So everything good is evil, it seems.

Dangerous Minds on Facebook

Orange Church of God announces on the advertising board thingy (what do you call those things, anyway?):

SURFERS, SKATEBOARDERS, MUSICIANS, ARTISTS, VEGETARIANS, OCCUPIERS, ACTIVISTS, ADDICTS AND FORNICATORS ARE ALL GOING TO HELL!

REPENT NOW!

Seriously? Surfboarders? Skateboarders? Musicians, artists, vegetarians, activists? Going to hell? Why?

Maybe the Orange Church of God is actually just someone’s living room, and that’s a list of someone’s pet peeves. (But even then – surfing?? Why on earth? It’s so obviously fun, and it’s pretty to watch, and it doesn’t hurt anything. It doesn’t mess up anyone’s living room.)… Read the rest

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Here’s an example of the kind of thing that the statement Richard Dawkins and I posted last week opposes.

John ‏@JohnTheSecular
So tell me, @RichardDawkins, what is “modern art” the result of, then? Your fuckwittery?

Description: it’s a photo of Dawkins talking next to a passage in quotation marks:

“Too many so-called ‘great works of art’, from the Sistine Chapel to Bach’s Masses, were inspired by the Christ myth and therefore, despite their beauty, come from a place of anti-intellectualism and refusal to confront empirical reality.

The only pure, untainted art form left is the Japanese RPG.”

Richard Dawkins

That’s a shitty trick because it’s too plausible and people are passing it around and taking it seriously. It looks real. … Read the rest

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I learned about another cognitive bias this morning – the curse of knowledge. Wikipedia explains.

The curse of knowledge is a cognitive bias that leads better-informed parties to find it extremely difficult to think about problems from the perspective of lesser-informed parties. The effect was first described in print by the economists Colin Camerer, George Loewenstein and Martin Weber, though they give original credit for suggesting the term to Robin Hogarth.

…

…researchers have linked the curse of knowledge bias with false-belief reasoning in both children and adults, as well as theory of mind development difficulties in children. The curse of knowledge bias reportedly decreases in degree for adults versus children, who experience exaggerated effects; however, it was also found

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The last paragraph of chapter XXI of George Eliot’s Middlemarch.

We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves: Dorothea had early begun to emerge from that stupidity, but yet it had been easier to her to imagine how she would devote herself to Mr. Casaubon, and become wise and strong in his strength and wisdom, than to conceive with that distinctness which is no longer reflection but feeling—an idea wrought back to the directness of sense, like the solidity of objects—that he had an equivalent centre of self, whence the lights and shadows must always fall with a certain difference.

Morality requires educated feeling. It’s never a … Read the rest

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The WHO says Ebola is spreading faster than efforts to control it. That’s not good. We need it to be the other way around.

But it’s difficult. Poverty makes it more difficult. Poverty means lack of infrastructure, and that makes it more difficult.

Analysis: David Shukman, BBC science editor

Friday’s summit should provide the kind of international co-operation needed to fight Ebola but the battle against the virus will be won or lost at the local level. An over-attentive family member, a careless moment while burying a victim, a slip-up by medical staff coping with stress and heat – a single small mistake in basic hygiene can allow the virus to slip from one human host to another.

The

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Simon Davis talks to David Futrelle of Confused Cats Against Feminism and We Hunted the Mammoth (formerly Manboobz).

There’s a catharsis in saying “You know what? Your argument is based on ignorance. We’ve tried to explain this. We’re just gonna respond with a picture of a cat.” When you get into these discussions with these guys online, it becomes just like quicksand. Because you feel like you’ve fallen into this realm of “Wait a minute. The sky is blue, right?” It’s also just sort of nice to present something that I think the opponents of feminism just don’t know how to handle or don’t know how to react to. So when they see the cat pics, they can’t go into

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So, cool idea for a movie – if we used 100% of our brains we could eat a mountain for breakfast, and memorize The Tale of Genji while brushing our teeth, and get from Seattle to Stockholm in a single bound. Except that we couldn’t, because we already do, and we can’t.

The fact is, people use all of their brains. Brain imaging research techniques such as PET (positron emission tomography) scans and fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) clearly show that the vast majority of the brain does not lie unused. Although certain activities may use only a small part of the brain at a time (for example, watching reality TV shows), any sufficiently complex set of activities will

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Guest post by Leo Igwe

UK authorities should take measures to stop controversial Nigerian pastor, David Oyedepo, from bringing his witch hunting ministry to Europe. Oyedepo with his Pentecostal church the Winners Chapel and his own fleet of private jets is reputedly the richest pastor in Nigeria. Oyedepo is scheduled to preach at the European Winners Convention to be held in London in August. There are numerous reasons why the UK authorities should not allow him to feature at this event. Here are just a few.

Not too long ago, Bishop Oyedepo assaulted a girl at one of his ministration events in Nigeria. He accused the girl of being a witch. But the girl denied this saying she was a … Read the rest

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Christina Hoff Sommers seems to have only one thing to say. (She’s a hedgehog not a fox.) That thing is: feminism sucks!!

A sample from her Twitter output.

Christina H. Sommers @CHSommers · Jul 29
It’s not the patriarchy, but third-wave feminism, that undermines young women’s freedom. Great read by @ashtenthinks http://www.pocketfullofliberty.com/third-wave-feminism/

There are rules of evidence & anyone worth taking seriously must abide by them–including feminists.@LadyGirlPerson @GodDoesnt @ashtenthinks

Wash Post & TNR just had weak posts on gender pay gap. For high-powered thinking on topic, check out these 2 guys. http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303532704579483752909957472

Due process has no lobby. Republicans & Dems do the bidding of gender warriors. Not a word about falsely accused. http://www.scribd.com/mobile/doc/235449362 …

Malicious and dishonest headline
alert!

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Birds Rights Activist knows.
… Read the rest

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A real world-shaker from women against feminism.

… Read the rest

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Secular Woman has a new project: meet Secular Woman Salon.

Secular Woman is incredibly pleased and excited to announce the start of a new project that will add to the growing number of incredible voices writing on issues of concern to secular women, and that project is the Secular Woman Salon! The Salon is a new outlet on our website for the latest in opinion, think pieces, and news for secular women, as well as anyone interested in advancing the cause of social justice with a secular lens.

Through this project we hope to, quite literally, advance our mission of amplifying the voices of secular women by establishing a dedicated space where the causes, issues, and thoughts of

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I was on a bus a couple of hours ago; a woman got up to be ready to get off at the next stop, and a guy sitting in one of the face-sideways seats started hassling her for not smiling. “Everyone else is smiling but you!” he informed her.

Nuh uh. I wasn’t, for one. I think there were others who weren’t.

He went on grumbling at her – sort of “joking” but in a pain in the ass way. She was certainly not amused.

It just reminded me, yet again, how odd it is the way women are considered a kind of public property, subject to being told what facial expression to have by total strangers and then hassled … Read the rest

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I’m still getting Vulcans telling me that the only rational thing to do is to argue everything using Logic and Reason while totally excluding emotion.

So what you get is people explaining about rape using what they take to be Logic and Reason while totally ignoring the fact that rape tends to be an emotive subject.

You can’t have a reasoned discussion about moral issues that excludes emotion not just as part of the discussers’ equipment but even as part of the subject matter.

Robotic arguments about slavery or child marriage or school for girls or rape or genital mutilation can’t get off the ground, because robots don’t give a damn either way.

Moral issues depend on emotion. If no … Read the rest

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Something else I do sometimes? Laugh in public. Omigod – the blasphemy of it.

Turkey’s Deputy Prime Minister Bülent Arınç says that’s not allowed.

Speaking during an Eid el-Fitr meeting on July 28, Arınç described his ideal of the chaste man or woman, saying they should both have a sense of shame and honor.

“Chastity is so important. It is not only a name. It is an ornament for both women and men. [She] will have chasteness. Man will have it, too. He will not be a womanizer. He will be bound to his wife. He will love his children. [The woman] will know what is haram and not haram. She will not laugh in public. She will not

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I sometimes post blasphemous pictures or news links or remarks on Facebook. Probably more than sometimes. You could probably say I do that quite often. It’s possible that I do it several times a day. I don’t keep track, but that’s possible.

It’s a good thing for me that I don’t live in Lahore.

The New York Times reports on what happens to people who do when there’s a whisper about “blasphemy” somewhere in the neighborhood.

A woman and two of her young granddaughters were burned to death Sunday night in the eastern city of Gujranwala after a member of their Ahmadi minority sect was accused of posting a blasphemous picture to Facebook, the police said.

The mob of

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Tulip Mazumdar reports on the Ebola crisis in Guinea for the BBC.

This is the final resting place of the latest victim of Ebola: a four-month-old baby boy called Faya.

He caught the virus from his mother, who died a few weeks earlier.

His is the 20th anonymous grave in this dark and lonely clearing.

“I was there with him just before he died,” says Adele Millimouno, a Medicines Sans Frontieres (MSF) nurse recruited from a nearby village.

“I had been feeding him milk. I stepped away, just for a short break, but then I was called back and he was dead. I was totally devastated.”

There is confusion and fear, and sometimes resistance to health workers.

Tarik Jasarevic, from

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Originally a comment by Maureen on Let’s sit down and discuss that proposition itself.

Richard Dawkins claims to be struggling against the forces of darkness – however defined – in order to have a logical and rational discussion on sensitive subjects. In order to do that, though, you would need facts. I don’t see that he even mentions facts, let alone informed opinion, let alone research.

No-one, not even intellectual super-stars, can be expected to conduct such a discussion as a pure intellectual exercise, nor would a wise man choose Twitter as the forum. How do you have a dialogue when you don’t know to whom you are talking or what knowledge or preconceptions they bring to the imaginary table?… Read the rest

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The title of Dawkins’s new post asks a question: Are there emotional no-go areas where logic dare not show its face? The first paragraph re-words the question.

Are there kingdoms of emotion where logic is taboo, dare not show its face, zones where reason is too intimidated to speak?

My answer is yes, of course there are. Not the ones he has in mind, necessarily, but there are some. There are plenty of situations where reason just isn’t wanted, only sympathy or affection or solidarity or just warm-bodiedness will do. There are others where only joyous abandon is wanted.

But that’s interpersonal; RD is talking about public discourse. That’s different. Discourse by definition rests on at least minimal reason and … Read the rest

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