The way it’s discussed, at times, you’d think atheism is about being against social justice. I’ve had really weird conversations with people on how feminism ruined atheism, for example. But this is confusing, as feminism doesn’t end belief in God or gods. That disbelief in God or gods is usually still there.
I mean, if you insist that atheism is ONLY about a lack of belief in God or gods, how can feminism ruin atheism? Does feminism get people to believe in God?
The only way feminism and other social justice concerns can “ruin” atheism is if they get people to believe in God. Otherwise, atheism is not being ruined. We are merely wrestling over its implications.
If atheism is truly about a lack of belief in God or gods, that’s all it is.
It isn’t naturally against something else, and that includes social justice.
One of the common rebuttals here is that social justice is like an impurity inserted into atheism. But these rebuttals seem to define “impurity” in fairly selective terms. Look at this logically and fairly:
If feminism is off limits, so is any discussion on MRAs.
If defending blacks from discrimination is off-limits, so is representing the concerns regarding prejudice that is exhibited towards white people.
And yet, several seem to act as if “purity” in atheism merely means trying to protect positions that embody the opposite of things that are somehow “impure.” Those concerned with keeping social justice issues out of atheism — especially those who are atheists — often don’t seem merely concerned with keeping those social justice issues out, but are also focused on bringing or keeping the polar opposite of these views in.
Very few people who call themselves atheists (at least, in my experience) seem to equally censor individuals on both sides of the equation. The tendency, at least in many atheist circles, is to use the idea of atheism’s purity to silence social justice advocates, while at the same time protecting or cultivating the growth of opposite ideas.
Let’s also be clear that if you say that atheism does not necessarily have to involve empathy, it’s a bit inconsistent if you say there is any necessity for it to involve “reason,” especially, any “reason” that is beyond what is necessary to reject belief in God or gods.
Thus, atheists who argue about the importance of a link between being rational (or using the scientific method) and being an atheist AND say that atheism can’t have anything to do with promoting empathy because of ideas about atheism’s “purity” are really violating their own principles.
If atheism is really about the absolute purity of a lack of belief in God or gods and nothing else, then the promotion of rationality and scientific investigation are also outside of the bounds of atheism.
If you remove a focus on empathy from the arena of atheism because it’s “just about a lack of belief in God or gods,” you can’t then go on and talk about how reason and scientific observation is important for atheists. That’s extraneous, too. In other words, if we are going to talk about the purity of atheism, there simply isn’t much to talk about.
But there’s another way to view atheism that is much more helpful. In my mind, atheism is not the end of a conversation. It’s the beginning. Atheism is an arena for discussion on how to best proceed in the world once we remove God from the equation.
If we argue that atheism has to be kept “pure” then we have nothing to talk about. Not just for the feminists, but also for the MRAs. But if we see atheism as an arena of discourse that deletes gods and ONLY gods from the outset, and then carries on discourse from there, we have space for a vibrant discussion of ideas.
Ideas that include social justice, as much as some may hate it. That even argue — as I do, in many of my blog posts — for the superiority of several ideas represented by social justice positions over anti-social-justice positions.
And many of the positions on many sides in this arena of discourse can best be understood, I would argue, through our individual stories and ways of thinking about the world. I think that one major advantage of a more humanistic viewpoint in this arena of discussion is that it allows for more interhuman connection and understanding as we figure out how to construct communities that are not bound by religious hierarchies, moral frameworks, or structures.
At any rate, my desire for a wide-ranging discourse is, in part, why I claim to be an atheist, oftentimes, over and above being a humanist (although I am largely a humanist, as well). I want to be involved in this arena of discourse, and it’s a bit hard for me to pigeonhole myself into the stricter definition of “humanist,” although my own personal position often coincides with humanist positions.
But my view of atheism as an arena of discourse is also why I don’t think my humanistic leanings as an atheist are reason to push me out of the arena of atheist discourse. Atheism, as an ARENA of discourse instead of an END of discourse, is the place to have many of the important conversations about the principles that we, as a God-free society, should embrace.
It’s not just about keeping religion out — it’s also an arena of discussion for what we are going to construct in religion’s absence.
And I think that this is a necessary conversation that needs the label “atheist” over it because we live in such a religious society. Perhaps eventually the atheist “bubble” will expand so that these are just things we talk about, and the label of “atheist” over the arena of conversation will eventually be no longer necessary. But right now, in this primarily religious society, this label for a conversation that only around 3% of the U.S. population engages in, at the moment, is important.
I also think it’s important to point out here that “atheist” does not mean “anti-religious” — I’m just proposing that it is an arena of conversation regarding what we should do now that we have deleted God and gods from the equation. My own position has shifted from being extremely antitheistic to being a little more tolerant of religious individuals, due to my thinking that happiness and empathy is much more important than I thought it was, once, and can come from (usually fairly liberal) religious spaces — sometimes more than certain more prejudiced alt-right atheist spaces. The arena of atheist discourse, in my mind, allows for such shifts.
So that’s what I’d like to argue. Atheism is not the end of discourse — it’s not concerned, at the very start, with keeping social justice advocates (for example) out with an a priori, hypocritical barrier of a definition. It’s an arena for a vibrant discourse on a wide array of topics — an arena whose title, “atheism,” is relevant for a world in which a very small minority of individuals actually realizes that it is living a god-free universe.
Hope that distinction makes sense for all the people who constantly ask me why my atheistic blog covers such a wide array of subjects. It’s my exploration of a world without God and gods, but one that includes you, obviously. It was nice, at least for this blog post, to explore a bit of this world with you.
Or, in other words, thank you for reading.
PS: I have a Patreon, in case you want to help me keep writing.
I’ve encountered a lot of pushback over protesting, but recently I have heard it supported by someone I deeply respect.
President Barack Obama.
In a press conference in Berlin, Germany today, when asked about whether he would, like so many others, advise people to stop protesting against Trump, his response was clear.
He not only called protesting their right; he said that: “One of the great things about our democracy is it expresses itself in all sorts of ways, and that includes people protesting.”
You get that? Protesting — in this case, against Trump — is “one of the great things about our democracy.”
He also linked the protests to specific concerns anti-Trump protestors had, stating: “I would not advise people who feel strongly or are concerned about some of the issues that have been raised during the course of the campaign — I wouldn’t advise them to be silent.”
This seems clear to me. He’s talking about “the issues that have been raised during the course of the campaign” — emphasizing Trump’s disturbing rhetoric over his run. The terrible sexist, racist, crude behavior he has engaged in over the last several months.
And then he spurs us on, stating that we should “organize” and that doing so “matters”:
What I would advise — what I advised before the election and what I will continue to advise after the election — is that elections matter, voting matters, organizing matters, being informed on the issues matter.
As if that’s not enough, he then discusses the factor that got Trump elected — the propaganda flying in the face of facts. He emphasizes the fact that we as a country need to inculcate ourselves against such lies in the future:
If we are not serious about facts and what’s true and what’s not — and particularly in an age of social media where so many people are getting their information in soundbites and snippets off their phones — if we can’t discriminate between serious arguments and propaganda, then we have problems….
Because in an age where there’s so much active misinformation — and it’s packaged very well and it looks the same when you see it on a Facebook page or you turn on your television — where some overzealousness on the part of a U.S. official is equated with constant and severe repression elsewhere — if everything seems to be the same and no distinctions are made, then we won’t know what to protect.
This is the advice we need for the future.
Thank You, Obama.
The protests matter. The organizing matters. The research you do to be right on political issues so that you can help the most vulnerable in this country — it matters.
But it doesn’t matter automatically. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, either way. Because if we don’t believe that it matters, we won’t do it, and it will fail, and we will fail as a country.
We have to gear up for a long fight. This isn’t going to be over in a few weeks. I’m prepared to protest and call my representatives and fight during the entire four years. And I won’t stop writing.
I know I haven’t written about religion for awhile. That’s because, frankly, I think that in Trump we are fighting a bigger threat. And we can’t let ourselves be complacent. We have to be vigilant and ready to fight as a nation if we are going to protect the people so many of us love and care about.
Thank you for reading.
PS: I have a Patreon, in case you want to help me keep writing.
I was dumbfounded, at first, at how on earth Trump got ahead with the blatant lies he was telling. How did that not hurt him more? How were people still saying he was trustworthy?
And in looking into it, I found that his lies actually hurt the press and helped him. Trump had figured out a way to lie and not only get away with it, but demonize the press and even convince people that Freedom of the Press was dangerous.
The trick was to consistently lie big. He lied so thoroughly and so ridiculously and so often that the media, in reporting the lies, came off as biased. And he always made sure that the lies were things that his base wanted to believe, so that in addition to seeming biased, the media reporting the lies as lies became more hated by Trump’s base. As the media became more hated, it lost credibility in reporting what was actually going on in the United States, and that credibility went to Trump.
It’s a disturbingly simple formula that fits with all the data. Trump seems to know it. It’s how he can rail against respected publications like the New York Times while endorsing stories from publications like the National Enquirer, even saying that the latter should get a Pulitzer Prize. It’s why he can say we should enforce stronger libel laws and restrict freedom of the press — he has successfully demonized the press with the big lie strategy so much that many people are angry at the press attacking the big lies that could not possibly be quite as wrong as the seemingly unassailable press keeps claiming. Trump took advantage of this viewpoint as early as February, when he said:
I’m going to open up our libel laws so when they write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money. We’re going to open up those libel laws. So that when The New York Times writes a hit piece, which is a total disgrace, or when The Washington Post, which is there for other reasons, writes a hit piece, we can sue them and win money instead of having no chance of winning because they’re totally protected. You see, with me, they’re not protected.
You see? The media’s biased seems unfairly protected — insulated from criticism as they unfairly criticize Trump’s statements, saying that he is lying far more than seems rational to the layman. It’s as if they just have it out for Trump.
You see, as Hitler stated once (albeit in a different context), we are used to someone lying a little bit. So we automatically adjust to that. But this tendency to only slightly adjust to lies puts us at a disadvantage when someone tells a huge lie. If you tell a huge, enormous lie, that small adjustment isn’t enough. Much of the lie will still remain in your audience’s minds as truth, so that the person exposing you tends to look like they are out to attack you. You make THEM look dishonest.
If you lie big enough, you make the person who is trying to expose you look dishonest.
That’s what Trump did. He lied enormously. He lied so much that the Pulitzer-Prize-winning Politifact couldn’t even choose one distinguishing lie for their annual “Lie of the Year” award, so they chose all the outrageous lies of Trump for the honor.
As Trump lied, more and more media outlets covered his lies, exposing them, because they have a responsibility to expose Truth. They thought that they were hurting Trump. But just the opposite — it seemed to many Trump supporters as if they were dogpiling him. As if they were out to get him. Surely Trump didn’t lie THAT much, right? They had to be making some of it up. And so the media looked bad in picking at Trump — and Trump milked that for all its worth, portraying himself to his supporters as a victim. Which made them even more loyal.
And this confused the media. They weren’t used to someone who lied this much, this thoroughly, and got away with it. The system worked well for exposing smaller lies. But the media was not built to combat the Big Lie strategy. And so, what Trump was doing also confused the other Republicans running against Trump. Every time you exposed Trump, YOU were the one looking bad. Because it was hard for the public to believe that Trump was lying as much as he was.
This makes journalism very difficult. If you don’t expose the lies, people believe them and you lose. If you DO expose the lies, and you can easily be demonized for even bringing up the possibility that someone who seems sincere could be a thorough liar. There’s no real way to beat them.
And so we didn’t. And the more we fight it, the worse we look.
We’re trying to figure out how to deal with it. But it might be too late. Facebook algorithms may change, Twitter may ban some people, and Google may have stronger filters on its results — but you can’t silence the President of the United States, and these actions will just cause people to hate the press even more.
I realize this is a problem without a solution, but it might just be an unwinnable war — unless something eventually, hopefully comes along to expose Trump to even his most hardcore supporters as the big liar he is.
I’m not holding my breath. Sorry for the bad news.
But thanks for reading.
PS: I have a Patreon, in case you want to help me keep writing.
Steve Bannon, the former editor of the infamous Breitbart who is widely rumored to be an anti-Semite and white supremacist, has just been appointed Trump’s senior counselor and chief strategist. What this means, basically, is that Bannon is going to have Trump’s ear as he goes about his White House duties, deals with the press, and makes his political decisions.
I wish this were true. But I am not exaggerating. Steve Bannon is a professional propaganda producer who is fitting with Trump, who lies more than any other politician in recent history. According to Steve Bannon’s own words, he is the alt-right’s champion, as Mother Jones states:
Last week, when Donald Trump tapped the chairman of Breitbart Media to lead his campaign, he wasn’t simply turning to a trusted ally and veteran propagandist. By bringing on Stephen Bannon, Trump was signaling a wholehearted embrace of the “alt-right,” a once-motley assemblage of anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, ethno-nationalistic provocateurs who have coalesced behind Trump and curried the GOP nominee’s favor on social media. In short, Trump has embraced the core readership of Breitbart News.
“We’re the platform for the alt-right,” Bannon told me proudly when I interviewed him at the Republican National Convention (RNC) in July. Though disavowed by every other major conservative news outlet, the alt-right has been Bannon’s target audience ever since he took over Breitbart News from its late founder, Andrew Breitbart, four years ago. Under Bannon’s leadership, the site has plunged into the fever swamps of conservatism, cheering white nationalist groups as an “eclectic mix of renegades,” accusing President Barack Obama of importing “more hating Muslims,” and waging an incessant war against the purveyors of “political correctness.”
Steve Bannon is such a poisonous figure that Republicans are either keeping quiet or lashing out at Bannon’s appointment — nobody is really doing any congratulating.
Why would he choose someone who specializes in targeting white nationalists through propaganda as his chief strategist and top advisor?
Well, as we saw with Hitler and Goebbels (yes, I just broke “Godwin’s law,” but I’m sorry, this shit applies here, clearly), if you are intending to lie to the nation, you need someone close to your side, who has intimate knowledge of your affairs and the message you want to send, who is really, really good at spreading disinformation. You need to underline his message as the truth and the other messages as lies.
By taking orders from a political candidate and reworking your entire site to promote the lies of a specific candidate without any kind of truth behind these things, and just spinning all of–doing what you’ve [Bannon] done to Breitbart (and anybody who reads Breitbart knows exactly what’s going on). If that is what your idea of being Roger Ailes is, you are so sadly mistaken. That doesn’t make you Roger Ailes. That makes you Goebbels. So, let’s leave it at that.
And you’ll hear many on the left saying the same thing — but even Glenn Beck, who is no liberal, sees this clearly. This is not a drill folks. This is the real deal.
And on the other side, the white nationalists are beside themselves. One states:
Stephen Bannon: racist, anti-homo, anti-immigrant, anti-jewish, anti-establishment. Declared war on (((Paul Ryan))) Sounds perfect. Muhahahaha. The man who will have Trump’s ear more than anyone else. Being anti-jewish is not illegal. Nothing you dirty stinking jews can do to keep him out.
“If anyone sat there and listened to that call, you’d think that you were attending a white supremacist rally,” said Bardella, citing what he called Bannon’s “nationalism and hatred for immigrants, people coming into this country to try to get a better life for themselves.”
“This is someone who has a very low moral compass,” he said of Bannon, “and the idea that this is the type of person that Donald Trump, as the Republican nominee, as president, would have closest to him is very disturbing.”
This is it, guys. Goebbels, similarly, was a minister of disinformation for white nationalists, with disturbing results. The lesson we learned there MUST keep us vigilant.
In the news, you may see that Trump is attempting to play nice for now, and think it’s not that bad. But there are signals that this is situational — that he’s attempting to ease into the presidency. As he stated in his 60 minutes interview last Friday:
You know, I’ll conduct myself– in a very good manner, but depends on what the situation is, sometimes you have to be rougher.
As soon as we let up, as soon as we let down our guard — we may be headed towards a nightmare.
I’m not exaggerating. We’ve already seen what “rough” means. As he said back in March:
We had some people, some rough guys like we have right in here. And they started punching back. It was a beautiful thing. I mean, they started punching back. … In the good old days, this doesn’t happen because they used to treat them very, very rough. And when they protested once, you know, they would not do it again so easily. But today, they walk in and they put their hand up and put the wrong finger in the air at everybody, and they get away with murder, because we’ve become weak.
But Trump is not going to stop us. We’ll keep marching and fighting. We have to, or we will see a roughness, protected by an army and lack of freedom of the press, as we have never seen before.
You’ve been warned. Now let’s fight.
Thanks for reading.
PS: I have a Patreon, in case you want to help me keep doing what I’m doing.
Many people have been asking myself and others why I’m going to a protest for the second night in a row. There are a lot of reasons, but I thought it would be a good idea to jot off 10. Here we go:
1. To show my disapproval with the statements he made over the past 18 months (and, by extension, his lifetime) and to show the vulnerable he hurt that we are not with him.
2. To show my disapproval with his track record and the example he has shown for us around the world, and in doing so improve relations between the United States and other nations joining on (in some cases, protesting as well).
3. To bother Trump, who keeps saying that he wants unity, and demonstrate that unity requires that he follow few, if any, of his campaign promises, and whose first post-election tweets showed that he was paying attention to and personally affected by the protests.
4. To mobilize and sign up people for grassroots organizations that we will need to protest many of the things on the Republican platform and in Trump’s speeches.
5. To embolden our Senators and Representatives on the Democratic side to do whatever it takes to stop the most dangerous of Trump’s policies.
6. To prepare for future protests against future policies Trump may try to enact.
7. To prepare for 2018, which will be a long, hard, strenuous fight, including runs for governors and Congressmen, as well as state representatives and mayors.
8. To show where the buck stops and encourage government defiance if necessary, should he enact some of his more disturbing policies.
9. To keep the Democratic party left and uncompromising to the most disturbing parts of the Trump agenda, knowing they have our backs.
10. To show Trump supporters that we’re going to fight back against many of their cruel attitudes and be a countercultural force against much of the hate (as exhibited by the 200+ incidences of hateful harassment since his election) that they think will exist in America post-Trump.
I could keep going, but that’s ten, it’s about 6:30pm, and I have a protest to go to at 7.
Do you have any you want to add? I’d like to hear them — please put them in the comments below.
Thanks for reading.
PS: I have a Patreon, in case you want to help me keep doing what I’m doing.
Our children and grandchildren will look back at this time, at the choices we are about to make, the goals we will strive for, the principles we will live by, and we need to make sure that they can be proud of us.
The calls for unity are strong. One problem: The bullies have not apologized.
The bully is still smirking. And if we make nice with the bully and his cronies, giving them a big hug, we are doing that in the face of the people they have so long bullied.
There is a large segment of American society with an extraordinarily short memory. It was truly startling, during the election, how quickly evangelical Christians, for example, were willing to forget the awful things Trump was saying about minorities, immigrants, women, and other groups of people. Many of us who were deeply affected by those comments found them harder to forget. The people who were avidly in agreement with those comments seemed to cherish them, as well.
Now, it seems, we’re supposed to forget the past and “grow up” and unify. But that’s not what growing up means. I was taught that even as a young child in a Christian conservative home. Growing up never was about being callous and forcing people to hug those hell-bent on hurting them. Growing up has always, for me, meant defending the defenseless, loving the vulnerable, and empathizing with those who need it most.
What I’m afraid is beginning to happen in America is that we’re changing that definition. Instead, we’re increasingly replacing it with one that we usually associated with being childish — the selfish insistence to bully and refuse to apologize, refuse to share, and try to shut up anyone who wants to say anything bad about you.
This is unhealthy. It’s unhealthy for ourselves and our children. The moment we make a virtue out of forgetting the oppression of the most vulnerable in this country, and judge people not by how they treat the vulnerable but by how well they get along with the people determined to bully the vulnerable, we have lost sight of what it means to grow up. We have replaced infantile, selfish bullying with grown-up love and empathy.
I’m just one blogger. I can’t really stop this. I’m just telling you what I see happening to my country, and it’s sad.
I’m going out marching, showing empathy and support, mobilizing the other grown-ups with full hearts who seek to support the broken, and I’m being told by Trump supporters, who have been jeering and insulting the most vulnerable in the country for the last 18 months with schoolyard bullying worse than most of us ever faced in any schoolyard — I’m being told by them that I’m not the grown up. That I’m childish for “whining” and caring too much.
And others are agreeing with them. It’s sadder than election night, in some ways. It’s like we’ve lost sight of what it means to grow up.
So I’m going to go out, again, and march the streets of Fort Worth tonight. Because I want to be an adult, not a schoolyard bully. I want to show and demonstrate to America how an adult is not supposed to tolerate the insulting of the people most struggling in this country. I want to hug other grown ups, not the bullies, as we mobilize.
And practically speaking, I’m gearing up for a long fight to make our discomfort with any callous bullying Trump does during his presidency known. I’m also trying to get people together to sign up at protests on email lists to mobilize for further action. I’m also working on changing Congress and its makeup in 2018, a long, hard, fight that has to start now. I’m working to show people that they aren’t alone, to keep progressive liberalism alive, and to keep the definitions of what it means to be an American alive. This isn’t the finale. It’s just another step in a long, long fight.
Personally, I want to be better. I want to be more loving to the most vulnerable in this country. I want to be more empathetic. I want to promote equality even more. I want to mature in my dedication to those Trump and his supporters are determined to bully.
I don’t want to go backwards. I don’t want to lose the maturity I have gained by throwing all those values and all that love in my heart away to embrace those in power as they ruin the lives of the most vulnerable in this country.
That’s why I’m fighting. You may succeed, Trump supporters. You may. Your schoolyard bully tactics may turn the most vulnerable people in this country into a pulp. But I’m telling you, when I march, that it’s not going to come easy. There are still adults on the playground, and you’re gonna have to get through us first.
Thank you for reading.
PS: I have a Patreon, in case you want to help me keep doing what I’m doing.
You remember, don’t you, what Donald Trump has CONSISTENTLY said about us? You remember how he consistently insulted us in ways worse than we have ever witnessed a candidate insult us in recent memory, right?
He got into office by being a bully. That’s the clear and inconvenient truth. I realize that it’s uncomfortable. I realize that this is a time when, more than ever, you may want to have a Kum-Bah-Yah moment and pretend that there are warm feelings of unity here. I realize that anger and depression is uncomfortable. I realize that the fight has grown wearisome. I realize that you might be exhausted and just want to go along to get along.
But the fact is that if you do that now, you are teaching this country that when a bully bullies you and your friends, apologize to the bully. Hug the bully. And if your friends are seriously hurt and wounded in the worst ways possible by the bully, force them to hug the smirking bully, too.
Because the cold, hard, inconvenient truth is that Trump is not contrite. He is the same man he was before he got elected.
The truth is that he is a misogynist – well, that would be an understatement. He is a sexual assaulter, an unapologetic and cruel one who said he would sue the victims. He treats women, minorities, the disabled, and the LGBT community draw-droppingly horribly. This is a nightmare of a person.
We should not be running to embrace him. I know he has power, and I know that there is a lot of pressure, due to that power, to play nice. But to play nice to Trump is to spit in the face of every single woman who cannot stand the cold hard fact that “grab them by the pussy” is rapidly becoming an anthem of this country we all so dearly love.
We need to see who is actually, really in pain, and it’s not the Trump supporters. What, after treating us more cruelly than they have in decades, we’re supposed to suddenly make peace?
They taught us how to win the battle. They didn’t make peace. They made war, and it worked. And every single time that we have rebelled in this country and done it successfully, we have been successful because we were driven, because we were able to fight out of pure determination and passion and fire rushing through every vein.
I am not here to make peace. I have tried that. I have sat in your pews, America, and tried to forgive. And forgiveness never got me anything but more oppression. It’s the honey-sweet cruel lie that gives you and excuse to pound, pound, pound away at every ounce of my dignity.
You want me to make peace with you? The goal is not peace. The goal is justice for the undocumented immigrants and Muslims you want cruelty for. I will not make peace that empowers bullies. I will make peace with the people they are oppressing. I will make peace with the ones they marginalize.
I am someone who likes, and wants urgently, to get along with people, as stridently as this may be written. But I want to get along with EVERYONE in this country, not just the people at the top. Because I love this country, all of it. And if you do not act as if you love all this country – especially the most vulnerable people in it – I will choose them over you, every time. Because I believe in the fact – and am willing to sacrifice my life on the fact – that every single goddamn person in this goddamn country deserves love; deserves to be in a country that knows it cares about them; deserves not to feel like an alien in the place they work, eat, sleep and raise their children; deserves not to be sexually harassed because their bodies are seen as objects or plain things for a billionaire and his cronies; deserves not to be cheated out of a decent wage and education and healthcare.
If you are cruel to them, then we will have to part ways, because I am not and I will fight fire with fire or do whatever it takes to stop you. I will not shake your hand, bully, while your cronies beat up my friends.
And it is cruel. It is cruel to tell a woman that the people who cheer at “grab her by the pussy” and “lock her up” and “I moved on her like a bitch” – it is cruel to tell her you have to smile and to turn the other cheek.
It is cruel to tell black individuals, when they are being unconstitutionally stopped-and-frisked under the infamous attorney general Giuliani, that they should play nice in the face of private prisons built on profit and racism, and that they should turn the other cheek in the face of a President who insists that black men are guilty of death, as with the Central Park 5, and insists they are guilty when there is DNA evidence to the contrary and the real perpetrator has confessed.
I can think of few things crueler than telling Hispanics to play nice when people want to deport them across the border, ripping undocumented men, women, and children out of their homes and into deportation camps in ways that would make Hitler blush, with a giant deportation force and a constant demonization of even the youngest and most vulnerable of them.
I can think of few things more heartless than to tell someone who is disabled and looked anxiously for hope and fairness that they have to respect someone who makes the bullying worse, who indicates that the bullying is OK.
I can think of few things more cruel than to say to those who fought for same-sex marriage, often deeply in the closet, and who had hopes that one day they would not be fired or kicked out of housing because they were lesbian, gay, trans, or genderqueer…for you to tell them that they have to make nice to people who have called them an abomination, who want nothing more than to break their bonds of love, who want to make it easier than ever to segregate them, who would return them to the suicidal effects of electroshock therapy, who wants nothing more than a license for paternalistic hate.
I am not going to be cruel to these people.
And so I am not going to say those things.
And I am going to fight against everyone who does say those things as hard as I know how.
And I am going to fight anyone who will sideline these and any other of the many groups of people Trump has sidelined.
The preachers are hired and in full force, like the Negro preachers hired to pacify the cruelly treated slaves. But I will not join their ranks.
This is not the time to play nice. This is the time to fight.
Buckle up America.
Thank you for reading.
PS: I have a Patreon, in case you want to help me keep doing what I’m doing.
I’m against urging people to dry their tears; there is good reason to cry for a long, long time.
So that’s what this is about.
I’ve noticed we hurt in different ways. And maybe, by accepting each other’s pain, advocating for each other’s pain and hurt — well, I’m not saying we can make everything better, but I think we can help each other.
I’ve heard of the five stages of grief. But they don’t strike me as stages, as if one is more or less “mature” than another, or as if your goal is to be on a linear path to get from A to B. No one way of grieving is more or less “mature” or “superior” than another. They’re all needed.
For example, when I looked in my Facebook feed recently I saw that there were insightful, valuable things said by multiple people. And some of the things said weren’t compatible — like the people who said they would close themselves off from Trump supporters and the others who said they’d open up to them. Those are opposite positions, on their face. But as I looked closer — I realized that both reactions were right. They weren’t contradicting each other. The just grieved differently.
We all grieve a bit differently, and too often that grief is demonized because it’s not identical to what someone else feels.
But the truth is that here, at the cusp of a nightmare, we will all need all the ways people are grieving.
We need the deniers.
We need people who help people for whom the reality of a Trump presidency and Republican Congress is too horrifying to deal with or contemplate. We need to defend their choices to defriend Trump supporters, because those choices deny Trump supporters their terms. They make clear that the support of Trump is unacceptable. They demonstrate to us and the rest of the United States that this isn’t something that Trump supporters can just shrug off and go back to business as usual, forcing us to accept it. No. What you did by voting Trump in was despicable, it was intolerable, it was hateful, and it was ugly. We need people to make it clear that there are no silver linings that make the choice acceptable. We need to protect these people with valuable perspectives from people who want to crush them or intrude or force themselves into their personal space. We need to give them support. And these people who roundly reject anything but a world without a Trump presidency and a Republican Congress and Conservative Supreme Court draw a picture for us of the future that we can fight for. We need them so that we realize what we are fighting, so that we don’t forget and get complacent about turning the dreams they need to protect into realities, so that the country doesn’t forget how thoroughly unacceptable and shameful the choice nearly half of its citizens made is.
We need the people who are angry.
Like it or not, as we saw here, few things are more powerful than anger. Anger created the Trump presidency. Anger, to some extent, will get us out of it. Yes, empathy helps, but raw anger often helps more. It helps us actually physically do things, like vote and rail and determinedly fight, to make things better. And some people need to be angry. Anger is how people gather the energy they often so desperately need to take back their lives. And so we need to support those who are angry, realizing that the anger comes from a deep sense of love and care in their heart for those hurt, and legitimate fear for what is to come if they don’t fight. And the anger can blossom into love and advocacy and activism that can create a wave of change. Even violence (as much as I don’t support it) gives voices to the unheard, especially if others do not demean the angry but, without condoning the violence, become advocates for the angry, representing their fear and pain. If there is one thing that this campaign taught us, it is that anger can create change. For many of us, Obama was like a vacation, and complacency dampened our resolve. But now those who are angry can reinvigorate our base and give us the energy and passion many need to fight. We need you badly.
We need the people who bargain.
We need people who come to the table and make small compromises for us in the pursuit of larger change. The ones who will go out and argue and debate and reason with the other side. This isn’t everyone’s inclination, but some of us can’t help ourselves. We need to go back and forth with the other side. We need to debate. We need to build bridges. We need to make things a little better for ourselves and others, even if that means wading and tolerating absolutely asinine, offensive, thoroughly disgusting positions. It’s not for everyone. We still need people who are angry to show how terrible those positions are to fuel a movement that can give us powerful change. We need deniers who can paint for us a better world without those positions, so we have something to fight for and can bind closer together in the strongholds when we need to. But we also need people who will take advantage of the smallest of opportunities we have, in the meantime — hopefully, ultimately, bringing some people from the other side over, or at least doing those small movements of the dial.
We need the people who are depressed.
Because what happened is sad. We need to realize that some others are sad, too. And we need to help them without ignoring their pain, because this hurts. The reality is that it hurts. And the people who are depressed have come to grips with the fact that it hurts, and they need to serve as reminders, too. We need angry people fighting, but not everyone can afford to be angry. We need deniers, but some people are forced into these worlds or are not able to ignore them. We need bargainers, but we also need people who can see and feel for their own hurt and the hurt of others. People who can cry and be a voice for our tears. Because if we’re honest, we’re all hurting right now, and we all need a place for us, when reality hits us in our face cruelly, to cry. Not just to be comforted. Not to be rushed into “being OK.” Not to be told to ignore. But to just admit the honest truth, and cry.
We need the people who accept (not be OK with, but accept) the world we are in and work to love the people in it.
Not people that are OK with it. But we do need to see the people who have given up fighting and somehow have kept going. Because we still have to live in this world, somehow, and there’s only one life, and not all of us can fight all the time. Some may be exhausted, and that’s OK; maybe we need to let them rest and help them believe in a better world. The truth, however cold and cruel it is, and the thing we’re all so terrified to say, is that this might be the world we are in now, at least for a good while. And if that’s the case, these people will be the people we need to lean on sometimes when, in spite of cruel truths we will likely face, we somehow will have to keep going for people who depend on us. It’s not that it’s OK. It’s not. It’s that it’s not OK, but rejecting it as much as the rest of us do is too hard for them and they can’t afford to fight, although they still show love in the corners they can. If you get tired, these are the people who may be here for you with a sliver of life in the brutal forced acceptance of a harsh reality. These people may be the trailblazers in how to live (or even die) in the current climate. Yes, we need these people, too, if for nothing else than that they provide a give a blueprint of how to live in Trump’s world when we are forced to accept that reality. And some of us may need them as a pit stop before we recharge and go out to fight, or embrace our sadness, or return to anger, or return to denial again. Because in the midst of tragedy, some of us need moments of beauty that make us smile in spite of overwhelming resignation.
I’m not trying moralize; these aren’t stages of progression. These are types of ways that individual people grieve, and each of them gives us something we may need at some point or another if we, as a group and individually, are going to keep going. We’re all going to be dealing with our grief differently in the next few years, but we can still work together, even when (as may happen with bargainers and deniers oftentimes, for example) we may have to work apart.
I’m sorry. It’s hard. I hurt; you likely hurt, too. I can’t promise it will be OK. But I can say that you are needed, important, and loved. I need you. We will need you, as our lives go on…
Together.
PS: Thank you for reading. I have a Patreon, in case you want to help me keep doing what I’m doing.
I’ve been thinking about cultural appropriation, especially as I see many people upset with the concept.
Let’s look at what the problem is.
Suppose a rich guy bought the same car you did. Same color, style, etc. And then they started stereotyping you — talking about how they were embracing the “slumming” lifestyle, how quaint it was to drive that car instead of their Lamborghini, how driving your car was like embracing a lazy and uneducated lifestyle, etc. He defines the way other people look at you by imitating this one part of your existence. And when he’s tired of that, he moves on to someone else.
It’s that same impulse of irritation children get when one imitates the other. The whole “stop copying me” thing.
The reason it’s rude is because it’s an imitation that gives you more control over who the other person is and how they are seen than that person. It can be disrespectful — not for no reason, but because you’re taking traditions that may mean a lot to the people they’re coming from, and then using that tradition to define them in ways they don’t want to be defined. Like trapping them in a box where they don’t have a voice, and taking over their voice and speaking for them.
It’s just not very nice. And it’s completely different from respecting the other person or culture and realizing that your indulgence in parts of their culture IN NO WAY defines their culture or gives you more control over it than they have.
It’s claiming authority to define a culture that’s the problem, not your respect of the culture. The problem comes when one is doing it from a sense a pride or superiority instead of humility and respect. And let’s be honest — it’s hard to do some things (like blackface, given the history) from a sense of pride and respect. Why not be considerate?
I mean, relax. Explore other cultures. Respect them. But use some humility; don’t think you have authority to define a culture people have been living in their whole lives because you participated.
You’re a participant, not a definer.
Have an awesome Halloween.
P.S. I have a Patreon, in case you want to help me keep doing what I’m doing.
The Amazing Atheist’s “Answering SJWs” series isn’t actually about having a dialogue, as in listening to the concerns of the concerns of those on the other side and giving real answers that debunk them.
It is yet another dog-and-pony show for TJ. It’s his chance to avoid answering insightful questions raised and just use those questions as an opportunity to go on self-serving rants, giving the impression to gullible fans that he’s actually in support of rational debate all the while.
The first question TJ answers in his second video is from Steve Shives, who asked that, if so many anti-SJWs abhor third-wave feminism as opposed to second-wave feminism, what second-wave feminist literature have they actually read and admire?
In case you missed it, TJ is being asked here about what he actually knows about second-wave feminism. Steve is betting that he hasn’t read anything about it.
Steve is brilliant, as TJ responds to his question very clearly: he has read absolutely nothing.
But even more delightful than the fact he hasn’t read anything from the movement he criticizes is the resulting utter lack of self-awareness he has about his own ignorance of the movement he detests.
He states that second and third wave feminism is the same to him, and the only real feminist movement that has any credibility was first wave. Then, he says that the problem with second and third wave is at the turn of the century society was very different from today, and that women didn’t have legal rights such as the right to vote. In his opinion, first wave feminism achieved those rights by 1920, in his opinion.
To say that’s ignorantly off the mark is an understatement.
First, a clarification. Yes, of course society was very different for women at the turn of the century. That’s exactly there are different waves of feminism. No one is pretending that women still do not have the right to vote or own property. Those days are long past, which is the reason second and third wave feminism succeeded the first wave movement. The whole point was to move on and have conversations about other issues women faced.
I mean, TJ’s argument basically boils down to his annoyance that there are more waves of feminism after women’s status in society improved, and he doesn’t seem to realize that multiple waves of feminism exist for the express purpose of addressing women’s changing condition in society. If you think women’s entire social and legal inequality in America was due to their inability to vote, you are completely out of touch with the history of feminism.
So when he blurts such a colossal non-point as “American society was different in those times,” my response is that’s the idea. If you understood the first thing about second and third wave feminism, you’d realize that.
TJ also exposes how little he actually has bothered educating himself about feminism by further lumping second and third wave feminism under the same vague caricature of “controlling sex”, “controlling the media,” and getting “special privileges for women.” All are impossibly unclear and ill-defined allegations, as are most of his charges against feminism. But the most important thing here is that he seems to be laboring under the delusion that second wave feminism had nothing to do with achieving women’s legal rights and amounts only to the third-wave feminism’s goals of criticizing the perception of women in media and society.
He is wrong.
It’s easy to see that Steve Shives’s intention in asking him about second wave feminism was to expose his ignorance on it, and he did.
Because TJ says that he doesn’t need to read books by second-wave feminists because he can “look at history and what they’ve done and what they’ve championed.”
Cute, considering he clearly hasn’t done either.
We can do better.
Let’s not just run our mouths about it.
Let’s actually take a look at it.
Second-wave feminism’s primary purpose was to broaden women’s legal rights beyond the single issue of voting and property rights. It broke down the barriers that prevented women from actively participating in the public sphere. Not only did second-wave feminism draw attention to domestic violence and marital rape issues that were widely overlooked by the nation’s laws, but it also achieved the right of women to manage their own reproductive health without interference from the government in the form of the birth control pill being legalized. Women’s jobs were severely limited to being a nurse, a school teacher, or a secretary. Second-wave feminism sought to address gender discrimination in the work place, for which there were previously no laws to protect women.
The major effort of second-wave feminism was passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, making gender equality protected under the Constitution. The amendment ultimately failed because anti-feminists such as the notorious Phyllis Schlafly successfully campaigned against its ratification in 1972. What were their arguments against it? That the ERA would take away the many privileges enjoyed by women, such as the luxury of not being drafted.
Consider the irony here.
The Amazing Atheist has previously argued that the fact that women aren’t drafted in the military is a failure of feminism, ignorantly unaware that the refusal to draft women into the military is a product of anti-feminism that destroyed the primary goal of second-wave feminism!
Remember that The Amazing Atheist also claims that second-wave feminism was about fighting for the “special privileges” for women – but those were actually the arguments of ANTI-feminists at the time who opposed the second wave!
Clearly, The Amazing Atheist doesn’t know the first thing about second-wave feminism.
Here is someone who in one breathe insists that he knows all he needs to about it in order to condemn it, and yet in the next breath, in under a minute, he thoroughly betrays just how out of touch he is with the history and the most basic fundamentals of the movement. His understanding of feminism is like his understanding of most social progressive movements. He projects his own personal conjecture as if it is actually a sober-minded critique. He exists in a perpetual state of intellectual self-validation. He is his own echo chamber, and his followers will gleefully rally around him and solidify his bubble of ignorance. TJs mentality is, “I already know everything I need to know because it suits what I want to think, so nah. Screw your feminist books and screw history. I know things.”
He fell right into the trap Steve Shive’s question was meant to create, and shows off his ignorance.
TJ further insists he understand feminism perfectly well. He concedes that feminists argue that women are objectified and commodified, and that we still live in a patriarchy. He rightfully says that feminists believe that media is male-dominated, the political system is male-dominated, entertainment is male-dominated, and religion is male-dominated. Yet according to TJ, none of this is true. There’s no evidence that any of it is true and it’s all bullshit, right in the face of the fact that the disproportionate amount of men versus women in these fields is well-documented.
Let’s take the two that are in my opinion the most bold-faced of lies. First, TJ’s claim that there is no evidence that politics are male-dominated. Any reasonable person should be shaking their heads at this.
Yes, the fact that women make up 51% of the population and yet only 18% of Congress is bullshit. The fact that only recently in the year 2016 has a woman been nominated for president by a major party for the very first time is bullshit. The United States currently ranks 60th in the world in women’s representation in politics, behind even countries with a long histories of the oppression of women like Rwanda. The vast majority of the politics in the United States, including policies about women’s own bodies and reproductive health, are being decided by men.
But… politics are totally not male-dominated, you guys. Move along. Nothing to see here.
As if this wasn’t as ridiculous on its own, TJ actually argues that religion is not dominated by men.
Did you read that?
He argues that religion is not dominated by men.
Seriously.
Let’s not even get into the fact that the Bible routinely sanctions taking virgins as spoils of war, stoning women for not being virgins on their wedding night, and calls for women to be submissive to their husbands and quiet in churches. Most atheists who read this blog are fully aware of this, and TJ as an atheist who has built his channel are criticizing religion absolutely should be, too.
Let’s talk about the fact that most of the major Christian denominations the United States, including Southern Baptists, Mormons, and Catholics, still do not allow women to become ordained.
Anyone who grew up in the church can tell you that women are still widely taught to be submission to their husbands and allow him to be the spiritual leader of the household.
And of course, there is the treatment of women in the religion of Islam at the hands of Muslim clerics which brings me to TJs most unbelievable and pitiful gaffe in the entire video.
When asked what he is doing to actually empower moderate Muslims and work with them to solve problems, TJ responds by saying that people should be less concerned with him refusing to actually do anything about the things he ceaselessly complains about in regards to Islam and to be more worried that other problems exist, such as the fact that Saudi Arabian Muslim clerics like Dr. Salih bin Fawzan issue fatwas declaring that girls of any age can be married off to older men.
To state the obvious for the sake of his supporters, this is what a deflection looks like.
The question isn’t about whether or not people are more concerned about you or human rights violations in Muslim countries.
The question that’s being asked is if you care so much about what’s happening in Saudi Arabia, then what the hell are you doing about it? TJ didn’t have a response for this because he isn’t doing anything. So instead, he goes on an incoherent rant about the dangers of “illiberal, intolerant, and frankly disgusting” Muslims.
But hey, I’ll give him points for going meta and using the three words that most perfectly describe his positions on almost everything in regards to human rights.
Here we see the root of TJs feigned concern about the treatment of human beings in Islam. TJ, earlier in the video, also argued that if someone was to say women in Saudi Arabia need feminism, he’d be right behind that. Yet to say women in the United States need feminism is “ridiculous.” Because apparently, in order for women to need feminism, they have to be denied the right to travel or go into public without male permission, denied the right to drive, forced to cover their bodies in public under threat of legal punishment, and face the threat of honor killings for having premarital sex. There is no in between, ladies. Either you live under the most oppressive and misogynistic religious theocracy on earth, or you’re perfectly equal in every way to men and should shut up already. This is the cognitive wasteland TJs belies concerning the proper place of feminism.
The fact that it takes such extremes for TJ to admit feminism is necessary betrays something striking about him.
He doesn’t actually give a damn about women in Saudi Arabia. Their suffering is a convenient talking point for him to silence women in America about their own experiences.
This is a classic game of victim Olympics. Tedious and pointless, and meant only to silence one set of victims while shamelessly using the other as bargaining chip.
But, going back, remember what TJ said about religion, about it not being male-dominated? That’s bullshit, and there is no evidence for it. However, contradictorily, he states that Saudi Arabia, a country ruled by religious theocracy, is the only country where women are truly oppressed, and Islam oppresses women.
The fact that TJ can rationalize holding these two thoughts in his head at the same time tells me about the purpose of these videos. Whatever argument is the most convenient talking point to dismiss feminism, he will run with no matter how inconsistent and intellectually dishonest he has to be to do it.
If you say American women need feminism, he’ll say you’re not really oppressed, and he’ll use the oppression of women at the hands of religious dogma to make you look like a whiny crybaby who doesn’t have real problems.
If you then say religion is male-dominated, he’ll say he can’t possibly understand why feminists think that is true and there’s no evidence to support it.
I wish I was making this up.
So when religious oppression of women offers a convenient opportunity to dismiss women’s issues in the West, he’ll take it. When religious oppression of women means he needs to agree with a popular feminist argument, he’ll then rationalize away the same exact thing he just used as his own talking point.
In the video, these two things happened with minutes of each other. And the fanboys eat that shit up.
He will admit that religion is oppressive to women if that means that he can get out of talking about the disadvantages women face in America. But don’t dare ask him to actually have a conversation about the oppressive nature of religion because that would require him to have a real conversation about how women are disadvantaged rather than simply mentioning their marginalization in passing to make a point.
The only time that TJ is ever willing to admit that women are oppressed in any meaningful way is when he can use the existence of that oppression to diminish the issues women face in the West. And if he can also use that oppression to criticize Muslims and Islam, that’s all the better.
He’ll gladly talk about Muslims oppressing women, but the minute you point out that it’s also men oppressing women, his brain comes to a screeching halt and goes into denial mode.
Religion is not male-dominated, but Islam and Muslims are a problem. Right.
This endless game of hide the ball has been utterly mastered by TJ. He will admit that feminism is needed somewhere only when it can be used to deny that feminism isn’t needed elsewhere. Then when feminists say okay, then let’s talk about how religion is male-dominated, he then insists that there’s nothing to talk about. When your position on a particular subject changes dramatically based on the context of the conversation and whether or not that position leads to a conclusion you like, you need to stop pretending you are a critical thinker. You need to stop pretending that this bullshit has anything to do with the truth and rationality.
