They announced they would be leaving the forum operational for 30 days and then replacing it with the new system. However two days later the forum was locked down with a message from Richard saying the following…

Imagine that you, as a greatly liked and respected person, found yourself overnight subjected to personal vilification on an unprecedented scale, from anonymous commenters on a website. Suppose you found yourself described as an “utter twat” a “suppurating rectum. A suppurating rat’s rectum. A suppurating rat’s rectum inside a dead skunk that’s been shoved up a week-old dead rhino’s twat.” Or suppose that somebody on the same website expressed a “sudden urge to ram a fistful of nails” down your throat. Also to “trip you up and kick you in the guts.” And imagine seeing your face described, again by an anonymous poster, as “a slack jawed turd in the mouth mug if ever I saw one.”

What do you have to do to earn vitriol like that? Eat a baby? Gas a trainload of harmless and defenceless people? Rape an altar boy? Tip an old lady out of her wheel chair and kick her in the teeth before running off with her handbag?

None of the above. What you have to do is write a letter like this…

You can find the entire thread here. Needless the say the letter that was written wasn’t in any way offensive – it was very pleasant and upbeat. But never the less it attracted widespread abuse from forum users. Here is why I think the reaction was nieve though…

Firstly, Richard’s first assumption is wrong. “What do you have to do to earn vitriol like that?” The answer actually is write a letter. Post a YouTube video. Visit /b. Basically anything on the internet attracts that kind of abuse, it saddens me that, that is the case but unfortunately that is how the internet is. Every time I post a YouTube video someone makes a stupid, inane and abusive comment, that’s life unfortunately.

Secondly I think it’s also a mistake to assume these comments are coming from people sympathetic to your cause. I suspect they didn’t. One possibility is they came from religious people just looking for any way to get to him but I suspect such comments actually came from general internet trolls who don’t really care about science, reason, debate or maybe even Dawkins, generally get off on the idea of annoying religious and non-religious people and just wanted to cause trouble. Basically imagine an even younger, more irriguous version of my friend Will.

I also suspect that it may be a nieve thought to think you can control and moderate the internet. I suspect a lot of the user base will be lost because people don’t like moderation because of the pressure it puts you under. However I could be wrong about this, only time will tell. At very least though you can see why this would annoy people.

All this resulted in us not getting back into Leeds until 2am this morning, something which my body did not appreciate when I had to get up for work this morning. Never the less it was a great weekend. On top of the talks and conventions we also managed to fit in the Ashmolean Museum, the History of Science Museum and of course plenty of watering holes on the way.

Oxford is a beautiful city, if occasionally puncuated by some hideous buildings that really stick out and the colleges are all like mini-cities in themselves. Would be a really nice place to be invited to do postgraduate study (hint hint) .

While Sikhism is often seen as preferable to the major monotheist religions, I think it falls into the same trap as Paganism in that it mixes some good stuff in with a load of rubbish and then tries to use the plausible aspects as all true. At least Christianity offers you wholesale bullshit, you either accept the whole idea of Jesus or you don’t, there is no trying to force a square peg into a round hole.

First off, I want to say that in general, the concept that most people used to describe it this time (which is actually something I coined last year ), that Sikhism is just “Humanism plus god”, I agree with. I was perhaps a bit harsh in my initial review in The Old bar on Friday night about my thoughts on it. However I stand by my stance that it is very much disagreeable.

Firstly, it has a concept of god, or “the Devine” but it doesn’t actually define what this is. According to the speaker, their holy book contains about 4,000 pages explain what god isn’t, but never explains what god is. This seems very confusing an ill-defined when it comes to building a belief structure around it.

It has the concept of a traditional family unit – you are commanded to get married and have kids. This is common among many other religions, especially Catholicism and Judaism and inevitably leads to an intolerance of homosexuals and even on a more general level creates judgement in the community of those that don’t choose to live as a traditional nuclear family.

They don’t cut their hair or shave. There is just no reason for this. You might be able to come up with some justification as to why this is done in terms of being one with nature but any such justification would almost certainly indicate you should do this with all your body – yet they are quite happy to cut their nails or shower for example.

Finally, they fall back on the favourite religious past time of trying to supress and control natural human behaviour in order to exhort control over the follower’s life.

The best example of this is that Sikhs are forbidden from indulging in anything that could be harmful to their bodies – such as drugs, alcohol or meat. Not only to most people naturally crave these things but actually there is nothing wrong with having meat or alcohol as part of a balanced diet and many studies have shown that they have a positive impact on your health. Particularly because I have Sikh friends who regularly eat at McDonald’s (having the vegetarian option of course but it’s still fast food¹) so the rules then seem to become rather less meaningful.

Footnotes
¹ I should point out that McDonald’s does not identify as a fast food restaurant. I use that term to describe the kind of food McDonald’s serves but they never call themselves it so don’t get arsey next time you’re waiting a whole three minutes for your food and making sarcastic comments like “you call this fast food?” because we don’t call it that, we never promised you it would be fast, we’re just so damn good at it that nine times out of ten we do have it all ready in under a minute.

To my surprise almost everyone came out in a huge sea of support for Dawkins and rightfully so too!

For example one of the things suggested was that what we called magic thirty years ago is now called neuro-linguistic programming and so a lot of Paganism is things science simply doesn’t understand yet. That would almost be an argument if it wasn’t for the fact that NLP is for the most part unproven bullshit. More importantly it really smacks of when alternative medicine practitioners try to attribute something that clearly doesn’t work but they are still trying to sell as being something to do with quantum theory, taking advantage of the lack of public understanding of the topic.

It was also interesting to witness the fact they couldn’t actually work out what they believed in. Most religions have differences in their beliefs – just look at the amount of different denominations of Christianity (or even Islam which now has more and more developing despite stricter controls over it and even, unbelievably, Scientology) but they do at least have some common beliefs. 100% of Christians believe in Jesus for example whereas the Pagans didn’t seem to be able to give us anything they could say 100% of Pagans believed in which, as Chris Tedd did, raises the question “how do you even know your a Pagan?”

Finally I also felt there was a lack of internal consistency in the beliefs, probably resulting in the fact that they can’t really work out what it is they believe in. For example they started by talking about reincarnation and then later talked about talking to dead ancestors so Heini raised the question “how can you talk to dead ancestors if they have been reincarnated?”

A much better approach to take to the belief system I felt was the one presented to us at last year’s session on Paganism where out speaker basically said “I’m not going to lie to you, we made it all up in the 60s, but it works for me.” Never the less, it was a very interesting evening and well worth attending.

At Leeds we managed to get 32 people down to the event most of which, including myself, downed an entire bottle of homeopathic arsenic and yet somehow survived. We also got a reporter from ITV’s Calendar news come down and featured us on their evening segment – I’ve yet to see it but I’ve heard a mixed reaction so far.

The response from Boots was a predictable one – homeopathy is recognised by the NHS (something which is in the process of changing as the government inquiry is quickly dismantling the case for it) and that many people use homeopathic remedies – of course many people read horoscopes that doesn’t mean there is any truth in them. But of course we knew they would just ignore the science and just try and insist that lots of people bought it so it must be true.

Most of the major papers have run stories about it today so we’re chalking this one down as a big success for the skeptics movement. A big thank you to everyone from Leeds Skeptics who came down to take part, Daryl for organising the Leeds event and the guys at Merseyside Skeptics for putting it all together.

We weren’t best prepared for the course not having things like plates but the food was never the less good and with Essentials now open until 10pm we even managed to source some coffee (Extras stocked it but they only had decaff so I just walked out).

The talk itself was very good, it was both amusing and very informative. It is hard to believe how biased the legal system is (actually have studied law I don’t find it that unbelievable but that certainly isn’t a good thing) and how easy it is to bring a liable suit forward – makes me wonder what would happen if the thousands of people who have seen Simon speak and are behind him brought a frivolous suit against the BCA.