We had another mass murder in America this week, and there’s no way around it: it was by a “none”, someone who hated organized religion, and who described himself as Not Religious, Not Religious, but Spiritual
. If he were participating in a survey, we’d embrace him as one of us, part of our growing majority. He was also a Conservative Republican
, and if he were attending CPAC, we have atheists who’d enthuse about a possible recruit to the cause. But instead, he slaughtered innocent people, so we turn around and pretend his disbelief had absolutely nothing to do with it. It’s all very convenient. If he’d been a Christian we’d all sneer at the hypocrisy of all the believers who’d reassure us that he wasn’t a True Christian™, but now it’s only reasonable that we rationally and calmly divorce ourselves from any responsibility.
I don’t accept that.
I agree completely with Ashley Miller’s point that the myth of atheist superiority is dangerous, and leads to terrible consequences. Even if it isn’t causal, it leads terrible people to do terrible things to achieve that affirming sense of being better than everyone else. It has to stop. And the first step is acquiring some sense of responsibility.
But of course, some of our self-appointed ‘leaders’ want nothing to do with that. It never fails that if you want to see the insufferable smugness of delusional atheists, all you have to do is turn to Sam Harris.
No rational atheist (or “New Atheist”) holds religion accountable for every idiotic or unethical thing religious people do. We blame a religion only for what its adherents do as a direct result of its doctrines, such as opposing gay marriage or killing apostates.
Atheism has no doctrines. It does not demand that a person do anything, or refrain from doing anything, on the basis of his unbelief. Consequently, to know that someone is an atheist is to know almost nothing about him—apart from the fact that he does not accept the unwarranted claims of any religion.
Atheism is simply the condition of not believing in Poseidon, Thor, or any of the thousands of dead gods that lie in the graveyard we call mythology. To that extent, everyone knows exactly what it is to be an atheist—he has simply added the god of Abraham to the list of the dead.
If a belief in astrology were causing people to go berserk—to deny medical care to their children or to murder unbelievers—many of us would speak and write about the dangerous stupidity of astrology. This would not be bigotry or intolerance on our part. It would be a plea for basic human sanity. And that is all that an atheist’s criticism of religious tribalism and superstition ever is.
If you understand this, you will recognize any attempt to blame atheism for specific crimes, great or small, for what it is: A fresh act of religious demagoguery.
Christ.
Humanity is suffering under a collection of half-assed ethical and moral principles, assembled with no rational foundation but superstition, and with awful, damaging, exploitive rules mixed in with a few good ones. Religion is primitive and lacking in any tools to address deep injustices and correct errors in its formulation. I am all in favor of tearing it down and replacing it with…what? According to Harris, nothing. Atheism has nothing constructive or productive to replace the bad system most people are limping along under — rip it all out and apparently, brute reason can then be trusted to evolve something better.
Never mind that the same atheists who adore the irresponsibility of the idea that their beliefs impose no demands on them are also the same atheists who so detest equality that they spit on feminism; that they so obliviously love their privileges that they scorn the whole concept of social justice; that they are so authoritarian that they rush to the defense of their Leaders with a capital “L” no matter how egregiously offensive their bigotry might be, and any who dare to criticize them are “harming the cause”.
Reason is not enough. Reason can show you the best way to achieve a goal, but if your goal is mass murder, or denigration of women, or the perpetuation of an oppressive hierarchy, it’ll help you do that, too. We need purpose and value and meaning as well, and if a prominent Leader of atheism is saying that atheism doesn’t do that, that’s a declaration that atheism is bankrupt, and has failed totally. It has become a Great Nothing.
That’s not my atheism, though. I argue that the absence of gods gives greater prominence to the interdependence of the human community, and adds greater weight and urgency to the importance of empathy and equality and all those human values — but if atheism is now a label that allows us to nonchalantly disavow responsibility for the actions of those within our own group, perhaps it’s time to disband the whole idea of an atheist community.
But then it’s also clear that my vision of what atheism ought to be is a minority view. The majority are doing their damnedest to confirm the poor opinion the believers have of us.
I understand your wish for the atheist community being more consistent and developing more rational and better moral scope. I am with you on feminism, on politics, but I am sorry to say, I am not with you on this one – your wish is wain. If US ever becomes a majority atheist state, thinks will be only marginally better.
I am living in a state where atheists are a majority – and assholes are assholes, privileged are privileged, greedy are greedy, sociopaths are sociopaths etc. Only the rationalisations for their bad behaviour are different from those that are given by religious people.
But you do not see perfectly ordinary and generally good people performing atrocities because their belief says they should. No bombings of abortion clinic, no shootings of abortion doctors, no picketing outside of hospitals etc – and if, then always by some religious nutjob.
So As far as my experience goes, Harris is right – saying someone is an atheist says essentially nothing about any individual person around here and it did not for around one century.
So dictionary atheism it is then. Most helpful, ta. Of course you don’t need to go as far as ‘doctrines’ to have atheism or religion to give out useful advice on how to live your life. Something among the lines of not being awful to the people around you, for instance. Then again some people, religious and otherwise, enjoy their preferred brands of awfulness so much they’ll shout anyone down who dares point out just how awful they are.
This works just as well for religion. I might as well say, just because someone identifies as [Religion], it tells us almost nothing about them. Even narrowing down the sect and some of their specific beliefs, so one could argue, are at best a rough indicator as to what a person was thinking. Cherry-picking the Bible and morals in general is ever so popular. Essentially we’d have to wait for someone to should “For [God]/[Atheist Thoughtleader]/[…]” before we could be certain why they were doing something. Very convenient when you’re trying to discreetly distance yourself from someone you’re worried you could be associated with.
But then surely Sam Harris won’t ever again assume certain people are more likely to commit certain crimes just because of their religious background. Unless they said they were doing it because of their religion. (Not bloody likely…)
Just saw this after reading Ashley Miller’s post you cited. If the shooter said he was an atheist, he is one of us. Same as anybody declaring they are Xian can be linked to Xians.
I haven’t read much Harris, but he certainly is showing he lacks the concept of consequences of his decisions. His inability to understand no matter how he tries not to “profile”, but he ends up profiling, is telling. That is a consequence of his Islamophobia and it makes him appear to be a bigot.
The consequence of being an atheist is that one should question laws and morals based solely on religious belief, and this should include other societal beliefs that are also presuppositional. Like male superiority, white superiority, LGBT is bad, etc. Once questioned, one needs to look at reality to determine the answers without using some irrational fear to twist the answers. Too many atheists don’t do that.
Just because the universe came from nothing doesn’t mean that nothing is the way we need to go. In the worst case scenario, our illusions of thought and free will allow us to chose a different path.
PZ, you are a former American Humanist of the Year, so how about promoting Humanism? Atheism with a social conscience.
I think, the key point which is “not” emphasized enough, mainly because it applies far more to one side than the other, is that the problem isn’t religion per say, but, “Belief that the world must be a certain way, and that violence is a valid solution to forcing it into that mold.” Religions have, kind of, in most cases, either used lies and misinformation, or violence, and often both, to mold the world. For many of them, its codified in their very principles, “Kill the heathens”. Atheism has never had a codified set of standards such as that. The ones who lack such standards are. ironically, the exact sort to declare, for example, “Islam” as a unique problem, and war as the solution. The ones that are trying to codify some sort of standard, for the most part, are at worst, highly suspicious of the use of violence to solve problems, and generally abhor using it instead, save when it is absolutely unavoidable, preferring social, and legal, solutions instead.
Guess which side of the line this guy was on, and every other atheist who has, through history, killed people, to try to change the world… And, but extension, what the one single thing they have had in common has been, with every religious person who has ever killed someone to defend the status quo, or force change on others.
You can fight lies ,and misinformation. Its.. damn hard to fight a bullet. And, the moment you start using them, the other guy has zero reason to not do the same.
Just because “atheism”, in the silly dictionary version, “has no doctrines”, doesn’t mean the people who accept it don’t. And, you have to be a bloody fool (i.e. someone like Dawkins, or Harris) to not recognize that, when doctrine meets a lack of doctrine, the latter doesn’t necessarily win – only a better, and less dangerous, doctrine can do so.
I’m frustrated that the important thing to commentators like you and Ashley, right now, seems to be getting atheists to take responsibility in some way. Distinguishing ourselves as atheists from “bad people,” or owning up to the fact that atheism isn’t a prophylactic against “bad people”, is only important to those of us living in a relatively small niche of the online atheism world. It’s not nearly as important as confronting the reality that American religionists are in denial about just as much: we have a problem with angry, entitled, misogynistic, hyper-competitive white men.
It should be obvious —-I know that it isn’t to the audience of atheists you’re addressing—by now that murderous entitlement is not “caused” by religion or “caused” by non-religion. It exists in relation to, but in important ways outside of sectarian belief systems. I don’t think there’s much actual, productive good that can be done focusing on the fact that a lot of atheists want to deny this. Even if you convinced all of them, it does nothing to compel them or the larger world to grapple with the fact that’s demonstrably killing people. White US male entitlement.
Demolishing that blind spot seems to me the much more important work. Work that has a chance of actually reducing the violence, because good people wake up to what’s driving the violence and address it directly.
Convincing Club Atheist people that ‘we do it too?’ That seems more like a peculiar attention to branding that’s only of interest to our small community. It’s like focusing on a feature of a particular hobby, as if servicing that particular hobby was recognized by the wider public as important. I don’t think it is.
I read he described himself as “pagan, wiccan, not religious but spiritual”, so i see your point, but i don’t know that i would have necessarily included this one on the “atheist by association” list. I’ve met too many people who hate “organized religion” but believe in all sorts of ridiculous rubbish themselves. Not trying to deflect responsability from the “demographic” or “movement” or whatever, there’s plenty of awful there with or without this particular case, it’s just a minor quibble, and irrelevant to your larger point.
I wholeheartedly agree that for atheism to mean something it absolutely requires a set of values and part of those values should definitely be “don’t fucking shoot people”. I also agree that these things are demanded by the reality that we live in, and that there’s a serious problem with atheist exceptionalism. This is not a topic that’s new around here but it needs to be repeated often, being an atheist just means you are not making one particular mistake, it says absolutely nothing about what other mistakes you might be making.
Well of course not-believing in gods is not the culprit. But any proper analysis should look into whether there were “in-group” factors at work. Are there violent strains of anti-theism that this person was involved with? Stuff like that.
@Josh, 7
That too, good points.
Are talking about the Czech Republic per chance?
Because one has to appreciate how the Czech politicians are dancing around the Syrian refugees issue: they may not be as blatant as Slovakia and Hungary, but the bullshit Zeman spewed about “completely different cultural background” made it clear that Prague is contemplating jumping onto the Christians-refugees-only bandwagon, despite Christians representing.. what? 20% of the Czech population?
Sociopathic assholes and the people courting their votes are indeed birds of a feather, regardless of their religion or lack thereof
This is almost exactly right. Except “brute reason” must be used together with brute fact.
Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls @3
We’re so lucky you’re never twisting anything thus. Here, take your cookie.
Harris:
I see Harris still equates person with male. How nice. Christ, I wish he would shut the fuck up.
PZ:
Word, word, word. For me personally, it speaks volumes that I expected this moronic reaction from the atheist community at large, and from the ever voluble thought leaders.
*actually, reason already does involve the facts, so I didn’t even need to add that correction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reason
Personally, I’m ready to give up on the “atheism” label already. While it should mean more, it obviously doesn’t. We’ve been living through, what has it been, three years of “atheists showing other atheists exactly how shitty they are”. We’ve had more than enough evidence that this idiotic belief in moral superiority because of their self-proclaimed “rationality” can make people behave as irrationally and badly as any belief in some deity and being the one true believer can.
Frankly, I don’t care waht you believe. I care about what you say and do.
@laurentweppe #11:
Yes. CZ. There are way too many people who, despite not being religious, babble about “christian culture” as if it was a real thing. There are way too many bigots, xenophobes and racists around. And that our last two presidents are bigots with overinflated egoes does not help.
@Nerd of Redhead #3:
Too many
atheistspeople don’t do that.FTFY. Religious affiliation or lack thereof is really mostly irrelevant. Assholes gonna asshole.
I think that prevalently atheistic society is in fact slightly better than prevalently religious one, because one factor of human stupidity does not play such a prominent role in it. But its importance is not as profound as Dawkins, Haris et. al would make us believe.
PZ’s rightly railed against Dictionary Atheists in the past, and predictable comments like Harris’s and others on Twitter reveal another aspect of their problem: they’re engaged in an ongoing campaign of equivocation on the meaning of “atheism.” Maybe we were wrong to so categorically reject terms like “Brights” way back when, because it might have avoided this issue. Sure, “atheism” as a philosophical position is just one answer to one question about your beliefs regarding the existence of one category of things, and as such, cannot be the sole basis for other beliefs or actions.
But the same is true of theism, which is part of why nobody goes around saying they’re theists and buying theist t-shirts and going to theist conventions. But we call ourselves atheists and buy/bought scarlet A t-shirts and books about atheism and so on, so we’ve sown this confusion over the term. Because unlike atheism-the-philosophical-position, Atheism-the-Community does include positive beliefs and core values that can form the basis of other beliefs and actions. That the two things share a name leads many (i.e., the Dictionary Atheists) to believe that they’re the same, but they aren’t—something that becomes abundantly clear when you note the relative lack of Raelians and Buddhists at atheist conventions.
It’s perhaps old-hat to note that the Dictionary Atheists who criticize PZ for wanting to “add” additional beliefs and baggage onto atheism have actually done the same, but it’s important to repeat. There’s nothing about “not believing in gods” that leads to skepticism or science advocacy or being open about disbelief or arguing against believers or supporting church-state separation, even though most of the folks with American Atheists memberships and bookshelves full of Dawkins and Harris and Hitchens would agree on those things. An Atheist Culture has developed (and splintered along Deep Rifts naturally), and we see it in action when people support efforts to remove public school prayers or rally around atheist luminaries—for good or ill, for valid reasons or for things we’d rightly criticize if a church leader did the same.
It’s disingenuous to engage in and perpetuate and benefit financially from a community of atheists with shared secular values as Harris (and others) have, then turn around and deny that atheists have anything in common beyond lack of belief when you look bad. It’s time atheists take a good hard look at the difference between their philosophical positions and the culture that has grown up around them. Because Atheist Culture has big overlaps with Nerd Culture and Libertarian Culture and Gamer Culture and Skeptic Culture, and all those have (largely common) toxic online spaces, as we’ve all seen over the last several years. People (mostly white dudes) in those toxic online spaces share with much of Atheist Culture a belief in the value of reason and the dangers of religion (especially Middle Eastern varieties) and a self-assured certainty that they’re dispassionate and rational and the smartest ones in the room. This guy was hardly the first to get riled up into a frenzy of violent male entitlement in those toxic online spaces and take it out on innocents in meatspace, and he’s unlikely to be the last.
Mercer was not an atheist, he was “spiritual” if you believe his post. Nobody knows why he asked the victims for their religion, he just said “You’ll meet your maker.” There were no reports of anyone volunteering their atheism, so we don’t know what that outcome would be. IMO, the fact that his dad is from Great Britain, may explain his fondness for the IRA and posible disdain for personal beliefs. Ultimately though, the guy is a self described conservative gun and conspiracy nut. Simple.
one of the things that is encountered when dealing with religious believers over issues like say the anti-abortion or the creationism or prayer in school is that one of the primary motivations for the religious is the in group this tribalism this feeling of belonging to a group.
one of the aspects that we see in people who act out in ways like shooting down a bunch of strangers is their disconnection from society in general and the identification with a few other angry people who feel similarly disconnected with society . They do not feel accepted by the larger dominate society. We are a very social animal and much of what we do is driven by the need to belong to groups.
I’m thinking that the need for positive social interaction is more important than the particular beliefs that make up a religious community.
In the broader sense if none belief does not signify anything deeper and if that was all there was to it, it would just be a big so what! The thought leaders would be right than the only thing left is dog eat dog competition for individual power and influence your in-group against the rest, if you wanted because it does not mean anything at all.
We are human beings who may have the ability of free choice. The population has grown so big and the weapons have grown so powerful that an old style feudal system is no longer as tolerable as it once was.
In this competition we see what will happen the losers ban together and destroy the winners they are not dissuaded by the fear of personal destruction as these shooters and the 9/11 terrorists demonstrate very clearly.
If we do not find a humane way to support each other as fellows beings and to include all in meaningful engagement with each other and our environment we will just be a foot note, a small layer in the lithosphere of the earth
uncle frogy
no
only those who identify as such based solely on the succinct definition, while still being inhuman, unapathetic, arrogant, willfully ignorant, etc. etc
Adopting “Atheism” as one’s philosophy is insufficient to ensure morality, humanism, empathy, etc.
Likewise “Reason”. It’s a useful tool to be utilized, but insufficient to be a good person.
The difference between Atheism and conventional Religions is that the latter don;t require thinking. The religion will tell one exactly what to do, “thought” (process, not “thinking”) is to be reserved for a form of meditation, which Religion calls “prayer”.
Atheism rejects such authoritarianism, instead advising its followers to think out the answers themselves with full consideration of all possible implications.
ugh
Bankruptcy implies Atheism is some kind of formal organization, Or that “no belief in God” is equivalent to “no beliefs [full stop]”. The bankruptcy charge needs to be redirected, Understanding _about_ Atheism, is often bankrupt; not atheism itself.
jbegan @ 19:
I expect that was along the lines of a sentiment I’ve seen expressed often in atheist circles: Christians should be thrilled at the idea of dying, as they’ll finally be going “home”, getting to sit in Jesus’s lap and all that.
Interesting that no one has pointed the “blame finger” at all of Atheism, for this wacko claiming atheism as his personal philosophy. Who, as a result, targeted all those who claimed conventional Religion as their philosophy.
Perhaps I missed O’RLY’s “War on Religion” bombastic outrage.
Regardless, it is worth self examining the philosophy one has adopted. Especially one that demand being self crafted and actualized.
I’ve found that a person’s stated religion (or lack thereof) tells me nothing about who they are…but a great deal about how they rationalize who they are. If a Christian wants to be anywhere from saintly to awful, they can cite chapter and verse to prove their behavior is God’s will. Atheism is, if anything, a bigger tent – we have no fixed scriptures, and can barely agree to “there are probably no gods”.
I don’t agree that this should be greeted with a shrug of the shoulders. I’m with PZ; the work of developing and promoting atheist morality is too important to be left to the nihilist asshole wing of the movement.
@7 Josh, I disagree that the two are somehow mutually exclusive. This isn’t PZ choosing between missions, this is PZ being consistent in his own reasoning.
I think that you’re looking at this situation backwards. This is about refocusing on the fact that we are humans. It’s people like Harris who are bringing peculiar attention to branding in order to externalize human vices, maintaining the illusion of exceptionalism that engenders the very privileged attitudes you speak of.
#19: I do appreciate people who failed to read the first sentence of my post, but still feel motivated to comment. They add a special something to the discussion.
Reason has to start somewhere. There is always some set of core assumptions that even the most elaborate personal philosophy is built on. You can be the smartest person in the world, but “Garbage in Garbage Out” still applies.
There are plenty of people who are highly intelligent but morally odious. And there are people who’s gut instincts on moral questions are very solid, even if they can’t reason their way out of high school geometry class.
Being smart and applying reason can be helpful (it usually is), that’s why ethics is a branch of philosophy. But it’s no guarantee that the person who is right is the smartest, nor that the person who is the smartest is right.
You disprespect the millions of us who simply don’t believe in gods. What do you want to call us…atheists? Fine. Why do we need to replace ‘it’ with anything? Shedding ridiculous baggage should be its own reward, you don’t need to ‘replace’ it. You are giving religion a power (that presumably should be emulated) that the rest of see for what it is…a mind virus. You lost this argument a long time ago.
Reading most of the comments here, and agreeing with most of the points made about the need to take a stand and all that… I still have to ask this question:
What makes someone NOT an atheist?
Yes, exactly.
scarr @ 28:
Perhaps you should be pondering on why you’ve earned such disrespect.
I would suggest that morality is simply not on the same axis as religion / atheism. Removing religion is not equivalent to removing morality; I would suggest it is more like removing a particular flavour of flawed, motivated reasoning as a source of morality. There are still many sources of both good and bad reasoning out there, thus removing religion does not leave behind a moral vacuum.
Respect must be earned it’s not something you are entitled to. Lack of belief in gods is a good start but in and of itself it’s just not sufficient.
Atheism should be intersectional in the same way that feminism needs to be intersectional and if you don’t accept that then maybe your morally bankrupt brand of atheism doesn’t deserve respect.
Dictionary atheists sounds about right.
Speaking as a third generation atheist (at least) whose spent my life living in countries where atheism is perfectly normal and fully acceptable, I support Charly’s point. Atheism is not a magic morality pill. And even if it helps in the long term on many societal or institutional levels (secular societies don’t generally see good reason to aggressively police people’s sexuality for instance) it does not stop individual people from being arrogant, stupid, sociopathic, greedy, criminal, etc… Perhaps (likely) it never will. Nor does it magically and instantly build better societies. The methods for doing that may become more possible because of atheism, but atheism is not the method in and of itself.
Because atheism is not the method, ‘dictionary atheism’ is perfectly reasonable. You can’t ‘give up’ on atheism unless you’re about to convert to a religion, and atheism can’t ‘fail’ unless convincing evidence is produced for the existence of supernatural beings. But if you want a better society, you need to look beyond that.
OK. So atheism is totally useless, and means nothing at all. We might as well go back to believing in Odin.
Yes, until you acknowledge your disbelief in phantasms has consequences, which require you to help make a better, more egalitarian society.
No, you need to look at the consequences of your disbelief. Like, why are you perpetuating the old misogyny, xenophobia, and social stratification seen in religious cultures? Why not a culture without that baggage? Sounds like just plain inertia to maintain the status quo, and not work to make culture better.
@ 35 – The thing is PZ, you DON’T believe in Odin (I’m willing to bet). So, end of story. You’re an atheist. And it’s ‘useful’ in that it’s a worldview that complies with the evidence that the world is free of supernaturals. You’ve apparently been expecting the wrong things of it. What? Do you think evolution is totally useless, because you know it isn’t actually progressive (in the naive ‘we’re all turning into superhumans’ sense)?
I think that the “dictionary atheist” argument is right: the only thing that atheists have in common is their rejection of religion.
But we do not stay silent to reject religion: we make arguments and positive statements about reality, about how humans work and a lot more.
Even dictionary atheists share a large collection of knowledge and philosophy built on top of a “negative” idea.
Someone who belongs to a group called “Doesn’t Like Organized Religion” is likely not a typical atheist. The wording suggests that there is some kind of religion (disorganized?) that he might like.
As some pointed out already, yes, “atheism” and “atheist” are mostly useless, which is why I use “secular humanist” for myself.
Still, I use neither very often; maybe it’s because I don’t live in a very religious environment so it’s rare that I get asked at all, my beliefs on social justice are much more significant than my beliefs on metaphysics.
I am still not sure why PZ is so enamored with the term “atheism”, but my history is not his.
On another note, I am just back from a hippie festival and have to note that, while the crowd there wasn’t exactly a beacon of rational thought, they get compassion and empathy SO MUCH BETTER than “atheists”.
Holms, #34:
Well put. But since morality and religion are so firmly linked in people’s minds, lack of faith would still have to come up with some basic suggestions* on morality, if only to make the substitution easier. Particularly in the US, where evangelicals and creationists like to claim that godless people are lost or somehow ‘evil’, this would be a useful feature. At the very least there’s no harm in including them.
I don’t really use or even like labels. If I did I probably would have started out with something more general (humanism?) and attached atheism to it. But the atheist movement has itself established (in the US) so it would be easier to go the other way and add social justice, equality and similar things to it. Especially now that the movement is dealing with hordes of horrid people who seem to revel in attacking anyone who dares conflate atheism with feminism or any number of other worthy causes.
That said, I couldn’t care less what atheism looks like as long as it does good things. Atheism in the US (and, to a lesser extent in the EU) has always enjoyed a certain notoriety, to put it mildly. But nowadays it is the wrong kind of notoriety for my taste. Dawkins is a good example for the good and the bad, and probably also a good example of how integrating moral suggestions would be useful. Having been wrong on virtually every social justice issue to come up in recent years, he seems to just keep going in the wrong direction. He used to be very good at pushing religion out of places it should never have gotten into. Now he’s hammering down feminists.
*I hesitate to call them guidelines because that’s heading in the direction of rules, followed by dogma
Bravo PZ!
Okay:
1. The shooter never said he didn’t believe in a god (or gods). He said he “wasn’t religious but spiritual” and was “Against Organized Religion”. Both of those descriptions, in my experience, are religious-people attempts to deny the consequences of their beliefs. I know many Christians who describe themselves with both of those phrases — the Catholic ones really become suddenly NRBS and AOR (we should definitely promote those as acronyms!) when you mention the pedophilia cover-ups. It’s… sort of like how passive racists decry the KKK or the John Birch Society, but will happily do all kinds of racist stuff on their own.
(Come to think of it, if someone is “not religious but spiritual”, then maybe they should call themselves a “Spiritualist”… you know, like the fraudsters and delusional people from around the previous turn-of-the-century? It is certainly closer to what they probably are than saying “none”.)
2. PZ, your “why don’t we just worship Odin then” response is foolishness. The dictionary definition of atheism only says “doesn’t believe in gods”, it is true, but there are two ways to arrive at that state. One is to just not think about it, which is what the NRBSes and AORs generally do. The other is to actually think about things, and start examining evidence and history and so on. If you actually describe yourself as an Atheist, you’re probably in the second group. In practice, there isn’t a whole lot of difference between the ethics of the two, but in theory, at least, the second group should be superior. If you are NRBS, then you might have some bizarre, literally-otherworldly theory for why racism or sexism or homophobia or transphobia or whatever is actually a positive thing, and no amount of persuasion will be able to convince you otherwise. In theory, though — and, yes, I realize that there are so many examples of this not happening — the second group should be persuadable based on evidence and reason. Sam Harris is a racist, but his racism is recognizably a thing he is doing wrong based on his own stated premises. Richard Dawkins is a sexist, but his sexism is recognizably a thing he is doing wrong based on his own stated premises. But if, say, Deepak Chopra is racist, or the Pope is sexist, you can’t say that same thing.
And, furthermore, if public policy is going to actually benefit society, it had better be set to accommodate the second group, rather than the former. The minute the NRBSes and AORs get their hands on things, things like anti-blasphemy laws get inserted because the NRBSes and AORs just can’t stand to see belief challenged. There is a positive good in not believing in Odin.
“No rational atheist…”
God damn it, Harris. Can you not make a textbook “no true Scotsman” in a sentence about rationality?
Re: The Vicar @43
In regards to your point number two, I think you might have missed the joke. Far be it from me to put words in PZ’s mouth but he’s been saying for years that, if you claim to arrive at atheism by reason, then that reason should have other consequences. You even give some of the same examples PZ has used over the years to rail against dictionary atheism. Oh, and if a Christian is classist, I feel perfectly comfortable telling them that they’re doing it wrong. Subjugation of the poor is demonstrably anti-biblical. In short, if someone’s religious views don’t tell us anything about their public policy positions, then the difference between an atheist and a follower of Asatru is meaningless.
You almost sound like a conservative pundit. Atheism cannot fail; it can only be failed.
Fuck that.
Yeah, as #8 Dreaming of an Atheistic Newtopia said, the same sources that gave us the “spiritual, not religious” and “conservative republican” quotes also tell us that he considered himself a Wiccan or Pagan or some such. Not that this invalidates PZ’s point, mind. It’s really just a matter of time until an “avowed atheist” or whatever commits a mass shooting. And we shouldn’t pretend like that person won’t be true atheist when that time comes. Being an atheist doesn’t immunize you against irrationality, against hate, against anything other than believing in gods. Look at all the atheists that believe in alternative medicine and homeopathy, condemn vaccinations, believe in ley lines or ghosts or whatever. A bit of humility in realizing that we aren’t safe from both misinformation or going down an extremely harmful path won’t hurt us. On the contrary. Just because we’ve disavowed one type of superstition or ideologies doesn’t let us off the hook for others.
dick @5
Humanism has two problems. Many Humanists aren’t atheists (something which needs to be pointed out to those pushing Humanism over atheism. The other thing is that people like the Harvard Humanists and Chris Stedman have given Humanism a bad taste in many of our mouths.
“No rational atheist (or “New Atheist”) ?”
What? is he implying that rational atheist is the definition of New atheist? does he genuinely believe he is rational? Oh the self-blindness
Also in response to atheism is nothing I would say, it is irrelevant because you, a new atheist arch-bishop said people should be killed because of their beliefs.
PZ, I don’t think that atheism should exist as community, except for cases such as fighting for a privilege that are given to a certain religion, and if atheists do not unite they might be denied that privilege. Other than that, any community formation that amounts to holding a belief, results in cult-like mentality, something we see in New Atheist cult today. Atheism needs to understand that reason is meaningless without humanism and that you cannot respond violently to something that you despise because you think it promotes violence (i.e. religion).
At this point it doesn’t even matter what his beliefs were because Harris and co are already circling their wagons. Regardless of what comes to light now they’ve already preempted any charge of association by playing the dictionary game.
If our in-group dynamics are no better than Christians that we resort to mere one-upmanship, then the goal is simply for one side of the coin to replace the other; atheism becomes just another tribe vying for dominance.
@43 The Vicar
It’s one thing to poison the well by impugning the motives of those who don’t identify with a religion, but when you declare that they “generally” don’t think about things in support of the “in theory” superiority of your own group, you pretty much forfeit any pretense of objectivity in your analysis, in my opinion.
Al, you’ve got me there, buddy.
1. I lived in the UK for nearly 27 years, until 2012, & I can tell you that Humanism is getting influential there, as it is in other parts of Europe. I belonged to a smallish town Humanist group that held meetings with highly influential speakers. So far as I know, every member was at least agnostic, & I got the impression that the vast majority were atheists, & very decent people. Humanism in Western Europe is alive & prospering.
2. I’ve no idea what people like the Harvard Humanists and Chris Stedman did to have given Humanism a bad taste in many of your mouths. Please enlighten me.
I admire the examination of conscience. When violence is committed in the name of faith I find myself engaged in a similar introspection. Is there something in faith itself that leads to that intolerance and the violence that bears its name?
I have gone this far: that those who engage in violence join in a communion of blood that crosses denominational lines, that there is no creature more dangerous than one who is armed with the certainty that God is on his side.
While I feel a personal responsibility to condemn the act I do not impose that responsibility on other believers. I am not compelled to accept or impose a communal responsibility for the violence.
I hope your search of your own conscience includes a similar tolerance toward atheism, your fellow atheists, and your own view of the universe and your place in it.
@Al Dente, and dick
But “atheism” has essentially the same problems, only worse. Many atheists aren’t humanists. And some popular atheists have given a bad taste in many of our mouths :P
I think this circumstance can be better understood with one or two venn diagrams although I’m not able to draw themIt seems to me nobody sane likes the insane, murderous acts of someone like Mercer. That’s one circle…one huge circle that includes woo’s theists, deists, atheists in regard to the supernatural.
Among atheists, there must be some who are also anti-social enough to murder or condone it. So the circle of atheists would at least extend a bit outside the larger circle of people who would not commit or condone murder. But are they “part of us?” By definition, I suppose, although I don’t think they’re all there–they’re several fries short of a Happy Meal. So they’re “our family” by blood but not voluntarily recognized, not knowingly embraced and not irrationally disowned when they cross that murderous line.
So is it fair when they act out to expect us to own them? I’m not so sure that it is. And I would hate to think that those who rail against a simple definition atheism would feel the need to claim these people as atheist–as our people. These people are not, after all, rationally atheist or sanely atheist. Being able to murder, especially mass-murder, certainly doesn’t fit within my definition of rational atheism.
That’s before even considering the likelihood that theists will want to marry us up. I wouldn’t want to claim them even if there was no issue with the “other side” wanting to smear us with them. Atheism is rational and a murderer or murder sympathizer is not rational, in my opinion. So I don’t own Mercer and I reject the notion that we should do so in any substantive way.
Now as to what Atheism is — again, we’re back to circles and here I would suggest it’s rational to accept and embrace people who are simple definition (rational) atheists. It ought to also argue, reason for atheists also being anti-theism given the damage to the only life humanity has when theism advocates for things, philosophy that are damaging to that — including restricting our right to rationally dissent, disbelieve.
If you’re there, we may have disagreements that you don’t embrace more positive to life positions, including moral holdings that would tend to do so (lots of those), but we are family and ought to disagree intellectually, not disdainfully, angrily. The simple definition atheism is valued baby, not dirty bathwater. We can build on that, we ought to be able to hold together on that while rationally arguing for more.
Certainly splintering with righteous anger, acrimony isn’t doing atheism — and thus humanity — any good that I can see.
I don’t see the point in insisting that dictionary atheism is not what atheism is and then getting cranky when people stick to dictionary atheism.
When you want reason and ethics and etc. then you have to choose those things and proclaim them. I’m an atheist but that means very little. I also am a feminist, and that means a lot, and I am against authoritarians and I am (shock horror) a socialist I think. I am a humanist as well. None of those other things that I am is entailed by being atheist. Atheism just seems to be the removal of a barrier to being those things. The asshole shooting people was none of those things and I don’t like those things being conflated with mere atheism.
This whole “atheists must be more” thing is just a way of painting yourself into a logical corner and creating false equivalencies. Settle for “atheists can be more” and note what those “more” things are as separate from atheism itself.
PZ: OK. So atheism is totally useless, and means nothing at all. We might as well go back to believing in Odin.
No PZ, atheism is an essential step, but is not an end.
@53
Atheism is not a person, murderers are. A person can adopt a variety of beliefs and attitudes: atheism (rational), vaccinations are bad (irrational), murdering people will get me the attention I crave at a cost I’m willing to bear (?????).
At any rate you can’t have an argument like: atheism is rational, therefore all atheists are rational people, therefore anyone who does anything irrational can’t be a real atheist. It’s a logical fallacy, though I’ll have to leave it to the specialists to point out which one(s) exactly.
Well, if you come to the conclusion that there is no god who told you not to kill, what do you do then? Are you the religious’ favourite straw atheist who then goes out killing and raping because you’re not afraid of divine punishment? Or do you still think that murdering people is wrong?* IN case of the latter, congratulations, you must have arrived at this conclusion by replacing the religious moral guidelines with secular moral guidelines.
*I realize that while many people think that “murder is wrong” they also condone a great many number of killings as long as long as they can rationalize not calling it “murder” such as executions, police killings, war and drones…
PZ
1. As Dan Dare says, no, not totally useless but sure not enough
2. Just because something turns out not to work as you thought it would is no reason to turn back to something that didn’t work either.
3. As people have noticed, atheism is a rather BIG tent which includes a lot of people, from humansits and intersectional feminists to vicious misogynists and folks in favour of genocide. Those people have awefully little in common and can agree on few things. You need MORE than disbelief in god to make a difference. I thought that became clear when Jen decided to add a little + to her atheism.
Why am I reminded of the trap many economists fall into when they insist that economic actors are by definition rational?
Before this last shooting I have had to point people in your direction and explain, carefully, why the “New Atheist” movement stinks. People must find out why you and others of like mind to yourself take a stand against the Harris’s and Shermers. Atheists must continue promoting the concept that atheists should follow an Atheism plus ethics and not just a New Atheism of open confrontation.
I mourn with you and with the rest of the USA and posted elsewhere (Wonkette) that my first response to this tragedy was Mozarts Requiem followed rapidly by Verdi’s Deus Irae.
So taking up the question of, say, murder, it’s a lot more complicated than people make it sound, if you analyze it. Rationally.
There’s the individual level:
* Do we want to murder someone? We know this is a thing that happens to people in general, religion or atheism notwithstanding. And when it does happen, the question of whether they ought to murder usually takes a back seat.
* Do we want to be murdered arbitrarily, at the will of some third party? No.
* Do we want other people murdered arbitrarily, at the will of some third party? No.
So, in general, a person may want to murder other people, but other people will want them not to. That situation is probably fundamental to being human and isn’t going away, no matter what worldview anyone holds.
Then there’s the collective level:
* Shall we have social institutions which defend our will to murder if we see fit?
* Shall we have social institutions which inhibit the will of all potential murderers?
And what about:
* Shall we have social institutions which lessen the likelihood of people wanting to murder other people?
It seems like a no-brainer, but many societies have institutionally condoned the right of at least some individuals to murder as they see fit, and removed protection from at least some groups of potential victims – often as part of a whole system of control and exploitation. All our societies today do inhibit the will to murder to quite a large extent, but shockingly, American society is relatively biased in favor of the individual’s right to murder (for example, through the polite fiction of arming for ‘self-defense’). America is also a very ruthless society – for example, it leaves individuals carrying a lot of the burden for their own survival and defense, let alone sense of meaning and dignity. In exchange, it gives Americans very large latitude to achieve those goals by any means they can. That is the NRA argument in a nutshell: ‘we reject all collective attempts at prevention, and instead we encourage and support individuals to defend themselves’. To a lot of outsiders, that really IS the American Way – individualistic rather than social.
The thing is, from the point of view of the OP, that the exact setting of this individual v. collective slider in society and the management of its consequences has got nothing whatsoever to do with religion or the lack of it. As far as I can see. At most, you could say that refusing to recognize the inevitable consequences of a given choice is irrational and atheists might be less likely to do that.
I say we don’t give up…we don’t relinquish “atheism” to the assholes. We keep reminding people that there is a morality to develop in an atheistic context and that people who think that doesn’t include not killing, violence, bigotry, etc, are simply and demonstrably wrong. We don’t relinquish “science” to scientists who misuse it, who claim it as a basis for their awful prejudices. We fight that with facts. We can do the same with “atheism” because the conclusions to be drawn from the actual facts are often unambiguous. Of course it’s exhausting, but so it is to fight against creationists and you keep doing that, PZ. I understand that the toll one of these things takes is very different from the other, but as much as i am naturally inclined to giving up, no, fuck that, we need each other to remind us what is right and wrong because we are all very fallible. I know it seems like there are atheists out there that are unreachable, and some probably are, but the same has been said about religious people and we all know that turned out to not be true. Minds can be changed, influence can be exerted, pressure actually works. There is a lot of ugly and morally disgusting whithin the atheistic demographic, A LOT…just like there is in any other demographic, but that’s all the more reason to fight. Otherwise we should not only abandon atheism, we should abandon being human, because all the awful, the stupid and the evil that’s being done by atheist is being done by humans and if that’s so defeating that it makes as quit, we are going to run out of things to quit.
I also feel like it’s a bit hypocritical to rightly point out that within atheism there is an awful lot of deflection of responsability, of dissasociation from anything valuable….and then say that atheism is so rotten and full of maggots that we should abandon and dissasociate from it…
Atheism has always had terrible connotations, but people said “fuck that” and took the label back…it can be done for this as well.
Divesting ourselves of belief in the unreal is a benefit in its own right, but the desire to be moral is not contingent on losing / never such beliefs. What it does instead is remove certain options from the table; we no longer answer the question of morality with ‘follow the bible’ or other mysticism related solutions.
That’s not to say that religion is empty of use as a moral guide. The ‘golden rule’ is a common element to many, and while plenty of religionists try to claim it for Team Religion, it is clear that it is beneficial to individuals and society without invoking any mysticism. This is the benefit of subtracting religion: clearing (some of) the bullshit reasoning in many areas, including morality.
To repeat my earlier point: even atheism in its narrowest sense – frequently derided as ‘dictionary atheism’ – does not imply a moral vacuum.
@PZ Myers #35
I did not see anyone saying something even remotely among those lines and I do not understand why you felt the need to insert a logical fallacy by stating a false dichotomy. You are perfectly capable of thinking about populations and the mulltitude factors influencing them, as demonstrated by many posts on your blog. so you understand that populations with different mean/average can, in fact, be hugely overlapping.
Atheism is a step forward (from societal point of view). But it is only a small step, because people in general do not think their ethical and moral stances logically through from some base premises. Mostly people simply take that from their surroundings and use post-hoc and ad-hoc reasoning to fit into their preconceptions whatever they actually like. End even when they think through a part of it, it does not mean they think throught all of it. That is how you get homophobic atheists, catholics who use contraceptions etc.
That is why atheism is not enough. It does not make society suddenly hugely better over a religious one. But this does not mean it is useless and has no influence whatsoever. I have experience with living in both types of society and living in a non-religious society is, as I said, slightly better. But not as much better as it should be, because most people my society did not arrive at their atheism and their moral guides through reasoning. They were brought up in it and most of them never thought about any of that too much. But there are those who do think things through and because they are not hampered by religious majority, they can work towards changing the society for the better slightly easier by slowly trying to persuade more and more people.
We can and we should work towards better society. But expecting unreasonable results won’t bring us anywhere. Progress is slow, but it is there, and atheism is one part of it.
As an addendum to my #62, I’ll point out that one of the bullshit lines of reasoning that is decidedly not removed by being an atheist – and is sometimes even reinforced by it – is the old ‘my position is based on pure reason! Therefore I am incapable of error’ arrogant shittery.
I noticed a faint smell, searched for it and realised that my post at @61 reeks of exceptionalism…
After reading this and the comments following, I am surprised to learn that there is something other than ‘dictionary atheism’. (I saw some comments about this equivocation, and it is sometimes difficult to work out which one is being referred to because when you speak of it as a thing it should have a capital ‘A’.)
It seems to me that if you want to have Atheism as a thing people can join, and which can be held up as a moral beacon to guide the superstitious (or a thing which can be bankrupt), then you are just building another religious institution with its own dogmas, visionaries and hierarchies (and tee-shirts) – in short – a target. I think this is a mistake (and Sam Harris is right). The battle against theocracy is just a battle against bad ideas; it must be fought with reason, not yet another competing ideology.
Do you even have to be atheist to be a humanist?
Ian Goldthorp @ 66:
No (which you would have known by reading the comments, as you said you did). As for atheism being a thing, it’s been that for a long time, no matter how much avowed dictionary atheists holler that it isn’t. Anytime this has come up for discussion (and it comes up a lot), those who are absolutely insistent that it’s dictionary atheist only, don’t seem to realize that they are participating in online atheist communities, of which, there are many. There’s the rub. Even those who claim there is no atheist community, nope, none at all, atheism isn’t a thing, smack up against that participation in atheist communities business.
Ian, I would say, “Yes”.
We could get into arguments over the definition of agnosticism, but if someone identifies as such, we might as well consider them to be atheists, because I believe it all comes down to semantics.
Now there are also people who consider themselves to be religious humanists. I believe the current Pope has been described as such. THEY ARE SUBVERTING THE TERM.
Ian Goldthorp @ 66;
The trouble with strict dictionary atheism is that it doesn’t actually lead anywhere or say anything of particular note. Non-belief in god(s) alone does note exclude other forms of supernaturalist thinking (such as belief in supernatural ‘souls’, belief in sympathetic magic, and so on) and also allows the label to be subverted by people with ugly and unevidenced beliefs about, say, the ‘proper’ role of women in society. They will then try to convey an undeserved mantle of rationality upon those toxic and inaccurate claims based upon the notion that their rejection of god(s) supposedly somehow means that they have clearer vision and vastly greater insight than ordinary mortals.
As an extension of this same mindset, here on Pharyngula we have often seen dictionary atheist bigots attempt to adopt the mantle of the justly derided ‘straw Vulkan’, and seek to claim that their position is infallible because it is somehow based upon ‘pure reason’, and that anyone who shows any actual concern for the well being of marginalised groups is being ‘overly emotional’ and so is incapable of making a worth while argument. Hyper skepticism and the corruption of ‘reasoned argument’ into a cudgel to wield against any one who shows any emotion at all are well established tools in the hands of privileged bigots.
One need look no further than so called ‘atheist thought leaders’ like Dawkins to see how it is possible to trade upon a cache within atheist circles to promote heinously bigoted positions with regard to a wide range of social issues. Narrow, ‘dictionary atheism’ invites more of the same, and also makes atheism such a narrow concept, and now one so poisoned by anti-feminists, racists and other kinds of bigot, that it will serve only to drive people away from openly identifying as godless, thus reinforcing the existing social presumption that everyone is at some at least nominal level a theist apart from a fringe grouping of prejudiced jerks. That path leads to only one outcome – the slow death of atheism by a thousand irrelevancies.
What makes you think that the idea of atheism doesn’t have implications for society and concepts of morality? if we reject the notion of god, then there is no mystic man up there leveling the playing field or helping out the under dog; there is no force striving to create a more equitable society other than we deeply imperfect humans. There are no cavalry coming to the rescue of the downtrodden. The only helping hand for the destitute and disenfranchised is a human hand. That places specific moral obligations upon us if we wish to live our lives in an ethical fashion that theists (with their belief in a benign god floating around to deal with problems) don’t share.
Further, if we reject god(s), and if we want our atheism to have any basis in reason rather than merely cherry picking our favourite unevidenced superstitions, then we must also reject the notion of an afterlife or reincarnation. That means that this is the only life we get, and there is no fixing the iniquities of this life after the fact. This world – right here, right now – is the only shot any of us is going to get at living ethically and trying to leave the world a slightly better place then when we entered it. There are no do-overs.
None of this requires any aspect of religiousity, nor any attempt to create an institution that amounts to a ‘church of atheism’, but rather simply requires that we think through the full implications of what our rejection of god(s) means with regard to any effort to live an ethical life.
There is also the point that bad ideas and social systems can only be fought if you have some notion of something better that you can replace them with – if your atheism is empty beyond the frankly pretty obvious assertion that Bronze Age mythology is not a good model for how the universe actually works, then you have nothing to offer in place of our current religion infested-social system. The very second you step beyond that, and start proposing some form of social system that could replace the religious aspects of our culture in a fashion that is better, more equitable, less oppressive, and actually consistent with observable reality, then you have also stepped beyond narrow dictionary atheism.
No, but humanism itself has a checquered past and is far from immune to problems with regard to inclusivism, and any religious humanist will inevitably find that their theism will obstruct their humanism because sooner or later their religion will ask them to choose between the notional imperatives of their god(s) and the good of actual, living and breathing human beings, and will demand that they choose the invisible phantasm. At that point they either abandon their religion, or they compromise on their humanism. There really isn’t a third path open to them, and humanism that privileges anything over the well being of actual people is not really a humanism worth the name.
Wait, so fi all atheism is is the non-belief of God, how fucking stupid are atheists that they needs to buy a Sam Harris book every few years, watch hundreds of Cristopher Hitchens videos, and follow Dawkins tweets simply to know that they don’t believe in God?
Seems to me like atheists who think there is little more to atheism are either a bunch of idiots who cannot keep the idea that they don’t believe in God in their head for more than a few moments, or that the atheist movement includes more than the dictionary definition, which leads them to spend money and time listening to the leaders of their movements.
And what do you think I’ve been saying here?
Dictionary atheists say “Hooray, atheism!” and then all they do is take one step and they’re done — but the journey isn’t over yet. And then they get all resentful when you point out how much further they have to go.
Caine 67 & Gregory 69, I disagree if you say you don’t have to be an atheist to be a Humanist. I agree if you say you don’t have to be an atheist to be a humanist.
Is there confusion arising out of Humanism versus humanism?
@70 addicted44
BAM!
The thing is, “dictionary atheism” is invoked only when convenient. The same people that use it as a cop out when they want to pretend that feminism is not the rational conclussion of observing reality and a goal that is demanded by any reasonable analisis of it, will then babble about creationists, separation of church and state and the evils of religion, including how horrible those terrible and monolothical mussies are to women. They will go to conferences on these topics, gather with other atheists, participate in forums, even rally in massive public events and proudly declare their values as atheists and their vision of what an atheistic society should look like. But then you mention something they don’t like, often related to feminism, LGBTQA rights, anti-racism, etc, and how no society, atheistic or not should tolerate discrimination against these groups, and they loose their fucking shit and start throwing dictionary atheism around like it is a fucking smoke bomb.
People are very good at finding excuses to hold on to their prejudices and biases, we know this. Among those, it’s the bias that if i’m correct on this one thing, and this other thing and that one, because i used reason and evidence to reach and support my conclussions, then it follows that i must be correct on all the other things i hold as true, because the idea that i might be wrong about something i feel strongly about doesn’t taste particularly good. The fact that this is completely idiotic is lost in the cloud of irrationality that smothers such beliefs, which leaves people free to imagine that they are perfectly rational.
dick @ 72:
Oh for fuck’s sake, that is pure idiocy. Fine, you want to argue the implication of capital letters, have at it, but it won’t be with me. This is the same level of fuckwittery that dictionary atheists present, to no fucking point whatsofuckingever, outside of making idiots feel smug.
As for who can be a Humanist or a humanist? Anyone, whether you fucking like it or not. Do some reading.
Do you pronounce that Capital-H-Humanism when you say it? How does it sound different from little-h-humanism?
PZ @ 75:
My guess would be that Capital-H-Humanism is pronounced whilst patting oneself on the back.
:delurk:
I’ve long since stopped identifying or describing myself as atheist precisely because it—the label and the movement—is morally bankrupt and almost-entirely useless. There are other labels which describe the ethics, values, purpose, and meaning I do have much more accurately, and other movements—which do not exclude theists—which advance them more effectively. Those labels just aren’t “atheism.” Most of them don’t even have atheism as a prerequisite; in fact I haven’t found it difficult at all to find self-described religious people who share many or most of them.
And guess what? A lot of them are exactly what you’re doing your damnedest to promote on this very blog. I find your continued attachment to the “atheist” label and identity a bit puzzling, frankly, given what it means to most people—including such glorious fountains of wisdom as Harris and Dawkins.
:relurk:
On a serious note, I think humanism is reason/science/reality oriented enough that we can talk about true humanism versus false humanism (unlike christianity, where it’s such a mess of contradictory fables and “personal revelation” that there can hardly be said to be one high fidelity version of christianity).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanism
Not in the true scotsman sense though. You can already say some atheist on the internet trolling as a christian is not a true scotsman christian. That’s not the sense I mean.
Well, I’m going to do what I hardly ever do, and mildly defend Harris (you can check, I have slammed him in this space within the past two weeks). His actual words don’t trouble me so much. I mean, the guy’s a dick who hides behind sophistry to cover a bunchy of -isms he commits on a regular basis. But the way his argument played out to me, before reading a bunch of the comments is more a less this: if somebody does something horrible in America, there’s an 80 percent they will be a Christian; there’s about a five percent chance they will be some other religion, Jew or Muslim or Buddhist or Wiccan, whatever. And there’s now about a 10-15 percent chance they will either be an atheist or a lapsed Christian (the distinction between which is often rather fine). So does the Vatican need to apologize every time a Catholic does something awful? I’m not sure, if the awful thing isn’t something they heard in the pew that morning about gays or abortion. Similarly, if an atheist does something horrible, and it wasn’t some revenge against octopus-fishermen spurred on by PZ’s latest Friday cephalopod, I’m not sure some spokesperson for Movement Atheism needs to chime in with either a mea culpa or a “we take no responsibility”.
Moreover, I think Harris is correct, to a certain degree, about what is referred to in spaces like this as Dictionary Atheism. To wit, the vast majority of American atheists, not to mention all of those in Asia and Africa and Europe and Latin America, don’t know what SJW means, and really have no particular political economy connected to their atheism. Do the majority of that vast majority tend toward liberalism and progressivism? Sure. They’ve already demonstrated that by freeing themselves of the psychosocial bonds of their religious upbringings (outside of Russia and China, let’s say).
In the same way, most feminists, in America and worldwide, have never heard of Rebecca Watson or Amanda Marcotte or Feministing — they are not necessarily Movement Feminists, and maybe only Dictionary Feminists. You can take this parallel to gays or African Americans or the disabled or the transgendered. If a person in their Movement Category, despite their having no particular knowledge of the leaders and websites who promote said movement, does something bad, then I don’t think they need to search their consciences. \
Squeaky Fromme was an ardent feminist, and actually part of a certain faction of Movement Feminism back in the 70s. If there had been a Fox News back then screeching “this is what feminism yields, assassination attempts on presidents!”, I don’t think I would have been offended had Gloria Steinem replied: “feminism is simply a belief in women’s equality, and the attempt to paint it otherwise is yet another attack by the patriarchy against women.”
I get PZ’s point about Movement Atheism needing to address some of the common asshole tendencies of its adherents, but I think that’s a separate issue from Harris’s distancing of atheism as a cuase for one asshole’s assholishness — an paint it what it is, videlicet, a normal condition of 40 million Americas with no particular Good Book to exhort or inhibit various behaviors. You can smirkingly sweep 39 million of those atheists aside as “Dictionary Atheists”. But if you asked them what their atheism meant to them, they’d probably reply, “um, read the fucking dictionary, I don’t believe in any gods”. Most would probably be fine people, as well, who support the SJW agenda. But that’s not what their atheism implies.
Ian Goldthorp:
What does this mean? How do you fight something with reason, without having an ideology about what is reasonable? It sounds like you’re just talking about debunking: you point out when someone is wrong. Isn’t there more to do? Besides, that by itself does unavoidably imply some alternative is right or closer to being right. You’re not kidding anyone if you pretend otherwise. Your ideology doesn’t need to tell you ahead of time what the right views are — such things can come empirically, through a lot of trial and error experiences if nothing else. I think that’s usually a reasonable approach to take. You obviously don’t need to be absolutely sure of the results once you have them, whatever they turn out to be, in order for them to be correct, understandable, useful, honest, effective, etc. And a process like that is building up an ideology, in the sense of a more or less comprehensive and systematic (at least consistent and coherent) set of ideas about the world. Maybe it’s a scary word, for the same sort of people who think “socialism” is a scary word, but it’s not as if we need to take those negative connotations and worries seriously whenever they don’t actually apply.
@80 anbheal
Like people who use gendered insults?
I really like you PZ Myers. You are a very smart guy with a big heart and a way with words, and an enormous drive to battle the forces of ignorance and evil. I am suffering from cognitive dissonance though, because there are other people I like, pretty much for the same reasons, and it is quite apparent that you loathe them with every ounce of your being. I am thinking of Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens.
How can it be that I agree with you when you rightly point out one of them has stepped in it, and still fail to feel the same contempt for them myself as you so readily exhibit?
Maybe because I’m not a particularly deep thinker. And maybe because I recognize that like the rest of us, despite their best efforts not to, they carry all sorts of cognitive biases around that affect their discourse. When they trot down a narrative path that indicates bad judgment on their part, as sometimes they have done, my opinion of them may be swayed one way or the other, but rarely if ever does it go from respect and admiration to utter contempt in one fell swoop.
From where I’m sitting, you stepped in it in this post. Sam made a valid point, using the literal meaning of the word atheism. You chastise him for adoring “the irresponsibility of the idea that [his] beliefs impose no demands on [him]”. I’m pretty sure atheism is a small subset if his (and your) beliefs. You assert that according to Harris, religion should be replaced with nothing, but he has made no such statement as far as I know, at least he did not in the text you quoted here. It seems to me your animosity towards Sam clouded your judgment when you read his comment. I’m afraid you pulled a strawman here PZ. :-(
Observing the bickering between for example Reza and Sam, as well as your snide remarks about Sam, reminds me of a scene from Life of Brian:
The common enemy isn’t religious people, right-wing atheists or middle-aged white men. It is ignorance in all its shapes and sizes (and lack of empathy). As a part of fighting the common enemy, by all means, let’s constructively criticize one another, harshly when warranted, but please, let’s ease off on the contempt. It doesn’t help.
Vicar
Or, y’know, Harris. (Note, I’m not blaming Harris for this act, just pointing out that atheists can call themselves “spiritual”.)
gunnar
Well then you haven’t read much of this blog, because PZ actually likes Dawkins, and like a critically-thinking person is able to recognize both the good and the bad in Hitch’s philosophy and writing. I think you’re right about PZ loathing Harris, but I don’t think that is really a fault. I don’t understand what Harris has to say that all the other famous, white, male atheists out there don’t. He’s also appears fond of maintaining a rockstar image while frequently utilizing DoubleSpeak.
Also, when the fuck did we start talking about Hitch as if he was a saint? I own and thoroughly enjoyed “God Is Not Great”, and he makes brilliant points in the book, but he was also an asshole. When he was alive I always liked that he was just enough of a prick to remind people he was human. Now he’s viewed through lenses of hero-worshiping retrospective.
And who decides when that line has been crossed? This line especially comes off sounding a bit like tone-trolling.
gunnar jakobbriem @ 83;
Contempt is an entirely warranted response when Harris wears his bigotry on his sleeve by advocating the oppressive and discriminatory practice of racial profiling, and doubly so when he supports this dangerous position with such utterly idiotic insights as;
And what does a Muslim look like? Harris’ answer seems to be any dark skinned person of vaguely Middle Eastern appearance, which utterly fails to deal with the reality of conversion to Islam that means that anyone, of pretty much any appearance, could be a Muslim. It also seems to trade on stereotypes of heavily bearded men in robes, which ignores the fact that, for example, the 9/11 hijackers were mostly clean shaven and in Western dress.
What Harris is proposing here amounts to a charter for boarder security agencies to harass innocent people under the ludicrous fig leaf that Muslim = terrorist to a sufficiently high degree that it justifies that harassment, and that stereotypical Middle eastern appearance = Muslim (because Middle Eastern Jewish people, Coptic Christians and Sikhs don’t exist, dontchaknow). That is contemptibly racist, even if Harris lacks the courage and intellectual honesty to admit it, I don’t see why any person of principle should be required to mince their words when saying so.
I find it mildly amusing / mildly saddening that this is one of the most smug posts I have seen in months.
Nope, he made a shallow point that allows him to keep his prejudices unexamined. Typical of Islamophobes, misogynists, RWAs, libertarians and other folks who believe they are better than some other humans.
It’s just occurred to me that this debate closely resembles the “faith vs. works” debate that’s been going on in Christianity since… pretty much the beginning. Christians who believe in “salvation by faith alone” resemble “dictionary atheists” in that they claim that the important thing is believing (or not believing as the case may be), while “faith and works” Christians believe that a faith that doesn’t result in positive actions in the world is an empty faith.
I’m an ex-“faith and works” Christian (Roman Catholic) and I happen to agree with PZ– calling yourself an atheist but doing nothing to address the structural injustice in society erected and maintained by believers strikes me as a meaningless position. It would be interesting to see whether atheists who’ve deconverted from Christianity split along the “dictionary atheist” and “activist atheist” (for want of a better term) line depending on whether they were raised in a “salvation by faith alone” or “faith and works” denomination.
Also, I think that many Christians who espouse “salvation by faith alone” have perverted, for their own selfish ends, the intent of the Protestant theologians like Luther and Melanchthon who came up with the concept. From what I can tell– and I Am Not A Theologian– their idea was that works were a Good Thing, but they had to proceed from one’s faith– what they objected to was the idea of people who were wishy-washy on some point of Christian faith like the divinity of Jesus, say, but did works anyway in the expectation of “time off for good behaviour” in the afterlife. Later Protestants simply decided– conveniently for themselves– that charitable works were therefore a sign of wavering faith and should not be done at all! It might all be a bit of theological hair-splitting but it seems to me that many “dictionary atheists” are guilty of the same self-serving behaviour: they want to sit on their little island of philosophical superiority and sneer at the god-botherers without having to do any of the hard work that their philosophical position might entail…
@70 –
They aren’t stupid, they’re often deconverts from communities in which religion is the center of people’s social lives and social support systems, and they’re looking to atheism to fill an empty space. That kind of response is a lot less usual in Europe, where attending a church is little more than a peculiar hobby, and people already have a sense of community built around public and political life. Note also that in America, atheist participation in public and political life is relatively difficult.
Personally, I think the idea of organizing social and political activism around atheism is abhorrent, if not immoral in principle. I mistrust atheist activists in my own country, because where atheism is an accepted norm and Christianity it stagnant, it’s often a cover for racism and xenophobia in the form of islamophobia especially.
gmacs
I particularly had this post in mind, but you may well be right that PZ does not loathe RD and CH as intensely as he does SH.
Having participated very little in discussions like this, I had to google that concept. Let me assure you I don’t consider myself a Very Serious Person. :-) I see your point, and wouldn’t want to be any sort of a troll. Maybe I’m too reluctant to condemn, but I can’t help but feel that much like manipulating the discussion by tone-trolling, being quick to play the bigot card is a way of manipulating the discussion by poisoning the well.
Caine 74, 76, PZ 75, I’ve been involved with Humanism since the 60’s. Most of that involvement was with the British Humanist Association, (BHA). I returned to Canada in 2012, but haven’t joined a Canadian Humanist organization, because Humanism, this side of the ditch, doesn’t seem to be as well organized. I’ve also been too busy getting settled in.
So, from the BHA website, I copied this:
I’m confused. What’s not to like? Isn’t this what PZ wants to promote? Why is there such a negative attitude towards Humanism here?
Is this it, (from a 2012 post)?
I wouldn’t be right if that were the case, because that’s not what I said. I said PZ doesn’t appear to loathe Dawkins or Hitchens at all.
I agree that throwing around the term “bigot” can be a conversation killer, which is why I think it’s an accusation that must be backed up. With Harris I think it is, because he has defended profiling, going so far as to suggest a large and cohesive community of Muslims living around the globe are willing to sacrifice their own children. When called on this bullshit, he claimed this was not what he said.
gmacs, I’m sorry, I did not intend to put words in your mouth.
@88, Cat Mara
Do you have any examples?
Side note: I’m pretty sure the “faith and works” Christians believe that a faith
that doesn’t result inwithout positive actions in the world isan empty faithnot enough to get you into heaven.Brian Pansky @13:
Does this mean you’re a Wiktionary Rationalist?
Thanks for your replies!
I haven’t been following the previous discussions here so I’m sorry if my thoughts are echoes of discussions which have been long settled among your ‘regulars’.
My main concern is that someone who subscribes to some form of deity-based magical thinking is less likely to reconsider their world view if their only alternative appears to be joining an obnoxious rabble standing beneath a flag marked “Atheists” (and you can be painted “obnoxious rabble” whether it is true or not). All I am saying really, given that “atheist” is a term which was coined by the religious so that they could put people in a pigeonhole and dismiss them collectively as unworthy and irrelevant, is that we should let the *label* die and use the word only to describe a world-view which is not founded on the basis of the existence of any kind of cosmic intelligence.
When someone asks me if I’m an atheist, I find myself wanting to respond with “that depends on what you mean by atheist”. If anything I am and anti-theist, but this is not the basis for my morality – it is an aspect of my morality – my morality makes me atheist/anti-theist because I see superstitious faith as an almost completely corrosive influences on society and, more importantly, because I think deism and theism are factually and philosophically incorrect.
So do we need to come up with a different label/name which suggests an ideology which is worth believing in? Well I think Secularism is the natural ideal to which someone whose world view is atheist should aspire; and, more importantly, is an ideal toward which all religious people should aspire, because it guarantees their protection against the, possibly hostile, adherents of other ideologies.
@Caine 67
Your comment seems to me an example of the problem – “participating in online atheist communities” as though Atheist communities are a good thing, or represent a higher plane than other kinds of communities?
@Gregory Greenwood 69
I can see all the things which dismay you and agree wholeheartedly with your sentiments, but I just don’t think Atheist or “Dictionary Atheist” are useful labels.
@consciousness razor 81
I agree fully with everything you said here, and yes adopting a label/ideology may be a necessary evil (but you didn’t say Atheism was the best label).
Brian Pansky @88:
Examples of which? If you are asking which Christian denominations are “faith and works” and which are “faith alone”, I believe Roman Catholicism is in “faith and works” camp and most Protestant denominations of the Lutheran and Calvinist traditions are “faith alone”. I don’t know enough about other denominations to say what their position is.
If you’re asking instead for examples of the “faith and works”/ “faith alone” dispute in the Bible itself, my understanding is (and again, I Am Not A Theologian yadda yadda) that the key point of contention is the phrase (2:14-17) in the Epistle of James: “What doth it profit, my brethren, though a man say he hath faith, and have not works? Can faith save him? If a brother or sister be naked, and destitute of daily food, And one of you say unto them, Depart in peace, be ye warmed and filled; notwithstanding ye give them not those things which are needful to the body; what doth it profit? Even so faith, if it hath not works, is dead, being alone”. By contrast, there are numerous passages in Paul which basically say, “once you have faith, you’re cool”; for example, Romans (9:30-32): “What shall we say then? – that the Gentiles who did not pursue righteousness obtained it, that is, a righteousness that is by faith, but Israel even though pursuing a law of righteousness did not attain it. Why not? Because they pursued it not by faith but (as if it were possible) by works…” Which as far as I can tell is basically saying, “works? pshaw! Look at the Jews! It was ‘all works, all the time’ for those guys with their Mosaic Law and what did it get them? Bupkiss, that’s what! Faith FTW!” What a great guy, Paul.
(Luther was not a fan of the Epistle of James, calling it an “epistle of straw”.)
I’m not sure I follow what you’re saying here with the strikethroughs but, no, I don’t think that the “faith and works” denominations think that anyone’s going to get into heaven on the back of works alone if they don’t actually believe in Jesus.
Ian Goldthorp, #96:
Well, the best is to crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women. We don’t really have a label for that, as far as I’m aware. But atheism is close in second place, for sure.
Seriously though, maybe I don’t understand what you’re asking. It’s a good label. I am an atheist. It says a lot about me, not just my metaphysical views but also epistemological and ethical ones. It’s not at all unusual for such things to be tied together and interdependent logically speaking, so this isn’t a wacky or incredible claim to be making. I could go into more detail if that would be helpful, but there doesn’t seem to be anything wrong in this case with saying they come as a package deal. For instance, you said of yourself that moral issues are among the reasons you reject theism — I think that’s perfectly valid. It’s also similar with epistemic issues (which, you might notice, sometimes have moral aspects too). So, saying it’s merely about the nonexistence of gods (as if it’s only a metaphysical claim and nothing else) is simply not enough to tell the whole story, to ensure people understand all of the obvious things and not-so-obvious things about what atheism means. Besides, purely as a metaphysical claim, it’s a claim about reality, so we shouldn’t be surprised that it implies numerous other things about whatever else there is, what it does, how it works, etc.
But, of course, let’s not go too far. Many different labels apply to me. It’s not like this is about excluding or denying those somehow. We just happen to be talking about this one right now: what atheism specifically means. In terms of ideologies or worldviews, I suppose there is only a single overarching one that I’ve got (and another that you’ve got, with similarities or overlaps), with no label for it, which of course many other atheists don’t share for a variety of reasons.
The thing is, it doesn’t need to be the case that all atheists must agree with each other, about what atheism entails as an ideology. First, because people can be mistaken — it seems we’re good at doing that with basically everything. Also, even when you have a reasonably good understanding of the core concepts and aren’t exactly making a mistake, we can simply learn new things that we didn’t know before, or make connections in ways we hadn’t realized were possible, since those may not be obvious at first.
In any case, agreement among all atheists isn’t the place to look for that, just as what atheism causes us all to be like (if anything) is also not the place to look. We don’t act, certainly not immediately or automatically, upon all of the conclusion that are logically entailed by a belief — that’s just not how humans are built. So, this sort of thing requires some real careful thought to work out, which you can’t get just by doing a survey or by noticing some trend concerning whatever atheists happen to have in common.
And once you’re thinking along these lines, it hardly needs to be said that this one atheist (which now includes the “spiritual but not religious”??) who commits murder (or does anything wrong) is not going to do anything like bankrupt atheism. It’s not a magic pill to me, which makes people do only good things all of the time — same as secular humanism, or the same as anything else since for fuck’s sake there are no magic pills. What gives it a genuinely harder time, as an ideology, are influential people like Harris or Dawkins confusing and obfuscating about it at every turn. It doesn’t seem like it’s going anywhere if we’re letting it get bogged down by all of that bullshit.
consciousness razor #98
“Its a good label. I am an atheist. It says a lot about me, not just my metaphysical views but also epistemological and ethical ones.”
When you use the label its intended meaning is clear to you; and now that you have explained that meaning it’s clear to me. (And it *is* good.)
But a *really* good label shouldn’t need to be explained, nor should it need to be defended against people who say “oh you mean spiritual but not religious – like that murderer guy?”
I don’t mean to sound critical – if you’re happy defending and explaining the label and the value it holds for you (or perhaps, rather, the value of what it labels) I think that’s a good thing because you seem like you will give a good account of it.
For me though there are too many misunderstandings around the word, and the conversion too often ends up in semantics when there are more valuable discussions to be had.
I guess it seems sometimes that the label gets mistaken for that which it labels.
I hope that makes sense…
Why? What about a label makes it a good one, when it is self-explanatory or doesn’t require explanation? You might value labels like that (can’t think of an example) for being convenient or easy to apply, but the thing itself which is being labeled may not be very interesting or important or relevant. When things are interesting, they often do require some explanation or least elaboration. I don’t see how that’s an actual problem.
If I had to teach you English, wouldn’t I need to explain to you what “democracy” or “intercontinental ballistic missile” means? Does that make them bad as labels? Or does it just make your job a little harder, because you have to do a bit of work to get the full idea across?
I haven’t said it needs to be defended against anybody saying anything like that. If gods don’t exist, then atheism is true — the essential point that needs defending is the fact that no gods exist. And, as I said, that fact has implications about lots of others — if anything turns out to be wrong anywhere along the way, we’ll have to do the usual thing of retracing our steps to find where we made a factual or logical mistake. It probably won’t be that we find a god hidden somewhere, but instead that we failed to make the correct inferences about what’s entailed by their nonexistence. But that doesn’t mean the whole project comes crashing down, that it’s useless, that we shouldn’t be doing it, that it’s a problematic label, etc.
I guess I get that, but you can’t discuss much of anything if you don’t put any value in semantics. I don’t really know what to say… you’re not exactly pushing the typical dictionary atheist claims here. Would you say you’re agnostic or skeptical or apathetic about it? Okay, it’s not your cup of tea, fine — but is there something wrong with the tea?
Thought provoking to be sure, but really, we don’t call Theists to take blame for the actions of Christians or Muslims, we usually blame individual sects or individuals for those things. So I see nothing compelling me to take on the blame for someone’s actions who does not claim to be one of us. Atheism is not a way of life. It is only a label that tells you less about me than Theism tells you about some Christian. Which is why I don’t use it to describe me.
Still, I take the point despite the undeserved disrespecting. I would much rather read a positive post about why I should consider Humanism.
No, not apathetic. But I live in Australia – we have our religious nutbags trying to get into politics – but it is OK to laugh at people’s stupid ideas here, and declaring oneself an atheist has no moral content (and our paedophile priests have made sure that morality is not strongly associated with religiosity either). So skeptical yes – always.
I suspect that this might be the end game that American Atheists should have in mind – a time when their is no need to label yourself regarding what you believe about elves and pixies; and morality as a subject in its own right.
The tea is good. Relax and enjoy it ;)
For what it’s worth, here’s what an eyewitness to the Oregon shootings said, as reported today on abc.com:
“He had us all get up one by one and asked us what our religions were,” Boylan said.
One student was shot when said [sic] his religion. “The shooter said that he would only feel pain for a couple of seconds and that he would be with God soon and then he shot him,” Boylan recalled.
Harris never really sounds smug to me. This post though, it smacks of the word “smug.”
He wrote a whole book entitled The Moral Landscape that specifically addressed what he believes should be the basis for morality.
If you want to criticize him for disavowing the actions of the latest shooter, fine. But again, he has proposed a basis for meaning and value outside of religion and put all of this out in the open.
Aside from my beef with your (mis)representation of Harris, I do share your concerns over atheists who are also misogynists, homophobes, and racists. We have a problem in our community and its good to call it out. I just don’t share your conclusion that Harris is part of it. I also think anyone who has done a fair reading of his work will agree that he probably cares about values and meaning more than the average atheist, they are the central thrust of his books on meditation and morality.
Hey PZ, youre an idiot, thats just about as simply as i can put it. I think its hilarious that you of all people accuse others of being an authoritarian, when for better or worse your plan of mixing atheism with feminism and crying is authoritarian as all hell.
If you want to live in your own little collectivist cult please by all means go ahead but dont force it on the rest of us, live and let live man.
Follow up: #105 has just made me more sympathetic to PZ’s smugness.
I’ve got a bingo on 105. Golux, you actually don’t understand the words authoritarian and collectivism, do you?
Saganite @ #46:
This has probably already happened, in 2007:
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2007/11/07/school-shooting-in-finland/
It’s interesting to note an excerpt from that perpetrator’s manifesto:
Hm.
i am with Sam Harris on this one. but reject him as a leader. my disbelief in gods does not require a leader.
i don0t see why i should take responsibilty for the deeds of someone i have never seen in my life, just because we share a non belief in gods? if he indeed did not belief in any god. (his , meet your maker, sounds very not Atheist to me)
from the few things i know about him by now, it seems that on most things i have a different view than him.
so why should i take responsibility?
if you feel responsible for his deeds, you are welcome to feel that way. but why anyone should feel that way is beyond me.
but then, i also don’t think my Muslim friends are in any way responsible for what IS barbarians do.
but sure when you belief that members of a group are responsible for the deeds of one group member, well then you should feel that way to be consistent.
He is not forcing a fucking thing on you.
As for live and let live, we’d like nothing more than a society where bigots and assholes are not fabricating horseshit to make the lives of others, like women, POC, etc, less livable. As long as people are spouting anti-feminist, racist, homophobic shit in any society, including atheistic communities, fuck your live and let live, you don’t have nor deserve the liberty of stomping on other’s people feet and whine when they point out what an arsehole you are for doing so.
“As long as people are spouting anti-feminist, racist, homophobic shit in any society, including atheistic communities”
wht has this to do with the topic?
was the shooter a member of a Atheist community?
was that community known for sexism / homophobia or racism?
Brain fart, i cross-posted in my mind from another threat. Substitute that for any other anti-social, anti-humanist phenomenon you like and it works the same. As long as people are promoting and doing terrible things whithin an atheistic, anti-religious, whatever, context, there’s a purpose to combating that with an atheism that has better values as well as countering the “it’s not atheism’s fault or responsibility because dictionary definition” bullshit.
well it seems that even some atheist want to change the meaning of atheistm, just like many religious people tried for so long.
To me Atheism is just what the dictionary explains, jsut the abswence of a beliefs in any gods.
why try to stick other stuff on to this like feminism and humanism to it?
i think Humansism is very good. and can replace a religion’s moral value system for some people. i like many of its ideas. but Humanism is not only for atheists, so why try to lump the two together?
same with feminism. what has that to do with a blief in gods or not?
i am all for equal rights , no matter sex or gender etc. but you can support that and still belief in some god concept.
in the end i am lo respnisble for horrible things some feminists say just because im an atheist?
i think i need to find another way to communicate my disbelief in gods. because all the stuff that is tried to be tied together with atheism has nothing to do with my non belief in gods.
heck i don0t even see what a crazy person shooting others has to do with me, just because we allegedly both did not belief in gods.
we both propably watched TV, we both ate food, we both breath air.
i just don’t feel responsible for other people murdering others. i think killing people is wrong except in self defence.
but that is not based on my non belief in any gods.
why try to make a mess about a topic that was once very clear. atheism = not beliving in gods.
oh daer , a place whithout edit button, horrible for me as a legastenic “too lazy to read posts before press post comment button” guy. i hope you can decypher my post anyway.
“n the end i am lo respnisble”
in the end i am also respnsible…..
also ,sexism, racism, homophobia etc are not Atheist problems, they are social problems, those are problems our society has, all groups have them,. some more than others, some less than otehrs.
heck i even saw sexism in feminist debates. thsoe problems are very deelpy rootet in our brains, generations of sexims, that is not going away over night, and sure needs to be fought and pointed out wherever it may be, no matter the group. but it does not have to be in every topic. and this mass shooting, i don’t know how sexism, homophobia and racism came into this topic.
If atheism is going to involved individuals, it definitely needs those things. It’s not changing the meaning of atheism to mean something else, it’s about Movement Atheism and actual, human atheists.
We all know this already, atheist groups are not just sitting around and saying “there is no god” every 30 seconds while they drink a cup of tea and then everybody goes home. And when atheist communities are actually promoting very bad things and claiming that this is ok because atheism just means desbelief in gods, you have right there and excellent reason to promote better communities with better values.
when i want to promote values i regard as better , i promote Humanism for example, but i don’t see what atheism has to do with that.
but then, i don’t sit around with atheists about atheis,. i have atheist friends, but atheism is seldom a topic for us.
so to me, it seems like some atheist are trying to change the meaning of atheism.
they want to promote stuff. and if that is considered atheism, i need to find a new name to describe my non belief in gods. i don’t want my non belief in gods to be associated with humanism or feminism or anything else.
every time when i said, iam an atheist, i simply meant, i do not belief in gods, never di i mean , i favor Humanist values. or i like feminism, or i like multiculturalims.
there are evidently already names fro thsoe concepts and ideas.
so i will have to stop using Atheist as a label for me.
In other words, sound like you are a bigot. Atheism should not mean one is a bigot, but dictionary atheists often are.
Why dors that sound like i am a bigot? I am in favor of humanism. I like what i know about it.
I am all for equal rights no matter ones sex or gender. And sexism is a huge problem in our society.
I am a total fan of multi culturalism. I am living in a part of a city that has more than 50% immigrants and i fucking love it. People from all over the planet living peacefully with eachother. This is the fiture. I dont care about skin color or etnicity. We are one species.
But whem i say i am an atheist. It simply means i do not belief in gods. I never said i am an atheist to express my support for feminism or humanism.
How that makes me look like a bigot is beyond me.
I can 100% honestly say I would not have “embraced him as one of my own” prior to his crime. I consider many nontraditional spiritualities’ supernatural beliefs to be extremely troublesome, including ethically. Newer evidence suggests the shooter was a theistic occultist, and does not support rumors that he targeted the religious. There seems little reason for concern about what this might say about nontheism.
Ashley Miller’s post is predicated on discredited rumors about the event.
I’ve done an in-depth analysis, including new information that has not previously been reported: On CNN’s Reliable Sources, Host Wrongly Calls Oregon Shooter an Atheist Targeting Anyone Religious
Well, first of all, what atheism means to you is clearly not the same as to what atheism means for large numbers of people who are currently involved in atheist groups.
Second of all, many if not most atheists have no problem with atheism being associated with separation of church and state, science, skepticism, etc…it only becomes a problem when it’s some value they don’t like, almost always specific progressive values.
Why wouldn’t you want movement atheism, not atheism as a philosophical position, which is not what we are talking about, to be associated with humanist values, feminism or multiculturalism? Those are eminently excellent things to be associated with, although i noticed that while you say you like humanist values you have rather conscpicuously avoided mentioning feminism, so maybe there in lies the problem, as usual…
@121
because i like it to be as precise as possible.
i have no problem if i am called a Humanist, Feminist, Gay-rights activist or Multiculturalist, enviromentalist. leftist, sometimes even socialist (while most real socialist would see me as a capitalist)
but Atheism, is neither of those , atheism is simply the non belief in gods. and i see no rational reason to extend the definition and include more groups that already have a name in this group of atheism.
A theist can be a humanist and a feminist, but not an atheist.
not every atheist likes science as much as i do. an atheist can reject evolution and still be an atheist.
when i want to express my support for gay rights, i try to keep my atheism out of it. because i fear that it might turn away people that otherwise might listen to my reasons for supporting the rights of homosexual people.
my non belief in gods is not as important as getting equal rights for homosexuals for example.
or promoting the theory of evolution is for me much more important than my non belief in gods.
so also there i make sure to point out that accepting evolution has nothing to do with belief or non belief in gods.
heck , there are Christians that understand evolution much much better than i do. so associating atheism with evolution is simply wrong and counter productive.
when you guys want to extend the group of Atheism, you should find a new name for it. and not try to hijack the word atheism.
If this is serious you’re an idiot PZ. Atheism is a disbelief. It does not owe you anything. That I don’t take Harry Potter seriously doesn’t mean that I derive a whole philosophy of life out of that. Exactly the same with atheism. I don’t derive my values from the nonexistence of gods. I don’t need you to replace gods. I don’t need anything nor anybody to replace gods. I don’t want anything to replace gods. I’m all right without them, just like I’m all right with the lack of Harry Potter.
I won’t gather around atheists and buy into whatever they have decided to be their philosophy either. I will listen, I will reason about what they say. But I won’t just fucking buy into it, just like I won’t buy into this crap you’ve written.
That mass murderer has nothing to do with me. Not one bit. If he’s one of yours, well, that’s your problem. But don’t count on me.
It must feel nice to completely disregard the argument being made, select a pointless and trivially “profound” strawman and bash it for your own enjoyement.
You don’t derive your morals from atheism..but you derive them whithin an atheistic framework because beliefs are informed by other beliefs. Your atheism very much does inform your other beliefs, that’s blatantly obvious to anyone except the most disingenuous of the dictionary atheists.
People, including, potentially, this murderous fuck, but certainly plenty of others, are deriving really shitty “morals” and claiming these are consistent with their atheism. We say BOLLOCKS. Not only are they fucking awful conclussions to reach, like shooting people because you can’t get a girlfriend, they are also not consistent with the idea of a morality developed in the absence of any gods…because they are simply NOT MORAL.
I don’t want atheism to be associated with arseholes, the murderous and non-murderous kind, mysoginists, racists, violent harassment, etc, because those are inmoral things. It is possible to develop a set of moral values that is consistent with and very much informed by a lack of belief in gods, that is far better than the shit a lot of atheists are peddling, all we are saying is what these atheists are doing is definitely not it, and the cries of dictionary atheism do absolutely fucking nothing to change that fact.
By the way, that mass murderer does have something to do with you, a fucking shittone in fact. He was human and a westerner, that right there means you have un unbelievable amount of things in common. But hey, feel free to feel superior because you can look at a fellow human being that was a member of your own society and culture who went and killed 10 people for unbelievably shitty reasons (not that there are good ones) and smugly go “nothing to do with me…”, that doesn’t make you an arsehole at all, no sir….
By the way, do you seriously mean to say that there no differences to your “philosophy of life” regardless of whether you take Harry Potter seriously or not? Are you that thick?
Because it absolutely does…your “philosophy of life” is very much affected and informed by the things you don’t believe in, just as much as the things you do believe in.
” He was human and a westerner” as are most of those doing those school schootings.
so?
why should i take responsibility for them? how does that even look like?
and how are my morals informed by my non belief in gods? how does that work? i try to base my moral values on rational things. and i know people that do belief in a god, that do the very same. they don’t need the 10 commandements or any such mythical nonsense. He uses reason and never talks abot nonsense like sin. and we are pretty much inline about moral values and the reasons for them.
why do so many Atheist go to Humanism for their moral values when they could get it from their non belief in a god?
when you want to feel responsible for this mass murdere, pls, feel free to do so, but why do you try to force otehrs to feel the same? why do you need to name call peopel that do not feel that way?
Do you also call Moslems arseholes that do not want to be associated with the IS, despite them both claiming to be Muslims?
a good frind of mine is a devote Muslim. But he does not see the IS as Muslims, because they are murdering innocent people, and to him, that is the biggest sin in Islam. and the way i red the Koran, he is right. and i never would think he should take responsibility ofr the terror of the IS.
actually i find it very biggoted of people that do this. but it seems you think Christians are responsible for other Christians that blow up an Abortion clinic. and A Muslim is responsible for the deeds of IS. are indians responsible for gangrapes in India? or just Indian men? or can we make Hinduism respionsible for that. damn , the blame game gets complicated…..
i jsut stick to blaming those that do those things. and not blame those that share some things with them.
when that makes me an asshole, then i am a proud asshole.
“We say BOLLOCKS”
who is we?
by the way, in what form or shape do you take responsibility of Stalin and Lenin? they were both atheists.
Do you think it was their non belief in gods that made them become tyranical mass murdering dictators? or why would you take responsiblity of their deeds?
or could it be that it were otehr beliefs they held that influenced their behavior and decision much more than their not beliving in gods?
Dreaming,
You’re right. I’m an arsehole. But that’s not due to my atheism. That’s not due to my disbelief in Harry Potter either. It’s just due to my commitment to myself. Take it anyway you prefer.
I sure as hell don’t derive my values from the absence of gods. Sure, it makes me aware of the many stupid “moralities” I have taken for granted, but it does not inform my values. It just takes away the blindfolds. But I don’t go and say “hey, there’s no gods, therefore I should value life!” or “hey, there’s no gods, therefore I should value freedom!” Those would be non-sequiturs. But the important point is that the absence of gods does not make me responsible to give you, or anybody else, values the way a religion would. That there’s no gods means, well, that there’s no gods. I have no responsibility to give anybody a substitute for their pipe dreams. If they need that, well, too bad, because there’s no gods, and I am not too blame for it. Do you get this? The absence of gods does not make me responsible for anybody who either discover this, or some other way doesn’t find gods a very compelling story. What next? Will I be held responsible for the effects of gravitation in your body?
Don’t get me all wrong here. I enjoy people who feel confused and helpless once they discover that they were believing fantasies. But I’m not responsible for the lack go gods, and I’m not about to act as if the absence of gods is a religion. You want to convince me of something you value? I am ready to listen. But don’t expect me to just buy into it just because we both don’t believe that there’s gods.
I meant “I enjoy helping people who feel confused …”
Here, I make logicked’s words my own: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJ6gDt8dWlk
The video is addressed directly to PZ as a response to this blog post, I hope at least some conversation can come out of this.
Dreaming of an Atheistic Newtopia #124 and 125 (and earlier)
Look again. Your arguments have been heard and responded to repeatedly (and politely). It is you who is disregarding the arguments being made,
Also, as a self-appointed representative of the ‘Born-again Atheist Movement’ your disrepacful and sometimes belligerent tone is not improving the image of the cause you profess to promote.
Rember, when someone disagrees with you, don’t assume they haven’t understood you. (Isn’t that what we don’t like about religious people?)
#56, if you’d take #53 in FULL context, would you still be saying the same thing? Could you explain in full context?
@132 Ian Goldthorp
Oh i’m not assuming the people disagreeing with me don’t understand that argument, i’m assuming they are deliberately ignoring it.
Saying “how are my morals informed by my non belief in gods? how does that work?” is on a par with a religious person saying “you can’t be good without god”. Both are equally absurd, shortsighted and influenced by the desire to preserve a narrative.
EVERYTHING you believe and DON´T believe informs your beliefs, which in turn inform how you derive your moral conclussions. This is a fact. Ignoring it and pretending otherwise just shows the dishonesty of the “dictionary atheist” bullshit which is designed to avoid responsibility when, and only when, convenient.
A lack of believe in gods can absolutely have important consequences to your other beliefs, it may for instance inform your belief that the universe is natural, which in turn informs your belief that scientific inquiry is the single demonstrated way to advance knowledge about said universe reliably, that we are therefore the product of billions of years of biological evolution and just another species among hundreds of thousands, that we only have ourselves, nobody else is going to solve our problems….you bet your arse that has consequences to how you derive your morality. To put it another way…if you still think it doesn´t, you are DOING MORALITY WRONG.
I don’t particularly care if my tone is belligerent. The persistent cries of “but atheism just means not believing in goooooods!!!1!!1” every time certain progressive values are promoted in atheistic communities, and ONLY when these are, are not just annoying, they are transparently a smoke screen used to distract and drown the conversation. It’s dishonest, it’s demonstrably false, because NO BELIEF EXISTS IN ISOLATION, and it’s really fucking tiresome. It’s also, very aggressive and hostile indeed, so no, i don’t care if i’m belligerent, when others are initiating the attacks.
And now i’m off for a weekend of amphibian nerdiness, cheerio!
“Saying “how are my morals informed by my non belief in gods? how does that work?” is on a par with a religious person saying “you can’t be good without god”. Both are equally absurd, shortsighted and influenced by the desire to preserve a narrative.”
not at all. and in your exampel you feailed to demonstrate how absense of a belief informs your beliefs. in your example, Science informs the beliefs. you assume your conclusion about science must be shared by everyone in regards to morality.
And evolution does not inform my morality either, notthat i know of.
but even if i would agree with you on that absence of belief informs your beliefs.
why should i take responsibility for the deed of a guy that has nothing to do with me? evidenctly most people that have an absence of god beliefs don0t go around murdering others.
when you think it is ok to make Muslims responcible for the deeds of IS and the Taliban, that i your thing, i find this extremely bigoted. and if such bigoted views are what atheism has become in the Internet, i will never call myself atheist anymore.
but why do you ignore all my other points?
” every time certain progressive values are promoted in atheistic communities,”
promoting progrssive values is fine, but it is not Atheism. you guys seem to be the ones that want to extend atheism to include political views and stuff. then it is you guys that need to get a new name. the name Atheism is already taken,
i get the impression you are searching for a replacement for religions, a community with shared values.
Atheims shares no values. it simply means absence of god beliefs. and i like it that way, i don’t want to replace religion. i don’t need it. when i want to share values, i join or found a group that shares the values i prefer but i don0t try to hijack a group and push my views into it.
conservative republicans can be an atheist ( which seems huge gymnastics to me, but there are such Atheists)
do we now have to call them no true atheist because they don0t share progressive values?
why don’t you join a group that has progressive values?
similarly if conservatives want to push their conservative “values” into atheism, i would ask them why they don0t join a group that shares their “values”.
Aanthanur DC, #136
Why is it “gymnastics” for a conservative Republican to be an atheist?
I thought atheist just means absence of a belief in theistic deities.
I can clear all this up for you, Aanthanur DC:
(First let me say I’m not taking PZ’s position on this particular Oregon killer)
There is atheist that is in the dictionary meaning not believing in deities.
Then there are atheists who exist in the real world, the majority of whom are atheist in the context of their societies (and their immediate families) being dominated by religion. Their atheism takes two forms: one is from the rational perspective of rejecting claims without evidence behind them; the other is from the moral perspective of rejecting religious practices which are harmful to people and societies. The latter clearly is the aspect of practical atheism that we’re talking about. We’re criticizing the atheists who are part of movements that oppose creationism, genital mutilation, forced marriage of young girls, religious bullying of LGBT, etc. We’re asking questions like why are they standing up for women when it’s about religion and not when it’s non-religious misogyny. Do they care about women only when the Taliban stone them or are they going to care about women when it comes to sexism in STEM, harassment on the street, elevators, etc.
Let’s take the United States for example. Do atheists in the U.S. not feel strongly about the problems that religion causes in society? Why? Don’t they feel that way in large part because they’re atheists? Of course. Is one of those problems sexism? Of course. So isn’t it the reasonable to expect those atheists to speak up against non-religious sexism too?
I said this in another thread, but here’s another way of looking at it. If you’re an atheist who used to believe in heaven and hell (which is going to be a sizable chunk of the atheists), your atheism has impacted your moral outlook significantly.
“Why is it “gymnastics” for a conservative Republican to be an atheist?
I thought atheist just means absence of a belief in theistic deities.”
because conservative republicans are a group where the christian god stuff is very central.
“So isn’t it the reasonable to expect those atheists to speak up against non-religious sexism too?”
i have no problem with atheists speaking out against things i perceive as unjustive, liek sexism bigotry etc etc.
but that is not what Atheism means to me, and being against sexism is not a requirement to be an atheist.
when you are talking abotu specific groups withing atheist, fine, but why demand it from all atheists?
if you are talking about Atheism+. ok, that is your thing, im not part of that. i am just atheist,
“If you’re an atheist who used to believe in heaven and hell (which is going to be a sizable chunk of the atheists), your atheism has impacted your moral outlook significantly.”
but i gain no insight into morals from my atheism. expect that i do not happen to belief that there is some god that gave anyone objective morals, i don’t even think morals can be objective. by definition.
a point where i for example disagree with Sam Harries and his view on objective morals. despite i mostly agree about what he sees as moral, i just dont see it as objective.
and atheism does not form my moral values, other things do. like Humanism, Feminism etc etc.
yet i don’t even feel respionsible for feminists that i see as extremists , like those that say stuff like kill all men etc. or that posting You suck on a video is harassement. and would also not feel responsible if a feminist would actually start killing others. because that is not how i understand feminism.
and i still don’t understand how this taking responsibility even looks like.
Dreaming,
I’m sorry, but you don’t seem to be paying much attention. I’ll make it simpler: I am not too blame for the absence of gods, just like I am not too blame for gravitation. I’m as morally responsible for gravitation as for the absence of gods: not one fucking bit.
Also, I don’t derive my values from the absence of gods. I derive them in the absence of gods. There’s a huge difference that I hope you can see. The lack of gods does not inform my values any more than gravitation does. I don’t derive my values from the non-existence of phlogiston either. That there’s no gods means that our values come from something other than gods. Not that they come from the absence of gods.
Is that clear enough for you now?
Dreaming,
I do that every time a creationist pretends that I should believe whatever they think I should believe. Now I’m doing it because you pretend that I should believe whatever you think I should believe. I do it every fucking time. I have no obligation to follow your values just because you don’t believe in gods. I agree with you that gods are fantasies (or maybe you just think that gods are “unconvincing”), but that won’t make me into a hysterical feminist just because you are one (if you are one). If you forego your reason to conform to hysteria derived from irrational opposition to something you perceive as due to religious indoctrination, then that’s your problem, not mine. As I said, I take each at a time, I think about it, and if I’m convinced I accept it. If not, then no. I don’t need hysterical fervour in my life. If you do, well, that’s your problem. Not mine.
No? It looks exactly like using the Bible as your Standard for Truth.
:)
“No? It looks exactly like using the Bible as your Standard for Truth.
:)”
hehe, but seriously, i don0t get what PZ wants. and reading his other posts since this one, it seems the shooting is not really a topic for him. he moved on and talks about other stuff.
so i don’t see him taking responsibility.
but maybe he learned meanwhile that he jumped the gun and that there is still no evidence the guy actually was an Atheist.
so maybe i have to wait until another atheist does a mass shooting, and i am sure that day will come. then maybe he can show how this taking responsiblity looks like.
sofar it seems, all you need is one post saying you don’t accept other atheist not taking responsibility.