Dawkins is in good form in the Spectator:

In a recent interview, I imprudently said I was a “cultural Christian”, and I haven’t heard the end of it. I find myself unwillingly counted in the Great Christian Revival (translation, “We don’t actually believe that stuff ourselves, but we like it when other people do”) which is the subject of so much wishful thinking these days.

Of course I’m a cultural Christian. Always have been. Packed off to Anglican schools, I was confirmed when too young to know better. Large chunks of the English Hymnal were imprinted in my long-term memory, and duly pop out when I’m fooling around with my electronic clarinet. I know my way around the Bible,

… Read the rest

Behold: an ethicist. “Friendly” Atheist tells us:

The following is a guest post by Aaron Rabinowitz, the ethics director of the Creator Accountability Network and host of two philosophy podcasts: Embrace the Void and Philosophers in Space.

Awesome, a philosopher of ethics at last; now all will be plain.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation recently faced criticism for posting and then removing an editorial by Jerry Coyne entitled “Biology is Not Bigotry,” which he wrote in response to an FFRF article by Kat Grant entitled “What is a Woman?” In his piece, Coyne used specious reasoning and flawed research to argue that transgender individuals are more likely to be sexual predators than cisgender individuals and that they

… Read the rest

Thanks for the help Mr Musk but we’re the professionals so go away.

Elon Musk’s attack on the government’s handling of grooming gangs is “misjudged and certainly misinformed”, Health Secretary Wes Streeting has said.

Tech multi-billionaire Musk has posted a series of messages on his social media site X, accusing Sir Keir Starmer of failing to prosecute gangs that systematically groomed and raped young girls, and calling for safeguarding minister Jess Phillips to be jailed.

Lots of people say lots of things, but Musk has a very large amount of money so what he says must be important. Whether it’s accurate or not is another question.

Tory leader Kemi Badenoch has called for a full national public inquiry into what

… Read the rest

Sarah Haider on atheism and gendertheism:

I have never seen anything like it. In amazement, I watched scores of people I respected add pronouns in their emails, flags to their bios, and repeat circular mantras like “trans women are women”. The same people who laughed at religious credulity accepted the idea of a “gender” fully and without question, and worse–they suppressed all open discussion. Overnight, the same people who campaigned against blasphemy laws enacted their own version without a hint of irony. I watched long-standing figures in the movement be cast down for this crime of doubt; first by insane radicals on social media, but as the disease progressed, also by the most prominent organizations we had.

In other

… Read the rest

Insight! As the New Agers liked to say.

I think this is an excellent insight into the anger from trans activists. The base expectation is that women will acquiesce – so when they say no, it's viewed as a 'demand'. pic.twitter.com/ALh8q2YRjB

— Helen Staniland (@helenstaniland) January 2, 2025

Yes, yes that is a good insight. We are not allowed to say no. Not ever, not to anything. We’re not allowed to have our own views, or to reject the views of the Enlightened Ones. It doesn’t matter how absurd it is to think of India Willoughby or Freda Wallace as enlightened; we’re still not allowed to say no. Shut up, curtsy, and sweep the second-best drawing room. … Read the rest

Oh is that so.

The cat is out of the bag. @parkrunUK will continue to put the feelings of males above fairness for women and girls. parkrun founder, Paul Sinton-Hewitt @PSH_A1674 told the Independent: “Inclusivity comes first – and fairness, I’m afraid, is affected by the drive towards… pic.twitter.com/dYE14jC21u

— Women's Rights Network – WRN (@WomensRightsNet) January 2, 2025

“Inclusivity comes first – and fairness, I’m afraid, is affected by the drive towards inclusivity.”

Who says “inclusivity” comes first?

And what kind of “inclusivity” are we talking about anyway? The word as I understand it means not excluding people for bad reasons. It can’t mean including everyone in everything. We can’t include everyone in everything; there isn’t room.

Furthermore we … Read the rest

Oh those rape gangs.

Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has called for a full national public inquiry into the UK’s “rape gangs scandal”.

It comes after Home Office minister Jess Phillips rejected Oldham Council’s request for a government-led inquiry into historical child sexual exploitation – saying the council should lead it instead.

Why? I’m guessing the government has more resources than a local council, so why shouldn’t the government investigate? Is it too…trivial?

Posting on X, Badenoch said: “Trials have taken place all over the country in recent years but no one in authority has joined the dots. 2025 must be the year that the victims start to get justice.”

There have been numerous investigations into the systematic rape of

… Read the rest

Let’s read Ron Lindsay’s Free Inquiry piece on the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s abrupt rude apology-free deletion of Jerry Coyne’s reply to a laughably silly article titled “What is a woman?”

In case you have not heard, here is a concise summary of the situation: The Freedom from Religion Foundation (FFRF) published on its website an essay by Kat Grant titled “What Is a Woman?” in which Grant concluded that “A woman is whoever she says she is.” Along the way, Grant argued that there is no biological basis for distinguishing men from women.

Jerry A. Coyne, an emeritus professor at the University of Chicago and, at the time, a member of FFRF’s honorary board, requested permission to post a

… Read the rest

A new chapter:

@FFRF made a regrettable error in removing Jerry Coyne's post. Because I believe FI's readership can evaluate arguments, FI has reposted Coyne's essay, with a link to the essay he was critiquing. I encourage those interested to read both essays. https://t.co/EAvnwrfY6L

— Ronald A. Lindsay (@RALindsay) January 2, 2025

I wonder how much yelling and screaming there is among the staff at CFI.… Read the rest

You have got to be kidding.

The Daily Mail (because the Guardian and the BBC are looking fixedly in the opposite direction):

Police forces are allowing trans officers to carry multiple warrant cards depending on the gender they choose on a given day.

At least 11 forces in England and Wales use the policy, blasted as dangerous by women’s groups.

Trans officers can receive two warrant cards, or more if they are ‘gender fluid’.

Police officers use warrant cards to identify themselves and they must be shown before using powers including stop and search.

Which is, surely, so that people being stopped and searched can be assured it’s a cop interfering with them and not, say, some random guy who … Read the rest

The Telegraph reports:

Almost two thirds of transgender prisoners who identify as female are convicted sex offenders, it has been revealed.

Out of the 245 trans women inmates, who are legally recognised as male, a total of 151, or 62 per cent, had committed at least one sexual offence.

Now…if you were a man who enjoys committing sexual offences against women, would you find trans ideology a generous gift to you and men like you? Wouldn’t you simply race to take advantage of your new “right” to pretend to be a woman in all situations at all times? Wouldn’t you be just thrilled to bits about your new opportunities?

A Ministry of Justice spokesman said: “Well over 90

… Read the rest

Mostly Cloudy alerted us to a piece by “a clickbait-spewing hack called Katherine Alejandra Cross” who disapproves of Jesse Singal. There’s this one bit in the piece…

Your average New York Times subscriber is not Extremely Online but is increasingly being fed opinions and ‘analysis’ from writers who are, and who find themselves increasingly angry at all the annoying people who spoonerise their names and troll them on platforms.

Trans people are a good example of this. Some small group of angry trans people harangues a journalist—rightly or wrongly—for being a bigot, and then this feeds a resentment that others like Jonathan Chait or Matt Yglesias give shape and form with plausible, lib-pleasing moderate language that, in turn,

… Read the rest

Steve v Elon: when ratbags fall out.

Donald Trump’s one-time White House strategist Steve Bannon warned Elon Musk Tuesday that he and other MAGA diehards are going to “rip your face off” unless Musk smartens up and stops pushing visas for skilled foreign workers to take good-paying [well paid] tech industry jobs away from Americans.

He told Musk to sit back and study. That sounds very likely, doesn’t it. Both Musk sitting back, and Musk taking orders from Bannon.

“They’re recent converts,” Bannon said Tuesday on his War Room podcast, referring to Musk and other tech-world Trump supporters.

“We love converts,” Bannon noted. “But the converts sit in the back and study for years and years and years

… Read the rest

Laurence Krauss joined the people reposting Jerry Coyne’s heretical piece, and a reader named Maria Comninou added a valuable comment:

For me, the asymmetry in the debate about transgender rights, i.e., the fact that it focuses on or originates from transwomen and requires biological women to define their womanhood is indicative of covert misogyny, perpetrated even by those who expound their transgender rights credentials. I do not see articles asking “what is a man?” or answering “I do not know what is a man”. Some of the transactivist language towards biological women conceals an effort to denigrate or erase them and is consistent with male behavior towards females. It betrays the very masculinity they want to deny. 

It’s true … Read the rest

As promised or threatened, continuing with Mister Friendly and his hostility to people who don’t fervently endorse every claim of every branch of trans ideology.

He insisted sex is binary, that trans women are more likely to be sexual predators (using misleading statistics) etc etc…

Along the way, he just ignored the countless ways the trans community is under attack, largely by people making similar arguments.

Notice that trans people are called a “community” while people who interrogate broad claims about what being trans means are not. Mehta might as well talk about the white hat people and the black hat people, or the good people and the bad people, or the angels and the vermin. Or even the … Read the rest

Hemant Mehta, self-declared “friendly” guy, is not as friendly as all that.

It’s always helpful when the trash takes itself out.

My piece on why three well-known atheists just resigned from the Freedom From Religion Foundation—and why they won’t be missed.https://t.co/gj8qsaLlBH

— Hemant Mehta (@hemantmehta) December 30, 2024

“The trash.” Not all that friendly, is it.

Somehow, there are even more updates to the anti-trans controversy I first wrote about on Saturday.

In case you missed it, the short version is that biologist Jerry Coyne, author of Why Evolution is True and Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible, wrote an article trashing transgender people. 

No he didn’t. He did not trash transgender people. He … Read the rest

Be careful what you believe.

Two men were found dead in a remote forest while searching for Sasquatch, also commonly known as Bigfoot, according to authorities in Washington State.

The two men from Portland, Oregon, were found dead after a three-day search was launched on Christmas Day after a family member reported that the pair had not returned from a trip to the Gifford Pinchot National Forest to search for proof of the mythical hairy, forest-dwelling, bi-pedal primates.

See that’s just pointless. Not even a hike in the forest for the sake of a hike in the forest, but a hike in the forest in hypothermia-friendly weather for the sake of “finding evidence” of something that doesn’t exist.

The

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Originally a comment by tigger_the_wing on A “so” doing a lot of work.

How does failure to believe a claim = erasure of the claimant? There’s no connection. The world would have to be entirely imaginary for that to work.

Person A: “I’m a unicorn.”

Person B: ” There’s no such thing!”

Person A: vanishes without so much as a puff of smoke.

Unfortunately for him, there really is an actual material reality which isn’t affected by his imagination. Unfortunately for the rest of us, if absolutely everyone else suddenly agreed that there’s no such thing as ‘trans’, he would go on stubbornly existing.… Read the rest

You have been warned.

https://twitter.com/SophieMolly_OFF/status/1873763346270634030 The chain of reasoning is impressive. He won’t let [insert target here] erase the existence of trans people; he is trans; so [insert target here] are erasing his existence. He won’t tolerate it.

Does the reasoning apply to all possible existences? Will he let [targets] erase the existence of flying horses, talking dogs, red-headed ghosts, pedantic extraterrestrial visitors? Will he claim to be a talking dog or a pedantic extraterrestrial? Will he try to claim that because he is a talking dog therefore [targets] are erasing his existence? Will he refuse to tolerate it? How will his refusal to tolerate it manifest itself?

These are deep questions.… Read the rest

We’re now the vassals of domineering right-wing billionaires. Resistance is futile.

The German government has accused Elon Musk of trying to meddle in the country’s election campaign with repeated endorsements of the far-right party AfD.

“It is indeed the case that Elon Musk is trying to influence the federal election,” said the government spokesperson Christiane Hoffmann after Musk’s X posts and an opinion piece published at the weekend backing the anti-Muslim, anti-migration Alternative für Deutschland.

People are allowed to express their opinions about elections in other countries, but even so, when the people doing the expressing are billionaires who own popular social media platforms, it becomes more than expressing an opinion.

Musk has often weighed in on German

… Read the rest