If you check this page, you will see a list of those who received the Richard Dawkins Award.
In 2016, it was awarded to Lawrence Krauss.
In 2017, it was awarded to David Silverman.
Warning to Michael Shermer – since they are running out of people to give the award to, if they try to give you the award in 2018, deny it and run away! 😉
Some atheists have begun to liken PZ Myers to a super-villain in a Batman story because of the damage he has done to the New Atheist movement. And I can see why. If you think about it, PZ’s destructive influence has been substantial.
It all began in 2011 when Richard Dawkins turned a small dispute about women at an atheist convention into a large scale controversy that consumed the atheist movement – Elevatorgate. And where did Dawkins set the movement on fire? On PZ Myer’s blog. And when Dawkins got himself in trouble on Myer’s blog, Myers simply stepped back and let Dawkins deep himself into a deeper hole.
Because of this incident, and its after effects, the A+ movement was eventually born in 2012 and began to target New Atheists leaders. Myers was an early supporter of A+ atheism. Furthermore, during the same year, Myers was among the first of the New Atheists to begin attacking Sam Harris for his position on racial profiling. Myers would continue to attack Harris over the years, just recently accusing Harris of being a racist who supports racial science.
Here is an interesting article.
The FFRF issued a response to David Silverman’s firing and I find it to be rather odd.
First, the FFRF (Annie Laurie Gaylor, Co-President) begins by complaining about the negative stereotypes about atheists and blames the Bible. These activists don’t seem to understand that when the media turn people like Madalyn Murray O’Hair, Richard Dawkins, and David Silverman into the “public face of atheism,” that their behavior might have something to do with those negative stereotypes.
She then goes to promote how wonderful the FFRF is.
She finally gets to Silverman and claims:
But Silverman’s highly aggressive brand of atheism does not represent FFRF or many nonbelievers, nor do his alleged actions here. There’s room in the movement for differences. There’s not room for this kind of misconduct.
The FFRF is not engaged in a highly aggressive brand of atheism? Using the social justice concept of “safe spaces” to threaten some small community into tearing down its 100 year old cross sounds like highy aggressive atheism to me. Apparently, the FFRF is oblivious to the way their own actions contribute to the negative stereotype about atheists.
In his book, Fighting God, David Silverman writes that he is a “proud feminist.” Amy Roth, over at SkepChick, publicly thanked Silverman for “standing with us” for implementing strict anti-harassment policies at American Atheist meetings. Feminist PZ Myers even spent $1200 for a lifetime membership with American Atheists because he was impressed by the way Silverman went after the “anti-feminist” atheists. And who can forget Silverman’s blood boiling and bile bubbling because of the Mythcon debate?
Yet we now learn that this “proud feminist” had a history of sexually harassing women. In fact, the stench of hypocrisy and deception becomes even more intense if you consider more closely the nature of his sexual misconduct, as it appears Silverman, the proud feminist, was sexually aroused by degrading women.
Buzzfeed exposes the creepy sexual behavior of yet another leader in the Atheist Movement:
David Silverman, a firebrand atheist with a knack for generating publicity for his cause, has been abruptly fired as president of American Atheists, one of the leading secular organizations in the US.
[….]
Silverman and his wife were in an open marriage.
[…]
On Tuesday, American Atheists placed Silverman on paid leave while it investigated a complaint from staff concerned that he had not disclosed financial and personal conflicts of interest relating to the promotion of his book, Fighting God: An Atheist Manifesto for a Religious World, and the appointment to a senior position of a woman with whom Silverman was allegedly having a sexual relationship. (That appointment has been rescinded.)
[…]
She and Silverman had known each other for years, and he flirted with her throughout the evening, she wrote in the complaint. After the other guests left, R. wrote that Silverman asked her to join him in smoking marijuana on the roof. But before they left the room, he suddenly forced himself on her.
“He physically pressed me to the wall and began to kiss me forcefully, grabbed my breasts, and put his hand into my leggings where there was actual penetration of my vagina,” she wrote.
R. believed Silverman knew she was interested in BDSM and wrote that he began using insulting language, calling her a “dirty little whore.” He then pushed her to her knees, “where his penis briefly made contact with my mouth,” she wrote.
R. got her feet and said “no,” she wrote. Silverman then lightly slapped her face and said, “You don’t get to say no to me.”
[…]
St. Clair said that she quickly became drunk, but remembered Silverman flirting with her and then suggesting that they go to his hotel room. “I don’t believe I was in a position to be able to give consent. I was very intoxicated,” St. Clair told BuzzFeed News. She said that Silverman did not have any condoms, and pressured her into having anal sex.
Afterward, St. Clair said that Silverman told her she would have to leave early in the morning because his wife would be arriving at the hotel. She said he told her not to apply for an internship with American Atheists because appointing her could be seen as preferential treatment.
I’m shocked. Shocked, I tell ya.
But if Buzzfeed had not been working on this story, does anyone really believe American Atheists would have fired Silverman?
From Here
On the evening of Saturday, April 7, 2018, the American Atheists Board of Directors received a complaint regarding David Silverman, the President of American Atheists. The Board takes very seriously the concerns expressed and, in accordance with organization policies, the Board has placed Mr. Silverman on leave while an independent investigation is conducted. Mr. Silverman has pledged his full cooperation with the investigation.
Sounds like ol’ Firebrand is in trouble.
Back in June of 2016, Omar Mateen killed 49 people and wounded 58 others in a terrorist attack inside Pulse, which was a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida.
Yet some very interesting facts have emerged since the trial of Omar Mateen’s wife, Noor Salman:
Salman’s trial cast doubt on everything we thought we knew about Mateen. There was no evidence he was a closeted gay man, no evidence that he was ever on Grindr. He looked at porn involving older women, but investigators who scoured Mateen’s electronic devices couldn’t find any internet history related to homosexuality. (There were daily, obsessive searches about ISIS, however.) Mateen had extramarital affairs with women, two of whom testified during the trial about his duplicitous ways.
Mateen may very well have been homophobic. He supported ISIS, after all, and his father, an FBI informant currently under criminal investigation, told NBC that his son once got angry after seeing two men kissing. But whatever his personal feelings, the overwhelming evidence suggests his attack was not motivated by it.
As far as investigators could tell, Mateen had never been to Pulse before, whether as a patron or to case the nightclub. Even prosecutors acknowledged in their closing statement that Pulse was not his original target; it was the Disney Springs shopping and entertainment complex. They presented evidence demonstrating that Mateen chose Pulse randomly less than an hour before the attack. It is not clear he even knew it was a gay bar. A security guard recalled Mateen asking where all the women were, apparently in earnest, in the minutes before he began his slaughter.
and
Based on data from their cell phones, neither Mateen or Salman had ever been in the vicinity of Pulse before. On the night of the attack, Mateen first went to Disney Springs and EVE Orlando ― both of which had heavy, visible security ― before ending up at Pulse after a Google search for “downtown Orlando nightclubs.” Notably, his search did not include the words “gay” or “LGBT.”
So it is pretty clear there is no evidence Mateen targeted the Pulse nightclub because it was a gay nightclub.
David French reminds us how activists and the mainstream media not only insisted this was a hate crime targeting gays, but that Christians shared in the blame:
Eric Hyde lists 10 common atheist arguments and explains why they fail. He nails it with #1 on his list:
“1. There is no evidence for God’s existence.”
Hyde comments:
There are a couple of problems with this line. Starting with the idea of ‘evidence,’ what exactly does one mean by evidence? What is sufficient evidence for one person is often not sufficient evidence for another. A court of law provides innumerable examples of how two parties can possess the same collection of data, the same power of logic and reasoning, yet argue for completely different interpretations of the data. The old saying is true: the facts do not determine the argument, the argument determines the facts.
Indeed. As we have seen, there is a distinct subjective aspect to evidence, meaning that “evidence” does not rescue us from the subjective nature of our beliefs.
Atheist Bob Seidensticker, a Hardware designer and software programmer who graduated from MIT, responds by side-stepping this point:
Hyde begins by asking what “evidence” means. My answer: evidence or argument of sufficient quality that would convince you the other guy’s argument is strong.
Seidensticker never addresses the subjective element of evidence and thus ends up reinforcing Hyde’s point. His entire definition is entirely dependent on subjectivity – what someone might personally might find to be of “sufficient quality” to be “convincing.” So when the atheist demands “evidence” from the theist or insists “there is no evidence for God’s existence,” we need to probe the subjective demands of the atheist; we need to know what data would count as “sufficient quality” to “convince” the atheist. Failure to provide this information is Hiding the Goalposts.
