Author: Leo Igwe

In case you’ve been worrying and fretting and gnawing your fingernails –

PZ got a stent, and is enjoying the drugs, and will be going home tomorrow.

Yeah!

Messing around with Google in Swedish, I find a blog post by a guy who was at the seminar on Thursday. He includes the wonderful book cover by Elisabeth Wallin and adds that he was the model for the guy on the left – the rabbi holding a big jagged stone ready to throw. How cool is that?!

There was a giant blow-up of the jacket at the launch – it was about the size of a door. In the huge version it becomes clear that all three clerics are spitting on the women at their feet. Once you know that you can see it in the small version – that thing that looks like a wispy beard on the pope is actually a river of spit.

Wallin was supposed to be at the launch but alas she didn’t make it, so I never met her. Too bad; that would have been great, she being so pleasingly controversial and all. But I met other pleasingly controversial people. I was apparently even controversial myself. I’d written an article for the occasion, at Fri Tanke’s request, and it was going to be published by Express Expressen, one of the biggest newspapers. During the launch, Christer got a text message from them saying on second thought, we don’t want it, because – er – well we’ve already said religion is not entirely wonderful, so there’s no need to say it again. The opinion page editor wanted it, but the editor-in-chief intervened to say No.

Don’t go thinking that because Sweden is all secular and cool and leftwing, it doesn’t scowl at frank atheism just like all other right-thinking conformist people. That was what I thought, but I learned better pretty quickly. Frank atheism is frowned on, and as for criticism of Islam – that’s right out. That was being discussed at the launch – I think perhaps I was saying a few words about it, but the fog of jet lag was thick by that time, so I’m not sure; at any rate it was being discussed when Christer got the text message so he was able to use it as an illustration of the very thing that was being discussed. It was an interesting moment. The room full of women’s rights activists and secularists, discussing the fact that there is heavy social pressure not to talk about the role of religion in denying women’s rights, only to be told that a major newspaper has changed its mind about publishing an article on the role of religion in denying women’s rights. The irony is poignant.

Catching up. Jerry has some thoughts on Phil Plait’s famous best-selling Booker Prize-winning Library of Congress-approved “don’t be a dick” speech. One thought is that it sounded a good deal too much like “Tom Johnson” and his Amazing Experiences With the Out-of-control Atheist Fiends. Another thought is that Plait didn’t offer a shred of evidence for all his claims of pervasive atheist baddery. Those two thoughts are not unrelated to each other. “Tom Johnson” didn’t offer a shred of evidence for his exciting tale of persecution and spitting, either, and oh hey gee what do you know, it turned out that that was because it never happened and Tom Johnson was just throwing mud at people he doesn’t like. So why should anyone think Phil Plait is doing anything different?

Well one reason is that Plait is a different guy, and has a lot more to recommend him than “Tom Johnson” did. And another reason is…no actually that first reason is the only one I can think of. The fact that he didn’t and wouldn’t and won’t give any examples means that we don’t even know what he means, which makes it possible for people who hate gnu atheists to think he means pretty much everything short of plain secrecy and silence, and also makes it possible for gnu atheists to feel universally if vaguely guilty or implicated. That’s the case even though what Plait actually does spell out doesn’t make me (for one) go “Oh right, I do that all the time! Must do better.”

Insulting them, yelling at them, calling them brain damaged or morons or baby rapers, may make you feel good. . . but is your goal to score a cheap point, or is your goal to win the damn game?

Yeah no, see, I don’t do any of that. I don’t see a lot of other people doing that, either. A few blog comments, but that’s about it, and that can’t be what Plait was making such heavy weather about. Can it?

Richard Dawkins (Mr Ground Zero of putative dickish gnu atheism himself) made a very helpful point.

Plait naively presumed, throughout his lecture, that the person we are ridiculing is the one we are trying to convert. Speaking for myself, it is often a third party (or a large number of third parties) who are listening in, or reading along. 

When Peter Medawar destroyed Teilhard de Chardin’s The Phenomenon of Man, in the most devastatingly barbed book review I have ever read, he wasn’t trying to convert Teilhard. Teilhard was already dead in any case. Medawar was trying (and succeeding, in spades)to convert the large number of gullible fools who had been taken in by Teilhard.Similarly, when I employ ridicule against the arguments of a young earth creationist, I am almost never trying to convert the YEC himself. That is probably a waste of time. I am trying to influence all the third parties listening in, or reading my books. I am amazed at Plait’s naivety in overlooking that and treating it as obvious that our goal is to convert the target of our ridicule. Ridicule may indeed annoy the target and cause him to dig his toes in. But our goal might very well be (in my case usually is) to influence third parties, sitting on the fence, or just not very well-informed about the issues. And to achieve that goal, ridicule can be very effective indeed.

Why have I never thought to say that? Because I’m not clever enough, presumably. It’s dead right, and it gets at one of the things that I hate about the whole framey discourse, which is that it’s always personalized in this stupid way, as if every book or article or review were aimed right at sobbing Suzy R Innocent of Fluffy Falls, South Dakota. It’s not. Books and articles and reviews are written for a broad or narrow public, but a public, not a single person in the hopes of making her cry. People who write, write for the larger world, not for the nice church-going people down the street. We get to do that! We get to write for everyone, and for no one in particular. That means we get to write stuff without worrying too much about whether what we write will hurt the feelings of some fragile Christian who feels lonely and sad because the skeptics won’t eat lunch with her. It means we get to treat Plait’s maudlin invocation of crying believers thanking him for his speech with contempt. That’s good, because contempt is what it deserves.

Another young woman, one I had never met before, similarly approached me and told me much the same story. She was crying as well. Eventually I heard from others who told me there were several people in the audience who were crying because they had felt so alone. Many were feeling so isolated from the skeptical community — and had experienced so many encounters with other skeptics who were rude, boorish, insulting, and dismissive — that they were seriously considering leaving the movement altogether.

I want to know where they keep their stuffed animals, so that I can steal them.

Hurry up and get back to blogging, 1.5 of you exclaim, we’re jonesing here. Very well. Since the vagaries of jet lag this time are working even on the westbound leg, and waking me up after three hours of sleep where normally I just crash and sleep for 8 or 9 hours on getting home – I’ll oblige.

First there was this seminar, which you heard about beforehand, the one that started 3 hours after I landed. A lot of it was Q and A, and it was rather like facing an audience of mind-readers. They all seemed to know exactly what I was getting at, and to feel the same way about it, and to have illustrative stories to tell. I wasn’t really expecting that. I was expecting, I suppose, broad general interest and curiosity (in anyone who showed up), since why else bother to attend, but I wasn’t expecting quite such…”oh, you too?”

I chatted to some while signing books afterward, and some of the same people were at the launch a couple of hours later. One lovely guy (hi Jan!) has been following the whole accommodationism-Mooney wrangles and sees Mooney exactly the way I do. Ha. Even in Sweden people have his number.

One of the real high points was the next morning, when I went to the office of Glöm aldrig Pela och Fadime – Never forget Pela and Fadime. They are two women who were murdered for reasons of “honor” and shame, and the campaign is run by a terrific, brave Iraqi woman called Sara Mohammad. I asked if there is any kind of umbrella organization that links the work of people like Sara and that of others like Mina Ahadi, Necla Kelek, Maryam Namazie, Houzan Mahmoud, Homa Arjomand, Azar Majedi, Fadela Amara, etc etc etc – and apparently there isn’t. There should be. We all agreed there should be; solidarity, you know.

That’s an installment. There’s more.