Meta x 11
A couple of thoughts on the hunting of the snark.
One thought is that I always wonder why the focus is so exclusively on the evil gnu atheists. To put it another way, I always wonder why the standard is so double. I wonder why the filter has only gnu atheist-shaped holes.
I wonder why the sustained activities of “Tom Johnson” are ignored in favor of shining a spotlight on something someone said five years ago. Gnu atheists are sometimes irritable, sometimes sarcastic, sometimes rude. “Tom Johnson” is a malicious misogynist liar who put great energy into attempting to smear several chosen gnu atheists. Why so much heavy breathing about the former and nothing at all about the latter? It’s not because the latter is irrelevant – he’s an enthusiastic partisan in the “gnu atheists are horrible” campaign. He is in fact the source of a lot of specific “gnu atheists are horrible” claims.
Like this one, which I had forgotten about. Milton C, May 27 last year. I didn’t know at the time that Milton C was “Tom Johnson” and all the YNH bloggers and all the YNH sock puppets, who were many.
The Ruler of Comment Overmoderation whines about comment moderation. Hm.
The irony – it BURNS.
See? That’s the confirmed confessed liar who filled whole threads at The Intersection with tirades about new atheists under different names, thus creating an impression of lots of haters of new atheists, then did the same thing with his own brand new blog. He’s accusing me of “comment overmoderation” – which is something he had been accusing me of via the YNH sock puppets for several weeks by that time. It’s a pack of lies.
Then this, after I retorted.
idk, Ophelia. I’ve been a “lurker” here for some time, and I’ve seen you engage in ‘total banning’ on some people who have made comments that really didn’t get too offensive or inconsiderate but that you just took personally…but I’ve also seen you engage in ‘total banning’ when people have been purposefully inconsiderate and offensive, too.
Complete and utter falsehood. (How can one “see” people engage in banning anyway? All he had seen, of course, was himself saying that under different names at my place and at his place.)
That’s morally repugnant, if you like. It’s a good deal more morally repugnant than sometimes being irritable under one’s own name and for truthfully-stated reasons. Yet the shock-horror is reserved for the latter. I consider that peculiar.
The other thought is about this comment – #4 on yesterday’s –
Well, it’s certainly a little ironic that the very same bloggers who leaped to condemn Sarah Palin’s incendiary rhetoric (perhaps with justification) are quite content to use this sort of language. Wasn’t there a suggestion somewhere that people on the “accommodationist” side of this debate, should be called “Quislings”? It’s classy stuff.
That’s for me. If you google new atheist quisling, I’m the first result. I did it.
Or I did and I didn’t. I didn’t do it in a Sarah Palinesque way. I did it in a hedged way.
Here is another…can we say quisling? If they call us aggressive new atheists, can we call them quislings? Here is another quisling atheist moaning about how boring and boring the gnu* atheists are. It’s Caspar Melville of the New Humanist, I’m sorry to say – I like the NH.
The real irony though is that Caspar was so horrified by my morally repugnant remark that he invited me to write an article on the subject. In other words, he probably did think it was a bit much, but also probably not the nadir of verbal wickedness.
Back when you brought up the Martin Gaskell incident via James Hannam’s CiF piece, Hannam put something up on Quodlibeta (16 Feb) and look at this comment:
Sisko said…
You know, I’d have more respect for Butterflies and Wheels if they didn’t delete comments or ban people who were giving them a right pounding.
Do you remember anyone commenting here with that name?
Unless Sisko was the one being banned or deleted under a series of aliases then, as OB points out, he wouldn’t know it was taking place. But then the blogasphere does seem to some to allow such folks almost unlimited bad behaviour. Wonder which particular names he was using here….
Hey, it’s not all bad; just think of it as a retirement plan. After Sarah Palin becomes president, you can still make a good living at Miniluv writing essays for Jeremy in his Room 101.
Huh. No, I don’t remember a Sisko.
I’ll tell you what though, I haven’t seen Hammill since that Rob Knop thread where I asked it “who are you?” Interesting.
If our incivility were anything like the way it’s described, Jeremy could do a weekly round-up of the 10 or 20 worst Gnu atheist insults of the past 7 days and they’d all be on the level of an unprovoked Crackergate (which was in response to death threats, even if not to PZ). Instead, he’s reaching for one a few years ago here, another a couple of years ago there…
There seems to be no talking to or arguing with the people who think there’s something wrong with us. We just have to carry on doing what we’re doing and getting more of us out of the closet by showing them that it is possible to be outspoken. Maybe some accommodationists really believe that we’re harming a cause, but I suspect that at least some, just like most theists, know that our methods are the best for achieving the results we want (which have precious little to do with making theists like us for being so self-effacing).
I would never tell someone what social battles to fight or what they can talk about or with who. But doesn’t Mr. Stangroom have anything else to do? You know, anything that won’t result in wasted time?
I sometimes wonder if these Gnu bashers aren’t all christian sockpuppets.
In part, this is a matter of people going from one fad to the next. And attacking the gnus seems to be the fad du jour.
Yes, maybe, but there is also the backlash aspect. That’s what makes it all seem so…distasteful. Atheists are already widely despised, not for good reasons but for very bad ones. It’s bizarre to see people who clearly think of themselves as liberals piling on this way. It has that McCarthyish note. That Invasion of the Body-snatchers note. That point and hiss note.
Chapter 8 of Unscientific America reeks of it. It doesn’t read like a dispassionate analysis of a perceived explanation for hostility to science; it reads like a highly passionate denunciation of thought crime.
And all this piling on seems like the same kind of thing. Ew, a common enemy, let’s get together and hate on them. Let’s keep saying how evil they are. Let’s write about how evil they are over and over and over and over again, because after all they’re a tiny minority, so where’s the risk?
Given how we (gnus in general) more or less declared war on religion and irrationality, it is no surprise that we would attract a few enemies here and there. I’m surprised we haven’t had more flack, although it was amusing to see the Pope rant about at us with poorly made arguments.
But fellow atheists that’s the rub! Getting the knife in the back from atheists is interesting, and worth understanding. Having seen recently just how absurd some atheists can be, even claiming to be Christian and preaching Christianity to their flock, while not remotely believing in God.
This is why we’re gnus, because it’s much more than atheism, and yet we still identify ourselves as atheists, and wonder why some atheists hate us. It’s because we’re also against some atheists, the quislings, the irrational, the religious atheists, as well as religion in general.
Oh boo hoo hoo. Seriously.
You publish a website that is very forward and very provocative, presumably in the interest of drawing readers. And you succeed. Very good, as it really is (usually) a worthwhile site indeed.
But in the process of being provocative, you also attract critics. And sometimes trolls. And even sock-pupettetry among the trolls.
Who could ever have imagined such an outcome? Time for you to whine and bitch. Save your money for a fainting couch-such a tragic result.
Who would’a thought it? And let’s not forget that you recently approvingly reprinted an item about the preposterous German lawsuit against Ratzinger which claimed that infant baptism is a form of child abuse.
Way to trivialize real child abuse there Ophelia. Now anyone who wants to cite you or your arguments can be met with the reply that “Oh that woman-she thinks that sprinkling water over a child’s forehead to please one’s grandparents is child abuse”.
It’s all about YNH. The thing is, though, the accommodationists have it ass backwards. When was the Clergy Letter Project initiated? When was BioLogos formulated? Unless I’m mistaken, it was after the horsemen. Any religious accommodation of science has been a response to being under attack. These folks genuinely, and appropriately, fear losing their children to the godless if they do not yield to a scientific understanding of nature. Suggesting that believers have nothing to fear does not promote scientific literacy. What promotes scientific literacy is reminding believers, continuously, that they fucking well do have something to fear.
Yes, Greg, critics will naturally respond to gnu attacks, and some of the criticisms have merit. But the attacks are focused on the supposed intrinsic nastiness of New Atheism, not just the behavior of individuals. That’s been the point all along, that our nastiness delegitimizes our anti-accomodationist views. It supposedly shows how wrong we are, and this is what I object to.
The attack on some of the nastiness emanating from our side does not do that, and I think the characterization by Jeremy Stangroom that gnus are bullies is not substantiated by his rather feeble attempt to provide examples of gnu misbehavior. They don’t prove anything worth proving. I think he’s fallen into the same error other anti-gnus have in thinking that arguments can be overridden by changing the subject from “who’s right” in the disputes to “who’s nice”. The problem is that move isn’t very impressive even when it’s well executed. Sooner or later you have to stop raving about Seeing and Believing and actually read the damn thing. Then you can understand a little better what a stupendous waste of effort the anti-gnu campaign has been.
Ophelia at #9 is not pleasant, but rings all too true. We’re fighting from the minority position to get equality, they’re pushing back with the majority, while conceding (almost grudgingly) that we do have our facts right (i.e. there are no gods).
We’re trying to level the playing field; they’re doing their damndest to skew it. The reason they’ve resorted to trawling through comments at Pharyngula or inventing or believing in Tom Johnson is because the people who are prominent in our movement have not slipped up in civility more than the average. But if it’s kosher to hold up comments like the worst of what’s ever appeared on Pharyngula, it must be kosher to hold up the worst of what’s appeared in the comments of our opponents. If one does that, we end up smelling comparatively like roses again. That people keep holding up the references to the “Colgate twins” as some kind of supremely damning evidence against us continues to bewilder me. It’s a snarky comment on their ultra-clean looks, it’s not much of an insult and it’s certainly not a threat of eternal conscious torment.
I am afraid that, even exposed as a fraud and buried, Tom Johnson has done some lasting damage. Some people who didn’t stick around long enough to hear the truth did hear some of the lies or heard them relayed elsewhere. A certain part of the general noise was devoted to villifying us (fraudulently done in a way that made the voice of one person seem to be a reinforcing conversation among many) and it has stuck in a way that defies ever setting the record straight properly. Something negative about us has become accepted as true in a kind of general way, even if almost every detail that makes it so just ain’t so.
As a P.S. to our civility, look at what it’s being maintained against. Go through the debates and catch D’Souza or Boteach against Hitchens trying it on with a Hitler=atheism argument. And watch how Hitchens reacts. Or is it perhaps uncivil of Richard Dawkins not to let go till an imam tells him what the penalty for apostasy is? I think, by and large, we are remarkably civil in opposing those who can command or inflame physical violence or who would tar us with the brush reserved for the most evil figures history has to offer. When have any of us ever gone further than Crackergate (which included atheist literature in its “desecration”) or putting up a few billboards (very few, compared to the hellfire ones)?
Greg,
Ophelia was quoting an Irish Times story which was quoting an application to the ICC for criminal charges to be brought against Ratzinger.
Ophelia’s post: http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2011/good-morning-mr-ratzinger-please-come-with-us/
No instance of the phrase “child abuse.”
The Irish Times story: http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/world/2011/0223/1224290630240.html
No instance of the phrase “child abuse.”
The original application: http://www.kanzlei-sailer.de/pope-lawsuit-2011.pdf
17 mentions of the word child abuse, all referring specifically to sexual abuse of children by priests. There is also a 648-word section describing the problems with Catholic Canon Law on baptism, never once referring to child abuse.
In summary: please get your facts straight.
That was an excellent parody of the kind of suspiciously selective criticism that is at issue here. :-)
As an addendum, Greg, I’d like to point out that this is how the anti-gnus seem to work. They imagine a claim (“Ophelia called baptism child abuse!”) and then repeat it to each other until they have convinced themselves that this easily checkable falsehood is an established fact. That was what was really at stake with the Tom Johnson episode. It wasn’t that someone was saying rude things about gnu atheists (and Ophelia in particular), it was that the rude things were obviously fabricated and yet one of the prominent anti-gnus allowed the fabrications to be published on his website, allowed a sockpuppet campaign to bolster the fabrications, banned Ophelia from responding to the fabrications, and even went to so far as to personally endorse the claims being made and the veracity of the source. And then, when the real truth was revealed, instead of the horrified apology one would expect from someone with a functioning conscience, we got a reluctant distancing from the offending material, a continuation of the ban on Ophelia, and a weaselly “it was all made up but there is still an element of truth to it” pseudo-apology.
Please don’t contribute any more to this framing technique.
It’s far from the only criterion I use in evaluating various individuals, but I do pay attention to the difference in styles, as in: who apologises properly when it’s necessary, who permits comments and who either doesn’t permit them at all or filters to them to the point where only yes-men are heard.
Yes, the arguments themselves become wearying sometimes, but it is illuminating to see the different tactics at work. Am I confirming a bias by doing some of my judging that way, or did I arrive at my current views by observation?
Nice try Greg but no cookie for you.
Despite your sneaky attempts to insinuate differently nobody is claiming that the baptismal ceremony itself is the same as child abuse – What is abusive (and what you are deliberately forgetting in your whine above) is the “threats of excommunication and the fires of hell” that often, years later, follow the ‘holy water’.
My Mother in Law arranged a baptism ceremony for my son when he visited their country a few years ago. It didn’t bother me in the slightest when I found out later since the way my wife and I bring up our son means he is not subjected to threats of hellish torture by demons if he doesn’t follow their religious teachings (his grandparents on my wife’s side are Japanese buddhists but my son is being brought up to make up his own mind on the subject).
Just so we get this particular question clear Greg, do you consider teaching religious threats of eternal hellish torture in any way abusive towards the developing mind of young children?
Greg,
That’s kind of my reaction to Jean and Jeremy calling us a “bullying mob” and similar stuff.
First, accommodationists write lengthy posts (even books) on how Benson, Myers and Coyne are all wrong, are hurting the cause, and that it would have been better if they didn’t voice their opinions publicly. Suddenly, out of nowhere and completely unprovoked a group of people write responses on their blogs, telling them that *they’re* wrong and that it’s *them* who’s hurting the cause with their promotion of lying and deceiving (or, as civil people prefer to call it, “framing”).
As a consequence, we are pronounced a thoroughly uncivil crowd who should learn how to control ourselves; it’s high time we learned the lesson that, while they can criticize us, we should be civil and not criticize them back, god forbid actually defend ourselves. Or, if we really can’t resist our instinct to respond, at least we should be civil about it: next time someone tells you that you’re hurting the cause and should shut up, you just politely tell them you disagree, but respect their opinion. Well, fuck that.
Greg:
Where exactly did Ophelia imply otherwise? Reading comprehension doesn’t seem to be your strong point, does it?
The whiniest and “bitch”iest person on this page seems to be you. You do realise that your insults and complaints appear to other people as their insults and complaints appear to you? Do you?
Again, you seem hopelessly confused as to what Ophelia actually wrote. The objection wasn’t to the ceremony itself, but to the threats of hellfire following it up. The former may be a harmless ritual, but the latter is a vile and calculating act, which torments many children with nightmares and panic attacks.
Stewart, thanks very much indeed for your comments.
Nasrin Alavi
http://newhumanist.org.uk/2495/dear-god-help-me-die-standing
And we have heard Sakineh’s “confession” (after how many years of imprisonment and abuse?). And the “islamic” declaration of human rights. It’s the same story of misinformation, confusion and corruption. Why discuss with people who have good arguments when you can just discredit them by appeal to simple-minded prejudice (those gnu atheists are so rude!) or (appealing to “comfort”) pretend that their arguments are simplistic and not worth bothering about, or (to cowards) pretend that they’re really on the “right” side after all. All sorts of ways to sideline the protesters and falsify how they are perceived without having to engage with the issues. “Quisling” is one good word.
Melville:
Oh well. I wonder how it is possible to miss the simple fact that it isn’t just about what people find in their religions or put into them, it’s the fact that they then go and believe it all. It’s the believing it that is the whole problem. Myths and allegories are all very well, if that’s what you want, but when people start taking them as literal truths they go right off the rails. I would call it insane. And many of these myths (etc.) aren’t even close to how things actually are, even when they are about ourselves, even if you don’t take them literally. Look at so much of the theology that Melville calls “moral reasoning”. I question both the “moral” and the “reasoning”. It is so often impossible to see anything of either. It is much easier to see it as simply the product of a mind which clings to a myth, and tries to translate all the world into its terms, and then must necessarily impose that view as belief on everyone else. A self-conditioned mind, a wilfully blind mind, and ultimately a cruel, destructive mind (even if the individual is a “compassionate” type). Melville seems to think that if we only understood about religion we would be much nicer people altogether, or at least less “boring”. How is it possible for a sensible man to miss the point by so astronomical a distance?
I suppose we just have lots of enemies: the foolish, the confused, the mischievous, the authoritarian, the temporisers and the cowards. There’s not one single plot, but there is a mish-mash of stupidity, point-scoring and opportunism. I think the mere atheism of some of our critics means nothing at all. We are about reason, equality, and truthfulness, and atheism is just one inevitable part of it. Not everyone really wants those things, in the end, especially (perhaps) if the price is atheism. Too many people want comfort, point-scoring, reputation, authority, respect… There’s no reason why an atheist as such should be any better.
What annoys me about this argument is that the civility brigade has an outright disdain for the general public. We trumpet the fact that atheists are a rising force on Youtube and the general internet, the civility brigade wants to police the discussion right back into ivory towers where those dirty proles can’t sully it. It is pure snobbery.
Jean Kazez’s post on subjects being too technical for public consumption was a great example of this. To us, if the public fails to understand something technical? Well its because we didn’t explain it well enough. To Kazez is because the public is simply too thick to understand. That is what I took from what she said. It is not that Kazez said “Shut up” that pisses us off – its that she writes off the majority of humanity as being too stupid to get it.
Greg, I don’t know what your religious affiliations are, or if you are an atheist or some such, so therefore can’t categorically pass judgement on your thinking where infant baptism is concerned with respect of Roman Catholicism.
However, I do know exactly where I stand on the subject having being baptised against my will as an infant. OB, with her excellent literary skills, phrases my sentiment on it far more eloquently than I ever could, when she says:
Although Fundamentalists are the most recent critics of infant baptism, opposition to infant baptism is not a new phenomenon. From what i read — in the Middle Ages, some groups developed that rejected infant baptism, e.g., the Waldenses and Catharists. Later, the Anabaptists (“re-baptisers”) echoed them, claiming that infants are incapable of being baptised validly. But the historic Christian Church has always held that Christ’s law applies to infants as well as adults, for Jesus said that no one can enter heaven unless he has been born again of water and the Holy Spirit (John 3:5). His words can be taken to apply to anyone capable of belonging to his kingdom. He asserted such even for children: “Let the children come to me, and do not hinder them; for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 19:14).
The Roman Catholic Teaching: In John 3:5 we read the words of Jesus:
Roman Catholics interpret this as meaning that baptism is required for salvation. Indeed, baptism is said to confer the grace of justification?
The Roman Catholic Teaching: In Mark 16:16 we read,
Irrespective of what i think of religious sects per se, I definitely would not think that the German lawsuit is preposterous, insofar that it is totally against child baptism. As a Roman Catholic – to reiterate – I too believe that I was baptised against my will as an infant. I never gave consent to entering through the the RCC door. Infant baptism was foisted upon me because that was the custom of the country of my birth. The decision was never mine and I was forced every single day of my childhood to adhere to the gruelling, cruel, brainwashing, dictatorial, patriarchal membership of the church, because of my belonging to it by way of my forced baptism so soon after birth.
In days of old, in Ireland, persons who died un-baptised were excluded by Ecclesiastical law from Christian Burial, and the full burial service was not read over the remains. Although it had been stated, the burial service according to the rites of the Church was not to be used in the case of persons who were never baptised, a minister could not refuse to perform the service in the case of a person baptised according to the forms of a Church. Un-baptised people were treated in the same way as hardened criminals.
*Children who died un-baptised were very often not buried within the burial grounds, but were afforded a strip of ground, which have found, to be marked by Love stones, with no record of their passing inscribed on any stone.
Re: this specific quote. I have observed that you are the only one who mentioned… child abuse…?
Is it not very forward and very provocative on your part? Sounds to me like you are trying to put words into people’s mouth? Maybe I’m wrong?
Bruce, what this incident is illustrating, I think, is simply the fact that atheism, as a term has a limitation in that it fails to encompass the actual philosophies (sorry Massimo!) and goals of a concise group. The Raelians are atheists – but they are not gnu atheists. That is a pretty easy observation. What is not so easy to distinguish is that there are atheists who pretty much share the same metaphysical philosophy but have very different goals. For instance Chris Mooney has very similar beliefs about the truth claims of religion as the gnus. Probably the same thing can be said of most of the atheist accomodationists. It is only when we examine goals that the differences become apparent. There are many atheists that don’t have much of a problem with the idea of a highly religious society. In fact changing the society to a more overtly secular one might be highly disadvantageous to them (think of this as a sort of SE Cupp effect). Taking atheism out of the philosophy class and into the high street might be a problem if you are content with its place in that philosophy class.
This is what I’m never sure about. It doesn’t seem to add up. He has said that he happens to be an atheist. It seems to me that if you have very similar beliefs about the truth claims of religion as the gnus, it wouldn’t occur to you to say that – and you wouldn’t want to say it.
I think part of this change in his view that he has talked about (never thoroughly enough) is a matter of giving up or rejecting the idea that there are good reasons to be an atheist, and especially that the reasons are (epistemically) much better than the reasons to be a theist.
That’s a big difference between gnus and non-gnus, so if I’m right about that, he doesn’t have (all) very similar beliefs, and the missing one that I’m pointing to is an important one.
I’m not sure I’m right about it though. I think when pressed he admits that there are reasons. But when not pressed, he doesn’t. It’s all a bit of a black box.
I only see us neoatheists as being consistent compared to normal atheism. We’re consistent in opposing faith-based beliefs and idealogies and claims because they’re untrue and wrong. Accommodationists and ‘liberal’ theists are perpetuating two lies: the lie that neoatheists are militant and the lie that religion is a social science.
Being half-rational is not good enough.
Dude, speak for yourself. I’m a militant neo-fundamentalist secularist atheist neo-dogmatist.
The really interesting quote about baptism from the ICC submission is this:
‘In case the child is in danger of dying, the baptism should even take place against the will of the parents. Can. 868, para. 2 C.I.C. determines the following regarding this: “An infant of Catholic parents or even of non-Catholic parents is baptized licitly in danger of death even against the will of the parents.”’
So not only is baptism a form of compulsory membership applied to infants (see Marie-Thérèse O’Loughlin’s comment above on how this makes her feel), but it should be performed in secret even when the parents have refused permission.
@26
Mooney’s favorite canned line is that he “shares 99% of intellectual DNA” with the anti-accommodationists. We’ve discussed before just how big an overstatement this is.
Thanks for the thanks, Gordon; I often wonder whether things I’ve posted haven’t been too obvious to be worth mentioning.
Why is it that when we hear “accommodationist” we don’t think first of someone playing nice with theists, but of someone who attacks gnus? I noted Ophelia’s and Steve’s ideas on the earlier thread about why people are like that. I would like Steve’s to be truer, because Ophelia’s is bloody depressing, which I know says nothing about how true either may be. Andrew’s input was not helpful enough.
My best effort at understanding this has to do with underestimating how important religion is to people, even those of weak belief. We want to shift the Overton Window so that atheism is in the opening that includes what’s socially acceptable. We are not there yet. For many, atheism is not merely another opinion and having no religious beliefs is far worse than having the wrong ones. For those people, atheism is not an absence of belief, it’s something that actively destroys the fabric of society. The defensiveness of some accommodationists makes me wonder if it’s that idea that has them in thrall, despite not believing religion’s claims.
I’ve found one sometimes doesn’t explicitly know certain things despite being in possession of the necessary information, because the prerequisite for answers is questions. We know a lot of things that annoy us that the accommodationists have written and said, but there are a bunch of specific questions I wish they’d answer. Of course, insisting on answers is what got Ophelia banned from the Intersection.
As Catholic parents, you have an obligation to have your child baptised. Code of Canon Law states, “Parents are obliged to take care that infants are baptised in the first few weeks; as soon as possible after the birth or even before it, they are to go to the pastor to request the sacrament for their child and to be prepared properly for it” (CIC 867 1).
However, to baptise your child licitly, the Church requires that
Unless the infant is in danger of death, canon law does not allow you to have her/him baptised against both parents’ will. Code of Canon Law states:
Note: Even a child of six years and eleven months counts as an infant since s/he has not yet reached the age of reason, which is customarily understood to be seven years of age.
Greg, I’m left wondering if you actually meant to say God-parent’s as opposed to grandparent’s? I always thought that baptisms of babies was more to please the RCC and {the unbeknownst forced will) parent’s. Mind you – grandparent’s do get to join in the happy celebrations in the aftermath (till communion time comes along, when the children have reached the age of reason and yet again another holy sacramental occasion arises). So perhaps it’s from the celebratory factor you are talking?
Once again – you’ve used child abuse in a very sneering way. Or so it seems to me anyway. i really think that you should not be making little of these two particular sensitive emotive words. Or use them as a weapon either to beat up on people. If you really understood the true connotation of these words, you would not be flinging them about so insensitively. They are sacrosanct, for sadly, the wrong reasons, to people who have been actually abused in one way or another. Taking cheap shots at people with usage of these extremely fragile words, is, to say the least, inordinately tacky and below the belt.
I wonder whether atheists who criticize the New Atheists* find the New Atheists “worse” (in whatever sense of the word you might use) than their religious counterparts. Or even just as bad. I would be interested in seeing them answer such a direct question, because it might force them to think about their priorities.
*I once did this but have since taken back much of what I wrote.
Whoops, I meant Michael.
Stewart
#32 – yes indeedy, and you’ve “wonder whether things [you]’ve posted haven’t been too obvious to be worth mentioning”. Well how are you gonna find out if you don’t mention them? One of the things I quite enjoy about He of the Muscular Prose is that I usually find a sentence or two that crystalises vague ideas I’ve had but never quite formed up into something I could easily express, or something I might have suspected as true but couldn’t validate. I think the conversation is useful in firming our personal philosophies, by giving them substance and features that give us purchase on them so we can test them against the world (reality).
Expressing your views also gives others licence to validate their own, and if necessary to leave the closet. What was that line from The Commitiments? “We’re black and we’re proud.” Except we’re not all black any more than we’re all horsemen, but never mind.
Mooney likes to use the study by Brendan Nyman and Jason Reifler that showed that exposure to a report – even one that disconfirms one’s existing idea – actually functions to strengthen that idea.
That factor is the entire factual basis for his policy of not wanting to associate scientists with atheism (or more accurately his desire that only religious scientists, or those who are not vocal atheists, should be the spokespeople or authority figures in public scientific matters).
In other words if religious people keep hearing that some scientists are atheists then they will continue to associate science as a whole with atheism and thus reject it. Therefore it is bad for gnu atheists to be vocal about scientific matters since this will reinforce the science=atheism prejudice in the minds of believers and they will be more obstinate about changing their minds on scientific matters (such as climate change and evolution).
The irony of this is that the most frequent exposure that most religious people get towards the atheists and science is the public attacks on gnus by the likes of Mooney and the other accomodationists. If Mooney followed the logic of his own argument then the best tactic for him to employ is one of complete silence towards the gnus. Furthermore what about the effect of the attacks on the gnus themselves? Wouldn’t it just make them more retrenched in their views rather than silenced? According to Nyman and Reifler’s hypothesis this would seem a distinctly obvious risk!
Very short version of a longer comment I don’t have time to write at the moment, but at least to get the bare bones of the thought out there:
It’s interesting, especially in the light of claims like Andrew Lovley’s on the other thread that he wants to “advocate” for all atheists, that the area in which they think we ought to limit ourselves (what we say, to whom, in what forum and in what tone) are precisely those in which our emancipation is most urgently required. We don’t need any advocacy that helps preserve a status quo so in need of change.
There’s a very interesting post on HuffPo at the moment from Chris Stedman, the “atheist chaplain” of Harvard. He is very big into ‘interfaith’ alliances between the non-religious and various faith groups. While the piece was not the standard anti-gnu attack that we’ve come to expect from the HuffPo it did seek to make its point by stigmatising some atheist groups by using, as an example of how not to behave, an incident involving the Elmhurst Secular Students Alliance where they failed to join with the interfaith group at that college to condemn an attack on a muslim student because they felt that religion as a whole was behind the attack and they didnt want to do anything to endorse religion. He took as fact the description of this incident provided by current current Elmhurst SSA leader Josh Zuke and doesn’t seem to have done any further checking of what seems to be a fairly serious charge about the behavior of the SSA four years ago.
Unfortunately for Stedman the person who was president of the Elmhurst SSA from that time read his piece and pointed out that he’d managed to get all his facts entirely wrong – they had supported the measure and were even featured on a T shirt!
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-stedman/talking-about-atheism-and_b_829256.html
Who is Jeremy Stangroom? Is he another of ‘Tom Johnson’s’ sock puppets? Or is the person behind Tom Johnson?
And does he not understand the concept of ‘qualifiers’ (aka ‘modifiers’) in the English language? That is a word or phrase that “qualifies, limits, or modifies the meaning of another word or phrase.” because when someone says ‘IF’ in the context of that particular writing, then CLEARLY they’ve put a qualifier on the rest of the sentence. In this case it was a rhetorical qualifier pointing out the hypocrisy of the ‘gnu atheist’ bashing and labeling that goes on by the DBAD/YNH crowd.
You didn’t need to be a rocket scientist to figure that out… Unless, of course, you are being deliberately obtuse in order to make an invalid and unsupported point.
I will, once again, point out the DBAD/YNH crowd have absolutely failed to learn the lessons history as taught us, time-and-time-again, in regards to civil disobedience and its concomitant cultural change. How many times does one need to talk about obvious examples such Gandhi and MLK, or entire movements, such as the suffragettes and civil rights eras and the power of non-violent resistance/protest versus doing (and thus getting) nothing?
If women had taken the DBAD/YNH route, they’d still be the properties of their fathers/spouses with virtually no real rights. If blacks had done the same, they’d still be living under Jim Crow. It takes time, energy, protest and challenge to authority to move society to equality and so-rare-as-to-be-practically-never, if history is any guide, does it move any other way…
Ah, ha ha ha ha…. Off topic, but my cat decided to lick the remaining dressing off my plate. It was a chipotle based dressing and now she’s not-so-happy… I’m sure, if she blogged, it would be related (somehow) to my being a new atheist cat owner…
lol. When I was small, I would sometimes worry I’d have an ‘inappropriate dream’ then die a ‘sinner’ and go to hell… Good thing I wised up relatively young, though did try religion again in my early twenties….
I guess he was holding back on this PZ example. Will PZ be convinced, to turn over a new leaf and be nice? Perhaps not.
Oh poor cat!! I shouldn’t laugh!
Anyway
Precisely. I didn’t just say “Caspar is a quisling” – I qualified it. Twice.
Yet that’s an object of shock-horror while TJ/YNH’s sustained campaign of lies and slanders is passed over in silence. I call bullshit.
I feel kind sad for all the gnu atheists, if Jeremy Stangroom is documenting them and all he has is a half dozen of comments by Blackford, Dawkins and Myers, we are a pretty pathetic bunch of hand wringing grandmothers.
I mean really, there is an AC (AC = Angry Christian) in my office that has stated that “If you aren’t a Christian, why the fuck aren’t you at work Christmas Day?”…
@46: Ask him why he’s at work on Wednesday if he doesn’t worship Odin.
Oh the angry Christian. I once worked around one of those. Nasty man.
@46 – wouldn’t it be more apropos to ask “Why are you off on Sunday if you don’t worship the Sun?” – although they could hear “son”, so you could refer to Mithras, which is the commonly accepted origin of the day-name if what I read and remember is correct.
Ophelia wrote:>It’s bizarre to see people who clearly think of themselves as liberals piling on this way.Ophelia, I’m not sure that you have noticed, but an awful lot of liberals are not very liberal.I happen to be in a political place (I’m with Thoreau, as in the “Essay on Civil Disobedience”) where I often disagree with conservatives as well as liberals: I was, for example, a very harsh critic of G. W. Bush – I think he deserves the ultimate punishment for all the deaths he caused.Frankly, it has been liberals more often than conservatives who have lashed out bitterly and irrationally when I have differed with them, even though I tend to be more provocative in expressing my disagreements with the conservatives.Of course, human beings are full of contradictions: what convinced me as a child to refuse to be baptized was the fact that “turn-the-other-cheek” Christians most certainly did not believe in turning the other cheek.Dave Miller in Sacramento
[…] come to my attention that you've recently devoted your blog to the purpose of highlighting uncivil statements by the […]
Bruce Gorton wrote:
Shortly before I read your comment about Jean, I happened to have gotten into a discussion on her blog about the post you’re referring to ( http://kazez.blogspot.com/2011/03/what-not-to-say.html ).
I wasn’t raising the “New Atheist” issue; I merely explained, as politely as I could, why, as a scientist myself, I doubted that philosophers had anything significant to say that was really all that hard to explain to the hoi polloi.
In response, she turned on comment moderation. It will be interesting to see if my later comments ever show up.Philosophers claim that all issues are open in philosophy. Alas, I have found that the issue of whether philosophy itself has any validity is an issue that many philosophers would rather not see raised.
Dave Miller in Sacramento
Others might already have spotted this, but I was just taking a walk down Tom Johnson memory lane and came across this comment from the Intersocktion:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/intersection/2009/10/28/what-would-bridge-the-nasty-new-atheistaccommodationist-divide/#comment-34548
It’s someone calling out Tom Johnson for quote mining PZ in an attempt to paint him as uncivil and strident. I am more than a little amused that someone else recently prospecting for Gnu incivility gold unearthed that very same quote! Guess who it was? Go on, guess! *snorfle*
I think we all know where it’s just been used. What got me was not just the smarmy way the quote had been doctored, but that Sigmund offered him an out, which he took, claiming his “crime” was not going back to the original to check, as he had it second-hand. I’m not assuming Sigmund believed him, but it’s interesting to see just how quickly he would do damage control when he was caught at something.
Oh good god, and then go on reading down that thread, with all Wally’s bluster and accusation and finally insults (he told Sigmund to grow up! Wally did!). One doesn’t know whether to laugh or heave.
Oh and no, I hadn’t spotted that, Jen. snorfle!
[…] Phillips pointed out another item from Wally in October 2009. A spot of quote-mining. What PZ […]
Stewart, I was laying a trap for Wally that he promptly jumped into. I had a lot of interaction with Tom Johnson on one of the earlier Intersection posts and this was a continuation of this. I wrote more about the trap on Ophelia’s latest post.
Sigmund, I didn’t expect you’d been quite as innocent as you wished to seem. Good job, though.