5 Atheists Who Need To Just Find The Jesus Already

You can pick  your friends, you can pick your nose, and if you’re sneaky you can pick your friends’ noses while they’re sleeping. But you can’t pick the most prominent atheists who get lots of media attention.

The thing about atheism is that it barely tells you anything at all about a person. Atheists can believe in ghosts, demons, racism, sexism, alien abductions, or any other number of other weird things just as well as theists. I once had a conversation with a young woman who told me, all in the same conversation, that she knew for certain that God didn’t exist and that fairies were real. Like, they have a type of habitat and certain environment where they thrived and there are foods they prefer and all that. In another conversation I learned that organized religion was horrible, but also that astrology wasn’t total bullshit.

Short of untimely deaths, there’s really nothing stopping bad proponents from speaking out on atheist issues on major media networks except for conversion. So here are some prominent atheists who would do better work making the other side look like idiots instead of doing the same for us.

Sexism is Woo

One of the themes I keep revisiting when I write about skepticism is how often people get into several different, seemingly unrelated types of woo. Biblical creationists sometimes dabble in conspiracy theories. Some believers in psychic mediums think Bigfoot is hiding out in the Pacific Northwest. There’s some overlap between racists and anti-vaccine activists.

One of the weirdest collisions of batshit crazies is between belief in the Illuminati and misogyny.  It’s pretty easy to see how misogynistic religious nuts justify their hatred of women. But there are also lots of conspiracy nuts who constantly whine about how feminism offends their delicate sensibilities. Also, it’s part of the elites’ plan to enslave us all, eventually. Kind of like everything else that happens in modern society.

 

Higgs Hysteria

One of the great things about science is how it strives to wipe away any of the subjective interpretations that fanatic ideologues try to impose on its findings. There aren’t liberal and conservative positions on, say, the speed of light. There is just the speed of light. It doesn’t change based on the political or religious views of the observer.

6 So Bad-They’re-Actually-Still-Bad Scams

One thing I want to make clear here is that when I say these businesses are scams, I’m not making any claims about conscious fraud. It’s entirely possible that all of the people involved in all of these businesses honestly believe they’re providing goods and services of actual value for their customers. My point is that if they do believe that, they’re wrong.

Dr. Rachael Dunlop Interview

Rachael Dunlop is an ALS and ageing researcher and Vice President of the New South Wales committee of the Australian Skeptics. She also won the most hilarious internet award ever. She blogs at Skeptic’s Book. We talk about science communication, homeopathy, the anti-vaccination craze and some of the other pseudoscience she and her fellow skeptics deal with in Australia.

Alex Jones is the King of All Crackpots

I first heard about Alex Jones during one of my first breaks home from college, catching up with a friend from high school. He went to college in Meadville, PA, at the same school which after one semester drove Trent Reznor into the happening nightlife of Cleveland and probably fueled his angst-based career for the next 20 years.

So there wasn’t much to do in Meadville. One thing to do was drive around delivering pizzas to townies while listening to the Alex Jones radio show. That’s what my friend did. This was in the days before iPods, so unless you wanted to drag around your CD collection and risk it getting stolen by Alex Jones fans for crystal meth money, radio was your only option.

So we would get stoned and laugh at the crazy man yelling about the global “elite” in his documentaries. It’d be fun to pick apart the fact from fiction and to try to identify the point where reasonable concerns about government waste turned into the fever-dream rants of a paranoid lunatic. So yeah, the drug war is bullshit, but it’s not part of a UN plot to end American sovereignty.

Flat-Earthers Are Probably Smarter Than You

Flat Earthers believe our planet looks something like this.

“It is error only, and not truth, that shrinks from inquiry.” -Thomas Paine

Last weekend my Twitter timeline blew up when Kirk Cameron showed up at CPAC to lecture at the attendees about creationism and the worldwide mad deadly evolution conspiracy. But the mocking wasn’t coming from scientists or secular activists who work at keeping religion out of science classrooms. Those people tend to not show up at events like CPAC. No, it was coming pretty much exclusively from liberal political activist bloggers and journalists. And not only that, it was also exclusively coming from bloggers and journalists who, as far as I could tell, have never once written about biological evolution or the fallacies involved in creationist arguments. I speculated that most of them have never even opened a text on evolution before.

Obama is a Secret Pharoah Clone

“OBAMA! And BIDEN! The Three Musketeers!”

So it looks like birtherism is about as dead as we could hope. Sure, the WorldNetDaily and Washington Times crowd will never be convinced Barack Obama is an American human, but the public consciousness has at least shifted enough around this issue that when someone admits to being a birther it’s pretty much the end of any serious conversation. So now the would-be birthers who still want to be taken seriously have to limit their race-baiting to the kind of dog-whistle buzz words and phrases that people like Newt Gingrich are so fond of.

But wait! There is a better… um… well, there’s another way! I just heard about it. There’s this guy who goes by the name Freeman. I’m not sure if he gave himself that name because he’s a fan of those people who don’t recognize the American flag when it has gold tassels, but if he did it would be the least absurd thing about him. Anyway, he thinks Obama is a foreigner, of course. But the twist is that he’s a clone of this Egyptian Pharaoh from 3300 years ago.

And We Wonder Why We Have Such Terrible Politicians

It’s because stupid people elect them.

What the Fuck is Wrong With You People?

The Earth-Spirit exposition is this flea market of New Age products and ideas which pops up around once a year. So I felt I had to go to find out what it’s all about.

The way we originally wanted to cover this was to register as a vendor, get our own table, and sell “Hitting You In The Face With A Stick” therapy. But this would require actual money up front, so it never ended up happening. Also you might have noticed we’ve been busy with other issues at the moment.