Steven Paikin

All feedback I’ve been privy to indicates atheists kicked butt on The Agenda last night when Robert Buckman, Humanists Canada President Emeritus and Advisory Fellow of the Centre for Inquiry Canada and I joined Gretta Vosper of the Canadian Centre for Progressive Christianity to take on the ultra-conservative Kathy Shaidle and the great Defender of the Faith Jordan Peterson (the three of us don’t agree on everything but this is how it worked out). But you decide. You can link to the episode page which I think includes the actual taping, and the online discussion is going on right now here. Here’s a rundown:

Not realizing I’d ultimately get to make a fair number of points over the hour, when Steven Paiken addressed me at the beginning I took the opportunity to introduce the campaign as one seeking dialogue and raising awareness that atheists are as interested as anyone in important questions, like science education, free speech and church-state separation.

Jordan Peterson’s aggressive bullying was not a surprise.

I had been in the audience when he was on the “Is Faith Inevitable?” panel also with Rob Buckman. However, I think he took it up a notch yesterday. This was an “immature” campaign he explained. I shot back by comparing it to what is being mounted in the UK in opposition to the British Humanist Association ads. There is a group that would like to put up bus signs describing atheists as a dark force. I would also have liked to remind him that Humanists of Canada’s slogan was a simple “Can We Be Good Without God” which I think is a very important and mature message, and that was deemed in need of being “toned down.”

The argument he keeps coming back to is that we are all irrational and emotional and that at bottom our ethics are founded on principles we can’t reasonably articulate. Well, perhaps humans aren’t the pinnacle of reason we like to imagine we are. That doesn’t mean there aren’t degrees of irrationality and that we can’t work together to correct each other’s mistakes and improve our ethical understanding, in the way science continually improves our understanding of the physical world. As to being emotional creatures, I would hardly disagree with the importance of a well-harnessed passion which can direct and focus one’s efforts. Was our side of the table lacking in passion?

Jordan Peterson

Jordan Peterson

Peterson also sees in religion a force to unite communities (glossing over the frictions between religous bodies). I pointed out that secular countries where citizens willingly choose atheism or agnosticism in great numbers are, as reported by Phil Zuckerman in Society Without Gods, societies that place great resources in social programs. (This prompted the first of several snorts from Kathy Shaidle. More on that later.) A 2005 study by Gregory Paul found that the more atheistic a democracy the lower the number of murders and suicides, as well as other metrics of a disfunctional society. Citizens in these societies report high levels of happiness and cohesion. Interestingly, the difference in the US in which happiness seems correlated to religiosity may have a rather ominous explanation. Paul Bloom, Professor of Psychology at Yale, published an article in Slate called “Does Religion Make You Nice?” in which he speculates on this phenomenon:

American atheists, by contrast, are often left out of community life. The studies that Brooks cites in Gross National Happiness, which find that the religious are happier and more generous then the secular, do not define religious and secular in terms of belief. They define it in terms of religious attendance. It is not hard to see how being left out of one of the dominant modes of American togetherness can have a corrosive effect on morality. As P.Z. Myers, the biologist and prominent atheist, puts it, “[S]cattered individuals who are excluded from communities do not receive the benefits of community, nor do they feel willing to contribute to the communities that exclude them.”

So the prevalence of religiosity in the public square by isolating atheists and depriving them of community benefits, may be at fault. Speculative yes but interesting.

Turning back to the show, Peterson also threw out the usual atheism=Stalin=evil equation. How tiring. Rob Buckman deflected that nicely by asking if Hitler’s vegetarianism should be blamed for his actions. I think it’s petty to tally atrocities committed by atheists and theists. Instead I said I wasn’t interested in converting people to my belief system, but would like to see critical thinking become a standard part of public education. If people become more adept at skeptical and scientific inquiry let that lead them wherever it may.

Kathy Shaidle

Kathy Shaidle

Although I received some warning yesterday, the real shocker for me – and Paiken as well I think – was Kathy Shaidle, advertised as a “religious writer and blogger”. Fascist might have been a more appropriate epithet.

Kathy says atheists are boring on her blog. I suppose to someone as aggressive as she, who doesn’t believe in shades of gray and speaks in extreme and uncompromisng language, anyone who shows the least bit of modesty or compromise in their language will be boring.

Her inability to form cogent arguments is reflected in the way her remarks were rarely longer then a sentence or two. Her chortles, chuckles and snorts – not sure if these were captured by her microphone – probably took up about as much airtime as her more successful vocalizations.

When she was able to form a comment, they were pathetically trite. She is of the opinion that Christians are marginalized in the United States. They certainly seemed to be at Obama’s inaugural, wouldn’t you say? But to be fair, she didn’t watch the inaugural, that apparently would have been like attending an hour lecture by a marxist professor.

I asked her if she realized that atheists – not catholics – were deemed the most untrustworthy demographic groups by US citizens, so what exactly was she basing this belief in christian marginalization on. She replied, comically, that it was something that hit her every time she walked out her door. Unless her neighbour is the Centre for Inquiry, I can’t imagine where she must be living.

Unable or unwilling to appreciate the nuance of divergent positions, she lumps all left-leaning organizations together as supporting Islamism and undermining free speech and good values. So I had to remind her that freethought student groups were the first to speak up against the banning of campus anti-abortion clubs (and for the re-printing of the Mohamed cartoons).

A few other random remarks…

I recall someone wondering whether Dawkins couldn’t admit some level of doubt in his atheism and how he would never have used the term probably. Whoever asked that question couldn’t possibly have sat through a full lecture of his, listened to any interview I’ve heard or indeed even read The God Delusion. He has a chapter in there called “Why There Almost Certainly In No God.” I would love to see the same hesitancy – even slight – in the book chapter of more theists.

Finally, someone pointed out to me that Peterson wasn’t referring to circumcision when he mentioned young male initiation.

Justin, there was one part where you seem to have misunderstood what psychologist guy said. The catholic woman mentioned that snake handlers were kooky at one point (did someone mention it before she did?). He was merely pointing out that such practices can have a rational basis: that by putting yourself in real danger you get to see how trivial most of our fears and concerns really are. He then said that rites of passage rituals for native peoples can serve a similar purpose. Justin then criticized him, by discussing circumcisions. But, I don’t think that he was talking about circumcisions at all.

Sure, I’ll grant that I was mistaken in believing that was what he was referring to, although I don’t believe he actually specified he was referring to native peoples. In any case, how he could think that initiation “rites” (initiation wrongs is more apt), be they genitally mutilating a helpless baby at 8 days old or the isolation and starvation rituals of certain native groups on pubescent boys, could be voluntary is beyond me. Perhaps the child sacrifices of the ancient Aztecs fall under voluntary worship as well. This is at bottom my problem with everything Peterson stands for. His obsession with group cohesion would see individual human rights and those who do not fit into the group completely neglected. Thankfully, our Human Rights Charter and the UN Declaration on Human Rights is an individualist document. It would not subject us to the tyranny of the majority and the human rights abuses – like male genital mutilation – which Peterson and those religious leaders he gives cover to, see as a vital part of building group identity.

This post is cross posted to my personal blog www.equalismactivism.com