Many Christians Do Not Believe in Prayer

With Hurricane Isaac moving into the area, I've lost count of how many references to prayer I've seen on Facebook and Twitter. There is nothing quite like a little fear to elicit delusional beliefs. And yet, it is a good reminder that many Christians - including the predominately Southern Baptist majority surrounding me - do not share Pat Robertson's conviction that natural disasters are divine punishment for whatever he considers sinful. At least, they don't share this view when they or their loved ones are the ones being threatened.

Many of the prayer references have been the standard fare you would expect (e.g., "I'm praying we don't have any damage," or "I'll be praying you make it through this okay."). I do not put much stock in these statements, as they are little more than Christianspeak. I suspect that relatively few of the people making such statements will actually pray as they describe. We could replace "praying" with "hoping," and little meaning would be lost.

How to Disagree in the Atheist Community

Most atheists, secular humanists, freethinkers, and skeptics pride ourselves in making an effort to be rational in our thought and communication. We do not always succeed, but we generally try. Or do we? In looking at a number of blog posts on prominent atheist blogs, comments left on these blogs, and Twitter interactions by well-known atheists, one could be forgiven for asking.

We have discovered that the Internet is ideal for one-directional forms of communication (e.g., videos, blog posts) and not well suited for complex argument. Dueling blog posts where two or more bloggers respond to each other over a length of time may be interesting to some but are likely to lose many others. Moreover, they are almost certain to attract trolls. Facebook and Twitter have a way of dumbing-down communication, often reducing things to crude metrics (e.g., "likes" or retweets) and oversimplifying to the point where communication breaks down. So much of what begins with lofty goals ends in childish insults.

Atheist Community vs. Atheist Movement

I'm not sure anybody enjoys admitting they were wrong, but it is something we must do from time to time. I'm recognizing that I've made some mistakes in how I've used the terms "atheist community" and "atheist movement" as if they meant the same thing. They aren't the same, and I think it may be important to understand the differences. Doing so may even help to prevent some of the conflicts we've encountered.

The Atheist Community

When I refer to the atheist community, I am using the term in a global way to characterize all of us who identify as atheists. If you identify yourself as an atheist, you are part of the atheist community. This is true even if you never engage in activism, meet with other atheists, or do anything whatsoever to call attention to your atheism. As one who identifies with atheism, you belong to the community.

I Am Not Looking for a Substitute Dogma

Staks (Dangerous Talk) had a great post recently about how some in the atheist community seem to want to replace religious dogma with some sort of secular alternative.

But lately there has been a growing orthodoxy within our community. People who believe that there is only one reasonable opinion to any given issue and if you deviate from that opinion in only a minor detail, then you are a blasphemous heretic. Of course they would never use those words. But their dogmatic view of reason is little different than the dogmatism of religious believers in my opinion.

I have noticed this too, and I consider it a problem. The moment we refuse to acknowledge that we might be wrong about any given issue, we surrender our claim to reason.

Lying By Sam Harris

I just finished reading Sam Harris' Lying. It is not one of his better known books, probably because it isn't about atheism, but I enjoyed it. It is very brief, comparable to Letter to a Christian Nation in length. Harris' central thesis in Lying is that lies, even "white lies," do more harm than good and should be avoided. He argues that such lies damage the very relationships we often think they protect, undermine trust, and deprive our friends and family members from the opportunity to engage reality. I can't say I agreed with Harris here, but it certainly was a thought-provoking read.

In addressing "white lies" we use to spare the feelings of others, Harris tackled a couple of the most common scenarios where we feel tremendous pressure to lie. One involved receiving a gift we don't like. I suspect we've all been there. He suggests that we politely tell the truth rather than pretending to like something we can't stand. The other involved the classic question, "Does this dress make me look fat?" Again, Harris suggested that we should come far closer to the truth than how most of us respond.

Reactions to Atheism+

I shared my initial reaction to atheism+ here. Some of the posts telling me how wrong I was have raised some good points that require additional thought on my part. Others seemed to be responding to something very different than what I wrote, so I'm not sure how to respond to them. In any case, I thought I'd do a quick link dump of some reactions I've seen to the atheism+ proposal:

"Humanism and "Atheism+": What's the Difference? (Love, Joy, Feminism)
The Backlash Against Feminism (In Living Color)
Atheism Plus (Atheist Ethicist)
"Atheism Plus"? (The A-Unicornist)
The "New Wave of Atheism" (Dead-Logic)
So, Atheism+ eh? (The Athefist)
Superskepticalihumanisticatheistplus (Cubik's Rube)
Atheism Plus or Minus (Too Many Questions)

It Would Be Nice If Everyone in the Atheist Community Agreed With Me

It would be nice if everyone in the atheist community agreed with me and shared my values. It would also be absolutely devastating for the success and survival of the community. You see, I'm not infallible. I'm far from perfect, and I make mistakes. Lots and lots of mistakes. I can be overly emotional, insensitive, biased, and thoroughly mistaken about all manner of things. And I can do all that in a single day.

That's Offensive

Here in the U.S., most of the pressure we face aimed at constraining our speech is social rather than legal or governmental. This is not true everywhere (e.g., countries that enforce strict blasphemy laws and jail dissidents for expressing unpopular views), but it does appear to be the case here. While we can each think of examples where one's speech would carry legal consequences and involve the application of state power (e.g., threatening to kill a high-ranking government official), these are not things with which most of us must be concerned regularly. Social pressure, on the other hand, is a fact of life.

The Freethought Bullies Meme

My primary goal in this post is to summarize the nature and development of the "freethought bullies" meme. I do this for two reasons. First, I have seen quite a few people on Twitter asking about it and what it means. And second, it has recently been made clear to me that a few of the bloggers writing for Freethought Blogs see the meme as primarily being the result of male privilege and irrational reactions to their efforts to introduce feminism to the atheist community. For example, see this post by Lousy Canuck in which he suggests that the meme is about people being upset by anti-harassment policies. These bloggers may be correct, but I fear that they are missing something important in the narrative they have constructed. I'd like to suggest that they consider expanding their views a bit with another possibility.

What I Learned From My Time in the Boy Scouts

I was in the Boy Scouts for a couple years. It was my dad's idea. While I was initially willing to give it a try, it did not take long for me to learn that it was not for me. Unfortunately, my dad "did not raise a quitter," and so I was not permitted to leave until a couple years later. He had been a Scout in his youth and found it to be a positive experience. I just needed to stick with it, and it would surely be a positive experience for me. I was 13 or 14 when I was finally allowed to quit, and I've never had any regrets about doing so.

By the time I left, being associated with the Boy Scouts was one of the least cool things a 13 or 14 year-old boy could do. I tried as hard as I could to keep it a secret from my peers in school, but this proved impossible. And so one of the downsides of being in the Scouts was regularly being made fun of at school. Had I enjoyed being a Scout, this would not have been a big deal. But having to be the butt of jokes for doing something I didn't want to do in the first place was not much fun.

Where is Jesus When People Starve?

If there are people starving to death and if the Christian "god" or its zombie son are real, Christians have a bit of a problem. Philosophers have stated this problem formally in the form of the problem of evil. One of the oldest and simplest statements of the problem looks something like this:

1. If an all-powerful and perfectly good god exists, then evil does not.
2. There is evil in the world.
3. Therefore, an all-powerful and perfectly good god does not exist.

Given the presence of evil, "god" is either not all-powerful or not perfectly good. One can certainly redefine "god" to lack either of these attributes, but this would bear little resemblance to the sort of deity in which Christians claim to believe.

Functions of Christianspeak

My fascination with Christianspeak is nothing new, but I still don't feel like I've found a satisfactory answer for the purpose it serves. I used to think that its primary function was to communicate group membership. That is, Christianspeak served as a quick way to determine whether a new acquaintance was a member of the in-group or not. But I have difficulty reconciling this theory with the observation that Christianspeak is far more common here in Mississippi where virtually everyone belongs to the Christian in-group than anywhere else I've lived. Given the near universality of fundamentalist Christianity here, why would Christianspeak be more common? Maybe it serves other functions I haven't yet considered.

To be clear, I am referring to the use of Christianspeak among individuals and not businesses. When a business uses Christianspeak, it is little more than an attempt to market their product or service to a particular sort of customer.

An Alliance Between Atheists and Progressive Christians

Writing for Salon.com, Adam Lee (Daylight Atheism) poses the question with which many in the atheist community have been struggling for some time: Should atheists ally ourselves with religious progressives? I have been wrestling with this question since Atheist Revolution started back in 2005. Thanks to Adam's article, I realize that my opinions on this question have changed in some important ways.

In one of the first posts I wrote on the subject of atheists forming an alliance with liberal-to-moderate Christians, I noted that many of the Christians in the U.S. are not fundamentalists and oppose theocracy too. I suggested that such Christians could be powerful allies for atheists.