Category: atheist-baiting

Who cares if religion is true if it makes us feel good?

September 29, 2018 • 1:53 pm

Here we go again: a Sophisticated Thinker decides that it doesn’t matter whether the truth claims of religion are really true, and argues that most believers don’t think that they are. Instead, religion is important because it makes us feel good.  The three problems with this are, of course, that it does matter to most people (if there’s no God, is there any sense in religion?), that in fact most believers do accept some supernatural truth claims, and that it’s hard to see how people can be religious, or go to church, unless they believe at least some claims about the universe—especially the claim that a god exists.

Further, the author, Stephen T. Asma, doesn’t worry about the downside of religion: how it controls people in a way that makes them feel bad (the guilt of Catholic children and the brainwashing of Muslim children come to mind), how it leads to a warped morality, and how it inspires bad and immoral acts. Finally, Asma doesn’t worry about whether the increasing secularization of the West (and the near-atheism of northern Europe) has proceeded in the face of increasing despondency of the secularized inhabitants. Are Swedes and Danes really that gloomy and bereft?

Do I need to go any further? Perhaps just for a bit. Read the article below (click on screenshot), whose author is identified this way:

Stephen T Asma is professor of philosophy at Columbia College Chicago. He is the author of 10 books, including The Evolution of Imagination (2017) and his latest, Why We Need Religion (2018).

 

Asma’s argument:

1.) Religion doesn’t make important truth claims that motivate believers. Some quotes (indented; emphasis is mine):

Religion does not help us to explain nature. It did what it could in pre-scientific times, but that job was properly unseated by science. Most religious laypeople and even clergy agree: Pope John Paul II declared in 1996 that evolution is a fact and Catholics should get over it. No doubt some extreme anti-scientific thinking lives on in such places as Ken Ham’s Creation Museum in Kentucky, but it has become a fringe position. Most mainstream religious people accept a version of Galileo’s division of labour: ‘The intention of the Holy Ghost is to teach us how one goes to heaven, not how heaven goes.

. . . Religion is real consolation in the same way that music is real consolation. No one thinks that the pleasure of Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute is ‘false pleasure’ because singing flutes don’t really exist. It doesn’t need to correspond to reality. It’s true that some religious devotees, unlike music devotees, pin their consolation to additional metaphysical claims, but why should we trust them to know how religion works? Such believers do not recognise that their unthinking religious rituals and social activities are the true sources of their therapeutic healing. Meanwhile, Hitchens and other critics confuse the factual disappointments of religion with the value of religion generally, and thereby miss the heart of it.

Ahh, he’s channeling Stephen J. Gould’s NOMA idea. You can see that taken apart in my book Faith versus Fact, but I’ll give a very abridged version in this post.  But do most people think that religion’s truth claims are bogus, or irrelevant? Here’s what a random poll of all Americans (not just believers) think is true; this was taken by the Harris organization five years ago. These are all metaphysical claims, of course:

A personal God concerned with you  68%
Absolutely certain there is a God  54%
Jesus was the son of God   68%
Jesus was born of a virgin   57%
Jesus was resurrected   65%
Miracles   72%
Heaven   68%
Hell and Satan   58%
Angels   68%
Survival of soul after death   64%

Further, many well known religionists have recognized that religious belief depends on truth claims. Here are three quotes I often use as well:

“I cannot regard theology as merely concerned with a collection  of stories which motivate an attitude toward life. It must have its anchorage in the way things actually are, and the way they happen.”  —John Polkinghorne

“A religious tradition is indeed a way of life and not a set of abstract ideas. But a way of life presupposes beliefs about the nature of reality and cannot be sustained if those beliefs are no longer credible.” —Ian Barbour

“Likewise, religion in almost all of its manifestations is more than  just a collection of value judgments and moral directives. Religion often makes claims about ‘the way things are.”—Karl Giberson & Francis Collins

Asma needs to get out more.

2.) Religion is really about morality, consolation, and emotional connection. 

Maybe, then, the heart of religion is not its ability to explain nature, but its moral power?

If that’s the case, then give me secularism any day. For religious “morality” is often twisted and warped, more about people’s sex lives than their character. It tells them who to copulate with, what to wear, what to eat, whom to hate, and how often you should pray, and in which direction. How is that good?  And of course here are some results of Catholic “moral power,” a list I often give in talks:

Opposition to birth control (leading to an increase in STDs, including AIDS)
Opposition to abortion
Opposition to divorce
Opposition to homosexuality
Control of people’s sex lives
Oppression of women
Sexual abuse of children
Instillation of fear and guilt in children

If that’s the heart of Catholicism, please do an Aztec-style cardiectomy! But wait, Asma has more! (Emphases are mine.)

Emotional therapy is the animating heart of religion. Social bonding happens not only when we agree to worship the same totems, but when we feel affection for each other. An affective community of mutual care emerges when groups share rituals, liturgy, song, dance, eating, grieving, comforting, tales of saints and heroes, hardships such as fasting and sacrifice. Theological beliefs are bloodless abstractions by comparison.

Emotional management is important because life is hard. The Buddha said: ‘All life is suffering’ and most of us past a certain age can only agree. Religion evolved to handle what I call the ‘vulnerability problem’. When we’re sick, we go to the doctor, not the priest. But when our child dies, or we lose our home in a fire, or we’re diagnosed with Stage-4 cancer, then religion is helpful because it provides some relief and some strength. It also gives us something to do, when there’s nothing we can do.

Asma makes a big deal about how religion can console people facing death, or those whose loved ones have died, implicitly arguing that atheists lack such consolation:

Consider how religion helps people after a death. Social mammals who have suffered separation distress are restored to health by touch, collective meals and grooming. Human grieving customs involve these same soothing prosocial mechanisms. We comfort-touch and embrace a person who has lost a loved one. Our bodies give ancient comfort directly to the grieving body. We provide the bereaved with food and drink, and we break bread with them (think of the Jewish tradition of shiva, or the visitation tradition of wakes in many cultures).

He goes on and on. But I want to point out just one thing. We all know, of course, that much of that consolation does indeed come from religious beliefs that are taken to be true, namely the existence of God and of an afterlife. And Asma even obliquely admits this (my emphases):

Part of our ability to cope with suffering is our sense of power or agency: more power generally means better coping ability. If I acknowledge my own limitations when faced with unavoidable loss, but I feel that a powerful ally, God, is part of my agency or power, then I can be more resilient.

What? But what about those “bloodless theological beliefs”? Clearly God isn’t one of them!

God’s existence is in fact a genuine metaphysical claim, and without that then not even Asma is consoled. And has he considered that we nonbelivers who don’t accept gods on the grounds of no evidence cannot force ourselves to believe, even if we think it would help us? God may make Asma feel better, but I can’t make myself believe in God. I am not so constituted.

All I can say is that Asma seems clueless here, oblivious—in his eagerness to argue that religious makes no truth claims—to how the world really works. And yet he requires God to be consoled! The man is not only clueless, but can’t make a coherent argument. And Aeon doesn’t require that he make one. All they want is endless and sloppy osculation of faith.

To close, I’ll point out that the countries that are the happiest ones in the world are on average less religious (see chart below). Just sayin’. This is a correlation and not necessarily a causal relationship, but it’s the exact opposite of what Asma predicts. So it goes.

What is going on with the online magazine Aeon, anyway? Are they taking Templeton money on the sly?

Stephen T. Asma:

h/t: Ant

Templeton funds more atheist-bashing

September 27, 2018 • 10:30 am

Lois Lee, a religious scholar whom I’ve written about before, is the lead investigator on a big Templeton grant, or, as The Conversation describes her in erroneous spelling, “Principle [sic] Investigator on the Understanding Unbelief programme.” Templeton gave her and her co-PI Stephen Bullivant (also a religious scholar) nearly three million dollars to study the nature and variety of “unbelief”. While the grant summary pretends that this is a dispassionate inquiry into the origin and nature of atheism, I wrote at the time that giving the grant to these two was “like asking creationists to direct a sociological study of why so many scientists accept evolution.”

And indeed, it’s clear from Lee and Bullivant’s writings that their study is tendentious. It’s not a rational inquiry into atheism, but rather an attack on atheism, and, in Lee’s latest article in The Conversation, “Why atheists are not as rational as some like to think” (click on screenshot), she positively celebrates irrationality. Note that the obligatory picture of the Satan Atheist accompanies the article:

I’m not sure I want to dissect this egregious and lightweight piece; it’s best summed up by saying its thesis is this: “Atheists are irrational, just like religious people.” In other words, “You’re just as bad as we believers are”: not a very persuasive argument.  In fact, Lee adduces no strong evidence that atheists are just as irrational as believers. Rather, she uses a series of arguments, many of which rest on opinion rather than data, e.g. “some atheists are irrational” or “many atheists don’t arrive at their nonbelief through reason or science, but because they’re indoctrinated by their parents.

Who would deny this? Certainly not all atheists arrive at their stand by reason, but many of them have enough rationality to think “there’s no evidence for religious beliefs”, which is all the rationality you need to reject religion. You don’t have to be rational in every aspect of your life. Further, Lee fails to mention that religious belief is completely irrational—in the sense that there’s no evidence supporting the existence of Gods or the factual (and conflicting) assertions of the world’s many religions.

So yes, perhaps to some people “atheists aren’t as rational as you’d like to think”, but so what? What matters is not whether atheists are 100% rational, or whether some of them become atheists for reasons other than reason, but whether the claims of religion are true. That crucial issue isn’t discussed. Lee’s purpose here is simply to criticize atheists rather than to examine whether atheism can be seen as it truly is: a rational response to a lack of evidence for gods.

Here are a few of her assertions that I’ve summarized in bold (Lee’s direct quotes are indented):

Atheism is a sad way to live. Here Lee begins her celebration of irrationality, which I take to be osculation of religion (I’m betting she’s religious):

When you ask atheists about why they became atheists (as I do for a living), they often point to eureka moments when they came to realise that religion simply doesn’t make sense.

Oddly perhaps, many religious people actually take a similar view of atheism. This comes out when theologians and other theists speculate that it must be rather sad to be an atheist, lacking (as they think atheists do) so much of the philosophical, ethical, mythical and aesthetic fulfilments that religious people have access to – stuck in a cold world of rationality only.

That I don’t get. Why does atheism “not make sense” because it’s “sad”? And of course many of us nonbelievers are not sad at all. We fall in love, enjoy friendship, beauty, books, art, and food. What we don’t do is proselytize or believe in divine fairy tales. What we have here from Lee is a knowingly distorted indictment of nonbelief.

Many atheists arrive at nonbelief for non-rational reasons.

Even atheist beliefs themselves have much less to do with rational inquiry than atheists often think. We now know, for example, that nonreligious children of religious parents cast off their beliefs for reasons that have little to do with intellectual reasoning. The latest cognitive research shows that the decisive factor is learning from what parents do rather than from what they say. So if a parent says that they’re Christian, but they’ve fallen out of the habit of doing the things they say should matter – such as praying or going to church – their kids simply don’t buy the idea that religion makes sense.

This is perfectly rational in a sense, but children aren’t processing this on a cognitive level. Throughout our evolutionary history, humans have often lacked the time to scrutinise and weigh up the evidence – needing to make quick assessments. That means that children to some extent just absorb the crucial information, which in this case is that religious belief doesn’t appear to matter in the way that parents are saying it does.

. . . Some parents take the view that their children should choose their beliefs for themselves, but what they then do is pass on certain ways of thinking about religion, like the idea that religion is a matter of choice rather than divine truth. It’s not surprising that almost all of these children – 95% – end up “choosing” to be atheist.

My response is “so what?” Many atheists give up religious beliefs as adults, not children.  And again, the main issue for me is whether it IS rational to be an atheist, not how you come to be an atheist. Of course not everyone gives up or rejects faith for the same reason.

Atheists purport to think scientifically and love science, but not all of us are that way.

But are atheists more likely to embrace science than religious people? Many belief systems can be more or less closely integrated with scientific knowledge. Some belief systems are openly critical of science, and think it has far too much sway over our lives, while other belief systems are hugely concerned to learn about and respond to scientific knowledge.

But this difference doesn’t neatly map onto whether you are religious or not. Some Protestant traditions, for example, see rationality or scientific thinking as central to their religious lives. Meanwhile, a new generation of postmodern atheists highlight the limits of human knowledge, and see scientific knowledge as hugely limited, problematic even, especially when it comes to existential and ethical questions. These atheists might, for example, follow thinkers like Charles Baudelaire in the view that true knowledge is only found in artistic expression.

Yes, of course not all atheists are completely rational in everything they do. But some are more rational than believers, especially in the crucial area of embracing superstitions. And any believers who see “scientific thinking as central to their religious lives” are, I submit, deluding themselves.

I’ll give one more quote and pass on:

Clearly, the idea that being atheist is down to rationality alone is starting to look distinctly irrational. But the good news for all concerned is that rationality is overrated. Human ingenuity rests on a lot more than rational thinking. As Haidt says of “the righteous mind”, we are actually “designed to ‘do’ morality” – even if we’re not doing it in the rational way we think we are. The ability to make quick decisions, follow our passions and act on intuition are also important human qualities and crucial for our success.

It is helpful that we have invented something that, unlike our minds, is rational and evidence-based: science. When we need proper evidence, science can very often provide it – as long as the topic is testable. Importantly, the scientific evidence does not tend to support the view that atheism is about rational thought and theism is about existential fulfilments. The truth is that humans are not like science – none of us get by without irrational action, nor without sources of existential meaning and comfort. Fortunately, though, nobody has to.

Check out that link. It doesn’t really show that “rationality is overrated” but that “gut instincts can be correct and we shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss them.” But “gut instincts” can also be the result of rationality, whether conscious but not pondered at length, or unconscious but either the result of evolved ways of thinking or unconscious ways of thinking that have been adaptive in the past.

In the end, I’d like to see Lee justify the rationality of theism. Is there any scientific evidence for gods or the divine? If so, where is it?  Templeton, of course, doesn’t care: their purpose here is to cast aspersions on nonbelievers.

Lee’s article is accompanied by a “disclosure statement”:h/t: Michael

NHS adds first humanist chaplain (and a small rant on accommodationism)

August 19, 2018 • 12:00 pm

Click on the screenshot below to watch this short 2½-minute video featuring Lindsay van Dijk, the first humanist chaplain to work for the National Health Service in Britain.

van Dijik was appointed by a trust, so I’m not sure the NHS actually pays her salary, but that doesn’t matter. What’s good is that she works in NHS hospitals, seems caring, is acting as a listener/psychologist and not at all as a proselytizer, and gives nonbelievers someone to talk to—someone who isn’t going to tout Jesus (most of the chaplains are Christian). And she’s not there to promote atheism, unlike those religionist who try to convert people in hospitals.

This just reminded me yesterday how, after I gave my talk on the evidence for evolution, and mentioned very briefly how the main opposition to evolution came from religion—a statement that was indubitably true—no fewer than three people, including a Jesuit priest, came up to me or questioned me about why religion and science couldn’t exist in harmony or have mutual dialogue. Rather than tell people that was possible, and that I “respect” religious beliefs, I said what I thought: that religion had nothing to contribute to science, and that while I will treat religious people with the respect due them as human beings, I wasn’t going to respect their unevidenced beliefs. We can work with the faithful to promote evolution, but can’t allow ourselves in the process to somehow give credence to the fairy tales they’ve embraced.

This got the Jesuit priest’s hackles up, and he came up to me afterwards to say that, by criticizing religion, I was driving people away from evolution and into the arms of creationists. I told him there was no evidence for that, citing the many religious people that Dawkins’s atheism had not only weaned from faith, but guided towards evolution.

In contrast, how many people say, “Well, if Dawkins would just shut up about atheism, I’d be glad to embrace evolution?” I’m sure that there are a few people who won’t embrace evolution because they think that means they must give up their faith, but I also I feel these are vastly outnumbered by those who have become secular because there’s no evidence for God—and then readily accept evolution. (There’s not much reason to oppose evolution if you’re not religious.)

As a friend of mine said, the priest’s point was like saying, “If you make fun of Santa, you’re just going to turn kids towards believing in Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”

I told the priest that while Catholicism formally accepts evolution, it still has problems with accepting science in general, like its official insistence (in Catholic dogma) that we not only have souls, but that Adam and Eve were real people—the ancestors of us all. He insisted that there was a long history of Sophisticated Theologians™ who interpreted Adam and Eve, not knowing that I knew a lot about it.  I refused to argue at this point, as I wanted to hear Wynton Marsalis. I wasn’t about to tell him that both Aquinas and Augustine believed in a real Adam and Eve, not a metaphorical one. That, after all, is what the Bible says. The rest is just mushbrained apologetics.

But at my mention of a soul, another woman jumped in and asked me why I didn’t accept souls. I said that she should ask Sean Carroll, who was sitting in the audience and had explained, in his excellent talk, the impossibility of a non-material object like a soul interacting with material ones like bodies. She then said she knew souls were real because she had had past-life experiences.

The attendees at KentPresents were highly educated and seemingly wealthy, yet there were still a few among them wedded to these superstitions. What was odd, even though I loved the conference (more later), was this: it was clear that nearly all the attendees disliked Trump intensely, and chuckled and guffawed appreciately when speakers made fun of him.  It was fine to make fun of Republicans, but not  fine—at least for some—to indict religion for promoting creationism and also to claim that there’s no evidential basis for religious truth claims, for every religion makes different claims. Such is the hold of faith on even highly educated people. The fastest way to alienate liberals is to criticize religion. The surest way to make liberals love you, besides mocking Trump (and here I join them) is to go all soft on religious belief, claiming that people need it as a comfort.

The Conversation’s dumb article on why New Atheism is just as violent as religion

July 26, 2018 • 11:00 am

I don’t know what’s happened to The Conversation site, but one would almost think it was funded by Templeton. Here we have a new article by Nick Megoran and Russell Foster arguing that the arguments of the New Atheists are just as violent as religion. Click on the screenshot to see it, but note the title: THE ARGUMENTS of the New Atheists are just as violent as religion. That is, the New Atheists themselves aren’t as violent as, say, Islamist terrorists, but their arguments are. That is a false equivalence.

The two authors simply analyzed the prose of some New Atheists and found “calls for violence” in it, which include approbation for the U.S./UK attacks on Afghanistan and, in the case of Hitchens, for the invasion of Iraq (a misstep on Hitchens’s part, I think). But the “calls for violence” by the three New Atheists are not at all the same as both the calls for violence in scripture and the daily calls for violence in mosques and in the Middle Eastern public media. Don’t forget that in Palestinian schools, children (even very young ones) are taught to hate and kill Israelis. Is there an equivalent to that in the writings of the New Atheists?

Naturally, Megoran and Foster repeatedly find “violence” in New Atheist writings, even if they have to take words out of context (they also mention the old canard that the USSR committed violence in the name of atheism):

Our study (jointly conducted by a Christian, an agnostic and an atheist) involved analysing the writing of Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens – the so-called “New Atheists”. We sought to establish their positions on US and UK foreign policy since the September 2001 attacks. We critically examined their bestselling books, along with their op-eds, social media posts and videos, to ascertain their positions – not on science or morality – but on politics, especially foreign policy.

They each argue that religion inherently incites violence, whereas atheism is more peaceful. Dawkins in particular asks: “Who would advocate killing in the name of a non-God?”

BUT. . .here’s the atheist “violence”:

All three of these New Atheists were sympathetic to the attack on Afghanistan in 2001. Hitchens also vociferously supported the 2003 Iraq invasion, while Harris saw Western engagement with Islam and the Muslim world as part of a war that the West must win, or else face “bondage”. In his 2004 book, The End of Faith, Harris says (p.131):

While it would be comforting to believe that our dialogue with the Muslim world has, as one of its possible outcomes, a future of mutual tolerance, nothing guarantees this result – least of all tenets of Islam. Given the constraints of Muslim orthodoxy, given the penalties within Islam for radical (and reasonable) adaption to modernity, I think it is clear that Islam must find some way to revise itself, peacefully or otherwise. What this will mean is not all obvious. What is obvious, however, is that the West must win the argument or win the war. All else will be bondage.

And in specific reference to the Afghan war, Harris adds (p.53):

There is in fact no talking to some people. If they cannot be captured, and they often cannot, otherwise tolerant people may be justified killing them in self defence. This is what the United States attempted in Afghanistan, and it is what we and other Western powers are bound to attempt, at an even greater cost to ourselves and to innocents abroad, elsewhere in the Muslim world. We will continue to spill blood in what is, at bottom, a war of ideas.

We argue that the three supported this war because they read global politics through the lens of their atheism. They appear to see the West as locked in an existential war with religion, particularly Islam. There are four striking aspects of this atheist vision of global geopolitics.

Supporting a war conducted by others, however, is not the same as what ISIS does, stoning gays or tossing them off roofs, and beating women for wearing insufficient covering on the streets.  Harris, Hitchens, and Dawkins do not promulgate hatred of Muslims the way the media of the Middle East does, portray Jews in vile stereotypes and calling for the destruction of Israel. Nor do the New Atheists call for jihad and for the murder of apostates and unbelievers. In fact, I haven’t seen any of these men call for murder at all, except to go to war in response to religiously-inspired violence. What they are saying is that if others attack us in the name of faith, we are justified in fighting back and engaging in a war of words against the tenets of violence-promoting faith.

The authors also make the mistake of saying that all religion is violent, and that’s just dumb. They characterize New Atheists as saying that “religion is the most prolific source of violence”, and that may well be the case. Dawkins adds that “Islam is one of the great evils of the world”, and that is arguably true. And when Harris says “We are at war with Islam,” he means a war of ideas, not a call for us to annihilate all Muslims. Note that, in contrast, it is Muslim dogma that apostates and nonbelievers should be annihilated. Reader Michael, who sent me this link, also called my attention to the Hamas Covenant, which calls for militant jihad against Israel.

Finally, Foster and Megoran make the familiar distortions of Sam Harris’s Gedankenexperiment arguments, and take them as equivalent to the violence committed by Muslims at the behest of their faith:

Harris extends his argument by suggesting that the racial profiling of Muslims and judicial torture of terrorists may be ethical in what he calls “our war on terror”. At its extreme, he contends that “Muslims pose a special problem for nuclear deterrence” because theologically they don’t fear death. He reasons they are immune to the usual logic of Mutually Assured Destruction. Therefore, if an Islamist government acquired nuclear weapons, then “a nuclear first strike of our own” may be “the only course of action available to us”. The irony in this argument, which began with the declaration that religion is uniquely violent, is apparently missed by Harris, who has since qualified his position on torture as this:

My argument for the limited use of coercive interrogation (‘torture’ by another name) is essentially this: If you think it is ever justifiable to drop bombs in an attempt to kill a man like Osama bin Laden (and thereby risk killing and maiming innocent men, women, and children), you should think it may sometimes be justifiable to water-board a man like Osama bin Laden (and risk abusing someone who just happens to look like him).

Harris hasn’t called for torture, but simply discussed scenarios in which torture might be acceptable.

At the end of this execrable piece, Foster and Megoran equate the use of violence with advocating violence. And yes, violence may be the proper response if you’re attacked by people, but fighting against ISIS is not the equivalent of doing what ISIS does. The authors’ call for “nuance” is a call that invariably means “let’s go easy on religion”:

Our research demonstrates the paradox that although New Atheists claim that their ideology is more enlightened and peaceful than religion, they often end up advocating violence. This is because they exhibit a simplistic view of the world as being divided between two civilisations – secular and religious – which cannot coexist. In this, ironically, they arguably mirror the hardline religious leaders whom they so vociferously denounce.

Fifteen years after the invasion of Iraq and the chaos it unleashed, it is clear that there needs to be a more nuanced understanding of Middle Eastern societies and politics. Those nuances are as unlikely to be found in the analysis of fundamentalist atheists as they are in their religious antagonists.

I’ve been to many atheist meetings now, and I’ve never heard—not even once—a call for violence against religionists. In contrast, in the mosques and madrasses of the world you’ll hear that every day.

h/t: Michael

Another plaint about sexism-ridden New Atheism

December 14, 2017 • 10:30 am

Suppose you start with the assumption that the atheist community is riddled with misogyny and sexism, that this is the explanation for the paucity of women atheist “leaders” and participants, then ignore the prevalence of gender imbalance and misogyny in other areas, and mix in some postmodern jargon, some “research” that consists of anecdotes and citations of other people’s data that simply show that women are less atheistic than men—what do you get? You get a new paper in the book Sociology of Atheism by Landon Schnabel, Matthew Facciani, Ariel Sincoff-Yedid, and Lori Fazzino, “Gender and Atheism: Paradoxes, Contradictions, and an Agenda for Future Research.” (Reference below and free access via Google Drive). The paper is also highlighted and summarized on Facciani’s Patheos blog (According to Matthew) in a post called “Sociologists begin to study the exism-found within the atheist community.”

Essentially, the paper is just a Salon article gussied up with academic jargon and some references, many of them blog posts. (The real citations to genuine academic articlse mainly document the higher religiosity of women than of men throughout the world). Here are the claims:

There are fewer women than men in “the atheist community”; this also holds for blacks compared to whites and gays and trans people compared to straight people. This is true for absolute numbers, but while there are about equal numbers of men and women in the world, indicating we need to study a cause for this differential representation, the authors simply mention different absolute numbers of whites compared to blacks and cis-gender men and women compared  to “queer- and transfolk.”  Well, of course there are fewer gays and fewer transfolk in the population as a whole, so differential numbers mean nothing here. What the authors need to show for their thesis (see below), but don’t, is that the atheist community includes lower proportions of black, gay and transfolk than among the population as a whole. They don’t do this, so we can immediately stop studying the issue with regard to those groups. What remains, and what the authors concentrate on, is the acknowledged paucity of women who are either vociferous atheists or in the atheist “community.”

The disproportionately low number of women in the atheist community is due to misogyny. While this is possible, the authors fail to document it with any data. Instead, they do what Salon always does: cite a few anecdotes that supposedly demonstrate misogyny in people like Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Richard Dawkins. Even Elevatorgate is dragged in, citing Rebecca Watson’s unsubstantiated complaint that a man asked her to his room for coffee when both were in an elevator during an atheist meeting. The quotes from Harris, Hitchens, and Dawkins are well known, and hardly demonstrate that they’re misogynists (remember, that means “women haters”, not simple sexists). There is the misrepresentation that Watson’s comment “guys, don’t do that” ignited a firestorm of misogyny in the atheist community, while in reality what happened is that people strongly criticized Watson not for that mild comment, but for her subsequent videos calling out a critic in the audience of a later talk, and saying that men who objected to what she said could simply go copulate with watermelons.

What we have here are the usual anecdotes, not data, and those anecdotes, like Harris suggesting that the paucity of women atheists might be due to differential aggressiveness, don’t convince anyone but the already converted that atheist leaders—much less atheists in general—are ridden with misogyny.

Further, it’s long been known that women are substantially more religious and far less atheistic than men, and this holds even in countries without a substantial number of atheists. Below are the data for Americans given in the paper. The relative heights of the bars show the proportions of men and women within a belief category:

Note the substantial disparity for the categories “atheist” and “agnostic”. This self-categorization has no clear connection to misogyny. Remember, the thesis is not that women are innately less atheistic, but that they are, because of misogyny, less likely to be members of atheist groups. 

Here’s what the authors say about this data, buttressing their preconceived notions:

Secular communities often argue that religion produces inequalities and marginalizes women, but within American atheism women are not far from being “tokens” by the standard proportion of 15% for a strongly skewed sex ratio.

The word “token”, of course, is loaded jargon that implies sexism. And the authors manage to find a sexist reason why women are more religious. (This is a suggestion, of course, but I could think of other reasons beyond sexism). I’ve cut and pasted their hypothesis because I can’t copy from the site or its pdf:

Well, that could be one explanation, but, as Facciani admits (see below), “it’s not a scientific study!”.  It’s further unscientific because they lack controls for other groups and because the article is tendentious, determined from the outset to implicate sexism. No other explanations are seriously considered for a gender imbalance in atheism.

I’m not sure why this male/female difference in religiosity exists, but it’s acknowledged repeatedly in the Schnabel et al. paper. Did they not consider that perhaps this could account for some part of the paucity of women in atheism, because fewer women are atheists? Depending on the shape of the frequency-of-religiosity curves of men and women, and the threshhold of nonbelief it takes to get you to participate in “the atheist community”, a small difference in religiosity could translate to a larger difference in participation. Or there could simply be a sex difference in innate preference, which is what Harris meant when he implied that atheism is an in-your-face, sometimes aggressive movement that might appeal to men more than women.

The anecdotes are just that—anecdotes. There is no random interviewing or surveying of women to see if they’re staying out of atheist organizations because of sexism, nor any controls about the pervasiveness of sexism in atheism versus other endeavors like antiracism or politics. In fact, Facciani, in the comments to his blog post, admits that:

As I said above, this paper is descriptive and provides an agenda for future research. It’s not a scientific study! The only data we have is from interviews from atheist women describing the sexism they have experienced within atheist circles.

So yes, there could definitely be other factors that create sexism in this space that is not caused by any unique aspects of the atheist community. And that is why I specifically said future research should try to find if this is the case. It’s an open ended question. We are definitely not assuming that atheists are more sexist than the general population. Again, atheists tend to be more pro-feminist according to several surveys. However, we do see instances of misogyny in atheist spaces so it would be interesting to see if there is some unique factor that allows for it to occur. But yes, it’s very possible that the sexism we see is not indicative of any unique factor and simply a product of a male dominated environment.

Yet the assumption that atheists are sexist (if not more sexist) than the general population pervades the paper. My general impression is that atheist meetings tend to be less sexist than other meetings I’ve gone to, like scientific meetings. Read the paper if you want to see their thesis. Further, they couch their “research” as if it were scientific, noting gravely that:

. . . . we draw on both previous research and original ethnographic data to explore gendered beliefs, interactions, and contradictions within atheist communities. In the ethnographic research that helps inform our discussion, field notes and interview transcripts were supplemented with a purposive sample of textual data collected from well-known atheist activist blogs [JAC: read “cherry picked accusations of sexism”], online new media, and popular atheist literature.

Atheists are ridden with misogyny as a byproduct of their love of science.  I find this risible because of the reasons they adduce for a scientific attitude producing sexism. Here are two examples:

and this:

This explicitly implies that women are either innately or socially programmed to be less rational, objective, or value neutral than men, and implies as well that there are other ways of getting knowledge than through science. The “other ways of knowing” claim is, of course, bogus.

At any rate, I don’t recognize any of the thesis here: that atheists regularly use science to buttress sexism. Have we seen this happening, not just occasionally but all the time in atheism?

There are no controls for the amount of sexism and misogyny in comparable groups, or in society as a whole. Now the authors don’t explicitly admit that atheism is more sexist or misogynistic than other groups or society in general, but they still claim that it is deeply permeated with these issues. Here’s one bit:

(The “expertise” claim is straight out of Pigliucci, who is cited).  Yes, there is sexism in atheism, as there is sexism in any movement that contains men, for some men are sexists. The important question is this: is atheism more sexist than other groups, or society as a whole?  While I don’t know the answer, my lived experience suggest that the answer is “no”.  But we’ll need data to answer one way or the other. And if atheism turns out to be less sexist than society, won’t that largely invalidate all the articles that implicitly claim that it is? Wouldn’t we then want to work on society in general instead of the “atheist community?” Granted, atheist meetings should be welcoming to women and minorities, and strive for some gender parity in who speaks. But there’s little doubt that this article, and all its antecedents in Salon and other places, call out atheism for being ridden with sexism, and, like this article, adduce “reasons” why this is so. The bogus accusations that Dawkins and Harris are misogynists sets the tone for the article. (They also snarkily drag in Dennett, patting him on the back by saying that “Dennett speaks with more tact”. Note that they don’t exculpate him of sexism, but simply say that he’s more tactful.)

Frankly, in the absence of data rather than anecdotes, I don’t accept the authors’ claim that sexism in the atheist community needs intensive study, for we don’t know its degree. If it’s minimal, we needn’t write a gazillion articles about it. And if it’s less than in other “communities,” I’d like to see articles praising atheists for being less sexist, and analyzing why nonbelief fosters acceptance of gender equality.

_______

L. Schnabel et al. 2017. Gender and Atheism: Paradoxes, Contradictions, and an Agenda for Future Research.  pp. 75-97 in Sociology of Atheism. R. Cipriani and F. Garelli, eds. Brill, Leiden/Boston

Once again: Why atheism is toxic—this time by Chris Stedman

November 8, 2017 • 9:30 am

I don’t want to write too much about this, since this new Washington Post piece by Chris Stedman, formerly a humanist chaplain at Harvard but now a “freelance humanist”, is pretty much a clone of all the articles in Vox, Salon, and BuzzFeed claiming that atheism (or New Atheism) is toxic and moribund: it’s sexist, racist, and xenophobic. Atheism, it’s said, makes fun of religious people, thus not fostering “dialogue” and driving away possible converts.

So your assignment this morning is the short piece, “I’m an atheist, but I had to walk away from the toxic side of online atheism”, and I ask for your reactions in the comments. I’ll put a few of mine here:

1.) Note that the title is “online atheism”.  Well, yes, many people—and not just atheists—tend to turn nasty when they can post anonymously online.  Some atheist websites are cesspools, which is why I try to keep the atmosphere civil around here. That said, there’s no evidence that atheist websites are worse than other secular websites.  Further, when Stedman raises the usual victim trope about all the nasty names he’s been called (and I do deplore those who made fun of his sexual orientation, appearance, and so on), it’s not clear that all of it, or even much of it, came from atheists. He gives several examples of online name-calling, but how many of those were from the faithful, or people who weren’t atheists at all?

2.) While online trolls may make some atheist sites unpleasant, my own experience giving talks and attendng many humanist and atheist meetings is not one of pervasive sexism, racism, or bigotry. Yes, I’m a man and not subject to sexual harassment, but all I can say is that I haven’t ever seen it—not once. It is true that there’s a paucity of minorities at these meetings, and in the community as a whole, but I’m not convinced it’s because “movement atheism” is racist. Rather, blacks and Hispanics, for instance, tend to be more religious than other groups, which may make them less likely to join atheist organizations. We need to do better in welcoming minorities, but I think nearly all atheist groups now make a conscious effort to include women in the program. While some people may have left atheism because of its so-called toxicity, I haven’t seen the egress that Stedman has, nor does he give any data supporting that. If so many people are leaving atheism, why is it growing?

3.) To repeat, the data in fact show that nonbelief is increasing in the U.S., and not just among men. If atheism has failed, why this growth? (Granted, many “nones” are “spiritual”, or accept a god but don’t affiliate with a Church, but pure nonbelievers are also becoming more common.) If you simply look at the data, atheism is winning, regardless of whether a few individuals leave “the movement.”

4.) Contra Stedman, I have talked to many people who have been exposed to atheism (and converted to it) by the Internet. In fact, that’s the main way atheists found each other, and found support, over the last two decades. Many people have been converted by listening to videos of Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens, regardless of any statements they’ve made that have caused them to be demonized.  Not everyone can afford to travel to meetings, but the Internet is free. And even if some website commenters were nasty and ad hominem, those talks (and their books) will remain as eloquent critiques of faith, and will continue to deconvert the faithful as the years pass.

5.) Personal note: Right at the beginning of his piece, Stedman includes me along with the Blog That Shall not be Named as one of his nasty critics after he appeared on Bill O’Reilly’s show. But I reject his implication that I was unfair. Here’s what he wrote:

A number of prominent atheist bloggers criticized my interview, saying I was awful and suggesting I was allying with O’Reilly. The comments were worse. Anonymous posters ridiculed me, saying I should decline future television invitations because I was too “effeminate,” my physical appearance made atheists seem “like freaks” and my “obvious homosexuality” made me an ineffectual voice for atheists.

Well, check the second link for yourself. I maintain that my post was constructively critical, did not make fun of Stedman, and, in fact, neither did my commenters. Since Stedman says he welcomes constructive criticism, what’s he beefing about here? (I’ve added the O’Reilly/Stedman clip to the original post, and you can see it here.)

6.) Stedman argues that the nastiness of online discourse impedes the course of mutual understanding:

My experiences helping people better understand atheists have been deeply rewarding, and so has working to support atheists struggling with life’s challenges or with families that don’t accept them. I can say without hesitation that my shift from blogging about atheism to community-building was the right decision.

h/t: Diane G

Sam Harris versus Reza Aslan

October 29, 2017 • 2:00 pm

Here we have two clips demonstrating the increasing polarization between Sam Harris and Reza Aslan over a year—or rather, the increasing hostility of Aslan. The first clip is undated, though because Harris cites the Pew Poll on the attitudes of Muslims, which was published in 2013, it would seem to be around then, which means Aslan’s hair got a lot grayer in one year. (This is part of a much longer discussion between Harris and Aslan that you can see here.)

Harris seems fairly conciliatory, asserting that his (Harris’s) rhetorical style is not suited to convincing Muslims to temper their faith (“I’m not a diplomat”); rather, that tempering must come from people like Aslan.

In response, what does Aslan do? At 2:41, he simply asserts his “expertise,” saying that because he doesn’t write books on neuroscience, Harris should shut up about Islam, implying he knows nothing about it. That’s not an answer to what Harris says, but an assertion that Aslan alone should be heard. And Aslan’s Islam isn’t extremist. This is when Harris brings up the Pew results, which, as I’ve said many times before, are disturbing to those who see Islam as a “religon of peace and tolerance”.

As usual, Aslan answers arguments by pulling rank, not by citing figures.

These two clips, put together by HuffPo in 2014, show a brief scene of Aslan accusing Harris of being a Biblical fundamentalist, and then a longer response by Harris. I have to say that Harris shows no stridency here, but rather a calm rebuttal of Aslan’s arguments. I wish I were as eloquent as he!

I append my badge of honor: as far as I know, Aslan is one of only two people who have blocked me on Twitter, despite the fact that I’ve never tweeted at him: