In Lehmann's Terms

Are Atheists Gullible?

Like many other godless heathens, I viewed the launch of Atheist Nexus, a new social networking site billed as “The Atheist Facebook,” as a welcome development. I’ve long seen the biggest challenge facing nontheists, particularly in America, as the lack of formal social institutions around which to coalesce, placing us at a distinct disadvantage in amassing political capital and cultural relevance in comparison to our theist brethren.

But disturbing evidence has come to light suggesting the site may not be all that it seems. For one, the site shares the same fax number, mail server, and domain name registrant as something called the  Divine Christian Center, an outfit that bills itself as “an Apostolic institution of Christ” that exists “to pioneer and promote the commission of our Lord Jesus Christ the world over.” A search on the domain’s owner, one Kym Membe, reveals him as someone who has posted on discussion boards under the handle IT4Jesus, given positive reviews to A.J. Jacobs’ The Year of Living Biblically, and, as blogger PZ Myers of Pharyngula reports, as recently as a couple months ago posted this letter on a bible college Web site:

We have seen a steady increase in uncommon and deadly events around the world - most recently, the quake in China and the cyclone in Myanmar. This is a call to prayer for the suffering and the hurting. God is calling us all to humble ourselves before Him in prayer. We may not understand what is happening; we may not have answers for anyone asking. One thing we should know without a shadow of doubt is that God loves the world and all who are in it. Let's join forces and pray for those in China and Myanmar.

Let's lift them up before God and ask that He comforts those who need comfort and bring healing to those who need it. Let's pray for the little boys and girls who have lost their parents, and for the everyone who has lost someone or something.

Kym Membe

Mattoon, USA

To his credit, Membe has been out front to try to address the concerns and assuage fears of Atheist Nexus registrants that they have unwittingly signed on to some sort of surreptitious fundie prospecting service that looks to win back the unfaithful. In a letter posted to the LifeWithoutFaith site, Membe declares that he only recently left the ranks of believing Christians and credits reading Dawkins and Harris for his de-conversion. The DCC site, he says, is one that he built as a Web freelancer, but it does not represent his current religious outlook, which he describes as:

Now, I am free from the idiocy of religion. And because I have always stood up for what I believe, I did not think twice about investing my time and effort to create Atheist|Nexus. While some of my language and mannerisms might show through as “religious”, you can be sure that’s only because I have spent the greater part of life speaking that way. I understand completely the questions that people have raised. There is still work to be done, and I am open to learning what I can from the 1000+ freethinkers on this site.

In further efforts to reestablish trust, Membe has tapped LifeWithoutFaith’s Brother Richard to serve as administrator of Atheist Nexus, and he had a personal sit-down with Phil Pherguson of CUFree.net to discuss concerns and vouch for his own sincerity. 

I’d like to believe Membe is above board, and I hope this little foofaraw doesn’t detract from the worthy goal of helping atheists network with one another. But I can’t argue too much if my fellow nonbelievers feel the Atheist Nexus brand is compromised and choose to focus that goal elsewhere. As in all things, a healthy skepticism would not be out of order.

Who's house? T's house

T pity the fool what don't respect his momma.  Link courtesy of the Mighty, Mighty C.K.

For T-related nostalgia of slightly more recent vintage (but nonetheless rapidly fading into the nether regions of collective memory), I offer the original gold standard in sites about human testicle consumption.

The Perils of Popular Friends

Knowing smart folks like AEI's Ted Frank or my old Independent Institute compadre Alex Tabarrok comes in quite handy when I need a quick quote about, say, Ben Bernanke, or John Roberts.

Plus, Ted hosts those panel discussions with the fantastic cookies. And thanks to Alex, I even got to sit in on one of those infamous lunches with George Mason's economists (Messrs. Hanson, Caplan, and Cowen) earlier this week.

But when popular, professional-looking, frequently updated blogs like Marginal Revolution and Point of Law link to the decidedly amateurish and part-time offerings I've got going here -- in the process, directing more than 1,000 hits to a site that had only quite rarely topped more than 50 in a day -- well, gawrsh, it sure does put pressure on a guy to get off his ass and actually post something.

Consider today's prolific output an overcorrection that, in all realistic probability, won't be too oft-repeated. But I'm trying to be better about maintaining at least a slow, steady flow. What's true of monitoring prostate health ought be just as true of blog health, I always say.

I can't believe I ate the whoooooooole thing

What happens when a 13-foot boa constrictor's eyes are bigger than his stomach? Well, it ain't pretty.

Link courtesy of La Palmer.

Another 'Nuck Bites the Dust

My old TII bud Alex Tabarrok has a brief but poignant post on his decision, after many years living among us Yanks, to undergo the metaphorical bris and join the American Tribe.  And a hearty "Mazel Tov!" to him on that front.

But where Alex credits the experience of 9/11 as particularly important to his newfound sense of identity, I would point to another formative moment several years prior. Having accompanied the good doctor to see the South Park movie back when it was in theatres, I can testify that only an American could find "Blame Canada" as funny as he did.

Of course, now that hockey's back, I feel I must accept the mantle of responsibility for taking Alex's sons to a few Caps games this season, lest their father's conversion completely rob them of their cultural heritage.

The Dalrymple Meme

A recurrent meme running through recent posts of several of my fellow AnCaps (shonk comments here, mock does the same here and here) suggests that we've all independently taken to reading Ted Dalrymple at about the same time. Perhaps there's something in the water.

I should mention that I've been following Dalrymple -- a retired British physician who has made a named for himself on this side of the Pond mostly on the strength of his contributions to the Manhattan Institute's City Journal -- for a number of years now, and at first, I did not think  kindly of him at all. My impression has improved over time, but there remain a number of habits in his writings -- which consist largely of anecdotal accounts of the failures of multi-culturalism and the welfare state, culled from his experiences working with Britain's underclass -- that never fail to irk me.

A gifted writer with an innate ear for evocative prose, Dalrymple's essays nonetheless tend to follow a pre-ordained formula. In part one, he offers a character sketch, or a number of related character sketches, about welfare-class patients, their numerous self-destructive habits, and their steadfast refusal to accept any sort of personal responsibility for the ails that have befallen them. In part two, he generalizes these stories as indicative of broader trends in society at-large, although usually without any supporting data. In part three, he offers his univeral diagnosis of the problem -- pervasive liberal permissiveness, albeit stated in a strawman form that few liberals would recognize as their own actual beliefs -- but tends to offer little in the way of prescriptions for treating it.

Invariably, Dalrymple sees trouble arising from the breakdown of customs that have generally served Western society well, and on this point, I'm broadly sympathetic, although his particularly British priggishness leads him to focus on a number of developments -- openly homosexual relationships, the popularity of tatoos among the middle class, the permeation of street slang into common language -- that don't tend to trouble me nearly so much as they do him. At other times, he hints that the solution lies in government sanction of various sorts of deviant behavior, though he leaves the details of such sanctions quite vague. If he were pressed to expound on the matter, I doubt his policy prescriptions would look much like any I would endorse.

Nonetheless, at times, he can be absolutely brilliant, and he's perhaps never been better than in his analysis of features of Islam that remain fundamentally incompatible with Western ethos, a subject on which he has been asked to comment frequently in the days since the 7/7 London transit bombings. In a recent panel discussion for Front Page, Dalrymple offers a critique of what could be called the "culinary model of multi-culturalism":

The London bombings may have caused at long last people to examine their fatuous multiculturalist pieties, which I believe are fundamentally derived from the restaurant model: today we eat Hungarian, tomorrow Mexican, the day after Lebanese, and so forth. Clearly, this is possible and very enjoyable, but there are more important and deeper things in life than a variety of cuisines.

Perhaps people will begin to see that some values are simply not compatible with others, and will now be prepared to stand up for those that we believe in. Certainly I hope people will start to examine the abominable abuse of women that, if not universal, is very widespread in the Moslem population, and that is a large part - I believe - of the attraction of Islam to increasingly and essentially secularised men. (Interestingly, a recent article in Le Monde about French converts to Islam gave the statistic that 83 per cent were men -and I suspect that the 17 per cent of women were in response to love affairs, though I don't know this to be the case. This is eloquent testimony.)

In Britain, if we had the courage to defend Moslem women, I think Islam would lose a lot of it residual attraction. Unfortunately, the Prime Minister's wife went into court shortly before the last election to defend a Moslem schoolgirl's right to wear 'traditional' costume - not traditional in Luton, by the way - I suspect to obtain the Moslem vote for her husband, and probably knowing, and certainly with the duty to know, the often abominable social meaning of this costume.

Let us hope the recent events have taught the Prime Minister the folly - no, the sheer wickedness - of this.

I think Shonk hits the nail squarely:

I was saying to my brother just the other day that it is possible to have a successful multiethnic and even multicultural society, but what cannot work is a multi-ethical society. Clearly everyone is not going to agree on all moral values, but there has to be one basic ethical standard in society. Without that the conflicts will be interminable and insuperable, and perhaps worse than that the tacit sanctioning of moral wrongs.

ADDENDUM: My eyes are due for a check-up. The Selling Waves posts were from Curt, not (Original Flavor) Shonk.

Deep throats, short memories

Somewhat surprising in the hullabaloo surrounding W. Mark Felt's outing as Deep Throat has been that not one outlet I've scanned has yet brought up the fact that Felt was previously outed six years ago in the Hartford Courant by a former playmate of Carl Bernstein's son.

As Timothy Noah reported in Slate at the time, the then-19 year old Chase Culeman-Beckman had met Jacob Bernstein at summer camp in 1988, when the pair were just eight years old, and that the younger Bernstein reported with 100% certainty that Felt was Throat.

I was in the "Herons" group along with about fifteen other 8, 9, and 10 year olds ... One Friday in July we went on a trip to Long Beach, Sag Harbor, and Jacob, Max and I ended up sitting in the sand precociously talking about politics. It was an election year and I was in favor of George Bush because he had gone to the Greenwich Country Day School where I was attending, while Jacob and Max were for Michael Dukakis, although I do not remember why. At some point, the conversation turned to Nixon and Watergate ... which I knew little, if nothing, about. During the conversation Jacob told me: "Deep Throat was Mark Felt, he's someone in the FBI. I'm 100% sure."

But as a separate Salon piece of the time points out, Culeman-Beckman was more than just a second hand gossip. He also seized upon a very simple -- and in retrospect, obvious -- clue to Throat's identity: that Woodward had always referred to his source as "My Friend." Initials -- M.F., the same as Mark Felt.

Don't forget to trackback, my Dark Lord

First the immortal Posner and Becker get a blog. Now, even Darth Vader himself has one. What legend will be next?

Darth on efficient project management:

Due to the haste with which we are proceding through the latter phases of this battle-station's construction we have been forced to employ scores of civilian contractors from across the galaxy in addition to our own Imperial Corps of Engineers. This had led to a certain clash of working cultures.

For instance, this morning I critiqued a tragically sub-par piece of workmanship on a tractor-beam repulsolift inversion assembly by snapping the neck of the site supervisor and throwing his limp corpse down a disused elevator shaft.

Imperial engineers would have snapped to crisp attention, of course, but all these civilian contractors did was give me was grief. "Oy, you do that again and I'll have the union on you!" barked one red-faced buffoon.

"It is vital that you enhance the inter-departmental syngergies of your operation," I said. And then I killed him.