Alternet says looky, there are other atheists besides those three that everybody keeps rolling out.
It’s surprising just how much media analysis, both mainstream and progressive, continues to take as given the notion that atheism can be defined and discussed solely by looking at the so-called “New Atheists” who emerged roughly between 2004 and 2007. It’s easy to understand the appeal: Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens became prominent representatives of atheism because they were all erudite, entertaining and unafraid to say what they thought. A lot of people, myself included, were drawn to their works because they were forthright and articulated things we had kept locked away, or simply hadn’t found the words for.
Gotta stop you right there. Sam Harris is not erudite and he’s not entertaining. He’s badly over-rated, including by himself.
More and more, the strongest atheist voices are talking about nonbelief less as an end in itself, but as part of a larger conversation about social justice. It could hardly be any other way: atheism is growing not only in numbers, but in diversity. When Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens were at their most prominent, a frequent (and credible) criticism was that the faces of atheism were all white, male and affluent. To make the same claim now is to deliberately ignore some of the most vital atheist and skeptic voices that have emerged in the last 10 years.
Social justice! Horrors! There’s nothing worse than social justice infiltrating and contaminating atheism. Watch out! Watch out for the “social justice warriors” and “ragebloggers” and “well-meaning women” because they are Impure.
Greta Christina, the author of Coming Out Atheist describes the changes in organized atheism: “[T]he movement has become much more diverse — not just in the obvious ways of gender, race, and so on, but simply in terms of how many viewpoints are coming to the table. The sheer number of people who are seen in some way as leaders… has gone up significantly…. And the increasing diversity in gender, race, class, and so on are important. We have a long way to go in this regard, but we’re doing much, much better than we were. And that’s showing up in our leadership. It’s absurd to see Dawkins, Hitchens and Harris as representing all organized atheism — it always was a little absurd, but it’s seriously absurd now.”
Would somebody please tell the Secular Coalition for America that? I’ve tried, but they don’t listen.
Just as in any other group, there are scores of people in atheist and skeptic communities who don’t want to have discussions about racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and other bigotries, or say they’re irrelevant to the agenda at hand. The increase in diversity isn’t happening quietly or easily, and it’s often brought out the ugliest sides of people who base their entire identities on being rational and humane. Direct challenges to racism and sexism haven’t traditionally been the domain of the large organizations like American Atheists or the Secular Coalition for America. It’s been far more typical to fight incursions against separation of church and state or educate against pseudoscience like homeopathy.
Gotta stop you for another correction there. No, they don’t base their entire identities on being rational and humane – they base their entire identities on being rational, full stop. The humane part is what they want nothing to do with – they call it “ideology.”
But the more people step forward and identify themselves as nonbelievers, the more it’s become obvious that this narrow focus is unsustainable. Although the top positions in many organizations are still dominated by white men, an increasing number of the most passionate voices bringing new people into the movement are people of color, women, transgendered, or queer.
Jamila Bey, the communications director of the Secular Student Alliance, summed up the concerns of many in a recent interview: “There are people who say, ‘Why are we talking about racism? We would rather argue that Chupacabra are fake.’ And fine, that is their right. On the other hand, I don’t get to divorce my critical thinking from my blackness, from my femaleness, from my position as a mother. So when I see the only affordable child care in my community being offered at churches, that’s an issue for me that makes me say ‘Wait a minute, there’s a problem here. Why am I not being afforded the opportunity for my child not to be indoctrinated just so my kid has somewhere to play and meet other children?’ I can’t divorce my whole life from my skepticism and for anybody who says, well , talking about female issues or talking about issues that impact black people, oh, that’s taking away from skepticism, I go, well that’s really easy for you to say. This is my life. I can’t divorce the issues. You can choose to not care about them or whatever, but don’t tell me I’m diminishing skepticism because I’m talking about the reality of what my life is.”
Yeah.
If Dawkins, Hitchens and Harris brought a single essential insight to modern atheism, it was the idea that atheists could and should be unapologetic about their disbelief. For Heina Dadhaboy, who blogs on Skepchick, that was critical as she moved away from the traditional Islamic beliefs of her family.
“I think the fact that [Dawkins] was so unapologetic is why a lot of us became quite taken with his writings. It wasn’t so much what he was saying or how he was saying it, it was just the fact that he never apologized or capitulated for being an atheist.” That shamelessness helped Dadhaboy to assert her own voice as an atheist. Like most of mainstream culture, her family expected that if she was going to be an atheist, she would at least have the good sense to pay lip service to religion’s superior worldview.
“They expected me to capitulate,” she says. “They expected me to follow their rules and even if I didn’t believe in their religion, to agree with them that it’s more moral and makes more sense. Reading Dawkins was like, ‘Hey, I don’t need to do that.'”
I still like his work in that area – I’m still glad he did it. But…
Progress has not come easily, by any means. In some ways, it’s been outright nightmarish. The standard use of harassment and rape threats against women who make even relatively mild critiques of gender has put some of the ugliest, sickest parts of atheist communities on public display. It has even cost the movement voices; in 2012, blogger Jen McCreight proposed a new wave of secular activism called “Atheism Plus,” which would explicitly embrace social justice as part of its mission.
“It’s time for a wave that cares about how religion affects everyone and that applies skepticism to everything, including social issues like sexism, racism, politics, poverty, and crime,” she wrote. “We can criticize religion and irrational thinking just as unabashedly and just as publicly, but we need to stop exempting ourselves from that criticism.” The campaign of harassment and abuse that followed, combined with stresses in her personal life, eventually drove her to stop blogging and speaking at atheist events.
But Dawkins is still called Our Thought Leader, so that’s what counts.
When Elliot Rodger went on his shooting spree in Isla Vista, the harm was not to the immortal souls of the people he shot and killed. His bullets tore into their bodies and devastated the lives of people in the real world. It was not a crime against god, or the spirit world, or Allah, or karma, but against fellow human beings who were alive and breathing and may have lived for decades more if he hadn’t pulled the trigger.
But those gunshots didn’t kill just because of chemistry and physics; the bullets were driven just as much by Rodger’s poisonous misogyny as by a sudden expansion of gases in the barrel of the gun. We are social creatures, and racism, misogyny, classism, and other prejudices affect our lives in ways that are just as solid as the earth orbiting the sun or our immune systems’ response to a vaccine. The activists who insist that atheism address matters of social justice are not distracting the movement from its purpose or being divisive; they are insisting it deliver on the promises that attracted so many of us to it in the first place.
Damn right.
Of course, it’s easier to discredit belief in Chupacabras if you’ve never shared it.
Atheism/skepticism have a traditional allegiance to Social Justice issues. Because the ‘social injustice’ fans are WRONG. A commitment to, as Greta Christina puts it, ‘caring whether the things you believe are true or not,’ must lead to critical re-assessment of social and political norms that resist questioning from within.
Believers in much of libertarianism, ALL of the PUA culture, the NRA’s propogande etc. etc. all have one thing in common: THEY ARE WRONG.
Diversity of opinion does not create a diversity of epistemic standards. There is a good reason that flat-earthers are grossly underrepresented in geology departments, or that young-earth creationists are ‘discriminated against’ in biology.
Damn right indeed. Chris Hall did a great job with that article.
That’s all well and good, but why, oh why the quip about Harris? Why the offhand rudeness implicit in ” a frequent (and credible) criticism was that the faces of atheism were all white, male and affluent”? Why can’t the atheist movement broaden its scope without such an unnecessary hostility?
What quip? The one saying he’s not erudite or entertaining? That’s not a quip, it’s what I think. I think he’s terribly overrated, and androcentric, and self-important, and humorless. We have masses of far more interesting and brilliant people in the atheist “movement” yet people still pay all this attention to Sam Harris. He’s just not that good.
I thought this was a decent article in that it’s nice to see somebody pointing out in a major media outlet that the Horsemen really aren’t the face of atheism/skepticism anymore and haven’t been for some time. Alot of people I know who don’t follow atheism as closely are still unaware of the new voices and the story behind A+. So I posted it to my FB wall, and the responses were…well…
Defensive yammering about what groundbreakers Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens were and ho this article is a hit-piece.
How Atheism+ is superfluous, since Humanism already does everything A+ could ever dream of.
People like Ophelia, Greta and their ilk are bringing an “agenda” to atheism and largely just trying to get attention by stepping on the coat-tails of Great Men (TM.)
And this was from fellow atheists who also claim to care about social justice and would never hesitate to call somebody out for their white, male privilege (except apparently for Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens.)
Sigh….
Yup.
Social justice is an Agenda™.
Won’t somebody think of Bigfoot? Bleeding statues? Nessie?
brought out the ugliest sides of people who base their entire identities on being rational and humane
What Hall might have meant to say — what Hall should have said — is “who base their entire identities on their claim to being rational and humane, a claim oft belied by their words and actions.”
I know Dawkins is, but were Hitchens and Harris part of “organized atheism”? I generally liked Hitchens, except when I didn’t, but I’ve never had any attraction to Harris (who seems to take Hitchens’ less endearing ideas and just run with them), or Dawkins, despite my interest in his field of science as well.
Yeah, it was great that these guys may have inspired people to be openly and unapologetically atheist. Until at least one of them and the fans of all of them started telling some atheists that they should be apologetic and shut up, because their kind of atheism is irrelevant, wrong, and uncouth.
I think that the reason that some skeptics want to focus on chupacabras and chemtrails and bigfoot and yetis at the expense of anything else is that it is easy to laugh at people who believe those things are real. It’s not so easy for them to examine other issues germane to the daily lives of a diverse field of atheists and skeptics because if they know they are guilty, to some extent, or their heroes are also guilty – it is hard to point and laugh at people that they have idolized.
Are they wiling to admit that Radford is a sleaze, that D.J. Grothe (who I admired at one time,) and Michael Shermer are not the great humanitarians because they do shitty things to women? No, some people just can’t bring themselves to do so. So, what’s the easier way to handle it?
Trash the messengers. It’s easier that way. We don’t like to find that our heroes have feet of clay, because at some point in their careers they did some pretty good things and may have helped them see the fetters with which religion or conspiracy-thinking had bound them.
Well, hey, this post got me prodded to go read Hall’s piece that I’ve had open in a tab for a few days. (Kept having other interruptions, not just forgetfulness.) I agree, it’s a pretty good piece. I have a few disagreements, but mostly nitpicky, and a couple already mentioned – nothing terribly important.
Coming across The Atheist Experience back at the end of 2008 was where I realized I was an atheist. I mean, what the real definition was and there was a significant number of us around. Hearing the definition, I thought it was quite obvious.
I thought the intersections of other problems were as or almost as obvious when I started hearing about those, too. I didn’t clearly see it on my own, but it didn’t take much convincing that things like race and poverty and sexism have a lot to do with maintaining religion, and oppressing people, and untangling the whole web is important. I still have great difficulty fathoming the backlash, the ‘mission drift’ complaints. I think we need a large movement if we want to fix social ills, and that means diverse, and that means addressing problems from many angles.
But then, it’s through the atheism community I got in to the skepticism thing even. I had seen a bit of Skeptical Inquirer and Free Inquiry before running across The Atheist Experience on YouTube, but that was about it. It’s once I found the local group, and then found people like PZ and Greta and Ophelia and Jen and JT (who was local at the time, actually), that I got much info on skepticism. Seemed like a great tool. Maybe coming at it that way helped understand it was more useful than just hunting bigfoot hoaxes.
It’s fascinating to see Daniel Dennett disappear from view whenever people talk about the prominent atheists. He was, I seem to recall, one of the “Four Horsemen.” And although he’s a white male, he doesn’t fit in with the other three in that he is a professional philosopher, more interested in argumentation than rhetoric, and has never AFAIK advocated anything as foolish as Dawkins on child abuse, Harris on nuking Muslims, or Hitchens on the innate inferiority of women. As far as I can see, the reason for excluding Dennett is the same as the reason for pretending there are only 3 atheist voices — it makes it easier to construct straw man arguments about atheism if you insist those three are the official representatives of the movement.
Pierino,
I think you’ve missed Ophelia’s point. She was making an offhand aside about how she doesn’t feel Harris warrants being put in the same bracket as Dawkins and Hitchens. And more importantly, the reason for the hostility about broadening the scope of atheism to include female, non-white voices is that vocal segments of the atheist and skeptic communities have fought vituperatively against it. If you want to question the hostility, you ought to start there.
I’ll take ‘begging the question’ for $200, Alex.
Sorry, let me clarify:
Usually when people start by saying “it’s fascinating” it is a precursor to condescension about whatever event or action is to follow. I see that the quoted sentence by chrislawson is in keeping with that mold.
Yes, “as far as you can see”, which alliteratively means “just my opinion.”
And what strawman arguments are those which are constructed on the presumption that Daniel Dennet is not a prominent atheist voice? Because I see nothing which hinges upon his absence nor his presence in any of the blog post here nor at the article. Unless you somehow think that all this broadbrushing of atheists as insufferable sexist racist clods is, in fact, what is actually occurring by mentioning what a problem those things can be even within our movement. Otherwise, it makes not one spit of difference who the original “Four Horsemen” were.
Dennet just isn’t as in your face about his atheism. I think he was heralded and grouped in with the other three just to aid in the construction of the “Four Horsemen” idiom.
And I have know clue how figuratively became alliteratively in my #14. -.- Blame it on the wine.
@ 14 throwaway
Oh. Just your opinion then.
@ 15 throwaway
I shan’t blame it on the wine, nor the sunshine, nor the moonlight, nor the good times, I shall blame it on the boogie.
A matter of opinion, one which I do not share.
Who is calling him our thought leader? He is one of atheisms many voices but I don’t think of him as our thought-leader.
@dogfightwithdogma, it would appear you need to catch up with current events
Or, more specifically:
Sam Harris can be quite entertaining at times.
More often he’s an opinionated, pompous, self-involved jerk. His islamophobia is well documented, he tends to see issues in black and white, and like many intelligent people he thinks he knows more than he actually does.
Silentbob quoting me at 16
Actually there is a bit more context to it than that: “I see nothing which supports X within the source of Y.” It is a literal figure of speech. I have seen nothing which aids the position that Dennet is being excluded as a matter of convenience to the points being made that atheism isn’t without its own problems. That’s me saying that there is no indication that the proposition is true from anything I’ve observed, and should be treated as an informal “provide evidence to your assertion.”
Even if he were included in the examples of the other three as a lone exception, it wouldn’t make a difference to the observable overall reaction towards social justice within the atheo-skeptosphere.
I just had to re-quote Jamila because this comment resonates with me so much. I’ve seen so many comments from people saying that an atheist/skeptic group shouldn’t talk about X because X isn’t related to atheism/skepticism, and I could never quite verbalize why this was so infuriating and then Jamila just sums it up so succinctly. YOUR atheism may not include matters of racism, sexism, classism, ablism, whatever, but that doesn’t mean those facets aren’t important to other people in the community. While no one is obliged to care about people who don’t share their privilege, it certainly says something about you if you don’t even want others to have the conversation in a shared space.
Al @#22:
“His [Harris’} Islamophobia is well documented,… (etc)
I put it to you that ‘Islamophobia’, or ‘irrational fear of Islam and/or Muslims’ is a concept tailor-made by Islam’s supporters and apologists to sow confusion, and Harris has dealt with it quite well. ‘Islam’ is conflated with ‘Muslims’ under this ‘Islamophobia’ concept, apparently quite deliberately.
One can be hostile to Islam (I personally regard it as about the worst creed around, and an abomination) yet be on friendly terms with those who have had the misfortune of being born and raised in it.
.
http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/lifting-the-veil-of-islamophobia
And also:
http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/dear-fellow-liberal2
Fixt! 😉
His islamophobia is well documented, By whom? The OIC? Tariq Ramadan?
I suppose you think that Ophelia’s postings on the baby scandal in Ireland are ‘christianophobic’
Atheists riticising theologies or clerics or faith-based schools/institutions of any type isn’t bigotry, it’s a much needed critical analysis.