The "New Atheism" Has a Problem with Women

David Klinghoffer September 16, 2014 4:37 AM | Permalink

A long and fascinating article at Buzzfeed ("Will Misogyny Bring Down The Atheist Movement?") is worth reading if you don't mind a lot of crude language. Reporter Mark Oppenheimer describes the misogynist culture of the atheist-"skeptic"-materialist demimonde, and it's an eye-opener.

I will not quote from it because the most fascinating passages would exceed the limits of tolerance for graphic talk by ENV's family-friendly audience. Suffice to say that, whether the rampant accusations of sexual harassment are all true, mostly true, or even just one quarter true, the New Atheism is a community that has a problem with women.

That's not entirely unexpected. A picture of reality that casts men and women as animals, nothing more, naturally listens with some respect to animal wisdom, which in turn has no idea of manners, restraint, or self-denial. Animals predictably, unapologetically give in to base urges. Every man wrestles with them too, with more or less success, but animal wisdom is bereft of any compelling rationale for rising above.

Among our atheist interlocutors in the evolution debate, biologist PZ Myers, aka the "Happy Atheist," has been a notable critic of this nasty side of the skeptic community. He talked with Oppenheimer and was remarkably frank about his own compatriots:

[A]ccording to PZ Myers, atheists and skeptics may be uniquely unable to recognize their own flaws. "You'll find the atheists who say, 'I'm rational, therefore I'm better than everybody else,'" Myers said. "They take it for granted that all of their beliefs and positions are founded on rational thinking."

Isn't that the truth? An email correspondent of ours offered a good insight, which I wanted to quote but he didn't respond to my request to do so. I'll paraphrase.

Proponents of atheism, especially the science-flavored kind, imply with the term "skeptic" that they have liberated themselves from faith, shedding belief in favor of knowledge, cutting through all the fat and getting right down to the bone. But that's a delusion. It's like the naïve English speaker who thinks only he and his nearby neighbors speak unaccented English.

Obviously the reality is that everyone who speaks any given language does so with an accent. Some people just don't recognize that they do. There's no "unaccented" English, Spanish, Russian, French, or anything else.
The New Atheist subculture has its own "accent," its own culture with its unquestioned assumptions, "tak[ing] it for granted," says PZ Myers, "that all of their beliefs and positions are founded on rational thinking." Some of those assumptions misrepresent scientific reality. Others, morally and spiritually, are vapid, ugly, or worse.

Unfortunately, however well meaning, leading "skeptics" have no resources for correcting their followers other than to appeal to gentlemanly ideals, without calling them that, which come ultimately from the religious cultures that they otherwise despise.

H/t: Human Exceptionalism.

From Does It Matter What We Believe About Morality?:

First, nihilism can’t condemn Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, or those who fomented the Armenian genocide or the Rwandan one. If there is no such thing as “morally forbidden,” then what Mohamed Atta did on September 11, 2001, was not morally forbidden. Of course, it was not permitted either. But still, don’t we want to have grounds to condemn these monsters? Nihilism seems to cut that ground out from under us.
Second, if we admit to being nihilists, then people won’t trust us. We won’t be left alone when there is loose change around. We won’t be relied on to be sure small children stay out of trouble.
Third, and worst of all, if nihilism gets any traction, society will be destroyed. We will find ourselves back in Thomas Hobbes’s famous state of nature, where “the life of man is solitary, mean, nasty, brutish and short.” Surely, we don’t want to be nihilists if we can possibly avoid it. (Or at least, we don’t want the other people around us to be nihilists.)
Scientism can’t avoid nihilism. We need to make the best of it. For our own self-respect, we need to show that nihilism doesn’t have the three problems just mentioned—no grounds to condemn Hitler, lots of reasons for other people to distrust us, and even reasons why no one should trust anyone else. We need to be convinced that these unacceptable outcomes are not ones that atheism and scientism are committed to. Such outcomes would be more than merely a public relations nightmare for scientism. They might prevent us from swallowing nihilism ourselves, and that would start unraveling scientism.
To avoid these outcomes, people have been searching for scientifically respectable justification of morality for least a century and a half. The trouble is that over the same 150 years or so, the reasons for nihilism have continued to mount. Both the failure to find an ethics that everyone can agree on and the scientific explanation of the origin and persistence of moral norms have made nihilism more and more plausible while remaining just as unappetizing.
- A.Rosenberg, The Atheist Guide to Reality, ch.5

Romans 1:18 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness;

19 Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath shewed it unto them.

20 For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse:

21 Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened.

22 Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools,...

Not an atheist, but I am honest. This entire article is based on a woman coming forward *five*years* after the fact, accusing a renown skeptic to getting her drunk to take advantage of her. There have been several incidents where feminists have played the ‘rape card’ with ZERO evidence, tried to ruin a man’s reputation, then cried when the court of public opinion declined to ruin him and then screamed ‘misogyny!’

This ‘anti-woman’ thing is a fight with feminism vs. atheism because the whiny little girls want to take over the atheist movement and make it part of their PC BS and the larger movement isn’t having it.

Here’s an article written about the incident that tries to do just that, but does hit the salient points.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/markoppenheimer/will-misogyny-bring-down-the-atheist-movement#2iq1jmg

(There are five parts to the following series, if anyone’s interested. You can find it on thunderfoot’s youtube page. Here’s part one)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKKQdJR7F_I

As usual, anyone who doesn’t swallow feminism’s dogma is labeled a misogynist and attacked relentlessly.

I’ve got a lot of issues with atheism, but not cooperating with PC feminist ideology is not one of them. (I hate feminism MUCH more than I’m at all concerned about atheism.)

“This ‘anti-woman’ thing is a fight with feminism vs. atheism because the whiny little girls want to take over the atheist movement and make it part of their PC BS and the larger movement isn’t having it.”

Did you read the buzzfeed article you quoted?

Randi; ““His reply,” Randi continued, “is he had a bit too much to drink and he doesn’t remember. I don’t know — I’ve never been drunk in my life. It’s an unfortunate thing … I haven’t seen him doing that. But I get the word from people in the organization that he has to be under better control. If he had gotten violent, I’d have him out of there immediately. I’ve just heard that he misbehaved himself with the women, which I guess is what men do when they are drunk.”

Randi is gay so he probably doesn’t understand the man/woman dynamic.

I’m with Amy on this one, I know a lot of men are jerks that would take advantage of a drunk young woman. The woman being a feminist or not isn’t a factor in that reality.

The article is so ironic because it shows the “enlightened” have exactly the same warts and feuds their despised religious counterparts have.

What’s funny is atheists like to claim they’re all rationality and logic. But their worldview ultimately is an evolutionary worldview. And their worldview ultimately declares belief in spontaneous generation, that life sprang from lifeless chemicals. But that is a faith statement, since there’s zero scientific evidence for life springing from lifeless chemicals.

Even the most “simple” single-celled organism is stupendously complex, such that it’s laughable to claim spontaneous generation as a fact. Pasteur disproved spontaneous generation a century ago with the Law of Biogenesis. Even the production of a single usable protein via random processes has been likened to a solar system full of blind men all simultaneously solving the Rubik’s Cube. And that “simple” single-celled organism has dozens of them, as well as organelles, cytoplasm, a nucleus complete with DNA and a variably permeable cell membrane. Yet they have faith (and zero scientific evidence) that all that created itself!

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/men-punished-in-sexual-misconduct-cases-on-colleges-campuses-are-fighting-back/2014/08/20/96bb3c6a-1d72-11e4-ae54-0cfe1f974f8a_story.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUSMi7EyMQw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKdvzSADayM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sI5PEGgac0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgxwPU0W-Wg

Back in 2009, you took advantage of me. You cornered me in an elevator, touched yourself, then took me back to your room and had sex with me. I was too drunk to really remember anything.

Now, according to your own criteria, that is enough to convict you in the court of public opinion. You should have your career and reputation ripped to shreds. Anyone who questions the claim that I just made is a woman-hating misogynist. You should be shunned by your friends and never again invited to a professional function. I’ll bet that I can find a half a dozen other women who ‘remember’ you being a jerk and hitting on them inappropriately. (The more famous that you are, the easier it is to find names.)

And, because some men do take advantage of women who are drunk, it must be true. Women *never* lie about such a thing. Women never confabulate and exaggerate about rape/sexual harassment.

I used to work with a rape crisis center. I definitely saw real victims. But I also saw women who ‘weren’t sure’ if they’d been raped or not. I’d see a woman who began as mildly irritated as she told her story and watch as the ‘counselors’ absolutely convinced her that she’d been raped. I heard the stories morph as she ‘began to remember things’ that she hadn’t remember before. It was nothing less than brainwashing.

I also saw women referred to us who had actually reported. Even when they *admitted* that it hadn’t happened and that she was just out for revenge, they encouraged her to keep going forward and told her that she was in denial. (Some of these women realized that they really screwed up and wanted to recant, but the counselors would push them to go through with the process.)

This is why I left and one of the many reasons that I despise feminism. They do promote a victim mentality in women and a mistrust of all men.

We have a legal system for a reason, people. I will not accept vigilante justice or condemn a man who hasn’t been tried and convicted in a court of law.

(And let’s not forget the daycare/child molestation scandal that turned out to be complete hysteria. Lives were ruined by that incident and NOTHING happened.)

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