A reminder!

Whoa. There’s way too much effort being put into parsing who said what. Stop. Step back. Go back to the original list of suggestions — it’s a good list. Read it and think about it and ask yourself whether any of your behavior on the threads violates any of them — and if it does, don’t take offense, don’t try to make excuses, set it behind you and tell yourself to do better next time.

This isn’t about judging or rebuking anyone — it’s about growing to do better and be better. OK? You don’t have to obey every word, but do try to take McEwan’s list seriously.

  1. Atheist men wondering what they can do to change this dynamic: Start with not engaging in misogyny yourselves. Ex: http://bit.ly/16xrGQ8

  2. A safe space for women doesn’t mean you get to be nasty in explicitly misogynist ways to women who aren’t “on your team.”

  3. Also: Institute a zero-tolerance policy for misogyny in your comments. No slurs, no misogynist narratives, no questioning women’s agency.

  4. Simply not having to encounter not being called a cunt in your comments sections isn’t good enough. My humanity isn’t a debatable issue.

  5. Read this on why debating “women’s issues” as an abstract exercise is some rank bullshit: http://bit.ly/16xsCUC

  6. And read this on how to effectively and safely communicate with women about women’s issues: http://bit.ly/Ygajwt

  7. Don’t play devil’s advocate. Let me reiterate that. DON’T PLAY DEVIL’S ADVOCATE. That is not compatible with a safe space for many women.

  8. Don’t appropriate or ignore women’s lived experiences. Let women be the experts on our own lives.

  9. Don’t treat women like a monolith. Or any subset of women. Not all atheist women think the same way about any issue.

  10. Don’t only listen to the women whose opinions support your perspective. If there is disagreement among atheist women, pay attention.

  11. Recognize that there are privileged women in the atheist movement who may collude to marginalize non-privileged women (and men).

  12. Extend opportunities to women in your space — as contributors, as moderators, as guest posters. Support female atheists with links.

  13. CHALLENGE OTHER ATHEIST MEN ON THEIR MISOGYNY. Silence is not good enough. It isn’t neutral: It signals tacit support.

  14. When you allow female atheists do the lion’s share of challenging misogyny, you’re reinforcing the narrative women are a “special interest.”

  15. Don’t accuse women of overreacting when we are merely reacting. Don’t accuse us of being oversensitive; maybe you are not sensitive enough.

  16. Don’t imagine that being a man makes you “objective” on sexism. It merely gives you a different perspective, not greater objectivity.

  17. Listen. Listen listen listen listen listen. Listen.

  18. And if you’re not willing to make the effort to make movement atheism more inclusive, don’t pretend that you are. Be a real ally, or don’t.

The Creationist State of the Nation

See? I told you that in addition to being a creationist, Ken Ham is also one of those far right culture warriors.

During the conference, I spoke on the state of the nation and said that we are observing Romans chapter 1 playing out in the USA right now. I have heard many people say that if America keeps murdering children in their mother’s wombs (over 50 million babies since the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision in 1973) and eliminating God from the culture (as by and large has been done in public schools and in the culture as a whole with the removal of crosses, nativity scenes and Ten Commandment displays from public places), then God will judge this nation. Well, I suggest that America is already under judgment, and a sign of this judgment is the increasing homosexual behavior (and the “gay” marriage issue) in the nation, reflecting that God is turning the culture over (as Romans 1:24 and Romans 1:26 describe).

I also declared at last week’s conference that the state of the nation actually reflects the state of the church. Frankly, I believe it is largely the church’s fault that the culture, from a Christian perspective, is collapsing and is coming under judgment. For example, there is so much rampant compromise in the church with its increasing acceptance of millions of years and evolution. This has led to generations of children in our church doubting and subsequently disbelieving the Bible. Today, two-thirds of them are walking away from the church by the time they reach college age. It only takes one generation to lose a culture, and we are seeing this happen before our very eyes.

The church is not influencing the culture in America as it once did. That is mostly due to the fact that the culture has invaded much of the church. Much of the church’s “salt” has become contaminated. And we know what God’s Word says about such contamination: it destroys.

But it’s not just happening in America! Our Western nations—once dominated by Christian thinking—are embracing sinful acts, such as abortion and homosexual behavior, and is now calling these evils “good.”

If you want to know where America will be in the not-too-distant future, look at the United Kingdom and the rest of Europe. The churches there are largely spiritually dead (though I rejoice in the small pockets of Christian life there). All across Europe, countless church buildings have been turned into stores, nightclubs, temples, etc. Sadly, America is on the same path.

Happily, America is on the same path. But right now he and Pastor Phelps and every tinpot preacher with a load of hate to deliver sound a lot alike, don’t they?

You can understand why they cling to something as gallingly stupid as young earth creationism: they see it as all of a piece, that the eternal salvation of their children and grandchildren is dependent on not just accepting the liberal Christian view that belief in the divinity of an ancient Jewish carpenter is necessary to appease an omnipotent and rather wrathful cosmic father. Think about it: that’s a rather petty and trivial thing to hang such an essential gift upon, so there must be more. And the more that they’ve accepted is the costly sacrifice of giving up science, hating gay people, forcing their women into domestic servitude, and demanding non-stop official public piety.

Of course, I can’t help but notice that most of the people forced to make the sacrifices are not the family patriarchs.

But this is also why it is not enough to just educate people about evolution. For most people, science is just this hard, boring thing that they take for granted that someone else will do; they aren’t going to be at all impressed with accusations that they’ve abandoned science or even common human decency. They are serving an almighty LORD. They believe they have the biggest, baddest, strongest, most demanding boss of them all.

The teaching of evolution in the schools is just one tiny symptom of the real problem, and that’s why I argue that to defeat this one aspect that annoys me personally and directly, we need to confront and diminish the nasty head of the beast: religion. Tear it down, and then we’ll be able to pursue real knowledge unfettered.

And as a wonderful glorious additional bonus, we also get greater equality and a reduction of prejudice. I have no illusions that eliminating religion will lead to paradise, though — more like, eliminating religion will knock down one more major barrier to progress.

Apparently, I need to clarify myself

Melissa McEwan has written two more posts on misogyny in atheism. They’re both good and highly recommended, but I have to clarify something.

McEwan takes exception to something I wrote.

And then there were the atheist men, in most cases ostensibly sympathetic to my position, who piped up to let me know that I wasn’t talking about them, that they were one of the Good Ones. Even Myers linked to my list with the curious line: “Melissa McEwan has some Advice to Atheist Men. The long list sounds very good, but I do have one reservation: none of it is exclusive to atheists or men. I think it’s more Advice for Decent Human Beings.”

I’m not sure why my “long list” (of 18 suggestions) would engender reservations simply because it is not “exclusive to atheists or men,” unless one is keen to deflect accountability for being part of the group being urged to decency.

And one commenter interpreted that to a remarkably vicious degree.

Where the HELL does Meyers get off asking for advice and then saying “oh, well that doesn’t apply to me.” Uh yeah. It does.

So let me clarify. I was not saying I disagreed with the list in any way. I was not saying that McEwan was not talking about us ‘good atheists’. I was not trying to deflect accountability away from atheists. Most importantly, I was not saying it doesn’t apply to me — a bizarre charge, since I most certainly aspire to belong to the category of decent human beings, and I would hope that being decent human beings would be one of the goals of all atheists.

It was a reservation that wasn’t really a reservation — it was an appreciation of the universality of the suggestions, and a comment that the title of McEwan’s post was not adequate to describe the usefulness of the content.

I would definitely hope that more atheists would pay attention to her work.

Fair’s fair

I was mean to the History Channel yesterday — I mocked them for portraying Satan as a dark-skinned man with a resemblance to Obama. But you know, that wasn’t fair. It’s not as if that show about the Bible is full of coded racist references to appeal to the yahoos of America.

Why, look here: they also include European white dudes! Racial diversity for the win!

20130319-093023.jpg

That’s Jesus, by the way. After the Sermon on the Mount, I think he took a break to go surfing off Malibu.

I support the #tooFEW project

Hey, we all know what atheists, gamers, tech people, and scientists have in common: underrepresentation of minority viewpoints and the presence of indignant white male gatekeepers. Now we get to add another category: wikipedia editors. In that great common resource that gets used all over the place as a quick entry to basic concepts, only 15% of the editors are women. The Feminists Engage Wikipedia project sounds like an excellent way to correct that, by educating more women in how to edit wikipedia and increase the range of contributions.

Note that this is a positive effort. No one is proposing to go in and destroy the patriarchal power structure of wikipedia or anything like that — they are simply trying to get more individuals from wider backgrounds to add topics of interest. All good, right? Exactly in the collaborative spirit of wikipedia?

You’d think so, but they’re already getting pushback. A few people are resentful and think that the initiative will lead to lots of inconsequential topics to clutter up wikipedia — how dare someone think a black feminist writer might be worthy, when we’ve got to document every episode of My Mother the Car? The guys are getting busy strategizing.

sinfest_strategizing

Those of you who are interested might follow Moya Bailey on her blog and on twitter…and participate!

(Thanks to Dana for making me aware of this!)

We should feel a sense of shame

For years I’ve been an enthusiastic cheerleader for the atheist movement, and I still am. I think it’s important for humanity to move beyond this childish and destructive crutch of superstition.

But at the same time I find myself constantly dismayed at the difficulty of moving atheism beyond the same old cliques, of making it a human movement rather than a well-off white guys’ movement. And why we can’t find room for good atheists like Melissa McEwan, who left her patriarchal church.

More than a decade later, I found movement atheism online. I was never one to evangelize my lack of god-belief, nor broadcast hatred of religion or its adherents, so that part of the movement was not a draw. But I did fancy the possibility of community around something that has been an axis of marginalization for me in some parts of my life.

I found the same inequality, manifesting in different ways.

There were precious few visible atheist leaders: The most prominent male atheists were very enamored with one another, and not particularly inclined to offer the same support to women, via recommended links and highlighted quotes and inclusion in digital salons about Important Ideas. They wondered aloud where all the female atheists are, and women would pipe up—"Here! Here we are! We’re right here!"—only to then go back to the status quo, with explicit or implicit messaging that women just weren’t working as hard as they are, just aren’t as smart as they are, or else they’d be leaders, too.

There was the exclusion from conferences, the sexist posts, the sexual harassment, the appropriation of religious and irreligious women’s lived experiences to Score Points and the obdurate not listening to those women when they protested.

In fact, female atheists’ protests were greeted much the same way with which my protests had been met in my patriarchal church. Silencing. Demeaning. Threats.

Read the whole thing. But I have to say that the closing paragraph is a real punch in the gut.

I would say I felt exactly as welcome in movement atheism as I did at my Missouri Synod Lutheran Church, but that would be a lie. No one at St. Peter’s ever called me a stupid cunt because I disagreed with them.

We will fail if we can’t change this.

What can I do better?

I’m sure you’ve all been wondering what Answers in Genesis thinks of feminism

Haven’t you? Or perhaps you’ve all assumed the answer is obvious.

Sadly, I don’t have any surprises to spring — the answer is actually rather predictable. They’re agin’ it. They do concede that suffrage was OK, and they think it’s acceptable for women to vote — how liberal of them, and it only took them a century to come around — but all that 2nd and 3rd wave feminism destroyed the family!

So what’s the problem here?

Does history hold a bias against women? Members of the radical feminist movement seem to think so. Radical feminism has had incredibly destructive effects on marriage and the family—and its influence has also been felt on the church. Evangelical feminism teaches an egalitarian view of marriage and roles in the church, to the point where passages that clearly teach male headship are reinterpreted, explained away, or ignored altogether. As a result, many men are abdicating or being forced out of their God-given roles as heads of their households and as leaders in the church. The negative effects of this kind of postmodern thinking have led to serious attacks on the authority of God’s Word.

They don’t really address the issues they bring up…anti-feminism is more or less a fait accompli. As you can see hinted above, they deny any real oppression of women — ladies, your role as a helpmeet is valuable and just perfect for you! The real problem is that feminism erodes male authority. And if you weaken male authority, you weaken the authority of scripture, which says that males are the authority and therefore you weaken male authority, which weakens scripture…hey! Extinction vortex! Goodbye, fundamentalists!

I wish.

Now why would feminists want to diminish godly authority? Easy. They hate men.

Most evangelical feminists would profess to believe in the authority and inerrancy of Scripture, setting them apart from many other forms of feminism. However, their method of interpreting and applying Scripture leaves something to be desired. What is at the heart of a reluctance or even outright refusal to refer to God as “he” and “father”? What drives the redefinition and dismissal of passages of Scripture that promote male headship in marriage and leadership in the church? Grudem concludes, “At the foundation of egalitarianism is a dislike and a rejection of anything uniquely masculine.”

When it comes right down to it, creationist and atheist MRAs are all kind of similarly stupefied and bovine when it comes to recognizing the legitimacy of women’s right to autonomy. Why aren’t they helping me stand at the head of the church, the godly men are wondering, and why aren’t they making me a sammich, the godless ones marvel. Women are so good at performing those subservient tasks, why don’t they appreciate the opportunities to do more and more and more?

Nature made them that way. Or god did. Follow your natural/divine purpose, as revealed to me.

Strident Catholics hurt my brain

I can call them ‘strident,’ can’t I? They apply it to atheists all the time, and this is clearly a case where the adjective is perfectly appropriate. It’s an opinion piece by a militant (I can use that, too!) Catholic who traces the fall of America to a court decision in 1972.

This year, the Supreme Court will render judgment on the institution of marriage. Though most of us don’t realize it, the Court first did so forty-one years ago in Eisenstadt v. Baird, a decision that gravely wounded marriage and set the nation on a course of gradual debilitation by ruling that states could not restrict the sale of contraceptives to unmarried people.

Oooh, marriage was ‘gravely wounded’ by that decision. It was a fairly straightforward issue in civil liberties: could the law decide that contraception could only be sold to married couples? The court decided no, it could not: even unmarried people have a right to regulate their reproduction by means other than abstinence.

Chaos then swept across the country as suddenly men and women were able to fornicate without spawning children! Yes, chaos! His word, not mine.

Having set chaos in motion in Eisenstadt, the Supreme Court quickly built the garbage bin for dumping sexual debris in Roe v. Wade, which gave a green light to the killing of 55 million unborn children, the overwhelming majority of whom were conceived by those unmarried singles with new access to contraceptives.

Having lived through that period (I started high school in 1972, so I was in prime temporal position to witness precisely all the horrible consequences), I’ve got to tell you: some kids were screwing before 1972, most were not. After 1972, some kids were screwing, most were not. There were single mothers, plenty of them, before 1972, and plenty afterwards — conveniently, during this period I worked part time as an assistant custodian in a school for single mothers*, so again I was in exactly the right place to witness the aftermath of sexual chaos.

It didn’t happen.

Also, I’ve got to wonder if the author thought his thesis through. New access to contraception led to a surge in unwanted pregnancies? Only if they weren’t doing it right. Maybe we should have coupled contraception access to better sex education.

Or just maybe the chaos was all in the author’s head.

teen-birth-rate

A lot of things are obviously only playing out in this guy’s head. This is the extreme Catholic position: it’s not just that child-raising must be carried out within a marriage, but sex is supposed to be channeled towards only supporting procreation. Which is scary, speaking as an old (but not dead) guy who has put all his baby-making days behind him.

Thus, in a well-ordered society sex and marriage go together exclusively, because the union of male and female sexual expression must be undertaken in a union that binds them in advance of the coordinated labors needed to raise the children they may bring into the world. To achieve this, a functioning society demands that each citizen channels his sexual capacities in ways appropriate to these two tasks (procreation and child-raising). That is, it demands marriage.

How about if sex has other roles? What if it’s a general social binder that brings people together in close affection? Wouldn’t that be a good thing, too?

And what if marriage isn’t such a great matrix for raising children when the two adults involved have lost that affection? Surely no one can believe that marriage is sufficient to create a healthy family environment, and knowing more than a few stable, happy couples who are not bound by formal marriage, it’s not even necessary.

So how can Catholics justify sacrificing the richness and complexity of human relationships on the altar of their narrow definition of how people must cohabit?

*Predictably, the community felt the need to isolate unwed mothers from other women their age; they might contaminate them. Also predictably, colloquial references to that school called it the ‘school for bad girls’. Further predictability: I did not tell anyone that I was scrubbing floors and cleaning bathrooms there after school and during the summer because every idiot would have lurid fantasies about what I was doing, when actually I spent little time interacting with the women there (I was working outside of school hours), and what little I did see were women in isolated and difficult circumstances.