Atheism With A "White Male" Problem? Yes!

Yes, Atheism does have a "white male" problem - meaning far too many white males to African-Americans, and especially females.  I noticed the dearth of females over all the years I attended Atheist conventions and conferences dating from the early 1990s. Generally, one would see about three white males to every female, and even the primary presenters would be white males.

Why does this imbalance exist? A piece in salon.com ('5 Reasons there aren't more women in atheism',  July 29) lists the following - and I will respond to each:

1) Women are more devout because they have to be. Women’s religiosity is directly related to economic security. The lack of a social safety net means that women, who are still responsible for the bulk of elder and child care, often need to rely on religious organizations to support themselves and their families

This is basically true, and one reason the preponderance of female atheists seen is from higher socio-economic levels, many in the $75,000 - $100,000 income range or higher. Thus, these women needn't worry about projecting a "halo" effect wherever they go since the probability is low they will ever have to rely on church-based charities or religious organizations for a safety net. The same is not  true for low-wage workers, who may not only require food stamps for their families but also supplies from food pantries  - many operated by religious charities.

2) Sexism is real and has an effect on women’s participation and leadership within the atheist community. Rape jokes and sexual harassment, as penalties and tools to silence women, exist in atheist and secular groups as well as religious ones

Yes, sexism exists everywhere - even among rationalists, of which atheists are perhaps among the strongest manifestations. However, in all my years attending atheist conferences, parties, etc. I've not seen or heard "rape jokes" or sexual harassment. Generally, male atheists at all these gatherings were well behaved and the female atheists of such powerful identities-personalities that  they likely wouldn't have tolerated any such nonsense. So I believe this reason doesn't apply to the same degree as (1)

3) Men of all ideological persuasions are overrepresented in media — why should atheists be any different?  .....We see more male atheists because we see more males. Prominent atheist and secular men benefit from media that grossly prefers the speech of men.

Well, true - but that is a problem of the media, as noted by Robert McChesney (The Problem of the Media) and many others. For whatever reason, the corpora-media emphasize and exalt the male voice over others, probably because of a misplaced belief it is more authoritative and the male has more credibility.  I confess to being guilty of this viewing bias as well. For example, when I see the smiling, winsome female physician who often reports on CBS News, her continuous smile for me detracts from her creds. Meanwhile a seldom smiling or non-smiling doctor - like Michael Agus - is taken much more seriously. Why? I don't know - but perhaps this is a reflection of the media bias, but also the tendency of females to smile too much when on the air. (I tend not to trust over-smiling individuals in general)

4) Atheism and secularism are part of a movement, with leaders, on Earth. This social movement is no less subject to norms than anything else and we live on a thoroughly patriarchal planet. Have you seen pictures of any of the major economic summits in the world

True, but again this ties in to (3). If the patriarchal emphasis wasn't present then it is logical to expect the media emphasis on male voices wouldn't be either. One feeds into the other. Perhaps also the fact that females doing the same jobs are paid only 79 cents to every dollar the male earns is also part of this. What we need is an entire transformation but where must it begin? With the society or the individual? The classic paradox of what comes first, the chicken or the egg

5) It’s no exaggeration to say that managing sexism is exhausting, depressing and distracts from work women could be doing as visible spokespeople of fighting for higher and equal pay, or immigration policies that include uneducated women, or ending sexual predation, or advocating for the right to control our own reproduction. All of which, by the way, would probably contribute to the growth of secular and non-religious culture.

True, but again, this is not genuinely independent but links in to (3) and (4). If the patriarchal paradigm wasn't predominant women would be paid equally to men, and also sexism would recede and we'd see greater female representation, not only in the secular sphere but also in business, economics and scientific conferences.

Now, I will list my own reason:

Women are more sensitive to moral issues and are likely cognizant that - by a large majority-  Americans view Atheism as an amoral or immoral philosophy (see, for example, the most recent Pew Forum on Religion survey). They are thus wary of taking on such baggage, given many are already caught in the crossfire of our politically polarized society. This is distinct from (1) because it cuts across all economic levels and one finds higher income women as sensitive to how they are perceived morally by the society as lower income women. (As an example, my wife - an atheist in every way one could be defined - yet refuses to call herself one.)

In other words Atheism, to reach these women - must show it can rise beyond the negation of deity and is also a positive moral force for good. The optimal way, as I wrote in my book, Beyond Atheism, Beyond God, is to support social justice causes.  What do I mean by this?

According to Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz:  “the upper 1 percent of Americans are now taking in nearly a quarter of the nation’s income every year and control 40 percent of the nation’s total wealth”.

Conversely, the bottom 80 percent of Americans own just 7 percent of the nation’s wealth. Stiglitz notes that “while the top 1 percent have seen their incomes rise 18 percent over the past decade, those in the middle have actually seen their incomes fall”

 By any measure this economic inequality is a corrosive, long term evil, given it reduces people’s choices and indeed can incept criminal acts for economic self-preservation. This also dovetails with the salon.com quote of Walter Bristol, an atheist interfaith activist, who wrote last year,

“Economic inequality is one of the most imminent issues facing Western society today. Any progressive movement that chooses to dismiss it is and will be rightfully dismissed themselves.”

This has become the warp and woof of today's white -male heavy atheism as it has become enamored of free market Neoliberal capitalism and libertarianism.  (Both of which eschew the "entitlement" state )

To me, this is the core of the issue and problem for modern atheism which has become too enmeshed with capitalist economics and libertarian BS especially.

To quote the 2013 salon.com article again:

"It’s time for the atheist movement to get off the political sidelines. It’s time to truly help this country become a better place to live for all its citizens"
 

And when it does "get off the sidelines" look for a dramatic increase in female atheists!

See also:

http://www.salon.com/2014/10/04/atheisms_white_male_problem_a_movement_needs_a_moral_cause_beyond_glamorizing_disbelief/

Atheists "Need Religion" for Community? Horse Manure!

In a nation already pretty well mind-gutted on account of the virus of "public relations" it stands to reason that deformed memes will huckster in on the back of PR, and soon evolve to become new implants. People tethered to their i-pods, i-pads or cell phones will then barely notice once the degenerate memes occupy mind space and what's left of civic space. We call this a memetic foothold, or mind virus foothold. We have seen it with ever increasing frequency over the past few years - from the efforts to insist or claim "happiness" is part of GDP, to Charles Murray's (in 'Coming Apart')notion that the white lower class or working class needs more religion to be redeemed of its moral defects including: too many children out of wedlock, refusal to marry, and males' refusal to work or work hard.

SO no surprise a new meme has cropped up: that atheists and secularists could see their lives prosper by incorporating some religious attributes, or even ally with a religion to prosper in life, and enhance one's morality. Puh-leeze! The grossest error of humankind was to ever believe or become convinced that any religion offered any self-consistent prescription for ethics or morality!

And where is all this offal to be found? Why in the book entitled: 'Religion for Atheists- A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion', by Alain de Botton. Now, I must confess I lacked enough barf bags to be able to read this dreck, but did read the extended review of it in the WSJ ('Religion for Everyone', Feb 18-19, p. C1) which believe me was bad enough.

In fact as I've repeatedly said, there is one and only one use for religion: to incorporate into a Museum of Human Anachronisms, as testaments to the period when human brains, wills, critical thinking and autonomy were essentially under the domination of beliefs in fictional beings, fantasy places and corrupt authoritarians. The latter using the vehicles of sanctimony, faith and other hogwash to gain control of their respective flocks' mind, gonads, money .....or all three.

Leaving all the pfolderol out, the central argument (of both Botton and the WSJ reviewer) appears to be that secularists have no real options to counter the evident "eroded sense of community" that permeates our society and world. We are then, as driftwood cast off into stormy seas, each tossing about with little connection or control of our lives. As the WSJ reviewer puts it (I presume with tongue in cheek, or maybe not):

"Religion serves two central needs that secular society has not been able to meet with any particular skill: first, the need to live together in harmonious communities despite our deeply rooted and selfish impulses, second, the need to cope with the pain that arises from professional failure, troubled relationships, the deaths of loved ones and our own decay and demise".

My problem here is that both Botton and the reviewer offer a specious solution to a real problem: that of communities rent asunder and the tragic loss of civic space.

But in at least a dozen past blogs - see e.g. 'The Shredding of the Social Contract'

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2011/11/shredding-of-social-contract-1.html

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2011/11/shredding-of-social-contract-2.html

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2011/11/shreddig-of-social-contract-3-why.html

I noted exactly where the answers inhere. I also noted that they have nada to do with religion replacing secularism but with beating back a vicious, predatory economic system based on the parable of wolves getting to eat "sheep". (The Pareto distribution and optimality of Vilfredo Pareto).

It is THIS bestial system that has destroyed common cause, cooperation, common investment in fairness and economic justice and replaced it with a predatory jungle landscape where the social Darwinian's "Survivel of the fittest" precedes all other considerations. So, how could we not have an atomized society?

Moreover, since religions themselves are often part and parcel of this vicious economic network (check out the money changers and others doing business at the Vatican Bank, or better yet, look into its past) why expect they would offer any ways to change the situation. Hell, THEY are part of the problem!

And ask yourself WHY has civic space been steadily eroded? WHY? Why is it that the Occupy Wall Street movement has been driven from every city space its attempted to occupy? Well, because what they occupied was no longer civic space but corporate space! Civic space occupies - or had occupied- the mid ground between government and the rapacious private sector. In terms of set theoretics, imagine circles for ‘government’ and ‘private sector’ respectively – with large intersection of commonality between them. Civic space or the ‘set of civic society’ lies apart from the influence of these two.

It was where people in the past met and discussed common issues, or conducted protests or simply speechified.

No longer.

The tragedy of the 20th (and now 21st ) century is the tragedy of the civic commons. The gradual erosion of civil society and civic space (including as actual property) is largely eclipsed by corporate and market interests. Either in pursuit of state (or corporate) power, profits or both. Thus, political influence is purchased via the power of the purse (for example in lobbying) and laws enacted to favor these special interests. Laws which include usurpation of once common ground, common institutions for sharing ideas, or conducting political campaigns minus the corruption of money.

Now the confluence of government –market/corporate interests has forced those wishing to live within non-coercive spheres of influence to make a Hobson’s choice: Either to side with state power and ‘commandeering of individual rights’ or private power, and its extirpation of what remains of government and its advocacy for the non-elite segment of the populace (i.e. those unable to purchase political influence).

One can choose to be passively serviced (and servile) by a massive bureaucratic state wherein the word citizen has little or no resonance (until it’s election time) or submit to the selfishness and barbaric, radical individualism of the private sector – which extols the Social Darwinist refrain of ‘survival of the fittest’.

HOW has this come about or when did it commence? Look no further than the 1886 Santa Clara Supreme Court Decision which made all corporations "persons" under the 14 th amendment. Look to the 2009 Citizens United Supreme Court decision that solidified it, and effectively made corporations super-citizens by the power of their money-purses. For what single ordinary, flesh and blood citizen can compete with monsters that own whole networks and airwaves.

Getting up to screech on a park bench? Right!

The sense of community has been decimated all right, but there is no religion in the world that can repair that fracture or fill the social vacuum. By which I mean, real community - not the egregious temporary confection that surfaces once a week on Sundays when Catholics shake each others' hands or whatever it is they do now. And then every other day of the week do whatever they can to stab their neighbors in the back to get ahead in the rapacious "wolf eats sheep" economic system that plagues us all and forces us (via a stacked deck) to be the "sheep".

As for secular communities - they have more than ample options and that will occupy the content of a future blog!

Catholics Come Home? Uh....NO Thanks!

Apparently the Catholic Church, especially the American mutation of it, is concerned about all the "lapsed" and "fallen away" Catholics, so have initiated a new nationwide campaign via TV commercials under the banner of 'Catholics Come Home'. The deal is to entice all the millions of prodigals back into the fold by using commercials that depict "personal family moments in church" (cheez, gimme a break!) as well as "images from the broad sweep of Catholicism through history" (err.....any from the Inquisition..?)

The alarming basis triggering this response (as well as new efforts at "evangelization" - which I'd suggest they put on ice since Pentecostals and Evangelicals do it better) is a recent Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life Study that shows Catholicism has experienced the greatest losses among U.S. born members. Pew has concluded that roughly 22.5 million American adults fall into the "lapsed" or former Catholic category, which means Catholic numbers in the U.S. would have taken a huge hit were it not for immigration...say from Latin American nations.

There are several questions that ensue on reading this claptrap. One is, how or why do they make the assumption that former Catholics "must come home". Maybe those who left that atavistic religion (still based on the primitive ritual of eating the god, or deophagia) have better things, better more enlightened options...and hence have found much preferable "homes". Take my sister-in-law, seen in the above image. She left the RCs over a half century ago and pursued her own spiritual path eventually finding enormous spiritual solace and inspiration in Eckanckar. Any chance she will come "home" to a primitve church that still teaches birth control is morally wrong while it sanctions (or at least protects) pedophile priests? The answer is, no chance at all.

Meanwhile, I left the church in the late 60s and began my own quest because I simply couldn't take any more of their theological horse shit. It all began in high school, Catholic high school in Miami, when numerous questions asked of the teaching Marist brothers would constantly go unanswered. They had no clue how to deal with an inquisitive mind, that is, one not content to sit back like a baby and just ingest pabulum.

I recall being a Materialist even as an altar boy. On one occasion before my 17th birthday, a few crumbs of consecrated communion wafer dropped off the paten en route back to the sacristy. The priest reprimanded me harshly, saying that I should’ve shown more respect for the "body of Christ". I told him flatly that the fallen crumbs were no more a body than those from yesterday's lunch. I informed him that I’d conducted chemical tests some months earlier and these showed the presence of starch and the absence of protein. He was dumbfounded and replied in words to the effect: "Ah well, so you’re a Materialist then? You don't think there’s anything there other than what your tests can reveal. Is that right?"

I replied: "That's right. And if you can prove to me that there is more than what my tests reveal I'll happily accept your conjectures. Until then, I regard them as a fantasy". Nonplussed, he responded briskly, recommending a solemn re-examination of faith and penance. He also included a smattering of threats about "eternal salvation" and how "Satan works through disbelief”.

His theocratic buttons pushed, he couldn’t respond rationally, only by mechanically regurgitating superstitious and incoherent mumbo-jumbo about nonexistent entities. None of the teaching Brothers fared any better, most fared much worse...including my questions pertaining to how they defined a "just war".

Later, while attending a Catholic university in freshman year, the mysteries of transubstantiation were part of a required course on ‘metaphysics’. The professor priest carefully avoided mentioning that thousands had lost their lives in the Middle Ages’ religious wars over the meaning of the ‘real presence’. Once again, as before in an earlier altar boy incarnation, I questioned that anything real or substantive existed.

His response included a look resembling a sneer, accompanied by more than a hint of sarcasm:

“Then clearly you don’t know the difference between substance of the consecrated bread and the accidents of the bread. In that case it’s not very likely you’ll pass this course.”

Of course I knew what the terms meant, given this was primarily a course in Thomist Metaphysics (after Thomas Aquinas). In so many words, ‘accidents’ referred to the phenomenal make-up, or what greets our senses. For example, a Thomist would argue that the earlier starch test merely confirmed the ‘accidents’, i.e. specific carbohydrate composition of the wafer. But none of the tests approached the invisible, defining substance wherein the real body and blood resided.

The reply to this priest can still be recalled with a fair degree of confidence:

“The point is there is no real ‘substance’. It’s an artifact of language having the capacity to create concepts or entities with no parallel in reality. By isolating the genuine material composition from the wafer you create an ersatz mystery.”

Ever since then, I have steadfastly maintained this position, and hence that Catholics are consuming no genuine Christic body but a plain carbo wafer. They could as well be ingesting a binet or a pretzel or cookie. Now, since the "Eucharist" is the central act of the Mass and the RC religion, then what would be the point of me "coming home" if I discharge it as so much codswallop? There'd be no point or purpose.

Beyond that, what pissed me off the most was the RCs' antiquated stance on artificial birth control in a world that's doubling in population every 20 years or so. Catholic impediments to a sane birth control policy began with the misguided encyclical Humanae Vitae in 1968. The Pope at the time, Paul VI, issued this document in direct opposition to his own specially appointed Papal Commission on the matter. Author David Yallop, in his book In God's Name, (1984, p. 58) has portrayed Humanae Vitae in stark terms indeed, as well as its paradoxical consequences:

"On a disaster scale for the Roman Catholic Church, it measures higher than the treatment of Galileo in the seventeenth century "

The implicit assumption in Humanae Vitae and subsequently, Pope John Paul II's encyclical Veritatis Splendor, was that procreation takes precedence over any other function of sexual intercourse. This is observably true in most other animals (with estrus cycles) but it certainly doesn’t apply to humans who exhibit a diverse array of sexual play. To devalue sexplay for its own end, while extolling procreation-based sex as the be-all and end-all, is to rob humans of their uniqueness as sexual primates.

The claim always made by the Catholic moral authoritarians was that "natural law" dictated this stance, and hence, to even engage in one sexual act using artificial contraception was to really engage in "mutual masturbation" and be eligible for hellfire, based on a "mortal sin". Lost on the Church's morality wonks was the irony that only a century and a half earlier they'd defended slavery as acceptable under natural law, since it was "natural that some men required guidance and mastery". Also lost on these blockheads was that they'd uniformly fallen into the trap of Aristotelian logic which tends to fix human behavior within very limited and fixed definitions and categories.

The jig was up, and the whole faux natural law -based morality super-structure was exposed as a sham once the priest pedophile crisis erupted in 2005. We learned in the aftermath that a cover-up reached all the way to the Vatican and to the one the Catholics now wish to confer sainthood on: Pope John Paul II.

Beyond this exhibition of the loss of any moral authority, we have the further evidence from history that the Church isn't what it purports to be. For example, in the late 1940s, under its Intermarium operation, the Vatican's cooperated with the CIA to use ratlines for the escape of vicious Nazis and especially the SS, to South America. (For those who may be interested, please refer to the book 'Blowback: America's Recruitment of Nazis, and its disastrous effect on our domestic and foreign policy' by Christopher Simpson, Collier / Macmillan, 1988)

Those remaining Catholics who don't wish to remain infants their whole lives, dependent on "Holy Mama church" for permission to do....whatever...., can do themselves a favor by looking further into the operations of the Vatican Bank since the 1970s, and especially Paul Marcinkus ("God's Banker"). Look at the killing of Pope John Paul I, who had vowed to clean up the Vatican Bank and its money-laundering operations for P2 and the Mafia, as well as change Church birth control policy to allow artificial contraception. Who was his biggest opponent at the time? Cardinal Joseph 'Rat' Ratzinger. You can find the sordid details in David Yallop's (previously referenced) book.

Come back to the church? Yeah, when hell freezes over, or more practically, when the Vatican sells all it wealth and gives it to the poor and destitute!

The Vatican insults our intellect by asserting these are all the "crimes of individuals", oblivious to the fact that they are directed and driven by irrational, indefensible and malignant doctrines built into the core of the Catholic religion. Doctrines that have one purpose and one alone: to keep most Catholics at the level of mental or sexual invalids, and more obsessed about the number of "impure thoughts" or "acts" before their next confessions, than about reality.

The Vatican and the Roman Church lost forever what small moral credibility they had some time ago. Like the other posturing authoritarians and their ilk, including the banks and our own financial and political system, we need to grow beyond these crutches and find our own ways. To quote St. Paul: "It is time to put away the things of a child". And no, I find no irony at all in using that quote!