Seriously, I thought there was already an agreement on how to approach this. Sex is the biological identification. Gender is the social identification. Sexuality describes the relation towards other sexes and genders. Neither take is really is disagreeing with the other, but rather than refer to proper identification and the differences between gender, sex, and sexuality, all they are doing is raising drama and playing hot potato with the terms that already cover this.
Yes, sex had a biological objective determinant (except for outlying cases). Yes, gender is subjective to ideology. However someone wants to identify themselves should be defined by their gender, yet things like how they get treated at the hospital is going to be determined by their biological sex. “Experts” (usually the self-appointed kind) unwilling to make any compromise at the risk of putting their big massively throbbing authority at risk, more at eleven.
I am reminded of Willian Jennings Bryan, who in his old age advocated for the eight-hour work day, a minimum wage, the right of unions to strike, women’s suffrage, and then Alcohol Prohibition and of course Anti-Evolution.
Even the most progressive will turn to “I am old and don’t like new ideas!” as they age.
I’m seeing that in some of my older friends. Some of them can be manually taught new ideas, but it gets tiring. Well, they still vote for the most progressive option on any ballot, so I’m not bothering with it anymore.
I’m getting older and get weird looks when I tell people I refuse to install apps that can be websites and if a company is going to force me to use their app I am simply not spending money there.
Returning my Norelco shaver and Beats headphones I received for Christmas this year because I don’t need an app for headphones and sure as fuck do not need an app for my shaver!I’m talking more about political prospectives. Your example is about privacy concerns and superficial tech advances, which I’ve never really seen a strong generational bias.
Reading that article and this comment thread just makes me want to endlessly reiterate the point that if you don’t intimately understand the difference between gender and sex then you aren’t qualified to claim scientific opinion on either.
Defining terms is absolutely crucial to any kind of meaningful debate including science. Cultural anthropologists find the idea of social gender and biological sex being the same concept to be genuinely laughable. Whether or not you dogmatically think they ought to be the same or not, they are historically obviously not and if you mix and match which you are talking about in an argument then your argument will not be productive or make sense.
Even according to Dawkins definition of sex, there are only two, which is scientifically inaccurate. He’s a fucking esteemed biologist and should know the difference between binary and bimodal.
Can we have a transgender religion though? Not to encompass the trans rights movement but to support it. Make memes religious art and Blåhaj a figure of worship. Girls’/boys’ nights, enby sleepovers etc. could be classified as gender-affirming rituals. Use constitutional protection of religious expression to support free gender expression. Medication and procedures would of course be sacred too. Members would be required to maintain a support network for all trans folk (including non-members).
the last thing we need is another religion. All that’s required in this case is basic human decency, which religions have been appallingly bad at delivering.
It would not be a religion in a traditional sense, just a way to wrap existing ideas to exploit the legal protection of religion. The “rituals” are whatever members would be inclined to do anyway and fits the spirit.
Anyway, you’re probably right that it would be a bad idea in the long term. Every major religion has been abused by people from within or outside and I can’t think of effective safeguards for this one.
“Boo! Hiss! Protect the citadel!”
-United Atheist Alliance
(I’m mocking dogmatic pop sci types, not attempting to denigrate trans rights or identities)
Well, I guess the trash took itself out.
Whenever I see some educated individual trying to make some sort of ‘credible’ stance against trans rights I just see an overgrown child.
These are grown adults who are angry that the simplistic worldview that they were taught as children doesn’t hold up to reality.
It was challenged by the mere existence of people who are different than themselves and they don’t want to confront the possibility that they were wrong(the people they care about were also wrong), so they the blame trans people for evoking those emotions instead of doing some introspection.
Do you really think that’s all there is to it? Don’t you think your worldview is a bit too simplistic? The one that gets the last word isn’t always that one who is right you know.
I first wanted to ask why the atheism foundation supports any religion at all… then I read the article, then I saw the ’ '… what an asshat.
Richard “Culturally Christian” Dawkins can go meme himself out of the meme pool.
I get, given how right wing, nasty, anti women and anti LGBTQ+ the American church is, why you would want to put Richard Dawkins, who is so nasty and anti trans (probably among other things) into the same bucket, but he’s British, not American, and famously very firmly anti-religion.
He has always been a dick, whatever he was trying to convince people of, and it’s no surprise he continues to be a dick in his old age. It doesn’t mean he’s a Christian. He’s really, really, really not.
“Culturally Christian” is not the same as “Christian“. The man clearly holds on to many of the perspectives he picked up being raised Anglican.
I’m one of those too, not all that voluntarily. I carry a lot of unconscious baggage left over from being raised Catholic. Not all of it is bad: there’s a tradition of critical thinking and cultural engagement that is positive. But I occasionally still get twinges of guilt about things that are not in my control, or that are not things to be guilty about in the first place.
Some context for you: https://skepchick.org/2024/04/richard-dawkins-cultural-christian-or-supremacist-bigot/
Surplus extra-topical context: https://religiondispatches.org/norway-massacre-suspect-anders-behring-breivik-hitler-the-jerusalem-post-editorial/ (you can find his manifesto online)
OK, the first article points out that he has a lot in common with the American right wing churches in that they don’t actually believe a word of it and just use it as a cultural sheild for their hatred, which is a fair point.
The second one doesn’t seem as related.
The second one is about how far [right] “Culturally Christian” can go.
Ridiculous.
I get the notion that biological sex is one thing, but gender is another thing entirely. They’re still conflating the two.
And even in saying that, biological sex is not a binary because we know intersex individuals exist—people born with ambiguous sex organs, sex organs that don’t match chromosomal makeup, or even chromosomal makeups beyond the typical XX/XY. For all of the claims of “scientific reality,” the figures named in this article seem to do a very good job of cherry picking facts while ignoring the actual, less convenient reality of science.
“It’s basic biology, XX or XY, man or woman!”
“OK, but have you ever looked into intermediate or advanced biology?”
Dawkins is such a disappointing person. He has all the knowledge required to not only understand but also advocate for trans people but instead is defending the Anglican church, “light pedophelia”, and gender essentialism. He wrote a couple of books with some good parts but honestly, he is a sad old man and should be forgotten. Science moves forward one funeral at a time.
light pedophelia
“That can’t be true!”
Looks it up : “Dear spaghetti monster, what did I just read”.
Science moves forward one funeral at a time.
That is badass
I knew it sounded familiar. It even has a name and a wikipedia article https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck’s_principle
Long ago I saw him speak at a local gathering of humanists and even despite believing that atheism was a morally superior path and that religion was a harmful plague on humanity, still came away completely repulsed by him. He just seemed like an egotistical jerk with not very complex thoughts on society. I believe he was almost entirely focused on Islam rather than the more proximally harmful Christianity. It’s not at all surprising to me that he ended up where he is.
Science moves forward one funeral at a time.
Imma steal this, okay? Just letting you know now because this is absolute #facts.
It is called Planck’s principle, so we are stealing from Max Planck.
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it ...An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out, and that the growing generation is familiarized with the ideas from the beginning: another instance of the fact that the future lies with the youth. — Max Planck, Scientific autobiography, 1950, p. 33, 97Cool phrasing from him, lots of people have enjoyed it since, and honestly from my exposure to the field it is accurate. The push back against plate technonics was hard, as was the clinging to steady state cosmology. Oh, and miasma as a model of disease. We really are just slightly smart monkeys.
Basic biology he says? I’m just gonna leave this here
Calling sex a true binary is strange for a talented biologist, intersex people definitely exist.
Transgenderism is a bit different though. Personally I think gender is a repressive, outdated social norm, and I disagree with transgenderism precisely because it reinforces this obsolete notion. Anyone should feel free to dress, act, and identify however they please, including but not limited to any body modifications they wish. But “switching” your identity to align with another set of stereotypical expressions only reinforces those stereotypes.
I can’t even see the point in “fitting in”, because those who care about how you express yourself aren’t going to accept you as transgender anyway, and the people who are going to accept you aren’t going to care if your expression matches the stereotypes they’re used to.
I dunno if that’s his objection because paywall, but I can certainly understand opposition to transgenderism that isn’t actually intolerant of transgender people themselves.
I can’t even see the point in “fitting in”, because those who care about how you express yourself aren’t going to accept you as transgender anyway, and the people who are going to accept you aren’t going to care if your expression matches the stereotypes they’re used to.
This is so important to understand, innerstand, overstand and outerstand.
I don’t think there is such a thing as “transgenderism”, as it is not an ideology. It is a human trait, such as this person is transgender, or that one is cisgender.
There is another issue I take with this approach. You seem to think that transgender people (in the positional sense you employ above) acquire the societal customs surrounding the sexes (like skirts and make-up or ways of talking and walking) and equate it with “being that sex”.
This is not accurate though. There have been studies who show that trans people are no more stereotypical feminine or masculine than their cisgender peers. Cis people are all over the place with respect to gendered societal norms, and the same is true for trans people. (And of course non-binary trans people challenge the norms even further.)
To better understand what gender identity is, consider the horrific assignment of gender performed on intersex people. When infants have ambiguous sex organs, a doctor decides, often on his own visual inspection about the future ability of the organ to penetrate, whether to mold it into a penis or a vagina, and not even tells the parents, so they think they’ve got a cis boy or girl the whole time. Over the years it has turned out that these people feel uneasy and when seek answers they discover they should have been another gender all along. So it is something in their brain that tells them “I am not the correct gender”. The same thing happens to transgender people. This is what it makes a protected trait.
Also, the provided definition of “acquiring the societal custom of the opposite sex thus becoming the other sex” does not account for dysphoria, a feeling of unease to the primary reproductive organs or secondary sex features (like body hair, breasts, muscular structure and the like). And it is very shallow from a sociological perspective as to how deeply ingrained are these customs to the identities of cis and trans people alike.
The starting point here is usually to notice how asking about a baby’s gender is the first question asked, and everything is shaped from there (baby room coloring and selection of toys, the content of compliments, and conditioning their plans for the future).
People never complain about cis women “always” being such stereotypical dolls and cis men being such insufferable chuds. They only complain for specific trans people that are performing at the extremes, and the only reason is that people don’t see trans people’s gender are equally genuine.
And that’s what gender critical means.
This article may have some direct relevance to you: https://medium.com/@viridiangrail/so-you-found-out-youre-agender-because-you-don-t-understand-trans-people-886fdee6f178
This is an interesting article but it’s a little superficial. I wish it addressed where that internal gender originates from. It’s something I’ve been trying to understand. We know gender dysphoria is real and transgender is something that needs to be addressed through presentation (I hope I’m saying this right). But doesn’t that presentation ultimately conform to arbitrary societal norms on gender presentation?
Kinda? I dress feminine because it makes me feel attractive and it’s my style. But the dysphoria took hormones and bottom surgery to deal with. If I’m a woman in a suit, I don’t feel dysphoric at all unless people are misgendering me, meanwhile before transitioning I attempted crossdressing and I swear I never felt more dysphoric in my life than then. But also other people have different experiences.
Thank you for sharing your experience. This clears up quite a bit for me and I’m a bit surprised with myself it wasn’t obvious sooner. I think I’m just fascinated by societal norms about gender presentation and how it evolves over time. What you explained makes total sense to me.
Thank you!
Oh absolutely. And yeah I think a lot of people see us and get a little stuck on the gender presentation bit. Hell, I did as a teenager.
In fact, for a long time (and still in some places) in order to medically transition you had to do something called “real life experience”, which was living as your preferred gender for however long the therapist wanted. Now theoretically that could be a frustrating roadblock that has notmal issues, but basically be come out, change your name, use your pronouns, etc. However this also caused problems of essentially forcing overcompliance to gendered expectations. In college a friend of mine was told by a therapist that she wouldn’t get approval to start hormones if she didn’t start wearing makeup and dresses to her sessions. It used to be a joke in trans communities that we’d basically ham it up for doctors then go home and put on jeans and a t-shirt like everyone else wears.
It’s a bit outdated but the book Whipping Girl by Julia Serrano deals with quite a bit around transness and feminism.
It’s because we are social creatures who are not entirely in control of our schemas, or conceptualisations. We can’t just decide to have logical opinions and have it work instantly. There’s always a difficulty, and the difficulty scales with personal relevance and importance. When we aren’t in control, society decides how we define things like “man” and “woman”. And the internal sense demands that we be able to categorise ourselves as the preferred gender, to the standards of not just our ego but also our irrational id.
Thanks for this
I personally smell either some kompromat-style blackmailing situation (remember him defending trans people in the past, as well as having a much lighter stance on being “culturally christian”), or money in behind the scenes.
Since some people are getting a paywall I’ll post the article text here:
Richard Dawkins has resigned from an atheism foundation over its “imposition” of a “new religion” of transgenderism.
Prof Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist and atheist, stepped down from the board of the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) on Saturday after it censored an article supporting the belief that gender is biological.
Prof Dawkins accused the group of caving to the “hysterical squeals” of cancel culture after it deleted the article from its website, saying it was a “mistake” to have published it.
His resignation followed that of two other scientists, Jerry Coyne and Steven Pinker, who accused the foundation of imposing an ideology with the “dogma, blasphemy, and heretics” of a religion.
The scientists’ resignations come after FFRF’s Freethought Now! website published a piece last month by Kat Grant, entitled “What is a Woman?”, which argued that “any attempt to define womanhood on biological terms is inadequate” and that “a woman is whoever she says she is”.
In response to the piece, Prof Coyne, a fellow board member and biologist, wrote an article last week called “Biology is not Bigotry”, in which he defended “the biological definition of ‘woman’ based on gamete type” – or reproductive cells.
However, FFRF later pulled the article after a backlash and released a lengthy statement apologising for the “distress” it had caused.
“Despite our best efforts to champion reason and equality, mistakes can happen, and this incident is a reminder of the importance of constant reflection and growth,” co-presidents Dan Barker and Annie Laurie Gaylor wrote.
“Publishing this post was an error of judgment, and we have decided to remove it as it does not reflect our values and principles. We regret any distress caused by this post and are committed to ensuring it doesn’t happen again.”
‘Quasi-religious’ ideology
Following the atheist foundation’s decision to unpublish his article, Prof Coyne accused the group of peddling a “quasi-religious” ideology.
“That is a censorious behavior I cannot abide,” he wrote in an email. “I was simply promoting a biological rather than a psychological definition of sex, and I do not understand why you would consider that ‘distressing’ and also an attempt to hurt LGBTQIA+ people, which I would never do.”
“The gender ideology which caused you to take down my article is itself quasi-religious, having many aspects of religions and cults, including dogma, blasphemy, belief in what is palpably untrue (‘a woman is whoever she says she is’), apostasy, and a tendency to ignore science when it contradicts a preferred ideology.”
Prof Pinker, the US-Canadian psychologist, announced his resignation from the board by lamenting that the FFRF was “no longer a defender of freedom from religion but the imposer of a new religion, complete with dogma, blasphemy, and heretics”.
Prof Dawkins described publishing Grant’s “silly and unscientific” article as a “minor error of judgment”, but that the decision to remove Prof Coyne’s rebuttal was “an act of unseemly panic”.
He continued: “Moreover, to summarily take it down without even informing the author of your intention was an act of lamentable discourtesy to a member of your own advisory board. A board which I now leave with regret.”
Grant is a non-binary author and fellow at the FFRF, focusing on state versus Church issues that specifically impact the LGBTQ-plus community.
In their November article, Grant argued a woman cannot be defined as someone with a vagina, uterus or the ability to conceive, as this would exclude intersex people, women who have hysterectomies and those who have gone through menopause.
Grant claimed using biology to define female identity is “inadequate” and alleged that the views of groups who have fought against gender ideology “disregard both medical science and lived experience”.
‘New definition of woman’
In his response to Grant’s article, Prof Coyne accused the author of attempting “to force ideology onto nature” in order to “concoct a new definition of ‘woman’”.
“Why should sex be changeable while other physical traits cannot? Feelings don’t create reality,” he wrote. “Instead, in biology ‘sex’ is traditionally defined by the size and mobility of reproductive cells.
“It is not ‘transphobic’ to accept the biological reality of binary sex and to reject concepts based on ideology. One should never have to choose between scientific reality and trans rights.”
Founded in 1976, the FFRF is a US non-profit that promotes the separation of church and state.
Ms Laurie Gaylor, the FFRF president, said: “We have had the greatest respect for Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker, and are grateful that they sat on our honorary board for so many years.
“We do not feel that support for LGBTQ rights against the religious backlash in the United States is mission creep. This growing difference of opinion probably made such a parting inevitable.”
So he is complaining about the quasi religious zealotry that permeates the ideology as, he himself is anti religion, and resigned of the place because it is now peddling to what is basically a new religion
Makes total sense actually
I agree. And censorship is not the way. I’d only criticize that it goes both ways, as he seems to disregard the hypotheses that support transgender views with equal dogmatism or lack of rigor.
But there’s nothing religious or dogmatic about what the FFRF did. Dawkins is just framing it that way because it’s how he became popular.
He’s just an asshole who constantly acts like an asshole, and people are done with his shit, so he’s having a little fit on his way out the door.
If anyone is acting “religiously” here, it’s Dawkins, who constantly lies and misrepresents medical science because it doesn’t match up the beliefs he grew up with.
Rejecting science (biology in this case) is one major component of religion. Others are dogma (a set of principles that are taken as axioms and never contested, eg gender can be whatever you want it to be), heresy (eg offering a scientific view that differs from dogma, like the fact that biology presents two genders), censorship and apostasy (removing such an article for disagreeing with the dogma, regardless of scientific facts).
Seems to me like Dawkins slightly overreacted, but it’s understandable because he did so based on the religious-like fervor exhibited by those who would remove an article published by a biologist, debating biological classification, because they disagree with its implications.
For all the talk about the unscientific right, it seems to me like the left ignores science just as much when it’s not what they want to hear - what their group has already agreed to be true. This video comes to mind: https://youtu.be/zB_OApdxcno
Who is rejecting biology?
Other than Dawkins I mean?
It seems like you’re confused between sex and gender?
I’m old and trying to keep up with the times, remind me; what is the difference between transsexual and transgender? It seems like the word, transsexual, I haven’t heard in a longass time.
“Transsexual” is kind of being phased out in favor of “Transgender,” I believe.
Gender is a synonim for sex. It is also used when speaking about words - in some languages, words have a gender.
That’s stupid.
Gender and sex are not exactly the same thing, and you have to be purposefully obtuse to ignore the entire context of the conversation. I won’t entertain your faux ignorance. You’ve had multiple people correct you on this, and you haven’t responded to any of them, because you know you’re not up to the task.
If you say sex=gender, you are factually incorrect. Try again. If they were exactly synonymous, then words would also have a sex. Tell me where “telephone’s” genitalia are.
I know gender and sex aren’t the same thing. You could tell that because I provided two meanings for gender, only one of which was sex. Your problem seems to be I don’t accept your definition of gender.
But this isn’t really your problem, because it’s not your definition. Instead, it’s a newer definition that’s been tacked onto the word, that you have accepted and propagated, and now are jumping on others for not doing the same. I ‘d be lying if I said I don’t understand why you’d want to change the meaning, to make it something else. It’s a good word for you. It’s a word that is already known, so it’s in the collective mindset. A new word would be harder to get ‘out there’, while another (weaker - lesser used) word wouldn’t generate as much buzz and discussion when you misuse it. It’s a cunning thing to do. It’s also unacceptable and vile. If we’re changing words’ meanings, then you’re welcome to find out
That’s stupid.
Has in the meanwhile been changed to mean “I concede that I am in the wrong regarding this matter and will take myself out of the conversation for future replies”.
To reinforce this change in meaning, I’ll be blocking you now. Have a good rest of the day.
heresy (eg offering a scientific view that differs from dogma, like the fact that biology presents two genders)
I often find – and such appears to be the case here – that when people make these arguments that they either do not know the difference between sex and gender, or are feigning ignorance.
Sex is not binary, and the “anti-trans” folks pretend that it is. Intersex people exist.
Gender is not solely biological.
All your premises are wrong. The existence of trans people doesn’t reject biology, quite the contrary, advanced biology supports the notion that sex can vary beyond a binary and is quite distinct from gender and sexual identity (which are psychosocial phenomena). There is no organized dogma on the LGBTQ+ support community. If anything, in fighting, disagreement and diversity is what defines it, not homogeneity or conformity. Our understanding of sexual identities, gender and transexuality is the result of scientific discourse, through and through. From phenomenological descriptions, to anthropological, sociological, psychological and biological study. Our theories and understanding of transexual individuals has changed radically as new evidence has come forth and discoveries and theories evolve around it. It is quite the opposite of dogma. On heresy, there’s only one thing that is considered universally bad, and is the idea that a group of people has to die due to something they can’t control and aren’t at fault for. Like declaring murder against trans people for being born transgender, yes, that’s a definitive faux pas and you will be ostracized for wanting minorities dead. This is a moral stance, but that’s it, it doesn’t imply adhesion to any organized enforcement of belief. There’s also no censorship or apostasy in here. The concept of censorship doesn’t apply as the FFRF is not a government. Coyne is perfectly allowed to publish his ideas somewhere else, just not there. Finally, apostasy doesn’t apply because this is not an organized religion.
The thing here is that Coyne and Dawkins want to declare themselves apostles of their anti-religion movement. Because that’s how they were raised and they lack the critical thinking skills to realize the irony of the situation they’re in. They are uncritically defending Anglican religious values and objectively acting against the anti-religion they claimed to champion. They’re exactly the kind of asshats they would’ve debated against 10 or 20 years ago.
censorship does not require a government and it does apply
Like declaring murder against trans people for being born transgender
was dawkins suggesting this in his opinion piece and if not then why remove it
People giving a biological stance against transgender women don’t even make sense because there are many supporting pieces of biological evidence which show that gender exists on a spectrum.
Indeed, a woman is whoever says they’re a woman, and it’s very likely that their choice is biologically driven. I know some people might not like a comment like this because it’s “trans med”, and I get the impulse to shoot down comments like this out of fear of being exclusionary, but if you really think about it this doesn’t exclude any known or unknown gender or identity.
He’s right, but religion is pretty natural for humans. Any kind of divorce between religion and core ideals of the society lasts only as long as the cultural movement behind that divorce doesn’t create its own religion. Because the majority of humans are not independent thinking and not rational, even if they are part of a crowd united by stated belief in independent thinking and rationalism.
That’s why ideologies can be divided into “creating a resilient structure of society, because apes will be apes” and “fixing the apes to be better humans”, and the latter kind always fails. Interestingly enough, this division is orthogonal both to right\left and to libertarian\authoritarian categories.
My point was - a person may identify as whatever they want, but they were, in the vast majority of cases, born clearly a man or clearly a woman.
I don’t think he’s against that identity. But to reject reality of nature because of self-identification and to try to impose that upon popular scientific discourses is a religion indeed, just sort of a protest against religious mainstream, not much different from East Roman iconoclasm or Jewish hassidic movements.
Or Christianity itself the way it conquered the old religions in the east Mediterranean, especially Egypt. Egyptian ancient religion from that age was very complex and well-canonized, and with apparently most people just as full of it as today of Christianity. While early Christianity in Egypt was a compact, simple and beautiful set of abstract beliefs ; in some sense Christianity of that time was less magical and allegorical than old religions, but at the same time claimed that its smaller miracles were true.
Something about doors and arses.
He lost all credibility and relevance when he piled into the bigotry clown car. Atheism doesn’t have saints.
Dawkins is a zionist
Dawkins schtick was pretending he was not racist but hated Islam. Turns out the man is simply racist.
Same with Sam Harris.
Richard Dawkins is his own religion.
Man thinks everything he says is infallible.
And unfortunately (and ironically) for too long some of his followers have acted like he is god.
Strong atheism is, in fact, a religious belief: claims of the non-existence of gods are no more falsifiable than claims of the existence of them, so in order to “know” there is no god one must have faith.
In other words, if religion is the faith-based belief in N gods, where N = many for religions like Hinduism and N = 1 for religions like Christianity, strong atheism is simply the religion where N = 0.
Meanwhile, scientific skepticism/disbelief in god(s) due to lack of positive evidence is more like agnosticism/weak atheism.
Edit: see also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_and_positive_atheism
Edit 2: I genuinely don’t understand what the downvoters are so upset about. Could some of you please reply to explain?
How is it any different than claiming with near certainty that leprechauns aren’t real?
I’m nearly 100% certain leprechauns aren’t real. Is my disbelief in leprechauns a religious belief? I similarly don’t believe in the Greek or Roman or Egyptian gods. Is that a religious belief, too?
The Christian god is a positive claim, and my near 100% certainty it’s not real is not a ‘belief’ unless you’re operating from a baseline that assumes it’s true, which is not how anything works. Strong atheism is a strong unwillingness to believe anything for which there isn’t evidence. That’s the opposite of faith – faith being the belief in things without evidence.
The only enlightened path for a Real Objective Thinker is to accept that anything might exist! If not you’re just engaging in the same mystical thinking as those people who believe sky-daddy is all powerful and all good, but is just working in mysterious ways all those times good people need help and nothing happens. It’s exactly the same you hypocrite. /s
Look, I’m just going by the classification system in the Wikipedia article I cited. I didn’t even slightly imply any of the bullshit you just tried to ascribe to me.
I find the issue with hardcore atheism is the certainy of a lack of God in a scientific sense instead of an philosophical sense. Also the organization, dogma, and a sense of hierarchy in regards to authorities on atheism.
That being said the amount of atheists who subscribe to the religion isn’t the root of all evil but false vs religion is the bane of all existence, is probably the same statically to jihadist and westboro baptist church
Again, do you believe in leprechauns? How certain are you that mermaids don’t exist?
How dogmatic are you in your lack of a belief in mermaids? Or fairies? How much are you bending to the will of anti-Tinkerbell propaganda?
Do you hear how insane that sounds?
eta: you said:
Also the organization, dogma, and a sense of hierarchy in regards to authorities on atheism.
What authorities on atheism? What dogma? What organisation? Do you mean the clubs such as this comment section? There’s no central group or organisation. Atheism is the opposite of that. Your answer makes me think you don’t understand atheism at all.
If that’s the case, please ask me anything. I love answering questions. :)
You also said:
the amount of atheists who subscribe to the religion.
I’m not going into the rest of what was obviously wrong in the bits I cut off, but I’ll just stop you right there, lol.
How is it any different than claiming with near certainty that leprechauns aren’t real?
Does Richard fucking Dawkins claim to be “near certain?”
?
Sorry, not following you, I couldn’t actually care less what Richard fucking Dawkins thinks tbh.
My comment was in the context of replying to https://lemmy.world/comment/14237089:
Richard Dawkins is his own religion.
Edit: also, funnily enough, it turns out that Dawkins does claim to be “near certain,” not “certain.” That was news to me, given his reputation!
That’s relevant because it puts a finer point on just how fervent the belief needs to be to count as “strong atheism.”
In The God Delusion, Dawkins describes people for whom the probability of the existence of God is between “very high” and “very low” as “agnostic” and reserves the term “strong atheist” for those who claim to know there is no God. He categorizes himself as a “de facto atheist” but not a “strong atheist” on this scale.
I am a dumbass.
Hey, only for continuing to engage with an off the rails discussion. But your arguments are articulate and on point.
That’s okay; it happens to all of us (see my edit).
There are some semantics at play, reflected in your link. Many atheists take the label to mean simply: absence of belief. That is: atheists require evidence before making a claim. As such, those that “believe” in nonexistence wind up falling into another category: anti-theists. There’s hubris involved in making the leap to belief, so I wager many just want to illuminate the distinction.
Thanks for replying!
Many atheists take the label to mean simply: absence of belief. That is: atheists require evidence before making a claim.
Well, yeah: that’s weak atheism (including “explicit weak atheism”, going by that Venn diagram’s categories). I don’t see any contradiction between that and what I wrote; weak atheism certainly still counts as atheism.
Are people getting offended because they think me calling their atheism something other than “strong” is some sort of judgement against them and not simply a categorization?
As such, those that “believe” in nonexistence wind up falling into another category: anti-theists.
That’s not quite what antitheism is. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antitheism :
Antitheism, also spelled anti-theism, is the philosophical position that theism should be opposed.
…
Antitheism has been adopted as a label by those who regard theism as dangerous, destructive, or encouraging of harmful behavior.
In other words, antitheism isn’t so much about the question of god(s) existence directly as it is about considering the behavior of those who answer in the affirmative to be harmful and dangerous. It’s more of an ideological or even political position than a purely philosophical one.
I certainly goofed on my lazy definition of ‘antitheism’. Certainly more logical it’d be predicated upon ‘disbelief’ (webster, 1913). I think I picked up my lazy “belief in absence” from elsewhere on the net where people were defending atheism and, mostly, railing on antitheism. I should be more careful.
I was thinking the response more folks that just didn’t check your link and were operating on their own definition. I do think it a useful link. I’ve only heard these concepts using ‘(a)gnostic’ qualifiers. I should update my vocabulary. My concept of atheism has long been a simple binary: believer | disbeliever.
Strong atheism is, in fact, a religious belief: claims of the non-existence of gods are no more falsifiable than claims of the existence of them, so in order to “know” there is no god one must have faith.
Um… Show evidence that a god exists. Poof, you have falsified the claim that no god exists. Pretty easy, actually.
Well, we can prove the universe exists, but not that it’s some unified, all-powerful thing controlling us all afaik.
It’s why I stick with agnostic atheism. I’m not claiming to know either way on all forms of deism or theism or whatever. There’s enough contradictions and falsifiable claims in all organized religions I’ve been made aware of so far, so I am gnosticly atheist for those specific gods.
Your inability to come up with a way to produce evidence doesn’t make the strong atheist’s stance unfalsifiable. Unfalsifiable isn’t “We can’t produce any evidence that would falsify the claim right now.” That would take us to an absurd definition of the word where any scientific theory that requires more advanced technology than we currently have is “unfalsifiable.” That’s not what the word means.
The difficulty in proving that God exists isn’t what makes theism unfalsifiable. You shouldn’t make any assumptions about what can or cannot be proven true at some point in the future. What makes it unfalsifiable is that there’s no rational way to prove that God doesn’t exist, not because of an inability to collect evidence, but because the logical framework constructed by religious claims forbids it. Strong atheism has forbade no such thing. There’s no equivalence here.
Believing that The Force isn’t real doesn’t make me a Star Wars fan, or even a Sci-Fi fan, even though that’s a Star Wars belief. People can have strong opinions about something without that belief indicating that they are devout zealots about that topic.
People can have strong opinions about something without that belief indicating that they are devout zealots about that topic.
Of course they can! I not only never said otherwise, I explicitly affirmed it myself:
Meanwhile, scientific skepticism/disbelief in god(s) due to lack of positive evidence is more like agnosticism/weak atheism.
Weak atheism is not a weaker opinion than strong atheism! “Weak” and “strong” are just categorical labels, not value judgements. Moreover, I didn’t make up the terms; if you don’t like them, blame the philosophers, not me.
The difference between weak and strong atheism is not of magnitude, but kind: they have different philosophical underpinnings. Strong atheism is a belief based on faith, while weak atheism is motivated by skepticism and confidence in the utility of the Scientific Method as a framework.
Strong atheism is a belief based on faith
My guess is this is why you’re being downvoted, because everything else seems to be accurate.
Saying strong atheism is based on faith is the same as saying that believing dragons definitely do not exist is based on faith. In such a scenario, we all have infinite faith because we all firmly disbelieve in the existence of infinite things. We are so faithful in that scenario that the word faith becomes meaningless.
I’m honestly not sure what your point is in firmly asserting that strong atheism is a faith based belief. At best it seems like dying on a hill of split hairs.
Also for anybody else who is interested, here’s some relevant reading material https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Atheism#Weak_vs._strong_atheism
So I mostly agree with you, except the understanding that most gods must not be real is axiomatically true, based on the beliefs of those religions. Almost every religion claims they believe in the one true god(s), so either all the other aren’t real or theirs is wrong and not real. That leaves mostly only one pantheon remaining at most, with maybe a few other that aren’t exclusive.
Its not a belief that most religions most be wrong, and odds are whatever religion any particular person believes is wrong based on how many competing religions have existed.
This is separate to a statement on a god though, only religions. There is no way to make a reasonable argument on the existence (or lack thereof) of a god. You can rule out particular beliefs, but never the concept itself.
So I mostly agree with you, except the understanding that most gods must not be real is axiomatically true, based on the beliefs of those religions. Almost every religion claims they believe in the one true god(s), so either all the other aren’t real or theirs is wrong and not real. That leaves mostly only one pantheon remaining at most, with maybe a few other that aren’t exclusive.
This feels like a very monotheism-centric argument to me. AFAIK it’s mostly (or only?) the Abrahamic religions that take such an exclusionary view, and I wouldn’t call them “almost every” religion since, although people fight over minor divisions, broadly speaking there’s only three of them. The rest of the world’s religions (Hinduism, Buddhism, shinto, African religions, native American religions, etc.) surely add up to more categories than that.
I’m no theologian, but I would expect polytheistic pantheons not being exclusive to be the rule, not the exception.
And finally, even if we’re just talking about Judaism vs. Christianity vs. Islam, each of their "one true God"s is the same entity anyway so they aren’t nearly as mutually exclusive as their followers would like to pretend.
Others may not be explicitly exclusionary, but they are implicitly. You can’t really take the Greek pantheon and mythos and also the Hindu one. Almost every religion has an origin myth about how the world was created, which you really can’t have two versions of that. Religions typically don’t mesh together well.
With that said, religions tend to evolve and engulf neighbor’s beliefs into their own. This doesn’t mean they weren’t exclusive, rather that religion is malleable because it’s made up and not based on fact.
Dawkin’s quote:
Prof Dawkins described publishing Grant’s “silly and unscientific” article as a “minor error of judgment”, but that the decision to remove Prof Coyne’s rebuttal was “an act of unseemly panic”.
He continued: “Moreover, to summarily take it down without even informing the author of your intention was an act of lamentable discourtesy to a member of your own advisory board. A board which I now leave with regret.”
He was/is upset about pulling an article and that’s why he resigned.
And the person whose article was pulled also has a point:
That is a censorious behavior I cannot abide,” he wrote in an email. “I was simply promoting a biological rather than a psychological definition of sex, and I do not understand why you would consider that ‘distressing’ and also an attempt to hurt LGBTQIA+ people, which I would never do.”
“The gender ideology which caused you to take down my article is itself quasi-religious, having many aspects of religions and cults, including dogma, blasphemy, belief in what is palpably untrue (‘a woman is whoever she says she is’), apostasy, and a tendency to ignore science when it contradicts a preferred ideology.”
Both of their issues was the article elaborating Coyne’s position was yanked.
This is a pedantic miscommunication issue, which is pretty much their point.
Instead of discussing the issue and coming to an understanding, discussion is immediately shut down.
That’s why they’re resigning and it’s valid.
I would buy that if Dawkins didn’t have a history of making bigoted statements about trans people.
He literally lost a Humanist of the Year award because of it a few years ago
He may have other motives and may be a total dirt hat, but I’m the spirit of pedantic disagreement, the argument given still holds water.
It’s valid to get mad at the article being removed and not discussed. But I have to say, that argument calling “gender ideology” a religion and its justification reads exactly as a right-wing anti-woke argument calling science a religion. Or the way I like to translate it, “everything I don’t like is X” syndrome. Be it woke, religion, or anything else. It’s a blatant display of rigid thinking. Just because someone didn’t intent to hurt doesn’t mean their actions can’t hurt, and that’s a big part of critical feminist theory (of which they might not entirely understand much about). Our actions and words have material and social consequences that extend beyond our intentions. Maybe try to understand why they were injurious instead of throwing a performative tantrum.
The problem here i think is “we remove this article because people got upset” this behaviour is basically the same as “we remove this article because (religious) people got upset”
People in the comment seems to have issue with the person or the article, but that not the problem. The person can be the worst, and the article could be written by chatgpt, but at the end should not be taken down unless it violate the website or publishing terms and condition if any.
He’s 83 and can’t handle the changing world, he can go spend his last years alone like every old asshole does.
“Why should sex be changeable while other physical traits cannot? Feelings don’t create reality,” he wrote. “Instead, in biology ‘sex’ is traditionally defined by the size and mobility of reproductive cells. “It is not ‘transphobic’ to accept the biological reality of binary sex and to reject concepts based on ideology. One should never have to choose between scientific reality and trans rights.”
As a fellow psychologist, I must regretfully state that this is the stupidest thing ever written by a psychologist. Our entire science is built upon the notion that feelings indeed create and modify (social) reality*. Sex is not gender, and he fumbled the most basic differentiation of concepts.
Heteronormative gender roles, on the other hand, are categorically a form of ideology and to defend them in place of basic human decency is a disgrace, good riddance to both asshats, I say. Specially with such a tenous biological argument that any good biologist can tell you is patently false. Gametes are not binary, there are hundred of thousands of intersex individuals for which this narrow definition doesn’t apply.
Grant is absolutely right, but I don’t expect the mentally weak asshole who invented the word “meme” to ever understand social sciences. His book is a pathetic pseudo scientific intrusion in a field he doesn’t understand in the slightest.
*: some philosophers would even argue that there’s no reality but social reality and both are one and the same.
Dawkins isn’t a psychologist afaict. I had to check.
He isn’t which is why I called him intrusist there at the end for writing a book about psychology and neurology which he doesn’t understand. But the quote is from Coyne, another biologist who wrote the reply and was supported by Pinker, who is a psychologist and should’ve known better. None of these people know what they’re talking about and are acting in this whole thing from passion instead of reason and evidence. Which is ironic, I believe.
This conflates material reality and ideology, though. Not to say a cultural or social reality isn’t real in its own way, just that it is preceded by objective, material reality. I think the arguments tend to boil down to people prioritising one or the other and then refusing to budge.
I’m pretty laid back about it but draw the line at people attempting to assert there is no such thing as material conditions. I’m not explicitly “Marxist” but definitely Marxian in the sense that I think all theories need to be anchored in material reality in the first instance. So gender categories exist, but are part of the superstructure.
This is where I’m at. Got banned over on r/atheism for presenting a similar sentiment.
Fuck r/atheism. It’s a cesspool of circlejerkers not ready to engage with crtitical thinking.
Eternal September is a bitch.
The moment humans had enough brain power to form and ideologies, they stated influencing material reality. Ideology as a concept therefore also precedes part of material reality.
In other words: The idea of gender expression has influenced human selection, therefore it’s part of our current gene pool, just like sexuality. (Because gender is what sexual attraction can have preference for, not karyotype)
That’s why we say the base precedes the superstructure “in the first instance”.
mentally weak asshole who invented the word “meme”
He coined the word to mean a thought or idea that spreads through a population. Internet memes are completely unrelated to his usage. It’s not like he created the first insanity wolf meme or something.
Yes, and it is the most useless concept ever committed to text. It’s ironic it was coopted by internet culture and then ridiculed and reduced to absurdity.
He just tried to poorly rebrand the concepts of cultural imagery, and social constructs but with less evidence. It’s akin to me going “I propose the term garggle, it is water that flows down by gravity following the contours of the solid ground”. It’s like, yeah, we call it water and when it does that we call it a river, you would know if you opened a book about it anytime in the past century. You could summarize that book as “better read a book on sociology, it’s more useful”.
Nah, this is a bad take. Memes are a sociological analog to genetic genes. They’re units of cultural information that mutate, recombine, and evolve in the cultural space the same way genes mutate, recombine, and evolve in the gene pool. It’s a poignant observation about the behavior of viral cultural concepts that transcends merely describing their existence. The parallel to genetic behavior is a useful observation that, to my knowledge, was not really acknowledged before he coined the term.
It was acknowledged before he coined it. He just summed it up better than people had previously. From Wikipedia:
The idea of language as a virus had already been introduced by William S. Burroughs as early as 1962 in his novel The Ticket That Exploded, and continued in The Electronic Revolution, published in 1970 in The Job.
The foundation of memetics in its full modern incarnation was launched by Douglas Rushkoff’s Media Virus: Hidden Agendas in Popular Culture in 1995,[15] and was accelerated with the publication in 1996 of two more books by authors outside the academic mainstream: Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme by former Microsoft executive turned motivational speaker and professional poker-player Richard Brodie, and Thought Contagion: How Belief Spreads Through Society by Aaron Lynch, a mathematician and philosopher who worked for many years as an engineer at Fermilab. Lynch claimed to have conceived his theory totally independently of any contact with academics in the cultural evolutionary sphere, and apparently was not aware of The Selfish Gene until his book was very close to publication.
What Dawkins did was make the concept more analogous to a gene than a virus, but it’s basically the same idea.
The difference between a gene and a virus is method of reproduction. The genetic model, I think, is considerably more apt than the viral. Memes combine with other memes, they have memetically distinct “offspring”. I think even that distinction is useful.
It is useful, I agree. I’m just saying the idea was already around. He definitely refined it and improved upon it though.
Memetics in action.
I can accept there’s people who like the concept but there’s a reason it didn’t take hold anywhere except pop science and is a theoretical dead end. It has a ton of epistemological flaws that make it useless as a scientific construct. It is unfalsifiable and it provides no venues for theoretical or experimental developments. As I stated, there are far more useful constructs in sociology and social psychology that allows the analysis of social constructs, cultural imagery, beliefs, values, worldviews, etc. With over a century of epistemological, theoretical and methodological traditions that have provided useful advancements to our scientific understanding, and provided tools for further development. Memes are barely a fun simile with genes that was cool to make YouTube videos about ten years ago, but that’s about it.
Hard disagree. I don’t think you actually understand the premise.
I don’t think you have ever read the premise beyond the cliffsnotes. But it is not my job to educate strangers on the internet.
Take the L buddy💀🙏
I read Selfish Gene, like, a few months ago.
some philosophers would even argue that there’s no reality but social reality and both are one and the same.
Some politicians would argue that social reality is oppressive and must be replaced with social unreality - http://soulism.net/
