Yesterday I posted an enhanced edition of my Ohio speech on feminism. Today I am posting key material from my Portland speech that extends the same argument to a broader application, focusing on some of the recent public statements of Peter Boghossian…

Gay Pride

Evidence-based reasoning that corrects for our innate fallibility leads to the discovery that women and other mistreated groups, for whatever reason (sometimes because of social prejudices, sometimes because of physical realities), unfairly lack access to the same privileges as everyone else, and that human happiness cannot be advanced if we just sit by and allow that status quo to remain. If there is no God justly distributing resources and advantages and consequences, then we have to do that. Only we can fix an unjust world. That is the fundamental realization of naturalism as a philosophy.

But many big names in atheism today, whom the media pay perhaps undue attention to as if they represented us all, fail badly at this. I outlined this fact for a few of them yesterday. Portland philosophy professor and author, Peter Boghossian, is one of them. Boghossian tweeted the following [in 2014] about gay pride:

I’ve never understood how someone could be proud of being gay. How can one be proud of something one didn’t work for?

Then when he got trounced by Twitter critics, his only defense was:

Questioning that one can be proud to be gay is a leftist blasphemy.

The best and clearest destruction of his bizarre misunderstanding on this came from Greta Christina (Peter Boghossian and What Gay Pride Actually Means). And what she said amounts to some basic truths that connect to naturalism as a worldview (which follows necessarily from combining atheism with scientific facts). Her commentary also illustrates the difference between living by a good epistemology or a bad one.

Epistemology Fail Number One: Boghossian didn’t check basic references (Wikipedia, Gay Pride event website FAQs, or even ask a gay person what it meant to them…after all, somehow I’m sure Boghossian would insist he has lots of gay friends).

For example, SF Pride’s FAQ would have answered his question before he even asked it:

The annual Pride Celebration [in San Francisco] commemorates the rebellion of LGBT patrons of the Stonewall Inn in New York City’s Greenwich Village in response to a routine police raid on June 27, 1969. The following year, a “Gay-In” that took place on June 27, 1970 that was the early progenitor of the current Pride Celebration. Since 1972, the event has been held every year, though under various names: “Christopher Street West” in 1972, “Gay Freedom Day” from 1973 to 1980, then “International Lesbian & Gay Freedom Day Parade” from 1981 to 1994, and finally, its present appellation, San Francisco Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Pride Celebration.

Since its modest beginnings, San Francisco Pride has grown to be one the largest and most well-known Pride events in the world. Pride has come to symbolize several things: the long history of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer dignity, the freedom of all people to meaningfully and proudly express their sexual and gender identities, and the commitment of LGBT people to combating oppression. From this history of rebellion grew the mission of San Francisco LGBT Pride: to educate the World, celebrate our culture, commemorate our heritage, and liberate our people.

To fail at so rudimentary an epistemological task as checking Wikipedia (or asking even just one friend in-the-know, or checking a website actually about the thing you are curious about) is such an irresponsible and epic fail that if a Creationist had asked an equally boneheaded question just as easily answered with an equally rudimentary use of Google, atheists would ruthlessly mock and ridicule them. Boghossian behaved exactly like a Creationist, and got treated exactly like a Creationist. He even kept on like a Creationist by claiming questioning gay pride (= questioning evolution) is a leftist blasphemy. In other words, dismissing all his critics as dogmatists with nothing to correct him on. Nothing other than all of the facts.

Epistemology Fail Number Two: That. Boghossian didn’t listen to his critics’ arguments, at all. They had pointed out that he failed at basic research, just like a Creationist, and in result said something profoundly ignorant, and they then provided him with all the information correcting his factual mistake. Which criticism he then called accusing him of blasphemy. Exactly like a Creationist would. Again, when evolutionists point out and mock Creationists’ ignorance and failure of basic research (when said Creationist says something ignorant and bigoted instead), Creationists often respond exactly the same way: by insisting questioning evolution is the new blasphemy (they even made a whole movie about it).

Ironically, that is what it means to shut down discussion. That is what it means to refuse to have an adult conversation. By simply declaring your critics dogmatists, learning nothing, picking up all your marbles and pouting your way home, refusing to have any conversation at all. I say ironically because Boghossian keeps saying these same things of his critics: that they just shut down discussion and refuse to have an adult conversation. When in fact, it is quite evidently the reverse. It seems pretty clear that Boghossian is the one refusing to have an adult conversation—by not even responding to his critics or even acknowledging what their criticism was.

That is quintessential bad epistemology.

Meanwhile, science-based metaphysics entails social injustice is a physical reality.

Social prejudice is a real, physical thing, manifested by social systems. It is physically present in the synaptic structure of the brains of those immersed in those societies, causing them to think and act in certain ways, and in the brains of those who design and enforce social and political systems, which then causally affect the lives of disadvantaged persons. The most obvious manifestation of this is the way we structure society so as to not recognize gay marriages, a reality many of us have been actively working hard to dismantle and change. And also the way people become enculturated to think beating up gay people is something they righteously need to do. Or the way they think they should be discriminating against gay people in places of business. This is a widespread physical reality. And it is not limited to the minds of the religious. These prejudices easily remain imprinted on the brain even after religion is abandoned—and even if religion was never installed, simply because these prejudices are pervasively materialized in our wider culture (as a result, homophobia is still disturbingly common among atheists; as is racism; no, seriously, really horrible racism).

Accordingly, contrary to Boghossian’s implicit assumption that gay pride is not something one works for, in actual reality struggling and fighting against that prejudiced physical system, and surviving it, especially doing it cooperatively and successfully with others in your same situation, is something one can do, and something one can work for, and thus something one can be proud of. One can be proud of choosing to be out and open about their authentic self and battling and surviving the consequences of doing so, and by doing that, helping those in worse situations who can’t be out and open. They can be proud because their very openness and celebration is undermining and physically chipping away at prejudices inherent in the system. Pride also can be felt in this show of numbers and thus voting support for the cause of equality, and the pride of coming together to fight all this, and to do it proudly rather than ashamedly.

Good naturalism, good philosophy, and thus in fact good atheism, means finding out how reality works first, before declaring notions that reinforce the attitudes and ignorance that perpetuate social injustices like homophobia and anti-gay bigotry. Which means if this kind of failure on Boghossian’s part is typical, then it means professor Boghossian is a really bad philosopher.

Godless Misogyny

Boghossian’s twitter feed has become increasingly disturbing, filled with smug and ignorant right-wing pronouncements. I no longer recognize the man. He looks like consistently uncomfortable company now. That could just be my perception. So I’ll let you peruse his feed and judge that for yourself. I have no idea how to deal with it personally, other than to just avoid him. Because he never shows any interest in engagement with anyone who criticizes him for this stuff. That all might be subjective. But what I can objectively demonstrate is that he has cozied up to flagrant and revolting misogynists like Stefan Molyneux. Boghossian even promotes his book with fawning blurbs by Molyneux, and has appeared on Molyneux’s show several times, always in chummy fashion.

This might be as disturbing as the revelation that Michael Shermer is best friends with Dinesh D’Souza, and actually declared to a court of law that D’Souza was the most honest and best of men, and tried to get this most dishonest and slimiest of scoundrels released without sentence from his felony conviction for political corruption. You heard right. D’Souza. Infamously among the most repugnant liars for a right-wing Christ that ever there was (example example example example example example example example example). How can Shermer have any credibility after that?

Still, Boghossian’s affiliation might yet be worse. Stefan Molyneux is a scary piece of work (see RationalWiki, Wikipedia, and tons documented on We Hunted the Mammoth, and tons of testimonials and documentation at MolyneuxRevealed). I would be horrified even to be in that guy’s company. Yet he and Boghossian seem like besties. WTF? Like Thunderf00t (whom I discussed yesterday), Molyneux is an über-popular sexist, anti-feminist YouTube atheist with a huge following. He is, of course, a radical anarcho-libertarian and climate science denialist (yet informed Libertarians appear to despise him as an ignorant poser: his economic knowledge and libertarian philosophy have been trounced by Libertarians themselves). Molyneux is also infamous for denying that mental illnesses exist, and once insisted the only reason anyone is gay is because they were molested as a child. Yes, those two statements contradict each other. (He later said he had abandoned his weird beliefs about gay people and would revise his videos that endorse it, but I’m told he still hasn’t done that. Maybe he’ll get around to it eventually.) But worse is Molyneux’s philosophy of women. Which I’ll get to shortly. Although spoiler alert, he is an outspoken Men’s Rights Activist. (Were you surprised?)

Lately Molyneux and Boghossian did a video together in which they chat for an hour about “Feminists vs. Atheists: The Death of Rational Discourse.” And that isn’t my personal judgment about their video. That is literally their official title of the video. (PZ Myers selectively fisked it awhile ago.) You can’t really be as horrified as I am by this thing if you don’t know who Molyneux is and what he thinks. So let me first get you up to speed.

David Futrelle (who monitors and exposes the Men’s Rights Movement at We Hunted the Mammoth) excerpted a key part of Molyneux’s show once where Molyneux singles out and explains his philosophy of women. Futrelle remarks:

Today’s thoroughly horrifying monologue stars the megalomaniacal libertarian-MRA philosopher guru Stefan Molyneux, who is, as many of you already know, one of the scheduled speakers at A Voice for Men’s conference in Detroit later this week. [To understand the significance of that, read this and this, although if you also want backstory on AVfM, this. — RC.]

The audio is an excerpt from his long-as-hell video “The Matriarchal Lineage of Corruption” in which he explains why, in his view, women are essentially responsible for all the evil in the world.

Futrelle’s excerpted audio from that you can find here, but a transcript follows below (which I have corrected against the audio myself to ensure it’s accuracy, at least as best I could; let me know if I got anything wrong).

Trigger warning: this misogynistic and hate-filled rant against women disturbingly sounds a lot like the manifesto of the misogynistic rage killer Elliot Rodger.

Here we go:

Women who choose to breed with assholes will fucking end this race. They will fucking end this human race if we don’t start holding them a-fucking accountable. Women who choose assholes will guaranty child abuse. Women who choose assholes will guaranty criminality. Sociopathy. Politicians. All the cold hearted jerks who run the world came out at the vaginas of women who married assholes. And I don’t know how to make the world a better place without holding woman accountable for choosing assholes.

Your dad [he’s speaking to a caller] was an asshole because your mother chose him, because it works on so many women. If asshole wasn’t a great reproductive strategy, it would have been gone long ago. Women keep that black bastard flame alive. They keep their hands around it. They protect it with their bodies. They keep the evil of the species going by continually choosing these guys. If being an asshole didn’t get women, there would be no assholes left. If women chose nice guys over assholes, we would have a glorious and peaceful world in one generation.

Women determine the personality rates of the men because women choose who to have sex with, and who to have children with, and who to expose those children to. [to the caller:] I get you are angry at your dad and you have every reason to be angry at your dad. Your dad is who he is fundamentally because your mother was willing to fuck him and have you. Willing and eager to fuck the monster. Stop fucking monsters; we get a great world. Keep fucking monsters; we get catastrophes, we get war, we get nuclear weapons, we get national debts, we getting castrations, and prison guards, and all the other foreign assholes who ruled the world. When women worship at the feet of the devil and wonder why the world is evil!

And then, you know what they say? [sneering tone] We’re victims! Poor us. And some women are. Absolutely. But dear God in heaven. Men will become whatever women want them to become. Because women are the gatekeepers. Men will become whatever women want them to become. Oh! So I think that if you accept that women are central to the cycle of evil in the world, then you will be able to see how it really reproduces. Evil is of matriarchal lineage.

Yep. Molyneux has said elsewhere (e.g. in his speech at the MRA conference referenced earlier) that women are responsible for all violence in the world because all violence comes from how you are treated as an infant, and all infants are raised almost exclusively by women. Therefore, just by being mothers (and also for spanking their kids, an obsession of his), women are to blame for all wars and all violent crime in the world. Also, he adds, for being elementary school teachers and dominating the day care industry. And that even when men are involved, it’s because a woman chose him to be, so women are to blame even for that.

Okay. That’s Stefan Molyneux.

This is basically one of the most explicit manifestos of misogyny I have ever read in my life. So for Peter Boghossian to be chums with this guy is downright scary. It is very nearly the same as chumming around with neo-Nazis (if Nazis transferred all their opinions about Jews instead to women). In their video against feminism, Boghossian and Molyneux complain at length, but apparently only in the abstract (I may have missed it, but I didn’t notice them discussing any actual examples), about being called sexists when they say stuff (what, like that volcano of misogyny we just heard from Molyneux!?). Although they really only focus on the examples of Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins that I surveyed yesterday, rather than examples of their own. The gist of their complaint is that they don’t like it when people like me say things like I just did. So they denounce such articles as this as the death of rational discourse.

Ironically, of course, Molyneux is on record saying he totally supports social criticism and public shaming as a means of improving society (“I am a big one for … social shaming; social negative consequences, is, to me, the best way society should be organized,” AVM Speech). Except when he is the target. Then it’s the death of rational discourse. Apparently.

To convince themselves of this narrative, they seem to either lie or construct a delusional system of false beliefs about what actually happens when they say stupid shit. For example, Boghossian in this conversation with Molyneux says at one point that there are secular blasphemies, such as whenever anyone claims there are biological differences between the sexes, then, he says, the atheist left shuts the conversation down with invective. This isn’t true. Ever. It’s not even true that any significant figure in atheism or feminism today claims there are no biological differences between the sexes. But it’s also not true that when they criticize a difference-claim they “shut the conversation down with invective.” That has never happened. Whenever factually dubious claims about gender differences have been made, the facts are meticulously questioned and critiqued (example example example example example), often by scientific experts (example example example example example example example example example). That is not shutting down the conversation. That is dismantling an argument with sound reason and a respect for evidence. But Boghossian somehow doesn’t see that, and somehow sees only invective in its place, which he says shuts down rational discourse. This looks like a major disconnect from reality.

What critics of gender essentialism do is precisely what Boghossian normally endorses: deconstruct badly evidenced and badly argued claims with better evidence and sound reason; they skeptically deconstruct a pseudoscience. That is what philosophy teaches us to do. Why Boghossian ignores all that, or calls doing that shutting down the conversation, I cannot explain. But there is a telling reveal in this video at timestamp 10:15 where Molyneux says, “there’s nothing more dangerous to the growth of knowledge than the illusion of an answer,” which he says is what religion uses, by shutting down conversations with question-ending answers like God did it. Take note of his point.

Because then at timestamp 12:06 they both agree the only reason Dawkins and Harris have been criticized for saying dumb things about women is that they are white males and it’s okay to blame white men for everything, therefore the critics of Dawkins and Harris are just prejudiced. Boghossian and Molyneux never once even mention, much less address, the actual substance of those criticisms or the actual evidence and reasons presented for them. Thus, they give the illusion of an answer, which prevents them listening to or addressing the actual things the critics they are dismissing said, and thus prevents them from learning anything. Exactly like religious people do. Exactly as Molyneux had just finished saying! “You just don’t like white people” and “leftist blasphemy” are in effect their gods: verbal talismans that, once uttered, shut down the conversation (literally: for they then refuse to continue the conversation or even acknowledge there is any argument to address—just like theists do).

So Boghossian and Molyneux are behaving exactly like the religious people they condemn. They are not behaving like good philosophers, or good atheists or good skeptics of any worthwhile variety. They are acting, well, I kind of have to say…like children. The rest of us are having a conversation at the adults table. They have resolutely stomped their way into their bedroom and locked the door. Harsh to say, I guess. But let’s be honest. That’s really what this looks like.

What We Must Learn from This

Good philosophy, well attended to, will help prevent you falling into a trap of irrational thinking like this. But mere atheism will not help you avoid that fate. Mere atheism clearly hasn’t helped either of these men escape ideological blindness and lead them to discover and understand reality. Their atheism has, in fact, resolutely prevented them from doing so. I wrote Sense and Goodness without God ten years ago because I knew mere atheism could not help people escape irrationality or false beliefs and assumptions. We needed more. We needed a complete worldview, one that stood on the best evidence of the world as presently known, with especial care for cultivating a good, reality-detecting, self-correcting epistemology. Atheists like Molyneux and Boghossian don’t have one of those. And in result they remain mired in false beliefs; in Molyneux’s case, even horrifyingly toxic beliefs.

Reality to Atheism:

Ending religion will do us no good whatever, if all we do is replace it with an atheism that’s just as bad.