The nice antitheist strategy

Alex Gabriel has an important essay, “My atheism will not be politically correct“, which discusses antitheism, and discusses the discussion surrounding antitheism. It’s common for many atheists to say that they are no longer antitheists, saying they now realize religion is not the most important problem in the world, and religion sometimes even helps people in times of tragedy. Furthermore, a lot of atheists are jerks and they find more allies among religious people.

Alex’s critique is that all these points, while they may have some merit, are unrelated to the issue of antitheism.  The only question is, would the world be a better place without religion in it?

At the surface, this might just seem to be a disagreement over how we define “antitheism”. But it’s more than that, it’s about how we choose that definition in the first place, and for what purpose. Many atheists choose to define “antitheism” as an extremist position, one that they contrast with their own position. This rhetorical strategy renders oneself more palatable to religious people, basically by throwing other atheists under the bus. Alex prefers a different strategy, where he doesn’t hold his tongue just to make religious people comfortable.

I also unhesitatingly identify as an antitheist, although for not quite the same reasons. I strive for a particular image: a radical queer atheist who is nonetheless very nice. In other words, I aim to break stereotypes. I do not think that this is something everyone needs to do; rather, I myself am well-positioned to do it, so why shouldn’t I do it? And an important part of breaking atheist stereotypes is making it clear that I am in fact an atheist, and why yes I even oppose the “nice” religions and do not think they are very nice at all.

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What is meaning?

PZ Myers has an interesting post discussing the motivations of people who join ISIS, and which attributes similar motivations to the alt-right. In short, it’s about people “who feel a lack of significance in their lives”, people “who felt culturally homeless”. People start “from vague dissatisfaction, and desire for social status and sexual success” and become radicalized.

For the most part, I feel powerless to do anything about the radicalization of men. The world is big and incomprehensible–and also I live in California. So the reader may forgive me if I turn this more introspective.

What even is this desire for “significance”? I feel that we in the atheist community have been discussing it for years, usually in the context of discussing the appeal of religion, and calling for the atheist community to fill the void that religion has left. If PZ is correct, some of those atheists went on to fulfill that need by joining the alt-right. But for all that discussion of “meaning”, I don’t think I understand it. I don’t know if this is something I feel myself.
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30 atheist discussion topics

I’ve long been involved in the local atheist student group. I really mean “long”–through both undergrad and grad school. I perpetually complain about the group, but never leave, and never lift a finger to help. This is probably important to understanding Who I Am As A Person.

Well, the leadership said they were looking for more discussion topics. I can help with that. I e-mailed them thirty topics that I came up with off the top of my head. If you run an atheist group anywhere, you are free to borrow any of these.

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Better identity labels

Last month, I said I didn’t care for most atheist models of identity. For example, I hate the “weak”/”strong” atheist distinction. I am not too fond of the gnostic/agnostic atheist/theist scheme. Dawkins’ 1 to 7 scale is okay though.

My views on identity label schemes is largely informed by my participation in asexual discussions. Asexual communities are renowned for making up new words and models. For example, one person might identify as heteroromantic demisexual gray-ace, and another as gray panromantic agender asexual. While these lists are often subject to mockery by Redditors, I find that they are far more intelligible and informative than, say, all the names we have for colors. Also note, for every successful asexual word, there have been many unsuccessful ones.  Everything goes through trial by fire.

The atheist community tends to be a lot less introspective about labels, which results in the persistence of bad identity label schemes. Here I’ll discuss some general qualities that you want identity schemes to have.
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Please don’t pick up the phone

I haven’t entirely been following this, but David Smalley wrote an article saying that petty disagreements were killing the atheist movement. PZ Myers disagreed, and it got hashed out in the Dogma Debate podcast. I have a lot of trouble listening to podcasts, so I mostly heard about it through Trav.

One of Smalley’s points is that we should resolve conflicts more amicably by “picking up the phone”.

Let’s pick up the phone and have conversations when we disagree. If you don’t have their phone number, send them a private message asking to get on Skype to talk it out.

PZ Myers argues that many of our conflicts are too substantial to be resolved over the phone.

My own reaction: calling my phone to talk about an internet disagreement would be hella aggressive. Sending me a private e-mail is also aggressive. I am astounded that people who want more civility sincerely advocate such nasty tactics.
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My take on burden of proof

While I’m criticizing Austin Cline, I also want to say something about his article on burden of proof in the context of the atheism vs theism debate.  Again, I have nothing against Cline, and in fact he brings up several points that I agree with:

A more accurate label would be a “burden of support” — the key is that a person must support what they are saying. This can involve empirical evidence, logical arguments, and even positive proof.

The “burden of proof” is not something static which one party must always carry; rather, it is something which legitimately shifts during the course of a debate as arguments and counter-arguments are made.

The part I disagree with Cline’s assertion that the (initial) burden of proof “always lies with the person who is making a claim, not the person who is hearing the claim and who may not initially believe it.”

This leaves open the question of who has the initial burden of proof when both people are making claims.  For example, what if the theist claims there is a god, and I claim there is no god?  According to Cline, atheism refers to people who make no claims about gods, and thus atheists don’t have the initial burden of proof.  However, I am part of the subset of atheists who positively claims there are no gods, so where does that leave me?

In my analysis, burden of proof is the answer to three different questions:

  1. Who wins if no further arguments are made?
  2. Who should win if no further arguments are made?
  3. Whose turn is it to advance the argument?

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Atheist definitions, according to atheism 101

In an earlier post, I discussed the need for better “atheism 101” resources.  One of my complaints about current resources is anything regarding definitions of atheism.  Part of this has to do with me being an opinionated contrarian, but you can judge that for yourself.

Here I will discuss, “What is Atheism? Overview of How Atheism is Defined in Dictionaries, By Atheists” by Austin Cline on about.atheism.com.  I don’t have anything against Cline, on the contrary he seems a decent writer, which is perfect to start this discussion.

Long-time readers may know that I already object to the title of Cline’s article.  Definitions are overrated.  Words have meanings, which cannot always be encapsulated by definitions.  As I recently observed, identity terms especially communicate a lot through subtext and connotation.  One alternative to definition theory is prototype theory (from linguistics and philosophy).  Under prototype theory, we have an idea of what an atheist looks like (i.e. a prototype), and we classify someone as an atheist if they look sufficiently close to the prototype.

But let’s just note the inadequacy of definitions and move on to the content of Cline’s article…

What Is Atheism? Why Atheists Define Atheism Broadly?:

[…] broadly defined, atheism is the absence of belief in the existence of any gods. Most disagreement over this comes from Christians who insist that atheism must be the denial of gods, or at least of their god.

Introductory atheist resources often hammer endlessly about the distinction between “absence of belief in the existence of any gods” and “denial of gods”.  And it makes sense–there are certainly people out there who lack any belief in gods, and yet they do not deny the existence of gods.  For instance, newborn babies have no coherent beliefs whatsoever.  But babies are besides the point. [Read more…]