Chris Stedman's Blog, page 10

The Burka Avenger, Superheroes, and Social Responsibility

Like many American boys, I was raised on superheroes. I knew about Batman, Spiderman, and the X-Men before I knew how to walk. Their god-like status captivated me for years—here were people sculpted and clothed like Greek marble whose every action connected to broad ideas about justice and equality. It’s one of the reasons I was brought back to comics a few years ago and filled a bookshelf with graphic novels.

There’s something deeply embarrassing about liking comic books, however, and it’s probably not the reason you’re thinking of. Our heroes have got to be white, they’ve got to be men, and they’ve got to be oozing heterosexuality from every pore not obscured by spandex—relics which correlate with power in our own society.

We saw this when we were outraged that Nightrunner, the Batman of Paris and just one member of an international team of Batmen-and-women, was revealed to be Muslim. We saw this when we were outraged that Miles Morales, Peter Parker’s successor as New York’s webslinger, was announced to be black and Latino. We saw this when we were outraged at rumors that Danny Glover might play a black Spiderman or that the next silver-screened Human Torch might be played by Michael B. Jordan. And we saw this when we were outraged when an alternate reality version of the Green Lantern was revealed to be gay. We saw this by how fans respond to any inclusion of a hero who differs from the straight white male standard.

These responses are not helped in the least by the words and actions of comic creators. DC comics has been consistently mistreating women characters in its mythos for years while employing shockingly few women, perhaps reinforcing its status as a ‘boys club.’ Women are used as props: this is most evident through the fact that male superheroes frequently have to ward off the advances of any number of mostly-naked women with proportions that defy physics (Batman has his pick of Catwoman and Talia al Ghul, while Luke’s descendent Cade Skywalker is irresistible to Deliah Blue and Darth Talon despite having a greasy mop, scraggly facial hair, and a Reddit account). Bizarrely, these women are seen as “empowered” and “confident” and “not at all products of sexually awkward man-children.”

These women are empowered (Image by Kate Beaton)

The industry response to these disparities has largely been characterized by a lack of concern and critical thought substituted with an abundance of hand-waving. Co-creator of the Kick Ass source material Mark Millar has referred to outrage over sexism in his media as “… meaningless. A tiny storm in a tea cup,” while remarking that such concerns “… don’t really [matter].” A recent panel discussion between industry giants Todd McFarlane, Len Wein and Gerry Conway expanded on these exclusionist ideas in full. McFarlane argued that objectifying women is OK because giving male superheroes perfect pecs is totally the same thing, Wein maintained that colorblindness is the best way to erode bias, and all three agreed that diversity within the medium would have to come at the expense of good storytelling. Conway noted that it wasn’t the responsibility for superhero comics to pave the way for a better society, but rather, “… the comics follow society.” This is exactly it: the genre replicates the values and social barriers we actually live with, serving as a mirror held up to our shortcomings. 1

In understanding the extremely toxic context the superhero medium finds itself in, it’s clear why criticisms that focus exclusively on Islam as especially misogynistic and socially harmful make me scoff. Who will save me from such ridiculous broad-brushing generalizations? Why, none other than the Burka Avenger!

Burka Avenger is a multimedia project consisting of a children’s cartoon, music album, and IOS game; the collective universe follows the exploits of Jiya, a Pakistani schoolteacher who augments martial arts with pens and books to thwart backwards-thinking politicians and hateful religious leaders. The cartoon features Urdu voice acting, and the first episode has been officially released with English subtitles on YouTube.

This character comes not just in the environment of the near-uniform second-class status women superheroes receive, but with the added context of the West’s suspicion and distaste for the burka.

The idea that the burka is an oppressive garment which subjugates women is not a new idea to atheism. Christopher “Women Aren’t Funny” Hitchens memorably praised the French burka ban as a step towards ending oppression against women, and this reasoning is the central line of thought behind FEMEN. Contrary to the opinion of many such firebrands, Muslim women, and those who have taken the time to respectfully engage with them, maintain that most who wear the burka do so autonomously.

As a Muslim superhero, Jiya has the opportunity to defy both the Western subjugation of women and the suspicion of the burka. She provides a beautiful visual metaphor for how Muslim women pursue justice through their faith. In donning the burka, Jiya is able to combat corrupt political and religious authority figures while advancing the values of equality and education; the fact that the burka is itself a religious garment clearly implies that these heroic actions are performed because of, not in spite of, her faith. In this way, Burka Avenger replicates a truth those of us interfaithers know all too well: Muslim women, hardly oppressed damsels in distress, are empowered women and crucial allies in combating religious extremism.

On their official website, the stated purpose of Burka Avenger is as follows:

The main goals of the Burka Avenger TV series are to make people laugh, to entertain and to send out positive social messages to the youth.

If the first episode can be any indication, mission accomplished.

Stephen Goeman is an atheist and Humanist. He just graduated from Tufts University, so all of his involvements are past-tense. He is the former President and Community Outreach Representative of the Tufts Freethought Society and also an Interfaith Youth Core alumnus.

Notes:

Of course, the industry is not ubiquitously hostile. Writers like Gail Simone have challenged the status quo by writing empowered minority characters, websites like ComicsAlliance have created socially conscious comic consumers, and public figures like Laura Hudson and Kate Leth have played public watchdog roles much like the atheist movement’s Skepchicks have. ↩

How Conferences Kill Critical Thought

 

In the last few days, voices upon voices have emerged raising accusations that some leaders in the atheist movement are perpetrators of sexual violence.  These assaults aren’t the product of just a few “bad apples,” and the fact that they have gone unheard of and unprosecuted until now isn’t a simple accident. That sexual violence runs rampant and unnoticed is a systemic problem, sanctioned by the structure of this movement itself. That structure: the (ironic) worship of our heroes.

I’ve been to several conventions put on by atheist and skeptic organizations over the four or so years that I’ve been a part of the political movement. As my views and understanding have drastically changed in those four years, so has my experience at these cons—I think it’s fair to say that I have grown consistently more cynical about my con-going experience.

Our movement, centered around critical thinking and challenging dogmatic authority, is grossly quick to defer to the interests and ideas of the powerful and subvert minority voices.  It seems that if a speaker has enough blogging clout, all it takes to get an applause break is to include a meme in their powerpoint and reiterate how atheists are smart, religion is dumb, and We are the future. Largely absent are discussions on issues such as how our movement should engage in social justice or even partner with other religious minorities. An underrepresentation of diversity views in these secular spaces have made me feel a bit ostracized in conference settings.

This problem is embedded in the structure of conferences, reflected in the mantra that certain speakers have more draw, therefore those speakers deserve that draw.  Atheist conventions in general (probably based on how conventions of any sort are typically run) relegate speakers either to one large space or one of several smaller spaces, putting the more powerful voices in the larger space to accommodate what they assume will be a bigger audience. But whether or not those sorts of speakers would draw that big a crowd, they’re still implicitly given the privilege of the big platform, which itself sends the message “my ideas are important, you want to see me.” Some people will go anyway, whether they know the speaker or not, whether they want to hear what they have to say or not, because in the end, they won’t want to miss the Important Ideas coming from the Big Important person.

Conference speakers, standing on a podium looking down at an applauding audience, are in an environment that social psychology holds clearly to be anything but conducive to critical thought. And when particular movement leaders occupy a sort of A-list elite, the ideas they speak into a microphone are more likely to go unchallenged by the riff-raff beneath them. This divide—between those who are ostensibly the “best” at atheistic critical thinking and those who are lesser—is as much a threat to intellectual integrity as is having the same sort of divide in a religious community.

I recently attended Secular Student Alliance conference in Columbus. Though this was a student conference where students were meant to share ideas with one another, headlining talks from prominent (nonstudent) bloggers and organization employees were largely double-booked with student talks. At one, the Atheist Community of Austin’s Matt Dillahunty admitted that he had nothing to offer on organizing debates (his talk was billed as a how-to-organize-debates-as-a-student-group), but instead shared what amounted to a BuzzFeed list of the common arguments against God’s existence. This talk essentially functioned as an opportunity for a popular blogger to perform in front of the student community, at the expense of members of that community sharing more tangible and practical ideas about actual problems facing student activists.

Later in the night Amanda Marcotte spoke on how atheism should align itself with feminism (a very fair and true point) to fight the religious right. As legitimate a topic as that is, the talk was even more out of place than Dillahunty’s, insofar as it barely touched on students at all. Again, a popular blogger performed. Thankfully, there were several questions in the audience that did address student concerns. “Should men be careful about stepping on women’s toes in feminism?” one student asked. Marcotte shrugged it off, saying yeah, we should be careful, but more than anything we should all fight religious misogyny. Applause.

Both of these speakers ignored student concerns, particularly concerns that are immensely relevant to, for example, a movement where men seem to be caring more and more about women’s issues, yet do so in a way that does step on women’s toes (earlier that day, I noticed one male student consistently interrupting and centering himself at the “Safe Space for Women” lunch discussion table). These speakers clearly weren’t asked, “Please address student concerns primarily in your talk, considering you are non-students entering a space that should be student-focused.” Quite the opposite: the nature of the conference legitimized these nonstudent voices and allowed them to speak without challenge. Students, some of whom paid the SSA so that they could attend and speak at the conference, who do the gritty work of organizing and came to share that knowledge with their peers, were relegated beneath the microphones of bloggers who already have immense platforms that they write from everyday.

Such a challenge would have been nice when some voices offered up particularly violent sentiments couched in friendly language (the most insidious kind of violence).  In the last talk on the first night of the conference, Todd Stiefel discussed the many virtues of Thomas Jefferson. Stiefel is not a historian; he really has no claim to a particularly insightful understanding of Jefferson’s philosophy. And so, we see the systemic problem out front. When slavery or racism or sexual violence are presented as parts of religious doctrine, we rightly hold them to be absolutely revolting. But Stiefel was on a platform, in a big room, with a big audience, and a big seal of approval by the conference where he was speaking, so he was entirely shielded from being held accountable for the fact that we’re propping up a figure who owned and raped slaves, with no mention of it whatsoever. Stiefel spoke on his honorable value system, and how he is a marker for our movement, and we are expected to temporarily ignore a particularly morally indefensible dimension of his character. No consideration was given to the experience of victims of sexual violence or racial violence in the audience, who could well have taken issue with the fact that we were revering a racist sexual assailant. Worshipping Jefferson in this way, subverting his moral failures to uphold some virtuous image of his good ideas, would without hesitation be denounced by the atheist community were it done in a religious context. Yet in a nonreligious conference room, it was given a standing ovation.

Furthermore, Stiefel offered up a quote that got several enthusiastic tweets during his Q&A: “If your identity is wrapped in fiction, it doesn’t deserve to be respected.” How nice. And how easily that could be interpreted as “Islam isn’t real, so if you are a Muslim, you don’t deserve respect,” particularly in our incredibly Islamophobic society (and see Richard Dawkins for more on the atheist movement’s Islamophobia problem). How easily that quote could be read to justify disrespect for an identity that experiences an immeasurable amount of violence in our society today. And how easily Stiefel was able to say it publicly, because there was no accountability for his statements whatsoever.

As we hear more and more of the heartbreaking stories about those who have been victims of sexual violence in our community, as we wonder how movement leaders could get away with something so horrible, it just becomes clearer and clearer: our movement loves its heroes. We love our big names. We love our popular bloggers, skeptical authors, and organization presidents. Unaccountability, intransparency, and corruption have split the atheist movement on class lines. Even if we say that we should always “question authority”, we still give them the privileges they don’t deserve. We still reserve the best for those with titles, for those with clout, for those with money.

For some reason, it’s okay for conferences to open a door for sexual violence, to make the word “student” synonymous with “secondary,” or to allow for someone on a platform to tell a crowd to disrespect minorities and to erase the moral revulsions of historical figures. This stems from a system where power isn’t challenged, largely out of a fear that the powerful will strike against us. Yet we easily forget that they already have, and will continue to until they’re checked.

Walker Bristol is a nontheist Quaker living in Somerville, Massachusetts. A rising senior at Tufts University reading religion and philosophy, he covers social activism and class inequality in the Tufts Daily and has organized in movements promoting religious diversity, sexual assault awareness and prevention, and worker’s rights. Formerly, he was the Communications Coordinator at Foundation Beyond Belief and  the president of the Tufts Freethought Society. He tweets at @WalkerBristol. 

 

More Than Just Human-ism

“Intersectionality” is social justice vocab that essentially refers to how all modes of oppression, how all types of injustice that we generally think of as distinct, share principles and share strife. At their root, all causes are intersectional in that they are the “powerful” exploiting the “non-powerful.” It is a reaffirmation, what should linger always in the mind of any activist, that pain takes many forms but is pain always, and that your compassion can always reach further than it currently does.

To be a vegan, to reject the use and support of the exploitation of animals (often in terms of dietary decisions, rejecting meat, dairy, and eggs), is to expand compassion beyond the human experience. Human society implicitly defines animals as sub-human, and considers the world dominance of humanity to be deserved, and therefore give us the privilege to exploit other species for our continued prosperity. We are all born into a continued narrative of human-centrism, and told constantly that we have earned what we are given. It’s a story that doesn’t sound unfamiliar  to other groups of privilege.

Vegans resist that narrative, holding that other species—which demonstrably feel pain, have emotions and consciousness and meaningful interactions and ideas—ought to be treated better, and that we should live out compassionate values by striving to only take what we need, and respect their sovereignty. Humans came to dominate the landscape in large part because they (despite being herbivores by evolutionary design) began to eat cooked meat to survive the Ice Age, and thus reproduced and spread further than our peer species as it ended. Human dominance today is a product of chance—we happened to be best adapted to the environment of the Ice Age, we emerged with the best chance for propagation. Yet, our culture teaches us that our human privilege is earned, that it is just for us to exploit other species for our continued dominance. It’s a story not unfamiliar to other groups of privilege.

With that in mind, I and some of the other vegan atheists I know, in this regard, challenge “humanism” as it stands. Compassion and criticality are immensely important values, but they can be taken much further than they often are—I feel that we should extend them across boundaries of (human-defined) species. Other animals feel, and interact and have emotional connections, and have unique experiences and abilities. I believe we should respect the experiences of all species.

We already tell our stories of how and why we strive towards a society pluralistic for humans, but let’s open the floor: why do we care about making society safe for all species, human and nonhuman? As always, tweet @NPSblog or email any of us (for me, walkerbristol@gmail.com). We’re always looking for new voices, and we’d love to hear the voices of those who see pluralism in ways we might not always expect.

Walker Bristol is a nontheist Quaker living in Somerville, Massachusetts. A rising senior at Tufts University reading religion and philosophy, he covers social activism and class inequality in the Tufts Daily and has worked in on-campus movements promoting religious diversity, sexual assault awareness and prevention, and worker’s rights. Formerly, he was the Communications Coordinator at Foundation Beyond Belief and  the president of the Tufts Freethought Society. He tweets at @WalkerBristol. 

 

Atheism is maturing, will Dawkins?

All the world's Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though.

— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) August 8, 2013

Right on cue, as I was about to publish my post yesterday about my frustrations with the atheist movement, I saw the above tweet by Richard Dawkins. 1 What bothered me about it wasn’t so much the feel of complete obliviousness, but how much like your standard everyday racist Dawkins and his defenders have been sounding. Replace “Muslims” with “black people” and you have the generic template for the propaganda white nationalists have used for decades: their crime rates are higher, education is lower, and the number of Nobel Prizes they have don’t even match a single University.

The defenses for these comments are predictable because I’ve heard this type of thing from Stormfront time and time and again: there’s nothing racist about just stating facts, blanket statements about immigrants I mean hip-hop I mean Islam aren’t racist because immigrants I mean hip-hop I mean Islam isn’t actually a race and if you think so maybe you’re the racist. 2

Something you can convert to is not a race. A statement of simple fact is not bigotry. And science by Muslims was great in the distant past.

— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) August 8, 2013

Of course, facts do not exist in vacuums and may obviously be racist. If you say that “a young black man is more likely to be a convict than a young white man,” and the next words out of your mouth aren’t “and this reflects poverty, systemic inequality, and a racist legal system” then you are racist. No amount of hiding behind “just stating facts” changes what facts you choose to state, in what context, and in what way.

There was a fantastic article published in the New Statesman this morning by Martin Robbins, 3 and it touches on these issues far better than I can:

When Dawkins talks about ‘Muslim’ Nobel prizes over the years, he is not simply criticising a religion; he is attacking a group of people in a fairly well defined geographical area, associated with a particular set of ethnicities. He contributes to racially-charged discourse through his choice of dubious facts, the exaggerated and inflammatory language he uses to describe them, and the context within which he presents them. In short, he is beginning to sound disturbingly like a member of the far right – many of his tweets wouldn’t look out of place on Stormfront. Whatever the motives behind it, one wonders how much further he can continue down this path before the tide of opinion turns firmly against him.

Dawkins remains a powerful force in atheism for the time being. Increasingly though, his public output resembles that of a man desperately grasping for attention and relevance in a maturing community. A community more interested in the positive expression of humanism and secularism than in watching a rich and privileged man punching down at people denied his opportunities in life. That, ultimately, is the tragedy of Richard Dawkins – a man who knows the definition of everything and the meaning of nothing.

It feels to me that so much of atheism has historically been this type of punching others down, but what’s so frustrating is how self-righteously it’s done. It’d be one thing if people would simply admit that they liked to call people stupid because it made them feel better about themselves, but it’s done under the guise of some lofty and noble secularist project. You can’t reason people out of what they didn’t reason themselves into, right? And mockery is an effective form of persuasion, right? So atheists make their memes, Facebook screencaps, and disparaging comments to put down people who believe something different. Atheists are just doing their part for secularism, all under the auspicious example of Richard Dawkins.

As I said yesterday, atheism is softening, and this strikes me largely as part of a maturation process. But moving forward, it’s worth keeping in mind that progress doesn’t tend to fall in the direction of pettiness. Movements won’t be praised for how often they make blanket statements of “just facts” about broad groups. Maturity recognizes how extremely easy it can be to rationalize our own cruelties and bigotry.

The CFI conference was so inspirational to me, exactly because I saw a movement dedicated to, as Robbins says, “a positive expression of humanism and secularism.” It’s that movement I want to be a part of. I would love to be able to include the passionate advocate  for science and evolution I was once so inspired by, but it’s difficult to move forward with someone so retrograde. 4

Vlad Chituc 5 is a Research Associate in a behavioral economics lab at Duke University. As an undergraduate at Yale, he was the president of the campus branch of the Secular Student Alliance, where he tried to be smarter about religion and drink PBR, only occasionally at the same time. He cares about morality and thinks philosophy is important. He has a pretty dope dog and says pretty dope a lot and is also someone that you can follow on twitter.

Notes:

Which I of course included as an example of how cringeworthy many mainstream atheist voices have become. ↩I’m not kidding Dawkins actually said that in his longer piece today. “If you think Islam is a race, you are a racist yourself.“ ↩And includes the line ‘“Islam isn’t a race,” is the “I’m not racist, but. . .” of the Atheist movement’ which made me so happy I think it freaked out my dog. ↩If you want to read more about the controversy, I suggest you read and Dawkins’s own response, which somehow manages to make things even worse. It’s funny how people only really seem interested in the fine-grained facets of race only after they’ve said something racist. It’s all just a social construct anyway! ↩Has been reading too much David Foster Wallace. ↩

So I’m probably not quitting atheism

 

Photo credit to Monica Harmsen

Followers of my Twitter feed may have noticed, through interpreting some occasionally abstract tweets, that I was at the Center for Inquiry’s Student Leadership Conference two weeks ago. Over a weekend, I sat in on and live-tweeted talks on philosophy, activism, policy work, engaging ex-muslims, and enacting social change. I put faces to Twitter feeds and Facebook profiles I’ve seen for some time, saw friends I haven’t seen in years, and met some fantastic and exciting people I was sad to leave come that Monday.

I haven’t been too active on the blog lately, and that’s been in large part because I’ve gone through a stressful and busy few weeks at work preparing to transition to a new lab. But to be honest, I’ve also just become frustrated with the culture that often surrounds atheism.

My tolerance wavers, but I’ve slowly realized that, as it stands, I don’t really want to be associated with the atheist movement. I can’t think of a recent lawsuit where I thought that American Atheists, for example, had demonstrated a solid grip on the establishment clause or the legal precedence surrounding it (the holocaust memorial controversy being an obvious example). I can’t remember the last time I was able to read more than a handful of Sam Harris’s or Richard Dawkin’s tweets without cringing just a little bit. And I can’t help but wish for many atheists to take a more balanced and thoughtful perspective on religion. 1 And this is all before considering all the horrific misogyny and harassment that’s just now receiving their due attention.

The movement can look pretty bad to many young atheists, particularly to people from the outside. So more and more I’ve been wondering whether I could spend my time somewhere more productive, where disagreements are handled more pleasantly. I’ve been preparing myself to just give up, quit atheism, and devote my time to cool research during the day and hanging out with my dog, reading more books, and drinking PBR in the evenings which, writing it out now, sounds more or less like heaven.

But I’m not so sure anymore, because I think a sea change is happening.

Four years ago, the Yale Humanists brought Greg Epstein to speak. At the time, most responses to his work seemed to simply question whether Humanism was too much like religion, whether we needed to organize around anything other than atheism, or whether atheists ought to even organize at all. The next year, at the 2010 CFI conference, interfaith work and engagement tactics 2 were hotly contested, with many people, myself included, on very different sides of these debates than we are now. 3 In the intervening years, I’ve seen James Croft go from a maligned fringe figure mocked in comment sections to an admired and passionate speaker in mainstream Humanist circles. I’ve seen a shift from questioning whether we need Humanist chaplains to expressing outrage at their exclusion. I’ve seen a lot of progress in what seems like a short time.

Just as religion has been softening, it seems like atheism has been softening, too. When I introduced myself at this year’s conference, I began by sheepishly apologizing for being the “squishy interfaith atheist type” but discovered throughout the weekend that not so many people opposed that position. Most people I talked to seemed largely supportive of Chris’s work, even those who identified as New Atheists. 4 Most everyone I remembered having a harder stance on religion in 2010 had a softer one now, and they either told me they were convinced by Chris’s work or had independently come to similar conclusions.

Fire-brandy accommodationist and an accommodating firebrand.                    Robby and I during our joint presentation.

My own presentation was on how best to engage in religious debate and criticism—an often heated topic, and it’s not too much of an exaggeration to say that positions like mine are rarely embraced, at least online—but there was relatively little push-back, and I was surprised by how well it was received. It’s not that people didn’t disagree, but those who did expressed it in a way that seemed more thoughtful and composed than some of the discussions in 2010 that occasionally lead to yelling and once even tears.

I don’t think I can overstate how encouraging and fun this conference was for me. Legitimate concerns about CFI’s management of recent controversies aside, the people on the ground are fantastic, and the conference was legitimately inspiring, helpful, and practical. But more personally, this was maybe the first time I’ve felt embraced by something vaguely representative of the broader atheist community, instead of derided and marginalized for the company I keep and positions I stake.

If the future of atheism is in the young leaders I met, laughed with, raged with, 5 stayed up until 6 AM to get diner food with, almost once or twice cried with, argued about philosophy with, and was appalled by AA’s and FFRF’s stance on the Holocaust memorial with, then that’s an atheism I want to be a part of. So for the time being, I’m still in. Thanks for sticking with me. 6

Night of the first day.

If you want to read more about the conference, here are some other excellent takes.

Vlad Chituc is a Research Associate in a behavioral economics lab at Duke University. As an undergraduate at Yale, he was the president of the campus branch of the Secular Student Alliance, where he tried to be smarter about religion and drink PBR, only occasionally at the same time. He cares about morality and thinks philosophy is important. He has a pretty dope dog and says pretty dope a lot and is also someone that you can follow on twitter.

Notes:

It’s always troubling when you realize that Michael Shermer and Lawrence Krauss are posturing on philosophical issues, while the Christians in a debate, Dinesh D’Souza and a Ian Hutchinson in this case, have a better thought-out take on science and religion. If you think I’m exaggerating, listen closely to Shermer’s argument and see if anything he says actually relates to science. ↩aka the confrontationalist/accommodationist debate, which I still think is a silly and false dichotomy. ↩Fun anecdote: Chris was among a few speakers on a panel, and I found myself largely disagreeing with him, actually. I was a jerk to him afterward and we somehow ended up friends, initiating events that lead to the eventual revision of my stance on religion and the start of my tenure blogging here. ↩I even convinced a few people to buy Chris’s book from the book table, which was doubly exciting. ↩I see you James Croft. ↩Also thanks to Robby Bensinger for the spirited and stimulating debate on the panel we were on. You’ve given me a lot to mull over and I’ll be writing about it soon. Thanks to Cody Hashman, whose idea I think it was to invite me. Thanks to Monica Harmsen for taking great photos all weekend. Thanks to the old friends I saw and new friends I made, and there are way too many to mention so I won’t even try, that talked with me and welcomed me over the weekend (particularly the ones with kind words after my talk and calming words before). Thanks to everyone who put up with my occasionally loud and debaucherous drinking, and everyone who picked up my mannerisms which seemed weirdly contagious. I’m to blame if you see anyone excessively saying “bruh” or “pretty dope” or “could you maybe just not?” And of course a huge thanks to CFI, especially Debbie Goddard, for hosting the conference with such a fantastic array of speakers and some delicious vegan food. ↩

Accommodationism, Sean Carroll, and the scope of science and skepticism

I’ve written before that I don’t like the term “accommodationist,” but, putting unflattering connotations aside, most usages seem to apply to me. I think that, compelling state interests not withstanding, we ought to accommodate citizen’s religious beliefs—for example, by not forcing jewish postal workers to deliver mail on the Sabbath. I also think that evolution does not preclude or disprove the existence of God—theistic evolution doesn’t conflict with naturalistic evolution in any substantive empirical way, so science ought to be more or less agnostic on the issue. And I draw my party lines differently in atheist-theist debates, generally arguing that dogmatism, not religion, is worth criticizing, and that pluralism, secularism, and liberalism in general (not atheism per se) are worth promoting. As such, I follow the generally supported atheist practice of criticizing positions I think are harmful or wrong.

All of this would brand me an “accommodationist” by many atheists, who treat it as a four-letter word. I’ve more or less just come to accept that this is the case, and I spend my time stressing about more important things.

I bring this all up because the philosopher Sean Carroll has a generally insightful post on his blog about the nature of science, and there’s a relevant portion that I think is worth drawing attention to.

I’ve talked about the supernatural issue a couple of times before. Short version: if a so-called supernatural phenomenon has strictly no effect on anything we can observe about the world, then indeed it is not subject to scientific investigation. It’s also completely irrelevant, of course, so who cares? If it does have an effect, than of course science can investigate it, within the above scheme. Why not? Science does not presume the world is natural; most scientists have concluded that the world is natural because that’s the best explanation for what we observe. If you are ever confused about what “science” has to say about something, just ask yourself what actual scientists would do. If real scientists were faced with a purportedly supernatural phenomenon, they wouldn’t just shrug their shoulders because it wasn’t part of their definition of science. They would investigate it and try to come up with the best possible explanation.

I selected this quote for a few reasons (but seriously read the whole post): first, it points out that science doesn’t actually assume the world is natural. Second, as I’ve argued before, a responsible understanding of science doesn’t make evolution incompatible with the existence of God—an idea that many atheists seem to want written into textbooks. And third, because it has some bearing on debates that have been going around skeptical circles about what the appropriate scope of skepticism is.

I like the distinction that Carroll makes about supernatural claims—some have natural effects and some don’t. When skeptics who want to say “skepticism entails atheism” or “skeptics who believe in God are compartmentalizing their religious belief” talk about the scope of skepticism, they often cite supernatural claims of the former kind (ghosts, ESP, miracles) as a way of arguing against claims of the latter kind (theistic evolution, God in general, transsubstantiation). Skepticism addresses ghosts, they argue, so why treat religion as something special?

But of course it’s not quite so simple. Most modern, liberal claims about religion actually seem to make no empirical predictions whatsoever. There’s no scientific way to test them. I’d argue that most religious claims that “accommodationists” are criticized for saying are “off-limits” are just claims that are empirically identical to the natural world. These are the types of claims Sean Carroll says “who cares?” about, and I agree.

Many people like to treat this type of argument as if it reveals some sort of intellectual cowardice—as if skeptics and atheists like me just want to keep religion off-limits solely for political reasons, or because we’re afraid of offending our religious friends. But no one would say “we ought not to hold this claim about this miracle up to skepticism,” or “skeptics ought not touch intelligent design, because that’s a religious claim.” We wouldn’t say that because those are the types of claims that science and skepticism address—claims that have natural and empirical consequences.

This is all just very much to say that I’ve more or less just accepted that I’m going to be branded an accommodationist. But if that’s going to be the case, then I’m going to object really strongly to the idea that accommodationism is political cowardice stemming from anything other than principled and reasoned arguments. I’m sure the atheists who say “science disproves religion” or “evolution and god are incompatible” have reasons for their beliefs; I do, too. So let’s weigh those reasons on their merits, not on uncharitable readings of their motivations.

Vlad Chituc is a lab manager and research assistant in a social neuroscience lab at Duke University. As an undergraduate at Yale, he was the president of the campus branch of the Secular Student Alliance, where he tried to be smarter about religion and drink PBR, only occasionally at the same time. He cares about morality and thinks philosophy is important. He is also someone that you can follow on twitter.

Faith Line Protestants Relaunch!

The interfaith movement seeks to encompass people of all spiritual paths: indeed, atheists, but those too whose faith is rooted in conversion. Faith Line Protestants is an online journal of evangelical Christians involved in interfaith work and interesting in better integrating the evangelical and pluralistic communities. Two and a half years since its inception, and after being on hiatus since October, FLP has returned with several new contributors to continue the discussion on modern evangelism and a pluralistic society.

Amber Hacker, the Alumni Relations Coordinator at the IFYC and one of the new SLP contributing authors, wrote on the tension between the centrality of proselytization to the evangelical worldview and the importance of mutual acceptance and respect in interfaith communities. “There are many places where proselytizing is appropriate, but interfaith work is not one of them,” she writes. “Being involved in interfaith service is bringing people of different religious and nonreligious backgrounds together to be partners in making the world a better place.” She further explains that the call to service–another dimension of the Christian identity–is an element central to the evangelical spirituality that is more important to engage in interfaith circles. Read her entire piece on the FLP blog.

Although of course conversion isn’t necessarily central to the atheist or humanist identity, it often does manifest, in the form of a drive towards spirited debate. And though the fact that interfaith efforts discourage that sort of engagement can be disconcerting, many atheists involved in pluralistic service and dialogue have taken a stance not dissimilar from Hacker’s: interfaith work is a place for our commitment to service and mutual understanding should take the fore, not our desire to strengthen our numbers or seek self-validation. We admit that we don’t know everything, and that we can be wrong–humbly listening to others, while working towards a world safer for diversity and for humanity, is perhaps the most enlightening experience we can have.

Follow Faith Line Protestants at www.faithlineprotestants.org or on Twitter @flprotestants.

Walker Bristol is a nontheist Quaker living in Somerville, Massachusetts. A rising senior at Tufts University reading religion and philosophy, he covers social activism and class inequality in the Tufts Daily and has worked in on-campus movements promoting religious diversity, sexual assault awareness and prevention, and worker’s rights. Formerly, he was the Communications Coordinator at Foundation Beyond Belief and  the president of the Tufts Freethought Society. He tweets at @WalkerBristol. 

In The Washington Post: Prayer and “True Nonbelief”

Who or what do atheists pray to? To many, the question doesn’t make sense—real atheists don’t pray.

Except that many atheists do. The Washington Post wrote this morning about one atheist in particular who followed a rigorous prayer schedule to help him through a 12-step program. That same article sites a Pew Research Center report which found that 17% of atheists and 42% of “nones” pray at least once a month.

Friend of the blog Paul Fidalgo is interviewed in the article (and so am I), and he has the following to say about atheists taking part in prayer:

Atheists deny religion’s claim of a supernatural god but are starting to look more closely at the “very real effect” that practices such as going to church, prayer and observance of a Sabbath have on the lives of the religious, said Paul Fidalgo, a spokesman for the secular advocacy group the Center for Inquiry. “That’s a big hole in atheist life,” he said. “Some atheists are saying, ‘Let’s fill it.’ Others are saying, ‘Let’s not.’ ”

Before I turn to the “let’s not” crowd, I think it’s interesting to turn to why atheists might pray and what there is to get out of it. I think prayer shares a lot of the aspects of something like mindfulness practice—something with well-supported empirical benefits. It’s true that praying might not raise the dead or heal a sick friend, but it very well might improve your concentration and GRE scores, or help you with a 12-step program. 1 It’s those effects that a certain kind of practice—mindful and deliberate reflection about your life, your goals, your failures, your strengths, and so on—might bring about. It wouldn’t necessarily be wrong to capture those things in prayer.

On the topic of prayer and spirituality, I talked a little bit about what the secular alternatives of these words meant to me (as well as my own somewhat failed attempts at them):

Vlad Chituc, a 23-year-old manager of a social neuroscience lab at Duke University, said he started college thinking religion was a negative thing but now wants its benefits. He’s working to start a regular meditation practice and seeks out places where he can pick up “that energy you feel when you’re in sync with a group of people,” such as at dance parties.

He wrote in an e-mail that he was open to the word “spirituality,” which “really is just kind of shorthand for feeling a deeper connection to something greater than yourself.”

But what would an atheist see as “greater” than self?

“Maybe ‘greater’ is a loaded term,” he said. “Finding meaning in something other than yourself . . . not something supernatural.”

I’m not the only atheist to be trying to salvage secular meanings for the term spiritual (Sam Harris has been a vocal proponent), but I think I might be the first to relate it explicitly to partying. Though I used it simply as a fun example, it can apply to any type of experience or meeting where you feel a connection to a larger group of people, 2 be it a concert, sports game, book club, debate society, secular congregation, or whatever else. 3 We’re social primates and these things seem to satisfy us in a really fundamental way.

I feel like a broken record saying again and again that we shouldn’t abandon every facet of religion simply because their metaphysics are false. Which is why I find claims about what “real atheists” or “true nonbelievers” do—the answer obviously implied to be something like “reject everything about religion” or you’re a Bad Atheist—to be shallow and lazy. You can skim the comments of the article and see at least a half-dozen (at the time of writing) people arguing that the article doesn’t actually describe atheism.

I’m always skeptical of people talking about what atheism really is or entails. A common argument I hear is that atheism entails feminism, or gay rights, or rejecting faith, or any other number of potentially and totally reasonable things that may very well be supported by atheism. But that’s a different thing entirely. For example, atheism supports naturalism but hardly entails it. Same with feminism and gay rights or whatever else. 4 It may very well be the case that common arguments against these things are often religious, and therefore unpersuasive once we come to atheism. That the opposite is entailed by atheism, though, only follows if religious arguments are the only arguments for these things. This seems very rarely, if ever, the case.

Would a real atheist pray? To answer that, we need to figure out if the only reasons to pray are religious and, as I’ve cited above, that’s almost certainly not the case. This would be beside the point if higher profile authors, bloggers, and speakers weren’t making exactly these sorts of bad arguments, though. So I’d advocate being skeptical anytime anyone talks about what atheism really does or doesn’t do, is or isn’t, entails or doesn’t, and so on. It’s likely little more than posturing.

Vlad Chituc is a lab manager and research assistant in a social neuroscience lab at Duke University. As an undergraduate at Yale, he was the president of the campus branch of the Secular Student Alliance, where he tried to be smarter about religion and drink PBR, only occasionally at the same time. He cares about morality and thinks philosophy is important. He is also someone that you can follow on twitter.

Notes:

It’s worth noting I’d prefer 12-step programs, particularly state mandated one, take on more secular language and practices. ↩If I can be pretentious and cite Durkheim’s concept of “collective effervescence“ ↩Feel free to be more creative than I am. ↩I say this as a feminist who cares a lot about gay rights but thinks that naturalism is conceivably wrong. ↩

Speaking at NYC’s First Sunday Assembly

I’m very excited to announce that on Sunday, June 30th, I’ll be the guest speaker for New York City’s first ever Sunday Assembly.

At this point you very well may be asking yourself: What exactly is a Sunday Assembly? Per a recent article in the NY Daily News:

After six months of packed houses at monthly services in London, an atheist congregation called The Sunday Assembly is bringing its movement to the U.S.

The co-founders [comedians Sanderson Jones and Pippa Evans] will soon embark on a cross-country tour to decide which cities might support their own permanent Sunday Assembly franchise, and the first test run will be held in a Manhattan dive bar.

That’s no typo—they’re essentially an “atheist church,” and they’ve become quite the phenomenon in the U.K. and other parts of the world. (For more on what they do, check out this profile of their efforts from The Guardian). Now, they’re coming to the U.S. to host a service at Tobacco Road in NYC on Sunday, June 30th at 12:30 PM.

Given that this event is happening the weekend of NYC’s LGBT Pride, and that some in attendance may be “coming out” as an atheist, agnostic, or nonreligious person for the first time, the service’s theme will be on coming out. As the guest speaker I’ll be sharing some of my story as a former Evangelical Christian who has come out as both a queer person and an atheist. And as I write about in Faitheist, I’ll also discuss what might happen if we all “came out” to one another—religious and nonreligious alike—and built the kinds of relationships that would enable us to work together to improve the world, challenging anti-atheist bias and other forms of intolerance in the process.

If you’d like to attend the first ever Sunday Assembly in the U.S., check out (and RSVP at) their Facebook event. If you want to get involved in organizing future NYC Sunday Assembly events, click here. If you can’t get to NYC, you may still be in luck: co-founder Sanderson Jones is also visiting Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and Chicago in the next week to meet with people interested in starting up Sunday Assembly groups. Click here to learn more about his trip. Finally, if you want to contact Sunday Assembly for any reason, click here!

Oh, and click here to check out the rest of my summer speaking schedule (with more events still to be announced).

Hope to see you soon in NYC for “atheist church”!

This post originally appeared on faitheistbook.com.

More Humanist Reflection (and technical difficulties)

You may or may not have noticed but the site has gone a bit wonky. We’ve run into some technical troubles on our end and are working to take care of it ASAP, so please bear with us as we sort that out. You might notice a bit of the skeleton peeking through and some of our fancier features failing, but other than that it shouldn’t affect the site too much.

In the mean time, I thought I’d provide a bit less of a cerebral reflection for World Humanist Day and share a poem I think that has a particularly Humanist flavor. It’s “Aubade” by Phillip Larkin. I’ve never been good at writing about literary topics, but it’s a special occasion:

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.

Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.

In time the curtain-edges will grow light.

Till then I see what’s really always there:

Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,

Making all thought impossible but how

And where and when I shall myself die.

Arid interrogation: yet the dread

Of dying, and being dead,

Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse

– The good not done, the love not given, time

Torn off unused – nor wretchedly because

An only life can take so long to climb

Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;

But at the total emptiness for ever,

The sure extinction that we travel to

And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,

Not to be anywhere,

And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid

No trick dispels. Religion used to try,

That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade

Created to pretend we never die,

And specious stuff that says No rational being

Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing

That this is what we fear – no sight, no sound,

No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,

Nothing to love or link with,

The anasthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,

A small, unfocused blur, a standing chill

That slows each impulse down to indecision.

Most things may never happen: this one will,

And realisation of it rages out

In furnace-fear when we are caught without

People or drink. Courage is no good:

It means not scaring others. Being brave

Lets no one off the grave.

Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.

It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,

Have always known, know that we can’t escape,

Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go.

Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring

In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring

Intricate rented world begins to rouse.

The sky is white as clay, with no sun.

Work has to be done.

Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

An aubade is a morning love song (as opposed to a serenade, which is a love song at night), but it’s not immediately clear what this poem is professing love to. It largely seems to be a reflection on death, and how inadequate many of our rationalizations of it are. Religion, that “vast, moth-eaten musical brocade ” is of little comfort, and equally unhelpful are the ”specious” replies many atheists tend to give—I didn’t mind not existing before I was born, so why fear death? and so on. I’ve never been persuaded or comforted by either.

When I was younger, I used to spend long care rides staring out the window and imagining what it’s like to not exist. It seems silly now, but it’s no less terrifying an idea now than it was then. The only difference is that I’ve gotten good at ignoring that death is there.  But Larkin reminds us, “Most things may never happen: this one will.”

There’s an alternative, almost stoic sort of way of treating death that Larkin suggests. At certain lonely and calm moments we can simply look at death squarely, realizing fully how terrifying and awful it is. We can’t escape it and can’t accept it. So we move on with our lives. There’s no profound answer, and no way to make death okay.

But work has to be done. The world moves on. The sun rises and we get out of bed.

I find a weird sort of comfort in poetry like this. I’m always interested to hear whether readers have any other works of art that comforts them or has meaning for them specifically. World Humanist Day seems a good time to share them.

Vlad Chituc is a lab manager and research assistant in a social neuroscience lab at Duke University. As an undergraduate at Yale, he was the president of the campus branch of the Secular Student Alliance, where he tried to be smarter about religion and drink PBR, only occasionally at the same time. He cares about morality and thinks philosophy is important. He is also someone that you can follow on twitter.