No Gods, No Heroes

The phenomenon of idol- or hero-worship is fascinating to me. For many reasons. Personal and not so much. Emotionally and intellectually. It’s something that I want to study more and in some detail at some point and I hope that I’m afforded, despite everything, the opportunity to do so at some point. But for now, there’s this:

Far too many of the people I have looked up to throughout my entire life have failed to live up to the pedestal I put them on, and in many ways that is extremely frustrating. Both religious and secular heroes have fucking failed miserably. On the other hand, that was not, in the end, what drove my deconversion process and it will not drive me away from the secular movement either. In fact, in some ways, it is an incredibly important lesson, perhaps especially important for one who, like me, is still in the relatively nascent phases of being openly secular and atheist and trying my hand at what secular activism is available to me.

This has nothing to do with anything. It's just a neat picture and I like it.

There is no single figure that remains so important to me that when I find out that, like everyone else, they have failures, faults, or possibly even are people that I don’t even really like personally, it will (hopefully) disturb me not one whit. It has not, so far. Ever since Professor Richard Dawkins’ spectacular display of privileged white maleness and dismal logical fallacy #FAIL last year, I recognized that I can still love and respect and learn fantastic and wonderful things from his books and at the same time recognize that he still has things to learn. He does not need to be perfect in every respect any more than I am perfect in every respect. Holy shit, when I consider the perspective of myself being judged and dismissed in the same way as it is tempting to judge and summarily dismiss these “leaders” and “heroes” in their totality because of their imperfections, I have to humbly offer silent thanks to those around me that they do not reject me outright. (ß Tangled sentence, I know. Deal with it. It stays, because it says what I want it to say and it makes sense in my head.)

It has been freeing, too. I now feel free (or freer, anyway, I’m still hyper-self-conscious and hyper-sensitive to my desire for acceptance and shit like that) to be critical of what others think and inspect what they say a bit more carefully. Rather than trying to mold my opinions and thoughts and everything else about me so that I fit in the niche. Like, please please please, can I be cool, too? Granted, I still have to beware of my own tendency to do this. It doesn’t go away in the snap of a finger, and I still find in myself that unconscious desire to have an idol to worship, a hero to look up to, an example to which I can point and say, “That is the right. Good. Whew! I don’t need to think about it anymore, I can just copy them.”

See? That last bit is just the thing, I think. The reason that many of us so desperately WANT those heroes is because thinking about ALL THE THINGS is HARD. Well, so be it.

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Shame Shame Shame and Sexism

So a thing has come up lately in the atheist blogosphere; an ugly thing, sort of, and an inspiring thing, sort of. LOTS AND LOTS of people have been posting, commenting, saying things. (I suspect that this post will largely consist in a shit-ton of hyperlinky thingies.) I count myself as a feminist, if an inexperienced and bumbling one that may say the wrong thing at any given instant, and I thought that it was about the coolest thing ever that there was a Women in Secularism conference that took place last weekend, and I so wish that I could have been there. I am also extremely grateful to Ashley F. Miller for providing a good summary of the whole thing and also for live-blogging the entire thing so that I could at least get a flavor of the conference in my head and a fair amount of the detail. I’m sympathetic to her fingers doing all that typing, and would just like her to know that the results did not go unappreciated. I can’t say that I felt like I was there, exactly, but still, it’s as close as I was going to be able to get. (I also just discovered that Ophelia Benson also has a whole slew of live-bloggy posts about the conference as well, but you’ll have to dig a bit to get at them all.)

I absolutely intend to write something about some of the other wonderful and inspiring things that were said at the conference, but just at the moment, I am now going to address the sort of ugly thing, maybe just so that I can get that shit out of my system a bit more and onto paper (however digital it may be – yes, I do keep an actual journal on actual paper as well – no, you will never see it – well, bits of it do bleed onto over here, which gets a bit messy sometimes, but that’s okay) and then move on to parts that make we want to fly.

So, the ugly thing: Sexism is very fucking real. And it happens all the time. Even among those of us that like to self-identify as freethinkers and humanists and skeptics and atheists and the like. For me, all of those things are a completely natural byproduct of and direct consequence of my atheism, which I’ve talked a bit about before so I won’t go on and on about that here. There was a mention of the fact that some not-so-small-fry men-speakers at conferences were behaving in some very sexist ways and that women-speakers, for a myriad of reasons, had formed a sort of underground warning system in order to cope with what in the end amounts to harassment, plain and simple. For more about the details, see Stephanie Zvan’s original post about the topic, and her follow up post. As an example of why women do not very often drag this shit out into the open, the example of the explosion of horrible that happened around “elevatorgate” was pointed to; it is an excellent example of what happens, and boils down to a form of “slut-shaming.” I hate shaming. HATE IT. Violently. Which I’ll come back around to in a minute, I think.

I posted the original article in my local atheist group and got an immediate and surprising amount of push-back on the issue, which largely swirled around the specifics of elevatorgate, rather than addressing the sexism-at-conferences and sexism in the movement issue as a whole. To be fair, that was addressed as well, but the whole underground network system of warning women about skeezy speakers was labeled as something akin to high school girls posting about ex-boyfriends on the internet and gossipy things. All of the push-back took me a bit by surprise, and I felt what I always feel when confronted with confrontation, especially from people that I genuinely like, want acceptance and approval from (which, I know, is a whole other, if related, issue); I felt shamed. I was sorely tempted to just drop it and delete the post. But, I hate shame. And this is important. So I asked for help, which is also difficult for me, so that I wouldn’t feel quite so backed into a corner by myself. With that help, I then stood up and stuck to my fucking guns. I did not back down.

This not backing down is an important part of me dealing with my own sense of shame, and that’s incredibly important to me and for me, so I didn’t want to leave that entirely out. However, that’s not really the point that I’m trying to make in this post, so I’ll leave that for the moment, but it can be expected to return periodically as it is something with which I do and will continue to struggle and work through.

There were many other people that have weighed in on the issue from a variety of different perspectives. Stephanie Zvan had a follow up post addressing some practical aspects of what to do, Jen McCreight (whose off-hand comments at the conference spurred the whole blogosphere discussion) had a great post on it, JT Eberhard (from whom I shamelessly stole the word “skeeve”) asked what he and other men who self-identify as feminists could do to ensure that consent and boundaries are respected while recognizing that sexual people will be sexual people, Greta Christina has a few posts on the topic, Beth Presswood, Matt Dillahunty (who threatened to and, I believe, did block people from his FB wall who were using that same trivializing and slut-shaming technique [“The point of bringing this up at the convention was to note that this should NOT be back-channel communication and that the individuals should be called out on it. Those of you who are STUPIDLY just ranting that this is all just unsupported allegations - that's part of the fucking point. …  It's fucking disgraceful that even the meta-discussion about what to do in the future is being reacted to in a way that virtually ensures that mouths will stay closed.” – Oh my shit, I love that quote]), Ed Brayton, Skatje Myers (who was guest posting at Pharyngula) has a brief discussion of it at the end of her also excellent summary of the event, etc. I know I missed some that I’d read. Feel free to post links in the comments if you know of anymore.

Alright, in closing, and I think this addresses a couple of different things I might be trying to say, I’d like to bring up this thing called the Johari window. It’s a bit Psych101, I know, but I find it a useful model for a lot of things.

In this case, it’s really the “blind spot” window that I’d like to talk about just briefly. These are things that other people can see about us, but of which we are, for whatever reason, unaware. The reall challenge is how we react when other people point out some things about ourselves of which we are, perhaps almost willfully unaware. It can be an incredibly uncomfortable thing to have that shit pointed out to us. It has certainly been uncomfortable for me in the past, and I imagine for most people. But it levels the playing field, so to speak. When we get uncomfortable, we often get defensive. Things get said. Words are used. People get hurt.

On the other hand, if we take a step back and look at ourselves, and recognize that perhaps there really was something there (and, of course, it’s not always going to be the case that the person was right, but how will we know if we don’t at least look?), then we can shift those things that were hidden from ourselves into the realm that is not hidden from us, but is rather known to both us and those around us. That is how we become more ourselves, more whole, more self-aware; that is how we change, grow, affect change around us, become better people, become a better community.

That all feels incredibly incomplete and very poorly stated, so don’t be surprised if I come back and edit the shit out of this later, but at least it’s out of me and onto this, and that’s a starting place.

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Close the Closet Door Behind You

I live in the Omaha Metropolitan area. The population here (depending on just exactly what you are considering the “area” of the Omaha Metro area to be) is between about 409,000 to 1.2 million. Purely for the sake of simplicity, I’m going to round that number off and say, conservatively, about 500,000. According to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life’s U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, the percentage of card carrying, flag waving atheists in America is around 1.6%. Purely for the sake of simplicity (read: so that my poor, tired, already-tax-numbers-beleaguered head doesn’t have to work too hard), I’m going to call that around 1%. Note that this is at the way down at the bottom end of the percentage of people that I’d like to call community allies of some sort in a freethought, skeptic-y sort of way, which is around 16%.

Now I’d like to take a look at the membership of all of the various atheist organizations in the Omaha Metro area. There’s an umbrella organization by the name of CoRTEX (part of a broader national movement of umbrella organizations) in Omaha, and according to their best guess, the membership of ALL OF THE ORGANIZATIONS COMBINED is around 500.

Now here’s the part where the math comes in (and the vast oversimplification of my numbers above begins to make sense, too). 500 is 1/10^th of 1% of the population. That is incredible to me. That is 1/10^th of the low end of the estimated Atheist percentage of the low end of the overall population estimate. To say that this is a proportionally inaccurate representation of the Atheist community is an understatement. So, even at the LOWEST of the LOW end of estimation, this represents a gigantic FAIL. Something is wrong here.

At least a part of that something that is wrong is that we have been quiescent. We have not wanted to create waves, to rock the boat, to make Atheists and Atheism look bad. But, you know what? Fuck that. Those numbers up there are one of the reasons that I want to be out, I want to be up, I want to be visible. I do not want to be timid in my Atheism. I want to rock the fucking boat. I want to be inspired. I want others to be inspired around me and with me, I want to be a part of that. I want to be a part of what inspires others. (And as an aside for those worried that we might make us look bad, I think in some sense that it is just as well that the broader civic community around us see ALL of thing that is Us, warts and everything; trying to hide the warts of their faith hasn’t worked out well for the religious – just sayin’.)

I have said in the past, and will probably continue to say, that there are simply a large number of people who are at the very least functional atheists, but for whom the issue of faith in a deity or religion are not that great of a concern, and who are therefore not likely to feel the need to belong to an organization of this sort. I’ll have more to say on that later, but for the moment, I’ll just say that I don’t think that those numbers can possibly account for the disparity represented by 1/10^th of 1%.

If we are not out and open, the numbers will never even out and it will never be okay or acceptable for anyone at all to be an atheist in our Midwestern metropolitan area. Or any area. Anywhere. I want anyone no matter who they are, what personality type they are, no matter where they see themselves fitting on the “scale of activism” to feel like it’s okay to be us just the way that we are. Come on out, boys and girls, come out and play. Close the closet door behind you.

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Reconversion Blues

This is just a quick 2 cents post.

So, the atheist blogosphere had (an admittedly minor) explosion over Patrick Greene. See here at the Friendly Atheist for a blessedly brief latest on. I know that I harp on about the No True Scotsman fallacy quite a bit, but it's because it's an obvious trap that SO MANY PEOPLE fall into, and I also hate it (like, little bit of vomit in the back of my throat, hate it) when someone questions the quality and honesty of the faith that I once had. However, I have to wonder if, perhaps, a bunch of atheists haven't just fallen into it a bit. We see this public example of someone seeming to convert to Christianity and we want to say, "Fuck that, he wasn't a real skeptic to begin with." But on the other hand, what I do see people doing is not simply saying that and brushing their hands briskly together and walking away; they go on to say, "And here's why I don't think so... look at this and this and this." And really, when I googled him and searched for past posts about him, he doesn't look so good. Still, though, I think that the community should be careful when something like this happens not to simply say, "Oh, well, he's not a real skeptic, she was never a real atheist." All of this, of course, is a moot point now that he has re-de-converted. But, then, I don't think he was a real Christian to begin with.