Tag: The backlash

  • Look out, he’s got a whip

    And last item on your exciting breakfast menu, all items with complimentary orange slice and sprig of mint, the Daily Mail on Dawkins as sekrit descendant of slaveowners.

    Never mind, don’t get excited, it’s just the Telegraph article, reported. It does add one stupidity of its own though –

    Equality groups are now calling on him to apologise for his family’s past.

    Are they? Really? Groups, plural? Independently of reporters phoning them and asking for a quote? Can you name as many as one?

    Plus they added an illustration.

     Ancestors of Richard Dawkins are believed to have been linked to slavery

     captioned

    Ancestors of Richard Dawkins are believed to have been linked to slavery

    Filthy. They’re a filthy crew. We knew that, but it’s worth saying anyway.

  • Argumentum ad haircut

    There’s a separate, unrelated hit piece on Dawkins in the Sunday Times, which I haven’t yet read because of the paywall, but a comment at RDF quotes from it, and that’s quite informative by itself.

    I’ve just been reading an article in today’s (19/02/12) Sunday Times By Camilla Long. It’s the front page of the News Review section and has a photo of Richard on the front page of the section. It really is the most appalling article. The very first sentence gives a flavour of how it will go, “Richard Dawkins has an extremely unfortunate face in that he always looks angry, even when he is quite calm.” I don’t know who she met, or if she has even bothered looking at the photo that accompanies the article, but that is not a description I would recognise of Richard.

    The whole article then has a series of slurs designed to belittle Richard, he has a “nibbly little voice”, he has a “thin smile”, he has a “slightly prissy manner”, he has a “crushing misanthropy”, he never just says any thing, he “retorts”, “fulminates”, “whinnies”, “shouts”, “scoffs”, “snapping”, “hoots”, “sneers”. An insinuation is made that he is “hideously pompous”, when he picks up a copy of the survey he “stalks over to the desk and snatches up a copy”. She even has a go at his haircut and the way he is dressed and his looks, saying he was “gnashing his tiny teeth”  and describing him as “complete with anorak, creased tie and grey hair cut into indignant little flaps”.

    Jesus Christ. Hair cut into indignant little flaps? What on earth?

    There’s just no end to it. It’s disgusting.

    You know…I hate the pope, as you know. I hate him with a passion – but mostly because of his office. He’s clearly not the warmest or most comparatively-liberal pope there’s ever been, but so what, however nice the occupant may be, the office itself is a monstrosity. I hate the pope, but I’ve never picked on him for his looks. Of course that’s partly because I’m ugly as shit myself so it would be unbecoming and silly to rail at other people for being ugly – but that’s really not all. The main reason I don’t do that is because I think it’s shitty. I think people who do that are shitty. I think Camilla Long is shitty and I think the Sunday Times is shitty.

  • The disgraceful Telegraph article on Dawkins

    The Telegraph hit piece on Dawkins is out (as many of you already know; it’s nearly 5 in the afternoon in the UK, while it’s only a fresh-faced nearly 9 in the morning here on the west coast of the US). It’s even worse than I expected it to be, and that’s saying something. It’s vicious slavering bullshit. It’s a disgrace to journalism.

    He has railed against the evils of religion, and lectured the world on the virtues of atheism.

    Now Richard Dawkins, the secularist campaigner against “intolerance and suffering”, must face an awkward revelation: he is descended from slave owners and his family estate was bought with a fortune partly created by forced labour.

    It’s not “awkward.” We’re all descended from people who did bad shit. Count on it. God, just think, here’s me, a feminist, yet half of my ancestors are men!! Omigod that’s so awkward; how will I ever explain it?

    There is no “estate”; there’s a farm. Everybody alive now depends partly on wealth created by forced labor.

    He is now facing calls to apologise and make reparations for his family’s past.

    Esther Stanford-Xosei, of Lewisham, south London, the co-vice chairman of the Pan-African Reparations Coalition in Europe, said: “There is no statute of limitations on crimes against humanity.

    “The words of the apology need to be backed by action. The most appropriate course would be for the family to fund an educational initiative telling the history of slavery and how it impacts on communities today, in terms of racism and fractured relationships.”

    Ah, Adam Lusher, that’s naughty.

    What he means is, he phoned Esther Stanford-Xosei and solicited that statement from her. The way he phrases it, it looks as if “calls” are coming spontaneously (despite the fact that this article is the first anyone has heard of this “revelation” apart from Richard’s account of Lusher’s obnoxious phone calls). That’s a sneaky journalistic trick, presenting their own “calls,” or “calls” that they’ve solicited for a story, as if they were independent. That trick borders on deceit; it borders on mendacity, not to say lying. It’s technically true but highly misleading. It’s contemptible. It shouldn’t be the job of journalism to play tricks of that kind.

    There’s more, in other papers. This stuff has to be bitten off and chewed one by one.

  • And another one, and more, and more

    This one also from the Telegraph, by someone called Stephen Bayley (by which I mean, as you may remember, that I haven’t heard of him before, not that he’s obscure or beneath my lofty notice). It has no content, it’s just a brief volley of abuse.

    …Richard Dawkins, a fanatic disguised as a scientist. And surely, in the powerful counterproductive sway of his noisy arguments, proof of the existence of God? Terrible to awake in that groggy matutinal state when things lodge in your addled brain and hear shrill, ugly, cruel arguments on the radio. Atheists seem to be very good at dogma. Dawkins seems not to understand that his own zealotry is itself a sort of religious quest. And he applies the “logic” of science, itself a fallible human construct, to a beautiful mystery. Sure, organised religion has caused appalling conflicts. But it has also caused Michelangelo, Milton and Bach. Organised atheism has produced North Korea. There is really not much more that needs to be said.

    It’s dispiriting, seeing how willing and eager people are to say really filthy things about someone who doesn’t admire their religion. It’s dispiriting to see how eager the major media are to publish this kind of shit-throwing, and to commission more and more and more and more of it. It’s dispiriting to see that Andrew Brown has yet another entry, as inaccurate and intemperate and illiberal as the others. It’s dispiriting to see all this lying rage pouring out of people who should know better and published by media outlets that should do better. It’s stupid, it’s nasty, it’s coercive, it’s dishonest. It’s dispiriting.

  • Telegraph does research, discovers that Dawkins has ancestors

    Well now that’s a new wrinkle – a Telegraph reporter phoning Dawkins to say, “Oi! Do you realize your ancestors owned slaves in Jamaica in the 18th century? What have you got to say to that? One was named Henry. They owned many slaves. Do you feel any guilt about it?” Then when Dawkins cuts the call short because it’s so stupid plus he has a lecture to prepare, the reporter phones back (despite having been dismissed, which seems quite ill-mannered) to say, “Natural selection has a lot to do with genes yeh? Well, some people might suggest that you could have inherited a gene for supporting slavery from Henry Dawkins.”

    Did you ever? And that’s not even all of it. He dared Dawkins to deny Wilberforce was a Christian (and forgot to mention all the slave-owners who were Christians, he said Dawkins should make financial reparations, and he said the profit from the slaves probably paid for an “estate” belonging to Dawkins’s family, which in fact is a small struggling farm.

    The reporter and reporters for all the UK media owe Dawkins quite a lot of money for all the pay they’ve been given for “researching” and writing this kind of dreck.

  • Beware the frumious bandersnatch

    Polly Toynbee thinks secularism is not such a terrible idea. She’s not completely persuaded by claims that secularism is ruining all the things.

    …the faiths are glad to circle their wagons round [the queen] against the unbelievers. Each has their own divinely revealed unique truth, often provoking mortal conflict, Muslim v Copt, Catholic v Protestant, Hindu v Muslim or Sunni v Shia. But suddenly the believers are united in defence against the secular, willing to suspend the supremacy of their own prophets to agree that any religion, however alien, from elephant god to son of God, is better than none.

    They can all feel their victimhood now, facing what Baroness Warsi called a rising tide of “militant secularisation” reminiscent of “totalitarian regimes”. Warsi on the warpath headed a delegation to the Vatican of six ministers, all agreeing the common enemy was not just the secularists but the “liberal elite”, too. How the Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph loved wallowing in the CofE as victim against the rise of christianophobia, as if the waspish Prof Richard Dawkins had thrown them all to the lions.

    And as if the Daily Mail and the Telegraph were powerless penniless orphans living in a gutter on crusts.

    The prefix “aggressive” or “militant” is now super-glued to the word “secularist”, but as president of the British Humanist Association and honorary associate of the National Secular Society, I find nothing extreme about trying to keep religion separate from the state. Aggressive? You should see this week’s “burn in hell” messages to the BHA attacking “that spastic Hawking who denies God”, and many more obscene unprintables.

    Or you could check out the stuff that gets thrown at Jessica Ahlquist, or Barbara J King’s standard-issue insults directed at Richard Dawkins, or any of a number of daily verbal attacks on secularists and atheists.

    Rev Giles Fraser wielded a deft stiletto, accusing secularists of closet racism. “Attacking religious belief in general neatly fits alongside a hostility to Islam.” I am hostile to any religion if it ever cuts across civic freedoms, for its own people or for anyone who challenges it. Without causing gratuitous offence for the sake of it, there is a duty to stand by brave free-speech campaigners, such as Maryam Namazie, organiser for One Law for All. An anti-Sharia meeting was broken up last month at Queen Mary College. Police were called after a man came in, filmed the audience and said he’d hunt down anyone who insulted the prophet. They campaign against Muslim arbitration tribunals, whose judgments can be applied in civil courts, nobody knowing if women suffered religious intimidation to sign away rights.

    I like that “neatly fits alongside” – it avoids the drawbacks of just coming right out and saying that dislike of Islam is hatred of Muslims. It’s deniable and subtle and imprecise; just the ticket for a smear that won’t get your hands dirty.

    Julian Baggini, writing in the Guardian yesterday took a swipe at secularism, wondering why bother with trivia like prayers at council meetings. He omits the heart of the matter, such as the right to die. Or the third of state schools run by religions, mainly CofE, oversubscribed as their results are burnished by admissions policies that consign an unfair share of poor or chaotic families to neighbouring schools.

    And as for the trivial matter of prayers at council meetings, well, the “Communities secretary” is fixing that.

    The government is activating a power it says will allow councils in England to hold prayers at meetings.

    Communities secretary Eric Pickles says he is “effectively reversing” the High Court’s “illiberal ruling” that a Devon council’s prayers were unlawful.

    Illiberal? The separation of church and state is illiberal? So it’s liberal to impose Christian prayers on everyone, including people of other religions and people of no religion (not to mention Christians who don’t want to do their praying in the workplace)?

    Militant secularists just can’t catch a break.

  • NPR throws mud at Dawkins

    Oh noes, says Barbara J King at NPR, that mean Dawkins guy is the keynote speaker at the Reason Rally. That will wreck the whole thing, right?

    No, but Barbara J King does her best to make it so by predicting it, as pseudo-concerned atheist-bashers so often do.

    In a 2006 interview with Steve Paulson at Salon (during his tenure as professor of public understanding of science), Dawkins suggested that greater intelligence is correlated with atheism. He also said that when it encourages belief in the absence of evidence, “there’s something very evil about faith.”

    Yes; and?

    Here is what he said in the full version – note first of all that it’s the interviewer who introduces the word “evil”:

    My sense is that you don’t just think religion is dishonest. There’s something evil about it as well.

    Well, yes. I think there’s something very evil about faith, where faith means believing in something in the absence of evidence, and actually taking pride in believing in something in the absence of evidence. And the reason that’s dangerous is that it justifies essentially anything. If you’re taught in your holy book or by your priest that blasphemers should die or apostates should die — anybody who once believed in the religion and no longer does needs to be killed — that clearly is evil. And people don’t have to justify it because it’s their faith. They don’t have to say, “Well, here’s a very good reason for this.” All they need to say is, “That’s what my faith says.” And we’re all expected to back off and respect that. Whether or not we’re actually faithful ourselves, we’ve been brought up to respect faith and to regard it as something that should not be challenged. And that can have extremely evil consequences.

    And? Is that such an obviously wrong, or evil, thing to think? We see examples of the consequences here every day.

    But King thinks it is obviously wrong.

    Slam. That noise you hear is the sound of thousands of minds closing down and turning away from anything that Dawkins might go on to say about science.

    By choosing words hurtful and harsh, Dawkins closes off a potential channel of communication about science with people who hold faith dear in their lives.

    Maybe, some, but maybe some others – assuming they read the interview itself and not just King’s six word gotcha – will see his point. King, however, does her best to prevent that.

    Will Dawkins rally The Reason Rally’s secular pilgrims with the same scorn towards the faithful that he’s shown to date? We’ll have to wait and see. If he does, he’ll drive a stake in the heart of the Rally’s stated goal. He will confirm that some of the negative stereotypes associated with the nonreligious — intolerance of the faithful, first and foremost — are at times aligned with reality.

    In the meantime, the rest of us, scientists, science writers, and followers-of-science alike, can opt to rally around a different principle.  Whatever our position on the continuum from deep faith to ardent atheism, we can lose the sneers. We can explain and, when necessary, defend science with rigor and passion and genuine civility.

    But it wasn’t a sneer. It was a very serious point, and it’s not obviously wrong. Arguably it’s the people who insist on protecting the feelings of people who “hold faith dear in their lives” who do the most harm.

  • Thou shalt not bear false witness

    From a few days ago, the same old dreck – the priest George Pitcher calls Richard Dawkins “shrill.”

    First there’s the usual boring empty non-argument –

    The narrow and rather meaningless argument to which Dawkins confines himself is the incessant charge that there is no “evidence” for God. And evidence, of course, is defined only within the strictures of his own empirical scientism. The problem is that faith isn’t primarily evidential, as he demands it to be, but revelatory – and we would claim no less true for all that in explaining the human condition.

    Oh yes? We need a “revelation” to explain the human condition? And when we have one, it’s reliable? Please.

    That contemptuously lazy pass at justifying belief in god accomplished, Pitcher gets on with the “shrill” accusation.

    The shrill voice of Dawkins is gradually being marginalised by those of no more faith than him, but who nevertheless perceive mystery in humanity and, while not accepting the presence of God in the world, are prepared to face in the same direction as the rest of us and stand in awe and wonder.

    God that’s bad writing. “Of no more faith than him”? Yuck. And then he moves on briskly without bothering to pick a subject for the verb, and then changes to a new one – what a dog’s breakfast. But as for shrill – George Pitcher has a nerve calling anyone else shrill. Remember him after the election, rejoicing that Evan Harris had lost his seat?

    A stranger to principle, Harris has coat-tailed some of the most vulnerable and weak people available to him to further his dogged, secularist campaign to have people of faith – any faith – swept from the public sphere. The Lib Dems served the purpose of providing him with a parliamentary seat, but his true love was the National Secular Society. For a doctor, he supported the strange idea that terminally ill people should be helped to kill themselves.

    I commented at the time. That’s the man who thinks Dawkins is shrill.

    At any rate – Russell posted on the “shrillness” meme, and Richard pointed out that Pitcher told a big fat lie in the Mail piece. Yes, a whopper. Pitcher said Hitchens said cuddly things about Christianity near the end, “much to the evident frustration of his interlocutor Richard Dawkins.” That was rather stupid of him, since he should have realized Richard could just say “no he didn’t.” But apparently he is stupid (as well as shrill), because he said it anyway. Richard said “no he didn’t.”

    I was his interlocuter in his very last interview, for the Christmas issue of New Statesman, which I edited, and I can state with total certainty that he expressed no sympathy whatsoever, generous or otherwise, for the Christian worldview. So that is a lie, and so is the “evident frustration of his interlocutor Richard Dawkins.”

    Shrill George Pitcher caught in lie shock.

  • “Evil in one of its purest forms”

    Are we seeing a new trend? A new variety of passive-aggressive accommodationist mendacious gnu-bashing?

    Ray Moscow alerted me to a new* entry in the genre at something called The Slacktiverse by someone called “Froborr.” It starts with: I’m an atheist. That’s my identity. It would be traumatic to change that. It’s just as traumatic to change the other way around. It ends with: Therefore, Greta Christina and other overt atheists are evil.

    There’s a lot in between, of course, but that’s where it ends up.

    Greta Christina posted last month[1] that, “For many atheists, our main goal is persuading the world out of religion.” She goes on in the same post to establish herself in favor of that position:

    We don’t want to see this happen by law or violence or any kind of force, of course. But we think religion isn’t just mistaken. We think it’s harmful. Some of think it’s appallingly harmful. Some of us think it’s inherently harmful: that the very qualities that make religion unique are exactly what make it capable of doing terrible harm. What’s more, we see religion as not just hurting atheists. We see it as hurting billions of believers. So we’re working towards a world where it no longer exists.

    So, according to Greta Christina, her primary goal as an atheist is to make most of the world’s population suffer the trauma of losing their faith, so that they can then be better (read: more Greta Christina-like) people with truer (read: more similar to Greta Christina’s) beliefs. And I should be okay with this, because she promises not to use legal coercion or violence to bring it about.

    I am not okay with this.

    The post in question is What Are The Goals of the Atheist Movement? (Why is there a footnote instead of a hyperlink? What’s that about? The hyperlink is a convention for a reason: it’s much easier. What on earth is the point of reverting to the print convention?)

    Now, notice that Froborr misrepresents what Greta said, immediately below the passage where she said it. She said “we’re working towards a world where it no longer exists” and Froborr misrepresents that as “mak[ing] most of the world’s population suffer the trauma of losing their faith.” Here’s the mistake: working towards a world where religion no longer exists means just that, not working towards a world where everyone has been converted from theism to atheism. There’s a whole spectrum of ways that can happen. One is that atheism becomes more visible and available, and people who are lukewarm or doubtful or closeted feel more free to become atheist or secular or humanist (or all three). Another is that as that happens, more children grow up without pressure to be theist. Another is that many people are persuaded by atheist arguments but the process is not traumatic or an experience of “losing” something, but a liberation or a revelation of vast possibilities. And then over all, there is no actual missionary activity. There is public discussion; there is not knocking on the front door with a tract. There are books; there are not atheist gangs invading churches and mosques.

    Froborr ends up with:

    You do not have a right to make others suffer for your beliefs.

    No one has that right. Ever.

    If Greta Christina’s assessment of religion were correct–if all religious belief is both false and inherently harmful–then religion would be not only a mental illness, but the most widespread mental illness in history. But even if that were true (and I do not believe it is), you do not have a right to cure people by force unless they are demonstrably an immediate danger to themselves or others.

    I cannot reiterate this enough: Proselytizing is yet another word for making people suffer in order to transform them into what you think they should be, for no other reason than because they are not what you think they should be.

    What Greta Christina advocates–what any atheist advocates when they suggest “increasing the numbers of atheists” as a laudable goal, what any adherent of any religion advocates when they suggest “increasing the number of members of my religion”–is evil in one of its purest forms.

    Evil in one of its purest forms.

    Extraordinary.

    *New but brand-new; it’s dated January 16 thus pre-dates Be Scofield’s similar piece.

  • The real privilege

    Someone commenting on Scofield’s Tikkun post endorses the claim that “new atheists” are totes privileged.

    The literature, social spaces, and most widely recognized voices of atheism are predominantly populated by Western, white, male, heterosexual, cis, middle class (and above) people…[T]he lopsided demography of our communities tends to draw upon otherwise privileged life experiences, and as you have illustrated, this privilege inadvertently shines through in our literature and our actions.

    True up to a point, but there’s another way to view that, which Scofield seems to be not just overlooking, but perhaps self-disabled from even recognizing.

    Many of those “voices of atheism” are privileged, but what is the most conspicuous kind of privilege they have? It’s actually not anything mentioned in that list, except for the hint in “middle class (and above).”

    The really big privilege they have is education, and the associated ability and freedom to think critically about their culture’s myths and how those myths are related to social control.

    And what they’re doing with that privilege is trying their damndest to share it.

    Not hog it, not Bogart it, not put a wall around it with a sign on the gate saying Rabble Keep Out, not charge a fee for it, not demand an oath or an initiation ritual as the price of entry, but share it.

    Another way to put it is that their most basic form of privilege is cultural capital, and again, what they are doing with that capital is trying to spread it around.

    Hank Fox has an argument in his Red Neck Blue Collar Atheist that has to do with the privilege of education, including self-education. (Hank doesn’t have a background of privilege. On page 2 he writes, “I don’t know of a single blood relative who got a college degree. Neither of my parents even finished high school.” But Hank is saturated with the privilege of self-education. He has the privilege of valuing it, of doing it, of sharing it.) The basic idea is that without education, people come up with bad mental models for how things work, relying on luck and magical ways of trying to get some, instead of figuring out what they need to do to change their circumstances. That’s a matter of privilege, if you like, but the good news is that it’s a kind that is inherently non-zero-sum…provided there is funding for good universal education, which there so often isn’t.

    The privilege of education and cultural capital has this awkward aspect – often called “elitism” – that educated people may well know more about something than uneducated people do. That’s inequality. That’s class. That’s a one-up one-down situation. There is always the potential for shame and humiliation…but there is also the potential for learning and sharing. Yes no doubt it can be shaming when some posh Oxford guy says your god gives no sign of existing…but that’s not all there is to it. Would it be shaming to hear some posh Oxford guy reading the news tell you that Robert Mugabe had decided to retire? You do the math.

     

     

  • “New atheists” are privileged racist homophobic imperialists

    Be Scofield tweeted me about a new article of his at Tikkun, apparently hoping I would dislike it enough to give it publicity by saying why I dislike it. Ok, sure, why not. I do dislike it. Why do I dislike it? Well because it quite unbashfully calls “the New Atheists” racist.

    It also claims that “New Atheists” see everything from a privileged point of view.

    Racism In the New Atheist Movement

    When Greta Christina says that religious people should be actively converted to atheism or Dawkins likens religion to a virus that infects the mind they are effectively saying “we know what’s best for you.” This is the crux of the problem with the New Atheists. They’ve identified belief in God or religion as the single most oppressive factor in people’s lives and feel justified in liberating people from it because they have “reason” on their side. However, as Reinhold Niebuhr warned, reason is always tainted with the prejudices of the privileged groups in society. He called this the historicity of reason. Thus, the way the New Atheists understand the designation “harmful” or “poisonous” is largely shaped by what they view as most harmful from their own social location.

    Oh yes? But who says Greta Christina (since she’s the example Scofield chose to illustrate that claim) belongs to a privileged group? Who, in particular, says she does so more than Be Scofield? He has some forms of privilege that she doesn’t have. Why does he get to italicize from their own social location by way of rebuking Greta, as if she loomed over him like the lord of the manor? Why is her reason more tainted by privilege than his? I don’t know; I suspect he’s just posturing.

    He quotes Sikivu Hutchinson and then adds

    If you are in a privileged position, as many of the white New Atheists are you may think that it’s easy to just give up your religion. But this of course ignores the complexities of how religion operates in the lives of people everyday. For African Americans, Christianity and Islam have played a central role in the process of humanization – both in the eyes of the dominant culture and in building up the community, personal identity and psychological resilience to resist white supremacy, slavery and segregation. “Reason” as articulated by the new atheists makes no room for marginalized populations need to resist these forms of oppression, nor recognizes the important role that religion has played in this process. Rather, the simplistic labels of harmful, poisonous or virus are carelessly used to discredit it.

    Lots of typos and mistakes in there, but more to the point – Christianity and Islam also played a central role in white or Arab supremacy, slavery and segregation. Without that central role maybe African Americans wouldn’t need them now, because they wouldn’t have been so disadvantaged by racial supremacy, slavery and segregation. Does Scofield recognize the important role that religion has played in that process? No; he’s too busy telling us he’s better than the New Atheists.

    As citizens of the U.S. we of course live on occupied land. Over the course of hundreds of years we systematically wiped out Native American cultures that were indigenous to the area. The arrogance of “we know what’s best for them” dominated. Their religious and cultural traditions were prohibited. It was the height of cultural imperialism. Of course Native Americans are extremely marginalized and face numerous pressing social issues today. Rest assured, their oppression has nothing to do with their beliefs in God or their traditional religious practices and ceremonies. Unfortunately, when Greta Christina says we’d be better off without religion and insists that we convert believers to atheism she is reproducing cultural imperialism against Native Americans. She knows best because she has reason on her side.

    I think I’ll just leave that there on its own, for pure contemplation. Be Scofield is comparing Greta Christina to imperialists obliterating Native Americans.

    If many of the New Atheists want to hold to an absolutist position that religion is harmful (despite not being based on any scientific evidence) then they inherently sweep into their critique Native Americans, the gay men who benefited so immensely from MCCSF during the Aids crisis and the Dinka tradition of Africa. Any benefit that the Nation of Islam or the Black Church had for African Americans is negated by the insistence upon religion or belief in God as the single most oppressive issue. If they make qualifications and recognize that yes, there is something wrong with waving a finger at Native Americans and scolding them for their childish ways, then they must abandon generalized sweeping notions like “religion is harmful.” They can’t have it both ways. Either they lecture every culture in the world about their religious traditions (after all you’ve discovered the TRUTH) and as a result reproduce cultural imperialism or make room for a more complex analysis.

    Many of these New Atheists claim that holding onto the belief in supernatural entities is absurd or irrational. However, there is nothing more absurd than whiteness, class oppression and patriarchy.

    There’s really nothing they won’t stoop to, is there.

  • Still alive

    Whenever I see Joe Hoffmann’s latest burst of hatred at Da Noo Atheists, I decide to ignore it because he obviously loves the attention. (He’s like Michael Ruse that way. Exactly like Michael Ruse. Ruse writes a stupid generalized sneer about noo atheism, gets flack for the stupidity and generality, writes an aggrieved response to the flack. Repeat. Repeat repeat repeat. This is what Hoffmann has taken to doing.) Then other people don’t ignore it, so once the pleasure of seeing the post ignored is no longer available, I shrug and don’t ignore it too.

    So the latest one, the New Year edition, is pathetically titled “Re-Made in America: Remembering the New Atheism (2006-2011).” As if he could make it be dead just by entering a terminal date. Nice try, Joe, but it’s not dead yet.

    And then – it’s the usual kind of thing. Elegantly written and witty in its way, but vitiated by spite and generality. Lots of magisterial summing up with no actual examples of the badness he so freely attributes to people he dislikes. There’s not really much more to say about it. It’s so arbitrary that it undermines itself; it’s embarrassingly obvious that attention is the only purpose.

    The funny (as opposed to witty) part is the predictable rambling self-referential slush of his acolyte “steph.”

    You’re so funny Veronica.  Yay, congratulations you beat me!  Isn’t it ‘wonderful’… I know how that makes you screech and run and tell every other ant all about it. “Everybody knows”: it’s a song.  Do you know it?

    Mr MacDonald grants Dawkins favours freely too?  More fool old Mack, eh?

    I wonder what your definition of angry is.  This post is witty, yes, and incisive.  Accurate as always.  The style is no different from previous essays on other websites.  Erudite and eternally critical, which is the nature of good academic scholarship.  He’s always consistently interesting don’t you think?  No?  It’s fascinating that when the subjects of a critique are atheists, the subjects angrily growl that it’s ‘angry’ critique.  Generally critiques of atheism are described by atheists as either ‘angry’, written by a ‘faitheist’ or even as ‘passively aggressive’ or ‘accommodationist’.  How can anyone be ‘angry’ with something that’s destroying itself Veronica? How can anyone be angry with something so small?  It’s blindingly obvious the ‘atheism’ in this essay is on the road to oblivion and I can’t imagine how your imagination stretches to Joe being angry unless it’s evidence of your own psychological projection.  If only David and Goliath were true … but atheists just ain’t go the right pebbles.

    Do admit. Notice especially the vulgar ”old Mack” – from someone who sets herself up as a critic of gnu rudeness.

    Sad. Hoffmann really isn’t vulgar in that way. It’s sad that he’s reduced to friends like that.

     

  • You did ask

    I was asked what I think of the quotes from the NO God Blog and Al Stefanelli quoted in Chris Stedman’s most recent Letter to the Atheists. Ok; what I think.

    The first one is from a post titled “A Point was missed” on what appears to be a blog on the website of American Atheists. It’s not signed. It’s short. It’s dated April 29, 2010. It seems about as random, as an “example” of anything, as one could get. The bit quoted is very badly and stupidly worded; no disagreement there; but so what? I don’t even know who wrote it. I certainly don’t take it as representative of anything. It’s nearly two years old. What on earth is the point of dredging up an old obscure anonymous blog post as part of what is called a “sampling of comments from prominent atheists about Islam and Muslims”? Yes of course you can find people of any point of view or faction or party or any other category, saying stupid things, but what of it?

    The second is from Al Stefanelli here at FTB ten days ago – so much better on the recent, and representative, and non-anonymous score; but when you read it you find it’s much worse on the making the case score. In context the quoted bit is not shocking or (to use Stedman’s term) “hateful.” Al doesn’t just say “Islam sucks booya”; he makes a case. You’d never know it from Stedman’s article.

    So that’s what I think. The first was a crappy comment but it’s obscure and far from recent so why bring it up, and the second was a forcefully argued comment and not “hateful.”

    And for dessert I will say a little more about what I think.

    As someone who is regularly targeted with false critiques by fellow atheist activists — most frequently that I believe that religious beliefs should be immune from criticism, a claim I countered in this post, or that I am an apologist for religion, for which no evidence has ever been provided — I can attest firsthand that the debate over how atheists should approach religion is perhaps the most contentious conversation in the atheist movement. It is a frequent cause of disagreement, and the disagreements it inspires are very often vitriolic and personal.

    This is what I think. Stedman isn’t “targeted” by atheists. Atheists reply to things Stedman says about them (us) or publishes other people saying about them/us or both. That’s not “targeting.” To reply is not to target. Atheists don’t just hide behind trees and pounce on Stedman for no reason; atheists react when Stedman does some shit-stirring about them, as he does with dreary regularity, including in this very post.

    Stedman gets quite a lot of attention and praise for this shit-stirring – this “targeting,” one might almost call it. I think that’s probably a major reason he keeps doing it – from his point of view it works. It’s self-pitying and disingenuous to complain about people responding to his endless accusations. I suspect that he actually wants the responses, and that that’s why he keeps stirring the shit. He gets attention and praise for stirring the shit, and then he gets attention and sympathy when we disagree with him; win-win.

    Oh and one more thing – I don’t consider him a “fellow atheist.”

    Update: and one more one more thing: more about this at

    Pharyngula

    Almost Diamonds

    En Tequila es Verdad

  • Are we making progress yet?

    Julian has a new installment of Heathen’s Progress out, in which he sums up the progress so far, by repeating what he’s said in the previous installments, with links, then in the last couple of paragraphs asks if that’s progress, and tells the reader to tell him. It’s all rather stately and solemn, as if he were a government commission, but let’s do our best to help.

    Since this series is called Heathen’s progress, I thought I’d take the opportunity of the festive break to see if I’d actually made any.

    Back at the beginning, I explained that my purpose was to move the God debate on from the stalemate it seemed to be stuck in, to see what could come after the new atheism. When I said that “the battle lines need to be redrawn so that futile skirmishes can be avoided and the real fights can be fought”, I was quickly and rightly told that I should start by ditching the military, confrontational metaphors. Lesson one: how issues are framed and the language we use really does matter.

    Well this is part of what makes it seem so stately and as-if-a-government-commission. It seems odd for one person to think he can move the God debate on, and to say that that’s what his purpose is. It seems…official, and powerful, and more than one person can usually do. It seems a little peremptory to look for what could come after the new atheism when it’s not at all clear that “the new atheism” is over yet. I think most gnu atheists, if you asked them, would laugh at the idea and say fuck no, we’re in the thick of it.

    And then there’s the needing to be told that military confrontational metaphors are just that, and needing to learn that how issues are framed and the language we use really does matter. Actually I know perfectly well he didn’t need to be told or to learn; I know that because he’s been writing about both for years, so obviously he’s perfectly well aware of both. I suppose he means he needed to be reminded. (Then one wonders why. Is it because there’s so much pugnacious anti-gnu rhetoric around, and some of it has infected him without his noticing until readers pointed it out? Could be.)

    Toward the end of his recapitulation of the entries so far, I come in for a tiny rap on the knuckles.

    The clamour to sign up the articles from religious leaders and thinkers was notable by its absence. Many of the people I wrote to did not even reply. When it comes to the crunch, it seems that very few genuinely embrace, or are prepared to admit they embrace, a form of religion that doesn’t make supernatural claims. This finding was backed up by two surveys I conducted, which while far from authoritative strongly suggest that churchgoers do, indeed, hold traditional beliefs about such things as Christ’s resurrection and the need to worship God. (Oddly, many people have claimed I was surprised by these results, when, as I explained in a reply, I have never expressed any amazement at all.)

    The penultimate link is to my “Surprised, surprised,” in which I quoted several people who were bemused “at Julian’s effortful discovery and announcement of what everyone already knew.” He says it’s odd that people claim he was surprised when he never said he was, and yet, in the very next paragraph he says

    I think the real movement has come from grappling with the question of how important literal belief is to religion. From an agnostic position, I have become convinced that it plays a very important part…

    Quite, and that’s all I meant, and that’s all the others meant. (Nobody said anything about amazement.) He laboriously discovered what a lot of people had been saying all along. It’s not particularly odd to point that out.

    At the end the summing up is summed up.

    Taken together, some in the blogosphere have suggested that in this series I have moved closer to the new atheists. I’m not sure this is true. For a variety of reasons (including unfortunate headlines others gave to some of my pieces) the extent to which I have disagreed with the new atheists has probably been overstated because it is the disagreements that I have found more interesting to write about. I agree with them that literal belief is not a straw man, strongly expressed belief is not aggressive dogmatism, we should be as free to criticise religion as people have been to criticise atheism, and that science does pose difficult questions for many religious people. But I still maintain that much of the rhetoric has not been helpful and that in order to make progress we have to look more at the best that religion has to offer, not the worst, and find common ground with more liberal believers in order to counter the more pernicious forms of belief.

    The last sentence seems to contradict the next to last – or if not flatly contradict it, at least to take back the ground it had just seemed to yield. If we “have to look more at the best that religion has to offer, not the worst,” then we are not (and indeed should not be) “as free to criticise religion as people have been to criticise atheism.” It just doesn’t make sense to say that we should be as free to criticise religion as people have been to criticise atheism, and then in the next breath say we have to look more at the best that religion has to offer, not the worst (emphasis added). It looks like having it both ways, or trying to – throwing a sop to “the new atheists” but then going on to say but all the same, do it this way and not that way; focus on the good not the bad; find common ground. Well you can’t have it both ways. If we really should be as free to criticise religion as people have been to criticise atheism, then none of that “you must meet them halfway” malarkey applies, because it certainly doesn’t apply to the way people have been criticizing atheism.

    Let me try harder to be fair. Maybe I’m misunderstanding what he means by “free” – maybe he means legally free. Except that wouldn’t make sense, because we already are legally free – so he has to mean what I mean, which is socially free, rhetorically free – i.e. not constantly subject to silly social pressure to be nicer to religion. But then maybe he thinks that that kind of freedom is not in tension with practical advice to “find common ground” for the sake of…some larger goal, in this case countering “the more pernicious forms of belief.” Maybe he does. In that case the last sentence doesn’t contradict the previous one…but I still think he’s mistaken, because I think that putative practical advice is very often just a disguised version of the silly social pressure. I think at this point it’s damn near impossible to distinguish the one from the other, and I think people who give that kind of putative practical advice should be sharply aware of that.

    Is that progress? You tell me.

  • Not another one

    Hey guess what the war is over!

    This year has marked, I believe, the beginning of the end of the war between science and religion. Creationism cannot last. The New Atheists are now old (or departed). And between these camps the middle ground continues to expand.

    Has it all, doesn’t it. The air of easy omniscience, the disdain for atheists, the gloating at the death of one particular atheist, the false dichotomy, the warm uncritical affection for the middle ground, the stupid assumption that it’s “extreme” (not to mention old, or dead) to think science and religion are not in every way compatible.

    Indeed, many folks have been hard at it, doing a new kind of peace work. Some have done it intentionally, some have not. Outliers, both atheist and religious hardliners, continue to wage battle but they look increasingly irrelevant.

    Yup, there it is again: marginalize those atheists, lump those atheists in with religious fundamentalists, declare the enemy irrelevant.

    Here are ten who, in small ways and large, have helped to spread seeds of peace on the blasted-out battleground of science and religion.

    10. Karl Giberson, science & religion writer and former physicist, for reminding evangelicals that science is not the enemy

    And who took a lot of grief from evangelicals as a result – but Paul Wallace omits to mention that.

    6. Jack Templeton, surgeon, president and chairman of the John Templeton Foundation, for bringing science into the church

    And the church into science, but Paul Wallace omits to mention that.

    5. Chris Stedman, interfaith activist and super-swell atheist guy, for decoupling atheism from science, and for being the face of a kinder, gentler atheism

    This year saw the softening of the atheist universe. Perhaps the Four Horsemen came out hard because they had to, but in their wake have emerged atheists who are more interested in dialogue and shared values than in pounding the snot out of other people’s notions of God.

    Kinder, gentler than what? Well, than those Other atheists, of course, the one who pound the snot out of everything. That seems to be almost the whole point of this super-swell interfaith atheism: to carve atheism into two pieces and claim the Good, Kind, Gentle, Non-snot-pounding piece for oneself while implying (in a super-swell deniable sort of way, of course) that the people in the other part are mean belligerent shits.

    Maybe the war isn’t over after all.

  • Religion is about literal doctrines after all

    So after weeks of heavy breathing, Julian’s Heathen’s Progress arrives at what we already knew – that believers actually do believe the tenets of their religion.

    So what is the headline finding? It is that whatever some might say about religion being more about practice than belief, more praxis than dogma, more about the moral insight of mythos than the factual claims of logos, the vast majority of churchgoing Christians appear to believe orthodox doctrine at pretty much face value. They believe that Jesus is divine, not simply an exceptional human being; that his resurrection was a real, bodily one; that he performed miracles no human being ever could; that he needed to die on the cross so that our sins could be forgiven; and that Jesus is the only way to eternal life. On many of these issues, a significant minority are uncertain but in all cases it is only a small minority who actively disagree, or even just tend to disagree. As for the main reason they go to church, it is not for reflection, spiritual guidance or to be part of a community, but overwhelmingly in order to worship God.

    Yes…just as the dread “new” atheists have said all along. Believers who don’t really believe are the minority, not the majority.

    This is, I think, a firm riposte to those who dismiss atheists, especially the “new” variety, as being fixated on the literal beliefs associated with religion rather than ethos or practice. It suggests that they are not attacking straw men when they criticise religion for promoting superstitious and supernatural beliefs.

    Yes…but then that would include Julian himself, for instance in his article in the Norwegian magazine Fritanke (not to be confused with the Swedish publisher Fritanke!) in March 2009:

    I also think the new atheism tends to get religion wrong. The focus is always on the out-dated metaphysics of religion, its belief in personal creator gods, miracles, souls and so forth. I have no doubt that the vast majority of the religious do indeed believe in such things. Indeed, I’m on the record as accusing liberal theologians of hiding behind their less literalist interpretations, and pretending that matters of creed don’t really matter at all.

    However, there is much more to religion to the metaphysics. To give a non-exhaustive list, religion is also about trying to live sub specie aeternitatis; orienting oneself to the transcendent rather than the immanent; living in a moral community of shared practice or as part of a valuable tradition; cultivating certain attitudes, such as gratitude and humility; and so on. To say, as Sam Harris does, that “religion is nothing more than bad concepts held in place of good ones for all time” misses all this. The practices of religion may be more important then the narratives, even if people believe those narratives to be true.

    I think Julian owes “the new atheists” an apology.

    He concludes

    It seems to me that these results, if truly indicative of what people actually believe, are highly significant for the present debate about religion. The challenge to the likes of Karen Armstrong – which I’d love to hear her response to – is to accept that when they claim religion isn’t really about literal belief, they are advocating a view about how religion ought to be in its best form which just doesn’t describe the reality on the ground. They are defending an ideal of religion, a possibility that is not the normal actuality. (Although I do have a potential response to this they could offer, which I’ll come back to in a future post.) Therefore when responding to atheist criticisms, the accusation cannot be that they misrepresent religion. The best that can be said is that atheists focus too much on religion as it is most usually found and should pay more attention to the better forms. Whether that is a good enough reply is the subject for another argument.

    Again, all this is what the gnus have been saying all along – and getting a lot of crap for saying, from Julian among others. Good that he’s finally correcting himself, but it would be better if he actually admitted that that’s what he’s doing.

     

  • We drift and dabble

    Oh goody, another more in sorrow than in anger rumination on Atheists Are As Bad As Theists And Vice Versa for a Sunday.

    For a nation of talkers and self-confessors, we are terrible when it comes to talking about God. The discourse has been co-opted by the True Believers, on one hand, and Angry Atheists on the other. What about the rest of us?

    What does he – Eric Weiner – mean “co-opted”? What does he even mean “what about the rest of us” – what about them? “Angry Atheists” haven’t “co-opted” anything, and the rest of us are just as able to speak up as the people Weiner is trying to portray as marginal.

    It’s such a typical and tiresome move, this attempt to convince “the rest of us” – the normal, the mainstream, the typical, the ok – that atheists are illegitimate and somehow stealing or usurping the discourse. It’s also fairly risible to do that on the New York Times op-ed page. If we’ve usurped the discourse, how is it possible for Eric Normal Weiner to get his views published in the NY Times?

    The rest of us, it turns out, constitute the nation’s fastest-growing religious demographic. We are the Nones, the roughly 12 percent of people who say they have no religious affiliation at all. The percentage is even higher among young people; at least a quarter are Nones.

    Hello: that includes us, you know. We have no religious affiliation at all, so we are part of your Nones.

    Nones are the undecided of the religious world. We drift spiritually and dabble in everything from Sufism to Kabbalah to, yes, Catholicism and Judaism.

    So Nones are all kind of goddy too, so poof! actually there are no Nones at all, everybody is normal, so we can all go back to sleep.

    We Nones may not believe in God, but we hope to one day. We have a dog in this hunt.

    The hell we do. Maybe he does, but that doesn’t mean all of us do, and some of us certainly don’t – we not only don’t believe in “God,” we also dislike it. I know I do. “God” is a tyrant, a Big Boss, a domineering male, a hater of women, a bully, an intruder. I don’t in the least hope to believe in “God” one day; on the contrary, I hope not to, because it would be a horrible surrender and self-betrayal.

     

  • There goes the neighborhood

    I saw Joseph Hoffmann’s post saying how tiny atheism and atheists now are a few days ago, when it was new, and decided to ignore it*, on the grounds that it was little different from its many predecessors and that nobody except one indefatigable fan was paying any attention so why bother. But then I saw that PZ had done a post on it, and then I saw that Eric had, so starving the beast is not an option, therefore I might as well do my share.

    What does it say? That atheism is not good enough.

    I cannot imagine a time in the history of unbelief when atheism has appeared more hamfisted, puling, ignorant or unappealing.

    Is this because its savants are also described by those adjectives, or because their fans are just being fans, merchandising the cause: t-shirts, coffee mugs, quick fixes, blasphemy competitions, and billboard campaigns? (Axial tilt is the reason for the season: Honest Jethro,  I thought I’d never stop laughing). I mean, who are we unless someone is offended by who we are?  What good is blasphemy if no one is getting their knickers in a knot anymore, for Christ’s sake. How can we “come out” when there’s no one standing outside the closet to yell “Surprise!” at? And, by the way you churchy jerks: we are victims.

    Atheism has become a very little idea, an idea that has to be shouted to seem important.  And that is a shame, because God was a big idea, and the rejection of the existence of God was also a big idea, once upon a time.

    But now, ah now, the grubby vulgar unlearned rabble have gotten their nasty unlearned hands on it and ruined it. It smells like a locker room now. It has potato chip crumbs all over it. It puts its shoes on the furniture. It chews with its mouth open. It doesn’t quote Goethe.

    The post starts with a little display of erudition meant to put us in our place.

    Lieber Gott: Bitte kommen Sie wieder.  Wir sind sehr traurig, daran zu zweifeln Sie.  Ihr, Faust.

    Cool, except that a commenter at Eric’s is a German speaker and says the quoted bit doesn’t make any sense. The “Ihr, Faust” particularly reeks of a machine translator – translating “Yours, Faust,” which isn’t said in German. So that’s pretty funny – a display of snobbish hostility that starts with…ahem.

    It gets worse as it goes on. It’s an unpleasant, even embarrassing display. There’s no apparent point to it except to express disdain and superiority.

    Atheism has become a very little idea because it is now promoted by little people with a small focus.  These people tend to think that there are two kinds of questions: the questions we have already answered and the questions we will answer tomorrow.  When they were even smaller than they are now, their father asked them every six weeks, “Whadja get in math and science?” When they had children of their own, they asked them, “Whadja get in science and math?”  Which goes to show, people can change.

    They eschew mystery, unless it’s connected to a telescopic lens or an electron microscope or a neutrinometer at the Hadron Collider at CERN. “Mystery” is not a state to be enjoyed or celebrated like a good wine or a raven-haired woman with haunting and troubled eyes: it is a temporary state of befuddlement, an unknown sum, an uncharted particle, a glimpse of a distant galaxy, the possibility that Mars supported microbial life.

    Ihr,

    Faust

    *Apart from a brief mention on the interview post, that is.

  • Residual respect for an enduring institution

    I did an interview with Geoff Whelan of QED which is now posted.

    One of the questions was

    Are you dismayed when those who you would think naturally would support a strong atheist position turn their criticism against those who directly challenge religion? Is there something about free thinkers that encourages dissent? Or are we talking about Dennett’s belief in belief, in the sense that someone may realise on an intellectual level that religious belief is false but that they still have residual respect for an enduring institution?

    Funny, PZ has a post about yet another example of that kind of thing, just today. The yet another example is yet another by Joseph Hoffmann, yet again in the same style – loose generalities about atheists, with no specifics to dispute. I saw it a few days ago and was going to retort but then deflated out of sheer boredom. It’s just the same old dreck. Hate-mongering, basically, stirred up against a category that is already thoroughly hated, and without any pesky particulars or evidence. It’s not an impressive or responsible thing to do.

    But never mind. Speaking of impressive and responsible – who do you think is going to be at QED too, along with his father? Rhys Morgan! Booya.

     

  • Sandals with socks? A whiff of wet dog?

    Another rather heavy-breathing piece by Julian in his “Heathen’s Progress” series. Once again he’s saying very much what “new” atheists have been saying all along, so why is it again that he’s so annoyed by “the new atheists”? Loud voices was it? Bad haircuts? Garlic breath?

    I’m very much in sympathy with this view*, and this series is largely an attempt to try to find more constructive points of engagement that can only emerge if we ditch lazy and tired preconceptions about those with whom we disagree. At the same time, however, I’m all too aware that “you just don’t understand” is a card that is often played far too swiftly and without justification.

    On the one hand, but on the other hand. I agree with the obvious, but at the same time, I also agree with a different obvious. That’s philosophy.

    It has become evident to me, however, that many people, especially the religious, suffer from a kind of conceptual claustrophobia. Their beliefs are of their essence somewhat vague and they are terrified of being pinned down. Although critics often leap on this and claim that this betrays woolly thinking, evasion or obscurantism, I think that there are times when such a refusal to commit is justified.

    Yes – provided that you don’t then go on to make lots of confident claims, but how often is that condition met?

    But embracing this mystery comes at a price. If, like the archbishop of Canterbury, your faith is a kind of “silent waiting on the truth, pure sitting and breathing in the presence of the question mark”, then think very carefully before you open your mouth. Too often I find that faith is mysterious only selectively. Believers constantly attribute all sorts of qualities to their gods and have a list of doctrines as long as your arm. It is only when the questions get tough that, suddenly, their God disappears in a puff of mystery. Ineffability becomes a kind of invisibility cloak, only worn when there is a need to get out of a bit of philosophical bother.

    Precisely; my point exactly. I’ve been saying that for years. Julian doesn’t need instruction from me, of course, but nevertheless I don’t quite see why he’s presenting all this as if it’s new and fresh as opposed to just the kind of thing the gnu atheists get so much shit for saying, sometimes from Julian himself.

    *that disputants in the religion debate are talking past each other because they do not have a sufficiently rich understanding of the positions they stand against.