Solidarity

One of the reasons I'm looking forward to the "Feminine Faces of Freethought" conference on Saturday is that for once, I'm (presumably) going to be sitting in a room with women who are happy to make common cause with other women. Ever since I organized a talk on feminism at my junior high school, when I was 13 years old, I've been happy to do that.

Some women--apparently a non-negligible number

What is Civility?

There's been a lot of discussion about that question at atheist blogs recently and I've had a growing sense that a lot of people are on the wrong track. They focus too much on decorum--politeness, name-calling, and the like. Civility has something to do with decorum, but the essence of it is something else.  I like what Robert Talisse and Scott Aikin say about civility in a recent post at 3

The Backlash Against Feminism

Jen McCreight has a long post today about the backlash against feminism within the atheist-skeptic (AS) movement.  I think she's right that there's a backlash, but it would pay to dissect it dispassionately, and not overstate how big it is and who's a part of it.

By a "backlash against feminism" you might think what's meant is that a lot of people have been challenging the positions of atheists

Why Philosophy Helps

Massimo Pigliucci has written a fine post today about irrationality and bad behavior in the so-called "community of reason."  Having regularly followed atheist blogs for about 5 years now, this strikes a deep chord with me. I'm much less familiar with "real world" skeptic/atheist groups than Massimo is (I imagine they're much better), but I am continually amazed by the online shenanigans. Massimo

Complaining about Sexism

Greta Christina says complaining about sexism and other forms of oppression is a Catch-22: if we don't complain, the problem remains invisible, but if we do complain, we

... get accused of “playing the victim card.” We get accused of making
up the marginalization, or exaggerating it, or going out of our way to
look for it, or twisting innocent events to frame them in this narrative
of

Are atheist accommodationists hypocritical?

Jerry Coyne finds philosophers very, very, very vexing when they try to reconcile science and religion.  He suspects it's always "political"--

In my estimation, all atheist philosophers who try to reconcile religion
and science are doing so for political reasons—as are organizations
like the National Academy of Sciences and the National Center for
Science Education that engage in the same

Faith

Michael Kelly's article about his daughter's marriage in the NYT Style section yesterday was a thing of beauty--try reading it without crying!  He starts with the horror of his daughter's rape 10 years ago and ends with this, on her abiding faith--



Ten years ago, bleeding and alone in the field where she had been left
to die at 24, my daughter got up and stumbled to a house in the dead of

Bullying

I've been on the road a lot in the last month, so away from a full-size computer. For rest and relaxation, I've been on Twitter quite a bit. Hey, it's fun compressing messages! Except some things are too complicated to talk about in tiny bursts.

Like Bullying.  Someone started a Twitter hashtag, #FTBullies, meant to call attention to bullying at Free Thought Blogs. If you don't define your

The American Atheists' Harassment Policy

While we all wait to find out what the Supremes think of the Affordable Care Act, let's have a look at the Harassment Policy hammered out by American Atheists in the wake of the recent online brouhaha about such things.  Here's the core of the policy--


That all sounds exactly right. [Update10:10 am:  Is there stuff to quibble with? I just read this, and maybe so, but it strikes me as being

Blaming the Victim?

What is it with the atheist online community in the summertime?  Last summer "elevatorgate" was endlessly discussed. This summer there's another brouhaha, also involving the treatment of women. Three years ago there was another interminable debate about very, very little.  You might be forgiven for suspecting that the no-God hypothesis leaves atheists with not enough "meat" on their plates,

Conference Behavior

I think this is funny.  So you
give a speech at a conference, and afterwards a couple comes up to you and
hands you a business card, saying (essentially) "care to join
us?"  For details and the card see
here.   Question:  when
should moronic behavior be treated as private vice, to be discouraged
informally; and when should moronic behavior be proscribed by the quasi-legal
standards of a community

The Value of Prayer

Julian Baggini acknowledges the value of prayer, despite being a non-believer:

I do think that prayer, like many rituals, is something that the
religious get some real benefits from that are just lost to us heathens.
One reason is that many of these rituals are performed communally, as
part of a regular meeting or worship. This means there is social
reinforcement. But the main one is that

The Believer's Atheist?

There's something just a little bit right about Ross Douthat's description of Christopher Hitchens as "the believer's atheist" in today's NYT.  Douthat says religious believers particularly liked Hitchens because of "his willingness to debate with Baptists and drink with Catholics and be comradely to anyone who took ideas seriously."  On a deeper level, ... many Christian readers felt that in

Atheists Untrustworthy, Study Says

art by Tracy Emin
See here.  The strange thing is that not only do religious people trust atheists less, according to this study, but atheists trust each other less too.  Is there any way to make peace with this?  Maybe we can, by focusing on the word "trust".  To trust someone you have to have a pretty confident idea about what they'll think and do in various situations.  Both religious and

What Science Can't Know

This short column by theologian Keith Ward generated a sprawling discussion at atheist blogs over the weekend. Let's see if I can summarize the discussion in less than 10,000 words, and maybe clear up a few things.

Ward's main assertion was this:  "many religious statements are naturally construed as statements of fact...."  More precisely, they're naturally construed as purporting to be

The Confession of Joel Marks

Joel Marks is a recovering moralist, as he confessed a couple of days ago at The Stone. What I find especially notable about his column is the way it's reminiscent of other confessions--especially Tolstoy's (excerpts here). Only Marks's journey is in the other direction--from belief to disbelief, and what's at issue is objective morality. Here's a very Tolstoyan passage:
A friend had been

Today's Talk

Let's not have another conversation about all "that", but this may interest commenters on my "Feminism and Atheism" post.

Today I gave a talk at the Fellowship of Freethought in Dallas, which meets one Sunday morning every month in a church-like manner, complete with potlock lunch, activities for kids, social justice initiatives, activism, and music.  This month's meeting theme was the now