So I get periodic visits here from hostile and uninformed visitors demanding to know just what I have against those Men’s Rights activist-adjacent fellows who have declared themselves to be Men Going Their Own Way. Surely, they sniff, I can’t be really opposed to men living the lives they choose to live, independent of women? Don’t feminists encourage women to be similarly independent? You go, girls, and all that?
As a fellow calling himself Praetorian wrote:
Why are women so bitter towards men going their own way, without them
“John,” meanwhile, thought he detected some hypocrisy:
So, if a woman says she does not need a man in her life, she is seen as a strong independent woman. If a man says he does not need a woman in his life, he is seen as someone who has a deep hostility towards and/or profound distrust of women.
How convenient and how logical…………….
Happpily, the commenters here always put these misguided souls straight: we don’t object , in principle, to men “going their own way,” if that’s what they want to do.
But in practice, the men who classify themselves as Men Going Their Own Way don’t go anywhere; they stick around and stink the place up with their raging misogyny.
If you go to MGTOWforums or any other popular MGTOW hangout, you’ll discover that the regulars there don’t spend much time talking about the fabulous lives they’re leading on their own — the things they’re learning, the hobbies they’re pursuing, the experiences they’re having.
Nope. They spend virtually all their time and energy taking about women, and how awful they are. The typical MGTOWer spends more time thinking about women on any given day than the president of Planned Parenthood does. And what they think about women is awful. Just go through my MGTOW posts here for example after example.
You want to see some men who are really going their own way? Watch the video at the top of this post. These are guys enjoying themselves and not giving a shit what anyone thinks. They are AWESOME.
That’s what Men Going Their Own Way should look like. And I’m not even joking.
NOTE: I think I’ve posted this video before. I don’t care. Some people might not have seen it. EVERYONE MUST SEE IT.
Ass’s arse, definitely cuter than troll’s arse.
Impressive actual ass (sfw):
http://media-cache-ec0.pinimg.com/736x/e2/d3/e2/e2d3e2851b9c5520b1e482f403f44ed0.jpg
Ninja’d!!! damn it. ass. 😉
http://media-cache-ec0.pinimg.com/736x/5e/c5/64/5ec56431e2fc65642f2cd73409a9b17c.jpg
It’s so fluffy!
Prime-time pecunium!
That first paragraph made me chuckle. I don’t get why female atheists are supposed to swoop in, defeat misogyny and make these guys not look like assholes.
Dawkins has many low moments, but I thought he descended into pure self-parody with “The Bright Movement”. I know he didn’t start the whole thing, but he sure took to it.
This is from their website.
http://www.the-brights.net/movement/how_to.html
How about defending those “old terms” which actually mean something, rather than hiding behind an unbelievably smarmy, obnoxious re-branding campaign? I’m keeping secular humanist, skeptic and agnostic, along with other off-putting “old terms” such as feminist, liberal and lesbian, despite their burdensome cultural baggage and yucky negative connotations, and yet will still expect people to relate to me as a person. Crazy, right?
Why doesn’t he just go ahead and start calling everyone who isn’t a buddy or follower of his muggles?
That’s just classic right there — “A Hint. For reasons we hope are obvious, we would in fact recommend to Brights a bit of caution when discussing worldviews to intentionally practice avoiding adjectival uses that could be readily misconstrued as arrogance until such time as the term’s new meaning takes hold in mainstream society…another 20+ years?”
But I’m gonna randomly pick the word Bright anyways!
Be creative! Be amusing! Idk, I’m a Silver Bullet, I kill werewolves? That took me all of two minutes.
Also, Pecunium tends to have stray commas, could that sentence please pick one up?
Yep, #youradick Dawkins – convinced he’s the brightest person in the room. which wouldn’t be such a problem if he didn’t also believe that made everyone else lesser. Now there’s someone who could GTOW without being missed by me.
Maybe because certain Big Name Pagans have already latched onto that one, much to the dismay of the rest of us.
I know this was like 200 comments ago (conversation tends to happen while I’m at work), but one can’t discuss what’s wrong with Dawkins without mentioning his latest bout of insensitivity: trying to excuse “mild paedophilia” (trigger warning).
@Kittehs, about using U.S. Fundies as a stand-in for all religions, the thing is that even the it doesn’t support Diane’s argument. The denominations those guys come from are overwhelmingly evangelical Protestants, who teach that to be “saved”, one need only accept Christ as one’s “personal savior”. While they tend to be Bible-thumpers, their theology is about the individual having a personal, direct relationship with Christ. In which case, what’s written in the Bible doesn’t actually matter.
Frankly, I’ve always wondered why Christians need the Bible at all. Once you know about the Nicene Council and how a bunch of guys just up and decided to include this and notthat, it becomes hard to trust the Bible as a source of information. And if Christ died for all our sins, what does the rest of it even matter?
emilygoddess: That’s a concern of all collections of “canonic” texts. The Torah and Tanakh are the same way, Given the givens (a much larger corpus of works not merely difficult to reconcile, but impossible; because the ideas were antithetical) deciding what texts were “valid” had to be done.
How/why this text, or that, was chosen is part and parcel of the problem (and it’s why there is so much Talmud, and commentaries on the Buddha, and on Confucius, because it’s not just a christian problem).
If Christ died for our sins the question of what that means is still out there. Does it mean the Baptist idea that once one has a Gnostic moment of “acceptance, and rebirth” one is bound to heaven? (there is a credible set of arguments that the ways in which “devout” people tend to have scandals at odds with their “faith” is they have been saved, so the peccadilloes don’t really signify), or does Jesus set a bar of active participation (works) which must be done, as well as the question of grace?
I.e. does the removal of “original sin” send everyone to heaven? Or do we have to try to make a better life for our fellows?
If so, what does that better life look like?
Those are the things Diana denies are actually things religious people can do. It’s amazingly small-minded of her; it’s incredibly Dawkinesque (though these days his greatest ire is for, “those people”, which doesn’t mean he’s not still ranting about Christians, but he doesn’t ascribe inherent malice; as Diana is doing), and denies that people are complex, and quite good at rationalising difficult concepts.
“does the removal of “original sin” send everyone to heaven?”
You’ em got the baptist line a bit wrong. Not everyone, just those who “have accepted jesus into their hearts” and once you do that then he’ll never ever turn you away.
Meaning I’ve been able to sin all I like since I was about 12. Logic, wtf is that?
Like, this is such a fucked up thing that one of the parodies of those tracts (sp?) is how this poor abused little girl dies on the streets, without accepting Jesus, and goes to hell, while her abusive father goes to heaven cuz he did. Seriously, by the standards I was raised with, you’re going to hell but serial killers who “find christ” aren’t (he was behind the sofa the whole time!)
99.9% sure that’s at odds with a SHIT TON of other sects.
Oh and “original sin” in the sense you use the term was NEVER mentioned. It was that Romans verse about how “all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of god”
Not necessarily. In my experience, the most vocal and vociferous atheists are people who have been genuinely and profoundly hurt by the religion they were raised in: they’re gay or female, or they were molested by a member of the clergy, or they endured a terribly repressive environment, or they were abused and it was “justified” by the religion (“spare the rod and spoil the child”, etc). While I don’t agree that one can generalize from these experiences to religion in general, and while obviously these things happen to people outside of specifically religious contexts, I think there are a lot of people who have a legitimate grievance about the way religion was used to harm them.
Argenti: I don’t think I got Baptists wrong:
It’s a question, followed by a second question: Does it mean the Baptist idea that once one has a Gnostic moment of “acceptance, and rebirth” one is bound to heaven?
The “Gnostic moment” is accept[ing] jesus into their hearts”
Which is when a Baptist sees the stain of sin washed away.
For the Catholic Original Sin is really different, and while the Sacrifice of the Cross makes it possible to wash it away, we each commit our own sins, for which we have to atone in our own right.
I have some problems with the idea of Original Sin being something which has to be removed from each person as they are born. It seems the Catholic Church is coming to a similar opinion; Limbo was done away with, and infants who die unbaptised aren’t deemed to be in hell/purgatory. How this applies to children below, “the age of reason” isn’t clear, but the implication is that infant baptism is more ceremonial (and all sorts of convenient: one of the things it did, in the past, was reduce infanticide, again I digress), but since one attains reason (and so responsibility for one ‘s sins) well before Confirmation, I’d say the devout ought to continue the practice.
But that’s where theology goes off the rails of easy/rational explanation; and one starts to deal with Pascal (though in a very different way, because the problem isn’t, “If God exists but “What if I’m wrong about the fiddly-bits?”).
Having been raised Baptist, and having real damage from that (hello thinking abusive relationships are normal, amongst other crap), the key tenets were:
– belief in JC as personal saviour
– belief is all that matters, good works are a neither necessary nor sufficient condition for being saved. There was a lot, and I mean a LOT, of emphasis that people who were doing real, actual good in the community but we’re christian were damned. This screwed me up a lot as an adolescent as I had a lot of really nice friends that I thought were going straight to hell. It also makes you proselytise to your friends, because you truely believe that you’re the only person that can possibly stop them being tortured in hell for all eternity.
– actual full immersion baptism is a pivotal part of the religion, as it represents the adult decision to be saved – is a stand in for being washed with the blood of the lamb, our church had a small pool area that was used for baptisms, and we got baptised wearing white. I wore a white, long plain cotton gown that had small weights in the hem. We got given a baptism certificate when we went through the process. It was quite a long time to get to the actual event, because we had to go through repeated questioning about whether we were ready for that commitment, etc. I was 16 when I was baptised and had been going to a Baptist church for 6 years. To a baptist, you’re not really saved until that event occurs. Not sure what happens if you don’t go through it, as Baptists don’t believe in purgatory or anything like that, it’s strictly heaven or hell. However, babies and children who are too young to choose to be baptised go straight to heaven. Baptists in the church I went to didn’t baptist anyone younger than 16.
– there were ways in which you could still go to hell regardless of your personal relationship with JC and baptism status. One of them was to marry a non-Christian (note: Catholics were considered almost worse than non-believers [we were taught that the pope was the anti-christ, for e.g.]. So yeah, even if you believed and were baptised, you could still go to hell.
– it was heavily influenced by American fundamentalist Baptists. We had quite a few overseas guest sermons. It also meant a huge focus on Revelation, where everyone I went to church with believed in the apocalypse in our lifetime. The old bankcard symbol with the b’s: 666 (see http://www.rationalskepticism.org/general-chat/light-entertainment-a-conspiracy-forum-site-t33615.html). Barcodes: satanic.
YMMV
Gah, second bullet “…actual good in the community but we’re christian…” should read “…actual good in the community but weren’t christian”
I can’t even get that far with Pascal; Before I can start believing in god just in case, I need to figure out which god.
emilygoddess: That’s the largest problem with Pascal: He defaults to the Christian God (and being French, the Catholic one). Since his actual argument is,”what if their is a God, and you act as if there isn’t’) the question of Which God becomes most important.
And that’s more imponderably structured; because if there is no god, and the believer is wrong, no worries. If there is a god, and the non-believer is wrong, some worries (depends on the god), but if there is a god, and the non-believer PRETENDS to believe,I figure they are more screwed than the devout wrong believer who did the best they could with what they knew/believed.
I figure being sincere (and consistent within your belief system) should be a touchstone of divinity. If the Divine Aspect, is that powerful, it’s going to be, at root, somewhat ineffable, and people (not being that sort of creature) are going to have the “blind men and the elephant” problem. So being honest has to count for something.
So (IMO) Pascal got it completely wrong.
“I figure being sincere (and consistent within your belief system) should be a touchstone of divinity.”
What if the divinity has a thing for manipulative bastards, or disingenious, dishonest people?
Or maybe the Divinity hates everybody unconditionally, like Sithrak
Kiwi girl — interesting, baptism wasn’t required in “my” church (I really hate those people, namely the pastor, for reasons that are entirely irrelevant to the topic at hand), it was encouraged as a way to publicly declare your faith, but one line you could easily parrot was all it took.
Pecunium — I was contesting it because we’re coming at this from different ends — you’re viewing it as, ah, a thought out decision that this Is Right (I think) and I’m viewing it as a thing one does out of fear of hell. And kiwi girl is right on the money with this —
“This screwed me up a lot as an adolescent as I had a lot of really nice friends that I thought were going straight to hell. It also makes you proselytise to your friends, because you truely believe that you’re the only person that can possibly stop them being tortured in hell for all eternity.”
Except I was like 8 or 9. This is where I could almost grok Dawkins saying religion is worse than “mild” sexual abuse, except he fucked it up six ways to Sunday. More like with some forms of religion it may be more harmful than sexual abuse sometimes is…I’m still failing…sometimes a religious upbringing may be more harmful than sexual abuse. Or, more to the point, religion can be used as emotional abuse, which may or may not be worse than other forms of a use. But he is categorically unable to refrain from eating his feet.
Except that my plan isnt to troll. Sparky sounds like you failed….
emilygoddess – perhaps I should have said Diana was reacting to a caricature of US fundamentalists, or the Faux News variety, which puts her nonsense even further from reality.
Re: atheists who’ve been genuinely hurt by religion in one way or another – not a doubt in my mind about that! But I was thinking more of the specific dudebro atheists, the ones who rant like Diana did without apparently knowing jack shit about any religion, and are misogynists through and through.
Oh yes, the whole Brights thing. And they claimed they were going to refer to the not-smart-enough-to-be-atheists (ie. most of the world) as Supers, short for supernatural.
Talk about clever idiots.
This Brights crowd sound as much fun to be around as people who think that their Mensa membership makes them super-special snowflakes too.
Years ago, I read about a group that called themselves Densa (not “smart” enough to join Mensa) and organised things like ten pin bowling nights. That group sounds like way more fun. Wow, does everything have a Wikipedia page? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Densa – maybe the lot I read about were a local chapter or something.
One of the things I find hilarious about people who think high IQ is everything, is that they seem to think that morality correlates with IQ. This possibly is the same thing that infests the Brights crowd – but speaking out of my arse here because I’d never heard of them/it until this thread.
Re Brights
Are they of the Atheism is only for academics and intellectuals , we have no need for people in menial professions kind?