Goodbye to Godless in Dixie

A couple of years ago, after getting into it with Tim O'Neill, I deblogrolled his History for Atheists. Beyond his insistence that I HAD TO listen to his podcast, a repeated insistence, I realized that, in the vein of Samuel Huntington's cultural Christianism, he practices some type of cultural Catholicism, especially in defending the papacy against antisemitism and other issues.

I also realized I was FAR from alone in recognizing this. And, the issue popped up on social media as well.

So, now, to Neil Carter, proprietor of Godless in Dixie.

He's another of the "deconverted gurus," like Ryan Bell.

He's run Godless in Dixie for several years and gotten a large following.

First? Before you go there? While not wanting to be a deconversion guru myself, do I admit to a bit of sour grapes over the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or whatever? Hellz yes, both on the fame itself and any money he makes that I don't. I'm kind of a post-capitalist, but not totally so.

Anyway, to the story.

He's not on my blogroll, but he's officially not worth my time at all.

About two years ago, he blocked me from commenting. Patheos uses Disqus, and I normally log into it via Twitter. So, a "why" would have been nice. (That said, I got blocked by MLB Trade Rumors years ago on that same account. Can't figure why.)

OK, I started following on Twitter a regular commenter on Shem the Penman's blog. That itself was a mistake, as I found out on another Patheos blog. So, I unfollowed him, but I still get Disqus notices regarding his comments anyway.

So, he was commenting on one of Neil's sites, and it involved something about New Testament interpretation and other things. Less than 24 hours later? Blocked again.

This time I know why. I called a lying Jesus mythicist a liar and was banned a couple of hours later. That violates either Rule 1 or Rule 2.

So, on Twitter, I told Carter to go fuck himself, gave him a small amount of time in daylight hours to comment back, and with no response, blocked him there.

As far as the gurudom? Well, I haven't started Facebook pages for any of my blogs because Facebook. My anonymity level is fairly thin, but it is there. And, I've done fake videos on my main blog, but no real ones or podcasts.

That said, in his commenting rules, Carter let the cat out of the bag. Other people do (most of? all of?) comment moderation. He surely has help with podcast recording, Facebook management, etc.

Anyway, back to the main point.

If I can't call a liar a liar, you've got a pretty weak site there. It's just like I said when leaving Quora — if you're going to let liars tell lies (Quora's bad on the alt-right, especially neo-Confederates) but you won't let me call them liars, you lost me.

And, if you're trying to protect mythicists, even though you claim you're not one, you've got less than critical thinking skills on this subject. (I "abused" other people as well as that particular mythicist.)

That said, as far as abuse? This, to me:

That said, said person is also a gun nut.

That said, while saying he's not a mythicist, Carter shows he's not a New Testament scholar, either. No, Paul in 1 Corinthians is not passing on traditions he received about the Eucharist from Jerusalem disciples. Rather, he's claiming a direct revelation from God for something he's inventing out of semi-whole cloth/stealing from mystery religions and dolloping with some Judaism on top. (As we don't know FROM PAUL when Jesus was killed, he can't be proven to be using a Passover seder as that dollop, either.)

Also, as multiple commenters have noted, the existence of Gospel fragments as early as 150CE may prove that something that became Christianity existed, contra a subset of mythicists who claim Constantine invented Christianity (yes, those nutters still exist), but that isn't proof for Jesus' existence.

I'm not a mythicist myself, but ... this is poor reasoning.

So, while Neil Carter won't be on my blogroll, he won't even be watched.

The first block, on my previous main Twitter account? I didn't notice that right away because it was the last time I visited that particular post.

A second reason he won't be watched is because he's on Patheos. And its corporate concern-trolling on comment moderation is simply ridiculous. I will occasionally visit Friendly Atheist, and a blog or two I follow there. Hemant Mehta generally knows his stuff, including on First Amendment law. Otherwise? Forget it.

And, Neil, if you and the guru team don't like it? My house, my rules, to quote your rules.

==

Ditto for a much more recently deconverted guru, Ryan Bell. I was asked to like his Facebook page and passed. I didn't get any AP stories written about me; you've got more than enough publicity already.

Do I wish I had enough publicity to comfortably come out of the shadows into a new line of work and other things? Yes. But I don't.

Ditto for many others who have chosen to make the leap of unfaith without wanting to be gurus, or even being able to enter gurudom if we did.

Carter, Bell and others could learn more about luck, starting with reading or re-reading "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven."

No, your free will isn't zombified by digital advertisers

That's the ultimate philosophical takeaway from this long piece about the lack of effectiveness of online advertising.

It's snark-heavy, with a headline of "The new dot-com bubble is here: It's called online advertising."

But beyond snark, there are real points.

A key early point of Jesse Frederick and Maurits Martijn is that here, in the most dismal of the social sciences (advertising as part of economics), as in other sciences, correlation is not causation.

From there, we dive into some actual research, which the hand-wavers didn't.

Finding one? Paid company brand name keyword links? Bupkis.

We then move beyond that to:

The benchmarks that advertising companies use – intended to measure the number of clicks, sales and downloads that occur after an ad is viewed – are fundamentally misleading. None of these benchmarks distinguish between the selection effect (clicks, purchases and downloads that are happening anyway) and the advertising effect (clicks, purchases and downloads that would not have happened without ads).

Interesting.

And the authors go on to tsk-tsk best-selling pop philosopher Yuval Noah Hariri:

An essay by best-selling author Yuval Noah Harari on "the end of free will" exemplifies the genre:  according to the Israeli thinker, it’s only a matter of time before big data systems “understand humans much better than we understand ourselves."

Now, Harari may have been operating in part from a starting point of traditional social psychology, which talks about the "blind self" or similar, being a part of ourselves that others know better than we do.

And that's true.

But, that's people. 

Not algorithms based on selection bias. More on that? 

The authors talk further about "selection effects" (i.e., selection bias) vs "advertising effects." And they apply this to the Hucksterman Empire.

In seven of the 15 Facebook experiments, advertising effects without selection effects were so small as to be statistically indistinguishable from zero.

Well, that's pretty serious.

Because the target audience for a lot of ad sales is small, you have to run large sample sizes on testing before you can figure out if you've got something real. The audience for some new Max Factor lipstick is nothing like presidential polling. Rather, going the other way, the authors compare the rarity of many product needs to that of cystic fibrosis.

From here, the authors note that this also shows advertising can't manipulate people as much as digital advertisers claim.

In other words, you, I and Yuval Noah Harari can all relax. We still have something similar to free will. It may have some psychological constraints, but nothing more than those "nudges" above.

Brian Dunning was not just a fraudster, he was ineffective; now, who will tell Sharon Hill and others?

That's one of several findings from this long piece about online advertising

It's snark-heavy, with a headline of "The new dot-com bubble is here: It's called online advertising."

A key early point of Jesse Frederick and Maurits Martijn is that here, in the most dismal of the social sciences (advertising as part of economics), as in other sciences, correlation is not causation.

From there, we dive into some actual research, which the hand-wavers didn't.

Finding one? Paid company brand name keyword links? Bupkis.

We then move beyond that to:

The benchmarks that advertising companies use – intended to measure the number of clicks, sales and downloads that occur after an ad is viewed – are fundamentally misleading. None of these benchmarks distinguish between the selection effect (clicks, purchases and downloads that are happening anyway) and the advertising effect (clicks, purchases and downloads that would not have happened without ads).

Interesting.

Now, that's all true of old-fashioned ads as well.

From there, the authors talk further about "selection effects" (i.e., selection bias) vs "advertising effects." And they apply this to the Hucksterman Empire.

In seven of the 15 Facebook experiments, advertising effects without selection effects were so small as to be statistically indistinguishable from zero.

Well, that's pretty serious.

From here, the authors note that this also shows advertising can't manipulate people as much as digital advertisers claim.

The information above is as true on affiliate marketing as on search, the authors show.

And, given that much of the research on both search and affiliate that the authors cite is about eBay, the specific company that unrepentant pseudoskeptic fraudster Brian Dunning pled guilty to defrauding? Schadenfreude is sometimes a semi-Nietzschean recurring bitch.

Now, who will tell Sharon Hill?

Is post-Great Recession America going to be like post-World War II Europe on religious participation?

Per the latest Pew Research Center data on religion and American life, it sure looks that way.

The biggest takeaway from all this latest data? Millennials (yeah, those slackers, despite adults calling the younger generation slackers as far back as Aristotle) are a LOT less religious than their parents. A LOT less.

"Nones," the common word for those with no religious affiliation or identity, plus non-Christians, have as great an identity among Millennials as all Christian groups combined. No, really.

Now, this is a lot broader group than atheists or agnostics, despite Gnu Atheists talk of an "atheist surge," which has been going on for a decade or more now. (The talk, not any surge.) That said, self-identified atheists and agnostics have more than doubled over the 12-year range of the data, from 4 percent in 2007 to 9 percent in 2019.

It should be noted that "nones" may well have metaphysical beliefs. That's another reason for Gnus to stop poaching and crowing. Looking back 15 years or so, a woman on Match.com who originally wanted to meet me said "no" when she found out that "atheist" meant just that and NOT "spiritual but not religious" or Wiccan light or whatever. (It should also be noted, which Gnus don't, that millions of Buddhists around the world, mainly in the Theravada tradition, are both atheist and religious — and believe in metaphysical ideas, just not a personal god.)

That said, Nones are voting with their feet, not just their brains. In 2014, people who attend religious services just a few times a year first exceeded those who worship monthly or more. Among Millennials, it's just one-third who go to services once a month or more.

Among Americans overall, that growth is driven by a surge in those who NEVER attend, by self reporting. That's up to 17 percent.

Yes, one-sixth of Americans, even if they have some metaphysical beliefs (astrology, luck, Kabbalah or whatever) lurking somewhere, say they NEVER attend religious services. Related? Among those who say they attend once a month or more, the most ardent, the weekly attenders (or more) lost six percentage points, down to 31 percent. (If even that is correct; time and motion studies have shown that decades-old self-reported religious attendance surveys were consistently too high.)

Pew notes that the National Opinion Research Center, with different questions and framing, shows a similar number of Nones. It's at 22 percent for all ages vs 26 percent from Pew, even with somewhat different framing and questioning.

At the same time, Christian denominations seemed to have plugged the gap among the self-identified faithful. Worship rates among them have held pretty much steady over the past decade. But, with more and more of this being among the older generation, not just the Baby Boomers but the Silent Generation behind it, absolute numbers of Christians are declining due to death if nothing else.

That said, there are other takeaways. Despite the "give me that old time Christianity" (which type? Catholic? Lutheran? Reformed? Arminian? Anabaptist? Eastern Orthodox? Jacobite/Nestorian?) claim that it's those liberal Protestants (and cafeteria Catholics) who are all running away.

Not really.

Conservative mainline Protestants and conservative newer-line denominational Protestants (Southern Baptists, Disciples of Christ, etc.) are declining at almost the same rate as mainline Protestants (UMC, PCA, ELCA, Episcopaleans, UCC). I have theories on why.

They relate to the header.

It's true that the decline started before the Great Recession. It started with the slow recovery after the tech bubble burst in the early years of the George W. Bush presidency. But that recovery was anemic by historic standards, and the recovery from it and the post-9/11 slump (along with late-Clinton era and Bush era deliberately blind regulatory eyes) directly lead to the Great Recession.

Paul, in 1 Corinthians 15:19, said:

If we have put our hope in Christ for this life only, we should be pitied more than anyone.

But I think the flip side holds true.

If you tell Millennials, just like Southern massas told slaves who weren't in a position to challenge them, that their hope should only be in and for the next life, they'll laugh at you.

And, it's not just today. It's like the claim in Isaiah 7:14, the famously mistranslated almah passage:

Therefore Yahweh Himself shall give you a sign: behold, the young woman shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.

No "virgin" was involved, of course, nor was any metaphysically divine Messiah being predicted. King Ahaz of Judah, worried about being invaded by Rezim of Syria and Pekah of Judah, would take cold comfort in being told to wait 700 years for a Metatron or whomever.

Instead, Isaiah was proclaiming in all likelihood that the new wife of Ahaz's son Hezekiah was going to give birth within a year, and per the rest of Isalah 7, before the child got much past the terrible twos, Rezin and Pekah would be smashed. Ironically, that baby would be King Manasseh, deemed the worst of Judah's rulers by biblical chroniclers.

I digressed a bit, but for a point. Contra Christians proof-texting the Old Testament, proclamations ("prophecies") were made for the people to whom they were directed.

So, today, with Millennials almost certain to have it worse off than not just smug Baby Boomers, but also Gen X, any church that can't address the here and now will get tuned out.

And, that's more than a soup kitchen or food bank. It's a job bank. It's sobriety support that may not be explicitly AA. It's church-based yoga and other exercise programs and more. Also, as America gets more ethnically diverse and it hits more than 50 percent non-white babies being born now, if that old church not only doesn't offer this support network, it's a bunch of old white people, the Millennials will tune out. Related to that? Unless they're conservative white Millennials, if they don't see social justice being addressed at that church (or synagogue, Orthodox and Conservative Jews), they'll tune out. 

And obviously already are.

And, given that they're young and debt-burdened in an era where income inequality continues to grow, they won't even be at success Gospel churches.


After all, per what I said about warning Christians about proof-texting the Tanakh, the preachers ("prophets") of the prophetic books were about preaching social justice, not "making predictions." And much of that social justice preaching was about wealth that was unearned, unshared, or both.

The situation is not directly parallel to World War II in Europe (and maybe in Japan?) where destruction was massive, and where deprivation lasted more deeply, not to mention pre-war and wartime political fissures that make America's look mild. But I think there are parallels.

For fundamentalist-type Christians who consider Europeans who aren't godless Communists to be mostly godless mostly Socialist, you're wrong to a degree today on belief (and way wrong on politics) and of short time sensibility.

European religious involvement closely tracked America's until the Great Depression started. It diverged some degree during then and the rearmament period, stayed about the same degree of difference during the war, then diverged more yet after World War II. But that shows it was a process. Jews lost god in the camps. Many Protestant and Catholic young German males, and their anxious families, lost god in Russian prison camps. Yet others on the Western side of the Iron Curtain lost god in postwar capitalism. (OK, the parallel fails there.)

But, it is happening, and unlikely to change. That's my analytical notes, including to my conservative Lutheran family.

Beyond that? I welcome it.

It's probably kind of like cigarette smoking. If the Nones who truly don't go to church at all continue that through age 30, they'll likely never be there. And, with that, contra the fakery of Supreme Court backtracking in rulings like Town of Greece, at some point, the First Amendment's freedom of religion meaning true freedom from government propping up religion in any way will maybe start to be realized. Beyond totally banning pre-meetings prayers, etc., I'm talking about things like churches not getting any tax breaks beyond those extended to nonprofit entities in general and things like that.

==

Update, with some related stats? In 2019, 23 percent of Americans went to church every week. Sounds fairly devoted, right, every week? But 29 percent never went once. Texas, Bible Belt stereotypes aside, is no exception. This site says that it was less than 20 percent, and they're a religious website.

A few thoughts on Catholic projectionism, partly Reformation connected

I'm using the word "projectionism" in its normal everyday psychological sense, made more popular perhaps by Freud but existing as an intellectual concept long before him.

As I noted before, Catholics don't seem to miss a dollar with church bulletin ads.

Nor, per my most recent post before this, do they miss a dollar with tchotchkes related to the Sacred Heart of Jesus cult.

And, even though Chimayó is not a wealthy place, the squabble between the Archdiocese of Santa Fe and other folks, plus the fact that it doesn't work even though it has swag for sale and takes donations, show that no dollar is missed there either.

And, the early modern Catholics who developed the Cult of the Sacred Heart (while condemning Aztecs for something, arguably in a symbolic sense no more grotesque) were lusting for gold in the New World.

And, on the reality side of legend vs reality on Martin Luther, the medieval indulgences system was a money-grubbing gold mine, and lots of Germans' beliefs about a ravenous Curia were true.

So, the projection?

First starting around, oh, 1095 CE and the First Crusade, then articulated by kings and emperors (often with Church-blessed titles) who didn't want to pay off bank loans, seems to me that about 1,000 years ago, and moving on from there, talked about "money-grubbing Jews."

Projectionism.

And, the bloodiness of the Sacred Heart, at least symbolically? The ancestors of the priests at Chimayo, the Franciscan missionaries who flagellated themselves (Puebloan society and moiety leaders also did)? The re-sacrifice of the Mass, which comes off not as metaphorical or symbolic, but, yes, as the church proclaims, a re-creation, a re-enactment, and which I also don't get as atheist or ex-Lutheran?

Versus those bloody pagan Aztecs, or other bloody pagans?

Projectionism.

I'm sure Tim O'Neill, cultural Catholic (maybe actual Catholic and not total atheist) proprietor of the deblogrolled History for Atheists will object.

Not that Protestants might not have some projectionism of their own on "pagans." Nor, given British then American capitalism and the so-called Protestant work ethic, that there's not Protestant projectionism on money-grubbing Jews.

But, I'd argue that, once we get past the early Baroque and into the Age of Enlightenment, Protestant monetary projectionism onto Jews was lower than Catholicism's. And, that lacking a cultus of sacrifice, that even if Luther himself held on to elements of the Sacred Heart myth, there still wasn't the same projectionism onto "savages" in this way.