There are atheists who don’t belong in the reality-based community

I thought this meme was a comical exaggeration. It’s obvious that gender is much more complex than a simple distinction between two categories, that there is a great deal of scientific support for that observation, and no one would be deluded enough to deny the science.

But then I read the comments. Apparently there are a lot of assholes out there who are eager to line up behind the asshole statement and flatly assert a) there are only two genders, men and women, and b) there is no scientific evidence otherwise.

So the author throws comment after comment at them, each one citing the scientific literature; she cites Science and Nature. You’d think just the obvious fact that there are human beings who don’t fit neatly into the stereotypical male and female pigeonholes would be sufficient to tell you that this binary model is inadequate.

But no. Commenters continue to assert that assert a) there are only two genders, men and women, and b) there is no scientific evidence otherwise.

I’ve been dealing with this phenomenon for decades, and you’d think I’d be used to it by now. I’ve dealt with it with my own binary thinking: there are people who arrive at conclusions by following the evidence, and they are the secular, pro-science community; and there are people who deny evidence to accept conclusions based on dogma, and they are the conservative religious, poorly educated masses. Some of those deniers in that facebook thread are certainly going to be conservatively religious, but as has become increasingly apparent, there are a lot of secular atheists who also engage in this behavior on certain issues. YouTube atheists, for instance, are dominated by looney-tunes dogmatists who assert that feminism is a cancer, who deny the significance, even the utility, of sociology and psychology and philosophy, and who have a simplistic and ultimately racist and misogynistic worldview that denies basic realities of the equality of all members of our species to prop up uncompromising doctrinaire notions of White Nationalism or Western Superiority or Manly Virtues.

They’re everywhere. They’re attending Mass and they’re going to atheist meetups. And there are egalitarians in churches and signing up for lifetime memberships in American Atheists.

If you want to understand what’s behind the erosion of support for the “New Atheists” and the Deep Rifts in our godless groups, all you have to realize is that the evidence-based community is looking at the evidence and seeing that assholes populate both the atheist and religious side of the pigeonholes, so the labels aren’t aligning well with our actual, substantial goals. And if your priority is following the evidence honestly where ever it leads, slapping the atheist label on someone does a piss-poor job of identifying your fellow travelers.

Science matters to me and it should matter to everyone. There are far too many obnoxious incompetents who think atheism is an acceptable substitution for science. It is not sufficient.

I think this is clickbait

Asking this simple question out loud could boost your chances of speaking to the dead, say experts, according to the Manchester Evening News. I marveled at that headline. It’s very impressive. It stirs up so many questions that I had to actually read the article. Who are these “experts” at speaking to the dead? (It doesn’t name any.) Do the dead ever answer? (No.) And mostly, what is the magic question? I’ll spare you the need to waste a click on them.

They explained: “You might consider talking to the spirit world whilst you’re investigating, encouraging the ghost to reveal its presence.

“Try to ask questions such as, ‘What is your name?’, instead of saying, ‘Is there anyone there?’ A lot of people might make this mistake.

“By asking ‘What is your name?’ you’re acting as though you know the spirits are there and this will increase your chances of making contact.”

The “they” referenced above are not dead people — if they were I might consider them credible — but instead, are flacks for a TV channel called “Really” that is putting on a week of shows about the paranormal.

I’m not impressed with their choice of a question. I’ve found shouting, “Your fly is unzipped” is far more effective at getting the dead to react.

(via Ally Fogg)

Halloween explained…with Chick tracts!

Here’s a roundup of the best Chick tracts to hand out on Halloween. You know you’re an awful person when you think these are a good idea.

Everyone knows you’re supposed to hand out full-size candy bars — none of this ‘fun-size’ nonsense, and no, candy corn is not a treat — because we’re supposed to fatten up children with gluttony and sloth, both so they’re juicier for the barbecue and because they’ll meet our Dark Lord Satan even sooner.

Hmm. Now I have to think. What would be the most sweetly lethal kind of candy I should give out on Halloween night, that would most thoroughly serve the Evil Atheist Agenda? If feminist candy were richer chunks of chocolate, that might work.

Would centuries of oppression be OK if Jesus would only forgive us?

This guy, Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, has a weird take on Ta-Nehisi Coates. Coates would be less pessimistic if he weren’t an atheist, and that pessimism, somehow, is a problem.

Coates’s belief that white supremacy is fundamentally woven into the fabric of the United States is built on a larger metaphysical assumption that without the existence of God the entire world bends towards injustice. He points to the egregious history of racial injustice in this country, and the atrocities committed by the Nazis and Soviets, through the books of Judt and Snyder, to prove his point.

The real problem for Coates, then, might ultimately not be white supremacy, but rather the non-existence of God. It is the non-existence of God, according to his argument, that rules out the possibility of any collective redemption not just in the United States, but the world writ large.

Hang on there, Dan. You got an explanation already — there is an “egregious history of racial injustice in this country”. Coates is aware of this history, and it is that history that leads him to understand that white supremacy is part of the fabric of the United States. His atheism is irrelevant to that specific understanding, since, after all, non-atheists like Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X also came to the same conclusion.

Steinmetz-Jenkins harps on “collective redemption” a lot, without bothering to explain it. I think he means something like a savior washing away the sins of the past; if only we believed in a magical being who magically blessed America and forgave it its deeply rooted bigotry, then the stain of the KKK, of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, of centuries of slave ships anchoring on our shores, of the extermination of native peoples, of every crime perpetrated in the name of Whiteness, would disappear, and all the neo-nazis would be allowed to dance in heaven, and our healing would begin.

It’s true, I don’t believe in collective redemption either. I think it’s superstitious ju-ju that tries to paper over serious problems with lies, and that we have to spend all of our lives working to atone for our errors…and that the errors never end. That’s not nihilism, though. Our goal, and the virtue of our goal, is in the process of living and working and striving to better ourselves. The myth that there is a “collective redemption”, where the problems of the individual can be eliminated with a snap of the fingers by a single person or single act, is one of the worst notions to come out of Christianity. It’s popular with people who want instantaneous absolution, and are willing to believe a lie that perpetuates the problem, as long as it makes them feel good.

An imperfect characterization of the New Atheism

I have a problem with this description.

Old Atheism: “there is no God.”
New Atheism: “we need to bomb more Muslims. European culture is superior. Also modern feminism is a cancer.”

They forgot the usual immediate followup:

New Atheism: “But all atheism means is that there is no god, and so we’re going to exclude any attempt to insert your values into it.”

But then, somehow, their heads fail to explode at the contradictions and hypocrisy. I don’t get it.

You’d think the importance of emotions & empathy would be of obvious importance to any movement

If you’ve got an hour, you might find it worthwhile to listen to this podcast by Thomas Smith, Emotion is Critical to Reasoning. There’s good stuff in there about this myth of über rationality by Libertarians and some atheists — you can also hear about in Julia Galef’s talk about The Straw Vulcan, also summarized here. I’m finding that there’s no one more emotional than an alt-right supremacist getting challenged on their cherry-picked and distorted “facts”, while the lefties are usually quite happy to acknowledge that their values are a product of their emotions, specifically empathy.

I listened to it while I was grading papers this morning, and found that I was more charitable in evaluating their work. I expect the students will henceforth insist that I can’t listen to or read anything by creationists or right-wingers, because it might make me much more critical.

Poisoning of a movement

Sigh. I might once have been willing to take exception to this characterization of the history of New Atheism, but I can’t anymore. I just can’t. It’s all too true, and what should have been an opportunity for reason to rise ascendant has been drowned in a rising flood of idiots who use “reason” as an empty buzzword.

Once Bush left office, the promoters of “intelligent design” curricula retreated from the public sphere, and millennials asserted themselves as the least religious generation to date; the group that had coalesced around the practice logically refuting creationists needed new targets. One of the targets they chose was women. Militant atheism had always been male-dominated, but it took several years and a sea change in American politics for the sexism within its ranks to fully bloom. In 2011, skeptic blogger Rebecca Watson described in a YouTube video how a male fellow attendee of an atheist conference had followed her into an elevator at 4 a.m. in order to ask her on a date—behavior that, understandably, made her uncomfortable. The community erupted into what was later remembered as “Elevatorgate.” A forum was created to harass Watson, and Richard Dawkins himself wrote a comment telling her to “stop whining” because she had it better than victims of honor killings and female genital mutilation.

This dynamic played out again and again. In 2012, the popular atheist vlogger Thunderf00t (real name Phil Mason) aimed his sights at Watson in a video titled “Why ‘Feminism’ is poisoning Atheism,” thereby reigniting the previous year’s controversy. This time it took off, leading him to create several follow-up videos accusing women of destroying the paradise that was New Atheism for their own gain. In 2013, Mason inaugurated his “FEMINISM vs. FACTS” series of videos, which attacked Anita Sarkeesian, a feminist video game critic who was then receiving an onslaught of harassment and violent threats for daring to analyze Super Mario Bros. This sort of idiocy, combined, again, with the growing popularity of jibes associating outspoken atheists with fedoras, neckbeards, and virginity, led to an exodus of liberals and leftists from the “atheist” tent. Those who remained for the most part lacked in social skills and self-awareness, and the results were disastrous.

And then the author starts talking about Stefan Molyneux and James Damore, and it just gets worse.

So here we are. There is still no god, religion is bunk, but the atheist movement has become a dogmatic label used by assholes, racists, and misogynists.