Since I just mentioned I’ll be in Portland at the end of March, I should also let you know I’ll be in Kamloops, BC in early May. More time in the great Pacific Northwest! I should see about doing something this summer in Seattle, too, so I can pop in and visit the family.
I’m sure they’ll fix my name by May.
A little advance warning for the Oregonians: I’ll be at the Northwest Freethought Regional Conference in Portland on 25-27 March. I hope it rains the whole weekend, I really need to get some normal, healthy, earth-like weather for a change.
I’ve been privy to some of the behind-the-scenes arguments among atheists about this episode of the Bill O’Reilly show, in which they discuss (if anything is ever discussed with O’Reilly) an aggressive billboard sponsored by American Atheists.
Most of the complaining I’ve heard has been about David Silverman’s performance, and I think that’s misplaced. Silverman was good: he’s confident and a bit flippant, which is exactly what you need when dealing with a pompous blowhard like O’Reilly. Silverman isn’t the problem, it’s the sign, and he was stuck defending an awful message.
That is one ugly-ass sign. Rebecca Watson has this one covered: she’s precisely right that it is a badly designed, ugly sign. If your intent is to be newsworthy and assertive and get yourself noticed, you don’t want to undercut yourself when you do make the national opinion shows by having to show off a sign that looks like it belongs on your refrigerator with your children’s other drawings.
Seriously, if you’re going to sink money into a billboard, hire a professional graphic designer. Get something that looks good first. For a good example, look at the Coalition of Reason. Their signs don’t hurt your eyes when you look at them, and the focus of any public argument is the message. It also helps to develop visual branding. I can recognize a CoR sign from a long way off. The message I take home from the visual inconsistency of American Atheists is that they’re an anarchic mob of amateurs with copies of Paintshop Pro.
The other problem with that sign is the message. I’m fine, as you all know, with an aggressive message, and I think it also makes sense for American Atheists as a kind of content branding — they’ll be the brash wing of the atheist movement. But that message does not work.
Bill O’Reilly would have been floundering if the message had been “Religion is a scam”. That’s something atheists are comfortable with wrestling over, and it’s something most of us godless folk do agree on. They could have spent their time arguing about the validity of religion’s truth claims. The problem is sticking that “You KNOW” in front of the phrase, because that suddenly moves the message into the realm of the indefensible. And look again at the O’Reilly interview — it got derailed right into a long, pointless harangue about the “You KNOW” part of the sign. That was a wasted opportunity right there.
You could try to argue that the billboard is only aimed at atheists who agree with the sentiment, but then it’s admitting that this is an in-house game you’re playing and isn’t part of an outreach campaign. The one thing you cannot do is try to argue that most of the church-going public agrees with you. They don’t. Most people who go to church, I’m sure, are sincere in their beliefs and really, really believe in Jesus and Heaven and Hell. They’re wrong and they don’t think very deeply about those beliefs, but it’s honestly what they believe. Trying to tell them what they really believe when it’s not is incredibly annoying.
We atheists get that all the time. How often have you heard the claim that we actually do believe in God deep down, but we just hate him? How persuasive do you find that approach? The only thing persuasive about it is that it convinces me that the person making that claim is a blithering idiot with no comprehension of atheism at all. Likewise with religious people: going up to them and suggesting that they don’t really believe in God is only going to convince them that you’re wrong.
I do have one criticism for Rebecca Watson and also Colbert, who made the original comparison: don’t criticize David Silverman for looking like Satan. It’s really obnoxious because we don’t have much of a choice in what we look like; it’s like carping at me because I look like an old bearded white guy, or at Rebecca because she looks like a snarky hipster girl. Sure, I could shave, and Rebecca could start dressing like S.E. Cupp or Ann Coulter, but is that really the straitjacket we need or want to wear? And seriously, turning into a young black woman isn’t an option for me, nor can David Silverman turn into a blond Aryan football player.
Also, another subtle point is that the reason Silverman looks like Satan is that the standard renditions of Satan are based on stereotypes of Semitic facial features. I’m sure everyone has noticed that Jesus is typically painted as a white European, but perhaps you’ve missed the fact that Satan is usually drawn as an Eastern European Jew caricature…so criticizing someone for “looking like Satan” ends up being a suspicion of anyone who looks to be of Middle Eastern descent.
The bottom line for American Atheists: Keep David Silverman, I think he does a good job. Crack down a little bit on branch chapters of AA and enforce some standards of presentation. Hire a professional ad agency with some skills in graphic design to come up with a visual brand for the organization. Keep up the assertive style, but make sure that what you put on your signs and literature is stuff you actually want to argue.
I just got a request to advertise a conference, and here’s the flyer they sent to me.
O Bitter Cruelty! It’s like they’re taunting me with their weather! And notice…I’m not one of the invited speakers. I get to just stay here in the frozen Northland and watch the icicles grow on my mustache while I fight off the savage penguins and starving polar bears.
Just for that, I’m not going to mention the Southern California Humanist Conference in San Diego on 5 February. I hope they all sweat and get sunburns and that their bikinis and speedos are all just a little bit too tight.
Jerry Coyne has just heard that Chris Mooney has an article in Playboy — I knew about this a while back, and have a copy of the text. I didn’t mention it before because it isn’t online, and it’s dreadfully dreary stuff. The entire article is a case of false equivalence: he cites scientists like Einstein and Darwin writing about a sense of awe and wonder at the natural world, and then tries to slide a fast one by…the idea that this means science and religion really are compatible. Well, science and spirituality. Well, spirituality is all about the believers. It’s a slimy game relying on the fact that apologists love to dodge criticisms of religion, the body of concrete, specific, institutionalized beliefs about the supernatural, by retreating to the tactical vagueness of “faith” or “spirituality”, whatever the hell they are. Apparently, in Mooney’s head, spirituality is just like religion is just like a scientist appreciating nature. It reduces these words to diffuse meaninglessness.
Would you believe he cites Darwin as a spiritual leader of the sort he likes?
You may argue that Charles Darwin was another spiritual leader of modern science. While he ultimately concluded he would have to remain an agnostic with respect to God, Darwin expressed great wonder at the diversity and interconnectedness of nature.
That’s it. All you have to do is love biology and science, and Chris Mooney has you drafted into the clergy. I guess that makes me a leading ally of the faitheist/accommodationist church of sacred worship, then.
But this is what Darwin actually thought of religion, as he described in his autobiography.
But I found it more and more difficult, with free scope given to my imagination, to invent evidence which would suffice to convince me. Thus disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at last complete. The rate was so slow that I felt no distress, and have never since doubted even for a single second that my conclusion was correct. I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother and almost all my best friends, will be everlastingly punished.
And this is a damnable doctrine.
Although I did not think much about the existence of a personal God until a considerably later period of my life, I will here give the vague conclusions to which I have been driven. The old argument of design in nature, as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me so conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered. We can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door by man. There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows. Everything in nature is the result of fixed laws.
Darwin is not the man to recruit in a crusade to reconcile American Christians to evolution.
Along the way, Mooney praises E.O. Wilson and his book, The Creation, as examples of making a spiritual appeal to find common cause with believers. I’ve read that book; it’s nicely done from the perspective of a liberal environmentalist, but I found it a doomed effort. Wilson is not a believer, he doesn’t hide the fact, but he tries to frame — no wonder Mooney likes it — the issues in a way a religious person could appreciate, and it clunked dreadfully, false notes every step of the way.
In his book The Creation, celebrated Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson makes a spiritual appeal to religious believers for help in preserving the diversity of species on Earth. Similarly, other scientists have reached out to religious audiences to find allies in the fight against climate change and for environmental protections.
It’s true. It was a resepected scientist reaching out to religious audiences. Did it work? It doesn’t seem to have had the slightest effect. If you want to see how religious audiences respond to pleas to preserve the environment, try reading Resisting the Green Dragon. The Green Dragon, obviously, is anyone who tries to argue that the environment is anything but a resource to be plundered. This is how religion — not faith, not spirituality, not awe — responds to science.
Mooney wrote almost two pages of fuzzy drivel, ignoring the actual threat of religious zealotry, and concludes this way:
There is, after all, a common interest between scientists and believers: Secular or otherwise, we cannot have spiritual experiences without an Earth to have them on. “Whether you believe all life reflects the operation of evolution or God’s good grace, our responsibility to future generations is to ensure that the creation is preserved in all its magnificence,” says Doherty. “That will happen only if those who live by science and/or by faith can work together in an atmosphere of mutual tolerance and respect.”
Sorry. You can’t expect us to simply respect foolish ideas. We tolerate them, but people like Mooney go further and demand that we respect nonsense, and that’s not going to happen, and shouldn’t happen.
And trying to coopt an honest scientific appreciation of the wonders of the universe as support for religion is a dishonest attempt to prop up bogus superstitions with an appeal to emotions — any emotions. If a scientist isn’t a passionless robot, Mooney wants to be able to pretend they’re on the side of religious dogma. That rankles. Love of science is not equatable to clinging to ignorance, although Chris Mooney is straining to make it so.
A few people have noted in the comments that Conservapædia’s hot new front page topic is “Atheism and Obesity” — we’re all supposed to be humongous wobbling lardasses, as if that is some kind of rational argument against an intellectual position (“you’re fat!” kind of shot its bolt in grade school, and really doesn’t weigh heavily in a debate beyond that). The poster boy for stupid atheist fatsos, unfortunately, is me.
Poor, poor pitiful me. I’m crying tears of self-pity right now.
Rebecca Watson has a reply to that nonsense, and she noticed that I’ve lost a few pounds lately (so…Rebecca was checking me out, hmmmm?), so comes to the only logical conservapædian conclusion: I must be converting to Christianity. I’m so surprised!
I think that’s a great rallying cry for atheism: We have cookies & booze & lesbians! I’m afraid it won’t entice me back into the fold, however: cookies aren’t on my diet at all, I’m limiting myself to at most one beer a night, and why would lesbians, sweet as they are, have any special appeal to me? I’m only into heterosexual women (actually, woman) for obvious reasons.
So sorry. I guess I’m going to have to continue my backsliding. If ever I show up at a talk skinny and raillike, you’ll know I’ve become a fundamentalist. And if I gain any more weight, why, I must have become a lesbian.
A few people have noted in the comments that Conservapædia’s hot new front page topic is “Atheism and Obesity” — we’re all supposed to be humongous wobbling lardasses, as if that is some kind of rational argument against an intellectual position (“you’re fat!” kind of shot its bolt in grade school, and really doesn’t weigh heavily in a debate beyond that). The poster boy for stupid atheist fatsos, unfortunately, is me.
Poor, poor pitiful me. I’m crying tears of self-pity right now.
Rebecca Watson has a reply to that nonsense, and she noticed that I’ve lost a few pounds lately (so…Rebecca was checking me out, hmmmm?), so comes to the only logical conservapædian conclusion: I must be converting to Christianity. I’m so surprised!
I think that’s a great rallying cry for atheism: We have cookies & booze & lesbians! I’m afraid it won’t entice me back into the fold, however: cookies aren’t on my diet at all, I’m limiting myself to at most one beer a night, and why would lesbians, sweet as they are, have any special appeal to me? I’m only into heterosexual women (actually, woman) for obvious reasons.
So sorry. I guess I’m going to have to continue my backsliding. If ever I show up at a talk skinny and raillike, you’ll know I’ve become a fundamentalist. And if I gain any more weight, why, I must have become a lesbian.
Have you noticed how religion is always telling you how simple the answers are, yet at the same time claims that the universe is too complex for science to explain?
Jen McCreight is running an online poll to determine the most influential female atheist of the year.
Uh-oh. You’d think she’d learn.
But given that the results will be utterly meaningless, it’s still useful — there’s quite a long list of good XX godless folk, and commenters keep mentioning more that were left out. Go there to see the depth and diversity of atheism, even if you don’t vote.
S.E. Cupp is a peculiar creature: she insists that she is an atheist, but I’ve never actually seen her defend or promote or even accept the idea of atheism. Instead, all she ever does is carp at atheists for being arrogant or smug or militant or whatever the current term of opprobrium might be. I don’t really understand her game, but then, I also don’t really care — she never says anything interesting, either.
But reading her latest column, I suddenly realized what she is: she’s the Good Atheist the believers want us all to be like. Good Atheists don’t criticize religion; they praise it and make excuses for it and pine away, wishin’ they had the faith themselves. Good Atheists do criticize atheism and atheists. They work hard to tell the Bad Atheists to shut up and stop making it hard for believers to be comfortable with their superstitions. Good Atheists love C.S. Lewis, and read theologians in their spare time, and marvel at their wonderful insights. Good Atheists follow right-wing politics diligently, and think theocracy might not be so bad, after all; at least the trains would all run on time, and the criminals and foreigners wouldn’t get so much slack, and church-goers are such good and upstanding members of society anyway — we should be encouraging them.
S.E. Cupp has found a profitable niche. She’s the Token Atheist, the Good Atheist, the Beloved Atheist who affirms religion. It’s sweet and creepy at the same time. I don’t know whether to say, “Poor girl — no principles and no mind, a sell-out to status quo” or “Lucky girl — the Christian majority loves her, and she’s going to be raking in the accolades”.
Personally, I’d rather be the Bad Atheist. At least I’ve got my self-respect.
Oh, and by the way, Cupp’s article has a poll attached to it. She’s pandering to the believers, all right.
Do you believe God exists?
Yes. 63%
No. 28%
I am undecided. 9%
Pretend the question is something a little more interesting and relevant, like, “Do you believe S.E. Cupp is sincere?” and have fun with it.
