The Friendly Atheist blog is excited about Netflix airing a new movie about Madalyn Murray O’Hair. O’Hair was the original New Atheist (Dawkins is just a polished version of O’Hair), so I always thought it strange that today’s New Atheists don’t pay her much attention. Anyway, what’s interesting is the way the Gnus are trying to rewrite history by turning her into a some victim of religion. The Friendly Atheist blog writes:
She was also murdered for having the audacity to not believe in a god and defend those who believed the same.
This could not be more wrong. O’Hair was murdered by another atheist, David Waters, she once employed as an office manager for American Atheists. And it looks like her murder was triggered by one of the those atheist fights that got out of hand. Waters apparently stole around $50,000 from Madalyn Murray O’Hair. She responded by writing this article for her magazine which publicized all kinds of dirt about Waters, including his past criminal history. This humiliated and enraged Waters, who then began to fantasize about gruesomely murdering O’Hair. With the help of two accomplices, Waters kidnapped O’Hair and her son and granddaughter. Although it wasn’t simply about killing O’Hair. As office manager, Waters believed the O’Hairs were able to embezzle money from their organization and figured he would be able to score all the hidden money. Anyway, the details of the whole kidnapping are strange, but as it ended, Waters killed all the O’Hairs and one of his accomplices and cut them up into pieces.
Why anyone would try to blame any of this on religion is beyond me.
Shadow To Light 
Coming from the same People how think that:
-Hitler was a christian
-communism has nothing to do with atheism
-Atheists are ALWAYS the victims never the offenders
-Religion as the virus of the mind is Legit science
-Religious Parents Brainwash their children
-The theocracy is coming
-The westboro Bapist Church is Representetiv for all religious People on earth
– Logic and reason always will lead to unbelief
-Logic and reason is something that you will automaticly have when you become an atheists and dosent need any further training.
-Religious People are corrupt and malicious because they dont really believe what they believe
-Religious People are corrupt and malicious because they Do believe what they believe
-My blog posts and Internet comments will stop the religious from destroying the Planet
-Mother theresa was a monster
-the crussaders were a bunch if blind fanatics who wope up one morning and though “lets start a war”
-Faith is believing with no evidence! dont mind what the dictonary says
-Most wars in history are Religion wars! dont mind what the History books say.
-Religious Belief is always Harmful! dont mind what science says.
-Religion would go Away If we stopped teaching it again dont mind what science says.
-Refusing to Study religious History and philosophy is an expression of sophisticated intellect
-God,unicorns,elves all the same thing
Did I forget something?Ironic that those that claim to defend reason and evidence are ine of its biggest offenders.
“As office manager, Waters witnessed how the O’Hairs were able to embezzle money from their organization and figured he would be able to score all the hidden money.”
So, organized atheism has *always* been a scam.
“Did I forget something?Ironic that those that claim to defend reason and evidence are ine of its biggest offenders.”
– That disproving, or at any rate, mocking, Zeus, who (allegedly) “arose” in a Darwinistic accidental-and-non-conscious-and-non-rational manner as an effect of the universe serves, somehow, to disprove the Creator-God who is the deliberate-and-conscious rational cause of the universe.
– That positing logical contradictions, such as Invisible Pink Unicorns, serves, somehow, to disprove the Creator-God who is the deliberate-and-conscious-and rational cause of the universe.
A suggestion: it’s the result of a general policy to blame all the world’s ills on religion.
Another suggestion: it is a manifestation of a new trend “lying for Nothing”.
The post has been corrected. Note the author of the post wasn’t Hemant. The uncorrected quote is, of course, absurd — at least as absurd as an intelligent design proponent lecturing about the politicization of science 🙂
I would probably draw a different lesson from this than you would. On one hand, I see a blog post that was corrected within 24 hours. On the other hand, I see a blog post at a different site that continues to carry provably false implications while its author invokes crazy conspiracies in order to justify them (https://shadowtolight.wordpress.com/2017/01/26/taking-richard-dawkins-concerns-seriously/).
What is your source for O’Hair engaging in embezzlement?
@Nolan, in My life without God, William Murray (Madalyn’s son) writes:
Unlike the so-called Friendly Atheist piece, Michael’s post, while it can’t be decisively proven, is still a far more reasonable position, based on the evidence, than the weak attempt to show that Dawkins was being truthful about his alleged ignorance.
If a conspiracy theory generally lacks supporting evidence without contortions and the ignoring of a larger body of contradictory evidence, then the defense of Dawkins is the conspiracy theory.
mechanar says:
“Coming from the same People how think that:
-Hitler was a christian
…”
Where the belief of “we are the aryan race”, “the aryan race is the more “evolved” and superior of all human races” and “the aryan race are decendents of -insert, usually, half-god people here-” fall in the christians beliefs? No one gnu atheist will ever answer that question without lying or reflecting.
“…
-The westboro Bapist Church is Representetiv for all religious People on earth
…”
Right now, in many web sites that show islamic terrorism acts, there are atheist blaming religion in generel sense as the problem for the islamic beliefs, they including christianity often saying “but the Bible..blah…blah…blah”, judaism “jews have the blame”, buddhism “all religion is bad” and any single form of theism “this is what people that belief in a god/s do”. Often you wil read in the comments something that go like this: “religion attacks again” or other general slur (prominent comment in Britain news web sites in the last years) every time that a islamic jihadist do their share in the muslim islamic belief in jihad againts unbelievers, for then those are kuffir (any non-muslims, non-practicing muslims and not enough muslims), plus their share in the global imposition of Sharia to “save the world form Allah offenders”.
“…
– Mother theresa was a monster
…”
Say the usual atheists/secularists that never help anybody with a serious disease with their own hands.
“…
-the crussaders were a bunch if blind fanatics who wope up one morning and though “lets start a war”
…”
Say the atheists/secularists that don’t know who the saracens were or the anything about the religion of the Ottoman Empire (hint: Islam).
“…
-Refusing to Study religious History and philosophy is an expression of sophisticated intellect
…”
Why they attack philosophy? Maybe they do not know that any methodology it is in its base a philosophy: “From wikipedia (in translated from spanish):
In the description of an adequate methodology, the philosophical stance is oriented by terms such as the following:
– Rationalism, as opposed to empiricism, emphasizes the role of reason in research.
– Pragmatic, which is how the elements of the project influence the meaning.
– Constructivism or epistemological constructivism, in which knowledge is developed based on presumptions (starting hypothesis) of the researcher.
– Criticism, also of epistemological order, that puts limits to the knowledge by the careful study of possibilities.
– Skepticism, doubt or disbelief about the truth or the effectiveness of what is generally admitted as valid.
– Positivism, derived from epistemology, states that the only authentic knowledge is scientific knowledge.
– Hermeneutics, which interprets knowledge.”
Note that “Rationalism, as opposed to empiricism…” (philosophy and science vs experience “usually sensorial experience”) part, note the pragmatic (elements that influence the meaning), contructivism (knowledge is developed based on presumptions or hypothesis), positivism (science is the only knowledge) and hermeneutics (interpretation of knowledge) parts.
@Nolan: Determined to turn around Friendly Atheist’s faux pas into criticism of The Enemy, hmm? Deflect! Deflect!
True, it was Lauren Nelson. Nobody had attributed it to Hemant, though, so … is this important for some reason, or are you just acting as bodyguard for Hemant’s reputation? I note that Lauren’s bio says, “… you’ll find her researching and writing extensively on the subjects of …” Evidently the adverb “extensively” applies only to “writing”, not “researching”, or else she wouldn’t make an “absurd” (as you say) error of this sort. As such, I stand by my original suggestion, with one clarification: it’s the result of a general policy to blame all the world’s ills on religion, coupled with complete ignorance of the facts of the case on which she was reporting. Of course she would assume that the atheist activist was murdered by an angry fundie.
And here’s the deflection. I’m glad everything is “proved” to your satisfaction. I re-read part of that thread you so kindly linked to, and I’m still waiting for you to point out where Dawkins retracts any of his views regarding a religious upbringing being worse than “mild” sexual abuse (or locking children in a dungeon or knocking their teeth out, etc. ad nauseam). Failing that, all you’ve done is highlight inconsistency on his part — and demand that we ignore the inconsistency and focus on the aspects which help your case. No: a back-pedal is not a retraction. Which part of that don’t you understand?
The post has been corrected. Note the author of the post wasn’t Hemant.
I know. It was written by an advocate and aspiring ally focused on intersectional justice. She is a feminist who wrote another post asking, ” Is feminism compatible with atheism? Are atheists forgetting their own humanity?” Is Hemant’s blog going the SJW route?
The uncorrected quote is, of course, absurd — at least as absurd as an intelligent design proponent lecturing about the politicization of science.
What made it absurd was when she also claimed “Her story is well known in atheist circles.” I suppose in the post-modern atheist circles, truth didn’t matter.
The fact remains that an atheist activist actually believed O’Hair was murdered because of her atheism. How does that happen?
I would probably draw a different lesson from this than you would.
LOL. No surprise there. Time to change the focus, right?
On one hand, I see a blog post that was corrected within 24 hours. On the other hand, I see a blog post at a different site that continues to carry provably false implications while its author invokes crazy conspiracies in order to justify them (https://shadowtolight.wordpress.com/2017/01/26/taking-richard-dawkins-concerns-seriously/).
Huh? I responded to your silly charges over 5 weeks ago:
What is your source for O’Hair engaging in embezzlement?
I corrected the post from “Waters wtinessed” to “Waters believed.” Within 24 hours of your comment. 😉
“Is Hemant’s blog going the SJW route?”
I hope so. 🙂
Nolan > The post has been corrected. … [Subsequent reference to discussion in an earlier thread here regarding Richard Dawkins retracting his signature and support from a petition to make teaching religion to children illegal.]
The “Oops” underlines rather than obliterates the author’s demonstration of her gross prejudice and pig-ignorance.
The same applies to Richard Dawkins’ earlier “Oops”.
Another post by Lauren Nelson, she who revealed her prejudice in her blog post about Madalyn Murray O’Hair, looks at a recent book by Dr. Michael Guillen; it’s entitled ““Scientist” Claims the Bible Is Compatible With Science”:
I have my own reservations about Guillen; but what I want to do here is point out that his scientific credentials are impressive, as Nelson grudgingly says, and compare him with some leading New Atheists.
Jerry Coyne is a (now emeritus) professor at a provincial university of somewhat less reknown and standing than Guillen’s Harvard. Coyne seems to be starting a new career as a writer and interviewee. Eg https://areomagazine.com/2017/03/10/jerry-coyne-on-taboos-in-science-skepticism-and-the-incompatibility-of-faith-and-fact/
Richard Dawkins was Assistant Professor of Zoology 1967-69, Lecturer (ordinary professor, in US terms) at Oxford (Harvard level) until 1990, was Reader (the next higher grade of near-Professor) until 1995, then was a full Professor until retirement in 2008. But on appointment as full Professor he seems to have effectively retired from academia and devoted his time to being a bestselling author, presenting occasional TV documentaries and being a media commentator. I’d say there’s pronounced similarities.
Michael Shermer got a PhD in History of Science (ie not in a science), then became a bestselling author, TV personality presenting science (via debunking pseudoscience), and media commentator. Not exactly the bona fides of respected academic or researcher, as Nelson puts it.
Then there’s Neuroscientist Sam Harris, who got his PhD then abandoned the idea of being an academic or researcher ** for a life as a journalist, podcaster, event speaker and media personality.
( ** I suspect Harris merely commissioned and financed the 2016 Neural correlates of maintaining one’s political beliefs in the face of counterevidence research by Stuart Kaplan, which bears Harris’ name as co-researcher; if I’m wrong and Harris was involved at each stage, as the paper claims, then Harris is lying about never lying, for that research relied upon deliberately exaggerated “facts” to make the “counterevidence” more impressive and persuasive; but since I don’t envisage Harris agreeing to deliberately lie — it’s against strongly held and expressed philosophical principles of his – I can’t see Harris as having been much involved in or even aware of the experimental design, whatever the paper claims.)
In short, that jibe, “bestselling author, and beloved media commentator. Not exactly the bona fides of respected academic or researcher” seems to apply not just to Guillen but also to the more prominent New Atheists. If Guillen can be criticised as being such, so too can these prominent New Atheists.
As for Hemant Mehta, he’s not in the same league. To borrow terminology from Peter Boghossian, Mehta’s still at the kiddies’ table. He shows no aptitude for science, for philosophy, or for original and distinctive thought; Mehta’s a non-entity. What’s his opinion worth on any subject.
*
Nelson quotes Guillen and comments:
I suspect she is misunderstanding what Guillen wrote; but whether she is or not, her comment is a slap-down of Harris’ claim in his The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values that science can serve as an arbiter of morality. Looks like the neuroscientist and philosopher has been slapped down by someone whose “About” says:
No, neurodiversity is not neuroscience, Nelson’s not a scientist, not even a TV science populariser like Guillen, who’s a Bill Nye and Neil DeGrasse Tyson lookalike. Odd, then, that she should slap the far better qualified Harris down – she herself appears to be merely a journalist.
*
The thesis of Nelson’s post is that Guillen’s book claims and argues that science and the Bible are compatible, and that this is wrong, they’re incompatible; though she doesn’t tell us what any of Guillen’s ten claims are or argue that any one of them is wrong, settling instead for the dismissive generality that the Bible is just myth that Christians are required to simply believe because it’s the Bible.Well, that’s hand-waved that away.
(Funny how anti-theists tend to be 100% Biblical fundamentalist, more fundamentalist than most Christians.)
But an equally prominent thesis of Nelson’s post is that Guillen, a Harvard Professor for eight years after gaining a PhD in physics, mathematics and astronomy, before diversifying into TV science presenting and into media-related businesses of his own, is really merely a showman. Well, so too are many prominent New Atheists, by that reckoning, and most of them do not have anywhere near the scientific and academic achievements and credential that would match Guillen’s.
Nelson finishes her post by saying of Guillen:
I think we can turn that around slightly and comment on Nelson in her own words: a scientist is not claiming incompatibility between the Bible and science, but a hack sure is.
Nolan,
“Note the author of the post wasn’t Hemant.”.
I hope you read Mike’s post because he never said “Hemant” he said “The Friendly Atheist’s blog”.
It is always unfortunate to find a figure in history who accomplished important things was a truly awful person. Many men and woman who accomplished good words were disgusting humans . While I have found contradictory information about her. The one thing that is in all reports is that she was vicious and meanspirited. Perhaps because she wanted the publicity, she was also stupid in her arrogance. Writing the article about her ex con employee did not make her murder excusable in any sense, the murderers were a million times worse than anything she did using words. But one should be careful in high crime districts and one should not bother with a criminal who one had arrested. It is a tragedy.
The Friendly Atheist post by Bo Gardiner, dated 15 March 2017 and entitled ‘This Atheist’s Obituary from 1889 Is Delightful: The “Infidel” Was “Perfectly Rational to the Last”’ struck me as rather absurd; I’ll pick out the meat:
“Delightful” the old newspaper clipping might or might not be. But on the internal evidence of the clipping, Gus was plainly not rational.
*
The Friendly Atheist blog pays $25 for each article used. You get what you pay for, I guess.
^ Dane Cook has the perfect joke for that “rationality”. The punch line being that a big, sweaty lumberjack can cut down the tree, it can be ground into paper, and then have the Bible printed on it.
Anybody remember that “Friendly Atheist Insists We Should Mock the Religious” post here in May 2016 quoting Hemant Mehta saying on his blog, “We should absolutely mock religion”, and giving his opinion why ‘we atheists’ should do so?
This same friendly guy has now posted “At Least a Dozen Dead After Church Bus Collides With Pickup Truck in Texas”, and what with his blog not being a ‘news collation’ site but specifically and relentlessly an anti-religion blog, I rather wonder how sincere he is in blogging that:
Tell you what, Mehta, fair’s fair, you go ahead and pretend you didn’t post this in order to attract the snark from your readers that you both knew you would attract and have attracted and I’ll pretend you’re not a hypocrite cynically exploiting a tragedy for the enjoyment of yourself and (many of) your readers, and to get hits and advertising revenue.
In his blog post dated 10 March 2017 entitled “White Evangelicals Are the Only People Who Think White Evangelicals Have It Rough”, Hemant Mehta looks at a PRRI opinion poll (linked from Mehta’s post) and spins it in ways unfavourable to Christians in general and to Evangelicals in particular, while also spinning in ways favourable to the “Religiously Unaffiliated” group which group presumably includes agnostics and atheists.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2017/03/10/white-evangelicals-are-the-only-people-who-think-white-evangelicals-have-it-rough/
This particular PRRI poll asked various groups whether they thought other groups (and their own) were being discriminated against. My memory triggered, I’d seen something about how to lie or “lie” with similar polls in Darrell Huff’s ancient (1954, observe the language used!) but still truly excellent small book How to Lie with Statistics; it’s in Chapter 7 – The Semiattached Figure:
Got that? There are major perils in taking people’s opinions on levels of discrimination at face value. In the absence of some objective reality check, of some Princeton study type way to calibrate report against actuality, a poll of the type described in Huff’s first paragraph – and although the PRRI poll is more sub-detailed and finer grained it clearly is of this type, even commenting on how some of the answer figures have changed over time – a poll of this type can yield very misleading results; and, for the unwary, yield very misleading conclusions.
The Princeton study showed that the more the actual level of discrimination, the less the reported level of discrimination, in a poll like this PRRI poll. And vice versa, of course, the less the actual discrimination, the more discrimination will show up in a poll like this PRRI type poll. With serious caveats (eg but especially the mere two data points Huff quotes) the Princeton study appears to have discovered an inverse correlation between reported discrimination and actual discrimination. Let’s call this ‘Huff’s Hypothesis’.
The actuality of discrimination against others appears to be the inverse of what people report. This implies that the actuality of discrimination is the inverse of what people report they think it is eg to the PRRI poll.
That is, this PRRI poll, which reports and tabulates peoples’ opinions of what levels of discrimination people think is occurring and to whom, may well report and tabulate the inverse of the actuality: it may be reporting the actuality of who is discriminating against whom arse-backwards.
Huff and his readers knew this sixty-plus years ago, whereas Mehta evidently still doesn’t.
I think that if you look at the PRRI results with eyes informed by ‘Huff’s Hypothesis’ you’ll find confirmation of ‘Huff’s Hypothesis’ in the tables, particularly in:
I note this discrepancy is mirrored in the highish levels of discrimination against “White Evangelicals”, as claimed by “White Evangelicals”, versus the much lower levels of discrimination against “White Evangelicals” claimed by the “Religiously Unaffiliated” – which latter group presumably includes agnostics and atheists, and who by ‘Huff’s Hypothesis’ are presumably guilty of high levels of discrimination against “White Evangelicals”. Which somewhat undermines the message Mehta is tacitly spinning that “White Evangelicals” are paranoid or delusional.
Can they be flipped back? A subjective opinion poll like this one won’t tell us; it takes objective non-opinion research to do that.
*
Another semi-attached figure is the PRRI’s “a lot”, as in “Percentage who say there is a lot of discrimination against each of the following groups”; it’s not only semi-attached, it’s not even a figure.
Some years ago I overheard some dock workers passing by and was startled by the unexpected level of coarseness of their language. Do dockers swear much? Not a lot according to a docker, one presumes, just a normal amount; horribly over the top, one presumes, according to the genteel woman from the Women’s Institute. So what’s “a lot”.
*
I have targeted this one PRRI poll in particular, but warn that many other PRRI polls – the Friendly Atheist blog has quoted a number recently – and likewise many Pew polls, etc, suffer from the same or similar deficiencies; it always pays to look at them critically and sceptically – even cynically; especially so when they appear to support your own prejudices and agendas.
There are lies, damned lies and statistics.
Hemant Mehta’s blog post dated 12 April 2017 entitled “Why Would a Church Advertise Easter Sunday Services Like This?” is short, just three lines and a picture, and is a good example of how Mehta spins, and sneers, and jeers, and hates:
What’s the “it” that’s been nailed? The context is Colossians 2:12-15, the sign says so, and there we find:
It’s about the Old Testament system of six hundred plus laws which were impossible for a normal person not to trespass against, together with the Temple-bound priest-mediated sacrificial system for restitution of those trespasses (debts) – which older system has now been set aside, “nailed to the cross”, we are free of it. We are free now to ask directly, and in confident expectation and promise, “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.”
Mehta’s “These people take such joy in the torture of their Lord” is not based on the poster, it is a Mehta fantasy, pure anti-Christian malice, a deliberate and unjustified slur, a mere sneering jeer based on nothing more than Mehta’s hate.
Mehta’s post word-paints an image of a bloodied Jesus writhing on the cross, and Christians enjoying the spectacle. That’s purely Mehta’s image, not that painted by the poster. It is Mehta’s image which is “a little too on the nose, don’t you think?”
Having criticised the church for an image which is his, not theirs, as being “a little too on the nose”, Mehta then word-paints a “next step” which is even more “too on the nose” – yet it’s clearly his next step, not theirs; in faux outrage he’s word-painting Christians as taking the next step in grossness, though the hypocrite is himself taking that next step beyond his own first step in grossness.
Accompanied, I see, by the usual braying pack of rabidly anti-Christian followers in the comments; not a one is bright enough, conscientious enough and intellectually honest enough to look up what the sign is about, or knowledgeable enough to already know; all are ignorant and pig-ignorant followers of their jeer-leader.
Mehta’s ‘Jesus as “Hole-y Ghost”’ “next step” shows a total misunderstanding of the Trinity; it is an atheist fantasy; it derives from and plays to atheist ignorance, atheist stereotypes, and atheist malice.
How to sum up? If Mehta had directed similarly ignorant, irrational, pig-ignorant jeers towards someone who was eg Black, a woman, LGBT2S*, he would be branded a racist, a misogynist, a hate filled hate speaking bigot.
Hemant Mehta, having found an evangelical Christian musical director – not a well-qualified minister but a well-qualified musicologist – and fellow patheos blogger who is as incapable as himself of actually reading the text referred to, has doubled down with a second post on that same “Nailed It” sign. Mehta starts:
Which tells me Mehta has still not looked up the sign’s context – see my response above to see why Mehta’s three “questions” simply ignore the actual sign and address Mehta’s fantasy version only. His clueless non-answer to those “questions” emphasises that I was right to accuse him of faux outrage: he was out for a laugh.
*
What’s up with that musicologist, Jonathan Aigner – apart from an apparent inability to read and comprehend a text, that is – who so foolishly granted Mehta hegemony? Aigner’s got a bee in his bonnet about, well, apparently any of those series of pre-Easter talks which churches often put on to promote deeper understanding of the significance of what happened at Easter (“Lenten Talks” as they are called in the UK):
Ah, a dissident evangelical by the look of it; very dissident, he “abhors”, no less; churches should adopt some preaching style which he approves of – or what, shut up?
Aigner then says Lenten Talks (in general) have “spurned” – probably true, but surely totally the wrong word for what he probably actually means – have “spawned”(?) bad theology and crappy exegesis; that’s a matter of opinion, his is an obviously dissident or ‘maverick’ opinion, he doesn’t give any particulars regarding what he actually finds problematic, if anything, about this particular series of talks, and who is he to spout off about bad theology and crappy exegesis – just take a look at this excerpt from Aigner’s immediately previous blog post:
Not just crappy eisegesis from Aigner – “we will… we will… we will… when we are tempted to dissociate from the violent scene…” (no mate, I won’t do that, if you are going to indulge in weird hysterical fantasies of you and I (“we”) betraying and torturing Jesus, you can do it on your own, that’s a classic of “bad theology and crappy exegesis”) – not just crappy eisegesis but also displaying, himself, that overheated fantasy “revelling in the torture of Jesus” which he wrongly projects onto the sign and onto the Minister giving the Talks.
By the way, he let the church know his objections “via a short, tactful post on its Facebook page.” I think not, somehow: Aigner seems to view over the top as ordinary. (I do not see Aigner’s “tactful post” there, so presume it has been removed as being one of those comments referred to by the Minister as “nor can we respond to every malicious comment”.)
When the Minister traced and phoned Aigner to ask him about his evidently inappropriate post, Aigner was “dumbfounded”, he said.
The marketing is presumably the sign, which arguably is unproblematic. It takes the ignorance of Mehta or the wild imagination of the musical but theologically ignorant Aigner to see something wrong. I see Mehta’s post came first, so wonder whether Aigner simply fed uncritically and unreflectively off of Mehta’s alternative facts.
Topical sermons, being topical, are based around a stated theme. Why is it a problem that the theme title is based on a “sliver” of Colossians, it’s got to come from somewhere, and a title based on a Chapter, or on an Epistle, or on a Gospel is a) unwieldy and b) the Talks themselves. Get real.
Aigner’s “main problems” effectively parrot or paraphrase Mehta’s blog post. Which is probably why Aigner is able to claim:
And why he links to Mehta’s post. Looks like Aigner’s post is derivative of Mehta’s.
*
Aigner’s closing lines are a puzzle to me:
Aigner appears to be quoting someone in that first line, but who? He’s not quoting himself from earlier in his post, he’s not quoting Mehta, the Minister seems far too dignified and restrained to say that, and a web search finds only this post.
https://www.google.co.uk/#q=%E2%80%9CWait!+I+thought+we+were+making+Christ+relevant+to+a+younger+generation!%E2%80%9D&newwindow=1&filter=0
My best guess is that Aigner is referring to his words immediately following the first passage I quote from him, above:
Looks like Aigner has condemned the Talks, talks unheard, text unseen, for failing to be the “old, outdated, beautiful story” (whatever that is), the which, and only which, is approved by Aigner. By coincidence, stcordova has just posted about The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, which his link to Wkipedia tells us is, “a scholarly analysis of evangelical anti-intellectualism”; I suspect Aigner of such anti-intellectualism, of being unable to accept any interpretation except the familiar, even to the extent of rejecting the “Nailed It” talks because they might be unfamiliar territory.
*
Let’s return to how Mehta finishes:
It’s a sign, a bog-standard roadside sign, as commonly used. It’s an excellent way to get across the church’s actual message, as opposed to such as Mehta dreams up for polemical purposes. Mehta has no source of information on whether the audience is interested or not, this is just spin, this is just alternative facts.
If it came across the wrong way, that’s Mehta twisting its meaning, there’s no reason why anyone capable of looking up the Colossians reference should misunderstand the correct meaning, and nothing requiring an apology. They certainly didn’t say that “Jesus getting nailed to the cross is in the Bible (get it? GET IT?)” – that’s mere Unfriendly Atheist alternative facts.
And finally, there’s:
Exactly what Mehta would expect, eh? He’s not one to pass up the chance to sneerlead and jeerlead, and to present alternative facts.
A minor but very symptomatic example of Friendly Atheist alternative facts is in Hemant Mehta’s post dated 23 April 2017 and entitled “Two Welsh Students Launch Petition to End Collective Worship in Public Schools”.
His opening line is:
“End”, no less, in the title; “do away with” in the opening line.
Compare and contrast that with the petition itself (which he links to, so he must have read it, and it’s not exactly hard to understand):
I’d say Mehta is definitely misrepresenting what the petition asks for; the petition asks it be made optional for schools to hold acts of religious worship, so that schools can choose to hold them or not to hold them, not that acts of religious worship be “ended” or “done away with”.
*
Reading the main article, it looks like two atheist kids (under-16’s) don’t like having to be part — unless their parents opt them out, which it looks like they’ve chosen not to, I can’t believe the kids are petitioning the Welsh Assembly (the Welsh version of Parliament) but not their own parents first — two atheist kids don’t like having to be part of religious worship in assembly and want to be able to choose to opt out.
If so, the wording of the petition will certainly not get these pupils what they want. As the petition is worded, if enacted into law it would grant the option to opt out of having religious worship in assembly to schools (ie each school’s managers), but not to individual pupils: if Ysgol Gyfun Gymraeg Glantaf’s management decides it will continue having a religious assembly after enactment, these two will be part of it.
I trust the education of these two in basic English Language and logical skills will continue until and past the point where they are able to petition for what they do want.
Be careful what you petition for: you might get it.
I spot another set of alternative facts in Hemant Mehta’s 03 May 2017 post entitled “We Should Celebrate New Information Even When It Means We Were Wrong”.
It sounds like it features recent research by Stuart Kaplan, Sarah Gimbel and Sam Harris as published in their paper entitled Neural correlates of maintaining one’s political beliefs in the face of counterevidence; and it does indeed feature that research, as the context and the link to the paper show.
Problem is, that research presented some accurate information to its experimental subjects but also — deliberately, and knowing the subjects might and probably would spot the distortions and lies – also presented a wad of inaccurate information sexed up to be slam-dunk convincing (such as presenting a near-doubling of the number of Russian missiles so it looks like the Russians have a large advantage in numbers, instead of the accurate information that the US has an advantage in numbers); and the Oatmeal comic follows suit: like the researchers, instead of presenting “accurate information that contradicts everything you believe”, the comic presents alternative facts.
I can’t say I’m interested in what Washington’s false teeth were made of, or other specifically US-centred facts or claims, so by all means trawl through the examples given of new information (c/w authenticating sources) which contradicts ‘what everybody knows or supposes’, but I recommend you scroll down to the enlarged words “backfire effect” and the bent-barrelled revolver and go from that panel.
Inman starts straight away:
“A few years ago …” [the Neural correlates of maintaining one’s political beliefs in the face of counterevidence study was carried out.] Wrong: the paper was published December 2016, there was an indication in a December 2015 Cosmos interview that the results were then being processed, on a reasonable timescale we can expect the experiment itself was performed some time in 2015; that’s not “A few years ago” from mid-2017.
Then Inman quotes two examples of beliefs to which strong counterarguments were presented in that study: the first – gun control – is accurate (See the Supplementary Materials pdf); the second – claimed to be “Gay marriage should not be legalized” – inserts a “not”, hence polarly misrepresents both the belief and the counterarguments to be their opposites.
“What the study revealed was that the same part of the brain that responds to a PHYSICAL threat also responds to an INTELLECUAL one. This area of the brain is known as the amygdala.” Hmmm, dodgy information indeed: firstly, you will search to study in vain to discover where the study mentions a “physical threat”, the study consistently refers merely to “threats”; it might well be that there are one or more studies showing that the amygdala responding to physical threats looks the same as the amygdala responding to intellectual threats, but it’s not demonstrated or in this study. The brain is famously multi-functional, with various bits showing the same level of increased activity under a variety of stimuli – a bad smell, disgust or (as Harris’ previous papers demonstrated) simply because you have formed a negative judgement; so of course the amygdalas showed increased activity when claims were rejected, that’s what amygdalas do when rejecting a claim – the amygdala of an atheist rejecting the Virgin Birth or anybody rejecting a factual claim like 2+2=5 responds just like that.
Inman’s “the amygdala of your brain is screaming BATTLE STATIONS” instead of calmly and rationally rejecting a false statement – and some counterarguments presented were deliberately and obviously false – is unproven; Inman is indulging in reverse inference, argument by mere association, a particularly weak form of argument, while presenting his speculation as truth.
At the end, Inman tells us “This comic was inspired by this three-part series on the backfire effect from the You Are Not So Smart Podcast.” Ah, he’s not himself responsible for the alternative facts he presents, he’s relied on other sources; which highlights a problem with alternative facts: if you don’t bother to do basic error-checking and apply a modicum of science and reason the alternative facts pass unchecked and echo back and forth across the bubble.
Did Mehta do any fact-checking? Apparently not. I guess he’s happy to cling to comforting lies.
The fact-checking by Inman and Mehta is truly awful; according to the comic the paper was “By Sarah Gimbel and Sam Harris”; this will be a considerable surprise to the principal researcher, Stuart Kaplan, whose name was omitted.
On S2L here I’m sure I have occasionally spotted that the shortened view of a post, as shown on the Home page, differs slightly from the full length view shown by clicking “Continue reading–>”, albeit in the very minor way that a video which appeared as a click-to-run still picture in one was a click-to-run link in the other.
No change to the content, though — at S2L when you click “Continue reading–>” you see the same text (continued), and you run the same video. No change to the content between Home page view of a post and the full post.
This contrasts with the Friendly Atheist blog, where clicking on “Read more…” generally reveals at the start of the full blog post not the text you have just been reading on the Home page, plus its continuation, but something different: sometimes it’s recognisably the text you have just read, with minor changes; sometimes it’s entirely different text, not a word the same.
Compare:
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/?s=Atheist+Activist+from+Colorado+Arrested+on+Suspicion+of+Second-Degree+Murder
with
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2017/05/15/atheist-activist-from-colorado-arrested-on-suspicion-of-second-degree-murder/
I don’t think Hemant Mehta actually means to deceive, it’s probably just the case that underneath every click-bait title (leading, if you click, to a click-bait post) Mehta puts what amounts to a click-bait summary sub-title.
In his 25 May 2017 blog post entitled “Conservative Host: Even Peaceful Muslims “Need To Be Eradicated” After Manchester Attack”, Hemant Mehta asks – in the Home Page flyer for the fuller blog post:
The fuller blog post adds:
And Mehta embeds the relevant clip from Bernstein’s show, and provides a Readers’ Digest Condensed version – that’s a compliment – of what Bernstein said, including:
Strong words, a call by Bernsten for eradication of Muslims “pretty much from everywhere”; which Mehta interprets as a call for “a complete genocide of all Muslims”.
Mehta’s view is:
I’ll point out that there’s two very outspoken New Atheists with views which are very similar to Bernstein’s, and with wish-list programmes (or pogroms) which are very similar to Bernstein’s.
One is Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who is on record as very clearly and unambiguously stating she wants to “crush” Islam, not radical Islam but “Islam, period”, ie including those peaceful Muslims Mehta is standing up for. Ali wants to:
Then there’s New Atheist Sam Harris, whose response to the 2006 Edge Question, “WHAT IS YOUR DANGEROUS IDEA?” was “Science Must Destroy Religion”.
Yes, destroy, eradication by violence. Ali would violently crush Islam; Harris, going further, would destroy religion in general.
This is not the language of “let’s combat jihadists who wish to end the world while leaving the peaceful Muslims alone”: this is the language of eradicating Islam in any of its forms, immoderate and warlike Islam and moderate and peaceful Islam alike.
I suggest that anyone who condemns Bernstein for his extreme views including his publicly stated wish for the eradication of Muslims “pretty much from everywhere” – even the moderate and peaceful Muslims – should also condemn Ali and Harris for their very similar views and publicly stated wishes.
Ah, but there is no such creature as “moderate and peaceful Islam”. That some nominal Moslems are “moderate and peaceful” — which is to say, they are “bad” Moslems, if perhaps good men — does not change the fact.
The thing about a “moderate and peaceful” Moslem — i.e. a “bad” Moslem — is that you never can tell when he will decide to become a “good” Moslem.
The title of one of Hemant Mehta’s 08 July 2017 blog posts looked intriguing and exciting, “The Book of Genesis… As Written By Someone Who Actually Knows How Sex Began”.
Golly gosh, someone actually knows how sex began: that’s very exciting indeed, the origins of sexual reproduction being one of the great unsolved mysteries of our time; this must be breaking news of important peer-reviewed research, mustn’t it.
Um, no: Mehta gives his readers an extract from a talk recently given to the American Humanist Association; it’s an interesting talk in its entirety, mostly covering the varieties of sexual differences found in different species, and Mehta recommends his audience click through — “The whole article is worth a read.”
But what Mehta feeds his readers is:
Yep, it’s a childrens’ story, of the ‘Just-So’ type. It no more tells Mehta or his readers how sex started than Rudyard Kipling’s famous stories told their readers “How the Leopard Got His Spots”, etc.
What does that tell us about the intellectual age of Mehta’s target audience.
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Of the first 232 comments (ie at the time of my looking), only one person had obviously clicked through to read the whole talk; the rest just provided the monkey-mind stream of consciousness mindless chatter which each and every post of Mehta’s conditions you to expect.
What does that tell us about the intellectual age of Mehta’s target audience.
If you want to bypass Mehta’s echo chamber and go straight to the original article mentioned by Dhay, above, here’s the link: https://thehumanist.com/magazine/july-august-2017/features/everything-know-sex-wrong
I seriously hope that Abby Hafer (author of said article) is deliberately dumbing it down for a lay audience, because it seems there’s an awful lot about it which you could point to and say, “no, that’s just completely wrong.” I mean, she starts with the idea that “female” is the original sex — i.e. that asexual organisms are all female. Maybe I’m just being an ignorant fundie creationist here, but I understood that asexual organisms were neither male nor female precisely because they were asexual. Dare I ask whether this is a feminism thing?
She goes on to say, “then a mutation took place that allowed some Esmereldas to swap genes with other members of the population.” Reducing the entirety of gene transfer to “a mutation” ascribes miraculous power to mutations, for one thing, but what’s worse than that is the way it completely glosses over the difference between horizontal and vertical gene transfer, along with the latter’s reliance on meiosis and the specialised differences in reproductive organs between males and females.
Seriously, Abby, I’m a layperson when it comes to biology, but I’m not so ill-informed that this ridiculously oversimplified fable of yours is even going to pass as a serious attempt to explain anything. I’d say that Mehta’s recommendation of the article does his reputation a disservice if it weren’t for the fact that his name is basically mud already.
Ah, but that’s just the beginning of the article. Mostly it’s not about “how sex began”, or even about sexual strategies (which also rank a mention); rather, the bulk of it falls under the heading, “assumptions about nature and sex”, and how those assumptions are mistaken, of course. The introductory paragraph of that section ends with the following sentence.
Ah — I recognise that tune from Bill Nye the Gender Spectrum guy. More shoddy science being used to lend authority to the gender deconstructionist brigade. Imagine my shock. I won’t dignify it with any further critical analysis.
Another alternative fact from Hemant Mehta is in his 29 July 2017 blog post entitled “The Bible Says Canaanites Were Killed, But New DNA Evidence Suggests Otherwise”. Mehta crows:
But over at the Critical Realism and the New Testament blog the Biblical scholar Jonathan Bernier tells us:
No, Mehta’s claim that “science has (once again) shown something in the Bible to be wrong” is ignorant bullshit. Mehta evidently cannot be arsed to read and understand the OT histories, and presumably is merely repeating the tired old “what every atheist knows” memes.
Hemant Mehta tells us that when Richard Dawkins was asked “why people think atheists are immoral” — apparently even atheists think atheists are more likely to be serial killers, see https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-017-0151 — “Dawkins agreed it was a stigma atheists had to deal with, but then turned the table on those who believe morality can only come from God.”
Turned the table — gosh — let’s see look at how Mehta claims Dawkins did this; firstly with:
@Dhay: “Dawkins has ducked the question.” More like he doesn’t understand it: he lacks a coherent meta-ethics. Take any half-dozen Dawkins pronouncements on morality, and see if you can resolve the conflicts between them.
… or whether he can resolve the conflict between his issuing of *any* of his many assertions of moral obligations-for-others and his meta-physical commitment that there are no such things as moral obligations.
Sarabeth Kaplin’s 13 August 2017 post on the Friendly Atheist blog entitled “I’m Christian, But I Can’t Ignore My Faith’s Role in the White Supremacist Rally” and commenting on the protesters versus Rally participants inter-group violence, includes:
It is easy but stupid for a writer to promote their own prejudices by an appeal to stereotypes and to the readers’ prejudices; Harris did so and Kaplin has explicitly followed in his footsteps.
It’s easy, it’s facile, it’s stupid and prejudiced; and it’s oh-so-easily parodied:
Why ever would one accept the first one or two, but not also the third?
But what would you expect from someone writing for Mehta’s blog: she’s probably a serial killer.
I see that in his 14 August 2017 blog post entitled “Kentucky Group Will Protest Eclipse Because It’s Getting Too Much Attention” …
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2017/08/14/kentucky-group-will-protest-eclipse-because-its-getting-too-much-attention/
… Hemant Mehta has fallen hook, line and sinker for a 24-7 Press Release article entitled “”Kentuckians for Coal” to Protest the Solar Eclipse August 21!”
http://www.24-7pressrelease.com/press-release/kentuckians-for-coal-to-protest-the-solar-eclipse-august-21-442178.php
Mehta starts:
Ah, this is a press release by reality-denialists, people to be scorned and laughed at … if we follow Mehta’s lead.
Staring in Mehta’s face are the possiibilities that a) the press release is carefully crafted to attract maximum press (and Friendly Atheist) attention, to raise attention to the plight of a former coal-mining town, and b) someone’s taking the piss.
I note that the assembly is to be right outside a “fake news” newspaper, that the psychic Edgar Cayce and “a terrifying landing by space aliens in 1955” are mentioned — smiley faces to indicate a Poe, surely — also that the 500 placards already prepared for protesters to wield include messages such as, “That’s what she said!”
So while there’s an off-chance this article is designed to raise awareness of the town’s economic plight, I don’t really doubt that this is an utter piss-take designed to see how many credulous and gullible people will turn out to protest outside a newsroom carrying silly banners.
Or perhaps it’s both.
I don’t think Mehta has been the same since “credulous” and “gullible” were removed from all online and new edition dictionaries.
Silly man. Silly blog.
In his 15 August 2017 blog post entitled “So Much for a Finely Tuned Universe”, Hemant Mehta plugs a YouTube video by Alex J. O’Connor (a.k.a. CosmicSkeptic).
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2017/08/15/so-much-for-a-finely-tuned-universe/
O’Connor is a spotty-faced adolescent; born 27 March 1999, he presumably he left school just a few weeks ago. Yet for Mehta and his readership, O’Connor has increasingly become a go-to authority on all sorts of subjects. I wonder, is it likely that a school-leaver actually is an authority on cosmology?
And why should Mehta be keen to project to his readership that spotty-faced 18-year olds (and younger — he’s been YouTubing for years) can be authorities on just about everything.
That’s something of a rhetorical question, really.
Someone who is an authority on cosmology, and definitely an authority on the physics of the finely-tuned universe, is Luke A. Barnes; he has studied the subject over a number of years, from peer-reviewed papers (eg the 2011 https://arxiv.org/pdf/1112.4647) to a recently published lay-person level book.
Which is why O’Connor’s ‘gotcha’ reply of “How do you know?” to Barnes’ brief — it’s Twitter — correction of O’Connor is so hilarious.
.
O’Connor fits the stereotype of the ‘teenager who thinks he knows everything’ oh-so-perfectly.
Only three days after Sarabeth Kaplin’s 13 August 2017 post on the Friendly Atheist blog entitled “I’m Christian, But I Can’t Ignore My Faith’s Role in the White Supremacist Rally” and commenting on the protesters versus Rally participants inter-group violence, there’s Hemant Mehta’s own 16 August post entitled “Alt-Right Expert Claims Movement Includes a “Lot of Agnostics and Atheists””.
In her post Kaplin claims – actually no, she insinuates, insinuates strongly, several times, without actually saying it – that “the vast majority” of the Charlottesville White Supremacy Rallyers were Christians.
Gosh, she’s “annoyed by the refrain of #NotAllChristians” apparently flooding in on her social media feeds – perhaps those people social-media-feeding her that #NotAllChristians refrain are as prejudiced and stereotype bound and ignorant of the reality (read on) as she herself is – is annoyed because “these “reminders” that not all Christians act a certain way is irritating”; and she then insinuates that “the vast majority” of the Charlottesville Rallyers are Christians: yes, “the vast majority”. To use a phrase we will see Mehta using later, “There’s no evidence to back that up, though. It’s pure anecdote.” Or in Kaplin’s case, it’s pure speculation and prejudice.
Kaplin is obviously clueless about what the Rallyers’ religions or none might be, but that doesn’t stop her projecting as truth what her own extreme prejudices tell her “must” be the case.
*
Three days later, Mehta’s post contradicts Kaplin and her stereotypes and prejudices – and those of her social media feeders, too:
Yep, as the blog post title has already told us, Mehta is in no doubt that Hawley is an “Alt-Right expert”; that is, that Hawley’s views and knowledge of the Alt-Right are those of not just an expert but an in-depth expert and genuine authority.
So by Mehta’s own account it shouldn’t be “Alt-Right Expert Claims Movement Includes a “Lot of Agnostics and Atheists”” – it’s shouldn’t be that deceptively spinning (implied merely) “claims”, it should be “declares with expert knowledge”.
A “Lot of Agnostics and Atheists”. Is there some fault in Hawley’s methodology – perhaps Hawley doesn’t get out much, perhaps he’s based in one of the more heavily atheist and agnostic areas of the country and this has skewed his findings and conclusions; but no, he’s based in Alabama, deep in the Bible Belt, at the opposite end of that particular spectrum. It’s almost a wonder that in his local area he found any atheists or agnostics in the movement at all. But:
Mehta acknowledges that “The sort of people who hang out on hateful internet forums aren’t exactly swapping Bible verses …” ie obviously Christian “… But it’s not like they’re spreading Richard Dawkins passages either. The idea that they’re atheist or Agnostic suggests that alt-righters have put thought into he subject of religion and — more importantly — are acting on those beliefs.”
Then follows two Kaplin-style insinuations, the which, Kaplin-style, are based upon, and show up, his ignorance:
So the Alt-Right must be Christians, mustn’t they. As Mehta says of Spencer: “There’s no evidence to back that up, though. It’s pure anecdote.” Or in Mehta’s case, pure “you’ll never guess…” insinuation.
Mehta admits that, yes, “Richard Spencer, one of the figureheads for the alt-right movement, is an atheist”, but looks quickly through the book and finds little mention of atheists:
Anecdote, perhaps, Mehta, but if Theresa May were to give me a similarly brief characterisation of a typical Tory supporter, I’m going to take it seriously as coming from someone in a position to know. Spencer, a leader, an open atheist himself, has described the ‘average’ Alt-Right supporter – and he’s in a position to know – as being an atheist.
(I see Mehta uses lower-case “alt-right”, so presumably this quote containing “Alt-Right” has been copy-pasted from an e-mail or similar text, hence is Hawley’s own words.)
Let’s re-phrase that first bit: Hawley has never talked to even one Alt-Right supporter that was a serious Christian; re-phrased again, Hawley has never talked to even one serious Christian who was an Alt-Right supporter.
Sounds clear enough to me: instead of the religion of “the vast majority” of the Alt-Right Rallyers being Christianity, as Kaplin insinuates – and it’s most certainly not the active, serious Christianity of “the Religious Right”, as Mehta insinuates – those Rallyers are “on average” atheists.
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Mehta spends much of his post in damage limitation: Alt-Right supporters might not be strong Christians but he hasn’t seen evidence that they’re strong atheists either.
Gee whizz, what impressive evidence: except that these are “Science and Reason” liberal social-political activist organisations which attract similarly minded liberal social-political activists. (Tories don’t join the Labour Party, nor do even the vast majority of Labour supporters.) I doubt these organised politically liberally oriented groups would claim to speak for the majority of atheists, only for their actual memberships; and if they ever did make that broader claim, I’d want to see it backed up.
Let’s re-phrase that: even if no organized group of atheists wants anything to do with them, the alt-right is made up of non-religious people. I don’t think there’s any doubt, not even in Mehta’s mind, that they are actually atheists, though he quibbles whether they are strongly and actively atheists (New Atheists?)
What was it that Kaplin (nearly) said: it’s time to admit that being an atheist and a bigot are not mutually exclusive identities
*
It’s perhaps as well that the hated Alt-Right have been authoritatively identified as being atheists and (anecdotally) as not including a single strong Christian. We now know authoritatively that atheists are far, far more likely than Christians to be supporters of the Alt-Right and members of those Charlottesville Rallyers.
For those who would blacken Christianity by associating it with the Alt-Right, as Kaplin attempted to do, Hawley’s evidence that they can’t do so must be a disappointment indeed. Yet for those many who would love to blacken the Alt-Right and the Charlottesville Rallyers, by association with a demonised group, Hawley’s expert testimony must be a God-send – atheists! ‘Everybody knows’ – even atheists themselves, apparently – that atheists are the group most likely to be serial killers.
When they’re not Rallying at Charlottesville, that is.
I wondered, if the Alt-Right are atheists (and also agnostics, but not strong Christians), were there any Christians involved at all. So I looked at to see who the opposition — the protesters against — were, and found Mark Bray’s Washington Post article entitled “Who are the Antifa?”:
Ah, Antifa the (main?) anti-Rally protesters, are “predominantly communists, socialists and anarchists”, ideologies not famed for their friendliness towards Christianity and Christians; presumably Antifa groups contain few Christians, those few feeling uncomfortable and out-grouped, or none.
Remember George Hawley’s “I did not talk to a single Alt-Right supporter that was a serious Christian.”
Was this, possibly or probably predominantly, perhaps even completely, an atheist-Right versus atheist-Left spat?
“Was this, possibly or probably predominantly, perhaps even completely, an atheist-Right versus atheist-Left spat?”
No, it was an atheist-left vs other atheist-left “spat” … *intentionally caused* by the allies-in-government of the former.
@Ilion: while I agree with you (especially the “intentionally caused” part), I think it’s time to abandon the traditional meaning of “The Right” in politics. Let the Nazis have that designation, and refer to fiscal or political conservatism in explicit terms.
Personally, I have figured out to my own satisfaction why Marxists and Nazis are forever at each other’s throats, despite the fact that they have more similarities than differences, and it is because they are mirror images of each other, like a left and right hand. This is the sense in which “Antifa” is an appropriate name.
To explain: Nazis, Fascists, and White Supremacists are The Right. They believe that the strongest should rise up and displace or kill the weakest and least productive, then rule over the remainder by merit of strength. It’s an ideology only a sociopath could love, unless you felt backed into a corner by a hostile under-class. It’s an openly aggressive position.
Marxists, Communists, and Anti-Fascists are The Left. They are the exact opposite. They believe that the weakest should rise up and displace or kill the strongest and wealthiest, then rule over the remainder by merit of justice for former oppression. This is a passive aggressive position, where one wins battles not by open combat, but by provoking the other into acts of aggression and then rioting over the injustice of it all, giving justification to one’s own escalating violence. They have passive-aggressive names, like “Black Lives Matter”, implying that everyone else thinks black lives don’t matter.
The Left is the more seductive ideology, as it coats all its poison in worthy ideals like fairness, justice, and an end to racism, prejudice, and oppression. This is why people are quick to denounce violence on The Right, but go soft on The Left. Thing is, The Left manufactures its own victimhood in order to advance its agenda. It can not be appeased. Also it is just as racist and prejudiced as The Right by any objective measure, but conceals it in a smokescreen of victimhood.
Given this understanding of The Right and The Left, it’s clear that The Centre is the place to be, and it’s the place described by Galatians 3:28. I don’t know how much of the escalating violence can be attributed to atheism as such, but I think that this trend is simply to be expected given the rise of the “nones” which the atheist activists celebrate. Leftism and Rightism have filled the “none” vacuum to some degree.
Further to my response above regarding Hemant Mehta’s gullibility about the “Kentuckians for Coal” anti-eclipse protest at Hopkinsville — his blog post was based upon a single press release in a nationwide ‘cost effective press releases for businesses etc company’, not the local media, and there’s many an internal ‘winking smiley’ in the release to indicate it’s a Poe — the eclipse has now passed without any report of any protest.
The alleged protest was to assemble outside of the Kentucky New Era newspaper offices for the handing out of 500 pre-prepared placards (or bring your own). Not a protest a paper could miss right outside their offices. The paper’s website has no mention of any such protest:
http://www.kentuckynewera.com/news/
Nor does entering [“Kentuckians for Coal” Hopkinsville] (omit brackets) into my browser reveal any press report of such a protest happening.
Gullible Mehta.
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PZ Myers also fell for it hook, line and sinker with his 15 August 2017 blog post, “You can count on coal 24/7. You can’t always depend on the sun!”
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2017/08/15/you-can-count-on-coal-247-you-cant-always-depend-on-the-sun/
Mehta’s (many) and Myers’ (few) followers also largely fell for it, too. Although some spotted it must be satire or a Poe, many took the release and posts at face value and jeered the stupid Kentuckians. It’s time now for them to jeer their own stupidity.
Mehta’s followers are in a class of their own, so many veering all over the place, evidently with the attention span of gnats, contributing — if that term is correct — inanities. But what’s new. The following of evidence and reason is clear in some responses, but obviously absent from most.
Mind you, I’d say Mehta and Myers took the lead in not following evidence and reason.
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My ad-blocker blocks 22 adverts on a fresh load of Myers’ site, and 34 adverts on Mehta’s. I guess that, for both but especially Mehta, a click is a click is a click is an earner, whether the post is evidenced and rational or whether the post is spin or fake news gullible garbage. Any post earns, however rotten.
Hemant Mehta, in his 22 August 2017 blog post entitled “Christians and Atheists Speak a Different Language on Facebook”, tells us that:
And a recent study of information — again, the data set is from several years ago — which Facebook users had been made publicly available found pretty much the same, this time with a ‘word-cloud’ to show the distinctive words which self-identifying Christians used but atheists generally did not, and another which showed the distinctive words which self-identifying atheists used but Christians generally did not. Mehta kindly reproduces those word-clouds:
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2017/08/22/christians-and-atheists-speak-a-different-language-on-facebook/
Yep, Christians seem happier on Facebook, too, and atheists swear a lot.
The most distinctively atheist word on Facebook, and by quite a bit, is “fucking”,
Top atheist words by both how distinctively they characterise atheists (indicated by word size) and how frequently atheists use them (indicated by brightness of word colour) include:
In his 25 August 2017 blog post entitled “Christian Textbook Urges Readers To “Keep a Closed Mind” Hemant Mehta castigates a Christian book for saying:
This, according to Mehta is an instruction to Christians to completely close their minds and let no new thoughts in whatsoever. Not that I can see why Mehta should suppose that, except as a thin excuse for a gratuitous sneer at supposedly closed-minded Christians.
Now what ever sort of person would suggest you shouldn’t concentrate your mind on being a good Christian (in the best sense) and shouldn’t close your mind to the spectrum of unrighteousness – a spectrum ranging from lack of love of neighbour right up to theft, fraud, violence or even murder.
The answer is, Hemant Mehta apparently thinks you shouldn’t, and he is using his Friendly Atheist blog to get that message, unwholesome at best and evil at worst, out to his rabble of scatter-brained follower atheists.
Maybe that’s why even atheists think atheists are more likely to be serial killers.
I see Hemant Mehta has competition of a sort. The Atheism and the City blogger, aka ‘The Thinker’, has posted:
Amazingly, “amazingly” has no meaning — unless ‘The Thinker’s readers are very easily amazed. That a phylogenetic tree is an example of phylogenetic trees in general, and looks like many other phylogenetic trees, should surprise and “amaze” nobody; furthermore, and contrary to ‘The Thinker’s claim, it neither looks to me “remarkably similar to the tree of life of actual Darwinian evolution” — that latter being a much more extensive and complicated tree — nor does the source article claim it does.
That is, ironically, the phylogenetic tree of the 65 bills doesn’t look “remarkably similar”, except in a very superficially way, to the tree of life of actual Darwinian evolution. The remarkable resemblance is a figment of ‘The Thinker’s imagination.
As for creationists seeing “the irony”, it’s not creationists who constructed the tree, it’s not creationists reading the Slate article reporting Nick Matzke’s “bill” tree construction, the tree doesn’t look like the Darwinian [**] tree; it’s ironical that “these creationists” — no nuance there, just ignorance that many creationists are perfectly happy with evolution and the Darwinian tree — should be expected to even sight the tree, let alone feel any irony.
(** Is this right? — I always thought phylogenetics (“classification”) long preceded Charles Darwin.)
Looks like the same ignorance, pig ignorance, insinuation, false information, and pandering to the baser instincts of the fan base found in Mehta’s posts.
Except — unlike Mehta’s posts — exactly zero fan comments have flooded in during the month since he posted.
An ‘award’ logo and accompanying text tell us that this blog is “Selected As One Of The Top 30 Atheist Blogs Every Atheist Must Follow!” (Yes, complete with exclamation mark.) If “every atheist” is dutifully following this blog, they are remarkably quiet about it.
Hemant Mehta’s 24 September blog post entitled “Man Kills 1, Wounds Several Others, Outside Tennessee Church” reports an attempt to commit multiple murders of churchgoers.
When Mehta reports some tragedy involving churchgoers it’s usually to gloat (or to enable his rabble of followers to gloat) or it’s to deny involvement by an atheist. In this case Mehta pointedly says:
So we know which of those two is likeliest: ah yes:
The murderer used to be Christian, but has now flipped and is now emphatically not Christian.
It’s a damage limitation exercise.
Mehta promised “More on this story as it develops.” The original blog post has not been updated, nor, two days later so far, has there been a subsequent post. Crickets.
Nothing more on that story. Still crickets.
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In his blog post dated 02 October 2017 and entitled “A Christian Created a Mass Panic on a London Train by Preaching About Death” Hemant Mehta tells us:
Odd, Mehta links to just the BBC report, which tells us the preacher wasn’t shouting, he was speaking:
At which polite request “the guy stopped and stood there with his head down.”
And far from being a genuinely frightening figure, the people in his immediate vicinity not only didn’t react, they stayed calm and unbothered, the train guard and the police likewise — it’s only a few years since a suspected terrorist (who wasn’t) got shot in the head as a precaution in case he might trigger a bomb, a massive contrast in police behaviour showing how unconcerned they were in this case:
Another source says he wasn’t shouting, he was reciting verses from the Bible.
Ah, the problem was ‘Chinese whispers’, a process of innocent accumulation of distortions; or in Mehta’s case, ‘Chinese shouting‘ of deliberately made up distortions.
Other terms for that are the thread OP’s “Alternative Facts”, though I quite like the modern “Fake News” or that good old-fashioned term, “Lying.”
Distracted weaving stories together, I omitted to point out that, contrary to Mehta’s claim quoted above, no source that I can find says the preacher was “talking about how ‘everyone’s going to die.'” Mehta’s made it up.
And no source included Mehta’s insinuation that the preacher threatened everyone’s going to die … today, now! Mehta’s made it up.
So far as I can tell, the preacher was not talking about death but about eternal life, the resurrection: as Mehta himself quotes, albeit without understanding it, “death is not the end.”
I see the Guardian’s account includes:
That’s very different from Hemant Mehta’s sensationalised report of him shouting. Mehta took the little information that he had at the time, added details which were not in the original BBC News article he linked to (nor anywhere else), hence which were evidently purely products of his own imagination, and happily lied to his readers.
In a very friendly manner, I’m sure, as one would expect from the eponymous Friendly Atheist.
In her 21 October 2017 Friendly Atheist post entitled “Trump Administration Pushes Abstinence and “Rhythm Method” Over Contraception” Sarahbeth Caplin’s message is encapsulated by the title and by the observation that the second method is notoriously unreliable and ineffective in 25% of users.
Caplin portrays the leaked plans as (adapting the quote below) a “desperate attempt to keep [women] from accessing [oral contraception] in order to enjoy “consequence-free sex.””
She compares how women’s contraception is treated differently from men’s:
Caplin’s probably not the best person to give advice on contraception methods; she thinks Viagra is a contraceptive.
In his 23 October 2017 blog bog entitled “Dan Brown Offers Blistering Critique of Religion in Interview for New Book” Hemant Mehta quotes Brown from an npr interview:
And Mehta adds, “If I ever get a tattoo…”; Mehta evidently agrees wholeheartedly.
Hmmm. I personally believe that it’s shocking in the year 2017 that … that we can have an American author declare that we are not allowed to question or ridicule religious ideas; religious ideas in general, by the look of it, and specifically those “the earth is 6,000 years old and that the fossil record was put there to test our faith” religious ideas which are .. but I’ll let PZ Myers speak on this one:
Myers has to remind atheists like Mehta, it seems — not that Mehta has read, has understood, has been reminded or has heeded Myers’ post.
And does Brown (and Mehta) really think that “religion” (whatever that might be) declares itself immune from rational scrutiny.
Hmmm. I personally believe that it’s shocking in the year 2017 that we can have an American author, Brown, who is not only ignorant of traditional Christian teachings, and the Bible itself, but also unaware of the First Amendment and its guarantee of freedom of speech and press.
And the atheist blog owner, Mehta, is proudly equally ignorant. “If I ever get a tattoo…” I suppose over the top ignorance attracts more clicks that rational scrutiny of Brown’s words.
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Off-topic, I love this part of the The Guardian review of Brown’s book:
I might give it the book a miss.
Looking down the comments of that same post, I spot:
Maybe that’s why even atheists think atheists are more likely to be serial killers.
Dan Brown: “we are debating whether or not to teach it in our schools, and that’s upsetting to me.”
We are? After the interview, Dan Brown put on his leisure suit and went out to find a disco tech.
Michael > … went out to find a disco tech.
Damn that spell-chequer!
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On a lighter note, you’ll probably be interested in a book I discovered recently in an antiquarian bookshop, which throws a completely new light on the doctrine of original sin.
It was the first edition of the Gospel of John, its flyleaf signed by the author himself; and the really interesting thing about it is that it shows that the opening words as we now know them are not as they were originally; for it originally began: In the begginning was the Spelling Mistake.
Comparisons with the second and subsequent editions of the Gospel, and with mysteriously altered other works of the time, indicates that towards the end of the First Century AD a copyist probably checked the spelling and grammar using the Microsoft Scribe 97 program, with predictably predictable results.
A Microsoft watcher has commented to me that ordinary everyday language was Greek at the time, and has remained so for Microsoft’s spell- and grammar-checkers ever since.
PZ Myers is another who thinks Dan Brown a bad writer: in his 25 October 2017 blog post ironically entitled “Hooray! Dan Brown has published a new book!” Myers displays empathy for the “horde of appalled English majors forced to wade through the sewage and write out disbelieving summaries” as part of their coursework. Myers quotes from one such student review, then adds his own comment:
Hmmm. Clickbait banalities (like Jim Bakker’s food tubs) recited (time and again) as if they were profound … the truly stupid reader can follow the stories and assemble superficial trivia as if they were insightful…as if they too were as brilliant (as the main and contributing authors self-portray as.)
If you are reading a blog to affirm that you are clever enough to be able to read a blog at all [**], then Friendly Atheist will pat you on the back on every web page and coo reassuringly that yes, you too are intelligent.
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( ** Ask yourself why some YouTube and SoundCloud atheists, their presentations devoid or nearly devoid of the written word, have large followings.)
David McAfee’s 24 October 2017 blog post for Friendly Atheist, entitled “U.S. Government Ran a $666 Billion Deficit in Trump’s First Year”, starts:
McAfee would?! Such credulity.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2017/10/24/u-s-government-ran-a-666-billion-deficit-in-trumps-first-year/
David McAfee’s 28 October 2017 blog post for Friendly Atheist, entitled “Woman Will Spend Years in Jail For Beating Her Daughter Over Bible Verses” is a classic example of Friendly Atheist distortion and spin.
McAfee alleges that the child in this case (and the child in another case five years ago, adduced as evidence that this kind of thing is happening all the time) was beaten to death for not reading their Bible.
Bollocks! If you follow the links and links onward, you find that in both cases the ‘child wouldn’t read the Bible’ crap is, well, crap: a malicious, abusive, controlling and violent killer sought and found a reason to attack.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist?s=Shoffner
In a British case that I know of an abusive father insisted his daughter both did her homework and cleaned the kitchen, and both tasks were to be completed in an impossibly short time; then he returned after that impossibly short time and punished her — sexualised punishment — for not finishing cleaning the kitchen.
Were any of these attacked (punished, each attacker claimed) because of the claimed reason? No, the attacker found a convenient reason — any reason would have done — to do what they were going to do anyway.
And this, I think, is obvious from the accounts. But for Hemant Mehta and for McAfee, Christianity is to blame; at least they tell their readers so.
I must stop reading that blog; it’s moronic.
In Hemant Mehta’s 30 October 2017 blog post entitled “Creationist Ken Ham Claims Atheists “Want Christianity Outlawed” he quotes a Ken Ham tweet saying:
Ham is too sweeping, of course, not all atheists are extremely intolerant and hateful towards Christians, and not all atheists want Christianity outlawed. Neither Ham nor Mehta can speak for all atheists.
But Mehta thinks he can speak for all atheists, even the most vocal:
Hmmm. Just a few responses above I documented:
prinefan: I’ve had enough. Stalin was right. It’s all you can do with’em.
ORigel to prinefan: ??
prinefan to ORigel: Shoot’em in the fucking head. Dump’em in a ditch. Plain enough?
And that was on Mehta’s own blog. Was, because someone — charitably, probably an assistant, because Mehta tacitly claims to have been unaware of it, though it’s still there on Disqus — deleted the two replies. That’s good, but shouldn’t the assistant have informed Mehta, so he could know not to talk ill-informed bollocks about “Even the most vocal atheists don’t argue for banning religion” when he’s got one such vocal atheist on his own blog advocating for eradicating Christians by mass-murder. It’s not a case of “Even the most vocal atheists don’t…”, it’s “Especially the most vocal atheists do…”
And Mehta is not only unaware of what is happening at home, he doesn’t get out much, either; is it difficult to find atheists who would like to ban (make illegal, outlaw) parents from providing religious education to their children, it didn’t ought to be allowed.
And here’s a quote from prominent atheist Peter Boghossian’s A Manual for Creating Atheists:
Boghossian doesn’t want merely to outlaw Christianity (and religion generally), or even just to create more atheists: what Boghossian wants — and what the currently 472 (target 10,000) Street Epistemologists who have publicly attached themselves to Boghossian’s stated aims and methods presumably also want — is to eradicate Christianity.
Perhaps the book should have been called A Manual for Eradicating Religion.
And the bottom line is that Mehta is claiming that Ham’s tweet is not just partially false, nor even mostly false, it’s totally false (“Not even the most vocal atheists…”); which is bollocks and he must know it’s bollocks.
It’s only a month since part of a Hemant Mehta post included this snippet:
Gee, thanks, Mehta, please don’t make any more suggestions like that. The BBC reports, “Texas church shooting leaves many dead”:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-41880511
Such a shooting would probably be because this “person had an animosity against religion”, would it. I have difficulty believing the shooter wanted to shoot his wife after a domestic tiff and had very bad aim. I await the inevitable ‘we don’t yet know for sure’ blog post.
The title of Hemant Mehta’s 29 November 2017 blog post entitled “Someone Stole Baphomet’s Head from the Top of a Satanic Christmas Tree” is self-explanatory and accurate; reading his post and the links to the Satanists’ FaceBook page and local news, it seems that was it, that the damage to the display was confined just to the theft of the Head; there was no actual vandalism in the sense of wilful damage to the tree or its decorations, as this comment from the FaceBook page makes clear:
I came out with a friend to see your tree—and nothing else. And the Baphomet topper was gone! We were so disappointed. The ornaments were there, though. The hand-painted “Hail Satan” was extra cute. Do you have any for sale? I might put up some dead twigs at home to keep with the season spirit, and those would make a fine decoration.
http://www.facebook.com/TheSatanicTempleSanJose/photos/a.1605741219659742.1073741829.1555485571351974/2030262213874305/?type=3
Mehta spins it as a Christian anti-Satanist act of vandalism, indeed, as a Christian anti-Satanist act of persecution:
It’s worth noting, though, that if this happened to a Nativity scene, Christians would be up in arms about how people are “persecuting” them and how this is an attack on their religious freedom. Overreaction or not, they’d be understandably upset. The way the Satanists are handling this is, by comparison, very calm and forgiving.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2017/11/29/someone-stole-baphomets-head-from-the-top-of-a-satanic-christmas-tree
I suspect the Satanists have spotted what Mehta obviously hasn’t spotted: if only the striking and artistically designed head is missing, and no damage or disturbance to anything else on the tree, the head probably adorns the bedroom wall of some teenager or young man after a good evening’s drinking and fun-making.
I reckon vandals would have wrecked the tree and smashed up the Head. Didn’t happen.
After the Sutherland Springs Church massacre Mehta lectured that, “It’s better not to jump to conclusions and make a tragedy all about your pet issue.” Funny that, that when a Baphomet Head goes missing Mehta immediately jumps to conclusions and makes it all about his pet issue.
Of course its never a “false Christian” act of vandalism when one of these losers smashes their own window and scrawls “Jesus Saves” on it, is it, Hermie? Then it’s a legitimate act of Christian vandalism. Projection never requires consistency.
In his 04 December 2017 blog post entitled “The Christian Version of Amazon’s Echo Will Ruin Your Date Night” Hemant Mehta tells his readers:
If I read Mehta right, he’s selling his readers the idea that there really is a Christian version of the Amazon Echo. No there isn’t: comedian johnbcrist (who sent Mehta the link to the ‘Christian version of the Amazon Echo’ comedy sketch) is a producer of a long string of comedy sketches which he is trying to publicise, presumably for the advertising clicks; here’s another of many similar, called “Tryna impress your new Bible study like”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqEIaORPge4
Is Mehta so stupid he cannot spot an obvious satire?
Or does he suppose his readers are that stupid?
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On a quite sideways note, that “Tryna…” video quotes Jeremiah 29:11 in passing as meaning “God has plans for us”. I’ve also recently seen it quoted in a blog post as meaning that, likewise heard it (complete with wrong verse number) from a minister. In its context it doesn’t mean God has plans for us, not us today, nor can it legitimately be cherry-picked out of context to mean “God has plans for us, us today”. When I read or hear that, or a similar cherry-picked sentence-in-isolation, its pseudo-authority deriving from being a verse in the Bible, I detest the quoter’s hypocrisy.
I remember my youth, when my main access to Christian literature was the Jehovah’s Witness spam, which was full of ‘God says …’ followed by a reference to what would almost certainly turn out to be an utterly irrelevant Bible verse: to my mind, that’s sheer dishonest, and that dishonesty misled me away from Christianity for many years.
Given what Alexa has actually said in response to questions, I find Mehta’s assertions regarding the alternatives being “too preachy” to be fairly rich. Evidently, one’s perception of “preachy” varies greatly with the content of that being preached.
He can dish, but not take.
Looks like for Hemant Mehta presenting alternative facts is deliberate policy.
In his 19 December 2017 blog post entitled “The FDA Is Taking a Tougher Stance Against (Some) Homeopathic Products” Mehta quotes a reply from a spokesman:
If you click through (Link below) to the AAHP Info page and count members, there’s 23 members; there’s very obviously not just the one member Mehta claims there is; I doubt Mehta is innumerate and has honestly miscounted — even an innumerate person should be able to distinguish at a glance there’s a lot more than one member.
http://www.aahp.info/
Looks like for Hemant Mehta presenting alternative facts is deliberate policy.
And with 139 comments by Hemant Mehta’s rabble so far, not one has spotted Mehta’s alternative fact claim. Odd, that, for Mehta went out of his way to make it, and pointedly.
What’s up with them? Are they very, very trusting of Mehta and his guest posters. Are they too lazy to click through, or are they too lacking in attention span to click through? Are they credulous and gullible?
Did some readers withhold comment so as not to embarrass Mehta? Or perhaps noted the alternative fact mentally but blanked it out with disconfirmation bias?
This exemplifies why, for me, Mehta’s followers are a rabble.
In his 25 January 2018 blog post entitled “What’s the Main Source of Global Conflict? Survey Says: “Religious Beliefs”” Hemant Mehta provides his gloss on a Best Countries gloss on their own survey entitled “Religion Needs a Savior” — odd, that, for the title is the only place where a saviour or the alleged need for one is referred to, it’s just not in the text body — and subtitled “Most people think religion is the root of the world’s problems, according to a recent international study.”
The subtitle just about says it all: they asked people across the world what they think, what is their opinion. Garbage in, garbage out.
Nor do the results inspire confidence that the questions asked were sensible questions. “What’s the primary source of most global conflict today?” — um, just global conflict, is there any global conflict, did World War 3 start but nobody told me, what about regional or local conflict, I have no confidence in the wording — that question elicited the opinion from 30% that the primary source is “Religious beliefs”. Which sounds significant until you realise that “Power”, “Economy” and “Political beliefs”, overlapping categories which are not that easily disentangled one from another, total a much larger 55%. Which is still merely opinion.
Oh, and if … :
… how do the pollsters disentangle religion, power, national economy and politics in those countries — those Muslim-majority countries where, it seems to me, most of the world’s various wars are. And how, at that, can those who were opinion-polled possibly have “it’s this but not that” clear opinions on such a tangled subject. Garbage in, garbage mangled, garbage out.
The Best Countries article figures are embedded in a deliberately provocative initially anti-Muslim rant which then becomes a general anti-religious rant before returning again to anti-Islam:
And doesn’t get better: not only is this an opinion poll, not science, it’s embedded in anti-religious polemic.
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To give the poll a spurious air of credibility they call in the “experts”:
Anonymous “experts” say … Go on, give over.
But not entirely anonymous: the sole “expert named or quoted is Sam Harris, “a neuroscientist and philosopher who has published books on Islam and the conflict between religion and science.” Personally, I’d call Harris an anti-Muslim polemicist, which is his role here too.
Is Harris an expert on Islam? Harris does indeed like to pose as an expert on Islam, but in his book The End of Faith, on Pp 30-31, there’s this priceless paragraph:
It’s so stupid, so clueless, it’s hard to know where to begin: even back in 2005 when he wrote this there was plenty of Sunni on Shia violence, and plenty of Shia on Sunni violence — how could he possibly miss it? And then there were the Sunni followers of Sayyid Qutb, who had long been attacking as renegades — with bombs, not just words — not just Shia Muslims but also their very own mainstream Sunni community:
Harris shows himself up as astonishingly naive and ignorant. Expert he obviously ain’t.
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Mehta, of course, swallows it hook, line and sinker; which shows he is rather poor at science and reason.
I reckon Mehta puffed the poll and Best Countries article because one minor (7%) ‘predominant cause’ picked by the polled was “Fake news”, giving Mehta the opportunity to jibe:
I rather think that “Fake news” has a well-established meaning, and that by well-established usage it has no connection to religion. It’s a jibe that falls flat and makes Mehta look juvenile and silly.
The “Fake news” choice seems an odd one to give, so odd I wonder whether it’s a winking smiley. The Best Countries article and the poll it is allegedly based on are both so bad, so skewed, so biased, so pseudoscience, so politically extreme, that I would be not at all surprised to find it is fake news itself.
And there’s the anonymous plural “experts”, who turn out to be a solitary non-expert polemicist.
More fake news from the Friendly Atheist site; reporting on a horrific case of the years-long child abuse and eventual murder of an eight-year old boy by his mother and her partner, ostensibly because the boy was “gay” (however can you tell?), Sarabeth Caplin claims:
One early commenter, ‘TimfromMaine’, hits the nail right on the head, there was no mention of their religious beliefs (or atheism) in any of the media coverage — the LA Times site doesn’t display in Europe, but as that is where ‘TimfromMaine’ will have followed her first link to, presumably there’s no mention there either:
Evidently ‘TimfromMaine’ has a low opinion of McAfee, as have I; but yes, there is someone yet more capable of “pure bullshit.”
Does Hemant Mehta pay extra when his guest posters demonstrate they lack integrity?
Having insinuated that there might have been some discussion of the perpetrators’ religious beliefs, contrary to the evidence of her own eyes — and we can be pretty sure there was nothing to quote, because we can be sure she would have been delighted to avail herself if there actually had been anything to quote — Caplin immediately continues:
There was nothing about religious beliefs but … but like the opinionated pub drunk she demands, Hey, I ask you, what else could virulent anti-gay sentiment and a violent murder be caused by!
The answer is provided by a commenter there, ‘Foxglove’:
Looks like Caplin is not only misinformed about science — above, I quote her supposing Viagra is a contraceptive — she’s also misinformed about anti-gay haters and she’s a vitriolically bigoted hater of Christians.
And she has crap reasoning skills. (But why use reason when a simplistic and irrational polemic will both earn you a fee and provide a vent for your bigotry.)
I ask myself, what sort of blog owner commissions posts like these.
Back in March 2017 Hemant Mehta posted twice to express his outrage that the theme and title of a church’s Lenten Talks was “Nailed It”, and I responded twice (linked for convenience, see…)
and
The executive summary is that Mehta was luridly fantasising that Christians were luridly fantasising about torturing Jesus. Er, no, the Colossians quote on the sign Mehta clearly says that the “It” that was nailed (and set aside) …
… was our trespasses, our record of debt, our sins.
Two years and four months later, I find in his 13 July “Progressives Are Using #ThingsJesusNeverSaid to Point Out Right-Wing Hypocrisies” that he reproduces some nicely humorous Christian Tweets and quips. Mehta, being Mehta, evidently thinks he can do as well or better and wants the last word; he adds his own wording to go on one such Tweet:
I didn’t get it straight away, and then recollection tickled my mind and I looked back. Yep, two years and four months later, Mehta is still obsessing over “Nailed It” and his lurid fantasies that Christians have lurid fantasies.
More ‘Alternative Facts’ (see thread title) from the Friendly Atheist site, this time from Beth Stoneburner (formerly Sarabeth Caplin), in her 28 January 2020 blog post entitled, “Christians Back Lawsuit Against UK Government for Not Passing Online Porn Block”.
https://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/2020/01/28/christians-back-lawsuit-against-uk-government-for-not-passing-online-porn-block/
The very title’s utterly misleading: the “Online Porn Block”, which is Part 3 of the ‘Digital Economy Act 2017’, is existing law (requiring age-checking of anyone accessing age-restricted ‘adult’ content online); it is, furthermore, the express will in writing of Parliament, a Parliament democratically elected, hence under normal conventions Part 3 is ‘the will of the people’. The Goverment (Tory) which presented Part 3 to Parliament was and is very secular, Parliament was and is very secular, the UK populace was and is very secular: the Act and its Part 3 are wholly secular in orgin and intent.
The intention of Part 3 is to extend to digital media the uncontentious restrictions which are already in place – and are they not in place in the US? – preventing UK children of all ages (ie not just older teenagers) from watching age-inappropriate films, reading age-inappropriate magazines, playing age-inappropriate computer games, etc etc.
Would you allow or encourage your child to smoke, to drink alcohol, to access porn? If so, you are probably due a visit from Social Services and the Police to enforce Child Protection policies and law.
The words and intentions of a UK Act (or in this case its Part 3) are brought into effect, after due consultation with interested parties, by means of Regulations which detail what the Act or Part prohibits and requires (and a Code of Practice usually follows, setting out model behaviour for compliance); in this case the consultation on the Draft Regulations was to have taken a year, but following (legitimate) concerns about the large dataset that (apparently) would be needed for checking ages and conflict with privacy and security, the Minister concerned sat on it for six months, then another six months, then a six month delay because of an administrative blunder, then announced an intention to water down Part 3 majorly – no age checks at all – via a proposed Act to be enacted at some time in the future.
There’s a constitutional issue here: Part 3 is existing law but a Minister is disregarding the express will of Parliament (which is sovereign over the will of the Tory Goverment and its Minister) and is refusing to implement Part 3 of the Act. There’s already a Peer seeking to introduce proposed legislation through the House of Lords, which if passed will require the Minister to implement Part 3. (“[The Peer’s] Bill would place a duty on the Government to set an implementation date for age verification to be introduced, which is the same outcome being pursued through this legal challenge” [follows].)
https://premierchristian.news/en/news/article/christian-charity-backs-legal-action-against-government-for-scrapping-age-check-on-online-porn
At a less exalted level, four (very secular) internet security firms, after having presumably gone to considerable expense to develop the age-checking technology needed according to existing law, are now taking the Government to court for a Judicial Review to decide whether the Minister may legally ignore existing law (with at present a mere promise to legislate to change it, no concrete proposals yet) or whether the Minister must implement the law. The four companies assert the Minister “did not have the authority to ditch the policy after Parliament had approved it and was supposed to only determine when the program would be implemented.”
And, “A Christian public policy [ie it lobbies – Dhay] charity has applauded four technology companies for launching legal action against the Government for its failure to implement age verification on pornographic websites.” It was “one of the signatories [just one of evidently several, and if The Christian Post mentioned only this one, the remainder of the lobbying signatories will have been secular – Dhay] of a letter published in The Sunday Times”.
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That’s the potted summary of the facts. So what are the Friendly Atheist ‘Alternative Facts’? Good heavens, who’d believe it, that (according to Stoneburner):
Evangelical Christians are using the courts to try to force an unwilling Parliament to pass a religiously inspired Bill (proposed legislation) to unfairly deny kiddies the access to hard porn they are fully entitled to.
That’s slightly too strongly phrased, but it’s as near as dammit what Stoneburner wrote and it’s what the Friendly Atheist Commenters on her post evidently understood her to mean.
Who’d believe that? It’s what the Friendly Atheist Commenters below evidently understood her to mean. One puzzled commenter commented that if you can’t force a Bill on the Legislature in the US, surely you can’t do that in the UK either; another, replying, agreed and hazarded it must instead be about enforcement regulations, but seems not to have grasped anything else; the rest suspended their critical faculties entirely in favour of launching their usual rants displaying mindless anti-Christian bigotry.
There is a saying that one should not put down to malice what can be put down to incompetence; but how can Stoneburner be so utterly incompetent that she has replaced every relevant fact with Friendly Atheist ‘Alternative Facts’! There’s more than incompetence involved here.
^ All God-deniers (both atheist and ‘agnostics’) are liars by their very God-denial.
One may be in honest error regarding whether Christianity, of all religions and philosophies, understands God most accurately. But, no one is in honest doubt or honest denial about whether God is (nor, for that matter, about most of Christianity’s doctrines regarding both God and man).
So, *of course* evangelical atheists are going to lie about this bill and about its supporters who are Christian.
Hemant Mehta first announced on 24 April 2020 that “A Hate Crimes Bill in Scotland Will Finally Abolish the Country’s Blasphemy Law” then on 13 May 2020 that “Scotland Inadvertently Created a New Blasphemy Law In Its Hate Crimes Bill”.
The abolition is welcome, but academic: nobody had been prosecuted for blasphemy in the last century and three quarters; it was never ever going to be used again.
https://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/2020/04/24/a-hate-crimes-bill-in-scotland-will-finally-abolish-its-blasphemy-law/
The “new blasphemy law” isn’t: what Mehta objects to is that the proposed Scottish legislation will apply equally to hate against all groups — sexist hate, ageist, disablist, racist, anti-Trans, anti-Muslim (etc), LGBTQ; the problem that Mehta has is that under the proposed legislation anti-Christian hate will be defined in the same way and punished in the same way as hate against all these other groups.
But Mehta wants an exception for anti-Christian hate, anti-Christian hate only; he wants anti-Christian hate to be treated differently in law; Mehta wants to discriminate against Christians.
Treating Christians the same as everybody else is not introducing a blasphemy law by the back door, it’s the application of the equalities and diversities principles which pervade Scottish and English law; and it’s basic fairness.
The link to the latter post:
https://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/2020/05/13/scotland-inadvertently-created-a-new-blasphemy-law-in-its-hate-crimes-bill/
More alternative facts from Hemant Mehta: in his 15 August 2020 blog post entitled “Franklin Graham, Unfazed By Trump’s COVID Deaths, Trashes Pro-Choice Democrats”, Mehta tells his readers:
Mehta’s lying. Why ever should Graham (or anyone) be “far more outraged” by 166,000 Covid-19 deaths than by (2016 statistics from Wiki, 2020 will surely be roughly the same) 623,471 deaths by abortion, abortions kill nearly four times (3.76) as many. Mehta’s being “far more outraged” by 166,000 deaths than by 623,471, and wanting his readership to be similarly “far more outraged”, reveals him to be an irrational idealogue, an outrageous propagandist, or both.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_statistics_in_the_United_States
There’s lies, damned lies, statistics, and unattached figures misused for Mehta’s propaganda purposes: while the Covid-19 death toll will undoubtedly rise, the Coronavirus is primarily killing not those with a full lifetime of healthy years left but the already old, especially the aged, those with often markedly fewer years left; it’s killing those youths and the middle-aged with underlying health problems, who already had fewer years left: in terms of reduction of years of life — a measure routinely used when assessing the value of health (and other, eg road safety) interventions — Mehta should be vastly “far more outraged” by abortion deaths than by Covid-19 deaths.
Covid-19 will sooner or later be controlled (we can hope and expect); US deaths from it annually will reduce: annual abortion deaths are continually high, year in, year out, every year. Mehta’s absurd comparison — rather, his failure to compare rationally — gets worse and worse for him as time goes on.
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And Mehta continues with greater statistical absurdities:
Hmmm, let’s see:
Mehta expresses “the same level of outrage” at a little over 200 deaths a years by police shootings (not all of which will have been by Mehta’s allegedly “corrupt” police officers) as he does over 623,471 deaths a year by abortion. And we and his readers should do the same? Get a life, Mehta, get a sense of proportion.
That’s chalk-and-cheese, I’d say. I don’t know the number currently imprisoned (alive), but that number deserves greater outrage than 600,000+ annual deaths? Get a life, Mehta, get a sense of proportion.
No, he’s focused on what’s more important. When your house is flooded setting the clock hands is a mere distraction.
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Finally there’s Mehta’s statistical claim, based on correlation equals causation, that:
Ah, an implicit — or is it explicit — claim that having a pro-choice Democratic president causes a reduction in abortions. Mehta gives no evidence or rationale for that claim (which may well be true, but why?) If I had to guess at a reason why, the obvious one is that when there when there is a pro-choice Democratic president those who are opposed to abortion become very aware that they need to be more proactive at getting stronger State-level legislation.
That’s my guess; it’s just a guess: Mehta didn’t even guess, he just insinuated without any basis in science or reason.
Another ‘Friendly Atheist Alternative Facts’ dodgy interpretation of survey statistics is provided by Beth Stoneburner’s 15 August 2020 post entitled “Survey: Pastors Say Adultery is a Forgivable Sin When Pastors Do It”.
My first comment is that it’s an unfortunate title: it implies a distinction and contrast, implies that pastors say it’s an unforgivable sin when parishioners do it; but that’s probably an unwitting, thoughtless implication, that’s probably incompetent writing, so let’s pass over that. Pass over it, that is, except to point out that taking care to compose highly sensational and eye-catching clickbait titles is evidently grist for the mill for Friendly Atheist authors, perhaps it’s not thoughtless after all.
She starts and finishes with:
Note straight away that Stoneburner is obsessed with Evangelicals; it’s all about Evangelicals. “Evangelical” is a code word to the Friendly Atheist readership, in modern parlance it’s a dog-whistle; her use of the word here, so early and late, book-ending the text, is as a trigger word for the typical reader to go into full hate-mode, it’s those utterly detestable Evangelicals being dealt with here, don’t reason, just sneer and hate.
Actually, it’s not about Evangelicals in general, nor about the pastors of Evangelical churches, it’s not about Evangelical pastors at all except insofar as they are Protestant pastors — it’s Protestant pastors in general who were surveyed **. If you look at P.8 and 9 (“Significant Statistical Differences”) of the ‘Pastors’ Views on Moral Failure’ official summary of the research you find that Evangelical pastors do not appear anywhere in the list of significantly statistically differences from the general run of Protestant pastors’ views.
Click to access Pastors-Moral-Failure.pdf
( ** That Protestant pastors in general category includes Stoneburner’s own Episcopal Church’s vicar. Yes, Stoneburner is Christian, and I judge genuinely so, though from the Janus-face she presents on Friendly Atheist it’s sometimes very hard indeed to credit that.)
And I note that The Christian Post, linked by Stoneburner and evidently used as her main source of quotations, doesn’t contain a single mention of Evangelicals. Tut tut, Stoneburner; shame on you for dog-whistling.
https://www.christianpost.com/news/most-pastors-say-committing-adultery-shouldnt-permanently-disqualify-clergy-from-ministry-survey.html
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What were their views? Says Stoneburner:
Presented with multiple-choice answers some 2% (not 0%, not none) answered that a pastor who commits adultery “does not need to withdraw” from ministry at all, though quite possibly that 2% represents those who interpreted the rather ambiguous question as the pastor having already repented (hence of course ceased) a past adultery rather than as the pastor having been caught out in the act of an adultery they would otherwise have fully intended to continue in. But 98% is close enough for me not to quibble Stoneburner’s “all”.
But I disagree with Stoneburner on rather more substantial grounds: she is totally misrepresenting the survey results. She says:
As already quoted, only 2% of Protestant pastors answered that a pastor who commits adultery “does not need to withdraw” from ministry at all; add in a further mere 6% who answered that an adulterous pastor should withdraw from public ministry for less than a year, total 8%; that leaves 92% of pastors either explicitly answering that the pastor should be excluded from public ministry for more than a year — in practice, that’s sacked and forced to try to find a position elsewhere… if the pastor can find another ministry with such a record, for whether they are hired or not will be up to the hiring church, not up to the disgraced pastor.
A total of 34% of Protestant pastors answered that a pastor who commits adultery should withdraw from public ministry for “at least a year” through to “more than ten years”. As noted above, that’s effectively sacked and with increasingly indifferent chances of finding a new post.
27% of Protestant pastors answered that a pastor who commits adultery should (voluntarily) withdraw permanently from public ministry. Again, the implication is that diligent Elders would sack that pastor anyway.
(I wonder why the question was so strangely phrased, ie in terms of what the pastors thought the pastor should do rather than what the pastors thought the church Elders should do!)
Adding those last two figures together, that’s a total of 63% of pastors who answered that an adulterous pastor should be sacked. 63% is not Stoneburner’s “all over the place”.
If there’s any justification for “all over the place”, it’s the 31% who answered “Not sure”. But look at Stoneburner’s own words:
Stoneburner realises there are ambiguities in the question posed, though she identifies just a few of those ambiguities: at one end, was the pastor’s adultery a brief one repented and given up voluntarily fifteen years ago, with fifteen years of exemplary behaviour since; at the other end, is the pastor a sexual predator, unrepentant sex pest and harasser who fully intends to continue in that vein; there’s all sorts of gradations and scenario complications in between, so the question is objectively as well defined as a fog or is subjectively (for each individual pastor) whatever ‘blot shape’ the pastor makes of it in the limited time allowed or taken for answering. The wonder is, that only 31% were not sure — but “Not sure” of what? Of the answer to give, or of the question?
What of those who would have answered, as I have above, that it’s not up to the adulterous pastor to decide their own fate — not up to the adulterous pastor whether or not they are sacked, not up to the adulterous pastor whether or not they are (with or without some “suitable” gap, whatever one of those might be) re-employed elsewhere.
As a diligent and conscientious answerer of questions (when I can), my own attitude towards stupid or ill-formed questions like this one is not even to answer them unless the questioner can clarify what the question actually is, what situation I should envisage I am responding to. Given what looks like a procrustean bed of a limited number of multiple-choice answers and (in effect) a plethora of multi-choice questions (scenarios) to pick from, I would perhaps not answer, or perhaps enumerate my objections to the ill-formed or ill-conceived question I am not sure of, or perhaps use “Not sure” as a polite fob-off.
So is that 31% “Not sure” the same as pastors being “all over the place”? Surely not. On the statistics — especially that 8% — I’d say the contrary to Stoneburner, that adultery is very definitely, very clearly, very much a dealbreaker for most pastors.
Which Stoneburner should have realised and acknowledged. But she’s crap at statistics, crap at reasoning her way out of a paper bag, and well practiced at anti-Christian propaganda.
Dhay: “Mehta’s lying.”
You could have knocked me over with a feather!
exempli gratia: “… the 166,000 Americans dead from COVID in large part due to Donald Trump‘s negligence of the virus..”
1) that 166,000 number is itself a lie — and *everyone* knows that it is a lie;
2) Trump has done all that he has the legal authority to do; moreover, it is, in fact, Democratic governors and “deep state” bureaucrats who have *intentionally* caused the Covid-1984 deaths of multiple thousands of the most susceptible of persons.
“Mehta’s being “far more outraged” by [allegedly] 166,000 deaths [only some of which were preventible] than by 623,471 [deliberate murders], and wanting his readership to be similarly “far more outraged”, reveals him to be an irrational idealogue, an outrageous propagandist, or both.”
This is one of those instances were there is no contradiction in “both”.
“… adultery — supposedly one of those unforgivable sins in the conservative Christian world —”
*Who* supposes this? Hell! We recognize that even abortionists can be forgiven, if they repent and turn away from their sin.
Mehta: “As we’ve said repeatedly, when pro-choice Democrats are president, the abortion rates go down.”
It seems that the abortionists don’t agree:
Guttmacher Institute: “Trends in U.S. abortion rate, 1973-2014” —
According to the graph from the Guttmacher Institute, the rate of abortions per 1000 women peaked at 29.3 in 1991, and has been on a downward trajectory since, declining to 14.6 per 1000 in 2014.
1991 was, you may recall, the first year of Reagan’s administration.
According to the graph, the rate leveled off during the last couple of years of Reagan’s term and the first year of Bush 41’s term, with a steeper downward trajectory from 1990 on.
In the first two years of the Clinton administration (1993; 1994), the downward trajectory became even steeper — I recall “the news” later giving Clinton credit for this, and I suspect that this is the “fact” underlying Mehta’s assertion — before leveling off for a year, after which the downward trajectory resumed, albeit not quite so steep.
The downward trajectory continued during Bush 43’s term, but leveled off in the last couple of years.
Then, during Obama’s alleged presidency, the downward trajectory steepened again, at least through 2014. Ah-hah! Another “fact” for Mehta’s silly assertion.
You mean 1981, the first year of Reagan’s administration.
Yes, I did.
Hemant Mehta’s 31 August 2020 blog post entitled “Researchers Say Atheists Are Better Sleepers Than Catholics and Baptists” has the one-line summary “It’s easier to fall asleep when you’re not worried about Hell”.
https://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/2020/08/
His post is a bit of fluff, as is the original paper. I was originally inclined to ignore it — there’s so much like it — until I saw PZ Myers’ 12 September 2020 post entitled “The sleep of the innocent” takes the piss out of the paper because:
And:
More should have jumped out at Myers: on average — and this survey deals with averages — atheists tend to be younger than Christians, hence presumably more likely to have more time to themselves before bed (or an earlier bedtime) and more likely to have nights undisturbed by the infant who wants feeding at 0500 then wants to watch Peppa Pig or play, more likely to have schoolchildren who have to be got up and fed before (or after) the adults can tend to themselves.
Then there’s that self-declared atheists (as contrasted with woolly ‘Nones’ — where are the ‘Nones’ in this?) are predominantly White and male, and above-average affluent: so when the paper says, “The effects persisted when controlling for age and were particularly evident in members of African American congregations”, you know that the researchers were not comparing like with like.
Mehta does realise the paper (and his own reporting of it likewise) is fluff:
Mehta knows it’s fluff, it’s mere correlation with “countless factors” rather than with main denominations and atheism, so why publish this post? Presumably it’s for the bottom line, where Mehta (leading Mehta’s Morons?) indulges his political fantasies:
Dream on, Mehta.
“Trump, Pandering to Crowd, Says the Only Person More Famous Than Him is Jesus”is a blog post headline of Hemant Mehta on 15 October 2020; and in the body he says:
As quoted by Mehta, Trump says that Jesus is more famous than Trump. Trump says nothing about being second most famous. Trump says nothing about whether or not there are others more famous than Trump. And Trump says nothing about coming a close second to Jesus, indeed he says “And it’s not even close.”
Mehta’s saying Trump says he is “the second most famous person in the world” and that he “was only the second most famous person in the world because Jesus edged him out” is so obviously wrong from even the most cursory examination of the text that I can but assume that Mehta’s not innocently mistaken, Mehta’s lying.
Blatantly lying.
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And in the echo chamber that is the Comments, of the 155 comments so far, not one has called Mehta out for his lying/distortion/spin or even drawn attention to his inaccuracy.
I see — bar chart, Page 6 of a recent survey of ‘secular voters’ that Mehta recently drew attention to and approves of — that 35% of atheists, that’s more than a third of them, describe themselves as a “bright”. I suppose very dim is a level of brightness.
And I see that 42% of atheists describe themselves as a “skeptic”. What sort of skeptic is oblivious to such obvious crap as Mehta here presents? Ah, Mehta’s commenters will be not skeptics but pseudoskeptics.
https://secularvoices2020.socioanalitica.com/
In his 02 December 2020 blog post entitled “Southern Baptist Leaders: Critical Race Theory is “Incompatible” With Our Faith””, Hemant Mehta rails at the Southern Baptist Convention leadership for:
Here’s the relevant part of the SBC statement, which contra Mehta doesn’t say, weakly, merely that “racism is bad”, it unambiguously condemns “racism in any form”:
Yep, Mehta has presented yet another ‘Friendly Atheist Alternative Fact’
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Then there’s Mehta’s “but” (another ‘Friendly Atheist Alternative Fact’, where the SBC has “and”: contra Mehta, the SBC is not tacitly or otherwise condoning racism — the SBC explicitly condemns racism in any form — the SBC condemns racism and also condemns “Critical Race Theory, Intersectionality, and any version of Critical Theory”.
But for Mehta, condemning Critical Race Theory is in itself racist; he rails against the SBC for that alleged racism. Even an outspoken proponent of Black Lives Matter gets railed at:
Nor will I elaborate. But I will quote others’ words in support of the thesis that Critical Race Theory (etc) can be, should be, and is condemned:
** I’ll start with Jerry Coyne, who quotes and “owns” the words and views of Heather Heying:
https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2017/10/03/more-on-evergreen-state-disruptive-students-actually-gets-punished-and-heather-heying-writes-about-the-lefts-anti-science-stand/
** Kemi Badenoch provides the second quote; she’s the UK Government’s ‘Women and Equalities’ Minister, she’s a Black woman, and she’s fired up — play the opening video of her address to Parliament in October 2020 to hear her words in full and hear how she says them:
*
“Critical Race Theory, Intersectionality, and any version of Critical Theory” ain’t the Gospel, they are “contested political ideas”: why ever should the SBC support them; especially, why ever should the Southern Baptist Convention preach “contested political ideas”.
^ Because any organization which doesn’t *actively* police itself and remove leftist/SJW infiltrators will eventually be subverted by them.
Over in the “Atheist Activists Mourn Murderer’s Death” thread, Michael’s OP opines of a Hemant Mehta post’s treatment of the story of atheist activist’s murder of his wife and mourning his subsequent suicide:
We can. And we can be sure that whenever there is a whiff of a possibility that a violent murderer is or might be an atheist, or that the murderer was anti-religiously motivated, Hemant Mehta will be straight in there, quick, posting pre-emptive denials on his blog. So when I saw a BBC news article about a 37 year old man in a Californian hospital Covid ward, who had struck the 82 year old man who was his his room-mate, had hit him with an oxygen cylinder and killed him because “The suspect became upset when the victim started to pray” [says the Police press release], it was an odds-on certainty that Mehta would post one of his pre-emptive denials; and the only surprise in my mind is that Mehta wasn’t quicker to respond.
The victim was 82, so probably getting frail; Covid-19 hits men of that age very hard, so we can probably safely assume he was very frail and unable to defend himself against a younger man’s attack, even against a mere slap or punch let alone against a deadly assault by a much younger man using an oxygen cylinder as a heavy weapon. The assailant had other options, options including complaints to staff and management, but instead chose the nuclear option of launching a violent attack, an attack which had inflicting grievous bodily harm as one end of the spectrum of probable results, and murder at the other.
The assailant, Jesse Martinez, won’t himself have been in a frail state: the murderous attack was on 17 December 2020, he’s recovered from his own Covid-19 quickly enough that he’s fit and due to appear in court on the 28th, and I strongly suspect that but for Christmas it would have been scheduled sooner.
In his 25 December 2020 post entitled “COVID Patient Killed By Hospital Roommate Who Was Angered by His Prayers” Mehta refers to the killing as being for:
Um, I think he’s already explained it, he’s already made sense of it, he’s done so in the post’s title.
He continues:
This is PR-speak: Mehta says it’s “unbearable”, so what’s he going to do about that; yep, thought so. Next Mehta says the victim “wasn’t bothering anyone”: plainly the killer was very bothered indeed. Finally, I’ll be generous to Mehta and presume he would have found the old guy’s not dying at all would have been the best possibility.
Hemant Mehta’s 29 December 2020 “State Dept.: 1,000 Pakistani Girls Are “Forcibly Converted to Islam Each Year”” borrows its title from its Washington Post source article and is factually accurate — sort of.
The Washington Post has (had?) a reputation as a serious newspaper, so it’s startling to discover it has resorted to misleading clickbait titles for its articles. (It most certainly isn’t a surprise to see Friendly Atheist doing so.)
Why is the title misleading clickbait? It’s because of the various crimes reported in the article (and in turn quoted by Mehta), namely paedophilia, rape, kidnapping, selling your own family’s girl children for a profit or to repay debt, abuse of power and wealth, death threats and underage “marriage” contrary to Pakistan’s law — of (or despite) these more important issues the headline issue getting the emphasis is that en route to their rape by paedophiles the girls (who are predominantly from the minority Hindu, Christian, and Sikh religious communities) were first forcibly “converted” to Islam in order to “marry” them off to Muslims.
That’s like writing a report on cross-border human trafficking for modern slavery or for prostitution but putting your emphasis on the heinous violations of border controls that got them there. Yes, it may be or is true, but it stares past the important points to a much lesser point.
And thus it misleads, it’s another example of ‘Friendly Atheist Alternative Facts’.
https://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/2020/12/29/state-dept-1000-pakistani-girls-are-forcibly-converted-to-islam-each-year/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/each-year-1000-pakistani-girls-forcibly-converted-to-islam/2020/12/28/49b4280e-496d-11eb-97b6-4eb9f72ff46b_story.html
In her 01 January 2021 Friendly Atheist blog post entitled “In Symbolic Proclamation, Trump Says “a Nation Without Faith Cannot Endure”” the serially clueless Beth Stoneburner confidently declares (of Christian martyr Thomas Becket‘s murder):
Granted, it wasn’t good to be an Albigensian in Southern France at roughly that time, but solidly Roman Catholic England?!
As a professed good Episcopalian Church member, perhaps Stoneburner should be rather more aware of the origins of her denomination in the Anglican Church established centuries later as the Reformation spread to Tudor England. It’s not until the Tudor period that, in England, “one’s life could be at stake depending on which type of Christianity he professed”.
(No, she’s not making reference to the Spanish Inquisition, which was a) Spanish and b) also multiple centuries later — not that I’d put it past her to make that blunder.)
[Originally mis-posted into the wrong thread. My apologies.]
As the punchline of her 19 January 2021 Friendly Atheist blog post entitled “Catholic Priest Apologizes to Church for Not Speaking Out Enough Against Trump” the nominally Christian but ignorant Beth Stoneburner tells her readers:
There’s partial truths there, and whopping howlers. The first partial truth is that in Honour-Shame cultures such as was found in the Ancient Near East and is found today in huge areas of the modern East and Near-East community was/is indeed emphasised over individuality; that’s epitomised by “Honour Killings”. The second partial truth is that before Ezekiel declared otherwise, sins were collective, offences against the collective Old Covenant.
The howler is her “In biblical times, there was no concept of “individual sins.”” — Really? Which “Biblical times” might that be, exactly? Certainly not “Biblical times” in general.
And in her “One person’s sins affect all.” — Really? Perhaps she should read the explicit denial in Ezekiel 18:
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ezekiel%2018&version=ESV
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I reflect that a lot of clueless atheists started out as (equally clueless) Christians. Perhaps Stoneburner is demonstrating the evolution in progress.
That she invokes the “No True Scotsman fallacy” fallacy is a give-away that she is quite … evolved.
Maybe next, she could address her wisdom toward what she expects will be (*) God’s judgment a nation which murders hundreds of thousands of babies every year.
(*) *is* judging even now, I believe
In his 20 January 2021 “Franklin Graham Falsely Claims Christians Weren’t Involved in the Capitol Siege”, Hemant Mehta provides evidence that Christians were involved by embedding a New Yorker video which, at 7:55 through to 9:20 shows the colourful Jake Angeli (born Jacob Anthony Angeli Chansley), known as “QAnon Shaman”, leading impromptu prayer:
Evidently Mehta didn’t listen to that prayer, or perhaps his knowledge of Christian theology and practice is abysmal. Here’s a couple of fragments from Angeli’s somewhat rambling prayer:
I cannot imagine that Franklin Graham would consider references to “white light” to be any part of Christian worship; nor would I: visualising a “white light of love and protection, peace and harmony” is part of New Age esoteric mumbo-jumbo, New Age thinking. I have been around New Agers long enough to recognise the “white light of…” notion as characteristically New Age. On the other hand, I have never ever heard a minister pray or preach Angeli’s “white light of…”, nor do I find the notion in the Bible.
So what’s going on? The clue is in that “QAnon Shaman”: as he told the Washington Post aterwards, he’s not just called a shaman, he actually is a shaman:
Ley lines, quantum realm, tinfoil-hatting, and “a spiritual path that led him from Catholicism to a mix of pagan and New Age-like religious beliefs”: whatever those listening to and Amen-ing Angeli’s prayer might have been, Christian Angeli ain’t.
Dhay, shame on you for applying evidence and reason to the matter.
I see the lawyer representing Jacob Chansley (aka Jake Angeli) describes him:
Meditation. He doesn’t seem the type to be practicing the “contemplation” practiced by Trappist monks, so that’ll be the Eastern religious variety of meditation, typically Buddhist or Hindu.
In his 05 February 2021 post entitled “A Humanist Leader Is Stepping Down and Hoping a Person of Color Will Replace Him” Hemant Mehta tells readers:
and:
No, the humanist/atheist community doesn’t always, does it.
Mehta himself would have us believe he is a voice for reason, he “claims that word”, though it’s evident that he is primarily a voice for propaganda; and that in many of his posts — see the responses above for the pointing out of just a very few of oh-so-many — he certainly doesn’t deserve to be acknowledged as a “voice for reason”, he cannot “claim that word”, he most certainly and very frequently “doesn’t always deserve it”.
In Hemant Mehta’s 19 February 2021 post entitled “FOX News Anchor: Cancel Culture is “Gonna Come After Bible Characters Next”” the discussion the news anchor commented in was about the pros and cons of removing statues; Mehta tells his readers:
Quite what Hemmer meant or might have meant by that escapes me, but it’s clear Mehta interpreted Hemmer as referring to statues of Biblical characters:
Starting at the beginning, statues of major OT prophets such as Moses, Elijah and Elisha (I took these three to probably be representative of major Biblical figures) are a) few and scattered worldwide, and b) tend to be on religious buildings or in the grounds of religious buildings: they are not civic monuments that can be “cancelled” by civic authorities. (Nor are the occasional arty artworks.) Mehta thus reveals himself to be ignorant.
Where Mehta shows himself particularly ignorant is his supposition that there exist, his supposition that there even might exist, “statues of God”.
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Mehta is plainly utterly clueless about the Abrahamic religions, but surely one or more of his Commenters must have realised there are no statues of God, and why that is? No, they too are plainly utterly clueless: I trawled down several pages of comments then gave up, it’s just mindless know-nothing drivel.
While using the Friendly Atheist’s ‘Search’ facility to discover how often Mehta and his guest writers make reference to Christian “hate” — so far in 2021 they are averaging once a week — I came across his 31 January 2020 “Christian Hater Condemns Group for Blocking Military Dogs from Going to Heaven”, said Group being the Military Religious Freedom Foundation.
Er, do dogs go to Heaven? Christian philosopher Edward Feser says “No”, so I think I can safely say that whether dogs go to Heaven is at best contentious. So the idea of said Christian Hater that the MRFF seeks to deny dogs access to God…:
…is questionable from a Christian standpoint as well as the MRFF’s.
Weinstein blew a fuse:
Mehta’s comment on that (and post end-punchline) is:
Er, yes, you can indeed argue with that: the worst dog is a child-killer; I’ve been bitten by a Jack Russell simply for casually jogging past — I’ve never been bitten by a human — which near-triviality alone refutes Weinstein’s absurd claim (and Mehta’s, since he plainly owns both the claims); stepping up to the definitely non-trivial refutation, you don’t wait long between news reports of yet another Doberman, Rottweiler, Staffordshire Terrier or other breed of dog savaging a child, often maiming, often killing.
What planet do Weinstein and Mehta inhabit?
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Mehta seems to call “hater” and “hate” (and sometimes synonyms such as “venomous” and “venom”, etc) whenever someone whenever someone expresses strong opinions or strong feelings. His habitual targets are Christians, so it’s preceded, explicitly or by context, with “Christian” — “Christian hater”, “Christian hate” etc.
I observe that by Mehta’s standard SJW activists and the “Woke” would also count as “haters” and their speech “hate”.
Likewise PZ Myers, Sam Harris, David Silverman, Michael Sherlock, John Richards, Richard Dawkins and all the other vehement anti-theists.
Not forgetting, of course, that by Mehta’s standard Mehta himself would count as a “hater” and his speech as “hate speech.”
Tsk, tsk, tsk, *rolls eyes* It’s different when we do it.
So, basically, they hate human beings. No surprise to me. I’m sure they’d deny it if you put it that way to them, and it might be mildly entertaining to see how they weasel their way out of that obvious implication.
The US far right is too alien to my British sensibilities for me to comment on the Friendly Atheist’s 22 March 2021 “A Montana Church Will Host a Right-Wing Militia Group Opposing “Mask Fascism”, but one phrase caught my eye in passing:
Antifa has a president? Astonished, I immediately Googled to find out who this person might be, and got the expected answer: there isn’t one.
The post author, Beth Stoneburner, continues to live down to utter ignorance and bullshit.
Dhay: “The US far right is too alien to my British sensibilities for me to comment …”
Do you mean *actual* “far-right” Americans — such as myself — are too alien for you to understand? Or do you mean that the sub-set(s) of leftists whom the other leftists *call* “far-right” are too alien for you to understand?
I’ll try to make understanding actual “far-right” Americans easier for you — the underlying desire of “far-right” Americans is to be left the Hell alone, Everything follows from that: limited government within carefully defined/enumerated authorities, free markets, a stable body of law, etc.
All it takes to be labeled “far right” by nutjob progressives (redundant I know) is to utter support for the concept of free speech. Oh, and it makes you a racist too.
In Hemant Mehta’s 12 April 2021 “Richard Dawkins is Still Denying the Basic Humanity of Trans People” he emphasises the message of his title by repeating it in his first line, and later in the body:
Dawkins nowhere in the tweet, nor has he elsewhere so far as I know, claimed or suggested that trans-people are not human.
(And for completeness regarding the relevant meanings of “humanity”, I’ll point out that Dawkins similarly hasn’t claimed or suggested that trans-people are not ordinarily nice, empathetic people who eg volunteer for charity work.)
That is, “Richard Dawkins is Still Denying [or questioning] the Basic Humanity of Trans People” is yet another Friendly Atheist alternative fact. It’s so alternative, it looks very like an outright lie.
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Mehta finishes with his own metaphorical question; it functions as a demand that the CFI should do something about Dawkins and his tweet, presumably one or more of: disown the tweet; bully Dawkins into deleting the tweet; disown Dawkins, perhaps even sack him from the CFI’s Board — though I’ll bet the agreement covering the merging of Dawkins’ RDF into the CFI doesn’t allow his sacking: —
If the CFI do anything — are they responsible to a blogger?! — it arguably could and should affirm the biological science — as both Dawkins and Jerry Coyne (below) have done.
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On Saturday 10 April 2021 Dawkins tweeted about trans-women not being biological women (etc) — and Mehta reacted furiously; on Sunday 11 April Jerry Coyne’s blog post, “The Skeptic magazine is skeptical about two sexes in humans; a clear thinker sets them straight”, said the same at length — and from Mehta, silence.
Coyne starts:
That’s much stronger than Dawkins’ tweet put it. And this is but a part of a much longer post.
I suppose Dawkins, without a blog on which to give an argued and lengthy slap back at Mehta, is an easy target. Mehta’s gone for the easy target and ignored the harder target, the one able to fight back.
Looks like hypocrisy to me, looks like Mehta will punch down but not punch up.
Jerry Coyne has now slapped back at Hemant Mehta (see previous response) on Richard Dawkins’ behalf, in his 13 April 2021blog post entitled “The Friendly Atheist is not so friendly, damns Richard Dawkins as “transphobic” for comparing transexualism with transracialism”.
Jolly good fun!
It probably never once occurred to Dawkins that his own god of scientific rationalism (as he sees it) would in turn be cast aside by humanity as soon as its teachings became inconvenient for the pursuit of their basest desires.
^ I would say that he didn’t think through the logic of his “scientific rationalism” (i.e. repackaged ‘logical positivism’, which is to say, mere scientism).
What I mean is, the point of his “scientific rationalism” was to cast aside actual morality, especially with regard to sexual activity and the natural result of sexual activity, the conception of new persons, and consequently to disregard actual human nature. Thus, in his scheme, to expect sexual fidelity of one another is absurd; to classify sexual infidelity as “cheating” is meaningless (Hell! even the terms ‘fidelity’ and ‘infidelity’ are meaningless); and to be jealous of someone “cheating” on one is both “primative” and “immoral”; and an inconveniet conception can be killed without consequence.
That is, he didn’t think through the logical entailments of turning reality on its head — he wants stop *here*, but did not consider that after denying reality, he has no principle by which to say, “This far, and no further”.
Indeed. Dawkins wanted to keep the moral principles that were “obvious” to him and didn’t interfere with his chosen lifestyle, but was happy to do away with the only ontological basis for their existence.
Is there any idea more dangerous to humanity than the notion that we’re all just basically good and don’t need any higher authority to guide our moral decisions?
^ Probably not, considering that, since the French Revolution, that notion has lead directly to the deaths of hundreds of millions of people at the hands of leftists of various stripes.
When they are not simply psychopaths, as Stalin, leftists start from the presupposition that human beings are inherently good (and, as night follows day, they they themselves are Good). From there, logic dictates that: since people are inherently good, yet social conditions are bad (and even Bad, when they’re really on a binge) and people constantly do things that are not-good, that therefore the cause of all this badness (and Badness) is something external to human beings, in general, and themselves, in particular. Thus, if they can only identify-and-eliminate the cause of all this Badness, they can create Heaven, God not needed. At the same time, even though human beings are inherently good, the one who oppose their schemes — or who simply become inconvenient — are inherently bad (and even Bad) … thus, *they* are the external cause of all the Badness that our leftist is battling, and so they must be destroyed.
In his 10 May 2021 “Georgia Churches Tried Recruiting Public School Kids Using Donated Backpacks” (with Bibles etc in) Hemant Mehta tells us:
Evidently FFrF staff attorney Chris Line is a clueless and ignorant atheist: Muslims have mosques.
^ Oddly enough, I don’t recall the Freedom From [the Christian] Religion Foundation ever once raising any objection to American school children being indoctrinated about how wonderful Islam is, compared to Christianity, much less being forced to recite the Islamic Shahada.
example 1: https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2019/feb/16/student-loses-her-appeal-over-islam-his/
example 2: https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/lawsuit-public-school-forced-my-child-to-convert-to-islam
==”a Muslim church.“==
“Evidently FFrF staff attorney Chris Line is a clueless and ignorant atheist: Muslims have mosques.”
When I was in college, way back when the original TSR-80 was cutting edge personal computing, I applied for a job at a start-up computer store. The two dudes (*) were concerned about my religiosity … because they had once had an employee who used to get down on the floor and play in the middle of the work day.
They didn’t hire me … and I didn’t mind at all (who wants to be around such ignorant people?). Nor did I whine about “religious discrimination” from God-deniers, even though I clearly was discriminated against … for Christianity … on the basis of Islam.
(*) Who seemed to me to be ‘atheists’ of more recent Jewish extraction than I.
More ‘Friendly Atheist Alternative Facts’, this time from Beth Stoneburner in her 21 May 2021 “Judge: California Owes Church $1.35 Million in Case Involving COVID Restrictions”, the Home Page subtitle of which is “”Christian Persecution” is a lucrative grift. [Read more]”
Hmmm, “to grift” means “to swindle” or “to defraud”; and as Merriam-Webster reports:
So what was involved in this allegedly lucrative alleged swindle? Stoneburner tells her readers:
But no, there was indeed “persecution at play” (as Stoneburner phrased it; in practice it was unlawful unequal treatment of the religious and the secular.) We can know this because no less an authority than the US Supreme Court ruled that churches must not be held to a different standard than is applied in secular buildings:
The case was referred back to the original judge, whose subsequent order in the churches’ favour declared (she quotes, and links to, the Christian Post):
Sounds perfectly reasonable to me. When I reflect that Friendly Atheist authors repeatedly and emphatically plead how essential it is that the religious and the secular should have equal treatment under the law for eg their Christmas manger displays and atheist anti-Christian displays alongside (or a Ten Commandments monument and a Satanic Baphomet), I smell hypocrisy when Stoneburner bewails that the same standard, the same legal requirement, applies to all.
There’s no higher court in the land than the US Supreme Court, which delivers judgments after careful consideration of the legal arguments (in full) and of the relevant constitutional principles – despite which Stoneburner has appointed herself a higher level judge in a higher level court than that of the Supreme Court Justices; and in her arrogance she passes summary judgment on them, the two sides’ legal arguments unheard, unread:
As is well known, every guy in a pub is expertly qualified to decide the solution to all the world’s problems and to judge and (usually) condemn those with the actual authority and duty to deal with them. Stoneburner skips the step – at least, I presume she does – of first getting tipsy.
But let’s get back to the “lucrative grift” allegation:
Actually, no. That $1.35 million is not “extra”, nor is it going into any church leader’s bank account. It’s reimbursement of costs and legal expenses actually incurred by the churches involved in the case, as assessed and approved by the District Court judge as the accurately totalled and reasonable costs and expenses; it’s not profit, even, still less the grift, swindle or fraud that Stoneburner alleges, it restores to the church’s bank account what the Governor’s unlawful – that’s unlawful, UNLAWFUL – emergency order forced the church to expend to get judgment that the order was unlawful; it restores the bank account to what it used to be; it restores to congregations their donations.
Would Stoneburner have the victim financially penalised instead of the victimiser? That should of course be a merely rhetorical question, a “No”; but for Friendly Atheist author Stoneburner, her need to generate clicks and revenue by peddling ‘Friendly Atheist Alternative Facts’, by her wobbly-fit public display of outrage at not getting the anti-Christian results atheist reader prejudice demands, and her disregard for, even contempt for, the law of the land and for the US Supreme Court and its Justices – I rather think Stoneburner would, indeed would much prefer to penalise the legally innocent victim (the church) rather than the victimising law-breaker.
More Friendly Atheist alternative facts, in his 16 May 2021 “This Furniture Store Hides a Cross in Each Piece to Spread Jesus Everywhere.” Well, no, not everywhere, Mehta’s evidently got critical thinking difficulties, even in the title. It gets rapidly worse:
Now read that again – despite it being completely harmless, and well-intentioned, Mehta nonetheless finds it troubling, indeed deeply troubling. Hmmm. What I see here is paranoia, or oh-so-faux outrage, or a need to feed his peanut gallery any old crap that can keep the clicks revenue coming in.
Ah, no. John 3:16 says: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life”; the cross has a very traditional, very, very positive significance; Mehta’s jibe signifies that he has comprehension difficulties, hence cannot acknowledge that significance and its positivity, else it signifies he has a mindless hatred, hence will not.
The cross might end up in the home of a non-Christian customer. Panic! It might even end up in the home of a militant atheist like Mehta and his readers, who by the sound of it would treat it like a Satanic sigil and nasty curse. Panic! Panic! Except she explicitly states she does it as a blessing, and Mehta’s linked news source she relates that it has been gratefully received as such.
One would expect a Muslim or atheist to simply discard an unwanted cross, with at most (in the latter case) mild contempt, no alarums or tantrums. Why ever should a rational person take offence and treat it as a curse?
Clueless and misleading! So far as I can tell there’s never been an Islamic equivalent of the cross. There doesn’t even seem to be an Islamic symbol. (No, not even the crescent moon, which is Turkish rather than Islamic.)
I rather think Mehta’s parting words undermine his whole very stupid and very petty case; I rest mine.
Honestly, these people behave like vampires.
I verified: this is the opening line of the Friendly Atheist article Dhay mentioned. The definition of “phobia” is “an extreme or irrational fear of or aversion to something.” This could hardly be a more textbook-ideal example of the concept. He recognises that the phenomenon in question is completely harmless and well-intentioned, but still has an extreme aversion to it for no rational reason.
Confessions of a Christophobe.
A thought of mine, not fully explored: whether militant atheism (ie anti-theism) is a variety of phobia.
Perhaps — parodying Peter Boghossian’s keenness to make religiosity a medically recognised and medically treated DSM pathological condition — perhaps anti-theism should be added to the DSM, so that appropriate medical treatments could then be ethically researched and applied.
Applied to Hemant Mehta, applied to Peter Boghossian, applied to [insert long list here.]
Not reporting an ‘alternative fact’ this time, but pointing out similarities between Right Wing Watch and Friendly Atheist; here’s Not the Bee deprecating the former:
Hemant Mehta, likewise, searches the web for video clips, commentaries, speeches, or sermons of some of the most obscure figures on the religious right to supposedly depict just how kooky and dangerous Christian evangelicalism is; the meanderings of “Prophet” Robin Bullock (who nobody in their right mind who would base their understanding of modern Christianity off of) has featured in Friendly Atheist posts fourteen times since November last, and that’s but a fraction of the number of “Prophet” and “Prophetess” posts, to which can be added endless “Hate-Pastor” and “Hate-Preacher” posts; post the shocking clickbait posts, paint with broad strokes meant to incite outrage, and demand
“action”— no, just clicks and Patreon donations, it’s too extreme a blog to attract moderates, moderate people will I am sure quickly tire of the asinine posts and lack of intellectual content; in practical terms it’s a failure, it’s just going to continue to preach to its existing peanut-gallery and go nowhere.Yes, there’s a lot of similarities.
In his 23 August 2021, “Research Shows a Rise in the Public Acceptance of Evolution Over the Last Decade”, Hemant Mehta tells his readers:
Alerted by Mehta’s claim of “more than 34 countries”, ie at least 35, I counted them: 34. Mehta’s ambiguous “more than 34” is precisely false.
The significance is not that Mehta has made a glaring numerical error — he hasn’t, the error’s upwards of just 3%: the significance is that Mehta is (i observe) so accustomed to lie, distort and mislead, he does it even in a smallest of details.
Where he doesn’t have to, where there’s no point, where it couldn’t possibly matter, Mehta’s instinct to lie, distort and mislead appears to kick in knee-jerk automatically.
In his 18 September 2021 blog post entitled, “A Pro-Trump Billboard with a Bible Verse Didn’t Even Get the Bible Verse Right”, Hemant Mehta rightly criticises said billboard and the two Bible verses it quotes or refers to (both of which are non-sequiteurs); as had :
So far, so good, though it’s easy to look bare-minimum knowledgeable when his source, Religion News Service, gave it to him on a plate. But Mehta adds this <Friendly Atheist Alternative Fact:
Presumably Mehta is implying to his dumbed-down readership that Isaiah 9:5 is a horrible verse about violence and arson. It would have to be his ignorant peanut gallery readership he’s insinuating “Very pleasant” (ie not pleasant at all!) to, because any Christian will recognise this is a verse in a very joyful passage that’s commonly read in Advent; and any Christian will also recognise that the garbled language is that of the KJV — basically, it’s Shakespeare’s archaic English, except, for pompous effect, deliberately written in the yet more archaic language of a generation or three previous to Shakespeare.
I looked to see what Isaiah 9:5 says in modern translation, and found that…
The message of Isaiah 9:5 in this translation, as in every translation except the KJV — or if you have the skill of reading Tudor English correctly, it is the message conveyed even by the KJV — the message is, that coming the Prince of Peace shall bring an end to war: the boots warriors tramp in, and the bloodstained clothing they fight in, shall be destroyed; and gone.
Only the KJV gives even the semblance of possibility of reading Isaiah 9:5 as unpleasant; there’s no reason why anyone should use the KJV translation (and to use the KJV version to pull the wool over readers’ eyes that it’s a verse with an unpleasant meaning) — except to mislead and deceive.
Mehta is (I once again observe) so accustomed to lie, distort and mislead, that even in trivialities where he doesn’t have to, where there’s no point, where it couldn’t possibly matter, Mehta’s instinct to lie, distort and mislead kicks in knee-jerk automatically.
In his 02 November 2021 “Survey: Most White Evangelicals Wish America Was a Christian-Only Bubble” Hemant Mehta deprecates that (using the words of the PRRI survey original rather than the blog text):
Given the ‘Great Commission’ (Matthew 28:19), “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,…” it would be astonishing were White Evangelicals not to prefer a strongly Christian America, indeed a 100% Christian world.
The wonder is that other Christians are in comparison very lukewarm; perhaps it’s the wooliness of the question, which lends itself to alternative interpretations.
Though Mehta is unhesitating in interpreting the White Evangelical answer to this ‘What’s your preference’ question as wanting intolerance and coercion.
https://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/2021/11/02/survey-most-white-evangelicals-wish-america-was-a-christian-only-bubble/
Well, in Mehta’s defense, one can see why he regards “White evangelical Protestants” as such a personal threat — we want to convert him; we want him to admit to and repent of his sin. Whereas some others, Moslems, say, who take Islam seriously, only want to kill him.
“No wonder Satanism is so damn appealing to people these days; look at the crazy alternative, says Hemant Mehta in his 14 November 2021 “MAGA Cultist Michael Flynn: In the United States, “We Have to Have One Religion””.
I’ll not comment on Flynn’s claim, but on that line of Mehta’s:
Mehta doesn’t specify what he means by “the crazy alternative”, he leaves it to his readers to fill in the gap, and from the context of the post I take it it’s White Evangelicalism that he has in mind.
However, I note that for someone who might find Satanism appealing, White Evangelicalism is not remotely an alternative to Satanism. No potential Satanist would give White Evangelicalism more than a glance, shudder and diatribe.
The obvious alternative to Satanism — especially to the numerically dominant The Satanic Temple variety — is atheism, though knowing the TST’s predominantly LGBTQ+ membership composition, cisheteronormatism might well run it a close second. Mehta seems to think one of those two, cisheteronormatism or atheism, is “crazy.”
That Mehta is not the brightest light on the street and that he gets muddled in his thinking and his expression, must be well known to readers of his posts. I just thought I would document it here.
At various times when I was a kid — 50+ years ago — my family attended *both* an evangelical church whose members were mostly black and one whose members were mostly white. I don’t recall anyone at either church being very concerned with people’s races.