UPDATE: In his comment below, DiSalvo gives contact information: “My email link on that site evidently isn’t working, but you can send email via my personal site, here.
Over at his Forbes blog Neuropsyched, science writer David DiSalvo takes up the question “Religion vs. Atheism”: Which side can rightly claim to be reasonable and tolerant?” His motivation was my post on the death threats issued by the faithful against Blair Scott, an official of American Atheists, especially my statement, “Perhaps some atheists have issued death threats against religious people, but I don’t know of any, and, at any rate, they must be much rarer than those aimed in the opposite direction.”
DiSalvo’s question:
Coyne’s first statement intrigues me, and my inner-researcher wants to know if he’s right. Which side is responsible for most of the hate mail and death threats, the religious or the atheists? Who has the greater right to call themselves reasonable and tolerant?
It would be difficult, I think, to answer those questions quantitatively. But I’m betting there’s enough evidence out there that a fair qualitative estimate is reachable.
So let’s make this a community project. Please send me, or leave in the comments section, any information you think helps flesh-out an answer. I’ll take a look at everything you send, in addition to what I find, and report back with results in a future post.
Well, if you have any information, go on over to his site and post it (he says his email is on the sidebar, but I can’t find it). I suspect DiSalvo might want to begin with Richard Dawkins reading his hate mail.
*sigh* You know someone’s gonna drag in Stalin, or Pol Pot, don’t you?
I see your Stalin and I raise you a Hitler
Sorry you don’t trump an ace with a joker. Hitler failed, as an artist, a Christian and as a dictator. Stalin won at the dictator game.
Hopefully DiSalvo will see through such a wrongheaded ploy. We know it’s a dishonest argument and I’m betting that some religionists who use it do as well though I’m sure there are many more who think it’s genuinely a good and valid argument because atheists=evil in their minds.
I flatly reject that atheists are any more rational or any more moral than theists.
If the goals of the atheist movement is tolerance, equality and anti-prejudice, then those are our goals, to push superiority of one group over another, that’s going into self-destructive territory.
I think it’s unwise to reject the notion out of hand.
First, I’ll agree that a great many Christians — to pick on the majority — ignore much of the rampant anti-moral horrors their religion sets forth as absolute. To their great credit. But they’re still saddled with it to a significant extent; witness the prevalent bigotry against anybody whose sexual activity is anything other than straight-up no-frills heterosexuality, for example.
But the very bedrock of religion is faith, and faith is profoundly anti-rational. There’s simply no way one can be a believer and be fully rational — that’s the essential definition of the terms.
That doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a good idea to rub a believer’s nose in the irrationality and immorality of their positions, but to pretend they don’t exist? Preposterous and patronizing.
Cheers,
b&
Yes, religion is clearly irrational, and relying upon irrational premises as a basis for one’s morality is clearly problematic. Are religiously people intrinsically less moral than atheists? Almost certainly not. But does their reliance upon superstition co-opt and deform their intrinsic morality? Without question it has a great potential to.
You seem to discount the selection effect:
That intrinsically immoral or amoral folk are drawn to religion.
This has been clearly demonstrated, for intsance in the Catholic Church.
This doesn’t feel right to me. Only a very small percentage of, for example, Catholics join the religion as an adult choice. Almost all adherents are born into their particular sect.
Or do you mean “drawn to religious [office]”?
Those who choose to join the hierarchy of the church may well be or come to be motivated by less than noble instincts, like power or sexual deviance. Of these, there are those that become famous or infamous, but using them as representative or typical of all their fellow believers is hyperbole.
Power attracts, and sometimes power corrupts. Atheists are not exempt from this, present company excepted.
Damn. I knew that as soon as I hit ‘send’, I could have worded that with far superior conceptual targeting.
When I said “drawn to religion”, I actually meant more in the line of “drawn to the church”.
I fully recognise that these are two distinct things, but the survey does not make that vital distinction, and you are quite correct to point out my somewhat inexcusable ‘definition fumble’. 😉
I would expect that, even if there was no difference in the morality of the two groups, atheists would behave in a more tolerant manner, at least in those countries where we are a distinct minority.
They do: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-do-americans-still-dislike-atheists/2011/02/18/AFqgnwGF_story.html
The question is not “who is more rational and moral,” it is “who is more reasonable and tolerant.” There is a difference. I am curious, though, as to how one measures reasonability and tolerance and how DiSalvo can possibly expect to get a fair sampling of both sides. If he wants to use hate mail as a metric then he’d have to come up with a way of weighting the intolerance expressed in hate mail. Is “You’re stupid” more or less tolerant than “You’re going to burn in hell forever”? I’m pretty sure we could agree, though, that death threats display the most extreme degree of intolerance.
The problem here is that believers are likely to think that “you’re stupid” is a vile insult, while “you’re going to burn in hell for eternity” is a simple, unemotional, statement of fact.
I see your Stalin, and I raise you a Hitler
Yeah, but I’m holdin’ 2 Khomeinis and 3 Torquemadas…beat that!
HA!
One Father, one Son, and one Holy Ghost! A Divine Psychomaniac Flush!
I win!
b&
Sorry, that’s just three of a kind. Or is it three not of a kind but really all three of the same kind. Maybe Lane Craig could help us out here.
I’ll see you one Psychomaniac Flush/three of a kind and raise you one Nordic and one Greco-Roman pantheon. That should put me over the top in mumbers alone. I’d haul out the millions upon millions of Hindu gods, but that deck’s to big to shuffle.
I doubt that there is an answer to the question posed in the title. Both athiests and goddies are very diverse groups.
I’m not working on this exact project, but I am doing some similar comparisons (not trying to state one is better than the other, just different). Also, I submit it can be done quantitatively.
How are you going to account for sampling bias?
Quantifying such things based on those who self-report may be far, far different than the real incidence, missing those who just hit the “delete” key and dismiss a threat as impotent raving.
That’s why you don’t use self-report (aside from a religiosity scale).
Oh, I was assuming you were responding to my work. You were responding to me saying you could measure this quantitatively. Yeah, you wouldn’t want to use actual hate mail as data. It is a very select person that sends hate mail. Although, Facebook has a pretty big data mining operation. I wonder if that would be a source.
However, I feel like if one thought about it long enough, one could get a pretty good measure of tendency toward hate mail writing in the lab. Again, this would not be something I’m interested in doing, because I’m not about finding out who is “better”.
If you ask the nicest christian or muslim what’s going to happen to you when you die if you’re an atheist, they will probably say that you’re going to burn in hell for eternity. You can’t get much nastier than that, it’s eternity after all. And that comment is, btw, a threat.
The nicest “christians” will tell you flatly “I don’t believe in hell” as if their personal beliefs shape reality. How someone who rejects most of the teachings of the biblical jesus character and the whole rationale for the birth and crucifixion of jesus can consider themselves “christian” has always been beyond me.
I’ll point out to Christians that it doesn’t matter if they believe in hell or not, according to Muslims they are still going there for worshiping Jesus as a god. (“There is no god but Allah, and Mohummed is his prophet… peace be upon him.”) Everybody is going to hell according to somebody’s religious beliefs.
Don’t forget the sunscreen & marshmallows. Might as well make the best of it.
Heaven for the scenery. Hell for the company.
As Nietzsche said: “In heaven all the interesting people are missing.”
Heaven for scenery, hell for company….lol…proof that one doesn’t need many words to make a good point.
As long as we continue to think, speak, and fight in terms of labeled groups – no matter what the labels – we will continue to prejudge individuals based on their labels.
The path to a better world lies through a view of individuals as individuals, individually judged by, to steal a phrase, the content of their character.
I’m not a nameless piece of a “side”, I am a human being. Those whose ideas I argue are incorrect are equally human beings – they are not “the goddies”, and to talk of “the goddies” and of “their side” being hateful is to commit the very prejudice and divisiveness that leads us to oppose a religiously-dominated society.
It is perfectly legitimate and rational to speak of the aggregate consequences of certain beliefs – to talk about whether religious belief leads to more hateful behavior, in this case – and it may seem like mere semantics vs. talking of “their side” vs “our side”, but there is a world of difference.
It is their ideas I have an issue with, not their person. The more we blur the distinction, the further we are from a rational society.
IMO 🙂
But what is the content of one’s character if not one’s position on whether or not, for example, all adults deserve the right to choose what forms of medical treatment are appropriate for their conditions? Yet there’s no better predictor of where one stands on the abortion debate than association with religious fundamentalism.
Similarly, it says a great deal about the content of your character if you think forgiveness of trespasses is achieved through prayer to Jesus or through restitution and remediation. Again, an inescapably religious position.
And what of the contents of the characters of all those who think infinite torture is right and justified for all who disagree with them on religious matters?
While I agree that we should be careful to avoid short-circuiting our evaluations of people based on labels, we can’t forget that those labels are descriptive, and the characteristics they describe are profound and far-reaching.
Cheers,
b&
Thanks for the thoughtful response. My own thoughts:
1) Let’s be careful of goalpost moving here. “Religious fundamentalists” were not the topic of this post, “religious people”, also referred to as “goddies”, were.
2) Let’s not commit an inductive fallacy to compound the first. Yes, objections to abortion come almost entirely from religious sources – but, by no means, are all “religious people”/”goddies” opposed to a woman’s right to choose. Nor, by any means,do all “religious people” (or theists, which is not the same thing but more rationally labeled “goddies”) believe in divine forgiveness (let alone prayer to Jesus in particular) as an alternative to human justice.
3) As for torture, while there is a tendency to be somewhat more tolerant of torture among some religious adherents, it is by no means a strong correlation. Some religious adherents oppose torture in polls more strongly than atheists/non-religionists do.
Labels of humans are rarely descriptive, and even more rarely truly useful. Most often, they are a lazy shortcut for prejudice.
I assert that if one stops for a moment and rationally, dispassionately, considers it, the fact that X is a “religious person” tells you next to nothing about that person’s individual character, ideology, social beliefs, opinions about justice, economics. (Hell, they might not even be a theist, but that’s a separate conversation).
Nonetheless, we are as naturally inclined to prejudge that individual, based purely on that broad, indefinite label, as they are to prejudge us if we say we are “nonreligious”, or even “atheist”.
I submit that being a critical thinker working for a more just, rational society means learning to overcome our natural as well as our learned biases and prejudices, to question our assumptions most strongly when they seem most intuitive and fundamental.
I think I could probably resolve all your concerns if I prefaced “label” with “accurate” and “specific” — and especially with “self-applied.”
Also, if I point out that even the non-specific labels are excellent for observations about aggregates. Knowing that an individual is religious won’t tell you anything about the person’s stance on abortion, but knowing the percentages of a population who identify as devout Christians will give you a good idea of how many oppose abortion.
Yes, telling me that person X is religious tells me very little about the person’s character, though it does tell me that the person at least implicitly (and probably explicitly) values wishful thinking over rational empiricism in what that person would likely describe as the most important possible field of knowledge.
But, on the other hand, telling me that the person is a self-identified fundamentalist young-Earth creationist tells me a great deal.
Cheers,
b&
Given that my concern is about the label “goddies”, and asking if “goddies”/”religious people” are more or less hateful than atheists – with the clear implication that this is informative with regard to any given “goddie” one meets – I respectfully am not comforted by your use of other, more specific labels.
I fail to see the utility of the entire exercise, given that DiSalvo starts off with the admission that he is asking for anecdotes about a correlation (with a winked, assumed causation) at least quite hard, if not impossible, to measure.
Most questionable is the starting supposition – that there is a relationship between whether or not one is a religious person (or a “goddie”, not the same set) and whether or not one is tolerant or reasonable toward others, a la DiSalvo (or whether one is hateful, as per Coyne – the entire question is vaguely worded and not conducive to actual empirical testing).
It is prejudice masquerading as actual critical inquiry; that is what bothers me.
The fact that you and I and Coyne and DiSalvo and likely nearly all the readers here share the impression that religious people, particularly fundamentalist theists, are less tolerant and more hateful toward others does not make it fact.
Nor would that correlation, if empirically demonstrated, prove causation.
I am sure you have had experience with individuals of all convictions who fit anywhere along the spectrum of tolerance and hatefulness.
Why are we not talking about whether certain religious and/or theistic beliefs make one more hateful and less tolerant – rather than lumping Jainists in with Islamic fundamentalists and Mahatma Gandhi in with Osama Bin Laden as “religious people” and “Goddies”?
Certainly you agree that people who think there are invisible beings guiding them or influencing them are different than those who don’t believe in such things. People are influence by such beliefs and they often try to influence those who don’t share their beliefs.
I think it would be fine not to talk about “sides” if religionists were as private in their beliefs as they’d want Scientologist to be with theirs. I’d prefer not to know what magical things people believe in– I’d like to assume they were rational like me. I think it’s crazy that those who don’t believe in the supernatural are supposed to walk on eggshells so as not to hurt the feelings of those who imagine they are “saved” and “special” and “in on the secrets of the universe” because of what they believe. I think it’s as crazy in a Christian as it is in Muslim or Mormon or Scientologist or those who truly believed in myths past.
People can be made to do anything if you can convince them their eternity hinges upon it, can’t they? I don’t want any part of enabling this insanity.
Adults should keep their magical thinking as private as their fetishes if they don’t want to know what an outsider to their faith thinks of their beliefs. There is no more evidence for the invisible beings you believe in than there is for the invisible toes growing out of your head. Quit making excuses for primitive thinking. It’s time for humanity to grow up.
If you believe in the equivalent of “magic”, you really aren’t on the same “side” of rational as those who don’t.
I agree with everything you wrote. Unfortunately, it has nothing to do with either the article’s question, or my objection to its framing.
JAC- The “Post Your Comment” link is below the article where the comments begin, not on the sidebar.
Who’s more hateful, you ask? Time to drag out the historical record!
State-sponsored irreligion, particularly Marxism (which is an inherently and foundationally atheistic ideology), claimed the lives of perhaps 150,000,000 persons in the 20th century, by far the bloodiest century on record. By contrast, the worst abuse of ecclesial authority in Christian history – the Spanish Crown Inquisitions – claimed the lives of 30,000 people over a period of 3 centuries, and even then only after a legal process that produced far more acquittals than convictions. The Soviet Union or the People’s Republic of China often killed that many people in 3 days, without any trial at all.
So yes, Eamon Knight, you and your brethren have good reason to “sigh”! Organized irreligion has proven itself to be the most despotic, murderous, and capricious historical force ever recorded. God only knows how different the tone of atheists would be if they were the majority in a country all but bereft of Christian influence or gain political power. If history is any indication, they would be more despotic, murderous, and capricious than Christians could ever hope to be; and, unlike Christians, if or when atheists choose to “correct human nature” through the cruel mechanisms of a “provident State” (as was the central goal of the secularist ideologies of the 20th century), they will not be in any theoretical discord with their atheism.
Oh, come off it.
Stalin’s lack of belief in Thor had no more to do with his sociopathy than his lack of belief in Siva, and you know it.
Or is it you position that, but had he fallen to his knees and welcomed the loving embrace of Quetzalcoatl, all those millions would have been spared?
What jingoistic lunacy.
b&
Well, golly, that didn’t take long. Sometimes I hate being right.
And to those who would shriekingly asseverate: “But they didn’t do that in the name of atheism!”
Atheism is wholly responsible for those deaths, because atheism was the foundational theoretical underpinning of their secularist ideologies, particularly communism. The secularist ideologies of the 20th century were essentially projects to remake society on a more rational model, specifically to “correct” human nature through the mechanisms of a provident state. Take communism as a salient example. According to Karl Marx, whose thought was colossally influenced by the novel atheistic thought of Ludwig Feuerbach, human nature needed correction because human beings were standing in a false relation to themselves, and they were standing in a false relation to themselves precisely because they were “projecting” all of their essential human qualities into a distant Father-figure or repository entity they called “God.” In doing so, human beings “emptied themselves” and hence stood in an “inauthentic relation” to themselves and to the material Earth. Their correction would occur, and hence the ideal, fully authentic human society would emerge, only when the idea of “God” finally died. In other words, the ideal human society would emerge only when atheism was the widely-accepted creed, which, as dictators like Stalin came to realize contra Marx, ultimately required the force of state-sponsored atheism, not merely changes in economic material conditions, as Mark had previously suggested.
So yeah…You guys ain’t gonna get off tha hook that easily!
Recommended reading:
Ludwig Feuerbach’s, “The Essence of Christianity,” and Karl Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach,” “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,” “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” and “Das Kapital.” And next time try to know what you’re talking about.
Cheers.
Recomended watching: “A Fish Called Wanda”.
Boasting how much philosophy you’ve read doesn’t make you look smarter.
In fact, it has the opposite effect. In honest debate, anyone recommending a book will naturally demonstrate an understanding of that book’s content, and give a strong impression of what a prospective reader is missing out on.
However, when it comes to popmous Dunning-Krugerites like “WhiteHawk”, we never get an inkling of what may be inside those books, besides what anyone could glean from the corresponding Wikipedia articles. (In fact, I’d say it’s 10 to 1 that he’s never even read them himself.) He simply uses the titles as incantations, to assert his superiority. Unfortunately, this superior knowledge is never directed into making a coherent argument; it’s just alluded to.
Frankly, it’s pathetic.
If you had actually *read* Feuerbach and Marx, you’d know (a) that there is a lot more to each than atheism. Please demonstrate how, if somehow the atheism is the basis, one gets to other things, like, say, all the criticisms of economic arrangements, etc. from that. Hint, Marx’s famous saying about people’s opiates is one of sympathy: he says (basically) the poor have it real bad, so they turn to “drugs” (and those in charge encourage them to take them, to get them to not realize what is going on) (b) they (Feuerbach, Marx) have precious little to do with what those horrendous monsters (Mao, Stalin) did. (This is irrelevant to the main point, of course, but just for the sake of historical accuracy.)
In high school a few decades ago, we read both the Communist Manifesto and Mein Kampf.
The latter is a Christian theological exhortation to mass murder indistinguishable from Martin Luther’s screeds. The former is a pie-in-the-sky formula for a peaceful, nonviolent utopian paradise.
You were blathering…?
b&
The problem with this is that you can’t get from atheism, which is simply not believing in gods, to any actions, because those actions have to be the result of something you DO believe in.
On the other hand, if someone is committed to communism, that can then lead to atheism, because that particular totalitarian form of government can’t handle competing ideologies. You demonstrate this in your post.
What if we look at societies that aren’t afflicted with communism to get a better gauge of the effect of atheism on a normal society, what do we have? Let’s see, Denmark, Sweden, Japan… some of the most caring, non-violent places on the planet.
As far as I can see (and this is, of course, an opinion), there is no way to connect the excesses and cruelties of the 20th century communists exclusively with atheism and dissever it from the fact that they were politically motivated. Did Stalin and Mao cause the deaths of millions because their victims refused atheism? I highly doubt it, but it doesn’t take much to connect those deaths to consolidation of political power.
In that case I take you assume full responsability for nazism:
“This human world of ours would be inconceivable without the practical existence of a religious belief.”
[Adolph Hitler, _Mein Kampf_, pp.152]
“Anyone who dares to lay hands on the highest image of the Lord commits sacrilege against the benevolent creator of this miracle and contributes to the expulsion from paradise.”
[Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf” Vol. 2 Chapter 1]
“The Government, being resolved to undertake the political and moral purification of our public life, are creating and securing the conditions necessary for a really profound revival of religious life”
[Adolph Hitler, in a speech to the Reichstag on March 23, 1933]
“I believe today that I am acting in the sense of the Almighty Creator. By warding off the Jews I am fighting for the Lord’s work.”
[Adolph Hitler, Speech, Reichstag, 1936]
(Where do we get these incompetents from? You can almost hear sheep bleating the background. Baaa… Atheism… Baaa… Stalin… Baaa… Mao… Baaa… Baaa…)
At the very most, communist atrocities discredit communist atheism. The fact that Jerry Coyne and Stalin both rejected the existence of your god is about as relevant as the fact that the both rejected the existence of unicorns. Jerry Coyne is a rationalist, who rejects your god as a subset of that rationalism. You may regard your pet superstition as oh so special, but ultimately it is one of large batch of superstitions that Coyne has rejected. Social implications aside, it doesn’t stand out in the slightest.
On the other hand, the idea that Stalin was a rationalist is ridiculous. In Stalinist Russia, modern genetics was denounced as “bourgeois pseudoscience”, and the country’s entire agricultural policy placed in the hands of an incompetent crackpot who didn’t even know that plant pots need drainage holes. Millions were killed in attempts to root out non-existent conspiracies. Communists may claim to be rational, but rationality is a method, not something that can be asserted. At the very least, rationalism is based on free enquiry. Asserting communist philosophy as unquestionable truth, and murdering anyone who suggests otherwise doesn’t quite meet this standard.
Prove that atheistic rationalism is to blame for atrocities, and you may have a point. At present you have nothing.
Man that is hilarious. In many respects the teachings of jesus were essentially communist, and the early Christians lived in communes where goods were distributed according to need, etc. All the things that today’s lunatic selfish Christian anti-Communists despise.
If today’s fundies were teleported back to the 1st century of the C.E. in Jerusalem, they would have taken care of the jebus problem and saved the Romans a lot of grief (and a few nails to boot).
All leaders of murderous regimes have been non-Scientologist men. You don’t believe in Scientology, right? Are you a man?
I think your analogy only works on those who have been brainwashed to believe that their morality comes from god. The evidence shows that their morality comes from the same place as everyone else’s morality, it’s just that theists imagine that god thinks like them: http://www.pnas.org/content/106/12/4876.full
This is as true for the Taliban, Fred Phelps, and witch burners as it is for you, Whitehawk.
Well, I think this is quite simple: Stalin ‘was’ religious. He believed in Marxism, something that even Marx himself did not believe!
What is the difference between Islam, Christianity and Marxism? The fact that it was as Karl Popper say none falsifiable and nobody could even attempt to falsify Marxism under the totalitarian regime makes it a religion, maybe not a Godly religion, but religion nonetheless.
No, Stalin was a Stalinist.
It is even worse in, say, North Korea, which is arguably the triple oxymoron of a confucian stalinist theocracy.
True, and sad…
Comparing the numbers of people killed by the Inquisition or Crusades to those killed by 20th century tyrants is patently silly & misleading: middle-ages communication, technology and travel time were likely the only things preventing Catholicism from sweeping the entire globe and exterminating every last heretic or converting every last heathen. Put an equivalent amount of wealth as well as access to railways, aircraft, radio, electricity and 20th century weapons into the hands of those middle-age mentalists and replay the scenario. Hell, just think about what Hitler managed to accomplish between 1933 and 1945 and multiply it by the obscene wealth & power of the Vatican.
Further, the functioning of the regimes of people like Mao, Stalin and Pol Pot bear a much stronger resemblance to that of religious ideologies like those of the Inquisitors and Crusaders than most religious apologists like to have pointed out:
– absolute subservience to official dogma
– demonising & dehumanising opponents/perceived enemies (which then facilitates atrocities against them)
– crushing any/all dissent
– repression/elimination of potentially competitive ideologies or organisations (incl but not limited to religious groups; Hitler himself outlawed German freethinker groups)
– elevation of a Leader to saviour status (Stalin named himself – “Man of Steel”)
– propagation of mythical stories about said Leader
– abandonment of rationality & reason in governance in favour of dogmatic adherence (see first point)
No, atheism doesn’t lead to Stalinist atrocity – but abandonment of reason in favour of rigid ideology, absolute adherence to dogma in favour of free inquiry and brutal repression of dissenting views do. Whatever the motivation, be it supernatural sucking-up or pure political power-mongering, those three factors (among others) are a time-honoured and successful recipe for calamity.
I’ll close with a question:
Do you think that the brutalised & starving people of North Korea would be better off if the Kim dynasty ran the country as a full-blown theocracy instead of a Democratic People’s Republic?
Just to clarify: that’s not to say that atheists are intrinsically better than anyone, or the faithful are intrinsically worse – regardless of precisely why, when you abandon your reason you leave yourself open to unreasonable beliefs. Unreasonable beliefs can lead to unreasonable actions.
Spiritual or not, the tyrants of today, and of history, can not be considered reasonable.
Which, BTW, was precisely the problem with the way certain strident individuals sought to frame “Elevatorgate” – not as behavior of an individual which one can discuss, weigh, learn from and from which to draw rational conclusions about one’s own individual behavior – but, instead, as a pretext to pull out every PoMo-gobbledygook oppressed-privilege excuse for generalizations and prejudice.
It was distressing to see irrational, emotionally-driven rhetoric override reason in that debate, and it is equally disheartening when folks refer to “the religious” (let alone “the goddies”) as a monolithic, depersonalized mass.
There are strong atheists who are irrational, rage-filled, hateful people, and devout theist religionists who are kind, loving individuals. I know you know that – but that implicit knowledge gets buried in name-calling rhetoric.
Please do NOT confuse this for an accommodationist argument. I am anything but. The reason I have concluded that religion and reason are incompatible is, in part, because religion is all about labels and prejudice and prejudgement.
What is “Elevatorgate”?
Trust me: you don’t want to know.
Seeking the answer to that question can only bring several fortnights of solid face-palming.
It all started with Rebecca Watson talking about how some stranger cornered her in an elevator and asked her up to his room “for coffee”. She said it was kind of creepy and folks shouldn’t do it – and from there it just went crazy. The Oppressed stood up for their right to harrass women in elevators, R. Dawkins stepped in it by writing that there are bigger problems on the planet (sure there are, but so what – should we ignore all other problems on the planet simply because there’s something bigger), then there was this whole anti-Dawkins stuff going on in addition to the anti-Watson stuff … it was like watching kids brawling in their sandbox. I don’t know if it’s over yet, but I don’t care to waste my time watching idiots bickering – if I wanted to do that I’d watch Fox.
Okay, that’s enough about this incident; it’s been amply discussed elsewhere and inspires vitriol that I don’t want here, please.
JAC says
“he says his email is on the sidebar, but I can’t find it.”
Scroll down to “About Me” you will see
My Profile My RSS Feed
My Headline Grabs Email Me Tips
However, when I click on “Email Me Tips,” a rectangular box appears containing the words “Cancel and close”
Mine just opens the same page– does anyone have the direct email address?
I first ran across the following in Alfie Kohn’s 1990 book, You Know What They Say, a volume that examines a number of tenets of popular wisdom according to “them”:Religious People Are More AltruisticIn a society that teaches us to associate morality with religion, it is easy to assume that a strong relationship exists between piety and pity, between god and good.“…After all, the sacred texts of Judaism and Christianity, like those of most supernatural belief systems, contain reminders to be compassionate and charitable.These familiar injunctions…have not been sufficient to prevent the commission of a range of horrors under the banner of one religion or another, from the Hebrews who utterly destroyed] the men, women and children, of every city” as they invaded in Canaan (Deut 3:6) to the barbaric Christian Crusaders to fanatics killing in Allah’s name. Less dramatically there are also exists a “long parade of findings demonstrating that churchgoers are more intolerant of ethnic minorities than nonattenders”A careful study of about 2,000 episcopalian in th 1950’s turned up “no discernible relationship between involvement [in the Church] and charitable acts.”“ In a questionnaire based study of altruism involving several hundred male college students in 1960, there was only a slight correlation between altruism and belief in god and none at all between altruism and attendance of religious services. In interviews with randomly selected adults in 1965, “the irreligious: [were] nearly as frequently rated as being a good Samaritan, having love and compassion for their fellow man and being humble as the most devout and religious of our group studied.”Two experiments with undergraduates during the 1970s found essentially the. same thing: Min one, the students who believed in the bible’s accuracy were no more likely to come to the aid of someone in the next room who appeared to have fallen off a ladder. In the other study, students who were classified as being “born again Christians”, conventionally religious, nonreligious or atheists. There was no statistically significant difference among these groups to volunteer time with retarded children or to resist temptation to cheat on a test (There was only one group in which a majority did not cheat: the atheists).In 1981, a researcher who surveyed more than 700 people from different neighbourhoods in a medium-size city expected to find that religious people were especially sociable, helpful to their neighbours and likely to participate in neighbourhood organizations. Instead, she reported, religious involvement was virtually unrelated to these activities Finally, an ambitious new study of people who risked their lives to rescue Jews from the Nazis found that “rescuers did not differ significantly for bystanders or all non-rescuers with respect to their religious identification, religious education and their own religiosity or that of their parents.Notes: Churchgoers’ intolerance: G.W. Allport & J.M. Ross “Personal Religious Orientation & Prejudice,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (JPSP). (5:432, 1967). Episcopalians: C.Y. Glock, B.B. Ringer & E.R. Babbie, “To Comfort & To Challenge, (Berkeley, U of Calif. Press, 1967, 182-83). College Males: R.W. Frederichs, “Altar Versus Ego” “American Sociological Review (25:496-508, 1960). The 1965 interviews: V.B. Cline & J.M. Richards Jr., “A Factor Analytic Study of Religious Belief and Behaviors”, JPSP (1:577, 1965) Biblical Literalists: L.V. Annis “Emergency Helping & Religious Behavior”, Psychological Reports, (39:151-58). “Volunteering & Cheating”: R.E. Smith, G. Wheeler and E. Diewner “Faith Without Works”, Journal of Applied Social Psychology” (5:320-30, 1975). Neighborhood involvement: S Georgianna, “Is a religious Neighborhood a Good Neighborhood?” Humboldt Journal of Social Relations (11:1-16, 1984). Rescuers: S.P. Oliner & P.M. Oliner, “The Altruistic Personality (New York: Free Press, 1988, p.156).I will cross-post this on Mr. DiSalvo’s blog.
Apparently, the tag isn’t working. Sorry about that.
That is, the line break [br] tag.
Excellent, thanks!
You should be able to email him from here :-
http://www.daviddisalvo.org/contact/
This probably only counts as anecdotal evidence, but nevertheless this:
“Evangelical Christianity, as everyone knows, is founded upon hate, as the Christianity of Christ was founded upon love.”
— H L Mencken, “Bryan” (coverage of the Scopes Trial) The Baltimore Evening Sun, July 27, 1925 (posted in Positive Atheism’s Historical section)
suggests that HL Mencken was of the same opinion over 80yrs ago.
Won’t DiSalvo suffer a selection bias from whichever group reads his article in greater numbers and from which one is more motivated to prove the other ‘more hateful’?
Yes,this isn’t a scientific poll.
But I think there is more than enough evidence to show that theists are not more loving, tolerant, or compassionate than the atheists– that religion does not make people more loving or less likely to spread prejudice and hate . Of course each religionists imagines that those that believe as they do are the most moral of all. Even Fred Phelps and the militant Muslims. They spread anti-atheist bigotry, but it seems that secularity is associated with greater tolerance and fewer social problems. If religion held any truth or was beneficial you should see different result.
Religion is also associated with income inequality: http://epiphenom.fieldofscience.com/2011/08/well-that-settles-it-income-inequality.html (Hey, he mentions Jerry in this link!)
I’m fairly confident there’s sufficient evidence too, although I encourage more research to be done. I worry, however, that non-believers have the same assumption that those that ‘believe’ as they do are the most moral of all. There’s nothing wrong with desire to show that, as long as evidence isn’t ignored that doesn’t back up the desire.
I’m not saying anyone here has done that btw
The comments on Pharyngula showcase some of the least-appealing examples of atheist vitriol and hate. As I think ERV described it, they can be a ‘toxic cesspool’ although PZ describes them as ‘adult’. I am closer to ERV than PZ on that issue. I find little ‘adult’ about the rabid responses to comments on any issue that the community there has decided is a settled issue.
I’m afraid my experience confirms your opinion of many atheist commenters. In response to one of my first comments on Pharyngula, I received a verbal lashing that was truly hateful (something like “You are a moron trying to pretend to be an idiot”). That was in response to my suggestion that buying the rights to “Expelled” would only reinforce the fundamentalists’ conspiracy theory, which of course is the thesis of the movie. Then several weeks later, after I made a comment that the evidence showed a majority of US breast cancer cases are environmentally caused rather than genetic or random, I was beat up with amazing sustained name-calling through dozens of posts. In the end, other regular posters intervened to point out the unwarranted hate.
Having said that, I would rather expose my ideas to atheists than to fundamentalists any day. Most are reasonable, and at least they think they are being open-minded. True believers in religion do not even consider open-mindedness to be a virtue.
I would hope that DiSalvo would know that basing his study on internet comments sections would not be representative of how reasonable and tolerant people are. The depersonalization (not seeing a person with feelings, etc. in front of you in addition to the lack of facial expression, body language, and tone of voice for context) that can result from internet discussion added to emotionally charged subject matter can lead to absurdities such as some of the Pharyngula comments. That said, how out of hand it sometimes gets there is rather depressing.
Morality is all about how you behave when no one is watching, comments on blogs are a perfect way to assess that.
Thanks. I needed a good laugh.
Blog comments are a perfect way to assess a person’s morality. Awesome.
Oh the irony of using ERV to condemn Pharyngula of ‘vitriol and hate’.
They may use some nasty language, but in my experience it’s always backed up with facts and evidence.
And since when do atheists engage in tone trolling?
Let’s leave the whining to hyper-sensitive theists and accommodationists, shall we?
The essence of Swulf’s opinion was sentences 1 and 4. Sentences 2 and 3 referencing ERV were not the basis of Swulf’s opinion, so we can delete them without invalidating Swulf’s opinion, which stands as:
I agree with that opinion.
That.
Considering ERV’s tolerance of – and participation in – hateful misogyny following E’Gate, she’s hardly one to claim any sort of moral high ground in the blog world.
Theists are innately more intolerant! Read what their books say about women, gays, at one time blacks, at people who don’t follow their faith, and on and on.
I’ve just woken up and cannot go on any further.
I would hope that his methodology (as informal as it is) would take into account one fundamental issue. It is my impression that atheists can get significant hate mail and death threats merely for stating their position (the lack of theistic beliefs). On the other hand, if there is any hate mail directed at theists, I would bet that it results from specific positions of the theists involved — e.g., denying rights to gays, attacking women’s rights, fighting against basic sex education or evolution in the schools.
In other words, the ire of atheists tends to be raised not because there are theists, but because of their actions in the world. Alternately, it seems that the ire of the theists starts with the very existence of atheists.
It’s something to consider as the data comes in.
“In other words, the ire of atheists tends to be raised not because there are theists, but because of their actions in the world. Alternately, it seems that the ire of the theists starts with the very existence of atheists.”
I’d say that this is particularly true in the big three bible religions, because their most basic principles establish and depend on monotheism. The first commandment tells Jews and Christians to “have no other gods” and Islam’s primary tenet is that “there is no god but god”. Since all religious authority for (or over) believers derives from those principles, it’s quite apparent that the very existence of atheism is a threat to that authority.
I once read somewhere that all priests (or ministers or imams or rabbis) were required to be religious bigots, because their entire life is defined by a certainty that their beliefs are the only ones that are valid. If I ever find the quote I’ll post the source. Until then, I’ll take credit for it.
That sounds like something Hitchens would have said.
I’m pretty sure it wasn’t Hitchens, because I came across it in a work of fiction. The character was a priest who was speaking in a moment of candor and went on to mention that he couldn;t sell his faith to others if he wasn’t committed to it himself.
The religious folk who take their fairytales too seriously are irked by the fact that not everyone on the planet follows their specific brand of voodoo. Atheists just get a lot of the crap because they’re seen as an underdog to kick around. If you think the atheists have it bad though, just have a look at another (not exclusive with atheist) group like the homosexuals. Or if we look at the catlick church 80 years ago and how they taught that all Jews are evil because the Jews killed their Jewish god. Mel Gibson is a good example of a good ol’ catlick from 80+ years ago.
Agree completely. And what about honesty vs willingness to lie? Religious people have shown a nearly boundless capacity to lie and misrepresent their opponents in order to further their agenda. From ID supporters (“we want only the best science taught and are not motivated by religion”) to prayer in schools (“they want to prevent us from praying”) to abortion (“they want to kill babies”) to same-sex marriage (“they want to destroy the institution of marriage and end the human race”) and the list goes on. Obviously not all of these issues fall strictly along believer/non-believer lines….
Back in the early ’90s, I got a questionnaire from the Christian Coalition which came with a request for a donation. Just for kicks, I filled it out (identifying my denomination as Odinist Pagan) and answering the rest of the questions (on things like abortion, prayer in schools, not taxing the rich and so forth) pretty much straightforwardly – which meant that my answers weren’t what they wanted to hear. I then mailed it back, with no donation.
Imagine my surprise when I received a second mailing with a regular membership card and a brochure with instructions for “Christian political activism”. One of the things I was instructed to do was to never identify with the CC in any way, but to work on election campaigns, and even run for minor offices – school boards, town councils or the like – all without revealing any affiliation to the Coalition until or unless I at least managed to reach the state legislature level. In other words, I was instructed to break one of those precious commandments and lie.
Despite the fact that I never sent them a penny (costing them postage and printing instead), I’m sure my fake membership was reported as one of their “millions” of supporters.
Oh, but it’s *not* lying – it’s simply witholding information. That’s Excuse #1 – there are a thousand others which cover actual lying.
The brochure did, however, tell us to lie (perhaps I wasn’t clear, but I was trying not to drag it out). If questioned, we were instructed to deny any involvement with any organization other than local political parties until our involvement exceeded the local level. School board/town council/alderman: deny. State assembly/senate on up: start showing your true affiliation.
30+ years ago, my GF (now wife) managed to unintentionally join the Moral Majority via a similar route. Whatever people or computers they have tracking incoming mail seems to just take any response as assent, without even looking at the content.
If you want to actually volunteer to read Christian hate, then try VoxDay.blogspot.com
Blake Stacey had a list of Xian abuse of atheists in the US a while back (in response to the Expelled claim that creationists are persecuted, if I recall). I’m too busy/lazy to look for a link though.
The fallacy in the extremist minority and fundamentalist position and apologia is that a small, it appears to be 10%, extremist minority can get total control and very quickly.
It appears they do this by playing in implicit and explicit magical beliefs with a hyper-emotional and false appeal. Not all Germans were fundamentalist Nazi, nor man Russians Bolshevists, but we see the effect of a very small group of angry, violent and aggressive clever political “marketers” in those societies.
The extreme actors need the fertile soil of the mass and moderate magical beliefs to plant roots and grow often quite quickly.
In human nature, it is not a big leap from magical beliefs to mass murder – as history repeatedly attests.
Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot were not atheists they defined religion and magical beliefs in mere modern garb.
“a very small group of angry, violent and aggressive clever political “marketers””
This actually describes tea-patiers…kinda scary.
And I think your comment is quite accurate.
Who is more hateful is a silly question, although I must say that I’ve never seen hateful comments by any atheist that rivals those by some self-professed, god-fearing folk.
Rather, the question should be “Who has a more sensible world view–those who base their lives on reason and knowledge, or those who base their lives on bronze-age fables?”
If you’d like to see some really unpleasant email you should go to Pat Condell’s feedback page, not just christians either, muslims too.
http://www.patcondell.net/page4/page4.html
That link is no longer valid, it seems.
The link works for me.
My car was keyed last year because, I presume, I had an ‘Evolve’ bumper sticker. Purely anecdotal, but I’de bet no atheist did the deed.
This is a moot question to me. Theism is normative and can (and does) thus provide an impetus for people to do all sorts of things. This includes sending off nasty letters and even death threats. Atheism, on the other hand, is purely descriptive. Atheists surely also do crazy things like make irrational threats, but they do not do so out of atheism. They can’t. It’s like saying people doing something out of geology. It’s descriptive. Until something makes a normative claim it cannot be said to provide any direct motivation to action.
But “theism” by itself, is hardly normative.
Take simple deism, for example.
It is superstitious religious dogma, and the consequent behavioural baggage imposed by churches and cults that is normative, surely?
Theism to me means the belief that there is a god who has revealed himself and given a set of commands/instructions concerning the best way to live. That has to be normative.
You are most certainly NOT describing Deism.
Are you unsure about the definition of Deism?
For deism *is* a form of theism.
I don’t see the point in soliciting information. I wonder what he’ll do.
Let’s see … Salman Rushdie has had many bounties on his head, there were these Mo cartoons a few years ago, crackergate, any number of religious groups with their hate websites, Fred Phelps … I can waste my entire day making up a list and it will be nowhere near complete. As for godless people making threats, I’m sure there would be a few simply because people do that sort of thing – but in the case of religion it’s widespread and somewhat organized.
Accounting for the difference in size between the two groups, there’s probably a fairly equal amount of abusive rhetoric on both sides- Pharyngula (of which I’m a daily reader) being a prime example.
I think it’s obvious, however, that there’s a far far higher level of violent and threatening messages from Christians i.e. not “you’re going to Hell” but “I’m gonna get my shotgun and send you to Hell.”
Altemeyer’s data, both on Atheists specifically and on authoritarians generally, would suggest that the abusive rhetoric is not equal even on a per-capita basis. In the US and Canada, Christian fundamentalists appear more likely to be aggressively conventionalist authoritarians than the overall population; Atheists, less than overall.
That said, Atheists aren’t immune; and furthermore, in so far as some of the psychological traits correlated with those more prone to such rhetoric appear to be more genes than environment, and in so far as the demographics suggest the rate of increase in non-theists is more as a result of conversion of others’ children than bringing up their own rugrats to be Godless, this would suggest Atheists may have an increasing genetic tendency to such abusiveness. (Environmental effects of such conversion may either mitigate or exacerbate those personality tendencies; I’m uncertain which seems more likely.)
Some religious people do not believe much!
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-14417362
All — I’m the instigator of this chat over at Forbes. I’m enjoying the comments here and wanted to repeat Jerry’s invitation to comment at Forbes as well.
My email link on that site evidently isn’t working, but you can send email via my personal site, here: http://www.daviddisalvo.org/contact/
Thanks again for the great feedback. And, no, I won’t fall for the “Stalin, Hitler, et al” ploy. Been to that rodeo a few times before.
Best,
David
David, there’s one dimension to this that I don’t think has been mentioned yet that I think might be worth considering.
When theists — however calmly — defend something abhorrent, such as the genocide and mass child rape of Numbers 31, or even Rabbi Wolpe and ritualistic animal sacrifice, it’s not uncommon for atheists to call them out on it and even dogpile on them.
I would suggest that such a reaction is entirely appropriate, and no different from the reaction a Klansman would get at an NAACP rally or a Neo-Nazi at an ADL meeting.
Is the response hateful? Does it matter if it is?
Cheers,
b&
I think you’re making the same point that I did in comment #18. I think it’s an important point to consider, obviously.
Indeed I did.
Well, carry on, then!
Cheers,
b&
Does putting nails in the tires of biology professors count?
http://www.gainesville.com/article/20110803/ARTICLES/110809846/-1/entertainment?Title=Biology-professors-say-they-ve-been-targeted-over-evolution-emblems