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Another college atheist writes in defense of Sam Harris:

I read your book today. I too, was a Chrsitian, and a fairly conservative one. But I had some questions about it, and Sam Harris book turned me away from it. I found most of your attacks on Harris to be erronous. Except for when you talked about Harris glossing over the evils of Stalin and Mao (you’re dead right there) it sounded like you were distorting what Harris said, or at least what he meant. Also, I never read that Harris thoguht religion was worse than rape–did you make that up?

It’s very strange that this kid could see through the spurious nature of Harris’s No True Atheist defense of communism, yet not recognize the ridiculous nature of the Red State argument and other Harrisian fabrications. As for the hope that I’m dumb enough to simply fabricate quotes relating to a controversial subject, well, here’s the notorious statement right here:

Saltman: “Your analogy between organized religion and rape is pretty inflammatory. Is that intentional?”

Harris: I can be even more inflammatory than that. If I could wave a magic wand and get rid of either rape or religion, I would not hesitate to get rid of religion. I think more people are dying as a result of our religious myths than as a result of any other ideology.

It’s sad that a child raised Christian would turn away from the faith of his fathers. But one despairs for the human race to know that anyone could do so on the basis of arguments made by Sam Harris. Mercury in the vaccines is the only plausible explanation.

UPDATE – Speaking of vaccine damage, another TIA reviewer is obviously quite reliable on the details in his review of the response to Clinton, Sam, and the crew:

Robert Beale, right wing blogger, video gamer and part-time Christian fantasy novelist is the literary equivalent of Ann Coulter, and his frequent invocation of the Holocaust, race, gender, class and other cultural hot buttons on his Vox Populi blog is an exercise in intellectual bomb throwing.

I particularly enjoyed the claim that I confuse correlation with causation, when I specifically point out that it is the very high level of correlation that suggests causation. The New Atheists, on the other hand, are permitted by their acolytes to assume causation without even demonstrating correlation in the first place.

Richard Dawkins has demonstrated why evolutionary biologists should stick to biology. Now a soon-to-be physics PhD demonstrates why physics majors should stick to physics in his cursory attempt to review a single chapter of TIA:

1. Entirely, well, idiotic argument that religion has not produced means to destroy the world while science has. Of course religion has not produced a means to feed people, while food has, which means religion is useless. Wow… bad start, Voxy.

Uselessness has nothing to do with it. Imminent danger to the human race is the subject at hand, due to Sam Harris’s assertion that Science + Faith = Human Extinction. Since it has been proven that the danger cannot derive from Faith, even eliminating Faith from the equation means that the threat to humanity will still remain so long as Science exists. Logic therefore dictates that either Harris is incorrect – in which case he has no argument against Faith – or he should be advocating the End of Science. Bad logic, Andy. I note that claiming that food has produced a means to feed people is a tautology… stick to the math, college boy, it’s clear that both logic and analogy are beyond you.

2. More arguments that knowledge is evil. Yawwwwn…

Is he stating a belief that absolutely no knowledge is evil? Or even dangerous? Because I certainly don’t argue that knowledge is inherently evil, (although I think I could make a fairly convincing case for the knowledge of the taste of a virgin’s still-beating heart), I do argue that some knowledge can be dangerous. I find it hard to believe that he seriously disagree with this, I suspect he’s merely intellectually careless.

3. More refutations of Harris’ argument that religion can cause evil. Argument entirely identical that it’s not the man who commits murder who’s at fault, it’s the knife, whose existence is responsible. So far so bad…

Again, Andy can’t do analogy correctly. His man-knife example rests on the fact that “man” is a sentient object and can be responsible for murder, but “knife” is not and therefore cannot be. However, both “Religion” and “Science” are equally abstract concepts and equally capable of being held responsible (or if you prefer, not responsible) for endangering humanity. If one must bring murder into it, both Motive and Means are considered relevant factors in proving a crime, in fact, Means is the more significant factor. So far, still got nothing, Andy.

4. A sort of an argument that not all current science is “good” science, as if that means something, or as if he’s discovering something no one knew.

It certainly does mean something. It means either “bad science” should be held against science, or “bad religion” should not be held against religion. Pick one, I don’t care. And, of course, it also eviscerates the romantic idea that mutable science can be the basis of an objective and rational moral standard.

5. Argument that there are some things we’re better off never knowing. Ridiculous for a variety of reasons, ranging from the fact that there will never be agreement as to who gets to decide which knowledge must never be pursued, to the fact that making a subject taboo is possibly the best way to ensure someone explores it.

Yes, this is why scientists publish information on making nuclear weapons and biological agents in public journals available for free download on the Internet. I submit that the idea that humanity is better off knowing every possible piece of information is not only stupidly short-sighted, it’s downright insane.

6. Oh lordy… “for the first two-thirds of the scientific era, life expectancy was comparable to that of ancient Rome.” I think he thinks this is somehow meaningful, because apparently if the progress of medicine, as measured directly by life expectancy, does not exactly match progress in every other discipline of science, this invalidates all of science.

Andy apparently scored rather better on his Math than his Reading Comprehension. The fact that science has not altered human life expectancy anywhere nearly as much as is commonly assumed doesn’t invalidate anything about science, it invalidates a claim to a specific benefit of science made by many science fetishists.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why you should never be impressed by the mere possession of an expensive piece of paper sold to an individual by a paper-selling institution, or expect those possessing such pieces of paper to be capable of even the most rudimentary reading comprehension or logical analysis.

We have a Broncos fan in our midst…. No, I only jest in order to show that if I’m so ruthlessly insensitive that I will publicly poke fun at a guy condemned to life in a wheelchair or a poor little crippled boy* for the sake of my own amusement, just imagine what I’m willing to do to you.

Now, wheelchairs. One of the regulars has a request:

I’m disabled and, now that I’m finishing up school, am looking into buy a wheelchair-accessible van to use for employment. It’s proving to be more costly than I first anticipated, so I’m investigating places that might be able to help me out a bit. I’m searching out local charities and agencies, but would like to spread the net as widely as possible, so thought that you (among others) might be worth asking for leads. Can you suggest any philanthropic groups in the US who might be appropriate?

This is a subject of which I remain thankfully ignorant, but I imagine some of the more charitable and/or less fortunate in our midst might know something about it. If you’ve got any thoughts on the matter, post them here please.

* Won a much-treasured Bane award for that, actually. I like to consider myself an award-winning cruelty artist.

In which we are reliably informed that the New Atheism is dead:

So basically Vox “Turbo Porsche” Day is confining his attention to the three least credible atheists in the entire movement — all of whom are already being disavowed and renounced by significant numbers of atheists, who are waking up to the fact that those three have contributed little or nothing to the most important battles of their day. Wake me up when Day and WorldNutDaily are ready to take on a less easy (and more relevent) target.

If any atheists would like to point me towards any more difficult and more relevant targets, I’d be happy to consider their arguments as well. But it seems I have done such a number on Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens that they are now described – by atheists – as being “the three least credible atheists in the entire movement”. Now, I’m openly contemptuous of all three men and find them to be worthy of very little credibility, let alone respect, but even I wouldn’t go quite that far.

By the way, it’s not “Turbo Porsche” these days, it’s “Lamborghini Libertarian”. Do try to keep up.

I’ve argued that what now passes for “school” is nothing more than a statist propaganda factory meant to intellectually cripple children for a long time, but now a California appeals court has confirmed this to be the case:

A California court has ruled that several children in one homeschool family must be enrolled in a public school or “legally qualified” private school, and must attend, sending ripples of shock into the nation’s homeschooling advocates as the family reviews its options for appeal…. Specifically, the appeals court said, the trial court had found that “keeping the children at home deprived them of situations where (1) they could interact with people outside the family, (2) there are people who could provide help if something is amiss in the children’s lives, and (3) they could develop emotionally in a broader world than the parents’ ‘cloistered’ setting.”

There are few things more mindlessly cruel than sentencing a child to public school. The school Nazis know their factories are under threat, which is why they are ratcheting up the pressure on families who don’t obediently send their children to the intellectual death showers.

The second print-run left the printers today, so the books are on their way to the distributor. Figure about a week for them to get to Amazon and get processed, then another three days to your house. I’m sorry about the delay.

It seems I’m not the only one pointing out the intellectual, moral and spiritual bankruptcy of the Enlightenment:

[W]e humans, probably unlike animals, need death to be more than just dying in a Darwinian sense, and like a dead fish, rotting and stinking on the beach. If that’s all death is, biological death in that sense, then life loses its meaning. If death doesn’t have meaning, one doesn’t need to argue this, one just needs to look at the great stories and the great paintings, the great wrestlings with precisely this question, from Tolstoy right back to Shakespeare and then back to the Greeks. It just is the case with us humans. If death has no meaning more than the biological sense, then life loses its meaning, and life becomes absurd, or horrible, to quote Nietzsche. So yes, looking back over 500 years of Humanism, Humanism was doomed from the start, and I think this is precisely Shakespeare and Holbein’s point in the Renaissance.

Humanism, like Communism, Feminism and Secularism, was absolutely doomed from the start. The only reason it hung around as long as it has is that it was sustained by the Christian tradition. Severed from that, it can’t last, one need only look at how much the Humanist creed has transformed in the two iterations since the first one to know that it is a transient thing.

The wall begins to crack:

The federal government continues to deny a link between vaccines and autism, but the U.S. Court of Federal Claims has ruled in favor of a child alleged to have regressed into autism as a result of vaccinations. Several of the vaccinations included the controversial mercury-based preservative thimerosal, points out the National Autism Association, which sees the ruling as confirmation of the claims of many parents.

“This case echoes the stories of thousands of children across the country,” said NAA President Wendy Fournier. “With almost 5,000 similar cases pending in vaccine court, we are confident that this is just the first of many that will confirm what we have believed for so long – vaccines can and do cause children to regress into autism.”

Now cue all of the science fetishists and herd statists squawking about how a court ruling isn’t science. That’s true, and neither are statistical meta-studies. Notice that it’s always the vaccine sellers and the see-no-evil “vaccines are an unmitigated good” crowd that is staunchly opposed to any proper double-blind empirical studies of the matter.

Vaccines aren’t inherently bad. But even generally pro-vaccine European pediatricians think that the U.S. vaccination schedule is insane. If the federal government didn’t know that vaccines caused harm, they wouldn’t have made the vaccine makers and administrators immune to civil lawsuits from the families of the children harmed. And that’s despite the applied standard of harm that if applied to handgun homicide would conclude that about 50 percent of gunshot victims died of unknown causes wholly unrelated to the bullet-sized holes that happened to exist in the bodies.

She does paint a vividly vicious metaphor, though:

One of the recurring sticks which women are whacked by, and whack each other with, is the “FACT” that you can’t find a husband past the age of thirty five. On your 28th birthday, three quarters of available straight men apparently shift into an unreachable dimension distant from your own, and, if you haven’t got one by then, you have to wait until they’re all released from their first marriages, ten years later, and come to you bitter, broke and lugging two traumatised children behind them – children whose sole purpose is to loathe you….

Is me calling my sisters (30 and 28) “shrivelled-up childless spinster-antelopes on the edges of the migrating pack” actually a bit too close to home?

She’s generally correct, though. A woman who marries in her twenties will almost always marry better in superficial material terms than a woman who marries in her thirties. It’s worth keeping in mind if such things matter to you. I don’t quite understand why so many women think that it’s wiser to wait until they’re past their peak level of attraction to the opposite sex to begin looking for a husband. There are three things that every pretty girl should have branded on her brain at puberty:

1) The world isn’t all about you even if it looks that way now.
2) Looks fade surprisingly fast.
3) There’s plenty of girls on the girl tree, with new ones blooming every year.

Gentlemen, I submit that if you wish to have even a remote chance at a successful marriage with a woman, beginning it by demonstrating to all and sundry that you are the submissive party is not the optimal way to kick it off:

“I expect that more women than ever will be proposing in 2008,” says Dr Sheri Jacobson, a relationship counsellor at Harley Therapy in London. “I think that attitudes are shifting and there’s more room for women to assert themselves.” How much more room can there be?…

And besides, you may be surprised to know that a tradition dreamt up by other chicks doesn’t insist that the woman buy the ring. Suzanne Kelly proposed to her husband Eamon during what would otherwise have been a magical trip to Florence in 1992. “After he recovered, we found a jeweller and he bought me a classic diamond solitaire,” chirruped Suzanne, smugly.

That isn’t marriage, it’s a pirate with a cutlass in her mouth boarding a helpless merchant ship. However, some of the unquestionably brilliant writer’s suggestions for how the gamma male can avoid an unwanted proposal are pretty amusing:

You are not even safe taking your nephews to the local branch of Games Workshop for a few rounds of Warhammer – she will get the shop assistant nerds to let her write “Will you marry me?” underneath all their area of effect-damage templates (ask nephews). Only a modern “high-class” orgy will dampen her plans – the last thing she wants is for your (inevitable, gutless) acceptance to be celebrated by a round of applause from a bunch of naked “heedonists”, as Larry David calls them. Don’t admit that it’s an orgy either. When she brings up the fact that everyone’s getting it on, say: “Sex party? What are you talking about? These are my friends from university.”

It sends shivers down your spine, really. If women are getting so desperate for establishing legal claims on men’s finances that they’re actually willing to enter a Games Workshop of their own volition, there’s no telling what they might do. In the old days, before women realized that geeks can literally buy and sell jocks, a few strategically arranged painted little orcs and elves were sufficient to send any self-respecting girl running screaming into the night.