On Faith

Debating God Slobberers

Long before they go cosmological or ontological on you, there’s this bit of pablum you have to wade through with almost all of your run-of-the-mill God slobberers.   Here’s the short list of the debating tactics of those on the religious short bus and how to deal with them:

The Gob Slobberer Starter Toolkit

1. You are mad at/hate God.
2. You wish to masturbate (more enthusiastically?) without oversight. (Masturbation just manages to squeeze out “practice homosexuality” as the ‘go-to sin” above the Mason-Dixon line).
3. You are lashing out at “the church” because (e.g.) a priest masturbated you a little too enthusiastically or you had some other negative experience at church.
4. You haven’t looked for God in the right places.

The Skeptics Responses

1.  I wish there was a God to be mad at but since that’s s a fantasy of yours I don’t share I’m going to have to hold you personally responsible for all the chowder-headed nonsense you’re spewing and the damage that occurs as a result.

2.  I do the best I can not to embarrass the ghost of Oscar Wilde.

3.  The soft hand of a Catholic priest would have been a Godsend in lieu of the total subjugation of my mind which was attempted in order to help me find comfort in the patently ridiculous notions being promulgated by mindless goobers like you.

4.  I looked everywhere for God as a child, but it was all to no avail. Were the father, son and holy ghost all too busy for for my toast?   Upon puberty it finally hit me.  Vaginas seemed the likeliest hideout for God that I hadn’t already searched in my youth.  Checked a bunch….nada God there..

I’ll keep looking to broaden the sample size but I’m skeptical I’ll find anything other than an echo in even the largest of vaginas.

Maybe God is too ashamed to show his face after looking around and seeing what a horrible job he did in the first place.  That’s a distinct possibility and the one I’d run up the flagpole if I was a master goober in religious apologetics.

Enjoy.

Shadow Doxxing

General Observations

There’s an internet phenomena that is becoming increasingly prevalent these days and it’s a practice known as Doxxing.  The range of issues and the fervency of the participants in the many internecine battles between competing ideologies and interests is the driving force behind this rapidly rising trend..  The practice of Doxxing commenters in heavily contested issues has become the new ‘thing’, and is often invoked as an attempt to silence any participant to a discussion who is seen as potentially troublesome to deal with.

Illusions of Anonymity

I’m not a particularly big fan of anonymity on the web in general, since it only gives the anonymous poster the ILLUSION of anonymity while simultaneously bolstering their own foolish (and often illegal) tactics. In the case of anonymous trolls making slanderous remarks or threats, there is no level of imaginary hell too low, nor any level of Doxxing too high for my tastes.

I heartily support the exposure at all these types of gutless miscreants.

Gaming the Gamergate GangSistas

Appended to add: I am not for harassing or raping anyone and if you’re doing that you’re no friend of mine. That said, for all the ongoing and constant rapity rape rape rape  claims and overly sensitive threat assessment tactics from the delicate flowers of gamer feminism (or atheismplus) I’ve yet to see one actual police report in support (evidence?).  If there was one police report or actual attempted rape for every 50,000 words spewed by these WATB, it would be a different story.  I’m just dam tried of their grabbing the stage and using it to promote self serving balderdash.

Yesterday I reposted a comment on my blog that I had dropped on a website trumpeting an ability to mock and track the “new” misogyny!  I used the opportunity to express my thoughts on (the ginned up) “gamer gate” controversy.  It was received with the usual (expected) mix of ad hominem malarky and knee-jerk bile.  What the replies lacked in total were any honest attempts at refuting the issues I leveled. There were plenty of feminist keyboard warriors who found the time to partake in my metaphorical stoning while simultaneously love bombing each other. This is a technique borrowed from religious cults and bolsters the mind-lock within the clammy confines of their heavily bunkered internet silos.  

It’s not like I don’t have other things to tend to, but I do find the Gamergate brouhaha to be at least as interesting a time-waster as FarmVille or Bejeweled.  It’s “CoffeeGate” all over again.  Get out the porn and potato chips.  This is going to be another doozy.

Evolution Proven False?

This seems as good a time as any to examine the tendency of nut-jobs (religious and otherwise) to grab onto minor controversies within the ranks of their opposition and distort them out of all proportion.

The inspiration for today’s posting comes from Jerry Coyne, who pointed me in the direction of this article in The New York Times, with a further reinforcement from a favorite Youtuber of mine, Coffee With Claire.

The NYT story highlights a case of recently discovered academic fraud within the field of social psychology and the faked data of a Dutch researcher. Claire’s latest YouTube offering reminded me of how it will be misused by anti-science zealots as proof that all of “science” is just one big scam, by invoking the logical fallacy of composition (what is true of the part is necessarily true of the whole). Claire does an excellent take-down of this knuckle dragging God slobberer. His YouTube handle is noimplant4me and his video exemplifying the well worn logical fallacy of composition is here.

Claire rightly notes that noimplant4me fails to mention that in every instance of scientific fraud, it is other scientists who are responsible for policing and catching the miscreants. In the case of noimplant4me, this misuse of logic is aimed at supporting the house of cards that is young earth creationism, but I’ve also seen similar scientific shenanigans leveraged in support of global warning denial.

My noting this tendency will likely have little effect on those who continue to misuse it. That said, I think it is worth mentioning that in this latest example of fraud within the field of social psychology, not much of consequence was really affected. The studies under scrutiny were of the touchy-feely variety and the results, much like religious texts, were manipulated by a man of ignoble character into a framework that fit social convention.

I don’t want to pile on the social psychologists too hard. Sure, most of what they study looks to be about as useful as the beard on my Aunt Bess, but at the end of the day, it’s experts in this field who are responsible for having to make a comprehensible analysis of crazy cultural shit like #atheismplus, so I’ll cut them some slack.

Evolution has not been proven false.

Enjoy.