What the hell is wrong with PZ Myers? The last time we checked in on the excitable New Atheist gadfly, he was having bizarre hallucinations involving Ben Stein, eyeballs, razor blades, and urine.
Now he’s gotten even more worked up about the yearly non-event that is the National Day of Prayer. After complaining, reasonably I think, that the once-ecumenical event has now morphed into a plaything for the Fundies, he lets loose the bonds of reason and sputters:
Fuck the National Day of Prayer. I can scarcely believe my country is officially pandering to such willful stupidity — elevating evangelical kooks to positions of prestige, trumpeting the virtues of sectarian religion, and actually crediting the successes of America to the fact that a subset of deluded, demented fools sit on their asses and beg an invisible man to protect us and help us kill people in foreign countries.
And he’s only getting going. We haven’t even gotten to the part about the spitting:
I feel like just declaring this the official National Day of Derangement and writing it all off, maybe spit in the soup of people who say grace, or flip off any group I catch trying to do a collective exercise in ritual invocation of nonexistent beings… .
No need to set aside a special day, PZ. For you, it’s clear that every day is a Day of Derangement.
10 Comments
May 5, 2008 at 6:25 pm
your entire post has no substance, it’s nothing but concern trolling, in essence.
let’s loose the bonds of reason?
the use of invective hardly equates with the level of reason in the arguments presented.
you haven’t at all made the case he is incorrect, in fact, you appear to agree with him fundamentally.
all you are doing is lamenting his use of colorful metaphor and invective, that only reflect an obvious righteous anger over the way this country has kowtowed to religious idolatry.
i hope this isn’t what you consider to be well reasoned debate on your part.
What the hell is wrong with PZ Myers?
what do you THINK he’s pissed off about?
You’re what’s wrong with much of the media today: You focus on the color instead of the substance of the arguments presented.
May 5, 2008 at 6:39 pm
For every claim that the New Atheists are really not angry, but simply dispassionate observers rationally investigating the beliefs of others, PZ is handy to point to as a source of religion hating vitriol spewing.
He is a very angry ex-Christian, I wonder if some pastor touched him in an inappropriate place or something when he was young. I dumped Christianity too, and I had that awkward period of proclaiming God didn’t exist loudly on the bus and whatever. But I was pretty well over that by the time I was of drinking age. I wonder why he can’t get over it.
The poor guy. He’s also the source of the anti-rational “Courtier’s Reply,” which amounts to “I don’t care what you say, I won’t listen to you since I know you are wrong no matter what you say.” What a piece of work.
>flip off any group I catch trying to do a collective exercise in ritual invocation of nonexistent beings
Hey, wait a second! I thought that the party line that atheism is just a lack of belief, not an actual belief in the nonexistence of God. Funny how things flip back and forth, depending on what’s convenient. There are a bunch of “atheism is just lack of belief” NAs who also call God an imaginary friend or something similar that asserts his non-existence. Odd behavior for “rationalists.”
May 5, 2008 at 6:45 pm
Hi Ichthyic,
You seem really confused, but I am afraid that if I did point anything specific out I’ll be “concern trolling.” It’s unfortunate that criticizing people you partly agree with is off limits in your unique form of rational discourse.
Kind Regards,
SRG
May 5, 2008 at 7:30 pm
Come on, Itchy, you don’t think the spitting in people’s soup bit is a little much?
June 11, 2008 at 10:19 am
The Courtier’s Reply is “nothing you are saying has any substance”. You use it when a person declares that you must be an expert in a given field to criticize it. Now, alot of things you do need experience in. If however, they can’t answer BASIC questions without logical inconsistency, than the whole field is probably nonsense.
The reason he hasn’t gotten over it is because he reads the news- you hear about honor killings enough and… well, you change.
Atheism covers the lack of belief in God. There are some atheists who believe that God doesn’t/can’t exist. To differentiate them, they are referred to as “strong atheists” due to their large muscle mass and dominance of professional wrestling circles.
August 12, 2008 at 10:16 pm
The kind of aggressive verbal abuse P.Z. shows toward people of faith (who, BTW, have a fundamental and Constitutional RIGHT to believe whatever they want to believe) only magnifies how unreasonable and immature he truly is. I’m sure he would love nothing better than to have this country turn into a communist center of control and tyranny – where he could be free to spit in people’s soup and have them all flogged if they didn’t agree with him.
As far as him hearing about honor killings and then changing because of that…
Uh-oh… I think I’m getting a Deja Moo… The distinct feeling I’ve heard that bull before. His “changing” has nothing to do with honor killings. It has everything to do with being a control freak. It’s not just a lack of belief in God (notice the capital “G”?) but a HOSTILITY toward religion (more particularly Christianity… since that is the prevalent religion he experiences as an American citizen) which goes far beyond just an intellectual disagreement. If he could succeed in the unconstitutional act of having all religion outlawed, I’m sure he’d have his own very special experience complete with a cigarette afterward. I’m sure Dawkins would be more than happy to join him in that as well.
There is a distinct difference between having the personal philosophy of not believing in God on the one hand, and on the other hand cursing out people and acting like a school yard bully toward other people because of their religious beliefs.
November 8, 2008 at 11:07 pm
>The Courtier’s Reply is “nothing you are saying has any substance”.
No, it’s “I’m going to presume nothing you are saying has any substance.” Big difference.
November 8, 2008 at 11:45 pm
Just to add a bit, PZ Myers got grumpy when a bunch of reviews of Dawkins mentioned that Dawkins didn’t take into account the views of a bunch of books that a person who wanted to be an expert on the topic would need to take into account. Myers wants to pretend that he can be an expert in a realm of discourse by proclaiming the whole realm nonsense without knowing what they are saying. That’s pure anti-intellectualism. You have to know what an argument says before you can declare it false. Especially since it’s not the premises he’s disagreeing with (he shown many times he doesn’t even know what those are), but the conclusions.
February 19, 2009 at 7:30 pm
For the atheists on this forum, y’know, you don’t HAVE to be here! Nobody is forcing you to read these blogs. If they make you so pissed off, why are you reading them?
June 21, 2009 at 6:58 pm
replie to Alex: – for the same reason for religions to hate each other – self importance and an attention getter.
They don’t realize the rest of us are not fooled and see them for just another group of religious zealots.
and idiots like PZ and Dick Dawkins don’t realize the rest of us are practicing social evolution by attempting to expose them and confine them to social natural selection.