Another critic who hasn’t read the book

The City Pages, the arts and entertainment newsweekly in Minneapolis, had an article on the best artists of the year. One of the entries is jarring in its strange conclusions, the award to Christopher Hitchens:

Fueled by cigarettes, alcohol, ego, and, most importantly, intellect, Hitchens employs his excoriating eye in his Vanity Fair column, television appearances, and what’s quickly becoming his very own nonfiction canon. The only thing more surprising than the abundance of his output is his sheer audacity. After alienating pretty much every leftist in the country with his vociferous support for Bush’s invasion of Iraq, he dropped God Is Not Great, the most cogent condemnation of religion in recent memory, onto the number-one slot of the New York Times best-seller list and earned himself a National Book Award nomination in the process. Far from the vitriolic diatribe of a God-hating misanthrope like Richard Dawkins, Hitchens’s work is both appropriately respectful and right.

The City Pages is not a doctrinaire organ for the right or for religion — it’s irreverant (another winner is Stephen Colbert), and atheist-friendly (ditto for Philip Pullman), and this is a positive review of Hitchens. That last sentence, though…the complete mischaracterization of Dawkins took me aback, as did the cockeyed assessment that Hitchens is “appropriately respectful”. Hitchens isn’t respectful of religion at all, and Dawkins certainly isn’t less respectful.

Did Dawkins make a surprise visit to Minneapolis specifically to shoot Emily Condon’s dog or something?

Paulos summarizes Beyond Belief

Cool — John Allen Paulos has a roundup of the events at the Beyond Belief conference this year. It really was a stellar meeting, in part because there was such a variety of talks (almost all in attendance were atheists, but there were some deep disagreements). Paulos had one of the talks I found copacetic rather than irritating…and, by the way, he has a new book out: Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don’t Add Up(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). It’s a slim little thing that comes right to the point—and this is a reminder that I ought to pull it down off the stack and get it read.

The limited representation of movie atheists

I saw the new Will Smith movie, I Am Legend, last night. In short, it was far worse than I expected, with a drawn out and rather boring beginning (Smith is lonely, everyone is dead except for his dog. Got it), and the ending felt like a stapled-on feel-good absurdity that didn’t follow from the premise—and is only a happy ending if your dream of paradise is an armed camp of Christians. The only virtue I’d heard about the story is that the hero is openly atheist … but that was a disappointment, too, because I discovered he was the wrong kind of atheist.

Atheists in the movies aren’t that common. Most seem to be cast as amoral opportunists — the villains. They are rarely cast as the hero, and when they are there is only one atheist stereotype allowed in that role, and Will Smith filled it perfectly.

The acceptable atheist is the one who has faced so much tragedy, whose life has been damaged by cruel fate to such a degree that his declaration that there is no god is understandable. He is a failed Job; he’s portrayed not as an actual contented atheist, but as someone who has broken under the burden a god has placed on him, and is therefore a sympathetic figure, and also is implicitly endorsing the audience’s beliefs about god. Job without god, after all, is just a deluded loser.

That’s the standard trope: the atheist is a broken man, a nihilist, a cynic, someone who has come to his disbelief as a consequence of a devastating emotional experience. This is the kind of atheist theists are comfortable with — but it’s not the kind of atheists the New Atheistswann are, and especially not the scientific branch. We don’t fit into their unthinking convention, which is probably why they stuck us with the label “new”.

There are atheists who look on a tragedy and cry, “There is no god,” in despair. But we are atheists who look on beauty and complexity and awesome immensity and shout out, “There is no god!” and we are glad.

That’s the distinction we’ve got to get across. We are fulfilled, happy atheists who rejoice in the superfluity of the old myths. We generally don’t have a tragic backstory — quite the contrary, we’ve come to our conclusions because we have found natural explanations satisfying and promising.

wann: who are not “new”.

There is no such thing as a godless family?

John and Cynthia Burke have adopted two children. By all accounts so far, they were a decent couple of an appropriate age and financially able to take care of the kids. The first was from the Children’s Aid and Adoption Society in East Orange, New Jersey. They recently adopted a second child from the same agency — strangely, the article says their first son is now 31, which would put them in their mid-50s at the earliest, and I might see some grounds for objecting to the adoption on the basis of age…but no, a judge has ruled that they may not adopt on the basis of a rather interesting legal requirement.

In an extraordinary decision, Judge Camarata denied the Burkes’ right to the child because of their lack of belief in a Supreme Being. Despite the Burkes’ “high moral and ethical standards,” he said, the New Jersey state constitution declares that “no person shall be deprived of the inestimable privilege of worshiping Almighty God in a manner agreeable to the dictates of his own conscience.” Despite Eleanor Katherine’s tender years, he continued, “the child should have the freedom to worship as she sees fit, and not be influenced by prospective parents who do not believe in a Supreme Being.”

Wow.

This is so revealing. I’ve mentioned that religious indoctrination is a kind of child abuse, as has Richard Dawkins even more notably, yet when you press us we are both are at a loss to what we can do about it; parents have rights, and this is a situation where there there are all kinds of conflicting interests. Neither of us have advocated taking children from parents, or punishing people for mentioning god to kids, or any other penalties, not even mild ones — all we’ve ever said is that this is a real problem, one with no clear solutions, but we shouldn’t hide away from it.

Of course, the typical reaction from Christians and creationists and wingnuts has been pure hysteria — the atheists want to snatch your children away if you take them to Sunday school! Now we can understand it all as a perfect example of projection: if you don’t take your children to Sunday school, the Christians will try to take your children away.

I hope all those good theists who rebuked Dawkins and other atheists for a false perception that they were out to dismantle their families or deny them the privilege of instructing their children in their religion are howling about this attack on the family right now. Perhaps some of them, especially the New Jersey residents, are writing their representatives right now and demanding that this intrusion on the rights of parents be removed from the New Jersey constitution immediately…and perhaps they should be suggesting that Judga Camarata’s high-handed personal bigotry warrants official censure.

And hey, all you conservatives out there, with all your lip service to “family” — what are you doing about this? James Dobson and Tony Perkins must be furious. I’ll be looking forward to their denunciations, and their cooperation with the ACLU to correct this injustice.

Yeesh — now I discover this is old news, from 1970. Why did so many people suddenly send this in to me, anyway?

Anyway, it’s still relevant — I hadn’t known that theists had in the past tried to remove children from atheists. No wonder some freaked out at Dawkins’ description of religious indoctrination as child abuse…again, it’s projection.

Sermon and Sermonette

We’re going to have to start calling ourselves the Three Wise Atheists of of Scienceblogs: as Revere reveals in his Sunday Sermonette, he, Greg, and I don’t seem to have much difficulty with this Christmas stuff, and contrary to the Fox propaganda channel, most atheists and cheerful holidays with our families and friends, just like Christians, only without the boring superstitious part. I really don’t understand how people can so consistently fail to get it — our atheist Christmas is so much better than anyone else’s, because we get the presents and feasts and fun without the tedious ritual obligations. We’ve got to start marketing ourselves that way.

Meanwhile, I’ve always said that if you scratch one of those appeasing wooly-headed agnostics, you’ll find a raving fundie underneath (well, at least I said it just now). Wilkins exposes his militant fundamentalist side with his announcement that he’s an Eighth Day Inventist, and uses his militant, angry agnosticism to fuel a vicious tirade against some poor brain-damaged lunatic named Grant Swank. He seems to be a kind of Christmas pinata, because Wilkins seems to enjoy wacking him. Tsk, tsk — those mean-spirited agnostic Eighth Day Inventists. It makes me glad to be a warm-hearted atheist, it does.

Spend Easter in Minneapolis!

Everyone ought to mark their calendars: on the weekend of 21-23 March, the 34th Annual National Conference of American Atheists will be held in lovely Minneapolis, Minnesota — my backyard. Well, my distant backyard. I’ll be going, of course. If you read the Minnesota Atheists newsletter, you also know who a few of the speakers will be.

  • Ellen Johnson, president of American Atheists, will be everywhere.

  • Lois Utley will be speaking on the consolidation of public and religious hospitals.

  • Robert Lanham will be talking about the dangers of the religious right.

  • Some guy named Richard Dawkins will be there. I wonder what he might talk about…

  • There will be others, the schedule of speakers is still being worked out.

Come on out — it’s on Easter weekend, so it’s not as if you’ll have anything else to do.

Don’t look to god for help, Racine

You’ve turned your back on him. Racine, Wisconsin has joined the heathen ranks of communities that have erected godless holiday displays in the public square. It’s cute and simple, a pyramid with atheist/secular quotations written on it.

The blog entry describing it is amusing in its feeble attempts to distance itself from the vulgar monument to unbelief. It reassures us that there are many, many churches in Racine, and the atheists are few in number, less than a dozen. We are too a devout and faithful community, please don’t smite us because of the evil minority, God!

The pitiful excuses won’t help. Jehovah has a reputation for overkill.

‘Godless liberal’ is not an oxymoron

Damon Linker doesn’t like the New Atheism because it is “illiberal”, and so he writes a screed in the New Republic — one that is poorly thought out and guilty of the crimes he accuses atheists of, while exercising his distaste for the godless, and nothing more.

The problems begin with his opening gambit: he’s outraged that Richard Dawkins dares to regard religious indoctrination as a form of child abuse. As has been typical for complaints of this sort, Linker doesn’t bother to address the substance of the argument, since that is apparently too difficult for him — is, for instance, telling a child that they will go to hell if they get a blood transfusion a damaging psychological act or is it not? — and instead makes the lazy and fallacious leap to the claim that Richard Dawkins wants Christian parents arrested.

[Read more…]

Bad news: atheists can be good people

A recent poll of bigotry among religious groups managed to expose another level of bigotry in a certain unthinking tool, one David Briggs, who reported on it. It’s fine that they’re examining the problem of prejudice, but the last sentence at the end of this quote makes it clear that the virtue isn’t seen in terms of ending prejudice, but in promoting religious adherence.

A new study by Michigan State sociologist Ralph Pyle presented at this month’s joint meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion and the Religious Research Association in Tampa, Fla., shows how all sides in the conservative-liberal religious divide have work to do in combating prejudice and promoting tolerance.

Pyle measured nearly 3,000 responses from General Social Survey data from 1998-2004 on several issues such as openness to racial intermarriage and racially mixed neighborhoods and ranked religious groups on a scale of anti-black and anti-immigrant attitudes.

He found that moderate Protestants held the strongest anti-black attitudes. The next most prejudiced group? Liberal Protestants.

As expected, black Protestants were the least prejudiced against blacks. But they were the most prejudiced against immigrants. Conservative Protestants were the second most prejudiced group against immigrants. Jews, Catholics and other religious groups showed less prejudice to both groups, being particularly open to immigrants.

The good news for religious groups: People who go to church regularly were less likely to be prejudiced, Pyle said. The bad news is people with no religious affiliation were also much less likely to be prejudiced than individuals showing modest levels of commitment to their faith, those who attend services monthly or less.

Whoa. It’s “bad news” to discover that atheists and agnostics are more tolerant than modest church-goers? I guess it’s bad news for the church that’s trying to pretend they have the one true path to righteousness and goodness, but it sounds like good news for the people who are being discriminated against that there are many ways people can reduce their biases.

That is the goal, right?