At least I am not one of them
Harris’s “The End of Faith” launched the so-called “New Atheist” movement, a make-no-apologies ideology that maintains that religion is not just flawed, but evil, and must be rejected.
No, that’s wrong. “New Atheism” doesn’t necessarily claim that religion is flawed; it claims that theism is wrong – not true, mistaken, false; and that it’s permissible to say so in public discussions.
Within two years, Harris was joined on the best-seller list by Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett, who all took religion to task for most — if not all — of the world’s ills.
No, that’s wrong. As usual with these things, it’s off the mark about Dennett’s book. Lazy journalists who simply parrot what 40 thousand other journalists have already said should be sent back to journalism school. Kimberly Winston obviously never read a word of Dennett’s book.
“9/11 ushered in a big change, in that it put Islam squarely in the center of the discussion,” said Tom Flynn, director of The Center for Inquiry, and a supporter of the New Atheists. “Previous freethinkers would have said religion is horrible, look at the Crusades, look at the Inquisition. This opened up the possibility of directing strong arguments against religions other than Christianity.”
Flynn points out that atheists have long called for an end to religion. What’s “new” about the New Atheists is their stridency and refusal to compromise.
Since Tom Flynn is a supporter of the “New Atheists” he won’t have said it that way, but the reporter apparently summarized what he did say that way. Nice.
Ryan Cragun, a sociologist of religion at the University of Tampa, is more qualified in his assessment. In their extremism and intolerance, he likens the New Atheists to Fox News Channel — “so far to the right,” he said, that they opened up the middle.
“Now it is OK to be a moderate atheist because you can point to the stridency of the New Atheists and say, ‘At least I am not one of them,”‘ he said. “It opens up a bigger space for freethinkers to actually communicate.”
Overton window. You’re welcome.
Vomit. Buckets of it, everywhere.
What a small-minded, parroting, arrogant little twerp.
That article’s writer is a person who has clearly never bothered to actually talk to a new atheist generally, or have a real discussion with one outside of clandestine quote mining operations. It is simply astonishing how determined she is to misunderstand nonbelievers.
I’m so over this nonsense, this constant stream of tying intelligent, reasonable people to the train tracks without bothering to understand their views, in the name of moderation. These people could find a way to be moderate about a cure for cancer.
“Flynn points out that atheists have long called for an end to religion. What’s “new” about the New Atheists is their stridency and refusal to compromise.”
This reminds me of one of the most odious hack techniques I’ve seen. If this is true, the first sentence is the hack summarizing Flynn. The second is personal commentary (as will be admitted if pressed) but is portrayed as unbiased reporting.
Yes. The best part about this, I think, is the aptness of your word choice: “unbiased.” As it happens, that word is used in the motto of RNS, the wire HuffPo got this intellectual refuse from. It reads:
This is an organization who has clearly discovered offshore drilling; now we just wait until they realize articles like this have broken the pipeline, gushing millions of gallons of pure, black irony crude into the Gulf of Mexico.
Not only has FOX news not opened up the middle, it’s done everything within its power to make that middle nonexistent. That has, in fact, been the entire point of FOX news. So aside from biasing the reader against New Atheist, what exactly was the point of saying that? Some kind of backhanded compliment and half-assed attempt to look impartial?
The Overton Window is overrated:
http://scienceblogs.com/tfk/2011/08/on_the_overton_window.php
============
To begin with, the Overton window is an atheoretical, poorly substantiated notion dreamed up by an anti-public education activist and popularized by Glenn Beck. It is often invoked as a magical salve that justifies any form of extreme rhetoric. But when people try to really dig into the underlying dynamic that Overton was trying to describe, that simplistic approach doesn’t work.
============
I have to wonder what part of calling for the end of religion demonstrated a nonstrident willingness to compromise.
Oh, neat. A link to TFK from Nick Matzke assuming our alleged need to “justify” our “extreme rhetoric.”
Don’t ALL atheists claim that religion is wrong? I haven’t read Dennet, so I can’t comment with respect to him or his writings, but as far as I can tell in reading New Atheist blogs and commentary, religion being evil is an extremely common theme, in addition to insisting we can criticize religion and say it’s wrong. Contrast that with accommodationists, who don’t seem to think that all religion is evil, and that we should tone down our criticism.
In other words, I’m not so sure I agree that Winston got it completely wrong, or even mostly wrong. Perhaps just a little wrong.
Oh boy, another daily dose of gnubashing. Maybe the bashers can start putting their stuff in pill form so we can just pop it after breakfast.
And might there be any way we can just retire the word “strident” from these discussions. I don’t think too many gnus are opposed to debating the merits of what we advocate. And I think we’ve described pretty well what it would take to prove us wrong or show we’re misguided (which is usually more than our religious antagonists can say). So where’s the stridency? Do they know what that word even means? Strident would better describe the reaction ostensibly “tolerant” people (think Chris Hedges) have to gnu atheism.
PZ was being critical of religion on talk.origins, long before Harris’s book. I would think that both Dennett and Dawkins have also been criticizing religion before 2004. That’s not intended as a criticism of Harris. It’s just that Kimberly Winston is giving him too much credit.
It’s of course the comment section to the Rosenau post where you’ll find a less biased, more erudite and well-informed grasp of the Overton Window.
Nick, it’s true that Overton wasn’t an academic, and that he had a crazy set of politics. So there’s not much grown-up academic literature that uses the concept of the Overton window.
And of course Josh is right to dismiss it as a method of prediction. But then again, I’m not sure anyone really uses Overton to make predictions. As you sort of suggest, usually people only use it as a way of justifying themselves when confronted by those who try to play the tone card. Josh misses the point on that.
Also, the idea of the Overton window is only a few shades away from actual social sicence. The ‘door-in-the-face’ (DITF) technique, studied in the psychology of persuasion, is the psychological expression of whatever Overton was getting at.
Ah, Mystyk said it best.
Whoah whoah whoah—-are you implying Sam Harris DIDN’T invent atheism? Because I’ve always figured that my adoption of atheism back in 1999 was proof that Sam Harris could time travel and make people from before 2004 atheists retroactively. It was the only way I could make sense of how my deconversion happened before his book came out.
Huff Po. ‘Nuff said.
Nathan – I imagine Ophelia was making a distinction between “religion” and “theism” (which is smart because there are non-theistic religions, like Ethical Culture).
The article really is a piece of shit. I’m glad you’re here to pick up on these things Ophelia – I don’t know how you find all of these!
Nor does “old” atheism claim that religion was flawed. It makes the same claims as bew atheism.
I had to look up Ethical Culture, and only skimmed, but I don’t think it matches what I would consider a religion, not even a non-theistic religion. Still, I’m exhausted and only skimmed, so I could be way off. Regardless, generally when I think of religion, and what I would consider a religion, there’s some form of supernaturalism involved, even if there is no deity.
Then again, if one holds to a strict definition of “atheism” as being without theism/deities, then atheism would leave open the possibility of ghosts or reincarnation and other such things, so it couldn’t say that all religion is wrong.
And of course, perhaps my definition of religion is incomplete.
Ah, fuck it. I’m going to bed, maybe I’ll be more cogent tomorrow.
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Nathan, I don’t recall any prominent New Atheist (or even their lackeys and stooges in the Ruse hierarchy) saying that “all religion is evil.” A more common remark is to say that some religion is evil, and that even so-called moderate religions have negative effects by inhibiting critical thinking and sheltering more virulent varieties from criticism. To say that “all religion has negative consequences” (or even “religion poisons everything”) is not the same as saying “all religion is evil.”
Having said that, I’m sure you can find a few blog posts containing those words (Google spits up a Facebook page and a YouTube video with that title). But that’s not the same. No one who said such a thing would be taken seriously in the Gnu Atheist movement, because it is obviously a gross overstatement.
Oh please, we all know Dawkins stole Dalek technology from his cameo on Dr Who that allowed him to travel back and stop this from happening. Go back to your own timeline!
I’m not an expert in journalism, but the problem appears to be this style of gutless journalism that holds claim to being unbiased and balanced, where the journalist hides behind the opinions of others. Fact checking, reasoning, honesty and truth are all qualities of a journalist who isn’t afraid to make a stand or hold a position, and is therefore biased and no longer balanced. It’s a sweet kind of irony. Perhaps this truth-seeking mode of journalism is not good for circulation or selling adverts? Or maybe that’s my biased cynicism.
The first passage quoted uses the word ‘evil’, a term beloved of the religious and a term very rarely used by atheists. The second passage quoted uses absolutist terms ‘religion’s responsible for virtually all the world’s ills [ie evils]’, again terms beloved by the religious and largely shunned by atheists. I haven’t read anything more than these two passages and already I see this common tendency to cast atheists in religious terms, which is hugely sigh-inducing. Even Hitchens’ claim that religion poisons everything isn’t a statement about evil it seems to me. It’s simply the claim that basing your beliefs on faith rather than evidence is ultimately very bad for your health, and the health of everyone around you.
I think we should call it Boo! Atheism. It clearly scares the bejebus out of some people.
I do a little reflection on this HuffPo piece over at my place. I don’t point out all the various things that she simply gets wrong, but I do point out that it is what I think is a deliberate misrepresentation for the sake of Winston’s own reilgious biases. She’s written three books, one about making prayer beads, another about a quilt ministry, and a third about what happens after faith healing disappoints. She’s a woo-meister, and the whole piece is simply groaning under the weight of religious idiocy. Yet this woman is on the editorial team of Religious News Services which claims to be a secular news source with unbiased reporting on issues of religion and ethics. Kimberly Winston is a fake.
Eric, I clicked on your name (I assumed that doing that would take me to your blog, choice in dying) but the link is broken.
Ophelia, thanks for posting this.
Ah, but her name be given as Winston, so she will doubleplus-surely one day find truth and correction to her little heart, bless it.
No, and the same applies even to theism. Some (at least) of the accommodationist or “framing” school claim that they just “happen to be” atheists, which tends to create the impression that it’s just a matter of taste or happenstance rather than one of epistemology. Chris Mooney does this. I think if pressed he will admit that he thinks theism is wrong, but I’m not sure about that.
That sounds like a quibble but it isn’t; this is perhaps the chief divide between gnu atheists and framer atheists. We think we’re atheists for reasons, and that the reasons are good, and that it’s important to be clear about that. Framer atheists disagree strongly about the last item and tend to be evasive or secretive about the first two.
It appears that between “choiceindying” and “com” is a comma rather than a period.
@Marta, @Eric: I think the link-brokenage is that there is a comma instead of a full stop before the .com part. Try this one instead.
Oh, I see SC is much quicker, again!
Even though nobody is saying anything differently from Bertrand Russell, there are more people saying it, to the extent that it might threaten religious privilege, justifying extreme rhetoric in defense of such privilege.
(1) Fox News is all about deception. If Professor Cragun is convinced that new atheists have been deceptive, he should cite instances or stop using the comparison.
(2) How the hell has Fox News opened up the middle? The fact is that, through intellectual intimidation, they’ve forced the middle off the side of the road. Barry Goldwater would be ridiculed by that bunch.
Though it’s open to question whether he would stand and take it.
Right? On the chance that Cragun actually thinks atheists are on the right, I think the spectrum goes something like this: Atheists > Deists > New Agers > Animists > Polytheists > Monotheists. We are about as far left as possible, and monotheists, who consider themselves property of a totalitarian deity and his human manifestations, are about as far right as possible.
I have always understood the statement “religion poisons everything” as meaning that religion is evil. It’s not a mindless, natural force like nuclear radiation. It’s created by humans, and has a moral dimension. Whether it actually is all evil is up for debate, but I don’t think it’s as simple as just having negative consequences. But then, I think that what we believe is extremely important, and we have a moral obligation to seek correct belief for ourselves (this is not the same as saying we have any right to force others [if it were possible] to believe as we do).
Now, see, I obviously haven’t read enough of the accommodationist writing. I had been under the impression they merely disagreed about how we present ourselves, and to what extent we should talk about our belief (or lack thereof) in public. I am saddened that that might not be all there is to it.
Damn it, that first blockquote was supposed to be two separate blockquotes, as they’re from two separate people. Teach me not to preview.
I’m no expert either, and Kimberly Winston certainly doesn’t appear to be. But I know if you’re doing journalism you don’t want to be accused of writing polemics. Unbiased reporting is the only authority a journalist has. Still, journalists want it both ways and the lazy ones try and have it both ways in the same piece, employing rhetorical tricks to insert their opinion among the quotes.
SC, I am surprised that you did not point out that Bakunin predates all the Gnu-atheists
“If God really exists, it would be necessary to to abolish him” God and State, 1882 (It was a posthumous publication)
andrewD, here is another Gnu Atheist echoing PZ’s Courtier’s Reply from 1748:
From L’homme machine by Julien Offray de La Mettrie.
Nathan –
Well, the intense (not to say obstinate) conviction with which they agree with themselves about how we should present ourselves seems to push them (eyes open or not) into the “I happen to be an atheist” frame. I think I did a post once about Mooney’s saying that, and how annoying it is.
I’ve pointed and linked to Bakunin, Goldman, de Cleyre, and some others many, many times. People don’t usually respond so I think they’re ignoring it (or annoyed that I’m bringing it up again), but then I’ll be pleasantly surprised to hear from someone who followed one of my links and read it. But thank you for doing it here!
For anyone who somehow managed to miss/avoid my links in the past, here’s one to the Anarchy Archives :):
http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/
Ophelia,
You probably did, but I’ve only been involved in any way for a matter of months. Atheist for years, but read the “God Delusion,” then slowly started reading a few other things, and here I am. So, there’s still a lot I’m not up on (for instance, I’m still unclear who this “Tom Johnson” person is, despite attempts to search it out. oh well).
May be it doesn’t match what you would call a “religion”, but they are incorporated as such and consider themselves a “religion”. They use religion in its sociological sense, referring to the sorts of services and experiences they provide for people rather than to any supernatural content they adhere to.
I didn’t mean “and you should be aware of it” Nathan! Was just murmuring, and making a note to search later, maybe, possibly.
True, and I’m trying to think what else I would call that, besides religion. I’m not having much luck with that, so I’ll provisionally agree to refer to them as a religion. It’s dissatisfying though.
I think I knew that; you’ve made plenty of such murmurs before. I was more trying to make an excuse for any idiocy or ignorance I display.
Eric @25, you’re being far too modest about your piece. For those interested in some very good research on a journalist of quite outstanding partiality (not to mention a woo purveyor of the first water that ought to interest skeptics, too), go here:
http://choiceindying.com/2011/08/29/new-atheists-emerge-from-911/
This is almost the post I was thinking of, but not quite. It doesn’t have the “I happen to be an atheist” part so it’s not quite the one, but the basic idea is the same. Mooney described his atheism in that same evasive way –
And I said but it’s not identity, it’s reasons.
I’d still like to find the “I happen to be an atheist” one though. Oh well.
Nathan DST @44: I just popped across to your place and noticed the link you’ve got to a piece purporting to be a ‘secular argument against gay marriage’. I note that one of the co-authors is Robert George, a Catholic natural lawyer. Both Robert George and I had the same teacher at Oxford: John Finnis. Nothing either man writes could be considered a ‘secular argument’ against gay marriage (or any other moral claim on sexual matters). Finnis, however, is intellectually honest, and does not try to have his own facts. George, by contrast, is notorious for misrepresenting late (Christian) Roman law, ‘retconning’ to make it look as though pagan Romans had the same laws.
Here’s a tip: they didn’t.
Atheism as a personal identity is a good way to avoid the epistemic questions, and a natural move by accomos to paint NAs as behaving badly rather than representing atheist reasons, which they share with atheists generally. Since accomos have a hard time arguing against positions they agree with, they argue disagreements are about about identity. And arguing against identity is insulting and wrong, akin to racism.
Exactly. It’s all about avoiding the epistemic questions, and there are several ways to do that.
One of my complaints is getting caught up in identity politics. Atheism is not an identity, but lack of belief. I think identity is very good at uniting people, but it’s also very good at dividing them. A double-edged sword that ultimately threatens individual free thought.
Heh
Individual free thought isn’t the ultimate good either. Given just how predisposed we are to be wrong and not realize it, how naturally neutral we are to the plights of others and how generally lousy we are at realizing when we ourselvs are in the wrong, that coercive outside influence can help.
skepticlawyer@#47: Oddly enough, I was thinking of some of your commentary about Roman pagan law compared to Christian/Jewish law when I read them saying that marriage has always been the way it is (along with various polygamous societies). I don’t like retconning in the comic books, and I like it even less in real life. And that’s hardly the only problem with that paper, I’d say it’s actually a minor problem in that paper (seriously, “organic bodily union”?? really??).
Back on topic, identity as it relates to atheism might be tricky. I mean, I completely accept the label of atheist, and would even say it’s part of my identity, in that the movement to gain respect for atheists, and various other related issues, are important to me. But, I would not say it’s a core part of my identity, but rather the respect and love of reason and evidence based thinking that led to my atheism is far more a core part of my identity. The atheism could change with appropriate evidence, but I don’t see that skeptical nature changing. If anything, it’s only gotten “worse.”
Could I say “I happen to be an atheist,” in the sense of “the evidence ‘happened’ to lead me to being an atheist”? Does that make sense?
One more thing, I tried a google search a few different ways, and couldn’t find Chris Mooney saying “I happen to be an atheist,” but did find Jen at Blag Hag, and Ebonmusings at Daylight Atheism saying it. Any chance you’re misremembering who annoyed you?
Josh Rosenau, quoted by Nick Matzke above:
(I’m recycling a comment I made at EvolutionBlog here.)
I don’t think that this is a fair characterization of the relevant research.
I entirely agree that there isn’t a lot of very direct scientific testing of Overton’s hypothesis, but here’s a lot of indirect evidence for it—and the “scientific” evidence for accommodationist strategies isn’t any better, and is IMO worse.
There’s wealth of generally applicable research in cognitive biases and social belief fixation going back to the 1960s and 1970s—about anchoring, bracketing, conformity, groupthink, deference to authority, diffusion of responsibility, breaking a spiral of silence, etc.
Given several well-known biases in how people and especially groups change their opinions, it’s hard to see how Overton effects could fail to occur, or fail to be important. They are a predictable consequence of things we do know about human psychology and especially social psychology.
It is quite clear that even in “non-social” belief fixation, people are heavily biased by the range of salient options. That is one of the most important facts social scientists get drummed into them, because it’s tremendously important methodologically. You can’t design a non-terrible survey or test without knowing that.
For example, on any multiple choice test with a range of available options, involving any sort of guesswork, you can quite heavily bias the responses by biasing the range of answers given to choose from. If the correct answer is the lowest given value, people will systematically guess too high, on average—and the higher the modal and highest values are, the higher they will guess, on average. (Many will be adamant that they did not take the given range into account, when in fact they demonstrably did.)
Social belief fixation is heavily biased in a similar way. People consciously or unconsciously triangulate and adjust their opinions to the range of opinions expressed in the group. Sometimes they actually internalize group opinions, and sometimes they don’t, but fake it—they self-censor their views for various reasons—and that leads many others to accept and internalize the views that are expressed. The triangulated center shifts away from the self-censored views and toward the expressed views.
Overton was clearly right that that general sort of thing goes on. We have thousands of controlled studies over several decades showing that much.
Whether that applies in the way Overton said—and as strongly as Overton said—to something as complicated and multileveled as national politics is a somewhat different question. It’s really hard to do definitive studies of such things, for the usual reasons social science is hard.
But that problem applies in spades to the kind of “scientific evidence” accommodationists cite as evidence that you catch more flies with honey, and that centrist triangulation is the best long-term strategy.
Overton wasn’t just some right-wing kook, as you could easily be read as suggesting. His hypothesized pattern of social opinion-shaping is at least consistent with a half century of research in the social sciences, which accommodationists tend to conveniently ignore.
It seems like you guys have never even heard of Asch and Milgram and Kahneman and Tversky, or the Bandwagon Effect, or Herd Behavior, or the Holocaust or the Bay of Pigs. (If Overton was simply wrong, how did those things happen, anyhow?)
Paul, while that’s all to the good, it sounds as if you’re broadly agreeing with Rosenau’s conclusion — that the Overton window is at best a heuristic, it is not the direct subject of scholarly research, and it is not a predictive device. To paraphrase, you think Overton is an effective synthesis of various mid-level theories. But Rosenau can do that too, without changing his conclusion.
Mystyk showed in the TFK thread is that, in the broader scheme of things, the Overton window is besides the point. Overton’s window is just a way of thinking about the persuasion of populations. The real issue is persuasion. e.g., accommodationists like Rosenau advocate for something like the Foot in the Door technique, and Mystyk rightly observes that even Overton himself tended to use the Foot in the Door technique in practical politics, and argues that he did so in such a way that is consistent with the Overton window scheme. Hence, the Overton window by itself is a red herring when it comes to the broader dialectic.
The real fight, of course, is over whether or not it is more effective to use FITD alone (accommodationists), or to leave yourself open to either strategy depending on the nature of the audience (everybody else). And when it comes to the Door in the Face technique, the latest research indicates that Door in the Face really does work — but only so long as it triggers a sense of guilt. That way, the first try gets you thrown out, but the sense of guilt reels people back in so that you can give it a second try. That’s the insight that people like Rosenau and Mooney are genuinely missing out on.