Guest post: The “So Very Skeptic Atheist Bros”
Originally a comment by Cluecat on Summation.
This is something that seems very strange – how is it that *this* is what the “So Very Skeptic Atheist Bros” have thrown everything away for. Really.
They’ve quite literally gone from “Hurr, Religiot! Humans don’t have souls! You’re all stupid to insist on it!” to “Hurr! Of course I have a pink sparkly feeeeeemale identitay! You’re all stupid to deny it!”.
They’re right back agreeing that souls exist, and that they can be in the “wrong” bodies (by some mechanism that’s never made clear). Do they understand this, these Big Skeptic Bros?
It’s embarrassing, frankly. It’s the antithesis of everything they have been claiming when it comes to any other area. Unlike those who have been seriously considering the ideas and discussing what this *means* for practical life (in addition to intellectual implications), they’ve just been calling believers stupid. So it’s looking like they just wanted an excuse to feel Very Superior Doodz, and be dicks to people. All that Skeptic Stuff, and the Deep Thinkers, and the Rational Bros, and… they’ve thrown it away. For a bunch of fetishists in dresses.
Seriously!
So embarrassing.
It’s really dismaying, and only a very few have been in opposition such as Michael Shermer.
The damage that it does to the skeptical “movement” is incalculable, because it reinforces the idea that people choose their critical thinking based on their ideology. So, no longer can such skeptics make fun of climate idealists, anti-vaxxers, and have credibility.
It all relegates skepticism to making fun of people for believing in Bigfoot or flat-earthers, while believing in things like the alkaline diet or that the Shao-Lin have tapped into a form of energy, not yet explained by physics, that enables them to block spears from penetrating their skin.
Skepticism requires credibility when it causes social discomfort and the possibility of losing friends when you challenge their beliefs. It starts with challenging the dogma that GMOs are evil because Monsatan developed them and then moves onto challenging the notion that a body can express the sex opposite to the True Self contained therein, and in both cases we get called hateful shills for something or other.
And atheists are not immune from being smug about not believing in God(s,) in part because for many it’s the default based on how they grew up. They like to believe that they came out their lack of belief through rational thought and consideration (“I read the bible all the way through and that’s what made me an atheist,”) so that’s all the heavy lifting they need to do. For the rest, they quote skeptics to defend their positions rather than think things through.
Mind, this is a generalization based on my experience. Some of the conversations that I have had over the years have led me to my conclusions, and I could be wrong. All knowledge, like all science, is pending better observation and more informed analysis. But, when I have someone repeating the mantra “correlation does not imply causation” while in the next sentence telling me that the number of cancer cases in gardeners is proof that glyphosate causes cancer, I know someone is regurgitating rather than analyzing. Or, if they tell me that without causation, there is no data. It reveals a lack of understanding of science when someone explains to me that correlative studies have no value.
The Atheist Community of Austin (ACA) has a bunch of podcasts that I used to listen to. At some point, I noticed that they’d bought into the trans dogma. The podcasts are mainly about religion, and the trans stuff is kind of side-show, and for a while I tried to ignore it.
But the trans stuff kept getting pushed front-and-center in the podcasts, and they wouldn’t give an inch on the dogma, and finally I just stopped listening. It’s very discouraging.
Dillahunty is a Savonarola on the subject.
Social psychology and social epistemology are often uncomfortable subjects. They call into question our rationality and our ability to know our own minds. They tell us we may not believe the things we believe ourselves to believe, and we may not believe for the reasons we believe we believe.
People’s beliefs are often determined by the beliefs of their peers first, and justification for those ideas follows after. In a way, it was somewhat naive to think that skeptics and atheists would be exempt from this fact of social psychology. Given the content of the beliefs professed, that naivete is understandable, as skepticism is antithetical to the sort of credulity necessary to accept the claim that men can be women. When we take a step back and ignore content to focus on form, however, the similarity between theists’ reciting apologia and atheists’ reiterating debunkings becomes clear. By mastering the arguments, one gains social standing and prestige, just as one gains prestige for mastering a performance of any sort.
It would be a mistake to say that either the theists or atheists insincere in their belief, though. It’s a matter of supervenience. Does the belief supervene on the reasoning, or on something else, such as moral intuition? For a quasi-Vulcan like me, the idea that we should begin from moral intuitions has always seemed silly, and I never shrank from saying so in philosophy courses whenever it was time for an “intuition pump”. For most humans, though, such intuitions do a lot of heavy lifting, much more than is often recognized or admitted. Much of philosophical ethics consists in justifying intuitions or finding ways to square them with other intuitions.
I’ve always been a bit leery of those who come to their atheism because of theodicy or the like. It suggests that the irrationality of theism isn’t the root of their disbelief. But for that ethical disagreement, they would be happy being religious. Mastering arguments for the irrationality of theism is a way to buttress their comfort and confidence in what is fundamentally a normative judgement. We see the same kind of thing with the Red/Blue Pill phenomenon. When people switch camps over one issue, they almost always somehow change their opinions on other issues to match their new peer group. It’s almost as if their positions aren’t derived from root principle to which they’re committed, and they are instead a function of social context.
If we think about the timing of the atheist/skeptic movement when people like TAA and Rebecca Watson and such were making their names, then it must be acknowledged that many of them were drawn to skepticism because of rainbow rights. That is, due to moral intuitions. If we then add in the dynamics of social media, then the aforementioned scrabbling for social status becomes a real factor. It’s unsurprising that many have taken up this cause, because for them it is contiguous with their experience of skepticism.
I may be misremembering, but didn’t Dillahunty’s initial dissonance with his own religious belief result from experiences in the military, particularly with types of people he’d met and come to regard as good? If so, that’d be consistent with my ramblings above.
This was why I was always a bit off-put by the skeptic movement, and I stuck to the philosophical and humanistic aspects of atheism instead. The skeptics weren’t interested in understanding the minds of the people they criticized — there was too much superiority and not enough compassion. If they’d taken the time to truly empathize with people who hold irrational beliefs, they’d be far better equipped today to catch themselves falling into the same mental traps.
This is completely unsurprising to me. Atheist dudebros have often gone very long on posturing about how “logical” and “rational” they are and come up very short on actual critical thinking.
Amazing Atheist strikes me as perfect example of the all-too-common mindset amongst “dudes who are super logical and rational,” dissected amusingly in this article from a few years back:
<a href="https://theoutline.com/post/7083/the-magical-thinking-of-guys-who-love-logic")"The magical thinking of guys who love logic.
That’s a good article G, thanks. Reminds me of how “feminist” some of these dudes who mock women think they are.
Arty @6 I agree, much of it was fairly high handed.
Nullius @4 Atheism is sometimes characterized as a religion unto itself, with it’s own doctrine and dogma. I suppose that happens when any ideology is accepted uncritically — All the cool kids are atheists type of thing. There seems to be a ton of that with trans activism.