Author: Ophelia Benson

Meanwhile, James Croft is struggling.

Obama was exercising his capacity for leadership at a time of extraordinary uncertainty, when the USA is wracked with debate about the reasons for those terrible events, and he drew heavily upon the reservoir of his Christian faith to do so. Repeatedly quoting scripture, enjoining Americans to kneel and pray, and movingly speaking of the heaven to which he believes Christina Taylor Green has gone, jumping in puddles. This is truly faith and leadership in a fragmented world.

Well, I would rather he didn’t enjoin us to kneel and pray. I don’t think there’s anyone to pray to, and if I did, I don’t think I would want to pray to it. What would be the point? To ask it not to do it again? To thank it? To ask it to make everyone feel better?

And the idea of Christina Taylor Green in heaven jumping in puddles isn’t really all that moving or comforting once you think about it. She was nine, not three; she wanted more than just jumping in puddles; she wanted worldly things, like politics and meeting her Congressional Representative. She wouldn’t have wanted some fluffy fantasy-life where she just jumped in puddles all day. Notice it doesn’t sound very moving to say Christina Taylor Green has gone to heaven where she is meeting a different, dead Congressional Representative. One wonders what they would talk about, and what the point would be. It doesn’t work. That’s because we’re human beings, not angels, and we want human things, things of this world. It’s childish to let ourselves be fobbed off with talk of bending the knee and a dead child frolicking in the sky.

The thing is, though, Croft realizes this. His problem is that he’s agonizing about it. I don’t think he needs to.

I can see that Obama’s faith provides him with both courage and hope – essential qualities in a leader facing dark times – and I am challenged by the thought that much atheist writing provides neither.

That’s one thought too many. Much writing of all kinds provides neither courage nor hope some of the time, but that doesn’t mean it never does. Much atheist writing is simply talking about other things; that is not a reason to conclude that atheism can’t possibly provide courage and hope. On the contrary: atheism dispenses with many sources of needless fear and despair.

Yet I recogniz[e], too, that I cannot join the ranks of Americans bending knee to pray while remaining true to my beliefs, to myself. I must express my shock and sadness in another way. I’m standing outside the church, my face pressed against the stained-glass windows, longing for solidarity with those inside, but unable to cross the threshold.

Wait until they come out. Join them somewhere else. Seriously. Church is not the only place we can find solidarity with people. It is a handy, ready-made, familiar one, but it’s not the only one.

I don’t see belief in God as “another way of understanding the world”, or as “a different route to truth”. I see it as wrong. Mistaken. Unsupported.This realization – that despite the positive connotations of the word I cannot consider myself a true religious pluralist (at least in Eck’s terms) – has troubled me. I strive for respect in my work and writing, and I want to make it clear the majority of those attending the workshop next week that I respect and value them as people. But Eck’s description has led me to the understanding that I cannot honestly say that I respect their faith. There truly is a gap between my worldview and a religious one, and despite the best efforts of Stedman and the Foundation Beyond Belief, I see no authentic way to bridge it. However much I respect an individual and work beside them, I cannot put the Sun of God in the center of my intellectual solar system. However grave the situation, however powerful the incitement, I cannot bend my knee to nothing. I am stuck outside the church, face pressed against the glass.

And it’s getting cold.

You don’t have to bridge the gap – and I would say you shouldn’t. You can’t expect to believe that all human beings are right about everything. Build solidarity independently of belief.

I’ve had a look at Chris Stedman’s blog, NonProphet Status. It becomes clearer why he’s so hostile to atheists: he’s not an atheist himself, and he’s the religious kind of humanist as opposed to the non-religious kind. He seems to be tragically homesick for religion, and comforting himself by engaging in a simulacrum. That’s fine; it’s just unfortunate that his chief goal and hobby seems to be throwing atheists under any bus he can find as a way of sucking up to believers.

There’s a guest post there from a few days ago, by another pious Humanist type, which is another extended exercise in saying Why Atheists Suck and Why Believers Are Better Than Everyone Else. Like all such exercises, it is cloying and dishonest at the same time.

Atheist activism is at a crossroads, says Andrew Lovley. Whither next? What best to do with our newfound visibility?

Some suggest that we should focus our efforts toward making society less religious by actively trying to persuade people away from religion, while others believe we should work toward toleration and coexistence with our religious neighbors. Until atheist activists achieve some sort of consensus on this issue, we will continue to contradict each other in words and in actions and threaten our relevance as a movement.

As always, that’s a simple-minded dichotomy which leaves out almost everything of importance. It’s not necessarily a matter of trying to persuade people away from religion; it’s often a matter of trying to show people that religious beliefs don’t stand on anything. More important, though, it’s false and highly prejudicial to imply that the more argumentative atheists are opposed to tolerance and coexistence with religious people. We already do tolerate and coexist with religious people! We’re not planning to round them up at gunpoint, or burn down their churches and mosques, or kidnap their children. We’re tired of these sly accusations. We’re tired of “humanists” trying to build up their own reputations by urinating on ours.

Stedman called this hatchet-job “among the best explications I’ve read on this topic.” He would.

There’s another thing about Stedman’s campaign “to find common ground between the religious and the secular.” It’s that all his finding and common grounding and affirmativing and positiving is directed toward the religious while he is in effect quite unfriendly toward the nonreligious. He goes about his work of saying what should be done, by throwing a little dirt at atheists.

We cannot promote Humanist values when we expend our energy lobbing simplistic critiques at the religious…we must get over this sense that provocation should be our number one goal, and that positive engagement with others is unimportant…the future of Humanism isn’t blasphemous billboards, bombastic rhetoric or even blogs…

Little jabs, one after the other, all over-general and subtly unpleasant, all just the kind of thing that appeals to existing prejudices which have been getting systematically stoked for several years, all directed at atheists.

Well…if positive engagement is such a good idea, why so much negative engagement with us? Why recycle the hostile stereotypes yet again? Why add yet more stiffener to the existing hostility to atheists?

It’s a safe path he’s chosen. He’s agreeing with The Great Majority, and kicking sand in the direction of the widely-hated minority. His schtick is that he’s more benevolent and ecumenical than other people, but doing the 87 millionth trashing of atheists isn’t really all that benevolent.

The comments at the Huffington Post bear this out. Lots of people gleefully seize the opportunity to say how boring and smelly and awful atheists are, as Stedman must have known they would. We’re an easy target.

Yet another confusion between equality and deference to religion.

Something called the “Equality Challenge Unit” is doing a survey called Religion and Belief in Higher Education. Given the name of the “unit,” one smells a rat at once. One smells bossy people creeping around universities demanding more “respect” for religions and religious beliefs in the name of “equality.”

The ECU said the research will “inform the further development of more inclusive policy and practice”.

Ah yes – just what we’re afraid of. We don’t think universities should be “more inclusive” of unreasonable beliefs.

In a letter to David Ruebain, the ECU’s chief executive, [Keith] Porteous Wood takes issue with some survey questions, including one asking students if they agree that “the content of my course is presented in a way which is sensitive to my religion or belief”.

That’s why we don’t think universities should be more “inclusive” in that way. Being “inclusive” should not extend to welcoming mistakes and fantasies into the curriculum.

An ECU spokeswoman said that Derby was chosen through a “competitive and comprehensive tendering process”, and that “assuming that a religious academic wouldn’t be able to conduct robust and unbiased research raises several equality issues in itself”.

This is where we came in.

Paul W has a long interesting comment on Ben Nelson’s The Unquiet Scientist post from last year, a post which has been quiet so long that Paul’s comment might be missed.

One or two highlights:

…experimental data that seem to support the opposite view—including a bunch of very basic and very well-known social psychology results from the 1960’s and 1970’s about bracketing, conformity, and groupthink. They seem to support Overton reasoning: if you don’t voice the “extreme” views, the group tends to converge on a new center position, midway between the views that are voiced. The center thus shifts away from the people who self-censor their (perceived) “extreme” views.

And

The individual psychology of belief fixation is complicated, and the social psychology is far more complicated. If things were as simple and one-sided as Mooney makes them out to be, politics would be simple, and that’s just false. There are a lot of two-edged swords flying around, for basic, deep reasons.

Good image!

Once again Chris Stedman is at the Huffington Post (home of woo and worse, home of Jenny McCarthy in deep denial about the exposure of Andrew Wakefield’s fraud) saying how great it is when atheists Reach Out to peopleoffaith.

He had a good time at Christmas. He went home and hung out with his family. Excellent; lovely; I have not a word to say in dissent. But he drew a moral from it, which seems to be that atheists are grumpy therefore it is urgent for humanists to Reach Out.

The trouble with that is that not all atheists are grumpy and that, especially, even atheists who are grumpy are not necessarily grumpy all the time. Things aren’t as stark as that.

We cannot promote Humanist values when we expend our energy lobbing simplistic critiques at the religious, or demand that people stop participating in practices they enjoy simply because they’re associated with religion.

Yes we can. We can do the one, and then the other.

All right, I know; he means we give Humanism a bad name by doing the things he accuses us of doing. But I think that oversimplifies the matter. Maybe some vocal atheists give some branches of humanism a bad name by doing foolish or trivial things – but that’s life in the big city. I’m not convinced that vocal atheists need to shape what they say and do according to what might possibly give Humanism a bad name.

As the Interfaith and Community Service Fellow for the Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard, I am working on the ground to build up positive Humanist community…To build, literally and metaphorically, a Humanist community that is healthy and sustainable, we must get over this sense that provocation should be our number one goal, and that positive engagement with others is unimportant.

What sense? I have no such sense. I don’t have some settled view that “positive engagement with others is unimportant.” I don’t put it in those terms, because I’m not enamored of managementspeak, but I certainly think it’s fine to get along and sometimes collaborate with other people. Of course I do! Stedman’s version is sheer strawman. What I don’t think, however, is that I have some affirmative duty to Reach Out to Faith Communities as such, any more than I have some affirmative duty to Reach Out to Republican Communities as such, or Banker Communities as such, or Realtor Communities as such. Stedman, on the other hand, does think he has such an affirmative duty. He seems to think that he has to Reach Out to People of Faith precisely because they are in some sense opposites. I don’t have that. To me, disagreement is disagreement. It’s not a motivation for Reaching Out. I disagree with “faith” as a way of thinking, so I’m not going to Reach Out to it. That doesn’t mean I’m going to pounce on anyone I happen to encounter who has it, it just means I’m not going to open a diplomatic mission to it.

I believe that ethics and engagement are central to what it means to live in the world as a Humanist, and that Humanist community and identity require an affirmative foundation, not one structured in contrast to ideologies we disagree with.

But you can have both. You can be affirmative and still go on disagreeing with ideologies you disagree with. The one does not interfere with the other. Stedman really wants to persuade people that it does (so he’s not being affirmative toward atheists, wouldn’t you say?), but it doesn’t.

I don’t know how Leo Igwe keeps going, I really don’t.

Leo Igwe, an activist arrested last Tuesday in the ongoing onslaught against child rights activists by the Akwa Ibom State government, was released today by the Police who claimed it was a case of mistaken identity.

Confirming his freedom in a telephone chat with Saharareporters, Mr. Igwe described his incarceration as a nasty experience.

It was a terrible encounter and it was premeditated going by the way they executed the plot to hold me accountable for “kidnapping;” my hands were tied behind me and they beat me mercilessly,” he said.

Martin Robbins has a good, longish piece on the subject today. More publicity, which could make it harder for people to bully Leo and his parents and siblings; excellent.