One of the first posts on Daylight Atheism, "A Mile Wide and an Inch Deep", was about the pathetic levels of Biblical knowledge in a nation that's theoretically 85% Christian. Well, thanks to a widely reported new survey, we can add another fact to that picture: not only do Americans not know much about the Bible, they don't go to church very often either.

In a more recent study, Hadaway estimated that if the number of Americans who told Gallup pollsters that they attended church in the last week were accurate, about 118 million Americans would be at houses of worship each week. By calculating the number of congregations (including non-Christian congregations) and their average attendance, Hadaway estimated that in reality about 21 percent of Americans attended religious services weekly — exactly half the number who told pollsters they did.

As the article notes, the most striking fact is how often Americans lie to pollsters about attending church. America is an outlier among the industrialized nations not in the number of people who actually attend religious services, but in the number of people who say they do. Sociologists can pin down this deception in several ways: for instance, when Americans are asked, "Did you attend religious services in the past week?", high percentages say yes. But when people fill out "time-use surveys" which ask them to list what they were doing throughout the day, without priming them with the idea of attending church, the percentages in the pews are much smaller.

This should be greatly interesting to the New Atheists, since it both validates our basic approach and suggests a strategy for our future efforts. What these findings show is that in America, "being religious" is still synonymous with "being a good person", and vice versa. Whether because they don't have the time or out of simple disinterest, millions of nominally religious Americans skip church each Sunday. But when a pollster asks these people if they went to church that week, they hear the question as, "Are you a moral person?" And since no one wants to think of themselves as immoral, they often answer yes anyway.

What this means for atheists is that it's less important to convince people that their religious beliefs are false. Between their lack of church attendance and their lack of biblical knowledge, the actual teachings of religion are already irrelevant as far as tens of millions of Americans are concerned. What's more important is to break the perceived link between religion and morality that motivates people to claim religious membership as a marker of good character. That link is a vestigial trait: a holdover from the days when, for better or for worse, religion genuinely could claim to be the only source of moral guidance.

And that, in turn, suggests a strategy. The most effective way for atheists to sever that link is to come out! When we're known to our friends and neighbors as friendly, generous, compassionate people who are also nonbelievers, it will be far more difficult for them to cling to the prejudice that the godless are all wicked misanthropes. This also suggests that when we criticize religion, we should focus less on its factual claims (which, again, are irrelevant to most theists) and more on its moral claims. When we argue strongly that religious books condone horrible practices like slavery, genocide and the oppression of women, we can attack that link from the other direction, proving by example that belief in God doesn't automatically make one a good person.

It's no wonder that so many believers react with outrage and try to censor us when atheists unapologetically stand up and proclaim our existence - especially if the message is that the godless can be good people too. As peaceable as that is, from the standpoint of religious culture warriors, it's the most dangerous message we can possibly convey.

I've mentioned in the past that as the Catholic church dwindles and ages, it's increasingly having trouble finding enough people who want to join the priesthood, and it's relying heavily on the few Catholic-majority countries remaining, such as Poland, that are net exporters of priests. At the time, I mused:

Even former Catholic strongholds such as Italy and Spain, the article points out, have only a 10-20% rate of church attendance. In this respect, it seems that Europe is leading the way; now only if we can make headway in Poland, the Vatican's last European stronghold, the results might truly be worth seeing.

Well, what do you know: it looks like the gods of atheism have answered my prayers! (I knew that extra burnt offering would do the trick.)

"It seems we are Catholics in a cultural way; we identify as Catholic, but do not attend church," said Tomasz Terlikowski, editor of Fronda, a conservative Catholic magazine, who said he was upset with what he called the lack of effective church leadership against the secular tide.

Mr. Terlikowski said he was astounded when he heard that church leaders in Poland were so frustrated with what was being said about the church in the national newspapers that they ordered their staff members to stop bringing them the papers.

This article observes that Poland, in recent years, is experiencing the same secularizing trend we've seen in other European countries. A majority of Poles still identify as Catholic for cultural reasons, but church attendance is plummeting, the influence of church leaders is waning, and large majorities reject the church's harmful and archaic moral beliefs. In major cities like Warsaw and Krakow, church attendance has fallen as low as 20 percent, similar to the numbers in other former Catholic strongholds like Italy and Spain.

The papacy of John Paul II, who was hugely popular in his native country, probably masked this trend for a while. But since his death, the church has grown more rigid and doctrinaire, and Poles' warm feelings are beginning to ebb. A key turning point was the Vatican's recent, shockingly heavy-handed intrusion into Polish politics over in vitro fertilization. When Parliament took up a proposal to regulate the popular procedure, bishops demanded that it be banned and openly threatened to excommunicate any politician who didn't fall in line. Even Poland's center-right government was disgusted by this naked attempt at blackmail:

A spokesman for the centre-right government, Pawel Gras, said: "The threats and attempts to blackmail are amazing."

...Prime Minister Donald Tusk said politicians were responsible to citizens, not the Church hierarchy.

On behalf of the atheist movement, I'd love to take credit for the decline of the Catholic church in Poland. I'd love to say that our slashing rhetorical attacks and dazzling wit are persuading people to quit the church in droves. But the truth is that they brought it on themselves. With their clumsy and brutish intrusions into politics, with their arrogant demands that Polish people put their own opinions and moral beliefs aside and bow down before their betters, they've shown themselves to be a gang of thugs and bullies, and the people are responding accordingly. But even if atheists didn't have anything to do with this, we can take heart: even as the church shrinks and fades, it steadfastly refuses to change course, continuing to confidently steer its way into irrelevance.

I've got a couple of links this weekend, some atheism-related, some not:

• Lost a digital camera lately? It made me smile to find out about I Found Your Camera, a website helping to reunite lost cameras with their owners.

• After the terrible and entirely preventable deaths of three people during a "sweat lodge" ceremony last year, the New Age community in Sedona is suffering a tourist backlash. Is this what it takes to make people realize that pseudoscientific gibberish is not harmless?

• "The most rapidly growing religious category today is composed of those Americans who say they have no religious affiliation." An excellent piece on the rise of atheism among young people, due in part to obnoxious evangelicals insisting that conservative politics are a prerequisite for believing in God. (Thanks, guys!)

• NPR covers the founding of a secular student group at historically black Howard University in Washington, D.C. (See also).

• The FFRF stops Christian proselytizing at a Tennessee public school. One board member complains that anyone who didn't want to hear the prayers could just "put their fingers in their ears".

• A wonderful meditation on atheist spirituality. (HT: Unequally Yoked)

• And lastly, any female readers want to advance the course of science? My brother is working on his graduate thesis, and he's looking for volunteers to take this study on female sexual response. It's completely anonymous and doesn't collect any personal information.

As you've probably heard, the Pew Forum has released a study on American religious knowledge. And their top finding deserves to be heard far and wide: atheists and agnostics outscored every other religious group - even evangelicals!

On average, Americans correctly answer 16 of the 32 religious knowledge questions on the survey by the Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion & Public Life. Atheists and agnostics average 20.9 correct answers. Jews and Mormons do about as well, averaging 20.5 and 20.3 correct answers, respectively. Protestants as a whole average 16 correct answers; Catholics as a whole, 14.7. Atheists and agnostics... perform better than other groups on the survey even after controlling for differing levels of education.

This shouldn't come as a surprise. It's well-established by now that most American theists are abysmally ignorant of the religion they profess: I wrote a post about this topic over four years ago. But the finding that atheists and agnostics are more knowledgeable is a nice little cherry on top!

That said, I'm not writing this post to gloat; I'm saying that this is what we should expect. Christianity is still the default option in American society, and tens of millions of people with no real commitment to that faith have been indoctrinated into thinking of themselves as Christians. On the other hand, it's still rare that people are raised atheist from birth. Most people who become atheists take that step because they've made an effort to investigate religious teachings and make up their own mind. The New York Times has a nice little stinger of a quote from Dave Silverman of American Atheists:

"I have heard many times that atheists know more about religion than religious people," Mr. Silverman said. "Atheism is an effect of that knowledge, not a lack of knowledge. I gave a Bible to my daughter. That's how you make atheists."

Silverman's point is excellently put. The virtue of this study is that it dispels the myth, still bandied about by proselytizers, that atheists are "afraid of the gospel". Instead, it supports the explanation that we're atheists because we've sincerely considered the claims of religion and found them unconvincing.

Truthfully, I wish more Americans would read the Bible. After all, it's not as if people who are ignorant of its contents will be easily shamed into becoming atheists. More likely, they'll just believe whatever their preacher tells them is in there. And when their preacher tells them that the Bible says God wants everyone to be rich and that being poor is a divine curse, or when their preacher tells them that God wants America to invade Iraq, or when their preacher tells them that Jesus argues for public prayer and the merging of church and state - when they hear those things from the pulpit, they believe them, and we've witnessed firsthand what the results are. If people read the Bible for themselves, they probably wouldn't be cured of sexism or homophobia or religious intolerance, but they might at least absorb some of its occasional teachings about universal love and social justice.

On that topic, I also wanted to mention this article, about how churches across the country are struggling with a lack of donations. The recession has accelerated the dropoff, but it's not the sole cause. Donations to churches have been slowly declining over the past forty years. As older, more religious generations fade away, they're not being replaced by younger members:

A 2007 study by three professors at Indiana University-Purdue University in Indianapolis found that baby boomers in 2000 were donating about 10 percent less to religious bodies than their parents’ generation did at a comparable age in 1973 — and almost 25 percent less than those parents, by then ages 62 to 76, were donating in 2000.

And this is a phenomenon that crosses denominational lines, from conservative synagogues to evangelical megachurches. As an explanation, the article cites a study which found that baby boomers are "more likely to construct a personal sense of spirituality than to subscribe to a denominational or even congregational one".

But I think this ignores a far simpler explanation: donations are declining because more people are becoming atheists, and fewer trust religion to be able to answer their dilemmas. It's not a lack of trust in institutions in general, but the simple recognition that religion's factual claims are unsupported and its moral beliefs are often cruel, arbitrary, and irrational - relics of a less moral and more superstitious past. Why should people donate their time and money to churches which have repeatedly failed to offer proof for their claims of authority, much less use that authority wisely to advance the good?

The Chaplain over at An Apostate's Chapel posted about the latest poll by the Barna Group, which found that 1 in every 8 Americans is an ex-Christian. Meanwhile, about 3% of Americans were raised non-Christian but later converted. The Barna Group's press release described their finding in these terms: "The study underscores that the spiritual allegiances of childhood are remarkably sustainable in our society... the most common faith journey that people take is to form spiritual commitments as children and teenagers that typically last for the duration of their life."

While it's certainly true that most people don't change their childhood religious beliefs, I think Barna is glossing over the most significant finding in their own survey: people are leaving Christianity at four times the rate they're being converted into it. Even though Christians still command an absolute majority of Americans, we've known for some time that their share of the population is shrinking, and this is probably a large part of the reason why: they're just not holding onto their members nearly as fast as they're making new ones.

Part of this, I'm sure, is the low-hanging-fruit issue. When Christianity is virtually the only choice and any other religious belief results in harassment or worse, which was the de facto state of affairs in America for decades, the vast majority will naturally choose the path of least resistance. But with the rise of the atheist movement, Christianity is facing genuine competition in a way it's never had to deal with before, at least not in this country. Leaving faith altogether is more of a viable option than it ever was, and there are bound to be people who respond to that. For the same reasons, it's no surprise that Christian evangelism is bearing little fruit. In our society, it's safe to assume that most people have heard the basics of Christianity already, and anyone who wants to join a church has ample opportunity to do so. They're selling a product in a market that's already saturated.

For atheists, the ongoing exodus from religion is validation of our strategy of persuasion. We've turned a large number of people into nonbelievers, and opened up the religious landscape for many more doubters, questioners and seekers - the people I described as "soft atheists" in the linked post. Although the majority of people still go through life as Christians, it's no longer the automatic option, and we've made them aware that there are other possibilities.

My question is this: We've got half our strategy down - making the arguments and the appeals that convince people to switch religions. But we need to work on the other half - building the secular community that makes nonbelief more "sticky", that is, making it a friendlier and more appealing option for people with opened minds. I can think of two things that may not be obvious:

• College scholarships for atheists from religious families. I was thinking of this after reading a comment by Sarah Braasch in the thread on escaping ultra-Orthodox Judaism. Atheism is growing fastest among young people, but many of them are from ultra-religious families who may retaliate against their kids for being honest - cutting them off, kicking them out of the house, etc. A scholarship for young people in this situation, enabling them to escape and to get an education, would be a lifeline.

• Vocational training for former clergy. A similar, but even more extreme, problem is faced by nonbelievers among the clergy, who, for the most part, have no marketable skills outside religion. It would help the atheist movement greatly to have more of these people out of the closet and speaking out, and we can make it possible for them to do so if we could offer job training or some other opportunity to have a life outside their church.

What other suggestions do you have for ways we can expand the secular community and make new atheists feel welcome?

By B.J. Marshall

In The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, Francis Collins presents what he believes to be the strongest arguments for theism: what he calls the "Moral Law," the origins of the universe, and life on earth. In a nutshell, Collins sees the ubiquity of morality to be the work of God on our hearts; he sees the marvelous universe and the nature of reality to be "an insight into the mind of God" (p.62); and he sees life on Earth to be the handiwork of God. While the brand of theism he supports is specifically Christian, he does not spend a great deal of time arguing the point. He does spend one chapter apiece devoted to refuting atheism, agnosticism, creationism, and intelligent design. He then posits what he calls "BioLogos" as an alternative worldview (Bio meaning life and Logos meaning word.)

Well, that covers the gist of the book. Before we delve into it, starting with Collins' introduction, I would like to introduce my plan of attack here. I intend to post weekly, where I will most likely cover a chapter in anywhere from two to four weeks depending on the content of the chapter. I openly welcome your comments to my content, so feel free to use the comment section liberally.

To understand Collins' perspective, it is helpful to know a little about him. Here's an excerpt of his Wikipedia entry: "Francis Sellers Collins (born April 14, 1950), M.D., Ph.D., is an American physician-geneticist, noted for his landmark discoveries of disease genes and his leadership of the Human Genome Project and described by the Endocrine Society as 'one of the most accomplished scientists of our time.' He currently serves as Director of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. Collins... was president of the BioLogos Foundation before accepting the nomination to lead the NIH. On October 14, 2009, Pope Benedict XVI appointed Francis Collins to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences."

Collins starts his book by recounting a press conference with Bill Clinton, Tony Blair (connected via satellite), and others to announce the complete mapping of the Human Genome. He asks the reader to consider blatant religious references by political figures (Clinton referred to this event as "learning the language in which God created life" (p.2)) and the number of scientists who hold a belief in God. Collins is obviously discouraged that there exists such antagonism between the spiritual and scientific worlds, and he claims that a synthesis of the spiritual and scientific worlds is possible, although he maintains the notion of non-overlapping magisteria.

Collins asks why a president and a scientist would feel compelled to invoke God. In reply, he lists a few possibilities: is it poetry, hypocrisy, currying favor from believers? Presidents and prominent figures invoke God all the time. Every State of the Union address has "And God bless America." Although I try hard not to, I still invoke god with surprise "OMG!" or when I stub my toe (use your imagination to think of what I say). Given that almost everything a president says is carefully crafted, Clinton's statement may very well be to curry favor from the 92% of Americans who believe in God.

Collins also attempts to demonstrate to readers how many scientists believe in God, but I found it to be disappointing. Collins mentions a 1916 study that asked scientists whether they believed in a God "who actively communicates with humankind and to whom one may pray in expectation of receiving an answer" (p.4). In 1997, the survey was conducted again with much the same results - about 40%. Collins doesn't cite his source for this study, so we don't know who these "scientists" are. Are they they same scientists who doubt evolution? According to a 1996 article in the journal Nature, in which scientists who were members of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) were polled, more than 65% did not believe in God. (Percentages varied by fields of study.) Many who did not believe were agnostic. In the table of the link I provided, one figure for personal belief in God is only 7%. That's a far cry from 40!

Whatever the number of scientist-believers are, Collins maintains that "[s]cience's domain is to explore nature. God's domain is in the spiritual world, a realm not possible to explore with the tools and language of science" (p.6). There are two glaring problems with this. First, wouldn't God's domain be both the spiritual and natural realms? I mean, he's omnipotent and omnipresent, right? Second, the Christian deity is apparently one that operates in the world. Recall how the study Collins cited asked scientists whether they believed in a god who actively communicates and answers prayers. (I'm assuming at least some of those prayers have expected results that are tangible.) As soon as God enters the natural world, science can test those claims. In fact, it has in many cases.

Collins at least gets it right when he states that science "is the only reliable way to understand the natural world" (p.6). So I wonder how he justifies a belief in something he can't validate. He says that science can't answer certain questions like "why did the universe come into being," "what is the meaning of human existence," and "what happens after we die?" I think it might be these questions which spur him to look at something beyond the natural.

In the next chapter, Collins shares with the reader his journey from atheism to belief in a "God who is unlimited by time and space, and who takes personal interest in human beings."

Other posts in this series:

• Rebutting The Language of God

Since I've written a fair amount lately about the child-rape scandal engulfing the Catholic church, it would be unfair of me to overlook any steps they've taken toward reform. Well, you all know I'm nothing if not fair, so I have to report on this tiny, hesitant step:

Last week, the Vatican for the first time issued guidelines telling bishops they should report cases of abusive priests to police where civil laws require it.

Marvelous! At long last, the Vatican has bravely decided that its employees should report criminals to the police to prevent them from committing more crimes. How stirring! How inspiring! Give them a medal for heroism!

Seriously, while it's good that they've done this, it's not an accomplishment worth praising them for; it's literally the bare minimum. Let's be very clear that a step as astoundingly obvious as this - as announcing that Roman Catholic bishops will henceforth actually obey the law, rather than aiding and abetting child molesters - wasn't official church policy until April 2010. Yes, yes, the Vatican has insisted that this was its unwritten policy all along. That perfunctory assertion is hard to believe in view of the fact that there was apparently unanimous agreement among the bishops to keep these cases covered up. I'm not aware of a single case from the last five or six decades where a bishop who was informed of a predator priest went to the police. Instead, for the most part, they dealt with it by shuffling problem priests around so that they could abuse more children in new parishes.

And that's the real reason I'm not satisfied here. Yes, fine, the church has generously agreed to start turning in child molesters (as if they could have said anything else). What they notably haven't done is institute any kind of accountability or punishment for the bishops and cardinals who protected, aided and abetted those child molesters. That's no surprise, really, since the current pope is one of them.

But that's the real scandal here - not the relatively small percentage of predator priests, but the huge percentage of bishops who helped cover up their crimes and enabled them to continue abusing children. And it's clear that the church authorities haven't come to terms with their own culpability in this. One Irish bishop has resigned after being cited in an Irish government report on abuse in Catholic schools, and a Belgian bishop resigned after admitting that he himself abused a child (!), but nothing has been done about the many others, like the despicable Cardinal Bernard Law, who haven't stepped down voluntarily.

And if you want more evidence that the church has learned nothing, take this case in New Jersey. The church higher-ups are still fighting tooth and nail against statute-of-limitations reform and other legal measures that would let the victims have their day in court. (Read the link, it's quite astonishing - the church filed an amicus brief in a case it wasn't even directly involved in, arguing that non-profit organizations should be immune from liability even if their employees acted criminally to protect child molesters.)

Efforts like this show that the church's reforms are, at best, cosmetic. When faced with a tidal wave of bad publicity for actions no sane person would defend, they'll condescend to apologize - but only on their own way and in their own terms, and with the proviso that there be no punishment for anyone who did anything. Just as in the earlier child-abuse cases, they're more concerned with protecting their own assets and reputation than making any meaningful effort to repair the damage they've caused. And why should they do otherwise? Whatever hits their reputation has suffered, the scandal hasn't hurt their finances, according to this article:

After hundreds of incidents of priests sexually abusing their parishioners were disclosed in 2002 in the U.S., fundraising by bishops and parishes went up, said Harris, the author of "The Cost of Catholic Parishes and Schools," published in 1996 by Sheed & Ward.

..."Parish giving wasn't affected by the earlier scandal and I expect the same pattern to hold here," said Charles Zech, director of the Center for the Study of Church Management at Villanova University in Pennsylvania.

The biggest obstacle standing in the way of real reform is that there are still millions of Catholic loyalists who support the church financially, regardless of what crimes it commits. They may even give slightly more in times of crisis, due to a circle-the-wagons mentality. As long as the church is being sustained by this steady stream of cash, it has no incentive to change its ways, and probably won't.

However, I'm not as pessimistic as that article would imply. As is usually true with religion, I think change comes about generationally. Younger people who aren't as set in their ways are seeing the crimes of the church and are turning away from it. This may not have a large immediate impact, but the biggest effect of this scandal isn't going to be in the present; it's going to be some years down the line, as elderly Catholic faithful die off and aren't replaced. We already know the church is fading, and this crisis can only accelerate its decline.

As we ring in the new year, here's some news to give you a sense of optimism for 2010. This holiday season, we can add another piece of evidence to the growing pile which indicates that atheists are becoming more numerous and more successful:

This Christmas season, 78% of Americans identify with some form of Christian religion, a proportion that has been declining in recent decades. The major reason for this decline has been an increase in the percentage of Americans claiming no religious identity, now at 13% of all adults.

Granted, 13% doesn't seem like much, especially compared to the size of the Christian majority. But considering it was 2% in 1948, and only 6% even as recently as 1998, it can't be denied that this represents a major demographic boom for atheists and nonbelievers of all stripes. I can't think of any religion, historical or modern, that's ever enjoyed such rapid success. And given the steadily increasing rates of secularism among the younger generations, we can expect this rise to continue.

What this shows, as I've said before and will doubtless continue to say, is that we should ignore the brow-furrowing and finger-wagging of the Very Serious theologians who sternly inform us that we're doing a disservice to our own cause by advocating and defending it in public. We have every reason to believe that atheist campaigns of persuasion are working, achieving their intended purpose of convincing more people to become atheists and weakening the social prejudice that treats religious belief as immune to questioning.

Further evidence of this comes from the Gallup poll, which shows not only that more people are walking away from religion, but also that those who stay are beginning to question whether religious belief has all the answers:

Note that the percentage who say religion is "old-fashioned and out of date" now stands at 29%, significantly higher than the 13% of Americans who say they have no religion. We could call these people "soft atheists". Most likely, the majority of these people aren't formal members of any organized church, and either don't attend religious services or attend only infrequently. But because of societal pressure to conform, or their own belief that belief in God is necessary for virtue or community, they continue to call themselves religious even as they reject most of religion's factual claims.

These people are the low-hanging fruit whom atheists can reach. We need to deliver a strong, effective message that belief in God is not necessary for the things human beings care about - that nonbelievers can justify morality with reason and conscience, and build a secular community without reference to faith. And given that our audience's sympathies are already leaning in that direction, we should continue to make the case that religious belief is archaic superstition, contains many immoral rules, and has no solutions for the ethical problems humanity faces today. Let the theologians and mystics continue to carp and complain that atheists are being disrespectful, that we're not acknowledging the magnificence of the emperor's new clothes. We don't require their consent, and they're not our target audience anyway. The continuing growth of atheism throughout the world is all the encouragement we need to speak out.

Earlier this week, I posted a piece by Sikivu Hutchinson, "The White Stuff", about the legacy of racism in science and to what extent issues of race affect the atheist movement. Today, I want to write a response to that piece and venture some of my own thoughts on the subject.

To begin, I want to echo one of the more common objections raised in the comments: this piece was long on criticisms, short on suggested solutions. Granted, it's not the responsibility of every woman or member of a minority to educate white males on the explicit and implicit prejudices that still exist in our society (just as it's not the responsibility of every atheist to educate believers on the privileges afforded to religion). But if you're going to take the time to write about this at all, why not offer at least some suggestions as to what we can do about it?

However, that said, I still appreciate Hutchinson's bringing up this topic. Even if we don't know the solutions, this is something we should be talking about. As atheists, we should appreciate the value of consciousness-raising, of enlightening people to prejudices they may not even have realized they were holding. And as a political movement, we should recognize the value of including people of all types, including women and minorities - if for no other reason, then because it will make our criticisms more consistent and effective when we point out the examples of explicit racism that still exist in many religions - but more importantly, because I believe we have the most to offer to groups that have historically suffered the most from religious oppression.

For that reason, I strongly disagree with sentiments like this one from the comments:

I never thought I would see racial politics being brought into atheist discourse... It saddens me that, once again, skin colour and gender have taken center stage in an arena in which they do not belong.

I reject the suggestion that issues of race and gender "do not belong" in atheist discourse. Again, I agree with Hutchinson that not having to think about these issues is a privilege reserved almost exclusively for white males, whereas most women and minorities are confronted with them on a daily basis. That makes it all the more important that we do think about and discuss them, even those of us who don't have to.

Refusal to consider the possibility of unconscious bias is a sure way to perpetuate such bias, and to perpetuate the hostility that - like it or not - some women and people of color have felt from our movement and that's dissuaded them from joining us. Whether you think these criticisms are valid or not, the fact that they're being made clearly proves that some people feel snubbed. As good skeptics, we should make every effort to find out why that is, and to bend over backwards looking for anything we might have done wrong rather than dismiss the possibility out of hand. After all, we're asking religious people to reevaluate their entire worldview - the least we can do in the name of honesty is to subject our own to that same scrutiny.

I do want to take issue with a few of Hutchinson's specific points. For instance:

Surveys that suggest that atheist affiliation actually reflects race/gender demographics similar to say a John Birch Society confab are dismissed as being just the way it is because white boys naturally dominate science and are better writers anyway.

I don't agree that atheists' race and gender demographics are as distorted relative to the general population as Hutchinson suggests here. Although it is true that our movement has a decided (though not overwhelming) imbalance of males, according to the 2008 ARIS results, our racial breakdown in terms of black, white and Hispanic is virtually identical to the general population. Granted, she might be calling attention to the lack of visible, well-known atheist spokespeople who are women or people of color; in that case I would be more inclined to agree, though again there are notable exceptions.

However, more importantly, I think the accusation leveled in this paragraph is false. I know of no prominent atheist who has suggested that white males "naturally" dominate science, or that we are better writers than members of other race and gender groups. (If any counterexamples are given, I'd be glad to join in condemning them.) I know that such sentiments have been expressed by certain people, but I'm not aware of any well-known atheists who've done so.

If there's anything that does concern me, it's the attitude I've observed in many atheists when this topic is brought up - the casual, automatic dismissiveness that claims this can't possibly be a problem, that only whiners and malcontents say otherwise, and therefore there's no need for us to engage in any self-examination or consider whether we're inadvertently perpetuating any prejudice. We should know better than to say this because, as atheists, we ourselves have been on the receiving end of that patronizing message so often.

It's not PC to suggest in the science-besotted circle jerk of atheist-supernaturalist smackdowns that Hottentot-obsessed traditions of scientific racism and fire and brimstone Judeo-Christian religiosity went gleefully hand in hand for much of the West's enlightened history.

Again, I know no one who is expressing this sentiment. Most atheists do recognize that science has been used to serve awful ends, from Sarah Baartman to the Tuskegee experiments. Science is a tool for gaining knowledge about the world, and like any tool, it can be misused. But the actions of ignorant and hateful men do not impugn the tool itself. Nor do they prove that science is an intrinsically white, male, or "Western" enterprise, or that it does not produce objective truth about the world, and I unequivocally reject any suggestion to the contrary.

And it flies in the face of the myth of meritocracy to suggest that eminent white philosophers and scientists don't "focus" on race and gender because their identities are based on not seeing it.

I also do not agree that prominent white male atheists have neglected issues of race and gender. For instance, in The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins devotes an entire chapter (chapter 7) to these issues in the context of how our society's moral attitudes have changed over the decades. He quotes prominent thinkers of the past, including Thomas Henry Huxley, Abraham Lincoln and H.G. Wells, to illustrate how even people who were progressive social reformers by the standards of their day held attitudes which we would describe as intolerable racism. Christopher Hitchens writes in God Is Not Great about Martin Luther King Jr. and the "filthy injustice" of racism. Daniel Dennett writes in Breaking the Spell about how racism is recognized as a great social evil and how this affects the legitimate scientific study of racial differences (for example, how people of different ethnicities may respond to certain drugs). One could argue that the New Atheists don't pay enough attention to these issues or don't treat them in sufficient depth, but to argue that they neglect them entirely is a charge that is simply not true.

Our movement is about atheism, not about racism or sexism, and there's nothing wrong with that. We don't have to give up our chosen cause altogether to address a different injustice. (Individuals, of course, can belong to more than one cause at once.) But, at the very least, these are issues we should be aware of - what they consist of, how they impact our movement (because they do), and how we can avoid obvious blunders. This is the right thing to do morally, will make the atheist movement more open and welcoming to people of all kinds, and will help us avoid repeating the mistakes that so many societies have made in the past.

A note from the editor:

There are some things in the following post that I agree with, and some that I don't. I intend to write a response to it myself, but I wanted to offer my readers the chance to have their say first. I've said in the past, in regard to those who wish the "new atheists" would sit down and be quiet, that I'd rather see too much criticism of religion than too little. I think exactly the same is true of our movement. Whether you agree with her criticisms or not, I see no harm in merely letting them be heard. If you disagree, then join the conversation and explain why. —Ebonmuse

Her name was Sarah Baartman, aka the Venus Hottentot, and she had ass to spare.

Like many Africans staged for public exhibition in 19th Century Europe before her, Baartman became an object of scientific investigation. She was poked, prodded, measured, assessed and ultimately dissected in death by British and French empiricist wizards like the esteemed scientist Georges Cuvier. She was marshaled as resident Other to determine the exact nature of her "difference" from "normal" (i.e., white) men and women. This standard only had weight and relevance in the context of Baartman's grotesqueness. Her deformations provided white femininity with its mooring as the standard of feminine beauty. Her sub-humanity gave her white male examiners a biological compass (and canvas) that was then translated into immutable racial difference. The sexual deviance signified by her enormous backside literally functioned as an epistemological frame and cover for her interpreters' own cultural biases and assumptions. Identified as the "missing link," Baartman's anatomy was critical to affirming white racial superiority and capturing inexplicable gaps in the ascent from "savage" to "civilized." Through the lens of the scientist, looking, seeing and interpreting were deemed to be "transparent" enterprises--not naturalized through the cultural position of the observer.

Tim Wise, the foremost white critic/interpreter of the phenomenon of white supremacy, once noted that whites "swim in white privilege." Like fish in water, whites don't grasp or see the complexity of white privilege because they breathe it and live it 24/7. It immunizes them in the predominantly white schools, neighborhoods, social networks, media, places of worship and scholarly traditions that they inhabit. It makes the systemic institutionalized nature of racial hierarchy invisible. And it marginalizes race and racism as part of the narrow, sectarian and, ostensibly, divisive concerns of a "minority" lens.

Navigating a fantasy "post-racial" universe, these "invisible" cornerstones of white supremacy are not supposed to matter. It is not supposed to matter that a five year-old African American male has less chance statistically of going to college or even of living to the age of 25 than his white male sandbox comrade. It is not supposed to matter that home equity for blacks and Latinos of all classes has historically been far lower than that of whites due to institutional segregation in so-called inner cities and working class suburbs. These "blemishes" in the fabric of American liberal democracy are not supposed to matter because individualism is the currency of Americana, and there is no evil intelligent designer separating one's exercise of free will from free enterprise.

Yet for W.E.B. DuBois, these disparities constitute the "wages of whiteness," a public and psychological wage of white social capital, translated into everyday white privilege. For those who bemoan the "provincial" and "race-obsessed" orientation of American writers of color, DuBois implicitly forces us to consider how the very arc of European American intellectual, social and economic "progress" has been shaped by the racialization of the Other. As an artifact of a supremely barbaric and unenlightened aspect of the Enlightenment, Baartman's dissected backside was a key player in the birth of the objectivist researcher. Representing reason and rationality, Baartman's interpreters were conferred with a personhood and subjectivity that afforded them "unraced" status.

Toni Morrison has defined unraced status as the ability to appear to be beyond racial classification or identification. Whiteness becomes the norm not only through racial segregation but through the discursive tools of defining value and worth. This status rests on having the right to write, analyze, classify, quantify and have one's conclusions recognized as universal truths, rather than as the culturally contextual products of a racist colonialist legacy.

When it comes to the "new atheism," the romance and Bambified innocence of not seeing is just a living. Recent debates in the blogosphere about the whiteness of atheist discourse get sidelined by accusations about the perceived "hysteria" of those making the claim. Surveys that suggest that atheist affiliation actually reflects race/gender demographics similar to say a John Birch Society confab are dismissed as being just the way it is because white boys naturally dominate science and are better writers anyway.

So it stands to reason that white folk don't like it when it is inconveniently pointed out by ghetto interlopers that knowledge production and universal truth claims in the West have historically been marked as white. It's cartoonishly pro forma when white folk, ignorant of these historical traditions, swaggeringly insist that atheist discourse is implicitly anti-racist, anti-sexist and anti-heterosexist because one, we say so, and, two, hierarchy is something only those knuckle-dragging supernaturalists do. It's paint-by-the-numbers entitlement time when the so-called new atheist "movement" is resistant to the charge that racial and gender politics just might inform who achieves visibility and which issues are privileged in the broader context of skeptical discourse. It's not PC to suggest in the science-besotted circle jerk of atheist-supernaturalist smackdowns that Hottentot-obsessed traditions of scientific racism and fire and brimstone Judeo-Christian religiosity went gleefully hand in hand for much of the West's enlightened history. It belies humanist delusions of pure objectivism to say that "science as magic bullet" boilerplate will not enlarge the conversation to include those for whom organized religion has had some cultural and historical resonance (as an albeit complicated bulwark against white supremacy and racial terrorism). It is treasonous to argue that having the luxury and privilege to proclaim one's atheism, publish, become recognized as an unraced authority, disseminate tomes to and command a global audience and garner recognition for capsizing the sordid ship of theological tyranny is a peculiarly white enterprise precisely because of the history of Western knowledge production. And it flies in the face of the myth of meritocracy to suggest that eminent white philosophers and scientists don't "focus" on race and gender because their identities are based on not seeing it.

As Greta Christina has noted in her insightful critique of racism, sexism and visibility within the new atheist movement, hand-wringing about the absence of diversity without confronting the historical power dynamics of access and visibility becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. When not seeing becomes a virtue, it's equivalent to telling all those uppity "missing links" to sit down and shut up. Let us write the record for you, because we know how it ends.

Sikivu Hutchinson is the editor of blackfemlens.org and a commentator for KPFK 90.7 FM in Los Angeles.