Women in Secularism 4 April 20, 2016
Posted by Ubi Dubium in Events.Tags: atheism, CFI, critical thinking, feminism, religion, Women in Secularism
1 comment so far
I have not seen much buzz about this event yet, but I got an email about this and want to do my part to make sure word gets around.
CFI has announced that there will be a Women in Secularism 4 conference this fall, September 23-25, in Arlington, VA. I had been concerned that Melody’s leaving the DC office might mean that this conference would end, so I’m very glad it’s continuing.
I’ve been to all the past versions of this conference, and they’ve all been thought-provoking, spawned important conversations, and let me hear other voices that I otherwise might not have known about.
Speakers for this conference include Julia Sweeney and Rebecca Goldstein. I’ll plan to be there!
Why we can’t win August 14, 2013
Posted by Ubi Dubium in Rants, Responses.Tags: atheism, CFI, feminism, MRAs, PZ Myers, Radford, Ron Lindsay, Shermer, Skepticism, Stollznow, Women in Secularism
8 comments
I just needed to post this today.
Reposted from Jim C. Hines via Pharyngula
Overdue thanks to Ron Lindsay July 7, 2013
Posted by Ubi Dubium in Rants, Responses.Tags: CFI, feminism, Ron Lindsay, WIS, Women in Secularism
add a comment
(I had meant to post this earlier, but I’ve had some personal travel, a knee injury, and a major Fourth of July concert to deal with, so I hadn’t gotten to it. Sorry.)
This is a follow-up to my posts on Ron Lindsay’s opening remarks at WIS2 and the CFI Board’s non-response.
Back on June 22, Ron issued an apology:
http://www.centerforinquiry.net/blogs/entry/some_remarks_on_my_talk_at_wis2/
To Ron Lindsay,
Thank you. An apology is what I was hoping to see.
I can’t tell from this apology whether you actually understand why we were so upset, but apologizing is hard and I appreciate your being able to do that. With this apology I am now willing to put this behind me, and can (cautiously) participate with CFI on future events and projects. I hope for amicable relations and good discussions in the future.
To the CFI Board,
I’m still peeved with you. All I have from you is your original non-answer. You don’t need to apologize for Ron’s speech, he’s already done that. But you do need to show some kind of support for Melody, Lauren and Debbie’s hard work, and you need to show real commitment to encouragement of diversity within the secular movement. This can best be shown by action, rather than writing. I suggest announcing your sponsorship of WIS3 as soon as possible. Or something else specifically aimed at making traditionally marginalized groups of people feel important and welcome in the secular community. (And a lack of specific support for the small but extremely vocal minority in our community that’s specifically trying to marginalize people, that would also be helpful in restoring my trust.) Show us that people matter, even people who are not the traditional core group of well-educated middle-aged middle and upper class white men. And please don’t claim that “we don’t have the resources.” The people from the diverse community you need to reach out to, with their large untapped pool of talent and energy, are resources that you need to build this movement for the future.
I’ll work with you for now. But I’ll also be paying attention to what CFI does in the next year.
Non-answer from CFI Board June 17, 2013
Posted by Ubi Dubium in Events, Rants, Responses.Tags: atheism, CFI, feminism, Ron Lindsay, Women in Secularism
7 comments
The CFI Board has issued a statement:
The mission of the Center for Inquiry is to foster a secular society based on science, reason, freedom of inquiry, and humanist values.
The Center for Inquiry, including its CEO, is dedicated to advancing the status of women and promoting women’s issues, and this was the motivation for its sponsorship of the two Women in Secularism conferences. The CFI Board wishes to express its unhappiness with the controversy surrounding the recent Women in Secularism Conference 2.
CFI believes in respectful debate and dialogue. We appreciate the many insights and varied opinions communicated to us. Going forward, we will endeavor to work with all elements of the secular movement to enhance our common values and strengthen our solidarity as we struggle together for full equality and respect for women around the world.
Whut.
That’s the entire statement? That’s IT????
“…unhappiness with the controversy”. They “…appreciate the insights and varied opinions…”. “Going forward we will endeavor to…”
No specifics. Nothing about how they will take action to avoid this happening in the future. Nothing about how Ron blindsided the CFI staff, and insulted and condescended to a roomful of dedicated secular activists, not to mention spending the rest of the weekend belittling invited conference speakers? Nothing about how maybe they could institute some guidelines for this sort of thing, or make sure that any speech to be given by someone representing CFI at a CFI-sponsored conference that has more substance to it than “howdy” will be available for review by the conference organizers first? Notice how the word “apology” was not included there, either.
They’ve shown us where the board stands on this issue, which is that they don’t stand anywhere. Maybe something happened internally, but that does nothing to cool the anger of those of us who were sitting in the audience for Ron’s sermon. I’ve been considering working on developing an education project with our local chapter, and while I know that the local staff would make me feel welcome, and that my efforts matter, my confidence that the national organization would be able to effectively address gender-related issues has just dropped another notch. I’ll have to think seriously about this before agreeing to work with CFI on any upcoming activities. If I were a position to make any donations, they would be earmarked for WIS3 only.
If nothing else, this whole thing shows how desperately the WIS conferences are needed. I’d hate for them to have to be held by a different sponsoring organization, but I wonder if that’s what needs to happen. I’ll be watching for the reaction of the other attendees, this should be interesting.
Letter to CFI Board of Directors June 5, 2013
Posted by Ubi Dubium in Events, Rants, Responses.Tags: CFI, feminism, Greta Christina, Ron Lindsay, Women in Secularism
2 comments
(I’ve finally written to the CFI Board regarding Ron Lindsay’s behavior at WIS2, and thought I should also post the text of my letter here:)
To: The CFI Board of Directors
Re: Ron Lindsay, and his unwelcoming speech
I know that you have received many letters regarding Ron Lindsay’s conduct at the Women in Secularism 2 conference, so I will keep this brief.
In his role as CEO of CFI, Ron’s responsibility to the organization was to open the conference with welcoming remarks focusing on support for the mission of CFI, perhaps summing up the previous conference or introducing and welcoming the speakers for the current conference, and generally getting the weekend off to a positive and enthusiastic start. Instead, Ron delivered an “unwelcoming” sermon that focused on the personal opinions of Ron Lindsay. None of his actions that weekend did anything to boost my opinion of CFI, or encourage me to be a financial supporter, or become more active with the organization.
The attendees at the conference included not only currently influential secular activists and CFI donors, but also future secular activists and potential CFI donors as well, and Ron managed to alienate almost everyone in the room, both with his speech, and with his defenses of it over the rest of the weekend. Ron’s behavior was unprofessional, and reflected badly on the conference organizers as well as reflecting badly on CFI in general.
I give great credit to Melody Hensley, Lauren Becker, and all the CFI staff and volunteers who made the rest of the conference such a success. The presentations and panel discussions at each WIS have been a focus and inspiration for further discussions, understanding and action, and these important conferences need to continue. I will look forward to seeing the Board’s response to the actions of Mr. Lindsay, and hope that CFI will continue to be able to bring “science, reason, freedom of inquiry, and humanist values” to an increasingly diverse audience.
Regards,
On Heroes and Disappointment May 28, 2013
Posted by Ubi Dubium in Events, Rants, Responses.Tags: atheism, CFI, disappointment, feminism, misogyny, Richard Dawkins, Ron Lindsay, Skepticism, Women in Secularism
7 comments
It’s been a rough couple of weeks. At WIS2, I listened with jaw-dropping disbelief as Ron Lindsay used his welcome speech to deliver a patronizing sermon to the conference participants about tone. Much has been said about this topic (links can be found here, if you have not heard about this incident), and I’ll just say that Ron was unprofessional in the timing of that speech, and doubly unprofessional in his responses to criticism of it. When he was confronted with the fact that his remarks were inappropriate for the time and place he gave them, he doubled down and increased the problem, instead of apologizing.
And I recently found out (through channels that I will not specify) that a beloved community leader from my town has been arrested for molesting a 9-year-old child. I have been expecting it to be in the news, and the first mentions of it just hit the newspapers about an hour before I wrote this. This was someone I had known, not really as a friend, but perhaps as a “dear acquaintance”. Someone whose work and enthusiasm I respected, that I would have said that I looked up to, at least until a week ago. Crap.
I’d really like there to be people in the world that I could really consider role models. People that I can look up to, that I can aspire to be like. It’s not that I’d expect them to be perfect, but that their faults would not be deal-breakers. For instance, I used to love watching The Frugal Gourmet on TV – his creativity and energy were great, and I tried lots of new foods because of him. OK, so he didn’t like desserts, but I could forgive that. He was wonderful, until the child-molestation charges came up. Crap.
Or, another example, I’ve learned an enormous amount from reading books on biology by Richard Dawkins. The God Delusion is good, but it’s not even close to The Selfish Gene for influencing the way I think about the world. I was close to being a Dawkins fangirl, until a couple of “dear Muslima” comments at Pharyngula a couple of years ago took care of that. I was really hoping at the time that maybe it was a troll using Dawkins’s name, trying to make him look bad. It wasn’t. Crap.
Robert Bakker is religious. ThunderfOOt turned out to be a mysogynist. Bill Maher is an anti-vaxxer. There so many people I wish I could admire for the good work they do, but there are some things I just can’t get past.
Of course, the fact that I want something to be true has no bearing on whether it is actually true. But this kind of thing really makes it hard to me to feel confident that I can look up to anybody as an example. I’ve got a sour taste in my brain about humanity right now and I think I need for somebody I currently dislike to really exceed my expectations of them, to make me feel better. (Like maybe Ken Ham could deconvert, or something.) I’m not holding my breath.
Why the vitriol? September 10, 2012
Posted by Ubi Dubium in Brain Glitches, Rants.Tags: A+, atheism, BlagHag, Boob-Quake, Carol Tavris, Cognitive Biases, elevatorgate, feminism, FTB, Greta Christina, Jen McCreight, MRAs, Rebecca Watson, stupidity, Surly Amy, twitter
9 comments
I’ve been looking at quite a few posts and comments in the Atheosphere complaining about the whole idea of Atheism Plus. A few of these are thoughtful, some are just whiny, but many are downright nasty. Where is all of this spite coming from? If it were a new website for atheist knitters or a club for atheist baseball fans, I don’t see that there would be this kind of outcry. So why such outrage? I’ve been thinking about this rather a lot, and I have some thoughts on the subject.
I’ve been reading a lot over the past years about cognitive biases, and I think I may have gotten some what is going on here. First, I recommend a talk given at TAM9 by Carol Tavris:
The part I want to focus on is her discussion of the pyramid metaphor. Two people who share very similar opinions are faced with an ethical decision to be made. (They are shown near each other at the top of the pyramid.) Her example was cheating on a test, and in this example, one cheats and one does not. After the fact they each begin to rationalize their decisions, to find reasons to reassure themselves why the decision they made was the correct one, and why the other decision was wrong. In the case of the student who cheated, they are faced with a cognitive dissonance: either they must admit to themselves that they took an action which was not consistent with their self image of an ethical person, or they must create reasons why their action actually was ethical. Nobody wants to admit to themselves that they are less than a good person, or that they made a mistake. Rationalizing is easier and less painful. And so both of these students later wind up quite separate in their opinions, even though they did not start out that way. (Shown as each student now far apart at the bottom of the pyramid.) And each may now harbor hostility towards the other, even though there was none there to start with.
Also involved here is the Backfire Effect. Once someone stakes out their position, evidence to the contrary makes them dig into their chosen position all the more. This even happens to those of us who try to be good skeptics, and always approach problems rationally. We still get caught by this problem.
So now I’m looking at the storm that erupted over elevatorgate, and that has only intensified since. Before women started speaking up publicly about this issue, there were probably a lot of guys who casually made inappropriate comments, or advances, or any of the other things were are now saying are part of the atmosphere of harassment we are fighting. Or maybe they didn’t do any of that, but just made comments in support someone else who did. At the time, it might not have seemed wrong, because there was a general atmosphere that this sort of thing was OK, and there was a lot of it going on.
Now we are finally speaking up, saying that it wasn’t OK, it’s a big part of the reason that women have been avoiding events, and that it’s time for it to stop. And so now any guy who has behaved in ways that we are now defining as unacceptable, even if he didn’t realize at the time that it was offensive, is faced with that cognitive dissonance. Either he has to admit to himself that his actions might have been inappropriate and say “I didn’t realize, I’m sorry, I won’t do that anymore”, or he has to say “What I did was totally OK, and here’s all the reasons why it’s OK, and you are horrible whiny people for saying it wasn’t OK.” It’s hard to for anybody admit that they were not the perfect paragon that is their mental image of themselves, but it’s easy to argue. We’re all very good at arguing. And the more we point out that this kind of justification is part of the behavior that has been the problem all along, the harder they dig into the position that they are in the right, always were in the right, and have nothing to be sorry about. Which has now escalated into name calling, abuse and threats.
So what can be done about this? I don’t have a solution, except to talk about cognitive dissonance in hopes that a few people may recognize it in themselves. If there’s another answer to this problem, I’d love to hear about it.
Fuming September 5, 2012
Posted by Ubi Dubium in Rants.Tags: A+, atheism, BlagHag, Boob-Quake, feminism, FTB, Greta Christina, Jen McCreight, MRAs, Rebecca Watson, Skepticism, stupidity, Surly Amy, twitter
4 comments
Jen McCreight has announced that she is taking a break from blogging at BlagHag. Why? Because of the continual abuse she suffers on her blog and on twitter for the apparent crime of being female and vocal. And for attempting to do something about the fact that every time somebody mentions that abuse is not OK, the result is more vitriolic abuse. And that the abuse redoubles simply because she wants to establish one small corner of the internet where people can talk safely without the interruption and aggravation of that abuse.
Jen, I am totally behind you in this. Take a break from whatever you need to, for as long as you need to. If you never go back to twitter (or not under your own name) then that’s fine. If you never go back to blogging, I’ll miss you but I’d support that too. Finish your PhD, be the best damn biologist out there, write a book, or just retire to some nice beach somewhere and watch the ocean. Do whatever you want on your own schedule. From Boob-Quake to Atheism Plus, you’ve given us your time and effort and wonderful writing over the past years and been completely amazing, especially for someone so young. You don’t owe us anything, we owe you. And you certainly don’t owe the haters any of your time and energy.
And now the challenge. I’ve been inspired to blog by Jen, and Greta, and many many others. So now I need to figure out what I can do from my one small little blog. My decision to stay off twitter will stand for now, as does my decision to stay off Facebook. The internet already consumes enough of my free time, without seeing updates on what some old acquaintance had for breakfast, and I’m old enough that a cellphone is an annoyance, not an appendage. I’ve joined the A+ forum, but I’m not sure quite which goals to work on there yet. I’ve got some thinking to do, and then probably some serious noise to make down the road.
WiS Conference – Why are women so religious May 31, 2012
Posted by Ubi Dubium in Events, Uncategorized.Tags: feminism, religion, Skepticism
6 comments
I spent the weekend of May 18-20 at the Women in Secularism conference, and it was certainly a great and thought-provoking event. All the speakers and panels were terrific, and CFI expects to have the talks on their YouTube channel, so I won’t try to summarize any of them here.
But there were a few points made at the conference that I wanted to respond to. There was an afternoon panel called “Why Women Need Freedom From Religion”, and the panelists were Greta Christina, Wafa Sultan, Annie Laurie Gaylor, and R. Elisabeth Cornwell. One of the points they started out with was the fact that women do seem to be more religious than men. Statistics show that, in the US, among those people who identify as having no religious preference, the gender ratio for male/female is 60/40. Further, among those identifying as “atheist” the situation is worse, with the male-female ratio at 70/30. So the natural follow-up question is “why are women more religious than men?”. There was some good discussion on it, and one of the points that Elisabeth Cornwell made is that a woman must consider the costs of staying in a religion versus the benefits of staying. So in answer to the question, “So what are the benefits women get from staying in religion?” Annie Laurie Gaylor immediately suggested “not getting killed”.
The panel went off on another track, discussing what direct benefits women get from religion, things like social support, daycare, etc., that they would have to give up if they left. But I think Annie Laurie was spot on, and I wish they had elaborated more on what she said.
A while ago, there was a wonderful set of articles on Ex-Christian.net about how religions have immune systems (I think it was Valerie Tarico writing, not sure). Religions evolve by Darwinian natural selection just like organisms do. They compete for a limited set of resources (believers), propagate themselves (from brain to brain), reproduce with variation, and the variations that survive and reproduce the best are the ones that thrive and grow. To propagate, they have to be good at infecting new hosts, they have to encourage those hosts to transmit the infection, and they have to do something to prevent people from shaking off the infections. There are lots of things that religions do to keep people from leaving. The ones I see talked about the most are things like apologetics, condemnations of doubt, accusations of interference by “the devil”, threats of hell, or chalking everything up to “god’s mysterious and perfect plan”. But equally important is what Annie Laurie brought up: “not getting killed”. Many religions have active penalties for leaving, such as social ostracism, family rejection, physical punishment, and, yes, being killed. Doubt is dangerous to a believer because of what happens to those who dare to voice their doubt, not in the next world, but in this one.
That still leaves the question of why women are more religious. As childbearers, and primary child-rearers, we need social stability. And being typically physically smaller and less muscular, violent retaliations are much more of a threat to us. Is the answer simply that we are more vulnerable to the kind of harm that religion dishes out to those who leave?
So women might be more religious because of the benefits they get, and/or they might be more religious because of fear of reprisal, or is there another reason in there as well? I think this subject needs a lot more thought. (And research. Always research, once we figure out the right questions to ask.)
Question With Boldness 