Stanley to manage the offer. Yes, Morgan Stanley has tech-industry depth, as Merrill Lynch did in the late 90's into the early 2000's. (Then they decided that wasn't toxic enough and decided to see if they could help destroy the American economy.) But here's the thing: Twitter doesn't need to go public just yet. As far as I can find out (they are quite secretive about their financials), it's not approaching SEC limits where it will have to go public, but it has some big name investors who value it between $9B and $10B. Apparently it's also making a profit, even with 900 employees and a massive investment in infrastructure. Those sorts of costs should decline in the near future. But even so, it's difficult to see how Twitter can be a juggernaught like Google.

Comparing Twitter's financials with Google's is delusional. But apparently that's not stopping anyone.online.wsj.com/article/SB1000… — Justin Wolfers (@justinwolfers) February 26, 2013

The biggest problem is that it is still difficult for anyone to see how Twitter can turn its platform into a profit generator. Put up ads and it might make a few million here or there, a bit like Facebook (let's hope their efforts are better than FB's!), but that's not a $10B business. A billion or two, perhaps, but ten? No way. I can see the big guns of the tech world buying it - then it would probably get bid up to about $15B, perhaps $20B if Apple and Google go at it. (To be honest, I'd not be surprised if that's what investors like Black Rock are thinking.) The rumor is that Twitter will go public this year. Somehow, I just don't see it. And pricing it will be very difficult (that's where the Morgan Stanley/Facebook debacle comes in). After the silly Facebook evaluation ($38? Really?), investors will be shy; there's no tech bubble to boost prices, for instance. Yes, there are some over-inflated prices, and we might be at the start of a bubble (I kinda hope so!), but in general people are going to be leery of a platform that doesn't have any discernible revenue prospects. As with so much from the tech world, just because something has become part of the fabric of our lives doesn't mean it has any profit potential. Twitter will need more capital, probably sooner than they'd like, but whether the market feels the same way as society remains to be seen. Carolyn Ann

During her Saturday morning address, Wendy drew attention to the following statement made recently by evangelical minister Tim Keller:

If you say to everybody, 'Anyone who thinks homosexuality is a sin is a bigot,' . . . you're going to have to ask them to completely disassemble the way in which they read the Bible, completely disassemble their whole approach to authority. You're basically going to have to ask them to completely kick their faith out the door.

One of the thing I noticed about this quote was the fear involved.  Some evangelical Christians fear that if they allow themselves to question their views on same sex sexual relationships -- any one of a host of other issues -- they might end up losing their faith altogether.  In a lot of ways, I get that fear.  I experienced it once upon myself at times, too. And I get it because, in some ways, I represent the realization of those fears.  I started out as a devout Christian.  When I allowed myself to rethink my views on homosexuality, it also gave me the freedom to grapple with a number of other questions.  The end result of that process, which only started with my struggle with my sexual orientation, was that I eventually chose to follow an entirely different path altogether and serve other gods. It's easy for someone like Tim Keller to point to me and others like me and say, "See, this is what happens when you start down that path!"  And I can understand their tendency to do that, at least to some degree. The problem is, people like Tim Keller think that what happened to me is inevitable for anyone who starts asking those questions.  I don't think it is.  I sat in a room with roughly fifty other people this weekend, most of whom serve as living evidence that a journey that begins by asking the tough questions and reconsidering what they've been taught doesn't have to lead one down the path I took.  It's just as likely that one could change their mind about same sex sexual relationships -- or any other single topic -- and go no further.  It's just as likely that after one does all the thinking and reconsidering, one ends up back at the same conclusions they held before then.  So people like Tim Keller are fearing something that's not inevitable. I would like to suggest that the fear people like Tim Keller are feeling is the exact reason I think they need to rethink something about the way they do faith.  Because right now, the way they're doing it causes them fear, and I don't think that's healthy for them.  So I'd personally like to see them to start asking some hard questions -- and maybe not even questions about human sexuality -- in an attempt to restructure and firm up their faith so they don't have to worry about it unraveling on them so much.  In short, I'd like to see them develop a faith -- and a way of doing and having faith -- in which they can actually have more faith.

The "free speech zone" at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I've always operated from the perspective that we all benefit from a public forum where free speech is protected. In such a forum, the assumption is that good ideas will rise to the surface while bad ideas will sink to the bottom. The problem with this is that it doesn't always work. That is, some truly bad ideas never seem to sink into obscurity and some good ones never gain traction. Take Fox "News" as an example of what I'm talking about. It seems to have been created, at least in part, to preserve bad ideas by insulating them from criticism. This keeps discredited ideas (e.g., "trickle-down" economics) relevant long after they should have disappeared. Organized religion is perhaps the best example of all, as it has managed to convince many people that their claims should be exempt from criticism. Those who dare to criticize religious claims are viewed as insensitive or intolerant, and the discussion quickly shifts from the content of the criticism to the act of criticizing. Far too many bad ideas have been preserved in this manner. As we have all observed, my quaint idea of the public forum may not reflect the modern reality of "he who yells the loudest wins." Perhaps the public forum only works when all parties are willing to participate "in good faith." If not, the process can be manipulated to the point where it ceases to function for the public good. Maybe the public forum is merely a convenient fiction, one that must be maintained because we lack a viable alternative. Subscribe to Atheist Revolution

By now you’ve heard that a right-wing scholar by the name of Jason Richwine has resigned from the Heritage Foundation as a result of his previous work on race and IQ. Richwine produced a paper on the costs of immigration, which brought him into the public eye and led some to check his credentials. This inevitably led to the discovery of his Harvard dissertation on low IQ in latinos.

Some folks on the right, including the inevitable Andrew Sullivan, weigh in. They speak as if this in unplumbed territory that is being carefully guarded by political correctness and leftist thought police. I think the best response comes from Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Dark Art of Racecraft“:

It is almost as though the “dark arts of race and IQ” were an untapped field of potential knowledge, not one of the most discredited fields of study in modern history. We should first be clear that there is nothing mysterious or forbidden about purporting to study race and intelligence. Indeed, despite an inability to define “race” or “intelligence,” such studies are one of the dominant intellectual strains in Western history. We forget this because its convient to believe that history begins with the Watts riots. But it’s important to remember the particular tradition that Charles Murray and Jason Richwine are working in.

Coates shows off the advantages of the blog format by blockquoting selections from previous racial scientists like Lothrop Stoddard. Coates points out that their success rate with predictions is on par with Christian apocalyptics:

One might oppose the Stoddard tradition strictly on its tendency to birth suffering, misery, and catastrophe. But one can oppose it for simpler reasons — its practitioners have a nasty habit of being wrong.

Just as an aside, it’s amusing that this should all happen just as The Great Gatsby is coming out it theaters.

“Civilization’s going to pieces,’ broke out Tom violently. ‘I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read The Rise of the Colored Empires by this man Goddard?’

“Well, it’s a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be — will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientiic stuff; it’s been proved.”

“Tom’s getting very profound,” said Daisy, with an expression of unthoughtful sadness. “He reads deep books with long words in them. What was that word we ——””

“Goddard” is probably a reference to Stoddard, possibly by joining it with Madison Grant, another eugenicist.

Ya gotta laugh: Adam Kokesh, and his loaded and armed "protest march" will be met by DC police on the DC side of a bridge and prevented from marching with their guns. In addition, CodePink "plan to be on the bridge that day to offer hugs to the protesters as a counter to their pro-gun message." I can see it now: the cops offering a hug from an anti-gun peace protestor or an arrest... :-D What a party that will be! :-) Carolyn Ann PS Carrying a loaded weapon in DC can result in a year's jail time, 5 years if it's a pistol. I wonder how many are willing to carry their protest that far?

Sooo... Just when the Right Wing Blogosphere was celebrating its "knock out punch" to the Obama Administration and The Man himself, he bounces back up and lands a good solid wallop on the side of their head and a powerful one to their jaw. Good lad! :-D The man is becoming something of a Muhammad Ali of politics. (He's definitely dancing like a butterfly! And those 100 pages of Benghazi emails? They're a stinger that's going to keep on delivering.) :-) Carolyn Ann