2014

I donated a draft copy to the "children's
library" at Sunday Assembly Seattle.

Friendly Atheism 

Today I was the guest speaker at Sunday Assembly Seattle. Sunday Assembly is a secular “church,” a celebration of life with singing and community. They asked me to talk on the topic of why atheists can act like jerks sometimes, based on my September 28th blog post. Today I’m addressing the topic in a less confrontational way and suggesting that atheists ought to achieve greater degrees of self-awareness, niceness, and humility. Here’s the vision of atheism that I talked about. 

Atheists ought to be self-aware. 

We don’t have any holy books or priests to tell us that our thoughts and feelings are right and true. If we’re proud or offended, we have no choice but to own those feelings. We can’t imagine that God is proud of us or that we are offended on his behalf. We don’t understand human reason to be a gift from God, nor can we expect reason to function objectively. We see ourselves as evolved animals with biased, self-serving minds.

Atheists ought to be nice. 

We know that this is our only life. We can’t look at starving people and tell ourselves that they deserve their lot because of sins they committed before they were born. We can’t overlook suffering in this life by looking forward to an afterlife. We can’t look at differences between races or genders and say that God wants it that way. We don’t have a holy book that glorifies killing infidels, apostates, gays or anyone else. We ought to be especially nice to the people who disagree with us. If people disagree with us, we never think that they’re being controlled by Satan, that they are committing blasphemy, or that they deserve to be tortured forever in hell. When we feel antipathy toward someone in an "enemy camp," we should be self-aware enough to be skeptical of our own negativity.  

And atheists ought to be humble. 

We know we’re not God’s chosen people, and we know our truths aren’t God’s truths. We understand ourselves to be biased and fallible just like everyone else. We know that humans are varied, both in their genes and in their experiences. We don’t think that the King of the Universe wants everyone to think the same way we do. We ought to be self-aware enough to recognize our feelings of self-righteousness as bias rather than rationality.

Where we’re at

Maybe one day evangelicals will say, “Those atheists are going to hell, but they sure are self-aware, nice, and humble.” My sense is that we’re a long way off. Honestly, we’re already behind. In a nation that has defined itself as religious, atheists are a distrusted, misunderstood minority. Meanwhile, atheist authors make big bucks by attacking religion with one-sided criticisms. This “anti-theist” contingent reinforces hostility and arrogance among atheists, and it reinforces the idea among believers that we’re a bunch of haters.

What next?

A number of different things are going on that seem to point to the rise of a more humane atheism. Authors such as Alain de Botton and Chris Stedman are showing a nicer side to atheism, while others, such as Robert Wright, Ara Norenzayan, and David S. Wilson are showing us the good that religion has accomplished historically. Christians don't talk about the good that atheism has done in the world, but we atheists are open-minded enough to talk about the good that religion has done. Our ability to see “them” more objectively is a big step forward. Sunday Assembly is a step forward of a different sort, giving secular people a way to gather and form community. Here in Seattle I’m working on setting up moderated dialogs that might help atheists address sensitive topics with greater sensitivity. The theory of evolution also offers us an opportunity to share a natural vision of the world and our place in it. In particular, natural selection explains why we are born into this world ready to form ourselves into “moral tribes,” as psychologist Joshua Greene calls them. Some people think these changes are big enough that we should leave the “atheist” label behind, associated as it is with us-versus-them thinking. All of these developments don’t add up to a movement, but maybe they are evidence of a shift in atheist culture. Or maybe the beginning of a shift. 

2014

See ReThink Prize webpage here. 

Ten Secular Commandments

The ReThink Prize is offering $1,000 each for the ten best secular commandments, as determined by a panel of judges. The prize is promoting a new book, Atheist Mind Humanist Heart, which promotes a vision of atheism as positive and ethical rather than negative and reactive. Here are the ten “commandments” I submitted, each with a note on why I submitted it. 

Know yourself to be the gloriously evolved animal that you are. 

Our evolutionary history tells us two important truths: that we are connected in flesh and blood to all living things on earth, and that we are something new and wonderful. 

Connect yourself to a caring community. 

Secular people generally don’t connect to communities the way believers often do, so here’s your reminder. It’s natural and healthy to be part of a group that cares about you. 

Thou shalt not get sucked into the wasteful vices that corporations keep pushing on us. 

Some corporations run entirely on their ability to get you to consume their unhealthy products. They are devoted full time to distracting you from a better life. Enjoy what you like, but don’t get sucked in.

Focus on the things that you control and that make the most difference. In particular, focus on how you respond to things.

You can’t do everything, but you can do something. 

Be good to your “us” and be good to your “them.”

Invest in your community and the people you think of as “us.” Check your natural instinct to think ill of the people that you think of as “them.”

Expect exceptions as part of the natural order.

The world isn’t as simple as it looks. The mind expects bright lines and clear definitions, but nature is variable. In a world of exceptions, humans in particular are exceptional.

Pay your way and then some. 

Help humanity move forward faster rather than making it advance more slowly. 

Sing together. 

People find lots of occasions to do sing together. Find more. Coming together is the reason we evolved singing in the first place. 

Check your bias. 

Your intuitions are generally accurate but bound to be biased in predictable directions. Just because you feel like something is true doesn’t mean it’s true. 

Contend with each other over actions and policies, but don’t fight over thoughts and words. 

Creeds and labels separate us into opposed camps. There are plenty of practical issues to disagree over, but don’t argue about beliefs or identities. 

Historical Note: The historical Ten Commandments are well known, but many secular people don’t recognize what was special about them. The first ancient laws were commonly lists of punishments for crimes, and most of the Hebrew law was like this, specifying punishments for transgressions. The Ten Commandments, however, issue absolute imperatives, such as “Thou shalt not kill.” This apodictic form of law was unique to the Israelites. In ancient law, murder was usually a crime that you should avoid because you’d be punished for it. In the Ten Commandments, Yahweh just tells you “Don’t murder.” Why were the Israelites unique in this? Maybe standard laws were created by rulers and promulgated to their subjects, so it made sense to specify the punishments that the rulers will mete out to transgressors. But the Ten Commandments come from a time when the Israelites had only recently given up nomadic life for permanent settlements, and their tribal egalitarianism was still strong. Maybe the Ten Commandments represent not a lord’s threat to his subjects but rather a community’s voice, declaring that they are, among other things, a people who don’t murder each other (or at least really really shouldn't).

Agreeing How to Disagree

Daniel Dennett offers four rules for
more intelligent disagreement.

What if atheists were the best at disagreeing? What if we were the ones that could be counted on not to attack straw men or exaggerate someone else’s viewpoint? In theory, we atheists should be the best at deliberation because we have no holy books or dogmas to bias us. Furthermore, we don’t consider believers to be worthy of hell, and we don’t consider ourselves to be God’s favorites, so we ought to be the nicest, most respectful disagreers out there. That’s my dream, but we’re not exactly there yet. Daniel Dennett advocates high standards for critical commentary and I think we can do more along those lines. Here’s a concrete suggestion: replace the debate format with an intentional, moderated dialog. The debate format is outdated, and we could use a new way to disagree, one that better anticipates the human tendency to deceive oneself.

Debating is Outdated…

In October, Bill Maher and Ben Affleck got into a heated exchange about Islam. They talked over each other for a while, and the next day everyone was saying that their guy had won. Online, the Maher and Affleck partisans would link to the same video clip, and each would claim the score was 1-0 in their favor. Arguing over each other doesn’t work, and the problem is that it looks like it works. Each side thought that reason had prevailed, which shows that it hadn’t. If anyone, Maher is the one who prevailed because he got a heated exchange on tape and got a lot of free publicity. But did the conversation get anywhere? People on both sides seem to say that there’s nothing more to be said. Each thinks that their side has been proven right, and that people on the other side are just being pig-headed. Audiences like to watch smart people talk about important issues, but the antagonistic emotions of the debate trump rationality. Could a better format for a discussion reduce how much the participants talk past each other? After all, the debate format hails from a time when faithful people thought God-given Reason could deduce the Truth. Now we know that humans are political side-takers, and that reason is primarily our tool for making ourselves look good. 

…Because Reason Doesn’t Rule.

It’s traditional in Western culture to give reason pride of place among human faculties. The thinking part of you thinks that the thinking part of you should be in charge. We tell others that we believe what we believe because we’ve reasoned it out. We atheists in particular love to assert that we came by our faithlessness through rigorous cognitive effort. With the premise that reason rules, it’s logical to deduce that you can bring people’s opinions closer together by giving them more information and a better understanding of a topic. The more information that people have in common, the more their opinions should converge. In fact, the opposite is true. After an even-handed debate on a controversial issue, the audience finds itself further apart rather than closer together. It turns out that we’re biased little social apes, not detached intellects. When we hear an argument that agrees with us, our intuition responds positively before our reason has had time to analyze the argument. My side’s arguments sure sound rock-solid! But the other side’s reasons? We intuitively react to them as threats, and we spot their flaws effortlessly. That’s how an even-handed debate polarizes people rather than helping each side understand the other side better. 

Your Instincts Know a Fight When They See One

It turns out that instead of detached intellects, we’re flesh-and-blood creatures connected emotionally to each other, and especially to our respectve groups. The thinking part of your brain might think it’s watching a rational debate about, say, abortion, but your unconscious mind recognizes the event as a battle between your tribe and the enemy. You listen to the enemy debater tell horrible lies, and your blood boils. Conflict between groups can trigger the fight-or-flight response, which channels blood away from the part of your brain that makes you reasonable. You sit quietly, but you’d like to throw something or yell. The Internet, with its anonymity and lack of social cues, is even worse. Forums are littered with endless threads of people arguing back and forth across political and religious divides. Each side presents logical arguments the way a rational person is expected to do, but the energy driving the flame war is good old us-versus-them. These threads can get abusive pretty fast. An attempt at rational argument quickly turns into mere arguing.

The human mind comes with several self-serving biases. Our ancestors evolved to get ahead in life, not to evaluate life objectively. Some positive biases aren’t too bad, such as thinking you’re better than you really are, but a host of other biases evolved to help us unite against the hated enemy. These instinctive biases get us to judge people by what group they belong to and to see one’s own group as more virtuous, reasonable, worthy and varied than out-groups. When intellectual disagreements turn vicious, they typically concern questions of identity: religion, gender, race, nationality, politics, and evolution. People who are on the opposite side from you on these sorts of issues are generally “them,” the enemy. Truth is the first casualty of war, and objectivity is the first casualty of us-versus-them thinking. 

New Ways to Disagree

So if we’re hopeless partisans doomed to see things from a biased perspective, can we ever communicate across a tribal divide? Yes, but it takes work. Daniel Dennett has long popularized four rules for criticizing constructively. The best one, I think, is that before you can criticize someone you have to summarize their viewpoint so generously that they agree with your summary. This approach has been called "kind," but as Dennett points out the real benefit is that it's effective. By acting non-antagonistically, we set aside our us-versus-them instincts. By following Dennett’s four rules, you communicate to your own unconscious mind that the exchange isn’t a fight, and with any luck your opponent's unconscious gets the same message. I’ve used these rules in correspondence and have achieved mixed results, which is to say that they work miracles. Typically, a reason-oriented, antagonistic debate feels compelling but leads nowhere. To get mixed results means enjoying an unprecedented amount of success communicating across a tribal divide. These rules work well enough that I’d like to see them incorporated into a moderated dialog, in place of a debate. Another of Dennett’s rules is that one should describe areas of agreement with the person that you’re criticizing. This step confounds the us-versus-them instincts, too. In fact, in a dialog, I’d like to see the moderator working with the participants to find more common ground between them. Debates highlight differences but systematically exclude commonalities. 

It seems like rational debate should be effective in reaching agreement, but instead it’s usually divisive. Now that we understand our own evolved tendencies to lie to ourselves, it’s obvious why debates don’t work the way we thought they should. With this improved self-understanding, we could use a better way to frame disagreements. So my friends and I are working on something along these lines.

Update, February 2017: The Seattle Atheists nonprofit has now hosted three moderated dialogs, one on Islam and Islamophobia, one on historical Jesus, and the last on Christianity. They have been well received, and the last one in particular seemed successful. Here’s a link to the Christianity video.

Christianity: Good and Bad. An honest debate among atheists. 

Further Reading

This post is based on insight gained from a number of different sources. Here are the major ones. 

Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, Daniel C. Dennett. For the complete treatment of his four rules for criticizing.

Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High. Kerry Patterson and Joseph Grenny. Focusing on the context of the conversation rather than content, avoiding impasses, managing emotions during verbal disagreements. Probably worth paging through at a bookstore even if you don’t buy it. 

The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do to Get More of It. Kelly McGonigal. The flight-or-fight response versus the pause-and-plan response. 

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. Jonathan Haidt. Emotional foundations of morality, including tribalism.

Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them. Joshua Greene. Emotional foundation of tribalism.

Thinking, Fast and Slow. Daniel Kahneman. Quick, effortless intuition versus slow, difficult deliberation. 

How We Decide. Jonah Lehrer. Emotional basis of decision-making. 

Other Evolution-Themed Posts

Crow Scientist is Live, 2020

[Review] Human Swarm, by Mark Moffett, 2019

Not “Race” but Ancestry, 2019

Testosterone for Amateurs, 2019

Evolution Unites Us All, 2018

March for Science, Seattle, my speech, 2017

Evolution Activities for Darwin Day, 2017

Mother Love and Human Nature, 2017

Kids and Grandmother Fish, 2017

Reading about Religion, 2014

Creatures of Love, 2011

Grief and the Human Animal, 2011

2014

Suffering Versus Faith

Last Monday in Seattle, Teresa MacBain, an ex-minister, gave a talk about building secular community. Incidentally, she strongly recommended singing together as an exercise in group bonding, which suggests that the Sunday Assembly may be on the right track. MacBain is the second ex-minister I’ve met who would like to see the secular community have more to offer in terms of community. The first was Richard Haynes, who hosts Atheist Nexus, the most active online atheist site I’ve found. For sure there are others like MacBain and Haynes. For myself, the only reason I know anything about community is my years of experience in a Unitarian congregation. As an introduction to her topic, MacBain recounted her personal story of losing her faith. For a minister, that basically means losing your job and your community. What would drive a minister to abandon her faith? For MacBain, it was the failure of theodicy. Theodicy is an answer to the philosophical puzzle of why the world that God controls is full of pain. Why do bad things happen to good people? Theologians and apologists have come up with plenty of explanations of why this makes sense, and most of the arguments are strong enough to convince those same theologians and apologists. But for MacBain, it wasn’t an abstract, philosophical issue. It was personal. Hurting people from her congregation came to her, and she had to tell them something. For centuries, elite men have been generating wordy explanations for what all this suffering is about, but those words don’t do much for flesh-and-blood humans who are actually suffering. MacBain tried to figure it all out so that she would know what to say when a congregant came to her and needed comfort. Instead, she came face-to-face with the realization that Christianity doesn’t really do much good for you here. The Christian tradition hails from a more brutal era when personal suffering was a given, and it is not in synch with modern sensibilities about individual justice. 

In the ancient world, everything around you demonstrated that you were not worth much. Human life was cheap. Famine, plague, war, wild animals and personal violence were all eager to do you in. If you survived, life didn’t have that much to offer the average person. You put in your time laboring in the fields, and maybe you didn’t starve. There were no police, social workers or other third parties looking out for you. In this context, God was great, and that meant he was too far beyond us to worry about our individual lives. That was true of both Zeus and Yahweh. Think of the little babies that Yahweh drowned without a tear in the Flood, not to mention the puppies, hedgehogs and other adorable critters. Think of Lot’s family, which Yahweh would have incinerated along with the evildoers of Sodom and Gomorrah. If it hadn’t been for Abraham intervening, Yahweh would have killed that family of innocents and not batted an eye. The story of Adam and Eve explains where death and suffering came from, but tellingly it doesn’t explain why we deserve death and suffering. What an individual deserves was not at issue. Likewise, when you died, you were just plain dead. God didn’t even bother to punish evildoers in a hell. The tribe mattered, but individuals didn’t.

It speaks highly of our civilization that the suffering of everyday people is felt so strongly that it becomes evidence that God doesn’t exist. Three thousand years ago, suffering was taken as evidence for God instead of against him. Your suffering showed that Yahweh was a total badass, and he had cursed you before you were born. All the pain that he inflicted on humans, what did it matter to El Shaddai, the Lord of the Holy Mountain? But today God gets called to account. Why, God, did you let this child die? This everyday child? We live in a culture where everything tells you that you do matter. You have police, firefighters and paramedics standing ready to help you when you need them. If you’re suicidal, people you don’t know are waiting for your phone call so they can talk you out of it. You elect your leaders. If someone in your family is beating you, society takes that as its business, not a private affair. These days, humans look out for each, and God doesn’t live up to our example. 

Maybe the Catholics are onto something with not letting women be priests. Men are, on average, more easily satisfied with abstract ideas, and you have to think pretty abstractly to be OK with a God who watches the Holocaust without lifting a finger. When a woman asks her minister why God let her daughter die, a female minister probably has a harder time saying it’s all part of God’s mysterious plan. If the minister is a mother herself, that line will be even harder for her to say. 

Believers like to say that they have an advantage over us because they can take comfort in God’s love even in the face of personal tragedy. Certainly some believers facing loss find support in their faith. In my experience, however, assurances that everything is in God’s hands are more assuring to the person speaking than to the one suffering. Telling a suffering person that God will make things all right often seems motivated more by a desire to protect one’s own feelings than to actually comfort the person who’s suffering. When my wife was dying, she was lucky to have a Unitarian minister tending to her. Our minister helped my wife face her mortal end without recourse to any supernatural palliatives, such as the promise of going to heaven or everything having a purpose. She helped my dying wife face her reality, not duck it. Maybe those of us who face loss straight can sometimes be more help than those who minimize a suffering person’s profound experience of loss. 

- - -

Macbain shared this link to a blog post with me. It’s by Rachel Held Evans and covers similar territory: http://rachelheldevans.com/blog/fail-abraham-test

2014

More Talk About Talking

Last weeks’ post about men talking over women generated a lot of commentary, so please allow me to clarify and elaborate. The universal relegation of women to second-class status is obviously a huge issue around the world, but here I’m focusing on one particular issue. The phenomenon of men talking over women deserves special attention, I suggest, because it’s ubiquitous and overlooked. That makes it a big opportunity for men to have their consciousnesses raised, and maybe even to make a real difference in how people communicate. What I recommend is that people spend some time observing conversations. There are plenty of gender-related dynamics to look for, but a good place to start is to watch who talks over whom. It can be eye-opening.

As with any social or political movement, feminism includes an us-versus-them element. Our social instincts provide use with adaptations such as pigheadedness and selective hearing so that we can successfully engage in identity-based, us-versus-them struggles. Feminists who try to prove male privilege have limited success because opponents can pigheadedly derail the conversation with straw man arguments, contentious demands for definitions, and other handy devices. If you cite the wage gap, an opponent can question all the details of how you compare one employee’s career to another’s. Any statistic is easy to question and possibly ignore. But what if someone observes a conversation and sees for himself how often men talk over women? Maybe seeing it happen will be like a Zen koan, an experience that circumvents logic to offer enlightenment. It’s hard to argue with something that one has seen oneself.

There are plenty of communication dynamics that one could look for, but the dynamic of men talking over women is easy to see and requires little interpretation. You could look for which participants in a conversation are one-upping each other and which are connecting with each other, but that can be subtle. You could see how much “air time” each participant takes up, but it’s generally OK for some people to talk more and others less. But when you see someone talk over someone else, that’s not a matter degree. No amount of shutting others down is good.

Self-awareness is a hallmark of post-modern society. More than any people before us, post-modern Westerners understand their perspectives as their own personal perspectives. Even so, we’re subject to blind spots and biases. Here’s an opportunity for some men in particular to learn a little more self-awareness. The subtext of this lesson is that the everyday interactions that you take for granted might reveal an underlying bias, if you just know how to look. That’s a big lesson.