If You're Only In Atheism To Tear Others Down

It turns out there’s another atheism I don’t like. (If you’re missing a context here, consult the last post on this blog, about atheist activists who deserve more press than Richard Dawkins.) I wrote last Halloween about why I need this community, how focusing exclusively on the Dawkbros makes life harder for progressives who depend on an atheist movement. There’s only one school of atheist thought I hate more than the angry white male one, and I hate it far more: it’s the approach that slams organised atheism but shows no interest in making it work. I’m taking about faitheists.

Around this time year, when Chapel Hill antitheist Craig Stephen Hicks shot his three Muslim neighbours dead, a slew of posts appeared in part of the atheist blogosphere, claiming their authors had been proven right: new atheism was irretrievably terrible, antireligious movements unsalvageable. The triple murder of Deah Barakat and Yusor and Razan Abu-Salha had everything to do with our community—chillingly, Hicks and I had a number of mutual Facebook friends, and I’ve written plenty about his kind of politics—but it didn’t prove anything about religion being good or bad.

Since today’s atheist movement took off, its ideas have directly brought about human deaths exactly once. Every day, religious ideas kill thousands of people. (Fasting. Denial of medicine. Genital cutting. Suicide. Sectarian violence. Execution.) That doesn’t alter the problem of racism in atheism, or mean Hicks isn’t our reponsibility—but it does highlight the double standard of those who blamed antitheism itself for the shootings. When movement atheism has problems, they are invariably inherent; religions’ problems are all extrinsic, with no import on the value of faith.

More regularly than I’d like, I get mistaken for someone hostile to the atheist movement, a Chris Stedman or CJ Werleman. When I roll my own eyes at the Dawkbros, it’s because I need a godless community—because my atheist movement is about helping survivors of spiritual abuse, giving apostates safe places, fighting the exploitation of children; about secular mental health support, civil rights work and social provision. I take on infighting because it’s necessary, because I’m invested in building the environment without which I and others can’t manage.

The people who used Chapel Hill as one more excuse to tear atheism down? I’ve never seen them doing that work. When I look at any of them, I don’t see people building a better movement—or to build anything. I never see them highlighting the parts of our community that deserve praise, or holding religion’s feet to the fire. I see beneficiaries of exceptionalism, pandering to anti-atheist sentiment, signing book deals with religious presses, appearing on Fox News, chewing the fat with believers about how vile the nasty, movement atheists are while letting religion off every hook.

I don’t know what the faitheists are here for. It’s hard enough building an antitheism that isn’t terrible without being erased—hard enough fighting the Dawkbros, making the case for an atheist movement progressives respect, without having one’s work pissed on—but I don’t know what their investment is in criticising a movement they treat as irredeemable; don’t know why they bother at all, except to cash cheques with the religious. Atheism matters to some of us, and our criticism is constructive. If others have nothing to contribute, I wish they’d just fuck off.

* * *

I tell stories and write a blog. If you enjoy my work,
consider
becoming a patron or leaving a tip.

Follow my tweets at @AlexGabriel,
keep up with
my writing, or get in touch.

If You're Only In Atheism To Tear Others Down
{advertisement}

Let’s Talk About The Other Atheist Movement

Let’s talk about the other atheist movement.

I get it if you’d rather I discussed the brouhahas—the CFI/Dawkins Foundation merge, Richard’s second epistle to the Muslima, that chain of tweets, that disinvitation. I could do that, and maybe make a decent fist of it—could give you another flowchart, another acrostic, some more zingers. Right now, I just don’t care. There are other posts to be read; there will be other times to mock the movement Dawkins inspired, one that often insists it isn’t a movement, which hasn’t moved since 2006, but sits stickily back, wanking to the thought of its own rightness. Progressives spill a great deal of ink over that movement, talk that’s as cheap as it is lucrative. I want to talk about the other one.

Over the last twenty-four hours, with media fixated on Dawkins’ absence from one upcoming convention, atheists have been gathered at another in Houston. The Secular Social Justice conference, sponsored jointly by half a dozen orgs, highlights ‘the lived experiences, cultural context, shared struggle and social history of secular humanist people of color’. Sessions address the humanist history of hip hop, the new atheism’s imperialist mission and the lack of secular scaffolds for communities of colour in the working class US, whether for black single mothers or recently released incarcerees. Perhaps we could talk about this?

‘When African-Americans across the economic spectrum look to social welfare,’ convenor Sikivu Hutchinson writes, ‘they are more often than not tapping into . . . faith-based institutions. . . . Atheists who bash religion but aren’t about the business of building [alternatives] are just making noise.’ ‘There are compelling reasons’, Hutchinson wrote last autumn, ‘for black women to be attracted to atheism. The stigma of public morality, fueled by white supremacy and patriarchy, has always come down more heavily on black women. Religious right policies gutting reproductive health care disproportionately affect poor and working class black women.’

I’d like to talk about that too—and if the editors who put Dawkins in charge now want to milk their monstrous creation, there’s a lot more I want to talk about. Continue reading “Let’s Talk About The Other Atheist Movement”

Let’s Talk About The Other Atheist Movement

David Bowie, 1947-2016.

David Bowie was wonderful. He was also an abuser. How do we handle that?

* * *

I dreamt about David Bowie last night. I forget the details, but I woke up thinking I’d write a post about how he seemed to regenerate rather than age. (The first Bowie was Cockney and a mod, the second was Byronesque, et cetera.) The first thing I saw on starting my computer was a friend’s Facebook post: ‘I don’t think I ever really believed it was possible.’ The headline underneath took me a moment to digest: ‘David Bowie, the Legendary Musician, Has Died at 69.Oh no. Don’t say it’s true.

While there was me, I’d always assumed, there would Bowie. At eight, a clip of Ziggy’s arm round Mick Ronson was a queer wake-up call, and later ‘Life on Mars’ would help keep suicide at bay. Having died three short days after a new album’s release, it seems music sustained him too, and it hurts to have been denied the songs the twelfth or thirteenth Bowie would have made. After ten years away, The Next Day and Blackstar were considered two of his best records, and it would be a fair statement that he meant far more to me than any other singer.

It would also be fair to call him a child rapist. (Details ahead.)

Bowie did bad things alright. In the seventies he fixated on Nazis, calling Hitler one of the first rock stars and himself a believer in fascism—a phase which, to be fair, he grew out of and came to call ghastly. More disturbing are the stories of hotel room threesomes with fourteen year old girls. Former groupie Lori Mattix describes Bowie disrobing and having her wash him in the bath before ‘devirginising’ her. Both Mattix and the friend of hers who joined them later had been plied with drugs.

It’s hard to know what to do with this knowledge except rehearse it. I know the above to be true, according to Mattix’s nostalgic account, and that it deserves to be remembered. I also know without Bowie, my own obit would have been written long ago, and I can’t help but remember that too. How do you find room in one eulogy for both those facts? Just for today, I’ll mourn the hero I saw in Bowie, thankful on behalf of the kid who needed all those songs; tomorrow and the next day I’ll let one more hero go. That’s the best I can manage—sorry if it’s not enough.

It’s the legend more than the man I’m grieving in the end, the performances that have stayed with me. ‘Starman’, aforementioned, on Top of the Pops, a Technicolor explosion in a monochrome world. ‘Footstompin’’ on Dick Cavett’s programme, Bowie’s mic trained on joyous, gyrating Ava Cherry. ‘Under Pressure’, where Annie Lennox stares undiluted lust at him after that last breathy note. ‘Heroes’ live in Berlin, where Bowie’s voice rises over six minutes from a mumble to a shout. And then, of course, this week, the video to ‘Lazarus’.

You wouldn’t call it a live act, but surely that’s the point. How much sense it makes now, that song that was so inscrutable days ago, the deathbed pose, title and lines about release, even the rush to productivity between this album and the last, the decision not to tour or perform. Unmissable as it is in hindsight—how visible the cancer’s impact is, quite suddenly—no one took ‘Lazarus’ literally because no one imagined Bowie could die. How unlike anybody else, how entirely like him, to stage his own death as performance art. Now ain’t that just like me?

Hard to think someone who did that could have much faith in any afterlife. (Bowie, for his part, called himself ‘not quite an atheist’.) I don’t often wish I believed in one, and it’s hard to wish heaven on a man with his history, but at eight I longed to travel to Ziggy’s world. It hurts to know for the first time that where he is, I can’t follow. But I do live in David Bowie’s world—the world where everyone followed his tune, where he was sometimes a hero, sometimes a monster, always singular. I don’t feel good about all of that. All the same, I’m glad it was my world too.

David Bowie, 1947-2016.

* * *

I tell stories and write a blog. If you enjoy my work,
consider 
becoming a patron or leaving a tip.

Follow my tweets at @AlexGabriel,
keep up with 
my writing, or get in touch.

David Bowie, 1947-2016.