Chris Stedman's Blog, page 14

Years Later, Secular Student Group Recognized On A Religious Campus: Here’s How It Happened

In 2010 I wrote my first piece for Huffington Post Religion. In it, I addressed Concordia College’s decision not to recognize a secular student group on their campus. Last week, they approved a secular student group. What changed between then and now? Check out an excerpt of my new piece – coauthored with Andreas Rekdal (a founding member of Concordia’s Secular Student Community) — below, and then click here to read it in full.

This piece was co-authored with Andreas Rekdal, who works for the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs. He graduated from Concordia College in December 2012 with a B.A. in political science and philosophy, where he was a founding member of Concordia’s Secular Student Community.

In my first ever piece for The Huffington Post Religion, published in 2010, I wrote about Moorhead, Minn.-based Concordia College’s refusal to recognize “Secular Students of Concordia,” a student organization centered around nontheistic values. In that piece I argued that, in order to be truly inclusive, interfaith dialogue and collaboration must also include — and defend — those without faith, who are often marginalized and discriminated against in the United States.

Last week, the same college gave official recognition to the “Secular Student Community” — an organization similar in name and still centered around nontheistic values, but with a different vision.

This long-overdue affirmation of secular students’ place within an otherwise predominantly religious institution owes largely to precisely the kind of interfaith dialogue and collaboration called for in my 2010 piece — the kind of approach that encourages mutual respect and solidarity between atheists and the religious, rather than scorn or derision.

* * *The debate about giving Concordia’s nonreligious population official recognition and a voice on campus first began in November 2009, when a group of students applied to form Secular Students of Concordia. The group’s stated goal was to be “a secular alternative to the religious and faith based clubs at Concordia.” Their application was rejected by the school on the grounds that “the organization [was] not in compliance with ELCA [the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America] and the College Standards.”

Looking at the organization’s constitution, a few aspects appear problematic with regard to the college’s nondiscrimination policies and religious affiliation. First, it required that all active members affiliate themselves with one or more national secular organizations. Second, if the group were disbanded, its remaining funds were to be donated either to “an on-campus initiative promoting or strongly supporting secular values” or to the self-described ”aggressive, in-your-face” American Atheists, a national organization widely known for its confrontational tactics and anti-religious activism. The latter was particularly problematic because funding for campus organizations usually comes from the college itself. By approving the Secular Students of Concordia, the college could have potentially placed itself in a position of being forced to make a donation to American Atheists — a perhaps less-than-tempting prospect for a college that finds itself at the crossroads of its increasingly religiously diverse student body and its explicitly Christian heritage.

In January 2011 the group’s founder, Bjørn Kvernstuen, appealed the college’s decision and reapplied for recognition with a redrafted constitution. In the appeal, Kvernstuen argued that the organization was in fact not at odds with the ELCA, and that the organization would play a crucial role in promoting openness and diversity on campus. The redrafted constitution appeared free of the problems contained in the first, but nonetheless, the college rejected this application as well.

* * *Ironically, the resistance met by the Secular Students of Concordia coincided with a campus-wide push for interfaith dialogue and cooperation. A group of students began forming an Interfaith Youth Core-affiliated “Better Together” interfaith campaign, and the college was in the process of creating a “Forum on Faith and Life” — a campus office concerned with matters of interfaith cooperation and community service. Moreover, the following academic year kicked off with an appeal for interfaith dialogue in a September 2012 campus-wide lecture by IFYC founder Eboo Patel.

Interpreting the choice of Patel as the convocation speaker as an invitation for religious minorities to become part of the larger discussion on interfaith, another group of students (including Andreas Rekdal, who co-authored this piece) submitted an intent form for a Secular Student Community in October 2012. This organization was meant to be a place of belonging for Concordia’s many nonreligious students, centered around constructive dialogue about secular morality. Furthermore, the group wished to spark a campus-wide conversation about inclusivity — to raise awareness about the college’s many nonreligious students, and to advocate on their behalf.

Six months later, to the surprise of many, the group finally gained official recognition from the college. What had changed in the just over two years since the group was first rejected, and the less than two years since its last appeal, that allowed for this?

Click here to continue reading.

“How Skeptics and Believers Can Connect”

The New York Times printed a particularly relevant op-ed today, entitled “How Skeptics and Believers Can Connect.” Author T. M. Luhrmann writes on her experience investigating “the way evangelicals learn to experience themselves in conversation with God.” In addition to discussing her own faith narrative, and how “in-your-face confrontation” had left that muddled, she address at length pluralistic cooperation. Luhrmann writes:

“Yet believers and nonbelievers are not so different from one another, news that is sometimes a surprise to both. When I arrived at one church I had come to study, I thought that I would stick out like a sore thumb. I did not. Instead, I saw my own doubts, anxieties and yearnings reflected in those around me. People were willing to utter sentences — like “I believe in God” — that I was not, but many of those I met spoke openly and comfortably about times of uncertainty, even doubt. Many of my skeptical friends think of themselves as secular, sometimes profoundly so. Yet these secular friends often hover on the edge of faith. They meditate. They keep journals. They go on retreats. They just don’t know what to do with their spiritual yearnings.”

Luhrmann considers “faith” in a very explicit, functional sense: the common actions of churchgoers necessarily mirror their common beliefs. Perhaps, then, this is why she is surprised to find that they have moments of uncertainty. Faith is a very individualistic concept–if we fall into the trap of thinking of it institutionally or traditionally, we can just as easily assume that everyone in a particular church community shares the same conviction as we can that to be a Muslim necesarrily means holding to some sort of Quranic literalism.

The writer concludes by warning that today’s contentious issues “should not be approached by drawing a line in the sand and demonizing everyone on the other side.” Here we should be careful: in conflating our political and religious differences, I think Luhrmann opens the door too widely for complacency. Certainly, a lot of people tie their spiritual convictions with their political passions, but both can be overcome if we find the common ground of human dignity and equality. It’s not about expelling those who disagree, it’s about fighting the structures–not necessarily the people–that uphold injustice and inequality.That can, and must, be done together, with everyone taking inspiration from their own individual spiritual persuasion, whatever form that may take.

You can read the rest of Luhrmann’s article here.

Walker Bristol woke up this morning and realized, to his dismay, that he is the President of the  Tufts Freethought Society  and the former Director of Communications for  Foundation Beyond Belief . This is especially peculiar considering he grew up as a high school wrestler-pianist in North Carolina and intended to become Luke Skywalker for an undisclosed period of his life, eventually settling for a Star Wars tattoo. The Tufts Political Science and Religion departments suffer his enrollment. He writes about social activism and art in the  Tufts Daily . His diet consists of hummus. He tweets nonsense on all these fronts  @WalkerBristol .

 

FEMEN: Please slow your roll

Just a heads up: this post and a few of its links feature topless women. Please click and read accordingly.

Courtesy Jezebel

FEMEN, a “sextremist” 1 feminist group based in Ukraine and known for their topless protests, organized “International Topless Jihad Day” this past Thursday. Protests were organized all across Europe to show support for Amina Tyler, a 19 year old Tunisian FEMEN activist who posted topless photos of herself on Facebook with the words “Fuck your morals” and “My body is my own and not the source of anyones honor” written on her body. Reports reveal that Amina was committed to a mental hospital, and many high ranking Islamic figures have called for rather extreme violence in response to her photos. She has been reportedly hiding in a village a few hours from the Tunisian capital, fearing for her life and the lives of her family.

I feel like I should first note that I can’t stress strongly enough just how very much FEMON is on the right side the issue, here. Anyone who believes that, in FEMEN’s words, “killing a woman is more natural than recognising her right to do as she pleases with her own body” deserves our strong condemnation, regardless of whether they subscribe to a particular religion or not. That said, I can’t help but agree with Jezebel when they note that many of these protests 2 are troublingly islamophobic.

REALLY IMPORTANT NOTE: 3 I realize that “islamophobia” is a somewhat contentious term right now, particularly because of the recent popular articles painting new atheism as islamophobic. Glenn Greenwald puts forward what I think is the strongest case for this, and Hemant Mehta responds to many of these charges. It should be noted that I (maybe unsurprisingly) fall closer to the Glenn Greenwald side when it comes to this issue. That said, criticism of Islam so obviously isn’t what I or anyone else, as far as I can tell, mean by the term.

Because this seems to be such a touchy issue right now I’ll try to make it clear what I mean when I say that these protests have troubling undercurrents of islamophobia—even without going any further than the image above, I hope it shouldn’t take that much explaining. It’s hard to see what posing with a fake beard, a unibrow drawn on in eyeliner, and a towel fashioned into a turban achieves other than to exploit a crude Islamic stereotype.

More and more it seems that the go-to reaction many Westerners have when faced with legitimately condemnable actions on the part of Muslim radicals is little more than this: rush to find the nearest Muslim 4 to stage a protest. 5 Don’t think about it too hard, any local Muslim or mosque will do! We saw this clearly with Everyone Draw Muhammed Day, 6 where statements by Muslim radicals lead to atheist groups across the country drawing chalk Muhammeds on their college campuses—as if the already-marginalized Muslim students could somehow serve as appropriate stand-ins for hateful radicals—and we see it now with FEMEN protesters from Paris to San Franciso taking to their local mosques to perform topless protests.

Imagine that, in response to the reported “secret squads” enforcing modesty in conservative Hasidic parts of Brooklyn, local activists protested topless in front of random synagogues across the country while dressed in crude caricatures of Hasidic men. How many hours do you think it would take the Anti-Defamation League to put out a press release, and do you think they’d be wrong to think that there was some implicit, if not (extremely) explicit, bigotry going on?

Courtesy Twitter

On top of that, when presented with a counter-protest by Muslim women objecting to what they saw as imperialistic and patronizing attitudes of the FEMEN protesters towards Muslim women, the leader of FEMEN, Inna Shevchenko, told the Huffington Post UK that:

through all history of humanity, all slaves deny that they are slaves. . . They say they are against Femen, but we still say we are here for them. They write on their posters that they don’t need liberation but in their eyes it’s written ‘help me.’

I hope this attitude speaks for itself, and that I don’t need to add any more commentary to explain how wrong and condescending a view like that is. I can’t deny that hearts are in the right places and heads are on the right side of this issue, but I just ask of FEMEN: please, slow down and make sure that your protests are respectful of whoever you’re tying to help. There’s no need to be patronizing or to exploit harmful stereotypes.

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:

Their words. FEMEN should also maybe slow their pun roll. ↩Certainly not all. Many of them strike me as extremely brave and powerful. ↩So important that I won’t even footnote it. ↩or anyone who looks like they could be one. ↩ Or worse. Read Stephen’s HuffPo piece on islamophobia for a few examples of people who were assaulted or murdered simply for looking Muslim ↩An event that the original cartoonists later dissociated themselves from ↩

Vlad’s Duke Event Audio

To anyone who was waiting for a recording of the dialogue I had with my friend Neil Shenvi last week, the audio is now online, hosted on Neil’s website.

I listened to it this morning while walking my dog and the audio came out surprisingly well. It’s not without its issues (some clipping here and there, a few moments where it cuts out during transitions, and so on), but definitely listenable.

My opening statement starts at around the 18 minute mark, and our conversation starts after a short bit of silence.

I had a great time at the event, and even met a few readers I had no idea lived in the area. 1 Neil’s a really smart and friendly guy, and we were having a lot of fun up there. If you want to hear me talk really quickly, laugh a little too much, and bash Sam Harris way more than I remembered doing, you can take a listen here! (Warning, the audio starts a little loud).

I’ll be taking some time in the coming weeks writing more about what I covered in my talk, since it involved ideas I’ve been developing for a while, and it was nice to try to articulate them for an audience. If I was ambiguous or unclear at any points, leave a comment and I’ll try my best to address it!

Thanks again to the Duke InterVarsity Christian Fellowship (who hosted the dialogue in place of their normal group meeting), the Duke Secular Alliance, and of course, Neil Shenvi for making the event a lot of fun.

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:

I’m always down to grab coffee and chat with anyone in the area. You can hit me up on Twitter (@vladchituc) or my email address (vladchituc@gmail.com) to schedule something! ↩

NonProphet Status and ‘Faitheist’ featured in ‘Atheism For Dummies’

One of the newest additions to the wildly popular “For Dummies” series—a collection of reference books intended to “present non-intimidating guides for readers new to the various topics covered”—is Atheism for Dummies. Authored by Foundation Beyond Belief executive director Dale McGowan, it looks like an incredibly comprehensive resource for anyone who wants to learn more about atheism and atheists, and I’m thrilled to say that NonProphet Status, as well as my book Faitheist, are featured in the book!

Atheism for Dummies on Faitheist:

Chris Stedman became an evangelical Christian in his teens. But when he came out as gay, and that community turned its back on him, he began to question his beliefs. Eventually he decided he was an atheist.

Change a detail here and there and you’ve got the story of many an atheist. But Stedman’s story takes a different turn once he’s left the fold. Instead of diving into his new secular life without a backward glance, or glancing back only to berate, Stedman recognized that not everything he’d lost had been bad. He also became aware that for all of the obvious differences, there was a lot of common ground between the religious and nonreligious, more than either side usually saw.

Stedman had become a “faitheist” – a name some atheists use to describe other atheists who they see as too accommodating toward religion. Eventually he would write a memoir of his experiences and co-opt the word for his title: Faitheist: How an Atheist Found Common Ground with the Religious (2012).

Unlike many of the other books in this chapter, Faitheist isn’t a collection of arguments or a work of history. It’s a story, specifically a memoir of Stedman’s own complicated path through religion and into atheism. He went through the phases so many people describe – thinking he could fix Christianity, then looking East for another religion, then deciding religion was garbage but God was real, then finally, in an instant, getting rid of God as well.

But as he engaged in the atheist community, he began to feel that something was missing. They had the intellectual side of life managed really well. But the more emotional, humane side of life, the side that religion had fulfilled for him, seemed to get very little attention.

The last chapters of the book describe Stedman’s re-engagement with religion – not for its beliefs, which he still rejected, but for what it seemed to know about satisfying human need – and his breakthrough work as an atheist in the interfaith movement.

Atheism for Dummies on NonProphet Status:

If you want to have all of your preconceptions about atheists and atheism shattered, look no further than Non-Prophet Status, a blog founded by interfaith activist and atheist Chris Stedman and featuring eight outstanding contributors.

The blog is described as “a forum for stories promoting atheist-interfaith cooperation that hopes to catalyze a movement in which religious and secular folks not only coexist peacefully but collaborate around shared values.”

For a soft-spoken twenty-something from the upper Midwest, Chris Stedman has done a lot of world-shaking. He’s the Interfaith and Community Service Fellow for the Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard University, Emeritus Managing Director of State of Formation at the Journal of Inter-Religious Dialogue, and holds an MA in Religion from Meadville Lombard Theological School at the University of Chicago.

Chris grew up Christian, then began to question the church when he came out as gay and felt the sting of judgment from those around him. He eventually decided he did not believe in God, but he continued to see the benefits religious people got from their involvement in religious communities. His work now is focused on achieving those same benefits for the nonreligious and encouraging bridge-building between worldviews along the way.

The middle isn’t an easy place to stand. Chris takes a lot of grief and abuse from both sides – from the religious for being an atheist, and from atheists for consorting with the religious and for criticizing the New Atheist approach. But Chris also has a lot of supporters on both sides who see tremendous courage, integrity, and restraint in the work he does to build those bridges.

If you’re interested in seeing this kind of conversation and connection between different worldviews, Non-Prophet Status is the place to watch it happen.

Visit Amazon to get Atheism for Dummies!

NPS: Lenten Reflections 2013

It’s been nearly a week since the end of our 40-odd days of Lenten fasting, and we’d like to take some time to briefly reflect about the process. This post will be updating as we get more perspectives, and it seemed like a good place to aggregate all the links and writing we’ve done on the topic for easy reference.

Our inaugural post this year.
A defense of Lent as a secular practice
Vlad writes about secular Lent on the Huffington Post
A reflection on how we ought to treat religious holidays
Kimberly Winston at Religion News Services interviews many of us on the topic.

Vlad Chituc

It wasn’t until compiling this post that I realized how much time I’d spent and pixels I’d rendered on the topic of secular Lent. It seems like a lot of fuss has been made over of what was really just an innocuous, fun, and challenging practice we decided to take part in. You might imagine from some of the push-back that I’ve seen on Facebook and a few other blogs that our actions amounted to nothing short of an endorsement of all of Christianity, as well as a command that all atheists suddenly drop all pretenses of rationality to join the religion-loving horde we were apparently amassing. It might be somewhat cynical to note that none of this really surprised me, and I can’t say that this somehow opened my eyes to many of the more unsavory and dogmatic elements that can pop up in the atheist movement, particularly online. It did, though, serve as a fairly clear illustration. The problem isn’t religion, but rather dogmatism, and I think a lot of the push-back has shown exactly why this is the case.

That said, I’m happy to report that I’ve been continuing my veganism this week, for what I hope will be indefinitely. It went much smoother this time around (internet comment abstinence met some success, but not nearly as much), and I’m glad I did it. I’m happy for all the support, and for everyone who reached out to let me know that they thought what we were doing was cool. It meant a lot, and even though they weren’t as loud as many of the negative voices, my impression was that there were more of them.

Keith Favre

I don’t think I did this on purpose, but my two commitments actually represent quite well the two categories of sin in Christian theology: omission (not doing something that you should) and commission (doing something that you shouldn’t). They’re represented by procrastination and eating meat, respectively. This Lenten journey has offered valuable insight into the nature of self-improvement. The main lesson I’ve learned is that the easier half of making a change is stopping a bad habit; the real challenge lies in starting a good one. My commitment to give up meat went wonderfully — to the best of my knowledge, I’ve consumed absolutely no meat in the past 46 days (the closest I’ve come is chicken broth). My performance on my commitment to stop procrastinating has been far less commendable. I get the feeling that I’ll be struggling with procrastination for a long time. I’ve had small victories, but I’m far from solving my procrastination problem. One was so easy to maintain and the other so difficult because it’s much easier to stop doing something than to stop not doing something (which is basically what procrastination is).

In short, what I’ve learned from Lent is this: All commitments for personal change could be categorized as omission or commission commitments. A commission commitment is easy to maintain (you may feel tempted, but as a rule, it takes zero effort to not do something) but less likely to have very significant rewards. An omission commitment is much more difficult, but if you’re successful, you’ve managed to make a positive change in your life.

Adam Garner

As I originally predicted I failed hard. I was keeping up my “don’t obsessively check my cell phone/ Twitter/ Facebook/ every 30 seconds” promise for about 10 days before I ran face first into my lack of self-control. Well, it wasn’t just going cold turkey catching up with me. I took a trip for work that for some stupid reason I thought required me to relax my curtailed phone usage. I guess by itself wouldn’t have been a problem if I would have been able to shift back into my austerity plan right after. Problem is, I let myself cheat a little bit after I got back. That little bit very quickly evolved into a-lot-a-bit.

Without really realizing it, I was back where I started.

To me this emphasized the power of habit and actually the importance of things like Lent. To me, I see it as a tool that break up the crushing weight of habit and allows the critical distance that’s necessary to fix things like bad habits. It reminded me about the importance of stepping back and taking stock of who I am as a person and my short falls. I mean, I still ultimately failed, but it was a worthy experiment nonetheless.

Chelsea Link

Primarily, this whole Lent exercise has made me even more certain that I need to get out of the atheist “movement” as soon as possible. How it is possible for people to become offended that I choose to participate in a practice that I find meaningful, without any effort to force that practice on anybody else, is beyond me. It’s disgusting how much I’ve had to justify the simple decision to not drink alcohol for a few weeks. So yeah, that’s been disheartening.

But it’s also been an interesting experience in itself, independent of haters hating. It felt more like a mindfulness exercise than anything else. I became much more aware of when I drink because I want to and when I drink because it seems necessary within certain contexts. I already knew that adult socialization is often built around alcohol, but I didn’t even realize the extent to which non-drinkers can be excluded from social life until I put myself in their position for an extended period of time. I’m not sure exactly what can be done about this, but it’s troubling.

Oh yeah, and one bartender felt so bad for me that he gave me a free juice box.

Walker Bristol

I have written so many raisin puns and saved them in my Twitter drafts folder that my phone actually has started favoring “raisin” in autocorrects for words like “reason” and “rational” and I am totally okay with that.

Salon: “Stop trying to split gays and Muslims”

My new piece for Salon, published two days ago, looks at Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer’s efforts to pit the LGBT community against Muslims, and includes quotes from folks at GLAAD, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, and Believe Out Loud, as well as authors and activists Reza Aslan, John Corvino, and Faisal Alam. Check out an excerpt below, and click here to read it in full.

I have an earnest and sincere question for the LGBT community: Do you support Pamela Geller?

Geller, who is one of the most active proponents of anti-Muslim attitudes in the United States, rose to notoriety as one of the key instigators of the Park51 backlash, misrepresenting a proposed Islamic Community Center (think a YMCA or Jewish Community Center) by calling it the “Ground Zero mosque” and engaging in dishonest rhetoric and blatant fear-mongering. Her organization, Stop the Islamization of America, was identified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights organization, alongside extremist groups like the Ku Klux Klan and Nazis. And it’s earned that label — Geller and her allies have dedicated countless hours and millions upon millions of dollars to drum up hatred, fear and xenophobia toward Muslims.

Last week I learned that Geller and one of her biggest allies, Robert Spencer, are hosting a fundraiser for their anti-Muslim advertisements on the website Indiegogo. This disturbed me for a number of reasons, but particularly because Indiegogo’s terms explicitly prohibit “anything promoting hate.” (Despite reports from me and many others, Indiegogo has so far declined to remove the fundraiser; if so inclined, you can let them know what you think about that here.)

While I was looking into this, I discovered that Geller recently announced plans to run a series of anti-Muslim advertisements in San Francisco quoting Muslim individuals making anti-LGBT statements. Why? Because members of San Francisco’s LGBT community criticized other anti-Muslim ads she has run there.

I tweeted my appreciation that the LGBT community in San Francisco is standing up against her efforts to drive a wedge between LGBT folks and Muslims. Soon after, Geller retweeted me, claiming that she in fact has “huge support in Gay community.” Immediately, her supporters began to lob insults and even threats at me; Spencer himself suggested that I should be rewarded for supporting Muslims by someone “saw[ing] off [my] head.” (Meanwhile, though Geller, Spencer and their supporters kept tweeting at me that Muslims “hate gays” and want to kill me, many Muslim friends and strangers aliketweeted love and support for LGBT equality at me.)

As things settled down, I realized that Geller had stopped responding to me when I requested more information to back up her assertion that she has “huge support in Gay community,” after the only evidence she provided was a link to a Facebook group with 72 members. I’ve since asked her repeatedly for more information, but have not gotten a response.

I couldn’t think of a single LGBT person in my life that would support her work, but I didn’t want to go off of my own judgment alone. So I started asking around. It wasn’t hard to find prominent members of the LGBT community who do not share Geller’s views.

Click here to continue reading.

North Carolina Readers: Vlad’s first speaking gig

For any readers in or around the Durham, Chapel Hill, or general North Carolina area: I’ll be joining my friend Neil Shenvi in a dialogue this Thursday at Duke. It’s a joint event between the Duke Secular Alliance and the Duke InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, so it should hopefully lead to a great discussion.

A few quick notes: leaf through Neil’s website because he’s a really smart guy and and his writings are, I think it’s fair to say, pretty exhaustive. He and I also go way back (Neil was involved in Yale Students for Christ while I was an undergrad. I was close friends with one of the ministers of the group, and as the president of the Yale SSA, I organized and was involved in a fair number of interactions with the group. Neil and I saw a bit of each other), so we’re trying to keep it friendly.

I think we’re both fairly averse to the standard antagonistic and adversarial debate format. We’re trying to frame this event instead as a cordial and friendly dialogue to explore and press these issues in a warm but challenging environment. We’ll be presenting justifications for our own beliefs 1 and respectfully  pushing back on one another, while leaving lots of room open for discussion and Q&A. We’re both pretty new at this, but hopefully this format will give us a better chance to reach some mutual understanding and have a challenging and thoughtful discussion, without talking over each other’s heads or simply resorting to the intellectual shadowboxing that characterizes most debates on the topic.

I spend a lot of my time here on NPS writing about more meta-level issues about the relationship between atheism, science, religion, philosophy, secularism, pluralism, and so on, so it’s nice to talk at a more basic level to explain why I don’t think God exists. 2 I feel like it’s something I don’t get a chance to do very often, so I’m pretty excited. If you’re in the area, I’d love to see you there and maybe even chat afterwards. I think a recording will be taken of the event, so if you can’t make it and are interested, check back after the event to see the videos. Here’s a link to the Facebook page, with a fancy flier that I put together below:

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:

Neil: Why we should believe God exists. Me: Why we should believe God doesn’t exist. Yay for arguing positive positions! ↩It might be easy to forget but I’m a real atheist, I swear! ↩

Freedom of, and freedom from religion

This week, NonProphet Status has been reflecting on the national discussion around gay marriage. (See here and here.) Today, in the guest piece below, NPS reader Andreas Rekdal looks at the intersection of religious freedom and gay marriage.

Socially conservative activists have long tried to paint the gay rights movement as a special interest crusade. This could hardly be farther from the truth. At its core, the debate over same-sex marriage is a debate over freedom of religion and the right to due process. Therefore, the Proposition 8 and DOMA cases before the Supreme Court constitute a moment of truth for all Americans—not just the LGBTQ community.

The equal protection clause (contained in the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution) is a component of the right to due legal process, and it protects minority groups from being targeted with discriminatory laws. Earlier Supreme Court decisions have applied this clause to discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

The equal protection clause is not the only ace up the equality camp’s sleeve, however. After the right to due legal process, freedom of religion is probably the most essential of all rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. It allows Americans to believe in and assemble around whatever value system seems more compelling to them. Thomas Jefferson best summarized the rationale behind this principle: “… it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”

This quote also highlights the most crucial (and often overlooked) component of freedom of religion—freedom from religion. Although our neighbors are free to believe whatever they please, they are not free to impose their religious view on others by force. (Physical, financial, or otherwise.)

Because backers (despite their best efforts) have failed to provide satisfactory, non-religious rationales in favor of restricting the definition of marriage to include only heterosexual couples, legislative measures like California’s Proposition 8 and the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) are in direct violation of this principle.

While some politicians and activists speak candidly about their religious motivations for opposing gay marriage, others try and present arguments that at least pay lip service to the Constitution. Most popular among these is the “marriage exists for the purpose of procreation”-argument. Because marriage is an institution centered around raising a family, the argument goes, access to marriage should be restricted to those who can have children. The proposition that modern marriages exist primarily for the purpose of procreation, however, is absurd. So far as I know, no law requires heterosexual married couples to intend on having children, and I can only imagine the outrage that would ensue if marriage laws required couples to prove that they are fertile.

Another popular argument is the appeal to tradition and history. In essence, it argues that because marriage is an age-old tradition, we should not change it just to appease a small part of the population. This argument fails for several reasons. First off, the institution of marriage in its current form (a partnership between a man and a woman with roughly equal legal standing) is a very recent development—not an age-old tradition. Second, appeals to tradition are less than ideal foundations for public policy: banning women from voting was once an age-old tradition too.

I personally believe the term “marriage” itself—or, more specifically, its religious connotations—is the root of the problem. The number of religion-based arguments invoked in the debate over gay marriage only serves to underscore First Amendment issues associated with the legal implementation of a term with religious origins. Rather than extending marriage rights to gay couples, the government might be better off abandoning the term altogether, instead giving all civil unions equal standing.

The Proposition 8 and DOMA cases before the Supreme Court this week will hopefully be the long overdue final chapter to governmental discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. However, these cases constitute a moment of truth for all Americans. Does America guarantee its citizens freedom of religion, or is the First Amendment an empty promise?

Hailing from the mild-wintered Norwegian west coast, Andreas braved the godforsaken tundra known to non-locals as “Minnesota” while obtaining his B.A. in political science and philosophy. After graduating in December 2012, Andreas went on to work for the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, proving once and for all that a liberal arts degree is only almost useless. While in college, Andreas founded an organization called the Secular Student Community (the official recognition of which he and his friends are still anxiously awaiting–it’s complicated). On his spare time he enjoys talking theology in bars, and getting way too into Facebook discussions.

A quick note on gay marriage and slacktivism

Unless you’ve been completely abstaining from any form of media over the last two days, you’ve likely noticed that the Supreme Court has been hearing oral arguments for the Defense of Marriage Act and Proposition 8—two landmark cases for gay rights.

You may also have noticed that the pink and red version of the Human Rights Campaigns’s logo has been circulating on many people’s Facebook walls and profile pictures. For yesterday and much of today, Facebook feeds were inundated with the HRC’s red and pink, as well as a few snarky or clever derivative images.

There’s been a somewhat predictable backlash, though, and contrarians from many different ideological backgrounds have been criticizing this campaign as if it were #KONY2012 all over again. There are definite problems with slacktivism, particularly when it replaces legitimate work that might have otherwise been done to help solve a problem. But I think images like this are misguided:

I saw this on Facebook at least a half-dozen times

The edgy provocateur-extraordinaires at Vice Magazine wrote an entire post about how useless a gesture the Facebook campaign was, noting that it would be more helpful to do things like donate money, write representatives, and take other proactive measures to ensure that gay men and women can share in all the same privileges and responsibilities that the rest of the country enjoys.

And I actually don’t disagree at all with the idea that there are more pressing and influential actions that can be taken by those sympathetic to gay marriage, 1 but I think Vice and other Facebook naysayers are wrong to suggest that the heavy show of solidarity doesn’t matter or otherwise help.

Chris wrote yesterday about how momentous an occasion these Supreme Court cases are, and the hopes and futures of many gay Americans will be determined by the decision. Even if we ignore all the gay users who were very personally invested in the ruling, 2 I think it’s a mistake to suppose that everyone who took part in the Facebook campaign was trying to somehow shift the outcome of the case.

Instead, I think the gesture is done out of a show of solidarity for our gay friends and family. 3 People recognized what an important and pivotal moment this was for so many Americans, and what resulted was a spontaneous outpouring of support that turned many users’s Facebook feeds into seas of pink and red. And this hasn’t gone unappreciated. Andrew Sullivan posted a letter from a reader, who saw:

. . . update after update of friends changing their profile pictures to red equal-sign logos, and posts about wearing red, and posts on hearing updates. Even my young niece changed her profile pic to a red logo.

And then it hit me like a ton of bricks: the majority of folks who made these updates and posts are straight! In my circle, the biggest champions of marriage equality have been my straight friends. I am somewhat ashamed that others are fighting and believing in something for me that I never fought myself – merely for the reason that I just never thought it was possible. To be sitting here on such a precipice, with all of their support, is amazingly humbling.

So, given responses like this, I’m confused how a gesture of solidarity and support for gay Americans can not matter. Perez Hilton called this campaign the greatest idea since stuffed crust pizza, 4 but it’s somehow ineffectual because a few cynics don’t think it’ll shift the decision? I don’t think anyone expects it to shift the decision, and that was never the point.

Trying so hard to be a contrarian, responding to everything with cynicism, and taking every opportunity to try to put others down so that you can be distinguished from the red-and-pink masses strikes me as a sad and shitty way to live. This might sound strange coming from me in particular, 5 but I think that sometimes we can take things at face value. We can let our hearts be warmed by good faith gestures and showings of support without becoming gullible or overly credulous.

So I’m going to keep a different profile picture for a few days. I’m not under any misapprehension that this will drastically change the world, and I won’t blame anyone for not taking part. But if you take an outpouring of support for gay Americans as simply a chance to let everyone know how above slacktivism you are, then I’ll probably just think you’re an asshole.

Vlad Chituc 6 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:

and I encourage readers to do some of the above if they haven’t already ↩George Takei was one of the early popularizers of the image ↩That’s at least why I did it. I hope this post is more than simply my own rationalization. ↩and I’m sure there are more examples than the two I’ve provided, but I’m kind of too lazy to go digging. Links would be appreciated ↩I’m saying this as an often sarcastic and extraordinarily cynical human being who reacts to nearly every situation in life with some kind of mixture of reluctance and disdain. ↩has been reading too much David Foster Wallace ↩