PZ Watch 5 15 10

Today’s Ad Hominems:

Father Barron is a “smug prick”. A “pompous fraud”. A “fool”. A “stuffy old gomer” [simpleton, fool, dolt; Webster’s Unabridged].

Why?

”…the crazy complaint that the New Atheists aren't serious enough, that they're playing at atheism, because they just don't express the existential anguish that apostates are expected to feel.”

Of course PZ never seriously, intellectually defends Atheism, he screeches it using all manner of Ad Hominems rather than any conceivable intellect. This is what satisfies the particular demographic which he serves: the unthoughtful, smug-yet-cowardly bullies who have found an apologist for their two-year-old anti-authoritarian behavior. Strings of tantrums do not produce an argument, certainly not an argument worthy of a considered response. But that is not the goal of PZ-ism.

The PZ space corresponds to the playground bullies who hang around under the slide, deriding and bullying everyone who comes along who is not-one-of-them. It is a group exclusive to a certain type of bully, the anti-religious snorter, and it is formed around exclusion and anti-tolerance, i.e. discrimination in the true sense of hateful, category-aimed derogatory rhetoric. In this sense it is not dissimilar to anti-Semitic postings of white supremacists and other fascists. The weapons of the PZ-ites do not include rational analysis – despite the empty claim attempting to associate their attitude (of which they are quite proud) with intellect (of which none is apparent).

The presuppositions are as clear and blindly accepted as axiomatic truths: Science produces truth, as is shown in global warming; evolution is proved by the fact that we exist and have similar stuff in us as other living things; gay marriage by (their) definition of inclusion is goood; illegal immigrants by (their) definition of inclusion are goood. These are stated and known truths, inarguable absolutes. After denying absolutes, others such as these come and go as required.

But PZ is more than just that. He has insisted that Obama is too conservative, and that Democrats are, too, most of them. And PZ, like most New Atheists, is a Humanist.

When PZ stakes a claim on fulfillment, truth, goodness, and justice, one has no idea what he means by those things, unless one understands both Humanism and PZ’s methodological approach to obtaining it.

Humanism is understood best by examining actual humanist experiments and the humanists who perpetrated them. Couched in terms like “New Man” and Consequentialism, and “egalite’, fraternite’ et liberte’”, the implementation of Humanism on the ground, in real life, was to create a bloodbath of the opposition leaving only cowards and true believers behind because they were easier to deal with. Humanist heros of yore are Robespierre, Mao, Lenin, Stalin, Che, Castro, Pol Pot, etc. etc. This is the legacy of Humanism, a belief system to which PZ and the New Atheists belong and promote. Humanism is first of all a war on its own people, at least its own people which it sees a threat: it is the us vs. them of the Red Army vs. the White Army and the need to eliminate suspicious ethnic groups altogether by starvation or, if necessary, direct murder. Victims of Humanism numbered around 250,000,000, in the 20th century, the century of scientific and technological progress. That is the cost of the highly vaunted sacrifice of self for humanity as a whole - the "love" of the group, but not the individuals. Individuals are disposable.

For the moment, PZ is a bag of toxic gas and little more. But due to the aspirations of his chosen ethic, as well as his highly intolerant and hateful behaviors (and sizable following), PZ and all the New Atheists merit close watching. Just as the toxic fumes from Nietzsche have fueled Humanists in the past century even well after his own death, the Humanist toxicity can remain embedded in others, producing nasty outcomes.