In this post, I want to take a moment to hype the many things I will be doing this summer.

One-on-One Philosophical Counseling/Tutoring
This summer I plan to get certified in philosophical counseling. Not all the problems people have in life are the kinds that require psychological counseling. If your problems do—don’t come to me, that’s not my qualification and I won’t pretend it is.

Some people are mentally healthy but still want the benefits of philosophical discussion for sorting out questions about their values, about how to live a genuinely meaningful life, about important metaphysical questions, about developing an irreligious or post-religious worldview, etc. Some people would just like to have a philosophical mentor or tutor with whom they can read philosophical texts and/or engage in vigorous open-ended dialectical inquiries into philosophical issues. Some people just think studying Nietzsche with a passionate Nietzsche specialist would be an enriching experience.

I have in recent months held sessions with a private student which have served all those goals and it’s been a very gratifying experience for both of us. We have both learned a lot and become good friends. I am really hoping in the coming years to make one-on-one philosophical counseling, mentoring, and tutoring a primary source of my income. This summer if you are interested in booking some time with me, either in person here in New York City or online (through video conferencing on Skype), please write me at camelswithhammers@gmail.com or on Facebook. If you would like to study with me but cannot afford frequent one-on-one time, I would be very amenable to teaching small groups for a more manageable fee, so let me know if you can rustle up the people for such a group or would like to be put on a list with others looking for such an option. My times to meet with individuals or with groups can be very flexible all summer as I have no official employment outside of Freethought Blogs until September. Hopefully relationships begun in the summer can continue on through the fall or resume in the spring.

As far as free philosophical advice goes, this summer I will finally launch my “Philosophical Advice” column here on Camels With Hammers, wherein I will answer your questions about ethical dilemmas and other tough life choices which are amenable to philosophical analysis. I was sent some very good questions to dive into a couple months ago and I am eager to get on with answering them on the blog.

Blogging Like A Maniac
This summer I am going to ramp up to my usual prolific levels of daily blogging. I hope to generally take the available time to do philosophical research and dig into some philosophical depth in most of my posts. But being available to blog most of the day will mean that I can also comment on breaking atheist and political news more often.

The last several weeks I have not been blogging to my usual standards, either in terms of quantity or quality, as I have been trying to wrap up teaching and grading 8 classes of philosophy. And so long without blogging makes me a little sluggish, so to get unstuck and back into the regular blogging swing I am going to carry out a 24 hour blogathon, as I did in January after my winter grading break. To make up for several weeks of anemic blogging, I will write 36 posts in 24 hours, one every 45 minutes starting Thursday May 24 at 9am and ending at 8:15am on Friday May 25. None of the posts will be written before Thursday. Numerous readers have sent me things to look at over the last several weeks and months and I will try to get to some of those items during the blogathon. Thanks for your patience in the meantime, everyone.

Writing A Book
This summer I have resolved to write a book. I know exactly what I want to write. I am going to keep the details about it under wraps until it is fully drafted. I promise it will be bold and creative, uncompromisingly philosophically rigorous, deeply informed by scholarship, and also scrupulously, unabashedly accessible to philosophical novices. I am going to write the book that is deep in my guts and worry about the marketing after the fact.

Learning How To Make Videos
I have long wanted to make Camels With Hammers a more multimedia experience. This won’t be my highest priority among these many ambitious projects I am setting out for myself but I at least hope to practice and learn a lot about filming, getting audio right, developing visuals, and doing editing so that some day further down the road I can make this a significant part of the Camels With Hammers experience.

Philosophizing About Batman Live
July 7 from 2pm-3pm I will be a panelist talking about Batman and Philosophy at CONvergence, in Minnesota. Be there!

I will also be hanging around lots at the Freethought Blogs/Skepchick room at the convention, meeting readers and promoting the blog network. Be there too!

Being A Groomsman in Dave and Meagan’s Wedding
Dave Smith, the web guy at Camels With Hammers who made the whole blog’s existence possible for its first two years, is getting married this summer to an incredible woman. Dave is a spectacular human being and an old friend going back to freshman year in college. His fiancé Meagan is a new friend and already one of my favorite people on the planet.

Losing Weight
I shall be more svelte come summer’s end.

Visiting My Family
Yes, Mom, I am coming down to Florida the week I have told you a dozen times that I am coming. I will book the flight soon as the semester is over to make it official so you can stop asking.

Your Thoughts?

Thanks for a great semester, all of you.

via Milwaukee Mart

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Your Thoughts?

Your Thoughts?

Photographer Joel Sartore shoots gorgeous portraits of endangered species to raise awareness about what’s at stake and to raise money. See photos and buy prints to support the cause here. Below is a news story from NBC about Sartore’s project.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

H/T: Neko Case, whose love for and identification with animals is unmissable on her brilliant 2009 album Middle Cyclone.

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John Lauber, a soft-spoken new student one year behind Romney, was perpetually teased for his nonconformity and presumed homosexuality. Now he was walking around the all-boys school with bleached-blond hair that draped over one eye, and Romney wasn’t having it.

“He can’t look like that. That’s wrong. Just look at him!” an incensed Romney told Matthew Friedemann, his close friend in the Stevens Hall dorm, according to Friedemann’s recollection. Mitt, the teenaged son of Michigan Gov. George Romney, kept complaining about Lauber’s look, Friedemann recalled.

A few days later, Friedemann entered Stevens Hall off the school’s collegiate quad to find Romney marching out of his own room ahead of a prep school posse shouting about their plan to cut Lauber’s hair. Friedemann followed them to a nearby room where they came upon Lauber, tackled him and pinned him to the ground. As Lauber, his eyes filling with tears, screamed for help, Romney repeatedly clipped his hair with a pair of scissors.

The incident was recalled similarly by five students, who gave their accounts independently of one another. Four of them — Friedemann, now a dentist; Phillip Maxwell, a lawyer; Thomas Buford, a retired prosecutor; and David Seed, a retired principal — spoke on the record. Another former student who witnessed the incident asked not to be named.

Read More.

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But Tuesday morning will be my final lecture and a week from tonight is my final day having to travel out of Manhattan. At that point, as I finish my grading for the semester I will slowly begin to ramp up for a summer of steady blogging. Thanks for your patience in the meantime. As a reward, please enjoy this cute video of a smart little seagull who shares my passion for Doritos, which come courtesy of Nick.

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Where the Wild Things Are,

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Tom Gilson thinks that theism accounts for moral realism better than atheism does.  My reasons for rejecting that view are here (though I am interested in tailoring a future post specifically to Gilson’s particular way of arguing for a theist basis for moral realism).

For now, however, rather than counter Gilson’s positive claims for theism’s ability to ground moral realism, I want instead to answer the first of nine questions he poses as challenges to atheist moral realists.

I consider myself a form of moral realist, even on his specific definition of it as “the view that moral duties and values have an objective reality that does not depend on any person’s or group of persons’ opinions or beliefs about them”.  But I reject his equation of this position with the ideas that (1) that there are “unchanging moral absolutes”, (2) that moral duties and values have always existed, or (3) that morality’s “essential principles are eternally unchanging”.

In this context, I will answer the first of nine supposed problems that Gilson proposes for atheistic moral realists and in a future post I hope to address the other eight.  Gilson’s first question is, “What is a moral value or duty; specifically, to whom or what is it a value, and to whom or what is the duty directed, owed, or pointed?”

Moral values are valuable to human beings and possibly to other rational beings which may exist–if they share certain relevant features which would make moral values valuable to them.

But what are moral values and why are they important to human beings?  The first thing to note is that moral values are not our primary values. Our primary value is simply to exist.  This is the most fundamental value because it is the precondition of any other values whatsoever.

Our existence is constituted of certain activities in which we are instantiated as the beings we are.  For example, without our brain activities which generate our thoughts, for example, we do not exist as persons.  And, on a more physically fundamental level, without our cells performing the activities which constitute our bodies, we cannot even exist bodily and since our personhood depends on certain brain activities and the brain is a bodily organ, we cannot exist as people if the cells in our body do not perform “body activities”.

Therefore, in order to exist maximally we must maximally perform the activities which make up our kind of being.  In order to fully realize our humanity, which is our fundamental essence, we must maximally powerfully express our various powers through which we exist.  To certain important extents doing this entails having the requisite physical health to sustain the bodily underpinnings of those flourishing powers.

The more we realize our powers, the more we come into being, i.e., the more we are at all.  We have an inherent interest in being what we are since this is the precondition of all of our further interests.

It is in the context of this most basic good—the existential precondition of all our other goods—that we can assess the worth, i.e. the value, of everything outside of us and inside of us.

As far as things outside of us go, oxygen, for example, is of crucial value because it is an indispensable precondition of our organic life.  As far as internal components of our psyche go, we can assess some of them as being of greater value insofar as they either constitute, contribute to and/or amplify powers we have and others as being of lesser value insofar as they tend to detract from our other powers with a detrimental effect on our overall powerful realization of ourselves.

In this context, our minds have evolved powers of value discrimination, some of which function automatically and some of which involve deliberative processes.

Evolution has imperfectly but nonetheless powerfully effectively overall equipped us to make many snap judgments.  We taste sweet things as pleasant, which is equivalent to interpreting them as desirable.  This is because in the ages in which we evolved, sugary substances were highly advantageous to us and were in rare supply.  When those of our ancestors who had mutated the quirk of finding sweetness incredibly pleasant and desirable stumbled upon sugary things, they kept eating them and reaped an advantage over any of their peers who may have not had the quirk of finding sweet things pleasant.

Over time the fitness for survival of sweet tooths to our prehistoric environment kept encouraging the transmission of an automatic preference for sweetness until today our brain automatically makes the value judgment that sweet things are good for it (in the form of pleasant sensations when our tongues come into contact with them).

In such manner as this, our brains are naturally conditioned to make all sorts of automatic judgments of positive or negative value. Many of these judgments are immediately indicated to us with the persuasive force of pleasures or pains which often enormously influence how we react to things without any rational deliberations occurring or needing to occur.  And in certain matters in which erroneous rational deliberations would be extremely harmful (or even fatal), pain can be so extreme that we have no psychological ability to resist its demand we remove or avoid whatever is causing it.

There are some situations in which our automatic pleasures or pains may not be finely calibrated enough by the process of natural selection to guide us by themselves.  In some cases, we need to reason about the actual conditions of our survival or our flourishing either because our natural pleasures and pains offer no direct input or because the input they give us is insufficient for figuring out what is best for us overall when abstract considerations, remote effects, and complicated calculi about how to generate net gains in pleasure are all taken into account.

So we have vitally evolved powers of inference, by which we are capable of figuring out both what ends are worth pursuing for our most fundamental good and various effective means to attaining those ends.  Of course our inferential powers are imperfect and in numerous cases have taken centuries or millenia to figure out how various things work.  Nonetheless, inference is an often effective tool for figuring out what means are objectively efficient for attaining what ends.   And so we can say that inference is an effective tool for discovering values, insofar as value means potential effectiveness for attaining an end.

Within all of this context, moral values can be situated as real, objective, but nonetheless historically malleable, goods for human beings.  Specifically moral values arise out of several psychological value priorities innate to our minds, given how we have evolved.  Because social cooperation was a powerful means for human survival, we have evolved naturally to be social beings.  Insofar as certain virtues and habits of judgment made social cooperation possible, we have evolved basic natural tendencies to develop various pro-social virtues and habits of judgment.

Some of these habits of judgment take the form of calculations of advantage which reflect the prisoner dilemma sort of situations in which our minds evolved.  We have habits of suspending our own primary interests when they come at the expense of others whose cooperation we need and of punishing others when they do not do the same for us and of punishing them even when it comes at further cost to us.  These habits help us automatically form and reinforce everyone’s participation in a cooperative society that objectively was the precondition of our survival.

In this situation we have deeply ingrained and further cultivatable aversions to causing each other serious harm which keep us from hurting each other—as long as other specific emotions which were naturally selected for their own contributions to our flourishing are not activated in such a way that they powerfully override this default restraint.  And we also have both automatic and cultivatable inclinations to care for one another which are manifestly powerful and constitute an enormous amount of our human lives—more than we ever realize or appreciate.  (We are understandably extremely highly sensitized to deviations from this cooperative norm and tend to remember, dwell upon, and lament these failures and, in our morally hysterical moments, confuse them for the dominant way we engage with each other, when in fact they are not.)

Our fundamental need for cooperative group and interpersonal behavior made it so that those who had strong intuitions that they should treat others the same as they themselves needed to be treated were likely persistently selected for since this inclination had the effect of leading to that vital cooperative group and interpersonal behavior that made humans live long enough to pass on their genes.

We can infer from here that an a priori norm of formal fairness, which tells us that we are required to treat each person who is similarly situated to another in the same way, has evolved and become a standard issue part of our mental machinery, in terms of which we all think.  And one of the primary concerns for formal fairness that we have also had is that it is only fair that we return favors with favors and harms with harms.

And so our consequentialist modes of thinking that seek to maximize not only our own pleasures and flourishing but others’ as well extends from our sense of fairness.  It strikes us as unfair to not generally wish others the goods we wish for ourselves–at least if those others are cooperative with us and not harmful to us.

Our ability to think in terms of formal consistency and formal fairness makes possible our strong feeling that there are moral absolutes. It is formally unfair for anyone to make himself an exception to the basic rules of cooperation which we all except.

The principle difference between deontologists and consequentialists strikes me as a difference between thinking of the rules atomistically and non-situationally  or thinking of the rules of fairness as allowing for highly contextual factors to influence what is fair.  So the deontologist thinks one may simply “never lie” or “never steal” since these actions are generally unfair; whereas, for the consequentialist it can be both fair for everyone to have the right to lie in cases where lying will save a life and fair for no one to have the right to lie where lying involves cheating others out of what they are owed on grounds of fairness.

Since very few cases of lying will actually have fair outcomes that give people what they are properly due, even most consequentialists will talk in shorthand about lying as bad without bothering to enumerate all the qualifying exception cases in which it would be good and fair.

A duty is a responsibility we have to act fairly and fulfill the demands of our moral intuitions. This duty is objective and our intuitions about the binding character of the principle of fairness is objective because the cooperative activities which their exercise sustains are integral to our survival and our thriving and our survival and thriving are intrinsically necessary to us.

To answer Gilson’s question about to whom our duties are due, the answer from the moral perspective is other people.  We have these duties to others, however, because they are a precondition of our own survival and our own thriving, and thus, ultimately our duties to others are actually made necessary by our intrinsic interest in our own being.  These duties are important to us regardless of whether we consciously acknowledge them as such.  They are independent of our beliefs and desires and objective in this way.  They need not be “eternal”, they need not “absolutely” override all other goods without qualification, and nor need they demand the same specific things of us in every circumstance whatsoever.

There is of course more to morality and Gilson has 8 more (generally simpler to answer) questions just about the justification of moral realism for me to address.  But those details will require other posts.

In the meantime, the considerations spelled out in the above post should offer a greater context and justification for the ideas in the following, roughly logically ordered, posts.  Several posts below have been written in response to this one and others were written earlier:

Goodness Is A Factual Matter (Goodness=Effectiveness)

Grounding Objective Value Independent Of Human Interests And Moralities

Non-Reductionistic Analysis Of Values Into Facts

Effectiveness Is The Primary Goal In Itself, Not Merely A Means

What Is Happiness And Why Is It Good?

Deriving An Atheistic, Naturalistic, Realist Account Of Morality

How Our Morality Realizes Our Humanity

Subjective Valuing And Objective Values

My Perspectivist, Teleological Account Of The Relative Values Of Pleasure And Pain

Pleasure And Pain As Intrinsic Instrumental Goods

What Does It Mean For Pleasure And Pain To Be “Intrinsically Instrumental” Goods?

Against Moral Intuitionism

Moral vs. Non-Moral Values

Maximal Self-Realization In Self-Obliteration: The Existential Paradox of Heroic Self-Sacrifice

On Good And Evil For Non-Existent People

My Perfectionistic, Egoistic AND Universalistic, Indirect Consequentialism (And Contrasts With Other Kinds)

Towards A “Non-Moral” Standard Of Ethical Evaluation

Further Towards A “Non-Moral” Standard Of Ethical Evaluation

On The Incoherence Of Divine Command Theory And Why Even If God DID Make Things Good And Bad, Faith-Based Religions Would Still Be Irrelevant

Rightful Pride: Identification With One’s Own Admirable Powers And Effects

The Harmony Of Humility And Pride

Moral Mutability, Not Subjective Morality.  Moral Pluralism, Not Moral Relativism.

How Morality Can Change Through Objective Processes And In Objectively Defensible Ways

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So, when I discovered this cool old Leonard Cohen song just now, I figured I’d go ahead and blog it:

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Transcript at Think Progress.

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I don’t get the differences between likes and other forms of free expression.

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See more.

And if you haven’t ever seen the page devoted to awkward family portraits, it’s worth gawking at too. Below the fold is the most disturbing of those:

rithvikvinekar in the comments points us to this video about the crazy naked suits in the photo above:

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I think “Batman Begins” is certainly my favorite Batman movie I’ve seen.

Huh, not “The Dark Knight”? Most people would say “The Dark Knight.”

“The Dark Knight,” for me, has the same problem that every other “Batman” movie has. It’s not about Batman. I think Heath Ledger is just phenomenal and the character of the Joker is beautifully written. He has a particular philosophy that he carries throughout the movie. He has one of the best bad guy schemes. Bad guy schemes are actually very hard to come up with. I love his movie, but I always feel like Batman gets short shrift. In “Batman Begins,” the pathological, unbalanced, needy, scary person in the movie is Batman. That’s what every “Batman” movie should be.

You pitched a Batman movie at one point. Was that your vision for it?

It was different, but similar in that it had to do with the fact that he’s not okay. He’s not a guy who knows how to live like a person. That’s one of the great things about Batman. Everyone knows don’t invite Batman to Thanksgiving. That guy, he’s gonna be dark and weird. And that’s a great character.

Read more.

While I don’t think Batman Begins was nearly as good at delving into the dark and unhinged character of Batman’s psychology as Whedon thinks, I would love to see the Batman movies he is imagining.

Oh, and by the way, have you seen the intriguing Dark Knight Rises trailers yet?

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In truth, that’s not the real German ambassador to the United Nations. But it’s still funny.

Below is the original Colbert interview with Kermit on the Republican primary, referenced in the above video:

In truth, that’s not the real Kermit the Frog. But it’s still funny.

Your Thoughts?

First, let me be clear, I am not registered with any political party. I am an independent. As a matter of principle I have always been squeamish about aligning myself directly with a party. The primary reason for that is that I don’t want people to hear a label and presume to know what I think on every issue. I also don’t want them to presume to know why I hold any particular position. I like to reason about issues for myself and so even where I share the same views as others, I don’t like people to assume that my reasons are necessarily the same as others’. It turns out I am like most self-declared independents and a pretty reliable supporter of one party over the other. For all intents and purposes, I am de facto a Democrat even if I am not registered as one.

But I resist party identifications because in principle I am persuadable and never want to think merely like a party hack. I even, rather sincerely, long for a Republican party that would give me a legitimate alternative to think about. I long for a Republican party that was not what we see at present—a regressive, authoritarian, Christianist, anti-secularist, paranoid religious party which fetishizes anti-tax/pro-gun/pro-patriarchy absolutism and demonizes women, the poor, immigrants, minorities, gays, scientists, moral progress, and the separation of church and state. I long for a Republican party which did not equate strength with reflexive warmongering and which did not treat the prosperity of the few as morally intrinsically good and the reduction of out of control income disparity as intrinsically immoral.

I could go on and on with the ways that the Republican party disappoints me. And it all particularly pains me as someone who grew up as a conservative and was educated at one of the nation’s most politically conservative undergraduate institutions.

And being from New York I know some moderate Republicans who want nothing to do with the theocratic wing of their party but who are just persuaded that less government involvement in the economy is better for overall prosperity than more, or they sincerely worry that our current welfare system goes beyond aiding the temporarily disadvantaged to creating a disempowered economic underclass of government dependents. Whether or not their views on these issues are correct is to figure out elsewhere. Simply put, there are some sincere, moderate Republicans who just come at facts with different secular interpretive frameworks or value concerns and with a politically workable amount of reasonableness. They can make concessions in debates and they can force me to reexamine facts to make sure my assumptions are grounded.

It seems clear to me that there are enough of these potentially more sober Republicans that the party keeps nominating candidates with histories of pitching themselves as centrists—at least before competing in primaries in which they must reposition themselves temporarily as extreme conservatives. Bob Dole, John McCain, Mitt Romney, and George W. Bush (who was originally perceivable as primarily the son of a moderate president, a “Compassionate Conservative”, and a “uniter, not a divider” who was friendly with the Democratic Texas legislature and broke decades’ worth of precedence as a two-term Texas Republican governor).

The theocratic contingent of the party is ascendent. They have the most vigorous activists, have infiltrated the highest echelons of power, and have shown they have the muscle to knock moderate Republicans out of office by backing “Tea Party” primary challengers. In 2008 the post-Bush losses were so severe to the party that all that remained in the Congress were the Republicans in the safest seats, i.e., those from the most dyed-in-the-wool right wing congressional districts and overall states. And when the evangelicals brilliantly rebranded themselves as the “Tea Party” they very effectively disguised themselves as fiscally focused and diverted attention from the theocratic agenda that serves as their core motivation. With a midterm electorate which already favored right wing gains in the Congress coming up, they made sure the right wing candidates were covertly as extreme as possible (using the code word of “Tea Party”) and the result was the most reactionary House of Representatives we have seen in a long long time. They have employed a cynical and dangerous scorched earth policy, according to which total and complete obstructionism against Obama and absolute allegiance to reactionary evangelical right wing political principles have been the Republican caucus’s only governing philosophy for the last three and a half years.

But the moderate Republicans still exist in sizable enough numbers that they can divide the party if they ever got their act together. They already have gotten their way against the theocrats in the last two presidential nominations of the party (even though their moderate choice last time proceeded to give the hard right the most shameless, ignorant, charismatic superstar representative of their attitudes they could have ever hoped for, as his VP choice).

Republican moderates exist. I want them to exist too. I want them to make compromises possible so that Barack Obama can finally get something positive through Congress on a long list of issues. I want them to give electoral incentives to elected Republicans to stop pandering so absolutely to the most reactionary, unpragmatic, anti-secular wing of their party. I want them even to give Democrats fear that if they don’t deliver on progressive values that sometimes Republican challengers will actually run to their left on specific issues. That gives left leaning voters much more leverage over Democrats than we have at present.

So in this context, my hope about Edwina Rogers is that she is at heart a true secularist, whatever her specific Republican policy ideas about the economy or foreign policy. I would hope she is sincerely pro-gay, pro-choice, pro-environment, pro-secularism. I would hope she believes in the rule of law and would be willing to dissent from, and denounce, the war crimes of the Bush administration for which she worked. I would hope she only supported Rick Perry’s campaign because of some personal connections stemming from working for his close friend George W. Bush, and that she was at the time unaware of the vile attacks on gays and secular governance which he would eventually levy later in the campaign. Even then it is still troubling that she gave money to a figure who was already obviously odious to all secularists I know by last summer. I would hope she was always fervently in favor of science trumping religion in public policy matters. But then I see she either had no such passion or she was willing to ignore it for money when three years ago she backed right wing theocrats over Michael J. Fox on stem cell research.

I believe in the possibility of people who are sincerely conflicted by the sometimes arbitrary alignments of our two parties. Not every policy position that we label as “left” or “right” is one which naturally must be associated with other characteristically right or left issues. Right wing need not mean anti-secular and left wing need not mean pro-secular. It is possible that there can be true social libertarians who are also fiscally right wing and foreign policy hawks. Such people may be forgiven if they hold their nose and join one party over another and only focus on the portion of their political beliefs that that party agrees with. There may be an outspokenly social libertarian but quiet fiscal conservative who aids Democrats exclusively on gay rights or women’s issues or drug policy. My hope is that deep down Rogers was a secularist about a range of issues while she did right wing economics work for Bush. The evidence does not so far bear out my hopes.

But some are saying that none of this matters. She is (as we are learning more and more clearly) primarily just a hired gun. She will serve the interests of the board of directors or be fired. She is in all likelihood not a mole bent on sabotaging the SCA. It will be in her own self-interest to advance the SCA’s goals. She has taken a commendable risk by associating herself so prominently with secularism and by outing herself as a non-theist. She is burning the bridge back to her former career as a Republican party hack. Mitt Romney just fired a gay foreign policy adviser with impeccable right wing credentials because the modern Republican party has no room for gays. I doubt it will have much room (at least outwardly) for Rogers now that she has formally aligned herself in favor of secularism.

Nonetheless, I worry that a hired gun, while potentially more effective in vital arts of strategy and persuasion, makes for a potentially disastrous figurehead. Were Rogers just hired to be one lobbyist among many then that would be far less controversial. We need some people who can adequately engage the Republicans in Congress, even if they are themselves Republicans. Even then I would prefer someone with a clearer history of secularism herself, but it would be less worrisome. Now, however, the executive director of our chief lobbying organization is going to be someone who transparently flips her public positions based on who she works for. It is possible that after a few years she could leave the organization, take with it credibility to speak as a representative of secularists and then, in her next paying gig, try to spend that credibility undercutting us. Think of all the “former Democratic strategists” who work for FOX News and present right wing talking points disguised as “centrist viewpoints shared even by sensible Democrats who are willing to break with their party’s ideologues”. It is troubling to me to wonder whether she could profit in her next advocacy job by giving voice to “how even the former head of a secularist lobbying firm thinks there is a place for faith-based initiatives if only they are done right” or something like that.

One last worry.

In principle Republicans and all religious people should be as committed to secularism as Democrats and atheists are. It is a scandal that in America (of all places) secularism has become a partisan issue and not an unquestioned bedrock of our government. Even worse than just a partisan issue, the word “secularism” itself has become a dirty word in domestic politics. Secularism is only a good thing in the Middle East. Here it is something which one can only implicitly adhere to. The Democrats, while more often secularist in their actual governing style than Republicans, will themselves almost never build their campaigns around secularism as an explicit value or a governing ideal. Rather, when pushed, they will trump up their own religious bona fides to prove they can pass the implicit (though wholly unconstitutional) religious tests for office which the media and the right wing in this country vigorously enforce.

But even though there should be secularist Republicans and secular religious people of all stripes and even though theoretically left wing atheist secularists should welcome this, it is nonetheless unclear that distinctively right wing secularist political thinking leads to the same sorts of policy judgments as distinctively left wing secularist political thinking does. Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris have notoriously advanced some dubious right wing policies. And Hitchens has done so specifically on the grounds of secularism in the case of his support for starting a war with Iraq unprovoked. Similarly some atheistic libertarians might interpret political secularism as requiring that we reject all social welfare as crypto-Christian policy which does not meet independent standards of secular justification.

So what exactly someone determines to be the public policy implications of secularist fundamental principles could vary quite a bit. It could reach into economics and foreign affairs as much as into social issues. If so, it is important that we left wing secularists not assume, without due scrutiny, that right wing secularists hired to lobby on our behalf will share our values or will represent our interests.

Your Thoughts?

Elsewhere on Freethoughtblogs:

My follow up posts: The Pros and Cons of Hiring a Republican To Represent Secularists and Edwina Rogers vs. Michael J. Fox

Elsewhere on Freethought Blogs:

Edwina Rogers vs. Michael J. Fox
Introducing Edwina Rogers 
Attempting the Impossible?
Controversy comes with the new Secular Coalition for America Executive Director
I won’t comment
A Republican to Head the Secular Coalition for America?
Who is going to be our spokesperson on Capitol Hill?
Despicable Right-Wing Political Hack New Director of the Secular Coalition for America
Secular Coalition For… The Right Wing GOP?
Edwina Rogers: the unanswered questions

There are many things to be said both in her favor and against her. In a follow up post to this one I have spelled out some of the pros and cons I’m seeing in detail. But in this post, I want to point out one disturbing bit of her past work as a Republican operative that I have come across. Just watch the first clip featured in the video below:

The only real glimpse of her views on specifically secularist issues we get in the above video is that snippet right at the start. Right off the bat, in the video’s first clip, we get a red flag comment for those of us secularists who want a strong and passionate advocate for irreligious, science-based public policy about medicine.

First, the background of the clip. Several years ago Michael J. Fox, who suffers from Parkinson’s Disease, made a commercial in which he talked about the need for public funding for the sorts of embryonic stem cell research that could help find treatments for people with illnesses like his own. This research was (and is) opposed by right wing forces based on a flagrantly religious view of nature in which embryos have the full humanity of adult humans because they have “souls” already. In the ad, some of Fox’s symptoms were obvious. Rush Limbaugh saw the ad and disgracefully mocked Michael J. Fox’s Parkinson’s induced jerky body motions and accused him of acting and exaggerating in order to appear like his illness was less under control and more disruptive to his life than it really was.

In steps Edwina Rogers in the clip above. Acting as a Republican party hack, she distances herself from Limbaugh’s specific, politically toxic, remarks but does not stand up for Michael J. Fox and his integrity and the value of his scientifically informed testimony. She does not stand with a man whose health and life itself are on the line. She does not stand with the man conveying the realities of his experience and the realities of the science he has studied because his life depends on it. She did not stand up for evidence-based medicine itself against the influence of distinctly religiously based, anti-stem-cell policy.

Rather she condescended to him and patronizingly claimed that “sick people like Michael J. Fox” were being manipulated by “disappointing” people. Presumably, as the executive director of the Secular Coalition for America she is being hired to be one of those “manipulative”, “disappointing” people who argue that medicine policy should be based on science rather than religion.

She claims that she supports the mission of the SCA 100%. She claims she will stand for evidence-based policy. Has she only recently come to believe in evidence-based medicine? Has she only now come to realize that the people trying to manipulate the sick are those who tell them to believe in Christian dogmas at the expense of their own health? Has she only now come to realize the harm that is done by public policies that defer to the will of the people whose bidding she did in the past?

How passionate can she really be about secularism if she attacked Michael J. Fox on behalf of a theocratic stem cell policy?

Your Thoughts?

Elsewhere on Freethought Blogs:

IntroducingEdwina Rogers 
Attempting the Impossible?
Controversy comes with the new Secular Coalition for America Executive Director
I won’t comment
A Republican to Head the Secular Coalition for America?
Who is going to be our spokesperson on Capitol Hill?
Despicable Right-Wing Political Hack New Director of the Secular Coalition for America
Secular Coalition For… The Right Wing GOP?
The Pros and Cons of Hiring a Republican To Represent Secularists

From 2001-2002, Rogers served as an Economic Advisor for President George W. Bush at the White House, at the National Economic Council, where she focused on health and social security policy. She also worked on International Trade matters for President George H. W. Bush at the Department of Commerce from 1989 until 1991.

Rogers served as General Counsel to the National Republican Senatorial Committee in 1994. She worked for Senator Lott while he was Majority Leader in 1999 and she handled health policy for Senator Sessions in 2003 and 2004. She practiced law in the Washington office of Balch and Bingham from 1991 until 1994.

In 1996, she was a Fellow at the Kennedy School at Harvard. Rogers received her B.S. in Corporate Finance from the University of Alabama and a J.D. from Catholic University in Washington D.C

The SCA posted an interview with Rogers yesterday:

Have you always been a secularist? How do you describe yourself and your beliefs?
I am a nontheist, but tend to shy away from labels, because I think they have a way of creating division within the movement. I have always been a firm secularist and an ardent supporter of the separation of religion and government. I am passionate about increasing the respect for nontheists in the United States and protecting the secular character of our government. I think that America is a place where there should be no religious test for participation in political life. I certainly feel that theists should be fully able to participate in public life—but no more than nontheists. I am not here to end religion.

How do you think your Republican background will play into your role here at the Secular Coalition? 
My Republican background will help open certain doors that may have been closed to the secular movement before. It’s a misnomer that the majority of Republicans believe in the comingling of religion and government. The Religious Right is a vocal part of the Republican Party, but it’s also a minority. Most Republicans don’t necessarily agree with them, but may simply take a laissez faire attitude on that particular topic because they haven’t been engaged on the issues. If we aim to combat the political influence of those who want to see religion inserted in our secular government we will have to work with decision makers on both sides of the aisle—and I am uniquely qualified to help the Secular Coalition do that.

Hemant Mehta also has a long interview with Rogers:

Can Republicans in Congress ever be receptive to our cause? Do you think your own background can help in that matter?

The answers are yes and yes. Last month I participated in SCA’s Lobby Day for Reason and was received very warmly by the offices of several high profile Republican U.S. Representatives. There have been times in my past as a lobbyist, where I was thrown out of politicians’ offices when they didn’t like my message — this wasn’t one of them. There is definitely an opening there, and we are going to work to make our issues known and widely accepted by those on both sides.

My Republican background will help open certain doors. The sky is really the limit. Good work has been done but it’s only a foundation, and now we’re going to build a skyscraper. On the top of my agenda for this year will be meeting with every U.S. House and Senate office, as well as the appropriate committees. We are going to educate them on the downside of allowing laws to be based on religion and faith and not reason and science…We need to strive to have an absolute division between religion and government, but keep in mind that we need to be respectful and open to people of all faiths and none. No one — religious or non-religious — should be excluded from the conversation. But ultimately, the laws shouldn’t be based on a religious perspective.

Read much more.

I have to chew this over a bit. Help me out. Your Thoughts?

——————

My follow up posts: The Pros and Cons of Hiring a Republican To Represent Secularists and Edwina Rogers vs. Michael J. Fox

Elsewhere on Freethought Blogs:

IntroducingEdwina Rogers 
Attempting the Impossible?
Controversy comes with the new Secular Coalition for America Executive Director
I won’t comment
A Republican to Head the Secular Coalition for America?
Who is going to be our spokesperson on Capitol Hill?
Despicable Right-Wing Political Hack New Director of the Secular Coalition for America
Secular Coalition For… The Right Wing GOP?
Edwina Rogers: the unanswered questions

A tumblr called The Millenium Kids has done a fine job decoding the implicit messaging:

Underpinning this entire drama is the juxtaposition of the clean, safe, neighborly Smalltown with the dirty, violent and hostile urban city. To say that this dichotomy has historically been predicated on the nostalgia for all-white rural homogeneity is not exactly a quantum leap. The sentimentality that surrounds fifties-style community is often expressed through a fear of the urban, which transposes quite naturally into (and is often meant as nothing but a coded expression of) a fear of non-white minorities.

Before the accusation comes that we are reading too much into this, the depiction of ‘The Moopets,’ and the positioning of them as greedy, violent villains says otherwise. The Moopets are entirely composed of Muppets that were darker-toned to begin with or are conspicuously darkened versions of light-toned ones. In the case of dress, clearly the Moopet versions of Fozzie, Miss Piggy and Janice are so overtly racialized as ‘thugs’ as to make the point clear.

Last, but certainly not least, comes the fact that these characters align themselves with Chris Cooper, the primary antagonistic in the film, who, in his one musical number, delivers a parody rap called ‘Let’s Talk About Me.’

In this, the racial coding finally becomes crystal clear: the villains rap, the heroes sing. But, even beyond that, we have the extra racism that is inherent in what these days passes as hip-hop parody.

Read more.

I also would add that there was something at least mildly transphobic about Miss Poogy’s characterization too.

It’s a great disservice to The Muppet Show‘s legacy to cast the muppets lopsidedly as symbolic only of all that is musically and comedically vanilla. Definitive of the original show’s spirit was its gleefully anarchic comedic subversion and joyous musical ecumenicalism. As I mentioned in my previous review, the muppets were always deeply ironic and meta. Their defining schtick was that they were total weirdos engaged in unrestrained, mayhem inducing, creative self-expression, loaded with tons of lovable irreverence and acting out. There are also passionate, uncompromising, insecure artists among them (like Gonzo, especially in his original incarnation). The joy of the muppets was watching ugly monsters with funny voices unabashedly sing and dance and play instruments and put on skits and in the process turn old comedic and musical standards alike into absurdities and quirky musical and visual revelations.

It is, frankly, weird when rewatching the original muppet show (as I’ve been doing of late) to imagine that there would be any musical genre the muppets wouldn’t embrace with abandon and wholly incorporate into their own unique idiom. It’s hard to imagine they would not have found their own way to celebrate rap music with any less sincerity or humor or integrity than they encompassed every other genre they encountered in their heyday. Why rap would only fit into their world as the music of villainous threat is wholly unclear. Is the message of the new muppet movie really that the muppets are unhip and unadaptable?

Is the overwhelming nostalgia of the film not only a charming storytelling angle for the target audience of adults who loved them as kids, but also the embodiment of a (false) belief that the muppets thrived in the past because the times and their routines were unremittingly wholesome in some almost reactionary and reality-denying way? Because such a thesis rather incredibly underestimates the progressive, experimentalist, subversive overdrive that was ’70s culture in general and its Muppet Show in particular. The Muppet Show translated the whole spectrum of several decades’ worth of adult entertainment culture into a vibrant language that was accessible and appropriate for all ages. That was way cooler a thing to do than sanitize or demonize contemporary trends and offer retrograde pollyanna fantasies as an ideal.

I do have one other qualm that didn’t hit me when I first saw the film but has irked me a bit in subsequent viewings. There’s a strong theme in key songs in the film that the only source of happiness in life is having other people around. The idea that nothing is enjoyable alone is an annoying denial of the experience of introverts and happily single people. I am, myself, both an extrovert and an introvert and a (usually) happily single person myself. Contrary to the songs, it is possible to find alone time more fulfilling than pathetic and there are other ways to “have everything that you need” besides having someone right there next to you to sing along.

Your Thoughts?

Your Thoughts?

From a fall article about the city of Philadelphia’s refusal to run this ad:

When asked whether such a billboard would be appropriate for first-time visitors to the city, [Robert Brooks, director of the NAACP's criminal-justice program] said, “Absolutely.”

“We are a country that locks up more people than any other country in the world, and if I was traveling somewhere, I would want to know that when I get there,” he said.

The website advertised on the billboard is here. A petition to sign and send to your governor requesting that education become a greater priority than incarceration is here.

Your Thoughts?

Stick with the video after the credits for Brian’s account of what Dan Dennett is really like and to see a message to the Mr. Deity audience from numerous famous atheists (including our own PZ Myers) recorded at the Global Atheist Convention in Melbourne.

Your Thoughts?

And for real life anchor slip ups too unpredictable and fast to get censored in time, here’s a nice compilation of some of the recent years’ most infamous instances:

The look on the Dari Alexander’s face at 2:36-37 is priceless.

Your Thoughts?

David Petersen’s website.

Support Camels With Hammers by purchasing your muppets graphic novels using the links below:
Muppet Snow White (Muppet Graphic Novels (Quality))

Muppet Sherlock Holmes (Muppet Show)

Muppet Robin Hood (Muppet Graphic Novels)

Muppet King Arthur (Muppet Graphic Novels (Quality))
Muppet Peter Pan (Muppet Graphic Novels)
The Muppet Show Comic Book: The Treasure Of Peg-Leg Wilson (Muppet Graphic Novels)

The Muppet Show Comic Book: Meet The Muppets (Muppet Graphic Novels (Quality))
The Muppet Show Comic Book: On the Road (Boom Kids!)

The Muppet Show Comic Book: Family Reunion

Your Thoughts?

For one, there is a controversy which lies in the background of the video, one about whether or not it is fair to consider Christian students who object to the morality of homosexuality in school to be engaged in intolerable bullying simply by voicing such views. I recommend a dialogue I wrote on this topic last fall called Bulling or Debating? Religious Privilege or Freedom of Speech which attempted to give an evenhanded consideration of the complexities of that issue. For a particularly strong case for the position that religious students should be curbed in their right to condemn homosexuality in public school settings, even when they are only speaking in the abstract, see James Croft’s remarks in the comments sections of that post.

Secondly, Dan Savage has, subsequent to this video going viral, posted follow up clarifications and retractions. He rightly apologized for his use of the word “pansy-assed”. But, more annoyingly, he has tried to water down his condemnation of Christianity, making very unconvincing appeals which amount to implying that it would be wholly unreasonable to infer he would ever denounce the religion in which he was raised!

He has tried to delicately parse a tenuous distinction between calling parts of the Bible bullshit and calling Christianity, in turn, bullshit. He is squeamish on the word bullshit, half-apologizing for using it. I can understand the desire not to alienate people who would otherwise listen to arguments if the word bullshit were not included in them (though I still think it is valuable for reasons explained below). But implying that Christianity itself is not deserving of criticism itself, but only the bad parts of the Bible are, is cowardly weaseling from a man who surely knows better. It’s also a troubling acquiescence to advice he says he received which was along the lines that one simply cannot call anyone’s religion “bullshit” in today’s America.

Such demands make it clear to me that it is absolutely incumbent on those of us who think religions are bullshit to start saying so more frequently and to fight to stop this trend of insidious undue deference to baseless believing. It is the result of decades’ worth of concentrated effort by the Religious Right to make politics bow the knee to fundamentalist religion, combined with the Left’s confused understanding of the value and limits of multiculturalism. Of course no one deserves to be made into a second class citizen on account of their beliefs. But American freedom of speech has to not only politically but morally and intellectually guarantee that all beliefs are open to rational scrutiny by public figures and intellectuals without fear of career reprisals.

Religions do not deserve the support of the rules of politeness when it comes to their truth and falsity. The public sphere should not revere indiscriminately everything that tries to halo itself with the name of religion. The secular public sphere should feel no such shyness about sacrilege, blasphemy and treating religion rudely less it implicitly be in the political thrall of the religious sphere. To so refrain from unabashed, scrupulously rational, public criticism of religion is to favor and support it implicitly. This is intolerable. Forcing atheists to honor the excessive reverences of religious feelings is coercing atheists to treat as sacrosanct that which their own consciences do not judge to be genuinely sacrosanct. This goes beyond normal social politeness and deference to other cultures’ traditions to the point of atheists having to de facto accept religious restrictions in their own right, on account of their being religious. That’s intolerable to my atheistic conscience and should be to other atheists’ consciences as well, as it cuts to our very right to live thoroughly independent of deference to all religious authorities which we don’t believe in.

Finally, Savage’s distinction that he was not attacking Christianity when attacking the Bible on account that he knows there are some good Christians whom he very much appreciates, seems to confuse attacking Christianity with attacking all Christians whatsoever. Christianity can still be directly attacked even if there exist some more (thankfully) progressive strands and virtuous individual Christians just as much as America or Americans as a group can be justly criticized for our government’s behavior or our fellow citizens’ regular, overall patterns of behavior—even if some of us individual Americans disassociate ourselves from our corporate behavior and personality. That’s how groups and group membership works. It sucks, but it’s part of the reason group members have a vested interest in not letting the collective they contribute to be a rotten one.

Your Thoughts?

But obviously it is believers in the supernatural who are the most blatant about not only having normal human tendencies towards habitually protecting their prejudices but who also outright embrace their prejudices on purpose. And they are the ones who most often go so far further as to  to shamelessly consider this tendency to be some sort of virtue of theirs—whether the alleged virtue of faith or some alleged intellectual virtue of spiritual openness and/or spiritual perception, etc.

Regardless of the whitewashing job apologists want to put on faith—whereby they falsely equivocate it with various forms of rationally defensible ways of believing—the kind of faith which is characteristic of religiosity and vital to its survival in the modern world is, at its core, the self-conscious decision to deliberately believe beyond (or against) what evidence warrants, out of willful allegiance to one’s religious community and the worldview one receives from it. And quite usually this believing is done with explicit goals of creating hope or solace within oneself and of maintaining loyalty to one’s imagined deities and fellow believers.

When the religious pray fervently for faith they actively crave the ability to make doubts go away however possible. They do not necessarily yearn for conclusive proof. Some ask for evidence, but many others outright spurn the desire for evidence as the opposite of desire for faith. They just crave a kind of belief and a kind of will to believe that are each unshakeable regardless of whether there is proof or not and regardless of whether they encounter rationally insurmountable counter-evidence for their beliefs. While some seek for evidence to make doubts go away. Most would rather pray for faith that is strong enough to do the trick. They are effectively praying that God will make them more impenetrably prejudiced people. No amount of disingenuous semantics of apologists or willfully blind eyes to the actual practices, preachings, and psychologies of believers will make religious faith any less properly definable primarily in terms of this kind of willful, irresponsible anti-rationalism.

I consider beliefs in general to be to a certain extent morally assessable because of the various ways that we have choices about what sorts of information we will seek out (or endure exposure to from others) and because of the ways we can choose what sorts of ideas we will spend our time ruminating upon. In other words, at least some people, to at least some extent, are morally culpable for their erroneous beliefs.

Beliefs are morally culpable to the degree to which maintaining them means (a) actively evading certain duties to educate oneself before affirming propositions, (b) explicitly training oneself to reinforce the prejudices of one’s community and/or personal inclinations rather than training oneself to scrupulously scrutinize them, (c) self-consciously believing disproportionate to evidence, and especially when this means believing against evidence and not just beyond its warrant, and, finally, (d) deliberately avoiding uncomfortable lines of research or the implications of compelling ideas which arise either from within oneself or from the provocations of opponents.

Being properly critical or avoiding doing so is a choice. It’s not a matter that is wholly out of our control. To the extent that false beliefs stem from traceable choices to be uncritical, they are morally blameworthy as they represent some degree or another of willingness (or even outright desire) to be deceived. Self-deception is a moral failure, insofar as it is both socially irresponsible and an intrinsic failure to flourish in one’s own rational capacities for grasping and coping with truth most powerfully.

And it is a moral failure which I want to argue either stems from or leads to other related character flaws as well.

Frequently believers and non-believers alike will defend people’s supposed moral rights to believe whatever deluded things they desire by treating them as permissible “as long as they don’t hurt anyone” or “as long as they keep those beliefs out of legislation” or “as long as those beliefs don’t disrupt their overall life functioning”, etc. Depressingly few seem to recognize truth as an intrinsic good at all or to calculate all the ways in which it should trump other intrinsic goods in most circumstances. Few recognize that truthfulness about reality and values, while not absolutely valuable and not always deserving to override competing goods, should nonetheless be subordinated to other goods only rarely and conscientiously—in those cases when truly urgent and indispensable competing goods are unavoidably incompatible with it. Truth and falsity seem to so many to be merely morally equivalent potential expedients to living a pleasant life. The implicit prevailing view can be summed up as, “Wherever truth is what it takes to serve your goals, be truthful with yourself. Wherever falsehood is what it takes, lie to yourself. And don’t complain about your neighbor’s falsehoods unless they cause you tangible harm.”

It makes me seriously wonder why most people assume that this sort of crassly consequentialist, selfish, small-minded, shortsighted, cowardly, lazy, anti-philosophical, and cavalier attitude with respect to the value of truth in the supremely important matters of fundamental reality, life-purpose, and morality does not further translate into an equal readiness to lie about any other number of more “trivial” factual, moral, and political matters, or into a willingness to blithely deceive others in those matters as much as one deceives oneself with a good conscience in the most fundamental matters. In fact, given that the willful self-deceivers lie about fundamental realities and values it is likely that there are many occasions in which it is simply necessary for them to have false judgments about all other sorts of factual, political, and ethical realities in order to preserve their most fundamental beliefs to themselves and to others. To avoid cognitive dissonance, it is inevitable that they eventually will have to view at least some practical moral matters and proximate, everyday sorts of factual questions as distortedly as they view foundational issues in order to make them align.

More simply put, all the “lying for Jesus” and all manner of political lying from even the most sincerely pious of politicians, which continually outrages people as hypocrisy, is actually the natural and inevitable logical outgrowth of religious believers’ decisions in the first place to base their lives and beliefs on demonstrably disprovable accounts of reality and values. No one who recognizes the transparent falseness and self-deception in religious believing should be so surprised by religious people’s capacities to lie and be hypocritical and self-serving. It is naive to trust that they will have an unusually conscientious allegiance to principles of honesty and selflessness owed to their putatively strict religious moral principles when one can plainly see that within their psychology their most basic commitments are emphatically contrary to disinterested virtue or reason and instead are, above all, oriented towards their own communal loyalties, their imagined deity (or deities), and their own self-interests as served by their religion and even at the considerable moral cost of enormous self-deception. Why would anyone expect such people to be especially morally trustworthy when they put their personal happiness and their group loyalty above self-criticism and the criticism of their received traditions? Of course some will wind up committing to their religions’ putative moral principles enough that they will become genuinely self-sacrificing or truth seeking. But why expect it to be the norm, given faith’s psychological and epistemological structure, which orients beliefs around selfishness, in-group loyalty, and systematically defensive dishonesty?

Some unbelievers approve of all this faith-based self-deception because they contemptuously and cynically assume that religious people are either uneducable or would become even worse than merely self-deceivers were they ever to be disabused of their errors. So even when they do recognize that people who deceive themselves will go on to deceive others as well, and eventually thereby harm them too, they are nonetheless unmoved, due to their apparently low estimation of their fellow human beings’ potential to do any better by each other with the truth.

In addition, or in some cases instead, such unbelievers have a lazy desire for personal truces with the particular people in their lives who they don’t want to be divided from over matters of truth. I guess they judge that it is better to placate the ones they love than to sincerely debate them and take an interest in their personal growth or knowledge. I honestly question their judgment but I empathize with the emotions it comes from.

Another reason they placate others’ self-deception is out of an overextension and misapplication of the vitally necessary legal attitude of tolerance towards others’ legal rights to believe as they wish into the realms of ethics and epistemology where it does not belong. Legally we need to be tolerant. And, of course, socially we are quite often just not in appropriate positions to properly, knowledgably, or humanely interrogate each other’s value decisions. But ethically and epistemologically—at least in the abstract, and certainly in those times where our views are asked of us or others say transparently false things that we are in a position to correct—we should feel compelled to take a stand that believing falsehoods is in most cases bad, and doing so through self-deception (however happy) is in most cases morally wrong for being irresponsible and lazy.

And we should stop falsely calling it a matter of indifference simply because we ourselves are too lazy to stand for anything inconvenient or because we perversely define being close to people as a matter of not discussing anything of actual importance about the nature of reality or values too honestly with them.

Your Thoughts?

Plug your ears and sing “la la la” all you want, Christians, but the truth does not change on that account.

Your Thoughts?

For more, see this follow up post. 

See the chart at full size.

In January, Alexander Aan, a 30-year-old in West Sumatra, Indonesia, posted messages to Facebook expressing his lack of belief in God, as well as some satirical cartoons about the prophet Muhammad, and as a result was attacked by an angry mob and then arrested by police under the charge of blasphemy.

The Center for Inquiry needs you to help come to Alexander’s aid. 

Alexander did nothing more than exercise the most basic of human rights, his freedom to express his beliefs, and now he is in great jeopardy — not only has he lost his freedom, but many are calling for his death.

CFI wants to make the voices of those who support Alexander loud and clear to the Indonesian government. The Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) is organizing a letter-writing campaign on Alexander’s behalf, and we at CFI urge you to take part.

Visit this page to have your say and show your support for Alexander and basic human freedoms. We encourage you to use the text below as your template for you to copy and paste into the web form, but please feel free to add your own thoughts as you see fit. (AHRC has provided its own sample text on its web page, but you can simply remove it and replace it with ours or your own.) Make sure you keep all bracketed text as it is, such as “[salutation],” as it will be automatically filled in once the letter is sent.

Let’s show Alexander and the whole world that we will not be silent when governments suppress, persecute, and jail those who speak their mind.

SUGGESTED TEXT FOR LETTER:

Dear [salutation],
Name of victim: Alexander Aan
Names of alleged perpetrators: Police officers of Pulau Punjung Sub-District Police Station, prosecutors of Sijunjung District Prosecutors Office, potentially the panel of judges at the Muaro Sijunjung District Court who examines Alex’s case.
Date of incident: 18 January 2012 – present (ongoing)
Place of incident: Dharmasraya, Padang, West Sumatra

I am writing to voice my concern regarding the case of Alexander Aan, an atheist civil servant in Dharmasraya, Padang, West Sumatra. Alexander has been arrested and charged with blasphemy and promoting atheism for posting a status on Facebook questioning the existence of God. He is also alleged to have disseminated religious hatred on the Internet by posting a note and comic on Facebook entitled ‘The Prophet Muhammad was attracted to his own daughter-in-law’ and ‘The Prophet Muhammad had been sleeping with his wife’s maid.’

Alexander’s postings were an exercise of free expression of his religious beliefs, and Indonesia is a state party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), which guarantees freedom of religion. His posts did not incite, condone, or glorify violence or persecution of anyone, Muslim or otherwise. Though some have found his posts insulting, there is no human right to freedom from feeling offended. Alexander has committed no crime and should be released.

I was alerted to Alexander’s situation by the Center for Inquiry (CFI), a nonprofit organization based in the U.S. that stands for science, reason, and secular values such as the separation of religion from government and the basic freedoms of thought, conscience, and speech. CFI has affiliate organizations and branches all over the world, and holds special consultive status at the United Nations under the UN Economic and Social Council. I stand with CFI in its support of Alexander Aan and of all those who are persecuted for their beliefs — or lack of beliefs — wherever on this planet they reside.

I look forward to your swift action on this matter.

Sincerely,
[fullname]
[country]

From The Huffington Post.

When I was a Christian my conception of religious belief was that it was either literally true or it was decisively false. Coming to terms with the literal falseness of Christianity made me not the least bit interested in even trying to have a religious attachment to things which might be only metaphorically accurate (and, if scrutinized with an open mind rather than with religious prejudice, do not seem to be even that). Even before conceding the falseness of Christianity I found it irritating when people who did not believe in Jesus would bow and scrape before what a great guy he was anyway. And soon as I abandoned faith, I had no intentions of going out of my way to assume he must be an especially awesome teacher and person anyway, rather than to treat him like any other historical figure or to scrutinize his moral claims objectively.

So, I never made any stops in the halfway houses of religious liberalism on my way from evangelical literalist Christianity to out and out irreligious disbelieving anti-theism. The closest I got to embracing a watered down faith was turning for the last couple months of my believing to liturgical Anglicanism, where going to church was more about psychologically satisfying rituals and symbols and less about strict theological meaning. I continued to attend those services for a few weeks after relinquishing my Christianity even because I still loved the ritual, both of the services and the trips there with my friends. But when one of my friends was tired of me bashing the faith the whole way there and back and asked why I was even going if I was no longer a Christian, it seemed simply right that I just quit the indulgence. I did read liberal and postmodern philosophers of religion once my faith was dead in an attempt to give as fair a hearing to them as I could for the entire winter break and summer after I deconverted. But they didn’t leave a dent on me. They were wholly unconvincing rationalizers and that was all.

And I had no living atheist role models and few close atheist friends—and certainly none with any connections to organized atheistic community. And I was suspicious of the whole concept of Humanism because of my Nietzscheanism and resented being lumped in with Humanists simply on account of my atheism (or as I mislabeled it back then, my “agnosticism”.)

All of this is to say that for the first nine years of my atheism, before I got involved with the atheist blogosphere, I never seriously contemplated the reality of committed atheists who conscientiously stayed (or returned to) attending religious services. But many of you are there. Many of you are Buddhists or in Unitarian churches or in pagan religions or in explicitly Humanist groups.

Growing up I knew of many skeptical fathers (including my own) who indulged their wives’ fervent religiosity to one degree or another and showed their faces in church on occasion or made some efforts at belief for their wives’ sakes (again, as my own silently but noticeably agnostic dad did). But I really had no sense of the men and women who disbelieve and yet deliberately choose to get involved with religion for either the ritual or the moral education and traditional grounding of their kids.

Then, as part of my atheist blogging, I started to quickly wake up to the reality of how many people do sell their children’s souls to dubious religious institutions and to think about the need for atheists to have constructive alternative institutions in order to meet the needs a tremendous amount of people obviously feel for an interconnection of philosophy, community, ritual, symbol, “spiritual” exercise, identity, tradition, ecstatic experience, and (most importantly) the moral education of children. We need to meet people’s psychosocial, moral, and philosophical needs for coherent, conscientious identity, values, beliefs, community, and rootedness or people will continue to judge it worth it to shutdown their brains or compromise their commitments to intellectual principle for the sake of these goods they feel as urgent.

And so I have written a whole lot about how I think constructive alternatives to religions need to work and what they need to do to avoid the pitfalls of the existing religions.

But what’s missing from my thinking is any systematic personal study of, or firsthand experience with, the ways atheists are in practice already making do with the options that already out there for them in more atheist friendly religions—and even in atheist unfriendly ones. I have only picked up bits and pieces. And I admit I get irked when I describe my visions for self-consciously atheistic, philosophically robust alternative communities to religions and get told, “We already have the Unitarians.” This might be my ignorance and prejudice but my first response is to recoil and think that settling for Unitarianism is just unbelievably philosophically and spiritually lazy and apathetic about truth. As far as I understand the Unitarians they meet in the spirit of “everyone being essentially right” and they don’t overthrow the traditional symbols and rituals of the traditional religions. They may jettison literalism and water down their notions of gods to the most rationally acceptable deism or to a form of mystical abstraction that is functionally equivalent to nothingness, and they may be so open to freedom of intellectual conscience that they welcome even atheists with open arms, but in theory they have still always sounded to me like people who are trying to cling to the trappings of religions they don’t really believe, instead of as innovators willing to start fresh and build new rituals and symbols on fresh foundations using true philosophies.

In other words, my suspicion, of Unitarians is that it’s all leftovers and syncretism and watered down vagueries that cling to the symbols of religions that, frankly, due to their superstitious legacies I simply want little to do with. I really want atheists to have alternative communities and organizations that can make superstitious, authoritarian, patriarchal, irrationalistic religions obsolete—or which can at least prevent atheists from perversely feeling like those are the only games in town for giving their children roots and a moral education. I really want atheists to have rituals and values discussion that are rooted in sophisticated, critical, well-informed, and thought-provoking philosophy and not in the selective reading and decoding of the tired and idiosyncratic myths and sayings of ancient religions.

I really want atheists to have groups that are not just dressing up like the traditional religions but which are built on foundations we can actually believe in and which are structured rationalistically from top to bottom. We don’t need a church that is retrofitted to accommodate us among others but we need our own buildings and institutions. I don’t want the price of rituals and community for atheists to be having to pay lip service to how swell Jesus was. I mean, it’s fine to quote or otherwise approve of him where he actually gets things right, but I don’t see the worth in pretending that he deserves special attention. I don’t see the point of religious services that are a tribute to the history of religion rather than an attempt to get in touch with truths as understood using the contemporary state of knowledge in philosophy and science.

Now, my question is for all the atheists involved in existing religions and in existing Humanist groups that have functional equivalence to religions to some extents. How do they already meet your needs or not? How much do you feel like you’re playing along with things you don’t believe in? How much of what you do cuts against your atheism specifically? How much is it play acting in the forms of religions you don’t really accept and how much is it a successful reappropriation of symbols that still have some life in them and which you feel capable of reinfusing with some true meaning? How are my inferences about Unitarian Universalism off base and how on target are they? How good a job at building from a new foundation is Humanism doing? What should constructive atheist groups of the future be incorporating from Buddhism and paganism?

Your Thoughts?

For more on my thoughts on the possibilities for “true religion” and for atheist religion, see the posts:

Answering Greta: My Goals As An Atheist Writer

Islam, 9/11, and “True Religion” (Or “What Could George W. Bush Mean When Talking About ‘True Islam’?”)

The Dangers of Religion Itself

I Am Interviewed About My Personal (Atheistic) Religiosity/Spirituality

Sex and “Spirituality”

Is It A Waste Of Time For Atheists To Care About Spirituality?

On Defending True Spirituality And Taking The Word Back From Spiritually Bankrupt Fundamentalism

Disambiguating Faith: How Faith Poisons Religion

What’s Worse For Atheism: Being Confused For Being Too Much Like Bad Religion, Or Too Little Like Good Religion?

On the eighth grade test, one question had no correct answer, and schools are instructed to alert students.

And on the fourth grade exam, one question has two correct answers. But in this case, schools are directed to tell students about the problem only if they ask questions about the item.

Elizabeth Phillips, principal of Brooklyn Public School 321, called it “completely unfair” not to warn fourth-graders.

“That means that in some rooms, where a child asks, the children will be at an advantage as they will know that they don’t have to keep deliberating, while in other classrooms, where students don’t ask, some are likely to waste a lot of time on this question,” she said.

Read more.

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A disturbing new Australian study backs up the chart:

Prolonged sitting is considered detrimental to health, but evidence regarding the independent relationship of total sitting time with all-cause mortality is limited. This study aimed to determine the independent relationship of sitting time with all-cause mortality.

… We linked prospective questionnaire data from 222 497 individuals 45 years or older … to mortality data …

During 621 695 person-years of follow-up …, 5405 deaths were registered…. The association between sitting and all-cause mortality appeared consistent across the sexes, age groups, body mass index categories, and physical activity levels and across healthy participants compared with participants with preexisting cardiovascular disease or diabetes mellitus.

Conclusions Prolonged sitting is a risk factor for all-cause mortality, independent of physical activity. Public health programs should focus on reducing sitting time in addition to increasing physical activity levels.

Greg Laden drives home the most challenging implication of the data:

I know what you are thinking: “I go to the gym for five hours a day so that fixes that problem.” Sorry, but no. Apparently (and this is not fully demonstrated, so this is something of a guess) it’s the sitting that hurts you, independently of the lack of exercise. Yes, those several hours a week of exercise helps you and makes you healthier, but the sitting itself, if we’ve got this right, is a bad thing, with negative effects, and if you do too much off that every day you’ll die sooner than otherwise.

Maybe.

Yeah, I’m going to die of sitting.

Maybe.

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Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

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Did Jesus Exist?: The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth

As many readers know, Richard Carrier has written a hard-hitting, one might even say vicious, response to Did Jesus Exist. I said nothing nasty about Carrier in my book – just the contrary, I indicated that he was a smart fellow with whom I disagree on fundamental issues, including some for which he really does not seem to know what he is talking about. But I never attacked him personally. He on the other hand, appears to be showing his true colors.

I don’t see those charges sticking at all. Read Carrier’s review and tell me if you see Carrier inappropriately attacking Ehrman for personal failings instead of professional ones.

H/T: The A-Unicornist

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[Martin] Amis spoke of Christopher’s private struggle with his embrace of the Iraq war. He never recanted as I did. Indeed, one of our more heated recent chats was over his enthusiasm for a new war against Iran. But the idea that he did not feel the pain of isolation, of misjudgment, that this humane man was immune to the suffering that this horrifying war entailed for so many innocents, and took no personal responsibility for it, is untrue. He told Martin that in the period when the war was at its worst, he was in a “world of pain.” Being a contrary public writer, being prepared to lose friends over principle, challenging one’s own “side”, and forever braced for battle, takes a toll. Hitch bore it with great aplomb. That does not mean he had nothing to bear.

And despite Sullivan’s Christianity, he expressed some sincere appreciation for the value of Hitchens’s attack on religion:

Of course, I do not believe Hitch has disappeared from reality. But even if he has, his example raises all our standards, and begs for us to follow him in slaying sacred cows with wit and merciless accuracy. He inspired love in so many for one reason. He was true to himself, and he loved the world. And what was so truly moving about his final years – especially in his campaign against religion – was how much, how overwhelmingly, so many who never even met him loved him, and I mean loved him, back.

Read more, including Hitchens’s last words.

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In the meantime, this made me smile tonight:

Bonus Rowlf and Fozzie:

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Why We Love Sociopaths: A Guide To Late Capitalist Television

My greatest regret is that I’m not a sociopath. I suspect I’m not alone. I have written before that we live in the age of awkwardness, but a strong case could be made that we live in the age of the sociopath. They are dominant figures on television, for example, and within essentially every television genre. Cartoon shows have been fascinated by sociopathic fathers (with varying degrees of sanity) ever since the writers of The Simpsons realized that Homer was a better central character than Bart. Showing that cartoon children are capable of radical evil as well, Eric Cartman of South Park has been spouting racial invective and hatching evil plots for well over a decade at this point. On the other end of the spectrum, the flagships of high-brow cable drama have almost all been sociopaths of varying stripes: the mafioso Tony Soprano ofThe Sopranos, the gangsters Stringer Bell and Marlo of The Wire, the seductive imposter Don Draper of Mad Men, and even the serial-killer title character of Dexter. In between, one might name the various reality show contestants betraying each other in their attempt to avoid being “voted off the island”; Dr. House, who seeks a diagnosis with complete indifference and even hostility toward his patients’ feelings; the womanizing character played by Charlie Sheen on the sitcom Two and a Half Men; Glenn Close’s evil, plotting lawyer in Damages; the invincible badass Jack Bauer who will stop at nothing in his sociopathic devotion to stopping terrorism in 24—and of course the various sociopathic pursuers of profit, whether in business or in politics, who populate the evening news.

On a certain level, this trend may not seem like anything new. It seems as though most cultures have lionized ruthless individuals who make their own rules, even if they ultimately feel constrained to punish them for their self-assertion as well. Yet there is something new going on in this entertainment trend that goes beyond the understandable desire to fantasize about living without the restrictions of society. The fantasy sociopath is somehow outside social norms—largely bereft of human sympathy, for instance, and generally amoral—and yet is simultaneously a master manipulator, who can instrumentalize social norms to get what he or she wants.

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Dan waves the red flag of warning and rightly so. Preaching, particularly certain styles of preaching, can be used to manipulate and control. Dan wisely warns about making an end-run around reason. Far too often preaching is nothing more than the reinforcing of “this we believe” and “we shall not be moved from this we believe.”

People are not taught to reason or to think for themselves. They are taught to believe. They are taught when reason suggests something that runs contrary to the received truth that it is to be rejected. Just have faith, people are told.

As a preacher turned atheist I can not turn off the speaking skills I used to ply my trade for 32 years. They are very much a part of who I am.  The best I can do is be mindful of the power of the skills I have and make sure I use them in such a way that people are not only moved but instructed. I need to be aware of the power I have to manipulate people with my words. Self-awareness of this will keep me from falling back into using the tricks of the preaching trade to elicit the desired response from those listening to me.

That said, I want to put a plug in for passionate, pointed, challenging public speaking. Quite frankly, the atheist/humanist movement needs a bit of life pumped into it. I have listened to many speeches/lectures/seminars/debates that people told me were wonderful. Well-known atheists and humanists, aren’t they great? Uh, no. B-o-r-i-n-g. Dry. Monotonous.

Some speakers are better off sticking to what they do best………writing books and magazine articles. Leave the public speaking to those who do it well. (or go back to school and get some public speaking training)

What was the power of movement for racial equality in the 1960’s? Baptist preachers who had powerful, moving public speaking skills. Yes, their words were packed with meaning but it was the delivery of those words that moved a nation.

The atheist/humanist movement in America needs people who have the ability to passionately move people to action. I would rather suffer a bit with Jerry Dewitt’s preaching style (and I am not a fan of the Pentecostal style of preaching) than listen to well-educated, boring men WOW me right into an afternoon nap. We are in a battle against religious zealots and theocrats and we need speakers who can stir and motivate people to action.

Some atheists and humanists naively believe that knowledge is all that matters. Like Joe Friday, they think if they just give people the facts they will see the error of their way. Don’t get me wrong, knowledge is important. Way too many people become an atheist out of anger or disappointment with the Christian church. Just like the Christian zealot, the atheist should KNOW why he believes what he believes. Or as the Bible says, be ready to give an answer for the hope that lies within them. But, at the same time, we should not divorce our beliefs from our emotions. Some things matter…..and if they matter, our emotions should be stirred,motivating us to act accordingly.

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——————

UPDATE: Bruce Gerencser has quit his blog. When you go there you simply get the following message now:

Welcome to fallenfromgrace.net This domain was recently registered at namecheap.com. Following is a message from the owner of this domain.THANK YOU!I have reached a point in life where it is time for me to stop blogging and move on to some other things I want to do in my life.I want to thank you for reading this blog over the past 3 years.I know my decision to stop blogging will upset some people and cause others to rejoice. I can’t please everyone and most days I can’t even please myself. This was a difficult decision for me to make and one I hope you will understand.Bruce Gerencser

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Darth Vader and Son

9 more panels here. Order the book here.

Jeffrey Brown, the author and illustrator, gave an interview to the Los Angelas Times.

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AND they’re recording their new album finally! And they’re filming all their trips to and from the studio and posting “carpool confessionals” weekly throughout the process. They already have 6 episodes. You probably have to be a pretty big fan (like me) to appreciate any of this stuff. So, if you’re not and you don’t, don’t blame me. I warned you. But that said, the fourth one (below) is probably hilarious enough to be viewed by even non-fans.

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Here is the official full logo:

And here is the coming new banner for the site (which will be a little bigger of course):

And here is the Facebook profile “Timeline” cover:

And I am sure there will be uses for the original logo. Ideally, it would rotate with the new one as that would create a neat effect. But we cannot yet do that with our banners. Here, for posterity at least, is the original logo:

Thanks everyone for your input on the earlier drafts here and on Facebook!

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There’s also now a hilarious official video for “Save the Rich”. I think it’s funnier than the song itself:

Both songs can be found on their new album Slippery When Moist.

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The most glaring figure comes from a USA Today/Gallup poll in which people were asked “Would George Zimmerman have been arrested if the person he shot was white, or do you think (Trayvon) Martin’s race did not make a difference?”

While 73% of black people said Zimmerman would have been arrested had his victim been white, only 33% of white people thought so. The story in that bit of info isn’t “There’s a racial divide,” it’s “67% of white people are wrong.” If George Zimmerman gunned down a Skittle-wielding white kid, he’d be charged faster than a flux capacitor in a lightning storm. If you don’t instinctively know that, the consistent racial disparities in our criminal justice system, particularly with regard to the race of the victim, ought to seal the deal.

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So, at present it goes from this current site banner

to this basic Facebook cover, which needs to be scaled and adjusted to work as a site banner:

At minimum, I want the words Philosophy and Nietzsche swapped since Nietzsche is much more in the background and philosophy much more in the foreground on the site. I like the blurring effect and ambivalent about the words overlapping.

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With Rick Santorum out of the race, RoboRomney’s programmers start reinstalling the “ModerRomney2002″ software and start uninstalling some, but not all, aspects of the “ConservaRomney2012″ software.

It should be interesting to see the differences it makes to RoboRomney’s hilarious “trying to sound human like you, people of place x with concerns y” gaffes from here on out.

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Four: When I have gained weight, going from my usual size two/four to a six/eight after a lazy six months of not exercising, and that weight gain shows in my face and arms, I am a “cow” and a “pig” and I “better watch out” because my husband “is looking for his second wife.” (Did you catch how this one engenders competition and fear between women? How it also suggests that my husband values me based only on my physical appearance? Classic sexism. We won’t even address how extraordinary it is that a size eight would be heckled as “fat.”)

That women are joining in the ongoing disassembling of my appearance is salient. Patriarchy is not men. Patriarchy is a system in which both women and men participate. It privileges, inter alia, the interests of boys and men over the bodily integrity, autonomy, and dignity of girls and women. It is subtle, insidious, and never more dangerous than when women passionately deny that they themselves are engaging in it. This abnormal obsession with women’s faces and bodies has become so normal that we (I include myself at times—I absolutely fall for it still) have internalized patriarchy almost seamlessly. We are unable at times to identify ourselves as our own denigrating abusers, or as abusing other girls and women.

Read More.

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Open the Door!

An anecdote about constituent lobbying:

The Secular Coalition for America sponsored a Lobby Day for Reason on the Friday before the reason rally.

My spouse, 10 year old son, and I participated. I can report that it is extremely personally empowering to be in a group of atheists/humanists/etceterists, sitting around a table with a top aid of our representative or senator and saying, one-after-another,

“Hi, I’m(nym here)and I am an atheist(or etcetera). (Our group was mostly atheists).

There is no question that the staff people had never heard or considered their non-theist constituents. The staff were particularly touched by my son who bravely spoke his mind about the Pledge of Allegiance that his school repeats daily, and that atheists are people too.
Our group met with very senior people (legislative directors and top health advisers).

We were allotted 15 minutes but each meeting went well over 30 minutes and the conversations were great.

The personal stories (like Sean promotes) and the personal interaction can break through and open doors to communication.
As a practical consequence of our meetings, all of the aids want to know what the Secular Coalition thinks about any pending legislation in the future. Now I live in a liberal state so not everyone’s experience will be that positive I am sure. But after the meeting, you have a name, an email address, and the door’s open, at least a little.

I think everyone should try it, just do it in a group if possible.

What are your experiences with lobbying? What have you found works and what does not? Did you participate in the Lobby Day for Reason? If so, please share your experience!

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Name Your Link

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I found this video as part of an “IAmA” at Reddit begun by a cisgendered man in a relationship with a transgendered post-op woman. Early in the questions, at least the ones that appear at the top of the page based on voting, another transgendered woman who is not the original poster’s girlfriend, does most of the answering. And she gives a really illuminating 101 on all things trans, including both how her personal experience is different as a woman, on the one hand, and some of the ins and outs of how the physical transformation occurs. You can skip the back and forth with commenters and focus on her comments by clicking on her name, isleepinahammock. In particular, here are a few well-put points everyone should understand:

Hormones rewire things so even before SRS, people often report a shifting in the way orgasms work. I know mine have changed a ton. They’re a lot harder to get and are more of a wave rather than a spike. They’re more spread throughout the entire body rather than just centered on the groin. They also can repeat. :3 I haven’t had SRS yet, only hormones.

A key thing to realize is that there is no such thing as male tissue or female tissue. There’s not male muscle and female muscle. There’s no penile tissue and vaginal tissue. The different set of genitals have the same kinds of tissue, just in a different configuration. With SRS, the tissues are just reconfigured.

And

People really don’t realize how much of their bodies and feelings are dependent on their hormonal balance.

Hormone therapy isn’t magic. It’s all pretty mundane really. All they do is adjust the hormone levels in your body to match those of the sex you’re transitioning to. Testosterone level too high? Take androgen blockers to bring it down. Estrogen levels to low? Take the same estrogen pills they give to post-menopausal women.

Just by changing the hormone balance, all the following happen:

*Your skin changes. It gets softer, any remaining acne from adolescence disappears. Body hair thins and becomes thin and clear.

*Your entire musculature changes. If you have well-developed upper body muscles like pecs or biceps, these melt away. I suppose you could keep them up with constant vigorous use, but without this they rapidly diminish

*Your fat distribution changes. It’s like your body just flips a switch and says, “oh! I should store my fat on my bust and hips/butt instead of around my midriff.” Slowly, your body fat just starts moving to a female distribution.

*Mental changes. Orgasms change. Emotions don’t necessarily become more intense, but they become more visible. It’s like before I was viewing them through a curtain and now they’re clear as day. Consequently, it’s now a lot easier to get happy or to cry.

*Breast development. Very much a YMMV thing, but it triggers the same breast development as in any other girl. It’s not like the pure-fat manboobs a fat guy would get. They’re the regular female breasts with all the supportive and ductile tissue. Nipples size and shape dramatically changes. They’re not just for looks either. Eventually, my partner and I will have kids. I won’t be able to give birth, but I’m really looking forward to being able to nurse. :3 <3

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Attack of the Theocrats! How the Religious Right Harms Us All- —and What We Can Do About It

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Two new scholarly works out this spring take opposite sides on the question of whether Jesus was an actual historical figure or a purely mythical invention. Bart Ehrman’s Did Jesus Exist?: The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth came out a few weeks ago and argues for the historical Jesus. Richard Carrier’s Proving History: Bayes’s Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus comes out in just a couple of weeks.

And Ehrman and Carrier have already begun to tangle on the internet, with Carrier taking Ehrman to task over some egregious errors in an article on Jesus’s existence that he posted on The Huffington Post. James McGrath has since come to Ehrman’s defense. And Carrier has replied in detail. And McGrath has responded.

Also featured: David Silverman, Thunderf00t, Shelley Segal, ZOMGitsCriss, Ashley Paramore, DPR Jones, AaronRa, Sam Singleton, and Richard Dawkins.

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Dewitt gave the rousing talk below at the American Atheists convention:

Part of Recovering From Religion’s mission is to get formerly religious people in touch with therapists who will commit to thoroughly secular counseling which respects godless people’s disbeliefs instead of sending them back to church. If you are a therapist who atheists can trust to support them in their unbelief and cope with the social fallout from their loss of faith or lack of faith, please give your information to Recovering From Religion’s Therapist Project so they can add you to their lists.

Below the fold I am reposting “Atheist Preaching”, my review of the above talk from the day after I witnessed it live. Since my original posting of the article, Jerry was kind enough to write me enthusiastically and offer a gracious invitation to dialogue with him more about some of my potential reservations about his style which I considered and rose for discussion as part of my review. 

Atheist Preaching

Two of the most striking of many interesting speakers at the Reason Rally and the American Atheists convention were Nate Phelps and Jerry DeWitt, who were both affiliated with the organization Recovering From Religion which, among other things tries to get recent deconverts to therapists who won’t do what most therapists apparently do and tell them they need to “get right with their religion”. I found Phelps poignant primarily for the somber way he countered, contrasted with, and repudiated his father’s and his family’s hatreds. I found DeWitt interesting for the way that he embraced his Pentecostal idioms and put them to the service of a form of rousing atheist “preaching”.

Former Pentecostal preacher Jerry DeWitt only admitted to himself he was an atheist less than a year ago. Not knowing where to turn, he googled Dan Barker since he remembered that Dan had written a book about leaving the ministry upon becoming an atheist. Dan, who DeWitt describes as the closest thing to a real life Jesus, took the time to call DeWitt and eventually DeWitt became part of the Clergy Project. The Clergy Project is a community of closeted clergy who secretly no longer believe in their faith and who provide support for each other as they contemplate the difficult life and the possible career moves involved in coming clean to the world about their loss of religious beliefs. It would not be long until DeWitt went ahead and outed himself on Facebook as an atheist in October by posting a picture of himself with Richard Dawkins. There were several things that I either liked or found fascinating about DeWitt.

Firstly, it resonated deeply with me that he framed his deconversion as “identity suicide”. Although I am long over it now, that was the most initially traumatic thing about leaving Christianity for me. I had no idea who I was or could be without Christianity and I felt a serious loss in realizing that all the Christian accomplishments in which I had placed my pride and self-satisfaction were all not only a waste but downright counter-productive to the real advancement of truth.

Secondly, I appreciated DeWitt’s implicit apology for being so wrong for so many years. He stressed the deep ways that his religious identity bound him to the faith and the ways that deep family associations warped his sense of the world so profoundly from the start. It’s good for atheists to be reminded that religious people are usually accepting the only world they’ve ever known and are not always willfully obtuse.

Thirdly, I appreciated that he stressed that there were two constants motivating him in his faith and which eventually led him to his unbelief, and they were the love of truth and the love of people. He wanted desperately to stop people from going to hell if that was the truth of what would happen to them. And he spent 25 years trying to work out the truth about who goes to hell until he first theologized away all belief in hell and then finally reasoned away all belief in such theological delusions whatsoever.

In the post that I consider definitive of this blog I explained how it was my religiouscommitment to truth that made me an atheist. And, so, my turn to atheism really represented my last and most decisive religious act, which culminated years of religious ardor. I think this fact about my and many other apostates’ deconversions should be much more respected by the supposed defenders of religion who want to shut up atheists for daring to criticize religious beliefs. For us apostates, our religious experience is one of disillusionment and deconversion, but it is still a religiousexperience in many ways. Many of us could not leave devout Christianity except asdevout Christians. Anyone who wants to respect all religious beliefs and experiences, to be fair, should honor our apostate experiences and our moral rights to spread the word about them and to criticize our former communities, as much as any other religious experiences and as much as intra-faith debates.

And about a year before I deconverted, while still in college, a nihilistically doubting Christian friend talked about his feelings that if there were no God he would wake up in the morning one day and just not move as there would be no point to living. Though at the time I still believed relatively confidently and was trying through seemingly endless dialectic to persuade my friend to believe, I nonetheless speculated that even were I not to believe, that I would still clearly love what I already loved. I would still care about truth and care about people. There not being a God would make no difference to any love motivation.

So, in substance, I connected with DeWitt’s experience a whole lot. I too was a Christian because I loved truth and people and I too deconverted because of my commitment to those values. But what was, so to speak, a revelation and a puzzle was DeWitt’s style of presentation.

DeWitt essentially delivered a full-out atheistic sermon in the southern Pentecostal style.

It was a tale of being lost and found, mired in the muck and raised up. It was delivered with all the humor and emotional rhythms we have seen a million times. And it was fascinating. The crowd ate it up. The whole time, DeWitt made jokes aimed right at the irony of what he was doing in coopting such a highly specific form of speaking, one barely if ever replicated outside of a very specific kind of religious sermonizing, and using it to talk to atheists about the goodness of atheism. It was surreal and fascinating. The line between irony and seriousness was totally blurred. He got numerous huge rounds of applause for rousing lines. The room felt like it was on the verge of getting “Amens” numerous times and he even got a couple by the end, even as he joked about it the whole way. And I saw an atheist woman afterwards come up to him and express a great excitement and a warmed heart from getting a taste of this style of preaching she fondly remembered from days doing something with church music as a believer—but now fortunately without all the bogus Christianity involved.

DeWitt explained afterwards to some of us assembled that he realized that this style of speaking was simply a deep part of him. It is what he does. And he feels like to speak in some other style would actually be disingenuous to who he is. So, as he said in his “sermon”, the answer to the question about what he should do upon leaving the Christian ministry was to keep preaching, rather than to stop, and to keep doing “ministry”, rather than to stop. But now the preaching and the ministry would be on behalf of atheism.

So, what should we think about this? On one level at least, I found the experience really inspiring for the way it coopted powerful rhetorical tools forged in a religious context and satisfyingly turned it against the lies it is normally used to promulgate. It also allowed some of the parallels that deconversion narratives often share with conversion narratives to feel even more explicit in a really fascinating way.

Coincidentally, I had just that morning been explaining to Richard Wade on the train to the convention the ways that I saw recovering alcoholics’ narratives about their debauched drunken days and their eventual redemption as patterned on evangelical conversion stories. I also talked about how, in a strange way, I feel like my own deconversion from evangelicalism was similarly the fulfillment of a narrative planted in me by my evangelicalism itself. Evangelicals grow up with a strong pressure to have a good story about coming out of darkness and into the light. The idea of screwing up your youth and then having a life-altering transformation upon encountering Truth and Redemption is downright idealized. So even though a deconversion is scary and identity destroying and alienating and leaves devout believers with few forms available through which to understand their experience—nonetheless, this is also the kind of destruction of the old self and rebirth into a new self with a new beginning and a betrayal of the past that evangelicals so celebrate in conversions.

I think this at least partly explains why aesthetically, and on a certain emotional level, the entire drama of deconversion always appealed to me (after it had happened). As emotionally devastating and disorienting as it was on one level, there was a lot of romance to it all. I even have a sort of perverse love of the scene in Revenge of the Sithwhen Anakin converts to the “dark side” due to the Jedi’s inabilities to help him actuallycultivate his emotions and powers rather than try to force him to abandon them or limit them.

So, as Richard Wade watched this former evangelical go so far as to present the narrative of his turn to atheism in the precise idiom of a Pentecostal preacher, he turned to me and said, “You were right!” It made the dynamic so clear.

So—is this a good thing? I think in most ways it is, but I have a reservation. There is nothing wrong with a narrative in which “once I was blind but now I see”. This has always been a part of secularism. The Enlightenment’s emphasis on the “light of reason” was coopted, for example, by Descartes from St. Augustine. We need to reclaim some of the emotionally resonant metaphorical terrain that is part of our linguistic and cultural means of expressing certain kinds of experiences. Just because a certain emotionally powerful form of personal narrative was cultivated in evangelical circles does not mean it cannot have genuine parallels among apostates. We are not just ripping them off or somehow remaining Christians. But sometimes we do remain evangelicals, only now atheistic kinds. The apostate’s narrative often just has some basic formal similarities that make it true to co-opt similar categories to evangelicals when conceiving of and narrating what is happening within oneself.

But what about the Pentecostal delivery? I can imagine some atheists with what I like to call “religious PTSD” rejecting it out of hand for its “triggering” connotations that remind them of the shameless charlatans who pioneered, and up through today still, exploit those techniques to manipulate people into falsehoods and religiously based moral corruption. But the vast majority of the auditorium seemed happy to play along with DeWitt and to really enjoy the experiment. He got a hearty standing ovation from a good portion of the room when he was done and was one of the day’s leaders for applause lines for sure.

But the Pentecostal style might also simply look so well practiced and formulaic and manipulative that it is the equivalent of a shameless Hallmark card or a schmaltzy movie providing cheap emotional triggers using the easiest and least respectable methods in the book for pushing people’s buttons.

I think that if the emotional button pushing is a way to make an end-run around reason, that is corrupt and despicable. But if it is to package and deliver rational truths and moral ideals of rationalism to people in a way that will properly align their emotions to what is actually true and ethical, then ultimately I am not convinced there’s anything dishonest or manipulative about that. I am open to arguments though. It may be unseemly for example to ever pitch things to the lowest common denominator like that, but if the virtues of rationalism and atheism are going to spread all throughout society there probably have to be pitches which meet the lowest common denominatorwhere they are, emotionally and intellectually.

As I also explained to Richard the morning before seeing DeWitt, I have preachers’ rhetorical skills and yet for the most part I assiduously avoid them in my classrooms, and instead work with my students dialectically and put the stress on the development of their own reasoning skills. Occasionally, I will get on a roll about something I’m passionate about and reach back to make a rhetorically boosted little speech. But even then I hold back on going quite to preacher levels. And if I do, it’s tempered and not exploitative.

There are two reasons for my hesitation. One is purely technical. I once picked up the interesting advice that if you can do something exceptionally well you should do it only selectively, so as not to diminish its impact. In general you should only put as much rhetorical push into an idea as it needs and save your force for when it’s really needed, always calibrating force applied precisely to what is necessary at every level.

But the more morally serious and germane reason I hesitate to go into preacher mode is that it can be downright anti-dialectical and counter-productive to cultivating an atmosphere of rationalism and habits of careful reasoning. Preaching, rather than just teaching or guiding through questions, runs the risk of inherently training and reinforcing the audience’s infamous preexisting susceptibilities to falling for passions and pretty words at the expense of rational thought. Even if you convince them of your point with your bluster and poetry, you do not train them in careful critical thinking in the process, and so you have not guaranteed they have learned to think for themselves, so much as to simply think like you. And you may have just contributed to their ever ongoing habituation throughout the culture in being led by irrationalistic appeals rather than rational ones. This is not just a pitfall of the parts of our movement that dance with religious forms but also the ones which dance with dubious political rhetorical tactics too.

I’m not sure if it is the case that the preacher’s style is always mutually exclusive with training in critical thinking. Clearly a major part of why it’s so dangerous in actual religions is because it is explicitly coupled with injunctions to just have faith and with countless dubious appeals to unjustified authorities. Can a rationalism which explicitly denounces such things be compatible with some fiery preaching? Can one preach successfully against authoritarianism and faith or is their an implicit bogus appeal to faith in the ungrounded authority of the speaker that is structurally there every time a teacher takes recourse to the tactics of the preacher?

Your Thoughts?

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Your Thoughts?

John Derbyshire, a regular contributor to National Review until now, wrote a piece about the talk that he allegedly has given his kids, in pieces over the years. He denies it is satire but rather calls it “social commentary”:

(9) A small cohort of blacks—in my experience, around five percent—is ferociously hostile to whites and will go to great lengths to inconvenience or harm us. A much larger cohort of blacks—around half—will go along passively if the five percent take leadership in some event. They will do this out of racial solidarity, the natural willingness of most human beings to be led, and a vague feeling that whites have it coming.

(10) Thus, while always attentive to the particular qualities of individuals, on the many occasions where you have nothing to guide you but knowledge of those mean differences, use statistical common sense:

(10a) Avoid concentrations of blacks not all known to you personally.

(10b)Stay out of heavily black neighborhoods.

(10c) If planning a trip to a beach or amusement park at some date, find out whether it is likely to be swamped with blacks on that date (neglect of that one got me the closest I have ever gotten to death by gunshot).

(10d) Do not attend events likely to draw a lot of blacks.

(10e) If you are at some public event at which the number of blacks suddenly swells, leave as quickly as possible.

(10f) Do not settle in a district or municipality run by black politicians.

(10g) Before voting for a black politician, scrutinize his/her character much more carefully than you would a white.

(10h) Do not act the Good Samaritan to blacks in apparent distress, e.g., on the highway.

(10i) If accosted by a strange black in the street, smile and say something polite but keep moving.

(11) The mean intelligence of blacks is much lower than for whites. The least intelligent ten percent of whites have IQs below 81; forty percent of blacks have IQs that low. Only one black in six is more intelligent than the average white; five whites out of six are more intelligent than the average black. These differences show in every testof general cognitive ability that anyone, of any race or nationality, has yet been able to devise. They are reflected in countless everyday situations. “Life is an IQ test.”

(12) There is a magnifying effect here, too, caused by affirmative action. In a pure meritocracy there would be very low proportions of blacks in cognitively demanding jobs. Because of affirmative action, the proportions are higher. In government work, they are very high. Thus, in those encounters with strangers that involve cognitive engagement, ceteris paribus the black stranger will be less intelligent than the white. In such encounters, therefore—for example, at a government office—you will, on average, be dealt with more competently by a white than by a black. If that hostility-based magnifying effect (paragraph is also in play, you will be dealt with more politely, too. “The DMV lady“ is a statistical truth, not a myth.

(13) In that pool of forty million, there are nonetheless many intelligent and well-socialized blacks. (I’ll use IWSB as an ad hoc abbreviation.) You should consciously seek opportunities to make friends with IWSBs. In addition to the ordinary pleasures of friendship, you will gain an amulet against potentially career-destroying accusations of prejudice.

(14) Be aware, however, that there is an issue of supply and demand here. Demand comes from organizations and businesses keen to display racial propriety by employing IWSBs, especially in positions at the interface with the general public—corporate sales reps, TV news presenters, press officers for government agencies, etc.—with corresponding depletion in less visible positions. There is also strong private demand from middle- and upper-class whites for personal bonds with IWSBs, for reasons given in the previous paragraph and also (next paragraph) as status markers.

(15) Unfortunately the demand is greater than the supply, so IWSBs are something of a luxury good, like antique furniture or corporate jets: boasted of by upper-class whites and wealthy organizations, coveted by the less prosperous. To be an IWSB in present-day US society is a height of felicity rarely before attained by any group of human beings in history. Try to curb your envy: it will be taken as prejudice (see paragraph 13).

Read the first half here.

It’s rare you see this kind of racism admitted this explicitly by a mainstream writer. It’s quite instructive about what so often lies beneath. A brief scan of the comments shows the racists are out in full force there too.

Your Thoughts?

Flynn begins by considering the function of collective ritual in religious congregations. He notes that such practices (although he is unhelpfully unspecific regarding which ones, only vaguely mentioning “touching, swaying, singing, and the rest”) “promote physical responses such as endorphin release, suffusing participants with a sense of well-being and, coincidentally, a heightened pain threshold. They create a feeling of solidarity and personal closeness—a sense that together the community can accomplish great things.” These might seem in-themselves good reasons to engage in ritual collective practice. However, he then offers a quote from Alan Greenspan to explain (explain away?) such benefits: they are examples of “irrational exuberance”. Ritual may be effective, Flynn avers, but its effectiveness is built on a lie: the community isn’t really that close, the people’s circumstances don’t truly justify their sense of well-being, and the local solidarity created by ritual is purchased at the expense of the global solidarity humanists seek in any case. We should fling aside such well-worn crutches, Flynn argues, and look reality squarely in the face. Case closed.

Two things are remarkable to this rationalist about the case offered here: first, Flynn begins and ends by examining “the function [ritual] serves in religious congregations”, without considering the functions ritual serves in any nonreligious settings; and second that no evidence or reasons are presented to accept Flynn’s view that the sense of wellbeing and solidarity created by collective ritual are in fact false.

The first problem is damning because there is no reason to believe that ritual serves precisely the same purposes in secular settings as it does in religious settings. If one of our strongest criticisms of religion is that it is based on demonstrably false beliefs then, obviously, rituals used in such settings to reinforce such beliefs will be objectionable. But consider the graduation ceremony: can we so clearly dismiss such a ritual practice on the same basis? Or might we recognize that the rituals associated with graduation actually point to something true and valuable, and therefore function in a way which is significantly different to religious ritual? More on this below.

The second problem is more damaging: Flynn simply asserts that the positive physical, psychological and social effects of ritual have a false foundation and, in so doing, assumes what he set out to prove (that collective ritual practice erodes rationality). But it seems obvious that this needn’t, in principle, be the case. Collective ritual could instead reveal to the participants the solidarity that truly does exist between them, for example (such as when sports teams use rituals developed from previous experience playing together to remind themselves of past victories). It could focus our mind on reasons for a sense of wellbeing that we tend to overlook. Ritual could, in helping engender a sense of solidarity and wellbeing, actually generate the very grounds for bonhomie that Flynn calls (without justification) “ungrounded”: it makes perfect sense to reply, in response to the question “Why is your community so close and happy?”, “Because we engage in regular collective rituals which make us so!” So there are many other ways of viewing ritual which do not succumb to Flynn’s critique, and he gives us no reason to prefer his view.

Further, Flynn’s assumption that the solidarity ritual might promote works against efforts to develop a more global sense of solidarity with humanity is flawed. As Kwame Anthony Appiah notes in Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, it could well be that global solidarity must begin at home, close relationships with our own relatives and tribes providing the security to reach out to other people. In order to learn to love the world, we must first learn to love our mother.

Read More.

I’ve also written some things on the pros and cons of rituals in my posts, Sex and Spirituality, The Dangers of Religion Itself, and Answering Greta: My Goals as an Atheist Writer. Several months ago on Camels With Hammers Eric Steinhart explored potential uses of numerous Wiccan symbols and rituals for atheists. A full list of those blog posts can be found at the end of his post introducing the series.

Your Thoughts?

WASHINGTON — A Wisconsin law that made it easier for victims of wage discrimination to have their day in court was repealed on Thursday, after Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) quietly signed the bill.

The 2009 Equal Pay Enforcement Act was meant to deter employers from discriminating against certain groups by giving workers more avenues via which to press charges. Among other provisions, it allows individuals to plead their cases in the less costly, more accessible state circuit court system, rather than just in federal court.

In November, the state Senate approved SB 202, which rolled back this provision. On February, the Assembly did the same. Both were party-line votes in Republican-controlled chambers.

SB 202 was sent to Walker on March 29. He had, according to the state constitution, six days to act on the bill. The deadline was 5:00 p.m. on Thursday. The governor quietly signed the bill into law on Thursday, according to the Legislative Reference Bureau, and it is now called Act 219.

I’m sure if asked whether they support such measures, Mitt Romney and all other Republican candidates will say, “This is just a distraction! This is the liberal media trying to change the subject from what really matters! Not bodily self-determination! Not equal pay! What women want are jobs! Not to be paid for them!”

Your Thoughts?

(via Boing Boing.)

If you’re anything like me, after watching that, this is running through your head:

Relatedly, my mom bought me The Muppets (which was awesome) for Easter. So I should probably re-mention that I love my mom too.

Let me close with a troubling conversation I had the other night which impressed upon me the need to talk about the muppets more on my blog. It began when some 17 year olds overheard the muppets while I was watching them on the bus home from New Jersey the other night. It speaks for itself.

17 year old girl: What are you watching?
Me: The Muppets.
17 year old girl: What’s that?
Me: ?!?!?!
Other 17 year old to her: Are you an American?!?!
Other 17 year old to her: Are you a communist?!?!

Your Thoughts? (Do you think she’s a communist? If not, then WTF?)

Finally, the song I want played at my funeral:

What’s so wrong with this? As Terry Munger puts it on my Facebook page, “It is such a huge problem to treat animals as commodities rather than as living creatures that have been brought into someone’s life and home. It’s not ethical or acceptable to promote a message like this in order to spread dogma, period.” And Adrian Allen writes, “More than tasteless. Just shows that some of them are so obsessed that they have no respect for anything but Jebus.”

Prompted by atheist disgust and contempt, Kevin Childs, the church’s pastor, gave an apology which missed half of the point and managed to unwittingly insult atheists specifically while he was at it:

The question I have faced the most has been this: “Any regrets?  Would you do it again?” And I have quickly responded with “YES!”

Now, frankly, I’m not so sure. Not because I don’t believe in the message we wanted to send out. Not because our motives were wrong. And not because I’m shrinking or caving in because of harsh criticism. But if MUCH of the criticism is coming from the very people my own heart longs to reach, THAT stops me in my tracks. I could pretend otherwise. I could stick my jaw out, think up some zinger come-backs, and pretend I’m “earnestly contending for the faith.”

Listen, if fussy over-churched little Pharisees slam us, I honestly could not care less. If their unbelieving neighbors say that we’ve pushed them FURTHER from faith, that will keep me up at night. If our attempt at edgy irreverent outreach cast our church and Christianity in a bad light, blame me. Just me. And I apologize. If you actually did have a small child get traumatized by what you received in the mail from us, please believe that was absolutely not our intent, and I personally apologize for that too.

I hope those don’t sound like the “if you’re offended, I’m sorry you’re offended” non-apologies that don’t impress me either.

Martin Wagner scratches his head:

Apparently, Childs is surprised and disappointed at the criticisms he’s getting, not from his congregation (whom he dismisses, strangely, as “fussy over-churched little Pharisees” — seriously, this guy’s on douche overload), but from atheists.

So, Kevin, what you’re saying is that you really intended your card as an outreach to atheists? Because somewhere in that cracked clay pot you call a brain pan, you got the idea that we’re such disgraceful, immature, heartless and morally bankrupt people that we would look at an image making a joke of animal cruelty and totally go “LOL! Dude, I used to think religion was bullshit. But this church looks like the fucking bomb! Look at that little bunny’s guts! LMAO! I gotta go to this church now. Maybe if I get lucky the pastor will sodomize a couple of kids and put a kitten in a microwave!”

I mean, really?

Look, dude. You want to reach out to us? Fine. Here’s a protip. We like things likearguments, and evidence, and discussion, and rational discourse. We’re not a bunch of overgrown frat boys lighting farts and doing our best to extend our arrested adolescence into our fifties. (Can you actually light a fart, by the way?)

I admit, the last part is where Martin’s atheism does make him ignorant. Had he grown up in youth group like I did he would have learned that you can actually light a fart. Not that I had any interest in learning this myself. But it was demonstrated to me several times at a Christian youth conference.

Your Thoughts?

Let alone ‘Western feminism’, I had no idea about ‘Eastern feminism’. Without any familiarity with these concepts, I have since childhood questioned a lot of diktat, advice and proscriptions from the family and from society at large. When I, unlike my brothers, wasn’t allowed to play outside; when I was called ‘impure’ during my menstrual periods; or when I was told I had grown up and must cover myself  in a black burqa if I wanted to step out, I questioned, I didn’t give in readily.

When strange boys would hurl abuses at me, snatch my scarf or pinch my breasts as I walked by, I protested. I couldn’t stomach it when I saw husbands beating their wives, young mothers weeping in anxiety and fear of being divorced after  having given birth to a female baby. Upon observing the shame on the faces of raped women, I felt their pain acutely; I broke down after hearing about women being trafficked from city to city, from one country to another in order to be forced into sexual slavery. No logic, no intellect could make me accept the torture of women by the men, the society, the state. But no one witnessed my pain, my tears, the non-acquiescence, the non-acceptance, the speechlessness, the inability to tolerate, the screams – that is, until I started writing.

The society that I grew up in engendered questions in the minds of many. They were forced to accept the answers given by the leaders of the patriarchy. I didn’t give in to that coercion. No one taught me to be disobedient. I didn’t learn defiance from a book. It is not necessary to read thick and heavy books to be aware; one just needs eyes to observe. No one helps build courage either. In order to demand rights for women, one doesn’t need to internalize  Betty Friedan or Gloria Steinem; one’s own awareness is often good enough.

Read More.

Your Thoughts?

Her credentials?

Taslima Nasreen, an award-wining writer, secular humanist and human rights activist, is known for her powerful writings on women oppression and unflinching criticism of religion, despite forced exile and multiple fatwas calling for her death. In India, Bangladesh and abroad, Nasreen’s fiction, nonfiction, poetry and memoir have topped the best-seller’s list. Taslima Nasreen was born in Mymensingh in Bangladesh in 1962. She started writing from the age of 13 and was acclaimed as a major writer in Bangladesh in her late 20s. Her writings also won the hearts of people across the border and she landed with the prestigious literary award Ananda Purashkar in 1992 and 2000. Taslima won The Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought from the European Parliament in 1994. She received the Kurt Tucholsky Award from Swedish PEN and the Simone de Beauvoir Award and Human Rights Award from Government of France. She got the UNESCO Madanjeet Singh prize for Promotion of the Tolerance and Non-violence in 2005. Bestowed with honorary doctorates from Gent University and UCL in Belgium, and American University of Paris and Paris Diderot University in France, she has addressed gatherings in major venues of the world like the European Parliament, National Assembly of France, Universities of Sorbonne, Oxford, Harvard, Yale, etc. She got fellowships as a research scholar of Harvard and New York Universities. And she was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow in the USA in 2009. Taslima has written 35 books, which includes poetry, essays, novels and autobiography series. Her works have been translated in twenty Indian and European languages.Some of her books are banned in Bangladesh. And she has been banned, blacklisted and banished from Bengal, both from Bangladesh and West Bengal part of India. She has been living in exile for more than 17 years.

Her blog is No Country For Women, go there and welcome her!

Your Thoughts?

And unfortunately dogmatic, faith-based religions actively inculcate and explicitly encourage numerous intellectually inhibiting irrational and anti-rational habits of thought and practice. They deliberately teach people to believe transparent falsehoods on irrational grounds and to embrace numerous normal cognitive errors as truth-conducive and virtuous. Some people of course learn to think with a fair degree of creativity and logical consistency within the ultimately stifling boundaries of their faith. And of course outside of matters deliberately distorted for them by their faith, many believers are fine thinkers. But the effects of faith traditions on too many people’s abilities to think clearly about philosophy, ethics, politics, or science is too much for me to take passively. I want to argue on behalf of better understandings of science, philosophy, and critical thinking. I especially want people’s philosophies, ethics, and politics to be shaped by reason rather than unwarranted deference to the frequently childish, outdated, regressive, heteronomous and/or stagnant traditionalism of religious faiths.

Now, in reply to this desire of mine alone (and not to any specific failures to be civil or fair to believers) people accuse me (I think almost offensively falsely) of being self-righteous, rude, presumptuous, intrusive, moralistic, illiberal, pushy, imposing, and/or arrogant. In short, evangelical atheists like me are accused of being just as bad as religious proselytizers who try to shove their religious beliefs down people’s throats. No discriminations are made between we evangelical atheists who try to reason with others based on philosophy and science on the one hand and those religious proselytizers who try to emotionally harangue and manipulate people into believing things that reason alone could never persuade them of.

But it is different to seek to have rational debate with someone than to restort to threats of eternal torment, emotionally frenzied worship services, programs that exploit the vulnerabilities of the poor, addicted, or otherwise disenfranchised, arbitrary appeals to authorities that unwarrantedly claim absoluteness, disingenuously formed friendships, and the concentrated brainwashing of children (sometimes even other people’s children whose parents are of a different religion) all in order to win converts at whatever cost.

Now some religious proselytizers, of course, may be more committed to rational restraint and try to only win converts in ways that respect autonomy and reason. And some atheists on at least some occasions can be excessively obnoxious and rude and otherwise intemperate when dealing with believers. But at least in principle, evangelical atheists are explicitly committed to rationalism and science, whereas, in principle religious proselytizers are typically concerned with winning converts at nearly any cost, PERIOD  Even if they won’t confess to this, their behaviors bear out that uniquely amazing shamelessness that the illusion of God’s permission commandment to save anyone they can gives them.

But, I digress. On to my question. The other major reasons we are told not to try to dissuade others of their beliefs (besides the concern trolling lament that it would just be futile anyway) is that if religious people are happy as they are, then that’s simply their business and it’s rude and presumptuous to try to change them. And since people’s religions are often deeply incorporated into their sense of identity, it is seen as disrespectful, even to the point of being a violation of their core being to treat their beliefs as needing changing. It’s tantamount to saying that their whole identity, their whole being as they are at their core must be destroyed and replaced. So, the argument goes, just as it is morally offensive and demeaning to ask gay people to change their sexuality, so it is also morally offensive and demeaning to ask religious people to abandon their beliefs.

Finally, in liberal countries it is common to think of politics as the only area where we should be concerned about others’ actions or beliefs. So there is a reflexive aversion to any thing that could be remotely perceived as meddling in people’s private moral lives against their will. I appreciate the sentiment behind that suspiciousness. We indeed need to be conscientiously cautious to avoid being pushy, harmful, judgmental moralists, but I also think that abdicating all rights and responsibilities to discuss and debate values with others is an irresponsibly dangerous form of cultural neglect that takes too little interest in our fellow humans’ well-being, evinces too little community solidarity, and eventually even risks costly political effects down the road. In short, political values are too steeped in social, cultural, and moral values for us to be complacent about all of the latter.

This is why I am not ashamed of the atheist movement’s interest in subjecting matters of belief and religious practice to critical moral scrutiny. And while I respect the fact that people’s identities are indeed often religiously constructed in ways that need to be partially respected, I do not think that it is rational for anyone (theist, atheist, or otherwise) to stop reexamining their beliefs or to demand their beliefs be put off limits from criticism simply because one is attached to those beliefs as a matter of identity or because those beliefs make one happy.

But what I want to do now is ask only a specific type of person a specific set of questions. I don’t want to hear from those who loathe or mistrust nearly all attempts to change others’ religious beliefs. I have tried to adequately represent your objections above, please listen to what the deconverted themselves have to say. I don’t want to hear from lifelong atheists or deconverts who were only ever nominally believers for whom leaving faith behind was a fairly painless or, even, imperceptible process. I don’t want to hear from current religious believers. I appreciate all of you as readers and hope you’ll read the comments below and provide Your Thoughts on all my other posts.

But I want to use this comments section specifically to survey you atheists who really did experience your religious beliefs as very important to your identities and/or your happiness. You were the very people that evangelical atheists are being told to leave alone. In very many cases you were at least partially influenced to deconvert by the explicit efforts of atheists to dissuade you of your beliefs. You are the “victims” of evangelical atheism.

So tell us all how devout you were. What are your bona fides as a true formerly devout believer? How did any anti-religious atheist media or friends actively influence your deconversion? How long ago did you convert? How do you feel about it now? Do you resent what they “did to you” or are you grateful? Is being an atheist better or worse than you expected? Are you happier or unhappier or equally happy as an atheist than you were as a believer? And to what extent do you attribute your increase, decrease, or stasis of happiness to your deconversion? Do you think you are a better, worse, or equally flourishing with respect to your virtues and other excellences, now that you have deconverted? Has any increased unhappiness caused by deconversion been compensated for with feelings of being stronger in virtues or with counterbalancing new happinesses?

And what do you think of evangelical atheism? And, as a former devout believer, if you are, by chance, yourself the type of evangelical atheist who wants to dissuade others, how do you feel about being chastised by non-believers for challenging religious beliefs and practices? What do you think evangelical atheists can learn about both respecting and dissuading believers from your own successful deconversion? What do you think lifelong atheists need to understand in particular about what it is like to be a believer having their beliefs challenged? What do you think is more important when a choice needs to be made, truth or happiness? If you are an evangelical atheist, what motivates you to want others to deconvert—concern that they have truth, happiness, or both? Would you think it worth it for someone to deconvert even if they were less happy afterwards? Are there any people you know (or types of people) whom you wish not to see deconvert because you fear it would be overall worse for them if they did?

For my own thoughts about how I feel as a deconvert when I am scolded for attacking religious beliefs, read Apostasy As A Religious Act (Or “Why A Camel Hammers The Idols Of Faith”).

Your Deconverted Thoughts?