Paul Elam has apparently become something of a comedian – though not on purpose. In his latest post on A Voice for Men, he takes on the atheist community for being too in thrall to (wait for it) feminism.
I’ll let him explain:
[T]hey are too religious. Yes, I mean that literally. For when you wipe away all the bombastic bellowing about empiricism and the strident mocking of those who choose a life of faith, what you are left with is a population of people that surrender their reason and cognition as though they were at gunpoint; that hit their knees as fast as any Catholic…to worship at the altar of feminism.
His proof? Several years ago someone at Atheist Nexus posted a link to a Men’s News Daily column of his, and – get this! – some feminists responded!
You can go here to see all the horrible things these evil cultish feminist atheists said. Like, for example:
I guess I’m a feminist, but I really like men and these are some of the things I love about them:
Protectiveness is a positive trait in men that women who want to have babies look for. We also like passion and some recklessness, but you won’t get me to admit that to my daredevil husband…..
Confidence; men usually have more of it and it is mostly a postive trait.
The ability to make decisions quickly.
Physical strength and endurance are helpful in many family situations. Ahem.
Penises. You have them, lots of us like them. I know it’s not technically a “trait”, but I had to put that in.
You can practically taste the man-hate there!
Elam, I should note, ignores that comment. No, what’s got his underpants in a wad is this comment:
The whole web site mensnewsdaily.com is a sad overreaction to the growing equality of women in society.
Evidently he’s been stewing about this remark for more than two years.
In fact, if you go and take a look at it, the discussion on Atheist Nexus wasn’t … really … all that feminist. Yes, several people criticized Elam and mensnewsdaily as “extreme,” but one of those people also criticized radical feminists as similarly “extreme.” Some of the commenters explicitly identified themselves as feminist; others explicitly criticized feminism. Nonetheless, the discussion somehow managed to be the politest conversation about gender I’ve run across online in a long, long time.
Seriously. Go take a look at it. Then consider how Elam sums it all up:
Apparently they can’t even handle 50 years of loud mouthed arts majors without drinking the Kool-aide and going brain dead. There was scarcely a voice among them that did not wallow in the ersatz enlightenment so common to feminist ideologues.
And then he moves on to whatever this is:
Feminism, as far as ideology goes, has been very effective at using human reproductive realities to co-opt other movements. In fact, from the American Civil Rights Movement to Occupy Wall Street, feminism has progressed without paying its own way, but rather by sending women in to other social arenas and wheedling men into supporting them. The Borg would be proud if they had emotions. Resistance is Futrelle.
Ho ho! Futrelle rhymes with futile! Sort of! Lest Elam and co. become too overwhelmed with pride for this clever wordplay, I should note that some junior high schoolers beat him to the punch back in the late 70s. Or maybe it was grade schoolers. I really don’t remember.
I’m less clear about the rest of his argument about “human reproductive realities.” Apparently it’s a fancy way of saying that dudes only support feminism so they can get laid. Another highly original notion.
Elam’s other piece of evidence that feminism has taken over the atheist community? PZ Myers.
He quotes this evil athio-feminazi ideologue arguing that if male atheists want to get more women involved in the atheist community, they should:
Learn to shut up and listen. Seriously. You want women to find your organization pleasant and interesting and worth contributing to? Then don’t form panels full of men trying to figure out what women want, talking over women who try to get a word in edgewise, belittling women’s suggestions with jokes, and trying to determine how We Well-Meaning Men can give Those Women what we think they want. You are assuming an authority and presuming that it is in your power to give it to the minority, when what you should be doing is deferring to that minority and giving them your attention, letting them speak and shape your organization.
God – or, if you prefer, Imaginary Entity – forbid that male atheists actually listen to women explain why they might feel unwelcome in the mostly male (and not particularly feminist friendly) atheist community.
You really think feminism has taken over the atheist community? Take a look at Reddit’s Atheism subreddit, where, recently, a woman who recently described how she had been raped was attacked as a liar and a slut in a thread filled with rape jokes. Or go back a little further to the Elevatorgate brouhaha, where an atheist blogger who politely mentioned in a podcast that she doesn’t really like being hit on by strange men in elevators at 4 AM drew the ire of countless angry atheist dudes, including Richard Fucking Dawkins himself? (In case you want to revisit that bit of nastiness, I wrote about “Elevatorgate” in several blog posts; here are some reactions from decidedly non-feminist atheists.)
This is a movement that “worship[s] at the altar of feminism[?]” Not really seeing it, dude.
But again, congrats on the whole Futrelle/futile thing. Genius!
MRAL, you should fit right in with those atheist assholes. Being a gigantic asshole yourself, and all.
I’m actually feeling a little better about myself, Xanthe. I have made some friends, which is why I was gone for a while. Also, I’m taking one humanities class where there are actually some females- there are none in the 500-level math courses- and some of them are ok. Not that any of you care, but since you brought it up…
I think PZ’s pretty smart, but he’s never ended a post with “…and I have a high IQ”, so I guess we can’t tell for sure.
Well, has he bragged about membership in Mensa? That’s the best way to know!
PZ Meyers is stupid? Damn, all those academic papers Wikipedia is telling me about must be lies. As we all know, common morons can get research papers published and there is never peer-review in the field of science.Plus PhDs are so easy to get, I don’t know why anyone bothers with mere bachelor’s degrees.
And he’s such an asshole, too. Singlehandedly raising more money on his blog for a charity last year than several other blogs combined . . .
I feel like I should comment on other things, but everyone else will handle it, I’m sure.
Also, Shaenon, I realized the other day that you’re THE Shaenon. You have a Wikipedia page. That was really cool.
You really don’t understand the arguments you’re trying to shoot down, I see.
MRAL, why do you go to social justice spaces just to lose your shit about how straight young white men are the only people who deserve social justice?
Do you get why that will NEVER go over well?
Go to a fucking straight-young-white-men space, on the Internet, if you can find one (hahaha). It’ll kinda make you into a horrible person, but at least maybe you’ll be sort of calm about your horribleness, instead of being in a constant state of shit-loss.
Oh, look, the “atheists are the real irrational ones! I am an agnostic. It’s the only reasonable thing to do!” argument. This is so old and so stupid. Atheist doesn’t mean “Being sure there can not be any god-like being at all”. Atheist means “being without belief in gods”. *Of course* we can never be sure of anything (the Matrix, yadda yadda). You won’t find a sensible person who disagrees with that. However, there are things we can be a lot more certain of than others in the world as we perceive it. And one of those things is that none of the theistic gods exist, meaning a being or beings that created us and deserves to be worshipped. That’s why I don’t believe and that’s why I am an a-theist. It’s pretty easy.
Also, what the hell, ‘minorities have it better’? I know I am foolish for even talking to this guy, but I can’t help it. What makes you, an apparently male, white, cis, able-bodied, and Christian (because, you know, that is the majority… or are you yourself part of a minority? Whoops!), so sure that it is easier to be part of the majority, when you have NEVER BEEN PART OF ANY MINORITY? The only way you could be sure of that is by believing every member of an oppressed group who ever talked about being disadvantaged, oppressed and marginalized is lying, and that sounds like practically the opposite of scepticism.
Holly, old white men are perhaps the only oppressed group that is not treated as such. Feminists etc. love to sneer about “old white guys” and “dead white males”…. so, I’m not looking forward to that. Hopefully Ray Kurzweil is right.
Posted for MRAL
For MRAL: http://youtu.be/34u_3Z9_LUw
“I’m smarter than PZ Myers, jp, and I’m damn certain of that. So yeah, I have no problem sneering at a fat old loser who teaches a bunch of uninterested college students about basic cellular structure.”
I’m sure PZ would be devastated by the assessment of a punk kid with delusions of adequacy.
Well, I also just despise most atheists in general. They’re usually self-righteous and obnoxious. Actually, it’s my impression that Dawkins is actually LESS pompous than most other atheist figureheads, and that’s saying something. I did enjoy his book The Greatest Show on Earth, I’ll give him that.
Cluisanna, agnosticism doesn’t mean that “one of the pre-approved religions HAS TO BE RIGHT”. I’m (almost) sure none of them are. It just means that anything could be right. The laws of physics break down completely at the Big Bang, so we know jack shit. We have no observations or “likely explanations.” There could be anything. So that’s what agnosticism is.
This blog is educational.
Well, obviously. I would never have heard about Wizzard otherwise.
“As we all know, common morons can get research papers published and there is never peer-review in the field of science.Plus PhDs are so easy to get, I don’t know why anyone bothers with mere bachelor’s degrees. ”
Actually, having a PhDs doesn’t necessarily stop one from being a moron. Especially when one speak on subjects that one don’t know. And not all publication have the same standards.
From my observations, the only people who care about the differences between atheist and agnostics are agnostics, and that’s what define them.
I gotta give MRAL credit, most of the cretins who whine about PZ mispell his name when it’s on the blog face. So you know, as idiotic as his posts have been today, they’re one tiny iota better than the idiot MRAs trying to say TAA isn’t so bad.
Oh, and fun fact, you can watch a ‘reasonable MRA’ in the comments there manage to just flame out spectacularly when he tries to defend the claim that “False Rape Accusations” are a thing.
I’m sure PZ would be devastated by the assessment of a punk kid with delusions of adequacy.
Hey! As a great admirer of punks, I resent that remark.
Well MRAL, if you wanted to find the “logically correct” alternative between atheism and theism, then atheism would be the one closer to the scientific null hypothesis, since theistic claims are almost always unevidenced, or unfalsifiable, or contradictory, or irreconcilable with reality short of a retreat into metaphysical philosophical wanking about what “reality” is.
As for the actual “first few microseconds” of the universe, you might want to think about what Stephen Hawking has to say about boundary conditions, which asserts that the universe doesn’t actually need a “beginning”.
You could, agnostically-speaking, have a deistic “God” who started the universe and is completely uninvolved with the order of things, but that is very far from the ordinary claims of theism, which are an enduring monument to human fallibility and gullibility. This last-ditch clinging to Deism would still in violation of a good scientific principle, namely Occam’s razor.
Also, most of the FreeThoughtBlogs.com bloggers are solidly behind feminism or egalitarianism (the kind of egalitarianism that isn’t populated by misogynist anti-feminists) and are generally pretty awesome. Comradde PhysioProf is a radfem, and he’s not responsible for the Rebecca Watson slurs.
Over on ScienceBlogs Abbie Smith has turned her ERV blog into a cesspit of misogynists who have been running a campaign of character assassination since last July; one of that number came up with the slurs on her name.
I think MRAL’s problem (and that of just about any man claiming he’s more oppressed than women) is a combination of two things:
1. Believing that anything that hurts his feelings is oppression.
2. Not believing that anyone else really has feelings.
TAA’s got this too. He’s written multiple long posts about how much the backlash to his statemnents is just tearing him up, with apparently no awareness that the rape survivor he was deliberately trying to trigger might also have feelings.
I think feminists’ problem (and that of just about any woman claiming he’s more oppressed than men) is a combination of two things:
1. Believing that anything that hurts her feelings is oppression.
2. Not believing that anyone else really has feelings.
I don’t believe in God for much the same reason that I don’t believe in unicorns. No one has presented me with reasonable evidence that there is such a being. There may be reasonable evidence somewhere that there is a deity and I just happen not to be aware of it.
Hey, MRAL, wanna trade? You get to cope with the urge to punish yourself with knives every time you come in two minutes late to class and with crying in the bathroom out of anxiety at social events you’ve been looking forward to for months, and I get to cope with not getting laid. Deal? 🙂
Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t MRAL blind in one eye? Wouldn’t that make him part of a minority?
Oh by the way, MRAL, if you want to be part of a discriminated minority there’s an easy one: get fat. (that’s faster than being old) I’m sure you’ll spend way less time thinking about why all of your problem come from being withe and male. I’m sure you’ll love the slurs, people dismissing your ideas for on the account of you being fat, the mockery,…
Or dress as a woman, it should mak your life all sunshine and kitten, I’m sure.
(Or don’t. There is a reason, or a zillion ones, that Work It got canceled)
Lauralot: Oh God, don’t bring that up, unless you want 20 pages of whining about how put-upon he is because of his hideous deformity.