It’s not the accent you hate. It’s the people.

Vocal fry is in the news again! Bethany Brookshire explains:

Bringing to mind celebrity voices like Kim Kardashian or Zooey Deschanel, vocal fry is a result of pushing the end of words and sentences into the lowest vocal register. When forcing the voice low, the vocal folds in the throat vibrate irregularly, allowing air to slip through. The result is a low, sizzling rattle underneath the tone. Recent studies have documented growing popularity of vocal fry among young women in the United States. But popular sizzle in women’s speech might be frying their job prospects, a new study reports. The findings suggest that people with this vocal affectation might want to hold the fry on the job market — and that people on the hiring side of the table might want to examine their biases.

I’m at a liberal arts college that is attended by at least 60% women, and I hear it all the time — and it doesn’t bother me in the slightest. People have different voices, there are patterns that mark men and women, young and old, regions and races, and it’s no big deal — I actually find that the vocal fry becomes more common as people become less formal and more friendly, so it’s more a signature of a kind of knowing familiarity.

I thought that if it were off-putting in a job interview, as that study finds, it might be because that’s a situation with an expectation of greater formality, or as Language Log suggests, it’s because the recordings used in the study were a bit forced, and people trying to use an unnatural (to them) style of speaking can easily come across as insincere. But surely we don’t judge people by small variations in their speech, do we?

I forgot. People suck.

In an article on vocal fry on NPR, the commenters persuade me that there probably actually is considerable discrimination going on.

Ms. Eveleth admitted that she “sometimes” catches herself in her own high rising terminal (“upspeak”). How could she miss it, considering the number of people it must cause to void the contents of their stomachs?

More alarming than Eveleth’s contemptible defense of creaky speak was prominent on-air talent Rachel Martin’s claim that she’d never even heard of “vocal fry”. This is the state of broadcast journalism.

Upspeak bothers you? So much that you want to vomit? I suggest that the problem isn’t so much with the speaker as it is with people who want to so thoroughly police others’ speech patterns to the degree that they feel physically ill when they hear variants. I’m wondering how this commenter reacts to a Southern accent, which I find lovely, or to a Black American accent (which I also heard all the time when I worked at Temple University), or, horrors, the pitch accent of so many people in the upper Midwest.

Vocal fry is so subtle that most people don’t recognize it as a discrete entity, but apparently it is an indictment of all of journalism that a reporter should fail to deplore it with the vigor this commenter demands.

This one is even worse.

Also funny that Rose Eveleth doesn’t think vocal fry would interfere with job performance. I’d suggest that she consider how impossible it is to work with someone who habitually scratches out the final words of every statement. Vocal fryers don’t hear each other doing it, I guess. A community of unconscious croakers.

It’s not just women, either. You hear it in interviews with young male media hipsters. Guy Raz of the Ted Radio Hour has a curious sing-song vocal fry.

Awareness is the first step toward a cure. America needs mass speech therapy in the worst way. Up speak, vocal fry, and Valley Girl princess speech all constitute a national cultural emergency.

Edit: On second listening, Ms. Eveleth is not that bad a fryer, mostly lapsing into it in the egg story. And fortunately, Rachel Martin is completely fry-free, and a full vocalizer.

It’s a national cultural emergency! Speech therapy must be administered immediately to eradicate all variation from General American!

Jebus. I’ve been all over the country, and one of the things I like is that people have their own unique ways of speaking — ways that are distinctive and regional and act as indicators of identity. I’ve been to the United Kingdom and heard the range of voices there — I don’t know what that is they speak in Scotland, but it deserves a more appropriate label than “English” — and that makes the addition of a faint growl to the end of sentences trivial.

This isn’t about language at all. These vocal variations don’t affect communication in the slightest. This is all about language as a marker for class, race, and sex, and providing the excuse of subtle differences in speech as a way to publicly air prejudices. That guy who detests “Up speak, vocal fry, and Valley Girl princess speech” isn’t actually perturbed by how they speak — he has singled out a set of patterns associated with young women.

I also notice an omission. If we’re going to have mass speech therapy for the entire country, why is it to correct everyone to the General American standard? Flat and nasal isn’t pretty. If we’re going to do this and enforce uniformity, I’m going to insist that we use Shelby Foote as a model and get everyone to talk like that, with voices like soft music. Or maybe the casual, confident, laid-back style of Snoop Dogg. I also wouldn’t mind Sarah Silverman as a voice coach.

Anything but the boringly level voice of standard radio announcers everywhere.

Bringing back Salt Lake memories

In anticipation of the American Atheist conference next week, many ex-Mormons marched and sent in resignation letters to the LDS leadership. The timing was key.

David Silverman, president of the American Atheists, said the Mormon church has too much influence on people’s lives, especially Utahns’. Officially leaving the church during General Conference sends a message, he said.

"They’re doing it during the General Conference to make a statement, and that statement is that they feel oppressed here in Salt Lake City, where the Mormon church governs so much of not just the Mormons’ lives but everybody else’s lives," Silverman said. "It’s not fair. It’s a violation of the separation of church and state, but it’s also a violation of religious freedom."

They did it during the General Conference? Risky. It might have gotten completely ignored.

When we lived in Salt Lake City, I remember the General Conferences as the times when a news blackout fell over the state. The local newspapers would all run big front page stories on the most tedious pablum: “SENILE OLD MAN SPEAKS FOR TWO HOURS ON HOW WE SHOULD BE NICE”. The LDS leadership was (is) all these older conservative fellows in the same dark suits who took themselves very seriously, and all the news organizations were expected to report in detail everything that was said…not that they ever said anything of any interest or importance whatsoever. It was the time of the year that felt closest to living in North Korea — although, of course, the LDS church never subscribed to purging undesirables with flamethrowers. No violence, just state-enforced veneration of the blandest boringest bureaucrats of the church.

Most of the time, you could ignore the Mormon leadership, especially if you were living in SLC, which was about half Gentile. Not during the General Conference. Even then, though, what was most striking wasn’t the actual leadership, which was facelessly tedious, but that there were so many devout Mormons who would reverently worship every word dripping from the White Geezers at the top. It was weird; it was the time of year when the pod people would start speaking synchronously.

Which atheists get exemption from criticism?

Some people are really unhappy that some of us disagree strongly with David Silverman’s CPAC strategy. JT Eberhard has invented a series of rationales for why people had the temerity to question the president of American Atheists (and he didn’t call me up to ask if any of them were valid!).

1. People took this to mean that David Silverman was anti-choice.

Interesting. Could you name some? I didn’t see anyone accuse Silverman of being personally anti-choice, although admittedly I could well have missed some. For myself, I simply took it for granted that Silverman himself was pro-choice, and that he was simply trying to acknowledge some arguments that are floating around out there…bad arguments. It would have mitigated a lot of the criticisms if he’d come right out and said that, but he didn’t.

2. People were upset that he was trying to make inroads with conservatives.

Take that sentence apart, JT. “Make inroads”…how? When I heard that American Atheists was going to be represented at CPAC, I was baffled — I didn’t understand the purpose. I assumed that he was going to be a bit confrontational, as he’s so good at doing — that it would be analogous to his appearances on Bill O’Reilly’s show, where he’d be forthright in presenting the atheist position. I’m all for that kind of honest confrontation.

I was even more confused by the statements he made to the press, though. Instead of confrontation, I saw an attempt to empathize with far right radicals. That was troubling. Silverman’s specialty is not subtlety, and there he was trying to balance between provocation and conciliation. He failed.

3. While not saying or believing that anti-choice arguments are sound, what he still did was a “tip of the hat” to the anti-choice crowd.

That’s more like it, and I think that’s a more accurate representation of what Silverman’s critics are thinking. As I already pointed out, a fairly solid majority of the atheist membership have a strong opinion on abortion, and actually, those “secular arguments against abortion” are abysmally bad.

It is simply not enough for an argument to be atheist or secular — it also has to be sound. We don’t simply accept bad arguments if they have the consequence of reinforcing atheist perceptions, we’re supposed to be better than that.

4. People think making the statement in the context of CPAC made it easy to misinterpret.

That’s a good point. When you’re representing a politically liberal organization (you may think the charter has no political leaning, but the membership most definitely does), you had better be acutely conscious of perils of attempting to recruit within the ranks of one of the more rabidly conservative conferences out there. Why is anyone surprised that many of us fail to see the point of this exercise, when Silverman failed to make the case to us?

He still hasn’t made the case, either. I still don’t understand what he hoped to accomplish at this meeting.

JT then makes a set of accusations that I’ve typically heard from the misogynist side of the atheist community, including, on twitter, a claim that David Silverman was a victim of a “witch hunt”. Good god. I like David Silverman personally, I support American Atheists, but that doesn’t mean I can’t disagree with tactics, and openly say so. This is simply ridiculous:

Holy crap, can we stop trying to make it out like people who have fought for causes we love for years are suddenly betraying them?  Can we stop shoving words into allies’ mouths they never said to support that narrative?  We’re the atheist movement, we should at least be able to deal with what each other actually say.  That is the minimum standard to which we should live up.

As was done. No one shoved words into his mouth; we quoted literally what he was reported to have said, and took issue with that. Apparently, we’re supposed to have an imaginary David Silverman in our head who only says things we agree with, and interpret those words in that light.

So many atheists are sick and fucking tired of the in-fighting and the inability to resolve things without just talking to one another (and questioning their loyalty).  

You know what I’m sick and fucking tired of? Atheists who value unity so much that they won’t tolerate dissent from the leadership. Our strength is our willingness to object and argue, that we don’t bow down before dogma, that no one is above criticism. People are disagreeing with Silverman; I haven’t heard a one question his “loyalty” (which is a really weird statement in the first place — when did loyalty to the movement become a criterion for membership?).

If this is the way atheism is supposed to be, how about if we get a list of all the people we are not allowed to question? That would be helpful, since there is some ambiguity in who the infallible ones are. I know I’m not one of them, since other atheists are quite comfortable with savaging me in terms that make David Silverman’s treatment look quite cuddly. Are we really going to go down the road of setting up authority figures and condemning dissent as disloyalty now?

How many people do you think actually said to themselves “Dave Silverman is anti-abortion?  That doesn’t sound right given everything I know about him.  Maybe I’ll ask him before making a big deal out of this.”  The answer: not many, and that’s a damn shame.  There are plenty of real enemies to atheism out there, we really don’t need to fabricate more out of the people who are on our side.

This is stupid.

Again, where are these people who said Silverman was anti-abortion? I know I wasn’t one of them. Ophelia Benson wasn’t, either. Neither was Jason Thibeault. Who called David Silverman an enemy to atheism? I think he’s usually a good advocate; I also think this case was a misstep. That doesn’t in any way imply that I suddenly have changed my tune and think he’s an enemy who must be deposed.

And here’s another thing I find naive and annoying: did I call up Dave and ask him if he was anti-abortion? No, because for one thing, I assumed that he was pro-choice, like almost all atheists, and for a second, who the hell does that? I notice that no one called me and asked whether I thought Silverman was anti-choice. Never in my entire blogging career has anyone called me or written to me and asked me to expand on something I said before they started publicly criticizing me for it, whatever it was.

What was criticized was a set of published statements that we disagreed with. It was that set of comments that we thought important enough to address; a personal communication that said he didn’t really mean it doesn’t make the public record disappear.

I want people leaving religion to see an atheist movement that is patient and eager to understand, not a group of people chomping at the bit to question the motives/character of people who have been doing the legwork in our interest for years.

There you go again, JT. You’re taking vocal disagreement with policy and tactics as character assassination. It wasn’t. I think the CPAC mess was a mistake, and poorly handled. That doesn’t mean I’ve been calling for anyone to be burnt at the stake. And I’m not going to abstain from saying so out loud out of deference to some abstract notion of “loyalty” to a movement, an attitude that I find detrimental to freethought.

I want people leaving religion to see an atheist movement with the integrity and honesty to question its own. Not another dogmatic institution with authority figures that will accuse you of disloyalty if you disagree with them.

There’s a secular argument for wearing underpants on your head. So?

Sarah Moglia points out that David Silverman has been saying some weird things recently.

Yesterday, an article was published about atheists at CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference). Featured prominently in the article was Dave Silverman, president of American Atheists. In it, Dave was quoted as saying, “I will admit there is a secular argument against abortion. You can’t deny that it’s there, and it’s maybe not as clean cut as school prayer, right to die, and gay marriage.” Is that so?

I’m trying to figure out what this ‘secular argument’ actually is; he didn’t say. I have encountered anti-choice people tabling at an atheist convention, and they couldn’t say either — I got the impression these were actually religious people trying to evangelize to the atheists with a pretense, and they stood out oddly from the rest of the crowd…rather like an atheist shilling at CPAC. So speak up, Dave, tell us what these secular arguments are.

I’m also wary because in my business we’ve run into folks peddling religious bullshit under the guise of being secular before: we call them intelligent design creationists. No one is fooled. Similarly, the anti-choicers who claim to be making a rational secular argument are easy to see through, since they ultimately always rely on some magical perspective on the embryo.

But here’s the bottom line: it is not enough to make a purely secular argument. It has to also be a good argument, unless atheism is to become a smokescreen for nonsense, to be accepted purely because of its godless label. And then atheism might as well just be another religion.

Palimpsest Jesus

Some reporters from Vice crashed a UKIP meeting, and photographed and interviewed attendees. Normally that’s a fine idea to help humanize the opposition — there has been a lot of effort to make people recognize that gays and atheists are their next door neighbors, for instance — but somehow, when it involves really fringey ideas, especially British ideas, everyone comes out looking like participants in a Monty Python skit.

I’m not picking on the UK. The same phenomenon happens with the American Tea Party, we just lack the convenient surreal television referent.

Anyway, it’s full of weird stuff. The religion of capitalism poisons everything, and when you combine it with the religion of religion, you’ve got a hopeless case.

Two people who probably weren’t caught out by booze over the course of the weekend were Sally Grant and Philip Foster, members of Christian Soldiers in UKIP – a group who claim to be "Fighting through Christ for deliverance from EU tyranny". I asked Philip why God hates the EU so much.

What lies behind capitalism and Adam Smith are basic Christian principles of personal liberty, the right to property and respect for honesty in dealings. A free market only works with an unlevel playing field. If we’re all evened out, you won’t have anything I need, and I won’t have anything you need. The European Union is not a free market. It’s a customs union, which is quite a different thing. It’s a level playing field that’s held like that by regulation. They destroy free trade. Adam Smith would be tearing his hair out.

And there he is! Palimpsest Jesus! Once you spot him, he’s everywhere. There is no real Jesus — there’s only this blank screen on which people project their imaginary ideals. So Philip Foster sees Jesus as a property rights warrior, a kind of investment banker in robes who thinks inequity is a wonderful thing (Matthew 5, Philip, or Luke 10:30).

And then I spotted him in this interview with Sarah Silverman.

And to me, I love the symbol of Jesus. It’s so odd to me that so many people on the far right use his name to justify terrible things that I can’t imagine he’d approve of.

And I just want to say to Silverman that he was a first century Jewish rabbi: he probably would have been horrified at openly gay couples, or worse, women speaking and living independent lives. At least she said “the symbol of Jesus”, the tolerant and loving myth, when the reality of Jesus was a man of his time (see Matthew 21 and 25:46).

But Jesus has become this foggy dead mysterious authority figure that you can trot out for just about any cause you care about — he’s a regular mercenary who serves any cause, on the left or the right, and can happily serve them at the same time. Abolitionists and slave-holders, pro-choice and anti-choice, capitalist or socialist, he’s right there, manning the barricades and storming them. I tune out any argument that invokes Palimpsest Jesus any more, even ones where I may agree with the side using his name.

By the way, while I criticize her silly Jesus views, the Silverman interview otherwise earns her some respect. Standing up for liberal political causes has been some sacrifice for her.

Do you worry by being so public with all of this that you’re alienating a section of your fan base?
Oh, this is terrible for my career, make no mistake. This is not good for my career, and it definitely lost me an entire kind of audience. For networks that are selling soap, I can’t imagine that it would behoove them to hire me.

First of all, I don’t let myself read the comments. I need to protect myself, because when I’ve done that I’ve found myself trembling, scared that I’m gonna get killed. People on Twitter can be really, really scary. They always have avatars that are really scary cyber monsters. The bio is always like, “Family, Jesus, America.” It’s so odd. My friend told me she wants to write a book called “Jesus Would Hate You.”

Good work, and boy, that sounds familiar.

But really, Jesus would hate everyone.

Saying it like it is



I was reading the latest issue of Secular Nation, and one article in particular made me smile.

Why Atheist Libertarians Are Part of USA’s 1% Problem
By CJ Werleman

In the days running up to Thanksgiving, Walmart urged its workers to donate food to their most in-need colleagues. You know, instead of Walmart having to pay said workers a livable wage. When people ask me what libertarianism looks like, I tell them that. By people I mean atheists, because for some stupid reason, far too many of my nonbeliever brethren have hitched their wagon to the daftest of all socio-economic theories.

It doesn’t help when atheist luminaries publicly extol their libertarianism. Penn Jillette writes, “What makes me a libertarian is what makes me an atheist — I don’t know. If I don’t know, I don’t believe….I’ll wait for real evidence and then I’ll believe.”

Well, the only excuse Jillette has for his breathtaking ignorance is that he earns his living performing as a Las Vegas magician. Also, he graduated from a clown college.

Famed science author and editor of Skeptic magazine Michael Shermer says he became a libertarian after reading Ayn Rand’s tome Atlas Shrugged. Wait, what? That’s the book that continues to inspire college sophomores during the height of their masturbatory careers, typically young Republicans (nee fascists). But unless your name is Congressman Paul Ryan (R-WI), most people grow out of the “Screw you, I have mine” economic principles bestowed by the Russian-born philosopher by the time they’re legally old enough to order their first beer.

You can begin crying now: O WHY DOES HE DIVIDE THE ATHEIST COMMUNITY SO? BOOO HOO HOO.

Also look for good articles on electing atheists to political office by Edward Tabash, and Herb Silverman writing about his hopeful expectations for atheists in politics. Just not Tea Party politics, please.

American Atheists…expelled!

Just today I mentioned that American Atheists were going to have a booth at CPAC, which prompted many of you to say that you’d rather atheists didn’t attempt to recruit from that mob of sanctimonious assholes. You didn’t have to worry. CPAC had their own idea.

On Tuesday, American Atheists President David Silverman received a phone call from American Conservative Union Executive Director Dan Schneider informing him that the ACU board is breaking its agreement to permit American Atheists to host an information booth at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), March 6-8.

They’ve been kicked out, even before the convention started.

The conservatives cited Silverman’s “tone” as a problem, to which Dave makes the perfect reply:

Silverman repudiated Schneider’s assertion: “This is exactly the problem. The ACU, which has invited CPAC speakers such as Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, and Sarah Palin, is afraid of my tone? My ‘tone’ was clearly an excuse to back out after our press release angered religious conservatives.”

This is actually the best possible result. We aren’t at risk of tainting atheism with any more of those jerks, and American Atheists has effectively highlighted their intolerance. Win win!

They will return with stories, I’m sure

David Silverman, Amanda Knief, and Dave Muscato are going to be at an American Atheists booth at CPAC, that radical Conservative Political Action Committee meeting all the wingnuts attend.

It’s a cunning trick. If they survive, they know we’re all going to have another reason to attend the convention in Salt Lake City — so that we can take them to a bar and ply them with beverages and get them to tell us all the stories.

Philosophism

I have seen scientism, and it’s usually not us. The most blatant example recently was Pinker’s appalling essay in which he suggested that Hume could have used some instruction in molecular biology; I’ve seen people like Hawking and Krauss claim that philosophy is dead, killed by science. But usually the prominent atheists manage to step back from the brink and acknowledge that there is virtue to the humanities that is not dependent on science (but make no mistake, poetry is not a tool for generating new knowledge, but for communicating insights into human nature, which is fine and valuable — science is the tool we have for testing and verifying, and for acquiring new information about the universe).

Massimo Pigliucci has written a paper chastising the New Atheists for taking a turn towards scientism. But take note of my first paragraph: I’ve already given more specific examples of scientism than Pigliucci does in his entire paper. I’d also consider them illuminating: Krauss has retracted his sentiments, both Krauss and Hawking took a lot of flak for their weird ideas about philosophy (science is a branch of philosophy, so I found both rather discombobulating), and Pinker…well, I’d consider that the most damning evidence for a plague of scientism within atheism, that so many praised that blatant example of ahistorical and aphilosophical BS. Pinker isn’t even mentioned anywhere in the paper.

Pigliucci has picked his scientistic enemies: Dawkins, of course, and Harris and Stenger, adding just for the sake of completeness a couple of other scientists, me and Jerry Coyne, who also strongly criticizes the paper. Hitchens is dismissed as a mere polemicist, while Dennett, as a philosopher, causes some discomfort to his thesis, Pigliucci simply acknowledges that he can’t accuse him of scientism and moves on to his other targets.

But he can’t really defend his accusation against any of the others, either, and he doesn’t seem to care that there is a range of perspectives on philosophy even within his hand-picked sample. I consider myself to have a strong appreciation of philosophy and the humanities, and have even proposed to colleagues that a real liberal arts education ought to require learning some philosophy. Stenger’s work is full of history and philosophy; read God and the Atom, for instance, to see what I mean. I think Harris’s The Moral Landscape was all kinds of awful, but that he exercised some bad philosophy does not support his claim that the New Atheists reject it.

And look who he leaves off: Susan Jacoby, David Silverman, Hemant Mehta, Greta Christina, Ibn Warriq, Ophelia Benson. And worse, he has to explicitly deny that AC Grayling is a New Atheist! The impression I get is that what he has done is not find prominent New Atheists who endorse scientism, but prominent New Atheists who also happen to be trained as scientists, and then clumsily elided “is a scientist” into “is practicing scientism,” while also glossing over the existence of philosophers in our clan. We have a word for this: cherry-picking. It’s not a compliment.

Then he tries to define New Atheism, mentioning that nothing in it is actually “new” (a point that I think all of the New Atheists have made repeatedly! It’s a stupid name we got stuck with by a journalist writing in Wired). Here’s his definition.

Rather, it seems to me that two characteristics stand out as defining New Atheism apart from what I refer to as classical Atheism, one extrinsic, the other intrinsic. The extrinsic character of the New Atheism is to be found in the indisputably popular character of the movement. All books produced by the chief New Atheists mentioned above have been worldwide best sellers, in the case of Dawkins’s God Delusion, for instance, remaining for a whopping 51 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. While previous volumes criticizing religion had received wide popular reception (especially the classic critique of Christianity by Bertrand Russell), nothing like that had happened before in the annals of Western literature. The search for the reasons explaining such an unprecedented level of popularity is best left to sociologists, and at any rate is not really relevant to my aims here. It is likely, though, that the New Atheism qua popular movement is a direct result of the complex effects of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. We have seen that the first book in the series, by Sam Harris, was written explicitly in reaction to those events, and I suspect that careful sociological analysis will reveal that that is also what accounts for Harris et al.’s success.

The second reason is intrinsic, and close to the core of my argument in this paper: the New Atheism approach to criticizing religion relies much more forcefully on science than on philosophy. Indeed, a good number of New Atheists (the notable exception being, of course, Daniel Dennett) is on record explicitly belittling philosophy as a source of knowledge or insight. Dawkins says that the “God hypothesis” should be treated as a falsifiable scientific hypothesis; Stenger explicitly—in the very subtitle of his book—states that “Science shows that God does not exist” (my emphasis); and Harris later on writes a whole book in which he pointedly ignores two and a half millennia of moral philosophy in an attempt to convince his readers that moral questions are best answered by science (more on this below). All of these are, to my way of seeing things, standard examples of scientism. Scientism here is defined as a totalizing attitude that regards science as the ultimate standard and arbiter of all interesting questions; or alternatively that seeks to expand the very definition and scope of science to encompass all aspects of human knowledge and understanding.

So he’s got two criteria: 1) We’re popular. That’s an accusation that has me stumped; would we be more respectable if nobody liked us at all? 2) We’re scientists and take a scientific approach. Well, we’re not all scientists, and what’s wrong with looking at an issue using evidence and reason? Why shouldn’t we reject ideas that might be pretty to some people, but contradict reality? It’s not as if we can’t appreciate beauty or justice, entirely non-scientific ideas, unless they’re also counter-factual. Beauty and justice are best when they aren’t wrapped around lies and nonsense!

I’m going to start replying to these broad-brush accusations of scientism with my own accusations of philosophism. It seems to me we’ve got a plague of people who resent the success of atheism and respond by belittling it with trite claims of it being “bad theology” or “naive philosophy”. I’m about to be served with a big plumbing bill for a frozen pipe — I wonder if I can get a discount if I argue that those two guys with the big toolboxes were insufficiently appreciative of the philosophy of flowing water, and are unwarrantedly popular with homeowners this time of year. Damn plumbists.

It’s not disrespect, it’s a reminder of the trash atheists have to fight

Christopher Hitchens died two years ago today, so either obliviously (most likely) or with malice (not impossible), Salon has to run one of their New Atheist bashing pieces. It’s gotten ridiculously predictable. Their rule seems to be to find someone who simultaneously hates atheism, and doesn’t know a goddamn thing about it except for some fragmentary bits of third hand quotes they heard somewhere, and then let them babble.

This time, it’s Richard Rodriguez, illustrated with a photo of Richard Dawkins so that we might bother to read it. Come on, Salon, at least try: if the guy’s words are interesting enough to be worth an article, why are you splashing a photo of someone he dislikes front and center?

I could tell it was going to be awful from the first question.

So let’s start talking about “Darling” and we’ll get into some other things from there. You open and close this book with trips to the Middle Eastern desert taken after September 11. The social and physical aspects of the desert seem very important to you, for the origins of the three monotheistic religions. So I wonder if human history would have been different if the God of the Axial age had emerged not from theses parched deserts, but say, from a dark German forest or something.

Well, I think obviously we would have a different experience of nature. And maybe a different notion of what God expects from us; this is said as a believer, I should stress. It seems to me that a God who would reveal himself to Abraham in a place of such desolation is at least reminding us that our place on this Earth is temporary, and this is a place – a landscape – that reminds us of just how empty it is. The word desert comes from the notion of deserted; something was here and now it’s gone. What’s gone, of course, is the ocean; this was the bottom of the ocean. And this is a place of such rigor and difficulty that one stands in nature with an adversarial relationship.

So a softer, more sentimental God would have revealed himself on a lakeshore or in a forest. That would have been a very different experience. One of the things I’m asking of people, believers and unbelievers, is that we come to terms with place. The Semitic god has always been acknowledged to have broken through time. The eternal breakthrough of time at a specific moment. But we don’t talk about places much, partially because it is such a difficult thing to imagine that we are being called, by God, in a place of death.

Why do you assume that there is a god to appear? Maybe instead you should flip that around: this happens to be a myth conjured up by people who weren’t living in a lush tropical paradise. Rather than this nonsense about a desert god, talk about a desert people.

But even there, this guy is talking nonsense. Once upon a time, many millions of years ago, the Middle East was under water — before people existed. This fact has nothing to do with the origins of the term, nor did the people there historically have any awareness of their geological history (even now, there are many Christians and Jews and Muslims who would deny it).

I also have to wonder about this persistent myth of the parched desert, barren, empty, and desolate. The Abrahamic faiths rose out of a pastoral people; they raised sheep and goats. The land of the Tigris and Euphrates was a well-watered flood plain, and the Hebrews invaded Palestine, with its coastal plains where olives and fruit trees grew, with areas forested with cedars, and fertile valleys with lovely streams and cool shady forests. They were well aware of the bordering true deserts, but we’re taking about a place with a Mediterranean climate — where perhaps the desolate desert was a place with mythic resonance to them.

So here you have people talking amongst each other, playing up the frightful horrors of the desert, and bragging about how tough and mighty their ancestors were to have lived through it, and this myth is now perpetuated by every believer in the Abrahamic faiths on the planet. I think it’s like the idea of persecution in the Roman arena — mostly legend, with next to nothing to connect it to reality.

Furthermore, deserts are actually complex, interesting places. They may be inimical to us damp, squishy apes who like our swimming pools, but “empty” is the wrong word to use for them.

You want a desolation, look at the parking lot at a WalMart superstore. There’s hell on earth; I’d hate to meet the god conjured up by the people who dwell there.

But let’s cut to the chase: where’s this nugget of anti-atheism to justify Salon publishing this tripe?

You write about the “New Atheism” emerging from England, catching on here. How is it new and why does it seem like a dead end to you?

It seems to me that the New Atheism — particularly its recent gaudy English manifestations — has a distinctly neo-colonial aspect. (As Cary Grant remarked: Americans are suckers for the accent!) On the one hand, the New Atheist, with his plummy Oxbridge tones, tries to convince Americans that God is dead at a time when London is alive with Hinduism and Islam. (The empiric nightmare: The colonials have turned on their masters and transformed the imperial city with their prayers and their growing families, even while Europe disappears into materialistic sterility.) Christopher Hitchens, most notably, before his death titled his atheist handbook as a deliberate affront to Islam: “God Is Not Great.” At the same time, he traveled the airwaves of America urging us to war in Iraq — and to maintain borders that the Foreign Office had drawn in the sand. With his atheism, he became a darling of the left. With his advocacy of the Iraq misadventure, he became a darling of the right.

That’s it? Pathetic. And Salon, why are you taking the most shallow point in his interview and making the title all about it?

He’s heard of Dawkins and Hitchens…well, good for him. What about the other big proponents of the New Atheism, Dan Dennett and Sam Harris? No plummy accents there. Or Ayaan Hirsi Ali? Or as I try to remind everyone, Susan Jacoby or Annie Laurie Gaylor, who were talking up freethought years before Dawkins’ spectacular book, or David Silverman or David Niose or Hemant Mehta or me, even? You simply cannot define atheism by one live Brit and one dead one, even if your weird premise is that we’re atheists because we like their accents.

I’ve noticed often that anti-atheists look at us and try to define us by our leadership, which doesn’t exist…so they appoint one, containing whichever people are a convenient fit to whatever thesis they’re trying to advance. News to believers everywhere (and to some misguided atheists as well): there is no hierarchy, no atheist pope, no atheist bishops, and if someone tried to declare themselves head of all atheism, 90% of all atheists would immediately announce their rejection and tear them down. We have no holy book — there are atheists who dislike The God Delusion and God is Not Great, and even those of us who like them feel free to criticize bits and pieces, as well as the authors.

You can also knock individuals for their politics — I detest Hitchens’ and Harris’s conservative and militaristic ideas — but there aren’t any politics that define atheism as a whole. Most (but not all!) of us are politically progressive and looking to broaden the appeal of rational unbelief, so it’s very strange to see some outsider trying to pin membership in the New Atheism on Hitchens’ politics. Or his accent.

But then, consistency and reason aren’t things we should expect from someone described as “gay, deeply Catholic”. It seems to be a too frequent combination that leads only to muddled thinking.

nun

OK, Salon, you are now on notice. The latest edition to the front page? An article praising the simple lifestyle of the nunnery, illustrated with that photo on the right. Yeah, because attractive young women with carefully applied makeup personify Catholic austerity so well.