Why do public atheists have to behave like such jerks? – The Sydney Morning Herald

Seriously gents: just because Richard Dawkins says weird things about women on the internet doesn't mean you have to as well.

Dear god, it's hard to be an atheist sometimes.

That's not just because Australia's non-atheist community get to have cozy little get-togethers in Parliament House, in which a subset of a subset of a subset of Australian Christians buddy up with politicians that continue to ensure that LGBTIQ citizens have fewer civil rights and less protection from schoolyardbullying.

No, it's also because atheists have failed to make a strong organisational case to become a meaningful lobby group because we have a tendency to well, act like a bunch of jerks.

On the face of it there's nothing super-controversial about atheism. After all, it's basically just a statement along the lines of "I don't believe in the supernatural".

The greatest exponent of this sort of worldview was the late, great Carl Sagan via his groundbreaking science and cosmology series Cosmos in the earlyeighties. When talking about the still-unknown origins of the universe in the episode 'The Edge of Forever', he laid out a case for scientific thought that struck me then and now as having a gentle humility to it:

"In many cultures, the customary answer is that a God or Gods created the Universe out of nothing," he explained. "But if we wish to pursue this question courageously, we must of course ask the next question: where did God come from? If we decide that this is an unanswerable question, why not save a step and conclude that the origin of the Universe is an unanswerable question? Or, if we say that God always existed, why not save a step, and conclude that the Universe always existed?"

However, that attitude - that the unknown is a wonderful thing to explore, not something to be closed off by adhering to dogma - has been less in evidence in recent times as atheism seems to have become less a travelling companion to science and knowledge and morean excuse to jump on the Islam-creates-terrorists bandwagon(out of which the US atheist author Sam Harris has made a career) orto express remarkably misogynist opinions.

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It's become a massive problem in the international atheist community, due in no small part to comments made by the likes of Richard Dawkins, whose ill-considered "Dear Muslima" letter basically told women that since they didn't experience the level of repression of those in Muslim theocracies they should shut the hell up when guys get pushy - and though he later apologised for that, he did subsequentlytweet that women that drink can't be trusted when they claim to have beensexually attacked.

Harris, for his part, weighed in to let women know that "There's something about that critical posture that is to some degree instrinsically maleit doesn't obviously have this nurturing, coherence-building extra estrogen vibe." In his defence, "Estrogen Vibe" would be a pretty decent name for a jam band.

Even sceptical pioneer James Randi, a personal hero of mine, has rationalised reports of an employee making unwanted advances at Randi's annual Amazing Meeting in 2008 as "he misbehaved himself with the women, which I guess is what men do when they are drunk."

Thus in recent times there hasbeen a concerted, deliberate effortto overcome the not-inaccurate perception that atheism is exclusively a boys' club. And there has been predictable pushback from members of said community who are deeply concerned that this progressive attitudemay yet expose them to dangerous levels of girl germs.

The latest example came on Tuesdaywhen the upcoming Atheist Global Convention in Melbourne announced that feminist author and commentator Clementine Ford would be one of the speakers.

Predictably, this made a few people unhappy - but the venom levelled at Ford and the conference generally for daring to have a line up of speakers which approached gender parity was a shock.

And that's despite the moderators on the Facebook page makingclearthat "we have been deleting specific rape and death threats as they occurthere have been substantial numbers", just in case there was any doubt about the calibre of awesome dudes weighing in with their important opinions about the line up.

And this breaks my little non-theistic heart, because this is exactly why women and men who aren't terrified cowards think twice aboutjoining atheist groups. It also means such groups end up much like the Australian Christian Lobby: filled with reactionary voices that don't remotely represent the diverse community for which they're claiming to speak.

The likes of Sagan made atheism seem like a welcoming way to escape from the dangerous constraints of superstition and enter a wider, more spectacularuniverse. These sorts of atheistsreduce it to a tatty ideologyexactly as small, petty, violent and exclusionary as their own cartoonish portrayal of religion.

It's also proof, if any was needed, that faith - or not-faith -isn't what makes people behave like jerks: it's an excuse that jerks use to justify their jerkiness.

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Why do public atheists have to behave like such jerks? - The Sydney Morning Herald