Atheist bigwig Sam Harris: “If I could wave a magic wand and get rid of either rape or religion, I would not hesitate to get rid of religion.”

I am a total stalker of this blog, but just to weigh in on the Anne McCaffery stuff – it’s not just the books themselves that can be totally skeevy, it’s a lot of fan behaviour. The Pern fandom is notorious for roleplaying drama which usually revolves around the worse traits of her books – particularly the flights (which are horrifically rape-y). There’s been a looooot of O_O recently over a scene played out in a fan weyr I’ve some loose affiliation with in which a flight was rape and played as rape but it couldn’t be rape because it was a *flight* and their dragons screwed and the woman *wanted* it really. Whole thing was kind of vile and I’ve got my fingers crossed the mods come down hard on it :/ (that said there are some lovely fan weyrs out there which have pretty much done away with the notion of flight sex)

Ehrm. I feel the need to point out that being a minority does not make you automatically persecuted. If being honest about your religious/atheist standpoints will mean risking your job or risk being subjected to violence, ok, but not agreeing with you is not persecution. Saying “I believe you are wrong” is not persecution. As far as I can tell being an atheist in the US can be socially disadvantageous, but there is no governmental persecution or actual violent hatred of people without a religion spread through all layers of society.

Also: Congratulations atheists. You superior old dudes are as horrible as ours!

er, well. My anecdata agrees with Katelisa’s. The persecution of atheism that I see is consistently either tied to other facets of identity (atheist women, atheists of color, etc), or it pales in comparison to pretty much any other kind of marginalization.

I’ve seen more prejudice against my identity as a polyamorous person, or male s-type, than as an atheist.

But then, part of the reason that I specify that this is my personal observation is because I live in a coastal city. I’ve only lived in the midwest for a sum total of 4 years, and it was in a college town.

I imagine that bible-belt atheists have somewhat more direct experiences of real persecution.

I came out as an atheist while living in Georgia back in 2008. While I did live in a relative oasis (East Cobb, Marietta) of somewhat rational thought (it was a largely Jewish area), they still didn’t like atheists.

Before I even came out, I walked to the local library to pick up “The God Delusion” out of curiosity (I’d been hearing a ton about it). While walking home, in full view of the public, a pick-up truck pulled over and a very southern guy got out with his shotgun and told me to give him the book so he could burn it. Luckily, a cop came over and made the guy leave, but even the cop was short with me and told me that I shouldn’t be waling with filth like that (referring to the book) in view of the public.

When I first noted my atheism on my Facebook, I was trying for two jobs. The interviews for both of them were short. The first person said “how can I trust someone who has no faith in God?” and the second person said “we don’t want commies working here”. Oh and no, I didn’t tell them. They had looked up my Facebook profile, which at the time was open to the public. I’ve since changed that.

(Also, I know that’s illegal as hell, but even my atheist lawyer knew it’d be next-to-impossible to prosecute, at least in Georgia.)

Not long after that, after coming back from an atheist meet-up, I was attacked and chased by three guys who wanted to show me what would happen to me in Hell (I guess they knew about the meet-up and were waiting for someone). I managed to escape relatively unharmed.

Of course, this isn’t as bad as being jailed or even killed. It isn’t government-sponsored persecution. But it still sucks.

I should note that even though a majority of US-Americans will now vote for an atheist as president (according to Gallup), it’s still the smallest percentage of people in the US (more will vote for a Muslim). We’re still less trusted than rapists. Atheism is still used as a charge against political candidates.

I live in Boca Raton, FL now (otherwise known as “Jewy Jewsville” [by the Jews who live here] or “Heaven’s Waiting Room” [by most of the people who live here]). It is a kind of relief that has to be experienced to understand to live around people who know I’m an atheist and don’t care. That is so. Fucking. Awesome.

It’s even better, as I work at a Hebrew school, and not only does my boss know, but she thinks it’s cool. She knows I have a soft-spot for Judaism (the cultural/ethnic aspect, as I’m half-Jewish [on my Dad’s side]), and she knows that I respect the fact that it’s a Jewish school. And she loves to talk to me about it.

But I have friends who went through some horrible shit when they came out as atheists. Being beaten, disowned, humiliated in front of their whole town… it’s no surprise that many atheists are anti-theists, to be entirely honest.

In the US, we have what Bill Hicks liked to call “serious pockets of humanity”. There are many places, especially in the Bible Belt, where atheist aren’t just unwelcomed, but are outcasts and social pariahs. I really didn’t go through anything compared to what many atheists in the US have gone through…

@Katelisa: It’s probably hard for us Swedes to fathom how different the US is in some respects, despite being pretty similar in others. I’ve come to understand that it CAN be pretty shitty for atheists over there…

What really baffles me though is when you bump into Swedish atheists who have borrowed their attitude from their American peers, strutting around like they’re oh-so-radical for not believing in God. Check out page 5 here: http://www.pitzer.edu/academics/faculty/zuckerman/Ath-Chap-under-7000.pdf and get some feel for how “radical” it is being an atheist in this country. (Various researchers have found that anything between 54 and 85 percents of the Swedes don’t believe in God.)

I guess I’m pissed off by Swedish atheists with this attitude precisely because in reality, I’m the one, with my belief, who constantly have to explain myself to people. (Obviously all atheists aren’t like that, all my colleagues are atheists for example and only one of them pretend to be radical because of it… but they’re an annoying subset of the atheist population.)

@Ithiliana: That is… just absurd. Geez.

Very scary: military evangelism

ithiliana, you’re giving me flashbacks now. I went through basic training at Ft. Leonardwood, MO back in 2002. A local Baptist church ran a once a month program while I was there, kind of an outreach ministry to soldiers in training. They’d pick us up, take us to the fellowship hall, butter us up for a few hours with lightly supervised leisure time and a home-cooked meal, then herd us into the fellowship hall for a sermon about how U.S. soldiers did God’s Work, but that God would still turn his back on us if we turned our backs on Christ (I also seem to remember some kind of story about a soldier who died without faith and left his poor daddy heartbroken). Then, for extra measure, they broke us down into small groups for some one-on-one prayer, scripture, and guilt tripping with church elders, before they brought us back into the chapel for a good ol’ fashioned altar call.

The leadership at our basic training company strongly encouraged us to go to this thing. It wasn’t mandatory; if you decided not to attend, you could stay behind at the barracks and help the people who were on extra duty (aka, being punished) move wall lockers and buff linoleum. You can guess what most people chose.

At the time I was still a strong Christian, so I regarded it as “Look at these nice people who want to save our souls. And they’re feeding us cake!” Now that I’m a decade out I think that was so freaking far out of line I can’t believe it was allowed to happen. Most of the people in my unit were kids, and everyone was homesick, stressed, and sleep-deprived. I wish I could think of a stronger word than “manipulative” to describe putting the hard Christ sell on people in that condition. I’ve read the whole Bible, and I can’t think that’s something Jesus would have approved.

… and I just googled this thing. It wasn’t just my chain of command who was all about it. They got an award from the Pentagon, too. Link is here (scroll to page 8).

I think I might have been in BCT during one of the most effed-up periods in U.S. military history.

second *fellowship hall* should have been *sanctuary.* Need to stop typing while I’m in a pissy mood. Look at all these mistakes.

Never a big fan of McCaffrey, and the whole “rape makes you gay” thing turned me off it for life.

Wasn’t huge into Pullman either. I enjoyed Clockwork okay, but was really conflicted about His Dark Materials. (Not for any deep existential reason; I just read ‘the Golden Compass’ before, really really enjoyed it, and had to wait for the rest of the series to come out, only to be turned off by leaving the world of the first book that I was so into. Having another main character felt like it was barging in on the dynamic between Lyra and Pan. What can I say, I was twelve.)

As far as favorite woman writers… hrm. Patricia Wrede! Fractured fairy tales, a lot of her work has a big nineties feel, but still love reading her work. Gail Carson Levine… enh, she has a couple great ones, but the rest of her work is really meh to me. Read ‘Ella Enchanted’ and ‘A Tale of Two Castles,’ MAYBE ‘The Two Princesses of Bamarre,’ and ignore the rest, in my opinion.

Damn, now I’m realizing how many works I love that are by women, but I didn’t really care for the rest of their stuff, or they only wrote like one or two books. : (That or they were nonfiction/inspirational/psych stuff, which doesn’t seem relevant to this discussion.)

Jesus! That some pretty sick manipulation there. Isn’t the US supposed toi have a seperation of church and state?

Yes, it is, but a lot of people really do say that “separation of church and state” does not appear as a clause in the Constitution.

The Air Force Academy in Boulder, Colorado is a high-value target (to borrow some slang) and many churches are deeply involved in life on campus there. (Those cadets who opted out of religious services were marched back to their barracks in what I recall were termed “Heretic Flights,” although I’m probably misremembering the name.)

Lt. Gen. Jerry Boykin has said problematic things about the mission of the U.S. Military in the Middle East and Asia (basically, the GI is called upon by God to kill Muslims).

And Petraeus, who was recently removed from office because he killed all kinds of civilians militarized the CIA concealed all of this from the public put his penis in the vagina of a woman he wasn’t married to, was heavily involved in promoting “spiritual fitness” among the soldiers.

@ithiliana:

I enjoyed much of HP until the last two novels (I have a whole rant about what she set up and then did not follow through with, and what happened to Tonks, etc).

HOLY CRAP I’M NOT THE ONLY ONE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

There wasn’t much I liked about the last two HP books, to be entirely honest. I remember wondering if JKR had a ghost writer for the first five books and wrote the last two herself, or if that was reversed (I’m no longer a conspiracy theorist, so I no longer think like this).

But I’ll stop here before going into my rants…

On the thing about vegan evangelists:

1. I was once actually accosted by a vegan at the meat section of my local Kroger (in Georgia). She called me all sorts of nasty names, like murderer, and cannibal, and so on (I wasn’t even buying any meat at the time… just pricing it). It actually provided the fodder for a couple of okay jokes for my first and last attempt at stand-up comedy (which surprisingly went well, but that’s only because I was fortunate enough to go to an open-mic night with other wannabe-Bill Hicks’/George Carlins’, so the audience for most part found the cynical, misanthropic, humans-are-all-stupid-morons, Nice Guy(TM), anti-religion shit funny).

2. I’m studying Anthropology, and one of my interests is the roots/origins of fanaticism. I’m pretty much convinced that it’s a sort of “complicated”/evolved expression of tribalism. I’m pretty sure that when, for example, one group of chimps attacks another, what we’re seeing is a sort of primitive expression of fanaticism, in this case “patriotism”/tribal loyalty.

If right, this would mean that fanaticism is kind of unavoidable within social species (like humans). Every group of any kind will have it’s fanatics. They’re most pronounced within religion and politics, and obviously Patriotism is a form of fanaticism, but I guarantee, if you look hard enough, you’ll find them amongst vegans, meat-eaters, Led Zeppelin fans (we’re called Zepheads… and yes, I’m a fanatic Zephead :D), and everywhere else, too.

I would say that vegan evangelicals are possibly quite rare, but I guarantee that you’ll find one if you look hard enough.

Crap, a whole McCaffrey conversation while I’m in bed!

I loved the Pern stories that were around when I was a teen – Dragonflight through to The White Dragon, plus the Harper stories. I enjoyed a few that I read later – the ones about the settling of Pern and the ending of Thread – and some of the Ship series. Some of the post-Thread ones were pretty skeevy, though at least in the one about F’lessan and the green rider (can’t recall her name, just that McCaffrey gave her a MULLET – gah) she does more or less acknowledge that yes, flight is rape for the humans involved. The story of hers that really put me off was called A Meeting of Minds, I think; it was one of the ones that gave rise to the Rowan series (which I didn’t like at all). There’s a bit near the end of this story where the heroine – Damia? Rowan’s daughter, anyway – suddenly realises that her Most Important Role In Life is pumping out babies and that a REAL relationship with a REAL man starts with physical submission. So much gagworthiness in so few sentences.

I also think McCaffrey couldn’t write a convincing villain worth a damn. They’re so bloody one-dimensional, too often just malevolent for no obvious reason at all.