The diversity of Diversity

Atheists are not popular. This comes as no surprise to us or anyone, really. As far as I can tell we are dead last in every U.S. poll in which we are included and explicit terrorists, Nazis, and the Westboro Baptist Church are not.

I suppose the cultural assumption that ‘you need God to be good’ should be explanation enough for our banishment from the realm of the acceptable (Would you want your sister to marry one? Would you want to be one? Nuh uh.)  But I keep running into a common plea that no, the problem is not really atheism. Atheism isn’t necessarily okay, of course … but after all it’s a free country and people have the right to believe what they want to believe. It takes all kinds. Just be nice and you’re okay.

No, the problem isn’t atheism itself – it’s atheists. But not all atheists. The tolerant believers discern critical distinctions in the group. There are Good Atheists who don’t manage to believe in God themselves but who still manage to show the courtesy to respect those who do. And then there are the ones like Richard Dawkins . The outspoken ones, the militant ones, the shrill ones who won’t shut up and try to blend in and instead write books and articles and letters meant for the general public. The stigma is focused like a laser on the atheists who act ‘just like fundamentalists’ by trying to convert people and thereby change their minds. The arrogant. The not-nice.

Gnus.

It’s an insidious trope which appeals to values like respect, acceptance, and inclusion: why would anyone be so  rude as to try to get other people to not believe in God? What about diversity? Diversity is good. We ought to let people be who they are.

Outspoken atheists then are disparaged even by those who claim to be “fine” with atheism because we are seen as breaking the social contract which values diversity and individuality. Atheists attack people’s deepest identity the way racists attack race or bullies attack those who are different than them. When you get right down to it — they’re bigots. Telling people their religion is wrong is being judgmental.

This is apparently a major charge made against us. I feel as if I see and read and encounter variations of it all around. I suspect most of us do. It’s a theme which seems to run more often through liberal communities than the conservative ones (which are usually just fine with the assumption that you can’t be good without God) but many of us live in such communities and engage regularly with those who seem so frustratingly on the edge of rationality.

So I’ve been attempting to figure out exactly what is happening and why,  working it out mostly here and there in parts and pieces. Since PZ gave me the keys while he’s away, though, I’ll take advantage and will to try to expand a bit, to see whether people in this forum think it makes sense. Because I think that, once again, theists are making a category error when it comes to religion. And they’re getting a lot of non-theists to go along with them because they are appealing to values which are essentially not religious, but humanist.

Bottom line, there is a sort of equivocation going on with the concept of “diversity”  – and it’s helping to fuel the general antipathy towards atheists.

Consider it this way: it might be said that there are two basic frameworks in which we value ‘diversity’ as a modern virtue. One of them is what I call the Diversity Smorgasbord. The other is what we can call the Diverse Problem-Solving Group. [Read more…]

Live, from the Palace of Parliament!

I’m at the humanist conference on “Education, Science and Human Rights” in Bucharest, sponsored by Asociatia Umanista Romana, the International Humanist and Ethical Union, and the European Humanist Federation…and you’re not. I’m not going to be live-blogging it, I’m afraid — I’m so tired right now I’m going to be using my currently limited cognitive faculties to simply pay attention. But I thought in these moments before the knowledge starts flowing I could at least let you know I’m sitting on lovely leather-bound seats beneath a gigantic chandelier in huge auditorium surrounded by marble pillars. I think my expectations for conference accommodations have now taken a giant leap upwards in opulence.

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I’m also looking at the schedule — this is the first I’ve seen it — and feeling a great relief that I think my talk will fit right in with all these other people’s. Well, unless that talk on religious education in Romania is in favor of it…then I might be in trouble.

The 2013 Dawkins Award goes to … Steven Pinker

Who well deserves it, I think. It’s “presented every year to honor an outstanding atheist whose contributions raise public awareness of the nontheist life stance.” Very laudatory and gratifying press release here.

I just finished reading his Better Angels of Our Nature: Why violence has declined. I thought it a well-reasoned and researched testament to the power of humanism and a excellent resource for rebutting the folks who think the world is worse than it has ever been and people never more wicked. One would think that evidence to the contrary would be welcome … but it’s not. My neo-pagan spiritual friends would have none of it. I hold out even less hope for the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Last year’s recipient was also excellent: Eugenie Scott. Perhaps not quite a ‘mirror’ representative of  “the uncompromising nontheist life stance of Dr. Richard Dawkins” — but quite solid on the raising of the public awareness of science. Pinker, then, is a twofer.

 

He’s also an excellent speaker. I plan on attending the Atheist Alliance of America’s national convention to see him receive the Dawkins. It’s taking place on  Aug 30 – Sept 2 … in Boston. The Alliance’s conventions are imo one of the best. Everyone should go. And now there’s Pinker to tempt you.

(from Sastra)

Pope Reaches Out to the Damned

Hello, all. Sastra here doing a guest post for PZ, who is toiling hard, very hard, in Romania. Or sleeping. Either; both. Please bear with me then as I try to figure out how to work this thing. Trial and error…

My title echoes an old one from the Onion. The Cracker People are at it again.

Are traditional religions all moving closer to humanism? Is Catholicism? Perhaps.

Two days ago the new pope appeared to come very close to saying that “it doesn’t matter what you believe – as long as you’re a good person.” While giving a short sermon ( a “homily”) during Wednesday’s mass, Pope Francis suddenly began to address the status of the non-Catholic – yea, even the atheist – regarding salvation … and he pronounced it good.

“The Lord has redeemed all of us, all of us, with the Blood of Christ: all of us, not just Catholics. Everyone! ‘Father, the atheists?’ Even the atheists. Everyone!”.. We must meet one another doing good. ‘But I don’t believe, Father, I am an atheist!’ But do good: we will meet one another there.”

Really? Just “do good?” Does that include intellectual integrity? Say, something along the lines of approaching the existence of God as a hypothesis whilst taking all our scientific evidence regarding cosmology, evolution, and neurology into account? Does that include objectively applying Occam’s razor to God? We atheists are very good at that. It’s a fine form of  virtue. One of our finest.

It’s odd, though, if he really does mean that. I suspect not — given that he is the Catholic Pope.

The relationship between Catholicism and humanism is a strange one. While the roots of humanism — with its emphasis on reason and science and its focus on human rights and virtues – go back to classical Greece, the gradual infusion of ancient philosophy into a Church concerned with both scholarship and apologetic lead to contending views regarding the role of nature in theology. “Catholic humanism” may sound like a contradiction, but it seems there is a thin thread of Renaissance liberalism feeding into what is a far more varied religion than its proponents usually say it is. This thread sometimes weaves itself into a culture which is increasingly humanist in sentiment.

Most of my relatives are Catholic. They mostly know I am an atheist, too.  But “Don’t worry,” I’m reassured. God is large. God knows my heart. Christ died that all might be saved and surely the virtue in the life that I live will speak for me at the end. And so they calmly rationalize and dismiss what is undoubtedly a very contentious issue within their church. How much of religion is specifically religious? One would think doctrine matters. It can’t all be some sort of literary effort and performance art.

Like most Catholic pronouncements, however,  the interpretation of the homily is a bit open. A Father Martin clarified the pope’s position thus:

“Pope Francis is saying, more clearly than ever before, that Christ offered himself as a sacrifice for everyone. That’s always been a Christian belief. You can find St. Paul saying in the First Letter to Timothy that Jesus gave himself as a “ransom for all.” But rarely do you hear it said by Catholics so forcefully, and with such evident joy. And in this era of religious controversies, it’s a timely reminder that God cannot be confined to our narrow categories.”

Uh huh. This clears up nothing. Of course we all know that Christ died “for everybody.” Say it with as much joy as you want and you still won’t match the current general hysteria on this point, an excitement shared by fundamentalist Protestants.

Clarify the terms, padre. The question is whether those who are said to “reject” this bizarre human sacrifice and thus end up damned include everyone who is not Catholic or everyone who is not Christian or everyone who doesn’t believe in God … or just the “bad” people (who are…?) When Francis says that “we will meet one another there” is the “there” supposed to be heaven – or the Holy Mother Church, where the newly converted atheist has been led by his or her good works to finally adopt the religion of the One True God?

My guess is that some will take it one way, others will take it another way .. and each side will think the other side lacks Understanding. Because the pope was “more clear than ever before.”

Perhaps that is not a high bar.

The day after the pope’s apparent inclusion of the nonbelieving damned into salvation, the Vatican went into damage control.

On Thursday, the Vatican issued an “explanatory note on the meaning to ‘salvation.'”

The Rev. Thomas Rosica, a Vatican spokesman, said that people who are aware of the Catholic church “cannot be saved” if they “refuse to enter her or remain in her.”

At the same time, Rosica writes, “every man or woman, whatever their situation, can be saved. Even non-Christians can respond to this saving action of the Spirit. No person is excluded from salvation simply because of so-called original sin.”

Rosica also said that Francis had “no intention of provoking a theological debate on the nature of salvation,” during his homily on Wednesday.

I’ll bet he didn’t. But no fear: the Vatican easily spins it as business as usual. You must still enter into the Church. So no big deal.

Except that this is not how the pronouncement is being spun in the media, is it? From what I can tell one and all seem to be treating it much more along the lines of “it doesn’t matter what you believe … as long as you’re a good person.” Even Dave Silverman is displaying a cautious approval. Well then.

So let us hope this impression is augmented by various Protestants furiously protesting the wickedness of the Papists and their false god.

 

Works vs. faith. The world moves on.  Eventually  “works” like saying the rosary and taking communion are going to give way to being charitable and refraining from serial killings. Humanism triumphs and Catholicism turns into a quaint ceremonial term used mostly by history buffs and its rituals are adopted by the goths. Amen.

 

Thugs in cheap suits are not paragons of human rights

So Ron Lindsay just said this on twitter:

Free inquiry. Free expression. Not only are these indispensable in our quest for the truth but they’re necessary conditions 4 human dignity

A lovely sentiment, and completely misleading. This long-running argument has never been about “free speech” — no one’s free speech has been denied, as any glance at the raging and constant torrent of abuse will show. It’s been about the responsible recognition of what kind of speech supports that “human dignity” he wants to cloak himself in; it’s about realizing that free speech as we see it in that unfettered medium called the internet is going to produce mostly noise with only a little signal; it’s about the responsibility of organizations to pluck out and amplify the good and damp down the stupid.

It really is about taking sides.

Not taking sides — pretending to have a false objectivity that values all speech equally — is actually favoring the noise. It’s the pretense that a statement on twitter like “It is honorable, noble and good to change your mind if you are wrong” from Lauren Becker has equal weight with “Get out, Amanda, you not welcome here. Take your dogma elsewhere (you too, Ophelia)” from a troll who doesn’t deserve to be named. It’s the refusal to recognize that some of the people who support the same causes as CFI have been barraged with incessant hatred for about two years now — and that that hatred has been aimed at women and the people who support women’s rights. It’s a willingness to let your organization be affiliated with websites dedicated to misogyny.

A Voice for Men is essentially a mouthpiece for its editor, Paul Elam, who proposes to “expose misandry [hatred of men] on all levels in our culture.” Elam tosses down the gauntlet in his mission statement: “AVfM regards feminists, manginas [a derisive term for weak men], white knights [a similar derisive term, for males who identify as feminists] and other agents of misandry as a social malignancy. We do not consider them well intentioned or honest agents for their purported goals and extend to them no more courtesy or consideration than we would clansmen [sic], skinheads, neo Nazis or other purveyors of hate.” Register-Her.com, an affiliated website that vilifies women by name who have made supposedly false rape allegations (among other crimes against masculinity), is one of Elam’s signature “anti-hate” efforts. “Why are these women not in prison?” the site asks.

Oh, right. That’s just free speech. Where is the human dignity, though?

It’s also about being smart enough to see through the dishonesty of thugs who puff themselves up and call harassment a right, who claim tawdry garden-variety sexual bullying “free speech”. Amanda Marcotte has the clarity of thought to see right through this game.

If it seems baffling to you that people are “into” harassment, I don’t know what to tell you. Why else would people harass? (Don’t say autism, for the love of god. People on the spectrum struggle to interpret social signals. Harassers, on the other hand, are masters at manipulating social rules and actual physical space to creep people out as much as they can get away with. It requires careful study of social signaling, not the opposite.) I got harassed on the sidewalk the other day, because that’s just part of the atmosphere of being female. I didn’t catch exactly what the guy said, because he muttered it, but what he wanted out of the situation couldn’t have been clearer. He had that sly smile, that glint in his eye that harassers get when they manage to capture their target’s attention and make them uncomfortable. It’s the feeling of power they have over you, the little jolt they get from putting a bitch in her place. Why people harass is not a mystery. It makes them feel good to exert power. This motivation is all over the Twitter rampage from the pro-harassment forces. They love drowning out useful tweets about real information with their anti-feminist garbage and ranting. It makes them feel good, like they have power. They can harass you and get under your skin and make you write blog posts about them, and then they feel powerful. It’s all of one cloth, and it’s not about unexamined privilege. It’s about being an asshole. We’re asking them to give up this jolt of feeling powerful they get from making other people sad or angry. No wonder they resent us.

When they photoshop our faces onto porn, when they call us “manginas” and “cunts”, when they flood CFI conference streams with denigrating insults to the speakers, they are not making “free inquiry”, they are not using “free speech” in a “quest for truth” or to advance “human dignity”. It’s embarrassing to see the leader of a major freethought organization making excuses for the toxic, petty viciousness from the anti-feminists that has been plaguing this movement since a woman dared to politely ask for her share of that human dignity.

This is why I’ve lost all confidence in Ron Lindsay. He can talk about human dignity, but he doesn’t have the vision to actually lead CFI towards greater support for that principle.

We need a leadership that is willing to take sides. Otherwise, what’s the point of it all?

See also Secular Woman’s post on privilege.

I was not even tempted

Aron Ra brings up a minor incident from the past, in reference to the iERA’s recent denunciation of the Woolwich murder.

However I must remind anyone reading this that the iERA is headed by one Hamza Tzortzis who PZ and I met when he crashed the World Atheist Convention in Dublin Ireland. Hamza tried to convince PZ to get into an iERA car where they intended to take him to an undisclosed location for a private discussion. Sensing the insanity of that invitation, I altered the challenge to invite Hamza onto the Magic Sandwich Show instead.

While on our show, DPR Jones asked Hamza what would be the appropriate and reasonable response to apostates, and Hamza Tsortzis, head of the iERA said non-believers should be decapitated. He said it was the only humane thing to do, as he belives sawing someone’s head off to be a merciful and painless way to correct opposing opinions.

Aron did not have to try very hard. When a group of indignant Muslims who have just spent 20 minutes telling me that every word of their holy book is literally true ask me to take a ride with them, I am not at all tempted. The same would be true if they were a gang of clean-shaven Christian fanatics.

Can you imagine anything more boring and infuriating than being trapped in the company of loquacious Abrahamic zealots? Even without considering the neck-chopping thing, it would be an awful experience.

Factor in the predilection for decapitating their perceived enemies by some of them, and others’ refusal to so much as condemn violent murder, and is it any wonder that most people give them a wide berth?

What have you done that atheists can’t?

Ah, Glenn Beck: bizarre as always. He’s now claiming that Wolf Blitzer Was Set Up, that “forces of spiritual darkness” maneuvered him into asking an atheist on air about whether she wanted to thank the Lord, just so she could denounce God publicly. Now everything is a conspiracy theory to these guys.

But what I also found interesting in his long ramble is his challenge to Christians to prove themselves worthy by getting out there and doing something that atheists can’t. This sounds like the inverse of Christopher Hitchens’ challenge: “Name me an ethical statement made or an action performed by a believer that could not have been made or performed by a non-believer.” There is an assumption that somehow, Beck’s Christian followers have some mysterious capability that atheists don’t, although he never specifies what it is. I’d love to hear it, though.

Perhaps…standing by and doing nothing in the face of tragedy other than praying, and somehow feeling self-righteous about it? They do seem to have an almost magical lock on sanctimony.

Help This Desert Kit Fox Study Get Moving

This Indiegogo science campaign is wonderful.

Desert kit fox camera trap image from the Genesis Solar site

Desert kit fox camera trap image from the Genesis Solar site

Desert kit foxes are in trouble. They’re shy, they’re faced with competition even when things are good from other carnivores such as coyotes, and they’re increasingly being displaced by human industry. One recent distressing example of that last: builders of the Genesis Solar Project were trying to evict a population of desert kit foxes from the construction site in the Mojave-Sonoran transition zone. The foxes suddenly started dying of distemper, which disease hadn’t been known in desert kit foxes before.

Enviro groups petitioned this year to protect the desert kit fox, Vulpes macrotis arsipus, as Threatened under the California Endangered Species Act. Sadly, that petition went nowhere.

Here’s a quote from that piece of mine in the last link from Ileene Anderson, a desert biologist working with the Center for Biological Diversity, that pretty much sums up the kit fox’s situation:

At present, more than 114,000 acres of desert kit fox habitat are approved for largescale industrial solar and wind development and close to 1 million acres of desert kit fox habitat are currently under environmental review or application for large-scale industrial solar and wind development as of January 2013. Key threats from large-scale industrial energy development to the desert kit fox include habitat loss, degradation, fragmentation, and loss of connectivity, as well as direct and indirect impacts resulting from reduced ability for movement, increased competition and depredation, increased in non-native cover, mortality from roads, and displacement of foxes from den sites. In addition, a recent outbreak of canine distemper centered at a large-scale solar project site in the southern California desert highlights growing anthropogenic disease risks for the desert kit fox associated with habitat loss and development. Unfortunately, industrial-scale energy development projects approved to date have not properly considered the impacts and risks to the desert kit fox and the need to avoid, minimize and mitigate those impacts and risks to protect the species’ long-term survival.

One of the problems is that there just hasn’t been a lot of baseline science done on desert kit foxes. We know a few things. They’re nocturnal. They like to eat kangaroo rats. The will grudgingly eat other prey, including jackrabbits that can weigh more than they do, but without kangaroo rats they suffer population declines. They don’t like people much, though they seem not to be bothered by low-flying aircraft. We know a few other things about their behavior and sociality, but not so much about their choices of habitat. What distinguishes a stretch of alluvial fan covered in cresosote bush that the kit foxes like enough to move into, from a seemingly identical one across the valley that they don’t bother with?

It would be good to know that kind of thing as we develop the desert. That way, we can know where the really prime kit fox habitat is, and have a better idea of how our projects are likely to affect its viability.

Duke University grad student Dipika Kadaba wants to do the fieldwork to start developing that base of knowledge about desert kit fox habitat. I’ll let her explain:

For the tl;dw folks: Kadaba and her colleagues are trying to raise funds via her Indiegogo campaign to support four biologists in the field for a summer not far from here. They’ll use small drones to survey about 200 square miles of desert for kit fox dens. They’ll then conduct ecological surveys of plots both with and without kit fox dens to see what the differences are between kit fox habitat and not-fox habitat.

They’re looking for $8,000 to conduct this study, an eminently reasonable amount. It’s a really cool project and I encourage you to check it out and consider donating. For those of you who partake of the Great Blue Evil, Dipika has set up a Facebook page for her Desert Kit Fox Project where you can keep track of what they’re doing. Update: The project also has a blog for you Facebook objectors.

There are just so many aspects of this project I like, including finally having a reason to be glad drones exist. Check it out.