The body ASC tried to bury at those crossroads has clawed out the grave and left them worse off than before. They face some difficult choices: try to woo back the reactionaries, and piss off the LGBTQI+ community even further; make a big show of inclusion, and start the long and difficult task of regaining the LGBTQI+’s community’s trust; or try to bury the body again, and risk an even bigger controversy at a later date.

That’s a four year old prediction at this point, so it’s worth circling back to. Has the Atheist Society of Calgary been embroiled in more controversy?

Recently, the ownership of our website domain and related Internet channels was disputed and we were unable to retain them. This required immediate action on the part of the board, so we decided to change our name to Rocky Mountain Atheists (RMA).

A sudden name change is more than a bit suss. I can’t take credit for this, said change happened three years after I last wrote about our local atheist group. If the name change was to wiggle out of controversy, they’ve either done an excellent burial or the body requires a Facebook account to see. I thought it could be an internal dispute among the board, but that seems unlikely as well.

We at Rocky Mountain Atheists (RMA), formerly the Atheist Society of Calgary (ASC), have a lot to celebrate this season. Yes, we have a new name, and a beautiful new logo. I want to emphasize, however, that we are the same organization with the same leadership. Nothing has changed except the name.

Did they get scammed out of the domain name? That’s also unlikely, the scammer would have retained ownership of the domain name as leverage then turned it into a SEO farm if the victims failed to pay up, yet as I type up this blog post nobody owns it. We’re down to “a former member of the board refused to hand over the domain name” or “the current leadership isn’t telling the truth” as the leading theories, but the evidence is so thin you can’t cover a slice of toast with it.

While there’s no good evidence of a controversy, “we are the same organization with the same leadership” implies the future prognosis remains grim. My eyebrows shot up when I spotted an article titled “Who are the ‘groomers’?“, but the content wasn’t nearly as bad as advertised. Consider the last paragraph:

Interestingly, there is a lot of rhetoric, especially among Christians, calling trans people ‘groomers’. Considering the history of the Catholic Church and other Christian denominations, where accounts such as the one above abound, one would ask what does the evidence say? Who are the real ‘groomers’?

See, that’s perfectly fine. It wasn’t until my second reading pass that I noticed the evidence given. There’s one article about one megachurch pastor who’s been arrested for grooming minors, and… that’s it. Oh, there’s a lot of assertions that this is common among Christian pastors, but nothing to substantiate them. Also, notice there’s no evidence provided that trans people aren’t groomers? It’s not hard to find, the Wikipedia page on “LGBT grooming conspiracy theory” not only links to multiple studies that debunk the myth, it also points out this slur began in 1920’s Germany and has mostly been aimed at gay men. It’s only in the last five years that lazy transphobes repackaged this tired old line to justify their transmisia. A little elbow grease could have turned a simplistic “NO UR THE BADDIE” argument into an rigorous defense. Instead, transgender people are nearly an afterthought in an article defending them; the paragraph I quoted is the only time they’re mentioned, in fact.

A skim of RMA’s upcoming book club readings brings more cause for pessimism. There’s some great choices, such as Greta Thunberg’s recent book and one on The Petroleum Papers, but the list also contains “Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America” and “The Coddling of the American Mind,” two “culture war” books that are heavy on rhetoric and light on fact. There’s no left-leaning equivalents on the list, either. Their book for last September put my eyebrows back on the ceiling.

Recently, I’ve been enjoying videos of Peter Boghossian, author of How to Have Impossible Conversations, in conversation with a variety of people. He had an especially interesting conversation with Douglas Murray, author of The War on the West, which the Book Club is reading this month. They touched on many controversial topics of the day. After watching the video, we will have a discussion on how we think that they handled the controversial issues and how we would handle them if we were to have such a conversation.

Regular readers of my blog are well aware of Boghossian, PZ’s done more coverage, but I’m not sure if either of us mentioned his warm welcome in Hungary? As for Douglas Murray, he’s been a vocal proponent of Great Replacement theory, the idea that non-white people are going to out-breed white people and cause them to become a minority or worse. If that sounds like something a white supremacist would say, have a cookie.

So why hasn’t this stirred up controversy? I think you can spot a reason in photos from the Western Canadian Reason Conference of 2023. It looked rather fun, to be honest: the speaker line-up is decent, plus they brought in a band and a drag queen. What I noticed, though, were an awful lot of middle-aged white people. The gender balance is an improvement over skeptic/atheist groups of yore, but Calgary is only about 60% European. The fundraising page for that conference had a goal of $10,000, and raised… $5. From a single donation, tossed in by RMA’s president. From my logged-out vantage point, the Facebook post announcing their 2024 iteration only earned one like. Flip to the RMA website’s about page, and there’s still no information of who the current president is, let alone who sits on the board.

To me, all of this signals that the Rocky Mountain Atheists is a small, close-knit group. There’s nothing wrong with that per-se, hell I’ve been in such groups and quite enjoyed them, but conformity and blind spots thrive under those conditions. Controversy hasn’t returned because none of the most active members can spot it coming, and almost all of their members are active. Should someone raise a stink anyway, they’d take immediate action to bury it under a crossroad. These are terrible conditions to grow your group or make a lasting impact on the world, but if you’re just a bunch of friends hanging out in a pool it can be quite fun to blissfully tread water together, oblivious to any undertow.