After several prominent science bloggers announced that they would be leaving Bloggingheads.tv, AI researcher and rationality blogger Eliezer Yudkowsky has decided to announce he’s not going anywhere:
Why? Two main reasons:
1. Robert Wright publicly said that this was foolish, apologized for the poor editorial oversight that led to it, and says they’re going to try never to do this again. This looks sincere to me, and given that it’s sincere, people really ought to be allowed more chance than this to recover from their mistakes.
2. Bloggingheads.TV has given me a forum to debate accomodationist atheists who are insufficiently condemning of religion – for example my diavlog with Adam Frank, author of “The Constant Fire”. Adam Frank argues that, while of course we now know that God doesn’t exist, nonetheless scientific wonder at the universe and its mysteries has a lot in common with the roots of religion. And I said this was wishful thinking, historically ignorant of how religions really arose and propagated themselves, and a continuation of such theistic bad habits as thinking that things of which we are temporarily ignorant are “sacred mysteries”. And no one at BHTV complained that I was being too confrontational, or too anti-religious, or that it was unfair to have the diavlog be between two atheists.
In the rest of the post he reiterates his commitment to the mission of antitheism.