7.30.2015

Christian Wants to See You Fry Like Sausage

Coppo di Marcovaldo, Hell
Coppo di Marcovaldo, via Wikimedia Commons

There are many intelligent, thoughtful, kind, and compassionate Christians out there. It is good to remember that. They are our friends and family, our neighbors, our co-workers, and so on. Our lives are richer in some ways for having the opportunity to know them. It is also helpful to remember that there are many hateful Christians out there among us, people who have been blinded to reality by years of indoctrination. So afflicted are some of these Christians that they see nothing wrong with emailing random atheist bloggers (like me) things like this:
I would love to be close enough to all you so called atheist two seconds after you drop off into the lake of fire right after the Great White Throne Judgement. When you start frying like sausage. You will believe in GOD then. I have talked with folks that say there is no GOD. But then I tell them; well what if I am wrong, I haven't lost anything by believing in JESUS CHRIST, trusting HIM as Savior, following the 10 commandments and living good. But what if you are wrong and there is a GOD, and you have rejected HIM, and you have missed your chance to repent and live for HIM? Please repent and be saved. You are doing what the antichrist wants you to do; Just think about it!

7.29.2015

Would You Rather Be Happy and Wrong or Unhappy and Right?

happiness
happiness (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
In a recent comment I left at Bitchspot, I suggested that many religious believers would probably prefer to be "happy and stupid" than "sad and smart" in the sense that they are willing to believe things that are probably false as long as such beliefs are perceived to contribute to their feelings of happiness. In this post, I'd like to expand on this possibility a bit and suggest that it might not even be limited to religious believers.

If you have watched any of Anthony Magnabosco's street epistemology videos, you may recall seeing him explain how he wants to believe things that are true and avoid believing things that are false. He sometimes asks his conversation partners if this is true of them as well (i.e., are they interested in trying to maximize true beliefs and minimize false beliefs?). Not surprisingly, most say that they are. My guess is that they probably only do so because they are not making the connection between the pursuit of truth and their emotional state. That is, I'd guess that many are interested in maximizing true beliefs only up to the point where the pursuit of truth might be perceived as jeopardizing their happiness.

7.26.2015

Outrage Culture: Punishing Offenders Like Hulk Hogan

Hulk Hogan 04 (14029003947)
By GabboT, via Wikimedia Commons
It appears that we have yet another excuse to discuss outrage culture, so let's do it.

Suppose you were to learn of an incident in which a waitress at a popular chain restaurant called a customer a racial slur that many people find offensive. It would be perfectly reasonable for the customer to complain to the manager and to expect that the waitress might lose her job. After all, she said what she said at work while performing the responsibilities associated with her job. The employer almost certainly has policies indicating that this sort of thing is not tolerated.

Now suppose that the manager and even the bosses up the line decided to do nothing. The manager took the customer's complaint but decided not to act on it. The customer, who is understandably angry by this point, takes to the Internet to tell her story. It generates considerable buzz, and this is where you and I first learn about it.

The question I'd like us to consider is what, if anything, you and I should do in this situation. Specifically, should we as persons not directly involved in the incident join the online mob in demanding that the waitress be fired and/or her employer be boycotted at least until they do fire her?

It seems to me that reasonable people can and probably do have different opinions on this question, as well as the many related but distinct questions the situation raises. Note that the question of whether the waitress should lose her job is a different question from the one I asked above about our role as persons not directly involved in the incident. I might, for example, believe that the waitress should be fired without necessarily believing that it is my right or responsibility to try to make that happen. Similarly, I might hope that bad things happen to the waitress without deciding that I personally need to act in order to bring about such bad things.

7.22.2015

Proactive Activism: Taking on Religious Privilege

Virgen del Carmen
By Jorge Barrios, via Wikimedia Commons

If public declarations of faith grant one access to benefits one considers desirable and to which one would not otherwise have access, we would have to expect to witness many such declarations. Viewed this way, public declarations of faith seem quite rational. Even false declarations of faith seem rational, albeit morally questionable.

And if pushing one's faith on others through unconstitutional government action brings similar benefits, we'd have to expect to see quite a bit of this as well. It occurs to me that those of us who would like to see fewer public declarations of faith by elected officials and who value the separation of church and state might want to give more thought to how we can erode the religious privilege that makes these things so appealing to so many.

Admittedly, this is not normally how we think about secular activism. Our approach tends to be far more defensive in the sense that we generally end up reacting to perceived threats as they surface. What might it look like if we were to embrace a more proactive approach to secular activism? What might it look like if we sought to gradually remove the motivation many have for promoting faith and violating church-state separation?

Reducing religious privilege seems like a massive and long-term task; however, it also seems like one with many benefits. As far as what it might look like, the good news is that there are already models available we might be able to use. Think about other forms of privilege that are still with us to some degree but to a much smaller degree than they once were. Is there anything we can learn from those who have helped them erode?

7.21.2015

Growing Up Atheist in the U.S.

fear

I came of age during the Reagan era. The Cold War did not seem all that cold in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Many buildings were equipped with fallout shelters, and nuclear war seemed almost inevitable. I remember doing the duck-and-cover drills and wondering how the flimsy wood desk above my head would hold up against a nuclear attack.

There was no question that the Soviet Union was our "enemy," and this was a vital part of our indoctrination at the time. "Commie" was one of the worst insults one might hear on the playground. We didn't know what it meant, but we knew it was bad. We also knew that it was associated with godlessness. Apparently, these "Commies" didn't believe in gods. My young mind could barely comprehend that someone might not believe in gods, but I knew that this made them evil.

Within a couple of years, I'd find myself questioning how much of what I had been taught about the Soviet Union and Communism was true and how much was propaganda. On the rare occasions when I saw Soviet citizens interviewed on television, I'd marvel at how they seemed just like us and not the bloodthirsty monsters I'd grown up imagining. They seemed like people, and they did not seem to want war any more than I did. I wondered what other lies I had accepted uncritically.

7.19.2015

Toxic People Are Worth Avoiding on Social Media

toxic
What is a toxic person? I'm sure we all have different ideas for the sort of person to whom that label might be fairly applied. After all, it is a highly subjective label that is tough to define without relying heavily on our own feelings. When I think about the sort of people in my life I might consider toxic, it is usually those who seem to do nothing but complain and those who always seem to make me feel worse after I've interacted with them. They have little of value to contribute to any interaction besides negativity. After I've interacted with them, I feel that the interaction was unproductive. I feel drained. I almost always ask myself why I spend any time with such a person.

Toxic people can be found online too, and their effects there do not seem much different. I have had a particular atheist blog in my RSS reader for some time and have been following the author on Twitter for even longer. The blog is relatively popular and is on one of the big blog networks (not Freethought Blogs or Skepchick). The author is quite prolific on Twitter, tweeting as much as anyone else I follow there. That means I have read several hundred if not several thousand of this person's tweets. And I have finally come to the realization that I find this particular individual somewhat toxic and have decided that I have been making a mistake by supporting his/her work by subscribing to the RSS feed, following on Twitter, and so on. In essence, I've decided that supporting someone who behaves like this is probably not something I should be doing.

7.15.2015

Generational Differences in Social Media Use

English: Graph of social media activities
Graph of social media activities (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I wanted to expand a bit on a response to a comment I left on a recent post. The comment expressed a sentiment I have often had: Some people take social media way too seriously, so much so that they actually become angry or upset when they are unfriended, unfollowed, don't have enough Facebook "friends," and the like. I have had this same thought more times than I can count, as I often find myself feeling incredibly puzzled why some people seem to take this so seriously. But as I noted in my brief response to the comment, an alternative way of understanding this phenomenon has been presented to be by people I know and respect.

One of the really cool things about working in a university setting, despite some of the nonsense that happens in such settings, is that I get to know some outstanding young adults and engage them in the process of doing science. Over a few meetings with a diverse group of undergraduate and graduate students where I spent more time listening (and believing) than speaking, a fascinating picture of generational difference emerged.

7.14.2015

Secular Activism: Doing a Better Job With Action Alerts

warning
I have repeatedly encouraged people to join national secular organizations as a way of supporting their work and becoming more involved in secular activism. And yet, I have had more than a few complaints with the national secular organizations and how they operate over the years. One in particular rises to the top, and I'd like to address it here before offering some suggestions about how to fix it. My chief complaint concerns the manner in which most of the secular organizations disseminate secular action alerts. Since this information is vital to secular activism, I believe this is an area where we should demand improvement.

Current Practices

I'd like to start by taking a look at how most of the national secular organizations currently operate when it comes to informing the public of opportunities to engage in secular activism. First, some organizations actually require you to join and pay their membership fee before they will even send you action alerts. This makes sense if their primary goal is fundraising; it does not make sense if they genuinely care about promoting secular activism. And to be frank, I find myself feeling much less inclined to support any organization that operates this way.

7.09.2015

Being a Christian Today

internet

I know what it is like to be indoctrinated into Christianity from an early age, experience doubts about what I had been taught, and gradually emerge on the other side of a long struggle as an atheist. The fact that I went through this many years ago limits my ability to understand what it is like for young people today. I went through this process before the Internet, and that alone is a powerful illustration of the gulf between my experience and theirs. And so, I don't know what it is like to be a Christian, experience doubts about my early indoctrination, or to discover atheism during the Internet age. I can only imagine that young people going through this today face a somewhat different set of challenges than I did. I wonder sometimes what it would be like to be a young Christian these days.

Not Everyone is Christian

When I was a Christian, everyone I knew was a Christian. They weren't all the same kind of Christian, but I considered them all Christian. Whether they were Protestants, Catholics, or Mormons did not matter all that much. This was a function of the lack of religious diversity where I grew up, but it was compounded by the lack of information to which I had access. In my childhood, I did not have access to anything other than pro-Christian material. I was not exposed to any of the other world religions.

7.08.2015

Freethought in the Face of Totalitarianism

The first time I read George Orwell's 1984, I was in junior high. It was the first book I had read up to that point in my life where, upon reaching the final page, I went back to the first page to read it again without delay. I cannot pretend that I fully understood it then. It is one of the few books to which I have returned many times over the years and for which my appreciation seems to deepen each time I read it. I just read it again, finding it difficult to put down even though the story is quite familiar by now.

It has been more than 15 years since I last read 1984, meaning that I have not read it in all the time I have been writing Atheist Revolution. The last time I read it, I certainly wasn't thinking about the importance of defending freethought against the totalitarian left. I wasn't yet aware of any sort of totalitarian left. My focus would have been squarely on the religious right. They would have been what I recognized as Big Brother, with their intrusive attempts to legislate what happens in bedrooms across the U.S., maintain a state of perpetual war through domestic propaganda, and restrict rights as basic as reproductive freedom and contraception. I remember learning about Bush's "Clear Skies Initiative" and how it was designed to abolish many of the environmental protections contained in the Clean Air Act. It struck me at the time as an extremely clever use of language to obscure meaning and made me think of Orwell.

7.04.2015

Being Exceptional: Thoughts on the 4th of July

US Flag

Instead of clutching our flags and insisting - despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary - that the U.S. is "#1," I wonder what we might be able to accomplish if we decided to pursue the goal of becoming #1 at something. We don't have the best health care system in the world, but we probably could if we were willing to learn from other nations and invest in making improvements. We certainly don't have the best infrastructure, but I bet we could if we decided to get serious about it. We're falling behind where we once were in science and technology, but we could certainly turn that around with a coordinated national effort. We could pick something and become the world leader at it. We have that potential.

When it comes to national pride, wouldn't it be great if it translated into meaningful action aimed at being the best instead of pretending that we already are the best and demonizing anyone who dares to suggest that we are imperfect? Perhaps if we learned to take pride in our accomplishments instead of where we were born, we might be more inclined to strive to accomplish something. Allowing ourselves to be convinced that we are already perfect leads to apathy. Recognizing our failings and seeking to improve is part of what a healthy sort of patriotism looks like.