David Silverman Goes To CPAC, Some Atheists Miss The Point

As soon as American Atheists announced they were going to CPAC, they got nearly as much fight from atheists as they did from the conservatives who got them kicked out.  Dave Muscato's personal (not in his official capacity with American Atheists) response to one such complaint is the best defense of the effort that I've seen so far.

If an atheist is being discriminated against for religious reasons, or is being intimidated such that s/he's staying in the closet about her atheism, or being forced to pray in a government space, or being forced to learn religious mythology in science class, etc, it is not our place, as an atheist-rights nonprofit, to treat that person any differently regardless of whether she was a conservative or a liberal. We still fight for her because that's what we do.

While there, Dave Silverman said something about abortion that resulted in some atheists getting upset at him.

“I came with the message that Christianity and conservatism are not inextricably linked,” he told me, “and that social conservatives are holding down the real conservatives — social conservatism isn’t real conservatism, it’s actually big government, it’s theocracy. I’m talking about gay rights, right to die, abortion rights –”

Hold on, I said, I think the Right to Life guys who have a booth here, and have had every year since CPAC started, would disagree that they’re not real conservatives.

“I will admit there is a secular argument against abortion,” said Silverman. “You can’t deny that it’s there, and it’s maybe not as clean cut as school prayer, right to die, and gay marriage.”

People were upset over that for a variety of reasons.  JT Eberhard debunked them so well, I was compelled to tweet this about it:

I might as well just stop writing things. @jteberhard usually says what I wanted to say way better than I could. http://t.co/IvXwiYu6nA
— Robert Fuller (@aparticularA) March 11, 2014

It's well worth the read.  It says exactly what I was trying to explain some, that the argument against Silverman is not based in reality.  It was all I had to say about the matter until I read a few other pieces from the perspective JT was challenging.

On the blog Reasonable Faith, objection to even going to CPAC was repeated.

So, they’re closet atheists? “A lot of them, yes.” And beyond that, he says, “a vast majority of Christians here would support atheists being part of the movement.” Well, they need all the help they can get.

Iffy. There may be a lot of atheists lurking about. But ever since Edmund Burke the conservative tradition has emphasized the need for religious institutions and religious indoctrination to ensure social order. Even an atheist might endorse religion if they think it will keep the masses in check. I’m reminded of Emerson’s line that his aunt was not a Calvinist but wished that everybody else was.

They're much more likely to keep going with the religious line if the atheist community keeps telling them they're not welcome.  Why would they want to join us if we're telling them they're not welcome?  On the other hand, if we show ourselves willing to support them in their atheism (without necessarily supporting all of their politics), they'll be more likely be openly atheist around the Christian Right that dominates American conservatism.

I don't think it's unreasonable to say we can agree that bad arguments won't hold weight if they lose the protective veil of religion & the vagueness of gods.  Getting conservative atheists (who do exist) to be openly atheist is a step toward this end.  Shunning them just because they have different politics is a step away from it.

Jason Thibeault's response to the hullabaloo was much longer, and thus much more wrong.  I've generally liked what I've seen from Thibeault, but on this issue, he's so intensely wrong I simply cannot speak up.  If I addressed all the wrong things, this post would be way longer than it already is, but some the overall point needs addressing.

People are upset about this, and I strongly feel, rightly so. I’m pretty upset about it too. Not that Silverman is explicitly anti-choice, because he’s later apparently multiple times clarified that he’s not personally convinced by those arguments. I’m mostly upset that he raised the issue of secular arguments for conservative social causes, thus painting himself into a corner where he could be trapped into having to weasel out of a specific counterpoint that easily undermined what he was saying. I’m further upset that by hedging on this issue, he gives cover to people who think he means there’s a valid, cogent argument against the right of a mother to choose whether to be pregnant.

He knows Silverman isn't anti-choice, so he's just upset that Silverman admitted that there are secular arguments against abortion.  Those arguments do, in fact, exist.  The other option Silverman was to lie.  I tend to prefer honesty over lying.  I expect Thibeault has a similar stance, despite his inaccuracies here.

He claims Silverman hedged & painted himself into a corner.  Also nonsense.  Thibeault's post goes through a lot of mental gymnastics & hypotheticals to justify this stance, but it's all entirely unnecessary and done for reasons I cannot figure out.  It's especially confusing because he stated the plain truth in the middle of all of it.

He did not say that there was a valid, cogent argument against abortion. Only that there’s a secular one. 

That's it.  He only said there was a secular argument against abortion.  Because there is.  The quality of that argument was completely irrelevant to what Silverman was talking about there and counterproductive to his entire purpose for being there.  He was there to show conservative atheists that it's okay to be openly atheist.  Not to pick fights with them.  There's nothing wrong with saving the arguments for later, and doing so need not imply malice or incompetence.

But my criticisms are entirely predicated on the face value of what he said, without reading anything extra into it.

They're really not.  His criticisms are entirely reliant on reading more into it.  Entirely reliant on a pile of completely unnecessary hypotheticals, "what ifs", and the complaint that he didn't make a point to argue against abortion right then & there.  That last bit is the crux of this.

Silverman is accused of painting himself into a corner while simultaneously being accused of avoiding the argument.  It cannot be both.  But that incoherence fits the rest of it.  The argument against Silverman here is so bad and so desperate, it includes some blatantly inaccurate statements.

There’s even a secular argument for prayer in schools. But first you have to have a secular prayer, to eliminate the religion from the context of the consequence as well as the argument. When you do that, you’re left with, essentially, arguments for the American Pledge of Allegiance, which is still said in most states. It’s a vocal exhortation to an entity that is not a deity, said mostly to remind yourself and others around you that you are affiliated with that entity. Only in this case, it’s a country, not a god.

There, by definition, cannot be a secular argument for (school led) prayer in school.  Prayer is explicitly religious.  "Secular" explicitly means "without regard to religion".  The example of the Pledge of Allegiance is a huge stretch, to the point of just being flat out wrong.  The Pledge is not prayer.  And since 1954, it's not even secular. And even though, it's currently religious, it's still not prayer.  It's not TOO a god.  It merely references one.  My money, before I fix it, isn't praying either.

Silverman is accused of hedging because he didn't go off message by not going after abortion at that moment.  It's like his famous "Tides go in" encounter with Bill O'Reilly.  He got criticism for not correcting O'Reilly on the air.  I was among those criticizing him initially, until I realized why I was wrong.  Rather than letting O'Reilly derail the conversation, Silverman staid on message.  He wisely saved the argument for another time.  He did his job.

I'm sure I will end up criticizing Silverman at some point.  While quite good at his job, he's not infallible.  And I have a big mouth.  But if/when I do, it will be based on something he actually said or did.  And it won't be something as silly as an over-hyped complaint about one instance where he didn't do what I specifically wished he'd done in one fleeting moment.  Especially not one where he said something accurate and staid on message, like what happened in this instance.

So far, my only complaint about David Silverman since joining American Atheists is that he hasn't grown the devil beard back yet.

Atheism Is Not An Intellectual Luxury For The Wealthy - An Open LetterTo Chris Arnade

The following is an open letter to Chris Arnade, in response to his article on AlterNet, titled "Is Atheism an Intellectual Luxury for the Wealthy?" (originally in The Guardian).

My answer to the question you pose in the title of your article, is an adamant "no".

You start the article with a story from your adolescence similar, in regards to interactions with believers, to the stories many of us who were atheists at that age have.

Preacher Man's eyes narrowed. He pointed at me, "You are an APE-IEST. An APE-IEST. You going to lead a life of sin and end in hell."

You then describe your later life.

Three years later I did escape my town, eventually receiving a PhD in physics, and then working on Wall Street for 20 years. A life devoted to rational thought, a life devoted to numbers and clever arguments. During that time I counted myself an atheist and nodded in agreement as a wave of atheistic fervor swept out of the scientific community and into the media, led by Richard Dawkins.

You're incorrectly equating atheism & science and lending credibilty to the silly notion that Dawkins is some kind atheist Pope, but that's only minor criticism.  My problem is more with what followed.

I eventually left my Wall Street job and started working with and photographing homeless addicts in the South Bronx. When I first walked into the Bronx I assumed I would find the same cynicism I had towards faith. If anyone seemed the perfect candidate for atheism it was the addicts who see daily how unfair, unjust, and evil the world can be.

You expected the homeless drug addicts to be atheists.  This is insulting for a number of reasons and reveals your ignorance in a few ways.

When you expected to meet other atheists you assumed they would be just like you, as if we're all identically cynical.  The atheists I've met have been the least cynical group of people I've ever encountered.  I tend to be fairly cynical, and it shows most when shown next to the optimism of the atheists I know.  And yet we still constantly face this stereotype.  Maybe you didn't know many atheists or knew nothing of what atheism really is, but either way, you were reinforcing that stereotype.  I doubt that was your intention, but it was nevertheless the result.

In addition to your ignorance about atheists, you reveal an even greater ignorance of both the poor and of religion.  The most common path from religion to atheism is indeed a level of inquiry not available to the homeless, whose entire focus is rightly on merely surviving.  This fact could have been a good argument in favor of a "yes" answer to your titular question, but you didn't address it all.  I suspect you left it unaddressed because it never even occurred to you.  If you'd realized that economic status is not relevant to belief in a god, you'd probably have spared us the article entirely.

How else could you have been so surprised that they're not only believers, but they're more so than most others?

None of them are. Rather they are some of the strongest believers I have met, steeped in a combination of Bible, superstition, and folklore.

Of course they're strong believers.  Religion provides hope to the desperate that their current situation is a temporary stepping stone to something far better.  It's a false hope, but that's irrelevant to the desperate.

Also unaddressed was how religion uses that false hope to prey on the desperate.  Religious charities often use the promise of help to coerce people into letting themselves be preached to.  Religious charities promise religion will make their lives better and then give them things, like food & shelter, that actually will make theirs lives better.  It's not far fetched to expect that the people being helped would mistakenly attribute the improvements in their lives to the religion and not to the food under a roof.

And that's all assuming that everyone in that situation is even a believer.  It ignores that many may have left religion before they they encountered hard times.  It disregards the fact that atheists can become homeless too.  It ignores the fact that homeless atheists often feign belief when it's what's required to eat.

You may have left your cushy Wall Street job to photograph the homeless, but you appear to still have some things to learn.

They have their faith because what they believe in doesn't judge them. Who am I to tell them that what they believe is irrational? Who am I to tell them the one thing that gives them hope and allows them to find some beauty in an awful world is inconsistent? I cannot tell them that there is nothing beyond this physical life. It would be cruel and pointless.

At least you got this part right.  Sort of.  Of course we shouldn't be preaching atheism to them.  As noted above, their focus is on survival.  Preaching atheism to them would make us no better than the religious ghouls preaching religion to them.  They don't need to be preached at.  They need something more tangible.

This is all obvious to most atheists I know, so why include this?  Do you think atheists are going around preaching to the homeless?  I'm not aware of any atheists who would call that acceptable behavior.  Including that bit suggests that atheists running around acting like assholes, preaching to the desperate, when we're doing no such thing.  You needlessly throw us all under the bus.

And for what?  To make yourself feel superior about not doing that thing that none of us are doing?

Soon I saw my atheism for what it is: an intellectual belief most accessible to those who have done well.

I'm sure your intention was not to suggest that atheism is only available to the rich.  You tried to qualify it by saying "my atheism", but the rest of your statement negates that by talking about atheism in general.  It's a blanket dismissal of all the working class atheists who exist.  That, by the way, is a hell of a lot of atheists, including myself.

You were a rich guy interacting with the opposite end of the spectrum.  You ignored the majority of people in between those two extremes of economic status.  You also ignored all the rich people who are devout believers, especially those who became rich via those beliefs.

I also see Richard Dawkins differently. I see him as a grown up version of that 16-year-old kid, proud of being smart, unable to understand why anyone would believe or think differently from himself. I see a person so removed from humanity and so removed from the ambiguity of life that he finds himself judging those who think differently.

I see someone doing what he claims to hate in others. Preaching from a selfish vantage point.

Preaching from a selfish vantage point is precisely what you were doing with this article.  You're preaching at the atheist community for being proud of our reason.  You're projecting your own arrogance onto Dawkins and the rest of us.

Dawkins is indeed arrogant about his intelligence.  But that doesn't make him out of touch or so single minded that he cannot understand why people believe differently from him.  He understands it well enough to have a written a book, The God Delusion, that many atheists credit as sparking their path to atheism.  The only other book I see given such credit more is The Bible.

You, on the other hand, seem to have trouble figuring out why people disagree with you.

When the religious disagree with you they worry for you, talk about hell, and bring you things to read and eat. Atheist call you dumb
— Chris Arnade (@Chris_arnade) December 27, 2013

Given that tweet, you also apparently have extremely limited experience interacting with both the religious and with atheists.  This seems pretty odd to me, since you're more public to the religious than I am.  If you got the e-mail I receive, you'd know better than to suggest they simply bring things to read & eat to those they disagree with.

And if you knew the atheists I know, you would know better than to suggest that they're hypocritical assholes.

If you're going to talk about us in the future, please do us the favor of actually learning about us.  That would be much more appreciated than preaching from your Wall Street high horse.