Pearls before swine
Russell Blackford posted a comment he made at the Intersection on July 30th, that never got posted, in reply to Mooney’s “final word” on Tom Johnson. It’s a good comment – thoughtful, and civil. But it’s not uncritical – and it’s not posted there.
It may have been penny wise and pound foolish to censor it though, since it’s more conspicuous as a post than it would have been as a comment. Russell suggests (this alone will have been enough to explain the non-posting) that Mooney should lift the ban on me, and adds that if he did I would probably ask the old question again about why he thinks Jerry Coyne was wrong to review books by Miller and Giberson for the New Republic.
You seem to think that Jerry did something wrong in agreeing to review the books and in reviewing them the way he did. I don’t see it. If you no longer think that, it would be nice if you said so explicitly. If you do still think it, I’d be interested to know what you think Jerry should have done when asked to review those books.
Yes, so would I. I don’t expect I will ever know. It’s one of those haunting unanswered questions that irritate us while we’re waiting for the bus.
Sadly, the comments on Russell’s post got infested by the Pieret-Ramsey faction and then by Ramsey jabbing at me endlessly – not to mention DM, who has added me to his death threat list, blasphemous little bitch that I am.
Well, at least I can clean up after DM. I just hope that the police in Montreal are correct in treating him as a harmless crank.
Yes so do I, and so do quite a few people now.
“Jerry Coyne… you are going to be exterminated”
He might be a Montreal-based Dalek.
Speaking of Ramsey’s obsessive jabbing – this is funny – he dug out three ancient links to make some obsessive point, and I said I didn’t know what he was talking about. This did not go down well.
So I looked at that recent post of mine – at the first para –
Ha! There’s no good excuse for me not to recognize a post of PZ’s from last March – apart from the fact that I said twice in that one paragraph that I hadn’t followed the dust-up closely. By that I meant that I hadn’t followed it closely.
People are funny. My little clutch of weirdly obsessive haters – all men – are very eccentric, every last damn one of them. As eccentric as a Montreal-based Dalek, they are.
“blasphemous little bitch that I am.”
LOL! That’s the best kind! :)
I’d almost forgotten about how Money lectured everyone on how terrible Coyne was for his straight-forward but disapproving review, yet failed to provide any alternatives. The best part of that whole affair was seeing people like you asking simple, direct questions and bring down their whole inflated argument.
And now Mr Public Relations blows it again, classic.
Ophelia wrote:
I see on that thread that JJ Ramsey is still bleating the ‘PZ and the Pharyngulite horde tried instigate assault Intersection posters’ lie to defend pretty much everything anyone else on the internet does – I wonder if he realises that the he and John Kw*k (hardly someone I’d want agreeing with me on very much at all) are the only two out there still flogging that dead, intellectually dishonest straw-horse.
I had a bit of revelation about Mooney not long ago when reading Mad Biologist.. Chris isn’t really interested in truth because he’s a member of what Jay Rosen calls the Church of the Savvy:
Chris is a journalist who isn’t interested in having persuasive arguments. Instead he wants us to be impressed with his detached, pragmatic insight into how the world really works.
So if Coyne were savvy (or if he appreciated people who were savvy), then he would know that it doesn’t matter what the truth is, what matters is how we spin things to gain political power. In Chris’ view, all the straight-shooting scientists (and philosophers) are just rubes to care about arguing for the truth.
The only question remaining here, in my mind, is whether it’s doing any good to continue pointing out Mooney’s censorship and refusal to face criticism; or whether he’s not worth even the minimal boost in traffic and attention he doubtlessly gets from people talking about him.
Wow, I sure am glad we have J.J. Ramsey to mansplain to us that calling someone a “useless, putrid twat” isn’t sexist.
That really is the fundamental ugliness of Ramsey’s entire shibboleth directed at Ophelia. I can actually sympathize with his obsessive focus on minutiae, his dogged insistence that his opponents haven’t responded to precisely what he’d been arguing, and so on. That’s often how I deal with opponents myself. But his constant insistence that the way Ophelia was treated was not as bad as she has claimed (and keeps claiming)–that’s just disgusting. The value judgments he makes in order to get to that conclusion are simply putrid, and he’s too blinded by his own pedantry to even think about it. As a sometime pedant myself, it gives me seriously discomfiting “there but for the grace of [… er…] Socrates go I” sensations.
If there is somebody who has not followed these debates (with and without scare quotes), it has gotta be me. This is because I followed, before I joined Facebook and Twitter in the dying days of 2009, certainly as acrimonious debates (with or without…) on other topics. However, I had read Jerry´s now famous/notorious review and felt that it was brilliant. When I had completed my reading of it, I thought: “Gee, I would really want to see what our ‘science and religion are and ought to be compatible’ friends will respond to this! They will hate this, but what can they say?” I have now been making some catch-up on all this, but it seems that my first thoughts are rapidly turning into my carefully considered letzten Gedanken….
The abuse, the intellectual debasement and fanaticism as well as the moral cowardice much in evidence in the furor Jerry´s article created was not surprising to me, given my history of following (and also sometimes participating) discussions on ancient history of India and Near East. So, after posting a critical synopsis of some rather uncritically accepted ideas, I was called, among other interesting epithets, “an Axe Murderer breaking into your house”!…:)
I really think that all such materials would be wonderful data for those who would want to write the “Evolutionary and social psychology of nasty emotions”….
If certain people didn’t deliberately complicate these issues, the story could be seen in all its simplicity. Mooney swallowed and publicised a lie, which he claimed had a great many implications about the nature of Gnu Atheists, despite being warned that it didn’t sound true. Now that he’s been proved wrong, he admits to having made an error, but will not be even-handed enough to acknowledge that there are now implications going in the opposite direction, including both the falsity of his claims about the nature of Gnu Atheists, and the clear evidence that: a): he either has a bullshit detector vastly inferior to the ones possessed by Russell, Ophelia, Jerry et al, and should therefore cut them all the required slack, not to mention displaying a bit more deference to those with demonstrably clearer vision than he possesses, or b): that he, whether consciously or not, did a manual override on his bullshit detector because the content of the Tom Johnson lie was just too irresistibly convenient to the line he wanted to push. Mooney continues to plug himself as the authority on these matters, despite overwhelming evidence that says precisely the opposite. And this is an active, not passive, stance; he reinforces it with massive skewing of the nature of the comments permitted to be seen on his blog, ensuring that those who do consider him an authority will see the really damning criticism only on blogs belonging to the enemy, which makes them easy to discount without checking further. Those readers will fall for his rhetoric about reconciliation and the humbug about how the exposure of the hoax was some kind of joint effort.
Excellent summary, Stewart, of the state of play in the Intersection vs. the World prize-fight. It’s obvious that Mooney is going to play dead through all of this, perhaps because he simply can’t stand having lost the fight. Best to lie doggo for a little while, and then he can rise again, without any apparent injury.
The real problem is, of course, that Mooney’s position was a defence of the widespread idea, almost uniformly disseminated amongst the friends of religion, that the Gnu Atheists are a pack of rabid dogs aiming at doing mortal harm to religion, and doing it in the most uncivilised and barbarous ways imaginable. There seems to be a general consensus (amongst believers, at least, and their cultured supporters) that there is something really ‘gnu’ here, an emblematic lack of civility, and that this lack of civility, this stridency, this loud-mouthed boorishness about religion, has mortally wounded the possibility for reasoned public discourse.
But the whole cultural impasse can be seen in a completely different way, and it would explain the know-nothing response of people like Mooney, whose intellectual position (and possibly reputation) is now, arguably, in tatters. Religious believers know — how could they not know, one wonders? — that their position is extremely dire. Science has been roaring ahead for generations, and religion has been trying to fill the holes in the religious project created by the advance of science, and the intrusion of critical thought into the heart of the religious project itself.
It is hard for religions, and their adherents, to acknowledge that critical thought has largely undermined, rather than supported religious belief, that the compatibilities they sought, between the growing authority of science and what would have been a rejeuvenated critical religion, had all ended in a dead end, and that the only recourse was to retrench and re-present the tradition without any basis of critical support. This explains the reversion of Roman Catholicism, after the daring exploratories of Vatican II, to the narrowing orthodoxies of a John Paul II and Benedict XVI, or the growing evangelical movements in the mainline Protestant churches, the explosion of fundamentalism and spirit-led idiocy, and the burgeoning of entrepreneurial religious hucksterism: all of them reasserting, in their various ways, traditional and non-traditional, the old old story of Jesus and his love. (Islam, of course, has just met up with science, and is lagging far behind, but it is responding in its typically ham-fisted way, resorting to violence right out of the starting gate. Give Christianity time.)
It also explains why there is a growing movement of scientists and philosophers who are not prepared to compromise any more, or to temporise with religious belief, which is showing itself, more and more, to be, contrary to all appearances, in very rapid decline. Feeling itself under threat, religious rhetoric is becoming increasingly intemperate, more strident, and its intrusion in public affairs more public and pugnacious. As Grayling suggests, this may be a sign — and I think it is a sign — that religion is failing its own constituency. It is when threatened that religion becomes most dangerous, and religion clearly is under threat. Its cultured supporters, like Massimo Pigliucci, or Francis Collins, Francisco Ayala, etc., having nothing whatever to add to the religious catalogue of apologetics, can only repeat, endlessly, the same old story, and complain, intemperately of the intemperance of religion’s cultured despisers. The sarcasm and abuse of an Eric Reitan or a David Bentley Hart have to be read to be believed.
We all have front row seats as religion goes through its death throes. We won’t be here to see its demise, but it is mortally wounded. AC Grayling suggests that it may, as it dies, go through a characteristically bloody fling. Indeed, it is possible that religion’s end may be apocalyptically horrendous. Perhaps the human world, after all, will end with a bang, instead of a whimper.
But there will be lots of whimpers along the way to that big bang, and Mooney’s is just one of them. He still thinks that religion still should have an honoured place, because he does not notice the cultural trends that militate against its preserving that place. He thinks he can afford to ignore the courtesies of intellectual discourse. I suspect he believes the religious hype, that it is the gnu atheists and others who are the boors at this particular feast. It is not so. Religion is becoming the boor at the dinner table, because it is plumb out of resources. It has no more polite conversation. It’s fighting a losing battle, and, this time, it doesn’t get to choose the ground.
I did not have this reaction. I thought Coyne’s review would be widely admired outside of conservative religious circles. I really had no idea, at that time, of the tenacity with which some people demand compatibility. It’s baffling.
@Ken. You said:
It’s really not all that difficult to understand. There’s a lot of hand holding going on. Christians are claiming, ridiculously, to be under attack. They’re not under severe attack, but when you’re a Christian, it seems like it, because your whole world view is under severe threat and stress.
The religious world view is dissonant with practically everything that is happening. Even the media used to such good effect to spread your message is giving a hostage to the opposition. Look how far someone like Karen Armstrong has to retreat in order to give succour to the religious. And there are lots more just like her, people who have a foot in both camps. Lots of clergy, trained in critical disciplines, are very insecure. They apotrophise doubt, and try to domesticate it religiously.
Being religious in today’s world is a very difficult balancing act, and so, rather than tip over into unbelief, questioners ape the language of true believers. But don’t think this is a comfortable position to be in. It’s not. That’s why the “New Atheists” sold so many books. People know that the religious world view is finished, but it makes them very unsettled. As Onfray points out:
Besides, banishing transcendence is still very difficult to do. Ordinary, unlettered people are not the only ones who need the mild narcotic of religion to face the dizzying fact that we will die, and all this wonderful illusion will one day simply disappear. We are, after all, such stuff as dreams are made on. Don’t underestimate the power of these things.
What a great phrase! I’m totally stealing that.
I like the “church of the savvy” idea too. I think it’s right. It’s the James Carville, war room, political campaign kind of savvy; the win at all costs kind of savvy; it’s totally out of place in science and epistemology. This is what I’ve been saying about Mooney all along – his stance is fundamentally political, and he doesn’t even seem to notice that it’s totally out of place in science and epistemology.
Juha
Ah – I have an article here by Latha Menon about controversies in ancient history of India. I recommend it!
Could “Tom Johnson” really be David Mabus?
No. I know who he is; quite a few people now know who he is; he’s not David Mabus. He’s also not a crazed nerd in a basement.
It really is disingenuous of Mooney to characterize the outing of “Tom Johnson” as a joint effort between atheists and accommodationists. It was nothing of the sort. I finally got tired of all the stonewalling by Mooney and his pals in the face of persistent questions, and decided to do something about it. And no, the outcome doesn’t make me feel more comity towards accommodationists. They dug into Tom Johnson not because of an overweening devotion to truth, but because not doing so would have made them look even more ridiculous than they were.
Quite so.
And it’s all very fitting, in a way, except that it was a waste of Jerry’s time. As Russell’s post reminds those who have forgotten, this round of the longer “framing” campaign started from a brainless objection by Mooney to Jerry’s terrific “Seeing is Believing,” which I, like Juha, thought was brilliant. It continued with critics asking what exactly Mooney meant by claiming that that article was not “civil,” and getting banned and libeled as liars for their pains. (That sounds hyperbolic but it’s exactly what happened to me.) At a later stage it continued with the fraudulent Tom Johnson story, then with Tom Johnson’s libelous fraudulent blog, both centrally concerned with trashing Jerry. Jerry has been at the core of this campaign all along; it is fitting that he’s the one who excavated the truth; fitting but also, as I said, an idiotic waste of his time. This is Mooney’s contribution to the scientific literacy of Murkans – taunting busy scientists who are contributing to the scientific literacy of Murkans, and causing them to have to waste their time cleaning up messes that he either created or inspired. Brilliant.
More than just disingenuous, Jerry. It’s [not true]. And it’s a bit galling that Mooney won’t settle this issue once and for all, make the appropriate apologies, and try to start over. But he’s not going to do that. He’s not going to do that because, like a lot of people, he’s got too much invested here. As I point out in some excessively long posts, religion is deeply embedded in the way we think, and some people just aren’t going to let go. Mooney is one of them. But it is vital to keep hammering the point home, because that’s the only way this cultural transition is going to happen, and it’s the only thing that will make it likely to go more peacefully, strange as that may seem to people like Mooney. The old fabric of the ages is worn and threadbare. We need to keep unravelling it.
Sorry, I’m being a bit heavy-handed today.
I think disingenuous is fair enough. Mooney did (way too late) do some things, so it’s not just outright false to claim he was involved in some way. It’s misleading – very misleading – to pretend it was a team effort, or anything like that, but he did make some phone calls.
It’s funny…I have some really malevolent enemies, some of whom used to be friends, apparently monitoring every word I type and every word I allow others to type. I suppose that does tend to increase my scrupulosity (though it doesn’t, oddly, increase theirs), and I suppose that’s a good thing.
They’re still malevolent shits though. Mwah.
I too was stupefied by Mooney’s suggestion that it was a joint effort. Consider that Paul W. asked them to check for sock puppets before the Tom Johnson admission came out,
Sheril’s response,
I politely asked Sheril to address Paul’s question, to which there was no reply. But she did subsequently answer a couple other questions. A “joint effort” to uncover the truth?
Through email I told “William” that we would be going after Sheril’s misleading remarks, and that he should come out with Tom Johnson sooner rather than later. His admission came after that.
I have noticed that JJ takes everything literally and has absolutely no sense of humor. Most people would only latch onto to the things he does as a means of teasing someone, but for him it is a way to demean those he doesn’t like. For instance, yesterday my wife told my son to turn off the fan in his room, if he wasn’t going to be in there. His reply was, but I have to go into my room to turn off the fan and therefore I can just leave it on. He was kidding and being lazy, but JJ would spend the next two years bringing up the logical inconsistency of your telling him to turn off the fan when he is not in the room. Almost every single argument of his is of this type and he never gives up with reply after reply after reply.
Thanks, Eric; honoured to be stolen from, Ophelia.
I think it’s not at all a coincidence that Mooney and his ilk, though claiming to be pro-science atheists, seem to rely more on the “ways of knowing” associated with religion. It is, above all, that which enabled some of them to go on saying something like it (the TJ claim) may have happened, even after being forced to admit there was no longer any evidence that it had.
What’s happening to us is that we’re being “othered” and invested with group properties that maybe none of us even have as individuals. There was a comment Jean made that I found horrific:
We may be guilty of something for which there’s no evidence because that’s what we’re like. Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to participate in the discussion here that touched on the ritual murder accusation against the Jews, but it was exactly what I’d thought of anyway. The severity of the accusation is completely different, but the kind of thinking that makes both possible is pretty similar.
Are any of us really reminded of demagogues when we think of the public appearances of any of the leading Gnu Atheists? My impression is one of polite individuals, sometimes forceful, but dismissive only when appropriate. On those occasions when anger is displayed (usually, it seems to me, in writing), what prompts it? What is being reacted against? When is it something other than particularly excessive behaviour by the religious? And let us not forget: any subscriber to one of the monotheisms who hasn’t explicitly disavowed its sacred texts is party to a villification of all non-believers, which in many cases includes threats in both this and any other lives. If you look at a lot of conflicts it can be hard to go backwards and say who really started it, which side committed the original act of aggression against the other, but the case of believers vs non-believers could hardly be more clear-cut.
Weren’t there once some good old days when it was just believers and non-believers? When the non-believers were either tolerated or not and if they were, then they could talk to the moderate religious people on their own terms? What has brought us to the situation where Eagletons and Armstrongs keep pushing a god so stripped of substance there’s nothing left to push that can be expressed in a meaningful sentence, and people like Mooney define themselves as pro-science atheists while doing almost nothing but cosying up to believers and attacking atheist scientists?
I know, one of the answers is Templeton, but isn’t there more to it than that?
Oh, and I do agree with Eric about some of the nastiness being attributable to religion’s death throes, however protracted they may turn out to be. They’ve had a couple of hundred years of a few prominent open atheists and survived pretty easily because they remained a fringe affair. They’ve never had a bunch of atheist best-sellers before, there’s never been an internet before and there have never been growth figures for non-believers like this before. This is the first time in the history of atheism, I think, when one could say that it’s beginning to escape from social stigmatisation and become a minority norm.
Exactly – and it’s a steady, relentless drumb beat. It’s very McCarthyish and very nasty and it creeps me out – yet people who should know better keep doing it and doing it and doing it.
And I know, about Jean’s comment…she’s made a lot of comments like that. Some of her colleagues have said they mock their students’ religion in class, therefore, TJ’s story is plausible. M&K said PZ was naughty and rude in their book, and PZ is naughty and rude, therefore, it is fine that they left out important details in telling the cracker story.
When the subject is gnu atheists, evidentiary standards just go right out the window. It’s extraordinary.
No, not heavy-handed at all. You are just doing what you have already claimed that Mooney is not but should be prepared to do. I can come on a bit too strong sometimes, especially when I’m busy reading something like Marci MacDonald’s The Armageddon Factor (about fundamentalism and (and in) Canadian government). It’s enough to put one off one’s oats.
Michael
Oh, he doesn’t take everything literally, it depends on what side of the argument you are on. He is very happy to cut slack – so long as you largely agree with him. Been arguing with the idiot on Russel’s blog, but you bark at dogs…
Anyway he doesn’t seem to get that if you quote somebody’s own words directly, in context, it cannot be a straw man. It is their argument. He also doesn’t seem to get that pointing out unfortunate implications isn’t a straw man either. Its like he found a new favourite word.
I really think that part of the othering process is due to the precariousness of religious belief today. If you read the New Testament, the most hysterical forms of faith come to expression in the context of opposing beliefs: in John’s gospel, for example, or in some of the so-called pastoral epistles. And the hysterical high point comes, of course, in the Apocalypse at the end.
Religious faith is always teetering on the edge of disbelief or heresy. It can’t be any other way. So, when the age you live in is one in which, at every turn, faith is being challenged, the result is hysteria, of course. What else can it be? Well, it can be avuncular, like John Polkinghorne, or ditzy, like Karen Armstrong, or even liberal and critical, like some forms of Anglicanism, or other “mainline” churches. But this kind of religion is dying, because faith feeds on doubt, disbelief and disagreement. Liberal religion is religion without the religious motor. But the religious motor demands a diabolical opposition, the devil in his many guises, and we’re it. So, the drum beat. Get used to it. It’s not going to stop.
Of course, some people are playing right into this oppositional quality of religious belief, thinking that we need to accommodate religious belief, make peace with it. But that kind of religion, accommodating, liberal, thoughtful religion, has been tried and found wanting. Real religions don’t accommodate. It’s in their very nature not to. They rule. Hitchens is right. Religion poisons everything. It does not of course follow — and sometimes Hitchens seems to suggest that it does — that everything that poisons is religion.
Diabolical opposition – precisely. I’ve tried to think my way through some disagreements with believers and in many cases it boils down to them believing my side is inspired by Satan. It can’t be god’s fault that there are people who reject (their) religious belief, nor can it be something random or unintentional, so the diabolical is what remains. This is why there is so much denial that Darwinism is simply the result of observation and can lead people who understand it to realise there’s nothing there that couldn’t happen without a god; they’re always explaining that Darwinism is a lousy, unworkable theory cooked up and propped up by those whose starting point is a hatred of god and a need for an excuse to be free of divine morality.
Ophelia Benson wrote:
Okay, only 6,999,999,998 more guesses to go.
Well put – except I think it would be not the next two years but (from all appearances) the rest of his life.
Some commenters give the appearance of being socks, others make one think they’re bots. Could Ramsey stop if he hadn’t been programmed?
Two points. The first, regarding the way M and K at The Intersection dealt with this mess. When Mooney chose to elevate TJs comments to “Exhibit A” a number of us asked him in the comments whether he had verified the story. I even gave him a few pointers as to how to do it (mainly to ensure that he had got some sort of independent source other than the word of the originator.) The verification might have taken a little effort on his part but he’s a journalist, right? Thats what they do, isn’t it? Anyway, Mooney never commented on my or other’s requests as to how or whether TJ’s story was independently verified. Not only that but he didn’t comment as TJ’s story unravelled over the course of a couple of threads, changing from a group of new atheists quoting PZ and Jerry Coyne and shouting at the top of their lungs how ignorant the religious people were, and causing a whole roomful of religious individuals to walk out, to a story of one colleague saying something reproachful to a single pastor. In a further thread a couple of days later TJ was caught out making up a malicious quote from PZ Myers, (he changed a sentence of PZ’s criticizing the creation museum, replacing a whole segment identifying the object of PZs ire as the organizers of the creations museum with the words “the religious”) In other words simply reading Tom Johnsons comments in the threads following the original accusation would have given cause for strongly suspecting him to be a malicious liar – no expertise in IP address monitoring was required. Now we all know that ‘The Intersection’ is tightly monitored, at least in terms of comments, so the disintegration of TJs story and personal credibility must have been visible to M and K a year ago and yet they remained silent on the matter until TJ was forced into the open by others just recently.
My second point is regarding the motivation for Mooney to act in the way he has over the past few years. I don’t think he seriously considers the gnu atheists to be as terrible foes as many of his current fellow travelers seem to think. I think its mainly a pose for him in order to position himself as some sort of middle ground ‘moderate’ on the religion question. I may be wrong on this one – perhaps he is more like David Sloan Wilson and thinks religion is useful rather than truthful – a utilitarian excuse for keeping untruths popular amongst the masses.
Oh yes, I keep forgetting about that fabricated quote. Sigh. It’s hard to keep up with this!
I love the idea of Ramsey as a bot. Heehee.
Most children, in their normal development, get over this by the time they are three. After that they begin to line up the pencils in ascending order of hardness with the 3B on the left and display an inordinate interest in order. These children grow up to be fascists.
Stewart wrote:
I’d be thrilled if you & Eric turn out to be right, and I’m not saying you won’t. I am extremely pessimistic, though. I think critical thinkers have been anticipating the demise of religion since the Enlightenment, with no real progress. Best-selling books still amount to only a tiny proportion of the media that form people’s opinions. Reading books is far more endangered than religion these days, IMO. And the internet benefits the woo-meisters every bit as much as the critical thinkers. Quite a bit more, I should guess.
Assuming, for a moment, that he isn’t really a bot, this bit of a comment left on the Dawkins site back in 2007 seems to sum up his philosphy of life:
“A good argument should be able to hold up in the face of nitpicking, and if you pick all the nits in an argument and find that what’s left is somewhat wanting, then it wasn’t that good to begin with.”
Diane,
I agree that we can’t know, and the religion meme has great built-in resilience and a few best-sellers don’t automatically change the world. Where I see things differently is the bit about “the internet benefits the woo-meisters every bit as much as the critical thinkers.”
It’s undoubtedly true, I’ll admit, that crazy conspiracy theories and other whacky ideas manage to get about a lot more because of the internet. But the very fact that serious, demolishing criticism of religion is out there where even children brought up to know only religion can access it, is, I feel strongly, damaging to religion in ways no previous attack has been. An internetless society can really turn the light off, but they can’t transmit the meme as successfully when other ideas can be heard at moments when young people are unsupervised. The other important aspect of the internet is that those with serious doubts can network in ways they never could before. Pre-internet, they would have gone through life kept isolated from even the knowledge that others had such doubts or had gone all the way to junking belief.
It used to be difficult for a child growing up like that even to realise there might be an alternative. Now it’s dead easy, sometimes it’s even in your face. That’s never been the case before.
I have a feeling that the efforts of the new atheists will become manifest in ways that are not so obvious and direct. Looking at my old home country, Ireland, I see people finally questioning the special status of the Catholic clergy and their seeming virtual immunity from legal due process when serious accusations of child abuse are made. This kind of attitude towards the Catholic church is very novel in Ireland and yet it mirrors the points being made by the new atheists – that we should treat religions the same as we treat any other special interest group – ask for evidence for their claims and demand that they are not above the law. I wonder if the widespread dissemination of the views of the likes of Dawkins and Hitchens has not been an important factor in the current Irish question and thus a thorn in the side of the old and dying church.
I don’t think anyone’s expecting the whole edifice just to collapse within a generation or five. But what Sigmund’s describing, which is a weakening, that can happen and in some places it already has. More obvious things may happen as numbers dwindle and of course it’s not a question just of absolute numbers, but each religion is in a percentage competition with both other faiths and none. If there are only 25 people in the world and they’re all Catholic, Catholicism is doing fine. If there are 25 million Catholics out of a world population of 7 billion, Catholicism ain’t doing so great anymore. And that’s why the networking is so important for us. How come certain much smaller minorities have a leverage we don’t?
Quite, about the networking. But the gnu atheistophobes call that “tribalism” and line up to throw rocks at it.
And it’s so much worse than gathering in places of worship and getting one’s moral marching orders.
It’s been the case, for generations, for children raised to think critically; hence the association with education. Whether the new atheists have extended the cultural reach of skepticism remains, for me, an open question. There is no small amount of energy devoted to portraying NAs as philosophically naïve and intellectually shallow. And, if you haven’t been raised to think critically…
Well I have seen reports that atheist and secularist groups at universities are having a huge growth spurt. That’s one datum.
I was referring specifically to the cases of children raised to think anything but critically. Like a hypothetical religious family driving down a highway with one child in the back who may have had doubts but would never dare mention them. Then the car goes past a billboard saying you’re not alone if you don’t believe in god and that child is never the same again, which is probably the biggest real reason the billboards get vandalised.
Stewart wrote:
I do agree, and have been known to make similar claims myself. What I’ve been coming to think, though, is that there is a persistent portion of society for which no amount of explanation will make any difference. A hypothesis: religions persist because they are adaptive. A given society prospers for having a reliable percentage of the population predisposed to be followers. The habit of critical thinking, which I agree is the missing element for most of the committed religious, is simply not attainable by some part of the population.
I say this partly because I’ve spent a lifetime seeing the faithful act immune to facts they’ve been exposed to over and over again. I would agree that the availability of atheist/freethought info online will bring out a certain number of those who already have a predisposition to question what they’re taught or born into…But I don’t think that’s going to result in a huge increase overall in the non-religious sector. Meanwhile the demagogues of whatever stripe are simultaneously capitalizing on the internet, with emotional appeals that resonate with a far larger segment of humanity than reason ever will.
Stewart wrote:
Which minorities are you referring to ? What occurs to me is that the only thing we have in common is a commitment to reason, freethought, and possibly science (we can’t forget that there are at least some atheists who come from the liberal arts side of life…smile). Most of the minorities that inspire stronger cohesion have ties of kinship, ethnicity, historical commonality, culture, etc; let alone those with a centuries-old religious tradition…
Ophelia wrote:
Talk about the pot vs. the kettle… Tribalism is largely what we’re up against, it seems to me; and a formidable obstacle indeed. It may in fact be an inherent property of human civilizations. What are the theories that speculate on the maximum size of communities that seem to be able to function well? I never retain what I read. But the arguments that there’s an upper limit seems to play out in the real world. For all the talk about spaceship earth, most seem unable to grasp the humanity of those sufficiently distant from themselves; and sometimes that’s a philosophical versus a physical distance…
I completely see your point and you may – unfortunately – be right. I’m thinking of the fact that it’s the upbringing that makes them impervious to reason. How many of the ancestors of today’s growing body of atheists did not subscribe to or genuinely believe in a religion? If you consider that we come from a percentage of the population pretty near to zero, we’ve already done a staggering job of eroding religion’s formerly absolute stranglehold on society. So what I’m saying is that if we’ve increased so much from such humble beginnings in such a short time, who can say it can’t possibly go further than this? I agree that looking at many hopeless individual cases can be depressing, but a longer view needs to be taken here and a slightly more optimistic imagining of what might be can give all of us the incentive to do the pushing without which nothing will change.
I also wanted to be a little clearer in my reply to your point about the woo-meisters benefiting at least as much as critical thinkers from the internet. On the face of it, more information is making the rounds, which will always mean more false information, as well as more true information, if I may put it that way. Looked at like that, the playing field may appear level. But those memes, like most religions, which have as one of their main defences the exclusion of ideas that could challenge their claims, are put at a certain disadvantage by the mere fact that more truth is in circulation, even if much of it is warded off by the automatic assumption that if it doesn’t match the revealed teachings it must be the work of the devil. They thrive in darkness and we do more damage than we realise ourselves, I suspect, simply by switching the light on.
Just saw your other comments while I was previewing. I was thinking of the oft-mentioned U.S. figures, which put the number of non-believers higher than every non-Christian minority and those other groups all get an automatic respect that is not accorded to a lack of belief. What you say about ties of kinship, ethnicity etc., is surely true. And anything based on them does seem to be valued more highly than a commitment to reason.
Just out of interest, something sparked by comments and this whole issue, but: who is “we”? Some of you seem ok, so no offence, but I’m not part of any “we”. Atheism isn’t a group or a cult or a tribe or anything, it just is. I’m not a “non-believer”, “faithless”, “new atheist”, “gnu atheist” or any other tag. There is no we, there can’t be. Thinking something’s a crock doesn’t buy me a membership card, badge, posters of Hitchens and newsletter to any group.
It’s like the Moon Hoax issue (in more ways than one). The point is that those who understand that we did actually get to, land on, walk on and come back from the moon aren’t a group. There’s no lasting tag of “believers” or “anti-moon hoaxers” “debunkers” etc, it just is. This grouping together and making a tribe out of applying a bit of rationality to the world diminishes everything. It makes out that to be rational is a cult led by the Best Sellers list, to be rational no less a marketable clique or fad than some prepubescent girls thinking they’re in love with Mormon Vampires and Werewolves. It allows the comparison with a religion, it allows this whole accommodationist farce to spread and gain a foothold. The grouping was created by the vocal religious; it is perpetuated by the accommodationists.
You all seem nice people, as with other blogs and their commentators, as with other authors, and in the main we agree on some core principles and more, but we’re not a team, there is no “we”.
Point taken and one could write a lengthy reply, but one thought has suddenly flashed uppermost which may get more to the heart of the matter than longer analyses: “we” may be those that have been “othered.”
Specifically, here on B&W, I suspect “we” is often used to mean regulars, those who, as you yourself said, seem to share at least certain core principles.
C Anders
Did your decoder ring get caught up in the mail?
:p
C Anders:
Think about why that is. There wasn’t a majority of people who thought the moon landings were a hoax, and there certainly isn’t a majority of people who think that now.
In the U.S. and many other places, the majority does believe in souls, god(s), etc. That makes us different and noteworthy. (Are you perhaps in Scandinavia or something? If so, I could see why might find it odd that atheism is particularly noteworthy, and would compare it to thinking that the moon landings were real. If you live in the U.S., the difference should be striking.)
Any time you have a minority that disagrees with the majority on a basic and important point, it’s going to have a label—especially if the majority opinion is also endorsed by the ruling elites.
When the majority thought that the sun went around the Earth, and the ruling elites said they were right, but some notable people thought the Earth went around the sun, there were inevitably labels for people with such minority views—“heliocentrists” or “Copernicans.”
That’s just how language generally works, about most things. The non-default case is linguistically marked. (E.g., “flightless birds” as opposed to, you know, birds.)
When people have a significant non-default view on an important subject, they’re going to be similarly distinguished. (E.g., a-theist people as opposed to, you know, people.)
This is inevitable, and for good reasons. It’s a drag to be labeled and have the labels used in bad ways—e.g., stereotypes of atheists as assholes—but it’s good to have a label when you want to talk about how your atypical aspects are a good thing.
Atheists don’t get an atheist membership card and a Hitchens poster, but then penguins and emus don’t get a flightless membership card and an Opus poster, either. That doesn’t mean that atheists aren’t appropriately labeled as “atheist,” or that flightless birds aren’t “flightless.”
Yes there is. You don’t have to care, and you don’t have to like it, but if you’re an atheist, you’re one of us atheists.
What “we” means depends on context—it might mean atheists generally, it might mean gnu atheists as opposed to accommodationist atheists, or it might mean certain regular posters here. (That’s perfectly normal usage of the word “we,” too—who an “indexical” word like “we” refers to always depends on context.)
Paul,
Ireland, not Scandinavia, so I get the context. And I agree with you on that point, however I still maintain there is no “we”. It’s a tag of others, not me and of late it’s a tag used to imply a bandwagon.
The conspiracy theory issue stands, the point being in everything else, it’s those with the extrodinary beliefs who are labled, not those who just don’t buy that line. So it’s a matter of principle, there is no group, no band, no troup, no army, no fans, no street team. You can’t be grouped as a body just on the basis that you don’t buy a particular line of belief.
I’m probably stretching into the Ministry of Contradiction, but all there is is “them”. There’s different types of “them” and then it’s just “everyone else”.
C Anders:
It seems like you have a basic objection to set theory and natural language expressions of set theoretic relations. :-)
Membership in a set is a valid thing to remark on, e.g., saying that you are one of us atheists. That only denotes a set membership which you agree is true.
I agree that it’s a pain in the ass that such statements often inaccurately connote considerably more than that—bandwagons, etc.—but I’m not sure what the point is of denying a simple truth. (E.g. that you are in fact “one of us” if by “us” I clearly just mean atheists.)
Complaining about labeling sets per se is like complaining about the weather. It happens. It can’t not happen. Deal with it.
Complaining about how particular labels are being abused—e.g., othering—is a different thing, and possibly constructive, but don’t conflate that with labeling sets per se.
Paul,
It would appear so…
And maybe it’s part complaining at labelling, coming back to youthful days where when you don’t get accepted by any group you justify it by saying you don’t want to be aprat of any group, I’m out the mainstream man… But it’s greater than that.
It’s not about where the label came from or how it’s applied. It’s simply the fact that those of religion identify themselves by what they believe, I don’t identify myself by what I don’t believe in, otherwise I’d be there all day.
And that’s it, I’m an atheist, but I don’t identify myself by that. Part of the group or set thing is identifying yourself to something. I just find it illogical to pick something I find absurd (e.g. religion or Moan Hoax or JFK conspiracy or…) and identify myself by that conclusion of absurdity.
You can’t be grouped together or identified because of something that you don’t believe in, which is what’s happening.
C Anders – sure, I know. I said that in a piece I did for C is F last year.
But “we” as used here means different things in different contexts. Sometimes it just means “we” on this page – anyone who is reading, plus me. Sometimes it means gnu atheists, which includes self-identification as such, so it needn’t irritate you, because you’re already not included in it. Sometimes it probably means the much larger set of people who try to have good reasons for thinking what they think. Is that really an irritating “we”? I know what you mean – I’m aware of the way the pronoun crops up, and how coercive-seeming it could be – but sometimes there just are reasons to talk about that set of people.
(Sometimes “we” is women. Sometimes it’s feminists, sometimes it’s liberals, sometimes it’s secularists, sometimes it’s people who are horrified by stoning or “honor” killing or mass rape.)
:( Another “Anyone but Anders Club” ah my youth in flashbacks… ;)
But I do get that side of it, it’s hard to construct a post without using “we” in a general sense, but sometimes it creeps in as a greater use as a club of atheists and I do find that an irritant. In most cases it’s easy to identify who the “we” is referring to, I just don’t want to fall into the trap of the zealots (and accommodationists) of being some collected group where individual identities are lost for group norms and behaviour.
I’m not saying count me out, just be careful how “we” identify ourselves. None of the “celebrity” atheists identify themselves as atheists, they’re biologists, mathematicians, philosophers, writers, journalists. “We” should bear that in mind.
@ C Anders
Sorry, I fail to understand your point. An Atheist is usually defined as one who lacks belief in the existence of any god.
If that description fits you, you are atheist. Are you saying the word shouldn’t exist, that it’s wrong to use that word or do you disagree with the definition? Or are you simply saying that some people have associations with the word that you don’t like and hence you don’t like to be labelled as such?
I’m not sure what you mean by not identifying with being an atheist. One can be many things, such as a German, a European, a Saxon, a university graduate, a humanist, a lesbian, a mother, an aunt, a capitalist, a linguist, a car driver, a stamp collector, a tax offender, a cancer sufferer and so on… all at the same time. Do you mean that some of the sets you are part of you like and associate with and some you don’t like? Or that some are more relevant to who you feel you are? I think that is trivial and true for everybody, but it doesn’t change whether one meets the definition of a set or not.
Tssssss! Not! The whole point is – that definition includes people who want to be included and not those who don’t.
I’m not sure it’s true that none of the “celebrity” atheists identify themselves as atheists, in fact I think it isn’t true. They don’t say that is their profession, of course, so yes they are biologists etc, but naming one’s profession isn’t the only way of identifying oneself.
A confession:
From my standpoint, coming to the whole atheist blogosphere party only a year or so ago, I see a bit of irony. Mooney’s (et al.) claim is that one ‘better reaches people’ by following his rules and guidelines. Yet through this whole thing I’ve been thinking “You know, Jerry and Ophelia seem like genuine, straightforward people that let you know what they’re thinking, without all kinds of obfuscation and false smiles. And Russell Blackford writes his blog the way my mates and I talk at the pub — there’s a guy I understand and could really get along with. On the flip side, this Mooney fellow comes across slightly presumptious , very insecure, and somewhat deceitful.” So the people who are supposed to be ‘militant’ and ‘strident’ are the ones who come across, to me, as decent folks. The ones who are supposed to be ‘charming’ and ‘accommodating’ come across as anything but.
Now that’s all to one side: it sort of kills Mooney’s stance dead, but doesn’t address the ‘New Atheist’ position — the important truth that the veracity of the message isn’t determined by our opinion of the messenger. So I look at that, and see (sometimes obsessive) efforts of getting at the facts by people here, vs. swallowing of all kinds of false propoganda over there. Hmmm….
I still think we need to talk nicely to some people sometimes, to get them to listen. But I’ll not be taking advice on how to do it from Mooney and others of his humorless ilk.
:- )
With all due modesty, and leaving me aside, that is how I see it too. On the one hand PZ, Jason Rosenhouse, Jerry, Russell; on the other hand M&K, Josh Rosenau, Massimo, John Wilkins, the John Pieret faction.
It is interesting to note that the first four of the second group all took YNH seriously, and linked to it, and quoted it, and praised it. That by itself is an indicator of something Off.
There’s a thing here. I’m never exactly sure how it works, how to pin it down…but it’s there. I’ve said several times that the people who make a big display of being especially “Nice” are actually not nice at all, while we (sorry Carl) who make no claim to be especially “Nice” are at least not nasty in the way the former group is. I’m as nasty as I seem to be; the Nice faction are much nastier than they claim to be. My nastiness is there on the surface, where it can be dealt with, and it’s not unknown for me to apologize for being over-nasty. The “Nice” faction…I’ve never known any of them to do that. Not one. Their nastiness is kind of covert, and manipulative, and hedged around with rhetoric and trickery; and they never ever cop to it.
That’s a stab at pinning it down, at least. I think it’s true. Look at Massimo, taking stupid potshots at Jerry to the bitter end. Look at amos, saying nasty things about me on Kazez’s blog and when I call him out telling me a pack of lies about how highly he thinks of me, and a few days later calling me Ayn Rand II and a woman with a need to dominate. Look at a whole slew of things like that.
There must be some kind of Grand Theory that would account for all this, but I don’t know what it is.
Dunno. I’d almost put Pigliucci in a third group — sure he enjoys intellectual acrobatics, and makes a game of trying to philosophically reconcile what the rest of us see as incompatibility — but I’ve seen few instances of him blatantly kowtowing to the loons the way some of the others do. Then again, I don’t read his every post, so I may have missed some.
As far as YNH — a number of us, at first, hoped it would be what it claimed, vs. the (if you’ll pardon the word) putrid cesspool it was. I’d hold YNH against its creator, of course, and against people like your friend and admirer J.J. , who continue praising it even after its implosion, but I wouldn’t treat it as poison against Oedipus and myself, for example (for logical as well as merely self-serving reasons!).
Regarding covert nastiness, that’s one thing I have bitter experience with. At the tender age of 22 I moved from New York state to Virginia. I thought “Wow! These people are so nice! I love Southern hospitality!” What I learned was that the ones with the biggest smiles held the longest grudges; they let them fester, and would gleefully stab you in the back years later for some slight — real or imagined — that you might not even have been aware that you commited. Everyone said that I was “rude” because when I felt wronged in some manner, I would gauchely point it out, instead of creating a secret revenge list. I wonder if Chris & Sheril are southerners? (Edit: Chris — raised in AZ and LA. Hmmm…)
I put MP there because of the relentless vendetta against Dawkins and especially Coyne, and because of the endless misrepresentation (he keeps saying they think science can answer all questions, and they keep saying No I don’t, and he keeps saying it anyway), and because of the childish insults accompanied by disclaimers. “I don’t dislike Jerry Coyne,” he told me in a comment the other day. Please.
No, you and Oed and others are different, because newcomers. The ones I mentioned are all old hands. Old hands have tools to recognize signals of – fraud.
I think part of the difference is that between giving one’s opinions and employing one’s own tone in making one’s arguments, as opposed to talking primarily about which opinions, tones and arguments may be legitimately employed by others on one’s own (ostensible) side.
A follow-up: looks like Sheril’s from NY/ME. Anecdotes are poor engines of prediction, and my hypothesis fails — I hereby retract it, and apologize to Southerners (except Moonie, of course).
Oh, that’s interesting. Very interesting. It seems to confirm this intuition I’m trying to pin down. You’re safer with people who don’t pretend they are never ever irritable or rude…something like that. You’re safer if you know where you are.
Except Mooney and “Tom Johnson”! :- )
Stewart @ # 53 wrote:
I’m not convinced our stats about any increase are unassailable. First of course, there are all the reasons self-reports are unreliable. And then there’s that damnable confirmation bias…It seemed to me that we were quick to frame the surprisingly high number of Americans who identified as non-religious as non-believers, when a closer look revealed merely a disassociation with traditional sects…
You don’t seem particularly young (& I mean that in a good way!), so forgive me if I say that the hope you & others here express that just “getting the information out” will bring about the fall of religion reminds me of how I felt about so many favorite causes in the late 60’s/early 70’s. (“Get-off-my-grass!” alert.) But a good half of my USA-Boomer cohorts had equal access to the same knowledge we liberals/progressives were dealing with, and they brought us Dubya and ‘pre-emptive war,’ not to mention a marked resurgence in religious fundamentalism. So I don’t see the propensity for critical thinking as poised to spread through civilization contagiously (and I DO appreciate that you’re not saying it would be a rapid process). Rather I submit that it’s more akin to the status of homosexuality; that is, something maintained in the population at a relatively low level. If we were ever to entertain that sort of model, rather than our triumph-on-the-basis-of superior-ideas model, it might have significant influence on how to proceed (or how we should be proceeding differently). Not that we should ever stop trying to reach the educable!
(To that end, Dawkins’s suggestion that we insist on evening the playing field of which ideas command respect (fighting the automatic assumptions that religion should, and that we never do) is a good place to start. He also suggests modeling the “consciousness-raising” of feminism. Both of those goals are of course already in the gnus’ playbook; in the accomodationists’s, not so much.)
I realize that the secularism of modern Europe is an enormously hopeful sign. But it is also a very recent phenomenon, and one that is being sorely tested ATM by immigration. I’d say we’ve yet to know whether it’s a bellwether or a blip.
(Ophelia—sorry for my sort-of hijack, here. One thing leads to another, and Stewart & Eric made me wish I could be less cynical. [Apparently not.] All—sorry all for the tl,dr post.)
[Heh…Stewart…found the first reply I’d started to you (below)…you can see it was going nowhere, but I offer it for the Wired link, which, although dealing with different subject matter does point out an encouraging way the ‘net is fundamentally different from other media….:]
Stewart, your point about those whose “upbringing…makes them impervious to reason” is excellent; I can’t help but agree that access to information at critical ages must be invaluable for sparking critical thinking in secularly benighted backwaters (which are actually, uh, frontwaters…at least here in the US of A). But–I’m currently reading Hirsi Ali’s Nomad . That she seems to be one of the few of her acquaintances with similar backgrounds to fight her way to rationality, brings me back to the thesis that only some of us (far from a majority) are inherently predisposed to critical thinking. Perhaps another portion are capable of getting better at it with sufficient exposure.
That some other, obviously highly educated, intelligent people are only capable of same up to a point (the point of theism), and prefer what seems to us to be maddening dissonance, is what makes me think that rationality per se will never win the day, however true it is.
Despite an encouraging article in Wired, recently ( http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/05/ff_pink_shirky/ ), it seems to me that usage stats portray the internet as primarily a venue for traditional (esp., libidinous ;) ) entertainment…When the populace has so much at the tip of their fingers, they’re most interested in…celebrity gossip. When they’re not reinforcing their existing tribalisms, that is. Which may be all we’re doing here…
The part of Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 that most struck me was the bit about the mesmerizing dramas beamed onto the walls of people’s houses; mostly, of course, because by the time I read it, it was already happening via the boob-tube. Now, it’s the ‘net…
I think it’s partly the Paradox of Tolerance. The (false) premise is that (ahem) “we” are intolerant and the New Niceists are tolerant. Tolerant, that is, of all expect those who disagree their tolerance.
I have an equal mistrust and disregard for those who profess to be totally tolerant as I do those who are obviously totally intolerant. Those who claim to be totally tolerant are liars, delusional and inhuman to the exact same extent as those who are totally intolerant.
I shan’t claim there can’t be confirmation bias and I would like to be optimistic (if possible) about something which is important to me. Somehow I think 30 or 40 years ago (when, yes, I was already alive) no amount of confirmation bias could have gotten one feeling this optimistic about atheism being out of the closet. Apart from the then-non-existent internet, the bus campaigns and billboards seem more miraculous to me than the books. They still encounter many problems in various countries, but I can’t imagine it happening anywhere a few years ago.
As one of those who does favour the way Dawkins describes memes, I think part of the reason critical thinking can’t sweep through the population the way religions have sometimes done would seem to be because it is almost the opposite of a meme. It’s not just going along with something that everyone else is doing (there is sooo much peer pressure in religion); it’s all about stopping and saying: wait a moment, let me think about this instead of or before just going along with it.
I think the coming-out and demanding an end to stigmatisation is something atheists today have in common with the homosexuals of a few decades ago, but the comparison can only be taken so far (unless someone wants to insist that the majority is only heterosexual because they were brain-washed into it at an early age – a kind of inversion of the “gay agenda” conspiracy theory). Just as 1,500 years ago no one in the world was Muslim, 2,000 years ago no one was Christian and a few centuries before that no one was Jewish, so the fact that history records so few atheists doesn’t have to mean that it can’t one day be the majority position. Things do change, which I take as a kind of proof that they can change, even if that sounds too obvious to bother saying.
I’m assuming Ophelia doesn’t consider it hijacking; it’s what I consider suitable grist for the B&W mill. The who-are-we topic does need addressing.
On your other points about the critical age for critical thinking, well, Dawkins is doing some of the best pushing there. He’s fighting the problem at the root, challenging the labelling of children and taking on the faith schools via television. Ethics, making sure kids know that what their parents do is not the only way it’s done, even if their parents assure them it’s the best, or the only true one. The latest frontline in that battle is Australia; a couple of years ago it was in Berlin. When progress is very slow, it’s easy not to realise it’s progress. Religion is still too strong and enjoys too many unearned privileges, almost everywhere. But it’s inconceivable today in the western world that someone would be executed for having said the “wrong” thing about belief. It’s only a few generations ago that religions were powerful enough to do that. Not being able to do that anymore, that’s what I call weakened. So that’s the direction it’s gone in lately; sure there’ll be backlashes, but backlashes don’t prove that it’s not the direction things are going.
I’m away and offline till Monday, just in case anyone says something really interesting I don’t react to. Have a nice weekend, all.
Hijacking? Certainly not. Enjoy awayness.