Scientific hypocrisy

I always enjoy the way atheist science fetishists who believe firmly in the scientific method as the sole arbiter of Truth simultaneously insist that they don’t have to read a book in order to reach conclusions about it. So much for their supposed preference of observation to logic. Catkiller challenged an atheist named Maxpower to read The Irrational Atheist and this was the unsurprising ad hominem response:

I have not read the book (I prefer books like “The Science of Good and Evil” by Michael Shermer), but I did peruse the blog of the man who wrote The Irrational Atheist and read through some arguments he’s put forth. Since you’ve previously referred me to such nonsense as Jonah Goldberg, I should have expected some pretty poor arguments and old, tired fallacies that often turn up in theism-vs-atheism discussions, but I was particularly disappointed by the nutcase you’ve held up as your trump card this time. Here is what I have learned based on what I have read about and by Vox Day:

– He is a writer for World Net Daily, a fringe extremist website one step above Prison Planet or StormFront
– He appears to be a birther, an anti-feminist, and even opposes womens’ suffrage
– Oh, he also seems to be a white supremacist
– He has argued that Sam Harris is more immoral than Jeffrey Dahmer, which is a mind-boggling statement
– He appears to dispute the theory of evolution and the age of the earth
– He has stated that maybe “some” people don’t need God or the threat of punishment to be good, but he “certainly” does
– He has stated that, if commanded to do so by God, he would kill every 2-year-old on earth.

This last part makes Vox Day a particularly dangerous brand of psychopath, since people often commit horrific acts when they mistakenly believe to have been ordered to do so by God. Parents who withhold medicine from dying children or who violently kill “possessed” children are prime examples. No atheist would have a reason for doing such a breathtakingly cruel thing.

Well, this atheist certainly would have if given the opportunity. Consider his manifesto: “All programs on Discovery Health-TLC must stop encouraging the birth of any more parasitic human
infants and the false heroics behind those actions. In those programs’ places, programs encouraging human sterilization and infertility must be pushed…. Talk about Evolution. Talk about Malthus and Darwin until it sinks into the stupid people’s brains until they get it!! The humans? The planet does not need humans. You MUST KNOW the human population is behind all the pollution and problems in the world, and YET you encourage the exact opposite instead of discouraging human growth and procreation.”

Atheists usually claim religion is behind all the problems in the world, but since they also believe religion is human-created, they are eventually forced to end up advocating mass murder of one form or another. It would appear that Maxpower has forgotten the extraordinarily lethal behavior of a number of powerful, well-known atheists in dozens of countries during the 20th century. The late James Lee may be unusual, but he is unfortunately no unique aberration. The seed for mass slaughter is sown when atheists who share Lee’s faith in Malthus rather than the Apostle Paul and Darwin rather than the Gospels take positions of power.

By the way, the correct response to Maxpower’s question is that he hasn’t sufficiently understood what morality is to formulate a coherent question about it. The threat of punishment from a supernatural deity is not a source of morality, let alone “the only ultimate” one. Maxpower has done the metaphorical equivalent of confusing the possibility of a penalty flag for the NFL Competition Committee and the 32 NFL owners. The ultimate source of morality is God, whose authority over Creation rests upon the fact of His being its Creator. His game, His rules. The threat of punishment is merely an incentive to abide by those rules and should never be confused with either the rules or the Rulegiver.


Atheism does kill

So much for the No True Atheist arguments blaming all that 20th century atheist slaughter on communism. It is even peer-reviewed science:

Atheist doctors are almost twice as likely to take decisions that speed up death for very ill patients as those who are deeply religious, research has found…. The findings, published in the Journal of Medical Ethics, showed that doctors who described themselves as non-religious were more likely than any other group to have given continuous deep sedation until death, having made a decision that they knew could or would end life.

The more important question, of course, is how much more likely atheist doctors were to strangle their patients with their bare hands or to perform horrific scientific experiments upon them. I expect that percentage would be rather more than double. Unfortunately, it would appear the study didn’t cover that one.

What I find amusing is that the same atheists who deny there is any historically demonstrated atheist predilection for killing will read that piece and find themselves thinking “yeah, what’s wrong with that?” Although considering the bureaucratic nationalized morass that is the NHS, I suppose it’s possible that most of the doctors in Britain are communists these days.


Demonstrating ignorance

Gary Gutting of Notre Dame upsets the league of the ignorant godless:

In these popular debates about God’s existence, the winners are neither theists nor atheists, but agnostics — the neglected step-children of religious controversy, who rightly point out that neither side in the debate has made its case. This is the position supported by the consensus of expert philosophical opinion. This conclusion should particularly discomfit popular proponents of atheism, such as Richard Dawkins, whose position is entirely based on demonstrably faulty arguments.

A professional academic’s dismissal of Richard Dawkins hapless arguments? Make that the league of the indignant and ignorant godless. The comments are hilarious, as the immediate reaction from the usual sort of moderate-IQ atheist is demands for Gutting to “support” or “prove” his factual statement that Dawkins’s position is “entirely based on demonstrably faulty arguments”. Of course, whenever someone does bother to demonstrate precisely how Dawkins’s arguments are factually and logically flawed, the reaction of most such atheists is to a) refuse to read it, b) lie about the substance and attack strawman substitutes, and c) fall into an abrupt silence and hope the criticism goes away on its own.

On a tangential note, Half-Sigma’s argument for superior atheist intelligence is almost Hitchensian in its self-refuting quality.

I want to address the controversy of “atheism” vs. “agnosticism.” In the comment section, some people said that agnostics are smarter than atheists. I find this unlikely. Rather, smarter people are more adept at fitting in and avoiding controversy.

That’s what passes for his argument. Note how this fits the classic pattern of atheist illogic, to say nothing of the bait-and-switch of turning to fundamentally philosophical arguments instead of making any use of the science upon which they claim to rely. Half-Sigma happens to personally “find” it unlikely, (as opposed to “believing” it), ergo it must not be. But who fits in better and avoids more controversy, agnostics or atheists? Agnostics, quite clearly. So, agnostics are smarter than atheists by Half-Sigma’s own metric, his real argument is that he doesn’t believe (find?) that they are truly agnostic, the Archbishop of Oxford’s statement that he himself is actually an agnostic who leans atheist, not a genuine strong atheist notwithstanding.

If I did not believe in the existence of God, I would be downright embarrassed to call myself an atheist these days. I don’t know if it is because they are all studying butterfly collecting and evolution by something that is vaguely related to natural selection rather than history, philosophy, and literature, but they are simply incapable of presenting coherent arguments, let alone valid ones.

As for the myth of high atheist intelligence, that is one of several myths that are addressed in the Against the New Atheism slide show. You don’t have to be of limited intelligence to be a militant atheist, but it most certainly helps. The ironic thing is that like Ilya Somin of the Volokh Conspiracy, Half-Sigma is neither as stupid nor as ignorant as his reflexive atheism makes him sound. Consider, for example, Steve Sailer’s citation of his correct take on the results of meritocratic testing: “For example, a few years, Mayor Bloomberg and NYC schools supremo Joel Klein decided to fix the ramshackle admissions process to the gifted schools by imposing a standardized test on all applicants. Blogger Half Sigma immediately predicted that the percentage of Asians and whites admitted would rise at the expense of blacks and Hispanics, which would cause a sizable unexpected political problem for Bloomberg and Klein. All that has come to pass.”

It was obvious, perhaps, but sound reasoning even so. The problem is that due to a combination of factors that tend to include familial relationships, social inadequacies, sexual obsessions, group dynamics, and intellectual pride, otherwise intelligent atheists insist on continuing to dumb themselves down by repeatedly staking out completely indefensible positions contra religion, especially Christianity. I don’t mind that they do so, since it only makes it that much easier to shoot them down, but for the sake of intellectual exercise if nothing else we theists would be better served by a higher class of atheist apologists.


More atheist ignorance

Ilya Somin demonstrates that ignorance of theology is no basis from which to pontificate about the nonexistence of God:

Atheism is not a complete theory of the nature of the universe. Rather, as I discussed here, atheism is simply a rejection of the existence of God, by which I mean a being that is omnipotent, omniscient and completely benevolent (the definition [traditionally] accepted by [the vast majority of adherents] of the major monotheistic religions). One can reject the existence of God without believing that we “can or will be able to explain how and why the universe came into existence.”

There are numerous arguments against God’s existence that don’t depend on any particular theory of the origins of the universe. In my view, the “problem of evil” is one of the strongest. For a good and accessible summary of the major arguments for atheism that don’t require explanations for the nature of the universe, see David Ramsay Steele’s recent book Atheism Explained. The “new atheists” whom Rosenbaum attacks also don’t rely on any comprehensive theory of the universe in making their case against the existence of God. Writers like Harris, Hitchens, and Dawkins have their flaws; but believing that they can explain the origins of the universe isn’t one of them.

If that’s your strongest argument, you had better give up on atheism now. The so-called problem of evil is one of the most ignorant arguments that can possibly be made against the Christian God’s existence, let alone various other conceptions of the Divine. The existence of evil is absolutely central to the Christian faith, so it requires a remarkable amount of theological cluelessness to claim that the existence of observable evil can possibly serve as any sort of evidence against the Christian God. Moreover, anyone with an even cursory familiarity with the Bible, or for that matter, CS Lewis’s Space Trilogy, knows that “the god of this world” is not the Creator God. And finally, Sunday School theology notwithstanding, there is no serious Biblical claim for Divine omniscience; the various claims to God’s knowledge tend to involve a complete knowledge of human nature.

But no doubt “the problem of evil” is a serious objection to a God in whom no one of any religion actually believes, let alone worships.


Mailvox: Uber Dawks strikes three

You can’t stop him, you can only hope to contain him!

I did not mean “objective scientific evidence”, I mean any objective evidence at all. The Bible is not an objective piece of evidence, scientific or otherwise. Wrong. Try again in our bonus round. Reading the comments on your blog this morning, it seems that none of your ilk can come up with anything either. The Courtier’s Reply is still looking mighty valid.

Finally, not that I need to justify any credentials, but since your ilk has been speculating, I am a Ph.D. candidate in Evolutionary Psychology at a prestigious major university. My views are not the minority among atheists, but the majority. Go to Pharyngula and you’ll see that I’m not alone. Read Dawkins more polemical work, read Sam Harris or Chris Hitchens, I’m not saying anything that hasn’t already been tackled at length by these great thinkers.

Also, for all the mocking of my celebrity atheist paragraph, I was not appealing to these men to validate atheism, but rather to show that the atheist in that comic is a grand caricature, representative of the kind of narrow thinking that you Christian fundies are known for.

evidence
–noun
1. that which tends to prove or disprove something; ground for belief; proof.
2. something that makes plain or clear; an indication or sign.
3. Data presented to a court or jury in proof of the facts in issue and which may include the testimony of witnesses, records, documents, or objects.

Evidence is any information so given, whether furnished by witnesses or derived from documents or from any other source.

I have to admit, I’m not exactly what one would call concerned about the opinion of anyone who believes that there is no evidence for the existence when God even after the difference between “evidence” and “scientific evidence” has been pointed out to him. I am probably the least likely man on the planet to be moved by the arguments of anyone who genuinely believes Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens are, and I quote, “great thinkers”. This is surely the very worst site on the Internet to make an appeal to Pharyngula and as for The Courtier’s Reply, it requires the sort of innumeracy and complete philosophical ignorance we have come to expect of butterfly collectorsbiologists to take it seriously. But I have absolutely no doubt that his maleducated and irrational views are the majority among atheists; that is precisely why I titled my book on the subject “The Irrational Atheist”.

The thing that is so ridiculous about the definitionally challenged “no evidence” argument is that even third-rate minds like Dawkins know that it is hopelessly incorrect. The existence of testimonial and documentary evidence for God is the very reason Richard Dawkins wrote an essay arguing for the superiority of scientific evidence over eyewitness evidence in The Devil’s Chaplain, although scientific evidence is less valid in a court of law than eyewitness evidence and is rightly considered much less reliable than documentary evidence of the sort that the Bible represents.

Anyhow, I’m sure we all wish the PhD-to-be great success in his future career in the gastronomical service industry.


Mailvox: the return of Uber Dawks

Apparently not content with demonstrating his complete ignorance of American history and PZ Myers’s confirmed cowardice, Uber Dawks has returned as part of his quixotic crusade to demonstrate that militant atheists are every bit as smart and educated as they are socially adept and sane.

After mockingly laughing my way through the two days worth of posts to your site that were inspired by my email, I’ve come to the conclusion that you and your “ilk” may be even more delusional than I could have ever imagined. When they discuss you at Pharyngula, I would think to myself that no one could be that obtuse, delusional and falsely magnanimous. Turns out that you are all that and more.

PZ afraid to debate you? Why should he debate delusional fundies like you? You wanna know why he doesn’t have to? Courtier’s reply. All you Christards have to contribute is philosophical flatulation about your phony baloney sky daddy. You have no objective proof of god’s existence at all. I challenge anyone on your site to give me one thing — one tiny piece of objective evidence for god that cannot be better and more fully explained by natural science.

Oh, and all your posters whining about the Christards label…sorry for being honest with you, but you are mentally handicapped if you actually believe that some bearded Jew (who probably didn’t even actually exist) came back from the dead 2000 years ago. So I called you a bad name, boo-hoo. You use negative labels for atheists all the time on your site.

Are you just not smart enough to see your hypocrisy? For all the self-promoting about your IQ, you could not on your best day come up with a universal neutralizer and falsifier for atheism the way Myers has done for theism with his Courtier’s Reply. That’s why conservative sky bully worshippers like you and philosophical liars like William Layne Craig aren’t fit to be in the same conversation with PZ Myers or Richard Dawkins.

In reading the responses from those two other atheists (assuming those emails were real, which I doubt) I have only one thing to say to them. Grow some balls. Stop bowing to the tyranny of the religious majority. You Christians and Muslims are destroying this world with your religious nonsense and killing everyone else in the process. Sam Harris wrote about conversational intolerance and possible retributive violence against dangerous religious groups, and what he says is true. Atheists need to speak out and show that we will no longer tolerate your fairy tales and your killing in the name of them. All atheists need to join together and drag all of you kicking and screaming from the Dark Ages into the modern secular age, whether you like it or not.

Fact is this: Atheists are winning. Look at Denmark or France or the UK. Your sky fairy is about to go bye-bye.

That idiotic cartoon you posted shows that you are as clueless about atheists as you are science. Atheists do not look like that at all. George Clooney, Bill Maher, Adam and Jamie from Mythbusters are all atheists. Brad Pitt is functionally atheist. Joss Whedon is a feminist and an atheist and has stated that knowing there is no god is “a very important thing for you to learn.”

These guys are famous, they get women and are nothing like that idiotic cartoon. What should I expect though, Mariano from TrueFreeThinker is nearly as bad as you are. He spends his time tossing philosophical chum into the water to be decimated by atheist piranha.

The problem is that you people with your god-goggles on can’t see reality. This is why Darwinian Evolution deniers, Global Warming deniers and Christian fundies go hand in hand. All of you are in the same boat and most of you are the same guy.

Best of luck. When you die, you pass into nonexistence. That’s it. Get over your fairy tales now and do something worthwhile like help save the environment.

Let’s count the most conventional signs of atheist cluelessness:

1. Thinks The Courtier’s Reply is meaningful – check!
2. Thinks the Dark Ages existed – check!
3. Doesn’t know what “evidence” is – check!
4. Science fetish – check!
5. Thinks religion is a serious global threat – check!
6. Thinks atheists are winning in Europe – check!

I have to say that the appeal to Brad Pitt and Joss Whedon is a new one on me. Wow! I will really have to rethink all of my most fundamental conclusions about life, the universe and everything. What use is Aristotle, Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas when you’ve got Adam and Jamie from Mythbusters!

And since he brought it up….


Mailvox: homo inedicabilis

Although I am inclined to make heavy use of statistics-based probability in observing human behavior and find that it is a very useful tool in in explaining and predicting individual behavior, I never, ever forget that probability is not certainty and that even a powerful 97% statistical probability means that you can count on rolling boxcars sooner or later. Here are two examples of why I am always careful to distinguish between atheists who merely happen to lack god belief and militant/New atheists who can be expected to exhibit a predictable range of social disfunctionality and political ideology in addition to overt hostility towards that which they claim to be nonexistent.

M writes:

I love your blog. It really keeps me thinking every day. One of the most important things you have done for me is that, while not converting me from atheism, you have taught me that religious people can be just as skeptical and rational, if not more so (probably more so), than atheists. You have also really let me realize how irrational most atheists are. While I already knew most of the flaws, your retorts to their arguments are just so witty, concise, and overall entertaining…. I am a skeptic. I am skeptical of just about everything, from scientific claims to mystical claims to political claims. It’s no surprise that I would find myself loving the skeptics community, a world-wide network of people who embrace rational and critical thinking. Well, or so they claim.

Being a skeptic, I really wanted to go to the Amaz!ng Meeting 8 this weekend in Las Vegas. I forgot something, though. The skeptical community heavily overlaps with the new atheist movement, and they all seem to be, as you call them, “science fetishists”. There’s never enough skepticism about political issues. In fact, skeptics who don’t believe in global warming are quick to be called “climate change denialists.” I myself stay in the camp of “I don’t know, and I doubt you actually do either” but I don’t even say that, because I don’t want to deal with people about it.

It’s obvious that many of these people are irrational, even though they claim to embrace rational thinking. But what can we expect from a bunch of people who think Richard Dawkins has intelligent things to say? I love science. I love skepticism. I also love actually applying my rational thinking to the two. Thank you for writing a blog that actually uses critical thinking. I am glad that while I find one community is lacking, there is another community out there that has the right mindset.

Another atheist, S, writes in response to a previous atheist’s email:

I’m a big fan of your blog and although I don’t agree with everything you write, I think you’ve almost always got something interesting to say. I read your post regarding the comments by one “UberDawks”, and I have to say, I’m surprised that you were so easy on him. (I refer to Rule 1 of the blog- I thought that, given the guy’s total lack of reason or civility, you’d be a lot harsher, though the cartoon was an interesting touch.)

As an atheist, I have to say, I’m amazed at just how bad his “reasoning” really is. Unlike most atheists I find the notion of anthropogenic global warming to be deeply suspect, and I was not particularly surprised to find that the inquiries into Mann and Jones cleared the scientists involved of wrongdoing- despite clear evidence that both ignored FOI requests, deleted and manipulated data, and exercised academic privilege to quash dissenting views. One would think that any reasonably literate atheist would at least be able to read those CRU emails.

As for his comments about the Founding Fathers- I think of myself as a libertarian, and I’ve often wondered myself about the religious views of some of the Founders, but I’ve never doubted that the men who built this nation were for the most part Christian in their outlook. It seems to me as though UberDawks has never even read the Declaration- the document makes clear references to Divine Providence and “the Supreme Judge of the Universe” right there in the text. And to ignore the role that Christian theology played in creating the Constitution is to ignore all of the Constitution’s understanding, clearly articulated in the text, of Man’s fallen nature and of the need to protect free men from the depredations of over-powerful governments and less-than-moral men. In other words, one would have to ignore the very reason the Constitution was created in the first place. That’s precisely the kind of leap of faith that atheists are supposed to be above making.

Overall I find UberDawks and his ilk to be mildly worrying. It’s no wonder that atheists can’t be trusted with power- if his email to you is representative of the level of thinking that goes on within the atheist community, secular nations with atheist or humanist leadership are in really big trouble. I also think that the peculiar atheist faith in man-made global warming exists primarily to replace the human need for some kind of faith in something. That still doesn’t make it a good idea; not all faiths are productive, and that particular one is downright absurd (and for once, it’s possible to show this scientifically).

S is correct to be worried about the more rabid species of atheist; their science fetishism and political utopianism is every bit as dangerous to more reasonable atheists and agnostics as they are to Christians and other theists. Still, I didn’t really see any need to kick UberDawk’s teeth in despite his incivility since he was clearly just a drive-by critic and the unreason and ignorance revealed in his email tended to render it self-refuting. One thing that people like him who wrongly perceive me as being intrinsically “anti-atheist” fail to understand is the significance of the difference between one’s religion and one’s political ideology. While they are usually related, they are seldom identical. My religious faith certainly colors my ideology, which is why I describe myself as a Christian libertarian, but the fact remains that I would vastly prefer atheist libertarians with realistic views of human corruptibility in positions of political leadership to both Christian progressives attempting to bring about Heaven on Earth and Christian conservatives seeking to impose Biblical morality through legislative fiat.

Of course, in addition to being imperfectly predictable, Most People Are Idiots, as demonstrated by this commenter at the New York Times. If this isn’t enough to cure you of an instinctive democracy fetish, nothing will.

“I am dismayed that commentators and inquisitors like Chris Matthews let their “guests” get away with the lie that “small businesses, not government, creates jobs.” I can’t believe that these troglodytes get away with pushing such a patently false proposition. As you may guess, I’m a government employee, and my money spends just as well as a window clerk at McDonalds. Spending is spending; buying is buying. I eat food, buy housing and clothing, and pay my utility bills just like everyone else. So why doesn’t keeping my job count just as much as me opening a small business? Let’s stop the lying.”

Yes, let’s absolutely stop all this lying and simply have government hire everyone who is out of work to do… something. After all, since government creates jobs just like small businesses, then there is no reason for anyone to be unemployed ever again! Mises wept.


Help, help, they’re being repressed!

 Come see the religious oppression inherent in the system!  In tangetially-related news, this email from UberDawks may amuse:

I’ve been reading your blog and I have to say that it is chock full of the most delusional christard fundamentalist bullshit I’ve ever had the displeasure of reading.   Guess what jerkweed, the CRU was just CLEARED, and Penn State found that the “hockey stick” held up. Where is your precious “Climategate” now?! Packed away with the rest of the fundie Christian myths?

Also, the constitution was not based on the BIBLE you historically inept moron. The posters on your site are idiots. The founding fathers WERE deists and DID NOT base the Constitution on your idiotic cracker-blessed bible. You should all educate yourselves by reading Chris Rodda’s articles at HuffPo.

No wonder PZ Myers won’t debate you, you’re so ignorant that it would be like a mighty bearded hammer fighting a skinny, bald nail.  You don’t understand science, you don’t understand history and I’m pretty sure you are as batshit crazy as Jesus was, I would wait for a response…but you have NO arguments to make.
To reiterate from my previous post, there were only two, at most three Deists in comparison with the 52 Christians, most of them CALVINISTS, who were at the Constitutional Convention.  The same Christian-heavy ratio is true of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence.  The CRU was “cleared” in a whitewash where the science, such as it was, was not examined in any way, shape, or form and it is a far cry from Penn State finding that Michael Mann was not guilty of professional misconduct to claiming that the university declared that the long-disproven “hockey stick” temperature graph is valid.  When did the myth of Global Warming become adopted as an article of the atheist faith?
UberDawks concludes by demonstrating that impeccable atheist logic which insists that PZ Myers regularly runs away from debating people because he is afraid he will destroy them so utterly.  And to think that these are the intellectual giants who want you to take them on faith that God does not exist.

The myth of Deist America

I suppose we can’t be surprised that atheists so often get Christian “mythology” factually incorrect when they can’t even keep their own myths straight:

The thinkers who formulated the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were deists, not theists, and were inspired by the ideals of the Enlightenment movement in England and Europe.

Pure.. Unadulterated.. Poppycock. This flies completely in the face of serious scholarship on the subject by Dr. Miles Bradford (University of Dallas) in which he careflully examined the religious beliefs of 55 of the framers of the Constituional Convention and found only 3 whose religious leanings were a bit unclear.

For crying out loud, there were nearly as many MINISTERS signing the Declaration of Independence as there were deists. The lesson is to always treat atheists spouting “facts” like Jehovah’s Witnesses “quoting” the Bible. Always, always, always, ask them for their source. Most of the time, when you force them to trace it back, it will turn out to be pure fiction.


Atheism: the anti-Game

PZ Myers considers why women don’t like atheists:

It’s an odd way to put it, I know, but it gets your attention. I could have called this the Atheist and Skeptic Problem, which is more accurate, but leads people to start listing all of our problems, starting with how annoying we are, and just for once I’d rather not go down that road. So here’s the Woman Problem, and it’s not a problem with women: it’s a problem with atheist and skeptic groups looking awfully testosteroney. And you all know it’s true, every time I post a photo of some sampling of the audience at an atheist meeting, it is guaranteed that someone will count the contribution of each sex and it will be consistently skewed Y-ward.

Let’s me get this straight. Women don’t like a group of men who are known for being socially difficult, taking every excuse to pick arguments, launching unprovoked attacks on other’s beliefs, throwing hissy fits at the drop of a hat, and basically behaving like drama queens on all occasions. And on top of this, they tend to be inordinately interested in science.

This is a mystery? Seriously? All that’s without even taking the high Creepy Guy factor which some of the atheist women report of the skeptic conference attendees and even atheist leaders into account.

Now, obviously not all atheists are hapless when it comes to women. Consider the examples of Bertrand Russell and Richard Dawkins, who managed to marry seven women between them…. But I would be interested in hearing from the women here why they are disinclined to find atheist men attractive beyond the obvious desire to marry a man of like religion.