Chris Stedman's Blog, page 4
April 7, 2015
Is atheism about Civil Rights?
My latest for The Daily Beast went up yesterday. Is atheism about Civil Rights? In part because of horrors that atheists experience in the rest of the world, and in part because of gross abuses experienced by other minorities in the West, I tend to roll my eyes at rhetoric often used by the public faces of [Read More...]
April 3, 2015
March 29, 2015
Psychology is complicated and other reasons anti-theism doesn’t work
Because I’ve been working on a paper where this is relevant and it’s fresh in my mind, let me start with an illustrative example (which you can probably skip past the line-break if you’re lazy). I don’t talk about this very often, but I work with Dan Ariely at Duke University, which is fucking dope because [Read More...]
March 28, 2015
Why men don’t touch each other anymore
I’ve been thinking about friendship and male intimacy for a few years now, prompted by a talk I saw as an undergrad and further developed by reading Catholic writers like Patheos’s Leah Libresco and Eve Tushnet (I’ve always liked to read Catholic writing on friendship; I suspect it’s because they trace their views through Aquinas to [Read More...]
March 25, 2015
The CNN atheist special covered American Atheists more than atheism in America
Last night, two friends and I watched the CNN atheist special, and I spent from about 10-2 AM writing up my thoughts. They went up this morning at The Daily Beast: One couldn’t help walking away from the program with the sense that atheists are a roughly unified group. They might have a lot of different [Read More...]
March 24, 2015
Vindicating Chris Stedman: Reddit’s atheism forum is the third most toxic on the site
My good friend and founder of this blog, Chris Stedman, got into a lot of controversy a few years ago when he called New Atheism toxic, and frankly people were pretty petty and cruel in response (Seriously, people wrote about Chris Stedman eating shit-corn. That was about the level of intellectual discourse back then). A recurring point [Read More...]
March 18, 2015
Atheism, Islam, and Race (Ctd)
Timberwraith had a great comment on yesterday’s piece about atheism, Islam, and race: The notion that dominant racial, ethnic, and cultural groups in predominantly Christian and/or European countries have been treating Muslims in ways that strongly resemble the social patterns of xenophobia, ethnocentrism, and racism isn’t some wooly concept which Vlad pulled out of a magicians’ [Read More...]
March 17, 2015
What atheists still don’t get about racism and Islam
There’s a fantastic post at Vox discussing the racial fall-out of recent controversies surrounding Ferguson and the SAE chant. It touches on a point I think many of us often miss, particularly in the atheist community. Jenée Desmond-Harris writes: Many people believe racism has to be spelled out or said out loud to be taken seriously or [Read More...]
March 13, 2015
What good are billboards
I’ve been struggling to figure out the intended purpose of belief driven billboards. For example “Jesus is Lord: And You Know It”or “Reason over faith, always” or “Jesus is Muslim (yes we used the present tense.)” Who exactly is the intended audience for such billboards? Taken at face value the obvious answer is others—in these cases [Read More...]
March 12, 2015
Al Jazeera on New Atheism’s hypocrisy toward Islam
Usaid Siddiqui at Al Jazeera America published a fantastic editorial on the tendency of New Atheists to be selective with holding certain ideologies responsible for violence: The Feb. 10 killing in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, of three Arab-American students, allegedly by atheist Craig Stephen Hicks has led some to compare militant atheism to Islamic militancy. Atheists are [Read More...]
