Category Archives: Atheism

BABYLON, Iraq Lara Ahmed wears a headscarf and behaves like a pious Muslim.

But the 21-year-old Iraqi woman hides a secret from her peers at the University of Babylon: her atheism.

I was not convinced by the creation story in the Quran, she said. Besides, I feel religions are unjust, violate our human rights and devalue womens identities.

She doesnt dare share her strong beliefs with strangers.

I wear a headscarf despite being an atheist, said Ms. Ahmed, who studies biology at the school, about 115 miles south of Baghdad. It is difficult not to wear it in southern Iraq. Few women take the risk not to cover their hair. They face harassment everywhere.

Her fears stem from the remarks of powerful politicians such as Ammar al-Hakim, the head of Iraqs Islamic Supreme Council, a major Shiite political party and the president of the National Alliance, a Shiite parliamentary bloc.

Some are resentful of Iraqi societys adherence to its religious constants and its connection to God Almighty, Mr. al-Hakim said on his partys TV channel in May, claiming a rising tide of atheism was threatening the Arab world. Combat these foreign ideas.

Statistics on atheism in the Middle East and North Africa are hazy, but analysts say Ms. Ahmed represents an increasing trend based on recent developments.

In 2014, an Egyptian government-run Islamic legal institute, citing a dubious international study, said that only 866 atheists lived in the country of more than 90 million. Recently released court statistics saying thousands of Egyptian women sought divorce in 2015 claiming their husbands were atheists one of the few ways women can initiate divorce under Islam suggested the numbers might be far higher.

In 2011, the now-defunct Kurdish news agency AKnews published a survey finding that 67 percent of Iraqis believed in God and 21 percent said God probably existed, while 7 percent said they did not believe in God and 4 percent said God probably did not exist.

Today, the information revolution fueled by the internet, the freedoms released by the Arab Spring, the growing power of sectarian religious parties and the rise of the harsh orthodoxy of the Islamic State have all fueled growing unbelief in God and traditional religions, said atheists and others.

For youths, who are the majority of new atheists, the savagery of the Islamic caliphate established by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria in 2014 created a reaction that [has] shaken the religions image, said Ali Abdulkareem Majeed, 22, a nonatheist Iraqi sociology student who conducted a study on atheism for a religious body that he asked not to be identified for his safety.

Social media shutdown

Last year, Facebook shut down more than 50 atheist, Arabic-language pages in after extremist Muslim groups campaigned to remove them, according to a petition sent to Facebook by the Atheist Alliance-Middle East and North Africa, a U.S.-based global atheist federation.

Many of those Facebook pages have been since been relaunched.

In March 2015, U.S.-based Iraqi and other Arab atheists launched the Arabic and English-language Free Mind television and magazine websites, which promote atheistic viewpoints and have recorded more than 1 million visits so far.

That led scholars at Al-Azhar University, a pre-eminent Sunni Muslim center of learning in Cairo, to call on Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi to push Free Mind organizers to repent or face execution by beheading. Mr. el-Sissi responded by suggesting that those who insulted religion should lose their Egyptian citizenship.

Even so, online atheist programming is easily available in Arabic now.

Atheism is not illegal in Egypt or Iraq, but officials often level blasphemy or other charges against atheists in those countries. Those rejecting the faith face the death sentence in Saudi Arabia, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan and Mauritania.

Many atheists in the region say their bigger fear is not being punished for their beliefs but that they will become targets of violent sectarian groups seeking political support from the faithful.

It is a distraction from the fact that Islamists were not able to accomplish anything over the past 13 years, said Faisal al-Mutar, a U.S.-based Iraqi human rights activist who heads Ideas Beyond Borders, a nonprofit that supports minorities in the Middle East. So they want to create an enemy to keep [the] constituency united against and avoid being held accountable for their mistakes.

Keeping their beliefs secret is the norm for atheists of all backgrounds throughout the region.

In Jordan, an Amman-based writer at the Free Mind Magazine whose last name is Farouki but who asked to keep her first name secret said she is nearly estranged from her family, angered by her rebellion against religion. They see me as insane, said Farouki, 50. Jordanians cannot accept atheists, and it is highly possible to be killed if you are one.

Social media has provided atheists with a meeting place and source of information.

Most of my atheist friends have not changed all of a sudden, said Osama Dakhel, 21, a fine arts student in Baghdad. Some were so devoted at first exploring the religions minute details. They start to read for Islamic reformers. Then they start to accept other opinions, discuss atheists online and end up atheists.

Ahmed Abdul-Aziz, 22, a medical student in upper Egypt, also writes openly for the Free Mind Magazine on atheism. It is easier to announce your ideas in Cairo, he said. Nobody would look after you, but in small rural towns, everyone watches the other.

Even so, Mr. Abdul-Aziz said, he hides his beliefs from his own family.

They will feel angry even if I call for some modern Islamic ideas, he said. I am forced to attend the Friday prayers and fast during Ramadan. I feel uneasy to practice things I do not believe in.

Ms. Ahmed paid a price for unwittingly drawing notice for not praying or fasting during Ramadan at the University of Babylon. A colleague called me an infidel and insisted on waking me up at dawn to pray, she said. I faced problems even for not using the name of Allah to swear.

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Atheists in Muslim world: Silent, resentful and growing in number - Washington Times

This weekend, I spoke at Gateway to Reason, an atheist convention in St. Louis. It was a large gathering of non-believers, including big names like Seth Andrews and David Smalley, but there was still something missing: scientific skepticism.

Many atheists are also skeptics, but thats not always the case. This is something I already knew, but it became even more apparent after my talk on Saturday. The topic was You Dont Have to be a Scientist to Think Like One, and I talked about all that is pseudoscience from acupuncture to UFOs, and everything in between.

I expected most people to be on board, but as my talk progressed it became clear that I had offended a number of audience members by categorizing their particular beliefs as false. After I left the stage, the first person to approach (confront) me was a 9/11 Truther asking me about the missing engine from the plane that hit the Pentagon that tragic day (anyone who asks this question seriously is more of a denialist than a scientific skeptic).

The second person to come up to me, believe it or not, was also a Truther who wanted to know why I believed the official government story about what happened. But they werent the only ones. People who believed in ghosts, psychics, and other assorted woos all came to tell me why theyre right despite a complete lack of supporting evidence.

This is a real problem for the atheist community. Atheism is only important because it often reflects a persons critical analysis of god claims from various religions, but what about when those non-theistic beliefs are the result of anything else? Like being born into an atheist family? Whatever the reason, one thing is clear: many atheists dont ask important questions about other non-religious areas of their lives. They dont apply skeptical scrutiny to certain beliefs.

Its worth noting that the skeptical movement also needs more atheism. At skeptical conferences, its common for people to discourage discussions of religion so as not to offend any believers. This is extremely hypocritical, however, considering religion is one of the first (and arguably the most dangerous) incarnation of pseudoscience.

Dont worry, there is a bright light at the end of this tunnel filled with nonsense. There is a cure for the type of gullibility I saw at Gateway to Reason and have seen for the last 10 years of my career as a secular/skeptical author. Its very simple: scientific skepticism the process of looking for demonstrable evidence prior to forming beliefs.

As I mentioned in my talk at Gateway to Reason, belief in non-religious supernatural ideas is rising even as church attendance falls at record numbers across the globe. More people believe in ghosts and Bigfoot, despite the fact that the nones (those of us who dont associate with any particular faith) are growing at an unprecedented rate. It is more important now than ever to look at these issues critically and skeptically.

I love the stick to atheism! posts I get when I discuss another brand of irrational belief. It reminds me how important rigorous scientific skepticism is.

The good news is Ive seen signs that this is already happening. There is at least some indication that skepticism is being injected into the atheist movement and thats encouraging. For starters, I didnt see any of the speakers at Gateway to Reason fall prey to these pseudoscientific beliefs (that, of course, includes Andrews and Smalley). This means that, if people follow their example, we should be OK, right?

Not necessarily. We need to do more by actively discussing these cousins to religions, demonstrating their harm, and showing people how they result from the same failure to think critically. Fortunately, some people are already doing this. At Gateway to Reason, for instance, Dan Broadbent and Natalie Newell of the Science Enthusiast Podcast did a live show in which they discussed skepticism and pseudoscience.

So, there is hope, and I think ultimately the atheist movement will receive the shot of skepticism it so desperately needs. If it doesnt, it will lose its relevance as people continue to turn away from religion in the Age of Information.

Id like to end with a quote from my new book, No Sacred Cows: Investigating Myths, Cults, and the Supernatural. This is from the chapter called, Blurred Lines Between Atheism and Skepticism.

If youre an atheist, it means you havent fallen for the god gambit, but the existence of deities isnt the only commonly held yet likely false notion. Skepticism and critical thought protect from all forms of faith-based ideas. Although the god question is often one of the most controversial ideas for which we can utilize skepticism, its not always the most relevant one. Thats why its important to stress critical thinking and reason in all areas of life above all else. I want to encourage those who reject the worlds many god claims to apply the same skeptical scrutiny to ghosts, psychics, unsubstantiated conspiracy theories, and just about any topic supernatural or not.

Yours in reason,

David

Please support my work here: https://www.patreon.com/DavidGMcAfee. Any amount helps!

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The Atheist Movement Needs More Scientific Skepticism - Patheos (blog)

Today the Seattle Mariners were better at baseball than the New York Mets. They may not be a better baseball team than the New York Mets, but today they were, and continued their march towards .500. Hooray!

Yovani Gallardo went 5.2 innings and... [checks notes]...outdueled Jacob DeGrom? That cant be right. But no: Gallardo was effective with his pitches, getting lots of weak contact and commanding his pitches effectively. He finished his day just shy of six innings, allowing five hits and just one run while walking two and striking two batters out. Tony Zych came in to relieve him in the fifth and was wild to start, but settled down to close out the inning. Zep, Vincent, and Diaz closed things down. Things got a little hairy in the ninth with Diaz allowing a run, because Conforto gonna Conforto, but Diaz came back to strike out Asdrubal Cabrera to secure the win.

Meanwhile, DeGrom struggled. He was at 70 pitches already after the third and had lapses of control, such as when he HIT OUR PRECIOUS MITCH HANIGER IN THE FACE. Haniger had to leave the game and is now on the DL, and whoever has the Mitch Haniger voodoo doll, its like, enough already, okay? Anyway, so DeGrom rearranged Hanigers face in the second, when Nelson Cruz had singled and Kyle Seager had doubled, so the bases were loaded, and then Jarrod "I love to hit in the clutch" Dyson hit a single to give the Mariners a 2-0 edge. The Mariners would smallball their way into another run in the third, and for today, that would be enough.

Today the Mets fans mobbed up at Safeco amd made the "Queens Court." They had K cards and t-shirts and everything and I got pretty mad about it, although everyoneincluding the friends I was at the game withtold me I shouldnt be so mad. On the one hand I guess my reaction was outsize; I tend to listen to my friends and there was sun and beer, etc. But on the other hand, it sucked a little to see an opposing fan base invade Safeco and ape one of our most cherished traditions in our own house. I might have been wrong about my anger, but i was selfishly, gleefully glad about winning this game. And Im super-excited to see the Maple Grove in action tomorrow. GOMS.

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Mariners declare atheism, refuse to save the Queens Court - Lookout Landing

In 2006 Wired contributing editor Gary Wolf wrote a story on emerging trends in atheism. In his skeptical piece Wolf coined new atheism, a term later applied to the four horsemen: Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and the late Christopher Hitchens.

These men had varying responses to the term. Harris, for one, pointed out that atheist never appears in the book that kicked off this movement, The End of Faith. Alas, the four horsemen are the usual go-to thinkers when considering atheism in the 21st century, which begs one important question: What about women?

sam-harris-considers-a-creator

In general there are more male than female atheists. One 2010 survey found that males outnumber females in confessed atheism. In the United States that equates to 6 percent of men compared to 1.2 percent of women. (The not religious category is closer, as it is in most nations.) In Russia the number was 6.1 to 3 percent, whereas Switzerland it was 9 to 7 percent.

Numbers become confusing with examples like this 2012 poll, which reports that while women make up 52 percent of the US population they count for only 36 percent of atheists and agnostics. The problem with this differentiation is that everyone is agnostic, in that no one knows whether a god exists. Youre either theistically or atheistically agnostic. Many choose to not think much about it. Thats qualitatively different than pronouncing your atheism.

On top of that these are self-reported polls, and there might be reasons women do not claim their atheism. In a 2015 discussion, secular scholars Susan Jacoby and Rebecca Goldstein explore the question of why more women dont profess critical skepticism of faith. They point first to social reasons: children of women who admit their atheism are more likely to be bullied at school, for example.

penn-jillette-on-muslim-refugees-and-atheists

Personal beliefs are one thing, but social circles tend to be tight-knit. If your circle is comprised of devout followers, expressing atheism might ostracize you from this network, which could lead to larger problems for the entire household. Jacoby believes this is a driving factor of why some women stay in the closet regarding atheism.

Jacoby also points to an education gap. She says there is an enormous deficit in math and science education between women and men. The more educated one is in the sciences, she says, the more likely you are to be skeptical regarding divinity. While medical schools are seeing roughly equivalent numbers in terms of men and women, Jacoby reminds listeners there are very few female surgeons. Her preference appears to be for the more rigorous degrees.

There are other reasons. Humans are generally more reactive than proactive, and stringent religious dictatesPresident Trump announcing transgender people will not be allowed to serve in the military appeals to specific Christian sensibilities, for exampleturn people off of religion and its questionable metaphysics. Sociology professor Phil Zuckerman believes this is turning many young people, specifically women, away from religion, as Kyle Fitzpatrick reports:

Zuckerman believes this has to do with traditional organized religions' male-centrism: teaching women that they're second class, must remain virginal, and must stay out of leadership positions. Pair this with the amount of women in the workplace rivaling men, and the group doesnt need to turn to a church for social or financial support that churches typically offer.

This is an important about-face for women willing to declare their unbelief. In the Los Angeles Review of Books Zuckerman writes about Elmina Drake Slenker, the mid-19th century ex-Quaker atheist who scandalized the nation when she publicly declared her atheism in 1856. She was prosecuted shortly thereafter. Zuckerman points out her actual crime, which led to months in prison because she refused to swear heavenly allegiance on a bible:

Writing leaflets and personal letters to various people about human sexuality, marital relations, birth control, and bestiality. She was put on trial, and it only took the jury 10 minutes to find her guilty.

How things have changed. Instead of submitting to public pressure and governmental interference women have, thankfully, fought back, especially when theyve been personally affected by religious mandates. Ayaan Hirsi Ali still remains a contentious figure in Islam, where shes constantly harassed by dogmatic followers, but her secular foundation, dedicated to combating the ravages of archaic religious displays of power, such as female genital mutilation and honor violence, is flourishing.

ayaan-hirsi-ali-on-islamophobia-in-the-west

Technology has helped aid such movements. Jacoby believes many female freethinkers existed in the past, but their voices were never heard since publishing was a male game. Women who broke through often had to assume male monikers just to do so. With easy access to social media this has changed dramatically.

Jacoby believes the next step in inviting more women into the fold requires educating people that morals are not dependent on religion. She expresses disdain for those who feel that moral decisions depend on religion or what she finds to be an innocuous term, spirituality.

The statement Im spiritual but not religious makes me want to throw up. What this sentence means is Im not religious, I dont go to church, but I am a good person. And this word spiritual comes to stand for being a good person, just as people were talking about religion as a transcendent experience, as if its different from what people experience when they listen to great music.

She admits women appear to be more religious than men thanks to biology and a penchant for spirituality. During their talk Goldstein points to social psychologist Jonathan Haidts work on purity as one possible motivation for religion: women tend to associate more with the concept of being pure in part due to its long history of patriarchic power structures. Both women agree that a link between spirituality and sexuality also align more women than men with religion.

And both women agree that intellectual equality and freedom will even the gender playing field regarding atheism. Jacoby states that comforting people in the face of tragedyshe cites Newtown as an exampleis possible without an allegiance to a metaphysical figure or a prophet. Reason, she says, is more likely to foster relationships based on equality and sharing, as the pretensions of right and wrong promoted by religious ideology dissolve. What you are left with is our human nature, fallible and beautiful, imperfect though empathetic, no deity required.

--

Derek's is the author ofWhole Motion: Training Your Brain and Body For Optimal Health. Based in Los Angeles he is working on a new book about spiritual consumerism. Stay in touch onFacebookandTwitter.

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Many Women Are In the Closet Atheists. Intellectual and Financial ... - Big Think

The new atheist movement emerged shortly after the 9/11 attacks with a best-selling book by Sam Harris called The End of Faith. This was followed by engaging tomes authored by Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and the late Christopher Hitchens, among others. Avowing to champion the values of science and reason, the movement offered a growing number of unbelievers tired of faith-based foolishness mucking up society for the rest of us some hope for the future. For many years I was among the new atheism movements greatest allies.

From the start, though, the movement had some curious quirks. Although many atheists are liberals and empirical studies link higher IQs to both liberalism and atheism, Hitchens gradually abandoned his Trotskyist political affiliations for what could, in my view, be best described as a neoconservative outlook. Indeed, he explicitly endorsed the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, now widely seen as perhaps the greatest foreign policy blunder in American history.

There were also instances in which critiques of religion, most notably Islam, went beyond what was both intellectually warranted and strategically desirable. For example, Harris wrote in a 2004 Washington Times op-ed that We are at war with Islam. He added a modicum of nuance in subsequent sentences, but I know of no experts on Islamic terrorism who would ever suggest that uttering such a categorical statement in a public forum is judicious. As the terrorism scholar Will McCant noted in an interview that I conducted with him last year, there are circumstances in which certain phrases even if true are best not uttered, since they are unnecessarily incendiary. In what situation would claiming that the West is engaged in a civilizational clash with an entire religion actually improve the expected outcome?

Despite these peccadilloes, if thats what they are, new atheism still had much to offer. Yet the gaffes kept on coming, to the point that no rational person could simply dismiss them as noise in the signal. For example, Harris said in 2014 that new atheism was dominated by men because it lacks the nurturing, coherence-building extra estrogen vibe that you would want by default if you wanted to attract as many women as men.

This resulted in an exodus of women from the movement who decided that the new atheist label was no longer for them. (I know of many diehard atheist women who wantednothing to do with new atheism, which is a real shame.) Harris attempted self-exoneration didnt help, either it merely revealed a moral scotoma in his understanding of gender, sexism and related issues. What he should have done is, quite simply, said Im sorry. These words, I have come to realize, are nowhere to be found in the new atheist lexicon.

Subsequent statements about profiling at airports, serious allegations of rape at atheist conferences, and tweets from major leaders that (oops!) linked to white supremacist websites further alienated women, people of color and folks that one could perhaps describe as morally normal. Yet some of us mostly white men like myself persisted in our conviction that, overall, the new atheist movement was still a force for good in the world. It is an extraordinary personal embarrassment that I maintained this view until the present year.

For me, it was a series of recent events that pushed me over the edge. As a philosopher someone who cares deeply about intellectual honesty, verifiable evidence, critical thinking and moral thoughtfulness I now find myself in direct opposition with many new atheist leaders. That is, I see my own advocacy for science, critical thought and basic morality as standing in direct opposition to their positions.

Just consider a recent tweet from one of the most prominent new atheist luminaries, Peter Boghossian: Why is it that nearly every male whos a 3rd wave intersectional feminist is physically feeble & has terrible body habitus? If this is what it means to be a reasonable person, then who would want to be that? Except for the vocabulary, that looks like something youd find in Donald Trumps Twitter feed. The same goes for another of Boghossians deep thoughts: Ive never understood how someone could be proud of being gay. How can one be proud of something one didnt work for? Its hard to know where to even begin dissecting this bundle of shameful ignorance.

More recently, Boghossian and his sidekick James Lindsay published a hoax academic paper in a gender studies journal (except that it wasnt) in an attempt to embarrass the field of gender studies, which they having no expertise in the field believe is dominated by a radical feminist ideology that sees the penis as the root of all evil. Ive explained twice why this hoax actually just revealed a marked lack of skepticism among skeptics themselves, so I wont go further into the details here. Suffice it to say that while bemoaning the sloppy scholarship of gender studies scholars, Boghossian and Lindsays explanation of the hoax in a Skeptic article contained philosophical mistakes that a second-year undergraduate could detect. Even more, their argument for how the hoax paper exposes gender studies as a fraud contains a demonstrable fatal error that is, it gets a crucial fact wrong, thus rendering their argument unsound.

The point is this: One would expect skeptics, of all people, who claim to be responsive to the evidence, to acknowledge this factual error. Yet not a single leader of the new atheist movement has publicly mentioned the factual problems with the hoax. Had someone (or preferably all of them) done this, it would have affirmed the new atheist commitment to intellectual honesty, to putting truth before pride and epistemology before ideology, thereby restoring its damaged credibility.

Even worse, Boghossian and Lindsay explicitly argue, in response to some critics, that they dont need to know the field of gender studies to criticize it. This is, properly contextualized, about as anti-intellectual as one can get. Sure, it is a fallacy to immediately dismiss someones criticisms of a topic simply because that person doesnt have a degree on the topic. Doing this is called the Courtiers Reply. But it decidedly isnt a fallacy to criticize someone for being incredibly ignorant and even ignorant of their own ignorance regarding an issue theyre making strong, confident-sounding claims about. Kids, listen to me: Knowledge is a good thing, despite what Boghossian and Lindsay suggest, and you should always work hard to understand a position before you level harsh criticisms at it. Otherwise youll end up looking like a fool to those in the know.

Along these lines, the new atheist movement has flirted with misogyny for years. Harris estrogen vibe statement which yielded a defense rather than a gracious apology was only the tip of the iceberg. As mentioned above, there have been numerous allegations of sexual assault, and atheist conferences have pretty consistently been male-dominated resulting in something like a gender Matthew effect.

Many leading figures have recently allied themselves with small-time television personality Dave Rubin, a guy who has repeatedly given Milo Yiannopoulos the professional right-wing troll who once said that little boys would stop complaining about being raped by Catholic priests if the priests were as good-looking as he is a platform on his show. In a tweet from last May, Rubin said Id like a signed copy, please in response to a picture that reads: Ah. Peace and quiet. #ADayWithoutAWoman. If, say, Paul Ryan were asked, hed describe this as sort of like the textbook definition of a misogynistic comment. Did any new atheist leaders complain about this tweet? Of course not, much to the frustration of critical thinkers like myself who actually care about how women are treated in society.

In fact, the magazine Skeptic just published a glowing review of Yiannopoulos recent book, Dangerous. The great irony of this intellectual misstep is that Yiannopoulos embodies the opposite of nearly every trend of moral progress that Michael Shermer, the editor of Skeptic, identifies in his book The Moral Arc.

Yiannopoulos is a radical anti-intellectual, often ignoring facts or simply lying about issues; he uses hyperbolic rhetoric (e.g., feminism is cancer) that stymies rather than promotes rational discussion; he holds some outright racist views; he professes nonsensical views, such as the idea that birth control makes women unattractive and crazy; he uses hate speech, which indicates that hes not a very nice person; he once publicly called out a transgender student by name during a talk; and he supports Donald Trump, who has essentially led a society-wide campaign against the Enlightenment. Oh, and need I mention that Yiannopoulos once said that if it werent for his own experience of abuse by a Catholic priest, he never would have learned to give such good head? The merger between the alt-right and the new atheist movement continues to solidify.

Perhaps the most alarming instance of irrationality in recent memory, though, is Sam Harris recent claim that black people are less intelligent than white people. This emerged from a conversation that Harris had with Charles Murray, co-author of The Bell Curve and a monetary recipient of the racist Pioneer Fund. There are two issues worth dwelling upon here. The first is scientific: Despite what Harris asserts, science does not support the conclusion that there are gene-based IQ differences between the races. To confirm this, I emailed the leading psychologist Howard Gardner, who told me that The racial difference speculations of Herrnstein and Murray remain very controversial, as well as James Flynn (world-renowned for the Flynn effect), who responded that, Taking into account the range of evidence, I believe that black and white Americans are not distinguished by genes for IQ. However, the debate is ongoing.

The point is simply this: Scottish philosopher David Hume famously declared that the wise person always proportions her beliefs to the evidence. It follows that when a community of experts is divided on an issue, it behooves the rational non-expert to hold her opinion in abeyance. In direct opposition of this epistemic principle, Harris takes a firm stand on race and intelligence even receiving adulation for doing this from other white men in the new atheist community. A more thoughtful public intellectual would have said: Look, this is a very complicated issue that leading psychologists disagree about. A minority say there is a genetically based correlation between race and IQ while many others claim just the opposite, with perhaps the largest group holding that we simply dont know enough right now. Since I am rational, I too will say that we simply dont know.

The second issue is ethical: Is it right, wise or justified to publicly declare that one race is genetically inferior to another, given the immense societal consequences this could have? Not only could this claim empower white supremacists individuals who wouldnt be sympathetic with Harris follow-up claim that generalizations about a race of people dont warrant discriminating against individual members of that race but science tells us that such information can have direct and appreciable negative consequences for members of the targeted race. For example, stereotype threat describes how the mere mention that ones racial class is inferior can have measurable detrimental effects on ones cognitive performance. Similarly, teacher expectancy effects refer to this; if teachers are told that some students are smart and others are dumb, where the smart and dumb labels are randomly assigned, the smart students will statistically do better in class than the dumb ones.

To broadcast a scientifically questionable meme that could have serious bad effects for people already struggling in a society that was founded upon racism and is still struggling to overcome it is, I would argue, the height of intellectual irresponsibility.

Although the new atheist movement once filled me with a great sense of optimism about the future of humanity, this is no longer the case. Movements always rise and fall they have a life cycle, of sorts but the fall of this movement has been especially poignant for me. The new atheists of today would rather complain about trigger warnings in classrooms than eliminate rape on campuses. Theyd rather whine about safe spaces than help transgender people feel accepted by society. They loudly claim to support free speech and yet routinely ban dissenters from social media, blogs and websites.

They say they care about facts, yet refuse to change their beliefs when inconvenient data are presented. They decry people who make strong assertions outside of their field and yet feel perfectly entitled to make fist-poundingly confident claims about issues they know little about. And they apparently dont give a damn about alienating women and people of color, a truly huge demographic of potential allies in the battle against religious absurdity.

On a personal note, a recent experience further cemented my view that the new atheists are guilty of false advertising. A podcaster named Lalo Dagach saw that I had criticized Harris understanding of Islamic terrorism, which I believe lacks scholarly rigor. In response, he introduced me to his Twitter audience of 31,000 people as follows: Phil Torres (@xriskology) everyone. Mourns the loss of ISIS and celebrates attacks on atheists. Below this tweet was a screenshot of the last two articles I had written for Salonone about the importance of listening to the experts on terrorism, and the other about how the apocalyptic ideology of the Islamic extremists of ISIS is more likely to evolve into new forms than go extinct.

First of all, Dagachs tweet was overtly defamatory. I wrote him asking for a public apology and heard nothing back, although he quietly deleted the tweet. But even that did not happen until I had received a hailstorm of disturbing responses to Dagachs false statements, responses in the form of internet trolls aggressively defending Harris by asking me to kill myself and proposing new nicknames like Phil Hitler Torres (seriously!). This is the new atheist movement today, by and large. The great enemy of critical thinking and epistemological integrity, namely tribalism, has become the social glue of the community.

I should still be the new atheist movements greatest ally, yet today I want nothing whatsoever to do with it. From censoring people online while claiming to support free speech to endorsing scientifically unfounded claims about race and intelligence to asserting, as Harris once did, that the profoundly ignorant Ben Carson would make a better president than the profoundly knowledgeable Noam Chomsky, the movement has repeatedly shown itself to lack precisely the values it once avowed to uphold. Words that now come to mind when I think of new atheism are un-nuanced, heavy-handed, unjustifiably confident and resistant to evidence not to mention, on the whole, misogynist and racist.

And while there are real and immensely important issuesto focus on in the world, such as climate change, nuclear proliferation, food production, ocean acidification, the sixth mass extinction and so on, even the most cursory glance at any leading new atheists social-media feed reveals a bizarre obsession with what they call the regressive left. This is heartbreaking, because humanity needs thoughtful, careful, nuanced, scientifically minded thinkers more now than ever before.

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From the Enlightenment to the Dark Ages: How new atheism slid ... - Salon

MOSCOW (ChurchMilitant.com) - A recentpoll is showing the number of atheists in Russia has dropped by half in the last three years.

According to the Levada Center, a Russian-based, independent, non-governmental research organization, those who consider themselves "absolutely irreligious" fell from 26 percent in 2014 to just 13 percent in 2017. As many as 44 percent described themselves as "quite religious," 33 percent as "not too religious" and 9 percent as "very religious."

The survey was conducted in urban and rural populations within the respondent's home by a personal interview method. In June, a total of 1,600 people aged 18 and over were interviewed in 137communitiesin 48 regions.

Entrance to the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception of the Holy Virgin Mary,opened in 1911,closed by Communist authorities in 1937 and reopened in 1999.

Between 2014 and 2017, the feelings toward Catholics have not changed significantly, but 34 percent of the Russians polled view the Holy Catholic Church with "respect" and 40 percent view the Church with "benevolence." Ten percent have "conflicted feelings" toward Catholics and another 5 percent look on them with "dislike" and "fear" combined. Thirteen percent found it "difficult to answer."

The poll is also indicatingthat Jews are now seen in a more favorable light. The number of those who say they either "dislike" or "fear" Jews has dropped from 15 percent in 2014 to 11 percent in 2017.

As to Muslims, 17 percent have "conflicted feelings," and 13 percent look on Muslims with "dislike" or "fear."

After the Soviet Union dissolved in December 1991, 500,000 Catholics were estimated to be in the country. Several have since died or emigrated to their ethnic homelands in Europe, such asGermany,Belarus orUkraine. The communist Soviet Union, which persecuted all religions, saw Catholicism as a non-Russian allegiance. Owing to the dominance of the Russian Orthodox Church in present-day Russia, Catholicism is still not officially recognized by the State. As a result, Catholics have commonly been seen as outsiders.

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Atheism in Russia Cut 50% in Three Years - Church Militant

On Friday, it became official: The New Atheists are no longer welcome on the left. Battered, condemned, and disinvited, these godless and once-favored public intellectuals are now homeless, spurned by their erstwhile progressive allies.

Richard Dawkins, the famously skeptical evolutionary biologist, was the last shoe to drop. He was disinvited from a speaking engagement at Berkeley because his comments about Islam had offended and hurt...so many people, according to the events organizers.

Dawkins is in good company. His New Atheist compatriots, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris, had already been expelled from the party. In both cases, insufficient deference to Islam was the proximate cause. Hitchens was denounced as a neocon for his support of the Iraq War. This was nonsense; he remained a committed socialist, but felt a war on Islamic terror and autocracy was needed. Harris is a liberal, straight and true, but drew the ire of Reza Aslan for refusing to except Islam from his broad critique of religion. Islam is not a religion of peace, Harris often says. In fact, he thinks its just the opposite. For that, everyone from Glen Greenwald to Ben Affleck has cast him as an Islamophobe and a bigot.

That means that three of the much-acclaimed Four Horsemen of New Atheism have been turfed from the left for extending their critique of religion to Islam. The fourth is Daniel Dennett, who also criticizes Islam. The only actual philosopher of the bunch, he is far too boring and ponderous to be noticed, let alone denounced, by anyone. In his place, one can add Bill Maher, a popularizer of New Atheism who has also been barred from Berkeley over criticism of Islam. One by one, these men have been excommunicated from the Left.

What has happened? Why did the Left delight in seeing these men ignorantly mock and vilify Christians, but denounce them when they treated Islam the exact same way?

Confirmation bias deserves at least a part of the blame. The New Atheists have long harbored an irrational fear of Christianity, but Christophobia doesnt worry the Left. Combatting Islamophobia, however, is a progressive priority, and so it is noticed and addressed when it strikes.

The argument that the liberal obsession with Islamophobia stems from a healthy regard for the status of minorities only goes so far. As Michael Walzer, the socialist intellectual, has written in Dissent, I frequently come across leftists who are more concerned with avoiding accusations of Islamophobia than they are with condemning Islamist zealotry. There is a reason, after all, why many Democrats stubbornly and proudly refuse to say the words Islamic terrorism, preferring to speak of generalized extremism.

But these same people who insist that evil men have perverted Islam are usually the first to falsely bring up Timothy McVeigh as an example of a Christian terrorist. Christianity is presented as a reflection of the actions of its evildoers (and even those who disclaim the faith), while Islam is not. The actions of orthodox Islamic believers, the Left suddenly maintains, are no reflection on the tenets of the peaceful Islamic faith.

Farther left, the defense of Islam becomes a defense of Islamic radicalism and intolerance. Slavoj iek sees in Islamism the rage of the victims of capitalist globalization. Judith Butler insists that understanding Hamas [and] Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the left, that are part of a global left, is extremely important.

These voices cannot just be dismissed as aberrant: They are prominent, fiercely secular left-wing intellectuals who find common cause with Hamas which pushes gays off of buildings and stabs children in their sleep and with Hezbollah, the Party of God.

In fact, they join a long line of left-wing apologists for murderous anti-Western regimes. Eric Hobsbawm, the renowned historian, refused to abandon the Soviet Union, even after the tanks rolled through Prague. Professors Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman spent years dismissing and minimizing reports of a genocide in Cambodia as Western propaganda. Michel Foucault, the postmodern philosopher, defended the indefensible cruelty of the Iranian Revolution by claiming that Iran doesnt have the same regime of truth as ours.

Clearly, the Lefts problem is bigger than Islam. Any foreign leader who can be seen as opposing Western, capitalist domination will find some praise or at least rationalizations from progressives. As Alan Johnson, the social-democratic political theorist, has written:

The left is vulnerable...because it takes its cue from what it is against rather than what it is for. In conversation with the Polish anti-Stalinist dissident Adam Michnik in 1993, the liberal philosopher Jurgen Habermas admitted he had avoided any fundamental confrontation with Stalinism. Why, asked Michnik? He did not want applause from the wrong side replied Habermas. You have to read that twice, and then think about the enormities of Stalinism, to realise just how appalling it is. But Habermas was only expressing a piece of liberal-left common sense.

In short, the New Atheists have won applause from the wrong side: the anti-Muslim, crusading Right. Christopher Hitchens, an endlessly entertaining writer who could give it to Saddam Hussein as good as anyone, was every right-wingers favorite radical. Sam Harris started finding agreement with the likes of Douglas Murray and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Rich Lowrys defense of Harris from Ben Affleck appeared in the New York Post. Bill Maher now delights the Right as much as he infuriates it. And the Left, smelling traitors in its midst, simply cannot tolerate this sort of transgression.

But more attention is needed to the specific nature of the Lefts double standard when it comes to Islam. Why must ardent secularists from the Islamic world like Ayaan Hirsi Ali the type of people the Left looks to for inspiration in the history of Western secularism be deemed bigots, while Sharia-supporting conspiracy theorists like Linda Sarsour are cherished? Why has criticizing Islam caused the New Atheists to cross a red line in the progressive imagination?

These positions make no sense if one thinks of the Left as seriously secular, convinced of the need to end the reign of superstition. But American liberals profess neither the passionate skepticism of David Hume nor the honest, urgent atheism of Nietzsche. They prefer to embrace a shallow, culture-war atheism instead.

This culture-war atheism provides evidence, quick and easy, to support the proposition that America is split into two camps: the intelligent, sophisticated, urbane, righteous liberals and the idiotic, gullible, backward, bigoted conservatives. The former are atheists and the latter are believers, flattering one side and bludgeoning the other. In fact, it is this type of thinking that made progressives fall in love with the New Atheists in the first place.

New Atheism pleased the Left as long as it stuck to criticizing God, who was associated with the beliefs of President George W. Bush and his supporters. It was thus fun, rather than offensive, for Bill Maher to call religion ridiculous, because he was assumed to be talking about Christianity. Christopher Hitchens could call God a dictator and Heaven a celestial North Korea, and the Left would laugh. Berkeley students would not think to disinvite Richard Dawkins when he was saying Bush and bin Laden are really on the same side: the side of faith and violence against the side of reason and discussion.

Truth be told, New Atheism was always fundamentally unserious. It does not even try to address the theistic arguments for the existence of God. Indeed, philosopher A.C. Grayling insists that atheists should not even bother with theology because they reject the premise. Our new rationalists, it turns out, will not even evaluate arguments that do not conform to their prejudices.

Battering a fundamentalist straw-man with an equally fundamentalist materialism, New Atheism is one big category error. Over and over, its progenitors demand material proof for the existence of God, as if He were just another type of thing a teacup, or perhaps an especially powerful computer.

This confusion leads the New Atheists to favor the rather elementary infinite-regress argument: If God created everything, then who created God? But as the theologian David Bentley Hart replies:

[God is] not a supreme being, not another thing within or alongside the universe, but the infinite act of being itself, the one eternal and transcendent source of all existence and knowledge, in which all finite being participates....Only a complete failure to grasp the most basic philosophical terms of the conversation could prompt this strange inversion of logic, by which the argument from infinite regresstraditionally and correctly regarded as the most powerful objection to pure materialismis now treated as an irrefutable argument against belief in God.

The rest of the New Atheists arguments can be handled even more quickly. Dawkins sees God as a complex superbeing subject to natural evolution and then deems him to be statistically improbable. He may be right, but why he thinks he has in the process critiqued anything resembling religion is beyond me. Dennett, who endeavors mainly to show that religion is a natural phenomenon, seems to confuse his validation of a religious claim with its refutation. Hitchens offers no real argument and plenty of historical inaccuracies. He is generally content to list the bad deeds of believers, explain away or ignore the good deeds of other believers, and then pretend that he has somehow disproven Christianity. Harris, to quote David Bentley Hart once more, declares all dogma pernicious, except his own thoroughly dogmatic attachment to nondualistic contemplative mysticism, of a sort which he mistakenly imagines he has discovered in one school of Tibetan Buddhism, and which (naturally) he characterizes as purely rational and scientific.

None of this New Atheist silliness bothered the Left so long as it flattered the right tribes and battered the wrong ones. It was only once the New Atheists extended their critique of religion to Islam that progressives began to turn on them. Muslims, though largely right-wing before the War on Terror, had become a marginalized group. Seen as the victims of Western colonialism, neoconservative aggression, and day-to-day discrimination, they became a part of the coalition of the oppressed, which is to say, they became virtuous. Islam, consequently, became a faith and tradition deserving of respect, not a mind virus like Christiniaty, busy infecting fools.

As such, attacks on Muslims or their faith not only appeared to be punching down at the innocent, but also became attacks on the left itself. The New Atheists, merely by being consistent and focusing on the most-egregious religious intolerance, in effect surrendered their sophistication and, in the Lefts eyes, joined the ranks of the bigoted, reactionary Right.

There is just one problem: We dont want them either.

Elliot Kaufman is an editorial intern at National Review.

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New Atheists & American Left Fall Out over Islam | National Review - National Review

The poll, which was conducted in late June, revealed that the number of Russian atheists, or those who consider themselves absolutely irreligious, fell sharply from 26 percent in 2014 to just 13 percent in 2017.

Religious believers now make up 86 percent of the population, the survey found, with 44 percent describing themselves as quite religious, 33 percent as not too religious and 9 percent as very religious.

Levada, a non-governmental Russian research center, conducted the survey on a representative all-Russian sample of urban and rural population among 1,600 people aged 18 and over in 137 settlements in 48 regions of the country.

Unsurprisingly, the poll found that Orthodoxy remains the dominant and most popular religion in Russia, and more than 92 percent of respondents view the Orthodox church with respect and benevolence. Regarding Catholics, 74 percent of Russians views the Catholic church with respect and benevolence, while 10 percent have conflicted feelings toward Catholics and another 5 percent look on them with dislike or fear.

Fifty-nine percent of respondents hold a favorable view of Islam, while 17 percent have conflicted feelings toward them and 13 percent look on Muslims with dislike or fear.

The poll furthermore seems to indicate that anti-Semitic sentiment is falling in Russia, as the number of those who say they either dislike or fear Jews has dropped significantly, from 15 percent in 2014 to 11 percent today.

The portion of the population that backs the Orthodox Churchs involvement in state politics has risen slightly from 26 percent in 2014 to 28 percent today, while the majority (58 percent) say that the Church should not influence political decisions.

Last fall, Russias Ministry of Justice declared the Levada research centerthe countrys leading independent polling agencyto be a foreign agent just two weeks before parliamentary elections.

Levadas director, Lev Gudkov, said the measure amounted to political censorship.

This practically means the imposition of political censorship and the impossibility of independent polls. Its the typical behavior of this repressive regime, he said.

All the other main polling centers in Russia are government controlled.

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Report: Atheism in Russia Falls by 50 Percent in Three Years - Breitbart News

CENTER SANDWICH In a special presentation, Tuesday, Aug. 1, at 7:30 p.m., The Arts Center at 12 Main in Center Sandwich will feature the Rev. Marshall Davis reading from his new book, "Thank God for Atheists: What Christians Can Learn from the New Atheism." Over the last many years, Davis has published several books and essays on faith, including "A Christian Version of the Tao Te Ching," "Excusing God: A Critique of Christian Solutions to the Problem of Suffering & Evil" and "More Than a Purpose: An Evangelical Response to Rich Warren and the Megachurch Movement." He also writes a blogspot, Spiritual Reflections, Meditations on Culture, Art, Religion and Spirituality. Recently retired as pastor of The Community Church of Sandwich, Davis is a deep and eclectic thinker, who brings his informed perspective to a wide range of topics essential to living an examined life.

Regarding "Thank God for Atheists," Amazon.com reports, "Warning! This book may be dangerous to your faith! This book is not for the faint of heart. This is not a work of Christian apologetics designed to arm the believer with biblical and theological strategies to counter humanist arguments. It is not designed to buttress your Christian faith against attacks from atheists and other unbelievers.

"On the contrary, this book takes the claims of atheists seriously. It listens to the arguments of atheists against the existence of God, and it comes to the conclusion that in a number of areas, atheists are right and Christians are wrong. For that reason it may actually undermine your faith. So please, if you are a Christian, think twice before you read it.

"Drawing upon the writings of the 21st century New Atheists, as well as previous generations of atheists, the author explores the most convincing arguments that atheists make against theism. His conclusion is that the New Atheists have important things to say to todays Christians. He goes so far as to say that atheists are Gods prophets to the Church today, sent by God to purify the Church by proclaiming hard truths that Christians are not willing to hear.

This book examines the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of Christianity as exposed by the New Atheism. It also explores the responses of Christian apologists who oppose the New Atheism. In the last section of the book, Davis reimagines Christianity in the light of reason, evidence, science and historical criticism."

Admission is free, but donations are welcome and support the arts, the Arts Center, and Advice To The Players, Sandwich's Shakespeare Company. Please feel free to bring your copy of "Thank God for Atheists" (or any book of Davis') if you would like him to sign it for you.

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Arts Center hosts reading from 'Thank God for Atheists' Aug. 1 - The Laconia Daily Sun

If truth be told, oftentimes when lying in bed at night with my better half, well put on some trashy TV whilst I tap away furiously at my keyboard. Some of the TV that we watch isnt of the highest cerebral quality, but is entertaining in its own manner. For example, we might watchEmbarrassing BodiesorBody Bizarre,TV shows that document the abnormal bodies and health issues of otherwise normal people (in the case ofEmbarrassing Bodies), and that document truly amazing and challenging abnormalities in the bodies of some very unlucky people on Earth (Body Bizarre).

This is the sort of thing I mean:

Other such episodes have any other number of staggering natural occurrences:

The thing is, any data in the world, in the universe, needs to be explicable in terms of ones worldview. My worldview is naturalism, and these physical abnormalities are easily explained within such a paradigm. Science works to understand them, and then hopefully cure them (not always with success). In a sense, the Problem of Evil (or why there is so much suffering in the world) is answered by the simple naturalistic mantra of shit happens. But with theists, every instance of suffering must be rationalised away with reference to an OmniGod. If God is all loving, powerful and knowing, then how can people like this exist?

I am not, here, being prejudiced about the physical look or situation of these people in the sense of the judgement of the last sentence of these people shouldnt exist. What I am questuoning is that given Gods fathomless love, how can he stack the cards so much against certain people? Sometimes, such harshness, such terrible hands of cards that are dealt to our fellow humans can be so bad that it causes such people to rise to the challenge and arguably become greater, more worthy people as a result. That said, I guarantee that almost every one of them, to a person, would swap their body for a typical body given half the chance. Would you rather have those warty protrusions or the body you presently have (assuming you dont already have the warty protrusions of Tree Man)?

The point here is that, given the existence of OmniGod, it seems that life is desperately unfair. We could talk about this in any number of contexts: neurological disorders, diseases, poverty, IQ or whatever. The world is full of people who are dealt, in the sheer luck (or lack thereof) of their birth, wildly different hands. How do we explain these really challenging and often pretty terrible bodily scenarios in light of an OmniGod? If these bodies were great, then why do we not all have them? If they are terrible, then why do people have them at all? We can explain them without recourse to any post hoc or ad hoc rationalisation with naturalism, but with theism, we have this perpetual headache.

If these bodytypes are sub-optimal (and you could take this to a much finer detail of differentiating myself from another normal body type that differs only in smaller scaled things, but still presents at least some non-zero degree of unfairness), then God is unfair in stacking the cards in favour of one person against another. Peoples suffering appears to be a thing of random chance, determined by where and how they are born, or some other variable outside of their control.

Unfairness, as previously mentioned, can be instantiated in many different contexts. But here we can take away any ideas of mind (though the mind is affected quite considerably in the sorts of cases above) and look at simple physical differences as instantiating unfairness. We dont need to talk about what sin they may have done, and whatpunishment they may have deserved. These are birth defects, often, dealt out to the unborn.

Simply put, God is unfair, and this is yet another way of showing it.

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Tree Man, Deformities and an Argument for Atheism - Patheos (blog)