Though I rarely have time, I occasionally check out what’s being produced in atheism. And thus I went on a binge of Noel Plum videos recently. My entryway was researching what happened to The Atheist Conference, which collapsed almost as soon as its planning began, and whose promoters weirdly slagged off MythCon while simultaneously claiming to do exactly what MythCon was doing: promoting civil dialog among divided atheists along the socio-political spectrum. Plum has two useful videos on the debacle (I recommend watching the second, Atheist Wars; and then going to the first, Worse Than Kilroy, only if you want to dive deeper). I then watched a random sample of his other stuff.

He’s a bit shouty, which is hard to keep listening to for hours on end on long drives. But otherwise I like a lot of his stuff; and his avowed critical approach to things. He sometimes sounds a bit like a social conservative (in the European sense), but really he’s more like a liberal critic of the far left. I agree with him sometimes. And I disagree with him other times. But I’m also okay with listening to reasonable people I disagree with, even when they drop the evidence ball really badly (though I very much prefer when they don’t). But as I went through cataloguing the difference between his good arguments and bad, I noticed something. A rather consistent thing kept happening.

When Plum cites evidence, and specific actual examples, he tends to be right—or at least make a worthy point; when he just makes abstract assertions and generalizations and doesn’t present any data or real examples, he tends to be wrong. And I realized…this explains a lot of things that have happened over the last half decade of movement atheism.

Trolls & Demagogues vs. The Merely Wrong

Plenty of folk who voice bizarre or implausible or outdated beliefs, when they do “cite” evidence in support of their arguments, it’s typically cherry picked, or made-up, or massaged, or there is some fallacious disconnect between what they claim as evidence and the conclusion they want to reach. These are fraudulent reasoners. And fraudulent reasoners are immune to evidence. I believe each side of any political or values debate in atheism—both conservative and liberal—mistakenly assumes everyone on the other side is a fraudulent reasoner. Because they encounter so many who are, and too often when they encounter those who aren’t, those who aren’t still fail to correctly attend to evidence, the one thing that would correct them if they were a good reasoner, because everyone is fallible, and unconsciously subject to prejudice and bias…while fraudulent reasoners will never be corrected in this, because they have no intention of actually formulating sound arguments; they will simply invent endless excuses to ignore the evidence. Which looks very similar. So uncharitably, everyone assumes they are the same. This makes it difficult for either side to listen to and learn from the other. And that creates tribalism and division.

A good example in Plum’s case is his video Want Sports Gender Equality? Stop Whining and Do Something. Eyerollingly ridiculous, and in result, inadvertently sexist. Notably, he never cites any examples of anyone ever saying the thing he is criticizing. So what happens? Immediately he goes off the rails of reality. He instead attacks some sort of fictional feminist he invented in his head. Had he actually done research on this, and committed to the first rule of good reasoning—never criticize fictional people; always give a real example of the real person whose arguments or claims you are challenging—he would have produced a much more useful and correct piece of criticism.

But even that would only be half good. It would have been really good, if he committed to the second rule of good reasoning—don’t just pick the idiot in the room; make sure you steel man the opposition, by finding its best representative, not its worst. It can be fun, and useful, to pick on the idiot. Quality entertainment. And educational. But if you don’t mention the better opposition (at least to acknowledge it, if you aren’t going to voice any criticism of it), you will come across as someone who thinks the idiot is the best opponent you could have taken on. Which doesn’t make you look great. People will read your having done that as disingenuous. They will categorize you as a fraudulent reasoner. When really, you just screwed up. You let your biases run that episode. Rather than applying your own avowed principles to every show you do.

Apart from village idiots, amateur activists and internet fools—and not, for example in this case, the actual athletes in question or a professional journalist or analyst—no one has ever said all women in sports should always get paid the same as men regardless of associated revenue. In some cases revenue isn’t even relevant (e.g. national Olympics teams do not exist to earn revenue). But when it is—free market commercial sports—disparities aren’t all explained by revenue. The gender pay gap in sports has actually narrowed a lot in the last ten years (most reports show it went from achieving effective equity in about 20% of all sports to now over 80% of them), but in many cases it remains in defiance of any proportion to revenue. If one team brings in the same revenue as another, those teams should be paid the same. But sometimes that isn’t happening. And that’s what angers people. People who know what they’re talking about.

For example, in America women’s soccer is more successful than men’s (and by literally every measure now). Yet women players are paid a mere fraction as much (or were: a lawsuit just ended in a negotiated settlement of equitable pay). See this article in Forbes. And this article in Bloomberg Business. And certainly this article in The New York Times. (Those right there? The kind of things Plum could have read had he followed the rule of never arguing in the absence of evidence: always check first). Even the WNBA, which obviously earns vastly less than the NBA (so we certainly shouldn’t expect equal pay by gender there, any more than we’d expect bottom ranking men’s teams to earn as much as top), is still not at parity in pay even in proportion to revenue: NBA payroll is 50% of its revenue; WNBA payroll is 33%. That raises some eyebrows.

Audience bias is also a thing (there isn’t any objectively coherent reason we should be so much more interested in men’s competitions than women’s), though that’s only curable culturally (audience interests would have to change). But endorsements can also be gender biased—from direct corporate bias (e.g. marketing departments simply assuming female athletic endorsers don’t appeal to the market, even when that actually hasn’t been demonstrated), and from bias in media coverage underplaying women (e.g. shows and magazines will under-cover women relative to men, thus making them less attractive as product endorsers). Not all that disparity is bias—much of it is simply in expected proportion to audience and revenue. But some of it is bias. Reality is complicated that way. And reasoners who attend to evidence before making arguments, tend to figure that out. And after they keep finding that out a lot, they become humbled by it.

But on top of all that: look at what the Women’s Sporting Foundation is asking for…

  • Attend women’s sporting events
  • Support companies that advocate for women’s athletics
  • Encourage television stations and newspapers to cover women’s sports
  • Sign up to coach a girls’ sports team, whether at the recreational or high school level
  • Encourage young women to participate in sports
  • Become an advocate: if you are or know a female athlete that is being discriminated against—advocate for her rights.

Notice what’s not on the list: asking for equal pay regardless of revenue draw (there is now a similar discussion of sexism as a problem in eSports). They well know the gap is more a product of women being ignored, than of their being paid inequitably (even though there is evidence many still are, hence the points above; although note: progress on that score has also been moving fast). It makes no logical sense, for example, to say women aren’t as strong as men, ergo they should be paid less, because that actually isn’t how sports enthusiasm is measured. When women are competing with women, the only game on is strength-equal. And trust me, women’s hockey is just as exciting as men’s. You wouldn’t even notice a difference, if no one told you which you were watching.

Plum’s argument is thus just as illogical. Women are accomplishing quite a lot. They are exceptional athletes, putting on amazing performances, and filling seats. So they aren’t filling fewer seats because they suck. They are filling fewer seats, because we suck. We aren’t paying them the kudos and fandom they are due. We should get over our biases, and realize it’s as much fun watching women play, as men. So then women can finally have as many opportunities to excel at sport as men do. But you can’t legislate that. It’s just a matter of asking people to think about it; until enough generations absorb the message.

So Plum completely hosed this one, because he didn’t base anything he said on any evidence. He argued against no actual opponent, and checked no facts. And in the absence of facts as a corrective, all that came out of his mouth was bias. The same sexist bias most people have, no matter how much they insist they don’t. But that doesn’t make him a demagogue or a troll. He’s not a fraudulent reasoner. Nor is he a Nazi or a sexist pig. He’s just wrong.

Contrast that with Plum’s treatment of a fallacious argument made by feminist Steve Shives, in Peak Tinfoil Hat. Here Plum is criticizing not just a specific real world example of something an actual feminist said (and not some rando, either, but an influential voice in movement atheism)—which is already looking like we’re on track for something actually good for a change—but he focuses on an argument that actually appears disturbingly often in feminist circles. So it’s not a straw man. It’s not a steel man, either. But rather a solid example of something that happens a lot. Not all feminists are this uncritical. But enough of them are, that Plum has a point to make that’s worth hearing.

In this video, Plum catches Shives arguing as an example of sexism, something that happened that actually has well known explanations other than sexism, and Shives did nothing to rule those out, before jumping straight to an assumption about cause, without evidence for his assumption. Shives is no different than Plum. He’s not a fraudulent reasoner. He just screwed this up. He’s just wrong. Just like Plum is from time to time. But I expect neither will ever listen to the other, because they each think the other is a fraud. So nothing gets learned. And nothing gets better.

In this case, Shives reports a single instance of a single professional email sent by a woman, that when followed up by a man got a reply. This could have happened even had she sent the follow-up. So we can’t actually tell the correlation is causation here. (Remember that lesson? Correlation is not causation? You have many more methodological hoops to jump through before you can confirm a correlation indicates a cause. Science is all about that.) Plum covers every angle of this. And he’s completely right. Shives hosed this. In fact, Shives hosed it twice—because it sounds weirdly similar to another case in the media around the same time, in which steps were taken to confirm the correlation was likely causal. It certainly seems odd to me that with a really good example floating around, almost identical to the one Shives used, that he would instead use this totally dismal example, that’s easily destroyed with a minute of common sense. Evidently, like Plum above, Shives didn’t do any research either. They’re pretty much the same dude. Just on opposite ends.

That good example? The office experiment run by Martin Schneider and Nicole Hallberg. They switched email signatures, each pretending to be the other, and compared productivity results and client behavior over a whole week, with prior weeks. The result was pretty damning. Clients were treating the woman like shit and forcing her to spend more time and do more work. Even when she wasn’t actually a woman. They only thought she was. Had Shives used that example (or…correctly described it, if in fact he was at the wrong end of a telephone game on this one), Plum would not have needed to make any video about it.

Of course, we well know, that the most pernicious thing about unconscious bias, is that targets of that bias can’t tell when things are going against them for other reasons, or because of sexism or racism, or any other axis of prejudice. To find out, you have to run controlled tests, like what Schneider and Hallberg did. And indeed, even formal scientific tests have verified biases exist, along many axes of targeted discrimination, and usually unconsciously (the people acting with the observed bias, are not even aware of it). But those same studies have also found that the same actions (e.g. not hiring or promoting someone; treating someone with more distrust; etc.) are also often caused by reasons having nothing to do with bias. And because both look identical, you can’t tell them apart. Not individually. You can only tell something is going on by looking at actions in aggregate. And even that won’t tell you which acts were a result of bias. Only that some percentage of them were. Frustrating, I know. Imagine that. You know you are being discriminated against, but never know who is doing it or when. Get Out made a horror story out of that.

So critics of feminism can be disastrously wrong…and feminists can be disastrously wrong—and their critics entirely right to point that out. Feminists need to reason better, to persuade anyone they’re right. So they should be listening to critics, precisely so they can up their game. Feminists shouldn’t want bad reasoning or backfiring rhetoric in their ranks any more than any other advocacy movement would.

If only they’d listen to each other.

And that pattern plays out the whole way through. Plum does logic way better than Shives. He just doesn’t always do evidence better than Shives. Plum often gets things right—just look at his latest video on Social Justice, where evidence isn’t important, he’s just exploring conceptual space and explaining his values and policy goals; or his exposing the egregious misrepresentation of Steven Pinker by P.Z. Myers (where Plum’s evidence is extensive, and his conclusion a slam-dunk); or this video on the gender pay gap, where even if you disagree with his conclusions as to policy, as to facts he makes well-sourced points that certainly any social justice advocate needs to take seriously and think about. But often he gets things wrong. And I find the frequency of his getting things wrong, corresponds to the frequency with which he fails to bring in actual specific evidence. Which means even a good reasoner, with good values, can be wrong. And that might even be you.

Appreciating that is key to making civil engagement possible.

Replacing Listening with Hysteria, Nukes All Progress

Okay. So both sides suck. They both don’t listen when they should. They both over-rely on fantasies. They both vilify critics rather than learn from them. They both use fallacies. They both forget to fact-check. They both forget to base arguments on real examples; and to steel-man instead of straw-man. They both lose track of nuance and complexity. They are pretty much the same people. It’s that horseshoe all over again. They just root themselves in competing dogmas. Which neither will allow to be questioned. Of course #NotAllOfThem. But enough on both sides to be a problem. And usually the loudest, thus drowning out any reasonable voice—in fact, all to often turning on any reasonable voice as a traitor, burning bridges to allies left and right. Both sides have done this.

See The Left and Anti-Left Both Have Much Still to Learn.

But I also wrote about this last year in Why Mythicist Milwaukee Is Right and Their Critics Wrong:

What I actually said years ago about Atheism Plus, for example, does not match what any of my critics said I had said. Just see for yourself: actually watch my video on the subject and try to find any objectionable thing in it; look at my Sobrado interview (an Atheism Plus critic who—shock!—actually tried discussing it with me); even my own repeated efforts to make clear what I said—all ignored. The term was instead hijacked by opponents into something it wasn’t until it became useless.

Atheism Plus in its original form was falsely attacked as promoting a feminist purist extremism when in fact it wasn’t; it was only after that false attack rendered it a useless term that some of its advocates became those very feminist purist extremists, thus destroying the entire enterprise by turning it into what its enemies accused it of being. Consequently, I abandoned it as betrayed and dead. I now just stick with saying we need to be atheists, skeptics, and humanists, and to share the common values of compassion, honesty, and reasonableness. Which is what it was originally supposed to be about. This avoids the “baggage fallacy” of assuming I mean things I don’t. But honestly, I shouldn’t have to do that. I should be able to be listened to and believed to think only things I’ve actually said. And all should be ashamed who didn’t pay me that courtesy.

Noel Plum does this in a recent video: PZ Myers, Winters, and Logan. Watch where he brings up my original Atheism Plus blog post (all the way back in 2012), at timestamp 15:34. He shows it and quotes it to make a point about how, he claims, I had called for an unbridgeable divide between moderate/conservative and liberal atheists…but at the crucial point where he says what the sentence he quotes was about…Plum drops his methodology of basing his claims on specific actual facts, and just inserts his own words. Based on no evidence whatever. At the very moment he stops relying on evidence for his views, he gets reality entirely wrong. Funny that. Hm. Maybe we should only base our opinions on, like, evidence? And maybe, given that—I don’t know, but maybe, just maybe—we should actually go check what the evidence is first…and then (!) change our views when we find the evidence doesn’t align with what we thought.

So Plum uses exact quotes, even shows my words, about expelling and denouncing horrible people, and then just adds what isn’t there, his own comment, “Bear in mind, he’s talking about what clearly turned out to be the great majority of our community here, including myself, not some fringe group of sociopaths.” Um. No, Noel. That wasn’t about you. Or anyone like you. And you’d know that, if you’d first stop and ask yourself: Wait, who was Richard Carrier talking about there? And your often strong standard of presenting evidence—like, exact quotes of me, for example—would have served you well here. So why did you drop that ball at this point? Strange.

Notice the screencap Plum shows: he highlights the words of mine he quotes, but leaves unhighlighted the first parenthesis of the first sentence: “(I mean people like these and these).” Why didn’t Plum click through to see who “these” and “these” are? Why didn’t he tell his audience who I actually outright said I was talking about? Because he replaced his usual drive to find evidence and base claims on specific actual facts, with his own mythology and ideology. And didn’t even notice he did that. Just like all the feminists he criticizes. He did the exact same thing he complains they do.

And this is the point of my distinction earlier. Do I think Plum is a liar? Is he a fraudulent reasoner, who knows darned well what’s behind those two links, but is deliberately hiding it and lying about it instead? No. For some folks, I have enough evidence to say it’s yes. But in Plum’s case it’s the other way around. I think Noel is a totally sincere guy. Indeed, from his many other videos, even the ones I disagree with, I can confirm he’s overall a fairly reasonable guy. He’s someone who will listen to evidence more often than not; who will have a civil discussion when asked to. He makes mistakes, he is wrong about things, he has biases (like maybe a bit of sexism) that he is shielding himself against realizing the same way most people do. In other words, he’s not evil. He’s just wrong. He screwed up.

What’s behind those links, BTW? Accounts of atheists joking about raping a teenager in her own online thread about getting a Dawkins book as a gift. Atheists calling women cunts to their face. An atheist who compared one woman’s civil criticism of Dawkins to “child abuse” and published “graphic pictures of abused children to prove his point,” then engaged in wanton defamation, asked people to harass her on social media, and joked about how she can’t complain about strange men hitting on her in confined spaces because she shows cleavage. Remember your remark about sociopaths, Noel? Yeah. That’s who I was talking about.

But tons of people didn’t listen. They just jumped to the weird conclusion Noel did, based on no evidence whatever. And despite my making extensive efforts to correct the myths they kept spreading, with detailed explanations of what I did and didn’t mean (like here and here), all was ignored. No one listened. Noel, if you are frustrated that we don’t listen to you; well, we are frustrated that you don’t listen to us.

It took me a while in fact to even realize this was going on. When people started flaming me out for that post, because it was about sociopaths doing horrible things to people, I assumed that’s what they were defending. So I flamed out on them. Why on earth would it have occurred to me that anyone would think I was attacking libertarians or conservatives or centrists or egalitarians or anyone other than people who outright abandon respect for women, gays, and minorities, people who denounce humanism, and joke about raping a woman to her face? Once I realized we had been talking past each other for days, I apologized, and tried correcting the miscommunication. But by then, no one listened. Because not listening is what most people do. And that’s the problem. Plum is guilty of it. Shives is guilty of it. I used to do it too. I’m done with that now. And so should you be. Good skeptics listen. And ask. And engage civil discourse, not avoid it.

The Harris Example

It all reminds me of a conversation I actually had recently about a speech recorded by Sam Harris, his podcasted statement about Lawrence Krauss. Which was actually surprisingly sensible and nuanced. I often don’t agree with Harris. In fact, I’m a pretty harsh critic of the man’s ideas (as people know even by a recent example). I usually find his reasoning sloppy and terrible, and I think he suffers from some sexist and racist bias. Not as much as many of his critics do, but still; I’m no Harris fanboy, is what I’m saying. This podcast? Exactly the sort of thing I expected him to get face-palmingly wrong. So that he nailed it was a surprise.

A feminist man I encountered had a different take. Our conversation went something like this (paraphrasing):

Them: What Harris said on the Krauss matter was disgusting and sexist, all rape apologetics.

Me: Really? That’s a baffling comment. I watched it. It seemed very sensible to me.

Them: You must be a sexist pig then.

[Degenerated into an angry exchange until…]

Me: Wait a minute. All this time, and…hold on…what do you think Harris argued??

Them: He said all accusations of sexual harassment were just women who didn’t like ugly men hitting on them, but who’d totally be into it if the same guy were good looking.

Me: Um. That’s not what Harris said. At all.

Them: Yes it is.

Me: No it isn’t.

[Degenerated into an angry exchange until…]

Me: Look, Harris spent practically ten minutes walking through numerous, and I mean numerous, levels of a whole spectrum of sexual harassment realities, from Weinstein abuse on the top, through progressively less egregious but still bad behavior, all the way down to what Harris was saying was on the complete bottom of possible examples, the least of offenses imaginable, which would be when (and this really does happen sometimes), a woman reacts negatively to a flirtatious comment from someone she finds unattractive, when she would have reacted positively to the exact same comment if he were handsome. Harris specifically said that that was on the bottom of the scale, as an example of the least concerning event; he never said that was a large proportion or even beyond a negligible example of what does happen. He was specifically looking for what would be the weakest kind of occurrence imaginable, and then describing it. He was not saying any occurrences are that weakest kind (nor even that any of the incidents with Krauss were). He was simply describing a scale of possible things that can happen, and saying we should investigate to make sure we know where on the scale a given incident lies, and proportion our response accordingly. A perfectly sensible point to make, and surprisingly detailed and clear in its structure and logic.

Them: Well that’s not what I heard.

Me: Maybe you should actually listen to the recording this time. Actually listen. Try to get right what he said from now on. Don’t go spreading around the myth that Harris said all sexual harassment claims were just the idle complaints of unflattered women. He never said that.

[Dude leaves and never talks to me again.]

This is exactly the same thing that happened to me when I was attacked for what I said about Atheism Plus. At first I thought my attackers were defending actual rape threats and harassment campaigns and things like explicit homophobia and transphobia and blatant racism (indeed, atheists had just recently mocked a fellow blogger as a ‘coal burner’ because she had a black boyfriend…they were fucking defending that, I was thinking?). Because that’s what I was talking about. I never said anything about denouncing mere critics of feminism, for example. It took me almost a day or more to finally figure out they thought I’d said something completely different. Since I had never said such a thing, it remains baffling. Hence why it took so long for me to figure out they had gone so irrationally off the rails of reading into what I said things that I never said.

I then published a clarification, and apologized for my excessive reactions to them, because all along I had mistook them as defending sociopaths. But once I cleared that misunderstanding, no one ever listened, or even knew that it had been corrected. Every “Them” in that conversation just kept going on spreading the myth. Even after it was debunked. And it remains the mythology to this day—confused, like Jesus, for fact. Notice, that’s how anti-feminists treated me. It’s exactly the same way that that feminist treated me in the conversation about Harris: he completely fails to get correct what Harris said, and absolutely refused to ever be corrected on it. They are probably to this day still spreading the myth that Harris said all sexual harassment claims are just unflattered women who’d have “totally gone for it had he been hot.”

Both sides. Same people.

Modeling a Rational Conversation

Here is how a rational conversation would have gone:

Them: It’s unclear who you mean. Who are you condemning?

Me: [Answers the question. And now they know]

That’s it. Pretty simple, right?

So why isn’t that what anyone does?

Many other questions could have evoked valuable and productive communication and understanding like:

  • It’s unclear. Do you mean just anyone who criticizes feminism?
  • It’s unclear. Do you mean anyone who won’t label themselves a feminist?
  • It’s unclear. Do you mean people who disagree with feminists?
  • It’s unclear. Do you mean we have to see sexism everywhere or only just admit it’s out there?
  • It’s unclear. Do you mean we have to agree to certain legislative solutions or affirmative action or something?

Almost no one asked those questions. And those few who did, the only people who actually engaged with me sincerely, and thus found out—like Tony Sobrado—no one paid attention to.

Let’s stop doing that.

Model in your head what a rational conversation looks like. Then please try sticking to that model in the future.

What It Was Supposed to Be

Atheists need to have values and not be sociopaths. They need to be better than theists, not worse. That should not be a controversial thing to say. Right?

Atheists also need to be good skeptics. That means critical thinking about ourselves as well as woo, supernaturalism, and religions, and also politics and policies, ideologies and popular beliefs, science, pseudoscience, everything. That should not be a controversial thing to say. Right?

And of course atheists need to just be atheists.

Yes, P.Z. Myers is an idiot for trying to argue atheism “is” more than just unbelief in gods—because the argument is supposed to be that atheists need to be more than just atheists, not that atheism is itself already that. We need to exclude wooish charlatans who are atheists, anti-science atheists, pseudoscientific atheists, supernaturalist atheists, flat earth atheists, though we needn’t ban them, but we’re certainly going to roast them with criticism. Meanwhile, atheists who are members of the Nazi party or the KKK, who send rape or death threats, who engage in criminal activity, violate civil and human rights, and create a toxic waste dump of any community they enter, those folks have to go. The first group of people aren’t getting the message of evidence-based reasoning, and we are just always going to make fun of them, and criticize them as wrong, and rightly. The second, is simply abhorrent.

That shouldn’t be controversial. And indeed we pretty much have always agreed that was the case. There wasn’t any rift over that, as if a horde of anti-vaccination atheists were outraged we didn’t want them in our movement, that we were very much going to be criticizing and making fun of them as part of the problem that we, as organized atheists, were trying to overcome in society, every bit as much as religion. Atheists of all political and social positions agreed: the anti-vaxxers are a joke and do not represent what we want the atheism movement to be and be known for. Likewise people who mocked gay and trans people rather than engaged with those communities respectfully and critically. Likewise people who defended rape as something various women deserved.

It’s obvious most of the time. There is a reason Moby was not invited to the Reason Rally despite him being an atheist and a lot of atheists recommending him: he is a Scientologist. Sorry, we don’t want Scientologists in our movement. Which does not mean we wouldn’t have debates or interfaith conversations with them at conferences, or that we wouldn’t be civil to them, but it would always be with the understanding that they are the outsiders and not what we want normed in our movement. Those conversations, even on stage, would always be about why we don’t want them running our organizations, dictating their policy, or commanding or populating our conferences, meetups, and events.

Now carry the same point to human values.

So it’s not that we want atheism (as a concept or a description) to be defined as “skeptical, critical, scientific, empiricist, rationalist, and humanist.” That would be stupid. Like insisting democracy be “defined” only as mob rule, so that we can say no democracy exists today, because we are now defining-out-of-existence constitutional, rights-bounded, representative democracy. No. What we mean is, we don’t want our organizations controlled by Scientologists, or anti-vaxxers, or ethno-statists; we don’t want meetups and conferences in our movement promoting woo or villainy, or accepting the idea of calling women “coal burner” or “cunt.”

We don’t want anti-scientism or explicit defenses of fascism or genocide or apartheid in our movement. These should not be controversial things to say. Just as we don’t want a democracy anymore that is a mob rule, because we know now why we need democracy bounded by constitutional rights and run by dedicated experienced personnel whom we elect (which really means democratically hire) to represent us and write and vet our legislation and bylaws. That does not mean we want the word “democracy” redefined. It means we want democracy to be more than merely democracy. And we want that because we believe in rational, evidence-based reasoning, and in structuring democracy as a movement on the learned facts of history. So, too, atheism as a movement. It’s no good by itself, any more than mob rule is. Despite being nevertheless the dictionary definition of democracy, mob rule is dangerous and shitty. Hence it is democracy, yet still not enough by itself. We have learned by how that it needs to be more than that. It needs to be bounded by constitutional rights and experience-based governance.

This should allow lots of room for differences and debate. Republicans and Democrats, Libertarians and straight-up Marxists, should be able to compromise and get along and debate with civility and still work together to better our country, even while disagreeing and never yielding on some things. This is just as true in Congress as much as anywhere else. Hence all such people should be able to get along at conferences. Simply by sharing basic human values, and thus always enacting a civil engagement. And organizations should help all of them (Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians, Marxists, Whoever) in matters relevant to atheism (such as atheist rights, atheist interests, and atheist welfare and community, or whatever their mission).

But that does not mean Democrats should compromise with the KKK or Stormfront, or Republicans compromise with Antifa or Ecoterrorists. The “big tent” cannot include them. And even that does not mean dehumanizing or killing them, or stripping them of their rights, or sending them rape threats. Atheists can express any hatred of them they have and ridicule them and criticize them and exclude them from conferences and organizations, yet at the same time fully stand by the fact that they still get all their human and civil rights. We should even defend every last one of their rights, even as we loathe and denounce what they do with them—calling for it to be otherwise, is exactly the kind of criminal and nightmarish thinking the atheist community should stand against. But we should also be against equating “being a Republican” with “being a member of the KKK” and against equating “supporting BLM” with “supporting terrorism.” Do you get that? Or do I honestly have to explain this further?

Let’s Progress From Here

Acknowledging that sexism is sometimes a problem in the atheist community is simply evidence-based reasoning. And yet at the very same time assuming everything you think is sexism is sexism is still just as wrong as thinking nothing is. Both extremes are false. Both are divorced from reality. Both are a complete failure of competent skeptical reasoning.

Debating what is or might be sexist, and what is reasonable to do about it, should still be possible, and not only possible, but valued, and pursued as valuable, by every atheist who wants to be a part of organized or movement atheism. The assumption that we must either defend, platform, and embrace explicit misogynists like Stefan Molyneux or else ban anyone who refuses to call themselves a feminist or doesn’t agree with every single thing any feminist says—as if those were the only options and you had to pick a side between them—is fucking absurd. It’s the very irrationality I was against in everything I wrote about Atheism Plus.

And do note: this was an irrationality manifest on both sides. And still is. Too many atheist feminists absurdly think we must ban anyone who so much as disagrees with anything they say or any judgment they make. Likewise too many atheist non-feminists absurdly think I ever said we must ban anyone who so much as disagrees with anything feminists say or any judgment feminists make. Both sides have lost the capacity for civil discourse, civil disagreement, and honest and considerate discussions of logic and evidence. That is the world now that both have wrought. And that is why atheism is collapsing as a movement, and more or less just aging out into oblivion. If you think that’s the path to progress, you have a bizarre notion of progress.

As good humanists and skeptics, atheists need to start caring more about knowing—and understanding—why each of these disagreements exist in the community, than about just skipping that part and punishing those disagreements with coercive puritanism. And yes, the non-feminists are doing this too. Just as much as the feminists are. This myth about what I said about Atheism Plus is an example. But their campaigns of abusive harassment that led to my vitriol were real too. And continued thereafter. Now the feminists are using the same vile tactics—using lies and threats, for example, to shut down venues, and using coercion to compel people to agree with them, and campaigns of harassment, and every other like tactic. They’ve become their own enemy. Both sides ought to be wringing their hands about this. They ought to be speaking out against the abuses coming from their own side. Not just the abuses coming at them from the other.

That’s the atheism movement we all need to be working toward and advocating the embrace of. You all have that responsibility now. Stop complaining about the other side, unless you are also cleaning up your own. And take seriously this task: to learn what civil and productive discourse actually means, and what it actually looks like. Then embody it.

The right and the left nuked Atheism Plus. The right by not listening to what it was actually about, and not participating productively in its evolution and improvement. The left by becoming the divisive, puritanical bludgeoners the right had feared. They both destroyed a very basic idea: that we should all agree on the core values of reasonableness, compassion, and honesty, and be good skeptics and humanists as well as atheists. The left abandoned those ideals. The right never heard they were on offer.

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