I just… Ugh…
Why does anyone even pay attention to The “Amazing” Atheist? The only thing he’s amazing at is being an amazingly large and dirty asshole.
He is a worthless sack of shit and I will never understand why folks worship this dude.
The so-called “Amazing Atheist” has been a known douchebag for a long time.
I’m glad that there are believers who think that their faiths compel them to feed the poor, fight for justice, demand free health care, and oppose homophobia, racism, and misogyny. I would rather have them as neighbors than the other kind. But at the same time, why someone believes something is as important to me as what they believe. And if your ultimate reason for fighting injustice is “Because God said so,” then that’s not good enough for me.
The question I always want to ask of progressive believers is this: What if you’re wrong? What happens to your beliefs about justice then? How would a group of liberal Christians respond if I were to pop into my TARDIS, bring Jesus Christ to their next church meeting, and he said, “Oh, yeah. That Phelps guy got it totally right. Faggots? Hate ‘em.” If it turns out that your savior really is a right-wing asshole, do you abandon the savior or your concept of justice?
This is an important question. It cuts to the heart of why faith is ultimately authoritarian. How one answers it is not only a fundamental test of character, but also of how you actually make your moral decisions. If someone faced with that decision chooses the god, then they show that they have no moral agency of their own. If they go ahead and continue to advocate equality of gender, of ethnicity, of sexuality, then what it says is that ethos of justice transcends even the authority of god.
” Faith No More, Part 1: Why Religion is a Poor Tool for JusticeLast month’s Godless Perverts Story Hour at the Center for Sex and Culture went off very well, even better than we expected. We’d like to take the opportunity to thank our readers: Anthony O’Con, Simon Sheppard, M. Christian, Miss Maggie Mayhem, and Loren Rhoads, as well as the audience members who came to see us.
Also, great thanks to Carol Queen, Robert Lawrence, and the staff and volunteers at the Center, who made the whole thing happen more smoothly than we could ever have imagined.
Since the reading, we’ve spent some time talking and thinking about what we liked about the evening, and more importantly, what we’d like to do in the future. We’re very eager to continue with more Godless Perverts events, not only because we had a blast, but we think that bringing discussions of atheism and sexuality together is vital, and as of now, it happens very little either in kinky and queer communities, or in the atheist movement.
At this point, we’re kicking a lot of ideas around, and we’d like to get as much feedback as possible from other atheists in the alt-sex and gender communities. Whether you attended the Godless Perverts Story Hour, or the panel earlier this year, or didn’t get to see either, we’d like to hear from you on how to For one thing, we’re going to be looking for more people to read or perform at future events, and we’d like to get as broad a range of voices as we can. If you’re interested in contributing, email us with your personal info and a summary of what you’d like to do, whether fiction or non-fiction.
If you’re not interested in performing, feel free to email us with thoughts about what you think you’d like to see, or what topics you want to see explored. We do not by any means intend for this to be a San Francisco-only thing, and are looking at ways to do Godless Perverts in other areas as well. We’re also going to be working on building online community and conversation, so keep an eye on this website, join our new Facebook page (still a work in progress), and follow us on Twitter.
Also, if you really want to keep on top of what we’re up to, sign up to have our newsletter emailed right to you.
So, Greta Christina made a post where she talked about the misogyny, trolling, and general hatefulness within atheism circles. She proposed that it was time to start a different “wave” of atheism that directly addressed this. It was proposed that this new “wave” be called Atheism+ and that it should directly address racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, etc. I think Jen McCreight said it best in her article How I Unwittingly Infiltrated the Boy’s Club & Why It’s Time for a New Wave of Atheism:
I don’t want good causes like secularism and skepticism to die because they’re infested with people who see issues of equality as mission drift. I want Deep Rifts. I want to be able to truthfully say that I feel safe in this movement. I want the misogynists, racists, homophobes, transphobes, and downright trolls out of the movement for the same reason I wouldn’t invite them over for dinner or to play Mario Kart: because they’re not good people. We throw up billboards claiming we’re Good Without God, but how are we proving that as a movement? Litter clean-ups and blood drives can only say so much when you’re simultaneously threatening your fellow activists with rape and death.
Sounds good, right? Well, as you probably guessed it didn’t go over too well. Tim decided to leave this little gem in the comment section of Greta Christina’s post:
GRETA CHRISTINA YOU FUCKIN HOE… I HOPE YOU GET RAPED YOU FUCKIN FEMINAZI SLUT… GO CHOKE ON A DICK AND DIE
“What are you gonna do, Greta? Are you gonna ban me again? :) ”
Here’s a small sampling of atheists losing their shit on the #atheismplus tag on twitter:
There is no nice way to say this, so I’m just going to come out and say it:
There is no way for an atheist movement to be inclusive of everyone.
An atheist movement cannot be inclusive of atheist women… and also be inclusive of people who publicly call women ugly, fat, sluts, whores, cunts, and worse; who persistently harass them; who deliberately invade their privacy and make their personal information public; and/or who routinely threaten them with grisly violence, rape, and death.
An atheist movement cannot be inclusive of atheists of color… and also be inclusive of people who think people of color stay in religion because they’re just not good at critical thinking, who blame crime on dark-skinned immigrants, who think victims of racial profiling deserved it because they looked like thugs, and/or who tell people of color, “You’re pretty smart for a…”.
An atheist movement cannot be inclusive of trans atheists… and also be inclusive of people who think trans people are mentally ill or freaks of nature.
”Why Atheism Plus Is Good for Atheism | Greta Christina’s Blog
Greta, Jen McCreight and the others behind AtheismPlus speak for me on this.
An excellent example of how most religious believers have to ignore their holy book just to get through the day.
Tattoo of Leviticus 18:22 forbidding homosexuality: $200
Not knowing that Leviticus 19:28 forbids tattoos: Priceless
Coming up this Thursday! Hope to see as many of you as possible.
Godless Perverts: Atheism and Alternative Sexualities
What’s it like to be a queer or kinky atheist? Alt-sex communities might favor calling the goddess or tantric rituals instead of a church revival, but the belief that a spiritual life makes you a better person is as common as in Middle America. The reality is that for nonbelievers, dungeons and Pride Parades can be as unwelcoming as the neighborhoods they grew up in.
Godless perverts of all stripes are encouraged to join us at the Center for Sex and Culture on Thursday, April 26 to explore the role of atheists, agnostics, and skeptics in alternative sexuality. The panel features Greta Christina, Charlie Glickman, Chris Hall, and Maggie Mayhem speaking about how to be a good perv without God(dess), community attitudes that privilege religious and spiritual beliefs, how science can be ecstatic, what atheists call out when they come, and much more.
$10-20 sliding scale
The Center for Sex and Culture
1349 Mission Street between 9th and 10th Streets
(via centersexculture)
The fucked-up logic of religion.
(via Married To The Sea)
I think that anything that could be called sex-positive in any meaningful sense needs to be strictly anti-fluffy bunny. I would go even further: I think that the whole point of being sex-positive is to seek out fluffy bunnies in sex and gender, wring their little necks, skin them, and sink our teeth into the meat with relish. The fact that it is so very, very popular in sex-positive communities to put sexuality in the realm of the mystical by defining it as “spiritual” or “sacred” doesn’t make me feel warm and fuzzy; it gives me a numbing chill because what I really hear is shame. I hear people making excuses for their kinks and their pleasure. That so much talk about sexuality is wrapped in platitudes about spirituality, magic(k), or transcendence shows how deeply we’ve failed in being able to discuss sexual pleasure as a good thing in itself, without any excuses.
Probably the biggest obstacle facing anyone who thinks or writes about sexuality is that the body is always suspect. The idea that our bodies are inherently flawed and corrupt and that what matters is our abstract self — whether you call it soul, spirit, mind, or whatever — is only slightly less universal than 1+1=2. It’s central to the religious teachings of the Catholic Church and the Dalai Lama, but it’s also laced into the more secular ideas of feminists who write about objectification, and transhumanists who long for the day when they can upload their consciousness into a cloud of nanites.
” Why Sex Is Not Spiritual, by Chris Hall