I woke up early, so I have a little time to mutter things before I hit the road.

I’ll mutter about Sharon Rupp’s interview of wonderful me. I got a chance to name-check some atheist women:

 She is part of that cadre of professional atheists that includes best-selling authors Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, and a host of lesser known writers, none of whom seems to be a woman.”Oh there are women: Polly Toynbee, Katha Pollitt, Greta Christina…” Benson protests, noting that even the humanist-secularist-atheist crowd is subject to that old problem of blindness when it comes to women’s accomplishments. “I’ve asked conference organizers why there are no women speaking and some say it didn’t occur to them, others say

The bishop of Phoenix is getting some more glare of publicity, this time from Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times. I hope more people will start to grasp just what it is that he and his Conference of catholic bishops are saying. They are saying that hospitals – all hospitals if they had their way, not just Catholic ones – should flatly refuse to save pregnant women’s lives by ending early pregnancies. They are saying that if ending an early pregnancy is the only way a particular woman’s life can be saved, then that woman must die. (They make an exception for something they call “indirect abortion,” which is enormously generous of them.)

Now the bishop, in effect,

As you may have seen (I think I’ve mentioned it), I’m doing a talk in Vancouver tomorrow, so I’m away for three days. Have a tranquil yet quietly thrilling weekend.… Read the rest

It’s so horrible about David Kato.

A school teacher, he became a prominent campaigner in recent years, especially taking on the Anti-Homosexuality Bill, which called for the death sentence to be imposed for some homosexual acts…

Ms Kimani said he was one of the most visible gay campaigners in Uganda, serving as the litigation officer for the group Sexual Minorities Uganda (Smug)…

He often faced accusations that he was trying to groom children, which Ms Pepe, who worked with him at Smug, blamed on “religious propaganda”.

“These allegations were of course were false,” she said…

Rebecca McDowall, a student in London who met Mr Kato at an event recently, said he was aware that what he was doing was

Ew.

Slightly afraid and slightly queasy in advance, I hunted up Glenn Beck’s website called “the Blaze” and looked for something on Frances Fox Piven.

And found it.

Ew.

And people think violent rhetoric might be a problem…I can’t imagine why, can you?… Read the rest

So now we’re disputing whether or not goddy claims can be untenable even if they’re not, technically, demonstrably false.

I think they can. It’s true that it’s not possible to demonstrate that goddy claims are false. (When Russell first met Wittgenstein, the latter drove the former crazy by refusing to agree that there couldn’t be [or that he couldn’t know that there wasn’t?] an invisible rhinoceros in the middle of Russell’s study, or some such thing.)

But that doesn’t make goddy claims tenable. It doesn’t make them plausible, either. There are myriad reasons that are short of demonstration but are still good reasons not to believe “God” exists.

To repeat the bit I quoted from Georges Rey:

Now, it doesn’t