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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.
@Thomas Vacula is the person who said he searched for her in the trademark registry. You are incredibly dumb.
@ Thomas: and still the point is flying right by you. It doesn’t matter what degree of effort was involved, and it doesn’t matter if vacula (in some kind of imaginary psychic bubble in which doxxing doesn’t exist as an established threatening action) didn’t intend for his action to be threatening. Why are you twisting yourself into such bizarre knots to defend him?
p.s. I never said I didn’t find her, you dolt. Gah, you are as dumb as a bowl of rancid refried beans.
p.p.s. Answer my questions, you pustulent goose.
I invite any of you to quote or link to where I explained how recognizing that believing in things for which there are no evidence, or contradictory evidence, makes me superior to anyone at all.
Did I ever say that I don’t suffer from cognitive errors, or biases, if you prefer? No. We ALL are prone to making certain kinds of mistakes in reasoning. The question is, will we recognize these tendencies and try to compensate for them, or will we pretend that these errors are something to be valorized and promoted? I am simply saying that the statement, “Faith is a virtue” is wrong. It’s hard to argue that believing in things for which there is no evidence or contradictory evidence is a good thing, so a lot of people fell back on making unsubstantiated accusations about my mental state being that of superiority towards believers. Whatever. If I did think that I was automatically superior to all religious believers, that would be stupid and I would be wrong. But that would not change the fact that promoting the idea that “faith is a virtue” leads to bad reasoning and thus to bad outcomes. I fight against this type of thinking because I see how it can lead good people to do bad things. If you mean well, but do not invest the necessary effort in making sure that your beliefs align with reality, how do you know that you’re not doing evil when you think you’re doing good? That is the main problem I see with religion–not that it promotes bigotry, because lots of other, non-religious ideologies do that, and plenty of religious ideologies don’t, but because it cuts people off from the necessary reality check to make sure they’re not accidentally acting in opposition to their stated values.
[Aside: I kind of love that there are something like four discrete discussions going on at the same time in this thread, only one of which directly relates to the original post. I know some people would see that as a weakness…]
@Ithiliana, We will do our best while you are otherwise occupied. Several good friends have diabetes, and it has been mostly easily managed once they got the hang of it — so I will wish that for you. If you want me to find out what resources they’ve found helpful, drop me a line @gmail and I will find out. Take good care!
Sally Strange: , but because it cuts people off from the necessary reality check to make sure they’re not accidentally acting in opposition to their stated values.
Citation needed.
Also, show where the argument has been made here that “Faith is a virtue”.
Thomas: @pecunium Are you alleging his actions weren’t intentional?
By his own account he didn’t post the address with malicious intend.
Evasion. I didn’t ask about malice. I asked if his actions were intentional, i.e did he do them willfully?
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.
Then you haven’t been paying attention. I don’t troll.
So, lets look at your definition:
Ithiliana: Sorry to hear about the diabetes. Is it Type I? I can offer some ways of making food tastier; I have lots of practice working in limited ranges (allergies, and kosher, and vegetarian and vegan), and have a pretty good palate; even if I am the one saying it.
Sally Strange – you didn’t talk about religion. You talked about faith. And as pecunium said very clearly, the whole atheist-superior thing was implicit in your wording, if ‘implicit’ is really the word for something that kind of screamed its meaning at more than one person reading it. Now suddenly you’re talking about religion. Faith =/= religion.
“It’s hard to argue that believing in things for which there is no evidence or contradictory evidence is a good thing, how do you know that you’re not doing evil when you think you’re doing good?”
So what sort of ‘things’ do you mean? What sort of evidence? Are you talking being a young-earth creationist in the face of all the evidence of geology and palaeontology, or simply people’s personal experiences and interpretations of them, things which may touch nobody else at all?
You’re still making massive generalisations, and faith (let alone religion) is not a one-size-fits-all.
And to relate this back to how this relates to our particular evolutionary heritage, consider the outcome for a primitive human who THOUGHT she detected a conscious agent, such as a hungry predator, when there was none. Now consider the probable outcome for a primitive human who, upon hearing a mysterious rustle in the bushes, assumed that there was no conscious agent, that it was likely the wind rather than a hungry predator. What would be the cost to each primitive human if she were wrong? And how would that affect her chances of passing on her genes to the next generation?
/Blatantly stolen from Michael Shermer’s “The Believing Brain” – I disagree with Schermer about many things but I thought his description of how evolution created patterns of cognitive biases in that book was pretty apt.
I distinctly recall stating that not all theists subscribe to the idea that faith is a virtue.
I don’t believe I ever said that anyone here said that; I cited the platitude that “faith is a virtue” as one of the reasons I am opposed to religion in general, since religion is (in my experience) the most prolific promoter of this obviously wrong idea.
Sally Strange: But you introduced “faith is a virtue” to defend the critiques of your previous comment.
So you changed the subject.
Wow, the Secular Coalition for America is making some terrible leadership choices lately. I had to double-check, but yeah, this is the same group that appointed former Republican lobbyist hotshot Edwina Rogers as their head honcho. She’s made it abundantly clear that she doesn’t see any incongruity between the current Republican platform and the policies that secular Americans would like to see instituted, which makes her an obviously terrible leader for a secular lobbying group. But, despite the huge outcry from their would-be supporters, they’re sticking with her.
So yeah, I fully expect them to do absolutely nothing about this. Obviously, Vacula is way worse than just some run-of-the-mill Republican operative, but if massive push-back won’t make them reconsider someone antithetical to their whole organization for the top spot, I doubt a petition’s going to make them take action against some nasty little misogynist in a local position. I think it’s time to just write the organization off entirely.
@cloudiah
First of all, calm down.
Second, you claimed “Vacula went to some trouble to search for her personal info. “ I said I could find the address through a simple Google search. To be clear, I’m not 100% sure it’s the address he posted, but I strongly assume it is, because a trademark database shows up as the fifth result in my search. All I’m saying is that typing two words in Google and hitting enter doesn’t fit your description of going “to some trouble to search for personal info”. Can we be friends again now?
p.p.s. Answer my questions, you pustulent goose.
Could you repeat the question? I assume you’re addressing me with “pustulent goose”.
I don’t actually give a toss whether someone claims faith is a virtue. Nobody here was talking about that. You came in making sweeping statements about cognitive failures and talking as if faith is always and only a bad thing, an implicitly not-very-smart thing that the world would be better off without, as if every last form of faith was identical (and probably identical with something from America’s Religious Right, at that).
My last comment was for SallyStrange.
@Thomas
Calm down, dude. I am laughing at you, I’m not angry. You are hilarious, but no we can’t be friends.
What did Vacula say he did? He searched the trademark registry, not Google. Are you Vacula? Vacula took some trouble; it was easy for me.
The questions? You are the internet bad ass, I would think you would be capable of scrolling up. Sorry you haven’t learned that particular skill. Hint, you can either scroll up and click on Older Comments or alter the URL to bring you back in time.
Were we talking about ducks here? I am too lazy to check, but this is sweet:
Maybe not stupid or mentally ill, but it does imply that atheists’ brains are superior in that respect (or atheists are superior at using their brains), because religious people make a cognitive error that atheists don’t. I mean, the word “error” is in the phrase. You’re directly saying that religious people have something wrong with their brains. (And while that’s not exactly the same as saying they have a mental illness, it’s damn similar.)
And of course the whole purpose is to dismiss their arguments out of hand! You’re classifying their beliefs as the same kind of thing as optical illusions: Things that are not real, and therefore don’t need to be given real attention. Why even bring it up if not to explain why you shouldn’t really have to listen to religious people?
Also, Nepenthe, where are those studies proving that religious people are more likely to support ineffective charities?
@The Kitteh’s Unpaid Help,
Speaking as someone who is both an atheist and a therapist, I take a pragmatic view of my clients’ religious beliefs. If faith is helping them more than hurting them, I’m all for it. It’s not my job to impose my beliefs on anyone, but rather to help my clients get where they want to go–or decide where they want to go if they are not sure.
It’s much trickier, however, if a client’s beliefs are interfering with living a happy, fulfilling life (i.e., being forbidden to marry outside one’s faith). Then, rather than challenge beliefs directly, I look for loopholes and wiggle room (“but wouldn’t God want you to find love?”). Even then, I have to proceed VERY carefully, since the life consequences of bucking one’s religious beliefs can be unpredictable to say the least. Much better to help people get some clarity on the issue and then make their own decision–which, of course, they will do anyway.
Just a reminder of SallyStrange’s first comment on this particular theme:
No, no implicit superiority there at all. Calling faith “a fucking cognitive error” couldln’t possibly be read as a put-down. Assuming you know better than someone else what their faith is, or how they reached it, or whether it was difficult or not, isn’t putting your atheist beliefs above theirs at all. Silly me to think it was.
Captainbathrobe – I would bet that’s exactly where my psychologist was coming from. He could see how much happier I was with the changing mindset. Plus I guess the matter of professional ethics would come into it, wouldn’t it?