Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, The New Atheism, and Rebecca Watson

I am a non-believer myself. But the New Atheism got old really fast. There's just not that much to say on the subject.

There was a fairly recent Russian movie called Cargo 200 set in the Soviet Union. It had a scene of a Communist who taught a course in atheism at a university. He gets into a debate with a Christian and doesn't do terribly well. One review of the movie described his arguments as sounding like a teenager's attacks on religion. But I turned on You Tube and saw Christopher Hitchens using the exact same arguments in public debates.

Don't underestimate teenagers. And don't overestimate the grown-ups.

Christopher Hitchens became a George Bush supporter in spite of Bush's religiosity and seemed to focus his "atheism" against Muslims. Hitchens was pro-Palestinian---at least he started out that way---but he hated Hamas and Hezbollah simply because they were religious. 

And now...

Rebecca Watson has an article in Slate magazine subtitled "I spoke out about sexual harassment among atheists and scientists. Then came the rape threats."

Read it here:

http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2012/10/sexism_in_the_skeptic_community_i_spoke_out_then_came_the_rape_threats.html 

I was rather shocked.

Watson wrote that when she discovered the skeptic community, she thought she had found her people.

Then women started telling me stories about sexism at skeptic events, experiences that made them uncomfortable enough to never return. At first, I wasn’t able to fully understand their feelings as I had never had a problem existing in male-dominated spaces. But after a few years of blogging, podcasting, and speaking at skeptics’ conferences, I began to get emails from strangers who detailed their sexual fantasies about me. I was occasionally grabbed and groped without consent at events. And then I made the grave mistake of responding to a fellow skeptic’s YouTube video in which he stated that male circumcision was just as harmful as female genital mutilation (FGM). I replied to say that while I personally am opposed to any non-medical genital mutilation, FGM is often much, much more damaging than male circumcision.

The response from male atheists was overwhelming. This is one example:

“honestly, and i mean HONESTLY.. you deserve to be raped and tortured and killed. swear id laugh if i could”

In 2011, Watson was on a panel for an atheist conference in Dublin. She sat next to  Richard Dawkins himself.  The topic was "Communicating atheism."

Dawkins used his time to criticize Phil Plait, an astronomer who the year prior had given a talk in which he argued for skeptics to be kinder. I used my time to talk about what it’s like for me to communicate atheism online, and how being a woman might affect the response I receive, as in rape threats and other sexual comments.

The audience was receptive, and afterward I spent many hours in the hotel bar discussing issues of gender, objectification, and misogyny with other thoughtful atheists. At around 4 a.m., I excused myself, announcing that I was exhausted and heading to bed in preparation for another day of talks.

As I got to the elevator, a man who I had not yet spoken with directly broke away from the group and joined me. As the doors closed, he said to me, “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I find you very interesting. Would you like to come back to my hotel room for coffee?” I politely declined and got off the elevator when it hit my floor.

A few days later, I was making a video about the trip and I decided to use that as an example of how not to behave at conferences if you want to make women feel safe and comfortable. After all, it seemed rather obvious to me that if your goal is to get sex or even just companionship, the very worst way to go about attaining that goal is to attend a conference, listen to a woman speak for 12 hours about how uncomfortable she is being sexualized at conferences, wait for her to express a desire to go to sleep, follow her into an isolated space, and then suggest she go back to your hotel room for “coffee,” which, by the way, is available at the hotel bar you just left.

What I said in my video, exactly, was, “Guys, don’t do that,” with a bit of a laugh and a shrug. What legions of angry atheists apparently heard was, “Guys, I won’t stop hating men until I get 2 million YouTube comments calling me a ‘cunt.’ ” The skeptics boldly rose to the imagined challenge.

Even Dawkins weighed in. He hadn’t said anything while sitting next to me in Dublin as I described the treatment I got, but a month later he left this sarcastic comment on a friend’s blog:

Dear Muslima

Stop whining, will you. Yes, yes, I know you had your genitals mutilated with a razor blade, and … yawn … don't tell me yet again, I know you aren't allowed to drive a car, and you can't leave the house without a male relative, and your husband is allowed to beat you, and you'll be stoned to death if you commit adultery. But stop whining, will you. Think of the suffering your poor American sisters have to put up with.

Only this week I heard of one, she calls herself Skep"chick", and do you know what happened to her? A man in a hotel elevator invited her back to his room for coffee. I am not exaggerating. He really did. He invited her back to his room for coffee. Of course she said no, and of course he didn't lay a finger on her, but even so …

And you, Muslima, think you have misogyny to complain about! For goodness sake grow up, or at least grow a thicker skin.

Richard

Dawkins’ seal of approval only encouraged the haters. My YouTube page and many of my videos were flooded with rape “jokes,” threats, objectifying insults, and slurs. A few individuals sent me hundreds of messages, promising to never leave me alone. My Wikipedia page was vandalized. Graphic photos of dead bodies were posted to my Facebook page.

You should read the whole article. She's faced the same crap at the regular skeptics conferences---I mean conferences that focused on debunking psychic powers and the paranormal rather than religion. There are rape threats, blogs and twitter accounts all aimed against her.

Meanwhile, other skeptical women are being bullied out of the spotlight and even out of their homes. My fellow writer on Skepchick, Amy Davis Roth, moved after her home address was posted on a forum dedicated to hating feminist skeptics. In September, blogger Greta Christina wrote that “when I open my mouth to talk about anything more controversial than Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster recipes or Six More Atheists Who Are Totally Awesome, I can expect a barrage of hatred, abuse, humiliation, death threats, rape threats, and more.” And Jen McCreight stopped blogging and accepting speaking engagements altogether. “I wake up every morning to abusive comments, tweets, and emails about how I’m a slut, prude, ugly, fat, feminazi, retard, bitch, and cunt (just to name a few),” she wrote. “I just can’t take it anymore.”

What's wrong with these people?

I should note here that Watson wrote that some atheist and skeptic groups were more sympathetic than others.

Jeff Sparrow on Counterpunch

I read about Watson's article here, on Counterpunch.com. An article by Jeff Sparrow. It noted that you could google the name Rebecca Watson and see the attacks on her.

Sparrow notes that emergence of "the new atheism" coincided with the War on Terror. The new atheists explain religion "purely and simply as a result of the dangerous ignorance of the faithful" and ignore culture and history. This leads, he says, to "certain political conclusions" about the countries the US and its allies are occupying.

...Figures like Sam Harris and the late Christopher Hitchens shot to prominence after 9/11 precisely because they offered simplistic explanations for the ‘why do they hate us?’ queries dominating the media (short answer: cos they’re religious fanatics!), and then consolidated their careers with an anti-God shtick in which an essentialised Islamophobia jostled with bloodthirsty warmongering.

Not all the New Atheists are so explicitly enthusiastic about imperialism (indeed, many think of themselves as liberal) but a racialised attitude to Islam has steeped through the movement as a whole, with the attitudes in the comments threads on many atheist blogs often comparable with what you’d find on so-called counter-jihadi sites.

Even so, the vitriol directed at Watson might still seem perplexing, given that the New Atheists often pitch their hostility Islam as a defence of gender equality.

...

Humanitarian imperialism is not, it should be remembered, an entirely new phenomenon: in the glory days of the British Empire there were no shortage of jingoes lauding the civilizing impact of the Raj, precisely because it rescued Indian maidens from the depredations of their savage culture. If you picture a sloshed London clubman simultaneously harrumphing about suffragettes and decrying how the darkies treated their wives, you’ve got a pretty good sense of the mentality that allowed Christopher Hitchens to laud the Iraq invasion as a victory for women – and then call the Dixie Chicks ‘fucking fat slags’ for opposing it.

It’s no coincidence that Dawkins belittles Watson by contrasting her with the mythical Muslima, someone he seems to like precisely because she doesn’t exist. A hypothetical Islamic victim begging for white men to save her appeals to the self-perception of the imperial atheist; a flesh-and-blood American standing up for her own rights, not so much.

...Right-wing atheists have long argued that Islam needs a reformation. Well, the same thing might be said about their movement. It’s high time that the atheist Left asserted itself against the atheist Right – an Occupy Skepticism, if you will.

Libertarian types

I've seen this kind of crap before from "free thinkers".

I've encountered members of the Libertarian Party---Ayn Rand cultists, who called themselves "Objectivists"---who thought they were really sticking it to The Man by smoking cigarettes and being openly racist.

"That's Objectivism, is it?" I asked one of them.

They view "political correctness" as stifling, so they think racism must be liberating.

I've seen this in low budget documentary style movies with racist characters----I assume it's because the filmmaker sees "political correctness" as phony, so they imagine that racism must be a sign of sincerity.

In this case it's rape threats and obscene epithets instead of cigarettes and racial slurs, but the principle is the same.