Freethinker Tweets of the day: Atheism+ edition

Well, since Atheism+ is eating a shit sandwich over on Twitter, I thought a special edition was in order. So, without further adieu, here are some of the many Tweets from today:

Atheism++ ‏@AtheismPlusPlus We have created the website and the forums. And we see they are good. Now, #atheismplus followers, go forth and divide.

skeptical joe ‏@skepticaljoe I used to believe in racial and gender equality, then I found the truth of #atheismplus, & learned that WHITE MEN are subhuman animals.

AIDS VENTURA ‏@SUICIDEBOMBS #atheismplus Do you want fries with that unending sense of smugness?

human rights gal ‏@bexxbissell #atheismPlus …kill it, before it lays eggs

skeptical joe ‏@skepticaljoe I walked through the produce aisle when suddenly, a woman smiled and SAID HELLO! Oh, I feel so violated! Help me #skepchick!#atheismplus

The Honest Atheist ‏@AtheismHonestly I just bought a homeless person dinner. Not because I’m an Atheist, but because I could. Fuck you, #AtheismPlus.

Яune ‏@sp00x It doesn’t take a plus after your lack of belief in a god or gods to conclude that misogyny is wrong. (Ok, I’m done for now :P)#AtheismPlus

Яune ‏@sp00x What happened to just being good because it’s good? When did atheism have anything to do with random people being döüchëbägs?#AtheismPlus

skeptical joe ‏@skepticaljoe @AtheismHonestly Don’t you understand? It DOESN’T MATTER that you walk and donate. Only joining #atheismplus will cleanse you of sin!

Steve Zara ‏@sjzara Due to quantum conservation laws #atheismplus is equivalent to a group of sensible atheists going backwards in time.

Hans C. Schellenberg ‏@hanscs The #AtheismPlus crowd is beginning to remind me of Religion’s#Puritans. Anyone else?

Nephilim ‏@TeRetwitteoNJ 2,000 years of Christianity should’ve taught us the lesson that divisions don’t improve anything, but #Atheismplus seems to think otherwise.

Renee Hendricks ‏@reneehendricks #AtheismPlus “…it’s fabulous marketing-wise…” Ah. Now we see the true purpose of this silliness 🙂

Atheism++ ‏@AtheismPlusPlus Do u want “social justice warrior” on your resume, but find real world too messy? Then join #atheismplus. All u need is Internet connection.

Renee Hendricks ‏@reneehendricks *That’s* the term I was looking for that, to me, accurately describes#AtheismPlus – a big, ol’ circle jerk.

Atheism+ … mas or menos

This roused me with a good chuckle. Here’s a Twitter post from Jen McCreight about Richard Carrier’s most recent post about Atheism+, titled “Being with or against Atheism+“:

Jennifer McCreight ‏@jennifurret Finally had time 2 read Richard Carrier’s #atheismplus piece. His language was unnecessarily harsh, divisive & ableist. Doesn’t represent A+

Isn’t that rich? So, if the mighty Richard Carrier got it wrong, from where does the canon of all things Atheism+ spring? From the singular mind of McCreight it seems, with a dash of P.Z. Myers and Greta Christina.

10 Commandments vs. Bill of Rights

The man-made, extensively debated, committee assembled, legislatively enacted Bill of Rights contains more useful morality in its first adopted amendment than we find in all 10 commandments combined. — Steve Shives

See more here.

On Atheism+ and humanism

Jen McCreight over at Free Thought Blogs has created quite a stir in the atheist/freethinking community with a post titled, How I Unwittingly Infiltrated the Boy’s Club & Why It’s Time for a New Wave of Atheism, which has garnered in the neighborhood of 500 responses thus far.

In the post, McCreight laments her experiences with some of the more brutish individuals within the movement and said she was “welcomed with open arms” into the atheist and skeptic community until she started discussing feminism. Perhaps her first mistake was to create “Boobquake,” which was a day (April 26, 2010) for feminist supporters to protest Hojatoleslam Kazem Seddiqi‘s odious comment that women who dressed immodestly were the cause of earthquakes.

As if that weren’t a silly enough suggestion, McCreight’s response was to create a one-day protest that, by itself, seemed to objectify women. On April 19 of that year, she offered a post titled, “In the name of science, I offer my boobs,” and then asked supporters to follow suit on April 26:

On Monday, April 26th, I will wear the most cleavage-showing shirt I own. Yes, the one usually reserved for a night on the town. I encourage other female skeptics to join me and embrace the supposed supernatural power of their breasts. Or short shorts, if that’s your preferred form of immodesty. With the power of our scandalous bodies combined, we should surely produce an earthquake. If not, I’m sure Sedighi can come up with a rational explanation for why the ground didn’t rumble. And if we really get through to him, maybe it’ll be one involving plate tectonics.

So, who’s with me? I may be a D cup, but that will probably only produce a slight tremor on its own.

Since that time, she has seemed stunned by the immaturity and brashness of some within the community. At least she admits she was naive:

Boobquake made me wake up. What I originally envisioned as an empowering event about supporting women’s freedoms and calling out dangerous superstitious thinking devolved into “Show us your tits!” I received sexual invitations from strangers around the country. When I appeared or spoke at atheist events, there was always a flood of comments about my chest and appearance. I’ve been repeatedly told I can never speak out against people objectifying or sexually harassing me because a joke about my boobs was eternal “consent.”

So I started speaking up about dirty issues like feminism and diversity and social justice because I thought messages like “please stop sexually harassing me” would be simple for skeptics and rationalists. But I was naive. Like clockwork, every post on feminism devolved into hundreds of comments accusing me being a man-hating, castrating, humorless, ugly, overreacting harpy.

Adding (in bold):

don’t feel safe as a woman in this community – and I feel less safe than I do as a woman in science, or a woman in gaming, or hell, as a woman walking down the fucking sidewalk.

Of course, as a frequent Counter-Strike player, she damn sure shouldn’t feel safe in many online gaming communities. Pockets of those communities are filled with homophobic, sexist and racist deviants. Thankfully, the more civilized communities among them have numerous administrators online 24/7 that are diligent about banning people who display such crude behavior.

In any case, amid the unsuspected backlash of “Boobquake” — seriously, what did she expect with a name like that? — she is in the creating business again with something she has called Atheism+, dubbing this a “third wave” in the wake of traditional atheist scholarship that has been around for hundreds of years and the “new atheist” movement of Dawkins and Hitchens lore:

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. We can criticize religion and irrational thinking just as unabashedly and just as publicly, but we need to stop exempting ourselves from that criticism.

She also seems to criticize modern atheism for being a “Boys Club,” for some reason, presumably forgetting the likes Susan Jacoby, Annie Laurie Gaylor, Julia SweeneyAyaan Hirsi AliJaneane GarafaloPaula Poundstone, Ann Druyan, Margaret Downey and scores of others who came before them:

The Boy’s Club may have historically ruled the movement, but they don’t own it. We can.

One can argue, but I won’t, that this last statement is kind of a reverse sexism. Is McCreight now suggesting that females can and should “own” the movement? I’ll chalk that up to hyperbole on her part.

In her most recent post on the topic, McCreight addresses 10 “misconceptions” about Atheism+, none of which touched on my concerns, which I posited as a comment to her original:

… I didn’t see any evidence to suggest that non-believers are any more or less sexist or potentially offensive than any other group. It’s a little pie in the sky, don’t you think, to expect all atheists to be good people, just like calling yourself a believer doesn’t make you a good person. Quite the opposite in many cases. While working toward equality is commendable — as it always has been — you aren’t going to get it by proclaiming that you have invented a new movement and requesting that these offensive atheists play nice. If you want a perfect society, or even a movement, free of offensive people, you are on the wrong planet.

Adding further:

Feminists, who also happen to be atheists, and their supporters are certainly free to fight it and also fight to reduce the influence of bad apples from the atheist movement (and I fully support that) without inventing new movements when “New Atheism,” if we take Jen’s timescale here, is still in its infancy, while the “first wave” of atheism has thousands of years of scholarship behind it. Seems too soon to be conjuring up new movements based on some anecdotal evidence about some bad experiences with unbalanced individuals who could just as well exist in any movement.

To take the cake, McCreight’s first listed misconception was the similarities between Atheism+ and humanism:

I don’t give a diddly what label you want. Atheist, atheist+, humanist, pastafarian, Supreme Crusher of God-Belief. Whatever. I care more about getting stuff done, and I see the humanists as our natural allies. I just don’t understand why some of them are so cranky that we…what, are saying we agree with their ideals and values? Let’s not let progress get derailed by discussions about labels.

But she did label it and even presented a logo for it. So which is it? Do you want to create a name for a new movement that addresses ills like racism and sexism from an atheistic standpoint or do you want to stick with tried and true humanism? The former seems rather redundant to me.

As Twitter user @AdrianBriggs said:

Fans of #atheismplus, we’ve already got #humanism. If you’re sexist, racist, or homophobic then you’re not much of a humanist.

In the most basic definition of the word, humanism at its core does address racism, sexism, homophobia or anything else that degrades the dignity of humanity in general or individually. It’s not just a rejection of the belief in god:

hu·man·ism

noun

1.
any system or mode of thought or action in which human interests, values, and dignity predominate.

EDIT: “Reverse sexism” above should just be “sexism.”

Niall Ferguson’s recent column

So, apparently, even tenured Harvard instructors cannot escape the allure of partisanism, as “historian” Niall Ferguson has mightily thrown his weight against the Obama camp and in favor of the GOP ticket. So much for college professors promoting exercises in free thought and inquiry rather than sheepish allegiances to whatever ideology is the flavor of the day.

But that’s actually not the bad news. The bad news is that Ferguson has made his case against Obama with a healthy disdain for accuracy, and in his numerous distortions of facts, he should probably not only ask for forgiveness from his students but from his superiors. Numerous writers from The Atlantic (here, here and here) have lampooned Ferguson’s recent cover story, no less, in Newsweek. Yes, I said Newsweek and I said cover story. Apparently, in addition to an absence of competent editors and a competent publisher, Newsweek doesn’t have fact-checkers either. And this is a leading news magazine. How and why does Newsweek not have fact-checkers? I don’t know. Tenure at Harvard does not and should not make a person immune to editing and fact checking. Tenure at Harvard means just that; whatever hot garbage you spew in other venues should come under the same scrutiny as anyone else, mighty degree or not.

GOP convention: 1600 edition

From The Borowitz Report:

Republicans Move Convention to Seventeenth Century

TAMPA (The Borowitz Report)—With the threat of Hurricane Isaac hitting Florida next week, the Republican National Committee took the extraordinary step today of moving their 2012 National Convention to the seventeenth century.

While the decision to send the convention four centuries back in time raised eyebrows among some political observers, R.N.C. spokesperson Harland Dorrinson downplayed the unusual nature of the move.

“After exploring a number of options, we decided that moving to the seventeenth century would cause the least disruption,” he said. “We’re not going to have to change a thing.”

Mr. Dorrinson added that despite recent controversy involving the U.S. Senate candidate Representative Todd Akin (R., Miss.), there would be no modification of the Party’s official platform: “After we ban abortion in cases of rape and incest, we’re going to focus on America’s spiralling witch problem.”

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/borowitzreport/2012/08/republicans-move-convention-to-seventeenth-century.html?printable=true#ixzz24KXzRW7d