Gaming and feminism

Right on cue, P.Z. Myers doesn’t waste any time dubbing this promotional image of a video game called “Dead Island: Riptide for Europe” as “vilely misogynist,” yet fails to ruminate on how he would feel if a “hot” male body was depicted in such a way. I mean, for god’s sake, if you insist on showing graphic content such as this, there are only two options: either you show a mutilated female body or a mutilated male body. Does Myers and the feminist crowd want equality or not? Or do they just want men to be the exclusive victims of violence and women to be portrayed only as fragile flowers who somehow stand above the fray of human suffering? I chafe at this image as much as the next guy, but doesn’t it at least say something about the equality that has already been achieved that marketing material such as this can see the light of day without unraveling society as we know it?

Response to PZ Myers’ post: ‘Atheism and the real search for meaning,’ part 2

Also see my previous post.

Continuing on, I concur with Myers on at least one point: his admiration for the writings of Susan Jacoby. Her book, “Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism,” is a brilliant contribution to skeptic thought in this nation. In his post, he quotes the following two passages from a New York Times piece from Jacoby titled, “The Blessings of Atheism:

The atheist is free to concentrate on the fate of this world — whether that means visiting a friend in a hospital or advocating for tougher gun control laws — without trying to square things with an unseen overlord in the next. Atheists do not want to deny religious believers the comfort of their faith. We do want our fellow citizens to respect our deeply held conviction that the absence of an afterlife lends a greater, not a lesser, moral importance to our actions on earth.

Today’s atheists would do well to emulate some of the great 19th-century American freethinkers, who insisted that reason and emotion were not opposed but complementary.

to which Myers responded:

There’s the step the Dictionary Atheists don’t want to take — that once you’ve thrown off your shackles you’re now obligated to do something worthwhile with your life, because now all of our lives shine as something greater and more valuable and more important. That with freedom comes responsibility.

And other passage from Jacoby:

We must speak up as atheists in order to take responsibility for whatever it is humans are responsible for — including violence in our streets and schools. We need to demonstrate that atheism is rooted in empathy as well as intellect. And although atheism is not a religion, we need community-based outreach programs so that our activists will be as recognizable to their neighbors as the clergy.

To which Myers concluded:

But not as clergy, as privileged people set apart from others by a special paternalistic relationship. How about as a community of equals? What if every atheist, rather than some particular special subset of atheists, were to acknowledge their part in building a better society?

Maybe then this movement could change the world.

OK, that’s a lot to dig through, but first, I fully realize and acknowledge the deep history of freethought, not just in America, but in Europe and even the Middle East, and I recognize that many freethinkers, like Robert Ingersoll, have found it worthwhile to devote their lives to important social causes. But that is the key. They found it worthwhile on an individual basis. There is no corporate mandate to do anything, and this seems to be what Myers is supporting: A mandate or a strong exhortation to turn atheism into a social justice movement would could equal a slavish loss of freedom for some people. People have the freedom to be self-absorbed assholes just as much as they have the freedom to move to Africa and do the hard work of feeding children and giving shelter to the homeless. In every case, I prefer the latter and sincerely hope that more people would work toward equality and making the world a better place, but that’s not my choice to make for other people. The best we can do is discuss our thoughts on creating a better society and how we get there and hope the enthusiasm spreads.

Myers, of course, attempts to adopt Jacoby to his cause, but in doing so conveniently leaves out a key distinction that she makes and understands:

Today’s secularists must do more than mount defensive campaigns proclaiming that we can be “good without God.” Atheists must stand up instead of calling themselves freethinkers, agnostics, secular humanists or “spiritual, but not religious.” The last phrase, translated from the psychobabble, can mean just about anything — that the speaker is an atheist who fears social disapproval or a fence-sitter who wants the theoretical benefits of faith, including hope of eternal life, without the obligations of actually practicing a religion. Atheists may also be secular humanists and freethinkers — I answer to all three — but avoidance of identification with atheism confines us to a closet that encourages us to fade or be pushed into the background when tragedy strikes.

Did you catch it? She said atheists may also besecular humanists and freethinkers. There is a good reason why Myers, in his endless nods to Atheism Plus, didn’t mention this paragraph. Because it clearly shows that Jacoby realizes that atheism alone does not come freshly and neatly packaged with social justice and by itself it is not a movement at all. However much Myers might want to cater to to his Atheism Plus friends, he is simply wrong on this one, good intentions aside.

I also want to add a few more thoughts to another of Myers’ passages about newly minted atheists that I touched on briefly yesterday:

You lack belief in the existence of gods? That’s nice, you’ve taken your first tiny baby step. Now what does that mean for human affairs? What will you do next? When will you stride forward and do something that matters with your new freedom?

This was stunning to me because it sounds exactly — I mean exactly like — things I was told as a believer. I remember hearing sermons about how people who were infants in their faith needed time to progress to maturity in Christ (a la 1 Corinthians 3:2) and that when someone came to believe in Christ, they gained “true” freedom. Of course, once someone becomes firm in their faith, they can then go out into the world, “stride forward” and perform the Great Commission, which in the analogy I’m making would be akin to Myer’s final sentence in the above paragraph. The point I’m making is that both propositions — what I heard in church and what Myers is saying here — are both doctrinal in nature, one just happens to be about the belief in Christ, while the other is, although built on a core nonbelief in God, is still purporting as a matter of policy that atheists “do something that matters.” I see little difference in these two: the content may be different but the preachy exhortations remain. Dogma is dogma whether it comes from the pulpit, a dusty old book or an overlord of the blogosphere.

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On Thunderf00t, misogyny, misandry and nonsense

Want me to make a long story short for you? Thunderf00t, a.k.a. Phil Mason, said some things about misogyny that some people thought were controversial while on a brief run over at Free Thought Blogs, and regardless of whether his removal from FtB was warranted or not, he has seemingly been on a hack campaign against his detractors ever since. I’m not saying that his criticisms have not been legitimate in some cases — describing an invitation to have coffee in a hotel room as a “sexualization” comes to mind — but I am saying that what began with a brief mention of misogyny seven months ago has veered off the tracks and has devolved into a ridiculous Internet war between a two groups of people who should have more things in common than not and who should, with all their supposed rationalism and goodwill in tow, be able to play nice. But the silly infighting continues. People have been bickering about fake jewelry for god’s sake … for months.

During a video posted June 24, 2012, in which Mason tells viewers that he, along with a couple other bloggers, was joining FtB, he says,

On this very auspicious occasion, I’m going to do something that I would never normally do and indeed, something I would probably call tactically dumb. Well, mostly dumb. And that is to get involved in one of these issues that causes a disproportionate amount of fighting within the rationalist community.

That little bit of prophecy turned out to be his first mistake, of course, was also his worst.

In the video, Mason rather gingerly and briefly criticizes certain people within the atheist community for “haggling over trivialities” involving disputes about sexual harassment at conferences. He doesn’t name her, but he is referring here to Rebecca Watson and the rift-inducing, giant facepalm that has come to be known as Elevatorgate. In his explanation below the video, Mason explains:

I’m just tired of those presenting sexism as some horrible injustice at atheist conferences (by reporting troll comments as symptomatic of a problem (other than not feeding the trolls)) when in reality its a very minor issue.

This takes focus away from more useful ventures, and also makes the community look like a bunch of incompetents, incapable of focusing on more important issues.

Mason was quickly removed from the blog network on accusations that he passed along confidential information shared through an internal FtB email list. Here is Mason’s response. Since that time and not taking his own advice, he has been steeping himself in trivialities and tediousness, most recently in a series of YouTube videos titled, “Why ‘Feminism‘ is poisoning Atheism” (Here are parts 1 and 2). The first video made some personal attacks against Watson, P.Z. Myers and others and shamelessly pulled most of the content out of context, while in the second, he argued more saliently that any kind of internal harassment policy at secular conferences would be redundant since we already have laws against harassment. (While conference leaders are perfectly free to make their own set of policies that speakers should abide by, they can’t necessarily control the behavior of attendees. As Mason never tires of pointing out, we have laws in place to protect people from miscreants and laws to bring offenders, harassers and other riffraff,  to justice. If some women don’t feel safe at skeptic conferences and if the organizers are really that concerned about it, they should arrange for extra security to be on hand and ready to file any complaints.)

But back on topic: In response to Mason’s first video, Michael Nugent prepared a detailed critique, arguing essentially that

I know that TF is criticizing behavior that he sincerely believes is harming the atheist and secular communities, but his personal attacks are disproportionate to his concerns, they are unfair to those who he is attacking, and they are not helping to resolve the issues that they address.

I have been critical of the neofeminists and Atheism Plus in general for the atmosphere of parochialism that has been created in the skeptical community, and I don’t agree with the approach that many of these feminist supporters have taken, name-calling not the least of their childish tactics used to chide their critics. For example, Myers seems to have no problem calling people assholes, idiotsmorons and best of all, he has a whole category filed under Fuckbrained assholes, where he mostly blasts the religious but also summoned that category to file his criticisms of Mason.

But what makes me want to bang my head against the wall is the spirit of parochialism that has permeated both sides of this discussion, from the neofeminists to the men’s rights crowd, known commonly as MRAs. As far as I’m concerned, neither are doing the atheist community much of a service, and frankly, are linking atheism with other causes that may or may not be supported by other nonbelievers.

I’ve written enough about Atheism Plus and the neofeminists, so let’s take the A Voice for Men website and the MRA crowd. AVfM only has one sentence in its long list of “editorial policies” that I actually support with regards to gender issues:

AVfM supports the idea of total and complete equality of opportunity between the sexes.

All this rubbish about male privilege on one side and a pro-male agenda on the other side can all be scrapped, just like the notions of white privilege and black reparations should be scrapped. Along with Black History Month, all four of these are relics and do nothing to move the human species forward. I should not attempt to use my whiteness to get ahead in life. Likewise, were I a black person, I should not use my perceived disadvantage to get a one-up on a candidate of another race. Nothing short of complete equality among genders and races in practice should be desired, and to continue to speak in terms of some kind of privilege based on what sex a person is only continues to promote a problem where one need not exist here in the year 2012. And this applies on either side. I chafe at hearing feminists complain about privilege and people crying about misogyny as much as I would chafe at the suggestion that I approach life through some pro-male prism and people crowing about misandry on the other.

My perception is that people get a sense of belonging, and perhaps purpose, when they link up with these various groups, but it all seems like a resource-draining distraction to me. If we really want to move the species forward, the goal and the thing that we should all be working toward is human equality. Period. The rest is just childishness, territorialism and schoolyard-style clap trap.

I’m tempted to dovetail this post into a discussion about Myer’s recent post, “Atheism and the real search for meaning” because the topics are related, but I’ll get to that next.

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Year in review: top posts of 2012

Here are the top posts for 2012. Each title links back to the full post, and a pull quote is added on each. I didn’t count them this year, but they are presented more or less in chronological order from January-December, with about two posts from each month.

***

Inner strength: Review of Jean Edward Smith’s ‘Grant’

The presidency changed neither Ulysses S. Grant’s approach to leadership, nor his character. In the White House, Grant exhibited the same even-tempered ability to guide the nation through eight years of tensions after the Civil War as he did in his most important victories on the battlefield at Fort Donelson, Vicksburg and Appomattox. …

Biblical deconstruction VIII: the covenant

The entire biblical narrative hinges on a promise, that is, the promise from Yahweh to Abram that God would give him and his descendants the land of Canaan “forever,” as quoted in Gen. 13:14-15.

God did not live up to this promise. The lands in and around “Canaan” were in those early epochs and still are contested territories, as evidenced by the constant strife in the Middle East between Israel and Palestine. Of course, “Canaan” encompassed more than just Israel and the West Bank to include parts of modern-day Jordan and Syria and other areas, so God is still far from living up to his long-past promise to Abram and the tribes of Israel. Christians here will say that in Christ, a new Covenant was formed by which Christ will reconcile Jews and Gentiles and allow everyone who believes to be saved through Jesus. …

Debate with a theist

Please read here for some interesting correspondence between myself and a fellow blogger named, David Smart, aka, Ryft, who challenged a comment I made on one of his posts. I invite you to read his original post(too long to quote here), and what follows is my initial comment to it, which was chided for its brevity (didn’t know that was a bad thing). Here is the paragraph to which I responded: …

The argument from beauty

I listened to most of Bach’s Brandenburg concertos this afternoon and got to thinking again about the argument for beauty.

This fellow blogger raises a concern that the argument, which is articulated this way

  1. Beethoven’s quartets, Shakespeare’s sonnets, etc., are beautiful.
  2. If there were no God, then there would be no beauty (and thus no beautiful things).
  3. Therefore, there is a God.

may not be a legitimate argument for the existence of God in the first place and that Richard Dawkins’ only reference to the argument in “The God Delusion” is anecdotal. The writer also claims that Dawkins dismisses the argument for beauty by committing the begging the question fallacy because he asserts “without argument, that beauty doesn’t depend on God.” …

Free will an illusion?

The following video has been making the rounds in various freethinking circles lately to varying degrees of praise and criticism. In this lecture, author and neuroscientist Sam Harris delivers a lecture arguing against the notion of free will based on his book of the same name. …

Here, Harris puts forth a deterministic view of the human experience in which we are obviously not free to choose our genes, our backgrounds, our places of birth or control other factors that will eventually lead to our fully developed, adult selves. While some, through any number of variables, become “good” people and generally strive to improve the lives of the people around them, others, due to different and more malignant factors, are decidedly unlucky and become sociopaths and/or killers. …

Revelation revisited

Here is an intriguing look at the Book of Revelation that claims that the writer of the book, emphatically not John the Apostle, wasn’t writing about the end of the world, but rather about the collapse of the Roman empire, with Nero as the one stamped with the numerals 666.

I don’t know what John Milton’s personal interpretation of the Revelation might have been other than what he wrote in Paradise Lost, but it seems at least plausible to me that Milton, as ever, was onto something revolutionary. …

Punctilious punctuation 2

… Writers (and readers, I guess) apparently don’t have the attention span to follow the sentence throughout its entire construction, so they sometimes forget where previously placed commas occurred. This is easy to track in your head as you reread or edit a story, but problems such as this crop up time and time again. And for people who care about the language, it’s a distraction. As a colleague has often said, “Journalists are the keepers of the language.” That’s not to suggest that I won’t have typos myself, but the will for perfection is there. This is apparently not the case with many who haphazardly throw in or leave out commas seemingly at random. …

O, Lost

If the word has not already been coined, I’ll do the honors.

This year, I unequivocally became a Lostophile, that is, a person with a deep affinity for the philosophical nuisances of the television series, “Lost.” Granted, the TV show went off the air in 2010, but I only came toThe Island, so to speak, this past fall (October 2011) when I began watching the series from start to finish on Netflix.

OK, that’s not quite accurate. My initial engagement with the show was so intense that I watched the first three seasons, started right back at Season One and then watched the whole way through. I recently finished Season Six a couple weeks ago. …

Sullivan in denial on Christ

Christians arguing with other Christians about the “true” nature of Jesus and the church always makes for entertaining reading, but even more so when it comes from an openly gay Catholic whose own intellectualism should undercut his own faith in the first place.

In his new essay for Newsweek, “Christianity in Crisis,” Andrew Sullivan says that we should eschew the influence of politics and power that has crept into religion and get back to the “radical ideas” that spring from what Jesus did and said, including loving both our neighbors and enemies, turning the other cheek, giving away all material possessions and loving God the Father, whom Sullivan calls “the Being behind all things.” …

Bible ‘ho-hum’ on homosexuality. Really?

… So, if the people commit acts such as sleeping with their relatives or with people of the same sex, the earth will regurgitate them. In what “historical contexts” are we supposed to read these passages? I can maybe grant his point about Sodom — those guys were clearly out of line wanting to have sex with the angel-men! — but his blanket statement about homosexuality in the Bible is patently false. The passages above sound like pretty firm prohibitions to me, and not just of the acts themselves, but of the ideas of homosexuality, bestiality and incest, all of which are lumped together in two separate chapters.

 Satan and/or God’s wrath behind [insert tragedy here]

Another tragedy, more crazy talk to boot. Former Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee recently said America’s “sin problem” was behind the Aurora movie theater shooting, while Rep. Louie Gohmert has said the nation was no longer under God’s “protective hand.” …

Book review: “Madison and Jefferson”

The above passage seems to summarize the general error of history that Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg address in their colossal, that is to say, towering work on a friendship between James Madison and Thomas Jefferson that endured for half a century.

Madison, as history has recorded, has been judged as the mostly quiet and stoic political thinker and constitutionalist, while Jefferson is widely thought of as the passionate, if not hyperbolic, consummate republican, always heralding the interests of the Virginian farmer against a potentially overbearing federal government that is always in danger of overextending itself. …

Biblical deconstruction X: God tests Abraham

Here we deal with one of the most well known, and by that I mean notorious, verses in the whole Old Testament.

The passage in Genesis 22 begins with God deciding, for whatever capricious reason God decides to do anything, to test Abraham by asking him to sacrifice his son as a burnt offering to him: …

Biblical deconstruction IX: Sodom and Gomorrah

Continuing with this series, we now turn to Genesis 18-19, in which Abraham and Sarah in the first part of Chapter 18 learn from God that she, now at an old age, will bear a son. The passage begins with the Lord appearing to Abraham under some trees, as well as three “men,” presumably angels. …

Why progressivism?

I took a long drive today — specifically eight hours round trip from Tennessee to South Carolina and back — and had some time to think about exactly why I can’t, under any circumstances, morally or intellectually, understand or support the conservative program of the last, well, 32 years since I’ve been old enough to be cognizant of it.

I concluded that it is this: while progressives, Green Party members, some Democrats and others, have been champions of people — you know, human beings with pulses and feelings and a pitiable capacity for suffering under immense physical, emotional or financial stress — Republicans more or less have mostly been concerned with A) protecting the rights of inanimate religion in all its forms, squashing gay rights, squashing all abortion, sometimes even in cases of rape or incest, and protecting the right of prayer in the public square, and B) protecting the rights of inanimate state governments and inanimate corporations. …

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. …

On trial: ‘The Case for Christ,’ part 2

Welcome to the second part of this 16-part series on Lee’s Strobel’s “The Case for Christ.” If you missed it,here is Part I.

Strobel now gets to the meat of the book designed to investigate the trustworthiness of the New Testament authors and their accounts of the life of Jesus.

In Chapter 1, Strobel interviews Christian apologist Craig Blomberg and asks him how we know that the Matthew, Mark and Luke are the actual authors of the first three gospels. Blomberg then points, not to two sources outside of the church who can vouch for the authorship or the validity of the claims, but to two early church bishops, Papias (70 to about 155 A.D.) and Irenaeus (130-202 A.D.). …

On Atheism+ and humanism: part 2

At the expense of repeating myself, I’ll take some time here to explore some of the other components, criticisms and responses to Atheism+ that were not covered in this post. I have wanted to write a follow up post on this for quite a few days, but it has taken awhile to gather my thoughts.

Here I will show in fuller detail why Atheism+ is not only redundant but why it’s actually corrosive to the legacies of atheists and freethinkers who have done important social work under the old banners and who did so bravely and under conditions that were far from friendly or accepting. …

The omnipotence paradox

In a video series YouTube user Mike Winger calls, “Things Atheists Should Never Say,” he claims that nonbelievers should never ask this question to believers: “Can God make a rock so big He can’t lift it?”

I believe the typical phraseology goes like this: “Can God create a rock so heavy that even he cannot lift it,”with the common perception being that if God is all-powerful, he could, in theory, create an object bigger than his omnipotence will allow him to lift, thus hurling his supposed nature into logical entropy. This is called theomnipotence paradox.

Now, I’m not going to write a long essay defending this question. I and fellow nonbelievers don’t need this question, as it were, to tear holes through Christianity and religion in general, but I will add a few words in reference to some comments made over in Mike’s comments section on YouTube. …

Response to ‘Atheism’s growing pains’

As a number of folks on Tweeter had posted a link to the Salon.com article, “Atheism’s growing pains,” particularly because it referenced Atheism+, I thought I would have a look. I skimmed half of it because it just summarized the rise of atheism (I won’t call it a “movement”) and later, the prominence (or notoriousness) ofJen McCreight and her ill-named “Boobquake.” I wrote about Boobquake briefly here, but Adam Lee’s statement here is too good to bypass:

At first it seemed like lighthearted fun in support of a good point, but she (McCreight) wrote that it had encouraged some men in the atheist community to view her as a sex object, rather than a person with ideas worth taking seriously …

Again, I ask: ya think? …

Death of Reaganomics, rise of middle-out economics

Michael Tomasky with The Daily Beastargues that supply-side economics, as well as its ugly stepsister,Reaganomics, died on Election Day when Americans largely rejected the general economic platform of Mitt Romney in favor of a “middle-out” philosophy trumpeted by Barack Obama.

Tomasky makes a good case, but I would suggest that Americans began pulling the curtain on Reaganomics earlier in 2008. …

Why I write about religion

… I enjoy exploring questions in religion and philosophy because it’s intellectually stimulating. As a churchgoer, I used to compose whole essays about certain passages in theBible and how modern believers could find relevance from them and come away with some kind of moral lesson. I could still do this if I so desired.

Nowadays, I find that a better use of my time is to expound, not only on the many logical inconsistencies with the Judeo-Christian belief structure, but on the dangers of belief itself. And these are not just the intellectual perils. Religion has plenty of that to go around. No, I mean physical danger: parents who believe so much in prayer that they fail to take their sick children to the doctor when illness strikes, and when the kid inevitably succumbs to the illness, the words, “God‘s perfect plan,” shamefully spills from their lips; young men who fly planes into buildings for Allah and the promise of a reward in some long-hoped for paradise; Catholic priests who use the shroud of religion to coax small boys into back rooms of a sanctuary, strip away their innocence and then threaten them with more villainy if they say a word. And all of this just in modern times. This speaks nothing of the hundreds of years of oppression, violence, slavery and misery that religion has heaped on mankind, a misery that is flippantly and ludicrously explained away by the notion of original sin. …

Bad poetry: ‘Twas’ 11 days before Christmas’

This sinister and silly little poem has been making its rounds around Facebook and the interwebs after the shooting in Newtown, Conn. Here’s the text:

Twas’ 11 days before Christmas, around 9:38
when 20 beautiful children stormed through heaven’s gate.
their smiles were contagious, their laughter filled the air. …

Bad poetry redux

Since my responses were becoming a little long, I decided to make a new post to address a few of the comments I received on my criticism of “Twas’ 11 days before Christmas.” …

The Neofeminists (and The Neofeminists, ctd)

How to describe this “new wave” of hypersensitive, reactionary, dogmatic and witch-hunt brand of feminismthat has surfaced in the last year, with Ophelia Benson, Jen McCreight, Rebecca Watson and others carrying the banner?  As I’ve said before, I think the term neofeminism is about right. …

Purpose driven pastor

Here is an interesting profile of Saddleback Church pastor, Rick Warren, and author of the best selling book, “The Purpose Driven Life.”

Warren seems to be attempting to make a resurgence by taking advantage of the 10-year anniversary of the work’s publication, which outlines the five “purposes” that people, specifically Christians, have in life. He is releasing a new edition of the book with a couple new chapters and well as some accompanying links to extra audio and video content, no doubt hoping to add more millions of dollars to the surge of book sales (and related instructional material) that he got from the first publication. …

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The Neofeminists

How to describe this “new wave” of hypersensitive, reactionary, dogmatic and witch-hunt brand of feminism that has surfaced in the last year, with Ophelia Benson, Jen McCreight, Rebecca Watson and others carrying the banner?  As I’ve said before, I think the term neofeminism is about right.

Here is Benson at her accusatory best, this time accusing Michael Shermer, of all people, of believing that women are, at least implicitly, “too stupid to do nontheism:”

Don’t laugh: Michael Shermer said exactly that during a panel discussion on the online talk-show The Point. The host, Cara Santa Maria, presented a question: Why isn’t the gender split in atheism closer to 50-50? Shermer explained, “It’s who wants to stand up and talk about it, go on shows about it, go to conferences and speak about it, who’s intellectually active about it; you know, it’s more of a guy thing.”

It’s all there—women don’t do thinky, they don’t speak up, they don’t talk at conferences, they don’t get involved—it’s “a guy thing,” like football and porn and washing the car.

What Benson didn’t mention was that Shermer’s remarks were lifted out of context. Here is part of Shermer’s response:

First of all, Benson shortened the quote. What I prefaced the above with is: “I think it probably really is 50/50.” Benson also left out my follow up comment moments later that at the 2012 TAM (The Amazing Meeting) conference of skeptics and atheists, there were more women speakers than men speakers. I misspoke slightly. According to D. J. Grothe, the TAM organizer, there were an equal number of men and women speakers (the roster on the web page is incorrect) until, ironically, Ophelia Benson herself dropped out.

Whatever reason Benson had for dropping out of the conference, this is telling. So, she is calling for more nonbelieving women to get involved in the conversation but was absent herself. Nice. As it turns out, a brief browse through the Twitter secular community will reveal that many women have spoken out against this new wave of feminism that seems more about exclusion and frantically thwarting contrary arguments than really enacting societal change. The us against them dichotomy, which seems to include most everyone, couldn’t be stronger.

According to Shermer’s blog post, even Harriet Hall, who was instrumental in the “first wave” of feminism, has even been put off by this new brand of nuttiness:

Harriet Hall, M.D., the SkepDoc columnist for Skepticmagazine (one of two women columnists of our three, I might add, the other being Karen Stollznow), who lived through and helped bring about the first-wave feminist movement, told me she “was vilified on Ophelia’s blog for not following a certain kind of feminist party line of how a feminist should act and think. And I was attacked there in a disturbingly irrational, nonskeptical way.” I asked her why she didn’t defend herself. She wrote in an email (12/08/12):

“I did not dare try to explain my thinking on Ophelia’s blog, because it was apparent from the tone of the comments that anything I might say would be misinterpreted and twisted to use against me. I have always been a feminist but I have my own style of feminism. And I have felt more oppressed by these sort of feminists than by men, and far less welcome in that strain of feminism than in the atheist or skeptical communities.” (Italics mine)

There you have it. Straight from a feminist that these folks are overtly confrontational and misguided.

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Freethought Tweets of the day: Atheism Plus edition

The WoolyBumblebee ‏@WoolyBumblebee #Atheismplus has 2044 users – 13 mods – 3 admin – 38 banned users = 1990. Of which only 831 ever made MORE than ONE post on the forums.

Atheism+ ‏@atheismplus #atheismplus inclusiveness. Everyone is welcome, just so long as you’re not foreign. Or if you are, you’d better have PERFECT English.

Atheism+ ‏@atheismplus In #atheismplus we have special words. Objections are ‘hate’. Objectors are ‘angry at outspoken women’. Dislike of us/A+ is ‘misogyny’.

Atheist Smeghead ‏@AtheistSmeghead My question about #atheismplus STILL hasn’t been answered: What do those social issues have to do with a lack of belief in any deity?

Renee Hendricks ‏@reneehendricks Really? http://atheismplus.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=26361#p26361 … WTF is wrong with those mods on #AtheismPlus? Gigantic asshats, I swear.

The post she is referencing:

Re: Men: Are You Willing To Be Called A Potential Rapist?

Postby maiforpeace » Sun Oct 07, 2012 11:34 pm

Specimen, bonjour!I speak several languages including French, and I’m afraid you don’t possess the English language skills to communicate properly in such a serious and mindful discussion. I think you are better off just reading right now, and maybe you can get a buddy who writes English better to help you write posts so you can participate and offer your own contributions to this thread.

So I will ask you politely to desist from posting further in this thread. Thank you, Mai

A reader was asked to quit posting because they don’t speak perfect English? Wtf.

And further down in the thread:

Postby Flewellyn » Mon Oct 08, 2012 1:19 am

MOD NOTE: This topic is no longer serving a useful purpose. It has been locked.

So an admin just locks a conversation whenever they subjectively feel it’s no longer serving a purpose? Stunning.

More Tweets:

Stormye Weather ‏@Nuclear_Wynter Can you imagine a room full of black men pontificating on being labeled “potential criminals” to make white people feel safe?!#atheismplus

Maria Maltseva ‏@bluharmony @Stefanelli is my hero: Q&A about Atheism Plus, White Male Privilege, Guilt by Association, Schrodinger’…http://freethoughtblogs.com/alstefanelli/2012/10/09/qanda/ … …

Za-zen ‏@Zaminuszen Next time that homeless wanker logs on to his laptop, somebody please point him to #AtheismPlus forums so we can correct his privilege.

Jamie Stanton ‏@finalcontext Just told by #atheismplus mod that treating people equally regardless of gender, race etc makes me “part of the problem” *head explodes*

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The faces of feminism

Deacon Duncan over at Free Thought Blogs made an interesting post today about feminism and what he calls, “counterfeminism.” Duncan grappled with the question of why some women are vehemently against feminism when, indeed, it has been the feminists who “are fighting to win them equal rights. It boggles my mind.”

OK, so when approaching questions like this, especially when referencing writers at FtB, it becomes necessary to determine whether said writer is referring to the type of hypersensitive, reactionary and every-male-is-a-potential-misogynist-or-rapist brand of feminism of the Rebecca Watson, Jen McCreight, or the run-of-the-mill hypersensitive feminism that has been with us for decades. Since Duncan has voiced his support for Atheism Plus, I suggest that it’s the former.

Duncan provides his definition of feminism and counterfeminism:

The feminist is working to establish women as autonomous and respected individuals who are equal in status, opportunity, and financial compensation, as compared to their male counterparts. The feminist assumption is that the ideal condition for women is equality. But that’s not necessarily an assumption shared by all, not even by all women.

It’s possible that there’s a counterfeminist assumption that the ideal condition for women is one of dependency and entitlement …

I prefaced this with a brief mention of Atheism Plus because Duncan’s post seems to suggest that in characterizing those who oppose feminism, he seems to be referring to the women who are against the A+ brand of feminism. It’s not believable that he would be referring to any other group since he’s writing at a place called Free Thought Blogs. But at the same time, I have never met, for instance, a female atheist, online or in person, who thinks that the ideal condition for women is dependence and entitlement, other than the aforementioned jaded individuals who think the male world is out to get them. So, I can only conclude that he is talking about some type of mid-20th century housewife, or perhaps, a 19th century Southern belle, neither of whom could in any sense be described as feminist in the modern sense. Or, as he describes it:

… that in a perfect world, a woman would live by forming an attachment to a man, who would then provide her with food, clothes, a home, and some spending money in return for a bit of light housework and some sexual gratification now and then.

This seems to me to be an outdated characterization that isn’t anything like feminism at all. Thus, I don’t know from where this theory of a type of “counterfeminism” comes.

I have already identified two types:

  • Feminism 1: reactionary and every-male-is-a-potential-misogynist-or-rapist brand of feminism
  • Feminism 2: run-of-the-mill hypersensitive feminism

and here is a third type:

  • Feminism 3: non-reactionary brand that fully supports equality, rights, critical thinking, rationality and female emotional and mental strength that is not necessarily comfortable with the “feminist” label.

I wouldn’t dare speak for them, but I have a small hunch that the women who do not support the Atheism Plus brand of feminism, and further, if the word “feminist” weren’t so damaged by overemotional, reactionary whiners of the current stripe, they may be willing to consider adopting the title if it truly signaled a characteristically strong form of female-ness with all the aforementioned rights in tact. That word, however, may now be damaged beyond repair at this point.

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One Nation Under God?

Now that the kinks are straightened out, here are some of my thoughts about the 120th anniversary of the Pledge of Allegiance and the United States as a Christian nation:

 

Now if only I could clean up the rambling. I think I botched “recite” and invented a word called “roboticism.” Ahh, the price of a writer by trade going unscripted on camera …

Referenced links:

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Free Thought Bloggers: where they stand on Atheism+

This post is in response to a comment I received from Giovanni Rilasciato regarding a previous article of mine titled, “On Atheism+ and humanism: part 2.”

Rilasciato writes:

FYI, there are 36 bloggers at FtB, and most of them haven’t even commented on A+. There’ve been a few who have even written about why they do not support it, such as Al Stefanelli. It seems that there are about half a dozen there behind this.

I presume that Rilasciato was referring to two parts of that previous post. This passage:

It seems to suggest that this very small group of people (Free Thought Blogs and their supporters) are preparing to carry the banner of social justice for the rest of us, and for a group of people that inherently eschew cliques and in-groups and chafe at being told how they should think or act, this is contemptible.

and

On a final note, I think it’s telling that nearly all of the Free Thought Bloggers, from Miller, Christina, McCreight to P.Z. Myers and others are all supporting each other, which to the rest of us, smacks of provincialism if nothing else and speaks to me personally that not one of them are capable of independent thought.

I have waded through all 36 35 Free Thought Blogs and have attempted, as best as I can, to surmise which bloggers support Atheism+ and which have either made no public statement about it or have voiced their opposition. I will admit here that saying that “nearly all of the Free Thought Bloggers” may have been an exaggeration, but I think what I’m about to show indicates that a significant number of FtB’s (more than a dozen) have publicly hopped on the bandwagon. The number could very well be more if they had written anything about it. Two have spoken against it and a couple more were either vague or seemed to be on the fence.

For brevity’s sake, I did not attempt to sift through any comments that may have been left by the bloggers in response to readers that may assert support or opposition. I just stuck with their posts. For each individual page, I went back through the archives from Aug. 18, the date of McCreight’s original post (“How I Unwittingly Infiltrated the Boy’s Club & Why It’s Time for a New Wave of Atheism“) to today.

Someone may ask: isn’t this a waste of time? Why bother? Sure, but so is playing video games or watching movies. I put some effort into this because:

  • I did make a serious claim that Free Thought Blogs was filled with people who hopped on the bandwagon, and I actually found that the figure appears to be more than one-third of the all bloggers at FtB. Again, the figure could be greater, but some either have remained mum or post so infrequently that it’s hard to gauge where they stand.
  • Rather than speculate, I thought it would be instructive to throw out a more concrete figure.
  • Since Atheism+ has become such a divisive issue the last few weeks, I thought readers would be interested to see a rundown on where the bloggers stand. Personally, I would like to see where all the Free Thought Bloggers stand on the issue because hell if the blowback from this thing can compel McCreight to quit blogging altogether, the public obviously has some strong feelings about it, even if some idiots who can’t tell the difference between blasting a person’s arguments versus demeaning the person.

That said, here is the format that I used. Again, this is a best effort on my part. Any corrections or additional information is welcome.

Name — Stance on Atheism+ with link showing support or dissent

Ed Brayton — Has made no statement that I am aware.

P.Z. Myersa supporter but says he’s not an official “member.”

Chris Rodda — No comment that I am aware.

Stephen Andrew — No comment that I am aware.

Cuttlefish — Seems generally supportive even if not willing to adopt the label.

Reasonable Doubts — An infrequent podcast show; has made no comment.

Comradde PhysioProffe — Seems to be a supporter since he reposted part of McCreight’s original post from Aug. 18 with the title of his own post, “Skeptical D00ds Are Not Skeptical About Their Own Gross Misogyny,” included in the title is an apparent reference to Thunderf00t.

Assassin Actual — Hasn’t posted since Aug. 2.

Daniel Fincke — Supporter.

Deacon DuncanSupporter.

Greta ChristinaSupporter.

Hank FoxPossibly a passive supporter. He speaks on the perceived motivations behind the “movement” and about a “Beta Culture,” which seems to be a similar alternative.

Stephanie ZvanSupporter.

Ophelia BensonSupporter.

Jason ThibeaultSupporter.

Jen McCreight — Inventor in chief.

Dana HunterSupporter.

Al StefanelliNot a supporter.

Martin WagnerSupporter.

Brian Lynchehaun — Supporter.

Justin Griffith — No statement.

Kylie Sturgess — Not a supporter.

Maryam Namazie — No statement.

Blackskeptics — No statement.

Richard Carrier — Alientating, overly enthusiastic supporter.

Edwin Kagin — Seems skeptical about Atheism+.

Mano Singham — No statement.

Natalie Reed — Not a supporter.

Chris Hallquist —No statement, moved to Patheos.

Brianne Bilyeu — No statement.

Taslima Nasreen — No statement.

Zinnia Jones — No statement.

Ashley F. Miller — Supporter.

Cristina Rad — No statement. Only two posts since McCreight’s Aug. 18 introduction to Atheism+.

AronRa — No statement. Only three posts since Aug 18.

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