Another atheist woman who says no thanks to the atheist “movement” because it’s such a shit-show.
But as defensive as I’ve gotten with believers, I’ve never actually been tempted to join an atheist group. Partly, that’s because it’s hard to avoid the white men ruining it for the rest of us by using atheism as just another platform for a macho power struggle. Atheism offers no guarantee of other shared ideas or philosophies – and when white male atheist leaders and communities act racist, Islamophobicand misogynistic, I find myself wishing that there were another way to describe my non-beliefs.
It’s sad. The “movement” could have been good, but it took a wrong turn and then a whole bunch of wrong turns and here we are – a big swathe of atheists repulsed by organized atheism.
The piece is from January, by the way. The situation has improved out of all recognition since then.
Hahahahaha totally kidding, no it hasn’t.
We need some atheist and/or skeptic Thought Leaders™ to think thinky thoughts about what might be done about this problem.
As a white male, I’ve quit identifying myself as an atheist, too. There’s a deep rift between me and people like Michael Shermer, and Mike Nugent, and I have no interest in being lumped in with them.
I suppose I “identify” myself as an atheist in the sense of: that’s an accurate descriptor for one particular aspect of me — but it’s never been an Identity in the way “Christian” was once an Identity (um, not to be confused with Identity Christianity, you understand). I think the only time I’ve ever felt like I was an capital-A Atheist was three years ago this month, when I stood among ~20000 of Us in the rain on the National Mall in DC. There was this sense that, for all Our diversity and disagreement, We were collectively repudiating the single most socially-sanctioned, institutionally-supported, and politically powerful superstition on face of the earth, and there was a kind of joy in that. And that evening I sat in the hotel lobby reading media reports on the Rally, over the shoulder of someone who turned out to be Phil Mason. Been a lot of water under the bridge since then…..
….and I find myself back where I was 10 years ago, wondering what’s the point of a uniquely atheist movement. Secularism is important — and lots of religious people agree. Human rights are desperately important — again, lots of the religious on-side with that (I have no idea of the opinions or affiliations of the folks with whom I stood across the street from the Saudi embassy today, and it doesn’t matter). And lots of religious people strongly oppose the obvious evils and stupidities done in the name of religion — sexism, homophobia, faith-healing scams, huckstering evangelists, creationism, political demagoguery, etc. Rationalism and critical, evidence-based thinking are important, and I think they lead away from faith just as I think they lead away from quack medicine and pseudoscience and pseudohistory. So promote that as an attitude and a method, and let the chips fall where they may on the answer to the God Question (it’s guaranteed to be the death of the really dogmatic, harmful kind of faith, at any rate). So what’s left for Atheism qua Atheism to do?
Reading a thoughtful article on intersectional feminism (Hana Shafi, “The trouble with (white) feminism”, THIS, March/April 2015, p. 21).
I wonder if one of the root causes turning the atheist “movement” into a shit-show is because when “ism”‘s (‘macho power’ aetheism, ‘white’ feminism) rest on exclusionary assumptions (maybe a bit like religious belief) they are hollow. The intersection of humanism, feminism, aethism, other “ism”‘s (which you often find in the Free Thought blogs) is unveiling, something narrowly based adherents cannot allow.
(in the same issue of THIS a great made up word I never heard before: “catastrofuck”)
catastrofuck
. UPLOADED
. SAVED
. VOCABULARY UPDATED
The big problem goes beyond the Shermers and Dawkinses of the world and rests on the shoulders of the leaders who know better, but still enable these assholes for money or prestige or whatever they can get from them. Nobody with any pull in the movement is willing to stand up and say, “No more.” And seeing how craven so many of them are, I don’t see it happening any time soon either.
The claim of “Islamophobia” is linked to a Salon article about Islamophobia and atheists by a “CJ Werleman”. The first sentence of that Salon article claims:
That contradicts the primary religious motivations expressed by many of these terrorists themselves. So Werleman’s claim is an extraordinary one, needing extraordinary evidence. What does the author present to back up that claim? Werleman continues:
So maybe we can get extraordinary evidence favouring such a sweeping claim from that linked article. But the link is broken, AlterNet says “Page not found”. Hmm. So Werleman’s claim of what Science says, gives us no way to find the scientific evidence the author cites to support that claim.
Boko Haram, al-Qaeda, the Pakistan Taliban, the Afghan Taliban, Islamic State — these groups among others are all explicit to the point of tedium about the fervor of their religious motivations for terrorist attacks. Is the author claiming “Science” shows those attacks are not motivated by religion? Despite the fact that’s exactly what the attackers themselves say is motivating them to attack?
Or perhaps the author is claiming there are more than 95 times as many attacks perpetrated by non-religious motivations, as the many explicitly-religious motivated attacks in 2015 so far. And in 2014. And in 2013, in 2012, in 2011, and so on back.
Either there’s a nearly-100-fold more terrorist attacks not listed there, all by groups who don’t have religion as a primary motivation for their attacks; or that author has access to some astounding Science reaching into those attackers’s heads to find their true unconscious motivations. Neither seems likely, so some pretty strong evidence is needed.
Organised atheism always struck me as absurd. Nothing follows from atheism, so what do the members or any movement think they share? It is like organising a movement for people who don’t wear hats. What would they do?
What Bluntnose said.
Offtopic, @Marcus Ranum, if you like that word, you need to listen (if you don’t already) to John Oliver and Andy Zaltzmann’s podcast, “The Bugle”. John Oliver has coined some corking words, including (in reference, I think, to people profiting from natural disaster relief) “catastratunity” and the certain winner for me of word of the decade “fuckeulogy”.
As in, in the week Osama bin Laden was killed, he announced that their topical podcast would be “not so much a tribute episode to bin Laden, as a special fuck-you-logy to the big man”. They’ve since had occasion to do fuckeulogies for Hugo Chavez, Muammar Gadaffi and Saddam Hussein, although not, to the disappoinment of a lot of listeners, Margaret Thatcher.
Sorry for derail.
Bluntnose, #8:
In a world where nobody claimed any gods exist, you would be right of course: nothing follows.
But in this world, where huge numbers of people claim gods exist, and furthermore claim that their god-beliefs justify sexism, racism, science denial, expertise denial, denial of rights to people who don’t share their god-beliefs, denial of human rights in general, cruelty to animals, and generally acting like tribal apes — then quite a lot follows from atheism.
If it strikes you as absurd to organise against religious oppression, tyranny, subjugation, despoilation, violence, and other regressive behaviour; well, you’re welcome to stay in whatever comfort the scientific enlightenment wrought for you (which it wrought by following the implications that follow from lack of god-beliefs).
Just don’t get in the way of the rest of us who realise atheism implies that it is this world where life must be improved, and we humans who must do it.
Oh dear lord. And I don’t even work here anymore.
Ok, for anyone reading this who can’t see what’s wrong with this statement, a short primer.
What follows from atheism is that holy books are not true. And what follows from that is that the instructions of killing the tribe over that hill, raping and marrying your war slaves, of women being chattel and servants, of not laying with a man, of certain dietary requirements, it’s all not true, non-binding stone age bullshit.
So I’d say there is actually a lot of stuff that directly follows from atheism. Denying that to preserve a status quo that took religion to establish is rather ironic.
I think the post is missing the link to the source article. I mostly agree with Jaya Saxena.
For instance, what could possibly possess a humanist to join American Atheists, whose president attended CPAC, in part, to help fellow conservatives “fix” (his exact word) the issue of conservatives losing votes? Ignoring the issue of “gun rights,” the conservative position on the Affordable Care Act alone has a body count in the thousands. According to a study by a team of researchers from Harvard Medical School, Republican Governors who rejected the ACA’s extension of Medicaid to millions of their residents resulted in thousands of needless deaths.
Getting to see an atheist billboard is super awesome. Not dying from an easily treatable illness that I can’t afford to pay for is even better.
rorschach, #10
Exactly. Atheism would solely be a lack of belief in god(s) if theism was solely a belief in god(s).
@9,@10: Except that lots of religious people somehow manage to oppose all that bad shit, and a lot of it would still happen even if religion magically went away tomorrow morning. What is logically entailed by any given starting point often doesn’t seem to align very well with human motivation. If one can work against tyranny and the rest without needing to worry about the gods, then who cares what atheism “entails”?
Organised atheism always struck me as absurd. Nothing follows from atheism, so what do the members or any movement think they share? It is like organising a movement for people who don’t wear hats.
Your analogy fails because: a) “people who don’t wear hats” are not a marginalized and hated group whose very lives are in danger in many parts of the world; and b) people who don’t wear hats are not dumping their hats in response to a longstanding pattern of blatant lies, ignorance or injustices perpetrated by hat-wearers and/or whoever is forcing them to wear hats.
A better analogy might be “women who don’t want to wear burqas.” And that, of course, would show that atheism is a LOT more consequential than you think it is.
I strongly suspect that there are a lot of people, both in and out of the atheist camp, who WANT to ruin the atheist movement for as many people as possible. There are people who hate atheists, liberals, and Muslims and other minority religions, and who have a lot to lose if all three of those groups ever managed to unite against them. And they have a lot of money to manipulate people into discrediting atheism, knowingly or not; and they clearly have no problem using it for that purpose. One example I can think of offhand is libertarians and their patrons, who do not want atheists to unite, or gain support from others, for any progressive cause that involves people improving their own conditions at the expense of the rich and powerful. Another example is anti-Muslim bigots who can’t stand the idea of atheists making common cause with non-extremist Muslims against religious extremism. And then there’s the MRAs who don’t want women atheists getting too uppity about, well, anything.
Ditto Marcus@2. Dawkins and Shermer and the rest of their annoying ilk have defined their exclusive club, and I have no desire to be part of it. I’ll be an unbeliever and a skeptic on my own, thank you very much, without identifying with or helping those people in any way.
Since, I have seen you and other women bloggers condemned for Islamophobia, racism, and transphobia right here at FTB, I would think you would meet such rhetoric with a bit more skeptical mind, Ophelia.
Why would I want to be in a “movement” with people too compromised by their political agendas to take on Islamic misogyny and homophobia unapologetically (usually while having the gall to call themselves feminists)?
In fact charges of “Islamophobia” and “racism” with respect to atheist criticism of religion are virtual identifiers of a strand of leftwing politics that kicks gender equality under the bus.
The mass “grooming,” i.e. rape and sex trafficking, scandal uncovered in the UK shows where the Guardian’s craven attitude leads. The continued unwillingness and inability of governments to aggressively attack FGM in Western minority communities is an even starker reminder of the costs of Saxena’s attitude.
Imagine if whites were mutilating black women as severely as FGM in the same numbers. We would practically be in a state of civil war. But women are mutilated by their families and we do almost nothing.
@Ben Finney
https://beta.groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/Writers_Forum/conversations/topics/75251
That contradicts the primary religious motivations expressed by many of these terrorists themselves.
Some people who have studied this e.g. Scott Atran seem to say that religious motivation is less of a factor when it comes to terrorism. While I do not know about the accuracy of that , atleast the study seems to have been conducted professionally. People on the other side of this issue(E.g. Harris and Coyne) seem to forget that the plural of anecdotes is not data. (for e.g. is Ted Cruz religiously motivated? or does he just want to appeal to his base? are you just going to rely on a superficial reading of what he is saying? )
I’ve attended meetings of a couple of atheist groups, and no longer go because they were dominated by highly aggressive and opinionated male sociopaths. I am a guy, but empathize with the women looking for support in a culture that ranks atheists among the criminal and morally deranged classes. There is a place for organized atheism / Humanism as a political shield against the winds of the local gods or at least their enthusiastic salesmen and enforcers.
The relationship between atheism and progressivism is complex. I don’t think there is a direct causal link. It’s more like questioning one dogma is likely to be done by someone capable of questioning others.
So say a person doesn’t like being told one of the following:(a)Believe in one or more supernatural beings or powers because I say so( b). Believe because most other people do (c) All economic and political systems besides the current one dominant in your country right now are wrong (d) Don’t be curious; things just happen somehow (e) All or most members of group 1. are inferior to members of group 2. (f) Sexual acts or desires which differ from those of the majority are bad even if they don’t cause any identifiable harm.
(g) There is no ethical difference between a potential and actual person.
Odds are that if they object to one, they would object to at least one or two others on the list (and a thorough list of such things would be much longer). But at the same time, even people who are good at critical thinking have their limits and blind spots.
One dogma, prejudice, or superstition is just too scary to confront or too enticing in its flattery, seeming internal consistency, or promises of rewards. Or it’s so conditioned into the person or so prevalent in their environment that they don’t notice it.
Some famous atheist writers promote great critiques of supernaturalism but are a mixed bag on social issues. I say a mixed bag because hardly any atheists, even ones who are relatively backward, are reactionary enough to have a Fox News show or even buy into the whole Republican Platform.
Some consistent social progressives believe in channelling and healing crystals (or just nicer versions of traditional religions). The main problem is making anyone into a “Leader” to the extent that devotion to them bypasses one’s mind or conscience.
Deepak Shetty, #19:
That’s very different from, and much more modest than, the claim I was addressing: that it is “Islamophobia” to say religion is a significant motivator for terrorist attacks.
Scott Atran has publicly objected to this very simplification of his views:
So no-one should attempt to invoke Atran to support the idea that religion is not a significant motivator for terrorist attacks.
Werleman cites, and fails to refute, a point made by Sam Harris: “If ISIS hasn’t convinced you that they are motivated by their religious beliefs, what could they possibly do to convince you?”
An attempts to retort, as Werleman does, that IS is also beheading Muslims, does nothing to refute this point. Religion is quite decidedly a primary reason Muslims in Islamic State are killing anyone not part of their sect, including other Muslims.
No, religion is not the sole cause of terrorist attacks; no such claim is made. Religion is a primary motivator among many other significant ones, and most terrorist attacks in the past decade (as I referenced above) are explicitly motivated by religion.
No, religion does not necessarily lead a person to terrorist attacks; no such claim is made. The majority of religious people don’t perform suicide bombings; but the majority of suicide bombers whose motivations we can access explicitly give religious causes as their primary motivation.
The article by Scott Atran which I referenced is a response by Scott Atran to Harris over-simplifying Atran’s views. Atran is careful to point out religion is an important motivating factor for terrorist attacks.
This is the real issue, I think. I can’t consider someone an ally just because they don’t believe in God. That’s not enough. They have to reject sexism, racism and homophobia. They have to be socially and politically progressive. They have to be an environmentalist. They have to be non-ideological on issues of economics. These things are more important to me than whether or not they believe in God, actually.*
I mean, if faced with the option of working with Penn Jilette or Bill Moyers, I’d pick Bill Moyers every time. I’d rather work with a progressive Christian than a libertarian atheist. I’m not afraid of modernity losing out to faith but I am worried about a lot of other potentially disastrous things that might transpire if progressives cede the ground to conservative ideologues.
*Although, I acknowledge that social conservatism and religious faith often go hand-in-hand.
As one who has taken his departure from the “new atheism”, this is something that I can appreciate. There are several reasons for my decision to disassociate myself from the new atheism, but the main reason was the overly confident pronouncements of the “inner circle” (for want of a better term) of the atheist club. Indeed, when I took my departure, the word ‘deconversion’ was thrown around with rather abandoned carelessness, as though I had ‘reconverted’ to religion. While I find Atran’s views often a bit stretched, trying to fit his supposed ‘evidence’ into what seems to me his preconceptions about the nature of religion, at least he is unwilling to be a mouthpiece for opinions that have no obvious basis in fact. As I read through the comments on Jerry Coyne’s blog (website), for instance, it is clear that, in the main, they consist mostly of a cheering section, and any comment that goes against the grain of the settled opinions of Coyne’s followers is immediately pounced on with cheap and often fatuous remarks which do not appeal either to argument or to evidence.
I think the best of the new atheist books is Christopher Hitchens’ god is not Great, and this mainly because Hitchens actually bothered to read with some intelligence the views of those he opposed. It’s a mixed product, but it is far better than The End of Faith or The God Delusion, both of which are doctrinaire and largely uninformed. Dennett’s appeal for the empirical study of religion, unfortunately, seems to be largely ignorant of the advances that have been made in this area, and he often speaks as though he were the first person ever to broach the idea of such study, a field which now has an enormous literature, and had one at the time that Dennett wrote his book. I mention this because, despite the repeated claims by the central new atheists regarding the centrality of science to the project of human knowing, none of the central figures of the new atheism have bothered to study any of the current findings about religion in detail. Dawkins, for instance, satisfies himself with the analogy of the moth flying into the flame, as though this is a sufficient characterisation of a cultural product which is almost universal, has produced complex literatures and practices, and still dominates the human quest for meaning and purpose.
Besides this, practically every summary by the key new atheists and their hangers on of what religion consists in simply takes no notice at all of contemporary theological revisions, and the way that actual belief in supernatural entities, and commerce between the natural and supernatural is often bracketed (in the sense of Husserl’s epoché) in order to understand the function of God-language as a human project and undertaking. Read, for example, something like D.Z. Philips’ The Concept of Prayer, where prayer is divorced completely from any supernatural object, but is explained wholly in relation to what prayer does to us, how it changes us, how it reflects upon the human condition. The new atheists, of course, would simply dismiss Philips as an atheist manqué, but that would be to misunderstand something that, on the face of it, people like Dawkins and Coyne should take into consideration, namely, the fact that religion is all but universal (and may in fact be universal), and therefore may reasonably be thought of, as part of the human phenotype, as something that serves or has served a vital evolutionary function. Indeed, since atheism is obviously just a negative position, without any obvious cultural implications, it is not unreasonabe to suppose that a widespread adoption of atheism might lead to cultural or species suicide. I find it surprising that evolutionists amongst the new atheists have not taken this into more serious consideration, instead of constantly railing against fundamentalist varieties of religion, which are, even from a reasoned religious standpoint, dead ends. There is no place for them to go, since there is very little chance for them to evolve with the fast paced changes taking place in society and in our knowledge of the world. One place, of course, where the sciences are weakest, is in their understanding of what it means to be human, which is why many of them, including some of the inner circle of new atheists, are so keen to get rid of anything that is characteristic of human beings, such as intentionality, freedom and self-consciousness. That these things do not fit very well into a scientific framework (which, from the start was established by abstracting from them, and providing, as Nagel said, a “view from nowhere”), is perhaps more reason for those not committed to scientism to look more seriously at those things that human beings have created. I read recently a article which argued, with some reason, I thought, that the decline in what we call “classical music” is due almost entirely to the loss of faith, primarily Christian faith. It may be, when we study it more closely, that culture itself is dependent upon aspects of faith, which can now be returned to the human world, since all religions are, after all, human constructions, and perform a cultural function within human groups. The new atheism’s narrow-mindedness in its understanding of religion is, I think, its greatest failing, and something which, in the end, will seal its doom.
It is only fair to point out, sambarge, that religion and progressive, not to say revolutionary causes, have sometimes been closely associated. Consider, for example, the social gospel of late nineteenth to mid-twentieth century Anglicanism, or the Liberation Theology which was making such great strides in South America, before John Paul II (a reputed saint!) closed down with peremptory and unreasonable speed. Indeed, the spread of evangelical fundamentalism in South America may be connected immediately to the Roman Catholic decision to suspend Liberation Theology and its advocates.
I feel thousands of times more connection with people who support tolerance and human rights across the board whatever their metaphysical views than I do with atheists as such. That’s why I love the Unitarian Universalists (a significant minority of whom are atheists anyway).
But sometimes the more hardcore, narrowly focussed atheists of all political persuasions (and to be fair even Harris is left of center by American standards and Dawkins would be considered far left if American and seems to be kind of centrist by British standards ) have their uses when looking for further arguments and evidence in favor of a naturalistic worldview.
They tend to be walking encyclopedias of conceptual and empirical material to use when criticizing supernaturalism. Since this is often their main interest in life, and since a lot of them have a fine education, it’s no surprise.
A person who doesn’t believe in or is skeptical of things that most people around them (even many otherwise progressive ones) consider central to a meaningful life gets drawn into detailed debates with tricky questions.
If I was living in an environment where my views on the nature of the universe were at least as respectable as non-mainstream religions or New Age ideas and evolution wasn’t demonized, simply being in the minority wouldn’t matter to me, and I wouldn’t even give the “pure atheism” people or publications a second thought.
Rorschach@11:
….and I finally figured out why I don’t buy this argument (yeah, I’m slow that way) — because the only “holy book” I ever paid attention to has a bunch of that crap, but also instructs its adherents to love their neighbours as themselves, to treat others as they would like to be treated, to heal the sick, to feed the hungry, to lift up the oppressed and free the captive. Which by the logic of the argument means that atheism also implies that stuff isn’t true. And yet, somehow I thought all that stuff was a Really Good Idea before I was a Christian (modulo the fact that I was fairly young at the time), while I was a Christian, and after I became an atheist. To me it’s entailed by the idea of being oh, I don’t know — call it “being a decent human being”.
So you’ll have to pardon me for having a bit of a mental block against the “atheism entails XYZ” meme.
It’s just as untrue to take that as an instruction based on the factual claims in that holy book, yes.
So those instructions, just like the instructions to kill foreigners, rape and enslave foreigners, make women into chattel, demonise homosexuals, etc. — all those instructions must be justified or not without reference to the holy book, because the holy book is false. That’s what follows.
The instructions which have secular, moral justification – the ones you and I agree on – stand on their own without any instruction from a supernatural tyrant. That’s what follows from atheism.
Eamon,
That’s just plain rationality, not atheism: clearly, when such codified purported divinely revealed morality includes mutually contradictory claims, at least some of those claims must be false. What atheism implies is that none of the stuff in those books was actually revealed by a deity, and so its validity has to be determined by other means.
It’s quite possible to get a right answer using a wrong method.
It’s an epistemological issue at heart; do you dispute that an atheist will not accept that some is right purely on the basis the claim is a revelation from a deity?
(If you don’t, then that’s an entailment right there)
@30: ….do you dispute that an atheist will not accept that some is right purely on the basis the claim is a revelation from a deity?
Of course not, but that’s trivially true — practically part of the definition of “atheist”. It’s the body of positive ethical claims that are in dispute (ie. the linkage, not the claims themselves, which I’ve made clear I’m on board with). At the very least you need the auxiliary premise that human welfare and flourishing (and not just one’s own) are important. Maybe that’s taken as being so obvious that I’m the only one who feels the need to spell it out — but I don’t see how it derives from atheism, either.
@29: The instructions which have secular, moral justification – the ones you and I agree on – stand on their own without any instruction from a supernatural tyrant. That’s what follows from atheism.
Granted, but again this seem trivial. Acknowledging the necessity for a secular basis for morality is a long way from arguing out the specifics of that morality.
Eamon:
Exactly: it’s so obvious that you don’t think of it as an entailment of being atheist, but rather practically part of the definition of “atheist”.
Well yes… if an atheist cares about being a good person and cares to codify their ethics, they’ll probably end up with some sort of humanistic ethics; if they don’t, then anything goes.
(But that’s a contingent implication, not an entailment)
As I wrote, it’s contingent on other things — like caring about issues affecting people.
(Movement atheism supposedly cares about issues affecting people, no?)