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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.
So let me get this straight. His behavior has nothing to do with his character and it is everyone elses responsibility to regulate it for him in a constructive manner.
One of the enduring characteristics of the abuser lobby is that they hold everyone else to a higher standard of behavior than they hold themselves. This is a classic example of that world view.
Holy crap. What did Ryan Gosling ever do to deserve that? Seriously, I went looking, and I didn’t find any dirt on him, but I did find TWO separate tumblrs using his picture and saying asshole things. What’s up with that?
Yeah, that surprised me too!
@Molly
No, not really. 😉 There’s nothing we should do “logically”. You have to supply logic with values in order to get ANY conclusion of what we ought to do going. If you have nothing but logic, it’s neither better nor worse to kill everyone than to give everyone puppies and ice cream.
I’m not pissed of with Nepenthe for asking me about religious experiences btw. I think zie sounded disrespectful in zir first posts, but was respectful enough when zie asked me questions.
Damn! I was hoping no one would notice that. 😉 I didn’t realize until after I’d posted.
Could we make that kittens and ice-cream as an alternative? 🙂
Or the best of both worlds, maybe.
@Molly Moon. 😀
However, it’s been claimed earlier in the thread that science can’t explain everything, and logic is a good example. Science makes use of logic, but logical rules can’t be scientifically proven. You can’t device an experiment or think of an observation that would prove modus tollens… rather, the very idea that science could prove anything presupposes the validity of modus tollens.
I taught a seminar on Anselm’s ontological proof of God yesterday. In short form it goes like this:
I define God as a being so perfect that nothing more perfect can be thought of (it doesn’t matter for the argument if this is the ordinary definition, or “right” definition… just that it’s a definition you can make, and which is comprehensible).
Now, suppose that this being only exists in your mind, and that it’s loving, wise, omnipotent etc. However, it’s possible to think of a more perfect being than this, namely one who has all the previously mentioned qualities plus existence outside of the mind.
Therefore, if God were only in my mind, it would be possible to think of a being more perfect than the being whom is so perfect that one cannot think of a more perfect one. That’s a logical contradiction.
Therefore, God exists outside of the mind, not just in it.
The classic response, which is pretty generally accepted, comes from Kant. He points out that existence isn’t a predicate. It’s a quantifier. Logically, existence belongs in a different category than qualities such as wise, loving, omnipotent (or red, blue, tall, short etc), and can’t be lumped in with them to make up the overall quality of perfection. Therefore, the logic of the argument is flawed.
Now obviously you can’t pinpoint the logical flaw that Kant points out unless you have had logical training. However, lots of people without it spontaneously feel that there’s SOMETHING wrong with the logic. Like my husband, when he said “it’s some kind of philosophical cheating going on here”.
A Facebook friend yesterday though thought that the problem with the argument was that it couldn’t be scientifically proven. And I’m like… what? It’s not a scientific argument! It’s a logical argument! Shouldn’t THAT much be obvious? But it’s like the notion that EVERYTHING is science and must be proven or disproven by scientific means has become so widespread now, that lots of people just can’t see when a problem they’re presented with doesn’t fall into that subject matter.
I have no training in logic at all, but Anselm’s argument seems really odd to me. It’s like … it’s all just theory, being able to imagine something existing outside your mind doesn’t prove it does. I dunno, it doesn’t work for me as a proof. All these arguments just leave me going “whut?” because I haven’t the training to sift through them.
But aye, the whole idea of everything being provable by science or being fake, imaginary, or valueless … that’s the thing that riles me. Apart from anything else, it seems to assume we know everything we possibly can, that science has nothing more to learn. (I feel a Hamlet moment coming on – “More things in heaven and earth, Horatio … “) 🙂
@Kitten:
Yeah, that’s the normal reaction if one hasn’t studied logic… One instinctively feels that there’s something wrong here, since how could one possibly proceed from imagination to reality like that. But to pinpoint where things go wrong one needs some kind of logical training.
I think it’s important to distinguish between a) what science can’t prove today, but might prove tomorrow, and b) what science can’t prove because it falls outside the subject matter of science.
Immanuel Kant was critisised for his speculations about life on other planets in the solar system, since he had also claimed that it’s useless to speculate about things that can’t possibly be proven. He responded that although it’s impossible to prove or falsify the existence of aliens in the solar system NOW (i e, the eighteenth century), it’s in principle possible to solve the question through scientific means. And he was right about that. Nowadays, we’ve investigated the other planets, and we’ve falsified Kant’s hypothesis that there’s intelligent life there.
Just like they couldn’t investigate other planets in the eighteenth century, there’s stuff we can’t investigate right now but may investigate in the future.
Basically, the subject matter of science is to causally explain and predict events. Everything that falls within that subject matter, science COULD one day explain or predict, even if it’s impossible right now.
But then, outside this subject matter, there’s philosophy (logic, epistemology, ethics etc), and interpretative enterprises like, say, litterature and movie analysis. Saying science can’t solve questions in these areas is just like saying you can’t use biology to prove a mathematical theorem, or you can’t use chemistry to translate a text from English to Swedish.
Thank you for putting it so eloquently! Yes, there are two problems with the “science explains everything” notion – there are things science may well explain eventually, but hasn’t yet; and that there are things where it just isn’t relevant. When the idea that it can explain everything and anything gets bandied about, it seems to be fodder for the reductionist outlook that says we’re nothing more than a bunch of chemical or electrical reactions. Sure, we are those, physically, but even if one doesn’t believe in the soul (I do) I’d say it’s very much the whole being more than the sum of its parts. Reductionism of that sort can explain away, but it can’t really explain. I’m thinking of the feeling of being loved, for instance, when there is no physical being doing the loving. Calling it delusion or a cognitive error is just … no, it doesn’t work, it misses the point, for me.
Gah, I’m getting all messy trying to express this. Friday night brain fade.
I don’t think Ryan Gosling did anything! Last I checked, he’s pretty popular with feminists. I think it was just the height of the Ryan Gosling memes when that meme was created.
@Anselm’s argument fails far before the transition from imagination to reality. The argument presupposes that one can imagine a perfect being, but can you really?
You can certainly imagine the concept of perfection in broad strokes but the details are what kills it. What does this being look like? What is its energy source? How big is it? Does it have organs? Does it have a brain? Does it exist in the universe or is it somehow outside it? In either case, how does it interact with the universe? What atoms is it composed of? Is it even composed of atoms? If not, what is its composition?
If you can’t answer these questions and many more about the nature of this being, then you haven’t imagined a perfect being, you have imagined an incomplete or flawed being that you are calling perfect.
(sorry, but that argument always bugs me)
Very true. Just talking about a being ties it to an earthly concept, an individual, which seems to be starting out wrong, to me. I don’t think of deity as something I can grasp, or imagine, let alone being some version of “a person”; it’s simply too different and I’ve no knowledge to base the imagination on. I guess I fall into the “it’s essentially unknowable” camp on this one. Which is fine by me, I’m not looking for evidence, let alone proofs.
Except cats, of course. Cats are proof of divinity. Just ask them.
@Myoo:
That’s a good point. Up until the nineteenth or twentieth century (I’m hazy on this point since this isn’t my expert area) philosophers tended to assume that if you grasped a concept, that meant you had some kind of image in your head. Like, if I grasp the concept “horse”, this means I have a mental horse image. Anselm thinks we can grasp the concept of a perfect entity, and one might give him that much, but when he goes on to talk about said entity “being in the understanding” (as he puts it) of the one who grasps the concept it seems like a false idea of what it means to grasp something.
Wow, this is an amazingly uncharitable and distorted interpretation of what Nepenthe is saying. Full disclosure: Nepenthe and I both post a fair bit at FTB, so I may be more familiar with the arguments ze is advancing, but still.
First of all, when was it established that other people holding false beliefs does not affect anyone else? That just seems extremely obvious. I mean, it’s not just religious beliefs. The beliefs we hold cause us to choose certain actions over others. Our beliefs are our model of reality. They determine how we interact with it.
If other people are holding false beliefs about reality, how can you be in a community with them? Example: the GOP’s current behavior. Denying reality, insisting that unfavorable polls are faked, that global warming is a hoax, that the President is a fraud. It makes governing impossible.
If other people don’t bother to check that their beliefs match reality, how can they, or I, be confident that their actions will match their stated intentions?
It matters because the truth matters. Because reality matters. Because we live in reality, or at least an imitation of reality that’s impossible to tell from the real article, and odds are that this is our only life.
Frankly I don’t see that religion or atheism predisposes any people towards good or bad behavior. The content of beliefs seems to function pretty independently of character. But with religion, the act of holding onto falsified or un-evidenced or un-falsifiable beliefs does, in fact, increase the chances that you’ll hurt someone without intending to. Perfectly nice Christians who mean well but insist that marriage equality is sinful, for example.
It matters, not just what you believe, but also why you believe it.
Oh, and, for the record, faith, as I defined it, clearly, several times, to wit: believing in things (concepts, beings, whatever) for which there is no evidence or contradictory evidence is a fucking cognitive error. If you hold a belief in something for which there exists ZERO evidence or CONTRADICTORY evidence, then you are making a cognitive error.
I explicitly said that all people, including myself, make them. It’s pretty much inevitable. But it is a tendency that we should compensate for, not indulge and lionize.
Making a cognitive error does not make you an inferior human being. It is part of being human.
So just fucking bite me, Katz.
Dammit, cut and paste error
Oh, and, for the record, faith, as I defined it, clearly, several times, to wit: believing in things (concepts, beings, whatever) for which there is no evidence or contradictory evidence is a fucking cognitive error. If you hold a belief in something for which there exists ZERO evidence or CONTRADICTORY evidence, then you are making a cognitive error.
I explicitly said that all people, including myself, make them. It’s pretty much inevitable. But it is a tendency that we should compensate for, not indulge and lionize.
Making a cognitive error does not make you an inferior human being. It is part of being human.
So just fucking bite me, Katz.
I think you are hearing “Your feelings are a delusion,” what what is really being said is, “You have likely misidentified the cause of your feelings. It’s unlikely that an external conscious agent is causing them. There is no evidence for this agent, and also perceiving an external conscious agent when there is none is a common mistake.”
Here I was hoping this discussion got necro’d for some actual discusssion.
When will I learn?
You know, Laura, I said other things besides those words that reflected my irritation and frustration with Katz’s willful distortion of what I was saying. So you could address those other things I said, or you could just wring your hands about the fact that I gave voice to the emotions Katz was inspiring in me. ONE of those options will lead to actual discussion. I’ll let you figure out which one.
Yeah, I’m so interested in holding a discussion with the poster whose only contribution to this site has been to repeatedly return to a single thread to tell us time and again why worldviews different than zir own are wrong, even when everyone else, including the people holding the same position, have stopped. So, so interested.
Oh wait, no. No, I’m not.
Sally: What you said was a repetition of things you said before; right down to the, “but you didn’t understand”.
Why should anyone here repeat their disagreements with your arguments, since you’ve not made any new ones, esp. because a long discussion of how/why the actual underlying philosophical questions addressed in the course of the discussion you didn’t take part in addressed other failings in the limited view you used in reply.
Woah, I missed what was happening, but if it’s necro’d, then I’ll jump in, too.
My own background is that I was a fundie as a child, became an atheist, and now take the “accomodationist” stance in atheism. That means I believe that as long as someone’s beliefs aren’t harming people around them, then it’s none of my business. I have heard all of the “new atheist” arguments on why accomodationism is wrong, but I still take this stance.
Now I saw this comment
Okay, religion definitely can compel some people to do harm. I’m in the Bible Belt, so I see that kind of stuff all the time. On the other hand, religion can also make people more likely to do good for others, even if their motive is wanting to score points to go to heaven. I can’t even count how many many churches and religions have helped here in Joplin. The United Arab Emirates gave laptops to all the high schoolers because the temporary mall school doesn’t have lockers. They specifically said that the pillar of Islam promoting charity is part of their motivation. Billy Graham’s charity Samaritan’s Purse has helped a lot of people patch their roofs or rebuild homes from scratch. Almost all the local churches, mosque, and synagogue opened their doors to displaced people, collected food, clothing, and medicine from outside sources, and then distributed it all to those who need it. These were and still are very effective charities. So if someone’s religion compels them to help others, and they don’t use their beliefs as an excuse to do harm, then it’s a net good.