The Atheist Conspiracy

The death of Christopher Hitchens yesterday brought out such wonderful examples of the religious sentiments of love, peace, fairness and justice.

On Twitter, the hashtag #GodIsNotGreat started trending. Many, many ignorant — and in some cases nutty — believers then began adding to that stream with complaints about the mere fact that it was trending, or highly offended responses about the existence of such a hashtag or the existence of people who believe such sentiments.

Many similar sentiments were aired in the ABCNews.com comments, with many there disingenuously using Hitch’s Islamophobia (never mind of course that many atheists also disagree with it and will readily say so) in an attempt to discredit his religious skepticism. Some didn’t go this far, but still took passive-aggressive shots at the fiery style that made Hitchens so well-respected amongst atheists despite some of his less favorable stances, characterizing it as anger and acting as though the world could do with less of it (they’re wrong; in fact, liberal institutions would do very well to copy Hitch’s playbook, considering that conservatives have been doing so since forever).

This brings to mind other events where atheism and atheists were brought into some facet of the mainstream public eye. Every time this happens, it seems, we will have religious nuts ramping up their nuttery, religious non-nuts calmly and condescendingly pooh-pooh-ing the mean atheists, and staunch “agnostics”, “spiritualists” and the like murmuring some light derision at the nuts before loudly agreeing with the non-nuts and echoing such claims as atheists being angry amoral nihilists who really should just leave all those nice religious people alone. All those non-atheists, furthermore, will immediately run over to the other side and crow about special exceptions, how this is only one case, how they only don’t like the mean atheists when another (ostensibly not mean) atheist brings up the fact that this happens every single time atheism is brought into the public eye.

How many times do you hear about a church getting this sort of response when they want to put up a billboard pushing their flavor of Christianity?

How many times do you see Christian missionaries called “angry” or “militant”? These are people who are sent around the world for the sole purpose of converting people to Christianity. That is, at the end of the day, their job (and almost none of them are paid to do it). No atheist does that. There are no atheist groups that send bands of atheist missionaries out to the Philippines or Africa or South America to deconvert all those deranged Christians. Hell, I don’t even know of any individual atheist (except maybe Dan Dennett) who exclusively devotes their time to justifying atheism, let alone going around trying to get as many people as possible to deconvert. Missionaries are many, but how many times do you hear missionaries told that they’re not allowed to do what they do because that’s just too mean, too aggressive, and they should respect others’ beliefs?

When do you see any religious apologetic get told that their arguments are not worth addressing because of some perceived “meanness” or “aggressiveness” or “anger” or the like? Never mind Christianity, when have you seen a Muslim, a Jew Buddhist, a Confucian, a Scientologist told this?

I haven’t. The Scientologist will get called crazy — but not angry, not aggressive, nothing like that. But as an atheist, on a large and public forum meant for debate? I got that. Someone would make a post about their religious beliefs, I would respond with my questions, and more than half the time the discussion would quickly degenerate into me having to defend myself from a slew of accusations regarding my tone or intentions, and wondering why questions I had worded to be as calm and objective as possible were having all of this dishonest intent and “negative” tone read into them. When I asked about these things and got no answers, I would then begin to get angry — but not so much anger as frustration, the feeling of beating my head against a wall. I literally was. I wasn’t having anything explained to me; why I was wrong, what was so wrong about my questions, where this claimed dishonest intent was, where this reading of anger was coming from, why I was getting such a hostile reaction, none of those apparently deserved to be made known, or I somehow already knew them. In fact, those I talked to wouldn’t even admit their hostility, instead claiming that I was (in some unexplained manner) being hostile!

Valid question, non-answer. Probe further, further non-answer. Probe even further, malicious intent. Probe into the malicious intent, non-answer. And so on. Thud, thud thud, my head, concrete wall, until eventually it got so tiring that I resigned myself almost exclusively to atheist communities because it seemed like atheist communities were the only place where these questions were taken seriously. And the more time I spent in atheist communities, the more it felt like the debates I had outside of them consisted of me making a rational point only to have my opponent try to find every reason possible to not address my argument, let alone believe it. As if my opponents saw my arguments and felt them so horrible that they could not even be given the time of day, that they had to be dismissed for some reason — and none of those reasons had anything to do with their logical consistency.

Non-atheists wonder why we’re so angry. Of course we’re fucking angry. You would be too, if every time you tried to debate you got dismissed for reasons that don’t belong in any debate. If every time you tried to advance your point of view, you were surrounded by people doing nothing but attempting character assassination and not explaining what exactly you’re doing that’s so wrong and makes you so deserving of this assassination, and if you saw nothing different except when amongst those who agree with you on the point you’re trying to defend, you’d be livid. Wouldn’t you? You wouldn’t? Tell me that again, with a straight face. Tell me that after days, weeks, months, years even of getting this, that you wouldn’t get frustrated. Maybe you wouldn’t get mad the first time, but don’t tell me it wouldn’t pile up in the back of your head, slowly eating away at your unflappable temper until you discover that it’s really not as unflappable as you think.

You’re not unflappable. No one’s unflappable. At some point, you, like any of the rest of us, will have had enough of the bullshit, the silencing, the domination of the public square by this belief that is at the end of the day propped up by nothing.

Isn’t this supposed to be a democracy? Aren’t we supposed to have free expression of ideas? Aren’t ideas supposed to duke it out in the public square, fairly and honestly?

One idea is being dismissed. One idea is being told that it cannot participate, that it is wrong not because it is wrong but because some people are offended by it, they think it “angry” or “aggressive”, and they think its advancement dishonest. What is fair about this? What is honest about this? What is reasonable about this?

Would it be reasonable for me to tell a missionary that they are being angry and aggressive, and deny them the ability to put their religion into the public square on an equal ground on this basis? If not, then why is it reasonable to tell an atheist that?

Religion, in particular Christianity, has hogged the public square for far too long. Even 15 centuries is far too long to remain in childhood. Believers need to grow up and accept — really, not just grudgingly — that they’re not the only fish in the pond, and then re-evaluate whether they truly believe in a free and democratic society where all ideas are granted equal respect and judged on their factual and logical merit.

But for that to happen, non-atheists need to stop babying believers and rushing to their defense when atheists rightfully point out that they’ve stepped out of line and are acting like children and trying to monopolize debate (again). They need to stop being big brothers and start being parents, welcoming and accepting yet willing to bring down the hammer if necessary, upholding fairness and equality for both sides rather than just one.

Non-Christians in particular need to check their priorities. Fifteen centuries, people. Fifteen. Centuries. Christianity is now the largest religion by number of adherents, it dominates the political discourse in many countries; most notably the United States, where a party stacked full of Christian wingnuts (even by moderate standards!) currently owns enough of both legislative houses to block anything that they don’t like.

You defend them now. But how well do they defend you? You will find these nuts and their supporters spouting off a myriad of claims about how the United States is a “Christian nation”, how Christianity is seemingly required for one to be considered a Real American, et cetera. You can find sentiments to this extent all over outlets such as Right Wing Watch that devote themselves to chronicling the lies of the “Moral Majority”.

They came for the Muslims and you did not speak up because you were not Muslims. They are coming for the atheists and you are not speaking up because you are not atheists. How long will it be before they come after the agnostics? The spiritualists? The Hindus? The Buddhists?

What about all of you liberal Christians who disagree so vehemently with their politics while defending their religious sentiments? How long will it be before you are the last enemy that must be destroyed?

Let me open by saying that “non-atheists” aren’t all theists. Non-atheists are people who don’t identify as atheist — and a significant amount of these people aren’t theists, identifying as “agnostic”, or “no religion”, or “spiritual” (believing in some supernatural force that lacks agency).

A lot of you non-atheists probably have heard us atheists say that we respect people regardless of their belief or lack thereof, or something similar to that, which probably makes you wonder why we’re so angry.

Well, see, we do respect you. The problem is, you don’t respect us.

I really hate to say this. I would love to say that yes, religion is as nice as you say it is, that it is respectful as it — and you — say it is.

But it isn’t, and you aren’t either when you stand up to defend it.

When you call us mean and disrespectful, and then tell us that it is our questions — questions that would be asked by an extraterrestrial scientist speaking to a human missionary — that are disrespectful, you are telling us to shut up and nothing more. This is disrespectful to our views. You are telling us that we are not allowed to provide a counterbalance to our opponents’ claims in the public sphere because our opponents do not like us. And we get mad, because we don’t like this.

But when have you seen an atheist do this?

Have you seen an atheist ever tell a theist or a Christian, when they make their claims, that they are simply being disrespectful and need to stop because of that? Do you have any examples of that?

You can look, but I don’t think you’ll find anything — because we don’t do that. We give you that respect because we give everyone that respect. It’s called honesty and it’s fundamental to any reasoned discussion, that is, if the discussion is going to get anywhere useful.

Which brings me to my second point: those of you non-atheists who don’t believe in a god are still non-atheists regardless, because you don’t understand what it means to be an atheist.

You see, when you’re an atheist, you get this sort of shafting all the time. Being an atheist means that, for some reason, non-atheists are free to make all sorts of assumptions about your moral character or inferences about your tone or intentions without backing them up at all. Sure, you can ask, but all you’ll get in response are reiterations, or just driving the person off in a huff because you asked all of your mean and inconvenient critical questions.

What’s more, it means that people feel the liberty to make insane leaps of logic or sophist constructions in order to not just explain things about religion or their religion, but also about atheism — and your atheism. They feel like they are allowed to say whatever they want about atheists, creating obviously-disrespectful caricatures of invisible atheists they supposedly know — or even real, prominent atheists such as Dawkins and Hitchens and Harris — and waving them about in your face as if they, the non-atheist, know more about atheism than you, as if somehow all their pronouncements are made law by their burning scarecrows with names and faces taped to them. Not only that, but they feel that they are allowed to declare that the atheist is acting dishonestly, trying to “win” the debate rather than come to some sort of rational conclusion, and not back this up at all because who other than the atheist (who is obviously being dishonest) is going to oppose that?

And that’s only when you merely debate and make your arguments known ON THE INTERNET. FSM forbid that you actually advertise your existence on a billboard, or a bus. Worse yet is when you start making the arguments there. When the churches advertise their services, when the religiously-backed PACs put out their ads and have their fundraisers and hobnob with parliamentarians and congresscritters to spread their backwards views about how women are property and evolution is evil, that’s all fine and dandy, freedom of speech and all that. But us atheists? Once again we’re being mean, strident, disrespectful, what have you. Or, worse yet, the ads will get vandalized and pulled, with whoever was hosting them mumbling something about religious content being too controversial. But when have you ever heard of church advertisements being vandalized by atheists? Almost never — because we respect their freedom of speech.

When you go on a site advertised as an atheist community, furthermore, you will find some fairly stringent rules — excessive proselytizing will universally result in you being banned, as will excessive use of any of the dishonest tactics above. You’ll also find a lot of people talking about these tactics being used against them, and how much they love having a space where they can come in and not have those tactics used. And if you do use those tactics, while you won’t be instantly banned, you will receive a fairly hostile response — and when you ask why you’re getting such a hostile response, you’ll most likely be told that the community has many many posts regarding such tactics and you should probably have done a bit of background reading, and that by making your complaints you are simply annoying the community by posting things that have been posted and discussed tens or hundreds or even thousands of times, mostly with the same results. Why? Simple: atheists have to deal with that all the time in public. When they come to an atheist community, they are coming there specifically so that they DON’T have to deal with that, and when you make them deal with it there, you are invading their safe space.

Furthermore, when you do that, you contribute. Your post justifies everyone else in saying that, regardless of their beliefs being as innocuous as yours or as kooky as Ron Paul’s (or anywhere between or outside those two points). By saying it, you allow them to say it, and you add to the unjust delegitimization of atheist arguments for irrational reasons. Worse yet, when you say it, you do direct harm to the atheist and any other atheists reading it. For no rational reason, you undermine their self-confidence and make them feel more alone in the world, as if they will never get anywhere outside of their atheist communities because when they venture out of the safe space all they get is non-atheists posting and agreeing with this sort of derision, and only other atheists — few, if any — rising in defense of atheism. Invariably, the responses will be heavily skewed towards agreement with the non-atheist position, with the atheist arguments (if there is even more than one before the discussion dissolves into the atheist asking for evidence that they’re being disrespectful or dishonest) left dismissed even though they haven’t been addressed.

Sure, you might not believe in god either. But when you come in there with your “I don’t believe in a god, but you atheists could sure be more respectful…” you prove that you’re not an atheist right to the core refusal to admit that you are an atheist. When you say these things, you uphold a culture that says these things, that says things about respecting beliefs while stomping on the face of atheism with every breath.

To be an atheist requires ignoring the words and focusing on the boot. It requires knocking the flimsy stool out from underneath the mountain of pleasent lies constructed by religion and its abettors and not only admitting that atheists are marginalized but fighting back. It means calling out the bullshit niceties trotted out about religion when the crazies are drumming up US Senate votes for their latest hare-brained initiative. It means standing up and saying “that’s wrong and fucked up on so many levels” when religious apologists assert that parents own their children right down to being allowed to dictate what superstitions their children do or do not believe. It means dispensing with all of this idiotic framing of things in terms of the non-atheist’s “offense” rather than this “offense” being the driving force behind the maintenance of religious privilege. And it means admitting that you’ve been doing harm too, by upholding the edifice of religion even as a “nice” nonreligious person.

Being an atheist, in short, means being honest.

But being honest doesn’t necessarily mean being an atheist. I could give a fuck less if you’re Christian, or Buddhist, or “spiritual”, or even “freezone” Scientologist. Just be honest, and stand with me when I call out dishonesty for what it is — I and the atheists who stand with me will be more than happy to call you an ally. We’re not mad at you. We’re never really mad at you, unless you yourself give us reason to be. We are mad at what you are saying, what you are doing, what you are upholding — and if you stop saying, doing and upholding those things, we will welcome you with open arms and a cask of grog as a valued ally. Indeed, because atheism is a choice, we are seen as less deserving of allies than other marginalized groups; the amount of non-atheist allies that I know about can be counted on one hand and worse yet I know them all on a personal level, not merely as prominent names.

All we’re asking is that you stop thinking about you being offended, and instead think of us being harmed. Offense is not harm, and your offense at our position isn’t remotely close to the harm done to us by your silencing “offense”.

So stop.

Please.

“You have faith too — faith in reality!” — common theist/religionist argument

Yes. I do have faith that reality exists. But this is pointless nothing because we all do, as it is necessary to survive and we can`t really ignore what happens if we ignore some of the obvious and even not so obvious aspects of reality. I take that reality is real on faith — so what? You do too, since you are making claims about it that can be backed up with evidence from it (unless the claims are made so meaningless that they would be more readily attributed to the weakest of charlatans and crooks). So back them up and be honest. Taking for granted that reality is, as we both do, show how your claims are correct.

Until then, you get nothing. You lose. Good day, (appropriate pronoun here)!

You tell me my virtues are beyond words. That I am deserving of all the help I need to get onto the same level, because all of us know that fundamentally I am different and have been different, by my own actions, the actions of others, and my sheer nature.

You wax eloquent about how I have done so much and do so much, how I bend over backwards to be nice and care about other people and have done virtually nothing — or indeed nothing at all — deserving of the mistreatment you admit I receive.

You say this as you take the pipe from my hand, as I put the drink down in front of you, as I come back with an extra cheeseburger or handful of candy, as I lend you a tiny bit more money to cover the rent.

But when we’re among friends, socializing, drinking, I sit alone. You all talk, smile, have fun, and when I ask why I am left alone you claim it is my fault somehow, even though when I talk no one responds, and when I am given attention it is temporary and perfunctory, and I am lucky to have five consecutive minutes where I am not alone.

When it comes to action, your words go out the window, and I am deserving of the mistreatment, the total ignorance I receive.

That is, until you need another drink — and when I tell you ‘no’, I’m an asshole.

And you almost never care when I sit in my room, where I am the least alone that I could ever be, surrounded by all of my real friends…so how, then, can you call me ‘friend’?

ΛE = Λq + ΛW

That is the equation to calculate the amount of energy (positive or negative) in a chemical reaction. E is total energy, q is the temperature of the system and W is the work done on or by the system.

To find q, you would need to know the substances you’re dealing with, their specific heat capacities, and what reactions they’re going through. If you’re applying more than one reaction, you need to take the equations for both reactions and add them together.

Furthermore, specific heat capacity only applies under given conditions. Most specific heat capacities will be tailored to standard laboratory conditions (ambient pressure ≈101.4 kPa, temperature ≈24°C), but heat capacity varies based on temperature (the heat capacity of water is 4.1855 [J/(g·K)] at 15°C and 2.259 [J/(g·K)] at 25°C), and the human body has an internal temperature of 36.6°C.

“But Setar, isn’t there a lot of energy in food? You know those labels say calories when they mean kcal, right?”

Oh, I know. There’s two problems with that:

1) The body expends energy to break the food down in the first place. Your digestive system is not run by a wizard (though that would be cool, and explain irregular bowels quite well), it needs energy just as much as the rest of your body does.

2) Obviously, not all of the food we eat is taken up by the body in the first place, otherwise I wouldn’t be talking about bowels at all.

3…wait, crap, let me start over again. Among the problems with saying that there’s a ton of energy in the food and therefore the first law of thermodynamics holds…

3) Not all of the energy is taken up in the same way, and the body manages how that is done quite well.

4) Remember how I said that the equation only applies to a single given reaction under set conditions? Well, nutrients go under a hell of a lot more reactions after they’re taken up. The most famous cycle is the citric acid or Krebs cycle, and to get the energy output, you’d need to add up the energy equations for ALL of the reactions in that cycle.

And then you’d need to add in the reactions from all the other cycles in the cell that help to convert the nutrients into usable energy, and you’d have the total energy output over that cycle of reactions. You’d then somehow need to tie the energy inputs to concentrations of nutrients, and trace those nutrients back to the food they came from, and figure out how much of the energy present in that food actually makes it to the cell.

Getting complicated yet? Because it gets worse.

If you do all that, you will get the food intake to energy output ratio…for one cell. In one part of your body, under one set of conditions. And the intake-output ratios will be vastly different over differing types of cells in your body, and different parts of your body. To get the intake and translate it into something meaningful like weight loss — such as fat deposits — you’d need to intensely monitor what you ate, figure out what it would get taken up as in the digestive system, and then monitor your body and see how it worked out and where all this food actually ended up. You’d also need to account for other confounding factors such as your genetic structure and general life. Then you’d need to figure out how much energy your body puts out over a given period of time — and that is a lot more than just exercising; you would probably want to use a given 24-hour period to cross a range of activities including sleep. And then you’d need to monitor how changing that affected your fat/muscle/energy distribution.

And then you’d figure out exactly how much fat you’ll put on by having that extra brownie or bigger slice of cake. My guess, however, is not much, and if you’re not willing to have that bigger slice of cake then I guess it just means more for me ^_^

Accommodationists and self-professed ‘agnostics’ are cowards; it’s not really hard to tell that, since the entire argument is a tone argument against atheism. They attack the messengers, not the message; they claim that atheism is too ‘strident’ or ‘extremist’ and harp on about the invisible fundamentalist atheists who berate all the religious people they know every day — or the invisible fundamentalist arguments of every prominent atheist from the “Four Horsemen” to us gnu atheists who include a social justice worldview based on making society better for all of its members while retaining individuality — which is a hard balance, but it’s not like we’re going to get there if we’re ideologically shackled.

There’s another half to it: atheists are marginalized. If you’re an atheist, it becomes acceptable for your opponent to start launching tone arguments or declare that they won’t answer your question because they don’t want to and by the way you’re trying to rob me of my faith how dare you ask that question of me. It becomes acceptable to insinuate that atheists do not have a system of morals or ethics, and it becomes acceptable to look down on them as lesser, as “limited”, “closed-minded”, “mundane”, “hopeless” know-nothings who would be so much better if they just believed some form of claptrap. It also becomes acceptable to simply project logical faults onto them and dismiss their arguments with only a superficial address that claims fault with little, if any, description of how this fault actually occurred, or that appeals to “obvious” common knowledge (with, of course, no regard being paid to how obvious it actually is if someone is asking them about it).

Worse yet, it becomes acceptable to not vote for one for President of the United States. In some areas of the United States (most notably Utah) it is possible to be denied a livelihood and run the risk of being beaten or murdered if one is openly atheist (the mere fact that I must refer to it as “openly atheist” in the same way one would refer to “openly gay” or “openly transgendered” is itself problematic). It is acceptable in certain areas to enforce sectarian prayer at public school graduation and ostracize an atheist for supporting freedom of religion.

So for the accommodationists, it’s not just about having to admit wrong and that religion isn’t this special, mystical thing. It’s not just intellectual cowardice.

It’s about not wanting to take up a new fight, a harder fight than an intellectual battle for science and skepticism. It’s about fighting back at the single largest establishment that perpetuates and has spent almost all of its existence ingraining the anti-science, anti-critical thought measures meant for its preservation into society. It’s about admitting that the roots of all quackery are intertwined with religion, and that quackery feeds off of religious privilege, and that they and their fellow wishy-washy ‘moderates’ do so as well.

And if you’re admitting it — actually admitting it, not just paying lip-service — you have to fight back against it. That fight is very hard — ask GBLT activists (heavy emphasis on the T here), feminists, people against the health-industrial complex…or atheists, especially gnu atheists.

Surplus accommodationist weaponry for sale — never used, dropped once.