CNN aired an hour long documentary about “inside the world of non-believers” tonight. I had mixed feelings about it.
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The opening bit was about an atheist student whose parents announced that he was dead as far as they were concerned. It really exposed the inhumanity of fanatical Christianity. In general it portrayed atheists in a positive light.
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Everything was framed in terms of religion and church. We got shown lots of atheists who are basically reconstructing church without Jesus — Jerry DeWitt and Greg Epstein, for instance, who may be very good guys, but stained glass windows and sermons and sitting in rows of pews on Sunday morning really isn’t atheism.
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Atheism looks awfully white and male. There was a woman in the segment on the Harvard Humanists, and that was about it.
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The commercials! Gah! CNN is next having a documentary on “Finding Jesus” — they aired one spot which was all about how scientists are using science to find fragments of the True Cross. BULLSHIT.
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It ended rather querulously, wagging a finger at the in-your-face tactics of David Silverman, and once again, turning to church-like atheism as an alternative.
I think it was a net positive for atheism — it did consistently portray atheists as normal, decent people. It did not, however, reveal what was “inside the world of non-believers”. CNN was unable to see atheism as anything but a version of religion, and clearly sought out frames that would fit that perspective.
Apparently atheism is also something that only white men do. At the end they mentioned that atheism was part of religious diversity in America…but it would have been nice to have shown some of the diversity within atheism.
There are religions that are atheistic, but atheism itself is not a religion. Similarly theism isn’t a religion, but there are theistic religions (such as christianity).
Hated it. Don’t know how much was the fault of the program, though, and how much was the fault of the actual reality the program was showing.
Very glad my children didn’t have to leave religion. Very glad the story on CNN was not my story… ok, was glad for me, not for the CNN story.
The body language of the CNN reporters (along with the paralanguage–the choice of words, the inflection, the facial expression) was just horrendous. Couldn’t they have assigned an atheist reporter?
I guess it is good that we are some sort of foreign, alien entity to them, incomprehensible enigmas. It means they spend most of their time sputtering incredulous about how a human can possibly function without ever going to church or at occasionally flipping through a Bible or fellating a crucifix. While they wrestle with that mystery, they also gloss over the MRAtheist Brigade and the other clusters of Neo-Randian assholes. If they are barely able to present Atheism 101, I certainly wouldn’t them delving into the Atheist Misogyny Rift of Deepitude.
So many omitted words. Time for bed.
Movement Atheism has done everything possible to eliminate diversity, and has mostly succeeded. At this point it is clearly a feature, not a bug. Since atheism is an ego boost and a cash-grab for people like Silverman and Dawkins, diversity only dilutes their “fix”.
Just finished it (recorded–I had to see iZombie!)–
Yeaaaaahhhhhh, no. Did not like it. Nothing about the documentary spoke to my life, to my family’s life, and we are atheists in our community, nothing special, nothing rare, just … us. And we were nothing at all like what was presented.
Yes, the CNN thing was overwhelmingly White Male Atheist blah blah blah… and that is enough to damn them for, right there. But even within White Male Atheist blah blah blah, this program presented the tiniest sliver of the atheist experience.
I truly and honestly hope that most of you had a better opinion of the program than I did. I would love to be the curmudgeon in the minority. But damn, CNN just painted a portrait that looks nothing at all like me (well, it was overwhelmingly white, so there’s that at least), and that might well be the new face of atheism for a while.
Seriously?
One of the things I was interested in doing, when I first started studying anthropology, was a video ethnographical mini-series of atheism in the United States. I still kinda wanna do it, but I had to scrap original plans after many of the people I originally wanted to include turned out to be raving misogynistic assholes (also, as I’ve matured, I’ve realized that I had basically no diversity in it… it was mostly straight white cis dudes I had listed as interviewees… and I wanted to interview Richard Dawkins… in an ethnography about atheism in the US… #notthinkingitthrough). But that’s okay because it means I now know better and can be all diverse and feature a whole ton of women and people of color and LGBTQA people and stuff… and watch the privileged fucks screaming about how it’s so “biased” towards feminism even though my focus would be atheism, and they’d be screaming that because I would intentionally interview more women, people of color, and LGBTQA people than straight, white, cis men.
Assuming I ever do this.
What’s stopping me now is procrastination and also this feeling of “I don’t give a shit about atheism anymore because fuck ‘big tents’.” I mean, I wanted to include David Silverman and American Atheists… now I’d rather pretend they don’t exist.
Hardly CNN’s fault, is it? Though yeah, some progress is being made somewhere. Here, for example.
I generally approve of wagging a finger at Silverman, though it sounds like they did it for the wrong reasons.
I am about as likely to watch CNN as I am to watch Sunday prayer shows.
The only way I could see some positive benefit to the show was to put myself in the shoes of the average moderate Christian. They’d watch the parade of ex-ministers and people who were building churchy institutions within atheism, and they’d say, “They seem nice.” They’d see that awful sanctimonious Christian couple at the beginning, and say “They seem icky.”
But otherwise, that wasn’t my atheism on the screen up there, either, and it did a poor job of showing the variety of ways people can live without religion.
Bah! Humbug!
@3 anteprepro:
Atheism seems such a mystery to the religious because they insist that (as a system of belief about supernatural claims) it must be in the same category as religious beliefs. Were this actually valid reasoning my favorite sport to play would be “watching ESPN”, my favorite radio (or TV) channel “silence”, I propose the new law of “vetoed”, and the most common profession in all of history is “dead”.
Which is all to say: just because there may be a superficial description of the two that makes them sound similar, does not mean that similarity must actually exist.
Needed more strippers, whisky, lasers and explosions.
Alexander: True. It’s just part of them thinking of atheism as Just Another Religion, because it doesn’t make sense to them to imagine Non-Religion. I guess.
Stacyturner: Wait for the summer blockbuster version.
Hearing descriptions of shows like this, I get the feeling that TV producers are, on the one hand, trying to be cutting-edge and informative, and, OTOH, so scared of offending the “mainstream” (as they understand it) that they feel they have to pull their punches every step of the way and water down their dangerous-cutting-edge work to the point where it’s comfortingly meaningless. And then they expect us to be grateful to them for even admitting that atheists exist — that’s about as bold and brave as they were willing to get. After placating the insecure Christians by gumming their work up with pro-Christian commercials, of course.
TV producers love Davis Silverman because he can be guaranteed to say something that makes us all look like assholes. Then really nice guys like Jerry Dewitt (Chris Stedman will do in a pinch) are brought on to make us look harmless.
As it hasn’t been mentioned, I assume there were no scenes of atheist baby eating.
And isn’t that the upside, if any? Some religious person who watched might stop to think the next time they hear someone…say a Phil Robertson…vilify atheists. Of course, the image of atheists and atheism that’s presented isn’t real because nothing on TV is real, not even reality.
No doubt serious fundamentalists weren’t watching CNN at all…way too liberal (meaning middle of the road) for them. Fox maybe, but more likely Pat Robertson and the ilk. Correct viewing is required for a stainless Christian life, ya’ hear. (Once had a youth director…and brother of the pastor…tell us that we were sinning if we listened to pop radio when we could listen to Christian programs. The Beatles won.)
referencing an earlier post: Did CNN even mention Ron Reagan’s Freedom From Religion Foundation?
or would that conflict with their implication that Atheism is a Religion(minus)Gawd?
Completely disregarding that Atheism, really, is a rejection of both Gawd AND Religion.
FFRF is worth recognizing as a part of Atheism.
The synchronicity of: this, after Ron’s brouhaha, seems suspicious. ^-^
confession! personally: I became ATHEIST by flatly rejecting Religion (period), Gawd was just the metaphorical ‘baby in the bathwater’ that got flushed away. I then spent a few years trying to figure out what Gawd really was, without all that Religion nonsense. Took me a while to realize ‘Reality Just Is, Gawd Not Necessary’.
Sorry to speak as if I was The Voice Of Atheism.
Personally, Atheism is: Recognizing reality exists, and Magic (religion, mysticism, wishes, etc) does not. YMMV.
Did CNN even mention Ron Reagan’s Freedom From Religion Foundation?
More broadly, did they make any attempt to mention what atheists actually say about religion, religious thinking, and why atheists think religion is bad? Did they air any substantive atheist criticism of religious thinking or practice?
I didn’t watch the CNN documentary, but I’m going to guess that it hammered home the point that atheists who have a live-and-let-live attitude towards religion are the right kind of atheists. They “respect” faith; they won’t debate or argue or even try to persuade the religious to change their mind — and they’re disgusted by the militant atheists who do.
The message being that atheists can be tolerable if they keep their views to themselves and try not to spread them. This is considered progress … and maybe it is. It seems to be the theme which keeps popping up in most mainstream media treatments of atheism. Did anyone notice it in this documentary?
The documentary didn’t mention Ron Reagan’s ad, but it was one of many that ran during the show.
#21, Sastra: Nope, it didn’t hammer it home. That was the insidious thing: it just presented a slice of atheism as if it were the whole. It only showed the atheists (other than Silverman) who are happy to accommodate churchiness.
The worst part of religion (in my view) is the organized. The bulls#!t the churches spin on it. So, to have organized atheism completely defeats the purpose of atheism.
Sastra #21
We’ll be getting our own version of DADT any day now.
Okay, I watched the video and it was a bit better than I thought it might be. But yes, it did emphasize the “kinder, gentler” face of atheism, preferably an atheism co-opting and appreciating religious trappings. At one point the narrator mentioned someone having “converted to atheism.” It was that sort of vibe.
Could have been worse. Wait for the “Duck Dynasty” version.
PZ, I agree with your points. Regarding whether the pogram was a net positive or negative for atheism: Hey, at least it was on CNN. For all the criticisms that channel gets (& deserves), it is widely considered a mainstream news source & has a lot of viewers. It didn’t portray atheists in the way I would prefer, or make many of the points I wish it had made, but it introduced some atheists to many people who probably don’t personally know any (or any who are “out”), & they didn’t say or do anything that made me cringe. It was pretty obvous, however, that the reporter had a pro-religion bias.
Or rather, obvious.
@Sastra- yeah these MSM pieces always focus on the only two variations of atheist that seemingly exist: 1.) white male assholes (Dawkins/Harris/Maher) or 2.) nice, easy-going ruffle-no-feathers atheists who keep their views to themselves and are eager to point out the many good things that religion has to offer. It’s become a sort of Respectability Politics. The only good atheists are the quiet ones. Everyone else is Dawkins. Never much focus on the variety of atheists (women, PoC, LGBTQ, etc.), never any mention on the reason WHY people are atheists or what their actual views are, never a mention of how many of us DON’T agree with Dawkins/Harris etc. or WHY.
@Nate 7- I hope you do go through with your project, I’d love to see it. Seems that you could get a pretty great representation of more diverse atheism just from FtB writers. Greta, Mano, Taslima, Tauriq, (former ftber) Ian Cromwell, as well as outsiders like NdGT, Hemant Mehta etc.
The kinder, gentler atheism is or should be…Atheism +.
Social justice, equality, freedom, the reality and data driven life and so on. The truth matters and it should.
Just my opinion of course. I was a social justice xian before becoming a social justice…atheist. My old denomination didn’t want to set up a theocratic dictatorship. Their causes were and are eliminating poverty and world peace.
A CNN documentary on Atheism + would be a lot more interesting and a real eye opener to a lot of people. Or someone else could make one and put it on Youtube if nothing else.
I’ve attended a number of meetings of Greg Epstein’s Harvard group, and it is roughly half female: lots of young couples attending. His staff is also roughly half female.
Uncle Ebeneezer at #29:
One thing I’d have to consider is whether or not to include the Deep Rifts(TM), and then regardless of whether I do or not, how I control for my pro-#FTBullies bias, if I even should… :D :p
The DeWitt/Epstein model always makes me cringe. I always thought that one of the benefits of being an atheist is that you didn’t have to get up early on weekends to participate in rituals.
Nate @32:
I like your idea quite a bit.
Also, I think you should include the Deep Rifts.
Yeah, there are times that I have used that as my sole definition of atheism: We don’t go to church. We don’t do anything else in particular, and we don’t do whatever it is as a replacement for going to church – it’s more that religious folks do something that we aren’t even aware of.
Except we are aware of it, and are aware of the injustices caused by religion. But doing a church-like activity? Do we get to do the injustices as well?
My high school history teacher was decisive in changing me from a militarist from a military family to a committed socialist and atheist, although the changes didn’t come until after a few years of college. He was disarmingly kind, gentle and knowledgeable, much like the “dead” kid from the fundamentalist family. The CNN documentary gave a similar portrayal of atheists and by contrast, a rather unflattering picture of Christians. In the long run, the character of atheists will be decisive for the social transformation we need..
https://youtu.be/uiNY3anKBa4
Typical Omega Man in link.
Also, call me old-fashioned, but I like my blowjobs to be consensual Maybe if this Vox guy tried dance lessons, or learned to play guitar or toned up a.bit…there’s lots of things women find attractive, such as adult conversation “I’MA KILL A BUNCH OF PEOPLE” isnt usually it, unless they are really comfortable with each other, and even then a safe word is a good idea. Dr Ruth taught us that.