Atheism+: Doing Good Without God.
It’s been said that getting atheists to agree on something is like herding cats. I’d say it’s more like trying to herd cats into a tub of water. Atheists tend to be an inquisitive bunch; an intellectually bunch. We reject dogma and the authority that goes along with it, hence we are loathed to being told what to do and what to think. You could say we are fiercely independent (at least I say that we are).
Given all that, you can see why trying to get a consensus about where to go for breakfast might be hard enough, never mind were we should all stand on a particular social issue. And that’s the real issue in getting us all to band together for a common cause: we don’t like to be told what we should think or feel.
Still, being openminded and skeptical (yes, they do go hand in hand) we are able to listen to each other and really consider what each one of us has to say. This attitude tends to lead to civilized debates, respect for each other’s rights to express ideas, and compromise, or at least it should. I believe that it can and that it does.
The atheist/humanist/secular/(add your own label here) movements have much more in common than they do differences. Most of us in these movements (and most of us identify with more than one) understand this and this has allowed us to begin to come together in the past few years in greater numbers and with great effect in support of issues that we all feel that we have a stake in.
Still, there is an ugly side to us as well. Anti-feminism has shown its self to be much more prevalent that most of us imagined it was. This is both bad and good. It is bad, for the obvious reason that it shows that we all are not as enlightened as we’d like to be. It is bad because it distracts us from working together to achieve our common goals.
It is good, however, that this is now out in the open. You can’t tackle a problem until you can first acknowledge it. Also, it is an opportunity to clean house, as it were. By exposing the misogynists in our midst ( actually they tend to expose themselves) we can shame them into recognizing their misplace sense of privilege or shun them from our ranks. It is vital that we do so because we have the fight of our lives with the religious and social conservitives on our hands.
This is where Atheism+ comes in. The new movement is not an attempt to establish an atheist dogma, as some try to claim. Atheism+ is an attempt to bring together atheists who believe that we have a responsibility to go beyond fighting against superstition or fighting for the separation of church and state. We strongly believe that we have a responsibility as atheists to fight for social justice for everyone, theist and non-theist, the superstitious and the skeptical, the religious and the non-believers.
Feminism, gay rights, separation of church and state are just a few of the issues that most of us feel are important and that we are doing a good job of brining to the forefront of the social and political forums.
We have already begun to raise our profile in the general public’s minds. Just this year we had the Reason Rally, which made the national news. We also have many good organizations supporting critical thinking and humanist issues such as the Secular Student Alliance, CFI, FFRF, American Atheists, the JREF, and American Humanists.
Except for American Atheists and the Secular Student Alliance, most of these, while they might have many atheists as members, are not atheistic groups. What Atheism+ is, or can be, is a way for those of us who self-identify as atheists to get out and fight for social issues in public where we can meet “average” people and have them get to know us. It will allow us to be seen as people who care for others, who do good things. This is vitally important if atheists hope to ever become accepted by a society that currently sees us a amoral, selfish, heartless.
I urge those of you want to fight for social justice for everyone, who want to fight against misogyny, racism, bigotry, homophobia, poverty, and ignorance to consider joining the Atheist+ movement. Talk about it with your friends and family (if they are still talking to you, that is), write about it, blog about it, tweet about it, set your Facebook profile picture to the Atheists+ symbol (see below), join the Atheist+ forum.
Let’s show the world that we are not only good without God, but we do good without God.
Use me as your profile picture on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, or any other site of your choice.
Follow-up and Apology
I posted the other day about some comments DJ Grothe made about women feeling safe at TAM. I was dismayed and angry about how his words were perceived as sexist.
I overreacted. I’ve had a chance to read more from other sides of the issue and I can no longer stand by my condemnation of DJ. He has done much to help the skeptical community become more inclusive and I was wrong to be so quick to judge him.
I let my emotions get the best of me. I allowed my bias (the fact that Rebecca was the first one to really inspire me to become a skeptic) to get in the way of clear thinking. Worst of all, I didn’t do any digging to find out more about all sides of the issue. I didn’t use reason, but I let emotion guide my writing. It was a disgraceful performance equal to the sloppy woo ridden drivel that I constantly rail about here.
To DJ, and to all of my readers, I most sincerely apologize.
Paying For Sex With Your Taxes
Rush Limbaugh has sparked an intense controversy with his sexist, misogynistic, and immoral statements about Sandra Fluke’s testimony supporting mandated provision of contraceptives by health insurers. Besides his horrendous comments and personal attacks against Sandra Fluke, his comments also begat a strange, terribly misinformed notion that American taxpayers are paying for women to get free contraception, in essence, we are all paying for women to have sex.
First of all, the foundation of this argument is totally bogus. Taxpayers are not paying for anything here. Insurers are paying for it. These insurers pass the cost of free contraception (just as they do free pre-natal care, yearly physicals, etc) onto employers in the form of insurance premiums. The employers then pay their portion of the premiums and the employee pays their’s. Nowhere does the taxpayer pay one penny for contraceptives, except for government programs like Medicaid.
So Limbaugh’s argument, which is being taken up by the religious right, is false. I might give him and others the benefit of doubt that they are just clueless, but I find it hard to believe that anyone in the public sphere, especially legislators, are ignorant of the reality. They are simple liars, lying to promote their particular political agendas.
But, for sake of argument, let’s assume that Limbaugh’s argument it valid and that taxpayer money is being spent to provide contraceptives. If that is the case, then it is no different than paying for Viagra for old, impotent men. Why should we pay for these men to have sex? There isn’t even any corollary argument for it, as with contraceptive. Contraceptives prevent pregnancy, STDs (in the case of condoms), help some women regulate periods and treat ovarian cysts. Viagra has no other benefit except to give a man a hard-on. So all these aging white men can stop getting viagra at taxpayer expense. I don’t know about you, but I sure don’t want to pay for Rush Limbaugh to have sex, never mind actually watching him do it on video (as he suggested Sandra Fluke do).
Of course, the above argument is just a spurious as Limbaugh’s. The real lesson here is that this is one more attempt by privileged men to control women. The latest outrage is taking place in Arizona (that hotbed of radical religious inspired insanity). Read Rebecca Watson’s take on the new law that would force doctors to lie to their female patients about the health of their unborn child.
If you don’t think that there is a war on women being waged by the religious right and the GOP (which have become one and the same), there have been dozens of similar attempts to allow the state to control a woman’s body. For a party that claims that they are for less government and putting a stop to government’s intrusion into our personal lives, they sure don’t seem to think that applies to women. I supposed that as long as the government isn’t trying to regulate your guns or property, everything else is fair game.
What’s in a Name?
What’s in a name? you might ask. Well, in India, quite a bit, if you are a girl named ”Nakusa” or “Nakushi,” which mean “unwanted” in Hindi. In a heartwarming CBSNEWS World article, 285 girls changed their names to reflect a new beginning in their lives.
It is hard to imagine, in our society, that parents could choose such a cruel name for their child. This reflects, I think, the sad social insistence in many countries on having male children.
It is known that in many cultures in the past, baby girls were buried in the sand, thrown into rivers, lakes, and seas, or left out in the wilderness to die of exposure and starvation, or be eaten by wild animals. Where this horrible concept that a female child is worthless came from is hard to understand. Ok, I get the idea that many cultures desired male children for the purposes of inheritance, protection, wage earning, and so on. Also, many of those same cultures required that the parents of a daughter pay a dowery when she married, which can be seen as a financial burden. Still, why was no thought given to the fact that females are needed for reproduction, or that a marriage of a daughter to a man from a good family could be a benefit? Then there is the most important reason of all to value daughters: that hey are humans begins just as worthy of love and caring as any male.
These misogynistic ideas have their roots in a major change in human social development.
In their book, Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality, Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá trace the origins of misogyny to the advent of agriculture, which “…changed everything about human society, from sexuality to politics to economics to health to diet to exercise patterns to work-versus-rest patterns. It introduced the notion of property into sexuality.” (Ryan and Jethá, 2010)
What we see here is the result of the male desire to secure a claim to property for himself and his offspring. In order for this to work, the woman becomes property as well. These attitudes have prevailed for close to 10,000 years even though there is really no longer any reason to treat woman as property.
We have made great strides toward sexual equality in the past 100 years or so, at least in the West. I hope that the cross pollination of cultures we have seen in the past couple of decades will have a positive influence on less enlightens cultures around the world. Until then, more girls will be shamefully labeled “unwanted”, both in practice as well as in name.
References:
Ryan, Christopher and Jethá, Cacilda, 2010, Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality, Harpers Collins
Women in Science
There is a very cool article on the Smithsonian web site called Ten Historic Female Scientists You Should Know. It is a wonderful example of the contribution of women to the sciences throughout history.
There are, of course (since they only listed 10), many more women who have played important role in the history of science. Here are just a few of them:
Hypatia (b. ca. AD 350–370, d. March 415) was a Greek scholar from Alexandria, Egypt, head of the Platonist school at Alexandria and mathematician. As head of the Platonist school at Alexandria, she also taught philosophy and astronomy. As a Neoplatonist philosopher, she belonged to the mathematic tradition of the Academy of Athens, as represented by Eudoxus of Cnidus; she was of the intellectual school of the 3rd century thinker Plotinus, which encouraged logic and mathematical study in place of empirical enquiry and strongly encouraged law in place of nature. Hypatia lived in Roman Egypt, and was murdered by a Christian mob which accused her of causing religious turmoil.[9] Kathleen Wilder proposes that the murder of Hypatia marked the end of Classical antiquity, while Maria Dzielska and Christian Wildberg note that Hellenistic philosophy continued to flourish in the 5th and 6th centuries, and perhaps until the age of Justinian. (Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypatia_of_Alexandria.)
Ada Byron – Considered by many as the first computer programer, man or woman. She assisted Charles Babbage on his analytical engine, creating the first ever computer program for it that could calculate Bernoulli numbers.
Grace Hopper - Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper (December 9, 1906 – January 1, 1992) was an American computer scientist and United States Navy officer. A pioneer in the field, she was one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computer, and developed the first compiler for a computer programming language.[1][2][3][4][5] She conceptualized the idea of machine-independent programming languages, which led to the development of COBOL, one of the first modern programming languages. She is credited with popularizing the term “debugging” for fixing computer glitches (motivated by an actual moth removed from the computer). Because of the breadth of her accomplishments and her naval rank, she is sometimes referred to as “Amazing Grace”. (Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper)
These are just a small sample of woman scientists. If you are interested in find out more about all the wonderful woman who have had a major impact on science, visit these links:
http://www.women-scientists-in-history.com/historia.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_science
http://womenshistory.about.com/od/airspacesciencemath/tp/Famous-Women-Scientists.htm
A Brief History of Women in Science, Told by Marie Curie
To all the girls and woman out there with even a hint of an interest in science; listen to Marie Curie (or at least her zombie). You can change the world, as have many women before you (too bad men got all the credit, not to mention the Nobel prizes. Grr!)
If You Care About Women’s Rights, Vote for Obama
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Obama is running for reelection. I voted for Obama and I will do so again. It is not that I am particularly impressed with his tenure as President, I’m not. He has certainly not lived up to the vast majority of promises he made in his campaign. His failure to roll back much of Dubya’s disastrous social programs is disappointing, to say the least (I’m going with infuriating).
A friend of mine said that one of the reasons she will vote for him again is that he has already appointed two Supreme Court Justices to the high court and that appointments to the high court are possibely the most important, and certainly the longest lasting legacy, any President can hope to have. Obama’s appointments are two women:
Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Age: 56. Liberal.
Associate Justice Elena Kagan. Age 50. Presumed liberal.
There is also:
Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Age: 77. Appointed by William Clinton in 1993. Liberal.
The reason these women are so important to have on the court (and given their ages we can hope to have all of them there for at least another decade, and two of them for many decades to come) is that we need these liberal, female judges to counteract the conservative bent of the current court.
This is vitally important given the current conservative war on women currently being waged in congress. A republican in the White House would be a disaster for the rights of every woman in this country. Women’s rights are in already in precarious position with laws being introduced in the House to limit women’s reproductive rights, including trying to redefine rape so that women and girls who are raped can’t get a legal abortion.
There is a huge push across this country by conservatives to strip women of their rights, from the national level all the way down to the local level. Even If these rights aren’t yet being limited legally, the idea of doing so is becoming culturally and socially acceptable. When it becomes culturally and socially acceptable to curtail people’s rights, legal means to do so aren’t usually far behind. Just ask any Japanese American over the age of 60.
Pornography and Feminism – Why Woman Should Be Able to Watch Porn if They Want To.
NOTE: I borrow heavily from a similar post on my personal blog, but hey, they are both my blogs so why reinvent the wheel? WARNING: the descriptions of sex acts and the language there is explicit. If this bothers you, then I’d suggest avoiding it.
I’ve been wanting to do a post about pornography for a while now, but I just haven’t had the time. This is a subject that I really haven’t had many discussions about with others, especially my female friends. I am a firm believer that women have as much of a right as men to enjoy pornography if they wish.
One of the blogs I follow is Our Porn, Ourselves that has the tagline, “Women like to watch porn. Deal with it.” In their Origins section of the blog, they have the following to say:
For women who are pro-porn and all those who support us. WE are the answer to anti-porn feminists. All genders welcome.
A little further down we find:
We women are tired of people trying to control our sexuality by telling us what we should or shouldn’t like sexually (porn) based on what someone else thinks is best for us. It’s like keeping women in a perpetual state of being children about sex. And women who say they are feminists make it worse by discounting all the women who find porn to be an empowering sex toy. Or if not, to at least give us the benefit of the doubt that we can make that decision for ourselves, thank you very much.
Bravo!
The notion that porn is somehow bad for women is outdate (if it was ever valid to begin with). Today there are plenty of women within the professional porn industry like Nina Hartley, Annie Sprinkle, and Sharon Mitchell who are dedicated to both producing porn for both women and couples. as well as advocating for the workers in the adult film industry, especially woman. Sharon Mitchell, for example, is currently the Director of the Adult Industry Medical Health Care Foundation, which she established in 1998.
These are woman who came into a male dominated business and took control of their lives, bodies, and careers. They made sex, and watching sex, acceptable and enjoyable for women and couples alike. They are successful not only because they performed sex on screen, but because they worked their asses off to succeed business. Just because it happens to be the business of sex doesn’t make their achievements any less admirable or important.
For people, especially feminists, to try to tell other woman that they shouldn’t watch, engage in, or support porn is as deeming to women as any possible degradation porn it’s self could be. Real equality for women must include the right to choose to watch, support or participate in pornography if they wish. It is a part of human sexuality that by extension makes it a part of female sexuality. The desire to watch pornography is no different than the desire to engage in BDSM, water sports, role playing, strap-on, or any other “alternative” sexual activity. Of course some of the very same people who rile against pornography probably find these activities degrading to women as well. What they fail to see is that it isn’t their choice. By insisting that women are somehow unconsciously degraded by these acts is to call the very women they claim to support stupid, shallow, and weak minded. What an insult!
The Shame of the Shame of Sex
I had an amazing, day-long conversation on FB with an old, dear friend and a new friend of hers that she introduced me to. The conversation was about sex. It ranged from the innate beauty of the penis, the importance (or lack thereof) of penis size, the the sensitivity and depth of the vaginal canal, female ejaculation, what constitutes real intimacy, the consciousness shattering of shared mutual orgasms, to my new friend (a woman) giving me male masturbation advice that included interesting and clever devices.
There was mutual agreement that the shame associated with sex in our society is almost always motivated by males trying to maintain their supposed privilege where they feel that they have control over women, especially their sexuality. This we all also agreed is complete and utter bullshit.
I’ve said it before here, anything that happens between consenting adults, regardless of gender, orientation, or numbers of people involved, is perfectly OK and, more importantly, perfectly natural.
In the end, intimacy, both physical and emotional, come down to the following: openness, honesty, and respect. One of these lovely women mentioned to me that she had problems with men because they viewed her openness as a invitation to hit on her. She said that she never could figure out the rules. I told her that I have three rules, which are stated above: openness, honesty, and respect. And those rules apply to all relationships of all types, not just sexual ones.
It was one of the most fascinating and stimulating (pun intended) conversations I’ve ever had. I found it so refreshing to be able to talk to women who were so comfortable with their sexuality and so confident in themselves. They are both also very articulate and intelligentand they showed great respect to myself and each other. I find these traits in a women to be irresistibly attractive.
The problem with many men is that they find these traits in women to be highly threatening. They can’t deal with a woman who is so secure and comfortable in her sexuality. I believe it truly frightens them. It is because they have this false sense of privilege that leads them to believe that they must control the women in their lives.
Personally, I find it liberating, fascinating, and beautiful.
Oh and I learned something else very interesting in the discussion yesterday. One of the women has studied the sexual practices and mores of ancient societies. Did you know that women in ancient Greece loved small penises? They considered large penises grotesque. As Spock would say, fascinating!
How comfortable are you with your sexuality? How about with the sexuality of others? Comments are most welcomed and encouraged.
Mother Fucker!
It is men like these that make me want to castrate and/or kill a significant percentage of my so-called “brothers”. Brothers! Blech! Guys like this make me truly embarrassed to have a Y chromosome and a penis. We need to supercharge our space program and create a penal colony on an asteroid and send every man who preys on a woman, wether physically, emotionally, sexually or financially there for the rest of their days to work in mines. They don’t deserve the privilege of walking among others of their species.
Now that I have vented, let me say that we need to do whatever we can to help future generations of boys become men who value and appreciate the existence of 50% of their species who carry the X chromosome, not to mention carrying every single one of every person who ever has, is, or will be. The real challenge, of course, is how to achieve this. I try to do my part by, first, raising my children to see and appreciate the equality of men and woman. I say equality in the sense of rights, opportunities, and respect. Second, I write about feminism from a man’s point of view hoping that others will see that a man can be a feminist while still being “a man” (whatever that means). I try to call out men (and some women as well) when they perpetuate the stupid and corrosive sense of male privilege that permeates most societies around the world.
I am not perfect, as much as I try to see what I’ve called “male privlones” in myself as I was recently reminded. It is all about mindfulness. Mindfulness of our words and actions effect’s on others. We all need to stop and think before we open our mouths, put words to media, or raise a hand.
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