NOTE: Just one more day of the Man Boobz Pledge Week! Big thanks to everyone who has donated!
If you haven’t yet, and want to, here’s the button you’re looking for:
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.
The really fun part is when people believe things that are right for cognitive-error-filled reasons… Like me. With feminism. XD
Well?
Katz, I don’t think Ozy is saying that religious people have a problem with their brains, but rather that their religious beliefs are the result of cognitive errors that everyone makes but which are expressed differently in different people under different circumstances. I’m not saying I necessarily agree or disagree, but that does appear to be what Ozy is saying. (Oz, tell me if I’m wrong.)
Okay, well then, would Ozy accept the religious corollary that atheism is the result of a brain malfunction that everyone has but which is expressed in different ways, one of which is the inability to believe in God, something which is clearly a normal, healthy brain function in most of the population?
IDK, I feel like one can have rigidly structured systems of morality and comfort in the face of death and social aspects and connection with a greater whole *without* having the God part, and that in fact developing those is one of the things the atheist movement should be doing instead of appointing Vacula to leadership positions.
Sure, but it begs the question of why religion has been such a persistent and pervasive presence in human history. Even if God doesn’t exist, humans have invented him/her/it/them again and again and again. If all of these things can be achieved without having the God part, then why has God shown up so often in so many different forms? There’s something else going on here, and I think it has to do with how our minds work, generally speaking.
Captain Bathrobe: Yep, you adequately summed up my ideas, thank you. And God coming up cross-culturally is why I think it’s a manifestation of some, probably evolved, universal human cognitive error. Which one, I don’t know. I’ve read several plausible explanations and few with the evidence I’d really like to back it up. Hell, maybe we’ve evolved to believe in God, there are weirder things.
Katz: Sure. I presume (coming from a Catholic perspective, as that’s the one I know best) that my atheism is a manifestation of original sin, the habitual tendency of humans to be separate from God and to choose evil over good.
No, no, not original sin, we’re talking about a brain malfunction. Like there’s a neural pathway that causes people to perceive the existence of God, but it’s missing in you, and you’re God-blind like some people are color-blind.
(Gonna keep repeating that none of this is true.)
I’m not quite sure what you mean by “evolved,” since rationalism isn’t an organism and thus doesn’t participate in the generational genetics of evolution. Assuming you mean developed over the course of time, yeah, obviously. I’m… pretty sure I never said it didn’t? My point was that it’s silly to tell just-so stories about how and why it developed when we have little to no evidence backing that up. We can speculate about it, but let’s not front like we know enough to construct even a basic theory.
Like, it’s not even clear that either rational or religious thinking provide any substantial evolutionary advantage, nor that even if they do that it’s the sort of thing selected for. Going from “maybe groups which exhibited religious thinking gained an evolutionary advantage over their competitors, that seems like it might’ve happened” to “religious thinking helped us avoid predators in the following ways and that’s why religion” is totally unsupported, and that’s the line of thinking I criticized.
Katz: Cool, if that’s your theory. Can we figure out some empirical way to test it? Although identifying a particular “God” neural pathway would probably require more knowledge of how the brain works than we have right now. But, no, I don’t take any particular offense at that as a working hypothesis.
Gametime: Yeah, sloppy phrasing, sorry. 🙂 I agree with the rest of your statement, with the caveat that if something appears to be a human universal I think it’s fair to speculate about how it might have evolved, since appearing cross-culturally is pretty good evidence that *something* non-cultural is happening there.
Fine, points for internal consistency (although I did say a million times that it’s not my theory).
I think lots of American atheists don’t believe in God because they feel cool and radical having a different opinion than the mainstream one. And I think that if you take any group of people that oppose the mainstream view in any given democratic society (I hesitate to apply this theory to societies where you can actually be imprisoned or killed if you go against the mainstream view) it’s gonna be the case that a pretty large percentage of them are motivated by a desire to feel cool and radical. I think this is true for Swedish vegans, for instance. I’m a vegan myself and think this position is the reasonable one, and I think meat-eaters are wrong, but it doesn’t follow that all vegans came to their conclusion for rational reasons. I think lots of vegans were exposed to some vegan argument, and then accepted it not for its strength but for its radicalness.
I also totally believe that most people with the mainstream view in any society hold the views they do because it’s comfortable to believe what the majority believes. And I think whether you like to feel cool and radical, or like to conform, is largely a matter of personality. Most people like to conform, a majority likes to oppose, and this lies behind LOTS of views people hold.
Sure, but I’m not sure it’s quite accurate to characterize belief in God as a “human universal” given the wide variety of divine beings described by different religions. There are interesting themes that tend to pop up – sacrifice, resurrection, etc. – but once you move past the Abrahamic religions it gets harder and harder to convincingly argue that all the theistic belief systems share a single evolutionary explanation.
But I don’t begrudge people investigating possible candidates for that explanation; if they can support one, more power to them. I would welcome a comprehensive study of the origins and development of religion and theistic thinking.
Sally’s train of thought was featured in my blog post last night about how to smash stupid arguments in Evo-psych. spoiler: it’s a stupid argument. If we need to keep talking about it, I will hand you the literature on the neurobiology of human faith, a big book about evolution, a slap in the face, and a well-designed experiment to determine the biological origins of superstition and storytelling. Hope you’re not an ARA, you’ll be mapping macaque and chimpanzee brains and plying them with optical illusions for the next four years! BECAUSE NOBODY ELSE IS DOING IT.
Love,
An actual fucking working evolutionary biologist making a living in a field constantly undermined by squawking laypeople.
The thing is is positing “God-blindness” is not the inverse of saying that cognitive flaws (i.e. cognitive tendencies that lead to errors in reasoning) lead to religious belief. We’re all susceptible to cognitive flaws like confirmation bias and motivated reasoning, as plenty of atheists demonstrate
admirablythoroughly all the time. Aside from the asshole atheists who think religious people are just stupid, I can’t think of anyone who has or would say that religious people’s brains are deficient; rather, the cognitive flaw argument is just that religious conclusions are being derived from cognitive flaws common to all humans and paired with a lack of critical thinking. Some more info on these kinds of cognitive flaws so we’re clear:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_bias
http://www.npr.org/2011/07/14/137552517/brain-bugs-cognitive-flaws-that-shape-our-lives
http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/is-optimism-a-cognitive-flaw/
It’s not “your brain is broken,” it’s “all our brains behave in basically the same flawed ways.”
One thing I wonder, reading the thread – what ideas of “God” are we all talking about? An anthropomorphic deity? An unspecified source of life or ground of being? Is this discussion framed in a basically Christian-God-as-painted-by-Michaelangelo sort of cultural background? That’s precisely the sort of God I didn’t, and don’t, believe in, so it’s interesting when anyone mentions lack of convincing evidence. I’d certainly agree there, but it doesn’t lead me to the conclusion of no god at all. Nor does the matter of rigid codes come into it, for me, because believing in deity =/= religion or anything to do with behaviour, morals, ethics or whatever. They don’t have to overlap.
Actually I think Ceilng Cat is the best idea of God anyone’s come up with yet. 🙂
I don’t know that religious faith has been selected for/conserved in evolutionary terms as that would require evidence that people with faith are better at producing offspring that then both have a predisposition to having religious faith and reproduce themselves. In order for it to be selected for in evolutionary terms, it must provide a reproduction advantage.
There are social, cultural reasons why religious faith is encouraged. For example, sharing a faith creates an ingroup that supplies a shared meaning of existence, and shared ultimate goals and values, and operates as a glue to bind society together. It’s a pretty easy way to get people to work together. And if cohesive societies tend to do better over time compared to less cohesive societies, there’s the social/cultural answer that doesn’t require an appeal to evolution/ evo psych.
Additionally, there is the comfort that religion can provide to life’s big questions, such as “do I really matter in such a large universe?”, “I feel so alone in society, is there someone, somewhere that cares about me?”, “is there some purpose to my current suffering?” I’m not saying that religion is good in all cases, for example where it encourages people to stay in pain because they’ll get a great reward in the afterlife, and there is something that they could objectively do now that is within their means to limit their suffering. People tend to want to know that they matter, that they are cared about, and science really has nothing to offer in this area, which is fine as it’s outside the provenance of science. But maybe that’s where we could do better as a less religious society, let people know that they do matter. It’s kind of tending to people’s spiritual needs, without being religion-based.
Of course, based Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, we do need to fix some basic stuff first, like proper food and housing for the poor, and justice system problems. Otherwise it’s kind of just #firstworldproblems.
Not that any of us are squawking laypeople. But we really do live on public funds, and people claiming that “storytelling is a brain disability that happens in stupider people than me because BIOLOGY!” is…. Well. In a positive spin, it’s motivation to do better outreach!
Elodieunderglass, just read your blog article. 🙂
Tulgey. Don’t link to Wikipedia. We all know it exists.
I’m aware what I said wasn’t exactly the same as Ozy’s original hypothesis, but Ozy had mentioned original sin as a religious corollary to zir belief, which is a very different sort of thing, so I was bringing the topic from theology back around to psychology. And it’s moot anyway because that’s not something that anyone actually believes.
But you have to understand that “religious conclusions are being derived from cognitive flaws common to all humans and paired with a lack of critical thinking” is only ever so slightly less insulting than “religious conclusions are being derived from cognitive flaws specific to you and paired with a lack of critical thinking.”
You’re still saying that people are religious because their brains have problems and they’re not that bright.
Except everybody has brain problems and critical thinking isn’t the same thing as being bright.
So…you aren’t grasping that telling someone that they only believe something because of their lack of critical thinking is insulting? And that nitpicking is not making it less insulting?
Do you understand that there’s an inherent implication that, since you don’t believe the thing that results from a lack of critical thinking, that you therefore have better critical thinking skills (at least in that area)?
And that you are therefore implying that your brain works better than theirs?
And what about the people who believe in things after doing the critical thinking, people who are aware of cognitive bias?
Imma scratch this statement because I just read the part where Sally Strange says “Anyway, it’s a fucking fact that faith is a cognitive error” because no, there are multiple ways “faith” is expressed, even in my own personal experience. It’s not a single cognitive error by any means.
If I’m implying that by explicitly stating that we’re all subject to cognitive biases, I really don’t know how. For the record: my brain is a normal human brain, subject to confirmation bias and motivated reasoning, etc.. To say that one has applied critical thinking to a subject does not make one’s brain function better, not even “in that area”.
Comment on the thread, not the article. Mainly anecdotal, very tentative.
Of course I would say this, because I’m a language/literature teacher and an arts and history nerd, but I think that many people tend to forget that the empirical, positivist scientific method is not the only relevant form of knowledge- or thought- building. I suspect that the atheist movement might be a bit overbalanced in favour people in STEM-related fields, which gives us a great understanding of loads of things, but is usually not concerned with qualitative studies on the myriad ways in which humans think, feel and express themselves. As a humanities-person, I tend to butt heads a lot with people from STEM-related fields when trying to discuss religion, theism, atheism, secularism and a whole host of other things, due to us coming at the subject from vastly different systems of thought, both of us trying to claim that out viewpoint is the most useful in discussing these things. This kind of discussion end with them calling me a superstitious, deluded fool and me calling them reality-challenged robot-wannabes (eh, my usual opponents are The Husband Elect and my closest friends). I think that less people would feel unwelcome in the atheist movement if some care was taken to make sure that voices from within the humanities were heard as much as physicists and biologists, or at least more than they are heard right now.
As for my self? I’m mostly a theist. I like science as I think it’s the best tool for giving us the most accurate picture of the physical world. However, I don’t think it’s the full extent of relevant human thought and knowledge. I’m also lucky to live in a society where your religious habits are pretty much as much of a private matter as your masturbatory habits.
Edited to add: “…a superstitious, deluded fool unable of critical or structured thinking…”