Fantastic rant via The Fat Atheist / The Amazing Atheist –

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Reiterates many of my points, just without my token efforts at self-restraint. Yes it is puritanism. Yes it is quasi-religious. Yes it is deranged dogmatism. Yes PZ Myers is pwned. Yes, yes, yes. ::applause::

A note for the ladies –

I do appreciate your sentiments of support, but I need to make something explicitly clear. Whilst I may be very good at articulating the same kinds of thoughts that you yourselves have in the face of Watson’s bone-headed idiocy, I can’t speak for you. Nor would I ever presume to even try doing so. Anything I say is like water off a duck’s back for the TrueBelievers and only further evidence of misogyny anyway.

Ladies, Watson is your problem, not mine. She degrades and debases your gender far more than she does mine. She is very much like the Lord of the Nazgul –

‘Hinder me? Thou fool. No living man may hinder me!’

Famous last words before being stabbed in the face by Lady Éowyn. Watson’s arrogance is the same – she knows no man can ever harm her and she knows she is free to spit and snarl at us as she pleases and be accountable to no one. If you ladies want Watson taken down, you’re going to have to do it yourselves. It’s the only way. The alternative is to have her and her cadre of maniacs carry on as normal, claiming to represent your voice and some mythical feminist majority with their divisive, nihilist nonsense (because she knows you are too stupid to know what’s best for you).

A note for the younger atheists, skeptics and Freethinkers –

Do not look to your elders for wisdom1 – you will only invite disappointment. One fruitful result here is that PZ Myers has been exposed in all his glory – just another populist chump who’s opinion is for rent to whatever the cause du jour is. Very flexible and accommodating chap.

Another useful outcome is more correlation for the theory that the integrity and median intellect of any of the major atheist and skeptic websites has an inverse relationship with site membership numbers. The tragedy is that stupidity attracts stupidity, and on these sites, sooner or later, stupidity coagulates into a critical mass large enough to crush any kind of independent opinion or contrarian thought like a bug on a windscreen on a freeway.

Resist the temptation to look to any of these sites for authority. Do your own reading, research your own scribblings. Look for smaller forums where stupidity has not grown to sufficient mass as to be immovable and is still possible to combat. Better yet, start your own. These godless / skeptic megasites underscore the observation that –

you can take the (wo)man out of the church, but you can’t take the church out of the (wo)man

They are not communities, they are congregations, and though they will deny it to the death, they are suffocated with dogma, ideology, confirmation bias, groupiedom and all manner of other nonsense. Beware: they will rot your mind, and you will become one with them. Instead take a leaf out of Crowley’s book –

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law

Ruminate on the sublime implications of that thought for the human condition. Just don’t be fool enough to take too much of anything else Crowley says seriously. Most importantly, when dealing with these communities, remember to be able to state boldly, and with confidence –

Why don’t you all just go and get fucked?

1 – Except for me. But at least with me, you know you can say and do whatever you please and I won’t roll over on my back like a crippled dog and piss my belly in terror while howling about oppression.