Atheists turning misogynistic - guess the brights aren't so bright after all?

Started off from something that I saw on a facebook feed and putting this up here - there's quite a bit of misogyny in atheism. Women are being shouted down in atheist rallies, one atheist threatened to "cop a feel" when a woman complained of sexist behavior, and women in general are being treated as second-class citizens. Which makes the atheists responsible no better than the religious fundamentalists or bigots they hate. (And which, once again, ties in with what Eric Hoffer has to say.)

Putting a couple of links here. This is as disgusting as it is unacceptable, and shows just how little critical thinking is going on in the atheist community regarding their own behavior and beliefs, and that's a horrible sign in more ways than one. Those responsible for misogyny should think back on their behavior and be ashamed of themselves.


http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/629857/the_atheism_movement%27s_misogyny_problem

http://www.shakesville.com/2013/03/my-advice-to-atheist-men.html

http://www.skepticink.com/tippling/2013/09/13/feminism-christian-vs-atheist-misogyny-and-sexism/

John Taylor Gatto and Education that works all too well (plus Eric Hoffer)

Well, I've been reading John Taylor Gatto's work - the Underground History of American Education is a fascinating start. The man has put together a frightening and coherent history of the American education system, which turns out to be thoroughly contrary to the entire point of American Democracy. It's surprisingly nightmarish - and it, among other works like Grace Llewellyn's Teenage Liberation Handbook, really do offer a much-needed wake-up call to the problem plaguing schools. The issue with the US school system, according to them, is not that it's not working - it's only that it works far too well. Having been to Alcatraz and having been reminded of School when stepping into one of the infamous cells at the end of Block 'D', I completely agree with the notion of school as a prison.

Not that many people would be reading this, but if you disagree and think that school is a great place to be, well, that's your opinion. Leave me to have my own. I don't mind making it public, because I do believe that schools and education are far from the same thing. I could go on and on about schools, but that's not the point I'm making here.

I'm bringing Eric Hoffer, an old favorite of mine, into this melee. Eric Hoffer was one of the greatest scholars of fanaticism to have ever lived and his work has yet to be rivalled in terms of sheer simplicty, lucidity, and descriptiveness when it comes to explaining the nightmare phenomenon of fanaticism. To quote the man himself, in section 8 of page 14 in the 2002 Harper&Row edition - "Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute in the lost faith in ourselves" - a sentence that is at once simple and profound, and which says more than a hundred pages in average book ever could. Indeed, sections 7 to 13 discuss the ways in which an individual's lack of self-worth and longing for something greater in life - especially when their individual lives are seen as irredeemably spoiled and worthless - leads them to seek a 'greater cause' in order to restore meaning to their lives. "The vanity of the selfless, even those who practice the utmost humility, is boundless", says he (section 11) - and perhaps I have seen some of this in my life as well.

Hoffer's extraordinary analysis doesn't seem to dive deep enough to the root cause of this feeling of insecurity and individual worthlessness - however, Gatto's analysis of the schooling system puts up an explanation for what Eric Hoffer, Der Autodidakt (German: The Self-taught man) did not pinpoint: schooling itself is the basis for creating worthlessness in society. Gatto references the great theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer's analysis of Nazism (which, frustratingly, remains elusive on the internet) as a case in point : the best schooled people turned out to be the best suited to the fanaticism of the Nazi movement. Of course, with Germany having taken a full-on hit from the Great Depression in the early 1930s and the Communists and Nazis brawling on the streets 24 hours a day, it was just a matter of which movement eventually came trumps. The Nazis won, and former communists landed up joining the Nazi ranks.

How does this stay relevant for the present day? Well, all too many commentators the world over have complained either about the education system being hopelessly ineffective (as in the United States) or have clamored for expanding the present system of education to new areas and making it more 'competitive' (as in India). In the Indian case, education is indeed justified because Indian communities, particuarly in rural and poor urban areas, just don't have the resources at hand to educate their kids. But imposing industrial-style 'western' education on them as-is would be asking for a disaster.

Education was never meant to educate : it was meant to train children to be obedient, and accept their place unquestioningly (Gatto even fingers the caste-based education system in India right alongside the Prussian education system as a root of modern education). Even if all these kids are 'educated' to fit into a modern industrial society, what guarantee is there that they'll have jobs and a life that won't stop them from falling into the hands of fanatics? Whether in India or the United States - or any other place where large-scale 'modern' classroom education is prevant - there is rich fuel for fanaticism. Create an army of angry, frustrated people who have been educated to 'know their place' and mindlessly obey orders, and bring in a few 'peddlers of hope' - and you get serious trouble.

As our past educators have sown, so shall this generation, and those following it, reap.

Fanaticism and the fact-proof screen - and Eric Hoffer

http://www.atheistrev.com/2013/06/fanaticism-and-fact-proof-screen.html

Via Atheist Revolution, a quote from one of the greatest political philosophers most people have never heard of, and a rather disturbing reminder that Atheism can be just as fanatical as religion. And indeed, when a fanatic uses a dogma - any old dogma - to shield themselves from the rest of the world, all reason and thought go out of the window. Winston Churchill nailed it when he talked about a fanatic being a person willing to change all other minds except their own.

As I noted in my connectivity-plagued Wordpress blog, Eric Hoffer is a fantastic political philosopher.
The man who would rather have been known as an ordinary longshoreman has done more than anyone else in contributing to an understanding of fanaticism. One can only wish that his name had been more prominent in the terror-plagued first decade of the 21st century. Hoffer had his flaws - in being overly conservative and judgmental in a number of instances - but I have yet to see anyone explain things as lucidly and as wonderfully as Hoffer. His observations are profound in the truest sense of the word, and he manages with one sentence what other writers fail to do with ten pages. John Taylor Gatto would have been proud of him too - here is a man with so little in the way of formal education, but who taught himself to the point of outclassing post-doctorates.

We'll miss men like Hoffer who could expose fanaticism for what it really was: a grand system of madness and delusion that insulates a damaged, frightened, broken individual from a mad world. None of us are willing to look at the social and educational systems that create broken people, to 'use the slime of frustrated souls as mortar in the creation of a new world'.

Those who fight fanatics are often in ignorance of their true nature. May the light of Hoffer's knowledge be a candle in the dark to all those who fight the demon of fanaticism.