Skeptics I no longer have any respect for.

[theVOID]

Regarding Dawkins, I have much more respect for acommplished biologist venturing a opinion in philosophy, than an accomplished philosopher opening his mouth on anything, including on philosophy.

Philosophy is fucking bullshit.

When a person philosophises so much that they begin to claim that they don't know santa isn't real, then that person is a) detached from what is important - like objective reality, and b) a tedious cunt.

If you really think "Philosophy is fucking bullshit" then unless you want to be a glaring hypocrite you'd better not be seen around here talking about ethics, morality, naturalism, theism, political philosophy, the scientific method, logic, mathematics, reason etc - All of these things are either directly philosophical (naturalism) or have risen from philosophy (the scientific method).

It's no secret that a lot of philosophy is complete bullshit, but a lot of the 'science' that people believe is also incredibly fucking stupid, like young earth creationism - Quinean naturalism, Bayesian analysis and a great deal of analytic philosophy is extremely useful for describing thing like logic, reason, science and natural epistemology (deciding how to treat beliefs and evidence) and many of these things are at the root of modern atheism, things you unknowingly it seems philosophise about probably every day.

Whether or not Santa can be known to be not real depends entirely on what you mean by 'knowledge', and defining knowledge in a consistent way is extremely difficult - or maybe I'm just a "tedious cunt".

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It was the blasphemy that upset him. I'm not arguing the technicality of it being his private business, nor the fact that it's bigoted. Of course it's ridiculous in a moral sense for him to act that way just because he disagrees, but it's also more than a bit stupid for people to NOT understand that he would be offended by what he saw at the conference when those are his deeply held beliefs. I don't care what your judgment of his beliefs are - he should be accorded the same respect that ANYONE who says "Okay, I believe something different, I acted badly but changed it and apologized," should be. Telling him he HAS to think something different, or crucifying him for his beliefs, makes PZ no different from the Christians who try to vilify us for our lack of it, in my opinion.

How is it 'of course' ridiculous in a moral sense? Exactly what is 'morally wrong' about deciding not to trade with a given subset of the population? I think that's a ridiculous notion, but I'd love to see your justification for that.

Sure, it makes PZ a jerk, but we already know that he is. This isn't news. His refusal to accept a legitimate apology isn't a moral wrong, it's amoral, none the less it has the effect of making some individuals change their opinion of him which may or may not be detrimental to his own goals and values.