URLs du Jour — 2014-10-06

  • It must be a blue moon, because I am going to quote the opening paragraph from an article by Katha Pollitt of The Nation magazine.

    Here’s a great way to make a movement: have your most famous and powerful public figures obsess over Henry Higgins’s famous question, “Why can’t a woman be more like a man?” Why aren’t they more into critical thinking, argument, logic? more rational? Why do they accuse a man of sexual harassment when he’s just trying to chat them up in an elevator at 4 in the morning? Why do they get drunk and then accuse men of rape? Then, having alienated a huge number of actual and potential members, to whom you sound arrogant, vain, sexist and clueless, look around and wonder, Gee, where are the women? They must be even less rational than we thought!

    Katha is talking about atheists. On and on, she does. Conclusion:

    Why would women join a movement led by sexists and populated by trolls? If this is atheism, I’m becoming a Catholic.

    I find this odd that atheism is a "movement" that one might "join". I'm pretty sure that all you need do to be an atheist is follow the first half of Psalm 14:1:

    The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.

    Pretty simple. You don't have to join anything, attend any meetings, send in dues. You don't even have to say anything out loud.

    If you're looking for fellow fools, though… Well, you shouldn't be surprised if you find foolish ("arrogant, vain, sexist and clueless") people doing foolish things.

    [Atheism is a surprisingly hot topic at Pun Salad. Previous posts at least tangentially related here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.]

  • Need verification? You can always ask the Google autocompleter:

    [why are atheists...]

    Tough, but why should you care? You're an atheist, man!

  • A pretty neat tweet from Virginia Postrel:

    That leads to a very neat article at Slate. Apparently they're doing map stuff all week. "Tomorrow: Remapping America based on baseball player birthplaces."


Last Modified 2019-01-09 7:04 AM EDT