It is good to deplore, but you can do more
I was thinking today about the famous split at CFI (it came up in my dispute with Nathan at Facebook), and I looked again at the Affirmations of Humanism. At the first two of them, actually, because I stopped there. Check out the second one.
We deplore efforts to denigrate human intelligence, to seek to explain the world in supernatural terms, and to look outside nature for salvation.
Well exactly. This is what I take gnu atheists to be doing! But exactly. Deploring efforts to seek to explain the world in supernatural terms is what we’re doing. So what’s the problem?
I asked Nathan that, but more civilly this time, and got a very civil reply. We have different starting points of emphasis, is what it comes down to. It’s good to clear away dead wood, but there’s more to do than that. Indeed; I couldn’t agree more – but then so could the other gnu atheists I know.
There is a lot of dead wood though. It does still need clearing out. But perhaps eventually it will be cleared out, or if not cleared out, at least tucked away where it won’t keep clogging up the works. That would be great.
When you press accommodationists, they claim only to want us Gnu’s to be respectful of religious types. But that respect seems to be a one-way street.
We are respectful of such types. We treat them as individuals capable of thinking for themselves. What we are thoroughly disrespectful of are the irrational beliefs which they nevertheless adhere to.
I think Saikat proposes one piece of deadwood that is too heavy for anyone to lift.
When people identify with their stupid ideas, then an attack on any of those ideas is equal to an attack on them, by principle of the transitivity of stupidity. Causing personal offense might not be the point of the critique of the dogma, but it’s what people are going to come away with.
So you can either insist on saying: “That’s not what we’re doing, we reject the idea that you should take offense in that way” (Dawkins style), or you can say, “OK, no worries, we’re attacking their sense of identity too” (Myers style). But both ways of looking at the situation lead to sub-optimal results, which means this issue is always going to cause people to break out into apoplectic fits.
I think there’s only one solution — skeptics and humanists have to learn something from leftist political activists, and take the phrase “Diversity of tactics” to heart.
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Skeptic South Africa, Ophelia Benson. Ophelia Benson said: It is good to deplore, but you can do more http://dlvr.it/93n7s […]
I must say, I’ve been re-invigorated recently with some atheism zeal in our ’cause’. So what is our cause exactly? I would say reason is our cause (or I would say naturalism). And it seems that’s the cause for humanists and also sceptics, and gnu atheists, and so why can’t we join together and cut away the dead wood, the irrational and incoherency? Because all this seems to be the current ‘phase’ of a kind of movement. There is much fuzzy terms to clarify, and a single coherent worldview from which we can become a solidarity. I think we’re getting there, I have optimism.
As for learning from leftists, as Benjamin mentions, I think Lenin’s What Is To Be Done? Just might offer a few insights into getting our house in order.
Well, my cause is a reduction in the social and political footprint of religion. And that, I think, is the cause that has a lot of people rallying under the banner of Gnu Atheism. The trouble with a lot of humanists is that they don’t seem to be serious about that goal. And as I’ve said so many times, part of what we need to do is actually question the truth of religious claims.
A secularism that never does that is fighting with one arm tied behind its back. Supposed allies who say we shouldn’t do it are asking us to cripple ourselves.
So some people will take offence, no matter what. What do you do about them? I think those who identify themselves with stupid but potentially harmful ideas need to be offended. That should be the point of the relevant critique. However, the focus should always be on the ideas themselves. The aim is to dissociate bad ideas from persona.
Neither Dawkins nor Myers adopt those styles. But let’s assume they do. Exactly how do you figure out those methods always leads to less than desirable results? Which data are you looking at? Deafening, incoherent rants on blogs and discussion forums? What makes you think absolutely no one is persuaded to change their minds by such abrasive yet honest arguments?
Funny, isn’t it? We should all adopt a diverse array of tactics except that being confrontational shouldn’t be one of them. Because clearly that never works, ever. We’re all for diversity and welcome people of all color – black, white, brown. Just not the yellow ones. Yellows never mix well.
This is true, and way more so for religious ideas than for any others. If I challenge your belief in homeopathy or reiki, you’ll understand that I’m a skeptic. But if I challenge your belief in supernatural agency, you’ll think me a nihilist, because Faith is a virtue, up there with Compassion, Justice and (ironically) Honesty. You’re suggesting that I should give up on righteousness. How dare you suggest that faith is not good.
The accommodationist impulse is to defend the believer from the challenge, to assert that faith gives meaning to peoples’ lives, and that challenging faith is unjustifiably cruel. I’m inclined to question whether most atheist accommodationists have any real experience with faith. Whether they appreciate that doubt – e.g., skepticism – is expected to be understood as a moral failing, and whether they understand what mental slavery really means.
Perhaps we should take the tactics of Socrates as our example. He was fighting the dead wood of tradition, the belief in gods and supernatural beings. So, instead of telling people they were wrong or mistaken, he merely asked questions.
The technique of asking questions to elicit a change of attitude avoids confrontation but can nonetheless be highly effective. However, it does depend on the willingness of the person whose view you want to change to answer questions honestly. Perhaps Socrates was lucky, or perhaps Plato only noted down the successful dialogues.
However, even merely asking questions seems to be a form of attack, which is why eventually Socrates was politely asked to take a drink of hemlock.
And you’re telling us there are tactics which won’t elicit a negative response?
All, just in case there was any confusion, I did not say any of the things that Saikat thinks i said. I don’t “think absolutely no one is persuaded to change their minds by such abrasive yet honest arguments”. Also, my comment about “diversity of tactics” was supposed to suggest that it is wrong to assert that “we should all adopt a diverse array of tactics except that being confrontational shouldn’t be one of them.”
Oh really? So there are no bad people out there spreading bad ideas? This makes the assumption that religious people are making rational arguments, so that you can debate them rationally. But this is not the case. It is fine sticking to logic when two rational people debate ideas, but when someone believes that you deserve to die because you won’t accept their ideas, then that somewhat falls outside logic or debate or civilisation.
Your statement does smack of “love the sinner hate the sin’.
One of the affirmations is “We believe in the cultivation of moral excellence.”
A belief in moral agency IS a belief in the supernatural.
Naturalism or bust for me.
I am a moral agent aren’t I? and I’m not supernatural. Damn, did I miss a memo again?
No one’s sending memos Tom. You’ll have work it out for yourself.
Start at naturalism.org if you’re interested.
I’m certainly a moral agent, although it’s obviously not my fault that I am.
Hold on: I don’t hold beliefs thanks, I know this is the murky world that humanism begins to seep into. The American Atheist website has for years defined ‘Atheists’ as the following:
No no no no no. That’s not atheism, that’s humanism. That’s blurred the lines and made the waters murkier for misrepresentation and misunderstanding. Atheism does not affirm any of those things, but humanism, well some ‘kinds’ of humanism does. That’s not helping.
Look at all those other statements of belief for Secular Humanism and its principles! That’s not philosophical naturalism, that’s a political manifesto that I never signed up for. That’s not helping.
@16
It’s shocking that that paragraph was written by an atheist organization.
Thanks Jack, good to know that I can be a moral agent in a non-supernatural way; wasn’t sure what you meant there for a while.
@ 8 – Pidcock
Kim Hill (see my previous comment here), makes the point that when arguing whether religion is good or bad, one needs to say whether they are looking at “in-group” effects or “out-group” effects.
Certainly, in-group effects include communal support, increased happiness and longevity.
However, out-group effects such as war, lynchings, bullying and other hate behaviour are spread across a much larger population than the in-group population, and therefore one might conclude that religion is a net negative.
Yuck – that American Atheist passage is terrible. Apart from all the goop, there’s the obnoxious assumed male and the stupid substitution of “man” for “human.”
As I said on another thread, some, perhpas many, people appear to be hard-wired to need to be “part of something bigger, to serve a larger purpose.” These are the people attracted to organized religion, the military, and political parties. They tend to be the nationalists.
Realistically, in the near term, these people are not going to turn into independent thinkers or, as in my case, outsiders. SO for people who need to belong to something larger than themselves, Humanism may be a satisfactory alternative.
@Egbert
Of course there are bad people out there spreading bad ideas. I never said or implied anything otherwise. In so far as the badness in their persona is shaped exclusively by the bad ideas they hold in their minds, every attack on those ideas will, without fail, be perceived by them as a personal attack. And I really couldn’t care any less. It’s hard comforting crybabies anyway. But I also don’t think every religious person thinks you’re gonna die if you don’t accept their ideas. If someone does think that, then I absolutely agree with you that that falls outside logic or debate or civilization. We might wanna fall back on humor or irony in such situations but then again, we risk being the only ones getting it.
Saikat Biswas,
Before 9/11, atheists weren’t really all that aware of the destructive potential of political Islam. Now we’re a bit more educated about political Islam, and we’re beginning to comprehend the monumental danger of it. We’re also becoming aware that our own western civilisation, that has progressed in terms of power with scientific knowledge and technology, still retains ignorant and stupid institutions that simply cannot face the challenges of religious (i.e., irrational) control.
Hence gnu atheism, or simply put, those of us who are taking atheism a bit more seriously than laughing at–or attempting to debate–religious people for being so blatantly irrational. Since 9/11 and consequently all the other acts of atrocity in the name of Political Islam and Political Christianity (George Bush and Neoconservatism) we’re being forced to take religion as a deadly force in the world.
@Egbert
The lack of awareness of which atheists pre-9/11 are you talking about? As far as I know, many around the world, atheists or not, were acutely aware of the danger posed by radical Islam way before 9/11 happened. Whether it was the Islamic revolution in 1979 or the fatwa against Salman Rushdie in 1989, secular societies have witnessed the brazen fanaticism of Islamic radicals with deplorable consequences.
And as the Danish cartoon controversy has shown us, even laughing at the cherished beliefs of these lunatics is no laughing matter. So yes, perhaps engaging in a rational debate with fundamentally irrational people is not a viable option. But, as I see it, you respond to intimidation by openly defying it. Certainly those of us who take their atheism seriously and honestly should start honing our ability to ridicule, mock and offend religious ideas. Or at the very least defend the right of those who can use those abilities effortlessly and are already being threatened with violence. It’s not a bad way to channel our rage.
OK, that was funny.
“We deplore efforts to denigrate human intelligence, to seek to explain the world in supernatural terms, and to look outside nature for salvation”
It seems to me that those who embrace religio-mythology as the explanation for everything in the face of science have denigrated their own human intelligence. Pointing this out to them is what they don’t like and find offensive. But WTF is this salvation to which they refer? That isn’t a humanist concept is it?
As for my “cause” – it is to opose religion (which truly DOES denigrate human intelligence) in the public square because I don’t want to live in a theocracy.
I think “salvation” can have a secular meaning, though it’s a rather purple word. But it can be used even in banal work contexts, in a faintly ironic sort of way. I think there it has the dual meaning.
Still, the word also hints at one reason I’m not drawn to humanism. It does tend to dress itself up that way. That was part of my quarrel with that “the new humanism” site – it has a lot of that kind of thing. It always makes me feel I’m being conned. Karen Armstrong uses language the same way: she has an irritating semi-churchy vocabulary, which is at the same time very stale, because she keeps saying the same things over and over. I’m reading her new book, and there it all is again.
You have my sympathies.
Yeh. I’m hoping there will be something better, once she gets going.
When Karen Armstrong gets going, the going gets worse.
@ Ophelia,
Max Stirner definitely thought there was something religious or at least idealistic about humanism. He took apart humanism in the form of Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity (a title enough to suggest how similar humanism is to Christianity) in his The Ego And Its Own. And so I have distrusted humanism ever since, and see no reason why I should call myself a humanist.
According to Jerry Coyne’s blog (http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2010/11/22/guardian-podcast-is-religion-a-force-for-good/) he likes how A C Grayling makes the case that humanism is non-religious:
But Grayling mentions that humanism (with a small ‘h’) comes from stoicism, but then why call it humanism, why not stoicism? I like stoicism a little more than humanism, because it seems to be no different to naturalism, only with naturalist ethics bolted on. Why not call it naturalism, because then we’re all within a single unified worldview.
@ Saikat Biswas,
This is the very reason why I’m here, why we’re all here surely. We’re all rather keen to become actively opposed to religion and irrationality, because it certainly feels like a very real political threat now, rather than a joke from a tiny minority of fundamentalists that we all thought would not be taken seriously.
@Egbert
So where exactly do you disagree with me?
Eg, probably since a lot of humanists wouldn’t endorse stoicism if asked.
I’d count myself in that number. I’m far too sentimental. Also I don’t hang lazily around my Stoa in the mediterranean breeze.
@Benjamin
I must have read your first post in haste. I now see that I have attributed to you statements that you were clearly not implying. I was wrong and I apologize.
Saikat, of course, no worries. :)
Saikat Biswas,
It looks like we’re in agreement.
Benjamin,
Now we’re getting muddy again…