Not so much “dabble in” as “dive head-first,” but still…

Hemant Mehta asks about the relative paucity of atheist fiction compared to non-fiction.

***Edit***: Readers point out that there are several other authors of atheist fiction — e.g. Phillip Pullman, Douglas Adams, Gene Roddenberry — so maybe a better question would be why atheist fiction isn’t as popular lately?

And as it happens, his blog seems to have eaten my comment. I don’t know whether it’s a technical glitch with Disqus or a moderation issue, and if it’s the latter, then I’d just be digging deeper into a hole by trying again.

If Hemant wants to know why we don’t have an author of the stature of Pullman, Adams or Roddenberry currently active, then I can’t help him. However, I can offer a brief answer to his question of “Where Are the Atheist Fiction Books?”: RIGHT HERE.

It’s even getting some good reviews now. Just because it isn’t on shelves in bookstores, doesn’t mean it isn’t available.

We shall have our Deep Rifts — no, they’re Bitter Rifts, you splitter!

We have the Reason Rally in less than a week (!!!), and wherever you have a gathering composed of thousands of heathens, will there be arguing? Why, yes. Yes there will be.

Round 1: PZ Myers is not happy with the list of speakers.

Round 2: Hemant Mehta doesn’t want to hear it.

Round 3: Jen McCreight also doesn’t want to hear it.

Round 4: PZ Myers is still unimpressed.

I’m sure this has the potential to be greatly entertaining, but in this case, I must admit that I feel for the organizers. I’m not taking a position on whether PZ has a valid point, but I am taking a position on the fact that he is not among the people who’ve put a huge amount of work into making the Rally happen. They can’t please everyone.

So, my priority on Saturday will be to navigate the Rally without having any meltdowns due to crowding and personal space issues, and until then, I have stories to make. When someone obnoxious/irrelevant/boring has the mike, I’ll feel free to take a pee break. It’s not all about me.

Review: Moral Combat

Coming to the end of Moral Combat: Black Atheists, Gender Politics and the Values Wars by Sikivu Hutchinson, I am forcibly reminded of PZ Myers’s endorsement of The Greatest Show On Earth, by Richard Dawkins.

There are no more excuses. None.

Perhaps it’s a bad sign that I can’t think of a better comparison than a recent biology-focused tome by Prof. Dawkins, but bear with me a few minutes.

While Prof. Dawkins chose an ambitious but uncomplicated project of establishing in layman-friendly terms the reality of Darwinian natural selection, Dr. Hutchinson’s book takes place at a very different degree of sociological difficulty. She places herself between the black church, the larger white-supremacist and patriarchal society, and the developing atheist movement, and she schools them all. There are few people left uncriticized by her scholarship, only some largely invisible and unheard slivers of society left uninstructed to unpack some invisible baggage.

When it is finished, there are no more excuses. None. There should be no more hand-waving away the need for a wider range of voices in the freethinking movement, no more man-splaining and white-splaining about what issues should “really” be the focus of skepticism and atheism, and no more clueless hand-wringing over why there aren’t more women or more people of color involved in outspoken atheism. There are no more excuses for failure to comprehend these concerns, no more assuming that skepticism begins with the Big Bang and ends with Bigfoot. Outside of the New Atheism, there should be no more telling the godless that for the sake of harmony we should simply stop being so noisy about our non-belief. There should be no more pointing to disadvantaged groups’ reliance on religion as evidence of its veracity. There should be no more attempts to silence atheism with the presupposition that religion maintains a more ethical, just and civil society regardless of its explanatory power. These are the questions that live at the intersection of sexism, racism, economic injustice and religion in America, and if you just sit down for a while and prepare yourself to unlearn some party lines, Dr. Hutchinson will make everything clear.

There will be some ideas expressed in her book with which you disagree, and some connections explored with which you were previously unfamiliar, and that is only more reason to become acquainted with these concerns. Fear not the expanse of an overly ambitious tome, for Dr. Hutchinson’s writing covers an astonishing breadth and depth of research and insight in a remarkably modest word count. There is no more need for multi-megabyte Internet explosions of privileged obliviousness over godless demographic issues. Here are the answers to your questions.

 

The parallel is really quite fascinating.

Because Richard Dawkins declined an offer to debate the existence of God with William Lane Craig, Premier Christian Radio is putting his (Dawkins’s, that is) name on buses:

The new advert reads: “There’s probably no Dawkins. Now stop worrying and enjoy Oct 25th at the Sheldonian Theatre.”

This, of course, is a paraphrase of the 2009 atheist advertising campaign, which put “There’s probably no God” on bus sides. Where the heathens put “God,” PCR puts, “Dawkins.” Hmm. Interesting. Of course I realize the context is different, but…you do know how this looks, right, PCR? It’s kind of like you think we worship Prof. Dawkins, or something. We don’t even always agree with him.

The reason why Prof. Dawkins is uninterested in debating is basically that the event would look good on their resume, not so much on his. Meanwhile,

Prof Craig said the poster campaign “leaves a shred of hope that he may turn up”.

He thinks Prof. Dawkins will change his mind because they’re using his name to advertise the event? Yeah, I don’t think so.

Those liberal atheist professors are coming for your sweet Christian babies!

Via Sullivan, Conor Friedersdorf asks why so many Americans come out of higher education with their religious faith considerably eroded. Apparently, Dennis Prager is all concerned that the university system is ruled by an evil cabal of liberal heathen professors using their vicious mind-controlling powers to churn out whole generations of left-wing secularists.

To me, there are better explanations for the fact that “the more university education a person receives, the more likely he is to hold secular and left-wing views.” One is that people who attend college leave home. That is to say, they leave their church, the community incentives to attend it, and the watchful eye of parents who get angry or make them feel guilty when they don’t go to services or stray in their faith. Suddenly they’re surrounded by dorm mates of different faiths or no faith at all. For many of these students, it turns out that their religious behavior was driven more by desire for community, or social and parental pressure, than by deeply held beliefs. Another reason education correlates with secularism is that secularists are more likely to seek advanced degrees, partly because they’re more focused than their religious counterparts on career.

Here we have two (not incompatible) theories: one, it isn’t necessarily the university that makes young people less religious, it’s the removal from the student’s sheltered home environment and sudden access to a diversity of beliefs. Two, the causal relationship is in the opposite direction. It’s not that education causes secularism, but that secularism on the individual level leads to more education.

There is further insight in the comments. For example:

Conor – you’re trying too hard! The negative correlation between education and religious belief holds up across countries, and the American phenomenon of traveling away home for college is much more prevalent here than in most other western countries where the same correlation can be observed.

The answer is much simpler. Education is a proxy for intelligence, and the more intelligent a person is, the less likely they are to hold religious beliefs.

Since education is a profoundly imperfect proxy for intelligence (particularly higher education in a country where attending university is prohibitively expensive for many people), I’m going to disagree with the second paragraph and instead focus on the first. It has indeed been observed that there is a very obvious negative correlation between educational attainment and religiosity, but it’s bigger than educational attainment. There is a major positive correlation between poverty/inequality, low educational attainment, and a whole host of social dysfunctions…with high religiosity. This is not to say that religion causes social problems (although one does have to wonder about the socioeconomic effect of teaching whole countries full of people that using birth control makes Baby Jesus cry), just that they tend to go hand-in-hand at the population level. I’m more inclined to think that poverty leads to social problems, and the insecurity of living in the midst of those problems leads to higher religiosity.

Thus, could it be (at least partly) that Americans who attend university are more affluent to begin with, and therefore tend to be less reliant on religion? It would be interesting to compare the data on the relationship between educational attainment and religious participation between wealthier students (whose parents can afford to send them to college), and poorer students (using scholarships and need-based aid to pay for school) and see what patterns emerge. It would also be interesting to investigate Friedersdorf’s first hypothesis and compare the data between students who attend school far away from home and those who either live close enough to commute or who go home every weekend. It would still be necessary in that case to control for household income, as out-of-state tuition and out-of-home living quarters both make higher education much more expensive.

Furthermore, there’s also the power of critical thinking; other commenters have described how their post-secondary educations gave them the tools to start thinking for themselves, whereas their religious upbringings focused on believing what they were told, even if it didn’t make sense. Those are the “ill-defined, superhuman powers to shape the minds of its charges” (in Friedersdorf’s words) which Prager apparently fears our university system wields.

How do you prove you’re not lying about your faith?

Jerry Coyne continues to suggest that President Obama is actually an atheist. He points to text from Obama’s book, Dreams From My Father, which demonstrates that Obama had reasons other than spiritual to join a church and start behaving like a Christian. That’s fair enough, but as Coyne admits,

Of course, there’s no way to adjudicate the issue—how can you look into his heart?

That is a very good question: how does one determine whether the President really believes in God? This is not a matter that can be measured or observed from the outside. Only Barack Obama knows what he believes. Further evidence for Prof. Coyne’s claim is:

Face it: none of us really knows what the man believes. Consider this, though: what if he really was an atheist, as his earlier history suggests, but also had a burning desire to be President? What would he do?  Pretend that he was religious, of course! Nobody who refuses to pander to the faithful could ever be elected President in this era. This fact immediately makes all the evidence for Obama’s “faith” suspect, like Michael Corleone assuring a Congressional committee that he’s just a simple importer of olive oil.

Well, that much is true: anyone who wants to be POTUS pretty much has no choice but to pass as a Christian. By that logic, how many of the previous 43 POTUSes were also covert atheists? Are we now going to sift through FDR’s early writings to seek evidence of godlessness? And if Obama really does believe in the Holy Trinity, how should he go about proving to Prof. Coyne that he’s not just going through the motions for political reasons? Do all presidential candidates have to pass an audition to demonstrate their Christian credentials to the electorate? How does a politician prove a negative?

Do religious apologists have a repressed man-crush on Richard Dawkins?

If you want people to read your article about religion, atheism and/or science, you know what you need to do? Start it with a nice picture of Richard Dawkins’s face. Love him or hate him, the man sells papers.

Seriously, though, I’m having a hard time grasping how Christianity’s appeal to the “intellectually and educationally excluded” should be a point of pride. Sticking up for the little guys, great. Choosing the side of “little children” in opposition to the “learned and wise”? Really? That’s where you want to plant your flag? If you expect the rest of us to join you in equating anti-intellectualism with moral integrity, don’t hold your breath.

Let me paint you all a picture

A young-ish single woman who happens to run a blog is enjoying (enduring?) a grayish, quiet weekend in her house. Conscious that she has not been posting to her blog as frequently as she used to (she still blames the Internet for failing to supply her with interesting blog material), she heads over to one of her favorite science/skeptic sites, RD.net, where she finds two articles, this one and this one, which both essentially say the same thing. The message on both sides, though with somewhat different tone and intentions, is that atheists don’t have enough children. That we need to be more like religious people and have more babies, or else we’ll all disappear.

The blogger reads these articles, takes another sip from her drink, and yawns.

Don’t Make Us Uncomfortable, Yet Again

PZ Myers brings us the news that atheists are still being horribly cruel, militant, strident, and shrill to those poor, marginalized people of faith.

Look at this: a group of atheists attended a city council meeting to protest (politely, of course) prayer before meetings and ten commandments signs, and they were threatened with expulsion for the terrifying t-shirts they were wearing. They bore a slogan that other attendees complained about as “offensive”. That slogan was simply One nation, indivisible.

The phrase “Under God” wasn’t actually in the Pledge of Allegiance until the 1950s, when Sen. McCarthy succeeded in making the whole country shit their collective pants at the thought of us having anything in common with those godless Commies, but of course that’s one more thing we’re not allowed to say. It makes the nice god-fearing folk terribly upset to learn historical facts.

I’m inclined to agree with PZ; there should be no internal hand-wringing over atheists’ lack of civility. Anything we do short of stop being atheists is going to upset someone. They don’t want us to play nice and mind our language; they want us to disappear.

Don’t make us uncomfortable: Christian edition

PZ Myers posts this gem of a “news” item about atheists and their evil War on Christmas:

“Wasn’t exactly happy about the Christmas Parade this year, I spent many years teaching my children to love and respect other people and to love the fact that they were children of God and I don’t feel that they should be influenced in any other way especially not at a Christmas parade,” said Tina Corgey, who is a lifelong Bryan resident.

Corgey brings her three kids to the B/CS Christmas Parade every year.

She said she was disgusted by what she saw on Sunday.

“If you have younger children they weren’t going to understand but I have older children, a teenager, 8-year-old and they were curious and they asked questions and it was hard for them to believe and understand that there are actually people out there that don’t believe in God,” Corgey said.

It must be so difficult to be a good Christian parent in a society in which atheists are allowed to exist. Your kids might become curious about people who aren’t like them. They might ask questions. You spend all those years teaching your kids to love and respect other people (except those dirty nonbelievers), and then along come a pack of non-Christians who start influencing your kids in other ways by playing Jingle Bells on vuvuzelas.

This is who the anti-atheist backlash is trying to protect, when they complain about how those horrible “New” Atheists are so intolerant, strident, militant, closed-minded towards people of faith. They want us to be like Harry Potter at the Dursleys’ dinner party: we’re allowed to stay in the house without the threat of violence, but we have to go to our room, make no noise and pretend we don’t exist. Otherwise, the people who weren’t previously aware of folks like us might start asking awkward questions and have to be Obliviated.

Odd, how we can tolerate being regularly told our lives are without meaning and morals and that we’re setting ourselves up for eternal damnation, but they can’t even tolerate our presence in their public spaces.