Rosa Rubicondor does an excellent job ripping apart The Argument From Incredulity. You’ve heard it a thousand times, the bug-eyed creationist announcing that he just can’t believe the universe popped into existence from nothing, that malaria resistance evolved without a helping hand from a really smart superguy, that complexity can increase in the absence of intelligent design.
Also, it’s illustrated with a perfect Scenes from a Multiverse cartoon.
For years I’ve been an enthusiastic cheerleader for the atheist movement, and I still am. I think it’s important for humanity to move beyond this childish and destructive crutch of superstition.
But at the same time I find myself constantly dismayed at the difficulty of moving atheism beyond the same old cliques, of making it a human movement rather than a well-off white guys’ movement. And why we can’t find room for good atheists like Melissa McEwan, who left her patriarchal church.
More than a decade later, I found movement atheism online. I was never one to evangelize my lack of god-belief, nor broadcast hatred of religion or its adherents, so that part of the movement was not a draw. But I did fancy the possibility of community around something that has been an axis of marginalization for me in some parts of my life.
I found the same inequality, manifesting in different ways.
There were precious few visible atheist leaders: The most prominent male atheists were very enamored with one another, and not particularly inclined to offer the same support to women, via recommended links and highlighted quotes and inclusion in digital salons about Important Ideas. They wondered aloud where all the female atheists are, and women would pipe up—"Here! Here we are! We’re right here!"—only to then go back to the status quo, with explicit or implicit messaging that women just weren’t working as hard as they are, just aren’t as smart as they are, or else they’d be leaders, too.
There was the exclusion from conferences, the sexist posts, the sexual harassment, the appropriation of religious and irreligious women’s lived experiences to Score Points and the obdurate not listening to those women when they protested.
In fact, female atheists’ protests were greeted much the same way with which my protests had been met in my patriarchal church. Silencing. Demeaning. Threats.
Read the whole thing. But I have to say that the closing paragraph is a real punch in the gut.
I would say I felt exactly as welcome in movement atheism as I did at my Missouri Synod Lutheran Church, but that would be a lie. No one at St. Peter’s ever called me a stupid cunt because I disagreed with them.
We will fail if we can’t change this.
What can I do better?
Haven’t you? Or perhaps you’ve all assumed the answer is obvious.
Sadly, I don’t have any surprises to spring — the answer is actually rather predictable. They’re agin’ it. They do concede that suffrage was OK, and they think it’s acceptable for women to vote — how liberal of them, and it only took them a century to come around — but all that 2nd and 3rd wave feminism destroyed the family!
So what’s the problem here?
Does history hold a bias against women? Members of the radical feminist movement seem to think so. Radical feminism has had incredibly destructive effects on marriage and the family—and its influence has also been felt on the church. Evangelical feminism teaches an egalitarian view of marriage and roles in the church, to the point where passages that clearly teach male headship are reinterpreted, explained away, or ignored altogether. As a result, many men are abdicating or being forced out of their God-given roles as heads of their households and as leaders in the church. The negative effects of this kind of postmodern thinking have led to serious attacks on the authority of God’s Word.
They don’t really address the issues they bring up…anti-feminism is more or less a fait accompli. As you can see hinted above, they deny any real oppression of women — ladies, your role as a helpmeet is valuable and just perfect for you! The real problem is that feminism erodes male authority. And if you weaken male authority, you weaken the authority of scripture, which says that males are the authority and therefore you weaken male authority, which weakens scripture…hey! Extinction vortex! Goodbye, fundamentalists!
I wish.
Now why would feminists want to diminish godly authority? Easy. They hate men.
Most evangelical feminists would profess to believe in the authority and inerrancy of Scripture, setting them apart from many other forms of feminism. However, their method of interpreting and applying Scripture leaves something to be desired. What is at the heart of a reluctance or even outright refusal to refer to God as “he” and “father”? What drives the redefinition and dismissal of passages of Scripture that promote male headship in marriage and leadership in the church? Grudem concludes, “At the foundation of egalitarianism is a dislike and a rejection of anything uniquely masculine.”
When it comes right down to it, creationist and atheist MRAs are all kind of similarly stupefied and bovine when it comes to recognizing the legitimacy of women’s right to autonomy. Why aren’t they helping me stand at the head of the church, the godly men are wondering, and why aren’t they making me a sammich, the godless ones marvel. Women are so good at performing those subservient tasks, why don’t they appreciate the opportunities to do more and more and more?
Nature made them that way. Or god did. Follow your natural/divine purpose, as revealed to me.
In the bowels of an ugly review of AC Grayling’s latest book, Jonathan Rée makes a familiar accusation against ‘militant’ atheism (just the use of his modifier is a grand tell, isn’t it?). It’s that atheists are fundamentalists who see all of religion as fundamentalist, in a classic act of projection.
Militant atheism makes the strangest bedfellows. Grayling sees himself as a champion of the Enlightenment, but in the old battle over the interpretation of religious texts he is on the side of conservative literalist fundamentalists rather than progressive critical liberals. He believes that the scriptures must be taken at their word, rather than being allowed to flourish as many-layered parables, teeming with quarrels, follies, jokes, reversals and paradoxes. Resistance is, of course, futile. If you suggest that his vaunted “clarifications” annihilate the poetry of religious experience or the nuance of theological reflection, he will mark you down for obstructive irrationalism. He is, after all, a professional philosopher, and his training tells him that what cannot be translated into plain words is nothing but sophistry and illusion.
Aside from being a thoroughly tin-eared statement of Grayling’s position — the man loves the metaphors and poetry himself — it’s completely wrong about us atheists in general. We certainly do see the differences between the varied approaches to religion, and we certainly do not confuse them or misapply criticisms valid against one branch to a branch to which they are irrelevant. I think he’s gotten confused because of all the varieties of religious thought, we despise them all…but I assure you, we despise each one uniquely for its own treasured inanities.
Part of the problem, of course, is of the believers’ own making. We use this word ‘religion’ to apply to so many different kinds of beliefs, and they love it that way: it makes the confusion universal, and creates a great blinking billowing smoke screen of noise and lights and chaos under which nonsense can thrive.
But let me take a moment to cut through the ambiguities in one way and propose one simple distinction that might help resolve these uncertainties about what atheists are criticizing. I propose that there are two very broad categories of popular theologies. I am not claiming that these categories are complete or perfect or absolute, just that you can go a long way towards recognizing the kinds of arguments your opponent is making if you identify which way they are thinking, and that you can at least make it clear to the other that you aren’t trying to accuse a Baptist of being an Anglican, or vice versa.
My two categories are crunchy theology and squishy theology.
Crunchy theology is rigid, absolute, inflexible, and clear cut. Crunchy theology proponents like to tell you exactly how the universe works: you will go to hell for abortion, masturbation, gay sex, and believing in evolution. They have a definitive dogma that changes every few decades, but even so, when they adopt a set of propositions, they will tell you that it has always been this way since the first century AD. A crunchy religious person votes Republican because that’s what Jesus would do.
Famous crunchy religious people: most of them, but they include people like Albert Mohler, Ken Ham, Shmuley Boteach, Ayatollah Hassan Sanei. I say “most” of the famous ones, because crunchy theologians are the ones who shout out their theology the loudest, and are the quickest to define themselves by their faith.
We atheists despise them because they are wrong. They will happily assert the most errant nonsense in defiance of all reason and evidence simply because it must be true, or the whole house of cards that constitutes their dogma will fall apart. The book of Genesis must be literally true, because if there were no Adam and Eve and no fall, then Jesus’ sacrifice would be meaningless.
Squishy theology is evasive, ambiguous (and reveling in it!), and well-meaning but dishonest. They are confident that people are good and that the universe is loving and beautiful, and that religion’s role is to provide a framework for gentle moral guidance and an appreciation of God’s creation. Squishy priests are like the docents at an art museum; they want you to really, really love everything, and for the right reasons. They’re offended if you don’t love God and Jesus because…because…because you’re supposed to, and Jesus loves you, so how can you be so mean and deny him? But you can love him in your own way, of course.
Famous squishy religious people are Karen Armstrong, Norman Vincent Peale, the Dalai Lama (sometimes, at least publicly), the religion columnists at the Huffington Post. Also, probably, most of the ordinary believers you know.
We New Atheists detest them because they’re dishonest pollyannas. They’ll skirt around conflicts between their beliefs and reality, preferring to divert the argument into a pursuit of red herrings (for example, accusing atheists of treating Karen Armstrong as synonymous with Terry Jones, rather than facing the vacuity of Armstrong’s beliefs). Look, most of the Western ones are Christian — they’re asking us to believe in the divinity of an ancient Jewish carpenter. But can they come right out and admit that? No. We point out that what they’re asking us to accept as reasonable doctrine is fundamentally absurd and silly, and they defend themselves by accusing us of denying poetry and metaphor and art (see: Rée, Jonathan). They love to call themselves “spiritual” (an undefinable, meaningless term) and claim atheists are missing out on feelings of awe and belonging.
Squishy theology even has some appeal to some atheists, like Jonathan Rée, who hold vaguely charitable feelings towards the ol’ church, because their wonderfully dodgy approach to the truth allows such atheists to avoid confronting any incompatibility between belief and actuality. It’s a fine refuge for people who don’t want to think too hard about what faith actually says.
So really, Jonathan Rée, I know the difference. I think you’re a foolish apologist for bogosity because you’re a coward who hides behind magical metaphors (to which I always ask, “metaphor for what?”), not because you believe Abraham had a strong position on the age of the universe. I will happily tailor my arguments against religion to be appropriate to your goofy beliefs in the beneficence of lies.
For instance, your blatant denial of valid knowledge…
The distinction between believers and unbelievers may be far less important than Grayling and the New Atheists like to think. At any rate it cuts right across the rather interesting difference between the grim absolutists, such as Grayling and the religious fundamentalists,
Wait, wait…I have to stop him there. Has Rée even read Grayling’s books, or met the fellow? Grayling is a soft-spoken, friendly gentleman who is happy to discuss nuance — he’s a freakin’ philosopher. “Grim absolutist” is about the most absolutely wrong-headed description of Grayling I’ve ever read.
OK, carry on.
who think that knowledge must involve perfect communion with literal truth, and the sceptical ironists – both believers and unbelievers – who observe with a shrug that we are all liable to get things wrong, and the human intellect has a lot to be modest about. We live our lives in the midst of ambiguities we will never resolve. When we die our heads will still be filled with a few stupid certitudes mixed in with some more or less good ideas, and we are never going to know which are which. There is no certainty, we might say: so stop worrying about it.
That we lack absolute certainty — a position that those scientific-minded New Atheists happily endorse — does not imply an absence of probablies. We can examine the evidence of reality and see that no, the universe almost certainly doesn’t love us; no, there is almost certainly no life after death; no, your favorite Jewish laborer or Arab merchant almost certainly wasn’t a prophet with divine favor, because there is no reasonable evidence for any of those claims. And further, the people who argue otherwise do not have any special access to evidence, no particular authority on supernatural matters, and are completely unable to provide replicable, confirmable support for their claims.
So I would agree that both atheists and theists (squishy and crunchy!) will die believing in things that are wrong. But that does not mean that we can’t discern in this life what things are almost certainly false.
I can call them ‘strident,’ can’t I? They apply it to atheists all the time, and this is clearly a case where the adjective is perfectly appropriate. It’s an opinion piece by a militant (I can use that, too!) Catholic who traces the fall of America to a court decision in 1972.
This year, the Supreme Court will render judgment on the institution of marriage. Though most of us don’t realize it, the Court first did so forty-one years ago in Eisenstadt v. Baird, a decision that gravely wounded marriage and set the nation on a course of gradual debilitation by ruling that states could not restrict the sale of contraceptives to unmarried people.
Oooh, marriage was ‘gravely wounded’ by that decision. It was a fairly straightforward issue in civil liberties: could the law decide that contraception could only be sold to married couples? The court decided no, it could not: even unmarried people have a right to regulate their reproduction by means other than abstinence.
Chaos then swept across the country as suddenly men and women were able to fornicate without spawning children! Yes, chaos! His word, not mine.
Having set chaos in motion in Eisenstadt, the Supreme Court quickly built the garbage bin for dumping sexual debris in Roe v. Wade, which gave a green light to the killing of 55 million unborn children, the overwhelming majority of whom were conceived by those unmarried singles with new access to contraceptives.
Having lived through that period (I started high school in 1972, so I was in prime temporal position to witness precisely all the horrible consequences), I’ve got to tell you: some kids were screwing before 1972, most were not. After 1972, some kids were screwing, most were not. There were single mothers, plenty of them, before 1972, and plenty afterwards — conveniently, during this period I worked part time as an assistant custodian in a school for single mothers*, so again I was in exactly the right place to witness the aftermath of sexual chaos.
It didn’t happen.
Also, I’ve got to wonder if the author thought his thesis through. New access to contraception led to a surge in unwanted pregnancies? Only if they weren’t doing it right. Maybe we should have coupled contraception access to better sex education.
Or just maybe the chaos was all in the author’s head.
A lot of things are obviously only playing out in this guy’s head. This is the extreme Catholic position: it’s not just that child-raising must be carried out within a marriage, but sex is supposed to be channeled towards only supporting procreation. Which is scary, speaking as an old (but not dead) guy who has put all his baby-making days behind him.
Thus, in a well-ordered society sex and marriage go together exclusively, because the union of male and female sexual expression must be undertaken in a union that binds them in advance of the coordinated labors needed to raise the children they may bring into the world. To achieve this, a functioning society demands that each citizen channels his sexual capacities in ways appropriate to these two tasks (procreation and child-raising). That is, it demands marriage.
How about if sex has other roles? What if it’s a general social binder that brings people together in close affection? Wouldn’t that be a good thing, too?
And what if marriage isn’t such a great matrix for raising children when the two adults involved have lost that affection? Surely no one can believe that marriage is sufficient to create a healthy family environment, and knowing more than a few stable, happy couples who are not bound by formal marriage, it’s not even necessary.
So how can Catholics justify sacrificing the richness and complexity of human relationships on the altar of their narrow definition of how people must cohabit?
*Predictably, the community felt the need to isolate unwed mothers from other women their age; they might contaminate them. Also predictably, colloquial references to that school called it the ‘school for bad girls’. Further predictability: I did not tell anyone that I was scrubbing floors and cleaning bathrooms there after school and during the summer because every idiot would have lurid fantasies about what I was doing, when actually I spent little time interacting with the women there (I was working outside of school hours), and what little I did see were women in isolated and difficult circumstances.
Mmmm-mmmm. Catholic saint stew.
I am late to the feast! the Digital Cuttlefish, Larry Moran, and Jerry Coyne have all picked over the bones of this ridiculous fellow Damon Linker, who has been moaning about the dearth of honest atheists nowadays. Real atheists, he says, should be dismayed and horrified at the absence of a god-being in their lives; they should be despairing at the knowledge that their lives are meaningless and doomed, nothing but the tragedy of blindly executing chemical reactions until they flop into the grave and rot. Oh, and also, atheist views are so despicable that they not only shouldn’t be allowed to run for public office, they shouldn’t be allowed to vote.
Sweet guy, huh? And so trite and unimaginative. His lack of ability to comprehend our sense of liberation at being free of his petty tyrant of a god is not an argument that we should be similarly fettered.
But all those other guys have torn that part of his argument to shreds. Let me take a different tack and approach another of his assertions. This one, the subtitle of his article.
“That godlessness might be both true and terrible is something that the new atheists refuse to entertain.”
I’m going to try something unusual, for me. I assume that Damon Linker fervently believes that his god is real, and normally I’d go after that and argue against his deity. But this time try pretending that somehow, by some miracle, it turns out that the Christian god exists, and Mr Linker is actually correct. Is he able now to contemplate this possibility?
“That Christianity might be both true and terrible is something that Christians refuse to entertain.”
Let it sink in, Christians. Really think about it.
If this religion were true, here is what we have to live with.
Our lives are miserable and evil, tainted everywhere by sin. Only in our death do we have an opportunity to escape.
We are pawns in a war between a god and an army of demigods (angels), and Satan and his army of demons. Satan is constantly trying to corrupt us.
When we die, we have two possible fates. The most likely is that we’ll end up in Satan’s clutches, which means an eternity (Forever! Endlessly!) of pain and agony and grief, tortured in a lake of fire.
If we win the god’s favor, we get to spend an eternity (Forever! Endlessly!) servilely worshipping this deity.
We have a purpose. It is to be slaves to god. That’s right, under Christianity we are all slaves to a omnipotent, omniscient master.
In some Christian sects, everything is predestined. Your efforts are futile, your ultimate fate in heaven and hell is set. No amount of struggle will change what will happen to you.
In other sects, you have free will, and can influence where you end up. Unfortunately, the exercise of your will is irrelevant except in your ability to follow arbitrary and peculiar rules: you may not masturbate, for instance, and you must avoid eating certain foods. You are free to obey god’s capricious whims, or not.
Your god loves you so much that he will kill his own son for you. But there’s a catch: you have to believe that god is the kind of guy who would murder his own son (and worship him for it!), ot you will go to hell.
Your god is the kind of monster who would exterminate just about every living thing on the planet because they were wicked. But at the same time, it’s dogma that every one of us is a wicked sinner. The axe is always suspended above your neck, the only thing keeping it away are the fancies of a tyrant.
This god is not a moral being: he has advocated rape, genocide, the murder of children, slavery, and blood sacrifice. The purpose of these horrific acts? His glorification.
Now please notice: I am not making the fallacious argument that because these consequences are awful, god is not real. I’m stipulating that the Christian god actually exists, and I’m asking Christians whether that would be a good thing or not — whether we should exult or be downcast at the idea of Jehovah’s existence.
If it would help, because I know they’re so soaked in the indoctrination that says an immortal incarnation of Dexter is a great thing that they’ll find it difficult to see beyond that, imagine if Allah were the one true god and you were expected to follow Muslim practices in order to be in his good graces. Or if that’s still too benign for you (I can’t imagine how), picture what eternity would be like if the True God were Huitzilopochtli, the Aztec god of war and human sacrifice.
I rather suspect that extortion on a cosmic scale will dictate what most Christians can say. The existence of the Christian god would be a colossal catastrophe for humanity, reducing us to inconsequential slave to an invulnerable authoritarian megalomaniac, but if you really believe in such a nightmare, you wouldn’t be able to complain — you’ll LOVE GOD AS HE DEMANDS, or he’ll SET YOU ON FIRE. And if you have any doubt, if you speak out and suggest that maybe his rule is a bit scary, he’ll just wish you into the cornfield.
But try, for just a moment, to admit that that god is damned evil. If he’s not so evil, he’ll forgive you a little doubt, right? And if he is that evil, why are you planning to spend eternity worshipping him?
Ophelia is hosting a wonderfully entertaining guest post on Hamza Tzortzis and the UCL segregation debacle. I know that guy; Tzortzis seems to show up somewhere every time I’m in Europe to peddle his peculiar brand of ignorance, and he’s invited me to debate him a couple of times now. The article will make clear why I’ve turned him down every time, even though it would have gotten me an expenses-paid trip to London. There are some things I just won’t do.
Ed West is a columnist for the Telegraph who seems to have two claims to fame: he’s a Catholic anti-atheist, and he’s one of those people who seriously argues that being against racism makes you a racist and oh, aren’t those immigrants a pain in the butt? Not one of my favorite people.
He now has a column in which he claims that the New Atheism is dead…a remarkable assertion, given that what I see of atheism, new or otherwise, is lively and thriving. The corpse is still dancing; perhaps we’re going to have to rename it the Zombie Atheism?
But wait: on what grounds does West claim that the New Atheism is dead or dying? Maybe he has a good argument.
Or maybe not. Here’s how he backs up his argument:
Richard Dawkins is annoying.
Another guy who is an atheist thinks Richard Dawkins is annoying.
Nobody likes Sam Harris.
Dan Dennett agreed with Dawkins, which makes him annoying.
Hitchens didn’t appreciate religion enough, which made him annoying.
Religion isn’t going away.
Religion isn’t as bad as Dawkins claims.
…and that’s about it. You know, if you’re going to claim a movement is fading, I would think citing some numbers would be indispensible to bolstering the claim; crankily reciting your animus against a few people within it doesn’t quite do the job. I could tell you that the Pope is far, far more annoying than Richard Dawkins and supports odious policies that have done far more cataclysmically awful things to other human beings than Dawkins has ever done — and in fact that there seems to be a remarkable dearth of facts showing that Dawkins has done any harm at all — but I wouldn’t be so stupid as to claim that the unsavory nature of ol’ Ratzi means the church is in decline.
West is guilty of very bad reasoning, which I guess isn’t surprising given that he somehow finds Catholicism reasonable. Even if every argument he made were true (and most aren’t, or are matters of taste and opinion), they wouldn’t support his thesis.
But the core of his claim is simply that there are many forms of religion out there, and even many kinds of atheism, and that that somehow means religion doesn’t do harm.
Even to non-believers, the argument that religion is a damaging parasite seems implausible. In their everyday lives people see that atheism does not explain the fundamental questions and a godless world doesn’t make us happier or even more questioning. The popularity of the Sunday Assembly, an “atheist church” in Islington, or Alain de Botton’s “10 commandments for atheists”, reflect the growing belief in secular Britain that religion is not just a beneficial thing but perhaps an essential one. Perhaps that is why New Atheism is as dead as Nietzsche.
The Sunday Assembly is a comedy act: a ‘church’ run by comedians to mock religion with a bit of positive spirituality thrown in. It had about 200 attendees on its opening day, and while not something I’d care enough to attend or oppose, isn’t exactly a testimonial to the failure of atheism. Next he’s going to try and tell us that Brother Sam Singleton signals a return to our Protestant roots.
De Botton…well, I’ve said a few things about de Botton before. The most generous thing I could say now about him is that he is a very silly man. That some people want to wear glasses made out of stained glass says nothing about the health of the New Atheism, which is populated by people who have no interest in any form of religion. You might as well claim that the existence of Wiccans means Catholics have ceased to exist.
But my main objection would be that atheism does address fundamental questions about the universe and our place in it, and answers them honestly, unlike religion. The answers may not be consoling, but they have the power of being true, and truth is a better foundation on which to build a good life than lies. Do they make us happier? It depends on who you are, I suppose: they certainly make me happier. Does religion make us happier? Clearly not, I can imagine few greater sources of world misery than the awfulness of the philosophies behind its religions — and as he is a Catholic, I would wave the miseries and death promoted by Mother Teresa, revered as nearly a saint by his faith, as an example of just how truly unhappy believers in his religion are.
At least I can return a favor. Catholicism isn’t as dead as Jesus; it’s an animated delusion, as lively as a cadaver on puppet strings, and still poisoning the world with its decaying reek. Would that it someday join Jesus’ physical form as scattered dust. Be one with your lord.
A notorious old fraud has kicked the bucket: Duane T. Gish is dead. He was a true pioneer in the art of lying: he was infamous for his “Gish gallop” style in which he’d simply rattle off distortion after lie after BS at a rapid-fire rate, trusting that any intellectually honest opponent would never catch up with him. He mastered the Chewbacca Defense before it was even named.
The NCSE has a beautiful quote from Karl Fezer that summarizes the Gish style:
Gish will say, with rhetorical flourish and dramatic emphasis, whatever he thinks will serve to maintain, in the minds of his uncritical followers, his image as a knowledgeable ‘creation scientist.’ An essential component is to lard his remarks with technical detail; whether that detail is accurate or relevant or based on unambiguous evidence is of no concern. When confronted with evidence of his own error, he resorts to diversionary tactics and outright denial.
Yeah, that’s Gish through and through.
