Vox Popoli

The Washington Post and the Boston Globe were two of the 25 brave newspapers that weren’t afraid to publish Berke Breathed’s mild cartoonish tweaking of Christianity.

I find these brave warriors of secularism to be truly inspiring, don’t you?

Sometimes I suspect PZ is secretly attempting to make my case about the fundamentally careless and unscientific nature of evolutionary biology for me. In the process of trying to deny the obvious connection between the National Socialist eugenics program and his hero Darwin, Dr. PZ Myers links to John Wilkins, who he says “eviscerated” the premises of a program called Darwin’s Deadly Legacy.

There’s just one little problem. Wilkins declares that there’s FOUR ways which one could reasonably draw a connection between Darwin and Hitler and then proceeds to address precisely THREE of them over the course of three posts.

Wilkins promises to get around to the last one – not that his argument relating to the eugenics thesis was the least bit convincing or even particularly relevant – but instead concludes by announcing that the research he needed in order to address his “cotraveller thesis” disappeared somehow. So, he doesn’t even try to address what he declares requires addressing.

Some evisceration.

I suppose it’s a fair objection, I’m just surprised it’s necessary:

I guess we all need a definition of “leading light”, don’t we.

Leading Light: “an important or influential person”.

Therefore, Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins are clearly leading lights of atheism. Warren Buffett, although an atheist, is not; he is not cited once in any New Atheist book. Albert Einstein is not, as he was an agnostic.

As for Daniel Dennett, no, I don’t think he’s an idiot at all. I not only favorably commented on Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, but I even dropped him from the Unholy Trinity, as some have noticed on the book cover. (There is still a chapter devoted to him, of course.) As those who have read all of the New Atheist tomes know, Breaking the Spell is very, very different in both tone and substance than Dawkins’s, Hitchens’s and Harris’s books, which are about as similar as they can be given Harris’s intellectual handicaps and Hitchens’s educational and occupational shortcomings.

The defensiveness of atheists about the most obvious, easily verifiable historical facts is really quite striking. Consider Ed Darrell’s absurdly ignorant statement here:

Then please show us where Lenin ever said anything about Darwin. It’s more likely Lenin was simply following the example of the Spanish Inquisition, having learned from Christian history the value of slaughtering one’s political opponents (see “St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre,” or note how Calvin dealt with his friend Servetus). “Scientific atheism” may have been what they called it. It has no relation to evolution theory, little relation to science of any sort, and not much relation to atheism, either.

First of all, they called it “scientific socialism”, not “scientific atheism”. It has a direct relation to the theory of evolution, it is outdated science and it is 100 percent pure atheism, more pure than the timid “christian atheism” of the New Atheists. But Ed wanted quotes, so we will give him quotes.

“Darwin’s book is very important and serves me as a basis in natural science for the class struggle in history.”
– Karl Marx

“Nature is the test of dialectics, and it must be said for modern natural science that it has furnished extremely rich and daily increasing materials for this test, and has thus proved that in the last analysis nature’s process is dialectical and not metaphysical, that it does not move in an eternally uniform and constantly repeated circle, but passes through a real history. Here prime mention should be made of Darwin, who dealt a severe blow to the metaphysical conception of nature by proving that the organic world of today, plants and animals, and consequently man too, is all a product of a process of development that has been in progress for millions of years.”
– Friedrich Engels, Socialism Utopian and Scientific p. 23 (quoted in full by Stalin in Dialectical and Historical Materialism as well as in the official Bolshevik History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union published in 1939.)

“Darwin put an end to the belief that the animal and vegetable species bear no relation to one another, except by chance, and that they were created by God, and hence immutable.”
– Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

“Darwinism, which explained the evolution of species through quantitative transformations passing into qualitative, was the highest triumph of the dialectic in the whole field of organic matter…. Marx, who in distinction from Darwin was a conscious dialectician, discovered a basis for the scientific classification of human societies in the development of their productive forces and the structure of the relations of ownership which constitute the anatomy of society.”
– Leon Trotsky, The ABC of Materialist Dialectics

“The Party cannot be neutral towards religion, and it conducts anti-religious propaganda against all religious prejudices because it stands for science, whereas religious prejudices run counter to science, because all religion is the antithesis of science. Cases such as occur in America, where Darwinists were prosecuted recently, cannot occur here because the Party pursues a policy of defending science in every way.”
– Josef Stalin, J.V. Stalin Complete Works Volume 10, p. 138

“Chinese socialism is founded upon Darwin and the theory of evolution.”
– Mao

“The metaphysical or vulgar evolutionist world outlook sees things as isolated, static and one-sided. It regards all things in the universe, their forms and their species, as eternally isolated from one another and immutable. Such change as there is can only be an increase or decrease in quantity or a change of place. Moreover, the cause of such an increase or decrease or change of place is not inside things but outside them, that is, the motive force is external…. As opposed to the metaphysical world outlook, the world outlook of materialist dialectics holds that in order to understand the development of a thing we should study it internally and in its relations with other things; in other words, the development of things should be seen as their internal and necessary self-movement, while each thing in its movement is interrelated with and interacts on the things around it.”
– Mao, On Contradiction

It’s hard to get much more explicit than that. And it’s pretty clear that Ed doesn’t know anything about the Spanish Inquisition, for if Lenin and Stalin had learned from its example, the Soviet body count from 1917 to 1953 would have been 324 instead of 25 million or more. Not only was Lenin a virulent, vehement atheist, but his destruction of the Russian churches and mass murder of its priests was explicitly committed in the name of atheism as proof of the nonexistence of God. It was The God Delusion in action.

Ed also makes the same ignorant mistake that PZ Myers made a few weeks ago:

The fascist overeager nuts made the same errors. The belt buckles of the SS said “God with us,” not “No God.” You keep trying to ignore the facts.

They most certainly did not. They said “Mein Ehre Heisst Treu”. “Gott mit uns” was not a Nazi slogan, but the slogan of the Wehrmacht, which dated back to 1871. It’s worth noting that the Nazis did not elect to continue the German military tradition of declaring “God with us”, but preferred to select a new one instead.

I suggest that Ed has no idea whatsoever of what the facts are.

UPDATE: I note that Stalin sounds almost exactly like PZ complaining about Creationists when he writes in the explanatory footnote referring to the quote above: “In 1925 (July 10 to 21), a trial took place in the state of Tennessee, U.S.A., which attracted world-wide attention. A college teacher, named John Scopes was tried for teaching Darwin’s theory of evolution. The American reactionary obscurantists found him guilty of violating the laws of the state and fined him.”

China shows the first signs of the end of the feminist experiment:

The Chinese government says it is drafting new laws to tackle the growing gender imbalance caused by the widespread abortion of female foetuses. The practice is already banned, but new rules are expected to set out specific punishments for parents and doctors. China’s Family Planning Association (CFPC) has revealed the extent of the imbalance – in one city there are eight young boys for every five girls. Experts fear the phenomenon could have unpredictable social consequences….

On Friday it was revealed that the eastern city of Lianyungang had the most skewed population. Among children under four years old, there are 163.5 boys for every 100 girls.

This is exactly what will happen to no-fault divorce, women’s suffrage and other aspects of the feminist program once the social ills they cause become overly dangerous to society. Most likely, this will first require a lapse into some form of authoritarian government; it would be fortunate if the idiot voting public was capable of considering these matters and forestalling the obvious unpleasantries, but there is no shortage of evidence to prove that it is not.

Feminism is arguably the most retarded political ideology Mankind has ever known; women should be deeply and profoundly embarrassed to know that it is their sex’s most notable intellectual contribution to date. It takes a severely dysfunctional mind to come up with an ideology so self-destructive that thinks to champion women by ensuring the right to murder little girls.

Communism collapsed under the weight of its own self-contradictions in seventy years. Feminism won’t even last that long.

To point out the obvious. A lawyer reaches precisely the same conclusion I did about Mr. Pivar’s libel suit against Dr. PZ Myers:

So, in my opinion, Judge Scheindlin will promptly dismiss your suit. Assuming, for sake of argument, that she does not, your suit faces several insurmountable evidentiary obstacles. First, your complaint alleges that your Lifecode book, in both the 2004 and 2007 versions, was published by “Ryland Press, Inc.” My research has turned up no such publisher anywhere in the world. There is, in New York and London, a publisher called Ryland, Peters & Small, but during my recent telephone conversation with a member of their staff, I was told they did not publish your book (they specialize in cookbooks and stationery). So you would certainly be asked during discovery to identify and produce records from “Ryland Press,” including sales figures. I also talked with Terry Krohn at Axiom House, which advertises your second Lifecode book; he told me it was not published by him, that he listed it as a favor to you, and that it had no sales to date. It would be impossible for you to prove even one dollar of damages, let alone $15 million.

The law, such as it is, is very much like a certain Tom Cruise movie. It’s nothing but “show me the money”.

My offer of an affadavit in PZ’s defense still stands.

The New York Times profiles this lovely man, Nobel Prize-winning novelist Jose Saramago:

Saramago, who is 84, is an austere man, extremely tall and so lean that he is practically concave. The night was hot, but he was wearing, as usual, a dark suit and tie. An outspoken atheist, Saramago maintains that religion is to blame for most of the world’s violence….

“Saramago’s novels are endlessly inventive, endlessly good-natured, endlessly skillful,” [Harold] Bloom told me, “but it baffles me why the man can’t grow up politically. In 2007, to be a Portuguese Stalinist means you’re simply not living in the real world.”

Saramago has a mixed reputation in his native land. When he won the Nobel Prize, Portuguese readers evidently felt vindicated that one of their countrymen had at last received this high honor…. Yet Saramago also often appears to be disliked. In part this is the resentment of a country that has long been dominated by a small elite. In part, it is a matter of Saramago’s own unaccommodating personality. Everywhere I went in Lisbon in June, people described him as “cold,” “arrogant,” “unsympathetic.”

It’s interesting how the leading lights of atheism are so prodigiously, verifiably and unrepentantly idiots. To a man, they lack wisdom; they are demonstrably fools. Intelligence is only mental firepower, wisdom is knowing how to direct it to optimal effect.

If I invented an atheist Stalinist clinging to the idea that religion is the cause of most of the world’s violence, I’d be accused of creating a strawman. And yet, Saramago is one of the elite atheists they proudly cite – unknowingly, of course – when they brag about the inordinate number of atheists who have won the Nobel Prize.

It is men like Saramago who give the lie to the New Atheists, who frantically wash their godless hands like Lady Macbeth, desperately trying to wash away the blood stains that will never disappear. But it doesn’t matter how often they chant their absurd mantra “communism is not atheist, communism is NOT atheist!”, history conclusively proves otherwise.

The idea that communism is a religion is a METAPHOR. To take this metaphor literally is to demonstrate both a measure of illiteracy and conceptual confusion. Because communism is entirely materialistic and entirely godless, it is more purely atheist than the publicly recorded beliefs of Bertrand Russell, Sam Harris or even Richard Dawkins.

Here’s the roster thus far:

Greenfield Grizzlies
Mounds View Meerkats
Cranberry Bogs
Village Valkyries
Burns Hausfraurers
Black Mouth Curs
Masonville Marauders
W.C. Silver Spooners
East Mesa WhiteTrash

So we’ve got a bog and a WC, and Masonville borrowed Mounds View’s old moniker. Classy! Anyhow, whoever is missing, email me. Everyone else, post your keepers here, this will be definitive as I will rank them and export the rankings to you so that everyone will draft accordingly.

That’s the idea anyhow.

I’m so surprised that the assailant didn’t turn out to be someone named Swen Olsen:

A 26-year-old man was charged Thursday for allegedly raping and beating a woman in an apartment hallway — an incident apparently witnessed by several people who did nothing, police say, to help the alleged victim. Charged with two counts of rape, Rage Ibrahim turned himself in to Ramsey County authorities Thursday afternoon….

Police say the alleged attack was captured by the building’s security camera. “It shows the suspect striking the victim,” says St. Paul Police spokesperson Tom Walsh. And police say the tape also shows something else – as many as ten people who saw the alleged attack, but did nothing. “They simply walked down the hall and turned backducked back into their doorway,” says Walsh. Police say the alleged assault lasted 30 minutes and no attempt was made to help the woman and there was no immediate call to 911.

We are informed that culture and race don’t make any difference and that people everywhere are all the same. And yet, less than one hundred years ago, Minnesotans were more inclined to lynch men wrongly accused of rape than to ignore the commission of one.

But then why should anyone do anything now, when there is a reasonable chance that intervening will not only risk one’s health, but one’s wealth should one make the mistake of causing bodily harm to a criminal?

Sam Harris making his customary hash of a case against religion:

At a time when Muslim doctors and engineers stand accused of attempting atrocities in the expectation of supernatural reward, when the Catholic Church still preaches the sinfulness of condom use in villages devastated by AIDS, when the president of the United States repeatedly vetoes the most promising medical research for religious reasons, much depends on the scientific community presenting a united front against the forces of unreason.

What depends, Sam? For the love of the Galapagos Islands, for once in your pathetic career, put some actual substance behind your incompetent logic and half-assed rhetoric! WHAT DEPENDS? I mean, Nature itself has reported that one of the places where science is currently growing fastest in terms of funding and employment is IRAN. Religion does not seriously inhibit science in any way, let alone imperil it. The argument is demonstrably false on its face.

It’s been published – in Nature, no less – that your stem cell argument is outdated. It’s now bad science. How is the fact that Muslim doctors and engineers happen to be politically active terrorists any jeopardy to science in any way, shape or form? And which is more likely to spread AIDS, your advocacy of free sex with condoms or the Catholic Church’s position of chastity until marriage? Is it merely a coincidence that AIDS didn’t emerge until after the invention of the condom and the sexual revolution?

Sam Harris is not a scientist and he isn’t a fan of the scientific method, he’s a fraudulent philosophy major who is attempting to hijack science in service to his anti-theistic jihad. It is my fondest wish for TIA that it will finish off this intellectually dishonest charlatan once and for all.

If science unites against religion, then science will be destroyed and deservedly so. It is science, not religion, which poses a distinct and multi-faceted threat to mankind’s continued survival, moreover, it is a historical fact that while science can be shut down for centuries, not even the most violent totalitarian government is capable of eliminating religion over a period of decades.

PS – On the evolution debate front, my interlocutor Scott has expressed the wish that I hold off until he completes his next response. Since I’ve been under the weather lately I’m quite happy to comply, although I do look forward to hearing his further thoughts on the matter. His partial response can be read here.

PPS – It’s amusing to note that religious youth are more moral by Sam Harris’s own metric of morality: “Eighty percent of those who call religion or spirituality the most important thing in their lives say they’re happy, while 60 percent of those who say faith isn’t important to them consider themselves happy.”

Evangelical atheists sure have a tough sell. On the one hand, you’ll be less happy, live a shorter life, and need therapy before you kill yourself. On the other, you’ll be less popular at a party than a homosexual Haitian pedophile with tuberculosis and three STDs. So wear that scarlet letter with pride!