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UPDATE: Vacula has resigned.
As most of you are no doubt aware, the atheist and skeptic movements have had just a teensy bit of a problem with misogyny in their ranks. You may recall the unholy shitstorm that erupted last year when Rebecca Watson of Skepchick casually mentioned in a YouTube video that it might not be such a good idea for dudes to try to hit on women in elevators at 4 AM. The assholes of the internet still haven’t forgiven Watson for her assault on the sacred right of creepy dudes to creep women out 24 hours a day, every day.
Watson is hardly the only skeptic to face vicious misogynist harassment for the crime of blogging while feminist. Last month, Jen McCreight of Blag Hag announced that near constant harassment from online bullies was wearing her down to such a degree that she felt it necessary to shut down her blog – hopefully only temporarily.
I can no longer write anything without my words getting twisted, misrepresented, and quotemined. I wake up every morning to abusive comments, tweets, and emails about how I’m a slut, prude, ugly, fat, feminazi, retard, bitch, and cunt (just to name a few). If I block people who are twisting my words or sending verbal abuse, I receive an even larger wave of nonsensical hate about how I’m a slut, prude, feminazi, retard, bitch, cunt who hates freedom of speech (because the Constitution forces me to listen to people on Twitter). This morning I had to delete dozens of comments of people imitating my identity making graphic, lewd, degrading sexual comments about my personal life. In the past, multiple people have threatened to contact my employer with “evidence” that I’m a bad scientist (because I’m a feminist) to try to destroy my job. I’m constantly worried that the abuse will soon spread to my loved ones.
I just can’t take it anymore.
McCreight’s harassers and their enablers were delighted in this “victory,” taking to Twitter to give McCreight some final kicks on the way out the door. “Good riddance, #jennifurret , you simple minded dolt,” wrote @skepticaljoe. “I couldn’t be happier,” added @SUICIDEBOMBS. “Eat shit you rape-faking scum.”
One of the celebrators that day was an atheist activist named Justin Vacula, who joked that “Jen’s allegedly finished blogging…and this time it’s not her boyfriend who kicked her off the internet.”
So here’s the latest twist:
Justin Vacula has just been given a leadership position in the Pennsylvania chapter of the Secular Coalition for America, a lobbying group for secular Americans whose advisory board includes such big names as Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Susan Jacoby, Wendy Kaminer, Steven Pinker, Salman Rushdie and Julia Sweeney.
It’s an astonishing choice. In addition to gloating that bullies had led McCreight to shut down her blog, Vacula has harassed atheist blogger and activist Surly Amy, including writing a post on A Voice for Men (yes, that A Voice for Men) cataloging all the sordid details of his supposed case against her. At one point he even posted her address, and a photo of her apartment building, on a site devoted to hating on feminist atheist bloggers.
Blogger Stephanie Zvan has set up a petition on Change.org urging the Secular Coalition of America to reconsider its choice. You can find further examples of Vacula’s questionable behavior there.
As Watson notes in a post on Skepchick, Vacula’s position with the SCA is likely to “drive progressive women away from the secular cause.” She adds,
I will never, ever get involved with SCA so long as someone like him holds a position of power anywhere, let alone in a state I live in. So Vacula is actively driving people away from SCA. …
It’s all a real shame, because SCA fills an important role in our movement and I’d like to give them my support. … I don’t believe secular organizations should reward bullies and bigots with high-level positions, even if those positions are volunteer-only.
I recommend that everyone here take a look at the petition.
You could totally cross-post that to the other thread, where they’re talking about Sherlock Holmes XD
@pecunium:
Exactly. I’m glad the time-zones meant you answered SallyStrange before I got the chance, because you said it better than I would have. 🙂
@lauralot:
Ditto. And ditto about asking what it matters to others if someone gets the ‘warm fuzzies’ from their faith. My faith isn’t anything to do with any organised religion, and nothing much to do with a deity other than the idea that one exists; it doesn’t impose on anyone, there’s no creed. What it has done is make my life one hell of a lot happier than it was before. It’s not an absolute, it’s something I’ve thought about and questioned and doubted, and it all comes from my interpretation of my experiences. So screw anyone who calls that a cognitive failure. And if it is – I’ll take that over an empathy failure, thanks.
@polliwog:
Which is exactly what comes out of sweeping statements like SallyStrange’s about how ‘faith’ – not even ‘religion’ but ‘faith’ – is soooo terrible. Not one suggestion that there is any difference between the Todd Akins of this world and deists, spiritualists, pagans, or any not-bigoted members of any organised religion. No, they all have ‘faith’ and are therefore making terrible mistakes and (as pecunium pointed out) implicitly not as smart as the oh-so-rational atheist. Funny how irrationality in other matters never gets a look in with this sort of talk … you’d think the speakers were Vulcans.
@Dvarghunspossen – thank you for posting about your experiences! That chimed in with my own “How do I interpret this” ones, though I don’t have medication complicating matters.
I don’t think that’s entirely true. I believe in a whole bunch of things for no reason. My bug-eyed Boston Bulldog is the cutest dog evar, Mars bars are the epitome of chocolate snacks, the Flames will eventually win another Cup …
Not one of those things has led me down any sort of slippery slope to tinfoil hattery.
Even if you could design an empirical study to determine which choclate bar was “the best” (percentage of flavour-bearing compunds? efficiency of delivery of compounds to taste buds? i don’t even know!) you wouldn’t be able to say that science has proven that Mars Bars are officially the tastiest, because “tasty” is just so damn subjective. Lots of things people have feelings about just are.
Part of applying empiricism and rigourous critical thinking is realizing that there are limits to the method. There’s no logical reason for me to love Mr H more than any other human on this planet, i just *do*. That’s a big difference from me being unable to recognize that homepoathic remedies don’t have the same success rates as say, antibiotics.
Okay, you’re putting forth an empirical claim here–believing in God will make you a supporter of alternative medicine, ineffectual models of charitable donation, etc.–so you must have some evidence to support it. You’ve got some studies, right? Ones that control for other sociocultural factors (education level, income, political affiliation)? Because if you don’t, you’re irrationally believing something without evidence, and who knows what other crackpot beliefs you subscribe to.
@cloudiah
I didn’t see that bit. After a while I was just skimming it because I couldn’t stand how padded it was. English is not my first language and I’m always double-checking what I write to make sure I’m communicating my message correctly and concisely. And then I see guys like these who just pad their posts with unnecessary “smart-sounding” words, often without any attention to flow or readability and it just annoys me that they have so little consideration for their readers.
So, why can’t people believe what they want to believe as long as it makes them happy? If they’re trying to force others to share their beliefs that’s not cool, but I still don’t see why someone else believing in a deity is harmful to me as an atheist in and of itself.
Basically I think people need to try to separate obnoxious, pushy behavior from religious people from the fact that religion is a thing that exists. There are religious people who are not pushy assholes, so it’s not like religious and pushy asshole are automatically the same thing, and it makes more sense to me to focus in on the pushy asshole part as a thing that atheists should object to rather than the fact that religious faith exists. I’m not seeing the need to pick a fight with the religious people who aren’t pushing their beliefs on anyone else.
@Thomas
Dude, you are an idiot. First, sure, you can find all kinds of information in Google, but you cannot find all information in Google. Google itself estimates that it has indexed only about 0.04% of the Web, the tiny little bit of the Web that it can see. Most Web content is “dark” — completely private, hidden behind paywalls, or accessible only through specialized interfaces. The last two categories? You know who makes them widely available online to users? Libraries, you condescending twit.
So, as I said, Vacula went to some trouble to search for her personal info. Most people give up if they don’t get a result in the first page of Google results. Why did Vacula feel a compulsion to keep going until he found it? Why did he then post that not-easily-discoverable information about what is clearly a private residence, along with a photo of it, online in a setting that was obviously hostile to her? And why do you feel this continuing need to defend him so ineffectively? If you feel he is being treated unfairly here, you may want to recruit someone capable of making a cogent argument.
I don’t think Nepenthe was trying to say “religious beliefs are the result of a neurological disorder and therefore I can dismiss them automatically” so much as “religious beliefs are the result of basic modes of thought being misapplied.”
For instance, Nepenthe mentioned agency detection. Human beings need to be good at detecting agency. We live in groups of other human beings — we’re surrounded by agents — without the ability to detect agency we’d be pretty much screwed. Most of the time we attribute something to agency, it’s because a particular action really was caused by an agent.
But occasionally, our agency detection systems are going to get something wrong. Let’s say that my friend and I decide to go on a hike through some woods. When we’re on this hike we hear something rustling in the bushes. I think that someone’s following us (or that it’s an animal trying to hide from me), but my friend thinks that it’s just the wind. Let’s say that it turns out that my friend was right. This wouldn’t mean that I’m an idiot or that I’m a fundamentally irrational person. It wouldn’t mean that my friend was simply intellectually superior. (After all, just because my friend didn’t make the same mistake I did in this situation doesn’t mean that they never make this sort of mistake.) It doesn’t mean that every time I detect agency, my conclusion can immediately be dismissed. All it means is that a useful cognitive skill has misfired. (And useful cognitive skills are going to misfire sometimes. That’s how healthy, neurotypical brains work.)
Now, I don’t think that all religious beliefs reduce down to useful cognitive skills misfiring. (There are billions of religious people out there – I doubt that all of their beliefs and experiences could ever be reduced down to any one thing.) But I don’t think that the idea that religious belief is caused, at least in part, by “cognitive errors” necessarily implies that religious people are stupid, that they have a mental disorder, or that their opinions can be dismissed out of hand.
To add on what Cloudiah said:
Sometimes I have to look up the information about a corporation here at work. I often have the advantage of having the name of the business which I have no idea if this smegger had. Then you have to also find out which state is it incorporated in (sometimes they are not where you think they are.) If you do, then you have to determine what website one uses to look at the incorporation documents to obtain the address. After you do that, then you can do a search on the building and find a photo of it or capture one from Google’s database.
And that takes time-more than just doing a quick google search.
Unfortunately, that’s exactly how it’s used, all too often. Though I suspect the “faith = mental illness = you need a therapist” crowd would be a trifle put out if they stopped to consider that psychiatrists and psychologists are not automatically dismissive of faith. They may, shock horror, have faith themselves, or be able to see that yes, this belief is helping this person. (I spent a year seeing a psychologist for CBT about stress issues, and it was during that time my own belief system changed. He was wholly encouraging, simply because of the effect it was having on me. I have no idea whether he had any religious/spiritual beliefs of his own; I think he was just open-minded.)
@ Anathema–I think optical illusions are a very good way of thinking about cognitive errors. We don’t “see” the raw light that enters our brain, we see the world processed through a very complex visual system that picks out the important bits and translates it into comprehensible whole, and sometimes that means that it gets things wrong and its correction for shadow makes us think that two squares are a different color when they are actually the same color. We also see faces all over the place where faces don’t exist because of how much of our cognitive machinery is devoted to understanding and recognizing human faces.
So falling prey to a cognitive error basically means using a shortcut that turns out to be wrong in this instance. However, I’m still not convinced that explains religious belief–I think belief is social for all of us, and that’s a better explanation. There are plenty of things I believe in despite not having direct experience with (like the existence of Wisconsin) because everyone around me believes in Wisconsin, too. It’s just that there is much more evidence for Wisconsin, and I could see it if I wanted to, but I don’t bother thinking about it.
I’m not sure I believe in Wisconsin even after visiting it … it’s a gummint conspiracy. Or a NASA one, maybe.
@Nepenthe
“As I explained initially, believing things for no reason is not good.”
Yet you believe in feminism even though everything about it has been proven to be a fraud and a lie.
1 in 4 women in college are raped? Show me?
Women get paid 77 cents on a dollar compared to men for the same job, years on the job, amount of hours? Show me?
Women have always been oppressed. Ridiculous. Men have always died and suffered in far, far greater numbers than women to support and care for women in dangerous jobs that women simply couldn’t do, or wouldn’t do. Only a hatefilled mind could ever consider dying to support ones family oppressive.
Men and women are the same, just socialized differently. With the exception of course that women are better. Empathy, holostic, group oriented. Basically all the good stuff. We’re told it every day. Of course the only reason men are bad is because of patriarchy. If men were more like women we’d be good as well.
You believe all these things for no reason. Your belief is simply based on believing what you believe. Nothing more. And being the true supremacist that all feminists are, you look down your nose with disgust at any who don’t believe what you believe. Everything you’ve written is just filled with aristocratic contempt for all the non-believers.
Oh yes, you’re oh so superior.
@ The Kitteh’s Unpaid Help:
I can’t say that I’m surprised that there are atheists who use that argument to dismiss or belittle religious people. It’s just that the I don’t think that the whole “cognitive error” idea is inherently problematic, so much as it is that atheists can be nasty and stupid sometimes.
It’s especially annoying because I would think that, if there’s any lesson to be learned from the “cognitive error” argument, it’s that the human mind is flawed and that we all make mistakes. If someone looks at the cognitive error argument and comes away with a sense of superiority, I can’t help but think that they’ve rather missed the point.
@ wordsp1nner:
The optical illusion analogy works really well.
@Cloudiah: *waves feebly*
I’ve been reading far too many student papers (PLUS just got a diagnosis of diabetes, so am studying up on diabetic diet and other Fun Stuff), or I’d be happy to smack that turgid prose down so hard that it would never get up again.
Things are going even CRAZIER at my uni than they have been in the past–it’s just too much.
@anathema, I agree – to me it’s more a case of ‘be aware what this might be caused by’ than the instant dismissal atheists-who-are-being-jerks go for. You’d think ‘Am I imagining this?’ is a thought that never crossed the minds of anyone theist, deist, etc etc, the way some people talk. Or that there’s only one answer to any question along those lines, or that everyone’s experiences or perceptions must be the same or else they’re wrong … . ::rolls eyes::
Ithiliana – that’s a bummer about the diabetes. I hope it turns out to be as easily managed as my mum’s. Her regime = three-four pills a day + give up eating Black Forest cake!
@pecunium
Are you alleging his actions weren’t intentional?
By his own account he didn’t post the address with malicious intend.
Are you saying the target of his actions didn’t find it threatening, or disturbing?
I don’t know if she found it threatening or disturbing. As far as I know, she posted a link on twitter to the comment with her address. To me personally, this makes no sense. If I felt threatened by someone publishing my address I wouldn’t make the address available to a even wider audience. But again, I don’t know if she found it threatening.
Because unless that’s what you are arguing, you are saying what he did was harrassing behavior, and you want me to let you off with saying it’s not.
No, not according to definition I posted. The questions you asked have little to do with the definition. Right now, I’m honestly not sure if you’re just trolling me.
It assumes the people here who disagree with you haven’t done that
This is not about me. I’m digressing, but contrary to many of the regular commenters here (including you) I don’t take myself too seriously. I’m speaking out against something that I perceive as an unfair attack against a young men. And yes, I assume that many people here are not well informed about the situation. Manboobz is not really a place where a plurality of opinions are encouraged.
@Anathema
Thank you. That is precisely what I was attempting to say. And of course, I should clarify that I think that while the foundation of religious ideas is cognitive bias like agent attribution, the reasons individual theists have for believing are diverse, as wordsp1nner pointed out.
I am the last person who either a) gains a sense of superiority from knowledge of cognitive biases, given my own susceptibility to them b) thinks that waving the term “mental illness” around willy-nilly is a great idea. My brain tells me shit 24 hours a day that is plainly false and I’m perfectly aware of that.
Ithiliana: Damn. That sucks. I hope the transition to a diabetes friendly diet goes as smoothly as possible. And if my extended family’s cooking is any indication, you still have plenty of opportunity for modified Black Forest Cake if that’s your thing. (Diabetes runs in the family like whoa.) I’m sure you’ll rock it like Nellie the Otter.
@Ithiliana
Sorry to hear about the diabetes.
@Ithiliana I’m also sorry to hear about your diabetes and I hope you quickly find a diet that fits in with your lifestyle.
On the harassment side of things, it doesn’t matter what his intention was. Workplace definitions of harassment/bullying are firmly based on the perspective of the recipient of the behaviour: so it’s harassment/bullying if she perceived it as such. This is no different from how we don’t allow perpetrators of other negative actions (thieves, white collar criminals, etc) to misdefine their behaviour as a “not crime” or “non offence”. So the main point is not that you “don’t know if she found it threatening or disturbing” but that you ARE purposefully defining it as not threatening and not disturbing. It is not up to YOU to decide how others define behaviours that affect them.
Thanks for the repeated PSAs about how you think the “attack” (not sure how a petition that has a clear outcome based on evidence of misbehaviour is construed as an attack rather than an appropriate course of action, but meh) is undeserved. Your message appears to have been received, it simply does not appear to have triggered the behaviour that you wanted as an outcome. Too bad.
Sorry, should have pointed out that I was addressing Thomas in the last point, and not Ithiliana.
Gah, I meant in the last post….
Just for the record, since it’s the internet and we can actually find things out, Surly Amy did talk about the posting of her address.
The relevant bit (emphasis in original):
It seems pretty clear from both this and her comments later in that post that she considers this a big deal and harassment at the very least.
@cloudiah |
It took me about a minute to find the address via Google. Her business address is in LA and I strongly assume its the same which was published. I guess you are using the wrong keywords. I don’t want to go into details but the link to the address appears on the first site of search results. I used two keywords, one is “address”.