And a good time was had by all

I had to skip out on all the talks of the last day of the American Atheists convention — we’re entering the last two weeks of the semester, with lots of extra work, and usually I spend my weekends catching up on grading and preparing for the next week of content, so I’m already behind.

It was a good weekend though, although yesterday was all deja vu. So many talks on social justice! It sounded like an atheist conference from 15 years ago, with all the liberal weirdos standing up and talking about feminism and gay rights and how the atheist community needs to fight for equality, except this time around we didn’t have audience members leaving their seats and cornering the speakers later to hiss at them about how “atheism only means disbelief in gods, how dare you taint the meeting with liberalism” and then the speakers get assailed with nothing but hate mail from the unbelievers for a year afterwards. So it’s getting better. I think the religious right is actually helping things, because nowadays everyone is seeing the horrible consequences of raging conservatism on the country. The few times I heard Trump mentioned, the audience was snarling/groaning/booing in response.

One difference: no one was talking about science. Not one talk the entire weekend. I think that might be another unintended consequence of so many of the atheist-scientists of yore having turned out to be such roaring asshats. Thanks so much, Dawkins & Coyne & Harris & Pinker, you’ve made science a toxic pill in everyone’s mouth.