The Official Considered Exclamations SSA Week Page!

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I will repost this as I blog on the 12th. August Brunsman, the SSA's director, has already made the first contribution; go show him up!

BLOGATHON

Hello all.

This is my announcement that, in support of SSA Week, on June 12th I will be blogging for 12 hours straight, starting at 10 in the morning and ending at 10 in the evening.

Why, you ask? Because the Secular Student Alliance is a fucking phenomenal organization that I love with all of my heart. Since my adventures with DAFT began, they have always been there with support and guidance and friendship, and I consider myself incredibly lucky to know and work with them.

There's an added bonus to this: if you donate to the SSA and mention me, I will write a blog post on the topic of your choice.

So, there it is. Look out, the secularists are coming for your malleable minds.

This is... a promise.

So, I've been meaning for a long time to do a series of posts outlining my philosophical views. It's a desire that has been fostered by many, many debates on Facebook that have, against all of the evidence that it is a moronic timesuck, led me to believe it has a certain worth, though one that is only dictated by those one interacts with on it. The other impetus to this, aside from all of the research I have been doing for my forthcoming thesis that will be finished in about a year's time, has been the writing of Daniel Fincke of the Camels with Hammers blog. Dan is a professor of philosophy at Fordham, amongst other universities, and through his writing and my interactions with him at the Reason Rally and on Facebook have proved, a phenomenal talent at communicating complex ideas very clearly and accessibly. It's a skill that, above all others, I wish to attain, and I can't thank him enough for all of the work that he does.

This is not necessarily the first true post in this series, which I hope to seriously devote time to over the summer, but a placeholder. I plan to detail my thoughts on ethics, politics, aesthetics, and other areas, all of which are aimed at deconstructing and eliminating the kinds of thought processes that I believe are, subtly or overtly, enabling of authoritarian ways of thinking, via Theodor Adorno. Kant's Categorical Imperative will be a particular target of mine, as will most Enlightenment-era ways of thinking.

I want to lay out an ethical imperative to action and social justice, driven not by some airy notion of freedom or goodness, but by the need to do so that is not entirely able to be categorized or explained, but that is nevertheless demanded of all of us. Levinas and Simon Critchley are my inspirations here, though certainly without the theological strains of the former. In short, I want to firmly answer the seemingly constant accusation of the more fundamental faithful that to be faithless is to be morally deficient. One does not, in my view, need to have an absolute demand of fealty in order to be a decent person.

I will attempt to do this as soon as I have the time, hopefully as soon as school is over three weeks' time. I hope you'll stick around to watch.

Reason Rally Recap

This past weekend, I took a twelve hour car ride from Chicago to Washington, DC in order to attend the Reason Rally, advertised by its organizers as the largest gathering of secular Americans in our nation's history, a turning point for the movement, the massive, unavoidable statement that would make politicians on Capitol Hill and Americans at large take notice of the nonbelievers that live amongst them, and begin to view atheists as not a group to despise, but one to be accepted, in the same sort of way that the larger number of comings-out amongst queer peoples have resulted in greater, if certainly not complete, acceptance. More hyperbolic and embarrassing spokespeople, for instance American Atheists president Dave Silverman, dubbed it the “Woodstock of atheism.”

This kind of rhetoric quite simply puts me ill at ease, and so ever since the rally was announced and plans were made by friends in Chicago to go, I had been hemming and hawing about attending. The speaker list was always amazing; Paul Provenza was the MC, and the list included favorite people of mine like Greta Christina, Jamie Kilstein, Jessica Ahlquist, Tim Minchin, PZ Myers, Taslima Nasrin, and the man whose involvement finally convinced me to go, Eddie Izzard. But I was still concerned with the overall message; I did not want the rally to be some religion bashing fest or a massive wanking fest of how great and smart we are because we don't believe in God, and if that's what it was going to be, I really did not want to sit in a car for 24 hours over three days to deal with that.

Fortunately, I was pleasantly surprised. There were certainly speakers who parroted those things I've mentioned, Silverman, United Coalition of Reason director Fred Edwords, and R. Elisabeth Cornwell, the Executive Director of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science. being the notable examples. Cornwell in particular made me uneasy; she started out excellently, with very strong, feminist rhetoric in relation to the Republicans' war on women. However, she chose to devolve her talk into a rah-rah, chant slogans at Capitol Hill type of thing. A bit too religious and moblike for me, thanks. 

The messages from most of the speakers, though, were positive, and more importantly, the most powerful and impressive speakers were the ones who made calls to action for the movement, for development, for atheists to begin looking beyond the movement's established paradigm of veneration for reason, rationality, science, and historical religion bashing into a more learned, informed, political frame of mind. Jamie Kilstein exemplified this. Jamie is a standup comedian and co-host of Citizen Radio, a superb independent progressive political podcast, and someone who I've always been a fan and supporter of. His talk at the Rally, though, was like no one else's. In his trademark million-words-a-minute style, he spat absolute fire for ten minutes about homophobic Republicans, closeted gays and atheist teenagers, the misogynistic assholes on Reddit who made horrible comments towards a girl with a Carl Sagan book, and the need for the movement to get political, to engage with other progressive movements, for us ever to be accepted. I was honestly surprised at the response to him; he does not mince his word, and made a fair share of borderline comments (borderline for a mainstream crowd, not necessarily for you and me, dear reader), but he got an overwhelming round of applause.

Greta Christina has written often on the accusation made by many who are not atheists against us that we are just too angry; she presented the reasons why. She laid out a laundry list of things; the fact that her marriage is recognized in only 8 of 50 states in the union, the Catholic church's insistence on preaching against contraception even when a person's basic health requires it, that politicians in America are currently engaged in a war against women's bodies and their autonomy over them. The only proper response to the mountain of injustice and oppression that currently exists, a huge portion of which is directly propagated and endorsed by organized religion, for Greta, is to be angry, and to do something about it. As usual, I can't really find anything to argue with her about. Complacency in such circumstances as we live is immoral, unethical, and inexcusable.

Also, I can't really put it into words, but Tim Minchin was just absolutely fucking brilliant. If you don't know his music, I must implore you to check him out. He absolutely brought the crowd to its knees, especially, for me, with his performances of Confessions (dedicated to the amazing Rebecca Watson) and Storm. I cannot wait to see him perform again.

One of the biggest surprises, for me anyways, was the talk by Sean Faircloth, the Director of Strategy and Policy for the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science. I was not particularly familiar with him before the rally, aside from some sexist comments and quasi-MRA excuses that he made at an American Atheists conference.. However, both of them were impressive for the same reasons mentioned previously; Faircloth encouraged massive political engagement, not just in terms of voting, but of more secular people running for office in order to make actual change and not just propagate the current clusterfuck that is American government. Now, given his past conduct, and also his history as a legislator within the current political system, I'm not here to declare that he's some kind of radical, or the kind of feminist or activist that I want within the movement. But, here, the message was right, I think, and I'll take any small victory I can get from the old guard of this movement. It gives me hope that maybe even they can change, though my skepticism remains strong.

All in all, a little over 20,000 people attended the rally, and I can only hope that this message sank in. As Greta points out, if even half of the attendees go back home to wherever they are from and start a group, strike up a relationship with their local representatives, run for the city council or something in this vein, then the Reason Rally will have been a massive success. The first part of this movement consisted of community building, of finding likeminded people in a country where nonbelief is reviled more than any other viewpoint, and creating safe spaces for atheists to gather, to talk, and most likely, drink heavily. This is all well and good, and must continue, for there are undoubtedly many people in America who are not yet out as nonbelievers for one reason or another. However, now that we have a foothold, it is time to move forward and begin engaging with society, not just sitting by the sidelines and scoffing at it all. Intolerance, bigotry, and absurdity must be fought up close and personal if it is to be defeated; it will not go away if we just ignore it. An activist secular movement won't be feeding the trolls; it will be driving them back into their caves for good. 

The Reason Rally, despite its small missteps, could be the signalling moment for this shift; I sincerely hope that the messages of Jamie, Greta, Jessica Ahlquist, PZ, et al are carried back and put into practice all across the United States.

Everybody's Got A Victim Complex These Days

Seriously, there are a lot of days these days when I feel mortified by the atheist movement and, moreso, who are considered luminaries within it. Days when I just want to curl up with a bottle of whiskey, put a bag over my head, hide in my apartment and watch QI forever. Paraphrasing Tim Minchin, I am ashamed of my fellow atheists and their innate sense of superiority over everyone else.

What is it this week? Well, technically, it was a few weeks ago, but American Atheists, that most cringeworthy of secular advocacy organizations, put up a billboard in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, ostensibly to protest Governor Tom Corbett's signing into law a bill that declares 2012 the "Year of the Bible" in that state. Now, AA has a long history of poorly designed, blunt, generally terrible billboards, but the Harrisburg one really takes the cake. It shows a shackled black slave with the quote "Slaves, obey your masters," a quote from Colossians 3:22. Now, the intention behind the billboard was, apparently, to show one of the many instances in which the Bible endorses slavery or misogyny or rape or all of the other wonderful things the supposedly happy, peaceful, transcendent piece of literature does.

However, as anyone with a modicum of understanding of how advertising, particularly billboards, actually work, that message is not what this billboard projects. What it projects to the average passerby is something incredibly racist, particularly given its location in one of Harrisburg's most diverse neighborhoods. Billboards are not made to push complicated ideas; they're made by their images, and it's not ridiculous for anyone to see a giant shackled slave with a supporting quote looming over their heads and get a bit upset. The advertisement was summarily vandalized and replaced after one day.

Surely, you might think that an organization such as American Atheists, which prides itself on its promotion of Reason, Rationality, and all those other objective buzzwords, would take notice of their mistake here, publish an apology, and work in the future to avoid such things? Well, their partner group, the Pennsylvania Nonbelievers, did indeed put out an explanation, managing in the space of it to completely miss the point of why the billboard was defaced; namely, its use of race, and essentially say "well, I guess you guys who caused this DESTRUCTION (that's how they term it) just aren't smart enough or have strong enough investigative skills to get it. Our poor billboard!"

This is the same old white New Atheist bullshit that I am so tired of; this intellectual superiority that is carried as a badge of honor by its adherents, and the intellectual imperialism that follows from it. I have previously written on why I think this kind of conversion advocacy is wrong, and this debacle is just another example, I think. Dave Silverman and his ilk are so convinced of their own rightness, of their own indefatigable rationality, the superiority of not believing in the genocidal sky man, that they think that gives them the duty to force others to follow their own path. They think that if everyone would just read "The God Delusion" then everyone will be convinced, and we can run off and create a grand secular wonderland, because science.



Sikivu Hutchinson, as ever, lays it down:

“It’s cartoonishly pro forma when white folk, ignorant of these historical traditions, swaggeringly insist that atheist discourse is implicitly anti-racist, anti-sexist and anti-heterosexist because one, we white people say so, and, two, hierarchy is something only those knuckle-dragging supernaturalists do. It’s paint-by-the-numbers entitlement time when the so-called new atheist “movement” is resistant to the charge that racial and gender politics just might inform who achieves visibility and which issues are privileged in the broader context of skeptical discourse. It’s not PC to point out that traditions of scientific racism, secularism, and Judeo Christian religiosity went gleefully hand in hand for much of the West’s enlightened history.”

The New Atheists LOVE to do this kind of thing: they put out shirts declaring "We Are All Africans", or sit around asking how to diversify the movement in rooms entirely made up of white people, or make ignorant comments wondering why people of color still go to church when it is oppressing them. The ignorance of race and gender oppression, in particular, amongst New Atheists is absolutely stunning at times.




I have recently had discussions (well, if we're honest, arguments) with two such strident atheists, who insist that their views are the best because they are "rational," and that they have a right to compare themselves to oppressed groups like African Americans and queers because atheists are like, super oppressed too. Certainly, as I mentioned in my conversion piece, atheists are not exactly well liked in America, but we have never been stolen from our native lands and kept in the worst conditions possible for months-long sea voyages only to be sold into nigh-inescapable slavery for the rest of our days. There aren't Atheist and Christian drinking fountains. We aren't forced to live on the outskirts of town, or in the worst neighborhoods of a big city, in food deserts without any public transportation access, for our nonbelief.

The attitude of American Atheists in the Pennsylvania billboard escapade, and in fact pretty much all of their publicity stunts, are steeped in these ridiculous notions of intellectual imperialism, superiority, and oppression, that just scream out the fact that they are desperate for a place in the Oppression Olympics. The victim complex at work here is mesmerizing in its sheer absurdity, and frankly, I believe through things like this they are ruining any chance our movement has of growing into one that is respected by other activist communities, or one that can make any kind of meaningful change. We need to cut this kind of discourse out, now.

Breaking News: The Catholic Church Is Awful

For the first time in quite a while, I am honestly pleased at something Barack Obama has done.

Recently, as part of the new healthcare legislation that has been passed, it has been mandated by his administration that all employers must provide insurance options that cover contraception for women, making it so every woman in America can have access to "co-pay or deductible-free well-woman visits, screening for gestational diabetes, breast-feeding support, domestic violence screening and all FDA approved birth control methods -- including emergency contraception such as the morning-after pill." Again, that is free and available women's health support to every woman who has insurance; admittedly, there are still far too many people without insurance, even with the passage of the Affordable Care Act, but it is quite frankly an unprecedented step for American politics, namely, that they would care about women being healthy, or having control over their own bodies. It's the kind of awesome thing that the more optimistic types expected from Obama at the start, but never happened. Better late than never, I suppose.

Of course, in the face of this, the hordes of women-haters from the American right wing and their buddies in the religious establishment just will not stand for freedom for anyone but themselves. They have tried to frame this issue, hilariously, as one of religious freedom; they say that not being able to deny women potentially life-saving care is a "direct challenge to the fundamental beliefs of Catholics and are directly contrary to the Catholic faith"; the Archbishop of New York, Timothy Dolan, called it an "unprecedented incursion into freedom of conscience,"and Rick Santorum, our favorite frothy-mouthed presidential candidate, said at CPAC that "It's not about contraception, it's about economic liberty, it's about freedom of speech, it's about freedom of religion, it's about government control of your lives." Bill Donohue, head of the Catholic League and quite possibly my least favorite human being on the planet, rounded these protests off in typically batshit fashion, announcing that “This is going to be fought out with lawsuits, with court decisions, and, dare I say it, maybe even in the streets.”

... There is so much to analyze in just those four quotes. Admittance that Catholic doctrine advocates against equality and autonomy for women, "freedom of conscience" equaling oppression, capitalism, and a call for outright revolution to protect their inane and backwards beliefs. And frankly, it's all horseshit. As Amanda Marcotte points out, this is not about religious freedom in the slightest, but about maintaining gender divisions and hierarchy. Catholics as a whole are in favor of the mandate by a sizable majority, and in fact Catholic women use birth control just as much as do other women, but the kicker is the fact that far more men are against this new law than are women. Huh. Imagine that. A majority of men want women to be unhealthy and unsafe, and to be controlled by men. No sir, officer, no patriarchy here. Uh uh.

So, after all of this madness exploded, President Obama announced that he was working on a compromise that would make everybody happy. And my heart sank. Oh shit, I thought: here we go again. Another backdown from the administration that will further eradicate my nonexistent faith in the man.

Imagine my surprise, then, when it turned out that Obama has well and truly done a number on the haters. Now, religiously affiliated universities, hospitals, etc now don't have to provide contraception through their own policies, but insurance companies can now provide such care directly if the employers object. So, religious institutions still get to officially hate women, but no matter what, women will be able to get contraceptive care. It's quite frankly a brilliant move, and my hat is well and truly off to the President. Start pulling this kind of stuff more often, and you might make me a fan yet. Y'know, if you stop torturing people and prosecuting whistleblowers. That's still the kicker.
 
In news closer to home, it turns out that the school I attend, DePaul University, the nation's largest Catholic university, already provides contraception in its health insurance plan for its employees, which is awesome, and keeps up with the institution's habit of pissing off the Church for things like not hating queer people and the like. However, there is still a rather large elephant in the room when it comes to their health policies, namely that it is not permitted to distribute contraception of any form on campus, that our Office of Sexual Violence Support Services has only one employee to deal with all of the issues that may arise on campus, and furthermore that the code relating to sexual violence is difficult to find and woefully written and organized. There is not even a centralized student health office; those duties have been farmed out to an outside practice, Sage Medical Group, which any patient of will know is not necessarily the best place to go even for small procedures, much less assault counseling. For a university of 25,000 students in one of the biggest cities in the country, this is quite frankly a pitiful state of affairs.

Why am I talking about DePaul in this? I mention these issues to illustrate that, despite the new government regulations on contraception described above, there is a very, very long way to go in this country before proper health care for not just women, but all Americans, is not just offered, but easily accessible. Just because this fight seems to be going in the right direction does not mean that we can stop and pat the President and ourselves on the back: there is so much more to do, on DePaul's campus and across the country. So by all means, we should congratulate Obama and DePaul on their steps forward, but we can''t let them off the hook until full coverage is achieved.

Not Atheism, but Secularism

The opinions of this post do not necessarily reflect the positions of the membership of the DePaul Alliance for Free Thought.

There has been much talk recently, on In Our Words and elsewhere, about the circumstance of being religious and yet also devoted to progressive activist causes that contravene the tenets of one's faith. Relatedly, I have also engaged in many conversations about "New Atheism" and how it should approach such people and activism in general; unfortunately, in my view, many of those who I have encountered in such conversations believe that we should be essentially preaching atheism, looking to convert the religious as we without faith have so often been targeted for conversion to faith. I believe this to be a position that is untenable if we as a secular movement are to truly do without the trappings of organized religion, and so in this post I will examine these two phenomena in light of some recent developments in secular activism, and provide an alternative to such preaching that allows us as a movement to continue with a proactive, rather than domineering, message.

It is easy to forget in places like Chicago and New York and other more cosmopolitan areas of this nation that atheists stand as the most disliked and distrusted group of people in the United States of America: as Julian Baggini discovered on a recent journey around the country, it is one of the last big taboos existing in America. His piece documents numerous people who have been isolated by their friends and families for simply admitting their nonbelief. Our country's longest standing institution, bigotry, truly does extend to every group that is not white, male, rich, straight, and Christian.

One story that Baggini did not cover is, I think, one of the most important. Two years ago, a Rhode Island high school student named Jessica Ahlquist noticed that her public school, Cranston West, had an official school prayer emblazoned on a banner in their gymnasium. Such an exhibition is, of course, in violation of the First Amendment to the Constitution, and Ahlquist, an atheist, found herself feeling marginalized by it. She contacted the American Civil Liberties Union and the Freedom From Religion Foundation, and the former sent a letter to the school district asking the prayer to be removed, and offers a fine explanation of the issue at hand:

Rhode Island, as a pluralistic state founded on religious freedom, should be particularly sensitive to the divisiveness of government-sponsored displays promoting religion. While students remain free to privately pray at appropriate times, prayer does not need, nor should it have, the guiding hand of government for its effectuation. No student should be forced to attend his or her public school only at the cost of being subject to a religious message that may run directly counter to his or her deeply-held beliefs.

Being such an open and shut case, one might think that the district would understand how in the wrong they were and take down the banner and have that be that, with no legal battle having to ensue. Ahlquist went and sat in at the school board meetings deliberating on the issue, and found that not just the board, but most of the town and her classmates were fighting for the banner to remain. In fact, when she spoke out against the banner, Ahlquist had to be escorted by police from the school due to the volume and seriousness of the abuse against her.

The abuse did not stop. She was threatened regularly at school, as well as in the community, especially so when the ACLU filed suit against the town. In the end, the ruling was granted in her favor, as expected, but since then she has continued to receive a sickening volume of threats, many violent in nature, and she has been given police escorts during and after school, and the police has deemed several serious enough that they are worth criminally investigating. Through it all, she has stood tall and spoken incredibly eloquently on behalf of herself and her cause, and is a credit to all activists dedicated to equality everywhere.



Jessica's story is sadly not unique. Damon Fowler had his entire town, including his parents, turn against him for speaking out against prayer in his school, to the point where his parents kicked him out of their house. Eric James Borges, a gay teen, recently committed suicide after his fundamentalist Christian family tried to perform an exorcism on him and made his life toxic and unbearable. There are far too many stories that follow this pattern.

Why am I writing about these events? They are to illuminate my belief that religion of this sort, so discriminatory, so bigoted, so unthinkingly horrible, is near-fully enmeshed with American life, and that it needs to be stopped. There is no good to come, I believe, for establishments of religion to have any role beyond the private lives of their adherents and in charitable causes. There is no reason for a religious organization to have any influence or involvement with matters of politics or public life, because it has never, to my knowledge, resulted in any good. It only results in the kind of awful sexist and patriarchal abuse of the sort suffered by Jessica Ahlquist, and other varieties of bigotry aside.

I say this with a very large caveat; I am not the sort of Dawkins/Harris/Hitchens atheist who believes religion needs to be destroyed, or cast away entirely. I am more than well aware of the good that can and has been done by more liberal sects, and I stand behind them as much as I am able, so long as they would remain committed to such good works. As Patton Oswalt rather wonderfully details, I don't give a damn why or who with you are working for social justice and to make the world a more equal and fairer place, just so long as you are. Whether it's because you believe Jesus or Mohammed or Mahavira or Athena tell you to, or you just have rationally deduced that it is the right thing to do, it does not matter. Solidarity and collective effort are everything in the fight against the kind of intolerance that has dogged Jessica Ahlquist and the others mentioned previously.

In the end, however, thought we can and must work with our friends of faith for equality, we cannot, as James Croft recently explored, end up maintaining religion's place of privilege in our society. At the end of the day, Christianity and Hinduism and all the rest are superstitious belief systems with no grounding in fact or rationality, and as such do not deserve any sort of privilege. But to the point I made before regarding converting people to atheism, we must not as secular people turn around and place rationality or empiricism or any of the various methods we use to examine the world on a pedestal. It already happens; I encounter atheists who never question authors like Harris and Dawkins because they are the Most Rational, The Best Atheists, and so on. But they have to be, because the fact of the matter is that most of the mainstream atheist writers do not so much as mention activism or social justice issues as worthy pursuits, instead sticking to high-minded academic arenas such as historical instances of organized religion's awfulness, or scientific proofs against the Bible, and so on. These are extremely important areas to know and understand, but they do not relate us to the wider world at large. Sikivu Hutchinson, in her brilliant book Moral Combat: Black Atheists, Gender Politics, and the Values Wars, puts it best:

New Atheist discourse purports to be “beyond” all that meddlesome stuff. After all, science has been cleaned up to redress the atrocities of the past. The “bad” racist eugenicist science and scientists of back in the day have been purged. Religionists of all stripes are merely obstacles to achieving greater enlightenment in the generic name of science and reason. Race and gender hierarchies within the scientific establishment are immaterial when it comes to determining the overall thrust and urgency of the New Atheism. Non-believers who argue for a more nuanced approach to or progressive understanding of the political, social, and cultural appeal of religion are toady apologists. Religious bigotry and discrimination are deemed the greatest threat to “civilized” Western societies. As delineated by many white non-believers the New Atheism preserves and reproduces the status quo of white supremacy in its arrogant insularity. In this universe, oppressed minorities are more imperiled by their own investment in organized religion than white supremacy. Liberation is not a matter of fighting against white racism, sexism and classism but of throwing off the shackles of superstition.

Thus, I come to my ultimate point: making an argument for atheism as a preaching movement, as one that actively seeks to convert, is wrapped up in the same hierarchical, holier-than-thou rhetoric that allows religions to go out and try to do the same thing. However, by working to remove religion from the institutions of the state, to eliminate their influence over politicians and those who hold power in our country, we can actually make progress in making the United States a more free and equal place. We must work to secularize our government, not turn them all into atheists. The latter is simply not tenable, and ignores the good that religious motivation can do. Our worldview is no more privileged or better because we have the evidence and common sense on our side: what matters is how we act as citizens in the world. If we do not work for change, then we are no better than the religious fundamentalists we love to criticize.