But while numerous historians share the position that Jesus was a myth, few go as far as Acharya S, who, from my understanding, believes Jesus was deliberately invented as part of a grand conspiracy. Acharya’s popularity particularly rose after she was prominently featured in the first part of the controversial Zeitgeist film, which became an instant hit among 9/11 deniers. To date, I can’t find any instances where Acharya has made any public statements regarding her own beliefs about who caused 9/11.

But all that is just background. Since I’m not a historian myself, I can’t comment with any authority on the validity of Acharya’s fringe historical claims one way or the other. That is best left up to the experts.

The real purpose of this piece is discuss an argument Acharya used on her forum in response to her critics:

“Acharya’s overreaches and doesn’t back up her work.”

This statement is absolutely fallacious and almost invariably comes from those who have not read my work at all or who have failed to understand that that voluminous material I freely present on the internet frequently represents EXCERPTS from my books, which contain thousands of footnotes and citations of pretty much each and every point I make. (Obviously, the online excerpts DO NOT contain all of the details – that is what the books are for.)

I’ve seen her use this argument on numerous occasions. Now on the surface, this may sound entirely reasonable. And of course she may be right. Again, I haven’t done the research myself and so won’t comment on the veracity of her claims or how much of it is backed by evidence.

And as the excellent atheist blogger Greta Christina points out, it’s unreasonable to expect to receive the totality of a person’s position on a broad topic from just one particular instance:

It doesn’t make much sense to assume that the atheist critique of religion you’re reading that moment is the only atheist critique of religion this writer has ever come up with.

However, it is possible for one to take this rationale too far and conclude that it’s reasonable to ignore or dismiss out of hand any critics who haven’t read everything one has written on a particular subject. Demanding that substantive criticisms and questions must come from those with a complete knowledge of everything you’ve ever written is most certainly not a reasonable expectation. And every author must learn to accept this and take it in stride. If they didn’t, book tours would become a lot more confrontational very fast.

An author or any person promoting ideas in the public sphere should have the capacity to briefly and concisely address reasonable and even some unreasonable criticisms and questions on the spot without having to immediately resort to excuses to invalidate their opposition’s right to ask a question. But too often, I see Acharya and others immediately jump to the “you haven’t read everything I’ve ever written’ gambit.

For instance, I was shocked last year when I saw this tactic so frequently used by Chris Mooney, a usually terrific science journalist and thinker as well as a newly appointed co-host of the Point of Inquiry podcast (Congrats Chris!) when defending controversial passages concerning the growing outspokenness of atheists  in his book, Unscientific America. This was especially troubling because the book had only just come out at the time and Mooney had on countless occasions already laid out his position regarding aggressive atheism on his blog, The Intersection, as well as numerous other news outlets. So demanding critics first read the book before commenting on a general position he’d already presented elsewhere seemed like somewhat of a cop-out. I mean, if he failed to adequately articulate his position in his piece in the LA Times, for instance, then it sounds like an unsuccessful piece. And if that’s the case, why should anyone even bother to read it?

The fact is that if a person states their opinion in the public sphere, that opinion is subject to scrutiny at any time regardless of a critic’s knowledge about the history of the individual making the initial claim. And the same certainly goes for those who make specific statements of fact in the public sphere. If someone thinks that that a statement is factually wrong, they have every right to question it regardless of who the claimant is, what their credentials are, or what they’ve written or said in the past.

Whether the “you haven’t read everything I’ve ever written” gambit is used to deliberately dodge substantive criticism or not, I can’t say. Maybe some people use it as a deliberate dodge while others don’t. But while nobody should reasonably expect an author or anyone arguing their point of view in the public sphere to condense their every thought on a particular subject to a few brief sentences, nor should the author get away with skirting legitimate criticism by dodging critics simply because they hadn’t read that author’s entire every word on the subject. And if you can’t find a way to briefly and politely address sincere questions or criticisms without treating it as a personally attack or without treating the inquirer like an idiot for not being an expert on your work, then maybe you should reconsider your position.

http://www.nycskeptics.org/blog

Thanks for your readership!

Unlike a lot of other people, I had to work on Monday.  The trains, in case you weren’t aware, were totally screwed for the entire day, but I’d made lunch plans with some of my best friends and I was excited for it.  Anyway, after work, I go over to get my train.  Some stupid pink tape has blocked off the Rector Street station on the 1, so I say, “Okay, it’s a nice day, I’ll walk up to Chambers”, and this little walk brought me straight over to Ground Zero.

The thing that still gets me upset about Ground Zero isn’t the tragic loss of life or the ludicrous and unnecessary wars that it launched.  At this point, I’ve been able to accept that those events occurred and move forward.  No, what really pisses me off is that eight years after the tragedy that befell thousands of people and our entire country on September 11, 2001, Ground Zero is still nothing but a concrete hole.  It continues to be a scar upon our fair city, a festering wound that in many ways, the city has still not recovered from.  But what gets me even more pissed off are the god damn 9/11 Truthers, and because tomorrow is the eighth anniversary of September 11th, they’re back in the news.

Part of me thinks that if we just don’t acknowledge their idiocy, they’ll slither back to their basements thousands of miles away from where the damage actually took place.  (Note on my “thousands of miles away crack:” In all my time getting pissed off about their crap, I’ve only met one New Yorker who actually bought into the conspiracy nonsense.  Then again, he lost his wife that day, so I don’t completely blame him.)  But they continue to spout their insanity, claiming that the physics are wrong when they’re not, and that the most elaborate conspiracy ever devised was put into play without anyone noticing.

Their latest volley comes from Charlie Sheen, an actor I very much enjoyed watching in Major League, Hot Shots: Part Deux and his bit role in Being John Malcovich.  Charlie came onto the 9/11 baloney scene a few years back when it was announced that he’d be voicing the newest version of Loose Change, the well debunked 9/11 conspiracy movie that was made when a kid wrote a movie about how 9/11 was a conspiracy and then convinced himself that his own fiction was reality.  I’m not sure whether Sheen ever actually voiced a version or not, I try not to pay too much attention to these assholes, but I do know that he was given a very special thank you in the 2009 edition of it.

Sheen’s insanity has prompted him to put a transcript online of a fake 20 minute conversation he has with President Obama, in which he convinces the president that 9/11 was a conspiracy by the “Bush/Cheney regime”.  He  followed it up with a visit to conspiracy theory collector Alex Jones’s show, and the two are trying to make Charlie’s ridiculous little farce a reality.

Look, I get where they’re coming from.  Stuff like 9/11 is scary.  It’s frightening because 9/11 showed us that there can never truly be safety.  No matter what technology we put in place to stop people from doing bad things, if someone really wants to find some way to kill a lot of people, and they’re really determined, they can do it.  It is easier to face a world where a huge, nigh-omnipotent government needs to orchestrate an event like 9/11, rather than some smelly bastards huddled in a cave with some floodlights pinned to the walls.  But the 9/11 truth movement is just inane.  The idea that while we’re dealing with two wars in the middle east, the biggest push for Health Care since Clinton, and the closest we’ve come to depression since the great crash of the 30′s… that with all that on his plate on top of, you know, running the country, Obama should put aside 20 minutes to talk with Charlie Sheen about 9/11 – that’s ludicrous.  He’s not going to do it, and that’ll just add fuel to the Truther’s fire.  Obama is avoiding the truth.  Maybe he’s in league with the Bush administration.  Ooooo, scary.

I’m tired of their crap.  I’m tired of them trying to scare my country with this garbage.  I’m sick of the scars of 9/11.  Give me my memorial and will someone please shut Charlie Sheen up.

In the meantime, take our skeptics survey!

All the links will be redirected shortly, but you can view the new look now!

Photo by www.musicofnature.com

No, this is not a frat boy pub crawl in cricket costume. On September 11^th, the night before NECSS (have your tickets yet?), Discover Life in conjunction with the American Natural History Museum is sponsoring the first New York City Cricket Crawl,  “an aural expedition and a celebration of life in the leafy jungles of urban and suburban NYC and surrounding area.” More specifically, these organizations are urging people to wander their neighborhoods, with ears cocked, listening for the burring sounds of crickets and katydids. Under the hum of cars, stereos, screaming kids, droning air conditioners, and laughing hipsters, how many species do you think you can identify in your neighborhood?

The website gives identification information and links to sound recordings of seven prime species, and then invites all amateur entomologists to phone, text, email or tweet their locations and identifications. On the 11^th, they will be generating a Google map of the info as it comes in to create a real-time survey of these species. As a sort of homage to naturalism as it was practiced in days of yore, they are also arranging several “Orthopteran Expeditions,” in which a scientist and a blogger team up to hunt crickets. For instance, The Buffington Expedition:

Matt Buffington heads up an expedition along with his trusted blogger Nif (Jennifer Minnick ) Matt’s patron is the USDA Systematic Entomology Lab at the Smithsonian Institution where knights in shining armor seek out unknown species of insects from around the world and bestow upon them Latin names. Blogger Nif has inhabited the land of NYC for many years, where she has learned to speak their languages, and is facile of blog, mapping, and twittering. Together, armed only with cell phones and a high speed Internet connection, they will traverse the Island called Manhattan by bicycle listening for the quiet folk who continue to call and whisper at night from trees and the grasses of that island.

You can follow or read later the adventures of Matt and Nif as they survey and blog their way through the Island.

The Cricket Hunter’s Blog

Follow the Buffington Expedition via Twitter

What a fun way to inspire New Yorkers to learn something new about their urban habitat. This activity has science, it has aesthetic appreciation of nature, it has community organization, it even has an element of mystery. At the crux of this “call to ears” (sorry) is a question of whether an originally endemic species, that was thought to have been lost from the NYC area, is in fact currently present. The Common True Katydid used to flourish in a more wooded version of Manhattan, and appears to have been absent since at least the 1920’s. Reports suggest that there these katydids may have returned, or perhaps are still thriving in hold-out populations. The entomologists working on this project hope that the Cricket Crawl with shed further light on these rumors. It is a charming program, and I wish them much success!

William T. Davis…[a naturalist in the 1920’s who first reported the loss of the True Common Katydid from the area] was no trained entomologist, he didn’t go to school to learn these things, he went outside, he used his eyes and ears, he took notes, he made mistakes, he collected specimens, and asked others to help him learn what they were.

Well, what are you waiting for? Do you think that watching the Discover Channel is helping us save the planet? Step outside and make a real contribution and figure out what crickets and katydids are calling in your neighborhood. Sheesh.

Please examine the picture below.

I found this gem on All News Web, a great website if you want to just smack your head fifteen times in a row.  What I really love about this particular article is the way that the whole thing is framed around a false dichotomy.

For those who don’t know, a false dichotomy is a bit of spurious logic where the person being asked is forced to choose between two black and white choices when there are probably more options out there.  And what I really love about this particular use of the logical fallacy is that in this case, both options are crap.  “UFO or Cryptid, what do you think?”

Tangent.  You have to love this “Cryptid” term that the Cryptozoologists have been tossing out lately.  It’s as though one of them said one day, “Hey, calling these things monsters is making us look nuts.  Let’s say that Nessie is a Cryptid instead!”  Which is sort of like deciding that instead of “Elf”, Santa is a Snow-Magi.  See?  Now looking for him is legitimate.

Back to the dichotomy though, UFO or Cryptid… UFO or Cryptid… well, I’m going to go with UFO for now.  Though… not aliens.  My guess?  Kite,  Maybe bird.  It’s in Argentina, so maybe a big bird?  But the honest truth is, I’m not so good at sussing these things out and the picture isn’t terribly clear.

What do you folks think the blurry picture could be?  Anything else that’s “magic?”  Personally, I just don’t understand why they didn’t think it could be a ghost.  I’m sorry.  “Specter”.   Now, it’s scientific.

Enjoy your Labor Day.

Take our survey!

Atheist Bus Campaign creator Ariane Sherine and Richard Dawkins at its launch in London

I “came out” as an atheist a few years ago, after years of shilly-shallying.

The basic Protestantism of my upbringing yielded, as a teenager, to an orthodox but rather devout kind of new-age pantheism; this drifted imperceptibly into a “spiritual but not religious” phase, followed by a lengthy spell as an agnostic. If people understood the word “agnostic” as it’s meant to be understood — the view that God’s existence isn’t provable one way or the other, so we should reserve judgment — I might have been willing to leave it at that. But in reality, most people think agnostic means “undecided,” as if its proponents just haven’t made their minds up yet. In either case, “agnostic” began to seem annoyingly timid, the soft option. So I took a deep breath and embraced the big, scary “A” word.

In general, I dislike applying ideological labels to myself. I don’t really want to be anything that ends in an “-ian” or an “-ist”; all it usually does is inspire people to put you in whatever stereotypical box the word conjures up for them. But in this case, I wanted to play whatever minuscule role I could in reclaiming the word — which is, after all, a perfectly good and useful one.

In Julia Sweeney’s wonderful one-woman show Letting Go of God, which chronicles her journey from devout Catholicism to cheerful nonbelief, she describes the difficult process of coming out to her parents. For her mother, not believing in God was one thing — but being an atheist? That was beyond the pale.

Sweeney is onto something here.  It’s not the concept that shocks people so much; it’s the word. Somehow, “atheist” has acquired a whiff of Stalinist absolutism — even among people who should know better, like Robert Wright, author of The Evolution of God.  In a recent Huffington Post Interview, Wright said, “. . . I don’t understand how people can call themselves atheists, if the term means you’re sure there’s no God. I don’t see how you can be sure of anything in this world. I’m technically an agnostic, although one with spiritual and religious leanings. But I don’t know anything, and I don’t know how anyone can say they know there’s no God.”

There you have it:  the assumption that atheism implies rigid, dogmatic certainty in the nonexistence of God. But why?

When people refer to themselves as Christians, I don’t automatically peg them as fire-breathing fundamentalists who have never entertained the slightest doubts about God’s existence. When people express their political leanings, I don’t take it for granted that they’re intolerant ideologues who will view me as a contemptible fool if I disagree. Unique among isms, atheism is assumed to contain an arrogant degree of certainty.

In my book, certainty is the real enemy. I respect doubt far more than faith. Even the things I’m surest of — such as that I am bald, and wear a size 10 1/2 shoe — I’m only about 99% sure of. A healthy, intellectually honest outlook demands that one percent of doubt, which is not enough to keep you up nights or to interfere with the daily business of life, but is enough to acknowledge that our minds are limited and easily-bamboozled instruments; and that reality as we think we understand it may be a delusion. I’m 99% sure I’m A.J. Mell, but the lunatic in the asylum is no doubt equally convinced that he’s Napoleon.

In fact, the most cocksure people I have ever run across are devout believers. Whenever I debate matters theological with Bible-believing Christians, it’s virtually guaranteed that, at some point in the conversation, they’ll assert that they don’t just believe there’s a God; they know there’s a God. Not through mere reason, you understand — but through some higher, deeper, purer way of knowing.

Well, I beg your pardon, but you don’t know. No one knows, because the assertion can’t be proved one way or the other, and is therefore unknowable. I used the lofty, mysterioso, higher-way-of-knowing canard many times myself, when I was a believer — and it was nothing more than a self-deluding dodge, a way of avoiding the tough questions by throwing up a cosmic smokescreen. And furthermore, where does all that “knowledge” leave the concept of faith? I thought faith, by definition, was a decision to believe in something that can’t be known. If you already know, what purpose or virtue is there in having faith?

The truth is, nobody really knows what’s going on. I expect that, like every other living thing, I have my finite moment of existence, and that when I die I’ll go back to wherever I was before I was born: i.e., oblivion. That said, if I discover that I do live on after death, I’ll be delighted — unless the fundamentalists are right, and nonbelievers are cast into a pit of eternal fire, in which case I’ll be depressed. But just because we can’t be 100% sure of anything doesn’t mean that one philosophy is as good as the next, or that we can’t passionately defend our particular world view. It just means that when contemplating infinite issues with finite brains, a little humility is in order.

First off, Dayle Schear is a woman.  I know that seems innocuous, but every time I see her name I get confused by the pronoun, so I guess I’m just writing it down to force myself to remember it.  Thank you for your indulgence. More importantly, Ms. Schear is a Reno, NV psychic who has recently been claiming that eighteen years ago, she insisted that Jaycee Lee Dugard was still alive.

Let’s not go into the fact that Dugard was missing for 18 years.  Let’s not go into just how vague and inane Schear’s predictions (according to every media outlet I’ve seen so far, she basically just said “Don’t give up hope”, said the kidnapping was “sexual” – <sarcasm> very precise </sarcasm> – and described a shitty looking place) were. Why not, you ask?  Because that’s already starting to be done by the mainstream media. Even “The Examiner”, crackpot haven for every Bigfoot enthusiast and Psychic apologist is writing a wishy-washy article (The title calls her “Bragging Psych”ic and this is by a guy who thinks this crap is real… oy, he thinks it’s real…) which boils down to “Ms. Schear… No.”  I’ve even seen some folks mention Shawn Hornbeck.

Dayle Schear has managed to do the impossible. She’s gotten MyFox to write an article (reprinted in over 20 cities) where over a third of the text is about Benjamin Radford (In case you don’t know, Benjamin Radford is the managing editor of “The Skeptical Inquirer and the author of the “Bad Science” blog – which you should know, by the way).  The amazing thing about this article is that, even though the title is “Jaycee’s Mom Consulted Psychic”, there’s a sub-title of “But many argue psychics can’t help solve crimes.”  When’s the last damn time we saw an article where there was a sub-heading stating that a lot of people say psychic’s are bunk?

I don’t want to overstress all this.  What we’re looking at is token skepticism being made a little less token.  But still, a small victory is a victory nonetheless.  Even on the most generous article out there, “Psychic Predicted Jaycee’s Return” from KOLTV.com, almost all the comments are anti-psychic.  I should mention that reading the article will probably just piss you off.  It’s pretty much a free print add for Schear.  But take a look at the comments and you’ll see that there’s a lot of people, even out in Reno Nevada, who are tired of the bullshit.  Because you can’t defend what Dayle is saying.  It’s just too damn ridiculous.  “18 years ago, I said you shouldn’t give up hope.”  Whoopeedoo.  Your psychic powers are astounding.

It seems that people actually start thinking after 18 years.  Folks out there are saying, “Damn, Schear. You’re taking credit?  With only that?”  This is beautiful.  And it’s really unexpected. And it’s sort of something I always thought was impossible…

Wait.

No.

Yes!

Dayle Schear has gotten the mainstream media to be a touch more skeptical!  She’s clearly demonstrated a paranormal ability!  Someone get Randi on the horn right now!!