Dear fellow atheists,
I did offer Maya some advice. And offered to share the story here. She said she will be following comments, so please feel free to post to her here. I can't promise she'll respond, but she will be able to see your notes.
A viewer emailed us asking if we wouldn't mind alerting our vast armada of fans to his short film project on Kickstarter, Genesis 51:33-51, that "explores the relationship between God and evil." As a film person who is myself about to explore the hazardous world of getting my own documentary project off the ground, I am simpatico. Good luck to Mr. Rogers.
This is embarrassing. I feel the need to comment on this because Martin, Tracy, and Matt are clearly being hypocrites here.
"Lets make a TV show where we call all religion false. People will feel offended/threatened/fearful for viewer's salvation, but in the name of free discussion, its worth it. After all, people don't have right not to be offended."
And now look whats happened. "Its good for Rebecca to set incredibly subjective social rules for all men (applying to all women as well) because she might be frightened."
You know, i watched quite a bit of your stuff a few months ago, just when i was realy beginning to go deeper in to my relationship with Christ. After i had listened to the things you guys where saying i began to feel attacked for some reason. And started questioning my own character. Your poison started to pull me away from a God who has loved and looked after me all my life, despite the ravages of religion. Christ told me in 2003 to follow him. That night was very real to me. Theres no other way to explain what happened to me, and i think it had to happen that way otherwise i would never have beleived. I would have fallen away as soon as someone would try to pull me apart. Like you try so hard to do.
I mite not be a seasoned christian with all the answers like you. But i will always have that night. I will always have the times i cried out to Jesus in the back of ambulances and he pulled me through.
He gave me hope that i will see my Brother again. And so much more.
And that alone, you and your goons will never take from me.
I dont know why you never felt or herd Christ in your 25 years of "being a Christian"
And im sorry for what it has done for you.
You guys are like naughty kids who dont like the fact you have to follow the rules, thet what God says goes. You reject him because you know whats going to happen to you and you hate him for it.
So your going to do your level best to take as many with you as possible.
With the rubbish that flows like efluient from your mouth. Just like the great deciever.
I dont push my veiw on anyone, if people read my stuff. Its up to them. If the kids ask me about Christ i tell them. Otherwise i grow my faith in Christ. And i do this because deep inside, despite the poison of people like you and the doubt you breed. I know Christ is real, and you can chuck off as much as you want about it and be little it as much as you want.
But you are the one that twists his word and takes it it out of context, that is obvious from your show. You pray on Christians searching for answers. And enjoy the the easy game.
Ive seen what mans religion has done, and yes it is mind blowing how people can cause such pain and suffering in a Loving Gods name.
But that still doesnt change the person of Christ and his love for us and even you.
You need to turn from this and go back to Christ as you already know you should, or fight him and blame him for all the worlds problems and die alone.
The things you said to me in your last letter were quite character destroying and demoralising. But thats because you dont know me. Just like you dont know all those people whose lives you may have already destoyed by taking there hope away from them. Without Christ in your corner and regardless of how smart you think you are against a mans undertanding of God. You will still have to stand before him. And that you can do nothing about.
If you regect him then he will give you what you want, because you wanted it.
As for me your smuggness has made me feel ill. And i am going to continue to love Jesus despite Religion, including yours.
You have nothing good to say.
"What do women want?" Sigmund Freud once famously asked. Aretha Franklin answered him just as famously: "R-E-S-P-E-C-T, find out what it means to me!"
If you haven't been keeping up with the current online eruption surrounding Elevatorgate — and I suspect most of you have at least heard about it, as Skepchick and Pharyngula are just slightly more widely read than our little blog — I will just direct you to those sites for the full-immersion experience. But to recap, here are the main bullet points...
Rebecca Watson of Skepchick fame attends a conference overseas. Gets hit on by clueless doof in the hotel elevator at 4 AM, brushes him off. Mentions the incident in her talk, as well as online, saying, in effect, "Hey guys, don't do stuff like that, thanks."
This being the Internet, the situation Escalates into full-on web drama. Loser guys with same sense of clueless entitlement blow Rebecca's reaction all out of proportion, make her out to be stick-up-the-ass prude who pilloried some poor Nice Guy for the ghastly crime of asking her for coffee. Larger group of Rebecca defenders jump in, including PZ, Jen at Blag Hag, and many others, chiding the guys for not getting it and pointing to a very real problem of acculturated sexism that infects the skeptical/atheist community just as it does the wide world.
Then, out of the blue, Rebecca gets a "Methinks the lady doth protest too much" note from no less a luminary than Richard Dawkins, the boneheadedness of which stupefies everyone (except, of course, the clueless doof brigade). Short version: in a world in which women are undergoing such horrors as genital mutilation and death by stoning, any chick who has nothing more to complain about than an unwelcome pass in an elevator is clearly a petulant whiner. Seriously.
Understandably incensed — I mean, way to miss the point, Prof! — Rebecca publicly chastises and disowns Dawkins. And now, it appears the godless Internet is splitting into Team Rebecca and Team Richard camps.
From such pebbles do avalanches begin.
I will make my position so clear even a gerbil with dyslexia should be able to get it, because this is the Internet, and it appears one's words can be wildly misunderstood and misrepresented here. (Who knew?) In six words: Dawkins is wrong, Rebecca is right. Dawkins' point — which is fundamentally no different than telling atheists that in a world where the godless are burned at the stake, we're being kind of petty to complain about "little" things like God in the Pledge or creationism in the classroom — is simply wrong. He's as wrong as a wrong thing with the word wrong written on it by someone who can't spell.
Now, TAM9 is coming up, and I am concerned that the backwash from all this is going to cast an ugly pall over a convention that ought to be the community's annual high point. It isn't that Rebecca and her supporters (hello, I am one) aren't justified in their anger. They are. But...
The whole "throwing Dawkins under the bus" thing is, I think, unproductive. We are rationalists. We pride ourselves on our capacity for reason, which we boast of having more of than anyone else. So what do we do about this? Do we employ our reason, and turn this event into the teachable moment it needs to be? After all, Dawkins wrote TGD, in his words, in the interest of "raising consciousness." Clearly, acculturated sexism is a matter about which Dawkins desperately needs his consciousness raised. Will we give him the chance to do this? After all, the man's achievements over the last decade in the service of promoting atheism and reason — culminating in both topics today being suitable for bestselling books, rather than shameful topics you just cannot mention in polite society — are considerable, and the debt atheists worldwide owe him is incalculable. I am simply acknowledging a fact, not putting the man on a pedestal or anything. He's done a lot, and that deserves recognition.
So how do we pay him back for this? Do we say, "You helped us gain stature and credibility. Now you apparently need our help, getting over some ideas of privilege you seem to have a problem with. Here. This is why you are wrong. Please think about these things and man up to your mistake." This, is seems to me, is the path of rationality.
Or, do we abandon rationality, give ourselves over to emotion, anger and ego, and circle the wagons around the sense of righteousness gained from believing that we've taken the right side of a split? (Note: I do not accuse Rebecca of this, as she's responding to a personal insult and has every right to respond as she chooses. But I think such a thing would be the case if skeptics en masse did so.) I can think of nothing that would disappoint me more than to witness the drama of a mass walkout of Dawkins' speech at TAM. I would understand it, but I'd wish a path had been taken towards allowing this conflict to be something the godless community saw as an opportunity for education and problem solving, rather than digging in trenches.
Attitudes of sexism and male entitlement do exist among those of us who consider ourselves rationalists. You should see some of the fratboy bullshit that pops up in the chat room when either Jen or Tracie are on the show. It's like, WTF? Who are you people?
I know that I myself had to unlearn a lot of my own acculturation, and I am equally sure I'd get a "Needs Improvement" grade on my efforts even today. But I know that when I was younger, less secure and a bit more arrogant, I reacted poorly to rejection in ways that I can only now, years later, understand were wrong and, yeah, pretty damned creepy. I had to outgrow feeling sexually entitled, just like I had to outgrow homophobia. My perceived loneliness and need to dip my wick was not, I had to learn, any woman's problem to solve. There is so much about my 20-24 year old self that embarrasses me to remember.
But I learned, and am still learning, and I want those who still need to learn — even if they are 70-year-old celebrity scientists — to be able to do so. It's harder to change your attitudes as you get older, as you get set in your ways. But I think it can still be done.
For the most part, I do see an effort to correct and educate Dawkins has been made. Dawkins has asked to be led to understanding of where he is wrong, even if, as far as I could tell, he may still not yet get it.
What I want to happen out of this is consciousness-raising. Will TAM9 be the event that helps that occur, or that divides us further? I guess we will see.
Had an absolutely insane personal encounter today that I'm still having difficulty processing, because it was the sort of display of flagrantly irrational, histrionic and emotional behavior that we as atheists and rationalists criticize, but which you in fact rarely get to experience right in your face. It reminded me of a great many basic axioms though. For one thing, being an atheist is no guarantee you'll come with rationality pre-installed. For another, it never fails that people who have fanatical views that they refuse to see challenged will be the first to praise themselves as beacons of reason. It's a human flaw I suppose we must all watch out for.
So I'm at a nearby mall today, when I pass by a fellow — who Shall Remain Unnamed — who, many years ago, used to be an ACA member. He left a while back, to the disappointment of few, it must be said, and I recall not liking him much personally for some prima donna behavior he exhibited in regards to the TV show at the time. But anyway, I caught his eye and decided it never hurts to be friendly, so I waved and said hi. I soon had cause to regret my sociability.
We spoke for a moment, and everything was gas and gators. Then he demonstrated that, since leaving the ACA, he's travelled to a much weirder place, by turning the conversation towards — are you ready? — 9/11 conspiracy theories. Basically, he buys them.
Now, before I continue, I'm sure this is futile but the point of this post is not to start a sprawling endless comment thread debating such theories. (Just go here if you want to have that discussion.) It's to talk about, well, behavior. And I think it dovetails with a lot of current kerfuffle that's playing itself out among the online godless community right now — like Rebecca Watson and the Elevator Incident. In other words, part of living the rational life is having a sense of self-awareness. How you interact with others has much to do with how your message will be received. This is basic common sense and socialization, not an advocacy of tone trolling. Indeed, there are times in-your-face rudeness is the way to respond. But in most cases — and certainly in public — how you behave reveals more about you than you might wish people knew. Not only does it reveal what your beliefs are, but it reveals how those beliefs inform whether you're a normal, cool person that others want to interact with. In short, if you cannot control yourself, expect to be an embittered loner, whose sense of victimhood is shored up by righteousness. Which brings me back to the person at hand.
So the guy shows me the new issue of Skeptical Inquirer, and indignantly denounces its cover story debunking 9/11 conspiracy mongering as "propaganda." He then goes on to speculate that the Center for Inquiry has been infiltrated by the CIA, who planted the story in the magazine. (He did not, in his genius, consider that if the CIA was doing this sort of thing, they certainly have the wherewithal to plant such a story in bigger and better-selling publications than Skeptical Inquirer, whose global circulation is around 50,000, compared to, say, Time's 3.3 million.) Anyway, it was a farrago of absurdity, and I could tell he was passionate about it.
Now, you know me from the show. I'm snarky. So when he mentioned that the airplanes that crashed into the towers had "nothing whatsoever to do" with their collapsing, despite destroying support columns and causing fires in excess of 1000 degrees, I replied, "So what, was it just special effects on TV, when we witnessed the planes actually hit the buildings?"
Rule #1 when dealing with the fundamentalist mindset (which is something one sees displayed often in non-religious environments, you know): Mock them, or even make them think you're mocking them, and they will completely lose their shit. Which this guy did. Right there, in public, in the middle of a shopping mall.
So he leans in, and starts shouting at me. No really...shouting. And it has now become a "violating personal space" issue, in addition to the plain inappropriate public display of temper. So, not being one to take this kind of crap, let alone from someone whom I approached for a friendly social chat despite not especially liking him in the first place, I put up both hands and said, "No! Wrong! I'm not doing this in public. Goodbye." And I walked off.
Naturally, he followed me, keeping up his harangue. How could anyone believe that "gravity could make buildings fall"? Etc etc. Now I am seriously pissed, and begin making my way towards a nearby jewelry store, where they usually employ a cop. Really. I am not making any of this up.
Finally, I stop, in the hopes of just convincing him to fuck off before I have to go and make things really ugly, like pressing public nuisance charges. After another few seconds of heated exchange, he wailed that he has "lost all respect for every atheist blah blah blah." I say, "Good, so goodbye! Stop following me!" And he leaves.
Gang, this happened. I mean, this happened.
What is it that turns a person into something like this? I understand ideologies, I understand being someone who gets too emotionally involved in what you believe, and I understand a lack of self-awareness and poor social skills. But outside of street riots — where the environment seems to be conducive — you don't tend to encounter someone whose complete lack of anything resembling basic respect for others and common sense is so proudly on display.
At the core of it all, I think, is irrationality married to poor social skills. Irrationality is not necessarily about what you believe (though yeah, it often is), but how you believe it, why you believe it, and how your beliefs inform your personal interactions and behaviors. After all, why would a rational person choose to take a friendly greeting in a shopping mall as an invitation to start a shouting match about whatever political thing you have up your ass today? And if you expect the person you're trying to pick this fight with to disagree with you anyway (he began by saying that he expected I, like "most atheists," to have "swallowed the official 9/11 story"), then what other than arrogant stupidity would provoke you to go ballistic at them when they give you the expected disagreement? If he really hoped to persuade me I'm wrong for not believing in a conspiracy, did he really think totally jumping my shit in the middle of a fucking shopping mall was the way I'd have my mind changed?
I reiterate that this fellow is an atheist, and that his reason for leaving ACA was that we weren't the group of political agitators he wanted us to be, plus the part he doesn't mention, which was that he also didn't like the way we reacted negatively to his being a douche to everyone. But his behavior today was entirely in keeping with his behavior of the past. When in the group, he angered the entire TV crew — of which he was not a part — by turning up at the studio one Sunday holding a bunch of signs he'd had printed, pronouncing himself "art director," and proceeding to redecorate the backdrop (which took 45 minutes longer than it usually did) with these signs, which had type so small they couldn't be read onscreen. When repeatedly told this, he flounced off in a huff, making a misogynist insult against one of our women crew and deriding our "amateurishness." I followed him into the parking lot and chewed him about six new assholes, and never saw him again, until today. Guess I shouldn't have been shocked.
So, why am I belaboring you all with this? Well, in part, it's cathartic. In other part, it was a healthy reminder of the dangers of irrationality — the unwillingness to have your views challenged or to entertain that you may be wrong, the blindness to how your behavior affects others, the inability to what what behavior is appropriate and when, the failure of letting temper control you rather than vice versa. We all talk about crazy fundies and how they impose themselves where they aren't wanted. But if we wish to consider ourselves on the side of the "angels" of reason, if you'll pardon my phrasing, then we should be vigilant and self-aware, strictly applying our own standards to ourselves before we demand them from others. I guess what I'm saying is — "Don't Be a Dick!" I don't, like Phil, think we all do it, and I certainly don't agree that challenging anyone in any way is dickish. But with a little too much ego and self-absorption, and too little sense and rational thought, anyone can be a dick if they don't watch out. An encounter like today's is upsetting, sure. But you can take it as a cautionary tale, and get the positive from it.
And that's your drama for today. And I bet you thought Matt got all the wackos. Now, I'm going to go hang with my dogs.