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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.
@lauralot89: “Going by that logic, I shouldn’t let anyone have different political/philosophical/ethical/any other beliefs than my own.”
All I am saying is that it can be very problematic for people to hold positions built off of faulty premises. It can cause vast amounts of unnecessary suffering.
http://skepticink.com/justinvacula/2012/10/04/i-resign-my-leadership-position-with-secular-coalition-for-america/
Did we already note that he voluntarily resigned in a totally woe-is-me style letter this morning? He says he “was the target of a campaign of lies, character attacks, and distortions”. What a whiner.
I’ve been a part of the skeptic community on YouTube for at least four years, now. I’ve had numerous experiences with sexist atheists/skeptics – up to and including an atheist male telling me that the only thing I could contribute to the community was having atheist babies (ie. to ‘outbreed’ the believers) and being harassed constantly in a sexual manner (trust me, I’m no wilting flower, but in some cases, I’ve had to flat out tell people to stop because they’re just going too damn far). But, really, it doesn’t surprise me in the slightest. I mean, one of the preeminent Atheists vloggers (TheAmazingAtheist) posts in the MensRights subreddit and clearly has issues with women (he didn’t always, but he definitely has issues with us now) and another one has outright said that harassment of women at skeptic conferences isn’t a big deal. With friends like that in the community, who needs MRA’s?
All I have to say is it’s a good thing I don’t go on camera in my own videos. I keep as much of myself and my personal details/specifics about my life out of my videos as I possibly can. It really sucks to have to do that, but that’s what you have to do if you’re going to be a feminist *AND* a woman and call people on their bullshit on the internet.
@Nepenthe:
Fair enough. 🙂 Just wanted an admittance that you too believe certain things for no epistemological reasons. 🙂 (Believing X because one doesn’t think one will get anywhere by debating whether X, or because it’s way easier to just assume that X than not assuming X, is a reason to believe X, just not an epistemological one. Just like believing X because it makes you feel good is a reason to believe X, but not an epistemological one.)
I’m not sure I agree about the “the fewer the better” part. Suppose we have belief system A and belief system B. In belief system A, there are a small number of axioms, and every other belief are deducted from those axioms. In belief system B, there are like a hundred axioms, and all other beliefs are supported by like thirty-fourty axioms. Now if the axioms of A are really true, A is rock solid. But if these axioms are false, A is completely demolished. In B on the other hand, it could be the case that ten or twenty axioms turn out to be false, and it doesn’t shake the entire structure that badly…
Well, it could be true that some people can function without theism and others can’t, so the existence of atheists couldn’t prove that particular theist wrong.
I don’t think I’m quite that theist, though. I’m not saying that I gotta believe in God because life is horrible otherwise or something like that. It’s rather that I don’t have any knowledge, at all, if I don’t trust my God experience. Because this world has always been so flimsy to me. It keeps flickering on and off, and there are other worlds beneath it. In order to trust normal scientific evidence I first have to trust this world. And I can’t just accept that it’s real, and other worlds unreal, like an axiom, because it’s not obvious to me.
Fuck, I wrote such an enormously long post and did a blockquote fail! 🙁
Okay, try again… @Nepenthe:
Fair enough. 🙂 Just wanted an admittance that you too believe certain things for no epistemological reasons. 🙂 (Believing X because one doesn’t think one will get anywhere by debating whether X, or because it’s way easier to just assume that X than not assuming X, is a reason to believe X, just not an epistemological one. Just like believing X because it makes you feel good is a reason to believe X, but not an epistemological one.)
I’m not sure I agree about the “the fewer the better” part. Suppose we have belief system A and belief system B. In belief system A, there are a small number of axioms, and every other belief are deducted from those axioms. In belief system B, there are like a hundred axioms, and all other beliefs are supported by like thirty-fourty axioms. Now if the axioms of A are really true, A is rock solid. But if these axioms are false, A is completely demolished. In B on the other hand, it could be the case that ten or twenty axioms turn out to be false, and it doesn’t shake the entire structure that badly…
Well, it could be true that some people can function without theism and others can’t, so the existence of atheists couldn’t prove that particular theist wrong.
I don’t think I’m quite that theist, though. I’m not saying that I gotta believe in God because life is horrible otherwise or something like that. It’s rather that I don’t have any knowledge, at all, if I don’t trust my God experience. Because this world has always been so flimsy to me. It keeps flickering on and off, and there are other worlds beneath it. In order to trust normal scientific evidence I first have to trust this world. And I can’t just accept that it’s real, and other worlds unreal, like an axiom, because it’s not obvious to me.
It’s just… a loving presence which is SOLID. Like, not flickering. Not going on and off. Like, a sun compared to a flickering strip light.
Okay, that was a shitty metaphor and probably explained NOTHING. I’m not certain it’s possible to describe an experience to someone who didn’t have that kind of experience. Like, describing what it’s like to see colours to someone who’s colourblind perhaps.
But anyway… throughout my life, in times when this world has been particularly flimsy, I’ve experienced this SOLID presence as a contrast. One of these times were when I had first come in touch with psychiatry, and they’d given me anti-psychotic meds. I had heard all their arguments for taking said meds, but these arguments only made sense GIVEN that I would FIRST believe in this world with its scientific structure. Now, if all that were false, if it were instead the other world that were the real one, I might be completely fucked if I started taking these meds and thereby changed my perception and way of thinking. You might be tempted to point at other patients taking these same meds as proof that it’s safe to do so, but once again, that’s only proof if we assume the reality of this world with its scientific system.
And then I had the experience of God, of something solid and Real with a capital R.
I can’t quite recall myself right now what it’s like to hear the voice of God, since it was quite a lot of years since I last did this, and it’s only happened a couple of times in my life. It’s not like hearing human voices. The voice of God rather appears in the centre of the head. It’s not like hearing psychotic demon voices either, which is something I’ve had my share of. Psychotic voices can come either from inside the skull, but they still have a certain external or alien feel to them when they do, or come from somewhere outside, and they just have a special creepy quality to them. The God voice just have this incredible reality quality to it, and is completely calming. Anyway, the message just was to believe in this world, psychiatry and science rather than the alternative world I experience time to time with its demons. So I went with psychiatry.
You’ll probably think that from an atheist perspective the God voice is a psychosis symptom too, but that’s not quite true. There are atheists who have studied religious epiphanies and think they’re different from psychosis, although they still think it’s a neurological/psychological phenomena. It was years since I studied religion at university, so I don’t remember this precisely, but I do remember there are different definitions for psychosis and epiphany, and it has to do with how the experience impacts the individual’s ability to function. Psychosis has a negative impact on you, epiphany hasn’t (obviously, by this definition, a psychosis can have religious content and an epiphany may not refer to God). So yeah, if you’ve already accepted this world and science, you could probably find a neurological explanation in my brain for everything. The key is “if you’ve already accepted…”, and that’s what I can’t unquestioningly do the way others do.
I don’t think you should write science/empiricism, since one can be a rationalist rather than empiricist and still hold empirical science high – only a rationalist would believe that it all ultimately rests on reason rather than sense experience.
Anyway. Know about David Hume? He started asking sceptic questions and just never stopped, until he had reached the point that he was even sceptic about scepticism. Eventually he concluded that there was nothing left to do but going out with his mates and have a beer and stop thinking so much about philosophy.
He still remained an atheist in everyday life though. Just came to think about it, through the beer
Hope I made it right this time… There really should be a function on this site where you could just go back and change a post.
@heidhi
That’s good news. At least he has some self-awareness.
I cannot believe how many of commenters talk about FtB ‘bullying’ Vacula on his resignation post. They don’t seem to notice any cognitive dissonance there at all.
@inurashii yes, I noticed that too. There is not much evidence of sceptical thought, a la Thomas in this thread. Really, if they want to convince how our ladybrains are not as good as theirs for scientific thinking, they should actually, you know, show they can think in a scientific sceptical manner. Having one post after another complain about how FtB people post similar comments to each other is a level of irony I haven’t seen for a while.
The Vacula supporters appear to be predominantly male, and believe what he says without question. But should any woman do a post about how they feel intimidated, creeped out, or harassed, then the woman is “wrong”. And this group of atheists has the unmitigated gall to think they are bereft of the illogical thought-traps of religious people.
Sorry, I should have put “illogical thought-traps” in quotes to indicate that I am paraphrasing what they believe, not stating my own beliefs.
We should all save up for vacation by putting aside a dollar every time an mra doesn’t seem to notice their own cognitive dissonance. Ah well, douche-nozzle was forced to resign. Good.
Ok, this needs to be rephrased: I did some awful shit, but since it didn’t bother me that much I’m not willing to concede how awful it was. Take my word for it- posting the home address and a picture of the home of a woman with whom a group known for harassing its detractors was totally done in good faith (maybe I thought they’d admire her apartment building!). Since I wasn’t worried about emotionally unbalanced and angry strangers coming to my door at any time, I don’t understand why everyone’s so upset. Further, I totally said I was sorry and they didn’t even forgive me! I mean, if I encourage a bunch of angry strangers to show up at a person’s door, how am I supposed to know that person will be upset. She should have contacted me to tell me she was mad! No fair! And now someone is forcing me to say I am sorry- my life is so hard.
I’m not confident my income is large enough to do that. Maybe putting a nickel aside.
So you’re admitting that your entire argument was a non-sequitur. To recap:
NEPENTHE: It’s bad for people to be religious!
OTHERS: Why do you care so much about what other people think? Isn’t that their own business?
NEPENTHE: If you are religious, you are irrational and will do irrational things!
OTHERS: Example?
NEPENTHE: Alternative medicine!
OTHERS: Have you got a study showing that religious people are more likely to use alternative medicine?
NEPENTHE: No, but I never said that religious people support alternative medicine!
OTHERS: Dude, we can scroll up, you know…
So we’re back at square one: You have absolutely no reason you should care if other people are religious, because you’ve admitted that you have absolutely no evidence that religious people act any less rationally than anyone else.
@Nepenthe: I’m sorry, I’m going to have to disagree with your generalisation, as I come from a place where religion is private to the point of some people finding a cross on a necklace a bit too confrontational and it’s more likely that Christian/religious people pass for atheists out of desire not to be singled out negatively. I understand that the situation is different in the US and that this site deals mostly in US culture and US media, but I just want to pipe up and say that the US experience of being an atheist / being religious isn’t universal. And yes, I know that I’m incredibly privileged in having grown up where I have, and that I have hardly been oppressed (especially as I like that religion is seen as a private matter and think that the state should be wholly secular), but the need to discuss questions of belief and how to introduce more sceptical and critical thought into society compelled me to keep commenting…
I do have to admit that the public discourse in the US baffles me, however, and I understand how sceptical, secularist and/or atheist people feel that their beliefs (or their lack of belief) is under threat. I feel threatened by some of the anti-science, anti-equality, right-wing, prosperity-theology religious thoughts in the US, even if I’m not American, because the US is so hugely influential on my society, and I rather like my society secular, scientific minded, critical of authorities and open to progressive ideas. Even though I believe there’s a God.
@katz
My impression of what nepenthe was saying was less that religion causes irrational behavior and more that it falls under the category of irrational behavior.
IMO the vast majority of human behavior falls under this category so idk why religion always gets flak. People don’t, like, logically prove that the best possible thing for them to do right now is change the channel during commercials or buy brand name products instead of store brand, but who cares? We’re not robots, which is great! (Although I totes want to be a cyborg. Not because logic but because OMG awesome!!!)
No, the question was:
And Nepenthe’s answer was:
So zie was indeed directly saying that, if you are religious, you will totally support alternative medicine and stuff. And backing away from that, aside from being disingenuous, leaves no answer to the original question (why do you care if other people believe things that don’t affect you?).
*(Nepenthe, I’m not sure I know your preferred pronoun.)
*sigh*- Nepenthe, it’s not people believing in sky unicorns that is problematic. It’s people doing stupid shit because the sky unicorns told them to. And the majority of people are quite happy believing in sky unicorns without doing what they say. Further, people do stupid things with or without sky unicorns. But this isn’t the time for petty fighting- some douche-nozzle who tried to harass a woman for writing on the internet was just forced to resign. We should be celebrating!! Huzzah!! Sky Unicorn be praised!!
Katelisa, couldn’t agree more with your posts – first, that science is not the only, or even just most important, way life is experienced or explained; second, that the world doesn’t reflect the US’s atheist-religious way of looking at things. I’m in Australia and while we are oversupplied with bigoted Christians – at least in some of the church hierarchies and in our parliaments – we’re a very secular country too. The closest I’ve ever had to religious harassment was the odd Mormon or JW trying their luck doorknocking.
Nepenthe – if someone isn’t trying to convert you or pressure you, why the hell should they have to explain their experience of deity to you, or to anyone? What are we, lab experiments? There are times when the atheist response to somene’s individual experiences sounds far too much like mansplaining about why this or that didn’t happen. I know it’s not a direct comparison, but it sure comes across that way.
As it happens deity is way down on my list of important spiritual matters; I’d echo much of what Unimaginative said upthread. Or just let this do the explaining.
A massive “This” to katz’s, timetravelllingfool’s, and The Kitteh’s Unpaid Help’s latest posts.
@katz
You’re right, I’d forgotten the content of the conversation and just remembered the one part of Nepenthe’s point. I was too lazy to go back and try to find the OP.
The way I think of it, the rationality of people or ideas is irrelevant when compared to the effect they have on the world. I’m not necessarily convinced that rational ideas are inherently better for humanity. After all, logically, humanity is completely unimportant. We’re part of a fungus that somehow started growing on a rock orbiting a star in a galaxy in the universe. Logically we should just disinfect earth so the whole universe doesn’t spoil.
Amirite?
Molly Moon: Absolutely to all of that! (Except the cleanse the earth of humanity bit, of course.)
Just got this from a coworker.
http://cheezburger.com/6635790080
@ Molly- Did you mean to start talking like a super villain there? Like, are you declaring mineral superiority and down with organic matter?
ttf: I assume her role would be played by The Rock.
@ttf:
Absolutely! Was that not clear?
@katz:
I was thinking more like Hugo Weaving? Or maybe Katey Sagal