We should not embrace moderate religion

On de-conversion writerdd exhorts us to embrace, or at least befriend moderate Christianity. I think she's incorrect.

She first asks the question, "Is fundamentalism the authentic religious voice?" Her answer is no.

The problem is that the frame of the question is wrong. There is no such thing as the authentic religious voice. All voices of people who sincerely profess a religion — left, right and moderate — are "authentic". And atheists and the non-religious — precisely because we are not religious — do not have standing to contribute to the religious voice.

(And I think the more accurate and less presumptuous word is "extremist", not "fundamentalist". Religious moderates might well object that their interpretation of religion is just as or even more compliant to the fundamental nature of their scriptures and theology as the extremists. I might disagree, but I'm an atheist; I have no standing to interpret theology.)

writerdd would like it if the moderates were the "authentic" voice of religion.

I don’t know about you, but I, for one, would rather encourage a moderate, liberal kind of faith where people are free to cherry pick what they want to believe while they conform to modern, secular values and use skepticism to make decisions in daily life.

I'd like that too, but it's not up to me or any other atheist. I'd like to see that portion of any community that conforms to my personal views become the "authentic" voice of that community, but the whole point of defining a community is that they get to define their own authentic voice; outsiders are entitled only to criticize that voice, not define it.

People outside of any community, physical or self-identified, do not have the standing to contribute to or restrict the voice of that community. The religious do not have standing to contribute to the atheist voice, white people to the black voice, men to the feminist voice, straight people to the LGBT voice. We might have an obligation to listen to these voices, but we cannot directly contribute. Standing is what defines the community; standing is an essential property of the entire notion of a community.

In just the same sense, the conservatives would like to see the stay-at-home moms become the authentic voice of feminism; they'd like to see the hard-working black people condemning affirmative action as the authentic voice of the black community; the self-hating celibates become the voice of the gay community. You simply don't get to do that though, and any attempt is fundamentally patronizing, condescending, and intrusive. The community defines itself.

As skeptics first and foremost, atheists do have an obligation to the truth. And the plain truth is that there are religious moderates and they are not extremists. It would be patently false to state or imply that all religious people actually are extremists. But I'm obligated to speak the truth even about enemies who were actively trying to kill me; speaking the truth does not seem to constitute embracing or befriending.

writerdd asserts that moderate believers are being "left out" of the conversation:

The media features fundamentalists or extreme conservative believers every time a topic regarding morality comes up, as if these are the only people who can speak for believers, as if they have authority to speak for all people of faith on these issues. Not only are atheists and agnostics left out of the conversation, but moderate and liberal believers often are as well. They are not taken as seriously as those who are literalist or extremist in their views, and are often considered “soft” or “lax,” as if they were not “true” followers of the faith. When journalists act this way, they are echoing the fundamentalist point of view.

This idea is just nonsense. It's very difficult to determine in the first place what constitutes being "left out of the conversation" or not taken seriously. Even if we could make that determination, what power do atheists have to change the situation? And why is the marginalization and exclusion of the religious moderates our problem as atheists? writerdd just points out a pseudo-problem that atheists couldn't change even if it were a real problem.

Reading further, though, we perhaps get a sense of where writerdd is going:

The new atheists seem to agree. In The End of Faith, Sam Harris wrote that fundamentalists, who take their scriptures literally, are in a very real sense the best practitioners of their faith because they follow their scriptures most closely. Richard Dawkins also belittles those of moderate faiths when he insists that religion never changes because it is tied to the ancient writings of scripture, an entirely fundamentalist viewpoint (and entirely wrong, but that is another issue all together).

It's important to understand that Harris and Dawkins here (assuming writerdd accurately represents their views) are stating matters of truth or falsity. They are either correct or incorrect.

The closing parenthetical comment tells the story: the truth or falsity of Dawkins' statement is beside the point. This is an outrageous statement for any soi disant skeptic to utter. The whole point of skepticism is that the truth is paramount. If Dawkins is wrong, that he's wrong is the issue. writerdd seems to demand that we should not investigate the truth or falsity of some claims because simply raising the question "belittles those of moderate faith." This position is bullshit postmodernism at its worst.

One is a skeptic only if the truth always matters, only if the truth always comes first. Subordinate the truth to any consideration, and one is a skeptic no more.

Sam Harris may be a woo-woo loving airhead, but his fundamental point is either true or false, and deserves to be decided on the merits: Are extremists really "better" because they are truer to the literal meaning of their scripture? Are moderates really giving cover to extremists by endorsing the notion that sincere belief in an invisible sky fairy gives one a privileged position to talk about morality? These are serious questions, questions that seem to have a definite yes or no answer. If embracing or befriending the religious moderates means that the truth or falsity of these questions doesn't matter, that merely raising them is insulting or wrong, then I want no part of this "friendship".

Greta Christina loses my respect

I like Greta Christina. I found her popular angry atheist post [link fixed] and I've been reading her ever since. A lot of her stuff is very good, and there's no doubt she's an excellent writer. But the last few days her idiotic opinions have been finally succeeded in pushing me away, in destroying any respect I might have for her intellectual honesty and character.

First, she can't be bothered to put in a couple of words and turn a specious generalization into specifically targeted advice. When I took the San Francisco Sex Information training, lo, these many years ago, the first words out of my instructor's mouth were, "'Norm' is the name of a guy from Brooklyn." Outside of adult informed consent, there are no justifiable generalizations about sex: it's too complex a phenomenon with too many variables. Expressing any kind of generalization, however well-intentioned, establishes a norm and marginalizes those who fall outside that norm. Not a particularly gigantic issue, but it establishes a pattern that Christina is prone to the logical fallacy of hasty generalization from her own personal experience.

Second, she irritatingly uses "faith" to denote both skeptical and religious thought processes. I charitably presumed this usage was merely lazy, but today I see it was intentional.

Today she goes off the rails [link fixed].

It is entirely possible to be an overall sane, rational, functional person, and nevertheless have one particular area of irrational belief. Or even more than one.

In fact, it's not just possible. It's damn near universal. To atheists, as well as to believers.

We've all held irrational beliefs, and held on to them irrationally for longer than we should have.

This is simply false. Christina enumerates a long list of irrational beliefs (or beliefs she considers irrational) and simply presumes that because the list is so long, the probability that someone will hold at least one of those beliefs is very high, indeed almost certain (from which she concludes that irrationality is "damn near universal"). The problem is that the beliefs she lists are not independent: The truly irrational beliefs (the rest are simply common mistakes) derive from a core of attachment to irrational, unrealistic thinking. Eliminate that core and all of the beliefs are simply ludicrous; lacking that core of irrationality, I wouldn't hold any of them.

She asserts

Do any of these [irrational ideas] sound familiar? From your life, or from the lives of anyone you know? If not, I'm sure you can come up with some of your own, from your past, or maybe even from your present.

No, I can't, regardless of your surety. Sorry, I'm not a hyper-self-critical neurotic woo-woo refugee.

I'm really fucking tired of implicitly or explicitly being labeled as a freak, a soulless, unspiritual computerized automaton, a emotionless Spock, simply because I do indeed rationally consider all my beliefs. And there are a lot of people like me who are sensible, rational people, who do apply rational thought to all their beliefs. Greta Christina might find it difficult, but for some of us it's just routine.

Believing some proposition without certainty is not irrational; indeed being actually mistaken is not evidence of irrationality. A rational person has to make actual decisions about what to do and what to believe based on information that is not just finite, but usually extremely limited. It is not irrational, for example, to believe "that you can argue people out of their religious beliefs, if you just make your arguments good enough." It's almost always (but not always) mistaken, but not irrational per se. It would be irrational to believe you can argue religious people out of their beliefs after you have been proven wrong for the zillionth time. It's not even irrational per se to believe the Earth is fixed and unmoving: it definitely feels fixed and unmoving. The belief becomes irrational only when it's held after apprehending the evidence to the contrary, in spite of evidence to the contrary.

It's not irrational to feel emotions, to have opinions and preferences. It's not irrational to do something just because you want to do it. It's not irrational to make moral judgments on the basis of emotions, opinions and preferences. It's not even necessarily irrational (although I argue it's mistaken) to believe that there are good objective reasons for one's moral judgments.

Christina is advocating appeasement.

Again, while secular faith has instances of irrationality -- many of them, even -- it isn't irrational by its very nature. I think religious faith is.

But --

and this is very important --

I don't think religious believers are.

Not all of them, at any rate. Not by definition.

Here's the thing I think atheists need to remember. It is entirely possible to be an overall sane, rational, functional person, and nevertheless have one particular area of irrational belief. Or even more than one.

There's a prima facie contradiction here: Religious believers are not irrational "by nature" because everyone (except the insignificant, marginalized, freakish Spocks such as myself) has irrational beliefs. The contradiction is obvious: By this argument, it's not that the religious aren't irrational, it's that everyone is irrational.

This argument is frankly stupid. We can draw a distinction: "[S]ecular faith... isn't irrational by its very nature. I think religious faith is," but we can't draw a distinction: "[R]eligious believers [just] hold one irrational belief that atheists don't hold," i.e. religious belief isn't substantively or essentially different, it's just superficially different.

Christina seems to rely on some bullshit postmodernist notion of universal humanism:

But the fact that religious believers hold one irrational belief that atheists don't hold doesn't make them fundamentally less-rational human beings than us. And we shouldn't pretend that it does.

We're all human beings, right? Who's in a privileged position to judge?

Well, this is bullshit. Universal humanism does not entail that we shouldn't judge each other. It entails only that we are all equally privileged to judge, and we are subject or not subject to others' judgment all in the same way. Universal humanism is not the idea that there should be no laws, it's that all are equal before the law. The idea that one should be "perfect" to make moral judgments is a Christian idea. This idea doesn't argue against judgment per se, it argues only that God alone is privileged to judge... via His self-appointed Earthly representatives, of course.

Christina's position here is hopelessly confused. Taken to its logical conclusion (and Christian presuppositional metaphysics does indeed take this argument to its extreme) one could justly conclude that rationality itself was just another arbitrary belief. To be fair, Christina explicit disclaims such an interpretation, but a disclaimer of the logical conclusion of an argument is itself irrational.

I must admit, I don't have much empathy for people who struggle with irrational beliefs. I've of course had mistaken beliefs and I've had lazily constructed beliefs, but I've never had an irrational belief. Not one. I've modified or rejected every belief I've ever had for which I've been presented with sufficient contrary evidence. I've never felt the slightest bit of angst or discomfort in conforming my beliefs to the evidence available. And I've met a lot of people just like me.

Appeasement and Censorship

I am, like Christopher Hitchens and very much like Shalini, an "angry" atheist. I have nothing but contempt for religion, supernaturalism, woo-woo, and secular philosophical bullshit, and I'm more than willing to say so in no uncertain terms. I don't think simple rational argument is enough. If people really could be swayed by simple rational argument, we would have been rid of supernatural bullshit a thousand years ago. It's really not that difficult intellectually; you don't have to be a genius.

The fundamental problem that I see are the socially constructed values which promote supernaturalism and deprecate naturalism. The problem is not that we haven't thought the issues through well enough, the problem is that all human societies, including Western civilization, deprecate to some extent the activity of thinking things through and accepting the conclusions. Values are facts, not rational conclusions, and cannot be established by truth-seeking discourse. They must be established by propaganda and negotiation.

Truth-seeking discourse is still an important and indispensable tool. Many arguments for supernaturalist claims use truth-seeking discourse as a model, and it's important to be able to rationally deconstruct and disprove these truth-claims. If you're going to call someone a liar and a bullshit artists, it's important to be able to prove these labels. But, on the other hand, you need not stop at deconstruction and disproof: you can then go on to employ specifically pejorative labels.

I don't just think it's possible, I think it's important to do so. I think it's important to say out loud that there are not only millions of rational naturalists who disagree with the religious, superstitious and supernaturalists, but also that there are a lot of people who hold such ideas in contempt. I'm in favor of some degree of tolerance and pluralism, but I have my limits. And lies and bullshit, essential components of supernaturalism, cross some of those limits. So I speak up and say what I say.

Not everyone has the same opinion. Some atheists favor a more friendly approach. Good for them. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe you can catch more flies with honey than you can with vinegar. More power to 'em. I have been, on occasion, intolerant of such people in the past for no better reason than they choose a different approach to promoting rationalism and naturalism. I was wrong and I apologize.

Friendly atheists (as a class, not just Hemant) do not use pejorative words, but still hold the line that supernaturalism is still wrong. They may not call you a liar and a bullshit artist to your face, but they will still point out the falsity and fallacy in your supernaturalism and the suffering it creates. Fair enough.

I'm not, however, going to apologize for my hostility towards appeasement and rhetorical censorship. These positions go beyond mere advocacy of friendliness.

Appeasement entails that we recognize superstition and supernaturalism as "just as good" as rationalism and naturalism, that the conflict between supernaturalism and naturalism is a fundamentally irreconcilable difference of opinion, of no more moment than chocolate vs. vanilla, or classical vs. punk rock. Appeasement is often based on appeals to "pluralism" and "tolerance".

I'll hammer on DJW yet again: "A society that contains deep disagreements regarding these sorts of questions will be benefited by deep pluralism and ecumenicalism." There can be no misinterpreting DJW's position: If there is deep disagreement about "these sorts of questions" (questions on which DJW does not have a strong opinion?) no one should judge the other position.

I'll hammer on Robert Farley yet again: "Dawkins statement [that teaching Catholicism to children is more harmful than child sexual abuse]... isn't just illiberal; it's virtually totalitarian," for no better reason than that, if true, we might then use the violent oppression of the state to prohibit the religious indoctrination of children by the threat of torture.

The enormity of this appeasement is staggering. It is very clear that the truth or falsity of Dawkins' opinions is not immediately relevant to DJW's or Farley's argument. DJW says that "In addition to being demonstrably false, this view is an awful and appalling thing to say." In addition to is the key phrase here. If Dawkins view were simply false, why not condemn it for being false? Why condemn it for reasons other than its falsity? It's important to note that neither DJW nor Farley actually demonstrates the "demonstrable" falsity of Dawkins' statement.

If Dawkins' statement is bad for reasons other than its truth or falsity, we must therefore conclude that it would be bad even if it were true. Therefore, we must conclude that DJW and Robert Farley would (in theory) condone an activity as harmful as child sexual abuse in the name of "deep pluralism and ecumencalism."

I have to repeat: I don't condemn DJW and Farley for disagreeing with Dawkins. If Dawkins' statement really were false, it would be perfectly acceptable and entirely sufficient to demonstrate its falsity and then, if they were so moved, condemn Dawkins for error, stupidity or mendacity. But to condemn the statement because it is "virtually totalitarian*" or non-pluralist in addition to perhaps being false, is to imply that the condemnation would still stand even Dawkins were correct.

*I really would like Farley to explain precisely how it is "virtually totalitarian" to use the violent oppression of the state to prevent children from being threatened with hellfire and damnation. Especially since such threats establish priests' coercive authority facilitating the sexual abuse Dawkins uses as comparison.

Shalini objects to some atheists' rhetorical censorship: demands that angry atheists sit down and shut up, not because our position is false, but because it "hurts the cause". Rhetorical censorship is not so egregious and despicable as appeasement, but it's still profoundly objectionable.

It's a bullshit position for several reasons. First, it's not demonstrably true: how does anyone know angry atheism is hurting any cause other than the cause of appeasement, tolerance and respect for supernaturalism, which we're explicitly trying to hurt? Furthermore, precisely what cause are they talking about? My statements may hurt their cause, whatever it might be, but my cause is different: I'm not particularly interested in converting individual theists. I explicitly want to make it so that supernaturalists — i.e. theists, woo-woos, and bullshit artists in general — ashamed, embarrassed, defensive, and ultimately socially marginalized in polite society.

Third, why should I shut up just because I'm hurting any cause? One of the causes I support is that people should, with few restrictions*, say whatever the hell they damn well please. Advocate anything you please: Child molestation, Nazism, Stalinism, Catholicism, Islam, or mopery on the high seas. I'll tell you why I think you're wrong, I'll tell you that I disagree so profoundly that I hold your opinions in contempt and disgust, but I'll never explicitly demand that you shut up just because I don't like what you have to say.

*specifically advocating extra-legal violence, lying, and negligently repeating lies.

Please note that I don't demand the appeasers or censors shut up. I grant them every right to say what they please, and I demand only the same right to say that they're full of shit.

I'm an angry atheist, and damn proud of it. If you don't like it, tough. Go start your own blog.

Robert Farley takes the stupid pill

Farley is a usually intelligent, perspicacious writer who makes insightful, sound arguments and is a tireless champion of not only liberalism but rationality. But we can conclude that immediately before this post, "Thoughts" on religion [scare quotes added], he took a stupid pill... or perhaps the whole bottle.

DJW is absolutely correct to follow up Matt's condemnation of Dawkins statement on Catholicism. It isn't just illiberal; it's virtually totalitarian. Dawkins is, essentially, arguing that raising children as Catholic is worse than sexually abusing them. Since we all agree that sexually abusing children merits the violent retribution of the state, the next logical step is pretty much unavoidable. Dawkins may have been tossing the statement off without really thinking about it (indeed, his "arguably" suggests that he isn't really willing to stand by it in its strongest form), but it is nonetheless illiberal, particularly if we define liberalism as, in large part, a political recognition of the fact of pluralism.

The logic here is egregiously faulty and the insinuation can be considered nothing less than a canard, more appropriate to Ann Coulter or perhaps Jonah Goldberg.

Let me repeat Dawkin's statement, quoted in the earlier post, "New Atheism" [quotation marks original]

I was asked what I thought about the widely publicized cases of sexual abuse by Catholic priests in Ireland. I replied that, horrible as sexual abuse no doubt was, the damage was arguably less than the long-term psychological damage inflicted by bringing the child up Catholic in the first place.

Now Dawkins is making a dramatic statement here, and he might well be mistaken. But is it totalitarian? He is not advocating or even suggesting the violent retribution of the state. That is Farley's own invention. And it's simply retarded.

Perhaps Farley slept through fourth-grade civics class. The reason that we don't allow the state to violently punish speech is not because speech cannot be bad, or harmful or abusive. The one and only one reason we do not allow the state to punish speech is that no state can be trusted to punish only bad speech: the government will inevitably punish speech that is detrimental to its own interests, rather than the people's interests.

There's a lot of speech that is incredibly harmful, terribly damaging, and deserves our contempt and scorn. Racist, homophobic bigotry, neoconservative propaganda, Ann Coulter, and LOLCats. Just because the cure of coercively suppressing speech is worse than the disease doesn't mean bad speech is not in fact bad. In contrast, we punish sexual abuse because sexual abuse is bad and sexual abuse is not typically used to resist an evil government.

...most of us quite likely know a mildly irritating militant atheist.

And I'm sure most people who would have rather ignored the ugly facts of slavery knew a mildly irritating militant abolitionist. Most people who would rather not think about the war in Iraq... you get the point. We want to be irritating: It is only by irritating people who would rather not think about evil that anything bad gets fixed.

[R]eligion is so deeply embedded in human culture and society that there's very little point in trying to pry out and then weigh its positive and negative effects.

Do I really have to draw yet another obvious parallel to slavery here?

But nevertheless, I can only bring myself to say that yes, Hitch is probably right about the effect of religion; I can't say for sure.

You can't say anything for sure, all there is are degrees of probability. Farley makes arguments on "probably right" all the time, but suddenly when it comes to religion, he has to be absolutely certain to commit himself? Sorry, Bob, only the religious get absolute certainty, a.k.a. fanatic self-righteousness.

[R]eligion has an entirely different relationship with the unobservable, positing that it has some critical (but fundamentally unknowable) relationship with the world that we see.

Good grief! Did Farley go to school to construct such egregious bullshit? A critical but fundamentally unknowable relationship with the world? Let me say that again, so you can savor the stench of bullshit: "[R]eligion... has some critical (but fundamentally unknowable) relationship with the world that we see." Please do tell me how a critical relationship can be unknowable... but first put down the bong.

Religion can explain the empirical world fully

What. The. Fuck. Religion can't explain jack shit. Religion's explanation for almost everything is "goddidit" (the explanation for the rest is "fallofman"). This apparently counts, in Farley's mind, as an explanation. I hope he's equally charitable grading his students' work.

But I'm probably wandering farther into philosophy than I should on this question...

Ya think?

we're in danger of granting science a bit too much credit when we put it up against religion in debates like this. Science was made, not found; it is a mode of inquiry that was created by human beings, and it has had and continues to have many of the flaws that those human beings had.

Science was created by man! Completely unlike religion which comes from God, Praise the Lord! Oh wait... religion comes from man too, but from that paragon of human history, that Golden Age, when we were all perfectly wise, and before we became corrupted by all that worldly stuff like agriculture, fire, or the wheel. How can mere science compete?

I most certainly prefer to have science taught in public high schools than religion, but that is in large part because I think the teaching of religion to be illiberal, and the teaching of science to be a part of the liberal/Enlightenment project.

This is not the kind of endorsement we want. We teach science because it is better (much better: religion is bullshit through and through) not because it was endorsed by the priests and prophets that Farley prefers.

If I actually agreed with Dawkins that a commitment to science required atheism...

I've never read that sense from Dawkins. A true commitment to science entails atheism, but doesn't require it. You do not have to first purify your mind to conduct science: You merely have to observe and think precisely and honestly. Of course, such an exercise does tend to purge the mind of bullshit, but that comes afterwards.

And one more bit on the rational/irrational point; most of the commitments we feel are, in some sense, irrational. I love my wife, and I'm not sure that there's a version of rationality that can sufficiently explain what that means.

This is simply retarded. Love is an ordinary human emotion. It's complicated, and I doubt a complete reduction to neuro-biology would be worthwhile, but there's nothing unscientific and irrational about love. Just because I love my wife (and I do) doesn't mean I have to believe anything actually false or unprovable about the world. I don't believe I can literally read her mind, or violate the laws of physics. I just have a lot of groovy, but entirely natural, emotions working in my brain when we're together.

Moreover, it seems to me that evaluating and condemning such [irrational] convictions is absolutely the last thing that we should want the state to do.

Again, it is only Farley's lying insinuation that has the state condemning irrational convictions. Dawkins has never, to my knowledge, advocated the state condemning irrational convictions. He, and I, and Farley himself (when he's off (on?) his medication) condemn irrational convictions as terribly all the time, in our capacity as citizens and rational people.

But if you say it's about God, that's different. I guess.

Retarded Appeasers

Here is proof positive that just the mention of the word "religion" can turn ordinarily sensible and intelligent people into right-wing-talking-points-spouting mystical mush-brained retards willing to bend ordinary logic and reason into pretzels to avoid offending sky-fairy-worshiping authoritarian theocrats.

New Atheism
"Thoughts" on Religion [quotation marks added; it's clear that whatever Robert Farley has posted bears no discernible relation to any brain activity that could be regarded as actual thinking]

I'm steaming mad, much to mad to do anything constructive right now; I'll have more tomorrow. It's all the more infuriating because these guys are otherwise very smart, very perspicacious, and argue extremely well.

This post also inaugurates a new tag: spineless appeasement. It will be retroactively applied to older posts when I get around to it.

The New Abolitionism

Stowe and Brown are deeply and troublingly illiberal on the subject of abolitionism (and in the Brown case, at least, everything else). Some are suggesting Stowe ought not be linked with a bombthrower like Brown, but this won't fly. From the Linker piece:

Following a lecture in Hartford, she recalls, "I was asked what I thought about the widely publicized cases of sexual abuse by slave owners in Georgia. I replied that, horrible as sexual abuse no doubt was, the damage was arguably less than the long-term psychological damage inflicted by bringing the child up a slave in the first place."

In addition to being demonstrably false, this view is an awful and appalling thing to say, and she clearly deserves strong criticism for it. As does, in my view, anyone who suggests that anyone who holds a substantially different position on slavery is not capable of being a good and decent person. A society that contains deep disagreements regarding these sorts of questions will be benefited by deep pluralism and ecumenicalism. Many commenters feel compelled to point out that abolitionists of all sorts are often not afforded the respect and tolerance that Linker wants abolitionists to extend to slave owners. This is factually correct, but as a defense of the likes of Brown and Stowe, it's nothing but a tu quoque. Moreover, even if returning the disrespect in kind had some sort of strategic value, which I can't really see, Brown and Stowe attack cruel and exploitative slave owners and compassionate and generous slave owners with the same broad brush.

With no apologies whatsoever to DJW