Tag: Be quieter

  • Oh hai, why can’t the new atheists be nice?

    Why can’t they, asks “interfaith” atheist (don’t ask me, I don’t know how that works) Chris Stedman via a guest post on his blog by someone called Karla McLaren. He says “It’s a hugely informative and clear-eyed assessment of the state of the atheist movement.” I don’t agree. I think it’s just the 14 millionth installment of “new atheists are bad and mean ick.”

    Atheism, McLaren informs us, is more visible thanks to those books by the four New Ones, or as she calls them, “the Fractious Four.” Yes really.

    I call them the Fractious Four, which has a cool superhero ring to it (even though their superpower is to argue with everybody).

    Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris have written polemics against religion, and true to the polemical form, they’ve taken a moral absolutist stance which asserts that religion is orders of magnitude more harmful than it is beneficial (if it is beneficial at all). Dennett is a philosopher, and his work is nuanced and, well, philosophical – and I often wonder why he’s included with the polemicists. However, he is, so on we go.

    We do? Why do we? Why not not include Dennett if you think he doesn’t belong? Why swallow the clichés whole in order to barf them back at us, even the ones you don’t agree with?

    The Fractious Four have put forward some very attention-grabbing ideas in a post-Twin Towers world, where many of us have seriously questioned the purpose and limits of faith and supernaturalism. However, the Four (Dennett excluded) have put those ideas forward at the end of a fist, and in a way that questions the sanity and morality of anyone who disagrees with them. But see, that’s the point of a polemic … you put forward the most extreme version of your argument, and you don’t make any room for moderating views.

    A polemic is a deeply emotional appeal made not just with anger, but with rage; not just with sadness, but with despair; not just with fear, but with gut-wrenching terror. If it’s done skillfully, a truly masterful polemic is melded with a careful overlay of logic, scholarship, and verbal skill. A polemic is made to be powerful and arresting, and it can be a very beautiful thing indeed. But it’s not something you should make a career of, because it’s exhausting (both to create, and eventually, to witness).

    And so on, and so on. It’s all like that – treacly and belligerent at the same time, and of course wildly inaccurate in the usual way of gnu-haters. This is the basin of warm sick that Stedman urges on our attention.

    The Four Horsemen of New Atheism did their work well, but they cannot help us clean up the battlefields they created. That’s not their job. The clean-up, the strategizing, the community rebuilding, the future imagining, and the alliance-making — this is not a job for bomb makers.

    In order to move forward, we need to rely on more than mere polemics. How about if we try dialectics?[iii] Dialectics can be just as fun as polemics (and they require just as much skill), but dialectics have the added benefit of creating community, building intelligent synthesis out of seemingly intractable positions, and teaching people how to manage – rather than merely weaponize – their emotions.

    It’s one long “shut up, ur doin it rong, stop doin it the way ur doin it and do it the way I do it, stop arguing and get busy creating community.” It’s written in a fey style so that it perhaps comes across as friendly, but it is in fact very unfriendly indeed. It’s packed with fiercely hostile language about argumentative atheists and their rage and extremism. With friends like these we’ve already got all the enemies we could possibly find room for.

  • Be really nice to the people who are telling you to hush

    Stephanie Z has an excellent comment on Josh Rosenau’s post about how I’m totally wrong about what he means by “the New Atheism.”

    It’s worth remembering where this debate came from. Atheists, only recently starting to stand up and be counted in any number, are seeing the people who have been saying the same things that atheists have been saying for centuries (as noted in comment 5, then largely ignored) being told to hush up because they’re being noticed for once and that’s making trouble. These are frequently also the people who gave your rank-and-file atheist the courage to come out and who provide sympathy when coming out results in the crap it always results in. But hush, because what these other people are doing is really important.

    Of course, it is important. But so is being supported and encouraged as an out atheist. So is being able to tell people how religion hurt you or those you love without having to put bows on it. So is being able to tell other people that they have a real choice to get out of abusive religions. So is being able to run for public office. So is being able to keep your job. So is being able to keep your kids.

    But hush. And be really nice to the people who are telling you to hush. Be nice to the people who are telling you that you matter less than what they’re doing. Be nice to the people who are doing good work but only talk about why people like you are bad. Be nice to the people who might, someday let you eat at the grown-up table if you stay quiet enough at the children’s table first (and when there are no more grown-up problems you might interfere with). Hush and trust them, despite the fact that they’re calling you the problem.

    Yeah, no. Atheists are being aggressive, in part, because they’re being told to go back to being passive. They’re being argumentative because there’s a constant onslaught of messages leveled at them and everyone they have to deal with that becomes the unquestioned social background if they don’t. They’re being rude because everybody is rude sometimes, and they’re not going to be left out if you’re not. They’re being condescending because you’ve been told this before in some form, but you can’t seem to move past the fact that someone insulted you in order to hear it.

  • Shut up so that you won’t have to shut up

    Another thing about Ruse’s claim.

    Most of all I detest the New Atheism because I think it is playing into the hands of the Religious Right.

    But if you decide it’s Forbidden to say certain things lest you “play into the hands of the Religious Right” then you are already playing into the hands of the Religious Right. If you give up the right to free speech as a precaution against theocracy then you are already in a theocracy. It doesn’t make sense to give up secular rights in order to hang on to secular rights.

    I don’t want the religious Right deciding what I can say. I don’t want to defer to their sensitivities or their unreasonable beliefs. I don’t want to check what I say for acceptability to the religious Right before I go public with it.

    Ruse is arguing for burning the village to save the village. No thanks; I’d rather just hang on to the village.

    Dave Barash made a similar point on Ruse’s post:

    The argument that we shouldn’t call out the incompatability between science – any science, including evolutionary biology – and religion for fear that this will compromise our constitutional right to teach the former strikes me as logically fallacious, legally naive, pedagogically vapid and intellectually cowardly.

    I couldn’t possibly comment.

  • You people are so amusing, and a danger to the wellbeing of America

    What, again? Yes, again. Yes, for the 14 thousandth time, Michael Ruse is telling us how angry with him “the new atheists” are, how right he is in spite of their anger, how wrong and bad and dangerous and immoral they are, how brave he is, and how right and brave and amusing and important he Michael Ruse is.

    Oh dear, I am in trouble again with the New Atheists… I am being called all sorts of nasty things…Even I sometimes wonder why I am in such bad odor, apart from the fact that whenever I am confronted with people for whom disagreement is considered not just wrong but morally offensive my first tendency is to laugh and tease.

    No it isn’t! Your first tendency is to complain and boast. And then what you call “laugh and tease” other people call by harsher names. There was the time you sent a “laugh and tease” to Daniel Dennett and then forwarded the resulting exchange, civil on his part and splenetic on yours, to William Dembski without Dennett’s permission. That kind of thing is why you are in such bad odor: it’s because you give every appearance of being energetically malicious.

    I have spent forty years fighting fundamentalism, including so-called Intelligent Design Theory – on the podium, in print, and in the courtroom (as a witness for the ACLU against Scientific Creationism).

    He’s important. He wants you to know that. He wants there to be no doubt about that. He mentions it every time he throws another rancid tomato at the gnu atheists, so he must really need everyone to get how important he is. All together now: Michael Ruse is very important. Next.

     I am so close in so many respects to the new Atheists that I am hated with the kind of passion that you usually find between Protestant sects differing over the true meaning of the Whore of Babylon.  Is she just the Pope or is she the whole of the Catholic Church?  Of course I also suffer from what we might call the Laurie Essig syndrome.  I do like a bit of a bust up.

    Well exactly. (Laurie Essig apart; I have no idea what that is. No, don’t bother telling me.) Of course you like a bit of a bust up. If there isn’t one, you create it – hence emailing Dan Dennett that time, and hence all these rancid tomato articles in the HuffBop and the CHE and CisF. You like a bit of a bust up, so stop pitching fits about why are the new atheists angry at me. You know perfectly well why they are, and it’s what you wanted! So what’s the point of opening by pretending to be puzzled? To be irritating, perhaps, and I have fallen into your trap. Well that’s all right. However much you like a dust up, you are acting like a conspicuous jerk, so it’s worth falling into your trap. I didn’t fall in, I stepped gracefully in.

    But then – I’ll revert to talking about him in the 3d person now – he veers into the serious and the McCarthyesque.

     I think the New Atheists are a disaster, a danger to the wellbeing of America comparable to the Tea Party.

    “The New Atheists are a danger to the wellbeing of America” – and he wonders why he is in bad odor.

  • Baying for blood? Moi?

    Are the few people who commented on JK’s post on the Toxic Sock affair really (though metaphorically) “participants in [a] witch-hunt” and “the 21st century, virtual-world, equivalent of a medieval mob baying for the blood their latest victim”?

    No.

    I can see why they (we – I was one) look like a crowd, because there are quite a few comments and they are critical and sometimes hostile. On the other hand, there are only (if I counted correctly) 23 people total, not counting Jean, and a few of them are friendly; there’s a total of 63 comments. So a rush of mostly-critical comments, yes; a mob baying for blood, no.

    But more to the point: are we the Bad People? Are we the bashers, the demonizers, the bayers for blood, the pitchfork-wielders, in contrast to the kindly peaceable loving villagers who want only to be left alone to raise their raspberries and kiwis?

    No.

    No; I seriously don’t think so. I think the issue here is that we “new atheists” think we are allowed to be openly critical of religion, and that we think haters of “new atheists” are wrong and illiberal to keep throwing merde at us for doing so. We think that when it’s Ron Rosenbaum throwing, and we think it when it’s “William/Tom Johnson” and we think it when it’s Chris Mooney.

    So we tend to push back when people throw merde at us for doing something that is not and should not be seen as wrong. We pushed back at Mooney and Kirshenbaum when they threw merde at us in their book, and the result was that they banned some of us from their blog while allowing their pets to call us liars. That’s the backstory in a nutshell. M&K have chosen to spend a lot of time demonizing a minority that in the US is already thoroughly despised. That would be reasonable if the minority in question were Child-torturers United; but we’re not, so it isn’t.

    So no. We’re not the witch-hunters here.

    Mark Jones finds the whole idea quite ironic.

  • How to do dialogue

    Chris Mooney is in praise of dialogue again.

    The fact is, journalism (and dialogue) about science and religion are pretty difficult to oppose.

    Case in point: Last week, here in D.C. (my old, new home), I attended an event at the American Association for the Advancement of Science to reintroduce its Dialogue on Science, Ethics, and Religion…At the close of the session, I rose and posed a question. One can never remember exact words, but in essence, it was this: “I’m glad you’re trying to foster dialogue between scientists and the religious community, and I’m sure you’ll succeed. But here is a harder question–how will you foster dialogue with the New Atheists?”

    Oh that dialogue about science and religion – the one where everybody gets together and hates on “the New Atheists.” And if they’re slow to get around to that, fortunately, Chris Mooney is there to remind them to get down to it – Mr Communication, Mr Framing, Mr Can’t We All Get Along himself. Chris Mooney is a friend to everyone – except the evil marginal non-mainstream people he insists on calling “the New Atheists” as if that were a known classified species rather than a sloppy journalistic catch-all pejorative.

    Good to have you back Chris. You’re a real piece of work.

  • More lessons in civility

    Backlash against “new” atheists, chapter 479,811.

    We were initially surprised that our co-authored book, Unscientific America, was so strongly attacked for observing that scientists should strive to improve their skills at public communication–and that this probably includes not alienating potential religious allies or mainstream America. But in a sense, the attacks made a kind of sense. Mostly, they came from those for whom this advice ran contrary to their particular project of denouncing much of America and the world for alleged ignorance and superstition–the New Atheists.

    That’s “backlash” because it’s untrue, and distorted, and misleading. It’s dishonest and unreasonable, and those qualities make it backlash as opposed to disagreement or criticism. It is of course entirely possible to disagree with “the New Atheists” or “new” atheism in a reasonable and truthful way. It’s noticeable and interesting, though, that the vast bulk of the unfavorable reaction to “new” atheism is not like that, but is, rather, untrue, and distorted, and misleading. There has been a torrent of unfavorable reaction to “new” atheism, and I have seen very little of it – to tell the truth I don’t recall any, which of course is not to say that there isn’t any – that is not hostile and dishonest.

    The quoted passage is untrue and distorted in several ways. One is that it doesn’t say who “the New Atheists” are, which means it leaves the impression that anyone and everyone that someone might consider a “new” atheist fits that hostile and dishonest description.

    That’s an ugly trick. And the description itself is ugly – typical, and ugly. It’s typical of the shameless hyperbole that backlashers permit themselves to indulge in, as if it were simply self-evident that “new” atheists are on a moral level with Nazis or child-raping priests. I’m often considered and labeled a “new” atheist, and I consider myself to have a lot in common with people who are so labeled (and so I consider the label a compliment), so I’ll give my position on this description. I have no “project” to “denounce” much of the US and the world for alleged ignorance and superstition. That doesn’t describe me, and it doesn’t describe the “new” atheists I’m familiar with, either.

    It’s a curiously anti-intellectual and paranoiac description of people who make arguments in books and articles and blog posts, too. It makes us sound as if we lead Nuremberg rallies against the majority of human beings.
    In that, of course, it is simply typical of backlash rhetoric, which seems to be hell-bent on stirring up as much hatred of avowed atheists as it possibly can. It never stops surprising me how cheerfully willing the backlashers are to play with this kind of fire.

  • A schism between the nice people and the demons

    Another columnist does a bang-up job of describing explicit atheists in such a way that everyone will take care to hate them.

    the split also underscores a serious and widening schism in the broader community of non-believers, between those who want civil engagement with people of faith, and even cooperation where possible, and atheist “fundamentalists” (as Kurtz and the old guard call them) — true believers in godlessness who belittle religion and religious people at every turn, and yet by doing so can wind up sounding like the very enemy they are trying to defeat.

    That’s wrong. It’s false. It’s inaccurate. We are not “fundamentalists” in any meaningful sense, we do not belittle religion and religious people at every turn, some of us don’t belittle religious people at all, and we don’t sound at all like “the enemy.” And notice how sweetly reasonable the other side of this “schism” is made to sound – all they want is civil engagement with people of faith, and who could say boo to that?

    So, once again, we are given an unsubtle reminder that we are Other and unacceptable and to be maligned.

    “Although we” [quoting Paul Kurtz] “are skeptical of religion, we nonetheless have a positive statement to make. We want to work with religious people solving our planetary problems. This represents a basic philosophical difference.”

    No it doesn’t. Explicit atheists have sworn no oath of refusal to work with religious people solving our planetary problems. There is no basic philosophical difference about that. We don’t walk around with “Explicit Atheist” labels on our clothes, so there is no barrier to our working with anyone to solve our planetary problems. It’s a non-issue, one that’s been worked up to make explicit atheists look stupid and evil.

    The wider debate among secularists over whether to engage religious believers, or whether snark and sneer are the best ways to defeat faith and rally unbelievers to atheism, seems destined to continue.

    Same thing. Exaggerated at best. Snark and sneer is not all we do. David Gibson is himself uncivil and inaccurate. Bad journalist. No cookie.

  • The modes of inquiry are, to be sure, very different

    The World Science Festival is offering a “Faith and Science” panel, funded by the Templeton Foundation, of course. Chad Orzel disagrees with Jerry Coyne and Sean Carroll on the wrong-headedness of this. Sean points out

    there is a somewhat obvious omission of a certain viewpoint: those of us who think that science and religion are not compatible. And there are a lot of us! Also, we’re right. A panel like this does a true disservice to people who are curious about these questions and could benefit from a rigorous airing of the issues, rather than a whitewash where everyone mumbles pleasantly about how we should all just get along.

    To which Orzel responds

    I’m not convinced you need anyone on the panel to make the case that science and religion are fundamentally incompatible…The interesting subject of conversation is not so much the absolute compatibility or not of science and religion– given that neither side is really going to budge on that– but rather how it is that religious scientists reconcile the supposedly incompatible sides of the issue.

    He doesn’t know that “neither side is really going to budge on that” and therefore he doesn’t really know that a discussion of it would be immovable and uninteresting. It’s true that it’s unlikely that either side will budge as a side and as a result of being on the panel, but what individuals including those attending the panel will do is much less obvious. His dismissal is, as so often with accommodationists, flippant and dogmatic at once.

    Josh Rosenau thinks it’s good stuff though – in fact better than that: he says Orzel is absolutely right.

    Someone like Dawkins would stop the World Science Festival panel cold. The whole point Affirmative Atheists are making is that there is no dialogue to be had. Which means that the panel would descend into a metaconversation about whether there should even be conversations like the one they were supposed to be having. And that wouldn’t inform anyone.

    Why wouldn’t that inform anyone? Rosenau doesn’t say. Why should there be conversations like the one they were supposed to be having at a science fest? It’s certainly not obvious to me, given that science and “faith” operate in rather different ways. It’s also not obvious to me that, or why, an explanation of that fact would not be interesting.

    Larry Moran comments on Orzel and Rosenau.

  • Fresh deep boundaries

    Andrew Brown spots another opportunity to piss on “the new atheism” and pounces on it with his usual cheerful malice.

    …the new atheism, with its constant use of “religion” as a term which means something (nasty) is an attempt at social construction. In particular it’s an attempt to make fresh deep boundaries between ingroup and outgroup.

    Yes, in some senses, and partly. But one could say the same thing about the civil rights movement; about science; about feminism; about scholarship; about liberalism; about conservatism; about any human endeavor with actual specific articulated ideas or truth-claims. And it might and should occur to Brown that religion too is very often an attempt to make fresh deep boundaries between ingroup and outgroup, but for worse reasons and with less warrant. But Brown is much too hostile to atheism to give that sort of thought any space in his head.

  • Dissent

    For the record – the (critical but reasonable) comment I tried to post on Chris Mooney’s post on science and communication yesterday has now been deleted. Yesterday it was showing up (for me only) as being held in moderation, and today it’s gone.

    It is possible of course to think that no matter how reasonable one particular comment may be, the person behind it is not. Mooney doesn’t delete all dissent on his posts, so clearly he does think something along those lines – that I am myself inherently unreasonable and unallowable, even if I do manage to fake up a reasonably mild comment at some particular moment.

    I think he’s wrong. I can easily see why he would resent my criticisms, but the fact remains, I think he’s wrong. I think I’m not so unreasonable as all that. I think I’m a more honest and forthright disputant than he is.

  • New sandbox rules

    Karl Giberson explains about political science in the US and what it means for how we have to behave:

    America has a complex and enduring commitment to pluralism. We want people to be free to act — and believe — as they please. But we must all play in the same sandbox, so we are attentive to the idiosyncrasies of our playmates, especially when they don’t make sense to us.

    By “attentive” it turns out he means we don’t disagree with them, and by “idiosyncrasies” it turns out he means beliefs, no matter how unreasonable and arbitrary and evidence-free. So we must all play in the same sandbox, meaning, apparently, that we must all spend our lives three inches from all 300 million of the rest of us, and therefore we must never disagree with any of the beliefs of any of the 300 million.

    What a happy and fulfilling life that sounds like! In airless proximity to 300 million people and forbidden to dispute any of their beliefs no matter how demented those beliefs may be. If that’s what pluralism means, I’d better start packing for Antarctica, where there’s a little room to breathe.

    Giberson goes on to explain that “informed religious belief can accommodate modern science” and that things are looking good in that department, then he goes on from there to explain that the only problem is, “New Atheists.” Then he goes on to spend the vast bulk of the piece saying what’s so awful about “New Atheists” – thus violating his own rule about how to play in the sandbox, I would have thought, but he doesn’t seem to notice.

    Dennet’s brother-in-arms, atheist Jerry Coyne, raked Brown University cell biologist Ken Miller and me over the coals in The New Republic for our claims that Christians can unapologetically embrace science.

    Enough with the jokes; now I’m serious. That’s a really offensive claim. Not offensive in the frivolous sense the word is so often used to convey, but genuinely offensive, because it is untrue. Coyne doesn’t rake Miller and Giberson over any coals; he says good things about both of them in that long review in The New Republic; he also disagrees with much of what they claim in their respective books. He does it honestly, and carefully, and with detailed argument. That is not the same thing as raking people over the coals! It is offensive for Karl Giberson to make that accusation in a large-circulation national newspaper. Yet here he is telling other people how to play nicely. It’s so typical – say things about atheists that are not true, in the very act of telling atheists to be Nicer.

    For the sake of argument, let us set aside questions about the truth of religion vs. the truth of science. Suppose there is no such thing as religious truth, as Richard Dawkins argued in The God Delusion. Allow that the “New Atheist Noise Machine,” as American University communications professor Matt Nisbet calls it, has a privileged grasp of the truth. Even with these concessions, it still appears that the New Atheists are behaving like a boorish bunch of intellectual bullies.

    Does it? Or does it just appear that they are describing reality as they see it, and disputing other descriptions of reality that seem to them to be wrong. That’s how it appears to me. It also appears to me that Karl Giberson is confusing “saying something I don’t like” with “behaving like a boorish bunch of intellectual bullies” – while doing some genuine bullying himself.

    There is something profoundly un-American about demanding that people give up cherished, or even uncherished, beliefs just because they don’t comport with science.

    But nobody is “demanding” that – because nobody is in a position to demand that. People are pointing out incompatibilities, in public discussions. It seems to me there is “something profoundly un-American” about treating that as impermissible.

    I had thought Giberson was a mistaken but decent guy (I got that impression from Coyne’s review, ironically enough), but now I know better.

  • Be Quieters v atheists

    It reminds me of the old Bugs Bunny line – “Of course you know, this means war.”

    This means war. The grotesque punishment meted out to Harry Taylor might as well be an official government announcement that atheists have no rights.

    It is a common accusation that the “new” atheists are bullies who gang up on poor innocent bystanders like Mooney and De Dora and other Be Quieters.

    Well – not so fast. Let’s pause and consider. Who exactly is bullying whom?

    Which is the majoritarian view? Which is the conventional wisdom? Atheism? Hardly. No, the majoritarian conventional wisdom is, at the very least, that religion deserves an almost infinite amount of “respect” and that any atheist who falls short of that heightened “respect” is automatically a “New” aggressive militant brash extreme atheist and subject to being called just that by people with prominent soapboxes like…Mooney and De Dora.

    The dissenting view is a minority one, and it is somewhat odd to accuse people with minority views of bullying people with majority views. Only somewhat odd; it is of course literally possible that, say, an atheist could physically bully a theist or a Be Quieter. But to see the disagreements between Be Quieters and atheists as the latter bullying the former seems warped to me. To me it looks much more as if various prominent Be Quieters with lots of media access started shouting at atheists and calling them names, and then atheists fought back. I don’t consider fighting back “bullying.”

    This always happens when people start to feel their oats and speak up, you know. It happened with the civil rights movement, it happened with the women’s movement, it happened with the gay rights movement. There are always anxious people hopping up and down on the edges saying, “Oh dear oh dear I agree with you, I support you, I’m on your side, but for god’s sake slow down, and ssshhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, don’t say it so loudly, be careful, watch out, keep your head down, you mustn’t be so extreme. I fully support you but be patient! Extremeness never got anyone anywhere. Be patient, be respectful, be well-dressed and punctual and neatly brushed, and in a few decades, or it may be generations, things will start to get better, I promise you.”

    Fuck that. (I should work up a “fuck that” dance to go with Stewart’s “go fuck yourself” dance.) Things are starting to get better, Harry Taylor notwithstanding, but that’s because we have been making noise rather than being quiet. Annie Laurie Gaylor says as much.

    “It used to be a lot worse,” said Ms. Gaylor, 54, an atheist whose organization, the Freedom From Religion Foundation, recently won a suit in federal court here that declared the National Day of Prayer to be a violation of the First Amendment. “Things are changing. Society is becoming more secularized. It’s becoming acceptable to be atheist and agnostic. And there are more of us.”

    And there are more of us. Not fewer – not quieter – not more apologetic – but more, and more vocal, and more forthright. And that’s how change is made.