Unease

So apparently, this thing with Ophelia Benson pissed me off more than I thought it would.  I thought I didn't care that much, because OB is just some FTB blogger that I don't read.  But I guess I do care after all.

Part of it is that I read more about it, including OB's latest defenses of herself, and I started seeing the trans-hostile signs all over.  It's one thing to hear other more knowledgeable people like Zinnia Jones say that they can read all the signs, but it's another to see the signs myself.  It's more visceral, emotional.

It's frustrating because I have no power over it.  Ophelia isn't listening to her colleagues, why would she listen to some other random blogger?  And even if she did, what good is anything I have to say?  I am not, you know, well-practiced at blogging in support of trans people.  Like a language I don't know too well, I understand it but I don't speak it.  Maybe I need to learn that skill now.

And even if I were decent at blogging about it, would it really do any good?  OB is already feeling embattled and can't deal with all the criticism she's getting.  It's not really desirable to have OB leave and form another splinter faction of people who say they're totally not transphobic, they just think trans women are binarist.

I think it may be good to take a step back and remember, OB is just some blogger.  I don't interact with her at all.  We are in that most wonderful of relationships: we are strangers.  I won't say any more about it, at least until the other shoe drops.

If you have any better ideas, let me know.

Wait, what's going on at FTB?

Content note: arcane atheist blog politics

Some dark clouds are currently looming over Freethought Blogs.  Whatever it is, it's gloomier than your typical blog kerfuffle because it's friends against friends, and many people clearly have mixed feelings about it.  It's all rather low profile so far, despite apparently having been bubbling in the background for months, as if many people don't want to talk about it.

Freethought blogger Ophelia Benson is being accused of being a TERF, or maybe just transphobic, or maybe just a little too sympathetic to "gender-critical" feminism.  As Alex Gabriel describes, she's favorably linked to a lot of articles which have made people suspicious.  Recently, someone finally asked her in a blog comment whether trans women are women, and she couldn't bring herself to answer that.  Instead, she wrote several posts talking about how much she hated yes or no questions (more posts where that came from).  In a recent clarification, she says she accepts the genders of trans people but that she doesn't understand the ontology of gender.

I only read a handful of Freethought Blogs, Ophelia Benson's not among them, and hardly any comments.  So I only heard about this when some of the bloggers started talking about it, including Heather McNamara, Heina Dadhaboy, and Jason Thibeault.  I think they're all very kind, but they absolutely disagree with OB's waffly answer.  You can find less kind reactions in Pharyngula's infinite thread.  Incidentally the infinite thread was recently closed for good.

Right now, OB is doing another round of responses.  Ugh... doesn't look good.  This is probably not the end of it.

--------------------------------------------

My perspective is fundamentally different from the those above, because OB is not my colleague, I don't read her blog, and do not interact with her ever.  I don't particularly care whether she's transphobic or not any more than I care about whether some Patheos blogger is transphobic or not.

But I do care about what happens to the online atheist community.  I've been around since 2007, so I know it's not the same thing over and over, stuff actually changes, it really does.  I didn't realize it at the time, but post-2011 dramas were some of the best things ever for the community.  We actually got some widespread trans-positive feminism, at least within our own sphere.  Wow!  The best!  We can never go back!

And I'm not just saying that as a purely altruistic cis guy.  In my experience, the number one indicator for the ace-friendliness of a group is, how well do they deal with trans issues?  FTB, along with the online atheist social justice community in general, has been in accordance with this trend.

What I'm worried about is not whatever OB says.  I'm worried that this will develop into a larger issue, with people taking sides.  I don't want it to be a community-wide debate whether you can make waffly deniable statements about trans people. If a few people make waffly statements, fine, but what I fear more is that many people will simultaneously start to defend it.

And I feel sure that the other issue that will pulled in is the issue of ideological purity and call-outs.

Incidentally, at the moment I'm working on a big summary of all the things social justice bloggers have written in critique of call-out culture.  But none of that nuanced discussion comes from atheist social justice.  Frankly I think the atheist community is rather naive about the issue.  I would love for atheists to start talking about it, but not this way, not when it will be associated with this particular incident.  I don't want it to be Defenders of Transphobia vs the Defenders of Call-out Culture.

Anyway, here's hoping that nothing significant will happen, and all of this will look like arcane nonsense in a month.

A critique of secular humanism

The main problem with secular humanism is that it's too reactionary.  The movement seems designed to counter the accusation that non-religious people have no morals, or have no positive ideas to offer.  It's fine and good to offer a positive moral vision for non-religious people, but because of its reactionary nature, secular humanism mostly only achieves the appearance of a positive moral vision.

Vague Positivity

Secular humanists want to offer a positive moral vision, but don't want to actually pay the cost of excluding significant numbers of non-religious people. And what better way to express vague positivity than through the medium of the manifesto?  Indeed, manifestos are littered throughout humanist discourse.

You can take a look at the most recent manifestos of the IHEU, the AHA, and the CSH.  They appear to be written as if they didn't want anyone to disagree. The most common themes are ethics and reason.  As opposed to people who throw their lot in with evil and irrationality?  When you dig down, the particular kind of ethics they favor are consequentialism plus human rights, which is something.  But it's still too broad to indicate any particular stance on a specific issue.

The most specifics we get are from CSH, which seems to be in favor of the UN.  However, I have not gotten the impression that this is a major thing among people who identify as humanists.  This is a problem, because statements of humanist principles are either maddeningly vague, or they're too specific and don't represent the views of most self-identified humanists.  I conclude that there is hardly anything that actually unites humanists.

At most, secular humanism seems to indicate, in the US, nonreligious views and liberal politics.  I guess that's useful, for what it is, but it doesn't get you very far.

Vagueness in humanism today

The problems with vague positivity become acute when we consider the current context of the atheist movement.  The most important dispute in our community is the feminist wars.  Surely, secular humanism should be taking a stance on that?  But in my experience, identification with secular humanism is not indicative of any particular stance on the feminist wars.  Greta Christina agreed:

Many humanist groups have a huge diversity problem. Many humanist groups are overwhelmingly made up of older, middle-class, college educated white men — and while the groups typically embrace the idea of diversity in theory, some individuals in them can be very resistant to the idea that maybe their lack of diversity is partly their responsibility, and that they should maybe consider changing the way they do things. And I can’t tell you how many humanists I’ve talked with who have been total douchebags about feminism: insisting that humanism is superior to and more important than feminism, that feminism is exclusionary and anti-male, that they “don’t see gender” and anyone who does is the real sexist, and that the best way to make sexism disappear is to ignore it and pretend it doesn’t exist. Humanism in theory is on board with social justice — but the practice can be very different indeed. If every atheist who’s sick of sexism and misogyny in the atheist movement picked up their stakes and moved to humanism, it wouldn’t make these problems magically disappear.

This is a monumental failure on the part of secular humanism.  Wasn't the whole point to take "positive" stances on issues that matter?  I would think this a travesty if I didn't already think that humanism was about appearance over substance

Instead we have the Council for Secular Humanism, run by CFI.  I think it's cool that CFI runs the African Americans for Humanism and Women in Secularism.  But I'm also reminded of the time that their CEO Ron Lindsay gave a tone-policing opening speech at the Women in Secularism conference, or the entire string of drama surrounding Ben Radford.

Respectability politics
 
Part of offering an "appearance of a moral vision" is maintaining appearances.  This image-consciousness echoes from the individual level to the community level.

On the individual level, "humanist" has long been used as a softer alternative to the hated word "atheist".  To be clear, I think this is a fine thing to do.  I personally would rather subvert atheist stereotypes by loudly identifying as an atheist, but this is an expression of my own privilege.  Some people might be made unsafe by an atheist label, or perhaps they don't feel comfortable with it themselves.  I would be a terrible person to take that tool away from people who need it.

But on the large scale I do not support it.  It's a bit like queer people being in the closet.  Being closeted is important for many people and it would be heartless to accuse them of being unhelpful to the cause.  But it would also be wrong to advocate more people staying in the closet.

On the community level, secular humanism has produced several notable communities like The Sunday Assembly and The Humanist Hub at Harvard.  These communities have periodic gatherings reminiscent of protestant church services.  I've been to the Sunday Assembly, and it isn't really for me, but I am still in favor of them.  It's good to have nonreligious communities that fill the social roles that churches did, because there are definitely people who want that.

On the other hand, I don't like the kind of media coverage they attract.  For example, a recent NYTimes Op Ed lauded the potential of the Sunday Assembly to fill that church-shaped hole in all our hearts, and criticized it for not doing enough to bring moral philosophy to all the heathens.  That makes me wonder, why do we expect sing-along gatherings to be the future of atheist moral thought?  Why focus on this particular atheist social trend, among all others?  I bet atheist blogs are far more effective at teaching its participants moral philosophy, but nobody ever writes op-eds about how blogs are filling church-shaped holes.

It feels like a kind of respectability politics.  Somehow, it's more appealing to the mass media to talk about the "next step" in atheism, to talk about how atheists are just now developing new moral values and building new communities.  As for me, I must be one of those angry "new atheists" with no community at all, or at least not one which will be recognized as a substitute for church.  As far as I can tell, even a lot of Christians don't care for church, and there are all those religions where weekly services aren't really a thing, but nevermind those inconvenient facts.

To be clear, I don't blame humanists themselves for the coverage they attract.  Some atheists are secular humanists who love wonder, spirituality, music, and sunday gatherings, and that's fine for them.  Some queer people are attractive young white masculine gay men in long-term monogamous relationships, yay for them.  But what about the rest of us deviants?

Summary

Secular humanism plays the role of offering positive moral vision for non-religious people.  However, it falls short of this goal, because offering a real moral vision means dropping members who would disagree with it.  Instead, secular humanism takes the path of a vague moral vision that nearly everyone would agree with.  As a result, the secular humanist community fails to take a consistent stance on feminism, despite it being one of the most important topics in the atheist community today.

Secular humanism also plays the role of being the more respectable sibling of atheism.  I don't begrudge people who are able to fit themselves into that box.  However, we should critically examine the cultural values that led humanists to be more respectable and the rest of us less respectable.

"Tenets"

Earlier, I read a reference to the "tenets" of atheism, and though it is not at all unusual to speak of tenets, I was struck anew how strange the idea is.

I have two issues with the idea of "tenets" of a social movement.  First, I don't think there is any non-arbitrary way to define what a social movement is.  It is not the case that social movements have specific and well-defined beliefs. There is no objective answer to the question of whether any particular individual is part of the movement.

Second, I don't believe in a foundationalist worldview.  We do not start with assumptions and then build upwards.  Social issues are not mathematics.  Instead, we have a web of ideas which connect in all directions, up down left right in out.  We can easily observe that many people in a social movement share similar webs of ideas, but there is no "basis" which defines the movement.

Even Objectivism, which explicitly purports to be based on a few basic axioms ("existence exists" and other vapid statements), does not really have a basis which defines it.  If someone agreed with the axioms but disagreed with everything else, that does not make them Objectivist; if someone quibbled with the axioms, but agreed with the philosophy built on them, they're Objectivist as far as I'm concerned.

So it is true that most atheists don't believe in gods.  But there are also people who have complicated feelings about god beliefs, and yet still agree with the goals of the atheist movement or participate in atheist groups.

This is not hypothetical.  I've met plenty such people in meatspace groups, and often I have trouble remembering who exactly considers themselves "technically agnostic" or otherwise.  That they disidentify with atheism indicates a point of disagreement between me and them, but there are so many points of disagreement to speak of, and this one isn't special just because of its implications on the word "atheist".

Similarly, there are plenty of atheists who I don't consider to be part of the atheist movement or who are only distantly associated with it.

I would not speak of the tenets of a social movement.  Instead, I would speak of organizations, communities, media outlets.  I would speak of common (but not monolithic) beliefs, values, and goals.

Re-evaluating the negativity argument

As explained in a recent post, the negativity argument is a cluster of arguments used against atheism.  The general idea is that because atheism is only about opposing religious beliefs, and doesn't advocate anything positive, it is a poor basis for a community or a social movement.

Given my growing dislike for certain segments of the atheist movement, particularly those which advocate close adherence to only the "negative" goals, it's worth re-evaluating my opinion of the negativity argument.

My first thought is that atheism is just one example of a social movement.  If sticking to "negative" goals is problematic for atheism, that may only be an incidental fact about the modern atheist movement, rather than a general truth about social movements.

Consider the anti-slavery movement, the veg*n movement, the anti-colonialist movement, the anti-racist movement, the anti-vaxxer movement, the skeptical movement.  Many of these groups have had "positive" goals, but are primarily defined by their "negative" goals.  You could argue that just a few positive goals are sufficient, but I would argue that the atheist movement is no different.  Even in the broadest definition of the atheist movement, it clearly isn't just a lack of belief in gods, end of story.  We don't include most of China and Japan, for instance.  The atheist movement generally believes in naturalism, the separation of church and state, and protecting the rights of the non-religious.

There's also a fundamental incoherence in the positive/negative distinction.  Are pro-lifers negative for opposing abortions, or are pro-choicers negative for opposing legal restrictions on abortions?  And even if we could answer that question, would it have any bearing whatsoever on which of the two movements is the winner?

In any case, we can avoid generalizations by discussing only the modern atheist movement.

Historically, the atheist movement simply hasn't taken a unified stance on things like feminism, social justice, and the whole liberal/libertarian spectrum.  It's okay for a movement to not have a unified stance on absolutely everything; I guess they just won't talk much about the stuff they disagree on.

But I think in this decade, the complete lack of agreement on social justice has proven maladaptive.  Feminism and social justice are highly relevant issues to how any community is run, even communities that nominally nothing to do with social issues.  The atheist community is a grass-roots social movement, so social justice is doubly relevant.  So these are issues that we want to and need to talk about, despite the lack of a unified stance. That's what divides the community.

On reflection, this has nothing to do with the positive/negative distinction at all.  The issue isn't that atheism doesn't have a "positive" stance.  The problem is that the movement doesn't have a unified stance on an important issue.

Take, for example, the "humanist" label.  In my experience over the last decade, "humanism" has generally been used as a positive spin on atheism.  But humanism is also maddeningly vague!  If someone tells me that they're a humanist, all I know is that they believe in supporting humans.  I have no idea whether they believe implicit sexism exists, or if they believe in anti-harassment policies at conferences.  In fact, it's kind of a trope for people to say that they're humanists rather than feminists.

We don't need positivity, we need specificity.

The atheist aesthetics battleground

While I'm on the topic of aesthetics, I'd like to take a moment to observe that many arguments over atheism and religion are really arguments about aesthetics.

For example:
-Why would a god make this vast universe, just so humans can occupy a tiny part of it for an insignificant moment of time?
-Why would a vast and powerful being care so much about whether people believe him that he'll only perform the subtlest of miracles and then damn you forever when you don't take notice?
-Insert joke about zombie Jesus or Catholic cannibalism.

These are all arguments that religion (Christianity in this case) simply doesn't make "sense", that it's kind of an absurd or ugly way to view the world.  No evidence or reason is really being presented, it's just intuition and aesthetics.

And this is fine, since a lot of the arguments for religion are also aesthetic arguments.  One explicit example is in The Life of Pi, which argues that life is a story and a story is better with God in it.  Or consider the many Christians who say they believe simply because it's what they feel in their heart.  Or consider the portrayal of atheism as sad or rebellious or otherwise something you wouldn't want to be afflicted with for long periods of time.

We can shoehorn these kinds of arguments into rational form, and try to think about philosophical interpretations or concrete evidence.  Indeed, even most rational arguments have some aesthetic element to them, and I don't think there's a hard distinction to draw.  But with arguments that are mostly based on aesthetics, it's easiest to make counterarguments which are also based on aesthetics.  For instance, I might observe that stories with omnipotent deities are not better, and stories with wizards are better.

Personally I don't really like aesthetic arguments over religion, at least not the transparent ones.  I recognize the value of aesthetic arguments, and do not desire for everyone to avoid them, but I would rather avoid them myself.  I just have weird feelings about aesthetics that I'm not sure I can coherently express.  It's fine when atheists argue for the ugliness or small-mindedness of the religious worldview, because I agree with that.  But whenever atheists talk about how amazing the real world is, and how awesome science is, I hate it.  I just can't stomach that level of sincere cheesiness.

What happened to the negativity argument?

One of the comment arguments against atheism, or against the atheism as a social movement, is that it's too "negative".  There are a variety of arguments in this category, ranging from the respectable to the absurd.  It can mean, "If you destroy religion, what will you replace it with?" or "You can't base a whole movement around something you oppose," or "Stop being so critical!"  The general attitude is so pervasive that I tried to rebut it seven years ago, immediately after I started blogging. 

At the time, I was simply expressing the dominant opinion among atheists, which was that the negativity argument was entirely wrong.  Interestingly, it is no longer the dominant opinion!  In my view, the negativity argument was victim to the same social forces as the tone argument.  Since 2011, a lot of atheists finally realized they have some rather severe disagreements with each other over feminism.  This led to a crisis, since for many people, the negative definition of atheism simply wasn't working.

For example, in 2011, PZ Myers defined and criticized "dictionary atheism":

Dictionary Atheists. Boy, I really do hate these guys. You’ve got a discussion going, talking about why you’re an atheist, or what atheism should mean to the community, or some such topic that is dealing with our ideas and society, and some smug wanker comes along and announces that “Atheism means you lack a belief in gods. Nothing more. Quit trying to add meaning to the term.” As if atheism can only be some platonic ideal floating in virtual space with no connections to anything else; as if atheists are people who have attained a zen-like ideal, their minds a void, containing nothing but atheism, which itself is nothing. Dumbasses.

A year later, Jen McCreight proposed the idea of "Atheism Plus":

We are...

• Atheists plus we care about social justice,
• Atheists plus we support women’s rights,
• Atheists plus we protest racism,
• Atheists plus we fight homophobia and transphobia,
• Atheists plus we use critical thinking and skepticism.

Atheism Plus is essentially a response to dictionary atheism.  If you say, "Atheism means only a lack of belief in gods," then I can say, "True, which is why 'atheism' isn't sufficient to define my goals."

Even though Atheism Plus didn't really go anywhere, these ideas continue to be repeated today.  For instance, a more recent article on Pharyngula said:

Movement atheism, as currently formulated, has serious problems precisely because it refuses to incorporate any position on human values at all. It’s in the awkward state of trying to be all things to all people, a blank slate on which Libertarian atheists can scribble selfish manifestos, or Humanist atheists can state their altruistic values. I’ve been arguing not that atheism leads inevitably to liberalism, but that if we don’t make any commitment at all to any progressive ideas, we’re only going to descend into chaos and purposelessness.

Each of these three quotes offers a successively stronger variation on the negativity argument.  First, PZ points out that atheists as individuals do in fact have "positive" views and goals that we should acknowledge.  Then, Jen McCreight expresses a desire for a movement that includes some of these positive goals.  Finally, PZ says that without well-defined positive goals, the movement is chaotic and meaningless.

This is a simplification of the progression of ideas, but it's suitable enough to seed discussion.  The history of the negativity argument raises several questions:

1. Which forms of the negativity argument are correct or incorrect, and why?
2. Why was there a change in the way people view the negativity argument?
3. By what process was there a change?  Is this a matter of people changing their minds, or of people leaving and entering the relevant group?

"Nothing is sacred" is cheap talk

I had an incidental disagreement on Tumblr the other day.  I said that atheists have the value that "Nothing is sacred".  Another person* replied that some atheists do in fact hold certain things sacred, and that's what makes atheist culture so racist and misogynist.

*I'd provide links and names, but the details aren't really important, and they're welcome to identify themselves if they wish.

I totally agree that there is widespread racism and misogyny in atheist culture, and that criticizing it is a worthwhile endeavor.  However, I disagree with this particular critique.

"Nothing is sacred" is just a slogan.  It has some meaning in the context of religion, where people feel that certain ideas are off-limits.  But when you get down to it, I'm really not sure what it means for something to be sacred.  Does it mean that people hold to the idea despite counterarguments?  Does it mean they don't like when people make counterarguments?  Does it mean that social pressure plays a role?  You could say that about every ideology ever.

And I'm sorry to say that this is exactly what atheists do sometimes.  They'll criticize anything, and if someone tries to defend themselves, it must be because they're holding the idea sacred, and off-limits from criticism.  So if I say that sexist jokes contribute to sexism, and cite studies saying the same, clearly the only reason I came to that conclusion is because I refuse to hold political correctness up to the bright light of science.

There's a major hearsay problem.  It's very easy to say that you know such and such person who just refused to see reason, and acted like you were wrong to even criticize them.  Yeah, I believe that's how you perceived the argument.  But that's practically every argument ever, from everyone's perspective.  I wasn't there, so I can't tell.

Yes, there are some cases where people hold a belief too close, and use "unfair" means to discourage criticism.  For instance, I've criticized Christianity for discouraging doubt.  But the critique must be precise to be valid! I needed to provide examples of specific Christian narratives which were contributing to the problem.  If I merely waved my hands around, saying Christians are so dogmatic, and this one time I met a Christian and they were just so offended when I gave them hard evidence against God, you could rightly dismiss it as cheap talk.

If you criticize atheists for holding certain beliefs sacred, you're just taking one of the lowest quality atheist aphorisms, and turning it around.  You're not helping.

Merging discourses on sexual repression

Content warning: this post deals with some uncomfortable issues regarding people who are or think they are sexually repressed.

In a recent post on The Asexual Agenda, I discussed how it is okay to identify as asexual even if you feel your asexuality was caused by some identifiable reason.  Among the reasons that people commonly identify is sexual repression, particularly from a religious upbringing.

There is a similar common narrative among atheists.  For example, Libby Anne said that she used to be "sexually suppressed and extinguished" by religious purity culture, and that she was "essentially asexual".  For thousands more examples, there was an informal study conducted by Darrel Ray (see Greta for a summary), which concluded that leaving religion improves people's sex lives.

These two discourses are in conflict about their valuation of sexual repression.

Asexual discourse is essentially reacting to the accusation that asexuals are sexually repressed.  Some have reacted by asserting that asexuals aren't sexually repressed.  Some have probed the meaning of sexual repression, and questioned whether it exists at all.  Some have questioned whether sexual repression is necessarily a bad thing, even if we acknowledge that its source, religious purity culture, is bad.

Atheist discourse is primarily geared towards criticizing problems with religion and recovering from religion.  Sexual repression caused by religion is a problem to be overcome.  There is no reason to look for any positive or neutral aspects in repression, or to probe its meaning.  For example, Darrel Ray's Sex and Secularism report claims that sexual repression is ineffective at actually reducing sexual activity (although it tends to slightly delay it), and that the primary effect is that people feel guiltier about their sexual behavior. This is pretty damning, because even if you believe that it's good to reduce sexual behavior, repression seems ineffective in achieving that.

I would like for atheists and asexuals to listen to each other more.  However, on reflection I think asexuals are already listening to atheists.  After all, most people in the asexual community are non-religious themselves, and I found Libby Anne's article (as well as others) through ace community discussions.  So really I should say, I would like atheists to listen to asexuals more.

There are many questions which get asked by aces, which are never addressed by atheists. Questions with no straightforward answers.

What does it really mean to be sexually repressed?  In some cases, it appears to mean only that a person has sexual desires, but feels too guilty to act upon them.  In other cases, like Libby Anne's, it appears to mean lacking sexual desires.  If one has no sexual fantasies or desires, how does one know that one's "true" self is the counterfactual self, the one with fantasies and desires?

How do we know that repression is bad?  Though religion may be bad, there is no reason to think that all of its consequences are uniformly bad.  I accept that guilt is bad, especially when it has no positive effect on one's behavior.  Lack of sexual desire or attraction, though, is more subjective.  It may cause relationship problems, and it may cause personal distress.  There are some people who overcome sexual repression and subjectively feel that it is an improvement in their lives.  But are these problems inherent to ourselves, or inherent to the way society is structured (or both)?

How do we know it can be changed?  Yes, we've heard stories of people who have successfully overcome sexual repression.  But I've heard plenty of stories of people who tried and failed. It often constitutes a form of self-harm, as people try to have sex in hopes of "fixing" themselves.  And since sexuality is a spectrum, there are people who try and end up landing in the middle.

How do we distinguish between attempts that will fail, and attempts that will succeed?  This is an empirical question.

If you are recovering from religion, and its effects on your sexuality, your experience is valid.  You only need to come to terms with your own experience, and you don't need to answer to anyone else's experiences.  You don't need to have answers to the questions I've posed.  Nonetheless, I think these are questions that the atheist community should think seriously about.

(Aside: If you looked at Darrel Ray's study, I have an important comment to make.  Darrel Ray hypothesizes that people who grow up religious and then become non-religious still have residual guilt.  This hypothesis is of great interest to asexuals who think they may have been affected by religious upbringing.  Darrel Ray claims to disprove the hypothesis.  However, the associated survey question was, "How much anger do you experience towards religion because of how it affected your sexuality?" which simply appears not to address the hypothesis.  Therefore, I am skeptical of his conclusion, and have ignored it.)

The nightmarish collision of FTB and Tumblr

Here's a video of our panel last night:


We also got this reaction from Thunderf00t:

the 'freethoughtblogs' conference FTBcon3 is in full swing.It REALLY is the nightmarish collision of FTB and tumblr!

Thunderf00t's tweet led to about 30 dislikes on our video plus a few troll comments (now deleted).  See Lousy Canuck for details.

I'm so proud.

FTBCon is still going, with lots of good stuff on the way!

I will be in FTBCon3

FTBCon is a free online atheist conference affiliated with Freethought Blogs.

I will be on a panel, "Asexual Spectrum Atheists", on this Friday, 9pm CST.  You can watch the panel here, but I also recommend tracking the conference as a whole.

If you're not sure which panelist I am, I'm the only male panelist.

Update: The archived video is here on YouTube or here on Google+!

Atheists react to queer religious people

I was happy to see that Alex Gabriel talking about how queer activists give way too much credit to Christianity, and how this excludes queer atheists.  I was even happier to see this picked up by other atheist blogs, including Heina Dadabhoy and PZ Myers.  (And once Myers picks it up, it's likely to get more reactions from there.)

I feel this topic is under-discussed, and thus when people finally talk about it, so many different feelings and issues get swirled together.  I myself have a lot of mixed feelings which are difficult to disentangle.  It helps to contrast the perspectives of Dadabhoy and Myers.  Dadabhoy brings up her many negative experiences in queer activism:

When I volunteered for the No on Prop 8 campaign, the local dispatch center was a church. At on-campus LGBT events, many of the speakers were religious and talked about their god as if everyone believed in that sort of deity.

The worst experience I had was at a local conference about mental health and LGBT issues. Fully half of the panels were about religion, and every panel had a representative of what was euphemistically referred to as “the faith community.”

PZ Myers, being straight, doesn't have the ground-level experience with LGBT activism, and instead talks about the way religion is used to justify everything:

The problem is that Jesus and Mohammed and Moses are completely malleable imaginary authority figures who can be invoked to justify anything — Jesus simultaneously blesses the peacemakers and comes with a sword in that muddled book of myths, the Bible, so pacifists and warmongers are both happy to adopt his ‘philosophy’.

These are two distinct issues.  There's the practical issue, that LGBT activists are very religion-friendly, and not very atheist-friendly.  And there's the theoretical issue, which is that the pro-LGBT arguments within Christianity and Islam just aren't very good.  It's important to distinguish these issues because there are contexts where only the practical issue is present, or only the theoretical issue is present.

There are some religious traditions which are much more plausibly LGBT-friendly, from a theoretical standpoint.  In particular, I point to Unitarian-Universalism, and Shin Buddhism.  I also point out that most religious traditions are much more ambiguous about other queer groups, such as asexuals and genderqueer people.  And yet LGBT conferences can still be dominated by religious perspectives in a way that is exclusive of ace and genderqueer atheists.

There are other cases where the theoretical issue is present, but the practical issue is not.  Many people, myself included, have complained about the dominance of religion at the big NGLTF conference, Creating Change.  And yet, Zack Ford, a major critic, says it has not always been this way:

I’ve had numerous conversations with folks in the movement about the phenomenon, and the consensus has been that this embrace of religion is new, and a swinging of the pendulum away from what used to be a very toxic environment for any discussion of religion to an environment eager to reconcile with religion.

In the past, LGBT groups frequently excluded religious queers, which is not a situation I endorse.

It's also important to remember that the "LGBT community" is far from a united community.  There are LGBT activist organizations, but nearly every non-activist group subdivides by individual letters.  Furthermore, most of these groups are local, and don't really interact with each other.  Without an activist agenda, why would they?  What I'm trying to say is that while LGBT activist groups may be dominated by religion, in my experience this is not consistent among all queer communities.  Some may even have the pendulum swinging the other way.

Having seen a lot of the practical issues associated with queer atheists, I find myself a little uncomfortable with atheists who focus exclusively on the theoretical issue of reconciling queerness and religion.  The pendulum can swing both ways.  We're not talking about the general US population, which is 73% Christian.  We're talking about LGBT people, who, in the US, are 47% non-religious.  My own community, the ace community, is 59% non-religious.  We absolutely need to continue discussing the theoretical issue of reconciling queerness with religion, but we need to be careful about the practical issue of how that feeds back into queer communities--all queer communities.

I have the sense that many atheists, when they see Christians arguing that the Bible is actually LGBT-friendly, really don't like this.  It seems so hypocritical, and utterly inconsistent.  In fact, it subjectively feels even more inconsistent than the belief that Jesus is God.  I think we should examine why we feel this way.

On some level, believing that Jesus was a queer ally is more sensible than believing Jesus was God.  We at least know that allies exist.  The Bible doesn't say Jesus is an ally.  It doesn't say Jesus is God either.  Besides, it's a work of fiction.  I think the fact of the matter is we're simply more used to Christians believing Jesus is God, and so even as we reject that belief, we take it more for granted.  When Christians believe Jesus loves gay people, that seems more unusual, and thus somehow worse.

I do not see queer Christians as any worse than other Christians.  On the contrary, I like queer Christians better, because they're probably not homophobic.  Straight atheists can complain all they want about bad epistemology and the irrational justifications used within religion.  However, I can only be so principled before I care about the results of beliefs, irrational or not.

Queer religious people should be treated the same way as other religious people.  They absolutely deserve some space to talk about their particular issues and beliefs amongst each other.  But they cannot demand freedom from criticism, and cannot pressure critics into silence.  General queer spaces, just like general society, should be kept secular.  Currently, LGBT activist groups are not very inclusive of atheists.  They can't brush us under a rug just because they're afraid of what it will do to their image.

The tone argument, in retrospect

In an earlier post, I talked about the "tone argument" in the atheist blogosphere, and how that argument basically disappeared in 2011.  The tone argument accused atheists of being too angry, too mocking, or otherwise uncooperative.  Of course, mockery and anger are two very different things, but all these differences tended to get glossed over, and I'll gloss over them here as well.

Because I saw so much about the tone argument, and because it so suddenly disappeared in 2011, whenever I see anything resembling the tone argument, I think to myself, "Ugh, we already resolved this argument years ago!"

However, this is excessively dismissive of me, and basically amounts to relying on popular opinion.  What if the popular opinion is wrong?  What if it's only popular among the people who remained in the atheist communities?  Furthermore, even if popular opinion is correct, we need to examine the extent to which it is correct.  I have never believed, for instance, that anger is completely correct in all situations at all times.

So here I present a serious treatment of the tone argument, with the benefit of hindsight over years of atheist blogging.

Angry atheism is a stereotype

The key to understanding the tone argument in an atheist context is understanding that the angry atheist is a stereotype.  The stereotypical atheist is rude, strident, loud, smug, and a general asshole.  I can't tell you how many stories I've heard of people who knew an atheist in high school who argued vehemently with anyone who would listen.  I do not doubt these people existed, but it's odd how angry high school atheists become the prototypical atheist, and whenever atheists are nice, it's such a reversal of expectations.

It's easy to see the cultural underpinnings of the stereotype (in the US), even without being a great student of culture. Religion is considered to be a bit of a taboo topic, even more than politics.  It's not something you're supposed to bring up at dinner.  And if you identify as an atheist, you are explicitly saying that you disbelieve all the major religions in the US.  Your very existence is far too impolite, far too loud, far too angry.

The consequences of this stereotype--like the consequences of any stereotype--are far-reaching and complex.  On the one hand, you have people who simply say that the stereotype is wrong.  "I'm not angry!" they say, or alternatively, "Personally, I'm angry, but lots of atheists I know aren't!"

On the other hand, you have people who reject the implicit norm behind the stereotype.  "What's wrong with being angry?" is the question.  And so these people talk up the value of being angry, and in the process become angrier than they would be otherwise.  Additionally, they will be more likely to frame things in terms of anger, even if the same emotions wouldn't be framed as anger in other contexts.  I don't think atheists are any more vocal than US liberals, for instance, but liberals are far less likely to think of themselves as "angry" or "strident" about their views.

So you basically have two groups pulling in opposite directions.  There are atheists who play down the stereotype, because the stereotype is wrong.  And there are atheists who play up the stereotype, because they argue that there's nothing wrong with fitting the stereotype.  The "tone wars" of atheism started out by outsiders applying the angry atheist stereotype to atheists.  And then the conflict burned on because of conflicting ways for atheists to deal with the stereotype.

So whenever you think of atheists as angry, the two questions you have to answer are, "Are you sure that they're as angry as you perceive?" and "What's wrong with being angry?"

Is anger useful?

Besides being an issue of stereotypes, anger (or lack thereof) is also a big part of how a social movement operates.  If you're a rationalist-idealist, you might believe that you can persuade everyone by arguing calmly and rationally, but "rationalist-idealist" is practically a contradiction in terms.  Truly calm and rational arguments would mostly succeed in getting everyone to tune out.  For instance, it takes a very special kind of person who is willing to read loooong blog posts, and blogs already aren't exactly models of rigor.  Anger and mockery are important and necessary tools to get people to pay attention.

And yes, it is true that arguing angrily can turn people off.  I'm sure you can even find some SCIENCE which says as much.  But I am extremely skeptical of the SCIENCE, because it ultimately presents a very limited part of the wide range of settings of a social movement.

Try to imagine the most stereotypical setting where atheists argue against religion.  For me, I imagine an everyman atheist and an everyman Christian arguing over a game of chess.  Or maybe there's an atheist with his Christian family at Thanksgiving, and there's some conflict over the practice of saying grace.  Maybe the scientific studies apply to those sorts of "normal" situations.

But you know, neither of those "normal" situations has ever happened to me.  Arguing with people one-on-one just isn't a thing that happens on any regular basis.  The truly normal setting for me is I blog, and some people freely choose to read it.  Most of the readers are already atheists.

What about other settings for arguments?  Say that you're not talking with religious people at all, but talking with other atheists and trying to build a community.  Say you're not an everyman, but a trans woman, and you're dealing with religious people who insist you're really a man.  Say you're an activist, and you're trying to convince politicos that you're a force to be reckoned with.  Say you aren't using anger as a tactic, you're just genuinely angry, and the ability to express that anger is your main motivation for getting into activism in the first place.

Scientific studies might provide some useful insights about the way people think.  It's good to know a bit about the backfire effect.  It's good to know that expressing anger tends to make you angrier, rather than "venting" it.  But I deny that this means that a social movement should not use anger or mockery in general.

Is anger honest?

Aside from whether anger is effective as a strategy, there's also the question about whether anger is an honest strategy.  We're frequently stuck in this situation where it doesn't matter who is right about the argument, it matters who wins.  But in the atheist movement and rationalist community more generally, we tend to value honesty, and we generally want to win arguments if and only if we happen to be on the right side of the argument.

There certainly appear to be some cases where anger is unfair, or encourages confirmation bias.  For example, anger pushes some people out of the conversation.  And it often appears that angry people are more likely to "dig in" to their mistakes.

But perhaps not everything is as it seems.  While some people would feel pushed out by an angry argument, other people would feel pushed out of a conversation where "calmness" is enforced, especially in the presence of a stereotype which makes them appear angrier than they really are.  Furthermore, when I looked up anger and confirmation bias, it appears that anger tends to decrease confirmation bias.

I am less sure about mockery than about anger.  I have seen many instances of atheists mocking religions where I thought the underlying criticism was incorrect or unfair.  But I could be wrong about that too.  Maybe my perception is distorted, and I simply attribute these things to mockery when they're unrelated.

We can also ask the same questions about whether "friendly" tactics are honest.  One of the most effective ways to convince people of something is to make personal connections and socially surround them with opposing views.  We're used to seeing this tactic used by religious groups.  It's difficult to tell people, stop being so friendly, but it sure feels dishonest in some way that's hard to place.

Summary

The tone argument is wrong because it's based on a stereotype of angry atheists.  Not only do people perceive atheists as angrier than they really are, they underestimate the value of anger in a social movement.  Lastly, while anger sometimes appears to be associated with cognitive biases, it's far from clear that it is any worse in this regard than being friendly.

In my opinion, the ultimate reason the tone argument fails is because it overreaches, trying to make a universal statement about the value of anger.  But in a social movement there are so many vastly different contexts that it is difficult to make any universal statement.  If at some point, the "angry" atheists were to argue that everyone should be angry all the time, then this argument would similarly fail.

On asexuality, atheism, and other news

On The Asexual Agenda, I have a post talking about how asexuals are impacted by the current split in the atheist community.  Note that The Asexual Agenda has a much stricter comment policy than I do here, so if you want to comment freely, do so here.  I'm not obligated to respect you though.

In the years since 2011, it's become increasingly obvious that the atheist community has become more ace-friendly in the feminist communities, and less ace-friendly elsewhere.  This is good for people like me, who mostly follow the feminist atheists.  But the median person in the ace community is a non-religious woman who does not participate in the atheist community, and I suspect they mostly have negative encounters with anti-feminist atheists, or even MRA atheists.  I think aces mostly don't know where it's coming from, so the purpose of my post is to explain it to that audience.

Speaking of feminist wars, I feel like in the last month or so, the atheist feminist wars have been eclipsed by the gaming feminist wars.  That is, by Gamergate, which is probably the reason I've been blogging about social justice so much lately.  Gamergate looks very similar to Elevatorgate, albeit on a larger scale, even getting major media attention.  Furthermore, it's been noted that there's overlap between gamergate supporters and slymepitters.  To long-time atheist bloggers like me, it feels like deja vu.

I'm not so much concerned about gamergate itself, which I hope will die after so much negative news coverage.  The harassment campaigns are a serious problem, but I'm more concerned about the greater number of people sympathize with gamergate's supposed "journalistic ethics" platform, which really consists of ending "SJW" bias.  I'm more concerned about the gaming culture which spawned this movement in the first place.  I'm concerned about the impact these people have on wider society, even when they're not talking about games.

In other news, next week I will be traveling.  So I'm declaring a blogging break.

Where did the tone wars go?

The most fascinating things I've seen in the internet atheist community was the great "tone war"--and the subsequent disappearance of that war.

It used to be, since I started blogging in 2007, the biggest "schism" of the atheist blogosphere was between those who believed atheists needed to be more diplomatic and accommodating to religious people, and those who believed that the atheist movement is just as outspoken and angry as it should be.  I remember the inter-blog arguments. I remember the name-calling. I remember the mainstream articles.  And then the argument stopped suddenly in 2011.  It basically got replaced by Elevatorgate.

This can be artfully illustrated with the trajectory of the meme "Deep Rifts".  It was originally used by an external critic, who witnessed one of the skirmishes in the tone wars and decided this meant atheism was tearing itself apart:

...atheism was last week rent by disagreement, proving that the need for petty, internecine squabbling runs deeper in the psyche than the need to find meaning in existence. The question that is dividing its leading proponents is how much they should be evangelising about their lack of faith. Should they adopt a live-and-let-live approach to the religious? Or should they be shouting their atheism from the rooftops in an attempt to get all the blinkered throwbacks to see the light?

At the time, PZ Myers (who has participated in basically every controversy in the community) found this ludicrous. There was an argument over the best strategy, but it was hardly new, and not something so major that it would destroy the atheist movement.  Because it was so ludicrous, "Deep Rifts" became a bit of a meme, used to mock anyone who over-exaggerated the tone wars.

Several years later, "deep rifts" becomes a phrase used with complete sincerity.  And now it refers to the feminist/non-feminist split in the community.

If I had to advance a theory as to what happened, I would say that the "outspoken" side of the tone wars won.  The losers fell silent, or they were persuaded, or they're considered outsiders.  And then the winners proceeded to have a much more divisive argument over feminism.  When I think of the big players in the feminism argument, I think of PZ Myers, Rebecca Watson, Richard Dawkins, Michael Shermer, Jennifer McCreight, Greta Christina, DJ Grothe, Sam Harris, Thunderf00t, and so on.  I associate almost all of these people with the outspoken side of the tone wars (even if they've never made a statement about it, it's clear from their styles), and the most notable exceptions are the people involved in organized skepticism (who were frequently in favor of nicer approaches).  Nobody talks anymore about Matt Nisbet, Chris Mooney, or... well, I have trouble even remembering who else was on the "accommodating" side.

As for why the outspoken side won, I'm very biased.  I think they won because that side was more correct, and people were smart enough to realize this.  I think the "outspoken" side successfully framed itself as the more inclusive side, as allowing people to take a variety of approaches, whatever suited them.  I myself take a very polite style, but I'm still on the side of the angry atheists, because I think other people have good reasons to be angry.

But also, I think the criticism of the tone of the atheist movement came from a lot of external critics.  This is no accident, because the winners of the tone war were the ones who decided who is internal and who is external.  But frankly, there were some people who were just always going to be external.  It's long been fashionable in mainstream media to criticize the "strident" tone of Richard Dawkins, just like it's been fashionable to criticize him for not addressing "sophisticated" theology.

One thing to ask is how the tone war affected the current state of the atheist movement.  Is it a good thing that the angry outspoken people won?  It's arguably caused some degree of harm.  Some of the biggest problems with the feminism split come from the harassment campaigns.  People often justify their abuse by saying it's free speech.  If the "nice" side had won, would these harassment campaigns have happened anyway?  If the movement valued politeness, would we be able to slow the harassment down by appealing to that value?  I don't know, it's really hard for me to imagine such a world.

Even though the tone war spanned many years, not everyone knows about it, either because they weren't involved in the movement, or they weren't watching the right parts of the movement, or they weren't there at the right times.  So I still see people criticizing the tone of the atheist movement occasionally.  I don't know what to say about this because we... sort of already won that argument?  And it turns out that when the atheist movement had problems, they were pretty much orthogonal issue to the tone war.

Arguments are about power

I can think of a few arguments that aren't about power.  For instance, when I was on the internet in high school, the things I argued about were whether 2.9999... = 3, and what happens when you put an infinite number of marbles in an urn.  I feel confident in saying that those arguments had nothing to do with power.  (Although, it should be noted that I eventually earned a modder position on that website, and helped control content.)

But a lot of arguments are really about power, especially the loudest and most volatile arguments.  That's often why they're so loud and volatile.  And when I say that the argument is really about power, that doesn't merely mean arguing about who has power, or who deserves power.  The argument itself is part of the power struggle.  Winning the argument materially gives you more power, independent of whether you won by being on the right side.

I admit this is a very cynical view.  Nobody on either side of an argument wants to say that it's really about something so crass and selfish as power.  Better to pretend that the argument is about what's true and righteous.  But if you actually care about what's true, it's clear that arguments are often not about what's true.  And we need to realize that power struggles are not necessarily bad, and that we're participating in power struggles all the time.  It is not wrong to want power, or to want someone else not to have power.  Although it can be wrong, depending on how you get what you want.

Some of the clearest examples are arguments over video games.  Many recent high-profile incidents  show how nasty video game culture can be, but that much has long been obvious to anyone who paid attention to gaming communities.  This is easily explained by an underlying power struggle.  As I said last year, there is a limited space for games in the market, because they're so expensive to develop and advertise.  In particular, this is true of so-called AAA games, which are the big-budget games we usually think of as being "hard-core".  Everyone needs to choose from the same small set of games, so the power struggle is over what games get made, what games get the money.

There's an image that shows up repeatedly in these arguments, the white male gamer who is afraid of other people stealing his hobby.  For example:

It’s hard for them to hear they don’t own anything, anymore, that they aren’t the world’s most special-est consumer demographic, that they have to share.

This is treated as a caricature, something pathetic and laughable.  But I think it's also true, gamers really are afraid of sharing space.  And furthermore, they are right to be afraid, because sharing may in fact result in diminished space for themselves.  If more AAA gamers are convinced that games need to represent women better, then everyone will be forced to play AAA games with better female representation, if they play AAA games at all. Those poor sexist gamers.  In losing the argument, they really are losing power.  Although maybe not as much power as they think.  I'm sure they will continue to be able to find some games that appeal to them.  And perhaps having more women will just mean that more games will be made.

The power struggle among gamers comes from control over the public good of video games.  Another public good I often concern myself with are identity labels.  Arguments over labels are also frequently arguments about power.  Who gets to control what a label means?  Who controls the public image?  Who controls the actions of any organizations arising from the label?

All the big wars over feminism in the atheist movement?  Those are clearly about power.  Power over who speaks, power over who makes up the movement, and power over what the movement focuses on.

When people harass Jen McCreight or Rebecca Watson to get them to shut up, that's about power.  When Jen McCreight invented Atheism+, that was creating a space where social justice is legitimate atheist cause, and that was about power.  When people mock FTB as "FTBullies", they're discouraging people from looking at FTB, and that's about power.  When people on FTB mock "brave heroes" and "freeze peach", or talk about how Skeptic Ink was founded on hating FTB, that's about power.  When Dawkins refers to PZ Myers as writing clickbait, and using it as an excuse to not link to PZ, that's about power.  And when you say that you're above all that nasty stuff, well, that's about power too.  Everything is about power, get used to it.

That's not to say that there aren't also arguments about truth in there.  Some groups don't use their power as well as other groups, and that's a truth we can argue over.  Anti-harassment policies at conferences seem like an obvious good to me, and the people who would use their power to remove them are basically incompetent leaders.  And by winning this argument, we take their power away.

But we can also take their power away by name-calling.  That's the truth.  And while I'm hardly a name-caller myself, it seems like you have to accept the tactic, lest you just forfeit the struggle.  But how is name-calling different from harassment campaigns, which we also know go both ways?  Do we have to accept harassment campaigns too?  I don't.

It's a rationalist fantasy that if we just all argue rationally and carefully work out the details, we'll agree on the conclusion and rid ourselves of conflict.  A good rationalist recognizes how small a role rationality really plays in the biggest arguments.

I'm in a vocal minority

As someone who identifies as an atheist, and who is happy to criticize religion (often called a "new atheist"), I know I'm in a vocal minority.  This is pretty obvious when I interact with the asexual community, where non-religious people constitute the majority, but vocal atheists are still yet a small group.  But it's been obvious for a longer time than that.  I went to college, I studied physics.  There are a lot of non-religious people around.  Atheists are a much smaller group, and new atheists are smaller still.  Despite being at a university with tens of thousands of students, we only managed a small and disorganized atheist group, and even there, not everyone thought of themselves as an atheist. All the numbers I've ever seen also confirm the trend, though I'd rather not dig into the data right now, so let's leave that as hearsay.

I don't think there's really that much to say on this subject, but I'd like to briefly explain my relationship to the "quiet majority".

I do not see the quiet majority of nonreligious people as allies, really.  I do not see myself as representing their point of view, or them as representing my point of view.  In fact, that's not even the relationship I have with other new atheists.  I mean, new atheists are not a very cohesive group, and there are some factions and prominent speakers that I actively dislike.

Non-religious people, as a general category, are even less cohesive than new atheists.  It's hard to even enumerate the different "kinds" of non-religious people.  There are people who still essentially have Christian (or other) views, but disassociate with religion for some reason.  There are people who are part of some "philosophy" like Taoism, but for some reason don't consider it a religion.  There are people who take stuff from multiple religions.  There are people who are culturally, say, Jewish, but don't believe in any of it.  There are agnostics who reject the term of atheism for philosophy reasons.  There are people who have other idiosyncratic views on the terminology, preferring things like "humanist" or "ignostic".  There are deists and pantheists.  There are "not that kind of atheist" atheists.  There are people who just don't think about it much, and thus it would be impossible to define their position on the subject.  There are atheists who think religion is bad, but just don't care to make any sort of deal out of it, or who even resent that I make any sort of deal out of it.  And probably a bunch of other stuff I haven't thought of, especially when we venture outside of US culture.  That's the other thing, I know new atheism is primarily a US/UK thing, though not exclusively so.

Yeah, it's really hard to generalize across such a disparate group.  Maybe some of those people completely agree with me on my criticism on religion, maybe we share other common ground.  But that's something we need to figure out on an individual basis (both by individual people, and by individual topic).  We can't rely on labels to do the work.

I do have some specific beefs with other non-religious people (not all non-religious people of course, but enough that I have that negative association).  I see other non-religious people as being the source of a lot of tone policing of new atheists.  It's all "atheists are being too angry, don't they realize that religion fulfills certain needs?" I still hear this sometimes, I think from people who don't realize that we've already heard it all when the topic was beaten to death in 2007-2011.

I have a beef with people who say they're "not that kind of atheist", because, well, that's obviously based on some kind of opposition to what I stand for, or for what they think I stand for.  You don't like me, I don't have to like you.  Along similar lines, I often, but not always, have beefs with people who identify as agnostic.  Not because I think there's something particularly wrong with agnosticism, but because some people choose that label because they don't like something about new atheists.  (I suppose I have the more general beef that self-identified agnostics are choosing to emphasize philosophical hair-splitting over more important topics, like religion's influence on society, but that's not as big of an issue.)

Lastly, I don't agree with all the supernaturalist non-religious people.  I oppose supernaturalism.

So this is all just to say, if I have any readers part of the quiet majority of non-religious people, I know you exist!  I've talked to people like you before.  You might be okay by me, or you might not be. I don't really know!  Hello.

47% of LGBT Americans are nonreligious: a brief reaction

Recently, Gallup released a poll showing that LGBT Americans were significantly less religious than non-LGBT Americans.  Specifically, 47% were non-religious.

Among the blogs I read, Friendly Atheist reacted without surprise, because of course people are going to leave churches that condemn them.  Greta Christina said this means (American) LGBT organizations need to wake up.

My reaction was, "47%?  That's nothing.  The asexual community has 64%!"

The high percentage among asexuals makes me disinclined to accept the standard explanations offered for the number of non-religious LGBT Americans.  If it's all about people leaving their religions, why would asexuals, who are condemned by churches less consistently and less publicly, be leaving in greater numbers?

There are multiple alternate explanations.  Asexuals and atheists have overlapping demographics, both groups tending towards young and educated.  Furthermore, there's speculation that people who are religious are less likely to be aware of asexuality or identify with it.

Regardless of the explanation, if the 47% figure means that American LGBT organizations need to "wake up", what does the 64% figure mean?

Technical note: That poll has some, er, technical problems, because the question is in the form of "check all that apply", when it's clear that many respondents treated it as "pick the one that applies most".  So actually only 36% said they were nonreligious, 23% said they were atheists, and 23% said they were agnostics.  64% is what you get when you combine all three groups.  It's possible this includes some small percentage of atheistic religious people, like Pagans or Buddhists.

Actually, I have the source data for this poll, so I know if you remove all people who indicated specific religions, you're left with 61%.  If you also remove people who say they're "spiritual but not religious" (a group that would have been included in Gallup's 47% figure), you're left with 54%.

Western atheist Buddhism

Buddhists don't believe in gods, so they're technically atheists.  Even Jodo Shinshu Buddhism, which as I read earlier, calls upon the Amida Buddha for help reaching the Pure Land, does not believe the Amida Buddha is a deity.  He is just someone who attained enlightenment.  On the other hand, I suspect this religious tradition will not appeal to typical atheists in the US, because of the clear presence of supernatural beliefs.

But still there are plenty of anti-supernaturalist atheists around who consider themselves Buddhist.  Perhaps they are working within a different tradition of Buddhism where supernatural beliefs are absent or deemphasized.  Or perhaps they're picking and choosing from Buddhist traditions, taking only the parts they like.

There are some Buddhist traditions that I like too.  I like the idea of emptiness, and the idea that there is no constant self.  I think this is true to reality, or about as true to reality as an ancient belief can be.  I am not the same person I was or will be, I merely share some attributes.  Most (or all) things are not really things at all, but patterns.  There is nothing underneath.

But I'm pretty sure there's more to the Buddhist idea of emptiness than that.  And there are plenty of other non-supernatural Buddhist traditions that I just don't care for.  Like meditation.  Or the Middle Way.  Or framing the world in terms of suffering and enlightenment.  None of that stuff's wrong per se, but it just doesn't appeal to me as a way of seeing the world.

The choice for me is easy: I will not identify as Buddhist.  But if you're into all those Buddhist beliefs and practices, minus the supernatural parts, you might be justified in identifying as Buddhist.

Here are a few things people said on Friendly Atheist about being both Buddhist and atheist:

Yes many people who are Buddhist today believe in supernatural things. However at the base of Buddhism, it is just philosophy of how to live your life.

I really don't view Buddhism as a religion. Instead, I understand it to be more of a lifestyle or philosophy; one that can be easily adapted into any belief system or lack there of.

The early Buddhist texts, particularly the Pali Canon, are free from all the woo that seems to have come later.

There is a sutra in the Pali Canon where the Buddha basically states that it does not matter whether rebirth is real or not.

I respect people's decisions to identify as Buddhist, but I disagree with some of these specific comments.  If we see Buddhism as a philosophy, to be judged on its merits rather than on its authority, I don't understand why people feel the need to defend "original" Buddhism.  Gautama's Buddhism is no more authoritative than later developments.  For example, the concept of "emptiness" that I like so much actually appeared some six centuries after the origin of Buddhism.

I think people refer to the supposed naturalism of "original" Buddhism because they are trying to establish that Buddhism is at heart a secular philosophy rather than a religion.  But I disagree with this view, because I think Buddhism, like all other things, has nothing at its heart.  It is empty, without any central essence to represent the "real" Buddhism.  In other words, atheists can be Buddhists, but they are no more legitimately Buddhist than the ones with supernatural beliefs.

Buzzfeed once did a video "If Asians said the stuff White people say", which I think is relevant to the topic.

At 0:50, a guy says, "I'm really into western religions lately.  I love how they're so angry and uptight, you know?  I decorated my whole house in crosses!"

I wouldn't say that it's appropriation, exactly, to take ideas from Buddhism that you like.  It wasn't "appropriation" when Filipinos adopted Catholicism, it was just conversion (and colonialism).  Buddhism is an idea that wants to spread, so there's nothing wrong with having it spread and transform across cultures.

However, I suspect that if there were more Buddhists in our culture, atheists in the US wouldn't be so quick to say that the kind of Buddhism they practice is the real Buddhism.

I am oppositional

I have more to say on this quote:

But the way we talk about intersectionality doesn’t quite work for atheists.  Just by saying I’m an atheist, I’m telling you that I think your theistic beliefs are wrong.  By telling you I’m a “new” atheist, I’m telling you that I think you’re wrong and you should stop being wrong.  To speak of intersectionality is to look for allies.  But we are not allies, we are opposed. [emphasis added]

Previously I discussed how I think that all beliefs are subject to morality.  So if I have a belief that is factually wrong, then it is also ethically wrong.  But here, I'm not just saying that we disagree therefore we each think the other is wrong.  I'm saying that in this case, it actually puts us in opposition, to the point that I don't want you to be my "ally".

Being oppositional makes sense for atheism.  There isn't really a possible state where we coexist and agree on everything.  This is unlike sexual orientation, where it's possible for us to have different orientations and coexist.

But I also think being oppositional makes sense for vegetarianism and veganism.  Vegans believe that consuming meat is wrong.  So vegans and omnivores can't really coexist and agree on everything.  And yet all the vegans and vegetarians I know (many of whom are active atheists) don't really push the point.  Why is that?  Why is atheism different?

The social context is different.

Animal rights activists have PETA, but most animal rights activists I know dislike PETA for its aggressive shock tactics.  I think my friends are reacting against PETA by being very nice and diplomatic.  But also, the food we eat literally comes up multiple times a day, and it seems neither useful nor comfortable to argue about it every time.  The subject of food comes up often enough without pushing the issue.  (If any of my readers are vegan or vegetarian, perhaps they have more insight into this.)

Atheists operate in a culture where most people don't want to talk about religion in any sort of argumentative or persuasive context.  It's too personal, and people will never agree.  But I think religious beliefs are important, and as such should be discussed out in the open.  The "let's all play nice" attitude enforces the status quo.  When you stand with the status quo, refusing to argue about religion is a way to win on non-rational grounds.

Fuck the status quo.  I'm pretty non-confrontational by nature, and I don't think it's worth arguing with people all the time.  But that's my official position: fuck the status quo.  Religion should be a normal topic of discussion.  Maybe we avoid it at the moment because we don't have that kind of relationship, or because people are jerks, or because there's something else important to talk about.  But don't avoid it just because it's religion.

Imagine if whenever we tried to talk about sexism, people declared that beliefs about gender are just too personally important to be discussed, and anyway nobody will ever be convinced, and we all just have different interpretations of the same truth about gender, and by the way why are you so angry?  I'm wasn't angry before, but now I'm convinced that I should be!

Another aspect of it is that people are afraid of even vaguely resembling evangelical Christian bogeymen.  This strikes me as akin to arguing that Obamacare is a Nazi policy.  What we hate about the Nazis was their healthcare system?  What we hate about evangelical Christians most is their desire to persuade people?  That's funny because what I hated about evangelical Christians most is the way that they obstruct progressive public policies, hinder public science education, and teach queer kids to hate themselves.  Specific recruitment tactics may be problematic, but persuasion is just an instrument, no worse than using pews, microphones, or weekly meetings.

"Allies" suggests having a "live and let live" attitude.  But that's exactly the sort of thing I oppose, the very thing that has been smothering discourse about religion.  Maybe in the future, culture will be different, and we can have a live and let live attitude without it secretly being a tool to enforce the status quo.  In the mean time, I will do without "allies".