Author: Ophelia Benson

Now to tell you all about it. I realize the one place-holding “post” I did on the subject was just that, a place-holder. There was no need for the slightly acid comment telling me so.

I think I’ll do it in parts, and not necessarily in chronological order. So I think I’ll start with Sunday, with late Sunday morning. I did a panel with Maryam and D. J. Grothe, moderated (and also participated in by [yes you can end a clause with not one but two prepositions]) Paula Kirby. It was both fun and interesting. When it was over people drifted up to the table to talk, and among them was my good friend whom I had never met, Author of Jesus and Mo. I was expecting him, because we’d talked about it beforehand, but I naturally couldn’t mention it publicly beforehand. Paula took us out to lunch along with Rhys and Paul Morgan. (Alas Maryam had disappeared, no doubt to prepare for her talk in a post-lunch slot.) I felt a bit self-pinchy the whole time. I spent most of January blogging about J and M and much of that time blogging about Rhys-and-JandM.

(You know, FTB is about to add a very exciting blogger. No no not Author, not Rhys, not Paula – not anyone I’ve mentioned. But very exciting. Now is not a good time for you to wander far. Stay tuned.)

Author and I went to Maryam’s talk, which was great (as I knew it would be). One of her illustrations was the latest J and M, which Author was surprised to see; he took a picture with his phone. That was another self-pinchy moment – here’s me and Author at Maryam’s talk and there are J and M on the screen and here’s Author taking a picture of his own strip and Maryam talking about it.

Saturday, just after 6 in the evening. I gave my talk at 1. Met Maryam last night, also Paula Kirby, and Rhys Morgan, and Alex Gabriel.

I am here.

The clouds broke up enough on the short flight to Manchester so that I could get a good look at the Pennines – they’re beautiful!

Manchester Town Hall lives up to its reputation. Also there’s Sackville Hall, part of the University of Manchester, just across the canal from the central downtown area – some drop-dead gorgeous Victoriana. The doors were locked (it was after 6) so I couldn’t go in to gape at the amazing stained glass and ceiling decorations; I plan to go back today and do that.

Geoff and Rick took me along to their Skeptics in the Pub yesterday evening – an excellent talk on Burzynski. Unfortunately the jet lag kicked in and I kept falling asleep – but now that I’m not exhausted any more I’m glad I went.

Lucky you: another pointless I’m at the airport post. Can’t be helped – I was early, having over-estimated how long it takes via bus-and-train (despite having done it before), and the plane is running half an hour late. I just saw it pull in, as a matter of fact.

But I’m not fussed. I was very calm and un-irritable all the way here, and I still am. I’m in a very peaceful sitting area with chairs and tables and a killer view of Mount Rainier, which is on view today despite general cloudiness. (Rainier is seldom on view, and Seattleites tend to notice when it is.)

SeaTac is being a great deal pleasanter than LAX was.

Almost time to leave for Manchester (well not really almost – about four hours). Meanwhile, some more detail about Orlando.

One of the first talks was EllenBeth Wachs, who explained what’s been going on in Polk County, Florida. Theocracy, that’s what. The mayor of Lakeland and the Polk County sheriff are involved in something called Polk Under Prayer.

They and others got together and anointed all the roads that border the county, announcing that non-believers should be either arrested or shoved out of the county.

EllenBeth is president of Florida Atheists; she wrote a letter to an official about an illegal transfer of sports equipment from a jail (publicly funded) to a church. She was arrested and handcuffed, and her two employees were held at gunpoint. She was arrested twice more. The details are lurid and horrible. Natalie Rothschild would do well to study them. The whole thing is both shocking and frightening.

Rita Swan gave a fantastic talk about her work to end religious exemptions for child health care.

There is a Victims page. One of them was Rita’s own child.

Lionel Tiger’s talk was in the afternoon. It was about “male original sin” – everything men do is bad in some way, now that feminism has turned everything upside down. Schools drug all the boys with Ritalin so that they sit there passively like girls. Plus there was the pill, which meant that when men went into bars, all the women were chemically pregnant, which is a turnoff. Plus women don’t have any use for men now. Plus some other things, all equally random. Plus women can just go out and get money and status any time they want to, and men can’t. Plus more random things.

This caused a good deal of rage, I found out afterwards. I found it kind of funny – I suppose because it seemed like such a parody, and so calculated to insult. But in sober truth, it was not a very good talk, because it had no structure at all. It was just some things, offered one after another, with no attempt to get from one to the next in any way other than jumping.

I have to go do some packing type things now.

David Futrelle has an information-loaded post on MRAs on Reddit explaining that and why “cunt” is not a sexist word via an equally compelling explanation that and why Rebecca Watson is –

you know the rest.

More atheist-bashing, this time from Bryan Appleyard at the New Statesman.

Two atheists – John Gray and Alain de Botton – and two agnostics – Nassim Nicholas Taleb and I – meet for dinner at a Greek restaurant in Bayswater, London. The talk is genial, friendly and then, suddenly, intense when neo-atheism comes up. Three of us, including both atheists, have suffered abuse at the hands of this cult. Only Taleb seems to have escaped unscathed and this, we conclude, must be because he can do maths and people are afraid of maths.

Abuse? What kind of “abuse”? How are we defining “abuse”? How are we defining “cult”? What, exactly, are we talking about? Who is abusing whom?

De Botton is the most recent and, consequently, the most shocked victim. He has just produced a book, Religion for Atheists: a Non-Believer’s Guide to the Uses of Religion, mildly suggesting that atheists like himself have much to learn from religion and that, in fact, religion is too important to be left to believers. He has also proposed an atheists’ temple, a place where non-believers can partake of the consolations of silence and meditation.

This has been enough to bring the full force of a neo-atheist fatwa crashing down on his head.

Really? How are we defining “full force”? How are we defining “fatwa”? Not, I trust, as the order given by the clerical ruler of a large state offering a reward for the murder of a foreign novelist.

It turns out we’re defining it as PZ Myers talking about de Botton’s book as an object of nausea. That’s the full force of a neo-atheist fatwa crashing down on his head.

So, as I said, who is abusing whom? You could say that it’s abusive to characterize the words of a member of the despised group “atheists” as a fatwa crashing on someone’s head. You could say that’s just whipping up more of the same old hatred of atheists that already inspires a good deal of real “abuse.”

At the end he says something inadvertently funny.

Happily, the backlash against neo-atheism has begun, inspired by the cult’s own intolerance.

Begun? It’s been in high gear since almost the moment Sam Harris’s book hit the shelves. And as for what inspired it – does Appleyard really think it has nothing at all to do with believers’ sense of outraged privilege? Not to mention the non-religious or only semi-religious defenders of religion who think it’s their duty to defend the less articulate believers from the scary monster atheists?

Honestly; you go away for five days and come home to a pile of fresh atheist-bashing. Never a moment to catch your breath.