The folks at freethoughtblogs, who identify themselves as Atheism Plus, or A+, a name to distinguish themselves from what they call Atheism Less, have created a manifesto for their group,. The purpose of this manifesto, it seems, is to stomp out sexists, racists, homophones, transphobes, and anything else I’ve forgotten to mention. The reasoning goes like this: such people are irrational and antihumanist, so they should be marginalized and turned into pariahs.
Here is what I find disturbing about this: People who are labeled sexist, racist, homophobic, by one group, might not see themselves that way. If you want to make a manifesto that is clear and concise, identify types of people with descriptions that are universally agreed upon; people who think women belong in the kitchen, people who approve of physically assaulting and verbally ridiculing people for their sexual orientation or for their transsexuality, white nationalism, you name it.
Now let’s look at their reasons for why these subjectively named groups should be marginalized: the group who is being told they are irrational by the other group might think that it’s the other group that’s actually being irrational. What this means is the following fact: people who are irrational are not necessarily aware that they are irrational. And people who are wrong about the facts are not necessarily aware that they are wrong about the facts. And they never will be corrected if they are marginalized, nor will the ones who are doing the marginalizing either.
When Christians want to marginalize me, ridicule me, or take away my rights because I’m an atheist, I, and many other atheists, will find ourselves standing together to defend us and our rights. This means I may find myself standing next to a man hating feminist who believes I am a potential rapist and should therefore be castrated, if that’s what it takes to defend other atheists who are bullied by the religious. When men are harmed, harassed, and treated unfairly, the tables turn, and I may find myself standing next to a Christian in unity who fantasizes about me burning in hell for eternity.
It should be very noticeable at this point just how destructive this behavior is. When you marginalize someone, you are also marginalizing yourself, and a marginalized person cannot defend themselves from any group.
What is Atheism Less? From what I can tell, they are supposedly fanboys who cling to Richard Dawkins and thunderf00t, both of whom are personifications of the evil white male that will become yesterdays atheism, replaced by the new superior Atheism +, led by PZ Myers and the other bloggers over at Freethoughtblogs. So already, there’s a problem with this new “movement”, the pejorative use of “white male”, despite the fact that one has no choice in carrying those traits. But does this perception accurately describe the target of FTB’s marginalization?
I am neither a fanboy of Dawkins nor of Thunderf00t. I have always been big fans of Richard Carrier and Matt Dillahunty, both of whom are actually from the atheism + camp. I’ve followed Richard Carrier for years, fascinated by his insights in both ancient history and Bayes Theorem, the latter of which, he proposes, is what all valid reasoning is reducible to. Matt Dillahunty articulated something that I have always felt, that one should prioritize truth over belief, that one should not argue if they don’t care whether their beliefs are true or not. And that people can be smart about some things and dumb about others.
So why am I not on their side?
To understand who Atheism Less is, let’s look at the cause of the split in the atheist community; it’s feminism, and Elevatorgate served as its catalyst, with the pro-feminist atheists becoming atheism +. I won’t go into details about Elevatorgate here. Plenty of others have already done that. Instead, as someone who is not a feminist, and is therefore grouped with atheism less, I’ll explain who we are.
We are men and women who actually care about men. We are probably mostly men, but to my surprise, I’ve been finding lots of women too. We either don’t trust feminism, or we don’t trust the kind of feminism practiced by Freethoughtblogs. There are many reasons why I don’t trust feminism. I won’t go into detail about that in this post, I’ll just state that the problems I have with Freethoughtblogs and atheism + that I’ve already mentioned in this post come right from feminism.
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