Those sleazy, lying Harvard Humanists

It’s been flabbergasting to see kooks jumping all over Richard Dawkins, all claiming that Dawkins is softening in his views (do follow that link to Paula Kirby’s article, it is most excellent), when he’s actually just saying the same thing he’s always said.

Now I’m experiencing a similar discombobulation. Last week I had a discussion with Greg Epstein on the radio, in which I said all the same things I’ve always said about religion. The question was “How should atheists talk about religion?”, and here’s a summary of the main points I tried to get across:

The answer is obvious: any and every way they want to. There is no dogma here, so there is no “should”: let a thousand voices roar. So we can have angry atheists and conciliatory atheists, and since there is no central authority, no pope of atheism, no one can say that one or the other is “wrong”. So, ultimately, there can be no disagreement between Greg and I except to acknowledge that we belong to different schools of thought on tactics and priorities.

Those differences, though, don’t mean I get to tell him how to manage his humanism or vice versa. Most of the strain between atheist communities comes from a perception that someone is disparaging our way: we more militant atheists get a lot of flak from the milquetoast atheists that we’re wrong, we’re driving believers away, we’re too obnoxious, that sort of thing…and it works both ways of course: we do things like call milquetoast atheists milquetoast atheists, and have little patience for soft and fluffy approaches.

But I think the final answer has to be that we need all approaches. I wrote something today that pointed that out: that what I favor is the combined arms approach to changing culture, and where I personally might favor the artillery for the biggest bangs, I know we need engineers now and then to repair and rebuild.

But here’s a central issue of contention: FAITH. No one word personifies the absolute worst and most wicked properties of religion better than that. Faith is mind-rot. It’s the poison that destroys critical thinking, undermines evidence, and leads people into lives dedicated to absurdity. It’s a parasite regarded as a virtue. I speak as a representative of the scientific faction of atheism: it’s one thing we simply cannot compromise on. Faith is wrong.

So then we see this one subgroup of atheists and humanists cheerfully endorsing the umbrella of “interfaith” and it drives us into a rage: it’s a betrayal. It’s an abandonment of a core principle of our atheism. We wonder what the heck is wrong with these people — it’s like being a dedicated pacifist and seeing like-minded war haters working with the Pentagon and saying good things about military drones.

I know the usual arguments: there are good religious people doing good work, and it’s a way to join in to those causes as secularists. And it’s true, there is no denying that there are good religious people…but they are laboring under a delusion, this nonsense of faith, and it’s pandering to the bad in order to do good. I can’t do that, and I won’t do that, `and I’ll confess, it annoys me to see atheists doing that. If they are religious people doing good work in the real world, then do it as a secular effort…don’t give the most foolish part of the endeavor credibility by calling it “interfaith”.

So today I got an email from the Harvard Humanists. You wanna see dishonest spin? I’m gonna show you dishonest spin.

Speaking of Humanists and tradition, Greg recently debated biologist PZ Myers, one of the most popular science/atheist bloggers, on the topic of “How should the atheist movement talk about religion?” Myers has at times been a fierce critic of Humanist community work but in this forceful showing, Greg won some major concessions as the two found a surprising degree of common ground. Check out the debate on our website here.

Epstein ignored everything I said and just sailed on over me. And now he’s going to claim he won some major concessions”? Was he even listening to what I said?

I think what he really meant to say in that email was that he learned that his caricature of the New Atheist position was false, so he did manage to hear some things we’ve always been saying this time. Unfortunately, now he’s trying to turn his blithe ignorance our position into a triumph, and selectively turning a blind eye to our differences.

This press release sounds like something from the Discovery Institute. It’s a completely dishonest representation of the discussion. We have not reconciled. And their freakishly fraudulent spin makes me trust them even less.

The League of Nitwits has farted in my general direction

I feel powerful. A silly gang of people stung by the criticisms of the New Atheists met for dinner to grumble about us, and my name came up a few times. It’s kind of like being a superhero and learning that nefarious villains are teaming up to shake their fists at you and make plans to thwart you…only in this case, it’s more like the League of Nitwits, which just sucks all the glory out of it. My nemeses are sadly disappointing.

Two atheists – John Gray and Alain de Botton – and two agnostics – Nassim Nicholas Taleb and I – meet for dinner at a Greek restaurant in Bayswater, London. The talk is genial, friendly and then, suddenly, intense when neo-atheism comes up. Three of us, including both atheists, have suffered abuse at the hands of this cult. Only Taleb seems to have escaped unscathed and this, we conclude, must be because he can do maths and people are afraid of maths.

The author is Bryan Appleyard, that tired hack of British crank journalism, anti-Darwinist and self-admitted terrible writer.

John Gray is one of those atheist apologists for religion, who claims that beliefs don’t matter — all that stuff about Jesus being the son of God, requiring your devotion in order for Christians to get into heaven? They don’t really believe that. They just like going to church for the company and the rituals and those comfy pews or something.

He’s quite right, the New Atheists haven’t been picking on Nassim Nicholas Taleb much, but it isn’t because he knows math (really — here we are, a largely science-dominated community, and Appleyard thinks we’re afraid of math? Gimme a break) — in my case, it’s because I never heard of him before. I had to look him up. All I know is that Taleb doesn’t like atheists, and likes religion for a stupid reason.

You’ve written a lot about chance and probability. Do you believe in God?
I’m in favour of religion as a tamer of arrogance. For a Greek Orthodox, the idea of God as creator outside the human is not God in God’s terms. My God isn’t the God of George Bush.

What’s your view of the “new atheists”, people such as Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris?
They’re charlatans. But see the contradiction: people are sceptical about God, yet gullible when it comes to the stock market.

Yeah, he’s some stock market guru. It seems to me that the only way to really make money in the stock market is by getting paid for telling people how to make money in the stock market; Taleb tells people how to make money in the stock market, which sort of says everything you need to know about him, and also makes his accusation of charlatanry particularly ironic.

Oh, and he also likes Ron Paul. Not impressed.

The final guest at this peculiarly petty dinner party is Alain de Botton. Haven’t we heard enough of the silly de Botton lately? He’s the atheist who has been straining to crawl up religion’s asshole and take its place.

De Botton is the most recent and, consequently, the most shocked victim. He has just produced a book, Religion for Atheists: a Non-Believer’s Guide to the Uses of Religion, mildly suggesting that atheists like himself have much to learn from religion and that, in fact, religion is too important to be left to believers. He has also proposed an atheists’ temple, a place where non-believers can partake of the consolations of silence and meditation.

Right, because that’s exactly what atheists want, a new religion. And now he’s shocked that atheists sneer at his temple, and reject the papacy of Pope de Botton.

To rationalize this pity party, Appleyard tries to define the New Atheism by listing the three legs of our position. Would you be surprised to learn that he gets every one of them wrong? No, you would not, because this is Bryan Appleyard. You would be startled if he got something right.

First, a definition. By “neo-atheism”, I mean a tripartite belief system founded on the conviction that science provides the only road to truth and that all religions are deluded, irrational and destructive.

Atheism is just one-third of this exotic ideological cocktail. Secularism, the political wing of the movement, is another third. Neo-atheists often assume that the two are the same thing; in fact, atheism is a metaphysical position and secularism is a view of how society should be organised. So a Christian can easily be a secularist – indeed, even Christ was being one when he said, “Render unto Caesar” – and an atheist can be anti-secularist if he happens to believe that religious views should be taken into account. But, in some muddled way, the two ideas have been combined by the cultists.

The third leg of neo-atheism is Darwinism, the AK-47 of neo-atheist shock troops. Alone among scientists, and perhaps because of the enormous influence of Richard Dawkins, Darwin has been embraced as the final conclusive proof not only that God does not exist but also that religion as a whole is a uniquely dangerous threat to scientific rationality.

Heh. His weird misunderstandings say so much about Appleyard, and so little about atheism.

  1. Wrong. Science provides evidence that all religions are wrong or vacuous. The charge of scientism is a common one, but it’s not right: show us a different, better path to knowledge and we’ll embrace it. But the apologists for religion never do that. You’ll also find that we recognize that there are obvious attractions to religion — most of them don’t require a gun to the head to get adherents — but that they get the facts of the universe fundamentally wrong, and building on error is a bad policy.

  2. Wrong. We’re quite aware of the difference between atheism and secularism. I do not teach atheism in the classroom, nor do I encourage teachers to do so; I want a secular educational system. I do not argue that only atheists be allowed to serve in government, but that government only implement secular, non-sectarian, non-religious decisions that are appropriate for a pluralist society. You may notice I’ve got a badge over on the right sidebar to Americans United, a secular but not atheist organization that I whole-heartedly support.

  3. Wrong, but hilarious. Darwin is not proof of the non-existence of gods. He showed how life actually diversified and changed on this planet, and he provided a mechanism that works without divine meddling of any kind. He makes gods superfluous. I love the fact that this kook finds science as threatening and scary as an AK-47, though. It says a lot about him.

Appleyard was so enthused about his new buddies in the We-Hate-New-Atheists movement that he had to get right on the phone and call up his buddy, Jerry Fodor, the philosopher who wrote an anti-Darwinian evolution book and got thoroughly panned everywhere. A new recruit for the League of Nitwits!

Of course he complained about me. And complained dishonestly.

Furthermore, the rise of evolutionary psychology – an analysis of human behaviour based on the tracing of evolved traits – seemed to suggest that the human mind, too, would soon succumb to the logic of neo-atheism.

It was in the midst of this that Fodor and the cognitive scientist Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini published What Darwin Got Wrong, a highly sophisticated analysis of Darwinian thought which concluded that the theory of natural selection could not be stated coherently. All hell broke loose. Such was the abuse that Fodor vowed never to read a blog again. Myers the provocateur announced that he had no intention of reading the book but spent 3,000 words trashing it anyway, a remarkably frank statement of intellectual tyranny.

Fodor now chuckles at the memory. “I said we should write back saying we had no intention of reading his review but we thought it was all wrong anyway.”

No, I haven’t read and won’t be reading the book by Piattelli-Palmarini and Fodor. But that article he’s whining about wasn’t a review of his book at all, and I plainly said so! It was a review of Fodor’s article in New Scientist, and I did read the whole thing. I am impressed that I and the other critics have completely driven him away from blogs; now if we can just scare him away from books, magazines, and television, he can spend the rest of his life happily rocking away in an empty room.

Appleyard closed his meeting of the shocked, traumatized, trembling victims of New Atheist ferocity with the tepid call of the religious apologist:

Religion is not going to go away. It is a natural and legitimate response to the human condition, to human consciousness and to human ignorance. One of the most striking things revealed by the progress of science has been the revelation of how little we know and how easily what we do know can be overthrown. Furthermore, as Hitchens in effect acknowledged and as the neo-atheists demonstrate by their ideological rigidity and savagery, absence of religion does not guarantee that the demonic side of our natures will be eliminated. People should have learned this from the catastrophic failed atheist project of communism, but too many didn’t.

I’m pessimistic that religion will go away in my lifetime, too, but not because it is a valid and reasonable reaction to the world around us. It isn’t. It’s the invisible friend the fearful cling to in the darkness, it’s the lie the desperate tell themselves in denial. But there is a better solution: you can turn on the light, and the invisible friend evaporates, the dangers are all exposed to be dealt with, and the truth emerges. Atheists are the ones who’ve flipped on the light, and found the universe to be not quite as scary as the ignorant claim it to be, and even better, to be full of wonders — wonders that we are part of, that aren’t painted on a fabric of myth.

And it really feels good. Religion can go away, every one of us atheists is testimony to that, and it leaves us better, stronger, and happier. I see no barrier to the complete eradication of religion someday, other than the fearfulness of craven little shadow-huggers like Appleyard.

Why I am an atheist – Thomas Prentis

I could answer this question simply, by saying: because I no longer believe in God. But the reason this belief slowly ebbed and changed a young, conservative, fundamentalist Catholic into a fire-breathing liberal atheist was primarily the fact that the claims of religion are wrong.

If you pray every day for God to change your life, to get rid of your bad habits, your sins, your problems and nothing happens; if you see how restrictive and unnatural the rules your religion has; if you start to see how absurd it is for people wearing special gowns and hats to get some special say; if you come to understand that you are being told what to think, what to do by people with absolutely no grasp on reality; in essence if you find out that the God-voice you listened to was yourself and that religion is the biggest game of let’s pretend in the world..

Well then you stop believing.

And I’ve been better for it every step of the way.

Thomas Prentis

I deserve to be flogged

I have confessed over and over again that I was wrong about the atheist bus signs. I initially raised an eyebrow at the innocuous messages that people were putting on those things, and thought they should be louder and more inflammatory to catch any attention. And again and again I had to be proven wrong: even the mildest and most positive statement, like “You can be good without god”, provoked vandalism and angry letters to the editor.

And now more atheists have to rub my nose in it.

NEPA and American Atheists got together to put this sign on buses:

It was rejected. Too controversial.

I give up. Point made. Just mentioning our existence is anathema to much of the American public, so my plan for an ad with Jesus and Mohammed having gay sex on an altar while rabid beavers gnaw on a crucifix, with the slogan, “WHERE’S YOUR GOD NOW, MORONS?” would probably be a little bit of overkill. Just forget I brought it up.

Also, another thing I have to apologize for: apparently, it is possible for American Atheists to be associated with a tasteful and well-designed billboard. (I know: David Silverman is the guy who will be doing the flogging now.)

Because we’ve been given so much to laugh at

Steve Kryger is complaining about the lineup at the GAC.

It listed the usual suspects – Dawkins, Harris, Myers (and sadly not Hitchens). But then I was confused. Was the Atheist Convention trying to save money by co-advertising with the Melbourne International Comedy Festival?

Out of the 34 speakers, 10 are comedians: Ben Elton, Mikey Robbins, Lawrence Leung, Jim Jeffries, Catherine Deveny, Simon Taylor, Tom Ballard, Stella Young, Craig Foster and Mr Deity. Sounds like good news for Melburnians – buy one ticket, get two conferences.

How flattering! Now I’m one of the usual suspects in a group of atheists! I do feel he missed an opportunity by not also counting me among the comedians, though.

But seriously, why are comedians such a common sight at atheist rallies? For this conference in particular, billed as a “Celebration of Reason”, why are nearly one-third of the speakers brought in to have a poke and a giggle?

For atheists, religion seems to provide no end of potential comedic material.

EXACTLY! How nice of him to have answered his own question.

Unfortunately, he doesn’t seem to be clever enough to grasp his own point. It’s a sad situation: in the Chinese Room of Mr Kryger’s mind, some correct answers emerge, but he’s too dim to be aware of them.

Granted, there’s much about religion that can appear confusing and even difficult to believe. It’s also easy to do a quick scan of the fringes and discover a barn full of straw men to encapsulate everything you don’t like about religion. But this doesn’t explain why atheists so frequently resort to satire, mockery, ridicule and scorn.

We don’t find religion confusing at all: many of us were brought up in a faith, and many of us godless folk are interested enough to study the subject. We’re also not critiquing fringe beliefs: we’re addressing mainstream Christianity, Islam, whatever, and also various versions of the religions within those domains.

And they are all absurd.

No, really. Once you get outside of, say, Lutheranism, it looks just as nonsensical and ridiculous to you as Mormonism or Scientology or Islam look to a Lutheran. What? I have to believe a rabble-rousing rabbi from the first century was a magical being with omnipotence and omniscience in order to get into Disneyland after death? What? It’s faith not works that gives you the key? What? The talking snake and the flying horse were literally true? What? This special underwear, these ashes on my forehead, visiting this rock, dancing just this way, not dancing at all, chanting these special words, eating this food prepared just so, not eating that food ever, chopping off this part of my penis, wearing a beard, not wearing a beard, cutting my hair just so, not cutting my hair ever…all of these things I must do at the behest of the universe-spanning master of the cosmos, or to fit in with my people, and you don’t find it all hilarious?

Even the ones who claim to be distancing themselves from miracles and magic and anthropomorphic beings in the sky and babble about believing in the “ground state of all being” or whatever other vacuous foolishness they’ve been spoonfed by some dithering theologian are laughable. You can’t take someone seriously who has so piously dedicated their life to defending piffle with deepities.

My question for atheists today is this: do you think the incessant mockery and smug ridicule benefits your cause?

Yes.

Does being a stuffy po-faced dimbulb benefit yours?

I’ve been to more than my fair share of Christian conferences. I’ve never attended a single conference where those of other beliefs (atheists or otherwise) were the subject of ridicule. I’m not suggesting this never happens, but on the whole, Christians are respectful of those with opposing beliefs.

This is true. They just say the proponents of those other beliefs will get theirs in a satisfactorily grim afterlife of torment and despair. Christians are very serious about that — they actually talk cheerfully about getting good seats in heaven to look down upon the writhing agonies of their enemies. I guess that’s “respectful” in a way. They certainly do take the whole business very seriously.

But otherwise, ridicule isn’t a good look for people who believe in the ridiculous themselves. The guy with the big red nose had better not risk poking fun at the other guy in the giant clown shoes, because next thing you know pies will fly and everyone ends up looking silly.

More criticism of Alain de Botton

Have you ever noticed the phenomenon where one person throws up, then everyone around them gets queasy, and then they start retching, and pretty soon everyone is having a pukefest? My emesis yesterday seems to have triggered a wave, with both JT and Martin geysering on cue.

Hmmm. That wasn’t exactly an enchanting analogy, I guess. But you know what I mean. And I think it’s perfectly appropriate to regard de Botton as an emetic.

And a defense! Hemant Mehta thinks Stedman and de Botton aren’t really that bad. It’s too bad none of his arguments actually address why some of us despise Stedman and de Botton, but OK. You play that game, the next thing you know, we’re siccing Ian Cromwell on you. Really…you don’t want to get on Ian’s bad side.

Why I am an atheist – AJ Champlin

There are a multitude of reasons that I’m an atheist. With the exception of a brief time as an “angstheist” when I was a teenager, none of those reasons include denial or anger. Rather than focus on the negative, I’d rather focus on positive and start from the beginning.

I am an atheist because I am fortunate enough to be a member of an order of apes that evolved intelligence. This evolution may have wired us to see patterns and believe the absurd, but the intelligence we’re gifted with also allows us to overcome this shortcoming. I am an atheist because there were men and women before me who refused to believe that the mysteries of the natural world were to forever remain unknown. Collectively, they developed the most reliable means available of uncovering these secrets. I have no doubts that I would be dead (a severe impediment for being anything beyond compost) if not for this scientific revolution; let alone capable of writing this letter.

I am an atheist because I’m not afraid of questions to which I don’t have answers. Instead I am, like many before me, driven to embrace the search for truth, regardless of what strange, frightening or fantastic truth that search my unearth. I do not require fairy tales to reassure me and push an illusion of purpose.

I have been fortunate to have parents that cared more about my well-being than about indoctrinating me into their faith. They taught me to be a decent human being without the fear of divine retribution. I was taught to appreciate the truth and to discard any falsehoods I may have acquired. Perhaps most importantly, that is why I am able to say that I am an atheist.

AJ Champlin

Why I am an atheist – Matt Waldbrook

I’m afraid my history of unbelief is uneventful and boring compared to others. There was no blinding moment of insight; no dramatic discarding of the chains of superstition; no wild and passionate confrontations with theistic family or friends. I was born and raised in picturesque British Columbia, Canada, which bears the proud statistic of being the most godless state or province in North America. My father comes from a fairly devout Roman Catholic family; my mother from a United Church of Canada family. Neither were believers in any real sense. Our family never attended church besides occasional accompanying my Roman Catholic grandparents when we visited them in Ontario (by the way, my Catholic grandparents were saints, who never forced their beliefs on us as children, and were always supportive of our life decisions). Curiously, my family retained the habit of saying grace before dinner; a mere rote of “Bless us, O Lord, for these thy gifts, for which we are about to receive, amen”. There was never any faith behind it; it was like saying “Bless you” after a sneeze.

(As an interesting aside, one of my distant relatives (great-great-grandmother, I believe) was one of the people reportedly “healed” by the recently canonized Saint Andre of Quebec. If true, this marks the first and last time that God bestowed any gifts on me or my family.)

As a child, I loved learning about science and nature, particularly Astronomy. I read, re-read, and re-re-ad infinitum-read books on Astronomy. I was utterly enamoured by the cosmos; the silent grandiosity of galaxies, the terrifying power of supernovae, and the majestic constellations that grace our night sky. One book I had compared and contrasted the Big Bang theory of the universe’s origin with the biblical Genesis. Though I was still young, and I did not fully grasp the scientific method yet, I remember thinking “How do they know the Bible is true? How can they back up the Genesis story with facts?”. Thus, I recognized early that the Bible, and religious ideology in general, was an empty promise; a mere story told to the gullible and the fearful.

Unfortunately, my skill (or lack thereof) with mathematics made a career in astronomy exceedingly unlikely. As a youngster, I also displayed aptitude for music, thanks to early piano lessons and the like. In high school, I was a part of virtually every musical group that my school offered. It was in high school music that I started having confrontations with religious classmates. Many had come from church choirs and the like, and wanted/demanded that we as a group pray before a performance. This irked me, and I would often reply with a snarky “shouldn’t we be praying to Dionsyus, the Greek God of wine, music and partying, instead of God?”. Or when someone tried to sell me the idea that Christianity is a religion of love, I would reply if it’s the same religion of love that murdered millions during the Crusades and Dark Ages. At the risk of sounding like a hipster, I was a new atheist before I had any idea that such a thing existed.

After high school, I was left adrift. My confidence in my music skills was at an all-time low; I didn’t think I could make a career out of music. At my mother’s behest, I enrolled in night school, to add some courses that I had elected to skip earlier. It was here that I fell in love with Biology, and the sciences in general. I aced just about everything thrown at me (although I continued to struggle with Math). To cut a long story short, I went on to attain a diploma in Biotechnology, a BSc in the same, and an MSc in Microbiology. Today I work as a researcher in a local biotech/pharmaceutical company. I still enjoy music and play piano and guitar recreationally. Only recently (last 2 years or so) have I come to identify myself as a new atheist, and have started to read the works of the movement. I don’t do much in the community…as mentioned above, B.C. is a godless haven, and the religious have little influence on our society. But I fully support my brothers and sisters who, by accident of birth, are forced to live in areas where religious influence is strong.

Matt Waldbrook
Canada

I am officially disgusted with Alain de Botton

Unfortunately, he’s extremely talented at self-promotion, and keeps saying things that deluded god-botherers love to hear, so he keeps popping up in the media, saying the same stupid things. Now he’s on CNN, whining about atheists again.

Probably the most boring question you can ask about religion is whether or not the whole thing is "true." Unfortunately, recent public discussions on religion have focused obsessively on precisely this issue, with a hardcore group of fanatical believers pitting themselves against an equally small band of fanatical atheists.

Fuck you very much, Alain de Botton.

He might find the question boring, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s central and important. Are we to live in a society that values truth, or one run by idiots like de Botton, who think the truth is irrelevant, in which we are governed by and our children taught by people who promote falsehoods? Who live their entire lives guided entirely by disproven myths and falsehoods, and evangelize that nonsense intensely?

Our culture is currently divided between three groups: Atheists, who think the truth matters, and want our problems addressed with real-world solutions; theists, who want a god or supernatural powers to solve our problems with magic; and fence-sitting parasites like de Botton who see a personal opportunity to pander to the believers for their own gain, who will ride the conflict while pretending to aloof from it, and win popularity with the masses by trying to tell everyone they’re all right. He is no friend to reason; he’s a really good pal to Alain de Botton.