Atheism Plus/Free Thought Blogs (FTB)

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I'm white, atheist "cultural Christian" as Dawkins puts it. Am I allowed to criticize Christianity as practiced by brown or black people ?
 
Another question that also illustrates the fundamental problem of Atheism Plus:

My brother is developmentally disabled. He believes God exists. Is he wrong?

Respectfully,
Myriad
 
Myriad said:
Another question that also illustrates the fundamental problem of Atheism Plus:

My brother is developmentally disabled. He believes God exists. Is he wrong?

Respectfully,
Myriad
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You realize that's the A+ equivalent of when Morbius told Robbie to shoot the captain with his blaster, yes?

 
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ApostateltsopA said:
What are you suggesting? There was a thread at A+ we agreed it was shameful and hope Ms. Richards wins a wrongful termination suit.

PZ's post (Thanks for the link) is the first I've seen of one of the guys getting fired, I hope he also wins a wrongful termination suit.

The conduct of all the people losing their composure and lashing out at Richards over this is shameful. It does a tremendous disservice to the human race.
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I wasn't suggesting anything. Just sharing factual information.

However, I spiced it a bit by calling the A+ forum "ceepolkland" because it's one of those forums where a single person dominates and bullies everyone else, and seems to feel they have to answer almost every post and set the tone. I almost never visit there (or FTB) unless someone here provides a link. That's why I wasn't aware of their donglegate thread.

It's typical for companies to terminate employees who generate negative publicity, as Richards and her targets did. Richards has not had any activity on YouTube for a month. Her prudish, Joan of Arc moment may prove to be the worst decision in her life.

prude (prd)
n.
a person who is excessively proper or modest and is or affects to be easily shocked, esp. in matters involving sex.
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ApostateltsopA said:
What are you suggesting? There was a thread at A+ we agreed it was shameful and hope Ms. Richards wins a wrongful termination suit.

PZ's post (Thanks for the link) is the first I've seen of one of the guys getting fired, I hope he also wins a wrongful termination suit.

The conduct of all the people losing their composure and lashing out at Richards over this is shameful. It does a tremendous disservice to the human race.
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Our first instinct should not be to suspect the very worst possible of others. Ms. Richards decided against speaking to the two men first. She decided against resolving any differences in an adult fashion, one on one with her perceived detractors. Instead she decided to act in a way that had the greatest potential to harm the two young men.

Is there something that can be said that would shine a better light on Ms. Richards?
Would it not result in a better society if we tried to work things out between us without social media and authorities first? Wouldn't a little personal responsibility and charity go a long way to reducing miscommunications?
 
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Myriad said:
Another question that also illustrates the fundamental problem of Atheism Plus:

My brother is developmentally disabled. He believes God exists. Is he wrong?

Respectfully,
Myriad
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Too easy: You're appropriating someone else's experience for your own rhetorical games. Stop it. Or we will ban you.













Note that your actual question may--should--be ignored.

Note also that using artificial hypotheticals is similarly forbidden.
 
Myriad said:
Another question that also illustrates the fundamental problem of Atheism Plus:

My brother is developmentally disabled. He believes God exists. Is he wrong?

Respectfully,
Myriad
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We need more information. What race/ethnicity is your brother? What religion is he? Is he a woman? All of these will help us determine if he is wrong.
 
Now that the atheism+ people seem to get bored, they are looking outside of their forum to argue with people.

A couple of tactics which I have seen:

1. "Prove/demonstrate/cite every single bad thing that has ever been done by FtB/atheism+/skepchicks otherwise you are talking nonsense".

This is a derailing tactic. The people that care have already been steeped in these issues for a couple of years now and if you haven't there are 1000s of blogs/threads/posts/videos to help catch you up. If you fall for this tactic you will be arguing with people's interpretation of minutia forever

This tactic is also commonly used by pseudoscience believers in the form of "you haven't explained/debunked every paper/video/claim therefor psychic abilities are true".


2. Many of us have experienced the conversation:

P1: "I have concerns about the behavior and tactics of atheism+/FtB/skepchicks"

A+: "Then you are against the goals of equality/fairness/anti-discrimination you are a bad person."

It seems that this particular fallacy is the only reason atheism+ continues to exist, it ironically is also the reason that it will eventually fail.

Once they realize that the vast majority of westerners have similar goals, just not similar tactics, there is no reason to have an exclusive club. Conversely once you have alienated all the potential atheist allies you are left with nobody to in your movement.
 
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ApostateltsopA said:
Slight difference, my comment was a direct reference to you. Were you commenting directly to me? It helps if you put my name on. I'm ignoring a lot of background attacks, trying to address all of them is more than I have time for.



Yet you are still not denying the accusation. You are talking around it a lot but it is patently false what you characterized as elevatorgate.



So you removed two words, which alter the meaning of the sentence, for terseness.. I find that hard to believe.



Or you lack an answer but refuse to walk back a statement.



I doubt that,



Sure they were. I engaged you directly on what you posted. I used you as an example of what is wrong with the culture on this thread. However I do agree that the exchange should be a fair one and I'm happy to answer your questions. (Within reason, asking me to mind read others is out.)



Don't whine about walls, large posts are necessary to convey large amounts of information and you are hardly following your own advice with a single question on a single topic. Also given the nature of this threadnaught going back to previous pages is labor intensive and risks losing information, that is why I quote you fully.

As to emotions being valid tools of thinking, emotions are an unavoidable aspect of human thought. We can attempt to suppress them but this makes them act subconsciously. It strikes me that it is better to be aware of them, realize them and work with them. I think Quinn made great points about how empathy is only available if you allow for emotional thinking. I do agree with several posters I saw that one should not get carried away by emotion, however I see denying emotion as harmful in much the same way.



Given the way you have danced arround this topic I don't know that it's worth it. However it seems pretty simple to me. When you attack the religion of marginalized people you are attacking them and their culture. If you are white and in the US or Europe you are making that attack down an axis of privilege, and that's bad. Focus on the religious issues in your own culture. Let the atheists in their culture work on their religion. No good will come of attacking before things are evened out.

Sylvia sums it up pretty nicely.


Now I know someone mentioned that Islam is not marginalized because of fast growing and big numbers. In Islamic countries, I agree Islam is not marginalized, locally, assuming you are talking of the branch popular in any given place, being shia, for instance, in sunni territory is pretty damn awful.

However here in the states, being muslim is a very marginalized position. Look at all the nonsense with the "Ground Zero mosque" or any number of other attacks.

Now there is your olive branch, lets see some honest responses to the questions I have placed before you.
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Thanks for the olive branch. Accusing me of lying makes it wither a bit, though.

I scanned your post for questions and only saw one: "Were you commenting directly to me?" My answer is no. Point taken.

Most of your other remarks I've either already addressed, or I'd be stating the obvious if I addressed them. The two words I purportedly eliminated to misrepresent a quote are too far back for me to bother to locate in this long thread. It's your burden to support your claim.

You said, originally, emotions were valuable intellectual tools, yet in your response to me challenging that, you reworded it as "valid tools of thinking." Why? (serious question. It comes across as a backpedal) Skeptical and critical thinking requires being aware of all data, including emotional data. The original context, as best I recall, had to do with the emphasis applied to fear, such as the discomfort about being invited in an elevator for coffee. Fear is the most powerful emotion, and it's well established in evolutionary psychology that survival is helped more by false positives than by false negatives. Emotions are emotional tools. The emotional part of the human brain is virtually identical to the emotional part of the rat brain. We need to be aware of emotions, but putting excessive weight in the emotional interpretation of reality given to us by our rat brain violates an explicit goal of Atheism Plus: to use skepticism and critical thinking.

Regarding the religions of brown people being off limits (Sybil's "axis of privelege" statement strikes me as a bare assertion fallacy) makes me flash back to Dawkins' "Root of All Evil." He used all three Abrahamic religions, including the "religion of brown people," as examples of religion's harm. I don't care that Dawkins views it from an axis of privilege. It doesn't make him wrong. He is privileged to not be under the mind control of any religion, including brown peoples'. More than that, not being in the axis of the religion itself makes it easier to see how harmful it is. Dawkins obviously cares about the well being of all people whatever levels of melanin their skins produce. This is the axis I am on as well. I wish you were, too.

Ceepolk's edict resembles for me the consequence of racists who shrug their shoulders at black-on-black violence. The privileged have knowledge that can help the underprivileged, but should back off because of ancient colonialism and racism? Nope, I won't buy into that.
 
Mr. Scott said:
I wonder what the A+ stance on this phenomenon is: American fundies exporting their toxic religion to the developing (non-white) world.

You Wouldn’t Believe How Fast Americans Are Losing Their Religion – But the Fundamentalists Have a Plan
As their power declines in America, fundamentalists are moving to developing countries not as far along the secularization curve. And they're causing massive damage.
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Surely that's colonialism and interfering in brown people's religion?
 
Squeegee Beckenheim said:
Surely that's colonialism and interfering in brown people's religion?
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I recall aplussers are protective of Black Baptist faiths, which only exist because white slave owners infected them with Christianity. Would it not be OK with A+ for white secularists help try to undoing the damage?
 
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Something I don't get is how exactly they want to achieve more diverse skeptic/atheist communities. On one hand, they want to be more welcoming to non-whites. On the other hand, they are not too fond of questioning "brown people's religion". How's it gonna work out?

Richard Carrier back in the days wrote an article comparing Muhammad to Epicurus in "predicting" science, and came out in Epicurus' favor. I'd sorta love the plussers to become aware of this, and see if Carrier gets excommunicated. I mean, he disses the browner guy's religion! How do I best get this to the attention of the plussers?

Thinking of it, they should really like Christianity. It was a religion whose central figure was a brown guy, and the religion founded in his name wiped out the indigenous European religions, established by white guys.

Stout said:
I'm white, atheist "cultural Christian" as Dawkins puts it. Am I allowed to criticize Christianity as practiced by brown or black people ?
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I celebrate Christmas and such, I don't really think about Christianity. I suppose I'm a cultural Swede.
 
I've been thinking, and I want to create an account at the plusser forum. Is there any risk involved? I'm sure they'll get hostile sooner or later.
 
Humes fork said:
I've been thinking, and I want to create an account at the plusser forum. Is there any risk involved? I'm sure they'll get hostile sooner or later.
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So long as you don't already have an account there I expect you're fine, but afaik they'll screen all your posts until you can be "trusted" enough to post without premoderation. (Unless that has changed and/or unless I have that wrong.)
 
I think it'd be interesting to have some of the bigwigs (such as they are) of A+ over here, but they have no interest in posting someplace where they actually have to defend their views, and also someplace where they don't control the moderation. I give qwints and Apo full marks for coming over and carrying their banner, but I would like to see Setar or Ceepolk here on a (comparatively) neutral site.

Really, guys, come on over. I was just kidding about editing your posts to generate AutoModAction PMs.
 
If you want to engage atheismplus people just go over to reddit and search for links to freethoughtblogs. There are only a handful that post over there and they are spun-up.
 
Humes fork said:
I've been thinking, and I want to create an account at the plusser forum. Is there any risk involved? I'm sure they'll get hostile sooner or later.
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For what reason ?

You know they won't discuss their dogma but if you want to play SJW on the internet, I can't see there being any risk. They'll have your IP address, but so what ? The most they can do with that is report you to your ISP for some perceived crime. You can register with a disposable email address, I'd create a yahoo account just for this.

Your first 10 posts have to pass moderation muster, easy peasy, just write simple SJW stuff.

And remember...never, ever go full Setar. :)
 
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