unbibium

funny how I only started hearing the term "New Atheists" to refer retroactively to the people who bought RIchard Dawkins books in the '00s and got annoying about it. Now that Dawkins is two-thousand-and-LATE we've branched off into all these other things.

I have largely walked away with the simple principle that the danger posed by a religion is directly proportional to its influence over the government. Which is why, as an American, I'm more afraid of evangelical Christians than of any kind of Muslim.

Other New Atheists, however, seem to have taken the opposite branch, where they obsess over foreign Islamic extremism, with the broad assumption that they're still a domestic threat, despite 18 years of constant war and surveillance. They flood their social media with charts that "prove" that Islam is somehow uniquely dangerous, and somehow never include post-2016 terrorism data. Despite their claimed devotion to reason, they scoff at any evidence that illness kills more people than terrorism, and they definitely won't abide any suggestion that socialized medicine would save more lives.

Others, still, got drawn into nihilism, became convinced that both sides of everything are always garbage, and the only thing they could believe in is the catharsis of emotional vandalism, i.e. bullying and shitposting, and offensiveness as a virtue. They call it "watching the world burn" because of that one movie.

so, I can add "atheism" to the list of movements that failed to save us, because they got recruited or absorbed by the very institutions that they were supposed to save us from.

I listened to Dawkins tonight. Most of his talk was derived from The God Delusion, which I'd already read, so my mind wasn't blown as much as I thought it would be. There was a large video screen behind him, and I spent a lot of time thinking up what picture would be funniest to bring up. And there was closed captioning on another video screen, and the captioner had trouble spelling "Anglican" and probably some other words, to the audible amusement of the audience.

Q&A was my favorite part, as Dawkins is excellent in debate, though as a scientist he has the luxury of conceding the giant swaths of questions for which he is not qualified to answer. He wouldn't comment much on the nature of far Eastern religions, except to say that he was hoping a British law that funded only monotheistic organizations would be challenged by a polytheistic hindu organization. And when someone asked him how he might win a receptive Mormon friend to atheism, he admitted that diplomacy was not his bag. There was also one guy who didn't have so much a question as a five-minute ramble. Three minutes into it, the audience started murmuring, and four minutes in, when he got to the "Matrix-like simulation" part, people started laughing out loud. Dawkins said he would accept it as a comment instead of answering it, recognizing a tough act to follow when he saw one.

Unlike Lynchburg, there wasn't a long line of fundamentalist plants asking questions. There were a few pro-religion questions, and they were answered. Near the end of the lecture, Dawkins defended an accusation that religion's connection with terrorism was the same as atheism's connection with fascism. One person challenged that defense, and asked if there was any statistical comparison between atheists and believers in how likely they were to become criminals, terrorists, and so on. The questioner also asserted that religious people were more likely to be charitable, let people cut in line, etc, though who knows what his source is on that. Dawkins said he didn't have statistics on hand, and his only point was that religion provides certain cause-effect relationships that atheism does not. And he added that he'd like to see some good statistical studies, such as of the religious makeup of people in prisons.

Big duh moment of the evening: I didn't bring a book for him to sign.

Jerry Falwell dead? Shrug.

You know what death I'm really looking forward to? Fred Phelps, the guy who protests soldiers' funerals because the country they're defending doesn't behead our homosexuals.

I bet he's going to have to have his funeral in secret, because a lot of people already have their signs printed.