Jen at Blag Hag is attempting to clarify a few points about sexism and also hoping the drama will die now. I haven’t read all the relevant documents, but the gist of it is that there was a panel at a regional atheist meeting at which a woman objected to a bit of debatably sexist vocabulary and then all hell broke loose.

There’s a video of the relevant part of the panel, and I broke down and watched it this morning.

Here’s the thing. I can see that it’s not a slam-dunk that the word “female” is necessarily sexist…but by god that panel was sexist. It was sexist from the beginning (the beginning of that video, at least). It … Read the rest

Deepak Chopra is upset because atheists make too much noise.

For most people, science deserves its reputation for being opposed to religion.

I’m not thinking of the rather noisy campaign by a handful of die-hard atheists to demote and ridicule faith…

Despite the noisy atheists, two trends in spirituality and science have started to converge.

Are the noisy atheists any more noisy than Deepak Chopra himself? He’s not particularly shy and retiring, now is he. It’s my understanding that he makes quite a lot of money by writing quite a lot of books that talk raving nonsense – like about “spirituality” and science starting to converge.

It is becoming legitimate to talk of invisible forces that shape creation – not

Robert Wright is reliably vulgar. He shows us how it’s done in a throwaway little piece in The American Prospect – one that’s smug, thought-free and pandering all at once. Rather like a piece of political advertising.

He didn’t like nerds when he was in high school. (No, I bet he didn’t.) Then somebody told him about B F Skinner.

As intellectuals go, Skinner was pretty dismissive of intellectuals — at least the ones who blathered unproductively about “freedom” and “dignity,” the ones he considered insufficiently hard-nosed and scientific.

Look, he said, people are animals. Kind of like laboratory rats, except taller.

And I stopped trying to read it. What a cheap mind, what an impoverished vocabulary, what a stale … Read the rest