I think Richard was wrong about this, but not insanely outrageously save the beer and the cats wrong.

– referring to Miranda Celeste who is perturbed by the Skepchicks’ response to Richard Dawkins. Do I still have your attention? Awesome.

In Germany, when being unable to completely agree or disagree with something, we merge the words for yes (Ja) and no (Nein) to Jein.

So, Ophelia, Miranda – I say Jein (though I note that Ophelia might not be far off from my own opinion).

Here is what I think happened – in relation to only the Richard Dawkins part of the debacle:

1. Richard Dawkins was wrong. He was outrageously, stupidly and incredibly wrong because the dear professor could not see the bigger picture. Being outrageously wrong is not the same as being “wrong with very bad consequences”. If I think prayer can cure my children’s diabetis, I am outrageously wrong with really bad consequences. If I think the preacher is wrong about the fact that Noah actually kept two of each animal on a boat for weeks, the direct consequences are mild, but the belief comes with baggage and implications that might, together with other factors, have somewhat bad consequences – but in itself, it isn’t causing much harm. The preacher would also be outrageously, stupidly, incredibly and unbelievably wrong, however. So, Richard was wrong. One could say “embarassingly wrong”.

2. People got reasonably upset. Not only was Richard Dawkins belittling the problems of his own society and surroundings to which he apparently contributes, he was also committing a really dumb conversational mistake and adding to the problem by deciding it is a non-problem. He was omitting important facts for his assessment (yes, women do get raped in elevators at night), and committing the grave scientific error of forming his whole hypothesis post-hoc (nothing happened, so there was no possibility for danger). That is embarrassing for a man with his expertise in rational thinking.

3. Richard Dawkins said nothing else for a while, nobody noticed, but everyone got more angry with him.

Uh, what?

That is where I get confused. Richard Dawkins made three (admittingly very stupid) comments. That was a few days ago. He was thoroughly lectured on his mistakes on blogs and in comments, mostly after he had spoken himelf. Other commenters fought back. Not Dawkins. Dawkins was crawling about the USA somewhere. And only here and there, it seemed, people actually complained about him not having answered yet, which would be at least a semi-reasonable complaint. Instead, many people made the impression that they had decided that Richard Dawkins is never going to budge and that his opinion was set in stone, which would even seem non-typical for him. However, they might be right. They might be wrong, too. Maybe Dawkins is capable of saying “I see the mistake I made, now that it was kindly explained to me” and apologizing. Or maybe not.

The point is: How would we know?

THE MAN HAS NOT SPOKEN ABOUT IT YET.

There is no question that he has to defend his reputation at some point, there is no question that we can’t let it slide – his remarks were fanning sexism all over the place. But here we hear he is not going to get a penny, despite all the good things the RD-Foundation promotes, here we hear from Mindy:

I hope it was worth it. As you know better than most, you don’t get a second chance.

And while I partially understand Rebecca’s rage because at least one of Dawkins’ responses was aimed at her, Mindy is just bitchy. Of course he gets a second chance. Why the hell not?
You can start bitching when he doesn’t use it.

I know patience is very painful and I know Richard Dawkins cannot stress ours endlessly, but for goodness sake, give the guy a chance to reply before you burn him at the stake.

I have been watching the festival of the “elevatorgeddon” on all the atheist blogs, though, and my fingers were itching. I have commented here and there, mainly expressing my confusion about why Richard Dawkins, of all people, would be that incapable of thinking two steps further and not realize what he is implying (among other things, that all women who get raped in elevators are too stupid to push a button).

Now that I have gotten the dramatic part and my own confused annoyance out of the way, I mostly notice one thing that apparently any female who goes to atheist conventions already knows: A good deal of male atheists has a severe case of subconscious misogyny (and it appears Dawkins is their poster-boy!).

Here we have atheist not only denying that inviting a stranger woman for coffee to your hotel room in the middle of the night is a euphemism for let’s have sex (“But he was just asking for COFFEE, you know?”), but also claimning it is socially alright to make women feel uncomfortable, reasonably worried for their well-being and make them feel objectified objectifying them because you have a “right” to ask people for sex (“It’s legal, therefore it’s socially and ethically just fine!” – Since when has that rule come into place?).

It’s as if half of the atheist world has run into a lamp-post and lost the ability to think. Suddenly, they ignore that women DO get raped, and DO get raped in elevators, they ignore that euphamisms for sex are neither normal conversation, nor flirting, nor the same as just being present in the same place as a woman. Suddenly they ignore that all misdemeanor deserves an appropriate response, big or small, and that small problems do not negate the existence of big problems and that their discussion does not belittle bigger issues. Red herrings are no longer red herrings, but legitimate objections, and suddenly calls to be more considerate become accusations of criminal behavior and are overdoing it.

These are, in many cases, the same people who accuse accommodationism and moderate religion of being enablers of fundamentalism, but they cannot see that they themselves are contributing to “light” versions of misogyny. These people would not accept if they were accused of not taking the criminalization of homosexuals in third world countries seriously because they are discussing the possible ordination or not-ordination of gay Anglican priests in the UK. These are the people who wonder why atheism seems to be such a male-society.

But you know one other reason why I and some of my fellow atheist women are so shocked?

Because we all thought that the most reasonable community we know, the most socially advanced community we can think of – which has shaken off the confining rules of religion and tradition and followed the zeitgeist – would be a little more like PZ Myers and Phil Plait when it comes to the place of women within their society. We thought Richard Dawkins was a little more reasonable and considerate.

This is the community with the biggest hope of conveying equality between the sexes, between different races and sexual orientations and world views. In other words: This community is a feminist’s best hope for equality.

And it turns out that it still sucks.

If anyone thought that feminism is old and through, this is your answer – it is still very much needed.

PS: By the way, Richard, we have not heard anything from you since that remarkably inane comment on women, elevators and what happened and what didn’t happen. Care to share a thought or two?

This caused an outrage and more people than me have sent letters to the UEFA. The news were followed by three things.
1. support for Vlatko Markovic from some croation football officials
2. a weak apology (“It was not my intention whatsoever to insult or hurt anyone”)
3. a date with the UEFA for a hearing (Nov. 25th).

Yet, there were no news on November 25th or thereafter that I’ve come across.

What’s going on?

That’s good.

I’ve just put up my Christmas tree and am looking forward to seeing my family, but even in modest Germany, Christianity is getting on my nerves during the season, more than normally. But I love the traditions and I love having a set time that is reserved for family. I love the images and the singing – I even go to open singing sessions in the churches at this time of the year.

However, the more common the atheist-billboard or bus-sign idea becomes, the less witty the boards seem to get. “There probably is no god, so stop worrying and enjoy your life” was simply brilliant – as was the whole “be good for goodness sake” or “Don’t believe in god? You’re not alone.”. But now suddenly we’re at “You know it’s a myth” and “Yes, Virginia, there is no God”, which is just dreadful and negative and not clever… and certainly not humanist.

Somehow the AHA has morphed from “look, there are atheists out here” and “life is great without god, too” to “neener, neener, you are wrong”. You know, those Christians probably are wrong about God existing, but “neener neener” is for kindergarten playgrounds. And also, have they not read the 1987 story of Virginia O’Hanlon writing to the New York newspaper “The Sun” about whether Santa exists?

If they had read and comprehended it, they’d have understood the positive potential. The editor replying to Virginia’s question tells her that yes – Santa does exist – and then lists all sorts of non-graspable, positive concepts that also exist, followed by a description how sad and dreary the world would be without Santa. The difference to God is, that at some point everyone realizes hat Santa is actually not real and all these good, positive things exist, anyway… but it was a nice story. Since the same arguments are made about God, the Sun’s 1897 editor lays the perfect path for someone eventually realizing that God is also a myth and not exactly different from Santa. I’m not saying it happens, I’m just saying that if anything, the editor might have unintentionally played into atheism’s. But this apparently flew past the AHA… much like it must’ve flown past them how many people, atheist and religious, really love this story.

And how many atheists keep the stance “you can believe your myths, if you want, but PLEASE don’t shove it into our faces and don’t force us to act according to your silly beliefs”? I would say it is the majority. So, telling Christians to “celebrate reason” instead of their favorite myth actually seems like it isn’t speaking from the mind of most atheists, and certainly not all humanists. Humanism means that in social and political concepts, you put human values before religious values, but it does not mean that you’re an atheist. It’s actually a perfect place for many agnostics.

I think the AHA is running way off its course here.

This is great in a double-way. While civil partnerships in the UK are required to be equal to marriage, gay couples still can’t marry, so they’re still denied equality. If you think this is nitpicking on a principle thing, I have to say that making homosexual partnerships and heterosexual partnerships the same thing, asides from the romantic aspect of being married, also has legal implications: If it’s the same thing, you cannot change one thing without changing the other and that means that discrimination against either form of partnership becomes completely impossible. Of course it is also a moral principle issue – it’s discrimination. So yes – those couples should not be happy to live their partnership under a pseudo-name and they’re doing well going to court. I wish them the best of luck.

On a second part, four heterosexual couples will join the sueing because these couples want the civil partnership. It’s discriminatory towards them, too, to not grant them the same right for a civil partnership as a homosexual couple. All the more power to them for standing up for equality even though they can have the traditional, supposedly more desired legal bond and will, if any difference are made, probably end up with the better rights having a marriage. The best of luck to them, too!

Sometimes I dread reading translations of books (and I usually don’t, at least for English books) because stupid German publishers will do something like this:

Would you have recognized it? It’s Richard Dawkin’s “The Greatest Show on Earth”, translated and therefore re-branded as “The Lie of Creation”.

Would you believe it – there goes Richard Dawkins purposefully writing a book about the evidence for evolution and particularly not about the faults of religion, and his German publisher basically spits into his face. When I first saw this book in a store I missed the author’s name and thought this was what Dawkins calls one of his “fleas” – a book, mostly badly written and anti-atheistic, that tries to ride on the fame of Richard Dawkins’ name. But no, this was just the major fail of the Ullstein Publisher (I doubt it was the fail of the actual translator Sebastian Vogel – usually, editors have a lot to do with the title of things).

They already had a minor fail with “The God Delusion” by translating it as “Der Gotteswahn”, which is at least literally correct, but insinuates not a delusion, but outright madness. While “Delusion” can be translated as “Wahn”, it calls up the image of someone running around in a fuzzy frenzy screaming God, God, God all over the place (or similar). But Dawkins means, which is clear from the book, that people are “deluding themselves” which, in German, would better be translated as “giving yourself an illusion”, in which case the name “Gottesillusion” would have been just perfect.

This is not insignificant: English readers will already know how many English critics of this book appear to have only read the title and never the contents of the book and base their snark on it. Now imagine the title had been “The God Madness”, which maybe comes closest to the German title. It’s toxic to the contents of the book.

And now, after failing on that part, the Ullstein Verlag makes it all worse with “The Lie of Creation”. What does that even have to do with the main contents of the book?! Maybe Richard Dawkins would do good looking for a German publisher that has the ability to comprehend English.

Basically, the blog was a humanism/secularism/atheism/agnosticism news source that would just gather anything related to these topics. It was a fabulous source with lots of active commenters and a couple of posts every day. Nothing was known about the author except that it appeared to be only one person. Since it was basically just a pointer to the latest mishaps of the churches, atheistic activities and opinion pieces, the lack of identity only bothered those who didn’t like atheism, I suppose (maybe because it was their only ammunition for an ad hominem attack?). I once contributed a pamphlet translation “Was ist Atheismus?” (What is Atheism?) by “Cyberguy” which was, by the attentive readers (in a proper German manner;)) corrected and criticized and became part of the blog’s special sites. I’m not surprised – Cyberguy did a great job.

Nobody knows why the blog vanished, but there was a bit of disappointment in the German atheist sphere. Luckily, the active commenters opened up a new blog, Blasphemieblog Reloaded with now eight authors and nearly the same concept. To not infringe upon copyrights, they post their own summaries with the links to the relevant articles, and they even could retain some of the links, special sites and the basic concept of the blog (the pamphlet, to my greatest joy, is still there, too).

I say bravo to the eight admins and thank you for reloading the blog!

We may never know what has happened to the original blog, which is a shame, but it might actually not have been such a bad thing, except for the loss of all the info that had already been gathered on that blog and that is now gone forever.

And if former “Atheist Media Blog” author might end up reading this: You probably had a good reason, though it would have been nice to know what happned. I hope you didn’t get in any unnecessary trouble for keeping one of the most important German blog on the web, and I hope you didn’t let any negative voices get to you.

Don’t get me wrong – security measures, especially on airports, are very important. But there are different ways for the Transportation Security Administration to go about this, and humiliating sick people should not be one of them. Pulling people out of the crowd because they seem ‘different’ may sometimes not be preventable, but automatically treating them like criminals surely is. Especially not if they’re sick civilians with conditions that already make them feel embarrassed (whether reasonably or not) and make their lives just a tad harder. You know – like a urinary bag:

“And every time I tried to tell them about my medical condition, they said they didn’t need to know about that.”

“One agent watched as the other used his flat hand to go slowly down my chest. I tried to warn him that he would hit the bag and break the seal on my bag, but he ignored me. Sure enough, the seal was broken and urine started dribbling down my shirt and my leg and into my pants.”

Apparently they never apologized, either, or offered any help.

Oh, and if you do not know what a prosthetic breast is and that breast cancer patients are a bit touchy about them, what are you doing working in public with civilians? Get behind an office desk and humiliate your colleagues instead or type numbers into a computer, will you?

The TSA screener “put her full hand on my breast and said, ‘What is this?’ ” Bossi told the station. “And I said, ‘It’s my prosthesis because I’ve had breast cancer.’ And she said, ‘Well, you’ll need to show me that.’ “

In short, if you’re going to use new devices, be it high-end scanners or anything else that you’ve not worked with before, you need some schooling. Stuff like this could be prevented if the TSA officers had even the faintest notion about what medical conditions they might encounter – and how people feel about them. Having a badge, a uniform or a pair of latex gloves is no reason to think you’re riding a high horse. And having two working boobs and a working bladder is no reason to ignore the feelings of people who don’t.

Prof. Dr. Mu-ming Poo is a successful neuroscientist with an impressive publication list.

Our fields are closely related. But still, for the hell of me, I would not want to work for him:

1. Every one works at least 50 hr a week in the lab (e.g., 8+ hr a day, six days a week). This is by far lower than what I am doing every day and throughout most of my career. You may be smarter or do not want to be as successful, but I am not asking you to match my time in the lab.

2. By working, I mean real bench work. This does not include surfing on the computer and sending and receiving e-mails for non-scientific matters unrelated to your work (you can do this after work in the lab or at home), and excessive chatting on nonscientific matters. No long lunch break except special occasions. I suggest that everyone puts in at least 6 hr concentrated bench work and 2+ hr reading and other research-related activity each day. Reading papers and books should be done mostly after work. More time can be spent on reading, literature search and writing during working hours when you are ready for writing a paper.

(That last part is so generous! )

However, in his defence, he does understand if you’re not willing to completely enslave yourself for work. He lets you opt out:

But if you do not like to follow the rules because it is simply a matter of choice of life style, I respect your choice but suggest you start making plans immediately and leave the lab by the end of January 31. I will do my best to help you to locate a lab to transfer or to find a job.

For the record, though – this sort of schedule is not unusual in a research lab. My daily “bench work” easily exceeds eight hours and I find next to no time to read, which is bad. This week, I’ve been working for 60 hours, including today (Saturday), and 12 hours on Thursday, which was my birthday. It did include some surf-time, a quick chat and the whole of 30 minutes lunch each day. And not every week is as crazy as this one – sometimes I do get to do office work during my work time and pay my private bills.

By the way, I am paid for 20 hours. I actually have to fill out a sheet every month with my daily work schedule pretending I am working my paid 20 hours and not a minute more or less – it is ridiculous. Every months again, it’s like the gods of employment are laughing at my face and I feel terribly ridiculed when filling out this sheet. But that’s academia for you.

I admit to having some basic principles that don’t go with Mu-ming Poo, despite easily meeting his required work time (I begin around 7:30am and end between 6-8pm). My boss only wished that his employees would take an example in the Poo-lab – he sent the email around two years ago with a wink, insinuating that we wouldn’t have to work as much as the Poo-lab-members… just almost as much.

I’m done working in about 2 hours, and then I’ll get to buy groceries and maybe some Christmas presents – which needs to be done today since all stores in Germany are closed on Sundays.

Happy Saturday, everyone.

Apparently he published his memoirs and is complaining about – grasp that – the power of ideologiesm because they threaten our “legitimate autonomy of thought”. Well, well, true, you might say, just look at all those radical Islamists, fundamentalist Christians and cult-followers – certainly, these people have been brainwashed enough to have lost their “autonomy of thought”. But, reasonably, you might ask, why a Cardinal – a top ranking ideologist whose job is to brainwash other people into thinking they should give his cult money and let them get away with raping children – would speak out against that. Is the Roman Catholic Church making a 180° turn and finally becoming something less than a force for “evil”? Or are there, maybe, some reasonable, kind, tolerant, rational people in their ranks.

Well, of course not. The “ideology” the dear cardinal is so worried about is the “homosexual agenda” and feels attacked by it. It’s difficult to put something this extraordinairy stupid into any perspective, but imagine this:

Mommy, Daddy, Pondi and Biffi* are sitting at the table having cake. Mommy has cut the cake into four pieces and is serving everyone. Just as Mommy is about to serve Pondi some cake, Biffi interjects and throws the cake into the trashcan. Little Pondi starts crying because she is hungry, she likes the cake and she has helped bake it, plus, there’s no benefit in randomly wasting good cake.

Pondi: Mommy! Daddy! Biffi threw my cake away!!! *sob*
Biffi: It’s not YOUR cake! I think only Mommy, Daddy and I should have cake, so I threw yours away.
Pondi: *yells out* But that’s not fair! You’re being a jerk.
Biffi: DADDY! Pondi is yelling at me! THAT IS SO MEAN!!! *cries* Mommy, make her stop! Make her stop now!

The sad part is, Biffi really expects mommy to punish Pondi for that. And when mommy doesn’t, she’s part of Pondi’s agenda… or something.

* (Luckily, in real life, nobody in my family is that much of an asshole and I hope there never will be anyone like Giacomo Biffi to fill that vacant spot.)

The best comparison anyone can make to the current situation is by replacing “homosexuals” with “blacks” and “homophobia” with “racism”, and then the Cardinal’s memoirs, at least in this aspect, will get the right flair to it. if we’re “gay activists”, then Rosa Parks was a “black activist” and in that case, the world needs more of us!

One thing that I always enjoy adding to anything I say about homophobia: When I first fell in love with a nice girl with whom I had very much in common, I experienced mutual love for the first time (and homophobia, of course). I realized one thing that has not changed yet, but only been strengthened since I met my fiancée: I will not be able, ever, to acknowledge that anyone who is homophobic has ever been truly in love. Because if they had, they’d know exactly what it feels like and then they could not possibly be opposed to me loving whom I love, or decide I could willfully change whom I love.

And you know what? I am sorry for you. You, who has never truly been in love and who has never been truly loved in return, you don’t know what you’re missing. I cherish every day I am getting a cellphone message that simply says “I love you”, I cherish the effort my girl goes through to have a lead actress in my favorite Broadway show send me a personal video for my birthday, I cherish every time she only answers “to be with you” when I ask her what she wants to do.

And I am sorry, so profoundly sorry for any ignorant, loveless little fool who cannot open his heart enough to feel that.