Greta Christina has been writing professionally since 1989, on topics including atheism, sexuality and sex-positivity, LGBT issues, politics, culture, and whatever crosses her mind. She is author of
The Way of the Heathen: Practicing Atheism in Everyday Life, of
Comforting Thoughts About Death That Have Nothing to Do with God, of
Coming Out Atheist: How to Do It, How to Help Each Other, and Why, of
Why Are You Atheists So Angry? 99 Things That Piss Off the Godless, and of
Bending: Dirty Kinky Stories About Pain, Power, Religion, Unicorns, & More, and is editor of
Paying For It: A Guide by Sex Workers for Their Clients. She has been a public speaker for many years, and many of her talks can be seen on YouTube. Her writing has appeared in multiple magazines and newspapers, including Ms., Penthouse, Chicago Sun-Times, On Our Backs, and Skeptical Inquirer, and numerous anthologies, including
Everything You Know About God Is Wrong and three volumes of
Best American Erotica. (Any views she expresses in this blog are solely hers, and do not necessarily represent this organizations.) She lives in San Francisco with her wife, Ingrid. You can email her at gretachristina (at) gmail (dot) com, or follow her on
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Speaking as a former believer (so fresh in fact, that even as I wonder how the hell I ever believed this rubbish in the first place, I still rant & rave at non-exisitent “god” at times -parts of my brain are apparently stubborn at catching up-) I want to say that the atheist blogosphere (discovered via Pandagon; go figure) provided plenty of fodder for thought and support.
Admittedly, I was on my way already as an agnostic (but again, a very fresh agnostic), nonehtless, what I loved about the part of the atheist blogosphere that includes snark, sex posivity, feminism and science, is that it seemed more authentic, alive and relatable than the squeaky clean religious popular culture I was first familiar with.
I think that’s at least part of what lures the sheep from the edges of the flocks 🙂
Don’t the accomdationists have reams of studies proving Dawkins has never sold any books, PZ Myers has never gotten any hits, and nobody knows who Jerry Coyne is? What, you say, no cites? Well, I’m sure they’ve got evidence somewheres …
This is a logical fallacy:
1) there is an atheist movement now
2) atheist numbers are on the rise
conclusion: therefore 1 caused 2.
Well, Halo is right, the most this shows is that the activism is not actually harmful to an appreciable degree.
On the other hand, all of the “firebrands” admit, time and again, that they are not in the business of converting anyone, nor do they believe that their current methods would accomplish this task. They all seem, instead, to want to reach those who are already atheists but are afraid to admit it.
@Halo
Certainly those two premises alone don’t justify the conclusion, but I expect we can make a good effort toward including other justified premises that strengthen the argument?
eg: That advertisement, by and large, works rather well for raising consciousness and persuading people. And that the current atheist movement, such as it is, includes much advertising.
We can’t still PROVE that the actions of some prominent out atheists plays a causal role in why so many people are becoming out atheists themselves, but I do think it’s a plausible hypothesis. Anecdotes of deconversions aren’t themselves data, but they do provide a *poke poke* to go investigate this.
A time machine would be handy for testing this sort of thing out, but is prohibitively expensive.
How would you suggest we could test this? What would you count as evidence that the atheist movement plays a causal role in the rise of out atheism? What would you say is evidence against that hypothesis?
Kassul, I think we’d first have to have a statistically sound survey of how atheists feel about atheist activism, i.e. whether it personally had anything to do with them being an atheist, and whether they can name any particular atheist activists they like or dislike.
My guess is that the answers include a lot of “Well, don’t get me wrong, I’m an atheist, but that Dawkins guy is a jerk!” without any claimed knowledge about jerky things Dawkins has supposedly done. There’s been a strong meme these past few years that the “New” (read: publically not closeted) atheists are meanies, and at least some atheists have bought into it.
That’s a potentially major confounding factor, meaning we need to look not at the percentage of people who like atheist activism, but rather the influence that atheist activism is having on new atheists.
So, we’d do the survey again at regular intervals. The hypothesis is falsified if there’s a non-positive trend in new atheists (people that lost their theistic beliefs between the last survey and the current one) that see atheist activism as a good thing.