Especially amazed at the North Carolina thing. I'm used to laws remaining on the books after being invalidated by a Supreme Court decision, but I'm pretty sure this bit of the NC Constitution was invalidated in 1789 and nevertheless retained.
What do atheist groups in high school do? I found an NY Times article that mentions trying to create an atheist Frisbee team and setting up an informational table during Faith Week. But that doesn't fill up a school year.
Atheists are totally not winning the oppression olympics with this kind of weak-tea mistreatment.
It might, depending on how long Frisbee season lasts.
Lexington, more liberal than Louisville?!
Atheists are totally not winning the oppression olympics with this kind of weak-tea mistreatment.
It looks to me like the people in these anecdotes face relentless bullying for their beliefs.
Goose Poop Path? There is a footpath behind the seawall in C's (deceased) grandfather's village which we call Dogshit Alley. For obvious reasons. I nearly fell off my seat when I heard C's prissy stepMIL say "shit" out loud.
Now I will go and read about atheists.
Fuck. You people should move to a sane country.
I bet it's nothing compared to the hostile environment atheists face here.
Atheists are totally not winning the oppression olympics with this kind of weak-tea mistreatment.
Seriously. It's like these whiny atheists never even heard of the war on Christmas.
And the atheists started that war.
Mmm-bop! Bop, bop mm-bop! Shooby-doo-whoa...
8.2: It sounded like the atheists get a good deal of pushback/harassment when they put up billboards and such, but it doesn't seem like relentless bullying of people in their day-to-day lives. How often do any of us cross paths with people who know or care what we believe?
How often do any of us cross paths with people who know or care what we believe?
I live in NC, and it is chock full of people who will pester you about what your 'church home' is until you have to lie in self-defense. At least I grew up in a Christian home, so I can talk the talk and get all the references. It would be really rough for someone who didn't know the lingo.
Three years ago I had a person tell a joke about atheists in a staff meeting with no apparent comprehension of it being offensive. Did I say anything? Hell, no. I like having a job.
(In case anyone wanted to know the joke; Why is April Fool the atheist holiday? Because the fool says there is no God. It got laughs.)
8: You don't win the oppression olympics by being oppressed, you win by being the most oppressed.
Maybe I would feel differently if I lived in a different part of the country; I don't feel very alone where I am, but perhaps others do.
On reflection, "perhaps" is too weak. Almost certainly others feel more alone in their atheism than I do.
w1nna's entry alone has a better shot at a medal than all ten entries in the linked article combined.
w1nna's entry alone has a better shot at a medal than all ten entries in the linked article combined
Including the High Schooler who got thrown out of his house by his parents? You cold.
I am alone.
I am utterly alone in my unbelief.
Eli Eli lama sabachthani?
20: I forgot about that detail. While having asshole parents is not quite the same thing as being oppressed, that story was also a decent contender. I'm sure the same thing or worse has happened to some gay kids though.
21.last: Give your complaints about the uselessness of the over-relaxed modern, you might try "Eloi Eloi lama sabachthani?"
It sounded like the atheists get a good deal of pushback/harassment when they put up billboards and such, but it doesn't seem like relentless bullying of people in their day-to-day lives.
Seriously, all you have to do is keep your weird ways a secret. Maybe develop a plausible cover story about a church that is out of town that no one ever sees.
21: It's like I was saying to the other hateful urban elites I hang out with the other day, in between kicking the Mennonite girl and spitting on the nun: There but for the grace of God go I.
Maybe develop a plausible cover story about a church that is out of town that no one ever sees.
I go to church in Canada.
This post reminds me that yesterday I saw a plumbing-service van with several Jesus fish incorporated into the company name. What a weird way to advertise, but, hey, play to the majority, I guess.
Did I tell the story about how, after we got our old oil tank removed from the basement, we got a thank you note from the owner of the company, including several fairly bland fundie Xtian tracts? I guess he figured there's not a lot of repeat business in the taking-out-80-year-old-oil-tanks game, so why not let your freak flag fly?
Today I saw the van for the Muzak installer people. He was in slow traffic and had his window open, so I got to hear that he was listening to sports talk radio.
25 gets it right. There's a lot more than billboards in the list, and a lot of it would garner widespread outrage if it were dire cted at someone because of their religion.
I can pass for Catholic if I need to.
Beetlejuice! Beetlejuice! Beetlejuice!
I don't even believe in dinosaurs. Encino Man was for the money.
"Wine-dark sea" exists.
I do not understand a world in which metaphors, metonymy, similes, synecdoche are unreal. I cannot understand a world that divides the imagined from the sensible and possible to perceive. I don't really understand the qualitative differences, the differences in kind, between Glasgow, Ancient Rome, Hobbiton as far as the way I think of them. I can't see a vast gap between what is now dimly remembered and what is or was imagined.
Maybe I am ignorant or crazy, but Frodo, Huckleberry, and God are more real to me than most of you. This is not Idealism or an ontological argument.
And "just a metaphor or symbol" is more language that is incomprehensible to me. Metaphors are Angels.
Happy Bloomsday.
Semi-OT, major German paper on the NBA finals:
Dirk Nowitzki triumphs over Ghetto-basketball
That is one fucked up country you have there. Not Saudi Arabia, maybe somewhere between Iran and Pakistan without the frontier provinces.
Maybe I am ignorant or crazy, but Frodo, Huckleberry, and God are more real to me than most of you.
Do you fancy a bet on the result of "Seabiscuit"?
It's worth remembering, of course, that none of this would be happening if Richard Dawkins wasn't so smug.
I do have to say that the "oh noes! they defaced our posters!" on public transport ones are a bit weak. Posters are there to be defaced, and if you put a poster on a bus stop which has a controversial message of any sort, I don't think you really do have the right to expect the public not to reply to it.
I think the point is supposed to be that if you defaced a fundie poster it would be torches and pitchforks for dinner.
I bet it wouldn't though. Are American bus-stops completely different from the ones round my way?
I don't really understand the qualitative differences, the differences in kind, between Glasgow, Ancient Rome, Hobbiton
Glasgow: technologically primitive town full of short hairy men who drink a lot and occasionally get stabbed.
Ancient Rome: technologically primitive town full of short hairy men who drink a lot and occasionally get stabbed.
Hobbiton...
Oi! Less of the technologically primitive. And no, I've not had my tea!
American bus stops are usually positioned right outside locations of the Torches and Pitchforks Diner chain.
45. That is a fantastic business idea!
Customers are initially seated in the basement, on rough wooden benches, where they are offered a menu of bread and cheese, boiled potatos and a bland bean stew. However, if they can arrive at terms with enough of their fellow diners, they can attempt to break into the ground floor brasserie (against the resistence of suitably costumed ex-wrestlers).
If they succeed, they will be offered a mid price menu of plain but pleasant food with quaffable wine, but it will be in limited supply (which is why they will have to negotiate terms in the first place). The waiters will take their orders sectretly, so that it will only be apparent if anybody has ratted on their agreement when someone else orders the lasagna and are told that it's sold out. People who rat on agreements may be returned to the basement by a sufficient number of fellow diners.
Between seeing the brasserie menu and actually ordering, diners will have a further opportunity to try to storm the upstairs dining room (white table cloths and solid silver), guarded by rather larger wrestlers. Game and sucking pig, with exotic fruits and fine wines. Same rules apply. People who manage to finish a meal in the dining room may optionally distribute their leftovers in the basement to suitably grateful and obsequious customers.
46: outstanding. But you're missing a key point. Instead of having professional ex-wrestlers as bouncers between the basement and ground floor, and between the ground floor and upstairs, you should have customers. There's the option of getting a small portion of the food that they're serving on the floor above if you agree in return to prevent your fellow diners from trying to get up there.
Much more realistic and also cuts down on the staff costs.
Maybe I am ignorant or crazy, but Frodo, Huckleberry, and God are more real to me than most of you.
THAT'S HOW WE KNOW YOU ARE ONE OF US.
46 and 47 would fit right in at Tea Party summer camp.
47 is quite right, of course. Starter portions for the gendarmerie.
46: And in the very innermost sanctum, you sit on a plain bench, where you are served a pizza by the Dalai Lama. If you eat it, it really will make you one with everything.
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Modern Love: time-travelling sea monkeys division
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I took notes on American bus stops. The ads are not defaced much, though the shelters are usually beaten up a bit. There were two stops where someone had taped sheets of ordinary typing paper to the shelter. These said "Graveface" and were illustrated with a stylized skull where the lower jaw was just a horizontal line. I think it is a record company.
Also, the whole bus sat transfixed as a woman engaged her seatmate in a conversation that ranged from men on the down low to who was beaten by the police to how come this one woman with a nice body never showers to what you have to do to get your landlord to pay for spoiled food if the fridge doesn't work.
Allow me to be the first to commend 46 and 47.
Also: Real America does not have bus stops. The horror.
Game and sucking pig
The very best sort of pig to own.
I like my bus stop. We even have a cranky old guy who yells at cars going to fast and kicks cigarette butts into the gutter.
cars going to fast
Only on Fridays? During Lent? In any case, I guess that's one approach to Peak Oil.
He's about five four and wears a Vietnam Veteran ball cap, shorts, and knee height socks.
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Difficulties in reading, and I blame the Internet:
The book on urban space in Japanese film of the 30s led me to google Paul Morand (translated and popular in 20s Japan;imagistic,"I-novel";cold and cruel sex) which led yet again to Ford Madox Ford and this essay by Roger Poole, one of the very few to have to have a freaking clue about The Good Soldier. I don't know how old the essay is, Poole uses Kristeva and Barthes a lot.
Short:Poole says Dowell and Leonora conspire to murder Florence and Ashburnham for their money.
That so many academics have been incapable of reading that fucking book, to actually see what's in the text and on the page...well, that's actually in TGS the ways convention blinds us.
That would lead to my explaining, inspired by 2 Crooked Tinber posts on Bloomsday and representation, why very few read Ulysses with any insight or honesty, but I am not arrogant or aggressive.
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We even have a cranky old guy who yells at cars going to fast and kicks cigarette butts into the gutter.
Does he do this all day or does he sometimes take a bus to another stop to yell at different cars?
Seriously, all you have to do is keep your weird
ways a secret. Maybe develop a plausible cover
story about a church that is out of town that no
one ever sees.
Yeah, I guess I'm just not seeing that it's any different than any other weird ways in that respect. My hardcore family drama as a kid arose from being a mouthy little fundie. Life would have been a lot easier for me if I'd been an atheist.
I don't know what he does at other bus stops, but at my stop, he just does this until the bus comes. He's completely right about the cars going to fast. On school mornings, there's a crossing guard who yells at people but ignores the cigarette butts.
50: in retrospect, we really should have anticipated that the first-floor diners would simply pay the brasserie diners to lead the basement diners out of the building and down the road to nick 45 chicken madras from the Indian restaurant on the corner.
61: That fits with my experience. There were not many atheist kids around but there were a fair number of kids who really stood out because of various forms of extreme Protestanting.
various forms of extreme Protestanting.
Bungee Lutherans, high-altitude Episcopalians, whitewater Calvinists and scubatarians.
Life would have been a lot easier for me if I'd been an atheist.
Where'd you grow up?
At my old bus stop, I once eavesdropped on a conversation between two guys about them having both been at the 1963 Sam Cooke concert at the Harlem Square Club.
The crosswalk right by my current bus stop has a crossing guard in the morning, a woman probably in her 60s, who wears a giant clock around her neck, Flava Flav style.
Maybe all of us who use the bus stop should get together and buy her a big clock on a chain?
70: And then hold a neighborhood fête to celebrate. A clock block party, as it were.
I have recently had to travel out to Watford regularly. It's quite bizarre how quickly the canonical British bus sets in as you go out of London (where literally everyone uses buses, they are frequent and on time, but just a bit stabby).
Suddenly, nothing has ever been maintained since the Callaghan government, the routes are impossibly weird (the one in question, in one direction, sits at a bus stop in the shopping centre for 15 hate-ridden minutes while the passengers stare into the void, and in the other direction, does a complete loop around the centre passing the same road junction twice), and the people on them are different.
And you see teenagers sitting in the bus station staring at puddles. Next to the railway station where the fastest suburban trains will get you into London in 20 minutes. I mean, I did plenty of staring at the rain on bus stops as a kid but I had fewer alternatives. Hey, come stare at the rain in town! It's a better class of puddle!
2
What do atheist groups in high school do? I found an NY Times article that mentions trying to create an atheist Frisbee team and setting up an informational table during Faith Week. But that doesn't fill up a school year.
Maybe they're vocal atheists of the kind everyone loves to hate, or they'll persuade each other to go to go in that direction eventually. But then again, maybe they spend most of their time on non-ideological activities like Frisbee, just because they want to find solidarity in a school that was hostile to anything religious.
40: Granted that posters do get defaced a lot in general and often for no reason, I think it is meaningful if it's ideologically motivated. Putting an ad for something else over it seems very different from drawing a Hitler mustache on it, for example.
And granted that most (most) of the incidents of anti-atheist sentiment are relatively (relatively) minor, so what? OK, sure, it could be worse. Almost anything could be. Doesn't mean there's not little reason for things to be this bad and plenty of reasons for improvement.
43: Hobbits don't get stabbed in Hobbiton. They only get stabbed when they travel. Also, and relatedly, getting stabbed is a really big deal to hobbits.
71: So it was rough being evangelical in the Chicago suburbs, which doesn't necessarily negate the anecdotes described here...
Hey, come stare at the rain in town!
Costs money. Which they may not have.
76: There's probably a rain web cam.
I grew up in one of the states on the list and never got any sort of hassle for being irreligious and irreverent. Even at my church.
I did too, and treated my beliefs as the biggest possible secret, which didn't cause any problems. Which is still what I do.
My third grade teacher had us pray before lunch every day. I was always scared she'd call on me, but she knew enough not to. (Private school, though.)
67: and skydiving fundamentalists who specialise (of course) in HALO jumps.
An acquaintance recently quit her university counseling job, and opened up a private practice aimed at helping atheists who want to be back in the fold.
(I just thought that was interesting. I don't really have a well-formed opinion on it.)
I grew up in one of the states on the list and never got any sort of hassle for being irreligious and irreverent.
Also, frankly, Apostropher is charismatic and personable. People let charismatic people get away with all sorts of things that a stumbly person might get taken to task on.
In the same vein, a lot of these high school atheist kids are probably outspoken exploring new ideas, and thus ruffle a lot more feathers than if they were Apo-thetic. Still, they don't deserve threats of getting beaten up.
It's objectively easier to be an atheist, because there is no compelling reason for an atheist not to lie about it.
We had to pray every morning we arrived at school. In that sing-song chorus-ing way that large groups of small kids use in unison.
"Gooooood mooorNING missuHS AllehxahndUUURRRRR."
"Good morning children."
"OOOUrrr fathURR, hooARRT in hehhhhVN. Ha-lo'd betheyNAME"
78: Did people really get that you didn't believe at all, or did they just think you were being irreverent in a silly way?
It is a legal requirement that British kids get some sort of vaguely defined act of collective religion every week at school. However, nobody takes this at all seriously. I remember being at school when Education Secretary John Patten tried to make them take it seriously and nothing, but nothing happened. He also tried to order every school to hoist a Union Flag and as it turned out he couldn't even make them do that.
It was, in part, an education in passive resistance. You can achieve a lot by sheer bolshy inertia, if your aims are defensive.
Totes off-topic: to what extent is the usage "to fix dinner" or "to fix a drink", with "fix" meaning "prepare", a regionalism? I've somehow been under the impression that it's a widespread US colloquialism (though the only examples that come to mind are in the food and drink context), but someone was telling me it's chiefly found in the same regions where people say "I'm fixing to" to mean "I'm about to". "Fix dinner" is idiomatic for me but "fixing to" is not, so this sounded wrong to me.
I don't think it's regional. Now, fixin' to fix dinner probably is.
I was wondering if I'd left a bunch of people quietly confused for years. ("His drink is... broken?")
re: 88
Well, 'I'm going to fix dinner', or 'fix a drink' sound perfectly idiomatic to me in British English. 'I'm fixing to ..' would only be if someone was impersonating an American.
No, the two idioms are unrelated.
92 gets it right. In that when a British person is impersonating an American, he or she is usually impersonating someone from Louisiana.
81: Am I understanding correctly that she is aiming to help people that have lost their faith and want to get it back?
he or she is usually impersonating someone from Louisiana.
Or the midwest? "Fixin' to" do something was definitely said where I grew up.
Also, several years ago I was horrified to find myself saying, in chatting with some people at the bus stop about the long-awaited, approaching bus, that it was "like to gonna be full."
Another vote for 'fix dinner' or 'fix a drink' being idiomatic for me, while 'fixin' to' isn't. I'm trying to think of something other than food or drink that I could 'fix' in the sense of assemble rather than repair, and nothing's springing to mind.
I think you could fix someone, like, a care package.
I'm fixing to fix a fix for this fix I'm in.
I say "fixin' to" pretty regularly.
Did people really get that you didn't believe at all, or did they just think you were being irreverent in a silly way?
Well, I've always been plenty silly--and maybe that helped defuse what might otherwise have been tense and uncomfortable--but I don't think anybody had any doubts about what I did or didn't believe. I liked to argue.
96.1: Definitely true in my house, but we were transplanted Southerners, so I don't seem to know what's normal for my region.
96.2 Ha! I catch myself saying non-standard things quite often, despite having tried to coach them all out of my system, and I get really defensive when other people notice.
81: Am I understanding correctly that she is aiming to help people that have lost their faith and want to get it back?
That's my understanding. But framing it within a standard therapist context, not within some church-based context.
I don't quite understand how you'd advertise for "refind your religion therapy."
103: "Are you 'losing your religion'? Are you doubting when you want to be believing? Faith-based therapist, Dr. X will help you find your way back to the Lord! All major credit cards accepted, covered under many health plans."
75: So it was rough being evangelical in the Chicago suburbs, which doesn't necessarily negate the anecdotes described here...
Yeah, my point (to the extent I had one) was that most of the anecdotes described just aren't particularly shocking or indicative of some special oppression reserved for atheists. Probably didn't help that the article started with
Let's be clear. It's not like it's easy to be an atheist anywhere in the U.S. Atheists are the most distrusted and disliked of all minority group.
Like the atheist veterans who got booed at the Memorial Day parade. I'm too polite to boo or jeer, but I totally sneered at the veterans in the Memorial Day parade with the big Christian Veterans for Jesus banner. Not because I have anything against Christians or against veterans, but because waving the big Christian flag seemed ill-suited to the occasion, which was honoring veterans on Memorial day. (I was also totally disturbed by all the kids and middle school flag corps etc. carrying mocked up rifles, but that's not important here.)
Or the Alabama governor who said anyone who hadn't accepted Jesus was not his brother or sister. Hint: that's not directed at atheists in particular but anyone who hasn't accepted Jesus -- Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, and half the time from the sort of people who say such things maybe even Catholics.
A public transit authority rejecting an ad for Constitutionally impermissible reasons? Yeah, that sucks. But it's just not a level of suck that gets me terribly charged -- stupidity like that is rampant, by no means limited to atheists, and keeps my chosen profession financially viable.
Maybe I'm too jaded and cynical, but the handful of incidents cited aren't particularly awful and seem far too isolated to merit labeling entire states Top 10 Scariest.
104: But that's not really aimed at atheists, it's aimed at believers suffering with doubts.
All right. Then just trust that I perceive this state to be too hostile for me to comfortably speak openly about my beliefs. And Florida, too.
Off to swim! At the beach! For the weekend!
Without internet, so no posts from me till Monday.
107: I'll happily concede that your state and FL are among the worst in all the Union, generally. Comity...?
I have never, ever, lived in an environment where it was easier to be a hardcore fundie Protestant or serious believer of any kind than an atheist. Not by a mile. And I'd bet that going by population, it's at least equally balanced in the US between the two directions.
I've never lived anywhere close enough to the beach to just go for the weekend at the drop of a hat.
True fact. When I was a hard core fundie Protestant little snot, I very nearly dated the obnoxiously vocal atheist twit in my high school. But then he started talking about his plans to convert me and I decided I didn't really crave the drama.
And then I tithed $5.
110: Poll data and de facto religious requirements for office suggest otherwise.
113: A ratio of one or two congresspersons to several hundred isn't equally balanced?
110, 113: I think the disconnect is in the use of the word 'serious believer'. To an atheist who's getting hassled for saying that they don't believe in God, someone who says they believe in God, regardless of whether they're religiously observant in any particular or are making any particularly difficult personal choices on the basis of that belief, is still a believer. To an observant believer, I get the impression that someone who 'believes in God' but doesn't do anything about might as well be an atheist.
Inactive believers, or whatever you want to call it, probably have it easier than atheists or seriously observant believers in a lot of places. I doubt there's much of anywhere where an inactive believer has a harder time than an atheist.
Is the number of avowed atheist congressmen particularly relevant for this point? My congresswoman offiially belongs to a black church, because it's a politically necessary thing to do in this district for ethnic/cultural reasons, but I can tell you with 100% certainty that it's easier (or at least "less weird") to grow up an atheist in her district than it is to be some kind of hardcore Protestant. I'd expect the same is true for almost all major American cities.
113, 114: Halford in 110 was distinguishing hardcore fundie Protestants or serious believers of any kind from your dime-a-dozen generic believers.
116 before seeing 115, which is basically right.
I do think that if we're talking about social hostility to a group, saying that the average member of one group is perceived as less weird than the most intense portion of the other group isn't a very useful comparison. To put it another way, I do think it makes more sense to treat 'everyone who believes in God' as believers, if you're contrasting them with atheists.
Anyone want to compare the number of hardcore fundie Protestant elected officials to atheists of all types?
It's not a perfect proxy for social hostility, but it seems like it might measure the hostility to various public declarations of faith (at least better than Halford's personal experience).
With fundy protestantism there's also the weird influence of the bible teaching that you *should* be persecuted and that you're not really following Jesus if you aren't. This can lead both to encouraging behavior that results in persecution and overstating how much persecution there is.
It's hard to draw a line there. As a (I believe) regularly church-attending Southern Baptist, I think Bill Clinton, for example, would be fairly hardcore religious, although not a fundamentalist. But I think I'd get pushback on that question.
I think that here, at least, the default "normal" is just to be secular and not give a shit about religion, and noone cares at all if that's coupled with some core belief in atheism, agnosticism, or some residual official ethnic religious affiliation. Hardcore proselytyzing of any kind, including atheist proselytyzing, would seem weird, but no one cares one way or another about your belief in God, and atheism of the "I don't care about that" kind is way more acceptable than a strong outward expression of religious faith.
121: Hmm, do we count religious people being greeted by clerks with "Happy Holidays" as encountering hostility? Because then they might be ahead.
117 before seeing 115 and 116, which are basically right.
119 isn't quite right. I think when talking about social hostility to atheists or believers, it really isn't the "average member" of either group that is particularly at issue. Or at least I don't take the anecdotes from the linked article to necessarily represent the "average" atheist. That is, I don't think the "average" atheist is any more likely than the "average" believer to put up billboards or ads on buses or to march under a banner in a parade.
122: Yeah, defining "hardcore" religious is tricky. I wouldn't make weekly church attendance a determinative factor, though. For a lot of folks, attendance is more of a social activity than a spiritual one. "Serious" would, in my mind, require some sort of daily or at least near daily manifestation. "Hardcore" would require some proselytizing.
and noone cares at all if that's coupled with some core belief in atheism, agnosticism, or some residual official ethnic religious affiliation.
I'd contest that. That is, I think "I don't believe in God" gets a hostile reaction where a statement of belief in God doesn't -- Newt's gotten hassled for the former in an NYC classroom. I don't think there's anywhere in the US where you'd expect to get a hostile reaction for a simple statement of religious belief.
I think the difference re: atheists vs "hard core believers" is that in many areas of the country atheists don't have to do much beyond admit to being atheists in order to get a lot of flack for it. You don't have to be PZ Meyers, you just need to say, however non-aggressively, that you don't believe in god.
In contrast I think that it takes more than just saying "I'm a devout X" in order to get hassled for being religious.
I'm not sure what the working definition of hard core believer is in this thread, but if it involves loudly getting in peoples' face about religion, constantly announcing your beliefs to everyone regardless of whether it's really appropriate under the circumstances & etc. then, yes I can see how that might garner some hostility. But I really think that is different from the situation for atheists.
P.Z. Meyers's are rare.
I don't think there's anywhere in the US where you'd expect to get a hostile reaction for a simple statement of religious belief.
Allahu Akbar!
I don't think there's anywhere in the US where you'd expect to get a hostile reaction for a simple statement of religious belief.
Well certainly there are communities in which one can anticipate that admitting to simple belief will be met with scorn and suggestions that one believes in fairy tales. Or others in which one's claim to believe will be met with accusations that it's nothing more than some namby-pamby, wishy-washy feel-good belief.
Well, I guess the core question is whether you'd be more socially excluded as an avowed atheist than as a devoutly religious person. Here, at least, the answer is that the devoutly religious person would be more socially excluded, whereas acknowledging atheism is no big deal and wouldn't lead to any remotely negative social consequence.
I guess there are probably more people who announce as spiritual, agnostics, or once every few years for a wedding or baptism Catholics than avowed atheists, but I just don't think there is any significant social disadvantage whatsoever for not believing in God and saying as much (I mean, unless you're trying to cozy up to the hot girls in the church youth group or something). I'd imagine that the same is true in all
of the larger US cities outside of Texas and the South.
130: I can't believe there are many. I don't think there are many like that even in the UK which is a vastly less religious country than the US.
132: I don't mean communities in a geographic sense.
Internet communities, certainly.
Ah, OK then. But there are internet communities where you can get ridiculed for anything. It's like the derision version of Rule 34.
Well, I guess the core question is whether you'd be more socially excluded as an avowed atheist than as a devoutly religious person.
Well, we're still actually disagreeing about whether that's the core question. I do still think that a religious believer who doesn't meet any particular standard of devoutness is more like a devoutly religious person than they are like an atheist.
In that when a British person is impersonating an American, he or she is usually impersonating someone from Louisiana.
That's odd. Hollywood has a great deal of trouble with Louisiana accents, or anyway with New Orleans accents. They tend to substitute some kind of tidewater drawl, the same one that gets used for everything. (Cold Mountain is my favorite collection of hilariously generalized and just plain bad southern accents.)
136: Why? Maybe we're disagreeing over terms, but I think a person who holds only the most tenuous connection to religious belief, but isn't quite ready to announce "I affirmatively believe there is no God," is closer to an atheist than an actually religious person -- it's the difference between religion having some actual effect on a person's life, and not.
138: in terms of the way they are treated by others, I bet that the mild believer has a lot more in common with the fervent believer than with the atheist.
I'm not sure I understand 138, but in this city and, I'd imagine, in the UK, an atheist who doesn't care much about religion gets treated about the same as, say, an agnostic or nominally religious-affiliated person, whereas the religiously devout are seen as deluded weirdos.
138, 139: And I think the mild believer is also likely to be hostile to the unbeliever on the basis of the unbeliever's belief. That's one of the things that makes the stats about atheist elected officials (and willingness to vote for an atheist) interesting -- unwillingness to vote for an atheist is high enough that it can't all be coming from seriously devout people. Statistically, many mild believers must have strong negative beliefs about atheists as well.
I think there's a genuine difference here where in a lot of circles trying to convert people is considered rude, so if you're believer in a religion that has a command to witness then that has problems that milder forms of belief don't have.
While atheists and vegetarians are assumed to be proselytizing (regardless of the evidence), a christian actually has to cross some lines to come off as rude. But if your beliefs require you to cross those lines, then yes you get similar treatment to atheists and vegetarians.
I think vegetarians are fine in most parts of the country now. Vegan is where the othering starts.
I honestly think the first and last sentences of 142 are dead wrong, or at least completely foreign to my experience. People who don't care about religion don't give a shit about whether in your heart of hearts you're an atheist or an agnostic.
Because how can you not eat cheese?
Given that 142 is based on actual scientific surveys, you might want to consider that your experience is rather distant from somewhere on the order of half the people in our country.
People who don't care about religion don't give a shit about whether in your heart of hearts you're an atheist or an agnostic.
My sense is that there's a lot of people out there who don't qualify by any the offered standards as devout, aren't particularly observant, but do think of themselves as believers who care about religion, and do think that atheists are bad people. I can't see how the poll data could work without those people.
Well, but the survey evidence is tied to electing politicians, where atheism serves as a proxy for a lot of other things. If people can give me some evidence of actual, significant social exclusion practiced by secular agnostics or non-seriously but officially religious people towards atheists, I'm all ears, but it sounds implausible.
A couple years ago I was talking to a good friend from highschool who I'd always thought of as not very religious, and I was shocked when she said she wouldn't marry an atheist.
150: Robert will listen, but he won't believe you!
where atheism serves as a proxy for a lot of other things.
I can't think of what it's serving as a proxy for that would be worse, electorally, than atheism. It's more likely than not a proxy for left of center politics, but Democrats do win elections about half the time, rather than the almost-never for atheists. Other than being left of center, what's it a proxy for?
I bet if you polled people on whether they would want their kid to have an atheist school teacher you'd get similar numbers to what you get for the question about president. But I'm having trouble finding such a poll.
Other than being left of center, what's it a proxy for?
Devil-worship.
Mostly, a proxy for not belonging to the in-group that the district has been gerrymandered around.
Peep, go fuck yourself.
But I'm in a Pauline-Kael bubble in terms of actually being personally hassled for being an atheist. The closest I've come to a personal experience is Newt getting told by classmates he's going to hell, and I don't know that it would make sense to call that 'significant'.
Mostly, a proxy for not belonging to the in-group that the district has been gerrymandered around.
Which ingroup? The statistics I've seen are nationwide.
I clicked through to a survey, hosted on an atheist site, that says that something like 39% of Americans think that atheists "don't share their values" and that 49% wouldn't want their child to marry one. Even taking that as true, that's still under 50% of the national population, and I suspect that the marriage figure is heavily biased by an aspirational desire to have your kids marry within your in-group. But the hostility and marriage numbers are worse for atheists than conservative Christians, at least nationally.
Do you have a point, Peep, or are you just trolling around withrandom insults? Seriously, go fuck yourself.
This paper is a bit old, but it would be the best place to start if you wanted to read up on how to interpret these kinds of surveys.
161: If people can give me some evidence of actual, significant social exclusion practiced by secular agnostics or non-seriously but officially religious people towards atheists, I'm all ears, but it sounds implausible.
I thought 152 was a good summary of this sentence.
I didn't expect it to make you so angry, but I forget what an all-meat diet can do to a person.
What was the example I wasn't listening to? UPETGI gave one.
...but Democrats do win elections about half the time, rather than the almost-never for atheists.
That's not the same thing. You only need a small overlap between "Democrat" and "Won't Vote for an Atheist" before it becomes impossible to win as both. Probably well over 80% of the people who won't vote for an atheist won't vote for the Democrat. I was googling stuff, but then I got tired of it. Basically, I think RH is right about the atheism being largely a proxy.
162 looks interesting, but I can't open it. What is the point, in summary form?
80% of the non-Southern, white people, that is.
165: I don't think that works. If there were only a small number of Democrats who thought of atheism as a negative, atheists would be winning Democratic primaries in proportion to their representation in the population, and then losing general elections that a religious Democrat might have won. And that just doesn't sound like a familiar story.
166: Try this starting at page 121. It's kind of the same but in book form.
164: Heebie's repeatedly mentioned being really uncomfortable mentioning her atheism in her social circle.
Right, but Heebie lives is semi-rural Texas and teaches at a religious college.
168: I have no idea if this happens for atheists or not, but it certainly happens that the people who volunteer and donate for primary election candidates are very aware of the general election and that they very often pick who to back in the primary based on who can win a general. My guess is that most local committees would toss the atheists under the bus before the first nominating petition was signed. Or more likely, an ambitious atheist would keep quiet and be seen standing in the crowd at churchy things.
||
Prolly pwned but this makes me want to give money to a Republican for the first time ever.
|>
169: That is interesting. I do think the poll data I've been talking about overstates the hostility to atheists, rather than to atheism (no data here, just an impression). My guess is that the lower figure for "I wouldn't want my child to marry a Muslim" than for "I wouldn't want my child to marry an atheist" wouldn't work out that way in practice -- that a lot of people who would say they wouldn't want their kid to marry an atheist wouldn't mind someone who they were pretty sure was an atheist but never brought it up. People know that it's bad to be intolerant on the basis of ethnicity or religion, so they underreport any intolerance they actually feel -- on the other hand, intolerance of atheism is perfectly acceptable, so it shows up more strongly in polling data.
I'm kind of in that position with my inlaws, who are non-churchgoing believers. I'd bet that they'd answer that they wouldn't want their kid to marry an atheist. On the other hand, I figure they've probably guessed my lack of religious beliefs by now, and they still like me fine. But I consciously avoid the topic around them so as not to confront them with something they'd feel as if they had to disapprove of.
Obviously, it is very dated. I've been out of that area for a very long time now.
172: I'd buy that, but the implication is that even someone who's not anti-atheist themselves is completely comfortable throwing atheists under the bus in a way that really doesn't apply to other minorities.
176: Have you seen local party committees?
Has there even been a serious atheist candidate for office? I think that could only be a stunt candidacy.
Any atheist with serious political ambitions would lie about it.
Pete Stark is very high ranking member of Congress who is openly atheist. Of course, he was passed over for chairman of Ways and Means and he didn't say he was an atheist until he was very senior.
No (except Pete Stark) but the whole point of the discussion has been that the political representation numbers don't necessarily reflect, at all, social sanction for atheist beliefs in large parts of the country.
I'm not sure what to make of the whole "wouldn't want one's child to marry" thing. I mean, I'm fairly sure, in the abstract, that I wouldn't want to marry a religious person, though I could imagine that someone with enough positive qualities to outweigh that could exist. But, you know, incompatible worldviews seem problematic, whether or not they entail thinking of the other person as evil or something along those lines.
the whole point of the discussion has been that the political representation numbers don't necessarily reflect, at all, social sanction for atheist beliefs in large parts of the country.
Wouldn't a better way of describing that be "What you've been arguing" rather than "the whole point of the discussion"? There is disagreement on that point, after all.
161: If you want to avoid frivolous insults, then you might want to avoid writing things like 146 ("I honestly think the first and last sentences of 142 are dead wrong, or at least completely foreign to my experience", when most of 142 is based on public opinion surveys.) Yes, of course any individuals' personal experience can be different from the results of surveys, but that should be a starting point for asking why, not for kneejerk ignoring the survey. Or for poking holes in the survey's methodology, if you want. Do you think the sample size was too small? Were they making phone calls at times when tolerant people were unusually likely to be out of the house? How much is this survey skewed by the usually problems with polling cell phone users? Things like that seem more relevant than whether you have ever personally noticed atheists being discriminated against.
160
I clicked through to a survey, hosted on an atheist site, that says that something like 39% of Americans think that atheists "don't share their values" and that 49% wouldn't want their child to marry one.
Pointing out that the survey is "hosted on an atheist site" is simply ad hominem. And which survey do you mean? I haven't followed most links in this thread so I couldn't find the statistics you mention, but here are some statistics from links in the first paragraph of the AlterNet article in the original post:
Ninety percent of respondents thought whites and blacks could share their vision of society. About 80 percent said the same of Hispanics, Jews and conservative Christians. More than 70 percent said it of immigrants, and 64 percent said it of Muslims. Atheists had the lowest rating at 54 percent.
A March, 2007 survey done by Newsweek shows that 62% of people would refuse to vote for any candidate admitting to being an atheist... Gallup has been asking people about whether they would vote for atheists for president for quite some time. Here are the numbers who have said "no" over the years: February 1999: 48%... It might be argued that there is some cause for hope here, since the number of Americans who would refuse to vote for someone solely on the basis of being an atheist has dropped from 75% to "merely" 48% over the course of 40 years. It's not much hope, though. First, the numbers of Americans whose prejudice would prevent them from voting for members of other minorities has dropped much farther much faster over the same period of time. Second, the numbers of those prejudiced against atheists hasn't really dropped in the past couple of decades -- almost all the progress was made between 1959 and 1978.
Obviously it's reasonable for someone who is a strong believer not to want to marry someone whose beliefs are incompatible. But I think even a lot of people who don't really have strong religious inclinations still think of atheists as not sharing their values (that is unamerican, more than unchristian).
I wonder how much anti-atheist sentiment is residual anti-communist sentiment.
I'm always a little baffled by those questions about who you'd want your child to marry. I honestly have no preferences for race/gender/religion, nothing beyond someone who's loving, respectful, and blah blah blah. Is anyone here really hoping for a New Yorker or a water engineer or an atheist lawyer?
Also, the joke that made winna wince is the same one that prompted me to out myself as an atheist to the church we attend. The assumption of a like-minded Christian audience really rubs me the wrong way. (I was super annoyed during this week's foster training when I'd already said that I wasn't a believer though not specified what I was instead and then some guy still had to say, "I mean, we're all good Christians here, but some people..." and I was immediately livid.)
((I also have to add that said dude's daughter apparently listens to "hard gospel" whereas the parents only listen to gospel music. And yet the children mysteriously pick up all the popular secular songs, which is why you as a parent do not actually have to be conversant in the music of your transracially fostered/adopted child's culture!))
The assumption of a like-minded Christian audience really rubs me the wrong way.
I'd think that at a church you could maybe expect a certain amount of not-atheism among the congregants not running for Congress.
182 is a fair point. As for 183, come on. First, nothing I said even implied that there was nonsignificant discrimination against atheists -- the only point of contention was whether or not there is some massively socially disabilitatimg discrimination agains atheists even among people, and in regions, where people don't care much about religion.
Second, as for the survey results, the survey questions I mentioned are from the same University of Minnesota survey mentioned in the original article. AFAIK, there's no other "scientific" survey under discussion.
I was completely open about my lack of belief in god when I was in small town MO for the Obama campaign for a couple months, at least in the office. All the local volunteers belonged to one church or another, none of them cared or seemed surprised by my religious views. On the few occasions it came up in canvassing with Republican voters, I responded honestly and got some surprise but no hostility beyond whatever was already there for me as a Dem volunteer (ranged from none to threatening to shoot me, though I didn't have much in the way of conversations with the ones that seemed dangerous, just walked away slowly) Some of those volunteers did seem to be churchgoing out of a sense of social obligation, others were very devout. Interestingly, strength and nature of religious belief seemed to have no impact on their views on social issues. For example there was a fundy protestant pentecostal eighteen year old going into ROTC who was very vocally pro-choice, pro-gay rights, would tell everyone that pre-marital sex is awesome, and strongly identified with feminism. She was also very left-liberal in her economic views. Her fundy protestant parents seemed very happy and proud and largely shared her views. She wasn't the only one like that, though more rabidly religious than most. Then there were people who were semi-closeted non-believers who were stereotypical strongly partisan moderate democrats. On the other hand, the fact that even the non-believers felt they had to be members of a church and attend services at least occasionally is also telling.
188: Oh, if it had been at church that assumption would have been fine and I'd just have rolled my eyes, but it was a mass email sent to me and a bunch of other people by an old lady who was forwarding multiple mass emails a day. Just because I show up at your church doesn't mean I'm down with your bigoted jokes, and that's basically what I said. I probably wouldn't have said anything if it had been anti-white, so I'll leave that there for JBS, but I was really annoyed by the joke.
188: Though I will add that I think it's pretty stupid if people at the church do assume everyone's Christian and yet also have a segment at the end where they ask people to come up and give their lives to Christ or whatever, but that is indeed probably what most people think. That's a separate point, and obviously it's my own fault for going to church as an atheist and then being frustrated by what the church-goers believe.
191: That's different. You had me at "mass email."
There's this strange thing that in large parts of the US people lie about how often they go to church. That is, people don't necessarily go to church at a higher rate, but they say that they do.
That is, people don't necessarily go to church at a higher rate, but they say that they do.
I think those are the people I was talking about in 149.
Isn't there very significant regional variation with those numbers? Ie, there are plenty of regions where it's a great thing to be seen as going to Church even if you don't, and regions where that is not the case.
145: Only in a white UMC bubble. Rhymeswithmaria's job is having their yearly banquet today, and they have zero vegetarian food.
(That's in NYC.)
And that's in an East Coast urban center.
How do you manage to prepare a banquet with _no_ vegetarian food. Rice? Potatoes? Veggies? Bread? Cheese?
197: I suppose I'm in a minor university bubble of my own. There's always vegetarian food at our functions. Probably the subcontinental influence.
202: I am now imagining how Pittsburgh would assimilate the idea of a masala dosa, and am both intrigued and horrified.
I'm not completely sure what that is. I was just thinking that most of the vegetarians I know, at least those out of school, are doctors born in India.
|| It just occurred to me, and then occurred to me I should share the good news, that UNG got married today. |>
205: How come we never hear anything about OFGED?
197: 145: Only in a white UMC bubble.
This seems right for the most part, with some notable exceptions ('alternative' or activist communities, and/or coop-affiliated or organic food types).
Have there been surveys on whether people would be willing to vote for a vegetarian for President? The results would be sort of interesting, if only because, as far as I know, we haven't had a self-identified vegetarian President. One is supposed to be a meat-'n'-potatoes type of guy or gal; vegetarianism would register with quite a few as a mark of elitism, or else it is teh ghey. God knows a great deal of attention is paid to what candidates choose to eat when on the campaign trail.
202: I am now imagining how Pittsburgh would assimilate the idea of a masala dosa, and am both intrigued and horrified.
Primanti's masala dosa, now with french fries for the aloo?
204 is probably more the result of various perceptual biases I hold than an actual count. Still, we still always have at least a veggie sub or pasta with veggies whenever there its a function.
Have there been surveys on whether people would be willing to vote for a vegetarian for President?
Are you trying to get me banned?
210: No? Why, did you nearly get yourself banned? You awful man.
But I actually did read parts of the thread: were you tempted to declare that most everyone in LA wouldn't care if a Presidential candidate were a vegetarian, so you don't believe anyone else does either? OR ... good lord, you're not intimating that you wouldn't vote for a vegetarian?!
Probably just that a vegetarian would innately lack the paleolithic vigor necessary to withstand the tribulations of the campaign trail.
208 sounds really good. Cosma, use your superpowers to make this happen!
Guys, Hitler was a vegetarian. Would you vote for Hitler? Particularly, a weak, fat American Hitler? QED.
I've seen articles mocking Kucinich for being a vegan but that probably shouldn't count for this vegetarian presidential question since (1) Kucinich is extreme; and (2) as Moby states in 145, vegans are treated differently from vegetarians.
Also, maybe Kucinich wasn't the most competitive presidential candidate ever.
You prolly wouldn't let your daughter marry one, either. It's a hunk of meat for her, or nothing!
This list is pretty short on vegetarian US politicians. Only Cory Booker seems to be a currently elected official.
It's a hunk of meat for her, or nothing!
Is that why they wanted to see the blood on the sheet in the old days?
Also, the list of famous Dutch vegetarians is about 10x longer than a list of famous Dutch people should be.
207: The communities you describe there are all people I'd describe as UMC. Just because they're choosing to live poor doesn't mean that they didn't come from educated families and possibly have trust funds.
Anyway, I do tend to agree that "atheist -- oh noes!" is probably a proxy for something, just as "vegetarian -- oh please!" likely is.
I really didn't read the thread closely, so perhaps this has been said, but in the case of atheism, I'd hazard a guess that the nervousness has to do with the belief many people hold, whether they're strong or merely tepid believers/observers, that ethics must necessarily be grounded, in some hazily conceived way, in religious belief. So a Muslim is better than an atheist: atheists have no discernible moral grounding at all, according to this view.
222: I don't think that's exactly wrong, but I wouldn't call that a prejudice against atheism as a proxy for anything: what you've described sounds like a straightforward belief that atheists are less moral or ethical than believers of any variety.
222: That's too nuanced for 85% of the public. It has to be affective before it is likely to explain much.
185: I was thinking about this earlier while reading a friend's (insanely terrifying and totally awesome) manuscript about the emergence of the Christian right in American politics. On the one hand, I think the answer is, at least based on the as-yet-unnamed manuscript, a lot. On the other hand, Stephen Douglas tarred Abraham Lincoln as an atheist when they debated in 1858 and then recapitulated the same charges during the run-up to the 1860 election. Lincoln responded by upping the already considerable number of Biblical allusions with which he always peppered his speeches. And I don't think that had much to do with the Red Menace.
223: I wouldn't call that a prejudice against atheism as a proxy for anything
Yeah, that occurred to me; I'm not sure what work "proxy" is doing there, except to say that the problem isn't exactly failing to believe in God, but failing to exhibit a clear moral/ethical grounding. It might be quibbling to try to parse the difference between these two propositions.
"atheist -- oh noes!" is probably a proxy for something
As I said in the other thread, Walter Kaufmann believed that the vaguest possible profession of belief in whatever "God" might mean or not mean, just as simple and empty as that, was a profound social ritual.
The word piety comes from the Latin word pietas, the noun form of the adjective pius (which means "devout" or "good"). Pietas in traditional Latin usage expressed a complex, highly valued Roman virtue; a man with pietas respected his responsibilities to other people, gods and entities (such as the state), and understood his place in society with respect to others. That doesn't mean others will understand it. In its strictest sense it was the sort of love a son ought to have for his father.
In ancient times and places, when entering a town, you performed a polite ritual at the well, hearth, or shrine to show you would respect local customs while visiting.
Right, 228 gets at something.
225: It has to be affective before it is likely to explain much.
I'm not sure what you mean by affective here.
I suspect it's often a proxy for "not regular person from around here"=wouldn't vote for them because they're unlikely to be Jewish/Irish Catholic/Good Ol'Boy/Hispanic/African American/any other gerrymandered group, not an affirmative belief that any given atheist is less moral than a non-atheist. It clearly is a prejudice that many people are less constrained about expressing vocally and to pollsters than other prejudices.
In general, as a description of social life, I'm sticking with "an atheist who doesn't care much about religion gets treated about the same as, say, an agnostic or nominally religious-affiliated person, whereas the religiously devout are seen as deluded weirdos" as being true for large swaths of the United States, including many of the most populated areas.
While searching for DATA to support my claims, I came across this interesting graph. Clearly, Hindus and Jews are the best-off Americans, and the real prejudices are against black christians, evangelicals, and Jehovah's Witnesses.
Since the reformation and enlightenment, we have forgotten the "meaning" of "practice" religions, religious practice.
Shinto asks that you worship the Emperor. It doesn't say what that means, or even that you believe in Emperor-worship. All that is up for grabs and is outside of Shinto. Many modern Shintoists believe you worship the Emperor by respecting the uniqueness of each individual blah blah. Worshipping the Emperor is something you do outside of mind, feeling, understanding...it is a series of specific physical acts.
Part of the misunderstanding is the concept of "practical reason" which might precede Kant, that thought guiding action is necessary to morality.
"Believing in God" or professing "belief in God" can be an act, something you do, not something you think, believe, feel. Like bowing or shaking hands or nodding to keep conversation going, it is ritual, important and valuable precisely in its relative emptiness and thoughtlessness.
230: Halford, I wouldn't want to rehearse the thread again, but there really is a distinct difference between not caring or saying much about religion at all or behaving in any identifiably religious manner, and coming right out and saying that you don't believe in God. The latter tends to make a surprising number of people shift their feet and look away, even in urban areas: the result is that everybody tacitly agrees not to talk about it. That's the only point I'd want to make about this.
That said, sure, as long as you don't come right out and say it, in urban educated areas you're probably fine. The "large swaths of the United States" generalization: I really don't think so. Why are you being so Pauline Kael about this?
232:I put "meaning" in quotes because practice or ritual religions are not really interpretable.
Grasshoppers.
Actually, I'm sort of wondering -- Halford, I know I remember that you're a believer by my definition, but are you thinking of yourself as in the 'devout' category? If you are, are you referring to personal experience being treated as a 'deluded weirdo'? If so, that's really lousy -- does it happen often?
I just don't think that the feet-shifting and looking away is more significant when directed at the atheist than at the guy who wants to tell you about his personal relationship with Jesus Christ.
I also think there's a kind of reverse-Pauline Kaelism going on in this thread: We all know that out there lie the horrible religious bigots! They are out there! And while they are in fact out there, and we have both personal and vicarious experience with them, it's also worth remembering that much of the country doesn't work quite that way, and that part contains an awful lot of people.
236 -- no, not really, I don't suffer any discrimination. I will say that at work and in most social settings, though, I don't reveal that I'm a reasonably religious Christian; people wouldn't care particularly, but it would seem a bit odd and a lot of folks who don't know me might assume I'm an anti-woman, anti-gay right winger or something. And any proselytyzing beyond that (which I wouldn't do anyway) would definitely put people off. But mostly there's a tacit understanding to not speak about religion (or atheism), so I don't.
233:Well, ok, with Jews and Muslims around perhaps we do have a clue about ritual and practice religions.
Okay, what deep psychic damage would it do me if I started bowing toward Mecca five times a day? (Although without the submissive purpose, it may be incomplete)
What horrors will be unleashed if I say the four words IBIG?
"But it's not true!" I can't assign enough meaning to the words to make that claim, and I am not sure I care anyway.
I believe in Lamias and woodnymphs too.
Atheism a repellent and anti-social fastidiousness.
I should say that also my own religious views allow (shockingly!) for acting in almost all ways like a totally secular, hedonistic guy. If a hardcore dry conservative Baptist wanted to become a Hollywood lawyer, would he suffer social discrimination? Of course he would.
Might make for an entertaining sitcom.
229.last: Affect in a psychological sense. Emotion, not reason.
237: I also think there's a kind of reverse-Pauline Kaelism going on in this thread: We all know that out there lie the horrible religious bigots! They are out there!
Thanks for the explanation. No, I don't think that's it, though. It's just that in large swaths (swathes?) of the country, Christianity is the default assumption, which can be annoying, you know? I at least don't think that all Christians are horrible bigots.
Plus! It's a drag to know that atheist vegetarians can't win higher public office, even if they're, like, totally circumspect about sending pictures of their junk all around.
I also think there's a kind of reverse-Pauline Kaelism going on in this thread: We all know that out there lie the horrible religious bigots! They are out there!
Eh. There is good evidence that devout believers are subject to less prejudice than atheists nationwide. If you want to invent overheated rhetoric about that, and then note that the rhetoric is overheated, you can do that, but I don't think you're accurately representing the other participants in the thread.
Maybe my Christianity is what makes me afraid to visit California? I'd always thought it was the traffic.
It was nice, but not 8 hours in the plane each way nice.
Including getting past TSA and the layover.
No criticism of you, Halford, but I think the graph in 231 is more or less a textbook example of How To Lie With Statistics. When I see things like that I find myself wondering uncomfortably whether there is an ethical question at stake in choosing to publish something so misleading.
251: Hm, yeah, I don't know what to make of that graph at all.
168
I don't think that works. If there were only a small number of Democrats who thought of atheism as a negative, atheists would be winning Democratic primaries in proportion to their representation in the population, and then losing general elections that a religious Democrat might have won. And that just doesn't sound like a familiar story.
This assumes atheists never lie about their beliefs which is naive. Most atheists who are serious about getting elected will lie about their religious beliefs (just as they will lie about any other uncheckable unpopular belief, for example they will say they love their spouse even if they don't). So you can't say atheists are under represented.
Btw, do you seriously believe Obama started attending that black church in Chicago out of sincere religious belief rather than politcal expediency?
The graph in 231 is stupidly arranged, but it isn't misleading. What thing is made to look more what?
253 I'm sure there's some of that going on, but I'm also certain there's some deliberate exclusion going on, including by those who don't personally have a problem with atheism but see it as a political liability. In any case, straight up atheism, as opposed to some vague not thought out deism but 'no religion' is quite rare in the US.
Btw, do you seriously believe Obama started attending that black church in Chicago out of sincere religious belief rather than politcal expediency?
here is a 2004 interview with Obama on religion:
http://cathleenfalsani.com/obama-on-faith-the-exclusive-interview/
Here is Obama from his book about the black professionals who went to his church:
"Still, there was no denying that the church had a disproportionate number of black professionals in its ranks: engineers, doctors, accountants, and corporate managers. Some of them had been raised in Trinity; others had transferred in from other denominations. Many confessed to a long absence from any religious practice -- a conscious choice for some, part of a political or intellectual awakening, but more often because church had seemed irrelevant to them as they'd pursued their careers in largely white institutions.
At some point, though, they all told me of having reached a spiritual dead end; a feeling, at once inchoate and oppressive, that they'd been cut off from themselves. Intermittently, then more regularly, they had returned to the church, finding in Trinity some of the same things every religion hopes to offer its converts: a spiritual harbor and the chance to see one's gifts appreciated and acknowledged in a way that a paycheck never can; an assurance, as bones stiffened and hair began to gray, that they belonged to something that would outlast their own lives -and that, when their time finally came, a community would be there to remember.
But not all of what these people sought was strictly religious, I thought; it wasn't just Jesus they were coming home to. It occurred to me that Trinity, with its African themes, its emphasis on black history, continued the role that Reverend Philips had described earlier as a redistributor of values and circulator of ideas. Only now the redistribution didn't run in just a single direction from the schoolteacher or the physician who saw it as a Christian duty to help the sharecropper or the young man fresh from the South adapt to big-city life. The flow of culture now ran in reverse as well; the former gang-banger, the teenage mother, had their own forms of validation -- claims of greater deprivation, and hence authenticity, their presence in the church providing the lawyer or doctor with an education from the streets. By widening its doors to allow all who would enter, a church like Trinity assured its members that their fates remained inseparably bound, that an intelligible "us" still remained."
168: Btw, do you seriously believe Obama started attending that black church in Chicago out of sincere religious belief rather than politcal expediency?
I certainly believe that political expediency is one likely factor in any significant act by any politician, and I also have expressed doubts about the level of faith of many of our presidents, but 1) your description presents a false dichotomy and 2) even if I don't necessarily think he wholeheartedly accepts the core tenet of Christianity* it is easy to imagine his joining the church "out of sincere religious belief".
*To me that would be roughly the concepts expressed in the first half of the Apostle's Creed or a reasonable semblance thereof.
168 s/b 253
that black church
Charmingly written as always, James.
However, I will note that the saga of Rev. Wright illustrates that having an opinion while black* is certainly a greater problem than atheism. In his case it managed to eclipse even being a Christian minister and and history of service in the Marine Corps.
*And being associated with anything or any politician even remotely progressive.
You don't exhibit Fractal Wrongness, James, but you're in the neighborhood.
185: I wonder how much anti-atheist sentiment is residual anti-communist sentiment.
As Waferman points out in 226, it certainly predates communism, but it most certainly was strongly identified with as evidenced by things like the cretinous addition of "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance in the early '50s.
I'd also bet that there's way less hostility towards agnostics, which is the polite way to be an atheist.
Well, right. It's certainly not difficult to stay closeted as an atheist, which makes anti-atheist sentiment not a significant problem unless you think that the pressure to stay closeted is a problem in itself.
I walked by a house that was for sale and looked it up when I got home because I wondered if the inside was nice or not. It was very nice and they wanted $700k for it. There go my dreams of getting a really nice house by moving to what I thought was a transitional neighborhood.
(The house was next a Unitarian church, so I maintain that I'm on topic.)
I know a lot of people in this neighborhood who are asking prices for apartments that they aren't going to get unless the market recovers a whole lot. Not that I know Pittsburgh, but that $700K might be aspirational.
Not that I know Pittsburgh, but that $700K might be aspirational.
Wow, seriously.
(And I do know Pittsburgh!)
Having seen the outside and the pictures of the inside, it may be aspirational but it also seems possible. I've seen smaller hotels.
Every so often I daydream about leaving NY and moving into a palace someplace. Space is so cheap everyplace else (this offer does not include the Bay Area).
This house was, I think, what you would call a brownstone if it were in the right area of NYC. There are only a few blocks with that kind of thing here.
Shopping for a new (well, new-to-me) car this afternoon has me mildly depressed. You might think there'd be good deals for someone with solid credit and a large handful of cash to put down, but you'd be wrong!
They say that cash for clunkers and the general bad economy keeping people from buying a new car have made it so there are not many good used cars.
re: 268
We can't afford to buy, so it's not really an issue, but yeah. For what it'd cost to buy one of the nicer flats in our nice enough but nothing special building, in Glasgow you'd be looking at:
http://www.gspc.co.uk/property/188129/
Unless you have a different understanding of 'transitional' than I do, I'm surprised. You can get a brownstone in Bed-Stuy for that price. A really nice, recently restored one will run about a mil. In my, now rather thoroughly gentrified and fairly fashionable Brooklyn neighbourhood, the respective prices will be about $1m and $1.5M Back when I moved here nine years ago, you could get a top of the line brownstone for 700K. At that point it was both 'transitional' (significant consumer aspects of gentrification, plenty of UMC residents, plenty of very poor people, plenty of cash poor socially UMC types, and a street known locally as 'Murder Ave') and around ninety percent non-white.
I suppose there is no reason I can't link to it. Here it is. I call the neighborhood transitional because people are fixing these things up but much of the housing is falling down. There are $20k houses within a few blocks and. This street does face a very nice park (which was why I was there) and is very near lots of things.
Oh, my, that's a pretty house. The decor doesn't do much for me, but the building is gorgeous.
You can be right across the street from the National Aviary, which will be nice after all the private birds get eaten.
re: 275
Yeah, fairly standard late Victorian/early Edwardian house. Loads of them all over the UK, but they are really nice.
276: In the mid-90s I worked quite close to there and relatively close now. Edge of the Mexican War Streets area (although apparently built 1888). Just down the street from the Garden Theater, Pittsburgh's last porn theater (closed a couple of years ago) --continuous all day! (I think that sign never changed in the 6 or 7 years I was in the area.)
Reading about London prices I always wonder, don't you guys have Brooklyn equivalents there? Or maybe the density is too low to allow for nice neighbourhood at half the price in return for an extra fifteen minutes on the subway/tube.
That is one annoying, uninformative way to show house pictures.
re: 279
I live in an area a long way out of the centre of London already. Posh London prices are way way way above that.
278: It is supposed to be turning into an organic grocery because you can't get that free on the internet.
re: 279
Even basically so far out of London you can't even tenuously describe where you live as London at all, prices are still something like 10 x median wage or more, and that's not for a family home: that's flats or 'starter homes'.
The median house around here is about three or four times the median household income, depending on how you define "here."
But we are far from a porn theater and even farther from London.
Finding a family home in the outer NYC suburbs for under 10X the metro area's median full time income (c. 50K I believe) is not an issue at all. In NYC proper on the other hand, you'll either have to be in a sketchy neighbourhood, or you're out of luck. In Manhattan below Harlem, a townhouse like the one Moby linked to? If you have to ask... On the other hand, average income for Manhattan jobs is very high, so everything is fine.
Only tenuously connected to the thread, but interesting: writer visits ex-gay friend, now at a Bible school in Wyoming.
re: 286
I have no sense for how geographically big NY is, or how far out the outer suburbs are. What's that? 10 miles? 20? More?
The outer suburbs are about 20-50 mi from midtown, exurbs about 40-80 mi. Depends a bit on direction and where you draw the line between inner/outer/exurb.
That's interesting, I find I have no idea how far I'd think you'd have to go to get a family house in a reasonably non-blighted area for under 500K. Far is a complicated concept as well, because of all the islands that make traveling through NYC slow and bottlenecky. Fairly close to the city limits north is still quite far from downtown.
Every so often I wonder about what real estate costs in Staten Island.
A quick glance at '3 + BR's' in Staten Island on Trulia suggests the answer is roughly 350K-1M.
290 Southern Westchester to Midtown is about 30-45min by train. That's the same as the nice parts of Brooklyn to Midtown by subway.
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Since you are into real estate now.
Beth Lord and Alan Saunders on Spinoza's God and necessary fictions("neither true nor false"). Audio with transcript.
Beth Lord: That's right. Spinoza thinks that because religion is fictional, it means that it's not the kind of thing that can be demonstrated to be true or false. It's a useful organising structure that helps us to organise our experience. And Spinoza thinks that religion is specifically useful in helping people to behave better and to be obedient to the law. So this is quite an interesting factor of Spinoza's thought. He's all in favour of religion, not because he thinks that religion gives us a true understanding of God, but because religion interprets God to people in a way that they can easily understand. And Spinoza thinks that that's far preferable than that people should hold false notions or that they should just be left to their own devices, he thinks religion is actually quite a useful structure, in making people kind of get along well with one another, and, as he puts it, loving their neighbour and living peacefully and harmoniously. And that's really what fictions are for.
"Political systems, systems of civic laws are fictions in the same way that religion is a fiction."
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Further thoughts after reading that:
I think I might be able to develop an argument about humans being probably the only irrational element in a perfectly rational universe (Spinoza's God) that could justify some kind of Theism and Faith. It might sound something like "Harmony and Trust in Nature" It might include guiding fictions like wood nymphs and wind gods, used mostly to avoid hubris.
I was utterly bored by atheism by the time I finished Zarathustra, especially, you know, since Nietzsche built up his own mythos.
However: Einstein always used to answer that he believed in "Spinoza's God" I am interested in the reasons people feel they need to be so fastidious, why they need to assert a semi-public oppositional identity. Nobody really cares if you lie.
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Belatedly to 254:
The graph in 231 is stupidly arranged, but it isn't misleading. What thing is made to look more what?
It's not that any individual variable is wrong, it's that publishing a graphic that combines two pieces of data implies that the correlations it illustrates tell an interesting or valid story. But that data is so poorly explained by "religion" as the variable that I think it is misleading at best, and at worst borderline irresponsible to publish.
A couple of examples:
1. Virtually all Hindus in the US are Indian immigrants or Indian-Americans. Due to the design of the US immigration system, people from India who are allowed to immigrate are dramatically more likely than immigrants from other countries to have college or graduate degrees. You can see this by looking at Census or American Community Survey data: SEVENTY percent of Indian immigrants have college degrees, compared to 28% of US-born adults.
I would bet heavily that difference in income that is shown on this chart would essentially disappear if the categories controlled for education, age, and occupation (and perhaps state/region of residence -- Indian immigrants are much less likely to live in, say, the Deep South).
2. Both Jewish Americans and black Americans are primarily the descendants of people who were constrained by social and legal processes that heavily shaped their ability to acquire and accumulate capital, and to spend it. That's not even mentioning slavery.
I probably wouldn't have noticed the problems with the chart had I not had so much experience of people treating this like a "just-so" story. The amount of "People from Group X earn more/less because they are like THIS" that floats around in the general culture is actually pretty frightening, especially where the "THIS" is so often a purported moral value.
The outer suburbs are about 20-50 mi from midtown, exurbs about 40-80 mi.
I live about 18 miles from midtown, but in New Jersey. I'm in the inner suburbs?
Staten Island is the Red State borough. You wouldn't want to live there, LB.
Diane Savino represents SI, and she is the awesomest of state senators! But yeah, I'd rather live in Montclair, etc., than SI.
297.1 If I'd added inner suburbs to the list I'd have said that they end anywhere between 15-30 mi from midtown. In any case these, aren't hard and fast numbers, just approximations for ttaM to get an idea of the distances involved. The only ones I've really explored are Bergen and Rockland county back when i used to bike out in that direction. The rest are train stations and highways.
290: Fairly close to the city limits north is still quite far from downtown.
What would you describe as the northern border of downtown?
I was told all tests would be multiple choice.
294: It might sound something like "Harmony and Trust in Nature"
Mystic crystal revelations! Aquarius! Aquarius!
A. Houston
B 14th St.
C. 59th St.
D. Atlantic Ave.
I pick C. I know Houston is part of the "SoHo" thing and that Atlantic Avenue isn't real. It's from Monopoly.
I thought an earlier discussion had reached a near-consensus, at least among the New Yorkers, that "downtown" in New York doesn't designate a part of the city, but only a direction.
Monopoly street names come from Atlantic City. Which is sort of real.
I've been to Atlantic City so I don't think I'm that far off. Everybody there was either working or hooked to O2.
teraz was probably alluding to Brooklyn-centric views of New York, though.
You know, hooked to supplemental O2. We're all hooked to O2 in some way or another.
I can't stop listening to OU812. Does that count?
Apparently the game of Monopoly was originally a McManus-type didactic exercise, designed by an earnest Quaker-ish woman who hoped to illustrate the evil effects of landloridism, capitalism, and, well, monopoly. The Landlord's Game is apparently what it was originally called. Or so they tell me, but I'm in New Jersey now, so, you know.
But if true, or even partially true: how awful, but how quintessentially American, that an erstwhile critique of capitalism is co-opted into its mass-marketed glorification.
Luckily, for those who want to get the didacticism of the original, there's "Class Struggle: To prepare for life in capitalist America--an educational game for kids from 8 to 80."
Heh at the idea of 40-80 miles being the exurbs. 80 miles from London is France.*
People regularly travel into London from 50 miles away; that'd take you to Oxford and Milton Keynes, and Cambridge and those sorts of places. Those are entirely different towns altogether, though. I don't think anyone thinks of them as suburbs/exurbs of London. I think of places like Slough or Watford more in those terms, I suppose. I might be wrong about how long-term London residents think about it, though.
* slight exaggeration, it's more like 90.
Oxford is Zone 8, everyone knows that!
My company owns a house a bit like that in Dorchester which they fixed up nicely. It was clearly a mansion once, since it's got stained glass in it and a huge open staircase, but the neighborhood isn't really where rich people live. And it's too big for a single family, so it's a group home. It could probably get divided into condos or something some day.
Slough sounds like such an awful place to me. I'm only going from the descriptions of other English people who lived in Oxford for years and now Wolvercote. Milton Keynes, which my Dad has been through, sounds absolutely dreadful.
how awful, but how quintessentially American, that an erstwhile critique of capitalism is co-opted into its mass-marketed glorification.
This reminds me of the description in "Jarhead" of the marines watching and cheering films like "Full MEtal Jacket" and "Platoon", and the narrator concluding that there is no such thing as an anti-war film.
