"And you draw the line at intelligent breasts?"

So, there's this new Reebok commercial for their EasyTone shoes, which supposedly help work out your butt as you walk. It seems to me that shoes which leave you more tired after walking than you would normally be are defeating some of the point, but whatever. Here's the ad:

My first thought upon seeing that is that Reebok has brought us one step closer to "The Girl with Two Brains."



Oh FSM, it's been way too long since I watched any Coupling. Anyway, my second thought upon seeing that commercial is this: who's the audience? I'll admit, I was enthralled, but I don't think I'm going to go out and purchase any butt-toning shoes for women, and while Reebok does men's EasyTone shoes as well, you'd never know it from the commercial.

Presumably, the commercial is for women, but I have a hard time imagining that many women would be likely to have the same reaction to the commercial I did. Not only is it quite sexualized and objectifying, but it portrays even a woman's individual body parts as jealous, catty, and shallow. How does that appeal to any woman?

Is it just ridiculously tone-deaf and poorly targeted, or do I understand women even less than I previously thought?

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In case you're interested

Our review of vapid horror flick Paranormal Activity touches on some skeptical themes. Check it out!

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Guest Post: 'Sup, my duggars?

Jon's recently gotten back into the blogging game, so I asked him to write up a brief guest post here. Without further ado...

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The Duggar family basically exemplifies everything that is wrong with white people: hyper religious and preachy about it, southern, home schooled, ignorant and proud, multiple first names (let's face it, if I read Jim Bob Duggar in a work of fiction, it would thoroughly end my ability to suspend my disbelief), desperately wants to star in a reality show, too many damn kids, and of course Republican. In fact, Duggar should be an racial slur for white people. It even kind of sounds like one.

“I almost got run off the road by that duggar in the minivan.”

or

“I hate Wal-Mart, that place is full of duggars.”
“At least they're not screaming, hey mother f-er, where's my box wine?”

Get on this, people. You might want to start using Heene while you're at it.

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Our fallible perceptions

I totally just read that Psychic Reader sign as "Psychic Raper."

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So it's come to this

It's taken quite some time, but the camel's back is officially broken. I fucking can't stand Bill Maher.

I don't know where to begin, really. I liked "Politically Incorrect" back in the day, but Religulous was a mixed bag. And now, between the AAI debacle and his renewed rampaging against basic medicine, as well as the frothing and infighting he's inspired in the skeptic and atheist communities, I'm finally done with the asshole.

I guess the place to begin is AAI. I don't know, I think there's some tackiness involved already with their Richard Dawkins Award, and the criteria don't help assuage my concerns. Here's what the award was supposed to honor (according to the Wikipedia page):

The Richard Dawkins Award will be given every year to honor an outstanding atheist whose contributions raise public awareness of the nontheist life stance; who through writings, media, the arts, film, and/or the stage advocates increased scientific knowledge; who through work or by example teaches acceptance of the nontheist philosophy; and whose public posture mirrors the uncompromising nontheist life stance of Dr. Richard Dawkins.

Wikipedia cites the Atheist Alliance website as their source for that quote, but the site is poorly designed, and neither the search function there nor Google can find anything about the Dawkins Award anywhere on either that site or the convention site. I've heard charges that the criteria were changed after the Maher controversy started, but I can't confirm that. What I can tentatively confirm is that there's no apparent mention of the criteria on their site. There is this telling bit:

We are also pleased to announce that Bill Maher, effervescent host of HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher and host and co-producer of the 2008 documentary movie Religulous, will be in attendance Friday evening to receive the 2009 AAI Richard Dawkins Award for his efforts to further the values science and reason in the world.

Here are the problems: first, Maher is avowedly not an atheist. While all the direct quotes addressing his agnosticism, disavowal of the term "atheist," and vague spirituality come from years back, I seem to recall even in "Religulous" he claimed that atheists were just as dogmatic, or something along those lines. It wasn't until just before the convention, when he had Dawkins on his show, that he claimed that title for himself.

Second, there is no way that anyone can claim Maher "further[s] the values of science and reason." There wasn't any science in "Religulous," and even the reason was a bit light. I don't watch "Real Time," but I've seen enough clips of his antivaccination, antimedicine views to know what an antiscience kook he is. I'm convinced that the only reason Maher buys into global warming and evolution is because his political opponents are against them, not because he understands or trusts the science. His views on medicine have been and continue to be insane and dangerous--and probably spurred again by his anti-corporate political beliefs. He thinks that vaccines are a less settled science than global warming, overestimates the role of nutrition in disease prevention, subscribes to various flavors of detox woo, and generally distrusts "western medicine." All this should rather disqualify him for any award based around the promotion and advancement of science.

And I'm sure that there were others in 2008 who would better deserve this kind of award. What about the people who organized the London bus signs? How about Dan Barker and Annie Laurie Gaylor of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, who made serious waves with the Washington Christmas sign, have expanded their billboard campaign, and have continued their radio show and other ways of promoting both atheism and reason. What about Simon Singh, who has taken on the British Chiropractic Association in an ongoing campaign against pseudomedicine? These are just a few, off the top of my head, and there are others who have done more--and consistently--for science and reason than Maher.

Which has skeptics in an uproar, and rightly so. And no one has been roaring louder than Orac, one of my favorite bloggers, who has discussed Maher's woopidity in the past. Unfortunately, I think Orac got a little overheated in one of his last posts on the subject. For context, Orac's discussing a post by PZ at the AAI convention. PZ talked about Dawkins's introduction of Maher, and how Dawkins had to walk a tightrope in the speech between acknowledging Maher's contributions to the atheist movement and dissociating himself and the AAI from Maher's stupid views on science and medicine.

I don't envy the position that Dawkins was put in, there. AAI fucked up in their choice of Maher, and it's not as though Dawkins was in on the decision. He's also on a book tour, and apparently wasn't familiar with either Maher or his views (outside of "Religulous") until fairly recently. He could have disavowed Maher and refused to present the award, in which case I imagine AAI would have replaced him with someone who would give a glowing boilerplate introduction. By staying involved, Dawkins was able to throw a few punches in as well as acknowledging Maher's contributions.

Anyway here's what Orac had to say about it:

As for the "tightrope," well, suffice it to say that I'm still less than impressed. PZ is right about one thing; it wasn't enough. To me, this whole fiasco is pretty strong evidence that, if atheism and science come into conflict (unless, of course, that science happens to be the science of evolution, in which case I highly doubt that this controversy would have been so flippantly dismissed), for Richard Dawkins atheism wins hands down, and science-based medicine once again remains the poor, neglected stepchild of the so-called "reality-based" community. Atheism is clearly what's more important to Dawkins now. As long as he bashes religion, Maher's a-OK with him and only gets a brief remonstration for his promotion of quackery and anti-vaccine views.

Orac's posts on the matter, especially some of the later ones, came across to me as mildly unhinged (such as where he criticized PZ for not complaining about Maher in a post that was clearly just a list of speakers--no one was commented on), and this quote is really the apex of that. Richard Dawkins cares more about atheism than science? Yes, I'm sure that's why he just wrote a science book about science and is touring the country to read scientific excerpts from that science book. That claim, I think, is ludicrous.

Furthermore, it's not "atheism and science" coming into conflict, as Orac suggests. It's an atheist group and science coming into conflict. It seems that by the time anyone knew about Maher's receiving the award, the choice had already been made. So what to do, have all the prominent speakers pull out of the conference? Or use the moment to remind people that atheism isn't a dogma, and that we can vociferously disagree with one another--and with the organizations that supposedly speak for us? Perhaps there wasn't enough of that, but it's not reasonable to claim that this was a conflict between "atheism and science."

And then there's this bit: "science-based medicine once again remains the poor, neglected stepchild of the so-called "reality-based" community" Quoi? I'm sorry, Orac, but I'm not entirely clear on this: which reality-based community are you talking about? Certainly not the skeptical community, which gets more vitriolic about antivaccinationists and the dangers of alternative medicine than any other subject. Certainly not the skeptical community who rallied behind Simon Singh in his legal battles. Certainly not the skeptical community who take every quack's attempt to silence a skeptic and spread it like wildfire around the Internet. Certainly not the skeptical community who has tirelessly fought against the Mercury Militia and the Jenny McCarthy and Oprah followers. Certainly not the skeptical community who typically cut their teeth on debunking homeopathy. Certainly not the skeptical community who trumpets every child's death due to faith healing and quackery. Certainly not the skeptical community whose top luminaries include a neurologist, a psychiatrist, and a cancer surgeon. No, it must be some other reality-based community that Orac is talking about, because the one I'm a part of makes medicine a primary focus.

So, overall, I don't think anyone comes out of this looking good. Maher is a contrarian idiot, and has reaffirmed that since the conference ended. The AAI made a boneheaded mistake and apparently is more concerned with covering it up than addressing it, which certainly doesn't give me any desire to be associated with them. Dawkins comes across as someone who doesn't pay enough attention to what's done with his name and assumed endorsement (see also: the Brights). I think PZ makes it out relatively unscathed, though I'm willing to reconsider that. And Orac comes across as someone who wrote one too many insolent posts on this subject.

But while my opinion of the latter three isn't enough to tarnish my opinions of them more than a little, Maher's continued use of creationist-style arguments to promote his antiscience views has led me to the conclusion that he's a world-class asshat, and I'm as done with him as I am with Ben Stein. At this point, I'm glad I haven't bought "Religulous": I don't think I could stand to watch Maher for that long anymore. Fuck 'im.

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Allergic to Skepticism

Over the summer, I made the trip to visit Akusai, Magus, the Fianceé and Wikinite, along with an assortment of other Hoosiers. The trip was a blast--as any such gathering would be--but that's not why I'm dredging it up several months later. No, the reason for the resurrection comes from something Akusai was talking about at the event--namely, his allergies.

I've recently developed several such allergies. I remember most of my life that I would get a cold or two in spring or summer. At some point, my body decided that wasn't enough, so toward the end of high school, I started getting all those classic allergy symptoms at various times of the year, and always around cats.

I've never gone to an allergist; instead, I self-medicated. I experimented first with Benadryl antihistamines, and it only took a few weeks for me to realize that the reason I was falling asleep much earlier than usual was because of the whole "MAY CAUSE DROWSINESS" thing. I switched over to Claritin (loratadine) and its generic counterparts, and I haven't looked back since.

So, when Akusai brought up his allergy problems, I chimed in that Claritin really helped mine. He (and he can correct me if I get this wrong) replied that it didn't work for him, and that his allergist said it didn't really work for anyone. I was taken a little aback, skeptic though I am--had I really fallen prey to Doggerel #70? I know I'm not immune to the placebo effect or other fallacies of thought, but this one surprised me a little. So, I resolved that I would do some research into the medicine and find out what kind of clinical evidence supported its efficacy.

And then, I didn't do much else. I pulled up some articles on my iPhone at one point, but never really got around to reading them. I kept using the Claritin as necessary, mainly because I still had these bottles of it, and resolving to look into the literature eventually.

Eventually was within the last week, as it turns out. My fianceé, you see, has been using Zyrtec (cetirizine hydrochloride), and has been trying to convince me to give it a shot. I didn't want to run into the same trap that I'd apparently hit with Claritin, so I decided to do some research. In the meantime, I bought a trial pack of the Zyrtec.

I also completely exasperated my fianceé by launching into full-on skeptic mode in the medicine aisle, explaining that I wanted to do the research, and that I wasn't going to believe it worked just based on her self-reported experience. We also got into a bit of back-and-forth over whether or not the brand name mattered; clearly both bottles contain the same chemical (it says so on the label); why would one affect me differently? Apparently, I failed the "being skeptical without coming across as a dick" test. I'd like to work on that, but apparently the threshold is a lot lower than I suspected.

Anyway, when I got home, I pulled up PubMed and searched for combinations of "loratadine," "cetirizine hydrochloride," and "allergy." I read and skimmed a lot of abstracts, which covered an awful lot of terms that I didn't understand, but at the end of it I was pretty well satisfied that both loratadine and cetirizine had been shown to be significantly more effective than placebo in controlled trials. Moreover, at least some of the abstracts suggested that the latter was more effective than the former, which has inspired me to continue at least trying Zyrtec. And by "Zyrtec," I mean "generic cetirizine hydrochloride," because I still haven't been convinced that there's a difference. My next big step is to see an allergist (now that I have insurance), so I can get a better idea of what exactly I'm allergic to.

The point of this meatspace anecdote is as a reminder that it's easy, even for skeptics, to be fooled. I don't (and I'd say, I can't) really turn off that skeptical impulse, much to my fianceé's consternation, but through laziness and assumptions, I can delay it, and I should be more careful about that. True, I can't go researching each and every thing I do or consume or think about, but I can at least do the legwork when it's my money and my health on the line. All told, that research didn't take long, and while the details of the studies were well beyond my ability to comprehend, the conclusions were straightforward.

The other point is one I'm going to be working on in meatspace a bit more. As skeptics, we tend to be harsh and blunt because, I think, we recognize the value in that unvarnished truth (and because we like to argue). We understand that the only idea worth believing is one that's been through an unrelenting gauntlet of harsh trials and uncompromising questions. We have a specialized vocabulary to describe all the ways that people can be fooled and can fool themselves, and we use it regularly.

Most people, however, are not as steeped in the skeptical movement as we are. Launching into a skeptical examination with all guns blazing, talking about the worthlessness of anecdotal evidence and the placebo effect and mistaking correlation for causation is all well and good in blog comments and TAM conversations, but it seems to come across as hostile to non-skeptics. I think it's important to rein in those finely-honed skeptical impulses when we're in meatspace dialogues, lest we come across as condescending know-it-alls.

Conversely, though, we also need to educate (and it's difficult to educate peers without seeming like a condescending know-it-all) so that we can have these kinds of discussions, and so that other people understand why we are so focused on this harsh evaluation of ideas, beliefs, and claims. There is value in skepticism for everyone--except perhaps the woo merchants, frauds, and charlatans--and we have a responsibility to communicate and promote that. If we did it more often and more effectively, we'd have a lot less to worry about with regard to tone and civility.

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Alphabetical Blasphemy

Since today is International Blasphemy Day, I thought I'd take a few minutes to quickly blaspheme against as many religions as I can think of off the top of my head. So, here goes:

• Ásatrú: I'm not sure how to feel about Ásatrú. I mean, on one hand, it's got to suck to have other people casually citing your gods as the silly mythological ones that no one believes in anymore, but on the other hand, you've got fucking Thor. Plus, your canon is huge--once you've finished the Edda, you can start working on Journey Into Mystery. Even Catholicism doesn't have regular monthly updates. Or continuity editors, for that matter.
  
  
• Baha'i: I've read about Baha'i half a dozen times, but any information about them just kind of slides off my brain. I'm pretty sure their schtick has to do with letting the dogs out.
  
  
• Christianity: I realized today that I'd really like to do a comedy version of the Jesus story. Not "The Life of Brian," but an actual, accurate adaptation of the gospel stories (inasmuch as you can call any mash-up of those four contradictory stories "accurate") done in a wacky slapstick style. It occurred to me while reading Jesus, Interrupted that Jesus gets run out of town and stoned quite a few times. I can just imagine the scenes of Jesus and his crew running with huge crowds of angry Jews chasing them with stones and stuff, while Ciaphas (or someone) shouts "JEEEESUUUUS!" in a Mr. Slate/Dean Wormer style. The more I think about it, the better I think it would be. I just need to figure out how to funny up the downer ending. Much as I'd like to, I can't steal this idea:
  
  
  
• Deism: Deism is kind of like the bathtub drain of religious belief; it's almost totally empty, and so many things seem to end up sucked down it. Every major argument for the existence of gods ends up getting as far as Deism and no farther; people who aren't quite ready to give up religious belief altogether seem to get caught in it like clumps of hair, Antony Flew fell in from the other side of the tub, much though Christians would like to claim that he made it across the Deistic divide; and American government has spent so much time caught in the gutter that it's started using it for ceremonial purposes.
  
  I guess what I'm trying to say is "Deism sucks."
  
  
• Ellinais: All the lameness of Ásatrú, but without the awesomeness of Thor. Sure, Hercules and Zeus are cool and all, but there's so many also-rans--the Legion of Substitute Olympians like Iris and Eris and Nike and such. I don't know, I just can't imagine Odin turning into a golden shower to impregnate someone.
  
  Oh, and as long as I've mentioned Eris, I might as well mention Discordianism. Either it's a parody religion with its collective head up its own ass, or it's a real religion based around trying way too hard to be funny. I can't tell the difference, and I'm convinced that its followers can't either, and most of them are just playing along so they don't look like they don't get the joke.
  
  
• Freethinkers: When people accuse atheists of being smug and superior, this is the kind of stupid bullshit they're talking about. "Freethinker" is even worse than "Bright" in this regard; it's effectively calling everyone else a slave-thinker or restricted-thinker. Any organization with cute derogatory terms for everyone in the outgroup has its head way too far up its own ass. Can we please resign this elitist term to the dustbin of history?
  
  
• Gnosticism: Hey, look, an entire religious movement based around being super-special elites who know secret things that make them better than you. It's the religion equivalent of high schoolers with an in-joke.
  
  
• Hare Krishna: A religion known mainly for hanging out in airports, the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (which sounds more like an organization that James Bond would fight against) peaked with a mention in a George Harrison song and had officially jumped the shark by the time they started denying the moon landings on religious grounds. Yeah, let's teach that controversy. Bald assholes.
  
  
• Humanism: You know, there's not a lot I disagree with when it comes to Secular Humanism, but something about the tradition kind of squicks me out. I think it's the adherence to a specific set of ethics, or something. I guess I'm technically a Humanist, but it's not a term I really use. So, yeah, Humanists...stop being so squicky.
  
  
• Islam: I thought about just putting a crude cartoon of Mohammed here, but then a new thought occurred to me. See, like my "Laugh-In of the Christ" above, I think the life of Mohammed would make a fun movie. See, the Hadith has this bit about Mohammed flying up to heaven on a magic donkey that my brain connected to the end of "Grease," where Danny and Sandy fly into the sky in their car, and I thought "it'd be awesome to do the story of Mohammed like 'Grease'!" See, you start it with "Allah (is the Word)," then there's "Sunni Nights," "Look at Me, I'm Aisha B.," and "Madrasah Dropout." By the end, Mohammed will be all clean-cut and wearing a sweater, and Aisha will be sewn into her leather burqa. I know she's only supposed to be six years old, but given Hollywood's proclivity toward casting older people as younger people, I suspect that we might get an actual teenager in the role. I recommend Miley Cyrus.
  
  
• Jainism: You know, if the Jains were serious about their commitment to not killing any living things, they'd all take medication to inhibit their immune systems. You guys are so careful that you sweep bugs out of the sidewalk in front of you and avoid root vegetables since they kill living plants, but what about all those living bacteria that your body's killing all the time? Bunch of hypocrites.
  
  
• Kemetism: Why resurrect Egyptian mythology as a religion if you're not going to mummify the dead and build pyramids? Neopagans ruin everything.
  
  
• Libertarianism: Because substituting "the market" for "God" is still a religion.
  
  
• Mormons: Mormonism is religion as done by fanfic.com. It's a mishmash of Christianity, 19th Century science fiction, Masonic ritual, American patriotism, wish fulfillment, and really awful pseudohistory. "So, this guy discovered some magic stones, which may or may not have been in a breastplate of some sort, then used them to translate a book of golden plates (though the book wasn't in the room at the time), written in 'reformed Egyptian' by Indians who were actually Jews who sailed across the ocean to America, where Jesus went on walkabout once. Apparently, there's no such place as Hell (but somehow there's still a devil), so everyone gets into Heaven, but some people get better rooms, and if you're really good and wear your magic underpants and never drink coffee, you get to be the god of your own planet when you die! Oh, and God is from another planet, which orbits a star called Kolob, and there are Puritans living on the moon! And black people will turn white if they start behaving, and God and Jesus had bunches of wives, but we don't talk about those things anymore." Joseph Smith was fucking Harold Hill, and I wouldn't be surprised if it started as a drunken bet that just got out of hand. In fact, I would be very surprised if it didn't start as a drunken bet that got out of hand.
  
  
• Newage: Ah, newage, less a religion, more a smorgasbord of stupidity. There is no dumb idea that newage hasn't adopted, embraced, and woefully misunderstood. If Deism is a shower drain, then newage is the trap pipe underneath that collects all the gunk and detritus that gets past the screen.
  
  
• Objectivism: What kind of cult of personality outlives their personality? One with the personality of a petulant junior high student, I guess. It's a shame that Ayn Rand and L. Ron Hubbard are both dead; I'd really like to see a definitive decision on which cult leader was the bigger hack.
  
  
• Pantheism: Pantheism saw Deism's non-interventionist, impersonal prime mover god, and said "that god's not useless and superfluous enough! I can do better." And by George, they did at that. Way to set the bar high, Pantheists.
  
  
• Quakerism: The graph of Quaker popularity drops off significantly after the end of the 18th century, and has a short, sharp resurgence in 2003 or so, when everybody took the Belief-O-Matic Quiz and found out they were "Liberal Quakers." In between, it's all oatmeal.
  
  
• Rastafarianism: I think if you actually did the demographics, Rastafarianism comprises equally Jamaicans and pretentious college stoners who want to give up shampoo.
  
  
• Satanism: I don't know what's worse: that Christians repeatedly get panicked over an effectively nonexistent religion, or that they get panicked over an effectively nonexistent religion that they think is made up of Dungeons and Dragons players and KISS fans. Never has there been a sweatier, hairier nonexistent religion.
  
  
• Taoism: 'Nuff said.
  
  
• Unitarian Universalism: All the uselessness of Deism with all the boredom of church! UU is the best argument for good atheist meetup groups.
  
  
• Voodoo: The only group who has contributed more easy plot devices to horror movies than the gypsies. It's almost a shame that no one knows anything accurate about them.
  
  
• Wicca: A fifty-year-old ancient religion made entirely out of pale skin, fishnet sleeves, awkward body fat, pretentious teenagers, and lesbians. No religious tradition in history has ever needed a harder smack with the cluestick.
  
  
• X-Files: I know it's not a religion, I'm just using it as a handy term for all the conspiracy theorists out there who aren't adequately covered by the rest of the list. The X-Files was basically "Left Behind" for the Coast to Coast AM crowd. Which explains why the show ended up being totally incoherent, ridiculous, empty, and raising far more questions than it was poised to answer.
  
  
• Yoga: As I understand, this religion gives you the ability to stretch across the screen and breathe fire. And according to the manual, it supposedly allows you to teleport, but that's, like, 12th-level Yoga or something.
  
  
• Zoroastrianism: Spanish for "the foxastrianism." Extant since somewhere around 600 BCE, it's like the little religion that could...worship a god who answers phones on the Enterprise and drives a Japanese car.
  
  
• Everyone else: chances are, you're too lame or tiny to merit notice. I mean, come on, I picked Kemetism over you? Yeah, sucks to be you. With the exception of Scientology (aka Mormonism with a higher page count): it's okay, Scientology, someday you'll catch Nicholas Cage for killing John Travolta's kid. In the meantime, enjoy being 4chan's bitch.

And that's the end of it. Happy Blasphemy Day, everyone!

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On Labeling

I keep running into an issue with labels. It wasn't long ago that I revised my own from "agnostic" to the more accurate and more useful "agnostic atheist" (in a nutshell, anyway--but this is a topic for a future post). The problem I have is that the relevant parts of my beliefs didn't change, only what I called myself did. I didn't have a belief in any gods when I called myself an agnostic, and I don't have any belief in any gods now that I call myself an atheist. From any objective standpoint, I was an atheist the whole time.

And this is the substance of the problem: the dissonance between what a person calls himself or herself, and what categories a person objectively falls into. These labels are frequently different, and frequently result in various confusions and complications.

On one hand, I think we're inclined to take people at their word with regard to what their personal labels are. It's a consequence of having so many labels that center around traits that can only be assessed subjectively. I can't look into another person's mind to know what they believe or who they're attracted to or what their political beliefs really are, or even how they define the labels that relate to those arenas. We can only rely on their self-reporting. So, we have little choice but to accept their terminology for themselves.

But...there are objective definitions for some of these terms, and we can, based on a person's self-reporting of their beliefs, see that an objectively-defined label--which may or may not be the one they apply to themselves--applies to them.

I fear I'm being obtuse in my generality, so here's an example: Carl Sagan described himself as an agnostic. He resisted the term "atheist," and clearly gave quite a bit of thought to the problem of how you define "god"--obviously, the "god" of Spinoza and Einstein, which is simply a term applied to the laws of the universe, exists, but the interventionist god of the creationists is far less likely. So Sagan professed agnosticism apparently in order to underscore the point that he assessed the question of each god's existence individually.

On the other hand, he also seemed to define "atheist" and "agnostic" in unconventional ways--or perhaps in those days before a decent atheist movement, the terms just had different connotations or less specific definitions. Sagan said "An agnostic is somebody who doesn't believe in something until there is evidence for it, so I'm agnostic," and "An atheist is someone who knows there is no God."

Now, I love Carl, but it seems to me that he's got the definitions of these terms inside-out. "Agnostic," as the root implies, has to do with what one claims to know--specifically, it's used to describe people who claim not to know if there are gods. Atheist, on the other hand, is a stance on belief--specifically the lack of belief in gods.

So, if we're to go with the definitions of terms as generally agreed upon, as well as Carl's own self-reported lack of belief in gods and adherence to the null hypothesis with regard to supernatural god claims, then it's clear that Carl is an atheist. Certainly an agnostic atheist--one who lacks belief in gods but does not claim to know that there are no gods--but an atheist nonetheless.

The dilemma with regard to Sagan is relatively easy to resolve; "agnostic" and "atheist" are not mutually exclusive terms, and the term one chooses to emphasize is certainly a matter of personal discretion. In the case of any self-chosen label, the pigeon-holes we voluntarily enter into are almost certainly not all of the pigeon-holes into which we could be placed. I describe myself as an atheist and a skeptic, but it would not be incorrect to call me an agnostic, a pearlist, a secularist, an empiricist, and so forth. What I choose to call myself reflects my priorities and my understanding of the relevant terminology, but it doesn't necessarily exclude other terms.

The more difficult problems come when people adopt labels that, by any objective measure, do not fit them, or exclude labels that do. We see Sagan doing the latter in the quote above, eschewing the term "atheist" based on what we'd recognize now as a mistaken definition. The former is perhaps even more common--consider how 9/11 Truthers, Global Warming and AIDS denialists, and Creationists have all attempted to usurp the word "skeptic," even though none of their methods even approach skepticism.

The danger with the former is when groups try to co-opt people into their groups who, due to lack of consistent or unambiguous self-reporting (or unambiguous reporting from reliable outside sources), can't objectively be said to fit into them. We see this when Christians try to claim that the founding fathers were all devout Christian men, ignoring the reams of evidence that many of them were deists or otherwise unorthodox. It's not just the fundies who do this, though; there was a poster at my college which cited Eleanor Roosevelt and Errol Flynn among its list of famous homosexual and bisexual people, despite there being inconsistent and inconclusive evidence to determine either of their sexualities. The same is true when my fellow atheists attempt to claim Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Paine (among others), despite ambiguity in their self-described beliefs. I think, especially those of us who pride ourselves on reason and evidence, that we must be careful with these labels, lest we become hypocrites or appear sloppy in our application and definition of terms. These terms have value only inasmuch as we use them consistently.

The matter of people adopting terms which clearly do not apply to them, however, presents a more familiar problem. It seems easy and safe enough to say something like "you call yourself an atheist, yet you say you believe in God. Those can't both be true," but situations rarely seem to be so cut-and-dry. Instead, what we end up with are ambiguities and apparent contradictions, and a need to be very accurate and very precise (and very conservative) in our definition of terms. Otherwise, it's a very short slippery slope to No True Scotsman territory.

Case in point, the word "Christian." It's a term with an ambiguous definition, which (as far as I can tell) cannot be resolved without delving into doctrinal disputes. Even a definition as simple as "a Christian is someone who believes Jesus was the son of God" runs afoul of Trinitarian semantics, where Jesus is not the son, but God himself. A broader definition like, "One who follows the teachings of Jesus" ends up including people who don't consider themselves Christians (for instance, Ben Franklin, who enumerated Jesus among other historical philosophers) and potentially excluding people who don't meet the unclear standard of what constitutes "following," and so forth.

Which is why there are so many denominations of Christianity who claim that none of the other denominations are "True Christians." For many Protestants, the definition of "True Christian" excludes all Catholics, and vice versa; and for quite a lot of Christians, the definition of the term excludes Mormons, who are also Bible-believers that accept Jesus's divinity.

When we start down the path of denying people the terms that they adopt for themselves, we must be very careful that we do not overstep the bounds of objectivity and strict definitions. Clear contradictions are easy enough to spot and call out; where terms are clearly defined and beliefs or traits are clearly expressed, we may indeed be able to say "you call yourself be bisexual, but you say you're only attracted to the opposite sex. Those can't both be true." But where definitions are less clear, or where the apparent contradictions are more circumstantially represented, objectivity can quickly be thrown out the window.

I don't really have a solution for this problem, except that we should recognize that our ability to objectively label people is severely limited by the definitions we ascribe to our labels and the information that our subjects report themselves. So long as we are careful about respecting those boundaries, we should remain well within the guidelines determined by reason and evidence. Any judgments we make and labels we apply should be done as carefully and conservatively as possible.

My reasons for laying all this out should become clear with my next big post. In the meantime, feel free to add to this discussion in the comments.

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