Comment 29
Prologue: James Croft wondered about some fundamental value not shared among gnu atheists and accommodationists. Paul offered an answer which many readers found illuminating, too illuminating to be hidden as comment 29 on a long thread.
I think that gnu atheists and accommodationists disagree mainly over one thing: is there too much forthright criticism by atheists of religion generally, or too little?
Gnu atheists think more people ought to regularly speak up critically about bad religious ideas, and that those bad religious ideas are common to “liberal” religion as well as, e.g., fundamentalism.
The reasons why gnus think there’s too little forthright criticism and accommodationists think there’s too much vary considerably.
Accommodationists typically think some or all of the following, in some mix:
0. Distinctively religious beliefs aren’t all false, or aren’t all inconsistent with science, or aren’t so importantly false as to be worth objecting to.
1. In terms of its effects on human well being, religion isn’t a bad thing overall. A lot of religion (e.g., fundamentalism) is bad, but a lot of religion (e.g., theologically moderate or liberal Christianity) is actually good for the world, on the whole, promoting civilized conceptions of morality, or at worst harmless. If we dispensed with religion, or just diminished the mindshare of religion across the board, we’d lose a lot of good along with the bad.
2. Liberal religion is our friend, because liberal religious people are our main allies in the fight against conservative religion. If we talk people out of being liberally religious, that won’t help anything much, and may hurt because it will weaken institutions that we should be strengthening, or leaving as they are. Liberal religion is a crucial part of the solution to the problem of bad religion.
3. You can argue against the worst sorts of religion effectively without arguing against the best sorts. Fundamentalism is he problem, not religion, and critiques of religion should generally focus on distinctive features of bad religion. We should argue against theological conservatism, as liberals, more often than we should argue against religion, as atheists.
4. Even to the extent that it might be advantageous to undermine religion across the board, it is strategically unwise to attempt to do so. It will mostly alienate potential allies and generate backlash, doing more harm than good. It is better to be very “civil,” and only gently criticize religion, and mostly focus criticism on especially bad religion. You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.
Gnus, in contrast, tend to think at least some of the following to a greater extent than accommodationists:
0. Distinctively religious beliefs are generally false, are generally inconsistent with science, and are false enough to be worth objecting to, out of a more or less free-floating commitment to truth.
1. In terms of its effects on human well-being, religion is a bad thing overall. Some religion (e.g., very theologically liberal religion) isn’t especially harmful in its direct effects on people, and sometimes is even good, but most religion is a net negative, and religion as a whole could be dispensed with, and that would be a generally good thing, with lots of pluses and relatively few minuses.
2. Liberal religion is our friend in some senses, and not in others. On average, if we talk liberally religious people out of being liberally religious, that will be a good thing because they’ll be even better allies against religion, including especially conservative religion.
3. You can’t argue effectively against bad religion effectively without arguing against religion fairly broadly, because the most important features of bad religion—belief in God and souls and divinely or supernaturally inspired morality—are common to almost all religion. Once you grant those mistaken premises, or fail to challenge them, you’ve mostly given away the store, and are reduced to making the kind of lame-ass arguments that liberal religious people use so ineffectively against conservatively religious people. (E.g., justifying certain ways of picking and choosing religious beliefs—rather than explaining why it’s all a load of bollocks, for which there are much better more basic, and correct arguments.)
The root problem isn’t fundamentalism, but central premises of almost all religion, which are themselves stupid and dangerous ideas, acquiesence to which enables fundamentalism—and basic nonfundamentalist orthodoxy, which is a bigger problem than outright fundamentalism.
4. Criticizing religion does generate backlash and alienate some people, but fears of backlash are overrated, and it is important to challenge religious privilege and especially to shift the Overton window of public opinion. Being too afraid of short-term backlash—and too pessimistic about major shifts of popular opinion about religion—is a recipe for perpetuating religion’s privileged position and dominance. It is demonstrably untrue that you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar—successful social movements generally require a spectrum of opinion, including relatively “extreme” views. Excessive moderation is a recipe for stasis, and you need both reformists and “radicals,” who more or less play good cop / bad cop.
—
To summarize, gnus and accommodationists tend to differ in some or all of the following respects
0. How systematically false and/or antiscientific religion is,
1. How systematically harmful religion is,
2. Whether liberal religion is best thought of as part of the solution, or part of the problem,
3. Whether the most telling critiques of conservative religion apply to liberal religion as well, such that criticizing the only the former is pulling your best punches, and
4. Whether frequent forthright criticism of religion does more harm than good, strategically, in the big picture and the long run—is it worth the backlash? Is centrist triangulation a better political strategy than shifting the Overton window of popular opinion?
—
In general, gnus do recognize that there are important roles for both “radicals” and “moderates” (not that gnus are actually radicals—nobody’s talking about using force or anything like that).
They generally just don’t think we already have too many “radicals” (forthright critics of religion across the board), as accommodationists do.
What accommodationists say that sets gnus off is usually a criticism of gnus that implies that we’re wrong to be as “radical” as we are, and that we should sit down and shut up, or do something else instead, because our anti-religious fight
1) isn’t worth fighting in principle, because religion’s not so bad, or
2) isn’t winnable, to any particularly useful extent, so isn’t worth fighting in practice, or
3) isn’t winnable by our overt, backlash-generating means, so we should all be nice moderates like the accommodationists instead of being noisy troublemakers who undermine sound, centrist political triangulation strategy.
We generally think all those things are false, and get really tired of hearing them from people who don’t seriously address the issues of fact, of worthwhile goals, or of effective political strategy.
Every time we hear strategic advice that amounts to “you catch more flies with honey” by somebody telling us what to do, who is apparently entirely ignorant of Overton window strategies, it pisses us off.
We get really, really sick of people telling us what to do without addressing our very good reasons for doing what we’re doing, and actually showing that their reasons are better than our reasons.
One thing that does frequently bring deep emotions into play is the sense that accommodationists frequently advise us what to do as though they think we’re simplistic strategically naive zealots, as opposed to thoughtful people with well-thought-out positions, good arguments, and an arguably excellent strategic rationale that is almost never even mentioned, much less properly addressed, by people who proffer an “obviously better” strategy toward apparently different goals.
Until accommodationists are willing to talk very, very seriously about Overton issues, we’re going to dismiss their strategic advice as the shallow, platitudinous crap that we think it is. As long as they act like we don’t even have a strategy, and criticize us for not going along with theirs, we’re going to be seriously annoyed when they tell us to do what they want us to do, instead of what we’re doing.
Talking about us as though we’re simply strategically naive and gratuitously confrontational is straw-manning us, and we are sick as shit of it. Its been going on nonstop for years, and doesn’t show any sign of stopping.
We do understand accommodationist arguments. Of course we do. We always have. It isn’t exactly rocket science. (Or even passable political science.) And we’ve always had good reasons for disagreeing with them, which are almost universally ignored by accommodationists, who continue to talk past us, and talk systematically misleading cartoonish smack about us.
That’s just seriously annoying, isn’t? Should we not be annoyed by that?
Where should someone who hasn’t been closely following this issue look to find an explanation of what an “Overton window” is?
Glad to see this excellent rundown get the attention it deserves! Still wondering where Humanism comes into this framework.
@1: Let me Google that for you :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window
Short form: political views fall across a spectrum from those that are current policy/widely accepted to those which are considered too radical to be publicly expressed. Frequent and public expression of very “radical” ideas has the effect of shifting the “window” of acceptable views.
This is an extremely key part of the issue to me. Certainly in my personal pet cause of American homophobia, hate crimes and other violent acts tend to be produced by fundamentalism, but indoctrination with guilt, social ostracism, and institutional discrimination come primarily from those very conventional, traditional groups that “love the sinner, hate the sin”. The central problem is not the “fundamentalist” view that gay people are a particularly severe scourge upon society, but the conventional and rather bland view that homosexual behavior is simply sinful, or at best inferior, in the eyes of God. It’s only in the up-and-coming generation that religious homophobia is becoming confined to fundamentalists; it has been a mainstream Christian position in the U.S. since Stonewall, even forgetting the previous several centuries.
In a sense, atheism has come along rather too late for GLB’s in U.S. If something like New Atheism had really taken off in, say, 1900, a more effective base might have been established for religious skeptics to effectively take on more broad humanist projects. Unfortunately, at the moment religious skepticism is often still sufficiently a “fringe” (and so heavily psychologized) that atheists are still more focused on holding their own. Honestly, this is evident in the mere fact that American atheist groups are running campaigns about not being morally depraved or existentially vapid. If anything, by highlighting the intolerance of the religious right, homosexuality has probably given more ammunition to atheists than vice versa. (Although language about secularism and separation of church and state has still played a very useful role for LGBT rights, such arguments can only be leveraged against government discrimination.)
If religious skepticism becomes entrenched as an acceptable, or even preferable stance in a society, that’s obviously a much stronger position from which to aim at specific problems caused by religion, as opposed to appealing to liberal believers to fight all of one’s theology-related ethical battles.
Further notes:
If there’s no one pulling the Overton Window on our end, there nevertheless will be someone pulling on the other end. Gnus often get compared to fundamentalists. To this I can reply that the Westboro Baptist Church is widely reviled, and Terry Jones is at least generally disliked, but there are a variety of preachers, politicians, and lobbyists who can gleefully point to such people as worse than themselves, thus finding themselves closer to being “moderates” than they’d otherwise be. While I wouldn’t want to think of us as the WBC of atheism, we are definitely broadening the range of positions that everyone else considers it acceptable to hold. But weeding out “extremists” only makes the moderates look more radical due to ‘ lack of contrast.
As for Humanism (humanism? Hume-an-ism?), in a broad sense, I’m not sure that it’s on any one side of the confrontational/accommodationist dichotomy. Certainly there are people who consider themselves humanist on both sides, and indeed pretty much all of the ethical questions involved are going to be addressed primarily through appeal to humanist principles (though perhaps different ones on each side).
I suppose that if there’s a difference, it’s that accomodationists tend to hold that espousing humanism is the primary, central thing, and that increased acceptance of atheism is likely to be a useful side effect of that (perhaps an important one, but still secondary). I’ve noticed that people who take this view tend to focus on humanism as a social identity as well as (or more than) a philosophical/ethical approach. I’m sympathetic to this, insofar as broad community organization and support are definitely major roles that have been played by religious groups, and to date those are niches in which they have little direct competition. There’s also the desire we all have, to just sort of get away from all the arguments for a while and feel like friendly, normal people, and this is probably something that is more available when taking a generic “humanist” stance than acting as a religious skeptic in particular.
Gnus, however, seem to regard direct criticism of religion and promotion of atheism as being necessary for the establishment of broad humanist principles in the first place. The idea is that human-centered moral reasoning cannot be done properly as long as supernatural nonsense is exerting a distorting effect on people’s priorities (perhaps more mundanely, moral judgments cannot be made in a reliable and accurate way if they involve highly unreliable or inaccurate assumptions).
Personally, I think we sometimes might have an unstated assumption (or perhaps not so much an active belief as a hope or wish) that if religion would just get out of the way, we could make accurate and humane ethical and political judgments, and clear up a whole bunch of things very quickly. This is probably too idealistic a conception of the world, if it is something we really commonly hold. However, the inverse of this idea probably is true: if religion cannot be marginalized, it will always remain a barrier to the establishment of humanist ethics. In fact, some religious atrocities might even be rational, even from a humanist perspective, if the religions on which they are based were true. In such cases, the only intellectually honest way for an atheist to argue against such actions is to argue against the beliefs themselves. Asserting a humanist method of moral calculus, without examining the false premises being inserted into this calculus, will not cut it.
Frankly, I think that without religious skepticism and the promotion of atheism, we simply do not have adequate intellectual firepower to address all the ills of religion. In such a situation, we are stuck between the options of simply not addressing those arguments, intellectual dishonesty, hiding behind liberal believers (i.e. letting people who we already know are wrong speak for us), or just deciding to get it over with and make the arguments about the unjustifiable nature of religious claims. The problem I always have with “accommodationists” is the lack of a satisfactory answer to this dilemma.
Very nicely done, I especially like that the accomodationist position is laid out in a fair and even-handed way first. There is nothing wrong with accomodationism per se — what I call “weak accomodationism,” the position held by folks like Genie Scott, which basically amounts to a profession of faith/science conciliation. It is a valid strategy, just as ours is. The problem is with what I call “strong accomodationism,” of the sort practiced by Mooney, Rosenau, etc., which claims that anybody who doesn’t profess conciliation between faith and science is doin it rong and ur not helping and basically screwing everything up.
There is a hidden gem buried in this hidden gem of a previously-buried comment:
Damn right. For every Phelps-style “God hates fags” fundie, you have a hundred thousand moderates who nevertheless voted in favor of Prop 8 (or whatever anti-civil rights vote was available to them in their state) due to their “basic nonfundamentalist orthodoxy.”
You don’t have to be a fundie to have a religion-inspired opposition to reproductive rights, marriage equality, or fully realized freedom of speech; or to have a religion-inspired vulnerability to shallow political double-talk about “family values” or “faith-based whoziwhutzit”.
Truly progressive religions like UU and Quaker and Reform Judaism and such may very well be harmless. If they aren’t, the reasoning why they are harmful is very subtle and nowhere near indisputable. (FWIW I don’t have a strong opinion either way – they may even be a net positive, though I tend to doubt it). But those are the exception rather than the rule. There is a vast gulf in between Quakers and Evangelicals, and the dogmas that populate this divide have plenty of clearly objectionable features.
You don’t have to be a YEC to believe in crazy shit with negative real-world ramifications because of your religion.
The idea of ‘speaking out against religion’ makes it seem like gnus are actively proselytizing when I don’t think that is the case. The push from the gnus is not to convert the population as a whole to non-religion but to create an environment where public non-factual claims of religionists are going to face challenge. I think we are doing pretty well in that regard. Just look at any non-censored comment section in a religious article on a major news website and you will see plenty of gnu-ish comments. demands for evidence etc.
I think the gnu’s strategy is one for the long term – the US can go the way of Western Europe but even there it took a few generations for the non religious to become a significant part of the population and even then it was not due to mass deconversion, rather it was the fact that younger people simply weren’t convinced to become as religious as their parents.
Despite this I think the gnus approach of applying entirely reasonable skeptical questions to the religious debate is having an effect on even the religious themselves.
Look at the following section from an interview with current star Pastor Rob Bell about how he, as an evangelical, started to question the dogma about Hell.
He had put on an art exhibition at his church that sparked his personal debate.
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2065080,00.html#ixzz1Kj4IacDuTo me that sounds like a question that is entirely consistent with the gnu approach.OK, he still believes a lot of crap but at least its a start and one that I suspect the gnus approach may have a hand in starting. It at least sounds nothing like accomodationism.
:P
If you tickle us, do we not laugh?
If you prick us, do we not bleed?
If you poison us, do we not die?
If you troll us, shall we not raeg?
Svlad – ha!
James @ #1,
Re Overton Windows, you might also be interested in this overlong comment I made at WEIT.
It talks about the history of the accommodationist/gnu controversy but a big chunk of it is about Overton ideas.
This is one reason I favor the new Paul-Rieux blog idea, despite strong reluctance to see P-R shift their energy from commenting here to their own blog. A new blog would at least be a good way to collect their comments for easy finding. Like this one of Rieux’s from this morning
http://scienceblogs.com/tfk/2011/04/what_is_new_atheism.php#comment-3724195
and the ones he did in the same place yesterday, and the Overton one Paul links to above, and so on. Your comments (you two) are a resource. A library of them would be a good thing.
In fact I’m afraid I’ll have to insist that you spend some of your time (if you do set up the blog) collecting old ones and putting them there. Sorry – I simply can’t allow anything less.
:- )
This is an excellent summary of the issues at hand.
Having been both a conservative religionist and a liberal religionist along my past journey, I think that the things they have in common are more important and problematic than the differences between them. By not being willing to ask the basic question, “But is it true?”, Accommodationists make the argument completely about the political, social, or psychological consequences of different types of religion and ignore the intellectual and epistemic arguments which are some of the strongest arguments against religion in general. Accommodationists (at least many of them) seem so invested in the postmodern idea that objective truth does not exist (and that those who think it does are naive and “non-serious”), that they echo postcolonial scholars in making every critique about either unmasking or promoting a social and political agenda. For those who see religion as simply a constructed cultural tool like everything else, they can’t engage in an epistemological critique of supernatural claims – one that offers a more direct and effective way of diminishing religion’s influence.
Liberal apologetics frustrate me more than conservative apologetics these days because of the hermeneutical acrobatics I watch people do to maintain certain theological conclusions about the world. Most liberal and conservative religions are about belief in search of data – it’s just drawing the personal theological defense boundary at different places, not about truly opening up one’s beliefs to total examination by evidence-based thinking.
Great line.
I just got around to posting this comment on Overton and social psychology (in response to Josh Rosenau) at EvolutionBlog.
The gist is that so far as I know, Josh is right that there isn’t a lot of very direct, very “scientific” evidence for Overton’s claims, but that he’s wrong to dismiss them as some unsubstantiated claims by a right-wing think tank guy, because they’re predictable consequences of well-known scientific facts about individual cognitive biases and social belief fixation, supported by thousands of studies over the last fifty years.
It’s always hard to say how such results really apply at the strategic bottom line to something as big, complicated, and multileveled as national politics, but Overton’s ideas find a lot of support in basic cognitive and social psychology, which the leading accommodationists seem strikingly and quite conveniently ignorant of.
When they make it sound like scientific psychology is on their side, based on little studies that seem to show that you catch more flies with honey, they’re seriously wrong. It’s more complicated than they make it out to be, and IMNSHO the preponderance of evidence goes the other way. They need to at least acknowledge that Overton effects are quite plausible, and even plausibly quite large, especially in terms of long-term feedback effects; if they’re going to criticize our strategies, they need to seriously argue that Overton effects are for some mysterious reason nonexistent or just small, or systematically countered by other feedbacks, or something like that.
I’d like to see them try, and show how well-known facts about anchoring, conformity, deference to authority, bandwagons, herd behavior, and groupthink do not ultimately support gnu strategies. If they’re going to argue that our strategies are bad and counterproductive, the burden of proof is on them to show that Overton was somehow very wrong.
@Sean #4 I entirely agree with you re: the danger of the simple conception of “sin” and its attachment to same-sex relationships. It’s terribly pernicious.
I do want to point something out. You suggest that
As I’m sure you know, there was a thriving freethought movement in the late 1800s – it was known as the “golden age of freethought” in America! Many of the arguments made by freethinkers then are precisely the same as the ones being made today, and the figures were just as well know, relative to the time, as the New Atheists today. If you read Ingersoll’s speeches you will see Hitchens simply nicks large chunks from them in his own debates.
It’s worth considering why that movement died out, and whether the same could happen to ours. My suspicion is that, while they had a strong impact on the intellectual debate at the time, they had very little organizing capacity. Really the only relic from that time still about is the Ethical Society, and I suspect that is because Adler realized the need to build actual spaces and communities to keep the dream alive. There may be lessons for us here.
I think the glaringly obvious difference is the internet. The internet works as a ratchet – it makes it hard to just lose sight of something. It also, of course, helps with organizing, as various Middle Eastern dictators are learning to their sorrow and mortification.
This is a great point – the internet helps spread the message. Gut given the enormous fame of Ingersoll at the time, it’s surprising little came of it. I fear the same could happen today if we don’t actually organize. The capacity to organize through the internet is there, but too few Humanist and Secular organizations are actually doing it, in my view.
Perhaps I’m naive regarding some surveys or something, but I think that there’s probably a serious difference in terms of numbers. I’m quite aware that Ingersoll was as outspoken as anyone today, but it is certainly the case that he had a different audience, and of course different mediums available to him. In any case, my hypothetical was not to say that atheism actually could have taken off in 1900, but merely to point out that if it somehow had, humanism in the 20th century would have stood in a very different place.
As to whether or not our movement will die out? I depends, I think, on what you mean by that. I don’t see it as being likely that there will be a religious revival that sweeps through and drives Christianity back up to 95+% of the population. But there could be a general quieting down again, which leaves the status quo in place. You’re probably right that it’s more of a matter of organization; we need to actually direct all these new-found enthusiasts towards something.
I think that there are definitely some groups which are counteracting this. There are several atheist and humanist community groups where I live, as well as student groups, skeptic groups, and so on. Probably the biggest question is whether nonbelieving voices will reach sufficient mass to compete with cultural “common wisdom” about faith being a virtue and so forth.
Some of the work may be done simply due to failure on the opposition’s part. Many people are becoming rather apatheist as “Nones”, which doesn’t really make them strong allies, but is a serious improvement over commanding religious majorities.
This post is excellent. And add my name to the gnu-multi-blog petition.
Count me in on the Gnu Blog, as I’ve mentioned already. My vote for a name would be Gnu’s Not New or some variation on that, emphasizing the origin and purpose of the moniker, as well as being an additional play on the GNU/Linux backronym, Gnu’s Not Unix.
NB: And, anyone following this development of Paul’s awesome comments should not miss the awesome comments from Paul W. on WEIT regarding the origin of the gnu/accommodationist debate, and also the practical meaning of the Overton Window Strategy, which will henceforth be known as Comment 89953 ;-)
Oops, forgot to say that the last link has multiple comments from Paul W., and that they should all be read, not just the one I linked to.
0. How systematically false and/or antiscientific religion is.
Most of religion is not about science. An awful lot of the science/religion debate focuses on the first few chapters of Genesis and the occasional miracle. I think most accommodationists agree these should not be taught as fact.
1. How systematically harmful religion is.
This is just too general and too much to get into in a comment.
2. Whether liberal religion is best thought of as part of the solution, or part of the problem
In any attempt at social or political change, it is poor strategy to look for the most difficult areas and focus your attentions there. There is no clear divide of “difficult areas” that correspond with the liberal and fundamentalist split. Liberally religious people who are willing to engage in a reasoned discussion are good targets and completely wacko fundamentalists who are obviously hypocritical are also good targets.
3. Whether the most telling critiques of conservative religion apply to liberal religion as well, such that criticizing the only the former is pulling your best punches
This is pretty much the core of your argument, and I agree, the basic idea of supernatural forces needs to be attacked. However, this does not, as you say, “explain why it is all a load of bullocks”. Regardless of how you feel about how it is taught, or what it is wrapped around it, I have never heard an effective argument against the golden rule.
4. Whether frequent forthright criticism of religion does more harm than good, strategically, in the big picture and the long run—is it worth the backlash?
We also agree here, but I’m not sure that you get your own point about successful social movements requiring a spectrum of opinion. How those different approaches work together is a lengthy discussion, but you seem to be saying it is necessary and then saying you want to eliminate a big part of that spectrum. Or maybe you are just annoyed that they are saying they want to eliminate you, in either case, it is devolving into schoolyard type arguing.
You end with more generalizations that are difficult to address and spend a lot of time saying you have a strategy when you could have spent that time discussing the strategy.
Building on Paul’s great comment:
http://saltycurrent.blogspot.com/2011/04/gnu-atheism-as-prefigurative-politics.html
[…] Confrontation with non-believers? How rude! They clearly haven’t been listening to the accommodationists. […]
“An awful lot of the science/religion debate focuses on the first few chapters of Genesis and the occasional miracle.”
Maybe so, but is it actually the case that questions about the historicity of the Bible are the most significant conflict? We also have ideas like souls which can operate independently from brains, modern day divine interventions (either as answers to prayer or as judgments), faith healing, animate depictions of saints, prophetic visions, spiritual or demonic possession, and so forth. In these cases science may or may not be able to prove that certain events were not supernatural, but I think that accepting any of these religiously motivated ideas is definitely not consistent with any sort of conventional scientific methodology. And this is confining ourselves to issues within Christianity. There are certainly some belief systems which have been primarily driven by the promise of supernatural influence over the material world, through magic, or appealing to unseen agents, or both.
Not that accomodationists would want to promote any of those things either (for that matter, only mild interventions are likely to be advocated by most theistic evolutionists). But you get the point that a focus on Genesis and so forth is specific to certain times and places, and not in any necessary sense the most important battlefield.
Anyway, my interpretation of “incompatibilism” is that it is a question, not of consistent beliefs, but of consistent epistemology. The idea, I suppose, is that no religion can be accepted using an epistemology that is consistent with the basic principles of science, whether or not that religion actually makes statements that are subject to scientific disproof. Maybe this is false, if one believes that there is some kind of consistent way to separate out religious and scientific claims (as in NOMA), but this assumes both that this separation can be done in a way that’s consistent with scientific epistemology (i.e. that science does not internally prescribe its own scope as being broader than NOMA allows), and at the same time that there exists at least one belief system that makes only modest enough claims to be contained in this way, while still being appropriately labelled a religion.
Regardless, confidence in the falsity of religion strikes me as the more important distinction, regardless of whether that falsity is understood to be known through science specifically, or via a more general form of rationality that merely includes science. It seems clear that someone who thought that some religions had a pretty good chance of being true would probably not agree with the gnus. Nor would someone who believed that all religions were false, but that there was no rational reason to think so (a rather odd position, but a possible one I guess).
1) isn’t worth fighting in principle, because religion’s not so bad, or
Robert Mugabe was permitted to attend the beatification of John Paul II, which Italy conceded to at the Vatican’s request, which shows the moral colour and pernicious influence of the so-called “mainstream” religion.
I would love to see some evidence of such;
2) isn’t winnable, to any particularly useful extent, so isn’t worth fighting in practice, or
I love the elitism with which this argument is always tinged. Why so? Do you have some sub-set of people for whom dumb, harmless religion is OK?
3) isn’t winnable by our overt, backlash-generating means, so we should all be nice moderates like the accommodationists instead of being noisy troublemakers who undermine sound, centrist political triangulation strategy.
Kids need to hear the message loudly and clearly that they have an intellectual choice to make, and need to hear strong, lucid arguments put in favour of an atheist (in addition to and as separate from, secular) world view. It’s unfortunate that one cannot make such an argument without treading on some religious toes.
I can’t imagine a way that it would be otherwise. You cannot be an atheist and no be confrontational, as long as a majority of people remain confronted by atheism.
jwolforth,
Comment 29 wasn’t really meant to actually argue for our strategy, or for any of the other 4 major points. It was intended to clarify the characteristic substantive differences of opinion between accommodationists and gnus—largely to debunk the idea that accommodationists are nice atheists and gnus are the gnasty atheists.
Much accommodationist gnu-bashing systematically either ignores those issues, presupposing some or all of the 5 accommodationist points, and misrepresents gnus as disagreeing with the obvious for no good reason, and unaccountably being assholes, also for no good reason.
If you want some actual argument about some of the points you raise, do check out my comment at WEIT about the history of gnu/accommodationist conflict and Overton Windows, which I linked to in comment @9, above.
Also check out this comment in which I argue for points 0 through 3, i.e., that there’s a lot more deep and antiscietific falsity in liberal religion than accommodationists like to admit, and that it’s very politically important.
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2011/the-notion-lord-rees-so-casually-endorses/#comment-81428
Gnus aren’t just being busybodies taking pokes at perfectly nice and reasonable moderate religious people with harmless ideas. That’s an accommodationist whitewash.
Paul W;
Way too much to respond to at this point. We have a lot of definitional problems and you are focusing on things that I see as peripheral, even setting up dichtomies that don’t exist in my opinion. Many things you say I do agree with and I don’t see much need to work out the rest. I’ll just take your advice in the WEIT comment and call myself, “athiest with deep rich background in the history of religion and sophisticated theology” and we’ll call it good.
jwolforth,
I’m curious what you mean by that. The 5 points of common disagreement are mostly rough polarities, not either/or dichotomies, and I don’t pretend that the reality isn’t complicated.
I’m curious what you think the top two or three things I’m missing are.
As always, embarrassed to share a name with Paul W., as I just can’t compare. Don’t want to go to a pseudonym, don’t want to use my real last name, and can’t use middle initial to differentiate because they are the same.
FWIW, I registered gnuatheism.com on a whim some months back when the meme was first starting. Don’t really have much interesting to say to make use of it though. Paul W. is welcome to it if he wants to use it for this potential multi-blog venture. Or .org is unregistered. Just thought I’d mention it.
I’m not ignoring your request Paul W., but it might take a while to formulate.
[…] One of the best outlines of the problem came from James Croft on the Butterflies and Wheels blog (http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2011/comment-29/), and Daniel Loxton (http://skepticblog.org/2011/05/24/horse-laughs/, […]