GnuAtheism rebrands with same old triumphalism

In what is the latest wink, wink, nudge, nudge kicking of non-atheists by inference since Dan Dennett invented the word "brights" then lied about what he was implying, the Freethought bloggers "bullies" are at it again, with "atheism plus," unveiled by Greta Christina, whom I've never cared for.

Now, it's rebranding GnuAtheism as "Atheism +." (Will Google + sue over trademark infringement?)

Two of the FtB folks most promoting this? Greta Christina, whose on ninth-wave feminism like Rebecca Watson, Stephanie Zvan and others of her ilk, and Ashley F. Miller.


And, Miller spills the beans right away, and why this is nothing other than good old, bad old Gnu Atheism: 

The desire to hold on to “atheism” rather than use the term “humanism” isn’t from a fundamental difference of goals and beliefs, but from a difference of self-definition. I personally like “atheism+” because it’s more confrontational, embraces a minority position that is loathed by many, and it is more transparent about the belief that religion is one of the root causes of many social injustices.  My humanism is more than just secular, it is anti-religion.

And, this is exactly why people like me and online (would-be that it were in person) friends like Leo Lincourt don't use the word "atheism."

Beyond that, this is a misuse of the word. There's hundreds of millions of atheist Buddhists; they don't believe in a deity, but they're definitely religious.


Beyond that, as for Miller tying this into gay rights, etc.? While she's not talking about violence, the confrontationalism, to some degree, goes back to the 1960s and violent vs. nonviolent approaches to black civil rights. Well, to the degree that black (and other) civil rights were advanced, it was the nonviolent approach that won.


But, Gnus like her seem fixated on confrontation as part of the message.
Greta Christina implies the rebranding is all needed due to things that are the fault of plain old vanilla atheists:

If you’ve been getting worn down and discouraged by the seemingly-endless barrage of misogyny and trolling and hateful stupid in atheism and skepticism lately.

Actually, yes, I noticed the tidal wave of all of that. Actually, because I don't read that much of "ninth wave atheism," and never go to FtB blogs unless a friend points out inanity like this, I had no idea. (Of course, what I've posted at her blog's and Miller's is certainly already being labeled trollery.)

Jen McCreight, whose "freethinking" T-shirt this summer about wanting to "destroy religion" showed more of what this game is about, has this list of secular humanist ideals with which, under the guise of sterner, stronger atheism, all others must be confronted:

Atheists plus we care about social justice,
Atheists plus we support women’s rights,
Atheists plus we protest racism,
Atheists plus we fight homophobia and transphobia,
Atheists plus we use critical thinking and skepticism.

First, there's other atheists who do the same, without being confrontational. Second, you don't do the last point on your checklist, no matter your claim.



Besides, an earlier "wave" of feminism, rather than turning to atheism, turned to putative pre-patriarchy mother goddesses. They saw atheism as being patriarchal also. (It's not today, but looked more that way "back then," tis true.)


Then, in another blog post, she makes this WAYYYYY over the top claim:

I don't feel safe as a woman in this community — and I feel less safe than I do as a woman in science, or a woman in gaming, or hell, as a woman walking down the fucking sidewalk.

Ignoring the rhetoric,  since she of course doesn't hold truck with the existence of hell, it's still generally laughable. Let's track this empirically — what are the rates of sexual harassment claims at conferences of atheism (skepticism isn't the same thing, and you ladies aren't claiming to be skeptics +) versus all conferences of nonprofit informational groups?

Anyway, I've had enough fun with this one. It's just the latest salvo in the skepatheistchick nonsense and I'll stop feeding the flames.

A failed attempt at theodicy

Rev. Timothy Keller makes a nice try, when he says that if one uses the existence of suffering or natural evil, and its seeming unfairness, as part of rejecting the existence of god, it doesn't work, because the suffering remains senseless without a deity.

Not true; that's a framing mistake. It's really similar to Gilbert Ryle's idea of category mistakes.

"Sense" and "senseless" are both related, in general, to the issue of agency. And obviously, nature (unless one is a New Ager) isn't a personal being with powers of agency. A good existentialist could do more to straighten out Keller.

That's just the first of four straw men that Keller sets up to knock down.

The second is that this means that any god who exists is less than omnipotent.

But that kind of God doesn’t really fit our definition of “God.” So that thinking hardly helps us with reconciling God and suffering.

Well, maybe your definition is wrong. Isn't it arrogant to assume it isn't? And, that's a problem I have with theologically liberal Christians. It's for similar reasons I unfriended on Facebook, and eventually blocked there, a Harvard Divinity student who claimed Plato's famous Euthyphro dilemma (is "good" what it is because god orders it? then god can be capricious; is "good" what it is by its own nature? then "good" has moral standing independent of god) didn't apply to the god of Christianity.

(Honest grasping of the dilemma, perhaps through distinguishing between contingent and necessary moral truths, while ultimately a failure, would still be an effort, at least, not a craven dismissal. The "false dilemma" claims of some Christian Fathers, as listed on Wikipedia, aren't very good, either; they're halfway on the road to the ontological argument for god's existence, and it's no wonder Anselm is among those making this claim.)

The third one is that some people suffer because they're more evil. Well, about no nontheist claims that. Many of us do claim that, within a monotheistic theodicy, it sure looks that way, though, even if we're not Gnu Atheist knife-twisters.

Fourth is what he says is a half-answer; it's the will of god, we have to but accept.

He spins on this to go to us needing to be like children before god.

Not true. In fact, a god who creates sentient, curious, thinking beings, but then says "hey, wait a minute" and hides behind inscrutability is ultimately guilty of inflicting psychological evil on those creatures, thereby making the "problem of evil" worse, if anything.

Now Keller is just a parish pastor, not a theologian. Nonetheless, he's a pastor in New York City for a mainline, vaguely liberal Protestant denomination. And, he can't do better than this?

Gnu Atheists, hypocrisy, irony, petards and train wrecks

All of those items in the header are coming together at the "premier" blog site for Gnu Atheists, Freethought Blogs.

A blogger booted for attacking another blogger there, then whining about it on Google+. (Greg Laden two years ago, over #arsenicgate and my telling him that NASA had good budgetary and other reasons to engage in PR fluffery, threatened to have me "banned from the Internet.) Whine away, Greg. Hear that petard hoisting?

Meanwhile, your "wife," Stephanie Zvan, has an interesting dilemma. Support her "husband" and voluntarily quit FtB herself, or support the #skeptatheistchick movement and stay?

And next? Some sort of thought policing, I guess, as FtB cofounder Ed Brayton notes here: 

Other changes are in the works as well, mostly out of the view of the public — new rules, new policies, new ways to make decisions that I hope will avoid these kinds of unpleasant situations in the future.

No details from Ed, just that it's going to be more top-down. Well, we have long known that his co-founder, P.Z. Myers, is far from being a denizen of free thought on his blog, and that goes beyond banning people who threaten him, which is another thing. The longer he's been at this, the narrower his tolerance range has become, I think.

Speaking of PZed and #skeptatheistchick, it looks like his tolerance there has definitely narrowed. There's your train wreck, to the degree it's true. The 4Chan types hitting Freethought Blogs.

Now, the language Justin uses may be a concern, but there's backstory here. Already a week ago, Rebecca Watson, #skeptatheistchick High Holy Priestess herself, had distorted what at least one non-FtB blogger had said about her, Tweeted that to thousands of her Twit followers, then refused to correct the error, which had gotten picked up by P.Z. He then refused to let the blogger comment on his blog. There was childishness on both sides, but more of it on his. (Shock me. And shock me that P.Z. ain't going to provide the backstory. That said, I don't know if Justin was picking up on Coffee Skeptic or not.)

Meanwhile, said Justin shows the email by Laden that led to HIS downfall. Yep, threatening someone's job, even worse than threatening to ban them from the Net, will get you in trouble.

Meanwhile, video blogger Thunderf00t got himself banned for other stupidity.

I'm not wading further into the cesspool at this time.

Let me just say, as I've said before, that this is proof positive that atheism in general and Gnu Atheism in particular is no guarator of superior morals, superior intelligence or superior everyday common sense.

Ever since Dan Dennett invented the word "brights" for metaphysical naturalists and then lied (you did, Dan) about how that wasn't meant to imply religious people were "stupids," Gnu Atheism, sometimes on matters small, sometimes otherwise, has proven the three points above, plus has shown just as much tendency and ability to shoot itself in the foot as anybody else.

We'll have a Gnu Atheist sexual abuse scandal eventually, too, folks.

Failure is an option, and not (necessarily) an orphan

This is a poem inspired by the column in the previous blog post of mine:

Failure IS an option

I am not a failure,

And I am not the sum of my failures

But I am a person who has failed, and will fail,

Many, many times.

I am also anxious, fretful, and pessimistic –

A toxic brew.

Accepting that failures are not moral faults

Is not always easy to do;

Even harder to accept

Is that because of luck and the actions of others

Failure says little about my skills in many cases.

But self-flagellation

Is a means of trying to assert control

Rather than feeling powerless from its lack.

But that’s not reality.

The truth?

Many of my actions

Have countless outside tangential influences.

But even that is not all of reality.

Even my most important actions, most consciously decided

Have many subconscious influences

From chaotically driven, chaotically competing subselves.

Kennedy and others were all wrong here.

Failure has just as many fathers as victory,

Even if they scurry for dark corners

After the lights of the mind are turned on.

Accept failure! Accept half-empty glasses

Boy, a great column here from The Guardian, and what looks like a book that might be even better at undercutting the New Agey myths about the unstoppable power of blind optimism than Barbara Ehrenreich's "Bright Sided."

With a column title like "Happiness is a Glass Half Empty," followed by references to Stoicism, among other things, we've got real meat.

And, the book title, by the column's author, goes even further than Ehrenreich, in noting such potentially harmful thinking must be fought. Indeed, we need an "antidote" for such ideas.

The column delivers a good foretaste of this, including noting how it's OK to fail, and better than OK to accept the idea of failure.

The Museum of Failed Products

The column starts with a great "hook": a visit to a museum of failed products. It then notes that many companies, fearful of accepting failure, don't keep such products themselves.

But, Burkeman notes, products fail even more often than small-business start-ups. So, why can't we accept these and other failures?

He says that it's in part because we've forgotten some good wisdom from the past.

He doesn't specifically say this is connected to the relative ease of modern life, but maybe it is. Anyway, here's his dive into Stoic ideas:

Behind all of the most popular modern approaches to happiness and success is the simple philosophy of focusing on things going right. But ever since the first philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome, a dissenting perspective has proposed the opposite: that it's our relentless effort to feel happy, or to achieve certain goals, that is precisely what makes us miserable and sabotages our plans. And that it is our constant quest to eliminate or to ignore the negative – insecurity, uncertainty, failure, sadness – that causes us to feel so insecure, anxious, uncertain or unhappy in the first place.

If you know philosophy, you know his idea, though he doesn't use the actual word: "ataxaria." It's more, less and different than detachment or dissociation. The idea of "acceptance" might get closer.


And lest one draws the wrong ideas from Marcus Aurelius or Epictetus, he steps in:

Yet this conclusion does not have to be depressing. Instead, it points to an alternative approach: a "negative path" to happiness that entails taking a radically different stance towards those things most of us spend our lives trying hard to avoid. This involves learning to enjoy uncertainty, embracing insecurity and becoming familiar with failure. In order to be truly happy, it turns out, we might actually need to be willing to experience more negative emotions – or, at the very least, to stop running quite so hard from them.

Indeed. And, with some variations, beyond his hangups with sex and repression (while ignoring sexual abuse's connection to hysteria!) Freud talked about this to some degree. So, too, in yet another vein, Miguel de Unanumo arguably did this in "The Tragic Sense of Life." (To me, every Gnu Atheist who wants to bash religion in general should have Unanumo on his/her required reading list.)


Anyway, what about recent claims that blind optimism can improve one's actions in life? Not so fast, Burkeman says. Research shows that things like visualizing positive outcomes can actually backfire, by practitioners often refusing to do the work to get to those outcomes. Ahh, magical thinking, new variety.

And, there's other twists from the glass half empty. Here's one:

Psychologists have long agreed that one of the greatest enemies of human happiness is "hedonic adaptation" – the predictable and frustrating way in which any new source of pleasure we obtain, whether it's as minor as a new electronic gadget or as major as a marriage, swiftly gets relegated to the backdrop of our lives: we grow accustomed to it, and it ceases to deliver so much joy. It follows, then, that regularly reminding yourself that you might lose any of the things you currently enjoy can reverse the adaptation effect. Thinking about the possibility of losing something you value shifts it from the backdrop of your life back to centre stage, where it can deliver pleasure once more.

Burkeman then morphs back to the failed products. He says the flip side of not being realistic about failure is being unrealistic about the causes of success, including believing we have a lot of control over causing success when that's often not that true.


Or, if you want more reason to try to change your viewpoint, here's one:

Perfectionism is one of those traits that many people seem secretly, or not-so-secretly, proud to possess, since it hardly seems like a character flaw. Yet, at bottom, it is a fear-driven striving to avoid the experience of failure at all costs. At the extremes, it is an exhausting and permanently stressful way to live: there is a greater correlation between perfectionism and suicide, researchers have found, than between feelings of hopelessness and suicide. 

That ... the last part ... I did not know. Being somewhat pessimistic and a "negative" thinker, yet a bit of a perfectionist at times, that's words to take to heart ... accept failure! Failing at something doesn't make me a failure, does it?


There's plenty more ideas like this salted through this long column. Here's a good short one for conclusion:

Happiness reached via positive thinking is fleeting and brittle; negative visualisation generates a vastly more dependable calm.

Go read the whole thing and, like me, keep an eye out for this book.

Jesus crucifixion date NOT proven by geologist

OK, let's spot the errors in this story that claims paleogeology, or whatever the word, proves Jesus was crucified on April 3, 33 CE.

Error No. 1? Geologists treading WAY beyond their area of expertise.

Error No. 2? Geologists taking what is poetic license, at least, as literal truth.

Error No. 3? Geologists taking a story with legendary elements, at least, to be literally true, if even in parts.

Error No. 4? Taking the New Testament Gospels as anything close to history. That includes assuming that Jesus was crucified over a Passover period. If the “Palm Sunday” story is true, this would actually fit other festivals more closely, as Hyam Maccoby, among others, has argued.

Error No. 4A? Assuming that (outside of Luke, who still blows it) these books were written to be taken as documents of history, not polemic.

Error No. 5? Assuming that a Yeshua bar Yusuf, if he existed, had the approximate life and death dates that literalists and semi-literalists claim.

Error No. 6? Assuming we can know enough about this Yeshua, from the Christian New Testament, to even guess at facts that might mitigate Error No. 5.

Error No. 7: Assuming that this Yeshua was a historic personage.

Ohhh, other than THAT, there’s nothing wrong with geologists, on what’s probably shaky (pun highly intended) evidence, assuming that something from the geological record proves a Jew named Jesus was crucified on April 3, 33 CE.

Now, they do leave the door to the world of rationality cracked open a small bit:

In terms of the earthquake data alone, (Jefferson) Williams and his team acknowledge that the seismic activity associated with the crucifixion could refer to “an earthquake that occurred sometime before or after the crucifixion and was in effect ‘borrowed’ by the author of the Gospel of Matthew, and a local earthquake between 26 and 36 A.D. that was sufficiently energetic to deform the sediments of Ein Gedi but not energetic enough to produce a still extant and extra-biblical historical record.” 

“If the last possibility is true, this would mean that the report of an earthquake in the Gospel of Matthew is a type of allegory,” they write. 

Only to then shut it even more firmly:

Williams is studying yet another possible natural happening associated with the crucifixion — darkness. 

Three of the four canonical gospels report darkness from noon to 3 p.m. after the crucifixion. Such darkness could have been caused by a duststorm, he believes. 

Williams is investigating if there are dust storm deposits in the sediments coincident with the earthquake that took place in the Jerusalem region during the early first century.

Go BACK to studying sedimentary rocks, Mr. Williams, and stay there.

 

A pox on Gnu Atheist and non-Gnu houses alike

P.Z. Myers, aka Pharyngula, gives space to "Jesus mythicist" Richard Carrier for bashing liberal Jesus scholar Bart Ehrman, who is somewhere between deism and agnosticism himself, for nothing more than upholding the historicity of Jesus.

And, in return, self-appointed defender of secular humanism against the hordes of Gnu Atheism R. Joseph Hoffmann, bashes Myers, Carrier, and "mythicism" (a term I reject as much as "accommodationism" when used by Gnus).

And, I've come to the conclusion that what we have is Carrier and Ehrman (we'll see what reply Ehrman may have to Carrier) as authors of dueling books with dueling propositions. Between their stances, there is no room for compromise.

And, above that level, we have Myers willing to give a platform to anyone who might advance the Gnu Atheist agenda and help recruit cadres (his Chairman Mao word from a couple of years ago), while Hoffmann, in part because he's a Jesus historicist, sees P.Z.'s "using" of Carrier as another excuse to attack him.


First, my reply to Hoffmann, since I just wrote it;

I disagree with your take on mythicism, starting with the word. (That said, I'm not a Gnu by any means.) Were I to offer Bayesian-like odds, based on current levels of scholarship, I'd offer 10 percent odds, maybe 20 percent, that Yeshua bar Yusuf never lived. In other words, high enough probability for it to be legitimate discussion. That said, PZ is really ridiculous here. While Ehrman believes in the actual existence of Jesus, he's always, from what I've seen, been cordial about the issue. And, I know that from personal experience

And, quoting Paul? The only thing he says in an authentic letter is that Jesus was "born of a woman." That says nothing about his historicity, and could be interpreted as nothing more than an anti-Gnostic statement. [Calling James "the brother of the Lord" can be seen as nothing but stating his leadership in the Christian movement.]

Q?  Q says nothing historically grounded about Jesus' existence other than his baptism, and thousands of people were baptized by him. [Q is the putative source behind the wisdom sayings of Jesus common to Matthew and Luke.]

As for mentions of Caiphas, etc.? Well, Matthew mentions a likely non-historic "massacre of infants." Mark has no birth account. Luke of course botches the historicity of Jesus' birth and in a royal way, enough to argue AGAINST anything else he claims that is alleged to be historical.

Besides, as I've said, there's option 3: Yeshua was the Pharasaic Yeshua crucified by Alexander Jannai. That gives more than a century for the myth to develop and the history to be replaced.

And, yes, I believe that is at least in the 5 percent range, if not 10 percent. So, let's discuss it more.

Second, let's look at what Carrier says. The reality? Hoffmann overstates Carrier's tone vis-a-vis Ehrman, and ignores some of Ehrman's own tone in his original article. Carrier notes he has appreciated Ehrman's previous books, and even that many mythicists of the past have been kind of nutso. Otherwise, it's a general arguement against some of Ehrman's claims for historicity.

And, , yes, Ehrman DOES overstate his case. And, per my comment to Hoffmann, does so with a vitriol I've not seen from him before. Although, from what I've read, Carrier's now book-to-be is probably very overrated, Ehrman's, which I want to read, may well be, too.

And, just as Myers and his ilk are ruining the word "atheist," Gnu or otherwise, Hoffman and his "acoylte," Steph, are coming closer to ruin the phrase "secular humanism."