No More Heroes

July 3, 2014 Eimear Fallon

Towards the end of 2006, I was in a bookshop, about to pick up a copy of The God Delusion, not really sure what I was going to get out of it. Browsing in bookshops was still something people did eight years ago, and that sort of experience lends itself a little better to new discoveries than the “based on your recent purchases” model; prior to the Dawkins bestseller, I hadn’t ever read any books about or against religion.

The short version of the end of this story is that I bought it, and squirrelled it away from my culturally Christian family, and my sixteen-year-old brain went through a bit of a change. I’d long since stopped describing myself as a Christian, but nothing had really replaced it - there was no rationalist impulse there because my lack of religion was a problem of apathy rather than disbelief.

To have a book forcefully and charismatically explain why the beliefs of theists were absurd at best and damaging at worst was eye-opening. I was about to start two years at a Catholic sixth form college, where religion pervaded almost everything, and being able to describe myself as an atheist with conviction was part of what kept me sane over my time there.

In June 2008, Richard Dawkins joined Twitter.

This is going to be a long one. I have to get the demons out somehow. Also, there’s a very minor content warning for sexual harassment and assault below - I don’t go into any real detail (though links do, so be careful on that front), but be careful if that’s relevant to you nonetheless.

Here are some things that Dawkins is, or at least was: a world-renowned biologist, an excellent communicator of complex scientific ideas to a scientifically-illiterate public, an excellent advocate against the teaching of so-called “intelligent design” in schools, and an uncanny Emma Watson lookalike.

Here is something that Dawkins is not: a worthwhile cultural commentator, especially when it comes to expressing comments in 140 characters or less.

Back in 2011, at the World Atheist Convention, there was an incident where a woman was the victim of harassment. A male attendee propositioned Skepchick founder Rebecca Watson in an elevator, which is kind of creepy and also by no means an isolated incident - sexism in what’s loosely described as “the atheist community” is kind of endemic, but up until that point it was largely going ignored. Around that time, real grown ups were glowingly posting Youtube videos by TheAmazingAtheist (who I am not linking to for a reason), failing to notice the red flags in his rhetoric; the same man ended up being a rape apologist and threatened several women with extreme violence for speaking up.

In a comment thread on a follow-up post by PZ Myers (comments since closed), Dawkins was kind of an asshole. This wasn’t the first time he’d been confrontational - the recipients of his ire are too numerous to count, and he’d gotten into trouble a few times before for being unnecessarily reductive about Muslims - but it was arguably the first public occasion where he was punching down rather than up. He told Watson to grow a thicker skin, essentially telling her that being the target of some man’s unwanted attention paled in comparison to the female genital mutilation practised on Muslim women.

Which, okay, yes. There’s nothing incorrect there, but just because you’re not lynching black people it doesn’t mean that you should shrug off their concerns when people yell slurs at them in the street.

Celebrities will do this, sometimes - they’ll attempt to assess what made them popular, and rinse and repeat to keep the celebrity alive. Arden and I were recently talking about Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw, creator of the Zero Punctuation web series. Initially, his was a fast-paced commentary on video game releases that was packed with jokes and treated triple-A video games with all the respect they deserved - i.e. little - but the real joy in his work was to see his delight when a game as great as Portal came along. More recently, though, the series has devolved into unbridled criticism of anything and everything. While misanthropy is funny, when it’s so scattershot and unthinking it just gets dull.

The Dawkins trademark, at least since he started appearing as a keynote speaker and in televised debates, is to raise an eyebrow and tell someone that they’re stupid. Which can be so gratifying when he does it to genuinely stupid people in power, because there are a hell of a lot of them and their charismatic authority often goes unchecked. But much in the way that Croshaw now operates on autopilot, so does Dawkins. Recently, he tweeted this:

Learned a useful new phrase this week: Social Justice Warrior. SJWs can’t forgive Shakespeare for having the temerity to be white and male.

— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins)
June 28, 2014

Do you see it? The formula is all there - the false admission of learning something, the wry grin, the remark that attempts to undermine his opponents. Exactly the same linguistic process is on display here as it is when he rails against prohibitive religious dogma, or when he mocks people who believe that Jesus belongs in a science classroom. Except here, he’s being an idiot.

Richard Dawkins is 73 years old. He has done some incredible things in the course of his lifetime. His books are remarkable. Rereading The God Delusion last year, I now question the way that he reductively assesses some aspects of culture - there’s a thread in particular that calls for moderates to be more vocal in condemning extremists, which sounds more like a reactionary approach to 9/11 than a sober reflection. It’s telling, though, that this is the only real criticism I can draw from that book - it’s as brilliant now as it was then, and so are his other books.

What I see when these inane, moronic, offensive tweets pop up is less a case of outward hatred and more a reflection of the fact that Richard Dawkins is both white and male and has led an extremely privileged life. What’s fascinating is that in follow-up exchanges, he elucidates that were Shakespeare a black woman, his opinion of the work wouldn’t change, missing the fact that the stellar black female writers of the 17th century would have been laughed out of any publishing house in the civilized world.

It’s not even that, though. Richard Dawkins is not stupid - although he probably didn’t reflect on that fact before whipping out his phone, he’s probably aware that the literary canon is biased towards white dudes, along with every other academic field. The problem is that he has trouble with seeing people complain about that state of affairs when the work itself is still good. Really, Dawkins just wants to say this:

I wish I could go on the internet and just see people unreflectively liking things.

That’s naïve, but it isn’t an offensive sentiment. I’m constantly reminded of the fact that I don't enjoy things as much as I used to, because a combination of being a grown-up and having a university degree predicated on heavy analysis means that you can’t just bask in the childlike joy of unfettered experience. I see things through the viewfinder of feminism automatically these days, and while it doesn’t necessarily prohibit my enjoyment, I do notice when a character lineup leans toward a certain kind of face. I notice because situations like that arise far more often than they should.

No-one’s saying that we should police culture - Shakespeare will always be considered a literary great - but we also need to acknowledge that Shakespeare doesn’t have that status purely on the (admittedly excellent) merit of his work alone. To state something like that relegates the voices no-one thought to preserve to a lower class.

Back to Dawkins. I don’t want to believe that he actively has bad intentions towards other people. I think he’s a man who has spent most of his life figuring out how to be reductive in a way that magnifies the beauty of the universe, and is spending his twilight years failing to realise that you can’t be quite so reductive with people. His stupid tweets have the air of just that - stupidity - rather than active bear-baiting. The implied follow-up to his tweets is “yeah! Who’s with me”, not “fuck you, fight me”.

He wants the world to focus on the things that matter, not realising that importance is subjective; in part, he has the freedom to focus on the world’s true horrors because he hasn’t been subjected to the much smaller horrors that life presents to people without his good fortune.

As a 73-year-old rich white dude, Dawkins will never worry about being sexually assaulted in a confined space.

As a 73-year-old rich white dude, he will never have to consider the possibility that his best written work will go ignored due to an accident of his gender or skin colour.

He is old, and privileged, and sheltered, and a man with a Twitter account.

God, this got long.

December 12, 2012 Eimear Fallon

This one’s going to be short, because I don’t really do this anymore, and with good reason.

This billboard just went up in Times Square, and it’ll be staying there until the 10th of January. Predictably, it’s attracting a lo… — This one’s going to be short, because I don’t really do this anymore, and with good reason.

This billboard just went up in Times Square, and it’ll be staying there until the 10th of January. Predictably, it’s attracting a lot of criticism, and not because they hired a shitty graphic designer - because apparently, saying that Christmas tends to be more fun without all of the Jesus stuff is on the same moral level as Holocaust denial. Or something.

Actually, here’s what the criticisms really are - that atheism, as an ideology (and that’s possibly an inappropriate term), is predicated on saying that something else is wrong, and that in this case the “something else” is a belief that can be extremely personal, prop up the lives of countless individuals and generally be an all-round good thing regardless of its validity or not. Basically, it doesn’t matter if they’re all factually baseless - it’s still baselessness that does good, so why try and educate people if it’s just going to turn them evil?

Something about that doesn’t sit right with me. Before I mention a much bigger reason as to why I think that billboard exists that doesn’t have anything to do with turning the religious into secular heathens, let’s assume that that was the sole intention. In that sort of case… so *what*?

As an atheist, the problem that I see is that a lot of the rhetoric directed at it tends to frame it as Yet Another Religion - one with inaccuracies, contradictions and a general faith requirement for it to make sense. And that’s… wrong. I became an atheist because I learned about the world. I don’t think it’s possible to claim the “strong” version of atheism - active non-belief, rather than passive lack of belief - without straying outside the facts, but neither can you claim any religious conviction more specific than deism without essentially misleading yourself, or - worse - being misled. Atheists know that religious people are not in possession of all the facts - or they are, but they’re so hard-wired to believe (technically, we all are) that the cognitive dissonance they experience ignores them.

That’s why bad stuff done in the name of religion - and, um, there’s a lot - seems so much worse to atheists than bad stuff done without, because society holds up Christians as paragons of moral virtue, and the Bible is riddled with stuff that’s just incorrect. When people kill other people on religious grounds, unless it’s Islam, the religion’s always downplayed, even if Anders Breivik did write a 1,000-page Christian manual before going on a killing spree. They’re just ‘bad people’ - and, sure, they almost always are, but they’re also bad people motivated by something that most people think can only produce good. No-one kills in the name of atheism, because there’s nothing behind that name other than an absence. If you’re non-religious, and adhere to that conviction because you got there through critical reasoning rather than by default, then there’s a justifiable sense of moral outrage when you see religion put on a pedestal.

All kind of irrelevant, though, because I don’t really think that was the intention of that billboard. The phenomenon of closeted atheists is played down in the US, in part because there are other issues that take greater real precedent (you can’t discount LGBTQ communities - or, more importantly, the lack thereof - here), but also because most people writing the things you read tend to have liberal, middle class families that don’t really react to hearing that their kid’s a non-believer.

As someone who’s witnessed a family tear itself apart over their son’s atheism - and this was a family living in Pennsylvania, not Texas or Alabama - I can attest that it still exists, and I’ve read countless other similar cases. Something like this billboard, I think, is intended to make closeted atheists feel like they’re not fucked in the head - that regardless of the vitriol that’s piled upon them by the people entrusted with their care, they’re not alone, and that they don’t deserve to be hated.

And yes, the way they’re doing that is by saying that the idea that a fairly nice guy endured a torturous death to somehow absolve some middle-aged obese Texan mother of the sin of not sharing the box of doughnuts meant for her equally obese family is kind of absurd, because it is, and because that’s what becoming an atheist is like - it’s recognising absurdity in things that other people take for granted. Christians use the candle metaphor way too often to describe Christ (I’ve been to church a grand total of twenty-four times, and heard that crap twenty-four times), but becoming an atheist is just as much about seeing a flicker of light in the darkness, of making a few connections where the people around you don’t. A billboard like this, rather than delivering some colossal fuck you to every suffering, oppressed Christian in America, is saying to one of the largest but most under-represented minorities: *we see it too*.

Escaping Reddit Atheism

September 25, 2012 Eimear Fallon

Those of you who have been with me from the start know that I used to talk about religion a lot - sometimes thoughtfully, sometimes not. I also talked about my own lack of belief and the various ramifications of that, and in recent months - maybe even a year or so - I’ve kind of stopped. It’s hard to pin down why, exactly - granted, I don’t really feel like I’m suppressing myself, but that fact alone feels a little strange.

I think, at the centre of it all, is Reddit. Not just Reddit, but the reaction that Reddit provokes. Specifically, the atheism subreddit, which in general has a fairly sneering tone when it comes to faith. To reduce the entire board to this is stupid, of course - they’ve also raised a lot of money for charity, provide a groundswell of support to keep religion out of public schools and provide a decent level of support to people coming out as nonbelievers to their parents (still a phenomenon in the US, and not one that deserves to go unnoticed). I’m not interested in trying to defend it, though - for every good deed, there are a thousand generalising comments on how Muslims are naturally violent, unreserved praise for people like Bill Maher, and the scourge of all internet media that’s commonly referred to as a ragecomic.

But there’s the tone, really - one that says, without exception, I know more about your religion than you and you deserve all the mockery and vitriol in the world for believing such a stupid thing. It’s more of a celebration of a behavioural attitude than a hub for a belief system, and that sucks.

Before I explain why this sucks and how it forms other people’s attitudes, let me restate my opinion. I call myself an atheist. By this, I mean an absence of belief in God - and that’s different from what we might call “radical atheism”, which would constitute an active non-belief in God. I’m what Dawkins might call “agnostic in principle, atheist in practice”, which means that while I believe that it’s ultimately impossible to tell if the central tenets of the Judeo-Christian myth are horseshit (or any other, for that matter), the chances of any religion being right are so improbable as to make living on the off-chance that they’re right a colossal waste of time. Some of you disagree with me on this. That’s fine.

Part of what makes a Reddit attitude so tempting (and I’ll be abbreviating it to that, complications and all, for the rest of this piece) is that atheism can be - isn’t always, but certainly has the power to be - an extremely informed choice. Where faith is informed by gut instinct and cognitive dissonance, atheism can come out of prolonged study of the sciences, philosophy, and - yes - theology. In terms of sheer knowledge, there is no argument that religion wins, which is why it defaults to faith. Faith - and let’s get this clear - is belief in something without substantive evidence to back up those beliefs, and if you’re in a debating class then it makes you laughable. If you’re just going about your everyday life, it’s usually fine. Reddit sees the world, human society and a vast history of social development as one big debating class.

It’s also tempting because - surprise, surprise - religion has a way of fucking with people. One of the most unqualified, idiotic bastards ever to set foot on the earth might be on the verge of being elected President of the United States of America because there is a steady base of conservative Christians who will vote with their Bibles and not with their minds. There are countries around the world where blasphemy - as loosely defined a word as that is - is a punishable offence, sometimes by death. American schoolteachers are hounded for stating their lack of belief - by parents, by the press, and by religious figures who have no business opining about education in the first place. And this isn’t to touch on the long list of atrocities committed by the Catholic church, some of which have affected people I know closely. Religion - that is, doctrine, scripture and the weekly congregation - can fuck people up, and it’s short-sighted to say that it’s not easier to do so if you have faith to back it up.

Like I said, though, I don’t want to mount a defence, because if there’s anything I’ve learned since shutting up it’s that all of this is problematic. For all the bad things done in the name of religion, there are countless examples of good, kind actions with the same motivation. For every mouthy zealot screaming on a street corner, there are quiet churchgoing types who never let their beliefs hurt or marginalise others. And we have devoutly religious people at the top of their field. You don’t have to be an atheist to be a fantastic artist, or a world-class musician, or an engineer. There are thousands of areas where having faith shouldn’t count against you, and maybe even the odd one that might help your chances. There’s nuance when you’re talking about weighty subjects like this, because people are nuanced.

Unfortunately, it’s kind of hard to be an atheist and have others assume that you recognise this nuance. Let’s immediately assume that we’ve covered the religious people, however many (and it’s clearly not all), who might think less of you because you haven’t found faith. Weirder to me - and here’s where Reddit comes in - are… okay. This is where it gets tricky.

Here, I’m talking about moderates. People for whom religion, or the lack thereof, is largely irrelevant. Cultural Christians, apathetic agnostics, and everyone in between. Exactly the sort of people who would never dismiss atheists based on non-belief alone, but instead - and here’s the kicker - choose to do so because of what they saw on Reddit. Or because of Richard Dawkins, or Christopher Hitchens, or Bill Maher.

This is where you run into stereotypes. That atheists are duty-bound to sit you down and critique your approach to life. That we get together and laugh about how the rest of the world is so fundamentally wrong. That we believe that ganging up on isolated, innocuous believers and delivering them a Truth-Punch to the face is always justified. That - fuck, I dunno - we think Facebook is a fertile breeding ground for intelligent conversation. That we all resent our mothers. That we think atheists are the worst-treated demographic in the world. They’re frighteningly common, to the point where some of the kindest, most thoughtful people in the world don’t blink when they substitute “atheist” for “Reddit user” and follow it up with a bare-faced insult.

This didn’t used to be common. Of course it didn’t - as recently as 2010, I was talking about atheism around once a week, sometimes in less-than-tactful terms (that is, the kind that disparage people of faith and not the faith itself), without the knowledge that people might look at me differently because of it. Maybe I was sheltered, maybe I’ve just run into more people who stand by these stereotypes since, but it feels like there are more now. Every month that passes, the Internet’s presence in our lives grows. I can’t help but think that might have something to do with it.

It… I don’t know. I don’t want to be too simple and just say “it sucks”, because wherever this originates - and I think stereotypes are self-perpetuating, and that even if r/atheism turned around overnight and became Puppy and Cute Bunny Central people would still find a reason to keep those stereotypes going - it convinces decent people that it’s okay to not be decent when it comes to a certain segment of the population choosing to espouse their beliefs.

Part of what spurred this on was thinking about what atheism means to me, other than non-belief. I guess, above all, it means being good for goodness’ sake - clawing out a system of ethics based on trial and error, on learning from your mistakes and sticking to your guns when you get things right, and on recognising the intrinsic value in the happiness of others rather than doing it all to secure myself a place in heaven. It means celebrating the knowledge we have and the pursuit of more, with no restrictions apart from ensuring that we hurt as few people as possible along the way. It means engaging with people as ends in themselves - figuring out how they work, both as individuals and as members of larger groups. These are big, weighty concerns, but they’re all things that religion tries to answer in a different - and, I believe, inferior - way.

And let me embellish that last sentence: when I say that I think another belief system that contradicts mine is inferior, that shouldn’t be controversial. It’s just natural - and if you’re a Christian, or a Muslim, or Jewish, or a member of any of the other plethora of faith-based ideologies out there, you by default think that atheism is an inferior viewpoint, because it doesn’t prioritise faith - something that matters to you, obviously. Call that sense of exterior inferiority belief, or knowledge, or something in between (and it’s usually thought of as knowledge by the subject), but it’s ultimately irrelevant - it’s what you do with that sense that matters.

Navigating atheism in conversation is difficult, because there are red flags everywhere - opportunities to go the stereotypical route and say “no, but you’re wrong, and this is why”. I used to do this a lot, until I realised that no-one was listening. It didn’t stop the red flags - it just altered my attitude towards them. I’ll still point them out when they’re harming others - that’s why I’ll savage Catholic doctrine and hierarchy when it’s being used to legitimise the worst possible crime I can think of - but in conversation, it’s a point of conflict that isn’t necessary. Better to learn someone else’s outlook, no matter how wrong it seems, than futilely attempt to stop it in its tracks.

But, then again, let’s say that you’re talking about religion. (Let’s assume that these conversations happen, because they do.) There’s this assumption that if you’re talking about a faith in an all-powerful, all-knowing benevolent God who has explicit instructions on how to live your life, and that you’re talking about how that faith has impacted on your life, then when it comes to the atheist’s turn then their only justified response is to say “I don’t believe in God” and never say why or what we do believe, even if we’ve just heard exactly how Mr and Mrs Jones came to believe in Jesus in the first place.

The non-existent atheist congregation isn’t an inevitability, it’s a missed opportunity.

What is this, then? A plea would sound a bit desperate. Since I restarted this blog, I’ve been attempting to make it more of a personal record (though success as far as that goes has been limited) than speaking to the masses, simply because those masses aren’t there anymore. Maybe it’s just me expressing my frustration with people - the intolerant bigots on one side, and the people who should know better on the other. Then again, maybe it’s a re-affirmation of beliefs I used to hold close to my chest - beliefs I’ve let stray away from me over the last year or so to my detriment. Maybe it’s a bit of both.

Goodness, is that the time? I have to go to work tomorrow. Dear oh dear.