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If you haven’t seen it, Daniel Fincke over at Camels with Hammers is hosting the first ever Patheos Atheist Blog Carnival, with a round up of the best in the months blogging from the Atheist portal at Patheos. It’s a chance to find out what the atheist bloggers that you don’t ordinarily read are up to.
Go give it a look see and let him know what you think. If this goes over well it will hopefully be a regular occurrence.
Dr. Monica Stevens, assistant professor of geography at Humboldt State University in California, has turned her academic focus in an interesting direction. Working with a team of undergrads, Dr. Stevens has sorted through over 150,000 tweets containing racial or sexual slurs and produced a map of America showing the distribution of their origin.
The result is a “hate map” that shows which areas of the United States produced the most tweets, which can be filtered for various types of slur. Here’s New York’s distribution of tweets containing homophobic slurs:
Dr. Stevens explained the purpose of this map to a New York channel:
“So these are just looking at where the tweets are that are most hateful and hurtful. These are the communities where we see gay kids really struggling and needing projects like the ‘It Gets Better’ project,” said Dr. Monica Stephens from Humboldt State University.
Stephens says what makes her research special is that her team actually read every tweet to determine whether it was meant in a negative or positive way. Stephens says places that have high frequencies of hateful tweets, such as Lake Placid, Saranac Lake and Massena, should use this as a wake-up call.
Those three cities are in the Adirondack region, or the upper right of the image. More interesting to me is the large red dot between Buffalo and Rochester. Anybody know what’s going on in the Lockport/Medina region?
The full map is available here.
Dr. Stevens contributes to the blog Floating Sheep, and the process is explained there.
Kent Hovind’s PhD thesis is circulating again, thanks to wikileaks and blogs like Leaving Fundamentalism. This thesis for a doctorate in Philosophy of Christian Education was submitted to Dr. Wayne Knight of Patriot Bible University, pictured right.
It’s bad.
Oy.
Folks like Adam Benton have been picking out favorite quotes. It’s hard to know where to stop with a thesis that begins “Hello, my name is Kent Hovind. I am a creation/science evangelist. I live in Pensacola, Florida.”
What’s interesting is that Hovind seems to believe that evolution has always been with us. It’s basically a religion, started by Satan – literally – that has spread around the world and influenced nearly all non-monotheistic religions. I think he gets this from Henry Morris’ The Long War Against God, which basically makes that claim. Anyway, as evidence – or just to fill pages – Hovind goes through world history and world religion to classify ideas as godly or evolutionary.
And of course the whole thing is written like Hovind was talking to school children. We get sections like this: “Aristotle was the tutor to a man named Alexander the Great. Alexander the Great was the leader of the Greek Empire of the Third Century B.C. He spread the teachings of Aristotle all around his empire.”
Can you say “Hellenization” boys and girls? Good, have a candy.
Or consider this section:
The five major Eastern religions that developed during this time were Hinduism, Confucianism, Zoroasterism, Buddhism, and Taoism. Because of the atheistic and pantheistic philosophies of these religions, and the lack of importance placed on God, the entrance of communism into these countries was very simple. When the evolutionary doctrine was taught in these countries, the people did not have to change their religion in order to include it. Evolution and communism blended in fine with the Eastern religions. In about 1895, a man named Yen Fu translated Thomas Huxley’s book into Chinese. That was probably the turning point in China. It led the way for communism to take over so many of the oriental countries.
It’s just fractally wrong.
I’ll admit that I was surprised to see John Loftus’ new book The Outsider Test of Faith. On one hand, the OTF has been Loftus’ signature argument for six or seven years now. On the other hand, it’s fundamentally a simple argument.
The OTF, boiled down, states that you should evaluate your faith from the outside. As Loftus puts it, “The only way to rationally test one’s culturally adopted religious faith is from the perspective of an outsider, a nonbeliever, with the same level of reasonable skepticism believers already use when examining the other religious faiths they reject.”
So, in short, the OTF is nothing more than the golden rule: You should treat your own religion exactly as you treat other religions, and evaluate your beliefs using the same criteria that you use to evaluate others’ beliefs. It’s a sound and powerful argument. Granted, stepping outside oneself and one’s own upbringing is one of the most difficult things to do. Still, do we really need an entire book to explain it?
Answer: no, but we do need an entire book to defend it. Loftus’ first couple of chapters describe the OTF and the thought process behind it. His last two chapters work through the OTF and explain some of the implications. But half of the book is Loftus responding to critics.
Loftus is a magnet for apologists, so he’s got quite a rogues gallery of people to work through. He does a good job of condensing arguments that likely took up long comment threads on one blog or another, but there’s still a lot of ground to cover.
All this does leave me with a problem. The natural audience for this book are people like myself who are stuck in to the world of apologetics and counter-apologetics. This new work gives us a nice handbook where all the likely moves of the debate are spelled out. People who avoid these debates – known in the trade as sane people – might be better off sticking with Loftus’ shorter description of the OTF in the collection The End of Christianity.
By now you’ve heard that a right-wing scholar by the name of Jason Richwine has resigned from the Heritage Foundation as a result of his previous work on race and IQ. Richwine produced a paper on the costs of immigration, which brought him into the public eye and led some to check his credentials. This inevitably led to the discovery of his Harvard dissertation on low IQ in latinos.
Some folks on the right, including the inevitable Andrew Sullivan, weigh in. They speak as if this in unplumbed territory that is being carefully guarded by political correctness and leftist thought police. I think the best response comes from Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Dark Art of Racecraft“:
It is almost as though the “dark arts of race and IQ” were an untapped field of potential knowledge, not one of the most discredited fields of study in modern history. We should first be clear that there is nothing mysterious or forbidden about purporting to study race and intelligence. Indeed, despite an inability to define “race” or “intelligence,” such studies are one of the dominant intellectual strains in Western history. We forget this because its convient to believe that history begins with the Watts riots. But it’s important to remember the particular tradition that Charles Murray and Jason Richwine are working in.
Coates shows off the advantages of the blog format by blockquoting selections from previous racial scientists like Lothrop Stoddard. Coates points out that their success rate with predictions is on par with Christian apocalyptics:
One might oppose the Stoddard tradition strictly on its tendency to birth suffering, misery, and catastrophe. But one can oppose it for simpler reasons — its practitioners have a nasty habit of being wrong.
Just as an aside, it’s amusing that this should all happen just as The Great Gatsby is coming out it theaters.
“Civilization’s going to pieces,’ broke out Tom violently. ‘I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read The Rise of the Colored Empires by this man Goddard?’
“Well, it’s a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be — will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientiic stuff; it’s been proved.”
“Tom’s getting very profound,” said Daisy, with an expression of unthoughtful sadness. “He reads deep books with long words in them. What was that word we ——””
“Goddard” is probably a reference to Stoddard, possibly by joining it with Madison Grant, another eugenicist.
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